The theatre came alive. Conversations began or resumed or got louder, bag zippers buzzed open and shut. Desktops were cleared and cracked down, making a sound like scattered gunfire.
Fenton stayed firmly in his seat, watching her pack her things, knowing this would be his last good look at her for the day. In two minutes she would be gone, and he would be plunged into the long hell of an afternoon and evening and night of not seeing her, of not knowing where she was or what she was doing or who she was doing it with. So he stayed put and packed in the last impressions, laying them down for the barren hours ahead.
She stood and shook her hair back. She seemed to be thinking about something. Him? It wasn’t out of the question. She slung her bag over her shoulder and moved across to the stairs. There she joined the sluggishly rising crowd, her striped top gliding slowly up the aisle towards him.
When she was very close, about two rows below his own, Fenton did something rather odd. He abruptly turned the other way, presenting her with a point-blank view, should she choose to look in his direction, of the back of his skull. This was one of his signature moves. Roughly speaking, the philosophy behind it was this: it left entirely up to her the question of what would happen when she drew level with him. She was entirely free, for example, to come over and talk to him – if that was what she chose to do. She was entirely free to aim words of greeting or amorousness at the intriguing rear of his head. Fenton had been working this ploy, or some variant of it, at least once a day for several months now. Precisely why the fuck he kept doing so was unclear to him, because it always ended the way it did now: with her walking straight by without looking at or speaking to or indeed even noticing him. Even in the past, when she hadn’t known his name or who he was, and when she therefore couldn’t reasonably have been expected to do any of these things, Fenton had never failed to derive a quite fantastic amount of pain from being passed by in this way. Today, now that she did know him, the pain of it spiked clean off the chart, like a long silent scream. So here it was again, his last view of her for the day, the one he’d have to live with all night. Her wholly indifferent spine, bobbing slowly away from him in the tide of departing backs …
And then Fenton saw Pamela Scratch, striding militantly down towards the microphone. And immediately the shards of his soul flew back together, coalescing around a new imperative. Or an old imperative, frequently re-experienced. He had to flee Pamela Scratch. He had to get out of the theatre now, before she could see him. A folded sheet of paper was in her hand, bearing the details of the hectoring left-wing announcement that she was clearly about to make. Fenton was up and packed and over at the other set of stairs before she’d even reached the lectern. He merged with the ascending crowd there, cursing its glutinous lack of pace, twitching with a rodent-like need to be somewhere altogether different without delay.
A whinny of feedback from the mike: Pamela Scratch had seized its flexible neck, and was bending it down towards her bantamy person. “Oh come on,” she complained audibly, as if the instrument were consciously acting against her, participating in a widespread and long-standing conspiracy to suppress her voice. Her black bowler hat, worn with copious irony, hovered pugnaciously above the level of the lectern. Most of the rest of her was concealed behind it, but Fenton could picture her salient features anyway, all too vividly: the hair dyed black as oil, and cropped short like a marine’s; the eyebrow with so many ear-rings through it that it resembled a curtain rail; the sunglasses with the perfectly round black lenses, in which he had so often seen his own strained face, reflected twice, trying to feign pleasure at her latest suggestion that they “get together over coffee”; the tight black T-shirt; the black suit-coat designed for a man, with its jangling solar system of uncompromising badges and buttons; the harrowingly short black skirt; the swatches of chalk-white thigh disclosed by the ripped black stockings; the black socks and boots; the small white hands, ever poised to nip upward and supply the digital quotation marks she found it necessary to erect when uttering words like “civilisation” or “democracy.”
Now, having tamed the howling mike, Pamela was asking everyone to stop leaving for a minute and listen to what she had to say – a typically bold opening gambit, and one met by unanimous disregard. So already there was an ominous tremor in her voice, a quiver of imperfectly suppressed rage, as she defiantly moved ahead with her announcement proper. This concerned a forthcoming exhibition of her work as a graphic agitator. The exhibition was to be called Images of Suppression, Repression and Oppression. At it, in exchange for a dementedly large admission fee, interested parties would evidently get to see some photographs that she’d taken of an unspecified number of poor people, together with some other photographs that she’d taken of a caged and emaciated monkey up in one of the science labs.
