The Posthumous Adventures of Harry Whitaker

by Bobbie Darbyshire

  ‘That’s good,’ Richard said. ‘It’s a town full of odd bods – maybe that’s why. How about Worthing?’

  ‘Not too bad.’

  ‘I was furious at the stares you got in the café.’

  She smiled. ‘People always look – they can’t help it. It’s the way they look that matters.’

  Last night, as they ate pizza and salad on her patio, he’d spotted a woman spying from a neighbouring bedroom. He might feel trapped by Claire and his mother, but Lily was trapped by her face. She dealt with it bravely, but it must hurt. He didn’t ask her about it except when she spoke of it herself. That seemed the best way. Everyone else in the world homed in on her birthmark. He wanted to make plain by his lack of curiosity how little it mattered to him.

  She had a desk job dealing with government statistics and surveys. ‘Meetings and emails and figures on screens,’ was her answer last night to what filled her time. ‘I get glazed looks when I say how much I enjoy it. I’ve always loved numbers, that’s the thing.’

  It fitted the pattern, he thought now. Gentle, civilised, anonymous: numbers took no special notice of her.

  ‘We’re here. That’s the house,’ Lily said.

  They had turned one more corner without his noticing, and she was pointing across the road. No one was clipping or hosing at Jon Griffiths’ last known address. Its hedge was a heap of rebellious ivy, unkempt, overgrown. The glass in the bay window was dirty and the torn curtains were drawn.

  ‘It looks empty,’ she said, but crossing the road they could tell that it wasn’t. From inside came the clamour of heavy-metal music. They paused by the gate. No junk mail, said a door sticker. No hawkers, bleeding hearts or God-botherers, another. Beware of the dog. ‘Oh blimey,’ said Richard.

  All at once he was less keen to track down his mystery brother. Lily was wonderful, but there was no guarantee Jon would be too. Rather the opposite: Harry’s son, after all.

  ‘Deep breath,’ Lily said. ‘It feels like knocking on a door for one of our surveys.’

  ‘What? I thought you worked in the office.’

  ‘I went out with an interviewer a few times as part of my training. She was calm, nothing fazed her. Smiled for England. That was how she lulled people into agreeing to answer her questions.’ Lily put a hand to her cheek. ‘Oddly enough, this face of mine helped – the interviewer’s hit-rate went up. I guess people felt awkward telling the afflicted to get lost.’

  ‘Or maybe they loved you at first sight, like I did,’ said Richard.

  She grinned. ‘Fingers crossed for this one.’ She closed the gate behind them, stepped up to the door and rang the bell.

  It opened on a chain. Out-of-control barking and a strong smell of dog exploded through the narrow gap. A man with mean eyes and a week’s worth of grey stubble glowered at them.

  Lily spoke quickly, smiling and with a warm voice. ‘Not Jehovah’s Witnesses. Not selling anything. We’re looking for someone who used to live here.’

  ‘You the police?’ It was hard to hear him over the barking. The dog seriously wanted to kill them.

  ‘Not at all,’ Lily said. ‘Just me and my brother. It’s our other brother we’re after – Jon Griffiths. Our father just died, and Jon doesn’t know yet.’

  Richard beamed corroboration.

  The door slammed shut in their faces, then opened without the chain. The dog, standard issue pit-bull, lunged and scrabbled, desperate to get at them, held back by the man’s grip on its spiked collar. The man was wearing a dirty vest and track-suit bottoms over his muscles and tattoos. He scowled at Lily. ‘What the fuck happened to your face, love?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said pleasantly. ‘It’s how I was born.’

  ‘Jesus. Can’t they do something about it?’

  Still she smiled. ‘No. It’s complicated.’

  Controlling his temper, Richard offered a hand and shouted above the racket, ‘It’s Jon Griffiths we’re looking for. Used to live here.’

  The man didn’t take his hand. He was dragging his dog away, shoving it through a door towards the rear of the house, shutting it in. ‘Griffiths, you say? Are you from the papers?’

  ‘What?’ An uneasy sense of déjà vu seized Richard. He glanced over his shoulder, half expecting to find Claire’s journalist at the gate.

  ‘God, Keith, you’re slow.’ A woman emerged from the heavy-metal din of the front room. Lank grey hair, a man’s shirt over balcony-bra cleavage, a cigarette in her hand. Eyeing them suspiciously. ‘What’s it worth, that’s what they’re not saying.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Keith squared up to Richard. ‘What’s it worth, pal?’

