Carnivore: The most controversial debut literary thriller of 2017

JONATHAN LYON was born in 1991 in London. He studied at Oxford University, graduating in 2013. He moved to Berlin the same year where he now works as a musician and writer. He has had a chronic illness for over a decade. Carnivore is his debut novel.

For anyone who’s been ill too long.

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

ACT 1: The ordinary world

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

ACT 2: The call to adventure

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

ACT 3: Crossing the border

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

ACT 4: The resurrection

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

ACT 5: The return

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Acknowledgements

Copyright

ACT 1

The ordinary world

1.

‘What’s your fantasy?’

All sex and storytelling starts with this, of course. Sometimes the question’s self-directed, sometimes it’s only implied. But here, obviously, I was supposed to reply ‘being dominated,’ so that’s what I said.

I was actually fantasising about eating a satsuma, slowly, slice by slice, on the edge of a rooftop, or perhaps on a hilltop, watching a building below me burn in a fire I’d started. But this would be too long to say aloud, and probably wouldn’t arouse a man in the prime of his mid-life crisis as easily as a boy begging for a beating.

So now that my victim thought that I was his victim, he could breathe more heavily, and began struggling to unbutton his shirt.

‘No, no you should be doing this,’ he said, fluttering his fingers. ‘I mean, undress me, boy!’

Unsuited to the dominant role, he recoiled at his own orders. Clearly, he was a submissive – if I’d had the energy, I could’ve had him on all fours in a few minutes. But energy is not one of my vices.

‘Of course, sir,’ I said instead, my mouth twitching into a smile I had to hide by lowering my head.

Beneath his shirt was a paunch of greying hairs. As I removed the rest of his clothes, he hovered awkwardly between sitting and standing, his hands just above my back, not yet confident enough to touch me.

‘Now, now… you!’

I took off my tracksuit – the uniform he’d requested – delivered my finest doe-eyed simper, and knelt down. But he rejected this arrangement and instead dragged me upwards onto the bed.

‘No time for that… boy. Let’s get to the point.’

He forced my face into the pillow and I began to moan in a way that would make him hard. Perhaps he hoped I’d feel a kind of shame in this, but ‘this’ meant nothing.

‘This’ was merely boring, but it was worth a thousand pounds. And he wouldn’t last long. I was simply a blank page onto which he could write his desires. And what banal desires! There was no ambition in them, no real yearning, not even any real sadness. His mind was shut to himself – all he was semi-aware of were a few anxieties, a few humiliations, a few petulant disappointments. Perhaps he fancied himself a deviant for fucking a boy he believed to be nineteen while his wife wandered somewhere around the Mediterranean. But he was ordinary. To a true deviant, sex is much too straightforward.

I was aroused by making him think that I was afraid of him – extracting his desires like a vampire of fantasy, while giving him only falsehood in return.

My fiction was of the orphan desperate for money, slightly stupid, pleasingly unsophisticated beside the powerful newspaper-owner. I made him feel like his life – on the fifteenth floor of some glass and steel erection in central London – was beyond my understanding, and therefore more meaningful than it was.

He finished in about ten minutes. As he got off me, I assumed he was leaving for the bathroom – so I’d begun turning over, when he struck me with his belt. My body spasmed in delight – here, at least, at last, was a little more excitement, even if there was still no creativity in his lust. The pain made me laugh, but I hid it with a howl.

‘No, no, please,’ I begged, rolling my eyes at myself.

I could act more convincingly than this, but he wouldn’t want me to. Part of my charm was my innocence. I needed to seem out of my depth, ineptly play-acting at being a seasoned sexual plaything. He needed me to be a bad actor, so he could see through to the lost boy behind the performance.

Of course, the lost boy was the performance, and the bad acting was excellent acting. His metal buckle bit into my flesh with an eroticism his body could never have communicated. With each hit, a hunger in my muscles was being satisfied. And soon, my trembling was not an act – I was aroused. My senses began to mix: a blue the colour of a kingfisher’s back blurred the edges of my vision, and in my gums I tasted the squeezed juice of a lime.

