on the say-so of any two doctors. One of whom was her father, my grandfather, the other was his partner in the north London medical practice they shared.
So I know who my grandfather was. But my father was just somebody who shagged my mother somewhere in the building or grounds of St. Andrews Asylum. That’s a nice word, isn’t it? Asylum. With all its implications of a place of safety: somewhere that shelters you from the bitter and dangerous old world outside. Nothing like the reality of that hole. I went to see it, before they knocked it down in the late seventies. It still reeked of piss and pine-scented disinfectant floor wash. Long, dark badly lit corridors with clusters of tiny, cell-like rooms off them. If you were looking for Hell and you found St. Andrews you’d not have been disappointed.
It says on her medical records that she’d spread her legs for anyone, but I doubt it. She was locked up back then. Anyone who wanted to stick his cock into her would have needed a key to her cell.
When I was eighteen I spent my last summer holiday before I went up to university hunting down the four men who were most likely to have been my father: two psychiatric nurses, the secure ward doctor, and the governor of the asylum.
My mum was only seventeen when she went inside. I’ve got a little black-and-white wallet photograph of her from just before she was put away. She’s leaning against the side of a Morgan sports car parked in a country lane. She’s smiling, sort of flirtily, at the photographer. She was a looker, my mum.
I didn’t know which one of the four was my dad, so I killed all of them. They had each fucked her, after all: I got them to admit to it, before I did them in. The best was the governor, a red-faced fleshy old lech with an honest-to-goodness handlebar mustache, like I haven’t seen for twenty years now. I garotted him with his Guards tie. Spit bubbles came from his mouth, and he went blue as an unboiled lobster.
There were other men around St. Andrews who might have been my father, but after those four the joy went out of it. I told myself that I’d killed the four likeliest candidates, and if I knocked off everyone who might have knocked up my mother it would have turned into a massacre. So I stopped.
I was handed over to the local orphanage to bring up. According to her medical records, they sterilized my mum immediately after I was born. Didn’t want any more nasty little incidents like me coming along to spoil anybody’s fun.
I was ten when she killed herself. This was 1964. I was ten years old, and I was still playing conkers and knocking off sweet shops while she was sitting on the linoleum floor of her cell sawing at her wrists with a bit of broken glass she’d got from heaven-knows-where. Cut her fingers up, too, but she did it all right. They found her in the morning, sticky, red, and cold.
Mr. Alice’s people ran into me when I was twelve. The deputy head of the orphanage had been using us kids as his personal harem of scabby-kneed love slaves. Go along with him and you got a sore bum and a Bounty bar. Fight back and you got locked down for a couple of days, a really sore bum and concussion. Old Bogey we used to call him, because he picked his nose whenever he thought we weren’t looking.
He was found in his blue Morris Minor in his garage, with the doors shut and a length of bright green hosepipe going from the exhaust into the front window. The coroner said it was a suicide and seventy-five young boys breathed a little easier.
But Old Bogey had done a few favors for Mr. Alice over the years, when there was a chief constable or a foreign politician with a penchant for little boys to be taken care of, and he sent a couple of investigators out to make sure everything was on the up-and-up. When they figured out the only possible culprit was a twelve-year-old boy, they almost pissed themselves laughing.
Mr. Alice was intrigued, so he sent for me. This was back when he was a lot more hands-on than today. I suppose he hoped I’d be pretty, but he was in for a sad disappointment. I looked then like I do now: too thin, with a profile like a hatchet blade and ears like someone left the car doors open. What I remember of him mostly then is how big he was. Corpulent. I suppose he was still a fairly young man back then, although I didn’t see it that way: he was an adult, and so he was the enemy.
A couple of goons came and took me after school, on my way back to the home. I was shitting myself, at first, but the goons didn’t smell like the law-I’d had four years of dodging the Old Bill by then, and I could spot a plainclothes copper a hundred yards away. They took me to a little gray office, sparsely furnished, just off the Edgware Road.
It was winter, and it was almost dark outside, but the lights were dim, except for a little desk lamp casting a pool of yellow light on the desk. An enormous man sat at the desk, scribbling something in ballpoint pen on the bottom of a telex sheet. Then, when he was done, he looked up at me. He looked me over from head to toe.
“Cigarette?”
I nodded. He extended a Peter Stuyvesant soft pack, and I took a cigarette. He lit it for me with a gold-and- black cigarette lighter. “You killed Ronnie Palmerstone,” he told me. There was no question in his voice.
I said nothing.
“Well? Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“Got nothing to say,” I told him.
“I only sussed it when I heard he was in the passenger seat. He wouldn’t have been in the passenger seat, if he was going to kill himself. He would have been in the driver’s seat. My guess is, you slipped him a mickey, then you got him into the Mini-can’t have been easy, he wasn’t a little bloke-here, mickey and Mini, that’s rich-then you drove him home, drove into the garage, by which point he was sleeping soundly, and you rigged up the suicide. Weren’t you scared someone would see you driving? A twelve-year-old boy?”
“It gets dark early,” I said. “And I took the back way.”
He chuckled. Asked me a few more questions, about school, and the home, and what I was interested in, things like that. Then the goons came and took me back to the orphanage.
Next week I was adopted by a couple named Jackson. He was an international business-law specialist. She was a self-defense expert. I don’t think either of them had ever met before Mr. Alice got them together to bring me up.
I wonder what he saw in me at that meeting. It must have been some kind of potential, I suppose. The potential for loyalty. And I’m loyal. Make no mistake about that. I’m Mr. Alice’s man, body and soul.
Of course, his name isn’t really Mr. Alice, but I could use his real name here just as easily. Doesn’t matter. You’d not have heard of him. Mr. Alice is one of the ten richest men in the world. I’ll tell you something: you haven’t heard of the other nine, either. Their names aren’t going to turn up on any lists of the hundred richest men in the world. None of your Bill Gateses, or your Sultans of Brunei. I’m talking real money here. There are people out there who are being paid more than you will ever see in your life to make sure you never hear a breath about Mr. Alice on the telly or in the papers.
Mr. Alice likes to own things. And, as I’ve told you, one of the things he owns is me. He’s the father I didn’t have. It was him that got me the medical files on my mum and the information on the various candidates for my dad.
When I graduated (first class degrees in business studies and international law), as my graduation present to myself, I went and found my-grandfather-the-doctor. I’d held off on seeing him until then. It had been a sort of incentive.
He was a year away from retirement, a hatchet-faced old man with a tweed jacket. This was in 1978, and a few doctors still made house calls. I followed him to a tower block in Maida Vale. Waited while he dispensed his medical wisdom, and stopped him as he came out, black bag swinging by his side.
“Hullo Grandpa,” I said. Not much point in trying to pretend to be someone else, really. Not with my looks. He was me, forty years on. Same fucking ugly face, but with his hair thinning and sandy gray, not thick and mousy brown like mine. He asked what I wanted.
“Locking Mum away like that,” I told him. “It wasn’t very nice, was it?”
He told me to get away from him, or something like that.
“I’ve just got my degree.” I told him. “You should be proud of me.”
He said that he knew who I was, and I had better be off at once, or he would have the police down on me, and have me locked away.
I put the knife through his left eye and back into his brain, and while he made little choking noises I took his old calfskin wallet-as a keepsake, really, and to make it look more like a robbery. That was where I found the photo of my mum, in black-and-white, smiling and flirting with the camera, twenty-five years before. I wonder who owned the Morgan.
