by Paul Sussman
Whereupon, rather enjoying my game, I slowly pulled off the ribbon with which the box was done up and opened the lid. Inside was arranged a mouth-watering selection of éclairs, cream slices, strawberry pastry horns, doughnuts, meringues and custard tarts.
‘Oh God, I can smell them!’ whimpered Lord Slaggsby. ‘I can smell the cream!’
I selected the largest strawberry pastry horn I could find – as the name suggested, a horn-shaped pastry filled with cream and strawberries – and, leaning forward, screwed it on to His Lordship’s nose. Really screwed it on, as hard as I could, twisting it back and forth and pushing it right up against his withered old cheeks, so that it remained in place even when I withdrew my hand, protruding from the middle of his face like a large rocket. Thick tongues of cream dripped downwards on to his coat.
For a moment my employer was lost for words – the only time, incidentally, I ever knew him to be so – before, with a great deal of rocking back and forth in his seat, and thumping of fists on the chair’s armrests, neither of which activities, incidentally, served to dislodge the offending pastry horn, he screamed:
‘I’m going to fucking horsewhip you, you dirty little queer—’
He got no further, however, for, picking out a particularly extravagant meringue, I worked the latter firmly into his mouth like a cork into a bottle.
‘Urgggggh!’ he sputtered, a spray of cream emitting from the corners of his lips. ‘Urgggggh!’
I watched him as he blustered and spat, and then upended the box on to his head – one éclair dangling down on either side like a pair of earmuffs – before walking round to the back of the chair, knocking off the brakes and, with a heave, sending it flying off down the hill. It gathered speed as it went, despite His Lordship’s frantic efforts to reapply the brakes, and by the time it reached the humpback bridge at the bottom must have been going at near enough 50mph. This itself was not necessarily enough to kill him. What was, however, was the tractor approaching from the far side of the river, into the front of which Lord Slaggsby and his wheelchair slammed with a sickening thud as they both met at the very apex of the bridge, His Lordship disappearing head-first into the tractor’s radiator as though into the mouth of some large animal. I looked on for a moment as the tractor driver hurried round to the front of his steaming vehicle and tugged vainly at His Lordship’s inert legs, and then stepped back from the road and crouched down behind the holly bush to consider my next move.
I was still crouching behind the holly bush considering my next move thirty minutes later when the camper van pulled up. It was a blue camper van, with a puttering exhaust and rusty bumpers, and initially I thought it might be a police vehicle. Police vehicles, however, don’t generally have ‘Peace’ painted in large white letters down the side, and after a moment of panic I relaxed.
‘They’ve probably just stopped to take in the view,’ I mused. ‘I’d better move further back into the trees, though. I don’t want anyone to see me just at the moment.’
I duly came to my feet and, turning, began to creep further back into the woods. I had only gone a few yards, however, when I was brought up by the sound of a voice. A familiar voice.
‘Is there anyone there?’
‘No,’ I thought. ‘It can’t be. Not here. Not now. It’s just too outrageous.’
‘Hello,’ came the voice again. ‘I seem to be lost. I’m looking for Tripally village.’
‘Emily?’ I cried, turning round and hurrying back to the road. ‘Emily, is that you? Tell me it’s you!’
‘OK,’ she laughed – for her it was, sitting in the van, as young and beautiful as ever, an enormous map spread on the dashboard before her – ‘it is me!’
‘I don’t believe it,’ I yelped. ‘It can’t be true. What are you doing here?’
‘I told you. I’m trying to find Tripally village.’
‘Why, for God’s sake?’
‘Because once I find Tripally village I’ll know where I am on this map.’
She lifted the giant map and tried to fold it in half, but it refused to cooperate, buckling back and over her head, which it enveloped like a large bonnet. I leaned through the window and peeled it off her.
‘The village is just down there,’ I said, helping her bring her chart back under control, ‘on the other side of the river.’
‘Oh dear,’ she sighed. ‘I seem to have gone round in a big circle. Still, at least I know where I am now.’
She crumpled the map into a large ball and threw it over her shoulder.
