Ex

by Laurie Avadis

  M had not seen his father, the familial despot who turned his childhood into a booby trapped obstacle race, since his twelfth birthday when he had almost ‘funeralised’ him with his own gun. To entrust his son to this savage ghost, even for an afternoon, was to be complicit in the promulgation of his wicked credo and would be an act of unprecedentedly imaginative neglect even by M’s recklessly low standards.

  ‘Be my guest,’ said M. ‘Get him back in time for his tea.’

  *

  Jonah transported Daniel to the Hatred Cafe in an aged Zephyr with plastic bench seats and a passenger door which was held on to the body of the car with gaffer tape. Every time Jonah took a corner at speed – and he took every corner at speed – Daniel slid down the bench seat towards the broken passenger door clinging to Jonah’s headrest maniacally. Jonah did not believe in braking, both because he considered it to be a sign of cowardice and because the car did not technically have any brakes.

  Once deposited in the apartment above the cafe, Jonah ushered Daniel to the ‘dining’ area – an array of random tables and chairs which would have embarrassed a school jumble sale, clustered around an ancient armchair. Daniel was transfixed as much by the pitch and yaw of the day as the way the soles of his shoes had stuck to the slick of green and orange patterned lino which covered the floor and the newspapers, scrawled with giant blood-red words, which had been stuck to the walls. He picked his way over to the armchair through the viscous half light and gingerly sat down.

  The Treatment, who had been on a rare foray into the outside world to fulfil toilet-related obligations, stopped in his tracks and stared at Daniel in disbelief.

  ‘Get out of the armchair now,’ said Jonah so loudly that it made Daniel shrink back into it.

  A bead of sweat had trickled down between the eyes of The Treatment, along the rift valley of scars that traversed his nose and on to his chin where it hung like a flawed diamond before plopping onto the floor. His eyes were visceral pools, every sinew tensed to strike.

  It took fully ten minutes to unpick the claws of The Treatment one by one from Daniel’s chest and all the while the cat emitted a low, almost imperceptible growl.

  ‘That will teach you to sit in another man’s chair,’ said Jonah.

  *

  Jonah settled down at the least precarious of the tables in the cafe and beckoned Daniel over to join him. In the semi darkness, Jonah’s face gained an ethereal quality reminiscent of a slightly mouldy Halloween pumpkin. He lit up a cigarillo, inhaled so deeply that his lips subsided completely into his face and leant forwards until his nose was almost touching Daniel’s.

  ‘What you wanna know?’ His question floated in a fug of cigar smoke.

  ‘Why is my father trying to kill me?’

  ‘That’s a weak question, boy. Why you asking it? My son wants to kill you he got his reasons. You want to stop him then stop asking old men what to do and take an axe to his head while he sleeping.’

  ‘Your son is trying to kill your grandson and that’s your advice?’

  ‘What you bleating about, boy? Count yourself lucky my son’s no good at killing. Tried to execute me when he wasn’t much older than you are now, bullet went in the side of my skull here,’ he pointed at a thumb-sized indentation on the side of his forehead, ‘came out here,’ he grabbed Daniel’s hand and held it against a giant crater in the base of his skull. ‘Took out a piece of my brain the size of a golf ball. Looks like you not dead either so he ain’t got no better at it. Now when I kill a man he stays killed.’ His grip on Daniel’s hand tightened and with their increased proximity it became apparent that his grandfather was somewhat unfamiliar with the concept of personal hygiene. ‘Murdered my first man with an ironing board because he looked at your grandmother the wrong way in a bar.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Daniel.

  ‘My father told me, never trust a man who cannot find violence in his hands. When I made mistakes he corrected me with his fists. Man starts an argument with you, you finish it, man does you wrong, you finish him.’

  ‘What about forgiveness?’

  ‘Don’t use words you don’t understand.’

  ‘But I don’t want to be like you and I don’t think my father does, not really. There must be another way.’

