The Natural Law

by Steve Attridge

  “I didn’t realise you were that depressed,” I said.

  “Just unwinding from a life of toil and stress.”

  “Rich bastard loafing from where I stand.”

  “Actually I wasn’t watching anyway. I was thinking about your mum. I always liked her.”

  “I should go and see her,” I said, guilt immediately kicking in.

  “Let’s do it. Now.”

  “I can’t. I’ve got things to do.”

  The truth was I had over five hours before meeting with David, so half an hour later we arrived at the small nursing home where my mother spends the days in either a fog or a hallucinogenic carnival, I never knew which. Seeing her was an ordeal, not just because she was so reduced by incipient dementia, but because I was still angry with her for not telling me the name of my father, or giving me some clue that I could pursue. Now it was probably too late – she wouldn’t remember even if she wanted to, although her mind came and went. Reason tells me that she was trying to protect me from a man who was on the wrong side of the law. Perhaps she feared I would go to the bad. She didn’t understand that there are a thousand ways of doing that, and they don’t all involve the law. I’ve tried several of them.

  We sat down in her little room, the TV flickering out some mindless bland daytime trash that she probably never looked at. A lot of fat people with bad teeth were shouting at each other. I unwrapped an Everton mint and gave it to her. She looked at it uncomprehendingly, then there was a flicker of a smile and she took it, popped it in her mouth and started to suck noisily. I never knew from one visit to the next how much of her would still be here, how much there was left to disappear. The colours ran a little drier each time. I followed a routine of telling her that everything was fine – job, marriage, Cass – a little bundle of lies that took about ten minutes, then there was silence, except for the sweet sucking. If she had her teeth in it would end with a few crunches. I love her but we have no common landscape now. The best part of my visit is when I kiss her goodbye and I turn at the door and she gives a little wave. She must have some sort of strange inner life because there is a notepad by her bed, full of scrawled drawings of bizarre phantasms – birdlike creatures and flying stick harpies; perhaps these are her companions in the darkness where her mind has tripped to. The odd thing is that no one ever sees her draw them. They simply appear several times a week.

  Come with me, more than forty ragged years ago, to a basement flat in a building held together by soot and bad dreams, to Whitechapel Victorian tenement buildings before the area became sanitised and yuppified by BBC executives. These were playgrounds of ill health, bad sanitation and community feeling punctuated by extreme violence. My mother took a bus west to clean for the well off, then came back to look after me. We had two rooms and a shared toilet and I washed every night at the sink in a closet kitchen. It was Hogarthianly grim, but I knew no better and my imagination was fired by the squalor and the nightly stories my Mum told me about the area. She’d lean back with a cup of tea, old slippers on, still a young woman but ancient to me, and talk about the East End: fragments, ghosts, half remembered anecdotes. Now, I think she was talking to herself mostly and not to a terrified but entranced eight year old: “There was old one-eyed Marty who drank with Fergie the dwarf and they was doing a tailor’s shop one night but Marty left the hand brake off the van they was loading on account of his one eye and it rolled down and smacked ‘em both into the wall. Only way they could tell which was which when they scraped ‘em off is that there was less of Fergie. Stupid takin’ a dwarf on a job like that – anyone who clocks ‘im will remember. Jack the Ripper did all his business around here. There was others too. Springheel Jack. Killed people then escaped across the rooftops like he had a devil in him. My Aunt Peg swore she saw the ghost of ‘im once in Bateman’s Row makin’ ‘is way to Liverpool street where ‘e ‘id in the sidings. If you saw ‘im ‘e knew and you was done for.”

  Such was the literary content of my education. I spent much of my childhood trying not to look up in case I saw Springheel Jack and his red eye torched me and I would be marked for a grisly butcher’s death. Something of all this settled in my soul and is still broiling there, and makes me watchful, suspicious, intoxicated with the night. Even as a minnow I realised I was in the grip of something because as much as I fearfully watched the rooftops for the shadow, the switchblade eye, the quick jump and slice in the dark, I also started to crave it. I wanted to see him and, more importantly, to be seen, to register in the consciousness of the downright wicked. The prickle on the back of my neck became a strange friend. It is like the kick people get from slash fest and horror movies, only I wanted it real. I liked the taste of fear, the cordite of danger in my nostrils, the quickening rush through the brain. That’s when it started for me. A psychologist would say that was the moment my pathological obsession activated; I would say that was when the great adventure started, half in love with easeful death, as Keats would have it. The killer I was seeking now had something of this shadowy childhood world about him. My mum did her best and I love her for it. I just wish she’d given me a name to follow.

  *

  Symon smiled, moved his chair closer and took her hand. He started humming, then singing softly ‘Summertime’ from Porgy and Bess. He sang in a husky baritone and looked directly into her eyes. Slowly she focussed and returned the look. When he got to the refrain ‘So hush little baby, don’t you cry’ she joined in, a birdlike croaky warble that broke my heart. She closed her eyes on the end note and when she opened them she smiled warmly at him, then at me.

  “Symon,” she said. “Nice lad. Full of mischief, but you can’t ‘elp liking ‘im.”

