by Paul Sussman
There had, up to that point, been little method in my note. I had simply charged ahead, my sole aim being to recount as much of my life as possible in the week or so left me before I swallowed my pill. I wasn’t working to any great scheme. I just wanted to get it all down. At no point did I harbour what might be termed grander aspirations.
All that changed, however, with my arrival at the doorway of the eastern gallery, an event that coincided almost precisely with the start of my adventures with Walter. For several paragraphs the significance of this confluence of story and location quite escaped me. Only after I had written some nine feet of column on the gallery wall did the possibilities of the situation suddenly burst upon me, like a brilliant flash of light.
Why not, I thought, organize my note so that each murder corresponds to a specific room? Contain it within four walls, confine it to one area, like the galleries of a museum, each charting a particular period of history. That way, as well as being links in a longer chain, each murder could stand as an entity in its own right, part of a story, yet distinct from it. Just imagine! The Walter X Room. The Lord Slaggsby Gallery. The Keith Cream Salon. Places where you could not only read about a death but walk right into the middle of one. Feel it unfolding all about you, like a kaleidoscope of words and images.
‘What a brilliant idea!’ I yelled to myself, my voice ringing dully around the emptiness of my abode. ‘I’m not just writing a suicide note. I’m creating something people can actually experience. A masterpiece of interior decoration!’
Thrilled by my brainwave, I threw aside my pen and hurried up to the dome to think it out properly, pouring myself a large glass of thick red wine to accompany my ruminations.
The obvious difficulty was that I’ve committed ten murders in my life but have only nine rooms in my castle, four on the ground floor, four, of exactly the same dimensions, above, and one cellar (see plan on north wall of foyer).
This was compounded by the fact that Mrs Bunshop, true to her nature as an annoying old hag, had taken up the best part of two rooms at the start of the note, leaving me only seven rooms in which to recount a further nine killings.
For a moment it looked as if my beautiful scheme wouldn’t fit, like a jigsaw with too many pieces. Then, however, it occurred to me that the eastern gallery, and the corresponding room above it, were effectively the size of two rooms rolled into one, and could therefore contain two murders each. On that basis I would be able to shoe-horn the remaining deaths into the remaining rooms, my last murder (which was, of course, my first murder) taking place upstairs in my bedroom. This final death being a relatively short one, I would still have enough wall space left to explain what happened three nights ago with Emily, before concluding my note neatly at the doorway to the roof stairs. It would be a complicated business, and would require careful planning, but it was definitely within the realms of possibility. I whooped in delight, and poured myself another glass of wine to celebrate.
Here, then, is the scheme I have settled upon for my note. No longer a thoughtless, headlong rush into oblivion, but rather an assured procession of words and memories, leading me dignified towards the hour of my decease. In each room will be segment of my past; and between the rooms – in the foyer, and up the stairs, and around the first-floor landing, interspersing my misdeeds like white squares between black on a chessboard – shall be arranged the last days of my present. To keep the two absolutely separate might not be possible. Some murders, after all, are longer than others, and some rooms bigger, so that the past may well end up bursting its banks and flooding into the present, and the present, likewise, could leak annoyingly into a space that was meant to be past. In general, however, if I can create an impression, however flawed, of my past being on one side of a door and my present on another, then I shall have achieved all I want with my note.
‘It will be the most splendid note ever!’ I exclaimed excitedly, making my way back downstairs and setting to work again. ‘The note to end all notes. The note that all future notes aspire to. I might even get in the papers!’
One adjustment that had to be made immediately was a reduction in the size of my writing. Up to that point it had been rather large, each letter the size of a ripe walnut, so that even from a distance, and with eyes as bad as mine, you could still clearly make out what had been written.
To have maintained that size of lettering, however, would have been to eat too quickly into the space I had available, to move along too hurriedly, not merely scuppering my one room/one murder idea, but exhausting the castle’s entire supply of wall space before my story was half done.
