Death of a God

by S. T. Haymon

Just like that. I wasn’t even allowed to go upstairs for my coat.

  It was on the bus that I first realized I was pregnant. I had found the rest of my lunch money for the week in my blazer pocket, and so – for no particular reason: I was beyond thought – I had taken a ticket as far as Newmarket. But when the realization came to me, I can’t think how, that I was going to have a baby, I asked the conductor to put me down at a lonely crossroads called Hob’s Cross. One of the four arms was no more than a footpath through the forest, signposted to Hob’s Hole, the old flint mine. I knew that Hob was an old name for the Devil, so that it seemed an entirely fitting place for me to kill myself.

  There was no carry-on. I don’t even remember sparing a thought for that awful God who looked after the Conventicle of the Elect. It just seemed to me the sensible thing to do in the circumstances. One thing was abundantly clear to me: that life was a whole lot simpler if you were dead.

  I followed the trail between the purple heather and the dying bracken until I reached the mine, where I had a bit of trouble getting over the fence. But at last I managed it, stepped to the edge of the Hole and, without thinking any more about it, jumped.

  Chapter Thirty Six

  How annoyed I was to find myself in the Norfolk and Angleby Hospital still alive!

  Instead of falling straight to the bottom of the mine, I had – by a miracle, as they said – landed on a kind of ledge, merely breaking a leg instead of my neck. It took me a little longer to realize that the miracle consisted of the pleasantly ugly man with the foreign accent who came daily to visit me, bringing me gifts of fruit and flowers. My rescuer, Leo Felsenstein.

  On holiday from the dyestuffs company in Angleby where he was employed as a translator of research material, he had been on his way along the drove road towards the Hole and saw my efforts to climb the fence. He told me later that he had shouted out to me, but that I’d paid no attention. Well versed, after years in Auschwitz, in detecting signs of desperation, he had said nothing to contradict the ambulance men when they assumed that he and I were together. He gave my name as Mary Felsenstein.

  So that it was only necessary to change one letter, the ‘y’ to an ‘a’, when I came out of hospital and moved into his flat over a chemist’s shop in Mountergate. The first day he considered it safe to leave me on my own, he went back to the Hole, and brought back the statuette they call the Hob’s Hole Venus, which had apparently lain in a niche behind the ledge, unseen until he had clambered down to help me. He set it up on the mantelpiece in the little sitting-room, and turned to me with a smile I shall never forget.

  ‘Our patron saint and protectress.’

  Let me make it clear that Leo Felsenstein and I have never lived together as man and wife. What the Nazis did to him left him incurably impotent. Dreadful as it is to say it, I could almost be grateful. After what had happened to me I could never have stayed on any other terms.

  As to the child growing daily larger in my womb, if I had known about abortion there would have been no Loy Tanner. Well, I didn’t know, and I’m sure it never even occurred to Leo to tell me. The years he had spent cheek by jowl with death had given him an almost mystical reverence for human life. He could not have looked forward to the child’s birth with more joyous anticipation if it had been his own.

  What Leo really wanted was that we should get married before the baby was born, so that it would be born legitimate; but I wouldn’t have it; just as, when we did marry – I was eighteen by then – I wouldn’t let him adopt it either. I could never bring myself to tell Leo about the rape, preferring him to think of me as a silly, promiscuous teenager rather than have to speak about that night, the red eyes glowing in the darkness. Deeply as I knew I hurt him, I couldn’t saddle him with responsibility for a human being with that heritage.

  The boy was born soon after we moved to Sebastopol Terrace. I called him Loy after Robert Tanner’s youngest son, hoping that to be doubly named after the most honourable Norfolk man who ever lived might be a charm against the red-eyed darkness. Leo was wonderful with the baby. And I? I did for him all the things a mother does for her child. I took him in my arms, kissed him, rocked him to sleep.

  All useless. You can’t love when you’re afraid, and I was deadly afraid of my son.