He whipped me twenty or so times, until my pleading reached a satisfactory intensity, and he threw aside the belt – and left. As soon as he was in the bathroom, I sat up, rubbing my eyes so it would look like I’d been crying. Outside, October was white. I walked to the balcony and slid open its door.

Yesterday, I’d posed as an undergraduate for a calmer client – and quoted Nietzsche’s desire for music ‘to be as cheerful and profound as an October afternoon’. That had meant little then – but, following this violence, perhaps it could mean more to me. Nietzsche’s philosophy had, after all, come out of chronic illness – and so maybe mine could too. I’d call for a different music, though, since my illness was dominated by pain – a constant, meaningless, incurable pain at the core of my muscles, that weakened me into a fog without memories or focus – a pain that confined me to a parallel word, the world of the sick – where being whipped until my blood spilled out seemed like pleasure, or even like music.

So perhaps this October afternoon was cheerful and profound. Though now its music was the sound of a man washing off his semen in a hotel shower, transitioning from delight to shame at how he’d got there. The sky had a clarity that I could almost forget my body in – to be purely mind, racing into a new weather. But I had to put on my clothes before he returned, and resume the posture of a wounded adolescent – to maximise his regret, and so increase my price.

With my phone I photographed the credit cards and driving license in his wallet. He should have kicked me out before he showered, but his embarrassment had made him careless.

When he did return, he paid me £1,500 in £50 notes. My posture combined fear with gratitude. He couldn’t look me in the eye. I left him slumped on a chair in a towel, drained of his pedestrian ecstasy, shocked by himself and what he imagined I’d suffered.

The door closed slowly as I left along the corridor. By the time I’d got to the lift, I’d forgotten his face.

2.

‘Life is about to happen to us babyboyyy

Ring me cunt

This is yr mother btw

Luvvvv u’

These texts were from an unknown number, which I saved in my contacts as ‘Dawn, Mother Errant’ before ringing back.

‘You fucking done yet?’ she shouted. ‘I told you he was easy. He was easy weren’t he? I’m coming where you are. Wait – where the fuck are you again? You’re at the Waire, yeah?’

‘What? Yeah. How are you coming to me? Are you drunk?’

‘Shut up. I’m amazing,’ she laughed. ‘I’m a woman of the world again. I’m a fucking miracle! I told you I still have my ways, don’t I? I’m a goddess! Give me your perjury!’

‘Perjury? What you talking about? Are you in a car?’

‘Perjury, homage, whatever it’s called. Gifts for goddesses. You know what I mean. And fuck yeah I’m in a car. The fastest car in the Milky Way, sweetheart, you’ve got a chauffeur today. I’m nearly there so don’t move. Don’t you move! You can’t run off from me now anyway. It’s got the worst art you ever seen, don’t it? I told you.’

‘You mean like a religious offering?’ I asked, trying to address the first of her non-sequiturs.

The lobby I was passing through was indeed decorated with bland attempts at pop art, which, despite their garish colours, somehow all seemed beige.

‘No it’s a fancier word than that, you fuckwit. One of your posh words. I only want your poshest words. The fanciest fucking words you’ve got, for the fanciest woman you know.’

‘A libation?’

‘That’s the fucking one, beautiful!’ she said. ‘You’re a gorgeous boy! Libation, invective, perjury – you know the words – only give me the good shit now.’

‘How did you get a car?’

‘No spoilers, bitch, you’re waiting for me. Don’t move!’ She hung up.

I stepped onto the pavement. Kensington was tensing itself for rush hour. Bicycles flirted past wing-mirrors towards the calmer cobbled side streets. The clouds above us were tensed too, as if plotting violence against the autumn.

London seemed to grow out of its weather, not out of the ground – the mood came first and then the body – and this mood followed the whims of the surrounding sea, which was as changeable as a child – and had a child’s fury and a child’s persistence.

In a precaution I’d been taught by Dawn, I redistributed the stack of fifties across my two pockets, my boxers-briefs, and my right sock. The pain dizzied me pleasantly. And as I replaced my shoe, a white car drove up beside me – blasting one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos through an open window.

‘Oi, your highness!’ Dawn shouted. ‘Get the fuck in, we’re going to the guillotine!’

