How to Be Bad

by David Bowker

  “I can’t make out what you’re saying,” I said.

  “Der grarn!” he yelled.

  “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I don’t speak working class.”

  I don’t know why I was surprised when the man with the tattoos punched me in the forehead and I fell over. It had never occurred to me that the forehead was a sensitive area, but the blow hurt like hell, so I decided to remain horizontal for a few moments until I felt better. Someone touched my face and, thinking it was the illustrated scumbag, I told him to fuck off and die.

  “Now, there’s no need for that. I’m only trying to help.”

  I opened my eyes. A female paramedic was leaning over me.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “What’s your name, love?”

  I told her.

  “My name’s Sue,” she said, “and this is Geoff.”

  I was vaguely aware of a male colleague standing behind her, looking bored.

  “Mark, I’m not being funny,” said Sue, “but you can’t stay here.”

  “I only just this minute lay down.”

  “No,” she said. “You’ve been here for at least half an hour. That’s why we’re going to take you for a nice little ride in an ambulance.”

  “No need to be patronizing,” I said. “And I don’t need an ambulance. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “Mark,” explained Sue patiently, “you’re lying flat on your back in a public place with a lump the size of a grapefruit on your head.”

  * * *

  THERE WAS an enormous queue at the hospital. Everywhere you looked there were ill bastards. After showing such initial concern, the paramedics just dumped me on a chair in a corridor and left. While I was waiting, a police officer turned up to question me. One of the paramedics had phoned in to say I’d been assaulted. To our mutual dismay, I was attended by the same twelve-year-old constable who’d visited my shop that morning. Obviously thinking he had wasted enough time on me for one day, the rude bastard sighed again as he took out his notebook. “So this man who attacked you. Did he look like Jesus as well?”

  “No. This one looked like a tattooed Martian.”

  The police officer gave me a long, quizzical stare. “Mark, I’m going to ask you a question. I don’t mean anything by this, but I’ve got to be sure.”

  “Fire away.”

  “You wouldn’t be inventing these attackers of yours, by any chance?”

  “No.”

  “Only I wouldn’t be cross with you if you were. In fact, I could put you in touch with some trained counselors who might be able to help you.”

  “I am not a fucking nutcase!”

  “On the other hand, I must warn you that wasting police time is a very serious matter.”

  “What about the police wasting my time? I haven’t invented anything. I’ve had a terrible day. The Son of Man came down from heaven to insult me. A nasty tattooed cunt hit me in the face and stole my fucking bike. I suppose that’s not a crime, either?”

  The constable nodded and stared at the wall for a while. I assumed he was just humoring me, but when he looked at me again there was a thoughtful gleam in his eyes. “This man with the tattoos? When he spoke, did it sound as if he was talking a foreign language?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he didn’t happen to have his son with him, did he, sir?”

  “Yeah! That’s it. A horrible fat little Nazi.”

  “Ah.” With an air of hopelessness, the constable closed his notebook. “OK. The man who hit you is called Nigel Barker. Known locally as Wuffer. He’s already well known to us, unfortunately.”

  “Well known as what? Someone else you do fuck-all about?”

  “Mr. Madden, if you want to make a complaint about Mr. Wuffer—I mean, Mr. Barker—that’s fine with me. But the fact is, people like that aren’t like you and me, are they? They can’t be reasoned with. It’s not just the father. The whole family is competely out of control. You could make a complaint, but what good would it do? These people are the lowest of the low.”

  “So do you ever do anything about anything?” I said.

  He blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean is this how you spend your days? Every time someone makes a complaint, you try to persuade them there’s not really any point?”

  The young police officer looked affronted. “I never said anything of the kind, sir. All I was trying to suggest was that there’s no real harm done. And the fact is, a person like Mr. Barker simply will not learn, no matter how many times we fine him or send him to prison.”

  “So you wouldn’t advise me to press charges.”

