He rolled gingerly onto his back. The room was startlingly full of daylight. The air over his bed had a nasty late-morning kind of tepidness, like used bathwater. His quilt was in fevered disarray, twined around his lower body as if he were Socrates. His bare feet stuck out the end of it. By an odd paradox they felt warmer than the parts of him it still covered. In a not very distant yard a lawnmower was going.
It would come back to him in a moment, the incredibly bad thing that had happened to his life in the night. It would come back to him, whether he wanted it to or not. And when it did, it was going to make him groan with unqualified regret. It had something to do with her. But it was something newer and viler than the mere fact that she wasn’t his. That fact he was used to waking up with: it had the status of a permanently missing limb. But the thing that had happened in the night was somehow worse. It had ushered his life into a whole new sphere of badness. Whatever it was, it called for massive and immediate rectification.
He blinked groggily against the daylight. It appeared to be about noon. This fact was troubling enough in itself. On most days he was awake by six or seven, reefed from sleep by some dawn outrage on the part of Streetwise – a frenzied headbutting at his door, a methodical and rasping vandalisation of its wooden frame. But today the house was silent, the sun ominously aloft. Why? It beat angrily through the grime on his window, as if incensed by his failure to wake at a more decent hour. It lit the swarm of dust above his bed.
Crack! There it was again, that indecently loud slam of metal on metal. Up on the ceiling, a bagel-sized patch of sunlight briefly wobbled in answer to the clang. His neighbour was at it again, the one who looked like Ed Lauter. He was engaged once more in the ancient and cryptic rite of stacking large bits of second-hand roofing iron against his shed. Fenton stared up at the glint on the ceiling. Evidently some freak sector of the old scavenger’s rust pile still had the capacity to reflect light. Presently a second and smaller glint appeared at the ceiling’s edge, and began jerking spastically in towards the central one. At a point still criminally shy of that target, it halted – and then flew savagely in to meet it, with the sound of a bus hitting a bread van. Like a sperm and an egg the two glints became one, resolved into a single quivering pond of light.
Rolling onto his left side, Fenton found himself facing the crumpled shell of his Maoist costume: jumper and jeans and boots, splayed out on the carpet like a corpse. And suddenly the full memory of last night was on him, lunging into his head like a masked youth vaulting the counter of a convenience store. He groaned with unqualified regret. Oh yes, it was bad all right. It really was exquisitely bad. He was a terrorist. That was what had happened to him in the night. He had partaken in the composition of a death list. He had sat there and said nothing while body counts were spoken of, and liquidations, and claims of responsibility, and target selection. And then he had put forward the name of Ivan Lego, and that name had been unanimously approved! He squeezed his eyes shut, as if by doing so he could force the memory out the back of his skull. But it stayed there, it stayed there. He was a fucking terrorist!
Or was he? The question called for some serious thought. Maybe he was over-reacting. Maybe things weren’t yet as bad as he imagined. Maybe there was still some grey area, some ambiguity, some room for hope. He rolled back onto his other side. He clamped a pillow to his exposed ear. He shut his eyes. Now he was ready to think. Now he was ready for a sober contemplation of the facts.
Fact one: no terrorist act had yet occurred. Nor had any specific course of action been proposed. So really, this hysterical notion that he was a terrorist could be dispensed with straight away. He wasn’t one yet, and he had no intention of letting himself become one. All that they’d done in the night was talk, in very general terms, about the possibility of moving into terrorism. Was that a crime? Surely not. And even if it was, Fenton himself hadn’t committed it very thoroughly. For the most part he had just sat there and listened while the others had conspired. He had said maybe five or six words all night. Apart from that, everything that had happened would have happened anyway, whether he was there or not.
Another vicious slam of metal on metal. Fenton pressed his pillow down harder, as if applying it to his neighbour’s face.
