Bang: Memoirs of a Relationship Assassin

by Wailing, David

  Her face blurred. I was blinking, heaving deep breaths like the air was being drained from the room.

  “Who are you?” she asked quietly.

  “I…” My voice cracked. “I don’t… I don’t know…”

  “Yes you do. All these people that you’ve been, they’re not you.” Could she see them as well? All clustered around us? “They’re just your masks, Sco…”

  She stopped, nodded. “Scott’s just a mask as well, isn’t he? He’s your relationship assassin mask.”

  And there he was, right behind Emma, staring at me over her shoulder. Scott Rowley. Cocky, confident, a lady-killer, an assassin. But he was also blurred. Not really there. Not really any one thing, fluid, changeable. He could be anything he wanted!

  And now, after years of being him, I could see… now that he was finally standing outside my body… that he wasn’t me any more than the others were.

  “Let them go,” Emma said. “Time to stop acting. Just think about the real you.”

  All of the faces in the room became as blurred as Scott’s, fading. One by one they vanished, John, Andy, Mark, Simon, all the others. Self-destructing. Everything went watery as they disappeared. Except one, who had been hidden by the crowd.

  He stood alone by the sink. A boy.

  I caught my breath, startled. Who…?

  He looked about fifteen. Could hardly see his face under the baseball cap and hood. Grey tracksuit, Reebok trainers. He wasn’t looking at me. He looked like someone had just slapped him or insulted him but he was refusing to react. Fists clenched, jaw clenched, whole body clenched. Lips sealed like he couldn’t trust his own voice. The boy just stood there, quivering like there were things inside him pushing to get out.

  Emma touched my face, pulling me back to meet her eyes. “Who are you really?”

  I staggered to the sink, legs like jelly. The boy looked up at me. He had a smattering of acne, I noticed, and the sunken eyes of someone who hadn’t slept much, but you could tell he might grow up to be a handsome lad, given time. He could just as easily grow up with that taut sneer distorting him into something uglier. That was Andy Holloway, right there, being born on the boy’s face.

  He knelt down next to me and… and it was him who opened the cupboard under the sink, not me. He pulled it open and rummaged in the grimy darkness underneath, pushing aside washing-up liquid and bleach and oil-stained rags, until he found what was buried in the cobwebby darkness right at the back.

  But it was me, my hand, that flung the book across the kitchen, pages fluttering crazily.

  “That’s who I am!”

  Emma bent down and picked it up.

  “I’m him, the guy on the front!”

  She stared at the cover. A man with a gun in his hand. Dark hair, chiselled face, eyes narrowed, looking through the target sight. ‘Memoirs Of An Assassin’, by Frederick deClark. My father’s pseudonym.

  “The guy in the book is me, Emma, that’s me there!”

  She turned the book to read the blurb on the back. The one that started ‘Scott Rowley is a killer on the side of the angels.’ Dad’s melodramatic style. She looked back up at me, stunned.

  “I’m the assassin!” I shouted, feeling my legs give way. I slid to the floor against the cupboard. “I’m pretending to be him! I’m not Scott Rowley, I’m just pretending to be him! I’m pretending to be all of them! I’m just pretending!”

  I collapsed.

  “I duh-don’t know my own name,” I cried.

  I couldn’t stop the sobs. Couldn’t hold back all the things that had been pushing to get out. Fear. Shame. Boiling up suddenly, the feelings I’d never allowed to come out. At that moment I couldn’t understand how I’d got there, a stupid wet mess on my dirty sticky kitchen floor, saying the things I never thought I’d say. Somehow it had just happened.

  “These things just happen,” my Mum had sighed. She hadn’t planned on talking about it, as I sat down at the dinner table. Her floodgates just suddenly opened. All I’d done was ask if we were going to be able to visit Dad.

