It was after I’d gone out one night and got pissed instead of paying the rent that I went to work for Planet. I saw their ad in the evening paper while I was sitting in the Princess Caroline in Battersea Park Road. Planet didn’t ask questions—just did you have a current driver’s licence, and it was cash. Instead of asking questions, they worked the shit out of you, the Creamleys did. Forty a week rent for the clapped-out old motor they hired you, another forty a week to the office for the business—you pay your repairs, you pay the petrol, you pay the insurance, you pay every fucking thing. Anything you had left over was your own. That wasn’t much. The ad promised you could make a hundred and fifty a week—they just forgot to say that it was gross. I couldn’t take more than a hundred and fifty gross in a good week anyhow. Once the recession started, you’d got two cars to half a punter. The Creamleys didn’t care if there were drivers queuing for a job all the way down the stairs—they were taking forty a week off each of them, weren’t they? Whether they got any work or not. The ones that didn’t like it could piss off; there were plenty more unemployed drivers.
I might have forty a week to live on if I was dead lucky, say, one week in four, if I didn’t get clobbered for my drops. Unlucky, I’d have to try and get a sub from Creamley: ‘What’s the matter, Two Four? You broke again? Here, here’s twenty, have a drink on me.’ It was all right for drivers with capital—they’d invested it in Rollers or Mercs, and got all the airport and wedding jobs, also taking Pakistani businessmen up to their factories in the north. But what could you expect to get with a clapped-out rented Maxi? No, you don’t get the meaty jobs with a ’74 Maxi, not with the upholstery burst on the back seat.
Financial disaster could strike you easily on my margin. I remember the night—I knew I had rust in the wheel arches—when the rear suspension collapsed when I was POB to Dollis Hill with three Turkish waiters from the Ef-Es Kebab on board. They were good about it—said it was only a ten-minute walk to their place now anyway. They even tried to give me the money for the fare. I wouldn’t take it, though, because they’d been good about the breakdown and because I hadn’t got them home. Well, it was three in the morning when they left with news-papers over their heads, it was pissing with rain, the way it only seems to in North London—really cold, really hard, really wet. I had to phone a garage to tow me in. Creamley said: ‘Christ, you again, Two Four.’ I had to pay for a new back axle, two weeks’ wages. It was throwing money away on that wreck. Creamley said: ‘You gotter understand, Two Four—if I started paying my drivers’ repairs, where’d my profit be, mate?’ And he had to lecture me. He said: ‘The trouble with you is, Charlie, you don’t work long enough hours. You can’t hope to make cabbing pay if you don’t sweat at it.’ I said: ‘I am sweating at it; I got a private life too, though.’ ‘So’ve I,’ he said, ‘only I keep it where it belongs.’ ‘Where’s that?’ ‘In bed,’ he says, ‘or else doing the books—it’s common sense, Two Four.’
Some of the punters, when you did get them, were no good, either. Not like the Turks. After the Jewish businesswomen, the worst of the lot were the Africans and the Japanese, in my experience. ‘Don’t you know your fuckin way, man? You white, an you don’t know your own city?’ ‘Don’t you know the short cut to Camden Square, driver?’ ‘I don’t like this nasty old car, it smells. Stop, driver. Radio for another.’
The tough drivers just used to tell them to fucking well get out and walk …
I rewound Staniland’s tape and put it with the pile on the kitchen table, whose Formica glittered back at me blue under the central light. Then I opened a cold can of export beer and tried to think back to the castle that Staniland’s sister-in-law had said they had once had, and from there through the tortured points in the course of his life that had led him to cabbing a rusty old Maxi five nights a week for Planet, and from that to this Spark woman, and from that to the terrible way he had died—in agony, and then contemptuously kicked and dragged by his killers into that wet shrubbery in Albatross Road. Where I identified with Staniland, what I had inherited from him, was the question why.
Mind, I had always asked it myself—but this why was not a copper’s why. Staniland’s question was the question I had once read on a country gravestone erected to a child of six: ‘Since I was so early done for, I wonder what I was begun for.’
Though Staniland had died at the age of fifty-one, he still had the innocence of a child of six. The naïve courage, too—the desire to understand everything, whatever the cost.
This fragile sweetness at the core of people—if we allowed that to be kicked, smashed and splintered, then we had no society at all of the kind I felt I had to uphold. I had committed my own sins against it, out of transient weakness.
But I hadn’t deliberately murdered it for its pitiful membrane of a little borrowed money, its short-lived protective shell—and that was why, as I drank some more beer and picked up the next of Staniland’s tapes, I knew I had to nail the killers.
Not just know them. Nail them. I switched on the player: On the terrace at Duéjouls, sixty feet above the road. Boiling hot, sitting in a wicker chair. A great butterfly, the biggest I’ve ever seen, lands in front of me. It’s black, gold and purple; it must be nearly ten centimetres across. Its wings shuffle in the roaring south wind which will bring rain in two days. The butterfly clings to the sunlit stones with difficulty; then it’s whirled away over the roof, its flight mindless yet circumstantial, like the pleasure of singing. A lizard darts from under the vine that shades me. It is primitive, yet an exact purpose in itself. Its tongue flickers; it stares sideways, poised for food or flight. It gasps with excitement under its scaly skin—it runs towards me unafraid, its existence elsewhere as long as I don’t move. But I cough over my cigarette and its head shoots up, the eyes and tongue flutter in a blur of movement—it is gone.
