Bed of Nails

by Varenne, Antonin

“So just stop being rude and making such a din. I’m tired.”

  The parrot moved towards the armchair.

  Once on his master’s shoulder, he started pecking the dressings, while saying quietly, “Come on, sweetie”, in the warm voice his mistress had used when encouraging a less than virile client. Churchill could mimic the intonations perfectly, though Guérin didn’t suppose he had any idea what it was about. Still. The only thing the parrot had not inherited from anyone else was its anger.

  Guérin had always needed, somewhere in his life, a man who could get angry.

  He pressed “play”.

  As soon as the naked young man started running between the cars, Churchill began to laugh.

  8

  When John P. Nichols had woken the first time, he had felt only pain as shadows danced before his eyes. Muffled sounds, smells, and a roof over his head. He had closed his eyes and gone back to sleep. The second time, he concentrated and saw a woman looming over him. A peroxide blonde, like a Dutch advertisement for peanut butter. She was brandishing an orange chainsaw in a plastic forest: her little breasts were naked and perky, and she was wearing tiny denim shorts. She was holding the machine as if it were a precious object, charged with horsepower, her lips were parted, and she was flashing her come-and-get-me eyes. Before he lapsed back into sleep, John stammered his apologies to this woman who was impatiently waiting for a brawny lumberjack to get the saw started for her with his big hands. He apologised for not feeling up for it, and slipped away into the plastic forest, with the feeling that the pain was subsiding.

  Once the chainsaw had started spitting out sparks, and the blonde had slipped out of her shorts, while John used his teeth on a ring piercing her navel, a hooded man appeared and started licking his face. He woke up, and found a dog’s black snout up against his nose.

  A barrel-chested voice filled the air.

  “Down, boy!”

  The dog, panting, rested its head on John’s chest.

  A Husqvarna power tools calendar from the 1980s was pinned to the wall in front of him. On the page for April, the blonde, as faded as her photograph, had her shorts back on again. The surroundings briefly swam before his eyes, then he felt he had come down to earth again. Under the calendar, leaning up against an unlit wood-burning stove, were his rucksack and his bow. He was on a low camp bed in a wooden cabin. From his lying position, he could see a shelf with a few books, a dark cap hanging on a hook, some rough plank flooring, and two legs of a metal table. Between the metal legs, appeared the bottoms of a pair of trousers ending in two heavy leather boots.

  “Here, boy!”

  The dog, a mongrel with greying fur, wriggled to the foot of the bed.

  The voice made the air in the cabin move and John felt it vibrate through his ribs. He raised himself on one elbow. His neck was stiff and his head heavy. His first immediate thought was “how clean it is here”. The hut was immaculate. He tried to turn on his side, but his stomach wouldn’t let him.

  “Ah! Shit.”

  The boots moved on the floor. His second, more developed, thought was to his impression of the face of the man who was leaning over him. He was the spitting image of Edward Bunker.

  “Where the fuck am I?”

  “You speak French? Yes or no? Where do you come from?”

  “The U.S.A.”

  “Can you get up?”

  He really was Bunker: green eyes, hair not quite so white, but the resemblance went further than his features. It was the face of a wild beast who had worn his teeth down on the bars of a cage.

  “Am I in prison?”

  Bunker raised his eyebrows, stopping a smile.

  “You catch on quick, beat up or not.”

  “I’m a psychologist.”

  “A psychologist! Shit, Mesrine, get a load of that.”

  The black dog sprang up.

  “Down, boy!”

  On Bunker’s hand, a cross tattooed with ink surrounded with little lines, no doubt symbolising the divine light of window in a prison high-security wing. Maybe he didn’t look all that much like the famous ex-con and crime writer from Los Angeles after all, but he was from the same stable. John was sure of it.

  The dog poked its head through Bunker’s legs and looked at him as if it were meeting a shrink for the first time.

  “Yanks come in bigger sizes of everything, eh? Shrinks don’t look like you round here. Not so bloody stupid either.”

  “It’s not a prison …?”

  “Way off. Public garden.”

  “But you were in prison, right?”