  They’d taken him away the day before. I’d been at school. Mum said they’d sent an ambulance, they were really nice about it, took him away like he was royalty. He didn’t want to come out of the back room, where he’d barricaded himself for the past three months, still writing away. Mum said he’d been going to the toilet in there as well, so I shouldn’t open the door, she’d be getting cleaners in soon. She talked as if Dad had been a stain in the carpet she’d been meaning to get sorted for ages.

  Mum looked at me and told me that I didn’t have to worry. She knew what I was worried about, but in fact everything was fine.

  “I know you think that sort of thing might be… that it might run in the family. I mean, you probably think that you enjoy writing ‘cos your Dad’s a writer, and maybe that means you might end up… but you don’t have to worry about that. I didn’t really want to tell you this way but he’s not really your Dad.”

  I looked up at her, still chewing my dinner.

  “It’s good news really, when you think about it,” she had smiled. “Bit of a relief for you, I expect! Not sure who your real Dad was, to be honest, it was all a bit mad for me back then, I was doing a lot of… anyway, doesn’t matter, I got you out of it and that was enough for me. You weren’t even twelve months when I married your Dad – not your real Dad, I mean Dad Dad. It was easier to just give you his surname, less paperwork, but that’s the only thing of his you’ve got, and you can change that if you like, I think I will…

  “So I don’t want you worrying,” Mum had said kindly. “There’s no way you’re going to end up like him.” She ruffled my hair. “Life’s too short to worry about things like that, you have to just get on with it, make the most of it. You’re a long time dead.”

  She talked that way for a few more minutes. Most of the time it wasn’t aimed at me. It was like she was talking to herself.

  “These things just happen,” my Mum had said. “It’s not like they’re planned or anything, they just come along and happen all by themselves. You’ll see when you get older, you can’t plan anything, no matter how hard you try.”

  I don’t think I said anything back. I can remember sitting at the table, picking at the microwaved dinner she’d knocked up for me. Watching her rush around the house, checking her reflection and snapping her handbag shut and picking up her car keys all at once. My Mum never stayed still. Always on the move.

  “So there you go, nothing to worry about, okay? It’s good news really,” she had smiled. “I’ve got to go, I’m picking Darren up at six and the traffic’s going to be murder, everyone goes to the coast on a Friday night, I want to beat the rush. So you’ve got the number of the hotel if you need me, you know where everything is?” Kiss on my forehead. “Be good, I’ll see you Sunday night, okay? Oh, have some friends round if you like, have a party, enjoy yourself! Byeee!”

  The slamming door rattled the dining room window, like always. I sat there, listening to the silence. Empty council flat.

  I didn’t finish my dinner. I got up and walked through the flat. For some time, I stood outside the door of the back room, with the faint acrid odour from inside. I know my face stayed rigid. Like stone. Like a blank mask.

  No Dad. No Mum. No Darren. And no me.

  I went to my room and laid on my bed. Fished around in the bedside cabinet and brought out my copy of the only book Dad had ever got published. ‘Memoirs Of An Assassin’. It was already dog-eared, having been read twice and thumbed through every so often, especially the sex scenes and the fight scenes and the big gun battle at the end. The memoirs of Scott Rowley, man of many faces. I started reading it again, from the beginning.

  I started all over again.

  It was easy. Dead easy. I wasn’t anybody to begin with, so it was easy becoming whoever I wanted. I wasn’t my father’s son, that had all been fake, my name was fake, I wasn’t who I’d been told I was – but that was okay! These things happen! Life’s too
short to worry about anything, you know that, you have to just get on with it, make the most of it. Just like Scott Rowley did, in my Dad’s book. Kill when you have to kill. Shag when you want to shag. Live the way you want to live.

  If I wasn’t me, I could do anything.

  Years later, when the idea of being rewarded for being in the wrong place at the wrong time had hit me, I picked up the book again. But now I studied it intently, like a rulebook.

