Ex

by Laurie Avadis

  Chas could feel Dorsal’s grip on his collar loosen but he was not frightened for himself, only for the boys. They reminded him of his friends at school, always arguing about nothing, lost in the travails of youth before being torn to shreds by an enemy that treated them like annoying insects.

  Ferris felt one of Dorsal’s ears begin to unzip from its fastenings. Dorsal was losing his grip on the angel’s wing.

  ‘There is nowhere to go from here. What am I holding on for?’ asked Dorsal.

  ‘When we were waiting to die in the camp,’ said Chas, ‘waiting for the open door, the blank expression, the finger pointing towards the abyss, I asked myself where love had gone – had it drained away into the cracks between the planks in the floor beneath our lice-infested bunks, down into the deepest recesses of this planet from where it had once emerged? Was that what these places were for – a way to strip away the last vestiges of humanity, leaving us less than a mound of bones that were indistinguishable one from the other? I asked my father and my grandfather, was this ignominy really the end for all of us? I told them I had forgotten what hope looked like, we had been kept in the dark for so long that darkness was all we knew. My father did not have the words but my grandfather, the rabbi, told me that there was always a chance, that I should run if I had the slightest opportunity and never stop, the elbow in my cheek, the boot in my back, the bullet in my spine, nothing should stop me. If I escaped then all of my family would escape in me, if I were free, if they could see me be free, even for a split second then that would be a form of victory that would carry them through the end. I hated him for that, I wanted them to fight, to die fighting, clawing at the face of their enemy, but that was not in their design, they were great thinkers, but their hands would not form into fists.

  ‘When they came, on the day that the last vestige of my humanity drained from my body, the door opened and I was through it, the butt of a gun hit me in the face but I kept on running like a headless chicken and they let me. Where was I going to? I was an ant whose kingdom had once seemed eternal, destroyed by the child with boiling water until everywhere I turned there was degradation. But I was quick and they saw that this mongrel, this odd Catholic Jew could be of use, that I was worth keeping alive for the moment. I was used to ferry messages from one part of the camp to another, from commandant to commandant, I was the fucking internet. To other Jews, I became a jinx. I was a rag doll, fighting with the German dogs for scraps from the table, I was more despised than the Kapos but I survived, when even the dogs died I survived and yet in so many ways I did not survive. My grandfather was wrong. I died with my family, hand in hand with them and what you see, the husk that remains, is indestructible but empty.’

  And as Chas felt Dorsal’s grip fail and gravity pulled him with her persistent grasp, he knew he could defy even her. He closed his eyes and prepared to fly like one of Chagal’s winged horses.

  Chapter 40

  It took Chas more than a minute to open his eyes again and when he did so he realised that Daniel’s grandmother, Bernice, had caught him and deposited him on the floor of another desecrated crypt beside Ferris and Dorsal. Viewing himself for a moment through her wicked eyes, Chas could see that to her the three of them were of no more importance than butterflies pinned behind a sheet of dusty glass.

  ‘I was just climbing back up the ladder from the supermarket with my shopping, when I saw you clowns and decided I had better intervene before you drew any more attention to my little eagle’s nest,’ said Bernice.

  ‘Yes, I saw that,’ said Ferris, ‘but the other route looked far more exciting.’

  ‘You knew there was a fucking ladder and you didn’t tell us. Right, that’s it, I am going to actually rip your leg off and stick it up your arsehole.’ Dorsal lurched towards Ferris but was prevented from reaching him because the slightly built sixty-year-old woman who had plucked him out of the air with Ferris still attached to his ears, appeared to have him in a half nelson. He thought he might be falling in love.

  ‘What about Daniel?’ Ferris enquired reluctantly.

  ‘Oh I grabbed that and took it upstairs about ten minutes ago. It appeared to be relatively intact.’

  *

  Up in the shed, space was at a premium. Bernice had sectioned off a reception room, a bedroom and a bathroom/kitchen/conservatory/abattoir and every wall, every item of furniture, every square inch of flooring was decorated with dried and drying human blood and assorted detritus. It was a scene of singular, wretched desolation – much like McDonalds in Finsbury Park but without the plastic straws.

