Beyond Good and Evil

by Steve Attridge

  Beyond Good and Evil

  Steve Attridge

  © Steve Attridge 2015

  Steve Attridge has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published by Endeavour Press Ltd in 2015.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Extract from Philosophical Investigations by Steve Attridge

  Chapter One

  No one really understands themselves. You should not analyse yourself.

  Hannah Arendt (Interview 1964)

  Desperate love requires desperate measures.

  She’s slim, blonde and preoccupied. As if thought itself carries her. Clip clop of low sling-back heels and a shoulder bag bearing the accoutrements of daily war against time and the world – lipstick, mint lip balm (I can taste it), tortoiseshell comb with handle, a kindle, keys, face freshener wipes, pan stick make up, an address book, smartphone, a pepper spray and keys. I’ve been following her for half an hour; feels as if I’ve been watching her my whole life, which in some sense I have. I am good at this. The trick is to think yourself invisible and sometimes it seems as if you are. When it doesn’t work trouble is usually smoking in the wings and waiting to pounce, claws out and fangs drooling. She turns the corner. I wait ten seconds then follow. She stops momentarily, as if sensing someone, something, like a forest deer hearing the fatal click of a safety catch, the merest stale scent in the breeze, and I get ready to duck in a front garden if she turns. She walks on. I imagine her naked, pulling back the sheet, pausing to take off her earrings, nipples brown as peach stones. I want her. I’ve wanted her for a very long time. I always want her.

  She turns left into the front path to the house, a semi. She looks in her bag, a frown of annoyance because her keys don’t instantly deliver themselves up to her. I watch, screened by a hedge of evergreen that badly needs manicuring. I count eleven crocuses growing in the cracks in the concrete path. The road is still empty, which is lucky. No cars outside neighbouring houses and no frilling of curtains as the neighbourhood watch clocks in for the morning shift. What is really happening in this moment? In her private universe? A woman of a certain age preparing to open a door while I stand and watch and wait. The sweetness of danger. What is she? – if you strip away the galaxy of small disappointments and flickering hopes, the shambolic, quixotic dreams, the once upon a times and now fading futures, tea cups and books, her profile daguerreotyped on a wall by a broken lamp, the thousand small shocks – what is she? A moment of brightness about to be extinguished. A scrap of mirror to something bigger and brighter and starbound. Is she like me – a stranger to myself, checked and wounded by my own victory? For it is something of a victory simply to be.

  She has no idea I am there as she finds her keys, then the right Yale, as I approach from behind. Perhaps a mote of foreboding across her vision, that sand-flick of fear in the night when all is not well. Somewhere a blackbird sings, another calls back. My footsteps must be like thunder to whatever microbe world lives on the ground. My heart jumps, then stills. I am there behind her, quick as Springheel Jack. The lavender and rosewood of her hair. Everything close enough to touch and break. Key in lock, sticks a little, then turns. By the time she realises and turns it is too late – the door is open. She tries to fumble for the pepper spray. A gasp. Sheer terror. Then anger.

  “Jesus! You moron! You pathetic dork! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she shouts.

  “Stalking you,” I say.

  She looks at me as a nineteenth century doctor would look at a feral lunatic in bedlam. I don’t blame her. I see the adrenalin draining, pupils dilating, blood cooling. Some sort of rational explanation is required. But not the truth. Never the whole truth. The truth would be worse. That something in me enjoyed the game of it, the watching, seeing how close I could get undetected. A whiff of risk. Addicted to danger, even if simulated. It seems I am required to say more.

  “I had no choice. You never answer my calls. Never return them.”

  “And it doesn’t occur to you that perhaps I don’t want to talk to you?” she says.

  “You’re my wife. I love you, Lizzie,” I say, and it’s painfully, horribly true.

  “We’re separated. Soon to be divorced. I’m with someone else now.”

  “MPs and former best friends don’t count. Besides, he’s only with you because deep down, at some primal level, he wants to be me.”

  “You need help, Paul.”

  “And I’m getting it. A team of psychiatrists works around the clock on me. In fact it was one of them, Dr. Bandi Sanda, a Hungarian Mason who specialises in bipolar disorders and in distinguishing limerence from love, who suggested I stalk you, as a preliminary step to winning you back. Can I take you out to dinner?”

  “Fuck off.”

  I’m a man who understands subtlety. I turned and walked. As I reached the unruly hedge she called out: “French or Italian?”

  “Greek.”

  The ghost of a smile was on her face. We were back in touch.

  “Friday night. Pick me up at seven thirty.”

