I Want Him Dead

by Anthony Masters

  “I’m a realist. All Barrington’s good for is putting his finger in the dam. You can’t hold out against them.”

  “I want more time,” McMarn argued, but Leslie knew that he really meant he was not yet prepared to accept that he was beaten, that he was able to leave his own familiar meat rack.

  “You haven’t got it,” Ryland told him.

  To try and alleviate the sure and certain feeling of life closing in on him, McMarn once again sought respite in nostalgia, recalling The Eagle and his mother and father and the south London streets, the boxing club and his original yearnings. What would have become of him without Fergus Quinton? Would he have inherited the pub, become the landlord of The Eagle and maintained a private taste for young rough trade? Would this have been the better of the two evils?

  With his life threatened, his small empire crushed and his only associate in rebellion, McMarn also knew he was bone-weary, deeply depressed by his life-long compulsion to pursue those lithe bodies, to let them dominate his every move, his every decision. Pleasure was in anticipation, rarely now in actuality. He was a hunted man with only one weak card to play: Barrington the bungling assassin, Barrington of the blunt penknife, Barrington the amateur.

  On Thursday afternoon, with the telephone still ringing menacingly, a shrill warning of time rapidly running out, McMarn decided to drive down to Balham, a journey he had never permitted himself to take since he first went to Europe with Fergus Quinton. Now he was not only curious but had an overriding desire to reconnect with his childhood roots.

  To his disquiet, the area had hardly changed at all, and as the Candy Man drove down Balham High Road he was uneasily conscious of slipping back through decades of self-indulgence to the more hopeful, less contaminated days of childhood.

  Of course some changes had been made but they were minimal. The Roxy Cinema was a billiard club, the Majestic a car showroom and the fish and chip shop had become a McDonald’s, but the boxing club and gym were still there as were the swimming baths, their frontages completely unchanged. And so was The Eagle.

  McMarn braked hard, provoking a cacophony of angry hooting. Trembling, he drove down a side street, parked and walked back unbelievingly to the pub with its scarred plaster, blackened wooden eagle and large windows that were still partly painted over, advertising stout and ale and fortified wines. The saloon and public-bar doors had exactly the same frosted glass in them and the same blind boy, made of metal, held a padlocked box for donations outside.

  Tears pricked at the back of McMarn’s eyes. This just couldn’t be. The Eagle was shabbier and had a cracked portico, but nevertheless it was much the same as it had been when he was a boy. For a while he was afraid to open the saloon bar door, just in case his parents were behind the bar, but then he forced himself inside.

  Once again, the interior of the pub was virtually unchanged, although the gilt was tarnished and some of the mirrors were cracked, the plush seating faded and torn. There were grubby lino-tiles on the floor which hadn’t been there before, and a huge dominating television screen advertised a title fight, but the pictures of boxers still dustily adorned the walls and the grimy, deep red, embossed wallpaper and the lifesize plaster-cast replica of Sugar Ray Robinson were exactly as he had remembered them.

  “Christ!” muttered McMarn.

  He went over to the bar, almost expecting Mrs Mac and Flat Top to be behind it. Instead a sallow young man came up to serve him.

  He ordered a malt, and as the place was largely empty attempted to engage the apathetic barman in conversation.

  “I used to live here,” said McMarn. “My parents owned this pub.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “I’m surprised to see the way it looks.”

  “Dump, isn’t it?”

  But that wasn’t what McMarn had meant. “Why hasn’t it been changed?”

  “Preservation order.”

  “Yes?”

  “Listed building. That kind of crap.”

  “But it could be repainted. Refurbished.”

  “I reckon he wants it to fall apart.”

  “He?”

  “Jack Butler. He’s got a chain, hasn’t he? This one’s a white elephant, all right. Bought it for a disco and thought he could fix the planning. Found he couldn’t.” The barman’s gloomy smile was tinged with relish. “Maybe he’ll do an insurance job on it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Burn the bloody place down.”

