Life is a tale told by an idiot
Shakespeare
It was Thursday morning. A pale sun leaked into a soupy sky as I drove to Gosford Community Centre with a leaden heart. I inwardly cursed Audrey for making me do this. Marty sat like a corpse next to me. He seemed suicidal and I daren’t risk leaving him at home, especially as Cass had stayed at a friend’s last night and hadn’t yet met him. We drove through grim streets and several war zone estates and arrived at a graffiti-ribbed building that had mostly given up on windows. This was the Community Centre where I was about to meet a bunch of young offenders. A social worker called Cheryl showed us into a cheerless room full of anti-drug posters and leaflets about chlamydia and genital herpes on a notice board. There were six teenagers – three girls and three lads. One of the lads and two of the girls were asleep, one possibly dead. I was introduced by Cheryl as Doctor Rook, and she waved a hand uncertainly at Marty, then left the room. I sat down and Marty slumped in a chair to one side.
“Hi,” I said.
“You a doctor then?” a lad with acne asked. He had a name tag – Kev. I noticed he also had an ankle tag, courtesy of the criminal justice system.
I nodded.
“Good. ‘Cos I got a right pain in the arse. Wanna see?”
“Thanks for the offer, but I’m a teacher. Philosophy,” I said.
“Yeh. And who’s that rinsed crump?” he asked, looking at Marty.
“He’s a professor of linguistics. No, actually, he’s a criminal,” I said, thinking I may as well tell the truth and be damned.
“Yeh, right, and I’s the fucking Pope. ‘E’s a washed snitz.”
To everyone’s amazement, and particularly mine, Marty stood and with amazing speed was across the room and had Kev pinned against the wall, his feet kicking a foot above the floor.
“I am a very bad person, I have done things you can’t imagine. I have seen people on fire. Seen my brother crucified. Even now I could snap your bastard little chicken neck and not give a monkey’s blow ‘cos I’m already dead. But if you pay attention to this bloke, if you try and learn something in your sorry life, you might not end up like me,” Marty said, apparently not noticing that Kev’s face was turning purple.
“Put him down, Marty!” I said.
Marty complied, then shuffled across to his chair and slumped again, staring at the floor. Now everyone was awake. And paying attention. Kev stared at Marty with a mixture of fear and awe.
“Right. Philosophy is about the art of asking questions…” I said.
An hour later the room was transformed. We’d discussed life, crime, love, desire, and I’d learnt a whole new lexicon of street words. Mash man is a gunman, nang means good, a whip is a car, grimy means good. Fascinating. I hadn’t enjoyed teaching so much in years. As Marty and I got ready to go, Kev came up and shook my hand. He looked nervously at Marty, then they knuckle touched conciliatorily.
“Nice one,” Kev said, then flicked his eyes to a broken window. “He with you?”
I looked. Parked across the road was the black Audi. Darnel’s profile was in the driver’s seat. Clearly Brissot wasn’t satisfied with what had been found in my flat, and unless he was a technical genius he wouldn’t be able to unlock my laptop. And now he knew where Marty was. How to get him away safely?
“No. Definitely not with me, but after me,” I said.
“You don’t like him eyeballing you?”
“No,” I said.
Kev took out his mobile and made a call, asking someone to come. The last thing I wanted was some disaffected teenager with a record to get involved in my mess.
“Kev, thanks but please, just leave it.”
Kev waved it away.
“Nah, you was well grimy. Good sesh. Mint, yeh? You like was really talkin’ an’ lis’nin’. Don’t treat me like no idiot. One favour deserves whatevva… my bruvver’s got a coupla vans. He’ll enjoy the crack. Sort that munter.”
“Kev, you don’t understand. That… munter… could hurt you. He’s a violent and powerful person.”
Kev looked at me and snorted a laugh.
“And what the fuck you fink we is? Nuns? My bruvver’s seriously psycho. This is our yard. Get goin’.”
