The Late Hector Kipling

by David Thewlis

  ‘But I didn’t gun down those critics out of any desire for my own happiness,’ I protested.

  She leaned in and gazed deep into my eyes, ‘Really? Think about it, Hector, dear. Think about it.’

  I thought about it. ‘No,’ I said, ‘look at me. Do I look happy?’

  ‘A little,’ she said. She smiled, raised up my hands, brought them up to her lips and kissed each one in turn. ‘Buddha said: “What you are is what you have been. What you will be, is what you do now.”’

  But later that night I found myself masturbating over a vision of Bianca and Rosa getting off with each other in a spotlit bubble bath in the middle of the Sahara, so I think I still have some way to go before I can think about tucking into a nice bowl of pad thai in the splendid glades of Nirvana. The closest I’ll ever get to Nirvana is by putting a bullet into my haunted, unkempt head, if you get my drift. But there I go again with the jokes. But then again you can’t make a Hamlet without cracking a few gags. But, as I say, there I go again. Fuck, life drags. Sometimes I find myself wishing that I did hear voices in my head, rather than all this high-pitched silence. At least then I might have someone to talk to. At least then I might suffer a little conversation with someone other than Solomon Otto Sudweeks.

  Solomon Otto Sudweeks is my terrifying cellmate. The first thing I can tell you about him is something that you already know: he has an idiotic name. He told me that if he had been born a girl then they were going to call him Trinity, which would have been even more idiotic. He bears a striking resemblance to Zero Mostel (who also had an idiotic name), though he’s a deal fatter than Mostel and sports a kind of Tsar Nicholas moustache that went out of fashion sometime early in the last century, in a basement in Ekaterinburg. He sweats like a warm Emmental and is an habitual sleepwalker, though he never gets very far, obviously. Oh, and I should also mention that he hates me, which, given his proclivity for homicide is a bit of a worry, to say the least. He was dealt an unconditional life sentence about six years ago for butchering a clown who’d scared the wits out of his daughter at a party in Whitechapel. He then, a little confused and inconsistent, to say the least, proceeded to smother his daughter and dismember his wife with an antique Caribbean machete. He’s bounced my head off the walls of the cell two or three times, and, on one occasion tried to drown me in mouthwash, but on the whole the wardens don’t seem to be overly concerned about such trifles. I get the feeling that they think I deserve it. And perhaps I do. I say perhaps, because even though I can boast a bigger body count than Solomon, I’m not really what you would call a hardened criminal. Not really. I just had some kind of a conniption fit, as Bianca would say. Or a reet funny do, as Mum would say.

  Er . . . would have said. As Mum would have said.

  That’s right – poor old Mum is dead.

  Oh, and Dad, by the way, I should mention – Dad is dead as well.

  It was a terrible business. Really quite awful. As you can well imagine.

  As the news broke the following morning, on the lurid bulletins of GMTV, Dad was apparently sufficiently conscious to absorb the shock and the shame, and within three brief minutes his heart broke. Really broke. I mean like a clock might break. And at twelve minutes past eight, it stopped. He didn’t even make it through the weather, which, just for the record, forecast high winds, thick cloud and heavy rain throughout the North-West and down into the Midlands.

  Mum, meanwhile, slept on until noon, in a haze of Vicadin and Safeway’s gin, deaf to the endless ringing of the phone. It was a journalist from the Daily Telegraph who first broke the news concerning the rumpus at the Tate. And then a Dr Dennis Bannister from the Victoria Hospital who delivered the final blow with a slow and whispered description of how, at the end, Dad had curled up into a trembling foetal ball and for the next half hour, uttered only one word, and one word alone, over and over: ‘Connie, Connie, Connie.’

  It was about twenty past one, therefore, when Connie Mary Kipling, in nothing but her bra and a pair of her husband’s blue jockey shorts, climbed the sea wall, just north of Squire’s Gate, and screamed and screamed into the bluster of the building squall, before surrendering herself to the tea-brown, high-tide foam of the Irish Sea. A little after sundown her bloated cadaver was washed ashore about four hundred yards south of Lytham’s white windmill. Mum had always been rather partial to Lytham’s white windmill, and would often take me there as a child, to fly my Aristocat kite. Thomas O’Malley and a scrum of kittens, smiling on high, or swooping out towards the dunes.

