5
He climbed the porch steps. Raising a knuckle from one fistful of junkmail, he rapped out a crisp no-nonsense warning on the door. There was a flurry of movement behind it, as if he’d disturbed a nest of rodents. He waited. Although he had a key, there were certain protocols, certain unwritten rules. He gave it another half-minute, standing there on the doorstep with his twin bouquets of crumpled ad matter. Then, making far more noise than was strictly necessary, he crunched his key into the lock.
A wedge of moonlight followed him in through the door. Reluctantly he shut it out behind him. Then he stood there in the utter darkness, waiting for his pupils to adapt. The room was hot, and rich with the reek of burning incense. From the direction of the beanbag he heard, more or less simultaneously, the following four sounds: a telltale writhing, an indecipherable feminine whisper, a poorly repressed giggle, and the wet snap that occurs when two pairs of lips, having been briefly pushed together, are grudgingly pulled apart.
He took a forward step into the darkness. Between his right boot and the carpet, a tampon wrapper yielded with an unmistakable crackle. A step or two later his leading toe struck what felt like a Gender Studies textbook, propelling it forward into the leg of the coffee table. There was a muted thud, and up on the shaken tabletop something metallic rattled and clanked.
Fenton froze, fearing that these sounds had betrayed his location.
And sure enough the carpet resounded with a sudden clawed gallop, and the psychotic cat was upon him.
Its first strike was brutally unfocussed, a moronic show of pure aggression. The furred skull merely rammed into Fenton’s right shin and bounced off like a football. In the crucial seconds that followed Fenton was able to steady himself, get his bearings, and take a brisk bullfighter’s stride to his left. Then through the heavy gusting of his own breath he heard the quick thunder of the animal’s second approach … and the brief but ominous silence that meant it was airborne. And then the full weight of its launched brawn hit his kneecaps with such startling force that he found himself staggering helplessly backwards, arms pinwheeling for balance as the scythes of the frontal claws pierced the denim of his jeans and sank deep into the paleness of his upper thighs. With an abrupt crunch of spine on fibro his backward flight was halted by a wall. A grunt of surprise escaped him. The junkmail fell from his grasp. His flesh sang with pain where the embedded upper claws held the full mammalian weight. The free rear limbs pumped and scrabbled at his kneecaps, lashing for purchase. With a series of terrible thumps the bony little fist of the cat’s face was pummelling his jeaned groin in quest of a place to bite. Fenton’s testicles cringed in anticipation, and with no further ado he sent both his hands down into the vortex of pain and fur, one thumb jabbing something horribly eyeball- or anus-like before he found and gripped the revolting ribcage and tore the creature free of his thighs. The enraged claws turned on his wrists, and he heard his own skin ripping like a shirt as he flung the pulsing beast away from him, high and hard across the room, with far more force than he really should have. Its yowl of indignant hate zinged through the darkness, then ended against the far wall with a fatal-sounding crunch.
Fenton lunged panting for the lightswitch and snapped the room full of light. Sickly he made his gaze move to the site of that dreadful crunch. He expected to see a twisted fur shape lying at the wall’s base, dead or at the very least wickedly concussed. But the carpet there was vacant. The cat had disappeared. Fenton nervously swept his eyes round the margins of the room, seeking in vain the flash of piss-coloured fur. Where had it gone?
Still trembling, he shifted his gaze to the beanchair on the floor, in which his human housemates had now begun to stir. One of them had long black hair and lay there sullenly, blinking up with resentment into the light. She was about nineteen. With no special haste she reached up to fasten the top button of her flannelette pyjamas. This was Tara.
A second girl, of similar age, sprang up with simulated enthusiasm to greet him. She was smaller than Tara and her hair was lighter: it was mouse-brown and frizzy, and she was presently installing a pink scrunchy in it. She too wore pyjamas – pink ones, of the kind traditionally worn by china dolls. They consisted of a frilled shirt with short puffy arms, and a pair of nappy-like briefs with elasticised leggings. As always Fenton found this get-up deeply unsettling, and felt honour-bound to avert his eyes from it. Could nightwear so skimpy be purchased from a regular store? Or had she been obliged to buy it from the kind of establishment that also sold pornography and latex cocks? She scurried to his side, stood on tippy-toes, and planted a dainty but sinister kiss on his cheek.
“Hi honey,” she said subversively. “It’s garbage night.”
This was Trixie.
“Where’s Streetwise?” Fenton asked her in reply, breathily. But already this question was starting to lose its urgency. If the cat wanted to maim him any further, it would already be doing that. The waiting game wasn’t part of its modus operandi. It was probably down the hall somewhere, walking off its injuries. Its work for the evening was done. Fenton looked down for the first time at his stinging wrists. Each one was neatly incised with five parallel gouges of departure: red music staves.
