On any other day, Fenton might have relished the cosy contrast between these foul outdoor conditions and the white-lit womb of the library. But today he didn’t feel like relishing anything. In fifteen hours, unless he could bring himself to perform some drastic and selfless act of resistance in the meantime, he would be out there under that corrupt sky, keeping the least savoury engagement of his life. The second hand of his watch marched without mercy towards the appointed hour. It climbed doggedly towards the twelve, chewing up another minute that would never come back. Elsewhere on campus, Gus’s second hand would be performing the same grim march. So would Smithy’s. So would Col’s. At ten o’clock this morning the synchronisation had occurred. Both death squads were fully briefed now, and weaponised. At precisely two a.m. tonight they would deploy. And now his second hand was hitting the twelve, and was past it, and still he had done nothing to intervene.
In theory, the identity of the second victim, Col and Smithy’s victim, didn’t matter. All that mattered, in theory, was that they should brutally murder someone else at precisely the same time that Gus and Fenton were brutally murdering Ivan Lego, and do it in the same Aggot-like fashion, and do it somewhere far enough away from Lego’s house to establish that no single maniac could have committed both crimes. In theory, that was all that mattered. But at this morning’s meeting Gus had given the second atrocity a human face. He had assigned Col and Smithy a specific target. Their victim would be an aging and cantankerous local bus driver, known for his beet-red face and the general right-wingery of his work. More pertinently, he had once made Gus pay full fare after Gus had failed to produce a student card. More pertinently still, he had recently struck Gus in the face with a plastic garden rake, under circumstances that had allowed Gus to ascertain, and memorise, the old fascist’s home address. These circumstances were as follows. One bright Sunday morning a few weeks back, while staggering homeward from a party at which he had indulged too freely over the bottle, Gus had paused, in a neighbourhood not well known to him, to urinate against somebody’s front hedge. He was about half-way through doing this when something large and green flew into his field of vision from the hedge’s far side and cracked into his unsuspecting face. The impact had caused him to drop to the nature strip in a daze. Now he was on his knees and looking up at a large green plastic rake with an irate householder on the other end of it. The irate householder had a beet-red face. The beet-red face was directing a torrent of World War One-style invective down at him – bumface, skylarker, muttonhead – while the aging white arms lifted the rake to strike again. Gus had not, in all this confusion, stopped urinating. But he had forgotten to keep holding his dick, which was now distributing large quantities of steaming piss all over his defenceless boots and jeans. Both his hands were now raised to ward off the irate householder’s next blow. And as the rake came down again, Gus experienced a moment of clarity. That beet-red face at the rake’s far end: he knew it. He’d of known it anywhere! It was him, that bus driver that’d charged him full fare that time when he’d failed to produce a student card! And now the stroppy old turd was attacking him with a rake for no good reason, and making him drench his own thighs with white-hot piss – and committing the cardinal mistake of doing these things at his own place of residence! Calmly Gus scoped out the number on the old dude’s letterbox, right there under the hand-lettered No Junk Mail! sign. Gravely he committed it to memory. And then before the rake could come down a third time he was up and off, hobbling down the road in his soaked and smoking jeans, aiming his still-rampant piss-stream off to one side, and vowing that vengeance would one day be his.
And now it was going to be. At nine forty-five this morning, just prior to the synchronisation, Gus had written down the old man’s address on a slip of paper, and had handed it to Col and Smithy.
“Nobody,” he had ominously declared, “calls me a jackanapes.”
Thus it was that Fenton, here and now, in this remote nook of the library, found himself feverishly committed to ensuring that this awful old man would live through the night. This grizzled old rake-wielder he had never met or set eyes on. Or maybe he had. He sounded like half the bus drivers on Fenton’s route. And in general terms, of course, Fenton had no quarrel with the proposition that such a man deserved to die in a frenzied knife attack. But not in this one. Not in a knifing that Fenton had foreknowledge of, and would therefore be sort of, in a sense, responsible for. Let the old hedge-protector go down in some other atrocity. This one had to be stopped. It was Fenton’s most urgent priority: more urgent even than the salvation of Ivan Lego. That task could always be deferred until the last minute, if necessary. It could always be attended to on site. He could always, if it came to it, just turn around on Lego’s doorstep and wax Gus instead. As a member of the Lego death squad he would have that luxury. But the bus driver was a different story. If the bus driver was to be saved, he had to be saved before tonight.
But how? Fenton was fast running out of ideas. It had crossed his mind to place an anonymous call to the old man and advise him to spend the night with a friend, if he had one. But what was the old fool’s name? Not even Gus seemed to know that. Nor had Fenton got a look at the slip of paper on which Gus had scrawled the old urine-resenter’s address. So how was he meant to tip him off? What was he meant to do? Ring the local bus company and ask if they knew of a driver fitting this description: old, male, and rude? He would get laughed off the line.
