by Toby Litt
‘I’ll drop you at the next Underground. Give me a ring on my mobile when you get to the flat, and I’ll come over.’
‘What if they keep following you?’
‘I’ll just go home – you can still phone me.’
I almost loved her, then.
At the next Tube station, Anne-Marie slowed the car. I got out and rushed in. I didn’t look back.
Later, Anne-Marie told me that, at the exact moment I bolted, the Mercedes had been unsighted by a bus. The men in the Merc (who she described as ‘thugs’), didn’t notice that I was gone until a couple of hundred yards later – by which time I was safely on a Tube train.
However, although I was in no immediate physical danger, my anxiety levels increased. I’d escaped, but would Anne-Marie?
She still had all my stuff in the back of her car – including, oh god, the bag with the gun.
I couldn’t spend too much time worrying about that – things would either happen or they wouldn’t. Instead, I concentrated on making my way surreptitiously to Lily’s. As it was clear that no-one had followed me on to the Underground, I took the most direct route to Notting Hill. But once there, I approached the flat in a very indirect and cautious manner. When I was sure that I wasn’t being watched, I snuck in the front door.
After a quick look round to make sure everything was alright, I called Anne-Marie.
‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I lost them.’
‘How?’ I asked.
‘Don’t keep underestimating me.’
This episode seemed to have changed her slightly – she was more in control: of me, of us.
‘You can come over,’ I said. ‘If you like.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ said Anne-Marie.
She arrived half an hour later, and we carried my stuff in and up.
‘You must feel a bit weird being here,’ she said, looking round the living room.
I explained that most of the weirdness had occurred during my previous visit.
Anne-Marie examined the kitchen just as if she were flat-hunting.
‘You know,’ she said. ‘I never got much sense of Lily from this place. It still doesn’t seem very – you know – her.’
I resented this observation all the more for recognizing its truth. Lily’s tastes had always come off-the-peg. Whatever was ‘in’ that month, that’s what ended up in our flat. Her flat. It scared me that Anne-Marie could be so perceptive.
‘Lily was very busy,’ I said. ‘She didn’t have much time for home-making.’
‘Busy isn’t exactly the description I was looking for. I know she was busy.’
We went through into the bedroom.
I lay back on the bed in the hope that Anne-Marie would join me, simplifying things. She didn’t. Instead, she pulled open one of the closet doors.
‘God,’ she said. ‘All her clothes.’
For a moment or two she flicked hanger and thumbed fabric, emitting the occasional hum of approval or whistle of envy. Then Anne-Marie turned round and, looking at me very directly, said: ‘Are you still in love with her?’
All the questions.
I tried to calculate the risks of admitting out loud that I was (crying, losing control, pissing Anne-Marie off); and my moment of calculation gave me away – gave Anne-Marie time to take advantage.
‘It’s okay,’ she said, sitting down non-sexually on the edge of the bed. ‘It’s not as if I can’t see for myself.’
(Non-sexually. This was about as unsexy as it gets – telling an almost-girlfriend about a dead ex-girlfriend.)
‘Lily was…’
Anne-Marie waited. I knew what she was thinking: I might have loved Lily (might still do), but I’d never come close to knowing her. If I had known her, I could have talked about her – and, as I talked, it would have seemed as if Lily were only in the next room; that we could hear her feet squeaking and creaking on the polished pine; smell the sweet smoke of her just-lit cigarette; hear her humming, monotonously, as always. But, in that flat, at that moment, Lily was a completely dead thing – a dead thing dying again – dying through my inability to make her even partially live.
Suddenly, superstitiously, I leapt up off the bed, strode over to one of the wall-closets. Something in me was convinced that behind its blank white door I would find Lily’s upright skeleton – not mouldering or clad with flesh-remnants, but clean and fresh as an anatomical model.
I pulled open the closet door.