“Plus you didn’t wash up again,” said Tara, still supine in the beanbag. “We had to eat our tea off saucepan lids.”
“Yes you bad boy,” said Trixie. “Off the top of the saucepan lids, because the bottom of them still had crap on it from last night.”
She gestured indignantly at the coffee table. And there indeed sat a pair of sullied saucepan lids, their curved surfaces wet with grease.
“Ever tried keeping a sausage on top of a saucepan lid?” Tara said venomously from the beanbag.
Suddenly Fenton’s senses came alive. “A sausage?” he inquired, looking her sharply in the eye. “I thought you were vegans.”
Tara brazenly returned his gaze. “We can eat white meat,” she defiantly said.
“But a sausage isn’t white meat.”
Now she appeared flustered, caught out. She looked quickly away, pretending to have found a loose thread on her sleeve.
Trixie coolly intervened: “Fenton, don’t be childish. We didn’t have sausages. We had … salad, and that kept sliding off. She was just trying to translate that into the experience of a meat-eater like you. Nice clothes, by the way. What are you doing, pretending to be a communist?”
The question was bizarrely astute, but Fenton let it pass. Instead he kept his eyes fixed sceptically on Tara, letting her know that he remained deeply unfooled. He had realized some time ago that Tara was the weaker link. Trixie was the brains of their operation, the unflappable master of ceremonies. Tara, on the other hand, frequently slipped up. She was easily pushed to rage. In the final analysis, she was really pretty dumb. If one of them ever crumbled, it would be her.
But now she broke into malicious laughter, and jumped up from the beanbag to whisper something into Trixie’s ear. Trixie broke into malicious laughter too. They seemed to be looking at something in the area around Fenton’s feet. He looked apprehensively down: and found that the floor around him was littered with the balled-up pieces of junkmail. These proved, in the light, to be fragments of a photographically illustrated lingerie catalogue – one aimed, by the looks of it, squarely at the senior end of the market. A lady of about his mother’s age smiled pleasantly up at him, wearing garters and a nipple-dented bra. Various bits of other ladies’ bodies were strewn around her, attired in camisoles, slips, pube-shadowed teddies.
“I was taking them to the bin,” Fenton said firmly. It sounded like a lie. This struck him as deeply unfair. “Look,” he said. With as much dignity as the circumstances permitted he gathered the damning fragments up again, and bore them resolutely towards the kitchen bin.
The room he was leaving was known, frankly, as the television room. Between it and the kitchen there was no wall, just a navel-high bench covered in speckled laminex. He flipped the kitchen lightswitch. The fluorescent tubes above flickered squeamishly on, as if scandalised by the scene they were obliged to illuminate. A wonky pile of smeared dishes filled the sink. The top one had a pink Post-it note stuck to it. Wash me! it demanded, in Trixie’s hand. The tap, for its part, was not merely dripping, nor even dribbling, but dispensing a full-bodied jet of water straight down the open plughole. The fridge door stood half-open, disgorging the broad green leaves of what Fenton initially took to be some kind of fern. On closer inspection he reclassified it as a mammoth sheaf of spinach, which they must have purchased at some point during the day. Because this jungly chard was far too bushy to be stored in the fridge without being either bent or trimmed, they had simply shoved as much of it inside the fridge as they could, and then just rested the open door gently against the rest of it – as if that was about the most that could reasonably be expected of them. Fenton looked with hate into the TV room. They were back in the beanchair now, and Tara was rubbing some kind of cream or lotion onto Trixie’s half-exposed back. With the sole of his right boot Fenton forced the rampant vegetable back into the fridge till the leaves snapped juicily back on themselves. Then he shut the door with a pointed smack. Then he approached the bin.
It was perilously overfull. Heaped above its brim was a cairn of refuse as tall again as the bin itself, and not much narrower. Right near the summit sat a flagrant length of half-eaten sausage. Gingerly, very gingerly, he tried adding to this fragile edifice a single ball of the crumpled lingerie catalogue. It rolled straight off to the floor. The tower of rubbish ominously swayed, rearranging itself like a disturbed sleeper. The sausage fragment tumbled to the lino with a dank plop. A flap of ancient potato peel, as black as a pirate’s eye patch, slithered down and adhered itself to the bin’s flank. Then the whole structure came to an uneasy and provisional standstill. Fenton laid the rest of the catalogue at the bin’s base, and reverently backed away.
