by David Bowker
“Maybe we shouldn’t see each other for a couple of weeks,” I said, surprised by how cool I sounded.
I could see that Caro was surprised, too. Nodding humbly, she reached over the table and patted my hand. “Good idea. And if the police come round, I won’t mention you.”
She had made up her mind. I was her medieval champion. In her imagination, I had committed justifiable homicide on the westbound platform of Hammersmith station.
I could have made it absolutely clear, there and then, that I had not murderered poor Warren, that he had merely suffered a fatal mishap after picking a fight with the clumsiest bastard in Richmond-Upon-Thames, that if she wanted to show her gratitude to Warren’s killer, she should have had sex with my rucksack. But I didn’t say a thing, because this morning Caro was looking at me exactly like she used to look at me.
Caro opened a kitchen drawer and placed a black shiny object on the table in front of me. I blinked a few times before I could accept what I was looking at. It was a handgun. “What’s this?” I asked her.
“It’s Warren’s gun,” she said. “I need you to hide it for me.”
“Warren had a gun?”
“He hung around with some pretty dodgy people.”
I stared at her. “How dodgy?”
“The kind of people who kill their enemies and grind them up for dog food.”
* * *
AS SOON as I arrived at the flat above my shop, I got out the gun and studied it. I found the inscription Custom TLERL II on the breech and looked it up on the Internet. On a site called Safe Shooter (We look forward to serving all your firearm needs) I found Warren’s gun. It was a Kimber Swat, as used and abused by the Los Angeles Police Department. Altogether the Kimber carried eight shots, seven in the magazine and one in the breech. The gun was fully loaded. The black rubber grip seemed to sit perfectly in my hand, and the weapon was so light and well crafted that it was hard to believe it was designed solely to maim and kill.
My instincts told me to drop the gun in the Thames. Yet Caro had asked me to hide the weapon, not get rid of it. She trusted me and at the moment, incredible as it seemed, actively admired me. I had no desire to dampen her enthusiasm, but this wasn’t my only reason for following her instructions. The gun was sexy. My God, I thought fine first editions were attractive enough, but knowing I was holding something that the L.A. cops used to shoot holes in innocent bystanders thrilled me beyond reason.
Desperate to find out if the gun worked, I aimed at a bookcase and squeezed the trigger. There was a deafening explosion that made the door to the street shudder in its frame. The air was full of smoke, smoke that smelled of childhood. The shot had been so loud that I expected people to come running, but the only passerby was an unimpressed overalled workman, chewing a burger made from a cow’s arsehole.
Then I noticed I’d blown a smoking hole right through a signed copy of Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less. I cursed my misfortune. It was better than the book deserved, but that shot had cost me one hundred and twenty-five pounds.
Calling myself some well-chosen names, I laid the gun in my favorite hiding place, a hollowed-out copy of an old Arthur Mee Children’s Encylopedia. Years before, while living with my parents, this book had concealed my dope stash and the tranquilizers I’d stolen from my mother and saved up for special occasions.
* * *
I DIDN’T open for business that day. At lunchtime, I watched the local news report. There was a story about a man who’d gone hunting with a shotgun in a tower block in Mile End. A traffic warden in Epping had been set alight by angry motorists. There was no mention of a murder committed at Hammersmith station.
I needed a drink. In the fridge there was a bottle of gin and two cans of tonic water. I drank gin and tonic with ice until the tonic had gone, then I drank neat gin. By about two o’clock I could barely see the room in front of me and finally understood the meaning of “blind drunk.” I staggered up to bed, lay down in the darkness, and spun.
When I’d puked for about the third time, the phone rang. I heard my own voice deliver the answering machine message. I sounded middle-class, friendly, and faintly ridiculous. Then I heard Caro talking. Her voice was husky and womanly and at least ten thousand times more confident than mine. I staggered into the next room and picked up the phone.
“Hello?”
“What’s wrong?” she said. “Your voice is all funny.”
“Why are you calling?”
“I was missing you.”
