“Hmm.”
“Maybe you could remember the type of card even, the style, the font. I could even try to match up the styles or something. Or the date that you saw on the card, how long ago it was. Maybe that could help.”
“Ok, ok! Relax! I will try to find out who it was. I think her mum has her stuff still, She’d probably let me look through it if I say there’s something of mine in there.”
“Perfect!”
“Well, don’t count on it Joseph. I don’t know for sure, but I’ll try.”
“Thanks.”
I went to the door.
“Joseph?”
“Yeah?”
“I understand what you’re doing—I don’t agree with you, but I understand. Just try not to lose yourself, ok?”
Chapter 4
I couldn’t dispel a feeling of envy as the bus rolled through the picturesque streets. Not even the charcoal-grey sky could taint the quaintness of the white-walled spacious houses. The bus rolled to a stop and I stepped off onto clean, uncracked pavement.
I imagined what it would be like to live on such quiet streets. Walking down them made me realise just how crowded and noisy the tower block that Vicky and I shared was, surrounded by hundreds of people on all sides. She would probably have liked growing up here; for the manicured trees that lined the road, the pretty, uncluttered shops, the flowers that filled the windows and gardens. She probably wouldn’t be half as tough either.
The squat didn’t look out of place, it was just as large and grandiose as the houses on either side of it. But the boxes of empty beer bottles and the trampled foliage of the front yard gave it away. In a top floor window there was a large poster proclaiming something about the war.
As I walked up the path to the front door—a large, oak thing with an elaborately engraved knocker; probably worth more on its own than my entire apartment—I heard sounds from inside. Retro music, the occasional laugh or shout, and what sounded like some sort of action movie. The door was slightly ajar, and I pushed through it into a large hallway.
Inside, the house was a strange mish-mash of obviously expensive furnishings and decorations, and second hand bric-a-brac, arranged without the aesthetic cohesion I imagined other houses in the area had. Two teenage girls bounded down the stairs chattering away and glanced at me as they walked by. As soon they exited the house I heard them explode into stifled giggles. I knew they were giggling at me.
I poked into a few doors. The rooms were disorganised, some more than others. One room had a sick stain on the floor and blood on the walls. My guess was that whoever lived here hung out in rooms until they were too messy, then moved onto the next. A couple of guys drinking coffee in the kitchen eyed me from the other end of a passage.
I walked towards the sound of the TV and ended up in a large, fairly luxurious living room. Smoke hung in the air, and the smell of alcohol-filled bodies was almost invasively pungent. On the far wall a huge TV displayed video game images, and around it there was a couch and a couple of chairs upon which a group of people were playing and drinking. I smelt weed and saw the bong on the table, as well as cigarette papers and ashtrays. I walked up the the group, and stood between the overly-occupied couch, and an armchair that contained a skinny, grinning guy.
“Excuse me,” I said, during a brief lull in the conversation. “Does anyone know…”
“Tom! Your dad’s here!”
“Hahaha!”
“Who is this, man?!”
“Oh shit, look at his arm!”
“Fuck, where’s your arm?”
“Haha! ‘Where’s your arm!’”
“Ugh, that’s freaky.”
“I can’t look at it.”
“Look! That’s messed up! Look at it!”
“Did you leave it at home? Haha!”
They continued laughing. I raised my voice.
“Where’s Sewerbird?”
“What the fuck you want with Sewerbird?”
“Sewerbird only likes people with two arms. Hahaha!”
“How are you gonna shake his hand?”
“Hahahaha!”
As they laughed and joked at my expense even more I thought about leaving. I could have asked the coffee drinkers in the kitchen. At least they would be sober. Instead, I picked up a cindering cigarette butt from the ashtray.
“Yeah man! Smoke with us!”
“Ugh, go away. You’re freaking me out.”
I dropped it onto the lap of the skinny guy on the armchair. He continued grinning for a few seconds, before realising what I had done, and by the time he began to panic I had clamped down my arm upon his chest, holding him down.
“Ah! I can’t find it! Let me go!”
The laughter died out.
“Shit man! It’s beginning to burn!”
The smoke rising from somewhere beneath his body grew thicker, and the dense, black aroma of burning material filled my nostrils. I held him down as he writhed like an animal in a trap, feeling the sense of pleasure one always gets from a real world application of his own developed stength.
“Fuck! This guy is psycho, do something!”
I turned to look at the others, letting them know I was prepared to defend myself. The smoke was a thick haze now, and the skinny guy screamed even louder as the heat reached his thighs.
“Ahhhh! Please! Let me go! Please! Please!”
“Where’s Sewerbird?”
“I’ll tell you I’ll tell you I’ll tell you I’ll tell you.”
I continued to hold.
“Please!”
“Let him go! For fuck’s sake!”
Someone behind me finally said what I wanted to hear.
“Upstairs! He’s upstairs with his girlfriend! Last door on the right, the big one.”
I held a second longer, then let go. The skinny guy jumped up from the chair, brushing at his thighs and dancing around. His jeans were blackened on the back, and upon the chair a cindering hole gaped and grew, glowing and black.
