I had not been invited to Paul’s interment, which had been kept as a private family function. Presumably that had been equally disastrous because Stephane, the hated French girlfriend, had rung the office one evening and had been given the time and address of the funeral service by Dokie.
I thought about Paul’s death. If the police had any leads, they were certainly keeping them quiet. I hadn’t even been interviewed. According to Lottie certain substances had been found in the flat, cocaine she thought, and there was talk of Paul ‘angering his dealer’. This was patent bullshit. He was the last person on earth to get involved with drugs. It seemed more likely that Spanky had planted them to cover his tracks.
After the service, I offered to take Lottie home. She had not stopped crying since the start of the ceremony. I assumed, like everyone else who worked at Thanet, that she had been having an affair with her boss. It seemed to be common, if unspoken, knowledge. Even stupid Dokie knew about it. But as I awkwardly attempted to console her, she brushed my proffered Kleenex aside and sat upright, wiping away her tears with her own linen handkerchief.
‘I suppose you think I was sleeping with him, too,’ she said, carefully refolding the handkerchief and pocketing it.
‘It never crossed my mind,’ I replied unconvincingly.
‘I find that hard to believe. It had crossed everyone else’s. It was the impression he liked to give. He was old enough to be my grandfather, but men like you are still prepared to think I was sleeping with him. Charming.’
‘You didn’t discourage the rumour,’ I said defensively.
‘Christ, I felt sorry for him. His wife treated him dreadfully, changing her mind about the divorce every five minutes. She didn’t want Paul following his father into the furniture business. He finally did, and look what happened.’
She brushed her hair back from her face and stared at me. Her attitude had changed. Her shyness had faded in the light of recent events. ‘Max used to take me for a drink after work sometimes on a Friday evening, that’s all. He wanted people to think he was having an affair. Pathetic, really.’
‘Then why didn’t you deny it?’
‘What difference would that have made? Men just think what they want. Max was always decent to me. I’ve always been Good Old Lottie to everyone else, one of those amiable office people you look right through who vanishes from everyone’s thoughts at six o’clock.’
She was right about her transparency. We’d seen each other every day at work for over two years and I knew virtually nothing about her.
‘Poor old bugger, all that pressure to expand the store, then Paul dying. No wonder he broke down.’ She shuddered and pulled her coat around her. I stared shamefacedly at the ground. If I hadn’t invited Spanky to change things, none of this would ever have happened. It was obvious to me that the daemon had appeared to Max. The customer who witnessed his attack had seen him trying to fend the creature off.
‘What are we going to do now that Max and the store have both gone?’
I didn’t know, but I was soon to find out. As we reached the cemetery gates, Neville Syms sprinted up and tapped me on the shoulder, asking if he could have a word with me at his Bayswater office. His black mohair suit had an unseemly shine that gave him the appearance of a turf accountant rather than a mourner.
I put Lottie in a taxi and headed back into town. I arrived to find that Syms had somehow contrived to be there before me. He was pacing around the bare, echoing showroom clenching and unclenching his hands, and hardly acknowledged my arrival. I stepped across bundles of timber and thick black coils of wiring, looking for somewhere to sit.
‘I don’t wish to sound callous,’ he began, instantly sounding so, ‘but I have to think of the financial consequences of Max’s death.’
‘Have you spoken to the police?’
‘They think the fire started in the junction box that was being installed on the ground floor of the shop. Max was probably overcome with fumes. It’s a small mercy, but at least he wouldn’t have felt anything. There is a problem, however. I haven’t been able to contact the insurers yet—’
I should hope not, I thought. It was Sunday. Max had only been dead a day.
‘—but I imagine they won’t want to pay compensation. If they can prove that Max’s mental state was affected by his son’s death, they’ll try to suggest that he wilfully set fire to the store in order to commit suicide. I believe there was a witness who says Max was ranting and raving just before the fire broke out. That will go badly against us.’
