‘A fucking mess,’ Dickie agreed, taking a swift drag on his joint and handing it to me: I pulled off the oven mitts and joined him (‘I wonder if all that adds up to something … ?’ Iris mused, and Vic grunted: ‘The question to ask is, what’s she selling?’), sucking the sweet smoke deep into my lungs as though, I felt, to mark some turning, the completion of something, or the beginning, something perhaps not quite present yet nearby … ‘All the style’s gone out of your parties, Ger’ (‘That’s not a very generous view of art,’ Iris remarked, peering over her spectacles), ‘there’s too much shit and blood.’
‘Maybe you’re just growing up,’ Vic growled, wheeling around slowly. ‘Unlikely as that seems.’ I caught a glimpse of Ros, her extremities concealed in translucent bags, being carried around on a kind of litter made of one of our living room drapes tied at the corners to three croquet mallets and a golfclub (it looked like a five-iron), held high, Hoo-Sin in her kimono wheeling around below, eyes closed, keening rhythmically. ‘Ritualized lives need ritualized forms of release. Parties were invented by priests, after all – just another power gimmick in the end.’
‘Not for me, old man,’ said Dickie with a cold smile, taking the joint back. ‘For me, they’re like solving a puzzle – I keep thinking each time I’ll find just the little piece I’m looking for.’ Vic’s jaw tightened – Dickie turned toward me and winked, then glanced back over his shoulder toward the living room, seeing what I saw: Alison among the mourners, looking frightened, hemmed in by Noble and that guy in the chalkstriped suit and some of Zack Quagg’s crowd – Vachel the dwarf, that actor who played the wooden soldier, Hilario the Panamanian tapdancer – ‘Speaking of which,’ Dickie murmured (‘Please, Vic,’ Eileen whispered), moving away, hand fluttering at his bald spot once more. ‘Like so many open but unenterable doors,’ I thought I heard Mavis say, just as Dolph, scratching now with both hands, said: ‘The top cop’s there in the TV room, Gerry, if that’s who you’re looking for.’
‘Yes …’ I’d lost sight of her. Fats was doing a kind of dance in the front room around Hoo-Sin, who was down on her knees now, twisting her torso round and round, moaning ecstatically, some guy with a camera circling around her, getting it all on videotape. They’d lowered Ros to the floor and Hoo-Sin swept the corpse with her long shiny hair, back and forth, wailing something repetitive through her nose, while the others chanted and clapped or slapped the walls and furniture. Hilario banged a tambourine, Vachel clacked spoons, Fats danced, eyes closed, smiling toothily, his big body bobbing around the room above the others as though afloat on the rhythms.
While Quagg – directing the camera crew, shifting the lights, calling the angles – pulled the others into a circle around Ros, Regina swooped into the center, eyes and hands raised as though in supplication. She called out Ros’s name in a hollow stage whisper, and the others picked it up as a kind of chant. Alison (I saw her now) made a move in my direction, but Quagg stopped her, led her back into the circle, in a gap between Dickie and that wooden soldier actor. I tried to catch her eye, but she was peering anxiously back over her shoulder, where Noble and Talbot, digging at his crotch as though looking for the switch, were squeezing up behind her.
Malcolm Mee appeared then, as if from nowhere, in his ragged jeans and striped sailor shirt: he knelt solemnly beside Ros’s body, bent stiffly forward, and pressed his head against her breast. When he staightened up there was fresh blood dripping down his forehead between his eyes. Regina let out a shriek and fell to the floor, her eyes rolled back (I’d seen her do this as ‘Tendresse’ in The Lover’s Lexicon), Fats paused, the music stopped. ‘Ros!’ Fats whispered, and the others picked it up once more, chanting airily as though taking deep breaths together.
‘What’s all this supposed to mean?’ asked Alison’s husband, who’d stepped up unnoticed beside me, but Quagg shushed him angrily, pointing at the camera.
