A SECOND OF YOUR LIFE

content warnings: coarse language, explicit sex

The ‘music’ was deafening – shithouse GarageBand-generated R&B coming through a Bluetooth speaker pumping enough dbs to wake the whole arrondissement.

Bitch get ready, get down on your knees…

Kelvin’s head was pounding. Cheap French plonk was lethal, but this level of fucked up… He squinted back through his night. Maybe the Cognac, the Gitanes, the…oh fuck…brown-stained glass pipe some random slipped him late on …

When in Paris…

Ooh baby, slow baby, slow…

Thirsty. So fucking thirsty! He swatted his hand around the side of his cot, searching out the water bottle he knew was there somewhere. He rolled onto his side and opened his eyes to see one of his dorm buddies, Ramon, pressed up on his biceps, sexing with Cyndi, a Yank they’d met the night before.

Fuck me crazy, sexy lady…

This was a new low. He’d never been practically in the same bed with a couple just banging at it like this. Cyndi was spectacular – buck-naked apart from what looked like a schoolboy tie. Arms wrapped around Ramon’s neck, breasts bouncing and jiggling; she was making a weird-arse, low-pitched rolling moan sound, the like of which Kelvin had never heard. He couldn’t take his eyes off Ramon’s cock doing its thing. He was torn between fascination and humiliation; the dude was a sex artist. His sweaty, hairy, wolfish body worked like a machine – powerful, efficient and inexplicably nuanced. Kelvin had hoped that Paris, the ville des amoureux, might provide him with some tips, but this was not exactly what he’d had in mind – and he felt sure that when it came to the sack, he was closer to a chipmunk than a wolf.

Cyndi’s moans arced up. In deference to the dorm vibe, Ramon stuffed a pillow over her face, hunkered down and grunted hard – head lowered, fringe flopping, back gleaming. It seemed to Kelvin like a lot of hard work. There was a moment of suspension, then a spluttering sigh as they collapsed into each other. Ramon leaned over and smacked the speaker.

The sudden silence in the room seemed biblical in its relief.   

Kelvin swung his legs over the side of his cot and planted his feet, waiting for the head swims to stop. He stood – experimental and ginger – tuning in to ascertain whether the spume developing in his gut would settle down or rise. He had a scary moment gulping back an acidy backwash, but it sank and settled.

Thank Christ, because today he was meeting up with Carrot.

He stood, pale and wretched in his undies, and looked around the mass of snoring fuckers. The air was stuffy – a brutal combination of post-MDA metallic reek and sour hangover farts. Twelve people (thirteen counting Cyndi) were crammed into this linoleum-lined, ex-Parisian hat factory or whatever-the-fuck it had been.

Months ago, back in their Greensborough unit, he and Carrot had researched accommodation options. The website had promised ‘low-budget chic’.

The reviews were in.

Neither.

He jammed on his thongs, threaded his way between cots full of half-naked, sweaty tourists, and flip-flopped down the hallway to the dark, stone shower stall. The water trickled, the soap was wafer-thin and sticky, but at least he could get to a semblance of clean. The only light source was a fly-blown skylight propped open with a brick. The glimpse of sky was promising.

He hit the street with a cautious strut. The restorative powers of sunlight, a shower and the waft of fresh-ground coffee beans were doing their work. He fished for the crumpled map Carrot had handed him weeks before.

*

It was Carrot who’d talked Kelvin into travel. ‘It’s the duck’s nuts, mate!’ he’d said. ‘Standing there like a cunt with no idea what’s being said, drinking shit you’ve never tasted and munching weird-arse snacks. It’s grouse!’

Carrot was doing a working holiday thing in Eastern Europe, so they’d agreed to meet back in Paris. They’d flown over together and spent the first night face down in a gutter in Zagreb, having drunk a couple of buckets of Croatian moonshine. ‘Duck to fucken water, Kelvin!’ Carrot had barked between barfs. ‘Cheaper than a hotel, amirite?’

Just before he jumped on the train to Poland, Carrot handed Kelvin a map of the Marais district. ‘This fucking jaunt’s gunna be off-grid, so we’ll ronday-vooze here, mate!’ Carrot said, stabbing his stumpy forefinger onto a map. ‘10am, on the knocker.’

*

He was just over a block from Café O-La-Di when his guts started bubbling. He felt hot and panicky, then suddenly clammy, and before he could control it, a loud, wet, rancid fart ripped out of him. A forty-something woman walking the other way shook with revulsion as it wafted over her. ‘Fucking hell’, Kelvin whispered to himself, ‘get a grip, mate.’ Squeezing his arsehole as tight as he could, he turned left and spotted the café diagonally opposite.

And there, sitting at a spindly outdoor table, was Carrot. In his rush, Kelvin ran off the gutter nearly taking out a cyclist – he always fucked up the right-hand drive thing. She flipped him the bird, screamed a French torrent, and rang her bell loud and long.

Carrot must have registered the fracas – no one within two blocks could have missed it – and normally, he would have ripped the shit out of him for it, but as Kelvin joined him at the table, Carrot shrank back and stared, wide-eyed and trembling. It made Kelvin shiver.

