Sudden Death

by Phil Kurthausen

  Erasmus leaned in close.

  ‘Here’s a tip you should take. The pen is always mightier than the bat.’

  He pulled the pen out of the man’s palm and wiped it on his jacket before placing it in his inside pocket.

  Erasmus stepped over him and walked out of the Blood House Bar back into the fog.

  CHAPTER 13

  Pete hadn’t worried when Erasmus didn’t return from his cigarette. He was used to his friend disappearing to investigate any random thought that popped into his head. As long as Pete had his pint and a problem to solve, he was happy.

  Pete knew women as well as anyone he knew. He had had no choice; he was surrounded and outnumbered by them. His wife Debbie had given them three daughters: Lucy was fourteen, Anna was now seventeen and their youngest, Olivia, a recent surprise to both of them, was now two. His was a house where Dad was tolerated almost, but not quite, not really, as a member of the human species.

  The house was filled with potions and lotions, and although he had resisted at first he now knew their purpose, their intended effect and, more importantly, the reasons that lay behind their existence in their pastel proliferation in his bathroom and beyond. He rode the emotional tides in the house with the skill of a world-class surfer and he knew when to advise and when to hold them and say nothing. He also knew that his ability to survive so successfully in such an alien environment was being able to take time out to be himself, to engage in manly pursuits and talk man, to be a man.

  As such he was very aware of the irony that he was now posing as a woman, or more precisely, a girl. A girl called Charlie.

  He sipped his pint and studied his laptop screen. Beer and computers were a divine combination to Pete. He slipped on some headphones and chose an early Who track to drown out the braying vets next door. Heaven.

  It hadn’t taken long to set up a profile for the ersatz Charlie. He had decided that a boy, however good looking and mysterious, was the wrong choice. His observation of his daughters, namely the candour with which they discussed things with their friends – something he did everything in his power to avoid hearing since he had heard his darling Anna talking about dildos – compared with the guarded drip of information that was fed to their boyfriends had decided him. From then it had taken minutes to set up the profile.

  He made Charlie the same age as Rebecca, sixteen, put her in a boarding school down south and then scanned through some stock photographs of alternative/emo girls of the same age. Not too cool and polished, pretty in a quirky way was required. Soon enough he had it. A picture of a small, pretty girl, with a half scowl, dyed black hair and pale skin. It was an outdoor photo, the girl sitting on a park bench. Perfect.

  A call to Karen had furnished him with the most important information, the interests and likes and also a stroke of luck that he knew could save weeks of building up a relationship and get Charlie added as a friend and communicating with Rebecca in no time.

  The likes were mainly alternative bands, dead poets, a couple of edgy actors and some local clubs that played the type of music that Rebecca was into. He added them to Charlie’s profile. He didn’t have any other pictures of Charlie to add but that was easily dealt with. Another advantage of living with teenage girls was that he knew how they loved taking pictures, and held fantasies about becoming a photographer. He listed Charlie’s main hobby as photography and then added pictures from a stock library of mountains, sunsets and sea views from various countries that he imagined a girl of Charlie’s age and socio-economic background may have visited. Finally, as the piece de resistance he used his iPhone to take an extreme close-up of a beer mat that had one corner turned up. His eldest daughter had gone through a phase of taking extreme close-ups of anything and everything. He hadn’t questioned it, just accepted it as one of the inexplicable things that these strange creatures who he lived with did occasionally.

  Another pint and some finishing touches and Charlie was complete and ready to be released into the world. Pete uploaded her profile and disabled the timeline, which would have shown she was new to Facebook.

  Armed with the knowledge that Karen had given him, he clicked on a link to a forum dedicated to the American indie band Phantom Lust. Pete, who liked to keep up to date with these things, thought them derivative of the late seventies band Television, and they certainly didn’t come close to the soul and MOD classics that filled up his collection. But still, each to his own. You needed to experience lesser types of music before graduating onto the classics. Pete himself had had his own teenage flirtation with Dire Straits and Pink Floyd, something he would deny to his dying day.

