The Fat of Fed Beasts

by Guy Ware

  Outside the café it is hot, the pavement is sticky in the sunshine and the air is beginning to thicken. Across the street the guy from the deli in his heavy cotton apron with a picture of two artichoke heads where his breasts would be, if he were a woman, the same apron Gary has, or at least the same design, has come out to wind down his awning to keep the sun off the cheeses and the charcuterie in his window. The awning is a shade of deep dark green, like an old-fashioned racing car, and has the same picture of artichoke heads on it. Plus it has the words ‘artisan’ and ‘traiteur’ picked out in a clean un-cluttered white font against the dark green of the awning that makes me think of racing cars. When D was a child – and I was a child, too, although older – he had a model of a racing car he had painted and assembled from individual plastic parts pressed into the shapes of a steering wheel or an axle or a bonnet, and he had painted the parts of the car that would have been painted green – that is, not the chrome or glass or rubber or whatever – green, and he told me it was called British Racing Green. I remember our father holding up the model to the light when D had finished it and pointing out a tiny patch of grey plastic where D had failed to paint right to the edge, perhaps where he’d pinched it between his fingers to hold it still, and he hadn’t noticed the missing paint, but our father had, so he, D, could not have been older than seven, because after that our father wouldn’t have been there and D’s mother would not have noticed a thing like that.

  To the right of the deli is a nail bar-cum-tanning salon that used to be a post office; to the left a newsagent that used to be a different newsagent. But there is no bank in this little parade, the building that had once been a bank, and still has the word ‘Bank’ inscribed in stone letters above the double entry doors, is now a pizza restaurant, it has a phalanx of battered mopeds parked outside with large, corrugated plastic boxes on their back seats held in place by stretchy elastic cables. So I have no money and also nothing specific to do and nowhere to be, except, possibly, those places I can’t or shouldn’t go to.

  I unlock my bicycle and coil the chain around the saddle stem and lock it again and put the D-lock in its cradle and lock that. I hook my bag to the metal carrier and secure it with the velcro strap and wheel the bike to the kerb and lift it into the gutter and don’t know whether to follow the street down, that is, south, or to turn back up and head the other way, towards the city and in the end I decide to do that, to turn back the other way because I have to do something, and it might as well be that as anything else. I have no money and nothing to do. When he left, D told me he was going to see a man about a dog, it’s the sort of thing our father might have said and D has inherited or absorbed or consciously affected, I don’t know which, but he said it and when I asked him what he meant he said the man was a policeman, he told me Likker was dead and Rodkin was dead, and he didn’t say anything more, other than that I shouldn’t go to Rodkin’s flat or anywhere near Rodkin’s flat until he, D, returned. He said that. He must have thought, or assumed, that I was going to stay in the café all afternoon, he didn’t know I had no money, or not enough money. He probably had not even thought about it, he left without paying for his lunch, let alone mine. But I can’t stay, and not just because of my lack of money. I push off from the kerb and feel the muscles in my legs and the pedals through the sole of my shoes, first one then the other and I think about Alex and the telephone I heard ringing when I called him, or tried to call him, when I left Gina’s house, before I came to the cafe and called work and heard that voice, Lopez’s voice, and destroyed my phone. I wish I hadn’t done that now. At the corner I turn and begin to loop back the way I’d come earlier this morning and, at the next junction, I turn again and begin to head up towards the city.

  When I get to the railway bridge where normally, most days, I turn left and then left again for work I carry straight on, past the cathedral and over the bridge into the mediaeval heart of the city where there are plenty of banks, though most of them are not the sort of bank you can walk into and withdraw cash from, either from a machine or over the counter, they probably don’t even have counters and are not the sort of banks you can rob, either, not by going in with guns and balaclavas and telling everyone to get down on the floor, and telling the cashiers to put the cash in the bag, there probably isn’t even any cash there. I keep going, my legs pushing and rising, taking turns, the left and then the right. There isn’t much traffic, but the streets are narrow and I have to watch out for people stepping off the pavements, stepping into the roadway without warning or precaution, it seems, without thought or awareness even of what they are doing, I have to swerve more than once, to risk falling off or being run down by taxis coming up behind me. Gradually, however, the streets broaden out again and there are more cars, but also more space for cars to pass and fewer pedestrians, certainly in the road, but also on the pavements, which seem to be mostly empty here, north of the city centre, I keep going, without really meaning to, without, as far as I am aware, thinking about it, keep going in as straight a line as possible in a mediaeval city, or at least a city with a mediaeval street plan, the buildings aren’t all that old.