The process by which Trixie and Tara had come to be living with him had been a long and obscure one. Even today he didn’t fully comprehend the genealogy of it. Like osmosis or evolution it had all occurred very slowly, in a series of subtle increments invisible to the naked eye. He had started off living here with two friends. That much he was certain of. But university life was a strange and untameable thing. People came and went in it; and before long he had found himself living with one friend and a friend of that friend. And then friends of that person had begun, sinisterly, to enter the picture. In the mornings and evenings he had begun to encounter complete strangers in the hallway, brushing their teeth with his toothbrush, casually drying their scrotums with his towels. And so it went: until one day, without his ever being formally given a chance to veto it, it had come to pass that he was living in a house with two people he had never previously met and had no discernible link with and, more or less from day one, rancorously didn’t like.
But the thing was done now, and it was pointless to dwell on the history of it.
Still less did he like to think back on the chain of events by which Trixie and Tara had ceased contributing to the payment of rent and bills. Once again the situation had arisen with scarcely perceptible gradualness; and once again it harboured depressing truths about his shameful incapacity to put his foot down, to draw a line in the sand, to say enough is enough. It had all started, he seemed to recall, with his having allowed himself to drift into the role of physical rent-payer, the actual hander-over of cash to landlord. Once he’d placed himself in that highly vulnerable position, the rest had been pretty much inevitable. Perhaps he had agreed, one fateful day, to cover the contribution of one of them, probably Tara, and let her pay it back to him a few days later. And then maybe she had started to make a habit of that, and then before long he was no doubt letting both of them get away with it routinely – first paying him back a little late, then a lot late, and then unbelievably late, until one day it had finally dawned on him, well after it had stealthily become the norm, that they had quite simply stopped paying him altogether, and no longer contributed anything, ever, and were therefore living with him entirely for free. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember the precise moment at which all of this had become clear to him. Because that had been the proper time to act. That moment, whenever it had occurred, had been the appropriate juncture to speak of the situation openly, to bring it to a head, to demand either sweeping domestic reform or else their immediate and everlasting departure from the house, abetted if necessary by the full weight of the law.
But somehow he had never got round to that. He had let the critical moment pass him by, and it now lay deeply and irretrievably in the past. He had let the outrage harden into the status quo. Time had hallowed it. They were ensconced; attempting to evict them now would be far far nastier than letting them stay. Fortunately, the monthly sum that his parents sent him to cover his share of household expenses was naively high. He found that he was just able to meet all essential payments with it, provided that he remained unfussy about things like food, drink and clothing. Whenever his parents spoke of coming to visit him he vigorously quashed the notion, generally by paying a pre-emptive visit to them. The idea of having them or anyone else see what he had let happen here terrified him. These days his favoured policy was to think about the situation as infrequently as he possibly could. These days he did his best to pretend, not just to Trixie and Tara but also to himself, that their arrangement didn’t especially trouble him, that he had no problem with it, that indeed it didn’t even strike him as being in any way out of the ordinary.
“How full would this bin have to be,” he asked them from the kitchen, purely as a matter of interest, “before one of you considered emptying it?”
Tara, without looking up from Trixie’s naked shoulders: “Full enough to start bothering us.”
“How full would it have to be to start bothering you?”
“If it’s bothering you, Fenton, why don’t you just take it out?” Trixie said languidly. She was leafing through, while Tara nourished her back-skin, one of the brash and sassy women’s magazines that they bought endless issues of with the money they didn’t spend on rent or bills. Their front covers said things like: “Twelve Tips for the Perfect Orgasm” and – disturbingly – “Sorry Guys, Size Does Matter!” and “To Swallow or Not to Swallow? Our Expert Panel Decides.” Lately, one of these magazines had been running an educational feature called “Freud made E-Z.” Trixie had kept up with this series ardently, acquiring from it a wealth of ammunition with which to denigrate Fenton’s dreams, motives, bowel movements and genitals. Tara, not to be outdone, claimed to be learning how to speak Japanese under the tutelage of the same publication. Often, in conversation, she would utter long bursts of high-pitched phonemes that you were evidently supposed to take for fluent and legitimate deployments of that tongue. Since no other member of the household understood a word of Japanese or even claimed to, this practice had always struck Fenton as relatively pointless. Indeed he strongly suspected that Tara was, on such occasions, simply talking gibberish made up on the spot. Similarly, he felt pretty sure that the hand-scrawled notes she kept leaving around the place with chains of Asian-looking symbols on them were in fact composed of meaningless characters of her own invention. But unless he set about learning the language himself specifically in order to rebut her claims, she seemed destined to keep getting away with them forever.