  I’m sure Loy sensed it, even at that age. He hung round me like a forlorn puppy, begging for the love which, to all surface appearances, I was providing in abundance. I was dreadfully sorry for him – sorrier than I was for myself: it wasn’t his fault he was who he was. On the night he left home – the day Mrs Falcone came round and wanted to speak to him about Francesca – I even convinced myself that I was sorry to see him go.

  But once he had gone – particularly after the money began to arrive as he started to make a name for himself as a pop singer – the old, ambiguous feelings returned. I knew that, whatever else I did, I mustn’t accept money from him. It was too dangerous.

  Yet, in the end, I did just that. The years in the concentration camp had undermined Leo’s constitution, and he began to get more and more unwell. He had to give up his job, and I gave mine up too – I’d been working in a nursery school – so as to stay home with him. When Miriam took us both on as outworkers, it was a godsend.

  Financially, then, things were very tight; but if it hadn’t been for the progressive deterioration in Leo’s condition we could have managed very happily. Time had only deepened our passionate – yes, passionate! – attachment. I couldn’t face the prospect of life without him, and I ran about everywhere, from one specialist to another, spending money we couldn’t afford, looking for a cure.

  Then I heard of a new operation they were doing in America, still in its experimental stages, but offering hope beyond anything we’d been offered before. Here in England, the doctors said, ‘We’re evaluating the procedure. In two or three years’ time, maybe –’ But Leo didn’t have that long to wait. I found out that the cost of taking him to the United States and getting the operation done there was £13,000, and when Loy come round to see us the night before the concert at the Middlemass, I repressed all my doubts and fears, and asked him to give me the money.

  When I did that, his face went empty, the way it did sometimes, as if he had retreated deep inside himself. Then he said, with no expression in his voice, ‘When you finally want something from me, it’s not for yourself, it’s for him.’

  I replied that it was for me, too. ‘You know how much Leo means to me.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know.’

  This is the difficult bit.

  He brought the money round late at night, in a black case, after the concert was over. Leo, sedated to relieve the pain, had been asleep for an hour or more. Loy opened the case and I saw the bundles of notes packed inside. I saw Leo, by their magic, restored to health again. The vision impelled me towards Loy, to kiss him, for once, without reservations.

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ he said, backing away. ‘There is a condition.’

  ‘Condition?’

  ‘That first you go to bed with me.’

  You don’t want to know how I felt, do you? Only what I did. What I did was go to bed with Loy Tanner my son, there on the couch in my own living room. Was it rape? You policemen will probably say no. After all, I was – wasn’t I? – a consenting party.

  Let me tell you, what my son did on that couch was worse, much worse, than what his father did to me in that field on the way home from the dance. For the first time in my life – me, a woman who had lived in complete satisfaction with an impotent man – was made to understand the meaning of physical love. Have I made myself clear?

  I had an orgasm.

  When he had done with me I left him lying there, face down, one arm trailing. He seemed drowsy, if not actually asleep. Feeling the burden of my own body unbearable, I dragged myself across the room to Leo’s knitting machine, where a piece of ribbing hung on the needles, weighted down by some of those weights we knitters use to keep the bottom edge straight. They’re qui
te small, and I don’t suppose you’ve given them a second glance; but heft one of them in your hand after you read this, and you’ll be surprised how heavy they are, solid metal under the plastic coating.

  I took one of the weights off its hook, went back to the couch, and hit Loy over the head with it – hit him until I was sure he was dead. He made very little trouble about dying: one might almost have thought he welcomed it.

  For a moment, no longer, as the blood came out of his mouth and nostrils and his eyes glazed over, I felt a piercing love for him. Then I went and opened the black case, took out the lovely crisp notes, and, bundle by bundle, burned them.

  Is murder a drug, do you know? I ask because of the effect committing one had on me personally, quite the reverse of what I’d have expected, had I ever given any thought to the subject. No regrets or feelings of guilt, no panic as to what was going to happen to me. On the contrary, everything seemed beautifully calm and simple.

  First I went and put on my washing-up gloves, and then I went to the cupboard under the stairs and fished out the enormous polythene bag the knitting machines had come wrapped up in, and which I could never bring myself to throw away. I felt foolishly glad that at last I’d found a use for it.

