The Parasite Person (17 page)

R
UTH, WHEN SHE
arrived on Monday morning, wasn’t quite as thrilled by the news as he’d expected her to be. In fact, she sulked a bit, just at first.

“
I
want to be on it,” she said, “It’s not
fair
!
It was
my
idea.
I’m
the one who’s done practically all the work!”

She sounded so like a small child done out of a treat that Martin could not help smiling.

“But
of
course,
Ruth! You’ve been a most wonderful help to me, and
of
course
I’m going to give you credit for it, all the credit in the world! You’re going to be in my preface, practically in letters of gold! You’ll be the star! But this television thing—you must see, Ruth, dear, this is a bit different. I have no control over it, you see; who they put in the programme and who they don’t. It’s a terrific thing for me that they’ve asked me at all: I can’t—not at this stage—start asking favours, now can I? Not this first time,” he hastened to add, seeing her expression. “But another time … later on … when I’m in a position to pull strings, perhaps….”

The vagueness of these promises was all too evident. He laid his hand on her shoulder.

“Now, come on, Ruth! Snap out of it! The more of a success I am this time, the sooner I’ll be a man of influence, able to swing things for you! So come on, let’s get going. I want to get this stuff in some sort of order. I have to be ready, you see, for anything they may be going to ask me…. I want to know exactly where we’re at….”

Whether it was his adoption of one of her own favourite slang expressions, or whether it was the general tenor of his conciliatory
little speech, Martin could not tell, but anyway, she brightened up, and quite quickly became her usual enthusiastic self.

“Dreams…. You must try and get them to ask you about dreams, Prof, because we’ve got some jolly good ones….
Remember
that one about the rats …? That woman who kept on about how supportive and wonderful her husband was being, and then, every night, she had this dream about rats being in the bed with her, gnawing at her flesh? Here—here we are—F 55 C….” All the while she’d been speaking, Ruth’s deft fingers had been sorting through the piles of interviews—quite a few of them still awaiting typing. As he’d predicted, without Helen the typing was getting sadly in arrears. Still, they were fairly legible, and Ruth quickly found what she was looking for: some more dreams of this nature. Not quite so super as the rat one, perhaps, but of similar import. She gathered them into a small pile, separate from the rest.

“Good idea,” said Martin, watching her approvingly. “We’ll sort them into categories according to highlights, regardless of age and sex … and mark with a star, Ruth, the really good quotes. Here—have a look at this one! The accountant chappie—
remember
?—who was hell-bent on convincing you that his mother actually
enjoyed
being depressed! Listen—how about this for a quote?—

“See if you can find some others, Ruth, on these lines. This is something I’ll need to go into in a big way—the Parasite Person trying to convince himself that he’s doing his victim a favour … trying to assuage his guilt feelings while continuing his meal….”

Between them, they found several to illustrate this theme: and then they moved on to examples—and there were many—of the
victims themselves feeling abject gratitude towards their
persecutors:
the “I don’t-know-what-I’d-do-without-him” Brigade, as Ruth labelled them.

It was fascinating. The two of them worked together like professional tennis players, in perfect rapport, backing each other up, anticipating each other’s every move.

Once again, Martin had that feeling of something almost
supernatural
being at work. Everything he tried to make fit,
did
fit … it wasn’t just those sub-atomic physicists and their particles after all; it was the Martin Lockwood Project too, the whole universe was going along with it, he was swimming with the tide of things. How else could the facts—quotes—everything—be falling into place like this, exactly as he wanted them? It was as if they came running at his command, gathering round like well-trained dogs at the sound of the master’s whistle. His mind seemed to have grown an extra dimension, it felt choked with light.

Some of the material, he knew, was still very hypothetical, and yet he did not feel that by presenting it as established fact he was giving way to temptation: rather that by following his instincts in preference to cold reason he had come out on the royal road to truth, with every step he took bringing him nearer and nearer to the goal.

When at last they paused for a bread-and-cheese lunch, Martin poured them each a stiff drink.

“We deserve it!” he said, and they raised glasses.

