It had all suddenly fallen into place for Butterworth and he was appalled. He was sitting at the wheel of Kingsley’s Bentley and suddenly he knew what was going on. It had taken him a long time to work it out, far too long. He had never been encouraged to think of himself as very bright, but even so he believed he should have realised sooner. He’d had to go back a very long way to piece everything together, back to the very beginning, to the first day when he was interviewed for the job as Kingsley’s chauffeur.
Butterworth arrived an hour early for the interview. The bus had made good time into London and to the hotel off Baker Street where the interview was to take place. But even if it hadn’t made good time he would still have been absurdly early. That’s how Butterworth was; prompt, calm, well-prepared, judicious, overcautious; not bad attributes in a chauffeur.
He had thought carefully about whether or not to drive to the interview. In one way it seemed inappropriate for a chauffeur to travel by bus, on the other hand it wasn’t as if he was going to take the car into the interview with him, it would have been difficult and/or expensive to find somewhere to park and, most important, his car was not so reliable that he could depend on it to get to the interview at all, certainly not with an hour or more to spare.
This was one of the paradoxes of Butterworth’s professional life. He had driven some extremely smart motor cars in his time, Jaguars, Daimlers and now a Bentley, but when his working day was over, he always had to go home in some soulless, distressed old banger that was only ever a couple of months away from being declared unroadworthy.
In some men this might have created resentment, but not in Butterworth. He knew he was destined to work for those who were richer, more successful and less godly than he was. He had driven for chiefs of industry and their wives, for tennis players, for visiting American pop stars, for foreign movie directors, and he had succeeded in not feeling aggrieved about it. He knew he had cause to feel aggrieved, and not only about the clients he drove, but he had quite coolly decided not to feel aggrieved. A black man had plenty of things to feel bad about in this world if he chose to, but Butterworth had chosen otherwise. He knew that God had helped him a lot in this choice.
He didn’t have a very clear idea of who or what God was. He didn’t think he was a white man with a white beard, but he found it hard to believe he was a black man either. And Jesus? Well, Jesus wasn’t exactly white. He was Jewish, swarthy at the very least, heavily tanned no doubt, but that still left him a whole lot whiter than Butterworth. Not, of course, that skin colour meant anything, at least not in a perfect world, not in God’s world, and however white God turned out to be, he would at least be a paragon of anti-racism.
Inevitably, Butterworth would have liked a little more in the way of money and possessions, but he knew all about the dangers of wanting something too badly, of wanting anything too badly. He saw black kids who had developed a taste for trash, and he could see plenty of people around (not all of them white) who were all too ready to satisfy and exploit that taste. He wasn’t stupid enough to go around badmouthing earthly treasure, he didn’t want people to think he was crazy, but in his heart he knew most of it was worthless. Fortunately there was something up ahead that was worth a million times as much.
Life, it seemed to Butterworth, was an obstacle course in which you had to keep your head down, try to stay honest and out of trouble. You were free to enjoy it if you could, but if you couldn’t that wasn’t too serious, heaven was waiting for you. Life was just the first course. You don’t walk out of the restaurant just because the soup course isn’t too good. The main course and the dessert could still be pretty enjoyable.
Butterworth’s life had never been bad. He had no complaints. He enjoyed rum and cricket and a good smoke and good company. He liked food, but nothing too fancy; just coo-coo or goat curry or ackee salt fish or callaloo soup or Johnny-cakes or chocho cabbage. And if he could find a good Christian woman to cook it for him and share it with him, then so much the better.
Unlike a lot of people he usually had a job he enjoyed. He loved to drive. That was what he’d always done for a living. He enjoyed any kind of driving, but driving a big, black limousine, that was the best.