All eyes were on Mee, who knelt beside Ros still, back arched, staring up at the ceiling as though in a trance. His pants seemed to have opened up by themselves, and now his penis crept out like a worm, looking one way, then the other, finally rearing up in the lights like a flower opening to the sun. There were gasps mingled with the whispered chants of ‘Ros! Ros! Ros!’ Mee’s eyes closed and his lips drew back as though in pain. The head of his penis began to move in and out of its foreskin like a piston, plunging faster and faster – or perhaps it was the foreskin that was moving. ‘Look!’ someone rasped. ‘It’s getting wet!’ This was true: it was glistening now as though with sweat. Or saliva. Mee’s hips were jerking uncontrollably, his head thrown back, bloodstreaked face contorted, the scar on his cheek livid, his penis pumping. The others, still chanting, pressed round – I too found myself squeezing closer to watch. Suddenly Malcolm bucked forward, went rigid: the swollen head of his member, now wet and empurpled, thrust up out of its fleshy sleeve at full stretch, seemed to pucker up, and then let fly – but even as his sperm spewed forth (we all shrank back) it seemed to disappear into thin air. There were gasps of amazement and people fell to the floor. Regina, emerging from her own trance, searched her dress: it was dry. The carpet too. It had been like an explosion of yoghurt and now we couldn’t see a trace of it. Mee lay there, gasping, quivering, his eyes squeezed shut, the blood dripping down between them. Regina, with gestures grand and devotional, tucked his penis away and zipped his jeans up. ‘All right!’ exclaimed Zack Quagg, beaming, and he slapped the cameraman on the shoulder. ‘All right!’
‘I may be thick or insensitive or something,’ sighed Alison’s husband, ‘but I just don’t get it. I mean, is that what theater’s supposed to be about, communication with the dead?’
She was gone. Mee had distracted me. And Noble as well, Talbot, that guy in the lilac shirt and gray chalkstripes, they’d all vanished. Dickie was still there: he’d spied Sally Ann nearby, staring at me, one hand in her blue jeans as though playing with herself. Holding my gaze, she withdrew her hand, held her fingertips in front of her lips, and blew – Dickie reached out as though to intercept her dispatch, closing his hand around it and drawing it, grinning, toward his nose. She made a face, pushed around him, and came toward me. ‘Whoa there, Greased Crease!’ he laughed, and caught her by a back pocket. ‘At heart, theater doesn’t entertain or instruct, goddamn it – it’s an atavistic folk rite,’ Quagg was explaining, somewhat irritably. ‘Oh, I see,’ said Alison’s husband, adding in a whisper to me: ‘She went out through that door to the dining room …’ ‘Ah …’ It was over on the other side of the room. How had I wandered so far away from it? It was as though the room itself had circled around me. ‘Jesus, Cyril and Peg shoulda seen that one!’ ‘Weren’t they just here?’ Regina was mopping the blood from Malcolm’s forehead and nose with a white scarf. ‘That, bison gulls, is what you call ad-lipping it!’ Vachel squeaked, drawing tense laughter (‘Off the elbow, man!’ ‘No, haven’t you heard?’), and Fats, his bald dome shiny with sweat, stopped me in the doorway: ‘Doggone! What happened, Ger? I had my eyes closed!’
But she wasn’t in the dining room either. There were some people in there eating and drinking, and Mavis was carrying on still in her hollow and melancholic way, but neither Alison nor the guys chasing her around were to be seen. ‘Death came to me there as a woman,’ Mavis was saying – some of her audience had drifted to the doorway to catch Malcolm’s act, but were now drifting back – while behind me, Wilma sighed and said: ‘Dear me, what a waste!’
‘Ah well, spunk’s cheap,’ someone answered her, and Mavis said: ‘Her hair seemed to float around her head as though caught in a wind. She had a large fleshy mouth, and when she opened it the inside glowed with a strange fluorescent light.’ I turned back, but Alison’s husband was standing in the doorway, also looking puzzled. ‘Her breath smelled of wormwood and gentian root and her eyes were shriveled like dried mushrooms. Bruised fruit. She looked … like my mother …’
‘What—?!’ bellowed Vic, whirling around and staring fiercely past my shoul
der, just as the man in the chalkstriped suit came, grinning, out of the TV room.
‘She was blind and clumsy and the labyrinth of ice was impenetrable even for one who could see – it was easy to lose her—’
‘That goddamn sonuvabitch—!’
‘You got buried treasure down there, Dolph?’
‘Look at him go! Moves like a man half his age!’
