Authors: Jude Cook
‘I had to, didn’t I?’
‘Did you? What was it, some kind of penance to listen to my shit? Your single act of contrition?’
‘Maybe.’
‘But you don’t know, do you? Because you haven’t got a clue about anything. You tell me I’m your friend and then fuck my wife. You sit downwind of my disgust and then say it’s an act of penance when I put the idea into your head. You twist the truth with me, then think you can apologise and make everything okay. You probably twisted the truth with her for all I know. Certainly with yourself. If you think you’ve bullshitted me, its nothing to the porkies you’ve told yourself. There’s nothing to you, Rudi. You’re a blank. A nothing. A waste of space!’
Rudi took this verbal kicking in silence, like a condemned man. Then he caught my eyes from a lateral angle, like he was framing a picture. I knew what was coming. His explanation. His mitigating circumstances.
‘But I tried to put a stop to it, from the start! It was all a big mistake, with a mate like you, Byron. I think she did it because she, how can I say it …’
‘Say it.’ I was interested, even in his garbage.
‘… Because she hated you. She said she’d grown to hate you. It was awful to hear, with you being mah best friend and that. I used to try and shut her up, but, after that first time, she was ringing me up day and night.’ I shifted in my chair at the confirmation of this. Something that Nick couldn’t verify, only the guilty parties. Mandy’s punishment quickly went from suffocation, or a merciful strangulation, to burning at the stake. I felt dangerous sitting there, my heart pounding, my stupid feelings on fire. Rudi continued, ‘It was like a tidal wave of phone calls. Mainly at work.’ Again, I took a sharp intake of breath. So she phoned Rudi at work, just like she used to harass me until I finally gave in. In a smooth voice, Rudi went on: ‘I never thought she liked it that much, but she said I was her only excitement in life, that her marriage—you and her, like—was all but over, that she only used you to pay the rent. I told her to stop using you and get a divorce, but she wouldn’t listen. I hated lying to you, Bry, honest, you’ve got to believe me, God’s honest truth, I know I like to put it about a bit, but I never wanted to do this to a mate. It was always a point of honour with me never to—’
‘Stop!’ I shouted as loud as I could manage. I couldn’t bear any more of his cheap excuses. I stood up and faced him down.
Rudi looked stunned at the reverberation of my voice; scared, uncertain. Tentatively, he asked: ‘What are you going to do to me?’ I saw at that moment the full loneliness of his life. How much he needed me. How much he required a stooge, a scapegoat, someone to deceive, someone to destroy. Without such another he truly was impotent. Also, how much he needed someone to drink with; to play at full-blown masculinity in the company of another man. Although a chick-connoisseur and dedicated tail-chaser he didn’t actually like female company. Hated it, in fact. Bored him to death. Nauseated him with their banal pronouncements, risible vanities. No, Rudi only wanted one thing from women, that Holy Grail between their legs. And once that had been achieved the conquest was over and he sought out male company. The only problem was that the Holy Grail often belonged to his friends or business associates. He would continue incorrigibly in this fashion until he died—which wouldn’t be far off if I had anything to do with it.
‘Do?’ I enquired. ‘I’m not going to
do
anything. Except maybe get another bottle of champagne.’
He seemed confused, relieved. ‘Help yourself, big man.’ His eyes followed me to the fridge. The tension had been broken momentarily. The room seemed to assume its normal proportions once again. I returned to the table with another bottle of bubbly.
‘Shall I do the honours?’ he asked subordinately; the question a distant reminder of the old days, like light from a collapsed star.
‘You’re welcome to each other, for all I care.’
‘Don’t say that, Bry. I feel terrible. I’ve never felt worse.’
Secretly I thought, Oh, you will do, and stifled an inner compulsion to giggle, to start dancing.
I smiled. ‘I’m serious. Do you think I wanted her back anyway? Christ, after what she did to me?’
Rudi seemed tangibly to relax. His paddle-shaped hands grasped the bottle and swiped off the golden sheath in an easy movement. This, however, was all part of my plan. To placate him. For I had to work fast, skilfully,
‘She is a psycho, ah’ll give you that!’ he grinned, as if we were two friends finding mutual fault with a woman we had both willingly shared. But we hadn’t willingly shared her.
‘She used to slag you off too.’
‘Did she?’ said Rudi, suddenly affronted, very keen for information.
