Corpsing

by Toby Litt

  ‘I need a laugh,’ said Anne-Marie. ‘I’ve just lost my job.’

  ‘Oh, what did you used to do?’ Vicky asked.

  Anne-Marie explained. ‘But it wasn’t really as glamorous as you’d think.’

  And then Vicky, incredibly, said: ‘Have you ever considered joining the police?’

  After that, there was no stopping them. By the time Vicky left, they had exchanged phone numbers.

  ‘Now you behave,’ said Vicky, speaking to me directly for the first time in half an hour.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Anne-Marie on the doorstep. ‘I’ll make sure he does.’

  If I hadn’t needed her help to arrange the auditions, I would probably have dumped Anne-Marie that very moment. I had one mother already, thank-you-very-much; I didn’t need some kind of übermother, too.

  I spent most of the rest of the day refining or pretending to refine my script.

  On Saturday, Anne-Marie and I did couple-things: shopping, cinema, meal, sex. Anne-Marie kept talking about the prices of two-bedroom flats. I made sure to stop off at the bank and make a large cash withdrawal. Anne-Marie was erecting a future, I was destroying one.

  65

  Sunday afternoon.

  I told Anne-Marie that I was going to collect some things I wanted from Lily’s flat. She offered to come, but I told her I’d prefer to go alone. I set off to South-east London, to collect my gun. I’d already phoned ahead to check that everything was okay.

  It was the first time in a couple of days that I’d seen James.

  ‘I was starting to think something had happened to you,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d done a runner.’

  I told him about the brick through the window.

  ‘Are you going to report it?’

  ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said.

  My gun-contact was waiting for me in the public bar. He was a very small man who smelt strongly of cheap aftershave. At his feet was a zip-up sports bag so blatantly criminal that its logo might as well have been a sawn-off shotgun.

  ‘Nice to see you,’ he said.

  We went together into the Gents, him passing a few nods telling his mates to keep it Out Of Order for the next few minutes. Burly men stepped across in our wake, ensuring that our transaction would pass uninterrupted.

  I was carrying the cash down the front of my underpants.

  ‘Safe,’ he said, as we stepped into the cubicle.

  The toilet was seatless, paperless, but definitely not odourless – a sonic hum of alcoholic urine rent the upper air, a base boom of shit took care of the lower registers. If there were such a thing as the sound-barrier for smells, this toilet broke it and then some. It wasn’t the sort of place where business was likely to be conducted in a leisurely fashion.

  The guy unzipped his bag, carefully perching it on his knee, not letting it touch the piss-sodden floor. Reverently, he pulled the gun out. It was swaddled in bubble-wrap which took him a few moments to unwind. I stood impatiently to one side – the father, useless at the birth. The gun emerged: finished in silver and blue. When he passed it to me, he did so with both hands – cradling it. Oh, it was so small and so heavy and so beautiful and so deadly. Come to daddy, baby. For several long moments I was happy just to gaze, but then I took hold of it properly. Baby.

  The guy took the gun out of my hands and gave me a quick demonstration of its functions – the three different kinds of safety; loading; cocking for the first shot but automatic thereafter.

  After seeing the gun, handling it, I’d’ve wanted it even if I hadn’t needed to do anything with it. The gun was an art-object, worthy of the Design Museum – like a Porsche or a Leica. All its metal movements and intermeshings were Germanically smooth. And yet, at the same time, I found it difficult to reconcile this clinical machine with the passionate dying flesh of Lily.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, almost swooning.

  The combination was too much: the smell (reminding me of the moment when the nurse used to unhook my catheter – meaty, male, testosteroney piss-whiff) and the sight (a gleam of efficient metal drawing me towards a similarly efficient revenge).

  As I handed over the bundle of notes, I couldn’t believe I was getting away with such a con: all the cruel perfection of this for those cabbagey pieces of paper? It seemed for a moment that I’d have to kill him to get away with such a thing; but he seemed happy enough with his wad of notes. He gave me the bullets, the maker’s manual and the catalogue; he even threw in the sports bag – just so I’d feel like a proper armed-robber.