  He cleared his throat. “That’s up to you.”

  “I suppose no real harm’s done,” I said wearily. “I’ve still got my arms and legs.”

  Then he smiled. “Exactly. That’s exactly the way I look at it.”

  When the police officer had gone, I went to the coffee machine and bought myself a cup of steaming brown water. When I got back, a young woman with her wrist in plaster walked up the corridor looking for an empty seat. I watched her approach from a distance, saw the heads turning to stare after her. As she passed by, her loveliness hit me full in the face like the heat from an oven.

  The only empty chair was next to mine. She sat down without so much as a glance at me, took a book out of her bag, and began to read. She had pale skin and razored pale hair and an aura of casual insolence. Her name was Caro Sewell, and when I was eighteen years old she broke my heart.

  Caro was frowning at the paperback in her lap as if it had just said something stupid. It was some kind of self-help book, so it probably had. She must have known she was being stared at, but she didn’t look up. I cleared my throat and spoke to her. “Caro?”

  She turned to glance at me, then did a double take and almost smiled. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. The way she said it, you’d have thought she hardly knew me. You’d have thought we had never cried together at parties or taken drugs or lain in a field next to a railway embankment, fucking joyfully as the trains went by. Caro raised the level of her gaze, and I realized she had noticed the bump on my forehead.

  “It’s just a bruise,” I explained quickly.

  Caro nodded tersely, and I guessed she didn’t want to ask how I’d got it in case I questioned her about her injury. I wasn’t that interested, really. It sounds shit when you say it, but I’ll say it anyway. At that moment, I was only interested in her face. She was twenty-three, the same age as me. Still young but old enough to start counting the fucking birthdays.

  I hate those supermarket philosophers who tell you what a great healer time is. Time is a mere anesthetist. The years numb the pain, but the wound remains. I may no longer have ached for Caro, but nor had I forgotten everything she meant and took away. She had been an exceptionally pretty schoolgirl. She had turned into a startlingly beautiful woman. Just looking at her turned my mouth dry.

  “I thought you were at uni,” she said. “Weren’t you doing English or something?”

  “English lit. I left after the second year. I had to. They were putting me off reading.”

  “What do you do now?”

  “I own a top retail outlet in Sheen.”

  “You mean you work in a shop?”

  Ouch.

  “It’s a bookshop. Mark Madden Books. You can’t miss it. My name’s above the door in bloody big letters!”

  She half-nodded. “I think I’ve passed it. I didn’t think it could be the same Mark Madden. I pictured some fat middle-aged man in a cardigan. Your very own shop. How did you get the money together for that?”

  “Um, my dad helped me out. I’m going to pay him back, though.”

  A nurse appeared and called out my name.

  I got up and started to mumble a miserable farewell.

  “No, wait,” she said. She took a ballpoint pen out of her bag, grabbed my hand, and coolly scrawled a number on it. “If you feel like going out sometime, give me a call.”

  *
* *

  AT THE pub that night, Wallace asked why I had a grapefruit on my head. I told him about the book-burning maniac and the incomprehensible tattooed maniac, and he quickly lost interest. But when I told Wallace I’d bumped into Caro, he got all excited. “She asked you to call her? Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t say yes?” said Wallace.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Thank Christ for that.” He set his beer glass down on the bar and looked at me. “Because I hope you haven’t forgotten what happened last time.”

  “Er, no.”

  Wallace proceeded to tell me anyway. “You went out together for two months.”

  “Five and a half,” I said.

  “Then on your eighteenth birthday, she goes and dumps you for Danny Curran.”

  I nodded grimly.

  Wallace laughed. “I hope for her sake he was better as a lover than he was a teacher. God, your face when you caught her sucking his cock at your own birthday party!”

  “Get stuffed,” I said, blushing at the memory.

  “What are you so sensitive about? It was years ago.” He smiled and shook his head. “Poor old Danny, eh? I wonder what became of the dirty one-legged bastard?”

