The Last Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  He turned his face to the window: the light outside was gloomy. More frail snowflakes fell. He thought: I’ve never told my brother I love him. Not in those words. Do I love him the way I should? He admired him, sure, and – God forgive him – envied him too. Not for his material wealth, flash cars, good suits; he wasn’t lured by material items. Stuff was always replaceable. But love was just a damn tough card to play. The heart was reticent, the tongue lead.

  He skipped around these thoughts. ‘Do you remember that guy who hung himself when we were kids?’

  Colin Perlman shook his head slowly. ‘What guy?’

  ‘He was a local milkman. Kerr … I think that was his name.’

  ‘I have absolutely no recollection of any Kerr. Is there a point to this, Lou?’

  ‘No, not really, just …’ But yes, yes, there is, I’m searching for common ground. Fraternal glue. The shared history of brothers remembering childhood. You told me about the word suicide, Colin, how could you forget that?

  ‘You’re waxing all nostalgic, Lou. Is this some age thing?’

  ‘Must be, right enough.’

  Lou Perlman was uncomfortable. Trying to bond, and failing. Why did it always have to be this way with Colin? ‘I’ll come back and see you tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘Of course you will. But in the meantime make sure you keep the streets safe for respectable folk.’

  ‘I try.’

  ‘You do your best. You always did.’

  ‘So did you, Colin. Except your best always seemed that wee bit better than mine.’ No, Lou thought. Oh shit, why take this flight path? It was the wrong way to go, it invariably led to memories of childhood, to the old feeling that Colin had been Etta and Ephraim’s favourite, and Lou some kind of afterthought, a footnote to the Perlman family. But was there a hard truth in that? He couldn’t remember either his mother or father favouring Colin with specific gifts or treats. Maybe the feeling had its origin in the fact that greater things were always expected of Colin, because he was the sharper one, the gifted one – and Lou was the plodder, more persistent than brilliant. One time, Etta had said: Colin, I think you’ll do something with words, a journalist maybe, write for a newspaper. And you, Lou, you’ll be a schoolteacher, I can see it.

  Prediction obviously hadn’t been Etta’s metier.

  Colin said, ‘You didn’t have to be a cop, Lou. Who forced you? Who said sign on the dotted line and you’ll be a policeman?’

  ‘True. I might’ve been a businessman like you.’

  ‘Don’t knock it. I offered you the chance. Come in with me, I said. Make some real cash. But no, you always gave me the feeling that you looked down on what I did for a living, you didn’t approve of what you once called get-rich-quick schemes. You had other … let’s say, honourable motives.’

  Honourable, Perlman thought. Was that the word? ‘I never disapproved of what you did for a living. I never really understood it enough to approve or disapprove. And I don’t remember ever describing anything you did as a get-rich-quick scheme, you’re twisting my words –’

  Colin shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. You didn’t want to get involved. No filthy old capitalism for you. You didn’t have the spirit of acquisition about you, Lou. You were never a swashbuckler. You lacked that buccaneer element –’ He contorted his face, didn’t finish his sentence.

  Lou asked, ‘You in pain?’

  ‘A twinge. Do me a favour. Send Rifkind in.’

  Lou moved quickly to the door. He opened it, called out for Rifkind, who came down the hallway.

  ‘He’s in some discomfort, Martin.’

  ‘I’ll deal with it.’ Rifkind entered the room and shut the door behind him. Lou Perlman walked back into the reception area. I’ve got an unidentified dead man on my hands, he thought. And I’ve got a brother who’s just had a heart attack and I don’t know too much about him either. The mysteries of people. What secrets they stash.

  The outside door swung open just as he moved towards it. He saw her in the frame, dark against the morning sky and the pale snow, and his heart reared.

  He wasn’t conscious at once of the man who stood directly behind her, holding her elbow, he was transfixed by the sight of her, and anything on the edges of his vision faded to black. And then he was flustered, wishing he’d brushed his hair properly, that he was better-dressed, manicured and groomed, instead of looking like a bloody nebbish.

  ‘Lou,’ she said, and his temperature rose.

  Was he blushing?

  When she approached him, in long plum-coloured coat and scarf, and stepped into his embrace, he thought: I showered, shampooed, I’m fine. But does my clothing smell of mothballs? He remembered the photograph of her he’d hung in his house, right next to the picture of Ephraim and Etta, and how, guilty and ashamed, he’d taken it down, and removed it from the frame, then rolled the picture into a tube and stuck it in a drawer. I should’ve kept it on the wall where it was. I wasn’t brave enough to face my own delusions.