‘Well, get in then,’ she said.
‘What do you mean, “get in”?’
‘I mean get in, of course. We’re going to London. You can keep me company. And we’ll have to do something about those clothes. You look ridiculous.’
And that was that. I got in the van, we drove down the hill and over the bridge into the village – ‘Oh look!’ said Emily. ‘Someone’s tractor seems to have broken down’ – and then onwards towards the south. In the early afternoon we stopped off for a bite to eat and to exchange my butler’s uniform for a pair of candy-striped bell-bottoms and a tie-dyed shirt – ‘That’s much better,’ said Emily. ‘You look 20 years younger’ – and then continued on our way. At about 9.30 that night we pulled into gaudy, neon-lit Soho. Which is, you will remember, where an entirely different murder begins.
‘Goodbye, Raphael!’ cried Emily, nosing her van out into the traffic. ‘You look fantastic.’
‘Bloody damn it!’ I muttered, fiddling with The Pill in my pocket. ‘Bloody damn damn it!’
Which is, pretty much, all I have to say about Lord Slaggsby. I still have a little space left in this particular room, however – the kitchen – and so I shall clarify two final points before closing.
I was, of course, suspected of having a hand in the death of His Lordship. Even the police aren’t obtuse enough to miss the connection between a man who buys a box of cream cakes at 9.30 in the morning and the reappearance of the same cream cakes 15 minutes later smeared all over the face of a recently deceased peer of the realm. Whether they looked for me or not I have no idea. What I do know is that they never found me, for my new life as a rock star acted as an impenetrable disguise. A fact that was demonstrated some 18 months later when The Executioners played a gig at a club in Newcastle. It was a good gig, and the audience loved it, particularly one big blonde-haired girl who kept clambering up on stage and kissing me on the cheek. At the end of our set she came over and asked me for my autograph, clearly unaware that we had met a number of times before. She was, you see, Sharon Maggot, the big-boned girl who assisted behind the counter in Shine’s Bakery. Needless to say, I made my autograph as illegible as possible. No point tempting fate.
And, secondly, Emily’s official-looking document. The document that got me out of Germany and back to England, out of one life and into another. What happened to it? Well, I kept it on my bedside table for the best part of 23 years, kissing it before I went to sleep each night, running my hand across it as though it were a part of Emily herself, until one night in 1968 when, fed up with being woken by His Lordship for no reason whatsoever, I seized it in a fit of anger, scrunched it up into a ball and jammed it violently into the mouth of the rubber communication tube that hung at the head of my bed. Which is, for all I know, where it remains to this very day; yellowed, rotting, forgotten, a pale shadow of its former self. In its heyday, however, what a door-opener it was! Oh what a door-opener!
CHAPTER NINE
OH MY GOD, I’ve dropped The Pill down the lavatory! I was leaning over and it just rolled out of the top pocket of my pyjamas into the bowl. It’s gone! Gone for ever! Hit the water with a plop, fizzed like an aspirin, and dissolved into nothingness. It’s been taken from me, like a minuscule white turd. After all these years. My Pill! My darling Pill!
Only joking. Sorry, I couldn’t resist it. It’s Christmas Day and I’m feeling more than usually playful. I really am in exceedingly high spirits. I can barely contain my euph
oria. I’ve been dancing round the kitchen since daybreak, clapping my hands like a flamenco dancer and singing carols at the top of my voice. I’ve now done ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ twenty times, and ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ at least as many. I can’t remember all the words so I’m just making them up as I go:
God rest ye merry gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay,
For Mrs Bunshop’s dead and gone,
Oh hip hip hip hooray!
And so’s Lord Slaggsby and Keith Cream,
It’s murders by the day!
Oh-oh tidings of people that I’ve killed
People that I’ve killed!
Oh-oh tidings of people that I’ve killed!
I really haven’t the faintest idea where this sudden rush of seasonal cheer has come from. Had Dr Bannen not mentioned it yesterday I wouldn’t even have remembered today was Christmas in the first place. It would have slipped past unnoticed, just as it has done ever since I have been in the castle. For 15 years I haven’t pulled a single cracker, thought a single festive thought or hung a single sprig of mistletoe. Yuletide and all its paraphernalia have been packed away and forgotten, like a set of defunct fairy lights.
