Corpsing

by Toby Litt

  I was about to go back inside to call and book James’s taxi for the evening when I heard a police siren coming down our street and saw the flashing blue light reflecting down off the television aerials above the houses.

  It wasn’t Vicky. Not yet. I had been expecting her from the moment it became public knowledge that I’d been to see Asif. More private investigations? More illegitimate delving? Vicky would turn up eventualry. But this, when I opened the front door a slight slit, was nothing more than two ordinary policemen sent out because:

  ‘We’ve had several complaints about the noise, sir.’

  They stood between me and the photographer – although he jumped back and forth to try and get an angle.

  ‘Come inside,’ I said.

  I’d already turned the stereo off.

  In the hall I explained to the policemen what was happening. They were not impressed by the fact that I might be of sufficient importance to have a journalist outside my house. What did impress them was the possibility that the journalist outside my house might just be interested in them – if they went and had a chat to her.

  ‘What can you do to stop it?’ I asked.

  They looked at each other.

  ‘If they’re not breaking the law, not a lot.’

  ‘But isn’t it harassment or something?’

  ‘Why did you say she was interested in you?’

  It just wasn’t worth trying to explain again.

  ‘Okay, I’ll keep the music down from now on. But the neighbours didn’t complain about the noise of me having a journalist bashing down my door.’

  ‘We’ll have a word with her,’ said the policeman. ‘Please don’t force us to have to caution you.’

  I smiled and promised and let them out.

  For fifteen minutes there was no knocking – and then it resumed, slightly less passionately.

  I called James. Then I called Anne-Marie, to inform her of what was happening. She offered to come round, but I told her that it would be better for her to stay away. I didn’t want her getting involved. And, to be honest, I was quite looking forward to having a break from her.

  56

  James and his taxi turned up on time. I’d explained the situation to him on the phone. He beeped his horn three times as he was coming down the road. After grabbing the folded-up wheelchair, I squeezed out the front door, locked it behind me and crashed on into the passenger seat of the cab – the door of which James had leant over to open for me.

  The photographer, who had been reading a copy of a rival paper, took a couple of strides to catch up – but then was pecking away at me with the flash. The journalist dashed for her car, which luckily for me was facing the wrong way down our street.

  The flash kept exploding in the left side of my face as James promptly drove off.

  When the photographer could no longer keep up, he turned back to get into the journalist’s car.

  Because of this double delay, and a bit of shading the speed limit along Mortlake High Street – plus a double-back – we easily escaped.

  ‘You’re very good at that,’ I said to James. ‘It looks like you’ve done it before.’

  ‘Once or twice,’ he said, with a glance in the rear-view. ‘Angry husbands, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Really,’ I said, feeling our easy-natured chat lurch as it hit turbulence.

  ‘Not on my own account, of course,’ said James, steadying the conversational controls.

  We laughed.

  ‘So, who did your front door?’ James asked.

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘And what were that lot after you for? Have you just signed for Chelsea or something?’

  I laughed, and tried to explain: Asif, the hospital.

  ‘There may be a few more quick getaways to make,’ I said. ‘Could –’

  ‘No problem,’ said James. ‘If I’m around, you’ve got me. And I’m around a lot of the time these days. My gaffer hasn’t hardly called anything decent in for me in weeks. But I don’t quite understand – when I picked you up at the hospital, you’d just been in to talk to this Asif bloke about what?’

  It was a relief to have someone to talk to who wasn’t directly involved. I told him the whole story from beginning to end – including the visits with Robert, Josephine, Alun and Dorothy, Asif and Tony Smart. The telling of it took most of the journey. James nodded and yessed and ahhed, but didn’t interject much. Occasionally he said, ‘Pardon?’ and I had to speak up. He was a very good listener.

  Just as we were about to pull over in front of the Barbican, I asked him directly:

  ‘Do you think I’ve been doing the right thing?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it’s best to just see how things go. I know the police aren’t the greatest thing in the world, and they make my life hell by spending their whole time chasing me for touching a pavement rather than getting after the real villains. But if you believe that they’re really doing nothing, then I suppose you might as well do something for yourself. You’re not going to be able to arrest anyone, though. You’ll have to call them in for that.’

  I didn’t tell him that the only call that was going to be necessary was for an ambulance – and that I was pretty certain someone else would be making that one for me.

  We arranged for James to be outside the back of the theatre after the show, just in case the Mirror-mobile had somehow managed to catch up with us.

  As it turned out, I didn’t see another journalist until we drew up again outside my house. Unfortunately, now that I saw one, I saw more than one – I saw about ten. Plus ten or more photographers.

  ‘You sure you want to go in?’ said James. ‘I could take you to a hotel.’

  ‘They’d be banging on my door all night,’ I said. ‘No, I’ll try this – see how it goes. Same routine tomorrow?’

  ‘They may try to block the road.’

  ‘We’ll be too fast for them,’ I said – shouted, actually. I had to raise my voice to be heard above the thumping on the window and the screamed questions.

