by Paul Sussman
I, however, was not impressed. On the contrary, I was rather annoyed by his behaviour. Very annoyed by it. Here was I risking my life telling him to get out of the way, and all he could think about was the fucking bullion. His refusal to move struck me as a sort of personal insult; a spurning of the lifeline I was throwing him. I gave him one more chance – ‘Move, damn it, you silly man!’ – and, when he again insisted on staying where he was, hissed, ‘Have it your own way then, you bloody prat!’ and, leaning a little to my left, banged my elbow as hard as I could into the side of the teetering safe. The latter lurched drunkenly forward, stopped, teetered a little more and then, with an agonized screech of splintering wood and cracking joists, pitched forwards through the hole and landed with a loud thud straight on top of my portly superior. A thick plume of dust rose like ash from an erupting volcano, gradually clearing to reveal the safe lying on its front, with Mr Popplethwaite’s plump hands sticking out on either side, as though actually a part of it.
‘Mr Phoenix!’ came the voice from the other side of the door. ‘Mr Phoenix! What’s going on?’
‘Oh my God!’ I cried. ‘Oh my God. A terrible tragedy. Mr Popplethwaite’s been squashed by the bullion safe. Help him! Help him, somebody!’
They were still trying to lever the safe off Mr Popplethwaite’s pancaked body when I left the bank. No one noticed me go. Several female customers, I remarked, had passed out at the news of his demise, and were being revived by Mr Cree and Mr Blain, the twin heads of in-house security.
As always after a murder, I felt a need for fresh air and solitary reflection and, to this end, having purchased a bottle of lemonade and a packet of cigarettes, spent half an hour or so wandering through the streets of Liverpool trying to come to terms with what I’d just done, and wondering what I ought to do now that I’d done it.
‘I can’t very well carry on at Simsby’s,’ I thought. ‘I’ve just murdered the manager, after all. Most inappropriate. I could go back to London, I suppose. Or maybe I should just go down to the docks and get on the first ship I can find. Frankly, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Except’ – and here I delved into the inside pocket of my jacket and removed the call-up notice I had received only that morning – ‘I’m not going to join the army. That much I do know. I might be a murderer, but there’s nothing in the world that could persuade me to put on a uniform and fight. Nothing in the entire world!’
I became quite involved in this little soliloquy – stomping up the street, brandishing my enlistment card – and was so intent upon the idea of not joining the army that I quite failed to notice the woman walking towards me carrying a large pile of gift-wrapped boxes. Only when I slammed right into her, knocking her backwards and scattering her boxes about the pavement, did I emerge from my reverie and realize where I was.
‘I’m most terribly sorry,’ I said, falling to my knees and gathering up the spilled presents. ‘I was miles away. I do hope I haven’t caused any damage.’
‘I’m sure you haven’t,’ said a familiar voice. ‘They’re just shoes.’
I looked up, amazed, for there before me, wrapped up in a thick coat against the cold, was none other than Emily. Dear Emily, her face as exquisite as ever, her hair just as golden.
‘Emily!’ I cried. ‘Of all the amazing—’
I leapt to my feet and gave her a big hug.
‘Raphael!’ she gasped. ‘You’re crushing me!’
I released her and stepped backwards.
‘You’re all dusty,’ she said. ‘And you’ve got bits of plaster in your hair. You look like a bomb’s dropped on you.’
‘A wheel actually,’ I said. ‘I’ll explain later. What on earth are you doing here?’
‘I’ve been shopping. I’ve bought lots and lots of shoes. And where were you off to in such a hurry?’
I was about to say that I wasn’t really off to anywhere in a hurry, and had just been wandering around aimlessly, when I suddenly recalled the enlistment notice still clutched in my right hand. Thirty seconds before, I’d been vowing that under no circumstances whatsoever would I act upon it. Now, however, seeing an opportunity to impress Emily – and, let’s face it, such opportunities don’t come up that often – I flourished it theatrically and declared, in the most gung-ho sort of voice I could muster:
‘I’m going to join the army, Emily! To fight for king and country. So help me God, I might not be a good man, but this is one fight I can’t duck out of.’
