by David Bowker
Wallace was heavier and less fit than me, which was presumably why flabby Mrs. Wuffer managed to catch him in the first place. As we reached the passage at the end of the road, Wuffer, who was in worse shape than either of us, briefly caught up with him. Wuffer thumped Wallace once before relinquishing the chase and doubling up in a cigarette wheeze. Only when we were about four streets away did we stop to draw breath. Wallace started giggling, and I joined in. It wasn’t that we saw the funny side of what had happened. There was no funny side. Ours was the hollow, joyless laughter of the truly unmanned.
In the light of a streetlamp, surrounded by nice middle-class houses, I glanced back and noticed a trail of dark spots on the pavement behind us. It looked as if one of us had trodden in oil. Then I looked at Wallace, saw him falter, and realized the oil was leaking out of his side.
* * *
WALLACE HAD been stabbed above the right hip, probably with a small kitchen knife. It was only a flesh wound, but it required seven stitches. Early in the morning, when we were riding back from Casualty in a taxi, Wallace made a somber announcement. “I don’t think we should go out for a while,” he said.
“That’s crazy,” I said. “Something like this happens, you need to get out again at the first opportunity.”
“I agree,” said Wallace. “I just don’t want to go anywhere with you.”
“You’re joking.”
“No,” said Wallace. “I don’t like being around you, Mark. I think you’re unlucky. In fact, I think you’re probably cursed.”
* * *
THE NEXT day was a Sunday. I had lunch with my parents. They still lived on the wrong side of Kew Bridge, in the house I’d grown up in, with my father’s huge white refrigerated van parked outside to annoy the neighbors. There was always a good roast dinner on Sundays because Dad owns a food store in Twickenham called Madden Foods. When I turned up at one, my mother kissed me affectionately, but my father and Tom, already seated at the table, merely grunted. Tom, my brother, is my junior by two years. We like each other but have never found much to talk about. Tom works for Dad—works long hours, his heart already set on taking over the business when Dad retires.
They asked where I’d got the bruises. I told them about Wuffer, but not about Caro. Mum and Dad had never quite forgiven her for fucking up my exams. When I described how unhelpful the police constable had been, Dad started jeering. “What were you hoping for? A big wet French one?” To illustrate his point, Dad stuck his tongue out and wriggled it about obscenely.
“Maurice!” said my mother reprovingly.
“Well,” said Dad, nodding to me. “He doesn’t seem to know what being a man entails.”
(It seems unlikely that a working-class Londoner like my father would use a word like “entail,” yet he did. He was full of surprises.)
“Let me guess,” said my brother, raking roast potatoes onto his plate. “You’re about to tell him.”
Dad launched into a familiar speech. “Well, he’s got to learn. Someone hits you, you hit ’em right back. There’s no point crying to the law. What did the law ever do?”
Ever since I discovered Nick Hornby as a teenager, it had been my desire to bond with my father. So far, it hadn’t happened. He didn’t understand why I wanted to sell rare books, just as I didn’t understand why he had devoted his life to sausages.
As I held out my plate for more roast beef, I spilled gravy in my lap. My brother laughed. “Fingers!” That was his nickname for me, having observed at an early age that I was accident prone. Eighteen months ago, without telling anyone, I attempted to tackle the problem through therapy. My therapist told me the clumsiness came from a deep-seated feeling of unworthiness, dating back to childhood, when my newborn brother had usurped my place in my mother’s affections. This may have been true, but knowing it made no difference. I was still a clumsy bastard.
“You’ve got to fight your own battles in this life,” said Dad. “The only man you can depend on is you. Your grandfather worked in the stone quarries down at Weymouth. Day after day, a dozen blokes breaking rocks with bloody big hammers. Now, they were hard men. There weren’t any women there, women couldn’t have done the job. You wouldn’t have got Granddad talking about his feelings. He may have cried sometimes. If he did, he kept it to himself. That’s what a man does. He does what he has to do. He keeps his head down and gets the bloody job done.”
