The Late Hector Kipling (40 page)

There is no mistaking the persistent clunk and hum of
Domesticated Goose Chase.
There had always been a design fault in the motor driving the wheels of the pram. Lenny had muffled the noise of the coffin by installing a compact wad of cotton, but the drone of the pram he had never managed to overcome. Ideally – as I always maintained – the piece should have gone about its business in a haunting silence. The extraneous noises had always exasperated Lenny and he felt thwarted by his failure to master the problem. I think of him now, as I listen to the clumsy murmur of the axle. I think of him now with his bald head in his hands, confounded by the shortcoming. Gritting his perfect teeth and muttering, ‘Fuck,’ and ‘Fuck,’ once again, ‘Fuck, fuck,’ for minutes on end, tormented and surly, and the problem unresolved.

I’d known Lenny Snook since we were both seventeen, and he was going bald even then. But Lenny being Lenny it had never been a problem cos he had the head for it and it suited him, cos he was a handsome
fucker. He was handsome in middle age and I imagined he’d be a handsome pensioner. Bald and handsome. All the more handsome for being bald. All the more bald for being handsome. Whatever that means. It was a pain in the arse. But all he is now, as I forecast long ago, is an Exquisite Corpse.

My fear is that he died despising me, cursing me and damning the day he had ever set his eyes upon me. But then that says little about Lenny and everything about me. Perhaps I should come up with a finer and more noble fear. For instance: my fear is that Lenny’s wounds caused his death to be an extended and unfathomably painful trial, and that at the end he wept and begged for his lost father. Or that he screamed in medieval agony as he prayed for the tormented soul of his awkward and buckled mother. Ah yes, that sounds a little better. That, then, is my fear: that he died in a spirit of familial anguish and not, as I may have previously suggested, pissed off by the petulance and childish pedantry of his very great friend – The Late Hector Kipling.

I was still in bed when I heard the slamming of the door at Box Street. There was enough time for me to scurry into my pants and squirrel myself away behind the dense velvet curtains. Then, at last, the door to the main room was flung open, and in walked Monger carrying a duffel bag and holding a delicate pink handkerchief over his nose and mouth. He was wearing a panama hat and a pair of peculiar Harold Lloyd-style spectacles. I caught my breath, clenched my fists and tried, with all my might, not to move. In fact I had a serious talk with every last cell, the length and breadth of my body, about not moving, but it amounted to nothing. I was trembling behind the curtain, monitoring his every move. He put down the bag and, after testing the air, folded up the handkerchief and arranged it carefully in the breast pocket of his blazer. It was then that I noticed he was sporting a cheap false moustache. Next he limped over to the settee and lifted the sheet from Lenny and Rosa; the better to appraise his handiwork. He was only a silhouette, but
I imagined him smiling. After a few moments of rapt contemplation he replaced the sheet and smoothed it down at all four corners. After that he settled himself into the big blue armchair. He reached deep into his pocket and took out a cigarette case, his jewelled Cartier lighter and a gun. He tipped his hat over his eyes, sparked up a fag and began scratching at his thigh, which went on for some time. Before long, with the help of a few swigs from his hip flask, he fell asleep.

Silence.

Pathetic, if you ask me. Pathetic murderer behaviour.

The gun, the weight of it, the temperature, felt strange in my hand. I suppose that was to be expected, since I had never before held a real gun. As a child I had run amok with many toy guns of all shapes and sizes, and as I stood there keeping careful watch over the sleeping Monger I was reminded of a time when I had frightened Mum in the kitchen, firing at her repeatedly, shouting at her, over and over, ‘There you go, there you go, Mum. How do you like that, you punk? Eh? How do you like that?’ Mum, as I remember, had been a little discombobulated by this zealous display of homicidal play-acting, and had backed herself up against the sink, calling out for Dad to come and take me off her hands. Nonplussed by her giddy supplications, I had continued to threaten her with my silver plastic Smith & Wesson, ‘Come on, then, lady. Make your first move! Who do you think’s gonna come off the worse, me or you?’

I curled my sweating finger around the trigger and thought about shooting Monger right there and then. Wouldn’t it be easier if I did it whilst he was sleeping? I don’t know. I realized that I had to think very carefully about all this. After all, it’s not the sort of decision you want to make in a hurry – like buying a house or proposing marriage.

I pulled the sheet away from Lenny and Rosa and looked at them both, all dead and wet. And dry, in a way. Dry in many ways. In fact, hardly wet at all.

