by Mark Yarwood
Chapter Twelve
When I go and see Maggie the next evening, it’s as if she knows I’d be coming. She’s set out a banquet of a meal, like something Henry the Eighth would have laid on. I’m not really hungry, but I let her push me towards the piles of food on the dining room table and into a chair.
Maggie slides round to the seat next to me, crossing her legs in the mauve low cut dress she’s wearing. Saggy, folded skin hangs between what used to be her cleavage. The slit up the dress shows me a road map of blue veins.
She smiles and ushers me to eat something. I grab a chicken drumstick and nibble at it.
She asks me if Billy Wallis came to see me, like she doesn’t know he did. When I say he did, she acts all coy, embarrassed like he did it off his own back. The way she’s acting, you’d think Billy had asked me to take her dancing for the night, just as a favour to an old woman.
I’d be really helping her out if I could do this one little thing for her. This one little thing could land me in prison, or worse, I could die. She tells me about her house insurance and the big pay off that will result from the big cliff side home dropping flaming into the sea. She tells me that it would be a good idea if I rent a boat that day, take a little trip and bang- slam straight into her home.
I try and take a bite of the chicken drumstick, but as I do, I get a view of Maggie’s stringy bingo wings. The mouth full of chicken flesh bounces against my urge to puke.
‘You must be wondering why I’m so desperate for money,’ she says.
When I try and tell her that I really don’t care, she tells me anyway, stretching out a bony hand and gripping my knee. She looks deep into my eyes and starts telling me about the cure.
I find myself curious as she takes a deep breath. Not five years ago, she says, she was dying. She puts a hand on her chest. Lung cancer she says, spreading from her chest to her spine. She spent most of her fortune on private doctors round the world, until she came back to this village, where she was actually born.
‘Everybody thinks I was born in London, or the Home Counties, but that was just what it said in my biography,’ she laughs. ‘No, I was born here and then my mother took me to London where she married some rich fellow. She left me there. But that doesn’t really matter.’
I try and find somewhere to put the chicken bones as Maggie keeps talking.
She tells me about Billy Wallis helping her to find a house to buy, right here on the cliff. He carried her from the car in his arms and tucked her up in bed. She was ready to die. He’d run her a bath and wash her, while she’d limply lie against the cold surface of the ceramic. Slowly, bit by bit, she said she started to regain her strength. The pain subsided and she felt better than she had in years. On her next appointment in London, after the results of new tests came back, the specialist apologised profusely, saying they must have mistakenly diagnosed her with terminal cancer. There was none, he said.
‘Now, I suspect I may be immortal.’ She bites a piece of lettuce and smiles.
In a weird, almost frighteningly sentimental moment, I start telling her about my beard. She nods and smiles, knowingly. I tell her how it all happened, about the company and Tom’s miracle cream. Telling her about my pain, suffering, and my hairy mask that I wore for too long, is somehow therapeutic. When I stop, almost out of breath, she strokes my cheek.
Now we have this in common, she tells me. We must not let this out, she says. This is our secret. The water cured her too, she says. We are immortal now, she tells me, but I know this isn’t true. One day we would both die, but I just didn’t know if it would be sooner or later.
Maybe we’ve started sharing, but now Maggie starts sharing too much. She’s suddenly back to that night all those years ago, when the director came to her room and raped her. She starts telling me about all the blood on the sheets in Technicolor glory. She prayed that night he would die. Some people drop dead after a traumatic experience, Maggie says, from the shock of it all. Your body just shuts down. A switch is flicked, like someone turning out the lights, and then bit-by-bit your organs start to fail.
She read about two perfectly healthy women narrowly escaping a terrorist bomb without a scratch on them. The ambulance men made them cups of tea and sent them home. Next day, they were both found dead. She prayed the director would die in his sleep.
