Sonata of the Dead

by Conrad Williams

  25

  We were invited to use a studio at the BBC’s Broadcasting House in Portland Place, but we decided it would be better, and safer for all concerned, if we recorded the piece at a neutral venue. In the end we borrowed a sequestered second-floor office in Poland Street. It was pretty packed in there. We had radio broadcasters, a TV crew, reporters and photographers from all the dailies. Mawker introduced me to Tula Barnes, who was huddled in a thick grey shawl, looking like an owl poking its head out of a nest. She was standing next to a guy in a cream jacket who surreptitiously wiped his hand after shaking mine. He was Jacob Briers, apparently, an editorial director at Janner & Fyffe. Neither had agreed to be filmed. They were there solely in a consulting capacity.

  I agreed to assume the role of a literary critic, but it had to be a freelance position; none of the linens would agree to take me under their wing. They didn’t want any attacks on their offices.

  I said I’d start within five minutes and if people weren’t ready then tough shit. There would be no second take. It wouldn’t sound right if it came over too rehearsed.

  I basically recited what Romy had fed me, adding a little spin of my own. I said that The Hack’s serial rejection was incidental now, but it had been a pivotal moment early in his so-called career. I said that he was probably mentally ill, and prone to thoughts of sexual deviance. I suggested that he was unattractive, and possibly impotent. No doubt this was a violent person, but there was a likelihood that violence had been visited upon him all through his life, in many forms. Physical, emotional violence, of course, but also sexual abuse, likely from the key people in his life that he should have been able to trust. Was he an orphan? It wouldn’t surprise me. Was he deformed? How could he not be? He was a bully, a thug, a brutal outcast. A freak. I ladled it on. And then I read out some choice pieces from the manuscript. All the howlers I could find. I chuckled. I derided. Contempt oozed from every syllable.

  I watched the video cameras and the digital recorders blink. I watched the pencils form their curlicues of code in notebooks. Everything I said was a roundabout, fancified way of saying THIS IS A CUNT OF EPIC PROPORTIONS.

  ‘Is he man enough to come in and debate this with me? I doubt it. He’s a skulker, inhabits the shadows. He jumps you from behind. There is no nobility, no courage, no class to this person at all. He is a bottom feeder. He is a freak. He is a smear, the lowest form of life in the underclass. I pity and abhor him, and so should we all. He has nothing in his life. Some write as a form of therapy. Some write because they have great stories they wish to share. This vainglorious by-blow writes in the way the peacock spreads its feathers, but all his colours are grey and the plumage is collapsed and dusty. This man. This Hack. Is pathetic.’

  The recorders clicked off. The biros clicked shut. Eddie Chesters, a shit-strainer from one of the tabloids, touched my arm as I was leaving. ‘Don’t hold back,’ he said. ‘Tell us what you really think about this guy.’

  And then we got the hell out of there. I knew the owner of a basement cocktail bar nearby, and I steered Romy quickly into it before any of the journos could see us and follow suit. The guy who ran it, Mo Belper, an asthmatic with a grey face and a penchant for white leather jackets, locked the doors behind us and went to fix us drinks. Romy wanted a coffee, but I ordered myself a dirty martini and sank it quick. I felt dirty inside and out, as if breathing the same air as that pack of quote-hungry wolves had furred my lungs with filth, but also because it wasn’t even eight a.m. yet, and I was ladling sauce down my throat.

  ‘The breakfast of champions,’ Romy said.

  ‘That was not the most pleasant thing I’ve ever done,’ I said. I was shaking.

  ‘You could have had an Americano, like me.’

  ‘I’m not talking about the martini.’

  ‘It’s done now. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t, but now you can forget about it. You did a good job. If it was me you were talking about in there I’d come out all guns blazing.’

  ‘Is that a good thing, though, really?’ I asked. I was no longer so sure. ‘What if it just causes him to withdraw into himself, make him harder to find? He’s not stupid. He’ll realise how hot a property he is, how much fear he’s instilling in people, how much we want to nail him. He could go off the radar completely.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because this is his time, Joel. Why couldn’t he have done this years ago? Why now? Because of the way the chips fall. Because the voices tell him it’s now. Because of planet alignment. Maybe he doesn’t care if he’s caught. He’s determined to finish whatever is on that to-do list.’

