It started with his tires. Tread thick black and cross-hatched, like steaks on the plate of the very rich. Prickly antennae in small black coming from the sides of the wheels and brushing my white wrists like the strange parts of insects. I put my fingers to either side of the wheel, squeezing the neck of its small animal hum. The wheel was firm, the tire hard-pumped. The craft-knife I held was silver —

yellow body —

and a black notch you could draw down to make the slant blade bigger. I drew out a formidable length of blade, a three incher, and checked the stairwell. Nothing reflected in its thick layered emulsion.  Emulsion poured blindly over bricks and plaster. Insipid cream-grey emulsion. I ran down those stairs most mornings like a man in black and white, gripping the wooden spiral banister in one hand, running the other along the slip walls and into its dents of plaster cracks and crumbling wall-dust and that one wall graze that stared plasterback in the shape of a vase. Late, and my keys jangling. Gasping into the atrium with the sound of my footsteps like bird feet on tin. 

At first the tire resisted and I felt sorry for his parked bike. Resting innocent at the bottom of our spiral staircase. Not even locked. The d-lock sitting placid and big-hearted in its cradle that ran horizontal between the saddle and the bars. I pushed deeper, pulled long, and the score that followed was a light grey-white and hissing air. Just a neat little rip. And the blade going easy through the rubber flesh. 

And I was remembering —

the air still sighing in tremendous gulps —

scoring canvas from the frame and watching the tautness evaporate til the weighted canvas was bread dough in folds across my arm, or this very knife as it sliced layers of dried acrylic from a painting, incising their overwrought strokes from the rest of the work, revealing something smooth, something marbled. Activity I could only afford to hold in memory now. 

I watched the rubber collapse into grateful thick flatness that didn’t know where to go. Not so nice now, the toothless mouth that I had made, the big beautiful gape of black, the entrance to the endless dark or the surgeon's cut to an organless body, lopsided now, and limp. Not firm and just-undone and arrested in the act of piercing, but flat and slashed and done-deflating. 

I moved towards the second tire.

I had just meant to sink a sewing pin in —

have him find a flat on his way home, rifling through panniers in the pouring rain for a puncture-repair kit, ducking under the awning of a cafe in his sorry lycra, his special trainers that he left by the bike every day filling at the sides with water —

but then I remembered how easy it was to imagine the body of the bike was the body of him. The bread the body the blood the wine. The carbon fibre the bones, the oil-grease the plasma. The rubber as flesh, obviously. And me and my knife, sailing through. 

The second tire was dead in my hand. I lifted it in disbelief from the metal rim. The second tire had already been scored, the wound old and curling at the edges into the same seared black as the rest of the rubber. No tender grey-white skin. I remembered how he was screwing over a lot of other people, a whole tenement of people. I tried to imagine every person I had ever seen in the hall or on the stairs and on each one found blackened fingers, a grease-smeared forehead, or the rising sting-smell of brake oil. I put my fingers inside the cut, jaggedy, a plunge, a couple of stabs, maybe. Angrier than me. I was calm. I had been intentional. I flicked the blade back into the yellow body-sheath and half concealed it between my fist and my jacket sleeve. 

Stepping back, I lost my holy tether to the craft-knife, to the bike. I kicked it and couldn’t imagine his body winded on the sofa. I rang the bell and couldn’t see his nipple, fresh-flicked and tingling. I put my mouth around the metal bell and tasted only metal, not even the metal-tinge of blood. Soon there would be developers who couldn’t imagine my room was once a room, or anyone’s room, putting their plaster-hunger into the walls and tearing until the sunlight bore through, exposing iron rods to the sky, and the scatter of dust —

the scatterpeople googling where can i go? —

and the landlord confounded to find (tripping down his beautiful, demolishable stairs) his angel on two wheels, his expensive bit of kit this, lame and ailing in a clatter at the entrance to the echoing atrium. These bloody tenants. How pleased he was to be rid of them! 

We watched him hoist it onto his shoulder and walk out the front doors. Him, strong armed, virile, healthy. Stepping out the building full of crazies and into the immediate spring sun. And the wheels of the bike, catching the light, looked fuller, more plump, than they had ever been. He mounted it with ease, how beautiful, this light turning the hair on his skin to gold, turning his poor bike to a handsome steed, how lucky he was! And the hill fell to dispatch him home like the unfurling of clean bedsheets. I thought he looked handsome too, as he climbed gears and pulled the land along with him.