Beyond Good and Evil

by Steve Attridge

  “I’m sick of this. Do him, but slow, a bit at a time, until he talks, and if he doesn’t, then we’ll go get his daughter. Perhaps she knows where the originals are. And if the twat simply wants to die, let’s give it to him in five courses.”

  He looked at me. “If you talk I’ll have you finished quick. If not – you,” here looking at the fedora man – “you can serve the last course. So he knows. Everything. I want to savour it. I want him to know. I want to see it.”

  Know what? See what? The moment of death? What did he mean? There was something I wasn’t getting. Fedora man, shadowed and watchful, said nothing, but gave the smallest of nods. Darnel looked at his revolver, then smiled and returned it to his pocket. He took out a knife, the blade at least seven inches long. He was looking forward to his work.

  “A bit at a time then, like at the carvery,” he said.

  Freud suddenly stood and did a little jig.

  “This is beautiful. A slow and doubtless excruciatingly painful execution in my humble little kingdom – the stuff of dreams. I am truly blessed. I’d like to record it, but also – it shouldn’t pass without a toast.” He offered the bottle but no one responded. “Ah, I understand. No one wants to sup from the same bottleneck my own putrid and excremental lips have sucked on, but here…” He took another bottle of champagne from a case and popped the cork and offered it. Charlie declined, fedora man just looked down, but Darnel smiled.

  “Why not? Let’s celebrate,” he said, taking the bottle and swigging from it. When he’d finished he shook the bottle with his thumb over it, then sprayed Freud and laughed. Freud smiled back and wiped himself with a filthy sleeve. Darnel handed me the bottle.

  “Last sip before you go?” he asked.

  I reached out to take the bottle, but Freud intervened.

  “No no! Executioner and condemned never drink from the same cup. Bad form. And there’s only one drink to wei la la you to the Ferryman.”

  He reached into a box and brought out a dusty bottle. He blew on it and wiped the label clean.

  “Marquis de Montesquiou 1904 Vintage Armagnac. Three thousand five hundred pounds worth of heaven. A gift to me from a grateful patient whose strange sexual propensities were hindering him from climbing the greasy ecclesiastical ladder to the dizzying heights of bishop. I didn’t cure him, I just made him feel less guilty. Waiting for a special occasion – and this is it. The gods would approve.”

  “Which gods are they, Seb?” asked Charlie, who was coming down slowly from his own high.

  “Of chaos. Lunacy. Evil gods – the best kind. Your gods, my friend. We both reinvented ourselves, Charlie. I mean – who the fuck are we? How many of us are there in this knotted black church called the skull? And in case you don’t know, the date today is the thirteenth.” Freud fluttered his hands eerily, like bat wings. “Thirteeen!” he hissed.

  Charlie looked stricken. Freud popped the cork, savoured the hundred and ten year aroma and gave me the bottle. It smelled like redemption. I took a drink, let it stay in my mouth warming and seeping into the taste buds. Perhaps there was a god after all, and he made brandy rather than useless worlds of suffering. I took another drink. For a moment I felt as if I was floating above everything, looking down at this strange, sad little bunch of wrecks all intent on doing each other terminal damage. Sometimes at highly dramatic moments human beings are at their most pathetic. I would miss Cass so much, even in death, perhaps. And Lizzie. My Lizzie. I looked up and felt oddly quiet, mournful. I wished I could see the sky. I thought of everything I would never now read.

  Darnel looked at me strangely. Then he fell dead to the floor.

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well

  When our deep plot do pall, and that should teach us

  There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,

  Rough-hew them how we will

  Shakespeare

  I looked at the body, as did Charlie. Darnel was clearly as dead as a banker’s soul. Fedora man registered it but said nothing, still sitting in the shadows as if this happened every day. Perhaps it did in his world. Freud leaned down and looked closely into Darnel’s open eyes that now saw nothing.

  “Wei la. Don’t forget to pay the Ferryman, pilgrim,” and Freud put a brace of two pence coins over his eyes. “Only a second class ferry, but it makes no difference how you travel on the other side.”

  “What the fuck just happened?” Charlie said.

  “He died,” said Freud, and smiled.

  “I know that, but what did you do?”