  Scott Rowley. Assassin. A freelance killer who takes out members of the Mafia, or underworld kingpins, or rapists and murderers who walked free. A professional with a heart. An assassin with a code of honour, an assassin who made his own rules. Dad had been careful to portray his main character as likeable as well as ruthless. One little trick to make readers more sympathetic towards him was to have him secretly liking disco music. A funny character trait to make the reader warm to him a little. Scott Rowley loved the Seventies.

  I read the book again. Making notes. Practising my new signature. Scott Rowley. A name to rhyme with… whatever the hell I wanted it to rhyme with.

  And so Scott Rowley was born for real, conceived by the last remaining copy of a clichéd old thriller novel that nobody bought and my desperate need to be someone else, anyone else, even a man who fakes being other people for a living.

  Did you think I was a bastard? You were right.

  I had to be somebody…

  The fifteen year old boy was still there. Watching me cry. The one thing he didn’t do when his Mum told him he wasn’t him.

  I couldn’t raise my head, scared to even look at Emma. I felt broken and stupid in front of her. Amateur. I could feel the contempt in her eyes, the curl of that pretty lip, any second now she’d walk away disgusted…

  She knelt down in front of me. Placing the book on the floor.

  “I have a confession too,” she said. “Emma’s not my real name either.”

  I looked up. She wasn’t sneering. With her hair tumbling down and a black eye marking the left side of her beautiful face, she looked… inbetween. Half one thing and half another.

  “What…?”

  “I’m not really called Emma,” she said.

  I must have had the stupidest look on my face. Hint of a smile on hers. “It’s just the name I took when I started working for VenusVisions. None of the Venus girls use their own names, we all use pseudonyms. So I did the same thing you did.” She tapped the novel. “I took on a false name. I became Emma.”

  I wiped the snot away from my nose, astonished. I realised there was one thing I’d never known: “What was… your surname?”

  Now Emma did smile, but averted her eyes. “Peel.”

  Just as suddenly and uncontrollably as the tears, I burst out laughing. “Peel?” I gasped. “Eh-Emma Peel? Out of The Avengers? From that, that cheesy old show in the Sixties? Are you serious?”

  “I love the Sixties,” she grinned.

  I giggled hysterically, tears still streaming down my face. My whole body kept on shaking. Her hand slid onto my shoulder and gripped it firmly, and it felt like… I don’t know, sort of like someone had erected scaffolding around me, keeping me upright. The shakes stopped.

  “I did what you did,” she said. “I turned myself into someone else. Because I didn’t really… I never really knew what I was supposed to be. You don’t know any better when you’re young, you think you’re on charge and then someone, someone comes along and, and shows you you’re not…”

  I watched a memory twist Emma’s face, making her feel sick. What had happened to her?

  “I hate who I used to be. I hated her so much I got rid of her. She was stupid and weak and she let… she let boys… she let things happen, so I turned myself into someone better and stronger and in charge of themselves, just like you did. Emma Peel. My version of Emma Peel.”

  I stared into her eyes, one horribly bruised, one shining bright. Just like my own. “That’s probably why we’re good at what we do,” she went on, “although I hadn’t realised you’d been doing this for so long… and for your whole life, not just your job. Guess it’s me that’s the amateur.”

  “…”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Emma’s hand rubbed the back of my neck. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what your real name is. Or where you’re from. You are what you do.”

  And those were the words that stopped my breath in my throat. The simplicity of it hurt. Of all the ways you can look at yourself, all the different masks you can wear, the only true thing is your actions. If I did what an assassin does, then… I was an assassin. It was that simple.

  As if reading my mind, Emma added “You might not like it sometimes, but this is you. You’re a professional, like I am. A professional faker,” she admitted, “a professional bullshitter, yeah. But that’s what we do.”

  “This is us,” I said simply.

  Emma nodded. “This is us.”

  Neither of us made a move to hug the other – it just happened, like some sudden wind blew us together. But Emma wrapped her arms round me and I held her, tight, down on the kitchen floor.

  Over her shoulder, the fifteen year old boy was gone and the kitchen was empty, but I could hear him crying. Finally, he was crying, but he was smiling too. They were tears of relief as much as anything else.

