My nails and teeth throbbed. The darkness was like goodwill from the world. The darkness was on my side. I went around the house, silently, looking in the windows. There were things I could’ve accidentally kicked or tripped over, but I didn’t. I realised I’d probably never do anything like that again.

Four rooms. Tiny bathroom. Dirty kitchen with unwashed dishes and a microwave with a dark brown burn on its door and a drop-leaf table covered in take-out cartons. A lounge with a too big fake leather couch and armchair and a bookcase with what looked like car engine parts on it instead of books. TV still on, muted.

One bedroom at the front with a bare mattress on the floor.

The other at the back, a double bed.

With him on it.

Lying uncovered on his back in boxer shorts, a stripe of streetlight across his white paunch. Breathing. The paunch went up and down. Something in his nose whistled.

For a few seconds everything went black. Just nothingness. I thought I’d died.

Then I came back, as if every tiny particle of myself started speaking at the same time. I thought: I’m dreaming. I’ll wake up. But moments passed and I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I was awake right into my fingerprints and eyelashes.

I wasn’t aware of deciding anything. But I found myself moving, doing things.

Getting into the house wasn’t difficult. I took hold of the kitchen door handle, twisted and just gently pushed until the lock snapped. Like a perforated join in a sheet of cardboard. Big heavy things were nothing. When I put my hands on them I could feel how easy it would be to break them. I stepped into the kitchen. I thought the house felt sorry for him, the way he lived. Now I was inside, his breathing was louder. He sounded older. He was older. It made me feel sick again for a few seconds, thinking of him alive all these years, walking around and talking and drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and watching TV. I had a clear image of him sitting on the toilet, staring at the floor—and suddenly felt so sure I was going to throw up I had to lean on the table. I focused on a Domino’s pizza box on the floor to stop the room heaving and spinning.

But in a few moments everything around me went still and gathered again, the soft invisible arms holding me, moving me, gently, and the nausea passed.

I checked my jacket pockets, even though I didn’t need to. Duct tape and Tuff Ties in the left, gun in the right. I walked down the hall to the bedroom. The door was open.

A smell of socks and stale bedding and cigarette smoke and spilled beer. There was enough light to see his face. It looked small. Because in my head it was always huge. He’d lost a lot of hair. Still oiled what was left, back, off the tough greasy forehead. Open your eyes, they always said. Open your eyes. And when I did the faces were like giants, the smell of hair oil and whiskey breath and cigarette smoke and the pores with little worms of dirt and the eyeballs like planets. The laughter and the heartbeat against me the dirtiest thing. The bigness and heat of the heartbeat against me.

I stood at the bottom of the bed, looking down at him, amazed at how small he seemed. His legs were thin. He had varicose veins.

One of the things that could happen was that because of how small and insignificant he was now I could just turn and walk away and never go anywhere near him again. I’d seen this in movies. It was mixed up with the way people always said something like two wrongs don’t make a right or if you resort to violence they’ve won or you’re just as bad as they are and in Schindler’s List the way Liam Neeson said to Ralph Fiennes that the real way to exert power over someone was to forgive them. I was aware of this like a kind of glittery lightness somewhere near me.

Then he opened his eyes.

He saw me straight away. Started, with a small cry. Tried to get up.

“Don’t move,” I said.

I didn’t remember pulling out the gun or stepping into the light where he could see it. But I must have, because there I was. He was suddenly very alive, up on one elbow. His paunch quivered. His mouth was open. He was squinting to see me properly. Waking up like that his body had pushed out its stink of beer and pizza and coffee and sweat.

“Don’t move,” I said again. I thought the floor was tilting. I put a hand out to steady myself. But it was an illusion.

“Who the fu—”

“Shut up. Shut the fuck up.”

“What do—”

“Shut up!”

I hadn’t known the voice would be like that. The same voice. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand it because it was like being hit with a fascination. Like someone pulling a soft dark bag over my head.

The gun had gone big and heavy in my hand. In my mind was a mishmash of all the times I’d imagined this with me saying Don’t you know who I am and Do you remember telling me to open my eyes and You’re going to keep your eyes open and All you’ll want is to die quickly but you won’t you’re going to die very slowly and Look at me look at me open your fucking eyes. But it was hard to imagine saying any of those things now. Now that he was there saying those things would … It was as if those things weren’t big enough. Nothing I could say would be big enough.

A feeling of tiredness and disgust came over me. I had this image of dragging him outside the house and a crowd of people all standing around staring, amazed, because by the time I got him out he’d be this tiny, shrivelled thing, not like a man at all but like a little piece of dried up meat like that thing biltong they sell in the delis now and it wouldn’t be enough, just like nothing I could say would be enough.

Then he said “Jesus,” and I knew he’d figured out who I was.

I remembered his hand, sour and hot and moist over my mouth and nose. I remembered him saying You keep that wriggling up you’re gonna make me come and the one called Pinch laughing and her face staring at me and not seeing me showing me she couldn’t see me.

I had the gun pointed right at his face.

And when he flung his arm out and knocked it from my hand, it seemed to happen in slow motion. It was as if I’d wanted him to do that. It was as if I’d asked him to.

42

FOR A SPLIT-SECOND I knew everything up to now had been a dream and the reality was that I was the tiny one and that I had no power and that I’d come back to him willingly so it could all happen again. So he could do it all again. For a moment it was a relief to know I was nothing. Not even disgusting. Not even shit. Just nothing.

Then all the soft invisible arms in the air that had been guiding me hardened and coiled and released—and suddenly in place of nothingness was something dark red and full of energy and laughter and lightness, and when I looked again at his face I saw that my fist had smashed through his mouth, smashed clean through. Most of his teeth were gone and his bottom jaw was hanging from where my nails had sliced the muscle on their way out. He was making a weird gah, gah sound in the back of his throat, trying to get his legs off the bed.