  “I gave him a bottle of champagne. Perhaps he was allergic. Perhaps he wasn’t used to such quality, and his poor plebeian organs just… expired.”

  Whatever toxic brew Freud had put in Darnel’s bottle, it worked with a deadly speed. Charlie was still struggling to come to terms with the death of his lover. This wasn’t what he had scripted. He picked up Darnel’s gun and pointed it at me.

  “He was my… I loved him,” said Charlie, unable to believe what was happening and how quickly things could unravel when you are so used to getting your own way. He needed a scapegoat and I was it. “It’s on your head. You’re going with him.”

  Freud looked at us in turn, enjoying the drama. We had all gone beyond money, revenge, justice, good and evil. This was some bizarre theatre of blind impulses. I felt nauseous and dizzy, the sweat pouring down my face and turning cold down my neck and back. I put my hand in my pocket to get a tissue and felt something hard, metallic. At first I wondered… then I realised. It was Marty’s gun. I held it still in my pocket, and clicked off the safety. I angled it so that it was pointing at Charlie.

  “Last chance. Where are the originals of those documents?” Charlie asked. “I’ll give you five. One, two, three, four…”

  In such a confined space the sound was thunderous. My ears popped. Charlie fell like a sack of stones. I felt sick to my heart, but also horribly exhilarated. I’d never shot anyone before. The sound echoed and receded in waves. Charlie whined like a stricken animal, which is what he now was, and struggled to sit up. His shin was a splintered mass of blood and bone and he clutched it, his face clenched like a fist. I wondered if someone could die from such a wound. I doubted it. He’d dropped Darnel’s gun and Freud picked it up and looked at it curiously. My hand was throbbing and there was a hole in my jacket that smoked a little. I took out the gun. Charlie’s immaculate clothes now dirty, bloodstained, and his face waxy with sweat and searing pain. It was extraordinary how quickly the gloss of wealth and money can be wiped off and there we all are: base creatures slithering in the bloody earth again.

  “Give me the gun,” Charlie hissed and reached out his trembling right hand.

  I still don’t know why, but I held out the gun to him. Perhaps I didn’t have the stomach to kill him. Perhaps some primeval death wish triggered in me – this is what Freud would probably think. I really don’t know. Charlie took the gun and laughed. He raised it and pointed it at me. Another deafening gun shot. Charlie twitched back and gasped. He tried to focus and point the gun but already life was leaking from him. A purplish patch appeared on his chest, the expensive suit now acquiring a hippyish tie die look. He looked curiously at fedora man, who had just shot him.

  “Why?” he gasped.

  The answer was another shot, this time in the head. His eyes blasted open and there was a smattering of grey stuff, like bloodied snot, on the cardboard wall behind him. He swayed a little, then fell forward, as if claimed by sleep.

  A few moments of silence. Then they broke.

  “Now we’re really having the mother of all parties,” said Freud, and opened another bottle of champagne. He crawled over to Charlie and made the sign of a cross over him.

  “Goodnight Charlie Chaplin,” he whispered tenderly.

  I looked at fedora man.

  “What the bloody hell is going on here?” I asked him.

  He looked up.

  “Work it out,” he said.
“Charlie thought it was, I dunno, a good joke. Irony or something. Thing about jokes is that they can backfire. I’d had enough.” The accent was working class but with the faintest twinge of Brooklyn.

  He took off the fedora. He was an old man, but leathery, preserved, willed, sparse grey hair flattened over a pale head, assassin eyes that took everything in squarely. He turned a little and something flashed in my mind. A midnight door opening. Shadows and voices, the smell of burning wood in an old black grate, old cooking smells, beer, a laugh but bitter and caustic, everything black and white like an old photograph. Yes, the one photograph I have. Where was it taken? A day out. A few moments of something before the great disappearance that casts a shadow over a lifetime. The hunger to know. Just to know. I started to choke and stifled it. He blurred a little before me but I blinked back the tears.

  “Pete James,” I said.

  For a split second he looked ruffled. He wasn’t expecting me to know his name. The name broke the moment. He stood up, a little stiffly, perhaps arthritis in a knee or ankle, a promise of infirmities to come. He looked at me.