And yet now, just a few days from my suicide, with not a Christmas tree or slice of roast turkey in sight (when I was young we used to have roast goose at Christmas, cooked to perfection by dear old Mrs Eggs), I’m suddenly awash with festive cheer. I’m at a loss to explain it. It’s almost as if I’m being hijacked by my emotions. As if they are forcing themselves upon me, irrespective of the circumstances, aware that unless they take the initiative now they might never have the chance to be experienced again.
‘It’s your last Christmas,’ they seem to be saying, ‘and, whether you want to or not, you’re bloody well going to enjoy it.’
And so I am. I’m having a whale of a time. Hello: I feel another carol coming on.
Hark! the herald angels sing,
Glory to the newborn king, etc., etc.
Note-wise things are going marvellously well. Far better than I thought they would yesterday afternoon, after that damned stone hit me in the buttock. After that little incident I feared I might be too distracted to work. Too neurotic. Too full of suspicion about who was doing these things to me, and why.
Once I got going on the note, however, my worries receded. I lost myself in my story, holding up my narrative like a shield against the outside world, fighting it off, keeping it at bay.
All last night I wrote like a man possessed, my pen flying across the plaster like a bird skimming a snowy field (or, it being Christmas, perhaps I should say a sleigh rushing down an icy slope). The kitchen is now finished, as is all but a narrow strip of the front foyer, and I am currently writing my way downwards into the cellar, the door of which opens off the foyer to the left of the main stairs (see plan). It’s very dark down here, even with the light on, and I have had to strap a second candle to my forehead to provide adequate illumination. I feel like Orpheus descending into the underworld.
Nothing of any great significance happened in the kitchen – a gloomy, south-facing room with a cracked enamel sink beneath its window, a sagging sideboard along one wall and a rusty oven and fridge at either end of the sideboard – nothing, I repeat, of any great significance, save that, early on, I decided to increase the size of my writing. This is because the kitchen is a large room, and had I kept my letters as they were (i.e. the size of raisins), Lord Slaggsby’s demise would only have filled about a half of it, hence ruining my one room/one murder scheme. I therefore inflated them from raisins to hazelnuts and was able to achieve a perfect fit. The most perfect fit, indeed, of any murder to date, which would doubtless have pleased its victim, who was always a stickler for neatness.
My writing’s now back to raisin proportions again, although further manipulation might prove necessary later, especially in the cellar, which is also quite a sizeable space. I like the idea of my note expanding and contracting as it goes. It reminds me of a beating heart.
Size of writing aside, the only other real problem has been with pipes. The kitchen has more than its fair share of these – God alone knows who did the castle’s plumbing, but they made a right hash of it – and it’s been quite a job picking a path over and under and through and around them. On the room’s eastern wall, for example, there is a veritable spaghetti of the damn things – big pipes, small pipes, plastic pipes, copper pipes, straight pipes, curly pipes – and I had somehow to steer my note cleanly amongst these without ruining its shape or flow. It was like playing an exceedingly complex game of hopscotch, each sentence having to be carefully slotted into the space available like a foot between the cracks in a pavement. I managed it in the end, but it took a lot of effort and concentration, and by the time I was finished I was drenched in sweat, as though I had been defusing a large bomb.
Even with the pipes, however – the big pipes, the small pipes, the plastic pipes, the copper pipes, etc. – I still managed to complete the kitchen in record time. I entered it around seven o’clock last night, and was out again by eight this morning, by far the quickest progress I have yet made. My past, it seems, is going faster and faster, hurtling through the castle like a runaway train. If I really push it I reckon I could fill a room in under ten hours.