On the minus side, he had placed Ivan Lego at the top of the death list. That much could not be denied. And this was an action, wasn’t it, that a jury might well be inclined to frown on. To take a dim view of. Or was it? Consider, again, the grey area. Look at the context, the extenuating circumstances. Look at the purity of his motives. He hadn’t done it out of malice towards Ivan Lego, had he? He had done it to get Robert Browning’s name off the table. And not just Browning’s, either. In effect, his intervention had saved the skin of every other alternative candidate too. Of Barbra Streisand, of Smithy’s cousin, of a theoretically endless multitude of as-yet-unnamed persons who might otherwise have been chosen to fill the void …
Which wasn’t a bad effort, considering the hand he’d been dealt. Because Fenton hadn’t created the death list, had he? It wasn’t Fenton’s fault that there was a death list in the first place. It was Gus, and Gus alone, who was responsible for that. And surely that was the fundamental crime, the root illegality. To Fenton the existence of the death list had come as a given, a fait accompli. All he had done was make one tiny adjustment to its contents. A principled adjustment. A sound adjustment. An adjustment aimed at making the best of a very bad situation. What more could any decent citizen have done, in his unenviable place? It would have been easy, all too easy, just to bury his head in the sand and let it all happen the way Gus wanted it to, secure in the knowledge that none of it was his own fault. Instead he had done the hard thing. The courageous thing. The moral thing. He had grasped the nettle. He had seen to it that death, if it had to come to somebody, would at least come to a man who richly deserved it. A man who had made a career out of telling his students that good and evil did not exist. A man who viewed death as a culturally constructed fiction. As crimes went, putting a man like that onto a pre-existing death list was a pretty minor offence. A pretty civilized one. Maybe you could even call it heroic. Was that going too far? Perhaps not. Perhaps that was about as heroic as you could get in this day and age. Damage limitation, victim management. Maybe that was about as moral as you could be, in this fucked-up world …
How would these arguments go down in a police interview room? Would they cut any ice? Maybe – if the questioning was being done by one of those delightfully cultured detective inspectors you saw on crime shows. Some quirky, metaphysically inclined fat-boy with silver hair who played the clarinet, or liked doing crosswords, or kept quoting Kierkegaard, or listened to Wagner at top volume while waving an invisible baton.
Failing that, Fenton might be in a lot of trouble. Maybe he would get the other guy instead. The philistine with the loosened tie who thumped the table and asked him if he’d ever seen a dead man before. Or the look on a woman’s face when you knocked on her door in the dead of night to tell her the son she had carried and nurtured and suckled at her spent breasts wasn’t coming home …
But again Fenton was getting ahead of himself. He shifted his head to a cooler section of sheet. He resettled his hips and limbs. He was skipping over the fundamental question, wasn’t he? Which was this: how real was the danger to Ivan Lego’s life? How sinister or binding was a death list drafted by a bunch of clowns? It didn’t feel real. Did that mean it wasn’t real? Or was this what being in a genuine terrorist outfit felt like from the inside? Did authentic terror cells have people like Col and Smithy in them? And leaders like Gus, and right-hand men like Warren? And personnel as seriously unhappy about the thrust of proceedings as himself? Did his own deep reservations count for anything? Or was terrorism one of those things you could just drift into against your will, like a bad conversation at a party, a friendship with someone you didn’t really like …
And if he didn’t think the threat was real, then why had he been so desperate to get Robert Browning off the death list?
He rolled restlessly back onto his other side. What should he believe? On one hand, there was something inherently fantastic – was there not? – about the whole conspiracy. It was folly, surely, to fear that any plan of Gus’s might ever gain traction in the real world, the gritty real world of corpses, dental records, weeping relatives, arrests, arraignments, imprisonment without the prospect of parole. Operation Lego just didn’t belong to that genre, did it? It was a reverie, a cartoon. It had reality only in the crass themepark of Gus’s imagination. It reeked of unviability.
But then again, so had Gus’s plan to break into the Union Bar at 2am last night. And then at a certain point Fenton had found himself inserting his leg through the bar’s jemmied window, and watching it vanish into the darkness beyond. He remembered thinking, as he hauled the rest of his body over that legal Rubicon, that he had become involved in something all too real. He remembered thinking that the time had come to do something definitive to stop it.
But now, in the sprawling late-morning light, he found it hard to recapture that sense of urgency. Anyway, what exactly was this definitive thing he wanted himself to do? Go to the police? Now, on the strength of what he had? That would be ludicrous, an exercise in sheer bad taste. At best he would be laughed out of the station. At worst it would open a procedural Pandora’s box that didn’t bear thinking about.
Still, he couldn’t just do nothing. Could he? No. As the only remotely normal person present at last night’s meeting, he had a certain duty to the broader community. His felt that instinctively. But a duty to do what? And when? On concrete questions like these, his instincts supplied no answers. Maybe they would supply them when the time was right. Maybe it would all happen naturally. Maybe when the plan had attained the appropriate level of reality, he would start feeling seriously alarmed enough about it to act. Or maybe the crime would just incrementally go ahead and happen, unless at some point he made a conscious decision to become seriously alarmed about it. Maybe he should have made that decision already. Maybe he should be making it now.