I therefore decided to telescope my letters, reducing them from the size of walnuts to that of raisins. One can no longer read them from a distance, and the effort of concentration makes my eyes ache and my elbow and wrist cry out in disapproval, but at least I know I’ll get it all in. A little further along I might increase the size again, if it’s looking like I might come up short of my intended destination. To have space left would be as disappointing as to run out of it.
With my lettering reduced, and my intentions clarified, things really started to flow. My pen rushed across the wall like a skate across ice, the words racking up like line after line of marching ants. It was as if, imbued with a sudden sense of purpose, the note came alive beneath me. As though it were not a note at all, but rather some mythical creature galloping through my castle with little old me clinging desperately to its back. By dawn I had filled all the space between the door of the gallery and its northern wall, by late morning I had completed the northern wall itself and by early afternoon poor old Walter was descending towards Putney Hill attached to a giant balloon and the note had washed up against the first of the gallery’s east-facing windows. Which is, pretty much, where I find myself now.
So far, then, things have been going well. I’m enjoying myself immensely, and thoroughly looking forward to dying. I keep bursting into song, anything from Wagnerian arias to Sixties pop hits, and every now and then shimmy backwards from the wall as if dancing, something I haven’t done since old haddock-lips arrived at Nannybrook. The Pill sits contentedly in the breast pocket of my pyjamas, alongside The Photo. Every now and then, and rather to my embarrassment, I take them both out and hold them up so they can see what I’ve done so far. They are, of course, inanimate objects, but I like to think that, in their own way, they approve of my efforts to date.
It hasn’t all been plain sailing, of course. Not by a long shot. The further I’ve got into the note, indeed, the more problems have arisen.
Bottoms, for instance. The bottoms of my columns, that is. I have already mentioned what a strain it is writing up near the ceiling, 15 feet above the ground. It is equally if not more exhausting, however, working at the other end of the wall, down near the floor. Here, in order to bring each column as close to the ground as possible, one is obliged to sink to one’s knees and double up as though in prayer, hunching one’s shoulders and bending one’s arms as each successive line shunts you further and further downwards. By the time you finally hit the skirting board, about a foot from the floor, you’re practically standing on your head, and every movement wafts an irritating billow of dust right into your face. Once again I have been tempted to narrow the parameters of the note, but once again have decided against it. The physical discomfort is easily outweighed by the extraordinary impression a wall covered floor to ceiling in teetering columns of writing makes. Without the backache my note wouldn’t be half what it is.
Another obstacle has been doorways. The note, remember, is not being written along one continuous expanse of wall. It has corners to turn, and angles to negotiate. It is like a river, bending and twisting and squirming and writhing; and whilst its flow is always mono-directional – i.e. left to right – there are places where its progress is diverted or interrupted, just as with a river, with its rocks and sandbars and eddies and cataracts.
In most cases the confusion isn’t too severe. At a right angle – bet
ween walls, for instance – it’s fairly evident that the bottom of the column to the left of the angle corresponds to the top of the column to the right of it.
Doors, however, present more of a challenge. How, on reaching a doorway, is one to get the note round and into the room beyond without too much disruption to its flow? How is the reader, presuming there is a reader, to know that when the narrative breaks off near the floor on one side of the door it then reappears near the ceiling on the other?
To me it’s obvious, but then I’m the author. A complete stranger might get horribly confused, and that won’t do. I want my death to be a smooth and fluid progression, not a lurching, juddering struggle from one uncertainty to the next. I want its direction to be obvious and unavoidable, just as, in many ways, the direction of my own life has been obvious and unavoidable.
How, then, to clarify exactly where the note is going? One possibility was to write a belated preface to the whole thing, explaining exactly how it should be read. Something along the lines of ‘Kindly remember that whenever this note reaches a door it continues in the room on the other side’. That, however, seemed rather heavy-handed, as did the idea of inscribing ‘Please Go Through’ or ‘Enter!’ or ‘This Way If You Don’t Mind’ above every lintel.