  I tried opening the door on the pavement side, but they were all standing too close – deliberately, I suppose. I got out on to the road and walked around the back of the car. I ignored the questions, did not shield my eyes from the flash bulbs and made my way slowly up to the front door. As James drove off, I could hear someone shouting at him, ‘Where did you take him?’

  As I got the key into the door, a surge from the journalists smashed me up against it. Luckily, the red paint was now dry and didn’t stick, blood-like (for the cameras), to my coat.

  I tumbled through the door, flinging it shut behind me, and fell down on the hall carpet in tears.

  57

  Sunday morning, and the journalists turned up early. One or two of the younger ones had spent the night in their cars. The phonecalls had started around seven – the red light flashing, the beep, the quiet crackle as the message was recorded. The message counter clocked up – 24, 25, 26 – until the memory was full. That had never happened before. I was interested to see how the answerphone coped. But nothing exciting happened: it merely played the outgoing message and then neglected to record the incoming. The journalists started knocking on my door around eight. But the knocks were intermittent and came without much conviction. A couple of photographers tried to peek in through the front curtains. All of it only served to make me want a gun even more intensely. Not to use, just to have – to know I had.

  Around nine, I sat down at the answerphone with a cup of tea and pressed Play. Most of the messages followed the same escalation: from ingratiating to wheedling, from cajoling to threatening. These, I deleted, often half-way through the first sentence. I got to recognize the voices and phrases – the most persistent one being This is Sheila Burroughs of the Mirror.

  Only a couple of messages were of any interest. My mother had rung, saying she was going to come round at eleven to see that I was alright. Vicky was also there, also announcing an eleven o’clock vis
it.

  ‘I think we need to have a talk,’ Vicky said.

  I called my mother back immediately. The only way this situation could become even more embarrassing would be if my mother were to give an impromptu press conference on my front steps. I had no doubt that she’d speak out long and loud on the subject of my virtues – and then longer and louder on my defects. On the phone, I managed to persuade her that yes I was fine and no it wasn’t a good idea for her to come round and really from now on I’d call her at least once a day, promise.

  ‘Have you seen the papers?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  This was a problem. I solved it the only way I could think of – by phoning James and asking if he could buy me copies of all the Sundays, bring them to my door and post them through my letter-box.

  ‘I’ll pay you for the lot this evening,’ I said.

  ‘We still on for that?’ James said.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You must really like that play,’ he said.

  ‘Fucking love it,’ I said.

  He was round within half an hour. There was some banter between him and the journalists as he fed the thick-folded wodges of paper through on to my hall carpet. I felt the urge to stick my hand out through the letter-box, just to touch some friendly flesh.

  ‘Oh,’ someone said, ‘he’ll read us but he won’t actually talk to us.’

  There were unconvincingly amused guffaws.

  I carried the paper stack through into the dark-curtained living room.

  I couldn’t help but be reminded of Lily. The weekend after one of her openings was always dominated by dangerous supplements. Lily would sit on the sofa, anatomizing every single one of her reviews – and their reviewers. Confidential information about him – it was usually him – would be disclosed: how this one regularly didn’t turn up until the third act (and even then he was pissed), how this one always gave rave reviews to bottle blondes (his mother had been a bottle blonde), how this other one hated all women (because he’d lost a testicle doing National Service). Sometimes Lily would get into one of her ultra-rages. Breakable objects would be thrown, and some of them would hit their intended (fast-moving) target – me. Suicide threats would be made, pill bottles grabbed and fought over and grabbed back, over-dosages estimated. The downstairs neighbours would phone up and complain about the screaming and banging. Lily would tell them to fuck off or she’d fucking kill them.

  To try and calm her down I’d suggest we go for a walk or a swim.

  ‘What do you know?’ she’d say. ‘You’ve never put yourself up on that stage for people to come along and stare at! You’ve never tried to create anything! With you it’s all excuses for why you haven’t actually got around to getting off your arse and doing something. So, don’t criticize me for over-reacting. You have no idea what it feels like!’

  To suggest we go for a walk or a swim was, in the logic of Lily’s rage, to criticize her for over-reacting.

  Thing was, her reviews were usually excellent. Quite a few even scraped ecstatic. But if the belated, blonde-besotted, bollockless reviewer even glanced at a caveat – be it lighting or costume – it was taken as a direct attack on Lily’s very integrity.

  Review days usually ended with Lily laid out upon the sofa, surrounded by crumpled pages, dead-faced, intoning, ‘Nobody loves me. I want to die.’

  Well, now I had put myself up on that stage for people to stare at – unwittingly, it has to be said.

