‘Find her for me, please, Louie. Tell her that her mum didn’t want to give her away, tell her there wasn’t a day when I didn’t think about her. Will you tell her?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘It doesn’t have to be now. Not tomorrow. But one day.’
‘Yes. One day I will find her and tell her.’
‘Thank you.’
It was about 2 a.m. when she died.
The next day Calamity bailed me. It was a bright sunny day: the sky as pellucid and blue as a china doll’s eyes. We stood at the sea railings, leaning against them, hair ruffled by a soft sea breeze, our faces gilded by the watery sunlight. On such days it was a joy to wake up. Sometimes you had to wonder what the gods were playing at.
‘You shouldn’t be worrying about me, you’ve got your own business to run now.’
‘We go back a long way, Louie.’
‘That’s true.’
‘No way I could have left you there. You wouldn’t have left me.’
‘No, but I don’t want you . . . you know, to let things slip. You need to work hard to build a business up. How’s it going?’
‘Oh, pretty slow. Still waiting to hear back from the Pinkertons; can’t really do much until then. Sorry I wasn’t in when you came round.’
‘I haven’t been round.’
‘Oh. Someone told me they’d seen you knocking on my door.’
‘No.’
‘Must have been someone else.’
There was a pause and we were distracted by a man in a sandwich board walking past. ‘HOFFMANN IS COMING,’ it said. The End was, it seemed, no longer nigh. The Apocalypse had been postponed. Calamity made a slight, embarrassed shrug, as if the world had gone to pot during my night in jail and she was somehow to blame.
‘There are a lot of rumours going about,’ she said. ‘They reckon he’s coming. Some say he’ll turn up at the carol concert.’
‘Pure craziness.’
‘I know. Who would fall for a thing like that?’
‘Who?’ Who indeed, I thought. Tinker, tailor, Soldier for Jesus, gaoler . . . Take your pick. The people in the client’s chair have one more stop on the run from the wishing well to the priest.
‘Where did you get the money for a bail?’ I said.
‘It was only fifty quid.’
‘I know. Where did you—’
‘Oh! Before I forget,’ said Calamity, ‘I need to tell you . . . I did something . . . I did a tail job on the boy who collects the pies. He takes the empties to Erw Watcyns.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s very interesting. Where did you get the fifty quid?’
Silence.
‘Calamity?’
‘Oh, you know . . .’
‘Oh, no! You didn’t . . . Not the book . . . ?’
‘It’s OK.’
‘You haven’t sold it?’
‘I pawned it. I can get it back if you don’t jump bail.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m going to jump bail.’
‘I know.’
* * *
It’s the one thing they never tell you about in the movies: the hard manual labour. You see people walking around all the time – shaking martinis, playing tennis, clutching long cigarette holders – but they never tell you about the problems you get when you kill one of them, when you take away their means of self-propulsion. It’s a can of worms. It’s like having a dead cow in the living room. And then there’s the mess. That’s another thing they don’t talk about. When people can still move about they have a thing called delicacy. They go to secret places to empty themselves. It’s not the same when they’re dead. They don’t care any more. They’re just offal. They spill themselves all over your carpet. You can spend all morning mopping up the blood, but a lifetime is not enough. The forensic boys will come along and laugh at you. They spray the room with special chemicals and turn on an ultraviolet light and hey presto! the stains are back, shining in glorious Technicolor. The floor is as clean as a new pin and guess what? Something red seeped through the gaps in the floorboards. All you did was give him a little bang on the head; you put newspaper down; there was no mess. But it forms an invisible aerosol cloud and floats around unseen like a thought bubble; ten million microscopic droplets. They only need to find one and you’re off to the chair. The forensic boys laugh at you; they love you; they eat you for breakfast.
What are you going to do with all that meat, anyway? All that gristle and cartilage, and bone, a stomach full of undigested food and an arse full of shit? Where are you going to put it? What are you going to use? Kitchen utensils? It’s like demolishing a piano with a pair of scissors. The only one that’s any good is the ice-cream scoop to take out the eyes. And even then one of them rolls under the sofa and won’t turn up again for years. And boy, do they struggle! They flail and scratch and gurgle; they bite and kick; they stick a finger in your eye and pull your hair . . . Those poor crazed African dictators couldn’t take it any more. Just couldn’t watch. They came up with a better idea: put two people in a cell with a sledgehammer and tell them to sort it out between themselves. One of you goes free. You decide. And hose the place down afterwards.
It’s the one thing they never mention in the movies. We’re too effete these days: we don’t have the strength. Just ask old Doc Sawbones in his frock coat and blood-spattered top hat how hard it is to remove a limb: he’ll tell you. Try using an axe. Chop, chop, chop . . . They’ll still get you. You’ll run out of bin bags. Or a bit of bone goes in your eye and turns sceptic. The surgeon who takes it out is an amateur sleuth. The worst sort. Sticks it under the microscope and knows it all: it’s amazing what they can see. Young female, early twenties, five foot six in her socks, blonde hair, blue eyes, twenty-six-inch waist, had cornflakes for breakfast. All from a splinter. OK, Louie, let’s go through it again, and this time skip the fairy stories. How did you get DOA’s thigh bone in your eye? I don’t know, I keep telling you, I was chopping wood and I must have slipped. How do you explain the cornflake? It’s from your packet, the lab boys gave us a perfect match . . . Yes, it’s the one thing they never mention in the movies. You can’t burn them, you can’t hide them, you can’t cut them up; you can’t do anything with them. They’re made from the toughest substance known to man: man. In case you’re wondering, it’s why I will never kill Erw Watcyns.
Chapter 16
BESIDES THE CHAPLAIN there were four mourners at Miss Evangeline’s funeral: the director of the nursing home, one of the patients, a woman from the social services, and, standing some distance away, Lorelei, the one- eyed street-walker who used to visit Miss Evangeline. A small lane runs through Llanbadarn cemetery, and in the late afternoon gloom the streetlamp was already lit. She stood like a sentinel under the lamp, surrounded by swirling white moths of snow; her mouth a scarlet fissure across the powdery moonscape of her face. It was as if she was reluctant to get too close, as if a life being made to feel unwelcome at any sort of respectable gathering had led to ingrained habits that were hard to dissolve, even for the funeral of an old friend. We stood together and listened to the drone of the chaplain’s words. Watched them lower the coffin into the ground. Listened to the thud
