Bang: Memoirs of a Relationship Assassin (35 page)

Emma actually blushed. “You were never meant to see those…”

“Oh, wasn’t I? Well I did! I saw everything!” Becky was on fire. “How can you do that? How come girls like you can just waltz right in and just, just
take
whatever you like? For God’s sake, I was going to marry him, and you just… you just came along and killed it! It never even occurred to you, did it, what his girlfriend might feel! You just had him because you could!”

“No, it… it wasn’t like that!” Emma stuttered. “I didn’t just… it was…” She glanced at me, uncertain, then hung her head. “It was just business.”

“Business?!”
spat Becky. She glared back and forth between us. “Tell me what’s going on right now! Who are you people?”

Emma looked at me helplessly, not sure what to say. Becky stood in front of me, her eyes gleaming. “Who are you, John? What’s your real name, tell me!”

I took a deep, shuddering breath and told her.

“I’m John Holmes.”

“No you’re not – ”

“I’m Simon Templar.”

She shook her head. “What – ?”

“I’m Andy Holloway,” I went on, not looking at her. “I’m Mark Harris. I’m Reverend Timothy Farthing. I’m Kenneth Hutchinson. I’m Bo Duke. I’m James Garner. I’m Harry Callahan. I’m Mike Gambit. I’m Carlos Santana. I’m William Bodie. I’m Sam Tyler…”

And with each name, I couldn’t help but bring them all to mind, until the kitchen was standing room only. There they all were, crowding around Becky, hemming her in as she stared at me. John in his biking leathers, one arm around Becky’s shoulders. Simon taking her hand in a gentlemanly manner, loosening his tie. Andy spraying spit as he pushed his face into hers, groping his crotch. Mark Harris the writer, on both knees in front of her like a poet beseeching his audience to understand him. A trainee priest holding his Bible out with both hands. An office worker in shirt and tie. A surfer dude in Bermuda shorts with bleached blonde hair. A bodybuilder, tight t-shirt and jeans, biceps pumped by weeks at the gym. A floppy-haired student in grungy clothes. A military-wannabe, combat trousers, boots, green vest, dogtags. A plumber in boiler suit and toolbelt. A professional cyclist in tight lycra shorts and teardrop-shaped helmet. A punk with a cropped Mohican, fake piercings and tattoos. A flat-capped police officer in full uniform.

And more. Outside my flat, faces pressed up against the window and back door, filling the small garden. Faces I’d long since forgotten. The same face.

Like in the Anchorage, the same total loss of control, but fifty times worse – fifty voices ripping up my throat instead of just Andy Holloway’s, fifty different names, fifty different accents, all blurring together as they vomited out of me TILT TILT TILT –

“Oh God, STOP IT!”

Becky’s scream cut my throat.

I saw the tears in her eyes, standing close to Emma. Scared girls, trapped in the room with a freak. Their faces… I screwed my eyes tight so I wouldn’t have to see them.

Now Becky ran. I heard her bolt from the kitchen, faster than Megan. And then, again, the bang of the front door, rattling the windows the way it always had.

Not sure how long I stood there. My whole body was quivering like there were things inside me pushing to get out. Then I opened my eyes and saw them, already out there, filling the whole kitchen, all the faces. Staring at me. And Emma doing the same. She hadn’t left. She would, I thought, they always do, go on, why don’t you run, just turn around and run…

Emma stepped closer, looking up at me. One eye already swollen, it was going to be black like mine, but otherwise her face was calm. Not scared or confused but… curious.

I hadn’t realised I was clenching my fists until her fingers pried mine open. Her cool hand forced itself into my palm. “It’s all right,” she said softly. “Just relax. Think about who you really are.”

Her face blurred. I was blinking, heaving deep breaths like the air was being drained from the room.

“Who are you?” she asked quietly.

“I…” My voice cracked. “I don’t… I don’t know…”

“Yes you do. All these people that you’ve been, they’re not you.” Could she see them as well? All clustered around us? “They’re just your masks, Sco…”

She stopped, nodded. “Scott’s just a mask as well, isn’t he? He’s your relationship assassin mask.”

And there he was, right behind Emma, staring at me over her shoulder. Scott Rowley. Cocky, confident, a lady-killer, an assassin. But he was also blurred. Not really there. Not really any one thing, fluid, changeable. He could be anything he wanted!

