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‘Sorry?’ I said.
‘Eddie Bates is dead,’ he repeated.
I couldn’t quite breathe. My eyes started flickering around and I felt myself shaking. To my horror I felt I was going to cry. I heard Harry’s voice.
‘Angel? Angel?’
I shook myself and came back to myself. Back to myself but different.
‘Dead,’ I said.
‘Dead,’ he said.
I reached for a cigarette but there weren’t any. I don’t smoke any more. Harry reached over to the next table and helped himself to one from the packet belonging to the man sitting there. ‘Thank you,’ he said to him, in a voice that brooked no denial, and he lit it with the man’s lighter, and gave it to me.
‘Dead,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said.
My face was screwed up and I tried to untangle it. It wouldn’t go. We sat there in silence for a few minutes. Then Harry said: ‘Forgive an indelicate question, Angeline, but why the fuck do you mind so much?’
I couldn’t answer. Not only because I couldn’t speak, but because I didn’t know, and if I had known I couldn’t have told Harry anyway.
My enemy is dead. I should be singing and dancing my delight. If I was made safe by his imprisonment, how much safer am I now?
More minutes of silence.
‘What did he die of?’ I asked.
More silence, maintained this time by Harry. Then:
‘He hasn’t been well.’
Oh.
‘How not well? Not well of what?’ You see, I couldn’t speak.
‘Um,’ said Harry.
Into my state of shock came a sliver of … not fear, but … awareness.
‘What?’
He sighed. ‘I didn’t tell you because I thought it would just … go away. I thought he’d get better.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘Was it what he was talking about before the trial? What was it?’
I could just about register how difficult Harry was finding this, but I no longer let him get away with not saying things. We are way past the silent understandings, or more often misunderstandings, of our optimistic youth. In theory, at least.
‘You know when he was arrested,’ said Harry, ‘he had a head wound.’ I did know. I had inflicted it on him. I had hit him on the head with a poker when he was trying to jump me. Harry knew that. I had told him in the confusion of the end of the day of comeuppance. I seem to remember he had said, ‘Attagirl’. Anyway, some such unpolicemanly expression of approval.
Harry was not looking at me. ‘He has been suffering ever since from dizzy spells. That’s one thing his lawyers put up when they were trying to delay the trial. He’s continued to have them inside. Last week a new inmate arrived, who for reasons best known to himself took the first opportunity he could to punch Eddie’s lights out. Two days later Eddie was found dead on the floor of his cell. They haven’t done the post-mortem yet but it looks like a fractured skull.’
Now my skin was burning up.
‘He may have fallen,’ said Harry.
I took a drag on the cigarette and started coughing. Harry took the stub from my fingers and put it out.
‘So did I kill him?’ I asked.
‘He never said in court what had caused his initial head injuries,’ Harry continued, conversationally. ‘That was one reason why the application wasn’t accepted. The doctors agreed that he was not in the best nick, but he just said he’d fallen, and the damage wasn’t consistent with that, so they couldn’t accept it.’
I stared down at my plate. A gherkin had fallen out of my sandwich. I picked it up and ate it, and a huge sadness washed over me. Why do only mad psychotic scumbags love me, and is that love?
‘You didn’t kill him, legally or otherwise. But you did something,’ he said.
‘Yes I did.’
Bad people around me die, but I don’t kill them, but I do something. Oh for God’s sake. Janie wasn’t bad. Not bad. Not like Eddie.
‘When’s the funeral?’ I asked.
Harry was shocked. ‘You’re not going to go?’ he said. Aghast.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Why? Why the fuck?’
‘To see that he’s really dead,’ I said. ‘Because … because I thought it was over with the court case, and it wasn’t, and I want to make sure it’s over now.’
His face was amazed but kind. ‘There you go again,’ he said. ‘You want to do something absurd and ridiculous and stupid, but you’ve got a completely good understandable reason for it.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Is that what I do?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You should be a lawyer.’
Is that good or bad?
‘But it doesn’t mean you’re right,’ he said.
‘Right about what?’
‘About going to the funeral.’
‘You think I shouldn’t?’
‘I think it unwise,’ said Harry.
‘I’m sure you do,’ I said.
‘I’ll think about it,’ he said.
‘About what?’
‘Whether to tell you where it is,’ he said.
‘There you go again,’ I said, a little pointedly.
‘What?’
‘Telling me what to do. Acting like you’re in charge.’
‘I daresay,’ he said, unmoved. Only one step beyond his admirable unflappability lies his bossy pain-in-the-arse stubbornness. It reminded me of how he’d been when I first met Eddie, through him; when he warned me off making friends with him, not knowing that I was only doing so because Ben was making me. It reminded me of how jealous he’d been then, when he’d thought I didn’t know Eddie was a villain, when he’d thought that I fancied him. Harry protecting me for my own good, keeping things from me because I couldn’t be trusted to behave sensibly. Harry being a patronising sexist git. Harry watching over me, looking out for me, still caring what happens to me. Knowing me.
I would like to be able to take Harry’s concern for me and appreciate it. I would like to be able to maintain my independence without having to spit in his eye. I would like to think that I can rise above daily tribulation and problems of communication to a superior level of transcendent human understanding, but I can’t.
‘Then I’ll find out from somebody else,’ I said, in a very slightly nyaaah nyaah voice.
‘Who?’ he said.