If I had expected my companion to be impressed by this little speech, I was pleasantly surprised, for barely had I finished it than she cast aside the box she had just picked up, launched herself at me and planted a whopping kiss on my cheek.
‘Oh Raphael!’ she cried. ‘You’re so brave. I knew you’d do something like this. You’re my hero.’
‘It’s nothing,’ I muttered modestly. ‘Nothing at all. Every man should do his duty.’
‘It’s not nothing, Raphael. It’s tremendously selfless and courageous.’
‘No, no.’
‘Yes, yes. It’s fantastic. You must let me see you off.’
‘That really won’t be necessary,’ I said, feeling that perhaps things were getting a little out of hand. ‘And, anyway, I haven’t got to leave for a few days. Let’s go and have a cup of tea somewhere. And then we could have lunch. And dinner as well.’
Before I could stop her, however, Emily had seized the enlistment notice and read it.
‘It says you have to report today,’ she said.
‘Does it?’ I laughed nervously. ‘I must have got my dates mixed up.’
‘Oh Raphael, I know you’re just trying to be brave and spare my feelings, but there’s no need. I’ve said I’ll see you off, and see you off I will.’
With which, having gathered together her parcels, she bustled me up the street towards Lime Street Station, where, as Sod’s Law would have it, there was a suitable train leaving in five minutes’ time.
‘I’ll get a later one,’ I said.
‘There might not be a later one.’
‘Then I’ll go tomorrow.’
‘You can’t go tomorrow. It says you have to be there today. The army doesn’t like people being late.’
‘For God’s sake, Emily, a day won’t matter!’
‘I won’t be responsible for you being late for your first day in the army, Raphael. Look! There’s a space in that carriage.’
And before I quite knew what was happening, she had shepherded me across the platform and into the train, where I found myself sharing a musty six-seater compartment with a nervous-looking ginger-haired young man with a very sweaty forehead. I turned and leant out of the window. Steam billowed all around.
‘Emily, I’ve hardly had a chance to talk to you.’
‘I know, I know. But that’s war. It gets in the way of things. I’m so proud of you, Raphael.’
‘You shouldn’t be, Emily. I was lying when I said I was going to join the army.’
My words, however, were drowned out in a loud blast from the train’s whistle. There was a clattering of closing doors, a hiss of steam from the engine, and we started to pull out. Emily dropped her boxes and, pulling a monogrammed white silk handkerchief from her pocket, hurried along beside the carriage, waving it above her head.
‘For crying out loud, Emily,’ I shouted, ‘why does it always have to be so damned brief!’
‘That’s life,’ she cried. ‘Take care of yourself. Don’t get killed!’
‘What?’
‘Don’t get killed!’
‘I doubt I’ll have much choice in the matter. Think of me!’
‘I will. I will. I always do!’
The train had by now reached the end of the platform, and she began to drop away behind me.
‘You’re a hero, Raphael!’
‘I’m an idiot,’ I muttered, clutching The Pill in my pocket and watching as she disappeared in a cloud of steam. ‘A bloody idiot.’
‘We’re all going to die,�
� wailed the nervous-looking ginger-haired young man with the sweaty forehead. ‘We’re going to die! Die! Dieeeeeee!’
I shall end this particular room with an admission of ignorance, and a word of explanation.
The admission of ignorance is that, despite working for him for almost ten years, I never found out what the M. in Mr M. Popplethwaite stood for. I made extensive inquiries on the subject, but all to no avail, and he thus goes down as the only one of my victims for whom I’m unable to supply a Christian name. It rather niggles me. I feel it somehow leaves his murder incomplete.
The word of explanation, meanwhile, concerns the wheel. How, you may wonder, could I have known so much about it – about the low-level flying exercises, the jammed undercarriage, the radioing back to base. I was, after all, some 9,000 feet below at the time, and not privy to the inner secrets of His Majesty’s Air Force.
