by Clark, Simon
The Little Man’s face was striking, almost alarming. One side was blotched purple with a birthmark, almost as if someone had squirted him with blackcurrant juice. On that side of his head, his ear rose into a Spock-like point. He wore a look so permanently expressionless that it made Mark half wonder if it had been chiselled out of some solid material.
Mark Stainforth endured one of those predictable, safe lives that are completely dull. Only the Little Man brought into his life the unexpected.
Why? Mark had no answers. But the mystery, like the old wall, attracted him.
The Little Man stopped twenty paces from him. For a moment they watched one another impassively. Then the dwarf turned and walked slowly away, the radio clutched to his chest with one fat little hand. The song was Ultravox’s Vienna. And the DJ had just announced it had entered the top twenty.
Mark followed, keeping a distance of ten paces or so between them.
They crossed the park into a housing estate. After ten minutes they reached a large, detached house with tastefully landscaped gardens and a new BMW parked on the drive.
Without pausing, the Little Man entered the garden, walked up to the door and went inside.
Mark followed, the blood pumping through his head.
He shouldn’t be doing this. Years of social conditioning told him it wasn’t right. Not to walk into a stranger’s house without being invited.
He followed the limping dwarf upstairs where he paused outside a bedroom. Then the Little Man boldly pushed open the door and walked inside.
Mark followed. The first thing he noticed was the smell. Scent. An expensive one – and strong. It almost masked the smell of sweat lying thick on the air.
The Little Man stood by the dressing table, the radio softly playing.
Mark looked round the bedroom. A man lay in bed smoking a cigar and flicking the ash onto the white carpet. He was young, with tattoos, mainly girls’ names picked out at home with a pin and ink. He wore a bored, aggressive look.
‘Joe … Look, I’ve told you … Please don’t smoke his cigars … Oh, and look at the carpet. He’ll go bloody mad if he sees that.’
The woman hurried in from the en suite bathroom, her pink silk dressing-gown flapping open, flashing her pubic hair and dark-nippled breasts. She fell to her knees brushing frantically and ineffectually at the chunks of grey ash.
The youth watched her, bored. ‘It’s only fag ash. It’ll hoover.’
‘It’ll hoover yes, it’ll hoover, but the bloody cleaning woman doesn’t come until Monday. My husband will be home tomorrow.’
The youth sat up almost shocked. ‘Well hoover it up yourself, you idle cow.’
Mark stood by the Little Man and watched. He’d long since stopped asking himself why no-one ever noticed him when he was with the dwarf. Or why people never heard the radio.
They continued with their lives as if they were alone.
Mark watched as the argument came up to the boil. The woman was pampered. Gold rings flashed from her manicured fingers. About fortyish, she was still superficially good-looking with bleached blonde hair. That was obvious from the dark clump between her legs. Clearly she’d had her fun, now she wanted rid of her young, working-class lover.
Even after all that sex the man wanted some kind of emotional commitment from the woman. He wouldn’t use the word ‘love’, he just wanted more, that’s all. Denied that, he was going to lie there and wind her up to screaming pitch.
This kind of thing had happened to Mark twenty times before. He’d ditched God, Christ and his apostles in his teens and yet some vestigial superstitious streak prompted him to wonder if he should learn from the experience. He didn’t. The people were just puppets, with no past, no future, playing their piece then, for all Mark knew, tossed back into a box until the next performance.
On the bed the youth sat rubbing one tattooed forearm with his hand. He made sarcastic comments as she struggled to tidy the bedroom.
Soon they were shouting at one another. She, her eyes flashing, was yelling at him to get out.
Swinging himself out of bed he accidentally – more or less – caught the half full bottle of red wine on the bedside cabinet, sending it spraying across the white carpet.
