Corpsing

by Toby Litt

  The really unique position that Tony Smart held, though, was that of the only ‘real’ (although admittedly minor) criminal that anyone famous in London knew – apart from their pimps and coke dealers. Tony was the one who sparkled with the glamour of violence done and violence understood. The fact that he said he’d given up – and as a now-recognizable personality he’d probably had to – didn’t affect the straights at parties and on chat shows who wanted to know what it felt like to point a gun at someone’s head.

  It was most likely because of this side of his reputation, the reputation of a man who knew about crime from a street level, that Sub Overdale – Alun and Dorothy’s socially militant director – had contacted Tony Smart. There was also a snazzy PR angle: RSC luvvies sit at feet of gangland gag-meister.

  Going the most direct route, I called Sub Overdale at the Barbican – in the hope I’d catch him in his office.

  Sub was well known for attending every single night of his shows, and giving all the cast members notes the following day – down to the most insignificant extra. In the business he was called a ‘challenging’ director to work with, as in ‘a total fucking nightmare’.

  Luckily, I got him.

  Once through, I explained that I was a great admirer of him and his methodology (I used that word) – and that, as a struggling young director (by now he wanted me off the phone as fast as he could) about to direct a student production (off!) of Crime and Punishment (off! off!) in Portsmouth (off! off! off!) I wanted to consult Tony Smart.

  ‘Oh,’ said Sub. ‘I can’t give you his home number. He’s very touchy about that.’

  ‘How about his agent then?’ I decided to cut my losses and try to save myself another trip to the library.

  ‘But I’ve got his mobile.’

  He gave me it.

  I thanked him again and again, doing my best to appear desperate to want to continue speaking to my guru – until he put the phone down on my gushing gratitude.

  Part of me wanted to try the same story on Tony himself. But another part realized that I might do better with something a lot closer to the truth.

  ‘’Lo,’ he said.

  ‘Hello. Tony Smart? You-don’t-know-me-but-I-got-your-number-off-Sub-Overdale. My name is Conrad Redman. You may remember – I was shot, along with Brandy, that is Lilian Irish, in the Le Corbusier restaurant on Fr –’

  ‘Good restaurant that.’

  ‘I’m now writing a book about the experience, and the police aren’t being very helpful. I need to know about guns and hits and things like that.’

  He was on-track by now.

  ‘Gotcha.’

  ‘I was hoping you could put me in touch with a few people.’

  ‘You was goin’ out with her, right? From the ads on the telly – her.’

  ‘Yes, I was.’

  ‘I’m doing a surprise appearance at the Comedy Store tomorrow evening, nine. Try out some new material, y’know. Speak to me afterwards.’

  I would have to miss that evening’s Macbeth, but I didn’t care too much about that: it would just keep Alun and Dorothy on their toes. They might relax a little after the interval, but never completely. And, if I were lucky, there might even be a stand-in cougher at Friday evening’s performance – who, of course, they’d take to be me.

  It also meant I would be able to fit in something else that I’d been meaning to do – pay a visit to Alun and Dorothy’s home whilst they were both definitely away. If I was lucky, their son Laurence would be in. I needed to talk to him.

  50

  Friday.

  At six o’clock James’s taxi drew up in Belsize Park.

  We had passed through street after street of tall pale buildings divided up into six or eight flats. But Alun and Dorothy’s, when we came to it, was in a more modern 1930s block.

  The doorbell had both Grey and Pale written on it. I held it down for a couple of seconds – Laurence was bound to have something on too loud. He was fifteen, his parents were out.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘I’m a friend of Lily’s.’

  ‘Yes? And?’

  ‘Her boyfriend. The one who was shot.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  He wasn’t being as hospitable as I’d hoped. But I was prepared.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you about her… and incidentally I’ve got some really good dope on me.’

  After a comedy-pause that Tony would’ve been proud of, the buzzer went.

