by Adam Thorpe
I’ve sat down with a sudden headache. The cider is rolling around like bilgewater.
‘Why do you keep skulls and various items pertaining to black magic in your wardrobe, Mr Arkwright?’
‘It’s an African souvenir,’ I say. ‘From my childhood.’
My childhood!
In a gush like the pouring light of the open dream-sluice, the letters empty themselves upon me. I leap to my feet, shivering from head to foot.
‘Letters. Personal letters. Private, absolutely private.’
He’s startled.
I point at him. The scribbling bruiser behind me stiffens, I can sense it.
‘Where are they?’
‘Letters, sir?’
For the life of me I can’t. Can’t remember.
‘Some private letters. Older than me, just. Don’t take them away.’
‘Come across any letters, have we, George?’
‘Might have. I can ask the boys.’
With the socks, bedside table. I go over and pull at the drawer, the bundled socks making it stick. The cargo-label pops up, bent double. Feel with my hand, rustling, the dreadful rustle. Like putting my hand into the mustardy river from the dug-out, feeling a croc’s skin. How I’d imagine it, being eaten. Like reaching your hand into black night and touching the moon.
‘It’s all right. It’s all right.’
Sliding Eyes indicates to bruiser that he should take a peep –
‘No. They’re old. Strictly private. They’re not even real.’
‘Not real, sir?’
‘They’re pretend. Forgeries. Fakes!’ Spittle shoots out of my mouth. They’re frowning, they roll their eyes at each other. I end up in the easy chair, rubbing my thighs, holding my kneecaps. Loose bone. Bag of gelatine. Dripping for sale!
‘Had these forgeries long, have you sir?’
‘No. Yes. Anyway, I forbid you to look at them on pain of – killing myself – with an instant fit.’
‘Fit’ also spittles across the room, just missing the inspector. He thinks for a bit, tapping his tongue on the roof of his mouth. Then he makes this minute gesture to the other one – who relaxes, stays where he is. Silentium postulo.
‘Can we resume, sir?’
I nod once, slightly crick my neck.
‘Why was the, er, package in your wardrobe, sir?’
‘I think I need to call my solicitor.’
‘That’s up to you, but these are preliminary questions, that’s all. Designed to clear certain matters up, not an interrogation. Casting a bit of light in the murk, I call it. The reason we’re searching your room is quite straightforward. You have, in the past few days, burnt some clothes in your property’s garden. Also, the wood known as Pry’s Wood is. actually part of that property. Therefore the victim was picked up, as it were, on your property. You were seen in the wood on Saturday night. You were seen by many people looking dishevelled and not quite yourself on Sunday evening and Monday morning. In addition, it appears from the pathologist’s report that the victim was in fact attacked by some form of animal, as the wounds conform to those made by large claws and there have been animal hairs found on the body. However, no animal drags its victim up into a tree, does it?’
Steady eyes on my face. He knows, Mother. Another trap. The Pentel is poised at the door. He might be about to sew something.
I win.
‘Know anything about a leopard skin, missing? Belongs to you, apparently.’
‘What I was going to say. A leopard does exactly that.’
‘Sorry, lost you.’
I look at him. He’s playing the dullard, low-status, ready to pounce. Bounce.
‘A leopard drags its kill up, up into the tree.’
‘Does it now? Ah. I should’ve asked my son. He’s very keen on world animals. The one with the spots, isn’t it?’
‘World’ said almost derisively, as if being whirled around. As if it’s a notion he has to live with. He’ll be keen on football, probably cricket too. Has a prize yucca on his lawn – like the one in the garden here, Mother, which I so dislike.
‘A cheetah has spots,’ says Pentel man, suddenly, sounding as if he’s playing somebody acting stupid with great deliberation. ‘Sherlock Holmes and the Speckled Band. It was on telly the other day, with that actor who’s divorced. A baboon, and a cheetah, with speckles. Saw through it before the first adverts –’
‘At any rate,’ interrupts Sliding Eyes, ‘your leopard skin is among the items we would like to have a look at –’
‘Good. I hope you find it – and the thief. Find the thief, and you find the murderer.’
He’s fazed by this directness, I can see.
