‘I want you to choke me with that belt.’
‘What?’
‘Choke me with the belt.’
‘Still like it like that?’
‘Don’t laugh.’
‘Sorry.’
‘The belt.’
‘What about it?’
‘I want you to choke me with it.’
‘Now?’
‘Right FUCKING now. I want you to choke me with the belt. I want you to reach forward, while I’m pulling your hair, and take that black leather belt off the bed frame.’
‘Wait,’ she says. Bites my finger. Goes so tense I can feel the skin breaking between her teeth and then–
I let go of her ponytail and take my finger out of her mouth. Stop clenching my jaw. Pull out. Lie down. She turns around. There’s a vodka cranberry on the bedside table. She climbs on top. She takes a sip, puts my dick back inside her and loops the belt round my neck.
*
The first thing she said to me when we met the night before was, ‘Poison.’ I’d arrived at the pub at 7:45. After coffee in the park she’d texted me and we’d agreed to meet at eight but I wanted to get there early. Neck a drink. Buy another and one for her then sit quietly at a table by a wall, with a view of the door. Except there was ‘Poison,’ behind me, while I stood at the bar.
‘Willow?’
That’s how she’d kill me.
‘You’re early,’ I said.
She took a sip from a vodka cranberry and said, ‘I wanted to get a quick drink at the bar, buy another (and one for you) then sit quietly at a table in a corner with a view of the door.’ I sat down. Sniffed. There was a small thistle in a smaller, empty milk bottle between us. She moved it. ‘Poison,’ I said. ‘I remember. I suppose a florist would know all kinds of things about naturally occurring toxins.’ I eyed the pint she’d placed on the coaster in front of my chair, her hair a whole shade darker red lit up by the pound shop tea light. ‘You’ve got half an hour,’ she said, dipping her finger in the wax, ‘to impress me. And if you make me laugh in that half hour,’ picking wax off her finger, ‘we’ll ask for another candle.’
They’re only supposed to burn for an hour, and that one was mostly gone.
I took a drink.
‘What made you choose poison, anyway?’ I asked her.
She shrugged.
‘The thought of sitting opposite someone at dinner. Someone I had once known but no longer wanted to. The thought of watching them realise they were about to die. That it was already too late. And that there’s no sense in a struggle.’
A pause.
‘Are you hungry?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said, and she smiled a little. ‘Wouldn’t mind a cigarette though. Do you want to go outside?’
‘It’s a bit cold.’
‘Have you got a filter?’
‘Let me roll one for you.’ She took some tobacco out of a tote bag on the floor, put a filter between her lips while she pulled out a paper, leaving a little bit of lipstick on the end.
‘It might kill you,’ she said, passing me the cigarette then starting again.
‘Cancer,’ I said, ‘or your poisoned lipstick?’
‘Ha!’
‘Another candle, then?’
‘It’s not burnt out yet. But I could do with another drink.’
‘Already?’
‘Already. Is that bartender you know on tonight?’
‘I don’t think she ever leaves,’ I said. ‘Come on, I’ll meet you outside.’
*
When I wake up Willow’s standing by the bedroom window smoking a cigarette. There’s a half-empty glass on the bedside table. It’s not my bedside table. I cough. She says, ‘So,’ without turning round. ‘So,’ blowing smoke out the window (only open a little), ‘So-o-o-o,’ out of her mouth, into the draught and, like the smoke from the incense burning on the windowsill and drifting slowly outside, ‘So, you’re not dead, then.’
I cough again, take a sip from last night’s drink, thinly veiled with a layer of dust, feel a slight crack in the centre of my bottom lip threatening to split open again. ‘How did I do this?’
‘I hit you,’ says Willow. ‘You passed out and I hit you.’ She takes a drag. ‘We shouldn’t have done that.’
‘I’m not wearing a condom. Did you–’
‘No.’ She takes another drag. ‘When was the last time you were checked?’
‘Um.’
‘Well go then.’
‘Right now?’
She raises her eyebrows. ‘I’ll have to go get a pill, anyway, for fuck sake.’
‘What’s that noise?’
‘Come have a look,’ she says, still standing by the window in a t-shirt, bare feet, small Persian carpet by a chair and a desk that looks unused, except for an empty bottle of wine. Outside, three men are attacking a tree. ‘They’ve been doing it for hours,’ she says. ‘It’s almost beautiful, I suppose.’ One of the men is jumping between the branches on a line attached to a harness hooked up to the top of the trunk. ‘See how his chainsaw dangles by his feet? He just swings about then whips it up when he needs it.’ It’s a small chainsaw, thirteen inch bar. He uses it with one hand. A second man, looking up, stands below in the neighbour’s garden. When a branch falls to the ground he picks it up and chucks it over the fence to a third man operating a wood chipper in the street. ‘This is the last tree,’ says Willow. ‘They did the other two while you were still asleep.’
She puts her fag out on the windowsill. There’s a callus on her middle finger. It’s orange, from too much smoking. Stabbing out. Incense uselessly drifts out the window. I cough.
She says, ‘How’d you sleep?’
‘Fine. Had a weird dream.’
‘What happened?’
‘I got hanged.’
‘What for?’
‘I don’t know.’
She rolls her eyes, tries not to smile, asks me, ‘Did you die?’ but I lie and say I can’t remember. ‘If you die in a dream you die in real life,’ says Willow. She walks over to the bed and sits back down, chainsaw in head and planes to Stansted and City airports with vapour trails outside. ‘How about you, anyway?’ I ask, sucking my swollen finger.
‘Badly,’ says Willow. ‘We shouldn’t have done that.’ She rolls another cigarette. Willow’s fingers are blood red and when she’s rolled it she lights it and tries to take a drag from it but I kiss her. Quickly. Her lips are cold. I feel their moisture on the wind through the open window. She smiles like she doesn’t know if she should, then says, ‘It’s disappointing of you.’
‘That I passed out?’
‘No,’ she says, ‘not the sex. When I asked you how you’d kill someone.’
‘I chose a gun.’
’Yes. It’s just so like a man.’