Dead Europe (41 page)

She did not move. Her eyes did not stray from my face.
I was crying myself now, endless apologies. I thrust into my pockets and found money. I threw the notes at her. A fiver. A twenty. Another. Another. All of my money for England. She was still, then looking at the money at her feet, she sprang up from the bed, gathered the notes, grabbed her clothes and fled. I could hear the tumble of her steps as she rushed down the stairs. There was a shout, an obscenity. I picked up my crucifix and looked at it. The craving had not subsided. I was not clean. But I had consciousness. I had to feed. No Christ, no God, could change that. I made the promise then. And as I made it, out loud, in that piss-stinking fuck-room, I made it not to God but to a man. To Colin. I would choose righteously. Not her, not someone like her. I would have to choose. I could not pretend it was only instinct. I had to feed and I had to choose. I was Satan and I was God.

The man from the reception desk was standing in the doorway. He held a long dagger. When he spoke, his accent was from the Caribbean.

—You gonna fuck off?

I slowly nodded.

—If I ever fucking see you again, I'll fucking slice you.

When I walked past him he spat at my feet.

There was no London as I retraced my steps. There were no revellers, no whores. There were no cars and no lights, no neon and no laughter. There was no asphalt, no sky, no brick, no night. There was nothing above and nothing beneath. There was no form in the void. There was only my breathing, the coursing of my blood. There was no one in the hotel foyer when I entered. There was no doorman, no porter, no receptionist, no concierge. There was no desk, no lift, no door. There was only a question, whispered to me, by the Thames, by the wind, by Europe itself. It was Andreas' question, Maria's question, Sula's question, Zivan's question. What do you believe?

I know how to answer it now. What I believe is that we will kill each other, that we will hurt each other. We will destroy our neighbours and we will exile them. We will sell our children as whores. We will murder and rape and punish one another. We will keep warring and we will keep hating and we will believe we are just and righteous and faithful. We will keep killing and selling one another and we will believe that we are just and fair and good. We will pursue pleasures and destroy one another in these pursuits. We will abandon our children. We will do all this in the name of God and in the name of our nature. We will create poverty and illness and we will create obscene wealth and the depravities that arise from it. We will think ourselves just and righteous, faithful and sane. We will hate and kill and piss and shit on one another. We will continue to do so. We will create Armageddon. In the name of God or in the name of justice or, simply, because we can. This is what I believe.

 

The American answers my knock. When he sees me, he laughs, a sly victorious cackle, and he opens the door and welcomes me. How had I not sensed it before? The putrid, spent stench of him. He is naked except for a white hotel towel tied around his belly.

—I thought you'd be back.

He sits in the armchair and the towel slips to the floor. His cock is wet and limp and red. He lights a cigarette and points to the bed.

—He's yours, you can have him.

The room has been cleaned and the bed made up again with fresh sheets. But there is the stench of vomit and shit, the caustic foulness of amyl nitrate. The Russian is lying naked on his stomach in the centre of the bed. His wide, fleshy arse. There is a trickle of blood there, it has dampened the fine tufts of black hair along his crack, and my resolve weakens as I smell it. I want to enter him. I walk over to the
bed, my cock hard. I look down at him. His eyes are open and for a moment I fear he is dead. He is a man, I can see he is a man. His breathing is hoarse, there are silent tears falling, a constant stream. The side of his face lies in vomit. The empty brown glass amyl nitrate vial is clutched in his fist. The television screen flickers with images from CNN. A grim male newsreader with glasses. Flashes of desert, a handcuffed youth, scrawling letters.

—Don't worry, he's not dead.

I turn to the American. He is smoking the cigarette, stroking the thick grey fluff on his chest. His smile is cruel.

—Fuck him. It is an order, harsh, intoxicating.

I shake my head.

—Go on, you fucking cunt, that's why you've come back, isn't it? Fuck him.

I am startled by the venom but I am not afraid. I have nothing to fear.

He goads me in harsh, cold whispers, arousing himself with each threat. His hand has begun to stroke at his cock.

—This is what you want to do, I know. I knew it all along.

He has grabbed a tube of lubricant from the floor and is squirting it onto his limp cock.

—Go ahead, rape him. Go on—have you got the fucking guts? Kill the cunt.

I can smell the Russian. Blood and shit and sex. My cock is pressing against my jeans. Rape him. Kill him.

The American has risen and stands beside me. He looks down at the Russian. The Russian's eyes, unmoving, gaze somewhere beyond us. The American pulls the Russian's legs apart. There is a fart, then the smell. The Russian moans.

—Isaac, the American says slowly, deliberately; he is huge, he seems to fill the whole of the room. I order you to kill him. Get your revenge, Isaac. He's nothing, he's an animal. The American spits on the Russian. I command you. Destroy
him, kill him, annihilate him. I command you. Slaughter him.

The Russian is moaning. I can do it. I can do anything to him. Meat, blood and flesh. I know then what man is. Meat. Flesh. Blood. He moans, low, desperate, ill. I sniff the air.

