by Adam Thorpe
‘I was.’ I wasn’t.
‘Would it be inconvenient to you to cancel said trip, sir?’
‘Inconvenient, but not impossible. I can put it off for a day or two.’
Sliding Eyes nods at Fagg and the big red-faced man rises with a grunt. ‘Age,’ he says, by the door, looking at the door handle. ‘Creeps up on you, doesn’t it? Back, memory, all that.’ He turns round and studies me for a moment. Then he waves his biro at me again, almost in my face. ‘Don’t go burning any of your clothes in the next few days, will you, Mr Arkwright?’
Somewhere between counsel and threat. I snort. ‘I have never burnt any clothes in my life!’
As soon as they’ve gone, I scrabble again for the letters. I place the first one next to the scrap of paper from the fetish box, like so.
Look, Mother: look how meticulously and with what care Nuncle plotted my destruction. Look how close we came.
Your affectionate son,
Hugh
Clouds slapped up there like grout.
Dearest Mother,
My new friend Malcolm is not quite Malcolm: he’s shaved his beard. His chin looks like a small rodent unearthed from its den. Comes and goes, he says. But there’s something else: he’s even shiftier, almost wary of me.
I’ve been thinking hard in the night – I’ve had very little sleep. When I did drop off, I had the silliest dreams – more like flashes than dreams, dreams seen out of a hurtling train. In one of them, I came across Muck with his eyeball hanging out, but otherwise unharmed. He was collecting fardels on Mam Tor. I asked him whether Aunt Rachael ever wore a coat as red as any blood. He grinned and handed me a little picture in a gaudy plastic frame. It was a present. The picture was a photograph of Aunt Rachael in the last years, all eye bags and fag and stricken mouth. ‘Just to say sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s for your bedside table. Fancy, like.’ I looked at him. He was smiling, shyly. She was wearing your red coat in the picture, Mother. I started smashing him over the head with it and woke up in a boiling rage.
But I’m still elated. I share some of my thinking with Malcolm, when the Subject comes up. He’s overboiling the spaghetti.
‘A big cat,’ I say.
‘Sorry?’
‘Which big cat drags its prey up into a tree?’
Malcolm ladles out the spaghetti in tortured lumps. He seems to be prodding the answer into life. ‘The one with spots. You already said, in the Old Barn.’
I’d forgotten. And Malcolm had frozen. ‘Well. A certain spotty skin has disappeared.’
He gives me a dark glance. His chin is actually grey, like dead flesh. I nod discreetly towards the party wall.
‘What are you saying?’ He sounds annoyed, as if John Wall is his best friend.
‘Ever seen his sitting room, Malcolm? It’s full of animal skins. He’s obsessed by skins.’
Malcolm looks at the wall as if he can see through it. Very faint persistent muttering of a telly. He shakes his head. ‘No proof it was him who nicked it. Anyway, the boys in blue have had a word. Cast-iron alibi, apart from the fact that it was him who reported Muck missing, and that Muck was his best friend. Only friend, probably.’
He plops on the sauce, red and trickling.
‘Thank you. Well? What’s the alibi, Holmes?’
He doesn’t smile. He sits and pours out some green homemade cider with bits in. Did he hear me? The spaghetti looks unpleasant. I wonder if they’ve taken him down. I can’t believe the man’s dead. Loneliness is the worst thing and you go into death alone. Quiri told me that the dead can take the living with them, by the hand; they can come for you at night through a hole in the winding sheet. I wouldn’t mind if you did that to me, Mother, I really wouldn’t. Really.
Malcolm comes back to it a few minutes later.
‘He was with me.’
‘With you? Oh. What was he doing with you?’
‘Having supper. Wood-pigeon pie. I’m good at pies. He brought a couple of birds round on Friday, a sort of peace offering. So I said I’d make a wood-pigeon pie at the weekend. I invited him along.’
‘Must have been a late supper. He was in the pub until about eleven. I saw him, with the murdered man. Not yet murdered, of course.’
‘I’m talking about Sunday.’
A fleck of sauce has spotted his forehead. I swallow too much of the spaghetti at once and cough.
‘Sunday? But Muck was dead for a day by then.’
‘No he wasn’t. He was killed in the early hours of Monday morning, apparently. Whatever made you think he was bumped off the night before?’