Maggie starts to whisper, filling me full of her sour breath. A grave is open and I’m falling in. She recants the scenes in the untold biography of her life, where the kindly gangster Billy Wallis bundles the evil rapist director into the boot of his car. Picture the scene, in some untidy looking flat in London, four men, including Billy standing over the shocked director. First, they remove his teeth with a pair of pliers, which is Billy’s personal favourite. Then a mouth full of salt. Everything she tells me that Billy did to the director is inconceivable. I don’t believe any of it, I can’t. With glee, and a chicken wing, she draws the scene in the air, telling me that Billy cut off his toes and fed them to him.
For Billy there would be a stick of rock with the words: Fucking liar.
I wouldn’t say this to his face, after all, I’m happy with being handsome again.
She takes great pride in telling me how her gangster friend eventually took out a gun and shot the director in the head. His body, cut into several pieces, was taken north and buried deep in a wood. This is the only part I believe.
‘That is the beautiful thing about revenge,’ Maggie says and pours herself a glass of Chardonnay. ‘Like guilt, it stays with you. Knowing he is dead will never leave me and I’m glad.’
She, this ancient star, is an old house that wants to be haunted.
I tell Maggie how I’m quite happy now, now that my beard is gone, and the world seems okay. Yes, I say, I might be broke, but I have my face and my health. That’s the way I want it to stay, I tell her.
Things change she says, and sips her wine. Glints of evil flicker across her skin, rippling her face. A flush of red sprays out from her wrinkled cleavage, the reflection of the white wine dancing across her forehead. ‘Beautiful things don’t stay beautiful forever. They break. They get old. People stop caring for them or just sell them in desperate times.’
Is this a threat? If it is, it’s a threat that smells of half digested chicken and cheap wine. When people are scared, they generally lose their appetite, so I pick up a lump of chicken and start tearing the skin off, covering my chin in grease.
I look up from the chicken leg I’m gnawing, when a plate smashes somewhere in the kitchen. Maggie smiles, wipes her mouth and bounces off the furniture until she arrives at the sliding doors that separate the dining area from her kitchen. Through the frosted glass, I see her and another figure sort of dancing, moving awkwardly. When the doors open, Maggie comes through pulling Kevin along behind her. He’s wearing a tuxedo that fits perfectly, all tight round his body and just the right length in the leg. Maggie pushes him into the chair at head of the table, where he sits trying not to look at me or her.
Eventually Maggie pushes her plate towards him. I look at the plate and note the half eaten hardboiled egg, a tomato with a bite taken out of it and some chicken pieces. Kevin’s eyes bulge and his hand involuntarily moves across the tablecloth, but Maggie slaps away his fingers.
Just when I thought Kevin was about to have a violent fit, he grabs more food and takes bites out of everything, while Maggie keeps slapping his hands and face. To avoid this dinnertime circus, I tuck into a plate of cheeses. I stuff lump after lump of various nations’ cheeses into my mouth, while the wet slapping sound of Kevin’s mouth echoes round the dining room.
‘When I’m finished, he’ll be able to leave food on a plate,’ Maggie says.
When Kevin was a kid, his parents, especially his mother, wouldn’t let him leave the table without finishing every bite. She’d tell him about the starving millions of children in Africa until, heaving, he’d be forcing mash potatoes or green vegetables between his pinched lips.
Think of the
starving children, I want to say to Kevin as Maggie pulls the remains of his dinner away from him. Now she gets a bin and makes him scrape the debris of dinner into it.
I look at the clock. An hour passes, while Kevin hovers the knife over the plate, making irritating scraping noises as he fights his compulsion. It’s not his fault, remember that; if Kevin doesn’t eat that food, a girl Kevin once kissed in a playground on a bright summers day may die. Imagine her- perhaps she’s a doctor or mother to a swarm of kids or maybe a stewardess. One minute she’s living her life, doing the job, the next she’s lying lifeless on a flight between London and New York. No one knows why, no one has any idea. Kevin will know or at least think he knows.