A flash of urine-hued pelt. Streetwise was back, materialising on the kitchen benchtop with an unpleasant thump. Calmly Fenton met the cat’s eye, while extending his palms in an instinctive gesture of goodwill. Could cats sense fear? If so, did it offend them, or did they take it as a kind of compliment? Tensely the animal paced the speckled laminex, watching him with its one bad eye and its one worse one. From deep in its chest came its terrible rendition of a purr, which sounded like the chugging of an old machine in which some vital component was rattling loose. Back at its rear end swayed the repellent little stump that had presumably once constituted, prior to some unspeakable streetfight, the first quarter or so of a full and normal tail.
During his former life as an unloved alley cat, Streetwise had suffered an astounding farrago of horrid and in some cases surely near-fatal bodily traumas. He lacked, as well as the bulk of his tail, half of one ear and all of the other one. From a distance, this absence of ear-cover gave him the sleek look of an otter or ferret; up close, it gave you a pornographic view of the scarlet folds of his aural canals. Years of rolling in alleyfilth had rendered his fur, which must originally have been white, a permanent dirty blonde. Fist-sized chunks of the stuff were missing from several regions of his torso, exposing bald skin the hue and texture of a rugby ball. The knobs of his spine and ribcage bulged beneath his emaciated flanks like knuckles.
Streetwise had stopped being an unloved alley cat on the cold grey afternoon when Tara had spotted him behind a supermarket, trapped him under a giant bin, and wrestled him into a cardboard box. By the time she got the box home it was pocked with angry holes and throbbing like a washing machine. She placed it on the floor of the TV room and opened the lid. A malodorous and saffron-coloured blur shot out and hissed around the walls in quest of an exit. But Tara had taken the canny precaution of closing every door and window before opening the box. As the cat hurled itself desperately against the windowpanes, Tara had laid out her vision for its “cold turkey” domestication. Until further notice, all external doors and windows would have to be scrupulously kept shut. If the cat saw so much as a chink of open doorway, Tara maintained, he would be out it like a shot in order to re-embrace his former life as a “prisoner of the streets.” And Tara was determined to avert such a tragedy. If averting it meant Fenton’s having to “scrape the odd turd off the carpet,” that was a price she was willing to pay. Right from the start, she’d made no secret of her belief that she and the maverick cat enjoyed a deep spiritual bond. Being, she felt, something of a damaged survivor in her own right, she considered herself uniquely equipped to understand the animal’s troubled psyche. For a while, indeed, she had tinkered with the notion of naming the cat “Tara,” so as to bring this bond to everyone else’s attention. But in the end she had gone with “Streetwise.” Privately, Fenton believed this name to be considerably more than the cat deserved. If this half-bald amputee was street-wise, then what did a cat that wasn’t street-wise look like? A pile of whiskers and some teeth?
Today, some three months after his enforced salvation from the alley, it was hard to pinpoint a single respect in which Streetwise was appreciably less fucked-up than he had been to start with. Psychologically, he still seemed to be carrying a lot of rage. Physically, he still looked every bit as underfed as he had on that first day. Look at him right now, limping bonily along the laminex. Was it possible that Tara had forcibly converted him to veganism? Certainly that would explain his constant attempts to intervene in Fenton’s meals. It would also explain how rarely one came across his stools on the floor, and how ash-like they were when one did. Perhaps it was a straightforward hunger for meat that fuelled his still-constant bids for escape, his vicious arrowings towards the front door whenever you walked anywhere near it. But Fenton had never managed to think up a tactful way of broaching, with either Trixie or Tara, the topic of Streetwise’s diet. Besides, it was none of his business.
Now, as the nauseating cat eyed him from the benchtop, Fenton conceived a plan to go immediately to his bedroom and spend the next several hours there, if not the whole remainder of the night. He departed at an unthreatening pace. Halfway down the hall he stopped off at the bathroom, where he aggressively douched the claw-marks on his wrists with lashings of neat disinfectant. He moved next door to the toilet. Urinating, he fastidiously averted his eyes from the multiple discolourations at the bottom of the bowl. On TV, on ads for cleaning products, they referred to blemishes of this kind as “rust stains.” To him they looked an awful lot like shit stains. A pink Post-it was stuck to the toilet brush. Don’t you know what this is for? it said. Fenton averted his eyes from that too.
A third pink Post-it was stuck to his bedroom door. This one said:
1. Garbage Night.
2. Washing Up.
3. There Are Many Pubes In The Bathtub.
4. 
!
5. See Toilet Brush.
He peeled the note off and dropped it to the hall carpet. Short of dusting it for prints, there was no way they could prove it hadn’t fallen down there by itself.
