The Liar's Promise
Page 7
‘You don’t know that.’
‘This isn’t a simple case of a cold or a dose of chickenpox, Tony.’
‘I never said it was. I—’
‘Or have you been discussing it with the tart at work? Perhaps she has all the answers.’
‘There is no “tart at work.” For Christ’s sake, Mel, I love you.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Yes.’
Mel took a drag of her cigarette and ground it out in a saucer. She would buy an ashtray tomorrow, along with more cigarettes. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I’m telling the truth.’
‘Where did Chloe get it from, then? Her imagination?’
A slight pause. ‘Probably.’
‘Is she pretty?’
‘Who?’
‘The bitch you’re screwing.’
‘No.’
‘Then you admit there is someone?’
‘Stop twisting my words.’
‘Stephanie Wallace,’ Mel said, the words tasting foul on her lips. ‘Remember?’
Tony ignored her. Seemed to take a sudden interest in his fingernails.
‘When did we last have sex?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘It’s a simple enough question. When did you stop fancying me, Tony?’
‘I do fancy—’
‘Is it because I put on a few pounds after Chloe’s birth?’
‘Now you’re being ridiculous.’
‘Am I?’
Tony walked to the kitchen, flapping his hand in the air, making a big deal of the smoke.
Mel followed him as far as the doorway. ‘Is she thinner than me?’
He took a bottle of Budweiser from the fridge and removed the top.
Mel fired another salvo. ‘Even your over-rational brain must be able to see that Chloe is picking up stuff she can’t possibly know.’
‘I never said she wasn’t.’
‘You admit she knows things, then?’
Tony swallowed half the beer before answering. ‘Maybe.’
‘About my mother?’
‘It seems that way.’
‘About Megan?’
‘Yes.’
‘So, why the hell am I expected to believe the one thing she says about you knocking off a tart at school is a load of crap?’
‘Because it is.’
Mel walked back into the lounge, lit a fresh cigarette and sat on the arm of the sofa. ‘If you were any sort of man, you’d tell me the truth.’
He poked his head around the door as if coming into full view might leave him open to a fatal wound. ‘What’s the point, Mel? As usual, you’ve already made up your mind. Just like you decided to shut me out after Megan died.’
‘I was grieving.’
‘So… was… I.’ Tony banged the door frame with each syllable.
‘Maybe I was selfish. Too consumed with my own grief. I’m just a heartless bitch. I should have been more considerate when our three-month-old daughter’s heart stopped beating.’
‘I never said—’
‘Is that what drove you to that tart?’
Tony stood by the kitchen door. ‘Why are you so certain I’m having an affair based on a child’s hysterical outburst.?’
‘You think that’s what this is?’
‘I think she’s been having bad dreams, and they’ve somehow affected her. She a bright kid. An imaginative kid.’
‘Imaginative enough to draw a picture of the house on fire after what my dad said at the hospital?’
‘She’s gifted at art. I’ve heard of plenty of cases of child prodigies. Kids that can play the piano like Mozart at Chloe’s age.’
‘You saw the drawing.’
‘It was spooky, I grant you, but not unheard of.’
‘How do you explain it tying in with what my dad said?’
‘It could just be a coincidence.’
‘Piss off, Tony. It’s not a bloody coincidence.’
Mel told him about the picture Chloe had drawn at Kerrie-Anne’s. ‘Where did she learn about guillotines? Or was that just a coincidence as well?’
‘She might have seen one sometime. On telly. The computer. In a book.’
‘She hasn’t. And it was in fine detail. She even drew the grain in the wooden frame, for God’s sake.’
‘Like I said—’
‘I know what you said. Our child is a coincidental prodigy, right? One that draws a near-perfect depiction of a scene from the French Revolution.’
‘But—’
‘She’s four years old, Tony.’
Tony stared at his empty beer bottle, rotating it between his thumb and forefinger. ‘So, you reckon she lost her head in the French Revolution, do you?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s bloody absurd.’
‘You didn’t see the picture.’
‘Then show it to me.’
‘I left it at Kerrie-Anne’s. It was too disgusting to bring home. Too graphic. When she woke up screaming this afternoon, she started talking about having other parents. Jenny and Robert. Said they lived in Woking.’
‘Not a very French-sounding name, is it?’
‘Don’t mock me, Tony. I’m only repeating what she said.’
‘It sounds like a load of mixed up mumbo-jumbo.’
Mel resisted an urge to hurl the makeshift ashtray at him. ‘Guess what else she said?’
‘What?’
‘“Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.”’
‘Like I said, she needs to see a doctor. Get something to calm her down and stop the bad dreams.’
‘Haven’t you listened to a single word I’ve said?’
‘Yes. And it’s only convinced me more that our daughter’s suffering from an overactive imagination.’
‘You saw the marks around her neck.’
‘Marks can appear because of the subconscious mind. They’ve proved it using hypnotherapy. I watched a programme once where they hypnotised a bloke and told him they were going to touch his arm with a Japanese bay leaf. The leaf causes an allergic reaction. The hypnotist then touched the subject’s arm with a harmless dock leaf. Guess what happened?’
