Black Market Prosthetics

When I woke up, I found myself with one foot inside my wardrobe.  On the other side of the room, the alarm was beeping.  It enraged me and I wondered what I was doing.  I had had a restless night.  

Pretty soon, my nose began to bleed.  I could feel its cold descent long before I watched with satisfaction the vibrant colour stagger down my filtrum and splash into the sink, dappling the white porcelain with its healthy rouge.  I was positioned in front of the mirror: partly so that my blood fell into the sink, partly so that I could watch my life essence fall out of my face.  I tired of this after a time and, leaning forward, pinched the cartilage in my nose.  This did nothing but block the blood flow, only unleashing a greater flow when I released my grip.  In the end I stuffed some tissue up there and hoped that it would dry up before I had to leave the flat.  It did, and I washed the brown speckles from my nostril and flushed the tissue down the toilet.

It was raining.  Heavily.  Big droplets like icy needles being plunged into skin that wasn’t ready for them.  God was a mean acupuncturist.  So I gritted my teeth and pulled up my collar.  A sheet of purple slate had enshrouded the world and the sun shone vaguely through it.  As I walked, the puddles merged into great, unavoidable lakes and I became more aware of the hole in the sole of my shoe with every step.  I imagined it getting bigger and bigger, exposing my frail sock to the elements.  My foot felt wet.  Traffic hissed by me, filling the air with biting moisture.

The bus was full of the same dour faces, of every day wishing their lives away working day by working day.  I occupied one of the dirty, unnecessarily psychedelic seats and tried to give off an antisocial air while staring out of the window at the grey, splashing world.  Nobody took the place next to me until there was no other option.  My neighbour became a gangly youth who had poured himself into an ill fitting suit for what was probably his first office job.  He was unfortunate looking, his mouth agog, his sable hair shaved and fluffy.  From his turkey neck protruded an Adam’s apple that looked painful and gulped helplessly as I stared at him, putting him into words.  The stigmatism of his nervous gaze never wavered from whatever was dead ahead.

*

Around the back of King’s Cross Station are a series of large, unremarkable buildings, one of which is the prosthetics factory I call work.  Steam ballooned out of a drain grate like picture house New York.  A door buzzed and I was in.

The factory I work in is a loud confusion, the colour of dirty metal and imitation skin, the smell of industrial grease and tanning leather.  The people who work there are stupid, unambitious and miserable.  Like me.  Joking.  I speak to nobody unless it is necessary.  Most people don’t waste their time embarking on relationships there.  It is enough to work there, to switch off, to get the job done and leave it all behind at the end of the day.  Only, I don’t leave it all behind.

At 4.30, I ambled past the uninterested security desk, my hold all by my side, and clocked out.  The sky was only marginally darker than it had been in the morning.  It had stopped raining but great puddles remained strained across the ground.  The smell of static sat heavy in the oppressive air and infuriated the looming clouds.  There would be a storm.

The bus weaved a random course through a tangle of traffic.  By the time it had negotiated its path to Edgware Road the sky was a black that cloaked the world and hid so much from view.  My first step off the bus was greeted by a long flash of lightning, a momentary pause, then an explosive roar of thunder that sounded like London crashing to the ground under the weight of the falling sky.  The rain began again: big, slow, sparse droplets, that fell with increasing regularity and hurried me on my way.

*

The Beirut Express is a restaurant.  It is always busy.  Its vibrancy and luminescence hum into the night like laughter at a funeral: out of place in this area, but welcome all the same.  People wait in the wings for a seat and passers-by dart fleeting glances in through the window and want to be inside.  The flats next door to The Beirut Express are its reverse.  A hooded figure drifted out of the building as I approached.  I breezed past him, through the open door into the ramshackle lobby.  The figure turned and grunted at me before he swaggered into the night rain.  The heavy door slammed shut and I made my way up the creaking, groaning stairs.

