Debaser

DEBASER

  By Max Frick

  Copyright 2013 Maximillian Frick

  *****

  I find myself always torn between two beliefs: the belief that life should be better than it is, and the belief that when it looks better it is really worse – Graham Greene

  Our dignity is in direct proportion to our passion – John Ruskin

  1

  Framed in the doorway he cursed his trembling fingers as they tried, ineptly, to re-button his fly. He felt sick. The pounding in his head was virtually indistinguishable from the pounding of the music. Through fractionally open, sleep encrusted eyes he glimpsed the carnage. The grey light of morning, intruding through the bare window, had lent the room a lurid veneer, and the grim reality of the situation forced itself upon his attention.

  Last night the drugs – more, and more varied than he was used to – had tinted hard fact (their depraved behaviour and its horrific conclusion) with an innocuous shade of fiction. Beneath the half-light of a solitary light bulb – still burning but ineffectual now – it had all seemed different, funny even.

  ‘DEBASER!’ screamed the music accusingly. ‘DEE-BASER!’ it screamed again.

  A number of unwelcome sensations were battling for supremacy inside his throbbing chest, welling up and receding, before welling up again more violently. Vague anxiety, the usual victor on mornings such as these, had, on this particular morning, been ousted by dread and panic while despair, biding its time, looked on.

  He pressed his hands to his forehead, pushing the palms firmly into his eyes.

  ‘Think!’

  Above the din of the music he could hear Dooly whining, by the front door at the other end of the room. The dog's distressed ululations – desperate, pleading – seemed to accurately vocalise his own inner turmoil, and they affected him as the heart-rending strains of a violin might.

  ‘Poor cunt. Must be starvin by now. Just wants to go home. ’

  He took as deep a breath as his fearful condition would allow.

  ‘Come on, Billy, think! Should wake him up. Make him deal with it. Fuckin psycho! Right! First things first. Switch off that music.’

  He took a few timid sidesteps along the back wall, hardly daring to look where he was going. For there, beneath the window, lay the source of his anguish.

  Half crouching, with no small effort, he reached out a quivering hand and blindly fingered the front of the CD player. To better orientate his wandering fingers he risked a quick glance over and away and... Click.

  ‘Oh, fuck!’

  Outside, the diminutive twitterings of some few birds provided a cheerful counterpoint to Dooly’s baleful whining. But their cheerfulness could do nothing to lighten the mood in the room, only serving to bring out in bold relief the full horror of the situation. And it was even more horrific than Billy had first thought: as a result of that quick glance he had made a bewildering, grisly discovery. His sufferings were cranked up to hitherto unknown levels and a tidal wave of nausea coursed implacably through his body. The bile rose to his throat. He rested the palm of a hand against the wall to steady himself and his stomach made a fist. Its contents surged upwards through his trembling frame and were forcibly deposited, with a splash, onto the carpet.

  The gestural equivalent, in humans, to the note of hopefulness that Billy suddenly detected in the heightened pitch of Dooly’s whining would be the raising of eyebrows. He lowered his. Somebody in the stairwell! He listened apprehensively. Footsteps! Dooly’s tail wagged uncontrollably and an involuntary series of expectant yelps emanated from the depths of his animated body. Was someone at the door? He strained to hear, not daring to breathe. Silence. He raised his head slightly. Footsteps, next landing. He released his quivering breath. Neighbours only. But still Dooly... The front door swung vigorously inwards as though dealt a powerful kick by the sole of a heavy boot. It rebounded off the inner wall (leaving a handle-sized piece of wallpaper embedded in the plaster) and swung back towards its assailant. It was halted by a firm hand. Billy, had jolted violently at the noise and instinctively spun to face the intruders, whereupon he had lost his balance and fallen back against the wall. He now found himself staring into the eyes of a somewhat disconcerted policeman, while another younger officer attempted to keep a gathering of nosy neighbours from rubbernecking ghoulishly into the room. The dog, free at last, snaked sharply round the door-jamb and fled through the curious assembly.

