Corpsing (28 page)

I took the gun out of the sports bag for the first time since buying it. She was more beautiful than ever – a thing of pure brutal accomplishment. It still amazed me that there were men whose minds were constantly employed in trying to improve the design of machines intended to kill other men – and no-one arrested these designers, or called them murderers.

Handling the weapon made me feel like an art terrorist/theorist, convinced that I and I alone had discovered the perfect painting implement. This metal device was a creator of massive blood-flowers (a flesh-gardener) – huge gorgeous gory blooms, thrown up on walls and mirrors. This was the non-brush that Jackson Pollock spent his whole life in quest of – creating an instant composition of red and grey: all the Great Art Themes of Life and Death; controversy over the manner of the art’s making (dripping/triggering); the randomizing element (loss of control but control over loss of control); the collaborative nature of any true bullet art. (Dot. Dot. Dot.) And I was about to go and collaborate on a couple of specific deaths – painting them all over Le Corbusier’s shattered mirrors. This was going to be a hell of a grand opening: of heads, of arteries. Paint no longer
a buried metaphor for blood. This would be authentic impasto – the real Real Thing: Death. Perhaps I should put a call through to
ArtForum
first; have them send a couple of critics along. Get some restaurant critics in there, too.

I loaded the clip up into the handle, butting it in with my wrist – the force was unnecessary – it slid in like good, wanted sex. I clicked off the safeties, turning the machine dangerous.

Just as the gun-contact had shown me, I cocked the firing mechanism: this was necessary for the first shot. After that, the pressure generated by the bullet just fired re-cocked the gun automatically.

I pointed the gun at the exposed trunk of one of the fir trees. I wanted to pull the trigger but couldn’t: I wanted to know how loud the gun would be before I fired it. I thought of different bangs, snaps, cracks, pops.

The day was sunny but too windy for comfort. Sounds might carry unexpected distances in unexpected directions. There were farms close by, and I couldn’t guarantee that no-one would hear the shots. But maybe that didn’t matter. Perhaps they’d just think it was someone disposing of rabbits or ramblers or something. I had no choice, really. I had to test the gun, and here was the safest place I’d managed to find.

I went off into some kind of daze – and when I came round I found myself stood there with the barrel of the gun pointing into the side of my head.

Never before had I knowingly been so close to suicide. There had been low times, back in the hospital. But when the urge had been there, the means hadn’t – and vice versa.

For a couple of instants I let myself feel the possibility of remorse: maybe the best thing for everyone was to kill myself right here.

Then I saw Dorothy, onstage, flailing her way through Lady Macbeth’s hand-washing, and I knew that this was a woman incapable of truly acknowledging the depth of her guilt.

Maybe in the instant between me firing the gun and it splatting her brains out, she would dive into the knowledge – slow-motion.

Suddenly, I felt something rip down through me – as if I were a newspaper and someone were tearing off a strip. I felt: anger, resentment, hatred.

If there was a final moment of decision to go ahead, then this was it.

Fuck Alun. Fuck Dorothy.

I pulled the trigger.

The bang was much quieter than I’d expected and the recoil far more gentle.

Ah,
I thought,
those Germans.

No longer worried about interruption, I walked up to the tree to examine the hole where Dorothy’s imaginary head had been.

At the point of impact there should have been a chunk ripped out at least as big as my fist.

Going slightly closer, I saw the bullet lodged in the tree’s outer bark. A single touch was enough to make it fall.

I didn’t need to test it, but I did – I stepped back a couple of paces and fired off three rounds into the tree, point-blank.

Nothing. No destruction. No penetration.

I’d been sold blanks.

I pulled the clip out and looked at one of the bullets, suddenly so much less beautiful. But, from what my untrained eye could see, there was no way of telling that this wasn’t a real bullet.

Distraught, I got the bus back to the village and the coach back to London.

It couldn’t all be for nothing – not my plans and lies and adaptations. I wasn’t going to allow this to thwart me. Everything had to be done in a particular order. This had to be corrected. Otherwise the order would be destroyed. I would correct this.

‘Toilet,’ I said.

He followed me in and locked the door behind us.

‘You sold me fucking blanks,’ I said.

I held out a few of them in my hand.

‘Never seen these before in my life,’ he said. ‘Honest.’

‘They don’t work.’

‘You remember – the ones I sold you were gold at the end, these are silver. Look.’

I had a vague memory.

‘Someone must have switched them,’ he said. ‘Nicked them. Who’s had hold of the gun since you got it? Been out of your sight, has it?’

Oh most definitely.

I remembered Anne-Marie’s curiosity about the contents of my sports bag. Was it possible that the one person I’d thought I could trust had started deceiving me? It was a mad thought: where would she have been able to get hold of blank ammunition? One answer was all I could think of: she’d phoned up Vicky, she’d told the police. That meant not only that Anne-Marie suspected but that the police
knew
what I was intending. In which
case, why hadn’t they arrested me? I didn’t have time right now to think of that.

‘I want live ones – ones that’ll do some serious fucking damage.’

‘Give me ten minutes,’ he said.

‘How do I know I’ll see you again?’

‘I’m not going to skip the country just ‘cos of this, now am I?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But I need them today.’

‘You’ll get them –’

‘And this time I want to test them.’

He held back. ‘Tricky-dicky,’ he said.

‘But not impossible.’

He looked at the pissy floor, his shoes. ‘No.’

I waited for him in the bar while he disappeared off down the street. This was one of the worst moments. I truly believed I’d never see him again. But half an hour later, he came back and – after a quick word with the landlord – beckoned me to follow him.

