The Late Hector Kipling (15 page)

‘Hector, you are drunk, and
God Bolton
is going into the alcove.’

‘Fine, Joe,’ I scream down the stairwell. ‘Don’t fall, Joe. I’d hate for you to fall and crack your head open on the steps. I’d hate to have to clean that up, Joe. I’d hate to have to pick up your brain with a tissue. A small tissue, Joe. A fucking baby wipe, Joe. I’d hate to spend an hour trying to find your brain with a fucking baby wipe, Joe!’

He totters down the stairs and slams the door.

It’s the season of hanging up and slamming doors. And crying. It’s the season of crying as well.

I sit upside down in the armchair and pick up Joe’s beer. I drink it, spilling it down my neck and ears, and cry.

A plane flies over, very low and loud, like it might crash into the City. But it doesn’t. I just thought for a few delightful seconds there that it might, but it didn’t. Maybe next time.

The phone rings. It’s Lenny.

‘Hector, what the fuck’s going on with you?’

I hang up. I’m hanging up, Lenny, that’s what the fuck’s going on with me. It rings again. I let it. The machine clicks on. ‘I’m sorry that I can’t crumble to the bone right now, but if you leave a massage after the tomb, I’ll crawl on your back.’

And then it’s Lenny: ‘Fuck does all that mean? What’s going on? Have you lost it?’ There’s a pause and then a little cough. ‘I spoke to Kirk this morning and if you want to talk to someone who’s really lost it, talk to Kirk. At least he has an excuse, man. He says that the other night you said nothing and just left him. Fuck’s going on, Hector? I know you can hear all this. I don’t know if you’re listening, but I know you can hear it, so call me back, or crawl on my back, whatever. Hector, you is well out of order.’

You is
? What the fuck’s all that about?
You is
? He’s forty-three, he’s from Blackpool.
You is
?

I’m lying on the wooden floor, looking up at the ceiling. Last year I painted the ceiling white. I had to rig up a twenty-five-foot scaffold and do it on my back with Eleni pushing me along every now and then, with the paint running down my brush and forearms, like Michelangelo, except that I wasn’t painting God. Although, in a way, I did paint God. I painted a large black spot, four foot in diameter, right above the place where Godfrey Bolton hanged himself. As I look at it now, it looks a lot like a hole. I could drag the table from the kitchen, balance the stepladder on the table, climb right up to the top, get a grip on the edges and heave myself in. So that’s what I do. What I mean is I drag the table through from the kitchen, balance the stepladder on the table, climb right to the top, but I don’t get a grip on the edges of the hole and I don’t heave myself in. Of course I don’t. Because it’s not a hole. It’s a black spot that I’ve painted on the ceiling. And so when I come to the bit where I’m trying to get a grip on the edges to heave myself in, I scratch my hands against the ceiling, lose my balance on the ladder, the ladder falls off the table, the table flips over and I drop through space and land on my back on one of the legs. It really hurts. It doesn’t matter that I’ve had four beers and most of Myers’ beer and quite a lot of the other one I took out for myself, which is actually five beers, or nearer five and a half or . . . What I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter that I’ve got practically six pints sloshing around inside me – this time it really hurts.

I shouldn’t really be driving in this state. I woke up with a hangover. I’d only slept for about an hour. Maybe it wasn’t so much a hangover as a towering migraine of the spine where I smashed my back on the table leg. The point is I’ve been driving this car around with a dustbinful of booze inside me and now I’m trying to dump it in the Chinatown car park. I find a space and go in and out of first and reverse so many times that I might have to stop and rest my wrist.

I don’t know if Kirk’s gonna be in but I’ve taken the risk, and if he
isn’t then I’ll just sit on a bench in Soho Square and make up names for all the pigeons. It wouldn’t be the first time.

On the way I buy a half of Jack Daniel’s and some Nurofen. Soho’s full of newsreaders and quiz-show hosts, and smells of onions and petrol. On Frith Street two chefs are fighting. One of them has a ladle.

At first Kirk tells me just to go away. He’s got his round head out of the window, the fat of his cheeks hanging down with the force of gravity.

Kirk’s head. The head that may kill him. To be killed by your own head. What hell there must be in that head of his. That head shouting at me to go away.

‘Kirk, I’ve driven all this way to see you, now come down and open the door.’

‘I’m busy,’ he shouts, ‘I’m working.’

‘So you can work with me in the room. You’ve worked with me in the room lots of times.’

‘No.’

‘You used to say that it helped you to work with someone in the room – with me in the room.’

