Back Trouble

by Matt Kinnaird

  ‘So you’re saying,’ I said to Julia, ‘that we humans are no more significant than flies, spiders, amoebas and the like?’

  ‘No. I’m saying that they are no less significant than us. Life is life. A consciousness is a remarkable, unique thing. What gives us the right to decide which consciousness is more valuable to the universe, a human, or a cat, or a whale, or a fish or a spider? Each is alive and aware of its surroundings. Each feels pain. It’s only the reaction that troubles us. We can read the pain on a human’s face when he’s hurt, so we feel pity and try to help. It’s the same with cats and dogs and the like. But fish? I know vegetarians who eat fish, for goodness’ sake. There’s a double standard for you. They’ve no eyelids, no fur, and so they’re fair game. It’s why in the States they give lethal injections instead of the chair. There’s no less pain, but one of the chemicals in the injection kills motor skills, so we don’t see it. If we don’t see it, we don’t confront it. So it’s not about them, it’s about us. Your spider doesn’t show pain, he isn’t cuddly or endearing, but he was alive, and had as much right to that as you and I do.’

  ‘So that fly spray in the cupboard?’

  ‘Flies spread disease.’

  ‘And on a summer’s day, driving through country lanes, you’ll kill hundreds of harmless creatures. They’ll be stuck on the front of your car. Moths, bees, butterflies … They’re dying out, you know.’

  ‘It’s not perfect, I know, but it’s not malicious. And before you get started on eating meat–’

  ‘I wasn’t going to. I reckon you’ve a reply ready for that one.’

  ‘I do.’ She shook her head again, looking weary. ‘It’s just … killing that spider wasn’t even self-interest. It was just cruel.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I really don’t like them.’

  ‘Then let me deal with them,’ she said. ‘Don’t kill them.’

  ‘Ok. I’ll do that. I’m sorry.’

  I won’t kill spiders any more. I promise. But if I balls up this murder and get myself caught, my wife is in for a shock.

  Julia had some work to do this morning. She’s preparing to go off on a dig near Chichester with the BBC, seizing the opportunity to scour beneath the ruins of an old shopping complex before they replace the whole lot with a spanking new retail park. It’s what they call rescue archaeology, an intensive trawl through the broken earth set to a time limit before the diggers move back in; they’ll only have six weeks to do it, and there’s no postponing, even for Christmas, and even if one of the more eminent archaeologists’ husbands has thrown a hissy fit.

  From the arrangement of archaeological evidence nearby, there should be quite a treasure trove waiting to be unearthed. She explained this to me weeks ago, in far greater detail than I can remember it, but it seems that there’s a grave nearby. From that they have determined there is a likelihood of other graves being revealed in their excavation. Apparently, any evidence of Iron Age burial practices is significant, and they’ve been waiting to get at this lot for years. So she’s a vulture like the rest of us, picking through the bones of an exhausted commercial failure, and diligently recorded by our great broadcasting organisation so they can fuel our post-prandial Sunday boredom with it months from now. Long live planning permission. But it gave me a free hour, so I went to see Frankie.

  I hadn’t tried to kill him yet, and I felt bad about it, but I consoled myself with the knowledge he’s got a replaceable head. I knew I mustn’t anthropomorphise him too much, although I have developed a strange fondness for him. Maybe it’s the pride of being his creator: I made him, and it’s only armed with that knowledge that I feel justified in hurting him. If anyone else tried, I’d be furious.

  I slipped into the shed and locked the door behind me with the padlock, shutting out the dull, late-November air. The lights took a second to warm up and then burst into life, filling the room with clinical light and casting stark shadows on the walls. And on the blinds – I’ll have to watch for that. I looked at Frankie’s little melon head for a long time before I reached for a weapon, trying to muster some aggression.

  But then I thought, who needs aggression? I don’t need to be angry to do this. I’ve no motive. It’s just like crushing that spider. I picked up the hammer. I tested the weight. I felt a warm fire behind my eyes. I felt potent. I hit him in the head. Bull’s-eye: a circular dent, like a two-pence piece. I turned away and swung on the spin. Right in the temple. Fuck you, Frankie. I hit him again, and again, and again. His head collapsed and fell from his neck. You’re dead. I’m good at this. I gave him another head.

