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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF CAMPBELL ARMSTRONG

“Campbell Armstrong is thriller writing’s best-kept secret.” —The Sunday Times

“Armstrong is among the most intriguing of blockbuster writers … near to unputdownable.” —GQ

“While touching on suspense with a skill to please hard-core thriller addicts, he manages to please people who … warm to readable novels of substance.” —Daily Mail

“Armstrong’s skill is not just an eye for a criminally good tale but a passion for the people that will populate it.” —The Scotsman

“Subtle and marvelous … This is a dazzling book.” —The Daily Telegraph on Agents of Darkness

“A consummate psychological thriller … Without doubt, Armstrong is now in the front rank of thriller writers.” —Books on Heat

“Armstrong has outdone both Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett.” —James Patterson on Jig

“A full throttle adventure thriller.” —The Guardian on Mambo

“A wonderful puzzle that keeps us guessing right to the end.” —Publishers Weekly on Mazurka

Assassins and Victims

Campbell Armstrong

For Eileen

with love and gratitude

1

Eric

I got this room through a man in the Territorial Army. His name was Bayonet. One night he came up to me in the drill hall and said, ‘What-ho, me old soldier, I hear you’re looking for a billet.’

That was right, I said. The room I was in at the time didn’t suit me. I’m not a fussy person; but the woman downstairs cooked cabbage soup every night and someone was always flushing the cistern, through the wall.

Bayonet had this little stick he kept tapping against his leg. ‘Tell you what. My sister’s got a room she’ll let for seventy bob a week and no questions arsked.’

I was earning twelve pounds a week clear at the factory in Park Royal; so seventy shillings wasn’t really a lot to pay.

When can I see it, I asked.

‘Right now, me old cock,’ said Bayonet.

We took a bus to Cricklewood and sat upstairs because Bayonet wanted to smoke, although I don’t smoke myself. He liked to tell stories of the time when he’d been a regular soldier. One of his mates was peeling potatoes in Cyprus, just outside their hut, when a sniper shot off his balls. I didn’t think that was very funny, but Bayonet began to shake with laughter. I imagined that would have been very painful.

I liked the room at once. It has this large window that lets in a lot of light, which is good, because I can’t stand dark places. I looked around carefully. You have to be very sure. I once had a room that looked nice, it had this clean, shining appearance, but there were woodlice under the sink. So I examined the skirting for dry rot and looked under the bed.

There was a chair, a sofa, a wardrobe and a bed. Bayonet sat down on the bed and sighed. He seemed nervous. There was a sink and a little gas stove behind a curtain. The only thing I didn’t like was the colour of the walls. Pink’s a woman’s colour. It makes you think of women.

I wanted to test the bed, but Bayonet was lying on top of it.

‘Well now, what d’yer think?’ he asked.

I looked under the sink but it was dark and I couldn’t make anything out. But at least I couldn’t see anything that moved. I can’t stand things that just move.

‘What are yer looking under there for, me old cock, a bit of fluff?’

It looked quite clean, I said. I went to the window. You can see down into a little concrete yard and over the wall you can see part of the yard next door. A lane runs along the backs of the houses and there’s a street lamp with a blue light. On top of the wall little pieces of broken glass were shining.

‘Will yer take it then?’

Yes, I said. I liked it very much.

Bayonet got up and put his arm round my shoulder. He was smelling of sweat and aftershave. I’m sensitive to smells. And to noises.

‘You can have a bit of skirt up here any time you like – and no questions arsked. Eh? Eh?’

He began to nudge me with his elbow.

I wondered if I’d have to see his sister first. Perhaps she wouldn’t want me as a tenant. But I couldn’t see any trouble there. I’ve got good references. They say I’m a model tenant, clean, fastidious, quiet, considerate. She couldn’t quarrel with my references.

‘I’ll fix up that end,’ said Bayonet. ‘Don’t worry about her.’

I had another look round. I’ve had fourteen rooms in the last two years. This time I wanted to be sure.

‘There’s a month’s rent to pay in advance,’ he said.

He gave me his address and I wrote it down on a slip of paper. I had money in a post office savings account, more than enough to cover a month’s rent. We shook hands on the deal, I promised to send him the money next day, and then we left.

Yes, I liked the place. I looked forward to living there.

A week later I moved in. I rang the front doorbell and a woman came out. She looked at my two suitcases and she said, ‘Sorry, love, I’m not buying anything today.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not selling.’ I could see that the suitcases had confused her. I stepped inside and put the cases down.

She put her hands on her hips. ‘Look, let’s get one thing straight. This is number fourteen Ponsonby Gardens –’

‘That’s right,’ I said, and I began to climb the stairs up to my room. I’ve got a good memory. I’d only been in the house once and I knew where to go. She came chasing up behind me.

‘Where the hell are you going?’ she asked.

‘To my room,’ I said.

‘Your room? Your room?’

By then I had pushed the door open. I began to unpack. There’s no sense in wasting time over these things. Well, the sooner you get it done the sooner you can get settled in properly. I opened the wardrobe and saw mothballs there. That was considerate of her, I thought.

‘Moths can eat clothes so quickly,’ I said.

‘Wait a minute,’ she said. She sat upon the bed and stared at me. She was a little woman with long red hair and a black dress that was covered with bits and pieces of thread, as if she’d been lying on a carpet or on a quilt.

‘How did you know about this room?’ she asked.

‘Bayonet brought me here. I sent him a month’s rent.’

‘Bayonet?’

‘Your brother.’

‘My brother!’

Her mouth was open. She had lots of fillings in her teeth and her tongue was yellow. She simply stared at me and then said,

‘The bastard. He’s got a bleeding nerve.’

I emptied one suitcase and began on the other. I could see that I wasn’t going to have enough space to pack everything away and I wondered if I could ask about getting a little chest of drawers or something like that.

‘Told you he was my brother, did he?’

I looked at her. ‘Why, yes,’ I said.

‘What a bleeding nerve.’

And she went out of the room, closing the door.

I finished the second suitcase and felt thirsty. I hadn’t brought any groceries with me and so I went downstairs to see if I could borrow some tea and milk. I don’t take sugar, you see, because it can affect the heart.

She was in her kitchen, just standing there staring, and the kettle was boiling away on the cooker.

‘Can I borrow some tea?’ I asked.

She looked at me absent-mindedly and then threw a hand up in the air. ‘Go on, have anything you like. You might as well.’

I thought that was generous. But I only wanted tea and milk and that was all I took, although I liked the look of the biscuits on the table. But it’s wrong to take too many liberties with someone who’s being kind.

I went back up to my room. Yes, I liked the place. I filled up my kettle and lit the gas and looked out of the window. In the yard next door I saw a black mongrel move about. It was chained to the wall, although the chain was a long one. I’ve never cared for dogs much, but I don’t dislike them either. I mean, I wouldn’t go out of my way to hurt one. Well, not really.

The woman came into the room without so much as a knock on the door. I might have been changing my clothes for all she cared.

‘Bayonet, that’s who you said?’

‘He’s in the Territorials,’ I said.

She began to shake her head back and forward.

‘Well, Jesus, that’s just about the limit. What a cool bastard he is.’

And then she went out again.

I made my tea and sat down to drink it.

When I finished my drink I explored the room carefully. The gas stove had two rings and they were small, but that suited me all right. Living alone, you don’t really need anything large. It would be difficult if you were entertaining somebody, cooking them a meal, but I don’t ever entertain. It’s not that I’ve got anything against it, but whenever I’ve asked anyone from the factory to visit me – either Charlie or Nigel – they’ve always been too busy to come. I don’t mind. Charlie’s engaged for a start and Nigel, well, he’s keen on sport and spends his evenings at a badminton club.

The wardrobe has a design carved on the wood round the door. Not figures or animals but flowers, thick-petalled flowers. Inside the door there’s a full-length mirror. I stood and looked at myself. Not out of vanity, you understand, more from curiosity. I’m five feet nine inches tall and round-shouldered. I don’t know why. Perhaps I slouched a lot when I was a boy. I’ve got fair hair that I always keep cut short. It’s healthier and tidier. My face is large and round and my eyes bulge a bit. There might be a medical reason for this, I don’t know. It doesn’t worry me.

I closed the door and examined the rest of the room. There are four blankets on the bed. And the sheets aren’t cold linen but warm flannel. I like that. You don’t shiver when you get in at night. The mattress is soft. I remembered Bayonet talking about having a bit of skirt up in the room. But I’ve never really had much luck with women. The reason, the real reason, is that I haven’t tried very hard. I took Gladys Millar to the pictures once, but that was only because I wanted to see My Fair Lady and I knew that she was going anyway. We held hands. Hers were damp and sticky from ice-cream and mine began to sweat. When we came out they were soaked in perspiration. Gladys tried to kiss me in a dark lane but she smelled so much of cigarettes that I was almost sick. Why don’t you feel my breasts, she was asking. Feel how soft they are. Lay your head against them. Why don’t you. Come on, come on. But I didn’t like that very much. Anyway, she left the factory not long after and went off to have a baby.

What I like most about the room is the window. The view isn’t much, but the window is nice. It takes up most of the wall, and it’s not just one big pane of glass but lots of little ones. It has a sort of old-fashioned look. I’ve seen windows like that in old pictures.

I sat on the bed and looked at the window. Other rooms I’ve had didn’t have decent windows at all. Some of them were small, some were bolted tight shut, and some would open easily but were difficult to close again. You can get very annoyed with things like windows – when they don’t do what you want them to. I suppose they’re mostly meant for seeing through. But they should open and shut just the same.

I don’t get angry very easily, I want to make that clear. I’m really mild-tempered and I don’t have a ruthless streak. But when something irritates me over a period of time, then I can really get angry.

That might explain everything that follows a bit better.

I washed up my empty cup and cleaned the teapot in the sink. And then she came to the door again.

She was smiling this time. She said,

‘I suppose now you are here, love, we might as well make the best of it.’

I didn’t really follow that. But I’ve found that it’s best to keep quiet when you don’t understand anything.

‘My name’s Agnes,’ she said and we shook hands. ‘What’s yours?’

‘Eric Billings,’ I said.

‘Well, Eric, how do you like your room?’

I said that I liked it very much indeed. It suited me. I told her what I thought about the window. And then I mentioned the dog, the big black mongrel, that I’d seen.

‘That’s Rex,’ she said. ‘He belongs to Mrs Peluzzi next door. Poor dear. Her old man dropped dead last month.’

‘Dropped dead?’ I asked.

‘Well, the dog’s the only company she’s got left now.’ Agnes shook her head gravely. ‘Mind you, she could do herself up a treat and get another man. But she’s Italian, you know, and you know what they’re like.’

I said that I hadn’t been to Italy, although there was an Italian, Benito, at the factory.

‘Factory? D’you work in a factory, dear?’

She was on the bed again. I thought this a bit of a liberty. She had crossed her legs. The tops of her stockings were full of holes.

‘Over at Park Royal,’ I said.

‘That’s handy for the buses,’ she said. ‘What do you do there?’

I told her how the big cardboard boxes come down a conveyor belt and how I have to fill them with smaller pieces of corrugated cardboard. I explained that there was a knack in it. You have to fold the corrugated paper with a one-inch overlap, otherwise it won’t fit the box properly. I’d found this out for myself. But I could see that she wasn’t taking it in properly. I tried to make it more simple for her but she said,

‘Now isn’t that interesting? Well, I never.’

And then she smiled and went out of the room and back downstairs, saying she had left potatoes on the gas. I walked up and down the room, feeling a real sense of ownership. It was very pleasant. The window was red from the afternoon sun.

What a pity that everything went wrong so soon.

2

I said that I wasn’t the kind of man who gets angry very easily. And that’s true. You can’t do much in this life if you go around losing your temper. I’ve always said that. But there’s a limit to everything.

I’ll come to that later.

After I’d tidied the place up, I went out to walk round Cricklewood. I’ve always lived in Harlesden or Neasden, so Cricklewood was a new district to me. I could see that it was grey and a bit drab, just like anywhere else. I saw a lot of Irish going into the public houses. They looked red, as if they’d just come from a steaming bath, and they were wearing black suits with wide shoulders.

I don’t drink much myself, just the occasional lemonade shandy at the factory social club. Once I’d taken three pints of beer at a wedding and was sick down the front of a lady’s dress. It was embarrassing.

Out of curiosity I went into one of the bars. It was noisy and cramped inside and there was this odd smell, a sort of mixture of carbolic tobacco and drink. I just stood there a minute looking round, and then I left again. But I didn’t walk home straight away. You have to explore new districts. I walked around the streets and went into the railway station to watch the trains. There’s something fascinating about trains, I think it must be the fact that they’re so noisy and yet it’s a noise you get used to after a time. You listen for a bit and then, though the sound is still there, you stop hearing it. Unconscious, that’s the word.

When it started to rain I went back to my room.

Agnes was talking on the telephone in the hallway. It’s in a gloomy little alcove. She had a drink in one hand and a cigarette was burning on her lips and ash spilled down the front of her black dress. Her feet were bare and dirty. I stopped and looked at her. I didn’t mean to, it’s bad manners to stare, I know that, but I couldn’t help it somehow.

She covered the telephone with her hand and looked at me.

‘Well, Eric?’ she asked.

‘Oh nothing,’ I said.

‘Did you want to ask me something?’ And she grinned at me slyly, crossing her legs one over the other.

‘Actually, I was going up to my room,’ I said.

She took a drink from her glass and coughed. Well, she rattled more than she coughed, and I wondered what was inside her chest that sounded so loose.

And then she began to speak into the telephone again.

I went up to my room and sat on the bed. It was really very odd, but meeting her in the hallway seemed to have upset me. I couldn’t get the picture of her legs and that sly grin out of my mind. I shut my eyes to make it go away, but it only became sharper. I wouldn’t say it was unpleasant, no, but I didn’t want to go around with it in my mind. You’ve got to have some control over what you think about, after all. I boiled water for tea.

As I sat in the chair drinking my tea, I could hear her speak from the bottom of the stairs. You’ve got a right bloody nerve, she was saying. When do I see some of the money?

I wondered if she owned the house, or if she was just the caretaker. She didn’t look like a landlady to me, and I’ve got some experience in the matter. You develop a nose for landladies. They seem to be shifty, always watching you, always asking questions and seeing that you don’t do anything wrong in their house. Agnes seemed like a caretaker, except that she didn’t seem to take much care. You only had to look at her to see that. Though you shouldn’t judge from appearances. Sometimes you can make the most awful mistakes. King, for instance, the man who owns the factory, wears a boiler suit and looks like any ordinary workman. But he isn’t of course. He likes to think he is.

It began to get dark and the house became silent. I hadn’t seen or heard any of the other tenants. But that’s how I like it to be. I undressed and got into bed and lay with my eyes open, just gazing up at the window. I liked the room. It was warm and cosy, although I hadn’t needed to put on the electric fire so far.

Then I fell asleep.

Off and on I get this dream. I’ve had it since I was a young boy and it’s never really changed much. I’m lying on a bed in a room I don’t know and when I look up I see that the ceiling’s covered with slugs. They’re moving, but only slowly the way they do. If you didn’t look closely you’d think they were still. And then, one by one, they start to drop off and land on my bed, all over my body and face. You’d think that after so many years the dream wouldn’t be horrible any more, because it’s so familiar. But it is. It’s still horrible.

I had it on my first night in the room. I woke up with my face and body damp. Only a dream, I always say to myself. You’ve got to be reasonable about such things. It isn’t as if they’re real slugs in the real world. Only a dream.

I tried to get back to sleep, but I couldn’t. Because it was just then that I heard it for the first time. That dreadful noise, that whine, which has been the source of all the trouble.

The black mongrel in the next yard was whining. It barked sometimes. Sometimes it growled. It even scratched the wall and rattled its chain. Mostly it just whined, a low whine that rose to a howl and then dropped back to a whine again. I was sure that it couldn’t keep it up. But it did. It did. All night long. I was still staring at the sky, fully awake, and darkness was becoming light in those tiny grey streaks, before the noise stopped and there was silence. Silence at last. I rubbed my eyes, turned over, and slept.

3

I’m not the sort of person who goes looking for trouble. Well, it isn’t wise to do that. But when I woke up on the Sunday morning I put on my dressing-gown and went down to speak to Agnes about the dog. I mean, you can’t have that sort of noise at all hours. It isn’t reasonable.

I knocked on her door and waited. After a bit she came out. She was smoking a cigarette and wearing only a nightdress. It was silky and short and I could see right through it to her body. I could see everything, but she didn’t seem to care. She rubbed her eyes and smiled at me. I looked behind her into the room and I could see a man sitting up in the bed. He was wearing a vest and had his hands tucked behind his head. Was it her husband?

‘I don’t want to complain,’ I said. ‘I’m not the type who goes round complaining. But that dog barked all night and I couldn’t sleep.’

Because she was looking at me in this funny way, I pulled my dressing-gown tight. After a minute she laughed as if she thought me stupid.

‘Well?’ she asked. ‘The poor bleeder’s got to have his bark, hasn’t he? How would you like it if somebody told you you had to stop talking?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘That isn’t really the point.’

‘Of course that’s the point,’ she said. She was running her fingers through her red hair, stroking it up and then letting it fall down again. ‘Look, I’ll tell you what it is. Old Rex misses his master, that’s all. He’s only a dog. He can’t be expected to know that old Peluzzi’s dead, can he? Well? Can he?’

I shook my head. She didn’t really see my meaning.

‘But your room looks out to the front,’ I said. ‘Mine looks out on the back yard and I can hear the dog better than you. I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t hear it at all.’

‘He’s got to have his bark. Now, that’s only fair, isn’t it?’

She crossed her legs and smiled at me. Her right knee was moving back and forward, back and forward, and she was pushing her hand through her hair.

The man in the bed shouted something. Agnes winked at me and closed the door. I waited for a bit and then I went up to my room and made tea. I looked out of the window. Standing on tiptoes I could see the dog’s head pressed flat against the concrete of the yard. He was sleeping. Small wonder, I thought. He ought to be sleeping after all that racketing.

I didn’t feel quite right. I had this empty feeling in my stomach. I get that sometimes when I haven’t had eight hours of continual sleep. It’s a bit like indigestion, only worse. It’s worse because there isn’t any pain. I drank the tea and then I felt better. As I dressed I thought about Agnes. Her attitude seemed unreasonable. I mean, she was all right because she didn’t sleep at the back of the house. Because she was all right, she wasn’t worried about me.

I wondered if any of the other tenants had heard it. When you’ve got a genuine complaint you like to share it with somebody else. So I went across the landing and knocked on the door facing mine. Almost at once it was pulled open and a young man in a black sweater was looking at me. He had one of those Chinese moustaches, the kind that droop down over the lips. He had long hair.

I told him my name and explained my business. He was very patient and didn’t interrupt me once. And then when I had finished talking he kept looking at me. He didn’t seem quite all right to me, because he looked as if part of him was absent. Perhaps he was sick. But I don’t know much about illnesses, since I’ve never really had a day’s illness in my life.

After a time he said,

‘You’re quite sure that a dog does exist, are you? The fact is, I’ve got a strange feeling that I’ve heard this all before, do you know the feeling? I don’t really like it much.’

‘But it barked all night long,’ I said. ‘You must have heard it.’

He blinked his large black eyes.

‘The problem really is one of consciousness. One oughtn’t to allow sensory phenomena to impinge upon one’s consciousness to the exclusion of reason. But this is all a bit of a drag, don’t you think?’

He was terribly intelligent. You could see that straight off. I didn’t understand him altogether. I’m not stupid, no, far from it, but my mind works in a different way. He stood there in the door for about a minute and then he added,

‘What I’m trying to say is that you ought to be able to get on top of it all.’

‘But the barking,’ I said. ‘Well, it’s more whining and howling than barking. You must hear it just as clearly as me.’

‘I don’t hear a thing, man,’ he answered.

I went back to my room. I sat on the bed for a time. When I looked out of the window the dog was slopping over a bowl of water. I know that I’m sensitive to noise, very sensitive indeed, but the dog must surely have annoyed somebody as well as me. I watched it for a bit. It drank the water, licked its mouth, and then began to sniff the ground.

I felt sleepy again, but the sun was shining outside. So I decided to go for a stroll. That usually clears the head. I walk quite briskly, which is good for the circulation. I went round the block twice, walked down to the railway station and looked at the trains, and then went to a café in Cricklewood Lane for breakfast.

I ate bacon and eggs and thought about the dog. I’ve never really been fond of dogs. Somehow they make me nervous, the way they sniff round your feet and then stare at you. But I’d never wished any dog harm. Once I’d even had a puppy when I was a boy. It was a little white mongrel with brown markings. I liked it, especially when it came to lick the palm of your hand. But it ran out of the house one morning straight into the path of a truck and was crushed. My mother cleaned up the remains with a brush. She just swept it into the side of the gutter. I didn’t really miss it, except at first, but after a time I forgot. Now I can’t even remember what I called it. It wasn’t Rex anyway, I know that much.

I finished my breakfast and looked up to catch the waitress’s eye so that I could order a pot of tea. I saw then that some of the other people in the café were looking at me. I knew why. Sometimes I think aloud, if you see what I mean. It’s not like talking to yourself, because that means you’re a bit funny, it’s more a sort of saying the things that are running through your head. I must have been doing it then. I smiled at the people who were looking but none of them smiled back. When the waitress brought me a pot of tea I drank it quickly and then left.

I went back to my room with a copy of the Sunday Mirror. I sat in the chair reading it. After a time the young man from the room next door came in. He had combed his long hair back and had tied it with a white ribbon in an old-fashioned style.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said. He sat down on my bed and crossed his legs. For a moment I thought he had fallen asleep but he was only thinking about something. He blinked quickly and said, ‘If the dog really bugs you – now this is an entirely practical suggestion – you could get yourself some earplugs. A certain friend of mine has a pair that I know he’s trying to get rid of, so you could have them dirt cheap.’

This sounded like a good offer to me. But I didn’t want to rush into anything. I might buy the plugs and the dog might not whine any more. Then I’d be left with a pair of useless earplugs. So I said that I’d like a day or two to think about it.

‘I don’t want to push you into anything, man,’ he said. ‘But they might get snapped up.’

I shrugged my shoulders and picked up my Mirror. This was a bit of bluff on my part, because I wanted to look disinterested. That way, you can make it seem as if you don’t care. The young man got up from the bed and stood in the middle of the room for a time. We stared at each other. There was a long silence. He looked away first. I knew then that I’d get the plugs really cheap and that they wouldn’t go to anyone else.

‘Let me know,’ he said, and then went out of the room.

I lay down on the bed and finished reading the Mirror. There were some photographs of girls in it. One of them was wearing a swimsuit, but she was nearly naked. I held the picture up before my eyes and gazed at it. I imagined it to be Gladys Millar and she was saying, feel my breasts. Come on, come on. I imagined putting my hands down on the girl’s breasts and then I could almost feel her hands on my neck. But I put the paper away after that. Sometimes your imagination can be a bad thing, when it isn’t properly controlled and gets out of hand. I lay back and looked up at the ceiling.

I liked the room. In daylight the pink walls and the white ceiling were pleasant and comfortable. I fell asleep for a bit.

When I woke it was late afternoon. I heard Rex bark loudly and I went to the window.

He was jumping up and down at the end of his chain. A woman was putting a bowl of meat in front of him. She was a small woman with short black hair and thick, powerful arms. They were a man’s arms. She was wearing black clothes. I knew it was Mrs Peluzzi straight off. She watched the dog eat and then she turned and went indoors.

After that, there was silence.

4

Cats of course are different altogether. They’re proud and independent and only half-civilised. A dog will come sniffing round when you call its name but a cat will only look at you with disgust. A cat will come to you only when it wants something, but a dog will come almost anytime. Mind you, I don’t like cats all that much either. But if I had to choose between the two, I know which I’d pick.

As I watched Rex finish his dinner I thought about cats. But not for very long, because as soon as the dog had licked his bowl clean he did a disgusting thing. He lifted his leg, wet the ground, and then smelled what he had done. He seemed to take great pleasure in doing this. His pink tongue was flicking out and in and his eyes were fixed to the pool of urine. And then he opened his mouth very wide and shook his head back and flattened himself out on the concrete.

I sat on the bed and picked up my Sunday Mirror again. I was reading the sports pages when there was a knock on the door and Agnes came into the room. She was still wearing her see-through nightdress but on top of this she had a dressing-gown that hung open. She was really a slovenly creature. She had a cigarette stuck in her mouth.

She sat beside me on the bed and said,

‘I hope you’re settling in nicely.’

I then explained to her about the noise of the dog and she smiled sympathetically and dripped her ash on the carpet.

‘Like I said,’ she said, ‘Rex is pining away for his master. Now, I don’t think you want to take too much notice of any noise he might make, because that’s bound to pass. Have you met any of the other tenants yet?’

I told her about the young man.

She said, ‘Oh, Roderick’s a dear. You wouldn’t think so to look at him, but he comes from a wealthy family.’

‘He’s very intelligent,’ I said. I didn’t want to talk about Roderick, I wanted to talk about the dog. But she wasn’t interested.

‘Highly intelligent,’ she said. She looked about for an ashtray and then threw her cigarette into the hearth. I picked it up and stamped it out and then went to the window. Sitting close to her on the bed, I had discovered that she smelled a bit. It wasn’t a strong smell, but because I’m sensitive to smells of all kinds, I had to move away.

She said, ‘I hope you pay your rent on time, Eric.’

‘I’ll pay you once a month, regularly,’ I said.

She nodded her head. Strands of her hair kept slipping about her face. She got up from the bed and stretched her arms. Her nightdress rose up her legs. She wasn’t wearing stockings and I could see dark blue veins around her thighs.

‘I have to go to work tomorrow,’ I said. I knew that wasn’t really relevant, but sometimes I say things that just come into my head. It’s bad habit, because it makes you lose the thread of conversation. It’s one of my few faults really, and I keep saying that I’m going to be more careful in future.

‘Do you like to get up early?’ she asked.

‘I’m usually dressed by seven,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘an early bird.’

I laughed. She looked at me strangely and then laughed herself, although she didn’t seem to be laughing at the same thing as me. But while we were laughing together I felt that I liked her. You can never be sure with people, though. You never quite know what you’re getting. With rooms it’s different, because you can always look under the sink and tap the skirting, but you can’t do anything like that with people.

She sat down again and took another cigarette from her dressing-gown. I had to open the window. Rex barked from the yard and for a second I was afraid that he was starting up again. But he only barked once.

‘It’s cold in here,’ she said.

I did some of my breathing exercises at the open window.

‘It’s a funny thing,’ she said, ‘but I feel that you’re not quite at ease with me, are you, Eric?’

‘At ease?’

‘You seem all sort of nervy.’

‘Ah, well,’ I said.

She puffed at her cigarette.

‘Do you know what I mean, love?’

I didn’t like the way she seemed to be getting personal. Gladys Millar had been a bit like that before she went off to have her baby. She kept coming up to me in the canteen and sitting at my table and I saw how she was getting fatter all the time. I thought that she was just putting on weight, I didn’t dream it was because of a baby. But she said things to me that put me off my dinner. This annoyed me, because the canteen food is of a high quality. Besides, it was a waste of money. She kept saying personal kinds of things. She asked what colour was my underwear and did I ever stain it. She asked if I’d like to put my hand up her knickers. She asked if I wanted to have her and did I ever wank thinking about her. In the end I had to avoid her by going to a café near the factory where the food was inferior and more expensive, but it was worth it just for the peace of mind I got.

‘Do you know what I mean, love?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

‘You’re not a poove, are you? I’ve got nothing against pansies, you know. Some of my best friends are that way inclined, so you needn’t be ashamed.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, no.’

‘Just so long as we get that straight,’ she said. ‘I mean, you could entertain your boyfriends up here, it wouldn’t bother me one bit.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I said I wasn’t.’

‘We’ve had queers here before,’ she said. ‘I draw the line at sadists, though.’

I sat down on the chair and stared at her. She was leaning back across the bed with her knees raised up and her arms by her sides.

I said something about the dog and how it had disturbed my rest.

She said, ‘You must pop down for a cup of tea sometime.’

I gazed up at the ceiling for a bit. Then she straightened herself and walked over to the door.

‘I could speak to Mrs Peluzzi herself,’ I said.

‘You don’t want to do that, darling. Mrs Peluzzi’s still in mourning and she wouldn’t thank you for complaining about Rex. Just forget all about it. It’ll pass.’

After she had gone I felt exhausted. I didn’t care for the way she had become personal all of a sudden. It was a bit too much for me. I believe that you’ve got to keep yourself to yourself. If you go around probing into other people’s business, you can get a bad reputation. The Italian at the factory, Benito, asks questions all the time. He doesn’t ask others, just me. How many women you raped this week, eh? How many fall down at your feet begging you for it, eh? That kind of thing goes over the limit. Now I just don’t answer him any more. If he hasn’t got a personal life of his own, he’s not going to share any of mine.

I boiled two eggs and had some buttered toast with them. And then, at eight-thirty, I went to bed.

Rex woke me just before midnight. I sat up. I could hear him whining, his chain rattling, his claws scraping the wall. I knew he missed his master, but I couldn’t feel any real sympathy for him. I just sat there in the dark and listened to this awful whine. It was impossible to get any sleep. I got out of bed and turned on the light and made a pot of tea. But I didn’t enjoy that either. I sat down in the chair and tried to think of other things, so that I could take my mind off the din. But the noise fixed itself on to me. After a time it seemed to be coming from inside my head. I opened my door and went on to the landing. The house was dark and utterly quiet. I went downstairs and stood in the corridor.

A clock began to chime midnight.

I heard voices coming from Agnes’s room. One of them was hers, the other a man’s. I just stood there listening to the hum of their conversation without really hearing what they were saying.

And then a door was opened and the hall was suddenly alight.

‘On a midnight prowl, Eric?’ Agnes asked.

I closed my eyes. This time she didn’t have any clothes on at all.

Still with my eyes closed I said,

‘It’s Rex, I can’t sleep.’

