Red Gloves, Volumes I & II

by Christopher Fowler

  Toby pulled the gun from his pocket, took aim and shot the dame in the balls. It wasn’t a very powerful weapon and made hardly any noise, but Twankey released an incredible scream, so Toby made sure to aim the next shot into his mouth, which shut her up.

  Her purple wig skewed over her left ear, revealing a sweaty bald pate. She thrashed about on the money bags, spitting crimson teeth, her pudgy fingers digging into the bloody patch between her legs. Toby emptied the remainder of the clip into her stomach and face, then snatched up the backpack and checked its contents. The money was inside.

  The dame had torn down his Union Jack bloomers and was scrabbling blindly at his flopping scarlet cock, as if trying to recover his original identity in his dying moments.

  Toby crashed out of the stage door and passed the rear of the arcade. It was raining in hard squalls as he emerged from the end of the alley and dashed across the empty road, heading towards the station. The promenade was completely deserted now, the pier lost behind grey skeins of rain. The only living thing in sight was a single bedraggled donkey on the beach, tethered and facing stupidly into the downpour. He swung his arm high and threw the gun far into the grey sea.

  The train to London was due to leave in just over seven minutes. In London no-one would ever find him. There, he could be anyone he wanted to be. He increased his speed but the pavement was dangerously slick, and he did not want to risk a fall. The town would try any old trick to keep him back.

  He was getting soaked. Ahead he could just make out an odd figure approaching through the downpour. There was something about it he recognised. It was short and stumpy, and was walking as if it had broken its legs. At first he thought Harry had come after him. But as its appearance became more defined, Toby’s thumping heart rose in his chest.

  The thing crystallised from within the hammering clouds of rain, and he saw now that it was a truncated sailor the size of a child, dressed in navy blue, its hands flapping uselessly at its sides, its knees rising and falling like a puppet’s. The peals of recorded laughter grew louder as it approached. It rocked from side to side and rolled its eyes. The awful Edwardian seaside song warped and wavered through blasts of wind as it ran faster towards him. The music was distorted and sinister now, less a celebration of holiday pleasure than a Satanists’ chant.

  The Jolly Jack Tar slammed into Toby, winding him, sending him to his knees. As it threw its arms around his neck, he felt wood through coarse material, then realised that its wooden limbs were held together with wires that were cutting into his skin. He could feel them in its fingertips as it tightened its embrace, digging into his flesh.

  The dummy’s eyes rolled and its grin widened. It rocked back and forth, knocking against Toby’s head with a look that said I told you so. It was a museum piece, a doll, nothing more, but how like a living thing it was, filled with ancient sea-wisdom, preserved and trapped in a glass case for the amusement of others.

  Toby rolled over onto his side, the dummy clinging tight, then tighter still. He dropped the bag as its death-grip stopped his breath and the wires from its wooden fingers jabbed into his chest, as if trying to worm their way to his heart. It bit him with a strangely flat wooden mouth, but bit down hard and would not be dislodged, and he knew he was destined to fall and remain here beside the seaside, beside the sea.

  His last clear sight was across the desolate beach to the tethered donkey standing stoically in the rain, doomed like the rest of them, in the arcades and ticket booths, in the filthy glass cases and crumbling beach shelters, to live out its days at the end of the land.

  Enjoy

  Look here, I’m not a bad chap. I was educated at a minor public school, and I don’t pretend to be especially bright, but I’m not afraid of telling a story against myself. However, this is pushing the envelope a bit. I mean, suppose it wound up on Facebook or something? I’d look a perfect fool. But I have to get it off my chest.

  What happened to me was down to fate and inevitability, because of my background, because I was born out of my time, because I just wanted to make a good impression. I’m telling you because you’re young and you might have the same kind of night that changes your life.

  Here’s what happened.