‘Oh yeah, all the time. Said you were a pisshead, and that somebody should cut your balls off.’
‘I can take that,’ he said quietly, revealing that he couldn’t.
‘Also that your clothes were shit, you were ignorant and had bad breath.’
He smiled at this, seeing Mandy’s bile as acknowledgment of his two greatest qualities: his ability to drink and his ability to score. ‘She had a tongue in her head! I’m a bit surprised you only hit the stupid hen once.’
‘I thought you didn’t believe in that.’
‘Aye,’ he said uncertainly, another can of worms creaking open. Rudi popped the cork, still unsure that I wasn’t going to bludgeon him to death.
‘She also said you were a stupid Scottish poseur with a fat face and arse.’
Rudi muttered solemnly, ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Then don’t say it. It’ll spoil my celebration.’ I held his gaze. ‘Still, despite all that, she still fucked you. Women and their sexual choices, eh?’
Holding both glasses as he poured, I continued staring intently at Rudi, mainly to distract his attention. Go on, you beauty, pour your last glass! This was also part of the plan. As the top-notch Bollinger fizzed rapidly I dropped two colourless pills from the palm of my left hand into Rudi’s flute. Go on, you priapic waste of oxygen, come to Byron! And
santé!
They were, after all, his pills. That night he had crashed at mine, running scared from whatever goon he had aggrieved, a small transparent packet had dropped from Rudi’s trousers as he shed his clothes to kip on my couch. Fascinated to get anything on him at that stage, while I planned my grand revenge, I dexterously pocketed it and took it to the croupiers in the morning. Both were experts in drugs of every kind—at the casino it was part of the job description. They were unanimous. The pale, wheatgerm-like pills were Rohypnol. So this was another of his methods! Shocked, I concluded that I had been ungenerous towards Rudi in thinking him merely a master philanderer. He was a rapist too.
‘Cheers!’ I said.
Rudi looked surprised. ‘It doesn’t feel right to say that now.’
‘No? I’d like you to, though.’
Between his discoloured teeth, Rudi said, ‘Cheers’ and drank deep.
Yes!
Betrayal. Depravity. Filth. Dissolve away! I drained my glass in one and took a look around the room. Feeling calmer, I thought: it won’t be long now, my friend. We all go into the dark, eventually, you sooner than most. The liquid amber flames in the grate fluttered every time a gust came down his chimney. The breakfast bar was scrupulously wiped, the appliances gleaming on shelves, the wine rack stocked and hefty. I noticed that his bins were a series of plastic supermarket bags tied with bows queueing by the door. Disappointed that he didn’t have bin-liners for his own body parts, I suddenly remembered Mandy’s underwear that he seemed so keen to have that night, my wedding present to her in Barcelona, encased in their dismal plastic.
I looked at Rudi. His eyelids were already drooping. ‘One more question.’
Groggily, I thought, he said, ‘What’s that, Bry?’
‘All that gear of Mandy’s. The stockings and suspenders you said you wanted for what’s her name—’
‘Suki.’
‘For Suki. Did you ever use them with …’
‘You don’t want to know that,’ he said, shaking his head wearily.
‘That means you did, didn’t you.’
‘I cannae say.’
‘But you have to.’
‘Why do you want more pain?’ Rudi suddenly looked at me reproachfully, like a small boy. Then his chin flopped onto his chest.
My God, that was fast! And I must act: fast, I thought, climbing swiftly to my feet and running over to the bulked form of my ex-best-friend. I felt his pulse. Still alive. But he was out cold, like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Rapidly, I went through his pockets for his keys. The warmth of his thigh through the trouser material was strangely intimate, too redolent of the human animal and its needs. Because I didn’t want to see Rudi as human now, not with what I had to carry out.
Finding his coil of keys, I ran to the pine-floored master bedroom and knelt at the safe. A feature of the flat, which had been a clothing manufacturer’s office, the place contained three of them. Rudi liked to boast about these unmovable pre-war safes. Big and green with brass handles like a submarine’s periscope, the largest was situated in his bedroom. The first key didn’t work. Neither did the second. Finally, the weighty door swung wide with a sure oiled motion. Open sesame, bastardo! Inside was a sizeable amount of currency and a Jiffy bag. I wasn’t after the money, he could spend that in hell. Instead I took the Jiffy bag, which was unusually heavy, closed the safe door and locked it.