It is the American behind me. I can smell all of him. Lubricant, sweat, semen, muscle, blood, amyl nitrate, shit, piss, spit, soap, leather, cotton, denim, metal, plastic, steel, wood, alcohol, marijuana, coke, Pepsi, fries, wine, beer, plastic, steel, iron, leather, silk, satin, uranium, plutonium, petrol, chips, chocolate, gelatin, dollars, euros, pounds, Omo, Oreos, Oil of Ulan, porn, television, cinema, gold, silver, cash, stocks, bonds, insurance, tanks, guns, rifles, Versace, Gucci, Prada. Piss, sweat, blood, shit. God. The American stinks of Him. Piss, sweat, blood, shit. It stinks of Him.

 

Armageddon. How long must we sing this song, Lord? Sweet Armageddon, beloved genocide, Come to me.

 

I don't wish it to die straight away. I want to feel the liquid, thick and alive, course into me. I first bite into its upper lip. It does not scream, just a bare whimper as I tear the flesh off. Its eyes, horror swimming through them, catch mine but I have already ripped into its throat and it shakes, stammers and falls, slumping across the armchair. Its blood is on my face, on my lips, in my mouth, in my throat, pouring onto my body, the chair, the carpet, the walls. I feel its moment of death. Death makes a sound, a low rumble, a hoarse, desperate cleaving to life, then silence. Life is extinguished. The taste of the blood has changed, lost its potency, become stale. I wipe my face, lick at the blood. It has released its sphincter and bladder. Piss and shit run down its legs, drip onto the hotel carpet. There is laughter in the room, a boy's loud joyous exhilarated laughter.

There is a box in the corner; light dances and flickers across a screen. For a moment I stare, transfixed. Light
dances from it, sounds come from within it, patterns forming patterns, sound echoing sound. Elated, I walk over to the bed. I am not yet satisfied. There is more to be had. The other creature on the bed is asleep, snoring. I lift its head, and for a moment the eyes flick open, there is rage there, but my teeth sink into its face and the eyes disappear forever. I pull away skin and muscle and bone and the blood gushes onto my face and neck and as it pours over me I can taste Creation but almost immediately I feel virile life being extinguished and this blood too is spent. I throw the carcass off the bed and lie down on the drenched silk sheets. As I fall into calm sleep, I hear the jumble of confused electric noise coming off the box in the far corner of the room; I am aware of the insistent humming of the bedside lamp above me; I can hear the dripping of the blood as it slides down the walls and falls in drops onto the carpet; the last sound I hear before blessed sleep is the violent, delighted laughter of the boy as he comes to lie next to me, wrapping his legs and arms around me.

—EVERY CHRISTMAS THE Jews would steal a Christian toddler, put it in a barrel, still alive, run knives between the slats, and drain the child of its blood. Then they'd drink it. That's the first thing I ever got told about the Jews.

—I can't believe Rebecca told you that shit.

—I must have been about five when she told me. She made it sound like a fairytale …

—… pretty fucked-up fairytale …

—… I know, I know. Dad told her off when he heard her talking about that sort of stuff. He told us it was uneducated peasant bullshit. He sat me down and gave me a history lesson. He explained where the Jews came from, told us that the Bible was their history, told us about the Holocaust. He even explained what the Ashkenazi and the Sephardim were. Being Dad, of course, he put his own Marxist spin on it. He always said that the tragedy of the Holocaust was that the Nazis destroyed the Jewish proletariat. And he told us that the Bible was all crap and not to believe in any religion.

—He was never religious?

—Maybe when he was a kid. But, nah, he hated religion. His religion was communism. And heroin.

—My Mum hated religion too. Typical Aussie, she taught me jack-shit. I had to go to school before I heard about Jesus. I believed in the Easter Bunny but I hadn't heard of Jesus.

—So how was she when you became a Christian?

—I was never a Christian.

—I thought you were …

—… I was fascinated by religion; I read the Bible because Steve made me. I'm glad he did. It made me fall in love with reading history. I know, that's not very Aussie of me. But I hardly knew any Christians. Just Steve and some of the kids at school. I knew the Catholics, the Orthodox, the Muslims. But they didn't give a fuck about religion except for some fasting at Ramadan or Easter. That was all religion was for them.

—I know exactly what you mean. It's all ritual, no theology. When I got older I yelled at Mum, said: Your bloody Jesus was a Jew, how could you tell me the things you did?
He was a Jew.

—He wasn't.

—He
was.

—Listen to me. He was born a Jew but he came to earth to announce a new Covenant, to replace the old Covenant between Moses and God.

—Now you do sound like a Christian.

—I just fucking hate that liberal bullshit that claims we're all brothers, that it's all the same religion …

—…'s the same bloody God …

—Listen, all I'm saying is that if you're a Jew, you claim to be a descendant of the twelve tribes of Israel. Your law is the law of Moses. You are the Chosen People. That's it. Your God doesn't give a fuck about anyone else. It's all there in the Torah. If you're Christian you believe in the resurrection of Christ, the Trinity and the new Covenant. If you're Muslim then Mohammed was God's last Prophet and you submit to the word of God as written in the Qu'ran. They are not the same thing. I can't stand New Age Christian preachers trying to humanise the Bible. I can't stand secular American Jews brandishing their copies of the Constitution as equivalent to Holy Writ and thinking they can be both Jewish and non-believers. Fucking bullshit. At least the Muslims are bloody honest.
You can't be democratic and monotheistic. Choose. It's one or the other.

