(1998) Denial (21 page)

There was a gym and a sauna downstairs in the basement where the two of them worked out every day. There was no
need to go outside except for specific visits, like today, when they were going to the Science Museum. Only the underprivileged and people who were doing bad things went outside when they didn’t need to. And only children who did bad things, or whose mummy and daddy didn’t love them, were sent to school, where they had to learn in classrooms with lots of other kids, instead of having their own private teacher, like Mr Goodwin, come to their house every day.

Under his mother’s guidance, Thomas prayed every night to God, to thank him for making him normal, and for giving him a mother who loved him. And he prayed for God to help him find new things to love about his mother each day.

There were three cards on the breakfast table. One was from Grandma Lamark and showed an elephant holding a balloon in its trunk; a ten-pound banknote was clipped to the inside. The second was from his Aunt Stella, who had sent him a five-pound book token. On the front of her card was the number ‘6’ in large letters and the word
‘TODAY!’
beneath it.

He didn’t know that some children got toys on their birthdays. No one had ever told him that, and he had no way of finding out; the kind of books to which he was given access were not the kind that mentioned toys on birthdays.

He didn’t know either that the staff employed by his mother – the cook (Mrs Janner), housemaid (Elvira), personal maid (Irma), butler (Dunning), secretary (Enid Deterding), chauffeur (Lennie), gardener (Lambourne), and his tutor, Mr Goodwin, were expressly forbidden to give him cards and gifts. The same rule applied at Christmas.

There was a click of the door and Thomas turned round. Dunning, an elderly, courtly man in tails, with hair as smooth as sealskin, stood attentively. At a signal, he addressed Thomas.

‘Good morning, Master Thomas. Happy birthday to you.’

‘Thank you, Dunning,’ he replied.

Then the butler turned back to his mother. ‘When you are ready, Madam?’

‘Your special birthday breakfast, Tom-Tom, are you excited?’ his mother asked.

He nodded. He was! Porridge, bacon, egg, tomato, sausage, baked beans, fried bread, toast, marmalade! The
treat
breakfast he got when he had been especially good and didn’t have to eat the boring muesli that came in a box from Switzerland and had a picture of an elderly man in spectacles on the front.

‘Are you more excited about your present or your breakfast?’

Thomas hesitated. If he gave the wrong answer, there was the danger of losing both. ‘My present.’ His voice travelled in hope.

Such joy in her face! He beamed. This was going to be a good day today!

‘Can you guess? Can you, Tom-Tom? Can you guess what it is?’

It was about two feet square, little more than two inches thick and wrapped in cream paper with a blue ribbon. Heavy. He turned it around in his hands. Hard and heavy.

No, he couldn’t guess. Really he couldn’t!

His brain was searching for possibilities. He wondered what could be in a flat box. For Christmas she had given him a Meccano set which had come in a flat box and weighed a lot. In the booklet that had come with the set were instructions on how to make a swing bridge. He’d built a cage with it. He captured spiders and put them in the cage to see how long they could live without food or water. Sometimes they lived a long time.

Maybe it was more Meccano.

Eagerly hoping so, he untied the ribbon and let it fall free.

‘Don’t tear the paper, Tom-Tom, we don’t want to waste it.’

‘No, Mummy.’ He worked loose the wrapping paper, being careful not even to add further creases, then finally he pushed it open to reveal the gift.

It was a photograph in a silver frame. His mother, in a long dress and black gloves, was talking to another woman, who was also wearing a long dress and gloves.

‘That’s Princess Margaret! Isn’t that a wonderful present, Tom-Tom?’

He said nothing.

‘I thought it could go on the wall in front of your bed so you can see it when you wake up. Would you like it there best?’

Thomas looked down at the table, not wanting to let her see his disappointment.

‘That’s the film première I told you about, the one before you were born we did to raise money for Oxfam, to help children less fortunate than you. Princess Margaret told me she adored my films! Would you like to meet a princess?’

Thomas wasn’t sure what a princess was. ‘Yes.’

‘You’ll have to be good for a long time. Princesses don’t visit anyone who is bad. You’re not looking at your picture. Are you sure you like it?’

