I reflected about not having courage, but being driven by conviction – that was why I always thought of the example set me by Ballard, and the reason why I was thinking of him now.
I also thought that, being everywhere and nowhere, somehow you ended up being everywhere, seeing everything. It sounds stupid to say so, but I think that if there were such a thing as previous existence I must be purging some very heavy charge to the past to be doing this kind of work, to know I shall go on doing it, and to have had the grief I’ve had in my private life to go with it.
All I had to do was wait. I had opened Jidney’s tins of relics, examined them as my father would have examined the interior of a mine and closed them again; now I had them all laid out along the edges of the floorboards I had raised.
When I heard Jidney come upstairs and put his key into the lock and turn it, when I saw him come in I looked up at him and said quietly: ‘Hullo.’
He said: ‘What are you doing here?’
I said: ‘You are Ronald Jidney.’
He said: ‘What is it to you?’
I cautioned him and said: ‘I am a police officer. I have a warrant, and I am arresting you on a charge of murder.’
He said: ‘I refuse to answer. I know nothing about any murder.’
I said: ‘Do you know nothing about these tins laid out here?’
He said: ‘I have never seen them before.’
I said: ‘You will have to do better than that.’
He said: ‘What will I have to do?’
I said: ‘You will have to open these tins over here where the floorboards are up, the tins in front of me. I have done so, and know what they contain.’
He said: ‘You know I cannot do that.’
I said: ‘Then you had better come with me and we will continue this conversation at Poland Street police station.’
He said: ‘Thank God it is over. Do you hate me?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You will never realise the horror of what you have done.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
I said: ‘Look, seeing what you’ve done, if I were to hit you very hard, for instance, do you think that would be a good thing?’
‘Oh that!’ he said. ‘You don’t mean good, do you, you mean violence. Oh that’s all right, I know all about that.’
He quite obviously had no idea what I was talking about so I said: ‘We had better just go downstairs now.’
He agreed at once and we walked down to the street where Stevenson was waiting; Firth was with him. I thanked Firth for everything he had done and said: ‘Well, the end of a case is like any other kind of future, I suppose, it takes a long time to arrive, but it gets there in the end, like British Rail. Which car?’
‘The first one.’
‘Then let’s put him on board.’
Now that it was over, what I had found under Jidney’s floorboards had time to catch up with me and at last I could be sick, which I was, untidily, in the gutter. Far back, the night that woman threw the knife at me in South London and I got it in the stomach and was sure I was dying, something went through my head that I never afterwards forgot: that I was in a large low room and there were a lot of people in there; whether I knew them or not I still knew them. From there we all moved out through a french door into a garden on a summer evening; it was full of trees with fruit hanging from the branches, and there were peaches and apricots pruned and trained up red brick walls – it was a cool, quiet place where we had all long desired to be. Then, after we had been there for a while, we all moved off of our own accord without saying a word into the country beyond whose horizon was unending and white, discussing the coming encounter with the people we knew we were to meet. We had a long discussion on the way which was peaceful, because all the tired old questions were over now; everything was over and the verdict on every one of us was in – no matter who we were, or thought we had been, or had somehow been persuaded that we were.
Jidney said again: ‘Thank God it is over,’ as we got into the car. We all got in with him without any fuss and drove off, and that was all there was to it.
Not till after the news of the arrest had broken in the press, in fact the next day, did I speak to a man who had at last come forward to tell us he had known Ron when they had worked together on a building-site thirty years ago. ‘He seemed a very ordinary bloke to me and the rest of the lads,’ he said, ‘very quiet man. Although –’ He hesitated and scratched his head.
‘Yes?’
‘Although, mind you, on occasions, when the subject of women came up especially, then he might freak and then, if he did that, you’d want to get out of his way fast, because then he’d well, then he’d go fucking mad.’
21
Jidney wrote to me after his conviction saying he had decided to send me what he enclosed as a result of our encounter the night I arrested him, remarking: ‘I’m swiftanic, I am. I’ve always thought of myself as Mr Swiftanic, Mr Swiftie.’
‘What?’ I thought. ‘Are you trying to be daring?’
I started reading in a mood of indifference because Jidney had been caught now and was out of the way, but when I had finished reading I corrected that judgment and sent it upstairs to the Voice.
Jidney refers to me as ‘detective,’ and leaves it at that. The heading is: ‘Hell Opens Its Gates To The Public.’ After pointing out that he has abandoned art in prison and taken to writing, because he is having to find a new way of talking about life, he starts:
‘Well, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen – here we are in the museum of hell. Even though it is only a museum, and neutralised, you might feel even so that it could come alive at any moment like a sleeping volcano – therefore it might be better not to linger too much over the exhibits.
‘Here’s a tableau – look at this woman’s body. Her name was Mandy Cronin, as you can see from the label. She went in great pain; she appears to be trying to plunge through the floor like a listing boat. Here are her clothes that she took off in a corner, still warm, and look at her face in death – much smaller than you would think possible for a human being – turned to you as if it were still waiting for an answer. The answer, even if there were one, is stopped by the question in the mouth that fell half open in her last time; the congestion has turned the lips black.