It was easy to see Spanky’s hand in this so-called accident, but I had no way of explaining or proving his involvement. All I could do was nod dumbly and ask what would happen to the company now.
‘There’s no point in coming to work,’ Syms sighed. ‘I’ll have to suspend everyone until we know if the insurers will pay up. I’ll tell you this, though. You can forget about Thanet’s expansion plans. Without Max there is no company.’
He kept staring at the half-laid carpet tiles, finding it too difficult to meet my eye. Something else was bothering him.
‘What?’ I asked finally, breaking the uncomfortable silence. ‘Say what’s on your mind.’
‘If you had been there when you were supposed to—this terrible thing might never have happened,’ he muttered angrily. ‘You see, I don’t know you, Martyn. I’d never set eyes on you before we met that day in the restaurant.’
‘But you recommended me—’
‘I honestly can’t imagine what made me do so. I wish to God I hadn’t.’
So that was it. Spanky had rescinded the memory he had implanted in Syms’s mind. I was out in the cold. Syms told me he would need to review my terms of employment, and that I would no doubt be paid to the terms of my contract. I walked from his office to join the ranks of the unemployed.
As if the day couldn’t get any worse, I returned to my wrecked apartment to find a letter cosigned by two of my neighbours (neither of whom had I ever laid eyes on), members of the tenants’ association, warning me that damage had been caused by water seeping through to the floor below me, and that I would be evicted if there was ever a repeat of last night’s disturbance. I was tempted to spend the evening hammering on the walls with a saucepan, then remembered that as the extortionate rent was paid up and I had just been deprived of an incoming salary, I could not afford to piss off the neighbours.
But I had to admit that staying there unnerved me. Night had already fallen as I wandered about the lounge, sweeping the broken glass and china into piles. There was only one working bulb left in the entire flat, and I had no spares. I dug out some candles from beneath the sink and set them in saucers, which only made the place creepier. Perhaps it was Spanky’s intention to make me doubt my own sanity. In that case, he wasn’t doing a bad job.
The situation was absurd, intolerable, and insoluble. I decided to call Sarah again from the only functioning telephone that still remained in the apartment. She answered, but slammed down the receiver as soon as she recognized my voice.
I managed to salvage an unbroken, sealed bottle of Stolichnaya from the mess of splintered wood and glass that had once been a very expensive cocktail cabinet, and poured a generous measure into a toothmug. In the last few days I had started talking to myself, muttering under my breath like a lunatic. I stood at the cracked window and looked down into the street, where families walked and cars hooted and life carried on at its usual pace, and suddenly I needed to get out, to be away from the poisoned atmosphere of the room. I left and caught a bus down to the river, where I could sit and think.
I reached Waterloo Bridge and descended the stone steps to the promenade. Ahead, the benches passed into darkness and reappeared, as the rising wind threaded through the suspirant branches of the trees, flicking their foliage out of the lamplight. There was not a soul to be seen in either direction. Although it was perfectly safe to do so, hardly anyone walked here at night. I was about to seat myself when the hairs on my neck began to pri
ckle, and I felt a presence, malign, destructive, somewhere ahead of me on the breeze-pocked river.
I realized with a shock that my growing fear of Spanky had followed me from the apartment, and was now infecting the world outside. I had been here hundreds of times, and had always found it a welcoming place. But now a poisonous pall hung over the scene before me.
A thick, sudoriferous smell rose in the river air, but I couldn’t tell if it was being produced by the stale waters below, or if Spanky was tampering with my senses. How much of what I saw and heard was real, and how much my imagination? I could not stay beside the bench, and walked on, my sense of unease escalating with every sough of the wind.
I was filled with an overwhelming sensation of death; the dead were here and all around me, rising from the tide in stinking clumps, crawling from the trees and bushes, waiting ahead in tenebrous alleys. I could smell them. Feel them. I broke into a run, no longer able to screen out my skin-crawling panic. I had been a fool to come here. What I needed was light and people; the comfort of a crowded room.