  Given my volatile state of mind in those first few days, I was offered no report of all this until the following Tuesday, when, for fear of me hearing it from some other source, an avuncular vicar named Boris Crossland ushered me into a small blue room and recounted the events with – to be honest – a very lilting turn of phrase and meticulous attention to the finer details. When pressed he revealed to me that he had once, many years ago, taken the role of Poggio in the Bispham Amateur Dramatic Society’s shoestring production of ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore. I thanked him for his well-modulated account and he took me in his arms and spoke of God’s mercy and his baffling proclivity for forgiveness, and then, pleased with how well all that had gone, launched into a hushed rendition of a few apposite lines from The Tempest:

  Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

  As I foretold you, were all spirits and

  Are melted into air, into thin air:

  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on, and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.

  When it was over I disentangled myself from his sincere embrace, rose to my feet and applauded heartily. He appeared wonderfully proud and fulfilled, and I swear that I glimpsed the first bubble of a tear in his eye. And then, the door of the small blue room was thrown open, and a blowsy-faced Glaswegian in a black uniform and cap wrenched me by the arm and marched me off to a much darker room. And that is where I spent the next week and a half, weeping and squeaking till my bed sheets were so sodden and salty, it was as though they had been fetched fresh out of the sea – which in a way, they were.

  At my trial I made a little noise about how the bodies discovered in Box Street were not of my doing, but then, since I realized and then acknowledged that I had indeed dispatched Frederick Monger, and that Lenny and Rosa might still be alive were it not for my intrepid stupidity, it all seemed a rather moot point, and I elected to let it go. And so, therefore, it is on record for all time that I am named as the assassin of Lenny Snook and Rosa Flood. Furthermore, since the inquest into the case of Godfrey Bolton’s suicide was reopened and found to be replete with all sorts of anomalies, then I am also, for the record, the convicted slayer of that twisted old horse-fucker.

  My wake shall surely be an intimate affair: Boris Crossland and Bianca Schulz, sharing a plate of ham and a half bottle of flat Hooch, quoting Faust and bickering about Jung, Gomorrah and the dissolution of the monasteries. What a send-off.

  And here I am. A warm worm, in aviary earth. Solomon is asleep and snoring like a hollow donkey. No doubt he’ll be up and about in a minute or two, off on one of his nocturnal rambles to the door and back. The best that I can hope for is that he doesn’t pause by the bed, as is often the case, and piss all over my pillow before I can steer my head beyond the trajectory of his merry cascade. That is the best that I can hope for. Though you might as well remove the word hope from all dictionaries, since it has little meaning anymore. Pandora’s Box has been hosed down with bleach, dismantled plane by plane, nail by nail and tossed upon a well-built bonfire, the ashes scattered into space. That, to belabour my point, is the fate of hope in the life of Hector Kipling. The
Late Hector Kipling, as I am known around here – if only to myself.

  I never found out what happened to Eleni. As far as I understand she knows nothing of the pandemonium that broke upon the heels of her departure. It may be that some friend – some other friend, not mentioned here – has, in the meantime, made contact with her and supplied her with a report of my form and condition. But it may also be the case that she boarded an aeroplane that night and, having cultivated an understandable distaste for the British as a race, and therefore any manifestation of the British press, is completely ignorant of my transgression. All through the period of my arrest, remand and subsequent trial I heard nothing. Nor did I make any attempt to contact her and furnish her with the glad tidings of my predicament. After all, why bother? Where would that have got me? Indeed, it is some comfort to feel that there is at least one living soul, somewhere, far out there in the surviving world, who might just – just possibly – retain the last vestiges of something resembling love for me – albeit soiled and buckled. At the very least it is something for what is left of me to hang onto. It sustains as a welcome balm to the vilification of the media and the manifold hostility of my fellow countrymen. But then, who can blame them? They do not know me. And then, even if they did, really, who can blame them?

  If I am honest with myself, I doubt that I shall ever see or hear from Eleni again. After all there is little hope that she could ever forgive me for my insouciance regarding the passing of her mother; let alone my squalid liaison with Rosa; let alone the unfortunate blip of a well-publicized mass murder. And therefore, if that is indeed the case, and that she is gone from my life for evermore, then it is as though she too were dead. After all, it feels exactly the same. To conceive of her somewhere, in a land far from here, going about the concerns of her daily life, is no different than if I were to imagine the continuing carefree existence of Kirk or Lenny, or Mum and Dad – or Sparky, for that matter. The point is, she has been removed from my life, if not from her own. And thus, she is just another victim of my wicked infirmity. Yet one more innocent and hapless soul to have died by my hands. Sometimes, of course, I dream about her, and sincerely believe her to be alive. But then do I not dream of all my dead loved ones in an identical manner? So what comfort am I to take from such illusion? And besides, more often than not, in my dreams of Eleni, she is quite dead. And so it goes on. And so goodbye, Eleni. Farewell and adieu. Which pains me to say. For you see, I think about her till all thinking hurts. Like a wrecking ball’s punch to the belly of my brain. I think about her more than I think about anything or anyone else. I think about her to the point of being utterly baffled as to the meaning of the word think. Till think rhymes with clink, and thought rhymes with caught. Thinking with sinking. Wedding bells with prison cells. First kiss with only this. And love let loose with hangman’s noose.

