by John Burdett
She was in her mid-thirties and had begun to describe her single state as the consequence of too much feminism in her youth. With startling honesty she explained that a long hard look at the daunting wasteland of freedom had eventually sent her scuttling in search of a position of economic slavery from which to reproduce in peace and security. She amused me with her frankness, and we discussed at length the process by which unbeknownst to myself I had passed from the category of politically unacceptable to eligible bachelor.
Like scientific field-workers, we compared notes on some of the less-charted aspects of promiscuity. It was a way, we agreed, of making friends. There was something not quite trustworthy about someone you had never been to bed with. For a moment in time I found myself looking forward to a compromise state of sex and friendship, where the old, foolish idea of passion was mentioned ironically in the context of an emotional toy long since outgrown.
Then Thirst telephoned and inadvertently caused the argument that led to our final parting. Again the phone rang in the middle of the night, and she answered before I could reach the receiver. He had already hung up by the time I was ready to take the call.
“You should have let me take it,” I said.
“Why? Who’s Daisy? Whoever it was seemed to think I was Daisy and hung up. It was a man—friend of the family?”
It was not her passing jealousy that caused the end of the affair. It was everything the name Daisy evoked. Like a superior magic, the mere name was able to dispel, in an instant, the enthusiasm I had tried to muster for the girl next to me in the bed. The incident furnished dramatic proof, too, of what he had already told me: that Daisy and he were no longer together. Hope reawakened within me like a wound.
I had grown skillful in the art of rejection and contrived, somehow, never to see the girl again. For that reason I was alone, once more, the next time he phoned. On this occasion he sounded more drunk than stoned.
“That was Daisy, wasn’t it, the other night?”
“Well, yes,” I said, though her voice possessed virtually no resemblance to Daisy’s. No doubt his deranged state was responsible for his mistake.
There was a long pause. “I told her that if she went back to you ever, I’d kill her. And you.”
“Aren’t you a little old, Oliver, for that kind of talk?”
Another pause. “Yeah, you could be right, old son. Can’t say it doesn’t hurt, though. Silly, isn’t it? I don’t really want her, but I can’t stand for you to have her. The thought of you two living happily ever after, talking about poor Oliver, stupid Oliver, fetching and carrying in the Scrubs, being rogered by buck niggers and thick Irishmen—it makes me want to puke. No, I’m lying. I’ll tell you what it makes me want to do. It makes me want to die.”
Now it was my turn to say nothing. After a while he hung up, but the call was a signal that communication had been resumed. He continued to telephone about once a week, sometimes drunk or stoned, sometimes edgily sober. In addition to the previous themes of being in trouble and thinking a lot of me, there was the new concern about Daisy and me. I made no attempt to put him out of his misery.
When I saw him again it was the night of his death.
—
I glanced back at Daisy, who was staring intensely at the computer screen. I was embarrassed about the way I had written my confession; it was so full of “George this” and “George that,” it struck me now as mawkish. What was she thinking? Would Thirst come between us in death as he had in life? It is impossible to murder someone in the late twentieth century, I can report, without wondering what lifelong price one may have to pay. It is not a question of guilt so much as a question of having committed an act that stands outside the pale of contemporary experience.
I crossed to the other side of the room and stood behind her. The last few paragraphs of my letter were glowing in the screen. I began to read them with her, but they described his last night with less detail than it deserved. Memory supplied the color. I dropped my eyes from the screen while she stared, transfixed.
—
He had awakened me again, and for the last time, in the early hours of the morning. I opened the door, knowing that it was unlikely to be anyone other than him—and stood back a step. He had lost weight over the past months and in the darkness cast a younger silhouette. I even fancied that he grinned in the old way—the street-urchin grin that said he, at least, knew where the open window by the drainpipe could be found. In his hand he held a gun.
It was a small-caliber pistol, and he was pointing it at me.
“You’re pointing a gun at me, Oliver.”
He looked down curiously at it, as if it had appeared there by accident a moment before.
