A Personal History of Thirst

by John Burdett

  Her words reached my consciousness out of sequence, so that I had laboriously to arrange them into a sentence. My attention fixed itself upon the word “poison.”

  “Poison? Yes, I think he has.”

  “It’s LSD, isn’t it? Why has he done it?”

  I searched around for an answer, then beamed. “He’s tired of being a slave in our kingdom—he thinks it’s time that we were slaves in his.”

  She smiled dreamily. “You understand him so much better than the rest of us.”

  “Yes.”

  “It seems that he’s the one with Daisy tonight, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  She stared again into space.

  “Nevertheless, it’s a remarkable experience. Do you know that just a few minutes ago I started thinking about my son Michael and was immediately transported to the night he died? I’m sure only a mother could follow her child into death like that. Only mothers love that much.”

  I remembered that words were also experiences and that by entertaining the word “death” we also invited the experience. I held her arm as I began to shake with terror.

  She was oblivious to me. Large tears formed at the corners of her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.

  “Damn Thirst for doing this to us. Who the hell does he think he is?”

  “Eleanor, I think I’m dying.”

  “Will you excuse me. I don’t think I could face them right now.” She left me abruptly. I sensed rather than saw the reason for her sudden departure and felt like a small cornered animal.

  “We came to see if you were all right,” Daisy said.

  I wished fervently that she was not there. I saw that they were still holding hands, like lovers, and began to shake violently. They seemed solicitous after my welfare—a trick, I felt sure.

  “You put acid in the wine,” I said. The enormous concentration required to utter this simple sentence left me exhausted. I felt small and hunched, an old man spitting venom. “Why?” I asked him.

  “Everyone here tonight has been carefully selected,” he said. “We want to see what each one of you is really made of. I want to know how well you handle yourself when your structures are all gone.”

  I stared and shook.

  A word that seemed to have been hovering on the threshold of consciousness for some time, perhaps forever, erupted in my mind like something both sinister and man-made—a nuclear submarine surfacing in a clear blue sea: schizophrenia. As soon as it emerged into full consciousness, I became convinced that I was suffering from that very disease and that perhaps because of it I was unworthy of Daisy. I was a rat scuttling across a crowded floor, evoking shrieks of revulsion from the godlike humans standing there.

  —

  The detritus of the party lay strewn all over the ceiling. Then the ceiling swung round and became the floor. There was a smell of vomit, possibly my own. The aftereffects of the drug made me feel disoriented in all my senses, while my mind seemed to function with icy clarity. What terrible damage had I done to myself? I found that I was lying with my head against a wall. I groaned for the sake of demonstrating to myself my own existence.

  “Jimmy?”

  Daisy’s voice floated across the floor of the hall, bounced off walls.

  “Jimmy, I’ve been so worried. I wanted to phone for an ambulance, but the others wouldn’t let me. They said it would ruin your career—but they were just scared for themselves. That schmuck of a cop thought it was hilarious. Then they all got paranoid and fucked off. Even Oliver left. Oh, baby! I’ve been feeling so guilty, sitting here praying for you. Tell me you’re not crazy anymore. I’ve never seen anyone react like that to drugs.”

  “What happened?”

  “You were yelling and talking to people who weren’t there and everyone was watching and you crawled across the floor like a baby. Then you puked. It was horrible. Oh, Jimmy, I shouldn’t have left you—can you ever forgive me? Tell me you’re all right.”

  I reached out and held her for so long that she became uncomfortable and had to apologize for moving her body.

  As we left the hall I remembered that I had to catch a train to Sheffield in a few hours’ time.

  30

  I recognized George Holmes immediately from the train window as he walked briskly down the platform, although it was the first time that I had set eyes on his companion, Vincent Purves. George wore brown baggy trousers and brogues. The pipe clenched between his teeth made it look as if he were grinning with menace.

