Thicker Than Water

After half an hour of methodical but unproductive rummaging, all I’d come up with was Kenny’s porn stash tucked away on the top shelf of the wardrobe and a shoebox behind the porn that was full of old decks of playing cards, all apparently well used. Sometimes I can get emotional resonances from objects, too, although they tend to be more muted and tenuous than the ones I get from touching people. I took off one glove and touched the inside edge of the box, very lightly. It echoed with pulses of old excitement, anticipation, pleasure, layered very deep and very strong. Evidently Kenny had enjoyed the odd game of poker.

Thinking about the absence of photos I realised that I was ignoring the obvious. I went back through into the living room and checked the bookcase, where I’d suddenly remembered that one of the book spines was a lot bigger than the rest: yeah, there among the Jeffrey Archers and the Wilbur Smiths was a photo album bound in red leather-effect plastic. Slipping my glove back on, I drew the album out with a feeling of muted satisfaction. This might at least give me a feel for what was going on in Kenny’s life: probably not a smoking pistol, but maybe something that would point me in another direction. At the very least, I’d get to meet the elusive wife and kid.

In fact, I got one out of two. The album started with baby photos of a chubby, wrinkled Winston Churchill-alike baby who progressed over the space of ten or twelve pages into a much less chubby toddler and then into an increasingly tall and gangly boy with riotously unruly brown hair and a sheepish grin that seemed to be his default option when facing a camera. I flicked a few more pages and watched him grow into an even more gangly, longer-haired teen. And in the process I found the first mutilated photo. After that there were many more.

It wasn’t the boy’s image that was being mutilated: it was that of a woman who was sometimes with him - holding him as a baby, cuddling him when he was older - sometimes alone and sometimes posing beside a man who was unmistakably Kenny. In every photo where she appeared, the woman’s head had been excised with angular slashes from a knife or razor blade - usually in situ, creating holes that went right through to the other side of the page and cut out irrelevant wedges from the photos that backed onto them. It was always and only the face that was taken: usually the thick, lustrous blonde hair remained untouched, along with a micrometer-thin stretch of forehead. Kenny and the ever-growing little boy smiled and smiled, standing beside and linking arms with this woman whose eyeless absence stared out at me like an unspoken reproach.

More and more uneasy, I put the album back on the shelf. Then I went back into the bedroom to clear away any traces of my presence there. I put the shoebox back on its high shelf, then started to stack the porn mags up in front of it as they’d been stacked before. The incongruity of this struck me as I was doing it. What needed hiding more than two years’ back issues of Barely Legal? What do you keep behind your porn stash?

I took the shoebox down again and gave it another look. The sides of it were decorated with geological strata of stickers: characters from some manga cartoon, band logos, football players in identical head-and-shoulders poses. It had belonged to a kid at some point, and probably for a long time.

I carefully unpacked its contents onto the bed. Underneath the fourth layer of Waddington’s Number Ones there was a slender black box that was too long and thin to contain a deck of cards. It was made of plastic and bore the Lorus name and logo, so it seemed fair to assume that it was intended to hold a wristwatch. I clicked it open and found myself staring at a heterogeneous collection of objects.

The razor blades were what caught my attention first: a half-dozen or so of Wilkinson’s finest, still in their wrappings and held in place with a red elastic band. Next to them were some sticking plasters and a styptic pencil, a Sticheismall vial of pale yellow liquid that turned out to be cologne, and the shiny steel business end of a dart with the flight removed. There was also a single razor blade that was out of its wrapper and embedded in a wine cork: the cork in turn had been neatly spiked on one of the plastic brackets inside the box that had once held the wristwatch in place.

Everything was clean, with no trace of blood and the only smell the very faint floral-alcohol whiff of the cologne. I knew what I was looking at, though, and I knew what it was for. I touched the bare blade gently and confirmed what I’d already guessed. It wasn’t the playing cards that were associated with that old and frequent feeling of joy and excitement: it was this little hurt-kit.