  The grizzled bear tensed. The dog shrank back at the same time, fur ruffled, looking fiercer than at first.

  “Now tell me, what the fuck you were doin’ in my park?”

  John groped for an honest answer.

  “Someone stole my car. And I got beat up because of somebody else. And I like trees.”

  The dog relaxed its ears, and sat down. On the keeper’s face, which had all the expression of a breeze block, loneliness was fighting a battle with distrust. John managed to twist himself to a sitting position on the bed, clutching his belly.

  “I live in a hut too. Were you in for long?”

  The old keeper put his hand behind his back and pulled out a small weighted cosh. It just fitted in his hand, dark, polished and in theory unthreatening, as harmless as the dog. John followed it with his eyes, one hand on the back of his neck. It landed on the table. Crash.

  “Long enough to know a dropout when I see one. You been in the shit long?”

  He was still trying to give an honest answer, because Bunker clearly had a nose for the truth. A talent that years in jail must beat into you. But the big American couldn’t speak and just looked at him without saying a word.

  “Yeah, I can see it wasn’t yesterday.”

  John stood up slowly. The cabin was only about three metres by five, and between them they almost filled it. He didn’t find it hard to look unthreatening, but Bunker was still in a defensive position, legs apart. The old lag had the hard-boiled grin of a cock of the walk. His park-keeper’s costume fitted him about as well as a theory would a wardrobe.

  The American bent down to look at the dog.

  “What does ‘Mesrine’ mean? Sounds like a chemical or protein or something.”

  Bunker’s thin lips parted and he ended up smiling. Between his incisors was a gap, oddly like a little boy’s. But the smile made him even more dangerous. An uncontrollable libertarian madness. The smile and the eyes were fuelled by some kind of nuclear reactor, that he must have been carrying round since his childhood. Logically enough, it had taken him to prison.

  “Bloody hell, don’t they teach you anything at shrink school? Mesrine’s not a chemical! He was an enemy of the system! And how come you sometimes talk with an American accent, but not all the time?”

  Bunker’s confidence in strangers was not that well developed.

  “My mother’s French.”

  Bunker looked serious and consulted an old clock with a scarred glass face.

  “10.00 a.m., kid. Let’s have a quick shot of red.”

  The idea of a glass of red wine made John’s stomach rise in revolt.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  The cabin was an improved garden shed, furnished by the joint efforts of the Red Cross and the ex-convict. A cell, clean and tidy. Three books, the unlit stove, a shelf for clothes, a naked bulb swinging from the ceiling, two chairs, a table, the camp bed and a mat for Mesrine. In one corner stood a small wooden chest, repainted God knew how many times, a hot plate and three bowls. The light entered through two windows with small panes, and behind one of them in a plastic pot some red geraniums were swaying in the wind. If it had had four wheels it would have been a gipsy caravan; made of canvas it would be a tepee; of corrugated iron, a shack in a shanty town, except that the floor wasn’t beaten earth. While Bunker was feeling around in his kitchen corner, John went over to his bag and checked that the bow was still in one piece. The
confused memory of the latest events snatched a grimace from him. At least he was on his feet, and although he didn’t have much experience of being beaten up, it didn’t feel as if anything serious was broken. He scrutinised more carefully the photograph for April 1983 on the wall. A blonde pin-up, something between Playboy and Pierre et Gilles, a madonna for prison cells, faded but forever young, like a memory. He lifted the page and glanced at May. A garden strimmer this time. And more generous breasts. Twelve women for Bunker. John smiled at the thought of these girls, dreaming of an artistic career by posing nude and then ending up as fantasies for long-term prisoners. It was charity work. You had to give them that. Bunker put two Duralex glasses on the table, with an unlabelled litre of wine.

  “Right then, Miss April, better put some clothes on, we got company.”

  Bunker didn’t smile at his own joke. His absence of humour was profound. His soul was worn to a thread. When he wanted to laugh, Bunker probably had to hide in a cellar. Perhaps he even hammered his own fingers. Or maybe he was smiling inside. Like John and the fur-trapper in the shop window, his prison identity had taken him over. You couldn’t see what lay underneath, unless you could penetrate the gap in his teeth. Which he took care to show as little as possible.