I realised there was an England I knew nothing of, that was changing by the minute and inhabited by newly evolved tribes. I was also forced to realise I liked Kev and his little band of ne’er do wells. What did that say about me? Kev high-fived Marty and we left. Marty had been seen so there seemed no point in hiding. We got in my car just as two old Bedford vans arrived and sandwiched Darnel’s Audi tight. A furious Darnel got out of his car. Someone, presumably Kev’s brother, sixteen stone of muscle, tattoo and violence, got out of one of the vans brandishing a starting handle and squared up to Darnel. God knows what I’d unleashed here.
We drove away. I kept reminding myself that Marty had been up to his neck in the dirty pharmaceutical scam, but even so I felt responsible for him. I looked in the mirror and the silver Mercedes was a few cars behind.
Chapter Seventeen
What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth!
Joseph Conrad
I rang Freud and he told me to meet him on the South Bank outside the National Theatre bookshop. Marty came along because there was nowhere else to take him. Since his outburst at Kev, he slumped inside again, as if life had shrunk to a stone in the ungainly husk of his frame. I kept thinking of what he’d said: “I’m already a dead man.” I told him that probably the only thing keeping us safe was that Brissot didn’t know if I had anything on him. A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but so is a little uncertainty. Marty shrugged. He’d given up on everything, especially himself. He was looking for atonement. He craved oblivion.
Freud was leaning on a rail looking down on a small strip of beach by the Thames, where a white haired, ruby-faced man sat on a small canvas garden chair, an electric organ balanced on his legs, playing and singing Beatles songs tunelessly and with gusto. A towel spread before him had a few coins in it. We approached Freud, who smiled down at the elderly busker.
“There are worse ways to spend an afternoon,” Freud said without looking at us.
“This is Marty Hebden,” I said.
Freud looked at him and nodded. “Pilgrim under a curse,” he said, then to me, “Give me your wallet.”
I gave it to him. He took out a twenty pound note, gave my wallet back, and folded the note into a paper aeroplane, then launched it over the wall, where it soared, arced and then spiralled down to land at the busker’s feet. He was just about to hurl himself into a spirited rendition of Lady Madonna when he saw the note and stopped. He picked it up, unfolded it, smelled it, looked up at Freud and saluted. Freud showed a few rotting teeth and then made a fluttering gesture with his right hand. The busker packed up and left.
“You didn’t see the Ferryman just now. The flash. The rowing. The head. The wave.”
“No, I didn’t,” I said.
“It’s because he’s close. He’s coming. No longer just in your unconscious – stepping out of that dark cave and into the pit of the world. Let us go down to the water and Weialala leia…” and he took Marty’s hand and led him like an orphan child down the steps. Marty stared vacantly ahead, indifference hollowing out his inclinations. I followed. We sat on a few stones looking at the lapping brown-grey waters.
“What news on the woman, Rook?”
“She’s married to a doctor. She has a son. She’s happy.”
Freud frowned and looked long and hard at the waters.
“Happiness. Vastly overrated. For imbeciles. The moment you mentioned my name she looked over your shoulder to see if I was there. Panic set in. The day she dreads had arrived when the past rears up like a fiery goat to buck her into her darkest places and infect her dreams. But you reassured her. You said you would never tell me where she is. So she sunk back into her glove of imaginary safety.”
“Ex
actly as you say,” I said.
Marty had stood and wandered away a little. This great bad boy, built like a lanky piece of trellis, and who had probably caused grievous violence to many, seemed to be disappearing into a black hole inside himself.
Freud sighed.
“Now then, Brissot is an anal retentive. Everything has to be… just so. He is a prince of vanity and a spectrum of quirks, one of which is that he has triskaidekaphobia, he has an abnormal fear of the number thirteen, so if you want to spook him, play on that. Appeal to his vanity and then insult it and he may, I say may, take risks. Your friend appears to be intent on not waving but drowning. Which is where we came in.”
I looked and Marty was wading into the Thames. The water was up to his neck but he kept trudging forward. It lapped over his mouth and his head disappeared.
