Martyn Pig (6 page)

A blackened wound appears on his forehead.

He won't stop shouting. ‘
Lew-is! Lew-is!
'

Blood seeps from the corner of his mouth.

‘
Lew-is! Lew-is! Lew-is! Lew-is!
'

‘SHUT UP!'

I sat up screaming vainly into the darkness. It was four o'clock in the morning.

The thing about dreams, they don't come from anywhere else but yourself. It's not as if there's some evil demon waiting around somewhere, waiting for you to sleep so he can sneak into your mind and show you all his crazy things. It's you that does it. It's your mind. Whatever demons there are, you invite them in. They're
your
demons. No one else's.

I don't know what that means.

I couldn't get back to sleep so I decided to take a bath. I felt dirty. My skin itched, sticky with sweat. And my legs ached, too. My legs always ache in the morning. Growing pains.

I shut the bathroom door and turned on the bath taps. The water gurgled and spat for a while, stopped, then coughed into life. I sat down on the toilet and waited for the bath to fill. My reflection looked back at me from the mirror on the wall.

‘What?' I said.

The head reflected in the steamed glass was unmoved.

What I saw was a boy who didn't seem to fit his body. Thin. Gawky. Awkward. A shock of mud-brown hair, cut in no recognisable style, tired blue eyes, a too-small nose and a crooked mouth with slightly wonky teeth. I was no beauty. But then again, I wasn't exactly a hunchback, either. Odd-looking? Maybe. But what's wrong with that?

The bath was nearly full. I opened a bottle of shampoo and emptied a good dollop into the bath and watched the froth of rainbowed bubbles rise from the surface of the water like a perfumed mountain. Then I turned off the taps and stepped into the bath and lay there soaking and sweating in the silent heat of the water.

I lay there until it turned flat and cold. And then I lay there some more.

Thinking.

What could I do? What do you do when you don't know what to do? Cry? Scream? Run away? Feel sorry for yourself?

What's the point? There's always an answer somewhere. You've just got to find it.

I brushed my teeth. I dressed in clean clothes and ran a towel over my hair. I cleaned the sink, wiped the shelves, opened the window to let in some fresh air. It was still dark outside. A solitary bird whistled from somewhere hidden –
tsui-tsui-tsui
.

‘What the hell,' I said, and went downstairs.

Dabbing at toast crumbs and sipping tea, I watched through the window as the sun rose slowly and nudged away the dead cold blackness of the night. It wasn't much to see, the birth of another grey day, but I watched it anyway. When it was done I looked at the clock and saw that it was still early.

I made some more tea.

I felt as if I was waiting for something; but I didn't know what it was.

What happened next, I suppose you'd call it fate. Whatever that is. I remember once one of the teachers at school started talking about destiny – fate, determinism, free will – that sort of thing. Mr Smith, it was, the English teacher. ‘Call me Brian,' he used to say, but no one ever did. It was pretty weird stuff, what he talked about, but it was kind of interesting, too. I spent a couple of days looking into it, getting books out of the library, reading this and reading that, but I didn't find out all that much because it's one of those things that doesn't really go anywhere because no one knows the answers. There aren't any answers. All that happens is the further you look into it, the more confusing it gets. So I stopped.

One thing that did stick in my mind, though, was something that Albert Einstein once said. I like him, Einstein. He's the crazy-haired one who thought up relativity.
Everything is determined
, he said,
the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper
.

I thought that was pretty good.

The invisible piper on this occasion was the postman.

It must have been about eight o'clock when the post rattled through the letter box. Bills, junk mail, catalogue stuff. Dad liked to order things from catalogues. Gardening equipment, tools, pens, radios, Elvis Presley clocks, shirts, hats, anything. When the stuff was delivered he'd hide upstairs so the delivery man would have to leave whatever it was round the back and Dad wouldn't have to sign for it. Then he'd claim that he never received what he'd ordered and he'd sell the stuff down the pub. He even sold a computer once. Two computers, come to think of it. They sent a replacement for the one he said had never arrived and he sold that too.

