In the end I made my choice on, I suppose, the same basis as Steven once chose to drag me into a black hole of his own making, believing Robert Forrest the least judgemental soul of his acquaintance, the friend closest to a pure amoral state. There, he chose well. Here, I chose badly, as it turned out. I chose ‘my’ brother Lynval.
Down the drabness of Kingsland Road, a journey I’d never liked even from behind the wheel of my van; turning off to the square of new-build low-rise in Holly Street, up the stairs to his door, his den. Lynval was showing two sullen boys out, and they sneered at me in concert. My rag-tag dragged-through-a-hedge demeanour seemed to bring Lynval some amusement, and he bade me enter, offered me a can of lager and a toke on a small fragrant pipe, both of which I declined.
Studying Lynval from the opposing sofa as I told him my tale was like peering into a distorting mirror. He was I, only shorter, leaner, more gaunt in the face, his hair and beard razored with odd oriental zigzags, his eyes a little reddish and opaque, his smile much thinner than mine. The clothes he wore were only a boxfresh, more fancily embroidered version of the street-wear I had on me, but he carried himself as if they were the finest threads. And he appeared genuinely rapt, thoughtful, even tickled by my story – not surprised, by any part. Still, my request for money, clearly, gave him a valuable chance to levy judgement on me, for the sad folly of my acting so ‘white’, trying to be chocolate to that rich girl’s milk. I sat there and took my licks – staring fixedly at my big hands, calloused by long work with bradawl and chisel – tamping down the urge I felt to wring my brother’s neck. Lynval told me he would see what he could do; first I should oblige him by hitting his bathroom, showering my broke-joke self, perhaps availing myself of his wardrobe.
Behind a locked door, the shower hissing ignored, I looked hard at my eyeballs in the mirror. What had I done to Leon’s face? The sheer starkness of my hunted, haunted desperation was so clear, so disfiguring of him – this considerate mother’s son, this diligent if troubled father, this complicated but essentially honourable man whose life I’d traduced. The alienation from self that I felt was vertigo-like, I could smell my own corruption, the manner in which I’d made myself irredeemable.
In my head was a fragment of a book that I – and Leon, to my snobbish surprise – both knew: that the only true journey was not to a foreign country but behind foreign eyes, to perceive the world avec les yeux d’un autre, de cent autres … A hundred, though, seemed to me an interminable punishment, standing there alone with my pointless physical prowess, my redundant self-education, my broken heart.
No, I didn’t want no shower, no change … I wanted to be running again. I stepped quietly from the bathroom, to the threshold of the living space. No Lynval did I see. But peering round a corner I saw him on his cramped veranda, pacing slowly, muttering into a phone.
‘Well he here now, man. Decision be yours. Could be your business, could be, if what he say happen happen, oddawise … Naw man, mi just concerned citizen, mi tell you what mi know, if it be mi brethren or whatevah …’
My brother, my ‘brethren’, this bad bwai was, I now understood, also a nark, an infarma … I didn’t hesitate, moved, dropped the latch, was gone, directly to the stairwell and back onto those grey streets.
I headed north, out of Dalston through Canonbury, taking the backstreets, past terraces and estates, wincing in heatless autumn sunlight that nonetheless gave the windows of houses a blank, white-hot glow. I badly needed to turn the day dark before sundown. At Finsbury Park I tramped onto a disused railway line made into a rambler’s path, strode along this grassy embankment until it led down onto the old track bed, sombre and shaded by oak, beech and ash. I trudged some miles. A pair of joggers passed me at pace, a hapless father with pushchair rather slower yet more hasty. Otherwise I saw not a soul: this, clearly, a place where one went not much wishing to be seen, with its odour of dead leaves, dog shit, cheap stimulants. At Highgate I made reconnaissance of a masonry train tunnel, found it suitably dark and dank, rated it a hideout. I pressed onward, though, through the mournful Highgate Wood and into another maze of backstreets, before I chanced on a truly promising bolthole.