  Alun and Dorothy’s apartment was the sort of place that featured regularly in interior-decoration magazines. They had attempted to mix the very modern with the antique by making the antique showy and the very modern minimalist. (A very modern thing to try and do.) Thus Bridget Riley would hang happily (or so the theory went) above Louis Quatorze. The apartment, on the top floor, had more than its fair share of light and space – both of which seemed Scandinavian rather than English. Stripped-pine floors and whitewashed walls – very Lily. A large Whistler-grey entrance hall, decked with yellow roses, led out into the main living area – off which bedrooms, bathrooms and storage space occurred. Square petals round an oblong flower. At one end was an open-plan kitchen – Dorothy ‘loved to entertain’. (It had been afforded by Alun’s first, belated trip to Hollywood (1974), to play the villain in a schlock-horror movie. His facial hair – handlebar moustache and muttonchop sideburns – was the most terrifying thing in the entire film.) All of which décor was ruined by some overelaborate curtains – draped, tied, ruffled, pummelled – which simply screamed ‘menopause’. Someone in the apartment, you could tell, was straining away from received upper-middle taste and yearning towards a kind of mollifying Middle English Country comfort. Dorothy was showing signs of wanting to become a grand Tory lady, with huge amber rings and the hairstyle of a 1950s Bayreuth Brünnhilde. She was turning her environment into one vast sea-anemone-type labia-fest – frills and pink prettiness. How far was Dorothy from the Pekingese on one cushion and the soft-centred chocolates on another, I wondered.

  Laurence’s room, when I entered it, was painted black – an obvious rebellion against the rest of the apartment’s levity. There was a large ultraviolet lamp, stack speakers in all four corners, and Day-Glo stars and UFOs stuck to the black ceiling. On the wall was a single black-framed poster, a black and white photograph:

  KURT COBAIN

  1967–1994

  The dead singer, guitarist and lyricist of the second group to call themselves Nirvana. Below the poster was a black Fender Telecaster guitar.

  The carpet was black, the bedsheets, the furniture – everything in the room, it seemed, apart from Laurence’s pasty adolescent face.

  Laurence was skinny, slouching, sullen and very sexy. He looked as if he’d stumbled out of a heroin-chic fashion shoot. His skin was bad, but he had that fuck-you-I’m-gorgeous attitude. His fingernails were painted sludge-green – perhaps he’d got bored with black. There were the inevitable body-modifications – but more restrained than one might have expected: a black-etched tattoo on his shoulder and a single spike coming through the middle of his lower lip. This made me feel like I was talking to a rhinoceros or a spiky tropical fish – it did enough to confirm what it was meant to confirm: that I was talking to a member of another, younger, wilder generation.

  In Laurence’s room, I was an old person – even though I knew every one of the aesthetic moves it was trying to pull on me.

  In the corner facing the black-covered futon was the multimedia centre: TV, stereo, PC, CD-rom, Sega and Nintendo. It looked as though Laurence was a serious nerd.

  I decided it was worth wasting some time proving that even though I was a member of an older generation, I could still waste time with the kids.

  ‘Tekken II,’ I said. ‘One joint a game.’

  Laurence nodded and loaded it up. He was pretty cocky – little did he know.

  I thrashed him – I dragon-kicked him, I leg-swept him, I headbutted him, I kakaekomihijiuchied him. I did everyth
ing the pre-programmed moves allowed me – that is, everything short of disembowelling him and making him eat his own kidneys.

  We lay back on the futon. Almost an hour had passed.

  He looked at me, nodding, acknowledging that some respect – at least – was due.

  ‘Tell me about your coma,’ he said.

  Like all adolescents, he had a fascination with any state of total obliteration.

  I told him all about my coma. It seemed a strong point of communication between us – but not as strong as the dope that we fried, crumbled, rolled into Rizlas and passed back and forth.

  Anne-Marie’s was some pretty devastating shit – I doubted he’d ever been quite so blown away by the rabbit droppings he and his friends were likely to have scored off reassuring Rastas.