  ‘Time was, I ask my father that same question. I was sixteen years old and he had just come out of prison. He put on a mask, enough to make them believe he wasn’t broken inside but we knew different. It wasn’t a mistake they made again. My mother spilled whisky on his shirt day after he got home and he went to put his fury onto her again but I stood in his way. When he went inside I had been no higher than his waist but now I was taller than him, thought I was something special. Hit him square in the face with my best shot and he didn’t blink. Took me out to the garden by my hair and threw me into the mud. Asked him to forgive me then, as my nose and mouth fill up with dirt but he just laughed. He only laugh when he was hurting people who loved him. So don’t you talk ’bout forgiveness. I don’t blame your father for taking out the best part of my brain and you shouldn’t blame him for tryin’ to kill you if that’s what he has to do. It’s in our blood, no hiding from it. You either got to stop him or you gonna die.’

  Jonah let go of Daniel’s hand and his face receded into the filthy gloaming.

  Daniel could not allow himself to believe that all the future held for him was a daily cage fight with a demented bull elephant.

  ‘Do you think that grandma might be able to…’

  Jonah sat bolt upright, he seized Daniel’s arm, stood up and wrenched him towards the door.

  ‘Enough questions. Taking you back. I got nothing else for you.’

  ‘But if I could just speak with her then…’

  Jonah stopped and knelt down until his mouth was against Daniel’s ear.

  ‘Sometimes the crocodile kills because she need to and sometimes she kill because the act is so full of grace she just has to feel it again. Finding her might give you another answer but I don’t think it’s going to be one you want to hear.’

  Chapter 32

  School – that joyful daily sprint between classes while slightly gentler and more amicable punches rained down upon him from his new friend Dorsal Grellman – was Daniel’s only respite. His conversation with his grandfather had convinced him that as much as he still loved his father, a return home would almost certainly lead to yet another convoluted attempt to terminate his existence. Sleeping standing up in his school locker was a wholly more attractive option.

  It had been three long days and nights, by which time Daniel had developed back pains better suited to an octogenarian, when an envelope was nailed to Daniel’s desk at the end of the school day. In it was a card that had more in common with a ransom demand from a psychotic kidnapper than an eighth birthday party invitation. He was offered the option of non-attendance but was left in no doubt that this would be yet another decision that would shuffle him off this mortal coil.

  It sounded better than going home. Or waiting around in the boys’ bathroom until the janitors left for the night and he could slip back into his locker. Besides, Ferris had also received an invitation – though his had been superglued to his forehead.

  *

  Dorsal’s home nestled between a toxic waste disposal unit and a multi-storey processing plant which turned bird beaks and arthropods into meat products for the fast food industry. It was a somewhat symbiotic relationship; on more than one occasion a lorry load had been delivered to one rather than the other in error and thus far, no one had complained. The stench of the worst excesses of humanity had intertwined with Dorsal’s aunt on a subatomic level and she knew that her final years would be spent staring from her kitchen window at a mountain of beaks and exoskeletons glinting in the setting sun.

  Daniel and Ferris were ushered into Dorsal’s house by a woman of such dazzling decrepitude, it seemed unlikely she would see out the rest of the day. It was difficult to know whether she had been expecting them; she
was unable to muster words of any kind and after showing them into what was more of a crypt than a room, she collapsed into an armchair and fell into a deep sleep. It occurred to Daniel as he squinted into the dank sepulchral darkness at what appeared to be a mantelpiece decorated with animal skulls that Dorsal’s birthday party was unlikely to feature any aspects of the word ‘fun’ even in its broadest sense.

  Parting the gloom as if carving a knife through chocolate fondant, Daniel discerned a stubbornly enormous figure sitting cross-legged on the floor on the far side of the room.

  ‘I hope you weren’t expecting trifle and pass the parcel,’ said Dorsal.

  ‘I don’t know what we were expecting – at best, not to die in excruciating pain,’ suggested Daniel.

  He sensed more than saw that Dorsal was standing – it was a subtle and liquid movement for something so large. When a rabid dog enters a passage of stillness all that one can say for certain is that it will be short-lived. Daniel flinched in readiness for the first blow.