Thomas looked at it and nodded.

‘The princess was upset with me when I gave up my career to have you, Tom-Tom, because it meant she wasn’t going to see me in any more films. She asked me if you appreciated the sacrifice I had made, and I told her you were a wonderful son and you did appreciate it. I was right to tell her that, Tom-Tom, wasn’t I?’

He nodded.

‘You do appreciate that, don’t you, Tom-Tom?’

Barely a whisper. ‘Yes’.

His mother took the photograph, turned it round and peered closely at it. ‘This was seven years ago. Am I still as beautiful now?’ Her voice sounded forlorn.

The sight of her looking sad made him forget his own disappointment. He couldn’t bear it when his mother was sad. ‘You look even more beautiful now,’ he said.

She reached out a hand that smelt of pine soap. He took it in his own tiny hand and kissed it.

‘I’m glad you like your present,’ she said. Then she smiled.

He smiled back and squeezed her hand. Happy now.

Much calmer now. Dust on the photograph. Thomas wiped it with a cloth, then stood back. His mother talking to Princess Margaret. An old photograph. One of the dozens of photographs of his mother in his den. He hadn’t looked at this one in a long while.

How long?

Where was it taken? What was the occasion?

His memory was letting him down again, as if someone was following him around, tearing pages out of his brain at random. Useless junk never got torn out: he could remember with photographic clarity the circuit boards of every computer he had ever owned, every chip, switch, wire, nut, bolt, solder. Completely fucking useless. Yet stuff that did matter just went. Stuff like the reporter, Justin Flowering, who was his house guest, who needed his hospitality, his care, his attention: he’d forgotten all about him yesterday, hadn’t taken him any water, any nourishment.

One wall of his den was lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves containing science, medical and technological books, the other walls were filled with photographs of his mother.

There was a powerful microscope on his desk and a stack of glass slides containing preserved animal and human cells. He liked to study the intricacies of life; one day maybe he would take up biological research. He wasn’t happy with Darwin. He preferred his namesake, Karl Lamarck. One day he would get around to it. He liked the methodology of research. The hours, days, months, years of observation, experiments, patience.

Order.

Downstairs in the kitchen the microwave pinged.

He prowled over to the window, tall and proud, the master of this house now, and peered out through the curtains that he kept permanently closed to stop the molecules of shit and urine that came out of aeroplanes from getting into his room. Dawn was leaching away the darkness. He heard a taxi rattle past, saw tail-lights through the railings.

Sunday.

Are you chilling out today, Dr Tennent? Taking it easy? Enjoying fucking your bit of fluff?

Another picture of his mother caught his eye, one of his favourites. She was lying on a divan in a négligée, the tops of her breasts clearly showing. She was drinking a glass of champagne, smoking a cigarette from a long holder, and laughing.

He tried to remember the last time they had laughed together, but that page had been ripped out.

Dry lips. He needed a drink of water or something. He wondered if it was dry in the grave.

Down in the kitchen he removed the Pizza San Marco with wood-smoked ham and mushrooms from the microwave. He eyed some shrivelled red bits embedded in the melted cheese surface with suspicion. They looked like dried tomato skins he had seen in vomit.

He brought it to his nose and the odours were fine. It had been a while since he’d eaten or drunk anything. He’d had nothing for twelve hours before he began his surveillance of Dr Michael Tennent’s house, not wanting to have to break off to evacuate bodily fluids or substances.

NIL BY MOUTH
. The signs that were hung on the ends of patients’ beds in the wards sometimes, when he was a medical student. He’d once managed to leave the sign on a grumpy man’s bed for five days and no one had questioned it.

There was an electric clock on the kitchen wall that made a faint click at one-second intervals. The fridge and freezers hummed. The noise in the room sounded like a wasp’s nest inside his head. A neon strip in one of the units had blown
and needed replacing. The dishwasher needed emptying – he couldn’t remember when he had filled it, but the cycle-finished light was on. Dirty dishes were stacked in the sink and on the drainers. He couldn’t remember putting that stuff there – another page that had been ripped out.

He cut the pizza into four segments, put one on a plastic tray, with a jug of water, and went down the cellar steps into the gym, switched on the lights and walked across to the sauna.

