Ancestral Vices

by Tom Sharpe

  *

  For the next week Frederick applied himself to the tricky business of finding local dwarves without revealing his identity. He phoned round all the Employment Exchanges in the district only to discover that, curiously enough, there was no shortage of job opportunities for dwarves. Even his claim to be a representative of Disney Films interested in remaking Snow White along naturalistic lines with seven midget miners elicited no great interest, while his later tactics as a BBC producer working on a documentary dealing with the dangers to dwarves as a species, particularly after the murder of Willy Coppett, met with no response. In the end he had to report his lack of success to Emmelia.

  ‘They’re short on the ground,’ he said. ‘I’ve tried hospitals and circuses and just about every place I can think of. I suppose I could try the local Education Authority. They must have a list of teenage dwarves.’

  But Emmelia wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Young adults, yes, but I have no intention of infl . . . of having anything to do with dwarves below the age of consent.’

  ‘Age of consent?’ said Frederick, for whom the phrase had distinctly perverse sexual connotations when combined with dwarves. ‘You’re surely not thinking of . . . well . . . er . . .’

  ‘What I am proposing remains my private business. Yours is simply to find me suitable candidates.’

  ‘If you say so,’ said Frederick. But the sexual motif solved his problem. That afternoon he used the Personal Column of the Bushampton Gazette to place an advert stating that he was a lonely middle-aged Gentleman of Restricted Growth with independent means seeking the companionship of a similarly constituted Lady and gave his interests: Lego, model railways and bonsai gardening. This time he was lucky, and two days later had eight replies which he took up to the New House. Emmelia studied them doubtfully.

  ‘I should have told you to specify male dwarves,’ she said, reinforcing Frederick’s suspicions that whatever his aunt had in mind was some form of dwarf fetish.

  ‘I’ve had enough trouble rustling this little lot up,’ he protested, ‘and if you think I’m going to advertise myself as a gay dwarf in this neck of the woods, I can assure you I’m not. Quite frankly I find the whole business of masquerading as a heterosexual one unpleasant enough without being a deviant dwarf into the bargain.’

  Emmelia brushed his objections aside. ‘I trust you didn’t go to the Gazette’s offices in person,’ she said.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Frederick, ‘I’d have had to go in on my knees or have them wondering what a five-foot-ten man was doing inserting pieces in the agony column claiming to be three-foot-nothing. I phoned them and used a box number.’

  ‘Good. Well, these will just have to do. And remember that if you breathe a word of this to anyone, you will lose all chance of taking your father’s place as head of the family firm, quite apart from becoming an accessory before the fact.’

  ‘Before what fact?’ began Frederick and promptly decided that he didn’t want to know. Whatever Aunt Emmelia was up, or in this case down to, he wanted no part of it. Having said as much, he left the house and to avoid any further implication in her affairs drove to London and made hurried arrangements for a holiday in Spain.

  For the next week Emmelia continued her preparations. She bought a secondhand car in Briskerton, drove round the various villages and towns looking at the houses in which the eight correspondents claimed to live, and in general behaved in so unusual a manner that even Annie commented on it.

  ‘I can’t think what’s come over her,’ she told Rosie, whom she had delegated to do the washing-up. ‘Hardly ever out of the garden for years and years and now she’s gadding about like I don’t know what.’

  *

  It was an apt expression and one that corresponded at times to Emmelia’s own feelings. She didn’t know what either; what had become of her former self; what had happened to her family scruples; or what she now was. Only the how concerned her, that and the knowledge that she was no longer bored or driven by the dullness of life to write long letters to her relatives pretending to be what she had evidently never been, a dear, kind and gentle elderly lady.

  Instead, something harsh and almost brutal had emerged in her character in response, paradoxically, to the affront done to her naively nice view of the world and its ways by the sentencing of a foolish but innocent man. And Lord Broadmoor had called her a virago. Emmelia looked the word up in her dictionary and found its original meaning: ‘a woman of masculine strength and spirit. (Latin = a female warrior)’. All in all it was a fair description of her present state, and it was reassuring to know that the Romans had so described some women. It placed her in a tradition older even than the Petrefact genealogy. But residues of her former self remained and at night she would wake with a start of horror at the thought of the actions she had premeditated.

