The Mortdecai Trilogy (18 page)

The Bactrian was but a wild, childish man,
And could not write nor speak, but only loved:
So, lest the memory of this go quite,
Seeing that I to-morrow fight the beasts,
I tell the same to Phoebas, whom believe!

 

A Death in the Desert

 

You must have noticed that until now my tangled tale has observed at least some of the unities proper to tragedy: I have not tried to relate what other people thought or did when this was outside my knowledge; I have not whisked you hither and yon without suitable transport and I have never started a sentence with the words ‘some days later’. Each morning has witnessed the little death of a heavy drinker’s awakening and ‘each slow dusk a drawing down of blind’. The English, as Raymond Chandler has pointed out, may not always be the best writers in the world but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

If I have not always made clear the
rationale
of these events, it is partly because you are probably better at that sort of thing than I am and partly because I confess myself quite bemused by finding that the events which I thought I was controlling were in fact controlling me.

It has amused me, these last few weeks, to cast my recollections into some sort of disciplined mould but this foolishness must now cease, for the days are drawing in and time’s helicopter beats the
air furiously over my head. Events have overtaken literature: there is time for a few more leisured pages and then perhaps for some journal jottings; after that, I suspect, no time at all, ever.

It looks as though, by a piece of vulgar irony, I have come home to die within sight of the scenes of my hated childhood: the ways of Providence are indeed unscrupulous, as Pat once said to Mike as they were walking down Broadway – or was it O’Connell Street?

Getting here was easy. We flew from Quebec to Eire in the same aircraft but not together. At Shannon, Jock walked straight through Immigration waving his Tourist Passport, they didn’t even look at it. He was carrying the suitcase. He took a domestic flight to Collinstown Airport, Dublin, and waited for me at a nice pub called Jury’s in College Green.

For my part, I spent a quiet hour in the lavatory at Shannon with half a bottle of whisky, mingled with various groups of travellers, told all and sundry that my wife, children and luggage were in planes headed for Dublin, Belfast and Cork, and wept myself tiresomely and bibulously out and into a taxi without anyone asking for a passport. I think perhaps they were rather glad to get rid of me. The taxi driver milked me systematically of currency all the way to Mullingar, where I shaved, changed clothes and accent, and took another taxi to Dublin.

Jock was at Jury’s as arranged, but only barely; in another few minutes he would have been ejected for he was pissed as a pudding and someone had taught him a naughty phrase in Erse which he kept singing to the tune of ‘The Wearing of the Boyne’ or whatever they call it.

We took a cheap night flight to Blackpool, and only acted drunk enough to fit in with the rest of the passengers. The airport staff were waiting to go to bed or wherever people go in Blackpool: they turned their backs on the whole lot of us. We took separate taxis to separate small and hateful hotels. I had potato pie for supper, I don’t know what Jock had.

In the morning we took separate trains and met, by arrangement, in the buffet on Carnforth Station. You may never have heard of Carnforth but you must have seen the station, especially the buffet, for it was there that they made
Brief Encounter
and it is sacred to the memory of Celia Johnson. Nowadays Carnforth has no other claim to fame: once a thriving steel town with an important railway
junction, today it is distinguished only by the singular, and clearly
intentional
, ugliness of every building and by the extraordinary niceness of the people who inhabit them – even the bank managers. I was born five miles away, at a place called Silverdale.

Carnforth is in the extreme northwest corner of Lancashire and has sometimes called itself the Gateway to the Lake District. It is not quite on the coast, it is not quite anything, really. There are some good pubs. There used to be a cinema when I was a boy but I was never allowed to go, and it’s closed now. Except for Bingo, naturally.

One of the hotels is kept by a nice fat old Italian called Dino something; he’s known me since I was a
bambino
. I told him that I was just back from America where I had made some enemies and that I had to lie low.

‘Donter worry Mr Charlie, thoser bloddy Sicilian bosstuds donter find you here. If I see them hang around I get the police bloddy quick – are good boys here, not afraid ofer stinking Mafiosi.’

‘It’s no really quite like that, Dino. I think if you see anyone you’d better just let me know quietly.’

