The Donor - extract
CHAPTER 1
North East London
She pulled into a side-road and parked her spanking new Porsche 911 between a battered Ford van and a Vauxhall Astra stacked up on bricks because its wheels had been amputated. A shattered windscreen and missing doors completed the urban art form, perfectly framed by the broken glass and dog shit. She looked at the street: grandiose Victorian semis, sandstone cornices, ornate balustrades, four storeys high, five if you count the basements, a once wealthy area, mostly bedsits now.
She’d gone for a drive. She’d never normally do that, normally she drove to get from A to B. She was in Stoke Newington. She’d never been there before and didn’t understand why she was there now. There was a lot she didn't understand about herself lately.
Her pulse danced an agitated jig, like blood sugars dropping through the floor. She bent behind the seat and fished for the box of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts she’d bought three days earlier, enjoying the masochistic torture of knowing they were there but not eating them. Dieting was all very well but fuck it wasn’t easy. She grabbed a pink iced hundreds and thousands, opened her jaw extra wide for the first bun-busting bite of gastronomic pop culture but paused when a giant of a man exited a house along the street and stood staring directly at her.
He stepped out of the iron garden gate and strode aggressively in her direction. Aggressively? She thought so. In her direction? The way her new heart strained and tugged at arteries so painstakingly hand-stitched to its entry and exit points she doubly thought so.
She dropped the doughnut back in the box with its artery-furring bedfellows, slavered the tackiness from her fingers and kept her eyes pinned on the approaching monolithic man. His entire shaved head and half of his face were tattooed with what looked like a floral William Morris wallpaper design, making what should have been an artistic Pre-Raphaelite thing of beauty grotesque by its context.
He paced up the centre of the road - twenty yards, eighteen, sixteen, fourteen. She clicked on the ignition, slammed the car into gear, thrust the accelerator pedal to the floor and the vehicle leapt forwards. The front end reared out of control, her head whiplashed backwards against the headrest and an involuntary-
“Fuuuuck!”- escaped from her throat.
She clutched the wheel with both hands, more for security than steering, the car seemed to know where it was going anyway, and in those final micro moments as it surged with all the power of its 620 horsepower engine she realised it was going directly towards the man with the revolting scalp decor. He saw it too as he stared at his on-coming death with its halogen eyes, fixed grin of its grille and thick-lipped battering ram of its bumper. His mouth snapped open and emitted a deafeningly silent ‘NO.’ He spread his arms out horizontally to form a bizarre mock-up of the crucifixion, perhaps in the hope that in those final moments a token nod towards holy supplication may lead to his salvation.
Salvation eluded him. She felt the baulking of the car - 1400 Kilos of accelerating metal, glass and alloy - as it collided with the semi-soft tissue of a large human body and heard a dulled thump as the concentrated power of 620 horses slammed into him. His torso folded in slow motion onto the bonnet, their eyes met, they held each other’s gaze for an elongated millisecond as though both intended to capture that moment forever and then he was flicked sideways off the front wing with frightening speed. It took twenty yards for her to stop the 620 horses. The tyres puffed acrid smoke up into the warm summer air. She checked in the rear-view mirror: the twisted bulk of the man’s body on the tarmac had an oddly calming effect on her. It felt good.
She tugged the door handle to get out of the car. A movement caught her eye. A lob-sided humanoid raised itself onto one knee, pointed something small and black and then she heard the crack of a bullet penetrating the car’s thin skin.
She whacked the gear-lever into reverse, thrust her foot down and the car snaked backwards towards the man. The boom of another gunshot shook the car’s frame before he disappeared beneath the nearside rear wheel. The vehicle jacked upwards and dropped down hard as it drove over some part of him. Back into first gear the car bumped over him again, she threw it into second then third and made a right turn towards the High Street. The car didn’t handle correctly, she guessed a bullet had hit a tyre but wasn’t going to hang around and check. At the junction with the High Street she came to an abrupt halt. London evening rush hour. The place was choked. Fuck.
She waited anxiously for the lights to turn green. She wondered momentarily what she’d been thinking to run over a man not once but twice, but she hadn’t been thinking anything at all. She realised her bladder was about to burst, the excitement magnifying her ache to pee. She squeezed her thighs tight together. The lights turned green. The traffic didn’t move. Her phone rang and she stupidly answered it -
“Hello is that Cait?” Rich male voice, Mediterranean accent, the dreamboat Italian she’d met at the Rocher dinner at the Savoy.
She glanced in the rear-view mirror. A ghoulish figure, arm hanging limp, demonic eyes and bloodied face shuffled towards her.
The voice on the phone demanded-
“Anyone there? Cait Farrow?”
The tattooed ghoul sidled closer. The gridlocked traffic had her trapped. The valve controlling her bladder surrendered, she peed helplessly on the expensive calf leather seat.
“I’ll call you back.” She threw the phone into the passenger foot-well, cranked the power-steering onto full left lock, bumped the car up onto the pavement, narrowly missed a mother with a pram, swerved around an old woman and realised there were too many pedestrians for her to continue that course of action. She bounced the car back onto the highway in a minuscule gap in the traffic, her buttocks slipping on the urine-lubricated seat, making it difficult to control her feet on the hyper-sensitive pedals of the high performance car. She’d wedged into a gap with a black cab behind and a tipper truck in front, its rear flap dripping gritty water onto the front of her once-pristine car.
She checked the rear-view mirror to see how far behind her the monolith was but couldn’t see him in the mirror. His enraged face appeared suddenly at the passenger-side window, his blood-spattered hand reached for the door handle, she thought about pressing the central locking but by the time she had that thought it was too late...