  ‘I understand your father is trying to kill you,’ said Dorsal. ‘The head teacher told me over a glass of Chianti in his office last week.’

  ‘I didn’t think he believed me,’ said Daniel

  ‘Oh, he believes you, he just doesn’t care. He said that it would be one less child between him and his retirement. He just asked your father not to do it on school premises.’

  ‘He’s spoken to my father about this?’

  ‘At open day, between Geography and History, he has ten minute slots for parents who want to murder their children. It’s more common than you might imagine.’

  Dorsal was looming over Ferris and Daniel, his breath was fetid. He reached out and placed his hand on Daniel’s arm, it was the first time he had done so without trying to pull it out of its socket.

  ‘We could kill him – kill your father.’ Dorsal’s lips parted into a death skull grimace. It took a while before Daniel realised that this was a smile.

  ‘I don’t want to kill him, he loves me, if he didn’t he wouldn’t keep trying to murder me.’

  Dorsal took a step backwards, the word ‘love’ accosted him. It was as if Daniel had landed a blow in the middle of his forehead.

  Realising suddenly that he was going to be sick, Daniel struggled out of what appeared to be the only room on the ground floor of the house, up an uncarpeted stairway shrouded in blue-black dusk and into the first door he came too. Daniel’s bilious senses were assaulted by the contrast with the rest of the house. The room appeared to have been bleached white; the walls were covered by huge, dexterously graphic paintings of wild animals, real and imagined, slaughtering prey; there was a mantelpiece besieged by framed photographs and on the floor was a mattress covered by a single sheet. Daniel recognised the child in the photographs – there could have been very few other three-year-olds who were the size of a fully-grown man. It struck him that the faces of the couple draped around the infant Dorsal resembled the snapshots of murder victims that were printed in newspapers – there was some intrinsic part of humanity that had been lost from their expressions.

  ‘They used to be my parents,’ said Dorsal.

  Daniel assumed that if he turned around, his skull would join the others on the downstairs mantelpiece.

  ‘When they see me it reminds them what they really are, so they don’t see me any more.’

  ‘Did you paint these?’ Daniel shrugged towards the artwork on the wall hoping that this would not provoke an onslaught.

  Dorsal spun Daniel around and picked him up by his shirt collar until their faces were level.

  ‘If you tell anyone about this room I will really fuck you up.’

  ‘You’re going to fuck us up anyway, aren’t you?’ wheezed Daniel.

  ‘You are my friends now, so yes, I am still going to fuck you up, I just won’t enjoy doing it quite as much. But if you tell anyone about what’s in this room, I will rip apart your ribs and I will eat your heart whilst it’s still beating.’

  This was not an image that appealed to Daniel.

  Dorsal put Daniel down and straightened his shirt.

  The door opened and Ferris entered holding a Kermit the Frog birthday cake with six candles. He was wearing a party hat which had been stapled to his head and his fingers appeared to have been baked into the cake. Two more candles had been stuffed into his ears and their flames licked at his sideburns. Ferris was smiling as ever – he had never been invited to a birthday party before and had no way of knowing that this was not standard practice.

  ‘Are you just going to let your father kill you, Daniel?’

  Dorsal’s question glistened like the dazzling seeds of a sparkler – Daniel had reached out to touch these words in the void many times before but his fingers had always been seared.

  ‘My grandmother has a rather unhealthy degree of insight into the mind of a murderer – I thought I could ask her advice,’ replied Daniel. ‘She lives on a mountain in Milton Keynes. I asked my grandfather for directions and he told me to come out of the station, turn left at the organic greengrocers and follow the screams of the damned up to the vale of tears.’

  ‘We’re going to struggle to find that on a sat nav,’ said Ferris whose hair was, essentially, on fire.

  ‘He also told me she was one of the most dangerous people on earth,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Milton Keynes it is then. I’ll tell the headmaster to close the school tomorrow so you won’t miss any lessons and we can get an early start. You can pay the train fare, Ferris, you little bastard,’ said Dorsal, picking Ferris up and carrying him over to the toilet where he rammed his head repeatedly into the brimming urinal.

