The ‘gut-buster breakfast’ at the Belvedere Cafe in Fetter Lane consisted of fifteen eggs, twelve sausages, ten rashers of bacon, twenty-two slices of fried toast, five black pudding slices, a catering-sized tin of baked beans and a tomato. op had chosen the slimline option which omitted the tomato and was in the process of licking his empty plate clean. He had been crying since taking his first mouthful and the egg yolk that had not yet surrendered to his tongue had dripped down the side of the plate onto his shirt and tie. Only four people had ever consumed the entire gut-buster breakfast and all of them suffered from severe personality disorders. When M ordered the same again, the cafe’s owner’s left hand had hovered over his telephone with thoughts of calling the local Mental Health Service emergency line, but he decided that having yet another customer sectioned for eating his food would, on balance, be bad for business.
Neither Daniel’s father nor his stomach actually wanted him to consume this tsunami of calories each day – this was not a diet, it was an assault – but his capacity for self-destruction outweighed his sense of self-preservation and his buttocks outweighed everything else.
It had not always been this way. As a child he had been sinuous and perpetually in motion, as much to evade his father’s fists as his mother’s embrace. He survived life in his parents’ world where there were a hundred different words for pain. He was not inherently aggressive, yet once he discovered that he could deliver violence as arbitrarily as he received it he could not stop.
Special occasions came and went as anonymously as pigeons on a telegraph pole in a home without empathy. On his twelfth birthday, he received a jar of marmalade from his sister, a tangerine from his brother and a brief period of armistice from his parents. Jonah had beckoned him over, handed him a package and retired to a safe distance as if it were a small bomb. M reasoned that it might be, but that would have belied the true nature of their relationship. To have made his son explode would have been a tacit admission that he cared enough to disassemble him. It was the absence of caring that made his slaps sting more than the weight of their delivery.
As M tore gingerly at the wrapping paper, he had to admit that the gift was not what he had been expecting, even from a father who slammed his own head repeatedly into the wall if he got a question wrong on University Challenge. It was a loaded 10mm Glock hand gun.
‘I want you to stop her,’ said Jonah, nodding towards Bernice, who stepped backwards as if she had been headbutted.
Jonah tutted as his son held the gun by the tip of its nozzle as if it were the leg of a tarantula that was rearing up to bite him.
‘I want you to stop her now.’ he shouted, yet despite its volume he could barely make his voice heard. Jonah and his children stood at either end of the floral patterned settee with the curry stain on the arm, but it felt like they were a thousand miles apart on a lake of ice which was cracking beneath their feet.
Shepherding his brother and sister behind him, M placed his hands around the pistol grip and pointed the gun first at his mother and then at Jonah but he was shaking too much to aim it – it was the weight of every broken promise that had ever been made to him.
Jonah wondered why the children were not crying, but tears were just another symptom of love and they were immune to it. He had devoured them from the inside until they were empty.
‘It’s been a while since we went dancing, Jonah,’ said Bernice, smoothing down her dress, her hands smearing a bloodied smile on the bleached white cotton. ‘Dancing is the only time you look at me with joy and hold me without malice.’
‘Kill her and then kill yourself,’ demanded Jonah, but when he looked down at the tattered carpet he could see that the ice below his feet had broken. When the bullet hit him in the head, he plunged downwards into frozen darkness.
The image of Jonah’s expression that night, like the face of his dead son, never left M. They were superimposed one upon the other, the features of each morphing and evolving. Today their eyes were the yolks of two eggs, their mouths were a Cumberland sausage and their noses were a rasher of fried bacon.
His second gut-buster breakfast only half finished, M looked into the eyes of the police constable who stood over him with the kind of disgust normally reserved for peculiarly spectacular roadkill. ‘Have you finished?’ asked the young officer somewhat uneasily.
Daniel’s father straightened the lapels of his police sergeant’s jacket with eggy fingers, put on his helmet, pushed the plate away and began the first of the fourteen stages involved in raising his audacious bulk from sitting to standing, each one ushered in with a different verbal obscenity.
‘You finish it for me,’ he snarled, grabbing the young officer by the scruff of the neck and smashing his face directly into the remnants of his breakfast.
For a second, just before his face hit the plate, the policeman thought he saw the face of a child staring back at him.