Corpsing

by Toby Litt

  ‘I think, yes, I’m sure you’ve just managed to destroy my last few kind feelings towards you. If you continue trying to investigate this case on your own, I will have you arrested.’

  ‘You can only do that if I break the law.’

  ‘Don’t count on it. That hasn’t stopped us before.’

  ‘Just a blow-job,’ I said. ‘Not full sexual intercourse – how about that? Go on.’

  ‘You’re disgusting,’ said Vicky.

  ‘Everyone is disgusting,’ I said. ‘That’s not the point. Sex happens when two disgustingnesses coincide. I was just checking whether or not ours did.’

  Vicky stood up, picking up her cheapo work-handbag.

  ‘I’m going to try and get you a man to deal with, next time.’

  ‘Okay, then, goodbye.’

  We walked to the door and I let her out.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘and I still want those inventories. Remember?’

  Her look told me exactly where to go, and just what to do when I got there.

  She No commented her way through the press. Good girl.

  58

  Next, I gave Anne-Marie a call.

  She was flattered that Hitler was calling her live and direct from his besieged bunker. This was pant-wetting stuff.

  ‘What’s it like?’ she asked, meaning press intrusion.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You know. It’s a bit of a pain. I wish they’d go away. I’d really like to see you, but they’re going to follow me everywhere I go – and you can’t come round here and see me.’

  ‘I could,’ she said – as I’d known she would.

  ‘Really,’ I replied. ‘You don’t know what that would mean. By the end of the day, they’d have interviewed relatives you didn’t even know you had. I’m not even sure they’re not bugging my phonecalls.’

  ‘Don’t get paranoid.’

  ‘I miss you and I want to lie next to you and hold you close.’

  ‘Soon,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, they’ll lose interest in a couple of days.’

  ‘Conrad’ – Anne-Marie had changed her tone – ‘why did you go and see Asif?’

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ I said.

  ‘I do,’ she said.

  We exchanged a few more endearments before I hung up. The thought occurred, not for the first time, that Anne-Marie might herself be investigating me. But I wondered whether I shouldn’t suspect her a little more and trust her a little less.

  All that remained to do that day was the Cough Campaign. This time the paparazzi on their motorbikes were able to keep up with us as we drove into town. James made no especial attempts to elude them – there was no point. Plus, I wanted them to find out where we were going. This extra pressure on Alun and Dorothy – even if it were only perceptible to themselves – might be just enough to get them to crack. I decided to send them a card saying: I can go on doing this for ever. I wonder if you can? They would hopefully panic at the indirect press attention, and contact me.

  I’d had another thought, earlier in the day: perhaps I’d be able to direct some press attention towards the black man and the albino in the Mondeo. But when I snuck a look out of the front window, up and down the street, they were no longer around. Obviously they felt my movements were being traced efficiently enough. Or perhaps they feared that they might be spotted and questioned. I doubted they could pass as journalists, even though now was the most inconspicuous time of all for them to be sitting in a car outside my front door. It seemed as though attending a very bad performance of Macbeth was the furthest my press management could go.

  Although I didn’t know it at that moment, this was the last very bad performance I was going to have to attend.

  The call came last thing Sunday evening.

  Alun held the receiver, though I could sense Dorothy near by. She was the one in control – deciding what he should and should not say.

  ‘We want to know,’ said Alun, ‘what it will take for you to stop disrupting our performances.’

  This was the point we reached eventually, after Alun had called me a bastard and a fucking cunting bastard a few dozen times.

  ‘What I want – all I want – is the truth.’

  ‘You must agree to go nowhere near this theatre, or our flat, or our son.’

  ‘But we were getting on so well. And I just love the play.’

  ‘Those are our terms.’

  ‘Well, then, I’ll be at tomorrow night’s performance. With the national press. They may become a little more suspicious when they realize I’m going to see the same play every night – a play starring someone who has been widely rumoured to have had an affair with a woman who was later murdered. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them weren’t on to that already. Had any phonecalls?’