‘He’s ripe for a coronary …’
‘I think I musta caught something …’
‘But then, after I’d escaped from her, I grew lonely and longed, even in my awful fright, to see her again …’
Nor in the TV room, where Jim sat facing the Inspector across the games table (‘It’s a problem of dynamics, a subject–object relation,’ Pardew was saying, ‘for in a sense it is the victim who shapes and molds the criminal …’), Patrick just behind him, old Lloyd Draper over in the easy chair, sleepily watching the TV screen, Knud snoring on the sofa. There was a technician working behind the set, rigging up some kind of switcher between the cassette recorder on top, a lot of gear strewn around on the floor, and the tube itself, where now Mavis appeared in extreme close-up as though being interviewed, saying: ‘I went searching for her but I couldn’t find her …’ The technician flicked a switch and the image of Mavis gave way to a static wide-angle shot of a man in high-heeled boots, a leather vest, and a thick black beard, coming through the front door with a tripod over his shoulder: it was the technician himself, I realized, as humorless on the screen as he was at his work. ‘Did the victim suffer perhaps from extreme sensibility?’ the Inspector asked.
Jim smiled, glanced up at me – ‘Hardly,’ he said with a wink – and the Inspector peered around. ‘Ah,’ he exclaimed, waving at me with what looked like a knitting needle, ‘perhaps you can help!’
‘Well, I was just looking for—’
‘The good doctor here seems reluctant to provide us with the full medical history of the victim on the rather unprofessional grounds that it is not relevant,’ he went on snappishly. Some of Mark’s toy soldiers had been set up on the table in front of him, apparently to illustrate some theory or other, and it occurred to me suddenly what those ‘marbles’ were I’d found in my pocket. There was also another of Mark’s drawings there – the one Mark said was of Santa Claus killing the Indians – as well as Peedie, his stuffed bunny. ‘And I am trying to persuade him that there is a definite mutuality here, that the criminal and his prey are working on each other constantly, long before the moment of disaster, before they’ve even met each other, and that, in the war against crime, to know the one,’ here he pointed with the knitting needle at one of the little soldiers, ‘we must know the other!’ He pointed at another soldier, then gave a sharp little thrust and tipped it over. ‘By the way, why are all the heads gone off these things?’
‘I don’t know …’
‘All that may be very well with wolves and tigers,’ Jim said, ‘but it has nothing whatsoever to do with human beings.’
‘I can see that you have a higher – and a lower – estimation of humanity than I have,’ replied the Inspector, setting the needle down and lighting his pipe. Without the scarf, the back of his neck looked raw and naked. I caught a glimpse now of Janny Trainer behind the open closet door, her pink skirt hiked above her waist, some guy’s hand in her heart-shaped bikini panties. On the TV screen there was a wide-angle shot of my study with Roger’s lifeless body upside down in the far corner. Nothing moved. Yet the relentless intensity of the unblinking shot was almost unbearable. Pardew turned around to look at me, holding up the needle. ‘Does your boy knit, by the way?’
‘No—!’
‘There he is,’ Wilma said, leading Peg’s sister Teresa into the room and over to the sofa.
‘We found it in his room.’
‘Oh my! I’d like to be in his dreams!’
‘Kitty says you probably wouldn’t like it.’
‘It’s probably his grandmother’s, my wife’s—’
‘Who was the victim’s mother?’
‘Look, Wilma!’ exclaimed Teresa, pointing. ‘There’s Talbot on the TV!’
‘Ros? She was an orphan—’
‘Aha!’ He banged the table with the needle, sending the little soldiers flying. Jim looked pained and shook his head at me (my wife, I recalled, had been trying to tell me something about Mark), and Wilma said: ‘I wish at least the ninny’d stop scratching his pants!’ ‘An orphan! Now it’s all coming clear!’
Charley entered, groaning lugubriously with each slow step, and the guy with Janny – it was Steve the plumber – hurried over to help the bearded technician behind the TV, fumbling abashedly with his overall buttons. What was Teresa saying? Something about a ‘little boy’ or ‘little boys.’ ‘’Sno good, Janny! I’m all – I’m all washed up … !’
‘Oh, Charley, stop blubbering! Why don’t you just push a cocktail stirrer in it or something?’
