Blood Vessel

The boy drinks my burning blood.

Slowly.

His bony hand around my neck, a real strangler.

Soon he will drain me and break me.

Shatter me upon the living altar of another’s body.

I feel my blood slosh around his empty stomach, scalding him, the acid rising, stripping away the tender funnel of his gullet with paint peeling burps.

As I percolate within him, as my particles circulate, as I hitch a ride on the current of his bloodstream and swim around inside his head, riding the reckless lightning bolts of his easily fired synapses I get a feel for him.

I taste him.

The perfect host.

He’s a sick pup, sicker than a cancer ward’s bins.

Future bleak, as black as a body bag, jaw breaking tension and negativity have been amassing in this neglected runt for his whole life, forming a wickedly steep K2 for his bad intentions to race up like sherpas with speed shot into their eyes, a mountain with no safe way down, only a suicidal plummet.

I tenderise him, working on his soft parts, exploiting the chinks in his inadequate psychic armour.

“You’re a useless cunt and no one wants you. Dad left you, and your mum’s a pisshead because she can’t bear the thought of looking at you sober. And look at you. You are just like her. A drunk. Sucking on that whisky bottle like you sucked on your uncle Pukkah’s dick on that trip to the seaside. Oh yes I know about that. Everyone does. You think they don’t, but they can see it in your eyes, they can smell it on your breath. Especially Blaine. He’s at the party tonight isn’t he? What are you gonna do about that eh? You can’t let him get away with slapping you like he did last year at the fair. Remember how all those girls laughed. Probably won’t do anything will you though. Cowardice, it’s genetic I’m afraid.”

His grip tightens around my neck.

I rejoice.

I feel the violent red surge of murder shoot through his body.

His thoughts become a gas chamber, a melting reactor on the verge of total implosion.

I’m surprised his mates don’t have radiation burns from the corrosive aura he’s emitting.

They eye him with sideward glances as they walk along the street, the streetlamps oozing a sickly Berocca orange glow across the frozen black river of the road.

He passes me to them, and they take tiny, scared sips, my neck singing in the razor-edged autumn breeze.

They hiss and go back to nursing their lukewarm cans of Stella.

“Pass me back,” I whisper.

I don’t want him to go cold on me.

I command him to drink deeply.

He upturns me and allows me to flow seamlessly down his gullet.

I wash over him, running into the deepest darkest corners of his being, which I illuminate revealing a spread-eagled scrapbook of the things that keep him up at night; a secret suicide attempt involving a Stanley blade and a box of NyQuil, a stepfather handy with his fists.

A streak of yellow piss snaking down a skinny shivering leg as my boy stands in his pants in a cold caravan as his uncle Pukkah unzips his jeans.

Shame scrubbed away with a Brillo pad, only to return, years later, in the form of me, evil’s own emissary, smuggled into the human soul in a multitude of forms.

In this case, a bottle of cheap bourbon (£10.99).

I am fuel, and my human host is merely an engine of combustion.

Together we will produce an atrocity.

His spiritual agony is delicious, his mind’s eye scouring over bitter memories his psyche had long ago discarded for the sake of psychological preservation.

His sweet tears ooze out with the painful slowness of a wank hanging dying climax.

“You alright bruv? Maybe you should take it easy on that rocket fuel eh?”

“Fuck off,” my boy says, taking another swig.

“That cunt Blaine. Is he gonna be at the party tonight?”

“Why bruv? Not still thinking about last year are ya? Fuck me that was ages ago. Just leave it bruv. Get with a nice bird or saynk. Haley’s gonna be there. She likes you.”

“Yeah she likes you boy. Proper. Said you was well fit.”

“Fuck her. If he’s there I’m gonna do him. Proper.”

His friends reply with a crescendo of nervous fidgeting and shrugging. They practically tap dance.

“Leave it out eh, come on mate.”

“Yeah leave it out mate come on.”

My boy doesn’t reply, but the fear is tangible, whale omelette thick and Portaloo-shithouse smelly.