  He knew who he was now.

  Who we were.

  Chapter 22

  Saving Face

  She was sitting on the concrete steps by herself, smoking a cigarette. The street was empty. All the offices had closed hours ago. The sunlight was slanting between the buildings, stretching out the shadows, and the sky overhead was deep blue. It was as hushed as the Old Street area gets, with just a few distant footsteps and the rumble of traffic.

  Becky sat alone, waiting.

  John’s motorbike came grumbling softly down the road, as if the Honda was deliberately keeping its voice down. He slid to a halt outside Asquith and Bream Consolidated, where the steps led up to the main entrance.

  Kickstand down, helmet off, bike keys in his pocket, leathers creaking as he swung off the pillion. He looked serious. You could tell he was dreading something. It was written all over his face.

  Then Becky called out “Hey disco boy, can I see your helmet?” and suddenly he broke into a grin, with a kind of relieved laugh.

  “Pervert,” he said, making her smile.

  John’s chest ached. All the stupid little things they used to say.

  He watched as she stood up, trod out her cigarette and walked down the steps towards him. Typically, she looked absolutely gorgeous. He couldn’t put his finger on it but for some reason she looked better than ever right now. She’d had her hair done recently: brunette curls cascading down on one side, swept behind her ear on the other side, showing a hoop earring. It was a Tuesday, so her shoulderless cream top and stone-washed jeans meant that she’d changed after work, just for him. She looked great. Everything about her was perfect, making it hurt for John to breathe.

  And inside John, I thought: This has happened to me before.

  They always look their best at the end.

  He said how you doing, and she said fine how about you, and he said yeah I’m good. The two of them kind-of-smiling.

  “I, um, I didn’t know whether this was the right way to do this.” He made a gesture that took in his leathers, helmet, motorbike: John the courier.

  “It’s what I wanted,” said Becky.

  Yes. Her text had made that perfectly clear.

  I want to see John.

  And that’s who I was giving her.

  I hadn’t expected a reply. All I’d done was leave a message for her at Asquith and Bream the day before, saying that I was going to drop her mobile phone off first thing in the morning. It had sat on my kitchen worksurface for days, untouched, as I wondered what to do with it. Too scared to just go round to her flat and give it to her. Too scared to risk her being there when I walked into reception. So I gave an advance warning,
come in a bit late tomorrow and your phone will be waiting for you.

  And then an unknown number on my own mobile (texting from a friend’s phone, I assumed) and the very last thing I expected.

  She didn’t want me. I realised that straight away. It was John she needed to see. And that’s who she was getting, in full costume. I didn’t mind. I’d have done a lot more, for the chance to see her again.

  “I know you’re not…” she began, then squinted into the sunset for a moment. “I know you’re name’s not… but is it all right if I call you – ”

  “John’s fine,” I smiled. “Disco boy’s okay too.”

  “Hmm. I was never sure about that one. It was that or ‘easy rider’, maybe that suits you better.”

  “I prefer ‘sir’, actually.”

  “I prefer ‘up your arse’, actually.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Oh you do, huh?”

  “Not like that!”

  We giggled, and it felt great and it hurt like hell.

  The last time I’d seen Becky, she had run away like I was covered in blood and carrying a chainsaw. But look how relaxed she was now, the smile on her pretty face. I realised now why she insisted on seeing me as John, and the effect the bike and the leathers and all that had. Familiarity. It wasn’t me she was relaxed around, it was him.

  But we couldn’t keep pretending like this. Could we?

  My pulse leapt. Hope.

  “Had a visitor on Sunday,” she said brightly. “Your partner in crime. Emma.”

  I probably looked thousand-volt shocked at that. Written all over my face. “Emma came to see you?” I tried to visualise the two of them together, after what had happened, and just couldn’t. Well, actually I could, but it was pretty violent. “Why?”

  “To apologise. She came round to say sorry.”

  I laughed. “You mean she actually apologised for something? That’s pretty…”