In the Flesh (4 page)

  She walked on, though the rain persisted, and her walkabout gradually led her away from the quadrangles and into a concrete no-man's-land through which she had not previously passed. This was - or had been - the site of the estate's amenities. Here was the children's playground, its metal-framed rides overturned, its sandpit fouled by dogs, its paddling pool empty. And here too were the shops. Several had been boarded up; those that hadn't were dingy and unattractive, their windows protected by heavy wire-mesh.

  She walked along the row, and rounded a corner, and there in front of her was a squat brick building. The public lavatory, she guessed, though the signs designating it as such had gone. The iron gates were closed and padlocked. Standing in front of the charmless building, the wind gusting around her legs, she couldn't help but think of what had happened here. Of the man-child, bleeding on the floor, helpless to cry out. It made her queasy even to contemplate it. She turned her thoughts instead to the felon. What would he look like, she wondered, a man capable of such depravities? She tried to make an image of him, but no detail she could conjure carried sufficient force. But then monsters were seldom very terrible

once hauled into the plain light of day. As long as this man was known only by his deeds he held untold power over the imagination; but the human truth beneath the terrors would, she knew, be bitterly disappointing. No monster he; just a whey-faced apology for a man more needful of pity than awe.

 The next gust of wind brought the rain on more heavily. It was time, she decided, to be done with adventures for the day. Turning her back on the public lavatories she hurried back through the quadrangles to the refuge of the car, the icy rain needling her face to numbness.

  The dinner guests looked gratifyingly appalled at the story, and Trevor, to judge by the expression on his face, was furious. It was done now, however; there was no taking it back. Nor could she deny her satisfaction she took in having silenced the inter-departmental babble about the table. It was Bernadette, Trevor's assistant in the History Department, who broke the agonizing hush.

  'When was this?'

  'During the summer,' Helen told her.

  'I don't recall reading about it,' said Archie, much the better for two hours of drinking; it mellowed a tongue which was otherwise fulsome in its self-corruscation.

  'Perhaps the police are suppressing it,' Daniel commented.

  'Conspiracy?' said Trevor, plainly cynical.

  'It's happening all the time,' Daniel shot back.

  'Why should they suppress something like this?' Helen said. 'It doesn't make sense.'

  'Since when has police procedure made sense?' Daniel replied.

  Bernadette cut in before Helen could answer. 'We don't even bother to read about these things any longer,' she said.

  'Speak for yourself,' somebody piped up, but she ignored them and went on:

  'We're punch-drunk with violence. We don't see it any longer, even when it's in front of our noses.'

  'On the screen every night,' Archie put in, 'Death and disaster in full colour.'

  'There's nothing very modern about that,' Trevor said. 'An Elizabethan would have seen death all the time. Public executions were a very popular form of entertainment.'

  The table broke up into a cacophony of opinions. After two hours of polite gossip the dinner-party had suddenly caught fire. Listening to the debate rage Helen was sorry she hadn't had time to have the photographs processed and printed; the graffiti would have added further fuel to this exhilarating row. It was Purcell, as usual, who was the last to weigh in with his point of view; and again, as usual it was devastating.

  'Of course, Helen, my sweet - he began, that affected weariness in his voice edged with the anticipation

of controversy '- your witnesses could all be lying, couldn't they?'

  The talking around the table dwindled, and all heads turned in Purcell's direction. Perversely, he ignored the attention he'd garnered, and turned to whisper in the ear of the boy he'd brought - a new passion who would, on past form, be discarded in a matter of weeks for another pretty urchin.

  'Lying?' Helen said. She could feel herself bristling at the observation already, and Purcell had only spoken a dozen words.

'Why not?' the other replied, lifting his glass of wine to his lips. 'Perhaps they're all weaving some elaborate fiction or other. The story of the spastic's mutilation in the public toilet. The murder of the old man. Even that hook. All quite familiar elements. You must be aware that there's something traditional about these atrocity stories. One used to exchange them all the time; there was a certain fission in them. Something competitive maybe, in attempting to find a new detail to add to the collective fiction; a fresh twist that would render the tale that little bit more appalling when you passed it on.'

  'It may be familiar to you - said Helen defensively. Purcell was always so poised; it irritated her. Even if there were validity in his argument - which she doubted - she was damned if she'd concede it. ' - I've never heard this kind of story before.'

  'Have you not?' said Purcell, as though she were admitting to illiteracy. 'What about the lovers and the escaped lunatic, have you heard that one?'

  'I've heard that...' Daniel said.

  'The lover is disemboweled - usually by a hook-handed man - and the body left on the top of the car, while the fiancé cowers inside. It's a cautionary tale, warning of the evils of rampant heterosexuality.' The joke won a round of laughter from everyone but Helen. 'These stories are very common.'

  'So you're saying that they're telling me lies - ' she protested.

  'Not lies, exactly - '

  'You said lies.'

  'I was being provocative,' Purcell returned, his placatory tone more enraging than ever. 'I don't mean to imply there's any serious mischief in it. But you must concede that so far you haven't met a single witness. All these events have happened at some unspecified date to some unspecified person. They are reported at several removes. They occurred at best to the brothers of friends of distant relations. Please consider the possibility that perhaps these events do not exist in the real world at all, but are merely titillation for bored housewives - Helen didn't make an argument in return, for the simple reason that she lacked one. Purcell's point about the conspicuous absence of witnesses was perfectly sound; she herself had wondered about it. It was strange, too, the way the women in Ruskin Court had speedily consigned the old man's murder to another estate, as though these atrocities always occurred just out of sight - round the next corner, down the next passageway - but never here.

