The Dwarves of Death

by Jonathan Coe

  Madeline touched my arm and said, ‘William, can we go and talk? Let’s go into one of the bedrooms for a minute.’

  I looked past her, only half-listening. That key change from D major to F: that was really neat. I couldn’t have written something like that a year or two ago.

  ‘Look – I thought you knew what I was saying that night. When I said I wanted a change. And then I didn’t hear from you, so I thought… well, that you’d understood.’

  ‘But I sent you this song.’

  ‘Yes I know, but – you must have written it ages ago, didn’t you?’

  ‘No, I wrote it last week.’

  She followed me as I made for the door.

  ‘Does Piers know that I wrote it?’ I asked. ‘Has he listened to the words?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I don’t think so. He’s not very interested in music.’

  A riposte occurred to me at this point: something about them being suited to each other, in that case. But I didn’t say it. There’s a time and a place for everything, if you ask me.

  *

  Sometimes, all you can do is try and wipe things from your memory. As far as the rest of that night is concerned, I’ve done a pretty good job, and there’s nothing much to tell. One thing I do remember is the cold. I’ve never known cold like it. I suppose I could have gone inside somewhere, an all-night café or something, or a hotel, but I was too frightened, you see. Frightened of being seen. I went to a park. Several parks, in all probability, although they start to blur in my mind. I can remember going further into the centre of town, early in the morning it must have been, avoiding the queues for the night buses, ignoring the taxi touts and the beggars who kept coming up and asking me (me!) for money. I can remember heading down towards the river, sitting on some steps for a while. Steps that led into the water. I can’t find words to describe the cold. It was there – yes, it was there – that it started to get light. I watched the sickly dawn spreading itself over the Thames. I drank a whole bottle of champagne and ate a whole box of assorted continental chocolates. I was violendy sick, on two, three or possibly seven separate occasions.

  It’s a strange feeling, to feel lonely and at the same time scared that somebody might talk to you. Gradually, after about ten hours or so, the loneliness started to win out. I became desperate to see someone, and my situation began to seem so insupportable that I considered, for the first time, going in and giving myself up to the police. Perhaps it would be best, after all, to make a clean breast of everything. Who knows, they might even have tracked down the real murderer by now, and I wouldn’t be under any suspicion. They’d be pleased to see me, I’d be a valuable witness, and instead of finding myself on the threshold of a never-ending nightmare I’d be able to see the whole business wrapped up and disposed of, never to trouble me again. Oh God, if that could only be true.

  I didn’t have the courage to do it myself, of course. If I was going to give myself up I needed someone to help me, someone to take me along to the police station and be ready to back up my story. I only had one friend in London who could be relied upon to do that, and it was a lot to ask. An awful lot. But there was no choice, really. Not when you thought about it.

  It took me another couple of hours to walk to Tony’s house, which was in Shadwell. I kept close to the river as much as possible, and then headed up north when I reckoned I’d come far enough. It must have been getting on for ten-thirty by the time I got there. He and Judith had a new, fairly modern little place on a housing estate. I stood in the porch for ages, worried about the impression I would make as soon as they saw me, unable to imagine any coherent way of telling my story. I considered running away again. I hesitated, and wavered, and thought, and sweated, and shook. Finally I rang the bell.

  Judith came to the door almost immediately. She was wearing her coat over what seemed (from the parts I could see) to be her smartest clothes, and her hair looked immaculate. Far from being surprised to see me, she gave every appearance of being relieved.

  ‘William, there you are!’ she said. ‘We were starting to go frantic. We’ve been leaving messages on your machine all morning.’ Before I had time to say anything she had turned around and was shouting up the stairs, ‘It’s all right, Tony, he’s here!’

  Tony came running downstairs. He was wearing a light grey suit with a narrow tie.

  ‘Judith was convinced you’d forgotten,’ he explained. ‘We were a bit worried when we couldn’t get you on the phone all night, you see. We thought you might have gone away for the weekend.’

