Assassins and Victims

by Campbell Armstrong

  I turned my face into the grass and started to cry. It came over me just suddenly. I couldn’t stop the tears from coming. My life was all buggered up. I could see that quite plainly.

  Then a man and a woman came across the field and stopped beside me.

  I heard the woman say,

  ‘Come away, James, he’s drunk.’

  When they had gone I got to my feet. I walked slowly back the way I had come. I didn’t want to return to the room, in fact I wouldn’t have cared if I never saw that place again. I stopped on Cricklewood Broadway, not knowing which way to turn. I went into the café in Cricklewood Lane and ordered a Cornish pasty and chips but when the waitress brought it I couldn’t eat it. I just sat there staring at it and watching it get cold. I had a cup of tea which I drank down slowly.

  I felt a bit better when I had drunk it and I thought to myself perhaps I was getting worked up about nothing. I mean, she might not have meant what she said. It might have been a kind of joke, although her eyes didn’t have a jokey look. Or it might have been her way of warning me to stay away from the dog. But I kept thinking about those eyes and what I’d seen in them and I knew that she had really meant it.

  You can always get the truth out of a person’s eyes. Even if they’re good at lying and you can’t tell anything from their voice, you only have to look into the eyes to know what it is they really mean. I wished I hadn’t seen her look. I wished I had turned away when she’d spoken. I wished lots of things but what good was that now, what good was it to cry over spilt milk? I had seen her. And she had said to me, I could hear it all again, she had just come straight out with it, I am going to kill you. That’s what was going round and round in my brain. I am going to kill you.

  I had another drink of tea. I was trembling and the waitress – the same waitress that looks at me funnily – was walking around the table sort of staring at me as if she expected me to do something odd, perhaps break cups, or start throwing knives around. After a time I had to get up and leave.

  But I couldn’t face the room. I lived there. But I couldn’t go there. It gets like that sometimes. For lots of reasons, people don’t like going back to their rooms. Sometimes it’s because they’re lonely, living by themselves. But I had a much stronger reason really, I didn’t want to go back because I wanted to stay alive.

  So I went into a public house and bought a glass of whisky. I was used to the taste of it by this time. It burned my chest and made me feel sick but once that part of it was over it made me feel warm and somehow stronger.

  I saw my face in the mirror.

  There were these great streaks of dirt down my face from where I’d been crying. I took out my handkerchief and wiped it clean. And then I finished my whisky and asked the barman for another one. I went over to a little table just under the window and sat down. I stared into the whisky and all I could see was the mad woman’s face.

  Why? Why did she want to kill me? All right, I’d tried to finish off the dog by poisoning it but that didn’t call for her wanting to kill me. I’d only been joking anyway, I mean I knew that Rex wouldn’t have taken that chop, it was just a half-hearted effort, perhaps I should’ve ex-plained that to her at the time. But it was too late to tell her now. I’d gone beyond the point of going back and explaining everything to her. She wouldn’t have listened. Mad people never listen. Their ears are always tuned into something else.

  Anyway, with the meat he got to eat he wouldn’t have sniffed at a mouldy old chop, he wouldn’t have given it a thought. Surely she knew that. Surely she could see that I wasn’t really serious. But she was going to kill me just the same. And that was all that mattered when you got down to brass tacks, that was all that really mattered in the end, she was going to kill me, she had said so. I’d heard her say it, right there outside Mutter’s shop. In broad daylight. You are going to die.

  My fingers were shaking and my heart was banging away inside. It was like having a fever, a bad fever, something you can’t cure. My whole body just wouldn’t keep still. It was like hundreds of pulses all going at the same time. You are going to die. When you think about it, they’re funny words really. How can anybody say them and mean them?

  I tried to get the whisky to my mouth but the rim of the glass was rattling against my teeth and the liquid was slopping over my fingers. Across the room I could still see my face in the mirror. I looked a wreck, just as if I’d been rolled around in mud.

  How would she do it? How would she kill me? I didn’t like to think about it, it couldn’t do any good, only harm, but there it was in my head, the question How? I couldn’t get it straight. I couldn’t get it fixed into my brain somehow. It kept jumping about. How would she do it? She said she was going to. I could still hear it. There in broad daylight in the street on a Sunday morning with cars and people passing along, not knowing, not knowing what she’s said and what she means to do. But that’s it. When you’re a human being, you’re always alone. You’ve got nothing but your own problems and nobody can help you solve them but yourself. No, not even God. I mean that. He isn’t interested. I could’ve gone to someone passing in the street and said, She’s going to kill me, and they would have laughed and shrugged and just walked on. But that’s what life’s all about. There isn’t anything else.

  I clasped my hands on my glass. Something solid, something solid, something to get a grip on because everything else was slipping away, just slipping and sliding away.

  Matt could have helped, he could have said the right word and made me see the whole thing was just a poor joke, but he didn’t, did he? he didn’t care about what was going to happen to me, no, nobody gives a damn.