For the moment, however, enough of all that. It’s now about nine o’clock, and as clear and fresh a Christmas morning as you could possibly wish for. I’m feeling fit and cheerful and replete with energy, and have, after almost four days and nights of solid writing, decided to take the day off. I’m well on target to complete my note in the allotted time, and therefore intend to take some wine, cigarettes and Mrs Bannen’s plum pudding up to the dome, slump in my red wickerwork chair and while away the hours getting drunk and gazing out across the still, green sea. I can think of no better way to spend my Christmas. Except, perhaps, with Emily. Emily, however, has gone, so I guess I’ll just have to make do with the pudding.
Season’s greetings, everyone!
I’m only a couple of inches further down the wall, but it’s ten hours later. Later than the exclamation mark above, that is. It’s 7 p.m., and I’m a bit pissed. I’ve drunk four bottles of wine, two each of red and white, and my writing is looking distinctly wonky. Personally, I blame it on the cellar stairs. Very uneven. Putting me off my balance.
I’ve had an excellent day. Very sedate, very peaceful, very relaxing. The perfect hundredth Christmas.
‘Merry Christmas, Raphael!’ I’ve been saying to myself.
‘Why, thank you,’ I’ve been replying. ‘And a Merry Christmas to you too!’
As planned, I climbed up to the roof, carrying with me my pudding and drink and cigarettes. Despite the crispness of the air, it wasn’t unbearably cold, and as soon as I arrived I winched the dome open as far as it would go, its curved plates creaking backwards like the cheeks of a fat, smiling man. I then sat down on my old wickerwork chair and poured myself a large glass of vino.
‘Bottoms up!’ I toasted. ‘Down the proverbial.’
Mrs Bannen’s plum pudding was emitting the most delightful aroma – a rich, fruity fragrance, tinged with a faint perfume of brandy – and, having downed another couple of glasses of wine and smoked a cigarette or two, I removed its muslin covering and poked my fingers greedily into the sticky, yielding dessert (no point worrying about manners a week before you kill yourself!). I gorged out a large chunk and, grunting with pleasure, pushed it into my mouth. The taste brought tears to my eyes.
‘Oh Jesus, that’s good,’ I mumbled, spilling thick clumps of pudding on to my pyjama front. ‘That is so, so good. I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything so good. Oh God!’
I levered out another squidgy handful, and another, and another, ladling them into my mouth until, eventually, after twenty minutes or so, the bowl was completely empty. I licked my fingers like a cat, burped, and fired up a post-prandial cigarette.
‘To Mrs Bannen!’ I toasted, downing another gl
ass of red. ‘A queen amongst doctors’ wives!’
Having eaten my pudding, and with my stomach distended as though I were pregnant, I settled back in my chair, propped my feet on the dome’s winching mechanism and gazed contentedly out to sea.
There are, directly eastwards from the castle, a small group of islands – vague blips on the unerringly straight line of the horizon – and it has often amused me to search for shapes in their blurry outline, in much the same way as some people search for shapes in the billowing, fluffy whiteness of the clouds. One, for instance, has always struck me as looking distinctly like a forehead poking up out of the water, with the top of a slightly cabbage ear on one side, whilst another is the spitting image of a ship, seen in profile, with a pointed prow and a squashed funnel in the middle. Today I noticed for the first time that the largest of the islands, to the far left of the chain, bore an uncanny resemblance to a bedpan. One of those disposable cardboard bedpans you get in old people’s homes and asylums. The more I stared at it, the more real it became, until I was almost convinced I could get up and go and have a piss in it. I couldn’t of course, and so did one over the castle battlements instead.
I drank more wine, smoked more cigarettes, had a snooze, fetched and ate one of the packets of garibaldi biscuits Dr Bannen had delivered yesterday (suicide doesn’t half give you a sweet tooth), and then, although at what precise point in the day I’m not sure, started thinking about death.
It is a curious fact that I have been writing my suicide note for the best part of five days and in all that time haven’t once contemplated the actuality of my decease. I’ve announced it, I’ve written about it, I’ve planned it and I’ve accepted it, but at no point have I given serious thought to what it might actually entail. I’ve been like a typist, busily transcribing a document without taking much notice of its actual contents.
‘I’m going to die!’ I gasped, as though someone had just informed me of the fact. ‘I’m bloody well going to kill myself!’