The planet turns
From day to night
And a marvelous planet it is!
And sometimes the Devil
Looks over our shoulder
But who is it looks over his?
Andrew has to laugh then, because he can just see the old man there, being silly the way he liked to be sometimes, and it was beautiful, because his dad looked fine, like he was when Andrew was a little boy, a happy man with dark hair and blue eyes, not sick, not dead. And Andrew laughed and laughed because his dad could be so funny back then, when he was still well, before he had to go away.
UNDOING
I COULDN'T STOP KICKING HIM. I SUPPOSE I WANTED HIM TO DIE, SO THE stupid game couldn't go on anymore, or maybe I was angry with him for being so pathetic. He just lay there, screaming and making weird animal sounds, till I thought I was going to go mad, and I knew Jimmy and his crew would never let him go now. Tone was dancing around with some kind of spike in his hand, talking about sticking the poor bastard's eyes and Rivers was lying on the floor, wailing. So I couldn't take it anymore. I just laid into him. It was all red, like you hear people say. I saw red. That was how it was. I saw red and I couldn't see anything else, though I knew I was moving and kicking him, using the wall to balance myself and keep him in focus without really noticing it, just using the walls the way a boxer uses the ropes in a corner, when he's got the guy hemmed in and doesn't want him to escape. I could feel myself breathing, gasping for air like a freestyle swimmer. I was really aware of that, which was odd to me, because I'd been in fights and things at school and I didn't remember anything about breathing. This was different, though. I don't know how long it lasted, but when I stopped kicking him I felt sick to my stomach and totally exhausted. I didn't really register much for a minute, I just reeled away from him, feeling dizzy, but I think he was still moving when I stopped. Then I came out of the redness and saw the others, all of them standing together in the middle of the room, watching me. They looked shocked—or maybe not shocked, but bemused, a bit bewildered, as if they thought it was me who had gone too far, and not them. There was blood all over the place. There was blood on me, too, even on my hands and face, and I felt them watching me like they were watching an animal that had just got loose from its pen. I think they were scared, too. All but Jimmy. Jimmy wasn't scared, he was just puzzled.
I knew what he was trying to work out, but I didn't care about that now. I didn't care about his gang; I'd never asked to belong to it anyway. I'd wanted to find out about Liam and the other boys and that was all. Now it was finished. I looked back at Rivers and he wasn't moving at all. Maybe he hadn't been moving before, maybe I'd just imagined it.
Finally, Tone breaks the silence. “You fucking killed him,” he says, though not really to me. He looks at Jimmy. “He's fucking killed him, Jimmy.”
Jimmy shakes his head. “Nah,” he says. “He's not killed him.” He walks over to where Rivers is lying motionless in the corner. “You're not dead, are you, mate?” he says. He prods Rivers with his foot. The guy doesn't move. Jimmy shakes his head and ponders the scene for a minute. “You know what?” he says, turning back to Tone.
“What, Jimmy?”
“I think he's fucking killed him,” Jimmy says, then he bursts out laughing. Only it isn't funny ha-ha laughing, it's funny peculiar. Like he's just seen some sketch on TV that he isn't sure is funny or weird, or maybe just stupid. He looks at me. “Look what you've gone and done, Leonard,” he says.
Eddie laughs then, just one daft laugh, more nerves than anything else. “Bugger me,” she says. “I just worked out who he looks like.”
Jimmy turns to her. “What do you mean, you just figured out who he looks like?” he says. “He doesn't look like anything now, does he?”
“Hamburger,” Tone says.
“What?”
“He looks like hamburger,” Tone says. “That's what he looks like.”
Jimmy looks scandalized. “Well,” he says, “that's not very nice, is it?”
“What do you mean, that's not very nice?” Tone says. “It wasn't me what done it.”
“No,” Jimmy said, giving me a quick, sideways look. “It was Leonard. Still, you shouldn't speak ill of the dead.”
Eddie laughs again. “No,” she says, “I don't mean what he looks like now. I mean, who he used to look like.”
This makes Jimmy and Tone laugh. I don't know what Mickey is thinking. He's just standing there, looking at Rivers. He looks a bit disappointed, though it might be dismay. Maybe he thinks he's going to get into trouble. “All right,” Jimmy says. “Who did he used to look like, before he looked like hamburger?”
Eddie turns and goes over to the far corner. She points at a picture on the wall, above the little desk. “Him,” she says. “Psycho.”
Slowly, with genuine curiosity, Jimmy and Tone move over too, leaving Mickey still staring at the body. They stand with Eddie, examining a tatty magazine photograph that's been glued to the wall among all the stamps and shit. “Oh yeah,” Tone says.
Eddie is pleased. She does a tiny dance, like she wants to go wee-wee, then she lets out a microscopic high squeal. “I told you he looked like somebody,” she says. “It's the Psycho guy. What's his name?”
“Anthony Hopkins,” Tone says.
Eddie squeals again, a little higher up the scale. “That's him,” she says.
“That's not Anthony Hopkins,” Jimmy says. “He's the Silence of the Lambs bloke.”
