Red Gloves, Volumes I & II

by Christopher Fowler

  Unfortunately, the first conscious realisation to form in the brain of Butch, a bowlegged English bulldog whose new teenaged owner, Walt, eked out a pathetic living as a bar cleaner at the Five Aces on Neil Avenue in Columbus, Ohio, was that his master was a complete idiot. Well-meaning and innocent, maybe, but still an idiot. Walt had just been tricked by a group of friends into becoming the driver for a local robbery.

  ‘All you have to do is sit in the truck,’ said Heath, his supposed buddy from the Five Aces bar, ‘but bring your dog. We need him to intimidate the guard.’

  ‘Let’s leave him behind,’ pleaded Walt. ‘He’s not too smart.’

  Thanks a bunch, thought Butch. Right now I’m smarter than you.

  ‘He looks fierce, and that’s all we need.’ Heath hadn’t been able to get hold of a gun, and figured a scary-faced dog would do in a pinch.

  The gang ran into Hester’s Deli, Butch bit the checkout boy in the nuts, and much to his surprise, despite being chased half a block by an eighty-year-old woman, they successfully pulled off their first-time heist. But moments after Heath reached the corner and threw the money bag into the truck, Walt stepped on the gas and hightailed it out of town, leaving his fellow gang members on the sidewalk.

  ‘Finally I’m not a loser anymore,’ Walt told his dog. ‘You and I have made it, pal. We can make a new start, do anything we like. We’re going places.’

  Butch felt that Walt had somewhat misunderstood the concept of achievement, but he also recalled gaining human feelings last Halloween, and becoming disgusted to discover that he was a dog, sitting around a ratty apartment licking his balls and eating leftover hamburger meat. Actually, the ball-licking part hadn’t been so bad. But this was better.

  ‘This Halloween is gonna be the best you ever had,’ Walt promised. ‘What would you like to do?’

  Find me a hooker and get me wasted, thought Butch. Order some Cristal champagne. Anything just so long as I don’t have to sniff any dog assholes.

  They ditched the truck, changed some of the large denominations at the Great Western Shopping Centre, drove for a while, then checked into a motel. Butch wished he’d been given human vocal cords, just for the night of Halloween, but when he opened his mouth only barks and whines emerged.

  Walt explained that he knew a girl from the bar called Jenni, a real hottie he could trust because she’d told him she was nuts about him, and to come find her if he ever made enough money to buy her for the evening.

  ‘So let’s go see Jenni, have a party and get totally wild,’ said Walt, rubbing Butch between the ears.

  Finally, thought Butch, six Halloweens spent watching some old bitch sleeping in front of the TV, the seventh spent running around the streets trying to find a new owner, now it looks like I’m finally gonna get some human action. Thank you, Samhain.

  Walt called Jenni and told her he had money. Half an hour later they arrived at her front porch. When Jenni opened the door in her low-cut white shirt and tiny cobalt-blue skirt, Butch got a cross-species boner, then reminded himself it was okay because, for this night at least, he was an honorary human. And he knew that the best part about being human was that, even though he was in the body of a dog and still wearing a collar, he could briefly attain a state of grace and experience something lost to him the rest of the year. He could finally feel the respect and admiration of his human peers. Instead of just standing around with his tongue hanging out, whimpering for his lead or begging for food, he could show intelligence with his eyes and make a connection with other human beings. He could feel what it meant to be a man, not just some four-legged creature admired solely for its ability to fetch sticks from lakes.

  Jenni invited them in. It looked as if the entire contents of the Pottery Barn catalogue had been emptied into her little house, especially the section on flounces and frills. But he could tell she loved him. She squealed and scratched his belly, and fed him a steak, and Walt poured him a bowl of champagne. Jenni bent close and looked deep into his eyes. ‘Walt told me you helped him make some money today,’ she said, ‘so I’m going to do something special for you. We’re meeting up with some of my girlfriends tonight, and they all have dogs. You are going to have the best night of your life.’