  I, Elliot Sandhurst, son of Claude and Margaret Sandhurst, both late of Her Majesty’s Foreign Office, self-proclaimed chinless wonder, born posh, but like so many of the upper ranks these days without a pot to piss in, had to go out there and find paid employment—which I did, at something called an ‘event promotions company’, the sort of media joint where you don’t actually do anything except sit in meetings full of gobbledygook congratulating each other. I was always slightly amazed to see that a salary had been put in my bank account at the end of each month.

  After three years in the same department, I foolishly assumed I was next in line for promotion when I discovered that Renata, my boss, had hired a fellow ten years my junior to fill a position that was equal in stature to my own.

  The new boy was called Tamar. I assumed he was foreign or his name was an anagram or something, who knows. Tamar had street-cred, spiky hair, many pairs of Diesel jeans and a sense of entitlement that could cut through concrete. But to me, he appeared to be little more than a foetus with cheekbones. And he started on a higher salary than my current level of pay. Meanwhile, I had just been told that I would not be getting a bonus this Christmas.

  I knew I’d been rumbled. I was being sent a clear message: improve my game or be overtaken by somebody faster and hungrier. Tamar moved slowly, talked slowly and seemed inarticulate to the point of imbecility, but he was tall, dark and ludicrously handsome. It wasn’t fair; there were job applicants who shelled out for special courses that taught them how to hone their CVs, not realising that someone like Tamar could drift into reception with bed-hair and half-shut eyes, and casually step over them straight into a great job, all because he looked good in a cheap jacket and ironic shoes.

  I did not look good in a cheap jacket. I owned several expensive bespoke Jermyn Street suits that were cunningly designed to hide my nascent paunch. I had my hair cut at an exclusive Mayfair salon where they knew how to cover up bald spots and disguise thinning follicles. The Sandhursts are not rich; my father insisted I did these things because his father did before him, just as I was expected to apply for membership at the Garrick and spend my weekends in the freezing Buckinghamshire countryside repairing the rotted windows of our draughty, leaking stately pile.

  Tamar was twenty-three and lived in the kind of London suburb that was so unfashionable, most people couldn’t find its station on a Tube map if you asked them to point to it with a stick. Everyone said he worked hard and was diligent, never left early and tried his best to make money for the company in what was apparently a loss-making department, although I never saw any sign of it. He usually came in with a PowerPoint presentation that consisted of a lot of media toss-words like Brand Teasing, Cloudworking and Rightsizing, coupled to colourful but insanely complex bar charts that reduced everyone in the room to nursery school infants, having to raise their hands to ask questions. And they loved it. They loved him. He could do nothing wrong.

  Whereas I lived in Belgravia and spent most weekends listening to the threats of my gout-ridden father, and had been warned that if I failed to make this career work, the old man would decide once and for all that I was a useless wastrel and would cut me out of my so-called inheritance, which consisted of a mortgaged-to-the-hilt mock-Georgian monstrosity with half a roof and a few acres of knotty grass that stank of pigs.

  I felt I deserved a little more respect at work, so I needed to win my colleagues over. I had to give myself some credibility. I considered the options.

  What could I do? Take them to a new cool nightspot? No, because I didn’t know any. I just had my club, which would never allow them all in. Besides, my fellow office workers wouldn’t be very impressed by the sight of a room full of drooling old duffers asleep in leather armchairs.

  How about some kind of
sporting event? I’d never even made it onto my school cricket eleven, and anyway most of the group got tickets for corporate bashes at Ascot, Twickenham, Wimbledon and Henley.

  Dinner in a fancy restaurant? I couldn’t afford to pay for all of them, and besides, knowing Renata’s tastes, she would most likely suggest the kind of restaurant that only took bookings once every six months and specialised in novelty dishes that involved freezing crème caramel in nitrous oxide.

  However, unbeknown to them, I had a secret weapon. My sister Daisy. She was a surprisingly good cook. Daisy and I had grown up travelling with our parents through various Foreign Office outposts in the Far East, and she had regularly attended hotel cooking classes because it got her out of netball practice.