‘I don’t know. I just assumed. Seeing them go off together like that.’
I’m glad Malcolm didn’t serve me wood-pigeon pie today. He leans forward. ‘If I were you, I would let the police get on with it. My marriage was destroyed by rumour and supposition.’
I mop up my spaghetti sauce with a chunk of his home-made bread. It has grits in it. I recall Keiller going on about grit off the grinding-stones wearing down prehistoric teeth. Mine are mostly false. Malcolm has just been rather rude to me, I think. I’m almost upset.
‘Well, I thought it was Saturday night for two reasons. First, I saw them leaving the pub together. Second, the police were very keen to know what I was doing that night.’
‘They’ve seen you, have they?’ This is almost a mumble. He’s avoiding my eyes again, staring at his plate. Then he adds: ‘John’s not so bad, really. Heart of gold. Poor bloke. He might help with the sound for the mumming play. He’s quite good with electrics.’
Something amiss.
‘Not had our opportunities, has he, Hugh? You’re famous and successful, he’s at the other end. Lonely, rather pathetic.’
‘He’s got his mother.’
He snorts at this, of course, but I don’t know quite what else to say, Mother; Malcolm’s not really talking about John Wall. The party wall might as well be a mirror. Then he does look at me, very dark eyes and the grey snout of chin: ‘I mean, if someone like you thought John Wall had done this thing, the police might listen. And who’s going to stick up for the likes of John Wall? That’s the point. If it were between someone famous and successful and powerful like you, and someone like John Wall, we know who’d go down. Fruit?’
‘Thank you, Malcolm.’ He fiddles about in a basket, washes some apples in the big old porcelain sink with its green stain. I don’t like this at all, I feel threatened. Is it just the thing about Nuncle that’s annoyed him? But if he knew my reasons! The care the man went to! So meticulous! Then the guitar’s tuned and I have to hear the first song he’s written for the Nubat show. It’s called the ‘Song of the Boners’. The Boners stand for the Cresswellians, in Nuncle’s silly tale, Mother. Because we know nothing about the Cresswellians except that they were here before anyone else and lived in caves, Nuncle could do what he liked with them. Soppy words: ‘We are the True People, We are the Boners, We are the Few People, We are the Loners,’ or something, going on and on and on. I suppose ‘Cresswellians’ wouldn’t sound very good in a song. His voice is feeble but the tune’s catchy. This worries me. It’s quite African, I remark. But of course it is, he replies, Africa’s important in the book.
‘Nubat, and all that.’ What’s Nubat got to do with Africa? ‘Well, it’s an anagram for Bantu, for a start.’
My face goes white. Feels like that, anyway.
‘How do you know?’
The interview in the Listener, of course. ‘We all started in Africa, he said. No one was saying that, not then. So Nubat is a sort of noble African warrior in the original jungle of England – what we now call England, anyway. Before it was even an island. Stone Age happiness.’
I can’t bear it. Such fraudulence! I hear a cackle in the air. Fiends, probably. Or flames. Like the flame-like rustle of the letters as I turn them here in my room. The old way we theatre people used to do a fireplace, Mother, crouched behind the false hearth, strips of paper in front of the amber-red flood for the flickery shado
ws on the opposite wall, jiggled by the prompter, screwing up newspaper for the crackle. Ah yes. Half-empty halls. Cold back rooms smelling of mops. Truculent, squint-eyed janitors. Gorgets of size-stiffened felt, tin-lid armour bosses, Gertrude’s brocade from an old armchair. Telephone speeches pasted into the phone book that no one can find minutes before curtain up. Blinded by the lights coming up on resistance before they short. My temple was built upon such draughty wild beginnings, as Nuncle’s was upon poisoned mud. Ah yes. But Nubat can be Bantu and Tabun, surely! It is, it is! Nothing says it isn’t! As Malcolm can be bearded, then beardless! As you can be living and dead! As an actor can be a king or a fool or anything, anything! As I can be a man and a beast!
Your loving son,
Hugh
I’m sure there are bluebells in the woods, if I could get to them.
My dearest Mother,
I am very calm about all this.
‘What Edward Arnold most admired about Africa,’ I reply, ‘was its prehistoric mortality rate.’