  Jeez, am I gonna get laid as well? Butch dared to entertain the thought. Okay, it was sex with another dog, but he had to take it where he could get it. He gazed soulfully into Jenni’s eyes, then into Walt’s, and felt the connection grow strong. Tonight, he willed them to hear, I am truly one of you.

  —

  Butch looked around the room in disgust. There were five other dogs. Gonzales the mad Mexican hairless Chihuahua had been dressed up as a miniature Superman. Jackula was a Jack Russell and had been kitted out as a Bela Lugosi-style vampire. His mistress had stuffed false plastic fangs into his mouth, so that he was permanently baring his teeth. He even had a squawking budgerigar on his back disguised as a bat. Suzi the Pekinese had been dressed as a cat, the ultimate humiliation. Buddy the Labrador had been tricked up like a pilot in a biplane, with goggles and cardboard wings sticking out from his ribcage. Otto the German shepherd was dressed as Adolf Hitler, complete with little jackboots and a toothbrush moustache.

  Butch checked his reflection in the window. He had been dressed as Little Bo Peep in false eyelashes, a pink French Empire bonnet and dozens of pastel bows. He was a Halloween dog, and he looked fucking ridiculous. Ahead of him, the adults cavorted about in red plastic devil outfits.

  Butch silently cursed the pagan festival that had granted him the mind of a human, while leaving humans with the brains of animals.

  Poison Pen

  Andrew Bayer

  Uncle Andrew played the Stock Exchange and used his gains to fund his passions—but what were his passions? Nobody knew. He told his friends that he was a collector, but there were no collections at his Buckinghamshire mansion or his London flat.

  Now he was in Southern France, tearing along the Grande Corniche in his classic white 1968 Mercedes convertible, and the curving emerald hills had just parted to reveal the port of Monaco below. The autumn air was cool and smelled of pine and lavender. The morning sky was the same aching azure as the Mediterranean, and a few thin grey clouds still hung like spiderwebs in the trees below the road.

  Andrew pushed his speed to fifty, the most he could risk on a road with a forty-metre drop on one side and no crash barriers. He was late for lunch with Lycus Gerolstein, his lawyer, who would be waiting for him at the Salon des Etoiles, ready to celebrate their latest purchase with a glass of fine champagne.

  Coming from the opposite direction, a Nicoise estate agent was lighting her cigarette with one hand and arguing on her cellphone with the other, which didn’t leave her any way of controlling the wheel of her Porsche Boxster. She was trying to arrange for some Russians to view a pieds dans l’eau property in Fontvieille but they were being very difficult about the appointment times. She argued, threatened and cajoled but they wouldn’t come earlier, and she sensed she was losing the sale.

  What she should have been doing was watching the central divider as she rounded the bend, because moments later she blithely crossed it, forcing the car coming from the opposite direction—a classic white convertible Mercedes—off the tarmac and out into the clouds.

  The great vehicle sailed as gracefully as a galleon for a few seconds, then seemed to realise that it weighed over a ton, and dropped into the valley below. Andrew might have been able to get out, except that his hand-stitched 1968 seatbelt had not been manufactured for speedy removal. He was still trying to unbuckle it when he hit the cliff face and bounced all the way down to the roof of the rococo Banque de Grimaldi building on the Avenue des Citronniers in Monte Carlo. The noise was so loud that it made diners briefly stir themselves from their lobster salads.

  Andrew Bayer’s classic car stuck out of the bank’s roof with its rear wheels still spinning. Inside the grand financial institution his corpse, tethered by the effective seatbelt, dripped blood o
ver piles of banknotes. The accident made the front page of Nice Matin the next day, right next to a car insurance advert. The irony did not go unnoticed.

  In England, twenty-three-year-old Mark Bayer heard about the death of his favourite uncle, happy-go-lucky Andrew, and was heartbroken. He had been closer to Andrew than he was to his own father, who had worked in loss adjustment all his life and treated Mark as if he was a failure, just because he had chosen to become a graphic designer and get some pleasure from his career.