The tip of the knife pushes the food into the bin and Kevin collapses in tears. He makes no noise, but his shoulders and chest rise and fall, as Maggie folds her arms round him and squeezes him to her corrugated torso. Kevin starts grabbing food from the table and throwing it in the bin, grabbing great lumps of chicken and heaving it across the table, missing the bin and covering the floor in grease. He’s throwing away so much food, that I grab and hug a joint of beef to my chest.
Kevin breathes heavily, looking at me with a tear running down his cheek.
‘I’m cured,’ he says and sniffs.
Chapter Thirteen
I suppose I’ve always had some kind of thing against people with more money than me, especially the ones who only inherited it along with a giant sized silver spoon.
Now they surround me, all dressed up in suits, except the women, who wear designer dresses a size too small to emphasise their boob job or tummy tuck. They may look perfect, these women with their perfectly manicured nails and inflated lips, but when they’re dead, lying on a slab, you’ll see all the tiny scars. God didn’t make these women, man did.
They stare at us the way school kids stare at monkeys having sex in a zoo. A massive square sheet of white card covers most of the floor, leaving a few feet for the rich and their inflated partners to watch from.
A young man occasionally picks up a can of paint and throws it on us. He doesn’t just pick up any can of paint, for it has to be the next one laid out by Janet. It’s almost nice to know there is some kind of order in all of this…art.
The young man Janet had grabbed out of the dole queue picks up another pot of paint and throws Sunrise Yellow over us. Janet has me pinned down like a professional wrestler when the paint hits.
Solar Flare orange covers my back as I see Kevin replacing Cyrus in our little show. He neatly folds his clothes in a pile and walks over, grabbing Jenny in his arms. The paint on her body covers him. Milkshake pink, like molten lava, gushes over Kevin’s head. Like a scene out of an old custard pie fight, he scoops the paint from his eyes and mouth and grins at me.
Butterscotch becomes the colour of Janet’s hair and suddenly, with her sitting astride me, pushing me to the sheet of white card, she looks like a goddess.
Meadow Green.
Mad White.
Forest Fruits.
A day ago we bought all these paints from a big warehouse. You know the kind, the ones that you can’t even see the roof and there are shelves and shelves of large tins of paint. There’s every kind of paint and every kind of description to go with them. Janet walks along with the catalogue, pointing to tins, making me and Kevin climb ladders to fetch them down. All the time I’m thinking about all those posh eyes that will be watching us while we writhe like wild animals under a blanket of emulsion. Matt or Gloss? Art or Pornography? There should be a colour named Pornography blue or Dirty Cow mauve.
All the time we shopped for paints, it disturbed me how much Kevin was enjoying himself. Not once did he avoid the touch of a fellow shopper and never did he stop to do anything ten times or even five. No one he knew was about to die that day. That’s a good thing, surely? So why did I want the old Kevin back?
Margaret Parks had taken something less than perfect, something exquisitely broken and fixed it. I guess Kevin is my yardstick, someone by which I measure my wholeness. Without Kevin’s obsessions, I become a little less attractive to myself.
Kevin, with a face full of Hawaiian Orange and Café Crème, smiles broadly and says, ‘Mate, I’m cured. I’m filthy and I love it.’
No one is perfect. That is what I tell myself. From the moment we are born we are losing our warranty. Like televisions and CD players and DVD players, we are built to breakdown. That’s the way the great inventor, God, made us. But we are not satisfied. We believe we can be perfect and live forever, and that’s what we live and die for. Nobody is perfect, I tell myself. Nothing I do matters. I’m beautiful for this short time, so why not screw in front of a group of rich somebodies and their augmented other halves?
Janet said the tickets sold out in an hour. God knows where she found these people, but they piled out of their chauffer driven cars and scurried into the gallery. The blinds covered the large windows and a couple of spotlights illuminated the white board on which we now perform. In a corner, an Asian film student, with a thin cigar poking out of her lips, stands over a video camera recording every sordid rainbow coloured moment.
The young woman on the till at the paint warehouse asked us, ‘How many homes are you decorating?’
Mustard Cress White.
