This Party's Got to Stop

by Rupert Thomson

  Erica has given up trying to extract our secrets, and she is facing away from us, one gloved hand cradling the other. ‘We didn’t see each other very often,’ she is saying, ‘but we talked on the phone. We were always talking on the phone …’

  ‘He didn’t see anyone very often,’ I say.

  She keeps her eyes fixed on the end of the garden for a moment longer, then abruptly, almost defiantly, turns to me. ‘I’m going to miss him, you know.’

  She touches the back of a glove to her right eye. A tear darkens the leather. Watching her, I wonder if she might not have been a little in love with Dad.

  Before flying back to Switzerland, Sonya asks about the house. She seems to believe that if we put it on the market Rosie and Hal will be entitled to a share of the proceeds. When I correct her, she gives me a suspicious look, and though I’m sure she must have heard the story before, I tell her again.

  My maternal grandfather, James Gausden, bought the house shortly before the start of the Second World War, I say, and when he died in 1948, it passed to his wife, Pim. A year or two later, Pim was admitted to a mental institution in Northampton, where she was diagnosed as a chronic diabetic and a manic-depressive. The house, known as ‘Rokkosan’, stood empty until 1953. Meanwhile, Pim’s daughter, Wendy, had met my father, and they had fallen in love. With a wedding planned, but unable to afford a home of their own, they asked Pim whether they could move into Rokkosan, at least until she felt well enough to return. She gave her permission, adding that she had no intention of returning.

  On Pim’s death, in the early seventies, her will was found to be simple and uncontroversial. Her estate was to be divided equally between her three children, Frank, Joe and Wendy. Since Wendy was already dead by then, and had died intestate, her share of the assets devolved directly to her children – Robin, Ralph and me. A valuation of the house revealed it to be the rough equivalent, in cash terms, of one third of everything Pim owned. It was decided that we should inherit the house as our share of our grandmother’s will, which meant that we wouldn’t have to find somewhere else to live.

  ‘The house never belonged to Dad,’ I tell Sonya, ‘not even thirty years ago, when he moved in. It belonged to his mother-in-law, and then to Robin, Ralph and me.’

  But Sonya is shaking her head. I imagine she simply doesn’t want to believe what she is hearing, and who can blame her? When she first discovered that the house in which she was living, the house in which she hoped to raise her children, didn’t belong to her, and never would, and that she could, in theory, be evicted at any moment, she must have felt as if the ground had quite literally dropped from beneath her feet. She must also have nursed a sense of injustice. I seem to remember talk of Dad and Sonya moving – this would have been in the mid-seventies – though nothing ever came of it.

  ‘Sonya,’ I say, ‘it’s true.’

  Still shaking her head, she stares at the kitchen window, which streams with condensation, and it comes as no great surprise when we discover, two weeks later, that she has hired a local lawyer to monitor our handling of Dad’s estate.

  Once Sonya and the children have gone, we divide into two separate camps – myself and Robin on the one hand, and Ralph, Vivian and Greta on the other. Since Ralph and Vivian never seem to do anything as individuals, we have started calling them ‘the Unit’. Of the little army that existed prior to the funeral there is no trace.

  Moving through the house, I begin to notice spaces. On mantelpieces or windowsills. In drawers. I keep thinking, There used to be something there – didn’t there? I feel the lack of things I cannot name, or even picture.

  One morning, I find Robin in the scullery, hovering over the stove. Dressed in a black and white herringbone coat he bought second-hand in Aberdeen, he is stirring the contents of a saucepan. His size-twelve Dr Martens shuffle on the lino. I peer past him, into the pan. Chunks of something that could be potato float in a dingy brownish-yellow slurry.

  I lean on the sink and gaze at the dustbins. As usual, they are full to overflowing. The dustmen have told us to contact the council and make what they call ‘special arrangements’, but Robin and I have decided to make some ‘special arrangements’ of our own: from now on, we’re going to burn all our excess rubbish in the kitchen garden.

  I face back into the scullery. ‘I’m not sure if I’m right or not,’ I say, ‘but I think things are disappearing.’

  Robin looks at me over his shoulder. ‘Like what?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. It’s hard to notice things when they’re not there any more.’ I pause. ‘Like that time you came home for Christmas with your eyebrows shaved off and Dad couldn’t tell what was different about you.’