‘Jesus Christ!’ she screamed and flung herself at the carpet. She rubbed at it frantically with a pair of her briefs then swapped those for a hand towel. The stained briefs marked a clean section of the carpet. ‘Oh … You clumsy idiot. Don’t just watch me. Help. This is the last time you come here, the very last time.’ Panting she scrubbed the carpet, smearing the stain over a wider area. ‘The bloody last time. Ever! Do you hear?’
He glanced at her through narrowed eyes. A malicious idea was forming in that dim brain.
A minute later she kneeled up, her nose was running. She wiped it with the back of her hand. ‘Jesus Christ! How on earth am I going to explain this to him?’
Abruptly the youth leapt forward, yanked her roughly back onto the bed. Then he fastened his mouth onto her neck like a ravenous vampire. He sucked ferociously while she squealed and kicked under him.
Then, grinning he stood up and started to pull on his jeans.
Half sobbing she crawled to the dressing table mirror and looked at herself. There was a massive love-bite on the side of her neck.
The youth, grinning even wider, slung his T-shirt over his shoulder. ‘Jesus Christ, Joe. How do I explain this to him?’ he mimicked. ‘If you can explain that away, Missus, you want to be in politics.’
Laughing coarsely he sprinted out of the room, downstairs and out of the house.
The woman fingered the skin stained red by the broken blood vessels. Her eyes were fixed on her neck. ‘Oh, God … Oh, God … Oh, my God, oh my
* * *
Sixteen days since Sharon left with the kids. I miss them. I’m lonely. I never realized it before but loneliness is a horrible thing. It’s there. Always. A dull ache that never vanishes. I’ve worked since I was sixteen, married at twenty-one. I’ve struggled, saved, gone without to make a home. And what have I got to show for it all? I’ll tell you: a full, fat one hundred per cent, great heaped mound, a gigantic barrel filled to the brim and beyond with
NOTHING
I feel like the victim of some callous joke, the rug’s pulled from under my feet. Sharon leaving me wasn’t one almighty shock. No. It’s an organic thing. Growing. A series of small miseries. Now two weeks later, I can feel all those miseries settling on me, bit by bit, like snow falling on a field; flake by flake it builds imperceptibly, building up a white blanket that blots out the earth.
* * *
Sentimental codswallop, thought Mark glancing over the entry in his diary. He had recovered, thank God, completely. He didn’t miss the kids now. When he remembered them now he pictured them whining for this and that or behaving like spoilt brats. They were just part of Mark Stainforth’s history. Like his school friends, like the people he went to college with. Down into memory’s silt-bed they go, he mused lightly – gone, gone, gone. Now he had no attachments, no affairs.
He skipped a few pages. The scribble looked less overwrought, the impression on the paper lighter.
* * *
Today I went down to the old wall in the park. It seemed to glow; a rich warm red. Beautiful. I like to look at the wall and imagine myself there when it was built three hundred years ago, seeing the mason lay the last brick then wiping the lime from his trowel as he walked away. Then I would climb on the wall and sit there. Looking round I would see the old manor. A couple of farms. Mainly the landscape would consist of small fields, and a lot of forest. No cars. No mass housing. There I would sit for three hundred years and watch the village grow around me. The old manor vanish, forests retreat like a tide, houses sprout. The manor gardens become a municipal park. World War II, a bomb would fall on the barn at the end of the wall blowing the red tiled roof off. They repair it ten years later with corrugated iron.
* * *
DECEMBER 21. AFTERN
OON
Paris was cold.
A biting wind channelled in by the Seine rushed through the boulevards, shivering the Christmas trees and nipping the noses and ears of Parisians and tourists alike.
One of those tourists gritted his teeth and strode along the Boulevard de Clichy in the direction of the Sacré Coeur.
Mark Stainforth had seen the cheap package deal and jumped at it. Christmas, all the tackiness, the hysteria, appalled him. Whereas Paris appealed.