  “He had two legs,” I said. “One was shorter than the other.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I forgot. You saw him with his trousers down, didn’t you?” Wallace took a mouthful of his drink and tried not to laugh. He tried so hard that beer came out of his nostrils.

  “I’m glad you find it amusing.”

  When Wallace had stopped laughing, he leaned back on his stool and shrugged. “She didn’t do him much good, anyway. Lost his job for fucking a pupil. He and his wife split up, and Caro dumped him. Serves him fucking right.”

  “If it hadn’t been Danny,” I said, “it would have been someone else.”

  “Exactly,” said Wallace, spinning on his stool until he was facing me. “That’s exactly my point. What do you want her phone number for? You know what you’re like. You’ll see her once, then you’ll start following her about on all fours with your little tail wagging and your tongue hanging out.”

  “I’m nothing like that.”

  “Yes, you are. You’re doing it now. Why you ever wasted your time on a lying tart like that, I will never know.”

  This was the trouble with Wallace. He dreamed of being hip, but he used words like “tart,” words that even your parents would consider old-fashioned.

  “She was a teenager,” I reminded him. “Of course she was going to be flattered when her favorite teacher took a shine to her. She’s twenty-three now. People do grow up, Andy—present company fucking well excepted.”

  He sulked for a while, then tried to get his own back. “I’ll tell you something about Caro, shall I? Something you didn’t know. She used to take the piss out of you behind your back.”

  “No, she didn’t. Other kids might have done. Bastards like you. Not Caro.”

  “Madden, I’m telling you. Even when you were seeing her, she found you rather amusing. And I don’t mean in a nice way. She used to call you Madeline.”

  “Bullshit.”

  For a few seconds, Wallace looked at me the way comrades-in-arms look at each other in old war movies, just before they go over the top and get shot to fuck. “Mark?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Promise me you won’t call her.”

  “Why? What’s it to you?”

  “Just promise.”

  “All right, all right. I promise.”

  As soon as I got home, I called her.

  CHAPTER 2

  ABOUT A GIRL

  THE VERY next night, just before eight, I drove to Caro’s address on Kew Road. She lived in a first-floor flat overlooking Kew Gardens. A black BMW Sportster was parked in the drive, next to which my Fiat Uno looked like a car for cautious old ladies. Feeling scared and excited, I rang the bell. Caro, now minus her plaster cast, came down to open the door. She placed her hands lightly on my shoulders and greeted me with those fake kisses so beloved of middle-class women.

  We walked to the restaurant on foot, close but not touching. It was a mild but windy night in early February. Litter and dead leaves spun around our feet as we walked. I complimented her on the BMW. “You must be doing all right for yourself, to drive a car like that.”

  Caro laughed rudely.

  The restaurant was that French one at the shitty end of Kew Road. Our table was in the window, giving passersby an excellent view of my appalling table manners. The people around us were all rich and well groomed. In my slightly idiotic best clothes, I blended in rather well. “Have you been here before?” I asked her.

  “No. Have you?”

  “A few times. It’s the second-best restaurant in Richmond. The first is an Indian place called the New Manzil. You know it?”

  “Is that the place where they give you free wine?”

  “Yeah. And those cute little matchboxes with elephants on them.”

  I suddenly became aware of the Muzak softly playing in the background. “Listen,” I said. “They’re playing our song.”

  To our amusement and distaste, it was a Mantovani arrangement of “Fuck Me but Don’t Fuck With Me” by Sol Horror. The song that had been playing at that first party when Caro had puked all over me. The song that brought us together.

  “It’s an omen,” I joked.

  “I doubt it,” said Caro.

  The neighboring table was occupied by a leering white-haired man and a woman who was young enough to be his daughter but nowhere near ugly enough.