  ‘A fiver?’ offered Lily.

  ‘Try harder, love.’

  ‘A tenner then.’

  ‘Nope,’ said Keith. ‘What’s your boyfriend got to say for himself? Fifty, and we might be talking.’

  ‘A hundred, more like,’ said the woman.

  ‘What?’ Lily gasped. ‘We’re just looking for our brother.’

  The woman held Richard’s gaze. Took the cigarette from her mouth. ‘Tell that dog to shut the fuck up, Keith,’ she said.

  Her stare was unflinching. ‘Griffiths didn’t have no brother nor sister.’

  ‘Half-brother,’ said Richard.

  ‘Is that right? So how come you don’t know where he is, when everyone else does?’

  ‘Come again?’ This woman knew something they didn’t. There was information as well as greed in her eyes. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Twenty quid.’

  ‘A hundred,’ she said.

  ‘Twenty.’

  ‘Fifty,’ she said.

  ‘Thirty, and that’s final,’ he said.

  ‘Humpf. Okay.’

  ‘It had better be good.’ He pulled out his wallet. ‘Twenty’s all I’ve got on me.’ Fished in his pocket. ‘And some change. How about you, Lily?’

  Together they rustled up thirty pounds and handed it over. Keith quit kicking the door to the dog and sidled back up the hall to watch.

  ‘Okay,’ said the woman. ‘It was Griffiths upstairs when we moved in down here. Two of them, mother and son. Years back.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Keith. ‘We knew him, no mistake.’

  ‘Only to look at, mind,’ said the woman. ‘We didn’t get cosy. She was a right superior cow.’

  ‘We’d recognise him, that’s what I’m saying,’ growled Keith.

  Richard let his impatience leak. ‘Come on, what next? Where did they go?’

  ‘Got behind with the rent. Did a runner.’

  ‘But you have their address, right?’

  ‘Are you joking? As if we bloody care where they buggered off to.’ She paused, smirking, to stuff the cash into her bra, coins and all.

  ‘Just a minute,’ said Richard.

  ‘Keep your hair on. There’s more.’

  ‘Better had be.’

  ‘At least we know who he is,’ sneered Keith. ‘Unlike you, for all he’s your brother.’

  ‘Look, do you know where they went, or don’t you?’ said Lily.

  ‘Nope,’ said the woman. ‘We don’t know where they went, but we do know where Jon Griffiths is now. Come in here and I’ll show you.’ She disappeared into the front room.

  ‘Go on. She won’t bite,’ said Keith above the frustrated howls of his man-eating dog.

  Richard met Lily’s eyes, and she nodded. They left the street door open behind them and edged into the darkened room.

  The place was a wreck, not as full of junk as his mother’s, but far gone in filth and stink, a heavy mix of sweat and burgers and dog. The television was on, sound drowned out by the distortion and beat of the music. The woman scooped up a trampled copy of The Sun from the floor and pointed at the TV. ‘He’s gone now, but he was just on the news. That’s why Keith thought you must be the papers.’ She shoved the newspaper at him, and Richard looked uncomprehendingly at the headline.

  COOL WIN, QUENTIN!

  ‘That’s him,’ said the woman. ‘Sa
me boy grown up. We’d know him anywhere.’

  The photograph showed the curly-haired winner of Tomorrow’s Tycoon. ‘Drop-dead gorgeous heartthrob of the nation’ ran the caption.

  ‘Poncy little git changed his name,’ said Keith.

  Monday

  Harry

  As I watch, Henry V wakes abruptly, jumping me out of today’s meditational trance. His ears twitch, angled to catch some sound I can’t hear. Then he yawns and stretches before heading for the top of the stairs, where he waits, his eyes fixed on the street door below.

  I hover next to him, watching too. Mrs Butley has already been today, so this must be Sotheby’s. Sure enough, here’s Simon, punching the code into the house alarm, a young fogey in tow. Expensive haircut, moleskins and Oxford shirt, a large carbon-receipt pad and a small tablet computer.

  He stands in immediate awe of the Hockney. ‘Wo-w,’ he says slowly. ‘Really wow. I had no idea there’d be anything like this. It’ll stir up international interest. It could fetch – golly – I don’t know how much. I hope it’s insured. I trust the house is secure.’

