The Parasite Person

by Celia Fremlin

  “Besides, I went along and checked out a few of them. Funny, I thought, so many articles from defunct, out-of-print journals? And that’s what your supervisor’s going to think, too, when I call his attention to it. Funny, he’s going to think …”

  “My supervisor …” Martin stopped. His heart was racing but he managed to keep his voice calm, even authoritative. “If I were you, Ruth, I’d keep him out of this. There’s such a thing as trust, you know—or maybe you don’t, but there is. Trust between colleagues. He wouldn’t listen to you. He’d never dream of checking on every tiny detail of my work just on your say-so! A man in my position, too! It would be … well … undignified …!”

  “And how! That’s been my thinking, too!

  “But look, Prof, it doesn’t have to happen. None of it has to. Once I’ve got my £55,000, I’ll not only keep quiet about the swindle, but I’ll positively back you up in any further lies you like to tell. And that’s a promise. I’m a good liar, as you must have noticed. A top-ranking, experienced, bare-faced liar, and a sweet, innocent young girl with it; they’ll never suspect me. We can’t lose.

  “So come on, Prof, the money, please.”

  She reached out her brown little hand, with its childishly bitten nails, pulled open the third drawer down of his desk, and handed him his cheque book.

  Joke or not, this was too much. How the hell did she know which drawer to look in, anyway?

  “Leave my things alone!” he commanded. “Shut that drawer at once!”

  She obeyed instantly; and a little reassured by this—it gave him the feeling of having regained the upper hand—he continued:

  “What the hell makes you think I’ve got £55,000? What sort of salary do you imagine we poor bloody lecturers …?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care what salary you get, you can starve on it for all I care. No, it’s your house I’m talking about. Your half-share of the ‘Marital Home’—I saw the letters from the legal-freaks in your ex-wife’s desk; I had a quick decco while she was yapping on the phone one time. £110,000 it’s been valued at, and you’re getting half, right? £55,000 that comes to. She can do sums, too, this dumb little drop-out, she can actually divide by two, would you credit it?”

  Here, once again, was something that he could contradict.

  “I’m afraid, my poor child, that you’ve got it all wrong,” he said. “That’s what comes of poking and prying around in other people’s desks, you just come up with the wrong end of the stick. Let me give you a bit of reality on the thing. Those were just the preliminary letters that you found. Since then, we’ve decided—Beatrice and I—that it would be much simpler for her to keep the whole house in exchange for not getting any alimony. She doesn’t want to move, you see, and I don’t want to pay out good money to support her for the rest of her life, so it seems a good idea all round. She thinks she can make a living by taking in lodgers—lodgers, my God, she couldn’t even run the place decently for just the two of us, never mind lodgers—still, that’s her worry. And theirs too, of course, poor devils, but anyway not mine….”

  He paused. Why was he confiding his private business to this treacherous little bitch who sat watching him with bright, bird-like eyes, head on one side, waiting for a chance to score off him.

  He was not going to be intimidated. It was ridiculous. She couldn’t really have imagined she was going to get away with it.

  “So you see, I haven’t got £55,000,” he concluded carefully, watching for her reaction.

  “That so? Well, that’s your bad luck, isn’t it, Prof? It’s a shame, but this settles it. I’ll have to tell them. Has your publisher got the manuscript yet?—Oh, a pity, I was going to start with him, but it would be nice for him to read it first, wouldn’t it? So okay, I’ll start with ‘Psychology for Everyone’, and the rubbish you wrote for them about ‘Parasite Parenting’. That’ll have gone to press already, it’ll make them a laughing-stock, they’ll be charmed, won’t they? And then that Parapsychology Whatsit, who were so thrilled with your piece—I wonder how thrilled they’ll be now? You know how hypersensitive they are to fraud in that racket, they need to be….

  “I think I’ll leave your supervisor till last: his face when he hears it I want to relax and enjoy….”