The smell of Lily was instantly around and about me: half-alive, half-dead. All of a sudden, Lily was present – present in all her selfishness. (Lily’s selfishness had been her skeleton: it had held all that beautiful flesh in place. If her cheekbones were a photographer’s dream, it was the nightmare below the surface that defined them.) She was present for Anne-Marie, as well; showing up through my distress like bones on an X-ray. Being skeletal had always been Lily’s one true ambition – and now it was doubly achieved: here, in our minds; there, in her grave.
When I turned round, Anne-Marie was looking at me with real concern. I needed to say something, to explain my mad leap.
‘Why don’t you try something on?’ I suggested, as casually as I could.
Anne-Marie got up from the bed and came over to where I was standing.
‘Can I?’ she said childishly.
I hadn’t expected her to want to put on Lily’s clothes.
‘Really?’ I asked.
‘What would you like me to wear?’
If I was going to be sick, I might as well projectile vomit: I picked out the ghost dress.
‘Put this on,’ I said, picking the hanger out.
‘This?’ said Anne-Marie, obviously delighted that I’d started with one of the designer frocks.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Right,’ she said.
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘Out,’ she said.
The hard floors and bare walls of the bedroom were turning our talk to minimalistic monosyllables.
I went out into the living room, then through into the kitchen for a glass of water. It was a cup of tea I really wanted, but I knew there was a chance that Anne-Marie would want sex in Lily’s old clothes. The thought of a cup of tea going cold whilst we fucked was somehow unbearable.
I tried to work out why I was doing this, having this done; partly, it seemed to me, for the chance – once again – of humiliating Anne-Marie. I knew, from the way her hips felt in my hands, from her heaviness against and on top of me, that she was several sizes larger than Lily. But if humiliation were my main motive, I should have gone for a frock from Lily’s modelling period. That was when she’d been skinniest. (Most of the weight had been lost down the toilet bowl, but a few pounds had dissolved into the swimming pool.) The ghost dress was loose. It would accommodate and perhaps even flatter Anne-Marie’s curves.
‘Ready!’ Anne-Marie shouted.
I wanted longer to work out how I felt. My emotions were so complicated that I seemed to spend most of my time just spooling through them on fast-forward – checking to see what was on the tape; intending to go back later and watch the whole thing properly.
As I entered, Anne-Marie was inspecting herself modellishly in the full-length mirror.
‘Ta-dah!’ she exclaimed, spinning round to strike a pose: one of her arms up, ostrich fashion; the other punching her hip.
I looked at her, trying to put my face into some sort of unhorrified shape.
There was the sound of thinly stitched seams unpicking. The arm was tearing out at the armpit; a rip was forming a couple of inches beneath Anne-Marie’s left breast, exposing flesh.
I’d miscalculated.
At that exact moment, Anne-Marie looked so pathetic I almost loved her. (That she was prepared to make herself appear this grotesque, and all for me.) She wasn’t a model, never could have been – no-one knew that better than her; she, who’d sat watching nervous schoolgirls turn into psychotic world-famous stick insects. I knew, too: I’d lived with a m
odel. I knew how models related to clothes – how they dived into them as casually as into a hotel swimming-pool; how the fabric swished, watery, into the right shapes – flowing over the hollows they have where most of us have bulges.
Anne-Marie held the pose; held the smile. She had to. Where she was standing (submerged in a dress where Lily once floated), there was no oxygen. She had to hold the smile, the breath. To breathe out would be to bring drowning that little bit closer. And, more practically, breathing out might risk another rip under her other breast.
By default I had become Anne-Marie’s life-guard: either I rescued her, or she would turn blue-lipped and lose the irises of her eyes in the dead heavens of her skull.
I dived in, putting my fingers into the small tear – feeling Anne-Marie’s pitiful white skin against my knuckles – and I pulled the swimming-pool surface apart: giving her room to breathe, allowing her body out into a world of space that wouldn’t satirize it, pulling myself under, pulling her out.
‘Agh!’ she cried. ‘Don’t!’