The skinny guy fell to the ground in a ball, crying and clutching his burnt thighs. A few others crowded around him, poured beer on his legs and the chair, while one or two sat staring at me with widened, stoned, and frightened eyes. I turned and left.
I mounted the stairs in the hallway and began to walk up. Halfway I stopped, thinking about what I’d just done. It felt strange, uncomfortable, and yet in some way exhilarating. I felt a nostalgia, a nagging memory that flourished as I recalled it fully.
A dorm room party. Crowded, hot, and noisy. The middle of summer, when the days lasted so long, and the nights felt like a brief release. More girls than guys and enough booze for everyone.
I danced with Josephine forever. I was too drunk to think, and every song was the best song ever. I’d close my eyes and dance for a lifetime, then open them and see Josie, getting high from looking at her. Everything moved in flashing frames.
Then I heard a voice in front of me.
“Josie! Why does your boyfriend have one arm?”
“What?”
“Why does your boyfriend have one arm?”
I opened my eyes and saw him leaning into Josie, not giving her room to dance. I pushed him slowly away, he pushed back harder—scowling.
“Fuck off weirdo.”
Then everything stopped. The music, the movement, the drunkenness, the euphoria. I was just standing still, looking. I stomped my foot upon his knee, feeling it crack. Before he reeled backwards I threw a punch straight into his face. It struck him and followed through, throwing him back into the heavy TV set. I picked him up by the hair, and began hammering his head into the set until blood flew and I was engulfed by bodies.
Then, on the cold curb of some alleyway, the music a muffled distant booming, I was crying into Josie’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Josie.”
“He deserved it.”
“I broke his head.”
“You’re just a lion with a thorn in his paw.”
“Boy with
a thorn in his side?”
“Same thing.”
“My mum’s a bitch.”
“Mine too.”
“Is he dead?”
“He’s fine. Anyway, fuck him.”
“Yeah. Fuck him.”
The second floor seemed to be much tidier than downstairs, less a hang-out and more of a place people slept. To my right was a passage, and at the end of it a door. I walked towards it and knocked. No answer. I knocked again.
The fourth time I knocked the door swung open, and a half naked Sewerbird stood before me.
“What?!”
“Hey. I’m looking for a girl you spoke to a while ago.”
“I’m sorry man,” he chuckled. “I’m not bragging or anything, but I meet so many girls. I can’t help you.”
“You’ll remember her. Her name was Josephine, she had curly blond hair.”
He looked at me for a second. I noticed his eyes glance towards my missing arm.
“No, I’m not gonna remember. Sorry, do you mind? I’m here with my girlfriend, I’d rather not…”
He made to close the door and I put my hand on it to stop him.
“She was murdered. I’m finding out who by.”
“Are you police?”
“She was writing a book. She wanted to interview you.”
His eyes lit up.
“Oh! Josie?”
“Yeah, Josie.”
“Yeah man! ‘Course I remember her. She was something else.”
He opened up the door and invited me in.
His room was different from the rest of the house. It seemed more like a cave than a room. The space was larger than any other, and in the middle of it remnants of a dividing wall lay around the walls and ceiling. There was no wallpaper: The walls a mixture of grey cement and the occasional patch of red brick. No carpet either. There weren’t many furnishings apart from a bed on the other side of the divide (which seemed altogether cleaner), a paint-splattered table, and some mismatched wooden chairs. Around the edges of the room remnants of various objects were strewn. Pieces of factory machines, pipes, paint cans, clothes, electronic equipment—nothing indicated an order or purpose.
Sewerbird opened a fridge and pulled a few beers out, offering me one. I saw a shape beneath the covers of his bed shift and settle.
“So you’re not police then?”
“No. I’m Josie’s boyfriend.”
“I see. How did you find me then?”
“Found some old news stories about you. One of them mentioned this place.”
“Find out anything else about me?”
“Only that a lot of people like you, and a lot of people don’t.”
“Haha, right. Always like that if you dare to do something original.”
There was a smugness about him I didn’t like. Even though he seemed amiable, something about it was self-conscious. I wondered again what had interested Josephine; she would have sussed him out in seconds.
“Are you working on anything now?” I asked.
“Always, man. I’m going to do something really big.”
“What?”
“I shouldn’t tell you, but you’re cool. I can tell. Friend of Josie’s is a friend of mine. So I’ll let you in on it. I’m gonna build a big delete-man. A few of them in fact, then stand them up in a couple of places—can’t say where though. Problem is doing it in three dimensions.”
I knew he would have told me where if I’d asked again, his ego was far stronger than his sense of secrecy. Instead I asked: “What’s a delete-man?”
He threw me a puzzled look, before back-tracking.
“Never mind, man.”
I decided to let it go. I wasn’t interested anyway.
“So what did Josie talk to you about?”
“Oh yeah, Josie. Man, she was really cool. She found me when I was back up in East London. I was living with some girl there. We talked about all kinds of crap.”
“What sort of thing?”
He made some sort of thinking pose, and I got the impression he was choosing what to tell me.