How he wished she could see him like this! Here and now, ruggedly confronting his moral destiny.
What about telling her, then? In the abstract, the idea appealed to him. It always had. Telling her that her boyfriend was a terrorist: as a means of advancing his own interests, it still felt like the best, perhaps the only, weapon he had. And arguably it was now even the right thing to do, after last night. Let her decide whether or not the plot was real. And if she believed it was, let her try and talk the hairy madman out of it. She could only be better at doing that than Fenton was. In fact she would almost certainly, for reasons he preferred not to think about, succeed. The plot would be dissolved, if you accepted that it was solid. Lego’s life would be saved, if you accepted that it was really in danger. Decorum would be restored, all without the gaucherie of involving the police.
On the face of it, it was the ideal solution. But only on the face of it. In practice, it would be ideal only for Ivan Lego. From Fenton’s point of view it would be a calamity. Consider: when she confronted Gus and hosed him down, she would have to betray Fenton as her source. And that would be that. His cover would be blown. He would be out of the cadre on his ear. His days of pretending to be a Maoist would be over. The ladder by which he was ascending to her balcony would be gone, and he would be falling away from her through space, howling goodbye to the best chance he’d ever had of making her his. Compared with that, the prospect of Ivan Lego’s liquidation started to lose a good deal of its horror. Compared with that, the liquidation of Ivan Lego started to look downright palatable.
No, he would be a fool to bring her in now. To pay that unthinkable price in order to stop something that mightn’t even be real! And yet the idea of selling Gus out, of letting her know what he really was, of smearing him to her behind his back … it remained compelling, somehow. It would be such a shame not to do it, at least partially. Fenton kept coming back to the notion, sniffing at it like an interested dog. It had an undeniable primal appeal. For one thing it would provide him with a legitimate reason to sit down alone with her and talk. And that was by no means a trivial consideration. In fact there had been times when this had struck him as the most difficult part of the whole thing: finding his hook, his entree, the valid passport to conversation, the wormhole in space that would admit him to the miracle of regular one-on-one interaction with her. He had waited for months for an ice-breaker half as good as this one. It would hurt like hell not to use it.
And the smearing itself, the actual physical moment of telling her: he knew already that that would feel very good. It would feel like a kind of sexual betrayal. Not as good as actual sexual betrayal, obviously. But a lot better than no kind of sexual betrayal at all. And by no means a bad first step towards the real thing. How sweet it would be to show her that draft death list, the one on which Warren had written her name by mistake! A document that confirmed not just Gus’s criminal insanity, but his wretched incompetence to boot! What a sublime pincer movement! How could she possibly go on loving the fat fool once she’d seen that?
If only there were some safe way to deliver the blow. A way to screw Gus without screwing himself. A way to make her see roughly what the porky sociopath was into, without making her feel compelled to step immediately in and stop it, thereby blowing Fenton’s cover into the stratosphere. But maybe there was. Maybe he could tell her just part of the truth. Just as much of it as he needed to, and no more. Just enough of it to make her see that her boyfriend was both a bumbling cretin and a slavering lunatic. But not enough to make her want to discuss the matter with him. Nothing too alarmist or feasible-sounding, nothing that might strike her as a clarion call for her immediate intervention. Enough to make her skin crawl, but not enough to raise her hair. It would be a tricky balance to strike. But the rewards just might be unimaginably sweet.
And maybe he could take another precaution before telling her. A precaution so crassly obvious that he’d come close to overlooking it. Maybe he could simply make her promise not to raise the matter with Gus. Other people did that sort of thing. Why shouldn’t he? Would it strike her as too forward? He doubted it. After all, she had asked him to keep her informed, hadn’t she? In fact, hadn’t she come right out and told him that she could keep a secret? Which was pretty fucking forward in its own right, wasn’t it? Yes! Of course it was. Why hadn’t he thought about that statement more, far more? If that wasn’t a green light, an in-principle agreement to participate in Gus’s sexual downfall, then Fenton didn’t know what was.