What I found, when I reached the end of the bridge, was an Indian restaurant with steamed-over windows, where the welcoming pungence of curry blotted the stench of the grave from my nostrils.
The place was crowded, but they found me a table for one. I have no proper recollection of what I ordered. Prawns, lamb, familiar spicy dishes. The main thing was that I felt safe. Beside me sat a brace of businessmen, drinking pints and braying at their own jokes. In normal circumstances I would have loathed their enforced company, but tonight I gratefully welcomed them because they made everything ordinary again. Hot bread arrived, and spiced chicken of some kind, on a bed of scented basmati rice. A tipsy girl squeezed on to the table behind me, knocked over her wineglass and started laughing. I found myself smiling in her direction, pleasured by the sheer banality of it all.
‘So this is what you’ve sunk to.’
He was standing on the other side of the table, leaning on it with the tips of his fingers, watching the noisy diners in disapproval. He was wearing a pale blue Paul Smith suit, but the lapels and cuffs had been singed away. The outfit he had worn to torment Max and burn him alive. A Spanky joke. I ignored him and stared down into my plate, praying that he would be gone when I raised my eyes.
‘It didn’t take you long to return to your old suburban habits, did it? It was obviously a waste of time trying to teach you anything. Have you seen the state of the kitchens here?’
‘Just leave me—’ I realized I was speaking aloud.
Just leave me alone, all right?
Spanky picked up a fork and examined its tines against the light, scraping away a speck of food with his fingernail. ‘I may have to if you keep eating at places like this. You should see what’s going on in everyone’s stomachs right now. You don’t look so good, you know.’
Is it any fucking wonder, after what you’ve been doing to me? What do you want?
‘You know very well what I want, Martyn.’
You can’t have my body. It’s against my religion.
‘You can restructure your personal belief system any way you want to, my dear chap. The fact remains that you have a debt to pay, and it must be paid within the next three days.’
I threw down my fork and shoved my plate back, the food stifling and sour in my mouth.
Why don’t you just fucking kill me and get it over with? Do it here, now.
‘You must believe me, Martyn, when I say that the last thing in the world I want is to kill you. But the matter is out of my hands now. Submission within three days, or there’ll be a public massacre of the most appalling proportions, for which you will solely be blamed in the brief period of awesome guilt you’ll suffer prior to your own spectacular death.’ He dipped a finger into one of the sauces on the businessmen’s table, tasted it and spat the offending liquid on to the floor.
‘Witnessing your newly restored passion for downmarket food, perhaps I’ll make you walk into McDonald’s with a machine gun. During one of their children’s parties.’
He glanced at his watch. ‘I must leave. I have other matters to attend to. How’s your sanity holding up, by the way? Getting paranoid? Experiencing any difficulties with your sense of reality? It’s an overrated concept, reality. I think dreamers have far more rewarding lives than pragmatists. Especially these days. The nineteen nineties bear no comparison with the era of William Beaumont’s birth. The poor were much poorer then, of course, and yet they were spiritually richer somehow. Today even the lowliest paupers are well-shod and ill-mannered. What a horrible, bankrupt little era this is. The only advantage is that one can be as tasteless as one likes without anyone noticing. Well, I must be off. Whatever you do, Martyn, keep a tight grip on your mind.’
In a rare moment of restraint, Spanky walked across the restaurant and departed through the front door. Looking down at the tiled floor, I saw that he had left footprints of congealing blood.
Spanky’s appearance that night was a departure from his usual form, but preferable to an unannounced arrival in the flat. Perhaps he’d decided to change his tactics.
I should have found these daemonic conversations about my fate odd, but nothing seemed strange anymore. Paul and Max were dead. My life, and the lives of my family and friends, were changed irrevocably. And I, most frustratingly of all, could only continue to do nothing, accepting each venomous day as it arrived, until Spanky brought our war to an end.
