I lifted the door a little to set it closed in its frame behind me. It had been a cold winter, the doors were just unwarping.
They would come down, all three, in their own good time.
HAL
Chapter 31
They have found each other. They will be fine.
When Tertius gives me gossip, across the table over which we cannot touch, I don’t really listen. I loved him so much but now I am afraid I ever touched him. He looks bad. He has a thin plucky look to him like one of those ventriloquist’s dummies men in blue dinner-jackets stick their arms up and talk through, mouth shut for the duration of the act. He put on all this snobbish business, but he was never cold. We got drunk together after I’d done it, and by the end of the evening you couldn’t hear a single vowel that knew the MI from the AI. He panicked a bit and told Anne Angelica was there and didn’t mention me. Angelica was there for a while, but then it was midnight and she had to go and change into her wolf suit, or whatever she does. Besides, she’s not one for drink, she’s just disorderly. Her kicks, while Lucas was in hospital, she got from ringing up pretending to be his wife. It’s as if she liked them dead. I know she wanted him to be dead, but I sometimes thought she fancied him dead, as though that would give her more pleasure than anything else. Different, very.
She made me do it. She had more than a peck of dirt on me and she has the trait I’ve learnt in here is tops for a successful criminal; she knows all the weak spots, just by instinct. She knew how Lucas got his jollies, I guess from her cultivation of poor old Tertius. Is cultivation the word? She more like ploughed him up, but he was too chuffed to see he was being had, richly. The thought of her father’s place I suppose; more than a few frames down there. She was hard to resist, by the time I confessed I was more afraid of her than of anything the police could do. I think she could get in anywhere, she’s like smoke. I strictly am not a muff bandit but I could not stop thinking about her for all that bad autumn and winter and now I’m here I think I would cry if I saw her. I see pictures of her sometimes and I want to say, ‘There’s another notch I’ve carved,’ but I don’t think they’d believe me. I’m not as pretty as I was. I’m fatter, and my hair is just brown, like my brothers’. But she wouldn’t have looked even when I was like Eros. I’m just not on her level, which is way, way up. She’s so high up, she’s like God. Life is cheap to her and she’d think nothing of smiting, or drowning, or sending in the locusts. Perhaps she really does like animals only because they can’t answer back, like in all those mother-in-law jokes about bitches.
So Tertius told Angelica about Lucas’s not so angelic side. He probably thought that she’d like him more, the bigger the ball of dung he rolled her way. But she’s not like that; she’d’ve been more likely to eat him up. I’m getting my beetles and spiders mixed; it’s amazing how you remember things in prison, stuff you’d forgotten, almost as though you knew you were going to do time. So, for instance, I can remember The Ladybird Book of What to Look for in Winter and any number of manuals. I wish I’d read more, now.
She wanted him to look like any old cruiser with his number up on the great fruit machine, three plums, and then I was to tuck all this literature under him, so the police got a surprise but could never be sure. It’s quite possible the police think queers and people who think animals have rights are one and the same. Or Lucas could have picked up a hunt saboteur with his regulation spray of ‘Antimate’, the fragrance which is a must for putting people off the scent. It’s a joke, really.
Angelica was ready for an act of violence like some girls are ready to get married, and it was as though she’d settled on Lucas for the lucky man. She thought about it a lot, and when she talked of it her face went soft, as though she heard the footsteps of her lover. Tertius wouldn’t believe it, that I’d actually done it, and he thought it was his fault. Perhaps that’s what he’s got, guilt, not the other thing, the disease, about as easy to cure as each other. Unhelpful, aids.
The saddest thing is that Lucas liked being hit and my particular forte is hitting. A perfect match in a way, but the thrill goes with the same person, and knowing what they had for breakfast is just not romantic. Even knowing the other one’s name can kill the thrill. Actually, Lucas never did know my name. It’s Harold. My father converted when I was two; we are called Deerbergh really and the other boys’ names come out of a book called Pillars of the Church. My father got it wrong; he thought they were like Elders of Zion. It makes me sad. Those meals of pickle and piles of cheese and salt beef Lucas would make reminded me of something back before I got my big teeth. He was mad about me for being blond and English and all that and it was all a lie I was in the habit of because my mum and dad hid everything to do with the other thing. Not many Jewish criminals, so here I am. Lucas loved my blue eyes and they meant a whole lot to him I didn’t need to say. He supplied his own romantic crap. I didn’t have to do more than push a few gentle hints, and he had me born and bred flaxen on rolling acres. My mother pushed my father to convert. It can’t be a dramatic faith to enter, Anglicanism, more like a nursery pool after the real thing, with its waves and the great Red Sea parting like a cleft palate.
The other business came over me in a rush on account of a severe bit of facial readjustment I’d administered. It was because of that I’d got to marry – and chop chop. That’s the trouble. When a guy says ‘No’, it doesn’t always mean yes.