And now, after years of being him, I could see… now that he was finally standing outside my body… that he wasn’t me any more than the others were.

“Let them go,” Emma said. “Time to stop acting. Just think about the real you.”

All of the faces in the room became as blurred as Scott’s, fading. One by one they vanished, John, Andy, Mark, Simon, all the others. Self-destructing. Everything went watery as they disappeared. Except one, who had been hidden by the crowd.

He stood alone by the sink. A boy.

I caught my breath, startled. Who…?

He looked about fifteen. Could hardly see his face under the baseball cap and hood. Grey tracksuit, Reebok trainers. He wasn’t looking at me. He looked like someone had just slapped him or insulted him but he was refusing to react. Fists clenched, jaw clenched, whole body clenched. Lips sealed like he couldn’t trust his own voice. The boy just stood there, quivering like there were things inside him pushing to get out.

Emma touched my face, pulling me back to meet her eyes. “Who are you
really?”

I staggered to the sink, legs like jelly. The boy looked up at me. He had a smattering of acne, I noticed, and the sunken eyes of someone who hadn’t slept much, but you could tell he might grow up to be a handsome lad, given time. He could just as easily grow up with that taut sneer distorting him into something uglier. That was Andy Holloway, right there, being born on the boy’s face.

He knelt down next to me and… and it was him who opened the cupboard under the sink, not me. He pulled it open and rummaged in the grimy darkness underneath, pushing aside washing-up liquid and bleach and oil-stained rags, until he found what was buried in the cobwebby darkness right at the back.

But it was me, my hand, that flung the book across the kitchen, pages fluttering crazily.

“That’s who I am!”

Emma bent down and picked it up.

“I’m him, the guy on the front!”

She stared at the cover. A man with a gun in his hand. Dark hair, chiselled face, eyes narrowed, looking through the target sight. ‘Memoirs Of An Assassin’, by Frederick deClark. My father’s pseudonym.

“The guy in the book is
me
, Emma, that’s me there!”

She turned the book to read the blurb on the back. The one that started ‘Scott Rowley is a killer on the side of the angels.’ Dad’s melodramatic style. She looked back up at me, stunned.

“I’m the assassin!” I shouted, feeling my legs give way. I slid to the floor against the cupboard. “I’m pretending to be him! I’m not Scott Rowley, I’m just pretending to be him! I’m pretending to be all of them!
I’m just pretending!”

I collapsed.

“I duh-don’t know my own name,” I cried.

I couldn’t stop the sobs. Couldn’t hold back all the things that had been pushing to get out. Fear. Shame. Boiling up suddenly, the feelings I’d never allowed to come out. At that moment I couldn’t understand how I’d got there, a stupid wet mess on my dirty sticky kitchen floor, saying the things I never thought I’d say. Somehow it had just happened.

“These things just happen,” my Mum had sighed. She hadn’t planned on talking about it, as I sat down at the dinner table. Her floodgates just suddenly opened. All I’d done was ask if we were going to be able to visit Dad.

They’d taken him away the day before. I’d been at school. Mum said they’d sent an ambulance, they were really nice about it, took him away like he was royalty. He didn’t want to come out of the back room, where he’d barricaded himself for the past three months, still writing away. Mum said he’d been going to the toilet in there as well, so I shouldn’t open the door, she’d be getting cleaners in soon. She talked as if Dad had been a stain in the carpet she’d been meaning to get sorted for ages.

Mum looked at me and told me that I didn’t have to worry. She knew what I was worried about, but in fact everything was fine.

“I know you think that sort of thing might be… that it might run in the family. I mean, you probably think that you enjoy writing ‘cos your Dad’s a writer, and maybe that means you might end up… but you don’t have to worry about that. I didn’t really want to tell you this way but he’s not really your Dad.”

I looked up at her, still chewing my dinner.

“It’s good news really, when you think about it,” she had smiled. “Bit of a relief for you, I expect! Not sure who your real Dad was, to be honest, it was all a bit mad for me back then, I was doing a lot of… anyway, doesn’t matter, I got you out of it and that was enough for me. You weren’t even twelve months when I married your Dad – not your real Dad, I mean Dad Dad. It was easier to just give you his surname, less paperwork, but that’s the only thing of his you’ve got, and you can change that if you like, I think I will…

“So I don’t want you worrying,” Mum had said kindly. “There’s no way you’re going to end up like him.” She ruffled my hair. “Life’s too short to worry about things like that, you have to just get on with it, make the most of it. You’re a long time dead.”