  One nil to the unconventional art of wooing. My darling Lizzie, my desiderium incarnate, showing she still has spirit for the fight. Bastard David will be apoplectic, and perhaps if the gods of wrath smile on me the heart attack he so deserves will arrive and we could celebrate with olives and Metaxa brandy. I thought of the old joke – the magistrate calls it stalking, but I call it being in love. I took the divorce papers Lizzie had sent me and dropped them in the next dog shit bin I passed. Then my second mobile rang and I had a sense life was about to change. It was my Rook Investigations phone. Someone had a problem. People only rang if they wanted to avoid the police and there were usually very good reasons. A woman told me I was to meet a man called Andy Hebden and gave me an address in Birmingham, a city that has tried to reinvent itself and failed but done so with honour. Art galleries, several universities, theatres, concert halls, its own symphony orchestra, but it’s still Birmingham. Allow me to indulge my prejudices. Without them I am nothing.

  Chapter Two

  What really is it in us that wants ‘the truth’?

  Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)

  I called in at the university to cancel my seminars for the week. I needed the time if I was about to embark on a new case. Alfred, a parrot I’d bizarrely adopted, or perhaps he had adopted me, now lived a gregarious and colourful life in my office, tended to by Mrs. Simpson the cleaner, a night security guard, and many students. He was also happily poisoning the life of my new head of department, the self-entranced Audrey Pritchard, who looked like a cross between a bloodless mannequin and a Regency fop. She wanted me gone and in a frenzy of psychological displacement, she hated Alfred. He stepped deftly from his perch onto my shoulder and nibbled my ear, whispering “Onward onward rode the six hundred” from The Charge of the Light Brigade while I did a search on Andy He
bden. Andy and Marty – haulage contractors. A picture of a shining fleet of lorries, specialising in East European runs, so probably drug related, as most crime is. Andy had no qualifications and Marty dropped out of Art College twenty years ago. I’d never heard of them before, which perhaps meant they were very good at whatever scam they were pursuing. I smelled the familiar whiff of gunpowder of when a new case starts. Uncharted territories. The tyranny and freedom of the unknown.

  I decided to get the train and watched the English countryside flash by in a dull pastel of rain and disconsolate cows and sodden sheep. Drenched fields that seemed dissolved of life, housing estates in ramshackle geometrics of rectangles and squares. Counties arbitrarily bounded. Everything weighed down by some unspeakable calamity to come, overtaken by slow disconsolate apocalypse. If Bruegel was alive, I wonder what perfidy he would find to represent – perhaps a festival of parasites and leeches in ill-fitting clothes and baseball caps. A somnolent hoody dance around bonfire heaps of corpsed mobile phones while a DJ scratches a rap from the open red mouth of a long dead lion. I was cheered by the possibility of danger to come and by the thought of supper with Lizzie on Friday – two days to wait.

  Hebden Enterprizes was a canal-side suite of offices on the top floor, the walls pointlessly decked with Warhol and other pop art prints that supposedly gave a new way of seeing the everyday world. A large coke can sat beside a dozen Marilyn Monroes. Images for the sake of images. As if status is arbitrary and things only have substance when they are represented and reproduced en masse, behind which the real world is disappearing. We drown in a bland storm of images and no one really looks at anything. You know by now I am turning into Victor Meldrew, as darling daughter Cass tells me constantly. As I walk into a reception area a red headed young woman with a clipboard and a bust like a twin set of torpedoes eyes me over horn-rimmed designer glasses that she probably doesn’t need. She looks at my scuffed leather jacket and ancient hush puppies and winces slightly. I guess this does not signal the beginning of a seamy flirtation leading to heartache, torn sheets and regret.

  “Andy will see you now, Dr Rook,” she said.

  Andy? So her talents probably extend beyond office hours. She was the voice I’d heard on the phone. Her name, a plastic sign on her desk informed me, was Dancy. She knew who I was so that meant not many visitors. The offices probably a front for whatever the Hebdens really do. She stood and walked in front to code-open a door. Her legs, unlike the prints, were works of art – pure Michelangelo. I was buzzed through into a room the size of a landing strip with more pop art on the walls. There were no taxis so I walked across the parquet floor, each half a metre square, and I resisted the urge to count them, to a man sitting behind a glass and aluminium desk. He was watching a champagne hamster trundling on a wheel in a cage on his desk. Andy Hebden was fifty and going to seed rapidly, despite the attempts of a Pierre Cardin suit, two hundred pound haircut and fake tan, to suggest otherwise. Behind him a panoramic glass wall displayed all the delights of a midlands skyline on a grey English day.

  “Reckon he knows more than he lets on. He goes round and round on that wheel for hours. Why?” he asked without looking up. Faint touch of a Brummie vowel problem. The hamster seemed to have picked up speed.

  “He’s finished his library book? In training for a heavyweight fight? Going for a Guinness book of records title? Because it’s there?” I said.

  Hebden looked at me for the first time and smiled.

  “What do you know about me, Dr Rook?” he asked.

  “I know you have a lot of money to waste on bad pop art; that you have excellent taste in personal assistants; that you like being king of the pile – your offices are on the twentieth floor of a twenty storey building; and that imponderables absorb you – the hamster on the wheel. Hamsters are nocturnal, so I suspect you sometimes put a cover on the cage in the day so that he’ll think it’s night and start his workout routine. You enjoy watching him. Or her. I also know that you have a problem – otherwise you wouldn’t have contacted me.”