  She felt light in his arms. Delicate. He longed to kiss her, not some polite little dab on the cheek or forehead, but open-mouthed and passionate. He was in the grip of an absurd fever: how long was he destined to carry this yearning? There was no future in loving your brother’s wife – and if this wasn’t love then it was one hell of a counterfeit, and built to last. He trembled as he let her slip out of the embrace. Did she know? Had she suspected over the years? He imagined his face gave everything away, even to passing strangers. Apparently not. Somewhere along the way he’d become adept in the craft of camouflage.

  ‘I’m so glad to see you, Lou,’ she said. She had her long hair pinned up under a beret that matched her coat. He imagined undoing the pins one by one, slowly.

  ‘I didn’t expect,’ and he let the sentence wither. You twittering dunderheid. She robs you of speech, for Christ’s sake. She infiltrates you and steals your power.

  ‘Did you see Colin?’ she asked.

  When he looked into her dark eyes he thought of reincarnation. Could they meet under different circumstances in an afterlife of sorts? It would have to be corporeal – none of that airy-fairy disembodiment kack – because his feelings were instilled with a serious carnal longing. God have mercy on me, he thought; sometimes he’d imagined her in his bed with thighs spread and that long brown hair falling over breasts he wanted to kiss. Honourable Lou Perlman: aye, right, maybe in some respects – but was it honourable to lust after your sister-in-law and envy your brother because he was married to this woman?

  ‘I saw him,’ he said.

  ‘What do you think?’

  He noticed a wifely concern in her eyes, and understood – as he always did – that his longing was useless. She loved Colin. Nothing had changed. Nothing ever would. ‘He’ll be all right.’

  ‘Rifkind says he’ll have to take things easy. Can you imagine him pottering round the house?’

  ‘No, I can’t.’

  ‘Neither can I.’ She smiled sadly, and Lou Perlman was lost once more in her face, drawn into her smile and sent spinning through the tunnels of his emotions. Even at fifty her face seemed unworn. She had the lush mouth of a torch-singer in an after-hours club. She looked as if she knew deep secrets. There might have been blemishes, faint lines at the corners of the lips, even some slight slackening of flesh at the throat – but he was blind to her faults. She was still the girl he’d first met years ago, the astonishing girl hanging on Colin’s arm, smart and exotic and vibrant, her presence suggestive of blue ocean voyages and tropical jaunts and rum drinks. And sophistication. Paris. Florence. Milan. She’d studied art in these glam places.

  He was possessed by a daft urge to proclaim his feelings. In another world, yeh. In a comic strip reality. True Love Rescues Trapped Maiden from High Tower Hell.

  Miriam, neshuma.

  ‘I read somewhere you got a lectureship,’ he said. ‘I meant to phone and congratulate you.’

  ‘You never phone, Lou. You never come to the house. But thanks f
or the thought.’

  ‘Art School … right?’ He knew the answer. He’d read the two small paragraphs in the Herald half a dozen times. He’d hunched over them like a Talmudic student scrutinizing some sixth-century proverb for its concealed meaning. He was proud that Miriam’s oil paintings, big bold ambitious explosions of colour, hung in collections and galleries and banks. The ones he’d seen suggested nebulae detonating in space.

  Miriam said, ‘I’m teaching figure-drawing. Just for a year.’

  ‘Well, if you’re ever short of a model,’ he said, and wondered if it was a joke too far. Sitting naked in a class of students, Miriam watching and assessing him, thinking he was pale and a little overweight, muscles in dire need of toning. She’d compare him to Colin, and she’d find him lacking. In the red corner, Colin, sick and handsome. In the blue, Lou, lumpen cop. No contest. KO.

  ‘I’ll keep that generous offer in mind,’ she said, and she turned to the man who’d escorted her inside the hospital. ‘Artie Wexler. You two must know each other?’

  Artie Wexler said, ‘We go back a long long way.’

  Lou remembered Artie Wexler well, one of Colin’s inner circle. Sixtyish, square-faced, brown hair thick and unreal, a weave maybe. Lou accepted Wexler’s outstretched hand, which was hot and firm. Something at the back of Lou’s mind prevented him from wanting to hold the hand for long. Something buried. He wasn’t sure what.

  ‘How are you?’ Lou asked. He wondered if there was anything between Miriam and Wexler, but he set this aside as the fevered fear of the anxious lover, even though he didn’t have a lover’s proprietary rights.