As I replaced the sheet, Rosa’s dead left arm dropped, her knuckles
rapping on the bloody wooden floor. Upon hearing this, Monger’s eyes sprang open like a sinister and suspicious automaton – or a kind of natty cyborg, if you like. Whatever, I had awoken the beast and I really wanted to go to the toilet all of a sudden.

Silence.

Frozen.

And then, at last: ‘Ah, Hector,’ he said, and reached for his gun.

‘Ah, Monger,’ I said, showing him the strange and fatal machine that I held in my quivering hand.

Monger repositioned himself, smiled and straightened his tie. He removed his spectacles and threw them across the room. I watched them skid across the floor and come to rest by the leg of Eleni’s piano stool, shunting Rosa’s bloody green eye towards the bedroom door.

I was about ten feet away. I lifted the gun and pointed it at the centre of his face. I wasn’t sure if I should be cocking it, or whether that was just something they do in cowboy films. I was pointing it at his face and, judging by his expression, was reasonably assured that no cocking was required.

He straightened his cufflinks and cleared his throat. ‘Hector, you really are the most awful nuisance.’

I came very close to pulling the trigger right there and then, if only in protest at his dreary verbosity.

‘Says you,’ I snapped back, rather petulantly, given the circumstances.

‘You are aware, are you not, that you look an utter fool standing there with a gun in your hand?’

‘Well, it’s your gun, Monger, and I’ve got it. So who’s the fool – eh?’

‘Still you, I’m afraid.’

‘Why are you doing this to me?’

‘Why not, Hector?’

‘You murdered Lenny and Rosa, you nut! Look at them! You killed them!’

‘Ah yes,’ he whispered and tilted his hat to shadow his eyes, ‘sorry about that, old boy. It was rather remiss of me, I know. But you see I caught a glimpse of the balding pate, thought it was you and saw no reason not to muck right in. I must say that I’m a little ashamed to have slain the great Lenny Snook. He was really quite a talent. How will history ever forgive me?’

‘Quite a talent? Lenny Snook, quite a talent?’

‘Well, a deal better than you, let us say.’

‘You know nothing.’

‘Well, I know what I like, as they say.’

‘Who gives a flying fuck what you like? I’ve seen your paintings, Monger. And I’ll tell you what, in my time I’ve seen many things. I’ve seen shit smeared on top of shit, literally, in a gallery in Tokyo, I saw literal shit smeared on top of literal shit, but even that wasn’t as shit as the shit that I saw in your house, not even close.’

‘Oh, so it was you.’

‘What was me?’

‘You, round at my flat.’

‘You know it was.’

‘Yes, and I had a charming tête-à-tête with your ridiculous mother.’

‘Monger, I am so close to shooting you right now that I really wouldn’t push it.’

‘Yes, she really is quite an unfathomable idiot.’

‘I want the money back! I want all that money back! And the case. I want Mum’s little travel bag back as well!’

‘I told her that I had happened upon you fornicating with a tattooed and gothic harlot whose language would shame the coalface. Well, you can imagine how well she took that. I think perhaps that you should call her. She was slurring a little. I wouldn’t be surprised if her head wasn’t in the oven by nightfall’

‘I er . . .’ I said, and swallowed, ‘I er . . . think I maybe about to shoot you now.’

‘Go ahead,’ said Monger, wafting his fag in the air, ‘go ahead and shoot me. I could do with a little excitement.’

There was no fear in his voice. His eyes were shining and his teeth were brilliant white, as though I’d just asked him what he fancied from the bar. Beneath my finger I could feel the cool metal of the softly bevelled trigger.

‘Why have you done all this? Why are we stood here like this? Why am I about to kill you?’ I said.

‘Hector, calm right down. You are not . . . you are simply not about to kill me.’

‘But I really think that I might be. I really think that I am about to kill you. Fucking hell, you psycho, you invertebrate fucking bivalve, I really think that I may be about to pull this trigger!’ I closed one eye and corrected my aim to connect with the middle of his forehead.

‘Hector, you just haven’t thought any of this through,’ and he blew out two perfect rings. Then he closed his eyes and ran the tip of his little finger across one lid.

‘I’m about to kill you! I swear on . . .’ I couldn’t think of a life left to swear upon. I swear on . . .’

‘You’re a disgrace, Hector. I will destroy you,’ said Monger, chin up in the air, ‘I will fucking annihilate you, you sad, impotent specimen. You are no more capable of pulling that trigger than—’

And that’s about the moment when I pulled the trigger and watched his head turn into a special effect. His hat span across the room like a posh Frisbee and his hair flew up into a ridiculous quiff. My painting behind him was splattered with . . . Oh, need I go on? I’m sure you can imagine.