* * *
TAKING MY father’s advice to heart, I enrolled in a karate class. Although the idea of learning to fight had appealed to me for some time, I might never have been prompted into action had it not been for my recent humiliations. The instructor was called Lenny Furey. The poster outside Hammersmith tube station said he was a member of the national Shotokan karate squad. I didn’t know whether this was good or bad.
I took the train to Hammersmith and walked to the sweaty gym where the class was held. The first session didn’t quite live up to expectations. I’d been hoping for a touch of Eastern mysticism, but there was none to be found. Just a lot of stamping, kicking, and grunting. Lenny was a coarse-looking guy of about my height. He had big ears and a stupid-shaped head. Instead of intoning, “The pebble in the pond spreads out ripples; so, too, may the spirit of a warrior radiate ripples of honor,” he barked out orders like “You, straighten your leg!” or “You, give me ten push-ups, starting now!”
In the changing room after the session, Lenny called me over. He sounded like he’d smoked three hundred a day since the age of three. “You. Your sense of balance is shite. Would you agree?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Your punches and blocks are okay, but your kicks are fucking useless. Yes or no?”
“You could be right.”
“I am right. You’ve got next to no coordination. Has anyone ever told you that?”
I nodded. “How long will it be before I start getting good?”
“You personally? Maybe two years. And that’s only if you practice until you’re blue in the face. Understand? That’s your only chance of getting better. Because you’ve got absolutely no natural ability. None whatsoever. Would you agree?”
I looked at him. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”
“No. The opposite. I seen those bruises on your fucking bonce, my son. And something tells me you came here on a mission. Someone’s been smacking you about, am I right?”
I nodded meekly.
“It’s happened more than once. Yeah?” Lenny regarded me with fractionally more sympathy. “Thought so. I can usually tell.”
“I need to be able to learn to look after myself,” I said. “I need to do it now. I haven’t got two years.”
Lenny leaned closer and lowered his voice. “I can give you private lessons. How does fifty quid an hour sound?”
“Expensive.”
He shrugged. “I could settle for forty. It’d be fucking worth it.”
“When do we start?”
“How about now?” he said. “I’ve booked this place till ten.”
“I’m tired,” I said.
“That’s no excuse.”
* * *
FOR THE next hour, Lenny made me do push-ups and sit-ups and run around the gym. After twenty minutes, I had to go out to throw up. On my return, Lenny showed me absolutely no sympathy. He led me over to a punching bag and told me to hit it.
“A karate punch?”
“What do you think this is? The fucking Karate Kid? Kick like a ballerina and you’re just gonna fall over. I’m teaching you how to fight. Real street fighting’s got fuck-all to do with karate.”
“That’s strange coming from a karate black belt.”
“Just hit the fucking thing, will ya?”
I slammed my fist into the bag. My fist came off worse. Lenny tutted and sighed, then showed me how to move with the punch so that it carried my body weight, not just the weight of my knuckles. After a few minutes, he advised me to hit him instead.
“Where?”
“In the bel
ly. Don’t hold back. Hit me with everything you’ve got.”
Lenny tensed his muscles, and I slammed my fist into his midriff. It was like hitting a Henry Moore sculpture, but not as enjoyable. By the time the hour was up and I handed over the money, all I wanted to do was go home to bed.
* * *
WHEN I left the gym, it was pissing with rain and I was very depressed. I knew that if I trained hard, never losing sight of my goal, then in five years’ time I might be capable of felling a very old woman with a single blow.
I had no umbrella, so I jogged through the backstreets, my rucksack bobbing up and down annoyingly on my back. I thought I heard footsteps, so I glanced over my shoulder. There was a guy in a pullover, quietly jogging behind me.
When I reached Hammersmith station, I looked back again, but there was no trace of him. The sullen guard standing at the barrier barely glanced at my ticket. As I crossed the bridge, there was a train approaching. I hurried down the steps, but when I reached the platform I saw the train was bound for Ealing Broadway.