Like a golfer eyeing a distant green, Fenton squinted up the stairs towards the exit. If Pamela saw him before he got up to it, she would invite him to coffee right over the loudspeakers. She had done as much before. And then, over coffee, she would denounce him for not having come down to the lectern to suggest having coffee himself. And then she would almost certainly try to make him attend this overpriced atrocity show of hers, and he would almost certainly be unable to think of a serviceable excuse not to go. A mature-aged lady, ample in girth, was moving just behind him in the crowd. He tucked himself hard against the wall and matched his pace to hers, keeping her weight issues on a constant line of eclipse between the lectern and himself.
Fenton and Pamela Scratch had been childhood friends. That, presumably, was why she kept asking him to have coffee with her. Certainly there was no other apparent reason why she would want to keep doing this. She did not, for example, appear to like him now. On the contrary: she fairly openly disliked him, and constantly deplored his politics, and had on several separate occasions vocally lamented his failure to be a totally different person. She simply seemed to think it an iron law of social conduct that people who had been friends when they were five years of age had no choice but to go on meeting each other once every two weeks or so for the rest of their lives, in the presence of some variety of steaming liquid. Personally, Fenton wasn’t so sure that they had been friends when they were five. The way he saw it was this: when they were five, their parents had been friends. Admittedly, this circumstance had obliged the two of them, during that epoch, to spend a certain amount of time together in the same house, the same yard, the same tree, the same sandpit, and – yes – the same bathtub. But it was an arrangement that had arisen without his input, much less his approval. And what it had to do with the present – a present in which she wore multiple eye-rings and an ironic black hat – he couldn’t for the life of him see.
Down at the mike, that tremor in Pamela’s voice was getting more ominous by the second. There was no question about it now. She was going to lose it, and soon. Fenton had seen it all before. For another thirty seconds or so she would press on, struggling to keep a lid on it. And then she would erupt, and start denouncing the whole lot of them as bourgeois fools, pathetic sheep, silent partners in third-world genocide, and so forth. Her rage would spew like lava from the mike. And once she was in a state like that, it would be unthinkable to let her spot him among the departing herd. In a state like that, there was no telling what she might say about him over the P.A.… No: once she’d entered that mode, the only direction he could afford to be seen heading in was down, straight towards the lectern, with his hand lifted towards her in the heartiest of fake salutes.
In other words, he now had about thirty seconds at the most to get the hell out. The fat lady moved with intolerable slowness beside him. But he stayed close to her, sacrificing speed to security, checking a rash and growing urge to break cover and just make a brazen loping dash for it …
Whenever Pamela Scratch asked him to have coffee with her, Fenton invariably found that he had something better to do – not have coffee with her. He kept agreeing to have it with her anyway, out of fear. Partly this was the usual kind of fear, the fear that made his life in general an ongoing matter of doing things he didn’t want to do. But mainly it was the quite specific fear that if he didn’t keep having coffee with her Pamela might retaliate by saying something to him, or to somebody else, about the infinitely regrettable sex act that had taken place between them one ancient afternoon in a sandpit, while their white-skirted mothers were playing doubles on an adjacent tennis court. Precisely what the sex act had consisted of, Fenton couldn’t recall. His squeamish memory would supply him only with a rapid-fire jumble of images: hot sand; long shadows; some underpants rimmed with yellow elastic; a plum-coloured birthmark, which must have been hers, since he didn’t have one; a region of nude skin, which again was quite unmistakably not his own; and, finally, mercifully, a large-shadowed mother intervening, waving a scandalised wooden racquet.
Certain parts of his body, moreover, harboured their own memories of the incident, lingering sense impressions that couldn’t be gainsaid. For example: his genitals seemed to recall having experienced, at some point in the proceedings, the distinctive, somewhat bracing sensation of exposure to fresh air. And his fingers retained a vague impression of having grasped, and pulled down, the waistband of somebody’s underpants. But whose, damn it? His own, or hers? Had there been mutual consent, or had he – God help him – forced the issue? And even if he had, to what extent did he remain culpable for that today? He had been five years old! How long did he have to go on paying the price?
More crucially, how much of the incident did Pamela recall? The whole thing, right down to the identity of the instigator? Or were her memories as sketchy as his own? Certainly she seemed to remember something. The signs of this were subtle, but hard to dismiss. For example, she tended to look at him in a strangely accusatory way while discussing issues of gender politics, and sexual harassment – and indeed even rape. And she seemed to raise these subjects with him far more often than she really needed to, even by her standards. And didn’t she bring up the topic of tennis, too, with rather worrying frequency?