  ‘Considering the mileage, I’m fine,’ Wexler said, and laughed in the easy way of a man who has prospered in life.

  ‘Tell me about mileage,’ Lou Perlman said.

  ‘Still with the Strathclyde Police?’

  ‘Can’t find my way out.’

  ‘Must be interesting work.’

  People always said that. ‘It has its moments.’

  Miriam said, ‘I’m going to look in on Colin now. Lou, phone me soon?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Is that a promise?’

  He put a hand over his heart. ‘On my word.’

  Wexler said, ‘Good seeing you.’

  He walked behind Miriam and they passed through the door to the corridor. Wexler looked back once across the reception area and smiled at Lou, who wondered if he saw something a little possessive in the expression. Miriam and Wexler. Aw, ballocks, your head’s stuffed with keech, Lou.

  He stepped outside and lit a Silk Cut. Miriam’s scent hung in the fibres of his coat. He had work to do, a dead man to identify; funny how the silent mysteries of the dead had kept him busier all these years than the noisy cravings of his heart. He walked to his Mondeo and, annoyed with himself, annoyed with the world, his world, booted the right front tyre hard a couple of times and said she’s not for you, she’s not for you.

  Dear Christ, she’s been married to your brother for thirty-two years. Thirty-two long years. That’s a whole world, and you’re not a part of it. So it’s time, Lou, to grow up and move on, it’s time.

  9

  Club Memphis, bankrupt, stripped of assets, was located in a loft not far from the Gallowgate. The club had been the property of a man called Bobby J Smith, more commonly known in Glasgow entertainment circles as BJ Quick. He wore tight blue jeans and a white T-shirt and a brown leather jacket. He was forty-five years old and lean as a whippet. He had an ear-stud attached to his left lobe, and a thin gold chain around his neck.

  Quick fingered the chain and said to the man in the chair, ‘You’re telling me you’re fucking penniless. Don’t have a brass fucking farthing to your name?’

  The man roped to the chair wore only Y-fronts with a cross of St Andrew design. He had bald legs. ‘If I had the dosh, BJ, you’d get it. If I knew how to lay my hands on it, you’d have it. So let’s get these ropes off and act like rational men.’

  ‘Rational? I’ve lost my club. I’ve lost my fucking livelihood. I’ve lost my dream!’ BJ Quick gestured round the long drab room. A few old rock posters, cracked and creased, remained on the walls. The Killer thumping his piano. The King in black leather jump suit, lank of well-oiled hair hanging over forehead. Chuck Berry doing the duck walk, guitar held in bazooka position. ‘This is all I got left after the vultures came in. Life’s work. Life’s fucking work, arsehole. People like you put me outta business. Cretins. Wankers! People who wouldn’t come up with the readies when they said they would.’

  ‘These are competitive times in the club business, BJ,’ the man said. He had a big round face the colour of an unlit fluorescent tube. He was known as Vindaloo Bill on account of his addiction to fiendishly hot curries. ‘If you don’t keep up, BJ, you go under.’

  ‘I didn’t keep up, eh? That what you’re saying?’

  ‘Rock Revival, big yawn. Okay for a couple weeks, man. But kids want acid dance or just a general fucking rave. You’re a dinosaur, pal. Elvis is dead, by all reliable accounts. Jerry Lee’s an old-age pensioner. These kids want Backyard Babies and Micronesia one week, and God knows what else next. You can’t keep up with their tastes. You were beating off a dead horse, BJ. Even the name. Club Memphis? Past tense, pal. I mean, you might be obsessed with dead music –’

  ‘Fuck you, Vindy. Stick to the subject. You owe me fucking money, you hairy-arsed tub of shite.’ BJ kicked Vindy Bill’s kneecaps hard. ‘I dug in my wallet for you when times were tough. Here’s a grand, Vindy. Here’s another. Let me help you.’ He bent an arm, tensed it, and drove the ramrod of his elbow into Vindy’s face and blood poured out of a suddenly split lip.

  ‘Ah fuck,’ Vindy said, spitting out a dollop of tooth.