Back in the living room the pastel lights seemed to conceal Rudi’s slumped figure. Without his personality, his life-force, he was invisible. The flat seemed doubly empty with only me intent on performing an act of rank craziness. I tweaked his fleshy shoulders through his shirt. Not a peep. Then I emptied the Jiffy bag onto the coffee table. In front of me was a Browning automatic pistol, black and chipped, and a handful of five-pound notes. Originally a decommed weapon, or so he said, Rudi had bought it from one of the market goons. This skanker had had it doctored so it fired one shot at a time, the automatic function sadly defunct. Never having handled more than a starting pistol, the very thing frightened me, lying there with its potential for revealing a sudden eternity. I picked it up and checked the magazine like they do in the movies. It appeared full, the butter-coloured brass bullet casings topped with slugs of dull lead. Rudi had proudly showed me this fearsome weapon a month ago. We had spent the night arguing about it, like a married couple. He insisted the people he was mixed up with wouldn’t hesitate to wipe him out if they found he had shafted them. It was his only form of protection, he told me. I lectured him that he had never fired a gun before and they would probably use it to blow his head off. Not so, he stated. These nutters carried machine guns so they didn’t need his pissy pistol. And anyway, he had been in the army cadets at school.
Rounding on Rudi, I knelt beside him.
‘Sorry, big man,’ I said into his deaf ear. ‘But you didn’t expect to fuck her and for me to like it, did you?’ Heart pounding like crazy, I poured another flute of champagne, downed it in one, and suppressed the urge to burp. I took the gun and placed it softly, lovingly at his temple. For some reason I started to laugh. It sounded indecent in the quiet of the room. The jubilant peal echoed as if in a canyon. The empty clanging from outside had finally ceased. This gun, I thought, originally bought for Rudi’s protection or the bank job that he insisted he may at any moment be asked to perform, was now going to end his life. It was so wonderfully funny. And those pills, used to silence dollybirds so he could get his end away, were even funnier. I said, ‘You’re funny, Rudi. The best you can do is steal other people’s women or rape them when they’re out cold. Christ—’ then I felt a thread of anger unspool deep in my stomach. An escalating wire of rage. He had lied to me for years, bare to my face. Mandy—well, she had lied too. But lying was her modus vivendi—her first instinct in any given situation. She couldn’t do otherwise. No, with Rudi it was personal.
I pressed the gun harder to his temple and said, ‘Adios, old chum.’
We’re here! The train is slowing down! Imperceptibly, inexorably. The grinding, remorseless iron wheels decreasing in speed. The velocity dimmed. In counter-thrust, in sorrowful abdication of movement. I crane my stiff neck at the window, pressing my nose against the cold glass. The rivulet of water is back in the corner of the pane, a quivering vein. The bend of Leeds station is perhaps a quarter of a mile away, the floodlit silos for the many trains awaiting us. Rain, fast and nasty, is coming down in sweeping torrents. The station lights illuminate every detail: glitter-showers of jewels, more impressive and torrential in the icy glare. As hard and unappeasable as my heart.
Suddenly all around is movement. Robin jolts awake, nudged by an elbow in the ribs from Michelle. Ah, married life, I remember it well. Looming figures are everywhere: stretching, yawning, brushing mince-pie crumbs from beards; burping, coughing. They haul rucksacks from above my head. An infant, terribly upset to be woken, bawling like he did at his birth, his mother shushing him on her knee, looks at me through his tears.
And over so fast, like everything in life. Time is not a long-distance runner, he’s a sprinter; in training for all eternity, he’s faster than all of us. He’s crossed the finish line before we can even leave the blocks. Over before we knew it even began. Time throws you out of the way of experience too fast—no sooner are you involved in it than you are travelling away from it. My day-long psychomachia has left me with remarkably little to remember. What stands out most are the memories. And that’s no good. Because you cannot spend your whole life remembering; worshipping the goddess Mnemosyne. But, unfortunately, life is not linear—we’re arrested by the past while dealing with the present. Though we pass through each metaphorical station (never to visit them again) we somehow take them with us, accumulating mental baggage as the journey goes on. The beaming shrinks would assert that this is an attitudinal thing: we
choose
to carry this baggage—the station is past; we should feel luminously free at any given moment of our lives if we choose to perceive it as such.