Corpsing

by Toby Litt

  (I have to say, this hasn’t been easy on me – the production is driving me mad. By now there’s not a single self-satisfied detail I miss nor a piece of smug improvisation that eludes me. It took real strength of character to force myself down to the theatre this evening. I’m glad I did, though. It was one of my best performances.)

  Alun and Dorothy are reacting quite differently. Alun, his head hanging, sullen unscripted silences punctuating his entire interpretation, has almost admitted defeat; Dorothy, on the other hand, merely becomes more and more hysterical.

  The rest of the cast has obviously been informed of my hate campaign.

  Friday For reasons that will become clear, I was forced to miss Friday. But this was all part of my plan: that Alun and Dorothy’s performances should be disrupted – if not ruined, for them, in terms of satisfaction – even if I weren’t there to do the destroying. Approaching every significant: pause, there would be fear in their minds as to whether this was the one that was about to be shattered.

  Saturday Before the performance, the manager had a quiet word. He’d obviously been told to ‘stop the man in the wheelchair’. Luckily, there were another three men in wheelchairs – and he couldn’t stop all of us. Tomorrow, I guess, he will check tickets booked under my name – and see I’ve been six days straight (plus one). Therefore I will phone up to cancel my remaining tickets and – surprise surprise – go on my feet and buy them at the door or queue for returns and pay cash. That’ll confuse them.

  Sunday Alun actually stopped dead, turned and peered out into the auditorium this evening. I was limited in my attacks, as someone turned round and told me to shhh after only my third sally. Life without the victimology of the wheelchair-bound (whom no-one dare shhh) is quite a different, difficult thing. I rationed myself to six coughs (three each for Alun and Dorothy), but apologized loudly after every one.

  When the performance was over, I sent a note round to Alun and Dorothy’s dressing room along with a large bunch of white lilies. The note read: ‘I can go on doing this for ever. I wonder if you can?’ My phone number followed.

  45

  Tuesday.

  The printout of Lily’s phone bill arrived in the first post.

  The most important calls, obviously, were those she’d made to Alun. Using my fluorescent marker-pens, I traced back all her calls to him. To my distress, I found that they occurred fairly constantly from around the end of The Ghost Sonata until almost the day she died.

  In fact, just before that tour was the exact moment that Lily had decided to get a mobile phone. It looked as if her mobile, like so many, had been a means of conducting an affair. Or more than one.

  Alun, it seemed, had been lying about the length and seriousness of his involvement with Lily. And also about his reason for becoming involved – that Lily had told him I was on my way out.

  I wondered if Dorothy had been lying knowingly as well – or was she merely repeating the lie that Alun had told her, and the police. But the police, I remembered, had the printout as well. In which case, it was far more likely that the lie was to me alone – for the police would have seen through it in a moment. So, either Dorothy was protecting her husband by maintaining a lie – a lie that would be exposed as soon as we went to court – or Alun had managed to get the police to cover up for his affair. Neither explanation seemed any more or less likely than the other. Maybe they just didn’t want to tell me the truth. Maybe they were just playing for more time.

  And then I noticed something else: many of Lily’s calls to Alun were in the evening. The reason for this seemed simple – Dorothy must have been safely out of the house.

  A call to her agent, pretending to be a casting director for a film, gave me a rough c.v. of her past year’s performances. A couple more calls to the RSC and other theatres firmed up the dates.

  Then I had a thought – shouldn’t I check when Alun had been working as well: strengthen my case by confirming that the evening phonecalls only came when Dorothy was off working and he was free to take them at home?

  So, I repeated the casting charade with Alun’s agent, then with the film companies he’d worked with.

  The result was unexpected: on almost every occasion that Lily had called Alun and Dorothy’s number in the evening, neither of them had been around.

  For three weeks, during which there were five phonecalls, Alun had actually been off in North America and Asia touring a production of King Lear. At the same time Dorothy had been in Stratford as a miscast Mistress Quickly.