Physically I am here in Lewisham, but I am remember-ing the time when I worked at the hotel in Duéjouls. It is early January, half-past six in the morning, and the thermometer when I got on my Mobylette to go down to work said minus twelve. Behind the hotel, which is shut up for the winter, four of us are assembled to kill a pig. There is one dim light in the sty, and eight uneasy pigs.
‘Not that one,’ says the patron, Jean, ‘she’s on heat. Any of the others yes, that one, fine, the male.’
We surround and grab it; I get the rope with the noose round its hind legs and pull it tight. The pig is squealing; it knows all right.
‘Makes you feel like a criminal, doesn’t it?’ says Loulou, one of the men. He is squat, dark and young, with a broken nose. I work for him sometimes, and he reminds me of an engraving I once saw of Napoleon after the incident at Toulon early in his career. I agree with him. I feel like an executioner, too. It’s to do with the atmosphere in the sty—the dark, the single dim bulb, the intense, still cold. The only thing missing is the shot of cognac to give the victim before we do it to him.
‘Up on the bale with him,’ says Jean, pulling the other rope tight on the animal’s forelegs.
It takes all of us; the pig weighs a hundred and ninety kilos. Loulou and I hold the back legs I have lassoed; the others hold it by its front legs, and it writhes frantically on the straw. Somebody tugs on its ears, dragging the head back to expose its throat to the knife. Shut off in the next sty, over a low brick wall, the other pigs shuffle around grunting with fear, infected by the approaching death in their midst. Ours snarls and squeals. If only it were stupid! But nothing is.
‘Quickly, now,’ Jean says to the slaughterer.
I can smell death mixed with the smell of pigshit; it is a sharp, pungent smell, but not clean. The slaughterer approaches slowly in his rubber apron, a sixty-five-year-old peasant with rheumatism, sharpening a long knife on a steel sharpener.
‘Now then!’ says Jean sharply.
In goes the knife, a single thrust, point first, low into the right side of the throat down by the collarbone; the blood instantly starts to whistle out into the casserole that the
slaughterer’s wife is holding against the wound. They want to catch the blood to make black pudding with—a little garlic and mixed herbs with it, a sanquette, delicious. At first the pig screams louder than ever. The blood spurts out, a deep scarlet with bubbles in it; it steams in the cold, heavy air. Now the pig shits over my legs in its throes, then pisses into the straw bale. Loulou next to me gets a kick on the elbow and shouts: ‘Ah, putain de merde!’ The blood spatters feverishly, irregularly now, into the tin pot; now the animal’s struggles weaken. Still, it takes it ten minutes to die, and even then—
‘You can leave go now.’
I come round and look into the pig’s eyes where it lies on its side. Its big body is bloodless, has gone white. Dying, its jaws are half open and it shows its yellow teeth; it looks up and beyond me with an expression of disgust.
‘It’s still alive.’
‘No, no, it’s dead, Charles.’ The slaughterer’s wife has already started cutting into its snout; they’ve got another one to do before lunch.
But I was sure it wasn’t dead.
‘That’s just its nerves,’ said the slaughterer. ‘All right, let’s get it onto the big ladder and carry it out. Easy, now.’
‘Couldn’t you electrocute it?’ I said, when we had got outside. The sun was coming up at last, glaring yellow through the naked branches in the hotel garden.
‘Of course not,’ said the slaughterer. ‘You’ve got to get all the blood out. As long as the heart’s beating, that acts as a pump, that’s what gets all the blood out, see? The animal’s working for you like that.’
I said to Loulou quietly: ‘That was awful.’ I didn’t feel faint or sick, just cold inside.
‘Yes,’ said Loulou, ‘well, but what’s the use? If you don’t kill the fucking thing, you can’t eat it.’
So we carried the carcass out into the open and shaved off its bristles with cutthroat razors and hot water. Then Jean and the slaughterer started on the charcuterie, and I carried the slabs of meat, the chops, the ribs, the cutlets, the lights and all the rest of it down to the kitchen, where the women were waiting. Jean went off to salt the hams and twist the nerve and muscle out of them, and I stayed on to help in the kitchen, where there was a big fire going with marmites of boiling water over it. I listened to the women chattering away, exchanging village gossip while they worked.
Before he left, the slaughterer slapped me on the back. ‘First pig?’ he said. ‘Well, you’ll have fresh pork for your dinner today, I know Jean. Cheer up.’
Killing the pig didn’t turn me into a vegetarian. I just sat abstractedly over my pork chop at midday, thinking how good it was and finishing up every scrap of it, cutting back to the bone with my big pen-knife and sucking the marrow reflectively out of the end of the bone. Yet I still wondered how it must have felt to take ten minutes to die.
