A Personal History of Thirst

by John Burdett

  She fell into step with us.

  “Did you say that Thirst was studying?” I asked.

  “James always calls Oliver ‘Thirst,’ ” Daisy said.

  “Yes. Did you notice at the vicarage that his vocabulary had improved a bit? He’s a dark horse. He never told us until afterward that he sat for six O levels in Wormwood Scrubs. He passed them all with first grades in math and sociology. Now he’s swotting for A levels and taking it terribly seriously. Perhaps too seriously. He lives like a monk with his books in a small room in Camden Town. I think I’m the only person he sees. We go for walks every Sunday at exactly the same time. He’s become very controlled.”

  “O levels and A levels?” Daisy said. “What guts! He must feel like a twenty-odd-year-old high school kid. Does he want to use the exams to get into a university?”

  “He wouldn’t admit it, but I think so.”

  “Does he see Hogg?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid they fell out.” She hesitated. “Well, I’m sure you’re both streetwise enough to understand. James Hogg grew rather too fond of Oliver, and Oliver reckoned he had enough problems. I’m afraid James Hogg came out of it rather badly and suffered some kind of breakdown. Frankly, he’s the type who’s always having a crisis of faith. It may not be a bad thing; even vicars need to grow up sooner or later.”

  “Thirst bit him,” I said, “as soon as his parole was up.”

  Eleanor glanced sharply at me. “Well, yes, it did happen quite soon after his parole ended. Tom made the same observation. But he’s terribly sincere, you know, about getting on.”

  “And Hogg?” I said.

  Eleanor shuddered. “There was a scene. I wasn’t there, but I’ve pieced it together. Not very pleasant. You must have noticed how strong James Hogg is? He got drunk one night—very drunk, according to Oliver. When Oliver rejected him, he became violent. I believe Oliver when he says he tried to avoid a fight.”

  “But they did fight?” Daisy said.

  Eleanor hesitated. “I suppose there’s a skill even in brawling, isn’t there? No one could accuse Oliver of beating someone weaker than him, in this case.” Eleanor bit her lip, then grinned. “They smashed up the whole vicarage between them. Practically every room.” She looked at me and giggled. “Hogg did most of the smashing, interestingly enough. Eventually Oliver finished him off, but it was touch and go. Oliver admits as much.”

  “Any serious damage?” I said.

  “Apart from the vicarage, you mean? Hogg’s nose and one arm were broken.”

  “Wow,” Daisy said.

  We walked on.

  “They enjoyed it, didn’t they?” I said.

  Eleanor gave another side glance. “As a matter of fact, they both came away with positive things to say about that night.” She laughed. “Hogg said it was deeply cathartic and a kind of long-overdue initiation into manhood for him.”

  “And Oliver?”

  “That it was one of the best knuckles he’s ever had. But he won’t see Hogg again. Best to leave on a high note, he says.”

  “Is he very lonely?” Daisy said.

  “I think so. He has a massive complex about not knowing how to behave—not knowing the rules. He clams up totally when Tom’s around. Perhaps he would be different with you two; you’re more his age. He really needs a nucleus of new friends. He has no friends at all from the old days, except for someone called Chaz, who he did time with. He needs a family. Would you like to come in for tea?”

  It was a house we had always admired when passing it, a very Hampstead house, eccentric and full of character, with a stained-glass conservatory at the front full of cacti and orchids.

  “Hey, is this really yours?” Daisy said.

  “Yes. Do you like it?”

  “Like it! Do you know, we always stop just here when we take this walk and fantasize about owing it.”

  Eleanor beamed. “We waited for years for it to come on the market. Tom had our name down with every estate agent in Hampstead and even contacted the owners.”

  “It must have cost a million.”

  “We don’t talk about that. Let me show you around; I’ve just finished renovating.”