Then there was the disturbing question of her general conduct towards him: the snorts of mockery at his every opinion, the freewheeling denunciations of his ignorance and apathy. Taken as a whole, this behaviour, and the way she seemed to think she could keep getting away with it without his responding in the natural way – by telling her to piss off and never speaking to her again – surely implied that she considered him to be somehow in her debt. She behaved as if she had something on him, something large and terrible. She treated him as if they both knew that he had no choice but to sit there and keep taking it, out of sheer gratitude that she hadn’t yet mentioned the incident to the appropriate authorities. Actually, Fenton strongly doubted there were any appropriate authorities. Legally speaking, he felt reasonably confident he was in the clear. If he kept sitting there and taking it from her anyway, he did so mainly out of gratitude that she hadn’t yet openly mentioned the incident to him. The thought that she one day might do that was more than troubling enough in itself to keep him thoroughly in line, to keep him trotting along behind her to the coffee shop at least once every fortnight, with his wallet out like the tongue of a dog.
He almost made it. He was ten strides short of the door when she blew. What kind of people were they, walking out on an announcement of such gravity? What kind of people would refuse to spare one night of their lives to look at pictures of the wretchedly underprivileged? What kind of people wouldn’t want to look at graphic photos of a slowly expiring monkey? Or maybe they secretly applauded the monkey’s suffering! Maybe they actually approved of murder in the name of science!
The exit was wickedly near. This, coupled with a sudden reflaring of the thought of just how bad it would be to have coffee with her, impelled Fenton to shatter his own rules and risk one last kamikaze thrust for freedom. He ditched the fat lady and surged candidly for the door. With the clarity of a dying man, he could see every last detail of the scene beyond it: the sunlit foyer, people moving around freely in the vast bright space. A girl dropping a long segment of orange peel into a bin.
And then some backpacked bitch halted right in the middle of the doorway, stooping to pick up a dropped pen! The crowd juddered to a thick halt behind her, and suddenly Fenton was stationary and stranded and hopelessly exposed, and the risk had become untenable.
So with no more mucking around he turned and moved decisively back down towards the lectern, his right hand primed to give a jovial wave when she saw him, his face preparing to wrench itself into the semblance of a smile.
“Fenton,” she said, “I’ve got a proposition for you.”
Here it came. An urge gripped him to sweep his arm across the table, sending all this steaming crockery to the floor. But in the twin mirrors of her black sunglasses, his face remained remarkably composed. It quizzically raised its eyebrows, inviting her to go on.
“I want to ask you,” she said, drawing the moment out, pausing to tap ash from her cigarette, “to join SNARBY.”
Fenton calmly lifted his coffee. He took a small but molten swig. He returned the cup to its saucer. This was bad. This was worse than the photo show. SNARBY was a radical student group founded and spearheaded by Pamela. To get out of joining it, there were few lengths to which he would not go. But again he was pleasantly surprised to see his reflected face display no obvious signs of horror. With a paper napkin he dabbed foam from his lips. Spurious excuses were assembling in his head already, forming an orderly queue. A death in the family? A prior commitment to Maoism?
“You already have asked me,” he said in the end, factually. “And I think we agreed,” he went on, resurrecting a classic lie, “that it would endanger our friendship.”
“That was the first SNARBY, Fenton. The arms-race SNARBY. Jesus! That’s been defunct for …what, six months now!”
“Really?”
“What do you mean, ‘really’? Don’t you watch the bloody news? The nuclear arms race is over, man. It finished about two fucking weeks after we formed. I’ve told you all this. Remember? The Student Union froze our funding stream, remember? Just cut it off cold before we could get a single bloody cent.”
“That’s right,” he said. How could he forget? SNARBY Mark One: Stop Nuclear Arms Race, Barbaric Yankees! Offshoot or splinter group of the less cantankerous SNAR. “And then you, ah …” His armpits were damp with sweat. He had to be exceedingly careful here. There was no telling how much of this stuff she’d told him on previous occasions, when he hadn’t been listening.
“And then,” she impatiently said, “we got onto the Noelene Astle thing.”
“Right,” he said. “Of course.” Of course. Noelene Astle: beanie-wearing grandmother and clean earth advocate, outrageously imprisoned after some trivial infraction at a nuclear waste facility. SNARBY Mark Two: Speed-up Noelene Astle’s Release, Bureaucratic Yes-men! That body’s formation having been almost instantaneously followed – if Fenton was not mistaken – by the old lady’s unconditional release. Yes: he distinctly recalled, now that he thought about it, the stirring pictures on the evening news about a month ago: the sudden and abject government pardon, the harmless old granny shuffling in triumph from the prison’s front gate, raising a jubilant walking stick towards the waiting scrum of well-wishers and cameramen. “And now she’s been released,” he said stupidly.