  More respect was due.

  He lay back on the black, bringing up the subject as if he, not me, was the one who wanted to talk about it.

  ‘I liked Lily a lot. She used to call me, when she knew my parents were out. We used to talk.’

  Well, there was my main question gone.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Oh, everything, you know – shit and stuff. What was happening with me and with her. Life-stuff.’

  ‘You’re at college, right?’

  ‘Now, yeah. But back then I was still at school.’

  On the floor I noticed a number of copies of the Stage; they were open on the Artists Wanted columns. Some of the ads were ringed in black marker.

  ‘Interested in what?’ I asked. ‘Acting?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m going to college next year. I have an agent already. And I’m in Spotlight. I’ve done a couple of things, nothing great. It’s a laugh. I like films most of all. Action movies. But there’s never any decent parts for anyone my age. I’d like to play a villain: a real psycho. That’d be cool.’

  ‘Did you talk about me when you were with Lily?’

  I was doing my best not to inhale without looking like I wasn’t inhaling.

  ‘Oh’ – he had the stoner smile on by now – ‘I know all about you.’ He giggled. ‘She used to tell me everything. Ev-ry-thing.’

  ‘For example.’

  ‘Sex,’ he said, with more giggling.

  ‘Ah,’ I said.

  ‘Or not sex,’ he said. ‘Sometimes.’

  I smiled. I managed a smile.

  ‘How did you meet her?’ I asked.

  ‘It was the summer holidays. I went on tour with Strindberg for a few weeks.’ He made Strindberg sound like a deathmetal band. ‘Everyone else was just so old and serious. Not Lily – she was up for anything. Sometimes she went onstage just ripped to the fucking tits. It was really funny to see, up in Scarborough or Somewhere-on-the-Sea. You-know-what-I-mean. But Strindberg was off his head most of the time as well, wasn’t he? We used to hang out during the days – trying to find something to do in these fucking awful one-dog towns. If you looked hard enough, there was usually something. You-know-what-I-mean. We’d go fuck up tea dances and bingo sessions. I love bingo. But scoring was a fucking nightmare, whatever you say.’ For a moment I thought he meant scoring bingo games. Then I realized he meant drugs. ‘They’d have the stuff, they just wouldn’t sell it to you. ‘Cos you sounded like you came from down South and were middle class.’ He rhymed the word with gas. ‘They’d sell to Lily, though. You-know-what-I-mean. Everyone would sell fucking anything to Lily. It was mega.’

  I-knew-what-he-meant.

  ‘She did a lot of drugs on that tour?’

  ‘All the fucking time.’

  ‘Who do you think shot her?’

  Laurence sat up, unsteadily – he was deep in the slow-space of dope, right where I wanted him.

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Did your mum and dad tell you she was pregnant when she died?’

  He hunched over on the side of the bed.

  ‘Yeah – well, I heard them arguing about it a few days ago. They came back from the show and just the next two hours… I wasn’t supposed to hear.’

  ‘So you know who might be the father?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Dad… That’s what they were arguing about, you know. Saying, “You fucked her, didn’t you? It’s yours!” My mum’s a bitch when she gets mad.’

  ‘I told them about it. I went to see them at the theatre.’

  ‘Everyone here’s been so fucking arsey ever since.’

  ‘Lily started seeing your dad on that tour, didn’t she?’

  ‘I dunno. Maybe.’

  ‘Your dad went to the police after I’d told him. He wanted to find out if they’d done any testing – if they knew for definite he was the father.’

  ‘They didn’t tell him anything.’

  ‘Have they taken blood samples off him before?’

  ‘Yes. Months ago. They didn’t say why. They’re not telling anyone anything.’

  I checked my watch. It was time to set off.

  ‘I’m going to see Tony Smart this evening, you know.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Laurence. ‘He’s cool.’

  ‘Here,’ I said, chucking Laurence the small clingfilmed chunk of dope.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘We should meet up sometime,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, and lazily we shook.