‘I am neat. A swiftie. I cut corners, live for power.
‘I’m normal, sometimes for a long time – and then, I still don’t know what happens quite, I get restless and shuffle the deck for a new game.
‘Hell is a museum! The Chamber of Horrors is sterilised! The decayed evidence is arranged neatly, as exhibits in glass jars, with the blood, mess and putrefaction removed. I have nothing more to confess. In any case I am not confessing myself; I am acting as guide and curator to the museum.
‘So I shall die in this prison, but I shall be back in a hundred or a thousand years; I’ve got my return ticket. Will anyone recognise me? Of course they will. I’m eternal. I may return as another outer “I”, but the inner “I” will be the same; I never change. For the stone that was rejected by the builders shall be the keystone of the corner.
‘Do you understand what I’m saying, Detective? Do you share my language? Does what makes sense to me make sense to you? I can tell you everything now, I have eternity in front of me. I now have time.
‘I go here and there in my mind, pick dates at random; it doesn’t matter.
‘December 7th. Another most unsatisfactory year almost over – a new one ahead, perhaps the last. Everything is final now, irrevocable and flat, and I have started drinking again, which fuels my compulsion: I must continue with Ann, make a final effort to acquire and dominate. The complete understanding of another person. To penetrate the mystery of otherness – that is the art of my life.
‘The money I spent on materials for my painting, on the video camera, lighting, sound equi
pment, various – well spent.
‘Improve your mind. Everything interests me, therefore I have studied everything – the brain’s determination to understand the brain. Art, mathematics, literature, cinema – I can discuss a wide variety of topics. That’s how I hold women, through feeling myself the master of a conversation. Their submission makes me glow inside, whitening to the incandescence of final submission: If London is incandescent, London is burning away.
‘Knowledge smooths the path to being unique; I discovered that in prison a long time ago. Being in solitary confinement and surviving it sets you apart; in the difficult block you can really explore the darkness. To know yourself to be beyond the reach of light – that reveals a terrible strength in a man, spurs him to extraordinary things.
‘I feel old, inactive and full of foreboding – indeed today yet again it occurred to me to kill myself. It’s part of the cycle. I have always said to myself, be cunning like a wild animal. But now, increasingly, my pleasure in being alone is turning against me. I am lonely and at bay; it seems that even a wild animal finishes as its own victim.
‘Judith Parkes used to call me her “Mr Boastie” – but when I jumped her she screamed as she fled the world forever. As she screamed I drove my prick into her; it felt like fellating a fallow pig and then fucking it. My triumph and pride at getting her was so great that when I killed her it was a continuation of sex. What heaven! Stripping her naked as a savage, reducing her to gabbling fear and desire, was dark red poetry – you can’t help creating divine poetry when the drive comes. Go for the loners, for the ugliest, like I did with the whore they called Dutch Gerda. She told me why she shaved her sex, so that she could still feel like a kid being fucked. Kid? She must have been fifty. That was years ago . . . Of course, you get no view of what you might look like seen from outside by a third party, the experience crushes it out. Just as well.
‘ . . . And broke her neck. One moment I was leaning over her where she lay on the floor, her eyes discs of terror; the next, her neck tight inside the cord, one swift snap on my part and she relaxes, shrinks, falls in like a piecrust – not peaceful but still, not pale but waxen, unnatural, the sweat in her hair freezing.
‘It seems odd when I think back, Flora being so religious. One day, after her death, I found a book of hers. She had pressed a flower in it together with a sheet of paper on which she had copied:
Jerusalem, my happy home,
When shall I come to thee?
When shall my sorrows have an end,
Thy joys when shall I see?
‘Incredible, the things people find important – but then I know very few people, keeping myself to myself as I do. Paradoxically, I don’t at all like my apartness from people being pointed out. I remember the night Judith said to me, but we don’t even know each other, which sealed her fate. Judith was a schoolteacher; she exacted very high standards from people and had a great influence on me from the moment we exchanged glances on the bus, so that it was both insulting and exciting to be dismissed in her very severe tone as worthless, insignificant, a stranger. I subsequently taught her more about the meaning of severity than she would have thought possible, and yet here she is in the museum, look at her.
‘Vary the pattern a little. Each victim suggests her own death to you – sometimes the knife, sometimes the wire, sometimes bare hands. You ignore the mess, wade through it. It is inevitable. It is the precise inquiry, the assault on the abstract.
‘Evening birdsong outside; I forget the year. The people next door have put weed-killer down in the garden next door so that every plant has turned brown, bent over and died; I think they didn’t read the instructions or forgot to dilute it. Christine has voided her bowels on the mattress behind me, so I let the blind down and turn her face to the wall where I can’t see it. I was upset with her because she kept saying “It’s hard to say goodbye, it’s hard to say goodbye” each time I partly throttled her, till the din she was making got me down so much that in the end I finished her off before I meant to. Afterwards I was very depressed because it was another failure and I went and stared out of the window.
