Corpsing

by Toby Litt

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CORPSING

  Toby Litt was born in 1968. His first two books are a short-story collection, Adventures in Capitalism, and a novel, Beatniks.

  Corpsing

  TOBY LITT

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  To Mum and Dad

  * * *

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany,

  Auckland, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 5 Watkins Street, Denver Ext 4,

  Johannesburg 2094, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Hamish Hamilton Ltd 2000

  Published in Penguin Books 2000

  8

  Copyright © Toby Litt, 2000

  All rights reserved

  Lyrics from ‘Violence’ (Sparhawk/Micheletti/Parker/Nichols) © 1995 by kind

  permission of Universal Music Publishing Ltd

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-196526-0

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  82

  83

  84

  85

  86

  87

  88

  Acknowledgements

  Corpse (korps), v. slang. 1874.

  1. To kill (vulgar) 1884. 2. Actors’ slang. To

  confuse or put out (an actor), or spoil

  (a piece of acting), by some blunder.

  The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

  No, you can’t trust violence

  – Low, ‘Violence’

  1

  ‘Conrad? It’s Lily. Hi. Yes. Glad I got the number right. How are you? Really? That’s – encouraging. Look, someone’s just blown me out. I’ve got this table at a restaurant, Le Corbusier, Soho. D’you know it? Uh-huh. Yeah, but the food’s really wonderful – and we do need to meet up sometime, you know. There are things we need to talk about. Like you said. So why don’t we make it this evening and keep it in a public place – try and make it pleasant, at least. Well, it’s y’know a difficult situation. And I promise I won’t cry if you won’t. Conrad, that was a joke. Christ! Eight, yeah. You don’t want to meet up for a drink beforehand? You never. Hey. It was a jo. Mmmm. Touch-eee. Okay, yeah-oh. Yeah, there’s some. I’ll bring it along. God. Mm-’kay. Yeah-bye.’

  Lily has caught me in the edit suite at the Discovery Channel, so the VT Editor, Chris – all VT Editors are called Chris – is sitting next to me with a big I’m-not-listening smirk on his face.

  We are putting together the sixth of seven scarifying trailers for Shark Week. A Great White is freeze-framed on the screen in front of us, having just taken a watermelon-huge slice out of a scuba-diver’s right thigh.

  No way can we cut this particular shark-attack footage into what is intended to be a heavy-rotation trail. But Chris and I enjoy watching it – forwards and backwards, in ultraslow motion, frame by bloody frame.

  At the moment Lily calls, we are using the Great White’s gaping mouth as a sort of pseudo-screensaver. We are planning what we’ll do next – more company coffee or going for a take-out.

  I don’t even pretend to Lily that I might have something better to do that evening.

  2

  On the walk to the restaurant I try very hard not to think of what is about to take place: my first meeting with Lily since she dumped me.

  As I turn down Frith Street I am still relatively okay.

  I think: I am going to have to sit at a table with her. I am going to have to choose what to eat. As if I cared what I ate. As if I cared about food or restaurants or anything.

  Anything but her. And us.

  Lily is there already – standing at the downstairs bar, flirting with the barman. She looks great, as always. I haven’t seen her wearing this dress before – it must be new: I know all her dresses, even the ones that never made it out of the wardrobe.

  I think she may have changed her perfume as well.

  ‘Hello, Suit,’ Lily says.

  It is an old joke – a couple-joke, now and in this context particularly painful: I have only one suit, and when Lily used to meet me in town, before some smart party to which she’d been invited and at which I’d be barely tolerated, Lily used to greet the suit rather than me. Sometimes, she used to say, she thought she was actually going out with the suit, and not me – I just came along to animate the suit (not particularly well, others would have done it better).

  As I realize what Lily has just said, I begin to feel bad: Lily has forfeited the right to make the suit joke. If she wants to regain that right, she will first have to take me back. Which she may, of course, do. That may be why she wanted to see me.

  ‘Hello, Frock.’

  ‘Oh, do you like it? It’s new – from ghost.’

  The maître d’ approaches us. The maître d’ addresses Lily. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have a couple of minutes’ wait before your table comes free.’

  ‘Fine,’ she says, smiling.

  3

  Lily is an actress. At this, the time of our last meeting, she is best known for her rôle in a series of TV advertisements.