  The walls of the hall were chockablock with eighteenth-century prints—mostly Hogarth. In rooms off the hall there was antique furniture, including at least a couple of Chippendales, a harpsichord in the front room that looked priceless even to me, an ultramodern stereo system, a television set discreetly housed in a polished wood cabinet, some Persian rugs. It was the English Dream more fully realized than I had ever seen it: discreet, old-fashioned, understated, and prohibitively expensive. In the kitchen we sat around a genuine old oak farm table that had a colorful Florentine bowl with fruit in the center.

  Eleanor poured the tea. “That was a very interesting conversation we almost had, James, that evening chez Hogg.”

  “Before we conspired to steal your car?”

  “Yes. We started to talk about criminals—their rehabilitation. I was disappointed because you didn’t seem very interested.”

  “He’s not,” Daisy said. “He doesn’t believe in it.”

  “Is that so?”

  “For him life is like a Greek tragedy—you know, Oedipus and all that. The remorseless implacable Machine of Fate against which all human effort is futile.”

  “So there’s no hope for Oliver?”

  “I work with four different groups,” I said. “The criminals, the people who catch them, the people who judge them, and the people who try to change them. Of the four, the latter are the most pathetic.”

  “And the most heroic?”

  “If you like. And I should have said that it’s usually the do-gooders who end up hating the villains. The police don’t hate them, neither do the lawyers. But show me a probation officer or social worker who’s been at it for more than ten years, and I’ll show you a person who hates the people he deals with.”

  “Why’s that, do you think?”

  “Why did Hogg have a breakdown?”

  “He loved Oliver and tried to change him.”

  “Exactly. Anyone who tries to change people is in love with failure.” An image flashed up in my mind—Thirst’s confident hand on the gearstick that night, the life in his eye: “What was that?” “Hare.” “Dead one.” “Beg.”

  “Nonsense!” Daisy said.

  “No,” Eleanor said, “I agree. I agree totally. But what about someone who wants to change? In his own proud way he is asking for help—clumsily, grotesquely even, but still asking.”

  “If you must give it, give it at arm’s length. But you know that, Eleanor.”

  She gave me her shrewd, matriarchal glance. “It’s an amazing coincidence, meeting you both today, because I’d half made up my mind to phone you.”

  “To see if we would help Oliver?” Daisy asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Of course we’ll help if we can. Won’t we?”

  I refused to reply.

  “He’s a queer fish,” Eleanor said, “not totally unknown but very unusual—the criminal who really does have a brilliant mind. I’d quite forgotten what a powerful intellect is in the young. Neither Michael, who’s dead now, nor my daughter, Lizzie, are—were—especially gifted; just average. A very bright young person who’s escaped higher education is a frightening creature. His mind works at lightning speed, and because he’s never been trained, he picks up on things that no one else notices. He told me I’d never been in love with Tom. Not a stunning observation, you might think—but for a crook, a convict with no social programming at all that I can see? Isn’t that a kind of evidence of a very hungry mind?”

  “What a strange thing for him to say,” Daisy said.

  “He says many strange things. It’s weird. It’s almost like being with an animal with a human intelligence—as if he works by smell. And his eyes are everywhere. When he forgets his machismo, he can be quite charming, and at first I wanted him to cultivate that. But now I don’t know. The hungry
animal is fascinating, too.”

  Daisy listened attentively.

  “Perhaps you’re frightened of him, James?” Eleanor said.

  “Yes,” Daisy said.

  “What do you find to fear in him?”

  “Not his intellect, though it’s impressive, I agree,” I said. “What I find frightening is the lies he’s been told, and the rage he will surely feel when he discovers the deception.”

  “Lies?”

  “Yes. He’s very shrewd, but he wants to believe in the opportunities people are telling him about. The message he’s getting from everyone he talks to is that he must educate himself if he wants to get on. I told him the same thing myself. The subliminal message is that through education he will wipe out his past, live on an equal footing with the rest of us. In a house like this, perhaps.”

  “Why not?” Eleanor and Daisy both asked.

  “It’s happened, after all,” Eleanor said. “Some of the biggest tycoons are street urchins made good.”

  “Yes, but you’ve already said Thirst is a queer fish. He isn’t a managing director manqué, a wise guy who will one day tumble to the fact that he’s better off being dishonest legally.”