A door was pulled open in the floor behind the bar. Down a steep ladder and we were in a large, dark cellar.

Aluminium casks lining the walls; plastic shrink-wrapped lemonade bottles; a slightly wet concrete floor; a musty smell – half beer, half rats.

‘Come along here,’ he said.

I followed.

Someone had come down into the cellar after us: I recognized him – a burly barman.

Nods, back and forth.

‘The jukebox will play a little louder upstairs,’ he said. ‘And Paul’s going to shift some barrels. That’s the best we can do. You get one shot only.’

He pulled out a fresh box of bullets, held one up for my inspection.

‘Gold. Live.’

Then he loaded up.

There was a pile of smelly old mattresses in the corner. In front of them was the old-oak circle of a broken table-top. My gun-contact aimed at it.

‘Shoot into that,’ he said.

He gave the nod to Paul, who started shifting barrels around. The report of when they hit the floor fired off like gunshots. Upstairs, the music began to thud louder and deeper.

‘Quickly,’ he said.

I took aim, tried to coincide with one of Paul’s crashes, squeezed the trigger.

Greater recoil, louder noise – and a hole the size of a golf ball left in the circle of wood.

‘Satisfied?’ he asked.

‘The same number of bullets,’ I said.

‘Minus that one.’ He pointed at the hole.

‘Satisfied,’ I said.

We shook on it.

‘Can I keep the blanks?’ I asked.

He didn’t let go.

‘What use are they to me?’ he said.

He still had hold of my hand, firmly.

‘You can count this as a freebie. I wouldn’t do it for all my customers, but seeing how you paid well over the odds for that gun…’

He smiled and finally let go.

‘You can stop now,’ he said to Paul as we walked by.

We shook hands again in the public bar. The music had again been turned down. Everyone was too sensible to look too closely at the two men who might or might not just have fired a gun in the cellar.

I paid for a couple of drinks with a fifty and told the landlord to keep the change. I didn’t expect gratitude, which was lucky, because I got none.

Carrying the same suspicious sports bag, I walked out of the
pub – as close to being one of the lads as I’d ever been. But still pretty far off at that.

The question immediately came up of what to do now. Could I trust Anne-Marie not to pull the same trick again? What could she have told the police? Not everything. Had she mentioned the script? The audition? Laurence? No, that connection she couldn’t have made.

My first instinct was to confront her. Then I thought better of it. If she didn’t know – but how? – then my every question would be self-incriminating.
What did you do with my bullets? What have you said to the police?
I decided to act as normally as possible – whilst no longer trusting her.

Of course, I’d still have to leave her alone for periods. But she wouldn’t have the gun or the bullets to fool around with. Those I could leave somewhere safe. However, the only place I could think of to stow them was in the garden shed at my old address in Mortlake. It was far from ideal. I was pretty sure I’d be able to get there unobserved today. But on Friday, after Sheila’s story had gone in? I would have to gamble that the paparazzi would have discovered (from my delightfully helpful neighbours) that I hadn’t been home for several days.

I took a black cab direct to Mortlake.

‘This it?’ asked the cabbie, after I’d sat silent and motionless for a minute or so.

I nodded.

‘Yes,’ I said weakly. ‘I used to live here.’

He turned round to look at me.

‘Lucky you moved out then, isn’t it?’

I checked again, looking at the doors of the houses to the left and right – hoping that I’d made a mistake, and that I’d see (welcome this time) the blood-red paint-sloshed porch. But everything I’d taken in at first glance was confirmed.

Through the black gape of the front door, I could see all the way down the ruined hall and out into the back garden. The shed, as far as I could make out, was still intact. I didn’t need a key to get at it. But then, neither did anyone else.

‘Are you alright, mate?’ the cabbie asked.

It was only then I realized that I’d started to cry. I thought back to my pathetic bonfire of everything-to-do-with-Lily. The arsonists, whoever they were, had merely completed the job. I should have felt thankful towards them. I had supposedly left everything behind already. Up until this point in my life, most of my valued possessions had been made out of paper: favourite books, diaries. A few years ago, plastic had made its entrance: videos, cassettes, Polaroids, CDs. Only now (with the gun) had metal become a matter of sentiment. Really, I’d no longer had any need of anything that had been destroyed. The burning of it all, however, was something I myself would have put off – perhaps for the rest of my life; and perhaps the putting off would have been the ruining of my life. No person should become the archivist of their past loves. Not to the exclusion of future ones, certainly. But I couldn’t help feeling bereft. In my head, I played back the now-destroyed tape of Lily’s cereal adverts. The image had already deteriorated. She jumped from expression to expression, costume to costume. Now she was in the shower being stabbed; now she was standing beside me in the spoofed ad.

‘I’m sorry, mate,’ said the cabbie. ‘But the meter
is
still running.’

I couldn’t face becoming a modern genre-piece for some imaginary CNN news crew – picking stoically through the ashes of my gone home.

‘Notting Hill,’ I said.

I’d decided to return to Lily’s flat and hide the gun under the floorboards – in the secret place where Lily used to stash her drugs and diaries.

‘Are you sure you’re alright, mate?’ asked the cabbie.

‘Notting Hill,’ I said.

The cab pulled off.

I couldn’t stop myself looking back at the house. The wood of the door-frame was black streaked with white, just like Dorothy’s hair. I turned to face forwards.

The escalation was almost complete, I thought: from rubbish-tipping through brick-tossing to building-torching. The only thing left was a direct assault upon my body: injury then fatality then desecration.

It was only as we turned out of my road that the thought occurred: Who did this?