Ex

by Laurie Avadis

  ‘There’s a bank robbery happening where?’

  ‘In the bank, Sir.’

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ grunted Sergeant M, commencing the arduous process of convincing his momentous arse to accept the pleading missives it was receiving from his brain seriously and move.

  ‘Shouldn’t we call this in?’ asked Daindridge, who wanted to cry, urinate, vomit and scream at the same time and would have done so had he been left to his own devices. He picked up the car radio but a leather-gloved trotter encased his wrist and forced him to drop it.

  ‘If we call it in, it’s a KN33(22), a LN43 and two N9.3s. If we deal with it ourselves it’s a G41 and I can be sitting at home tonight curled up in front of the football with two plates of curry and a pizza.’ This was a less than persuasive argument but Daindridge knew that Sergeant M was far more dangerous than a man with a shotgun and he plunged unenthusiastically into the North London deluge.

  As they entered the bank, the man in the balaclava was standing on the chest of the prone security guard and had already blown a hole through the ceiling and the bank manager’s left arm. He turned to see what appeared to be a hippopotamus in a police uniform bearing down on him. The hippopotamus was not moving quickly but as anyone facing an impending impact with such a beast will testify, that does not really matter. He tried to reload the sawn-off, realised he had not brought any more cartridges, swung the shotgun at the creature and then the world became a black velvet coffin.

  As he lay amongst the remnants of the bank robber, Sergeant M felt the barrel of a low calibre pistol press against the side of his face. It probably should have occurred to him that there would be two bank robbers but his reasoning was as coherent as a portrait defaced by acid and the only mystery the world still held for him was that Marks & Spencer continued to manufacture pants large enough to accommodate his ever inflating buttocks.

  Chapter 34

  ‘Get up slowly and make your way into the safety deposit box room,’ growled the thief, his voice a melange of contempt and desperation suffused with ferocious anger. The gun pressed harder against M’s cheekbone.

  ‘Can you imagine me getting up anything but slowly?’ Sergeant M struggled to find purchase until Daindridge helped him to his feet.

  The safety deposit box room was the size of a large toilet and as the bank robber closed the door behind him M felt the walls and ceiling close in, as if he were a wilting flower, pressed between two slices of wood by an avaricious child. They were motioned to sit down on the floor beside a small table. The electrical spaghetti of the dismembered CCTV hung from the wall and the contents of the safety deposit boxes had been piled onto the table where Robber 2 now sat.

  ‘When I pull this trigger,’ the robber leaned down and pushed the gun into Daindridge’s eye socket, ‘your brains will explode and even people who know you, who love you, won’t recognise you, they won’t even be able to look at you without vomiting.’

  ‘That’s pretty much the story already,’ said M, who could feel sweat pooling between the layers of his voluminous lard. ‘Anyway, a bullet from a little gun like that would just blow a hole through his eye socket and out through the back of his head. A glass eye and a bit of wadding stuffed into his brain cavity and he’d look better than he does now.’

  The robber’s features were hidden behind his balaclava but his eyes were eloquent in their bitter antipathy for M.

  ‘How do they allow a rancorous fucking animal like you to become a policeman? You’re grotesque, like the kind of bloated, fly-infested buffalo that wallows in its own shit in the far corner of the worst kind of zoo. You are fucking disgusting – how does a human being let itself get in to this kind of state?’

  M wasn’t listening – the contorted mouth, framed in green patterned wool, had become a huge glistening maggot, writhing on a hook.

  ‘When my son died,’ said M, ‘when I heard that he had died, I waited at the hospital for his body to arrive. They show you into a room, a room about the size of this one and there is an empty bed for dead sons and an empty chair for doctors whose words defile you, who touch your shoulder like a cannibal because you are so much edible flesh to them. When they arrived with my boy, his little body, swaddled as if he was being lifted out of his bath, I became invisible, because he was the best of me, he was all of me of any substance in this vile, shit-infested world. What was left, what was left in that room, in this room, is raw sewage. So shoot me, you execrable little pissant, shoot me in my guts where it is going to hurt the most and do it now before I rip you apart with my fucking teeth.’

