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The Seven Days of Peter Crumb
A Novel

Chapter One

Monday

Write it down, he said—every dirty word, he said—the truth of it—the awful evil truth of it.

I woke in a shocking condition. My body livid with dehydration. My mind exquisitely deranged. That numb ache and the awful prospect, another day . . .

Straight away I could feel him, on me, and in me, that damp and familiar presence, disjoining through me, wringing me out, twisting the tired stiffened ends of me apart, distending his limbs long through mine, acknowledging cognizance, and yawning.

'Good morning,' he drooled. A tired wet slur of lazy vowels and sneering bonhomie . . . His breath was of the kidney, it is always of the kidney.

I ignored him, kicked at my slippers and shuffled off into the kitchen. He followed me, whistling. I recognized the tune immediately. It was a tune my father used to whistle. A cheery, seven-dwarfs-off-to-work sort of whistle. Quite terrifying. I filled the kettle and smelt the milk.

'Breakfast,' he said, pulling up a chair and joining uninvited, 'will be neither English nor Continental. Just two slices of stale brown bread—lightly toasted, smeared with rancid unsalted yellow fat and topped with cheap gollywog preserve.'

It was as if he was trying to impress me. I paid him no mind, lit a cigarette and sat perfectly still, my eyes fixed staring at the shadow between the edge of the table and the wall. I held my gaze unblinking until the kettle reached its climax. It almost had him fooled, for a moment I felt normal and everyday, but it was no use, the cigarette had worked its magic,my guts were churning, and he knew it——

'I feel the pinch,' he cried, 'and am ready to shit.'

I bolted for the toilet, my bowels voiding. Grade 7 on the Bristol, I'm afraid to say—'sloppy, no solid pieces', just a cloudy smattering of unctuous yellow viscidity, spat out of my arse all over the bowl, quite disgusting. The vile fetid stink of faecal waste was all about me, inside and out—I was gagging. 'Christ,' he said, 'I can taste it.' And he wasn't joking. I then found I had no toilet tissue. 'Bloody marvellous,' he said. I didn't panic, I kept a straight face and played the Hindu. I squatted in the bathtub, ran my arse under the tap and used my left hand. All in all it was quite refreshing. Afterwards, as I was drying off, I caught sight of him in the mirror, watching me . . . Shifty and venal, guilty and afraid . . . I looked away, ashamed.

My skin is green. I smell of mould. The scab on my ankle is weeping . . . What would Mother say? Clean your teeth.

'My toothpaste,' he said, picking it up and squeezing out a pea-sized blob, 'is herbal. Camomile, sage, eucalyptus and myrrh. It combines the oral-care science of Colgate with nature's best herbs and claims to protect the whole family.'

From what? I thought.

'The contempt these people hold you in,' he said. 'Doesn't it rile? Implicit in their claim to protect the whole family is the notion that your family is in danger.' And then he looked at me, brought his face close to mine and whispered—warning me, he whispered, 'Do not swallow.'

I sluiced with warm water. He doesn't like cold, it hurts his teeth.

In my jacket, as I was getting dressed, I found an old photograph of Emma. A twisted scrap of recollection, forgotten in a pocket. A girl on a beach with a bucket and spade, four years old, sticky beneath the sunshine, blushing ice-cream smiles. A mummy and daddy. Happy and whole. And unembarrassed. To think that was once my life . . . She'd be fourteen on the 28th of April.

My eyes were misting, my throat lumping, emotions mobilizing, and he was on me, snatching the photograph from my fingers. 'I don't forget,' he said. 'I'm very good at memory.' And then he tore the picture into tiny pieces and scattered them all over the carpet and barked, 'Remember that? Remember that?' . . . I do remember that. It left me shaking . . . The long arm was east, the short arm west . . . He went and stood in the corridor and made that munching noise, and then watched the cleaning lady through the spyhole in the front door. She comes once a month and pushes a hoover around the communal parts and gives it all a bit of a tidy. I don't know her name—I've never actually spoken to her—but I think she may be foreign. She has the gormless dewy-eyed look of an Eastern European about her, but he thinks she may be a Cockney—I'm not so sure. He said he could smell her and that she smelt cheap. He said she had a sour little mouth, pinched tight shut like a cat's arse. And then he put his hand in my pocket and tweaked the end of my penis. He said there was something about her guttersnipe demeanour that he found profoundly arousing. He said he imagined her to be an accomplished sexualist, exhaustively perverse in the bedroom, a cider-drinking reader's wife that knows no shame—a real dirty banger, he said —yes, he said, fiddling his fingers in my pocket, pinching the end of me. Sex among the common classes is so of itself, so sui generis—their uncles break them in at an early age and then they're at it every day after. She's probably seen more cock than the public lavatories in King's Cross station . . . And then he said I should rape her . . . He said she'd love it, that that kind of thing would be sport to a girl like her . . . He said that Nietzsche—or it might have been Oscar Wilde, or James Bond— once said, 'A woman hath no greater love, than that she hath for the first man that raped her.'

The Seven Days of Peter Crumb
A Novel. Copyright © by Jonny Glynn. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. <%END%>