Flesh Wounds

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Don’t bet on it,’ I said, objecting to his language. ‘The last person who sat there had a heart attack.’

  But Danny turned out to be completely different from the first impression he had given. Each morning he would arrive slightly behind the rest, his ginger hair fanning up uncombed and uncontrollable, and plonk himself down at the seat with a paper bag containing two polystyrene cups of cappuccino, one of them for me. He would never let me pay for mine, so eventually I started buying an afternoon treat, bars of chocolate, mints or biscuits. And I began to look forward to my cappuccino. His unremitting perkiness was a cross to bear at times but the young are like that of course, so sure are they of their invincibility. I couldn’t hold his age against him. Quite the reverse; his steady stream of jokes and anecdotes finally wore down my resistance, and we became friends. Danny was twenty-two but seemed wise far beyond his years. He was earning some money before returning to university to study Bulgarian history, of all things. Over the next few weeks he became my lifeline to the world of the young. Through his eyes I could understand them once more, by seeing what excited or upset him and his friends.

  ‘What do you think of this?’ he once said, pulling off his Walkman headphones and letting me listen. A hammering tempo sounded in my ears, electronically generated drum effects.

  ‘A bit repetitive,’ I replied.

  ‘I know,’ he said, smiling. ‘Nice though, isn’t it?’ And he was right, it was.

  One afternoon, after being briefed on the typing of a document by Mr Gould, Danny turned to me and pulled a gargoyle face.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘Does the Ghoul remind you of anyone?’ He had nicknames for most of the people on our floor. I shook my head.

  ‘You know that John Betjeman poem, “I am a young executive, no cuffs than mine are cleaner”?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ I agreed, thinking for a moment and placing the line, ‘He is a bit like that, isn’t he?’ I was amazed that someone like Danny knew any poetry at all.

  ‘A bit?’ Danny cried out incredulously, ‘It could have been written for him. He’s like the others; you get no sense of a moral dimension from any of them.’ And he was right. After this they became known to us as the Young Executives, Mr Gould, Mr Nash, Miss Kidston and the rest. It was us against them, just as it had been with Rose. I had found an ally. It meant that I wasn’t imagining things after all; somebody believed me because they could see what I saw.

  I wondered if I should confide in Danny about the comments on the private files. Mr Nash had taken to locking away his diskettes now, almost as if he suspected that someone had been checking them, but I had the copy on my machine’s hard disk, tucked away under a password.

  I was still trying to decide whether I should tell him when the matter was decided for me. Rose developed complications from her heart attack and died quite suddenly. Danny asked if he could join me at the funeral. Her old boss, Mr Davison, was the only other member of staff to attend. Afterwards, Danny asked me if I would like to join him for a drink at his local pub in the Edgware Road, but I declined the offer. Rose’s death had greatly saddened me, and I didn’t want the boy to become infected with the sense of mortality that hung in the air that day. He was too young to be hanging around with an old fogie like me, I explained, packing him off.

  Instead I decided to attend Rose’s wake, which was held in the house of her next-door neighbour, a pragmatic Irishwoman of indeterminate age. Her name, as far as I could gather, was Nessie, and she had sometimes cleaned for Rose.

  I sat in the gloomy front parlour with a whisky and a plate of dry sandwiches and listened to the neighbours talk as their children chafed and scratched at their constricting smart clothes. You could see they longed to be outside, and should have been, but it wasn’t my place to say.

  ‘She was a good-hearted soul,’ said Nessie, folding her hands in her ample lap, ‘and her in so much pain.’

  ‘I don’t think she was in pain,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean at the end, love. She was always in pain but hid it well, terrible for her it was. The night cramps in her legs, and her nerves in such a bad state. Ever since the old man went.’

  ‘I had no idea. Wasn’t she given anything for it?’

  ‘Indeed she was. Did you never see her with the little box of pills she always carried?’

  I thought back. I vaguely recalled Rose sitting at her desk, toying with an opaque plastic cylinder that rattled. ‘What was she taking?’ I asked.