  He registered Charlie as charlieitallbreaks97. ‘It all breaks’ was a reference to one of Phantom Lust’s more obscure tracks, which only a proper fan and not a ‘singles’ fan would appreciate. He posted straight away, starting a new thread in the ‘UK Tour’ section. The post was headed ‘tickets for real fans – Liverpool gig’. You see, Charlie had two tickets for the band’s sold-out Liverpool gig – obtained by Pete with a quick call to an old drinking buddy of Pete’s, Tosh Wearing – but she couldn’t go because her ‘bastard Dad’ had decided that he was actually going to use his visiting rights this weekend and take her to visit her grandparents in Scotland. Charlie wanted the tickets to go to real fans only. All could apply. If Becs669 logged in, as she did everyday, and saw the post, the tickets were hers and she would have a new pal into the bargain.

  Pete cast his line and considered his sock puppet alive and well. This deserved another pint, he thought, maybe two.

  CHAPTER 14

  Erasmus woke up and felt something cold and hard next to him. He shifted and the bottle rolled from the bed and hit the floor with a loud thump. He waited for the smash but it didn’t come. Carpet is good, he thought, and then wished he hadn’t as the act of thinking seemed to cause a fissure to open up in his brain. He groaned first at the pain and then at the memory of the night before.

  He had come home, opened the Yamakazi and finished the bottle. As far as he could see the only saving grace was that he had made it into bed. He didn’t need to speculate what had happened. It was the panic. The panic had gripped him tightly around his chest as soon as he stepped out of the Blood House Bar. It had sat on his windpipe as he hyperventilated in the car, and then it had crawled, with oxygen depleting tentacles, all over his body, making him cry out with fear.

  He hadn’t been able to wait to get home. There was no way he could drive in that condition. He had got out of the car and run to the Tesco Metro on the corner of Castle Street. He had headed straight to the booze section and bought two bottles of Yamakazi. The spotty youth who served him had given him a look of fear. He was puffing, trying and failing to breathe normally, to be normal. It hadn’t worked and the youth had looked down as he served him rather than face the pale, crazy man in front of him.

  He had the first bottle open as soon as he left the shop. The fine single malt was harsh when poured straight from the bottle into this mouth. But as soon as the first rush of alcohol was delivered to his brain, it began to dampen the flares and fires that were alight all along his sympathetic nervous system. A quarter of a bottle disappeared in seconds.

  He had sat down on a bench that was wet with foggy residue and tried to breathe. This time his lungs had responded and provided oxygen and he had felt the creature’s grip loosen as his head thickened pleasurably.

  ‘There you go,’ he had heard himself say. ‘There you go.’

  Now he looked outside the apartment window and down to the gravel driveway that he shared with two of the other apartments, one above, one below. He swore as he saw his old Golf there. Seems like he had driven home. At least it looked unmarked, which hopefully meant he hadn’t hit something or someone.

  He sat in his armchair and looked around the room. It didn’t need a CSI team to reconstruct what he had been doing last night. Records and CDs were scattered around the room, most of them on the floor, and his laptop was on the couch, still o
pen and running. He picked it up and placed it on the coffee table. It was burning hot, the fan whirring loudly. He wondered whether a laptop overheating on an old frayed sofa could cause a fire. The effort of wondering caused another blinding stab of pain, but not before he decided that yes it probably could.

  Erasmus let out a further groan as his foot found the second bottle of Yamakazi hidden under a record sleeve, The Fall’s I Am Kurious Oranj. He was thankful that the record cover and the floor underneath was soaking wet and stank of whisky. A two-bottle night would have left him incapacitated for a couple of days.

  Water, he needed water. He walked across to the kitchen diner and poured himself a long glass and drank it down, stumbled over to the couch and took a seat.

  Panic. She had been with him for years. Sometimes she would sleep and it was almost as if she had gone away. But then he would sense her, the insomniac twinge in the chest that your 4 a.m. brain told you was cancer, the fear of a late-night phone call, and there she was, not all over you, suffocating you like last night, but there, her breath on your neck, letting you know that she had never gone away.

