Ugly Things

by Mark Yarwood

  When I wake up, Jenny is standing over me and smiling like a mother happy to see her child awake after an operation. Panic hits and I push Jenny out of the way and start running along the harbour.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Janet Coleman lies dead on her kitchen table, her head tilted back slightly, with a giant stick of rock shoved down her throat. She suffocated. The stick of rock is jammed into her windpipe. Later, the police will say that her fingerprints were not the only ones on the stick of rock.

  Janet made sticks of rock. Her mother showed her how when she was a kid. Instead of nice little holiday messages, Janet would put messages of truth running through them. She called them messages of truth because they were the things that people wanted to say, but were too ashamed to speak. Snap the candy in half and the message is still there. You cannot escape the truth.

  The one jammed in Janet’s throat says: Without death, there is no art.

  You layer the still flaccid candy on top of each other, making sure the words are properly spelt out. I saw it on a children’s programme once, being made in a factory. They roll and stretch the candy until it’s the width you want and cut it up into tubes at least fifteen centimetres long. Then the candy is boiled until hard, like rock.

  Janet made one longer and thicker, so she could choke herself on it.

  The old couple, Ivy and Ted, who Janet hated so much, bought her home and shop. More money in Maggie’s pocket. Her daughter died so her mother could live again.

  Janet was the only woman I had met who accepted me for who I am- a tramp in a suit. She smiled and felt my beard. She had taken a few hairs from my paintings and kept them.

  Her skin was so very white while she was alive. Picture her breasts in her black bra, heaving mounds of snow. In death, her skin is tainted with blue.

  Janet believed in art. She didn’t believe life imitated art, or vice versa. She believed, almost religiously, art and life were inseparable, that you couldn’t have one without the other.

  On her hands, as she lay lifeless on the kitchen table, was paint. A forensic pathologist would scrape at it and wonder what it means. I would know and could tell him it meant her life.

  Imagine her naked, pouring paint over her body. Artists never really clean their pallets and it was the same for her, her body hiding dabs of dried colour about her person. A mixture of red and blue underneath a breast. Brown under her nails. A dash of yellow behind her ear.

  Janet loved to feel my beard on her skin.

  We’d make love and she’d make me brush my wiry hair across her naked breasts. Wire wool on skin.

  The furious red marks round her mouth, caused by my hairy kisses, she loved. Her lips had taken on an inflamed look and made her seem as if she was always pouting.

  A strawberry was appearing on her chin, ripening all the time.

  Janet didn’t mind any of that. She believed it was the mark of our love. She said she loved me in all the ways possible. She said that when we made love, it became art. Janet lay dead on her kitchen, served up like some cannibal’s feast and the police tucked in, taking her apart, making her less of an art form and more of a warning to others. They leave a sign in the street and it reads: Attention, woman found murdered and we are appealing for witnesses.

  I read the sign and all I can think is that it would make a great piece of seaside rock.

  By the next day, the witnesses have gathered and talk to the police, pointing their fingers, and begin making statements about who might be guilty. They all point to a man moved into the village and was her lover. Maybe they had an argument, they suggest, and set their eyes on my home. Janet’s mother wouldn’t have let this all happen, they say, and keep pointing their fingers across the harbour.

  He killed Janet Coleman, they say.

  He took the stick of rock and jammed it into her throat.

  She was only young, they say, but don’t mention her vulgar truthful statements.

  They point at my house and say that I murdered her for some unknown reason.

  The police turn up at my door, two of them. The one in uniform strides round the place, looking over my possessions, while the saggy looking detective sits at my kitchen table and takes out his notebook.

  ‘It’s a terrible thing to have happened,’ the detective says and smiles a little sadly.

  I nod and offer to make them each a cup of tea, but they decline with a shallow shake of their collective heads. It’s not like they are two people at all and suddenly the uniform officer is a shadow of his superior.

  ‘Where were you that night?’ the detective asks and looks at me pointedly.

  ‘At home. On my own. Then at Shelley’s café until the early hours,’ I say.

  The detective nods and scribbles something down, his jowls bouncing with his pen. I haven’t talked to the policeman before and wonder what happened to the other one. ‘And can anyone can confirm this?’

  ‘No, my friend who lives here with me was out. But Jenny, the waitress in the café, served me coffee.’ I touch the kitchen table and try not to scream at him that I didn’t kill her.

  I wonder where was Kevin that night.

  ‘I see you’re growing your beard again. I’ve seen you online, in one of your masterpieces,’ the detective says, still writing something down.

  ‘I see.’ He looks up and winks.

  ‘You look better with the beard,’ he adds and smiles. ‘Once you grow a beard, it stays with you.’

  I touch my face and feel the hair sprouting out of me. I see my beard like a stop- motion movie of a flower blossoming. My beard stretching quickly down to my chest. When you die, your hair and your nails keep growing. ‘I can’t seem to lose it.’

  ‘I’ve always wanted to grow one, but the force wouldn’t appreciate it.’ The detective smiles. ‘You and Janet were close, yeah?’