  “You’ve just got a job. I rent the nineteenth floor too to keep things nice and private. And I hate all this pop art crap. My brother Marty likes it. And he’s disappeared.”

  “You want me to find him.”

  “I want you to find him. He had half a million on him. We were looking to have the money revitalised, let’s say. He was also selling some of these Warhol travesties. One of them – bloody can of soup, worth three hundred grand. Marty hasn’t been seen for four days now. Nor’s the money or the paintings. And don’t ask if I trust him. I do. He’s either being kept somewhere, or he’s dead. The man he went to – Jacques Brissot – is where you should start. You’ll have a bloody hard time trying to find him. He’s tight as a nun’s corset. I want the truth.”

  “People always think they want the truth. Sometimes that’s the last thing they want.”

  “Just find him and be a clever bastard in your own time. Our aunt will start to get upset if he doesn’t visit her. She brought us up. Also, I have something on Brissot – a document that will finish him. If need be I’ll give it to you, but I want to know what’s happened to Marty, and proof it’s Brissot.”

  We agreed terms. I got as much information as I could and a photograph of Marty looking out of place in a cream suit behind a desk, Andy standing beside him. The name Jacques Brissot echoed for me. I turned over what little I knew – he was a Girondist writer and pamphleteer during the French Revolution. A cultured man who wrote on the philosophy of law and was one of the formative minds behind the revolution. He was guillotined by his own people as revolution capsized into the Terror. Considering he’d been dead for two hundred and twenty years it was unlikely this was the man I was looking for, but there might be a connection. Perhaps the current Brissot was using a false name. I was still pondering the little I knew of him and planning my next move when I boarded the train at Snow Hill. I telephoned the number for Jacques Brissot but the line went dead. I looked out at the station, was aware that someone sat down next to me, but when I turned to look at them they had gone. An envelope lay on the table. I picked it up and stood, trying to see who it had been, but there was only a confusion of crowds on the platform and no one in the carriage walking away. I turned it over and saw my own name written in neat copperplate. Inside, in the same copperplate: RIP.

  Chapter Three

  Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

  Albert Einstein

  I had been officially warned. When someone has committed a crime and bothers to warn you to stay away it tells you several things:

  1. a crime definitely has been committed, if ever there was doubt;

  2. it will be possible to discover what the crime is and who committed it;

  3. most interestingly, by warning you the criminal is often absolving himself of responsibility – I told you this would happen if you continued and look, now it has, so it’s your fault.

  I went to the university. My life there an increasing skirmish with complaints and threats of dismissal. At best these were a challenge and at worst an annoyance. I had a tutorial with my second year group on The Problem of Value, and given that the group included daughter Cass, I decided to honour it. As I approached my office Audrey appeared like the ghost of Christmas long gone. Since I had engineered a vote of no confidence in which Alfred the parrot was endorsed by the students over and above her she had viewed me with a mix of horror and hatred. I could see both those demons jostling for dominance in the tic above her jaundiced left eye.

  “Dr. Rook, just to inform you, I have proposed you to take up a key role in our Outreach Goodwill programme. In principle, the academic registry has approved.”

  I said nothing. She waited a few seconds for questions I would not ask. Why would I, when I already knew the answers?

  “As you know, competition for recruitment is at the knives out and sharpened stage. Staff redundancies loom. We all have to pull our weight. Shoulders
to the wheel. Show we are being progressive. You would effectively be away from the university for two terms, starting next September. Working in underprivileged areas to try and recruit for our open entry programme. Workshops, talks, being proactive in the community. Once approved, you will begin some early outreach teaching this term. Perhaps you would like to know where exactly?”

  “The estates in Woodside and the Gospark area. Places where even the rats are pimps and the cockroaches get tooled up,” I said.

  Her several chins dropped.

  “How did you know?”

  “Eyes and ears, Audrey. Eyes and ears. Those estates are ghettoes for bloated chavs and drugged offal on legs. Must dash. Tutorial. We all have to pull our weight. Shoulders to the wheel.”

  I knew because I had her password and regularly monitored her emails. If this was a chess game, we were still toying with opening gambits. Woodside and Gospark were ghettoes the media ignored, unless it was for a crass documentary designed to both entertain and frighten people. I wouldn’t last five minutes there.

  It was time to boondoggle my way through the morning. In my office a dozen students were seated expectantly, including my beloved Cass. I didn’t have the heart to cancel this seminar and risk her rebuke. My tumultuary life had enough mines beneath each step without her disapprobation. She smiled and my heart wrenched. It was still a shock that she was now a young woman. Where was the little girl I held asleep on my lap, a tiny thumb in her rosebud mouth? I looked at the others. I could never remember their names. I asked a girl with a barbed wire necklace tattooed around her throat to tell me something she valued.