He soon abandoned the rest of the people on his tour and struck off on his own. He was looking for the Rue de Le Pic where, for a while, Vincent van Gogh had lived with his brother, Theo. Vincent had seen personality in weather and landscape. His paintings appealed to something buried deep inside Mark. They seemed important. Over the last few months he’d half wished he could paint. His first subject would have been the wall. The wall held something more than lumps of fired clay and mortar made from bird droppings and water.
Here, the narrow streets were quiet. The houses quaint. But he didn’t stop. No, that was for the tourist. Without knowing why Mark seemed to be searching for something. One of those ‘somethings’ that he could never describe, but would know if he saw it.
Night was pulling in when he spotted him.
Same clothes as he wore in summer, brown hair neatly combed. The old radio clasped in his pudgy hands played a programme from ten years before.
The Little Man stood in the middle of the cobbled street looking down at him. One hand came up and slowly rubbed the purple stain on his face.
Now, how the hell did you get here? A stupid question. All questions connected with this dwarfish creature were futile.
All he could do was what he had always done when he saw the man. Follow. Then watch.
Mark followed.
After a few minutes, the Little Man left the street and followed a narrow alleyway uphill. High overhead the houses overhung so close they formed nothing more than a narrow channel open to the evening sky.
At a door, the paint flaking, the timber warped with age, the Little Man paused, and glanced back to make sure Mark had followed him. Then he pushed open the door to a gloomy hallway where wallpaper hung in shreds from the walls.
They ascended six flights of creaking stairs to an attic room.
The apartment – garret would have been more appropriate, thought Mark – showed the poor side of life in Paris. There was nothing chic about squalor. An armchair and a settee stained to the colour of mud. A table with a few scraps of dry-looking cheese and a half gnawed breadstick.
The place stank. It was cold.
In the corner an old-fashioned television showed a French dubbed version of Citizen Kane.
For a moment Mark thought the room was empty.
Then he saw the thing on the bed against the wall.
Even to him it came as a shock.
Creatures like that did not exist outside of –
Well, outside what?
He blinked and licked his lips. And wished he hadn’t. The foul smell settled on his skin – he could taste it. He looked down at the Little Man who himself looked up, face expressionless, then returned his gaze to what lay on the bed.
It grunted thickly like an old sow riddled with bronchitis. Then, laboriously, it turned to lie on its back.
Mark involuntarily clenched his fists as he found himself looking into its face.
Quasimodo.
He couldn’t help the association. There on the bed lay the near duplicate of the legendary bell-ringer of Notre Dame. Quasimodo. The hunchback.
Or at least the Charles Laughton version. Mark shook his head. Whatever had blasted this creature’s genes in its mother’s womb had done a thorough job.
The mouth was a diagonal slit. A large growth like a pink rose bud pushed one eye down toward the cheek. The nose almost hung like the flaccid snout of a proboscis monkey and the forehead was a mass of bumps and dents.
The similarity to Quasimodo ended there.
This thing could barely move. It didn’t have the hunchback of Notre Dame’s colossal strength or agility. There’d be no heroic rescue of modern-day Esmeraldas. No. It would require this heap of fat and cartilage a Herculean effort even to cash its invalidity cheque at the Post Office once a fortnight.
Then something happened that Mark Stainforth had never seen before.
The creature’s great, lumpy head rolled sidewards and it opened its single functional eye.
It looked at Mark, steadily for a moment, then at the dwarf.
A low uh … uh sound grunted from its throat. A string of saliva stretched down onto the pillow.
It was the first time anyone had seen Mark with the dwarf.
The creature pointed at the radio. Slowly the Little Man stepped forward and held it to one twisted ear.
They remained like that for fifteen minutes, then the Little Man leaned forward and gave one of the creature’s massive hands a reassuring pat.
* * *
DECEMBER 22. MORNING
‘The bells made me deaf, Esmeralda.’
‘Water! Water! She gave me water!’
The children in the party aping Laughton’s hunchback lurched through the doorway of Notre Dame and out of the church. The rest of the party took photographs of the statues decorating the front of the building.