  ‘Calcium tablets. She had a deficiency, poor woman.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ I added lamely, and the conversation moved on to the grim details of a neighbour’s gallstone complications.

  The next day, for reasons I myself was unsure of, I decided to confide in Danny about the private files.

  ‘Taken by themselves they don’t mean much,’ the boy agreed. ‘I mean, I don’t like the Young Executives any more than you do, but are you saying they murdered Rose? Don’t you think it’s a bit unlikely that they’d find a way of bumping her off just because she kept a messy desk?’

  ‘I know,’ I said with a sigh, ‘it’s absurd. I don’t know what I was thinking of. Forget I said anything.’

  Just as I was preparing to leave that night, Miss Kidston came by and left me with a three-hundred-page document to type. Three hundred pages!

  ‘Better wake your ideas up, Harriet,’ she said, slapping the paper onto my desk. ‘There’s a lot more where that came from.’

  For the next three days she applied the pressure, piling up work that kept me typing late into the night. Actually, it suited me well enough. I had nothing to rush home for. Besides, I was being paid overtime and was happy to earn the money. But by the end of the week I was arriving two hours earlier than the rest of the staff and knew that I could not keep up the pace.

  ‘They’re really piling on the pressure, aren’t they?’ said Danny, setting down my cappuccino. He reached over and took a thick file from my in-tray. ‘Here, let me do this one for you.’

  ‘No, it’s my work, I can handle it.’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ he said, holding onto the file. ‘Can’t you see they’re deliberately trying to wear you down?’

  ‘I know that,’ I replied carefully. ‘But I’m not going to let them beat me.’

  ‘Then at least let me help. Nobody will know.’

  Between us, we finished the work on schedule. Just in time for Mr Gould to dump a stack of Dictaphone tapes on my desk. I thought of complaining to Mr Franklin, but since poor Rose’s departure he had been oddly subdued in front of the Young Executives, as though he no longer felt like facing them. Over lunch one day, Danny and I tried to figure out what motivated these soulless creatures, these junior-assistant-vice-presidents, armed with their pompous work titles and their productivity quotas. Danny told me that many of his own friends pushed hard at work because they were frightened of failing, an idea that profoundly depressed me. Twenty-two is no age to become frightened.

  Friday evening arrived, and rain was falling hard around the building. I decided to finish Mr Gould’s tapes, hoping that the downpour might have eased by the time I was ready to leave. Danny wished me a pleasant weekend and left, and soon I was the only one remaining on the fourth floor. I was nearing the end of my final tape when the earpiece of the Dictaphone crackled and packed up. I remembered that Rose had kept a spare, and that I had asked Danny not to throw it out, so I went over to her old desk.

  I found the earpiece. I also found a plastic tube of tablets stuck at the back of the drawer, behind the box containing her Dictaphone equipment. I read the label, which referred to the treatment of something called hypocalcaemia. Calcium deficit. There was a warning not to exceed the stated dose because of the danger of respiratory acidosis. Now, I remembered from my days as a medical secretary that respiratory acidosis led to cardiac arrest. It immediately made me wonder if she had somehow overdosed on calcium.

  I don’t know why
I made the connection then.

  I looked down through the work room, with the neat desks and the emptied bins and the angle-poise lamps throwing cones of light in the dimness, and I listened to the distant falling rain. Then I returned to my own desk and withdrew Rose’s unwashed mug from the bottom drawer. The white coating at its base had dried to a hard sediment, like congealed chalk dust. I crumbled one of the white pills from the vial and compared it to the residue, touching both on the tip of my tongue.

  They were identical in texture, taste, everything.

  It was perfect. Calcium is a natural body product but lethal in overdose. Someone had seen her taking the pills, had checked out their content and added the medication to the coffee mug. It sat on her desk throughout the day. I wondered if they had also worked out the exact hour of her death. She took the medication for night cramps. With the contents of the mug still active in her system, the tablet before bedtime would have tipped her well over the limit.