And then I turned away and went quickly back upstairs. When I reached the landing I could hear her laugh. I closed the door of my room. The room was filled with the noise of Rex.

I lay down on the bed and pulled the pillow over my head. But that wasn’t any good. I couldn’t get rid of the sound. I couldn’t get rid of it.

5

I fell asleep on the bus to Park Royal with the result that I went past my stop. I woke up, realised what had happened, and rang the bell. The conductor became very annoyed.

‘Thass my job, mister, thass not your job,’ he said.

When the bus stopped I jumped off and ran all the way to the factory. I’d never been late before. I was proud of my timecard, because I always clocked on with at least eight minutes to spare. I knew, you see, that King himself looked at all the cards every week, and he had only to glance at mine to see how keen I was. Then, if there was any promotion going, I’d stand a good chance. Not that I was discontented with what I was doing, far from it, but you’ve got to be shrewd enough to look for opportunities. So I clocked on with eight minutes to spare with good reason.

The gatekeeper asked me if I couldn’t get out of the nest that morning. I punched my time. It was eight-twenty. I was twenty minutes late. I didn’t stop to ask him what he meant by ‘nest’. I hurried into my overalls and went to the belt. I stand at Number Three in Section Ten. Section Ten is packing, corrugated packing, and Number Three is the square in which I stand.

I worked extra hard until the tea break at ten and when I went into the canteen Benito came up to me and said,

‘The gay life, it is killing you, Eric.’

I stirred my tea and didn’t answer. He laughed and punched me on the spine but I didn’t want him to see that he’d hurt me. And then Nigel and Charlie came over. They were giggling together.

‘King’s looking for you,’ Charlie said. Charlie’s a big broad man with fair hair and freckles. ‘He wants to see you on the double.’

‘You’re for the high jump,’ Nigel said.

My hand began to shake. I didn’t really believe them, because they’d been giggling. Sometimes I think they take me for a fool. But I couldn’t stop my hand shaking.

‘You’re trembling,’ Charlie said. ‘You’ve been abusing yourself again, haven’t you?’

‘You haven’t been reading your Baden-Powell, have you?’ Nigel asked.

‘That’s very naughty,’ Charlie said. ‘You should read two chapters every night, Eric, you naughty boy.’

‘What does King want me for?’ I asked. I didn’t believe a word of it.

‘He gets thirsty,’ said Nigel. ‘He wants some of your blood.’

‘You’re having me on,’ I said.

‘Cross my heart,’ Charlie said. ‘He was looking for you only a moment ago. You’ve got to go upstairs at once.’

‘No,’ I said. I began to tell them that I’d fallen asleep on the bus, but Nigel said that I could pull the other leg. I finished my tea. Now they were looking serious. I got up from the table.

‘You’d better hurry, mate,’ Charlie said.

‘You don’t want to keep King waiting,’ Nigel said.

I went upstairs to King’s office. I still didn’t really believe them, but they seemed serious. King has a little office with a window that looks into the factory floor. Sometimes you can see his face there, staring down at his workers. Sometimes you can see him bent over his desk.

He had a new secretary that morning. His secretaries seem to come and go very quickly. They never stay longer than a month.

‘Mr King,’ I said.

She was chewing a pencil. She didn’t even look at me. She just nodded her head towards King’s door. I went straight through.

King was sitting behind his desk. He was wearing his boiler suit and looking at some large sheets of blue paper that were spread out in front of him. They looked like maps or diagrams.

‘You wanted me to see you, Mr King,’ I said.

He’s a very big man with a huge stomach that comes out from the rest of his body, as if he’s got a pillow stuffed up there. It doesn’t look genuine. He has great hands that are grimy and his face is covered with spots and pocks. He looked up at me after a minute and narrowed his eyes.

‘Who the hell are you?’ he asked.

‘I stand at Number Three in Section Ten, Mr King,’ I said.

‘What the hell does that mean?’ he asked.

‘Corrugated packing.’

‘Why should I want to see you?’

‘I was twenty minutes late this morning,’ I said. ‘I know you’ll see that for yourself when you look at the timecards, but I’d like to explain.’

He brought his two large hands together with a thump. I started to tell him about Rex and about how he barked, keeping me from sleeping, and how he was just pining for his dead master, Mr Peluzzi, who had dropped dead not long ago. I told him that the situation would change in the near future when Rex got over his loss. I was going to tell him about Agnes and how she went around without clothes on, but I stopped myself in time. I managed to explain how I was sensitive to noise. I got the impression all this time that he wasn’t really listening, because while I was speaking he picked up his telephone and dialled a number and started to talk to the person at the other end of the line. However, I kept talking until I’d finished.

He put his telephone down and stared at his papers. I could see that he was really concentrating on them, his forehead was damp and his face was tight, and I could feel something of his tremendous energy and dedication. For a moment I wished that he would give me the chance to show him that I could concentrate just as hard, that I could be a great asset to the firm. But just then the hooter sounded and the machines started to work again.

He looked up.

‘Jesus Christ, are you still here?’ he asked.

I didn’t know what to say to him. I thought he had been aware of me in the office. I started to move towards the door.

‘Leave,’ he said.

His secretary was slurping coffee and staring at her fingers. She glanced at me, twisted her mouth, and then blew her nose on a piece of tissue. I went downstairs to the lavatory.

Seeing King at work had impressed me. He was so single-minded. It was the same kind of approach that I gave to putting the pieces of corrugated, folded with a one-inch overlap, into the cardboard boxes.

While I was doing up the tin buttons of my overalls, I saw that my name had been written on the lavatory wall. The writing said: Who has the biggest cock in the factory? ERIC BILLINGS HAS.

Benito could have written it. Or Nigel, or Charlie. I tried to rub it off with my sleeve but it only looked worse afterwards. I couldn’t imagine any of them writing the same thing about Mr King.

I went back to my place and worked hard for the rest of the day.

Sometimes you can find some kind of escape in your work.

6

I fried three sausages that night for my supper. After I’d eaten and washed up, Roderick came into my room. He was carrying a brown paper bag.

‘I’ve got the earplugs you wanted,’ he said.

He opened the bag and brought out a piece of wire that had corks at each end.

‘My friend’s prepared to let them go for five bob,’ he said.

‘How do I know if they’re any good,’ I said. I had the measure of Roderick. He might be an intellectual, but he didn’t have my shrewdness. ‘They might be hopeless.’

He stood in the centre of the floor looking up and down the walls.

‘They should be very effective,’ he said. He began to play with his moustache. ‘My friend recommends them highly.’

I gave him two half-crowns. ‘If they don’t work, I want my money back,’ I said. I examined the earplugs closely. The thin wire was twisted in places and the corks were crumbling. They didn’t look too promising. But I would have tried anything.

‘Fine,’ he said, and went over to the window and looked out. He began to tap his fingers against the glass. After a bit I asked him to stop doing this. I explained that I was sensitive to noises.

He said that he was sorry but he didn’t stop his tapping. He then explained that he was a compulsive tapper and that he’d tap any kind of surface just so long as it was smooth to touch.

‘I’m neurotic, actually,’ he said.

Of course, I’d known all along, from the very first, that there was something wrong with him. And now he had come out with it. After a time he moved away from the window and looked at one or two things that were on the mantelpiece.

‘I’m also a nosy bastard,’ he said.

‘These plugs don’t look up to much,’ I said.

Roderick sighed. It was a deep sort of sound, as if it had come from his belly and travelled a long way upwards.

‘My neurosis manifests itself in (a) an unwillingness to work, (b) in an intense curiosity about the trivia of other lives and (c) in window-tapping.’ He sat down on the bed and sagged. His head fell forward between his shoulders. He reminded me of a stuffed vulture I’d seen in a museum.

‘Can I get you a glass of water?’ I asked.

‘You can get me one, certainly, but a fat lot of good it would do,’ he said.

I stared at the earplugs. Had I been too harsh on him? I straightened the wire out and said, ‘Well, you never know, these might just do the trick. I could put some sticking plaster on the corks, though.’

Roderick said, ‘I can’t see what life is all about. And because I can’t find a purpose, I’m inclined to suppose that everything is absurd. Your earplugs, for instance.’ He started to laugh. His head shook up and down. ‘Originally they were part of a mobile that my friend was transporting to a festival of avant-garde sculpture. But they fell off and he used them as earplugs. That’s absurd, don’t you think?’

‘Ah, well,’ I said. ‘This is really a fine piece of wire.’

He tapped his fingers on his knees and then got to his feet. He was clever, but I felt quite sorry for him. He stood in the doorway a moment just looking at me.

‘If the earplugs don’t work, you might try strangling the animal,’ he said.

After he’d gone, I thought about his last remark. It shocked me. It really did. All right, I didn’t like Rex. But I didn’t wish him any harm. He didn’t realise that his noises disturbed me. He was only a dog, after all, a dumb animal.

I walked to the window and looked down. He was slurping water from his bowl. Sometimes he stopped and his ears would prick up and he would listen to something. I read somewhere that dogs can hear very high sounds that humans can’t and that you can buy special whistles that only dogs can hear. Perhaps Rex heard things that I couldn’t. When he pricked his ears I couldn’t hear a thing. There was only silence. What was he listening to? I wondered.

Then Mrs Peluzzi came into the yard. And she did something very odd.

She got down on her knees and held her arms out and let Rex jump up against her breasts. He was licking her face and moaning a bit and she was burying her hair into his neck. It didn’t look quite right to me. There was something strange in the whole business. Rex might have been a man, not a dog, the way she was behaving. Then she took out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. She got to her feet and pushed the dog away. Rex whimpered a bit and then went back to slurping his water and Mrs Peluzzi went indoors.

After that I put on my coat for my evening stroll.

It started to rain when I left the house. I walked to the café in Cricklewood Lane and went inside to have a cup of tea.

I saw Bayonet sitting at a table in the far corner. When I went over to him he didn’t seem very pleased to see me at first.

He asked, ‘Well, me old son, how’s yer new billet?’

I told him about the dog. He shook his head.

‘That’s too bad, too bad,’ he said. ‘Still, it can’t go on forever, can it? Eh? Eh?’

He began to nudge me with his elbow. It’s an irritating habit, especially when you’re trying to drink tea.

He took a little flask from his pocket and poured some liquid into his coffee.

‘That’s the way the Irish drink it,’ he said. He lit a cigarette and blew his smoke into my face.

‘Otherwise,’ I said, ‘the room suits me. You see, I’ve had fourteen rooms in the last two years and I’m determined to settle down in this one. It gets very tiresome changing all the time.’

‘Of course it does,’ he said.

‘Everything would be fine, except for that dog.’

‘The dog, yes.’ He was fidgeting with his cup. Then he looked at his watch. ‘Well, I must be off.’ He got up and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘By the way, I’d be obliged if you didn’t mention to my little sister that you’d seen me.’

And then he went out into the street. As I finished my tea, I thought it a bit odd that he didn’t want me to speak to Agnes. It’s customary, after all, to pass messages on to your relatives when you meet somebody in a position to do so. Still, it was no skin off my nose, as they say.

I left the café and walked home.

I was feeling very tired so I undressed and got into bed. I must have fallen asleep straight off. The next thing I remember is waking up at midnight and hearing Rex. His noise isn’t like the sound a train makes. With trains, you can forget the noise, because somehow it just seems to melt into the background and after a bit you don’t really hear it. But with Rex it was totally different. The noise he made was as irritating as a rash on the skin that you have to keep scratching all the time. You can’t just ignore it.

I put on the earplugs. I had to stretch the wire a bit first. Roderick’s friend must have had a tiny head. I pushed the corks into my ears, but this was painful when I tried to lie on my side. And I can’t sleep on my back. Whenever I do I seem to get bad dreams. Anyway, pieces of the corks were breaking off and going down inside my ears, tickling me.

I pulled the blankets over my head, but I found it hard to breathe. So I turned on the light and sat on the edge of the bed. I was beginning to feel desperate by this time. In spite of the plugs I could still hear Rex clearly. I went over to the window and pushed it open.

‘Be quiet! Be quiet!’ I shouted down.

There was silence for a split second. In the reflection of the lamp in the lane, I could make out the dog’s dark shape moving around below. He wasn’t silent for very long. He started up again, worse than before.

‘Hush! Hush!’ I said, thinking he might understand that a bit better.

But he didn’t. He was leaping up at the wall, whining, and his chain was clanking and his paws were scraping the stone. I felt like killing him for the first time. I felt like going down there with a hammer and striking him again and again. I ripped the earplugs off my head and threw them down. They hit the wall and dropped down on Rex’s side. There was silence while he sniffed the corks and I could hear him chew them and then spit out the pieces. He stared up at my window. His eyes were shining green and blue in the light.

I pulled the window shut, turned off the light and went back to bed. But it was no good. It was hopeless, hopeless. I tried to think of something I could do. I thought of throwing down a piece of drugged meat, but I knew nothing about drugs, and anyway he might be suspicious and not eat it. I was desperate. What could I do? What could I do? This was worse than cabbage soup or flushing cisterns.

I didn’t fall asleep until it was dawn.

7

When you’re used to sleeping eight hours at a time it comes as a bit of a shock to your system when your sleep is interrupted all the time. You start to get nervy and jumpy and you wake with a sore head. The next morning I didn’t open my eyes until half-past nine. I’d slept right through the alarm. I started to get out of bed quickly. With some luck I could get into the factory at ten. But somehow all my energy had deserted me. I lay down again and stared up at the ceiling, my eyes wide open. I could telephone the personnel manager and say that I was sick. I couldn’t go to the factory in this condition, and I couldn’t go late two mornings running.

It was best, I thought, not to go at all.

I dressed slowly and boiled water for tea. I was just sitting down to drink it when Agnes came to the door. She was wearing her black dress and had her red hair tied up on the top of her head with a pink clasp.

‘Eric, you’re late,’ she said.

‘I’m taking the day off,’ I said. I explained that I’d had a bad night.

‘Oh dear,’ she said and sat down on the unmade bed.

‘And there’s no point in going at this hour,’ I said.

‘Do you want me to phone your work, love? I’m a good liar. I’ll say you’ve got diarrhoea if you like.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ I said.

‘I’ve been making excuses all my life,’ she answered.

She smoked a cigarette and watched me drink my tea. I would have offered her a cup, except I didn’t really want her to stay. I wanted to be on my own. I still felt dead tired.

I said, ‘I think I must speak to Mrs Peluzzi.’

‘Will that do you any good?’ she said. ‘You’ve got to remember that she’s in mourning and that she’s Italian. She might get annoyed and that wouldn’t get you anywhere, would it?’ She paused a moment and looked round for an ashtray. ‘Are you sure you’re not exaggerating all this a little?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m telling you the truth.’

‘Oh, well, I suppose you must have a word with her then. But I’ve got a feeling she won’t listen to you. She’s a funny sort of bird.’

I yawned. I’d been yawning ever since she came in. And my eyelids felt like lead. I could feel them begin to droop.

She asked for the telephone number of the factory and I told her. Then she went downstairs and I could hear her speak. I was beginning to doze off when she came back.

‘I told them you’ve got a bad attack of the runs,’ she said. ‘I suggest you go back to bed and catch up on your sleep.’

I said that I might just do that. But I was beginning to feel a little guilty. I kept thinking about the boxes. I’d never stayed away before. I could see the conveyor belt and the cardboard boxes coming down it and I wondered if anyone would be standing at Number Three in my place.

When Agnes had gone out of the room I lay down on top of the bed and closed my eyes. Funnily enough, I felt as if I really did have diarrhoea. There was this floating sensation in my stomach and my muscles were aching.

Lying there with my eyes shut tight I began to think about my life. All sorts of thoughts drifted into my head for no particular reason. I was born in Chelmsford and my father was a carpenter there. He kept his tools in a cupboard under the stairs. He died of pneumonia after getting soaked at a football match. My mother lived for ten years after that, but she didn’t go into mourning or anything, no, she went out with as many men as she could. Mind you, she was very discreet about bringing them home. I can’t remember hearing her with a man, so she must have made them keep quiet when she brought them home. But she drank a lot. She died of some liver trouble in great pain.

After she died I got turned out of the house because the council wanted it for a family of immigrants. Then I came up to London and got the job at King’s in Park Royal. I’ve been there for twelve years. Twelve years. That means I started there when I was twenty-five. It all seems a long time ago now, a lot of water under the bridge. At first I lived in Ladbroke Grove with a widow. I don’t mean I lived with her in that sense. No, I had this room in her house, and I was quite happy there for ten years or so. It was quiet and peaceful and then she started to push her daughter on to me. Daphne was ugly to look at, really hideous, so I had to clear out in the end. I felt sorry for the girl, but I didn’t like to look at her too closely. She had one of those wrinkled faces with deep eyes. I mean, she might have been nineteen or ninety. You just couldn’t tell. I didn’t like her even to touch me, even accidentally, when she was passing a plate or something. But there you are. Ten years, most of them happy ones.

I even went to night classes for a bit. I learned some French words, but I’ve forgotten them all except merde, and that isn’t much good to me any more. I had this teacher there, a Mr Sprockmorton, and he read out Shakespeare to us every Wednesday night. Sometimes he didn’t feel like reading and he’d just sit at his desk with his book closed in front of him and he’d say nothing for hours, absolutely hours. The real reason I went to the classes was because I hadn’t got much out of school. Well, school’s different in a way. I was a very slow reader and the teachers used to knock my knuckles with their rulers and send home horrible letters to my father and he’d hit me with his belt and then sit down and weep. I couldn’t do sums either. In the end, the teachers never even bothered to write anything in my report card.

The truth is, I was a slow learner. I knew I had it in me to do well and be smart, but it just wouldn’t come out properly. I got confused easily. I couldn’t take things in, and even when I did I forgot them pretty quickly. But they wouldn’t think me so stupid if they saw me now.

Lying there, all this sort of flashed through my mind. I don’t know why. Looking at my life I felt quite satisfied. I wasn’t smug with it. I was holding down a good job at King’s, I had my eye on promotion, and I was doing well financially. You can’t really afford to be smug, even when things are going well. Everything can get turned upside down so quickly.

When I was a boy I used to imagine that one day I’d get married and have a house and a family. Well, it isn’t too late for that even now, but the chances are getting thinner all the time. Not that it worries me at all. No, if it doesn’t happen it doesn’t happen, and that’s all. Besides, I’ve never had much energy for women. I think they find me attractive, I’m sure they do, but I can’t work up much enthusiasm really. When I think about Gladys Millar I count my blessings that I didn’t land up with her. But that’s the thing about women, and about people in general, you can never really tell what you’re going to get, can you? Everything goes all right for a time and then you start to find out things that you don’t care much for. Still, you can’t do much to change that.

I opened my eyes. It was nearly eleven o’clock.

It was strange not having to go to work. I washed my face and combed my hair and decided to take a walk. At the bottom of the stairs I met Agnes, who was speaking on the telephone.

She said, ‘Are you going to speak to Mrs Peluzzi?’

I’d almost forgotten about that. ‘Why, yes, I think I will. That sounds like a good idea.’

I went down the front steps and along to the next house. I saw Mrs Peluzzi’s name on a little white card with a bell above it. I pressed the bell and waited.

After a time the door opened and it was dark in the hallway so I couldn’t see a thing except this black shape. When my eyes became used to the light, I could make out her face. She was wearing a kind of black shawl that covered her whole body as well as her head and part of it was drawn up across her lips.

‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘I live in the house next door.’

Her eyebrows moved upwards and she made a gesture with her hands.

‘Please don’t think I’m complaining,’ I said. ‘But the fact is, I can’t get to sleep at night on account of your dog Rex. He makes such an awful noise …’

She took the shawl from her lips. She had this little moustache, it wasn’t too bad but it was plain enough. Tears were running down her face.

‘Are you police?’ she asked.

‘Police?’ I said, wondering what she was talking about.

She buried her face into the shawl and kept sobbing as if she expected me to arrest her all of a sudden.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s about your dog.’

‘Don’t take him away from me,’ she said. ‘Don’t take him, please! please!’

I waved my hands around, not knowing what to say.

‘He’s all I have! All!’

She fell on her knees against the door and clutched the door-handle with her hands. All this time she was weeping. I thought, She’s just like her dog. All that wailing and moaning.

I wasn’t sure what to do. So I just stood there and waited until she recovered.

She said, ‘You’re a wicked man, an evil man.’

‘Please, I didn’t mean any harm,’ I said.

‘Don’t make me laugh, this isn’t a laughing matter,’ she said. She had changed by this time. She was up on her feet and there were no more tears. ‘You come to take my Rex away, this is no laughing matter.’

‘Take him away? Now, that’s really a bit silly.’

She began to dodge around like somebody in a boxing match. She was throwing her arms back and forward, but she didn’t really mean to hit me.

‘I’m only asking you to make him keep quiet at night.’

‘Hah!’ She stepped back and then stepped forward again.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her. The shawl was coming away from her body now. Then suddenly there was this bang inside my head.

She said, ‘Hah!’

I put my fingers to my nose and saw that it was bleeding handeing. For a minute I felt like hitting her back, but I just kept my temper. I only wanted to speak to her quietly and reasonably, I didn’t want a brawl.

‘My God,’ I said. ‘My nose is bleeding.’

‘You deserve that,’ she said.

I had to dodge her next punch. I took out my hankerchief wagderchief and wiped my face. It was covered in blood.

She was shouting out loudly although people passing in the street weren’t really taking much notice.

‘He comes to steal my dog! Dog thief! Thief! He comes to my door, the door of a poor widow, and he wants to steal my dog!’

‘No, there’s been a misunderstanding,’ I said.

‘Hah!’ She looked at a group of children who were standing over by the railings. I felt sick. I can’t stand blood. ‘Look at this man, this thief,’ she was saying. ‘He comes here, to my door, to steal my dog. Heh? I punched him. I make his nose bleed!’

I turned away. I was sick on the pavement. I went down on my knees and stuck my finger in my throat to get it all up. I could hear her going on behind my back. I covered my face with my handkerchief.

‘Look at him,’ she said. ‘Sick as a dog.’

And then she was laughing like a maniac. I went in-doors and up to my room. I washed my face clean. I was shaking from the effort of being sick.

I made some tea and drank it black and after that I felt a bit better.

I don’t know when I decided to kill Rex. It must have been that same afternoon. I looked out of the window and he was staring up at me in this funny way. He was gloating. That’s what he was doing. Then I saw Mrs Peluzzi come out and get down on her knees and hug the beast. They were gloating together. The woman was insane. I knew that then. She was quite mad.

But what was the best way to kill him?

I thought of putting a bag over his head and suffocating him. But that wasn’t any good. He’d probably bite his way out of the bag. And I couldn’t use a gun, even if I’d had one, because of the noise. Poison would have been all right, if I could have laid my hands on some. Arsenic. But I didn’t know how to go about getting any. Even if I managed to get it, I couldn’t just ram it down Rex’s throat. I’d have to poison his meat and that left traces and I’d be tracked down by the RSPCA or somebody. No, I had to rule all those things out. I found that I was getting worked up about the thought. My hands were trembling violently. I just had to kill him. Then we’d all get some peace.

Of course I could have moved out of the room. But that meant packing all my stuff again and I was really determined to stay put. Determination is one of my good qualities. I didn’t intend to leave. So Rex had to go instead.

When it was beginning to get dark I thought about the string. I found a long piece in my suitcase. I wound it round my fingers. It would fit all right over the dog’s neck and all I had to do was pull it tight and hold it for a couple of minutes. It was really simple. It was better than guns and poisons and bags over his head. It was even quite cunning.

Yes, the string would be the perfect thing.

I waited at the window until it was finally dark except for the streetlamp.

And then Roderick came into the room.

‘Did the plugs work?’ he asked.

I was holding the string in my hand. I felt a bit guilty.

‘No,’ I said. ‘They weren’t much good.’

‘Oh.’ He looked at me fingering the string. ‘Are you going to strangle the dog?’

‘It’s the cleanest way,’ I said.

Roderick sat on the bed. ‘Are you sure, man? What I would do is stab it with a knife or something. That’s even cleaner.’

I told him that I couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

‘What a pity,’ he said. ‘Then you’ll just have to strangle him.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I wound the string round my hand. I never thought it would come to this, I really didn’t. Normally, I wouldn’t harm a fly. It’s wrong to take life, any kind of life. But this was really necessary. I’d had three sleepless nights. My nerves were all shot to pieces. I was losing my grip at the factory. It couldn’t go on. It had to end sometime.

‘You’ll have to climb the wall,’ Roderick said. ‘That’s a purely practical consideration, and it’s got nothing to do with the metaphysics of the situation. But if you don’t climb it you won’t get near the dog.’

‘I hadn’t thought about that,’ I said. And I hadn’t. I just hadn’t considered any obstacles.

‘The wall is about eight feet high. But you should be able to scramble over. And scramble back again, when the deed is done.’

I began to tell him about the puppy with the brown and white markings I’d had as a boy, but he interrupted me by saying,

‘A ladder might be helpful, man. Have you got one?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Too bad. You’ll just have to climb.’

I uncurled the string and stretched it tight.

‘Have you thought about the broken glass?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. I could see it shining along the top of the wall. It looked sharp and nasty.

‘You’ll have to be careful or you’ll cut yourself,’ he said. He began to laugh and tap his fingers on the mantelpiece. ‘The whole thing’s absurd, absurd.’

My fingers were trembling. I thought for a bit. The whole thing was really quite risky. I looked at Roderick.

‘Would you like to do it?’ I asked.

‘Can’t climb,’ he said.

And then he went out, leaving me on my own.

About eleven I went downstairs and along the passage that leads to the back yard. I couldn’t get the big door open at first and I twisted and turned the rusty handle and was about to give up and go back upstairs when all of a sudden it just sprung open. Outside, the yard was dark. There isn’t much light from the streetlamp because there’s a tree in the way. I realised I should have left my own light on so that I could see, but I might have exposed myself doing that.

I went to the wall. It seemed very high in the dark. I tried to get up. But I couldn’t grip the top because of the glass. I cut the palms of my hands and feeling the sticky blood felt sick again. But I knew I had to see the whole thing through. I tried to get up at another part of the wall. I felt the glass digging into me and I cursed it. But by pushing my feet hard I got halfway over. I could see Rex down below, chained to the wall. He was looking up at me. His black ears were pricked and he was panting. Working himself up for his nightly performance, I thought. I felt stupid hanging there, my body slung across the glass.

I dropped down. I tore my trousers against the glass. But at least I was on the other side.

I took out the piece of string.

In the darkness, the dog and I stared at each other.

‘Good dog,’ I said. ‘There’s a good dog.’

I got down on my knees and circled the string round his neck. He didn’t seem to mind. He thought it was a collar and that he was going for a walk. But it was going to be a long walk for him.

I began to pull the ends. I did this slowly at first. I was sweating.

I had only to pull it tightly and quick, and hold it there for a couple of minutes and everything would be all over.

He licked my hand.

He licked my hand and I couldn’t do it.

I dropped the string and stared at him. His rough tongue was splashing against my face. I couldn’t do it.

I cut my hands going back over the wall.

When I was in my room again I saw that my skin was bleeding badly. It was terrible. I went to the window and looked down. I could see him down there. He was wagging his tail.

I felt foolish. I bandaged my hands with an old towel and then went to bed.

At midnight he began to moan and howl. I lay in the dark and just listened. I was a coward. I hadn’t known it before, but I was. I might have been sleeping now, if I’d had the courage to do the job. Strangle him. But no. I was a coward.

Or was I just tender-hearted?

I was too soft to kill him. That’s always been my weakness. I should have known better.

Even so, I thought, as I lay listening to the noise, he would have to be disposed of. He would have to go.

He was ruining my life. I’d been conscientious and diligent, I’d been healthy, I’d been the perfect tenant. But I couldn’t go on being those things if I didn’t get my sleep.

Rex would have to be killed.

But I couldn’t do it. And if I couldn’t do it, I wondered who could.

Who?

2

Matt

On the night I met Eric Billings, I was sitting in a shabby pub in Cricklewood and thinking about the factors that had led me to undertake the Finchley job. In the end they boiled down to personal and professional vanity. Certainly there was an element of greed, there is always that element, but the job was important to my status. Now, on reflection, I regretted the whole thing. It wasn’t because I felt a twinge of conscience (I never feel such twinges), but because I was afraid. Just that. Fear. And the fear didn’t stem from the prospect of discovery but from the thought of violent recrimination. This time I had overplayed my hand. My sense of coolness, my judgement, my confidence above all – these things had deserted me. I was out on the proverbial bloody limb and all I could do, it seemed, was wait. But for how long? And how would I spend the waiting period? Biting my nails and slopping whisky in drab bars? Walking up and down some grubby bedsit? On the other hand, I could hide. But vengeance has a long nose and an acute sense of smell.

My time – if I was going to be honest – was limited.

But at least I could look back on the Finchley job with a sense of pride. It isn’t just anybody who can take Big Ed Sharp for as much as I had taken him. To achieve that you’ve got to be dedicated to this game, you’ve got to have a fully professional attitude.

The Finchley job was my promotion from the lower leagues to higher ones. No more calls on crazy old women to read their gas meters and swipe the cardboard box with their life savings in it as soon as they had their backs turned: no more phoney charity collections and cold feet trudging from one door to the next: and no more false life-insurance policies or subscriptions to encyclopaedias that never materialise. All that was soul-destroying and a dead loss and highly illegal anyway.

The beauty of taking Big Ed’s money was that it had been unlawfully earned in the first place. But if that was the beauty it was also the horror – because if he couldn’t take lawful steps to regain his cash there were other courses open to him. I’d seen it all before. I should have known better. Wisdom after the event is no wisdom at all. A boot in the face in some dark alley on a rainy night. A razor in the neck. Broken ribs, blood. I’d seen it all before.

Pride – and a great deal of Big Ed’s money – was all I had left.

Mind you, I felt that my pride was justified. The operation itself was classically simple. Exploitation of the victim’s weakness; and in this case Big Ed’s weakness was the desire to hide his philistine background behind a collection of objets d’art. Of course he didn’t know the first thing about art, but he listened to my flattery and erudition.