  “You don’t show him much respect, do you? This Butler,” McMarn reprimanded.

  “He doesn’t deserve any. He’s a mean bastard.”

  “Could I look upstairs?”

  “No point.”

  “I’ll give you a few bob.”

  “It’s empty.”

  “I’d still like to look.”

  “How do I know you’re not a nutter?”

  “Do I look like one?” asked McMarn wearily. “I’m just an old man, come back home.” He passed across a twenty-pound note.

  Once upstairs, McMarn wandered the empty rooms, trying to remember what had been in them — but he couldn’t. His mental geography of the family home had vanished and the bare boards and flaking walls told him nothing.

  He wandered around hopelessly for a while and then went into the kitchen where he received an unexpected shock. On the wall was a damp, crumbled and faded calendar, but he recognized it as his mother’s regular favourite. A Year in the Life of our Queen. It was open to July and showed the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh with their children, sitting in a field under a spreading oak tree, woodenly eating a superior picnic. The caption read: “An ordinary family.”

  The calendar brought back instant memories of his mother standing over the sink, grumbling and telling him to “Go off and do something useful for a change.”

  McMarn went into the room that he had deliberately left to last, and once inside he received his second shock of the visit. The bed — his bed — was still there, without sheets or pillows, just the headboard and springs with a couple of dusty old blankets flung over them.

  A hazy recall began and McMarn remembered how obsessively he had hidden his true sexual feelings from his parents, knowing how his father despised those “bloody poofters”, and his mother, in full agreement, asserting that “homos should be stood against a wall and shot”. This fundamental dyed-in-the-wool prejudice had dominated his adolescence, making him a pariah, a leper without a warning bell. At first his inner life had merely been a mental box of delights, but it hadn’t been long before it became promiscuous.

  McMarn remembered the photograph of the boyish actor he had worshipped as a teenager — Rip Torn — and how he had secreted the print in a hole in the plaster near the bedpost. He would lie on his stomach and reach out for it, later replacing the wrinkled photograph in its hiding place. He knew he had left it there as a kind of farewell to frustrated adolescence when Fergus had taken him away. Could it still be there?

  McMarn knelt down, breathing heavily, conscious that his health was getting worse. He had not had a check-up in years, but with a price on his head medical care was low on the agenda.

  Wheezing, he sought the hole in the crumbling plaster and eventually found the photograph amongst dusty, moving webs. With a gasp of revulsion at the feel of the sticky threads clinging to his fingers, he pulled out the dry, cracked print and, staggering to his feet, held it up to the light. A tousle-haired Rip Torn gazed artificially back at him, the roguish smile as enticing as ever.

  With a groan McMarn sat down heavily on the creaking springs, a cloud of dust flying into the air and making him choke. He studied the yellowing print and then lay on his back, looking up at the cracks in the ceiling as he had as a child. There was the one that looked like a ship, another shaped like a fox, yet another that had reminded him of a toad, and one with the beetle brows of an old woman.

  He closed his eyes against his childhood, but it merely crystallized more sharply in his mind and he saw his parents again,
going about their daily business, hampered by the child that had so unexpectedly intruded into their lives. If only they had known that he had turned out to be a poofter. A perverted poofter with his own personal Armageddon close at hand.

  McMarn lay on the bed, looking up at the world that he had created on the ceiling, trying to establish new cracks, to turn them into more pictures. If only he had stayed on at The Eagle, however unwanted he may have felt. His parents would have been pleased if he’d taken over the pub and become a local character. Mrs Mac’s boy. Flat Top’s kid. Or would he have been given a nickname too? He could see himself now as the heavy-shouldered, paunched landlord of The Eagle, chairman of the boxing club, tournament organizer, with his young protégés. A bit on the side, but not making a profession of it. He would have been safe.

  “You all right?” The sallow young man had come upstairs to see what his mysterious visitor was up to.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Not ill?”

  “Shouldn’t you be downstairs?”

  “Madge came on.”

  He was considerably less apathetic now as he slowly approached McMarn.

