The Late Hector Kipling (37 page)

Was not . . . Was not . . . er . . .

Was not what? Not a girl? Not in the bath? Not human? Not important? I stab at the page with my pen and screw it up like the rest. My coffee arrives and I begin to count the bubbles. I think of Kirk and how he used to blow on his pint. I take a sip, scald my lip, and think of Sofia. And then Eleni. My poor poor Eleni. My angel Eleni. My one true . . . Oh fuck, what a load of bollocks.

I flood my coffee with sugar and examine the spoon. I gaze at my face in the back of it and think of Kirk. But what do I think? Do I think of his face? The way he moved? His choice of clothes? The things he said? The way his eyes crinkled up when he . . . I don’t know. All I can say is that I think of Kirk. Fat lot of good it is to Kirk, all this thinking of him. They say that a soul is sustained in the memories of those they leave behind. But what kind of a life is that? A life of yesterdays. A life of not actually being there. No new stories, no new jokes. No prospects, no hope. In other words: Death. I place the spoon on the saucer and watch it dry. It doesn’t take long.

My body, it seems, is no longer my own. My brain and bones are beset by parasites, and my bowels are being devoured by something huge and ticklish; six furry legs, two million eyes, needle-sharp teeth and an outer shell of blister and scab. I shall soon be hollow. And once I’m hollow, then pain can move in. Real pain can move in and put its feet up on the ledges of my spine. Can’t wait.

‘Another coffee, sir?’

‘Why not?’

And off he goes. Can’t wait.

Now that I know where Monger lives I should just call the police. I don’t know why I’m sat here in this pink caff, dealing with it all by myself. But what can I do? What proof do I have? And besides, better that it’s me watching him than him watching me.

I haven’t really stopped shaking since he told me he was going to kill me. I’m not sure that I want to stop shaking. There’s something gratifying about the knowledge that someone cares enough about you to want to kill you. It’s like Lenny was saying about how death is only abstract. But there’s nothing abstract about Monger. On the contrary, Monger is magnificently real. If only we could do this with cancer: hide out in some cafe across the road and follow it to see where it goes.

I fall to my knees and hang my head down into my lap. I wish I could see myself from ten feet away. I think I’d quite like to paint it.

‘Another coffee, sir?’

‘No, thank you,’ I say, raising my eyes, ‘no thank you very much, I don’t think I should. Do you? I mean, really?’

‘So do you want the bill?’

‘Oh yes,’ I say, ‘the bill.’

‘Well, it’s six coffees. That’s five pounds forty’ He looks at my feet.

I begin to go through my pockets, but then I remember I’m wearing a dressing gown and that I only have two pockets to go through and both of them are empty, save for the odd tissue. I should have lobbed a few bob into my hood as I left the flat, but Monger was making his move and there was no time for thoughts of financing the pursuit.

‘Er . . .’ I say, I er . . . don’t really . . .’ And that’s when I see him again. The door opens and out he comes, all dressed in black and cream, like the Monger of old. Tie pin, cufflinks, handkerchief, spats. Spats! He takes a left and heads off towards Platt Street.

‘Can I pay you later?’ I say to the clod in the apron.

‘Later?’ he says, palms askance.

‘Like tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow?’

I hesitate. And then: ‘Oh never mind.’

‘Never mind?’

‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘never you mind.’ I stand and push past him on my way to the door.

‘Five pounds forty!’ he shouts, obviously not understanding my suggestion of a deferred payment.

‘Right,’ I mutter and stumble out onto the street.

Monger’s climbing into a taxi and I look around for a taxi of my own so that I can yell, ‘Follow that taxi!’ But this, alas, isn’t Manhattan and I’m left in the middle of the street with some blue-faced waiter
swearing at me, screaming something about care in the community and Baroness Thatcher.

I let it go.

I haven’t climbed a wall since I was in my teens. And I’m not really climbing a wall right now. I’m climbing a drainpipe, but my feet are on the wall. My poor bleeding feet. The belt of my gown has come undone, exposing my belly to the October winds. I don’t know what makes me think I’m up to this, but here I am, about to break into private property. I really don’t know what it is – perhaps it’s the season. I’m about twenty-five feet up in the air, the sort of height that’s gonna kill you if you have to come down from it in a hurry. It occurs to me that the higher I climb, the more unstable the drainpipe’s gonna be – the more unstable I’m gonna be. There’s a small extension on the building below and as I draw level with the roof of this extension I panic and attempt a leap. Messy and uncalculated. I catch my breath, fling out my arms and, like an Alsatian impersonating a kitten, smash into the side of the roof, all paws and snout. But no matter; I’m not dead. I’m still up in the air. I’m still safe, dangling there at a fatal altitude.