I’d’ve married anyone to get silence. It might have reached Dick and Gloria’s four little ears, and, what’s more important, all their little friends’ ears. They are not the same as me, with their plans for a shared mortgage and their doing the ironing with Tosca on Ice. So I will admit I was worried, and so was Tertius, who has always said that he liked to think he was the queen in my life. That is odd, he was much less good-looking than Lucas, but I did love him all down my early twenties, and still had a soft spot. I think it was that he was kind. Like Anne says, ad bloody nauseam, being thoughtful, having imagination, they aren’t the same as being kind.
I picked Lucas up. An afternoon and a decent watch, I thought. But he was like ice, and by the time he got around to accidentally on purpose touching my hair I was well past interest. Not to bother. I quite liked him, and he was a cheap charm school for me, not to say a host of contacts. The pathetic thing was, he was taken in by my bit-part posh English, coat for jacket and glass for mirror, and button flies, not realising my dad had got them from some kind of phrase book by P. G. Wodehouse. He was a snob, but romantic, Lucas. I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought he was English. He taught me more than the knifework at table (from the outside in, a useful tip when approaching a grown man in a topcoat with a view to stabbing, too, I may say). He taught me some of the lipwork. I’ve got a wide vocabulary and I know quite a few folk with stiffish handles, which could be useful. I met Anne Cowdenbeath. I liked her. I liked that her clothes needed a lot of people to keep them on the road. There was more than a suggestion of big running costs to her and I go for that. When I was growing up, we went to Harrods like church (the converting was all to do with standing, my mother would say, and I could not get what she was driving at); then Mum realised that the real class use Harrods like God, to have an account with but not to discuss, and not to mention at all available times.
We started going up in the world so fast you could see the greasemarks. I liked the things side of it. Mum took to it like a duck to water. Then she was taking to more than water, little glasses of gin and cin which she would hide behind the curtains and knock over fetching the next one. We had been to Spain a few times by now. I was happy enough at school. Boys like big cars. I started to learn the pleasurable side of being a mother’s boy. I never got like the brothers. ‘A good soft mouth,’ I heard Saxon say one day, and he was talking about a dog. I’ve kept my hard mouth, I think. He went and believed it all.
Being an estate agent was a doddle. Castles in the air, houses in the air, unfurnished semis for rent in the air, I can get a punter to pay.
I met a few expensive guys like that. What expensive means in the context is free, and with substantial tips. I found you could get anything out of them not with actions but words. As for women, it’s the same. It is all a lie about women wanting men, they want a taped message of soft porn telling them they are different. I learnt one or two poems to use on them and they drive me mad now after closedown here, when I hear the lines come back in my head, all those roses, hearts and flowers and I will love you still after all the seas ganging up. It makes you weep.
When Cora was wheeled on, I quite liked her. I got fond of her in a way. She was a bad liar and blind as a bat and talked too much, but she did have what the visitors here call a low self-image, and I love that. It’s something to stand on, it gives you a little rise. I put off bed for as long as possible, Johnny had told me what to expect, a grapefruit amidships at least, but that wasn’t as bad as the scar she had which he hadn’t warned me about. That did make me feel a bit rough, till I thought of the backhander Johnny gave me. I hate scars, or anything like that.
A monkey, he gave me.
He’s married now, so the papers say (all my friends are in the papers one way or another, it makes you wonder where the real news is), to a bird he met in Rio. Tertius said Johnny bumped into her in the street. She was dressed as a naked girl at the time, it being carnival, and they upped and off, and some time later got married. He had gold glitter all over for a month, he said in a note he sent me with a piece of cake in a box, and he’d swallowed so much of the gold stuff he could’ve laid a golden egg. And what a surprise I do not think when she turns out to be a miss bred like a greyhound with a couple of big ones, two castles, a grouse moor and more. No kid yet, but then he’s had a dry run, so they should be OK.
It’s not love that matters, or family ties; it’s money. Cora’s little bastard will have enough of that to keep it a love child for life, and to stop people thinking it’s a bit dodgy an old queer like Lucas setting up with two women, one as rich as greasers and the other old enough to be his daughter. I saw he’d married one of them, I can’t remember which, but I hope she is in for a white marriage and a big bandage-wash once a month. The baby is a girl.
Angelica saw I wanted to beat him up, I guess. She’s a witch, as such. It wasn’t love I got for her, it was obedience, like she controlled me. All the things I’d had to learn, trying to make them look natural, she had grown up doing and chucked in. She was like all the freedom I get from the bashing up. And the forays, as Tertius called them, were losing their charm. After the big announcement, me wanting to settle and all that, and meeting Cora, all set up naturally by Lucas and Johnny, not knowing they were both at it and thinking, She’ll have to do, I went out and trifled with Lucas’s umbrella for an hour or two.
It was a fumy night, and I touched the boy quite radically, but I kept having this severe feeling he had parents, you know, a mother and a father, and I couldn’t make it, hardly at all.