He sprang from bed with relative exuberance. He jived purposefully into his commie threads. Yes! One day soon, perhaps even today, he would get her alone, and swear her to secrecy, and tell her that her boyfriend was a terrorist! And if this would do very little to ease the plight of Ivan Lego, when had Ivan Lego last gone out of his way to ease the plight of Fenton Bland? Besides, if the threat to Lego should ever begin to feel significantly more real, Fenton could always give her all the more sordid details then, fully authorising her to take the matter up with Gus. Indeed positively encouraging her to. For the moment, however, he vowed to squeeze as much personal gain out of the situation as he could.
Lacing his desert boots, he half-recalled a quotation he had read once, somewhere, uttered by somebody long-dead and eminent and no doubt French. The precise wording of it eluded him, but the gist of it was this: that a man in love is not obliged, or even expected, to behave according to normal moral standards. What lapidary words! What unparalleled man of genius had penned them?
Fenton made a mental note to follow this point up.
Then he stepped out into the hall, to see why everything was so quiet.
So where were they? They never went out, not together. It would take something unprecedented to make them do that. And why was the TV not on? And where was Streetwise? Had the heinous creature finally escaped? If so, was that somehow Fenton’s fault? The clock on the kitchen bench said 12:25.
His upbeat mood had fully leaked away now. Instead he felt a potent urge to flee the house without delay. Then again, he felt like that on a lot of mornings. He therefore resolved, boldly, to press ahead with his breakfast routine as if nothing was amiss. After all, he’d done nothing wrong, had he? Nothing from which he should feel compelled to run? Not here, anyway.
The clock said 12.26. He entered the kitchenette, washed himself a bowl and spoon. He dried them. He tugged the handle of the fridge door, breaking the suction of its rubber seal. This prompted the usual faint tremor of shelving and jars – a sound that had never before failed to bring Streetwise skittering in over the ice rink of the lino, snarling for food. Fenton tensed his calves and waited for the inevitable scrabble of clawed feet.
And kept waiting.
The cat didn’t come.
He closed the fridge and reopened it, deliberately maximising the glassy shelf-rattle.
But still no Streetwise.
His calves went queasily slack.
The clock flipped over to 12:27.
He had gone past feeling merely troubled now. He felt proper fear. His appetite was waning. He lacked the will to go on with the mechanics of making breakfast. But he also lacked the will to abandon them entirely, or come up with something else to do instead. For several minutes then he just stood there in the open mouth of the fridge with his bowl and spoon, waiting for inspiration to strike. A wicked scenario occurred to him: last night, on his return home from the death list meeting, he had left the front door open, and the cat had bolted. And now Trixie and Tara were out there on the streets futilely looking for it, knowing that Fenton was wholly to blame for the escape. It was obscenely possible. He tried to recall the precise moment of his return. He tried to remember having firmly shut the door. He couldn’t.
In a way, then – in a very small way – it came as a relief when he heard Trixie and Tara’s bedroom door open, and heard them coming funereally up the hall. One of them was crying. No: weeping, sobbing with elemental force, hitching back air in dreadful snotty gusts. The other one was whispering soft words of comfort. Fenton wondered, distantly, why he wasn’t striding with extreme prejudice towards the front door. In theory, there was still time to do that. There was still time, if he moved right now, to slip out undetected. But this strange inertia weighed on his limbs still. His boots seemed to be fused to the lino. In any case, he reminded himself that he had absolutely nothing to hide.
They appeared. Tara was the one doing the weeping. Her face was a mess of red blotches and glossy smears. Trixie walked leadenly beside her, holding her upright with an expression of grim concern. Both were dressed in their sex-catalogue nightwear. This added an element of the grotesque to an already quite disturbing scene. Trixie steered Tara to the dining table and sat her down in one of its chairs.
At this moment Fenton dispensed with the remaining shreds of his intention to eat his breakfast there. He could dine on campus. The thing to do right now was get out the front door as soon as he decently could.
From somewhere inside her nightwear Trixie produced a fresh-looking tissue and passed it to Tara. In half a second her red nose had reduced it to a sodden wad. It was unclear whether either of them had marked Fenton’s presence yet. He decided to establish it by saying something well-meaning. He stepped away from the fridge with solemn empathy. The door whispered shut.
“Are you okay?” he said.
Tara lifted her scarlet face and looked at him with loathing. “Prick,” she matter-of-factly said.
Fenton frowned politely. He looked to Trixie for clarification.
Trixie said: “Bastard.”
“Steady on,” he responded, nervously.