  And then I remembered. I remembered it just like that. One of those things that jumped into my mind, something I’d forgotten all about. Once, I had gone with my mother and father to a carnival. I don’t remember where, in a big field, that’s all, and it was raining and the ground was muddy and I’d put a penny in a fortune-telling machine and placed my hand on a metal plate and a little card came out. It said, You will die a violent death. Just that. My father took the card and tore it. He dropped it in the mud. He put his foot over it and crushed it into the mud. I remembered looking at it. I was a child then. I didn’t know what it meant.

  But I knew now. It came flooding into my mind.

  I got another glass of whisky from the bar and went back to the table. I felt very cold. She might even have a gun, she was mad enough to have a gun. I tried to think what it would be like to have a bullet go into your brain, but the thought of blood made me sick. And the pain, what would the pain be like? And the feeling of light rushing away and darkness coming in, what would it be like?

  No, she couldn’t. She couldn’t.

  But she could. You had only to see her eyes to know.

  A man in working clothes sat down at my table and rolled a cigarette. He kept looking at me, flicking his eyes up and down across my face. I tried to hold my whisky steady but I was already beginning to feel a bit drunk. It goes to your head quickly. Everything in my mind was jumbled about, everything about Mrs Peluzzi, the dog, the fortune card.

  The man said, ‘Oi tink it looks loik rain.’

  I didn’t understand what he said. I tried to get up from the table and walk away but my legs were weak and wouldn’t hold me.

  ‘Now then, steady on, steady on,’ he said.

  I caught hold of the edge of the table. There was music playing Dum-da-didididi-dum.

  ‘Ye’ve had yerself a tot too much,’ he said.

  I looked at him but his face kept coming and going, in and out, all blurred. I tried to tell him what was worrying me but the words were mixed up in my mouth and I couldn’t make any sense of all the things that were running through my head. He was grinning and at the same time licking the sticky side of his cigarette paper.

  ‘Oi’ve often thought to meself that Oi’d like to be murdered,’ he said.

  That was what he said. Someone pushed open the door and I turned my head roun
d slowly. There was this square of light. The man caught me by the elbow and helped me to the door. Outside it was very cold. The wind was blowing through me, right through me, as if there was nothing left of me but rags and bones.

  ‘Get yerself off home and straight into yer bed,’ he said.

  I staggered off down the street. At the traffic lights a car nearly ran into me. The driver stuck his head through the window and said something unpleasant. But I didn’t stop to argue with him. I kept going. There was nothing else for it, no, I just had to keep going. Back to the room. There wasn’t another place in the world I could have gone to.

  When I got in I fell on top of the bed. The room was spinning round and round and my head ached badly. I thought the ceiling was going to fall in. I got up and made a cup of tea and drank it standing by the window.

  The dog was lying beside his bowl. Inside the bowl were bits and pieces of bone left over from his meal.

  I hated the dog. But how could I die and how could he still go on living? It wasn’t right, there wasn’t any justice in it, but is there any justice in the world any more, is there, is there? I shook my head. The pain got worse. There was this buzzing noise, like a lot of voices going on and on at the same time, all trying to speak at once, like voices in an empty room. I pressed my head flat against the window and the glass was nice and cool.

  The dog opened one eye. It was a horrible eye, mad and insane, and it rolled round the yard, glaring at every thing. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t stand by like this and let her get at me. What if she had a gun? What if she was going to stop me one dark night in the street and push the blade of a knife right through my ribs?

  I banged my head against the window and one of the panes snapped like a piece of dry wood and the next thing I knew there was blood coming from my head. For one moment I thought I’d been shot and that the bullet had passed right through the glass and into my head but then I realised that I had broken the glass myself by pushing my head hard against it. I sat down on the floor and held my hands to the place and then I got a towel and pressed it hard against the wound. Only when the towel was soaked red did it stop bleeding. I felt sick and faint.

  What had I ever done to hurt anybody? I had lived my life, that was all. I had minded my own business. But that wasn’t enough for some people. I never interfered. Live and let live. Because of that she was going to kill me. I couldn’t see it. Suddenly I was very blind. I couldn’t see anything or understand anything any more. I didn’t want to die. I was sorry, sorry, I was sorry in my heart for any pain I’d ever caused anybody but please, I didn’t want to die.

  I looked through the broken glass at the dog. He was snapping his huge mouth open and shut. I couldn’t wait any longer. I just couldn’t wait. If she was going to kill me, then I was going to get that dog first, before any-thing else happened. It was all clear in a flash. I’d go down there and I’d get him.

  I hunted out the piece of nylon cord and then went downstairs. I didn’t stop to think. The time for all that was past. Plans plans, fuck plans – they didn’t matter now.

  I got over the wall, scraping myself to the bone, tearing my clothes, without seeing anything or thinking anything I got over the wall and dropped down on the other side.

  The dog just blinked at me. I held out the cord. My eyes and my face were wet and my hands were shaking so badly that I could hardly hold the cord between my fingers and I even dropped it once.

  It was just beginning to get dark.

  I stopped for a minute and stood there. And then all of a sudden everything roared up inside me like a boil bursting, everything I had ever suffered on account of this animal, everything in my life came back on me like the smell of sick, and I shouted out, roared, and kicked the dog on the head with the tip of my boot.

  The animal snarled and jumped away.