“Who is it, then?” Eddie says. She looks disappointed. I think for a minute she is going to cry. But then, I think we are all on the verge of tears, or something, by now.
“Anthony Hopkins is the Welsh bloke,” Jimmy says. “This guy isn't Welsh.” He turns to me. “Tell them, Leonard.”
I think about just going then, but I feel too sad to go. I want to cry. I hadn't meant to hurt the bloke. I just wanted it to be finished. I hope he understood that. “It's Anthony Perkins,” I say. “He was the guy in Psycho. Anthony Perkins.”
“That's right,” Jimmy says. “Anthony Perkins.” He turns to Eddie, who still looks like she needs cheering up. “You're right, though,” he says. “This guy looks just like him.”
Eddie grins.
“Looked, you mean,” Tone says.
“Yeah.” Jimmy stares at Tone for a minute, with the air of having just realized something then he turns and looks at Rivers. “Poor bastard,” he says.
Tone nods. “Poor bastard,” he says.
Jimmy walks back to the far corner and stands over the motionless body. “This bloke didn't deserve this,” he says. He bows his head as if in prayer. Mickey joins him. Eddie and Tone hesitate a moment, wondering if this is a spoof or something, then they bow their heads—at which Jimmy immediately looks up. “You know what,” he says. “I think Leonard was right. I don't think this is our bloke. Was.” He looks at me. “You killed the wrong bloke, Leonard,” he says; then, without waiting to see what I will say in reply, he looks back to Rivers.
The others stand watching, waiting to see what he will do next. They are all tired and sad now and they look lost, as if in shock. Or maybe remorse has set in. Jimmy stands silent a moment longer, head bowed; then he turns to the others with a strange new light in his face. “We'll have to raise him up,” he says.
“What?” It's me speaking, it's my own shocked, maybe disgusted voice that I hear, though I'd had no intention of saying anything.
Jimmy looks at me; his eyes are shining. “Like Jesus,” he says. “I mean, you're a Bible reader, Leonard. Everybody knows that.”
“What are you talking about?” I say.
“We'll raise him up,” Jimmy says. “Shouldn't be too hard. If we get it right, he'll be good as new in three days' time.”
Eddie jumps up and down and makes her odd high squealing sound. “What do we do?” she says. “What do we have to do?”
Tone looks a bit lost. “Yeah, Jimmy,” he says, his voice low and worried. “What do we do?” I think he
's afraid it might work and that Rivers will rise up in three days and go straight to the police about what we've done.
Jimmy is really getting into this now. I'm not sure what he thinks he is doing, whether he really believes what he is saying, or whether it's all just a windup. Maybe he thinks he needs to give the rest of the gang something to take away with them. Maybe he needs something he can take away for himself. “All you got to do is lay him out right,” he says. “So he looks like a cross.” He studies the body. “Like Jesus.”
They are all involved now, Jimmy and Tone, Eddie, even Mickey has come out of his stupor and is getting into it. I can't, though. I can't go through the motions, and I can't stay in that room any longer, with the faces and stamps and little birds looking down at me from the walls, as if in accusation, and the smell of blood, dark and sickening now. I don't think they'll miss me, anyhow. This is their thing, not mine. So I quietly make my way to the door, and start to leave. Jimmy notices, but he doesn't try to stop me. None of the others see me go. When I leave them, they are laying out Rivers's body, Eddie with one arm, Tone with the other, trying to get them into the right position, while Jimmy stands over them all, murmuring the words he's heard in a film, or maybe read in a book. “I am the resurrection and the life,” he says. I slip through the door silently and his voice rises slightly, so his words follow me out and down the stairs. “I am the resurrection and the life. I am the resurrection and the life.” It's obvious that he doesn't know any more of the words, so he's just saying them louder and putting more stress on what he thinks are the most important ones. “I am the Resurrection and the Life. I am the RESURRECTION and the LIFE.”
His voice follows me out into the windy night, into the darkness, till I want to run to get away from it.
I don't really know how much of that resurrection stuff was real. Jimmy certainly made it sound real at the end there, when I was leaving, but that was done mostly for my benefit, I think. I didn't imagine for one moment that I had heard the last of it with Jimmy, but I wasn't much bothered about that. I was hoping nobody would see me, as I left the house, and then, when I got home and started taking off my bloody clothes, I was hoping nobody would see Jimmy's crew either, because if they got caught, I got caught, and they would say it was all me, everything, the cuts, the stab wounds, the kicking, the crushed bones, whatever else we had done to the poor bastard. I didn't want to get caught. I took my clothes off just inside the back door so I wouldn't trail evidence all through the house, then I put them in a black plastic bag and left it under the sink. I knew right away what I was going to do with it, but that would have to wait for later. Then I ran upstairs and straight into the bathroom. The shower was pretty cold, but I didn't care about that. I soaped myself well and washed three times, scrubbing hard, rinsing long; then I dried myself off, took the scrubbing brush and the towel, wadded it all up, and carried it downstairs. I put the washing things into a separate plastic bag, and put that bag next to the other one, under the sink. Then I went straight back upstairs, got dressed, and went to check on Dad. It was late, not that far off dawn, but he was still awake. He hardly ever slept at night. I think, maybe, it gave him some small, lingering pleasure, to lie awake in the early morning and listen to the birds. I don't know, though. You don't know what people like unless they tell you. All I could know was what I liked and maybe if I liked it, he might like it too. Some people like model trains. Some people like crazy golf. People are a mystery, when it comes down to it. I mean, how can anybody like crazy golf?