Well, the strange thing was that a few years later, quite by chance, I happened to meet two of the men who’d actually been in the plane. They’d only recently joined the RAF, and described in excited tones how they’d had to make an emergency landing on just one wheel. They were an odd couple, brothers, twin brothers, and you can find more about them down in the cellar. Their names were Clive and Matthew Brain. Oh what a web of strange connections life is!
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
DISASTER HAS STRUCK! Complete and utter bloody disaster. Not much over halfway through my note, with a good few murders yet to go and most of the castle’s upper floor still gaping pristine white before me, and I’ve run out of felt-tips. Can you believe it! I’m living on borrowed time even now, writing with a pen that’s liable to conk out any minute, as you can no doubt see by the faintness of the words it’s forming.
To be fair, I haven’t actually run out of pens. I still have 30 left, one entire box, half of what I started with. The problem is that those 30 have, in the 18 months since I bought them, all gone dry. Their ink has caked, like congealed blood, and their nibs shrivelled. I can’t explain why this should have happened to one box and not the other – they both, after all, arrived at the castle on the same day, and have sat side by side ever since – but the fact remains that where I ought to have more than enough pens to carry me forward to my death, I now have none at all. Damn, damn, bloody damn and fuck.
And things were going so well too. After the horrors of the cellar, and the disturbances of yesterday evening, I’d been worried I might struggle to recover the momentum of the note. Last night, however, I wrote as speedily and contentedly as I’ve done at any time during the composing of my gargantuan epitaph. I didn’t get started till almost 10 p.m., and yet, even taking into account several wine and cigarette breaks, I’d still murdered Mr Popplethwaite and set off to join the army by eight o’clock this morning.
What’s more, the study, which I’ve just left, is the first place in which my note really achieves its full potential. You will remember that, downstairs, it never quite attained perfection. Mrs Bunshop filled two rooms; the eastern gallery contained two murders (albeit neatly arranged); and the kitchen threw up all sorts of problems with pipes and sideboards. As for the cellar, the less said about that the better.
In the study, however, note and castle embraced in consummate symbiosis. I started Mr Popplethwaite at the ceiling directly to the right of the door, and then wrote my way, cleanly and without obstacle, right around the room, my letters of a uniform size all the way (i.e. that of raisins), before concluding the whole episode at the skirting board directly to the left of the door. The result is profoundly stirring – neat, dramatic, contained, overwhelming – and is precisely what I dreamt of when I first came up with my one murder per room scheme.
‘That,’ I said to myself as I poked a final full stop at the intersection of skirting board and doorframe, ‘is a bloody masterpiece. It’s almost worth delaying my death so I can have more time to admire it.’
And yet, within a couple of minutes, triumph had turned to despair when I discovered all my remaining pens were unusable.
I made the discovery on the landing, just as I emerged from Mr Popplethwaite’s room. I had fetched the second box of felt-tips from my bedroom and, having selected one from the 30 contained therein, had mounted my ladder ready to start work near the landing ceiling. When I placed the nib against the wall, however, and tried to write, no words appeared, just a vague, ghostly smudge on the whitewashed plaster.
‘Damn,’ I muttered. ‘Must be a dud.’
I threw the pen to the floor, climbed down the ladder and fetched another. Exactly the same thing happened with that, however, and the next one, and the next, and the next after that. Thirty times I climbed down and up that bloody ladder, each time with increasing desperation, until eventually there were no more pens left to fetch, every one of them having proved withered and hopeless.
‘Bastards!’ I wailed. ‘This can’t be! Please don’t let it be! Aaaaaaargh!’
It is, I suppose, my own fault. I should have checked all the pens at the very beginning; given each a little scribble to make sure it was in good working order. That way I would have discovered the problem last Tuesday, giving me plenty of time to come up with an alternative plan. Now, however, I’m stranded high and dry, and there seems no immediate way out of my predicament. The above has been written with what little ink is left in the pens from the first box. It’s taken me 20 of these to get this far, however – my writing faint to the point of illegibility – and the remaining ten will only last me another two or three paragraphs. I feel like a man who’s slit his wrists and is helplessly watching his own life blood slowly drain away.
