Mack The Bread Knife

 

The assistant fetches the last of the bread knives in the shop and places it on the counter.  Stan studies it carefully.  Inside the clear plastic moulded package is a black steel knife, with a silver ring around the handle, a sharp serrated edge and a pointed tip. Stan doesn’t want to buy it because it’s far too expensive, but his wife Sally says they need one for tonight, and none of the other shops have bread knives. Their old one has disappeared, so they have no choice but to buy it.  

Tonight their only daughter Juliette is bringing her boyfriend Marcus over for a meal. Stan and Sally are a particularly ordinary middle-class, middle-aged couple, whose only real concern in their lives at the moment is that they believe Marcus is a sly Casanova, and they fear for their daughter’s happiness. 

Stan even suspects Marcus stole their old bread knife, because he’s not seen it since last time the man turned up at their house. Stan doesn’t trust him an inch. He wants his daughter married, but not to Marcus.

They buy the black steel bread knife and it finds blood the moment it’s ripped out from it’s stiff plastic packaging. Struggling to remove it, Sally tears the wrapping with a vigorous tug, and the knife spills out, drops off the kitchen workbench and plunges tip first downwards, piercing through Sally’s foot, and pinning it to the wooden floorboards. She screams. Blood fountains from her foot. Stan slips on it as he rushes into the kitchen and cracks his head on the side of the cooker.  They manage to call an ambulance and there’s no long term damage to either of them.  At least the dinner that night is cancelled. 

The black steel bread knife is put in a wooden crate with a broken coffee machine, three stained lampshades and cracked tea-pot and left outside the door of a local charity shop.

A few days later it is spotted in the shop, on a tray of assorted knifes. This one stands out because it’s black and looks as good as new.  A young violin student called Matthew has moved into a tiny studio in the old town, and on a search around the local junk shop for essential cooking materials, he sees the knife.  Ten quid. He picks it up. It looks as good as new. He likes the weight, the feel the of the steel in his hand. He buys it. 

For the next month the locals get used to young Matthew practicing in his studio on the top floor of an old apartment building overlooking the square. 

He plays for four hours every morning, scales and arpeggios first, and then they hear him play through the pieces he’s learning. He plays them over and over again and the sound of his sweet music echoing around the high stone buildings of the square is a delight for the citizens living nearby. 

One cold rainy morning an old man, who lives in the area, walks into the square, and despite the drizzle, he sits on his favourite bench and rolls a cigarette as does at this spot most mornings.  He heard Matthew playing when he wandered into the square a month before, and coming here to listen to this music in the mornings inspires him for the rest of the day. 

He waits to hear the violin, the scales running up and down in every key, but on this particular morning he hears instead a long, howling scream of agony coming from the same tiny window on the top floor where the beautiful violin is usually heard. It sends a cold chill down the old man’s spine. 

In an attempt to cut a stale crust in half with the black knife, Matthew has just sliced his index finger off.  It lies on the bread board. He’s hysterical. Poor Matthew will never play the violin again. 

The knife ends up in another second hand shop. Maureen, a single mother with three angry kids, sees it and buys it, because it looks like new and she can wrap it in some nice tissue paper and it will do as a birthday present for her mum. 

Only a few days later Callum, her oldest boy, who is sixteen, spots it lying on a shelf in the kitchen and takes it. They live in a very rough part of the city. He’s been trying to get accepted in a local street gang, and a knife tucked into his boot will increase his credibility. 

He gets to use in soon enough. There’s a meeting one night between two local street gangs. Someone is owed money for drugs and it all gets violent.  He has no choice but to pull out the black steel breadknife to defend himself.  The moment it is in his hand a bolt of energy surges through his body and he starts to slash and swish it about recklessly in every direction till several other youths drop to the floor wounded. It all happens in a moment.  Callum can see a thick line of blood across an adolescent belly, glistening under the streetlight. He looks down at a second youth, screaming because the knife sliced through his face. Callum turns and runs, throwing the knife over a brick wall into a garden. 

Life won’t ever be the same for Callum now, and for a year the black steel bread knife remains where it landed, hidden by bushes and weeds. 

The new owner of the house, a middle-aged man called Phillip, finds it when he’s working on his front garden. He wants to plant irises.  He picks up the black steel bread knife, wipes it with his sleeve and takes it into the house. The knife still looks brand new. Not a stain or a mark. Phillip is a bit afraid of it. It looks dangerous. He puts it in his drawer. A few days later he’s slicing onions and his usual knife is blunt, so he reaches for the black steel breadknife. It’s very sharp. Slicing veg is suddenly now a joy. He smiles at his fortune and then a second later the knife slips and slices a thick layer of skin off the tip of thumb.  