“Yeah no shit,” Pamela icily replied. “I told you I had a live TV debate in the pipeline, didn’t I? Me verses the Minister for” – with lightning alacrity she raised the appropriate finger-quotes – “‘Justice.’ It was fucking imminent. Needless to say they pulled the plug on that the second Noelene walked. That’s the way these TV automatons think. They don’t care about the issues. Just the personalities. Plus that very day, Fenton, the very day of her release, we’d just ordered twelve dozen giant posters of her with these prison bars superimposed all over her face. Which are now totally useless, of course. Unless by some freak of injustice she gets locked up again.”
Bitterly she ground out her cigarette.
“So what do you stand for now?” Fenton asked, wondering if the topic of his joining had now been permanently left behind.
“What – you mean the letters, or SNARBY itself?”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
Pamela laughed ironically. “The letters don’t stand for anything, Fenton. Not right now. That’s the whole bloody point. We’re meeting next week to vote on that. But SNARBY itself, that’s totally another question. You surely don’t think the cut and thrust just ceases because we don’t have a cause! Fucking far from it. The other faction’s never been so active. And I’ll tell you what they stand for, Fenton. I’ll tell you what they stand for. They stand for getting rid of me. Me, who built this organisation up from nothing. They’re looking to roll me on this vote. They’re putting it about that my track record on causes is” – her fingers spiked up again – “‘dubious.’ A ‘liability.’ Apparently it was my fault the nuclear arms race suddenly ended, you see. And apparently it was my fault again that Noelene Astle got released so bloody fast. Apparently I’m no longer fit to decide what we stand for. Anyway, this is where you come in, Fenton. I need you to turn up at this vote, right, and stick up your hand when I put forward my option for the new cause. I don’t think that’s asking too much.”
“What is your option?” Fenton asked, still technically withholding his assent.
“Don’t worry about that. I’m still working on it. You try coming up with a position that’s both politically valid and consistent with the acronym. It’s a nightmare. The Y’s the hardest. In terms of the B … I don’t know, I’m thinking maybe Bourgeois this time would be good. The S, I’ve been thinking it’d be great to put two slashes through it, so it looks like a dollar sign. The mighty buck thing. Uncle Sam. The R, I don’t know. Always a tricky one. Reactionary? Racist? Oh who the fuck knows? The key thing is that these other idiots don’t get theirs up.”
“Why? What’s theirs?”
“Christ Fenton – I don’t know,” she sighed, as if this were yet another in a long string of palpably irrelevant questions. “With a bit of luck they won’t have thought of one either yet. But it’s bound to be bullshit when they do.” She bitterly ground out her cigarette. Hadn’t she just done that? “Anyway, this stuff needn’t concern you. All you need to do is be there at this meeting. I’m asking you nicely here, Fenton.”
Dear God: was that what it sounded like? Was that a veiled allusion to the sandpit?
“I’ll be there,” Fenton said.
“Good.”
An excruciating silence.
Finally, and only because he could stand the silence no longer, Fenton said: “Maybe you could just change the name.”
She looked at him with horror. “What, stop calling ourselves SNARBY? You’ve got to be joking! We’ve got these huge piles of letterhead, we’ve got name recognition … Christ, not even the others are proposing that.”
“No not your name. The name of the prisoner. I mean, you hang on to Release, and Speed-up, and whatever the rest of it was …”
“Bureaucratic Yes-men.” Suddenly Pamela was interested – as interested as he had ever seen her be in anything said by him.
“Right,” he said. “And then all you’d have to do is find another prisoner–”
“With the initials N. A.”
“Right. Who’s been unjustly imprisoned.”
“But not too unjustly,” Pamela said adamantly. “Not so unjustly that they’re bound to get released anyway. We don’t want a repeat of the bloody Noelene thing.”
“No.”