  Robin chuckles. ‘I remember that.’ Then, after a while, he says, ‘You mean, things are being taken …’

  ‘Maybe – but who by?’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘Not me either.’

  I believe him, and I can tell that he believes me – but then I would hardly have brought the subject up if I were guilty. I stare at the small square window above Robin’s head. Outside, the wind rushes against the house. The broken plastic ventilator spins.

  Robin’s eyes narrow. ‘The Unit.’

  ‘Or Sonya,’ I say, ‘when she was here …’

  ‘She was always going off by herself, wasn’t she – into rooms …’ Robin gives his food one last stir, then switches off the gas and moves the saucepan on to the blue work surface next to the stove. ‘But you can’t actually think of anything?’

  ‘No. It’s just a feeling.’

  ‘The Unit, though – there’s no telling what they’ve got squirrelled away behind that locked door of theirs.’ Robin stoops over the pan. From where I am standing, all I can see is a pair of elbows and a big curved back. Is it a heron he reminds me of? I’m not sure. In any case, it’s all over in a couple of minutes, and he turns, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. ‘Is it Thursday tomorrow?’

  I nod.

  ‘The Batcave’s on Thursdays,’ he says.

  ‘That’s a thought.’

  He dumps his empty saucepan in the sink.

  ‘What was that, anyway?’ I ask.

  ‘Curry,’ he says.

  The next day Robin and I set off up the A22 in Dad’s Renault, arriving in the Oval at about six. The grainy air, the dusty trees; the gas-holders burnished by a low orange sun. We look at each other and smile. London again. London at last.

  As we pull into the courtyard, a bulky woman lurches across the tarmac in a blue plastic raincoat. She lives in a flat on the fourth floor. Her legs are always bare, even in winter. I shout hello.

  ‘All right?’ As usual, she sounds as if she’s got a cement-mixer for a larynx.

  ‘I’m fine. How’s your husband?’

  ‘He’s all right.’ She calls her husband ‘Dad’. I used to hear her yelling on the stairs. You coming, Dad? I haven’t got all bleeding day.

  I ask Robin whether he has ever seen her cross the road. He doesn’t think he has. She doesn’t bother with traffic lights, I tell him, or zebra crossings. Instead, she launches herself off the kerb, rocking from one leg to the other, like the pendulum from some lurid nightmare of a clock. Any cars that happen to come along have to brake and let her past. Once, a lorry driver had the nerve to give her a blast on his horn. Her great head swivelled. Fuck off, she growled at him, and just kept going.

  ‘That’s what I love about living here,’ Robin says.

  The building is a C-shaped thirties’ council block, with concrete walkways that run the length of each floor. At night, when spotlights angle down into the courtyard, it feels like a prison. We lock the car and start up the draughty stairs. There are the habitual, pungent smells of urine and fried food. I no longer have a key, but Robin lets us in. The flat looks pretty much the same as it did when I lived in it with Tina. Vivid orange kitchen, blue bathroom. Synthetic tartan carpet in the lounge. When I left the country in 1982, I asked Graham, a friend of mine, i
f he would like to move in. A few months later, Robin took over my room. Since then, they have been joined by another mutual friend called Chris.

  In the kitchen, Robin opens a can of Special Brew. I reach past him for the kettle. The NSU I caught from a ballet-dancer in Amsterdam three years ago has flared up again – the doctor said it might recur in times of stress – and since I have been put on antibiotics I’m not supposed to drink. I make myself a cup of Nescafé instead.

  Before too long, a key turns in the lock, and Chris walks in. He is wearing what he always wears – black T-shirt, black trousers, and a pair of black Lonsdale boxing-boots. Chris works as an art director at a small advertising agency in Soho. We refer to him as Kennedy because he is always getting himself assassinated – by alcohol, usually, or drugs.

  ‘Oh God,’ he says when he sees us. ‘Trouble.’

  We pummel him in the ribs and stomach. He pushes us away. Settling on a beanbag, he pulls the ring on a can of beer, then takes out a packet of Silk Cut. We ask where Graham is. He runs a hand through his hair; his big, pale face stirs dreamily. He doesn’t know. When Chris looks at you, his eyes are so dark and blank that it’s easy to imagine he is blind. We tell him the Batcave is on tonight. Does he want to come?

