How to Be Bad (7 page)

I bought a bar of chocolate from a vending machine and paced up and down the platform. The chocolate tasted like it had been placed beside the mummified body of Ramses III in 1163
B.C.
, but I was so hungry I ate it anyway.

The next train was destined for Wimbledon, the next for Ealing Broadway. Just when I'd given up hope, the message on the board flashed
NEXT TRAIN RICHMOND.
There were three other people on the platform, a fat woman in a fake fur and miniskirt and a nervous teenage boy who seemed embarrassed by the attentions of his girlfriend.

It was then that I felt a stinging blow on the back of my head. At first, I thought the fat woman had seen me staring in disbelief at her badly-packed-sausage legs. I turned and saw the man with the pullover standing behind me, his hood up, raindrops all over his face. “Hey. Shitface. Stay away from her,” he said.

It was only then that I realized I was looking at Warren, Caro's most recent victim.

As always when faced with the threat of violence, I decided to try the reasonable approach. It had never succeeded yet, but there is always a first time. “Warren, isn't it?” I held out my hand. He ignored it. “I'm Mark.”

This time, Warren jabbed me in the chest with his knuckles. “Stay away from my fucking girlfriend, you stupid-looking wimp, or I will pull your arms out by the fucking stumps.”

“Warren, I'm not even going out with her. Come on. You know what a bitch she is. She's even less interested in me than she is in you.”

He grabbed my coat with both hands and swung me round so that we were both parallel to the track. Warren was a lot stronger than me. I was vaguely aware of the other passengers on the platform, slowly backing away. Behind me, I could hear the spit-and-rattle of the Richmond train entering the station. I thrust both my hands up through Warren's arms and punched sideways, breaking his hold on me. Contrary to what my instructor believed, I had picked up one or two tricks in my karate class.

I tried to walk away from him, but he grabbed my shoulders and forced me to look into his dead, dull eyes. I couldn't tell whether he was drugged or as miserable as hell. Probably both. “Fucking leave her!” he shouted.

“All right,” I said. “Message understood.”

As if he hadn't heard, he edged us to the very brink of the platform. The train was close, its yellow lights glimmering on the wet track. It was only then that I understood how desperate and confused he was. He didn't have a plan. All he was trying to do was ease his own grief.

With a huge effort, I broke free again, and as I turned to get past him, my rucksack whacked Warren in the chest and he fell off the platform. The only sound he made was a grunt. Then he hit the track, just in time to be cut in half by the wheels of the train. The train didn't brake; it was already braking. Blood sprayed everywhere. I felt my face burning. With shame? With embarrassment? I wasn't sure. As I walked away, I heard a woman screaming and a man shouting, but I didn't look back. I just kept walking. I'd already seen too much. I didn't want to see any more.

*   *   *

I
T WAS
after midnight by the time I turned up at Caro's house. I'd been wandering the streets for hours, feeling drunk with shock and fear and appalling guilt. I knew I had to go to the police, but I was worried about how they might react. I don't know why I walked away, I truly don't. As soon as I'd done that, the whole complexion of the incident changed. Innocent people don't tend to flee the scene of a crime.

There was a light shining in the living room window of Caro's flat, so I rang the bell until she responded. She finally pushed up a sash window and called out, “Warren, fuck off!”

“It isn't Warren. It's Mark,” I shouted.

She leaned out of the window and peered down at me. “Well, you can fuck off, too.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Jesus Christ. Now I've got two of them,” she said despairingly. She meant there were now two lovesick morons who hammered on her door at night. With noticeable aggression, she slammed down the window. Minutes later, when she deigned to come to the door, the light from the hall shone on my face and her attitude changed instantly. “Fuck. What is it? What's happened?”

I didn't say anything at first. I was staring at the purple and brown bruise over her left eye. “Yeah,” she said. “Would you believe that bastard Warren? He punched me in the face.”

