“I am. What if the husband catches you?” I put out my hand, which he shook vigorously, and introduced myself.
“Horace Hawksley, me. But what I say, Michael, is this: what’s life all about if you’re not prepared to take a risk? Life can be very monotonous after you’re retired, and being seventy-five what do I have to lose?”
“I can see you’re too old to die young,” I said, “but what if, Horace, for instance”—recalling Blaskin’s misadventure — “what if, say, Betty’s husband went to the airport, and found the plane wouldn’t take off for five hours; or he went to the station and saw that the rails had so many leaves on them that trains wouldn’t be running to London for another week? In view of such a delay he would come home and catch you in bed with his wife. He’d be so devastated he’d choose a chopper from the coalhouse and split your head from top to bottom.”
His face turned all shades from healthy pink to graveyard white. Then he smiled so widely I hoped his teeth wouldn’t fall out. “Michael, if I looked at it that way I’d never get anywhere, would I? Even though I expect to live forever, life’s too short to think like that.”
“But your life could be cruelly cut short if you don’t use caution.”
Anger sparked behind his glasses. “I’m not a bloody fool, am I?” The maniacal smile his girlfriend found such a come-on lit his clock. “I must be going. Never be late is my golden rule.” He winked, and gave another stab at my ribs. “Next stop Grantham! Wish me luck!”
I did, and as I relished the ambrosial inhalations of another cigar, I watched him peering at the number plate of almost every car before coming to his own, certain that Alzheimer’s would get him before priapic decline, and then where would he be? I’d scour the tabloids for news of his trial. Then I spat tacks at not asking him what he took to keep himself banging away, which I might need in the not far distant future.
I let him get well ahead, from an encounter which had touched my nerves unduly, felt myself sickening for either a cold or the flu. Frances never caught either, so many gunged up people in her pokey surgery that she was immune to all they could sneeze at her. Yet she frequently carried one home which I caught, and hid on going to work, in order to ravage the advertising agency. By the time I admitted to a cold all the others had it, and I claimed to have got it from them.
I’d heard it said that you shouldn’t drive with a cold, but I was safer than otherwise, in knowing I had to be dead careful. It’s when I’m feeling the fittest man in the world that I splinter the tailgate against the only concrete post in sight in an almost empty car park.
Driving along, I craved an alcoholic drink. A full leatherbound flask of prime malt lay in the glovebox, but I didn’t take it while at the wheel, in spite of knowing that if I supped a drop or two I wouldn’t be any less safe.
The sky turned glum, as it tends to on going north. I thought of wheeling south but told myself not to be a coward. Raindrops at the windscreen made me want to piss again, so I swerved into a lay-by to let go, careful to avoid stinging my knob on tall fresh nettles. Fancying closer contact with the fields, and to get away from pools of diesel, old tyres, and things worse that went squish underfoot, I leapt over a ditch and ran up a bank into an open stretch of green ending at an enormous creosote-painted barn that seemed about to fall in the next feeble breeze.
Why my legs carried me that way I’ll never know. Actions which alter the peace and quiet of life are never realised at such a time. My turn-ups were soaked after bending double to get between strands of barbed wire without snagging my jacket. I picked open a slit of the barn with my faithful Leatherhead toolknife and looked inside, at some kind of furniture assembly depot. Workmen were scraping, polishing, buffing up, sawing and hammering industriously at various specimens of antique pieces, their trannies jingling the same tune from each corner while they worked, everyone busy and contented, though I wouldn’t have been happy with most of them smoking among shavings, sawdust and glue.
At the front of the barn two pantechnicons were parked on the black cindered earth. A couple of subsidiary sheds were used as toilets, and a burly bloke who came from the nearest buttoning his dungarees ran towards me with both fists up. “You fucking snooper. I’ll blind you.”
His curses I give were troy weight compared to the amount that came filthily out but, as Blaskin said, when dealing with obscenities which a character expletes you must never reproduce the full measure, because a careful rationing on paper gives sufficient indication of what is used to satisfy any reader.
It was my advantage to recognise him first, and I stood with fists so ready that his halt gave time to say: “You touch me, Kenny Dukes, and I’ll drag you inside that barn and push your head into a bandsaw, even though you’d look a lot prettier with it off.”
He drew back the longest arms of any man, which I’d once trapped in my car window when he was in Moggerhanger’s Rolls Royce driving parallel and trying to fire his gun at my brains. He must have remembered the incident, because his smile showed cracked teeth, such a ripple at the mouth that a scar on the upper lip began to redden. He rubbed it with a clean handkerchief. “Oh, it’s you, Michael Cullen. I thought you was a nark looking around. If it had been I’d have split all his works and sent him back to his mother in a black plastic bin liner. That’s what we usually do to ’em.” He took my arm, and led me towards the main door. “Did Lord Moggerhanger send you?”
“I haven’t had any contact with him for a while.”
A fragment of suspicion flickered at his eyes. “You found the place, though, didn’t you?”
“Only by accident.”
I knew him as a greedy reader of Sidney Blood novels, some pseudonymously penned by Blaskin, though even Bill Straw had done one, as I had as well. Kenny read them over and over, as much as three times, without knowing he’d read them before, wallowing in the violence, gore, bestial fuckery, and the quick running crazy plots. I offered a cigar. “I’m doing research for the next Sidney Blood novel.”
He drooled. “What’s it going to be called?”
“‘The Bandsaw Men’.” We lit up, and I blew smoke into his face, hoping to hide the worst of his features. South London born and bred, a remand home had been his prep school. He’d done ‘A’ Levels in Borstal, gone on to university at the Scrubs, then entered a lifetime of postgraduate work in Moggerhanger’s employ, though what use such a strong-armed dimwit could be had always puzzled me. He squeezed my elbow so affectionately at the unsolicited information about Sidney Blood that I waited for it to crumble. “You once said you’d introduce me to Sidney, but you never did, did you? Well, you haven’t yet. I remember your promise, though, whenever I pick up one of his books.”
“It’s Mister Blood to you,” I said sternly. “He told me only yesterday how he took a chiv to a poor chap who called him by his first name without being invited to do so. He left him bleeding by Tower Bridge like a stuck pig.”
I detected admiration, and a lick of fear. “He didn’t?”
“He did. Sidney doesn’t lie. And he likes respect. All writers do, only he’s worse. But I promise I’ll let you meet him as soon as I can. He sent me out this morning to get background material for another book he’s got on the stocks called The Body Bank.”
His eyes turned into Hallogen lamps. “Fucking hell! Sounds like a good ’un. Can’t wait to get my French fries on it. Tell me more.”
“I won’t. Sidney would cut my throat if I did, and if you were there to see it you might come all over the place.” Such twitting went over his head, and he opened the barn door. “I only like you because you know Mr Blood.”