  I was pretty confident that if I could get my boss and her cronies over for dinner, I could impress them. Daisy loved cooking and would be able to provide a meal that would prove really memorable. I would just have to heat it up. I wouldn’t want her there on the night, because she was nuts and would scupper my chances of regaining a foothold in the company if she so much as opened her mouth, but I thought that if she could deliver the meal earlier in the day, I would be able to do the rest.

  There was the other problem. If Renata saw my Belgravia apartment she might feel less inclined to reward me at work, so I would have to borrow an apartment in an insalubrious part of town. Luckily, I had a friend, Will, whose father used to groom at my mother’s stables, who lived in King’s Cross. He was going away for a few weeks and needed someone to water his plants.

  I drew up my guest list.

  Renata could bring her husband, Lucio, who was a famous Italian graphic artist and, by all accounts, a total coke hoover. Simon, the group account director, was responsible for looking after the agency’s key clients, and could bore cats into comas just by describing his day to them. There was no need to invite his partner, presuming he had actually managed to attach himself to another human being so desperately lonely that she was prepared to spend time with him. I would pointedly snub Tamar by not inviting him, but would ask Cheryl, the company’s lawyer, who was an extremely attractive Caribbean workaholic currently being groomed for a directorship by the managing director. Perhaps she would be so impressed by the meal that she’d suggest getting together again, and the next time it would be just the two of us.

  The apartment was perfect: a loft of black slate, stripped brick and low lighting, edgy and cool enough to suggest that Will had style but not great wealth, near the station and taxi ranks, so that no-one would have an excuse for failing to turn up. It took three weeks of cajoling to get them all to agree to come over, and I had to bribe Daisy to pre-cook the meal, but finally the date was set and everyone accepted.

  I spent a small fortune on purchasing several bottles of decent French wine. I memorized the layout of the kitchen so that I would not make any mistakes, and laid a stylish table. On the Saturday afternoon, Daisy delivered several cardboard boxes containing a complete Thai feast arranged in numbered foil cartons, although she stayed long enough to down one of the bottles of vintage red and have a drunken shrieking fit about her ex-boyfriend.

  Then things started to go wrong. I managed to burn a lemongrass chicken dish while I was reheating it, a candle set one of the curtains on fire and the stunning Cheryl turned up with Tamar on her arm. Judging by the liquid warmth that filled her eyes every time she caught sight of him, she had fallen in love. It looked like she was wearing one of his shirts. He was so fashionably skinny that he could swap clothes with girls. Every time he made an ironic remark, she laughed. Everyone laughed. He’d been working at our place for less than a month.

  Lumpen Simon appeared without a date—no surprise there—and Renata arrived with Lucio bearing a very acceptable bottle of Chateau Lafitte. ‘Well, this is fun,’ she said, eyeing the tiny, cluttered kitchen with suspicion as she waited for me to take their coats. This was all a bit of a comedown for me. In India we’d had servants, for God’s sake, and here I was being piled with outer garments while my boss wandered about pricing the ornaments.

  ‘It’s been ages since I went to a dinner party,’ she said. ‘I honestly didn’t think anyone held them anymore. I suppose most people think it’s a bit old school now.’ She was fond of giving out the kind of backhanded English compliments that made you wonder if you’d just been insulted.

  ‘This is a great flat,’ said Cheryl admiringly. ‘We’d love to get something like this in town.’ I thought, We? You’ve known him for thirty seconds, woman, at this rate you’ll be going through swatch-books for the nursery before I’ve had a chance to serve dessert.

  It’s amazing what a difference good food and fine wine can make to your guests’ spirits. At first there was just a polite exchange of information, like pupils attending some kind of evening language class. But after a while the drinks kicked in and we sat around the cramped lounge table picking bits of wax off the candles opening our hearts to one another. I found out, in no particular order, that:

  Renata had spent her gap year earnings on an abortion.

  Lucio had tried out for the Lucchese football team and had been propositioned by the girlfriend of a famous Italian racing driver.

  Cheryl took pole-dancing lessons to keep fit.

  Simon belonged to a society that re-enacted historical British battles.