“Where are you?”
“Standing outside your front door.”
* * *
CARO STAYED with me all night, nursing me and cleaning up after me. There was no fornication. I was far too ill for that. I lay like a white-faced corpse, and Caro, lying beside me, spoke softly to me and brought me glasses of water.
In the early morning, she went out to a drug store and returned with some powders that were supposed to replace all the minerals I’d lost through vomiting. She emptied a sachet into a glass of water and forced me to drink it. About twenty minutes later, I started to feel better. Caro brought me some toast and a glass of milk, sitting on the bed to talk to me while I ate and drank.
“Why did you do that to yourself? Because of Warren?”
“I suppose so.”
“He isn’t worth it,” she said.
“Was there anything about him in the Standard?”
“Don’t be silly. This wasn’t a child or a famous person falling in front of a train. It was Warren.” She squeezed my arm. “That idea of yours, about us staying apart for a while. I don’t think I can do it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to be apart from you. I have feelings for you.”
“What kind of feelings?”
She shrugged and lowered her gaze. “I think we could be a couple.”
“A couple of what?”
“A couple of people who don’t ask each other stupid questions.”
* * *
WE SPENT the day together, me feeling frail and sipping herbal tea, Caro browsing through all the books in the shop with a silent concentration that made me suspicious. If I’d owned a security camera, I’d definitely have filmed her. We had a minor disagreement when she attempted to skim through a Wessex edition of Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree while drinking a cup of hot chocolate and eating a croissant.
“It’s just a book,” she complained when I’d snatched it away from her. “Books are meant to be read.”
“Not that book,” I told her.
She got up and peered into my Masculinity case at my mint Nick Hornby first editions, their flawless dust jackets protected in plastic. “You know what you do?” said Caro. “You collect books about what it’s like to be a man, written by men who don’t know.”
* * *
JUST AS I sometimes was quite unable to resist a first edition, whatever its cost, so was I quite unable to resist Caro. When we were in a room together and she wasn’t looking at me, I was miserable. To me, one little kiss from this bed-swerving bitch was worth a thousand fucks from any God-fearing Christian woman. (Not that I’d ever slept with one.)
Caro couldn’t walk across a room without dragging my entrails behind her. Her presence gave me a primordial, unwholesome hunger for warm flesh. If I appear to be overstating my case, I apologize. I just want you to understand why I accompanied her to her father’s house and even bothered to listen to her ridiculous plan.
It wasn’t far to Chez Gordon, so we walked. That lunchtime, Caro had returned from an illicit stroll in Kew Gardens to find her car missing from the drive.
“Did you call the police?”
“It was repossessed, you idiot.”
“They repossessed your car?”
“Yeah. Just because I didn’t keep up the payments. Isn’t that the unfairest thing you ever heard? That’s why we’re going to see my dad.”
“Your father repossessed your car?”
“Ha. Funny. No,
but he’s got money. Enough to buy me a new one.”
“You’re going to steal from your own father?”
“No. First I’m going to ask nicely. When he says no, that’s when I’m going to steal.”
It was a cool, crisp night with bright stars overhead and a thin coating of frost on the ground. The thrill of walking beside Caro combined with the way our breath flew before us reminded me of being thirteen, when I roved the streets with my friends because we had nothing to do and nowhere to go. In those days, just being seen with a girl like Caro would have been considered a sublime accomplishment.
“What is it you’ve got against your dad?” I asked her. “I mean, I know he’s mad, but what else?”
“You seem to be fond of lists. I’ll give you one. His mad eyes. The way he scowls when things aren’t going his way. His horrible high voice, his smell. The way he tries to kiss me. His gray hands. His very small feet. His dirty hair. His awful dick.”
“His what?”
“He was talking to me once in his pajamas. He leaned forward and his dick fell out. It looked like a scalded frankfurter.”
“Thank you for sharing. Anything else?”
