There was nothing odd or out of place; in fact it was extremely neat, and I found myself breathing a loud sigh of relief. My room was not what you’d call neat, and where Max had folded up a few clothes and placed them on a chair, I knew mine to be crumpled up on my bed. I quickly admonished myself and turned to leave the room. I didn’t like this place.
But as I did so I was drawn to a pair of slippers on the floor. They were lined up tight against each other and placed at the foot of the bed, as near enough at the middle point of the bed as you could get them. Of course, that is precisely what I did with my slippers every night, and had done since I don’t know when. I always sat on the edge of the bed, took off my slippers and lined them up in the very same manner. It was an inane nightly ritual that had no meaning whatsoever. So why was I so unnerved by this pair? I stared fixedly at these faded, grubby items of footwear like they were ferocious animals poised to pounce.
I shuddered, because to see my slippers he must have been in my bedroom, my own sanctuary. I shook my head at the irony; here I was invading his privacy, and Max had already beaten me to it. It was always the case. The sight of the slippers sent a chill through me that quickly turned to the heat of resentment. What on earth was he up to, mimicking me like this? And what’s more, why mimic me if no one else was going to see it, unless there was more to it than mere jibing? I kicked the slippers and they tumbled through the air, one bouncing off the bedroom wall.
Thinking better of it, I retrieved the slippers and placed them exactly where I found them, for there was trepidation nibbling steadily away at the back of my mind. Satisfied he could not be sure they’d been moved, I decided to search the room deeper, just as Max was somehow searching deeper into me. I needed to lay bare a little of his workings to feel we were on equal terms.
I lay down and looked under the bed, smelling the dust there in spite of mum’s Herculean efforts to eradicate it, but saw nothing. I knelt before the bedside cabinet and opened its door, slowly and cautiously, as if expecting something to leap out at me. But there was an empty space, the cupboard occupied by nothing more than ancient black ink stains that dad put there in his youth. The drawer above it revealed only socks and underpants, but in an act I can only describe as an attempt at defilement I ran my hand through them; it struck something hard and solid. I pulled it out from under the jumble of material. A long, flat, black leather case, perhaps six inches or more in length, words embossed into its surface. Poking out of the top was something metallic. I took hold of it and drew out a cutthroat razor.
My first emotion was bewilderment. As I opened the blade out and saw how it had been recently honed to an exceptionally keen edge, my thoughts took on a darker frame. I instinctively ran my thumb along the blade, aware that the slightest pressure would draw blood, and wondering why on earth this old thing was here. I had never seen Max with anything like this before. And yet I felt they went perfectly together, for both had that inert potential for violence once removed from their respective cases.
Because the razor was so close to my eyes, I saw the tiny stain at the point where the blade joined the black handle in a hinge. It was dark, dried and flaked away as I ran my thumbnail over it. My first thought was that it was blood. My second was that I was letting my imagination run the race, and so I slid the razor back into its sheath, and placed it where I’d found it, rearranging the contents of the drawer so that my visit was, I hoped, suitably disguised.
Rising from the bedside cabinet I approached the wardrobe doors, taking a handle in each hand and yanking them open, which they did with an alarmingly strident squeak that caused me to pause and cock an ear for company. There were a few clothes hung up on the hangers; they were huddled together at one end as if quivering in fear at the vast space that lay beyond. On the base of the wardrobe were two pairs of shoes, both pairs having seen better days, and beside them a tattered shoebox. On my knees again, I slid out the box and placed it on the carpet in front of me, lifting the cardboard lid with both hands. Inside was a white plastic bag, a small lump of something encased within. The bag had been sealed with a deliberately tight knot.
I prodded and squeezed the contents, curious to know what it was, and in the end I started to tease away at the compressed ball that was the knot, frustration fuelling my desire to get inside and hindering the dexterity of touch needed. I laboured at it for perhaps five minutes or so before it finally gave, and eagerly opened the bag to see what the elusive contents were. I gasped aloud and dropped it in repulsion.
Even now my stomach turns a little at the thought of the sight of the rat’s rigid body, dead for a long time judging by its condition, its eyeless head removed and lying beside its torso, its belly gashed with the desiccated contents of its insides strewn about the bag to mingle with grey matted fur.