He’d also thought of ringing Col or Smithy and getting the address from them. But he didn’t know their numbers either. As for their names, he’d never known Col’s last one, and what Smithy’s first one was was anyone’s guess. In fact what did he really know about them at all, his future co-defendants, his fellow dancers in this roundelay of death? Next to nothing. He knew roughly what they looked like. He felt reasonably sure that he now knew which one was which. But that was about all. There were four pages of Smiths in the phonebook. There were five columns of Smiths per page. Pretty soon he’d have to start coming up with good reasons why he shouldn’t spend the afternoon ringing up all of them, one by one. What would he say when they answered? Can I speak to Smithy please? Is this by any chance the home of Smithy the Maoist?
In the last hour or so, his thoughts had begun to turn – perhaps disgracefully – to the question of Col and Smithy’s competence as assassins. How capable would they be of carrying out such an assignment effectually, without glitch or bungle? How good were the odds that they would, if simply left alone to eliminate the bus driver as planned, botch the job completely, and save his life all by themselves? Was it poor form to ponder this question? Would it be morally okay just to leave the old man’s fate resting in the warm cradle of their ineptitude? By God it was a tempting option. But he knew already that his conscience would never let him get away with it. It wanted far more of him than that. It wanted action, of a sweeping and failsafe kind. It wanted self-sacrifice on a grand scale. And its voice was growing steadily louder.
On the desk before him lay three dictionaries of quotation, obtained from the reference section downstairs. Each of them was opened to the section headed Love. Every half-hour or so, with declining hope, he rescoured these pages in search of that quote about how being in love gave you permission to do anything you wanted to. How badly he needed that quotation now. He was starting to fear he’d imagined it. He’d always supposed he’d find it readily enough when the crunch came. But the crunch was now here. He was sitting right in the middle of it. And the quote seemed to have slipped away from him, like everything else. Things were happening too fast, closing in on him like those clouds out there, converging on him as the media pack would converge on him tomorrow, cables trailing, booms moving in formation over his shame-bent form. The towel over his head, screaming guilt. Him inside it, alone with his hot breath. Arresting officers at his elbows, beefy, humourless, moustachioed. His hands shackled in front of him, a golfer minus his club. That towel: did they give you a choice about that? Or was it compulsory, part and parcel of becoming that sort of guy? Did the police keep a pile of them on hand, or were you meant to bring your own?
Also on the desk before him was a disturbing document that had arrived in the morning mail. It was typed on the letter-head of his landlord. It began: “The purpose of the present item of documentation is to convey to you the following information – viz., that a routine interior and exterior inspection of the rental premises at the above address, to be conducted by myself personally, shall take place on Tuesday next, which is to say the 12th of this month …” And so on. To put it another way, his landlord was coming round to his house. His viciously pedantic landlord. In six days. To a house that still, as of this morning, had an exceedingly dead cat on its TV-room floor.
A forgery? A ruse of Trixie and Tara’s designed to panic him into dealing with the corpse? Possible, but unlikely. Stealing a piece of the landlord’s stationery wasn’t beyond them, certainly. But were they capable of duplicating his prose style with such fiendish accuracy? Fenton doubted it. They were good, but they weren’t that good. He had to assume the document was authentic. Which meant he was either six days away from getting evicted, or less than six days away from a decisive engagement with the remains.
But that of course was a problem for another self – a future self, a self who had the mountain of tonight safely behind him. A self he could not yet imagine being. For the self he was now, the only visible future was Operation Aggot. Fifteen hours to go. No: fourteen and a half. Funny how time never gave up, never got tired of shoving you on towards the things you dreaded. What was in it for time?
Still, he wasn’t licked yet. Not quite. Courses of action remained open to him. Unpalatable courses of action. Egregious courses of action. Zero-hour options he’d kept putting off till later, when everything else had failed. All of them drastic, all of them calling for terrible acts of martyrdom. But all of them demanding to be revisited now. Because now was later. Everything else had failed.
Option one: graphic self-harm. Preposterously, he still hadn’t ruled this out: ramming his fist or kneecap into some brick or concrete edifice before nightfall, and pulling out of the Operation on medical grounds. But would that even work? Would Gus agree to a postponement on such grounds? Would he agree to put both killings on hold till Fenton was back at full fitness? Or would he just press ahead with them regardless, with Fenton off the Lego death squad and even less in control than he already was? That was the salient possible drawback of doing himself some crippling injury. That was the potential downside of deliberately snapping one or more of his own bones …
The police, then? No. Not yet. Still not yet. Even now, even at this desperately late hour, explaining the plot to a live cop remained unthinkable. He just couldn’t see himself doing it. The conspiracy just didn’t feel real enough yet to warrant such a measure. There was still an element of the unbelievable about Operation Aggot. Right up to the moment of its execution, the plan would always be to some extent hypothetical. And therefore avoidable. Foilable. The same couldn’t be said of calling the police. Once they were called, they could not be uncalled. Could a hypothetical plot ever merit a response so extreme? So final, so grittily real? Did you bring on the guaranteed nightmare of police involvement to stop something that merely might happen?