“Try telling him to steady on, Fenton,” Trixie bitterly replied. And she pointed at something down on the carpet, over between the couch and the TV.
A certain inevitability had descended on the scene now. Fenton had no choice but to follow the line of Trixie’s index finger, even though he didn’t want to. No, he really didn’t want to, because he had a pretty good idea of what he was going to see at the end of it. He was going to see Streetwise, stone dead.
And so he did. The cat’s corpse lay at the foot of the couch, stretched out on its belly like a poor man’s tiger rug. It didn’t look like it was sleeping. It certainly didn’t look like it was at peace. It just looked exactly like it was dead. It had expired in the act of chewing the couch leg. Its jaws were wide open, the pornographic lips peeled back in one last eternal snarl that laid bare the white thorns of the teeth, the hideous liquorice of the gums. Its eyes were open too, blazing up in a frozen yellow stare of hate. Even from his distance Fenton could see that rigor mortis had already set in, imparting a plasticky and only half-real quality to the remains.
“Oh Jesus,” he intoned gravely. He tried to sound shocked, and above all unhappy. But in truth he felt relief, and a perverse urge to smile. Not just because the cat was dead, but because it had died so clearly of natural causes. There was nothing in the manner of its passing for which he could conceivably be blamed. It hadn’t, as he had so often feared it would, backed him into a corner and forced him to snap its spine in self-defence. It hadn’t streaked out a door he’d just opened and shot out onto the road and met a curt and graphic end under someone’s tyres while he stood there frozen on the doormat, palely holding his keys. It hadn’t set itself aflame on a hotplate left burning by him. It had simply expired, and Fenton was clean. He was gloriously clean.
He realized he was still holding his bowl and spoon. Respectfully he laid them down on the bench. The moment was weighty. It seemed to want him to say something more, something sombre and well-meaning and not necessarily true.
“He seems,” he said, “to have gone peacefully.”
“That’s that all you’ve got to say for yourself is it?” said Trixie.
“Murderer,” said Tara.
Now he began to catch on. He went cold. “You’re not suggesting … You’re not suggesting that I …” But there was no reasonable way to complete the sentence. What were they suggesting? That he’d poisoned it? That he’d stepped on it during the night?
“You killed him!” Tara wailed, seizing a nearby piece of incense-burning equipment and flinging it at his skull.
He ducked it, and snapped back to his full height. “How? What did I do?”
“Exactly,” said Trixie. “Nothing, Fenton. That’s exactly what you did do, you sick fuck. You stopped feeding him, didn’t you? You stopped feeding him and watched him die like a dog.”
“Cat killer,” said Tara, more concisely.
“Stopped feeding him?” Fenton’s mouth went dry. “What are you talking about? I never even – I never even started.”
This had seemed, before he’d begun to say it, to be a pretty unimpeachable thing to say. But as he neared the end of saying it, he suddenly wasn’t so sure. Trixie looked at him through widening eyes, as though he were confessing to something unspeakable, something even blacker than what he already stood accused of. Tara emitted a fresh groan of lamentation.
“Well I mean I threw him the odd scrap but …” His heart was galloping. “I mean Jesus Christ it wasn’t my job to feed him!” he declared, trying to cut through the nonsense with a firm statement of plain fact. But again he heard his voice wobble with doubt. Sweet Lord: had it been his job? Surely not? He tried to say something more, but now his voice did something unforgivable: it seized up entirely. With a contemptible glug, it jammed in the S-bend of his throat. He swallowed hard, and tried again. “It wasn’t my cat,” he said simply. He was on solid enough ground with that statement, surely.
Or maybe he wasn’t. Trixie’s eyes grew wider still. “Are you implying,” she said with infinite horror, “that it was Tara’s job?”
This notion was too much for Tara. From her sitting position she pitched suddenly forward in what looked to Fenton like a fairly poor imitation of a dead faint. Her forehead met the surface of the table with a dull clunk.
“Satisified?” Trixie coldly asked him, as though he had now killed Tara too. “This is a new low, Fenton, even for you. You do that” – she gestured broadly towards the dead cat – “and then you try to blame it on her.”
“How dare you even suggest that!” screamed Tara, returning to consciousness with improbable speed and springing up towards Fenton’s face with her fingernails raised. He readied himself for the moment of impact, feeling that it would come as a welcome alternative to having to keep canvassing the matter verbally. But at the last moment Trixie intervened, pulling Tara back in a strangely choreographed-looking way. Tara looked at him with contempt and said: “God that beard’s a joke.” Then she yielded to a fresh wave of tears.