  I pass the dissenters’ cemetery almost before I realise I am looking for it. I dismount and chain my bicycle to the wrought ironwork fence, and pass through the gate, and look at the graves and find a bench to sit down on. The cemetery is tiny, set back from the road behind its gate and high, black-painted iron railings, squeezed between a steel-and-glass insurance company building and the grey blank old stone side wall of an eighteenth-century building that had once been a furrier’s. The cemetery itself is older than either, the headstones uprooted and dragooned into ranks, eroded by centuries of weather and smoke and exhaust fumes, their inscriptions blunted as if disguising the dead, making them anonymous, the names and dedications and encomia blurred by age and lichen. Somewhere amongst these ranks, I know, are the gravestones of poets and political reformers, martyrs to causes, monuments to preachers and trade unionists and deportees. Our father brought us here, D and me, more than once, the last time not long before he died, I would have been fourteen, D would have been seven, before he died, before he killed himself. He was happy that time, I remember, his tie loose, the buttons on his tweed waistcoat open, his short thick hand on my shoulder as he pointed out headstone after headstone, people I had never heard of, people who had been dead a hundred years, two hundred years. D hung back saying nothing, even when our father spoke to him directly, which he mostly didn’t do, because mostly he spoke to me in a voice he knew D could overhear, he would say: Your brother is a boy, Rada, he can’t help it. Your brother has to fight me, to beat me, to trample me into the ground. That is the law. But he cannot do it. He is too weak, he is too like a girl. You are stronger than he is Rada, although you are a girl. You are strong, you know who you are, but D is weak, D is unable to challenge his father, even though he wants to challenge his father, even though he knows he has to, he cannot because he is weak, a weakling, a mother’s boy. Mother’s boy. Those were the words that did it, finally, that dragged D out of his sullen lethargy that made him put his head down and charge our father and bowl him over, both of them falling onto a grave, D’s arms around his chest. D was tall, even then, but he was a boy, his muscles a boy’s muscles and our father threw him off easily and, laughing, jumped to his feet and put up his fists and said, still laughing, Come on, then, Mitya, come on. D stayed on the ground, rubbing his elbows. Our father dropped his fists, he put them on his hips, he stood there like a gnome, like a troll, his face red above his beard, and said, more gently, Come on, Mitya. D did not move, did not look up at our father, and when at last he put out a hand to pull D to his feet, D turned without getting up, and scrambled away. By the time he got to his feet he was already running and he did not stop when he reached the cemetery gate, he kept going through and across the street, a bus missed him by what looked like millimetres, he kept going turning right towards the centre of the city. Our father did not move. I sa
id we should follow him, catch up with him, but our father said no, D would be all right.

  It is hot, even here, where the height of the buildings and the narrowness of the streets keep the sun from reaching the headstones and the paths and the grass between them, where there is grass. It is not unusual, not exceptional, it is almost to be expected, a woman sitting on a bench, resting, taking a break in the middle of the afternoon in the quiet and calm of the graveyard, the only surprising feature of the scene is that I appear to have the place to myself, there are no office workers – no other office workers – smoking cigarettes or talking on mobile phones, no homeless men waving lager cans to punctuate their discourse with their demons. I am alone.

  I was scared. Our father said, He’ll be all right, he’ll come back, and if he doesn’t, he’ll find his own way home. We waited but D didn’t come back and by then it wasn’t just D I was scared for. When we got home D was sitting on the doorstep, the house was empty, I don’t know where his mother was, my stepmother. I don’t remember. I remember our father called out when he saw D as if nothing had happened, he put his hand on D’s shoulder and D shrugged it off. When he opened the door D went straight up to his room, and our father said to me, let’s have tea, shall we, and I said, no, I wasn’t hungry, I wasn’t thirsty and I went to my own room and shut the door and when D found him in the woods behind our house, it was only a few months later, he was still seven and I was fourteen, the first thing he did when he had checked our father’s pulse and found no pulse was to kick his corpse repeatedly in the stomach and the chest. I know this because D told me that is what he did and I have no reason not to believe him, plus the coroner recorded the presence of bruises, which he could not explain, but which he said must have been caused at or around the time of death but about which he could not be sufficiently certain to undermine or change or invalidate his overall conclusion that our father’s death was the result of asphyxiation prompted by a combination of alcohol and painkillers and was not the result of foul play. Which means that our father must have been alive or very nearly alive when D found him. D only told me this – about kicking our father’s body – years later, only after his business collapsed and he came to stay with me because he had no money and very large debts and nowhere to stay and I suggested that he might talk to Theo about a job and he said he didn’t want a job and I said: What else are you going to do? When he told me, I asked him why he had kicked our father and he said it was obvious, wasn’t it, it was because he hated him. We were in the kitchen sitting at the table, Gary in the background washing up and D had drunk five or six cans of lager at this point and was homeless, in a way, not hardcore homeless, not sleeping on the streets and urinating in his trousers, but without a home of his own and sleeping in his sister’s second spare room, Alex already having taken the room we called the spare room.

