Free Seven Lies by James Lasdun

empty-handed.
    Far from feeling defiant, I remember a kind of looseness about me, as though I were in the process of surrendering to some large, dismantling power that had had designs on me for some time.
    Brandt was in his glass-walled cubicle. He himself was asleep in his chair, but his scar, glittering crimson in the peculiar, poisonous-looking light that flickered between the neon ceiling halo and the green-painted walls, seemed wide awake. I had the impression that it was expecting me. The keys dangled from their ring, asprawl on Brandt’s thigh, bobbing there as he breathed. A tight bud of anxiety was pushing up through my stomach. Yes, yes, come in , the bilious walls and the roil of glittering flesh seemed to whisper as I silently opened the door. Yes, yes, very quietly, now . But even as I crept towards Brandt, I knew that they had every intention of betraying me. I understood that what I was doing, as I ever so gently placed my fingers on the keys, was merely a kind of ceremonial formality, so that though it was physically a shock, it was in fact no great surprise when Brandt’s heavy hand came down suddenly on mine. He held it first to the bunch of keys, then, sliding it with deliberately slow forcefulness (as if to demonstrate to me that we had now arrived in a realm where his power over me was absolute), he locked it onto his bulging groin. Barely deigning to open his eyes, he said, ‘No more aquavit, eh?’
    I nodded, and he, rousing himself from his chair, his hand still gripping mine, said, ‘Come on, then,’ and as if we had long ago agreed to this contingency, we went down together to the storage area, locking the door behind us.
    *
    I HAVE little graphic recollection of what I or Brandt actually did that afternoon or the afternoons that followed at monthly intervals. What survives in me more vividly than the physical details was the sense, already familiar to me at that age, that the harm being done to me had in some mysterious fashion already been done. It had already happened . Not literally, perhaps, but in a manner that made this manifestation of it little more than a kind of hieroglyphic record of an earlier, vaster event, as, say, a particular rock formation, made visible by a mudslide, records a seismic upheaval that took place in the earth’s tectonic plates aeons ago. If there was any element of surprise, it was simply in the discovery that my blightedness was not by some miracle going to turn out to exclude this particular area of my being. But then I had had no reason to suppose that it would.
    The other thing I remember is that Brandt never seemed to experience anything resembling pleasure during our encounters. The vacant look on his large, round face (the face of a baby left to bloat in a jar of formaldehyde) would turn actively gloomy when I arrived at his booth for the key now. As we walked in silence down the service stairway, I had the sense that he was moving there through the same miasma of dimly apprehended horror as I was, and as we groped and grappled lugubriously together in the near-blackness of the storage room, a pair of lobsters in a murky tank, he had the weary air of someone undergoing a peculiarly burdensome penance. I think of the paintings of Bosch – the demons as tormented-looking as their victims, the two at times barely distinguishable as they reach down into each other with the blunt instrument of themselves, entering and breaking. When it was over he would leave me to the privacy of my mother’s trunk, limping off in a private cloud of muttered imprecationsdirected as much at the world in general as at me personally.
    This state of affairs continued for perhaps a year. I was aware that it was unhealthy, to say the least, but at the same time it seemed inconceivable that it could be otherwise. It had come about by a process of invincible logic, one that I myself was complicit in, even if I hadn’t initiated it, and for all its