‘Why not?’
She’d taken her bra and pants off.
There was now a shingle-size tear around Anne-Marie’s middle. The fabric was getting tight and ropey as we pulled against it. It would only rip in one direction – sideways; and we’d done all the sideways ripping we could. To rip more, we needed scissors – or risked bruising and crushed nipples and you-hurt-me recriminations. I paused: a final rescue needed. I pulled my T-shirt off over my head – allowing her to copy. The top half of the dress came off, leaving her semi-bruised by her own struggling fists; as if she’d been fighting or woken up puffy out of nightmare-sleep. As she started to pull the bottom half down, I saw a tear appear around her belly – I pulled it, and – mercifully – we had our first modellish, physical luck in the whole dress scene: it started to peel away in a diagonal downwards strip.
‘Turn around,’ I said.
Anne-Marie started the wrong way but almost immediately corrected herself. I pulled at the dress, extracting it into an uneven four-inch strip – until I reached the harder-stitched hem at the bottom; and Anne-Marie had to step out into my sarcastic arms.
We were laughing, for want of any better or more socially approved response. To tell the truth, we were lost – caught in a moral white-out. There was so much guilt in what we’d been doing, and so much innocence – it was hard to tell which predominated. The whole scene felt so much like the very very end of childhood and the earliest beginnings of middle age (dressing up, fancy dress).
This was the moment we both knew our relationship couldn’t last – but because of the difficulty and pain we’d gone through together to gain that knowledge, we felt a sudden tenderness for each other.
On coming into the flat we had known we were going to have sex but we hadn’t known what sort of sex it was going to be. Now, we knew: we were going to have the sex of pathos, of anticipated regret.
When we finally fell asleep, it was with our backs to each other – frankly separate.
74
The next morning I took the Tube to Victoria station, then a coach out into the country. After getting off in the most rural-looking town, I took another bus out to a small village. For half an hour, I tried to find somewhere obscure and secluded. Eventually I discovered quite a thick little copse of grid-planted fir trees.
I took the gun out of the sports bag for the first time since buying it. She was more beautiful than ever – a thing of pure brutal accomplishment. It still amazed me that there were men whose minds were constantly employed in trying to improve the design of machines intended to kill other men – and no-one arrested these designers, or called them murderers.
Handling the weapon made me feel like an art terrorist/theorist, convinced that I and I alone had discovered the perfect painting implement. This metal device was a creator of massive blood-flowers (a flesh-gardener) – huge gorgeous gory blooms, thrown up on walls and mirrors. This was the non-brush that Jackson Pollock spent his whole life in quest of – creating an instant composition of red and grey: all the Great Art Themes of Life and Death; controversy over the manner of the art’s making (dripping/triggering); the randomizing element (loss of control but control over loss of control); the collaborative nature of any true bullet art. (Dot. Dot. Dot.) And I was about to go and collaborate on a couple of specific deaths – painting them all over Le Corbusier’s shattered mirrors. This was going to be a hell of a grand opening: of heads, of arteries. Paint no longer a buried metaphor for blood. This would be authentic impasto – the real Real Thing: Death. Perhaps I should put a call through to ArtForum first; have them send a couple of critics along. Get some restaurant critics in there, too.
I loaded the clip up into the handle, butting it in with my wrist – the force was unnecessary – it slid in like good, wanted sex. I clicked off the safeties, turning the machine dangerous.
Just as the gun-contact had shown me, I cocked the firing mechanism: this was necessary for the first shot. After that, the pressure generated by the bullet just fired re-cocked the gun automatically.
I pointed the gun at the exposed trunk of one of the fir trees. I wanted to pull the trigger but couldn’t: I wanted to know how loud the gun would be before I fired it. I thought of different bangs, snaps, cracks, pops.