He shut himself in his room and stood in the middle of it for a while. His curtainless window admitted, as usual, a searing cataract of artificial white light. This emanated from the industrial-strength floodlamp clamped to the roof of his neighbour’s back shed. Arrayed in various attitudes around this shed – leaning drunkenly against it, heaped beside it like drooping flapjacks – were innumerable sheets of corrugated iron. The old man who lived there, who looked a lot like Ed Lauter, spent the best part of every day adding further sheets of corrugated iron to these piles. And then at dusk he switched on this blazing floodlight, so that he could spend the best part of every night doing it too.
Here he came now. Or rather: here came a large upright sheet of corrugated iron with a pair of dusty boots staggering beneath it, and a leathery arm and tuft of silver armpit hair sticking out on either side. The boots stopped staggering when they were about six feet shy of the shed. The old man had previously identified this as the point from which a freshly obtained sheet of corrugated iron, when flung to meet any one of the existing piles, would generate the greatest possible yield of noise. Sure enough, the present sheet came down with a savage mother of a crash that Fenton felt through his soles. And there, pot-bellied in its backdraft, the singleted old Lauter lookalike stood, grimacing with low-level satisfaction, whacking his palms together to free them of powdered rust.
Where, Fenton had often asked himself, were all these sheets of corrugated iron coming from? What, moreover, did the old philistine hope to achieve by stacking them all against his shed? Was it an end in itself, or was it a mere preliminary to some vaster and even more inane project? Fenton had long had the sense that he was overlooking, amid the banks and decks of scabby metal, some vital clue that would supply him with the answer. Surely if he looked at the stuff hard enough, and long enough, the old man’s design would ultimately reveal itself …
Suddenly the air was filled by another sound: massive and brutal, solid with bass. Up in the TV room Trixie or Tara had put on the stereo, at unconscionable volume. The old man next door flinched. His gaze swung hostilely across the fence. He spotted Fenton through the throbbing window. Their eyes met. The old man shot him a look of weary disgust, like a tennis star disputing the tenth bad line call of the match. Fenton spread his hands, looking to convey the impression that he was as much a victim here as the old man was.
The old man shook his head and stalked away, either to call the police or get another sheet of corrugated iron.
Out in the TV room the noise from the stereo was thick as smog. The air visibly quivered. Tara and Trixie had moved from the beanbag to the couch. Now it was Trixie who was moisturising the back of Tara. Beside them, unrebuked, Streetwise was methodically vandalising one of the couch cushions. On the muted TV a lady was lifting her sundress to show some liposuction scars to a wincing reporter. They looked a lot worse than fat thighs would have looked, but maybe that was the point.
Just short of the fridge, Fenton halted. He believed he could hear, from deep inside the typhoon of stereophonic shit, a feeble trilling from the telephone on the kitchen wall. He put his ear to it. Yes: it was ringing, bashfully clearing its throat into the din. Could it be her, Charmaine? It wasn’t impossible. He picked up.
“Hello?” he yelled.
“Fent. What’s doing with the marathon pick-up delay, champ? Don’t tell me I caught you laying some cable. Or facing the cistern? Christ forbid I caught you at that!”
“Sorry?” It sounded like Gus, but that couldn’t be right.
“Facing the cistern mate. Having a crank. There’s no shame in it, mate – I’ve been there meself.”
“Gus?”
“How’s it swinging, comrade?” the big Maoist casually confirmed. “I’m just ringing to chew over a couple of things from today’s meeting. Chiefly this, ah, this terrorism thing. Bear with me for a moment.” Vague mumbling, a shuffling of papers. “The thing is, we’re going to have to convene a special meeting to flesh this thing out. We need to put some details on it. Get ourselves the right target, sort out what type of gear we’re going to need – technicalities like that. When I say ‘secret meeting,’ Fent, I’m talking about without Charmaine. Behind her back sort of thing. Let’s be honest: this isn’t the type of stuff we’re going to want on the front page of Mao Now, is it? More to the point, the whole concept just wouldn’t be her cup of tea. Trust me on that. So don’t ever mention it to her, okay? She’d be bound to kick up a massive stink about it. Which’d put an unwanted dent in our forward progress mate, not to mention playing havoc with my sex life. I’m anxious to keep the ball rolling on this thing, Fent. I’m like a bull at a gate sometimes – you’ll learn that about me. And the more I think about it, mate, the more I reckon we’d better get on with this caper real bloody quick, before some other mob gets the same idea. Call me paranoid, Fent, but if the Anarchists got in ahead of us on this one, I … I wouldn’t be a happy camper mate, let’s put it that way.”
Over on the couch, all back-rubbing work had been suspended. Tara had shut off the stereo. Now, in the silence, they were both quite shamelessly watching him, waiting to listen in on his end of the conversation. If he ever got one.