‘I don’t care.’
‘He had the same reaction as he would have had with a Japanese bay leaf.’
‘Chloe said she lived with this Robert and Jenny before she died, for fuck’s sake. And you’re prattling on about leaves.’
‘What do you want me to say, Mel? Do you want me to lie and say I believe all this nonsense?’
‘I want you to open your mind for once. She had a deep red mark around her neck. It looked as if…’
‘What?’
Mel fumbled for the words to describe the ugly wound around her daughter’s neck. ‘It… looked as if she’d had her throat cut.’
‘Maybe she scratched herself in her sleep.’
‘Fuck you, Tony. You’re in denial.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes.’
Tony fetched another beer. He slammed the fridge door and stomped back into the front room. His eyes looked almost black. ‘There’s no such thing as reincarnation. It’s crap. We have one body, and when we die, that’s it. Into the ground or the furnace. It’s crazy to think we might somehow survive. Or come back. Why on earth would we?’
‘I don’t fucking know.’
‘Surely, if your soul theory is right, everyone would be born with a brand new one. It just doesn’t add up.’
‘I wondered when we’d get around to that,’ Mel said. ‘If you can’t divide it by the square root of bugger knows what, it doesn’t exist, right?’
‘I’m only—’
‘Saying? And I’m sick to death of listening. I want you to go.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not leaving you on your own while you’re like this.’
Mel picked up the saucer and threw it at her husband. ‘Get out, Tony. Get the fuck out before I do something I really regret.’
12
King had bought the theatre at the knockdown price of sixty thousand pounds some twenty years ago when it had been little more than a derelict shell. It had once thrived as a cinema in the small riverside town before the word multiplex was even invented. He’d bought it to indulge his love of Shakespeare and to fulfil his lifelong ambition to direct some of the great man’s finest works.
King’s ambition to act had been thwarted by the twin handicap of a stammer, which surfaced only when faced with pressurised situations such as auditions, and a father who’d done everything in his power to suppress his son’s natural inclination in favour of forcing him to learn the skills necessary to run the family’s clothing empire.
King’s father was a brutal man who seemed to make no distinction between cruelty and discipline. He ruled the family home in Knightsbridge with a rod of iron. Literally, considering his propensity to use a poker to enforce some of his more bizarre rules and regulations. King would often find himself subject to severe beatings and acts of barbaric humiliation under the dubious guise of making a man of him. Albert King was a possessive man. A jealous man. One who believed the only way to achieve faithfulness was by locking his wife away and denying her contact with anyone other than him.
Florence King was what Peter would later describe as a free-thinking spirit. A short woman, plain as a rice pudding, with small, round glasses and black hair streaked grey and scraped back in a bun, she looked nothing like the threat to fidelity King senior seemed to imagine.
But every cloud had a silver lining, and the long days locked away with his mother in the family library whilst King Senior was away on business had forged a deep bond between them. One which was enhanced by a mutual love of the written word. Most notably Shakespeare. He wasn’t a mere writer, in young Peter’s opinion; he was a sculptor of words. A creator of a language so rich and so empowering that, as Florence King read to him, he would often weep tears of joy.
Through Shakespeare, King had discovered a deep range of emotional states, visiting torment, suicide and triumphant vengeance in such a compelling way as to make Hamlet the greatest creation of all time, both real and fictional.
His father had started sexually abusing Peter when he was nine years old. The beatings had inspired Albert King to a state of sexual frenzy, sated only by sodomising the boy and threatening him with death if he so much as talked about it in his sleep.
King had endured twenty-two years of virtual hell on earth, relieved only by his mother’s kindness, before fate had dealt him the first decent break of his life. His father had dropped dead from a heart attack whilst wielding a poker and threatening to kill his long-suffering wife. King had kept that poker to this day. Secreted at the back of his wardrobe, and brought out on the anniversary of his father’s death each year, it was one of his most treasured possessions. A symbol of justice. King had forged a phrase of his own to pay his respects to the implement: Who shall live by the poker, shall also die by the poker. King wasn’t too concerned he’d largely stolen the words from the Gospel of Matthew; plagiarising religion was perfectly acceptable considering it was all a lie to control the weak and gullible masses with threats of hellfire and sin.
King had inherited the chain of high-end menswear shops located in such prestigious places as Bond Street and the King’s Road – no connection to the family. King had flourished upon his father’s death. Setting aside an allowance for his mother who’d inherited the house and nothing else, King had sold the family business, become an instant millionaire, and followed a natural path towards the arts.
He’d been forced to abandon his dream to act just shy of his fortieth birthday. No one seemed willing to employ an actor with a stammer. To make matters worse, his mother had succumbed to lung cancer after a long and fruitless battle with Mother Nature’s nasty streak. She hadn’t helped herself by smoking like a chimney after her husband’s death, but she’d hardly deserved such a rotten pain-ridden end.