“Well, he won't do it again,” I said. I was finding it hard to think, let alone talk. Rather than deliver the fuck-off-out-of-my-life speech she had planned, she seized my arm and pulled me into the grimly, dimly lit hallway.

I swayed drunkenly, and she hooked her arm under mine with a sudden show of tenderness. She was perfectly capable of tenderness, by the way. I wouldn't want you to think she was just some slick, callous bitch who only ever thought about herself.

Moving like a very old man on his afternoon out from the rest home, I allowed her to guide me up the communal stairs that stank of dust and antique semen. Once inside the flat, I followed her into the kitchen. Pasta sauce was cooking in a large pan. “Now tell me,” she said.

I looked at the dark red sauce and saw Warren's dark red blood exploding upward from the wheels of the train. Convinced that I was about to throw up, I brushed past Caro and rushed to the bathroom. It was a false alarm. I looked in the bathroom mirror and saw that my face and jacket were speckled with dried blood. I had just walked all the way from Hammersmith to Kew, looking exactly like someone who had just committed a murder.

After washing my face, I went to sit on her sofa, so stunned that I wasn't even aware that I was crying until Caro pointed it out. She opened a cigar box, took out a ready-made joint, and passed it to me.

“I'm not in the mood for dope,” I said.

“It isn't dope,” she said. “It's crystal. The best.”

“I thought you didn't do drugs anymore?”

“I lied.”

I took a blast and felt nothing, took another and felt my soul rise up inside me like a stallion rearing. “Fuck,” I said. “That's good.”

“Now tell me,” she said, eyes searching my face. “Tell me.”

“It's Warren,” I managed to say. “He had an accident.”

She drew back. “You're joking.”

“No.”

“Is he all right?”

“I shouldn't think so. He got run over by a train.”

“You mean he killed himself?”

“No. I knocked the poor bastard onto the track. He got sawn in half.”

Her eyes appeared to double in size. “You saw it happen?”

“No, no.” Despite myself, I started to laugh. The meth was making the room rush toward me. “No, I only saw the blood.”

Caro's eyes filled with tears. For a moment, I thought she was mourning the loss of a man who had meant something to her. Then she leaned forward and started to kiss my face. “So
you
killed him?”

I shrugged and nodded. It was pretty much the truth. “And I'm not proud of the fact.”

Caro's icy-blue eyes were shining. “But you should be. You're an amazing person, you know that?” She threw her arms around me so tightly that I almost stopped shaking. Then she began to kiss my face and neck. “No one … but no one … has ever done anything like that for me before.”

She guided my hand between her legs. She was soaking wet. Her clitoris felt like a bullet.

“Just tell me one thing,” I said as she unzipped my trousers. “Did you ever call me Madeline?”

Caro shook her head, being far too polite to speak with her mouth full.

CHAPTER 4

ABOUT A BASTARD

I
TOOK
no pleasure in Warren's death, but Caro seemed to. As far as she was concerned, I'd performed a selfless public service. All night she showed me just how grateful she was. She told me I was beautiful and potent. I almost believed her. We went to sleep at about four and didn't wake until after eleven. By then, the thought of phoning the police seemed even stupider than it had seemed the night before.

We had breakfast at the kitchen table while the planes roared over on their way to Heathrow. This morning, radiating light, Caro looked happier than I had ever seen her. “Last night was great. I thought you were never going to stop.”

I didn't bother explaining that the only reason I'd appeared insatiable was that I hadn't had real sex since she'd dumped me five years ago. Yes, I'd engaged in copulation. I'd made the right noises and kissed the right places. But I'd only ever experienced real sex with Caro. Dirty, filthy, beautiful fucking that obliterates the world and everyone in it.

“You know the only thing that might fuck us up?” (Overnight, Warren's death had become
our
crime,
our
shared triumph.) “CCTV. If the cameras were working, then they might have got footage of you pushing him off the platform.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“But it was night, and the picture quality on those cheapo cameras is piss-poor. You know what? It's going to look like two badly drawn cartoons that a little kid has scribbled over.”