“Needless to say mate,” Gus briskly pressed on, “I’m not blind to the gravity of what I’m talking about here. This is heavy stuff, I appreciate that. That’s why I’m working the blower now. I’m giving everyone a decent chance to pull out before it’s too late. And if you do want out, Fent, that’s a decision I’ll totally respect. What I won’t respect is blokes who say they’re up for it now, then develop qualms about it when we get to the business end. So if you haven’t got the stomach for it, I’d much rather hear that now. But don’t answer me verbally, mate. You never know who could be hearing this. Just give me a short silence if you’re in, or a long silence if you want out.”
Gus left a short silence, then emitted a bray of delight.
“That’s the way, Fent. That’s the stuff. I knew you’d be a starter, mate. The second I clapped eyes on you this morning, I’ve said to myself: ‘Gus, this bloke’s a short-fused visionary very much in the mould of yourself.’ I could see that telltale bloody glint in your eye, mate. Bear with me while I put you down on the acceptance list. Between you and me Fent, them other morons, Smithy and that, they’re passengers mate. Strictly footsoldiers. You and me are going to be the brains of this operation, don’t worry about that. Now: this meeting. I haven’t set a date for it yet. All I can tell you is, I’m fairly adamant we should hold it some time in the dead of night. About three a.m. sort of thing.”
“Three a.m.!” Fenton involuntarily cried. Trixie and Tara exchanged intrigued glances.
“Not over the phone, Fent!” Gus said urgently. “Mind you, I see your point. And it’s cogent. Why say three a.m. when you can say o-thirteen hundred?” He paused. He gave an affectionate chuckle. “I have to tell you, Fent: this gung-ho attitude of yours … it’s music to my ears, mate. It really is. It’s a dead-set joy to talk to a bloke that’s as fired up about this as what I am. Frankly, Fent – I can tell you this now – frankly, I wasn’t that sure about it to start off with. Frankly, I was wary about even putting it on the table. I feared it might scare a few blokes off. It’s a pretty emotive issue, like I say. But you don’t think it’s too wacky, obviously. You don’t think it’s biting off more than we can chew?”
“Not at all,” Fenton replied after a significant pause, hoping Gus would pick up on the manifest half-heartedness of his tone. He lacked the energy, for the moment, to voice his reservations about becoming a terrorist more formally, to open the question up to a full ethico-legal debate. There would, he felt, be plenty of other opportunities for that.
“If we do this thing right, Fent,” Gus was saying now, “it’s going to go right off the Richter. It’s going to put us squarely on the map. By the way mate, is what I hear true? My mail is – and correct me if I’m wrong – but I hear you’ve got yourself shacked up with a couple of chicks over there? Pretty sensual atmosphere, is it?”
“Yes and no.”
Again Gus chuckled affectionately. “That’s the way Fent. That’s the way. Keep your cards close to your chest, you enigmatic little ladies’ man. I swear but, mate, I don’t know how you do it. Chicks, mate. Chicks! I just find ’em that much of an enigma, Fent, in so many ways. And here you are shacked up with two of ’em! Maybe I should sit you down one day, get a few sage words of your advice.” He paused. “I’m not being serious there, of course,” he added, unconvincingly. “But chicks these days, Fent” – he breathed a philosophical sigh – “I don’t know. They read all these feminist magazines, mate, and their head gets filled with all these funny ideas. About … you know, about getting pampered and that. About how behaving like a normal red-blooded bloke makes you some kind of bloody Neanderthal! Christ Fent, I hardly need to tell you this. Like I say, my hat goes off to you for juggling two of ’em simultaneously. One’s bad enough sometimes.”
“Is that right?”
“Oh don’t get me started, mate. I mean, half the time she’s at me to quit smoking mull, the other half she’s at me to quit smoking durries. She could at least be consistent, Fent. She could at least make up her mind, don’t you reckon? I mean, what does she want me to smoke? Cheroots? I don’t even know what the fuck a cheroot is …”
“Maybe you should show her who’s boss,” Fenton proposed. “Tell her you’ll smoke what you like when you like.”
This uncharacteristic utterance took Trixie and Tara by surprise. Their eyes widened. Their mouths trembled with amusement. For a bad moment Fenton thought they were going to laugh out loud.
Gus whistled respectfully. “Ouch, Fent. You really are a fuckin’ firebrand, aren’t you? But we can’t all be like yourself, mate. We haven’t all got a spare one tucked away for insurance purposes.”