  “Don’t follow and don’t try to find me. There are people who will want to get me after this little drama. I need to disappear, and I can’t do it if my…” he hesitated.“If someone like you is following me. Let it be.”

  “You were going to kill me. When Marty got in the way.”

  He half smiled. Then he was gone. I wanted to run after him and either embrace him or kill him. Perhaps both.

  “Pilgrim, usually I’m the smartest plug in the engine, but I’m missing something here. Who is he?”

  “No one I know,” I said.

  And a tiredness like endless night came over me. My father had almost been my murderer. The only reason he didn’t kill me was that he thought the joke had gone too far. Jesus. I lay down and slept like the dead.

  I awoke to the smell of sausages. Freud was whistling Dixie and frying breakfast. He seemed remarkably cheerful. The colours with which he painted his life were lurid, bold, daring and always unexpected. The bodies of Darnel and Charlie were gone. My father already seemed like a distant memory. He’d saved my life, but then he owed me that. Hell, he owed me a lot more than that.

  “Breakfast. I can offer you a Walls banger sandwich with grilled cheddar or, if you’re feeling picky, some raspberry and date consommé, labneh with tomatoes and fresh herbs and coffee with cardamom,” he said perkily.

  “Just coffee. Where are the bodies?”

  “My little entourage took care of the dear departed. Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song. They were dispatched with holy prayer and full honours. A band played a Bach fugue and a tasteful selection from Don’t Mind the Bollocks. Two of my consignors are outside strutting in the dearly departeds’ clothes even as we speak, an act of fair dinkum recycling. Their wallets were diverted to a suitable charitable cause. Hence the fresh bangers. What now, pilgrim?”

  “It’s done. I know Charlie was behind the murders. I know what his dirty business was. I have a few loose ends, then it’s business as usual.”

  I drank my coffee and stood up to leave. I knew Freud was not one for goodbyes, so I just walked out, then a thought struck and I returned. He looked up and shared his ghoulish gremlin smile.

  “I have a proposition for you, Freud. It may appeal to you.”

  He looked interested.

  Chapter Twenty Four

  When we die, we die. No more. Once the spider-thread of life is severed, the human body is but a mass of corrupting vegetable matter. A feast for worms. That is all. Tell me, what is more ridiculous than the notion of an immortal soul; than the belief that when a man is dead, he remains alive, that when his life grinds to a halt, his soul – or whatever you call it – takes flight?

  Marquis de Sade

  Bedwell Lodge was quiet. It seemed as if a marathon party had just exhausted itself. The place felt like a pricked balloon. I walked into the gardens, stepping over the prostrate body of the young man who had been miming to Tom Jones’ Sexbomb. Still wearing his large nappy, he looked more like a bloated foetus than a sex icon at present. Two or three others were asleep on the lawns and a young woman in an Indian squaw outfit was on her knees retching into a rose bush. A barbecue still smouldered, steaks burnt to black smoking streaks. I stopped and pinched a sprig of rosemary and smelled its sweet antiseptic aroma. Beneath the bush a large and beautiful striped toad eyed me warily. I knelt down and looked at his glistening, almost metallic skin and the astonishing black and silvery white stripes down his back. I thought of Toad of Toad Hall in Kenneth Graham’s poignant Wind in the Willows, and of Toad’s rococo grandeur, his imperviousness to risk or chastisement, his decadent self-entrancement and his pitiful fall from grace and I wondered how long the gravy train would continue here in this Toad Hall now that Charlie was gone. Not long. One of the Warhol originals was on the grass and someone had spray-painted the word CRAP across it.

  Angela was standing by the pool looking down at the leaf strewn water. A McDonald’s wrapper chopped and tussled on the water in a light breeze, as if some tiny invisible creature was sailing it. She started when she saw me, and looked around, as if expecting others.

  “Where’s Charlie?” she asked.

  “Charlie’s dead. Darnel too. It’s over.”

  She looked down at the water, then covered her face with her hands, recovered and looked at me.

  “I knew, I always knew it would end badly. He thought he had some sort of magic circle around him once he started calling himself Brissot, but it was all make believe.”

  “Most things are,” I said.