  So she did mean it. She really did. Martin’s heart was thumping so that it nearly hurt; he felt the sweat breaking out on his forehead. He had to fight to keep control.

  “You realise that this is blackmail?” he said coldly. “And that blackmail is a criminal offence, almost equivalent to murder? You could get twelve or fourteen years in prison….”

  She laughed, really amused.

  “What, me? You must be joking, Prof! I’m only a kid you know, hardly more than a child. Nothing I do is my fault, it’s my mother’s fault … or my Dad’s fault … or Society’s fault! Someone’s bloody fault, anyway, not mine. They shouldn’t have brought me up like that, should they? It seemed okay at the time. It felt like a real good scene, but it couldn’t have been, could it, or I wouldn’t have turned out like this.

  “So you see, Prof, I’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. I can push you to the limit—in fact, I could be real mean, and go on pushing you, whenever I felt like it. But I won’t do that, I’ll be content with a lump sum down here and now, and that’ll be the finish. Fifty-five thou, and we call it a day, right?”

  “I tell you I haven’t got—”

  “Oh, that’s what they all say! I’ve blackmailed people before, you know, Prof, and it’s my experience they always find the money somehow. Especially smug, swollen-headed middle-aged failures who can’t admit that they’re failures. Or that they’re middle-aged….”

  “You must have struck lucky, then,” he retorted bitterly. “Not all ‘middle-aged failures’ are like that. This one isn’t, for a start. This one is going straight to the police.”

  She laughed again, delightedly.

  “And tell them what? I can deny everything, you know. I can say I never worked for you at all—never did any interviews or anything. There’s no one to say I did. Since I never got paid anything, your Grants people will never have heard of me, and they’ll back me up when I say I’ve never had anything to do with it.

  “Sorry, Prof, but I’ve got you over a barrel. You can’t prove a thing.”

  It was ridiculous. There must be a way out.

  “Okay, so the Grants people don’t know you’ve been involved in the survey: but lots of people do. Helen, for example. Right from the beginning she’s been …”

  “If Helen interferes, I’ll kill her! I’ve had enough of that bitch’s interference, I told you! This is between you and me, Prof. No one else, okay?”

  “You can say that, but you know, Ruth, it just won’t wash. All right, so we leave Helen out of it—and God knows the last thing I want is to have her dragged into such a sordid mess—but there’s a lot of other people who must know by now that we’ve been working together. Neighbours. The people downstairs. For weeks they’ve seen you coming in and out of the flat at all hours …”

  “—At all the hours when your live-in girlfriend is safely out at her job! Be your age, Prof! Do you really imagine that they’re telling each other we’ve been working? Or that they’ll tell the police anything of the kind either? Really, Prof, you want your head examined!”

  Martin was cornered, and knew it. He could see only one—very despicable—avenue of escape.

  “Walter,” he muttered, almost choking on the loathed name, “Walter knows that …”

  “Oh, Walter! Don’t worry about Walter, Prof, he’ll say whatever I ask him to say. He can tell them, for a start, that you never checked up on his interviews, either. Very obliging, Walter is, very imperturbable. With that big fat smile of his he’d make a perfect Parasite Person, if only there were such things. Pity! Leave Walter to me, Prof, he’s not looking for trouble. Besides, he likes me. You wouldn’t think anyone could, would you?”

  Martin cursed himself for
ever having brought the wretched lad’s name into the discussion at all, especially in the role of potential saviour. The humiliation was awful. He’d never hit a woman before, had somehow never felt the need of it, but in this moment he could have smashed his fist into that blandly smiling little face and felt nothing but joy.

  Rage, though, would get him nowhere, except perhaps into the police court. Nor, any longer, had he any authority left to wield. All that was left to him now was to plead with her. Humiliation could go on further.

  “Look, Ruth,” he began, forcing himself to speak placatingly, reasonably. “Look, we’ve worked so well together so far … surely we aren’t going to let it end like this? We’re on the same wavelength, somehow … there’s been such rapport between us … surely you must have felt it …?”