“Maybe we shouldn't see each other for a couple of weeks,” I said, surprised by how cool I sounded.

I could see that Caro was surprised, too. Nodding humbly, she reached over the table and patted my hand. “Good idea. And if the police come round, I won't mention you.”

She had made up her mind. I was her medieval champion. In her imagination, I had committed justifiable homicide on the westbound platform of Hammersmith station.

I could have made it absolutely clear, there and then, that I had not murderered poor Warren, that he had merely suffered a fatal mishap after picking a fight with the clumsiest bastard in Richmond-Upon-Thames, that if she wanted to show her gratitude to Warren's killer, she should have had sex with my rucksack. But I didn't say a thing, because this morning Caro was looking at me exactly like she used to look at me.

Caro opened a kitchen drawer and placed a black shiny object on the table in front of me. I blinked a few times before I could accept what I was looking at. It was a handgun. “What's this?” I asked her.

“It's Warren's gun,” she said. “I need you to hide it for me.”

“Warren had a gun?”

“He hung around with some pretty dodgy people.”

I stared at her. “How dodgy?”

“The kind of people who kill their enemies and grind them up for dog food.”

*   *   *

A
S SOON
as I arrived at the flat above my shop, I got out the gun and studied it. I found the inscription
Custom TLERL II
on the breech and looked it up on the Internet. On a site called Safe Shooter (
We look forward to serving all your firearm needs
) I found Warren's gun. It was a Kimber Swat, as used and abused by the Los Angeles Police Department. Altogether the Kimber carried eight shots, seven in the magazine and one in the breech. The gun was fully loaded. The black rubber grip seemed to sit perfectly in my hand, and the weapon was so light and well crafted that it was hard to believe it was designed solely to maim and kill.

My instincts told me to drop the gun in the Thames. Yet Caro had asked me to hide the weapon, not get rid of it. She trusted me and at the moment, incredible as it seemed, actively admired me. I had no desire to dampen her enthusiasm, but this wasn't my only reason for following her instructions. The gun was
sexy.
My God, I thought fine first editions were attractive enough, but knowing I was holding something that the L.A. cops used to shoot holes in innocent bystanders thrilled me beyond reason.

Desperate to find out if the gun worked, I aimed at a bookcase and squeezed the trigger. There was a deafening explosion that made the door to the street shudder in its frame. The air was full of smoke, smoke that smelled of childhood. The shot had been so loud that I expected people to come running, but the only passerby was an unimpressed overalled workman, chewing a burger made from a cow's arsehole.

Then I noticed I'd blown a smoking hole right through a signed copy of
Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less.
I cursed my misfortune. It was better than the book deserved, but that shot had cost me one hundred and twenty-five pounds.

Calling myself some well-chosen names, I laid the gun in my favorite hiding place, a hollowed-out copy of an old Arthur Mee
Children's Encylopedia.
Years before, while living with my parents, this book had concealed my dope stash and the tranquilizers I'd stolen from my mother and saved up for special occasions.

*   *   *

I
DIDN'T
open for business that day. At lunchtime, I watched the local news report. There was a story about a man who'd gone hunting with a shotgun in a tower block in Mile End. A traffic warden in Epping had been set alight by angry motorists. There was no mention of a murder committed at Hammersmith station.

I needed a drink. In the fridge there was a bottle of gin and two cans of tonic water. I drank gin and tonic with ice until the tonic had gone, then I drank neat gin. By about two o'clock I could barely see the room in front of me and finally understood the meaning of “blind drunk.” I staggered up to bed, lay down in the darkness, and spun.

When I'd puked for about the third time, the phone rang. I heard my own voice deliver the answering machine message. I sounded middle-class, friendly, and faintly ridiculous. Then I heard Caro talking. Her voice was husky and womanly and at least ten thousand times more confident than mine. I staggered into the next room and picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

“What's wrong?” she said. “Your voice is all funny.”

“Why are you calling?”

“I was missing you.”

“Where are you?”

“Standing outside your front door.”