“N. A.,” Pamela mused. “N. A. …”
“Neville Aggot,” said Fenton, without really thinking about it. No: without thinking about it at all. The name had simply jumped into his head. With improbable speed it had simply arrived there, ready-made, the name of an incarcerated felon with the right initials. And then at the same moment he had found himself just saying it, offering it out loud for Pamela’s consideration. As soon as the words were out he wanted them back. He wanted to seize them from the air and crush them into a ball and ram them back down his own throat. For it was surely a mistake, a very grave mistake, to utter the name of a crazed and patently guilty thrill-killer in the present context. Yes, it was an egregious error. At the very least it was a show of serious bad taste, and would draw from Pamela a five-minute harangue about his gross political insensitivities. At worst it made a mockery of everything she stood for – and how she might respond to that didn’t bear thinking about.
For several long moments she just stared at him, in what appeared to be appalled disbelief. Her face twitched and worked, as though he’d finally deprived her of the power of speech. Then she lunged forward. Fenton recoiled, expecting some kind of blow. Instead he felt an unpleasant pressure around both his wrists. Pamela had seized them, one in each hand. Her grip tightened.
“That,” she whispered, “is fucking brilliant.”
Then she let him go, and took a long and thoughtful drag on her cigarette. “Let me think aloud here for a minute,” she said, expelling a tight jet of smoke. “Campaigning for the release of a multiple murderer. That is right out there. It’d be unprecedented. It’s so radical that even … even Bakunin would look at it and say, ‘Jesus that’s left-wing!’ The other faction, they wouldn’t dare to oppose it. They’d be too scared of looking like reactionaries. Of looking like they’re not radical enough to see that Aggot’s just as much a victim of society as … you know, as a petty bread thief. And think of the publicity! Imagine how vividly it’d define SNARBY as an organisation! I mean, okay: confession time. We have been a little unadventurous in the past. Let’s admit that. Let’s face it, who wasn’t opposed to nuclear Armageddon? Who wasn’t? And Noelene Astle – every man and his dog wanted her to get released, didn’t they? Housewives, priests – is it any wonder we couldn’t get any quality airtime? More to the point, she always was going to get released, wasn’t she? One day or another. It was inevitable. So really, from our perspective the whole thing was just this futile race against time. But Aggot … I mean, there’s no way in the world they’re going to release Aggot off their own bat, is there? We’ll have breathing space. Time to build up a really well-oiled campaign. And imagine the kudos if we could swing it. Unconditional amnesty for a man like Neville Claude Aggot …”
“Amnesty? But hold on. He’s not exactly a political prisoner.”
“Politics is everywhere, Fenton. Don’t be so naive.”
“He stabbed them while they slept,” he reminded her.
“Allegedly, Fenton. Be very careful now.”
“Hold on. You’re not saying he’s innocent? Surely you’re not saying that?”
But Pamela furnished no reply. She was lost in thought, subjecting the option to deeper levels of analysis. Fenton saw that it was useless, for the moment, to keep trying to engage her on the finer details. The concept was in her head now, and wouldn’t easily be dislodged. He wasn’t sure how he felt about this. On the plus side, she did seem to have forgotten about her intention to draft him into SNARBY as a voting stooge. On the minus side, a plan to liberate an insane multiple murderer was being hatched right in front of him, and it was largely his fault. Neville Claude Aggot, justly locked-up freak. Psychopathic slayer of innocents. On this score, Fenton’s stomach registered deep unease.
He watched Pamela silently thinking the thing through, probing the ins and outs of it, and his head ran a grim slide-show of Aggot’s life and deeds.
The moon-drenched night of the slayings. The randomly chosen house. The well-to-do family of four inside. The Baker family. The father a bank manager, prominent in the local community. The mother an amateur painter of flowers in flowerpots. The happy-go-lucky teenaged daughter, just getting ready to celebrate a birthday and attend college. The kid brother, maker of model aeroplanes, popular among schoolmates. The breaching of their lock. Creeping from room to room. The frenzied nature of the attacks. The inordinate number of wounds.