I bought a bar of chocolate from a vending machine and paced up and down the platform. The chocolate tasted like it had been placed beside the mummified body of Ramses III in 1163 B.C., but I was so hungry I ate it anyway.
The next train was destined for Wimbledon, the next for Ealing Broadway. Just when I’d given up hope, the message on the board flashed NEXT TRAIN RICHMOND. There were three other people on the platform, a fat woman in a fake fur and miniskirt and a nervous teenage boy who seemed embarrassed by the attentions of his girlfriend.
It was then that I felt a stinging blow on the back of my head. At first, I thought the fat woman had seen me staring in disbelief at her badly-packed-sausage legs. I turned and saw the man with the pullover standing behind me, his hood up, raindrops all over his face. “Hey. Shitface. Stay away from her,” he said.
It was only then that I realized I was looking at Warren, Caro’s most recent victim.
As always when faced with the threat of violence, I decided to try the reasonable approach. It had never succeeded yet, but there is always a first time. “Warren, isn’t it?” I held out my hand. He ignored it. “I’m Mark.”
This time, Warren jabbed me in the chest with his knuckles. “Stay away from my fucking girlfriend, you stupid-looking wimp, or I will pull your arms out by the fucking stumps.”
“Warren, I’m not even going out with her. Come on. You know what a bitch she is. She’s even less interested in me than she is in you.”
He grabbed my coat with both hands and swung me round so that we were both parallel to the track. Warren was a lot stronger than me. I was vaguely aware of the other passengers on the platform, slowly backing away. Behind me, I could hear the spit-and-rattle of the Richmond train entering the station. I thrust both my hands up through Warren’s arms and punched sideways, breaking his hold on me. Contrary to what my instructor believed, I had picked up one or two tricks in my karate class.
I tried to walk away from him, but he grabbed my shoulders and forced me to look into his dead, dull eyes. I couldn’t tell whether he was drugged or as miserable as hell. Probably both. “Fucking leave her!” he shouted.
“All right,” I said. “Message understood.”
As if he hadn’t heard, he edged us to the very brink of the platform. The train was close, its yellow lights glimmering on the wet track. It was only then that I understood how desperate and confused he was. He didn’t have a plan. All he was trying to do was ease his own grief.
With a huge effort, I broke free again, and as I turned to get past him, my rucksack whacked Warren in the chest and he fell off the platform. The only sound he made was a grunt. Then he hit the track, just in time to be cut in half by the wheels of the train. The train didn’t brake; it was already braking. Blood sprayed everywhere. I felt my face burning. With shame? With embarrassment? I wasn’t sure. As I walked away, I heard a woman screaming and a man shouting, but I didn’t look back. I just kept walking. I’d already seen too much. I didn’t want to see any more.
* * *
IT WAS after midnight by the time I turned up at Caro’s house. I’d been wandering the streets for hours, feeling drunk with shock and fear and appalling guilt. I knew I had to go to the police, but I was worried about how they might react. I don’t know why I walked away, I truly don’t. As soon as I’d done that, the whole complexion of the incident changed. Innocent people don’t tend to flee the scene of a crime.
There was a light shining in the living room window of Caro’s flat, so I rang the bell until she responded. She finally pushed up a sash window and called out, “Warren, fuck off!”
“It isn’t Warren. It’s Mark,” I shouted.
She leaned out of the window and peered down at me. “Well, you can fuck off, too.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Jesus Christ. Now I’ve got two of them,” she said despairingly. She meant there were now two lovesick morons who hammered on her door at night. With noticeable aggression, she slammed down the window. Minutes later, when she deigned to come to the door, the light from the hall shone on my face and her attitude changed instantly. “Fuck. What is it? What’s happened?”
I didn’t say anything at first. I was staring at the purple and brown bruise over her left eye. “Yeah,” she said. “Would you believe that bastard Warren? He punched me in the face.”
“Well, he won’t do it again,” I said. I was finding it hard to think, let alone talk. Rather than deliver the fuck-off-out-of-my-life speech she had planned, she seized my arm and pulled me into the grimly, dimly lit hallway.