‘You think so, Mr Arkwright?’
‘I do.’
‘That’s very interesting. A very interesting deduction indeed. Wish I’d thought of it myself.’
I’m beginning to feel feverish, malarially so. It usually starts with jokes, Mother. That postcard in Bexhill, a McGill probably, Father chortling as I purchase it at the seaside kiosk: Mother, do you know anything about Kipling? Naughty boy! I have never kippled in my life! It’s chortling through my head so I close my eyes, which doesn’t help. Then there’s Reg on that little stage in the troop canteen, doing his Arthur Askey thing: ‘Now here’s one for Mrs Bagwash!’ Applause, whistles, whoops. ‘Are you sure you didn’t have the leopard skin in your possession between Saturday morning and Monday morning?’ Oh, good old Reg, but I never really got his jokes. Everyone around me does, they’re roaring, they can’t have enough, they’re in fits. I’m managing to say No through the din. It’s so like a rumbling bomber, when I put my fingers in my ears. ‘Here’s another one for Hugh!’ Good old Reg. Jeers now, though. ‘Why did you burn some clothes?’ Sudden, complete silence. My little voice. I’m being asked to go up on stage. I hate that. I can be an actor on a stage, but I cannot be a member of the audience on the stage. Oh, I so hate it! ‘Personal reasons. The attic of my property is full of junk. Among that junk were old clothes. I burnt them.’
‘Not good enough for Oxfam, then?’
Oh, Reg, you should have been a pro. Concentrate through the roars and whoops, the frenzied clapping. Boos, even. Some of these chaps won’t be alive tomorrow. ‘The attic hadn’t been touched for a very long time.’ That gets them. I’m winning. Reg looms very close. He’s milking it. ‘OK. Why were you in the wood on Saturday night, sir?’ Silence again, except for this thin flute. It’s Reg, playing his rivet. ‘It’s my property.’ Now Reg stops dead and grins. ‘You told us you came straight back here after leaving the pub.’ So quiet they can’t be breathing, out there.
‘I forgot.’
Somebody coughs, but nobody laughs. ‘Do you forget many things, sir?’
‘Anyway, he wasn’t murdered then, was he? He was murdered on Sunday night, apparently.’
Sliding Eyes ignores me and reaches behind him. He produces the claw-thing, wrapped in polythene.
‘It’s a tool,’ I explain. ‘A sort of jemmy, like burglars use. But it’s not. Can’t remember its proper name.’
‘What my old Dad used to call a pry,’ says Pentel.
‘Really? How extraordinary.’
I’m in the room again. Reg is long dead.
‘Why?’
‘Pry’s Wood. Pry meaning a lime tree. Prying on a pry in Pry’s Wood.’
I flush. They might not know I had it that night, that anyone had seen me. Dominick, the girl, the helicopter. No sign of these, yet. Both men look stupid, for a moment.
‘Anyway,’ I go on, offering information rather than waiting for any forced entry, ‘I used it to open things in my attic. Locked things, the old keys lost.’
‘Could do quite a bit of damage with this,’ says Sliding Eyes, reverently.
‘I was careful how I used it,’ I say.
The tool is put away again.
‘I think that’ll do. Sergeant, if you could tag this lot for the station –’
‘What?’ I expostula
te.
‘We’ll be taking the African material temporarily for examination, Mr Arkwright. It’s all covered, and we’ll be very careful –’
‘I don’t wish to be alarmist, but these were once very powerful and sacred objects. In fact, to my knowledge, the box has never been opened up until now.’
Only after the words have left my mouth do I remember the fetishes are about to be examined, presumably for fingerprints as well as for microscopic bits of Muck. Sliding Eyes speaks before I can correct myself.
‘I think you’re wrong there, sir,’ he says, taking a scrap of paper from a clear-plastic envelope. It’s the scrap of paper upon which my life depends, Mother! ‘Unless they have typewriters out in Bongo-Bongo Land.’
‘Don’t take that, please don’t take that,’ I want to say – but don’t. I am in enough trouble as it is. While I watch from my chair, everything from Bamakum is tagged and wrapped in polythene and zipped up inside a holdall and taken away.
Your loving son,
Hugh
Hot.