It took me all my strength to tie it back up in its plastic shroud and return it to its cardboard coffin.
* * * *
19
Carl
Carl closed the door softly behind him and locked it, turning the key slowly so as to make as little noise as possible. He swung round, avoiding for the moment the figure sitting in the corner of the room. His nose wrinkled, but the odour didn’t hold his smile in check, and his lips spread out to form a thin, hard line across his pallid face, emphasising the layers of soft skin under his eyes and the lines that struck out from them like miniature explosions.
He walked leisurely into the centre of the room, his shoes making hardly a sound on the thick carpet, his hand reaching inside his jacket pocket and drawing out a packet of cigarettes. Standing in a puddle of sunlight that forced its way between a gap in the chintz curtains, he flicked a cigarette proud of the packet, picked it out with a delicate finger and thumb, stuffed it casually into his mouth and popped the packet back.
He remained motionless, his lips sucking at the cigarette, tongue tasting, eyes glancing round the fixtures and fittings of the room. The sunlight was warm and welcome and he closed his eyes briefly, imagining himself to be a cat. A large cat. A leopard. His muscles stretched, limbs flexed, fingers stiff and fanned out, then curling into a claw. He might easily have purred. Like the cat that’s got the cream, he thought, and gave a single snort in appreciation of his own little joke.
“Like the cat that’s got the cream,” he called to the figure in the corner. “Meow!” he said. But the figure didn’t answer. He didn’t expect it to. “Dumb bastard,” he said under his breath.
Carl’s fingers found the box of matches in his pocket and he struck one, touching the end of the cigarette with the struggling flame – almost as if it wanted to be free of the wood, he thought, fighting to tear itself away. He fanned out the flame with the image in his head that he’d killed it before it could escape. The wisp of smoke spewing from the match end rose in languorous swirls, as if somehow this was the flame’s dejected spirit. He blew it away into nothing.
Smoking was not allowed inside Overton Hall. Which made the cigarette taste all the sweeter, the deep inhalations all the more satisfying. He attempted a smoke ring but failed. Again. Nearly. He grew tired of this and went over to a leather chesterfield, sitting down heavily in it, gazing thoughtfully at the figure in the corner. Crossing his legs, he took the cigarette from his lips, balanced it lightly between the fork of two fingers, his elbow on the arm of the chesterfield. His fingers drummed on the leather. It was the only sound except for the radiator pipes clicking as they cooled down.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked the figure. There was no reply. “I’d like to believe in them. Means there’s something else after this crap.” He sucked at the cigarette, the words that followed wrapped around blue smoke. “But what’s a ghost, eh? I mean, you’ve got to have something inside you when you die to become one. Follow me? Take me, for instance. Up here –” tapping his head, “– I’m fine, just dandy, I’m all there. When I die, what’s up here becomes – Well, whatever it becomes. Now take you. What’s up there in that skull of yours? Nothing. So
what happens when you finally shuffle off your mortal coil, uh? Nothing. What is there up there to become anything? You ain’t nothing now, you ain’t gonna become anything afterwards. You’ll always be a nothing. You might as well be dead already.”
The figure gave a sigh, almost inaudible, and heavy lids blinked laboriously over the eyes, like metal shutters coming down over a pair of shop windows.
Carl rose as if ejected by a spring. “Look at all this. What the hell do you need any of this for? What are you seeing of this painting on the wall, huh? It’s original. You know that? Know what I mean by original? Henry Thomas Dawson. Worth at least one and a half grand. Do you know that?” He shook his head. “And those two by Douglas Falconer, worth another thousand. What I can’t understand is how you get to have all this luxury surrounding you and I get jack shit. That isn’t fair, wouldn’t you agree?”
The figure remained motionless, blank, watery eyes fixed on the wall opposite. Carl strode over to the man and grabbed his head by the wiry grey hair over his ear and yanked it back. “I said, wouldn’t you agree, old man, old fellow?” He forced the head to do a nodding motion. “Yes, Carl, I would agree. I agree very, very much,” Carl said. “I don’t deserve any of this, because I’m a fucking imbecile. I’m a mistake for a man.” He released the hair and the head bobbed back into place, the eyes locking back onto the wall opposite again. A thin silver line of saliva ran from the corner of the man’s mouth. Carl mopped it up with his index finger and then dabbed the wetness onto the end of the man’s nose. “We don’t deserve any of this, do we?” he said acidly. “Do we?” No answer. He slapped the man hard across the top of the head in time to his words: “Hello, hello, hello! Is there anybody in there?” Wisps of grey hair floated from the man’s head, as if they were undersea worms poking from pink coral and waving in the currents.
