The Damnation Game (14 page)

Most of the men and women in whom Mamoulian had placed his trust had betrayed him. The pattern had repeated itself so often down the decades that he was sure he would one day become hardened to the pain such betrayals caused. But he never achieved such precious indifference. The cruelty of other people-their callous usage of him-never failed to wound him, and though he had extended his charitable hand to all manner of crippled psyches, such ingratitude was unforgivable. Perhaps, he mused, when this endgame was all over and done with—when he’d collected his debts in blood, dread and night—then maybe he’d lose the terrible itch that tormented him day and night, that drove him on without hope of peace to new ambitions and new betrayals. Maybe when all this was over he would be able to lie down and die.

The pack in his hand was pornographic. He played with it only when he was feeling strong, and only then alone. Handling the images of extreme sensuality was a test he set himself, one that if he failed, he would fail in private. Today the filth on the cards was, after all, just human depravity; he could turn the designs over and not be distressed by them. He even appreciated their wit: the way each of the suits detailed a different area of sexual activity, the spots incorporated into each intricately rendered picture. Hearts represented male/female congress, though by no means limited to the missionary position. Spades were oralist, depicting simple fellatio and its more elaborate variations. Clubs were analist: the spot cards portraying homosexual and heterosexual buggery, the court cards, anal sex with animals. Diamonds, the most exquisitely drawn of the suits, were sadomasochistic, and here the artist’s imagination had known no bounds. On these cards men and women suffered all manner of humiliation, their wracked bodies bearing diamond-shaped wounds to designate each card.

But the grossest image in the pack was that of the Joker. He was a coprophiliac, and sat down before a plateful of steaming excrement, his eyes vast with greed, while a scabby monkey, its bald face horribly human, bared its puckered backside to the viewer.

Mamoulian picked up the card and studied the picture. The leering face of the shit-eating fool brought the bitterest of smiles to his bloodless lips. This was surely the definitive human portrait. The other pictures on the cards, with their pretensions to love and physical pleasure, only hid this terrible truth away for a while. Sooner or later, however ripe the body, however glorious the face, whatever wealth or power or faith could promise, a man was escorted to a table groaning under the weight of his own excrement and obliged, even though his instincts might revolt, to eat.

That was what he was here for. To make a man eat shit.

He dropped the card onto the table, and spat a barking laugh from his throat. There would be such torment soon; such terrible scenes.

No pit is deep enough, he promised the room; the cards and cups; the whole dirty world.

No pit is deep enough.

IV

Skeleton Dance

Chapter 21

T
he man in the underground train was naming constellations.

“Andromeda … Ursa, the Bear … Cygnus, the Swan …” His monologue was for the most part ignored, though when a couple of young men told him to shut his trap he replied, barely altering the rhythm of his naming, with a smile and a “You’ll die for that,” slipped between one star and the next. The reply silenced the heckler, and the lunatic went back to his sky-watching.

Toy took it as a good sign. He was much preoccupied by signs these days, though he’d never really thought of himself as a superstitious man.

Perhaps it was his mother’s Catholicism, which he’d rejected at an early age, at last finding an outlet. In place of the myths of Virgin birth and transubstantiation he was finding significance in small coincidences—avoiding standing ladders and performing half-remembered rituals with spilled salt. All this was quite recent—only the last year or two—and it had started with the woman he was even now going to meet: Yvonne. It wasn’t that she was a God-fearing woman. She wasn’t. But the consolation she’d brought into his life brought with it the danger of its disappearance. That was what made him cautious with ladders and respectful to salt: the fear of losing her. With Yvonne in his life he had new reason to keep the fates friendly.

He had met her six years ago. She’d been a secretary then, working with the UK Branch of a German chemical corporation. A sprightly, good-looking woman in her middle thirties, whose formality, he’d guessed, disguised humor and warmth in abundance. He’d been attracted to her from the beginning, but his natural hesitancy in such matters, and the considerable difference in their ages, kept him from making any overtures.