An hour crept by. I think it was an hour. I hardly recognized it. Bearing no resemblance to any of the numerous other hours of my acquaintance, I hardly recognized a single second of it. I believe that I slept, though it was barely sleep, and come to that it was barely me.

Upon waking I rummaged through his duffel bag and found a trove of ammunition. Through a process of trial and error – learning how to load and reload – I shot up the entire flat. The mirror got it, the bed got it, my painting got it, and, just for good measure, Monger got it as well, over and over, over and over. In the end I threw down the gun and beat my head against the keys of the piano until even music was destroyed. Before I passed out I caught sight of my painting, rent by ladders, bullets and the shrapnel of Monger’s skull. A self-portrait at last.

Now I’m perspiring at such an alarming rate, I’m beginning to steam. And once again I am thrown into a flap that I will be discovered before I have the opportunity to fully explain why it is that I’m here in Lenny’s hole in the floor of the Tate. But no matter, the moment is almost upon us, and no matter what, I sincerely believe that they will warm to my cause once my point is finally made. After all, the room above is filling up and fairly rings with the trill of lyric banality and the clash of crystal. I must say that I never imagined my life ending this way. But then I never imagined all those other lives ending in the way that they did. But what does that really tell us about anything, other than that my imagination is not up to scratch? I always thought that death would unpick me slowly, meticulously, over a long period of time; first subjecting me to one ailment, just to put me in the mood, and then, as the years shuffled by, it would gleefully augment my suffering, little by little, with each succeeding malady spread on top of the other, much like a glaze, until, at last, there existed a dense impasto of crippling afflictions that would finally suffocate the subject, rendering it muddy, lifeless and without form. And that was the best that I could have hoped for. You see, I suppose I always found it near impossible to really delight in the rich tints and manifold textures of life, since they always seemed to me to be casually flattened by the lacklustre tones of the final account.

And so here I am, at last, scaling the walls of my dead friend’s deep and admired hole, naked and sweating, fumbling for finger holds with
one hand whilst clutching a loaded gun in the other. Who would ever have thought that it could come to this? My bare feet are quarrelling with their bleeding toes and I sear one side of my scrotum on the rage of a lamp. Just as I am about to poke my head above the trench my brain is assailed with the dizzy clamour of the mob of critics. I’m not sure if that is the correct collective noun when one is speaking of a gathering of critics – what else should it be? An ostentation, as in peacocks? Or a murder, as in crows? Perhaps a pride, an envy, a gluttony, or even a sloth. I believe that it is Brian Sewell who first comes to the aid of the baffled Miss Cookham, assisting with the translation of the offending French slogan daubed upon the wall, in what seems commonly agreed to be blood.

‘Why it’s perfectly straightforward, Becky,’ declares Sewell, with sixty-three plums pushed into his mouth: ‘“L’acte Surréaliste le plus simple est de marcher dans une rue peuplée avec un revolver chargé, et de tirer au hasard.” It’s Breton at his most asinine. It means, the simplest – or one might say the ultimate – act of Surrealism is to walk into a crowded street with a loaded revolver, and open fire at random. That’s what it says, but then Breton was a charlatan of the highest order. An utter quack.’ He’s sounding unnervingly like Monger. ‘I mean, quite honestly, I fail to see what point Snook is making here. I find it not only tiresome, but extremely jejune, and, I might add, cretinous to boot. I mean, for goodness’ sake, André Breton, this was a man who—’

And that, at last is it, I believe. That is my cue. That is when I make my move. A fleshy, unfathomable behemoth scrambling up and out of the dirt with a gun in its fist, eyes like cheap cufflinks. The first shot was understandably wide of the mark, ricocheting off the ambulant pram and shattering the back window of Lenny’s blood-filled limousine, thus flooding the gallery floor with ninety gallons of bubbling pigs’ blood. Although, in truth, it never was real pigs’ blood, as Lenny had always claimed, but only a sort of synthetic blood, a sticky, sweet and rather too pink substance, much used in the movies, which went
by the charming name of Kensington Gore. But then, you see, that is hardly the issue. Indeed that was only the start of it. For with the next shot, or twelve, the gathered pack of now howling traducers were brought to their knees and invited to savour some real pigs’ blood – some authentic Kensington Gore.