In the end I settled for a somewhat simpler option, drawing a long arrowed line from the point where the note leaves off on one side of each door to the point where it reappears on the other. That way, like a fish on a hook, your attention is dragged inexorably from the bottom of one column around the corner and up to the start of the next. It looks a mite clumsy, like something you’d find in a child’s drawing book, but at least it does the job. Better to have it clumsy and clear than neat and confused.
I don’t want to go overboard about bottoms and doorways. They have presented difficulties, but by no means insurmountable ones. A greater, if less tangible concern, and one that has been causing me substantially more worry, has been memory.
I have always considered my memory to be, if not perfect, at least very nearly so. I have an extraordinary capacity for recalling my past, to the extent that tiny snatches of conversation, engaged in as many as ninety years ago, remain lodged in my mind like fish bones in a throat. Obviously I can’t remember everything – to retain the entirety of one’s history would be as burdensome as wandering around with a full set of Encyclopaedia Brittanicas strapped to your head – but most of it’s still there, stored away in the distant recesses of my brain like books on the shelves of a library. All I have to do is to think to myself, ‘Now, what happened at such and such a time?’ and chances are the memory will be there. It might take a bit of looking to find it – if my mind’s a library it’s an exceedingly badly catalogued one – but I usually get there in the end. Not much has been lost these past hundred years.
Or at least that’s what I thought. Now, however, doubts have begun to creep in. For instance, I initially had it in my head that Mrs Bunshop’s name was in fact Mrs Burlap. I have absolutely no idea why, nor where the name Burlap came from, but I had already finished her story and moved on to a description of my castle when, like a thunderbolt from above, the truth suddenly burst upon me.
I was, to put it mildly, horrified. I’d murdered the bloody woman, after all. To forget the names of one’s victims is the very worst form of impoliteness. Far worse than actually killing them. I had to spend a frantic half-hour going back over everything I’d written, scribbling out all mentions of Burlap and inserting the correct name.
At first I hoped this would just be a one-off, a momentary lapse, which is why I didn’t mention it yesterday. Early in the eastern gallery, however, as I described my first meeting with Walter, I suddenly dropped my pen and cried in anguish:
‘The Nannybrook warden’s a man!’
For some inexplicable reason I’d recalled him as a woman, a rather malevolent female presence, prowling the midnight corridors with a bedpan, tweed skirt and large set of keys. Mistaking a name is one thing. Mistaking a gender, especially that of someone as conspicuously masculine as the full-bearded Norman Stoppard, was an error bordering on senility. Once again I was forced to stop what I was doing and hurry back across the walls, hunting down all references to ‘she’ and replacing them with a doubly underlined ‘he’.
I have, I must confess, been profoundly unnerved by these mistakes. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d simply forgotten Mrs Bunshop’s name, if where that name should have been there was merely a blank. It’s not the actual loss of memory that worries me. Rather it is the fact that instead of losing memories I am unwittingly falsifying them. Burlap for Bunshop. Female for male. Minutely altering the tapestry of my past. Pulling out its threads and replacing them with ones of an altogether different colour. Damaging the picture.
This is most alarming. Memories, after all, impart our sense of self; the feeling that we have roots, a past, a journey preceding our present. To falsify that past, however unintentionally, is in a way to diminish ourselves. I don’t want to be diminished. I want to be elevated. I want to die knowing where I’ve come from.
It’s four hours later, about 6.30 p.m., and I feel a lot better. I think I got a bit hysterical back there. My handwriting certainly looks like that of a man on the verge of a breakdown, all scrawly and ragged, dipping up and down across the wall like the rails of a roller-coaster.