  The calls, lasting ten or twenty minutes or more, had been made to Alun and Dorothy’s house but not to them. Lily had been calling someone else, someone at their house.

  There was only one person I could think of who it might have been: their fifteen-year-old son, Laurence.

  46

  When I came back from the Barbican on Tuesday evening, I found that someone had up-ended my dustbin on to the porch.

  Stepping over the mess, I opened the front door. There was an envelope. It was charred around the edges and had singed some of the mat. Inside, I could see, without even opening it, was shit.

  I tidied up, wondering who would want to do such a thing.

  It was only after I’d cleared up the dustbin mess that I checked my answerphone. There was the usual message from my mother. There was a message from Anne-Marie. And then there was a message from the rough voice. It was very simple, it went: ‘We know where you live.’

  Immediately, I started to dial Vicky’s number. But then I realized I would have to tell her that I’d been pursuing my own investigation via Lily’s mobile-phone bill. I would have to confess to dialling up all those numbers.

  I put the phone down.

  How had they found out where I lived? And who were they anyway? Why did they want to frighten me? And why had Lily been making calls to them the day she died?

  No serious damage had been done. I guessed it was quite easy to find out where someone lived from their phone number. Anyone could discover the area by dialling directory inquiries.

  After I’d had time to sit down with a drink, I began to reason myself out of my fears. It was – as the phrase always goes – probably just kids fooling around. ‘We know where you live’ was too much of a cliché to have actually come from someone wanting to scare me. But the voice itself had something unmistakably real about it. It got to me, and part of how it did this was by sounding so confident in the knowledge that it would get to me. The rough voice wasn’t merely terrifying, it was professionally terrifying. Terror (in the voice, in other people) was something its owner could turn on or off at will. Unfortunately, try as I might, I couldn’t do the same. My terror stayed with me all night.

  When I called Anne-Marie, though, I didn’t mention it.

  47

  Wednesday. Nothing much to do.

  I went to the local library and looked up a few articles on Alun and Dorothy.

  Anne-Marie came round in the afternoon. She wanted to talk. From her handbag, she brought out a large chunk of dope. After lightering, crumbling, tobaccoing and rolling it, she started to smoke it. Immediately, her shoulders relaxed and her eyes went moist.

  ‘I hate my job.’

  ‘Then quit.’

  ‘Oh, Conrad, I can’t. The models need me.’

  ‘I’m sure they’d survive.’

  ‘Most of them are far worse than Lily ever was.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said, finding it difficult to imagine.

  ‘Oh yeah. They have everything: bulimia, drugs, shitty boyfriends.’

  For a moment I thought of asking Anne-Marie if Lily hadn’t had everything, too. (Including the shitty boyfriends.) But she was already off on to another topic.

  ‘What are you going to do? Go back to… whatever it was. I never really understood it. Television.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Definitely not. I think I’ll probably dig out an old idea I had for a screenplay. See if I might not be able to make a go of it. I don’t have to work for a
year or two, if I live off what Lily left me. And I can always sell her flat.’

  ‘She left you her flat?’

  ‘It was in the last will she made before she died.’

  ‘Wow. How do you feel about that?’

  ‘About as guilty as you’d expect.’

  Anne-Marie looked at me as if to say sorry-for-asking.

  ‘It’s a nice flat,’ she said. ‘I always liked it.’

  ‘I’ve been back a couple of times. It wasn’t easy.’

  ‘I’d like to see it again.’

  ‘One day.’

  I asked if I could have some of her dope.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Keep it all.’

  I had an idea it might come in handy.

  ‘Tell me about your film.’

  I made something up.

  Then I told her I had to go out, and she left.

  48

  It was on my Wednesday-evening visit to the Barbican that I first began to suspect I was being followed. If I hadn’t received the shitty parcel and heard the rough voice, I probably wouldn’t have been looking out quite so alertly.

  When my regular taxi-driver arrived, I carried my wheelchair out and put it into the back of his cab – looking up and down the road. Just as I was slamming the door behind me as I got in, I heard a large car-engine start up. I glanced back round just in time to see a Ford Mondeo pull out about twenty yards away.