Malcolm’s chin slightly flushes, the rest of him stays pale. But we talk about other things over coffee, which is much too weak. His little daughter; children in general; schools; ecological collapse. When I tell him about Nuncle’s vision of the wildwood sort of bubbling over and spreading across the land, like the steaming porridge in the nursery story, smothering everything, his eyes brighten up. I don’t mention my detestable thought, because the letters have somehow thrust it away, let alone the new blood soaking into the mould. Plop, plop.
On my way out, in the porch, feeling a little fumed by the drink, I ask him if he knows how the body was found. Was it the helicopter, in the end? He says yes and no, respectively. He’s shifty again. He adds in a sort of mumble something about being a convert to reality, Marxist now Marxism’s out of fashion. I say I don’t see the connection. The narrow shelves in the porch are full of objets trouvés: pottery shards, hand-hewn nails, twisted sticks, flints with holes, a craquelured majolica door-knob. He’s turning one of the big old nails over and over in his hand, staining his palm with rust.
‘OK, she located the body.’
‘Who?’
‘My ex-wife. Maddy. She dowsed him. The police are into hokery-pokery, sometimes. They’ll be using broomsticks instead of squad cars, soon. Ray Duckett taught her. He’s a water diviner, mainly. You put a finger on the map and trace a line, as if you were walking it, and you hold his arm with the other hand. When the rods swing up or out or whatever it is, there’s your water. Theoretically. It’s never failed. He also does it with standing stones, the auras around standing stones and barrows and all that. Impresses the tourists. And Maddy got roped in to do it for a ripped-up corpse.’
He gives me one of his dark, piercing glances and then passes a hand across his face, sighing. It’s hot in the porch, even stifling, like a sweaty hand at the throat. Though divining is to do with long and boring afternoons in my youth, I express my amazement. ‘It’s not all that amazing,’ he says. He hesitates, and then mutters something about them already having a pretty good idea.
About what? Its location? That it was up in a tree in the wildwood? But I don’t ask him to repeat it. I can hardly breathe in the porch. Such an odd man: dismisses such mystic tripe at the same time as he worships Edward Arnold.
We wander out into the front garden and look in his shed: wooden music stands stare blankly back at us in various stages of completion – period copies of eighteenth-century originals in redheart and ash. Rather lovely, erect and raw in their heaps of shavings, but also like the old road signs with pointy caps. He says ash is a nervous wood but with a lovely grain. Like his ex-wife, he adds.
‘Hey, it’ll make my fortune,’ he goes on. ‘Can’t you hear the rush? W.H. Smith’s, I’m thinking. Free Big Mac with every five purchased, indigestion included.’
His stick savages the shavings at our feet, raising sweet smells. I tell him how much I like the music stands. We walk to the front gate. The mist of the last two days has lightened, but the sky’s now an oppressive blind of white, like the reflective sheets photographers set up. Even the autumn colours look bleached out.
‘By the way,’ says Malcolm, undoing the latch and then standing there with the gate half-open in his hand, as if afraid I might bolt, ‘if you want to tell me anything, you know, anything, I’m right here.’
He’s chewing his lip. A horrible sensation of fear in my stomach. Heart-rate up.
‘Tell you what?’
‘That’s the thing. Whatever.’ He’s run out, his batteries have run out. Out of the corner of my eye, through a tear in the ragged hedge, I see John Wall standing in front of his porch, looking our way. His face is a pale oval, from this distance. His hands in his pockets. Unusual, that. Not someone who stands about, slouching. Certainly slouched now. John Wall didn’t do it, I have to remind myself. Dreadful of me even to think it. Then who on earth did? Perhaps the leopard skin has nothing to do with it. This is what happens in books, in thrillers, in murder mysteries. Red herrings, false trails. Have the police contacted zoos, safari parks, eccentric pet owners? Maybe Muck was savaged by a real beast, after all. I mean one with a leopard heart and lungs and brain.
The gate squeaks wide. I’m free to bolt. I say, quietly, ‘I think you’re right. I think it was wrong and even dangerous of me to start pointing the finger at anyone.’
‘At John Wall, you mean.’
‘Ssssh. He’s just come out of his front door.’
‘That’s an event,’ he murmurs. ‘First time he’s used the front in living memory.’
On my way back I pass Dr Johnson, standing by the house in the square that used to be the barber’s; he wishes me a mournful good morning, studying the new paving stones tinted with sand that the council men haven’t bothered to sweep off. He presses something into my hand and says, ‘No need to say thank you.’ He wanders away, towards the pub.
