The Late Hector Kipling (23 page)

He lets all this hang in the air for a moment as he tops up his glass with beer. I feel that I should say something. In fact I’m certain that I should say something. But my brain is in spasm. And what would I say?
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ Is that what I should say? Or: ‘What a palaver, Freddie, that must have been beastly for you.’ I have no idea what to say. What the hell is he telling me? I’ve never had anyone, let alone a stranger, sit before me and report such spectacular atrocities. And with such considered and eloquent bravado. I say nothing. Instead I drain my can and wish I was walking on the beach with Eleni and Mum. Monger leans back into his chair and stares at the black spot on the ceiling.

‘My father – Godfrey to you, though it was a name he adopted in later life – was a very successful breeder and trainer of horses. He ran a thriving stud farm on the outskirts of Rickmansworth. My mother had been an heiress of sorts. That is to say that she inherited her father’s debts. Her own mother had also died in childbirth. Wonderful symmetry, isn’t there?’

I am so irrevocably adrift in the world of Freddie Monger that it takes me some time to awaken to the fact that the man himself has actually addressed me with a question, albeit rhetorical. Or is it? From the other side of the coffee table he fixes me with his gaze. His eyes are a kind of bleached indigo. His mouth is twisted into a sinister rictus. What a face! What a ruined and desperate face, all of a sudden. And yet there is something else in it. The word ‘arch’ springs to mind. ‘Sorry, what?’

‘Are you listening to me?’ He dispels the rancour of an Edwardian bully.

‘Yes of course I’m l-listening to you. How on earth could I not be l-listening to you?’

‘I said wonderful symmetry, isn’t there?’

‘Wonderful,’ I say, and then, ‘so your mother was raised by her father . . . er . . . also?’

‘You see, my mother was a species of fallen angel, whereas my father was something of a demon in ascendancy.’

‘I see.’

Monger plucks another cigarette from his case. He offers me one. I show him the one I’m already slaughtering.

‘Rich girl in penury, scoundrel in bloom. That sort of thing. Anyway, I won’t bore you with much more.’

‘Really, I’m not bored. I’m just a little . . .’ and I pause, afraid that I might conclude with some word anomalous to my dialect, such as ‘fascinated’ or ‘intrigued’, but after some thought, some dread, I manage to exhume ‘. . . discombobulated.’

He smiles – that buckled smile – suitably placated. Anyway,’ he says, ‘to cut to the chase, one night, two nights after my sixteenth birthday, my father, Godfrey Bolton, as you know him, placed a bit in my mouth, tied me to a stable door and hammered nails into the soles of my feet.’

Right, that’s it, I want him out of here. I don’t want to be listening to all this.

‘I think it was what has come to be known as child abuse.’

‘He hammered nails into the soles of your feet?’ I manage to squeak. ‘What, like Christ?’

Monger chuckles to himself and shakes his head, ‘No, no. Not at all. Not at all like Christ. Like a horse. Like a pitiful horse. What I’m saying is, he shoed me.’

‘He nailed horseshoes onto you?’ I think of the horseshoes that used to hang over Mum and Dad’s demolished fireplace.

‘Precisely’ He brings the palms of his hands together in an attitude of relish. He’s not stopping now. ‘I was left in the stable overnight. Around dawn I regained consciousness and was able to free myself. I galloped off across the fields and never saw him again.’ Monger stands up. ‘May I use your toilet?’

I can barely speak. ‘Er . . . yes . . . yes . .. over there, the door with the number three on it.’

‘Thank you,’ and he limps off.

I have to say here, in my defence, that there was a certain degree of dubiety regarding what Monger had just told me. The tale was so
horrific, so decorous and lurid, that I couldn’t help but think that he was just a total fucking mental case who’d read too many Gothic horror novels. I had never before come across anyone so abused, and not only abused, ritually abused. Do such things go on? I try to imagine my dad shoeing me. It was never going to happen. I put out my fag and immediately light up another. I can hear him whistling as he pisses. This has gone far enough. I want him out of here.

The toilet flushes and he emerges, doing up his fly and tightening his belt. His voice echoes across the distance as he staggers back to his seat. ‘That day I came to see him, the day I assisted you with your spilt oranges, I’d finally tracked him down. I’d read about his impending trial in the
Evening Standard
. Godfrey was his father’s name; Bolton, my mother’s maiden name. In fact it was me, unbeknownst to him, who had put up the bail. You see I’d made a little money of my own by then.’ He taps the side of his nose with his finger and sits back down. ‘A keen mind abhors faintness and lassitude.’