  ‘No, I was… round at Madeline’s house last night,’ I improvised, not entirely untruthfully. I didn’t have a clue what was going on.

  ‘Come into the kitchen,’ said Judith, ‘and I’ll show you what’s what.’

  As I followed her into the kitchen, the explanation suddenly hit me. It was Sunday morning, and I was supposed to be looking after Ben for the day while they went up to Cambridge for their luncheon party: that promise I had made more than two weeks ago. As was only to be expected, I had forgotten all about it.

  ‘There’s some salad in the fridge,’ Judith was saying, ‘and some quiche. You and Ben are to help yourselves but don’t give him any cucumber because he won’t touch the stuff. Don’t ask me why. He’s at that sort of age. He’ll show you how to work the video and he’ll probably want you to play with him on his computer games. There’s plenty of tea, and plenty of milk. He likes his milk with this strawberry stuff in it. It’s very easy, you just have to stir it in.’

  What could I do? I had been on the point of giving them a complete explanation – of narrating a more fantastic chain of events than I could ever have invented, in the hope that they would believe me and find some way of helping me out. But I couldn’t do that now. Once again, circumstances were sweeping me away, carrying me beyond the realm where decisions could be made and free will exercised.

  ‘He’s in the sitting-room at the moment,’ said Judith. ‘He won’t come out to see visitors. Don’t ask me why. It’s a phase he’s going through. You’ll find him ever so easy once you get talking to him. If he tries to throw things at you just give him a good smack. It usually works.’

  Tony came into the kitchen, jingling the car keys.

  ‘Come on, love, we’re going to be late.’

  Judith fetched her gloves and I followed them both to the front door.

  ‘Feel free to use the piano,’ said Tony. ‘I don’t think we’ll be back any later than four.’

  ‘Help yourself to biscuits,’ said Judith.

  ‘Play some records if you want,’ said Tony.

  ‘There’s beer in the cupboard,’ said Judith.

  ‘Have a nice time,’ I said. And then they were gone.

  From the sitting-room I could hear a medley of little electronic pops and whistles and bubbling noises, which seemed to suggest that Benjamin was happily occupied with a video game. I put my head round the door just to make sure.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘Hello.’

  I think Benjamin must have been about eight at this stage. He was a cute little child, with a healthy face and a cheerful disposition, and he already showed signs of his parents’ intelligence. He never took his eyes off the television screen, but I didn’t feel that he was being rude.

  ‘I’m just going to go and play the piano.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Tony had a really lovely upright piano which he had bought cheap at a sale from the Royal College of Music or somewhere. I had only ever played it a couple of times and it had made even my worst improvisations sound reasonable. To be able to spend a whole day with this piano was an absolute treat, in other words, but as soon as I sat down at it and opened the lid, a curious thing happened: I found that I couldn’t play. Even when I put my hands on the keys, chose a chord and took a deep breath, I couldn’t bring myself to sound the notes. I must have done this nearly a dozen times. I thought of standards, I thought of originals, I thought of cla
ssical pieces – but I couldn’t actually get any of them started. It was all too much. The murder, the flight from the police, that awful night in the cold, the realization that I was never going to see Madeline again – these things had been weighing down on me for too long, and all at once I caved in. I put my head in my hands and slumped forward on to the piano, and although I wasn’t really crying, my body shook with sobs.

  I don’t think this lasted very long. The spasm soon passed, but I continued to lie across the keyboard, feeling oddly comfortable. I got up when I realized that Ben had come into the room and was staring at me. I don’t know how long he had been there.

  ‘I want to go for a walk,’ he said, solemnly.

  *

  Once Ben was suitably wrapped up in his little duffle coat and woollen hat and gloves, we stepped outside and I locked up the house.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ I asked.

  ‘Let’s go down to the basin.’