They walk in silence now, their shoes clip clopping on the concrete, echoing down the empty throat of the street.

Something is gathering momentum; they can all feel it.

Something bad is going to happen, and they can feel themselves being pulled into the orbit of this unknown and awful event.

There is no escape.

Piggy backed on the gentle breeze, I hear the faint thumping of music, from a few streets away.

We are close.

My boy takes another slurp from me, and his chums cringe.

It’s party time.

***

As we approach, the momentum increases, the clapping of my boy’s footsteps on the road followed by the kick drum thud of his heart a rhythmic beat, punctuated by a ritualistic punch to the side of his own chin.

We enter the party through the back gate, avoiding a hunched double girl spewing up a chunky apron of cider sick into a flower bed that seems to wilt under the rancid wash she waters it with.

The gate shudders with a shoulder barge and we are in, a bull shark in the shallows, ready to leave limbless kiddies screaming in its wake.

My boy is reeling, lurching from one spinning image to another as I give him a one two punch of drunkenness and disorientation.

The party is one writhing mass of pissed up hormonal flesh, a singular monstrosity of barely legal tits and arses spilling out of too tight fancy dress costumes, dancing spasmodically to a spastic beat of drum and bass and RnB.

One or two couples are locked in awkward embraces.

Groups of young blokes’ posture on the side-lines, drinking cans of industrial lager and ogling at uninterested meat from behind SCUD missile sized joints of cheesy skunk.

My boy is almost on autopilot, and it’s an awesome feeling of power to be able to take the reins and steer him off a cliff, but I sense a reluctance, stage fright almost.

All the eyes, a hundred pairs or more, he feels them all crawl over him.

His psyche is a burning tower block with locked fire escapes; If he wants out he will have to jump and I tell him so.

“Are you gonna fucking sack it off then? Go home is it? Go home like a coward? We came here with a job to do. Find that cunt and do him. Open him up like a tin of beans. Do it. DO IT.”

The murder reignites. Spores of it sprout within him like mushrooms.

He scans the crowd for a particular face.

Someone hands him a cigarette and he takes one almighty suck and stubs it out on his own face.

He stalks the party, slithering between bodies, ignoring hellos and back slaps, drinking methodically from my open neck as he goes.

His gaze sweeps past something he recognizes and pans back to a group of lads at the back of the garden near a shed, standing apart from the rest, dripping in designer clobber and tacky bling, one or two sporting gold teeth and ear studs.

Lines shaved into eyebrows, mouths twisted into cruel little sneers.

A pack of try hard honkies, vanilla mice.

“There he is. Do it. Go over and do it. Make him bleed. Make him scream.”

He glugs me down, suckling at my teat as I rupture the vessels that line his throat.

He retches and then he grips me tight and makes a beeline for that face, the face he has pinned all of his heartache to, the face he has given to the trauma stored up in his bones like dormant leukaemia.

He walks through the throng and I swing by his side, happily hand in hand, like lovers walking bravely into the beautiful inevitability of blooming nuclear annihilation.

His heart hangs frozen in the freezer of his chest, a carcass swinging stiffly from a loveless steel hook.

And then an obstacle.

A girl blocks our path, a pretty one with a band of freckles that goes across her nose and under her big green eyes.

Lushly lashed, like spider legs.

She smiles at him and I feel my boy start to thaw.

“Haley,” he says.

“Alright Jimmy,” she says, crossing her legs and pushing out her chest.

Her scent fills his nostrils.

She leans into him and her heat accelerates the thawing process.

Endorphins begin to pollinate within him.

I feel the bomb I have carefully constructed start to be diffused.

“I was looking for you earlier. Who are you here with?”

She looks down, and sees me, hanging half empty by his side.

She gives him a cheeky smile and leans into him further.

I feel him stiffen. Pathetic.

“Got any of that for me?”

He chokes.

“Sure,” Jimmy says, lifting me up toward her glossed lips, and then he actually smiles as she robs some of my precious essence.

She screws up her face and actually spills some of my blood down her dopey fucking chin.