He had done his share of mini-cab driving, but you needed a four-door saloon for that, reasonably new, and by the time you’d paid for the car and the insurance it was hard to make much money at all. You could do it illegally, but that wasn’t his way. He had driven vans and made deliveries, but he was a driver not a labourer, not a humper of boxes, and he was getting older and he wanted to appear dignified and there was no dignity in loading and unloading vans. Driving a bus would have been similarly ignominious. Being a chauffeur suited him just fine. You wore a suit, you stayed clean. That’s why he really wanted this job. He didn’t know much about it, but what was there to know? He’d been put on to it by the friend of a sister of someone he knew at church. The job, as he understood it, was to be a chauffeur for a gentleman’s club. He didn’t think he was going to like these gentlemen very much, but there would be no need to hate them either. And he had an interview at eleven o’clock with somebody called Mr Kingsley.
After killing an hour, he announced himself at the hotel desk and the receptionist pointed out Kingsley, who was sitting at a small, circular table in the coffee lounge, flapping a copy of The Financial Times. His manner was confident, his manners impeccable, his smile infinitely reassuring.
‘Mr Butterworth, how very good of you to come. Please sit down. Would you like some coffee, some tea? A biscuit? Something stronger?’
‘No thank you very much, sir.’
There was a flurry of small talk before Kingsley asked Butterworth to tell him about himself. Butterworth did. It seemed to be well received. Kingsley seemed to be genuinely interested in the life and times of a chauffeur. It was a new world to him.
‘I’ve never had a chauffeur before,’ said Kingsley, confessionally, boyishly. ‘I’ve never felt the need, but here I am, a big wheel in the Everlasting Club, Chief Carver they call me, and suddenly everybody’s saying I ought to have a chauffeur. And it doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all.
‘Basically, your job would be fairly straightforward. You’d be my chauffeur, and your first allegiance would be to me, taking me hither and yon on club business, but if I didn’t need you, you’d be sent to collect the odd member and bring him to the club. And on those occasions when members have had a few too many, you’d be required to take them home again.’
It sounded to Butterworth as though he might have to do some clearing up of vomit in this job. He would cope with that if he had to. He wasn’t proud; dignified yes, proud no. Pride was a sin. Who sweeps a room as for thy laws … No doubt the same could be said for vomit.
‘Can’t tell you a great deal about the Everlasting Club,’ Kingsley continued. ‘Two reasons for that. One, we’re a bit private. We like to keep ourselves to ourselves. And two, I’m fairly new to it all myself. I only joined a little while ago and more or less immediately got made Chief Carver. Talk about meteoric. And if the powers that be tell me I need a chauffeur, who am I to argue?
‘Actually, there’s a little book published on the history of the club. I still haven’t got round to reading it yet, but if you get the job I’ll let you peruse a copy.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Do you do much reading, Butterworth?’
Butterworth noticed that Kingsley had already stopped calling him ‘mister’.
‘A little, sir.’
‘What kind of thing?’
‘The Bible mostly.’
‘I’ve never got round to reading that one either. Is it a good yarn?’
‘It certainly is, sir.’
‘Everybody lives happily ever after, that sort of thing?’
‘Not everybody, sir.’
Kingsley went ominously quiet, as though mention of the Bible didn’t suit him. Then suddenly he said, ‘I say, Butterworth, how do you feel about the Third World?’
‘I feel all right, sir.’
‘Good. You see I know as well as you do that an awful lot of people in this world are hungry. Oh yes, I know they’ve got lots of horrid diseases as well, and they have all kinds of toxic waste dumped all over them – which can’t make them very happy either – but essentially their main problem is they’re starving.’
‘Yes sir,’ said Butterworth. He was tempted to say something about ‘spiritual hunger’ but this didn’t seem quite right.
‘And most of these hungry people you’d have to admit, Butterworth, most of them aren’t white. And you’re not white either. So I wondered if that was a problem.’
Butterworth still wanted this job. He wanted to say the right thing. But he wasn’t sure whether finding mass hunger a problem was a good thing or a bad thing in Kingsley’s eyes.
‘Well, it’s not a problem for me personally,’ he said.
Kingsley looked at him as though he had missed the point.
‘Let’s take Ethiopia,’ he said. ‘Or the Sudan, or any of these places where there’s mass starvation. You see some programme on TV and it’s damned moving. You dig in your pocket, stump up the cash and keep them all alive for a year or two longer. Then what do the buggers do? They start having babies. There’s a population explosion and before you know where you are they’re all starving again, only now there’s twice as many of them. I don’t know, Butterworth, all these babies, all this reproduction.’