  It was the violence, of course, that had brought it on. Erasmus hated violence and he hated even more men who welcomed it, who sought it out, thinking it some sort of game.

  He breathed out. Relax, relax, he told himself. Another panic attack now was always possible now he was hung-over and tired: she liked to hunt when the victim was weak.

  Erasmus sat forward. He needed a distraction. He hit the laptop space bar and the screen lit up; a cool blue light. Safari was open at a web page. It was Liverpool College for Girls’ website and there was a picture of a girls hockey team. Underneath the picture there was a caption: ‘Liverpool College Girls Hockey Team (Seniors) 2012’ and then a list of names identifying each of the players. Erasmus read the list and then looked back to the photograph. Third from the end, back row, was a pretty, dark haired girl with her hair pulled back. She was wearing no make-up and had healthy red apples in each cheek. The text below identified her as ‘Jess Tallow’. He recognised the surname but couldn’t quite place it.

  He had obviously had a busy night. He clicked on the History tab.

  He could see the combinations he had tried, there were lots of Google searches: Jess and Liverpool; Jessica and Liverpool and Blood House Bar; Jessica and Natalie Cole; Jessica and Gary Jones; Jessica and Wayne Jennings; Jessica and Everton. The History tab showed over a hundred such searches. The random throwing of darts by a blindfold, drunken, whisky-soaked fool. Even this morning he knew straight away how to find Jessica. It must have taken him hours the night before. So much for alcohol aiding creativity.

  He clicked on Facebook and found Natalie Cole. Her profile picture was of her and an almost identical female – same eye make-up, same hair do – sharing a cocktail. Her privacy settings were the lowest. She wanted the world to see her. He navigated the list of friends. There were two Jessicas and one of them sort of matched the girl in the Liverpool College photograph. Sort of matched because the picture on Natalie’s Facebook page was of what looked like an older, much more glamorous woman, pouting at the camera, hand on hips, a mix of sexual invitation and innocence. Christ knows what her old man thinks seeing his school age daughter go out like this, thought Erasmus. He clicked on Jess Tallow’s profile but instantly ran up against full privacy settings.

  A wave of nausea hit Erasmus and he swallowed hard, breathing through his nose, and just about holding onto last night’s dinner, what ever that had been. If he saw it again now at least he’d know what he had eaten. He chuckled out loud in hysteria

  Jess Tallow was from the fee-paying Liverpool College. It seemed football player worship cut across the class barrier. He Googled ‘Tallow’ and ‘Liverpool’ and was rewarded with over five hundred hits. The first five told him that he had been right recognising the name.

  Frank Tallow and Partners was a law firm operating from a small office in Castle Street, not five hundred yards from the Blood House Bar. Erasmus had run into Frank at a law society function. He remembered a sneering comment upon being introduced that may have been, ‘I didn’t realise that the military had a legal service,’ before he had turned his back on Erasmus. He had forgotten about him but now recalled his face. A weighty man with a rosy face and a self satisfied air.

  Frank specialised in media law, defamation, libel and privacy. The first few links were newspaper articles, PR puff pieces, that showed him standing next to a string of Z-list celebrities, shaking their hand and usually accompanied by some banal text about the partnership.

  Erasmus had half been expecting to find references to a missing daughter, a murder even. He wasn’t sure why but he had thought Natalie’s comment that Jess hadn’t been seen in months after threatening to talk to the papers meant she could have been the victim of a plot to silence her. But surely any disappearance of the daughter of Frank Tallow would have made the news? There was nothing.

  He clicked through a few more articles. Nothing about the daughter. Although there was a mention, not in the local rag which may take advertising from him, thought Erasmus, about an unsuccessful libel claim by a minor kids TV presenter which had been withdrawn by way of agreement between the parties. Frank Tallow was quoted as saying his client vehemently denied the accusations but for the sake of his family would not be pursuing the newspaper that had hinted at his predilection for young boys. This time there was no accompanying photograph of Frank Tallow shaking hands with the celebrity.