I don’t know what lassitude means. What does lassitude mean? And why does a keen mind abhor it?

‘Anyway, he wasn’t in. I knocked and knocked. I waited on the stairwell for several hours, but he never appeared. It crossed my mind that he might have jumped bail for fear of having to justify his depravity at trial. Did you read about the trial, by any chance? I’m sure that you did.’

‘Yes,’ I say, my voice atremble, ‘yes, he’d done something weird to a horse.’

‘He’d cut out a horse’s tongue, and violated its privates. Some sort of vendetta on a botched con. Whatever . . .’

Oh yeah, whatever. Maybe I should have phoned Scotland Yard after all. He’s fiddling with his cufflinks again.

‘I have some small dealings with collectors of art.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes, yes, I er . . .’ he pauses and brings a finger to his lips, ‘mix in circles. Anyway, the point is that one day I found myself in Hyde Park.
The next thing you know, I’ve wandered into the Serpentine Gallery. It was about eighteen months after my father’s suicide and . . . well . . . perhaps I shall finish there. You can imagine what I was confronted with, Hector.’

It’s the first time he’s used my name since I met him on the front step. I’m lodged in the corner of the settee, curled up like an egg. I wish Bianca was here. I can barely speak, but I do: ‘Your dad?’

‘Quite. An enormous rendition – rather splendid, if I may say so -of my father, in repose. Finished. Eyes agog in mortal terror. The way I had always wished them.’

‘Thank you,’ I say.

‘I had only stood him bail so that I might have a chance of getting to him before he was incarcerated beyond my resolve. And then it was too late. You, however, had been privileged to gain access to his final torment. And to torment me – or so it seemed at the time – had preserved this memento mori in the name of profit. I came back the next day with my bucket, but alas, the exhibition had closed.’

Suddenly, the telephone rings; I’m delivered to my senses and somehow remember that I’m located on a planet where telephones exist.

‘Aren’t you going to get that?’ says Monger.

‘No . . . no . . . I don’t think I can . . . should . . . will. The machine’s on.’

Monger replaces his shoe. Ah ‘yes,’ he says with a certain amount of what he, I’m sure, would call ennui, ‘the machine is always on.’ And with this he puts his face into his hands and presses till his fingers turn pink. I think he’s crying again. Oh great.

‘I am not here, and neither are you. This machine, however, is, and may be able to assist us in one day being in the same place at the same time. So leave it a message. That is its purpose.’

Monger looks up, his cheeks wet.

Meanwhile – it’s Mum:

‘Hector, I don’t understand what you’re talking about most of the
time.’ (Pause) ‘In fact any of the time. Are you drinking again? It’s Mum. Your father’s in hospital. They took him in this morning. He couldn’t catch his breath and they’ve had to put a mask on him. I’ve just got back and he’s stable, but they’re worried about how he might respond when he wakes up again.’ Pause. A little crying and then a sniff. ‘Hector, I’d say maybe you should send that money – I know you’re only trying to help but . . . you know your dad; it doesn’t matter how much money you make . . . he’d still see it as the Kiplings losing out and . . .’ breaths, ‘and that’s what we are: we’re the Kipling family’ More breaths. ‘Silly bloody family it is, but . . . but it’s – ‘out and out sobbing – ‘it’s all my fault. I feel that it’s all my fault. And . . .’ Unbearable silence. ‘Hector, it’s your mum, your dad’s in hospital. I’m going.’

I’m holding back my tears. Mum sounds like she’s drowning in hers. And Monger, Freddie fucking mental Monger, is curled up in the chair leaking through his knuckles.

God, I love life.

Eleni’s dressing gown hangs on the back of the bathroom door. I’m sat down waiting for the piss to come, staring at it. Eleni’s dressing gown is a soft clean cotton apricot, made in Portugal. I can smell it from here. It smells of Persil and Comfort. Rosa’s dressing gown smelt of musk and sweat and blood and smoke. The ruddy Chinese silk was smudged here and there by scuffed umber fag burns. The hem, frayed and bitten. Collar in tatters. Last night is dripping from the ceiling. Drip, drip, drip. Tripperty-trap, tripperty-trap. Rosa slapped me in the face and told me to keep quiet. She eased her fist into my mouth. I tried to kiss but could only bite. Her nails felt like ten little beaks. Here comes the piss. Here comes the love. I know, of course, that it’s not love, but that’s what I’ve been taught to call it. Whenever I have felt incapable of squeezing this muddy hurricane from my brain, I have always called it love and had done with it. It is all I know of love. There is this word infatuation, but it hardly behoves me to pull out the dictionary at this juncture.
Infatuation is only the lobby of the gallery of love – as I have been taught to call it. I love my father and I love my mother. But what has this love to do with the love that is now flooding my intestines? We need two different words. More than two. We need a hundred-page glossary. Two thousand different words, three definitions apiece, six thousand strains of this thing. This thing. This thing dripping from this pen, dripping from this ceiling, as I drip into this pan.

