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P3

The Big 40th

By

Nic Pendrake

A long shot. Hand-held. Your white car parked up by the embankment. The front door opens. This is you, getting out of your car. It’s raining, but you take off your shirt (white T-shirt underneath) – you remember it was humid that morning. You lean in to the car and pick up something from off the back seat. It’s a squash racket.  You start heading this way. It takes a long time for you to come over. This is the kind of shot only Stanley Kubrick or David Lean could have indulged in.

You hear Iain’s voice, off-screen: “’ey, look, he’s come back for a game of squash.”

A figure enters frame, camera left, foreground. Just the back of him, it’s Derek.

“I’ll fucking squash him,” he says and glances back at the camera with a cocky grin, then heads out to confront you, a baseball bat in both hands. You keep coming, though, undeterred by the sight of a heftier weapon.  A few yards shy of clashing with Derek, you make a sprint, off to the left, the bracken. Camera pans left as Derek chases you into a ditch. You get behind a row of iron girders sticking up out of the ground from where you play a dodging game with Derek. Derek takes some wild swings at you. He’s mocking your choice of weapon, your desire to take back the camera – your silly toy. He clips you on the side of the head. Now you remember picking up a sense that he was not truly committed to this fight. The thing is, you were. So when he turns to camera and says: “You getting all this, then?” that’s when you seize the initiative with a Thwack on the back of the neck. He staggers and you whack him again and again until he falls to his knees, then onto his belly. You keep whacking on the one point as if to chop through his neck. It looks on tape as though you’re just being thorough in dispatching a rat that’s been driving you insane with its restless scratching behind a wall inches from your pillow night after night, but you seem to recall working up a terrific sweat, blood pounding in your ears. Iain is calling over pleading huskily for you to give it a rest, as if he’s truly sorry now.

By the time you’ve stopped, Derek has ceased moving. You’ve a bloom of blood spatter on your white T-shirt and a crazy but quite sexy and heightened look about you as you clock the person still glorifying your violent achievement with your camera. You pick up Derek’s baseball bat, you take a good grip  - and charge. It’s surprising how much ground you cover in just a few seconds. Like a big cat. It’s quite gratifying to watch. You’ve never seen yourself look so menacing, so powerful. It must be the wide-angle lens. The baseball bat comes right at camera. You can’t be stopped. The camera spins in the air and falls on a softer patch of the dirt road. It lies on its side like a stunned bird, gazing at the bed of tyres they might have executed you on had you not foreseen what was about to happen to you. Your feet enter frame left. You’re carrying Iain. No, you’re dragging him. You dump him on the tyres. Like rubbish. That’s what he is, rubbish. The camera watches as your knees spring back up, the chassis to the thumping motion of your blows. There’s this off-screen thwack of wood against bone, which invokes the memory of you as a boy tearing down a heavy, wet branch, proving your strength to your dad. You see Dad, I might be nearly forty, but I can still stand up for myself even against bullies.

Your feet finish their work. They pause a moment, then head toward camera. You reach for the camera and pick it up. The sky fills the screen for a moment, then the lens swoops down on the figures of two beaten men. The camera tracks past one mashed-in head to the figure of Derek lying in the mud and grass.  The camera goes back as though it has forgotten something, lingers like a fly over the head of Iain. You hear a buzzing sound and the images start to flicker, then die.

You are looking at the BLUE of the viewfinder.

You look a long time at this pool of electric blue. You remember the toothpaste ad you wrote for which they used ‘blue screen’, allowing your online editor to key in the things that weren’t there and key out the things you no longer wanted to be there, such as the minor stains on the model’s teeth… But how can you key in an alternative resolution that will undo what you have done?

You Fast Forward and PLAY - but not from the camera, this one’s from your own memory.  What had you done afterwards? You’d gone back to the car to clean up. Like after a Sunday football match, something you haven’t done for 20 years. You looked around a lot, checking – not a face, a voice to be heard, except those of birds. They all seemed to be talking about you, applauding. Peeling off your T-shirt, spirtled with blood and mud, you thought of soap ads. What Persil and the others don’t tell you is that even if you manage to get your whites whiter than white, trace evidence can be detected with luminol. The luminol would pick up blood spatter consistent with the owner of the T-shirt having been involved in a crime of ‘blunt force trauma’. So you peeled off the evidence, put it in a Safeways bag lying loose on the floor of the car and got into your sports top. Using the rear-view mirror, you took a tissue from the Kleenex box and wiped your face clean of blood splashes, spitting on the tissue like a mother making her child’s face presentable to the world. Looking into your eyes in the mirror, just one word occurred to you: irreversible.

Your mobile was ringing. Fuck, it was Jake.

“Hi Jake!” There was sherbet in your voice. “Er, yeah, fine. What’s up?”

“What you up to?” he asks, as if about to spring a surprise change of plan.

“Er, bit of filming. Why?”

“Yeah?” All of a sudden he sounds hurt, excluded from what you’re doing, what you will be doing in the future – without him. “Thought you was location hunting?”

“Er, yeah, bit of both. I’m about done, though. What’s up?” Now was hardly the time to let yourself get caught up in a long conversation with Jake.

“Well listen, mate,” his tone now clearly implying he doesn’t want to know anything further about your filmmaking, “I couldn’t rearrange that squash court for later, so – I dunno… we can still do that drink, though… maybe a bite to eat?”

You agreed to a place and time, your thumb and spit wiping off blood spatter from your watch face. (That was another thing you’d have to destroy - no doubt there was trace evidence on the leather of the strap.)

It was too risky to stick around and attempt to bury the bodies - you needed to be gone. So you got in the car - No, wait, you must have already packed the bodies into the boot by then. Yes. You’d done that before cleaning up. Of course. You’d been lucky to find a sheet of tarpaulin in the boot, left there by Kasumi; she’d been using it for her car boot sales over the past 12 months, it was perfect - did that make her an accessory? You barely paused to take in the carnage. Iain’s brains, like squashed maggots in tomato ketchup, splattered on the tyre he was going to beat you on. You felt their necks, got some buttery blood on your fingers. Nothing. Warm meat. God, they were heavy. The last time you’d carried anyone like this was when you’d transferred your daughters from your bed to theirs half way through the night and they were heavy enough. You packed them in carefully. You could almost feel Kasumi standing by your side, instructing you how to avoid getting blood on any of the car boot’s interior. You eased down the lid of the boot till it made a neat click. You looked about you. You looked long and hard. No, still no one around.