The day was sunny but too windy for comfort. Sounds might carry unexpected distances in unexpected directions. There were farms close by, and I couldn’t guarantee that no-one would hear the shots. But maybe that didn’t matter. Perhaps they’d just think it was someone disposing of rabbits or ramblers or something. I had no choice, really. I had to test the gun, and here was the safest place I’d managed to find.
I went off into some kind of daze – and when I came round I found myself stood there with the barrel of the gun pointing into the side of my head.
Never before had I knowingly been so close to suicide. There had been low times, back in the hospital. But when the urge had been there, the means hadn’t – and vice versa.
For a couple of instants I let myself feel the possibility of remorse: maybe the best thing for everyone was to kill myself right here.
Then I saw Dorothy, onstage, flailing her way through Lady Macbeth’s hand-washing, and I knew that this was a woman incapable of truly acknowledging the depth of her guilt.
Maybe in the instant between me firing the gun and it splatting her brains out, she would dive into the knowledge – slow-motion.
Suddenly, I felt something rip down through me – as if I were a newspaper and someone were tearing off a strip. I felt: anger, resentment, hatred.
If there was a final moment of decision to go ahead, then this was it.
Fuck Alun. Fuck Dorothy.
I pulled the trigger.
The bang was much quieter than I’d expected and the recoil far more gentle.
Ah, I thought, those Germans.
No longer worried about interruption, I walked up to the tree to examine the hole where Dorothy’s imaginary head had been.
At the point of impact there should have been a chunk ripped out at least as big as my fist.
Going slightly closer, I saw the bullet lodged in the tree’s outer bark. A single touch was enough to make it fall.
I didn’t need to test it, but I did – I stepped back a couple of paces and fired off three rounds into the tree, point-blank.
Nothing. No destruction. No penetration.
I’d been sold blanks.
I pulled the clip out and looked at one of the bullets, suddenly so much less beautiful. But, from what my untrained eye could see, there was no way of telling that this wasn’t a real bullet.
Distraught, I got the bus back to the village and the coach back to London.
It couldn’t all be for nothing – not my plans and lies and adaptations. I wasn’t going to allow this to thwart me. Everything had to be done in a particular order. This had to be corrected. Otherwise the order would be destroyed. I would correct this.
75
From Victoria coach station, I called my gun-contact’s mobile number. Doing my best not to sound too pissed off, I arranged to meet him in our usual pub. He said that he could be there in half an hour. I took a cab down to South-east London. When I walked into the grotty public bar, my contact was there – chatting to the landlord, ready to do business.
‘Toilet,’ I said.
He followed me in and locked the door behind us.
‘You sold me fucking blanks,’ I said.
I held out a few of them in my hand.
‘Never seen these before in my life,’ he said. ‘Honest.’
‘They don’t work.’
‘You remember – the ones I sold you were gold at the end, these are silver. Look.’
I had a vague memory.
‘Someone must have switched them,’ he said. ‘Nicked them. Who’s had hold of the gun since you got it? Been out of your sight, has it?’
Oh most definitely.
I remembered Anne-Marie’s curiosity about the contents of my sports bag. Was it possible that the one person I’d thought I could trust had started deceiving me? It was a mad thought: where would she have been able to get hold of blank ammunition? One answer was all I could think of: she’d phoned up Vicky, she’d told the police. That meant not only that Anne-Marie suspected but that the police knew what I was intending. In which case, why hadn’t they arrested me? I didn’t have time right now to think of that.
‘I want live ones – ones that’ll do some serious fucking damage.’
‘Give me ten minutes,’ he said.
‘How do I know I’ll see you again?’
‘I’m not going to skip the country just ‘cos of this, now am I?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But I need them today.’
‘You’ll get them –’
‘And this time I want to test them.’
He held back. ‘Tricky-dicky,’ he said.
‘But not impossible.’
He looked at the pissy floor, his shoes. ‘No.’
I waited for him in the bar while he disappeared off down the street. This was one of the worst moments. I truly believed I’d never see him again. But half an hour later, he came back and – after a quick word with the landlord – beckoned me to follow him.
