‘And you knew what it was for? Did you never stop to think about Mrs Mardy? About where your money came from?’
He said: ‘You never stop to think about anybody else when you’re hungry and broke.’
‘Where is Mrs Mardy now, do you think?’
‘I can only guess.’
‘Do you think she’s still up at their house?’
‘Maybe. There was this electricity strike, that’s when the dry ice deal was done.’
‘With Baddeley.’
‘With the undertaker, that’s right.’
I said: ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’
‘Once I’ve been paid,’ he said, ‘I never ask questions.’
‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but you’re going to answer some, I’ll see to it.’
He took a drink and put the bottle down on the floor. ‘Before I do,’ he said, ‘we’re all of us boracic up there, we haven’t a light between us, nothing to eat. Could you give us any money at all? We’re frantic up there, it’s desperate.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘here’s twenty quid.’ I got it out, it was my own money, and he took it. I said: ‘Now talk, and make it interesting.’
He said: ‘I don’t know what trouble I might be getting us into here if I do.’
‘Less than if you don’t.’
He said: ‘What Dick saw arriving one day at the Mardys’ was a big fridge—’
But I interrupted: ‘I hear a noise outside, we’ve got an audience.’ I went over to a window and tore the rags away. I looked outdoors and said to Brad: ‘Get down on the floor quick, take cover, do it now.’
‘We’re coming in,’ said a man’s voice out in the dark. In they stormed with knitted hats over their faces. They came in as a triangle with its point towards me, the head man holding a twelve-bore, the two behind spread out with bike chains, the one on the left of me with a knife open.
I said to the man with the gun: ‘Have you got a permit for that?’
‘Shut your gob,’ he said. ‘Who are you anyway?’
‘Someone who could cause you a great deal of bother,’ I said, ‘such as a police officer.’
‘What a job,’ he said, ‘that’s really tough, darling. Got metal on you?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you’re running no risk, you pathetic little man, I’m not armed, I never go armed, I don’t need to be armed for gits like you.’
‘We’re not after you anyway,’ said the gunman, ‘for which you can be fucking thankful. It’s that cunt behind you under the table there, that Brad, that’s the man we want.’
‘We all want what we can’t have,’ I said.
One of the men behind him wrapped his chain round his left arm and came up with his knife. He held it at me, its blade shining in the light from the stove.
I said to the gunman: ‘You make me weep. Am I supposed to be afraid of you?’
‘Most people are,’ he said. ‘Now stand aside.’
‘I never do that,’ I said. ‘I exist to make sure that folk like you do fourteen years apiece if you don’t drop all that on the floor, do it now.’
‘Don’t be a fool, John,’ said the gunman, ‘this is a contract on Dick and Brad – the folk backing me don’t like a grass, and what a pity you was here to spoil a neat scene. Now mind your face.’
‘I know the undertaker that called the contract,’ I said, ‘and the fact that I know means it’s gone rotten on you, you load of poofs. The man’s going up the spout, I should know, I’m in charge, and incidentally my name’s not John.’
The man behind on the left, who hadn’t spoken or moved yet, except to let his chain swing from his wrist in an idle kind of way, now said to the gunman: ‘There’s too much chat here, and knocking the law down, that can mean grey days, lots of them.’
‘At last someone’s talking sense,’ I said, ‘I didn’t think any of you were capable of it. You put me away and there isn’t a copper in Britain that wouldn’t wring your necks, and some of them have got big hands.’
‘Get that cunt behind you off the floor,’ the gunman said, ‘that’s all we want.’
‘You waste either or both of us, make up your pitiful minds which. Go on, fire, then – what’ll it prove?’ I thought if he does I’ll go somewhere, but where is where? Meantime, to know what justice is, you must still have a head, balls and kneecaps – the only way to find justice is to live without shelter, since all the messages are gloomy now.
The man with the knife said: ‘This is fucked,’ as if it were a failed orgasm, and suddenly closed his knife. The other villain who had stood swinging his chain still stood there swinging it, only now patches of sweat, even on that February night, were breaking out under his armpits.
The man holding the gun said: ‘We’ve no interest in your getting hurt unless you get in the way.’
I said: ‘It’s my job to get in the way.’
The gunman said: ‘That individual on the floor behind you has a contract on him, he’s a grass.’
‘You berk,’ I said, ‘I decide all that, I’m the law. Now break that gun and drop it; you’ll do life if you don’t, and I’ll lean on the parole board to make sure you don’t do less than ten, if I live.’
We stared at each other. ‘You won’t have Brad unless you have me first,’ I said, ‘you can be sure of that. You kill a police officer and you’re in real shtuck, you realize that, I repeat it, now decide. Shoot or wank.’
‘You’re a right runner, you are,’ said the gunman. He broke the weapon, kept it in his hand and dropped the shells. He said past me to Brad: ‘We’ll meet again, sweetheart, don’t you worry.’
‘If you do,’ I said, ‘it’ll be in court and then look out – ten years, three to a cell in Canterbury, but they say you can hear the cathedral bells if the wind’s right.’
