Corpsing [Paperback]

Toby Litt's third book is all bullet entry wounds, violent emotion and forensic detail. Corpsing works as a deconstructed literary thriller, a very knowing examination of the pathology of the genre. It starts off in the traditional way, with a death. Jean Luc Godard said 'all you need for a good story is a girl and a gun.' In Corpsing the girl is Lily, a beautiful actress and the ex-girlfriend of Conrad, the narrator. The gun is in the hands of an assassin, dressed in bike courier clothing who looks like "a vision of the future--a future where everyone is concerned with keeping their bodies fit and dodging between fast new technologies of damage." He fires at Lily and Conrad as they eat dinner at fashionable Le Corbusier, a restaurant which resembles an autopsy room in the morgue: "the tables are a frosty-looking aluminium, the walls are half mirror, half stainless steel". Six bullets later and the damage is done, Lily is dead and Conrad is nearly so.

The dissection really begins when Conrad comes out of hospital and begins investigating Lily's murder, his own near miss. The plot unfolds in short, sharp chapters, keen as knives. Toby Litt uses Conrad to provide an extra twist to the usual serpentine story. He has a morbid interest in the clinical details of the results of his injuries. He, like Litt, is very aware of the etiquette of cool violence, a cultural culling that takes in J F K succumbing to the "magic bullet", Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, and, of course, Reservoir Dogs. Corpsing is an interesting critique of our fondness for violence and death as entertainment, while cunningly providing us with all the gory details, the damage done. Clever, but a little soulless. --Eithne Farry --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The first bullet entered the body of my ex-girlfriend - gorgeous, slightly-famous Lily - two inches beneath her left breast. We were sitting at a table in Le Corbusier, Frith Street, Soho. As the first bullet went into her, I turned to look at the gunman. Wearing Day-Glo Lycra, a helmet, mirror shades and a pollution-mask - just like a bike courier - he had a black and silver gun in his hand. And he was shooting the woman I still loved...

CORPSING HAS ALREADY WON HUGE ACCLAIM
'Toby Litt is a really good writer. He will have you speeding through his latest - a noirish tale of murder, sex, revenge and adultery.' Time Out

'A thriller for our times, modern, sexy, full of twists and wickedly funny. Litt takes no hostages and he writes brilliantly...Corpsing is impressive.' Daily Mail

'a great evening in. Open the Chardonnay and let Litt take you on a thrilling ride from his Mortlake flat to the gents of a gangster pub in Bermondsey.' Observer

'Litt, one of the foremost young lions of British hip-lit, has a genuine appetite for pulp, and pulls off a remarkable crime debut which puts many veteran crimesters to shame...Corpsing has all the hallmarks of a cult book.' Guardian

'The screen rights to this devastatingly enjoyable novel have already been sold, and I cannot wait for the movie (Ewan McGregor and Jane Horrocks are my nominees for the roles.)' Daily Telegraph

'A chic, sharp shock of a thriller.' She

'Imaginative, eloquent and with an ear for the nuances of life, Toby Litt has produced a genuine page-turner of a thriller.' Daily Mirror --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Toby Litt was born in 1968. He grew up in Ampthill, Bedfordshire. His first two books were a short-story collection, ADVENTURES IN CAPITALISM, and a novel, BEATNIKS.

It is six-weeks-three-days since Lily and I split up, unamicably, at her insistence. Before then we had been going out for two years, and living together for one. The top-floor Notting Hill flat which we shared belonged to her (and before her to her parents), so I was the one forced to move out. I found myself a ground-floor flat in Mortlake, grotty but cheap.

The moment Lily said she didn't love me or fancy me any more, pop songs started to play in my head - and not just any pop songs: really crappy, supposedly forgettable ones: 'Can't Smile Without You', 'Leaving on a Jet Plane', 'All By Myself', 'You're an Uptown Uptempo Woman (I'm a Dowtown Downbeat Guy)'. I sat on the edge of what was now her sofa, weeping. She told me not to be so silly. I was out of there within a fortnight. I remember walking away from the flat for what I thought was the last time - the keys to the front door no longer in my pocket.