  Mark had inherited Uncle Andrew’s easygoing attitude. Recently he had spent more time than usual with the old man in London, for his uncle had been undergoing sporadic treatment for lung cancer at the Harley Street Clinic. Uncle Andrew was wealthy and knew how to enjoy himself, which made the rest of his serious-minded family regard him as a wastrel. Two years earlier he had retired to his grand country manse with his second, much younger wife, a woman who had appeared on his arm after a trip to Boston, where he had been attending some kind of collectors’ convention.

  But what had he been doing in the South of France when he died? Nobody seemed to know, not even his wife.

  Mark and his family attended the cremation service, which was held in Monte Carlo. Uncle Andrew had a brother and a sister of similar ages, a daughter from his first wife and the aforementioned much younger second wife. The family was therefore split into three separate interested parties, and at any time at least one of these was arguing with the other two. Their loyalties shifted and switched like warring states in an Eastern European nation.

  All in all, it was not the best recipe for a happy send-off.

  The much younger second wife turned up in a tight-fitting Dior trouser suit and a white hat better suited to Ladies Day at Ascot. She outraged Mark’s family, who were looking for any excuse to take umbrage.

  During the service, a vicious argument escalated between Andrew’s first and second wives, during which the first wife, whose name was Cheryl, questioned the second wife, whose name was Catherine, about her motives for marrying a wealthy man who was almost twice her age. Catherine replied that she had fallen in love with men like Andrew before. ‘Tell me,’ spat Cheryl, ‘at precisely what moment do you usually fall in love with your elderly millionaires?’

  The family members quickly became embroiled and lined up on either side, carping across the divide. At a drinks party afterwards there was another fight when Mark’s father, who was paying for the wake, had his credit cards humiliatingly rejected by the venue’s management. Money and inheritance were openly discussed—subjects Mark’s mother regarded as vulgar in the extreme. The English, she remarked pointedly, did not expose their financial affairs in public. This last remark was clearly aimed at Uncle Andrew’s second wife, who was American and regarded the entire Bayer family as a bunch of bitter Limey snobs with very little, as far as she could see, to be snobbish about. The wake ended on a very sour note indeed.

  A few days later in London, the entire family attended the reading of Andrew’s will at Lycus Gerolstein’s office. Here, seated around the lawyer’s boardroom table, they heard that Uncle Andrew’s possessions, including another classic car, a boat, a country house, jewellery, a London apartment and bequests of cash, were to be divided up between various family members. It seemed that everyone’s wishes had been catered for. Only one of the children had been deliberately and notably excluded from the will—Mark.

  The young designer was surprised by the fact that he had been left nothing, as it contradicted what Uncle Andrew told him when they’d last met. In fact, Andrew had gone out of his way to promise that he was leaving something very special to his favourite nephew. ‘You were always the one I liked the best,’ Andrew had confided. ‘I know you’ll make something of yourself. I want to ensure that you’ll be truly happy in your life, so I’m leaving you the greatest of the gifts in my possession.’

  But he had left nothing. There was not even a mention of the boy in the will.

  Mark was upset at first. He thought the old man had loved, trusted and confided in him. Perhaps he had caused some offence over their final lunch and hurt his uncle’s feelings? Even Mark’s younger brother Ben had been bequeathed some money. Mark thought back over their last meeting, breaking it down into moments, but could think of nothing he had done to upset Uncle Andrew.

  The family was very sorry to lose their patriarch. The amiably disreputable old fellow had been a touchstone for them, someone they could go to for advice and help, always kindly, always fair, a calm centre to the frequently bitter whirlwind of Bayer family spats, recriminations and alliances. Now that he had suddenly been taken from them, they felt as if they had been cast adrift. There was no-one to whom they could turn. Gabriel, Andrew’s younger brother, was flaky and neurotic. Joan, his sister, was a melancholia-prone hysteric. Life without their mentor would be very different indeed.

  At first the Bayers sought to pursue proceedings against the estate agent driving the other car, but she was in a Nice hospital with a broken neck, and Lycus, the family lawyer, advised them not to start an action against her in a French court of law. The process, he warned, would be protracted and constricted by red tape, and would probably last, Jarndyce-style, until there was no money left, but that was the French for you.