  'So why?' said Bernadette.

'Why what?' Archie puzzled.

'The stories. Why tell these horrible stories if they're not true?'

  'Yes,' said Helen, throwing the controversy back into Purcell's ample lap. 'Why?'

  Purcell preened himself, aware that his entry into the debate had changed the basic assumption at a stroke. 'I don't know,' he said, happy to be done with the game now that he'd shown his arm. 'You really mustn't take me too seriously, Helen. I try not to.' The boy at Purcell's side tittered.

  'Maybe it's simply taboo material,' Archie said.

  'Suppressed - Daniel prompted.

  'Not the way you mean it,' Archie retorted. 'The whole world isn't politics, Daniel.'

'Such naiveté.'

  'What's so taboo about death?' Trevor said. 'Bernadette already pointed out: it's in front of us all the time. Television; newspapers.'

  'Maybe that's not close enough,' Bernadette suggested.

  'Does anyone mind if I smoke?' Purcell broke in. 'Only dessert seems to have been indefinitely postponed - '

  Helen ignored the remark, and asked Bernadette what she meant by 'not close enough'?

  Bernadette shrugged. 'I don't know precisely,' she confessed, 'maybe just that death has to be near; we have to know it's just round the corner. The television's not intimate enough - '

  Helen frowned. The observation made some sense to her, but in the clutter of the moment she couldn't root out its significance.

  'Do you think they're stories too?' she asked.

  'Andrew has a point - ' Bernadette replied.

  'Most kind,' said Purcell. 'Has somebody got a match? The boy's pawned my lighter.'

' - about the absence of witnesses.'

  'All that proves is that I haven't met anybody who's actually seen anything,' Helen countered, 'not that witnesses don't exist.'

  'All right,' said Purcell. 'Find me one. If you can prove to me that your atrocity-monger actually lives and breathes, I'll stand everyone dinner at Appollinaires. How's that? Am I generous to a fault, or do I just know when I can't lose?' He laughed, knocking on the table with his knuckles by way of applause.

  'Sounds good to me,' said Trevor. 'What do you say, Helen?'

  She didn't go back to Spector Street until the following Monday, but all weekend she was there in thought: standing outside the locked toilet, with the wind bringing rain; or in the bedroom, the portrait looming. Thoughts of the estate claimed all her concern. When, late on Saturday afternoon, Trevor found

some petty reason for an argument, she let the insults pass, watching him perform the familiar ritual of self-martyrdom without being touched by it in the least. Her indifference only enraged him further. He stormed out in high dudgeon, to visit whichever of his women was in favour this month. She was glad to

see the back of him. When he failed to return that night she didn't even think of weeping about it. He was foolish and vacuous. She despaired of ever seeing a haunted look in his dull eyes; and what worth was a man who could not be haunted?

  He did not return Sunday night either, and it crossed her mind the following morning, as she parked the car in the heart of the estate, that nobody even knew she had come, and that she might lose herself for days here and nobody be any the wiser. Like the old man Anne-Marie had told her about: lying forgotten in his favourite armchair with his eyes hooked out, while the flies feasted and the butter went rancid on

the table.

  It was almost Bonfire Night, and over the weekend the small heap of combustibles in Butts' Court had grown to a substantial size. The construction looked unsound, but that didn't prevent a number of boys and young adolescents clambering over it and into it. Much of its bulk was made up of furniture, filched, no doubt, from boarded up properties. She doubted if it could burn for any time: if it did, it would go chokingly. Four times, on her way across to Anne-Marie's house, she was waylaid by children begging for money to buy fireworks.

  'Penny for the guy', they'd say, though none had a guy to display.

  She had emptied her pockets of change by the time she reached the front door.

  Anne-Marie was in today, though there was no welcoming smile. She simply stared at her visitor as if mesmerised.

  'I hope you don't mind me calling...'

  Anne-Marie made no reply.

  'I just wanted a word.'

  'I'm busy,' the woman finally announced. There was no invitation inside, no offer of tea.

  'Oh. Well... it won't take more than a moment.'

  The back door was open and the draught blew through the house. Papers were flying about in the back yard. Helen could see them lifting into the air like vast white moths.

  'What do you want?' Anne-Marie asked.

  'just to ask you about the old man.'

  The woman frowned minutely. She looked as if she was sickening, Helen thought: her face had the colour and texture of stale dough, her hair was lank and greasy.

  'What old man?'

  'Last time I was here, you told me about an old man who'd been murdered, do you remember?'

  'No.'

  'You said he lived in the next court.'

  'I don't remember,' Anne-Marie said.

  'But you distinctly told me - '

  Something fell to the floor in the kitchen, and smashed. Anne-Marie flinched, but did not move from the doorstep, her arm barring Helen's way into the house. The hallway was littered with the child's toys, gnawed and battered.

  'Are you all right?'

  Anne-Marie nodded. 'I've got work to do,' she said.

  'And you don't remember telling me about the old man?'

  'You must have misunderstood,' Anne-Marie replied, and then, her voice hushed: 'You shouldn't have come. Everybody knows.'