In theory Fenton was eager to press this theme further, much further. But the presence of Trixie and Tara hampered, for the moment, his ability to work freely in his new persona of hardline Maoist ladies’ man. Another uneasy silence, then. Gus began to drum his fingers nervously on a surface close to his phone. Finally he said, in a pained tone:
“Fent, since we’ve, ah … strayed onto this topic, there’s something I’d better say. I … Don’t take this the wrong way, mate. But I’m a bloke that believes in putting his concerns right out there on the table. Fent? You still there?”
“I’m here.”
“I’m talking about Charmers, Fent. I may joke about her … But me and her, we’ve got something special. You’re a man of the world, mate. You can see what I’m driving at. I’m just saying – and the mere fact I have to say it, Fent, it’s actually kind of a tribute to you, when you think about it. All I’m saying is, from one man of the world to another, mate, if I catch you entertaining thoughts in that direction I … I won’t be a happy camper. Let’s just leave it at that. And I’m not suggesting that you would, Fent. Far from it. All I’m saying is, she’s bubbly, right? She’s effervescent. She does a lot of touching people on the forearm. And look, I wouldn’t change that for the world. I’m just saying, don’t go mistaking it for some sort of invitation to have a crack. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Gus: say no more.”
“You’re a class act, Fent. A class act.” But still he sounded troubled. “I … Look, I don’t want to dwell on this stuff, mate. But …”
“Not at all. Go ahead.”
“Thanks Fent. Thanks for making this no harder than it has to be. I just wanted to say, like, given that you are such a class act, I’m going to take it as read that … that if you do get talking to her one day, you won’t go steering the conversation round to some sensual sort of topic like female circumcision so you can commit it to memory and have a wank about it later. Can I take it as read that I needn’t have any worries on that front? I mean, I look on that as taboo. And again, I’m not suggesting you’d do it. Not for a second. I’m just being clear up front that that’s something I do frown on. And don’t go pretending to be her ‘friend’ so you can keep scoring yourself the old full-frontal hugs. I know all these techniques, Fent. I invented half of ’em. And I frown on them all. In fact, let’s make the whole thing nice and straightforward. I’m thinking it’d be easiest for all concerned if you just basically agreed to never talk to her at all. How does that grab you?”
“I don’t foresee any problems with that,” Fenton monstrously lied.
“That might make the whole thing a little clearer, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely. Say no more.”
“Fent, you don’t know how relieved I am to hear you say that.”
“Think nothing of it.”
“You’re a champion, Fent. All right. I reckon I’ve taken up enough of your time. I’ll leave you to it, mate. Unless of course you’ve got any questions?”
As dearly as he wanted to hang up immediately, and cradle his face gently in both hands, Fenton could see that the conversation couldn’t be allowed to end on the present note. No: he had to reaffirm his innocence somehow. He had to flush these grotesque yet strangely accurate suspicions right out of Gus’s corrupt mind. But what would an innocent man say right now? What kind of question would he ask? Something jocular and man-of-the-worldish. Something that showed he’d forgotten the unpleasantness already. Something like this:
“Only one, Gus. I don’t have to grow a beard, do I?”
For five seconds or so Gus supplied no response. Fenton, indeed, was beginning to wonder whether something had gone wrong with the line. And then Gus said coldly: “You think that’s funny, cunt? You think this is a game? You think we’re a bunch of schoolboys playing dress-ups? Of course you’ve got to fucking grow one!”
Then with an ugly clatter the line went dead.
Fenton recradled the receiver. He rubbed his affronted earhole.
The phone rang again. He picked it up.
“Sorry about that Fent. It’s just, sometimes I get a little passionate about these things. I hardly need to explain that to a powderkeg like yourself. But the beard’s mandatory, mate. It was remiss of me not to state that from the outset. I like to think of it as a visible token of a bloke’s commitment. We’re not a bloody social club, as I say. You of all people should appreciate that. And the way I see it, any bloke that’s not prepared to put up with an itchy neck for the cause – and it’ll itch you like buggery for the first few days, I won’t lie to you about that – well, any bloke who won’t make that sacrifice isn’t worth having in the first place. Am I right? But take my word for it, mate – after them first few days you won’t look back. Anyhow, Fent. No hard feelings. Water under the bridge, mate. As much my fault as it was yours. I’ll get out of your hair now. Keep your legs together, pal. And that other thing. The thing I rung up about. The wheels are in motion, okay? Remember that. I can see us getting out of this thing scot free, provided we play our cards right.”
“What cards?”
“Precisely, Fent. Precisely. Couldn’t have said it better myself. Good talking to you. Ciao mate.”
He hung up again, this time for good.
