The Domino Men
( Victoriana - 2 )
Jonathan Barnes
Jonathan Barnes
The Domino Men
Chapter 1
I’m horribly aware, as I sit at the desk in this room that you’ve lent me, that time is now very short for me indeed. Outside, the light of day is fading fast; in here, the ticking of the clock sounds close to deafening.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that I won’t have time to write everything that I’d hoped — my definitive history of the war, from its origins in the dreams of the nineteenth century to the grisly skirmishes of my granddad’s day to the recent, catastrophic battle in which you and I played modest parts. No, I simply have to hope that there’ll be time enough for me to set down my own story, or at least as much of it as I can remember before the thing which sleeps inside me wakes, stirs, flexes its muscles and, with a lazy flick of its gargantuan tail, gives me no alternative but to forget.
I know where I have to start. Of course, I wasn’t present in person — wasn’t even born then — but I’m sure that it was there, for all intents and purposes, that it began. I can picture it so clearly, as though these events are calling to me across the years, pleading with me to set them down on paper.
It’s probably no coincidence that I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the old flat, the place in Tooting Bec where I lived with Abbey in happier times and which, in a strange sort of way, although I didn’t realize it back then), was always at the heart of the business. Our house was built at some point late in the 1860s. I had other things on my mind whilst I lived there and I never looked into its history, but Abbey did once, in an offhand, mildly curious sort of way, spurred on, I think, by some TV show or other. Her findings were faintly disquieting, although she never discovered what I know now about the place. But then, how could she? The Directorate kept those records locked up safe and everyone who was present or who knew anything about them is long dead.
It happened late one night toward the end of April 6, 1967. Years before the house was divided up into flats and a decade or so before I came into the world, a long, dark sedan motored to a stop outside the flat in Tooting Bec. Although spring should have been in full bloom, it had felt more like winter for almost a week and everyone had started wearing thick coats, hats and scarves again, shouldering their way to the backs of their wardrobes to tug out winter outfits that they’d hoped not to see again until October.
It had been raining for hours and the streets, lit up by the unforgiving yellow of the lamps, seemed to shine and dully glisten as though they’d been smeared with some grease or unguent. No one was abroad and the only sounds were the distant wail of a baby and the plaintive whinnies of urban foxes, padding through the darkened city, foraging for anything that might prove edible amongst the junk and wreckage so carelessly abandoned by humanity.
The car door opened and a tall man unfolded himself from the driver’s seat — middle-aged; sharply, almost dandyishly dressed in a dark blue, single-breasted suit and still handsome, albeit with a cruelly vulpine quality to his features. With him was a woman, about the same age, but already moving like someone much older, a brittle spinster decades before her time. Both wore expressions of stoic professionalism mingled (and I suppose we must consider this to be to their credit) with a kind of distasteful disbelief at the unconscionable demands of their jobs.
They had a passenger with them, lolling in the back seat, apparently drunk almost to the point of insensibility. It was a woman, very young and even then, after all that had been done to her, still extremely beautiful. Most of her hair had been shaved away, although a few scattered, tufty islets remained. Her scalp was marked out with scorings, scars and half-healed incisions, and she seemed only dimly aware of what was happening t her, clinging to the man in the same way in which a child clutches at her father’s hand on the way to her first day at school. He pulled her out onto the street and helped her stagger toward the front door of the house, letting her slump and flop against him, an arrangement which lent him the appearance of a shop boy grappling (not a little salaciously) with a storefront dummy.
When they got to the door, the older woman reached into her handbag, first for a key and then for a pair of torches. Once the door was open and the torches were switched on, the man steered the girl over the threshold, whispering declarations of love into her ear, honeyed fictions designed with the sole purpose of keeping her moving, saccharine lies told only to propel her onwards. Inside, the house was stripped and empty. The man dragged the girl down the corridor toward the dining room, the bobbing light of his torch picking out their way. His companion, after surveying the street with baleful eyes, busied herself in locking and bolting the door and ensuring, with the painstaking paranoia of the career professional, that the place was completely free of all listening devices, surveillance equipment and sundry bugs.
In the dining room there was an old white wooden chair, a few unlit candles and a brand-new television set. The floorboards were bare and seemed to have been daubed with strange signs and symbols in what I can only hope and pray was red paint. There was a strange quality of power in the room, of energy crackling in the air, its presence understood in the same distant way in which one might sense the throb of an engine or the humming whine of a generator.
The man helped the girl into the chair. She was moaning a little now, grizzling like a baby in the grip of a bad dream. He patted her head before producing a length of rope and binding her to the chair, winding it so tightly around he wrists and ankles that he drew blood. At this, she started to whimper and complain but the man cooed softly, stroked her lips and ran his fingers along the bridge of her nose in the kind of intimately soothing gesture which only a lover can perform, until she fell silent once again.