“Yeah. I think of it as Daisy’s gun. She used to pinch it from time to time and go on shooting practice with a bunch of dykes somewhere in Suffolk. She thought I didn’t know. Used to make me laugh.”
Now that he had spoken a full sentence I could tell that he was drugged again. Or if not drugged, then in some strange somnambulant state.
He looked thoughtful. “I want us to go for a ride—in your car. I hear you’ve got a nice new Jag.”
“I’m not dressed, Oliver,” I said, touching my dressing gown.
“Ah, right. Better get dressed, then. I’ll watch.”
He followed me into the house and up the stairs to my bedroom. I was suddenly conscious, of all things, of my small bookcase with the glass doors that held my mother’s books. The thought that I might never see it again gave it a surreal glow, as if my fear had made it luminescent.
He must have had an uncanny perception of what was going on in my mind, for he walked over to the bookcase to touch it. He then proceeded to open its small glass doors and take out the book that was dearest to me: The Golden Treasury of English Verse. I felt sure that he was about to commit some sort of malicious dismantling of my identity prior to the destruction of my body. Instead he caressed it.
“This is you, isn’t it?” He set the book down on the case. “I always wondered why I never really reached you, what kept you together. It was this. A silly little book. You got stuck somewhere in a romantic teenage fantasy—about women, about the world. And you fed the fantasy with books of poems. But poems can’t stop a bullet, old son. Get dressed.”
“Are you really going to stand there and watch?”
“Yeah.”
He stared at me as I slipped off my dressing gown and bent over for some underpants.
“Stop. Freeze. That’s just the position, Jimmy, just the position. In prison—you know, when they’re going to roger you—they make you bend over. Just like that. They use soap or Vaseline. And a couple of blokes on either side to hold you down. They’re experts, Jimmy, experts.”
He spoke slowly, in a hallucinatory drawl.
“Can I get dressed now?” I said.
“Yeah. Don’t fancy you after all. Too skinny, except for that rotten little potbelly. You look better in a suit.”
I dragged on some trousers. My hands were shaking wildly. When I was dressed, he gestured with the gun that I should go first down the stairs. He seemed to know where my lock-up garage was and waited while I pulled up the horizontal swing door. I got into the driver’s seat. I wished I could drive off—possibly crushing him against the wall—and cursed myself for my squeamishness.
He got in beside me and looked around with a connoisseur’s eye.
“Nice motor. Always did like this model. Got class, James—like you.”
“Where are we going?”
“Anywhere. Don’t mind, really. Where’s the best street to die in around here?”
I shuddered. “You’re not really going to kill me, are you?” Terror was doing nothing for my repartee.
He looked at me curiously. “Scared, huh? Green balls running down your trouser legs? Been like that for over a year, me. I’m not scared now, though. Matter of fact, I feel wonderfully relaxed. Wonderfully.”
“That’s because you’re holding
the gun.”
He smiled. “Yeah—at last. Old Oliver is finally holding the gun. Not much of one—a peashooter. Have to get you between the eyes at point-blank range. Even then you’ll probably get off with a headache. Trust my luck—when I finally do get to hold the gun, it’s shrunk to the size of a peashooter. If I’d have been smart like you, I would have gone for those big invisible guns—the undetectable guns you men at law always carry around with you, the ones you’ve been pointing at me all my life. You know?”
“Yes, Oliver—I know.”
I reversed out of the garage and drove aimlessly down the deserted streets. The Jag gave a smooth ride, which soothed me a little. As I drove, he began to talk about George Holmes. I encouraged him. One Thousand and One Nights.
“Embarrassing, when I finally discovered what all those words mean that the shrinks and probation officers use—very embarrassing. It’s like being a thalidomide cripple—everyone’s heard of it and everyone wants to look. I needed a surrogate father, didn’t I? And there he was, Detective Sergeant George Holmes, waiting for me on an old bomb site when I was twelve years old, burning alive with lust and ambition. Dear old father Holmes, more bent than any man I ever met—inside or out. Of course, no one’s ever taken his psychological profile. And he made me in his own image, James. Oh Christ, I can’t believe this.”