My meal was cold, the sauce solidifying.
I raised my head, still lost in thought, when the man on the next table began to cough. His excessive bulk stretched his white shirt around the buttons. His grey suit jacket was hung on the back of his chair. There was a mobile phone in the top pocket. I recall these details clearly. He coughed again, and his friends slapped him on the back. One of the women they were with offered him a glass of water.
Suddenly he knocked the tumbler aside and coughed again. A piece of chewed meat flew from his mouth, and I remember thinking that that should have been the end of it. But his next cough brought a spray of blood, and a piece of pink tubing which bounced wetly on to the paper tablecloth. His colleague started hacking, too. Everyone else in the restaurant had turned in their seats, and the conversations were changing, rising in inflection.
A chair scraped back. One of the women tried to stand and was violently, copiously sick down her dress and across the table. The sour reek of bile hit my nostrils as the first businessman collapsed into the serving trays before him, his hands smeared with lime and mango jelly as he retched blood and organic matter over himself.
Within moments, others were coughing and heaving up their undigested meals, streaming blood and gastric juices on to their clothes. Beside me, a yellow geyser of rice and half-chewed meat erupted from the other businessman’s mouth. He tried to stem the deluge with his hands, stumbling upright as the torrent turned scarlet with blood.
Horrified, I shoved away from the flooding table and staggered to my feet with a cry. Others shouted in alarm. I fought my way across the heaving, vomiting mass, passing a woman with purple entrails hanging from her gaping mouth, slipping in the food and sputum that was forming a bloody sauce on the floor. I crashed into the main door, yanked it open and looked back again.
And saw a restaurant full of unharmed, interrupted diners staring at me.
Everyone was fine.
No one had been sick.
But I had knocked over my chair and pulled the tablecloth from my table, sending the dishes to the floor.
‘Where you think you’re goin’, mate, what the fuck you doin’, tryin’ not to pay?’ called the startled waiter. But I had fought my way free of the ghastly vision, and was now running down the darkened streets as if pursued by all the daemons of hell.
Chapter 29
Culpability
Lottie lived in King’s Cross, on the top floor of a crumbling terraced Edwardian house with a box of sooty geraniums beneath each window. She peered out above one of the
m half-asleep, then spotted me in the street below. It was late on Sunday evening, or early Monday morning. I couldn’t tell the exact time; Spanky had taken my watch.
She raised her finger to her lips. I stepped back and indicated the front door. She hesitated, puzzled, then vanished. Minutes later she appeared in the hall wearing a hastily donned black tracksuit, and allowed me to enter.
‘Do you know what time it is?’ she whispered. ‘My flatmate’s a nurse at UCH. She goes on duty in a couple of hours.’
‘I’m sorry, Lottie,’ I said, following her toward the kitchen. ‘I had to talk to someone.’
The kitchen was a chaotic arrangement of dirty plates and empty tins of catfood. She searched around and found a pack of Marlboros on an ancient gas stove, lit up and exhaled the smoke gratefully.
‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
‘There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me. What’s so important that you have to turn up at half past one in the morning? You never showed much interest while we were sharing an office together.’
I didn’t know where to begin, or how to explain what was happening to my sanity. If I only told her part of the story, I would have to lie about the rest, and that would defeat the object of confiding in her at all. Yet there was something about her I instinctively trusted, a clearheadedness that might be able to return some order to my thinking. She made mugs of instant coffee and we sat on kitchen stools around a Formica-topped table, sipping it in silence.
‘I can’t help you if you don’t tell me about it,’ she prompted, reknotting the cord of her tracksuit bottoms.
I hesitated. Part of me was scared that if I told her what I knew, I’d be placing another innocent person at risk. But we weren’t close friends, and Spanky would have no cause to threaten her. I had to take the chance.
‘You won’t believe me.’
Spanky Page 21