‘How often have I stared blankly out of windows!
‘I was in a dilemma over Ann M, aware of what I was going to do of course, yet I felt my dreams had faded and that there was no splendour left in me. I even had periods when I felt like letting Ann go. She was very frightened of me at times, but whenever I pretended I was going to finish with her she started crying – so here she is in the museum too, waiting like the others for the parts of her I left under the floor at Thoroughgood Road, people who in their way are still with me, and whom Ann will probably want to get to know.
‘How strange it was to have all that money and never spend any, watching it grow in the Carat account. That makes me feel better for a while. Me, an orphanage boy! Rich!
‘But I am depressed. Looking out of the window, how bleak it is – a naked garden in midwinter. My lack of excitement at everything I see tells me how far I have declined. This is one of the days I dread, when I wouldn’t even care if I was caught, or killed. “Action” is the only cure.
‘I don’t know who I am today; I am going through wild swings of mood, veering from optimism to despair. This frightening but familiar disorientation is a bad sign for Ann; it means that the stranger who visits me is coming. During the period last year while I didn’t troll I went to bed each night feeling: “That’s another day I haven’t hurt anybody, another week I haven’t had anyone in my power.”
‘It was a great feeling, until memories of Flora stirred again; it’s surprising how she still has the power to move me, urging me on now that I have met Ann. I like women like Ann, with very decided views – prim, strict and politically correct.
‘We met at the Anguria; it was like dropping fat in acid.’
‘Already, by the time I was seven, I’d start a day which I’d know was going to be different as soon as I woke up; I’d have funny ideas about what I was going to do with it which didn’t come from me. The people in my head would be telling me to do such and such and I’d think up a cover story, and all the while I’d have my other, real story going, what I was really going to do. Only I’d know that what was planned would seem weird to other people, so that even though I’d know inside what this real project was, I’d just not be able to admit it even to myself, so I’d pretend it was just going down to the old bomb-site and skipping pebbles across the reservoir. Whereas the real idea would have been, say, setting fire to a hut out on the allotments, or else killing the neighbour’s cat and then playing with it, getting ideas about it sexually and trying them out, that kind of thing. I was very precocious sexually; I was masturbating at the age of nine.
‘At school I used to be very precise about the way I did things. I was always neat and very physical, anxious to prove things chemically – I’m still like that. I liked to handle objects, basically with the intention of altering them, changing their state, especially seeing what they would be like if they were dead. Sometimes the object would be an insect or a bird or a dog, and a lot of people didn’t like that, wouldn’t like the things I’d done to it. I didn’t get on with the other kids. What they liked was fighting, football and girls. I hated girls. My mother made me be like a girl.
‘The short time I was at school the headmaster used to send for me, and instead of beating me when I’d done something he didn’t understand he’d start trying to explain things. He’d say: “Now, listen, what I want you to realise for your own and other people’s sake is that everyone on the face of the earth is a person – that means that everyone’s got his own skin, his own name and his own thoughts, do you see, which he’s entitled to within reason, and every single one of these persons is different.” He’d say: “You’re the only boy in the years I’ve taught here that I’ve had to say this to – everybody but you takes it for granted.”
‘Only although I understood perfectly
well what he meant, it was just words. I always listen very politely to people when they tell me things like that; I haven’t the heart to tell them they’re just a drone in the background and that as far as I’m concerned the speakers are exactly like the words, all alike. But I also know that isn’t the right response, so I’m very polite – until the urges come over me, and then no one on earth means anything whatever, unless of course somebody’s stupid enough to get in my way.
‘There are more and more days now where I feel everything falling apart inside me. I get crumbling feelings, bits inside my head sliding about. Don’t think this is recent; it isn’t. I’ve always had it. Parts of my mind fly around in my head loose and I get dizzy spells, like a current switching on and off in there, till finally there’s what feels like a short circuit, the ends of two wrong wires being put together; there’s a shock with sparks and like a sharp cracking sound in my brain, and after that, whatever I do, it’s nothing but a kaleidoscope.
‘What’s worrying is the feeling I’ve been suddenly disconnected. A period of time disappears; then events come together as though they had happened on top of each other, even though you know they can’t have done. When you do find them side by side your brain feels like a compass needle going round and round on its card and then this needle suddenly reverses itself from north to south so that in the end you don’t have any real idea what’s going on. You know things are happening, that you’re doing things; yet they just aren’t real because they’re nothing to do with what you’re supposed to be doing, or it might be that you know perfectly well that you oughtn’t to be doing what you are doing, it makes no difference. I have to appear outwardly as if nothing bizarre were happening, but that’s just automatic pilot; it’s like nightmares where you’re autowalking into some place and you can’t do anything to stop it. So the way I seem to be behaving at any given moment could be concealing something that I’m reliving from years ago. Not against my will. Because when I’m living through episodes like that I haven’t any will. It’s someone else’s will; I don’t know whose will it is.
Dead Man Upright Page 15