by Jude Cook
‘You’ll find out.’
His distrustful look returned. He could tell something volcanic was bubbling under in me, magma-like, waiting for an opportunity to vent. He said, ‘Your good health, sir,’ and returned my gesture with his glass. Like an old friend.
‘I mean the contract they had out on you. Two grand for a maiming with a blunt instrument. Three for a sexual injury.’
Rudi winced. I bet he felt that one. ‘Aye, that’s still in the air. I seem to be keeping the bastards at arm’s length though.’ I almost said, ‘That’s a shame’, but let his slimy lips continue the story. He revealed that, the previous night, his foray into the London underworld had culminated in him driving a getaway car to north Wales after an abortive warehouse raid. Once over the border on the return journey, expecting to find five hundred cases of Silk Cut and a kilo of coke, all they discovered were bags of manure and pig feed. He continued, ‘Take the other week for instance. The Welsh fiasco. Because I was the new man on the job, they thought I staged the whole thing as a wee set-up. That I had all the loot in mah hoose. I told them they could come back here and poke about to their heart’s content.’
‘And did they?’
‘Aye,’ said Rudi and sank bank onto the groaning sofas. He rolled his shoulders like an oxen under a yoke. He was at ease now. Sure that I hadn’t found him out. We were playing cat and mouse. I decided to show my claws.
‘Did they find anything?’
Rudi flushed red, intensifying the barbecued effect produced by his sunlamp. ‘Not a crumb. But I had half a kilo of resin in my pocket from the back of the car. The stupid Taffy fuckers who did us over must have left it with the fertilisers by accident.’
‘I bet that required a lot of acting,’ I said, and drained the champagne. Courteously, Rudi reached forward to replenish my glass.
‘I was shitein’ myself,’ he roared. Outside I could hear the same curious clanking that was always present at Rudi’s, like a cowbell relentlessly struck.
‘But you always were good at acting. I remember your Kowalski in the school play. Tough, uncompromising, irresistible to women.’
Rudi puffed up at this. He loved flattery. ‘Aye, that was choice. Hey, you’re knocking that back.’
‘Well I’m celebrating, am I not?’
‘Aw come on man, tell me the occasion,’ he importuned.
‘I’m celebrating a breakthrough. I’ve turned a corner.’ I drained my drink and set it on the table. With the effervescence provided by two glasses of bubbly, I fixed the dark points of his eyes with mine. ‘No longer will I pine after Mandy. I’ve seen through her. She’s as transparent as—as this glass of fizz. That’s all she was, really. Froth in a glass. She was no fury, no termagant.’
‘That’s ma boy!’
‘Do you still do much acting, Rudi?’
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, cradling his glass in his groin. ‘No. Why would I? What do you mean?’
‘How long has it been going on?’
Silence. Except for the hollow clank clank clank from the darkness outside. I watched Rudi seemingly diminish in his seat as his eyes recognised my implication. No need for lengthy explanations between old friends. He knew. I knew. We both knew. His shoulders, hands, chest, head seemed to shrink visibly. The whole room felt suddenly small as a diving bell.
But still no answer. For a moment I thought he was going to bolt from the room. From the inquisition. The expected reprimand.
In his soft dexterous voice he said, ‘About two years. I’m sorry, Bry.’
An electric pause.
‘You were my best man.’
‘What can I say? She made all the running. Honest.’
‘You were my best friend.’
‘I know, I know,’ he looked at his feet, the fireplace. Anywhere but my eyes.
‘Do you know what I’m celebrating tonight, Rudi?’
I took the phallic bottle from the centre of the table and poured us both another glass. The fizzy head overflew the rims and surged down the stems, blackening the wood of the table. Under normal circumstances Rudi would have pulled me up about this, but he had no choice but to sit and endure my supremacy.
Sullenly, like a little boy, he answered, ‘Naw, man. Why don’t you tell me.’
‘I’m celebrating the end of our friendship. It’s been, what, twenty years now? We’ve been through a lot. School. Girlfriends. London. But now I’ve finally seen what a bag of shit you are.’
Rudi went to stand. I thought he was going to hit me, but then I saw the glaze of tears in his eyes. Sentiment and deception. That tired old pantomime horse. My nerves were tingling with the arousal of vindication. A hollow excitement sensitised my skin, as if I were plugged into the mains. A hollow high, with all the blowback of an empty victory round the corner, the inevitable turnaround. I held out a hand, and he sat.