  I lie on my back and pull faces at the ceiling. After a while I notice that one of my blackened molars is loose. After five excruciating minutes I hold it between my fingertips and press it against my nostrils to see how it smells. Not too bad. I summon up a gob of bloody flob, toss it to the back of my tongue and swallow. I return my attention to the ceiling and resume pulling faces. Oh, if only they would indulge me with a blunt black pastel, or even a brick of chalk and a sunlit wall. Then I might begin to write some of this down.

  The Late Hector Kipling

  ‘A hugely inventive and entertaining tale with a rich tapestry of well-drawn characters. It is also often laugh-out-loud funny. An exceptionally fine debut.’

  Morning Star

  ‘An intelligent, yet never verbose or pretentious novel which has perfectly formed characters, good twists and is littered with wonderfully odd scenarios.’

  London Lite

  ‘Thewlis has taken the turn-of-the-millennium London art scene and eviscerated it and the resulting gore makes for wonderful entertainment... This is a funny and successful satire of the contemporary art world, but at its core, it is a novel about the over-indulged and fragile artist’s ego, about insecurity, about the darker layers of human relationships. Lenny Snook, despite his many pretensions, is a decent and considerate friend, but is none the less the undeserved subject of the unpleasant Hector’s rabid, frothing rage. Thewlis has written with a black and cynical honesty about the triumph of bitter competitive destruction over our own will to succeed, as most around us aspire not simply to do well, but to do better as we stumble.’

  Observer Review

  ‘An accomplished debut ... Thewlis ... has successfully transferred his talents to the page, displaying a sharp ear for dialogue and a scabrously satiric prose style reminiscent of Howard Jacobson.’

  Daily Mail

  ‘[Thewlis’] great debut novel is a wry account of a spoilt middle-aged man’s collapse.’

  InStyle

  ‘Thewlis has an eye for grotesque minutiae and, unsurprisingly for an esteemed actor, a real feel for dialogue and wordplay.’

  List

  ‘All of Thewlis’s vigour – and his prose is pungent and splendidly sweary – can’t relieve [Hector’s] downward trajectory . . . Recklessly, exhaustingly energetic.’

  Art Quarterly

  ‘Thewlis has a driving, spiky prose style and a way with blackly comic scenarios.’

  New Statesman

  ‘Thewlis writes in an energized, propulsive style, peppered with slang, profanity and rude, inventive metaphors (the carpet of a dive bar “has cancer”; a river “stinks of pigeon”). His prose demands attention. It’s that style, coupled with the career-rivalry plot line, that made comparisons perhaps inevitable to Martin Amis’ The Information, a similarly revved-up novel that chronicled a snit between a pair of English writers.’

  LA Times

  ‘The first novel from actor Thewlis (best-actor winner at Cannes for Mike Leigh’s Naked) is a rollicking, no-corpses-barred black comedy set in the London art world.’

  Kirkus

  ‘Readers who have mourned the end of Sue Townsend’s wonderful, long-running Adrian Mole series will find solace of a sort here, as will anyone who enjoys a thought-provoking skewering of modern art by a knowledgeable writer and an inescapably doomed but appealing hero.’

  Publisher’s Weekly

  David Thewlis studied at the Guildhall of Music and Drama and has appeared in films as diverse as Mike Leigh’s Naked and Life is Sweet, Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven, the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski and Bertolucci’s Beseiged. He has also starred in Seven Years in Tibet and several of the Harry Potter films. In 1995 he wrote and directed a short film called Hello, Hello, Hello (which was nominated for a BAFTA) and, in 2003, Cheeky.

  First published 2007 by Picador

  First published in paperback 2008 by Picador

  This electronic edition published 2010 by Picador

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-330-53885-5 PDF

  ISBN 978-0-330-53880-0 EPUB

  Copyright © David Thewlis 2007

  The right of David hewlis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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