And of course he was besotted by the Renoir I had picked up in the Portobello Road.

It was dead simple, possibly all too simple. Whether he was a bigger fool than me is a matter for debate. He had only parted with money. God knows what I would have to part with before the whole thing was over and done with. Some of my blood – and some of my bones – at the very least.

I was proud, and I was scared stiff.

When I saw Eric Billings I was sitting at a table in a darkened alcove to the rear of the bar. From my position I was able to watch the door and see who came in without being easily spotted myself. Big Ed has a well-organised network of lackeys – most of them inexorably in his debt, most of them owing their life to him – and it only needed one solitary phone call for him to send out his heavy squad. I cursed my stupidity in ever having mixed with villains in the first place. But cursing wasn’t going to save me now. Nor was praying, if I’d been the praying sort: but how can you believe in God when you make your living in such an ungodly way as I do? I tell you, a man is born to this game. He finds that he has an extraordinary facility for inducing people to part with their money, and he capitalises on the gift. Sometimes it backfires. But not always.

I was watching everyone who drifted into the bar. Outside it was one of those filthy nights when the sky seems to have broken in pieces – it was raining, the pavements were sodden, and a brisk wind was blowing. The night seemed apt in many ways, it matched my mood and my feelings. I sat there at the back and whenever the door opened I could feel the dampness blow in and it seemed to have stricken my bones. Although my glass was empty, I couldn’t get up to order another drink. Perhaps I’d had too much already. But I felt stone-cold sober, icily sober, my perceptions sharpened to a fine edge.

Eric Billings came into the bar. At that time, of course, I didn’t know his name. He entered timidly and although he seemed desperately to be looking for somebody, I crossed him off my list of suspects at once. He didn’t have a villainous manner. He was wearing a gaberdine raincoat that was discoloured by rain and his hair was plastered down on his head. On the crown of his head there lay a handkerchief knotted at each corner, but this covered only a very small area of what seemed to me like a very large skull. He hesitated, hanging back from the crowd of drinkers at the bar, and then he pushed forward. He disappeared for a minute in the crowd and when he reappeared he was clutching a glass of what looked like Guinness, awkwardly, in both hands. He still seemed to be searching for someone. Because he didn’t interest me much, I turned my eyes back to the door.

And then he was sitting at my table, slurping his drink noisily. He was staring at me and I was beginning to wonder if perhaps I had misjudged him, perhaps he was after all potentially dangerous. Yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen a face so clearly stamped with the word idiot. His eyes are set wide apart and they bulge badly so that he has this constantly staring expression. He has a weak mouth with tiny lips that flap together like two loose pieces of flesh accidentally ripped from elsewhere. He looked positively harmless, but in this game you can never be really sure. Ninety-nine per cent certain, yes, but never totally so. I turned my eyes back to the door.

After a bit I became conscious of this strange sound. It sounded like a restrained gurgle, as if he were on the point of vomiting. I moved away instinctively because with all my other worries I didn’t want to be vomited on as well – but as I moved I realised that he was speaking and that he was simply having some difficulty in getting his words out.

‘Would you like to earn twenty pounds?’ he asked.

I said nothing for a time. It flashed through my mind that he might be homosexual, but he didn’t have that indeterminate femininity that you feel rather than recognise. I waited for him to enlarge on his proposition before speaking.

‘I would make it more, but that’s all I have in my post office account,’ he said.

A sucker, I thought. A genuine, first-class nit. I leaned forward to hear more. But for a long time he said nothing and just kept staring. For a moment I felt the impulse – who can explain these things? – to stick my fingers into his rounded eyes. But there was no point in being that rude and offensive.

After a time I heard this weird story about how he had been going around for two weeks looking for someone – and this killed me – who was prepared to assassinate – wait for it – a dog. I nodded my head. It was best in the situation to treat him seriously, although I did wonder at what time he would have to be back in his room in whatever institution contained him.

He told me more. He said that the dog was ruining his life, he was on the point of losing his job, he had pleaded, begged, the dog’s owner to shut the creature up, he had become a nervous wreck.

‘There is an easy solution,’ I said.

‘Tell me, tell me,’ he said, and gripped my wrist.

‘Move,’ I replied.

He slumped down into his chair. His flesh was pale, even grey, and he looked physically sick.

‘No,’ he said. ‘That would be an admission of defeat.’

‘I see,’ I said.

He was leaning over the table and prodding me.

‘Will you do it? Will you do it?’

I was on the point of telling him that he had some recourse in law and that he could quite easily get an injunction in the County Court: it sounded like a genuine nuisance. But I didn’t. I have found by experience that it is best to let people discover such basic facts for themselves. The world is such, the nature of man is such, that the element of competition enters into even the most simple relation of facts. Why should I tell him?

‘It’s a long time since I killed a dog,’ I said.

‘But you’ve done it before?’ he asked.

‘Oh, on many occasions,’ I replied. ‘The last was a diseased alsatian in 1960 down in Clapham. Mind you, it was difficult and it was bloody –’

‘Will you help me then?’ he asked.

‘Twenty pounds,’ I said, as if deliberating.

His mouth was hanging open while he waited.

‘I’d need to look over the premises and size up the situation before I could decide,’ I said.

He smiled then. The basic knack in my game – more a gift than something you can develop – is to recognise the possibilities of a situation, to know when you are on to what might be a good thing. I had such a feeling then. And I was willing to back the feeling, at least for the time being.

What precipitated my decision to return with him to his room was the sight of one of Big Ed’s heavy boys in the doorway. He hadn’t seen me, but his gaze was travelling quickly along the crowd at the bar.

‘Meet me outside,’ I said to Eric Billings and I ducked into the lavatory. I climbed out of the window into a little yard and then went through a door into a lane. When I thought it would be safe, I walked round to the front of the pub.

‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ Eric said.

‘Nature called,’ I said.

‘We can get a bus over there,’ he said.

I felt exposed at the bus-stop and when a taxi came down through the rain I stopped it. Eric and I got inside.

‘My name’s Eric Billings,’ he said. ‘What’s yours?’

I have a selection of names that I use at different times. Mostly I permutate any one of six Christian names with any one of six surnames. It gives some variety.

‘Matthew Churchill,’ I said. ‘But you can call me Matt.’

‘Do you always ride in taxis?’ he asked.

‘When I want to get somewhere in a hurry,’ I answered.

I felt inside my coat pocket. Big Ed’s money, wrapped in yesterday’s Daily Express, was safely there.

‘Rex has made my life a misery,’ Eric said.

‘Perhaps we can soon do something about that.’

The situation would have to be played strictly by ear. Another necessary gift. Another essential knack.

2

As soon as I saw the room I decided it would be the ideal place in which to lie low. It was scruffy and not at all the sort of place I had planned to rent with some of Big Ed’s money: my dreams had taken me to a penthouse overlooking Hyde Park. But stuff dreams. Survival was the issue now. I threw my sodden raincoat down on the sofa.

‘Is there any tea going?’ I asked.

Eric, who seemed uneasy at my presence in the room, filled a kettle and lit the gas.

‘What about the dog?’ he asked. He still had that knotted handkerchief on his head and his long gaberdine was almost stiff with rain. It made me uncomfortable to look at him. I turned on the electric-fire and lit a cigarette.

‘First things first,’ I said. ‘And the first thing now is a good cup of char.’

While he was making tea I had a look at the room properly. Along the mantelpiece there was placed a pathetic collection of objects. There was, for example, an old golliwog with buttons sewn into his face in place of eyes. Beside this was a school photograph in which I picked out friend Eric almost at once: the doltish expression and massive skull gave him away and the eyes, even then, had the same staring look.

‘I bet you were a bright lad,’ I said.

‘Well, the teachers didn’t think so,’ he answered.

‘Teachers,’ I said. ‘What do they know?’

He brought me a cup of tea. His face was screwed up in an odd sort of way. Later, I was to realise that this was his thinking look. But at the time I imagined him to be constipated or suffering from a rebellion of his digestive fluids.

‘Teachers,’ he said. ‘You’re right about them.’

‘Of course I’m right,’ I said. I gave him my cigarette end and he put it down the sink. The essence of tidiness. ‘Let me tell you something. When I was eighteen I wanted to leave Eton. I’d learned enough anyway and besides I’d been offered a fellowship at All Souls. Do you know the headmaster went down on his knees and begged me to stay? You wouldn’t believe that, would you? Teachers. Where’s the dignity in it?’

‘Well, I never,’ he said, impressed.

‘That finished me with teachers,’ I said. ‘This tea’s rather good.’

He blinked his eyes. He has this habit of blinking in a watery sort of way – as if you expect his eyes suddenly to melt and come running like tears, great liquid globs, down his face.

‘Eton,’ he said. ‘That’s where they have a boating song.’

‘You are a clever chap,’ I said.

‘I’ve picked up one or two things,’ he said.

We sat for a bit in silence and drank our teas. He made a great deal of noise over his, slurping it up, shaping his tongue into a funnel and slurping the liquid up the groove.

After a time he said, ‘About the dog –’

‘We don’t want to rush things,’ I said.

‘I went over the wall once to choke him with a bit of string –’

‘Wall? Wall?’ I asked. It was best to lay it on thick. ‘You didn’t say anything about my wall. That wasn’t very fair of you, was it? I didn’t think it was going to involve any climbing.’

‘It isn’t a high wall,’ he said. Frightened, all of a sudden, that I might leave. ‘There’s some glass along the top –’

‘Glass? Christ. Are there any machine-gun towers?’

He stared at me. For a second I thought he was going to reply in the negative, but the exaggeration penetrated his thick skull and he smiled, pointing his finger at me.

‘Ha-ha,’ he laughed. ‘Machine-guns, ha-ha.’

I finished my tea and got him to pour a second cup. He was easily dominated, docile, somewhat like a well-trained dog himself. Slightly more intelligent than a dog, I suppose. He came with the tea and then said – and I swear he said it –

‘No, there aren’t any machine-guns.’

‘That’s a relief,’ I said.

‘But there’s broken glass, as I was saying. The wall isn’t hard to climb. I went across it myself with this bit of string, but I didn’t have the heart to do it, you see. I’ve always been soft that way.’

He began some fantastically boring story of how his mother had once given him a spray-gun, with which he was meant to kill the flies in the kitchen. With idiot cunning – and because he didn’t have the heart – he had emptied the gun into a clump of bushes. The flies survived, but he himself was beaten when the leaves turned yellow and withered. Whether he makes these yarns up, fabricates them in that apology for a brain that lurks the size of a pea in his enormous cranium, I’ve never been able to discover. If he does invent them then I’m sure he does so innocently, in the sense that he believes them to have actually happened. He doesn’t lie, not in the way that I have to do professionally. Of course, I believe my own lies for the duration of the act, but afterwards I always recognise them for what they are: a load of bullshit. But Eric, I think, believes implicitly in his own drivel. And therein lies the difference between our kinds of fabrication.

‘That’s very interesting,’ I said.

‘About Rex,’ he said. ‘What sort of thing do you have in mind?’

‘Don’t rush me,’ I replied. ‘This will have to be planned and pondered upon before we can take appropriate remedial action. Your approach up to now has been crude, if you don’t mind my saying. A little subtlety is required.’

‘Yes, yes, you’re right,’ Eric said.

‘First of all I must actually hear for myself what it is that the dog does. After that, plans can be laid.’

‘But I can tell you all that. Rex moans. He moans from midnight until dawn. Can’t you take my word for it?’

‘Eric, second-hand information is of no value. Ask any scientist. Observation, rationalisation, hypothesis. That’s how I work.’

He sat down on the bed, his stiff gaberdine trying its best to remain standing. He hauled it off, folded it tidily, and laid it on the chair. I lit a cigarette and watched him. I’ve had no training in the descriptive use of words, no instruction in such things as similes and metaphors. So trying to describe Eric wasn’t easy. He sat on the bed and stared at the window and watching him I likened him to several different things: a rag that has been washed and squeezed until its fabric has all but gone: a bottle of milk left standing too long in the sun, gone yellow and curdled: a damp cigarette packet trodden in a flowing gutter: a slag-heap thrown up behind some quarry. The images have one common element; in each case their theme, their focal point, is that of a thing having been discarded, a useless thing, something thrown away because its only function now is as a reminder of futility. Eric Billings projected this same useless aura, this air of having been discarded, a scrap-heap man. He sat on his own bed like a foreign body, a fungus ripped out of the earth. These images amused me, because I’d never met another human being to whom they could so aptly be applied.

I tested the sofa with my fingers. It felt much too hard to sleep on. The bed, on the other hand, looked more appealing. I trotted out the India story, although Eric would have believed anything. In this story I begin with a brief résumé of my army career, most of which was spent in the Far East. I win several decorations, am mentioned in despatches, and have my photograph in The Times; grinning at the camera, although visibly in pain, an impression strengthened by the blood on my khaki shirt. And then, a dangerous mission to check German infiltrators in North Pakistan, during the course of which I fall out of an aeroplane straight down a gully.

‘My back hasn’t been the same since,’ I finished by saying. ‘Naturally, I get a meagre pension from the government, but I’d rather have my back in good shape.’

I wriggled uncomfortably on the sofa.

I said, ‘This sofa feels a bit hard, Eric.’

He was still thinking about my dangerous mission. His tiny mouth hung open and his eyes were glazed.

‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to sleep here,’ I said.

He stood up. ‘Are you going to stay overnight then?’

‘In the circumstances, don’t you think it would be better? I’d be able to hear the dog. I can start working on a plan.’

He went across to the window. Suddenly he said, ‘Last week I threw down a lamb chop I’d covered with mustard and insecticide. But Rex didn’t eat it. It’s still rotting down there.’

I moved over to the bed and put up my legs. I felt whacked and wanted nothing better than a good night’s sleep.

‘If your back’s really bad,’ he said, ‘why don’t you have the bed?’

‘That’s kind of you,’ I said. ‘It’s good to meet someone who knows the meaning of kindness.’

He sat down on the sofa and began to weep.

‘What’s up?’ I asked.

‘I can’t go on,’ he said. Crying, his face looked like a swollen balloon drifting through rain. ‘I can’t go on. He’s making my life a misery.’

‘Never mind, old chap,’ I said. I used my seaside manner and voice, the breezy one, the one that Britons everywhere used in the air-raid shelters when the bombs were falling and morale had to be boosted. ‘Things will get better.’

After he had put out the light I could hear him wandering around in the darkened room. He was sobbing now and again, and sometimes he stumbled into pieces of furniture.

I lay there thinking about what I could do with Big Ed’s money when the heat was off. The South of France? Italy? I dreamed of golden women wandering half-naked on sand. I dreamed of their being stretched beside me against a backdrop of sun and water, soft whishings up the beach. I could feel the heat begin in my thighs.

And then Eric said, ‘Did you hear that? Did you hear him?’

I opened my eyes. ‘What?’

‘Rex,’ he said. ‘Did you hear him?’

‘No. Get to sleep.’

‘I never sleep.’

I listened. Through the dark came a faint, a tiny whine. The dog sounded as if it were in pain. I listened for a bit, but most of the time I could only hear Eric mumbling about his unhappy lot, the awful fate that had dropped on his shoulders with the dead weight of bricks. I felt slightly irritated, the way you do when you want to sleep and someone is coming between you and your objective.

‘Silence,’ I said.

I could hear the dog clearly. But it wasn’t a particularly objectionable noise. It was recognisably the moan of a frustrated and lonely dog, but it wasn’t anything to get worked up over.

‘Listen,’ Eric cried. ‘Can you hear him? Can you hear that?’

‘We’ll start making plans tomorrow,’ I said.

I closed my eyes and the cries grew fainter the nearer I got to sleep. My beauties, my glorious summer creatures, paraded themselves in their burned splendour along the sand. I was judging a contest, but it was no ordinary beauty contest. The winner would have the pleasure of my bed.

I fell asleep. Rex didn’t disturb me at all. I did wake once when it was light though, on account of Eric’s terrible snore.

3

When I woke in the morning, Eric was standing over the bed.

‘I have to go to the factory now,’ he said. ‘But if you feel hungry there’s some bacon in the cupboard and a box of eggs.’

He was dressed in his long gaberdine coat, which was still damp and stiff and smelling of rubber, and there was a cloth cap pulled down tight on his head.

‘How’s your back?’ he asked.

I groaned a little for his benefit and he stood there making sympathetic noises. When he was gone I closed my eyes and pulled the blankets up to my chin. Rain was hammering on the window and panes of glass were rattling in the wind; a foul morning. On such mornings I have a tendency to think of my life in terms of what might have been, in terms of nostalgia for objects and persons past and lost – an uncharacteristic luxury for a selfish bugger like me. But such thoughts, interesting though they may be in themselves, reveal perhaps a basic weakness in my psychology – to wit, the need to find some saving grace in a personality almost totally self-centred. Unfortunately I can never find the saving grace, and even the most tender memories are somehow blighted by my own actions. There was Rose, for instance, dear Rose, a Swansea girl who came up to London on a day-trip and who never went back because she had the misfortune to collide with me on the pavement outside Selfridges. I had been acting as a guide at that time and had just managed to lose a party of Americans somewhere between the second and third floors, when Rose came my way. She ended up that night in the narrow bed of my dingy Kensington bedsitter, her knickers strewn across the floor, her virginity taken. It may have been because I was the first to have her, or it may have been something clean she saw in my personality – God knows what – but the fact is, she attached herself to me like a snivelling dog to its master.

My mode of life, reckless and uncertain, wasn’t suited to the demands of a woman like Rose, however pleasant and sweet she may have been. I returned home at all hours, I was irregular, I didn’t conform to the patterns of the man-woman relationship that the Baptist Church had indoctrinated into her. She wanted marriage, and possibly what was left of my soul, and I wanted out. It was a confining relationship that became alarming when she started talking about taking me down to Swansea to meet Mum and Dad. Swansea was bad enough without having her parents thrown in – so what did I do? Like the bastard I am, I arranged to meet her at Paddington Station but instead caught a bus that took me in the opposite direction. I never saw her again. I was thankful, but it proved a chastening kind of experience: I realised that I was committed to one kind of life and that the semi-detached ideal, the kids and the prams and the mortgages and the lawns to mow, left me unmoved. Poor Rose, you might say. But she was better out of it. I hope that she went to Swansea and that she married a coalminer or somebody who keeps regular hours and doesn’t bash her too much.

I was thinking about all this, unfeelingly as ever, when the redhead came into the room. With my head partially covered by the blankets she obviously mistook me for Eric, for she started to shake me gently back and forward. I pushed the blankets away and looked at her.

‘You aren’t Eric,’ she said.

She moved away from the bed and sat in the chair facing me.

‘You’re observant,’ I said. ‘I like that quality in a woman.’

‘Where’s Eric?’

‘Gone to his factory or to his salt-mines or wherever.’

She was small and neat and although she was worn she wasn’t too bad to look at. Her long red hair fell about her shoulders. She was wearing a nightdress that was short and transparent and through which I could make out plainly her nipples and the folds in her belly. A dressing-gown was thrown around her shoulders, but she hadn’t done up the buttons. Her face carried the smears of yesterday’s make-up, streaks of eye-shadow, pale lipstick.

‘I didn’t expect to find somebody else here,’ she said.

‘Matthew Churchill’s the name,’ I said. ‘But I use a nom de plume, so you might not have heard of me.’

‘A nom-de-what?’

‘Plume,’ I answered. ‘An implement of some six inches in length, which is sometimes dipped into a narrow-necked bottle.’

She looked at me blankly, although I think she understood the allusion. I pushed back the blankets and sat on the edge of the bed. I was wearing only my underpants.

‘Well, who are you?’ she asked.

‘Churchill, Matthew,’ I said. ‘To save you asking the question, no, I’m not a relation of the famous family –’

‘I mean, what are you doing here?’

My powers of invention are at their peak in the early morning. At any other time of the day I have to fall back on a stock of stale lies or sweat over something new. But in the morning I am fresh.

‘Allow me to explain,’ I said. ‘I’m working on a book about the suicide rate among those who live lonely lives in bedsits. You might say that I’m here to get the feel of the subject.’

She sniggered.

‘When I’ve written the book I’ll submit it to the London School of Economics for my Ph.D. thesis.’

‘What’s it got to do with economics?’ she asked.

Awkward woman. ‘Academic life has its peculiarities.’ I said.

She let it go at that. She said, ‘Well, it seems a bit morbid. You don’t think that Eric’s going to do himself in, do you?’

‘You never know,’ I replied.

She went to the cooker and put on the kettle and then she returned to her chair. The nightdress had risen to a careless height on her thighs.

‘We’ll have a cup of tea,’ she said.

There was silence for a time. I have this ability of being able to smell when a woman’s available, when she’s bedable, as it were. And it seemed a safe bet that the redhead would have come across in a flash. But although my powers of invention may be at their peak, my stamina is at its lowest ebb in the mornings and sex is beyond my capacity. So I contented myself simply with staring at her body. The breasts were flabby and hung a little, and there was too much spare flesh on the belly. But for all that she was acceptable: I wouldn’t have refused it.

I could also see that she was interested in me. Now and again her eyes wandered down my chest as far as my crutch and remained there, fixed for a moment, before they’d start to move back up again. She performed this visual movement several times. For my part, I stared at the shadowy region just under her belly.

The kettle began to whistle and she rose to make tea.

She brought me a cup and stood in front of me as I sipped it.

‘Tastes nice,’ I said.

‘By the way, my name’s Agnes.’

‘Married?’

She made a face and laughed with contempt.

‘I haven’t seen the bastard for six years, darling,’ she said. ‘Are you married?’

‘It hasn’t happened to me yet,’ I said. ‘I don’t think that marriage and the academic life go together.’

She drank some of her tea and lit a cigarette.

‘It must be frustrating for you,’ I said.

She raised her eyebrows. ‘I’m not a nun, if that’s what you mean.’

She began to scratch her thigh. I watched her fingers move across the flesh, scrabbling like a crab rushing to get under a stone.

‘Filthy old morning,’ she said.

Looking at her, I had the distinct impression that I was seeing a woman who was at her prime. She had been knocked about a bit, obviously, but she had resisted some of the deterioration that goes along with it. I reckoned that in six months, or a year, she wouldn’t be worth having. She had transferred her scratching hand to her armpits. First she attacked the one, next the other.

‘That’s hard work,’ I remarked.

‘I’m always itchy when I get up,’ she said.

‘Maybe you’re on heat,’ I said.

‘Who knows?’ she asked, and she looked at me coolly.

I got up from the bed and stretched myself. While I was doing this, I was conscious of her watching me.

Suddenly she said, ‘Did the dog disturb you last night?’

‘I didn’t lose any sleep over it,’ I answered.

‘I think Eric exaggerates a bit,’ she said, and sat down. She began to tell me about how Mr Peluzzi had been standing on the front steps one night, smoking his pipe and watching people go back and forward in the street. His wife called out that his supper was ready, at which point he pitched forward on his face. Dead. Just like that. Failure of the heart.

It had been a great shock to everybody. Mr Peluzzi, with tattoos on his broad arms, had been the picture of health. Never a day’s illness and all that.

‘What a sad story,’ I said, beginning to fidget.

‘Isn’t it? That’s how it goes, I suppose. But you can see why Rex plays up a bit at night, can’t you? He misses his master. I’ve told Eric that. But it’s a funny thing; I don’t think he takes things in very quickly, does he?’

‘Oh, he’s slow,’ I said.

‘Have you known him long?’ She took a battered cigarette from her dressing-gown and lit it.

‘All my life,’ I said. ‘He’s a distant cousin, in fact. But we come from different branches of the family. On his side they’re all manual workers in low social categories. On my side we’re scholars and industrialists.’

‘Well,’ she said, as if a penny had suddenly dropped.

The way she was sitting seemed an invitation to me. The hem of the nightdress lay dangerously around the top of her hip and the nipples, visible through the flimsy garment, were pointed and firm. I reproached myself for my lack of stamina: but what can you do if you’re strictly a night athlete? if you can perform only under the secrecy of dark? Does that indicate a sense of guilt in the sexual act? God. Had my parents, drunk or sober, taught me anything? I knew I’d only have to approach her – and bang. But I felt limp, used, devoid of any real urge.

She had tilted her head to one side and was examining me. Her eyes, tight from sleep, flicked up and down my naked chest, lingered around the area of my crutch, swept downwards along my legs. Another time, I thought: but soon.

‘Is Eric a queer?’ she asked.

‘Queer? Funny you should say that, because I’ve often wondered myself –’

‘You’d better look out,’ she said.

She finished her tea and then placed the cup neatly in the sink. She made no attempt to wash it.

‘Mind you, I’ve nothing against queers. You’ve got to live and let live in this world, don’t you think?’

‘Too true,’ I said, wondering if other profundities were locked away in her head. I reached for my shirt and pulled it over my head. Through the thin fabric I took a good look at her. Because she supposed that I couldn’t see her, her gaze was fastened unashamedly to my crutch and her tongue appeared, a tiny yellow thing, that swept once quickly across her lips – as if she were working up an appetite. I pushed my head through the collar and winked at her, but she turned her face away.

‘Filthy old morning,’ she said, looking at the rain against the window.

She threw her cigarette into the hearth and watched it burn on the tiles.

‘Eric’s funny about tidiness,’ she said. ‘He gives me the creeps the way he goes around keeping everything in place. And look at that lot on the mantelpiece. I mean, he’s a grown man, it’s not right. Christ, what does he want with a bloody golliwog?’

‘He’ll grow out of it,’ I said. I noticed that she was sitting on my trousers. That meant I’d have to approach her if I wanted to retrieve them and I didn’t fancy getting too close to her. She seemed the sort who might possibly just reach out and grab herself a handful if she felt like it. So I said, ‘You’re sitting on my trousers.’

‘Am I? Why don’t you come and get them then?’

‘I would do – except that my leg is a bit painful this morning. Would you throw them here?’

‘Leg,’ she said, with a certain amount of disbelief. She picked up the trousers and brought them over to the bed. ‘That was just an excuse to get me to come to you, wasn’t it?’

She sat beside me and placed her hand on my thigh. I smiled at her. The trousers slipped on to the carpet and I looked at them.

‘I don’t need excuses,’ I said.

‘Oooh, this bed’s nice and soft,’ she said, bouncing herself up and down. ‘And it’s springy, I like springy beds.’

‘It’s comfortable,’ I said.

Her hand worked up to the elastic of my underpants and she was breathing heavily against the side of my face. There was the odour of last week’s tobacco and tomorrow’s dental decay.

‘You wanted me as soon as you saw me, didn’t you, darling? As soon as I came in the room …’

I thought of myself, stupidly, like an owl, a thing that comes out only after dark, that stirs into life only after the sun has vanished. Rose used to say that I was only fit to make tea in the mornings. Poor bloody Rose.

The tips of her fingers moved towards my testicles.

I had the sensation of being raped. Somehow it’s a feeling that reduces your masculinity to a pulpy nothingness, as if castrated, chewed, broken.

She pressed her dry lips to my neck, fastened her teeth to a sensitive area just below my ear.

I stared at the rain on the window. I knew, from a hundred absurd experiences, that I couldn’t have raised a whisper, let alone what Agnes expected me to raise, at that particular moment.

‘Oh, oh,’ she said.

And then the door of the room was pushed open suddenly and a young man dressed in a paint-stained jacket was standing there. Agnes sprung to a position of propriety and said.

‘Hello, Roderick.’

Roderick said, ‘I was looking for Eric, actually.’

I said, ‘He’s gone to work.’

‘Isn’t it Sunday?’ Roderick asked.

‘It’s Thursday,’ Agnes said, getting up from the bed.

Hastily I pulled on my trousers and fumbled for a cigarette.

‘I could have sworn,’ Roderick said. ‘When I woke up the morning had this draggy, dead religious thing about it, and I thought, God, it’s Sunday. How could I have been mistaken?’

‘It’s an easy mistake to make,’ I said. ‘Especially if you’re walking across the Sahara without water.’

Agnes, deflated, went to the door.

‘Come down for a drink sometime,’ she said to me.

‘Thank you,’ I answered. ‘I will.’

When she had gone, Roderick lingered a moment in the open doorway.

‘Eric’s been having this awful trouble with a dog. He was trying to hire a man –’

‘To kill the beast?’ I said.

Roderick stroked his chin and looked pensive.

‘Are you going to do it?’ he asked.

‘That’s hard to say at this point,’ I answered. ‘Various contractual difficulties have arisen that will have to be straightened out before any further moves are possible.’

He leaned against the wall and drummed his fingers against the side of his leg. There was something arrogant and casual in his stance that suggested he was used to far better surroundings than those he now found himself in. That accent – Eton and Cambridge? That mien – hunt balls and the enclosure at Royal Ascot? There was a smell of money somewhere in the background that I responded to at once. But I had to resist any urge to ask questions and plan a strategy, if only because I had enough on my plate at that time. Some of the best opportunities offer themselves at impossible moments. But it’s a sick, contrary world we live in. Roderick looked simple and rich, a combination I’d dreamed and drooled over every time I’d counted the odd halfpennies of some old spinster’s life savings: bottom drawers that remained always at the bottom, unfingered by man. Now I would have to shrug and pass the matter over.

Besides, I felt indebted to him for having extricated me, however unwittingly, from a nasty spot. Agnes had been a millimetre away, a gasp away, from discovering my morning impotency. That was a chink in my armour that I preferred to keep to myself. Being in the business of exploiting weaknesses, it’s suicide to expose one’s own.

‘He’s offered you twenty quid, has he?’ Roderick asked.

‘I prefer not to say,’ I said.

‘As you wish, man.’ He pushed himself off the wall and ran one hand through his long, girlish hair. And then he turned and went out of the room, closing the door.

I heated up what remained of the tea in the pot and fried two eggs. And then I put the dirty dishes in the sink for Eric to clean.

After that I stood at the window and looked out on the miserable morning.

That was when I had my first sight of the dreaded Rex.

