3

Eric

I got a letter from the Territorial Army asking me to return my uniform as soon as possible. I went round to the hall on Friday night with the uniform wrapped in a brown paper bag. They asked me to sign a paper. After that I waited to see if Bayonet would turn up but one of the men there said that he had stopped coming and that if I wrote to Wormwood Scrubs I might receive an answer.

The reason I had to surrender my uniform was that they had to cut down on the number of men. At least, that was what they said. But the real reason was because I didn’t get on with Sergeant Dawes. When he said turn right I turned left, and when he said shoulder arms I dropped my rifle. Sergeant Dawes said that I was thicker than the thickest man he had ever met and he reported me. When I explained that my nerves were shot to pieces and tried to tell them the whole story, they didn’t listen. It was just that I couldn’t concentrate properly, I knew that. Anyway, I wasn’t going to make a fuss over something as silly as the Territorials.

When I got home, Matt was lying on the bed. He was smoking a cigarette and looking up at the ceiling. I opened the window. It was nearly dark. The dog was lying face down on the concrete, gathering his strength for the night ahead.

‘It’s bloody chilly in here,’ Matt said.

‘It’s the smoke from your cigarettes,’ I said. ‘We must get some fresh air.’

He didn’t argue with me. Ever since our fight he hasn’t argued very much. Ever since then he’s seemed more subdued and less energetic. I hadn’t wanted to fight, of course. But when he had looked at the nylon cord I’d bought and sneered at it in that funny way he has, then I just lost my temper. For a minute I couldn’t seem to see properly, blood rushing before my eyes, and I grabbed hold of him by the neck and banged his face into the table a couple of times until his nose was bleeding. After that we’d shaken hands because that was what he wanted. Since then he’s been different towards me in a kind of way.

He turned his face to the wall. It was about nine o’clock, too early to go to bed and too late to do much else.

I put on the kettle and made some tea and gave him a cup. It wasn’t just the way he’d sneered at the nylon that made me hit him. It was more than that. When he’d come at first I thought that all my troubles would soon be at an end. He was going to kill the dog. He was going to hide the carcass. But he didn’t do anything and seemed to be putting the whole thing off all the time and my suffering was getting worse and worse. So that was why I lost my temper.

But people are like that. You can never really tell about a person. They’re so disappointing.

‘You make a stinking cup of tea,’ he said.

‘It tastes all right to me,’ I said.

‘Your taste is in your arse.’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I’ve been making tea for years. I never see you make a cup.’

‘I’ve got better things to do,’ was all he said.

He lit another cigarette and looked about the room very restlessly, as if he would have liked to get up and smash something. I watched him carefully. He had been living with me for ten days. Ten whole days. And still the dog was alive, howling every night, moaning down there in the dark.

He picked up an old newspaper and started to read it. He’s smaller than me by about two inches and he’s very vain. He’s always ironing his trousers and washing his shirt and once he even asked me to buy a bottle of hair tint for him. I didn’t really want him in my room, but there wasn’t much I could do without causing another scene. I had picked him up in a public house at the other end of Cricklewood and he didn’t seem to have a home of his own to go to. At least he hadn’t mentioned one. He told me one or two things about his past, but not a great deal. He was once in the RAF in India before being transferred to the Army in Malaya. He was educated at a famous school and went to Oxford afterwards.

You can tell that he’s educated from the way he talks. He can put sentences together very well and he uses his hands a lot when he’s speaking. He’s killed dogs before. Or he says he has. But how I am supposed to know if that’s the truth? Once or twice he went down and measured the length of the wall and he’s covered sheets of paper with his calculations. But that doesn’t prove anything, does it?

‘How are the plans coming along?’ I asked.

‘Mind your own business,’ he said. ‘Who’s doing this job – you or me?’

‘You are,’ I said.

‘When I’m ready I’ll tell you.’

I nodded my head. That was how it went most of the time. When I asked how things were coming on he became abusive. I gathered the cups and saucers and washed them in the sink.

At half-past nine he said that he was going out for a bit.

‘For a walk?’ I asked. I felt like some fresh air.