Trixie drew Tara’s distressed face to her breast. “He’s not worth it, baby,” she said, stroking Tara’s hair. “He’s just not worth it.” She looked up at Fenton. “Tell us Fenton, how did it feel? Watching him slowly starve. Did it make you feel like a man? Did it make you hard?”
As it happened, Fenton did feel the stirrings of a potential erection right now – and wholeheartedly condemned himself for it. He stood his ground, doing his best to go on looking thoroughly innocent. Jesus, they couldn’t pin this on him, could they? Could they? But it seemed they already had. He stole another glance at the cadaver. It was indeed strikingly emaciated. Poor old Streetwise. From the depths of the nightmare, you had to spare a thought for him. Had these hellish bitches fed him nothing? Not a thing, ever? Had they genuinely believed the job was Fenton’s? If so, it was a small miracle that the animal had survived as long as it had. How often had Fenton fed it? Not very. On maybe twenty or so occasions, when there had been absolutely no avoiding it, he had lobbed it some token peace-offering from his own plate, or let it greedily polish off his cereal – but always on the assumption that these scraps had constituted between-meal snacks only, tiny supplements to the cat’s core diet. Now it seemed clear that that had been it. Those scraps had been Streetwise’s sole source of nourishment. No wonder the creature had kept harassing him during meals, until eventually he had found it necessary to do most of his eating off-site. No wonder it had kept launching itself at the windowpanes. No wonder it had looked so lean and hungry. It had looked lean and hungry because it had been lean and hungry. With a pang of remorse Fenton realized that he had judged the abused cat, in life, far too harshly. Many aspects of what he had taken to be its appalling personality could now be explained, even excused, by the fact that it had been starving to death the whole time he’d known it. Too late to do anything about it, he understood that Streetwise had been on his side all along, or at any rate not on theirs. All along it had been his brother, a fellow victim of their epic sloth, a co-recipient of the domestic raw deal. So many things made sense now: the ill-tempered ambushes, the industrial-strength miaows, the constant gnawings at the furniture … How had Fenton misheard these cries for help? How had he misread the signs? An awful thought struck him: maybe they were right to think him guilty. Maybe he was to blame. What a monstrous oversight it had been to assume they were giving it food! How criminally naive of him! After all, it wasn’t as if they ever did anything else like that. They never cleaned, they never cleared, they never swept, they never scrubbed, they never mowed. When they turned on a tap, the odds that they would turn it off again were never better than even. So what on earth had made him suppose they would feed their own cat? Common sense? The unwritten codes of ordinary decent human behaviour?
He should have known far better than that.
The phone began to ring.
He looked at it. He looked at them. They held their poses as if it wasn’t ringing at all. He thought he might as well pick it up.
“Hello?”
“Fent? Gus. How are we, comrade? Just a couple of matters, brother, and then I’ll let you get back to them ‘housemates’ of yours. Far be it from me to keep a man away from a triple-treat! First up mate, I’ve got to salute you on your selection of Ivan Lego. He’s a classic. Full marks for putting him in the frame. I might as well admit it: I wasn’t totally sold on the bloke to begin with. Truth is, I wasn’t that privy to how much of a cockmuscle he is. But I happened to catch him on the breakfast show this morning – and Christ what an arsehole! He was crapping on about this new book of his that’s got no words in it – and fair dinkum, Fent, I’ve never heard such a ridiculous load of jism in all my life! No wonder you crave his death, mate. Frankly, I’m surprised some other mob hasn’t taken a ping at him already. You know what really gets me, Fent? They were calling him the ‘thinking woman’s sex symbol’! ‘Sex symbol’, Fent, can you believe it? This grey-haired skivvy-wearing old homo is suddenly a bloody sex-symbol, just because he can string a few words together and isn’t actually deformed. Christ that sort of thing irks me. It’s high time someone took a stand on it. I swear to God, I was that ticked off I was ready to rock down to the studio and terminate him on the spot. Needless to say I’m speaking figuratively there. When the time comes to whack this cocksmoker, Fent, you’re gonna be right there at the sharp end, you can rest assured of that. Matter of fact, that brings me round to my main point. I’ve decided to put on a barbie round at my joint next Saturday, so we can all get together and really flesh out the concrete details of this thing. I’ll supply the snags and the piss – courtesy of the Student Union. All you’ve got to bring mate is yourself, plus any ideas you might have on how to move this thing forward. I’ve already got a few pearlers of my own. Believe me, I’m as eager to keep the ball rolling on this as what you are. The way I see it, all we need is another meeting or two to thrash out the finer points of it, and we’ll have your mate Lego on a slab before you know it. And, ah, Fent – this’ll be strictly a working lunch, okay? If them ‘housemates’ of yours want to come along, fob ’em off with some lie. Don’t get me wrong, I’m hanging to meet them. But this just isn’t the right forum, as I’m sure you’ll agree. I’ll be fobbing Charmers off from it – you can rest assured of that. I tell you, Fent – I’m excited about this thing. I really am. It’s dead-set going to go right off the Richter, I can feel it. And a lot of the credit has to go to you on that, like I say. Anyhow pal – I’ll let you get back to it. I’ll catch up with you Saturday week, if not before. Hooroo mate.”