It was a cemetery north of Muswell Hill, evidently abandoned to the wild, densely tree-lined. I hopped a wall and found myself in a relic of the nineteenth century. Graves were overgrown, stone crosses protruding from tall grasses as though some essence of decay had condensed in them. Certain tombs were adorned by carved figures, spider-webbed by creeping vines. Others were reduced to piles of rock. I passed a decapitated angel with calmly crossed hands; a gravestone with a carved skull atop it. This, the land of the spider and the beetle, deadness laying claim to all matter.
Shrouded by trees at the rear of these grounds was a stone chapel, its roof bashed in by a fallen yew. Within, everything was in pieces, though the area around the font seemed miraculously unharmed. I shifted some broken pews into the rudiments of a lean-to shelter, and I lay down and found sleep.
When I woke, in profound darkness, even I could feel a chill in my blood. I decided to forage out. With the change in my pocket I bought provisions, an evening newspaper at a shop on the Broadway. I didn’t have to ransack the paper to find my face staring out at me from Page 5: a holiday snap, me and Sheanna in Corfu, cropped – if I remembered right – to exclude baby Clyde crawling under the table. The zoom-in accentuated my proud chin and red eyes, induced by some alcohol and the camera flash.
I felt it now, some deep-lying vestige of the anger and frustration of this man; also his conflicted feeling for Eloise – there had been a crushing tenderness there, but also a veiled desire of attainment, an undigested resentment of unearned money. Leon was modest, ‘humble’, yet proud of himself, keen to impress. As a youth he had learned the art of staring right back at girls who stared at him. Eloise he had certainly wanted to touch, from first sight. I knew for sure, as no one else could, that when their skins met they felt the same wonder. He shuddered, though, always shuddered, whenever and wherever she introduced him clumsily to ‘friends’.
Those two lives, those twin hopes were buried now, thanks to me, and the gravestone I’d erected was this news story, this gift to all the sensational papers, the revived myth of the psychopathic black man at large. My umbrage, I knew, was a waste, too little too late. But it struck me very suddenly who would be feeling similarly, even more acutely, seeing this same travesty. My reptile mind went to work.
I waited until morning, passed the night on the chapel floor, then dialled Steven’s number from a call-box: a simpler blackmail, a better version, played with more pronounced distress, of the fiction I as Eloise spun to Leon, I as Leon spun to Lynval: the killing of Eloise a job ordered by hired goons of Sir James Keaton. I heard the misery in Steven’s voice. Yet his solicitude for me was great, urgent, affecting. Without question he would meet me – clean clothes, money, a friend’s ear, all of these I could have. That same night he came to my lair. When I found him, when he took hold of me, embraced me, I was surprised to feel myself moved. The hateful tears that sprang to my eyes were not wholly feigned. It pained me that I then had to go through with my performance. It pained me worse, though, that Steven had brought me no assistance other than a plan to deliver me to the police. The brute hopelessness of my predicament pressed down on me again. I meant him no real harm, but I certainly intended to take from him something I could use. I knew I had sufficient force in me.
Shouldn’t I have anticipated that Grey would step from the shadows, the dependable presence, the loyal wingman, the rock? Yes, and it ruined immediately any chance I had of ‘working on’ Steven – since Grey is the man for whom no useful ends permit errant means, for whom no crooked road can come to any good. Thus our pointless face-off, my ungovernable urge to taunt him – taunt both of them. I hadn’t even determined how to make my exit when I felt crushing pain in my head, and Grey jumped at my disadvantage to rush me. I hit him very hard, in my fury I stomped on him, might have injured him very badl
y had Steven not rugby-tackled me. For all that I had enough in the tank to best them both, I felt in horrible shape by the time I was clear. I tracked back through Highgate Wood, bedded down in that old tunnel, the floor carpeted with damp leaves. I longed for sleep, yet felt so brutally head-sore I wasn’t certain I would wake.
But once sleep had claimed me I suffered an appalling dream – my first since I’d left Robert Forrest behind. I was being trailed, taunted by some woman in the street; in the next instant I was stabbing her with some pointed instrument, piercing her throat repeatedly, she not quite dead, life in her eyes though her head was near-severed, bobbing, ghastly. Then the ground shook, godlike intervention, and my bones were being ripped out through my flesh as if by some great invisible barb, spine and ribcage wrenched gorily from my chest …
Daylight found me in physical inertia but slow-growing mental certainty. I remained a capable man, if nothing else. And I saw nothing left for me but one last stand against my tormentor.