  “I know I’m his sister, but he was an evil bastard. I didn’t want to… with Andy, but Charlie had a way of making you do things. It’s as if other people were an experiment for him.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s payback time,” I said.

  She looked at me, puzzled.

  “I’ve no doubt that a lot of Charlie’s money will come to you. Perhaps this house too. I want you to make the drug business legitimate – properly endorsed medical supplies. I don’t care if you lose everything in the process. I don’t care if it bankrupts you, though it probably won’t.”

  “And if I don’t?” she asked.

  “I have documents showing what Charlie did. Eric Tripp will pay for his involvement. I can also prove you knew what was happening and were directly involved in Andy’s murder. Women’s prisons are not beautiful health farms. Once you’re in the showers with a horny, six foot, eighty kilo Ukrainian dyke with a grudge, you’ll know what pain is. I’ll be monitoring to make sure you do what I say. Do we understand each other?”

  “What the hell? Are you trying to be a Good Samaritan or something?”

  “No, I’m a terrible man who wants someone else to do a good thing.”

  She nodded. We had an agreement. I walked away, then turned back and threw her passport to her. She caught it neatly.

  “You have great legs,” I said.

  “I know,” she half smiled.

  I got in my car and mentally ticked Angela off my checklist. I had three more errands before I could open a bottle and follow dreams to oblivion. I drove to the nursing home, hoping my mum was at least lucid enough to hear me, even if she didn’t know who I was. I found her sitting in her room staring at the wall. She had a sticky, half sucked Everton mint in her left hand. I gently removed it and put it in the waste basket, then I dampened a tissue in the sink and wiped her hand clean. The skin was as thin and translucent as a newly hatched bird’s, and bony, hard, carrying a lifetime of washing other people’s clothes and windows and houses. I kissed her on her forehead and sat down. She looked at me for a moment, then resumed staring at the wall. I guess she found it more interesting than her son and, given how tired I was, she was probably right. Leonardo da Vinci often stared at a wall to get inspiration and focus his mind, so perhaps Mum was on to something. I started chatting inanely – Cass was doing well, Lizzie and I were fi
ne (it’s so easy to lie), I was fine (the more you do it, the easier it gets), then I said more than I should.

  “Mum, I saw Dad. I mean, I actually met him. Spent time with him. It was great. We went for a coffee, then because it was going so well, we went for a meal. He’s OK. Bit of arthritis, but not bad, and getting by. I liked him and I can see why you… how it all happened. And he said, he’s sorry for everything, and for going in the way he did. He said he did love you. So much. You were his only real sweetheart, but life was complicated, and… that’s it, really. I just wanted you to know. He cared. And he’s sorry.”

  I looked up and caught sight of myself in the little mirror by her bed. I was crying and hadn’t realised it. I looked like a big, wrinkled baby. Then I saw she was looking at me, with a kind of resigned pity, and she turned slowly back to the wall and resumed her vigil. Why did I say it? What on earth was the point of such a gross dung heap of lies? I don’t know. Maybe I wanted to see if I could reach her. Make her feel better. Feel that all the struggles, the heartache, the deceptions, the false hopes, the sheer bloody difficulty of living, that it had all somehow been worth it. I’m not skilled at comfort, and doubtless I failed miserably, as I do at so many things, but do I regret it? Do I hell.

  I sat in my old Saab and mentally checked off Mum. Two to go. I drove to the university. It was High Noon time with Audrey and the Academic Committee for Overseas Exchanges. Audrey was already in my office, wearing what looked like a Victorian strait jacket. Her shoes were a tasteless bright blue with yellow buttons, as if twin gnomes had gone in for staccato vomiting over each one. She’d done something strange with her hair, so that it stuck up like a badly cropped lavatory brush. I said none of this, but smiled pleasantly. Alfred patrolled my desk, looking suspiciously at her. Kierkegaard was asleep. Audrey was in a state of high anxiety because the doubts I’d planted had taken root. Her purpose was to make my life as miserable as possible and eventually be rid of me – sending me to an urban ghetto was an opening move in this game. The irony was I’d actually enjoyed it. And I had a final card to play. She didn’t know what to think, and it was eating away at her, but her smile told me she thought she had the last trump card.