  ‘I love what you’ve done with the place,’ murmured Chas, searching forlornly for somewhere to sit which would not stain him permanently.

  ‘Excuse me for just a second boys, I just have to pop next door and polish off a little unfinished business,’ chirped Bernice.

  There was a scrotum shrivelling howl before Daniel’s grandmother re-emerged with the dripping severed head of the actor who had, until very recently, played Dr Who.

  ‘This is just another example of the way in which TV lies to you boys, look and learn. They tell you these time lords regenerate after they die but I’ve beheaded three of the fuckers and they all stay as dead as this one.’

  Daniel’s grandmother waited with disappointment for a response but since her guests all appeared to be rigamortised with horror, she felt obliged to fill the conversational void.

  ‘So what brings you to see your nana, Daniel? Forgotten the recipe for chicken soup?’

  ‘My father wants to kill me – I love him but he just sees me as prey.’

  ‘Love? Well you certainly didn’t inherit that from our side of the family. Anyway, despising you seems reasonable enough. On the day you were born there was a game of pass the parcel and you and Saul had to fight for the last seat. Selfish of you, don’t you think – leaving your sibling to die. You are clearly unfamiliar with the lyrics of The Hollies seminal 1969 number one, He Ain’tHeavy, He’s My Brother.’

  ‘How can I be blamed? I was only a few seconds hold when he died.’

  ‘Seems a little bit weak as excuses go.’

  ‘I’ve come all this way, don’t you have any advice for me?’

  ‘You need to man up.’

  ‘I’m eight and my thirty-two stone police sergeant father is trying to execute me and that’s all you have to say?’

  ‘You’re lucky to get that, sunshine. Any grandson of mine should be able to look after himself. These three however, I can help.’ She put down the severed head on the occasional table in front of them, went next door, popped back to turn the head round to face them and then came back again with a large, gore-soaked wooden chest.

  ‘This is for you, six eyes,’ she handed Ferris a huge sword/axe type weapon with two vicious spikes at either end. ‘This is for you, elephant boy,’ she gave Dorsal a large rectangular green metal box with ‘property of US Army’ written down the side. ‘It’s a rocket propelled grenade launcher,’ she explained helpfully.

  She walked over to Chas, took him by the hand and led him outside the shed, closing the door behind her. She pressed a small silk drawstring bag into his hand.

  ‘This contains everything you are going to need,’ said Bernice, ‘six coins – one each for the boys’ eyes – and a slip of paper on which I have written the Roman prayer for the dead; Ego sum dea, mortuanon sum.’

  ‘What about the weapons you gave them?’ asked Chas.

  ‘You could pitch up at 33 Bulstrode Avenue in the Starship fucking Enterprise, empty its entire array of photon torpedoes through the letterbox and it wouldn’t even slow my son down.’

  Chas stared at her with measured disgust. This woman was a different kind of evil…

  ‘My son and I are not the bad guys.’

  ‘That’s like telling me to ignore the sinking Titanic and have sympathy for the iceberg,’ said Chas.

  ‘My husband told me I needed a hobby, I tried needlepoint and yoga but they didn’t appeal, he was
too busy knocking seventy shades of shite out of myself and our kids to understand the landscape he was painting. I know we may seem like monsters to you but that isn’t even half the story.’

  ‘If something looks like a vulture, smells like a vulture and acts like a vulture then it might as well be a vulture,’ said Chas.

  ‘We were the victims, my children and I. Somewhere in the space between the punches and the degrading abuse we were…set adrift.’

  ‘And that justifies what you have done?’ asked Chas. ‘Is it somehow licence for that little boy’s father to lay in wait, in his home, to end his life? You cannot abrogate all responsibility for the Gomorrah you have built.’

  She took his right hand and placed it between her breasts – she was standing on the edge of the mountain. She held his left hand in hers. This was not tenderness, but it was all she had to offer.

