by Steve Finbow
I follow the figures on the screen. As they walk out into the hallway, I walk out into the hallway. They are in single file, the man with the phone second, they stop, turn. I stop and turn. I am facing a cupboard door under the stairs, so are they. When I lift the phone to my ear, I can hear a dog barking, when I hold it in front of me to look at the screen it goes quiet. I place my ear against the door. I press play. The first man takes something from his jacket pocket. A gun. I can’t tell if it’s the same one they used earlier. I hear growling.
‘What the fuck?’ I hear one of them say. London but with another accent underneath – Middle Eastern?
‘I thought you did it.’
‘I did,’ London.
‘Do it again,’ North-East, ‘open it.’
A hand reaches around the guy with the phone, pulls the door open towards him. The gunman leans back against the wall, holds the gun with two hands, points it into the cupboard. There is a growl, then two shots. The gunfire echoes in the cramped hallway. I hear the shuffling of bodies, swearing.
‘Fucking noise of that,’ I hear. London.
‘Should’ve kicked the fucking thing to death.’
The gunman pushes past the cameraman, the cameraman moves into the conical shadow thrown by the open cupboard door, as he does so he pans the screen down. I see smashed teeth, blood, what’s left of a corgi’s head. Behind that two bodies, gagged again, and stuffed into a foetal position – and these would come back to me in my dreams – reanimated Neolithic corpses hiding in my fridge, my toilet, my wardrobe.
I swallow the rising bile. Turn off the phone. Pull open the cupboard door. I step toward the kitchen but not quickly enough, and am taken down by Mrs. Beckford’s body, she falls heavily on to my legs, and on top of her falls her sister’s body, they are both screaming under their gags, their eyes wide and full of tears.
The Mermaid runs out of the living room. I roll out from under Mrs. Beckford’s body. The Mermaid’s screams are loud enough to drown out my own.
More than a little freaked out by this, I pull myself up. And slip down Mrs. Beckford’s gag. In a voice gurgling with fear and mucus, she says, staring at The Mermaid,
‘Mr. Balzac. I’m sorry. I called the police. They knew.’
‘It’s all right, love,’ I say, ‘they couldn’t have known. Just came on the off chance.’
‘But I don’t know where Sarah is, Mr. Balzac. I don’t.’
The Mermaid, comes over and unties and ungags the sister, wipes her bloodied face and then licks her hand.
‘Gross!’ I say.
‘Ketchup,’ she says.
‘What?’ I say.
‘Ketchup. Or corn syrup. Something sweet.’
While The Mermaid attends to the women, I go back into the living room, lounge – whatever – and pull off the cushions from the sofa, underneath the one with a big fucking hole in it are a dozen or so sachets of Heinz ketchup and barbecue sauce. Sleight of bloody hand. Clever bastards. Had me going. I stick my finger into the barbecue sauce and taste it. Not bad. Bit too much sugar.
Looking along the hallway, I see The Mermaid on her knees, the glass in the front door, a peacock’s tail of coloured glass, creates a halo effect around her head, her hair hanging loose, highlighted with amber rays, but her face is a muddy purple, lost in dim light, her eyes cast down to the two women she rocks in her arms.
Still quivery with shock, I jump again as my mobile vibrates in my pocket. I roll over, pull it out, look at the ID. One of Mikey’s boys. They can wait. I press the off button and sit upright, the vibration starting again.
‘Who is it?’ The Mermaid asks.
‘One of Mikey’s boys. Sod ‘em. You OK?’
‘Yeah. No. No.’
I rub my face, stand, help Mrs. Beckford and her sister up and guide them into the kitchen.
I lift The Mermaid to her feet, halfway up she crumbles like an over-stacked wedding cake, and I have to struggle to hold her upright.
‘I’ll make a cup of tea in a minute,’ The Mermaid says, and to me, ‘I think we should call the police.’
I lower my voice, ‘But Mrs. B said she’d called them. Where are they?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe they’re on their way.’
‘What, on a three-toed sloth?’
‘What are we going to do, Balzac?’ Her voice lost in itself. Somewhere else. Not here, delicate as a baby’s thumb. The late afternoon light fizzes in her eyes, changing them from blue to green to hazel.
‘What are we going to do?’ she repeats.