Neville Claude Aggot, multiple murderer. There it was, right there in the adjective, the sordid pointlessness of the man. Multiple murderer. Not serial. Not mass. Multiple. And what did it mean, to be a multiple murderer? Only that he had succeeded in killing more than one person. But not that many more than one. Four people only. One family. By no means enough to qualify as a mass murderer. And not in a twisted enough way to have books written about him by profilers or psychologists, startled inquiries into his perverse modus operandi. He had no perverse modus operandi. He just stabbed them an incredible amount of times for no reason. And all on the one night, so he didn’t qualify as a serial killer either. If he had vague notions of becoming one – if that had been his cretinous dream – he had turned out to lack the one meagre ability indispensable to serial killing: the ability not to get caught straight away, the day after the debut crime. Neville Claude Aggot, multiple murderer. Even in the field of killing people for no reason, a mediocrity, a non-event. A man who made serial killers look like high achievers. A man not fit to clean a serial killer’s hatchet, not fit to brush the dust from his hoard of pubic hairs …
The quickie paperbacks documenting his early years. The life that did nothing but lead up to the crimes. A series of borrowed scenes from other lives like it. The hoarding of weapons. The obsession with keeping them clean. The voices at night, saying do it. The dark and terrible childhood. The alcoholic and abusive mother. The even more alcoholic and abusive father. (Job description: unemployed and illiterate merchant seaman.) The bed-wettings. The locked closet under the stairs. The lifelong fear of confined spaces. Growing up, the below-average intelligence, the poor social skills, the radical lack of charm. The shame in the schoolyard. The self-esteem issues. The thick spectacles, the frames like Buddy Holly’s, the elastic on the earpieces to hold them on. The merciless mockery by his peers. The lewd group chants about his surname, homonym for a slang term denoting the testicle.
The twenty-minute loss of consciousness at age ten, occasioned by a self-inflicted blow to the head with a claw hammer. Quote from quickie paperback: “Years later, during the course of his nine-day trial for the Baker slayings, expert witnesses would pinpoint the injury as a probable root cause of Aggot’s disordered personality.” Other experts would demur, asking why a boy who wasn’t disordered already would strike himself on the head with a claw hammer. Blackouts. More bed-wettings. At twelve, the rash of local pet disappearances. At thirteen the spate of suspicious neighbourhood house fires. The petrol-scented jerkings-off at a safe distance from the flames. Not straight into the flames, not after the first time. At fourteen the burning to the ground of his own house with his father inside it. The old illiterate found welded to the bed-frame in a serious but stable condition: that of death. The lack of hard evidence, the open finding of the coroner. The period alone with just his mother, living in a tiny caravan parked next to the blackened houseframe. A year or so later, the burning to the ground of the caravan. The mother inside it, dead-drunk and then just dead.
The black and white photograph in the local paper the next day. The young Aggot hunkered down on the charred lawn. The husk of the caravan in the background, still visibly issuing smoke. Fifteen years old, his first day as an orphan. Tall for his age. The chunky outmoded glasses. The thick parka. The stark indifference to fashion trends and prevailing weather conditions. The soulless stare into the camera’s lens. The disturbing absence of affect. The sort of photograph destined to show up again ten years later, blown up on the TV news, dots of old newsprint fattening and blurring towards meaninglessness, ceasing to hold the shape of a human face. The kind of picture doomed to turn up in the poorly glued middle of the quickie paperback, next to yearbook pictures of the deceased. The kind of boy who will grow up to dig shallow graves in dense bushland, and leave genetic material under dead people’s fingernails, and get described by his neighbours as a quiet fellow who kept to himself …
From fifteen to eighteen, ward of the state. Surviving relatives waiving their right to adopt him. The grim series of grim institutions. The increasingly high fences. At eighteen, the trial government programme: releasing known weirdos into the hearts of decent communities and seeing what happened next. From eighteen to twenty-two, nothing. The non-murdering wilderness years. The small house in the leafy suburb. The never-mown lawn. Handwriting and drawings on the walls inside, the strewing of indoor filth. The naked mattress on the floor, reprehensibly stained. The shelf of video nasties. Being quiet, keeping to himself. Menial employment, drifting from job to job. The walks to the shop for canned goods.
Then the voices in the night, saying do it.
(And why are these voices always so vague, so unspecific? Do what? How is the psychopath meant to know what they want him to do? Why does he always end up doing the same thing? And why is he always a he?)
The earplugs rammed in deep to block them out.
The loneliness. The limited sense of self-worth. The wildly improbable boasts to workmates: John Wayne was my father; I invented the stock cube. The desire to become someone, maybe by saving somebody else from death. The purchase of weapons. Knives, many knives, more knives than he strictly needs, more knives than he could reasonably hope to hold at any one time. Sharpening them nightly, maintaining their gleam. The need to know what one felt like when going into a person. The nightwalks up the hill, where the houses of the well-to-do are. The concealed blades in their leather scabbards, strictly for purposes of self-defence.
