Beggars Banquet (17 page)

‘New barmaid’s a smasher,’ he said, placing a pint in front of me.

‘Really?’ Frank taught woodwork. His working knowledge was of planes and drill bits rather than women. He’d been fifty-six years a single man, never having ‘seen the point of getting bogged down’. I was a little envious of him. I glanced over my shoulder anyway. ‘Christ,’ I said, causing Frank to chuckle. She was chatting to a customer, fresh-faced and with a hand resting on one of the beer pumps, slender arms appearing from a baggy white T-shirt. I imagined Jennie Muir having depths of passion and provocation. But there was nothing submerged about the vision in front of me; all was glorious surface.

Inside a few days the lunchtime clientele of our unassuming pub had doubled. Word was getting around. Only later did I equate Donna the barmaid’s years, blonde hair and blue eyes with ‘Asian Brothel Orgy’. Then I happened to mention it to Maxwell. The biggest mistake of my life, just about.

He turned up one lunchtime with a slap on my shoulder. Startled, I tipped some beer on to my trousers.

‘Sorry, Kenny,’ he said. ‘Here, I’ll fetch a cloth.’

When he returned, he already knew her name and her age. ‘You were absolutely right,’ he told me, watching as I wiped stains from my crotch, ‘she’s great. And she does look like the bird off the front of the vid.’

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I knew Maxwell worked three miles away from the school and regarded lunch-hours as an anachronism. He shrugged.

‘Just passing. My name’s Maxwell, by the way.’ He shoved a hand out towards Frank Marsh. ‘Since Kenny’s not going to introduce us.’

Frank blinked towards me. Maxwell was the only one who called me ‘Kenny’. At school I was Ken, and to Alice I was always Kenneth. (She managed to make it sound like a rebuke.) I
hated
‘Kenny’, and Maxwell knew it. Once or twice I’d responded in kind with Max or even Maxie, but he just smiled fondly and eventually I came back to Maxwell. He’d managed somehow to avoid abbreviations and nicknames at school, while I was (thanks to my parents) already a Kenny when I arrived there. The nearest I got to niggling him was to attempt what I call the ‘reverse pun’, opening our conversations with the line ‘How’s Maxwell?’ making the ‘How’s’ sound like ‘House’. Get it?

‘Can I get anyone a drink?’ Maxwell asked now. Frank rapidly finished his pint. ‘And tell me, do they do food here?’ Maxwell stood up. ‘No, don’t bother. I’ll just go ask Donna.’

‘That’s why I work lunchtimes whenever I can, keeps the nights free.’ Her pale face surrounded crimson lips. She wore two gold studs in either earlobe. I started to drink a whisky with my beer, just so she’d turn around towards the row of optics, giving me the chance to stare. Her shape seemed near perfect, set off by short hugging skirts and thick black tights. Surface. Everything was
there
. Not like in the videos where the nakedness was so naked that it became clothing in itself.

‘I don’t know how you can teach in the afternoons,’ she said one day. She meant, how could I teach after a couple of pints and a couple of shorts. The answer was: by remote control, literally. I used videos more and more in the classroom, hogging the TV set, showing whatever was vaguely relevant and available. Shakespeare was easy, poetry not. I’d even take a class to the school’s video lab - we have some excellent facilities, due to a go-ahead rector who realises that technology is where future jobs lie. (What he doesn’t realise is that after hours I often use the video lab’s facilities for copying Maxwell’s tapes.) I could fill an hour showing the class how to edit films, why the cameraman is so important, and how an editor can make a movie work where the director has failed.

I could do all of this, and still have room in my head for candles and music and animal skins.

Until Maxwell came along. Within a week, he’d fixed a date with Donna, and the first date was followed by a second. One day, I hurried to the pub only to find the manager on reluctant duty.

‘She’s buggered off,’ he informed me. ‘Took another job.’

A job Maxwell had found for her, convenient to his own office. When he told me this on the phone that evening, told me while Alice played TV roulette with the remote and ate another packet of crisps, I knew I had to do something. The living-room seemed stuffier than ever, chip fat and salt, blue noise from the television and a sofa full of wife. My life felt horribly scripted, badly acted, its scenes decided long before I’d been cast for the role.

Splice and edit, I thought. Splice and edit. I might not be the director, but I could still save the movie . . .

