Angelica's Grotto (26 page)

‘Up jumped Lucifer,’ said Klein, watching the inkblot soar high above the world into the infinity of the blank wall.

‘What are you talking about? Where’s Leslie?’

Klein pointed. Melissa came round the desk, knelt by Leslie, felt for a pulse. ‘He’s dead, Harold.’

‘I can’t believe that I killed him, it doesn’t seem real.’ His mind was singing:

Pack up all my care and woe,
Here I go, singing low,
Bye-bye, blackbird.

Melissa was looking at the bloody stone and the fragments of porcelain. ‘What happened?’ she said again.

‘He came up here and he was all worked up about whatever you said to him. He was ranting about his black ass being thrown out into the street and he knocked
over the Meissen girl and I killed him with the Paxos stone.’

‘Jesus, Harold! You killed him for breaking a porcelain figure?’

‘The stone was in my hand and when I heard the figure shatter my arm went back and suddenly there was the stone in the middle of his forehead. It was nothing I’d intended – it just happened.’

Leslie fucked with the wrong guy this time,
said Oannes.

‘I wouldn’t have thought you were strong enough to throw that hard,’ said Melissa, shaking her head.

‘I wouldn’t have thought so either but there it is.’

‘Poor old Leslie,’ said Melissa. ‘What a way for him to go.’ She was silent for a few moments, then, ‘We’ve got to get him out of the house.’

‘Why don’t we just dial 999?’

‘And say what? That you killed a man because he broke your dolly?’

‘It was almost an accident, really.’

‘Whatever it was, it’s the kind of thing they lock you up for. Maybe that’s how you’d like to spend the rest of your days but I really don’t want police all over this house investigating us and the computers – I need to stay respectable.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘He told me Labyrinth had been doing some location work around King’s Cross, so it’s plausible that he might have gone back there on his own – he’d sometimes talked of doing a documentary off his own bat. We’ll put him in the van with his camcorder and his other gear and we’ll drive to King’s Cross and leave him and it there with the doors open. Somebody’ll steal the video gear and that should keep the police busy for a while.’

‘Whose name is the van registered under?’

‘Leslie’s. Shit.’

‘That’s right. They’ll trace him back to the Camberwell address and from there to here so there’ll still be police knocking on the door.’

‘Right. But if we just leave him somewhere without any ID it could be quite a while before they find out who he is and by then I’ll have cleaned up the computers and installed some dummy programmes for them to look at if they want to.’

‘What about the extra phone lines I ordered?’

‘I can say I’m just starting a study of the politics of language–that would need the same kind of technology as Angelica’s Grotto and I can fake it up from material I already have from the course I teach. So I can make all of that look kosher.’

‘What about the van?’

‘That fucking van! I’ve had too much to drink but I need another drink and the bottle’s empty.’

‘There’s another bottle in the larder under the front steps; I’ll get it.’

When he returned with a fresh bottle of Glenfiddich Melissa was sitting in his TV chair with her black-stockinged legs stretched out and her feet up on another chair. Her eyes were closed.

All yours,
said Oannes,
but first …

I know, said Klein. The body – we’ll think of something.

He refilled the glasses. Melissa opened her eyes and he put her drink in her hand. ‘Here’s to whatever,’ he said.

‘Whatever. Dirty old man. Now it’s just the two of us in this house, so you got what you wanted.’

‘There are still three of us here, remember? We were
talking about the disposal of the defunct member of the group.’

‘Poor old Leslie! Here’s to you, Les, hung like a horse and always ready! You had your limitations but none below the waist. In the mist of, midst of Death we are in life. Or vice versa, whichever. To Les, Harold!’

‘He was Les but he was more,’ said Klein, and the glasses seemed to be empty again so he refilled them. ‘I’m sorry for your horse, Melissa, but his next erection will be
rigor mortis
and we want him out of here by then. Try to focus on the matter at hand.’ There was a pause of several minutes while they shook their heads and drank.

‘The matter at hand,’ said Melissa, ‘is all bloody. We’ll have to put him in a couple of dustbin liners so we don’t get it all over ourselves. Got to clean the floor as well, pick up all your broken dolly bits. With her Virgin Mary face all smashed. This is more whisky than I usually drink, or have I said that?’

‘Me too but it’s an emergency, it has emerged. The Staxos pone, Paxos stone–that’s bloody too. Did I ever tell you about the olive tree?’

‘Smother time, Harold – trying to concentrate on the defunct member. Rest of him as well, all of him’s defunct. Excuse me while I abseil from felicity awhile. Just close my eyes for a moment.’