‘Have you had your hair done?’ I asked, getting in.

It had been dyed the colour of honeycomb, and her skin seemed to have been pulled tighter over her face too – so that it was sharp and handsome in an untrusting way. She wore a black leather jacket over a black lace dress, on a petite frame thinned by years of addiction.

‘I done everything. I look like a hundred years younger, don’t I? I don’t even remember what age is after thirty-four. I shaved my legs above the knee. I’m even wearing heels.’

‘You’re not,’ I said, and tried to bend to see her feet under the dashboard, but she pushed my head away.

‘Maybe I’m not wearing heels, you cheeky shit, you’re not allowed to check. A woman is wearing heels if she tells you she’s wearing heels. Wait, what’s wrong with you?’

‘Just drive.’

‘You’re flinching, what’s wrong with you? Why can’t you sit right? What he do?’

‘What? Nothing, it was fine.’

I adopted a tone of alluring evasion – to make her think that I wanted her to ask further, and was only pretending to be brave – since I played the lost boy for her just as much as I did for the clients she sometimes sent my way. This was partly because I took pleasure in manipulating for its own sake – and partly because it was the role Dawn wanted me to play anyway – as it let her be a more caring, protective mother to me, and so let her atone for failing her other son, from whom she was estranged.

She turned off the radio and gripped my wrist.

‘You’re telling me this fucking minute what just happened up there.’

‘I’m fine. He. I’m fine.’

Still gripping my wrist, she unzipped my tracksuit top. I twitched at her touch. She pulled the jacket over my shoulder, exposing the edge of a welt from the tongue of the belt.

‘What the fuck?’ She pushed me forwards to pull it down further, exposing the rest of his lashes.

I pretended to shiver, carefully, so as not to overplay it – and didn’t reply. I wanted her mind to spread multiple narratives across my silence.

‘Why’d he do this? That was never his game.’

‘It’s his game now,’ I said, attempting a half-laugh.

‘Fuck, babe, how’d I let this happen?’

But there was something so insincere about the way she said this that I began to wonder whether she was role-playing too. Dawn was as clever and as bored as me, after all – her other son refused to see her for a reason. Maybe she’d known her client would whip me, and wanted him to. He had acted as though it had been pre-arranged. Maybe she was playing a new game with me, then, a violent game – born of love and cruelty and love of cruelty, and love of games themselves – and in it we had to hurt each other, using people as our instruments. Or maybe I was being paranoid.

‘This had nothing to do with you, it’s not about you,’ I said, now hopeful that the opposite of this was true.

‘You need Savlon. It’s ok I’ve got Savlon in my bag – mummy can get you some painkillers – oh shit, you need some painkilling, I was wondering why you weren’t sitting right – look at you!’ There was no sympathy in her voice. ‘This is fucked up. How was you even standing out there? Who uses the belt end? You’re bleeding! Fuck. Lean over, let me fix this.’

‘Can we drive somewhere else first?’

‘No, lean over.’

She reached behind her seat for her handbag, rummaged awhile, and found the antiseptic cream. Her fingers drew its ointment across my wounds with a tenderness that seemed almost admiring of – or excited by – the violence she’d arranged for me.

‘Fuck men, fuck men, fuck men like that,’ she said, enjoying her own performance. ‘He better of given you extra for this. What the fuck? How much you get?’

‘Eight hundred.’

‘What? No! It was supposed to be a grand.’

‘No, it was supposed to be five hundred. Then he gave me a three hundred pound tip for this.’

‘Oh my god, baby, this is not how we start our new life. Life is about to happen to us, I’ve been telling you, we’ve got to be looking our best. Thank fuck he didn’t touch your beautiful face! You been crying?’

She kissed my shoulder. I shrugged her off and pulled my top back up. I wanted to believe she’d had me wounded on purpose. And if this was a game, then it was my turn to play.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Some painkilling would be good if we can get some though.’

‘Course we can darling, I’ve got you. I got you. We’re going to do something fun.’ Bored of her fake dismay, she’d become enthusiastic again. She jerked the car forward, away from the main road, towards the backstreets. ‘Mummy’s going to give you a driving lesson. We got to act like rich people now. So we got to drive where they drive. And I’ve got so much to say, you’ve been gone so fucking long.’