  It was the best day of Ferris’ life.

  Chapter 33

  PC David Daindridge stared out of the police car at a world from which he was separated by the width of a car window on one side and thirty-two stone of bastard on the other. Sergeant M was relating one of his horrifying anecdotes, punctuating each of the myriad of obscenities with a sharp poke in the young officer’s ribcage. There was more anger than there usually was – though Daindridge remained blissfully unaware of this – due to Daniel’s fortuitous escape from the jaws of death the night before. Had he come home on schedule, and opened his bedroom door, a jerry-rigged crossbow would have solved M’s problems once and for all. But it was not to be so.

  It was more an assault than a conversation and Daindridge found himself wondering, as he often did, just how painful it would be to sprint into the waves of the winter sea and never stop. ‘Every single day for six months I walked past a man in a set of threadbare fatigues on my way to work,’ said M. ‘Explosion of white hair, reeking of piss, carrying a canvas ruck sack. I would get to the chemist on the high street just as he was coming out of The Crescent and he would always have the biggest smile on his face, the kind that makes you want to punch it away. This particular morning, my wife came into the kitchen where I was preparing my usual pre-breakfast snack of twelve rashers of bacon and a king-size black pudding, picked up the frying pan with which I was preparing said feast, shouted “enjoy your breakfast you, fat fuck” and smashed it into my face with such force that I fell off my chair onto the floor and shat myself. It was one of those moments which really make you question where all the romance in your relationship has gone.

  ‘So, rather than walk up Haverstock Hill to Hampstead Police station, I decided, on balance, given that my cheekbone had been shattered and the word “Teflon” had been burnt in reverse onto my forehead, that I had better pop in to A & E.

  ‘Just at the bottom of Hampstead Heath I saw the white-haired man with the canvas ruck sack darting off into a bush and despite the obvious inconvenience of having only half a face, my police instincts kicked in and I decided to follow him. When he reached this small area of dense undergrowth, he crawled inside, singing “Flash, ah ah, saviour of the universe, Flash, ah ah, saved every one of us,” in a discordant falsetto, took something out of his bag, buried it and left. I managed to scramb
le in with no little difficulty and discovered, inside a plastic zip lock bag, a small red velvet gift box, tied with a silk bow and inside that a nose, lovingly severed from its owner, not a trace of blood. I dug out thirty bags, all containing human noses and do you know what I did, Dangerous Dave?’ Each word was punctuated by another painful prod in the ribs.

  Daindridge drank in the world through the distorting facets of a raindrop as it bled down the passenger window of the car in pursuit of oblivion. How much pain would he feel if he was hit by a train? Would there be a moment of such revelatory agony that his mind would become a perpetual bedlam, or would it just be a full stop at the end of the incoherent sentence that his life had become?

  ‘I buried all the boxes exactly where I found them and got up ten minutes later every day so I would never see the murderous old twat again and do you know why? The paperwork, can you imagine the shitting paperwork? Thirty fucking noses. Fuck me. No thanks.’

  The tributaries of a dozen raindrop rivers traversed the car’s passenger window, allowing Daindridge to view North London through a bleeding spectrum of convergent colours. He watched a disembodied man in a green balaclava, the sleeves of his red and black leather jacket melting down and around his sawn-off shotgun as he entered NatWest Bank in Haverstock Hill.

  ‘Errrrr…’ Daindridge sat bolt upright, pointing at the door of the bank.

  Sergeant M crammed the last of the twelve doughnuts he had joylessly consumed into his mouth and tutted.

  ‘Sir, I think…’

  ‘You’re not here to think, Dangerous Dave, you’re here to drive, listen to my diabolical anecdotes and shut the fuck up.’

  ‘There’s a bank robbery happening.’

  Sergeant M had been pouring fossilised sugar fragments from the upturned empty doughnut bag into his gaping mouth and as he turned, the sugar spilt down his uniform and into his ample lap. He was not best pleased.