  I had learned a lot about him since the Crook Street trial. His choice of dress aside, he belonged to a category of policeman whose day had come. Not for him the indulgent smile for young or female transgressers, the avuncular warning, the “Good night all,” the measured plod home. He seemed hardly to notice petty crime; his eyes were fixed on the exploits of heavy gangsters. Those of us in the business of defending them felt uncomfortable around him—George was a man with a mission.

  “Someone’s got to clean this city up,” I heard him say once in court. Barristers who worked with him testified to an amazing energy, an attention to detail, a refusal to mind his own business. He told younger counsel how to cross-examine and deserved his reputation as one of the most skilled interrogators in the Metropolitan Police—those reassuring old English clothes camouflaged a ferocious ambition. It was ambition that moved him to sit in the same compartment as me on that ride to Sheffield, although he made it look like coincidence. Vincent Purves left early to buy a cup of tea and did not return until we drew into Sheffield three hours later.

  —

  “Is this seat taken?”

  When he was settled, he asked me with an inflection of his eyebrows if I minded his pipe. He poked around in it and lit up.

  “You’re on this fraud thing, of course, in Sheffield?”

  I nodded.

  “On the wrong side, as usual?”

  I managed a weak smile. Most of the effects of the drug had now worn off, except for occasional disturbing flashbacks. But I must have looked awful. Daisy—haggard with worry, drugs, and alcohol—had helped me home and bathed me like a child. Most terrifying of all for me was the total loss of concentration. I found that my mind wandered like a hyperactive child’s, the intellectual discipline of a lifetime shattered. For the first time that I could remember, I was deprived of the power to think. I could not have provided George with a more malleable audience for what he wanted to say.

  “How did you like the party last night?” he murmured, so low that I had to ask him to repeat the question.

  My paranoia must have been painfully obvious. “How did you know?”

  “We’ve been watching Mr. Oliver Thirst for some time—and that bent copper he keeps as a friend. Don’t you think it’s a little unwise, being so close to someone like Thirst? A man in your position?”

  George would sometimes spend days thinking up the right first question to ask, but he could not have predicted the effect this one would have on someone suffering from the aftereffects of induced psychosis. I felt a paralysis of will; his presence oppressed me like that of an overweening father.

  “You all right? That bastard didn’t slip anything in your drink last night, did he? You know he’ll do anything to compromise you.”

  “I drank rather a lot, I’m afraid.”

  He grunted. There was a pause while he pulled on his pipe.

  “You must have seen enough bent men to know better than to try reforming them.”

  “He’s trying to change. I’ve never seen anyone try so hard.”

  George shook his head. “At the moment. It’s pathetic; it’s like watching an animal in a trap. Do-gooders just make the trap bigger, add a few options, a new treadmill, a tunnel that leads to another part of the trap. They do it to make themselves feel better; they don’t like the idea that their good fortune depends upon squashing people like Oliver Thirst. That’s what they pay me for, to do the squashing. Makes me sick. If I had my way, people like Thirst would be t
attooed on their foreheads, whipped in public. Society hasn’t changed since the days when those kinds of things were done, you know; people have just got very squeamish. Instead of shackles and torturers we have Librium and psychiatrists. In the end it comes to the same thing, because what Thirst wants is to be like you and me, but he can’t; he has a disease that sets him apart.”

  “Disease?”

  “Criminality. It’s like leprosy, a slow-moving disease that makes people crumble from the inside, inch by inch. All you have to do is restrain them till the disease has done its work and they’ve collapsed. You can let them out for their harmless last gasps. The best you can hope for is a burnt-out case. That’s what the prison system is for—to exhaust them, make them old and useless before their time, institutionalize them. Break them.”

  “Thirst isn’t broken.”

  “More’s the pity. They let him out too early—it happens a lot. We nail him again and again. As often as it takes, till he’s broken. Kinder to break them from the start—slit their noses, cut their lips off—but we’re too squeamish for that, so we use time. For a man in gaol, time is like a pile of rocks on his chest. Each new gaol term adds another rock, till he can hardly breathe. It’s the cruelest method of all, but we use it because you can’t see time. The BBC can’t film it in a documentary, the Guardian can’t describe the suffering it causes—it’s invisible. Keeps the liberals quiet. Thirst knows that.”

