by Jonny Glynn
‘What are you going to do now?’ he said, with his big gloomy innocent eyes. ‘Now that you’re wanted?’
‘I’m only wanted in the region,’ I camply replied.
‘Are we going to go on the run?’ he asked, with an earnest and impish appeal.
‘Hmmm…’ I thought, a cheeky suggestion, but why not? This city is, after all, a sewer. Why not go on the run–get out into the country, smell the shit in the air?
‘You’d need a disguise,’ he said
‘Yes, I would,’ I said.
‘You could dress up as Adrian and steal his car,’ he spluttered, quick as a flash. He’d obviously been holding this thought for some time, and wanted to be credited with thinking of it first–so I let him think he had and replied, ‘Ridiculous–I haven’t driven in years.’
‘It’s like riding a bike,’ he said.
‘Absurd,’ I said.
‘Get back in the saddle,’ he said. ‘Head north.’
‘Hmmm…’ I pondered. Dress up as Adrian, steal his car, head north?…And then I remembered…Valerie lives up north. Valerie lives in Leeds–and I haven’t seen Valerie in years, in seven years…
‘Is it that long?’ he said.
At least that long, I pondered. But why the hell not? Head north–see Val. Who knows, it might be fun.
A clean pair of boxer shorts, cotton socks, blue shirt, red silk tie and a rather smart, well-fitted, black suit from Hugo Boss. A pair of black brogues–a half a size too large, but nothing that an extra pair of socks and the odour-eaters from my shoes couldn’t correct. A new watch, removed from Adrian’s very rigid, blood-encrusted wrist–Ellesse, chunky stainless steel and good to a depth of two hundred meters, very reliable. Beth’s spectacles–asexual wire-framed oval lenses, covered in blood but soon rinsed clean, wiped dry and slipped on. I looked very professional, trustworthy even, honest and a success. Nothing like the scabrous oaf now famous throughout the region for the Sudder Street Slaughter.
‘You look like someone,’ he said. ‘Who is it?’
And we looked at me in the mirror and considered…He was right, I did look like someone, who was it?
‘It’s Tony Blair,’ he blurted.
And he was right. I look just like Tony Blair. A slightly bruised, characterfully haggard, somewhat raffish, paranoid Tony Blair…I admired myself, smiled and felt confident.
‘You know who that makes you then, don’t you?’ I said, and he looked at me, glowering. ‘That makes you Gordon Brown.’ He rolled his tongue along the inside of his lower lip, smiled and looked bashful.
‘And you know what he said, don’t you?’
‘What?’
‘Better to die roaring like a lion than braying like a donkey.’
‘Did he really say that?’
‘No–but he did say that courage is not the absence of fear, it is the realization that some things are more important than safety.’
‘Indeed.’
‘A lesson Adrian might have learnt.’
‘Yes.’
We smiled sagely, congratulated each other, and then went in search of the car keys. I found them in the pocket of a three-quarter-length macintosh hanging on the back of the hall-cupboard door. I slipped the mac on and took one last look around the flat. Adrian was lying with his face buried in the seat of the big white armchair, his legs splayed out behind him, blood everywhere. Beth was twisted beneath the duvet, her arms delicately crossed and her little hands folded into fists, her stomach split, and her pretty hazel eyes still staring…What have I done? I thought. What have I done…? And then other thoughts festered and started to seethe. On the mantelpiece were two photographs–one of Adrian and one of Beth, both of them smiling and looking happy. Those will be the photographs they’ll put in the newspaper, I thought, beneath the headline: Two Found Dead in E5 Bloodbath. Yes, I pondered, that will be forever how Beth and Adrian are remembered–smiling, happy, and butchered…That is, of course, if they are remembered at all. But I’m sure they will be–they’re the connected type. They’ll each have a mother and father, each have brothers and sisters, each have friends and colleagues…They’ll be missed and remembered…Their deaths are, after all, exceptional in their brutality and futility, so there’s a chance they may make it onto the television. And then there’ll be a wave of mawkish sympathy. Shrivelled bunches of daffodils bought at the local garage will be left on the pavement with misspelt messages of fond remembrance from people they never knew. Tears will be wept and kind words spoken. It will all be very sad…
And then I remembered the photograph they put in the papers of Emma–smiling, happy, and butchered…And I remembered an afternoon dredging a ditch. And I remembered the smell of damp, and a head, and a leg, and a foot, and an arm…
I turned the heating off, locked the door, pocketed their keys, slipped back into my flat, gathered some things, turned my heating off, locked my door and was gone.
As I exited the building my heart was racing.
‘Be calm,’ he said. ‘Be confident, you’re a professional. No-one’s going to recognize you.’
‘I’ve always been a head-turner,’ I said. ‘You know that.’
‘Relax,’ he said. ‘You’re disguised.’ And then he started whistling. It was that tune again, that tune my father used to whistle. That cheery good-morning off-to-work whistle. I recognized it immediately, but this time–for the first time in a long time, the words sang along in my head…
Mister Cellophane
Should have been my name
’Cause you can look right through me
Walk right by me
And never know I’m there.