  Now that the deal was done, he became lascivious in his praise of the gun – kept wanting to take it back off me to show me yet more felicitous features. He wanted me to take him for a connoisseur, but he was for ever trapped on the other side of the counter; I gave him money, yes, that was a necessity – but, in comparison with him, I was an angel of pure use. He had had custody (for a short time) of the commodity; I had taken full possession of the thing itself. He had thwarted its vocation, cramped its style, held it back; I would give it total liberation.

  Half-way through a discourse on the relative merits of rapid-fire settings as opposed to a straightforward single-shot action, he remembered his grubby self.

  ‘Nobody can trace it,’ he said. ‘It’s completely clean. No history.’

  (Telling me it was clean – the purest object I had ever handled!)

  James asked me no questions when I came out of the South-east London pub carrying a newly acquired sports bag. I’d had a lie prepared, if he’d asked: a camcorder. But he knew that I hadn’t come down here for something I could buy in any high street. We talked about other things completely – of football, of politics. But we talked more as mien than before. Did I sense a new respect in his use of the indicator? Maybe. Admiration, even, in the crispness of his cornering? Perhaps.

  Back outside my flat, I overtipped him.

  When she asked me what was in the bag, I told Anne-Marie it was just some stuff from Lily’s old flat.

  ‘Diaries. Photographs she wouldn’t let me have when we split,’ I lied. ‘That kind of thing.’

  Anne-Marie looked disappointed that I still cared about my past – about another woman in my past. (And that I wasn’t going to show her the photographs, read her the diaries.)

  ‘I want to sort through it – decide what to keep and what to throw away.’

  Her smile returned.

  I stowed the sports bag in the bottom of the wardrobe. Anne-Marie knew (I think, on some level) that it didn’t contain ‘stuff’. As I was putting it into the back of the wardrobe, she saw me swing it back a couple of inches too far. I was slamming the ‘stuff’ around not as neutral material but as something I had to demonstrate (as much to myself as to her) that I felt neutral towards. I was too smug in the pretended unsecrecy with which I surrounded it: it had a halo of false insouciance. Yet Anne-Marie was wise enough to let me think I’d got away with this. She wasn’t going to go sneaking a look in the bag. Instead, she would wait, letting her awareness slowly weigh upon and become a burden to me. If I was worth being with at all, I would come to feel it – she needed me, at least, to be that sensitive.

  However, wise as she was, she did miss the central fact: that I’d myself changed. And this was just the most recent alteration. Anne-Marie’s inability to see this was hardly surprising – she hadn’t known me well enough before to judge me against how I was now: and, of course, in between my before and my now came an event of such alteration that even the most intimate foreknowledge would have been next to useless. Even Lily, after all her life-hours with me, having passed through the breakfasts and arguments, inhabited the undersheet world of whispered sophistry and babytalk, known me both bawling and crowing – even Lily, alive, would not have been able to say for definite anything about me. I had become someone unpredictable – even to myself. There were things I was doing, and thinking about doing, that would never have got further with me before than flash-fantasies: in-
my-way-on-the-escalator-die-fucker-die; won’t-look-at-me-you-gorgeous-fucking-bitch-die.

  We went through into the living room.

  ‘Tea?’ I said.

  ‘Lovely,’ she said.

  I made it, in the kitchen, in silence.

  ‘Here,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  I got the terrible feeling we were running out of things to say to each other. But that was because I wasn’t being completely truthful; I was avoiding the only subject that, for me, held any emotional truth at all: killing.

  66

  Monday.

  I wanted to find out more about Lily’s pregnancy. Asif would be no help – I was already aware of that. It looked as though there was no way I could get anything more out of the police. Not on my own, anyway: with the assistance of the tabloids, I might just be able to force a statement. But that, of course, would have Sheila Burroughs et al doorstepping me again. I decided that I needed to remain a private citizen for a little longer. Josephine, the person who probably knew the most, wouldn’t talk to me. That left only one person who might know anything. I would have to go and see The Mistake.