My mobile’s beginning to piss me off, buzzing away in my pocket like a clockwork grasshopper. I pull it out. It’s H.
‘H, get over here as soon as.’
‘What is it, dear boy?’
‘Mrs. Beckford and her sister have had the frighteners put on them by what looks like renegade thugs from the magician’s circle. And like Debbie McGee, it ain’t pretty. Get a taxi. And hurry the fuck up.’
‘__________’
‘H is on his way,’ I say.
The Mermaid stares at the two women, shakes her head.
***
With Mr. Beckford safely ensconced in the capable but severely underfunded care of the NHS, and now travelling in a Hackney carriage on my way to rendezvous with Balzac and The Mermaid, I will continue my autobiography – or should that be orthobiography? – as my telling will be the true one, the correct version. At the age of three with Thales’ aphorism ‘Know thyself’ chiming in my auditory sense organ, I undertake a voyage around my body, investigating its crevasses, its valleys, its dark undergrowths. I surface at the age of four, a ravaged and sopping copy of John William Dunne’s An Experiment With Time grasped in my hand and exclaim to mother my purpose in life. What it was, I cannot now recall, but she has the foresight to bundle me off, sucking on a plastic soldier – the representational dwarf of Bernard Law Montgomery, 1st Viscount of Alamein – and I wave to her from the back window of a speeding ambulance. At five, having contrived a set of eccentric rules for Scrabble, comprising words that can only be heard when speaking in tongues, grandfather comes to my rescue and drives me in his galumphing jalopy to the wilds of Yorkshire. He has a library. My undoing. After fattening me up on bread and butter pudding, blancmange, sherry trifles, and flagons of stout, grandfather sits with me in the library where I stickily thumb through dusty volumes, devouring theories of time by great minds such as René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Francis Herbert Bradley. My grandfather’s dog – Kevin – I rename Zeno and by the time I am six years of age I am five years old again, such is my mastery of the temporal elements. My grandfather admonishes me for refusing to grow up and thrashes the power out of me with a very pliant yet steadfastly metal carpet-beater.
Needless to say, I retire from the philosophical life and lose myself in the fantasy world of toy soldiers. Field -Marshal Montgomery survives the vacuum pressure of my mouth and my desire to see him as a surrogate mammary papilla, mother having weaned me early in favour of a case of Trollinger and the hairy strivings of Mr. Toomey, the local Shakespeare scholar and poet about town. When bored with reliving the whimsical brutalities of Waterloo, the finger-licking horror of Stalingrad, or the engorged primitivism of Hiroshima (played out with Airfix scale OO/HO Japanese infantry – prone machine-gunner included – an oversize model bomber, and a paving slab), I torment the local children with tricks and petty violence.
Junior school sees me daubing hieroglyphs in tatty notebooks as I rise to the top of my class in whatever subject takes my interest. Then, at the age of ten, just before my move to grammar school, disaster strikes with the briskness of fate, like a piccolo trumpeter swallowing his mute. ‘Ayah!’ Taken ill, my mother, with the duplicitous aid of my grandfather, incarcerates me in the isolation ward of some municipal hospital impossible to reach for visits in the Yomi-like suburban badlands of Surrey.
Scarlet fever follows measles follows double pneumonia follows epidemic parotitis follows chicke
n pox with attendant attacks of asthma, eczema, and herpes simplex virus (that’s HSV1, dear thing, HSV1). For two months I am as blind as Borges, and I spend the day identifying nurses by the smell of their perfume and the stage of their menstrual cycle. The dreams I have are of the room in which I am imprisoned – and my daydreams are of the dreams of the room in which I am imprisoned – and so I live in a maze of reality, hedged with its own simulation, the entrance my imagination, its centre my fears, its exit my dreams of beginning over. At times, Time scurries by like a millipede; at others, it has all the velocity and volition of a comatose Sphinx; reading takes me beyond its confines, delivers me into festering jungles, the Gothic rooms of decaying cathedrals, the blinding ice of the Antarctic. I don the beige garb of colonial administrators lost in the purgatory of power, the dragging chains of unrequited lust, purdah; I shrug on the anti-gravity suits of space explorers, battle the telepathic wasps of Planet 6; machete my way through ancient forests, my loyal native boy and pet proboscis monkey at my side as I claim the lost golden lands of Uhz in the name of the Trotskyist republic of Albion. My grandfather visits rarely, my mother not at all.