He was lying flat on the concrete yard next door, his paws stretched, his snout somewhere between his legs. From time to time he looked up, blinked at the rain, and then covered his head again. His black fur glistened from the rain and – if dogs can have attributed to them human qualities – his expression was one of the utmost misery and despair. I thought it odd that Mrs Peluzzi had not provided a kennel, or some form of shelter at least, or failing that why did she not take the creature indoors in such weather? But that wasn’t my problem.

The wall dividing the yards looked about ten feet high. Nasty blades of broken glass stuck up from the brick. I wouldn’t have wanted to climb it in any circumstances. But then, I didn’t intend to try.

4

I’ve had to lie low at other times in my life. Once I was holed up in a dingy room in Brighton for two weeks, while the local police were searching for a well-dressed, glibly-spoken man of about thirty-five, wearing a moustache and an RAF tie. They had even constructed an identikit picture that bore a remarkable resemblance to the Frankenstein monster. I shaved off the moustache and flushed the tie down a lav, and hid myself from the world for a full two weeks. Going out in the street in such circumstances is a risky business, because they can haul you in for an identity parade at which some hysterical old woman can easily lay the finger. The great enemy, at such times when disappearance is essential to survival, is boredom. It springs up between you and four blank walls. It spits out of the cheap paperback you’ve already read three times and despised on the first reading. It attacks you from the grubby pack of cards that you can only use for solitaire or poker, with imaginary partners. It lingers in every line of the view you continually see from your window, every sickening, unchanging line.

Boredom is the killer. Conquer that and you more or less conquer all. The problem is how. Waiting that first day for Eric to come back I read through a pile of letters I found in his suitcase and a diary he had kept at the age of twenty-one. ‘I’m twenty-one today. I can vote if I like. I’m a man. And suddenly my childhood is over.’ Heady stuff indeed. But whether it was better than the emptiness of boredom is debatable. Then there were the letters, mainly from an aunt in Canada. ‘Today we saw our first rodeo and it was really exciting. You would have loved it Eric, what a pity you weren’t here to see it, but we thought about you when one of the cowboys fell off his horse.’ Absolutely hilarious, I thought. I searched through the rest of his papers: one cutting from an insert in a Deaths column (‘gone to the everlasting sleep, now at peace’); one birth certificate (Eric Shootler Billings – Shootler?); one old wrapper from a Wall’s Pork Pie, the sentimental value of which I couldn’t even begin to guess; and two or three photographs of women crudely cut from a nude magazine. Well, well.

I had the feeling that I had sifted through his entire life, and that there was nothing else to discover. Add all that lot to the golliwog, the school photograph, and the half-dozen or so cigarette cards that litter the mantelpiece and what have you? Eric Shootler Billings, a man.

When he came in at six o’clock I was lying on the bed. He went at once to the window and looked down into the yard.

‘He isn’t dead,’ he said. ‘You were going to kill him, you were going to –’

‘Relax, relax,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t it be the height of nonsense to kill the animal in broad daylight? Think of the consequences if I’d been discovered doing that.’

He paused for a second, before unscrewing the cloth cap from his skull and unbuttoning the raincoat.

‘I’m too eager,’ he said. ‘That’s always been –’

‘We’ve got to make plans, Eric,’ I said. ‘Planning is the essence of every success. Ask any successful man – Sir, was your success an accident? What do you think he’ll say?’

Eric put the kettle on the gas, shaking his head back and forward.

‘The bald fact of the matter is that everything has to be gone into, step by step. Blundering is useless. Think of the charge of the Light Brigade, Eric. If only that had been well planned, who knows what would have happened to the course of history?’

‘Like Cleopatra’s nose,’ he said. He was watching the gas flame, his mouth open in a kind of grin.

‘We could quite easily go down there and stick a knife in the animal’s neck. All right. It would bleed to death. So what? That would be a fine example of blundering because we’d be discovered almost at once.’

‘You’re right,’ he said. He began to make tea. He brought me a cup and a digestive biscuit.

‘That last dog I killed was a borzoi in Hampstead Garden Suburb –’

‘You said it was in Clapham.’

Memory like a bloody limpet. ‘That was the last but one,’ I said. ‘With the borzoi I sneaked into the garden during a snowstorm dressed in white PVC from head to toe. Camouflage, you see. I dragged the dog under my coat, got into my car, drove out the North Circular and choked it to death in a lay-by near North Finchley. It went like clockwork. And why did it go like clockwork, Eric? Because I’d planned every last detail, right down to the average circumference of the animal’s turds. You’ve asked me to do a job. I’m a perfectionist. You’ll get a perfect job. But I’ve got to have some time.’

Eric sat down on the couch.

He chewed his biscuit and said, ‘They warned me to watch my timekeeping, you know. The foreman took me into his office and said that I’d lost nearly three hours work over the last two weeks. It can’t go on, he said. Well, I explained to him about the dog and everything but he wasn’t interested. I’m interested in corrugated packing, he said. Your corrugated packing. So watch it.’

I lit my last cigarette and listened to his monotonous voice.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Things will improve.’

He sat in silence for a time. There were crumbs on his chin. I stared up at the ceiling. I thought about my boredom and wondered how it might be dissolved.

‘I’ve been at King’s for twelve years,’ Eric said. ‘That’s a lot of water under the bridge.’

‘Yes, well, you don’t want to get yourself sacked now,’ I said.

He held up his hand. His fingers were crossed. He accompanied this gesture with a smile at me, and there was something of trust, even faith, in the smile, that was utterly pathetic. Clearly he relied on me to flush this noise, this nuisance, out of his life; to restore the status quo, to enable him to return to his undisturbed, humdrum existence. And my services were to cost him twenty pounds.

I thought about the three thousand quid that lay in my raincoat pocket, wrapped inside the Daily Express. It was more money than I’d ever had at any one time in my life. It was my strike, my passport to a better elsewhere – and yet here I was, holed up in this dump with a nut.

‘When will you start making plans?’ Eric asked.

‘I can’t make any plans until I get materials, can I?’

‘Materials?’

‘First of all, I’ll need a measuring tape –’

‘What for?’

‘I want to size up that wall, don’t I? You don’t expect me to climb it if I don’t know how high it is, do you?’

‘Well, I climbed it,’ he said.

‘Do you want to do this job yourself?’

He shook his head, his eyes staring.

‘Fine. Then I need a measuring tape.’

‘Why do you want to know how high it is?’ he asked.

‘Mine is an exact science,’ I said. ‘What’s the point in my having mastered trigonometry at Eton if I can’t put it to practical use? I also need a flashlight, since most of the work will have to be done after dark.’

He shifted round on the sofa, that constipated look of concentration on his face.

‘In addition, I’ll need to have some form of protective clothing, because of the glass on the wall. When I go over, I don’t want to carve myself up like you did.’

‘Protective clothing?’ he asked.

‘Padded trousers, padded jacket, and several pairs of leather gloves.’

‘Where will I get padded clothes from?’

‘That’s your affair,’ I said. ‘I only do the job. You supply the materials. Apart from that, I must have a yard of nylon reel. String isn’t any good because it might break at the crucial moment. So I must have unbreakable nylon if I’m going to strangle the dog properly.’

He found a piece of scrap paper and the end of a pencil and was writing these items down.

‘If I need anything else I’ll let you know.’

He got up, looking thoughtful, and took a packet of sausages from his raincoat. He opened the packet and began to fry the sausages on the stove.

When we had eaten, he washed up the dishes, dried them, and stacked them away neatly. Watching him, I was almost stricken by a sense of pity. It was an uncomfortable feeling that I only managed to suppress at the last moment. Analysing it, I suppose it was caused by the sight of him grubbing around at the sink, the sound of him whistling tunelessly, and the realisation that all his trust and hope had been placed (or misplaced) in me.

‘Will you go out and buy me a bottle of whisky?’ I asked.

Almost at once he put on his coat. I gave him some money and watched him go.

When he came back he gave me the whisky and returned the money.

‘A present from me,’ he said. ‘I never have the chance to give presents.’

I went downstairs with the whisky and found Agnes in her kitchen, seated at the table, drinking gin from a cracked cup. I placed the bottle on the table and winked at her.

She looked at me blearily.

‘You invited me for a drink,’ I said.

She was wearing a black dress and had her red hair piled up untidily on the top of her head. Hairpins and wisps of hair protruded. I sat down and opened the whisky.

‘We were disturbed this morning,’ I said.

‘By Roderick,’ she said, as if remembering something in the distant past.

‘That’s right,’ I said. I found myself a cup and poured some whisky. ‘But we won’t be disturbed this time.’ I swallowed some of the alcohol and slipped my hand across the table, gripping her fingers. She was drunk. She knocked the bottle over while reaching for it with her free hand. I caught it, but not before some of the whisky had been spilled.

If there is one thing that cancels my desire, it is a drunken woman. Possibly there’s an ingrained puritanism in this reaction. Who knows? But I tried to forget her drunkenness, because I couldn’t afford to be choosy. It was all of three months since I’d last had a bit and that had been brief and unsatisfactory – a widow with a penchant for toes and fingers, a kind of trickery that doesn’t enthral me.

Agnes laughed and coughed, a spluttering, smoky cough that sounded decidedly bronchial.

‘So you’ve come down, have you?’

‘That’s right. Now that I am here, what are we going to do about it?’

I moved my hands over her breasts and she tossed her head back, laughing still.

‘Is something wrong?’ I asked. She wasn’t responding as I had anticipated.

‘God I want you,’ she said. ‘You know that I want you, don’t you?’

‘There’s nothing to stop us,’ I said.

She pushed my hands away. ‘There is, lovy, there is. My monthlies have just started and I make it a firm rule never to go with a man while they’re on. You’ll have to wait a bit.’

And she laughed a little longer.

5

I didn’t wake next morning until after Eric had gone to work. The sun was shining on the window and the outside world seemed silent and deceptively peaceful: deceptive, since I knew that the streets weren’t safe for me. I got out of bed and made a cup of coffee. I stood drinking it by the window.

In the yard, Rex was eating meat from a tin bowl. Sometimes he would raise his neck, chewing absently, staring upwards at the sky or along the walls of his prison. After a time, a woman came out of the house and watched him. I guessed that she was Mrs Peluzzi. She was small and plump with massive breasts – breasts, as the cheap novelists say, like melons – and she was dressed in the faded black of a Latin widow. When the dog had finished eating and had dragged a bloody bone to the far comer of the yard, she went down on her knees and threw her arms around the creature’s neck. She caressed the dog. Caressed may be odd in this context, but there is no other word. She pushed her fingers through the thick black fur and smoothed them down the animal’s flanks.

This little scene lasted perhaps for about thirty seconds, certainly no longer than a minute, but even so there was something in it, a certain element of perverse sexuality that appalled and excited me simultaneously. I’m not keen on extreme deviations, being an advocate of straight-up-and-down sex with minimal variations, but I sensed something of the sheer excitement in what was taking place. When Mrs Peluzzi had gone indoors the dog yapped for a bit and then slumped down on his belly as if prematurely abandoned.

This interested and intrigued me. Did she miss her husband to the extent that she had transferred her affections to the animal? Did the dog have the late Peluzzi’s face in her mind? Did she – I wondered, I wondered – have illicit relations with the beast?

I watched the dog for a time, but the pulse had gone out of the scene and I was left to wonder if I’d only imagined what had taken place. But I’m not given to illusions or to hallucinations: for me the external world is real enough, and everything in it is either true or false. I don’t believe in fairies or in God (since both come from the same stable anyway) but I believe up to the hilt in the things I can see. Mrs Peluzzi had caressed the dog in a way that went far beyond the normal sickening embraces given to pets by their owners.

I poured myself a glass of whisky and sat down on the bed. When I reached for a cigarette I discovered that I had none left. I dressed and went downstairs to borrow one from Agnes, but she was nowhere to be found. I stood for a moment in the hallway. There was a dreadful conflict between my craving for tobacco and my reluctance to venture on to the streets. I stood there, undecided.

After a moment, I opened the front door and looked along the street. Apart from a few parked cars and a streetsweeper, sleeping propped against his broom, I could see nothing dangerous. Nothing ostensively dangerous, that is. But vengeance has an odd habit of dropping out of the sky. I was once arrested in Chester for something I had done three years before in Southend, simply because someone recognised me at the self-service counter in a Woolworth’s cafeteria. I hesitated. Besides, I didn’t know where the nearest tobacconist’s was.

My craving won; or to put the matter another way, my weakness did. I went down the steps, turned right, and walked to the end of the street. It led nowhere. I turned back and went to the other end of the street. On the corner was a newsagent’s shop. It was filled with chattering women and an indolent assistant, an old man who must have passed his prime with Kitchener. When my turn came I asked for two one hundred boxes of Players.

‘Hundred boxes, oh dear,’ the old man said. ‘We only have them at Christmas, unless there’s some in the back.’

Before I could say anything he had disappeared. I looked through the window and on to the street. Were my fears groundless? This was just a quiet suburban street: nothing wild and violent could happen here, in the strong sunshine, in the very ordinariness of things. Some five minutes later the old man came back with two boxes of cigarettes.

‘Last of the Christmas stock,’ he said. He was peering at the coloured wrappers; S. Claus with reindeers, flurry of snow. ‘Thought we didn’t have any left. But there you are. Two hundred coffin nails for you.’

I paid with a five pound note and waited an age for him to count out the change. And then I stepped out of the shop and on to the sunlit street.

I saw the black Ford coming up on my left. I don’t know why I was suddenly struck by fear. The licence-plate number was faintly familiar, but I couldn’t really place the car itself. For a moment I couldn’t move. And then I turned and walked quickly along the street. There were three, perhaps four, men inside the Ford and it was moving with the slowness of a very patient patrol car. As I walked I heard it come up behind me.

All I could think, rightly or wrongly, was that the car had something to do with Ed Sharp. Because of this connection, I had the strong, almost overpowering feeling, that my survival hung by the thinnest of thin threads at that moment.

I ran up the steps of the nearest house and pressed the first bell I saw.

That was how I first met Bella Peluzzi.

6

I stepped into the darkened hallway and said,

‘Carson of the RSPCA. I believe you have a dog.’

‘A dog?’

I saw that, in spite of the almost inevitable moustache, she had a plump, pretty face. Her skin was a pale yellowy colour, but the secret of her appeal lay in the eyes. They were dark brown, perhaps black, the colour of burned wood.

‘Rex,’ I said. I was almost out of breath. I listened for the sound of the car, but the street seemed silent.

‘Yes, I have a dog and his name is Rex,’ she said. ‘What is your purpose?’

In spite of the drabness of the threadbare black dress, the breasts were magnificent. I contrasted them with the scrawny items that Agnes sported so freely. There was really no comparison, none whatsoever.

‘RSPCA,’ I said, my inventiveness having been stalled a little by the appearance of the car.

‘Maybe you’d better come in.’

I followed her into her sitting-room. I have never seen a room so full of photographs. Some were early and brown, some black and white, one or two were coloured.

‘You must have a great many relatives,’ I said.

‘A big family, yes,’ she said.

‘You aren’t English?’

‘Italian,’ she said.

I sat down. The furniture was massive and hard.

‘Why have you come to see my Rex? He isn’t ill.’

‘No, he isn’t ill,’ I said. ‘But you may have heard of the new government legislation, the Dog Owners’ Bill. Under the provisions of the DOB – as we call it in the trade – a census has to be taken every five years and the total number of dogs in the country computed. You do understand, don’t you? It’s all tied in with the restriction of the canine population by birth control methods.’

She looked at me oddly. ‘You’re crazy.’

‘I’ve got a job to do, madam. If you want to complain, you must utilise the proper channels.’

She shrugged and threw her hands in the air.

‘Can I see the dog?’ I asked.

‘Why?’

‘I must have descriptive details.’

I followed her into the back yard. Rex was asleep against the wall. The chain that bound him was fixed to a bracket high in the wall and was probably about twelve feet long.

‘Does he live in the yard?’ I asked.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she said, impatiently.

‘I assume you provide shelter.’

‘Of course, I am not a heartless woman.’

We stood looking at Rex for a time and then we went indoors again.

‘Certain other people are heartless, but not me,’ she said.

‘Oh?’

She lowered her voice. ‘There is a man next door who would like to destroy my Rex. I know it for a fact.’

‘Probably he’s just a crank.’

‘No, he throws down poisoned meat.’

‘Why don’t you do something about it?’

She didn’t answer me. She sat down on the sofa and clasped her hands together. I looked around the room. From every angle, photographed in every possible stance, sombre Italian faces stared down at me.

‘Can I see the licence?’ I asked.

‘I lost it.’

I tutted. ‘You really must have a licence, you know.’

‘You aren’t going to take Rex away, are you?’

‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘But you must get a licence before long. I take it that you acquired Rex in England?’

‘No,’ she said, tears suddenly streaming down her face. ‘He is an Italian dog. We bring him from Naples.’

I was beginning to get the feel of my role. ‘But you obtained permission, didn’t you?’

‘No,’ she said. She was howling a little now. ‘We smuggle him in a cardboard box.’

‘That’s very serious,’ I said.

‘Please, please, don’t take him away from me!’

I sat down beside her on the sofa and put my arm around her shoulders. She stiffened a bit at first and then relaxed. After a time she became silent.

‘Will you report me?’ she asked.

‘I’ll have to think about it,’ I said.

Another stifled sob. Then she got to her feet.

‘Will you take a cup of tea?’

‘Thank you.’

‘Perhaps a slice of home-made cake?’

‘Please.’

She went out of the room. The air was thick with the smell of her heavy perfume. In her absence, I realised that there was no longer anything to keep me there. Danger, if it had been danger, was now past. Perhaps I stayed because the alternative – Eric’s empty room – was so alarming. She returned carrying a tray. She set it down, poured two cups of tea, and handed me a plate with a slice of cream cake.

‘That looks appetising,’ I said.

‘If you don’t report me, you deserve it,’ she said.

She looked appealing when she smiled, as she did then.

‘Well, we officials have hearts like anybody else,’ I said. I ate the cake, which was delicious, and then lit a cigarette. ‘How long have you been in England?’

‘Three years,’ she replied. ‘My husband died last month.’

‘I am sorry.’

‘His heart.’

‘Dear, dear. It must be lonely for you.’

‘I’ve only got my Rex now,’ she said. ‘He is a comfort.’

‘I can imagine.’

Blinds were half-drawn across the windows. The room had a certain stuffiness – not that it smelled – a certain staleness that seemed a direct result of the lack of light coming through the windows. I looked round the faces in the photographs. It was like seeing the same face, constantly repeated in an infinite series of mirrors, poised in different angles yet ageing with each reflection.

‘Which one is your husband?’ I asked.

She looked at me coldly, sniffing a little.

‘There isn’t a picture of my husband,’ she said.

Odd, I thought. There should have been one of the late Peluzzi, if only for the sake of sentiment.

‘You’d like more cake?’ she asked.

‘Please.’

She cut another slice and slapped it down on my plate.

‘I make all my own cakes and bread,’ she said.

She was wandering up and down the room, wringing her hands together as if to rid them of moisture. She seemed uneasy – was she worried that I might impound her beloved Rex? I thought of the scene that I had witnessed only a short time before in the back yard and absurdly there came into my mind an image of Rex dressed in waistcoat and bow-tie, standing panting on his hind legs.

‘We all have to die some time,’ she said.

I stared at her. She was standing by the window, frozen in the yellow light that fell through the thick blinds. She turned round to look at me. We all have to die some time? Why had she said that?

‘Indeed,’ I said.

‘There is no escaping the fact.’

‘From the minute we’re born …’

She shrugged, lifting her eyebrows.

‘My husband,’ she said. She looked round the photographs – there must have been hundreds of them, all of them in tin frames, all pickled behind glass – as if seeking out the one that wasn’t there. And then she stared at me. ‘Will you report me? Will you?’

I shook my head. The whole situation was false. Her question meant nothing. Somehow I didn’t have the heart to carry on. But I said, ‘You must buy a licence as soon as you can.’

She sat down. ‘I can see you like animals. It shows a kindness in your soul.’

I neither like nor dislike animals. They signify nothing. I couldn’t, in cold blood, actually kill one, but that doesn’t mean that I’m an animal worshipper.

‘Mr Peluzzi didn’t like Rex,’ she said.

She was silent for a moment. I waited to hear more.

‘Sometimes he beat Rex with a rope until blood come into the fur. Can you picture that?’

Revelations. Was there anything more?

She turned her palms over in her lap and stared at the lines.

‘But. He’s dead. No good to talk of him like he was still alive.’

And then she began to clear away the dirty tea cups and dishes. I got to my feet.

I said, ‘You should have reported him to us.’

‘My own husband?’

She went with me to the front door. In the dim hallway my fingers, quite by accident, brushed against her bare arm. She looked as if the touch caused her immense pain.

I went down the steps and into the sunlit street. There was no sign now of the black Ford. When I turned to wave to her she had already gone and the door was closed.

When I got back to the room I felt listless and lay down on the bed, smoking cigarettes one after the other.

I’m not the sort of person who gets easily depressed. By nature I’m inclined to be extrovert, resilient, even optimistic. But I recognised in my listlessness a nagging, faint sense of depression. I stared at the window and the pattern drawn by sunlight on the floor.

What was it? What caused it?

It was something about the Italian widow; something about her room, her life; something to do with that bloody dog. Was it the pointlessness of the picture collection, the fact that dead faces pinned under glass indicate merely a docile subservience to past things? Was it the way she had spoken of her husband? I couldn’t think. Was it the way she had thrown herself, body and soul, upon the dog?

Or was I beginning to get a bad dose of solitude sickness?

I found an old copy of The People, faded and six years out of date, lining the shelf of the pantry. I tore it out, read it, re-read it, and smoked more cigarettes. ‘We say to the so-called Reverend Jim Birmingham – Come off it, Jim.’

The world is full of failed cons.

I threw the paper down and went to the window. I could smell faint traces of Mrs Peluzzi’s scent on my clothes. Rex was asleep in the yard, curled into an unrecognisable shape. Somehow I couldn’t stand to look at him.

7

When Eric returned he went straight to the window. He didn’t say anything at first. He took a packet of sausages from his coat and fried them. We had finished eating before he spoke.

‘I had to go and see King today. He had my timecards on his desk. They were covered in red numbers. You get stamped red every time you’re late, you see. He said that if I couldn’t improve within a week, I’d have to go. Twelve years I’ve given to the company. It’s funny when you think about it like that. It’s a lot of water under the bridge, twelve years. I was twelve years younger when I started there. Twelve. A dozen. I hadn’t thought about that. A dozen seems longer than twelve, doesn’t it?’

He hadn’t eaten the skins of his sausages. They lay crumpled, swept to one side of the plate.

I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, old son. These things can’t be rushed. Anyway, you can always get another job –’

‘I don’t want another job!’ he shouted.

‘All right, all right, take it easy.’

I hadn’t seen him in a rage before, but it was amusing to witness. His face became a dark shade of pink and his ears seemed to stiffen and move up his head. The tiny mouth shook wetly, beads of spit dripping down the chin.

‘I’m sorry. Excuse me.’ He circled a hunk of bread round his greasy plate. ‘It’s just that I’ve got a better chance of promotion at King’s than I’d have anywhere else. If I got another job, you see, I’d have to start at the bottom of the ladder again.’

Promotion! It was the first indication of ambition that he’d ever given. I almost laughed. Promotion for him was a matter of chasing ghosts. Did he imagine, did he dream, that you could walk straight off the conveyor belt and on to a seat in the boardroom, expense-account lunches, trips overseas, women in first-class hotels? Even if he’d had the necessary grey matter – and clearly he had little in that enormous skull – it couldn’t have happened. I could have told him, there and then, that he would spend the rest of his life packing boring little cardboard slats into boring cardboard boxes. We each have a station in life.

‘You see, it’s essential to kill the dog.’

He took a length of nylon cord from his trousers and threw it down on the table.

‘There’s one of the things you asked for.’

I picked it up. ‘I’ve been thinking, Eric. I wonder if strangulation is the best way after all.’

For a moment he was silent.

And then he said, ‘Oh mother.’

His huge hands came across the table, spilling sauce bottles, vinegar, and salt, and he tore at the lapels of my jacket, hauling me up from my seat and pulling my face down until it was level with the surface of the table.

‘What are you playing at? What are you playing at?’ he asked.

He pushed my face into the open packet of butter that lay on the table. For a second or two I was so surprised that I didn’t react. His hands were on my neck, digging into my flesh.

‘You’re supposed to be … killing that … bloody dog …’

He was lifting my head and then smearing it across the butter.

‘Supposed to be … what are you playing at?’

I drew my breath. I pulled myself free. I found myself staring into the ugliness, the blank stupidity of his face. His skin was red and his eyes were watering.

I struck him on the mouth and he stepped back, staggering a bit. He didn’t know what to do. He was scared of his own strength and shocked by his own behaviour. There was bewilderment in his eyes. I struck him again and again. He fell down against the bed. I crushed my knee into his ribs and he gasped. He lifted his arms in the air. Tears streamed over his face.

When he tried to get up I thumped him again, on the side of the neck. I can’t explain why, but I enjoyed it. I enjoyed inflicting pain on him.

‘I’m sorry, sorry,’ he said.

He was lying face down on the floor, his arms curled protectively around his head.

‘Please,’ he said.

I jumped once on his back and he cried out.

Shaking, I sat down and lit a cigarette. For a long time he didn’t move. I looked at him. It was pitiful. This huge object sprawled across the floor like a broken ornament, like something dropped from a great height.

‘Get up,’ I said. ‘Get up, you stupid bastard.’

He lifted his head and looked at me.

‘Don’t ever lay a finger on me again,’ I said.

He crawled over the floor and raised himself by pulling on the edge of the bed. He sat there, staring at me miserably, like a mournful dog.

I poured him a cupful of whisky and he drank it.

‘I don’t know why I did that,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to … but I … Oh mother, you’ve got to help me.’

Poor bastard. He was relying on me: he was relying on another human being. I felt sick. There are times when I wish I had a conscience.

He was examining himself for bruises. I turned away.

I picked up the nylon cord from the table.

‘You’re really getting desperate, aren’t you?’

He nodded his head slowly. ‘I can’t go on like this. You’ve got to do something soon. You’ve –’

I held my hand in the air to stop him. I was still shaking from the physical effort of punishing him. I was out of shape. But then I hadn’t needed to fight crudely like that for years. He got up from the bed and stood beside me.

‘Shake,’ he said.

Shake. Just like a child after a child’s fight.

I put out my hand and he took it. And then he gathered the dirty dishes and started to wash them in the sink. As if nothing had happened. Resilience or stupidity?

When it was dark we went down and looked at the wall. I pretended to be sizing it up, to look for the easiest part to climb. We had been there for about five minutes when there came the sound of Mrs Peluzzi’s voice from the other side of the wall. Eric and I stood silently and listened.

She didn’t say much to Rex. In fact, she only said one thing.

‘My Rex, my Rex, he can’t hurt you now.’

And then she went indoors.

3

Eric

I got a letter from the Territorial Army asking me to return my uniform as soon as possible. I went round to the hall on Friday night with the uniform wrapped in a brown paper bag. They asked me to sign a paper. After that I waited to see if Bayonet would turn up but one of the men there said that he had stopped coming and that if I wrote to Wormwood Scrubs I might receive an answer.

The reason I had to surrender my uniform was that they had to cut down on the number of men. At least, that was what they said. But the real reason was because I didn’t get on with Sergeant Dawes. When he said turn right I turned left, and when he said shoulder arms I dropped my rifle. Sergeant Dawes said that I was thicker than the thickest man he had ever met and he reported me. When I explained that my nerves were shot to pieces and tried to tell them the whole story, they didn’t listen. It was just that I couldn’t concentrate properly, I knew that. Anyway, I wasn’t going to make a fuss over something as silly as the Territorials.

When I got home, Matt was lying on the bed. He was smoking a cigarette and looking up at the ceiling. I opened the window. It was nearly dark. The dog was lying face down on the concrete, gathering his strength for the night ahead.

‘It’s bloody chilly in here,’ Matt said.

‘It’s the smoke from your cigarettes,’ I said. ‘We must get some fresh air.’

He didn’t argue with me. Ever since our fight he hasn’t argued very much. Ever since then he’s seemed more subdued and less energetic. I hadn’t wanted to fight, of course. But when he had looked at the nylon cord I’d bought and sneered at it in that funny way he has, then I just lost my temper. For a minute I couldn’t seem to see properly, blood rushing before my eyes, and I grabbed hold of him by the neck and banged his face into the table a couple of times until his nose was bleeding. After that we’d shaken hands because that was what he wanted. Since then he’s been different towards me in a kind of way.

He turned his face to the wall. It was about nine o’clock, too early to go to bed and too late to do much else.

I put on the kettle and made some tea and gave him a cup. It wasn’t just the way he’d sneered at the nylon that made me hit him. It was more than that. When he’d come at first I thought that all my troubles would soon be at an end. He was going to kill the dog. He was going to hide the carcass. But he didn’t do anything and seemed to be putting the whole thing off all the time and my suffering was getting worse and worse. So that was why I lost my temper.

But people are like that. You can never really tell about a person. They’re so disappointing.

‘You make a stinking cup of tea,’ he said.

‘It tastes all right to me,’ I said.

‘Your taste is in your arse.’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I’ve been making tea for years. I never see you make a cup.’

‘I’ve got better things to do,’ was all he said.

He lit another cigarette and looked about the room very restlessly, as if he would have liked to get up and smash something. I watched him carefully. He had been living with me for ten days. Ten whole days. And still the dog was alive, howling every night, moaning down there in the dark.

He picked up an old newspaper and started to read it. He’s smaller than me by about two inches and he’s very vain. He’s always ironing his trousers and washing his shirt and once he even asked me to buy a bottle of hair tint for him. I didn’t really want him in my room, but there wasn’t much I could do without causing another scene. I had picked him up in a public house at the other end of Cricklewood and he didn’t seem to have a home of his own to go to. At least he hadn’t mentioned one. He told me one or two things about his past, but not a great deal. He was once in the RAF in India before being transferred to the Army in Malaya. He was educated at a famous school and went to Oxford afterwards.