The night he does it for real. The black ski-mask. The can of petrol swinging at his side like a lantern. The breaching of their lock. The unsheathing of the knives …
Afterwards, the rummaging through the closets, the souveniring of their personal effects. Splashing petrol up and down the stairs, a trail leading off to each body. Downstairs in the kitchen, the increasingly frenzied search for the pack of matches. The sacking of the drawers. The desperate spanking of his own pockets. The tearful ditching of the inferno concept. Leaving the crime scene untorched. Back home on the raw mattress, the fitful night’s sleep. The day after, the endless waiting. Fruitless tunings-in to the news, the wait for shocked neighbours or grieving relatives to make the find. The repeated returns to the crime scene. Finally the walk to the phone booth, the anonymous call to the police, telling them where the house is and what they can find inside. Quickie paperback: “The call would prove to be the first in a series of fateful blunders made by a nervous Aggot in the hours leading up to his arrest …”
All afternoon, the procession of sirens wailing up the hill. Another return to the crime scene, mingling with onlookers behind the yellow police tape. His behaviour and comments considered tasteless and inappropriate, even by the kind of people who gather behind yellow police tape. The informing of officers after he leaves. The mass giving of descriptions. The second fateful blunder.
The fall of evening. His third blunder: going to the local church to confess to a priest. No theologian, he confesses to an altar boy by mistake. The altar boy down at the police station two hours later, working closely with the penri sketcher. Twenty minutes on the eyebrows and cheek structure before the kid happens to mention he knows the guy’s name: Neville Aggot, harmless local eccentric. The closing in of the net.
Back at home, lying naked on the rank mattress. Blanket coverage on the late news. Gratifying phrases: “grisly discovery”, “scene of horror.” “The Baker Butcher”: his chilling media nickname during the handful of hours when his real name isn’t known. Less gratifying: the on-air playing of his anonymous phone call. The appeal for public help in identifying the voice. The immediate jamming of the police switchboard. The flood of tip-offs from former menial work-mates, I.D.ing his piss-poor impression of John Wayne.
The troubled night’s sleep. Odd dreams: loud but muffled voices, ringing phones.
Dawn the next day. The removal of the earplugs. The vast and sudden noise in his unstopped ears, like a helicopter hovering two feet above his roof. The donning of the reeking pyjama pants, the puzzled walk to the TV. Switching it on, yawning. Scene: veteran newsman in bulletproof vest, crouching down in leafy suburban street. In the background, a small house with very long grass. A helicopter hovering two feet above its roof. Caption at bottom of screen: LIVE PICTURES: SIEGE IN PROGRESS. An armoured truck at the kerb, with a heavily armed tactical response team getting out of it.
Quickie paperback: “While Aggot fitfully slept, his habitual earplugs rendered him deaf to the repeated attempts of police negotiators to contact him by telephone, leading to the development of a full siege situation on the quiet suburban street outside.” Megaphoned negotiators upping the ante all night, thinking he was wide awake and playing hardball.
The walk to the front window to take a look out. The infra-red surveillance cam tracking his moving white aura. The tweaking aside of the curtain. The tactical response team raining down on him like a collapsing scrum. Broken glass gashing his naked chest. The shouts, the handcuffing. The escorted walk down the front path. The towel over his head. The moronic torso white and bleeding in the sheet lightning of the cameras. The bundling into the paddy wagon. Back on his TV, live coverage of him getting driven away, playing to an empty house.
The brief and emphatic trial. The mountain of physical evidence: hairs, fluids, fibres, flakes, footprints, fingerprints, handprints, face prints. The print with a good quarter of his index finger still attached to it, slashed off by accident during the rampage, left damningly behind at the scene. His leers at the jury. His lunge over the table at his own lawyer with a letterspike. The gashed advocate moving immediately for a mistrial, blood-soaked handkerchief pressed to his cheek.
The twenty-minute jury deliberation. The guilty verdict. The passing of the maximum sentence. Quote from the judge’s speech: “a depraved animal of the utmost turpitude.” The judge stamping Never to be Released on Aggot’s file. Meaning Aggot, not the file. Underlining the phrase twice.
His sanity reassessed post-trial, deemed non-existent. His removal to a secure psychiatric facility: Butterfly Lodge Enhanced Security Custodial Environment for the Differently Sane. And now, once a year or so, some fresh report of his doings inside. Assaults. Self-mutilations. Also, paradoxically, push-ups and sit-ups. Weightlifting. Devotion to non-spiritual modes of self-improvement. Honing of literacy skills. Rumoured readings in the literature of evil.