  Placing his hands on Daindridge’s shoulder and the robber’s knee, he levered himself up with surprising grace and punched the man in the face with such force that for a moment it seemed that his head might depart from his shoulders. He plucked the gun from a hand which was still clenching and unclenching and it was at that point he noticed the blood rose, blossoming on his shirt.

  ‘You’ve been shot,’ Daindridge reached out a timorous finger and touched the hot red petals.

  M pulled open his shirt and traced his fingers around and into the entry wound in the pregnant mound of his gut. A small calibre handgun, fired at close range into thirty-two stone of blubber and kebab – if he still had any vital organs in there, this pea shooter wouldn’t have found them.

  ‘I need this gun, David,’ said M, ‘I need it to bring an end to the relentless horror, I need to use it to kill and I can’t be stopped. You’d stop me, wouldn’t you, David? You’d have to stop me, it’s what people like you do, put your finger in the dam of bestiality.’

  ‘I…’ Daindridge’s vocabulary lay on the floor around his feet, he scrabbled around for words like ‘life’ and ‘mercy’ but they were lost amongst the dust bunnies and crevices. All he could find was ‘please,’ which, as he uttered it became an entreaty to do what he most feared yet most desired.

  M raised the gun and shot Daindridge at close range directly between the eyes. The young man’s mouth formed into an O as he eased slowly backwards as if in slumber. Automatically M reviewed the crime scene. There would be no one to gainsay the order of events, villain shoots young copper and fat copper, fat copper bravely snaps villain’s neck. Murder weapon and fat copper missing but that was just a footnote – it would read well, the brass would like it and reality, as ever, would slide off the page.

  He had tried and failed to slay his own son and now he had killed someone else’s. He wanted to care, for it to hurt more than the bullet in his stomach, but honestly – he had felt neither. His life was like a pool of quicksand and he had been drowning in it slowly for years. The only question now was who he took down with him.

  Chapter 35

  After two rays of building castles in the waves only to see them gutted and consumed by a gluttonous ocean, Daniel’s mother had earned, if not Prithy’s trust, then a dilution of his contempt.

  They were staggering, heads bent, alone on the beach in the early hours. Ice had formed into shallow opaque pools between the drifts of sand and as they broke it with their blistered feet they could see their faces shatter in a way that meant they could never be reassembled.

  ‘There is a garden in which I sit when the cold has me by the throat,’ said Prithy. ‘It is the place where I first realised I could defeat the sea, that it could be defeated, if one understands its purpose. The mermaid lives there – I could show you it.’

  Daniel’s mother could neither defy nor consent, her feet followed Prithy’s and that was all that life consisted of now. They arrived at a line of beach huts, their bright paint corroded into peeling leather rivulets by the talons of a force that would return them to their elemental form. Prithy ducked down into a shallow trench, up into the stomach of a sky blue shack through an unlocked service flap and she followed. She emerged into a tangled thicket of ivy and bindweed to find Prithy tearing at the green brown veins, unearthing a bench seat, a coal burning stove and some matches. The fire filled her with a warmth so intense that she
wanted to inhale it so that it resided in her lungs. Something inside her, where so much was broken already, snapped and she began to weep for the life that continued just beyond her grasp, as if she were Tantalus and her family was the fruit.

  ‘Whenever I wanted to take my dog for a walk it would hide,’ she said. ‘I just had to stand up and look for its lead and it would crawl under a bed or behind the settee, sometimes into spaces so small that it must have hurt itself to get in to them, anything but walk with me. On one occasion it wedged itself behind the fridge and I had to lever it out with a plank. Our dog had no name so we could never call it. We developed a complex series of hand gestures and whistles which, since neither we nor the dog understood them, made communication an ultimately unsatisfactory process. I forgot exactly what a dog was for, shortly after he arrived, by then the world was like two jigsaw puzzles that had been jumbled up together; but when I tried to use the dog as an ironing board it bit me with such unbridled fury that I still have a fragment of its tooth embedded in my knuckle.