‘No prob, Melissa, we’re all in this together. Maybe if we both close our eyes the world will go away.’ He sat down on the floor by her chair, leant his head against her thigh, and fell asleep.

Klein woke up with a headache, a dry mouth, and a crick in his neck. At first he didn’t know who he was nor where he was. Melissa was snoring in the TV chair, and seeing her he recognised the room and himself. It was dark outside, the street lamps were lit, and it was raining. He looked at his watch: twenty past eight. Morning? Evening? ‘Haven’t we already done evening?’ he said. He felt his face but learned nothing – the unbearded part of it was overdue for a shave most of the time. He went to the front door and saw the papers lying on the mat. ‘Morning,’ he said. ‘Oh shit.’

You can say that again,
said Oannes,
Action Man.

Along with the headache Klein felt lightheaded and wobbly, hypoglycaemic. He went to his desk, got out the test kit, pricked his finger, and got a reading of 3.3. He ate lumps of sugar until he felt steadier, then he said, ‘OK, I’m going to do it now.’ He stood up, looked over the far edge of the desk, and saw Leslie lying among the fragments of the Meissen girl. His eyes were shut; he must have done that at the moment of impact. The blood by now looked sticky. ‘You wouldn’t figure Leslie for a thin skull,’ said Klein, still speaking aloud from force of habit. ‘Maybe his fontanelle never closed up properly.’ The bloodstained Paxos stone
lay on the floor like an egg from which something bad would shortly hatch.

‘What do I do now?’ he said.

Time, unless you come up with something clever,
said Oannes.

Melissa, open-mouthed, continued to snore. Klein wanted to solve the problem alone if possible. ‘Bruno Schulz’s little guy never took out the stallion; this is a whole new ballgame. Cop films – think.
Internal Affairs:
Richard Gere’s partner shoots an unarmed man. “I thought he was going for a weapon,” he says. “It’s OK,” says Richard Gere, “it happens.” He takes a knife out of his sock, wipes it carefully, and puts it in the dead man’s hand. “It’s cool,” he says. “Don’t worry.” Knives and guns never fall out of people’s socks when they’re running in those films. Do they do it with Velcro or what? Matter at hand, must take care of.’

Klein found a pair of gloves, put them on, went down to the kitchen and got the knife Leslie had used when he made the coleslaw. He took hold of Leslie’s right hand and found it stiff. ‘He dropped the knife when the stone hit him,’ he said, and laid it on the floor where it might have fallen.

‘Yes,’ he said to the police inspector in his mind, ‘I was at my desk when he came up from the kitchen and began to shout at me. We’d all been drinking but he seemed out of control. He smashed the Meissen figure that was on the mantelpiece and then I saw there was a knife in his hand. He lurched towards me and I had this stone in my hand that I use as a paperweight. I threw it without even thinking and he went down. I’d no idea at first that he was dead, I expected him to get up and come after me again, the way the bad guy does in the movies.’

‘Mr Klein, you say this happened between eight and
nine o’clock last evening. When you saw that this man was dead, why didn’t you contact us immediately?’

‘I was in shock, the balance of my mind was disturbed. I was temporarily insane. I had post-traumatic stress. I was drunk and fell asleep.’

‘You fell asleep after killing a man?’

‘Well, I passed out, actually. Listen, can I get back to you on this? I’m really knackered and I’ve just had a hypo and I’ve got an awful headache. What I need right now is a little lie-down, so if you’ll excuse me …

‘Oh shit,’ said Klein, ‘this is really boring.’ Melissa was still snoring. He watched her for a while until Hannelore entered his mind and looked at him sadly. ‘Where have you been all this time?’ he said. ‘Look at what’s happened to me. Did it have to be like this? I know I wasn’t as good a husband as you were a wife and I know you wanted children but you oughtn’t to have killed yourself. Surely the life we had was better than being dead.’ He thought of their early years when he was middle-aged and she was young, how they had kissed shamelessly in public and held hands when they walked. He saw her face by candlelight in Le Bistingo in the King’s Road. He looked at her coming towards him, he looked at her walking away. ‘If you were still with me all this would never have happened,’ he said; ‘you would have rescued me from the rock of my aloneness and the monster of my impotent lust.’

Steady on,
said Oannes.
Be a man, for Christ’s sake, and stop embarrassing me.

You’re
embarrassed! I’m kind of tired right now, Oannes, and I need to be alone for a while, OK?

Do what thou wilt, old chum. Catch you later.

