How to Be Bad (9 page)

“No. More like a small boy who's keeping secrets from his mother.”

“What's your point?” I said irritably.

“Well, you obviously love this person, Mark. It's written all over you. Your eyes are shining. You keep drifting off when I try to talk to you. And now you can't get a hard-on, not even when I'm being Gestapo lady.”

Don't ask.

“There is someone, but it's nothing, it's purely platonic,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that my attraction to her isn't really sexual. She's just someone on my wavelength, someone I can talk to about anything.”

“Well, that's worse! That's much worse than just sleeping with her,” said Lisa. I could see she was getting angry. “I suppose I'm too bloody stupid to talk to?”

“No, you're very bright,” I said, trying to smooth things over. “You can't help being uneducated.”

Lisa threw the pillow at me and called me a number of interesting names, some of which I'm convinced she invented on the spot. I got out of bed and got dressed, feeling more relieved than anything. When I got to the foot of the stairs, Elliot was waiting for me. He was in his pajamas. He looked pale and shocked.

“Has something happened?” he said.

“Your dreams have come true, Elliot. Your mum and I have split up.”

“God,” said Elliot. “I'm really sorry.”

I was touched. All the abuse the boy had hurled at me came from pain. Deep down, he had grown attached to me. “Much appreciated,” I said, squeezing his shoulder.

“It'll be strange not seeing you,” said the boy.

“Thanks, Elliot,” I said as I opened the front door. “You look after yourself. Okay?”

He nodded. The cold, damp air from the street came as a shock after the warmth of the house. I walked out onto the path and looked back. Elliot was still standing there. “I'll miss you,” he said, his voice suddenly small and childlike.

I nodded back at him, too choked to answer.

“I'll miss laughing at you, you pathetic cunt!” shouted Elliot, before slamming the door behind me. I stood there for a few seconds, stunned. Elliot cackled in triumph. Then I heard his feet clumping rapidly up and down. I could swear he was dancing for joy.

*   *   *

W
HEN
I got home, I checked my Web site and found an abusive message. The sender had taken the trouble to register as [email protected].

The message was very long and repetitive. The first paragraph should suffice:

I hope you know what a talentless, pitiful piece of shit you are. Who would want to buy books after you've touched them? You filthy hermaphrodite. I walk past that shop and I can smell your armpits and your shitty arse, even through a closed door. Very soon you will die of cancer. Your brain will increase in size until your eyes explode. Then you will go to hell where all weak, grimy, ugly, smelly homosexuals go.

I had received abusive e-mails before, but only from a witch, angry because the
Book of Shadows
I'd sold her didn't have any shadows in it. My immediate impulse was to answer the e-mail. Then I remembered how my carefully worded replies to the witch had merely led to longer and more deranged e-mails, culminating in threats of a curse that would blight me and all my descendants. I blocked the anonymous sender, hoping to God it wasn't Caro, tipped over the edge from strangeness into outright insanity.

*   *   *

I
LASTED
for thirty-two hours. During that time I came close to phoning Caro seven times and once, Warren-like, even walked round to her flat to stare wistfully up at the window. I had never known a pain like it. I wanted Caro so badly that I couldn't stop shaking. The slightest thing would make me cry.

I turned on the TV to watch the morning shite. A working-class man was claiming his working-class wife had tricked him into marriage by passing off her tits as real, when he believed them to be silicone implants. Despite his suspicions, the wife insisted that her tits were real, so the working-class studio audience took a vote on it. A massive majority, 96 percent of the audience, decided the working-class tits were fake. Then it was revealed that the husband and the audience were right. The wife was a big-titted cheat!

In the next part, two more women were arguing about whether a man with half his skull missing should be playing around. One was his working-class girlfriend; the other was his working-class wife. The implication seemed to be that this man shouldn't be fucking two women when any decent half-headed person would be too filled with self-loathing to leave the house.