‘It’s been like ten days.’

‘Yeah and I made some changes. Cos I —’

There was a smack on the windscreen – we flinched. A bleeding lump rolled down the glass and slumped onto the bonnet. We peered forwards. It was an injured squirrel, perhaps fallen from a tree. It lay on its back, twitching, trying to right itself – as something black dived upon it: a crow as a big as a cat. The crow drove its beak into the squirrel’s skull. Dawn looked away. Between thrusts, the crow rotated its head to survey its surroundings – and eventually made eye contact with me. It knew it was being watched, but did not fear this audience. I smiled in encouragement. The crow hammered the squirrel into a mess of sinew, but ate nothing – seemingly intent only on the kill. And then it flew away.

‘What the fuck?’ Dawn said.

The squirrel’s innards rolled down the bonnet. She activated the windshield wipers, but dryly – smearing the blood in arcs across the glass before she worked out how to activate the wiper fluid – and the red was diluted towards orange. A strand of intestine got caught at the edge of the windshield. The carcass lay on the car like a wound in the steel itself – almost invitingly, like a portal you could put your hand through, into a future where muscle and metal were forgotten.

‘It’ll fall off when we drive,’ I said.

‘What the fuck? Is this what an omen is?’

I laughed. ‘It’s raining squirrels, that means fertility.’

‘I fucking hope not. I don’t need more sons.’

As we drove onward, the squirrel flopped slowly towards us, and then, with a last splatter, slid off the side onto the road.

‘What changes were you talking about?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘What were the changes you were going to tell me about?’

‘Oh yeah, fuck. No, no, no – we need to reset the mood first. I’m definitely not staying driving after that omen of yours.’

‘How was that my omen?’

‘It weren’t fucking raining dead squirrels till you got in here, was it? I’m marked for death now. Fuck. I’m getting the champagne out and you’re getting in my seat.’

She parked beside a terrace of improbably white five-storey houses.

‘You’ll be a natural babe,’ she said. ‘It’s automatic, it’s easy. Just pretend you are Kensington, ok?’

She got out and came round to my side. I let her lead me back past the squirrel streaks to the driver’s seat. But before I’d sat down, she began pointing out various buttons and levers, too quickly for a novice to remember. I wasn’t, however, quite a novice – five years ago, I’d spent two weeks sleeping in a car with a girl on a tobacco-manufacturing plant, and she’d taught me how to drive. Naturally, I wasn’t going to tell Dawn this – I needed her to believe that she was mothering me and, too, I needed to further the illusion I fed to her of myself as a prodigy, capable of adapting to any situation with astonishing rapidity.

So I turned the key, released the handbrake, and immediately lurched into the bumper of the car in front of us, setting off its alarm. Dawn shrieked and slapped me. I stamped the car to a stop, shaking, my confidence gone.

‘Let me get in my seat first you fucking psychopath!’ She slammed my door shut and sprinted to the passenger side. ‘The fuck is wrong with you? Get in reverse! Quick! Drive!’

I obeyed, trying to adapt to the vehicle’s rhythms, my mind narrowed, and backed out into the street – and then pushed the stick into ‘D’ and accelerated forward. Ashamed that I’d failed to maintain my performance, my cheeks flushed – and a taste like over-sweet strawberry jam came over my gums. I hadn’t been the master illusionist, I’d been clumsy. I was ashamed of feeling ashamed – of still having a pride that could be pricked. I tried to cough the taste away.

She reached behind my seat for her bag and retrieved a bottle of sparkling wine. The alarm of the parked car faded behind us as I familiarised myself with the controls, speeding up a little to turn the corner.

‘Don’t speed round a corner sweetheart, you got to go slow for a corner.’

‘Shit yeah,’ I said, flushing less as I regained command of my indifference.

I wondered whether she was humiliating me on purpose – in the same way she’d had me whipped on purpose – as part of some wider ploy to empower herself in a coming negotiation.