  I sat at my desk with the damned rain drilling against the windows, and I didn’t know what to do. Termination of employment, Mr Nash’s file had recommended. It hadn’t specified how. This is not my overactive imagination, I thought. They killed her, the Young Executives, because she was old and they hated her, and they were going to do the same to me.

  I had to do something, tell someone. I wrapped the mug and the pillbox in a plastic shopping bag and took them home while I considered my next move.

  I felt that going to the police would be a bad idea, that they would listen with amusement and merely humour me. Discussing my views with senior management would probably get me fired, and I couldn’t afford that. Which left positive action on my part or continued silent observation. I couldn’t see myself skulking around the building in a balaclava sabotaging the terminals, so I elected to remain silent.

  Well, not completely silent. The next morning Danny arrived at his usual time, slightly after me, marching to his work station with his hair in his eyes, whistling off key, paper bag clutched in his hand. He took one look at me and asked what was wrong.

  I’m ashamed to say that I burst into tears. When I could catch my breath again, I told him what I had discovered. About Rose being killed by a deliberately administered calcium overdose, and how I couldn’t tell anyone because they’d think I was deranged. I asked his advice. When I had finished I looked at him for help, waiting while he fumbled with the paper bag.

  ‘What do you think we should do?’ I asked.

  He removed a single cup of cappuccino, set it down on his desk and crumpled the bag into a ball.

  ‘What do you mean, we, you deranged old bitch?’ he asked.

  Then he rose with his coffee, took a sip and sauntered contemptuously away between the desks. With a pounding heart I grabbed a few belongings and left. As I passed the closed door of Diane Kidston’s office I could see Danny through the glass, laughing with her. I wondered what sort of offer they had made him. I never dared to go back, not even to collect the wages they owed me.

  The security guards have all been warned to look out for a crazy old lady, of course, and who’s to say that I’m not? I spend my time planning devious ways to take revenge for all the people like Rose, for anyone whose death was hastened by the young. I see them all around me, regiments of marching ebony suits and skirts, carbon-copy men and women culled from the fashion pages of glossy magazines. I loathe the stare of their frozen flat pupils, the supercilious look that says You are not a part of our fine modern world. I watch them and I long to see a hair out of place, a stumble in their step, a glimpse of humanity and freedom. I long to suppose that they dream of something other than mere success at the cost of all else, that they secretly hope to do more than just fit in. But I know they don’t. To them, imagination isn’t a profitable commodity.

  The thing I most regret is that I’m always suspicious now – distrustful of their youthful intentions toward me. Perhaps all older people are to varying degrees. Long life makes everyone a little crazy.

  It’s getting dark. I sit in the lounge and watch from the window until the sun has vanished behind the rooftops. Sometimes they slip pieces of paper under my front door. The neatly blocked lettering on yesterday’s note read simply, Why don’t you kill yourself?

  I tell the police they are after me. They’re very sweet about it; they want to send me a social worker. They wonder why I won’t talk to a nice, smart, ambitious young social worker. Young executives. Why am I such a thorn in their side, I wonder? How much damage can one old lady do? Perhaps they hate us because the past is another country, and I am a citizen of that country. If this war must be waged and this murderous new breed is really here to stay, the old ways need to be forgotten quickly. And I will become like that man in the flickering film print, forcing drivers to stop in the rush-hour traffic, begging someone to believe that the invasion has already begun.

  Jouissance de la mort

  * * *

  I make no apologies for this extremely odd tale; there’s joy in telling an absurd story which seemingly has no direction or solution, only to tie it up with a punch line that (hopefully) explains everything. The title refers to the almost sexual pleasure in death that signifies the curse of the Condorcet family.

  IT WAS A cool unmisted morning in the rich green fields beyond Rennes. Swallows filled the trees above the Château Saint Vincent as M. Jean-Luc Condorcet set off through the loamy pasture towards his herd. He preferred being in the open air; the château’s atmosphere was damp and unhealthy. For decades the building had been shunned by those villagers old enough to remember the Condorcet family’s dissolute flirtations with satanism. M. Jean-Luc was the last surviving member and preferred the bucolic delights of animal husbandry to the arcane interests of his forebears.