  But Tamar beat all of them. First he let slip that he had been in a boy band that had achieved Top 100 success. Then he mentioned in passing that he had once modelled for Dolce & Gabbana. Finally, he sent his credibility rating through the roof by telling us that he came from one of London’s worst housing estates.

  There was no way I could compete. All this opening up was alien to me. I had nothing to offer back. I realised that I simply didn’t fit in. The Sandhurst family revelled in their ability to keep everything secret. That was what the British did best. As I opened more wine and cleared the dinner plates and served fresh fruit salad and Eton Mess, Tamar was telling the rest of the table about the day he had saved a policeman’s life. His story had just the right amount of tousle-and-shucks modesty to it, and at the end, everyone went ‘aaaah’. He’d shared the love and made them all feel warm. I felt my pole position slipping away as Tamar roared past me towards the job-promotion finishing line.

  It was then that a funny thing happened. It took me a couple of minutes to pick up on the hint, but I realised that Renata wanted something, she just wouldn’t spell it out.

  I’m not very attuned to hints about drugs. To tell the truth, I hadn’t much experience of them. I’d taken one lungful of a joint at Oxford on Guy Fawkes Night and had fallen into the bonfire like a poleaxed elm. My roommate had been forced to put me out by rolling me on the lawn. That was the sum total of my chemical experience. So when Renata and Lucio eyed the glass table top and obliquely suggested I could make it a perfect evening by breaking out something for them to enjoy, I looked at them blankly. Then I saw Cheryl smiling knowingly, and realised that I was expected to have bought in some coke. Everyone seemed to perk up at the idea except Simon, who was going on about railway timetables.

  I actually found myself apologising for not having bought anything special in, but I was careful to make it sound like I usually did whenever I had friends over, and it was just an oversight that I had forgotten this time. Incredible.

  ‘Well, that’s easily rectified, darling,’ said Renata, smiling at the rest of the table. ‘We’re in King’s Cross after all. Why don’t you just pop out and get some while we finish this bottle?’ She made it sound as if I’d run out of milk and could whip over to the supermarket.

  Having made a bid for credibility in this field—I may have overdone it by suggesting that I regularly partied at the local night spots, something I could tell they didn’t believe even as the words came out of my mouth—I now found myself back-pedalling frantically. Renata started to look pouty, so I hastily donned my suit jacket and told them I’d be back in fifteen minutes, trying to sound as though this w
as the sort of thing I did all the time. As I left the room, I looked back and saw them drinking and laughing, barely aware that I was no longer in the room, quite happy to sit there and wait for my return. Londoners.

  I stepped out into the street and looked about. The station was brightly illuminated, but the sidestreets were dark and mean. Where to start on my quest?

  I noticed the tramps were back. Several of them were having a party in an alley beside McDonald’s, pouring the contents of one can into another as if making cocktails. Outside the nightclub next door, a huge gang of fairies—girls in pink glittery wings and little pink ruffled skirts—were queuing to get in, shoving and swearing at each other like pissed sailors. The area around the station was really busy. Businessmen were heading home after a night in the pub with their satchel straps slung across their chests like off-duty postmen.

  A couple of coppers were talking to a young black man, all in seeming good humour. If I was going to successfully buy drugs, I had to get down with my homies, except that they weren’t my homies, my homies were men with flat tweed caps who sat on tractors blocking narrow country lanes.

  I tried to get the lay of my new hostile territory. Who, around me, looked like a drug dealer? Not the girl sitting on the kerb being sick between her legs while her friend held her hair out of her face. Not the two perfectly square skinheads who kept shouting something in an incomprehensible Scottish dialect at passers-by between slugs of Special Brew. Not the wobbly man having a wee against the window of Nando’s, steadying himself with one hand on the glass.

  Would it sound racist if I said I was looking for black men?

  Ah, it would—okay—as you were. Well, I did, and I’m sorry for it now, it’s a cultural problem and all I can say is that I’m better than my grandmother, who screamed and ran off when a black man touched her arm at Victoria station. He was trying to return her purse, which she’d dropped on the concourse.