  ‘A little.’ I look out the window and watch the seagulls swooping at the sea.

  ‘People say you were. And you know her mother, the artist, of course,’ the detective says slowly. ‘You went to some of her parties.’

  ‘A couple. Why?’

  ‘Thought I might have seen you there. We are old friends. They say that you don’t get on with Maggie anymore. He writes something.

  I look at him. I try and see into his mind. What sort of policeman goes to Maggie’s parties and what has he done for her? Has he woken up in her bed, with her scratch marks freshly drawn down his chest and back?

  ‘Would you mind coming with us to the police station?’ the detective asks and gets up. ‘Just routine. Need to get your prints so we can eliminate you from the enquiry.’

  I remember, suddenly, another piece of rock that Janet handed me a few nights back. It read: I don’t want to live forever.

  The uniformed officer escorts me to the door like I don’t know the way myself and puts me in the waiting car, pushing my head down. Why do I get the feeling everybody is working for Margaret Parks? She is their queen.

  In the small building, which they call a police station, they cover my fingers and palms in black ink and press my digits on the card. A thick- set uniformed officer with a shaved head, holds my hand, but not with any kind of affection.

  I want to scream: I didn’t kill her!

  In the end, I’m handed a tissue and pushed out the door of the station, my hands still black. I stand for a few moments and watch the officers carrying on with their business. Janet is still dead and I don’t know who killed her.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  For a long while I’ve been hiding from everyone and everything, especially myself. My beard had been hiding the fact that I wasn’t handsome anymore, and to me that was worse than death. Although I’m stroking my beard like a pet, I don’t want to hide anymore. That’s the last thing I want to do now. Standing outside Maggie’s house, waiting for Billy to show, I should be ready to run. The rains been non -stop for the last few days, and every night I’m still waiting here.

  The rumbling of a motor engi
ne moans through the rain and a car’s lights paint my entire frame as I stand at the end of the drive, half under a tree. He’s back at last.

  ‘What’re you doing standing in the rain?’ Billy asks through his open window. He rolls down the window further and sticks out his head, his fading hair quickly getting soaked, and droplets of rains running down his rock- like face. ‘Isn’t Maggie in? You really are taking this stalking thing seriously.’

  ‘I’m not looking for Maggie,’ I say and my mouth fills up with rain. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

  Billy pushes open the passenger door and I run and get in. Once inside the car, seeing Billy’s hollow blue eyes searching mine, all I can do is listen to the rain pelting the car’s roof. I can smell the fragrant mushroom shaped piece of card hanging from his rear-view mirror.

  Billy Turns in his seat and stares at me. ‘If people don’t want to tell me something, I usually do something to their balls.’

  This isn’t the sort of thing I need to hear right now, not with the information I have to impart.

  Suddenly Billy’s starting the engine and steering the car away from Maggie’s place. I just sit and watch the road roll under the Jaguar, until we are facing my place and the engine’s panting to a stop.

  We silently walk into my cottage and stand in the kitchen. Billy picks up a spoon and seems to look at himself in it. ‘This something you want to tell me… should I be sitting down?’

  Right now, I feel like handing Billy a stick of Rock, reading: Your daughter’s dead and that bitch Maggie killed her.

  Thing is, I don’t know how she died; It sounded like she was planning this, that this was her family’s idea of keeping it together. Maybe she sacrificed herself so her mother might live another life as a saggy old actress. I tell myself I don’t care why she died, that I just want revenge on Maggie and Kevin, but somewhere in me is the feeling that all this crazy art belongs to me. This could be my inheritance. How much money will it take to help me forget my ugliness?

  ‘Do I have to fetch some pliers and a hammer from the boot of my car?’ Billy puts down the spoon and fixes me with his sub-zero eyes. In the half -light of my kitchen, the scars on Billy’s face stand out tenfold. Each line cut into his face tells of a distant and terrifying memory. He survived, fought his way out of whatever fate someone had in store for him and took his revenge. And even though he stands old and worn in my kitchen, the burning hatred and violence is still there, heavy on his shoulders.

  ‘Maybe you should sit down.’ He smiles a little, then, after staring at the kitchen table, pulls out a chair.

  I’ve never been the bearer of bad news. I’ve always been the smiling face on your doorstep delivering the goods that will change your life for the better. How do you sell something like this? Death, murder and all that comes with it, doesn’t come all wrapped up in a smart new box with a guarantee. This is a gift that no one wants. I look him in the eyes, or at least try to. Medusa is looking back at me.

  ‘Janet. Janet…your daughter… is dead,’ I say it and watch his cold eyes flicker- just like a gas fire igniting.

  His voice, like a child’s footsteps on gravel, asks me to tell him more, to tell the whole story of his only child’s murder.

  When I’m listening to myself speak, spilling out the way I found her, I’m wondering if he’ll think I did it, just to get back at Maggie, or for some other reason that his mind might make fit the circumstances; But I keep talking.

  Instead of running through a stick of rock, I wonder if the words: he told the truth and died for it, will be written on my headstone.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  You can run, but you can’t hide they say and, at this point, that statement, once said by some clever bastard, is perfectly true.