‘I’ll ring …’ I said, in one of those sentences that you begin, hoping that you’ll find an end for it by the time you get there, but I didn’t. Who would I ring? We didn’t exactly have friends in common. His wife! I’d track down his wife.
His wife.
You killed my love.
You did, and I mind.
Oh.
Well perhaps his wife would ring me. Perhaps in fact she has been ringing me.
‘Tell me,’ I said to Harry. ‘Do people who send anonymous letters ever get violent, generally? Is that the sort of thing that happens. Do you know?’
Harry looked tired. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What a …’
It suddenly hit me like a hammer. Eddie’s dead. His wife thinks I killed him. I burst into tears, stared at Harry in horror, and hurtled to the back of the café in search of the ladies. Only there wasn’t one. The sandwich shop man gave me a handful of paper napkins from a chrome dispenser and turned me round again. The napkins soaked up nothing; just smeared and redistributed. Harry was standing up, wobbly through my tears, tall and a little menacing as he unfolded himself from behind the café table. I remembered his father telling me how he used to stop fights just by unfolding himself out of the squad car and being exceptionally tall. Young miscreants would simply stop toughing each other up and gaze in amazement as more and more of the length of the copper unfolded. He’s six foot seven. Harry’s a shrimp in comparison, a mere six foot four. I forgot for years that Harry’s father was police. So strange. I daresay it helped to get Harry in, despite his past. Though he was never convicted of anything. Nor charged with much, come to think of it. Perhaps his father helped with that too. Not consciously, not on purpose.
The miscreant in me folded.
I was still crying.
‘Come on, lover girl,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you a cab.’ He looked disgusted. I remembered when he’d told me he was disgusted one time before. Over Janie. When he thought I’d known, and I hadn’t.
He took my elbow and walked me into the bright street. I could see reflections of Petty France on the teardrops that shook on my lower lashes. Like a hall of mirrors, a ball of mercury. Like the chrome rims of the surgeons’ lights as they pored over my leg, and I gazed desperately into the distorted reflections of my joints and ligaments, yellow and scarlet and black, trying to see what the hell they were doing inside me. Discomfiting and weird reflections. Harry hailed a cab.
Lover girl?
‘Remember,’ I said, ‘you were wrong last time. Don’t jump to conclusions.’
‘Wheee,’ he said, his face hard. ‘Wheeeee, splat.’
FIVE (#ulink_758be9cf-efed-5ab8-a502-567148bd849c)
Next (#ulink_758be9cf-efed-5ab8-a502-567148bd849c)
I can’t afford to take a cab all the way to Shepherds Bush so I got out at the top of Whitehall and took the bus. The cabbie tried to get stroppy about it but I told him that if he thought the quickest way to Shepherds Bush from Victoria Street was via Trafalgar Square he must be used to passengers walking out on him. At the bus stop I wondered whether Hakim had got home all right, and whether I would be on time to pick up Lily. On the number 12 I wondered whether Sarah Tomlinson el Araby Lockwood would be in London still, in the phone book perhaps, even. At Piccadilly Circus I wondered why London Transport had changed the system so that instead of getting a 12 all the way through you had to change to a 94 at Marble Arch or Oxford Circus. At Oxford Circus I wondered why you wait for half an hour and then three come along at once. Then on Bayswater Road, having wondered every damn boring other thing available, I started to wonder why I was so upset at Eddie Bates being dead. It wasn’t just that I may have contributed. Or that his wife seemed to think I had. There was something personal. And I came up with some fairly unwelcome reasons.
1) Although he was a scumbag of the worst order, he had expressed a fairly devoted devotion to me, and I liked that, even from a scumbag of the worst order. Which makes me something of a scumbag.
2) Although he was a scumbag of the worst order he had an enormous amount of passion in him. Energy, enthusiasm, life force. He was a big, pulsating character. And it’s a shock to think of that gone. Pff, just gone.
3) There’s an animal thing, a …
OK, I can’t.
OK.
When Eddie jumped on me, and I hit him with the poker and knocked him out
This is quite hard to explain because I don’t know why I did it. And I don’t know how I did it.
So there he was, with his
I can’t describe this. He’s dead.
OK. I fucked him then, while he was unconscious. I was as surprised as you are that it was physically possible. I was more surprised that I wanted to do it. I didn’t know I wanted to do it. I still find it hard to believe that I did do it. But I did.
I can only suppose that for some reason I still don’t understand I wanted to have sex with him, but I didn’t want him to have sex with me. Because I hated him and despised him. I am absolutely not happy with the fact that I fancied him. Not happy at all.
Silly word, fancied. From ‘fantasy’, I imagine. I fantasied him. And then I realised him.
So there is some animal thing, about a man you’ve had sex with (even though he didn’t have it with you) being dead. And there’s something about him being unconscious then, and dead now. Horizontal.
So there I am, quasi-necrophiliac, fancier of scumbags, flattered by a scumbag’s attentions. Just how I like to see myself.
Let alone about having contributed to his death. Let alone his wife.
*
I got off at Shepherds Bush Green and got to Lily’s school in good time. Just seeing her, love flowed through me, drenching and drowning the poison, flushing it through. You can feel warmth and cleanness in your veins. Palpable goodness, inside you, displacing and unmanning the badness and the shame. Simplicity clearing confusion. Redeemed by love. It happens. All the time.
I bought her a choc ice and we went to the park to chase squirrels.
*
When we got home Hakim was sitting at the kitchen table with all the telephone books, looking sad.