  Alun’s hesitation gave them away – yes, they definitely had.

  ‘I will contact you when I can,’ I said. ‘I don’t expect they’ll be all that interested in me for that much longer.’

  Dorothy must have grabbed the phone.

  ‘And don’t you dare come near us until you’re completely sure you’re on your own.’

  ‘Hello, Dorothy,’ I said. ‘I think your performance has really improved in the last couple of weeks. You’re probably the best Lady Macbeth I’ve ever seen.’

  So obvious.

  ‘There’s a real depth to it – an understanding – an empathy.’

  ‘Thank you – I’m glad you –’

  ‘Do you think it might be the guilt?’

  Crunch.

  I put the phone down immediately. After a minute or so, it rang – but I didn’t answer.

  Dorothy didn’t leave a message on the answerphone, but I could hear her distress hissing – like tears falling into a deep-fat fryer.

  59

  Monday.

  The only reporter left that morning was loyal, persistent Sheila Burroughs of the Mirror – and even she had been deserted by her photographer. Her picture editor had obviously decided that another shot of me in front of a red-paint-stained door wasn’t going to sell any copies.

  James brought round another load of papers. Asif was still there – clinging on to coverage. More interestingly I learnt that Tony Smart, even before he was beaten up, had been intending to leave the country. The Sun reported that, just the week before, he’d asked his agent to book him in for a two-month residency aboard a Caribbean cruise liner – rest and recuperation, easy audiences, selling out. ‘I wanted some peace and quiet,’ Tony was quoted as saying. ‘Keeping quiet is very important to me at the moment.’ But the passport office, for some reason, hadn’t wanted to let him out of the country.

  According to the report, Tony got off quite lightly with his beating. There was a picture of him. Both his eyes had been blackened; he had a ring-cut down one cheek and another across the bridge of his nose; his lip was split and flattened. He looked more handsome, and even more criminal, than before.

  Sitting there, reading about Tony Smart, the one thing I didn’t expect was for the phone to ring and for it to be him.

  ‘You saw what they did to me?’ he asked.

  ‘Pretty bad.’

  ‘I hope you have some idea of how gently they treated me. I mean, these men were practically breast-feeding me compared to what they’re likely to do to you. At the moment, you’re protected by invisible forces. But they won’t always be around to guard you. You managed to drop me in some serious shit – which, by the way, I myself don’t forgive you for. But let that pass: me and my baseball bat are the least of your worries. You’re lucky that I was able to convince those two gentlemen that I really hadn’t talked to either you or the police or anyone about any substantive issues – if you know what I mean. If I hadn’t, you’d have had my death on your conscience; along with however many others you have right now. So, accept a little advice: rent some porno videos, stay home, whack off. Go to the local supermarket and buy yourself some full-fat ice-cream. Take up sky-diving or bullfighting or Russian rou
lette. But if you want to have yourself a long and happy life, forget this going-round-asking-people-questions business. Don’t ask a stranger on the Underground for the time. Don’t ask a policeman for directions. Don’t ask for ketchup in McDonald’s. Don’t even ask for world peace in your prayers at night. Be a good boy and then, one day, you’ll be able to be a good man and then, another day, you’ll be a good old man. Because otherwise you’re going to become the action movie to my little trailer. This was apprentice work – a little first-out-of-the-gate stuff. If you want to see some masters at work, close up, really fucking close up, you just carry on doing what you’re doing. And, believe me, there’s nothing I’d like better than to see you back with your bandaged buddies in intensive care. Did you like it there? Did you?’

  I put the phone down on him, excited. I was getting close to something.

  Around eleven, Sheila Burroughs knelt down at the letter-box and shouted through, ‘It’s okay, I’m leaving. You can come out now.’

  ‘See you,’ I shouted back. ‘Don’t forget to write.’

  Ten minutes later, I checked to see that she hadn’t been lying – but it was true: the street was back to full-on suburbanity.

  Excellent.