  Billy didn’t say a word, just got up and left.

  Now I’m in town, walking round, trying to get on with this empty shell of a life, while the police question everyone, talk to every fisherman, every person who owns a shop that sells tat to the tourists, just so they might get a picture of Janet’s movements.

  There was another set of prints on the rock, the police said. I shudder, wondering where she, or the person who stuffed it into her mouth, got it from.

  For this whole story to qualify as art, someone had to die.

  Without tragedy there is no art, they would have you believe. Then why aren’t those artists, the ones who can only paint with only their mouths or with a paintbrush between their toes, hanging in the National Gallery? Why aren’t their works worth a bundle?

  Janet must’ve nearly thrown up as the stick of rock moved deeper into her throat. Apparently, some women can deep throat to give a man maximum pleasure, but I know, from experience, that Janet wasn’t one of them. I don’t care who you are and what you’re dying for, there is no way you can kill yourself like that.

  Someone made and boiled a special thick and long piece of rock for the job, someone with specialist knowledge. Yeah, sure, Janet probably made it, and put her final words through the rock so they would always be remembered.

  If you want to die, I mean, if you believe in your cause with that strength of emotion, then you strap a bomb to your body or jump from a building with a note pinned to you. Depressed people sit in a room or a bath and cut themselves open. You don’t shove a giant stick of rock in your own mouth. You couldn’t get it all the way down.

  It would take the help of a stronger assistant, someone to push you down, to slap you if you began to struggle.

  Someone’s fingerprints are on that stick of rock.

  Without Mark Chapman, John Lennon would have been just another solo Beatle, not a legend or a God. We cannot accept Marilyn Monroe got depressed and swallowed some pills and lied down and died. Without mystery, there is no art. That’s what Janet would say.

  Maybe they would have needed one person to hold Janet down, and another to shove the rock into her throat.

  How could she leave me with all this?

  I walk through town, occasionally stopping to see the uniformed policeman stopping and asking people questions. They seem to be going in and out of the shops carrying pictures of Janet.

  All I know is that there’s threatening notes typed on my paper, with my fingerprints on. The police have me down as a crazy stalker. If they know Maggie is Janet’s mother, they might make the leap that I killed her for that one little reason- I killed her daughter to get back at her.

  All this art, porno stuff, this has just been one huge PR stunt. Maggie knew how to make me into a crazy stalker, to make me love her daughter and then make it look like I killed her.

  Blackmail me onto a boat and get me to crash it into an old film star’s home. I was never getting off that boat and Billy must have known that, but didn’t care, as I was just another figure standing in the way of Maggie’s second coming.

  I unlock the door of my cottage and peer inside, making sure nobody’s waiting for me, hiding behind the door holding a blunt object. There’s no one here, but me, and I sit and think about the facts. I imagine Billy sitting opposite me, staring at me with those blank eyes when I tell him that his daughter is dead. Their daughter, his and Maggie’s.

  Could he kill his own daughter for Maggie? He’s got the strength to hold her down. No, I shake my head.

  I nearly jump out of my skin as someone moves behind me. I spin round and see Kevin sitting on the sofa in the dark, just looking my way, a subtle smile on his lips. How I want to make those lips bleed. How I want to shove a piece of rock through those teeth.

  ‘Mate, everything has to go to plan,’ he says and smiles a little bit more. ‘Maggie is depending on you.’

  I switch on the light and watch his eyes blink for a few seconds. He sits up and makes sure his nice blue shirt, which looks expensive, is un-creased. ‘I hope you don’t get seasick, mate. I do. I have to take special tablets.’

  I turn away from him and clench my fists, and hear him laugh deep in his throat. I hear the sofa breath and hear his footste
ps behind me, brushing the carpet. ‘Mate, apparently, the best thing to do on a boat if you feel sick, is to face the horizon, letting the sea spit in your face.’

  I wonder how Kevin thinks he’s going to make me get on that boat. I’m easily bigger than him, but then again, I’ve noticed a crazy look in his eye. It’s like all the abuse, all the times people have made fun of his affliction, has risen in him to give him power. A madman stands behind me, and crazy people are known to have the strength of twenty men.

  Did Kevin ram that stick of rock into Janet’s mouth? I know what he used to want to ram into her mouth.

  ‘Mate, I want you to know that I’m sorry about all that’s happened,’ Kevin says and lays a hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s what she wanted. It’s the way it had to be. You’ll get over her.’

  Now I’m the one who doesn’t like to be touched. I jerk away from his hand, my eyes trying to look at the spot where he touched me, desperate to cleanse myself.

  ‘Mate, you have to drive that boat into her house or this won’t have meant anything. You can’t let her death be in vain. Can you?’ Kevin walks round and looks into my eyes.

  His eyes burn into mine.

  Medusa.

  Windows to the soul.

  Pools of hatred.

  ‘We have the envelopes and letters with your prints on them, remember?’ Kevin nods as he speaks. ‘And the guy who’s just waiting to torch our old work place. Mate, don’t forget him.’