Butterworth felt that he wanted to deny personal responsibility for the world’s population explosion, but he kept silent.
‘The fact is, there are only so many babies because there’s so much fucking goes on in these countries. They may be starving to death but that doesn’t seem to slow them down when it comes to burying the old beef bayonet. Why don’t we hear about that?’
Butterworth felt that he personally didn’t want to hear about starving people having sex, but again he kept his peace.
‘But don’t think I’m prejudiced against black people,’ Kingsley said. ‘I don’t think you’ll find any racists in the Everlasting Club. You won’t find any bleeding-heart liberals, and you’ll find precious few democrats, but you won’t find any racists either. Racism, I fancy, is based on fear. We at the Everlasting Club know we have nothing to fear.’
Butterworth found himself nodding, though he couldn’t be sure what he was nodding at.
‘Of course you don’t hear much about cannibalism in these Third World countries, but you can bet your life it goes on. When people are hungry they’ll eat anything, their own shoes, their own shit, anything. I know a lot of them don’t have any shoes. Probably they don’t have much shit either, but you know what I mean. So I feel fairly certain that some of these starving people must be eating each other. It stands to reason. It’s only human nature. You don’t see that on TV either. Do you think you’d eat human flesh, Butterworth?’
‘Well, I enjoy soul food,’ Butterworth said.
Even Butterworth wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that but it sounded like a good answer. Kingsley certainly appreciated it. He doubled over with laughter, and guffawed, the sound being quickly absorbed by the plushness of the room. Butterworth smiled sheepishly.
‘I think we’re going to get on splendidly,’ said Kingsley. ‘When can you start?’
‘Does that mean I got the job?’
‘Oh yes, yes, Butterworth, you’ve got the job. You’re part of the team now. Welcome to the Everlasting Club.’
Of course, he didn’t mean that Butterworth was a member of the Everlasting Club. That was not the team he was now a part of. Butterworth was part of the team that worked for the club. He had now been Kingsley’s chauffeur for three months and it was true he had never encountered any racism in that time. Nobody had noticed his colour enough to comment on it, and in fact, people hardly noticed him at all. He took his orders from Kingsley. Mostly he just ferried his boss around but he would also occasionally pick up people at airports, deposit them at their hotels, transfer them to the club, then some time later take them or their equivalents home.
These comings and goings took place at all hours of the day or night. He might drive a man in full evening dress to the club at nine in the morning. He might take someone home who looked as though he’d had a hard night, but it would be one o’clock in the afternoon. He found this a little decadent but kept his disapproval to himself.
His instinct about mopping up vomit had been perfectly correct, but this was usually accompanied by a fair-sized tip to ease the hardship. Sometimes he had to carry unconscious members out of the club. On a couple of occasions he had to carry them in. But he never went into the club itself. He had to pick up or deposit his charges on the threshold. The entrance hall was a kind of air-lock beyond which he could not go. It was as if his lungs could not cope with the rarefied air of the inner sanctum. That suited him fine. He suspected the club was no place for a God-fearing man like himself. The less he knew about what went on in there the better.
Sometimes his passengers were famous, their faces familiar from newspapers and television, but Butterworth was seldom able to identify them. He took a perverse pride in knowing that the person he was chauffeuring was a somebody, but not having the slightest idea who. The drunk in the back of the Mercedes might be a professional footballer, a night-club entertainer, a politician; it made no difference to him. They were all equal in God’s and Butterworth’s eyes.
Butterworth had to keep the car clean and do very basic maintenance on it, but for many hours each day it was as though he was employed to do nothing. In fact, he was paid to wait, to be ready. He would often sit at the wheel of the car, staring blankly into space. That suited him fine, but Kingsley thought it looked bad. Couldn’t he read or something? Butterworth said he’d be very happy to sit reading the Bible but Kingsley thought that looked even worse. So he gave Butterworth the promised club history. He could read that. Butterworth kept the book in the car but it was a long time before he got round to reading it.