Dear Mother,
About an hour later I am standing in front of the nursing home holding two long hazel sticks cut from a hedgerow. I tell Cliff to return in an hour. Inside, the good news is that Mrs Stanton-Crewe’s sailing up the Nile. And Ray is ‘a bit better today’. The sweet nurse eyes my hazel sticks as if they’re unusual flowers. The end of one of them catches the strip of cardboard requesting old stockings for draught excluders, knocking it off the table. She doesn’t mind at all. ‘Whoops, that’s all right, she passed away ages ago,’ she says, folding it up and dropping it into the bin.
I go straight up, by myself. A good sign, I think. I knock on the door and enter, the sticks catching on the lintel. My mouth’s open to say hello but instead I gurgle; Ray’s so much better that he’s become his son. The door returns on its heavy spring and catches the sticks so that they leap out of my hand. The son ducks, I dive after them. One stick, caught in the door, springs up and quivers at head level, horizontally. I almost take my eye out on it.
‘Planning on taking dear old Dad out for a spot of fishing, this time?’
There’s a growl from the high-backed chair: Ray emerges from it as if from a tomb. Piers, that’s it. He’s got the same suit on. I can’t think of anything clever to say in reply. I feel very silly, holding the sticks. The whole idea feels very silly. The father and the son look at me: I’m an intruder, I’ve burst in on family. Ray asks how I’m doing, rather anxiously. But that’s what I wanted to ask him, Mother! Piers is holding a box with a picture of a mobile phone on the top. I need to find an excuse for the sticks.
‘I’m very well,’ I lie.
‘Not come to magic him away again, I hope,’ says Piers.
Another remonstrance from Ray, but it ends in a cough.
‘Just visiting,’ I say, taking a bag of liquorice allsorts from my coat pocket. ‘See how things were going.’
I stand like the third spear-holder in The Kingmaker (with whom I opened my professional career, Mother), handing a bag of gold to Robert Eddison. Piers looks quite like a pudgier Eddison, come to that. He places the box on a stool and takes the allsorts and gives them to his father, who has sat down on the edge of the bed, wheezing. These movements are complicated, as if we’re in a complicated blocking rehearsal.
‘My favourite,’ says Ray, scratching at the plastic wrapping. ‘And Piers thinks I need a mobile phone.’
‘It’s modern,’ says Piers, ‘can’t have anything modern, can we?’
He looks at me brightly and suspiciously at the same time, then at the sticks.
‘And I think your father needs a climbing plant,’ I say, looking up to where the sticks end above my head. ‘But I left the plant in the taxi, and the taxi’s gone off.’
Piers looks up at them, too.
‘Hope it’s unusually vigorous,’ he says, in a quiet voice.
Ray is blowing his nose and wiping his mouth in a kerfuffle of stained handkerchief. Anyway, his ears are bad. Ray’s lucky to have children, I think. Even if they turn out to be rockers and evangelicals, he’s damn lucky.
The son looks at his watch. He has very small ears. Tim said the Cheshire bog man had very small ears. It doesn’t matter who we come from: we come from everyone. Then the miracle: Piers announces that he must leave, that it’s the Get-Friendly-With-God bash over at Luton in a couple of hours and he’s organising the coaches’ car park. He says he’ll tell the nurses about the phone but Ray coughs and splutters, insisting he take it away. Piers taps the box thoughtfully then goes to the door, the box tucked under his arm. He puts his hand out and I shake it. His hand squeezes my hand as if wringing it clean.
‘Difficult sod, but we all love him,’ he murmurs, keeping the door open with his foot. ‘The Lord be with you.’
‘And also with you,’ I say. He doesn’t take it as mockery. The door strains to close him off, as if it’s under my influence. Then I’m alone with the father.
‘Modern my foot,’ he says, chewing on an allsort.
He’s looking out of the window. The word ‘modern’ hovers for a moment in the grey sky, above the spidery antennae and white dishes. Then it evaporates into its own dullness. I feel a bond. The hazel sticks have purpose again, leaning against the wall.