  I was looking forward to the knife. It seems to have more finesse. I enjoy the notion that with a knife the target is concealed, protected. It requires knowledge to use properly, like a surgeon’s scalpel finding its mark and carving away unwanted tissue. One can be elegant with a knife: in, out, done; quiet and deadly. A hammer is barbaric and undignified, albeit, it turns out, fun, but I feel like bowing to the pressure of the aesthetic, if I can pull it off. Imagine if I did it properly: ‘Assassin on the prowl in Whitbury,’ ‘Trained killer on the loose.’ One cut, one kill, and the papers would be rife with speculation. Oh, if I could make it look professional, how they’d tie themselves in knots. The real beauty of that is it would even bring doubts about the victim. How unfair is that? But it’s true. Any time someone’s rubbed out professionally, everyone assumes they did something to deserve it. What a country.

  In readiness for my assault on Frankie’s torso, I put some scissors and parcel tape on the Workmate, to heal the very wounds I was about to inflict. I rolled the irony of that around on my tongue for a moment, letting it excite my saliva glands like a pear drop, then stabbed him in the belly. I let go of the knife and watched it dangle. It hadn’t felt as easy as I thought it might. The sawdust was packed tight and the blade turned on impact. I don’t think I caught any vital organs. I reached forward with both hands and felt Frankie’s midriff. It seemed about human consistency, but then that would depend on the victim. And one also has to contend with a wall of abdominal muscles, which should put up more resistance than sawdust. The weak spot, where the knife turned, was my wrist. I needed to build up strength there, I decided, and work on my technique. But first, I’d have another couple of goes. No longer Frankie’s attacker, now his doctor, I prepared a strip of sticky bandage, removed the knife and staunched his dusty bleeding before reaching for the knife once more.

  He was a pincushion after ten minutes, and I was getting better. Five times in a row I got him in the heart or lungs under the ribcage (I could feel the tip of the knife penetrate his fruity organs) and finished with an opportunistic jab under the chin before reaching around him and slitting his throat. It all seemed effective to me.

  The agony of choice.

  By the time I came back in from the shed I was hungry. A scan of the kitchen cupboards told me there was nothing in the house I wanted to eat badly enough to cook it, so I decided to take Julia out for lunch. An hour’s intensive study had made her forget she was in a mood with me, and the offer of a roast in a pub put me back in her good books. We got into my car and drove to the Red Lion in Hambledon where we ordered roast beef and a bottle of house red. We didn’t talk much. Her mind was on her work and mine on tonight’s tasting, but the silences were comfortable. I’d finished my lunch and was enjoying how the firelight sparkled in the dents on a beaten copper pot hanging from a beam in the ceiling, when I noticed my stomach still felt weird, and that’s when I registered the extent of my anxiety about this evening.

  The hard work has been done. The wine and glasses went on Friday and the cheque is in the till, so my sales figures have gone through the roof and Head Office are delighted. With sales of that size, the usual anxiety is whether they’ll pull out at the last minute, and that anxiety has been removed, so as Julia set about polishing off the last of her potatoes I tried to examine what was getting to me.

  It’s a big tasting, I told myself. That should be enough to generat
e a flutter of nerves. We’ll have a Champagne table at one end of the marquee, and waitresses will take the wine to the guests, one marque at a time, starting with the Belle-Epoque, finishing with the Cristal. My job will be to deliver a précis of each one, pointing out what to look for, discussing the Pinot-Chardonnay blend, the vintage, the marque’s history and so forth. It shouldn’t be difficult, it won’t take more than an hour, and then I’ll be free to go about my business. But then, what will my business be? What will I do afterwards? Am I really going to chat up the hostess?

  At that point in my thinking I looked up at my wife, and hoped I’d be more sensible.