I didn't think Dad saw me, but if he did, it didn't matter. He wasn't going to say anything to anybody and, anyway, I was often up and about at night, in my clothes, doing stuff, or just sitting in the kitchen, watching it turn from dark to light, listening to the birds, maybe reading a book. That's what I like; I like books. When it comes down to it, maybe all you can really trust about a person is what they like. If you meet a crazy-golf fanatic, then you've got one kind of person. If you meet somebody who likes books, then you've probably got another kind of person. I can't imagine there would be much overlap between the two, but you never know. Maybe Marcel Proust used to sneak off from his cork-lined room and go for a few rounds of crazy golf in the Tuileries, or wherever they have crazy golf in Paris. When you think about it, that's quite a nice image: Marcel Proust in his frock coat and top hat, out on the crazy-golf course, early in the morning, when nobody else is about, indulging his secret vice. Maybe he'd play a few rounds with Gustave Flaubert, or André Gide. I don't know who was alive at the same time and I don't know if there is any mention of crazy golf in À la recherche du temps perdu. There might be, but I can't imagine it somehow. Still, I wouldn't know, because I haven't read the book all the way through yet. It's not that long since I got it out of the library, though it's probably overdue already. I've never really seen the logic of that: you lend somebody a copy of Marcel Proust's magnum opus, or Moby-Dick, or one of those big, industrious books by George Eliot, then you tell them they only have three weeks to read it. Really, they should have a sliding scale, so if you got Proust out, you'd get three months, or better still, three years. That would have made so much more sense.
I decided to take the black bags out on my bike to the landfill before it got too light. I wanted them gone as soon as possible and I couldn't sleep till that job was done. Dad was fine, he would just lie in bed listening to the world waking up for the next hour or two and, with the bike, it wouldn't take long to go to the landfill and dump the stuff. Then I could rest. I was supposed to see Elspeth later on that day, but I didn't think I would go. I had the black bags to do, and I needed to get some sleep after that. Besides, I didn't really want to see her. I thought, if I spent any time with her, she would figure out something was wrong and get it out of me. I was tired and I didn't feel like doing sex, or any of that stuff. I just wanted to stay in my room and sleep. After that, I could fix some food for Dad and me, and just stay around the house and read. I didn't want to be out in the world, where people could see me. I knew all about that Crime and Punishment stuff. It wasn't that I was feeling very guilty, or anything like that—I hadn't exactly killed some saintly old lady for no good reason, like the guy in the book, and I always felt the other one, the moneylender, pretty much deserved what she got. I wasn't the bad guy in any of this, or not as much as some people, though I had to admit, that morning, that I'd made a mistake going along with Jimmy and his crew. Still, even if I wasn't altogether to blame, I had done something bad, and you can't read Dostoyevsky without knowing how that worked. All I'd have to do is start walking down the high street and the guilt would be pouring out of me for all to see. Before I knew it, I'd be weeping like a baby and confessing to the Lindbergh kidnapping. Better to stay home, keep my head down, and figure out what to do next. Do some reading, maybe. Maybe I could make some progress with Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
After a day or two of this, though, I couldn't stand being in the house anymore, plus we'd run out of all the basics so it was time to get out there and shop. I do like shopping. I always want to buy expensive or decadent shit, like asparagus in tins, or those tiny pots of crème brûlée or Sicilian Lemon Cheesecake, but I mostly manage to confine my choices to sensible stuff, like potatoes, rice, sausages, frozen peas, all the reliable, filling basics that we've always lived on. Give me two days of dressed crab out of a tin and Asti Spumante and I'd be a happy camper, but I'd probably be shitting bullets, or throwing up all over the garden. People like us evolved to eat steak pie, mash, sausages, chips, roast chicken, peas, tinned veg. Feed us on anything else and we are magically transformed into big, sickly babies, all burping and farting and diarrhea. So I stick to what I know. Maybe what I like. I know Dad couldn't handle anything else, though it's not as if he eats that much anyway. He likes Angel Delight. He likes chips. As he slides down the hill toward death, he's getting a second childhood in before it's too late. Good for him. He's one of the few people I can make happy, and it doesn't take any more than whisking some pastel
-colored powder up with some milk.
I'm thinking about Dad as I make my way home, dragging my bags of shopping along with me, my mind wandering. It's that old don't-want-him-to-die versus merciful-release argument, and there's still plenty of mileage in that one, so I'm a bit distracted when Jimmy and his crew turn up. So distracted, in fact, that I don't even see them till Jimmy pops up in my path, in my face, and starts on his shtick.
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