Blood Money continued
alas, and it happened too often. Deals were made. Young blood has always been worth more and if they can get it and others can get let off for it, the deal is set. All too often a parent's deeds are paid for by their child's blood and this, this one thing affected me time and time again. To the point where now, I had begun to falter. I was only doing my job, and it usually ran smoothly. I was the good-bad guy generally. And I was respected. But where was the respect in this? This was cowardice, and this was me following the rules when the rules had begun to shift and crash together like tectonic plates. She said nothing, the girl, when I turned away and walked back out. I could hear the father's footsteps and then he threw open the door and was all fists and threats, but a knife to his throat stemmed the noxious flow. And when I threatened to cut off his balls and let him bleed to death if he ever used his daughter in this way again, I could see in his eyes that my reputation had remained intact.
I had a choice. I could return to work empty handed, or I could find a replacement. There are plenty of bums, drunks, homeless people who wouldn't put up much of a fight. But, chances are, they would be contaminated. I needed clean, A+, pure red stuff. The father had the same blood type but considering his heroine addiction had got him into this mess in the first place, he was hardly a good substitute. The borrowed money, mounting debts like the growing mountain of soil from his own dug out plot, and in the end, payment will always be taken. If I were assigned the case then payment was blood. But it could just as well be a thumb, a leg, a kidney, or something less painful, more subtle, but just as damaging in the long run. It all depends which sector of the business lent the money in the first place. Payment could be health, wealth, sanity, sight, mental ability... Contracts were signed, nobody borrowed money blind. All clients were aware from the outset of the type of re-payment required if money was not an option. Always desperate to sign, confident of getting the money back to us, but all too often spent up at the final count. A chemical injection here, a dip into a bank balance there, and a slow spiral into poverty, sickness or insanity, a total void, a vegetative state awaited them around the next bend. We don't play God. We don't hit out at random. We merely mete out the contracted punishment.
In the end it was blindingly obvious. And easy. The answer was at my fingertips, so to speak. I thought it over for maybe ten minutes. With every tick of the clock that little girl's blank stare moved further and further away, the scars in her arms that belied the number of times she'd actually sacrificed her blood for her father. I admit my hands, usually so steady, were shaking slightly as I uncapped the silver pen-shaped instrument that held the needle. I rolled up my sleeve and, using the tie from my bathrobe, I made a tournequet and poised the needle. It used to slide in as though through soft cheese when I stuck it into the arm of a client. The only resistance coming from the person themselves as they thrashed against the cuffs that held them down. But the skin itself opened up to the point like the spread legs of a whore. Especially those regular needle-users, whose flesh seemed almost to have morphed itself to jelly, all the better to gobble up the poison, senseless as to whether it was giving or receiving. Injecting myself though, that first time, was very different. Almost as though the flesh itself were hardening its layers to push the needle back out.
I still work for the business, but I no longer collect and deliver. I've been demoted. Now I am a barely-glorified secretary, taking calls, arranging meetings, organising schedules. My reputation isn't dirty, it just isn't there. I have no reputation to speak of any more. There are others now, sturdier, thicker-skinned, hardened, who will take and take and take without a second thought. I have never been questioned. I guess they just saw it - the light fading from my eyes, the skin losing its glow, my fainting spells. I always took care not to let the scars show, the bruises and lesions from skin forced between pincers (I left the comfort of the soft towelled belt long ago), the pin pricks, perforations that crawled up my arms and my thighs and stomach. When it was getting too difficult to sit down because of the old and new wounds in my arse and groin, I moved to my hands and feet. So, the evidence is all there now, like a tattoo. At least my colleagues have the decency not to question me. They just avert their eyes, so I don't see their distaste, and hasten on. Soldier ants, just doing as they're told. I should stop, I know, before it kills me. Which it will. And not before too long. But when I try I feel like I am losing my mind. The images of all those people I have drained come to the fore and leer at me, jeer at me as I crouch in the corner of the room with my hands on my ears to stop their laughing. This blood-letting, it eases me. I let it splash onto the floor and slide between the wooden slats, wasted, contaminated from the dirty knives I have begun to use, when the needle will not draw fast enough. I know there is little time left, that soon I will drain myself completely and be left an empty shell on the floor where only if you listen close will the sound of a distant sea be heard. I know that but I just can't stop. I like it too much.
