Corpsing

by Toby Litt

  A door was pulled open in the floor behind the bar. Down a steep ladder and we were in a large, dark cellar.

  Aluminium casks lining the walls; plastic shrink-wrapped lemonade bottles; a slightly wet concrete floor; a musty smell – half beer, half rats.

  ‘Come along here,’ he said.

  I followed.

  Someone had come down into the cellar after us: I recognized him – a burly barman.

  Nods, back and forth.

  ‘The jukebox will play a little louder upstairs,’ he said. ‘And Paul’s going to shift some barrels. That’s the best we can do. You get one shot only.’

  He pulled out a fresh box of bullets, held one up for my inspection.

  ‘Gold. Live.’

  Then he loaded up.

  There was a pile of smelly old mattresses in the corner. In front of them was the old-oak circle of a broken table-top. My gun-contact aimed at it.

  ‘Shoot into that,’ he said.

  He gave the nod to Paul, who started shifting barrels around. The report of when they hit the floor fired off like gunshots. Upstairs, the music began to thud louder and deeper.

  ‘Quickly,’ he said.

  I took aim, tried to coincide with one of Paul’s crashes, squeezed the trigger.

  Greater recoil, louder noise – and a hole the size of a golf ball left in the circle of wood.

  ‘Satisfied?’ he asked.

  ‘The same number of bullets,’ I said.

  ‘Minus that one.’ He pointed at the hole.

  ‘Satisfied,’ I said.

  We shook on it.

  ‘Can I keep the blanks?’ I asked.

  He didn’t let go.

  ‘What use are they to me?’ he said.

  He still had hold of my hand, firmly.

  ‘You can count this as a freebie. I wouldn’t do it for all my customers, but seeing how you paid well over the odds for that gun…’

  He smiled and finally let go.

  ‘You can stop now,’ he said to Paul as we walked by.

  We shook hands again in the public bar. The music had again been turned down. Everyone was too sensible to look too closely at the two men who might or might not just have fired a gun in the cellar.

  I paid for a couple of drinks with a fifty and told the landlord to keep the change. I didn’t expect gratitude, which was lucky, because I got none.

  Carrying the same suspicious sports bag, I walked out of the pub – as close to being one of the lads as I’d ever been. But still pretty far off at that.

  The question immediately came up of what to do now. Could I trust Anne-Marie not to pull the same trick again? What could she have told the police? Not everything. Had she mentioned the script? The audition? Laurence? No, that connection she couldn’t have made.

  My first instinct was to confront her. Then I thought better of it. If she didn’t know – but how? – then my every question would be self-incriminating. What did you do with my bullets? What have you said to the police? I decided to act as normally as possible – whilst no longer trusting her.

  Of course, I’d still have to leave her alone for periods. But she wouldn’t have the gun or the bullets to fool around with. Those I could leave somewhere safe. However, the only place I could think of to stow them was in the garden shed at my old address in Mortlake. It was far from ideal. I was pretty sure I’d be able to get there unobserved today. But on Friday, after Sheila’s story had gone in? I would have to gamble that the paparazzi would have discovered (from my delightfully helpful neighbours) that I hadn’t been home for several days.

  I took a black cab direct to Mortlake.

  I could tell something was wrong as soon as we rounded the corner and began to drive down my street. Something was wrong in the composition of the place. Something, I realized, was missing. But it was only when we drew up half-way along the street, just as I’d told the cabbie, that I saw – or rather didn’t see – what it was that was missing. It was my house, my flat. Instead, where it had once been, there stood a charred black mass haphazardly cordoned off with blue-and-white police crime-scene tape.

  ‘This it?’ asked the cabbie, after I’d sat silent and motionless for a minute or so.

  I nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ I said weakly. ‘I used to live here.’

  He turned round to look at me.

  ‘Lucky you moved out then, isn’t it?’

  I checked again, looking at the doors of the houses to the left and right – hoping that I’d made a mistake, and that I’d see (welcome this time) the blood-red paint-sloshed porch. But everything I’d taken in at first glance was confirmed.

  Through the black gape of the front door, I could see all the way down the ruined hall and out into the back garden. The shed, as far as I could make out, was still intact. I didn’t need a key to get at it. But then, neither did anyone else.

  ‘Are you alright, mate?’ the cabbie asked.

  It was only then I realized that I’d started to cry. I thought back to my pathetic bonfire of everything-to-do-with-Lily. The arsonists, whoever they were, had merely completed the job. I should have felt thankful towards them. I had supposedly left everything behind already. Up until this point in my life, most of my valued possessions had been made out of paper: favourite books, diaries. A few years ago, plastic had made its entrance: videos, cassettes, Polaroids, CDs. Only now (with the gun) had metal become a matter of sentiment. Really, I’d no longer had any need of anything that had been destroyed. The burning of it all, however, was something I myself would have put off – perhaps for the rest of my life; and perhaps the putting off would have been the ruining of my life. No person should become the archivist of their past loves. Not to the exclusion of future ones, certainly. But I couldn’t help feeling bereft. In my head, I played back the now-destroyed tape of Lily’s cereal adverts. The image had already deteriorated. She jumped from expression to expression, costume to costume. Now she was in the shower being stabbed; now she was standing beside me in the spoofed ad.