He’d sold the house, complete with the body of a young man encased in a concrete tomb beneath the basement, and left London with a renewed purpose. A small market town was just what he needed to get his creative juices flowing again and put some colour in his cheeks.
He’d bought a beautiful four-bedroom detached home on the outskirts of Feelham, and spent the next three years renovating the old cinema and turning it into Feelham Theatre. It was a project which excited him. Somewhere he could indulge both passion and fantasy in equal measure.
Now, King unlocked an oak door in the bowels of the theatre and swung it open on rusty hinges. An overbearing stench snuffed out his good mood. Excrement, with a dose of damp and a splash of halitosis. He pegged his nose between his thumb and forefinger and stepped into his kingdom. He hadn’t been down here for the best part of a week because he’d been planning a new game of One False Move. He’d also been involved in the Christmas pantomime, a distraction which did little to enhance his mood, and everything to remind him of the poor taste and questionable intelligence of the masses. Still, everyone had their cross to bear, and this year, Jack and the Beanstalk was his.
The room was thirty feet long and twenty wide. Lined up along one wall: a metal cage that had once housed a pet chimp according to the eBay advert; a set of wooden stocks, made to order and of less dubious origin; and a wooden post bolted to the concrete floor by way of a metal bracket.
There was a large oak table pushed against the opposite wall, with two dark-red leather chairs sitting either side of it. King walked to the table and sat down. The leather creaked beneath his weight. He stretched out his legs, rubbed his dodgy knee, and surveyed the game board set out on the floor in front of him.
One False Move was his brainchild. His baby. A concept nurtured and fostered over many hours of fantasy. The game was beautiful in its simplicity. Two players moved around four sides of the life-sized board painted on the floor. Each side comprised twenty-five coloured squares painted purple, orange, yellow and turquoise. The contestants moved to the value of a dice, and answered questions related to Shakespeare depending on which colour they landed on. Twice around the board before moving along the five squares leading to the large centre stage. Then the chance to answer the Encore Question and win the game.
To set the scene of One False Move, King dressed as Shakespeare, and his partner as the playwright and poet, Christopher Marlowe. The game was mined with punishments and forfeits, including the cage, the stocks and the whipping post. Two squares were also marked as Death Squares, but death was pardonable at the discretion of the opposing player.
King’s current crop of game pieces were housed beyond a locked door in the far wall. Known only as Purple, Yellow, Orange, and Turquoise, these real-life pawns were his longest serving pieces. Purple-six had been with him for five years now. An extraordinary feat when you considered the dangers inherent in playing One False Move.
To date, King had lost three pieces to the Death Square, two to the stocks, and four to the punishment cage. It was not a record he was proud of, but his opponent had lost far more than him. Six to the Death Square in the last three years alone, if memory served him correctly.
King and his partner spent many evenings trawling websites in search of new and interesting riddles. Once asked and answered correctly, the question was always destroyed. Anything was fair game. Direct quotes from Shakespeare’s many plays, the history of the characters, scenes, settings, plots.
Tomorrow, the game pieces could clean the place ready for the new game. Decontaminate their living quarters with disinfectant and bleach. King had been sorely tempted at times to reconsider his decision to use female game pieces in One False Move. Apart from the fact that they were cursed with menstruation and all the monthly mess incurred by
that ghastly freak of nature, they seemed to be largely preoccupied with mood swings, petulance and bitchiness. Not to mention that he found them about as attractive as thorn bushes laden with poisonous berries. But it was largely for this reason that he’d elected to use the fairer sex –a wholly inappropriate name, considering they’d shown themselves to be anything but fair. The last thing he needed was to be distracted by young lithe men moving around the board and leaving him in a permanent state of arousal.
‘“O mischief, thou art swift to enter in the thoughts of desperate men,’” King said, quoting the great man to reinforce his resolve.
An image of men wearing nothing but leg irons shuffling around the One False Move board popped into his head and treated him to a fantasy which was almost enough to tip the balance in favour of their use. Just for one game. Indulgence, in moderation, was a sin which was good for the soul.
King turned his mind to other thoughts to alleviate an overwhelming urge to masturbate and leave his seed on the Death Square. He would need to provide the game pieces with buckets of water and soap to wash themselves. The last thing he wanted was the stench of their poor hygiene putting him off his game. He’d won the last four straight, and he wanted to make it five out of five. He couldn’t think of a more splendid way to spend the twelve days of Christmas. Uninterrupted bliss.
His numerous yet brief affairs in London had taught him a lot about the frailty of commitment. He’d long since learned that a fool and his heart were easily parted. He’d also learned that promiscuity was rife, security scarce. He’d lost two lovers to AIDS, one to a skulking weasel he’d believed to be a friend, and another who’d expired due to an ill-fated bondage session which had resulted in fatal asphyxiation.
This unplanned death had both terrified King and excited him in equal measure. He’d kept the body in the bedroom at his mother’s house for almost two months, preserving it as best he could with embalming fluid and liberal doses of his mother’s perfume and make-up. His name was Alex. Or Big Al, as he’d preferred to be called in his more articulate days.