“To your bestseller, with my name on it in gold letters!” cried Ruth, and added:

“What d’you bet, Prof, that within a year Action Man will have been ousted from all the toy-shops, and been replaced by Parasite Person?

“And the Gift Departments will be piled high with Parasite Mugs, and Parasite Place-Mats …!”

They laughed exultantly, they clinked glasses: and now, joining exuberantly in the celebration, there came a shrill voice from the kitchen:

“Pretty Tweetie!” it yelled, “Pretty Tweetie, Pretty Tweetie!”

Tweetie was loving his new life, full of clear sounds, bright
daylight, and life surging all around him. He’d never known anything like it:

“Pretty Tweetie! Pretty Tweetie! Pretty Tweetie!”

“What’s that?” said Ruth sharply, setting her glass down almost with a bang, so that it slopped over a bit on to the polished table. For some reason, it didn’t occur to Martin to tell a lie.

“Oh, that’s the Timberley budgie,” he said carelessly. “Helen brought it over.”

“
Helen
brought it? Why did she do that?” and now Martin did begin to sense that he had put a foot wrong.

“Well, because …”

He stopped, not so much from nervousness—though by now he was indeed nervous—as because he truly couldn’t remember. Some terribly boring reason it had been, concerning a neighbour and somebody’s two cats: not at all the sort of thing he was in the habit of listening to, let alone remembering. By now, the only thing he could recall about the wretched bird was that he’d been agin-it, and that Helen had coaxed him into acquiescing.

“Well …” he began again, still wondering how he was going to go on: but luckily Ruth didn’t press her question. Quietly, she walked out into the kitchen, and stood staring at the creature for long minutes, her eyes so wide, so dark, that Martin wondered momentarily if she suffered from bird-phobia. There was such a thing, he knew, but somehow Ruth didn’t seem the sort of person who’d suffer from it.

And nor she was. Hardly had the possibility crossed his mind than she gave a short laugh.

“How very peculiar of her!” she commented. “Whatever did she want it for?”

Martin missed the veiled threat in the question.

“Oh, well, there was no one to look after it, you see,” he explained easily. “With the Timberleys both being dead, she thought …”

“
Dead
?”

Even before Ruth’s interjection, Martin had realised his
mistake
; but it was too late.

“So
that’s
what she told you, was it?” Ruth exploded. “That they
were both dead? She’s been spying on me, hasn’t she, that whore of yours? She’s been checking-up on my interviews! And
you
’
ve
been putting her up to it, you must have done!”

“I have not!” Martin’s outrage was genuine: never would he have employed Helen in such a role. “I wouldn’t dream of it! When have I ever checked on any of your interviews? As a matter of fact, I thought your Timberley interview was superb—I told you so at the time. It never crossed my mind to question it, you know that very well. As to Helen—she got the wrong end of the stick, that’s all … listening to idle gossip … a garbled story from some garrulous neighbour …. she’s not trained for this kind of work the way you and I are….”

Noting that Ruth seemed slightly mollified by the implied compliment, Martin set himself to follow up this small success by further blandishments. He assured her, over and over again, that his confidence in her integrity was absolute; and he attempted, too, to convince her that Helen’s visit to the Timberleys had been entirely innocent, a simple errand of mercy born of a
misconception
.

“She didn’t even know you’d
done
any interviewing there,” he affirmed, hoping against hope that this was true—since the
interview
in question had been lying about on his desk for days, there could be no certainty about it—“so do please stop worrying about it, my dear.”

Whether Ruth had indeed stopped worrying about it was hard to tell, but at least she stopped talking about it: a big improvement from Martin’s point of view, and one which enabled them to get back to work, and to spend the rest of the afternoon in a reasonably profitable manner.

After Ruth had gone, Martin still worked on, through the evening and far into the night. The glory of inspiration was still upon him, and when all possible preparations for the TV interview were completed, he threw himself into finishing Chapter I of his bestseller. This, together with the now completed synopsis, was to go this week to the lucky, lucky publisher he’d selected from the
Writers
’
and
Artists’
Yearbook.
It was a somewhat different synopsis from the one he’d submitted to his supervisor, but what the hell?
He no longer cared a damn what his supervisor thought or didn’t think, for Fame was already within his grasp, thesis or no thesis. He was on his way.