With a sharp clatter the phone went dead. For another minute or two Fenton kept it pressed to his ear anyway, nodding and uttering random phrases of assent as if the call was still in progress, postponing for as long as possible his re-entry into the Streetwise conversation. He noted that Tara was seated at the table again. For the moment her tears had given way to an ugly chain of dry sobs. Trixie stood behind her, mechanically patting her twitching shoulders – but glaring straight at Fenton all the while, as if she had something fresh to charge him with the moment he hung up. Before too much longer he reluctantly did so, knowing that the moment couldn’t be put off forever.
Immediately Trixie said: “So you’re not even going to bother to lie about it? You’re just going to stand there and openly admit that you never fed him.”
“Well that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?” His blood was up. It was time to take a stand: not just against them, but against his own creeping and craven sense that they might somehow be right. “That’s what she’s saying, and it was her bloody cat! Why can’t I say it? Why on earth did you think I was feeding it? Why? Are you really that insane? It wasn’t me that kidnapped the thing off the streets and kept it locked inside. I didn’t even –” He faltered, and took another swift glance at the remains. “I didn’t … We didn’t even get along.”
A long silence.
“Well,” said Trixie. “At least now we know why.”
“Oh come on. Now you think I did it deliberately?”
“So you did do it,” Tara countered shrewdly. “You do admit that.”
“Admit what? That I didn’t feed him? Take a look at him, you cretin. Nobody fed him.”
Once again Tara pitched forward onto the table, in lacklustre simulation of a person fainting.
“I notice,” Fenton said, “she got her hand down that time. To sort of cushion her head so it didn’t hit the wood.”
Tara’s face flushed visibly against the table, but in the interests of authenticity she stayed down. Trixie just bitterly shook her head, as if this remark was about as much as you could expect from a cat killer. “I think you’d better go now, Fenton, don’t you?”
He tended to agree. But he also knew that certain things had to be made totally clear before he went. He said: “You can see the difference between … between not feeding him and … and failing to feed him, right?” There was a valid and telling point to be made here, somewhere, but he couldn’t find quite the right words. “You can see the difference, right? There’s a world of difference.”
“You realize,” Trixie said, “that denial’s the classic response of the guilty man?”
“It’s also the classic response of the innocent man,” Fenton said.
“Fenton, I really think you’d better go.”
This time he complied, wishing he had the first time. He strode with dignity to the front door, taking an ample detour around the corpse. He reached for the doorknob.
“Where,” Trixie shrilly demanded from behind him, “do you think you’re going?”
Fenton turned back to her in wonderment. “You are insane,” he said. “I’m going. You just said I should. Twice.”
“You’re not planning to just leave him there!”
Fenton looked into her face. He studied it for traces of irony. But she was wholly serious. Her features were contorted in what appeared to be, and almost certainly was, an expression of genuine moral outrage. She really did think that the removal of the corpse was his job! She honestly believed that the onus fell on him! Tara, who was upright again, was looking at him in the same stroppily indignant way.
And really he should have foreseen it all then, in their shameless and unblinking eyes. He should have seen that it would be madness to try and outstare them, on this of all issues. He should have seen that they were just infinitely better at this sort of thing than he was. He should have seen that it would be the best thing for all concerned, not least himself, if he just gave in right now, and went and got a shovel while the remains were still relatively pristine.
Instead he walked out without saying another word.