‘I’m sorry. What more can I say?’ Rudi pleaded pathetically. His charismatic voice was now flat as beer left out overnight.
‘You don’t seriously expect us to be friends after this?’
‘I didnae think you would find out, especially now with you two being split up and all.’
‘It must have been hard to keep it a secret. For both of you.’
‘Aye,’ he muttered, shamefully, his gaze fixed on the floor. He looked like a broken man, cumbersome; a bag of spuds in a glitzy crimson shirt.
‘The market, for instance. The nights you drove her home after gigs.’ Rudi merely flinched at these concrete examples. He resembled a man undergoing the torture of a thousand cuts. I felt like kicking his head off his shoulders like a football, but I restrained myself. ‘Then there was that time earlier this year, after I burnt Mandy’s breakfast and she—’
‘Who told you all this?’
‘What does that matter?’ The helpless look in his eyes was giving me great pleasure. ‘Okay. It was Nick,’ I said with some satisfaction, knowing Rudi hated him.
He sneered, but refrained from a tirade of righteous disgust. That was my arena. I continued. ‘You were lucky I didn’t catch you at it that day. I almost followed Mandy after she stormed out.’ The morning—the morning of my appointment at the Eastman Dental Hospital, where Mandy threw my copy of Culture and Society in the bin along with the burning bangers—she had exited with her high hauteur, her immense attitude, the ceiling light plunging to the carpet as she slammed the door. And in reality she was off to fuck Rudi. My, oh my. I was about to tail her, to make amends, even if it meant getting a cab to follow her Volkswagen, but reason had prevailed. Of course, she hadn’t gone to the supermarket, as she had told me later. ‘Nick said he saw the two of you hand in hand in Waterlow Park that day.’ That last detail had hurt me considerably. It had been years since Mandy had held my hand, let alone consented to sex, or marital duty (as I never saw it). God knows what depravities they had enacted, maybe in the very location where I was sitting guzzling champagne. I felt a constriction in my intestines just imagining it. The champagne was reacting with the acid in my stomach. But these two—Rudi and Mandy. You had to hand it to them. What a pair of consummate thespians. And what a credulous fool I was. It must have been easy. Easy as taking candy from a—easy as pulling the trigger at a pogrom. I gave them every opportunity to display their acting skills, and boy did they take me up on it. An uxorious, patient, loving fool. Now enduring a badly needed lesson. What pedagogy, between them, did they exhibit! It was almost laudable.
‘I didn’t want to, Bry, but …’
‘But it was too good to turn down, wasn’t it? In a way I don’t blame you—no, I do blame you, a lot. With a body like Mandy’s, I mean—’
‘She made all the running, Bry, God’s honest truth! After the first time I didn’t want to carry on!’ Rudi’s eyes were now wild with appeal, sweat bubbling on his meaty forehead.
‘But you did carry on, didn’t you,’ I said coldly, pinning him to his seat. He couldn’t answer for a moment. The room had now transmogrified into something lar
ger, strangely altered, differently lit; the pastel bulbs of Rudi’s seducer’s lighting burning a lemony yellow. The hollow gong outside a death knell.
‘Aye,’ he said ruefully, like a schoolboy before the headmaster.
‘How could you live with yourself?’
‘I dinnae know.’
‘How could you sleep at night?’
He shrugged foolishly, ‘You’ve got me there.’
‘How could you have me round night after night for the last three months, listening to me disintegrate? Bold as fucking brass?’
‘I had to, didn’t I?’
‘Did you? What was it, some kind of penance to listen to my shit? Your single act of contrition?’
‘Maybe.’
‘But you don’t know, do you? Because you haven’t got a clue about anything. You tell me I’m your friend and then fuck my wife. You sit downwind of my disgust and then say it’s an act of penance when I put the idea into your head. You twist the truth with me, then think you can apologise and make everything okay. You probably twisted the truth with her for all I know. Certainly with yourself. If you think you’ve bullshitted me, its nothing to the porkies you’ve told yourself. There’s nothing to you, Rudi. You’re a blank. A nothing. A waste of space!’
Rudi took this verbal kicking in silence, like a condemned man. Then he caught my eyes from a lateral angle, like he was framing a picture. I knew what was coming. His explanation. His mitigating circumstances.
‘But I tried to put a stop to it, from the start! It was all a big mistake, with a mate like you, Byron. I think she did it because she, how can I say it …’
‘Say it.’ I was interested, even in his garbage.
