The Dwarves of Death

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘It’s not your main problem.’

  ‘You think you could do something with that?’ Chester asked. ‘Put some keyboards in, I mean?’

  ‘Yes, sure.’

  ‘Something with a bit of bite, I mean. No strings or anything. We don’t want it to sound like Mantovani, you know what I mean?’

  ‘I think so. Listen, Chester – ’ I felt in my pocket, and my fingers closed on the tape. ‘I’ve brought something of my own along: that tape we made, last week? I know you haven’t heard it yet, but – well, I think it’s really good. Can I put it on? Give everyone an idea of the kind of thing I do.’

  Chester shook his head.

  ‘Not now, eh? They might think you were being pushy. Maybe play it when we go down to the studio.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Which had better be now. All right, everybody! Clear that shit away and get the gear downstairs. We’re going to start on time for once.’

  To my surprise, there was a slow but positive response. They got to their feet (leaving the remains of the meal as it was) and began putting on coats and picking up instrument cases. I’ve never been able to understand authority. Some people (like Chester) have it, and others (like me) don’t. It’s not even as if he was especially tall. As they got ready, he stood there counting heads and making a mental calculation.

  ‘Janice, are you coming with us tonight?’

  ‘I thought I would, yes.’

  ‘We’ll need two cars. Paisley, have you got yours outside?’

  ‘Mm-hm.’

  ‘Give William a lift, will you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Soon they were all heading downstairs, leaving just Paisley and me.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ Chester asked him.

  ‘Finish my joint.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Paisley. It costs me five quid an hour, that place. Every time, we lose an hour for some reason or other. Usually to do with you.’ He turned to me. ‘Don’t let him be late, Bill. See you in a few minutes.’

  His footsteps echoed down the staircase. From the street, there was the sound of car doors opening and closing. Then the car drove away.

  Paisley got slowly to his feet, bent down to a wall socket and turned off the light. He turned all the rings on the cooker off, too, and then sat down.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  It was completely dark. All I could see was the yellow glint of his eyeballs, the shine of the grease on his jet-black hair, and the tip of his joint glowing as he inhaled.

  ‘Want some?’ he said, leaning forward.

  I walked to the window.

  ‘You heard what Chester said. We’d better go. Are you safe to drive after taking that stuff?’

  ‘We’re not going yet. Got some business to do first.’

  ‘Business?’

  ‘C’ mere.’

  I guessed that he was beckoning, so I went to the table and sat opposite him.

  ‘Chester tell you about our landlord?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘He’s a dealer. Uses this place to meet people. That’s why we rehearse on Saturdays, see – he wants us to be out of the house.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘There was a phone call for him this morning. First thing. Nobody else was up. Then I got this idea, see.’

  Not wanting to know, I asked: ‘What idea?’

  ‘I pretended to be him, didn’t I? ’Cause they said, “Is that Mr Jones?” – I mean, a name like that, it’s a cover, isn’t it? No one’s really got a name like that – and I said, “Yes, speaking.” So they said, “Meet you at the house tonight, six-thirty,” and I said, “What for?”, and they said, “We got some stuff for you,” and I said, “What sort of stuff?”, and they said, “Good stuff,” and I said, “How much stuff?”, and they said, “Loads of stuff, mate, loads,” and I said, “All right, I’ll be here,” and they said, “Make sure none of them wankers is in,” and I said, “It’s all right, I’ll be here on my own,” and then they rang off.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I’ve got this plan, see.’

  Still not wanting to know, I said: ‘What plan?’

  ‘Well look. They’re going to turn up with all this stuff, right, and they’re going to want some money for it. The thing is, I’m going to take the stuff, not give them any money, and then scarper.’ There was a pause. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘That’s your plan?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Look, Paisley, how many of those things have you had today?’

  We waited in silence for several minutes. Every time a car approached my heart began to beat frantically. It was an absurd situation. Why could my life never be simple? All I had wanted to do was audition with a new band. Why should it have to involve something like this?

  ‘Paisley, this is a stupid idea,’ I said at last. ‘Let’s go and join the others. I mean, if you really think these guys are going to come in here and calmly hand over – look, how old are you?’

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘Jesus, you’re only eighteen, you don’t want to be mixed up in all this. You don’t want to be into drugs and crime at your age. You want to be a singer, for God’s sake. You’ve got a terrific voice, you’ve got a manager who’s devoted to you – ’

  ‘You think I’ve got a good voice?’

  ‘Of course you have. Look, you don’t need me to tell you that.’

  He frowned. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes it doesn’t sound so good.’

  ‘Listen, we’ve got a singer in our band, right? To him, you’re like – Sinatra. You’re like Nat King Cole. Marvin Gaye. Robert Wyatt.’

  ‘You mean that?’

  ‘We’ve just made this new tape. Here, have a listen to this.’ I took the cassette out of my pocket and handed it to him in the dark. ‘Listen to what he sounds like. I mean, he’s OK, it’s not embarrassing or anything. But just think what you could do with a song like that.’

  ‘What – is this something you wrote yourself?’