It soon became apparent to Butterworth that he had not only landed a new job, he’d landed a new life. He now had no time for rum and cricket and a good smoke and good company. He certainly had no time to find himself a good Christian woman. But somehow it didn’t matter. He enjoyed being detached from the world of normal working hours, of five-day weeks, lunch breaks and weekends off. His existence became entirely regulated by work. He worked and he slept, that was all. He became oddly content. The job offered him no serious challenge, demanded nothing from him that he wasn’t capable of doing; until, that is, the arrival of Virgil.
He hadn’t formed any strong opinion of Virgil when he picked him up from the airport. Forming opinions was no part of his job. Virgil had been civil to him and Butterworth shared Virgil’s opinion that the business with the blindfold was pretty silly. Virgil probably didn’t care where the Everlasting Club was situated, but if he’d really wanted to know, Butterworth would probably have told him, certainly if the tip was large enough. A large tip could corrupt even a godly man like him, at least on trivial things like that. But Butterworth had been corrupted on something not so trivial by a very large tip from Kingsley. In fact, he was now prepared to admit to himself that it wasn’t so much a tip as a bribe. Either way it was dirty money.
Kingsley told Butterworth that Virgil was a very, very special guest of the Everlasting Club, one who merited very special treatment. Something new would be required of Butterworth, specifically he would be required to do a spot of ‘acting’. This all sounded very difficult and very unwelcome to Butterworth; an unexpected disruption to the regulated order. But Kingsley had placed a roll of twenty pound notes in his hand and suddenly Butterworth couldn’t see any harm in doing a little play-acting. His only worry then was that he might not be a good enough actor.
When he arrived at the hotel and interrupted Virgil in the middle of his sexual goings-on with Rose, Butterworth had, despite himself, started to form an opinion, one of fierce disapproval. Butterworth didn’t consider himself a prude or a killjoy, sex was, after all, a perfectly godly activity, but there was something sickly and ugly about that scene in the hotel room, the smell in the air, the remains of wasted food everywhere. Butterworth had begun to realise he was involved with something distasteful, but he had no idea what.
The next part of the act was to take Virgil to the underground car park and that was where the hard work was to start for Butterworth. It wasn’t as hard as what Kingsley had to do. Kingsley’s part was to provoke Virgil into hitting him, then he had to do a stage fall and pretend to hurt his head on the concrete floor. Butterworth had watched this part of the show carefully and he wasn’t at all sure that Kingsley had been acting. The noise his head made against the concrete was perfectly authentic. Then Butterworth’s own act came into the spotlight. He had to convince Virgil that Kingsley was seriously injured and get him to take the car keys and drive away in the Mercedes.
Butterworth hadn’t thought his performance was very convincing but it had obviously been good enough to convince Virgil, and the act had worked more or less as planned. At the time he’d had no idea what this plan was really all about and perhaps he hadn’t wanted to. He realised his part in it was small and that Kingsley would be unlikely to tell him, a mere servant, what the greater scheme was. Kingsley had muttered something about an initiation but Butterworth couldn’t see why Virgil needed to be initiated when none of the other new members he’d delivered to the club had ever needed it. And Kingsley had also said something about Rose taking him off on some kind of tour, putting some English flesh on his American bones. That too had meant nothing at the time, but now that everything had fallen into place it all seemed perfectly obvious.
Kingsley was not badly hurt. The crack of his head on the floor had been real enough, but the sound was more frightening than the injury. Butterworth administered a little light first aid, helped him into his Bentley and drove him back to the club. Kingsley was happy enough with events.
For Butterworth, the real bonus of the operation was that with the Mercedes purloined by Virgil he now became the full-time driver of Kingsley’s Bentley. This was a delight for him, but it required a slight change in his working practices. The car was Kingsley’s own, his pride and joy, and he was damned if he was going to let it be used to ferry armies of vomiting drunks to and from the club. So Butterworth only ever ferried one drunk: Kingsley. Consequently he spent even more of each day waiting, being ready, doing nothing. And Kingsley became more insistent that he shouldn’t sit behind the wheel looking vacant.
This had two crucially important and unpleasant consequences.