  Belper punctuated that with a hit on his inhaler. It broke the spell. The world filtered through. I heard the traffic outside, and a radio talk show playing in a back room of the bar. I smelled burned toast. The martini had given my appetite a tickle; I wanted something to eat.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ she said. ‘I have a fragmented love letter to return to, remember?’

  ‘What if it was fragmented not because it’s ancient, but because the person who received it tore it to pieces? What if it was unrequited?’

  She reached out and cradled my chin with her hand. ‘Look at you,’ she said. She was smiling but there was sadness in her voice. ‘Bruises and cuts. Don’t let your heart go the same way.’

  She kissed me and left.

  Mo Belper, who had been sweeping the floor nearby, kicked my shin.

  ‘What was that for?’

  ‘You,’ he said. His voice was deep and fractured, the result of a lifetime of firing salbutamol and tar at his lungs. ‘Always seeing red lights. You sit with a beautiful woman and you send her away on a downer. We all get the face we deserve, Joel.’

  ‘Your face is going to deserve that broom if you don’t piss off and fix me a bacon sandwich,’ I said.

  Refuelled, I stood at the doorway looking up and down the street. Clear.

  I caught a cab for the flat, in need of fresh clothes. Streets blurred past the window, and it seemed like a speeded-up version of the past few days, slogging along roads searching, running to, running away from. My hips, knees and ankles twinged with the effort of all the miles I’d clocked up. I wondered about holidays. Difficult to do when you have a stay-at-home cat, but now I daydreamed a little about putting the little fucker in a cattery, or paying for a sitter, or sticking him in a gulag with armed guards. Jet off for a week to a beach. South of France. Portugal. Drag Romy with me. Sarah too. Because I was going to find her. She was close enough I could touch her; I could smell the strawberry lip balm she always used.

  Mengele was there to greet me. I say ‘greet’ but ‘assault’ might be more accurate. His tail lashed at me and he stared at it, mildly alarmed, perhaps thinking what he might achieve if he attached razor blades to it. I bent to scratch his ear and he bit me, actually breaking the little web of skin between my thumb and forefinger.

  26

  I dreamed we were in the claustrophobic office on Poland Street. Standing room only. All attention on me at the front of the room. A light blazed in my face alongside the unblinking shark’s eye of the TV camera. Nerves rioting in my gut like a nest of snakes sprayed with petrol. Pencils poised. I speak and I can’t hear the words. They fold and jumble in my head like shapes I once knew but no longer recognise. Journalists transcribe anyway. I see the jag of graphite on paper, the weird hieroglyphics of Pitman and Teeline. And a shadow growing.

  Romy Toussaint with a collapsing smile on her mouth, nodding in encouragement, but perhaps taken aback by the savagery of what I’m saying. Ian Mawker looking tired and worn, stretched thin like his underpant elastic. I stare into that lens and see the soul of The Hack welling like black oil from the cracked engine block of a car too dangerous to drive any more. The words go straight into him like hooks. All distance is concertinaed; I’m pulling him into the midst of us. The shadow grows. He’s here. Everyone touched by that elongating black figure shrinks in p
ain, cradling charred limbs. A photographer with an arm like a mackerel-striped log left in the embers of a bonfire trips backward, his camera melting, fusing to his skin. A woman falls to her knees, her face blasted red, the flesh hanging off her like shreds left on a barbecue rack, eyes poached in their sockets, milk-white, puckered dry.

  The shadow has his arm curled around his notepad; a kid at school protecting his work from the copycats. Steam and smoke rises from his grinning mouth, and the black hoods where his own eyes should be. The pencil crackles and crumbles on paper turned to sheaves of grey wafer in the heat.

  Notes and queries, he said, but his voice was all breath, like some mystic wind in a far-flung desert. Skeletons on the page.