After three years in hospital, at the age of thirteen, four years ahead of my contemporaries in English, physics, biology, and history, I go to stay with an aunt, and attend the local comprehensive school with its Kevs and its Tonys, its Sharons and its Tracys, formidable figures intent on emitting semen and sarcasm in equal measure – the oh-too-real equivalent of any raging maharajah, giant insect, or bone-pierced and lip-hooped native. It does not last. Oh, no. My aunt – I forget her name – employs, with the financial help of my grandfather, home tutors, a motley crew of sinister spinsters, tweed-eating tyrants, pederastic pedants, who teach me not a jot – in my spare time, I lose myself in the world of books – H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and a young gunslinger by the name of Michael Moorcock – and through these authors, I lose myself in time, I lose myself in space.
At sixteen, with little or no urge to do anything, and having passed with flying A’s the ten exams I begrudgingly sat, I decide to join Her Majesty’s armed forces as a cherry, a turtle head, a shit-faced nobody. My aunt greets the news of my enrolment with open-mouthed terror, my grandfather with moustache-twiddling glee. My mother? Her body now covered in a sleek fur of whiskey and rum, denounces me as a human failure, pronounces me dead, buried, long gone. A year after I return from a war soon to be forgotten, a smudged insect between the pages of military history, my mother, enjoying an Indian summer of sex outside marriage, dies suddenly of shock. Of horror. Shame. Yet nothing dies. My love unmoving.
Now, what’s that twittering away in my world, making me lose my thread, my drift?
I lift the annoying device once again to my ear.
‘Balzac,’ I say, only to be rudely interrupted by an O’Cockney voice.
‘H, it’s Dave, one of Mikey’s boys.’
‘Ah, David, how are you, my dear boy? Last time I had the pleasure…’
‘Shut it, H, and just listen. Balzac is in trouble. Can’t explain right now. Where is he? He’s not answering his phone.’
‘I believe I may be able to contact him.’
‘The Eaveses want a word.’
‘As Mikey would no doubt say, I imagine you are talking about Jonathan and Martin, not the dry?’
‘Spot on. Who’s a clever boy?’
‘I’ll pass on your message.’
‘Oh, and, H, Mikey says to get Balzac to call him.’
***
‘What’s all this about? What could Sarah have got herself involved in?’ asks The Mermaid.
‘To be honest, I really don’t know. But you’re right, we have to call the police on this one. Look, if whoever’s looking for Sarah is this keen,’ I say, gesturing towards Mrs. Beckford and her sister, ‘then Sarah is in big trouble. Mikey knows something. I’m going over there.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Stay here. Call the police and ask them why the fuck they’re not already here. Tell them you were visiting to follow up on the call you got earlier. Tell them the basics. Fuck it, tell them about Mr. Beckford. Sarah. The lot. Don’t mention I was here. Not yet. Let me get this sorted with Mikey. Fuck. I’ve got to see Ozan an’ all.’
‘I’ll call when you leave.’
‘All right.’
I pocket the mobile I found in the living room. I’ll study it on my way to Mikey’s. They left it here on purpose. Fuck! What is this you’ve got yourself involved in, Balzac?
‘H. Where are you?’
‘Traversing the concrete and tarmac delights of the oricular borealis.’
‘Come again.’
‘The North Circular, dear boy.’
‘Yeah, well, stop. Go to Ozan’s club. Tell him you’ve come to have a word on my behalf and don’t take no for an answer. This has got serious. Mrs. Beckford and her sister have had the shit scared out of them. Oh, and whoever did the scaring also offed the dog. Whoever did it left a fake snuff movie for us.’
‘Heavens. And Ozan is implicated how?’
‘I’m not sure yet. It’s got something to do with Sarah, though, and I think even Ozan might have bitten off more than his molars can cope with. I’m on my way to Mikey’s. Seems like everyone and ‘is mum are involved in this.’
‘Dog, Balzac, dog?’
‘Where?’
‘No, everyone and his dog.’
‘Don’t shit me like that, H. And call me when you get something out of Ozan. And, H?’
‘Yes, dear boy?’
‘Notice I said when and not if.’