A
FTER THE UNFORTUNATE
contretemps about the Timberleys, Martin had been afraid that Ruth would turn up in a bad mood the next morning, and that he would have to devote valuable time to bringing her round. So he was greatly relieved when she walked in looking quite her old self.

“I’ve come to blackmail you,” she said. “I want £55,000.”

Martin stared. She was joking, of course.

“Otherwise,” she continued, settling herself comfortably in her usual corner of the settee, “otherwise, I’ll tell them. The whole bloody bunch of them. Your supervisor—your publisher—all those editors—I’ll tell them that the whole thing’s a fraud. That you’ve cooked your evidence … that your interviews are all fakes….”

Too dazed to take in the full implications of what she was saying, Martin pounced on the one thing which could be clearly
challenged
.

“Fakes? What do you mean, they’re all fakes? Hell, you did them yourself, nearly all of them …!”

“Yes. That’s how I know,” she explained, pleased with her own logic. “I made them all up, you see, every single last one of them. That’s why I can say with such absolute authority that they
are
fakes….”

“But … Hell …!” Martin reeled, struggling for words. “In that case, it’s
yourself
you’re condemning …!”

“Not so, Prof, and you know it! It’s
your
job to see that your assistants don’t cheat, not theirs! You should have checked up on
me. You should have done call-backs. You know quite well you should; then none of this could have happened.”

The self-righteous note in her voice as she administered this reproof was insufferable. Martin stood speechless, dumb with shock, unable to collect his wits. She was joking. She must be joking.

“All those faked sources, too,” she continued, in the same quite pleasant tone. “You think I didn’t know? You think a poor dumb drop-out like me wouldn’t be able to figure it out? Believe me, Prof, I’ve done enough grubbing in libraries to know that you
couldn’t
have tracked down that much in a single afternoon—and from a dozen different disciplines, too! It would take half a year. Even a dumb second-year drop-out knows the score to
that
extent.

“Besides, I went along and checked out a few of them.
Funny,
I thought, so many articles from defunct, out-of-print journals? And that’s what your supervisor’s going to think, too, when I call his attention to it.
Funny,
he’s going to think …”

“My supervisor …” Martin stopped. His heart was racing but he managed to keep his voice calm, even authoritative. “If I were you, Ruth, I’d keep him out of this. There’s such a thing as trust, you know—or maybe you don’t, but there is. Trust between colleagues. He wouldn’t listen to you. He’d never dream of
checking
on every tiny detail of my work just on your say-so! A man in my position, too! It would be … well … undignified …!”

“And how! That’s been my thinking, too!

“But look, Prof, it doesn’t
have
to happen. None of it has to. Once I’ve got my £55,000, I’ll not only keep quiet about the swindle, but I’ll positively back you up in any further lies you like to tell. And that’s a promise. I’m a good liar, as you must have noticed. A top-ranking, experienced, bare-faced liar, and a sweet, innocent young girl with it; they’ll never suspect
me.
We can’t lose.

“So come on, Prof, the money, please.”

She reached out her brown little hand, with its childishly bitten nails, pulled open the third drawer down of his desk, and handed him his cheque book.

Joke or not, this was too much. How the hell did she know which drawer to look in, anyway?

“Leave my things alone!” he commanded. “Shut that drawer at once!”

She obeyed instantly; and a little reassured by this—it gave him the feeling of having regained the upper hand—he continued:

“What the hell makes you think I’ve
got
£55,000? What sort of salary do you imagine we poor bloody lecturers …?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care what salary you get, you can starve on it for all I care. No, it’s your house I’m talking about. Your half-share of the ‘Marital Home’—I saw the letters from the legal-freaks in your ex-wife’s desk; I had a quick decco while she was yapping on the phone one time. £110,000 it’s been valued at, and you’re getting half, right? £55,000 that comes to. She can do sums, too, this dumb little drop-out, she can actually divide by two, would you credit it?”

