The Final Testimony of Raphael Ignatius Phoenix

by Paul Sussman

  Most days, however, I would simply go out wandering, setting off early in the morning directly after breakfast, and returning late in the afternoon, tired and sweaty, just in time for tea. These excursions were not at all to the liking of the Nannybrook warden, who discouraged residents from venturing forth alone because so many of them tended to get lost or run over. Since I was clearly in full possession of all my faculties, however, there was little he could do, and I wandered on unchecked.

  I went all over the place. To Wimbledon Common, or Richmond Park, or right the way up the King’s Road, past the scene of Rick’s murder, and so into the very heart of London, where I’d spend the day in the British Museum, or in St James’s Park, or rowing about on the Serpentine. Sometimes I’d head over to Baker Street and stare at Emily’s old home, now converted into offices, or go up to Regent’s Park to gaze at the site of White Lodge, scene of my birth and first murder, now demolished and replaced with a gaggle of park amenities buildings. I never lingered, however. It made me unbearably melancholy to see my past so comprehensively obliterated.

  Occasionally Archie Bogosian would accompany me on these jaunts, although he tired more easily than I and we tended to spend long periods in pubs and cafés, eating peanuts and supping Guinness while he got his breath back. Here he would regale me with intricate tales of his lifetime’s adventures before suggesting a quick saunter up to Soho ‘just to get the blood to the extremities’. We’d duly set off, Archie scampering ahead excitedly like a beagle on a scent, eventually ending up in the front row of some musty subterranean porno cinema on to whose mildewed screen would be projected scenes of quite breathtaking explicitness. We would watch for an hour or so, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, and then leave, Archie making a point of going up to the ticket booth and politely asking the woman therein whether they would be showing The Sound of Music the following week.

  Aside from all that, there were two further pastimes in which I engaged during my years at Nannybrook.

  The first was ballroom dancing. Every Friday afternoon, regular as clockwork, residents, or at least those of us who were still able to walk, would gather in the dining hall, where Mr Minghella, a dapper little androgyne with blue-rinsed hair and a red velvet waistcoat, would take us through a bewildering array of foxtrots, polkas, waltzes, rumbas, tangos, quadrilles and hip-juddering bossa novas, beating time against the panelled walls with an old snooker cue whilst deftly operating a monstrous gramophone which he brought down from his room each week specially.

  There were always more women than men at these Friday-afternoon dance sessions, and many of the old ladies would thus have to dance together, clutching each other like star-crossed lovers. This delighted Archie Bogosian, who would waltz round the room whispering ‘No kissing, you filthy old lesbos!’ at any all-female pairings he happened to pass.

  I didn’t go every Friday, and politely declined to take part in the over-seventies competitions for which Mr Minghella was forever entering us, but it was, in its own way, thoroughly enjoyable. I would practise my steps alone in my room with a pillow, and, having suitably spiked her afternoon tea with vermouth, would generally get up a real head of steam with Mrs Goshen on the Mexican salsa. When Mrs Bunshop arrived, however, I stopped dancing, and never took it up again. The sight of her in the jazz disco session was, frankly, one of the most repugnant things I have ever seen in my entire life.

  Finally, and what suicide note would be complete without such an admission, I had sex. Not with the residents, of course (what an abominable notion!), and not, perhaps, as much as I would have liked, but given my circumstances I think I did pretty damn well. Better, certainly, than I had any right to expect at my age.

  My sex life has always been something of a cyclical affair, swinging from the strenuously active to the depressingly dormant and back again. When I was a film star, for instance, I had an awful lot of it; even more when I played in a rock band. At Cambridge I did OK, and whilst maybe not prolific, my years in Liverpool were by no means barren either. In the prison camp, on the other hand, I had none whatsoever, whilst the 24 years I spent at Tripally Hall were, with the exception of the local baker’s wife, almost exclusively chaste. The insalubrious half-decade before my arrival at Nannybrook had been unmitigatedly sexless, and I now therefore felt I had a deal of catching up to do.

  I started about a week after my arrival at Nannybrook with a large-breasted Irish nurse named Madeleine who wore a starched cotton uniform and had a small mole on her left cheek.