“Talked about my inspiration, why I did what I do. She was interested in why I was so successful. She was smart about a lot of things; she was wrong about some things though.”
“Wrong about what?”
“She reckoned that I was going to drop in popularity. She talked a lot about society, symbols, all that crap. She was telling me that society would change. Values and stuff, and that my stuff wouldn’t fit in.”
“Yeah, Josie was always looking for subtext in things.”
“Smart girl, man. Shame.”
He sucked down the rest of his beer and walked up to the fridge again. He pulled out another, and some ham slices which he ate straight from the packet.
“She was wrong though, man,” he said, mouth full. “I mean, right about society. She said stuff even I hadn’t realised before. Made me notice little things; different fonts they were using in advertising, different tones in the news. She even talked a bit about how food was changing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sort of like, people eat things cause of what they represent. So like before, when people were well off, people were eating healthy this, organic this, diet that, because they wanted food to have meaning, to cut back. But now with the recession, everyone’s gone back on the junk food and big meat, ‘cause it’s more decadent. Something like that, I think.”
He spoke as if he himself had thought it out, but it sounded just the sort of thing Josie would say as she tried to gain some insight into the way the world worked. If Josie thought his time was up, I was sure it was, and that was a good thing in my book.
We talked some more about the conversations he’d had with her, and I began to fill in the picture. Despite his egotistical perspective, I realised that Josie had been interested not in him, but more his art, and why it had resonated so much with people. It was obvious he wasn’t much of an artist, he relied on a crude sense of subject, and his only real success had been with constructing large installations with which he disrupted some mode of daily life. Nevertheless, he let me know that t shirts of his images had sold all over the world, and various copycats had also had huge success with his primitive ideas. It was simply a case of the right time and the right place though, and Josie had obviously been trying to determine why that, and why now.
As we spoke, and as he tried to avoid it more and more, I realised there was something very important he was holding back. I had a feeling it was something to do with the ‘delete-man’ he had mentioned. Halfway through my third beer I decided to ask him again, but before I could, he jumped up and slapped a mischievous grin on his face.
“Hey! I wanna show you something. I showed Josie this, too.”
He threw a loose red shirt over his wiry frame, and picked up a few small radios—as well as a handful of biscuits—then led me outside.
“Where are we going?”
“Not far. Trust me, if you’re anything like Josie you’ll love this. She went crazy for it.”
I anticipated something underwhelming as I followed him out into the quiet streets. We walked for over twenty minutes, leaving all traces of the wealthy neighbourhood behind, and found ourselves in a typical high street.
“Not far now.”
He spoke as we walked but I wasn’t really paying attention. Eventually we reached a high rise. Sewerbird buzzed the intercom, said a few words and opened the main door. We took the lift up to the top floor, and despite going towards any of the apartment doors, and Sewerbird then led me up a few more flights of stairs until we reached the roof access door.
“Shit. It’s locked. They usually never close the padlock. Bastards.”
“You can’t open it?”
“Don’t think so. I could go ask my friend on the 8th floor if she has a key. Or I can ask the landlord, but I really doubt it. Fuck! Sorry, man.”
I looked at the door.
“Wait a second,” I said, looking around
. I got lucky and found what I was looking for: a discarded drink can. “Ok, I can probably open that padlock.”
I checked my jacket and found my small pocket knife, then held the can steady by putting my foot on it, so I could cut the metal.
“You know how to break open padlocks? Where did you learn that?”
“I spent a few months in a detention centre when I was a kid.”
“Haha! Cool.”
“Here, give me a hand. Fold this bit over, so it’s flat.”
After a few more minutes I had made the shim.
“Not perfect, but it should work.”
I spat on the shim, and slid it into the small gap where the padlock’s hook met the padlock itself. With my two lower fingers, I continued to push, whilst with my thumb and forefinger I pulled the hook away at the top. I felt a little give, but not enough.
“Rusty,” I said, then took the shim out and spat on it again.
This time, with a bit more pressure, it worked, and the padlock separated in my hand.
“Oh shit! Nice one! You got to teach me how to do that!”
“Weren’t you watching?”
We walked through the door out onto the roof of the high-rise. There were cigarette butts and beer cans on the tarmac. The wind seemed faster and stronger up this high, almost as if it could carry me away. Beyond the waist-high fence that lined the roof, London’s grey, damp sky went on forever.
I walked to the edge and looked down. The shimmering puddles and distant sounds made everything look ethereal. I swayed over the fence, feeling the three beers I had drank earlier. For a second I felt what it was like to float over the city.
“Hey, check it out,” called Sewerbird.
I turned and walked over to him. He was holding one of the radios and kneeling, the others laid all around him.
“Listen,” he told me, as he tuned the radio. He settled on a station. “Can you hear it?”
Clipped sounds emanated from the fuzz of the feedback.
“I hear something. What is it?”
“Wait.”
He tuned the radio again, to another station. The same staccato noises with no discernible pattern. He turned to me and grinned.
“I still don’t get it,” I said.
Delete-Man: A Psychological Thriller Page 4