  ‘I’m sorry, mate,’ said the cabbie. ‘But the meter is still running.’

  I couldn’t face becoming a modern genre-piece for some imaginary CNN news crew – picking stoically through the ashes of my gone home.

  ‘Notting Hill,’ I said.

  I’d decided to return to Lily’s flat and hide the gun under the floorboards – in the secret place where Lily used to stash her drugs and diaries.

  ‘Are you sure you’re alright, mate?’ asked the cabbie.

  ‘Notting Hill,’ I said.

  The cab pulled off.

  I couldn’t stop myself looking back at the house. The wood of the door-frame was black streaked with white, just like Dorothy’s hair. I turned to face forwards.

  The escalation was almost complete, I thought: from rubbish-tipping through brick-tossing to building-torching. The only thing left was a direct assault upon my body: injury then fatality then desecration.

  It was only as we turned out of my road that the thought occurred: Who did this?

  76

  When I told Anne-Marie about the fire, she took my hand and led me into Lily’s bedroom. We lay down.

  ‘I thought, what if you’d been been inside,’ I said. ‘I thought, what if you were dead.’

  She consoled me and I consoled her.

  ‘Just think if we’d been staying there,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed.

  After a while, I asked if she could go to the shops and get me some painkillers. When she said she had a huge stash of Nurofen in her handbag, I insisted on another brand. Reluctantly, she went out.

  As soon as she was gone, I called Sheila at the Mirror office. She picked up.

  ‘Sheila,’ she said.

  The sound of typing in the background.

  ‘I know about the fire,’ I said.

  ‘Phew,’ she said. ‘I thought I was going to have to break the news to you.’

  ‘Why should that scare you? It’s your job: standing on
the doorsteps of bereaved mothers, asking them how they feel about government policy on this issue.’

  ‘I can see you’re a little upset.’

  ‘It was a horrible flat.’

  ‘We’ll have to mention it in the story.’

  ‘I never liked it.’

  Sheila paused, then tried to get the conversation back on track.

  ‘The story’s going in for tomorrow. Front page, I think – unless something stronger comes in. Where will you be, if I need to contact you?’

  ‘I’ll be out of contact.’

  ‘A phone number.’

  ‘No, you can trace those.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Here’s my mother’s.’ And I gave it to her. ‘What did Alun say when you asked him?’

  ‘He said, “No comment” and shut the front door.’

  ‘Did he sound upset?’

  ‘Why are you so interested?’

  ‘I think he knows whether or not it was his kid.’

  ‘You mean someone’s told him?’

  ‘I mean, he knows when he last fucked Lily.’

  Sheila spent a moment taking this in.

  ‘We’ve got some nice pictures of her,’ she said. ‘Looking maternal.’

  ‘You have to protect me from the rest of the press,’ I said. ‘Keep them away from me.’

  ‘Only if you go exclusive.’

  ‘No, this has got to be a complete feeding-frenzy.’

  ‘You’re on your own, then.’

  I thought of Anne-Marie’s betrayal.

  ‘I am that already.’

  Sheila let this go by.

  ‘Who do you think torched your flat?’

  ‘Believe me, Sheila, it could be any number of people.’

  End of conversation.

  Anne-Marie came back from the shops and handed me the painkillers. The look she gave me was enough to make me want to swallow the whole pack.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘What did you do about the actors?’

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ she said. ‘I told you.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I phoned them all,’ she said.

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes. They’re all coming.’

  ‘You’re certain?’

  ‘Conrad, what is it? Talk to me.’

  I took two of the painkillers.

  77

  Thursday.

  In the morning I went out to the newsagent’s to buy the papers.

  The headline was BRANDY’S BABY.

  A Mirror Exclusive.

  Byline: Sheila Burroughs.

  My photograph had not been put on the cover of the Mirror – that had been saved for a shot of the maternal-looking Lily juxtaposed with a shot of Alun in his greatcoat – walking fast and looking at the pavement.

  Yes!

  I flicked through the other tabloids. A couple of unresearched spoilers had got in, but no-one had scooped Sheila. I went back to the Mirror. There Sheila’s picture was, beside the byline: all working-class perm and grinning aspirations. Perfect, and not like Sheila at all. I turned to the inner pages: a retread, from cuttings, of Lily’s shooting; a slightly bitter going-over of Asif’s articles (why, if he knew, didn’t he tell us about the baby?). As promised, I was sympathetically portrayed and not directly quoted.

  ‘It’s a terrible thing,’ said the newsagent. ‘Terrible.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was.’

  ‘Such a young girl, and so beautiful.’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘You were a very lucky young man.’

  I didn’t want to start an argument.

  Sheila had overplayed the pregnancy and underplayed the fatherhood issue, as far as she’d been able. They would be getting at Alun tomorrow, just as they’d got at Asif. Thankfully, she’d slanted the whole thing towards making the police look bad. The story ended with a demand that they declare who the baby’s father was. In the public interest.

