The Way Out Read Free

travels to his heart it will transform his heart to the heart of a pig.’
    â€˜What about a woman?’
    He looked at me, his eyes glassy.
    â€˜You said if a man puts this meat into his body. What happens to a woman?’
    He shrugged, dismissive, like it hardly mattered in that case.
    â€˜Where did you get it from?’
    â€˜Kevin. The butcher. When I buy the shop meat from him, sometimes he gives me things he has spare. Today it was this. I can’t eat it. But I thought, maybe you…,’ he trailed off as if unsure himself what he thought, as if the urge to take and cook this thing for me, to have me consume it, was something beyond his conscious control.
    At that moment a customer pushed through the door, making the bell ring. Hamid flicked the remaining blackened scraps of meat from the grill into a paper wrapper and dropped it into the bin.
    The rest of the evening went by with a constant stream of customers. Ali came back from his break and the three of us worked steadily, the column of donner meat reducing as slice after slice was shaved off and deposited in dozens of pitta breads, topped with salad and chilli sauce. By the end of the night it was shaved down to the metal spit.
    Tidying up in the cellar after closing time with Hamid, the small space felt claustrophobic. He asked when me and Col were getting married.
    â€˜Not right now.’
    â€˜But you plan to marry?’
    I glanced over at him. He was standing gazing upwards, longingly through the hatch of the cellar, back into the bright light of the shop as if looking at sunshine from behind prison bars.
    He sighed and shook his head. ‘Women here…’ His face was sad and he looked at me with disappointment, his eyes asking how I could have let him down so badly.
    â€˜People live together. It’s normal,’ I told him, bristling a little. ‘Gives them a chance to find out if they get on before having kids and all that. Even then, some couples never get married. It’s no big deal.’
    Hamid looked at me like I’d just told him the earth was flat. He reached one hand up towards the light. ‘In my country, a woman is like a flower.’
    I concentrated on gathering up some onions that had spilled out of a torn sack. I cast around for something, maybe some tape, to repair the rip and realised Hamid was looking at me, expecting a response.
    â€˜Oh?’ The cellar walls contracted and I strained to hear the sound of Ali moving around upstairs, cleaning down the grills and mopping the floor.
    â€˜Once she is plucked,’ Hamid made a mid-air snatchingmotion with his outstretched hand and stared into my eyes, ‘she dies.’ He shrugged and turned away sorrowfully, started moving boxes around.
    I wanted to ask him what he meant by that. Did he really believe I should just get on with it and die? My face grew hot. I felt my blood spewing through my veins, the pig blood working its way deeper in toward my centre, pushing fast in and out of my heart, the muscle swelling, coarsening, becoming an animal thing.
    I undress and look at myself in the bedroom mirror. White flesh, raw on my bones. I drag an old t-shirt over my head and slide under the sheets. The sweaty soundtrack from the living room oozes through the crack in the door, punctuated by the tight pop of released air when Col opens another beer. The creak of the couch as he settles back down.
    I can’t sleep. The clock says 3.30am. I’ve been lying in bed for an hour, listening to the roar of blood in my ears. The blind pumping machinery of my heart, dense and dark, convulsing, the blood forced this way then that, under pressure from both sides.
    I need to be moving. I throw off the sheets and pull my clothes back on, deciding to go for a walk. There’s only an hour or so before dawn. In the living room, Col is sprawled with his mouth open, snoring. The TV is fuzzed with static, giving out a low whispering breath, like a