The door to flat 4 had been replaced many times, having been kicked in by police, thugs, dealers, whoever.  The door itself had changed since I had seen it last.  It was a heavy blue fire door, probably from a school.  There was a framed hole just below head height, where a pane of safety glass would have been.  Instead, a piece of wood prevented anyone from looking into the flat.  I knocked: three loud, slow knocks.  I heard the muffled panic of an unprepared home.  The wood slid away from the window.  A single bloodshot eye stared out of the darkness.

“Devil.”

I looked down at the floor and then straight at the eye again.

“Are you going to let me in?”

“Devil.”

Spat the voice again.  I turned to walk away.  As I did so, the door creaked open and I turned back, smiling as I did so.  Linus stood in the doorway, steeped in aggression.  Crack had drained the Caribbean from his face so that he was a deep shade of jaundice.  He hissed at me as I walked in to the flat.  I ignored him.  He was not a threat.

*

Linus lived with Albert.  A couple of years ago, Albert bought some particularly brown smack from a relative he no longer trusts.  Only half an hour before he began cooking up, the pair had been all smiles and jokes before he ran home with the excitement of an adolescent boy with pornography.  He cooked up a large dose.  As his hungry vein twitched and swelled, he shuddered and breathed deeply, almost erotically, in anticipation of what he was about to do to himself.  With gentle pressure the jagged needle penetrated the soft skin of the aching vein.  Perhaps it was because his heartbeat was a galloping horse, or perhaps it was due to the potency of the poison he had just brought into himself, but Albert was gripped by the power of the drug before he could remove the needle from his arm.  Consciousness was replaced with insuppressable physical ecstasy.  Within minutes he began fitting violently, his pathetic body thrashing around the floor like a shark in the throes of a kill.  The needle thrust deeper into the frail arm until it had disappeared from view.  Then somehow, the plastic of the syringe began to enter the body as well.  As the limbs flailed, the syringe tore through the arm, rupturing veins and muscles, and the arm became more and more mangled.  Above his blue lipped foaming mouth his eyes were wide and glazed and his pupils, pleading pin pricks.  Then he lay still and began to breathe.

It was twenty hours before Linus returned home, enraged with the come down of a massive crack binge.  He found his friend lying almost dead on the living room floor, his tattered arm contorted beneath him.  In what he saw as a logical expression of his affection and concern for his only friend, Linus thrust his balled fist into Albert’s face.  His nose oozed thick dark blood and his eyelids opened to reveal unseeing eyes that had rolled far back in his head.  Linus grabbed him by the collar and, shaking him, began to shout:

“Wake up!  Wake up you fuck!”

Then he noticed Albert’s ravaged arm.  Linus slapped him across his ghostly face and shouted louder:

“You fuck!  I can smell almonds!  You hear?!  I can smell fucking almonds!  It will have to go.”

This last he said with cold authority.  He released Albert’s collar and his lolling head clunked to the floor.  In the kitchen drawer Linus found a breadknife and returned to Albert’s withered body.  Using a knife and a loose tile from the fireplace, he hacked and grinded imprecise surgery at the point just below where Albert’s shoulder became his arm.  I don’t know how that mess healed, but the severed arm went out with an old chicken carcass, newspaper and cigarette ash.

Linus kept Albert almost as a prisoner from then.  He was convinced that were he to go to a hospital, the authorities would become involved and would take away the lifestyle they so loved.  He wouldn’t allow him out of their flat.  At the vegetable distribution plant where Linus’s successful brother had given both of them menial but decently waged jobs, Linus protested of Albert’s long term illness.  Sensing his brother’s growing impatience with Albert, Linus sought me out, judging Black Market Prosthetics the solution to his dilemma.  He was just there one day, snivelling in the rain.  I don’t know how many of my colleagues had ignored him and dismissed his pleas, but the desperation that partners recurrent rejection possessed him like a consuming aura.  Detecting an opportunity for exploitation I accompanied Linus back to his desolate flat.  Upon inspection, Albert’s left arm was nothing more than a scabby stump.  I laughed when I saw him: this miserable, desperate, old, balding, one armed junky whose addiction was so resolute he had resorted to injecting his crotch.  But I saw my opportunity.  I stole a prosthetic arm from work and charged Albert a thousand pounds for it.  He winced as he handed over the cash.  