Kirk’s head disappears, but the window stays open. Maybe he’ll throw down the keys.

An old man called Alfie taps me on the shoulder. I know that he’s called Alfie cos Alfie’s been tapping me on the shoulder for the past five years. He never remembers from one time to the next but I do and I know he’s called Alfie cos he always says so.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ says Alfie, ‘my name’s Alfie.’

‘Hello, Alfie,’ I say.

‘Hello, sir,’ he says. He’s small and hunched. One of his eyes is blackened and I notice a raisin in his beard. ‘I was roller-skating down the Mall just now and . . . well, to cut a long story short, I was involved in a collision with Her Majesty’s Household Cavalry and one of my wheels came off – I lost one of my wheels.’ He looks down at the ground and
sighs. ‘So what I’m asking is . . . I wonder if you could spare me a pound towards the cost of a new wheel.’

‘And where are your skates now?’ I say.

‘They’re in a vault in Whitehall.’

This is fairly standard stuff for Alfie. It’s never money for a cup of tea or a fag. One time it was a quid for some banjo polish and another to buy some talc to freshen up his Arthur Schopenhauer glove puppet which had become sticky from overuse.

‘But, Alfie,’ I say, ‘I always give you a pound and you always go off and get pissed and then I always bump into you later in the day and you always spit at me and call me a Bolshevik cunt.’

‘Ah no, sir,’ he says, ‘not me, sir. You’re thinking of Alfie Bass.’

‘No, Alfie, not Alfie Bass, Alfie, you, Alfie whatever you’re called.’ I hand him his coin. ‘I’m subsidizing my own abuse here.’

‘Ah, well, sir,’ he says, smiling like a smutty wizard, ‘isn’t that the way of things?’ And off he goes, whistling ‘From A Jack To A King’ through his scabbed black lips.

I think about Eleni. Eleni in tears. Sobbing on her mother’s dead breast.

Suddenly Kirk’s big bunch of keys – one for every door in his life, and a novelty bronze scorpion – smashes down onto my head. It really, really fucking hurts.

The first time I ever visited Kirk in his flat I couldn’t believe how dark it was, and then he drew back the curtains and switched on all the lights and somehow the room got darker. It’s a frightening little space. If you can call it space.

Here’s how we met: 18 September 1997. Me and Lenny Snook are edging around the Royal Academy’s ‘Sensation’ exhibition, quiet and gutted cos we’re not in it. We join a small queue to view Marcus Harvey’s painting of Myra Hindley.

‘She’s a piece of cultural ornamentation, like a bowl of fruit,’ said Marcus Harvey.

‘Why not just hang a bucket of sewer water?’ said the
Sun.

‘These people who are queuing to see it are as bad as Myra Hindley herself,’ said the mother of murdered Keith Bennett.

So me and Lenny are queuing to see this thing when, suddenly, a big, burly, bearded bloke appears out of nowhere and starts smearing blue ink all over the killer’s face. There’s a small scuffle and in an attempt to wrench the painting from the wall a stout, unassuming little man is accidentally elbowed in the head by a security guard and knocked to the floor. Taking sympathy on the little fella, me and Lenny pick him up and escort him outside where we all smoke a couple of cigarettes. There’s a crowd of protesters holding placards. ‘When we said Myra Hindley should be hung,’ screams one of them, ‘we didn’t mean at the Royal Academy’ Forty minutes later we re-enter the gallery and queue up once more to get a good look at the defaced painting. Our new friend, Kirk Church, steps forward to admire Harvey’s control of the little hand and is suddenly struck on the back of the head by an egg. Five more eggs are lobbed at the painting and a second man is arrested. ‘I think it’s brilliant!’ said Winnie Johnson, mother of murdered Bennett. ‘I think what’s happened is brilliant!’ but she wasn’t talking about Kirk.

‘Kirk, so how are you?’

‘I’m having the time of my life, Hec, the time of my life.’

He’s peering down into the grill, seeing if his cheese has started to bubble. I take off my coat and hang it on a nail. It slumps to the ground.

‘So,’ he says, ‘you drove all the way here?’

‘Yeah,’ I say.

‘And what are you? Pissed out of your head?’

‘Does it show?’

Kirk stares at me for a long time and I keep very still as though the question isn’t rhetorical.

‘No,’ says Kirk, and peers back into the grill.

Kirk’s cat, Bacon, pads in to see what’s going on. He already looks a bit disgusted. He looks me in the eye, shrugs, wanders over to his bowl and sniffs at his clump of mashed fish.