  Chapter seven

  It was dark when I turned into Brougham valley, and from above the Manor’s grounds looked like the garden of an enchanted palace. The trees behind the house were peppered with sparks of light; the marquee was a glowing white orb, pulsating with shifting shadows. I parked my car halfway down the crowded driveway behind a silver Mercedes, got out of the car, straightened my bow tie and smoothed my tuxedo. A quick peep into the wing mirror told me all I needed to know: I looked good. Dark, handsome, groomed. To the rhythm of the music running through my head I strode towards the house, past more Mercs, BMWs, Audis, Porsches, two Bentleys and a Ferrari. There was a small crowd gathered around the front of the house, of beautiful, stick-thin girls shivering in tiny dresses and pulling knitwear around their shoulders, and floppy-haired public school sixth-form boys in tuxes with glasses of Buck’s Fizz and industrial-strength vapes or cigarettes. I met their eyes as I passed between them, and acknowledged each with a nod. The girls smiled and one peered at me over her glass with a twinkle in her eye. I decided to remember the face, and maybe I’d see her later. Walking even taller and feeling the girls’ eyes on my back I mounted the steps, and the door swung open before me. Lennox was behind it, and he granted me entry with a brief, respectful bow.

  Christine was by the carriage in the hall, locked in conversation with friends, but she caught sight of me and peeled away to greet me. As she sashayed towards me, hips swinging and breasts juddering in her strapless dress, I took in the view.

  I started at the bottom, admiring the shape of her feet in her stiletto heels, and how her ankles blended into her shapely calves. The skin of her legs was brown, smooth and naked, and her sheer black dress skipped as she walked, halfway up her thighs. Her hips described a womanly curve, her waist was slender, her stomach flat and her breasts delightfully sprung. The skin of her arms and shoulders glowed. I met her smile of welcome as she stretched out her arms and we hugged, kissing each other’s cheeks. I let my left hand linger on her waist and hers rested on my shoulder. We remained like that as we talked.

  ‘Simon. Thank you so much for coming.’

  ‘It’s my pleasure.’

  She looked me up and down. ‘I must say, sir, you look sharp in a tuxedo.’

  I shrugged. ‘And you look beautiful. Stunning. I hope your daughter doesn’t mind being outshone by her mother, because surely she can’t look better than you do now.’

  She hugged me again out of embarrassment, laughing. ‘Really, you flatter me. But,’ she said more quietly, ‘thank you. Now, let me show you where to go. It’s all set up, and–’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And …’ she shook her head, ‘and you do look handsome in that DJ.’ She took my arm. ‘Come with me.’

  We walked through a door under the left-hand staircase and into a high-ceilinged, oak-panelled room with twenty feet of French windows which opened to the steps down to the rear gardens. Christine explained as we went outside that the gardens had once been fussy and intricate, with narrow paths between symmetrical hedges, mock-Classical ornaments and endless flowerbeds, but an ancestor had opted some years ago for the controlled wilderness that exists today: the trees had been placed with precision but they seemed to sprout at random; the contours of the grounds had been carved out of the earth yet they seemed natural; the lake was artificial. It worked out well for the party, she said, because there was ‘tons of room for the marquee’ and it looked ‘rather picturesque’ next to the lake. She was right, too. It looked spectacular, and the magical quality I’d perceived from the top of the valley was undiminished at close range; in fact, I couldn’t believe what my senses were telling me. I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked around in confusion. The pinpoint white lights were indeed dancing in the trees, but there was no wind, and I could make out the sound of crickets in the air, now from here, now from there, bouncing off each other in irregular triangles around the gardens, but all from above. In fact, the sounds were coming from the trees. Strange enough in summer, I thought, but this is winter, and it all seemed a bit preposterous. I voiced my concerns to my hostess.

  ‘Marvellous, aren’t they?’ she said. ‘They’re the work of a local artist. The lights are on stalks which sway at random– there: look.’ I followed her line of sight to the nearest tree, a grumpy old oak. On closer inspection I saw that the white lights in its branches were on stems, tipping back and forth, metronome-fashion, chirping as they did so. Soon another three started up, one at a time, then another two as the first two took a rest. ‘And you see, they react to each other. I just adore them, don’t you?’