  “Look at that,” said Caro in a loud voice. “Beauty and the beast. She’s got her whole life ahead of her, but so what? She’s broke. He’s promised to leave his wife for her, and with her body, it might just be worth it. At the moment, his money is the only aphrodisiac she needs. But I wonder how sexy he’ll seem when she’s forty and he’s seventy-five and peeing his pajamas.”

  Caro may have looked like a more beautiful version of her former self, but the feeling she gave off was very different. At seventeen, despite her pretensions to cool, she had been as appalled and bewildered by the world as me. Now, unless it was an act, she gave the impression of being frighteningly self-possessed.

  “Wow,” I said. “Are you always this cynical?”

  “I’m no cynic,” she said. “A cynic doesn’t believe in the basic goodness of people.”

  “And how many good people do you know?”

  “Donny Osmond.”

  “Is that it? Donny Osmond?”

  “Isn’t that enough? I have faith in Donny. If Donny was found to be a junkie, a wife beater, or a pedophile, I wouldn’t believe in anything anymore.”

  We’d ordered a bottle of chardonnay. The waiter who opened the bottle, a puny French guy in his thirties, fawned over Caro as if she were royalty. He wasn’t exactly subtle about it, letting her sample the wine instead of me, despite the fact that I was paying. When Caro said the wine was lovely, the waiter said, “A beautiful wine for a beautiful lady.”

  “Well, thank you,” I said, fluttering my eyelids at him.

  Even when he was serving other people, the waiter couldn’t help staring at her. Humbert Humbert at the next table was also mesmerized by her. I don’t know why I’m acting so superior about it. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, either.

  I drank the first glass too quickly because I was so nervous. When I was on the second, she patted my hand. “Take it easy, I’m not going anywhere.”

  “So what do you do?” I said.

  She smirked. “Are we making polite conversation?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I do fuck-all,” she said. “And what do you do? Oh yeah, I remember. You sell rare books. Like Hugh Grant in Notting Hill.”

  “No. He didn’t sell novels. He sold travel books.”

  “How on earth would you remember that?”

  “I’ve got a very retentive memory.”


  “Retentive anus, you mean.”

  I decided to let this go. “If you’ve got any Nick Hornby first editions you want to sell, I’d definitely be interested. That’s my specialist area. Books by and about men.”

  “Ugh, no.” She shook her head vehemently. “All that men-with-feelings shit makes me throw up.”

  I smiled tolerantly to demonstrate that her contempt for my vocation would not affect my desire to sleep with her.

  “What’s the point?” she said. “Are Nick Hornby books worth anything?”

  “Fever Pitch would go for about twenty pounds. A signed one could fetch as much as forty.”

  “As much as that?”

  Now I was starting to feel uncomfortable. “Yeah, but you wait. In a few years, the value of those books will skyrocket.”

  “What if it doesn’t?” said Caro. “What if dear old Nick becomes one of those writers nobody bothers with anymore? Like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”

  “Well, I’ll have been wasting my time.”

  She nodded in satisfaction. I felt we weren’t getting on well at all.

  “You used to like Sylvia Plath, didn’t you?” I said. “I’ve got a copy of The Colossus you might be interested in.”

  “I’ve already got it.”

  “Yeah, you’ve got an old paperback. I’m offering you a hardback first edition. The first UK edition, published by Heinemann in 1960. You can have it for nothing.”

  “Why?”

  “To say thank you. For coming here tonight.”

  She frowned. “But has it got the same poems in it as the paperback?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thanks. But no thanks.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not interested in first editions. I’m not a collector. I think that collecting things is sick. It’s like hamsters filling their pouches with nuts. It’s just another way of trying to ward off death. Plus you could offer me as many books as you liked, it wouldn’t turn back the clock. I’m not going to suddenly fall back in love with you. I’m not going to want to sleep with you.”

  This crushed me so comprehensively that for a while I could think of nothing to say.

  It was Caro who broke the silence. “To answer the question you asked ten centuries ago, I tried working. Two and a half years on a magazine in Fleet Street.”