I assumed “this” was the tears sliding down his cheeks. He wiped them away with the back of the hand that held the gun.
“You know what’s really amazing? Really amazing is that I loved him, that I still do. Can you believe that? Most of it I did for him, right from the start. Can you believe that?”
He talked at length about his relationship with Holmes. He had been mesmerized from the start by the policeman’s compulsive duplicity. His love of sheer cunning was boundless, his secrecy impenetrable. His only weakness was to boast to his male lovers about the cleverness with which he was able to lead two lives. He liked them to know that he’d beaten the system, that he, in his words, was one snake that did crawl out of the pit. And who could deny it? He was at one and the same time the most successful criminal and policeman in London. The young Thirst had been overawed.
“He loved telling me about the way he used you, James—he couldn’t believe how naive you were, prosecuting all those drug barons while the biggest of the lot was sitting behind you in court. He thought it was hilarious the way he got you to prosecute by hyping it up about the evil of criminals, me in particular. Of course I never told him that I’d known you in another lifetime, so to speak.”
With a slow, delicate gesture, he put the gun down on the low shelf in front of the gearstick.
“I wanted you to save me from him. I wanted you to be my escape—you and Daisy—but you failed. And now you’ll have to do your duty, because I’m not going back to prison—no way.”
I grabbed the gun and transferred it to my right hand. He put his head back on the headrest and smiled.
“Now all I have to do is make you kill me.”
“Why should I?”
“Because I’m the part of you you’ve been keeping in the deep freeze all these years—ever since your mum died, remember?”
“I’m not responsible for you, I never have been. Thinking that I am, or anyone is—that’s part of your problem.”
He raised a weary hand. “Don’t. I know that catechism in words of ten syllables. Let’s just say I’m a mess. Before I met you I was a very ordinary mess. Now, because of you and Daisy and Eleanor and Hogg, I’m a very weird mess. I can tell you everything that’s wrong with me in the vocabulary of every social science. I’m very aware, very. And it doesn’t help—it just makes the pain worse. I’m an embarrassment to myself—‘Oh no, there he goes again, fucking up his life for the ten thousandth time.’ That’s not what they say about me, it’s what I say about me. I suppose I’ve learned one thing that almost nobody else ever finds out—I’ve broken my balls for something that doesn’t exist. My own identity. And that’s what you’ve done for me. You and Daisy and the rest. Only you’re different, James, there’s something about you that won’t let you walk away. We’re connected, you and me. Just as you had to answer the phone and open the door so you’ll have to do the deed tonight. But…Did Daisy ever tell you her theory about us being queer together?”
“Oh yes. There’s hardly a dysfunction, especially sexual, that Daisy didn’t accuse me of at one time or another. I think she fantasized about our having a homosexual affair—I think it turned her on.”
“But you never told her the truth?”
“The truth?”
He looked at me incredulously.
“No, I never told her the truth.”
He sighed. “No, me neither. I never told anyone we were mates as kids. I couldn’t believe my eyes when you turned up that day at Tower Bridge and turned out to be my barrister. You—of all people in the world.”
“There was nothing to say. There was a glass wall between us—what could I have done?”
“It was pride with me. I know it was a long time ago, but I have a terrible memory for these things. You cut me off, James—all of a sudden. You were my first experience of treachery, know that? You were the wildest of all of us, you taught me how to pinch motor scooters. Remember that night when there was just you and me—I was a nipper, but you must have been in your early teens? You showed me how to bump-start a Vespa and we went joyriding all round Camberwell. Then that day on Waterloo Bridge you had the brass balls to act like you’d never seen me in your life before. That was a very weird way to carry on in the circumstances. Thought you’d gone psycho.”