  I was backing away. I could feel the heat coming off him. I felt my eyebrows crisp. Moisture fled from my skin. I reached out to Romy but she burst into flames before I could touch her.

  * * *

  I came out of sleep roaring.

  Mengele was on the other side of the room, watching me warily. I must have been crying out in my sleep. Sweat speckled my brow; I felt it trickle down the small of my back. I took a hot shower and checked myself in the mirror. I looked like a filleted chicken skin with the bones put in ass backwards. I wrapped a towel around my waist and retrieved the bottle of Grey Goose from the freezer. I got a shot glass, thought better of it, and picked out a chunky tumbler. I poured in an inch, thought better of it, and half-filled the glass.

  I went out on to the balcony. It was okay, but you could feel the plucking fingers of winter just past trying to cling on. I stared out at the rooftops and the cranes and felt a tremor of fear at the thought of going out there again. I never seemed to do what normal people did any more. And it was getting harder to remember what that was, exactly. Not much of the last five years could be entered into the ‘mundane’ column of life’s ledger. The last time I went to the cinema, Rebecca and Sarah had been with me. I didn’t have long lunches any more. I didn’t go out to the pub with mates. I didn’t see any mates. I didn’t have any mates. Not close ones, the kind you can call any time to bend their ear. The kind you can drop in on, unannounced. Tokuzo, maybe, but she’d argue the toss.

  The drink was going down all too easily. I wanted another. But I knew another was going to skew everything. But that was all right. I needed some down time, some me time. A couple of drinks at home, a delivered pizza. Unexpected cat attacks and news programmes on the radio, or some music. I was dead on my feet, I suggested to myself. I deserved a night off, I persuaded.

  I put on my bathrobe as a way to underline that thought, and poured myself another drink. I ordered a pizza online with more toppings than gravity could deal with and put on some music. I hadn’t listened to Zbigniew Preisner since Rebecca had died – she loved his music – so I listened to that, expecting the floods to come, but it was okay. I had a drink to celebrate that Rubicon moment. The pizza turned up and I ate the lot, heroically fending off Mengele with one hand while I scarfed down anchovies, olives, hot green peppers and mushrooms. I drank some more. I didn’t notice the CD finish. I didn’t tune in to the news. I sat in the dark and listened to the rasp of Mengele’s tongue on the pizza box and drank until the glass was empty and then I refilled the glass and did it all again.

  Drinking released the fear I’d locked away in me. Drinking was the only way to deal with it too. An hour later and the fear was too big for me to contain it in my small living room and the vodka wasn’t putting too much of a dent in it. I went out on to the balcony again and breathed hard and deep. I rested the hand holding the glass on the railing but I misjudged and instead knocked the glass out of my fingers. I almost went over the railing after it, trying to catch it; it was the last of the glasses from our wedding list, a set of beautiful Polish tumblers. Really chunky numbers – very heavy: a third of it was a solid glass base – and they’d all been broken over the years but I’d been extra special careful with this one, until now. I heard it shatter in the communal back alley, the place where everyone in this block kept their bins. Ignominious ending. The sound seemed to go on for minutes.

  Another little link to Rebecca erased; soon all that remained of our marriage, the only tangible proofs, would be a certificate in a tin in a box in the attic. And Sarah.

  And the attic might catch fire one day. And one day Sarah would die. She might die tonight. She might be dying right now, while pizza congealed in my gut and I kept milking a bottle of vodka.

  I reeled to the bedroom and threw on some clothes. I had no idea where I was heading but wherever it was I was in no fit state to be there. I fell over twice before I’d even got my jeans on, and even then they were back to front. Mengele looked bug-eyed frightened: a first. This was in no job description he’d been privy to. Idiot opens cans – check. Idiot supplies arms/legs for general scarring – check. Idiot thrashes around failing to get dressed properly – WTF?

  I jack-knifed over the corner of the bed and cracked my head on the edge of the skirting board. Mengele turned his back on me and left the room. I opened the bedroom window and screamed Sarah’s name. I kept screaming until the guy next door – the guy who must have a cock made of splintered steel if his girlfriend’s coital shrieks were anything to go by – started hammering on the wall for me to be quiet. By that time I’d pulled something in my throat, or stripped it raw, and I couldn’t produce any more sound anyway. I shambled back to the kitchen and poured another drink, just a small one, to alleviate the pain.