  I visualise my portrait hanging in the Met, and it dawns on me. Suppose I were to attach myself to it, cast my lot in with it. I could be there too, basking in the admiration of the crowds. I need to be careful, though – it might equally end up on the wall of some private collector, or worse still in storage.

  Upstairs the auctioneer dryly disparages each piece of furniture, each treasured collectible, despite the receipts and other evidence of authenticity that Simon has unearthed from my files. ‘The market’s depressed,’ he says. He takes record shots with his tablet and taps in notes to go with them. ‘To be honest, there’s little interest nowadays in this style of thing. We can sell it for you, of course, but none of it will fetch much. Guesstimate, Hockney apart, five or six thousand, less commission, for the lot.’

  Little upstart! How dare he? Any discerning buyer will salivate over these wonderful objects. Simon protests too, turning pink around the collar and ears, until his anxiety begins to perplex me. It’s no skin off his nose if the vulgar world doesn’t share my good taste; it’s the RSC’s loss. ‘I’m in the antiques business myself,’ he asserts feebly.

  The auctioneer nods and smiles. He doesn’t enquire into Simon’s profit-and-loss account, doesn’t argue or snipe. The next time Simon challenges an estimate, he stares vacantly out at the sea. ‘Great view,’ he says. ‘That and the Hockney will fetch a vast amount more than any of this stuff.’

  I sulk in corners, hating both of them, adding my ghostly weight to Henry V’s feline beams of disdain. The young man picks things up, puts them down again, queries their provenance, points out their defects and starts to draw up a list of the things he will take. Swiftly, methodically, he itemises the sitting room, the bedrooms, the study, the garden room. ‘The personal memorabilia may well fetch a bit,’ he says. ‘The great man’s clothes and private papers and so on.’ At last some respect, and I warm to him slightly. ‘We’ll let the valuers have a look and see what they think.’

  He’s back on the landing, pausing before descending the stairs. ‘Hang on,’ he says, brightening, ‘how on earth did I miss these?’

  My two hand-coloured, eighteenth-century folding maps of the American colonies hang here in gilt frames, well away from the sunlight.

  He has come alive, as he did when he encountered the Hockney. ‘If these two babies are genuine, they’re worth a fair bit.’

  Simon is all ears. ‘A fair bit? Meaning what?’

  ‘Hard to be exact.’ The young man has them off their hooks, and out comes a magnifying glass.

  ‘Ballpark figure?’

  ‘Golly, that’s beautiful. In such good condition. Off the top of my head, hmm... five thousand apiece, but that’s minimum. Fifteen, maybe twenty thou the pair if we get telephone bids from the States, and why wouldn’t we?’

  Simon is beaming.

  ‘They’re genuine all right,’ the auctioneer enthuses. ‘Look, you can tell by the wear along the fold-lines. Impossible to imitate that in a reproduction.’

  He straightens up, smiling broadly. ‘Okay, I think that just about covers it. The van and the men are outside.’ He’s trotting downstairs, his tablet tucked under his arm. ‘We’ll start wrapping things and loading up, except for the Hockney of course. I’ll arrange specialist packing and transport for that.’

  As he reaches the hall, he spins on a heel to take another look at it. ‘I can’t tell you what an amazing find this is. Such a pity it has to be moved from this setting where it belongs.’

  Simon lingers on the landing. I hover on the staircase halfway between them.

  ‘I’ll give you an itemised receipt now. What happens next is our valuers take a proper look and I email their reserve prices for your approval. Should only be a few days.’

  ‘Fine,’ Simon calls down the stairs. ‘Although,’ he adds abruptly, ‘on second thoughts...’

  The young man turns from the door. ‘Yes?’

  ‘These maps...’

  Is Simon’s voice trembling slightly? The young man’s smile freezes.

  ‘Yes.’ Simon gathers certainty. ‘Would you leave them, please? I think I can find them a private buyer.’

  ‘A well-advertised auction will get you a much better price.’

  Simon clears his throat. ‘Thank you, but I’d rather...’

  We wait in vain for the end of the sentence. A private buyer? Private to you, Simon? You bastard.

  ‘Ah,’ says the young man. He frowns, shakes his head, but then seems to decide that it’s none of his business. ‘Anyway, let us know if you change your mind. We’d love to handle them for you.’

  Two hours later, after I’ve suffered the unutterable anguish of watching most of my home swaddled in blankets and bubble wrap and carried away, Simon bids the auctioneer and his scene-shifters adieu and returns to the landing, where Henry V paces, uttering small, pitiful cries.