The camera, which had followed Talbot and Dolph and the others (Talbot, in response to an interviewer’s question, had been describing his appetite for reflected sex) to the door of our master bedroom, now panned back down the hallway to the bathroom, and I saw as it slid past my son’s door that it was ajar: the room was apparently empty, toys and bedclothes flung violently about – and was that a foot stretched out behind the closet door? ‘Now about the hole in this stuffed rabbit,’ Pardew was saying and the TV camera had entered the bathroom, where the shower curtain was being pulled aside, but I was already on my way out of the room: I remembered now, there’d been a bloody handprint on Mark’s door when I’d passed it before – how had I failed to register it at the time?! – there was not a moment to lose!
I bumped up against Hilario in the doorway – ‘Oops!’ ‘Perdón!’ he exclaimed. ‘I am all left foots!’ – and over his shoulder ruffles I spied Alison in the group around Mavis: Noble was there, too, Earl Elstob, Dolph … ‘I saw her at last,’ Mavis was saying, ‘but she was trapped behind a high wall of shimmering ice – she was hideous, yet pathetic, and I felt a terrible closeness and a terrible distance at the same time.’ Alison mouthed something with a questioning look on her face – it looked like ‘the green room?’ – and pointed down at her crotch. ‘(Just be a minute!)’ I mouthed in return, and Dolph, cupping a hand to his ear (the other hand was out of sight), mouthed back: (What?) ‘And then, suddenly,’ Mavis intoned as Alison, wincing, lurched slightly and cast me a panicked glance – but what could I do? there was the bloody handprint, my son’s torn-up room (‘What—?! Down in the rec room?’ cried Brenda. ‘Oh no!’) – ‘everything began to melt … !’
‘Wasn’t Malcolm’s number something else?’ someone at the table remarked as I pushed past it – Quagg’s crowd were all in here pressing around the food now – and Hoo-Sin replied (‘Fats! Fats!’): ‘It was like the meeting of clouds and rain, tall mountains piercing the soft mist of the valley!’
‘I tell you she was there, man!’ It was the guy who’d played the wooden soldier, standing near the telephone: ‘Didn’t you catch her smell? That could only be Ros!’
‘You’ll never believe it, Fats … !’
‘I didn’t smell anything, but I could feel her,’ sighed Michelle below me as I took the steps three at a time. ‘It was like she was blowing through my clothes!’
‘But I thought Mee’s cock was tattooed like a serpent … ?’
Just as I hit the top, Ginger came wobbling out of the bathroom, looking unwell. She glanced up, met wide-eyed my startled gaze, and, as though in shock, all the stiff little pigtails ringing her face went limp. She snatched a kerchief away from one breast, clutched it to her mouth, covering her breast with her other hand, and went clattering down the stairs.
When I reached my son’s room, I found there was no blood on the door after all, maybe I’d been mistaken – but inside, the room was, as I’d seen it on the TV, all torn up. And the bed was empty, there were stains—! ‘Mark—?!’
‘Stick ’em up, Daddy! It’s the Re
d Pimple!’ he cried, jumping out from behind the closet door.
‘Hey—!’
‘Did I scare you, Daddy?’ he giggled, as my mother-in-law came in with a glass of milk. His face was painted bright red and he had a towel tied around his neck for a cape. My heart was pounding.
‘Boy, you sure did!’
‘The police were in here,’ his grandmother said without looking at me. The room was a mess, things strewn about everywhere, books, toys, bedding, unwound balls of yarn.
‘I’m sorry …’
‘They took Peedie away!’
‘They’ll bring him back, son.’ What had I been afraid of? I didn’t want to think about it.
‘They better! That’s my Peedie!’
‘Now they are in the kitchen.’ She seemed to be talking to the closet. She handed Mark his milk.
‘I know. I’ve just come from—’
‘That towel is filthy, Mark. And what have you done to your face?’
‘Yuck! This stuff tastes like soap!’ He now had a white moustache on his crimson face.
His grandmother gathered up the sheets and blankets, spread them on the bed, her movements slow and forced, as if causing her physical pain. ‘I’ll get a washcloth,’ she said, taking the towel with her as she went.
‘Why did the policemen throw all my things on the floor?’
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