  To quell these moments of panic she hardened her resolve by reading The Times most thoroughly and by joining Annie and Rosie in the boot-room of an evening to watch television. From these encounters with focused madness and violence she would come away reconciled to the relative mildness of her own intentions. A man had burnt twenty-two people to death in a Texas club ‘just for kicks’; in Manchester a father of five had raped an old-age pensioner; in Teheran more people had been executed by firing squad for ‘corruption against God’; another British soldier had been killed in Ulster while presumably trying to prevent Catholics and Protestants from slaughtering one another; a fourteen-year-old baby-sitter had dropped her charge from an upstairs window in a successful attempt to stop it crying. As if these acts of senseless violence were not enough to convince her that the world was mad, there were the TV series in which detectives were shot at or shot suspected villains with a gusto that was clearly shared by Annie and Rosie and presumably by millions of other viewers.

  Emmelia came away from these sessions with a quiet conscience. If the rest of the world behaved so irrationally and with so little motive she had nothing to be concerned about. By the end of a month she had been transformed inwardly beyond all recognition. Outwardly she remained Miss Emmelia Petrefact, the dear old lady who loved gardening, cats and her family.

  *

  For Yapp very little remained. Since his arrival at Drampoole Prison he had lost his clothes, most of his hair, all his personal possessions, and the illusion that criminals were simply victims of the social system. Only the knowledge that they were mostly members of the working class persisted, and with it the experience of discovering what the proletariat thought of child-murderers. Yapp’s frantic attempts to explain that he hadn’t murdered anyone and that, even if he had, dwarves were not children hadn’t saved him from being assaulted by the two genuine murderers with whom he was forced to share a cell.

  ‘We know what to do with sods like you,’ they told him and had gone to work in several revolting and exceedingly painful ways which they had evidently learnt in the grim school of life Yapp had previously revered. By the following morning his reverence had gone and with it his ability to voice a demand to see the prison doctor. He was still whispering at the end of a week and it was only then that the warders, who clearly shared his cellmates’ hatred for dwarf-molesters, decided in their own interest that he needed medical attention before they had a corpse in custody.

  ‘One fucking squeak out of you and you’ll have testicles for tonsils,’ said the larger murderer gratuitously as Yapp hobbled out of the cell. ‘Tell the pill-popper you fell off your bunk.’

  Yapp followed these instructions in a hoarse whisper.

  ‘Off your bunk?’ said the doctor shining a torch suspiciously on Yapp’s serrated sphincter. ‘You did say “bunk”?’

  ‘Yes,’ whispered Yapp.

  ‘And what precisely did you land on?’

  Yapp said he wasn’t quite sure.

  ‘I am,’ said the doctor, who knew an arse-bandit when he saw one and was as prejudiced against the species as he was against child-murderers. ‘All right you can stand up now.’


  Yapp tried and squeaked pitifully.

  ‘And what’s the matter with your voice? You’re not by any chance a knob-hound too?’

  Yapp said he didn’t know what a knob-hound was. The doctor enlarged his vocabulary.

  ‘Then I’m certainly not,’ whispered Yapp as indignantly as his vocal cords would allow. ‘I resent the imputation.’

  ‘In that case would you mind telling me how your uvula got into its present disgusting condition?’ asked the doctor, prodding the thing irritably with a spatula.

  Yapp made gurgling noises.

  ‘Call the doctor “sir”,’ said the warder, reinforcing the order by jabbing him in the ribs.

  ‘Sir,’ gurgled Yapp. The doctor turned back to his desk and wrote out his report.

  ‘One soluble pessary to be taken at both extremities three times a day,’ he said, ‘and can’t you move him in with someone who’s less susceptible to the ghastly creature’s sexual charms?’

  ‘There’s only Watford,’ said the warder dubiously.

  ‘Thank God,’ said the doctor. ‘Well, we’ll just have to keep the stomach-pump handy.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Yapp was prodded back to his cell to collect his blankets. The two murderers eyed him expectantly.