And yet here I am with Lily again, facing her over a frosty-looking brushed-aluminium table in Le Corbusier.

Lily's body is something I am so familiar with - yet there it is, sitting across from me, become a forbidden thing.

I know and can remember the minutest things about her: the squeak her fingernails made against the pillows under my head; the little clattering clicks her teeth made in the few slow moments after she fell asleep, always before me; the eggy smell of her early morning yawns.

Never again will my fingertips tap down upon her hard flat stomach. Never again will my tongue make tiny circles around her salty-sweet clitoris.

This is outrageous, I am thinking. This is almost obscene.

I remember her habits, her ways: how she used to steal my pillow the moment I got out of bed to go to work, cradling its warmth to her belly as she had so rarely cradled me; how she would suck me off, and would swallow, but had to brush her teeth immediately afterwards, couldn't not.

As I sit there opposite her, I feel that her body is something that I have almost a right to be intimately involved with.

What I really want to do, I am thinking, as I look across at Lily, gazing out over the widening gap of success and down into the chasm of indifference, what I want most of all in the world is to make you pregnant: I want to put a cut in your life so deep that the scar will be the first thing people mention when they mention you, think of when they think of you. And, even more, I want you to want me to make you pregnant

I am still in love with her.

All that happened, all she said, am I am still in love with her.

She is saying something now.

'Bastard', I hear Lily say.
* * *
Bullet # 1
The first bullet (there are to be six evenly distributed - three for her, three for me - though not equally destructive) enters Lily's body approximately two inches beneath her left breast. Slowly, or if not slowly then gradually, or if not gradually then at least moment by moment, leaving no gap in actual proceeding time, jumping no millimetre completely, the bullet begins its inevitable passage into Lily's thorax. A small brown mole taking the shape of a capsized figure-of-eight which she bears approximately two inches beneath her left breast, stark against her blue-white and otherwise unblemished skin, will be nowhere accounted for at the autopsy - and so instantly must be vaporized: pouff! Already, before it accomplishes even this minor intitial slaughter, that first bullet has traversed ten feet of air-conditioned air, has clipped through the floating grey viscose of Lily's ghost frock, has slit the slick black silk of her camisole. Now, however, that almost-perfect skin of hers begins slowly to stretch - restisting the onewardness of the bullet's metal apex, denting inwards above her delicated ribcage, tightening mometarily from shoulder to hip: but then - after this false, hopeless opposition - puctures easily enough. An anticlockwise spin has been imparted to the bullet by spiral grooves - called rifles - back inside the barrel of the guilty gun. This spinning motion maximizes flight-stability and therefore increases terminal accuracy. But it is the skin-stretch of kinetic energy not the drill of missile-spin that takes the bullet through into first flesh.

Entrance wounds are notoriously sexy. And although I will not get to see Lily's while they are fresh, I will study photographs of other penetrations: the abrasion ring that encircles an entrance wound, caused by the bullet rubbing the skin, turning it raw, looks like bright pink lipstick under slick lipgloss.

The bullet, during the long moment of entry, is not only spinning but also yawing slightly - like a fish, swimming, seen from above.

Despite refinements in weapon design over the past twenty-five years (particularly in higher quality barrelling and improved systems of rifling) some instability is always likely to occur in the flight paths of physical objects. However, this yawing only begins to play a major role in trajectorization once this first bullet has passed out of the air and into the denser material of the human body.

Lily's body.

After the skin and a thin layer of fat (forgive me, Lily), some thoracic vessels, nerves and membranes, the bullet next enters the red cross-hatching of Lily's ribcage muscles: external oblique, external intercostal, internal intercostal, innermost intercostal.

As the bullet passes through the cohesive but elastic tissue of the muscles, a cavity of greater diameter than the bullet's own is temporarily created - around and behind it. For all of five to ten milliseconds after the bullet passes, this ripping-rippling emptiness pulsates - in and out, in and out - spreading damage laterally, through to tissues the bullet itself hasn't even touched. This phenomenon is technically known as cavitation.

Next, the bullet breaks both Lily's fifth and sixth ribs...