It’s not an apothegm but a blue marble, chipped and soiled. A treasure. A great gift! I give the man a wave as he hovers under the oak in front of the Never Fear. He doesn’t wave back.
Passing the shop, I notice ovals of faces through the window, as if hovering beyond a new display of dog chews, bloody Hallowe’en masks, black lacy tights, rocket fireworks. Are they all turned to watch me cross the road? Why do I feel, walking between the street’s lacy windows, that I am on stage again? I don’t like that business about the dowsing rods. They’ll have a sorcerer in the mortuary soon, rubbing one of Muck’s teeth with scented leaves and then waiting for the tooth to whisper the name of the killer. Father tried to stamp that out, didn’t he? Because the killer was always a good man with a hard-working young wife much desired by his rich brother-in-law, and the sorcerer was always known to the brother-in-law, and the young man was always put to death just before Father arrived.
Lots of people in my room. The contents of the fetish box spread on the table, including the various skull bits – even the red-tinted skull-bit, Mother, though I’m not so sure it’s yours at this stage. My brief diary on the floor. Ted by the window, hands in his pockets, not really apologetic.
I project my voice like a missile into the nape of the one fiddling in the table’s drawer. ‘Good afternoon.’ His head jolts, as if hit by a brick, and he turns, rubbing his neck. Eilrig exercise, Mother, based on Noh practices and arcane Elizabethan pamphlets. How to soar above the cracks of hazelnuts, the whine of orange-sellers, the groundlings’ chatter, the rustling of gowns like bearded barley in a wind!
Like so.
Now they’ve come running in, the people here, to see what on earth’s going on. Maybe I’ve said something!
Your affectionate son,
Hugh
Daisies on the lawn. I do love daisies. But the mower’s getting nearer and nearer.
Dearest Mother,
Now the man’s turned and being winded by my eye and he steps back, knocking the table. His surprise turns to fear. I’ve melted his guts, you see. Arcane techniques have th
eir use off the stage, in certain extreme circumstances!
The other three, not in uniform, nod minutely and carry on plundering. Since there is little to plunder in my room, they’re into the lifting and peering stage. Sliding Eyes appears from the darkness of the bedroom, holding the Babinga mask. He puts it over his face.
‘To be or not to be, that’s the question,’ comes his muffled voice.
The glistening bit of his mouth, like animal tripe, like a man’s insides, works between the jagged teeth. He’s grinning, as are the others – even the frightened one (not Ted, I’m glad to see). Something tears in me, I’m afraid. I leap forward, seize the mask by the edges and jerk it off his face. He lets go of it immediately.
‘Never do that again,’ I say, so steady, oh yes. ‘Never do that again.’
A silence, except for my breathing. Sliding Eyes removes his aghast expression with a twitch of his head. No idea how the others look: I’ve an eye only for the oaf in front of me. My gut’s sourness eats into his face like acid on an etcher’s plate. Pure choler with a lashing of hate, by my reckoning.
‘Only a jest, Mr Arkwright. If I –’
‘Did you give them a key to get in, Ted?’
Ted nods.
‘They showed their search warrants,’ he adds, as if impressed.
‘On what grounds, young man, are you wasting your time in my room?’
‘I suggest you sit down and catch your breath first, Mr Arkwright. This isn’t helping you, nor anybody else –’
‘Give me a straight answer, please. On what grounds?’
The twine padding around the edge comes away in my fierce grip and the mask bounces heavily on the boards and clatters towards Ted’s feet, rocking on its face. Almost more frightening from the back, like that – the scooped wood roughly hacked at and cindered black between the eye-slits and square mouth, as if someone’s looking from the other side. Ted gapes as if it’s a mad rat, about to bite him.
‘I’ll bet that’s worth a bob or two,’ says Sliding Eyes.
‘I’ll charge you for any repairs,’ I say, my anger giving up on me. For an awful moment, I can’t for the life of me think why these people are here, or what exactly has so infuriated me. Sliding Eyes goes over to the table. He tells the others to check the rooms. Ted goes out with them. There’s a burly one left, in front of the door, taking a notebook and Pentel out of his top pocket. The inspector lays a thin white hand on the darkest cranium. The black hairs between his knuckles are a very realistic touch.