Fenton pulled open the fridge. Suppressed spinach furled out like flowers from a magician’s sleeve. Streetwise skittered in across the lino, tuned as ever to any noise that betokened the imminent availability of food. Stump swaying, he loitered angrily around Fenton’s ankles. Fenton made a snap decision: he would surrender an entire drumstick to the rancid cat, so that he would at least get to enjoy the other one unmolested. Holding the animal’s gaze, he reached back into the fridge, and blindly probed the top shelf till his fingers located and lifted the relevant plate. It felt strangely weightless. Bringing it out, he saw why. The plate contained nothing but a handful of crumbs and a greasy shred of cling film.
For several long seconds Fenton just held the empty plate there and stared at it, as if with a bit of patience he might cause the vanished poultry to rematerialise. Streetwise was having none of this. Like a trained dolphin attacking a beach ball, he sprang up and butted the plate from Fenton’s grasp. It hit the floor and smashed, peppering the legs of his jeans with flying chips of china. Streetwise started pawing hungrily through the wreckage.
“Fenton!” came an alarmed cry from the bathroom.
Fenton stepped around the cat and moved obediently down the hall. He saw in passing that the pink Post-it had reappeared on his bedroom door. Again he peeled it off and dropped it to the carpet.
“What?” he said through the shut bathroom door.
“What do you mean, what? What the fuck was that giant smash?”
“It was Streetwise.”
A gasp.
“Don’t say he went through a window!”
“Relax. It was just a plate.”
“Oh right Fenton,” said Trixie sarcastically. “Streetwise just picked up a plate and frisbeed it into a window, did he?”
“How twisted are you Fenton?” Tara demanded to know. “Who throws a plate at a window and blames it on a cat?”
“Who throws a plate at a window at all?” glossed Trixie. “Honestly Fenton, how much rage are you carrying?”
“Well go on then,” Tara urged him. “Go and board it up before he jumps out.”
“And get us a new plate tomorrow,” Trixie added.
But Fenton lingered. He put his ear to the door. He heard the drip of the tap, the gentle lapping of water on skin, the soft music of small aquatic disturbances. “As a matter of interest,” he politely asked them, “what does the word ‘terrorism’ mean to you?”
“If you’re suggesting we ate those bits of chicken,” Trixie coldly replied, “remember that we’re both vegans. So I’d watch who you go accusing of terrorism, Fenton. I’d watch that very closely.”
“But you do eat white meat,” Fenton pointed out.
Tara let fly with an indignant burst of quasi Japanese.
Trixie said, “If you’re suggesting the meat on those drumsticks was white, Fenton, you’ve got bigger problems than we thought. Now go and board up that window.”
Their attention returned to bathing. One of them shifted position with a meaty squeak. Churned water slapped against reddened flesh.
“I had this nightmare last night about a dick,” he heard Tara say quietly, as he moved away. “Just this huge dick. Maybe you’re right that all dreams are about sex.”
“Oh that’s not about sex, you poor baby,” Trixie advised her sagely. “That’s about snakes, you see. You must have this unconscious fear of snakes.”
He shut his eyes and tried to think about her. He tried to picture her face, but kept seeing Gus’s pressed up against it, feeding bestially on her lips and tongue. What were the odds that Gus would die very soon? On the face of it, not that good. On the other hand: think of the sheer variety of ways in which a person could meet with sudden death in the course of a normal day. Consider, to start with, the infinite assortment of flying objects that could hit and kill a man as he went about his daily business. Cars, trucks, buses, trains, motorbikes, bolts of lightning, stray javelins, bullets from bank jobs gone sour, concrete slabs dropped from building sites fifteen storeys above. And when a man took up as much space as Gus did, the odds of his getting mowed down by one of these things improved considerably. Moreover, the fatter a man was, the poorer were his chances of being able to leap spryly out of the way when he found such an object coming at him. In fact it was something of a miracle, when you thought about it, that the fat fuck had managed to stay alive as long as he had … And what about natural causes? Think of his cholesterol count. Think of the constant strain on his heart. Think of the thick slurry of abused substances that oozed like wet cement through his veins.
“Fenton!”
He opened his eyes.
“Fenton!” They were calling him from their bedroom.
“What?” he called back.
“You’re remembering it’s garbage night?”
The bin was cold and heavy against his thighs. The wet driveway chilled his bare feet. Setting the bin down at the kerb, he found that its rim had left a great damp stripe across the groin of his pyjamas. He stood there and looked out at the suburbs, at the lights spread out like dots on a radar screen. In one of those houses out there she lay. Maybe Gus was lying with her, and maybe he wasn’t. Either way, his days at her side were numbered. Fenton was sure of that now. This time last night, he hadn’t even known her name. Now he did, and she knew his. And that felt very good.
The wheels were in motion all right. More wheels than Gus knew.
He turned and headed back up the wet driveway, and each step felt like a step towards her.