‘You did all right, you know,’ Jean said as we started off for the vineyards again at half-past one, to prune.
‘Not as well as the pig did,’ I said.
‘We’ll do another one next Monday,’ said Jean cheerfully. ‘There’s seven to go.’
Winter at Duéjouls, alone. I stand at the window with my back to the empty room; I have sold all the furniture that Margo didn’t take. I watch the rain attack across the mountain opposite, slashing the leaves off the poplars by the stream. Tomorrow I finish the vendange at the Champagnacs’, the grapes black and beautifully iced with a frost that turns your fingers blue. Yesterday I cut my hand with the knife, feeling neither the hand nor the knife. I poured wine on the cut, better than iodine. It’ll be difficult loading the tubs full of grapes onto the trailer. The trailer will be solid ice. The wine will be awful. Water. The Champagnacs are the only people who leave the vendange till the middle of November.
But this cold will pass. The woodlice will come out of the walls again with the spring rain; the snails will sail slowly through the young weeds on the path. There will be warm, wet mornings dark with cloud, and I’ll be out with my plastic bag and a stick to get a free dinner of snails, the petit gris. I’ll put them to fast for nine days with a sprig of thyme, then clean them till they spit with vinegar and salt, boil them out of their shells and cut the shit off them, then do a cold garlic butter with parsley and eat them off the special plates that Margo bought in the market. I shall eat them by candlelight and pretend it’s a dinner party. I shan’t put the radio on; it talks about nothing but war.
I listen to France Musique on the rare occasions when they stop playing Mozart and Haydn or some teaspoon concerto in T minor.
I shut my eyes and it is summer and Margo is back again, sitting out on the terrace with me. She is getting tanned, wearing the straw hat with poppies on it that she bought in the Nouvelles Galeries.
Did it happen? Before Barbara, did anything ever happen? Impossible—everything is impossible. Time plays such tricks—but why on me?
There was a silence on the tape. Then Staniland continued on a new tack:
What am I going to do about my stepson? I can’t go on giving him money, I haven’t any more. I gave him that five hundred when I borrowed on the equities, and then that other three. I’ve got to think of Charlotte. Margo, too. Margo has the house at Duéjouls for her lifetime, I’ve seen to that. If she sells, she just has to share the money with Charlotte. After all, Charlotte’s my flesh and blood—not like Eric. Margo shouldn’t have made that row at Planet; she thought I’d just pissed off and left her in the shit. But I hadn’t. I’d made all the dispositions I could. I’m broke, and I can’t make any impression with my writing. It isn’t my fault that people don’t want to hear things straight. I can’t work miracles.
I put on the next tape, which started:
Eric takes me for a pushover, a softy. Maybe I am one. But he’s ruthless. I know he can’t get a job; but he sees the world’s in a mess and he takes advantage of the situation by lying in bed all day. He’s also a drug addict. Okay. But I’m not responsible for him anymore—he’s twenty-three, it’s up to the state now. It’s not up to me—not up to his mother, either. Poor Margo—I’ve heard that if he’s not after me for money, then it’s her turn. But she’s not well off. She has to take in men to make ends meet.
The player fell silent again. I thought: Of course, I’ll trace Margo in the end, but it could take a long time. Suddenly Staniland broke in again and said:
I felt bad about her, I suppose I ought to go round to Callow Street one of these days, but I’m afraid there’d be a scene like there was at Planet. I wish I could find someone who would listen, instead of just a tape. Barbara? Barbara’s no bloody good. When I tried to tell her about Margo she just interrupted me and said, well, your ex-cow decided she wanted to play it on her own, so why don’t you leave her be?
Well, there was me to listen—though, true, it was too late. I switched the player off and looked at the time; ten to seven in the evening, a fine evening. In my early days I had worked at Chelsea nick—the prison. I shut my eyes and spread Chelsea out in a mental map. Callow Street was short; it ran north to south between Fulham and Elm Park Road. But there were a lot of flats in it. In fact, it was nearly all flats. But I wondered if I might have some luck for once and just find the name on one of the street doors. I was already down in the street by that time.
18
‘Mrs Staniland? Margo Staniland?’
‘Yes, that’s me.’
She had probably been a pretty woman with red hair and smooth breasts, but she wasn’t anymore; she seemed to have clouded over and shifted out of focus. The half smile had once been seductive; now it was vague. Her right eye was bloodshot. She had a kind face, with intelligence in it; but it didn’t look as if she used that anymore.
‘I don’t think I know you.’
‘I’m a police officer,’ I said. ‘I was wondering if I could come in.’ I thought: Does she know he’s dead? And does she care?
‘I was just going out, actually,’ she said. ‘But of course if—’ She gestured behind her into the
dark flat.
‘I won’t take up much of your time.’
‘It’s all right, I was only going to meet a friend for a drink. Over at the Water Rat by World’s End, do you know it? Just a drink to pass the time.’ She led the way into the sitting-room, dark even on this early summer’s evening. The room faced east. She sat down on the sofa and indicated the armchair. ‘Well? What have I done?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well, then?’
He Died with His Eyes Open (Factory 1) Page 10