  And then I was in a bar I didn’t recognise and a woman who was at least as pissed as me was jouncing around on her stool laughing at some joke I’d told or she’d told. Or maybe there was no joke and she was just insane. Loud music was playing and someone was dancing on a table. A couple in a corner sat next to each other, drinks neatly aligned in front of them. They said nothing. His hand palpated her right breast as if he was searching for his keys; death couldn’t have made her features less thrilled.

  ‘Where’s Sarah?’ I asked the barman.

  ‘Where’s Sarah?’ I asked the doorman.

  ‘Where’s Sarah?’ I asked the woman in the bus queue.

  Outside a bar in Meard Street I asked a guy tapping the screen of an iPhone.

  ‘Sarah?’ he said. ‘I know where Sarah is.’

  ‘Is she safe?’

  ‘She’s safe. You want to see her?’

  ‘I need to see her.’

  ‘It’ll cost you.’

  Red descent. It wasn’t so much the content as the delivery; he wouldn’t look up from his fucking screen. I slapped the phone from his hands and grabbed him around the throat.

  ‘Where is she?’

  He seemed utterly unfazed, although his voice now sounded like Donald Duck speaking through a eunuch flute. ‘It’ll cost you.’

  I got his hand and folded it and sent it up his back. He yelled out. I folded it a little more. He begged me to stop. I told him to take me to Sarah.

  Somehow we got to D’Arblay Street and he led me into a mews filled with shadows and blocks of tired red light. He was saying something over and over – you’ll pay for this – but I was past listening to him.

  ‘Just get the fucking door open,’ I said.

  Inside three women unfolded from a sofa in front of a small TV. They were wearing fishnet stockings and push-up bras. They looked at us with a mixture of defeat and amusement.

  ‘Who’s this?’ asked one, in an accent I couldn’t place. She looked European at least. There was a smell of peppermint tea and scorched hair.

  ‘Where’s Sarah?’ I yelled.

  ‘Whichever one you want,’ said the guy. ‘You let go of me you’d better be ready to pay double or I’ll paint the fucking walls with you.’

  I broke his arm and left him pale-faced, cradling himself in the corner of the room while the girls huddled together. One of them pulled a Taser out of her bag and aimed it at me.

  ‘Get out,’ she said.

  I left.

  I ordered vodka and a Kronen
bourg chaser in a bar where the walls were decorated with what looked like cow hides. It was the last drink I managed that night. The woman sitting next to me was vaping on something that looked like a steampunk sonic screwdriver. She frowned whenever I spoke to her.

  ‘Warsaw?’ she said. ‘Warsaw? What the fuck are you on, mister?’

  I blacked out.

  When I revived I was outside. I’d pissed myself and I was wearing a bib of vomit. The smell of undigested alcohol hung in a pall around me. The sky looked like a funky bandage removed from an infected wound: all ochre and deep purple; there was even a soft band of green in there.

  I struggled upright and recognised where I was. Welbeck Street. At least I’d been heading home in vaguely the right direction before my gas ran out. The area below my left eye was stiff; I reckon someone had punched me at some point. Just the one person? Bonus. All things considered I’d got off lightly, although the evening wouldn’t return to me in glorious Technicolor. I got little snippets and excerpts granted me by the fear editor in my head. Look at what you did, you arsehole. Remember this? You did this too, look. You complete twat-meister.

  Another fifteen minutes and I was turning into Homer Street. All my gauges were at zero. Needles shivering in red zones. I was going to have a bath and sleep it all away.

  ‘Hey.’

  Another stranger. I’d had enough of strangers. It was folded into itself, crouched in my doorway, hooded. I saw the faintest spots of light where its eyes must have been. I hung back. I don’t like strangers who know where I live, strangers waiting for me.

  The figure stood up. It was Niker. His posture spoke of defeat. He looked finished.