  ‘Can you please stop me? Stop me and perhaps, just perhaps you can stop him,’ asked Bernice.

  He felt her heart race.

  ‘I cannot harm you, I am not equipped. It is not in my vocabulary.’

  ‘If you could have put a stop to the carnage all those years ago, to the plunder of your family and friends, wouldn’t you have done so, no matter how?’

  He had often wondered.

  He moved his right hand, it was no more than the tiniest of gestures but it was enough. She flew backwards and down and then she was gone.

  From an early age death had surrounded him like a forest fire, leaving him with nowhere to hide, taking everyone and everything he cherished until love itself perished in the flames. Now he knew, finally, it was time to stop running and make a stand. If death wanted to take these three children it was going to have to get past him first.

  Chapter 41

  DCI Moses Waif was the commander of a crack police specialist firearms and hostage situations unit. ‘I am the commander of a crack police specialist firearms and hostage situations unit,’ he told the reflection in his bathroom mirror as he stood flicking the floss in and out of the gaps between his unruly teeth. He raised his left eyebrow and the corner of his mouth exactly twenty-five degrees (he had measured) and held them in place until he felt his cheek beginning to cramp. This was ‘triumphant glare number 5’ – it made him look steely and magnificent. ‘I like it,’ he told his reflection and his reflection liked it back. He was on top of his game.

  He entered his kitchen which was glutted with child-related ephemera and picked his way to the best chance of sitting down the room had to offer, the top of an upturned filing cabinet. All chair-related surfaces had long ago been mandated for nappies – unused, ancient, full and any combination of the three. His two-year-old son Noah paused from his routine of throwing all food items from his high chair and then screaming for them to be returned, to dissect the man who purported to be his father with his blue-grey stare.

  Moses sat down and excavated an inadequately small landing area for his cereal bowl, in a table that groaned under the weight of every cooking utensil and receptacle he and his wife had ever possessed, each one more debased with the remnants of culinary disasters.

  Moses tried the ‘triumphant glare number 5’ on his son – a ray of sunlight played through the kitchen window and illuminated his face and he imagined that it made each of his features effervesce.

  ‘I told you not to do that with your face, it scares the shit out of him,’ snorted his wife Charon, as she blurred through the tiny room on the way to clean baby sick off her baby sick coloured blouse.

  Moses searched his son’s features but he stubbornly refused to resemble him in any way.

  Minnow, their opulently disgruntled au pair, lurched into the kitchen, opened the fridge, took out the last carton of milk, drank it from the carton, swirled around the remaining dregs, drained these, held the carton up to the light to make certain that what remained was so insubstantial that it would prove insufficient to extract even the smallest essence of the DNA of the donating cow and put the empty carton back into the fridge.

  Minnow was of indeterminate gender (it stated this on his/her application form for the job) and had a physique that was half-obese and half-anorexically thin. It wore a kimono and nothing else, which was often left alarmingly agape. Moses had never glimpsed the undercarriage which lay below, he feared it too much.

  ‘What about a little bit of cleaning in here?’ Moses asked with forced joviality.

  Minnow stopped in the midst of a rapid flounce back in the direction of his/her room and launched his/her pupils into the roof of his/her head as if they were two tiny spacecraft. The following conversation was conducted with his/her back to Moses.

  ‘I clin.’

  ‘What do you clean?’ demanded Moses, surveying a kitchen which appeared to showcase the total collapse of Western civilisation.

  ‘I clin dis,’ Minnow held up his/her mug which contained a drink which he/she made every morning and every evening that was of a greenish brown hue and was almost certainly toxic to humans.

  ‘It’s true,’ intervened Moses’ wife, now in a baby sick coloured suit, ‘that cup has been cleaned to a subatomic level.’

  ‘And I clean dis,’ Minnow whisked up his/her kimono exposing an arse which glinted in the morning haze and exited the room.

  Moses looked despairingly at his wife as she skimmed past him with her work case under one arm and a large pile of school exercise books against her right hip.

  ‘If you want to change au pairs again, Moses, you will have to sack this one – good luck with that by the way – advertise for a new one and interview them, I haven’t got time, I have to leave for school right now.’