Dad is in hospital and I am making no moves to pack a bag. Let that be my definition.

This is – I think, maybe, I don’t know – the first germ of love that blooms inside before you begin to talk about it. Soon you might mention the word to a friend. You won’t say that this is love, only that it feels like love, but by then it’s too late, the word is out of the bag and soon you’ll be running it past her. Past the woman herself. I’ll say it again: Dad is in hospital and I am making no moves to pack a bag. I toss my fag into the water and it fizzes and fades like a silly life.

Monger is still sobbing. In fact so much of him seems made of water that I feel I could just absorb him with a large towel.

‘Hector, I’m sorry,’ he blubbers. ‘There was no need to take out my anger on your painting. It’s a magnificent painting. And now it’s ruined. I have ruined a part of your life.’

I drop onto the settee. ‘I’m sure it’s not ruined. It was only horse shit and acid.’

‘If there’s anything I can do. If there’s
anything
I can do.’

I pour out the rest of his beer and bring it to his lips like a suckling mother. He sniffs and sups. He sniffs again – a big bubbly sniff – and pulls out his handkerchief. Eventually he’s restored to a place of equilibrium.

‘You must think me a fool,’ he says.

‘Fool isn’t one of the words I’ve been considering.’

He smiles and wipes his eyes on his cuff. ‘Do you have any more beer?’

‘I have some vodka. Would you like a vodka? I’d like a vodka,’ I say. ‘I’ll go and get the vodka.’

In the kitchen I take a good swig from the bottle and pour out two glasses. I drink both of them and pour out two more.

Settled back in our seats, he tells me of his feelings leading up to and during the attack, and even laughs at the slapstick of Myers and Delaney. I tell him about my pursuit and the Volvo and how I saw him run back for his wallet. I stop there. I tell him nothing of Rosa, though God knows I’m tempted. God knows I need to tell someone. If he wasn’t here I’d be telling it to the wall, to the floor, to the lamp in the corner, to the freckles on my knuckles and the scab on my shin. I think about calling Bianca but she’s probably sleeping it off. Instead I tell Monger about the attack on Marcus Harvey’s
Myra
, and about Kirk getting it in the back of the neck with a flying egg. I tell him about the mad Chinese on Emin’s bed, Napoleon’s troops shooting the nose off the Sphinx and how they pissed all over Duchamp’s
Fountain
. I make a joke about sewing up a Fontana but by then I think I’ve lost him and a polite smile dwindles to a cipher.

‘You have a lot on your mind,’ he says, apropos of nothing.

‘What?’

‘I can tell. Your mind is split in twelve.’

‘Twelve?’

‘Twelve.’

‘Why twelve?’

‘It’s a nice word. I like the sound of it and I like the look of it upon a page.’

I think about twelve.

12.

He may have a point.

‘Why is your poor mother so distressed?’

‘Because she’s my mother.’

‘Ah,’ he says, ‘and is that an indictment of you or of her?’

‘Of both of us, I suppose.’

‘But of course that’s not the real answer.’

‘But of course,’ I say, as though that’s the end of it.

‘You feel in some way to blame.’

‘To blame for what?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Why should I?’ I say.

He says nothing, but stares up at the ceiling.

Silence.

I tell him the whole story. Every last, lost fucking detail. I’ve poured out a few more glasses, dimmed the lights, and the memory of his father’s florid abominations are beginning to fade. He sits forward and listens, playing with his ring, asking questions now and then. When I reach the end he sits back, reshapes his hair and smiles.

‘What are you smiling about?’ I say.

‘I’m smiling because it’s perfect,’ says Monger.

‘What’s perfect?’

He stands and begins to hobble around the room, lowering and raising his voice according to his distance from me – which is, sometimes, considerable.