  “So what is he?”

  “Something not at all unusual in the criminal class. He’s a romantic. Have you picked up the subliminal message he’s really getting? That if he’s a good boy and passes his exams, he’ll have a life that’s as satisfying and exciting as pinching a car and joyriding late at night with the lights off. That, in one form or another, is exactly what an awful lot of people, not all of them young, really expect to get out of life these days. Offering Thirst the middle-class option is like offering sherry to a heroin addict. The addict’s problem is his joy—it’s too intense. But a comparable joy is the only true incentive. Thirst is convincing himself that it’s there somewhere down the line. And when he finds out it’s not, he’ll explode. That’s what I’m frightened of.”

  “It’s fascinating to me to hear you talk, James,” Eleanor said. “Very intelligent and very bleak. One could almost conclude that the underlying drive of our society is to be like Oliver.”

  “But that’s exactly what I think,” I said.

  “So we just leave that brilliant mind to rot?” Eleanor said. “We’re discussing a real human being after all.”

  The telephone rang. Eleanor answered it.

  “But, darling, we discussed this and we decided that you wouldn’t go to the Riviera with that crowd….They are not nice people, Lizzie; we talked about it and you agreed with me that they were decadent….Lizzie, how can you do this to me after all that’s happened….How could I stand to just sit here while you’re up to God knows what in Saint-Tropez with those drug addicts?”

  “My daughter,” she explained after she’d replaced the receiver. “Seventeen is a difficult age for a girl.”

  “Have you introduced her to Oliver?” I asked. Eleanor blushed.

  As we were leaving, Daisy said, “Of course I’ll help Oliver with his A levels. James will help, too. We’ll be his friends.”

  21

  I was developing an Old Bailey practice, the highest ambition of a criminal lawyer. The Bailey, as its users call it, is a temple of crime, its stones held together by a mortar of murder, rape, and armed robbery. Every morning the most extreme of criminal defendants are delivered—live meat in ugly prison vans—and taken in shackles to the cells below. The place intoxicated me, filled me drum-hard with confidence. Part of the glamour was knowing what was behind the banner headlines in the evening papers, which always covered the most sensational trials at the Bailey. I was grateful to the Bailey for providing a sure counterpoint to the insecurity I was feeling about Daisy.

  During the trial of a gang of armed robbers (a bank plundered, a policeman shot in the chest, a security guard coshed, nearly a million pounds stolen), I left the building one afternoon with my red bag over my shoulder. Beaufort had given it to me after Thirst’s appeal, a tradition when a junior has pleased a silk.

  I was wearing a new suit with waistcoat. It was the first I’d had made. Perfect white cuffs with gold links protruded two inches past the dark-blue cloth of the suit. These days I was sporting more flamboyant ties, vivid red with large white spots, around a detachable cutaway collar of military stiffness. Daisy has talked me out of a fob watch with gold chain: “Name one person under sixty other than a barrister who’s wearing a fob watch in this day and age.”

  I skipped down the steps—ignoring Thirst, who was waiting at the bottom. He fell into step, also saying nothing. He wore running shoes and jeans, a sweater with sleeves pushed up to the elbow, showing the tattoos on his forearms.

  “I told you not to do this,” I said out of the corner of my mouth. “You’re almost as well known here as I am.”

  I walked quickly to Ludgate Circus, often stepping in the gutter to overtake pedestrians, then down Carpenter Street toward the Embankment. I was unable to shake him. He kept up effortlessly, seeming to enjoy the element of competition. Whenever I dodged around someone, he was there beside me again immediately afterward, as if attached to me by an invisible beam.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “We? I’m going home! What the hell do you want, Oliver?” I stepped around a newspaper vendor, pleased to see that the trial was in the headlines again: MASTERMIND STILL AT LARGE. I would buy the paper later. My name had appeared two days running. The defense counsel generally had been described as “expensive legal talent.”

  He dodged around a couple who had stopped to have an argument.