  The first mouthful of wine practically took the skin off John’s throat.

  “This is the better stuff. Watch out, after this it’s just plonk.”

  No irony, but the serious tones of someone who has experienced the rationing of essentials. Bunker smacked his lips, savouring the acid richness of freedom, then looked John straight in the eyes. Apparently it was for the first time, since John had not noticed before the scar running from his forehead across half his right cheek, taking in the eyelid. A thin white line that slightly distorted the wrinkles on his face.

  “Kid, in prison, you can wait five years before a mate tells you anything personal. What’s good about life outside, you can make up time, instead of wasting it. Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to tell me your life story, but thing is, I’d like to know how this American shrink ends up at my place, in a state like that. ’Cos maybe you didn’t notice, but you fell down just behind my shack. Even Mesrine heard you.”

  Violence, fear, sincerity and solitude were all strangely combined in the pale green of his eyes. That gaze reminded John of Alan’s: more cunning, but perhaps a bit less wild. Using AJJA 17, extra strong tobacco, the old man was rolling a cigarette between his huge fingers. Precious gestures. John lit a Gitane and put the packet on the table.

  “I came to Paris, because this friend of mine died. He owed money to some dealers. They want me to pay his bills for him. So they beat me up.”

  Bunker tipped the glass up and drained it, then looked at John again with his weary eyes.

  “Your turn.”

  “What?”

  “You get a question now.”

  The wine was doing him good, even if it burned. He thought for a few seconds and rubbed his bruised temple.

  “Was 1983 when you came out of prison for the last time?”

  “No, last time I went in. Came out in ’91. Since then I’ve stuck to my promise. Calendar’s the only thing I kept. When I see it, it reminds me what I kept telling myself for eight years. Next time, stay out.”

  Mesrine rubbed his haunch against his master’s. Bunker patted his head. The enemy of the system accepted some masculine caresses. John took another swig and the tissues of his trachea seemed to adjust a bit better. The green eyes narrowed, hooded by the wrinkled eyelids.

  “That bow, that’s gonna be for some kind of vengeance, is it, for your mate?”

  Vengeance? For Alan? The idea made him smile sending a stab of pain through his jaw.

  “Vengeance isn’t really the right word. He did it himself. He committed suicide.”

  Bunker refilled the glasses, and before drinking rubbed the cross on the back of his hand. He drank the wine off in one long gulp and banged the glass on the table.

  “Next question, I know what’s coming. No, I never killed nobody. Maybe I came close once or twice. Armed robbery, that’s what I went down for. Always worked alone, except two or three times. That was a bad idea too. Two years, five years, eight years – fifteen years inside.”

  He rubbed his hand again.

  “First time, I nearly died of being lonely. Last time, the joint was heaving, lot of trouble.”

  His big fingers touched the scar.

  “This place now, courtesy of city hall, charity for an ex-con. Don’t get any more pay than if I was sewing mailbags, but at least I get a bit of peace.”

  Bunker dropped his head and looked down into the glass. John guessed the older man was about twice his age, sixty-five or so, but still sturdy with it. The toughest thing about Bunker was the way he spoke: every word like a nail being hammered into a plank. His words were backed up by reality, they had the solidity of objects.

  “So, kid, this friend who killed himself, who was he?”

  The question was transparent: tell me who your friends are, I’ll tell you who you are. But you couldn’t do better than Alan as far as Bunker was concerned: the kind of friend you get beaten up for is as good as a reference. John sat up and drank some more. He felt he needed to nail down reality with words as well, nails in Alan’s coffin.

  “My name’s John.” He held out his hand and Bunker shook it in his square paw. The old man did not give his own name but accepted a formal introduction.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Plenty of wine here, son.”

  John took another swig of rotgut.