  Simon picks up one of the maps and plants his fat lips on the glass.

  You unutterable arse, I tell him.

  Tuesday

  Richard

  Alone in his flat Monday evening and into the small hours, Richard had drunk his way steadily through the remains of a bottle of whisky and a six-pack of strong lager and had watched back-to-back episodes of Tomorrow’s Tycoon on catch-up TV. What he saw gave him the creeps, but he stayed the course, from the portentous start of the series to the razzmatazz finale. Then he began again from the start, muttering curses through Quentin Griffiths’ big scenes and fast-forwarding between them.

  The sequence in which Quentin was declared winner obsessed him. He paused and replayed, paused and replayed, unable to stop. He stabbed at the buttons on the remote, examining freeze-frames of this monstrous brother, curly-headed, hypnotically charming, that Harry had foisted on him. ‘Thank you,’ Quentin repeated, over and over, smiling frankly into the eyes of the viewer. ‘Thank you so much if you voted for me.’ Richard jabbed the remote again and swallowed more alcohol.

  When Tiffany had first shown him the magazine photographs, he’d acknowledged the resemblance but thought little of it. Now that this man was his brother, he saw something far worse. As he drained the fifth can and cracked open the sixth, he was recognising someone he knew all too well. Here was the same self-assured egoism as Harry’s, the same mesmeric gaze, the same compelling voice that, shout or whisper, the world couldn’t help listening to and half of it couldn’t help falling in love with. ‘You so, so deserve to win,’ enthused the series presenter, a shrill bimbo called Mariella Dukakis, who never stopped pawing the man and thrusting her silicone breasts in his face.

  Tiffany wasn’t the only one with a crush: the whole female population seemed to be smitten with Quentin. Pearl Allen’s receptionists fantasised about him, and even Pearl herself received the news on the phone with an audible intake of breath, followed by, ‘Well, I never.’ She was now busy making contact via The Reality Channel.

 
Most galling of all, even Lily was thrilled by the idea that this vile individual was her brother. In that squalid front room in South London, Richard had turned to her, assuming she would share his dismay, and had immediately seen that she didn’t. Her hand was to her mouth, but her eyes were full of laughter and excitement. He did his best to hide his own feelings, because he could find no way to explain them that didn’t sound churlish or jealous, as if he were miffed at being upstaged.

  It wouldn’t do. He had to call a halt to this resentment, he told himself. Mustn’t let it come between him and his wonderful new sister. He was jealous. He couldn’t deny it. It galled him to hear Lily enthuse about how much she liked this guy and how amazing it was that he was their brother.

  Sibling rivalry wasn’t the half of it, though. Quentin might be better looking than he was, more charismatic and clever and successful than he was, about to launch a business with half-a-million-quid’s-worth of prize money in his pocket, but none of that really mattered. No, the truly appalling thing was that this brother was famous, his name on everyone’s lips. Just when Richard had hoped finally to step out from under Harry’s shadow, here loomed another. He gulped down more lager.

  Everywhere this man’s face was on screens and hoardings, his name in the mouths of strangers. He’d been mentioned at least three times in the café today. The nightmare was happening all over again. The king was dead; long live the king. From A-list to Z-list, Richard’s life would yet again be hijacked and derailed and curtailed and – damn Quentin to hell, he hated Harry and he detested this obnoxious brother.

  One scrap of comfort was that his mother would detest Quentin too. She’d been oddly silent since Friday, when he’d rung to say, ‘No time to explain, got to run, visiting a friend for the weekend.’ He’d gritted his teeth for a deluge of questions and worries, but instead she’d said, ‘Fine, dear – have a nice time,’ and since then hadn’t called him, not once. He ought to check up on her, but he was too drunk right now – what was the time? – and, oh shit – he lurched to his feet – he’d forgotten about Claire, who hadn’t called him either, and Claire’s baby. His mother would hate Quentin, but Claire would be thrilled. Richard stumbled around the room, spilling lager and four-letter words. First her child’s grandfather was Harold Whittaker; now its uncle was the heartthrob winner of Tomorrow’s Tycoon. She’d tell everyone – there’d be no stopping her – she was the expectant mother of celebrity royalty. Soon there’d be flashbulbs and microphones and interviews, and Richard’s kid, just an ordinary kid, would end up embarrassed by his pretentious connections or else insufferably pretentious himself.