  It wasn’t a very good morning for a walk, in my opinion. It was far too cold, for one thing, and last night’s mist hadn’t entirely cleared yet. Of course, I also had my own reasons for not wanting to venture out, but I didn’t see that much harm could come from a quick excursion if it was going to keep Ben happy. It might even help to calm me down, since playing the piano (my usual form of therapy) seemed to be out of the question at the moment. The bleakness of those East London streets, the strange misty chill which lay over the whole area, harmonized pleasingly with my mood. I felt that I could smell mystery on every corner, and I enjoyed hearing the occasional, random sounds of a quiet Sunday morning – cars starting, children shouting – and seeing the fog roll back, way in the distance, over the grey and restless Thames.

  ‘Wow,’ said Benjamin. ‘What a massive piece of dog poo.’

  I pulled him away from the offending object, which he had been inspecting with keen interest, and continued to hold his hand as we walked on. Before long, we found that we had come to a church: the vast, intimidating bulk of St George In The East.

  ‘Is it true,’ said Benjamin, as we walked past it, ‘that criminals and people can go inside a church, and the police can’t come and catch them?’

  I stopped walking. I didn’t know whether this was still true or not, although I remembered once being told the same thing, many years ago. Sanctuary. It seemed a straw worth clutching at.

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ I said.

  Benjamin, still holding my hand, seemed happy enough to follow me. As we got near to the doors I could hear the sound of ragged hymn-singing, but the thought that a service was in progress didn’t deter me for more than a few seconds.

  ‘Dad’ll be so cross if he knows that you took me to church,’ said Benjamin gleefully.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He says that the church is a bourgeois conspiracy designed to preserve the existing social order.’

  ‘Does he?’ I said, rather taken aback. ‘He should really leave you to work these things out for yourself, you know. Come on, anyway.’

  We seemed to have arrived in the middle of a sung communion: the church was about half full (mainly with old people) and they were singing ‘Immortal, Invisible’, with the choir adding eccentric harmonies apparently designed to confuse the rest of the congregation. Ben and I settled down in a pew near the back and joined the hymn just in time for the last line. The service still had about twenty minutes to run but I don’t think either of us paid very much attention to it. What I had said to Madeline all those months ago was true: I had been through a brief church-going phase when I was much younger (at the age when most of my friends were having adolescent love affairs – I don’t know why I should have been different), but I wasn’t religious by nature and my faith, such as it was, had faded away quickly and painlessly. The only thing I liked about religion now was the music it had inspired. So I didn’t go up to take communion with the rest of the congregation, and most of the time my thoughts were far removed from the words of the priest: when they weren’t spiralling around the events of the last twenty-four hours in a kind of daze, they were focused – oddly enough – on Benjamin.

  He seemed to be poised between two different states, being both bored by the service and excited by the novelty of his unusual surroundings. Some of the time he squirmed in his seat and swung his legs restlessly over the edge of the pew; but sometimes he was content to settle against my side and stare up at the ceiling, or look around at the faces of the other worshippers, which presented a range of expressions from near-ecstasy to vacant inattention. The feeling of having a young child, trusting and dependent, resting at my side during a church service was (I need hardly say) the very last thing I had anticipated that morning. It was a long while, I realized, since I had spent any time at all in the company of children. I had shut myself off from even thinking about them. Had I ever fantasized, without admitting it to myself, about having children with Madeline? I tried to be honest, scratched around in the recesses of my most secret memories, but couldn’t see that I had. No, the only person I had ever discussed it with – and I could remember the conversation now: shy, serious, playful – was Stacey.

  Benjamin and I stayed put while the congregation was leaving. After a few minutes, we had the church to ourselves.

  ‘Aren’t we going to go now?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Let’s stay a little longer.’

  He got up and went on a brief tour of exploration. Even when he was out of sight, I could hear the echo of his footsteps as he ran backwards and forwards. It was one of those sounds – like the ringing of Mrs Gordon’s doorbell – which drew attention to the surrounding silence. I made no attempt to follow him but continued to sit there thinking about Stacey.