The room was full of winter rainlight. Across the common the District Line trains rumbled eastward to Tower
Hill, Upminster, and Barking; westward to Wimbledon. Klein’s headache wasn’t too bad; it was as if all the nuts and bolts in his head had been tightened a little so that he was able to think more clearly. With this new clarity he picked up the kitchen knife from the floor and took it back to the kitchen. He discarded the gloves, put on his outdoor-man waterproof jacket and his bush-ranger hat, and went out into the rain. The trees on the common were black and bare. The sky was dark but he heard the whisper of the light behind the darkness.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘people grow old and die but every morning is a whole new thing, every morning never happened before.’ He walked down Moore Park Road to Harwood Road, up Harwood Road to Fulham Broadway, where he turned left into the Fulham Road. Footsteps and umbrellas hurried past him. ‘I’d really like to excuse myself from the sexual scene,’ he said. ‘Maybe if I bring a note from my mother.’ He thought he heard laughter. ‘Yes, the whole thing’s pretty funny, really.’ He was silent as he passed the Blue Elephant restaurant and Oza Chemist, contemplating the lights reflected in the shining street and listening to the hissing of tyres.

‘Things are always much simpler than they appear at first,’ he said. ‘You do something and that’s what you’ve done. If it’s a police matter you tell the police about it.’ He was standing at the pedestrian crossing waiting for the green man when he saw a woman waiting at the central divider. She was wearing a yellow mac and a short skirt.

‘Great legs,’ he said. She turned and it was Hannelore. ‘Hannelore!’ he shouted. ‘Wait!’ The little man on the pedestrian light was not yet green but Klein saw a clear space in the traffic and started across the road just in time
to catch the full impact of the 14 bus that loomed above him, its redness heightened by the rain.

Fuck with me, will you,
said the bus.

‘He stepped right in front of me,’ said the driver to the crowd that gathered around the body. ‘I’d no time to stop.’

‘I saw it,’ said a man. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

‘What could he have been thinking of?’ said a woman.

Shit happens,
said Oannes, and moved on.

For accuracy of detail I am indebted to the following people,
listed here in alphabetical order: Jo Barnardo; Gordon
Beckmann; Isabelle de la Bruyère; Michael Hardwicke; Ben
Hoban; Ruth James; Sion Lewis; F. J. Lillie; John Naughton;
Doris Patterson; Thomas Seydoux; and Linda Wheeldon.
I am grateful to Dominic Power and Phoebe Hoban for
comments and encouragement on the manuscript. Lastly, my
special thanks to Rebecca_______, whose face I borrowed
for Melissa. The George III Mental Health Centre is
imaginary.

Russell Hoban (1925-2011) was the author of many extraordinary novels including
Turtle Diary, Angelica Lost and Found and his masterpiece, Riddley Walker.
He also wrote some classic books for children including
The Mouse and his Child and the Frances
books. Born in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, USA, he lived in London from 1969 until his death.

NOVELS

The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz
Kleinzeit
Turtle Diary
Riddley Walker
Pilgermann
The Medusa Frequency
Fremder
Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer
Angelica’s Grotto
Amaryllis Night and Day
The Bat Tattoo
Her Name Was Lola
Come Dance With Me
Linger Awhile
My Tango with Barbara Strozzi
Angelica Lost and Found

POETRY
The Pedalling Man
The Last of the Wallendas and Other Poems

COLLECTIONS
The Moment Under the moment

FOR CHILDREN
The Mouse and His Child
The Frances Books
The Trokeville Way

Grateful acknowledgement is made to HarperCollins Publishers
for permission to quote from
HMS Surprise
(1996) by P.O.
O’Brian; to Northwestern University Press for permission to
quote from Jerzy Ficowski’s Introduction to
The Drawings of
Bruno Schulz
(1990); to Channel Four Television for permission
to refer to the film
The Last Navigator,
an Independent
Communications Associates Production for Channel Four,
WGBH Boston, ABC Australia, Directed by André Singer; to
Dover Publications, New York for permission to quote from
London Labour and the London Poor, Volume III,
by Henry
Mayhew (1968); to the group Garbage for permission to quote
from ‘Only Happy When It Rains’ by Shirley Manson, Steve
Markes, Duke Erikson, and Butch Vig; to International Music
Publications Ltd for permission to quote from ‘Windmills of
Your Mind’, words and music by Michael Legrand, Marilyn
Bergman and Alan Bergman, © 1968 EMI Catalogue Partnership
and EMI U Catalog Inc., USA. Worldwide print rights controlled
by Warner Bros Inc, USA/IMP Ltd; to EMI Music Publishing,
London, for permission to quote from ‘Everybody’s Somebody’s
Fool’, words and music by Jack Keller and Howard Greenfield
© Screen Gems/EMI Music Inc, USA. Every effort has been
made to trace the copyright owners of the songs quoted.