  “I met Alan about thirteen years ago, in ’95. I was twenty, he was twenty-three. I lived in Los Angeles, Venice Beach, and I’d left my mother in San Francisco. I’d started college, but I didn’t want to live on campus. I found a room near the shore. In the evenings, I used to go along the board walk by the sea, drink a beer, eat something, watch the world go by. Venice Beach, you see a side of America on show that’s not always nice, but it’s always interesting. Always something going on. Music, street theatre, girls roller blading in bikinis, families, preachers pushing supermarket trolleys, veterans, old folk, shops, artists, fortune-tellers. One evening, I was on a terrace eating a sandwich and looking out at the ocean. On the other side of the Walk, this guy spread out a blanket and took off his T-shirt. He started with fire-eating, then he put needles in his arms and legs. When too many people had stopped to watch, I got up. This fakir looked sad, but he smiled all the time, so people didn’t notice. I don’t know if it was because I’m tall, or because I was looking fascinated, but he hauled me out of the audience and gave me this empty Jim Beam bottle and told me to break it on his head. Just a gag, he was doing the show, pretending to be in rehab. He was trying to stop drinking, so this was therapy. Everyone was laughing. I just stood still. I couldn’t do it. The people started laughing more than ever. Alan looked at me, and I was the sad one. Then he insulted everyone, and went on doing that till they all left.”

  John stopped. Overcome by his memories, he had forgotten Bunker and the cabin. But the keeper was still patiently listening, as if he expected the shrink’s story would last hours. Without changing expression, Bunker said.

  “Have to start on the ordinary stuff now.”

  Another bottle appeared, the glasses were refilled.

  “After that, he took me to a bar, saying I’d really made him laugh, standing there with the bottle in my hand. But in fact he seemed depressed. It was then that I realised the most important thing about Alan. It was only when he was joking that he told the truth. His trick with the bottle was funny. He really was an alcoholic. When I hadn’t been able to hit him, for reasons I later realised, he was possibly on the point of killing himself right there, in front of all those people.

  “He used to come almost every evening after that, to do his street act in Venice. Sometimes we went for a drink. I paid. After listening to all his jokes and nonsense, I understood that with his system of reverse t
ruths, he was on heroin. It took longer before he started making cracks about gays. And I picked up on that too. Well, for another couple of years that’s how it was, we’d see each other now and then. He would sometimes vanish for a bit then come back with a new tattoo and a new act, more violent. I finished my first degree and wanted to specialise in behavioural psychology. I began a master’s. I was doing this research on post-traumatic disorders associated with war, because we’ve got a lot of those back home, and people don’t want to talk about them. We built the country on them, and organised it round them, but they don’t exist. Alan had been gone a few months. One day he came knocking at my door. He was having withdrawal symptoms, but he wanted to stop. He stayed with me, and he was clean for a few weeks. One evening I was reading through my notes, and he said with a laugh that I could do some research on him. He said he’d been in Iraq in the first Gulf War. A homosexual fakir who’s seen combat – there weren’t a lot of those. But if they were anywhere, Venice Beach was the most likely spot. Perhaps I’d already suspected that, and I was already making choices because I’d met him. I don’t know. But his story became a part of my life. Before it became my work.

  “You can really only understand Alan’s life if you go back to the beginning. He grew up gay, on a farm in Kansas, with parents who were Methodists. They went to church every day, and all day Sundays! All the rest was a logical consequence of that, and of his personality. Alan was 90 per cent rage. The day after he told me he’d been in Iraq, he vanished again. With my T.V., my stereo and my records. He came back of course, not long after. He’d started to use my place as a refuge. He never propositioned me, and he never brought any partners home. That was an unwritten rule he seemed to have decided on. And that went on for another two years. He would come, he would steal from me, he’d feel better, he’d go off again and come back in a worse state. There were always problems when he was around: stealing, dealers, fights in bars, tantrums. I was carrying on with my life, and he kept bringing chaos into it. Every time it got a bit worse. He had gangrene under his skin. I was working on plenty of other cases like his, but he was a friend, I wasn’t his shrink. Then in ’99, I began my Ph.D., still on the same subject. I know now it was because of him that I wanted to go on with the research. Anyway, about that time he asked me straight out; did I want to know what he had been doing in Iraq. I finished my thesis in 2006, and in the end the subject wasn’t what I had expected it to be.