He laughed. “God, you make me want to puke. Do you know that? You make me want to puke. Look at you. Is that what you call a human being? Is it? We don’t sit in our own crap and piss. I don’t. Others don’t. But you do. You’re doing it now. I can smell it. You’ve shit yourself again, haven’t you?” He slapped the man across the head again. “Haven’t you? Yes, Carl, I have. I’m an imbecile, Carl, that’s why. I don’t deserve the Henry Thomas Dawson.”
Carl spun away, his nose curling. The stench made him want to gip. He sucked on the cigarette and blew smoke to block out the smell.
“I can’t afford carpets like this in my house and yet you go and piss all over them. What’s right about that?” he said, turning back to the man. Carl bent to his haunches and stared directly into the man’s glazed eyes, the milky-blue irises giving off a dull sheen like the eyes of a dead fish. Carl thought about his mother who had been overly fond of fish. Brain food, she’d say. You want to have brains and get on, don’t you? Then eat it all up. Your head will be so full of them soon you’ll become a professor or something. Then his dad had laid into that very head, rattling his fish-fed brains inside his skull with that savage, ham-like hand of his. You’re thick, you are! Thick, thick, thick! You ain’t gonna amount to nothing, he used to say. Books? I’ll give you books! Paper strewn on the floor.. A spot of blood from his nose looking like a red wax seal on one of them. So he ate his fish, but he never did get to be a professor.
You promised me, mother, he thought. I hated fish. But you promised me.
He lifted the cigarette and held it close to one of the man’s eyes. The man didn’t flinch. Didn’t even appear to register the smouldering end. “I could stick this right in and you’d not even know, I reckon,” Carl said contemplatively. “I’ll bet I could hold this sizzling on your eyeball and you’d not even flinch. Right, eh? Tell me I’m right.” The cigarette hovered about a centimetre from the man’s eye. The smoke made the man blink, but not with fear. Fear was absent. “Mustn’t damage the goods though,” Carl said, returning the cigarette to his lips, then blew the smoke into the man’s face. “Want a drag?” He placed the cigarette between the man’s flaccid, colour-drained lips. “Not a smoker? Can’t blame you. It’s bad for your health.” Carl removed it, extinguished the cigarette between finger and thumb, knocking ash away with a flick of his nail, then sliding it into his pocket. He rose to his feet.
He heard someone tramping the corridor outside and unconsciously held his breath. The footfalls faded. “You’re my little nest egg,” he said. “You’re my goose that lays the golden egg.” Then he chuckled. “Isn’t that strange? How did eggs and money get wrapped up together like that? Makes you wonder. Well, makes me wonder. You don’t wonder anything, do you? That’s because you’re like all the high-class morons at Overton Hall.” He bent close to the man’s face. “But you did once, didn’t you? You were capable of all manner of things. Very, very talented once upon a time. You see, I’ve been doing a bit of research, a bit of digging around, sifting through the dirt, you might say. And if you dig in dirt long enough sometimes you come up with a gem. Or two. I never realised how valuable you were. You’ve been a very naughty boy. Incredibly naughty. If that wasn’t enough, so has Mr Miller. Mr oh-so-mighty Gavin Miller.” He sprang up, strode to the chesterfield and plonked himself down in it, his hands clutching the arms, fingers digging into the leather, his body agitated. “Two fish on one hook,” he said. He couldn’t avoid the image of the dead mackerel lying jewel-like on the kitchen worktop. The memory prised its way into his head against his wishes (Eat up, Carl. My Little Professor). “All I need to do now is reel them in. Cautiously, so as not to lose them. The Old Man and the Sea, eh? Read any Hemmingway lately? Not your cup of tea? No, he’s not everyone’s. I like him, see. The hunter, that’s me.” He imitated the raising of a rifle and aimed it at the man. He pulled an imaginary trigger. “Boom!” he said, the invisible gun recoiling.
