‘What about Mort?’
‘No, no, I won’t hurt him. I’ll look after him. I’ll look after all of them. Go ahead,’ Benny said, seeing Vish trying to read the writing on the wall. ‘Please … you’re my brother, partner … It’s not a secret from you.’
Vish could read: ‘Let a virgin girl weave a white wool carpet …’ Some foreign names: ‘Kushiel, Lahatiel, Zagzagel …’
‘There’s nothing to be frightened of. I’m going to run this business effectively, that’s all. I’m transforming myself,’ Benny said. ‘By various methods, not just that.’
‘Into what?’
Benny grinned. He nodded his head and looked self-conscious. ‘I can show you a new layout for the whole place. A proper workshop, a modern showroom. If we put all the insurance work through British Union, we can finance it all through them.’
‘Into what?’ Vish insisted with his forehead all creased and his eyes squinting at his brother. ‘Into what are you transforming yourself?’
‘Many things.’
‘For instance.’
‘Angel.’
‘Angel?’
‘I have changed myself into an angel.’
Vish was suddenly back in that odd dreamy world you enter when you hear someone has died, or you see someone shot in the street in front of you. He heard himself say: ‘What sort of angel?’
Benny hesitated. ‘There’s angels for all of us,’ he said, standing up and brushing at his trousers. ‘Like you found out at the temple, right? Angels they never told us about in Sunday School.’ He smiled and folded his hands behind his back like a salesman on the lot and Vish, seeing the clear confidence in his eyes, thought, once again, that his brother was mentally unwell.
‘Benny,’ Vish said, ‘you’ve got to get out of here. Whatever’s bad, this place only makes it worse.’
‘You ask me, then you don’t want to listen to my answers. I already told you. I’m going to buy a block at Franklin Heights.’
‘It stinks in here. I won’t let you live like this.’
‘Let’s be honest. It’s because of you I’m here. You put me here, Vish. And that’s why you’re here now.’
‘Oh no. Let’s be clear about this. I took you to the ashram. I would have got you in.’
‘I was a runaway minor. They shat themselves when they knew that.’
‘I would have got you in. You ran away before they had a chance.’
‘Bullshit, Vish, you kissed their arses. Where else could I come except down here? You think I was going to stay with Old Kissy Lips alone? Is that how you were looking after me?’
Vish bowed his head.
‘Hey,’ Benny said.
Vish had his eyes squinched up tight.
‘Come on,’ Benny said.
Vish felt his brother’s arm around his shoulder.
‘I’m not mad at you,’ Benny said. ‘I was never mad at you. We each got out of home, in different ways. All I want is you fucking listen to me, eh?’ He paused, and smiled. ‘O.K.?’
‘O.K.’ said Vish, also smiling, ‘Fair enough.’
‘Ask me what angel I am.’ He pushed his brother in the ribs, ‘Go on.’
‘What angel are you?’
‘Fallen angel,’ Benny said, ‘Angel of Plagues, Angel of Ice, Angel of Lightning.’
Vish shook his head.
‘Hey, it’s not for you to say yes or no. You think I made this up?’ Benny held up a book –
‘Avatars.’
‘Atavars, yes. If I’m wrong, you’re wrong too.’ He opened the front of the book and let Vish read the inscription: ‘I cannot be what I am – A.V.’
‘Who is A.V.?’ Vish asked. ‘You’ve become an angel? Is that it? You’ve become an angel from this book?’
The truth was that Benny did not know. He had made himself into an angel, and he came out looking like his mother. But he was not his mother, he was an angel. The angels were his creation. By writing their names he made them come true.
He made Saboeth with a dragon’s face and the power of destruction. He made Adonein, a mischievous angel with the face of a monkey. They were his masters. They were his victims. He smoked dope and took their power. He broke their spines and crushed them as he tore them out of books. He played Judas Priest with the volume turned up full. He had a real blue tattoo wing which ran from his right shoulder blade to his round, white, muscled buttock. The angels had feet with five toes and toenails and heavy white callouses round their heels.
‘You’ve become an angel?’ Vish asked.
‘Hey,’ said Benny, ‘relax … I was just kidding you.’
‘Really?’
‘I was just scaring you. We don’t need to do anything extreme.’
21
When Benny was three years old, his mother was only twenty-three. Her name was Sophie Catchprice. She had bell-bottomed jeans and long blonde hair like Mary in Peter Paul and Mary. She had bare feet and chipped red nail-polish on her toenails. She stood at the door of her bedroom one Saturday afternoon and saw her husband sucking her younger son’s penis.
There was a Demolition Derby in progress in the paddock behind the house. The car engines were screaming, hitting that high dangerous pitch that tells you they are way past the red line, and you could smell the methyl benzine racing fuel right here in the bedroom. Sun poured through the lace curtains with the rucked hems. All around her were signs of her incompetence: the bed unmade; the curtains still stained; an F.J. generator-coil on the dressing table; Mort’s .22 still leaning in the corner next to the broken standard lamp. She had told him for two years – pick up that rifle.
She saw her husband, the father of her children, with his hand inside his unzipped trousers. Neither Mort nor Benny knew she was there. She was a fly on the wall, a speck, a nothing. She felt like her own dream – where she scratched her stomach and found her innards – her life – green and slippery and falling through her fingers. She picked up the rifle. What else was she to do?
‘Give him to me,’ she said. But she could not look at Benny. She was frightened of what she would see. He was three years old. He had a white Disney T-shirt with Minnie kissing Mickey: SMACK it said. Johnny had one the same, but Johnny was safe with his Grandma in Spare Parts.
‘You evil slime,’ she said.
‘Hey come on,’ Mort said. His trousers were undone, but Benny was not reaching for his mother. He clung tight to his father’s neck. Sophie felt like her chest was full of puke.
She had to do something. She heard the shell ‘snick’ into the firing chamber as if someone else put it there. She was not even angry, or if she was angry then the anger was covered with something rumpled and dirty and she could not recognize it. What she felt was sourer and sadder than anger, more serious than anger. Her fingers felt heavy, and spongy. She looked at Benny. His little eyes seemed alien and poisoned. He balanced on his father’s hip staring back at her.
‘Come to Mummy,’ she said.
But Benny was looking at the rifle. He shook his head.
‘Give him to me,’ she said to Mort, ‘and I won’t hurt you, I swear.’
‘Put that rifle down,’ he said. ‘You don’t know how to use it.’
Sure, she knew how to. She could not see what else to do but what she did. But even as she did it, as she took one action after the other, she expected something would happen that would stop her travelling all the way to