And now Pamela Scratch wanted to set him free.
“Maybe we could write to him,” she was saying now. “Maybe we could get him to send us a series of surprisingly articulate letters from inside. Maybe he’s written some poems in there or something. In fact: what if I wrote to him now, pre-empting the vote. That’d really back them into a corner …”
“You’re remembering he confessed, are you?” Fenton rallied, thinking there might still be some small chance of changing her mind.
Pamela looked at him sharply. “I wonder what you’d confess to, Fenton, after you’d gone twenty-four hours without sleep. With a light bulb shining in your eyes and your pants full of your own piss and shit.”
“He confessed it to an altar boy.”
“Do you watch the news, Fenton? Do you? There are people out there so damaged they’ll confess to anything. You must know that. People who’ll say anything just to get some attention. A bed for the night, a bit of human contact, a sympathetic ear. All the things you’ve been given on a platter.”
A sympathetic ear? When had Fenton last been given one of them, on a platter or anywhere else? In Pamela’s tone he was starting to detect a clear suggestion that she’d rather, on the whole, be having coffee with Neville Claude Aggot. He resented this. He said, labouring to keep the hate out of his voice:
“Speaking of damaged people, didn’t one of the Bakers’ buttocks have Aggot’s teeth-marks on it?”
“What baker? What’s a fucking baker got to do with it?”
“Not a baker. The Bakers. The people he killed. The family. And didn’t one of their chests have a knife sticking out of it with Aggot’s name carved into the handle?”
“And that means he put it there, does it?” Pamela scoffed. “That’s like jailing a butcher because someone’s been killed with a butcher’s knife.”
“Not quite.”
“Or jailing David Bowie because someone’s been killed with a bowie knife.”
“The Thin White Duke,” Fenton calmly retorted, “didn’t leave half his finger behind at the death scene.”
Again Pamela scoffed. The scoffs of Pamela Scratch were small miracles of compression. They managed to suggest that whatever she was scoffing at was at once scandalously unbelievable and precisely the kind of thing she expected. This was, when you thought about it, quite a feat.
“Can we cut out the schoolboy debating points, Fenton?” she said. “Do you honestly believe that planting a few pieces of evidence is beyond a police force that’ll strap an electrode to an innocent man’s dick just to get a confession out of him? Do you?”
Fenton began to respond: but Pamela raised a weary palm.
“Look. Fenton. Can we stop this tiresome dance round the bourgeois maypoles of ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’? I mean, look, okay, let’s say you’re right. Let’s say Aggot did do this. Big deal. The real point is, how many people die in the third world every day? Ah: you can’t tell me that, can you? But someone kills this bloody baker of yours and his 2.3 kids out in the suburbs, and suddenly you and all the rest of them get worked up into this great moral lather and acquire a sudden interest in the concept of justice! And the dance begins. So we put away petty criminals like Neville Aggot, while the real murderers in their three-piece suits walk free. That’s white justice.”
“Aggot is white.”
“Did I say he wasn’t?”
Did she? Fenton couldn’t remember, and lacked the energy to try. Suddenly he was spent. She’d worn him down. No: she’d worn him right through, so that he was no longer certain of anything. Maybe Aggot was innocent. Or maybe he was guilty but nevertheless deserved to be freed, pardoned, unconditionally apologised to, supplied with a weekly ration of petrol and matches at taxpayer expense. Fenton no longer cared. His sole concern now was to get out of here, and get himself embarked on the long bus-ride home, so that he could be lying down in his darkened bedroom as soon as possible with a cold compress, whatever that was, over his face and head.
“If you do write to him,” he said slackly, “you won’t mention me or anything will you? My name or address or anything like that?”
Pamela frowned. “Why would I do that?”
“Good question. You wouldn’t. It’s got nothing to do with me.”
“Fenton, I’m trying to stay focused here. There’s no time to lose on this. Right now I’ve got a couple of calls to make. What you can do is go and get me another coffee, yeah? I’ll be back in five. And get yourself one too,” she added in a raised voice, while moving jauntily towards the exit. “We could be here a while.”
“Will do!” Fenton cried.
The coffee shop had two doors. Before the one Pamela went out of was halfway back to its jamb, Fenton had categorically made use of the other one, and was out in the fluff-filled air.