  ‘I can find my way out,’ I said. ‘Can I use the phone to call a taxi?’

  ‘Sure. It’s in the kitchen. The number’s on the board.’

  This was good: I wanted as much of a look-round the apartment as I could manage without exciting Laurence’s suspicion. But from the wacked-out expression on his face, it was going to be several hours at least before he became excited about anything. I left him in his black bedroom, lying back and sniffing the dope.

  51

  Back in the central living space, I wasn’t sure where to start. Scanning the whole room once again I didn’t notice anything I hadn’t before. But what was I expecting? Something that would tell me, for definite, that Alun had been the father? A test-tube full of stealable sperm? Or maybe some cross-referenceable DNA printouts?

  Out of habit I looked at the titles of their books – a slightly more literate selection than I’d expected from actors. Then I checked their videos, where there were a couple of work-out routines called things like Fat-Burner and Butt-Buster.

  This was a public space, though. I needed to see where things were hidden.

  Quietly, I looked into a couple of rooms. If Laurence caught me I’d tell him I was searching for the toilet. I found the master bedroom third door I tried. Just as I was sliding my way in, Laurence’s music slammed on.

  The track was ‘Rape Me’ by Nirvana, from their album In Utero.

  Over the top I heard Laurence giggling – then he started to play along not badly on his Telecaster.

  More time for me in Alun and Dorothy’s bedroom.

  It was a large but cosified space – not a pine futon on the floor but a black steel four-poster, not clothes rails but two vast walk-in closets. The tasteless tide of Dorothy’s menopause had reached the flowery sheets and the frilly valence. On the wall above the 1930s-style tiled fireplace was Man Ray’s photograph of a woman’s back with cello-holes cut into her.

  The guitar continued, slightly quieter. This was exciting. I wasn’t meant to be here.

  There were two bedside tables – it wasn’t hard to work out whose was whose: Dorothy’s was untidily piled with self-help books going back a couple of years, each generation of further knowledge piled on top of the half-read last – a sedimentary accumulation of shysterism: Mars and Venus in the Bedroom overtopped Further along the Road Less Travelled which rested upon Toxic Parents which surmounted People of the Lie. At the very bottom of the pile, side by side, twin foundations, bearing all the others were I’m OK – You’re OK and My Mother My Self. Resting beside these was a bowl full of pill-popper packets – I glanced through: HRT, Nurofen, Ibuprofen, seriously bug-eyed sleeping tablets, M
orning Primrose Oil, Starflower Oil, Anti-oxidant Complex, Aloe Vera, Vitamin Supplements, Calcium Tablets, Minerals, Magnesium-OK, Confiance, Ginseng. It was surprising that green chemical froth didn’t come out of Dorothy’s mouth every time she opened it. Alun’s bedside table was much more –

  Suddenly, the music stopped, and I could hear the phone ringing in the kitchen. Laurence would assume I had made my call and left.

  I went to stand behind the bedroom door, trying to peek through the jamb and listen in on his conversation. Luckily for me the phone was a cordless – and the moment Laurence knew who was on the other end, he walked over to the living-room sofa, picked up the remote and started flicking through all the TV channels but with the sound off.

  The first words I caught were: ‘I know you told me. Look, Mummy, I know you told me, okay? I know. Do you hear? I know.’

  He listened to Dorothy. She must be phoning out during one of her times off-stage. It was about seven-fifteen. About now she’d be preparing for… I couldn’t tell. It was still fairly early on. Perhaps she hadn’t even been on stage yet.

  ‘Look, I handled it, you know. Yes, he’s gone, now. And it would have been much more suspicious if I hadn’t let him in. And I didn’t tell him anything he didn’t know already.’

  More Dorothy, who from where I was standing was almost audible in a tinny cartoon kind of way.

  ‘No, he didn’t ask that. I don’t think he has any idea… Well, I lied. I told him Lily and me were just good friends. Look, I handled it. Stop treating me like a fucking spazz.’