The knife cuts him again three days later, when his ex-boyfriend Charlie is about to arrive. Phillip has made bread and the knife nips another finger as he is slicing it. When Charles turns up, Phillip flaps his hands in the air, and makes a joke about the two fat plasters on his fingers. He shows Charlie the offending knife, now lying at the bottom of the trash can. 

Charles reacts with a weak smile. Charles is depressed, though he hides it well enough. He gets more depressed as the evening continues, because it’s clear Phillip has moved on, and won’t contemplate them getting back together. 

At the end of the evening,  Philip goes upstairs to bring down the few remaining books, belonging to Charles. While this is happening, Charles wonders miserably into the kitchen, steps on the pedal of the kitchen bin, sees the black knife, reaches down, picks it up and slides it into the inside pocket of his coat. 

Three days later Phillip gets a call from Charles’ mother to say that Charles has slashed his wrists and is currently on life support in hospital. 

The black knife finds itself being sold on-line to Steven, a newly qualified chef who has just opened a little brasserie in the prosperous end of town. He thinks the knife looks unusual, with its serrated edge and sharp elegant point. The advert says the knife is brand new, never used. Steven is sure it will be useful, so he buys it and when it arrives he’s very pleased.  It slices pretty much everything. One evening he’s in his brasserie and it’s busy, and he’s been told a local restaurant critic might be in tonight.  So, trying his best, he creates a spectacular cheese board, complete with little hand made bread rolls freshly baked. The black bread knife looks stylish lying beside the cheese display.  He carries it out the kitchen and as he lifts it up high over the heads of the guests sitting around a table, the black knife rolls off the board, dropping down into the lap of a local restaurant critic. It severs his penis and slices his scrotum in half.  The restaurant erupts with noise, panic and violence, and Steven knows this is the end of his brasserie. 

The black knife continues on it’s blood-thirsty journey. It gets taken to France, by a retired couple, who’ve bought an old stone cottage near the sea. They keep it for a while before one loses the tip of a finger and they sell it on line, to an anorexic teenager called Maria, who uses it to make cuts up and down her forearms.  When eventually she dies, the knife is released once more into the marketplace. It’s found by a local hunter and for several years it remains in a stone village hut and is used to skin wild boar, till the hunter loses a finger from it.  Six months later it appears as the fatal weapon in a brutal family argument,

and then by chance it comes back to England, like driftwood on the tide, where it is found in an intiques market by a young woman looking for props for a film. The knife is perfect for the murder scene, she thinks.  Sure enough it is.  On the very first take, the actor who uses it is a little too enthusiastic and he accidentally stabs his fellow actor in the heart. 

It lies on a shelf in a shed, wrapped in an old oily rag, still sharp and looking good as new, forgotten for a while, and then after several more bloody adventures, it finds itself in a junk shop on a street near the house belonging to Sally and Stan. 

It’s bought by Adam, a retired policeman. He lives nearby and happens to know Stan, and one day they are both standing in Adam’s garage looking at the engine of Adam’s new car.  Neither of them have any idea why it won’t start. 

‘I can’t even get the plastic cover off the battery. Tried everything.’

‘Let me have a go. You have a knife?’ asks Stan.

‘Yeah. Over there. On the shelf. In that tin.’ 

Stan sees a tin can, full of old knives. He clocks the one with the black handle at once and picks it out. 

‘Where did you get this?’

‘Oh yeah. Be very careful with that one. It’s lethal.  Belonged to my sister-in-law.  Her mother gave it to her as a Christmas present and within a week she said the entire family had cut themselves on it, so she gave it to me, and since it’s been in this house, it’s nipped me a dozen times at least. That’s why I keep in the garage. I need to chuck it.’ 

Stan examines it closely. There’s not a mark on it. 

‘I’ll have it.’ he says, thinking about Marcus.

‘I know someone who needs a bread knife, and I think he’d really like this one.’

‘You can’t do that! I’m telling you it’s a vicious knife.’

‘I know.’ 

Adam lets Stan take the black steel knife, and when Stan gets home he finds a long white cardboard box to put it in, wraps it up in silver wrapping paper and gives it to Juliette next time she visits. 

‘This is a late birthday present for Marcus, from me.’

Juliette takes it and next time she sees Marcus, she hands it to him.

‘I thought your dad hated me’ he says as he unwraps the present. 

A week later Stan gets a call from a surgeon working at the city hospital, to say his daughter has suffered serious knife wounds, and he needs to come to the hospital as soon as possible.  

So it goes on…

Daniel Guy.