I lower myself into Monger’s bathroom from the window, via the sink, and onto the floor. I take a few minutes to grimace and wheeze and growl and whine, attending to the sundry agonies of my flesh. Only my arse is intact. My feet, my hands, my elbows, knees, knuckles, nipples, thighs, groin, face and neck are burning and bleeding with such ferocity that I can’t believe they pass unheard in the flat below. I have so many pains I don’t know where to begin. And so I join them all up into one big pain. But the one big pain is more than I can take and I think I might pass out, so I pester them all back to their respective corners and resolve to monitor their intensities in a formal and alphabetical order. Since, as I mentioned, my arse is intact, I meditate first upon the pain in my balls. Jesus Harold Christ! I wonder if Monger’s got some morphine kicking about. I wouldn’t put it past him.

For a while I toy with the idea of running a lukewarm bath, just to bathe some of these wounds and offset infection, but taking a bath, however brief, in the flat of a lunatic who is hell bent on killing me would be madness. But isn’t this madness anyway, just being here? Why the fuck did I think that this was a sensible idea? I know that I need to nail this fruitcake and remove him from the board. I need to leave no space between arrest and imprisonment. And then I need to flee the country. But, fucking hell, this is total insanity. At school they never taught us what to do when your life is threatened by an irrational and sinister dandy. Or maybe they did. Maybe I was just off sick that day.

Were it not for a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bottle of Listerine and a scattered display of shaving gear, you might assume there was no one living here. There’s a bar of Imperial Leather soap by the bath and a toilet roll on top of the cistern, but apart from that, nothing to report.

The kitchen is another matter. The kitchen stinks. The walls are damp and scorched and the floor’s as filthy as a market pavement. A mob of flies patrol the one bare light bulb, to and fro, as though they’ve found their answer. On the work surfaces a hundred or so other flies lie still and brittle. Others, some of them only half dead, languish in the mould of an old salad, or tremble on the creased green skin of a forgotten coffee. I linger in the doorway, look at my feet and, having seen enough, decide to go no further.

The living room, for me at least, has no precedent. The first thing I notice – for how could I not? – is the cacophonous ticking of some fifteen to twenty battered junk-shop clocks. The clocks are dispersed, with no apparent method, throughout the room, on various surfaces, and half a dozen of them are strewn across the floor. The largest clock is about a foot and a half tall and sits on top of an old mahogany wardrobe. It is the only clock that tells anything approaching the correct time. The rest are buckled and grazed, missing faces or hands, or sometimes both; but all of them, no matter what their condition, are vibrant and ticking. The sound is appalling. In the middle of the room
sits a threadbare scarlet sofa bed that hasn’t been put away and a dozen bottles scattered either side. The wooden floor is stuck with a discordant collage of rugs and wrappers. There is a black butcher’s bicycle, and a blue bubblegum machine. There is a birdcage filled with billiard balls and nails, and over by the fireplace, a small dead tree. Two grimy windows, caked with pigeon shit and soot, offer up only a hint of the buildings opposite. The stench is crippling.

In another corner stands a full-length mirror and just to the left of that, two long clothes rails hung with cellophane-wrapped shirts and blazers. Along the bottom of the rails a dozen pairs of expensive shoes are lined up in neat rows. Leaned up against the adjacent wall are eight clean umbrellas, six canes, a basket of fine hats and a small Moroccan box filled with collar studs, cufflinks, tie pins, watch straps, signet rings, playing cards and dice. It is the only part of the flat that bears any relation to the man I met. Elsewhere there is such a rich jumble of arcane ephemera that I find it difficult to know where to begin. With the stuffed mice in the fireplace? With the red fire bucket filled with dentures and bells? With the fingernails on the mantelpiece, or the rocking horse with the rotting plastic saddle and the eye sockets filled with fag ash and sand? It is the home of a chronic sociopath and my tongue and gums are as dry as a Victorian flannel.