The three of them faded, becoming part of the darkness they had emerged from. I watched them leap into a shattered Ford with no plates on it; the back-ups jumped on, bottom gear went in and the tyres yelled on the bad road. ‘Bye-bye, cuntie!’ they shouted, now that they thought they were away. I thought, you poor pricks. Where I came from, a contract was a serious affair.
I turned to Brad and said: ‘You can get up now.’ He already had. I said: ‘We can be quiet now. What was it you were going to say? Stop shaking, you’re alive, aren’t you?’
He started to tell me about a heavy load that he and Dick had delivered three years ago, telling me about it and thanking me for just now.
When he had finished I went back to the hotel and had a bad night, what was left of it. I was thankful when dawn came, but in February the sun rises late, if at all.
15
My most murderous inquiries are into my own life, which is really less my own than of my friends. Most of my few friends, thank God not all, are dead or disabled – Jim Macintosh dead, Ken Hales also, Foden shot through the spine and Frank Ballard paralysed for life. I know my friends, they’re like myself – we were all intelligent, sure of our own thought; we knew what we believed and were never afraid. But I feel nearly alone now, though I stand in for my sick and dead, I believe. There are times when I feel alone in the face of our society, its hatred and madness, its despair and violence. To go on drawing my pay, to go on living in Acacia Circus, to go on acting on my own, just to go on at all, I have to be very careful. I feel the edge of the precipice with every step I take and have to be most particular how I tread; the path isn’t solid, and under it is the mist and that vile slide towards a bottomless death. I am a minor figure for whom no god waits. The state that pays me laughs at me; my own people at work find me absurd.
I dream across the altar of my past, have many enemies.
I once read about a man who was obliged to take poison for being too honest. He was given time; he was told to take his own life in his own time. His crime, as always with those who value life instead of taking it, was honesty, and his friends helped him to die, giving him the poison disguised in wine as he lay in a hot bath after supper and conversation in
which all the questions that had lain between them were discussed. The dying man said calmly that since all men must die we must from the earliest moment examine everything we have known so that good can reign; he said that to find out the best in man through logic, analysis and friendship, discussion and love, was far better than obedience to any state.
There was a man whose help I would have been glad to have in any obscure investigation – he was Greek, I think, and I gather another awkward bastard like me.
My conception of knowledge is grief and despair, because that has been the general matter of my existence. The Hampstead girl that I once loved, and of whom I spoke earlier, fetched a book once in the night that she had been reading and after we had made love stated the position of tragedy:
‘There, where the earth’s asleep, wedded to night,
Under dead gardens mortgaged to the stars I see my past.
A dream in white slips past, a passing gasp of light
Imagined in pale light;
My folly’s all attached to me,
Dark bombs trailing at my sleeve;
I’m lost, but do intend to find the right way soon
As clouds, moving, alter the subtlety of weather.
I dream and suffer in the sweet clasp of lost arms;
Love’s cast-off language from my past
Makes my lone waking, sleeping, strange.
I sigh and sigh upon my past, my green past,
My once pasture of knowing.
But now I am checked at last with nothing achieved
But perdition in summer leaf and stand at last
Faced by the screaming young disasters of my past.
There was nothing from father, nothing from the mother;
Her milk was not for me, nor her body for him;
No, nothing but new disasters for the other.
Nothing but a bullet and a flag,
Memories faceless, death in a fucking bag.
A graven angel passed through a second of fire
Then laid the grey pen of her brain aside for ever.
So we caught the train to work,
Laughing together.’
‘There are other ways of dying than being killed by a bullet, you know,’ she said after reading it, ‘just as risky. An idea can be a firing squad, a whole army – the continuing terror of loneliness can be its own trench, the long necessity of thought itself can rot you, leading you to the conclusion that the conditions of existence itself are intolerable: flesh shrinks, blood pales, bone fritters. Fear can kill you,’ she said, ‘and it makes it all the worse if you can think. I understand that now too late – intelligence is an introduction to fear, it’s no defence. Fear can really kill you,’ she said, her hand in mine.
And I think fear did kill her.
Sometimes I wish my mind would go away and leave me in peace; I would give all that I understand and feel and know, my very existence, to get out of my situation. I would grovel for the superb gift of stupidity, to be able to smile at my own death without knowing what it was, like the sheep did that I saw killed with my father when I was small – I don’t know what I would pay not to see through what I see, feel through what I feel, sense through what I sense, know through what I know, finding only the rottenness of others. All our agony is a short wonder to be forgotten like a day’s rain, as when the lights go down after a play and it begins to snow outside the theatre. But in my role how can I ever say what I intend – for language, like life itself, has become irretrievable, hobbling after what’s left of nature.
Few people have time to age in the face of beauty and terror, and I have been trying to do both for too long.
Do you see now why I detest the Charlie Bowmans, the bullies of this earth?