—I disagree. That's too hard, much too hard. You can be ecumenical. You can have a rabbi, a priest, a mullah …

—… they go into a bar …

—… You can have them get together, acknowledge differences but also accept similarities. Find common ground. Otherwise you are talking perpetual war. I can't agree with you.

—Listen, your mum didn't make that up about the Jews, not the blood libel. It's a fact. It's in the Gospels, I can't fucking remember exactly where, I think it's in Matthew. The Jews answered Pontius Pilate: let His blood be on us and our children. If you're a Christian, you have to accept that obscenity as fact. Your dad was wrong. Your mother wasn't speaking as an illiterate peasant but as a believer. That's the source of blood libel and I don't give a fuck how many bourgeois theologians attempt to explain it away by theorising about the politics of the early Church and the Roman state. What are you? What do you believe? Do you believe that the Jews killed Christ? Or do you believe that the Jews are God's Chosen People and his only people? Or do you submit to the word of God as revealed in the Qu'ran and unless you do you are doomed to Hell? This might offend your fucking democratic wishy-washy liberal pieties, but religion
is
war.

—Why are you so angry?

—Because people are cowards.

—Who came first? Abraham or Moses?

—Jesus Christ, I can't believe this. And you're the one who went to fucking university.

—They don't teach religion at university.

—They should.

—Why?

—It's history, it's politics.

—You sound like a bloody fundamentalist. Bullshit. God is dead. That's what you learn at university.

—Right, He's dead, is He? Go ask Khadijah and Bilal next door. Go ask your mum. Go ask the fucking Israelis and the Palestinians or the Hindus and the Pakistanis if God is dead.

—You haven't answered my question.

—Abraham was before Moses. He was after Noah. Isaac, your namesake, was his son whom God demanded he sacrifice. Abraham was prepared to do God's will. His other son was Ishmael, the bastard son he had with his slave, Hagar. The Jews come from the line of Isaac. The Arabs claim they are descended from Ishmael.

—Fucking perfect. Slavery and blood feuds. And that's religion? You can fucking keep it.

—That's history, mate, that's politics. Blood and servitude.

—So you're arguing that if you are going to believe in God, you have to believe fundamentally? You believe in Noah and the flood, Sodom and fucking Gomorrah? The Resurrection? That Mohammed received the word of God? That's your argument?

—Yes.

—And Adam and Eve?

—Yes. Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel. And Lilith.

—Who?

—Adam's first wife.

—What? That's not in the Bible.

—It's apocrypha. I like Lilith. She gave God the finger.

—Who the fuck was Lilith?

—First there was the Word. And the Word was Wisdom. Then there was God, Yahweh, and he created the heavens and earth and all that walks and lives and is on the earth. He created Adam after his own image and placed him in Eden. Then when Adam came of age he wanted a partner. So God passed all the female animals past him and Adam slept with them all but none of them satisfied him.

—You're making this up.

—I'm not. It's one version of her story, anyway. You want me to continue?

—Go.

—So God created Lilith from the earth, as he had done with Adam, and he created her in Wisdom's image. Sophia. You should know that word. It's Greek.

—Hang on. And is Sophia another god?

—Yes.

—But isn't there only one God?

—Moses told the Jews they could only worship the one God. But they had many gods before that.

—So Lilith and Adam get together?

—Yes. And they had children, which are now the demons that roam the earth. But Lilith wasn't satisfied with Adam and she left him. She wanted to be equal to him. She flew to the Red Sea and there gave birth to more demons.

—Fuck. What happened to her?

—She's still on earth. She departed Eden long before the Fall and, as she hasn't eaten off the Tree of Good and Evil, she's immortal. She will live to the end of time and God allows her to eat the blood of uncircumcised children. That's our first mother. Blood, you can't escape it. All religions know this.

—But they're fairytales.

—Or they're truth. It all depends on faith.

—But you must agree that they are of their place and time. You can have faith in God or Christ without having to accept all that superstitious shit from millennia ago.

—You can argue and disagree about the meaning of the words, but no, I don't believe you can pick and choose from religious moral codes as if faith is some kind of supermarket of beliefs. I'm with the fundamentalists. You make your choice.
You make your fucking choice
. You are either a believer or not. God makes his meaning and his character
clear in the Torah, in the Bible and in the Qu'ran. He is not a God of love, he is a God of justice.

—So for me to believe in God, I have to believe that loving you, making love to you, being with you, is a sin and I am damned to Hell forever?

—Yes. You can ask God's forgiveness, but if you remain with me, you are damned.

—So do you believe in this God?

—I don't know. But I'll tell you this, my love, if there is the one God, I still choose you. I choose you above God. I've made that choice and I'll live with that choice. I choose Lilith and the demons, I choose Lucifer, who too knew love. I promise you, Isaac, if God is the righteous prick from the Bible, I choose Hell over Him. Fuck him. I choose to be with you. I choose Hell.