We talk about doctors for a bit, as far as I remember. Then I sit down next to him, on the edge of the bed. We work through the allsorts like two small boys. ‘Have ’em before the nurses do,’ Ray jokes. I try to ignore the smell. We ramble around the subject of long-vanished sweets, the way certain brands fizzed or crumbled or shattered in the mouth. And the horrible counterpoint of the daily dose.
‘What I need,’ says Ray, ‘is a flagon of Clarke’s Blood Mixture.’
‘Good grief, yes. Clarke’s Blood Mixture.’
‘Vampire medicine. Food for the undead. That’s why I need it.’
He eyes me, wheezing under his baldness. I get up and go over to the window. Now or never!
I ask him if he has heard about Frank Petty. He has, yes. Awful business. Yes. Mr Petty was not only one of his ‘chief sources’, but the ‘last proper village character’. ‘Mr Petty’ sounds different, a different person, Muck with front teeth and wearing a tie, not like a village character at all – they’re always toothless. Well, I was never called ‘Arkwright’ until I went to school – was I, Mother?
He’s shifty now, like Malcolm. I ask him what else he knows. He looks out of the window. ‘Jessica tells me things.’
There’s a little silence.
‘But we both agree they’ve got it wrong,’ he adds. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘I’m frightened of them. They’re incompetent. I’ve always been frightened of incompetence.’
‘You can hide under my bed,’ he says, grinning. ‘It’ll be like The Thirty-Nine Steps. You can pretend to be me. You don’t look that far off. Now, what are those sticks doing there?’
I bring them over to him and clear my throat.
‘Ray, I want you to do something for me. I will always regard it as the greatest favour anyone has ever done for me in my whole life.’
He says he owes me. Well?
‘It’s divining time.’
He looks at me as if I’ve told him that I did do the awful thing.
‘But I can’t, I can’t,’ he says, quietly, seeming to wither in front of my eyes, sitting back in his chair.
I wither, too, and sit down opposite him. The window wavers a little. A hunchback in a zimmer frame crosses the lawn with the sweet young nurse. Our lawn is much bigger here, Mother.
‘Why not, Ray?’
‘Too feeble. I need a pint of Clarke’s Blood Mixture.’
Then he asks me what I want him to look for, and I tell him.
‘Never done leopard skins before. You need a dog for that. Woof woof. Oh look, here’s one. Fancy that. Woof woof.’
Bless his dying heart! I’ve brought along an AA map and I unfold it on the bed. It’s a motorist’s map,
and the area’s too big. It’s all towns and too many roads. Ray shakes his head. ‘That’s not a map,’ he says, ‘not what I call a map. Look in my top drawer.’ I open it and find a pink Ordnance Survey lying on crisp white linen. The eager contours, the little green woods, the winding lanes – how they wash through me! I’m a boy again. I’m planning my day-long bicycle trip, wiping crumbs from the crackly folds –
‘Give me one of the withies,’ Ray says. ‘You should have found a forked one, but I’ll do what I can.’
He starts to bend it, but its green strength is too much for him. With the help of my pocket knife, I force it into a V-shape. He sits forward with a grunt and holds it out flat in front of him. ‘Bring the map nearer so you can touch me and it at the same time, please.’
I do so. I hold his forearm – sheer bone, it feels like, through the sweater – and place my forefinger on Ulverton’s fawn sprawl. What a vast size my finger is. Albert Speer walked round the world in Spandau Prison Yard, using maps.
‘Now, think of the leopard skin. Count its spots.’
He closes his eyes, gives a brief sigh, sticks his chin out, and tells me to work grid square by grid square. I should start in one corner of each square and spiral in. I move my finger up to the tiny fawn speck that marks Ilythia and spiral in slowly. The leopard skin spirals with me, but I can’t fix its size or shape: it’s minute and then it’s enormous, blurring out of sight. I try to picture it lying on the tanning table in Bamakum; its hide is facing up, gleaming from its bath. Father, in a cloud of green flies, scrapes at it with his brush. The head is upside-down, hanging over the edge. I can even smell it, smell its dirt plopping off with the suds on to the copper earth of the yard, hear Father swearing softly as he scrapes and flicks, scrapes and flicks. I don’t know where you are, Mother. Through this picture the map all but disappears, or seems to drop to somewhere very far down.