Amongst all the rubbish there was an envelope addressed to William Pig, Esq., that caught my eye. It looked official. Handwritten, that old-fashioned slopey kind of writing, with a fountain pen. I chucked the rest of the post in the bin and went back into the kitchen, sat down at the table and opened the letter.

Dear Mr Pig, it began. Further to our meeting on 1st December, I write to confirm that, as requested, a cheque in the amount of £30,000 was paid into your account this morning, being full payment of the bequest made to yourself in the last will and testament of Miss Eileen Pig ...

I put the letter down, blinked, and picked it up again.

... £30,000 ... being full payment of the bequest made to yourself in the last will and testament of Miss Eileen Pig ...

A three followed by four zeros. Thirty thousand. Thirty thousand pounds. I read on.

... blah blah blah do not hesitate to contact us ... blah blah blah ... further advice ... blah blah blah ... Yours sincerely,
signed
M Squiggle, Malcolm G Elliott LL.B (Hons) Solicitor.

£30,000.

A three and four zeros.

Thirty thousand pounds.

I couldn't believe it.

Who the hell was Eileen Pig?

Thirty thousand pounds? Dad had never mentioned
anything
. He must have known about this for ages. He wasn't going to tell me.

He wasn't going to tell me.

I stared at the letter again. It was dated Wednesday, 18th December. Yesterday. Thirty thousand pounds. Paid into his account. And he wasn't going to tell me. I couldn't believe it. Someone, some relative, leaves him thirty thousand pounds in her will – and he was going to keep it to himself. It was so sick it was funny.

I went into the front room.

‘Dad?'

He didn't answer.

I held out the letter towards him. ‘What were you going to do with this? Leave me? Sod off somewhere on your own, drink yourself to death on a beach in the Bahamas and leave me to Aunty Jean?'

He still didn't answer.

‘Why didn't you
tell
me?' I shouted.

The sound of my voice, trembling, close to tears, rang out flat and dull in the dead air. I sat down in the armchair and sighed. The silence was true. Dad was never going to tell me anything. He was just a shape beneath a white shroud.

I folded the letter into my pocket and went upstairs.

Dad's room was a heap. Curls of wallpaper peeled from the walls revealing old layers of sick-yellow paint. Magazines littered the floor, mostly girly mags and copies of
Exchange & Mart
. A few paperback books, too – Westerns, stupid romances. I kicked them all into a pile. The bed – a big high thing with a solid wood headboard – was unmade and smelled unwashed. Bits of broken biscuits and breadcrumbs lay scattered beneath the duvet and three whitish pillows were scrunched up against the headboard, each one discoloured with the stain of Dad's hair oil.

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked around. I hadn't been in here for a long time, not since Mum had left. I used to come in early Christmas morning to get my presents. Dad would still be asleep, head beneath the bedclothes, snoring off the Christmas Eve drinks, but Mum would be awake, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, smiling. I'd sit at the bottom of the bed, barely able to control my excitement, as she reached down under the bed and brought out presents wrapped in gold and silver paper and tied with ribbon. Boxes, packets, parcels, all kinds of shapes and sizes. All for me.
Lego
,
Meccano
, a football,
Scalextric
...

Did that really happen?

It was hard to imagine now.

On the bedside table was a nightlight, a packet of cigarettes, an ashtray and a pint glass half-filled with dusty water. The ashtray stank. There was a bureau on one side of the room and a wardrobe by the window. A trail of discarded clothes led from the bed to the wardrobe – pants, socks, a vest, crumpled trousers and shirts. A polystyrene burger box lay half-hidden beneath a dirty vest. Two halves of a burger bun, hard and stale and burgerless, crusty and forgotten.

I stood up and went over to the bureau. A dinner plate and knife and fork sat on top, encrusted with remnants of dried food. The orangy-brown smear told me it was baked beans mopped up with a slice of bread. The bureau was locked. I reached for the knife and jammed it into the bureau door and levered down. The door snapped open. Inside, it was a mess: loose papers scattered all over the place, a handful of letters, leaky pens, a folded chequebook and cashcard, a spilled ashtray, more biscuit crumbs, a whisky tumbler, a scratty old tin box ...