  “Of course I’ve felt it! You know what it consists of, though, don’t you? You know why it is we work so well together? It’s because we share the criminal mentality. Neither of us has a conscience of any kind at all. I can intimidate my loving parents by bogus suicide attempts into giving me a nice big allowance so I don’t have to work: you can perpetrate a bare-faced fraud on colleagues who trust you. Neither of us cares a damn about anyone in the whole world except ourselves, and that’s what has kept us together. The gangsters’ moll in me cries out to the gangster in you and gets answered every time, haven’t you noticed?

  “That’s what we have between us, Prof; and if you give me that £55,000 we can go on having it. We could really go places, you and I. Both of us heartless, unscrupulous, totally without principles: the sort of people who will stop at nothing, who don’t hesitate to blackmail our dearest friends …”

  She paused, watching this sink in.

  “Well, how about it, Prof? If you don’t want to play, then just say so, and I’ll ring up all these people and expose you for the fraud you are. It’ll be fun—especially those television guys you’ve been getting so excited about. That’s going to be the biggest fun of all. It’s a bit of luck, isn’t it, that you never asked them to put me in the programme, like I wanted you to? If you had, I couldn’t have done any of this. Could I?”

  The little monkey! So this was what the whole thing had been about! Not genuine blackmail at all, but just a mischievous trick to scare him half to death as a punishment for not getting her on to the programme!

  He could have laughed aloud in his relief. The cheek of it! And she had scared him half to death, he had to hand it to her. Hell, he might have had a heart-attack, it had actually felt like that at one point.

  Still, he couldn’t bring himself to scold her. He felt (as is not uncommon among victims) such a rush of gratitude for the cessation of his torments, that he quite forgot to feel any resentment towards his tormentor.

  “You little monkey!” he said aloud. “You really quite took me in for a minute or two, and I don’t mind admitting it. I really thought you were serious! Look, I’m sorry, my dear, about the programme. For myself, I’d love to have you on it, you know that. Next time they ring me up, I’ll have a word with them about you. I promise you I’ll do what I can.”

  What he could do was absolutely nil, of course: but, as everyone knows, it’s the thought that counts.

  CHAPTER XXV

  HE’D ALWAYS KNOWN he would love being on television. It had been his secret dream for as long as he could remember, and now the dream was about to be fulfilled.

  He’d arrived at the studios ridiculously early, so nervous had he been lest he should arrive late, and had sat in the entrance hall for more than an hour watching the celebrities making their way in and out, and hugging to himself the thought that now, at last, he was one of them. Or nearly. Or would be, anyway, before the evening was over.

  Of course, they might not all be celebrities, these vaguely impressive passers-by. Some of them might be electricians and messengers and things. But somehow it made little difference. Here they all were, anyway, at the glittering hub of things, and he, Martin Lockwood, was among them.

  This was the place where he belonged: had always belonged. He was coming into his heritage.

  They were all charming to him. With bright, welcoming smiles they looked him up on their lists, showed him where to wait, brought him coffee in a plastic beaker. Well, he hadn’t expected it to be a golden goblet, had he? And indeed it had no need to be, for it was like the nectar of the gods anyway. This was Television, was it not, and this was himself, Martin Lockwood, taking his place among the mighty. It would take more than a plastic cup of warmed-up coffee with blobs of powdered milk floating in it to destroy the glory of it all.

  The make-up room was wonderful, too. He’d been startled, at first, by the notion that a bronzed upstanding he-man like himself shoud require such adornment; but the make-up girl, like everyone else, had been charming.

  “That’s what they all say,” she assured him. “But you’ll be surprised how natural it looks on camera. Your friends will all tell you—and you’ll be able to see for yourself, I daresay, if they do a repeat of you. I expect they will.”