Here, once again, was something that he could contradict.

“I’m afraid, my poor child, that you’ve got it all wrong,” he said. “That’s what comes of poking and prying around in other people’s desks, you just come up with the wrong end of the stick. Let me give you a bit of reality on the thing. Those were just the preliminary letters that you found. Since then, we’ve decided—Beatrice and I—that it would be much simpler for her to keep the whole house in exchange for not getting any alimony.
She
doesn’t want to move, you see, and
I
don’t want to pay out good money to support her for the rest of her life, so it seems a good idea all round. She thinks she can make a living by taking in lodgers—
lodgers,
my God, she couldn’t even run the place decently for just the two of us, never mind lodgers—still, that’s her worry. And theirs too, of course, poor devils, but anyway not mine….”

He paused. Why was he confiding his private business to this treacherous little bitch who sat watching him with bright, bird-like eyes, head on one side, waiting for a chance to score off him.

He was
not
going to be intimidated. It was ridiculous. She couldn’t really have imagined she was going to get away with it.

“So you see, I haven’t
got
£55,000,” he concluded carefully, watching for her reaction.

“That so? Well, that’s your bad luck, isn’t it, Prof? It’s a shame, but this settles it. I’ll have to tell them. Has your publisher got the
manuscript yet?—Oh, a pity, I was going to start with him, but it would be nice for him to read it first, wouldn’t it? So okay, I’ll start with ‘
Psychology
for
Everyone
’,
and the rubbish you wrote for them about ‘Parasite Parenting’. That’ll have gone to press already, it’ll make them a laughing-stock, they’ll be charmed, won’t they? And then that Parapsychology Whatsit, who were so thrilled with your piece—I wonder how thrilled they’ll be
now
?
You know how hypersensitive they are to fraud in that racket, they need to be….

“I think I’ll leave your supervisor till last:
his
face when he hears it I want to relax and enjoy….”

So she
did
mean it. She really did. Martin’s heart was thumping so that it nearly hurt; he felt the sweat breaking out on his forehead. He had to fight to keep control.

“You realise that this is blackmail?” he said coldly. “And that blackmail is a criminal offence, almost equivalent to murder? You could get twelve or fourteen years in prison….”

She laughed, really amused.

“What,
me
?
You must be joking, Prof! I’m only a kid you know, hardly more than a child. Nothing I do is
my
fault, it’s my mother’s fault … or my Dad’s fault … or Society’s fault!
Someone’s
bloody fault, anyway, not mine. They shouldn’t have brought me up like that, should they? It
seemed
okay
at the time. It felt like a real good scene, but it couldn’t have been, could it, or I wouldn’t have turned out like this.

“So you see, Prof, I’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. I can push you to the limit—in fact, I could be real mean, and go
on
pushing you, whenever I felt like it. But I won’t do that, I’ll be content with a lump sum down here and now, and that’ll be the finish. Fifty-five thou, and we call it a day, right?”

“I tell you I haven’t
got
—”

“Oh, that’s what they all say! I’ve blackmailed people before, you know, Prof, and it’s my experience they always find the money somehow. Especially smug, swollen-headed middle-aged failures who can’t admit that they’re failures.
Or
that they’re
middle-aged
….”

“You must have struck lucky, then,” he retorted bitterly. “Not
all ‘middle-aged failures’ are like that. This one isn’t, for a start. This one is going straight to the police.”

She laughed again, delightedly.

“And tell them what? I can deny everything, you know. I can say I never worked for you at all—never did any interviews or
anything
. There’s no one to say I did. Since I never got paid anything, your Grants people will never have heard of me, and they’ll back me up when I say I’ve never had anything to do with it.

“Sorry, Prof, but I’ve got you over a barrel. You can’t prove a thing.”

It was ridiculous. There
must
be a way out.

“Okay, so the Grants people don’t know you’ve been involved in the survey: but lots of people
do.
Helen, for example. Right from the beginning she’s been …”

“If Helen interferes, I’ll kill her! I’ve had enough of that bitch’s interference, I told you! This is between you and me, Prof. No one else, okay?”

