Rhinoceros 30
The horror of invasion into personal privacy is well documented; the trauma, feelings of being sullied, stripped bare, exposed, destroyed by the unfair randomness of life. And all of this usually occurs when the occupant is not even present during the criminal act.
Alan froze, more awake than he had ever been, heart painfully shovelling blood to all areas with great rapidity. He clicked into some form of action, disentangled himself from his anxiety-twisted duvet, and stood in his shorts and shirt, smelling of sleep and sweat, fearing distant sounds in the diaspora beyond the flat - the world carrying on in oblivious indifference - but hearing nothing close by.
This silence belied the awesome noise that startled him, the tear of solid wood from jambs, of bolts, hasps, pinions prised from their housings, of the tinkle of sheared and splintered debris landing on a wood-veneer floor in the hallway. And now silence. A silence that contained a question mark, like a still lake at the centre of a cataclysm.
Alan trod softly to his bedroom door, reached for the handle, slowly turned it. In a jarring instant his hand was yanked forward, propelling his body into his sitting room, sending a jolt of pain to the socket in his shoulder. He stumbled to a halt on the threshold of the room, and into a scene seemingly staged and arranged for him.
Mr Mitchelson sat nonchalantly, triumphantly, on his chair, at his desk. To Alan's right, a thickset man with a widow's peak, tiny dark eyes, and the merest hint of a smile, continued to hold the corresponding door handle, the door wide open, an invitation to enter. In his other hand, and explanatory crowbar, a tool and a weapon, ubiquitously utilitarian through the ages of crime. Alan was given time to appreciate the details of the scene. Mr Mitchelson, curiously in a suit jacket draped over jeans, recently shaved, had one hand and arm spread in ownership across Alan's desk, the other hand holding a small object, turning it over as though weighing its value. It seemed incumbent on him to open proceedings. He lifted up the memory stick and peered at its contents. "Morning Mr Scope, I just thought I'd pop round and collect a bit of my property. Intellectual property, you could say." He held the stick in opposable digits, the key to human evolution, and read, "Mitchelsons, March 2008. Yep, s'got my name on it. Definately belongs to me."
Alan embarked on few opening words, though not for long. "But I thought-"
"You thought wrong, Mr S. Bail, you see, while my solicitor looks at all the - what did he call it? - contextual circumstances. That's it. You'd appreciate that, Mr S, being an English teacher an' all." Mr Mitchelson smiled once more, unable to resist this small linguistic victory, the scent of the pack in obedience in his nostrils.
"Well, you've got what you want, so now you can fuck off." Alan glanced down the hallway, as if the very act of looking was enough to invite locomotion.
"Very nice, very nice indeed. You not going to fight for it? Giving up so easy? You really are as soft as shite, eh Mr S?" Mr Mitchelson pocketed the memory stick and clasped his hands together in expectation. His accomplice, seemingly lacking in the will to project a personality, stood at ease and folded his arms, like a wooden goytre. "I wonder what it is that would really rile you, Mr S? What gets your goat, eh? Let's see." Mr Mitchelson's rhetoric allowed him the opportunity to survey the flat and its contents.
"So that's it, is it? You can't just enjoy a little victory, you have to savour it with a bit of pain and damage thrown in. You can't help yourself, can you?" Alan surprised himself at the level of this anger and near-sarcasm.
"Good, good," said Mr Mitchelson, as though these words completed a jigsaw, and heaved himself to his feet, wandering, almost sauntering, over to the book shelves. "You've found your voice a bit. Let's see," he mused, as though to himself, "books, yeah, he's a book man. Likes his books, he does. Living in his 'ed, by the look of it. What do you think?"
At first Alan thought he had asked him this question, but the accomplice had a small spoken part, it turned out. "Yeah, Mr M, instead of in the real world. Intellectuals can't cope with reality, so they have books instead."
"Hmm," Mr Mitchelson half-agreed. He turned to Alan. "You read all these?"
"Most of them, yes."
"You like 'em."
"Do you want me to recommend some for you both?"
"He's a cheeky fucker," Mr Mitchelson quietly responded. "Any of 'em valuable?"
"Not really." Alan tried not to look at or think about the first edition Flann O'Brien.
"Oh well, doesn't matter then, does it?" Alan thought Mr Mitchelson was about to give up, having made some kind of class-war-based point, but with a measured, decisive sweep of his arm, he scooped every book, photo, object, and a secondary cloud of dust, from one of the shelves, and with bemusement watched it all settle at his feet. Satisfied, he emptied the other shelves similarly. In the brief fog of motes and dead skin Mr Mitchelson involuntarily sneezed and wiped his nose across his jacket sleeve with a disgusted snort. "Fucking hell, Mr S, you don't like housework, do you?"
The accomplice, as though switched on again, suddenly betrayed a further glimmer of intelligence, and piped up, "It's the middle classes, Mr M. They live in shitholes, but look down on us. Think they're better 'n us."