  My hangover blistered and fell apart. I grabbed her bony little hands in mine.

  “That’s right, Mum. That’s right. My friend Symon. He came round after school.”

  “Cupcakes,” she said, then her eyes flickered and she eclipsed, her hands dropped and she stared expressionlessly at the floor.

  “Remember?” said Symon.

  Of course I did. As a special treat on a Friday she’d bring in two cupcakes for us, with a glass of milk. We felt like princes. Symon had opened a door. We stayed a few more minutes, I kissed her goodbye, she waved at me, then we left.

  “I’m grateful,” I said as we drove back to my flat.

  “We’re friends.”

  “When we were young did she ever say anything about my father?” I asked.

  He took his time.

  “Sorry, Paul. Nothing. But if you want help in tracing him…”

  “It’s OK. I’ve tried every route I can think of. It’s a stupid obsession.”

  I decided to break a habit. It was a risk but everything important is precisely that. I took a deep breath and told him about my other life, and my interest in the shadowy side of humanity. As he listened I was reminded of what I liked about Symon – he never judged. He listened and weighed up and responded, but you never had to feel guarded. I even told him about Anna. When I’d finished he took his time, digesting all this new and improbable information about me.

  “Jesus. You could always surprise me. There I was thinking you’d settled for backwater academia. I don’t know what to say. But you have to be careful, Paul. Whoever this nutter is, he’s a minefield.”

  I nodded. The one thing I didn’t tell him is that I liked the danger; it was a form of addiction. More than that, I felt seduced by it.

  “I was wondering if you’d help,” I asked.

  He looked surprised.

  “You have a map in your head of how international business works. I’m trying to trace a company – Ocean Investment. It’s not registered but it made payments to Andy King. I have box numbers but nothing else.”

  “I’ll get on it, I need something to do,” said Symon. “Il est nécessaire de travailler, sinon par goût, au moins par désespoir.”

  “‘It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least fro
m despair.’ Baudelaire.” I said. “I forgot how much you liked him. You always were a miserable sod.”

  “You and me together. He’s the only thing I can remember from University. My head’s been full of excel spread sheets, export contracts and profit margins for the past fifteen years. Actually, helping you out will be a breath of fresh air.”

  Chapter X

  ‘I won’t slave for beggar’s pay

  likewise gold and jewels

  but I would slave to learn the way

  to sink your ship of fools’

  Robert Hunter

  I walked past Parliament and towards Portcullis House, where a lot of MPs, including bastard David, had offices. The whole world and its dog seemed to be taking photographs of other people taking photographs. It baffled me that Parliament had become a tourist theme park when the only person who should be allowed near it is Guy Fawkes. Portcullis House is a suitably ambiguous name, with associations of fortification, I guess mostly to keep dirty little secrets in and questions out. It was designed to resemble and feel like a ship inside, with offices and passages of bowed windows and light oak finishing. Presumably the metaphor is meant to suggest a wise ship of state, steering the nation to calmer waters and greater prosperity. I think a ship of fools all at sea in an impending storm with no one among the crazed cargo of deluded fools aboard able to read a compass accurately is more appropriate. The fact that it is not really a ship is a good allegory for all governments – they do not really govern and are simply there to create the illusion that we have choice. The world is actually run by a cartel of mega rich people who have most of the money, own the resources, take the profits, run the banks, and own or influence the media so we only know what we are allowed to know, and most of that is a dung heap of lies. Some call this conspiracy thinking – I call it reality.

  Such were my happy thoughts as I was frisked for the third time by an apparatchik armed with a pistol and a pepper spray, questioned by a young woman smiling like a predatory snake, and photographed by at least three dozen CCTV cameras. This Stalinist welcome combined with my hangover and the emotional scene with my mother created a lethal brew of rage and despair, and I had to take a few deep breaths to refrain from punching David in the face as he approached, smiling blandly and wearing an Armani suit paid for out of the public purse. I could see he was deliberating on whether or not to hold out a welcoming hand – rejection would make him look foolish, but not to do so might seem overtly frosty. I realised that he probably gauged every move like that now – not in terms of its value but how it would be perceived. Life as a giant PR manoeuvre. I put my hands firmly in my pockets to settle the matter for him.

  “Paul. Let me sign you in,” he said.

  I signed various bits of paper and was issued with a little badge, and then he led me into the bowels of the building. He was nervous, but also curious. He hoped that I was there to say that we could now all be grown up about things and the fact that he was bedding my wife was fine. Unless he had become a complete moron he’d also know that wasn’t going to happen. Finally we entered a small, clean office and I sat on a cheap IKEA chair while he sat on a £400 upholstered, swivel desk chair.

  “I’m glad you phoned. It’s time we cleared the air.”

  I decided to let him take the lead.

  “I suppose it’s because Lizzie has told you,” he continued.

  I smiled.

  “That I’ve asked her to marry me.”

  “Of course,” I lied. This was a bombshell.

  “All I ask, Paul, for the sake of our…of what was our friendship…is that you respect the fact that I do genuinely love her and agree to a divorce. ASAP. Let’s be civilised about it.”