While the women debated this important issue, the man with half a head was smiling contentedly, just happy to be on TV. The guy's wife started talking about how awful it was when this guy took the steel plate off his skull and exposed his brain while they were making love, but she still wanted him and hoped the baby was his.

“What baby?” said the girlfriend. It was the first she'd heard of any baby. She started crying. The wife looked triumphant. The guy lifted the steel plate off his skull and showed the audience his brain. The audience gasped.

Then it was time for the news. The main story was that a correspondent who worked for ITN had been accidentally killed while filming in the Middle East. For some reason, we were expected to value this man's life over the lives of millions of Arab civilians who had also been killed accidentally, the implication being that brown-skinned foreigners are expendable but white, well-fed journalists are selfless heroes who live only to bring us the truth. As I sat there, consumed by bitterness, I could hear Caro's voice inside my head. Now I was thinking her thoughts.

*   *   *

I
N THE
hope of getting some Valium, I made an appointment with a doctor. The GP was a nice fatherly old man, close to retirement. He wore a jacket in a quiet hounds tooth, and his salt-and-pepper hair was neatly parted to the left. He probably hadn't changed his hairstyle or his suit since his student days.

“What seems to be the matter?”

“I can't breathe.”

“You must be breathing,” he said. “If you weren't you'd be dead.”

“I'm definitely suffering from hypertension. Hypertension can kill, can't it?”

The doctor looked at me with a wry smile on his nice old doctor's face. “Mr. Madden, have you ever heard the expression ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing'?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“What do you think it means?”

“I think it means that people who know as little as doctors are very dangerous.”

The doctor sighed. He took my blood pressure and listened to my chest. “Your heartbeat's a little rapid. Apart from that, everything seems fine. Try relaxing.”

“Sorry?”

“You're sweating, you're shaking. Look at the way you're sitting. What's the matter with you?”

I shrugged. “I was hoping you'd tell me.”

He looked into my eyes. “Are you on drugs?”

“No. But I'd like to be.”

The doctor looked shocked. “Let me assure you, drug addiction is no picnic. Are you anxious about a woman, by any chance?”

“How the hell did you know that?”

“Let's just say I've been on this earth rather longer than you.”

“Could you give me something to calm me down?”

“You're in love, my boy,” said the doctor, smiling benignly. “There's no pill on earth that can help you with that. Have you tried talking to her?”

“Yes. But it doesn't do any good.” (He was already nodding as if he'd known this all along.) “She makes insane demands.”

“All women do.”

“So you think I should go back to her?”

“If it's causing you as much discomfort as this, yes.”

*   *   *

C
ARO KNEW
her father's schedule. Every Monday morning, Eileen took Gordon swimming, which his heart specialist had recommended as a gentle but beneficial form of exercise for decrepit bastards. According to Caro, all her father did during his sessions in the pool was squeeze his blubber into a rubber ring and blob around in the shallow end. But it got him out of the house.

We parked round the corner, then had to duck down in our seats when Gordon's Rover came skidding by. I caught a glimpse of Eileen, white-faced and taut in the passenger seat, and Gordon, scowling as he leaned forward at the wheel. There was a loud thud as the car passed. When I leaned out of the window to see what had happened, the wing mirror of my Fiat was lying in the road, surrounded by shards of glass.

“He knocked my fucking mirror off. And he didn't even have the decency to stop.”

“If he stopped every time he knocked a wing mirror off,” said Caro, “he'd never arrive anywhere.”

“But we're parked on the opposite side of the fucking road. There was enough room to drive a fucking tank through. The useless bastard!”

“Now you're getting the idea,” said Caro.

Once Gordon was engaged to be married, he had asked his daughter to return her door keys, claiming that now he and Eileen were a couple, they needed privacy. Caro had acquiesced, but only after duplicating the keys. Shortly before ten, we drove up to the house. First Caro unlocked the Chubb lock, then the Yale. The front door opened, and the burglar alarm commenced its prescreech countdown. Caro stormed down the hall to the cupboard where the alarm was housed and tapped in the code. Then we were in.