‘O.K., Mr Charlie.’

‘Thank you, Dino.
Evviva Napoli!
’

‘Abassa Milano!’

‘
Cazzone pendente!
’ we cried in chorus–our old slogan from years ago.

Jock and I stayed there in close retirement for perhaps five weeks until my armpit was healed and I had grown a more or less plausible beard. (I want to make it quite clear that Dino had no idea that we had done anything wrong.) I stopped dyeing my hair and eating starchy foods and soon I looked a well-preserved seventy. Finally, before venturing out, I removed both my upper canine teeth, which are attached to a wire clip: with my upper incisors resting lightly on the lower lip I look the picture of senile idiocy, it always makes Mrs Spon
shriek
. I let my now grizzled hair grow long and fluffy, bought a pair of good field-glasses and mingled with the bird watchers. It’s astonishing how many there are nowadays: ornithology used to be an arcane hobby for embittered schoolmasters, dotty spinsters and lonely little boys but now it is as normal a weekend occupation as rug-making or wife-swapping. I was terribly keen on it when I was at school, so I knew the right cries
and, as a matter of fact, I became rather keen again and thoroughly enjoyed my outings.

This part of Lancashire contains some of the best bird-watching terrain in England: sea and shore birds in their millions haunt the vast salt-marshes and tidal flats of Morecambe Bay, and the reeds of Leighton Moss – an RSPB sanctuary – are alive with duck, swans, gulls and even the bittern.

I gave Dino three hundred pounds and he bought me a second-hand dark-green Mini, registered in his name. I plastered on a few stickers – SAVE LEVENS HALL, VOTE CONSERVATIVE, VISIT STEAM-TOWN – and dumped a Karri-Kot in the back seat: an inspired piece of camouflage, you must admit. We contrived to get a pair of tinted contact lenses for Jock, changing his startling blue eyes to a dirty brown. He liked them very much, called them ‘me shades’.

Meanwhile, since Carnforth is on STD now, it was safe to dial a number of guarded calls to London, where various naughty friends, in exchange for a lot of money, set to work creating new identities for Jock and me, so that we could get to Australia and start a new life amongst the Sheilas and Cobbers. New identities are very expensive and take a long time, but the process of obtaining them is so much easier now that there are all these drugs about. You simply find a chap who’s on the big H-for-heroin and not long for this world, preferably a chap with at least some points of resemblance to you. You take him under your wing – or rather your naughty friends do – lodge him, supply him with H and feed him whenever he can gag anything down. You get his National Insurance Card paid up to date, buy him a passport, open a Post Office Savings Account in his name, pass the driving test for him and fix him up with an imaginary job at a real place. (The ‘employer’ gets his wages back in cash, doubled.) Then you pay a very expensive craftsman to substitute your photograph in the new passport and you’re a new man.

(The drug addict, of course, now becomes a bit superfluous: you can have him knocked off professionally but that’s an extra, and awfully expensive nowadays. The best and cheapest course is to deprive him of his medicine for three days or so until he’s quite beside himself, then leave him in a busy public lavatory – Piccadilly Underground is much favoured in the trade – with a syringe containing a heavy overdose, and let Nature take its kindly
course. The coroner will scarcely glance at him: he’s probably better off where he is; why, he might have lingered on for years, etc.)

In short, all seemed well except that William Hickey or one of those columnists had once or twice dropped delicate hints that certain People in High Places had been receiving certain photographs, which might or might not have referred to the Hockbottle art work. If so, I couldn’t really see who could be doing it – surely not Johanna? One of Hockbottle’s horrid friends?
Martland?
I didn’t let it worry me.

Last night, when I walked into the bar of Dino’s hotel, full of fresh air and nursing a splendid appetite, I would have told anyone that things were going uncommonly well. I had spent the afternoon on the Moss and had been fortunate enough to have had a pair of Bearded Tits in my field-glasses for several minutes – and if you think there’s no such bird you can jolly well look it up in the nearest bird book. That was last night, only.

The barman should have smiled and said, ‘Evening, Mr Jackson, what do you fancy?’ I mean, that’s what he’d said to me every evening for weeks.

