The Cartographer Read Free Page A

covered with a white bedspread. There were neat wardrobes and sets of drawers, chairs, and a dressing table covered with pretty bottles of all shapes and sizes. I couldsmell the room, everything in it. Nothing about it smelt grey; everything was alive. I would have given it a high number on the scale. The scents danced invisibly for me and played with me. I had never smelt a room like this one. It was fresh. But it was not quiet.

2 The map
    Somewhere in the house the man and the woman were fighting, and she was definitely keen for him to get out. It must be one of those days, I thought. She was yelling over and over at him to get out, and he was yelling that he wouldn’t leave until he got what he came for. It was just like Larry Kent, Detective. Larry said: ‘Dames are dynamite,’ and now I could see why.
    The woman kept on screaming her head off, and the man was still growling and swearing at the dame, and losing his temper. I peered into the empty room and listened to the voices that seemed to be coming from just outside the door — it almost sounded as if they were on the wireless. Then, suddenly, they were right there in front of me, and he was pushing her over and pulling out a gun. That stopped her. One minute she was telling him she didn’t have what he wanted and he didn’t know what he was getting into, and the next she was as quiet as a mouse, which is an effect that pulling guns tends to have on people, or I don’t know my Larry Kent.
    â€˜So,’ said the bloke. ‘That shut you up, didn’t it?’
    He put the gun to her head.
    â€˜Just tell me where they are and I won’t blow your fuckin’ head off.’
    â€˜If they were here, I’d give them to you, but they’re not.’
    â€˜Well, I can find the bloody things myself — they can’t be far away. You haven’t had time to hide them. But first we’ll have a bit of fun.’
    He waved the gun at her.
    â€˜Take ’em off — or would you rather get shot?’
    So she does, because he’s a mean bastard. I’ve seen a few when I’ve been out and about with Granddad, and I know what they’re like. She does as she’s told, but he hits her with the gun and splits her head anyway. So now she’s lying on the bed and there’s blood all over the place, and the bloke puts the gun down and gets on top of her and grabs her around the neck and starts choking her; and she’s making a hell of a lot of noise — she is dynamite! But then she stops screaming, because in the end you stop screaming and you just kind of give in, though she didn’t faint, but instead stuck her fingernails into the man, whose bum was white. And he just killed her by making her face purple until she stopped moving. But she never stopped staring, and she was staring right at me. But what could I do?
    And then he got off her and sat on the bed with his face in his hands for a while. And there was blood everywhere; some bits of her were red, mainly her lipstick and her blood, and some bits were pink and some purple and some black. I looked at her and she looked at me, but I realised she didn’t really care about me being there. The man with the white bum just sat there and sort of breathed hard, while I watched him.
    I was looking at another dead body, I realised, but what horrified me was not that she was dead, but that she had stared at me the same way Tom had when the monkey bar had fallen across his throat, like she was trying to tell me something important, a secret maybe. I had tried so hard to liftthe monkey bar off him that my hands had stopped working, and were in pain for days. Nothing had changed. A year later people were still turning purple and staring at me, and I still couldn’t do anything about it.
    I felt a kind of thickness in my face, and an odd sensation, like everything was wonderful and I was somewhere else; and when I snapped out of it I saw that the