  Erasmus sank back into the embrace of the couch and decided that he needed to sleep. There seemed to be liquid concrete setting in the vicinity in of his cerebral cortex. Sleep, he told himself, but his body violently disagreed and he set off running towards the toilet.

  CHAPTER 15

  The thing is, nobody else knows what it’s like. They think they do, but they don’t. They talk endlessly about how they feel, how their friends have made them feel, how TV makes them feel, how life makes them feel! But they never, ever, ask me how I feel!

  I can tell you how I feel. Only you understand. I don’t want you to take this the wrong way but I never knew how lonely I really was until you found me. Only now, now that I know ‘LOVE’ – how strange and exciting it feels to type that word and how insufficient are those four letters to try and encapsulate all that I feel, the fire that flows in veins that were cold and empty – only now do I realise how little I knew of loneliness.

  Loneliness is not sitting in your bedroom crying like a child because no one else understands me. It’s not missing my dead pets or wanting to find someone, anyone, to talk to and tell them how I feel. I’ve had that all my life. I can deal with that, you know I can. Loneliness is the absence of love. I was lonely but until I found love, or until it found me, I didn’t know what its absence felt like. Now I do. In the moments when I am waiting for you I feel loneliness of a kind that I never knew existed.

  You filled the void and you know – without me telling you so many times it’s scary!! – how I feel because you feel it too. You tell me I am beautiful too. Even my ‘artwork’ – did you like the pictures I sent you? Like filigree you said!! – you understand like nobody understands me.

  But a loneliness I can’t bear, I know I can’t live with, stalks my sleepless nights. It’s the thought of the BITCH and whether she may harm you (and Jonathan and Katy, of course) and I would lose you. To have you fill the void and then to be left empty once again would not be to return me to how I was. It would be to KILL me, and – from what you have said – I know you feel the same way too.

  I know you may not read this now because of the BITCH but please!! Reply or IM me as soon as you can!!

  You have my heart and my blood.

  Love,

  Your everlasting Red xxx

  CHAPTER 16

  Frank Tallow’s house was in Mossley Hill, only half a mile from Erasmus’s flat, but the distance was more financial than geographic. It was a large mock Tudor mansion, at least seven bed
rooms, thought Erasmus as he smoked a cigarette that made him feel sicker than he already was.

  He leant back against one of the gateposts as a wave of dizziness passed through. Once the worst of it had subsided Erasmus walked up the long gravel drive way and rang the doorbell.

  Judging by Tallow’s age and career choice, Erasmus had been relying on traditional gender roles to be operating in the Tallow household and on a Thursday afternoon he had expected Mrs Tallow, if there was a Mrs Tallow, to answer the door. He was therefore a little surprised when the door swung open to reveal Frank Tallow himself.

  He was dressed casually, jeans and a sweater. He looked older than his fifty years, but yet still had a full head of hair, although Erasmus noticed straight away that the brown colouring was clearly an expensive salon addition. Most surprising of all was that Frank Tallow was wearing a pair of aviator sunglasses inside the house.

  ‘Yeah, who are you?’ asked Tallow.

  Erasmus had given his introduction some thought. What he hadn’t factored in was that at the precise moment that Tallow opened the door a fresh wave of nausea would wash over him and bile fill his mouth. Erasmus staggered to one side and put his arm out to steady himself against the doorframe.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Erasmus as he took deep breaths. This put off the outgoing bile for a second but then a dry heave came on. Luckily his stomach was empty but he still gagged as he stomach contracted and protested.

  ‘If you don’t get out of my sight right now I am calling the police!’

  Erasmus took a final deep breath.

  ‘Sorry about that. Something I ate last night.’

  Tallow was red in the face.

  ‘Get the fuck – ’ He squinted. ‘Hang on, don’t I know you from somewhere?’

  Erasmus stuck out his right hand. Tallow looked at it with distaste and made no effort to take it.