No. Of course not. On the other hand: if he didn’t believe in the plot’s reality by now, when was he going to? When he was punching a nine-inch knife into Ivan Lego’s chest cavity? When he was writing things on the walls in his blood? These were distressing thoughts, to be sure. But here was the curious thing. He still found them far less distressing than the thought of ringing the police right now. Rightly or wrongly, that was how he felt. In short, he wasn’t going to call them, now or ever. Every minute he spent thinking about it was another minute wasted.
So. Her, then? Yes. It was coming to that. It was rapidly coming to that. The nuclear option, the moment when he would call her and tell her everything. The voluntary and irretrievable blowing of his own cover, with all that would entail. Almost certainly it would work. Almost certainly it would save both of them, Lego and the bus driver. That was what made it so horribly compelling. Picture it. The minute she hung up she’d go straight to Gus, and confront him with the charges. And Gus would find himself obliged to make a snap decision. He’d be faced with a stark choice between getting to kill Lego and getting to keep her. And surely he’d choose her, unless he was even madder than Fenton thought. What were a couple of cold-blooded murders, next to the great ongoing felony of possessing her? Yes, he would choose her, and denounce Fenton as a paranoid liar, and quietly pull the plug on the whole operation.
And that would be that. Operation Aggot would be aborted, at one draconian stroke. And everyone would live happily ever after, except Fenton. For him, the fallout would be obscene. Gus would be through with him, and so would she. Gus would end up with the girl, the girl would end up with Gus, and Fenton would end up with nothing. No: less than nothing. Nothing was what he had now, and he was fast losing his hold on it.
The irony was rich. It was palpable. Sealing his own doom to save the lives of a bus driver and a post-modernist. If the tables were turned, would either of those fucks have lifted a finger to save him? Of course not. Not a chance. And yet here he was, about to throw it all away to keep both of them alive. Why couldn’t he be more like them, these men who just did what they wanted to all the time and got away with it? These men who made things happen instead of letting things happen to them. Men whose lives had clear definition, whose personalities could be summed up in a few brisk words: the surly no-nonsense bus driver, the cold and brilliant theorist. Next to such men Fenton felt inauthentic, not fully alive. Next to them he was a ghost, hardly visible even to himself, drifting through his days in a profitless semi-life of doubt and hesitation, fated always to do the thing that would leave everyone else a lot happier than he was.
But there was no point sulking about it. He was going to do it, because he couldn’t not do it. He was going to throw it all away to preserve the lives of two utter cocks. He felt ill. He foresaw it all. Dialling her number as if dialling his own death. The misplaced optimism of her bubbly “Hello?” The gruff awkwardness with which he would announce his theme. The way he wouldn’t even bother to pretend to be charming any more, because such things were about to stop mattering. The distasteful but inescapable admission that yes, yes, he had lied to her about its being over. The way all the humour would seep out of her voice, never to return. His only hope now was that something else would happen first, before the call became unavoidable. Something large. Some major act of God or Gus that rendered the kamikaze solution unnecessary.
He struck the following bargain with himself. He would give it until seven o’clock tonight. Till eight at the very latest. That left things a grace period of seven or eight hours, or possibly nine, in which to take care of themselves. Or ten. Ten hours for the ball to get itself painlessly out of his court, before he was required to step forward and inflict the terminal smash.
Stranger things had happened, and eleven hours was an awfully long time.
“Hello?”
“Hi. It’s me.”
“Me who? Who me?”
Oh that was a fine start.
“Fenton. Fenton Bland.” He stood there in the dark kitchenette, cold phone pressed to his ear.
“Oh that me. I was wondering who this could be, ringing me at ten-thirty at night. I thought you must be Gus.”
“He’s not there then?”
“So that’s why you’re ringing. To talk to Gus! No one ever wants to talk to me!”
“No, no. It’s you I want to talk to.” Rain pummelled the roof. Never so fervently had he felt like having a quiet night in.
“Hey,” she said, “did you hear what happened to Warren? He’s in hospital.”
“Really?” He spoke without emotion, keeping himself steeled for the task ahead. He had forgotten that she might want to say things too.
“Yeah. Apparently some sort of firecracker went off in his hands.”
“Must have been quite a firecracker.”
“Poor Gus. He was shattered.”
“Oh was he?” Yes, this was all going to be much harder than he’d thought.