  He looked at Noah who was munching down on a huge rusk with stoic determination. ‘Tell mummy what daddy does for a job, Noah.’

  Noah’s eyes brimmed with joy, he stopped mid chomp, put down the rusk carefully into a lake of dribble – this was the thing he did for daddy and he was proud of it.

  ‘You de the colander of a crap piece of special flying pants and a goosey station.’

  ‘Fuck me, our kid’s a genius – shall we call The Times?’ shouted Charon from the depths of their walk-in fridge.

  ‘I don’t see why it always has to be me who has to take time off work.’

  ‘It’s not as if you do anything important, Moses. I mean, shouting through a loudhailer, the occasional bit of ducking and shooting, anyone could do it.’

  ‘Shooting people is important, Charon, especially if you’re the person getting shot.’

  ‘Yes yes, as I say, all very interesting but what do you actually achieve?’

  ‘I negotiate with armed kidnappers in high pressure scenarios, I free hostages, I save lives, I make a difference.’

  ‘And when’s the last time you managed to do any of that? I thought your record this year was three sieges – no one saved, everyone dead. As I say, anyone can do that. You want to try explaining to a class of rabid ten-year-olds about why they should stop trying to set light to their geography teacher and come back to school to learn French, that’s pressure, sunshine, not indiscriminately wiping out half of North London with big boys’ toys.’

  Moses’ mobile rang – a call from DCI Minerva – and he was relieved to bring yet another one-sided argument with the most frightening woman in the world to an end.

  ‘We’ve got a rogue policeman, Waif. He’s already killed a bank robber, a junior officer and a headmaster. We need you to flush him out before the situation escalates. He’s armed and he’s wounded and he’s the size of a bus.’

  ‘I’m leaving now, Sir.’ Moses assumed his ‘I’m on a life or death mission’ expression and stood up hurriedly.

  ‘Oh, and Waif, try not to kill everyone this time.’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  Moses put on his bulletproof jacket and strode purposefully toward the door, his mind already awash with tactical stratagems and manpower synergies – he was a world beater.

  ‘Where the fuck do you think you’re going, sunshine?
’ Charon had put on her coat and held a case brimming with exam papers.

  ‘I’ve got to go.There’s a situation that needs my tactical assault team.’

  ‘Not before you empty the dishwasher and change Noah,’ said Charon. She gave him the kind of look which Medusa employed to turn men to stone, ruffled his hair, kissed Noah and strode out of the house.

  *

  It is difficult to really appreciate the finer points of a meal consisting of a thirty-six piece Chinese feast, a family-sized quattro formaggi pizza and a whole Tandoori chicken, when you are bleeding to death. It was not that M had lost his galactic appetite, it was more that food which is covered in your own plasma all tastes the same after a while.

  M had tried to patch his wounds with the tiny sticking plasters that he had found at the back of his bathroom cabinet but after experimenting with other objects, found that the only effective method of staunching the flow was gaffer taping half a dozen copies of Playboy over the entry sites.

  He sat in his favoured green velour armchair and turned the gun over and over in his hands. Its cold weight was reassuring. He pointed the gun towards the front door and dug around in the allotment of his memories to unearth Daniel’s face, but he could not retrieve it. He could not remember the face of his son and he needed to remember it if he was going to erase it and him forever.

  Chapter 42

  Moses lay on his stomach, the damp undulating tarmac of the road outside M’s home a reassuring presence. He clenched and unclenched his abs, threw back his shoulders, adjusted the lapels of his bulletproof jacket, swept his dirty blond hair out of his eyes and imagined how he must appear to Stables and Thorn, the police marksmen who lay beside him under the cover of their armoured police vehicle.

  ‘I think of myself as Odysseus,’ whispered Moses, ‘fighting and defeating the Cyclops against all the odds, an indefatigable warrior on a legendary mission.’

  Thorn looked up from his rifle sight and into Moses’ eyes. Moses felt that his expression conveyed more than respect – perhaps even adoration.