“Shit!” I said and jumped up. I ran along the bank and shouted to the bubbles on the choppy water. “Marty! For God’s sake!” But what is the point of shouting to a drowning man who can’t hear you anyway? I turned to Freud for help but he’d disappeared. How could he leave so quickly? Not for the first time I thought he was a changeling goblin, a sprite of everything dark. I looked up but no one up there on the embankment path seemed to have seen what happened. How could a man wade into the Thames in front of the National bloody Theatre in broad daylight and no one see him?
I took off my shoes, because that’s what they do in the movies, and it’s silly not to if you wish to swim, and started to push in. If ever you try to save someone from drowning in the Thames, bring wellingtons because it’s not as easy as it sounds. Your feet suck into a sludge or wormy clay that makes it almost impossible to move. I had to pull each foot out with my hands – how did Marty do it so effortlessly? Perhaps if you want to top yourself the river lends a willing hand. Why couldn’t anyone see? Why wasn’t someone else taking responsibility? I managed to somehow stagger in until the water was up to my chest, but by then I had no idea where Marty was. A speed boat went by and created waves that lapped over my head and choked me. I hate people who own speedboats. I spluttered and shouted to anyone, but anyone wasn’t listening. Then about four metres to my left Marty surfaced like a baby whale, spluttered and then went down again. Perhaps it isn’t as easy to drown yourself as it might seem. I swam towards him, then I ducked under. God, the water was filthy – impossible to see anything, and tasted like death. I scrabbled around like a dyspeptic crab, my fingers in all kinds of sluggy detritus, then I fell over something big and it turned out to be Marty. I hauled him up and we both broke the surface with a volcano of spluttering and coughing.
“Let me go!” he shouted in my face.
I spat out choleric spume and took a deep breath. My eyes swam.
“No. Think how bad it would look if I try to save you and fail? I’ll never get my life saving badge.”
Something in him slumped and he let me drag him as I would a dead man, then we both staggered through the sucking mud and fell like giant twin soggy mud brown condoms on the filthy shore. I took some deep breaths and wondered why life was so difficult. A sound I didn’t instantly recognise started to claim my attention and I looked up to see some fifty people leaning over the wall applauding and shouting things like “Well done, mate” and “Bloody hero!” It infuriated me. I stood up, bedraggled and sopping, something brown and disgusting on my left shoulder, and shook my fist at the little cheering crowd.
“I am not a hero! Heroes make me puke! They’re always bland and sugary and doing good things, the bastards. The only reason I saved this idiot is because… he owes me money.”
This stopped them and deflated the moment. Someone spat over the wall. A man in a flat cap stuck a middle finger at me. People walked away and the show was over, but a little aside, another stood, watching, waiting, his face still shadowed beneath the fedora hat. He pointed two fingers and a cocked thumb at me, took a shot, and walked away.
Chapter Eighteen
Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world.
S. Beckett
I bought us coffee and we sat shivering, wet, steaming and filthy, on a bench, drinking it. No one came near because we stank so much. I felt like one of Freud’s subjects in his Tunnel kingdom. People stared at us on the tube and gave us a wide berth. I started to realise what it was like to be a down and out. You were a social pariah, a leper to be stared at as a curio, mostly with disgust but tempered by a gestural and occasional whiff of pity. Marty simply ignored everyone. I had a sense that our main function was to assure people that they would never sink so low themselves, and that it was probably our own faults we were so degraded. How quickly we cease to be a part of things. The gutter is probably always just a few steps away for most of us. Freud was a living example, although his life was the result of a baroque and perverse choice.
We had just gone past Finchley Central when Marty put his head on my shoulder and wept like a baby. It was so bizarre to have a stinking six foot gangster who smelled like a leprous cadaver blubbing on my shoulder that there was no room left for embarrassment. When a middle aged man in a suit stared openly at us I looked him in the eye and said, “Do you mind not staring. It’s been an emotional day and anyway it’s fucking rude.” Bizarrely I felt protective of Marty.