  ‘You’re very young-looking for your age, Mr Phoenix!’ she said one evening, standing beside my bed with a cup of cocoa and three garibaldi biscuits on a plate. ‘I could fancy you myself.’

  ‘Do you?’ I inquired, raising my eyebrows seductively. She blushed red as a sunset.

  ‘Oh Mr Phoenix, what a question!’

  ‘Because I fancy you,’ I said.

  ‘Mother of God, I work here!’

  I said nothing.

  ‘I work here!’ she repeated.

  Again, nothing.

  ‘It’s quite out of the question. You’re 76.’

  I ran my hand gently up her thigh and across her hip, and then leant over and turned out the light. By the time I got round to my cocoa it was quite cold.

  After Madeleine, there was Pam, who worked in the kitchens, and Ms Crux the physiotherapist, and Cindy, who did the gardening, and a couple of other nurses, and even the warden’s spinster sister. I had sex in my bedroom, and in their bedrooms, and in the backs of cars, and on Putney Heath, and even, once, in the downstairs lavatory, for which occasion I graffitied a special limerick:

  I hope the warden will treat with lenience

  This terrible act of disobedience,

  For where most people dump

  I’m having a hump

  Hooray for the great British convenience!

  I enjoyed my sex – as I always do – and so, hopefully, did my partners. (The warden’s spinster sister certainly seemed to have a good time, if her cries of ‘Oh Christ, it’s been so long!’ were anything to go by.) I steered clear of any emotional attachment, however. Quite aside from the obvious impracticality of the thing, I had neither the desire nor the capacity to bestow anything beyond the most perfunctory of affections on those with whom I slept. When it comes to feelings, I’ve only ever had room for Emily.

  And that, pretty much, sums up my life at Nannybrook. Walking, reading, backgammon, television, runner beans, dancing and sex. A little straight-laced by my standards, but then I was in my eighties, and I made up for it by doing for Mrs Bunshop. Not that anyone knew I’d done for her, of course. They all thought I was trying to save her. That’s the funny thing about murder. It’s so open to misinterpretation.

  I had been at Nannybrook for eight years when Mrs Bunshop took up residence in the room beside mine, to the left as you looked at them from the corridor.

  Archie Bogosian, with a certain prophetic foresight, had sniggeringly dubbed this room ‘The Morgue’, for more people had died in it than anywhere else in the house, six whilst I was there alone, two within a couple of weeks of each other. ‘One for the morgue!’ Archie would announce as each new occupant arrived. ‘Break out the embalming fluid!’

  So high, indeed, was the death count amongst my next-door neighbours, so regular and frequent their decease, that I began to wonder if perhaps mere proximity to me could kill people, without my even raising a finger. I mentioned the idea to Archie, who thereafter insisted I spend as much time as I could sending out my killer rays beside the Nannybrook warden. The latter remained resolutely and disappointingly alive, however, and my friend eventually put the whole thing down to the large metal floodlight bolted just beneath The Morgue’s window.

  ‘Too much electricity,’ he explained. ‘Pollutes the air. Worse than radiation.’

  The Morgue had been empty for almost a month when Mrs Bunshop arrived, its previous occupant having died of a heart attack whilst practising yoga in his bathroom. I was sitting do
wnstairs on the front veranda when she pulled up in a tiny yellow car, driven, I later discovered, by her son, Simon.

  My first sighting of Mrs Bunshop produced an image, which, for me, was always to define her. Her son opened the passenger door and she swung herself out, skirt rucking up around her waist, legs opening violently in my direction. I looked up and caught her staring straight at me, right into my sapphire-blue eyes. She waved, winked, and made no effort whatsoever to close or lower her legs, remaining, indeed, spread-eagled in the car doorway for considerably longer than was strictly necessary to achieve egress from the vehicle.

  ‘Cooey!’ she screeched, nodding jovially at me.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I muttered.

  Later that night I was lying on my bed, smoking a cigarette and scribbling limericks for the downstairs loo on a pad of paper, when there was a soft tap at my door.

  Thinking that perhaps it was Archie come for a late-night chat, or Bernie Mtembe with the backgammon money he owed me, or perhaps a nurse with a cup of cocoa – wink wink! – I extinguished my cigarette, put on a dressing gown and threw open the door. And there was Mrs Bunshop.