  That was the last straw. Billy quite simply could not possibly feel any lower than he did at that moment. Then his foot slipped and he dropped arse first into the puddle of tepid vomit. A few drops squirted out at either side of him, splashing his bare forearms. He leaned his head, wearily, back against the wall and even allowed himself an ironic half-smile. His capacity for suffering had, in a few hellish minutes, been utterly exhausted and his captors, who now held his fate entirely in their hands, had, paradoxically, afforded him a sense of release. Even the dampness of the sick, as it seeped through the seat of his jeans to warm his clammy skin, was mildly comforting to him.

  With his heroic entrance the policeman had no doubt intended to arouse the admiration of the onlookers, not least that of his second in command (he could have knocked after all), but the scene that greeted him had unmanned him more than a little and he now strove to superimpose the unflappable demeanour of a world-weary paperback detective over his obvious agitation. The appropriate attire – a careworn suit, say, and a shirt casually unbuttoned at the neck, no tie, and of course an overcoat – might have better enabled him to achieve this effect than did the navy-blue uniform that his lowly position as beat bobby called for him to wear.

  The neighbours were eager to condemn. The wrought-iron banisters lent a metallic resonance to the cacophonic clamour of damning voices now ringing from top to bottom through the cold concrete stairwell.

  ‘I’m never piggin done bangin up at them! Comin and goin at all hours, loud music day and night!’

  ‘That's if you can call it music! It’s just noise!’

  ‘Aye, that’s right! And the language! Always effin and blindin!’

  ‘It was quiet before that other one moved in, but now...!’

  ‘Last night I heard them shoutin “cut off his effin head! Cut off his effin head!”’

  ‘Well, I’m not surprised it’s came to this. If you live like animals, sooner or later you become animals!’

  Finally, after a few false starts, the second policeman managed to intervene, telling them, in patient tones, to go and wait at home and someone would come around to take their statements later. Reluctantly they dispersed, nodding and shaking their heads emphatically, each in sympathy with the grievances of the other, and the young officer stepped inside to join his colleague, closing the door behind him.

  He too was unmanned by the scene he encountered and had to swallow hard to keep from retching. His superior, who had since regained his composure, fixed him with a stern if hypocritical stare. They then proceeded to scan the room.

  It was a typically small living room, longer than it was broad and sparsely furnished. The eyes of both officers were immediately drawn to the far right-hand corner of it. There - at the base of a life-size cardboard figure with its arms raised (of the type a record or video store might use for promotional purposes, though only the white back was visible) - lay the bloodied corpse of a young man. It was partially obscured from view, at one end of a couch, by the couch itself and also by what appeared to be a curtain, complete with curtain rail, draped haphazardly across the midriff. While his junior partner remained transfixed, the more experienced officer got on with the task at hand.

  It was abundantly clear to him that what they were dealing with here was two age-old but distinct struggles. The first, and least important of these, was man’s struggle to conque
r himself, to raise himself above the level of the beast. A struggle evidently given up some time ago, if he were to judge by the squalor that now confronted them. Broken bottles and beer cans, drained to the dregs and crushed, before being tossed casually hither and thither, formed no small part of the garbage that thickly cluttered the floor. At the foot of a threadbare sunken armchair and the couch, long-ignored dinner plates and takeaway food containers were left carelessly lying and capricious summer flies, disappearing and reappearing, fitfully partook of the furred blue-green remnants of what had once been food and now - to the flies, at least - was again. This aspect of the room, while surely in breach of some council/tenant agreement, did not constitute a crime, and was testament only to the bacchanalian slovenliness of the flat’s youthful occupants. In this respect it was perhaps no different to the houses of other young men in the district upon whom the officer had had reason to call in the course of his duties.

  It was to the second struggle (by far the more serious), and anything that may be connected with it, that he now turned his attention. This was one individual’s struggle for survival, another battle, as he could plainly see, sadly lost.

  Blood, chilling in its ubiquitousness, tainted everything. It