  ‘Not if you two are going,’ he says.

  We ready ourselves for the club. I wear my black calf-length oilskin, as always. My eyelids are ghostly with greasepaint, and I’ve darkened the lower rims with kohl. Robin has used the kohl as well. His sixteen-hole Doc Martens and baggy mohair jumper are topped off with a crude gel-fierce blond Mohican that he gave himself a few nights back.

  By ten o’clock, we’re walking north on Carnaby Street. We push through a chipped black door, then up a narrow, creaky flight of stairs. Our teeth whiten in the ultraviolet. We hand our entrance money over. Once in the club, we head straight for the bar. The place smells toxic, chemical: hairspray, hydrogen peroxide, cigarettes. I order tonic with lime juice. Music lunges from tall black speaker stacks – the churning chainsaw snarl and vicious bass thump of an Alien Sex Fiend track. The sound’s so loud it feels solid; you can almost lean against it. We breathe in deeply. This is what we’ve missed. Exactly this.

  Since I’m not drinking, I’m going to do amphetamines. Well, I probably would have done them anyway. I scan the room for Wembley. There he is, runt-short, needle-thin, skulking in a fog of dry ice near the toilets. I call him Wembley because his hair stands up all round the edge of his head like football terraces. The shaved patch in the middle is the pitch. I don’t know his real name.

  ‘Wembley?’ I shout over the music. ‘You got any speed?’

  He gives me his usual look – a blend of anxiety, cunning and exasperation. ‘Of course I’ve bloody got speed. What else would I be doing in this dump?’

  A fiver buys me what I need.

  I take Robin into the Ladies. We lock ourselves in a stall and chop lines on top of the cistern.

  ‘Fucking hurry up,’ a girl says through the door. ‘I’m desperate.’

  Back at the bar, I order another tonic-and-lime. My heart begins to rattle like a stone in a tin can. The drugs are kicking in.

  A French girl asks me for a cigarette. Blue light skids off her cheekbone as she inhales. She moved to London a few months ago, she tells me. She works in a shop in Covent Garden. Her name’s Monique. I offer her a line. In the harsh glare of the toilets she looks even prettier, a quarter-smile on her lips, her short blonde hair tousled, dirty-looking.

  ‘Not you again,’ says the girl who was desperate before.

  The house band, Specimen, appear on stage. They slouch, spindle-legged, over their instruments, but there is nothing casual about the sound. The drummer starts out on his own, each beat emphatic, a crisp but savage detonation, white light flash-bulbing off his silver kit. In comes the bass, which twangs and snaps, springy as a blown-up rubber band, and lastly a brooding, rumbling guitar with a nasty edge to it, like the kind of jagged metal that gives you tetanus. They’re playing their most famous song, and everybody’s on their feet. The dance floor bounces.

  At closing-time, I clatter down the stairs and out on to the street. Robin’s already there. We decide to walk back to the flat. I check the knot of people on the pavement, but the French girl’s gone. It doesn’t matter. She’s told me where she works. And nothing could have happened anyway, not with the disease I’ve got.

  Through Soho, its streets medalled with chewing-gum and spit, drunk people staggering. A curtain of multicoloured plastic strips gapes suddenly. Fuzzy disco beats, a woman beckoning. Down Charing Cross Road, shop doorways clogged with the slumped shapes of the homeless. On through Trafalgar Square. Some bare-chested idiot is splashing about in the fountain. It’s cold, but he can’t feel a thing. He’s bellowing ‘Stand and Deliver’ by Adam and the Ants. Down Whitehall, over Lambeth Bridge. The river stretches below us like a sheet of wrinkled black plastic. Like a bin bag. A right turn, past the Imperial War Museum.

  By the time we walk in through the front door, it’s five in the morning, and Graham is already up.

  ‘Guys,’ he says.