Cass was less than pleased when I brought Marty home for a shower. My clothes were too small but he didn’t seem to care and sat at the kitchen table in a pair of jeans six inches too short and a shirt that ended just below his elbows. I left him with a notepad and told him to write down everything he knew about Brissot, and went to my little study. I checked the tracking device and Brissot was still at Bedwell Lodge. Cass came in.
“Dad, who is that weirdo?”
“Marty Hebden. A criminal with a death wish.”
“Right. And that’s OK?”
“I thought you liked unusual people. You were quite taken with Freud.”
“But not in my own home.”
“How’s your paper on humour going?”
“Not bad. Why?”
“I just wanted to change the subject.”
“You failed.”
“What do you think Sugartop means?”
“Sounds like a sweet or a drug. Are you changing the conversation again?”
“Yes. I’m going out and I’ll take Marty with me.”
“Oh, just when I was looking forward to an evening with a deranged suicidal criminal.”
“From whence have you suddenly acquired all this sarcasm?”
“I think from one of my parents on my father’s side. Be careful.”
In the kitchen Marty seemed to be in a trance. I snapped my fingers and he looked up at me from whatever damaged place he was in. He hadn’t written a thing.
“Brissot keeps nothing in his London home. It could be that there is something at his country house. Especially as Freud says there is something split in the man – one place signifying order and another risk and chaos,” I said.
“You’re going to him?”
“Yes.”
Marty suddenly became animated. “Let’s get the bastard. I’m sick of running,” he said.
This wasn’t quite what I had in mind, but I couldn’t leave a suicidal nut with Cass. Ten minutes later we were in the car driving to Hertfordshire. We never got there, thanks to Radio 3. Some Chopin was trilling like tiny bird wings, then the news came on. I almost turned it off – mainstream news is a drip feed of smoke and mirrors to uphold the status quo – but Marty suddenly turned it up.
“I know that name. That’s the one. He’s the one.”
An item about charity commissions and a big cheese about to announce a major initiative worth billions for global flood relief. His name was Eric Tripp. I stopped the car and waited for Marty’s wheels to turn.
“E.T., Brissot called him, thought it was hilarious, but I remember now, hearing his name when we were sorting out a new shipment. Eric was the respectable front Brissot
needed, plus he had something on him, so he didn’t have much choice. He provided the drivers and transport for a cream off of the money.”
“What did Brissot have on him?”
“Dunno.”
“Marty, it would have been helpful if you’d told me this before,” I said.
He turned his rheumy lost eyes on me. What was the point? This investigation was far too messy. I Googled Eric Tripp on my phone and found an address. Dockside. It was worth a cold call. I was sure we were being followed but by now I was paranoid to the point that everyone and everything seemed suspicious. I was just lurching from one hunch to another, like a chess player who only sees the next move. I needed to calm down a bit, let my waters settle, so that I could think pointedly. Perhaps the storm inside was why I didn’t see it coming. We parked and started walking. Something wasn’t right. We passed a few shop doorways and an alley. I looked across the road and saw three shadows reflected.
“Doctor Rook,” was said quietly, matter-of-factly. I turned and there was the coat, the fedora hat, a shadowed face looking at me. Then the hand from the pocket holding a small black revolver. “I’m sorry,” he almost whispered. He raised the gun a little, but with a swiftness I never would have thought possible Marty stepped in front of me and almost leapt at the figure and clutched the arm that held the gun. They seemed to twirl in some mad dance for a few seconds, then there was a loud crack as the gun fired, the man took a few steps back, then turned and quickly walked away. Marty stood rigid. I ran to him. He still held the gun against his belly with both hands. He looked at me with the ghost of a smile. They say a shot in the guts is one of the worst, though I imagine a bullet anywhere in your body brings a holocaust of pain. I gently took the gun and instantly the blood started to well over his hands. One leg trembled violently but he fought it back under control. I put the gun in my pocket.
“I have to get you to hospital, Marty. Let’s get to the car.”
“No hospital. No police. I just wanna get somewhere and lie down.”
“But for God’s sake…”
Beyond Good and Evil Page 8