  “Someone to talk to,” he said. “Know how long it’s been? Two weeks; spoken to no one in that time.”

  “You must have spoken to Eleanor; that’s why you’re here.” I was slightly breathless. The exertion seemed to have no effect on him. I shifted the bag to the other shoulder.

  He sniffed. “She said it was all right to contact you.”

  “I suspect she simply said that Daisy would help with your A levels.” Had she simply said that? Or had she repeated Daisy’s offer of friendship on behalf of both of us? Eleanor could be indiscreet, witness one night at the vicarage.

  “Daisy.” He spoke the name as if it were of no consequence.

  When we reached the river I felt safer. At five in the afternoon, the city was teeming; anonymity was a hundred yards in any direction. Even so, I leaned forward so that my gut was braced against the Embankment wall and I faced the river. Thirst had to crane his neck to see my face. I put the bag in front of me on the wall. It was a beautiful afternoon; I could see every detail of the oppposite embankment. I was still excited by the trial and not really averse to company, even Thirst’s, although I felt obliged to be short with him.

  “I’ll go if you like,” he said.

  “You checked up on me, didn’t you?” I was still facing the river. “You found out I was at the Bailey today.”

  “You’re always at the Bailey these days. Doing yourself grand, James. Hear you’re in the Crook Street trial.”

  The tabloids had pounced with glee on the name of the street where the robbery had occurred.

  “What if I am?”

  “Want to know who did it?”

  “Of course not; what do I care? I’m not a detective; I’m representing a defendant.”

  “Not even curious? Biggest gossips in the world, barristers. You’re Paddy Burke’s brief, aren’t you? Rank amateur, couldn’t rob a sweet shop in Penzance. Did you know I was in the nick with Paddy one time? He was two cells down, running a coke scam, paying off the screws. Reckon that’s how he got involved with this outfit. Word is they needed to make a payment on a shipment if they didn’t want the Amsterdam triads on their backs—they’re basically smack and coke, see, not bank robbers, and this smack came from Thailand on the Amsterdam route—”

  “I don’t want to know. Anyway, I thought you were going straight.”

  “I am. Just wandered down the pub the other night; had to talk to so
mebody. Few blokes in there discussing it.”

  “Not in Camden Town they weren’t. You must have gone all the way to Camberwell.”

  He grinned. “Just doing a little research for my sociology paper.”

  A river bus went by on the way to Greenwich. The possibility that he had obtained information about the robbery in order to impress me made me feel faintly ill.

  “Have you any idea how dangerous this is for me?”

  “Don’t get excited. I’m straight, honest—clean as a virgin. Just happened to pick up some gossip, that’s all.”

  “I’d better go.”

  “Here: Two nuns in a jungle, and one of them screws a gorilla—”

  “Don’t.”

  He told it anyway. It was funnier than I’d expected; I decided to remember it to tell to Daisy. He seemed relieved that he’d made me smile.

  “Let’s do something.”

  “You mean like rob a bank, steal a car?”

  “No, that’s against the law, James. Let’s have a drink.”

  “I can’t, Oliver, you know that. Anyway, they’re shut.”

  “Not round here. I know one that’s not shut—over there.” He pointed across the river.

  A short drink was exactly what I needed to relax and shift gears. And I was secretly intrigued by his hint that he had heard something about the robbery. Everyone knew the defendants were guilty but the mastermind had not been caught. It was obvious that I was being paid out of the proceeds of the crime, as were all the other defense counsel. How else could Paddy Burke afford me without legal aid? It gave me a mild frisson to think about the chief gangster signing a check for my brief fee, or paying it to the solicitors in new hot notes. If I spent a few minutes with him, Thirst would tell me who this paymaster was. I was also attracted to the idea of slumming it for ten minutes in some illegal drinking den south of the river—a harmless escapade to tell Daisy about. Perhaps over a drink I could explain to Thirst in a more civilized way why we could not be friends. My reputation was not so fragile these days.

  “Look at it this way—where I’m taking you, if you do see anyone you know, they’ll want to keep quiet about it as well.”