Mr Mitchelson grunted, "Indeed," somewhat preoccupied, and fumbled with the zip of his jeans. In the course of extracting his cock and pissing a long stream of steaming liquid over the pile of books and ornaments, careful to ensure equal coverage, Mr Mitchelson conducted a commentary. "You see, Mr S, books are old fashioned. You are behind the times, retro, as they say. I'm fencing a lot of them Kindles now, though they're not worth all that much. I suggest you get with the modern world, Mr S, the one the rest of us live in."
"Yeah," the accomplice added, unnecessarily.
Mr Mitchelson strained to squeeze out the last drops, sighed with satisfaction, put away his dripping cock, and turned to Alan. "'S a pity I don't fancy a shit."
"Hilarious," and Alan was about to continue when he felt a force of steel ram into his side, below his ribcage, and he yelped like a scolded dog and instinctively sidestepped the source of the pain, clutching his torso. Through bitter tears he said, "Go on then, do whatever you want, smash the place up, go on, I dare you."
"A dare? You want me to smash it up, make loads of noise for the neighbours, eh? Karl!" He glanced at the now monikered accomplice, who, with the efficiency and sureness of a carer with a recalcitrant patient, guided Alan to his chair, sat him in it, and produced gaffer tape which, despite Alan's futile struggles, enacted merely to retain a modicum of dignity, was quickly, neatly used to parcel him and the chair together, his arms thrust at his sides, his posture erect, ergonomic, as it should be.
"Are you going to shout, Mr S? 'Cos if you are, we'll tape up your mealy, piss-weak face with more tape." But the fight had gone out of Alan, or it had never quite arrived. Mr Mitchelson seemed satisfied. Karl, too, assumed human form, and began moving around the flat with the eye of a demolition expert.
What followed was a curious, comically subdued, dance of destruction, the opposite of wanton and wild, like a silent movie with enhanced sound effects for the hard of understanding. The two assailants, both muscular, though Mitchelson tending towards flab, crept around each room and methodically, quietly, choreographically, and destroyed as many of the contents a relaxed Sunday morning of destruction would allow. Alan listened with the astuteness borne of teaching for twenty-five years, matching each sound to an expired possession, picturing its demise. Some of the shattering and crushing was enacted before his eyes, for the specific entertainment value. The radio, for example, carefully disembowelled, the framed photographs gently stood on, twisted into the rug, then spat on, then moved aside for the next object. But most of the destruction he had to imagine, joining in vicariously. Such as the piss thrumming onto his bedsheets and splashing the alarm clock, or the fridge opened with a schlup and tilted forward so its contents aquaplaned around the lino. Then it was cereal boxes emptied, like picturesque waterfalls, plates wrapped in towels or sheets and stood on with dull clinks and scrunches, a toaster, perhaps, prised open with a satisfying twang, a fusebox defused, milk and juices and bleach sloshed around each room with a little more glee and abandon. Occasionally the pair hummed at their work, like all skilled workers.
"What do you think, Mr S? Enough?"
"I'm sure you can do better."
"I think we can, too. I agree wholeheartedly. This is a poor effort, Karl. The trouble is, Mr S, you haven't got a lot of stuff, have you? I mean for a teacher. Ryon always said you were a sad fucker, and now," he surveyed the carnage, "here's the proof. Incidentally, you going to ask after Ryon? Your old buddy, criminal partner, eh?"
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, just wondered if you wanted to pass on your regards, commiserations, send him some grapes, perhaps, or a get well card."
"You bastards."
"Well indeed, we are naughty fuckers, aren't we, Karl?" Karl nodded, his affirmation not really required. "Yeah," Mr Mitchelson continued in narrative mode, "caught up with him in town, he seemed to heading for the seaside according to the train ticket. Little holiday, perhaps. Wrong destination, I said to him. So we sent him to the Northern General instead." Karl chuckled at the standardised humour of the criminal. "Anyways, we'd like to stay and chat, but you know how it is? Business don't run itself. Thanks for the return of my stuff - " he patted his jacket pocket smugly - "Karl, let's finish and piss off out of the craphole."
With quick force and consummate violence, Alan's mouth was tightly gaffer-taped and his feet bent and secured under the chair onto the rungs. Then he was gently laid backwards until he lay prone on the seat back amongt the detritus of his life, like washed up flotsam, his view restricted to the ceiling, with a brief interlude of two leering faces.
"Nearly done," said Mr Mitchelson. Alan listened with all his might, heard the hiss of gas escaping, the accumulated rush of water bursting from opened taps, footsteps across shards of glass. "We'll see ourselves out," he heard, to another sycophantic chuckle, and the careful closing of a splintered and useless front door. Alan could just hear the van doors, the grumble of a diesel engine, and the rasping tyres on gravel over the swishing water cascading onto lino and carpet, and the harsh breath of gases exhaling from open pipes. Over that steady crescendo, he could hear his heart beating hopelessly. And he thought, 'I anticipated all that, except the water and the gas. Now that's clever.'