“His clutter. He was always an untidy bastard, but at least he used to keep his mess in his own room. Now it fills the house. I hate him. The way he shrieks when he can’t get the lid off a jar of marmalade. The sight of his bristles in the sink when he’s trimmed his beard. The way he eats, like a monkey cramming food into its mouth before a bigger monkey can take it off him. Ugh.” She shuddered. “He disgusts me.”
“Have you finished?” I said.
“I haven’t even started. He’s mean, he’s selfish, he’s rude to strangers. He’s a bully and a coward. He has to sleep with a night-light like a fucking baby. His politics stink. He claims to be left-wing, but he thinks women in the third world should be forcibly sterilized to keep down the population.”
“Maybe he’s left-wing like Lenin,” I said.
“And he’s pretentious. One week he thinks he’s a historian, then he’s a sailor. Last I heard, he was a poet. Although I’ve yet to see a single line the fat cunt has written.” She kicked a parked car as she passed it. “And his driving? Christ almighty. He drives like a drag racer but without the skill. I used to dread going on vacation as a child. He risked my life every time he got behind the wheel. We were always getting pulled over by the police because he was speeding on the wrong side of the road. He thinks the point of driving is to get away from the car behind him and to overtake the car in front.”
“The guy is a hundred percent knob-cheese,” I admitted, “but he is your father. There must be something about him you like.”
“I like his heart condition.”
“Jesus, Caro.”
“Yeah, well. Congestive heart failure. It’s incurable. The doctor gave him two years to live, but that was four years ago. I pray and I pray, but he just doesn’t seem to get any worse. Now he’s got his lady friend to make sure he takes his pills.”
“One question. If he’s so awful, why are you asking him for money?”
“What else has he ever given me?”
* * *
AFTER THEIR daughter left home, Caro’s parents moved from Sheen Common Drive to a larger house near Richmond Park. Caro claimed it was worth six million. It was certainly big enough. There were stone lions on the gateposts, and the house had a terrible name. It was called Seaworthy, and in the back garden was a huge yacht. Gordon fancied himself as a mariner, although he had never successfully controlled a dinghy, let alone a yacht. Now he was too sick and old to even try, but selling the boat would have been an admission of his own decrepitude, so he simply left it to rot.
We passed across the porch, and Caro rang the bell. The sound echoed through the house beyond, giving a clear idea of its cavernous dimensions. We heard the sound of approaching footsteps, and the door opened to reveal a coarse-faced middle-aged woman with a blonde rinse and the demeanor of an embittered barmaid. She was wearing extremely high heels like a drag queen. “Oh, it’s you, Caroline,” she said without enthusiasm. “I do wish you’d warn us when you’re coming.”
“I thought it’d be a nice surprise for you.” Caro gave the woman a lethal smile. “This is Mark, by the way.”
“You’ve got so many men on the go I lose track.” With this, the coarse woman walked away, leaving the door to swing on its hinges. I’m no snob, but this struck me as extraordinary behavior for a common servant. “It’s your daughter!” she bellowed, and flounced off down the plum-carpeted hall.
“Who’s that?” I said.
“That’s Eileen,” said Caro. “The wicked stepmother.”
Caro’s father was upstairs in his malodorous study, using a magnifying glass to peer at the small print in a book. A radio was blaring out the news at a volume that a rock festival audience would have found intrusive. Gordon was surrounded by books, not in bookcases but all over the floor and the furniture.
Whatever Caro said, Gordon didn’t look at all well. With his gray face, bloodshot eyes, white beard, and enormous paunch, he looked the way Santa Claus must look when he arrives home on Christmas morning. We stood in the doorway for a few moments without attracting his attention. Then Caro walked over to him and kissed him briefly on the face.
“Oh, hello, darling,” he said.
He looked genuinely pleased to see her. She nodded over to me. “Dad, do you know who this is? He was my boyfriend at school.”
Gordon stared at me for a few seconds, looking thoroughly bewildered. Then he started clicking his fingers. “Oh, of course. John … Jim … Jason! You owned a Chinese takeout.”