As he opened the door, a blast of heat and the stench of excrement greeted him. Justin Flowering, still in the suit and hideous tie he had worn at his mother’s funeral, now blotched with dried blood, lay in the same position, pinned down by the bonds around his arms, midriff, thighs and ankles.

His eyes were shut, his face was gaunt, his skin waxy, his hair matted; he had lost a lot of weight.

‘I’ve brought you some pizza with wood-smoked ham, Justin, and some water.’

There was no response.

Thomas put down the tray, briefly studied the blackened, cauterised stump at the end of the reporter’s right arm, then compared it with the stump at the end of his left arm. Both were healing nicely and he was glad about that. No sign of gangrene.

‘Healing well, Justin!’ he said.

Then he checked the young man’s pulse. Weak. The skin felt clammy. He stood back, wondering whether to put the young man on a saline drip and nurture him back to strength. Perhaps with what he had learned down here he would now be a better reporter.

But he was a distraction. Thomas had to remind himself of that. Justin Flowering was a distraction. He could not afford to let his heart rule his actions.

I really would like to make you better, Justin, but I can’t, there are too many complications. I’m going to have to let you go. I’m sorry about this
.

He climbed the stairs up to his den, took a hypodermic syringe from a drawer, then went back down to the kitchen
and removed a vial of curare from the fridge. Obtaining medical supplies was easy for him. He printed out fake prescription forms copied from one of his own doctor’s, on his computer, then filled them in by hand. No problem.

Back in the cellar, he injected sufficient curare into a vein in the reporter’s wrist, then sat beside him, on a slatted pine seat in the sauna and waited.

After a few moments Justin’s eyes opened in shock. He was shaking. Struggling to breathe. His lips, cracked and blistered, parted a fraction, still connected by a thin strand of saliva.

Thomas looked him in the eye, feeling a confusion of emotions. ‘Back with us again now, Justin!’ he said, trying to sound encouraging, hoping to give this creature at least a few moments of kindness while he died.

The reporter made a wheezing sound. His face was starting to darken, the flesh tones turning blue. His whole body was juddering.

‘I’m here for you, Justin,’ Thomas said, taking his wrist and holding it. ‘I’m here for you.’

Justin Flowering juddered for a full two minutes, eyes bulging, making tiny sounds somewhere in the depths of his throat. Then he fell silent. Thomas continued to hold his wrist until a further sixty seconds had elapsed with no tremor from the pulse.

Now he needed to take the reporter down to his final resting place, alongside Tina Mackay. This was the messy part. This he really did not relish doing, but he should do it now, he knew, now, before he forgot, before any bad smells started to come from the man.

But first he took the tray with the slice of pizza back up to the kitchen. No need to waste it. His mother had taught him never to waste food.

Three hours later, exhausted, but elated by the power of what he had just done, Thomas carried a tray with four slices of pizza on it up to his mother’s bedroom, went in (no need to knock! he thought, joyously) sat down on her bed,
then lounged back on it, deliberately keeping his shoes on, and balanced the plate on his lap.

He watched his reflection in the mirror in the top of the canopy. And on the wall opposite. And on the side walls. His mother’s smells rose up off the pillows and mingled with the pizza. He lifted a quarter segment and melted cheese rolled off the side like a lava flow. Crumbs fell onto the sheets. He smiled a defiant smile at his reflection. Then he closed his eyes and tried to conjure up his mother’s face. Instead, he saw the cheap wig and stark black bush of pubic hair of the woman, Divina.

Hope you’re watching, Mummy!

Hope you can see me, lying on your bed, getting pizza crumbs everywhere, thinking about other women!

Hope this is making you mad as hell
.

There was a rubbery smell on his hands and an unpleasant odour of disinfectant on his clothes and in his hair. Jeyes fluid. He’d put on protective clothing, but the reek had got through it. And the embalming fluid. He wasn’t used to housework, but it had to be done, when you had guests staying.

Need a new light bulb for the kitchen unit
.

His mother used to dictate a list each week. Dunning or some other member of staff would go out for the shopping. But in the last few years, when it had been just the two of them together, he had done it.