Just one of those things, I thought to myself. Just one of those crazy things. I couldn’t get those two lines out of my head as I stood there over Maxwell’s body. I was reassuring myself that I’d only come to his place to talk. To talk about what? That’s what the police would ask. To talk about Donna, whom he was dating and I fancied. So you were jealous then, sir?

Officer, I spend most of my life in a state of jealousy.

He’d only fallen down the stairs of course. I’d been apologising as I walked down after him. But he’d lain there very still, and when I hauled him up by the shoulders his head swivelled wildly, neck obviously broken. I checked his pulse anyway, and found nothing.

Only a fall down the stairs . . . except that I pushed him. Oh yes, we’d been arguing. Or rather, I’d been arguing and Maxwell had been laughing at me. We hadn’t even got as far as his living-room. I’d been arguing on my way up the stairs, arguing ever since he’d let me in the door. In the hall at the top of the stairs I fairly vented my spleen, until I could feel myself emptying, the anger lessening. Catharsis, I suppose. Or exorcism. But he was still laughing, rocking back on his heels. So I stood there and blinked and then gave him a mighty shove. I only just managed to stop myself tumbling after him. Gripping the banister rail, I watched him sail backwards and begin the thumping descent. It’s a steep staircase, uncarpeted, the wood stripped and varnished. I remember the varnish was expensive, but it meant the wood only had to be redone every five years or so.

Just one of those things, I thought to myself. It was lucky Maxwell lived in a mews. Those places are like morgues at the best of times. This one even boasted a dead end, no through traffic. Ground level was all doors and garages, with living-room windows above. Nobody was looking as I dragged Maxwell out of his own door and into the boot of my car. His keys slipped from his trouser pocket, along with some loose change. I scooped it all up and pocketed it.

I was supposed to be fetching fish and chips for our supper. My excuse to Alice for taking so long was car trouble. I used Maxwell’s change to buy the food, parked outside my own flat, and checked the boot was locked. Over supper I’d have a think what to do with Maxwell. Since Alice slept like a horse, I’d have no trouble sneaking out in the dead of night to get rid of the poor bugger. I’d seen enough crime movies to know that I mustn’t panic and I must take care. Each take had to be a perfect take, had to be what directors called ‘a wrap’. On the way upstairs I unwrapped a hot package and pulled out a chip, dropping it into my mouth. It had a new and vivid flavour.

Not that Alice noticed. If a thing wasn’t behind glass and wrapped in Japanese plastic and changeable with one press of the remote, she tended not to see it. She didn’t see my heightened colour, or the way I stared at my smeared plate. So passive was she, I almost wanted to blurt out a confession. Just
once
to surprise her. I resisted the temptation of course. As soon as it’s out of your mouth, it’s in the public domain, and this had to be kept strictly private, strictly between me and God.

It would be interesting, too, to see if I possessed such a thing as a conscience.

By the time we got to bed, I felt I’d explode. I wasn’t much nearer working out a plan, my head full of sitcoms and advertising jingles. I cleared my throat.

‘Alice, what do you
really
think of Maxwell?’

She was lying on her side, her back to me, one hand supporting her head and the other holding a paperback book.

‘Maxwell’s all right.’ I didn’t say anything. ‘I feel sorry for him actually.’

‘How do you mean?’ I was startled. She felt
sorry
for him? She couldn’t have surprised me more if she’d said she was carrying his child.

‘All that bravado of his, the macho stuff.’ She left the explanation at that and returned to her book.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘That, Kenneth, is because you never see things. You and the rest of your cronies.’

‘What don’t we see?’

‘You don’t see anything, you don’t see anything at all. Now shut up and go to sleep.’

I lay on my back compliantly, wondering whether it was best to feign sleep and wait it out till the wee small hours, or try to get some sleep and trust to my internal alarm clock. I needed to be clear-headed, which suggested sleep. So I closed my eyes and dreamed of a long beach on which I walked for hours and hours, while friends kept swimming ashore as though from some shipwreck.

‘You look rough,’ Alice agreed, starting to dress. I planted my feet on the cold floor and ran fingers through my hair. It took me a while to admit that I’d done nothing about the body in my car-boot.

I’d slept the whole night away.