  “Yes, I believe he does. But he’s fighting. He says he’d rather die than go back to gaol.”

  George raised his shoulders, opened his hands. “Let him die!”

  “But someone’s given him hope.”

  “Do-gooders. People who never grow up, never see the world as it is. They wish the world was a kind of padded playpen with no serious consequences. But you know better than that. I’ve been on the receiving end of your cross-examination. You’re a killer.”

  “There’s no salvation in your system?”

  “Salvation is just a safe toy in the playpen. Maybe you’re not quite old enough to agree; you still have a bit of the liberal about you. But not for long, I reckon. You’re not really the playpen type.”

  —

  The effects of the drug had completely worn off by the time we drew into Sheffield, leaving that unusual clarity of mind that sometimes occurs when the body’s resources are spent.

  It was wet and appreciably colder as we walked, the three of us, down the platform. Since we were staying in different hotels, we said goodbye at the taxi stand. It was Vincent Purves who turned at the last minute to make some ambiguous but significant gesture, something between a handshake and a wave. George simply got into the taxi and stared straight ahead, as if I was not there at all. It’s up to you now, the back of his head seemed to say.

  It’s curious how foreign different parts of England can seem. The Yorkshire accent struck me as perverse; there was something stunted about the land, and darker. A peculiar density crept into my mind and sat there. I had a feeling that something would go terribly wrong—and that there were no precautions I could take to save myself. I thought about Daisy all the time.

  Beaufort was already installed and drunk when I arrived at the hotel. We both had suites, but his was the one we worked from. The sitting area was a chaos of files and lawbooks, every available surface covered with documents. The bedroom part of the suite gave off the smell of an aging bachelor’s decaying ego.

  His inner crumbling was almost tangible. The man who, even drunk, had never left a sentence unfinished, or missed a syntactical nicety, had begun to lose concentration. Often he forgot what he was saying and stared at me, waiting for me to find some tactful way of reminding him. I was not especially fond of Beaufort, but this decline depressed me. Fraud cases consist of a mass of factual detail, usually contained in dozens of box files. Beaufort had the ability to master this detail. It was not simply that his memory was photographic; he could retrieve information and turn it into aggressive cross-examination questions in a seamless performance under the glare of the court. I didn’t have his memory or his polish, but if he deteriorated further I would have to carry the whole case.

  His cries for help were accompanied by the use of my Christian name.

  “I’m getting a bit old for this game, James.”

  “You’ll manage.”

  “James, I’ve been thinking, you might have to represent us at the prosecution’s opening on Monday. I’m not quite up to it.”

  “On the first day? But you’re leading counsel.”

  “There’s never much to do, James. Old Thomas will just put the boot in a bit—you know how to rattle him by now. I’ll be better once the thing’s under way.”

  This was blackmail. Barristers do not abandon trials any more than physicians abandon dying patients. If he collapsed I would have to take over. The alternative—of simply deserting our client—was too shameful to contemplate.

  And then, on Sunday morning, before the first day of the trial, when I stopped by his room, I found that he had finally snapped. He sat in a chair half-dressed, tears rolling down his cheeks. His eyes, when he looked at me, were pleading. “I’ve lost it,” they said, “and I’m too old to start again.” I had twenty-four hours to take over.

  It was the same day that Daisy’s mother killed herself.

  —

  The phone rang in the middle of that night, destroying the sleep to which I had finally surrendered after an exhausting day with the files, trying to make sense of Beaufort’s margin notes. At first I thought it was a crank call, there was such a strange sound on the other end of the line. The sound repeated itself several times, and I would have hung up were it not for the note of familiarity I sensed even in that inarticulate gurgle. The third or fourth time, I realized the sound was a sob.