They had a moment alone together then. He could have begged for her forgiveness, he could have wept tears of shame and regret, he could, at the very least, have said something to try to make amends. But he didn’t. She stared up at him with dull accusation in her eyes and he found himself unable to return her gaze. Head bowed, he walked across to the other side of the room and began, with sacerdotal reverence and intensity, to light the candles. A few minutes later, the woman came into the room, closed the door behind her and suggested, with only the barest tremble in her voice, that they begin.
What they did next sickens me to think about, no matter how many times I’ve been vociferously assured of its necessity.
The handsome man stood over the chair and, reaching down to a leather pouch that he kept out of sight and strapped to his flank, produced a knife. Its blade gleamed in the candlelight.
There may have been a ritual of some kind. Who can say? I never understood the specifics. But I feel certain that the older woman would have said a few words, that, in that clear, precise schoolmarm’s voice of hers, she would have issued an invitation into the dark.
Once she had finished speaking, the man moved closer to the girl and, in a few swift motions, lifted the knife into the air and brought it slicing down. Just before the blade bit into her flesh, he told her the same thing that, four decades later, he would say to me.
“Trust the process,” he said.
Then again, as though repeating a lie somehow makes it true: “Trust the Process.”
I don’t want to imagine what came next but I find it almost impossible not to — the cutting of her wrists, the animal screams of pain, the awful, unstaunchable flow of blood.
Once the bleeding had stopped, once the poor girl ought, according to any biological law, to have slid gratefully into death or unconsciousness, she sat up quite straight in her seat with a sticky, fleshy popping sound, like the noise one hears on pulling the heads off shrimp.
&
nbsp; Whatever it was which stared out at them from behind that girl’s eyes, it wasn’t remotely human. When it spoke, it was no longer in the voice of the girl at all. It would have been impatient, I think, a little peevish and annoyed, as it asked why it had been called to this place before it was time, before the city was ripe.
Then — the springing of the trap. Realizing too late what had happened, the thing that wore the girl’s skin screeched in rage and fury. It hissed and thrashed and struggled in its chair as, quite impossibly, the cuts on its wrists began to knit themselves together, the skin miraculously reconstituting itself over the slaughterhouse confusion of flesh and blood until, at last, it came to understand the parameters of its entrapment.
The man and the woman watched until the creature in the chair fell silent and began to change. Unable to bear witness to the alterations wrought upon the body, they left the girl where she sat and retired to the nearest public house, where, on taxpayers’ money, they proceeded to fortify themselves with a generous martini apiece.
Forty years later, I moved into that same building. I ate my meals, read the newspaper, kicked off my shoes, leant back on the sofa and watched TV in the room where they cut the wrists of that poor girl. All the time I was oblivious of what had happened there, foolishly (and, as it turned out, tragically) ignorant of the circle of history which was almost complete.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Until very recently, I knew none of this, and for a long time, I believed that the story of the Domino Men started last year, in slightly more prosaic circumstances, when everything in my life still seemed broadly normal. I thought that it began with my granddad and with what happened to him in the Queen’s Head.
Chapter 2
The first thing you should know is that no one in my family had ever liked my granddad much. I was always the exception. My mother’s opinion was typical and may accurately be gauged by the way in which she broke the news.
“The old bastard’s dead,” she said, trying to sound somber but unable or unwilling to remove the last few crumbs of glee from her voice. Then again, more firmly this time, not bothering to suppress the smirk.
“The old bastard’s dead.”
He was in a pub when it happened. Nowhere flashy or picturesque, just another link in a chain, one of those places with the decor of an airport waiting lounge and the ambience of an NHS dentist. It was four weeks from Christmas, the stores were oiling their tills in readiness for the season of consumption and when I picture what happened I always imagine “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” or “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day” echoing tinnily in the background.
The old bastard stood at the bar, clasping a pint, flirting with the barmaid, grandstanding for the regulars. Well into his seventies, he looked even older — puce faced and rheumy eyed, his nose stippled with smashed capillaries, those good looks which in his youth had magnetized the attentions of more women than he could count now barely discernible beneath the palimpsests of hard living, old age, regret.
Granddad had a way of drawing people into his orbit, a talent for acquiring an entourage. After he retired to devote the rest of his life to booze, the quality of his hangers-on underwent a vertiginous decline until by the end it was only the deadbeats who flocked to him, the idlers and the dropouts, the skiving masters and the loafing champs. They were the kind of human jetsam who wash up in the pubs the moment its doors are unbolted and stick at their stools throughout the afternoon, their natural habitat the post-lunch lull, the boozy quiet before the suits trample in. My story started for me at just this time of day, when men like my granddad rule the pub. It began in the hour of the pensioner.
He started to tell a joke, something corny which began, in his favorite formulation, with that whiskery triumvirate of comic stand-bys — an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman. It is a source of endless regret to me that he never got as far as the punch line. I often think that if he had then everything might have been different.