It made me wonder just what sort of a man my father was. What sordid horrors of his own did his life hide? That biscuit salesman for McVitie’s…I was eleven when he died, on a beautiful summer’s evening in 1977…I remember, for some time afterwards, feeling deeply aggrieved, and bitterly resentful. Not at Dad for having died, but at Mum for telling the mourners that his last words were: ‘Never trust a garibaldi.’ It got a good laugh and eased a lot of grief, but it was a lie. Mother wasn’t even present when he died. His last words were: ‘Oh fuck…please.’ And then he made a terrible pitiful noise. A noise that signified intolerable and excruciating pain, caught gurgling in his throat. His body twisted and contorted. He held himself tightly, collapsed onto the lawn, looked at me with a terrible dread-filled anguish, reached out towards me, and then died…I let go of my kite and ran away from him, back into the house, and called for Mum…I didn’t know what else to do.
The key ring told me I was looking for a Vauxhall Vectra. I didn’t have any idea of what a Vauxhall Vectra looked like, but there were only three cars parked in the immediate vicinity–one was a dilapidated orange Beetle, the second a small black Cinquecento with a Che Guevara bumper sticker and a Cornwall flag in the window, and the third was a dark-blue, middle-management-looking car–so I figured it had to be that one. I aimed the key at it and clicked the button, the car bleeped, flashed and snapped open. I got in and immediately felt safe and warm. The car was immaculate and smelt of an Alpine forest. It had air conditioning, a sun roof, airbags, a CD player, surround-sound speakers, a cup rack, four doors, a large boot, front and rear screen wipers, automatic windows, child locks, adjustable seating–it had it all. There was a button for everything. And he was right, it is like riding a bike–once you’re back in the saddle, it all comes back to you. A bit of a bumpy start–super-sensitive brakes–but once I got a feel for them we were off–both arms up, hands at ten to two–mirror, signal, manoeuvring north. Destination: number 3, Kepler Grove, Leeds.
It was a slow uncertain sneak out of London, a nervous crawl onto the motorway, and then a mad dash north up the M1, stopping only once for a piss and a cup of coffee at the services just outside Leicester. Nobody paid me any mind–I was just another journeyman heading north.
The time was straight north and south as I pulled up outside Valerie’s house. The daylight ho
urs had returned to dark and the past returned to the present. My body was aching, my thoughts were teeming, seven years of separation were about to be undone. Seven years of kennelled gloom, hounding me and barking, yapping at my ankles, were about to be let loose.
I got out of the car and stretched. The evening air was a bitter icy cold. Goose bumps, like frozen kisses, pimpled up and down, biting me all over, and an anxious shivering dread quivered within. I pulled my mac on and gathered it around me. I locked the car, it squawked and bleeped as if to say ‘Good luck.’ My thoughts fastened, my breathing equalled. I knew what I must do. As I lifted my finger to the doorbell, I noted that my hand was shaking.
I pressed the bell and waited…
Valerie always kept good time, she was very efficient with minutes. She liked time, it was a structure she could work with, make sense of and rely on. At six o’clock she would be sitting down to have her ‘tea’, as she liked to call it, being a good honest northern girl. Valerie always took her tea at six o’clock, she believed very firmly, almost to the point of high principle, in fixed eating times. It was how she controlled her bowels. She liked control. She became distracted and troubled if she ever lost control and didn’t ‘express’, as she ever so politely put it, ‘on time’.
‘I’m not an iconoclast!’ she’d say, smiling. It was our joke. ‘I want to go first thing in the morning, not last thing at night.’ And then we’d laugh and snuggle up beneath Egyptian cotton covers and make loving squeaking noises. But I digress…
A dark refracted shadow loomed behind the frosted glass. The door opened, and there she was…She had grown so old. And seemed to have shrunk. She looked thin and worn and used. Everything about her had fallen. Her hair line had retreated, her gums had receded, her skin was limp, pendulous and yellow…Life and time had worked their degenerate witchcraft.
‘Yes?’ she said.
And then looked at me. Nine seconds passed. Count them.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
‘Peter?’ The penny dropped. Her little voice not quite believing.
A sad, pathetic smile inched its way sideways into my cheeks.
‘What are you doing here?’ she said–her face creasing and eyes widening.
‘I’ve come to see you,’ I heard myself nervously mumble. And then there was a pause. A twitching, bewildered, off-kilter incertitude was undoing her. She was confused. I could see her thinking…This hadn’t been planned, there hadn’t been a phone call first–no arrangements had been made–a line, letting her know, hadn’t been dropped–this was unexpected, and all of a sudden, and out of the blue. She was unsure of how to react. What to think? What to do?…And a dark emotion bristled between us.
‘You’d better come in,’ she said, abandoning her discomfort to the safer formalities of procedural cliché, and showed me through into the ‘lounge’, as she liked to call it, where we stood, uneasily opposite one another, in the middle of the room, in complete silence, for exactly twenty-seven seconds.
Count them. And don’t rush…
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
It was electrifying. Our breathing was at odds throughout.