I broke out into a cold sweat. My hands were trembling on the wheel, especially the one that also held the gun, and I felt a great inner shuddering as two parts of my mind that had been sealed off from each other for decades came violently together. It was not that I had forgotten my early friendship with Thirst. I had simply never talked about it with anyone, not even him, so that it had had an independent existence for me, like a fantasy.
“Perhaps I was psycho, Oliver—I really meant it, you know, what I said. As if I really was another person, with no history.”
“You amputated me—the whole gang of us looked up to you. You were Jack the Lad, James—a born villain. Everyone said so. In the street they said you drove your mum to an early death. I could write a case study on you. Talk about guilt-driven. You cut out and left me to inherit your mantle. I’ve lived the life you were supposed to have. You got away with it—at a price.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Just tell me one thing. What was it made you turn like that? Your mother’s death, that’s all?”
I gave a loud involuntary groan. “Not really. I was addicted to pinching motorbikes. One night I took a Norton 750—you remember them? Massive things. It was too big for me. I skidded round a corner, hit a kid, made a dash for it. The next day it was in all the papers. Ten-year-old girl with multiple fractures. Legs, arms, skull, the lot.”
Thirst grunted. “But you didn’t kill her? Maim her for life?”
“No. She lived. She was none the worse after the bones healed.”
“Hm,” Thirst said. “You must have been more squeamish than you let on.” He pondered for a moment, frowning. “Hey, just a minute—” He peered at me through the gloom. “Oh, James! Oh, Jimmy old son! I’ve just tumbled to what you’re so coyly trying to say. I remember it now. It was in all the local papers. ‘Child’s Body Smashed by Brute on Motorbike’—that sort of thing. There were pictures of a kid done up in bandages from head to foot. Yeah, I remember, Norton 750. But, James, Fred Snark went down for that! He was one of us, only a good bit older and not very bright. He was just turned seventeen, so he got prison instead of borstal. He was like a brother to you, James. After all that publicity they threw the book at him. Grievous bodily harm, reckless driving, theft, driving without a license. With his record, they gave him some consecutive sentences. The kid was all recovered in four months, but h
e got five years. Fred know you did it?”
I swallowed. “No. He never knew. I stood outside Camberwell Green police station every day, willing myself to go in and confess, but I couldn’t. Just never had the guts. I was pretty young, really. Just over fourteen. In the end I told my mum. She told my dad. I was sure he’d make me go and confess. That’s what I wanted him to do, I suppose. Instead he got a relation of his who was a prison warden to give me a talking to. It was a graphic description of life in gaol. Male rape, syphilis, enforced fellatio, murder, beatings, calculated humiliation and degradation, the lot. This guy didn’t pull any punches. When he’d finished, my dad made a speech to me in front of him. It was the only time I ever heard my old man get eloquent. He said something like: ‘If you let your best friend rot in gaol for a crime you committed, you’re the lowest form of human life, no better than scum, not fit to lick the boots of an honest man.’ Then he paused. I’ll never forget. It was the most brilliant rhetorical trick I ever witnessed. ‘But if you confess, they’ll be so pissed off with you for making fools of them, they’ll throw the book at you. They’ll have your number. You’ll spend the rest of your life in and out of prisons. You’ll destroy your mother’s life, my life, and your own. So: you’re in such a fucking hurry to grow up, now you’ve got yourself a man-size dilemma. It’s a choice we all have to make in the end. Be a bastard or be a sucker.’ ”
Thirst grunted again. “Fred Snark thought the world of you. You know what? You made the right choice for you, but me, I’m the sucker sort. If it’d been my best mate, I would have confessed. No wonder you’ve always stuck with women. Male love scares you. You betray it.”
Confession has its own momentum. I hurried to finish. “A few days later my old man came home with a pile of books and an exam syllabus. Told me that since I’d decided to be a bastard I might as well become a lawyer, and if I didn’t get my head down and work my arse off, he was going to confess for me. I suppose I should thank him. I became very driven, knowing I was a shit for life.”
“So it was nothing to do with your mother’s death?”