  “Oh God, Jimmy!”

  I was immediately alert. The possibility that Daisy had somehow been hurt caused a cataract of primeval emotions.

  “She’s…oh God—oh God!”

  “What?”

  “Mommy. It’s Mommy. She was the only one, Jimmy, the only one.”

  “What?”

  “The only one who loved me totally.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “She…oh Christ, she killed herself. I’m at the hospital. Oh Jimmy, it’s all horribly real. You’ve got to come now, I can’t wait, I’m going out of my mind. You’ve got to come now, Jimmy.”

  “Listen, darling, Daisy—”

  “No, Jimmy, I can’t listen, that’s the thing, I can’t even think. Nothing like this has ever happened—how could she do this to me? Jimmy, I’m desperate, I don’t know what I’m going to do, I’m totally crazy. Listen, this is the address of the hospital.”

  With agonizing slowness she read out an address. Each word seemed to require an effort of concentration, after which her mind would wander for moments until she could muster the strength to articulate the next word.

  “I’ve got to go.”

  The phone clicked, leaving me stranded with a racing brain. Half an hour later she telephoned again, dramatically calmer. She even sounded listless.

  “They gave me a tranquilizer at the hospital; apparently I’m in shock. I need you. This stuff makes me feel like a zombie, but I know when it wears off I’m going to be screaming. Don’t let me down, Jimmy.”

  “I won’t, darling, but you’ve got to give me a day.”

  “A day?”

  “Please listen. Beaufort is having some kind of breakdown, and I’m the only one on the case at the moment. We start tomorrow. The judge—”

  There was another click.

  I spent the rest of the night telephoning the hospital and our flat. At the hospital they told me that Daisy had been helped, after a while, by a young man who came in. The matron could only remember that he was wearing jeans.

  “Did he have a strong cockney accent?”

  “Half the people here have cockney accents.”

  No one answered the phone at our flat.


  I did not sleep again that night. At about eight the next morning I telephoned my opponent on the case to request an adjournment. He was of the gentlemanly school. “But what are you going to tell the judge?”

  “That my girlfriend’s mother is dead.”

  “You’ll have to say wife, old boy, if you want your adjournment.”

  I said wife and got the adjournment. As it happened, the judge had finished another long trial only the week before and was glad of the respite. Only George Holmes was irritated.

  In London, there was no sign that she had been back to the flat after the hospital. It was obvious that she’d left in a rush. With my heart in my mouth, I telephoned Thirst’s flat, but there was no answer. She was not at her mother’s, either. I thought about phoning her father in the United States, Professor Sebastian J. F. Hawkley at Yale, but even in my despair knew that she would not have contacted him. As far as she was concerned, he was dead, too. I had helped her kill him.

  I toyed with the idea of calling the police. But I knew I’d be told that people go missing all the time; she would be merely one more name on a list. I also knew she was not really missing.

  Wearily I got on a train back to Sheffield, where it was still raining.

  For the next few days, dialing the number of our flat was a neurotic tick that overcame me every couple of hours. She never answered. In the end I did phone the police, who dutifully put her on the list of missing persons. The skepticism in the desk sergeant’s voice was predictable. He didn’t know Daisy or me from Adam; he just knew she had gone off with another man.

  Then, after a weekend during which I was glad to be occupied with helping Beaufort’s ex-wife collect him and take him back to the matrimonial home he thought he’d escaped, a letter arrived.

  Jimmy—you let me down. I needed you so badly but your fucking career came first, as usual. I needed comfort, Jimmy—I still do. When I’m out of shock I’ll call you. I’m with Oliver. Daisy.

  Shock. It’s funny how it can take you. And sometimes nothing makes us go into shock more effectively than when the long feared and suspected comes to pass. I held the letter, and my brain went into a tailspin. Specific, very vivid images of Daisy and me from our years together—little cameos, extracts of life—exploded in my head. For a moment the past seemed infinitely more real than the present. It was only a few hours later that the pain really began.