“Yeah, him and Warren, they go way back. He went to visit him yesterday, in the hospital. I wanted to go too, but Gus said he wouldn’t want me to see him in his pyjamas.”
“Shattered, was he?”
“Completely. When he got back from the hospital, he just asked me to hold him. With his face … you know, like a baby’s. Pressed against my … Well. You know.”
“I’ve got something to tell you,” he said.
“Hey, me too. I almost forgot.”
“What is it?” he asked her, putting off the inevitable by another moment or two.
She said: “Gus asked me to marry him!”
Fenton went cold.
“You see I knew there was something on his mind,” her voice went on with enthusiasm, in the dead shell of the phone. “He’s been acting funny all day. And then just a couple of hours ago he asked me. Or actually, he didn’t exactly ask me. Not properly. But he said he was going to. You know, one day, in the future. He just wants me to know that now, in case something happens to him first. Not that it will. Or you know, in case somebody else asks me before he does. So I can say no to them. I’d call that a proposal, wouldn’t you?”
He closed his eyes. “I’d call it a damn disgrace.”
She paused a few seconds, perhaps to scan these words for concealed humour. Then: “That’s not a very nice thing to say, Fenton.”
“Well, you asked for my opinion. That’s it.”
“I thought you’d be happy for us.”
“Why?” How little she still knew. How very, very little. “Happy for you? Why would I be?”
“Jeez. What’s up with you tonight?”
“I’ll tell you what’s up with me. Gus is up with me.” Dangerously, he felt himself parting company from his original purpose, rising away from it in rage. It was shrinking below him on the launch pad, looking less and less relevant by the moment. “I mean, do you even remember what he was up to? Do you? Before I stopped him?”
“So what’s this thing you have to tell me?” she asked him, curtly.
“Hang on. We’re not off the subject of Gus yet. Tell me this. I’ve always wanted to know this. What do you see in him? Just as a matter of interest.”
“He makes me happy, Fenton. He makes me laugh.”
“Intentionally?”
“Why are you being like this?”
“I mean, a dog on a unicycle, that’d make you laugh too, right? Wouldn’t it? But that doesn’t mean you’d … This is the guy who wanted to become a terrorist, till I bloody stopped him!”
She said nothing.
“Not that I ever got any thanks for that,” he bitterly added.
“Oh well sorry Fenton,” she came back, with a startling upshift of aggression. “Thanks. You’re such a hero. Is that enough for you?”
“It’s a start.”
“Most people wouldn’t need to be ‘thanked’ for it, Fenton. Most people’d just do it.”
So now she hated him. If only this were the goal: making them hate you. It was so easy. You could do it in thirty seconds.
“Why?” he asked her, in a voice he hated himself for. “Because it’s the right thing to do? Because virtue’s its own reward? It isn’t, you know. Take it from someone who’s virtuous. It really isn’t. Gus isn’t virtuous. Not even close. And look what he’s got. He’s got you. Me, I seem to have ended up with nothing. Where’s the moral in that story? Where’s the justice in that?”
“What’s he ever done to you, Fenton? He never talks about you like this, behind your back.”
“Too decent for that, is he? Too fine a citizen?” A bus driver and a post-modernist? Let them die! Let them perish in synchronized butchery! Let her nose be rubbed in the filthy reality of who Gus was! And if the night should culminate in his own arrest or death, so much the fucking better. Let her conscience deal with that as well.
“You should hear the way he talks about you. He worships you. He thinks you’re terrific. But really you’re just …”
“I’m just what? Come on. Tell me. I’d love to hear it.”
“If you hate him so much, why don’t you just quit? I don’t know why you ever joined in the first place.”
“Maybe,” he said, “I joined to get closer to you.”
“Huh,” she snorted. As if that revelation was a joke, and not a very good one at that. And the quality of that snort said it all. It told him exactly where he stood. He stood nowhere. Closer to her? It was a joke. He was less close to her now than he ever had been. The Maoist experiment, he suddenly and desolately saw, had been taking him in the wrong direction all along: not towards her at all, but farther and farther away. His chances had been shrivelling all the time, dying off with each floundering conversation. He’d been better off back at the start, when she hadn’t known him from a bar of soap. Then at least he’d had the element of mystique going for him, the infinite potential of the unopened book. Then at least there had been hope. But now she knew him: as a nasty crank, a foul-tempered weirdo, a bizarrely venomous critic of her fiancé. Fenton had always believed he was at the beginning of something, or at the very worst in the middle of it. He now saw that he was at the end of it. It was all ending. She was disappearing, spiralling away over his horizon, and she was never going to let him go to sleep with his face between her breasts. Never.
“Are you still there?” he said.
She indicated, with a sullen murmur, that she still was.
“I love you,” he said.