  Benjamin broke in upon my thoughts by tugging at my sleeve and saying, ‘William. William.’

  I looked up.

  ‘What?’

  He seemed on the verge of asking a question, but after a short pause he ran off giggling instead. Eventually he came and sat beside me again. I put my arm around him and when the weight of his body started to feel heavy I assumed he had fallen asleep. But then he said it again.

  ‘William.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why were you crying in the back room?’

  I glanced down at him, although for some reason I wasn’t surprised by the question. His eyes were wide and enquiring.

  ‘Well – without wishing to sound patronizing, I don’t think you’d understand.’

  ‘Men don’t usually cry,’ he said; but he said it to himself, as though, having decided that he wasn’t going to get a truthful answer out of me, he was pursuing his own train of thought. ‘Dad never cries. At least, only once, and that was Mum’s fault.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said, mildly curious. ‘Why was that?’

  ‘She had a fling.’ Benjamin was very matter of fact about this, and went on, ‘She told Dad about it, and they had an argument, and he cried.’

  I would never, never have believed that anything could make Tony cry. I tried to picture him in tears, weeping on Judith’s shoulder, with Benjamin standing by the door, grave, unseen and watchful. It was the first time I had ever tried to picture Tony in a domestic setting; away from the piano.

  ‘Was it something like that?’ Benjamin asked.

  ‘Well… yes,’ I said, exasperated to find how good he was at drawing out confidences. ‘I’ve been having a bit of trouble with a woman, if you must know.’

  Benjamin paused, his mind busily running through the possibilities.

  ‘Is it Auntie Tina?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You don’t know her. Her name’s Madeline.’

  As concisely as I could, I gave Benjamin a resumé of our affair, culminating in the scene at the party last night. Then we both fell silent. I thought, Well, at least that’s shut him up.

  ‘Is she tall?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How tall is she?’

  ‘I don’t know… slightly above average, I
suppose.’

  ‘And what about Piers?’

  ‘I suppose you’d call him tall. Six-one, six-two – something like that.’ Suddenly I lost patience. ‘Look, if you’re suggesting that…’

  Benjamin said nothing.

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s a thought…’

  He got up.

  ‘I’m cold. Let’s go home and have dinner.’

  He took me by the hand and we left the church, threading our way through the still backwaters of Shadwell, each absorbed in our thoughts. Benjamin was humming a tune to himself – it was ‘I’m Beginning to See the Light’, now I come to think of it, in his father’s favourite E flat – and I was wondering, ridiculous though it seemed, and however hard I tried to fight against it, whether there might have been an absurd grain of truth in his theory. If it was the truth, it was a bitter one; but in a way, I felt comforted. Any explanation was better than none, after all.

  I didn’t attempt to play the piano again that day. When we got back to Tony’s house we had some lunch and then watched television and played video games. I let Benjamin decide everything, except that I insisted on watching the local news bulletin. There was no mention of the murder. Perhaps time was not running out quite as fast as I’d thought.

  Tony and Judith returned at about half past four. They seemed to have had a good time, and they could tell that Benjamin had enjoyed his afternoon with me, so they were profuse with their thanks. So much so, in fact, that Judith offered me a lift back to the flat.

  ‘It’s no trouble,’ she said. ‘Anyway, it’s ages since I saw Tina properly.’

  They must have been confused by my hesitation, but I think you can see why the prospect alarmed me. In my mind I had already put together a probable sequence of events which would have enabled the police to trace my address almost immediately. Chester and the band would have arrived at the recording studio; they would have waited for Paisley and me to turn up, with mounting impatience; finally Chester would have gone back to the house, swearing under his breath, only to find the place swarming with policemen. He would have been taken down to the station for questioning, and inevitably he would have told them that I was the last person to have seen Paisley alive. He would have given them my name, and told them where I lived. Without a shadow of a doubt, the police would be waiting for me at the flat.