  BJ Quick looked at the blood dripping on Vindaloo’s Y-fronts. He was furious, he missed his club, he ached for the nights when the place was packed and the music was loud and money was rolling in like tumbleweed in a gale. Okay, moronic oversight to forget setting loot aside for the tax people, and the VAT man, and the assorted legalized proctologists who probed his bum with rough instruments for the government’s cut. Okay okay, mistakes were made. But he was damned if he’d suffer for his generosity to wallies like Vindaloo Bill. And he was damned if he’d hear his beloved Club Memphis criticized as old-fashioned. He walked to the window. He looked out. Snow blew in powdery swirls over chimney tops. He turned and stared the length of the loft.

  Willie Furfee stood in shadow at the far end. He was a big man dressed in the neo-Edwardian mode that had been popular in the late 1950s, long jacket with velvet collar, drainpipe trousers, suede shoes with thick soles: brothel-creepers. He was a fully paid-up Teddy Boy, an anachronism. Sometimes at revivalist rock concerts he encountered fellow travellers and they smoked skunk together in the toilets and talked about funky little shops where you could still lay your paws on some authentic threads from the old days. They remembered legendary concerts they’d attended. No fucking Beatles she-loves-you-yeah-yeah shite, or poncy Rolling Stones stuff. Furfee and his like were pioneers along the rock frontiers, sworn to Little Richard, or Jerry Lee, sometimes even Gene Vincent or Eddie ‘Three Steps to Heaven’ Cochran.

  ‘Got your blade, Furf?’ BJ Quick asked.

  ‘Always, BJ.’

  Vindy turned his head. ‘Blade?’

  Quick chucked Vindy under the chin. ‘Time for some serious biz.’

  ‘A fucking blade, man? No way. That’s not on.’

  ‘Oh but it is. The Furf doesn’t like to use his razor, because basically he’s soft-hearted. But he’s awfully good with it, pal, and a man shouldn’t be denied the chance of practising his skills now and again, right?’

  Vindaloo shook his head vigorously. ‘I’ll get you your money. I will.’

  ‘Aye, when pigs crap gold. Fuck you. I’m tired waiting.’

  Furfee walked across the wooden floor, which had been burned and gouged by millions of cigarette ends and stiletto heels. He took an old-fashioned bone-han
dle razor from his jacket. He opened the blade, and it gleamed like a terrible mirror.

  Vindaloo said, ‘Youse are kidding me, right?’

  Quick asked, ‘Are we kidding, Furf?’

  Furfee said, ‘Do I look like I’m kidding?’

  Quick said, ‘The Furf never kids. What’s your sign, Bill?’

  ‘Sign?’

  ‘Star sign, arsehole.’

  ‘Fuck. Pisces. So what?’

  BJ Quick said, ‘Do us a fish, Furf,’ and he grabbed the left arm and held it, and Furfee brought the blade down and carved a curving line in the skin of the backarm, and blood surfaced quickly where he’d cut. Vindaloo roared and wriggled around in his chair and tried to break free of the ropes.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, don’t cut me again,’ he shouted. ‘Come on, BJ, we go back years, tell this guy not to cut me, eh? Please.’

  ‘Sit still and shut your face. Here, this’ll help,’ and BJ Quick stuffed a filthy rag he found on the floor into Vindaloo’s mouth, just as Furfee drew another curving line with the edge of the blade, joining it to the first incision he’d made. Now he had two five-inch lines, each bleeding. Vindaloo tried to scream, but the thick rag muffled his sound.

  BJ Quick said, ‘Nice work, Furf.’

  Furfee took the razor away. ‘Want me to finish this, BJ?’

  Vindaloo Bill shook his head with vigour. ‘Blllblllwoobbb,’ he said.

  ‘Is that a no?’ Quick asked.

  Furfee said, ‘Hard to tell.’

  ‘Do the eyes of the fish now, Furf.’

  Furf bent over the arm and made two deep punctures between the curved lines with a slight stabbing motion of his hand. The blade was wondrously sharp. Blood spewed down Vindy’s arm and over his belly.

  ‘Star sign,’ Quick said. ‘Scar sign more like.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ Furf laughed.

  ‘The tail, Furf. Don’t forget the tail.’

  ‘I wish this fucker would stop wriggling.’

  ‘You hear that, Vindy? Be still. Be very still.’ BJ patted Vindaloo’s cheek gently. ‘A fella cuts you, it’s going to hurt like hell. Just think, this could be much worse. Eee gee, I could ask the Furf to skin you. He’s got a diabolical skill for that. Skinning’s worse than anything. You see somebody slice off the top layer of your skin and you start to think, what the hell will it be like if he skins my whole fucking body? Try and imagine yourself without your outer covering. Got the picture? Not a very pretty sight …’