* * *
Once night fell I threw up my hood and picked my way through the wood to Highgate station, rode the train to Warren Street, emerged into rain and wet mist, pressed on into Fitzrovia. I was sodden as I mounted the stone steps up to the double doors of that Edwardian mansion block. But no door was going to bar me, I intended to have my confrontation by any means. As it happened, the entrance clicked and swung open for me. I was awaited, it seemed.
I mounted the stairs to the sixth floor, slipped down the corridor, outside the door to apartment 6F. Turning the doorknob, I found it unlatched. I trod on tiptoe into the gloom of the entrance hall. All within was silent, shadowy – a novice in these matters would have thought it deserted. A small white card lay on the parquet. It issued from Dr Grey Lochran FRCS(Ed), and requested that a Mrs Ragnari call him.
I stepped left into the darkened reception room. And there She stood, in Her Russian coat and cowl, before a trio of lit candles on the mantelpiece.
‘Good evening, doctor.’
‘Dijana. Is that still … the best name we have for you?’
She was impassive. ‘This is what you came to ask me? Why do you waste your precious time? There is nothing for you here. In that new skin of yours you are a badly wanted man. You must keep moving.’
‘Where? Where does this end? Am I meant to do this forever?’
‘Of your physical being, there will be an end, I am sure. It ends when I am done with you, or when you surrender. But a-ways to reach that yet, I suspect. Promises to keep, miles to go before you sleep. Above all, you must remember, you are ours for eternity, doctor. I appreciate you struggle to grasp the concept. And I fear I can’t explain it to you. Beyond the petty hourglass I have, myself, no true cognisance of time …’
It was then I asked Her to tell me what was Hell. Her answer left me alone in the ruins. Her triumph was complete in Her appalling smile.
‘But for all that, tell me,’ She said, ‘do you still regret our business?’
Then She stepped lightly across the floor and slipped between the double-doors. I recovered myself, followed Her into that room which was the double of the one we’d left – the same parquet, the same great damask curtains torn and frayed – save for ‘my’ cheval glass lording over all. She stood apart from it, motionless, Her back to me. I was recovering the ferocity I’d brought with me, the desire for violence that had carried me here.
‘Before we’re ‘done’ – I don’t know how, but I will make you regret our “business” too.’
My words were hollow. I stared at Her dark and narrow shoulders, the glossy mane of Her hair, waited to see what haemorrhaged eyes, what putrescent face She would turn on me. But silence reigned still, eerily. I stepped in front of the mirror. And there at its depths was myself – in full length, the body and face of Dr Robert Forrest.
I wore the dark suit in which I had met my demise. I seemed a little startled, yes, but soon free of that surprise, for what was more familiar and dearly beloved than my own countenance? The look in my eye was so affecting, meek, chastened. I touched my cheek, my brow, with a tenderness I thought I’d lost long ago, as if I were a father to myself. Where have you been to, my prodigal one? With what a bursting heart was I ready to forgive the flaws and failings in myself I’d once held to be insurmountable! If the years had not been entirely kind, there were enduring qualities in myself I had overlooked, distracted by the merest vanity, overbearing pride, truly hideous folly …
And then the surface of the glass shirred and warped, distorted, as if vomiting forth the illusion it had held like water, and the mirror showed me I was Leon once more, that hunted sickness restored to my face.
‘Goodbye, Doctor Forrest …’
I heard the words in my head, nowhere else; felt the affront of a door shut hard in my face; and was seized by a frenzy. Her back to me still, She was shaking like a dog. A blast of freezing air crossed the room to me. And I lunged at Her, spun Her round, held Her wrist and slapped Her across the face just as hard as I’d strike a man. Her head whip-lashed violently, Her hand shot to Her face – and when Her eyes found mine again the look was unmistakably one of shock, mingled with real, naked fear – with horror. Oh, but I drank that in.
I was insane, lost, the impulse was irresistible, such a dominant part of me in that moment. I seized Her, forced Her to the floor, found the scalpel in my pocket and stabbed down into the heart of Her face. I had not thought for one moment of what would surely follow … but then came the throes of the change, the plummet, the revived surety that the shift had occurred.
