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Scratchface

B. Lawrence

    Me and Katie had met on a popular dating app, which is the grimmest opening to a story I’ve ever written. After a few messages, we met at the Stone Lions. For those of you not from Nottingham, whatever you’re imaging in your head is probably close enough. It was cold enough out there that my hands were numb, but I walked round the Lions a few times before arriving, to not seem needy. The slush from the snow had seeped through the holes in my boots into the socks. The sky looked that dark kind of blue when it makes up its mind to change from day to night. Katie was leaning against one of the Lions, looking like someone who edits their appearance in profile photos. She looked at me like she didn’t know what I was, so it didn’t seem like a hugging moment. While we walked to a bar, she told me the reason she was anxious was that while she was waiting for me, three guys had approached her.
    The bar we drank at had a really bored looking bouncer holding court under a dark archway. Through the archway was a bar, and above the bar were series of arts and crafts mannequins arranged in sexual positions. The bartender looked through me. There was no music or sound at all. Katie said she just wanted an orange. I had the idea to look Katie up on social media to flesh out some of the details here, but she’s still a blank slate. All her pictures show her fake smiling. Her hair is long, a kind of uncertain brown. Her dating profile pictures showed her posing black and in negligee. She looked like she was trying hard to look like something else. Maybe an ex-boyfriend took that photo, but now he’s just another part of a marketing campaign. Back at the bar, I ordered a pint of cider.
    We sat at a table, and I mainly listened. I learned that she worked in marketing, or something and that she had a micro pig. That she just decorated her room with Christmas lights, and she thought car insurance was too expensive. That she loved her parents, like most people, and that having big boobs meant she couldn’t wear most kind of dresses. I looked down and realised I had sat at the table before. Me and a girl I was dating sat there and I carved obscure references into the soft of the table, while I was trying to impress her. Beautiful switchblade marks, tragic spirals of leaves cascading around the table leg. When Katie came back, I asked her If she wanted to go, and she said yes.
    Katie’s place was a flat share twenty minutes out of the darkness. I had a toothbrush in my back pocket and used it while she was talking out of the hallway. After that, we made it on her bed a few times and then talked a little. There was no love in it, but it was better than I usually am at sex. Katie’s room felt hot from the Christmas lights, and old cigarette smoke. My knee was messed up from falling on hard earth, so I was wearing this massive leg brace. The leg brace itched and itched, and I imagined I could feel my flesh slowly rotting. I was going to lose the leg, or worse, it would force blood away from lower body and I would never be able to get erections. I took a drink from her bedside to stop from thinking and Katie told me a story. She said that in Ancient Sparta, if a man ever put his hands on a woman, or hurt them during that sex, then the woman had to get a piece of pottery urn and slash at it across the man’s face so that he’d always have a scar. Then woman would know to stay away from him. She said this wasn’t optional, that this was a civic duty. How you could bring that back now, and it would still work. The story and her telling of it made me think that some guy had hurt her real bad sometime. There are all these ethic laws and civil rights guidelines and wrong convictions now. I guess Sparta was a simpler time.
    While I leant on the bed and put my knee brace back on, Katie started to tell me more about her work, and how hard they were working her at marketing or something.
    “That’s pretty rough” I said
    “Yeah... er yeah it” she said “I’m er working tomorrow too”
    “Oh okay”
    “...Yeah I’ve got to get up really early”
    “....You want me to go?”
    Nothing was said for about a minute.
    I felt kind of foolish and turned around, playing with a Christmas lights for a few minutes, before getting dressed and leaving.
    I got to the bus stop in the scary 3am darkness of a residential street. Full of strange noises and odd laughter. Behind every dark alleyway, a clown or a murderer or a presenter from the 1970’s. I got a burger while I was waiting for the bus to come, and it was so bad I had to spit most of back into the brown paper bag. No high street food retailer should call themselves “king of burgers” If they can’t do one without meat. The thin slice of cheese tasted like desperation. As the night bus came, some dregs shuffled on, and by the time I beeped my card and sat down, a guy was arguing with the bus driver because he didn’t have the right fair. It costs one pound extra to get a night bus, and probably 5p of that goes to the driver for staying up so late. The guy was kicking off even more when the driver told him to leave and the man without the fair started scanning the faces that had entered the bus. I was trying not to sweat whist also wondering whether if I got stabbed, Katie would feel in some part responsible. I hoped she would. The man without the fair shoved an Asian man as he walked off the bus and my heart pumped gasoline. I sneaked a look while he kicked at the glass, from the other side.
    Then he started to laugh
    He was a middle-aged man, with a dark face, no shirt on but a black bobble hat. A tattoo of a knife pointing downwards ran from his chest to his groin. In one of his hands was a polystyrene cup, and with the other hand, he reached down his trouser leg to pull out a machete.
    “I’ll fight any one of you” said the man without the fair
    No one answered
    The blade glittered in the darkness
    “None of you got any balls”
     The man without the fair started to laugh
    I looked at the driver’s protective see through barrier, and wondered why they hadn’t driven away yet.
    The man sat behind me started to whisper to himself
    “I’ve done kickboxing for ten years- If he comes for me- I’ve done kickboxing- I’m no pushover- I’ve done kickboxing”
    The driver still hadn’t closed the doors.
    He wasn’t laughing anymore, and no one was telling the driver to drive because they were scared to speak and scared to break the safety of the silence.
    The driver still didn’t drive and it was like the man without the fair had cast a spell.
    “I GIVE PLACE ONTO WRATH FOR IT IS WRITTEN- VENGENCE IS MINE!”
    I couldn’t look away, so I saw as he danced the blade up close on my face, through the other side of the glass.
    “Just drive!”
    It was a woman’s voice.
    The spell was broken, and the driver pulled away as the old doors clunked shut. After he saw his audience try to slip away, the man looked at the objects in both hands, before throwing the polystyrene cup up the bus’s windowpane. It was full of pink milkshake. For a few paces he ran along the side of the bus. A long white scar ran sown the side of his face.

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