Mark Stainforth shut out the voices and stared up at the twin towers that soared toward the winter cloudscape.
Masons had taken years to cut the stone and erect this temple. More a monument to their skill than to Our Lady.
The same skills that produced the wall at home. That was more humble – but almost as enduring.
The little tourist shops round Notre Dame sold small plaster casts of the gargoyles. Normally Mark would have dismissed them as overpriced rubbish.
But somehow their ugliness appealed.
Later, in his hotel room, he pulled the gargoyle from the carrier bag and held it up level with his face with both hands and, sighing, murmured, ‘Alas. Why was I not made of stone like thee?’
* * *
DECEMBER 22. EVENING
Mark walked through the Pigalle, the red light district.
Yet he did not find it sleazy. The evening brought down a keen frost and Mark walked along the packed streets where the French-speaking Africans enjoyed a night out. The cafés were full. Roast chestnut sellers vigorously stirred the nuts which rattled around the hot iron pans like pebbles in an empty oil drum.
The shops in the street were like those found near any market, specializing in cut-price food, clothes and kitchen utensils. Outside, trestle tables were sagging under the burden of tights, clothes pegs, coloured felt-pens and wooden spoons.
If sex was for sale there, Mark did not see it.
He did, however, see the Little Man.
For the first time, Mark saw him first. Usually the dwarf appeared, made eye contact, and Mark would follow. Tonight the dwarf hobbled up a side street clutching a brown paper parcel to his chest. On impulse Mark followed. The dwarf seemed to be on some important errand. What’s more, he paused occasionally and glanced back. Almost anxiously. As if afraid he would be followed.
He turned into one of the ‘we-sell-everything’ shops. Mark sidled up to the plate glass window and looked in.
The dwarf had picked up a knife; he picked up another. Then another.
It took him five minutes to carefully select the one he wanted.
Puzzled, Mark watched as the dwarf paid for a massive carving knife, the blade reflecting the shop’s lights like a mirror. The dwarf slipped the knife into the paper parcel and hastened on up the hill.
Mark followed at a discrete distance. Soon they were in the maze of ancient houses at the top of the hill. They reached the house of the Quasimodo creature.
Stealthily Mark followed up to the stinking garret.
The dwarf had hurried up well ahead of Mark, who approached cautiously and looked in.
The creature lay supine on the bed. It s
truggled for breath even though, Mark guessed, it had not moved all day. Perhaps it was dying.
The television showed an opera. Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. The music thundered into the room, an avalanche of spectacular chords.
The dwarf quickly cleared the table and placed the package in its centre.
Then, respectfully, he reached out to the misshapen thing on the bed and pulled down the duvet to below its waist.
It was naked. A humped and lumpy carcass the colour of dirty lard.
Then he drew the carving knife from the package and held it steady above the thing’s chest.
Mark saw it open its single eye, look up at the knife, then at the dwarf.
Then a nod. Once.
The music roared from the television’s tinny speaker. It filled the squalid room until Mark felt the sound would burst the walls.
He watched. Appalled. Knowing he should do something. But what?
The dwarf, as if mimicking a surgeon, inserted the tip of the blade under the skin at the pubic bone. Then slowly pushed the knife up to the throat as if opening a sack of wool.
The blade travelled smoothly. It was sharp and the dwarf was strong.
At the throat the Little Man did not stop. The blade tip travelled up over chin, mouth, bisecting lips, between the eyes and up over the top of the head.
As the blood ran, steam billowed up from the gash as if cutting into a hot pie. The steam clouded the room, and when it reached the cold walls and window it condensed and ran down in trickles. The heat released from the vast body warmed the room like a fire.
Mark chewed his tongue. This was murder. He would be involved.
The blade continued to run down from the shoulders to the creature’s fingertips. The dwarf’s concentration never broke. The blade did not waver.
Cut. Slice. Carve. Peel.