Another corner of the room is festooned with magician’s silks and tinsel bunting. There are twenty-five to thirty canvases stacked against the wall, and a work in progress clamped into an antique easel. The work in progress (if you can call it progress – or work, for that matter) is a disastrous soup of rust and pink paste, trying to pass itself off as a representation of the human face. A smear of burnt sienna which, since it cleaves the face in two, I take to be the nose, is highlighted with what looks like wax and vicious flecks of schoolroom chalk. The mouth is an idle crimson gash, and the gas-blue swirls, which must be the eyes, bob and frolic beneath an angry amber brow. It makes Dubuffet look like Raphael.

Upon investigation, the other canvases are equally abominable. It looks as though they were painted by a child, or a robot, or a monkey; or some kind of robotic monkey child. Were it not for the noose I might have missed the point altogether. But since there is a noose – an infantile umber line and loop, cross hatched with jagged, unmixed lampblack acrylic – the point is inescapable. Since there is this noose in every last one of these diabolical stabs at portraiture, I am left in no doubt whatsoever regarding Monger’s subject matter. For they are surely, are they not, painfully misbegotten renderings of his late, purportedly murdered father, Mr Godfrey Bolton. And you know what? No one could really blame me if I just squatted down and shat right here on one of the numerous ticking clocks that populate this filthy wooden floor.

Instead I collapse back upon the sofa bed and stare up at the ceiling. I won’t even begin to describe the ceiling. Suffice it to say that there have been times – and even within recent living memory – when I have felt considerably better than I do in this moment. Is this it, then? Is this what I am dealing with? The envy and rancour of a failed artist? I use the term loosely. I mean most failed artists are usually some kind of artist to begin with. Kirk, for example. At least Kirk’s ill-judged cutlery pictures were halfway there in terms of hyper-realism, when it came to representing knives, forks and spoons. At least you were left in no doubt as to the intention. He was simply misguided in his belief that anyone might be remotely interested in such insular interpretations of domestic flotsam. But with Monger it really is a titanic struggle to apply the epithet of artist in the first place, before you can even begin to broach any discussions about the application of the word failed. Indeed when it comes to Monger, the word failed seems to suffice in every respect; so why concern oneself with any mention of the word artist, which is clearly wide of the mark, no matter how you look at it? What a fuck-up the man is. What a forty-eight-carat fuck-up on every level. And his bed stinks of piss.

Fearing that I might pass out with the pain of my wounds and the
turmoil of my spirit, I raise myself up from the bed and for some reason attempt, for the first time ever, the lotus position. A ridiculous idea, of course, and one which I can safely say will never be revisited for as long as I live. As I’m attempting to wrestle my left heel out of the pillow of my right thigh in an attempt to forgo the early stages of a thrombotic seizure, my eyes are suddenly drawn to a curious item, partly concealed by one of the lengths of frayed hemp that pass for curtains in Monger’s Boschian dungeon. At the end of the row of fancy shoes there is a small battered blue suitcase, with two stickers in the upper left-hand corner, boasting of bygone excursions to the Trough of Boland and the Keswick Motor Museum. Recognizing it immediately, I attempt, and then fail, to swallow. The suitcase belongs to Mum. In the first moment of realization I wonder why on earth Monger would have bothered to snaffle Mum’s tatty valise. I mean isn’t it enough for him to make off with Mum and Dad’s fifteen thousand pounds in cash and Sparky’s scabrous cadaver?

And then, in the next moment it hits me. Oh, how it hits me. Of course, of course. I walk over to the case and squat down on the sticky floor. After a few fumbled seconds of resistance, the clasp finally succumbs and I take the lid between my fingertips and lift it away from the base. And there they are: fifteen identical, slipshod portraits of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the fucking Second. Fifteen neatly bundled bricks of fifty-quid notes squeezed between the burgundy nylon pleats of Mum’s forgotten travel bag. If Quentin Tarantino ever saw fit to set a film in the North of England, wherein a twee clique of Lancastrian pensioners pulled off some spectacular and lucrative crack deal, then it might very well look something like this. I take a few deep breaths. ‘Sometimes people forget to breathe,’ said Bianca the other day. Well, Bianca, let me tell you, chuck, right now I’m not one of those people. I’m breathing. Oh yeah, I’m breathing all right. I may even pass out with how much I’m breathing.