  I rushed in. I could only see blackness and smell fur and feel everything that was going on inside me and nothing else mattered.

  Nothing else mattered but crushing this dog until there wasn’t anything left.

  6

  Matt

  My life had become endless operas sung in foreign languages; the sight of those alien faces staring from their tin frames like dead gnats pickled in jars; and the feel of her alien hand between my own nervous fingers.

  ‘You would like to hear the other side?’ she asked.

  ‘Not just yet,’ I said. My head was filled with music. I lit a cigarette and watched her move about the room. I had resolved that this would be my last attempt at getting her into the bedroom, that I’d devote all my energies to the task in the last hours of our relationship, and that if I failed I would go down gloriously, all flags flying. There’s no future in persuading the unpersuadable, or in unravelling impenetrable mysteries. And Bella, it seemed, was content to keep our relationship as many yards from the locked bedroom door as possible.

  She moved about the room emptying ashtrays, fussing with this or that, rearranging the forest of photographs in such a way that – or did I just fancy it – they were staring in a circle into the room like unwelcome guests at a wedding. Something about the photographs unnerved me. Was it her slavish attention to them? Was it because of an almost morbid element I sensed in her attitude to them? Or was it because the most obvious picture of all was missing from the collection?

  I had asked myself enough unanswered questions to occupy a market research firm for a month. And the time for such questions – a luxury, in my circumstances – was almost over. I fully intended to leave Bella that night for the last time. Nor did I plan to return to Eric’s room. This was the ultimate break. Three thousand pounds in my coat, a taxi to London Airport, and a quick flip to anywhere warm. Enough is enough.

  Let them settle their own battles. An adage that I believed, but that I hadn’t always adhered to in my crowded life.

  Bella sat down and crossed her plump legs. She had her eyes fixed on my face.

  ‘Opera is so beautiful,’ she said.

  ‘Indeed, yes,’ I said.

  ‘It takes you out of this world,’ she said.

  ‘To where?’

  ‘Does that matter?’

  I went to where she sat and laid one hand on her knee. She didn’t move a muscle. Her eyes, shining, suggesting a warmth that I had still to discover in her, were staring into my face. Slowly I started to move the hand, inch by inch, up the inside of her leg. When I was about four inches from where I wanted to be, she clamped down on me. She was shaking her head.

  ‘You have a dirty mind,’ she said.

  I moved away. A dirty mind – that was an interesting if somewhat prohibitive remark. Did she confuse healthy lust with unhealthy lechery in her mind? Or perhaps she didn’t know that there was a difference between the two.

  I sat down and took out my cigarettes.

  Having lit one, I said,

  ‘I’m a man, I have normal male appetites. And …’ I paused for maximum effect, my face heavy with the pain of the secret I was about to reveal. My last tactic, my last gambit. The card that I had been saving, thinking all along that I’d never have to use it.

  ‘And what?’ she asked.

  Good. She was interested.

  ‘I am in love with you.’

  She looked serious for a second and then threw her head back and laughed. She looked attractive doing that, but I couldn’t quite conceal my surprise at her action.

  ‘Why are you laughing? Is love a laughing matter?’

  ‘Love. You make me sick up to here,’ and she indicated a place level with her throat. She walked about the room. ‘Love. There is no love. In the whole world there is no such thing. Selfishness, yes. Hatred, yes. Envy. The need to be dominant. Yes. Yes. Yes. But love, no, there is no such a thing as this.’

  I said, ‘I only know what I feel.’

  She picked at a bowl of flowers on the table.

  ‘Do you think, do you dream that because you tell me this I am going to lift up my skirt for you and say come to me? You
are stupid.’

  ‘I know what I feel,’ I said, simulating the breaking of one heart in my expression. ‘I know that you’re hurting me. Why? Why are you doing this?’

  I was on my knees. It was impressive. The tone of my voice was exactly right. I clutched the hem of her skirt and tugged gently, half-hoping that it might just fall off. But it was held in place – like that other intriguing part of her anatomy – with a hoop of unblemished steel.

  ‘Stop crawling, stop it,’ she said.

  ‘I would crawl to the ends of the earth for you,’ I said.

  She pushed me away and walked to the other side of the room. She was fidgeting with a piece of paper in her fingers. On my knees, I went stumping after her. There is little advantage, I realised, in being a dwarf. Even so, I didn’t rise. I looked up at her.

  ‘You are interested only in my bed,’ she said.

  ‘No, that isn’t true. You know that isn’t true.’

  ‘Do you deny it?’

  ‘I’m interested in you,’ I said. ‘I’ve been let down before by a woman. I said I was never going to get emotionally attached again. But look at what’s happened, look at what you’ve done to me, what you’re doing to me.’

  She was laughing. Outrageous woman. I was pleased that I wasn’t a genuine suitor. My heart would have broken at this kind of reception. But the more she laughed, the more attractive I found her, and the more I found her attractive the greater became my desire. It was almost an obsession with me now. I’d never gone after a thing so single-mindedly before. For God knows what reasons, I had to have her. Once would be enough. I wasn’t asking a great deal, only the sort of favour any right-headed widow at the prime of her life would grant. If she didn’t like the idea she could always have closed her eyes.