  Loy went in quite easily, once I’d bent his knees a little. He had told me that he’d parked on the bomb site, so I took his keys out of the jeans he’d discarded on the floor, quickly put my own clothes back on again, put on my coat, and went out to the van and unlocked it. I left the rear doors wide open. Then I went back to the house to fetch his body.

  He was a skinny boy, not at all heavy. I trussed the polythene with some cords I’d found lying in the back of the van, and heaved him on to my shoulder without difficulty. The art was in manoeuvring him through the narrow doorway into the hall, and then out of the front door without banging him; though why it was important not to bang him I couldn’t tell you. The possibility that somebody might be watching never occurred to me, and even when a voice that sounded full of suppressed laughter sounded out of the darkness, ‘Need a hand, love?’, I wasn’t seriously perturbed. Nothing was quite real that night, the speaker included.

  Yes, as you’ve probably guessed, it was Mr King, the Punch and Judy man. Well, that was our introduction – quite chivalrous, in an odd way: a gentleman offering to help a lady with a bulky package.

  If you knew him, you’ll know that everything about Mr King was odd. I myself only knew him for a very little while, but it was long enough for me to know that. What he told me was, that Loy and he had fallen out over a business deal and he had followed Loy from the University because he wanted to have it out with him once and for all. What with one thing and another, he said, he wasn’t at all put out to find Loy dead, though he doubted he’d have gone as far himself, if it had been left to him. However, what was done was done, and might he ask how I proposed to dispose of the body?

  I answered, truthfully, that beyond getting it out of the house, where the sight of it might upset my ailing husband, I hadn’t given it any thought. Mr King tut-tutted, and said that was the trouble with women, they never thought things through. He seemed quite exhilarated. I fleetingly wondered if he had been taking drugs, but as I had never, to my knowledge, actually seen anyone under their influence, I was unable to come to any conclusion. I was only aware that I was beginning to feel very tired – to remember, if not with my mind, then with my violated body, why I had committed murder; and when Mr King suggested that he take over from then on, I was only too happy to comply.

  Under his direction, we first shifted Loy’s body from the Second Coming van to his own dark blue one, less conspicuous; and I went back to the house and fetched Loy’s clothes, stuffed into the case which had contained the money. At the last moment I found I’d left one of the packets of notes unburnt, but there wasn’t time to do anything about it, so I just left it in the case along with the clothes.

  The Punch and Judy man following, I drove the white van down to the Chepe, and left it there.

  I got into the blue van, and suddenly I knew where I wanted to go: Hob’s Hole. Hob was the Devil, and the Devil should have his own.

  Mr King said he was quite amenable, so long as I did the navigating. He had a figure of Punch on the front seat which he hung up in a kind of pocket at the side of the windscreen to make room for me.

  ‘Move over for the lady.’

  There was hardly any traffic on the road. I must have fallen asleep. When I woke up I realized that we had overshot the turn-off, and I was glad. What could I have been thinking of? Hob’s Hole was sacred to the Venus. Our saint, our protectress, Leo had called her. True, it wasn’t until later that I saw the pictures in the Argus and knew, although I couldn’t prove it, that it was Loy who had broken her breasts off in the Middlemass Auditorium. Even as a child, when she had stood on our mantelpiece he had hated her, and I had had to put her for safety on top of a bookcase, out of reach. All I knew then was, I couldn’t pollute her shrine with the body of my satanic son.

  Mr King didn’t seem to mind at all that I had changed my mind. ‘Women!’ he exclaimed cheerfully, turning the car round. He drew into the side of the road. ‘Where to now?’ he demanded. ‘Any other bright ideas?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, as if it had been in my mind all along. ‘I want to crucify him in the Market Place.’

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Well you saw for yourself the result of our labours. Having only one ladder between the two of us made it awkward. If I hadn’t thought of using that belt of Loy’s, I don’t know how we’d ever have managed it.