  On Thursday evening, Anne received two telephone calls. The first shook her considerably.

  “It’s Paul.” His voice seemed hollow, changed in a way she couldn’t work out.

  “Yes?”

  “I wanted to see — to hear — how you reacted to my letter.”

  If only you really knew, she thought, and then wondered yet again if the little man was playing with her, had made off with the only money she had left. What would she do if he had? But it was all a game. A drunken game. And this evening she was appropriately loaded.

  “I didn’t.” Her words were slurred, and there was a silence during which she distinctly heard him sigh.

  “Anne —”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re sick.”

  “I’m sick of you.”

  “We have to talk.”

  “Piss off!”

  She put the receiver down and fixed herself another Scotch, waiting for the phone to ring again. A few minutes later it did.

  “Piss off!” she said into the receiver.

  “Thank you,” said Penelope, and gave her brittle laugh.

  “I’m sorry. I thought it was Paul.”

  “Don’t worry. I have much the same reaction to Gavin. I wanted to see how you were after our little hen party.”

  “It should be all over town. Peter doesn’t seem to have picked anything up, though, but then he wouldn’t say if he had.”

  “It is all over town.”

  “Does Gavin know?”

  “Maybe he’s like Peter.”

  They giggled and Anne felt a wave of self-loathing.

  “Do you want me to come round?” asked Penelope.

  “It’s not a good time.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m pissed.”

  “Then I should come round.”

  “To get pissed as well?”

  “To make you a coffee.” Suddenly Penelope traitorously changed from comrade to reformer. “You shouldn’t be alone,” she said.

  “I prefer it,” said Anne, and rang off abruptly for the second time.

  Paul Lucas jogged gratefully towards The Lord of the Manor, his breath billowing in frosty clouds in front of him, the night chill still in his bones however hard he ran — which wasn’t very hard, anyway. The jogging was a ritual, a mere gesture to fitness.

  He would start off from Gladstone Avenue, run through the passageway and on down into Worple Road, along the flat towards Wimbledon Hill and then the long haul back towards the village. An hour later he would arrive at the pub on the common, sweating but conscious of a lack of credibility. Too often his jog slowed down to a trot, the trot to a walk and the walk to a halt, while he gazed around him, not seeing the suburb but the house on the hill in the Ardèche that he and Rachel had finally decided to buy.

  Her son Ben had already given approval in his usual decisive manner. “Great canoeing on the river,” he had said crisply. With his milky complexion, clean-cut features and smooth fair hair he was every inch the archetypal English public-school boy. Peter didn’t like canoeing.

  He could not have looked more different — stocky, with a round podgy face not entirely free of spots. Paul ascribed Peter’s occasional acne to a bad diet, provided of course by Anne, although he hadn’t the slightest idea what that diet was. He had always blamed her for the complexity and awkwardness of the son for whom he had done so little in recent years.

  In blotting out unwelcome thoughts of Peter, his mind jerked on to the equally painful subject of Wyatt. Paul knew that during his long career in publishing, his mercurial temperament had made him both friends and enemies as he gradually rose from graduate junior editor to Editorial Director.

  The company had been owned by its founder’s family. Mr Simon and Mr James were the two controlling brothers, with Mr Andrew, James Wyatt’s son, arriving at about the same time as Paul. The feudal atmosphere had been established for decades, and despite his undoubted talent, Paul had been made to feel an outsider, quickly realizing he would never be a “Mr” Paul, a title, it was tacitly understood, which would only apply to members of the Wyatt family.

  Nevertheless, despite being patronized by Mr Andrew, Paul slowly rose to power in a welter of firm’s sports days and sales conferences, but the company’s stock of long-serving authors, ranging from ageing romantic novelists to tetchy generals and explorers and from pedantic clerics to passé thriller writers, were a poor inheritance.