  With conflicting emotions, Mark listened to his family’s growing grievances. The complaints were petty: Why had Uncle Andrew left Mark’s parents jewellery but little money? Why had he only bequeathed his brother a classic car? Nothing quite made sense. Soon, a poisonous pall began to creep over the formerly happy family, and the things Uncle Andrew had left behind began to be evaluated, coveted and compared.

  Mark looked on in discomfort as his parents pored over their copy of Uncle Andrew’s will, endlessly reinterpreting every word. He had never thought of them as greedy people, but now it seemed they were becoming obsessed with the amounts they had been left. He had heard that this was the common result of losing a senior family member, but the process still disturbed him. Worse, it traduced his memory of the avuncular old man and made him think more harshly of the surviving Bayers. Assuming that these ill humours would be short-lived, he returned to work and family life, albeit diminished, continued as before.

  Gabriel Bayer

  Exactly one month after his uncle had died, Mark received a phone call just as he was starting to fall asleep at the keyboard of his computer. He had been putting in long hours, trying to drum up business for his ailing design practice.

  ‘Mark, is that you?’ asked a familiar voice.

  ‘Uncle Gabriel?’ Mark liked his other uncle, even though Gabriel struck him as emotionally unstable. Gabriel was forty-seven and twice divorced, and had a difficult relationship with his two unruly children, but his heart was in the right place.

  ‘I’m sorry to call you at this time of night, Mark. I know you always keep late hours.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ It was unusual for Gabriel to call.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. Look, I know how close you were to my brother. You were always his favourite. I thought you might understand.’

  ‘Understand what?’

  ‘I just saw Andrew.’

  ‘Yeah, I keep thinking I see him too.’

  ‘No, I mean I really saw him, alive.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but I was driving back from the office this evening and passed him standing on the side of the road. He was waving at me.’

  ‘Uncle Gabriel, you know that’s impossible.’

  ‘I know, but I swear to you it was definitely him. He was wearing the clothes he died in, that awful shiny blue suit he always wore in France and that awful straw hat—you know, the one the English always think they need to put on in the Riviera.’

  ‘Have you told anyone else about this?’

  ‘God, no, of course not. They’d think—well, you know.’ Gabriel had suffered a nervous breakdown soon after his second divorce.

>   ‘I think maybe it’s delayed shock,’ was all Mark could say. ‘I imagine it’s a common phenomenon.’

  ‘I know. It just felt so weird, what with me driving his old car and everything. I looked in the rear-view mirror and there he was. I looked again a moment later, and he’d vanished.’ Gabriel had been left his brother’s other car, another classic Mercedes, his favourite, a plum-coloured 1970 saloon with white leather seats and whitewall tyres. There were only fifteen of the left-hand-drive models remaining in the world.

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s been any word on what he was doing in Monaco that day?’

  ‘I’ve asked around. Nobody has a clue. He told Catherine he’d be away for a few days. She was used to him going on his collecting trips.’ As far as Mark could discern, Uncle Andrew visited private antique sales, but nobody knew if he ever bought anything. Apart from the few bits and pieces he’d left his family, he seemed to own no special collections. There was nothing but ordinary furniture in his country house.

  They talked for a while, and Gabriel rang off, a little happier. But it wasn’t the end of the matter.

  The following morning, Gabriel Bayer said goodbye to his nineteen-year-old son Jake, who still lived at home with him, and headed into work earlier than usual. The flat straight roads that ran through the Norfolk Fens were obscured by patches of thick mist. Gabriel tuned to Radio Four and listened to a heated discussion about the future of the Anglican church. He had just passed Melton Constable when the radio fazed and faded. On either side of him, misted patches of marsh water glowed softly in the early morning light. He fiddled with the radio’s tuner, trying to relocate his programme, when the dark man loomed at him.

  The figure was standing stock-still in the centre of the road. Its arms were raised in warning. Gabriel swung the wheel just enough to avoid hitting him, and glimpsed his brother Andrew’s alarmed face peering out from under his white straw hat as he passed. The vehicle’s wheels had lost their purchase on the mist-slick road, and no matter how hard Gabriel tried to correct the drift of the car it slid further in the opposite direction.