  I furrowed my brow and nodded sagely, revealing nothing of the seething cocktail of bile I was now becoming. My organs burned. His computer was on, which was what I’d hoped. My hangover was another piece of luck, as I looked like a corpse.

  “Are you alright? You look terrible, I mean, you always look terrible, but you look even worse,” he said.

  “Actually I don’t feel too well. You haven’t got an aspirin, have you?” I said.

  “Got some paracetamol somewhere,” he said, looking through a drawer.

  “No, I react badly to them. You haven’t got aspirin?”

  “Hang on. I’ll see if anyone in the café has any,” he said, and like a fool left the room. At worst I was hoping to prise Hugh Dillsburgh into the conversation, but this was better. I took the USB stick from my pocket and started to download all his emails. Then I had a quick look through the files and downloaded one called PRESS ISSUES. I finished with about three seconds to spare before David returned. He gave me a couple of aspirin and I swallowed one with a gulp of Commons spring water.

  “Paul, I know this has all been a bit of a mess, and I’m truly sorry. What do you think?” he asked.

  “About it being a mess, about you being sorry, about being civilised, or what?”

  “You know what. A divorce.”

  I’d got more than I’d hoped for, so I didn’t have to pretend any more.

  “I think the only reason you want to marry Lizzie is because you’re worried about your public image, because you’re a pathetically ambitious little snot who wants a nice respectable marriage to help brownnose your slimy way up the career ladder, and it has nothing to do with love or desire or hunger or anything I could understand, or even, God forbid, respect..”

  His eyes narrowed and his lips thinned.

  “You come into my place of work, into bloody parliament, just to insult me?” he said, his cheeks whitening.

  “Where would you rather I go?” I asked.

  “Paul, you’re an insecure, egotistical shit,” he said.

  “Well done. Something real at last.”

  “Get out.”

  “You’re a parasite, David, even to the extent that you want to feed on the smoking ruin of my marriage. You’re a flaccid, self-entranced little grub squatting your furry arse along with all the other little grubs in this factory of lies and incompetence, all hoping to steal from the public purse. I hope a drone missile cops the lot of you one day soon and that I’m here to watch it.” Absolutely childish stuff, but great fun.

  He called Security on an internal phone and moments later a guard tooled up with enough weapons to fell a herd of buffalo appeared and smiled.

  “Get him out,” David said.

  “Would you come with me, sir?”

  “Are you asking me on a date?” I said.

  “I like a comedian. You can tell me a joke on the way out.”

  He was surprisingly strong and a few minutes later I found myself on the pavement. I was feeling better already. The whiff of risk and danger had warmed my blood. I went to a café and looked at the USB on my laptop. A lot of soap opera emails about who said what or who might vote which way. I would read them all more carefully later. A few from Lizzie: You’re the only one…your integrity, openness, the opposite of Paul…I love the smell of you, your hands on my back…And there it was – an email about Hugh Dillsburgh with the phrase: It really does look like a heart attack. Why the word ‘really’? This suggested there might be another reason for his death. Then six emails mentioning Ocean Investment. One was very telling: We cannot prove any links with the government, and in any case considering it was our baby we’d be in murky waters. This from Henry Kellas, a player in their ever burgeoning team of Press Officers. I looked in the PRESS ISSUES file. Several things interested me, but I only looked at one on OCEAN INVESTMENT. A lot of boring data but one telling phrase torn from a note pad: The weapons link must not get out, esp. re D.

  Now I had something. I didn’t have a clue what exactly, but when the fog cleared then perhaps faces, names and events would appear. Whatever all this was it seemed that both Government and Opposition were in bed together over it. It also gave me something to use with the mysterious Rod Whiteley. I’d been texted and told where to go
– the café in Dulwich Park. I just had time to get there. As I stood I got a text: Natural Law is preferable to political deceptions. You should know that by now. Remember the First Law of Nature. Gladiator. Number unknown. He was still watching me. I looked around, suspecting everyone and everything. The first Law of nature is from Hobbes’ Leviathan: ‘…that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war’. This character was at war with everyone, perhaps even me. I wondered if by going to see Rod Whiteley, whoever he was, I was putting him in trouble too.

  Chapter XI

  ‘Everything in this world sweats crime: the newspaper, the wall, the face of mankind.’

  Baudelaire

  I sat in the Dulwich Park café sipping a coffee. Ten minutes after five another text told me to go to the Crown and Greyhound and wait in the first bar on the left facing the pub. The pub is also known as the Dog, a big listed building, a fusion of two Victorian pubs, with an impressive fresco front. I ordered a Famous Grouse and sat by the door. A tall, forty-something, athletic-looking man in a leather jacket, far more expensive than my battered relic, was reading a paper opposite me. I knew he was aware of me and he eventually got up and as he passed me, said without looking, “Outside now. Silver Audi.”

  A driver stared straight ahead and a tubby man with bulldog jowls and Father Christmas eyes sat in the back. I got in next to him and the man from the pub slammed the door, and then joined the driver in the front. The car eased away and I waited for what was next.

  “Are you Rod Whiteley?” I asked.

  “Shut up,” said tubby man. I never did like Father Christmas.