Over breakfast, I pressed Alice about what she’d said in bed. Her face was grey and puffy like an inmate’s. She’d given up looking for a job a year or so ago, and filled her days with shopping, gossip and TV. She gossiped at the shops, often discussing the doings in one or other daytime soap. Her life too was an eight-track cartridge. The sofa had taken her shape, so that I no longer felt comfortable sitting on it. Usually I sat on a beanbag on the floor, reminding myself to get it refilled one of these days. I even ate breakfast (a bowl of cereal) on the beanbag, while Alice sat on the sofa, both of us staring towards breakfast TV with its little onscreen clock in the corner, telling us it would soon be time for work or, in Alice’s case, for yet more television.

She ignored my question, so I repeated it.

‘What did you mean last night about Maxwell?’

‘He’s gay.’

‘What?’

‘Gay.’

I hooted disbelief. ‘Who told you that?’

‘He did. Well, not in so many words, but women just
know
. The way he talked to me one day . . .’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know, a few months back. He came round, and you’d been kept at school by some meeting.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He didn’t say anything. He sort of talked around it. You had to read between the lines.’

This from someone who didn’t even read a newspaper.

‘He goes out with loads of women.’

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘Because he’s scared to admit the fact. I bet the reason he’s so successful at dating is because his dates are so safe with him.’

‘You’ve been watching too many of those problem-airing programmes.’

She shrugged. But Alice, bless her, had given me an idea. There was a run-down cemetery in the city known to be frequented after dark by gays. What a fine ironic place to dump the body. Then I thought of Donna. If Maxwell
was
gay, I’d killed him needlessly. The whole thing was crazy.

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘Why should I?’ She gave me one of her looks and disappeared into the kitchen. I could hear running water. She was washing her cereal bowl. She hadn’t even thought to take mine, empty and on the floor beside me. I stared at the TV. No more porno evenings at Maxwell’s flat. No more fucking around with the remote. No reason to leave my own flat on a Friday night . . .

Then, without any warning, the
real
plan leapt into my head, so focused that it seemed like a gift from above.

‘Whatever turns you on,’ I said to myself as I debated bringing the body back into the flat, but decided against it. I wanted to set everything up before allowing Maxwell to be found. So he stayed in the car-boot all the way to school. I did consider rigor mortis. I wasn’t sure about these things, but reckoned he was going to be stiff by the time I got him back to the mews. He’d be all bunched up. I wasn’t sure what the police or the pathologist would make of that. TV detectives were infallible, but I had doubts about their real-life counterparts. I hoped my doubts were well founded.

The two free periods before lunch were my real break. There was no one in the video lab, so I could edit to my heart’s content. There were three videos in all, two from Maxwell’s wardrobe and one from his living-room. This last video was shot at one of his parties. You know the sort of video I mean. The camera is aimed at you, so you open your mouth and eyes wide and wave wildly into the lens, sometimes saying something crass at the same time. Either that or you studiously ignore the contraption, despite the film-maker’s enticements. And you still look a prat. Of course, Maxwell being behind the camera most of the time, there were lots of shots of the women in their party dresses, with attendant leg and cleavage, Max calling out a cod director’s ‘Enthuse, darlings, I want some passion from you!’

After an hour, I had basically what I wanted. It didn’t look great. I wasn’t at all sure that it looked even halfway persuasive, and I was about to drop the whole scheme, but there was fever in my brain now. It was all or nothing. I was risking all my winnings on another turn of that wheel. Greedy, that’s what I was. Avarice was my sin of the moment.

‘To hell with it, it’ll do.’

I knew the police wouldn’t be watching for clues anyway. They’d be watching for other things, and finding them.

During the lunch-hour, I drove back to the mews, this time pulling Maxwell out of the boot and laying him at the bottom of the stairs. Who could tell, maybe the whole thing would be taken for an accident after all. I didn’t put the porn videos back in the wardrobe - they were
en route
to the dump - but I did put my little home-made ensemble in there. Then I sat down in Maxwell’s study and switched on his word processor. I’d been thinking about the letter, and it proved easy to write. I read it through and it seemed convincing, so I printed it out. Then I crumpled the sheet of paper and placed it beneath the occasional table at the top of the stairs.

I was back in the study, checking everything was as it should be, when the downstairs door opened. For a hysterical second I thought: It’s him! Maxwell’s back! How was I going to explain . . . ?

But then I heard a sort of squeal, and a protracted thud. I tiptoed into the hall and looked down. A middle-aged woman was lying inside the door. Maxwell’s cleaning lady. I’d never set eyes on her before, but I knew he had a ‘Mrs Mop’: he never tired of repeating the fact. I crept quickly downstairs and out of the door, and kept my eyes on the rearview mirror all the way back along the mews.