What to do now? Dr Bannen isn’t coming till Friday, and even if he could get me some new pens I’d never have enough time to finish the note, due as I am to kill myself in the early hours of Saturday morning. Delaying my death is out of the question – when you set yourself a date to die you really have to stick to it – as is going down to the village in person. I simply couldn’t cope with all those people. I could try carrying on in chalk, I suppose, or with my fountain pen, but what’s the point? I only have a few sticks of the former, and a single ink cartridge for the latter. Neither would last anything like long enough to get the job done.
I might as well face up to it – the note’s over. Finished. Caput. Terminito. After six days and God knows how many words, I can’t go any further. I’ve reached an impasse. I am, as you can imagine, devastated. I’d say suicidal if I wasn’t that already. All that work, all those memories – and all for nothing. I’ve juddered to a halt short of the mark. I am unable to complete myself. I want to cry. To scream. And my back’s throbbing like buggery. And now that fucking knocking’s . . . Oh Christ, come on you damned pen . . . that fucking knocking . . . oh bollocks, it’s run out . . .
It’s about midday on Wednesday, 29th December, two days after I wrote the above. As you can see, I’m writing again. And as you can also see, my words are strong and clear and vibrant and assured, quite different from the pale anaemia of the preceding few paragraphs. Yes, I’ve got new pens. And yes, I’ve been away from the castle to get them, although not quite as far away as I expected I’d have to go. I simply couldn’t abandon the note. I had to keep on with my life. It’s come to mean too much to me.
For two whole days after my felt-tips ran out I stayed up in the dome. I smoked, I drank, I fingered The Pill, I wallowed in self-pity.
‘My note,’ I mumbled to myself over and over. ‘My beautiful note.’
On Monday someone knocked three times on the front door – once as my last pen conked out, once in the early afternoon, and once late at night. Boom, boom, boom. Each time I rushed to see who it was, but each time there was no one there. On Tuesday there was just a single, loud, solitary knock around midday, and then, late in the evening, someone threw an egg at the castle. It flew up over the battlements and landed with a splat on the side of the dome, leaving a trail of viscous goo running like a large yellow tear down the face of the metal plates.
&
nbsp; ‘What sort of monster are you?’ I screamed at my invisible tormentor. ‘Why can’t you leave me in peace?’
These assaults were the only fixed points in the otherwise all-consuming emptiness of those two terrible days. Between them I just sat, useless, wreathed in cigarette smoke, shackled to the void of my soon to be ended life, crumpled.
Only once I’d stopped writing it did I come to appreciate fully how important the note had been to me. How essential. How much colour it had imparted. Now it all seemed black and white. Not even black and white. Just grey. My life was a drab, grey, empty thing; a torn cobweb of a life. Without the note, I realized, I was nothing. The note was me. I was the note. And when it ran out, puttered to a halt, faded, so too did I. Ending it was, in its own way, like ending my own life. I’d committed suicide without even knowing it.
‘I might as well take The Pill now,’ I thought late on Tuesday night. ‘I’m as good as dead anyway. All I’ll be doing is confirming the fact.’
But I did so want to get to my hundredth birthday. To complete a full century. And that, ultimately, is what persuaded me to swallow my fears and go out to find new pens. If I was to remain alive for the next four days, you see, I needed the note, because it is the note that brings me to life. I needed to keep it going. To carry on writing. To continue with my recollection of myself. Ludicrous, perhaps, like bringing someone back from the dead simply so as to be able to kill them again at a more appropriate moment. But that’s just how it is. I can’t finish my life until I’ve finished my note. I needed more pens. It was a matter of life and death.
Thus it was that early on Wednesday morning, this morning, after a hiatus of two days, I went into the bathroom and cleaned myself up (getting wax out of your hair is one hell of a bloody business). I put on some clothes, the very ones I had worn 15 years ago when I first arrived at the castle and which had lain untouched ever since in a heap beneath my bed, and took 20 pounds out of the biscuit tin in which I keep my paltry savings. I descended to the front door, opened it, passed through, closed and locked it behind me. And then, like an astronaut stepping out into a new and uncharted world, I started off down the track towards the village.