  ‘Surprise!’ she bellowed, holding up two plastic cups and a bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream, singularly my least favourite drink ever. ‘Getting-to-know-you time!’

  ‘I’m just doing some writing,’ I said, hoping she might take the hint and leave me alone. No such luck.

  ‘Writing!’ she cried, delighted. ‘I knew you were an intellectual as soon as I saw you. Your eyes are full of wisdom. Are you a former professor?’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Nothing of the sort.’

  ‘Oh well,’ she chortled. ‘You look like one. Like a genius. I’m your new neighbour.’

  She was clad in a thick woollen dressing gown and high-heeled pink slippers. Her lips were smeared all over with a buttery layer of bright red lipstick and surmounted by a thick black moustache. She smelt of lavender perfume, with just the faintest tinge of formaldehyde, and carried beneath her left arm an ominously large red-leather photo album.

  ‘I saw you through the window when I arrived,’ she said, arching her false eyebrows in a most suggestive manner. ‘You were staring at me as I got out of the car.’

  I denied that I had been doing any such thing and endeavoured to manoeuvre her out of the door. She was having none of it, however, and, oblivious to my protests, barged into the room and poured me a huge cup of sweet sherry.

  ‘Cheers,’ she said, plonking herself on the end of the bed. ‘Down the proverbial.’

  I sighed, accepted the sherry and moved as far away from her as I possibly could.

  ‘And have you settled in?’ I asked by way of small talk.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I’m perfectly comfortable. Although I would have preferred to stay at home. But he won’t have me there, you see. Wanted me out so I won’t see the Greek boys. He does it to them, you know.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘Simon, of course. My son. Makes out he’s doing me a big favour bringing me here, but it’s because he wants me out. So I won’t see the Greeks. He’s been bringing them back ever since Ted passed away. Ted wouldn’t have stood for Greeks in the house. Ted wouldn’t stand for any foreigners.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I watch them through the keyhole. Horrible. And we gave him such a good education. He once won the school egg and spoon race, you know.’

  She downed her sherry and poured herself another.

  ‘Drink up,’ she said, indicating my as yet untouched glass. ‘Don’t hold back on my account. I’m Ethel, by the way. Ethel Bunshop, née Boocock.’

  ‘Phoenix,’ I said. ‘Raphael Phoenix.’

  She roared with laughter.

  ‘Phoenix! Phoenix! What’s that? A bird or something? A bird that catches fire.’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘I hope you won’t be catching fire while I’m here.’

  ‘I shall do my best to avoid it,’ I answered.

  ‘Seventy-four, and still got my own teeth,’ she announced proudly. ‘Simon won’t at my age. Not the way he goes at it with those Greeks.’

  She gulped at her sherry, draining the second glass and letting out a small burp.

  ‘Noisy pipes you’ve got,’ she said, wiping her mouth and trailing a blood-red smear of lipstick up to her ear. ‘Mind, you’re a handsome man, aren’t you? Handsome and intelligent. I bet you’re a one with the ladies. Secret liaisons late at night. Sweaty gropes in cramped cupboards. I see you have a cupboard over there.’

  ‘I live quite a quiet life,’ I assured her. ‘Very quiet.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘Single! I do hope you’re not going to ravish me.’

  ‘Nothing could be further from my mind,’ I said firmly.

  ‘Oh.’ She seemed rather disappointed, and lapsed into silence, tapping her feet on the floor and pouring herself another glass of sherry.

  ‘I never thought it would end like this,’ she sighed after a while. ‘In a home. You never do, do you? You have such high hopes. Such dreams. But the dreams just fade.’

  She sounded so despondent as she said this, and appeared so shrivelled and wretched, that I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy for the old moose. I took a sip of my sherry to try to appear friendly, and, forcing a reassuring smile across my face, told her that Nannybrook really wasn’t that bad, and that I was sure everything would turn out OK. I obviously overdid it, for, rather than just perking up, as I had intended her to do, she leapt bodily from the bed, displaying in the process considerable elasticity for one her age, and threw her arms around me (she only came up to the level of my waist, leaving her rouge-lipped mouth pressed somewhere around my belly-button).