  ‘He’s going in with Watford,’ said the warder. ‘You two buggers have had your fun.’

  ‘Serve the swine right,’ said the small murderer.

  Yapp hobbled out onto the landing again with a terrible sense of premonition. ‘What’s the matter with Watford?’ he croaked.

  ‘You mean to say you’ve never heard of the Bournemouth poisoner? And you a fucking professor. Oh well, live and learn,’ said the warder, unlocking a cell door at the far end of the landing. ‘Got a friend for you, Watford.’

  A small chubby man sitting on the bed eyed Yapp with an interest that was in no way reciprocated.

  ‘What are you in for?’ he asked as the door shut. Yapp slumped onto the other bed and decided for the first time in his life that the truth was definitely not to be told.

  ‘Must have been something really nasty,’ continued the cheerful Mr Watford, radiating a bedside manner. ‘They never give me anyone nice.’

  Yapp croaked wordlessly and pointed to his mouth.

  ‘Oh a dummy,’ continued Mr Watford, ‘that’s handy. Silence is golden, as I always say. Makes things so much easier. Want me to give you a medical examination?’

  Yapp shook his head vigorously.

  ‘Oh well, just as you like. Mind you, I’m better than the prison doctor, not that that’s saying much. Of course that’s why I’m here. I mean nature intended me to be a great physician but my background was against me. My dad being a trolley-bus driver when he was sober and a sadist when he wasn’t and Mum having to make ends meet by scrubbing. I wasn’t allowed to stay on at school past fourteen. First job I got was with a scrap-iron merchant sorting out lead piping from other metal. Interesting stuff, lead. Gave me my first insight into the physiological effects of metallic poisons. Arsenic’s a metal too you know. Well anyway, from there I went to work for a photographer . . .’

  The tale of Mr Watford’s terrible life went on while Yapp tried to stay awake. In the ordinary way he would have been interested and even sympathetic, but the knowledge that he was in all likelihood destined to become the Bournemouth poisoner’s next victim counterbalanced the call of his social conscience while his previous cellmates had given him a traumatic inkling into the mentality of the common-or-garden murderer. If he was to survive in Mr Watford’s lethal company he must establish an immoral superiority over the man. Above all he must be different and subtle and in some horrible category of crime that was all his own. For the very first time in his life Yapp addressed his mind to a problem that was personal, immediate and real and had nothing to do with politics, history or the inequality of class.

  By the time supper arrived he had reached a decision. With genuine revulsion and a ghastly smile he handed his tray to Watford, shook his head and pointed to his mouth.

  ‘What, don’t you want this grub?’ asked the poisoner.

  Yapp smiled again and this time leaned forward so that his face was disturbingly close to Mr Watford’s.

  ‘Not enough blood,’ he croaked.

  ‘Blood?’ said Watford, looking up from Yapp’s awful smile to the sausages and back again. ‘Well, now you come to mention it, you don’t get much meat in prison sausages.’

  ‘Real blood,’ whispered Yapp.

  Mr Watford shifted further back on his bed. ‘Real blood?’

  ‘Fresh,’ said Yapp leaning forward in pursuit. ‘Fresh from the jugular.’

  ‘Jugular?’ said Mr Watford, losing a good deal of his facial colour and all his bedside manner. ‘What do you mean “Fresh from the jugular”?’

  But Yapp merely smiled more horribly.

  ‘Lumme, they’ve put a nutter in with me.’

  Yapp stopped smiling.

  ‘No offence meant,’ continued Mr Watford hastily, ‘all I meant was . . .’ He broke off and looked doubtfully at the sausages. ‘Are you sure you won’t have your supper? You might feel less . . . well, better or something.’

  But Yapp shook his head and lay down again. Mr Watford eyed him cautiously and began to eat rather slowly. For several minutes there was silence in the cell and Mr Watford’s colour had begun to return to his cheeks when Yapp struck again.

  ‘Dwarves,’ he groaned. A portion of sausage that was on its way to Mr Watford’s mouth quavered on the end of his fork.

  ‘What do you mean “dwarves”?’ he demanded rather belligerently this time. ‘Here I am eating my supper and you have to—’

  ‘Little dwarves.’

