Daniel’s grandfather Jonah shared the Hatred Cafe, in which he lived and worked, with a cat of indeterminate age and origin called The Treatment. Jonah had never liked cats, perhaps because he sensed that they alone could see through the thin veneer of his humanity into the wretched effervescing cauldron of animosity which dwelt below. When Jonah found that a cat had entered his home and was sitting in his armchair observing him with practised indifference and poorly suppressed incredulity at the human condition, he picked it up by its neck with a view to violently terminating this expression and the cat attached to it.
This was a mistake.
Jonah realised that this was a mistake because as he held The Treatment’s throat between his fingers, he saw the festering contempt for all of mankind which dwelt deep within its black, black eyes; a hatred that was gothic in its intensity. What helped Jonah to concentrate on The Treatment’s expression were the claws which were imbedded in his eyebrows. Jonah was attached to his eyebrows but so too, in a literal sense, was the cat. On reflection he returned The Treatment to his armchair and the cat, in turn, returned Jonah’s eyebrows to his face.
It came as something of a surprise to Daniel to discover his grandfather’s telephone number in his father’s address book since he had been under the impression that Jonah was dead.
‘Did you kill grandfather?’ asked Daniel that afternoon, when it became apparent that his father had nothing planned that would be especially injurious to his health.
‘Yes,’ said M.
‘Only I called him an hour ago and he’s coming round to see me.’
M reflected for a moment, running his hand around the circumference of his catastrophic girth.
‘It would appear that he’s not as dead as I might have suggested.’
*
Jonah stood on M’s doorstep, hopping from leg to leg, like a four-year-old in need of the toilet, in an effort to contain the internal combustion engine that dwelt between his ears.
‘Boy called me, told me he had some questions needed answering,’ muttered Jonah. ‘Thinking of taking him to the cafe.’ His flammable expression suggested that he was afflicted with a personality disorder of arrogant potency.
M had not seen his father, the familial despot who turned his childhood into a booby trapped obstacle race, since his twelfth birthday when he had almost ‘funeralised’ him with his own gun. To entrust his son to this savage ghost, even for an afternoon, was to be complicit in the promulgation of his wicked credo and would be an act of unprecedentedly imaginative neglect even by M’s recklessly low standards.
‘Be my guest,’ said M. ‘Get him back in time for his tea.’
*
Jonah transported Daniel to the Hatred Cafe in an aged Zephyr with plastic bench seats and a passenger door which was held on to the body of the car with gaffer tape. Every time Jonah took a corner at speed – and he took every corner at speed – Daniel slid down the bench seat towards the broken passenger door clinging to Jonah’s headrest maniacally. Jonah did not believe in braking, both because he considered it to be a sign of cowardice and because the car did not technically have any brakes.
Once deposited in the apartment above the cafe, Jonah ushered Daniel to the ‘dining’ area – an array of random tables and chairs which would have embarrassed a school jumble sale, clustered around an ancient armchair. Daniel was transfixed as much by the pitch and yaw of the day as the way the soles of his shoes had stuck to the slick of green and orange patterned lino which covered the floor and the newspapers, scrawled with giant blood-red words, which had been stuck to the walls. He picked his way over to the armchair through the viscous half light and gingerly sat down.
The Treatment, who had been on a rare foray into the outside world to fulfil toilet-related obligations, stopped in his tracks and stared at Daniel in disbelief.
‘Get out of the armchair now,’ said Jonah so loudly that it made Daniel shrink back into it.
A bead of sweat had trickled down between the eyes of The Treatment, along the rift valley of scars that traversed his nose and on to his chin where it hung like a flawed diamond before plopping onto the floor. His eyes were visceral pools, every sinew tensed to strike.
It took fully ten minutes to unpick the claws of The Treatment one by one from Daniel’s chest and all the while the cat emitted a low, almost imperceptible growl.
‘That will teach you to sit in another man’s chair,’ said Jonah.
*
Jonah settled down at the least precarious of the tables in the cafe and beckoned Daniel over to join him. In the semi darkness, Jonah’s face gained an ethereal quality reminiscent of a slightly mouldy Halloween pumpkin. He lit up a cigarillo, inhaled so deeply that his lips subsided completely into his face and leant forwards until his nose was almost touching Daniel’s.
‘What you wanna know?’ His question floated in a fug of cigar smoke.
‘Why is my father trying to kill me?’
‘That’s a weak question, boy. Why you asking it? My son wants to kill you he got his reasons. You want to stop him then stop asking old men what to do and take an axe to his head while he sleeping.’
‘Your son is trying to kill your grandson and that’s your advice?’
‘What you bleating about, boy? Count yourself lucky my son’s no good at killing. Tried to execute me when he wasn’t much older than you are now, bullet went in the side of my skull here,’ he pointed at a thumb-sized indentation on the side of his forehead, ‘came out here,’ he grabbed Daniel’s hand and held it against a giant crater in the base of his skull. ‘Took out a piece of my brain the size of a golf ball. Looks like you not dead either so he ain’t got no better at it. Now when I kill a man he stays killed.’ His grip on Daniel’s hand tightened and with their increased proximity it became apparent that his grandfather was somewhat unfamiliar with the concept of personal hygiene. ‘Murdered my first man with an ironing board because he looked at your grandmother the wrong way in a bar.’
‘Why?’ asked Daniel.
‘My father told me, never trust a man who cannot find violence in his hands. When I made mistakes he corrected me with his fists. Man starts an argument with you, you finish it, man does you wrong, you finish him.’
‘What about forgiveness?’
‘Don’t use words you don’t understand.’
‘But I don’t want to be like you and I don’t think my father does, not really. There must be another way.’
‘Time was, I ask my father that same question. I was sixteen years old and he had just come out of prison. He put on a mask, enough to make them believe he wasn’t broken inside but we knew different. It wasn’t a mistake they made again. My mother spilled whisky on his shirt day after he got home and he went to put his fury onto her again but I stood in his way. When he went inside I had been no higher than his waist but now I was taller than him, thought I was something special. Hit him square in the face with my best shot and he didn’t blink. Took me out to the garden by my hair and threw me into the mud. Asked him to forgive me then, as my nose and mouth fill up with dirt but he just laughed. He only laugh when he was hurting people who loved him. So don’t you talk ’bout forgiveness. I don’t blame your father for taking out the best part of my brain and you shouldn’t blame him for tryin’ to kill you if that’s what he has to do. It’s in our blood, no hiding from it. You either got to stop him or you gonna die.’
Jonah let go of Daniel’s hand and his face receded into the filthy gloaming.
Daniel could not allow himself to believe that all the future held for him was a daily cage fight with a demented bull elephant.
‘Do you think that grandma might be able to…’
Jonah sat bolt upright, he seized Daniel’s arm, stood up and wrenched him towards the door.
‘Enough questions. Taking you back. I got nothing else for you.’
‘But if I could just speak with her then…’
Jonah stopped and knelt down until his mouth was against Daniel’s ear.
‘Sometimes the crocodile kills because she need to and sometimes she kill because the act is so full of grace she just has to feel it again. Finding her might give you another answer but I don’t think it’s going to be one you want to hear.’