  To change my appearance slightly, I went into the nearest barber’s and had a crew cut. I decided I wouldn’t shave.

  A copy of the Mirror was open on the glass table behind the cutting chairs. The barber didn’t say anything but I was terribly aware of his nonchalance.

  As well as the tabloids, I guessed that the police would be quite seriously interested in tracking me down and talking to me about the torching. It would be, I guessed, highly suspicious if I didn’t come forward. They might even start thinking that I’d done it myself.

  When Vicky and Anne-Marie met, they had talked for quite a while. I couldn’t be sure what had and hadn’t been said. It seemed likely, though, that Vicky would be able to find Anne-Marie – either through the phonebook or the modelling agency. I wondered how long this would take, once Vicky found out I’d disappeared.

  Back from the barber’s, I showed Anne-Marie the front page of the Mirror.

  ‘Why’ve you had your hair shaved off?’

  ‘I was just fed up with it.’

  Anne-Marie took in the headline.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘A while.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she wailed. ‘Why don’t you ever tell me anything?’

  ‘It wasn’t important.’

  She wasn’t listening. Slowly, she sat down upon the sofa – reading all the stories from beginning to end.

  For the next couple of minutes I got nothing out of her but the sound of pages turning.

  The phone started to ring, She moved.

  ‘Don’t answer it,’ I said. ‘It’s bad enough that the thing’s connected.’

  ‘But it could be anyone.’

  ‘If you pick it up, they’ll know we’re here – that someone’s here – and we won’t be able to come back for at least a week.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The paparazzi – press and photographers. It’ll be open season on me now.’

  ‘You don’t seem very upset.’

  ‘I wanted this.’

  ‘This is all going wrong,’ she said.

  The phone stopped ringing, then started again. Anne-Marie got to it before I did.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, then held it out. ‘It’s for you.’

  ‘Who is it?’ I whispered.

  ‘Who is it?’ Anne-Marie asked.

  I heard the phone answer, ‘Josephine Irish.’

  Taking the receiver from Anne-Marie, I said: ‘I’m sorry, Josephine, I really can’t speak now.’

  ‘I want to see you,’ she said. ‘I have something to tell you.’

  ‘I’m very busy.’

  ‘It’s about Alun.’

  That halted me. ‘I’ll call you.’

  ‘You said that last time.’

  ‘I will. I’ll call you.’

  I put the phone down, eyeing Anne-Marie. She knew better than to ask me any questions. It was now clear to her that I’d been doing a great deal behind her back. A phonecall from Lily’s mother, particularly on the day that Lily was back in the papers, wasn’t going to add too much more to her suspicions.

  ‘That was a very stupid thing to do,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t call me stupid.’

  The phone started ringing again.

  ‘We’ll have to go to yours,’ I said. We can’t stay here.’

  She sulked but moved.

  78

  As far as I could tell, no-one followed us during the drive from Notting Hill to Chelsea. Anne-Marie remained silent most of the way. It was important for me to try and persuade her that I still trusted her. I wanted to explain why I’d, at least in her eyes, over-reacted.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘You’ve never been doorstepped. You don’t know what it’s like.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘Some of my models used to spend their entire lives dodging the press – and who do you think helped them make it through? Who ordered the taxis and brought over the cigarettes and went in the
decoy car? You can’t tell me anything I don’t already know.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I forgot.’

  ‘Well, remember a bit more, why don’t you?’

  No more conversation after that.

  For a while, I thought that Anne-Marie was going to make me sleep on the sofa. But when we got to her flat all my stuff went straight through into her bedroom. I stowed the sports bag on top of her pink-painted wardrobe.

  As soon as I could, I turned the TV on for the twelve o’clock news bulletin. There was no mention of Brandy’s Baby, no statement from the Met.

  From the bathroom came the sound of heavy running water.

  ‘Can I use the phone?’ I asked.

  ‘So, I can’t touch your phone,’ Anne-Marie shouted back, ‘but you can use mine whenever you like!’

  ‘Can I?’

  ‘Oh, alright.’

  I waited until Anne-Marie was installed – the watersounds now reduced to feminine lappings.

  Josephine answered within two rings.

  ‘Meeting up could be difficult,’ I said.

  ‘How can I make it easier?’ she asked, sarcastically.

  ‘You can drive over to near where I am.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  I wanted somewhere we were unlikely to be seen. The best place seemed to be Josephine’s car.

  ‘Pick me up outside McDonald’s on the King’s Road.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘One o’clock.’

  ‘Alright.’

  Before Anne-Marie got out of the bath I transferred the gun and bullets into my courier bag. From now on, I would take it with me wherever I went.

  I cooked dinner. I made jokes. And by the end of the evening, Anne-Marie had almost forgiven me everything.

  79

  Friday.

  It was one of those bright, brisk days when the sky seems a couple of layers thinner, and space just that little bit closer.

  As I walked along the King’s Road, the cold air made my lungs feel huge and healthy. The gun in the courier bag banged against my hip like a kid punching me to try and get my attention.

  McDonald’s. One o’clock. Josephine was on time. I got into the Volvo.