The intense discomfort of being human, each uncertain of the other, the stark reality of our existence and the unalterable history between us, abruptly, and all of a sudden, squashed together in a confined space, jangling, stilted and irreconcilably at odds–after all those years. I can’t describe it–but it was wonderful. It was so intense, such exquisite awkwardness…For twenty-seven seconds, a gluey sensual unease, binding us–and an urgent ticking, racing and harrying time…It was extraordinary. I felt profoundly alive…I can’t explain it, but for all of its awfulness, I would have held that moment forever.
My eyes gave the room a rapid, glancing going-over. It was a small room, untouched by the Ikea sensation and full of cheap oversized traditional English MFI. A matching sofa and armchair in the old-fashioned chintzy second-hand style, a simple round wooden table with two chairs, a television and video and DVD player and satellite box, an electric fire with pine surround, a carriage clock, a few shelves, a few books–Mary Wesley, Catherine Cookson, Joanna Trollope–a bureau full of things–who on earth keeps a bureau these days? Some posters of art from galleries–National and Tate, touting good taste, in clipframes. A green-and-gold carpet, floral curtains, and in pride of place, above the fire, a portrait of Jesus Christ–the prophet son of carpenter Joseph. There he was in all his bearded glory, with his sacred heart, his bleeding palms, his crown of thorns, modern good looks and devout attendance. Everything was very neat. Everything very tidy. Everything in its place. And everything almost exactly as I had remembered it, as I had last seen it, seven years before. I’d been up on a reconciliation bid, which needless to say ended in tears. I arrived late, and it all went wrong from there. I can’t be bothered to relate the tired details of that miserable encounter now, and anyway it’s all irrelevant, all that is needed to say is that her last words to me then were: ‘You killed my child. It was your fault. You killed Emma.’
But we looked at each other now through much older and sadder eyes…
‘I was just about to serve my tea,’ she said, turning away and gesturing towards the kitchen. ‘Have you eaten?’
My stomach rumbled, imploringly, right on cue. ‘No,’ I replied.
‘It was only nothing but I can put some gravy on…’ She knew she hadn’t made sense but it didn’t matter.
‘Yes,’ I said–her eyes returning to mine–‘that’d be nice.’ And then we held a look and remembered…And then we looked away. There was something in that look that I didn’t understand at the time–but picturing it now, as I write this, I can see there was something in it, something that should have told me, something I should have remembered, but had forgotten…But I digress…My eyes were darting–away from Valerie and into a shadow in the corner of the room, and then to the ceiling, and then to a photograph on a shelf of Emma fresh out of the bath, sat on her mother’s knee, wrapped in a big thick towel. I didn’t linger on it–I couldn’t–I deliberately moved my eyes away from it quickly and onto another photograph of a woman I didn’t recognize, standing in a blue cagoule in front of a red minibus, smiling and holding some rope. I remember I didn’t understand the photograph, it had nothing to do with anything I knew or understood about Valerie, and it confused me. Who was this woman, I thought, and why was she holding a rope?
‘Who’s she?’ I asked, unfolding my arms and pointing.
‘Oh, that’s Pat,’ she said, nervously twisting the corners of her cardigan. ‘She’s a friend of mine, we go climbing.’
‘Climbing?’ I repeated, my eyebrows arching.
‘Yes, I joined a club.’ And then she splayed the fingers of her left hand, stretching them out, wide apart. It was a childish, anxious, edgy shadow move that she seemed to be quite unaware of making, but I noticed it.
Look at her, I thought, look at what’s become of her, careworn, and worn out. She was dressed in a long brown Marks & Sparks cardigan, a black pleated skirt and thick black tights, ridiculous slippers, her hair scraped back and tied, her face unadorned, drawn and emaciated. She looked like a nun, which made me smile. Valerie had always wanted to be a nun. It was another of our jokes. I’d’ve loved to have been a nun, she’d declare–but I wanted a family–so what could I do? And then she’d kick her heels and flounce away, beaming sil
ly girlish smiles…And you had a family too, didn’t you, Val? But your family failed you. Your daughter was butchered and your husband lied and left you…Your smiles are not so brazen now, are they?
I glanced at the carpenter’s son, and then back at Emma and then back at Valerie…And then I realized I no longer knew anything about Valerie. She had changed, as all things must, and as all things do…We were strangers now, our lives no longer each other’s. We existed in separation, as all humans must, and as all humans do. What we had shared was now nothing more than a few sorry chapters in an awful little story full of heartache, grief and dole. The arbitrary moments of recollection, the absurd arrangement of words and the random druthers of detail, were now all that remained between us…This is all very obvious, I know, but the sudden realization of it affected me. I folded my arms. And then folded my arms again. The silence broke.
‘Right, I’ll put an extra sausage on. Why don’t you sit down and make yourself at home?’ Her last few words seemed to stick in her throat as she turned and disappeared into the kitchen. Make myself at home? I thought, slipping out of Adrian’s mac, hanging it on the corner of the door and sitting down–my only home is Hell…I pondered for a moment, thinking of nothing, and then a sinister smile thinned my lips and a devil-may-care insouciance warmed.