The first was that Butterworth finally read the history of the Everlasting Club. It was an eye-opener. He didn’t find it at all an enjoyable read. He was disgusted by much of it. He had already guessed that some untoward things went on behind the club’s closed doors, but all this talk of wildness with whores and food and semen was worse than he could possibly have imagined. He was also deeply offended by the anti-religious sentiments. And he was thoroughly appalled by the loving detail in which Haarman’s sex murders were described. He was so appalled that he couldn’t bring himself to read every word of it. He couldn’t see why anyone would want to write a book like that, much less read it. And he couldn’t see what this apparent obsession with cannibalism was all about.
The second consequence was unpleasant in a completely different way. When Kingsley was inside the club, Butterworth had to park the Bentley as nearby as possible, but sometimes this was not very nearby at all. He would use a parking meter where possible, but sometimes he had to park illegally and watch and wait for a meter to come free, then grab it. He felt that scrabbling for a parking space was rather undignified for the driver of a Bentley but that was what driving in London required, and he could manoeuvre, reverse and park the Bentley with as much ease as some people parked their Minis.
And so it was that he was waiting on a double yellow line with his eye on a row of occupied parking meters. Then a car left its spot and he immediately, silkily, reversed the big Bentley into the now vacant meter bay. So easily did he accomplish it, he didn’t even notice that a brand new red Mini had been lining itself up to drive forwards into the spot. Even when he did notice, he didn’t think much of it. So he’d pinched somebody’s place, so what? It was a jungle out there when it came to parking your car, dog eats dog.
The two people in the Mini saw it differently. There was a woman driver and a male passenger. They were young, expensively dressed with fancy haircuts, well-heeled but a bit too flashy. Their skins were white.
Whether the male passenger was motivated by chivalry or London traffic aggression or class hatred was not clear, but he decided his companion had been insulted and honour needed to be satisfied.
‘You cunt!’ he shouted in Butterworth’s general direction without even looking at him.
Butterworth nodded at him, acknowledged his existence, making it clear that he had no intention of getting into an argument. It was then that the man noticed the colour of Butterworth’s skin.
‘You black cunt!’ he shouted.
Butterworth nodded again and smiled in a dignified, condescending, provoking way, guaranteed to make things worse. It did.
‘What’s a black bastard like you doing with a car like that?’
Butterworth shook his head sadly as though humouring some poor, demented simpleton.
‘Fucking dumb as well as everything else,’ the man yelled. ‘Why don’t you get back to the jungle where you belong?’
Butterworth continued to smile. Then the girl shouted something. At first Butterworth thought perhaps she was embarrassed by her friend and simply wanted to put a stop to it, or perhaps she just wanted to drive on and not miss some other parking space. She shouted to her friend, though it was clearly meant for general consumption, ‘Don’t get into a fight with him, Chas. If he wins he’ll put you in a fucking pot and eat you.’
That was when it all fell into place for Butterworth.
Why hadn’t he realised before? It all fitted. It all made sense. Those references to the starving in his interview with Kingsley, those references in the history of the club. It was all glaringly, blindingly obvious to him now. Quite simply, the members of the Everlasting Club were cannibals.
Butterworth had heard about this sort of thing, societies who ate human flesh as a horrible parody of the Eucharist, in order to perpetuate themselves, like vampires. That was what was meant by the word ‘everlasting’, a club that tried to make itself immortal by eating the human body.
And how did they come by human flesh? Well, that was obvious now too. They made human sacrifices. They slaughtered young men. That was where Virgil came in. He was young, good-looking, a good example of the tribe, yet being American he was an outsider. He was being treated like a king, given free air tickets, hotel rooms, sex, fine English food. And at the end of it all he would be sacrificed on the altar of the Everlasting Club; and the members, those devils, would consume his body and his blood.
Butterworth crossed himself. He had only ever wanted a quiet life. He had wanted to serve God in a diligent but relaxed, unspectacular way. That was irrelevant now. His personal preferences counted for nothing. The moment finds the man, and Butterworth had been found. Virgil, in the name of all that was holy, needed to be saved, and Butterworth believed he was just the man to do it.