You can tell that he’s educated from the way he talks. He can put sentences together very well and he uses his hands a lot when he’s speaking. He’s killed dogs before. Or he says he has. But how I am supposed to know if that’s the truth? Once or twice he went down and measured the length of the wall and he’s covered sheets of paper with his calculations. But that doesn’t prove anything, does it?

‘How are the plans coming along?’ I asked.

‘Mind your own business,’ he said. ‘Who’s doing this job – you or me?’

‘You are,’ I said.

‘When I’m ready I’ll tell you.’

I nodded my head. That was how it went most of the time. When I asked how things were coming on he became abusive. I gathered the cups and saucers and washed them in the sink.

At half-past nine he said that he was going out for a bit.

‘For a walk?’ I asked. I felt like some fresh air.

But he just looked at me, put on his jacket and went down the stairs. When he had gone I sat on the bed and counted his cigarette ends. There were thirty-eight in the ashtray. I emptied them out. In the space under the sink were six empty whisky bottles.

But I had other worries apart from Matt.

King had called me into his office only the day before. For my second warning. ‘We don’t like to sack employees,’ he said. ‘But if your timekeeping doesn’t improve you’ll get your cards.’ I felt myself tremble in front of him. I tried to explain the situation and even outlined the plan to get rid of the dog, but all he said was something I couldn’t catch about the correct solution to every problem.

Afterwards in the canteen Benito came up and told me not to worry and Nigel and Charlie bought me a plate of fried eggs and chips. But my nerves were so bad that I couldn’t eat. I went into the lavatory, locked myself in and wept. I couldn’t stop crying. I dried my face with toilet paper and opened the window to get some fresh air. In the yard some of the men were kicking a ball about and I could hear them shout and laugh. I knew then that nobody else really cares about your problems the same way as you do yourself. It stands to reason anyway – you feel your own problems in a way that you don’t feel someone else’s.

I was sitting on the edge of the bed when Agnes came into the room. Her face was heavily made up. I could hardly see her eyes for all the dark blue stuff that she had painted on.

‘Where’s Matt?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He’s only just gone out –’

‘On your lonesome, darling?’

She sat beside me on the bed.

‘He’s a bit of a lad, your Matt,’ she said.

She crossed her legs. Her knees were tight, white where the bone showed through.

‘Is he going to stop here much longer?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘I hope he does,’ she said. ‘He brightens the place up a bit.’

‘I suppose he does.’

She turned her head round and looked at me for a time, as if she was trying to size something up.

‘Now then, you seem down in the dumps, Eric.’

‘I don’t sleep much at night –’

‘Oh, that.’

‘My nerves,’ I said.

She patted me on the knee.

‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘It can’t get any worse. I was talking to Mrs Peluzzi only yesterday, you know. She seems to have perked herself up a bit lately. She doesn’t wear that drab old black dress any more. Still, I expect she’s over the worst by this time.’

I got up from the bed and walked to the window. It was now completely dark outside. The lamp in the lane hadn’t come on and it was impossible to see very far. But when I looked down I was sure I could just make out the dog’s shape. He was moving about. Like a great black insect.

And then it happened again. For the second time in two days I started to cry. I couldn’t stop myself from doing it. The tears just rolled over my face. All at once it seemed as if everything had piled itself up on top of me, like a huge weight on your brain, and I had to cry.

Agnes put her arms round my shoulders.

‘There, there,’ she said. ‘Who’s being a big baby? Is Eric being a silly boy?’

We sat down on the bed and she held my hand, patting it.

Ever since I had come to this room my life seemed a mess. It was all the dog’s fault, I knew that, but it didn’t stop there. It interfered with my work, I was losing my good reputation. Only the other day I had spent a whole morning folding the cardboard back to front inside the boxes. One hundred and fifty-eight boxes, all wrong.

‘Feeling better now?’ Agnes said.

There was a horrible pain, like a lump, in my chest.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s all right.’

When she had gone I took a couple of drinks from Matt’s whisky. After that I felt a bit better. I opened the window and shouted down at the dog.

‘You’d better make the most of your noise, you black bastard.’

Then I lay on the couch and closed my eyes. I opened them later when I heard the dog bark. I sat up. Matt hadn’t come back. The room seemed funnily empty.

I took another drink of the whisky and added some water to the bottle so that he wouldn’t notice.

He came in just before one o’clock.

His clothes were untidy and he looked tired. Without saying anything to me he fell on top of the bed.

‘Did you have a nice time?’ I asked.

But he didn’t answer. He opened his whisky and held the bottle to his mouth.

‘Where did you go to?’ I asked.

‘Stop your bloody silly questions,’ he said.

‘I’m only trying to be friendly,’ I said.

I could hear the dog moan from the yard and the sound of his chain banging at the wall as if he was leaping up and down. Why didn’t he kill the animal? What was he waiting for? I mean, he could hear it just as well as me – why didn’t he destroy it?

I covered my ears with my hands.

‘I’m not in a very friendly mood,’ he said.

I watched him swallow some more whisky.

‘Agnes was looking for you,’ I said.

‘Sod Agnes.’

I lay flat out on the couch and closed my eyes. The noise of the dog seemed somehow to be inside my brain. Matt turned out the light and I could hear him toss and turn on the bed. My bed. I had not shared a room with another person for years. The last time was when I first came up to London, before I found my first lodgings, when I had spent the night in a house in Camden Town. It was a sort of dormitory with wooden partitions and bunks. The man in the bunk below kept going through my clothes for money, but I had everything valuable under my pillow, just in case. When he hadn’t found anything he grabbed hold of my arm and started to swear. I knew I could trust Matt not to steal anything. He had been too well-educated for that.

I listened to the dog as I always did. Then, since I couldn’t sleep, I walked quietly up and down the room. I wanted to put the light on but that would have woken him up, so I walked round in the dark.

I felt inside my coat for a bottle of codeine tablets that I’d bought, because I’d heard that they helped you to sleep. Instead of finding the bottle, I found a package. I pulled it out and realised that I had mistaken Matt’s coat for my own in the dark.

I know I should have put it back without looking at it. But I didn’t. I went out of the room and across the landing to the toilet and I sat down on the seat and looked at what I’d found.

There was an old newspaper wrapped round something else. I opened it. Under the paper was a stack of money bound with an elastic band. I spread the money on the floor and counted it. There was almost three thousand pounds. I’d never seen so much in my whole life. Three thousand pounds. Once my mother had won seventy in The Spastic Society raffle. But this was three thousand. I just sat there, staring at it. And then I wrapped it all up again and weighed it in my hand. I wondered what he was doing with all that money, but I didn’t like to think about it. It was his business, nothing to do with me. I wouldn’t pry into someone else’s affairs.

Still, it was a bit odd.

I unlocked the door and went back to my room. I put up my hand to his coat and tried to shove the package back into his pocket.

The next thing, the light had been turned on. He was standing there in his underpants, staring at me. I was holding the money in my hand.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

He spoke very slowly, like someone in real anger.

‘It was a mistake,’ I said.

‘Did you open that paper?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I had this tight, tight feeling in my chest. Like panic, or fear.

‘What did you do that for, Eric?’

He was breathing very slowly, his whole body rising and falling.

‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’

He came closer. I stepped back.

‘I came here to do you a favour, and you repay me by rifling through my private belongings –’

‘It was a mistake,’ I said.

‘What did you see in that parcel?’ he asked.

‘M-money,’ I said.

He was standing about a foot from me. I looked at his hands. The blood had run out of his fingers and his knuckles were white.

‘A lot of money?’

I nodded my head. I could hardly speak.

And then suddenly he smiled.

‘It isn’t my money, of course,’ he said. He fumbled around and found a cigarette. He was shaking. ‘It belongs to someone else, you see. I have to look after it for him. That’s all. That’s all there is to it.’

‘I knew it would be something like that,’ I said. ‘I mean, you wouldn’t be here for twenty pounds, would you, if you had that much money?’

We both laughed for a bit. And then he slapped me on the back.

‘Look, I’m sorry if I’ve been speaking to you a bit roughly recently. It’s just that I’ve got a lot on my mind at the present. You can understand that, can’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘There’s the plan for killing that wretched dog for a start.’ He had his arm round my shoulder. ‘Well, that’s a grave responsibility. Not to be treated lightly. Let’s have a drink.’

He poured whisky into two cups and we sat together on the couch and drank it.

‘You mustn’t think I’m wasting time, Eric,’ he said. ‘The fact is – and I’m speaking plainly now – we don’t want to botch the job, do we? The last thing we want is a balls-up. We’ve got our backs to the wall at the moment, I’m aware of that. But we need courage, that’s all. Courage will see us through the days ahead. So you must forgive me if I’ve been a bit short with you lately. We creative people – well, we’re inclined to have short tempers.’

‘I understand that,’ I said.

‘I knew you would.’

He filled my cup again. I was beginning to have this drowsy feeling. He talked a bit more. He mentioned Dunkirk and how the British nation had its back to the wall then and how they won through in the end. I didn’t take it all in. The whisky had gone to my head. It was a pleasant floating sort of feeling.

When he put off the light I lay with my eyes closed.

He said, ‘We’re killing a dog, Eric. We’re taking a life. It isn’t to be treated as a joke.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

Somehow the noise seemed less of a nuisance that night. I didn’t expect to sleep but I did. I woke from time to time, but never for very long.

The sound came from a great distance. It was like the sea in one of those shells you hold to your ear. It must have been the whisky and the way Matt had spoken so frankly about his schemes.

2

In the morning I was just about to get out of bed when I remembered it was Saturday and I didn’t have to go to work. I opened my eyes and lay there staring up at the ceiling. Sharing a room with somebody when you’re used to being on your own is a funny sort of experience. At times I didn’t want him there, because I had gotten used to being on my own and he seemed to be in the way. And at other times I liked having him, especially when he was friendly as he had been last night.

After a time I sat up and looked round the room. The clock on the mantelpiece said it was ten-thirty. Matt had made the bed, but he wasn’t in the room. I put on the kettle and boiled some water for coffee. When I was sitting down drinking Roderick came into the room.

‘Do I smell coffee?’ he asked.

He went over to the stove and made himself a cup and then he came and sat down beside me.

‘I suppose that the dog is still alive,’ he said.

I looked at him. With Roderick you have to be careful, because his mood changes so much. Sometimes he whistles and laughs a lot and sometimes he stands at the window tapping his fingers on the glass and says nothing.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But not for much longer.’

He shook his head. His long hair moved up and down and the white ribbon swung back and forward.

‘Doesn’t it strike you as rather strange that your friend hasn’t got round to doing the job yet?’

‘Strange? But you can’t rush a thing like this. You have to plan it very carefully. That’s what was wrong with the way I was tackling it, you see. I didn’t plan it out properly.’

‘Mmmm,’ he said. He was deep in thought. He got up and walked about the room. And then he said, ‘But it’s just a matter of going over the wall and doing it, isn’t it? I can’t see any need for planning anything.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. Matt says that you must have a scientific approach to the problem. If you rush in, then there’s no telling what will happen –’

‘He could hardly be accused of rushing, could he? He’s been here – what? – for over a week, and he hasn’t really done anything, has he?’

I looked at Roderick carefully. For someone of his intellect, he was really very slow on the uptake sometimes. I started to explain carefully and slowly but I could see that he wasn’t listening closely because he had started to tap his fingers on the table.

‘And your friend’s making plans, is he?’

I got out the sheets of paper that Matt had written his calculations on and showed them to Roderick and he looked at them for a time, scratching his head.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Well, well, well.’

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Nothing.’ He returned the sheets to me and then went to the window. ‘I must say that I don’t understand the figures. They’re a bit deep for me.’

‘They’re a bit deep for me too,’ I said.

‘What I don’t understand is why he visited Mrs Peluzzi the other day. I mean, you just don’t visit a woman if you’re planning to kill her dog, do you? Or do you?’

He turned and looked at me. Mrs Peluzzi? Matt?

‘I don’t believe that,’ I said.

‘I saw it with my own two eyes, man,’ he said. ‘I was coming down the street and there he was – coming out of her house. He had on his coat and the collar was turned up. He looked like Edward G. Robinson.’

‘No, you must be mistaken.’

‘I’m not infallible, I admit. But I don’t think I’m mistaken. He came out of her house and then he hurried into this one. I’m certain.’

I stared at the sheets of paper.

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ I said.

Roderick picked up his cup and drank some of the coffee. Then he made a face. ‘Perhaps that’s part of his plan.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That might explain it.’

We looked at each other in silence. I thought about the mad woman next door and then about Matt, but I couldn’t picture them together, it was difficult to know what they might have talked about, or even why he had gone there.

Roderick said, ‘Perhaps you better speak to him about it.’

I said, ‘He knows what he’s doing.’

After Roderick had gone I put on my clothes. When Matt had come at first he had just stayed in the room every night and even when I asked him if he wanted to go for a walk or to the café in Cricklewood Lane he’d said that he didn’t want to. And then, a few nights ago, he started to go out. He didn’t say where he went. When I asked him, he wouldn’t tell me. Mind you, I didn’t pry, and I didn’t want to push the matter because a person will tell you a thing only when he wants to and not before. Had Matt been visiting Mrs Peluzzi? I wondered. Had he? I wouldn’t say that I didn’t trust Roderick’s eyesight, it’s probably as good as mine, but perhaps he had imagined the whole thing.

I went down into the street and stood outside the house. There was a bench on the other side of the street, just a little way down, and I went over and sat there. From that position I could watch Mrs Peluzzi’s.

An old man sitting next to me said,

‘The weather’s breaking, I see.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘When it breaks we’ll all be better off.’

I fidgeted about on the bench. I knew I was prying, sitting there and watching to see if Matt came out of the house, and I felt unclean. After last night, when he had spoken about his plans and his difficulties, I trusted him. After all, he had been honest with me, he had been open, he hadn’t tried to hide any of the difficulties and he hadn’t tried to say that everything was going to be easy. He had been perfectly frank, and frankness in people is very rare. Now I was sitting there spying on him.

The old man said, ‘There used to be more sparrows about a few years back.’

‘Well, times change,’ I said. You’ve got to patronise old people and agree with everything they say.

‘Mind, we’ve got more pigeons than we ever had before.’

I was just going to say what I thought about that when Matt appeared. He came down the steps of Mrs Peluzzi’s. He had the collar of his coat turned up just like Roderick had said. He hurried into number fourteen and closed the door behind him. I got up from the bench and walked to the house. What was I going to say to him? I didn’t know.

When I got into the room he was washing his handkerchief at the sink. The basin was full of water and the handkerchief was floating about just under the surface, like a white, flat fish. It was covered with blood stains.

‘I cut my face,’ he said.

There was a wound on his cheek, like a long scratch mark.

‘You’ll need some plaster.’ I got the Elastoplast box out of the cupboard and gave him a long piece which he put over his cheek.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘I walked into something sharp,’ he said.

I sat down on the couch and looked at him. He rinsed the handkerchief in cold water, squeezed it out, and then laid it flat on the draining board.

‘The plaster will heal it,’ I said.

‘Will it?’ he said and touched his cheek. ‘What a remarkable little invention.’

‘It’s very useful,’ I said. I kept getting this image of him and the mad Italian woman sitting together in her room, chattering to each other.

He sat on the bed and lit a cigarette.

I said, ‘I was coming down the street just now when I thought I saw you.’

‘You might have done,’ he said.

‘I thought I saw you coming out of Mrs Peluzzi’s.’

He looked at me a moment as if he was surprised and then he laughed.

‘So. You’ve discovered my secret.’

‘You were in Mrs Peluzzi’s, weren’t you?’

He took a draw of his cigarette and looked over at the window. After a time he said, ‘I didn’t want to alarm you, Eric. I didn’t tell you that I’ve been seeing her because I didn’t want you to jump to the wrong conclusions. Who knows, you might have got hold of things in quite the wrong perspective.’ He took a drink from his whisky bottle. Drips of blood ran down under the piece of plaster.

‘I don’t think I understand,’ I said.

‘It’s perfectly simple,’ he said. ‘I intend to plan this assassination in a military manner. I intend it to go off like clockwork. Like a bloody well-oiled clock, if you see what I mean. I have, if I may say so, vast experience of military procedure. And an elementary step in this kind of logic is to make your enemy think that he has nothing to fear from you, that you are in fact a friend. In this way you lull him into a false sense of security and at the same time provide yourself with a perfect opportunity for probing, exploring and assessing his various weaknesses. This is exactly what I’m doing in the case of Mrs Peluzzi, you see. Now, do you follow all that?’

I thought about it for a bit. I had to admit that it was complicated, but that it sounded a very good idea.

‘That’s marvellous,’ I said.

‘It’s cunning,’ he said. ‘Nothing more, nothing less.’

‘What do you say to her?’

‘Oh, we talk on endless topics, Eric. But I always bring her back to the dog in the end.’

I went to the window and looked down. Rex was asleep, his great black head between his paws.

‘Why does she keep him in that yard all the time?’ I asked.

‘Because she doesn’t want him indoors,’ he answered.

That was reasonable, I thought. I sat down. We didn’t say anything for a long time. He was lying on the bed smoking, looking up at the ceiling.

I said, ‘She’s mad, isn’t she? She’s off her head.’

He looked at me and smiled.

He said, ‘It looks that way.’

3

My mother used to say never trust a living soul. You’ll only regret it. I thought about this when I was looking at Matt. He fell asleep on the bed though it was just afternoon. His mouth was hanging open and he was snoring a bit and blood was dripping out from under the Elastoplast.

I mean to say, it’s funny how someone can just walk into your life and no matter what happens, nothing can ever be the same again. Ten days ago I’d never even heard of Matt Churchill. And now there he was, lying on my bed in my room, sleeping. I walked over to him and looked down. Like a baby. Sound asleep. I could easily have choked him to death without a murmur, if I’d wanted to. Because when you’re asleep you can’t feel anything. You can’t struggle properly until you’re awake, so you’re at a disadvantage right away. I touched his shoulder, but he didn’t move.

The skin of his face is smooth and pink and when he shaves he cuts right into the roots of the hair so that his flesh always has this same smooth look. The lids of his eyes have little veins on them, running up and down and crisscrossing. His hair is brown and black, brown at the sides, black from the front to the top and then brown again. His fingers like his face are smooth and pink, not at all like mine, which are hard and corny. When I compared myself to him, he seemed very superior.

I went and sat on the couch and drank some of his whisky. I would never have touched the stuff before he came to the room. Now it tasted good and warm. I poured some into a cup and went to the window and looked out.

Agnes was in our yard hanging clothes on a line. First she hung a skirt and then a corset and then several pairs of knickers. The light came up through the thin material, showing the stains that hadn’t quite been washed out. Now and then when the wind blew, the knickers moved as if there was little legs dancing about invisibly inside them.

When she bent down to the basket I saw that her skirt ran up her buttocks. But the area was covered in shadow and I couldn’t see anything. Then she went indoors.

Never trust a living soul. You’ll only regret it.

Had my mother been bitter when she’d said that?

Matt was still asleep on the bed. I took another good look at him. It’s a funny thing, but when he’s asleep all the strength goes out of his face just as if it’s never there in the first place. As if under all his talk there isn’t really anything else. What a stupid thing to think.

I’m always thinking stupid things. I see now that all my life I’ve had stupid thoughts. But I hadn’t known before. I mean, I hadn’t known until Matt came. He plans everything out, you see. Every single move he works out in advance. Nothing is left to chance. He thinks. When did I ever think?

Once, I remembered working out that the universe must be infinite. It must just go on and on, for ever and all time, and endless darkness. When you think about that everything else seems so silly and pointless. Well, it does. I mean, the business about the dog. It seems so small and tiny compared with the universe. It seems so frail. If you were up there, at the farthest comer of the universe, you wouldn’t hear him bark, would you? You wouldn’t even think about it, and if you did think about it you’d say to yourself, Bloody ridiculous.

When I looked out of the window and saw Rex in the yard next door I thought, Bloody ridiculous. It only needed one knife in his neck or a cord pulled tightly and that would be that. That would be the end of everything for him.

But he was still alive.

Never trust a living soul.

I looked at Matt and I wondered if I could trust him. Not just trust him to kill the dog but trust him in everything. In everything.

He opened his eyes and stared at me.

‘I hope you don’t mind me drinking a drop of your whisky,’ I said.

He said, ‘I didn’t know you drank.’

He got up from the bed and rubbed his face with his hands.

Looking at him I asked, ‘Can I trust you?’

He didn’t answer me straight off. He took out a cigarette and lit it and took a deep draw on it.

‘That’s a damned funny question,’ he said.

He picked up the whisky bottle and held it up to see how much was left.

‘I want to know,’ I said. ‘Can I trust you?’

It seemed all of a sudden very important to know the answer. I didn’t know what trust was. Didn’t really know.

He laughed. ‘Of course you can trust me, Eric. I’m surprised you even asked.’

That was all I wanted to hear, really, and now that he’d said it I didn’t know why I’d asked in the first place. But there you are. It had just suddenly filled my brain, like a huge light. Trust. I could trust him.

I finished my drink and lay down on the couch. I didn’t sleep but I felt myself sort of float about the room. I couldn’t really hear anything either. Bits and pieces of the afternoon light came through the window in a kind of broken way, breaking into the room. Peaceful. Matt was moving around but I didn’t look to see what he was doing.

Later, when I sat up I felt light-headed as if I was going to be sick. I ran cold water all over my face and pressed my head against the cool glass. Matt wasn’t in the room.

I could see him down there in the yard. Mrs Peluzzi’s yard.

Mrs Peluzzi was there too. They were talking together. At one point I saw him stroke Rex’s head. And I thought of how cunning he was and how clever of him to get so well in with the widow.

The dog licked his hand.

4

On the Sunday morning I walked to the shops to get the Sunday Mirror. There was a queue in the newsagent’s and because I had something of a hangover I waited outside until the shop was empty before going in. It was a stuffy little place that usually gave me a headache.

The little man behind the counter had my newspaper lying in front of him. I was a regular customer.

‘Well, Mr Billings,’ he said. ‘And how is work?’

I picked up the paper and put down my money.

‘Busy, you know,’ I said.

‘It’s a busy time of year,’ he said.

I looked at the headline.

‘More trouble in the Middle East, I see,’ the little man said.

Beside the headline was a picture of this girl in a swimsuit, kicking up splashes of water. The swimsuit was very small. It hardly covered her breasts.

‘You do look a bit rough this morning, Mr Billings. Been on the tiles, have you?’

‘I had a few drinks last night,’ I said.

He sucked in his breath and shook his head. I didn’t like him much. I always had the funny feeling that he was smirking all the time.

‘Drinks, whoooosh,’ he said, sucking away.

‘It’s a free country,’ I said.

‘I’m not denying that,’ he said. ‘But drinking. Well.’

And he shook his head some more.

I tucked my paper under my arm and went out of the shop.

Mrs Peluzzi was just going in.

For a moment we looked at each other. I didn’t know what to say. I kept thinking about the poisoned chop I’d thrown down one day in the hope that Rex would eat it, but he hadn’t. It had been a foolish thing to do. I mean, she could easily have gone for the police.

‘You,’ she said. ‘You.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘How you have the nerve to show yourself around this district is over my head, I swear it.’

She was wearing a lemon dress that made her look fat.

‘I don’t quite understand,’ I said.

‘You know damn well what I’m talking about,’ she said.

I shook my head. ‘No, honestly –’

‘My Rex,’ she said. ‘You want to kill him.’

I laughed. ‘He makes a bit of a noise at night, but –’

‘There is no noise,’ she said.

‘No noise! He keeps me awake every night, my nerves are shot to pieces –’

‘There is no noise,’ she said. And she tapped her head. ‘That’s where all your noise is.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘What do you think I’m saying?’ she said. ‘Huh? Huh?’

I stepped away from her. Obviously she was mad. Out of her head. There was this strange look in her eyes.

‘You will die before my dog does,’ she said.

I walked away quickly. I didn’t like the way she’d said that.

When I got into the room I was trembling. I opened the paper but I couldn’t read it.

I said to Matt, ‘I met Mrs Peluzzi just now.’

He looked at me, saying nothing.

‘She threatened me,’ I said.

He began to laugh.

You will die before my dog does. Well, that wasn’t any laughing matter. What was he laughing for?

‘It isn’t very funny,’ I said.

‘Where’s your sense of humour?’ he asked.

‘But she really threatened me. She really did.’

He laughed a little more. Then he took a drink of his whisky and passed the bottle over to me.

‘That should make you feel better.’

I drank some and it burned my chest.

He said, ‘You don’t want to take her too seriously, Eric.’

I said, because I was suddenly irritated by everything.

‘It’s high time that dog was killed.’

Matt didn’t answer.

4

Matt

I had never met a woman quite like Bella Peluzzi. I can say that without wishing to impart a totally wrong impression – namely, that I was head-over-heels in love with her or something equally false. The plain fact of the matter was that she interested me, intrigued me – and teased me to the point of distraction.

Probably if you were to go back into my childhood far enough you would find some reason for this odd compulsion of mine to martyr myself. Did some thoughtless babysitter finger me, thus drawing attention to my inadequacy at a tender age? Or is the explanation even more banal – namely, that I was playing out the act yet again in the theatre of my own vanity? Christ knows.

I had gone to visit her that first time from sheer bloody expediency and I had lied about my purpose. I can’t explain why I went the second time, except perhaps by reminding myself of the unbroken boredom of Eric’s room. The third visit came about when I invited myself to supper. Fourth and subsequent visits happened because our relationship – as I conceived of it – simply had to move on to a physical plane. Namely, bed.

Or is there something in the Latin temperament that attracted me? Something obscure, something of the sun, something that we in this frozen northern country have forgotten about, if we ever knew at all? A sense, perhaps, of passion coiled up like a tense spring.

On my seventh visit – my ninth day with Eric – Bella had cooked a pot of spaghetti and a pan of meat sauce. We sat down in her sitting-room, those dreadful photo-graphs staring all around us, and ate. Half-way during the meal she suddenly stopped and she said,

‘I know that you want to find your way to my bed, Edward. But this I can never allow. Do you understand?’

I allowed strands of pasta to slip from my fork.

‘You misjudge me,’ I said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I do not trust you.’

Trust. The whole world wants to know what it can trust. I never understand why. Shifting things are ultimately more satisfying. I finished the meal and sat on the sofa drinking my wine. She played some of her operatic records on the old-fashioned gramophone. There was another door leading from the sitting-room into the hallway. At the end of the hall was her bedroom. Once, when I had attempted to coax her in there, she had refused with a strange violence. You don’t expect widows to be so moral. After all, they’ve been used and surely there is something to spare for the rest of us.

That night she sat beside me and we held hands like a courting couple under the bulldog eye of a chaperone. I kissed the damp palm of her hand and bit her wrist. It was like kissing a bowl of luke-warm rice.

But how do you explain a fascination anyway? Possibily it was just my bloody vanity. I wanted her. I had to have her. I had to know her just once. Forget the moustache and the belly like sponge – a belly filled with curled and rotting strands of spaghetti – and think about the massive breasts and the huge hips. And so I hung around her.

When the record had stopped playing I said,

‘Why don’t we go down to the coast this weekend?’

‘To a hotel?’ she asked.

‘The best hotel.’

‘Separate bedrooms, of course?’

I didn’t answer. I should have known better. You can’t win them all, but God, you ought to be able to win some of them. At nine-thirty she went into the back yard. I watched her from the window. She went through the business of caressing the wretched dog, kissing it, throwing her arms around its neck. When she came back I put my hands on her hips and drew her down on the sofa. I could feel that she was trembling. I thought, At last. At last. But as soon as I had moved my hands across her front and up, she pushed me away.

I took out a cigarette and smoked furiously. That sometimes brings a woman to her senses, that look of frustrated agony, that impatient silence. But not Bella. She turned over the damned record and sat down well away from me.

At half-past ten I stood up to go.

‘Why are you rushing?’ she asked.

‘Isn’t that obvious?’ I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders and rolled her eyes. She brought out another bottle of wine and we sat drinking it. She had an enormous capacity. When I was on the verge of drunkenness she was still clear-eyed.

‘Do you like your work?’ she asked.

‘I love animals,’ I said.

She didn’t say anything. She sipped her wine and looked at the many photographs. The he was a difficult thing to sustain. In the end, I dropped it, mentioning it only in a mumbled response to her questions. I thought about the dog, Blessed Rex (who came in for her attention more than me), and I thought about poor Eric. I was the assassin, the hired gun. I wondered what she would have said if I’d told her.

‘Animals are beautiful,’ she said. ‘Humans are so ugly.’

‘A matter of opinion,’ I said.

‘No, it is not,’ she said. She was waving her arms in the air in a theatrical way. ‘With an animal, there is never any doubt.’

She loved her dog. She loved it in what seemed to me a perfectly unnatural way. Yet, if she loved it so, why did she keep it shivering in that yard? A real RSPCA officer might have had something strong to say to her about that.

‘With an animal, you always know.’

‘Know what?’ I asked.

‘Everything there is to know,’ she said.

That night, when she showed me to the door, she allowed me to kiss her. She kept her mouth tight shut, she pressed her body flat against mine. Before I had time to respond, I was out in the cold street. I waited on the steps until she had closed her door, before I went into number fourteen. It was an absurd situation.

Thinking about her, I found it difficult to know why I found her so attractive. Breaking her down into individual parts, only the eyes, the curves of the hips, and the large firm breasts were appealing. The rest could have been discarded – including the legs, which were thick, and for some reason the sort of legs you might expect to find in an industrial area where all the women work lathes and tread machine controls. Industrial legs.

Eric was sitting mournfully by the window when I got in. He looked up, blinking like one of those ponies that used to work down pits.

‘I saw her a minute ago,’ he said. ‘She came out and kissed that dog. It was disgusting.’

‘Everyone to their own taste,’ I said.