The money I got from Johnny to make an honest woman of Cora went on shushing up the boy I’d carved up. He was very polite, lived at home, about forty. He was quite nice about it, and I felt bad when he said, ‘I just told my mum and dad I was mugged.’ I wondered if he had a dog just so he could go out for walks and told his mother every week hers was the best chicken à la King he’d ever tasted. I gave him a smile, and he gave the money to his parents. He smiled as though he had some teeth left.
When Angelica started me off doing errands, it was nothing physical. I had to do a bit of writing (‘Imperative Graffiti’, she called it), and a couple of interferences. I did not like carrying that tongue in my bag like a big old snail. How the ox carries it in his head I will never know. It had black patches, and I wondered if it came from a spotted cow, the sort city children learn the country on, those cows which are always picking their noses with their tongues.
She had told me before she started getting me wired up about Lucas, told me about her and Anne’s son. She told the kid his mother killed his dad, and that he had better kill his mum. Lucas always said the father committed suicide on account of having cancer, but you can never trust a doctor.
Angel told me about the kid, and how he would moon about after her wanting a kiss, never leaving her alone, pestering her, all eyes and teeth and a place at his father’s school.
The animal stuff mostly passed me by, but Angelica was working on me about Lucas. She could see so clearly. She told me about how he had taken me from myself, killed my spontaneity, and I could get back in touch with myself with this one single act. She’d send Dolores out for these chats, to get the food and drinks. Angel’s a feminist, you see. Angel told me my heart was in the right place and I felt good. Then she started seeing me a bit less, being a bit less nice, and the wedding was coming and I felt bad like those timberwolves shut in their cages sloping about watching the children sucking Mivvis and wishing they could suck the children’s little red legs with the white marrow. I felt shut in. I wanted to be like her. She was beautiful and free like that little dish in the opera Lucas took me to, a boy who is a chick and gets the best of everything, bed, champagne and all the attention. I began to dread the wedding, the house in Fulham, the sneaking out to pick up a boy.
The day we went to Chatham, I did feel nervous about hurting him. I thought about the time we had had together. I had a sailor in the ropery that day. The corridor is about half a mile long, and this dirty great hank of rope is getting twisted and twisted till it’s as tight as death, steel and sisal in a twist like hair when you drag a man’s head back and turn it. It was heavy and dangerous and under control. Released, it would have knocked the heads off a line of men. I watched it spin, under eight wedges of light from the eight dusty windows, and I touched the neck of the boy, just above the blue edge of his square-necked shirt, with my mouth. I had made up my mind.
I drew the line at the little fur man’s shop. Dolores was put on to that. I don’t know if it was something racial. I drew the line, but Angel stepped over it. She had feelings about Jews, she said, about how they run the money and the arms and all the fur shops and the law and how they put bad stuff in oranges to give to monkeys in the zoo. ‘You’re talking buckets of eyeballs,’ said Dolores, a bit cheeky, and I saw trouble coming her way, though I couldn’t get why. Angel said she had it in for Jews more than for even all other people. She says these things which aren’t pretty but they make you want to do stuff for her, and bring her things, heads on plates, or on big thin knives.
I knew where Lucas went at night. After all, I went to the same places. The problem up to now had been avoiding him, it would’ve been like asking him to marry me, meeting him in all that shining white. Angel posted all those not too good pictures of animals staked out to all kinds of people and I kitted up.
She’d told me she’d get me away for my alibi and she said – she knows all the social stuff – that the wedding would have to be cancelled. No wedding guest, no wedding, she said.
What did for me was I listened to him. She had said, ‘Do it for me, do it, do it,’ and her voice was like a little girl’s. I felt good and strong, and I knew I could give her joy. I went for him, that was easy. I was quite interested to see him without his manners. But I got carried away and I began to bawl, as I cut him, ‘D’you get me, d’you get me, d’you get me?’
‘Don’t let those be the last words I hear,’ he said, but I was well on the job, cutting away like a doctor on the television.
He started raving about undoing a button. Disgusting, really. I suppose it shows how far some of these oddballs will go.
I looked at him. His eyes showed sections of brown under the lids, which moved very slightly. I had no heart to go on.
I could not cut out all that stuff I had learnt. And it’s not as though I asked to learn it either. I can’t forget about starting from the outside with the knives.
CANDIA MCWILLIAM was born in Edinburgh. She is the author of A Case of Knives (1988), which won a Betty Trask Prize, A Little Stranger (1989), Deb
atable Land (1994), which was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and its Italian translation the Premio Grinzane Cavour for the best foreign novel of the year, and a collection of stories Wait Till I Tell You (1997). In 2006 she began to suffer from the effects of blepharospasm and became functionally blind as a result. In 2009 she underwent surgery that cut off her eyelids and harvested tendons from her leg to hold up what remained. Her most recent book is her critically-acclaimed memoir, What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness.
By the Same Author
Debatable Land
A Little Stranger
Wait Till I Tell You
What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness
First published in Great Britain 1988
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Candia McWilliam 1988
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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A Case of Knives Page 28