‘… Because she hated you. She said she’d grown to hate you. It was awful to hear, with you being mah best friend and that. I used to try and shut her up, but, after that first time, she was ringing me up day and night.’ I shifted in my chair at the confirmation of this. Something that Nick couldn’t verify, only the guilty parties. Mandy’s punishment quickly went from suffocation, or a merciful strangulation, to burning at the stake. I felt dangerous sitting there, my heart pounding, my stupid feelings on fire. Rudi continued, ‘It was like a tidal wave of phone calls. Mainly at work.’ Again, I took a sharp intake of breath. So she phoned Rudi at work, just like she used to harass me until I finally gave in. In a smooth voice, Rudi went on: ‘I never thought she liked it that much, but she said I was her only excitement in life, that her marriage—you and her, like—was all but over, that she only used you to pay the rent. I told her to stop using you and get a divorce, but she wouldn’t listen. I hated lying to you, Bry, honest, you’ve got to believe me, God’s honest truth, I know I like to put it about a bit, but I never wanted to do this to a mate. It was always a point of honour with me never to—’
‘Stop!’ I shouted as loud as I could manage. I couldn’t bear any more of his cheap excuses. I stood up and faced him down.
Rudi looked stunned at the reverberation of my voice; scared, uncertain. Tentatively, he asked: ‘What are you going to do to me?’ I saw at that moment the full loneliness of his life. How much he needed me. How much he required a stooge, a scapegoat, someone to deceive, someone to destroy. Without such another he truly was impotent. Also, how much he needed someone to drink with; to play at full-blown masculinity in the company of another man. Although a chick-connoisseur and dedicated tail-chaser he didn’t actually like female company. Hated it, in fact. Bored him to death. Nauseated him with their banal pronouncements, risible vanities. No, Rudi only wanted one thing from women, that Holy Grail between their legs. And once that had been achieved the conquest was over and he sought out male company. The only problem was that the Holy Grail often belonged to his friends or business associates. He would continue incorrigibly in this fashion until he died—which wouldn’t be far off if I had anything to do with it.
‘Do?’ I enquired. ‘I’m not going to do anything. Except maybe get another bottle of champagne.’
He seemed confused, relieved. ‘Help yourself, big man.’ His eyes followed me to the fridge. The tension had been broken momentarily. The room seemed to assume its normal proportions once again. I returned to the table with another bottle of bubbly.
‘Shall I do the honours?’ he asked subordinately; the question a distant reminder of the old days, like light from a collapsed star.
‘You’re welcome to each other, for all I care.’
‘Don’t say that, Bry. I feel terrible. I’ve never felt worse.’
Secretly I thought, Oh, you will do, and stifled an inner compulsion to giggle, to start dancing.
I smiled. ‘I’m serious. Do you think I wanted her back anyway? Christ, after what she did to me?’
Rudi seemed tangibly to relax. His paddle-shaped hands grasped the bottle and swiped off the golden sheath in an easy movement. This, however, was all part of my plan. To placate him. For I had to work fast, skilfully,
‘She is a psycho, ah’ll give you that!’ he grinned, as if we were two friends finding mutual fault with a woman we had both willingly shared. But we hadn’t willingly shared her.
‘She used to slag you off too.’
‘Did she?’ said Rudi, suddenly affronted, very keen for information.
‘Oh yeah, all the time. Said you were a pisshead, and that somebody should cut your balls off.’
‘I can take that,’ he said quietly, revealing that he couldn’t.
‘Also that your clothes were shit, you were ignorant and had bad breath.’
He smiled at this, seeing Mandy’s bile as acknowledgment of his two greatest qualities: his ability to drink and his ability to score. ‘She had a tongue in her head! I’m a bit surprised you only hit the stupid hen once.’
‘I thought you didn’t believe in that.’
‘Aye,’ he said uncertainly, another can of worms creaking open. Rudi popped the cork, still unsure that I wasn’t going to bludgeon him to death.
‘She also said you were a stupid Scottish poseur with a fat face and arse.’
Rudi muttered solemnly, ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Then don’t say it. It’ll spoil my celebration.’ I held his gaze. ‘Still, despite all that, she still fucked you. Women and their sexual choices, eh?’