  ‘Yes. It’s… well, it’s a very personal song, actually. I’d like you to hear it and… maybe hear you sing it some time.’

  Just then, a car stopped outside the house. Two doors slammed.

  ‘Here they are.’

  He slipped the cassette into his jacket pocket, stood up and went to the window overlooking the street. Quietly, I joined him, and saw the car parked outside, with its sidelights still on.

  ‘Can you see them?’

  I thought I saw figures moving in the shadows by the front door; but couldn’t be certain. The next thing we knew, there were footsteps in the corridor.

  ‘Two people,’ I said.

  Now that I could see his face, Paisley looked scared; more scared even than I felt.

  ‘Have you any idea what you’re going to do?’

  ‘Ssh.’

  From downstairs, a voice called: ‘Hello!’

  Paisley went to the door and, doing his best to disguise his voice, shouted, ‘Up here!’

  The footsteps ascended the stairs, slowly. We heard a thud and a cry of ‘Shit!’ where the missing boards must have been. Paisley withdrew to the centre of the room, where the wall had been knocked out. I stayed right where I was, beside the window.

  The footsteps stopped on the first landing, and we heard one voice say, ‘It’s a bit bloody dark in here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Shut up,’ said the other.

  ‘We’re upstairs!’ Paisley called. His voice was shaking now.

  The footsteps approached, getting slower and slower. Outside our room, they stopped.

  ‘In here,’ said Paisley.

  ∗

  I find it hard to describe what happened. There was a long silence, a very long silence, and then some more footsteps. Suddenly, two figures were framed in the doorway. They stood apart, threatening and wordless, their little bodies visible only in silhouette. They were wearing hoods and carrying heavy wooden clubs, and they could only have been about three feet tall,
both of them. I don’t know how long they must have stood there. Paisley just stared at them, frozen with shock and terror, until they stepped forward and began to scream, together. This awful, icy, high-pitched scream. All at once they were running towards him, and then one of them jumped on to the table. The other one was swinging his club around and starting to hit Paisley about the legs with it. Paisley turned, and from somewhere or other he produced a knife and started slashing madly in the air. He was shouting something, too. I don’t know what. Then he must have managed to knife the little man in the hand because he dropped his club and started screaming and shouting ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ and he grabbed the bottom of Paisley’s jacket and tried to pull him down. But by now the other one, the one on the table, was standing right over Paisley, and before I could warn him or anything, he’d crunched him over the head, and there was this sound like an egg-shell cracking when you’re making an omelette. And then Paisley was on the floor, and for the next minute or so they were both at it, beating the life out of him till there was nothing left of his head at all and they were both too tired to do any more.

  They still hadn’t noticed that I was there. I was stooped beneath the window sill – not a very good idea, when you think about it, because it put me at eye-level with them – but it must have been too dark for them to make me out. I just crouched there and looked at these two little figures standing over Paisley’s body. One of them had his wounded hand clasped between his knees: he must have been in agony.

  ‘Come on now,’ the other one said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  This produced no response other than an indistinct mutter, followed by a moan.

  ‘Come on, for Christ’s sake. Let’s get you down to the car.’

  ‘The jacket.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’ll have to take his jacket. It’s got my blood on it, and my prints.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  He dropped his club, rolled Paisley’s body over and got the jacket off as best he could.

  ‘And his trousers. It’s all over his trousers, look.’

  So they took off his trousers, too, and wrapped them around the still-bleeding hand.

  ‘Come on, let’s get shot of this place. Let’s go.’

  Just as they were leaving, the injured one paused, reflectively. He shook his head and said: ‘I didn’t enjoy that much.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  And then they clattered off down the stairs, these two little men, leaving me to shake and shiver beneath the window, alone with Paisley’s corpse. I heard their two car doors opening, and heard the car drive off even before the doors had had time to close.

  I stayed there for a while, God knows how long. I didn’t go anywhere near the body, though. I didn’t even step over it – I skirted right round it, giving it as wide a berth as the room would allow. Then I too climbed down the stairs; slowly, one at a time, clutching at the banister. When I got to the front door I stood in the doorway, drinking in the fresh air. I don’t think, at that point, that my mind had taken in what I’d just seen.

  I guessed, afterwards, that the police must have had their eye on that house for quite some time. Perhaps they’d even been tapping the phone or something. The first thing I saw when I stepped outside, anyway, was a police car tearing down the street in my direction. Before I knew what was happening it had pulled up at the front door; so the two of them must have got a good look at my face as I stood there wondering what the hell I was supposed to do next. Then, after a few fatal moments of indecision, my brain stuttered into action again. In the time it took them to get out of the car, I realized that no explanation I could give for my presence would stop them from suspecting me of being involved in the crime; perhaps of having committed it myself.

  So I turned and ran back up the stairs. I could hear them coming after me. When I reached the first landing I remembered the broken window, clambered through it and crouched, ready to jump. I’m sure they would have got me, sure they would have caught up with me, if it hadn’t been for those missing stairs. There was the sound of wood giving way and a cry of pain and I knew that one of them had fallen through.

  ‘Are you all right?’ his mate was calling. ‘Are you all right?’