The arm itself was faulty.  I had seen to this by loosening a bolt and removing a crucial washer in the complicated wrist joint.  It was a couple of months before I was called upon again following an embarrassing incident at work that almost caused Albert to lose his job.  He called me himself to make his request.  His voice shook with emotion, full of the embarrassment and indignity of his predicament.  Then he began to cry, his tears taking over his words with erratic breathing and incomprehensible babbling.  I couldn’t help but laugh.  So I brought him a new arm, making sure that this time, the joint around his stump was a little too big.  He bore it with remarkable stoicism for, again, no more than a couple of months before I received another call.  And this is how the cycle continued: their desperation causing me to make defects in my own product causing their desperation and so on.  Tonight I bring Albert his ninth prosthetic arm.

“The last one was too big.  It was about six inches longer than my right arm.”

Said Albert with a snigger, trying to lighten the mood and raise an amicable reaction from me.

“It was all I could get” I muttered.  It was a lie.

“I’ve got a good mind not to pay you for this one” he said, sniggering again.  

I stopped fitting the new arm and stared into his shallow yellow eyes.  The smile left his drooping face and he looked down and nodded.  My mind laughed and I continued to fit the arm which had, incidentally, a small cube of broken glass under the material of the socket fitting into which Albert’s stump slotted.  After, say, a couple of months this would irritate so much that I would be receiving another call.

The index and middle fingers on Albert’s right hand were yellow, an indication of yet another vice.  They clutched the wad of cash as my own hand rose to meet it.  Then we were both holding it.  Albert wouldn’t let go.  I looked at Albert’s face; at his weary eyes where tears formed in gaping pink ducts.  I was suddenly reminded of summer holidays when my grandfather would give me money for sweets.  Albert continued his silent plea.  I snatched the money from his frail hand and turned towards the door.

“Devil” spat Linus one last time as he opened the door for me.

“Fuck off” I said and marched out of the flat, the door echoing an aggressive slam behind me.

*

Finding a body isn’t the shock I expected it to be.  I was on the flaking groaning stairs that led me up to my flat when I saw the protruding foot and immediately resigned myself to having happened upon a corpse.  I was not disturbed and intrigue had vanquished any murmurs of fear – murmurs I thought I should have had, but murmurs I, in reflection, did not for an instant feel.  The foot itself was connected to a trousered shin.  But that was all.  Before the shin had a chance to stretch into a knee, it dribbled into a shimmering pool of deep cherry blood.  A very clean cut, the leg had been severed without complication or hindrance, like the deft slice of a butcher’s cleaver through a bleeding raw ox tail.  It lay on the floor like a stick of rock, the bone and the marrow on full display.  I kicked the leg down the stairs I had just ascended, enjoying the comedy and complex irony of kicking such a dismembered limb down a flight of stairs.  I stepped over the rippling puddle rouge and opened the door to my flat. 

Crossing the threshold it occurred to me that somewhere, somebody was missing a significant portion of a leg.  If I could find this somebody, I stood to make money by finding them a false limb.  Unless of course, this was the kind of person who would visit a hospital for such an injury.  I hoped that it was a junky or a lunatic and that I could find whoever it was.  But as I shut the door behind me, it started to eat at me.  Why should I rely on anybody else to drum up business for me; why should I rely on anybody else to lop the stricken limbs off hapless heroin addicts?  I had stumbled upon a wealth of opportunity.  I would create my own clients for Black Market Prosthetics.  I smiled.  I would buy a machete.