  ‘Thank you!’ she cried. ‘Oh thank you. I’ve been so worried. But now I’m not any more. We’ll get through it together.’

  I tried to prise her off, but she was having none of it, clinging to me tenaciously like a koala to a tree trunk.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she whispered. ‘We’ll get through it together. I think I’ll have another sherry, and then we’ll look at the photos. I’m only 58, you know.’

  She stayed for three hours, finishing the Bristol Cream, smoking 18 of my cigarettes (‘Just one more, to keep you company!’) and guiding me with eviscerating slowness through the opening pages of the vast red leather album (‘Nine aunts, you know, and all but one married to a vicar!’). Only when the grandfather clock on the landing struck one did she reluctantly shut the enormous tome and totter towards the door.

  ‘You’ve kept me well past my bedtime – we’ll have to finish this at a later date,’ she cooed, her pudgy fingers stroking the spine of the album. ‘You naughty boy.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said curtly, opening the door and shepherding her out into the corridor. ‘I can assure you it won’t happen again.’

  ‘I don’t mind!’ she trilled. ‘It’s good to talk. To’ – and here she leaned towards me and grasped my hand – ‘liaise. Goodnight, dear Mr Phoenix!’

  She winked knowingly, and staggered off.

  Over the ensuing weeks and months Ethel Bunshop née Boocock became the bane of my existence. I didn’t think it possible that anyone could be quite that much of a nuisance. Could make my life quite that unpleasant. But she managed it. Oh boy did she manage it. Dreadful woman.

  Every morning at 8 a.m., without fail, she would lurk in the corridor like some malevolent spirit, waiting to accompany me down to breakfast. I took to leaving my room earlier and earlier in the hope of avoiding her, but she always caught me. Once I crept out at 5.30 a.m. and she was still there, leaning against the panelled wall like a wrinkled courtesan.

  ‘Do you sleep out here, Mrs Bunshop?’ I asked angrily.

  ‘I thought I heard a noise,’ she explained. ‘I came to investigate.’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing here, so you can go back to sleep.’

  ‘Oh but I’m awake now. Perhaps I’ll come
downstairs with you.’

  ‘I’m not going downstairs,’ I lied.

  ‘Well, where are you going?’

  ‘Nowhere. Back into my room.’

  ‘Then why did you come out?’

  ‘I came out, Mrs Bunshop, so I could go back in again. So I could stand in the corridor and experience the inestimable pleasure of walking back across the threshold of my room and slamming the door behind me.’ Which I duly did, with a crash and a growl.

  ‘Have I said something wrong?’ came a concerned voice from the other side of the door.

  ‘No!’ I shouted. ‘Nothing at all.’ And then went back to bed, falling into an uneasy slumber until I was woken at eight on the dot by a soft tapping on the door and a cry of ‘Breakfast, Mr Phoenix. Jam and croissants, like lovers on the Champs Élysées!’

  ‘Bollocks,’ I muttered.

  Nights were equally as bad, save that whereas in the mornings I dreaded coming out, last thing, I dreaded coming in. Again, she’d always be there, waiting, loitering, hovering like some horrible shrivelled wasp, ready to pounce with the next instalment from her photo album and bottle of disgusting sweet sherry.

  ‘Well, fancy meeting you, Mr Phoenix,’ she’d say as I reached the top of the stairs, all surprise and innocence, as if she hadn’t been waiting for me at all and the whole thing was just some extraordinary coincidence. ‘I was just doing some dusting, but now you’re here we might as well have a glass of sherry.’

  ‘No, thank you, Mrs Bunshop, I really am rather tired.’

  ‘It’ll help you sleep. It’s Harveys, you know. Better than Mogadon.’

  ‘I think not,’ I’d say, edging towards my door, key at the ready. ‘It’s very kind, but I’ve been walking all day and feel like a nice long bath. So if you wouldn’t mind . . .’ All this whilst surreptitiously insinuating my key into the lock, opening the door and making ready to dash inside. But old bugger lips was quicker. God she was quick. I’d get halfway in and just be pushing the door shut when that fucking photo album would be jammed in the gap like an enormous leather doorstop.