There were times when he annoyed me to the point of murder. It was partly the slow way he spoke, and the cumbersome manner in which he moved. I remembered how I had enjoyed hitting him, and though I had resolved to be as kind to him as I could be, it was always difficult. Bloody difficult. In a sense, he provoked me. His very existence was provocation. I lay down on the bed and took a drink of my watered-down whisky. That was a trick he had picked up only recently. I didn’t say anything. He kept drinking the stuff and adding water to it afterwards. No doubt he thought it the height of cunning.

He began to whine about how the dog was still alive – the old story.

I said, ‘For God’s sake shut up and give me some peace.’

I lay in the darkness thinking about Bella. The Italian widow – perhaps a variety of snake. I imagined her undressed, but somehow the pictures that came were blurred ones. My thoughts had taken an indecent turn. Why, in any case, did I want her so badly? Agnes was always on offer. Perhaps to choose the easiest is the worst possible thing. Perhaps Bella Peluzzi embodied something of a mystery. Widow with dog. Pictures. Perhaps I wanted to puncture, to penetrate, the mystery. Yet when I thought, What the hell do I mean by mystery? it evaporated. And then there was nothing but me and this room and Eric Shootler Billings.

What a combination.

2

On the Friday night Eric found the money in my coat. I had been careless, leaving it there, but somehow I hadn’t anticipated him blundering across it. Earlier I had gone to Bella’s for supper. We had listened to the inevitable records and talked about the RSPCA and found between the talk uncomfortable silences. I knew that she was physically conscious of me and of what I wanted from her and I suspected that in spite of herself she wanted exactly the same thing. But we sat in mutual embarrassment, waiting for something to happen.

She said, ‘Why have you never married?’

I said, ‘I’ve only been in love once.’

‘And?’

‘I was left waiting at the church. But she never came.’

‘Oh, what a shame.’

She ran her fingers through my hair. She mothered me for a moment. When I looked at her I saw that she was crying. That was a good sign: a red sky in the sexual night. Play on their sympathy and Aladdin’s cave will surely grind open.

But she got up and walked around the room.

‘I had a beautiful wedding,’ she said. ‘How can I tell you how beautiful it was?’

‘Ah,’ I said.

‘But it turned sour, it went wrong.’

And then another silence. She was striking a fist into the palm of her other hand. She did this several times.

‘Now I am a widow.’

‘Yes,’ I said. Was that an invitation?

‘What does life mean? What is death?’

If anything kills sex, it is philosophy. I felt myself subside. She sat down at the other side of the room, half-smiling.

‘It is because you can never know how people will turn out,’ she said.

‘True,’ I said.

She turned over the record. She wiped her eyes with a piece of tissue. The music, the loud drumming of voices, filled the room. It was like being in a cathedral. For Christ’s sake, I thought, what’s wrong with her?

I thought about the bedroom at the end of the hall. I guessed then that it was simply a matter of frustration, that all she needed was a little horseplay and all would be well.

She didn’t speak until the music had finally stopped.

‘How can I be sure that you will not take my Rex away from me?’

‘I give my word,’ I said.

‘I have had words before,’ she said.

‘But not mine,’ I answered.

‘Words are always the same.’

‘What else can I do?’

She raised her eyebrows. Her plump hands fluttered about like two bats.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

She sighed for a bit and I wondered, for no reason, if she was frigid. That would have fitted. Her old man occupied only a bitter place in her memory, she didn’t think of him with love in her mind, and when he had been alive he had tortured the dog. Probably the poor bastard had been kept waiting at the door, unfulfilled. Probably he had never crossed the threshold of their marriage. I imagined him (faceless since there wasn’t a photograph) standing in the doorway and gazing down at the plump Bella under the blankets. What had passed between them? What was said and done?

She sat down beside me on the sofa.

She said, frowning, ‘You see, I cannot live without my dog. I do not want you to take him from me.’

I vowed that such a thing would never happen. But that didn’t seem to please her much. Her face was dark and clouded. She was working her plump little fingers together, massaging them, knitting them, as if she were coaxing dough into shape for an oven.

I took her hand in mine and kissed her gently on the mouth. Her arms went round my neck, drawing me into her face, drawing me closer to her body. I pushed my hands under her blouse. The breasts were firm, the nipples hard. There was a smell, I remember, of garlic and lemon.

And then she pushed me away and rose from the sofa.

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘He is hardly cold yet.’

‘Don’t be morbid,’ I said. ‘He’s dead. Does it matter if he’s cold or warm?’

She said nothing more. She flicked her eyes round the photographs, as if she were again seeking the missing one, the great omission. After a bit I got up and left. She didn’t see me to the door that night. I stood on the cold street for a time, stamping my feet on the pavement, looking this way and that.

For Christ’s sake, I thought, what was I doing here? I should have packed up and cleared out, should have been long gone from this pitiful street, from the widow, from moaning Eric and his predicament. Yet there I was. Involved. Unintentionally involved in a situation that I didn’t particularly like and that was surely bad for me.

When I got in Eric was stretched out on the sofa. He looked up and said,

‘Where have you been?’

There was no point in answering him. I lay down on the bed and covered my face with my hands. Between my fingers was the smell of the woman. An intolerable reminder of my frustration.

‘Did you have a nice time?’ he asked.

I took off my jacket and yawned. I lit a cigarette and stared at him. Again, the question: Why didn’t I clear out?

He was gazing at me blindly, his mouth hanging open a little way, his tiny teeth (the size of a child’s milk-teeth) shining with saliva. His eyes were bulging.

‘Don’t ask such stupid bloody questions,’ I said.

‘I thought we were friends,’ he answered.

Friends! I turned my face to the wall. Was it possible, barely possible, that he imagined there to be some sort of relationship between us? I undressed and turned off the light and listened to him stumble around the room in the darkness. He collided with an article of furniture and cursed. After a time he went out. He was gone an unusually long time. When he came back I got out of bed and turned on the light – perhaps I was curious to see what he was up to, I don’t know.

He was standing there with the package containing my money in his hand. We just looked at each other for a time, while I tried to think of how to handle the situation.

I said, ‘I didn’t think you were a thief, Eric.’

His face was red. ‘No, I wasn’t going to steal anything – you see, it was an accident.’

I gripped his wrist and twisted it. The package fell to the floor. I picked it up and threw it on the bed and then I turned to him.

‘It isn’t nice, is it, to be caught in the act of going through someone else’s belongings?’

He shook his head, very slowly, from side to side.

For a second, I felt like striking him. But part of me was too exhausted to care. I sat down on the bed and shoved the package under the pillow.

‘Did you see what was in it?’ I asked.

‘A lot of money,’ he said.

‘I suppose I might as well tell you the truth,’ I said. ‘I won the money playing roulette. I didn’t want you to know this in case you have any religious objections, but I’m a professional gambler.’

‘Are you?’ he asked. ‘Well, that’s interesting. I wouldn’t mind having a job like that.’ He sat down and placed his hands on his knees. He kept staring at me for a while, his jaw slack.

There was such an open stupidity in his look that I had to turn away. When a man has a stupid expression, generally he will attempt to disguise it – either by smoking a pipe, setting his jaw firmly, narrowing his eyes, or wearing glasses with heavy black frames. But Eric was blissfully unaware of how he looked. Blank and stupid. I turned out the light and got back into bed.

‘A professional gambler,’ he mumbled in the dark. ‘I wish I did something like that. It sounds really interesting.’

But I wasn’t listening to his voice. I was thinking of Bella Peluzzi. I tried to imagine how it would be when she came across. I dreamed of the naked thighs white in the dim light of her bedroom and her arms stretched across the sheets and her hair stranded on the pillow. Her lips would be slightly parted, slightly damp, and the poor light would make her thin moustache seem nothing more than a playful shadow. Or so I dreamed. But is there anything inherently wrong in dreaming such things?

As a child my fantasy life had been restricted to acts that I couldn’t conceivably have performed in the real world. I mean, some kids dream of playing at Wembley and some even make it – but my fantasies didn’t have the least feasibility. Stemming single-handed an attack of enemy soldiers, dropping from an aeroplane without a parachute, landing on Mars with a cellophane-wrapped Union Jack to plant in the sore, red soil – these were some of my actions.

But now, dreaming of Bella Peluzzi, the dream had acquired a strong element of actuality. It was within my grasp, it was nothing I couldn’t do.

3

I visited her again at midday on the Saturday. She opened the door wearing only a dressing-gown and a nightdress. Her feet were bare. I observed the stunted ugliness of her toes – like trees blasted by a sea wind. Yet, strangely, the more I discovered in her that I didn’t care for, the more I seemed to care. She allowed me to kiss her on the side of her face and then she went into the bathroom to get dressed.

I waited in the depressing sitting-room. At night the photographs are only just tolerable because electric light reflects from the glass frames and the faces beneath have a tendency to disappear – but in a natural light they can be seen in all their frozen horror. What was it that I didn’t like about them? Was it simply the fact that they existed? No, it couldn’t just be that. Was it then the fact that some of the faces were now dead while the others had changed unrecognisably since the shutter had first nailed them on to film? I was thinking about this when Bella returned.

She was wearing a pair of slacks that did very little for her figure. She asked me for a cigarette, the first I had ever seen her smoke.

‘You come here so often that the neighbours will soon be talking, eh?’ she said.

‘Let them talk,’ I said.

‘It isn’t good that they should have something to talk about.’

‘They don’t have anything to talk about though – do they?’ I loaded the question heavily, to make my meaning plain, but she simply spread her hands and shrugged and turned her eyes up to the ceiling.

She walked up and down the room, puffing on the cigarette without inhaling it. And then she stubbed it in an ashtray.

‘My husband used to smoke a hundred cigarettes every day,’ she said. ‘His nerves were bad.’

I thought about poor Peluzzi. In the circumstances, I almost felt sorry for him. I imagined him trying every night to get her to bed and failing more and more miser-ably with each attempt. No wonder, I thought, he beat hell out of the bloody dog.

‘Why don’t you have a photograph of him?’ I asked.

Without answering, she went out of the room. I could hear her potter around in the kitchen, dishes clacking, water dripping. She came back with a jug of coffee and a plate of ham sandwiches. At least, she fed me. It was small consolation, but I never left her with an empty stomach.

‘Since you’ve got the whole of bloody Italy in this room anyway, why isn’t there a picture of your husband?’ I asked.

Whether it was the noise she made in placing the coffee and cups on the table that prevented her from hearing me properly, or whether it was because she chose to ignore my question, I’m not sure – but she didn’t answer.

Instead she said, ‘Where do you live?’

‘Oh, not far away,’ I said.

‘Then you do not have to do much travelling to visit me?’

‘I always walk,’ I said.

‘Perhaps I can come and visit you some time,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

She poured coffee and gave me a plate with a pile of sandwiches on it.

While I was eating, I looked at her. She was seated facing me, her legs apart. I noticed the marvellous thickness of her thighs – yet again, yet again – and the way the belly protruded a little, softly, before it dropped down to her crutch. She was opening and closing her mouth on a sandwich. She performed this action in an odd way: first she nibbled round the crust, taking in about an inch at a time; then she bit a small hole in the centre of the sandwich, through which she looked, as if it were the end of a telescope or a keyhole; after that she ate from the hole outwards and seemed to roll each bite around her tongue for a long time before swallowing it. When she was left with only a very small piece of bread she put it on a plate and cut it into six or seven even smaller pieces with a knife. These she put into her mouth one at a time. Then she wiped her hands on a napkin and drank some coffee.

I had the strong feeling that she had been dissecting the sandwich, as if to analyse its contents. As if, in some very peculiar way, to be sure of what was in it before she digested it.

I remarked that she had a strange way of eating. But she didn’t comment on it. Instead she said,

‘Shall I play a record now?’

‘I’ve got a bit of a headache this morning, if you don’t mind –’

‘Of course,’ she said. She looked at me. ‘You left here last night in a very black mood, Edward Carson, didn’t you? I didn’t think you would come again.’

‘You’re fatally attractive,’ I said.

‘You mean that my bed attracts you. Why don’t you be honest?’

‘I’m always honest,’ I said.

‘Hah,’ she said. ‘I have still to meet the honest man.’

Although she said this in a light-hearted sort of fashion, I felt – as I had felt before – that she meant it, that somehow she liked, even enjoyed, the feeling of not being able to place her trust in anyone or anything – except of course her bloody Rex.

She said, ‘Shall we go and have a look at my dog now? After all, that is really your business in coming here, isn’t it?’

I followed her into the yard.

The creature jumped at her as soon as she approached. She went down on her knees and, oblivious of my presence, caressed the dog. She pushed her fingers through the black fur, kissed the ears, tickled the belly. The dog enjoyed it, even if I didn’t. And then she took a piece of paper from her slacks. She opened it and removed a bone which she threw up for the beast to catch. The huge mouth opened and closed like a spring.

I watched all this with a strange mixture of excitement and nausea. There was something definitely sexual in the way she handled the dog, something that I could feel myself. On the other hand, the scene was basically all wrong. I should have been receiving these attentions – not the bloody dog.

She hugged the black head to her chest and whispered,

‘Nobody is going to hurt you now.’

But the dog by this time was more interested in the bone. He gnawed it, chewed it, ground his pointed white teeth into the thick meat until raw blood spurted out.

Inside the house again we were just passing the bed-room door when on an impulse I caught her by the arm. I forced her against the door and ran my hands across her body. She kissed me with her lips tight shut, her hands against my arms. I tried to turn the handle of the bedroom door, but it wouldn’t open. She was struggling against me. I felt her fingernail in my flesh and a second of sharp pain.

‘The door’s locked,’ I said.

She stepped away from me, smiling triumphantly.

‘You take all the bloody precautions, don’t you?’ I said.

‘I keep it locked,’ she said.

I followed her into the sitting-room. We finished the rest of the coffee in silence.

‘Your face is bleeding, Edward,’ she said.

I got up and left. It seemed fruitless to stay.

Some women will play games with a man; like opening flybuttons and fingering tentatively as if the thing were electric and likely to be lethal, but all the time keep themselves buttoned up in a puritanical straitjacket. Others will kiss with their throats open, as if to devour you, but would no more open their thighs than shit on a pavement. The point of these games is simply to demonstrate mastery of the weaker over the stronger. To show that although the male lives in a world where all the power lies, he’s a fumbling helpless bastard when he’s battering his head against a fallen portcullis.

Was it so with Bella Peluzzi?

No, no, it couldn’t be. I refused to entertain the possibility. Of all beliefs, surely the belief in the ability of the self to conquer all adverse factors is the most important. I would conquer Bella.

In the end.

4

I had been with Eric longer than I had originally intended. From time to time he still asked how the plans were coming along for the assassination of Rex. Although I wouldn’t have minded seeing Rex killed, I certainly didn’t intend to do the job myself. But the game had to be played out. Normally, I would tell Eric to mind his own business or threaten him with my departure, but when I returned to the room that Saturday afternoon he showed such consideration for the wound on my face that in a brief moment of weakness I told him of my liaison with Mrs Peluzzi, explaining it – not in terms of physical attraction, which he wouldn’t have understood anyway – but as part of the strategy I proposed to follow through. He listened while I explained that my knowing her gave me a great chance to study the enemy and its weaknesses at very close quarters, thus enabling me to plan accordingly. He was impressed. His rounded eyes – which look as if they’re going to burst from behind at any moment – lit up.

‘What a marvellous idea,’ he said.

‘Common military sense,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t in the army for nothing.’

‘I used to be in the Territorials,’ he remarked.

‘Did you really?’

He went on for a bit about the exercises he had learned there, the marching he had done, and the annual camp he had once attended. Someone stole his trousers in the middle of the night and ran them up the flagpole.

‘There’s no future in the Terries,’ I said.

‘That’s what I thought,’ he said. ‘That’s why I left, you see.’

I lay down on the bed and fell asleep. The afternoon was warm and the room, in the direct glare of the sun, like the inside of a glove. When I woke up Eric was lying on the couch asleep. When he’s unconscious he looks strangely childlike. His mouth was open and the thumb of his right hand was pressed against his teeth. He breathed slowly and regularly and his body was curled in the foetal position. In a sense, I thought, he hadn’t really left the womb. The fanatical desire to remain living in this room, in spite of the inconvenience of the noise, and the dull routine of travelling back and forth to work by the same route every day (like a slug leaving a crystalline trail, was my fanciful image) suggested the attachment to the warmth and stability and sameness of the inside of the womb. He was soft and weak and dull. His attitudes – for what they are worth – were already frozen, never to be changed.

Again I was struck by the impression that I’d received on first meeting him – that his entire existence was a symbol of waste.

I left the room and went downstairs. I intended to go back to Bella, to try my luck another time.

Agnes came out of her room just as I was walking down the hallway.

‘Hello, stranger,’ she said.

I stopped and smiled at her. Briefly, I compared her with Bella. In objective physical terms there was really very little to choose between them; a casual observer – unconscious of Bella’s mystique – might even have opted for Agnes as the more attractive of the two.

‘Popping in for a drink?’

I hesitated a moment before going into her room. The place was in a state of disarray; several pairs of knickers lay on the floor amongst tangled nylons and discarded bras. She took a bottle of gin from a cupboard and found two glasses which she wiped hurriedly with a handkerchief.

She handed me a glass and then she sat down on the bed, looking up at me.

‘Well, we haven’t seen very much of each other lately,’ she said.

‘The book, you know,’ I said. Lying is for some the most difficult of human activity, the difficulty being in remembering what you said to any given person. But I never find this. For me lying is easy. I rarely forget my lines. ‘I’m going through a somewhat rough spell at the moment. This gin’s nice.’

She was smiling at me as if she were in possession of a harmful secret.

‘What do you do with your spare time?’ she asked.

‘I don’t get much spare time,’ I said.

She crossed her legs. Running one hand through her thick red hair, she said,

‘I’ve been waiting for you to come. You said you would. I get lonely sometimes, darling.’

‘Loneliness is the specific problem that I’m working on at the moment,’ I said, hoping to turn the conversation.

‘You’re not working very hard on my particular loneliness, are you now?’

‘I’ve been busy,’ I said. I sat down in an armchair and took in the room. It was drab and faded – as if it had witnessed too many orgiastic scenes, too many late nights. I could picture the succession of men who had come, like a line of soldiers, to share the bed and the pleasures of the body. In and out, in and out. The curtains that hung on the window were frayed, streaked with dirt.

‘Have you gone off me?’ she asked.

‘I don’t understand the question. Any more gin?’

‘Help yourself.’

I took the bottle from the cupboard and poured another glass. While I was doing this I could feel her eyes burning into my back.

‘What I mean to say is that at first you seemed quite keen on me,’ she said. ‘But now I hardly ever see you.’

I sat down. I placed the tips of my fingers together in a scholarly sort of way, as though I was working out Great Problems. After a bit I said, ‘We academics are a funny lot.’

‘I don’t know about funny,’ she said.

She finished her drink and stared at me.

‘Are you frightened of me, love?’

‘Frightened?’

Still staring, she began to undo the buttons of her blouse. She took it off, threw it across the bed, and sat there in her bra. After a moment she unzipped her skirt.

‘Do you want me to go on?’ she said.

I kept thinking about Bella. But this was Agnes before me, undressing herself, and I couldn’t imagine – try as I might, and I’d tried bloody hard – Bella behaving in the same way. The frankness, the open randiness, the sheer lust – while these were present in Agnes, they were absent in Bella.

‘Go on, if you feel like it,’ I said.

‘What do you feel?’ she said. ‘That’s what I’m interested in – what do you feel?’

The skirt lay wrinkled around her ankles. I looked beyond her to the window. A passing car was reflected on the ceiling. To be honest, I didn’t feel a thing. I had been concentrating my energy on Bella Peluzzi for what seemed like such a long time that there was nothing left over for Agnes. I had always been that way – one woman at a time, nothing excessive. I looked at her and shook my head.

‘Perhaps another time.’

‘There won’t be another bloody time,’ she said. ‘You’ve had your chance.’ She began to put on her clothes again. ‘You’ve really had your chance.’

I got up from the chair. I had insulted her.

When she was dressed again she poured some more gin from the bottle and looked out of the window. She was annoyed, not just with me, but with herself for going on open offer in that way. But was she really that desperate?

‘What are you hanging about for?’ she said.

She turned to look at me. Her expression had changed. She looked mean and petty.

‘Do you intend to live in this house much longer?’

I shrugged; ‘It depends.’

‘Double rooms cost extra,’ she said. ‘I can’t have people sharing rooms without paying more rent.’

‘I’ll remember that,’ I said.

As I turned to leave she said, ‘I think you’re a right bastard.’

I went into the hall. Her comment didn’t worry me in the least. She had probably spent her life calling men bastards – what difference would another one make?

Outside in the street I hesitated before ringing Bella’s doorbell. The incident with Agnes had depressed me. Women are great enigmas. I remembered Rose, Swansea Rose, and her allegiance to the great middle-class ideal: suburban home with central heating, children asleep in a nursery, bills falling with a soft swish on the doormat. She thought she could achieve the ideal by giving herself to me, by living with me until I saw sense, until I saw the beauty in her vision. Women will do almost anything to hold on to what they have or to obtain what they have not. Rose sinning to achieve the beatific state of non-sin; Agnes undressing to attract to her body a man she wants, even if the desire lasts only for the moment; and Bella … But there I could not find the formula. What did Bella want? Or rather, what did she not want? What sort of game was she playing? And how would the scoreline read at full-time?

I rang the bell several times, but there was no answer. It was the first time I had ever called unsuccessfully. I waited a bit, thinking she might be asleep or in the back yard with her dog, and then rang again. When nothing happened, I walked away.

I should have returned to the room and to Eric, because the district wasn’t a safe place for me. With the passing of time and the increasing anger at his failure to find me, Ed Sharp’s patience would be very thin. I could imagine him – those tiny green eyes burning, his white unworked hands clasping and unclasping, his fingers tugging at his tie, and a hole in his heart where his three thousand quid had been. But the prospect of Eric wasn’t an attractive one, so I walked round the streets for a bit, taking care to choose only those that looked as if they weren’t lived in. Narrow, grey, mean.

I found a pub at the end of a one-way street and I went in. Apart from a couple of old men bent over dominoes, it was safe and empty.

I bought a double whisky and sat down away from the door, facing a mirror that reflected the faces of anyone who might come in. I drank the whisky and listened to the faint strains of music coming from a radio in the other bar. Other than this there was only the occasional shuffle of dominoes on the surface of the table and the sniff of one of the old men.

I thought about Bella. I tried to reconstruct her marriage. It had been a beautiful wedding, she said, but it went sour. That could only mean that she had fancied herself in love at first, but that something had happened to make her change her mind. What? The sight of old Peluzzi’s organs? Had she been shocked out of her virgin mind when she realised what was expected of her? Or perhaps Peluzzi drank and she couldn’t tolerate his drunken behaviour? Or was it that he hated the dog which she so clearly loved? I could imagine the tension. No, darling, it isn’t right to have Rex sleeping between us. But, dear, it’s so cold in the yard at night.

Yet this puzzled me. It had struck me before as odd, but I kept returning to it. If she loved the dog – and she did, otherwise she wouldn’t have cuddled him so demonstratively or cared that some irresponsible RSPCA officer could impound the beast – if she loved her darling Rex, then why did she keep it chained to the wall in a draughty back yard, why did she keep it there without shelter, why did she never exercise the beast? It was odd: but nothing more really than the sort of mental exercise you practise to while away tedious minutes in a lonely bar. She could have constructed a kennel, or some form of shelter. She could have taken the dog indoors at night. She could have had him in her bed even, now that old Peluzzi, who apparently despised the animal, was out of the way. But she chose not to.

I returned to her marriage. Was it just possible that it had been unconsummated? Was it feasible that she had refused to sleep with him? Had this led him to the blind frustration of whipping the dog? If the marriage had gone wrong – and she had said as much – then what factors had contributed to this state? Incompatibility? Impotency? Frigidity? Fear? I finished my drink and went to the bar to buy another.

Suppose then that she was still a virgin. Would that explain her unwillingness to sleep with me? Was it just an excuse, a flimsy one, to invoke the memory, the sacred remembrance, of her dead husband? But if she were still a virgin – at her age, which must have been around thirty-five – then surely she would have been all too eager to shed this burden?

But it was fanciful to suppose that she was still unpunctured, and that the flower – as they say – hadn’t been plucked. If she weren’t a virgin, then what reason could she have for not sleeping with me? She couldn’t plead fear of the unknown, or act out a terrified ignorance. She couldn’t say that she was inexperienced and wanted to keep it that way. Perhaps, I thought with some surprise, she simply didn’t like sex. I hadn’t considered that possibility before, because I hadn’t wanted to, since the possibilities seemed endless and complex enough in any case. But how was it possible not to like sex? If she didn’t care for it, then that placed her in a category beyond my experience and totally beyond my interest. Because all my interest was centred round the likelihood of getting her into bed – provided, of course, I could coax her to hand over the key to the bedroom door.

It was all a shade unhealthy, I thought. There was too much in the situation that was strange and unaccounted for. She had no photographs of Peluzzi – why not? She had, after all, pictures of everybody from Pope Pius XII down to Aunt Sophie in Sicily. So why not old Peluzzi himself?

If it hadn’t been for the fact – something to do with my vanity – that I wanted to get her to bed, that I had counted on it coming about, and that there was a challenge in the situation, I would have packed up and cleared off. There were other and more attractive women in the world, and I had three thousand quid to squander on the beaches of Europe – so why Bella? It was a question I had continually asked myself to the point of meaninglessness, and I was convinced that really there wasn’t an answer to it.

I finished my drink and went outside. The pub had become crowded, and therefore dangerous. I walked back to Ponsonby Gardens and rang Bella’s door again. But there still wasn’t a reply. Frustrated, and a little irritated, I returned to the room.

Eric was sitting on the bed. He had a pack of playing-cards spread out on the blankets and was playing the game of Pairs. I watched him for a time. He was hopeless at doing it.

‘Put on the kettle, will you?’ I asked.

He went over to the sink. While he was filling the kettle, he said,

‘I was thinking how much easier it would be if there wasn’t a wall down there. If there was only a wooden fence, there wouldn’t be the same problems, would there?’

‘Are you suggesting that I knock the wall down?’

‘No,’ he said, serious. ‘But it would make a difference.’

‘Don’t put too many sugars in my tea,’ I said. ‘One of our main problems is to get rid of the corpse of the dog after the job’s done. If we just left it there, you’d be suspected at once. Bella – Mrs Peluzzi, that is – knows how you feel about the animal and she’d put the finger on you right away. But if we remove the corpse, then she won’t know that it’s dead and she won’t be able to say very much because she won’t be in a position to prove anything.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he said, bringing me my tea. ‘Yes, you’re right.’

He took a half-bottle of whisky from the cupboard and poured some of it into his tea.

I said, ‘I didn’t know you were a secret drinker.’

He turned a deep shade of red. ‘I bought this because it helps me to sleep, you see. It makes everything a bit easier.’

‘Does it now? Well, you’d better be careful that you don’t start getting into any bad habits.’

‘I’ll be careful,’ he said. He drank his tea, screwing up his face at the taste.

Then he went back to his cards and when he had finished playing he put an elastic band round them and shoved them into a drawer.

‘What’s it like being a gambler?’ he asked.

‘It’s not an easy profession,’ I said. ‘It’s not like being a joiner or a plumber, because you serve a long apprenticeship. But once you get the hang of things, and know your way around, well, it’s a job like any other.’

‘It isn’t like my job,’ he said. There was a certain amount of frustration in his voice. ‘I just put pieces of cardboard into cardboard boxes, you see. I used to like it. But I don’t like it so much now. I mean, I’ve mastered it. I’m really on top of it now, and the fun’s gone out of it.’

‘That happens in any job,’ I said. I lay down on the bed. He muttered about how he would like a change, except that he had been at King’s for twelve years and change wasn’t really a good thing, was it, etc., etc., but I found his monotonous tone a sedative. I closed my eyes. For some reason I felt fatigued. It was the sheer lack of physical activity.

I opened my eyes when I heard this odd gurgling noise. Eric was hunched over the sink, a finger probing inside his mouth.

‘I was a bit sick,’ he said. ‘I felt like vomiting, but nothing came. It must have been the whisky.’

I sat up. It was just before nine o’clock. I wondered where Bella had gone to. I put on my jacket.

‘Are you going out?’ Eric asked. ‘Can I come with you?’

‘This is business,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ he said.

I heard noises coming from Agnes’s room as I walked along the hall. A man was singing drunkenly. She was shrieking with laughter at some obscenity. At least, she wouldn’t be lonely tonight. With some relief I thought: there but for the grace of God.

It was almost dark outside. A wind had come up. I rang Bella’s doorbell and waited. After a minute she answered, opening her door only a little way.

She just looked at me, saying nothing.

‘Can I come in?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘No. Please go away.’

‘But why?’

She kept shaking her head. I stood on the top step, looking at her. But there was nothing in her expression to indicate any sudden change of heart, or any trauma. In fact I could hardly see her face in the bad light.

‘Why can’t I come in?’ I asked.

‘Please, I’m tired. I have to feed Rex and then I am going straight to bed.’

All the more reason for getting inside, I thought.

‘I won’t stay for long,’ I said.

She sighed and opened the door and I stepped into the hall. We went into the sitting-room where I sat down on the sofa. We looked at each other in silence for a long time.

And then she said, ‘I am tired.’

‘I won’t stay for long,’ I said again.

‘There is Rex to feed,’ she said.

‘Shall I do it for you?’

For a moment she stared at me with astonishment. She made a strange gasping sound.

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Nobody but me feeds Rex. That is how it has always been –’

‘Look, it was just a suggestion.’

‘I have always prepared his food.’

I lit a cigarette. I reached out and took her hand. I imagined her suddenly undressing the way Agnes had done earlier – or tried to imagine, but no pictures came. Why was it that I couldn’t get sexual images with Bella? I looked at her hand. It lay there between my fingers flabbily.

She was looking down at the pattern on the carpet, as if tracing its mazy pattern with her eyes.

‘I called earlier, but you were out,’ I said.