  I knew that if I tried to make an appointment, I would never get in to see him. The best thing, or so I guessed, was to turn up distraught – emotion would melt the prophylactic secretary.

  The Mistake’s offices were in the City – a small brick building amidst the glass towers of corporations. Everything about it said ‘We own this land. We value it at more than mere money. We’re here and we’re staying here.’ Here was trustworthy un-Real Estate.

  And The Mistake’s room, when I’d blubbed and blabbed my way in, was similarly trustworthy-looking: small and cramped, with a framed photograph of the queen up above the second filing cabinet (N-Z). Yet space had somehow been found for two deep leather club chairs and a low glass table – the early evening snifter was a tradition resolutely to be upheld.

  I had moderated my distress the moment I gained entry to the inner sanctum. There was no need to make the situation immediately uncomfortable.

  After minutely shuffling some papers, The Mistake came out from behind his desk, shook my hand, guided me into one of the club chairs, sat down opposite me and then gallantly did his utmost to give the impression that my popping in was the highlight of his day so far, and that – such was the tedium of his life – it was also likely to prove the highlight overall.

  He stretched his legs, as if we were relaxing in the boss’s office whilst the ‘real’ boss was away – although he, in fact, was the boss, the bosses’ boss. I glimpsed his sock-suspenders, framing oblongs of waxy white flesh.

  We chatted for a few moments about his filing cabinets, which I’d admired on my one previous visit (Lily, lunch, embarrassment, escape): they were a dark blue, ex-Navy. The Mistake had rescued them from a frigate about to be scrapped. They had some special mechanism inside them (which he’d told me about before – but didn’t hesitate to tell me about again) to prevent them from toppling over in stormy seas.

  The idea of this appealed to me: storm-proof Navy filing-cabinets in a financier’s office in a Georgian terrace in the Square Mile.

  But it was time we got on to our real subject: I made a short speech, then waited for The Mistake’s response. It didn’t come.

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said The Mistake. ‘I heard.’

  He looked down into the black pockmarked shine of his brogues – then reached down and, with his forefinger, flicked off a dusty piece of fluff.

  I asked again: ‘Did Josephine tell you anything during your reconciliation?’

  He winced – either at my mention of that or at his own memories of it.

  ‘You will understand that it wasn’t a subject easily approached.’

  Dead end.

  ‘I wondered if you might have known – if you might have used some of your influence to find out…’

  I tried to allow him the opportunity to decide whether or not to take the inference. By such half-clues, our conversations had always previously advanced – little leaps, tiny sidesteps. This time, however, we were having to follow the dance steps numbered out upon a sheet of paper on the floor. One by one, no short cuts. It was the tango or nothing.

  ‘I think you overestimate my importance, Conrad.’

  ‘Did you try to find out who the father was? Because it might be my – that might be me. I think it was – but I don’t know, and I need to find out.’

  ‘Sometimes one overestimates one’s own importance, too.’

  It took me a moment to realize that what he’d just said had been intended as further self-depreciation rather than a direct insult to myself.

  ‘Does that mean you tried and failed?’

  ‘I have been told, quite firmly, that I will have to wait until the trial – like everybody else.’

  This was as close as The Mistake was going to come to saying yes; he’d tried and he’d failed.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘But I would like to think that if you did manage to find out before then, you would tell me. I hope you can imagine what it’s like for me – not knowing: guessing, but not knowing. The uncertainty –’

  The Mistake looked as nearly human as I had ever seen.

  ‘I had to identify the body, you know,’ he said. ‘Josephine was off somewhere with one of her men-friends. Cornwall, I believe. The police couldn’t locate her, so they called me. It’s not the sort of sight a chap forgets in a hurry. In a way, I was glad I spared Josephine that. Lord knows, I’ve done her enough services over the years. I don’t think she appreciates it, though – quite how awful it was; and that’s part of the service, don’t you see? – protecting her from the knowledge of just how bad the thing was from which she needed protecting.’