Instead he gave me a hostile stare and said, ‘Well, Paddy, usual I suppose?’ I was completely taken aback.

‘Come on,’ said the barman disagreeably, ‘make your mind up. There’s other people want serving, you know.’

Two strangers at the end of the bar studied me casually in the mirror behind the display bottle. I twigged.

‘Arl roight arl roight,’ I growled thickly, ‘av coorse Oi’ll have me usual, ye cross-grained little sod.’

He pushed a double Jameson’s Irish whisky across the bar at me.

‘And watch your language,’ he said, ‘or you can get out.’

‘Bollocks,’ I said and tossed the whisky back messily. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, belched and lurched out. It is a good thing that a serious ornithologist’s field clothes are more or less the same as an Irish navvy’s drinking kit. I fled upstairs and found Jock sitting on the bed, reading the
Beano
.

‘Come on,’ I said, ‘they’re on to us.’

We had kept in a state of readiness for any emergency so we were out of the hotel by the kitchen entrance some ninety seconds after I had left the bar, heading for the station yard where I had parked the Mini. I started the engine and backed out of the slot; I was quite calm, there was no reason for them to have suspected me.

Then I cursed, stalling the engine, paralysed with dismay.

‘Smatter, Mr Charlie, forgotten something?’

‘No, Jock. Remembered something.’

I had remembered that I had not paid for my whisky – and that the barman had not asked me to do so. Drunken Irish navvies hardly ever have charge accounts at respectable provincial hotels.

I got the engine started again, jammed the gears cruelly into mesh and swung out of the yard into the street. A man standing at the corner turned and raced back towards the hotel. I prayed that their car was pointing in the wrong direction.

I rammed the unprotesting little Mini out of town to the north on the Millhead Road; just before the second railway bridge I doused the lights and whisked it off to the left, towards Hagg House and the marsh. The road dwindled to a footpath and then to a wet track; we squashed barbed wire, nosed our way down banks, half-lifted the Mini across the impossibly soft parts, cursed and prayed and listened for the sounds of pursuit. To our left some three-headed spawn of Cerberus started to yelp and yap dementedly. We continued west, hating the dog with a deep, rich hatred, and found the River Keer by pitching into it. To be exact, the Mini had pitched down its bank and come to rest, nose downward, in the squishy sand beside the channel, for the tide was far out. I grabbed the almost empty suitcase, Jock grabbed the knapsack and we scrambled into the stream, gasping with shock as the cold water reached groin level. At the far side we stopped before scaling the bank and showing ourselves on the skyline; half a mile behind us an engine raced in a low gear; two cones of light from headlamps waved about in the sky, then suddenly went out.

The stars were bright but we were too far away to be seen by our pursuers; we scrambled up the bank – how I blessed my new-found physical fitness – and made off northwestwards, heading towards the lights of Grange-Over-Sands, six miles away across the glistening mud flats.

It was quite unlike anything that has ever happened to me, it was the strangest journey I have ever made. The darkness, the unheard, nearby sea, the whistle and bleat of the wings of flocks of bewildered birds, the slap of our feet on the wet sand and the
fear
that drove us on towards the wriggling lights so far across the bay.

But I had this much going for me: I was on familiar ground. My plan was to strike Quicksand Pool – a two-mile treacherous lagoon – at its most dangerous point, then turn northeastwards and follow it to its narrowest part and cross there. At that point, the friendly shore of Silverdale would bear due north at two miles’ distance. This depended on our having crossed the Keer at the right spot, and on the tide being where I believed it to be – I had no choice but to assume that I was right about both.

That was where the nightmare began.

Jock was loping a few yards to my left when we both found ourselves on quaking ground. I did what you should do in such a case – keep moving fast but circle back sharply to your starting point. Jock didn’t. He stopped, grunted, tried to pull back, splashed about, stuck fast. I dropped the suitcase and hunted for him in the dark while he called to me, his voice high with panic as I had never heard it before. I got hold of his hand and started to sink also; I threw myself down, only my elbows now on the quagmire. It was like pulling at an oak tree. I knelt to get better purchase but my knees sank straight in, terrifyingly.