“That’s brutal Jimmy, corr. Like petrol.”

“Yeah,” he says sheepishly as she pushes herself deeper into him.

She leans in and speaks right into the tender plughole of his ear, which sends ripples of pleasure through him, right to his toes.

“You are well fit. I’ve fancied you for ages.”

His hands close around her buttocks and she sighs.

A disgusting flower of happiness opens between the two of them and I realise I am dangerously close to blowing it.

I summon all my waning energy, and channel it into his core.

You’ll never be normal Jimmy. Never. As soon as she kisses you she’ll taste unwanted cock in your mouth and realise you are a quivering little freak. Even if you get anywhere with her you won’t be able to get it up or keep it going, because you will be ashamed and you’ll be thinking of the flaming plane crash of your whole life. You will always be a little boy trapped in a cold caravan Jim, pissing his pants as reality unzips its fly. Now take that bottle and stick it in Blaine’s neck. It’s all you’re good for.

That does it.

The smile drops away from his face like a guillotine and he snatches me back.

“What’s the matter Jim?”

He pushes her away.

She yelps.

He strides over to Blaine and his mates, wading through the thick tide of tinny music, crusty smoke clouds and clammy bodies, and as he reaches them he says “Oi cunt” and Blaine turns with a cardboard cut-out roadman sneer and meets the thick glass of my angular body with the unsuspecting ridge of his brow, with a loud ‘thunk’ that makes everyone stop what they are doing and turn to watch a great gash yawn wide on his pasty forehead.

By the time Blaine has even registered that the drapes of coppery blood cascading down his front is his, Jimmy swings me again, harder this time, with real venom, and I shatter into pieces and the party erupts into screams.

My sudden freedom from the physical plane is rapturous, seismic.

I coat the grass in a treacherous lacerating frost.

A small icicle of my body goes into Haley’s eye and she squeals and tries to blink it away, detaching her cornea, and a larger more triangular piece is swallowed by a fat girl’s shoeless foot.

Blaine collapses into Jimmy and all three of us tumble backward into a flower bed, Blaine thrashing, head lolling like a new-born crack baby as Jimmy secures his grip on my neck and buries the jagged remnants of my jagged body into weeping flesh, again and again.

A knot of limbs, punches ineffectual and slow.

I realise this must be what nightmares are like, this syrupy unreal slowness.

Jimmy catches Blaine in the throat and he gurgles and sits upright with bulging boiled eggs for eyes, as if he was already dead and a bolt of electricity passed through him and reanimated him and he clutches at the ropes of blood that jump away from his neck, slipping through his fingers in greasy squirts.

The harder you try to grasp life the quicker it evades your grasp.

Wounds begin to scream open across his head and face, each one smiling and menstruating, each one baring the rude truth of existence to the onlookers; we are all meat, and nothing more.

The music is cut short and replaced with the sounds of sirens.

Grown men erupt from the house and bundle Jimmy, a real pile up of bodies, a scrum, and someone finally tears what remains of me from Jimmy’s desperate grip.

He’s screaming, crying, ranting incoherently, about his dad, about bullies, about something that happened long ago in a lonely caravan park.

Soon, my neck and its cruel crown of zig zag blades will be placed in an evidence bag, and I will go into a dark musty drawer in the purgatorial stiffness of a bus London police station, and I won’t see daylight again until I am laid upon a table in a courtroom, as scarred for life victims and eyewitnesses’ blubber, as a man in a silly wig bashes a desk with a hammer.

I will be picked out of Haley’s sightless eye, and out of the fat girl’s foot.

I will remain etched upon Blaine’s face and neck in a tapestry of creases and ugly furrows, and he will look into the mirror each morning and trace it with his fingers.

He will weep.

I will live on in Jimmy’s memories and mind, his only source of pride this personal Armageddon, his only real achievement, the putrid mix of shame and elation that rises like bile, the only thing he holds dear to himself, and he will be thinking of me when he decides finally after three years in HMP Belmarsh to turn himself into a chandelier and hang himself from his bunk bed.

That’s it.