*
A child, a little girl, came up to me one night at Waterloo Station and begged me for a pound. She was so small, dirty and cold; the last dark daring was in her eyes that faced me like a gambler’s one card. She had single roses in her hand wrapped in plastic and I said, thinking of my own daughter: ‘How old are you, my darling?’ and she said: ‘I’m ten.’ Then I looked at her and saw at once that she had been sent out into existence far too soon and would go to the dark; poverty would push and pull her to the slaughterhouse without her ever having known the air of love, as you manage cattle. But she was brave and human. In the rush-hour crowd around us I gave her ten pounds, all I happened to have, and she dashed away skipping, while I turned away to my train, holding her rose. When I was alone in the compartment I read the message printed round the frozen flower: the pleasure of giving.
I took both rose and paper back to Earlsfield with me and have them still among my few souvenirs, both of them wrinkled and dead now. Yet I keep them carefully in a vase on my mantelpiece; there’s a flower that will never die for me.
I was in difficulty for a while as a child myself for some time after the war and went through trouble in my head; I caught it from my father’s nightmares.
Pity, terror and grief.
16
The blanks on Baddeley, everything I needed to know, arrived by police courier at twenty to four in the morning. The phone rang, and I struggled out of a bad sleep. The clerk said: ‘There’s gear come for you,’ but I was already getting my trousers on.
The courier handed me a fat envelope, said sign the book, Sergeant, looked at his watch and was gone.
The night clerk had a bad cold. ‘You people never stop,’ he moaned, bubbling through his left nostril. He wiped it on the sleeve of his woolly. ‘It’s a strain I can tell you, my job is.’
‘It’s a doddle compared to the strain of what I do,’ I said, but he had picked up his porn again.
‘This is really hard stuff, this is,’ he murmured from behind it, ‘like lurid, yes, very fruity.’
I kicked his desk so hard that he dropped the book. ‘I hate you,’ I said.
‘It’s the time of day,’ he said philosophically, picking up his book again and whispering his fingers through the pages, ‘when emotion gets on top of you.’
‘I don’t hate you so much after that,’ I said, ‘it’s true. Have you logged any calls?’
‘I’m an unmarried man,’ he said, ‘and likely to remain one on my wages, that’s why I like reading Dare. It’s a sort of vicarious relationship I have with women through the snaps and the print, you know.’
‘About calls?’
He said: ‘Yes, now I think about it, someone did come round looking for you.’
‘What was his name?’
‘He didn’t leave one.’
‘Did you ask him?’
‘I didn’t bother.’
‘Did he tell you his name?’
‘He may have, I wasn’t listening. He left a card, but I’m afraid the cleaners threw it away, they’re quite ignorant.’
‘I’ll bet they’re brighter than you are,’ I said. ‘Now pull your finger out of your fundament with a loud pop and try to describe him.’
‘Couldn’t,’ he said, ‘I didn’t look at him, I was busy reading. Anyway, fewer questions you ask, fewer you have to answer.’
‘It’s just the reverse in my job,’ I said.
‘That must be tough,’ he said, turning a page, ‘hey, look at this one.’
‘You’re great fun to be with,’ I said. I ripped the book out of his hand, tore it in two and threw the pieces on the floor. ‘But try and be useful, will you?’
‘Oh, God, now look what you’ve gone and done,’ he groaned, ‘it belongs to a mate of mine and I’d only got a bit of the way through it, there was masses more. That’ll cost you a tenner.’
‘It’ll cost you a tenner,’ I said. ‘You’re the taxpayer.’
‘I don’t believe in taxes,’ he said, ‘I’m a sociologist and I think taxes are robbery.’
‘In my job,’ I said, ‘I reckon robbers are robbery and if it weren’t for taxes I couldn’t do my job.’
‘Good,’ he said, ‘I can’t knock that, I cannot stand the police myself.
’
‘Say that again when you’ve had your throat cut,’ I said.
I went upstairs, opened the packet and started reading. On top was a note from Harrison which read: ‘This was what I got by checking on Marianne Mardy with the Aliens Registration Office. Maiden name Vayssiere. Born Lyon, France, April 4th 1941. Married William Mardy October 14th 1963 at Russell Square Registry Office, London WC. Enclosed is a photograph of that date from the Evening Standard. Her father, now deceased, was Jean-Luc Vayssiere, area director of the Credit Lyonnais. Had money, property in France. Daughter Marianne sole issue of marriage, sole heir. Mrs Mardy also, before marriage, worked for Credit Lyonnais and was posted to their London, City branch and met Mardy socially. Hope some of this will be helpful, Barry.’
I spent some time looking at this other photograph of Marianne Mardy. With her was a man, holding her hand. It was William Mardy, but I barely recognized him. Spruce, elegant and alert, he was gazing down at his wife. She was smiling up at him; it certainly looked as if they had been in love.
I got out everything else in the envelope and spread it out on the bed. There were twenty-two sheets of photocopied cheques, all Walter Baddeley’s and Wildways’ major transactions over the past year. Kedward’s were there too. Kedward received a cheque from Wildways on the tenth of each month, not that I had doubted it. The sum, two hundred and fifty pounds, never varied.
I also very soon singled out the cheques drawn on a company called Clearpath in favour of Wildways and signed William Mardy. They were all dated the first of the month to start with, but latterly the dates had become irregular. The first ten were each for a thousand pounds, the last five for five thousand apiece.
How the Dead Live (Factory 3) Page 15