‘Carrot?’

Nothing.

‘Carrot, what the fuck’s happened?’

An exquisitely tattooed, wraith-like waitress drifted to their table. There was a terrible silence. Carrot finally mumbled, ‘You must remember Garance?’

Kelvin looked at her properly. She was a pale brunette with a blunt cut and what looked like three layers of eyelashes glued to her face. It felt like she’d have to work to lift those lids. She smiled at him: lazy and reptilian. ‘Bonjour chéri Kelvin.’ His stomach lurched. That low, smoky voice, the tatts… He burned in shame remembering himself, two nights ago, in her apartment, having to peel his already-jizzed undies off when she’d demanded to know why he’d stopped. ‘But how the fuck –’ he thought to himself, ‘how the fuck does Carrot–?’

Then it happened.

(Kelvin would feverishly replay this moment in the following days and months. The second his life as he knew it vanished.)

An ear-splitting tyre squeal ripped through the morning as a black SUV fish-tailed across the road and slammed into the bollards at the edge of the café. Two giant skinheads scrambled free as a police van rocking a deafening siren rammed into the back of them. Eight gendarmes poured out, guns cocked and yelling. They fired a shot into the air, and the skinheads split up and sprinted for their lives, with the gendarmes scrambling after them, screaming into their radios. The street was filling with people pouring out of shops and houses. Cars stuck at the nearby intersection blasted their horns.

Kelvin was shaking and crying. In all the chaos, he couldn’t find Carrot anywhere. He was suddenly grabbed around his belly and dragged across the café-front, then into a dark laneway. He was slammed against the wall and immediately pushed back, trying to wriggle free. ‘Don’t fucken resist, you idiot. Just relax, OK?’ It was Carrot. ‘What’s going on, what’s happening?’ sobbed Kelvin.

Carrot flipped him around so Kelvin’s back was to the wall, but he kept an iron grip.

‘No time to explain, mate.’

Carrot was unrecognisable. His laugh lines had transformed into deep, angry furrows, and his trademark happy-go-lucky energy was alarmingly direct and unnervingly forensic.

‘No questions, no interruptions, OK?’ Kelvin gave a teary nod. ‘Do whatever Garance asks you to do. Don’t open your mouth. Let them think you’re me, OK?’ He put his hand over Kelvin’s mouth, ‘Mate, I didn’t want to fuck you up, I’m fucken sorry, but there’s no way out.’ And with that, he vanished down the laneway.

            He felt a grip on his shoulder. ‘Allons,’ Garance hissed, ‘your friend is gone; everything is you now.’

            Kelvin spluttered.

            ‘Don’t fuck it up, koala boy. Follow!’

They were on foot. At seemingly random locations, Garance sent Kelvin in to collect what he assumed were clues in some weird game. ‘If I’d wanted to go on the Amazing Race, I would have applied,’ he whinged during a particularly frustrated moment in a pissoir in the sixteenth arrondissement. ‘And if I’d wanted to fuck an Australian bogan, I would have picked a rich footballer,’ she hissed in reply. ‘We all gotta drink our medicine, Kelvy.’

‘What the actual fuck is–’

‘Shut up, you dumb cunt!’ Garance spat, instantly shrivelling him.

By the end of the day, they had amassed a strange collection: a pair of rabbit ears, a pirate outfit, bikini undies, and an antique cigarette box containing some hand-pressed pills.

The last location was a nightclub.

‘Costume on. Tonight, you play Captain Carrot. And take two pills: here, now, in front of me!’ Garance grabbed the box and poked two pills in his mouth. ‘I need to fuck you up. You no go anywhere, OK?’

They were starting to kick as he squeezed out of the tiny French toilet. She handed him an enormous blue drink. They stood together at the edge of the crowded dance floor, the drugs sizzling in his blood. A skinny, shirtless blonde twink in satin shorts appeared amongst the writhing throng, staring at him. Kelvin’s brain was floating in curves, and he kept seeing the twink as Aphrodite, surfing towards the shore on a wave of God-cum.  He giggled. ‘Shut up, SHUT THE FUCK UP!’ yelled Garance, but he couldn’t stop. He was hysterical. The twink grabbed Kelvin by the jaw and yanked his face so close he could feel his hot breath on his mouth. He stared furiously into his eyes. ‘You’re not Carrot, you fuck.’ 

Kelvin felt a violent shove from behind. The twink screamed as Garance vanished into the dance floor. The last thing he remembered before his brain melted down was being dragged downstairs by two skinheads – who somehow knew his name.

*

At sunrise, Garance made a call from a phone box on her way out of Paris. ‘Police? Je voudrais signaler un meutre.’

*

Outside in the nightclub carpark, trembling in his pirate outfit and rapidly coming down, Kelvin stared frantically at the skip in the corner. Lying on top of an enormous pile of rubbish, Carrot’s naked, bloody carcass lay stretched out, face up, around his neck a hand-drawn sign which spelled one word – NARK.

His hands were warm and sticky. He looked down. He was covered in blood and guts. Not far from him was a gory axe.

No need for any checks.

He knew his prints would match.