A visit to the roof, however, has done much to calm me. I watched the winter sun go down, and then sat in the dome for a while, chain-smoking and gazing out across the darkening ocean. It was very quiet, very peaceful, and I felt my concerns melting away. Two mistakes, after all, hardly merit a full-on existential crisis. Henceforth I shall just get on with it. I’ll write it down as I think it happened, and if the truth is something completely different, well, so be it. What is truth, anyway? Were Archie or Walter any less real because they based their lives on fantasies? Of course not. It’s what you believe that counts.
I believe my name is Raphael Ignatius Phoenix, that I am close on a hundred years old, that I have committed many murders, and that I have in my possession a small round pill that will kill in seconds. I believe I am homing in on my death, like a pigeon homes in on its loft after a long and exhausting flight, and that that death will take place in the dome early on the morning of 1st January 2000. I believe, above all, in me.
And if ‘me’ should turn out to be a mirage? Well, what can you do? The alternative would be to ignore myself altogether, which is quite out of the question. The only thing worse than leaving a mistake-ridden account of my life would be to leave no account at all. I insist on posterity. I deserve to be known.
PS. I also have wings.
CHAPTER SIX
NEXT BEFORE WALTER. (Question: Can one actually say ‘next before’, or does the use of ‘next’ presuppose a future occurrence rather than a past one? Sounds pedantic, I know, but these things are important. I shouldn’t like my masterpiece to appear ungrammatical.) Anyway, right or wrong, next before Walter was Keith Cream, doyen of rock and, so far as I’m, aware, the only person I’ve ever killed accidentally.
I crossed paths with Keith in the February of 1969, shortly after the killing of Lord Slaggsby. Barely had the wheels of the latter’s bathchair stopped turning before Emily had picked me up in her van and driven me south, depositing me a day later in the centre of London. I was clad, of all things, in a pair of candy-striped bell-bottoms and a tie-dyed shirt, and, as is generally the case after I’ve murdered someone, had not the least idea what to do with myself.
‘Goodbye, Raphael,’ cried my golden-haired darling as she dropped me off in Soho. ‘You look fantastic!’
‘Wait!’ I shouted, banging on the side of her van. ‘I don’t know what to do! I’m almost 70, for Christ’s sake!’
‘You’ll be OK. Have fun! Live a little!’
‘How in God’s name am I supposed to live? Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know!’
‘Do be careful, Raphael! You’ll get run over. Goodbye! G
oodbye!’
‘Please, Emily! Where are you going?’
She shouted something, but it was lost in a blast of hooting from the cars behind. I grasped despairingly at her rusted bumper and then she was gone, swallowed up in a surge of traffic. Once again it looked like I was going to have to start my life from scratch.
‘Bloody damn it,’ I muttered, fingering The Pill in my pocket. ‘Bloody damn damn it!’
Soho wasn’t at all as I remembered it. The last time I’d been there was as a child over half a century ago when it had been a rather drab, nondescript confusion of narrow streets and small shops, peopled in the main by artisans and Italian immigrants.
The scene that now confronted me was rather different. Crowds of people bustled in all directions; music belched from the interiors of garishly lit cafés, and everywhere I looked there were strip clubs and sex cinemas and peep shows and porn shops. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.
I wandered around aimlessly for a while, staring up at the winking neon signs and taking in the unfamiliar clothes and sounds; and then, feeling decidedly disorientated, ducked into a pub and ordered a large whisky. Nothing like a large whisky to settle the nerves.
‘Better make it a treble,’ I told the barmaid.
She served me, and I looked around for somewhere to sit. Most of the tables were taken, but after a bit of casting back and forth I noticed a space in a smoky booth at the back of the pub and duly made my way over and sat down. To my right a young couple were kissing and fondling each other, whilst to my left sat a morose-looking man in dark glasses, supping a pint of bitter. He had a large moustache, bushy sideburns and a voluminous Afro hairdo, which, sitting as it did atop a livid green shirt, made him look rather like a dandelion. I wondered if I blew at him whether all his hair would fly away.
I’d been ensconced beside the latter for almost 15 minutes when, apropos of nothing, he suddenly spoke.