‘I have every right to go out,’ she said.

Christ, she was touchy at times. I stubbed out my cigarette and sighed. Conversation seemed impossible; beyond us, circles of words out there that we couldn’t quite reach.

‘Of course you have every right to go out,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t disputing that.’

She looked at me. ‘Why do you keep coming here? Why? Sometimes I think it is because you want to sleep with me, but sometimes I also think that you want to take my Rex away.’

The bloody dog! I wished that I could put my hands around its throat and press. Press hard. Crush the breath out of its lungs.

‘Of course I don’t want to take him away,’ I said. I stroked her wrist. I lowered my voice until it was little more than a broken whisper. ‘Why should I want to take him away?’

‘Because you know that I shouldn’t have him here. It is against the law for him to be here, you know it is.’

‘Let’s forget the law for a moment,’ I said.

She was crying. Great Italian tears dropped from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. I put my arm round her shoulder and dropped one hand on her knee. She sobbed, trying desperately to keep her body still.

‘I wouldn’t take Rex away,’ I said.

I kissed her on the mouth. She didn’t respond. I pushed my tongue against her teeth. Still, she didn’t return the gesture.

‘Let’s go through to the bedroom,’ I said. She didn’t answer at once and then, with considerable force, she thrust me away.

‘That is all you want,’ she said.

‘At least you know I don’t want your dog,’ I said.

We stared at each other. Why hadn’t she Agnes’s mentality in these things?

‘You will not enter my bedroom,’ she said. ‘You will not go in there at any time.’

‘Well, this sofa’s quite comfortable,’ I said.

She got to her feet. ‘Please go. I think that Rex will be getting hungry.’

‘I’ll come tomorrow,’ I said.

‘Do whatever you wish.’

She didn’t look at me. She was staring straight at the floor. I went along the hallway and opened the front door. Outside, I felt the frustration build up in me to the point of rage. It didn’t help when I heard the rattle of bed-springs from Agnes’s room. It didn’t help to hear the muffled moan of Agnes and her lover.

I went upstairs. Eric was sitting at the table drinking his whisky.

‘You’re back,’ he said.

Master of the obvious. I dropped down on the bed. Rage, rage … I listened to Eric mumble about the dog and its impending doom. But I said nothing. My time was running out, along with my patience.

5

On the Sunday morning Eric went out for his newspaper and I stayed in bed, picking at a rind of bacon on my plate. In Eric’s favour it must be said that he cooks reasonably well: solid, digestible stuff, if unimaginative. He serves it nicely too; tomato cut into slices, toast exactly right, a touch of mixed herbs on top of the scrambled egg. I put the empty plate on the bedside table and lay back, smoking a cigarette.

Sunlight was burning on the window. I stared out, up at the sky. If I didn’t think of Bella, if I forced out of my mind all those bloody endless questions, then the day could be a pleasant one. But sexual images have a habit of returning, like the taste of good food. They come up before you, brilliant colours in the mind’s eye, orgies that take place on the ghostly stage of some interior theatre. The creature of my imagination, while she had Bella’s body, she had Agnes’s face and manner.

The door opened at that point and Roderick came into the room.

‘Fine morning,’ I said.

‘I was looking for Eric, actually,’ he said.

‘He’ll be back in a minute,’ I said.

Roderick hovered in the centre of the room. His long hair was tied at the back with a pink ribbon and he was wearing a brocade jacket sewn with floral patterns. He looked just what he was – an aristocratic hippy.

He went to the window and stared out.

‘Good view?’ I said. I fumbled around and found my trousers.

‘The dog lives yet,’ he said.

‘These things take time,’ I said.

I got out of bed and dressed.

‘I don’t see why they should take such time, man,’ he said, turning to look at me. ‘I mean, it’s just a case of going down there and over the wall and doing it.’

‘Ah, that’s where you’re wrong,’ I said. I stood beside him at the window. He smelled of turpentine and camphor. Down in the yard the damned dog was pacing back and forth, extending the chain until it would go no further, and then turning, he shook his head, yawned, and lay down.

‘These things have to be planned,’ I said. ‘The major difficulty is in getting rid of the corpse.’

‘Yes, I see that,’ he said. He hummed and hawed. ‘You’d have to cut the chain from the wall somehow.’

I sat down on the sofa. I lit another cigarette and sprawled, just gazing up at the ceiling. There was something about the room that niggled me. Was it the colour scheme? It was a dark shade of pink, somehow a depressing colour, especially when stretched over chipped plaster. Or was it rather the claustrophobic feelings that the room induced?

Roderick went to the mantelpiece and picked up Eric’s golliwog.

‘I used to have one of these,’ he said. ‘But they took it away from me when I was sent to boarding school. I don’t suppose I’ve ever really gotten over it. You know how it is – you get like attached to something and then it’s snatched away from you. It was just the same with Santa Claus, Jesus Christ, Batman, and God. I mean, I really believed in those cats and then, God, they were all knocked down.’

‘That’s how it is,’ I said. I watched him as he tapped his fingers on the wall, as if he were waiting for someone to answer him from the other side. His long body drooped somewhere in the middle, so that the upper part of him came out at right angles to the lower. He looked as though he was in pain.

He stopped tapping and said, ‘I remember once speaking to Mr Peluzzi about it. Just before he died. He felt exactly the same as me. He said it was a rotten world and that because we were human beings we always looked at it through rose-coloured glasses. I mean, I see his point. But –’

‘Peluzzi? Did you know him?’ I sat forward, interested.

‘I spoke to him once or twice. He had a passion for badminton. He was always asking me to play with him. But, Christ, it’s such a bourgeois sport. I mean, all sports are, because there’s no point in playing unless you want to win. And I don’t care a fuck about winning anything.’

‘What did he die from?’ I asked.

Roderick looked at me oddly. ‘They said it was his heart.’

‘And was it?’

Roderick began tapping again. He didn’t say anything for a long time. I became more and more conscious of the irritating noise of his fingers on the wall, the only sound – like a hundred insects creeping – in the silent room.

‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘It was his heart, all right. I mean, he looked healthy enough on the surface. He was a big fellow with huge arms. He was a bit excitable I suppose. But then I didn’t really know him.’

‘It must have been a great shock to Mrs Peluzzi when he went,’ I said.

Roderick smiled. He shook his head back and forward.

‘They didn’t get on, man. They had a dead scene going.’

I smoked another cigarette. I was aware of the sound of my own blood beating inside my ears. The silence that fell into the room was strangely terrifying. For some reason my fingers were uncontrollably trembling. But why? Roderick hadn’t said anything. Yet in the way he had paused before answering my question I sensed something, something that suggested – or did it really? – he wasn’t absolutely confident in the explanation that Peluzzi had died of heart failure. In my game you develop a capacity for hunches: sometimes right, sometimes not. I drew on my cigarette and watched him.

In an agitated way he was tapping noisily.

‘He was a big man,’ he said. ‘But when you looked at him closely he had an unhealthy sort of look. I don’t know, I can’t remember.’

And then, as suddenly as it had happened, the moment passed. Everything was in its place again. The mood that had inspired the hunch was gone. The room, the ordinariness of things, the sun on the window. And there, fixed firmly in the past, was an historical fact: old Peluzzi had died of heart failure. That was that.

Roderick was talking about the dog.

‘If I were you, I’d get it over with quickly.’

‘You’re not doing the job,’ I said.

‘You don’t seem to be doing it either,’ he said.

‘Time,’ I said. ‘When you get to my age, you’ll see the folly in haste.’

He looked at me with some scorn, not that I blamed him when I thought of my last remark. He went to the door.

‘I’ll see Eric later.’

I sat for a time on the sofa after he’d gone, trying to work out what it was about the conversation that had struck me as so odd and that had affected me so strangely. But it’s impossible to pin down a mood that no longer exists. It was in the past. I went to the window and looked out at Rex.

Was it just a trick of light?

Or was he staring at me?

Later that night Eric went berserk.

5

Eric

Sometimes a thing like that just gets into your mind and stays there, eating away at you like a worm, eating through your brain right down into your guts until you can’t think straight about anything and everything seems to be centred round the awful feeling of emptiness. It happens sometimes. It happened to my mother. You see, she had this idea in her head that she was going to die of cancer and sure enough she did, she did, not that her drinking helped her much, it only made holes in her liver. But what I’m trying to get at is that because a thing gets into your head and stays there, you can’t do anything to get rid of it until in the end you become blind to everything else.

And that’s what happened to me.

It was what she said to me, you see. She said, You’ll die before my dog does. She actually said that. Well, with some people you could ignore a remark like that because it’s a joke or just an empty threat or even sheer carelessness, but not with her, not with Mrs Peluzzi.

It was the look in her face, the way her eyes came up mad and bright and fixed, not into my eyes, but in a way into the very depth of my skull. Mad, crazy eyes. You see eyes like that on Wanted for Murder posters. I felt scared. I wouldn’t have minded so much if Matt had put me at my ease, but he didn’t even try. He ignored it. He laughed. Oh, she’ll get you all right before that dog goes. That’s what he said.

When I came back with my paper that Sunday morning he seemed funny and sort of faraway, not really in the room, not really with me. But miles away. I told him what she had said. I told him. The words went round and round in my head and I was screaming them at him. But he didn’t listen. I felt like a ship signalling SOS on a dead radio with the storm battering against it, dragging it on to the rocks. I wanted to get down on my knees and ask for his help, for anything, anything to save me from her. But he was sitting there, looking up at the window, and his eyes were glazed.

I’m not easily scared. I know how to look after myself. But it was just as if she had laid the hand of death on my shoulder and said, Your time’s up. Say your prayers. It was just like the feeling men used to have when they were walking to the gallows and saw the faces staring up at them and seeing the shadow of the rope and knowing that in a minute they’d be dead unless something ridiculous happened like the trapdoor not working.

If I hadn’t gone for the paper, if I’d stayed in the room, if if if. But what’s the point in wishing? I had walked straight into her and heard what she said and saw that crazy look in her eyes. And now the words were running and running through my head. You’ll die before my dog does.

I looked out of the window. The dog was sleeping. You could just about see him, because he was tucked in near the wall. I didn’t want to die. I had my whole life ahead of me.

Of course you might say that I was being bloody stupid getting worked up over what a woman said to me. After all, she was weaker than me. I could have beaten her easily. If it came to a fight, I would’ve won. I know that. But it was that expression in her eyes. She really meant what she said.

Down there in the yard the dog was sleeping.

And then she came out. She had a big white bowl filled with chunks of red meat. She called the dog’s name and he jumped up, his ears all stiff, and she started to throw him the pieces. Raw meat. I felt sick. I went and sat on the edge of the bed. Matt was looking up at the window. He took out his whisky and gave me a drink.

‘Where’s your sense of humour?’ he said.

It wasn’t funny. It just wasn’t funny. A man’s life isn’t a laughing matter. But I’ve noticed before that he treats things lightly sometimes. He should be more serious.

‘She threatened me,’ I said. ‘You could see she meant it. I’m not joking.’

I could hear her words buzzing about in my head like flies round a lightbulb. I closed my eyes and felt the whisky bum into my chest.

‘Roderick was looking for you,’ he said.

Roderick. I couldn’t stop to think about Roderick now. I opened my eyes. The room was moving about in front of me. It wasn’t every day that you got threats.

Matt was looking down inside his whisky bottle.

He had his eyes half-shut. I wanted to talk to him about the whole thing and make him see the seriousness of it all, but what was the point if he wouldn’t listen? I’d never felt so alone. When a thing like that happens, when a woman, an insane woman, stops you in the street and says she’s going to kill you, you expect your friends to support you. Otherwise, what are friends for?

But Matt wasn’t really my friend if he didn’t want to help me in my time of trouble.

I finished my drink and coughed.

‘You won’t think it a laughing matter when they fish my body out of the river,’ I said.

‘Ha-ha,’ he said, not looking at me.

I went to the mantelpiece and looked at the objects there. It was like I was already dead. I could picture somebody from the council going through my belongings, touching all these things that mean so much to me and then saying, Put these odds and ends into the garbage can. I didn’t want that to happen. Whenever I’ve felt lonely I’ve got some comfort from these bits and pieces, it might be childish, but I don’t think so. What’s wrong with liking things that you liked when you were a child just because you’re grown up? Nothing, nothing at all. These things mean a lot to me.

Then, a funny thing happened. I was looking at the golly when all of a sudden I saw her eyes burning away there. Not the golly’s own eyes, but her mad, hateful ones. I looked away.

Matt said, ‘I think I’ll go out for a bit.’

I didn’t ask where. I knew. He was going next door, to see her. He put on his jacket and looked at me. For a minute I just thought that he was going to reach out and help me, there was a sad sort of shine in his eyes, but he didn’t. He did nothing, he turned and went out of the room.

After a bit I went across the landing to see Roderick. He might listen. He might help. I knocked on his door. But there wasn’t any answer. I went downstairs and tried Agnes’s door. She came out, tying the cord of her dressing-gown.

‘What d’you want?’ she asked, all nasty.

I couldn’t speak. It was as if the world was empty all of a sudden. I couldn’t turn anywhere. And there was that echo in my head. I should’ve controlled it. I should’ve sat down and said. Stop, stop, forget it, it means nothing.

‘I’m busy,’ she said. ‘Stop mumbling and say what it is you want.’

I felt my mouth opening and closing but there was nothing to come out and she was staring at me in a hard way, her face sharp, staring, not trying to help. Then she shook her head and said,

‘What a bloody waste of time.’

She closed her door. I could hear her laugh. I went out on to the street and started to walk. I must have walked a long way. I found myself in a place I’d never seen before. It was an industrial estate. It was empty because it was Sunday. Everything was dead silent. I sat down on a wall.

At the end of the road, coming round the corner, I saw a woman with a dog on the end of a leash. I couldn’t move. It was ridiculous, but I couldn’t move a single muscle. She came nearer and nearer. I could do anything. Just look.

But it wasn’t Mrs Peluzzi. It was another woman altogether. And the dog was a black spaniel, not a mongrel.

‘Quiet up here,’ the woman said.

The dog lifted his leg and pissed on the wall.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘I say, you’re trembling.’

‘Ah,’ I said. It was all I could say. You can’t speak when there’s nothing but fear in your head. What was I supposed to say?

‘I can give you an asprin,’ she said.

She was a little woman with white hair and warts on her face. The dog sniffed my feet.

I got off the wall and walked away. You’ll die before my dog does. It kept running through me. It wasn’t just in my head. No, it was moving through my blood now, through my bones. It was everywhere. I came to a field and I lay down in the grass. I stared up at the sky. I remembered when I was a little boy we used to go on picnics and I’d lie in the grass and think about the length of the sky and how high it was and my father would stroke my head with his fingers. That was a long time ago. Another world, it seems now. Why do good things have to come to an end? That’s what puzzles me. When I was a boy I never had anything really bad happen to me. I never had anything like this.

I turned my face into the grass and started to cry. It came over me just suddenly. I couldn’t stop the tears from coming. My life was all buggered up. I could see that quite plainly.

Then a man and a woman came across the field and stopped beside me.

I heard the woman say,

‘Come away, James, he’s drunk.’

When they had gone I got to my feet. I walked slowly back the way I had come. I didn’t want to return to the room, in fact I wouldn’t have cared if I never saw that place again. I stopped on Cricklewood Broadway, not knowing which way to turn. I went into the café in Cricklewood Lane and ordered a Cornish pasty and chips but when the waitress brought it I couldn’t eat it. I just sat there staring at it and watching it get cold. I had a cup of tea which I drank down slowly.

I felt a bit better when I had drunk it and I thought to myself perhaps I was getting worked up about nothing. I mean, she might not have meant what she said. It might have been a kind of joke, although her eyes didn’t have a jokey look. Or it might have been her way of warning me to stay away from the dog. But I kept thinking about those eyes and what I’d seen in them and I knew that she had really meant it.

You can always get the truth out of a person’s eyes. Even if they’re good at lying and you can’t tell anything from their voice, you only have to look into the eyes to know what it is they really mean. I wished I hadn’t seen her look. I wished I had turned away when she’d spoken. I wished lots of things but what good was that now, what good was it to cry over spilt milk? I had seen her. And she had said to me, I could hear it all again, she had just come straight out with it, I am going to kill you. That’s what was going round and round in my brain. I am going to kill you.

I had another drink of tea. I was trembling and the waitress – the same waitress that looks at me funnily – was walking around the table sort of staring at me as if she expected me to do something odd, perhaps break cups, or start throwing knives around. After a time I had to get up and leave.

But I couldn’t face the room. I lived there. But I couldn’t go there. It gets like that sometimes. For lots of reasons, people don’t like going back to their rooms. Sometimes it’s because they’re lonely, living by themselves. But I had a much stronger reason really, I didn’t want to go back because I wanted to stay alive.

So I went into a public house and bought a glass of whisky. I was used to the taste of it by this time. It burned my chest and made me feel sick but once that part of it was over it made me feel warm and somehow stronger.

I saw my face in the mirror.

There were these great streaks of dirt down my face from where I’d been crying. I took out my handkerchief and wiped it clean. And then I finished my whisky and asked the barman for another one. I went over to a little table just under the window and sat down. I stared into the whisky and all I could see was the mad woman’s face.

Why? Why did she want to kill me? All right, I’d tried to finish off the dog by poisoning it but that didn’t call for her wanting to kill me. I’d only been joking anyway, I mean I knew that Rex wouldn’t have taken that chop, it was just a half-hearted effort, perhaps I should’ve ex-plained that to her at the time. But it was too late to tell her now. I’d gone beyond the point of going back and explaining everything to her. She wouldn’t have listened. Mad people never listen. Their ears are always tuned into something else.

Anyway, with the meat he got to eat he wouldn’t have sniffed at a mouldy old chop, he wouldn’t have given it a thought. Surely she knew that. Surely she could see that I wasn’t really serious. But she was going to kill me just the same. And that was all that mattered when you got down to brass tacks, that was all that really mattered in the end, she was going to kill me, she had said so. I’d heard her say it, right there outside Mutter’s shop. In broad daylight. You are going to die.

My fingers were shaking and my heart was banging away inside. It was like having a fever, a bad fever, something you can’t cure. My whole body just wouldn’t keep still. It was like hundreds of pulses all going at the same time. You are going to die. When you think about it, they’re funny words really. How can anybody say them and mean them?

I tried to get the whisky to my mouth but the rim of the glass was rattling against my teeth and the liquid was slopping over my fingers. Across the room I could still see my face in the mirror. I looked a wreck, just as if I’d been rolled around in mud.

How would she do it? How would she kill me? I didn’t like to think about it, it couldn’t do any good, only harm, but there it was in my head, the question How? I couldn’t get it straight. I couldn’t get it fixed into my brain somehow. It kept jumping about. How would she do it? She said she was going to. I could still hear it. There in broad daylight in the street on a Sunday morning with cars and people passing along, not knowing, not knowing what she’s said and what she means to do. But that’s it. When you’re a human being, you’re always alone. You’ve got nothing but your own problems and nobody can help you solve them but yourself. No, not even God. I mean that. He isn’t interested. I could’ve gone to someone passing in the street and said, She’s going to kill me, and they would have laughed and shrugged and just walked on. But that’s what life’s all about. There isn’t anything else.

I clasped my hands on my glass. Something solid, something solid, something to get a grip on because everything else was slipping away, just slipping and sliding away.

Matt could have helped, he could have said the right word and made me see the whole thing was just a poor joke, but he didn’t, did he? he didn’t care about what was going to happen to me, no, nobody gives a damn.

And then I remembered. I remembered it just like that. One of those things that jumped into my mind, something I’d forgotten all about. Once, I had gone with my mother and father to a carnival. I don’t remember where, in a big field, that’s all, and it was raining and the ground was muddy and I’d put a penny in a fortune-telling machine and placed my hand on a metal plate and a little card came out. It said, You will die a violent death. Just that. My father took the card and tore it. He dropped it in the mud. He put his foot over it and crushed it into the mud. I remembered looking at it. I was a child then. I didn’t know what it meant.

But I knew now. It came flooding into my mind.

I got another glass of whisky from the bar and went back to the table. I felt very cold. She might even have a gun, she was mad enough to have a gun. I tried to think what it would be like to have a bullet go into your brain, but the thought of blood made me sick. And the pain, what would the pain be like? And the feeling of light rushing away and darkness coming in, what would it be like?

No, she couldn’t. She couldn’t.

But she could. You had only to see her eyes to know.

A man in working clothes sat down at my table and rolled a cigarette. He kept looking at me, flicking his eyes up and down across my face. I tried to hold my whisky steady but I was already beginning to feel a bit drunk. It goes to your head quickly. Everything in my mind was jumbled about, everything about Mrs Peluzzi, the dog, the fortune card.

The man said, ‘Oi tink it looks loik rain.’

I didn’t understand what he said. I tried to get up from the table and walk away but my legs were weak and wouldn’t hold me.

‘Now then, steady on, steady on,’ he said.

I caught hold of the edge of the table. There was music playing Dum-da-didididi-dum.

‘Ye’ve had yerself a tot too much,’ he said.

I looked at him but his face kept coming and going, in and out, all blurred. I tried to tell him what was worrying me but the words were mixed up in my mouth and I couldn’t make any sense of all the things that were running through my head. He was grinning and at the same time licking the sticky side of his cigarette paper.

‘Oi’ve often thought to meself that Oi’d like to be murdered,’ he said.

That was what he said. Someone pushed open the door and I turned my head round slowly. There was this square of light. The man caught me by the elbow and helped me to the door. Outside it was very cold. The wind was blowing through me, right through me, as if there was nothing left of me but rags and bones.

‘Get yerself off home and straight into yer bed,’ he said.

I staggered off down the street. At the traffic lights a car nearly ran into me. The driver stuck his head through the window and said something unpleasant. But I didn’t stop to argue with him. I kept going. There was nothing else for it, no, I just had to keep going. Back to the room. There wasn’t another place in the world I could have gone to.

When I got in I fell on top of the bed. The room was spinning round and round and my head ached badly. I thought the ceiling was going to fall in. I got up and made a cup of tea and drank it standing by the window.

The dog was lying beside his bowl. Inside the bowl were bits and pieces of bone left over from his meal.

I hated the dog. But how could I die and how could he still go on living? It wasn’t right, there wasn’t any justice in it, but is there any justice in the world any more, is there, is there? I shook my head. The pain got worse. There was this buzzing noise, like a lot of voices going on and on at the same time, all trying to speak at once, like voices in an empty room. I pressed my head flat against the window and the glass was nice and cool.

The dog opened one eye. It was a horrible eye, mad and insane, and it rolled round the yard, glaring at every thing. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t stand by like this and let her get at me. What if she had a gun? What if she was going to stop me one dark night in the street and push the blade of a knife right through my ribs?

I banged my head against the window and one of the panes snapped like a piece of dry wood and the next thing I knew there was blood coming from my head. For one moment I thought I’d been shot and that the bullet had passed right through the glass and into my head but then I realised that I had broken the glass myself by pushing my head hard against it. I sat down on the floor and held my hands to the place and then I got a towel and pressed it hard against the wound. Only when the towel was soaked red did it stop bleeding. I felt sick and faint.

What had I ever done to hurt anybody? I had lived my life, that was all. I had minded my own business. But that wasn’t enough for some people. I never interfered. Live and let live. Because of that she was going to kill me. I couldn’t see it. Suddenly I was very blind. I couldn’t see anything or understand anything any more. I didn’t want to die. I was sorry, sorry, I was sorry in my heart for any pain I’d ever caused anybody but please, I didn’t want to die.

I looked through the broken glass at the dog. He was snapping his huge mouth open and shut. I couldn’t wait any longer. I just couldn’t wait. If she was going to kill me, then I was going to get that dog first, before any-thing else happened. It was all clear in a flash. I’d go down there and I’d get him.

I hunted out the piece of nylon cord and then went downstairs. I didn’t stop to think. The time for all that was past. Plans plans, fuck plans – they didn’t matter now.

I got over the wall, scraping myself to the bone, tearing my clothes, without seeing anything or thinking anything I got over the wall and dropped down on the other side.

The dog just blinked at me. I held out the cord. My eyes and my face were wet and my hands were shaking so badly that I could hardly hold the cord between my fingers and I even dropped it once.

It was just beginning to get dark.

I stopped for a minute and stood there. And then all of a sudden everything roared up inside me like a boil bursting, everything I had ever suffered on account of this animal, everything in my life came back on me like the smell of sick, and I shouted out, roared, and kicked the dog on the head with the tip of my boot.

The animal snarled and jumped away.

I rushed in. I could only see blackness and smell fur and feel everything that was going on inside me and nothing else mattered.

Nothing else mattered but crushing this dog until there wasn’t anything left.

6

Matt

My life had become endless operas sung in foreign languages; the sight of those alien faces staring from their tin frames like dead gnats pickled in jars; and the feel of her alien hand between my own nervous fingers.

‘You would like to hear the other side?’ she asked.

‘Not just yet,’ I said. My head was filled with music. I lit a cigarette and watched her move about the room. I had resolved that this would be my last attempt at getting her into the bedroom, that I’d devote all my energies to the task in the last hours of our relationship, and that if I failed I would go down gloriously, all flags flying. There’s no future in persuading the unpersuadable, or in unravelling impenetrable mysteries. And Bella, it seemed, was content to keep our relationship as many yards from the locked bedroom door as possible.

She moved about the room emptying ashtrays, fussing with this or that, rearranging the forest of photographs in such a way that – or did I just fancy it – they were staring in a circle into the room like unwelcome guests at a wedding. Something about the photographs unnerved me. Was it her slavish attention to them? Was it because of an almost morbid element I sensed in her attitude to them? Or was it because the most obvious picture of all was missing from the collection?

I had asked myself enough unanswered questions to occupy a market research firm for a month. And the time for such questions – a luxury, in my circumstances – was almost over. I fully intended to leave Bella that night for the last time. Nor did I plan to return to Eric’s room. This was the ultimate break. Three thousand pounds in my coat, a taxi to London Airport, and a quick flip to anywhere warm. Enough is enough.

Let them settle their own battles. An adage that I believed, but that I hadn’t always adhered to in my crowded life.

Bella sat down and crossed her plump legs. She had her eyes fixed on my face.

‘Opera is so beautiful,’ she said.

‘Indeed, yes,’ I said.

‘It takes you out of this world,’ she said.

‘To where?’

‘Does that matter?’

I went to where she sat and laid one hand on her knee. She didn’t move a muscle. Her eyes, shining, suggesting a warmth that I had still to discover in her, were staring into my face. Slowly I started to move the hand, inch by inch, up the inside of her leg. When I was about four inches from where I wanted to be, she clamped down on me. She was shaking her head.

‘You have a dirty mind,’ she said.

I moved away. A dirty mind – that was an interesting if somewhat prohibitive remark. Did she confuse healthy lust with unhealthy lechery in her mind? Or perhaps she didn’t know that there was a difference between the two.

I sat down and took out my cigarettes.

Having lit one, I said,

‘I’m a man, I have normal male appetites. And …’ I paused for maximum effect, my face heavy with the pain of the secret I was about to reveal. My last tactic, my last gambit. The card that I had been saving, thinking all along that I’d never have to use it.

‘And what?’ she asked.

Good. She was interested.

‘I am in love with you.’

She looked serious for a second and then threw her head back and laughed. She looked attractive doing that, but I couldn’t quite conceal my surprise at her action.

‘Why are you laughing? Is love a laughing matter?’

‘Love. You make me sick up to here,’ and she indicated a place level with her throat. She walked about the room. ‘Love. There is no love. In the whole world there is no such thing. Selfishness, yes. Hatred, yes. Envy. The need to be dominant. Yes. Yes. Yes. But love, no, there is no such a thing as this.’

I said, ‘I only know what I feel.’

She picked at a bowl of flowers on the table.

‘Do you think, do you dream that because you tell me this I am going to lift up my skirt for you and say come to me? You are stupid.’

‘I know what I feel,’ I said, simulating the breaking of one heart in my expression. ‘I know that you’re hurting me. Why? Why are you doing this?’

I was on my knees. It was impressive. The tone of my voice was exactly right. I clutched the hem of her skirt and tugged gently, half-hoping that it might just fall off. But it was held in place – like that other intriguing part of her anatomy – with a hoop of unblemished steel.

‘Stop crawling, stop it,’ she said.

‘I would crawl to the ends of the earth for you,’ I said.

She pushed me away and walked to the other side of the room. She was fidgeting with a piece of paper in her fingers. On my knees, I went stumping after her. There is little advantage, I realised, in being a dwarf. Even so, I didn’t rise. I looked up at her.

‘You are interested only in my bed,’ she said.

‘No, that isn’t true. You know that isn’t true.’

‘Do you deny it?’

‘I’m interested in you,’ I said. ‘I’ve been let down before by a woman. I said I was never going to get emotionally attached again. But look at what’s happened, look at what you’ve done to me, what you’re doing to me.’

She was laughing. Outrageous woman. I was pleased that I wasn’t a genuine suitor. My heart would have broken at this kind of reception. But the more she laughed, the more attractive I found her, and the more I found her attractive the greater became my desire. It was almost an obsession with me now. I’d never gone after a thing so single-mindedly before. For God knows what reasons, I had to have her. Once would be enough. I wasn’t asking a great deal, only the sort of favour any right-headed widow at the prime of her life would grant. If she didn’t like the idea she could always have closed her eyes.

‘Get up on your feet,’ she said.

At last I rose. I took a snotty old handkerchief from my pocket, held it tightly to conceal the stains, and blew my nose with a great display of sadness.

‘You are weak and I do not trust you,’ she said.

Had I been overdoing it? ‘Why? Why don’t you trust me?’

She didn’t answer. She held back the blind and looked out into the darkening street.

There was a long silence while I considered my next move. Force? Only in the last resort. Only when love failed me.

The silence was broken by a noise from the back yard. There was the cry of a human voice and the roar of the dog. I hadn’t seen her come to life so quickly before. In a flash she was across the room and into the hallway. I followed her out. She pulled open the door to the yard, muttering to herself in Italian.