Eventually it was Yvonne who broke the ice between them, commenting on small things about his appearance—a recent haircut, a new tie—and so making her interest in him perfectly plain. Once the signal had been given, Toy had proposed dinner, and she’d accepted. It had been the beginning of the most rewarding months of Toy’s life.

He was not an overly emotional man. The very lack of extremes in his nature had made him a useful part of Whitehead’s entourage, and he had nurtured his reserve as the salable commodity it was until, by the time he met Yvonne, he’d almost come to believe his own publicity. She it was who first called him a cold fish; she who taught him (difficult lesson that it was) the importance of showing weakness, if not to the world at large at least to intimates. It had taken him time. He was fifty-three when they met, and this new way of thinking went against the grain. But she persisted, and slowly, the melt began. Once it did, he wondered how he had ever lived the life he had for the previous twenty years; a life of servitude to a man whose compassion was negligible, and ego, monstrous. He saw, through Yvonne’s eyes, the cruelty in Whitehead, the arrogance, the mythmaking; and though he showed, he hoped, no change in his superficial attitudes to his employer, beneath the conciliation and the humility there increasingly simmered a resentment that approached hatred. Only now, after six years, could Toy contemplate his own contradictory feelings about the old man, and even now he found himself forgetting the worst; at least when he was out of Yvonne’s sphere of influence. It was so difficult when he was in the house, subject to Whitehead’s whim, to keep the perspective she’d given him, to see the sacred monster for what he was: monstrous, but far from sacred.

After twelve months Toy had moved Yvonne into the house Whitehead had purchased for him in Pimlico; a retreat from the world of the Whitehead Corporation that the old man never inquired about, a place where he and Yvonne could talk—or be silent-together; where he could indulge his passion for Schubert, and she could write letters to her family, which was spread across half the globe.

That night, when he got back, he told her about the man on the train, the constellation namer. She found the whole story pointless; couldn’t see the romance of it at all.

“I just thought it was strange,” he said.

“I suppose it is,” she replied, unimpressed, and went back to her dinner preparations. A few words on, she stopped.

“What’s wrong, Billy?”

“Why should something be wrong?”

“Everything’s fine?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

She was always quick to ferret out his secrets. He gave up before she really began on him; it wasn’t worth the effort of deception. He stroked the ridge of his broken nose, a familiar trick when he was nervous.

Then he said, “It’s all going to come down. Everything.” His voice trembled and fell away. When it was clear he wasn’t going to elaborate she put down the dinner plates and crossed to his chair. He looked up, almost startled, when she touched his ear.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked, more gently than before.

He took hold of her hand.

“There might come a time … not so far away … when I’d ask you to leave with me,” he said.

“Leave?”

“Just up and go.”

“Where?”

“I haven’t thought that through yet. We’d just go.” He halted, and looked at her fingers, which were now dovetailed with his. “Would you come with me?” he asked at last.

“Of course.”

“Ask no questions?”

“What is this, Billy?”

“I said: ask no questions.

“Just go?”

“Just go.”

She looked long and hard at him: he was washed out, poor love. Too much of that wretched old fart in Oxford. How she hated Whitehead, though she’d never met him.

“Yes, of course I’d go,” she replied.

He nodded. She thought he might cry.

“When?” she said.

“I don’t know.” He tried to smile, but it looked misbegotten.

“Perhaps it won’t even be necessary. But I think it’s all going to come down, and when it does I don’t want us to be there.”

“You make it sound like the end of the world.”

He didn’t reply. She didn’t feel able to chisel at him for answers: he was too delicate.

“Just one question?” she ventured. “It’s important to me.”

“One.”

“Did you do something, Billy? I mean, something illegal? Is that what it is?

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed his grief. There was so much more she had to teach him yet; about allowing those feelings out. He wanted to: she could see so much bubbling away behind his eyes. But there, for now, it would stay. She knew better than to press him. He’d only withdraw. And he needed her undemanding presence more than she needed answers.

“It’s all right,” she said, “there’s no need to tell me if you don’t want to.”

His hand was gripping hers so tightly she thought they’d never unknot them.

“Oh, Billy. Nothing’s that terrible,” she murmured.