Granddad collected bad jokes, had even written a few of them in his time, and he would have been spinning this one out, hamming up the details and relishing the accents. The courtiers chuckled along with him, sufficiently beered up even at that time of the afternoon to laugh at almost anything, tugged along by the promise of another drink once the joke was done, because Granddad — despite his casual treachery and deceit — could always be relied upon to stand his ground.
This, then, as near as I can reconstruct it, is the joke that he told. As things turned out, it was to be his last.
An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman are summoned before the Queen. They stand there at Buckingham Palace, lined up before her, gawping at the finery of the place like a trio of slack-jawed yokels on a daytrip. The Queen has a commission for them — a kind of favor — and she asks if there’s anything they wouldn’t do for her. It’s the Englishman who steps forward first. “Nothing,” he says. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my Queen.”
“Nor I,” says the Irishman.
“Nor I,” says the Scotsman.
To which the Queen replies: “Would you kill for me? Would you maim and hack and slit for me?”
The witnesses agree that it was at this moment that my granddad’s mood changed completely. It was as though all the good humor had been vacuum-pumped from the room.
He winced. A shadow passed across his face. Everyone swears blind that this is what he said next, his voice quaking with emotion: “This is not a joke. This is a secret.”
Another wince. Or rather, an expression which began as a wince before growing into a spasm and was well on its way to becoming a convulsion when he pitched forward on his stool and sprawled face-down in the sticky carpet. His companions gaped blearily at him. One or two even wondered whether this might not be part of the fun and were starting to wish that he’d hurry up, get back on his feet and order another brace of drinks, when it became apparent that this was more than play-acting. A murmur of disquiet. A small but noticeable sobering up.
A stranger stepped forward from the back of the pub, where he had been sitting, silent and unobserved, nursing a lemonade with a couple of similarly unobtrusive friends. In a flat, prim voice, he told them that he was a doctor and asked, politely but with the air of someone used to an attentive audience, whether he might be of some assistance.
He wore a dark, old-fashioned suit, a skinny tie and a grubby white shirt with a peculiarly high collar, and he looked completely out of place in that pub, absurdly, embarrassingly incongruous.
No sooner had he appeared than one of his companions, dressed, so far as anyone could tell, in exactly the same quaint way, abandoned his lemonade and trotted up beside him.
Without the slightest trace of emotion, he announced that he too was a doctor and wondered aloud whether he could help to alleviate the situation.
Then, with the woozy logic of a recurring dream, a third stranger, identically attired, strolled up to the bar to casually announce that he’d trained at Barts and that his services were unequivocally at their disposal.
Everyone shuffled back, too befuddled to do much else, as the strangers knelt beside Granddad like the magi turned up by mistake at an old folks’ home.
The first of them rolled him onto his back and reached for his wrist, groping for a pulse with forefinger and thumb. After a few seconds, he announced that Granddad still lived. It was only then that any chink of emotion entered his voice. The entourage told me later that it sounded like disappointment.
As the second man speculated about a stroke, a heart attack, an embolism, the last of the strangers took a handkerchief from the top pocket of his jacket, wiped his brow and suggested that someone call a bloody ambulance.
When Mum told me this story, I stopped her here, my heart cartwheeling in hope. “You told me he was dead.”
I could hear the sneer in her voice. “Well,” she said. “As good as.”
There’s something more you ought to know. Each of those men, each of those so-calle
d doctors, spoke with a different regional accent, each so pronounced and distinct as to be immediately recognizable.
Those men were walking stereotypes. They were a bad joke.
They were an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman.
Chapter 3
Nothing out of the ordinary ever happens to me on a Tuesday. It’s reliably the dullest day of the week. Even the Tuesday on which my life began its skydive into horror seemed, at first, to be no exception.
I opened my eyes a few seconds before the alarm intended to jangle me awake, rolled across the bed and smacked the machine into silence. With only a little groan at the prospect of another day, I got up, visited the bathroom, washed my hands, trudged into the kitchen for coffee, rummaged around the fridge to see if there was anything salvageable for breakfast and settle eventually for a bruised and doughy banana. But I was disappointed to see no obvious sign of my landlady, no evidence that she was even awake.
We lived, my landlady and I, in a rickety two-bedroom flat in Tooting Bec, SW17. It formed the ground floor of a careworn Victorian house, a short walk from a main street which had about it that distinctly London bouquet, that eau de Tooting — beer, dope and drains; old fish, exhaust fumes, stale urine. The second floor was empty and, so far as we knew, had been for years — something to do, we thought, with some structural infelicity or other. My landlady had been there several years whilst I was still the new boy — freshly ensconced only a month earlier but already resident for long enough to know exactly how I felt about her.
After I had showered and changed into my suit (fraying at the hem, balding at the knees from its overfamiliarity with the dry cleaner), I confess to dallying as I made my sandwiches in the hope of seeing my landlady emerge, gummy eyed and yawning, on a hunt for cornflakes. But her bedroom door remained resolutely closed.
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