“Dad? Does he look Chinese? No, Dad. This is Mark. Mark Madden.”
Gordon frowned and shook his head. “No. Doesn’t ring a bell.”
Caro signaled for me to go away and closed the door quietly behind her. I walked up and down the corridor. The house was freezing cold, although the radiators were on full.
I walked into a front room, where there was a framed photograph of a younger, dark-haired Gordon digging in a garden. He was smoking a pipe, and beside him, holding up a trowel for the camera, was a pudgy blonde girl-child with a familiar frown on her pale baby face. She must have been about four when the picture was taken. It looked like any happy family snapshot.
I crossed the room to Gordon’s bookshelf to see if there was anything worth stealing. All I found were shoddy book club editions of the wrong books by the right people. The one exception, amazingly, was a UK first edition of A Clockwork Orange, without a dust jacket. I had never seen the novel in hardback and sat down on the sofa to inspect it.
I felt someone watching me and looked up to see Eileen standing in the doorway. “Don’t walk away with that. That’s what Caroline does, you know. Every time she comes here, something goes missing.” Eileen brought in a tea tray, which she placed on a rickety table. “I’ll leave this here. Best not to disturb them.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
She smiled to show she hadn’t meant the remark about book stealing, when we both knew perfectly well she had. “Drink it while it’s hot,” she said as she left the room, somehow managing to inject this homely advice with frosty disapproval.
I poured myself some tea and was settling down to drink it when a door slammed and I heard someone running. Then Caro walked in. She was crying. I put down my cup and held her. “He’s a fucking bastard,” she said. “I hate him.”
* * *
SHE KEPT me up for most of the night, fretting about her inheritance when I just wanted to sleep. I tried to be sympathetic, but she wouldn’t shut up.
“Just because he wouldn’t give you money doesn’t mean he’s cut you out of his will,” I told her.
“It does. I know it does. He’s usually given me money before. Suddenly, now that he’s marrying that awful woman, it’s ‘Sorry, dear, but we’re saving for the wedding.’ She’s got her claws into him, Mark. I won’t get a penny.”
“Mo
ney isn’t everything.”
“Since when?”
“It’s unlucky, Caro. Sitting around waiting for people to die, that’s what vultures do.”
She sat up in bed. When she spoke again, I could tell she was getting tearful. “I know that, but I’m terrified all the time, never having enough money. Just once I’d like him to be a father to me and look after me.”
“Okay,” I said softly. “I can understand that.”
“So will you kill him for me? Please?”
I was glad I was at her flat, because that meant I could leave. I got up and put my jacket on while the first plane of the morning rumbled over Kew Gardens on its way to Heathrow. I expected her to try to stop me, but she just lay there with her arms folded, shadows round her eyes and her mouth like a purple gash. I walked out of the flat and out of her life.
CHAPTER 5
MY MURDEROUS GIRLFRIEND
I KNEW I’d die if I didn’t go out, so I phoned Lisa and asked if she was free that evening. She said yes, although I thought I detected a faint note of suspicion in her voice. I picked her up at eight, Elliot giving me the rude finger from the front bedroom, and we went tenpin bowling. Bowling was Lisa’s idea of a good time.
As we were waiting for a lane, I caught her staring at me.
“Okay, what is it?” she said.
“What’s what?”
“You’re crying. What’s the matter?”
I touched my face. Sure enough, drops of moisture came off on my fingertips. “Oh,” I said. “Maybe I’ve got some kind of eye infection. Crying? Of course I’m not crying!” I gave an unconvincing stage laugh. “What have I got to cry about?”
Later, I drove her home. Elliot had gone to bed. This was always our cue to do dirty things to each other. We tried to have sex, but I was too sad to get a hard-on. “All right,” she said, rolling off me and leaning on a pillow to study my heartbreaking profile. “Who is she?”
“Who’s who?”
“Is a big book about famous people,” she said. For a hairdresser, she could be pretty sharp. “I want to know who you’ve been seeing.”