  In each ad Lily’s character (Bran-dy) dresses up in one of a variety of mainstream-kinky outfits – flirty French maid, saucy schoolgirl, nympho ski-instructress, whip-cracking dominatr
ix – in a renewed attempt to persuade her hunky-but-chunky husband (Cyril) to sample a particularly bran-heavy breakfast cereal. The pay-off – which never ever varies – is that, as soon as Brandy has given her trademark humph and slammed the kitchen door behind her, hunky-but-chunky Cyril will slyly produce a large bowl of the bran-heavy cereal from beneath his trademark newspaper. He will then cheekily turn to the camera, wink endearingly and start ecstatically chomping.

  Buh-boom.

  All of Lily’s cereal ads take place in that strange parallel universe, the Cosmos of Commercials – where colours are primary, perspectives neo-Expressionist, gestures cartoonish and pain non-existent.

  And for most people this is the universe that Brandy-Lily will for ever inhabit. Blissfully married to a husband who cynically deceives her; endlessly propositioning him, eternally rebuffed; constantly crashing from blazing optimism to fiery pique. For most people Brandy-Lily is in Hell eternal.

  A year or so before I met her, Lily spent six months at EuroDisney-playing Snow White in a black wig and a crushingly uncomfortable bodice. She could still flip into Snow White’s cutesy, high-pitched accent at will. If anything marked Lily out as a natural actress, it was her wonderful way with voices. The smile-lines she’d acquired from all that corporate grinning in Mauschwitz never quite left the sides of her mouth – the way she told it, she’d practically been in muscle-spasm by the end of each and every shift. One sure way I’d always had of driving Lily crazy was to whistle while I worked.

  After Snow White there’d been a few months’ gap before she was cast in a made-for-TV murder mystery. Her part was simple enough: she took her clothes off, had a shower and was violently murdered. Her big break.

  At the time of the meal, I still have this episode on video. Since she dumped me, the tape has become quite worn. I am intending, one day soon, to take it in to work and make a copy of it.

  Being Brandy pays Lily well enough to think of Le Corbusier as reasonably affordable.

  While we are waiting for the table to come free, Lily has been telling me her good news. She has just got the lead in a likely-to-be-controversial new play at the Royal Court. It is called ‘deathsex’ and is about women and necrophilia. She is about to quit the ads.

  Really, Lily is going to make it very big, very quickly.

  She has It.

  4

  ‘So,’ Lily is saying to me.

  My life is very different to hers – a slow and painful coming-to-terms with first the possibility, then the suspicion, and finally the utter certainty that I don’t have It.

  Instead, I am working in television, as a Promotions Producer – editing trails for whichever of the satellite channels happens to need me that month.

  I have always wanted to make films. Even at school I was constantly thinking of cheapo special effects that could be used in a low-budget movie. (If you want a sink to look like someone’s been sick in it, slosh a Pot Noodle in there. If you want something that looks exactly like spunk, use shampoo.) Needless to say, I have never come anywhere close to needing cheapo vomit or low-budget spunk. (A shame I never came up with placebo blood – tomato ketchup isn’t anywhere realistic enough.)

  It is my ultimate ambition to write and direct a serious full-length feature film and win two Oscars (Best Original Screenplay, Best Director) and be world famous and rich and loved.

  Instead I am being fucked around by a series of decreasingly talented and increasingly stroppy writers.

  As enthusiastic film-buffs, these writers and I have sat together in bars and pubs discussing Tarkovsky and Tarantino, Huston and Hitchcock. As a pitch-making mean machine, we have approached producers and have received much encouragement but no cash. As a writer-director team, we have entered a hundred BBC short-film competitions and never even got past the first round.

  I am thirty, and I know things just aren’t going to happen for me like they’re happening for Lily.

  I just don’t have It.

  Lily knows this.

  It – or my lack of It – may be one of the reasons she left me.

  We still need to talk about It (or just it).

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ Lily says, meaning my long silences.

  ‘Your table is ready,’ says the maître d’.

  5

  It is a balmy, bare-fleshed Friday evening, late in August. Lily and I are seated opposite each other upstairs at Le Corbusier, a Modern French restaurant half-way along Frith Street.

  The interior designer has won several international awards for creating this innovative-yet-functional space.

  The upstairs room is clinical. The tables are a frosty-looking brushed aluminium. The walls are half mirror, half stainless steel. The floor is hard, pale, unpolished wood. The lighting comes from fluorescent strip-lights part-concealed behind the edges of the mirrors. The food is served on white porcelain plates. The cutlery is stainless steel. The napkins are white cotton. The napkin holders are rings of shiny stainless steel. The waiters wear white cotton jackets with stainless-steel buttons. French bread is served on a napkin of white cotton in a bowl of latticed aluminium with a rim of stainless steel.