But he just looked at me, put on his jacket and went down the stairs. When he had gone I sat on the bed and counted his cigarette ends. There were thirty-eight in the ashtray. I emptied them out. In the space under the sink were six empty whisky bottles.

But I had other worries apart from Matt.

King had called me into his office only the day before. For my second warning. ‘We don’t like to sack employees,’ he said. ‘But if your timekeeping doesn’t improve you’ll get your cards.’ I felt myself tremble in front of him. I tried to explain the situation and even outlined the plan to get rid of the dog, but all he said was something I couldn’t catch about the correct solution to every problem.

Afterwards in the canteen Benito came up and told me not to worry and Nigel and Charlie bought me a plate of fried eggs and chips. But my nerves were so bad that I couldn’t eat. I went into the lavatory, locked myself in and wept. I couldn’t stop crying. I dried my face with toilet paper and opened the window to get some fresh air. In the yard some of the men were kicking a ball about and I could hear them shout and laugh. I knew then that nobody else really cares about your problems the same way as you do yourself. It stands to reason anyway – you feel your own problems in a way that you don’t feel someone else’s.

I was sitting on the edge of the bed when Agnes came into the room. Her face was heavily made up. I could hardly see her eyes for all the dark blue stuff that she had painted on.

‘Where’s Matt?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He’s only just gone out –’

‘On your lonesome, darling?’

She sat beside me on the bed.

‘He’s a bit of a lad, your Matt,’ she said.

She crossed her legs. Her knees were tight, white where the bone showed through.

‘Is he going to stop here much longer?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘I hope he does,’ she said. ‘He brightens the place up a bit.’

‘I suppose he does.’

She turned her head round and looked at me for a time, as if she was trying to size something up.

‘Now then, you seem down in the dumps, Eric.’

‘I don’t sleep much at night –’

‘Oh, that.’

‘My nerves,’ I said.

She patted me on the knee.

‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘It can’t get any worse. I was talking to Mrs Peluzzi only yesterday, you know. She seems to have perked herself up a bit lately. She doesn’t wear that drab old black dress any more. Still, I expect she’s over the worst by this time.’

I got up from the bed and walked to the window. It was now completely dark outside. The lamp in the lane hadn’t come on and it was impossible to see very far. But when I looked down I was sure I could just make out the dog’s shape. He was moving about. Like a great black insect.

And then it happened again. For the second time in two days I started to cry. I couldn’t stop myself from doing it. The tears just rolled over my face. All at once it seemed as if everything had piled itself up on top of me, like a huge weight on your brain, and I had to cry.

Agnes put her arms round my shoulders.

‘There, there,’ she said. ‘Who’s being a big baby? Is Eric being a silly boy?’

We sat down on the bed and she held my hand, patting it.

Ever since I had come to this room my life seemed a mess. It was all the dog’s fault, I knew that, but it didn’t stop there. It interfered with my work, I was losing my good reputation. Only the other day I had spent a whole morning folding the cardboard back to front inside the boxes. One hundred and fifty-eight boxes, all wrong.

‘Feeling better now?’ Agnes said.

There was a horrible pain, like a lump, in my chest.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s all right.’

When she had gone I took a couple of drinks from Matt’s whisky. After that I felt a bit better. I opened the window and shouted down at the dog.

‘You’d better make the most of your noise, you black bastard.’

Then I lay on the couch and closed my eyes. I opened them later when I heard the dog bark. I sat up. Matt hadn’t come back. The room seemed funnily empty.

I took another drink of the whisky and added some water to the bottle so that he wouldn’t notice.

He came in just before one o’clock.

His clothes were untidy and he looked tired. Without saying anything to me he fell on top of the bed.

‘Did you have a nice time?’ I asked.

But he didn’t answer. He opened his whisky and held the bottle to his mouth.

‘Where did you go to?’ I asked.

‘Stop your bloody silly questions,’ he said.

‘I’m only trying to be friendly,’ I said.

I could hear the dog moan from the yard and the sound of his chain banging at the wall as if he was leaping up and down. Why didn’t he kill the animal? What was he waiting for? I mean, he could hear it just as well as me – why didn’t he destroy it?

I covered my ears with my hands.

‘I’m not in a very friendly mood,’ he said.

I watched him swallow some more whisky.

‘Agnes was looking for you,’ I said.

‘Sod Agnes.’

I lay flat out on the couch and closed my eyes. The noise of the dog seemed somehow to be inside my brain. Matt turned out the light and I could hear him toss and turn on the bed. My bed. I had not shared a room with another person for years. The last time was when I first came up to London, before I found my first lodgings, when I had spent the night in a house in Camden Town. It was a sort of dormitory with wooden partitions and bunks. The man in the bunk below kept going through my clothes for money, but I had everything valuable under my pillow, just in case. When he hadn’t found anything he grabbed hold of my arm and started to swear. I knew I could trust Matt not to steal anything. He had been too well-educated for that.

I listened to the dog as I always did. Then, since I couldn’t sleep, I walked quietly up and down the room. I wanted to put the light on but that would have woken him up, so I walked round in the dark.

I felt inside my coat for a bottle of codeine tablets that I’d bought, because I’d heard that they helped you to sleep. Instead of finding the bottle, I found a package. I pulled it out and realised that I had mistaken Matt’s coat for my own in the dark.

I know I should have put it back without looking at it. But I didn’t. I went out of the room and across the landing to the toilet and I sat down on the seat and looked at what I’d found.

There was an old newspaper wrapped round something else. I opened it. Under the paper was a stack of money bound with an elastic band. I spread the money on the floor and counted it. There was almost three thousand pounds. I’d never seen so much in my whole life. Three thousand pounds. Once my mother had won seventy in The Spastic Society raffle. But this was three thousand. I just sat there, staring at it. And then I wrapped it all up again and weighed it in my hand. I wondered what he was doing with all that money, but I didn’t like to think about it. It was his business, nothing to do with me. I wouldn’t pry into someone else’s affairs.

Still, it was a bit odd.

I unlocked the door and went back to my room. I put up my hand to his coat and tried to shove the package back into his pocket.

The next thing, the light had been turned on. He was standing there in his underpants, staring at me. I was holding the money in my hand.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

He spoke very slowly, like someone in real anger.

‘It was a mistake,’ I said.

‘Did you open that paper?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I had this tight, tight feeling in my chest. Like panic, or fear.

‘What did you do that for, Eric?’

He was breathing very slowly, his whole body rising and falling.

‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’

He came closer. I stepped back.

‘I came here to do you a favour, and you repay me by rifling through my private belongings –’

‘It was a mistake,’ I said.

‘What did you see in that parcel?’ he asked.

‘M-money,’ I said.

He was standing about a foot from me. I looked at his hands. The blood had run out of his fingers and his knuckles were white.

‘A lot of money?’

I nodded my head. I could hardly speak.

And then suddenly he smiled.

‘It isn’t my money, of course,’ he said. He fumbled around and found a cigarette. He was shaking. ‘It belongs to someone else, you see. I have to look after it for him. That’s all. That’s all there is to it.’

‘I knew it would be something like that,’ I said. ‘I mean, you wouldn’t be here for twenty pounds, would you, if you had that much money?’

We both laughed for a bit. And then he slapped me on the back.

‘Look, I’m sorry if I’ve been speaking to you a bit roughly recently. It’s just that I’ve got a lot on my mind at the present. You can understand that, can’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘There’s the plan for killing that wretched dog for a start.’ He had his arm round my shoulder. ‘Well, that’s a grave responsibility. Not to be treated lightly. Let’s have a drink.’

He poured whisky into two cups and we sat together on the couch and drank it.

‘You mustn’t think I’m wasting time, Eric,’ he said. ‘The fact is – and I’m speaking plainly now – we don’t want to botch the job, do we? The last thing we want is a balls-up. We’ve got our backs to the wall at the moment, I’m aware of that. But we need courage, that’s all. Courage will see us through the days ahead. So you must forgive me if I’ve been a bit short with you lately. We creative people – well, we’re inclined to have short tempers.’

‘I understand that,’ I said.

‘I knew you would.’

He filled my cup again. I was beginning to have this drowsy feeling. He talked a bit more. He mentioned Dunkirk and how the British nation had its back to the wall then and how they won through in the end. I didn’t take it all in. The whisky had gone to my head. It was a pleasant floating sort of feeling.

When he put off the light I lay with my eyes closed.

He said, ‘We’re killing a dog, Eric. We’re taking a life. It isn’t to be treated as a joke.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

Somehow the noise seemed less of a nuisance that night. I didn’t expect to sleep but I did. I woke from time to time, but never for very long.

The sound came from a great distance. It was like the sea in one of those shells you hold to your ear. It must have been the whisky and the way Matt had spoken so frankly about his schemes.

2

In the morning I was just about to get out of bed when I remembered it was Saturday and I didn’t have to go to work. I opened my eyes and lay there staring up at the ceiling. Sharing a room with somebody when you’re used to being on your own is a funny sort of experience. At times I didn’t want him there, because I had gotten used to being on my own and he seemed to be in the way. And at other times I liked having him, especially when he was friendly as he had been last night.

After a time I sat up and looked round the room. The clock on the mantelpiece said it was ten-thirty. Matt had made the bed, but he wasn’t in the room. I put on the kettle and boiled some water for coffee. When I was sitting down drinking Roderick came into the room.

‘Do I smell coffee?’ he asked.

He went over to the stove and made himself a cup and then he came and sat down beside me.

‘I suppose that the dog is still alive,’ he said.

I looked at him. With Roderick you have to be careful, because his mood changes so much. Sometimes he whistles and laughs a lot and sometimes he stands at the window tapping his fingers on the glass and says nothing.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But not for much longer.’

He shook his head. His long hair moved up and down and the white ribbon swung back and forward.

‘Doesn’t it strike you as rather strange that your friend hasn’t got round to doing the job yet?’

‘Strange? But you can’t rush a thing like this. You have to plan it very carefully. That’s what was wrong with the way I was tackling it, you see. I didn’t plan it out properly.’

‘Mmmm,’ he said. He was deep in thought. He got up and walked about the room. And then he said, ‘But it’s just a matter of going over the wall and doing it, isn’t it? I can’t see any need for planning anything.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. Matt says that you must have a scientific approach to the problem. If you rush in, then there’s no telling what will happen –’

‘He could hardly be accused of rushing, could he? He’s been here – what? – for over a week, and he hasn’t really done anything, has he?’

I looked at Roderick carefully. For someone of his intellect, he was really very slow on the uptake sometimes. I started to explain carefully and slowly but I could see that he wasn’t listening closely because he had started to tap his fingers on the table.

‘And your friend’s making plans, is he?’

I got out the sheets of paper that Matt had written his calculations on and showed them to Roderick and he looked at them for a time, scratching his head.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Well, well, well.’

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Nothing.’ He returned the sheets to me and then went to the window. ‘I must say that I don’t understand the figures. They’re a bit deep for me.’

‘They’re a bit deep for me too,’ I said.

‘What I don’t understand is why he visited Mrs Peluzzi the other day. I mean, you just don’t visit a woman if you’re planning to kill her dog, do you? Or do you?’

He turned and looked at me. Mrs Peluzzi? Matt?

‘I don’t believe that,’ I said.

‘I saw it with my own two eyes, man,’ he said. ‘I was coming down the street and there he was – coming out of her house. He had on his coat and the collar was turned up. He looked like Edward G. Robinson.’

‘No, you must be mistaken.’

‘I’m not infallible, I admit. But I don’t think I’m mistaken. He came out of her house and then he hurried into this one. I’m certain.’

I stared at the sheets of paper.

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ I said.

Roderick picked up his cup and drank some of the coffee. Then he made a face. ‘Perhaps that’s part of his plan.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That might explain it.’

We looked at each other in silence. I thought about the mad woman next door and then about Matt, but I couldn’t picture them together, it was difficult to know what they might have talked about, or even why he had gone there.

Roderick said, ‘Perhaps you better speak to him about it.’

I said, ‘He knows what he’s doing.’

After Roderick had gone I put on my clothes. When Matt had come at first he had just stayed in the room every night and even when I asked him if he wanted to go for a walk or to the café in Cricklewood Lane he’d said that he didn’t want to. And then, a few nights ago, he started to go out. He didn’t say where he went. When I asked him, he wouldn’t tell me. Mind you, I didn’t pry, and I didn’t want to push the matter because a person will tell you a thing only when he wants to and not before. Had Matt been visiting Mrs Peluzzi? I wondered. Had he? I wouldn’t say that I didn’t trust Roderick’s eyesight, it’s probably as good as mine, but perhaps he had imagined the whole thing.

I went down into the street and stood outside the house. There was a bench on the other side of the street, just a little way down, and I went over and sat there. From that position I could watch Mrs Peluzzi’s.

An old man sitting next to me said,

‘The weather’s breaking, I see.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘When it breaks we’ll all be better off.’

I fidgeted about on the bench. I knew I was prying, sitting there and watching to see if Matt came out of the house, and I felt unclean. After last night, when he had spoken about his plans and his difficulties, I trusted him. After all, he had been honest with me, he had been open, he hadn’t tried to hide any of the difficulties and he hadn’t tried to say that everything was going to be easy. He had been perfectly frank, and frankness in people is very rare. Now I was sitting there spying on him.

The old man said, ‘There used to be more sparrows about a few years back.’

‘Well, times change,’ I said. You’ve got to patronise old people and agree with everything they say.

‘Mind, we’ve got more pigeons than we ever had before.’

I was just going to say what I thought about that when Matt appeared. He came down the steps of Mrs Peluzzi’s. He had the collar of his coat turned up just like Roderick had said. He hurried into number fourteen and closed the door behind him. I got up from the bench and walked to the house. What was I going to say to him? I didn’t know.

When I got into the room he was washing his handkerchief at the sink. The basin was full of water and the handkerchief was floating about just under the surface, like a white, flat fish. It was covered with blood stains.

‘I cut my face,’ he said.

There was a wound on his cheek, like a long scratch mark.

‘You’ll need some plaster.’ I got the Elastoplast box out of the cupboard and gave him a long piece which he put over his cheek.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘I walked into something sharp,’ he said.

I sat down on the couch and looked at him. He rinsed the handkerchief in cold water, squeezed it out, and then laid it flat on the draining board.

‘The plaster will heal it,’ I said.

‘Will it?’ he said and touched his cheek. ‘What a remarkable little invention.’

‘It’s very useful,’ I said. I kept getting this image of him and the mad Italian woman sitting together in her room, chattering to each other.

He sat on the bed and lit a cigarette.

I said, ‘I was coming down the street just now when I thought I saw you.’

‘You might have done,’ he said.

‘I thought I saw you coming out of Mrs Peluzzi’s.’

He looked at me a moment as if he was surprised and then he laughed.

‘So. You’ve discovered my secret.’

‘You were in Mrs Peluzzi’s, weren’t you?’

He took a draw of his cigarette and looked over at the window. After a time he said, ‘I didn’t want to alarm you, Eric. I didn’t tell you that I’ve been seeing her because I didn’t want you to jump to the wrong conclusions. Who knows, you might have got hold of things in quite the wrong perspective.’ He took a drink from his whisky bottle. Drips of blood ran down under the piece of plaster.

‘I don’t think I understand,’ I said.

‘It’s perfectly simple,’ he said. ‘I intend to plan this assassination in a military manner. I intend it to go off like clockwork. Like a bloody well-oiled clock, if you see what I mean. I have, if I may say so, vast experience of military procedure. And an elementary step in this kind of logic is to make your enemy think that he has nothing to fear from you, that you are in fact a friend. In this way you lull him into a false sense of security and at the same time provide yourself with a perfect opportunity for probing, exploring and assessing his various weaknesses. This is exactly what I’m doing in the case of Mrs Peluzzi, you see. Now, do you follow all that?’

I thought about it for a bit. I had to admit that it was complicated, but that it sounded a very good idea.

‘That’s marvellous,’ I said.

‘It’s cunning,’ he said. ‘Nothing more, nothing less.’

‘What do you say to her?’

‘Oh, we talk on endless topics, Eric. But I always bring her back to the dog in the end.’

I went to the window and looked down. Rex was asleep, his great black head between his paws.

‘Why does she keep him in that yard all the time?’ I asked.

‘Because she doesn’t want him indoors,’ he answered.

That was reasonable, I thought. I sat down. We didn’t say anything for a long time. He was lying on the bed smoking, looking up at the ceiling.

I said, ‘She’s mad, isn’t she? She’s off her head.’

He looked at me and smiled.

He said, ‘It looks that way.’

3

My mother used to say never trust a living soul. You’ll only regret it. I thought about this when I was looking at Matt. He fell asleep on the bed though it was just afternoon. His mouth was hanging open and he was snoring a bit and blood was dripping out from under the Elastoplast.

I mean to say, it’s funny how someone can just walk into your life and no matter what happens, nothing can ever be the same again. Ten days ago I’d never even heard of Matt Churchill. And now there he was, lying on my bed in my room, sleeping. I walked over to him and looked down. Like a baby. Sound asleep. I could easily have choked him to death without a murmur, if I’d wanted to. Because when you’re asleep you can’t feel anything. You can’t struggle properly until you’re awake, so you’re at a disadvantage right away. I touched his shoulder, but he didn’t move.

The skin of his face is smooth and pink and when he shaves he cuts right into the roots of the hair so that his flesh always has this same smooth look. The lids of his eyes have little veins on them, running up and down and crisscrossing. His hair is brown and black, brown at the sides, black from the front to the top and then brown again. His fingers like his face are smooth and pink, not at all like mine, which are hard and corny. When I compared myself to him, he seemed very superior.

I went and sat on the couch and drank some of his whisky. I would never have touched the stuff before he came to the room. Now it tasted good and warm. I poured some into a cup and went to the window and looked out.

Agnes was in our yard hanging clothes on a line. First she hung a skirt and then a corset and then several pairs of knickers. The light came up through the thin material, showing the stains that hadn’t quite been washed out. Now and then when the wind blew, the knickers moved as if there was little legs dancing about invisibly inside them.

When she bent down to the basket I saw that her skirt ran up her buttocks. But the area was covered in shadow and I couldn’t see anything. Then she went indoors.

Never trust a living soul. You’ll only regret it.

Had my mother been bitter when she’d said that?

Matt was still asleep on the bed. I took another good look at him. It’s a funny thing, but when he’s asleep all the strength goes out of his face just as if it’s never there in the first place. As if under all his talk there isn’t really anything else. What a stupid thing to think.

I’m always thinking stupid things. I see now that all my life I’ve had stupid thoughts. But I hadn’t known before. I mean, I hadn’t known until Matt came. He plans everything out, you see. Every single move he works out in advance. Nothing is left to chance. He thinks. When did I ever think?

Once, I remembered working out that the universe must be infinite. It must just go on and on, for ever and all time, and endless darkness. When you think about that everything else seems so silly and pointless. Well, it does. I mean, the business about the dog. It seems so small and tiny compared with the universe. It seems so frail. If you were up there, at the farthest comer of the universe, you wouldn’t hear him bark, would you? You wouldn’t even think about it, and if you did think about it you’d say to yourself, Bloody ridiculous.

When I looked out of the window and saw Rex in the yard next door I thought, Bloody ridiculous. It only needed one knife in his neck or a cord pulled tightly and that would be that. That would be the end of everything for him.

But he was still alive.

Never trust a living soul.

I looked at Matt and I wondered if I could trust him. Not just trust him to kill the dog but trust him in everything. In everything.

He opened his eyes and stared at me.

‘I hope you don’t mind me drinking a drop of your whisky,’ I said.

He said, ‘I didn’t know you drank.’

He got up from the bed and rubbed his face with his hands.

Looking at him I asked, ‘Can I trust you?’

He didn’t answer me straight off. He took out a cigarette and lit it and took a deep draw on it.

‘That’s a damned funny question,’ he said.

He picked up the whisky bottle and held it up to see how much was left.

‘I want to know,’ I said. ‘Can I trust you?’

It seemed all of a sudden very important to know the answer. I didn’t know what trust was. Didn’t really know.