He remembered cringing the first time he saw a dead fish, folding his arms as if to fend off death. Don’t be afraid of it, his mother said, it won’t hurt you, it’s dead. Look. She prodded it with a knife. Don’t, he said. As if it might burst into life and throw itself at him. She laughed, held it up by its tail in front of his face and he ran away with tears in his eyes. Afraid. Always afraid. He scrubbed away the image.
“Which is strange, really, because so were you once. The hunter. Tell me I’m right, eh? If you weren’t such a dumb bastard now I’d have to admire you. Your ruthlessness. But you can’t admire a cabbage, can you?”
He stood up again, walked swiftly to the man, cradling his head with a hand under a slack jowl, forcing him to look directly into his eyes. “Alas, poor Collie, I knew him, Horatio.” He smirked. He thought he detected a glimmer of a light in those foggy mackerel eyes.
“Let me into a secret. What’s it like, huh? What’s it like to kill someone?”
* * * *
20
Friday
There was no reason why I should go back, but go back I did, six months or so after the South Yorkshire Chronicle building had closed down.
I had always assumed it couldn’t look any worse, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Whereas once it had been a red-bricked beast, now it was a soulless red-bricked beast. In a way I felt sorry for the old thing, the way one might when confronted by a stuffed grizzly bear in a museum, its teeth bared, claws raised, menacingly harmless, alive but in image only. The Chronicle building looked pretty much the same now. It stood empty and quiet, life having slowly trickled away from it as people filed from its wooden doors for the last time like blood from a slashed artery.
As I studied its barred windows and the impenetrable blackness beyond, I considered what had happened to all the workers and where they were sitting now eating their pork pies. No doubt some of them, the more experienced and qualified, had been soaked up by some of the local rags, but no one wanted me, a mere junior. When I read the Chronicle’s lengthy and eloquent rendering of its own obituary – ‘…following fifty-five years of serving the locality with energetic, high quality articles that will sorely be missed, it is with great regret…’ –
I somehow felt in my very bones that the words were tolling the demise of my short foray into journalism. I wasn’t sad, or indeed worried for the future; in fact I can’t recall feeling anything in particular, maybe a sense of relief that I could hang up my bicycle clips for good. And I suppose, in part, this was because I was inwardly confident that Fate’s hand would once again slip from its jewelled glove to give me a lift to the next rung of my cobbled-together ladder of life. Hadn’t it already done just that? There was no reason to suppose it wouldn’t do it again. It was simply a case of waiting.
In a strange way I looked to the canal for direction, this black, watery thread that I deemed to be important. Yet as I stood on the bank and peered into its sombre depths for perhaps half an hour or so, it refused to give up any of its answers. Even the Chronicle building appeared to do the same, its melancholy shadow sitting perfectly still on the waxy surface of the water, probing, no doubt, for signs of its resurrection. I sat down beside a clump of dusty nettles, tossed a smashed piece of roof slate into the canal, the agitated water causing the surface scum, with attendant paper, tab ends and crisp packets, to undulate like the swelling and falling of a grotesque belly. Bubbles rose from the cloud of disturbed mud beneath.
The thing I noticed more than anything was how quiet the place had become. There’d always been cars driving up to the old place, people leaving, entering, chatting, complaining, vans delivering, vans picking up. Now the car park was empty and desolate. And I became aware for the first time that a few of the buildings that shared this middle-of-nowhere spot - a tile warehouse, a ramshackle furniture store and a rickety tin roofed building that once housed two guys who used to cast concrete into paving slabs and garden gnomes - had all closed down. Brand new padlocks hung on the wire gates that led into the yard where once there had been rows of multi-coloured garden slabs, elaborate bird baths and fountains and concrete flower tubs with fat cherubs decorating their clumsy sides. I couldn’t be sure how long they’d been closed down. I hadn’t been aware of their departure. Too hung up with my own life, I guess. Only a car mechanic’s garage remained. I can still hear him even now, some way off in his oily den and the clink of metal against metal as he tried to revive flagging vehicles.
Blood Bonds: A psychological thriller Page 15