  Only one of the Sunday tabloids, the News of the World, led with the story – and that was only because it was a good excuse to print some videographs from Lily’s made-for-TV murder-mystery shower scene on pages four and five. (Lily naked, Lily wet, Lily screaming, Lily dead.) The other papers buried it in the home news. Other issues of greater import or titillation were already taking over. If things continued like this, my doorstep would probably be clear in a couple of days. Asif’s revelations continued in the Sunday Mirror. As I’d thought, he was photographed on a beach. But he wasn’t in the Caribbean, only the Isle of Wight. And the pina colada was nowhere to be seen. Instead, there was a large pot of tea. ‘My mother’s always wanted to come here,’ he was quoted as saying. ‘She’s always loved Tennyson.’ I was relieved to see that he didn’t seem to have mentioned the pregnancy. Instead, he had progressed to a more general revelation of goings-on in the UCH Pathology Department – the sick jokes, the cuts. My behaviour was explained as stemming either from distraught grief or impatience at police delay. A Met spokesperson (Chief Inspector Hetherington) was quoted as saying that my actions might damage the eventual chances of a successful prosecution. All of this was much as I’d expected.

  But the small article I found on one of the inner pages of the Sunday Sport came as a very nasty shock:

  Ex-con turned top stsnd-up comic, Tony Smart, 32, was badly beaten up yesterday night outside his Islington mansion. The unknown assailants, who are believed to have used knuckledusters, made off without stealing anything from him. Smart was quoted as saying: ‘I’ve been in more pain-watching West Ham play at home.’ Police are investigating.

  This gave me something to think about until Vicky turned up.

  One major possibility seemed to be raised: that the black man and the albino who constantly followed me around weren’t policemen at all, but were – in fact – the unknown assailants who had beaten Tony up – and perhaps twice vandalized my house.

  In trying playfully to scare Tony by giving them the impression that he’d seriously helped me out, I’d unwittingly ended by getting him beaten up. If so, then I must be in some real danger myself. They hadn’t attacked me, yet. Perhaps they were waiting for me to find out something I shouldn’t.

  Vicky arrived just after eleven.

  I left her outside the door with the question-screaming pack for just a few seconds longer than was necessary. It was a small opportunity to make her suffer the discomforts of impatience.

  ‘How are you?’ asked Vicky, as we turned to go into the living room – as if she were really being civil.

  ‘It would be nice to have a couple of policemen outside my door, to stop them knocking on my door and shouting through the letter-box. Apart from that, I’m very well thank you. How are you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m okay.’

  She didn’t look it.

  ‘This is supposed to be my weekend, you know.’

  I offered her a seat on the sofa which, after some hesitation, she took.

  ‘You’ve caused us a huge amount of trouble,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you have any idea how much. I mean, you seem to be doing your utmost to make us seem stupid and incompetent.’

  She was finding it hard to cover up her sadness and depression.

  ‘It’s unfair of them to expect you to stop me,’ I said. ‘If I were put under house arrest by a squad of armed guards, then I might sit round doing nothing.’

  ‘Conrad,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry that I can’t tell you what we’ve found out. But – believe me – if you knew, you’d be acting very differently. Wait until the trial. Everything will be in the open then. It’s not particularly simple. I shouldn’t even be telling you this, you know.’

  ‘Is there anything new that you can tell me?’

  ‘We’re setting a date for the trial – in about six months. The Old Bailey.’

  ‘Fantastic.’

  ‘Perhaps you should take a nice long holiday – or go and live somewhere else.’

  ‘How’s Tony Smart?’ I asked.

  ‘Scared,’ said Vicky, then realized it had been a trick question. ‘Oh shit,’ she said.

  ‘So far,’ I said, ‘have I actually broken the law?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘What do you know about whoever tipped red paint all over my front door? I think I’d like to report it.’

  ‘You’ve caused us so much trouble, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t a couple of disgruntled coppers.’

  ‘So, you knew it had happened?�
�

  ‘There were pictures in the paper.’

  ‘I think I might need protection. Whoever beat up Tony Smart could come after me.’

  ‘You’ll be perfectly safe if you go away somewhere.’

  ‘Will I find out at the trial who the father of the baby was?’

  ‘I can’t prejudice the prosecution by telling you what evidence they may or may not choose to introduce.’

  ‘Be a little imaginative. You want me to stop, you give me what I want. Tell me if the baby was mine. Tell me who wanted Lily dead. Or if not that, then at least tell me that whoever wanted Lily dead is going to be properly punished.’

  ‘I don’t know about the first two, but the last – yes.’

  She looked embarrassed, as if she’d said too much.

  ‘Look, Conrad, I’m under real pressure. There’s people who think that if a man were doing my job he’d keep you under control. Every time you go off limits, I take the blame. No-one touches you. Just because you’ve been in a bit of a coma and got shot. It’s so fucking unfair. I wish someone would just shoot me. I’m sure it’s a lot easier.’

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ I asked.

  ‘Please,’ said Vicky. ‘For me. Stop.’

  She was genuinely getting tears in her eyes.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘can’t we just dump all this sexual-tension-being-nasty-to-each-other stuff? Really, we just fancy the pants off each other. Why can’t we just go to bed and fuck?’

  Vicky looked at me – even more hurt, if possible.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it was worth a try.’

  ‘What sort of perverted little wank-fantasy do you live in, Conrad? This isn’t the letters page in some nudie mag – this is reality, yours and mine.’

  ‘But wouldn’t it feel good to have sex with the national press outside, not knowing what was going on? Wouldn’t that give you a feeling of power and control? Wouldn’t it feel exceptionally naughty?’