  This was my chance. I jumped and landed in the middle of all this long wet soft grass. The whole garden was like a jungle. I ran right to the bottom, scrambling and tripping over brambles, branches, old broken milk bottles – all sorts of junk – and then at the end I climbed over the wall and found myself in a quiet, unlit alleyway.

  I was more terrified than I had ever been in my life. Much more. So although I was tired, it wasn’t difficult to carry on running. While I was running, you see, I couldn’t stop to think.

  ∗

  I wanted to get the difficult part out of the way – to describe what happened, that evening in Islington. The temptation now, of course, is to go straight on and tell you how it all ended, but there are a few things I have to explain first. I have to explain about Madeline, and Karla, and London, and why I wanted to join Paisley’s band in the first place. It’s hard to know where to start – hard to know if there was a specific point where things started to go downhill. But I think there was. It can be traced back to a particular evening, and to a particular culprit. Yes, I know where to point the finger of accusation.

  Because it all started, as far as I’m concerned, with Andrew Lloyd Webber.

  Theme One

  Boy afraid prudence never pays

  and everything she wants costs money

  MORRISSEY,

  Girl Afraid

  Why do I dislike the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber so much? I suppose for the same reason that I dislike London: because everybody else flocks to it as if it were the only thing worth experiencing on earth. Take that night at Phantom of the Opera. It was a Thursday evening, more than two weeks before the events which I’ve just described. I hadn’t seen Madeline for days and I was really looking forward to being with her again. We should have been having fun; instead it was a disaster. And it was all that bastard’s fault.

  Oh, there were some OK moments, I suppose. A nice cadence in ‘Think of Me’ which sounded remarkably like Puccini’s ‘O Mio Bambino Caro’, and a recurring phrase which made me think insistently, for some reason, of Prokofiev’s Cinderella. But I couldn’t stand the way he jumbled it all together with no concern for style, for period, for genre – bits of pastiche operetta leading into passages of lumpen rock music, and endless chromatic scales on a Gothic-sounding organ which would still have seemed like a cliché forty years ago if you’d heard them on the soundtrack to a Universal B-movie. And yet the audience lapped it up. They couldn’t get enough of it. I just cannot understand this phenomenon.

  And what a hassle, what a ridiculous, exhausting palaver I’d had to go through just to listen to that load of old nonsense. Have you any idea how hard it is to get tickets to that show? Did Madeline have any idea when she suggested it, I wondered? After endless enquiries at the box office, I was told that my best bet was to come along on the day itself, early. So I joined the queue at five o’clock in the morning – five o’clock, do you hear me – behind a bunch of Japanese businessmen, and I stayed until nearly half past ten (which made me two hours late for work) only to see the last set of tickets go to some people five places ahead of me in the queue. So then I phoned some agency in my lunch hour, and they said they did have some tickets – returns or something – but I could only have them if I came over and paid for them in person, and then they fished these things from under the counter and I ended up shelling out ninety pounds (I feel ill just thinking about it) for two seats. So you can imagine what sort of mood I was in by the time I met Madeline at the theatre, and things didn’t improve when we took our seats – which were quite good ones, actually – and just as the show was about to start, this six-foot monster came and sat right in front of me, so that for the whole evening all I had a view of was the back of his neck. I couldn’t see a damn thi
ng. I might just as well have stayed at home and listened to the record.

  Not that I paid much attention to the music anyway, to be honest. A date with Madeline was always a special occasion, and most of the time I was thinking about what we would do afterwards, whether we would go for a drink, what I’d say to her, whether she would let me kiss her. I’m sure that better composers than Andrew Lloyd Webber have suffered from the fact that shows and concerts are ten per cent works of art, and ninety per cent stopping-off points in a mating ritual. It’s funny to think of someone like Debussy agonizing over the orchestration of some bar or other of Pelléas et Mélisande, not realizing that most of the men in the audience would be too busy wondering whether they could get away with putting a hand on their girlfriend’s knee to even bother listening to the music. You can’t help it, it’s natural. Every move she made, every little unconscious gesture was more interesting to me than anything that was happening on the stage (not that I could see any of it). That bit, for instance, which is supposed to have everybody gasping, when the chandelier suddenly comes right down from the top of the theatre – there was a time when Madeline scratched her cheek which was far more exciting than that. I was conscious of every little change in the distance between us. Every time she leaned towards me my heart beat faster. At one point she bent over, close to my side, and I thought, my God, she’s actually going to touch me. But her shoe had come off, and she was just putting it on again.

  Three long hours later, we were outside, out in the middle of a wet, cold and noisy London night. Taxis and buses dawdled past, their tyres splashing and hissing, their headlamps reflecting on the surface of the road.

  I thought, what the hell, and slid my arm beneath Madeline’s. As usual, she offered neither resistance nor encouragement. She merely let it stay there, and I didn’t have the nerve to follow it up by taking her hand. We had been going out for nearly six months.

  ‘Well …’ I said at last, as we began strolling, for no particular reason, towards Piccadilly Circus.

  ‘Did you enjoy that?’ she asked.