  I replied in the affirmative. Christine squeezed my arm and led me down the garden to the marquee. There were more of the younger guests gathered outside, of the same ilk as those at the front of the house, and I could feel a combination of admiring and envious glances upon us as we walked, arm in arm, among them, the Beau and Belle of the ball. I felt I suited Christine’s arm, and she mine, and I pictured us together at society functions all over the country. She could help me spruce up my wardrobe, advise me on the etiquette of occasions like this one, and I could show her what the other side of life holds, remove her from all the pomp and ceremony when she tires of it. We’re about due for a transatlantic plane wreck some time soon; perhaps Lord Milston’s flight will be the one. I can only hope.

  The marquee was cavernous, warm and well lit. There were perhaps fifty tables, around which most of the older guests were congregated, in clutches of affluent insincerity, prattling at each other over near-empty plates, and there was still room for a DJ and his kit in front of a small dance floor. Around the walls there were long tables groaning under the weight of food, drink and my Dom Perignon. Christine threaded me between the guests to my Champagne table, by the far wall next to the dance floor. On the table were dozens of glasses, several trays and half a dozen ice buckets. Behind it were an enormous refrigerator, powered by a lead from one of the generators outside, and five pert waitresses. Inside the fridge was thousands of pounds’ worth of bubbly.

  Christine wished me luck and went off to address her guests, and I got to work. I directed the waitresses to their tasks. We poured and delivered, poured and delivered, while she took the DJ’s microphone and somebody rang a bell in the gardens, calling the wayfarers back to the tent for the tasting. Among the younger people coming in from outside was a striking, pale blonde girl with another who must have been her older sister, and they walked up to Christine, who was chatting with the DJ and fidgeting with the mike. I could see the family resemblance. The older one was almost identical in appearance to her mother, just fresher, bustier and paradoxically lacking in the youthful zeal that cast such an attractive halo around the latter. She seemed almost stern. The younger one, though, was another story. She was Christine as heroin chic: the bones in her arms and legs were prominent, her dress hung from her in folds like ancient skin, her neck was toothpick-thin. But she had glorious cheekbones, as smooth and as round as pebbles polished by the ocean, and her eyes had me forgetting my own name. I’d never seen such a slender, pallid, fragile creature before in my life, yet she radiated a quality, an attitude. It throbbed from her hands, her hips, her sharp shoulders, her eyes, the sneer of her mouth; and she left the wake of it behind her as she glided through the marquee.

  I was dumbfounded by the effect she had on me. Against all
my natural sexual inclinations – if you showed me photos of them, I’d have taken her sister over her ten times out of ten – when I looked at her I was swamped by one desire: I wanted to fuck that girl.

  At least, my body did. I wanted to fuck her mother.

  The tasting went perfectly. When each Champagne was delivered to the grateful masses, at ten-minute intervals, I gave a speech (without notes) and fielded questions. And, although a novice with a microphone and daunted by the magnitude of my audience, I must say I pulled it off with some aplomb. When it was over Christine took the mic to thank me and I enjoyed a sustained round of applause. After a modest bow I was then free to join the party, which was about to hit full swing.

  It was now the DJ’s turn, and he kicked off predictably with Dancing Queen. Twenty or thirty teenage girls flooded the dance floor, apoplectic with excitement, and naturally the boys followed, with rather less enthusiasm. I will never understand why generation after generation of Y-chromosome-deficient juveniles still froth at the mouth over fucking Abba. Still, I guess it makes for a fun party. And they never shook their butts like that in my day – or at least, I was too crippled by teenage anxiety to notice.

  I decided to take a lap of the marquee. I think my nerves had concealed my hunger, but now the hard part was over, I fancied something to eat, so I thanked the waitresses and made for one of the buffet tables with a full glass of Dom Perignon. It was extraordinary how many of the guests went out of their way to engage me in conversation as I walked among them. It was as if my performance in the tasting had lifted me to the status of minor celebrity, and I was pestered for advice on wine and with invitations to run more tastings elsewhere; but the surest sign I received that I had impressed these people was that they tried to impress me in return: