5

Eric

Sometimes a thing like that just gets into your mind and stays there, eating away at you like a worm, eating through your brain right down into your guts until you can’t think straight about anything and everything seems to be centred round the awful feeling of emptiness. It happens sometimes. It happened to my mother. You see, she had this idea in her head that she was going to die of cancer and sure enough she did, she did, not that her drinking helped her much, it only made holes in her liver. But what I’m trying to get at is that because a thing gets into your head and stays there, you can’t do anything to get rid of it until in the end you become blind to everything else.

And that’s what happened to me.

It was what she said to me, you see. She said, You’ll die before my dog does. She actually said that. Well, with some people you could ignore a remark like that because it’s a joke or just an empty threat or even sheer carelessness, but not with her, not with Mrs Peluzzi.

It was the look in her face, the way her eyes came up mad and bright and fixed, not into my eyes, but in a way into the very depth of my skull. Mad, crazy eyes. You see eyes like that on Wanted for Murder posters. I felt scared. I wouldn’t have minded so much if Matt had put me at my ease, but he didn’t even try. He ignored it. He laughed. Oh, she’ll get you all right before that dog goes. That’s what he said.

When I came back with my paper that Sunday morning he seemed funny and sort of faraway, not really in the room, not really with me. But miles away. I told him what she had said. I told him. The words went round and round in my head and I was screaming them at him. But he didn’t listen. I felt like a ship signalling SOS on a dead radio with the storm battering against it, dragging it on to the rocks. I wanted to get down on my knees and ask for his help, for anything, anything to save me from her. But he was sitting there, looking up at the window, and his eyes were glazed.

I’m not easily scared. I know how to look after myself. But it was just as if she had laid the hand of death on my shoulder and said, Your time’s up. Say your prayers. It was just like the feeling men used to have when they were walking to the gallows and saw the faces staring up at them and seeing the shadow of the rope and knowing that in a minute they’d be dead unless something ridiculous happened like the trapdoor not working.

If I hadn’t gone for the paper, if I’d stayed in the room, if if if. But what’s the point in wishing? I had walked straight into her and heard what she said and saw that crazy look in her eyes. And now the words were running and running through my head. You’ll die before my dog does.

I looked out of the window. The dog was sleeping. You could just about see him, because he was tucked in near the wall. I didn’t want to die. I had my whole life ahead of me.

Of course you might say that I was being bloody stupid getting worked up over what a woman said to me. After all, she was weaker than me. I could have beaten her easily. If it came to a fight, I would’ve won. I know that. But it was that expression in her eyes. She really meant what she said.

Down there in the yard the dog was sleeping.

And then she came out. She had a big white bowl filled with chunks of red meat. She called the dog’s name and he jumped up, his ears all stiff, and she started to throw him the pieces. Raw meat. I felt sick. I went and sat on the edge of the bed. Matt was looking up at the window. He took out his whisky and gave me a drink.

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

It wasn’t funny. It just wasn’t funny. A man’s life isn’t a laughing matter. But I’ve noticed before that he treats things lightly sometimes. He should be more serious.

‘She threatened me,’ I said. ‘You could see she meant it. I’m not joking.’

I could hear her words buzzing about in my head like flies round a lightbulb. I closed my eyes and felt the whisky bum into my chest.

‘Roderick was looking for you,’ he said.

Roderick. I couldn’t stop to think about Roderick now. I opened my eyes. The room was moving about in front of me. It wasn’t every day that you got threats.

Matt was looking down inside his whisky bottle.

He had his eyes half-shut. I wanted to talk to him about the whole thing and make him see the seriousness of it all, but what was the point if he wouldn’t listen? I’d never felt so alone. When a thing like that happens, when a woman, an insane woman, stops you in the street and says she’s going to kill you, you expect your friends to support you. Otherwise, what are friends for?

But Matt wasn’t really my friend if he didn’t want to help me in my time of trouble.

I finished my drink and coughed.

‘You won’t think it a laughing matter when they fish my body out of the river,’ I said.

‘Ha-ha,’ he said, not looking at me.

I went to the mantelpiece and looked at the objects there. It was like I was already dead. I could picture somebody from the council going through my belongings, touching all these things that mean so much to me and then saying, Put these odds and ends into the garbage can. I didn’t want that to happen. Whenever I’ve felt lonely I’ve got some comfort from these bits and pieces, it might be childish, but I don’t think so. What’s wrong with liking things that you liked when you were a child just because you’re grown up? Nothing, nothing at all. These things mean a lot to me.

Then, a funny thing happened. I was looking at the golly when all of a sudden I saw her eyes burning away there. Not the golly’s own eyes, but her mad, hateful ones. I looked away.

Matt said, ‘I think I’ll go out for a bit.’

I didn’t ask where. I knew. He was going next door, to see her. He put on his jacket and looked at me. For a minute I just thought that he was going to reach out and help me, there was a sad sort of shine in his eyes, but he didn’t. He did nothing, he turned and went out of the room.

After a bit I went across the landing to see Roderick. He might listen. He might help. I knocked on his door. But there wasn’t any answer. I went downstairs and tried Agnes’s door. She came out, tying the cord of her dressing-gown.

‘What d’you want?’ she asked, all nasty.

I couldn’t speak. It was as if the world was empty all of a sudden. I couldn’t turn anywhere. And there was that echo in my head. I should’ve controlled it. I should’ve sat down and said. Stop, stop, forget it, it means nothing.

‘I’m busy,’ she said. ‘Stop mumbling and say what it is you want.’

I felt my mouth opening and closing but there was nothing to come out and she was staring at me in a hard way, her face sharp, staring, not trying to help. Then she shook her head and said,

‘What a bloody waste of time.’

She closed her door. I could hear her laugh. I went out on to the street and started to walk. I must have walked a long way. I found myself in a place I’d never seen before. It was an industrial estate. It was empty because it was Sunday. Everything was dead silent. I sat down on a wall.

At the end of the road, coming round the corner, I saw a woman with a dog on the end of a leash. I couldn’t move. It was ridiculous, but I couldn’t move a single muscle. She came nearer and nearer. I could do anything. Just look.

But it wasn’t Mrs Peluzzi. It was another woman altogether. And the dog was a black spaniel, not a mongrel.

‘Quiet up here,’ the woman said.

The dog lifted his leg and pissed on the wall.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘I say, you’re trembling.’

‘Ah,’ I said. It was all I could say. You can’t speak when there’s nothing but fear in your head. What was I supposed to say?

‘I can give you an asprin,’ she said.

She was a little woman with white hair and warts on her face. The dog sniffed my feet.

I got off the wall and walked away. You’ll die before my dog does. It kept running through me. It wasn’t just in my head. No, it was moving through my blood now, through my bones. It was everywhere. I came to a field and I lay down in the grass. I stared up at the sky. I remembered when I was a little boy we used to go on picnics and I’d lie in the grass and think about the length of the sky and how high it was and my father would stroke my head with his fingers. That was a long time ago. Another world, it seems now. Why do good things have to come to an end? That’s what puzzles me. When I was a boy I never had anything really bad happen to me. I never had anything like this.

I turned my face into the grass and started to cry. It came over me just suddenly. I couldn’t stop the tears from coming. My life was all buggered up. I could see that quite plainly.

Then a man and a woman came across the field and stopped beside me.

I heard the woman say,

‘Come away, James, he’s drunk.’

When they had gone I got to my feet. I walked slowly back the way I had come. I didn’t want to return to the room, in fact I wouldn’t have cared if I never saw that place again. I stopped on Cricklewood Broadway, not knowing which way to turn. I went into the café in Cricklewood Lane and ordered a Cornish pasty and chips but when the waitress brought it I couldn’t eat it. I just sat there staring at it and watching it get cold. I had a cup of tea which I drank down slowly.

I felt a bit better when I had drunk it and I thought to myself perhaps I was getting worked up about nothing. I mean, she might not have meant what she said. It might have been a kind of joke, although her eyes didn’t have a jokey look. Or it might have been her way of warning me to stay away from the dog. But I kept thinking about those eyes and what I’d seen in them and I knew that she had really meant it.

You can always get the truth out of a person’s eyes. Even if they’re good at lying and you can’t tell anything from their voice, you only have to look into the eyes to know what it is they really mean. I wished I hadn’t seen her look. I wished I had turned away when she’d spoken. I wished lots of things but what good was that now, what good was it to cry over spilt milk? I had seen her. And she had said to me, I could hear it all again, she had just come straight out with it, I am going to kill you. That’s what was going round and round in my brain. I am going to kill you.

I had another drink of tea. I was trembling and the waitress – the same waitress that looks at me funnily – was walking around the table sort of staring at me as if she expected me to do something odd, perhaps break cups, or start throwing knives around. After a time I had to get up and leave.

But I couldn’t face the room. I lived there. But I couldn’t go there. It gets like that sometimes. For lots of reasons, people don’t like going back to their rooms. Sometimes it’s because they’re lonely, living by themselves. But I had a much stronger reason really, I didn’t want to go back because I wanted to stay alive.

So I went into a public house and bought a glass of whisky. I was used to the taste of it by this time. It burned my chest and made me feel sick but once that part of it was over it made me feel warm and somehow stronger.

I saw my face in the mirror.

There were these great streaks of dirt down my face from where I’d been crying. I took out my handkerchief and wiped it clean. And then I finished my whisky and asked the barman for another one. I went over to a little table just under the window and sat down. I stared into the whisky and all I could see was the mad woman’s face.

Why? Why did she want to kill me? All right, I’d tried to finish off the dog by poisoning it but that didn’t call for her wanting to kill me. I’d only been joking anyway, I mean I knew that Rex wouldn’t have taken that chop, it was just a half-hearted effort, perhaps I should’ve ex-plained that to her at the time. But it was too late to tell her now. I’d gone beyond the point of going back and explaining everything to her. She wouldn’t have listened. Mad people never listen. Their ears are always tuned into something else.

Anyway, with the meat he got to eat he wouldn’t have sniffed at a mouldy old chop, he wouldn’t have given it a thought. Surely she knew that. Surely she could see that I wasn’t really serious. But she was going to kill me just the same. And that was all that mattered when you got down to brass tacks, that was all that really mattered in the end, she was going to kill me, she had said so. I’d heard her say it, right there outside Mutter’s shop. In broad daylight. You are going to die.

My fingers were shaking and my heart was banging away inside. It was like having a fever, a bad fever, something you can’t cure. My whole body just wouldn’t keep still. It was like hundreds of pulses all going at the same time. You are going to die. When you think about it, they’re funny words really. How can anybody say them and mean them?

I tried to get the whisky to my mouth but the rim of the glass was rattling against my teeth and the liquid was slopping over my fingers. Across the room I could still see my face in the mirror. I looked a wreck, just as if I’d been rolled around in mud.

How would she do it? How would she kill me? I didn’t like to think about it, it couldn’t do any good, only harm, but there it was in my head, the question How? I couldn’t get it straight. I couldn’t get it fixed into my brain somehow. It kept jumping about. How would she do it? She said she was going to. I could still hear it. There in broad daylight in the street on a Sunday morning with cars and people passing along, not knowing, not knowing what she’s said and what she means to do. But that’s it. When you’re a human being, you’re always alone. You’ve got nothing but your own problems and nobody can help you solve them but yourself. No, not even God. I mean that. He isn’t interested. I could’ve gone to someone passing in the street and said, She’s going to kill me, and they would have laughed and shrugged and just walked on. But that’s what life’s all about. There isn’t anything else.

I clasped my hands on my glass. Something solid, something solid, something to get a grip on because everything else was slipping away, just slipping and sliding away.

Matt could have helped, he could have said the right word and made me see the whole thing was just a poor joke, but he didn’t, did he? he didn’t care about what was going to happen to me, no, nobody gives a damn.

And then I remembered. I remembered it just like that. One of those things that jumped into my mind, something I’d forgotten all about. Once, I had gone with my mother and father to a carnival. I don’t remember where, in a big field, that’s all, and it was raining and the ground was muddy and I’d put a penny in a fortune-telling machine and placed my hand on a metal plate and a little card came out. It said, You will die a violent death. Just that. My father took the card and tore it. He dropped it in the mud. He put his foot over it and crushed it into the mud. I remembered looking at it. I was a child then. I didn’t know what it meant.

But I knew now. It came flooding into my mind.

I got another glass of whisky from the bar and went back to the table. I felt very cold. She might even have a gun, she was mad enough to have a gun. I tried to think what it would be like to have a bullet go into your brain, but the thought of blood made me sick. And the pain, what would the pain be like? And the feeling of light rushing away and darkness coming in, what would it be like?

No, she couldn’t. She couldn’t.

But she could. You had only to see her eyes to know.

A man in working clothes sat down at my table and rolled a cigarette. He kept looking at me, flicking his eyes up and down across my face. I tried to hold my whisky steady but I was already beginning to feel a bit drunk. It goes to your head quickly. Everything in my mind was jumbled about, everything about Mrs Peluzzi, the dog, the fortune card.

The man said, ‘Oi tink it looks loik rain.’

I didn’t understand what he said. I tried to get up from the table and walk away but my legs were weak and wouldn’t hold me.

‘Now then, steady on, steady on,’ he said.

I caught hold of the edge of the table. There was music playing Dum-da-didididi-dum.

‘Ye’ve had yerself a tot too much,’ he said.

I looked at him but his face kept coming and going, in and out, all blurred. I tried to tell him what was worrying me but the words were mixed up in my mouth and I couldn’t make any sense of all the things that were running through my head. He was grinning and at the same time licking the sticky side of his cigarette paper.

‘Oi’ve often thought to meself that Oi’d like to be murdered,’ he said.

That was what he said. Someone pushed open the door and I turned my head round slowly. There was this square of light. The man caught me by the elbow and helped me to the door. Outside it was very cold. The wind was blowing through me, right through me, as if there was nothing left of me but rags and bones.

‘Get yerself off home and straight into yer bed,’ he said.

I staggered off down the street. At the traffic lights a car nearly ran into me. The driver stuck his head through the window and said something unpleasant. But I didn’t stop to argue with him. I kept going. There was nothing else for it, no, I just had to keep going. Back to the room. There wasn’t another place in the world I could have gone to.

When I got in I fell on top of the bed. The room was spinning round and round and my head ached badly. I thought the ceiling was going to fall in. I got up and made a cup of tea and drank it standing by the window.

The dog was lying beside his bowl. Inside the bowl were bits and pieces of bone left over from his meal.

I hated the dog. But how could I die and how could he still go on living? It wasn’t right, there wasn’t any justice in it, but is there any justice in the world any more, is there, is there? I shook my head. The pain got worse. There was this buzzing noise, like a lot of voices going on and on at the same time, all trying to speak at once, like voices in an empty room. I pressed my head flat against the window and the glass was nice and cool.

The dog opened one eye. It was a horrible eye, mad and insane, and it rolled round the yard, glaring at every thing. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t stand by like this and let her get at me. What if she had a gun? What if she was going to stop me one dark night in the street and push the blade of a knife right through my ribs?

I banged my head against the window and one of the panes snapped like a piece of dry wood and the next thing I knew there was blood coming from my head. For one moment I thought I’d been shot and that the bullet had passed right through the glass and into my head but then I realised that I had broken the glass myself by pushing my head hard against it. I sat down on the floor and held my hands to the place and then I got a towel and pressed it hard against the wound. Only when the towel was soaked red did it stop bleeding. I felt sick and faint.

What had I ever done to hurt anybody? I had lived my life, that was all. I had minded my own business. But that wasn’t enough for some people. I never interfered. Live and let live. Because of that she was going to kill me. I couldn’t see it. Suddenly I was very blind. I couldn’t see anything or understand anything any more. I didn’t want to die. I was sorry, sorry, I was sorry in my heart for any pain I’d ever caused anybody but please, I didn’t want to die.

I looked through the broken glass at the dog. He was snapping his huge mouth open and shut. I couldn’t wait any longer. I just couldn’t wait. If she was going to kill me, then I was going to get that dog first, before any-thing else happened. It was all clear in a flash. I’d go down there and I’d get him.

I hunted out the piece of nylon cord and then went downstairs. I didn’t stop to think. The time for all that was past. Plans plans, fuck plans – they didn’t matter now.

I got over the wall, scraping myself to the bone, tearing my clothes, without seeing anything or thinking anything I got over the wall and dropped down on the other side.

The dog just blinked at me. I held out the cord. My eyes and my face were wet and my hands were shaking so badly that I could hardly hold the cord between my fingers and I even dropped it once.

It was just beginning to get dark.

I stopped for a minute and stood there. And then all of a sudden everything roared up inside me like a boil bursting, everything I had ever suffered on account of this animal, everything in my life came back on me like the smell of sick, and I shouted out, roared, and kicked the dog on the head with the tip of my boot.

The animal snarled and jumped away.

I rushed in. I could only see blackness and smell fur and feel everything that was going on inside me and nothing else mattered.

Nothing else mattered but crushing this dog until there wasn’t anything left.