  It is after four-thirty p.m. when I leave the cemetery. I am surprised how late it is. I have been here more than two hours and I haven’t eaten or drunk anything or seen anyone in all that time, and still have no money. I climb onto my bike and shuffle it round and point it back the way I came, back through the mediaeval streets of modern buildings, back across the bridge over the river and turn right towards work, towards the office but I’m not going to work. At the traffic lights I dismount and wheel my bike across the road towards the bank.

  There are two men outside the bank, standing on the pavement, not going in or going out. One is short and fat and has a beard, although it is not much of a beard, but will perhaps be a beard when he’s grown it for a few more days, or weeks, or however long it is these things take. He also has a mobile phone he’s talking into while the other man, who is neither short nor fat, but is not especially tall, either, or thin, plus is clean shaven and, if he has a mobile phone – as in all probability he does – he is not, at this moment, using it, but is looking past his friend, or acquaintance, or colleague or whatever the shorter, fatter and more hirsute man is, looking over his shoulder directly and unmistakably at me. He holds his gaze for longer than one usually might, longer than is conventional or polite, or socially acceptable, and even though he does not nod or smile or speak or make any gesture that might suggest that he recognises me, or believes that he recognises me, or acknowledges that the way in which he has been looking at me is in any way unusual or impolite or socially unacceptable, there is nonetheless something in the way he keeps looking at me and then, eventually, stops looking at me, that indicates, without me being able to quite say why, that he knows me, or recognises me, or has at least seen me before somewhere. He says nothing, however, but turns to his companion, or colleague, who says something I cannot hear. They both turn away, towards the cathedral and the station, the way the older professor-type guy had gone, the way I had followed, although without ever catching up with him, and now, at this moment, I know that he, the taller man, has seen me before, even though he does not say so, or indicate in any conscious way that he recognises me, and I have seen him before and I know precisely where and when.

  I have come here, to the bank, for a reason, to withdraw the cash I intended to withdraw on Monday, two days ago, but then failed, or had no real opportunity, to withdraw on account of the bank being robbed before I reached the front of the queue for the cash dispensing machine, as a result of which I still have no money, I have even less money than I had then, have exactly no money, in fact.

  And yet:

  I am certain that the two men, one tall, one not so tall, who were standing on the pavement in front of the bank when I arrived and dismounted and began to lock my bicycle, are the same two men who, with one woman, entered the bank on Monday and waved guns around and ordered us all to get down on the floor. Strictly speaking, of course, the gunmen are no concern of mine because, not being dead, they are no concern of the Office and because – have I forgotten? – I am not working, am not allowed to work, I have been instructed, in no uncertain terms by Theo, a man I admire and respect, and usually obey without qualm, to go home, and not to work, not to even think about working, pending Lopez’s investigations into the events of Monday morning.

  I follow the two men, wheeling my bicycle along the pavement, until I see them get into a car, a police car, or at least a car with bright blue and yellow stripes and a large black number on the roof, and the word ‘Police’ painted or decal-ed or somehow inscribed on the door I can see and probably also on the other door, which seems enough to suggest, taken together with Monday’s van, that the men – and possibly the woman, although the woman is not here – are in some way connected to the police, if not actual police officers, or possibly that they are actors or producers, or assistants to assistant producers, for a film or television company of some sort, a possibility that has not previously occurred to me. Could Monday’s robbery have been some sort of stunt staged for the benefit of unseen cameras, or for the bank’s own cameras which undoubtedly filmed it all anyway whether the robbers were real or actors and the guns real or fake? The guns were real. The screaming was real.

  I lift my bike into the gutter and straddle it. I push off and pass the police/fake police car just as the taller of the two men starts the engine. The car pulls out behind me. The taller of the two men, the one who had looked at me as if he knew me, or had seen me before, and may therefore have realised that he has in fact seen me before, and where, and may have concluded that I am a witness to the robbery and possible murder, or double murder, is now driving the car which pulls past me; the road is very narrow and it passes very close to me.