  There was little doubt, even to the family, that the list was losing money, but soon the continuing rise of Paul Lucas began to reverse the situation and even his arch-enemy Mr Andrew had to grudgingly acknowledge this was the case. Paul commissioned books from a young and much celebrated political journalist, a debauched rock star, a dietitian who championed the slimming powers of spinach and an American evangelist who had recently toured Britain, extracting thousands of “confession conversions”. All four became bestsellers, at which point Paul Lucas turned his attention to his real interest — the fiction list. Even in this more difficult terrain his harvest was bountiful, and two new bestselling authors emerged, Adrian Markham and Elaine Holloway. Paul’s golden touch was acknowledged, he was promoted to the board and remained there, still an outsider but now both respected and essential.

  For the next decade Paul Lucas rested on his laurels, still managing to pull out some plums but never quite emulating his original success. Nevertheless, Wyatt continued to prosper and its structure was slightly modified.

  The blow fell in the early 1990s as his authors were either head-hunted by other houses, or lost their form and with it their following. Paul panicked, calling in new names, but none of them came to his rescue. Realizing he had lost his touch, Paul made the mistake of participating in an expensive book auction against the family’s advice and trawling in an American writer who failed to excite the British public. A boardroom row ensued, and Mr Andrew was appointed Publisher, effectively blocking Paul’s decisions in his role as Editorial Director. He should have resigned and could have found a niche elsewhere. Instead, now a very frightened fat cat, Paul clung stubbornly to his diminishing power.

  His humiliation, however, was not yet complete, despite the fact that the long vengeful Mr Andrew was in the ascendant. Anne’s “worthy” (in Paul’s opinion) journalism began to glow in the columns of The Guardian, a rival publisher asked her to write a book and she won a civil rights award.

  Rather than being generous, Paul was mortified. Would it soon be his turn to sit in the airy, Regency-style house in Wimbledon, an ageing has-been who lived on memories of past coups and who worked overtime blotting out current failure? Gradually Paul became introspective, suspicious of Anne, seeing her success as betrayal, spending little time with his son who, in his adolescent moodiness, seemed to be part of the conspiracy against him.

  The crisis came when the
firm’s balance sheets for 1992 were shown to be even worse than expected. Mr Andrew suggested head-hunting a new commissioning editor and Paul was told his services would be retained as “Publishing Manager”. Knowing he was being pushed sideways into a powerless position, he still refused to resign and dug his heels in, making his situation untenable.

  Anne knew there was something wrong but was consistently repulsed as Paul continued to distance himself from his family, staying at his club as much as possible and locking himself in his study at home over the weekends.

  Mr Simon and Mr James finally came to a tired and negative decision, acceding to an asset-stripping takeover bid by Tamsin International who were only interested in Wyatt’s still marketable backlist.

  The family went, Mr Andrew kicking and struggling — the only perk in Paul’s otherwise modest redundancy package. Renting a small office in Clapham, he and Rachel eventually began Cafferty Steele. Her marriage to Josh Lancaster was already on the blink and Paul was humiliated and lonely; a hesitant drink in the pub after work became a ritual and Rachel began to restore his confidence, backing his ability to start a second career in his early fifties and to shed the various skins of delusion he had grown whilst digging in at Wyatt.

  The “sabbatical” with Rachel in the Ardèche followed, and on their return to England they moved into the flat together.

  As he thankfully neared The Lord of the Manor, Paul recalled the evening when his and Rachel’s working relationship had become something more.

  “Why don’t you come and have supper with me?” she had asked, after they had both been working late and were alone in the office. “We could go back to my place. Josh’s away, as usual.”

  Rachel had not enquired about Anne’s possible response to her invitation as she had already instinctively marginalized her. It was not as if Paul had complained about her or given an impression of incompatibility. He had just not mentioned her name and Rachel had taken her lead from his silence, assuming the marriage was dead.

  They had gone to bed after dinner. It had been months since he had had sex with Anne and even then it had been brief and awkward. A disaster. But with Rachel it had been slow, de-inhibiting and the climax had been so good that Paul could not have believed it possible. The fact that he knew the feeling had been mutual had filled him with elation.