  Graham has a rosy complexion and thick, shiny hair, and his voice is soft but urgent, with an American blur to the vowels, as if he might once have lived on the West Coast. We tend to think of Graham as a sort of hippie. The twisted end of the sixties, though. Not Woodstock. More like Altamont. There is something unstable, even maniacal, about the grin he often carries on his face. In November, when I last stayed in the flat, an oblique psychological battle was being fought between Graham and Robin. Robin would be trying to extract an admission from Graham, the simple acknowledgement of a truth that ought to have been obvious, but Graham would sidestep Robin’s probing, or simulate amused bewilderment, or sometimes, like a mirror, he would answer Robin’s questions with questions of his own – What’s your problem, Robin? What do you want from me? – and always in that infuriating, phoney San Francisco accent. The verbal skirmishing would go on for hours, and in the end Graham would frustrate Robin to such a degree that Robin would attack him physically. When Robin had him pinned to the floor and was threatening to hit him in the face, Graham would be gloating. Robin had been the first to crack. Robin had resorted to violence. Look, guys, Graham seemed to be saying, he’s really lost it this time.

  I settle on the carpet, with Robin to my left. Graham is sitting on my grandmother’s sofa. He has made himself a cup of herbal tea. Behind me, the sash window is open, and cold air pushes against my back.

  Our conversation revolves around recent events in Eastbourne. Robin and I know all about death now – we’re experts on the subject – and since we’ve had a gram between us, we do most of the talking.

  ‘It wouldn’t be so bad to die,’ Robin says.

  I’m nodding. ‘We’ve seen it up close now. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  Graham sips his tea. ‘So why don’t you do it then?’

  ‘Do what?’ I say.

  ‘Die.’ He is grinning, but his pale eyes look ruthless, volatile.

  In November, I discovered that although Graham had been subletting my flat for a year, he had paid no rent at all. He has also been wearing my clothes, and he has lost the Savile Row waistcoat my mother gave my father in the fifties. It’s possible he is testing me. How much can he get away with? What will it take to make me react?

  ‘Hey,’ Graham says. ‘There’s a window right behind you. You could throw yourselves out of it right now.’ He isn’t laughing. He isn’t even joking. He’s going to try and talk us into committing suicide. ‘There’s the window, guys,’ he says. ‘If you’re not afraid of dying, why don’t you jump?’

  We glance at the open window, then at each other.

  Robin shakes his head. ‘Look, fuck off, Graham,’ he begins, but Graham talks right over him. ‘Jump. Go on.’ Then he uses our own words. ‘It wouldn’t be so bad.’

  The window yawns, and I feel I’m being drawn backwards. The same thing happens when you lie o
n your stomach and peer over the edge of a cliff: your legs seem to lift behind you, tipping you towards the void. I feel I might be about to leap to my death despite myself. Is it happening to Robin too? I don’t dare look.

  Graham’s grin has tightened, and his eyes are chips of grey glass in his ruddy face. ‘Go on, you fuckers. Jump.’

  Laughing quietly, I stare at the carpet. I do my best to ignore the air shifting behind me. I have to pretend the window isn’t there.

  ‘You’re full of shit,’ Graham said. ‘Both of you.’

  He goes out to the kitchen.

  Later, driving out of London, we can poke fun at Graham and his little games. It’s rush hour, and all the traffic is going the other way. We have wound the windows down. We’ve got our sunglasses on. We’re full of shit.

  ‘He really wanted us to do it,’ Robin says.

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘He’s jealous.’ I’m not sure what I’m saying – it just came to me – but it seems like a good theory. ‘He wants to be us,’ I go on. ‘He hates us. He wants to destroy us.’

  I have just remembered the night I brought a new girlfriend round to the flat for the first time. As we sat on the tartan carpet, smoking a joint, Graham turned to Natalie and said, I bet you’ve got a nice cunt, haven’t you?

  ‘You know, I don’t think you should stay there much longer,’ I say. ‘I think he’s got it in for you.’

  ‘I’m not going to,’ Robin says. ‘When we’re finished in Eastbourne, I’m going to get a place of my own.’

  ‘Good. That’s a good idea.’

  ‘I’m not going to live with a fucking maniac.’

  ‘I don’t blame you. I wish I’d never said he could move in.’

  ‘He’s always got that grin on his face. He does it deliberately. I wish he’d stop grinning.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I mean, he’s not happy, is he?’

  ‘Fuck, no,’ I say. ‘He’s furious.’

  Robin bursts out laughing.