  I called up James and got him to drive me further east – Brixton, Clapham, Bermondsey. Here, I chose a cruddy-looking pub (one with cages over the windows and a nationalistic name on the sign) and arranged for him to pick me up a few hours later. I went in in my wheelchair, as it was more to my purpose to look fucked. I was wearing dodgy clothes: sweatshirt, tracksuit bottoms and trainers. I hadn’t shaved or washed my hair.

  Once inside the pub, I ordered my pint and – as I’d hoped – some friendly soul passed it down for me off the bar.

  After this introduction, me and the kindly soul got talking. We found a table to sit at. Soon enough, he was asking me about the wheelchair and I was telling him something not too far from the truth. I changed the venue, the motive, the company. But I kept the gun, the coma, the outcome.

  Other friendly souls started to listen in.

  ‘Cunts,’ one friendly soul said. ‘Fuck off.’

  They didn’t.

  Somewhere along the line, I started talking about guns, guns generally, their rarity, their availability…

  On the first day, I met a great deal of knowingness but very little actual knowledge.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said one of the kindly souls. ‘You can have anything you want – easy – for a price.’

  The second day followed much the same pattern. But then, on the third day, in the cruddiest, most easterly pub I’d dared enter – one where they’d had to carry me and my wheelchair backwards over the threshold – I got talking to a man who wasn’t boasting or bullshitting.

  Once it became clear I wasn’t bullshitting either, we began to make some tentative arrangements.

  ‘End of the week, mate,’ I was told. ‘It’ll be coming in the country end of the week. We’ll have it for you Sunday, no problem.’

  My gun-contact gave me his mobile number and we shook hands. In my excitement, I almost stood up out of the wheelchair.

  When I got home that first unsuccessful day there was a message on my answerphone from Anne-Marie.

  ‘Hello? Conrad? Are you there? Oh, god, I’m – oh, shit. Look, can you come round? I really need to see you. I’m at my flat. But only if you can, you know. Is it any better? With them outside? Something’s happened and. You don’t have to, you know, but, you know, I’d really like it, okay. And. Oh god. Bye.’

  As James had only just driven off down the road, I decided to call another cab company to take me there. I didn’t want to become too dependent. I was over to Anne-Marie’s in half an hour.

  Anne-Marie lived in Chelsea. I knew the address, though I’d never been there before. It was a basement flat in a tall Georgian building. I rang the aluminium doorbell.

  Anne-Marie came to the door. She looked ugly. Her face was very red. She’d been crying. ‘Come in,’ she said.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  Anne-Marie led me through into her living room. It was done out in defiantly cheerful colours. The green cushions didn’t match the orange sofa and the orange sofa didn’t match the red walls and, somehow, the brown carpet managed not to match anything else at all. Anne-Marie was a little more composed than she’d been on the answerphone.

  ‘They sacked me,’ she said, and started crying again. ‘This morning I walked in and they just gave me the sack.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ I said, weakly.

  ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have demanded you just come round like that. You must have other things –’

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘I’m –’

  ‘You are,’ said Anne-Marie, as if I’d said exactly the word she’d wanted. ‘And you’ve been through so so much worse.’

  ‘Look, I wasn’t really what you’d call around for a lot of it,’ I said. ‘Did they give any reason for sacking you?’

  ‘I’m too old,’ she said.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Thirty. Unless you make it far enough up the ladder by the time you’re thirty, they fire you. They say it freaks the models out to be working with old people. What the agency wants is young women, just slightly smaller and puffier and less neurotic than the models.’

  ‘That’s stupid,’ I said, whilst seeing the pure logic.

  ‘That’s the fashion industry. All they want is young bodies – they haven’t got any use for anything else.’