  ‘Fuck me,’ said Mr Watford, and immediately regretted it. Yapp was smiling again. ‘Well, if you say so, though I’d have thought all dwarves were little.’

  But Yapp was not to be mollified. ‘Little baby dwarves’ blood.’

  Mr Watford put the portion of sausage back on the plate and stared at Yapp. ‘Look mate, I’m trying to eat my supper and the topic of fucking little dwarves and their blood isn’t conducive to . . . oh my God.’

  Yapp was on his feet and looming over him. Mr Watford recoiled against the wall.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said shakily. ‘If you like little baby dwarves’ blood it’s fine with me. All I ask is . . .’

  ‘Straight from their little jugulars,’ Yapp went on, rubbing his bony hands together and staring pointedly at Mr Watford’s neck.

  ‘Help,’ yelled the prisoner and shot off the bed and beat on the door, ‘get me out of here! This bloke shouldn’t be in prison. He should be in a loony-bin.’

  But by the time two warders bothered to investigate his complaint Yapp was sitting quietly on his bed eating sausages and mash.

  ‘All right, all right, now what’s been going on in here?’ they demanded, shoving the gibbering prisoner aside.

  ‘He’s mad. He’s clean off his chump. You’ve stuck a fucking psychopath in with me. He won’t eat his grub and keeps going on about drinking dwarves’ blood . . .’ Watford stopped and stared at Yapp. ‘He wasn’t eating before.’

  ‘Well, he’s eating now, and with you around I can’t say I blame him not eating before,’ said the warder.

  ‘But he kept on about dwarves’ blood.’

  ‘What do you expect him to do, talk about arsenic all the time? Anyway what are you worried about? You’re not a fucking dwarf.’

  ‘The way he looks at me I might just as well be. And I’m entitled to talk about poisons. That’s my speciality. Why do you think I’m here?’

  ‘Right, so he’s entitled to talk about bloody dwarves,’ said the warder. ‘What do you think he’s here for?’

  Mr Watford looked at Yapp with fresh horror.

  ‘Oh Gawd, don’t tell me—’

  ‘That’s right, Wattie. His speciality is murdering little bleeding dwarves. The Governor thought you’d get on well together. The
other villains don’t want him.’

  And before Mr Watford could say he didn’t either, the door was shut and he was warned he’d be doing punishment if he made any more noise. Mr Watford crouched in the corner and only climbed onto his bed when the light went out.

  Yapp in the meantime had been considering his next move at self-preservation. It came with Mr Watford’s attempt to masturbate himself to sleep. This time he decided a religious tone would help and began to sing in a sinister whisper. ‘All dwarves pink and horrible, all midgets fat and small, all dwarves white and villainous, the good Lord kills them all.’

  Mr Watford stopped masturbating. ‘I am not a dwarf,’ he said, ‘I wish you’d get that into your head.’

  ‘Dwarves masturbate,’ said Yapp.

  ‘I daresay they do,’ said Mr Watford, unable to fault the logic but finding its implications as far as he was concerned exceedingly disturbing, ‘the fact remains that I am not a masturbating dwarf.’

  ‘Spilling the seed stunts your growth,’ said Yapp, recalling a rather oblique remark his religious aunt had once made on the topic. ‘The Lord God of Righteousness has spoken.’

  In his bed Mr Watford decided not to argue the toss. If the raving lunatic he had been lumbered with chose to combine the belief that he was the Lord God with disapproval of self-abuse and a predilection for dwarf blood, that was his business. He turned on his side and failed to go to sleep.

  But the horrors of the night were not yet over. Having discovered the remarkable effects of implied madness on a genuine poisoner, who must, to Yapp’s way of thinking, be mad, he was determined to continue the treatment. Presently he was groping in his trouser pocket for one of the soluble pessaries the prison doctor had prescribed and Yapp had not used. For a moment he hesitated. Soluble pessaries were not to be eaten lightly but they were infinitely preferable to some deadly potion Watford was likely to add to his diet. With a resolution that stemmed in part from his ascetic background, Yapp put the pessary in his mouth and began to munch loudly. In the other bed Watford stirred.