He laughed. ‘Of course you can trust me, Eric. I’m surprised you even asked.’

That was all I wanted to hear, really, and now that he’d said it I didn’t know why I’d asked in the first place. But there you are. It had just suddenly filled my brain, like a huge light. Trust. I could trust him.

I finished my drink and lay down on the couch. I didn’t sleep but I felt myself sort of float about the room. I couldn’t really hear anything either. Bits and pieces of the afternoon light came through the window in a kind of broken way, breaking into the room. Peaceful. Matt was moving around but I didn’t look to see what he was doing.

Later, when I sat up I felt light-headed as if I was going to be sick. I ran cold water all over my face and pressed my head against the cool glass. Matt wasn’t in the room.

I could see him down there in the yard. Mrs Peluzzi’s yard.

Mrs Peluzzi was there too. They were talking together. At one point I saw him stroke Rex’s head. And I thought of how cunning he was and how clever of him to get so well in with the widow.

The dog licked his hand.

4

On the Sunday morning I walked to the shops to get the Sunday Mirror. There was a queue in the newsagent’s and because I had something of a hangover I waited outside until the shop was empty before going in. It was a stuffy little place that usually gave me a headache.

The little man behind the counter had my newspaper lying in front of him. I was a regular customer.

‘Well, Mr Billings,’ he said. ‘And how is work?’

I picked up the paper and put down my money.

‘Busy, you know,’ I said.

‘It’s a busy time of year,’ he said.

I looked at the headline.

‘More trouble in the Middle East, I see,’ the little man said.

Beside the headline was a picture of this girl in a swimsuit, kicking up splashes of water. The swimsuit was very small. It hardly covered her breasts.

‘You do look a bit rough this morning, Mr Billings. Been on the tiles, have you?’

‘I had a few drinks last night,’ I said.

He sucked in his breath and shook his head. I didn’t like him much. I always had the funny feeling that he was smirking all the time.

‘Drinks, whoooosh,’ he said, sucking away.

‘It’s a free country,’ I said.

‘I’m not denying that,’ he said. ‘But drinking. Well.’

And he shook his head some more.

I tucked my paper under my arm and went out of the shop.

Mrs Peluzzi was just going in.

For a moment we looked at each other. I didn’t know what to say. I kept thinking about the poisoned chop I’d thrown down one day in the hope that Rex would eat it, but he hadn’t. It had been a foolish thing to do. I mean, she could easily have gone for the police.

‘You,’ she said. ‘You.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘How you have the nerve to show yourself around this district is over my head, I swear it.’

She was wearing a lemon dress that made her look fat.

‘I don’t quite understand,’ I said.

‘You know damn well what I’m talking about,’ she said.

I shook my head. ‘No, honestly –’

‘My Rex,’ she said. ‘You want to kill him.’

I laughed. ‘He makes a bit of a noise at night, but –’

‘There is no noise,’ she said.

‘No noise! He keeps me awake every night, my nerves are shot to pieces –’

‘There is no noise,’ she said. And she tapped her head. ‘That’s where all your noise is.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘What do you think I’m saying?’ she said. ‘Huh? Huh?’

I stepped away from her. Obviously she was mad. Out of her head. There was this strange look in her eyes.

‘You will die before my dog does,’ she said.

I walked away quickly. I didn’t like the way she’d said that.

When I got into the room I was trembling. I opened the paper but I couldn’t read it.

I said to Matt, ‘I met Mrs Peluzzi just now.’

He looked at me, saying nothing.

‘She threatened me,’ I said.

He began to laugh.

You will die before my dog does. Well, that wasn’t any laughing matter. What was he laughing for?

‘It isn’t very funny,’ I said.

‘Where’s your sense of humour?’ he asked.

‘But she really threatened me. She really did.’

He laughed a little more. Then he took a drink of his whisky and passed the bottle over to me.

‘That should make you feel better.’

I drank some and it burned my chest.

He said, ‘You don’t want to take her too seriously, Eric.’

I said, because I was suddenly irritated by everything.

‘It’s high time that dog was killed.’

Matt didn’t answer.