In the yard was an astonishing sight. Eric was circling the snarling dog, from time to time putting the boot in at the animal’s head. I was so amazed by this that for a moment I couldn’t move.

Bella screamed. I rushed into the yard and gripped Eric by the shoulders and threw him against the wall. He looked at me dazed. His face was covered with blood. His jacket was stained and dirty. He was almost unrecognisable. The vacuity had gone from his expression: in its place was a look of terror and anguish. I almost felt pity for him.

While he lay there I turned to look at Bella. She was bending over her dog, stroking and whispering. The dog seemed only to be suffering from shock and, of the two, Eric appeared to have come off worse in the encounter. His trousers were ripped where he had been bitten and his legs were splashed with blood.

I bent down beside him.

I whispered to him, ‘You bloody great idiot. Say nothing. Just keep quiet.’

But he didn’t know what I was talking about. His breath smelled of whisky. Poor bastard. He had come to the end of his tether.

Bella came rushing across. She stood looking down at Eric for a moment and then she spat on him. He got up, very slowly, and then moved towards her. For a moment I didn’t know what to do. One word of recognition from Eric and I could kiss Bella’s bed and the dream of her flesh that had sustained me for the past week a final farewell. They looked at each other. Eric was trembling and she had an almost savage look of hatred on her face.

I gripped Eric by the arm. As I did so Bella brought up her knee and forced it sharply into his groin. I could feel the shock of the pain run through him. She did this two or three times before I realised what was happening.

I moved towards the house, still holding Eric.

‘Murderer,’ Bella was saying. She was standing behind me, trying to get at Eric’s body. ‘Murderer. Bloody murderer. How could you could you could you –’

I got Eric into the hall. He was silent, but his eyes were open. He had gone beyond the point of pain, when the system has absorbed all it can take.

I propped him up against the wall.

She had scissors in her hand. I didn’t know where she had got them from, but there they were, flashing in the dim hall, flashing down through the air towards Eric.

But not towards his face. Not towards the most natural point of attack. They were dipping in a lower arc, moving to a point between his legs. I shoved my arm forward and the blades scraped over the side of my wrist. She dropped the scissors and stood there looking shocked and hysterical. It was then I became aware of the fact that she had intended to stab him in the testicles. I felt nausea inside.

Eric looked at me.

He said, before I could stop him,

‘Matt, please don’t let her kill me. For God’s sake, don’t let it happen.’

I put my hand across his mouth. Stable doors and bolted horses. I glanced at Bella. Had she heard? She was staring blindly at a point just over Eric’s head. She must have heard. She must have heard him, understood the recognition in his voice. But she showed nothing.

‘Matt,’ he said again.

I started to move him towards the front door before further damage could be done. But by then it was too late. I opened the door and pushed him out into the street. He slid down the steps and turned and looked at me, but in the poor light I couldn’t see his expression. And even if I had seen it, I doubt whether I would have understood it.

I closed the door. Bella had gone into the yard. I went into the sitting-room and lit a cigarette. I felt my nerves begin to play, tingling. When she came back she didn’t look at me. She sat down and stared calmly at the wall. It was the kind of calm that comes before a storm. It was the kind of silence in which you can read all sort of things. Hints, threats, unspoken words.

‘Is the dog all right?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, her voice flat.

I looked at her. Why had she tried to stab him in the balls? Did it make sense? Instinctively, you go for the face in such situations. It’s the first thing you think of marking because the face is vulnerable and has expressions that you might want to destroy. But what sort of instinct had led her to want to hurt him there?

She was looking at me.

‘Why did he call you Matt?’

‘He must have been mistaken.’

‘No, he looked as if he knew you.’

‘I’ve never seen him before in my life,’ I said.

‘I do not believe you,’ she said.

Savage bitch. I sat down beside her. When I took her hand it was cold and perfectly still. Was that what she wanted – the castration of the male species?

We didn’t say anything for a long time.

And then I said, ‘No, he was mistaken. Anyway, my name’s Edward Carson. I don’t know anyone called Matt.’

She looked at me wearily. There was nothing expressive of life in the dead face.

‘Like him, you want to harm my Rex. Isn’t that true? Isn’t there some sort of scheme between you?’

I laughed. ‘You’re joking.’

She shook her head.

‘I find it difficult to believe now.’

I said, ‘That’s your trouble. You don’t want to believe anything.’

She looked at me blankly.

‘Why don’t you leave me alone? Why don’t you go? I do not know what you want here. There is nothing for you here.’

Just like that. I could feel my frustrations somewhere inside me, shadows behind dark glass. But I couldn’t get up and leave the way she wanted me to. I’d gone too far along this particular road to make a detour at this stage. Apart from anything else, I felt angry with her. Whether it had something to do with the scene that had just taken place, or whether it was because of her continual refusal, I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I took hold of her hand.

‘You have to believe me,’ I said. A desperate last fling, a last attempt to remain civilised.

‘Leave me,’ she said. ‘Let me go.’

But why should I remain civilised when she wasn’t so far from the jungle herself? I remembered the scissors swinging down wildly on Eric. Was that civilised?

I pulled her blouse open. She started to move away from me. I got hold of her waist and dragged her down on the sofa. My time was running out, had almost run out. My patience had snapped long ago. She was throwing her hands against my face, striking me. But I could suffer that.

She managed to get her knee into the pit of my stomach and for a moment I rolled away, winded. She rushed out of the room and into the hall. I followed her just in time to see her vanish into the bedroom. Before I could get my foot in the door, I heard the lock snap.

I stood there for a bit, looking at the thick door. It was best to be rational. I could not have persuaded her, in a year, to come out to me – therefore, I had to get in. I kicked the door a couple of times but nothing happened, except that I wrenched my ankle.

‘Please,’ she said from inside the room. ‘Please do not come in.’

I didn’t listen. There wasn’t time. Part of me was saying, leave, leave now. But I had no time to listen to that either. I pushed my shoulder against the door.

‘I have bolted the door,’ she said. ‘You can never break it down.’

I rushed at the door again. My rage was increasing with every minute that I wasted, battering my body against the stubborn bloody wood. I stopped and looked round for something to use. In the silence I heard her scream a couple of times.

I found an axe in a cupboard at the end of the hall. It was a heavy instrument and the blade was rusty. But it would do far more than I could manage with my shoulder. She screamed while I banged the wood with the axe. She didn’t stop screaming. She wouldn’t stop. I wanted to get in there to make her stop. And then the bloody dog was howling from the yard.

Every so often I thought, Why am I doing this? But I’d gone beyond the point of asking myself stupid questions. I wanted the woman. I wanted to make her stop screaming. There were no answers to such questions anyway. I only knew I had to get through the door.

The wood began to splinter. Her screaming stopped. I could hear her sob. Christ, was she that afraid? I could hear her sob and beat her hands against the wall.

I drove the axe clean through the panel. And then, with a couple more blows, the whole panel came away. I could see into the room.

At last I could see into her bedroom.

There was only a small, dim lamp burning by her bedside. She was lying hunched up on the bed, her hands stuffed into her mouth, staring at me with a wild fear.

But it wasn’t at her that I was looking. It wasn’t at her. My eyes were drawn to a point beyond her head, to the other side of the room.

I couldn’t stop staring. I couldn’t take in what I saw.

On top of her furniture was a large glass jar. Inside the jar, suspended in liquid, was a white object covered in tattoos.

I stared inanely for a long time. The axe had fallen to the floor. Everything else suddenly didn’t matter. Everything had become concentrated on that object, that white object, covered with pictures, in the glass jar.

I started to say something. But as in a dream when it’s a matter of life and death that you speak, I could say nothing.

I turned and ran down the corridor away from the broken shards of the door. I pulled my coat from the peg and ran into the street.

I didn’t stop running until I got to Cricklewood Broad-way. A taxi. I had to get a taxi. I had to get to the airport. I stood on the kerb, feeling numb.

I stared at the passing traffic.

The taxi I wanted didn’t come. Instead, a large black Ford drew up beside me and I stepped forward, thinking only of putting a great distance between myself and Cricklewood, before I realised my mistake.

By then it was too late to turn and run again. By then it was too late.

7

Bella Peluzzi

When I hear the axe falling against the door I am frightened. I dare not think what he will do if he comes into the room. I cannot go back over all that again. I hear the axe breaking the wood into small splinters and I think, If he comes into the room I will die. I have already felt his hands on my body and his flesh against my mouth. I have seen his eyes on me when he did not think I was looking. He had followed me around the room, wanting to touch me. If it had not been for my fear that he might take Rex away from me, I would not let him into the house. Now I understand. He is not what he says he is. He is not interested in taking Rex away. He is only interested in getting through the door to me. I scream, but still the axe is falling time and time again against the wood. And then I see the tip of the blade come through. When I see it, I can scream no longer.

I close my eyes. When the noise of the axe stops there is a long silence and I look to see what he is doing. There is a hole in the door. In the hole is his face. But now he is no longer interested in me. He is looking at something just behind and above me.

And then I realise that he has seen Antonio’s arm.

For a minute he does nothing. The mouth hangs open with shock. Then he turns and runs down the passage and goes out of my sight. I hear the front door slam. Now what? Has he gone to the police? I do not get up from the bed at once because I feel weak and cannot trust my body to move. But he has gone and that is one blessing. There is no danger from him. For some time I lie there looking at the ceiling. My lamp throws a circle of pale light upon the plaster. And then I get up.

I go into the back yard. Rex is lying by the wall, asleep. He could be a child, easily. He is sleeping so peacefully, except that sometimes he trembles. But he has had a fright. I pick up the bowl with the bones and empty the bones into the garbage can. And then I return to the house. There is nothing to do but sit in the front room. I look at my family pictures.

At least Edward Carson has gone. When he touched me I could not bear to feel his skin against mine. I could not stand the thought of our flesh coming into contact. When he touched me, held my hand, placed his fingers on my knee, I could see the pores of his body opening up, each pore a large hole filled with his sweat. I felt ill when he touched me. But he is gone, and will not be coming back.

But the police may come. He may go to the police and tell them what he has seen. I do not want them here.

I put a record on the gramophone. Tosca. When the music is in the room everything is different. All the nerves go out of the world, it is like light shining in the dark. I do not think Edward Carson understood my music. He did not realise the soul in it. To him, it was just noise. But that was only because his mind was small and he could not think of anything else but my body.

Even Antonio did not like my music. But he was similar in many ways to Edward Carson.

When I listen to the music sometimes I think about Antonio. I do not think of our life together. Instead, I remember our wedding. Oh, it was a beautiful wedding. The night was warm, we made our vows, there were lamps burning in the twilight, and later, when it was dark, they shone down through the warm blackness, surrounded by night moths. Everyone was dancing and drinking. Even the old women were laughing. Even the widows who had come just to weep over what was past were smiling, a little drunk.

It was a beautiful wedding. It was spoiled when I allowed Antonio to kiss me. We had never kissed before, although he had tried often. But always my mother had been there, watching over us. She worried about me. I was marrying too late, she would say. That is her photograph, sixth from the left beyond the flowers.

I let him kiss me in the darkness. I did not mind his hands around me or even his legs pushed in against my body. It was fine until I felt his mouth open and my own lips drawn inside his mouth, and his tongue pushing forcefully as if he wanted me to open my mouth for him. I felt sick then. When he knew that something was wrong, he let me go. He laughed and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, Ah, you know so little, you have a lot to learn, my girl. But I will teach you, wait and see.

But it is not good to think of such things. Antonio is dead. I listen to the music. When it stops I go into the kitchen and make coffee. Then I take the coffee into the front room again, what the English call the parlour. I sit down, after turning the record over.

My mother used to say, You are a dreamer, girl. Your head doesn’t sit properly on your shoulders. There is a great distance between your body and your brain.

She wanted me married. Sometimes she arranged for young men to call, even to court me. But they called once, most of them, and never came again. I thought then that it was because my mother insisted on watching everything that went on. She did not let me out of her sight when I was with a young man. Only Antonio persisted and that was because he had lived such a dissipated life, no other woman in the neighbourhood would have him. Besides, he was not a handsome man. His body was thick and flabby and his face was scarred and pocked.

The music fills the room. It relaxes me, it floats over me like soft, warm water. I close my eyes and drift with it. Then, when it is finished, I go through to the bedroom. I will have to repair the hole in the door. But it is better to have that small inconvenience than to have suffered Edward Carson’s body … I dare not think about that now.

There in the glass jar is Antonio’s arm. I used to have all of him in jars once. Now there is only the arm. It is the left arm.

I lie on the bed and gaze up at the ceiling. I will not sleep. I do not sleep much at nights. My heart is beating quickly, because of the things that have happened tonight. I think about Edward Carson. Perhaps even now he is talking to a policeman. Will I have to go away? Will I leave here? But it is so difficult to find a suitable place in London where I can keep the dog. No, I will stay.

Antonio gave me the dog as a present. At first we called him Pippi, but we changed the name when we came to London – for our fresh start, Antonio had said. Let us make a fresh start together, you and I. Our life up to now has been hell. We will begin again.

It is sad and a little funny that the dog he gave to me as a gift of love, he should despise so deeply himself. But then there is no such thing in the world as love. There are situations when people say Love to each other, just as Edward Carson said it to me, but it does not mean anything. It is an empty thing to say. Edward Carson always said empty things.

I look at the hole in the door. Now I do not feel so safe. Before, I would draw the bolts, turn the key, and pull the chain into place, and the room was safe for me. It was the only place where nothing threatened me. Now, because of the hole, it feels different. But I will buy some wood and make it safe again.

Antonio used to say that I could do more practical things than he ever could. I should have been a man, he used to say, because I was so good with hammers and saws. Perhaps there is some truth in that. Anyhow, to-morrow I will put some wood over the hole in the door, and the room will become what it was before.

With my eyes closed, I find myself thinking about Antonio. Sometimes in these thoughts, although I try to resist them, I feel a little guilty. Did I do the right thing? But that is a foolish question. I did the only thing I could do. I would have done the same thing with Edward Carson, if he had persisted. Once I even did. Once I put some of the same stuff into his food as I used to put in Antonio’s. Not much, only a little. Only enough to cause him bellyache. But I stopped doing it. It was something to do only as a last resort, as they say.

Now that Antonio is dead I think more and more often about our wedding. You would not think that something so beautiful and so light could possibly be destroyed. But there you would be wrong. Evil things are sometimes born in beautiful places. I try not to think about Antonio himself, but only of the time when we took the vows. Body and soul. Body. That was the bit that I said, at the time with all my heart, but that was the bit that disgusted me. Body.

He came to our bed on the wedding night and rubbed himself up and down against my leg. There was this hardness, this hard hard pressure that made me sick. I had to get out of bed and stand by the window. I looked down across Rome and the lights burning in the warm night and I pushed the window wider. We had come to one of those large hotels, a tall building, and when I looked down I thought, I will jump. I will break when I hit the bottom but anything would be better than having to suffer this. I have read of women who couldn’t bring themselves to make love, even though they wanted to very badly. I didn’t even want to. I sat down on the floor and I listened to him toss and turn on the bed. Sometimes he sighed. What is wrong with you? he asked. Stop this little game and come here, I am your husband. But I didn’t go to him. My stomach was rising up inside me. I hung out of the window and tried to be sick.

So when I think of Antonio now I try to think only of the wedding. Because beyond that point it stops being light and becomes dark. I look around the room. The arm in the jar, the stiff fingers. With those fingers he tried a hundred times to touch me. I used to think of him pushing his fingers up inside me, into my body, and I screamed in my head. Now they are stiff and useless. That is how I want them to be.

I get up and go into the yard. Rex is awake. I put my arms around him. He is like a child. He licks my face. There is between us a genuine feeling that I will not call love because it would be foolish to do so. I will not put a name to it because I cannot.

I whisper to him, ‘Nobody can hurt you, darling.’

And then I kiss his hot fur. It hurts me that I cannot bring him into the house. I do not like leaving him in the yard. But I have to. It is one of those perversities of nature that though Antonio despised the dog, the dog seemed to love the man the more Antonio punished him. Love is wrong. I mean to say, admire, respect, become devoted to. And I cannot have Rex in the house because there are still scents and smells of Antonio that drive him wild with grief. Perhaps I am jealous of this devotion. I do not know truthfully. Perhaps I do not want to witness the animal’s grief because it reminds me of his devotion to Antonio. And that, perhaps, I cannot bear.

As I turn from Rex, he whines. It is not for me that he whines. No, it is for my dead husband. I look up at the light in the window in the next house. There, staring down, is the man who came earlier and who wants to destroy my Rex. We look at each other for a time. And then he moves away and all I can see is his shadow thrown upon the glass. I hate that man. If he harms even a hair of my dog, I will … No, I do not know what I will do. Perhaps it will be what I tried to do earlier. To shove the scissors through him. To cut into the blood of his sex.

I go into the house. I walk into the sitting-room and look at the photographs. All my family are there, going back for nearly sixty years. My great-grandfather, Enrico. He was a proud man. I met him only once, when he was lying on his death bed. His face was as white as the pillow. I was held up, hardly more than a child, to kiss his face. Tears were running down from his eyes. He could not compromise with death. I kissed his face quickly. There was a smell of decay. Minutes later he died.

But I can still see his face on that bed and the white hands that hang over the bedsheets.

I sit down. I am too nervous to sleep. I think about Edward Carson and the police. If he goes there what will I do? When a policeman comes to the door, what will I say? But it is best to put such thoughts out of my mind. I get up. I walk up and down the room. I imagine Edward Carson coming through the door towards me, and in his eyes I read the nakedness of what he wants.

Antonio had the same nakedness. After our wedding night he tried time and time again to get to my body. But when I refused, he would say, There is something wrong with you, why don’t you see a doctor? A head-doctor, that’s what I mean. He just did not understand, you see. He did not understand me. I remember him pressing his body against my legs and the feel of him through the thinness of my nightdress. I would rather have died than allowed him to do what he wanted. I am not exaggerating this. I would have died feeling him inside me, feeling his thing pushed up into my body, impaling me. I cannot think these disgusting things.

I return to the bedroom. He cannot harm me now. I am beyond harm.

I am safe. So long as I keep to myself, I am safe and need not fear anything.

I lie down on the bed. I hear Rex. He is whining. How can I tell him that Antonio is dead? The house is still filled with his smells, and smells to a dog mean life. And what if Rex saw the arm in the jar? No, I cannot bring him into the house. The time is not ripe for that.

I said once to Antonio, You disgust me. He looked at me without changing his expression and he said, Yes, I know. After that there was nothing between us to say. You cannot live with disgust. It is worse than squalor. It is worse than anything else. He disgusted me. His body, his smell, even his mannerisms.

We came to London to make what he called a fresh start. He said that a change of scenery would help me. As if I needed help! He was the one who needed it. But he did not see that. As far as he was concerned, I was the sick one. Not him, not him with his sickening desires and his appetites. We came to London, but it was a false move. Because if he thought things would change, then he was wrong. When there is disgust between two people, everything dies.

I lie on the bed with my eyes tight shut. I can pretend that there is no broken door, and that everything is just the same as it was before Edward Carson came.

Edward and Antonio. Two men from the same mould. But all men are like that. Walking along the street I have seen them. Their trousers bulge between the legs. It is an ugly thing to see but I have seen it without meaning to, because I would not look intentionally. One night Edward Carson was sitting on the sofa and saying how much he liked my records when I saw that the place between his legs was hard. I picked up a knife in my hand and looked at it. There was in me a great temptation to strike him with the knife. But I put it down.

No, I cannot say that life with Antonio was pleasant, because that would be a lie. It became worse when we got to London. He worked as a mechanic in a garage. Sometimes he came home late, very late, and looking at him I knew where he had been and what he had been doing. He went with women. He paid for his women. He paid them to open their legs so that he could enter them.

I could have suffered this, because it meant nothing to me. There was nothing for me to be jealous of in what he did with the women he bought. What I could not suffer was the way he hurt Rex. When he tried to make me go to bed with him and when I refused, he would take a bottle of wine and go into the front room and drink it, then he would begin to smash my records. After that he would try to force me and I would bite him, or kick him where it hurted most, and then he took out his rage on the dog. Many nights I lay with my face in the pillow and listened to the dog cry out and the sound of Antonio striking him with a leather belt. The dog bled. But it satisfied Antonio. He could be master of the dog, even if he could not be master of me.

He would say, You need a psychiatrist. You are sick in the head.

But I knew the value of silence. I said nothing. My mother had told me, You can break a man’s heart with silence, and I believed it. So I would say nothing and he would sigh. And then he would open a bottle of wine and drink it. After a time he stopped sleeping in the bed beside me. I was glad of that. I didn’t want him there. I didn’t want to feel him breathing against me, or pushing himself up at my body.

I look round the room. I find it hard to associate the arm in the jar with the man I married. There are those silly tattoos he had done when he was a sailor. As a sailor, he had picked up his habits. Once he boasted to me that he had seen a donkey mount a woman and that he himself had slept with three different women in one bed.

I did not care. It was nothing to me. I could see him in the bed with the women, grunting like an animal. On the morning after our wedding he had come into the room naked. He enjoyed being naked, showing off to me, trying to get me to look. But I did not look. Once, from the comer of my eye, I saw all that I wanted to see and I did not ever look again. I did not look again – except once, when he was dead.

But I should not think these things. Antonio is no longer alive. I should not think ill of the dead. I try to think other things. But this room is alive with memories of my life with him and it is difficult not to remember, to push him out entirely of my thoughts.

I get up and stand in front of the jar. In the light it sometimes looks quite pretty. But the colours of the tattoos are fading in the spirit in the jar. There is a snake, and an angel with spread wings, and a heart and – and there is a naked woman with yellow hair. I turn away from this and walk back to the bed. I lie down again.

He thought we could make a fresh start in London. But how can you make something fresh from something stale? It is not possible. I should have listened to my mother. You are thirty-four years of age, she said, and you want to get married. This is foolish of you. You are not the marrying sort. Some women are born old maids. I should have taken that advice, except that nobody wants to be an old maid. It was my last chance and I seized at it. Who would not have done? Antonio was ugly, but he was a husband. And I wanted a husband.

Now I was a widow. That is better than being an old maid. People are more sympathetic towards widows than towards spinsters.

Sometimes even in spite of myself and what I felt about Antonio when he was alive, I feel sorry for him. Like the rest of us, he did not want to die. Of course he did not want it, but it had to be. There was no other solution. I had listened long enough to the pain he was inflicting on the dog, and it had become my agony too. The pain passed between us, and only Antonio stood outside the circle.

I killed him. Over the weeks I put powder into his food in small drops and one night, standing in the doorway and looking at the girls go past in their short dresses, he fell dead. When he was dead I did not know at first what to do, since I had not planned anything. I had not looked beyond his death to anything else. But there he was lying in the hall, his eyes open and his pipe burning on the carpet. I closed the door and put out the pipe. I let him lie there for a bit while I tried to think it out.

I wrote a letter to his garage saying that he had gone back to Italy and would not return. And then I told the nosy woman, Agnes, next door, that he had died. She is a slut. I do not know how she can put up with it. All those men. I told her he had died suddenly of a heart attack; at least the suddenly was true. Oh, when’s the funeral? Agnes asked. Didn’t you see it yesterday? I said.

And then I waited. I waited to see what would happen. In my heart I felt that somebody would come to ask about Antonio. But the days passed, and then the weeks, and nobody came. So, without planning anything, I had done it all successfully. I was relieved. Not just because nobody seemed to care if what I said about Antonio was true, but because he was no longer there to inflict pain on Rex and me. He was dead.

I took the body into the bedroom and left it on the floor. It lay there for nearly two days. Then I realised what I would do with it. I did not like doing what I did, because I cannot even stand to look at carcasses in butchers’ shops, but it was necessary. The worst part was the lower half of him. I did it with my eyes closed. It made a mess. But I cleaned that up all right. Later, when I had everything in the jars, I washed the carpet.

Now there is only the arm left.

I fell asleep. When I next opened my eyes it was ten o’clock.

I am still wearing my clothes, because last night I did not undress for bed. I get up and go through to the kitchen. I boil water and make coffee. I drink it.

Now comes the part I like least of all. I return to the bedroom and get the jar down from the wardrobe. I then go back to the kitchen and empty the spirit from the jar. I shake the arm out into the sink. It is not the whole arm, because it has been severed just below the elbow. I then take the boiling water that remains in the kettle and pour it over the arm, leaving it to steep for a time. This removes any traces of spirit.

I go into the front room and drink my coffee, while the arm steeps. I do not feel anything, just a sense of numbness. As I say, I do not associate the arm with Antonio. He is dead. All that is left behind is flesh and muscle. Even if I did think of the arm in connection with Antonio, I do not believe it would much matter. After what he tried to do to me, and after what he did to Rex, he deserves anything.

When the arm has been in the water for long enough, I take the meat cleaver from the cupboard and hack the arm with it. Half of the time I do not look. I do not like to look. But I open my eyes now and then just to make sure that I am doing it properly. When it is cut up, and no longer recognisable, I put it all on to a plate. This I place in the refrigerator.

I make my bed and sweep round the room. The broken door annoys me. I will buy some wood today and repair it. Antonio said often that I should have been the man. But I wouldn’t want to be a man.

Then I go into the yard. Rex is awake. He is looking at me keenly, his tongue hanging out. Soon I shall be able to bring him indoors. It is not healthy for him to be outside all the time.

I kiss and pat him. He is such a friendly dog.

Then I bring him his breakfast. There is enough of Antonio’s arm to last for three days.

While he eats, I go back into the house. I like to think of him eating, but I do not like to watch him. I sit on the bed. There are several empty jars. It is funny to see them empty. I think about Edward Carson. He would have filled them nicely. But now he has gone.

I think about the man next door, and I wonder. Could I? From the window of the bedroom I can see Rex eat. It is good to see him happy. It is good that he is free from pain. Free, unless the man next door comes again. But if he does come again, I think I know what I can do.

8

Eric

He didn’t come back. He went out on the Sunday and he didn’t come back. I wondered for a time if she might have him down there but I decided she couldn’t have. He’d cleared off. Just like that. A snap of the fingers and he’s gone.

Mind you, I never liked him much anyway. He was too sort of sharp and couldn’t look you straight in the eye, too shifty for my liking. I’m not saying he wasn’t friendly enough in his way, it was just that he let me down when I needed him most. Still, he left behind a bottle of whisky and you’ve got to be grateful for small mercies. But I’m glad he’s gone. I’m not just saying that.

Anyhow, I’ve got other worries.

It isn’t just the sores that are taking a long time to heal up, or even because of the dog and his noise – no, I got this letter from King’s with my cards in it, saying don’t come back, you’re unsatisfactory. Twelve years. How can anybody say that after twelve years? I went down there the same day as the letter came, but the gatekeeper wouldn’t let me through. You old bastard, I said to him. But he just turned away and wouldn’t speak.

I’ve got twenty pounds in the Post Office and I have to see a man at the Labour Exchange tomorrow. I’ll get another job easily enough. It’s just that I wish Matt was here to advise me. He knew about things like that.

And then there’s the dog. It still troubles me, and I’m going to settle the matter soon. But I drink whisky at night and that helps me a bit. It doesn’t take the noise away, no, but it helps. It acts like a sedative, you see. If you take two or three codeine tablets along with it, then you drop off. Then the noise sounds like it’s coming from miles away instead of just a few yards.

I didn’t think Matt would go without saying goodbye. Just like that. I thought all along that we’d been friends. But now I see what it is. There wasn’t anything between us, really. Sometimes you can think that a person is your friend, but you can be wrong. Nigel and Charlie, for example. I waited outside King’s until after work and when they came out they said Hard luck, Eric, and that sort of thing, but they were in a hurry to get away from me. It was obvious.

Still, I’ll get another job. There’s bound to be plenty at the Labour Exchange.

Now I come to my main worry.

Yesterday, Wednesday, I was walking down Ponsonby Gardens when Mrs Peluzzi came up to me.

She said, ‘Good morning.’

Surprised, I stopped. I didn’t say anything. She had on a pair of dark glasses. I couldn’t see her eyes.

‘We have had nothing but trouble since we first met,’ she said.

‘Well,’ I said.

‘Don’t you think we could try again?’

‘Try what?’ I asked. I wasn’t going to commit myself.

‘Try to be better neighbours?’

I nearly laughed. Better neighbours? We couldn’t have been worse.

‘I mean, we could forget what has happened in the past and we could try again,’ she said.

I had this odd feeling that she was staring at me crazily from behind her glasses. I couldn’t forget her eyes before.

‘Life is too short to bear grudges,’ she said.

‘I’m not the sort to bear grudges,’ I said.

‘Do you think I am?’

I didn’t know what to say.

‘No, we must try again,’ she said. ‘Remember what Our Lord said about seventy times seven?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Why don’t you come some afternoon for tea?’

Later, when I got back to the room, I thought about all this. But it didn’t make sense.

So now I’m going down there for tea. But it worries me. Something niggles me. I’m not sure what it is.

With people, you never know. You never know how they’re going to turn out. I mean, she might be all right. She might not.

But my mother said Never trust a living soul.

And maybe she was right when she said that.

About the Author

Campbell Armstrong (1944–2013) was an international bestselling author best known for his thriller series featuring British counterterrorism agent Frank Pagan, and his quartet of Glasgow Novels, featuring detective Lou Perlman. Two of these, White Rage and Butcher, were nominated for France’s Prix du Polar. Armstrong’s novels Assassins & Victims and The Punctual Rape won Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Awards.

Born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Sussex, Armstrong worked as a book editor in London and taught creative writing at universities in the United States.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion there of in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or here in after invented, without the express written permission of the publisher

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1969 by Campbell Black

Cover design by Angela Goddard

ISBN: 978-1-5040-0411-4

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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Table of Contents

Cover Page

Praise for the Writing of Campbell Armstrong

Title Page

Dedication

1 Eric

2 Matt

3 Eric

4 Matt

5 Eric

6 Matt

7 Bella Peluzzi

8 Eric

About the Author

Copyright Page