  I knew it was sympathy not suggestions that Anne-Marie was after at this point. We could talk about what she was actually going to do a little later. I’d seen Lily like this, seen her like this often – her career was a career of Doubt. Every audition, every part, every rehearsal, every scene, word, line – Doubt. Plus, Doubt overall. Should I be doing this? Aren’t I wasting my time? Everybody’s time? But, from the outside, I could see that Lily’s periods of greatest Doubt were always those of her greatest advancement. What felt to her like floundering and drowning appeared – to the observer, to the outsider, to me – as a perfectly poised freestyle. The questions she addressed to me were always and only prompts. What I was meant to do was ask her the exact same questions back, so that she could dismiss them as my own stupid misinterpretations of the truth.

  Lily needed to broadcast her insecurity, then have it beamed back to her – so she could sit in front of the TV of her personality and slag off every single thing that appeared on it.

  All this gave me some idea of how to deal with Anne-Marie. Although Anne-Marie was a far less extreme case than Lily had ever been. Her flat, as far as I could see, was still intact: plates and windows were as yet unbroken. That wouldn’t have been the way with Lily. And Anne-Marie didn’t seem to have hurt herself, not physically. Whereas Lily would definitely have had the razor-blades out by now. Always careful, of course, not to cut anywhere that would affect her chances in a casting session. Lily’s breasts were flickered over with scars – pale tracings in seemingly random directions. I used to kiss these thin white ridges, as if I could kiss them better – mend them – unzip them. She used the blade from a safety razor. Not mine. She would buy it herself. Quite premeditatedly. The cuts were long and clean and she would dress them in the bathroom afterwards. I used to find the red-streaked cotton wool in the bin. Lily’s bras, going into the washer-dryer (I always did all the laundry) would have little dashes of blood smudged on the inside of the cups. Sometimes, from the timing, I knew that she must have done this to herself before an audition, in the theatre or studio toilets. There she would have been, reciting the lines of some new washing-powder commercial or vicars-and-knickers farce, wanting that shitty part so badly that she was bleeding to get it.

  Once, she shaved off her pubic hair – and I almost died from the thought of what else she might have done with the razor.

  There was nothing I could say to her about this. Lily didn’t mind me knowing, but she did mind me mentioning. The trauma was something I ha
d to accept as part of the person she was – the person she couldn’t help but be. If I did mention it, I would immediately hit ‘Don’t!’ If I pursued it, I would face a week of sullenness and no sex.

  That Lily could be happy like this – happy bleeding – was one of the hardest things to deal with. ‘It’s not as if women aren’t used to a little blood,’ she’d say. ‘A little pain.’

  Until the inquest, however, the only people to know about Lily’s razorblades were myself and however many lovers she had had. Alun would have known. Cyril would have found out.

  In comparison, Anne-Marie’s skin was perfect. Her life, really, wasn’t looking all that bad, either. However, I let her dictate whether or not it was appropriate for us to use going-to-bed as a way of healing her particular wounds. It was inevitable, I felt. We weren’t yet intimate enough for me to achieve her consolation by words alone. She took me by the hand and, wordlessly, led me into her bedroom.

  In a way, I might have objected: there was a sense in which Anne-Marie – though she might deny this out loud – was suggesting that her pain (at losing her job) and mine (at losing my life) were equivalent and equal. They weren’t comparable at all – a point I wanted to make clear. Some other time, though.

  We had gentle-sex – sex that was loving in everything but love. If there had been more love between us, the sex might have been more honest, less gentle. Our bodies were saying not I love you but I might one day love you. Each kiss was promissory and each caress borrowed from the future.

  When Anne-Marie came she was making sobbing noises, new ones, ones that I hadn’t heard her make before. They didn’t stop as dutifully she went down on me – dropping tears into my pubic hair and lifting her head up to take gasps in between sucks and licks. I was cruel enough to enjoy the novelty of this, and didn’t ask her to stop.

  Afterwards, we got out of bed, ordered pizza and watched a weepie that Anne-Marie owned on video. It was all for her – that evening. There was no way I was going to deflect it towards a more shared enjoyment. I took pleasure out of guiding her towards the soft warm centre of her chosen comfort zone (clichéd as it was), just as I took pleasure tonguing her to orgasm.