Kirk turns off the grill.

‘What’s that,’ I say, ‘cheese on toast?’

‘Yes,’ says Kirk.

Silence.

‘Can I take my shoes off?’ I say.

‘When in Japan,’ says Kirk.

I sit down and take off my shoes. I waggle my toes.

Silence.

Someone outside is screaming ‘Margaret! Margaret!’ over and over.

Silence.

Soho silence.

This kitchen is the scariest room in the flat. There are only three rooms in the flat but the kitchen is by far the scariest. The bathroom is scary cos it’s full of scorpions mounted behind glass, and the sink is full of scissors. The living/sitting/bedroom is scary cos that’s where Kirk keeps all his clothes and his paintings of cutlery. But the kitchen is the scariest of the three rooms, cos that’s where Kirk keeps all his cutlery. Kirk could win awards for how much cutlery he keeps in one room. First comes the cutlery drawer which is – fair enough – packed with cutlery. Then come all the other drawers which are also – a bit worrying – packed with cutlery. Then come the cupboards. The doors of the cupboards won’t close properly cos they’re so stuffed with cutlery. And then there’s the table and the draining board and the tops of cupboards and the floor. Knives, forks and spoons, wherever you look, wherever you don’t, stolen from parties, cafes, bars, restaurants, hotels, aeroplanes, home. Stolen from all over the world. From any incident which involved the use of a knife, fork or a spoon. Bread knives, butter knives, fish knives, fruit knives. Big forks, little forks, meat forks,
toasting forks. Tea-spoons, soup spoons, dessert spoons, coke spoons. He’s fucking mad as a gibbon’s bum, but I love him cos he’s Kirk and he wouldn’t be Kirk if he didn’t have the scariest kitchen in London. Lenny loves him as well, and I love Lenny and Lenny loves me and Kirk loves us both, and it is – it’s love. The real thing. And Kirk wouldn’t be Kirk if he wasn’t peering into the grill pissed off with me that I’ve turned up drunk to try and make him feel a little bit better than he does about his potential, and utterly plausible, imminent death. That’s what I love about him.

In the living room, Kirk bites into his toast. He hasn’t shaved and his whiskers have gone yellow with piccalilli. Kirk’s sat on the bed, I’m sat on the floor.

I look at the ashtray. ‘Is that a joint?’ I say, shifting towards it.

‘Yeah,’ says Kirk.

‘May I?’

‘Be my guest.’

I pluck it out and light it. I offer it to Kirk but he just holds up his piccalilli toast in refusal.

Silence.

I take three big drags and put it out.

Silence.

I should have thought about all this on the way here. I did think about all this on the way here. Well, not all of it – some of it. I even practised a few sentences out loud but none of them amounted to anything more than a platitude: ‘Kirk, everything’s going to be all right, you know’, ‘Kirk, just try not to dwell upon it’, ‘Kirk, you know how much everyone thinks about you’.

I sit here now, on Kirk’s blue wooden floor, looking quite calm, but in my head there’re a trillion molecules thrashing it out, each thinking they know best; beating themselves against the folds of my brain, and my brain – or the little fella sat on top of my brain – or perhaps it’s a woman – asking all these molecules to keep it down a bit, and don’t they
know that people are trying to get some sleep? My belly’s a snowball, my heart’s filled with cabbage and my bowels are burning up on reentry. I should have thought about all this. I did think about all this, I think. I thought I did. But then maybe it wasn’t this; maybe it was something else. Yes, in fact now I think about it, I think I was thinking about something else.

There’s so much to say, but somehow that first sentence seems crucial. Why can’t I be one of those carefree people? One of those passionate people? The sort of person who seems to enjoy their own personality? Why do I feel like my head’s filled with civil servants sat at little black tables, reading, signing, stamping, forwarding and filing every fucking thought?

I go off looking for that first sentence. I’ll find it if it kills me.

Meanwhile the joint’s barged into my brain and started throwing chairs around.

‘How’s the toast?’ I say.

And Kirk says, ‘Good.’

‘Piccalilli,’ I say.

‘Heinz,’ says Kirk.

Bacon leaps up onto the window ledge and stares down an earwig. I ponder Bacon’s beautiful green eyes. Indignant, incredulous. Infinitely patient. We could all learn a thing or two from Bacon.

‘Kirk,’ I say, ‘I’m really sorry if I’m not handling all this very well. I mean, y’know, we never did this at school.’

‘Nor did I,’ says Kirk and licks the crumbs off his plate.