  ‘I think I’ll be going,’ I said.

  ‘So you see, I couldn’t really discuss the thing with Josephine.’

  ‘I hope..’ I said, ‘I hope you don’t blame me too much.’

  ‘Blame you?’ said The Mistake, hearing me properly for the first time in minutes. ‘No, I don’t – I blame God.’

  At this, I couldn’t stop myself from staring at him. It was as if in my relations with him I’d constantly been dropping pebbles into a well, waiting to hear a far-down splash, and hearing every time nothing, nothing, nothing. Suddenly, though, by throwing a larger pebble or waiting a little longer, I’d heard it – a small, sodden plop of metaphysical resentment. Only now did I realize quite how much The Mistake resented being who he was. It had never occurred to me that I hadn’t been telling him anything new, in my earlier callow cruelty, by revealing the nickname that Lily and I had given him. From what I now saw, The Mistake had come to that realization himself – he’d always known that he was The Mistake. Probably since before he even met Josephine. But The Mistake hadn’t been his ex-wife’s; not as far as he was concerned. He blamed a far more august being.

  When I left that office I thought of him – for the first time, really, since we’d nicknamed him – by his Christian name, Robert.

  As I walked away from the low Georgian building, I was convinced that I knew – at every moment – what Robert was doing: buzzing his secretary; telling her in an even voice to hold his calls for fifteen minutes – no, half an hour; sitting back down behind his desk; glancing at the framed photograph of himself, Josephine and Lily – all falsely ecstatic with the squint-in to-the-sun expressions of holiday snaps; weeping as I had never had cause to weep (not self-pityingly, but for himself – for the entirety of himself).

  Although the day was hot, I felt as if I’d just strolled into a meat-freezer – and that someone had locked the door behind me. I realized in a terrible instant that Robert was the loneliest man I’d ever met.

  And another chilling thought immediately overcame me: that although Lily had always denied any similarity between her and her father, she had – in fact – equally as much in common with him as with her mother. Lily’s mother was essenti
ally gregarious: she didn’t actually believe in her own emotions until they were projected on to, and reflected back by, others; Lily’s father, in contrast, was a solipsist: he couldn’t really believe that anyone other than himself had emotions – and certainly couldn’t bring himself to hold the putative emotions of others as of any value. He therefore undervalued communication – believing all conversation inferior to talking to himself. Lily lined up beside her father in this – this terrible unwillingness to reach out, this terrible (when seen from outside) unreachability – and also, now I thought about it, in any number of other things.

  On the surface, they were very different: he, dull; she, brilliant. But – and it was only now I saw that this was possible (as well as how it could be possible) – the very things which made Lily’s father unattractive were those which had made Lily attractive: his hardness, his self-reliance, his style.

  Even to allow myself to think this was, I felt, to betray Lily’s memory – or worse still, her very essence. It was as if I were altering (by my perceptions) not only what I now thought of her but what, back then, she’d actually been – back then, when, cold as she was, and lovely, my love might have meant something to her.

  I let it drop – I had gone too far with this: Lily’s posthumous appearances had already done enough to alter what I’d thought of her. Something, at least, of the original should be preserved. Lily should remain as Lily had been because that was how Lily had been. Lily had been the Lily I had known – and lived with – and loved; the Lily that, for a while at least, had loved me back. I didn’t want to rewrite my history of her too much – if I did, it might take away too many of my current reasons for living.

  67

  To try and fix my preferred version of Lily, I paid my delayed second visit to Highgate Cemetery. This sunny afternoon, we both needed something: she needed re-interring; I needed to allow my memories of her to fuse with the new facts I’d found out about her. Lily, or at least my previous version of her, was the person I’d set out intending to revenge. Paying her a visit was something I might not be able to do for some little while afterwards, if things went to plan.