‘You’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘You got to go in the deep end. We’re big thinkers now, sweetheart. Take a sip of this –’ she lifted the bottle to my lips and I obediently sipped its lukewarm wine. ‘We’re going Wandsworth – go down there.’ She waved vaguely to our left. ‘Get over the river.’

‘Why?’ I moved into the lane she’d indicated.

‘Not telling you.’

‘So is this car stolen?’

Her face deflated into a sneer. ‘Don’t be such a fucking fun sponge.’ She punched me on the arm. ‘You think I know how to steal a fucking car? No. This car was an act of love. I’m in love now and I’ve got a man that’s in love with me.’

‘Who – that new guy? Is he rich?’

She laughed and drank again, shaking her head. ‘You know who he is, bitch – Kimber’s the man of my dreams, the love of my life! – I met him down the Rockway the same night you ran off sulking – cos you was jealous of him, weren’t you sweetheart? Ah my sweet sulking little gremlin, you got jealous, didn’t you?’

She lifted up her hand and waved it in front of my face until I noticed the silver band around her ring finger.

‘Is that an engagement ring?’

She cackled. ‘No, not telling you. My story needs to build. Talk to me about something else first. How you going to spend your money?’

‘I dunno… I need to buy a better edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems. I don’t want any editing. She had her own type of dash, and —’

‘You’re really talking to me about dashes? No. Sweetheart, we’re in a brand new car, we got champagne, we’re in the Royal Fucking Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Sweetheart, no. You got to think bigger now.’ She turned the radio on again and baroque orchestral music began shaking the metal beneath our feet. ‘You’re going to buy something stupid what won’t last. You’re going to buy expensive olives and expensive wine – cos we’ve got a new place to live! We’re out of the hostel forever – it’s done, we can’t go back – all our worldly possessions are in the boot of this car, and we’re moving in today.’

‘What?’ I braked in surprise. Car horns honked behind us. ‘Shit, what?’ I released the brake. ‘How?’

‘I know! Ah, but you’ve made me feel bad now – don’t feel bad about the dashes, sweetheart – I should be more supporting, sorry, sorry. Course you can buy your poems, tell me about them, I’m listening.’

‘What? Stop changing the subject.’

She laughed, tapping the side of the bottle in applause at her own performance. ‘This is how you build tension! But really babe, tell me why Emily should get your money. What’s her best line?’

‘I like “soundless as dots on a disk of snow”,’ I said, choosing to play along. ‘It’s about civilisation collapsing. She has a perfect verse about snow as well:

“This is the Hour of Lead —”’

‘Ok shut the fuck up, you win. No more poems, no dashes, I’ll tell you everything.’

‘I knew you wouldn’t last.’

‘Alright, have a drink first,’ she said, lifting the bottle up to my mouth. ‘But keep your eyes on the road. Oi! Breathe through your fucking nose you amateur. How many shit blowjobs you given with that technique? What the fuck? Breathe through your nose – there you go – I’m not taking this away till you drink all of it –’ I tried to lean my head back, groaning in protest. ‘No, drink it all,’ she laughed, and kept it there until I choked.

The alcohol could provide a little relief, perhaps – for the welts across my back – but these competed with the deeper pain a decade old – of my myalgia – which no alcohol could help. That pain needed harder drugs than the ones allowed by shops or doctors – it needed the heroin Dawn had promised me – and doctors had failed me long ago, anyway, as they had failed everyone else with my illness.

I coughed up Dawn’s wine until the taste wove into the sound and scent of sycamore trees brushing each other’s branches – and she settled back into her chair, preparing her story.

In her silence, I wondered whether I belonged to an invisible epidemic – the greatest epidemic of the twenty-first century, perhaps – since my disease afflicted tens of millions of people, but most of them hadn’t even heard of it – a multi-system sickness of pain and exhaustion and immune dysfunction, a metabolic crisis – that left no signs on the body, yet depleted its victims more severely than late-stage cancer, and lasted for decades – and yet made no appearances in films or books, received almost no funding or research, and had no known cause and no known cure, and no fixed name – a sickness that afflicted colder countries more, and northern Europe and America the most, like it was somehow the repressed remorse of imperialism, or the rest of the world’s revenge…