“You can say that, but you know, Ruth, it just won’t wash. All right, so we leave Helen out of it—and God knows the last thing I want is to have her dragged into such a sordid mess—but there’s a lot of other people who must know by now that we’ve been working together. Neighbours. The people downstairs. For weeks they’ve seen you coming in and out of the flat at all hours …”

“—At all the hours when your live-in girlfriend is safely out at her job! Be your age, Prof! Do you really imagine that they’re telling each other we’ve been
working
?
Or that they’ll tell the police anything of the kind either? Really, Prof, you want your head examined!”

Martin was cornered, and knew it. He could see only one—very despicable—avenue of escape.

“Walter,” he muttered, almost choking on the loathed name, “Walter knows that …”

“Oh,
Walter
!
Don’t worry about Walter, Prof, he’ll say whatever I ask him to say. He can tell them, for a start, that you never checked up on his interviews, either. Very obliging, Walter is, very imperturbable. With that big fat smile of his he’d make a perfect Parasite Person, if only there were such things. Pity! Leave Walter
to me, Prof, he’s not looking for trouble. Besides, he likes me. You wouldn’t think anyone could, would you?”

Martin cursed himself for ever having brought the wretched lad’s name into the discussion at all, especially in the role of potential saviour. The humiliation was awful. He’d never hit a woman before, had somehow never felt the need of it, but in this moment he could have smashed his fist into that blandly smiling little face and felt nothing but joy.

Rage, though, would get him nowhere, except perhaps into the police court. Nor, any longer, had he any authority left to wield. All that was left to him now was to plead with her. Humiliation could go on further.

“Look, Ruth,” he began, forcing himself to speak placatingly, reasonably. “Look, we’ve worked so well together so far … surely we aren’t going to let it end like this? We’re on the same
wavelength
, somehow … there’s been such rapport between us … surely you must have felt it …?”

“Of course I’ve felt it! You know what it consists of, though, don’t you? You know why it is we work so well together? It’s because we share the criminal mentality. Neither of us has a conscience of any kind at all. I can intimidate my loving parents by bogus suicide attempts into giving me a nice big allowance so I don’t have to work: you can perpetrate a bare-faced fraud on colleagues who trust you. Neither of us cares a damn about anyone in the whole world except ourselves, and that’s what has kept us together. The gangsters’ moll in me cries out to the gangster in you and gets answered every time, haven’t you noticed?

“That’s what we have between us, Prof; and if you give me that £55,000 we can go on having it. We could really go places, you and I. Both of us heartless, unscrupulous, totally without principles: the sort of people who will stop at nothing, who don’t hesitate to blackmail our dearest friends …”

She paused, watching this sink in.

“Well, how about it, Prof? If you don’t want to play, then just say so, and I’ll ring up all these people and expose you for the fraud you are. It’ll be fun—especially those television guys you’ve been getting so excited about. That’s going to be the biggest fun of all.
It’s a bit of luck, isn’t it, that you never asked them to put
me
in the programme, like I wanted you to? If you had, I couldn’t have done any of this. Could I?”

The
little
monkey!
So
this
was what the whole thing had been about! Not genuine blackmail at all, but just a mischievous trick to scare him half to death as a punishment for not getting her on to the programme!

He could have laughed aloud in his relief. The cheek of it! And she
had
scared him half to death, he had to hand it to her. Hell, he might have had a heart-attack, it had actually felt like that at one point.

Still, he couldn’t bring himself to scold her. He felt (as is not uncommon among victims) such a rush of gratitude for the cessation of his torments, that he quite forgot to feel any
resentment
towards his tormentor.

“You little
monkey
!” he said aloud. “You really quite took me in for a minute or two, and I don’t mind admitting it. I really thought you were serious! Look, I’m sorry, my dear, about the programme. For myself, I’d love to have you on it, you know that. Next time they ring me up, I’ll have a word with them about you. I promise you I’ll do what I can.”

What he could do was absolutely nil, of course: but, as everyone knows, it’s the thought that counts.