  She laughed a little, amiably, as she proceeded deftly with her task, and Martin felt his heart swelling with a mixture of nervousness and pride. “I expect they will,” she’d said—was she just being polite, or did she actually know something? It couldn’t be her business, exactly, but no doubt there was a busy grapevine here just like everywhere else, and he had, after all, been introduced to her by name.

  His face, in the mirror, seemed to glow with a new confidence, a new assurance that had nothing to do with the make-up. Already, he looked like a celebrity, and he wondered if the girl had noticed?

  Never mind. She would next time. “You mean the Martin Lockwood?” she would say with bated breath next time they were introduced.

  *

  The studio was so full of lights and wires and hurrying young men that at first Martin found it quite difficult to orientate himself. He was introduced to his fellow-members on the panel—the two of them who had already arrived, that is. One was a professor of psychology from some Northern university, the other a stout white-haired lady in a scarlet trouser-suit who had written a book about something or other, he couldn’t gather what, but it didn’t matter, he smiled enthusiastically and said. “How interesting!” and then the three of them chatted, rather stiltedly, “getting to know one another” until the fourth member of the panel arrived and was ushered into their midst.

  At first, he didn’t recognise her. In a slinky, silvery evening dress and with her greasy elf-locks done up in the glittering coils on top of her head, Ruth Ledbetter looked like a total stranger, and a most distinguished one at that. By the time he took in who she was, she was already in her seat, two places away from him, and chatting easily with her neighbour, the Northern professor, as if this sort of thing was all in the day’s work to her.

  The little devil! He couldn’t help admiring it. How on earth had she wangled herself on to the programme? Cheek, of course, sheer, brazen cheek—it could get you anywhere, especially if you were a beautiful young girl. He’d never thought of Ruth Ledbetter as beautiful before—rather the reverse—but tonight, in this get-up, perfectly groomed, and with that unwonted air of aristocratic elegance—beautiful was the only word. Her eyes, which he’d never really noticed before, were green as a cat’s under the arc lights.

  The interviewer, a good-looking young man who could not be more than thirty, was as charming as everyone else had been, if possible more so. The programme started with him talking to Martin easily, and with genuine interest, about the nature of this fascinating new project; drawing him out, encouraging him, and asking exactly the questions that he had hoped to be asked. Under this expert and sympathetic guidance, Martin found himself answering fluently, easily. All his nervousness had gone, now that the programme had actually begun, and he suddenly realised, with a little leap of the heart, that he was a “natural” for this kind of thing. Secretly, he had always known he would be, but how wonderful to have it confirmed, in fro
nt of all the world! All his friends would be watching, all his colleagues, all those people who’d got ahead of him in the academic rat-race—this would show them! This would make them sit up and take notice of him at last! These moments of absolute triumph, of total unqualified success, were moments of such happiness as he had never known.

  It couldn’t go on for ever, obviously. Other members of the panel had to be given their turn. Smiling and suave as ever, the interviewer turned to Ruth.

  “And now, Miss Ledbetter, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your share in this exciting enterprise? I understand that you’ve been working as Mr Lockwood’s assistant for some time now—collecting information for him, and generally helping with the great work?”

  There was a tiny pause. Ruth had been looking down into her lap as he addressed her. Now she raised her head and looked her questioner full in the face.

  “No, I haven’t collected any information for him,” she replied, “There’s been no need. He makes it all up, you see. Every single interview—all the case-histories, everything—they’re all completely phoney. He’s made the whole lot up to fit this crazy hypothesis of his. The whole thing is a swindle from beginning to end, a complete and utter con….”

  *

  What happened next, how they set about cutting-off the programme, Martin would never know. The moment was so appalling, so shocking, so totally unendurable, that he blacked out on it completely. He retained only a sharp little cameo-portrait of that pleasant smiling face grown icy with shock … of a stunned silence … and then of a cold voice saying, “I’m afraid, Mr Lockwood, this goes beyond apologies…. This is a kind of let-down we’ve never experienced before….”