‘A redundant phrase at the best of times, Balzac. However, I will pander to your choice of conjunctions. Oh, and Balzac, David Kilbane, one of the more erudite O’Goons, informs me that a certain Jonathan Eaves would like a word in your pinkish pinna.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘Ear, Balzac. Ear.’
I press the handy red button to mute H’s prattle. Turning to The Mermaid, I put my hand on her shoulder.
‘You all right doing this?’
‘Yeah. Yeah. Shall I call 999?’
‘Yeah, say the police were supposed to be here, that you had a look around. Door was open. Couldn’t find anyone. Then you saw the mess and found Mrs. B and her sister under the stairs. Show them the dog when they get here.
‘What about them?’ The Mermaid points with her chin across the road. As I look round, curtains twitch back into position.
‘They might’ve heard something. If the police ask them about me, then we’ll deal with that when and if. You sure you’ll be OK?’
She nods.
‘I’ll put your ringtone on so I know it’s you calling.’
A taxi pulls up about five doors down. I kiss The Mermaid on the cheek and leg it down the road, arm in the air.
‘Highbury Fields,’ I say to the taxi driver. He nods. I climb in the back, take out the faux-snuff moby, mute it, press play. Fuck.
They seem to enjoy their work. I mean, they aren’t laughing and joking or anything. Just professional. The main questioning over before they decide to film the violence. Leave a little message. But for who? Maybe they knew I was on my way. But how? But why? And who the fuck am I? If Mrs. B called the busies, why aren’t they here? Unless that toerag Dumar’s somehow involved. Maybe it was for Ozan’s benefit? The Eaveses? Maybe it was Uncle Tom Cobbley an’ all. I’m gonna need Mikey in on this. I watch the video again, each time it becomes less shocking, more like a prank, something you see on the internet. But I have to keep telling myself that the blood on my jacket is tomato ketchup, barbecue sauce.
OK. Let’s analyse this, shall we? Four geezers I reckon. The Londoner, the Geordie, the Middle-Eastern fella, and the guy – girl? – doing the filming. The strange light in the room. Peripherally blue, almost like the petrol-glow inside a shell, and towards the centre a liverish hue, like old photos, sepia. The figures move stealthily around the room in order not to be seen. They’ve done this before. Tr
ophies. The guy who doles out the beating is big, a broad back, wearing a donkey jacket or a duffel coat, then there is the guy with the leather jacket. I watch that bit again and can see a watch poking out from beneath a sleeve. I freeze it. Blurred. It looks like a Tag Heuer – a nice one. So, these aren’t some fly-by-night part-time muscle. These are the boys themselves. Then I see something else. The guy who did the cutting stands when someone else pulls down Mrs B’s gag and, what’s that he’s doing? Oh, the old coin knuckle roll, like Steve Martin in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid or one of the hoods in The Road to Perdition. Nice. Sweet.
We can rule out Mikey’s lot. No way he’d go this far, no matter how fucking serious it is. The Eaveses? Shit, yeah. Could be them. International muscle. I mean, you don’t get more exotic than Gateshead. Why the fuck does Jonathan Eaves want to talk to me? I’ll call him from Mikey’s. Ozan? It all keeps pointing back to Ozan.
In the leathery hush of the black cab, I feel my sinuses start to pulse, my knee throb, and my left sternocleidomastoid muscle in my neck start to tense. And, as if on cue, I look up and see a raucous clamour of crows take to the air from telephone wires I never usually notice. The dirty mauve of the clouds tumbles into spumy greys, the brittle biscuit of the sun dunked and friable in the liquid onslaught. We’re in for a storm.
***
Far from the main road, she stumbles through the forest’s undergrowth not knowing what to do next. She has no money, no phone, and nowhere to go.
***
I watch Balzac’s taxi turn the corner, dial 999, and, in a little-girl-lost-and-horrified voice – not that far from the truth – tell the emergency services operator what we found.
***
Except her parents’ house. She could get a cab, just go back there, a cup of coffee, her warm bed. The next second.
***
Then striding along the path, past the flowerbeds, the stone hedgehogs, I flick my hair back contemptuously, as if to tell the neighbours, in an almost Balzacian way, to fuck off and mind their own business. It is as if I can hear them muttering over their shoulders to their vest-wearing husbands, their worm-infested cats, peering out from behind their starched net curtains like coy courtesans. I can see them stealthily fingering their necklaces, planning, gossiping.