  When I checked a couple of minutes later, it was still there – one car behind us.

  When that car turned off, I got a clearer view of the Mondeo. I couldn’t see much of the two men inside it, except that one of them was black and the other seemed to have very white hair. He didn’t look all that old, though. As to the car, there was something suspiciously null about it – no individual personality had been allowed to imprint itself. Although the number-plate revealed it to be a couple of years old, it still looked exactly as it would have done in the catalogue. Everything about the Mondeo – when put together with the fact that it was following me – screamed unmarked police car. But if these were police, following and watching me, then why hadn’t they done anything about my shit-parcel visitors last night?

  One explanation was that they’d only just started following me. Another, that they’d decided it would be a laugh (or to their advantage) for me to have the shit scared out of me. Perhaps they’d done it (the shit) themselves.

  Of course, I wanted to see how my followers would cope once we got to the theatre. If they were really prepared, they would have tickets already – and that would make it even likelier they were the police.

  The taxi drew up outside the front of the Barbican.

  I didn’t get out immediately, pretending to be fumbling for my change whilst actually looking out for the Ford Mondeo.

  Disappointingly, it sped past and on round a corner.

  I waited a few seconds more, arranging with the driver to be picked up afterwards, but the Mondeo didn’t return.

  After the performance I spotted the Mondeo again as we were crossing the river. It followed us all the way to Mortlake, although hanging further back than previously – probably because it wasn’t hard to guess where we were going, and if they lost us they could easily catch up. Just to test this, I asked the taxi-driver to take me to a service station, so I could buy some cigarettes.

  When we pulled up into the service-station forecourt, the Mondeo carried on past and parked, facing out, in a side-road.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said as I got back in, softpack in my hand.

  ‘It’s no smoking in the back there,’ said the taxi-driver as we drove off.

  ‘Home, James,’ I said, stowing the cigarettes.

  ‘James is actually my name,’ said the driver, laughing.

  ‘God, you must get sick of that joke.’

  ‘Nah, course not.’

  We laughed.

  ‘I won’t tell it again.’

  ‘No problem.’

  James drove me home.

  ‘Same time tomorrow?’ I said.

  ‘Sure,’ James replied.

  The Mondeo returned to its parking space just as I was closing the front door behind me.

  I felt more exposed than I had since childhood. When I was a boy, I was in a permanent state of battle-readiness. I knew that Germans could be waiting round the next corner or Japanese hiding in the next shadow. I armed myself with pieces of wood nailed together to resemble the guns of Polish partisans. I carried a bowie knife strapped to my snake-belt. I studied survivalist manuals. But I had been preparing for the wrong war. The Germans never wanted to invade Milton Keynes – not in my lifetime, anyway. And this obscurely disappointed me. I wanted to die firing at the enemy’s incoming, arrogant, marching troops as they turned the bend down Amplewick Close. I wanted to splatter their blood on the Ford Cortinas and watch them dive for cover behind the birdbaths.

  Scared, I wanted to go to the police and ask for their protection. And not just this following-me-around-in-unmarked-cars business. But it seemed to me that there was no way I could do that – not without giving up on everything: the investigation, my revenge. Either I was out on my own, taking whatever risks were necessary, or I was made safe, unable to do anything but wait. Now that I’d come so far, I didn’t want to just give up. Part of me – quite a lot, actually – was enjoying the various new freedoms that being outside the law allowed me. For once, I could do what I wanted: be offensive, be dangerous. If this meant that I was myself in danger, then I would for the moment have to live with that. In one way I wasn’t afraid of anything specific they could do to me – the three bullets had taken away my fear of physical harm. Anything else would either be less than that, in which case I could handle it, or more than that, in which case I wouldn’t be around to have to handle it.

  One practical thought occurred. Maybe I should start making some serious attempts to get hold of a gun.

  I didn’t sleep very well.

  49

  Thursday.

  Yes, it was gun time.