We went straight upstairs to Gordon's study. The room smelled like its owner, an odd chemical odor with a faint dash of bile, like a science lab that someone has puked in. The shelves were crammed with books on sailing, exploring, archaeology, climbing, and outdoor survival. Gordon, the archetypal armchair adventurer, had never actually done any of these things, although he did once set off for a solo camping trip to Devon, only to return three hours later on the feeble pretext that he'd forgotten a can of soup.

We were searching for a last will and testament. I opened a drawer in the desk and found a neat black notebook with a sticky label attached to its cover. The label read
STORY IDEAS.
“Look at this,” I said. “Your dad's a budding author.”

“Oh, no,” said Caro, sniggering over my shoulder. “Now he thinks he's a writer.”

The book had been filled with short, scribbled plot summaries. Glimpsing an unsavory sentence, I tried to shove the book back in the drawer before Caro could see it, but I was too late. She snatched the sordid volume from my grasp and leafed through it, her amusement slowly giving way to bilious rage. “The dirty fucking bastard!”

The story ideas all shared a common theme.

Man, daughter, remote cottage. Incest?

Man, daughter, walking holiday. Incest?

Man, daughter, desert island. Incest?

Man, daughter, phone booth. Incest?

“He's been fantasizing about shagging me. My own father. Ugh. All that time I was growing up, the disgusting bastard wanted to stick his filthy old organ in me.”

“We don't know that.”

“I think we fucking do.”

She emptied the drawer and found a short story in a knackered old binder. The story was called “First and Last Love.” Caro insisted on reading it aloud. It was the touching tale of a man with a wooden leg. One day the man was hobbling past his daughter's bedroom when he accidentally saw her tits. The man with the wooden leg was embarrassed, but his daughter called him into the room and asked if he'd like to commit incest. “Would I!” said the old man. Seven fucks later, the old man wakes up in a mental hospital. It had all been a wonderful dream!

“I feel sick,” said Caro.

As we turned to leave, a rare flash of inspiration made me check Gordon's calendar, which was hanging on the wall above his desk. In the square for Friday, February 13, were the words
GRAEME & MERCER, 2PM.

Caro looked up Graeme & Mercer in the phone book. They were a firm of solicitors with plush premises on Richmond Green.

“That's this Friday,” she said, clutching my arm. “That's when they're going to change the will.” She looked at me earnestly. “My dad hates giving money to professionals. He wouldn't be going to a solicitor without a good reason. That only gives us four days. We've got four days to kill him.”

CHAPTER 6

THE WAY OF THE WORRIER

W
E WENT
to Kew Gardens and sat among the pine trees, smoking the last of our skunk and trying to think of a way to bring Gordon's life to a swift conclusion without incriminating ourselves. Caro suggested scaring him to death. “He's got congestive heart failure,” she said. “A sudden shock could kill him.”

“If seeing Eileen naked hasn't finished him off, nothing will.”

“There must be something you could do.”

“Something I can do? You're the one who wants him dead.”

“You could hide behind his car and jump out at him. Or set a firework off under his bedroom window.”

Christ, she would not let it go.

“Caro, he's your father. You don't want that on your conscience.”

“Conscience doesn't come into it,” she said. “Some people are so awful and useless that by killing them, you're doing a service to the world.”

“I don't agree with capital punishment,” I told her.

“Me neither,” said Caro. “Capital punishment only kills people who can't afford lawyers. What we're doing is getting rid of people like my father. People who poison the lives of those around them and never do anything useful.”

“He did one useful thing. He provided the sperm that fertilized the egg that turned into you.”

Caro punched me in the arm. “Don't be
disgusting
.”

The dope made Caro desperate for something sweet, but she was too stoned to move. I volunteered to walk over to the café to buy some cakes. When I got back, Caro had company.