I swayed drunkenly, and she hooked her arm under mine with a sudden show of tenderness. She was perfectly capable of tenderness, by the way. I wouldn’t want you to think she was just some slick, callous bitch who only ever thought about herself.
Moving like a very old man on his afternoon out from the rest home, I allowed her to guide me up the communal stairs that stank of dust and antique semen. Once inside the flat, I followed her into the kitchen. Pasta sauce was cooking in a large pan. “Now tell me,” she said.
I looked at the dark red sauce and saw Warren’s dark red blood exploding upward from the wheels of the train. Convinced that I was about to throw up, I brushed past Caro and rushed to the bathroom. It was a false alarm. I looked in the bathroom mirror and saw that my face and jacket were speckled with dried blood. I had just walked all the way from Hammersmith to Kew, looking exactly like someone who had just committed a murder.
After washing my face, I went to sit on her sofa, so stunned that I wasn’t even aware that I was crying until Caro pointed it out. She opened a cigar box, took out a ready-made joint, and passed it to me.
“I’m not in the mood for dope,” I said.
“It isn’t dope,” she said. “It’s crystal. The best.”
“I thought you didn’t do drugs anymore?”
“I lied.”
I took a blast and felt nothing, took another and felt my soul rise up inside me like a stallion rearing. “Fuck,” I said. “That’s good.”
“Now tell me,” she said, eyes searching my face. “Tell me.”
“It’s Warren,” I managed to say. “He had an accident.”
She drew back. “You’re joking.”
“No.”
“Is he all right?”
“I shouldn’t think so. He got run over by a train.”
“You mean he killed himself?”
“No. I knocked the poor bastard onto the track. He got sawn in half.”
Her eyes appeared to double in size. “You saw it happen?”
“No, no.” Despite myself, I started to laugh. The meth was making the room rush toward me. “No, I only saw the blood.”
Caro’s eyes filled with tears. For a moment, I thought she was mourning the loss of a man who had meant something to her. Then she leaned forward and started to kiss my face. “So you killed him?”
I shrugged and nodded. It was pretty mu
ch the truth. “And I’m not proud of the fact.”
Caro’s icy-blue eyes were shining. “But you should be. You’re an amazing person, you know that?” She threw her arms around me so tightly that I almost stopped shaking. Then she began to kiss my face and neck. “No one … but no one … has ever done anything like that for me before.”
She guided my hand between her legs. She was soaking wet. Her clitoris felt like a bullet.
“Just tell me one thing,” I said as she unzipped my trousers. “Did you ever call me Madeline?”
Caro shook her head, being far too polite to speak with her mouth full.
CHAPTER 4
ABOUT A BASTARD
I TOOK no pleasure in Warren’s death, but Caro seemed to. As far as she was concerned, I’d performed a selfless public service. All night she showed me just how grateful she was. She told me I was beautiful and potent. I almost believed her. We went to sleep at about four and didn’t wake until after eleven. By then, the thought of phoning the police seemed even stupider than it had seemed the night before.
We had breakfast at the kitchen table while the planes roared over on their way to Heathrow. This morning, radiating light, Caro looked happier than I had ever seen her. “Last night was great. I thought you were never going to stop.”
I didn’t bother explaining that the only reason I’d appeared insatiable was that I hadn’t had real sex since she’d dumped me five years ago. Yes, I’d engaged in copulation. I’d made the right noises and kissed the right places. But I’d only ever experienced real sex with Caro. Dirty, filthy, beautiful fucking that obliterates the world and everyone in it.
“You know the only thing that might fuck us up?” (Overnight, Warren’s death had become our crime, our shared triumph.) “CCTV. If the cameras were working, then they might have got footage of you pushing him off the platform.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“But it was night, and the picture quality on those cheapo cameras is piss-poor. You know what? It’s going to look like two badly drawn cartoons that a little kid has scribbled over.”