  ‘This particular Friday, Daniel was off school because of the snow and I found the dog cowering under a pile of frozen leaves and branches in the back garden. The dog had assumed the same expression as Daniel did when I tried to rationalise with him – a mixture of unexpurgated contempt and fear. It knew, they all knew, that I was like a wounded alligator floating on the surface of a river, directionless, floundering, but still capable of one last terrible attack. I dragged the dog out – I think it knew it would perish in that garden if it wasn’t discovered but it had accepted that – and down the road to the Heath. I had no idea if I had taken it for a walk already that day, I had no idea what taking it for a walk consisted of but I was going to do it anyway.

  ‘Middle Lake on the Heath is a landmark for migrating birds because of its size and normally it’s busy with children feeding the ducks and swans, but it wasn’t busy that day. That could be because it was minus four and it could be because I was screaming so loudly and the dog was moaning like a child begging for time itself to come to an end. I left the dog tied to a bench and walked out on to the ice – right into the middle of the lake. I got down onto my hands and knees and saw, in my reflection, exactly what they all saw, the children, the dog, the fucking milkman who still delivered even though I threw his bottles back at him – it was the void and it was in my eyes and it was labyrinthine. I took off my shoe and I hammered with the heel at that reflection, I hoped that beneath it I might discover the cobwebbed shards of my dignity. The ice begged me to stop as I hacked away at its pristine layers, my arm arced and fell and the dog struggled until its collar bit into its throat – it was like the dance of a murderer.

  ‘Eventually the face below my fists floated apart and the dull black velvet of the water below embraced me like a disciple, kissing my body until it was extinguished. Then the dog was upon me, pulling me back to the surface, its throat was wrecked from where it had broken free but it kept on coming and coming with its teeth, struggling against the ice, its feet splaying and skittering. Somehow, eventually, it dragged my body from the water onto the snow-matted soil.

  ‘I fucking hated that dog and it hated me. I would love to tell you that I lay on the bank of the lake and held it in my arms, sharing its warmth, discovering some hitherto untapped love for the species canine, but I can’t. It had saved my life, I knew it had killed itself in the process and that really pissed me off. It waited to see whether I was still breathing and when it could see that I was, it sunk its teeth into my left thigh and that’s how it died, inflicting as much pain as it possibly could.’

  Sarcastic applause spewed from deep within the foliage at the rear of the hut and a woman emerged clothed in seaweed strung with decaying seagull heads. Her hair appeared to have been recently excreted onto her head and her skin was befouled leather and rope. She waved a hand, depraved by arthritis. ‘I thought that Prithy was the most stultifyingly depressing little shitebag that had ever washed up on this beach but apparently I was wrong. This really is a seminal moment.’

  ‘I am a mermaid – I am here by serendipity,’ croaked Daniel’s mother.

  ‘You are a middle-aged woman in a torn swimsuit following around a maniac who lives on the beach in a pile of twigs and bird droppings.’

  ‘This is my little piece of England and I must defend it from the warrior Neptune,’ protested Prithy.

  ‘Exactly – he’s a headcase and you are lost.’ The woman lowered herself with no little effort onto the bench in front of the fire, beside Daniel’s mother.

  ‘This is perdition,’ bellowed Prithy.

  ‘This is Lyme Regis,’ the woman replied, ‘go and build some more sandcastles on the beach.’

  Prithy was about to protest but the woman dismissed him with a disparaging flick of the wrist.

  Daniel’s mother had nothing more to offer. She felt herself plummeting into the nether reaches of her psyche and plunged her face into an endless pool of tears. She had seen this place in sidelong glances during the worst of her waking dreams and knew that if she drank from this pool there would be no returning. The woman grasped her chin with fingers of petrified bone, turned her head gently so that it was inches from her own and after stroking the straggles of sand and mud from her face, headbutted her with tremendous force. Daniel’s mother collapsed to the floor of the hut and the woman fell upon her until the solidified strands of her hair trailed into Daniel’s mother’s eyes and mouth like rats’ claws.