This is the art world version of those sordid pens you can buy in seaside towns. You turn the pen upside down and the formerly clothed woman is suddenly very naked. The man or woman who invented them must be rich by now. Janet told us, as we stripped, that she had already sold every piece of art we’d make today. She said that we would soon all be very wealthy.
I needed money, but now it doesn’t really matter.
Billy Wallis came to see me again, came into my home and smiled politely. I made him a cup of tea and listened to him talk about the old days. He filled my head full of images of a time when gangsters ruled London and the police let them.
‘I like you,’ Billy says, ‘you remind me of my boy. He’s dead now. Drug problems. I tried to help. God knows how he got hold of a shotgun.’
Thanks, I say, for getting the company off my back. I hadn’t had a fax from my old boss for a few days.
Billy blows his nose loudly, and then looks at me, a little sadly. ‘You shouldn’t thank me really. I persuaded the company to get off your back, but only so me and Margaret could climb on.’
Billy tells me how he talked to my boss and their lawyers, telling them he would keep me in line. He explained who he was and who he had been and they seemed happy for him to take care of me, for a price. They even sent over the letters, Billy said and now he’s got them hidden away. In a safe place.
Maggie needs me to do this, he says. Anything Maggie wants she gets, is the point he’s trying to make. He’d die and kill for her, if he has to. He tells me how, when he found out she was dying, he went to church and prayed she’d survive. He prayed for a cure. He’d never been religious, but he got down on his knees, hearing his bones crackle, and asked God to save her, to take away her cancer. He promised, if she lived, that he would do anything to make her life happy.
There’s a tear leaking out of Billy’s eye and he wipes it away. ‘You’ll rent a boat and go out for the day. At precisely the time I tell you, you’ll steer it right into her house. You’ll be okay. You’ll jump from the boat at the last minute.’
I tell Billy that I cannot possibly do that. For one, I say, I don’t know anything about boats.
Billy gives a laugh that’s full of gravel, and pats me on the shoulder in a fatherly sort of way. ‘Don’t worry about that, son. That really doesn’t matter. Don’t forget, accidents happen all the time. Right now some stupid idiot’s probably just cut his arm off in some industrial accident. Accidents happen. They won’t suspect a thing.’
Billy tells me that the company has passed on my debt to him. He’s adopted me, he says and gives my shoulder a squeeze. He looks upon me as a son more than an investment. But this is still business, he reminds me.
&
nbsp; Now what can I say? If I don’t do what he says, he’ll probably pull out my teeth and feed them to me before he snuffs me out. Driving a boat into a cliff. How difficult can it be? I tell Billy that it looks like I don’t have any choice in the matter.
He nods and tells me that I’m right about that.
Chapter Fourteen
The same policeman that had raided Janet’s home, looking for her mother, sat in front of us both in the interview room. He leans back into his chair and smirks a little. I look around at the light blue walls of the interview room, and then over at a very naked Janet. Only a small towel hides her private parts from the copper’s eyes.
They gave me a pair of shorts that look like the kind of grey, unwashed underwear that they used to give you in school when you pissed yourself.
We are streaked with paint. He doesn’t know it, but the policeman is looking at two works of art.
I’m Orange squash.
Janet is Copper Penny and Traffic Red.
How do you explain art to a policeman?
We were on our second art show when the police burst in and raided the gallery. Somehow, the rich patrons, with large wrapped canvases under their arms, are allowed to walk away. When we were dragged in through the doors from the police van, with only matt and gloss to hide our indignity, we saw the rich patrons and their solicitors leaving. This is called suffering for your art. Cut off my ear. Take me out into a field and shoot me. Please.
The policeman says to Janet that they still don’t know where her mother is. They cannot locate her. Janet stands up, her towel dropping to the floor, asking the copper if he wants to give her a thorough body search. Janet tells the policeman that she hid in her mother for nine months, but it doesn’t work the other way round.
The detective smiles, tapping a pen on the desk. He tells Janet that if she doesn’t turn up soon, they’ll start suspecting the worse and this may turn into a murder investigation. Without her mother around, apparently Janet gets the house and the shop.