Holding both glasses as he poured, I continued staring intently at Rudi, mainly to distract his attention. Go on, you beauty, pour your last glass! This was also part of the plan. As the top-notch Bollinger fizzed rapidly I dropped two colourless pills from the palm of my left hand into Rudi’s flute. Go on, you priapic waste of oxygen, come to Byron! And santé! They were, after all, his pills. That night he had crashed at mine, running scared from whatever goon he had aggrieved, a small transparent packet had dropped from Rudi’s trousers as he shed his clothes to kip on my couch. Fascinated to get anything on him at that stage, while I planned my grand revenge, I dexterously pocketed it and took it to the croupiers in the morning. Both were experts in drugs of every kind—at the casino it was part of the job description. They were unanimous. The pale, wheatgerm-like pills were Rohypnol. So this was another of his methods! Shocked, I concluded that I had been ungenerous towards Rudi in thinking him merely a master philanderer. He was a rapist too.
‘Cheers!’ I said.
Rudi looked surprised. ‘It doesn’t feel right to say that now.’
‘No? I’d like you to, though.’
Between his discoloured teeth, Rudi said, ‘Cheers’ and drank deep.
Yes!
Betrayal. Depravity. Filth. Dissolve away! I drained my glass in one and took a look around the room. Feeling calmer, I thought: it won’t be long now, my friend. We all go into the dark, eventually, you sooner than most. The liquid amber flames in the grate fluttered every time a gust came down his chimney. The breakfast bar was scrupulously wiped, the appliances gleaming on shelves, the wine rack stocked and hefty. I noticed that his bins were a series of plastic supermarket bags tied with bows queueing by the door. Disappoi
nted that he didn’t have bin-liners for his own body parts, I suddenly remembered Mandy’s underwear that he seemed so keen to have that night, my wedding present to her in Barcelona, encased in their dismal plastic.
I looked at Rudi. His eyelids were already drooping. ‘One more question.’
Groggily, I thought, he said, ‘What’s that, Bry?’
‘All that gear of Mandy’s. The stockings and suspenders you said you wanted for what’s her name—’
‘Suki.’
‘For Suki. Did you ever use them with …’
‘You don’t want to know that,’ he said, shaking his head wearily.
‘That means you did, didn’t you.’
‘I cannae say.’
‘But you have to.’
‘Why do you want more pain?’ Rudi suddenly looked at me reproachfully, like a small boy. Then his chin flopped onto his chest.
My God, that was fast! And I must act: fast, I thought, climbing swiftly to my feet and running over to the bulked form of my ex-best-friend. I felt his pulse. Still alive. But he was out cold, like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Rapidly, I went through his pockets for his keys. The warmth of his thigh through the trouser material was strangely intimate, too redolent of the human animal and its needs. Because I didn’t want to see Rudi as human now, not with what I had to carry out.
Finding his coil of keys, I ran to the pine-floored master bedroom and knelt at the safe. A feature of the flat, which had been a clothing manufacturer’s office, the place contained three of them. Rudi liked to boast about these unmovable pre-war safes. Big and green with brass handles like a submarine’s periscope, the largest was situated in his bedroom. The first key didn’t work. Neither did the second. Finally, the weighty door swung wide with a sure oiled motion. Open sesame, bastardo! Inside was a sizeable amount of currency and a Jiffy bag. I wasn’t after the money, he could spend that in hell. Instead I took the Jiffy bag, which was unusually heavy, closed the safe door and locked it.
Back in the living room the pastel lights seemed to conceal Rudi’s slumped figure. Without his personality, his life-force, he was invisible. The flat seemed doubly empty with only me intent on performing an act of rank craziness. I tweaked his fleshy shoulders through his shirt. Not a peep. Then I emptied the Jiffy bag onto the coffee table. In front of me was a Browning automatic pistol, black and chipped, and a handful of five-pound notes. Originally a decommed weapon, or so he said, Rudi had bought it from one of the market goons. This skanker had had it doctored so it fired one shot at a time, the automatic function sadly defunct. Never having handled more than a starting pistol, the very thing frightened me, lying there with its potential for revealing a sudden eternity. I picked it up and checked the magazine like they do in the movies. It appeared full, the butter-coloured brass bullet casings topped with slugs of dull lead. Rudi had proudly showed me this fearsome weapon a month ago. We had spent the night arguing about it, like a married couple. He insisted the people he was mixed up with wouldn’t hesitate to wipe him out if they found he had shafted them. It was his only form of protection, he told me. I lectured him that he had never fired a gun before and they would probably use it to blow his head off. Not so, he stated. These nutters carried machine guns so they didn’t need his pissy pistol. And anyway, he had been in the army cadets at school.