  I’m sure, all those years ago, they did a more professional job with Jesus. For one thing, they weren’t wearing gloves then, I don’t suppose, in case of fingerprints. Yet it was funny, really. Apart from the gloves, we took absolutely no precautions – there, almost in the shadow of the police station! Anyone who happened along couldn’t have failed to see us.

  But nobody did come along. The Market Place and the surrounding streets were as quiet as the grave. Mr King seemed to take it all as a great joke. When we had finished, he drove me back to Sebastopol Terrace.

  I didn’t ask him in. After what had happened already that night, I wouldn’t have let even you in, Mr Jurnet, if you had come knocking. I got out of it by saying I still had the room to clear up. I added, meaning it, I suppose, that I couldn’t think of how to thank him for all he’d done.

  ‘I’ll think of something,’ he said: took the Punch out of its pocket and settled it comfortably on the seat beside him, and drove away.

  It was light before I had the house back in order. Not that Loy had died all that messily: simply that I suddenly felt so tired in all my bones, it was all I could do not to drop down on to the couch, on to that horrible, stained loose cover, and sleep forever. I forced myself to brew some really strong coffee and, having drunk two mugs of it, set to work: stripping off the cover first of all. The upholstery beneath was no problem, being a nasty plastic stuff you could sponge off. When it was dry I put on my spare cover, washed the other one in the kitchen sink, wrung it out, and left it by the back door in a bucket, ready to hang out after breakfast, along with some other household things I already had waiting.

  Very little blood had dripped on to the floor. Still, just to be on the safe side, I scrubbed the boards all over, and polished them afterwards with a polish scented with lavender. Leo would be astonished. I would tell him that I’d suddenly felt inspired to do some spring-cleaning in honour of Easter. The only job I left undone was the fireplace, choked with ash. I was simply too tired. I would make the fire early, before Leo was up, and he would never know that I had burnt his life away in that mingy little grate.

  You came next day, Mr Jurnet, with your Sergeant, and told us the news. You won’t believe this, but it’s true: it shocked me as much as if I were indeed hearing it for the first time. I wouldn’t want you to think I was pretending. Yesterday had happened to someone else. Today, I was a woman who had lost her son in a
ghastly way.

  Poor Loy! Poor Leo, who had loved him so!

  A couple of nights later, long after Leo had gone to bed, Mr King came back. This time I offered him a cup of tea, but he refused it.

  ‘One good turn deserves another,’ he said, still as full as ever of that spooky laughter. He said he’d been turning over in his mind what I’d said about showing my gratitude, and he’d come up with something.

  ‘Some time soon,’ he said, ‘you’re going to be a very rich lady, has that ever occurred to you?’ And, when I stared at him, dumbfounded: ‘Loy, that boy of yours. He had a head on his shoulders. Thousands, hundreds of thousands – millions, I shouldn’t be surprised – salted away here, there, and everywhere. The lawyers’ll know where to put their hands on it, they always do.

  ‘And who’s it all going to go to, if not his mum? If he’s made a will, you’re bound to be the chief one to benefit; and if he hasn’t, you’ll get the lot. Even if he’s gone and left it to the cat’s home, you’ll be bound to get what they call ‘‘reasonable provision’’.’ He got up from his chair, did a funny little jig, and sat down again. ‘Take it from me, Mrs F. – good times are just around the corner!’

  I thought of the £13,000 burnt in the fireplace. Any other time I could have laughed my head off.

  As it was, I said, ‘You’re mad if you think I’d take a penny of Loy’s money.’

  ‘I’m mad!’ Mr King burst out laughing. His large nose became bright red. When he had calmed down, he said, ‘What you do is your business. If you don’t choose to be an heiress, all the more for me.’

  It was blackmail, of course. Either I handed over to him an unspecified sum of money from Loy’s estate, or – there was no need to complete the sentence.

  ‘No hurry,’ the man said, smiling. I must say, I never saw him out of temper. ‘You don’t have to go running after them. They’ll be getting in touch with you. You’ll see. No need to act pushy – it makes a bad impression. Just bear in mind, that’s all, that I still have your polythene bag put away in a safe place, and that case with the lad’s clothes –’