  The farmer paused and listened; a distant aircraft. An unusual sound in this area. No commercial flights passed overhead. Several cows looked up as the engine noise grew. He searched the sky and glimpsed the tiny silver plane, a customised private Lear jet, banking above a crest of white cloud. The aircraft had been chartered to bear a dance band from Carcasonne to its first public appearance in Nice. Thanks to a leaking fuel lead and a drummer who insisted on smoking in the toilet, they never reached their destination. The plane exploded in midair.

  After the bang there was a shocked silence. Everything was still. A black ball of smoke and debris hung motionless in the sky. Then M. Condorcet was hit on the head by a falling cocktail cabinet with chromium legs and gold glass doors. One of his cows was knocked unconscious by a trombone. A bottle of Remy Martin demolished the henhouse, and two chickens were impaled by drumsticks.

  M. Condorcet was in such a terrible mess that they had to cremate him. His staff consulted an ancient family manual, then inscribed four lines from a poem, the first of which was ‘Les mouches bourdonnaient sur ce ventre putride’, on the side of the brass urn containing his ashes. Unsure what to do next, they parcel-posted him to the surviving member of his family, an English aunt living alone in a flat in Bayswater.

  Elizabeth Fritton had been dismissed by the education board after losing a child on the Northern Line, and the incident had destroyed her life. She and another teacher had set out with a crocodile of pupils heading for an exhibition of molluscs at London Zoo but had disembarked the train to find themselves one short. Extensive searches were made in the tunnels, but no explanation for the disappearance was ever uncovered, and Miss Fritton assumed that the boy must have drawn the attention of a molester, who had stolen the lad away when her back was turned. The police found a French essay book inscribed with the lad’s name on the tracks at Camden Town tube station and returned it to the school, whereupon it fell into Miss Fritton’s possession. On the last page was part of a poem that began ‘Les mouches bourdonnaient sur ce ventre putride.’

  Miss Fritton had not seen her nephew for some years and received nothing in his will, the château being sold to cover debts. What little monies remained from the sale of the property fell to the
staff in descending order of loyalty.

  When the urn arrived she set it upon the mantelpiece in her sitting room, where it gathered dust for several months and became stuck to the paintwork. Miss Fritton had few acquaintances and fewer visitors. The only woman she permitted within her fringed baroque apartment was an impoverished family friend named Maria Brown, who was Antiguan by birth and longed to return there. Kindly Maria convinced the wheyfaced ex-schoolmistress that she should get out more and cajoled her into visiting the seaside one August Bank Holiday.

  The morning of their departure, Miss Fritton tried to move the urn but found it stuck fast. Finally she was forced to use a chisel to release it from the paint.

  Bedecked in postcards and candyfloss, Miss Fritton strode the seafront and found herself having fun for the first time in years. She even suggested that the two of them should relive a childhood memory and ride the switch-back. Unfortunately, the switchback operator had temporarily left the attraction in the hands of his dimwitted French nephew, who noticed an unused car on the side rail and pressed it back into service.

  The car’s base was faulty, having lost a number of screws in the recent poor weather. In the middle of the first big drop, with the car travelling at forty-five miles per hour, Miss Fritton went through the floor, losing both her feet to the scything sleepers. Due to the centrifugal force of the ride there was scarcely a drop of blood that had not been forced from her by the time the electricity could be turned off.

  Maria Brown was deeply traumatised by the accident, but her misery was partially mitigated by the fact that Miss Fritton had left her a considerable amount of money, on the condition that she would take care of the apartment and its contents. Maria Brown dutifully did as she was bid, then booked her passage back to the West Indies.

  She returned to a wooden house in St John’s, Antigua, with almond trees, a pink and green verandah, a VCR and a cellular phone system imported from Montserrat. Feeling guilty but faced with no other choice, she left the urn and the rest of Miss Fritton’s belongings in the care of her cousin Bill in Notting Hill.