  From what I’d heard, it wasn’t that difficult to get hold of a gun. All you needed to do was go to the right pub in South-east London and get talking to the right bloke. But I knew that I’d never been very good at getting talking to the right bloke. (Once, I’d come away from Brixton having completely failed to score some dope.) And I didn’t want to waste too much time sitting in the wrong pub. What I needed was someone who could point me in the right direction – tell me the name of the pub and the name of the bloke.

  I wasn’t sure where to start, until I remembered something from the articles on Alun and Dorothy I’d looked up in the local library. Sub Overdale, the director of their production of Macbeth, had insisted on a great deal of pre-rehearsal research. Alun and Dorothy had gone on prison visits to meet real murderers. One of the articles also hinted that they’d spent time around some more glamorous, less caged criminals.

  All of this had been set up with the assistance of the stand-up comedian Tony Smart.

  As you probably know, Tony Smart is most famous for having done three years for armed robbery – and then for turning his life around, starting with a well-received appearance headlining the Her Majesty’s Prison Wandsworth Xmas Party. After this success, he was allowed to travel to other prisons to do other gigs. By the time of his early release, he’d already been taken on by an agent. Within two years, he’d headlined at comedy venues all over London and had supported a couple of more famous comedians on their national tours. By the time I became interested in him, his first video, Criminally Funny, was featuring heavily on the shelves of WH Smith. And he was all over the telly.

  A lot of Tony Smart’s material relied upon an implicit threat to the audience. He’d never had much trouble with hecklers. He dressed like a nouveau spiv – flash bespoke tailoring, alligator shoes, gold chains. This, the less imaginative critics said, was ‘post-Tarantino stand-up’. In a shoulder holster, he carried a replica of the gun he’d used during his armed robberies –
resprayed in ironic leopardskin. In a way, when he was onstage, he was actually playing an ironic replica version of himself. He was safe. He was disarmingly disarmed. The money he’d once been unable to get enough of directly (from terrified cashiers), he now picked up in wads (from satisfied punters) through the box office. Which didn’t mean he no longer got in trouble with the law – he’d been done twice in recent years: once for drunk-driving after a friend’s wedding and once for assault at a post-gig party. Both incidents had upped his profile and provided him with some new material (the impending Back Behind Bars tour).

  At the moment he was starring in TV adverts for a new brand of toilet cleaner – shaped like a powerful under-rim-shooting gun – with the tag-line: ‘Protect your home from scum like me.’ Various Watchdogs were aroused, which meant more publicity for both him and the product. Toilet-ducks had never been dangerous to anything but all-known-germs before. There were even some questions asked as to whether Mr Smart, as an ex-criminal, should be allowed to profit either directly or indirectly from his crimes. Even he wouldn’t deny that much of his success (and all of his material) was reliant upon the idea that he was a hard man who’d once been even harder. The prospect of a challenge in the courts was something that had him spending a lot more time with lawyers than ever before.

  He had it all, and he didn’t want to lose it – the house in Islington, the E-type Jag, the ex-air-hostess wife; mates in top-ten bands and the England football squad; journalists on his doorstep.

  For a boy from a dodgy area of Luton, he’d come a long way – via Brixton, via Wandsworth. And as a good working-class lad done good, he was giving-some-of-it-back: donating sequencers and samplers to a Luton music college, supporting meetings between the victims of crimes and their perpetrators, sponsoring a boxing club.

  A recent documentary had shown him – flash suit, E-type – revisiting the tower block in which he’d grown up. There had been a lot of laughter, but you could see his eyes jumping from side to side – wanting to work out where it was going to hit him from next: the panic of someone who has left the street, and therefore isn’t quite sure what it is any more – a new piece of street slang, perhaps, that he doesn’t want to appear not to know. But Tony had made it through – the winks went tic-crazy, the pats on the back rained down like clubs, the jokes about lend-us-a-tenner were received with the implication that Tony found them so hilariously funny he might just have to work them into his next act. Uncredited, of course. Ha ha.