Again, he made no reply.

Chapter 22

T
he old haunts were much the same as Marty had remembered them, but he felt like a ghost there. Along the rubbish-strewn back alleys where he’d fought and run as a boy there were new combatants, and, he suspected, far more serious games. They were glue sniffers, these grubby ten-year-olds, according to the pages of the Sunday tabloids. They would grow up, disenfranchised, into needle freaks and pill pushers; they cared for nothing and nobody, least of all themselves.

He’d been an adolescent criminal, of course. Theft was a rite of passage here. But it had usually been that lazy, almost passive form of thieving: sidling up to something and walking, or driving, away with it. If the theft looked too problematic, forget it. Plenty of other shiny things to be fingered. It wasn’t crime in the way he’d come to understand the word later. It was the magpie instinct at work, taking whatever opportunity offered, never intending much harm by it, or working up a sweat if things didn’t quite fall your way.

But these kids-there was a group of them lounging on the corner of Knox Street—they looked like a more lethal breed altogether. Though they’d grown up in the same lusterless environment, he and they, with its few wretched attempts at tree planting, its barbed wire and glass—topped walls, its relentless concrete—though they shared all that, he knew they’d have nothing to say to one another. Their desperation and their lassitude intimidated him: he felt nothing was beyond them. Not a place to grow up in, this street, or any of them, along the row. In a way he was glad his mother had died before the worst of the changes disfigured the neighborhood.

He got to Number Twenty-six. It had been repainted. On one of her visits Charmaine had told him Terry, one of her brothers-in-law, had done it for her a couple of years back, but Marty had forgotten, and the change of color, after so many years of imagining it green and white, was a slap in the face. It was a bad job, purely cosmetic, and the paint on the windowsills was lifting and peeling already. Through the window the lace curtains that he’d always loathed so much had been replaced with a blind, which was down. On the window ledge inside a collection of porcelain figures, wedding presents, gathered dust, trapped in the forsaken space between blind and glass.

He still had his keys, but he couldn’t bring himself to use them.

Besides, she’d probably changed the lock. Instead, he pressed the bell. It didn’t ring in the house, and he knew it was audible from the street, so it clearly no longer worked. He rapped his knuckles on the door.

For half a minute there was no sound from inside. Then, eventually, he heard dragging footsteps (she’d be wearing open-backed sandals, he guessed, and they made her walk ragged), and Charmaine opened the door. Her face was not made-up, and its nakedness made even plainer response to his standing there. She was unpleasantly surprised.

“Marty,” was all she managed to say. No welcoming smile, no tears.

“I came on the off-chance,” he said, attempting nonchalance. But it was obvious that he’d made a tactical error from the moment she sighted him.

“I thought you weren’t allowed out—” she said, then corrected herself, “—I mean, you know, I thought you weren’t allowed off the estate.”

“I asked for special dispensation,” he said. “Can I come in, or do we talk on the doorstep?”

“Oh … oh, yes. Of course.”

He stepped inside, and she closed the door behind him. There was an uncomfortable moment in the narrow hallway. Their proximity seemed to demand an embrace, yet he felt unable, and she unwilling, to make the gesture. She compromised with a patently artificial smile, followed by a light kiss on the cheek.

“I’m sorry,” she said, apologizing for nothing in particular. She led him down the hallway to the kitchen. “I just didn’t expect you, that’s all. Come on in. The place is in chaos, I’m afraid.”

The house smelled stale; as though it needed a good airing.

Washing, drying on the radiators, made the atmosphere muggy, like the sauna back at the Sanctuary.

“Take a seat,” she said, lifting a bag of unsorted groceries off one of the kitchen chairs, “I’ll just finish here.” There was a second load of dirty washing on the kitchen table—hygienic as ever—which she began to load into the washing machine, her chatter nervous, her eyes never meeting his as she concentrated on the matter in hand; the towels, the underwear, the blouses. He recognized none of the clothes, and found himself ferreting through the soiled items looking for something he had seen her in before. If not six years before, then in visits to the prison. But it was all new stuff.