He pulled at the brass ring handle of a drawer with a hooked, bloated thumb. It was the drawer that I had helped fit. I had not managed to fix the alignment quite right. It always stuck.
‘Where she is now, God knows. Your Daddy couldn’t hold her down for long either. Like I said, there was always that restless sadness about her. Always that inexplicable, unwarranted misery. If you told me she’d overdosed in a dark alley or Chapeltown brothel, I wouldn’t be surprised.’
Daddy kept his knives in that drawer. Every Sunday evening he took them one by one from that drawer, sharpened them with a whetstone and returned them one by one in their particular arrangement.
Mr Price did not select the largest. That was a long, thin filleting knife with a gently curving edge. He chose instead a paring knife with a walnut handle and a stubbed, pointed blade roughly the length of my index finger.
He stepped towards Daddy. He stood close to him, such that they could inhale and exhale each other’s breath. The air entered Daddy clean and left him with a bloody mist, and Mr Price breathed in that mist, the blood with it, and returned it dry.
Mr Price raised the blade and placed the point at Daddy’s shoulder. He struck through. The knife pierced the skin then went further. Mr Price had cut right through to the bone like he was jointing a stag. The blood gushed. Deep burgundy like thickened wine from deeper, more abundant vessels than the thin bright crimson blood splashed and smeared over his skin and candid white vest. The flow dribbled down his chest and arm both, soaked into his armpit.
Still Daddy’s breath did not catch his voice box. He could not muster a scream. He sighed and looked upwards at the ceiling, though his face relaxed into a serene expression like he could see past it, up to the clouds and up to the stars. I did not know whether or not Daddy believed in heaven and hell. I did not think I had ever asked him. And if I had asked and been told, I had forgotten the answer.
Mr Price unplugged the knife. Another red spill.
‘He’ll bleed out,’ Mr Price said to another man.
‘Slowly,’ said the other man, ‘he’s a big one. He may need another for good measure.’
‘Oh I know it will be slow. And I’ll put more on him before I’m done. But that one should be enough to do it.’
It was almost as if Mr Price was irritated by the advice, like he wanted to show that he knew what he was doing, like he, as much as any of the men here, could deal in matters of the body, in matters of slow death.
I watched Daddy as I had watched Cathy.
I wondered if he had come back for us and if that was why he had been found. I thought on what Vivien had said. And on what Ewart had intimated.
There was quiet from the other room. A silence that was unnerving. I cursed myself for being such a coward.
Then a whole lot of waiting. Mr Price leaned on the counter and he watched Daddy as he tried to keep his eyes open.
Then he came back and he stuck his blade into the softer place beneath Daddy’s left kneecap. And then his right. Long, red socks. Price returned to the counter.
Tom’s eyes were wide open now. It seemed as if he could not blink at all. Everything about his countenance was dry, parched, and guarded. His eyes were open wide but his mouth was shut tight. His lips were white: the outermost, cell-thin layer of skin had died and crumbled while we had been standing here. If he smiled the dead skin would crack. If he licked his lips, the dead skin would form a pallid, sticky paste.
Blood was pooling on the floor at Daddy’s feet.
The door swung open.
My sister cast a long shadow. It was heavy, the colour of charcoal, the kind of shadow that can only be cast by fire. It flickered and spat. Its source, held in Cathy’s left hand, had been hidden behind the door frame. She pulled it into view: a rag, doused in oil, tied around a bed post that she had pulled clean off its frame. Looped over her wrist was the wire handle of a tin bucket that swung dully as she moved her arm. It was filled with oil, and but a precarious two feet from the flaming torch.
In her right hand she held a shotgun, its butt locked to her side by her elbow, two thin fingers resting on its trigger.
Her hands and arms were coated with a thick layer of blood. Not her own. It was deepest red at her thumbs and fingertips, and lightest and brightest as it moved up her forearms.
It was as if she had plunged her limbs deep into that man’s guts.
I imagined him stretched out on the bed exhibiting a rough, gaping, bloody hole.
I could not imagine how she had done it.
She stepped into the room. She was still naked. She had found the bucket, the oil, the shotgun. She had not stopped to clothe herself.
And she shone. She had poured oil onto her own skin, and over her head onto her face and her thick, now slicked, black hair.
The man holding me loosened his grip. He recoiled like a spider from the light. I took my chance and leapt to the other side of the room, away from Mr Price, his surviving son, and his men. I took a place between Daddy, bloody, pinned to the oak board, and Cathy, her back as straight as the two barrels she pointed at Mr Price’s breast.
The scene had changed: the tempo, the climate, the aspect. The presence of the flickering flame shifted the saturation. Reds were now hot. Blues became muddy. Whites took on a tempered orange sheen. The skin of men’s faces, pulled back in dismay, tarnished and bruised in the new shadows. The slate tiles rippled between matte and satin like a frozen-thawed-refrozen layer of black ice.
‘One of you will untie my father,’ she said, simply.
There was silence. Nobody moved.
‘She doesn’t have the first idea how to use one of those,’ said a squat, bald man who had not spoken before.
Cathy shot him.
At that range the shrapnel had little time to spray. The full cartridge tore through his stomach and took out a cupboard door behind. The man dropped to the ground and shook a violent shake.
Her aim was natural. I expected no less.
Tom’s jeans darkened at his crotch as his piss spread. One of the men rattled the handle of the back door. It was locked. Cathy shot him. He too crumpled on the floor.
‘Stop!’ shouted Mr Price. ‘Tony, do as she asks.’
Tony was a tall man with faded tattoos the length of his long torso. He took the knife from his employer’s hand. He used it to cut through Daddy’s bonds, beginning at his ankles, then moving to his wrists. It was slow work. The knots were tight and the ropes were tough.
Free, Daddy fell away from the table top and shrunk against the back wall. Blood rubbed against the paintwork and soaked through to the plaster. Tony returned to his master’s side.
‘He’s already dead, Cathy,’ said Mr Price. ‘He’ll bleed out. There’s no helping him.’
‘I can see that.’
The torch was burning lower, closer to the bucket of oil.
The crowd quaked. Men shifted uneasily, dancing on the spot with a desire to run but with no chosen nor possible direction.
Keeping her eyes on Mr Price at all times, Cathy said quietly, only to me, ‘It’s your time to leave.’