She talked that way for a few more minutes. Most of the time it wasn’t aimed at me. It was like she was talking to herself.

“These things just happen,” my Mum had said. “It’s not like they’re planned or anything, they just come along and happen all by themselves. You’ll see when you get older, you can’t plan anything, no matter how hard you try.”

I don’t think I said anything back. I can remember sitting at the table, picking at the microwaved dinner she’d knocked up for me. Watching her rush around the house, checking her reflection and snapping her handbag shut and picking up her car keys all at once. My Mum never stayed still. Always on the move.

“So there you go, nothing to worry about, okay? It’s good news really,” she had smiled. “I’ve got to go, I’m picking Darren up at six and the traffic’s going to be murder, everyone goes to the coast on a Friday night, I want to beat the rush. So you’ve got the number of the hotel if you need me, you know where everything is?” Kiss on my forehead. “Be good, I’ll see you Sunday night, okay? Oh, have some friends round if you like, have a party, enjoy yourself! Byeee!”

The slamming door rattled the dining room window, like always. I sat there, listening to the silence. Empty council flat.

I didn’t finish my dinner. I got up and walked through the flat. For some time, I stood outside the door of the back room, with the faint acrid odour from inside. I know my face stayed rigid. Like stone. Like a blank mask.

No Dad. No Mum. No Darren. And no me.

I went to my room and laid on my bed. Fished around in the bedside cabinet and brought out my copy of the only book Dad had ever got published. ‘Memoirs Of An Assassin’. It was already dog-eared, having been read twice and thumbed through every so often, especially the sex scenes and the fight scenes and the big gun battle at the end. The memoirs of Scott Rowley, man of many faces. I started reading it again, from the beginning.

I started all over again.

It was easy. Dead easy. I wasn’t anybody to begin with, so it was easy becoming whoever I wanted. I wasn’t my father’s son, that had all been fake, my name was fake, I wasn’t who I’d been told I was – but that was okay! These things happen! Life’s too short to worry about anything, you know that, you have to just get on with it, make the most of it. Just like Scott Rowley did, in my Dad’s book. Kill when you have to kill. Shag when you want to shag. Live the way you want to live.

If I wasn’t me, I could do anything.

Years later, when the idea of being rewarded for being in the wrong place at the wrong time had hit me, I picked up the book again. But now I studied it intently, like a rulebook.

Scott Rowley. Assassin. A freelance killer who takes out members of the Mafia, or underworld kingpins, or rapists and murderers who walked free. A professional with a heart. An assassin with a code of honour, an assassin who made his own rules. Dad had been careful to portray his main character as likeable as well as ruthless. One little trick to make readers more sympathetic towards him was to have him secretly liking disco music. A funny character trait to make the reader warm to him a little. Scott Rowley loved the Seventies.

I read the book again. Making notes. Practising my new signature. Scott Rowley. A name to rhyme with… whatever the hell I wanted it to rhyme with.

And so Scott Rowley was born for real, conceived by the last remaining copy of a clichéd old thriller novel that nobody bought and my desperate need to be someone else, anyone else, even a man who fakes being other people for a living.

Did you think I was a bastard? You were right.

I had to be
somebody…

The fifteen year old boy was still there. Watching me cry. The one thing he didn’t do when his Mum told him he wasn’t him.

I couldn’t raise my head, scared to even look at Emma. I felt broken and stupid in front of her. Amateur. I could feel the contempt in her eyes, the curl of that pretty lip, any second now she’d walk away disgusted…

She knelt down in front of me. Placing the book on the floor.

“I have a confession too,” she said. “Emma’s not my real name either.”

I looked up. She wasn’t sneering. With her hair tumbling down and a black eye marking the left side of her beautiful face, she looked… inbetween. Half one thing and half another.

“What…?”

“I’m not really called Emma,” she said.

I must have had the stupidest look on my face. Hint of a smile on hers. “It’s just the name I took when I started working for VenusVisions. None of the Venus girls use their own names, we all use pseudonyms. So I did the same thing you did.” She tapped the novel. “I took on a false name. I became Emma.”