I sat down and went through the papers. It didn't take long, there wasn't much there – unpaid bills, old insurance stuff, birth and marriage certificates, a medical card. I sorted these into a pile and turned to the letters. There was one from a woman called Maeve. Stapled to the top was a cutting from a lonely hearts magazine:
EASY GOING 50'S FEMALE, slim and attractive, seeks younger male, 35-40, for dances and drinks. Photo appreciated
. The letter from Maeve thanked Dad for his offer, but no thanks.

The rest of the letters were all from Malcolm G Elliott, Solicitor, and told the story of Eileen Pig, deceased. Apparently she was Dad's aunt. She'd emigrated to Australia about forty years ago and no one had seen or heard from her since. She'd died in some kind of home. A touch insane, by the sound of it, which was probably why she'd left Dad the money. And that was about it, end of story. I don't know why I'd bothered, really. I secured the letters with an elastic band and tidied them away, then nosed around through the rest of the stuff. The chequebook was half full. I leafed through the stubs, curious to see what he'd written cheques for, but Dad's writing was illegible. The only one I could make out was in my handwriting:
Beer Tent – £7.50
. The cashcard was still valid. The ID number was written on the back in felt-tip pen. Good thinking, Dad.

The tin box was full of old photographs. Most of them were of Dad when he was a young man. In a pub with his mates, red-eyed, raising his glass to the camera; at the beach with a gormless-looking girlfriend; having a laugh, sticking a cigarette up his nose. There were none of me. And just one of Mum, a faded wedding photograph folded away at the bottom of the tin. Mum and Dad cutting the cake. I took it out for a closer look. Mum looked nervous. She was only young. About eighteen, I suppose. Her wedding dress didn't seem to fit properly and her veil was all cock-eyed, but she still looked nice. Shiny black hair, pale face, dark eyes, that slightly crooked smile ... she was beautiful. Dad was dressed in a too-tight suit, his face half-shadowed, and his hair slicked back with enough oil to fill a barrel. He looked like an East End gangster. There was empty space all around him, as if no one wanted to get too close. An exclusion zone. Even Mum was leaning away from him as he lurched towards the camera with a boozy leer on his face stabbing into the wedding cake with a long carving knife.

It felt strange, holding the photograph in my hand, feeling the dull shine of the paper, gazing into the depths of the image. That's him, I thought. That was Dad. Then, all those years ago. Is it the same person? Was it the same person, the same thing? And where was I in that time before I ever existed. Where was I then? What was I? Was I nothing, no thing at all? A non-existent thing? How could that be?

I put the photograph back in the box and shut the bureau.

Alex turned up a little later, about ten o'clock. By that time I'd done the washing-up, cleaned the kitchen floor, cleared away Dad's beer cans from the night before and emptied the ashtrays, hoovered, and sorted out all the washing. I was sitting in the kitchen when the doorbell rang. I had the radio on, Radio 4. I wasn't really listening but it was nice to hear the sound of quiet voices instead of the local radio racket I had to put up with when Dad was around.

As we moved past the front room into the kitchen, Alex glanced through the door and then looked away. I turned off the radio. She put her bag on the table and sat down with a sigh.

‘This is ridiculous, Martyn. All of it. It's ridiculous. You can't go on like this. You've got to call the police. You can't just pretend that nothing's happened.'

‘It's not that easy.'

‘Oh, come on,' she said. ‘Nobody's going to blame you for your dad's death. It was an accident. You didn't mean it. The police will understand that. All you've got to do is tell them what happened.'

We were back on the same old stuff again. I said, ‘And how am I going to explain why it took me so long to report it? It's been over twelve hours, now.'

She frowned. ‘I don't know ... you panicked, you didn't know what to do, you were frightened ...'

‘Traumatised?' I suggested.

‘Right, you were traumatised. People do all sorts of strange things when they're in shock. It was a terrible experience. You were too shocked to think straight.'

‘For twelve hours?'

‘Why not?'

I looked at her. ‘And what about you?'