  The waiter – with close-shaven head and a thick goatee-beard – is taking our orders: for me, the puffball and the grilled plaice, for Lily, the asparagus and the veal escalope.

  Already, we have compromised on a 1992 Chardonnay – which has turned out aromatic and endearing, the little of it we have so far drunk.

  All of this – the restaurant, the mere idea of the restaurant – is much more expensive than I can afford.

  But I can afford even less to let Lily know that.

  ‘Fine,’ I say, handing the menu back to the waiter.

  It is far from fine.

  6

  It is six-weeks-three-days since Lily and I split up, unamicably, at her insistence. Before then we had been going out for two years, and living together for one. The top-floor Notting Hill flat which we shared belonged to her (and before her to her parents), so I was the one forced to move out. I found myself a ground-floor flat in Mordake, grotty but cheap.

  The moment Lily said she didn’t love me or fancy me any more, pop songs started to play in my head – and not just any pop songs: really crappy, supposedly forgettable ones: ‘Can’t Smile Without You’, ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’, ‘All By Myself, ‘You’re an Uptown Uptempo Woman (I’m a Downtown Downbeat Guy)’. I sat on the edge of what was now her sofa, weeping. She told me not to be so silly. I was out of there within a fortnight. I remember walking away from the flat for what I thought was the last time – the keys to the front door no longer in my pocket.

  And yet here I am with Lily again, facing her over a frosty-looking brushed-aluminium table in Le Corbusier.

  Lily’s body is something I am so familiar with – yet there it is, sitting across from me, become a forbidden thing.

  I know and can remember the minutest things about her: the squeak her fingernails made against the pillows under my head; the little clattering clicks her teeth made in the few slow moments after she fell asleep, always before me; the eggy smell of her early morning yawns.

  Never again will my fingertips tap down upon her hard flat stomach. Never again will my tongue make tiny circles around her salty-sweet clitoris.

  This is outrageous, I am thinking. This is almost obscene.

  I remember her habits, her ways: how she used to steal my pillow the moment I got out of bed to go to work, cradling its warmth to her belly as she had so rarely cradled me; how she would suck me off, and would swallow, but had to brush her teeth immediately afterwards, couldn’t not.

  As I sit there opposite her, I feel that her body is something that I have almost a right to be intimately involved with.

  What I really want to do, I am thinking, as I look across at Lily, gazing out over the widening gap of success and down into the chasm of indifference, what I want most of all in the world is to make you pregnant: I want to put a cut in your life so deep that the scar
will be the first thing people mention when they mention you, think of when they think of you. And, even more, I want you to want me to make you pregnant.

  I am still in love with her.

  All that happened, all she said, and I am still in love with her.

  She is saying something now.

  ‘Bastard,’ I hear Lily say.

  Bullet #1

  The first bullet (there are to be six: evenly distributed – three for her, three for me – though not equally destructive) enters Lily’s body approximately two inches beneath her left breast. Slowly, or if not slowly then gradually, or if not gradually then at least moment by moment, leaving no gap in actual proceeding time, jumping no millimetre completely, the bullet begins its inevitable passage into Lily’s thorax. A small brown mole taking the shape of a capsized figure-of-eight which she bears approximately two inches beneath her left breast, stark against her blue-white and otherwise unblemished skin, will be nowhere accounted for at the autopsy – and so instantly must be vaporized: pouff! Already, before it accomplishes even this minor initial slaughter, that first bullet has traversed ten feet of air-conditioned air, has clipped through the floating grey viscose of Lily’s ghost frock, has slit the slick black silk of her camisole. Now, however, that almost-perfect skin of hers begins slowly to stretch – resisting the onwardness of the bullet’s metal apex, denting inwards above her delicate ribcage, tightening momentarily from shoulder to hip: but then – after this false, hopeless opposition – punctures easily enough. An anticlockwise spin has been imparted to the bullet by spiral grooves – called rifles – back inside the barrel of the guilty gun. This spinning motion maximizes flight-stability and therefore increases terminal accuracy. But it is the skin-stretch of kinetic energy not the drill of missile-spin that takes the bullet through into first flesh.

  Entrance wounds are notoriously sexy. And although I will not get to see Lily’s wounds while they are fresh, I will study photographs of other penetrations: the abrasion ring that encircles an entrance wound, caused by the bullet rubbing the skin, turning it raw, looks like bright pink lipstick under slick lipgloss.