* * *
A dead weight lay half-across me, I heaved myself free of Leon, hair across my eyes, my pulse racing, my arms painfully thin.
I found my unsteady feet, looked into the glass – saw a ghost, a girl with no memory of where she came from or where she had been, no sense even of her own name. The room was frigid. I knew I had to be gone. Leon’s body – was it best left abandoned here? In my new and consuming fear of what forces would be after me, I decided in an instant on the act that might conceivably cover my tracks. Without another thought, I stooped, moulded the scalpel into Leon’s palm and slashed open his throat.
As I watched the blow flow, I heard the front door creak in the dark somewhere behind me.
Sick, I darted aside into shadow with a practised stealth – made my way deftly through the cover of blackness, the unseen route back to the door – didn’t dare look behind me, found the light and ran. From on high above me I heard ‘Dijana!’ shouted with awful force. But I was not She, that was not my name.
What I had seen in the mirror was a terrified female – quite stripped, for sure, of whatever powers ‘Dijana Vukovara’ had possessed. And that fear stayed with me, cold in my bones, as I dashed blindly through darkened West End streets – skittering on heels, threading clumsily past strangers, avoiding eye contact – too scared to stop, but clueless, purposeless, as to where I should go. Nothing beckoned. I was homeless and penniless, physically shaken, vulnerable and yet too traumatised to contemplate the enormity of hunting out a safe place where I might lay my head down. So I kept pacing the streets, for all of the night, hiding in recesses and alleys when the soles of my feet were too raw. I stole fruit from an all-night store, drank from a fountain, ghosted from point to point until dawn. I believed I was by nature a hard woman to find. But who was I anyhow? Still, in my headspace, I was receiving no data, no input whatsoever from whomever had been the last occupant.
Rather, my head was in a hellish, boiling state. More than ever before I felt I had filled up a previously empty vessel. And yet there was something there, a sonic trace – a sort of drone, a muted cacophony between my ears, a babble. At intervals, a stinging sensation shot through me from head to toe, excruciating, sciatic-like pain through bone and muscle to the tips of my fingers. It was as if the flesh had been infected, poisoned, by the pure malignity of its old inhabitant. I started to wonder in what insidious ways this new sense of evil might creep across me; or w
hether, in my degenerate state, I could even distinguish what was Hers and what mine.
Then, with the dawn, I found a growing sense that my stumbling feet were leading me, drawn by some sense memory to pound a familiar route. Up Baker Street and down the Euston Road I drifted on some implacable tide, until I was gazing up from street-level at a huge, long, sombre brownstone apartment block, adorned here and there by Art Deco detail, somehow anonymous in its hulking prestige, but ghostly in the pearl-light of dawn, the sea of blank windows suggestive of many hundreds of flats within. I climbed the path to the main entrance: ‘Keppel House’ the lettering on the awning. Before me a grid of door-buzzers, and in that moment I was altogether certain which to push: #371. I was answered by a crackle, an accented female ‘Hello?’, heard my voice, newly husky, asking to be admitted.
‘Mund të më ndihmoni mua?’
A buzzer sounded, I pushed on the heavy main door and was admitted, rode a gated elevator to the fourth floor, and was standing for some long moments, perplexed, before #371 – when a stout 40-ish woman with small features, a bowl of dark hair and a faint moustache came out of the neighbouring door.
‘Senka, gde si bio? Mi smo bili u potrazi za vas …’
Her name, I knew, was Bojana. She gestured me hurriedly, concernedly into her sparse flat. A humming computer and scribbled workbooks occupied a cheap plywood desk; the gallery kitchen was quietly spotless. A double bed took up most of the living space, and I longed to lie down on it, but it was clearly in use as one more work-top rather than somewhere to sleep. On it sat stacks of washed and pressed bed-sheets, plastic buckets full of squirting detergents, two hundred paper sheets for toilet seats, a job-lot box of prophylactics … the mingled odour of hotel and hospital stores. And shapes of a buried reality were starting to emerge in my head.
The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Page 33