  ‘You selfish, selfish bitch. How dare you come here and abandon your son.’

  Daniel’s mother spat out two shattered teeth as she tried to speak.

  ‘I killed my son,’ she said, ‘I have lived on the margins of sanity for years, spare me your fucking contempt, you can’t know what this has made me, made of me.’

  The woman grabbed her by the ears, spittle drizzling between an abandoned graveyard of teeth.

  ‘I am the old woman with the supermarket trolley and two hundred brimming carrier bags, yet I have never been into a shop, I am the face that you look at a second time for the incandescent horror of it, I am the stubborn stain that this country scrubs and scrubs at but cannot remove. I have never been kissed, never felt a man’s hand other than in rage and I would give my eyes just to have known how it felt to hold my own child in my arms. This is the life of a mermaid, it is my life and it is wretched and it is interminable. Now fuck off back to where you came from and prove you can still be a mother to your son.’

  Chapter 36

  Chasney Mint had worked as an mortician in Milton Keynes for more than forty years. It was not so much a calling, more a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Born in 1930 in Paris, his parents found themselves in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time when their neighbours decided to pop round for a holiday bringing 2,750 tanks and 2,315 aircraft with them. When his family was invited to spend some time in Poland – a country they had never previously visited – he had survived by dint of his mother’s Catholic lineage and his body’s apparent inability to die. His father, uncles and aunts, everyone he knew and loved had been considerably less fortunate. The cross in their lounge, the star on his father’s and uncle’s jackets had been shapes and colours no more significant to him than the jagged lines in a broken mirror, but to others they were determinative of whether they remained in their homes or they all fell down.

  Chas wondered at night, whilst others engaged in cotton wool somnambulism, whether he should have been a man, a mensch, and insisted upon the star and not the cross; whether he should have taken his father’s hand and not let go when his mother told him to say goodbye in a way she had never done before. Should he have stood shoulder to shoulder with his school friends when the stones flew, friends who had laughed but had forgotten laughter, whose cries stained walls that were now and would forever be monuments to unimaginable excess? What was survival?

  Yet he endured the camp, he had children who were born from this terrible game of chance and they were Min
ts and not Mintovskis’ as his father had been, children with strong bones, thick hair and unwavering smiles. He had given them a strength that was not his to bestow – it was the strength of those who he had lost, whose faces and voices he could no longer remember. It was their legacy and he was no more than a cipher.

  Whilst Chas had spent more than four decades as an embalmer that is not to say that he was good at his work – he was certainly not. He had established three ‘looks’ regardless of gender, age or ethnicity and he stubbornly bestowed these without demur.

  Look 1: Gloria Swanson – the ageing Hollywood harlot;

  Look 2: Bela Lugosi – the vampire;

  Look 3 (and by far the most objectionable): Giuseppe the clown.

  It would seem, even looking beyond the superficial, that Chasney Mint was set to self-destruct and yet within the community, his community, there had arisen a sense of appreciation, that these were no longer just the faces of their beloved but the faces of others, whose lives had been stolen from them. They understood that to Chasney, these extinct faces were like the screams of the defiled, whose queue he should have joined, in whose arms he should have died. They were a love poem which had taken more than sixty years to write and to which his patrons were proud to add their stanza.

  Reaching over for some more rouge, Chas realised that he was not alone in the mortuary. In the doorway stood two children and something that looked as though it might have been a child, had it not been over six feet tall with the body of a gorilla.

  ‘We were hoping you might be able to help,’ said Daniel, ‘we came out of Milton Keynes station, turned left at the organic greengrocers…’

  ‘I would have said,’ interrupted Ferris, ‘that it was more of a holistic retailer with produce that varied between locally grown root vegetables and other edible tree-based items, such as…’