‘To begin with, I did not kill the King. I have never owned a rifle and nor did I ever see the King being driven through the City.’ I looked around at my audience. The numbers in the public gallery had swelled and my mother’s face was once more amongst them. I felt encouraged. If she blamed me for what had happened, not only for the death of my father but also for what it had done to her, would she not be sitting in the prosecution witness box rather than the public gallery?
The court was hushed, waiting for me to continue. The prosecutor appeared to have frozen to the spot. Only the cutting engineer’s disc moved, producing a low hiss. I sensed the need to go further.
‘The King was dying. He was suffering from a terminal condition which he knew would continue to cause him more and more pain and discomfort the longer he lived. He debated with himself the rights and wrongs of taking his own life and reached the decision that it would be better to do so. What right did I have to alter that decision at the last moment?’
A broad band of pain stretched across the front of my skull. Sweat tickled my neck and ran down my back. I couldn’t massage my temples or run a handkerchief over my face for even temporary relief. When I looked up at the public gallery it seemed impossibly distant, as if viewed down the wrong end of a telescope. My head started to spin. I looked at the prosecution witness box and it seemed as if its occupants had swopped positions with each other, but I couldn’t be sure. The prosecutor still stood with his head bowed. The judge had turned his head to bathe his face in the light streaming in from the high window.
‘I didn’t kill the King,’ I repeated. ‘He killed himself. I just let him do it. In the circumstances it was the right and most humane thing to do.’
In the public gallery my mother’s head was nodding slowly like a huge white bell. It was the only movement in the entire courtroom.
‘It was the right thing to do,’ I repeated.
If I really believed it, however, why when I looked back at the judge did I see my father’s face swinging from side to side behind the windscreen of his exhaust-clogged car? I blinked and shook my head and when I looked again I saw the judge shaking his head slowly and making an ambiguous gesture with his hand. The prosecutor, upon seeing this sign, slipped back to life, along with the rest of the court. It was like a piece of film that had been stuck in the gate of the projector slowly being freed and rolling again. The sound slurred back up to the correct speed and full volume. Witnesses stood up one after another in the prosecution witness box and rattled off accounts of how they had seen me holding the rifle, training its sights on the car that was carrying the King, squeezing the trigger. They saw the rear passenger window of the car shatter and the King slump forward inside. They saw me run away from the scene of the crime and collapse on the tow path of one of the City’s canals.
‘No, no,’ I shouted. ‘None of this is true. It’s not true. I didn’t kill him.’
I looked at the last witness, the one who’d seen me on the canal bank. He was a middle-aged man with white hair. I just bet he kept a dog as well. The prosecutor was summing up. All was quiet in the public gallery; my mother had disappeared. The judge laid his right arm across his own chest then pointed at my head. I looked up at the bright window and heard the judge’s gavel crash onto the leather stopper on his desk and suddenly the courtroom was in uproar. Officers freed my ankles and pushed me out of the dock. The crowd on the floor of the court parted to let us through. Bystanders and court officials shouted insults and spat at me as guards prodded and kicked me out into the open air where a mass of people had already gathered. They chanted ‘King killer, King killer’ and moved with the awesome, graceful give-and-take of the sea.
I was dragged up onto the back of a trailer and the tailgate was bolted after me. Four guards shared the trailer with me, each armed with a baton and an old-fashioned rifle. A sixth person — a woman — was helped up into the trailer as it began to move off through the crowds. When the woman turned around I saw it was Maxi. She was holding a straight razor in her right hand. My chest tightened and my throat dried. However poor the prospects for survival, the promise of pain is never easy to bear. Hence a dying man’s desire to commit suicide.
While the guards concentrated on the crowd so they could avert any attempt to kill me before the appointed time, Maxi set about finishing off the haircut she had started. Although a double-crosser, she was at least a familiar face.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked her as she grasped a handful of my hair and sliced cleanly through it. The razor was so sharp it almost wasn’t there.
‘You know where we’re going,’ she whispered.
‘How do they do it?’ I asked.
‘They have different ways.’
Part of me believed there had to be a way out. With my hands still secured by the plastic tie, however, it was going to be difficult. A stone thrown from the crowd hit me on the leg and my sudden movement caused Maxi to nick my scalp. It was so hot and sharp I didn’t realise until I felt the warm trickle of blood — stickier and thicker than sweat — make its way down past my ear. One of the guards fired over the crowd.
‘What about afterwards?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean, afterwards?’ she hissed. ‘There is no afterwards. This is it. The big one.’
‘Do I get buried, eaten by dogs, or what?’
She didn’t answer, just carried on shaving my head. I could tell she was being careful to avoid cutting me.
‘So?’ I insisted.
‘You know this place,’ she said mysteriously.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Hey, King killer!’ It was one of the guards. He thumped my shoulder with the butt of his rifle. ‘Shut the fuck up.’
The trailer rumbled on and eventually the guard had to turn his attention back to the mob below. Fists shaking, eyes rolling, they kept up their tirade of abuse.
‘They’ve systematically been slaughtering suspects here for years,’ Maxi continued. ‘But this place doesn’t follow your rules. The dead won’t lie down.’
‘They can’t kill me?’ I said.
‘They can kill you. And they will. But you won’t lie down and be buried.’
She fell silent, chopping away at what was left of my hair. I watched it fall to the floor of the trailer, hoping I would get a chance to grow it again. I wondered if they’d let me have a last cigarette. I still had a couple of Camels down my left boot, if they weren’t squashed beyond smoking by now.
‘I was reading a book before I came here,’ I told her, ‘in which the action constantly switched between two worlds. In one of them, the king was due to be assassinated, but then his body turned up in the other. And although one thread featured an unnamed first-person narrator and the other a protagonist called Boris, you sensed they were the same person. I wish I could just switch back to the other world like Boris could.’
‘Be careful what you wish for,’ she said in a whisper. ‘That’s what they’re going to do. Take you into your world. As the train crosses over, the dead lie down.’
‘What train? And then what? Do they bring the bodies back?’
‘No. If they did so, they’d just get up again. It’s that kind of place.’ She dragged the dry razor over the dome of my head, now almost bald. ‘They leave them there. In your world.’
The trailer was pulled off the main road into a grid of short straight side streets. The crowd was no longer stationary. Thousands of people were streaming through the streets alongside us, hundreds more joining the flow from other streets and back entries. I knew where we were going. There hadn’t been any sign of a football stadium on my map but I didn’t doubt that was where we were heading. I didn’t have long. There had to be some break in the network of streets. I needed another element. I needed an escape route. My eyes searched the back streets and patches of waste ground, searching for the interstices.