What had made her feel light and strong like this was the shedding of guilt. Too often had she stolen into the basement for an extended fag break and felt creepily guilty about it. While she was down there, with the cardboard crusher glinting its metal teeth, the cardboard riding up under the wire mesh as if in some ghastly parody of copulation, she often saw Mark staring at her from the jagged shadows, his tattoos pricked out in the scant light. But not today.
The lift shuddered and jolted. She thought she’d just die if it stuck now. Already she was slightly late. It would be entirely typical if she were late. Thanks, God. But the lift resumed its surly descent. Sam had a horror of God. It was because of God that she still thought, in her heart of hearts, that she had killed her father at the age of fourteen. And that was where the guilt sprang from.
Her father was a religious maniac. When he drew pictures for Sam it had always been scenes from the Bible. She never had annuals for Christmas; she was given instead, in annual installments, his masterwork, a lavish comic-strip adaptation of the Old Testament. It was all disasters and fingers pointing out of tempests. Her mother hid the carefully bound volumes each Boxing day, in case they gave Sam nightmares.
They still did and, when her father was dying, during her early teens, Sam found herself digging out the complete cycle of his work to read to him as he lay in the back parlour, coughing. The wallpaper was peppered with large red roses. Blood clots, she thought, retched up in the night. When she reread the captions of his comic strip and described to him the pictures (his eyesight went first) he had meticulously painted years before, she found that the pictures, glimpsed only once by her, each year after Christmas dinner, had been printed indelibly on her memory. She remembered each nuance, each twisted expression, each burning branch. She never knew what her father was dying of, painfully and inexorably; she still didn’t know. When she reread the Old Testament comic strip to him, she found that he had mixed his captions up in places. Here and there, the fervour of his religious convictions had gripped him so hard that he had the wrong people saying the wrong things. Several balloons were attributed to goats or servants, and the hand of the Old Testament God tended, at times, to point in arbitrary directions.
Peggy never warned her how little time there was. The day he died, Sam was arguing with him about Moses, annoyed by a wasp in the airless room. As she ranted about the burning bush having the lines that the lawgiver ought to have, and her father rattled his final imperatives, she stalked the insect to the windowsill and brought down this particular hardbound volume, crushing it, with a loud bang. Her father expired with a gasp of holy fright.
Guilt dogged Sam, but not today. When the lift reached the shrouded basement, she hauled the cardboard across the concrete towards the corner where the inert crushing machine bulked. Piece by piece she worked; fastidiously yet rapidly, eventually pushing down her first load and standing back against the railing as the machine screeched into action. Then Bob stepped out of the shadows in his Prussian-blue uniform. He even had his helmet on.
“In case I get seen by one of your security guards,” he explained as she stroked his blue-black chin. “I can pretend to be on duty down here.”
The security guards could appear at any time. When Sam had first learned to use the crusher, one had taken to creeping up behind her with handy tips.
“But I also left it on because I know you like it.”
He had neglected to shave, because she liked that too. He disengaged and set about making a rough bed against the wall out of cardboard and polythene. Sam resented Mark’s continuous shaving. It was because of his tattoos. Everything went; she had been startled, at first, at the sight of him, one arm raised, peering in the bathroom mirror, seeing to an armpit. Then they took to shaving each other’s legs in the bath, and it had been fun. But now she understood it was all narcissism. Bob had said as much, said Mark sounded queer, really, but Sam had let it drop at that. She found, though, that she resented having a hairless husband. His missing pubic hair weighed especially heavy here. She still felt bewildered and a little odd about that. Who was going to see the markings there anyway? Why had he had them done in the first place? It made him almost like a child and it gave her the horrors sometimes. She thought about the colours growing fainter as he grew erect, like a balloon, then turning brighter again in detumescence.
So here it was reassuring, it felt real, to have Bob’s hair ground and pressing to her own. She savoured the rasp of their markings of maturity. The cardboard sagged and buckled beneath them, adapting to the shapes they threw on the floor, shoes scraping the dust, raising little clouds. Bob was spread right across her and she luxuriated in the sense of him covering her, a voluptuous, darkly uniformed wrap that worked and worked at her, prising open sections of her clothing with blunt fingers while she pressed herself down on his eager, clumsy prick. It was different, this shocking, abrupt sex with a police officer. When Mark made love to her, she was an object in space, almost free-floating; his possibilities, at their best, seemed endless. Here she was a front, an assemblage of female parts crammed on her back in musty-smelling garbage, for Bob to ease himself into and rummage against. Sometimes she
