SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (9 page)

This,
though, well this was vandalism pure and simple. He briefly thought of asking
Jack to get his cops to investigate but quickly dismissed it, part of being
part of the power was knowing how far you could go. rupert assumed the work had
been done by some idiot, lower-class child of the slums, but how had the child
got here? He reckoned it must have taken a taxi from the working-class suburb
where it lived. There were no buses or tubes that penetrated this upper-class
faubourg and he knew from reading the government reports that no proletarian
kid was capable of waddling for more than a few hundred yards without having to
sit down for a packet of crisps, a bottle of Sunny Delight and some crack
cocaine.

rupert
had thought the term ‘hopping mad’ was simply an expression, but that’s what he
did; he hopped, right there on the pavement he stood and he hopped. He had to
do something to stop the hopping. Even if he phoned his decorators now to come
and paint out the graffiti he knew they wouldn’t turn out till the morning if
they turned out at all, bloody obdurate British workmen. He wished he could fly
them in from Germany like the paint. Fumbling with his keys he jacked the front
door open and brushing the au pair aside ran downstairs to the dark-filled
basement, and immediately felt utterly confused. When he had designed the house
he had insisted that he didn’t want handles on any of the doors and that indeed
the doors shouldn’t be distinguishable from the walls so that you couldn’t tell
where wall ended and door started, simple flat planes everywhere. He said that
if you were down there in the basement then you should know where you were
going and if you didn’t know you shouldn’t be down there. Helen had pointed out
that guests might need some guidance as to the whereabouts of the toilet so
after hours and hours of discussion late one night he’d conceded a sandblasted
square cut into the spare bathroom door; they’d have to locate that or pee in
their pants, he would go no further.

Now his
house, suddenly unfamiliar to him, seemed to sway and turn. He spun round and
round, all around him blank walls. What he wanted was the door that let out
into the small open area between the basement and the street. Frantically he
pushed and shoved at the walls until one bit gave with a click and he was
thrown into a narrow space smelling of soap, grazing his face on the brickwork
as he cannoned into it. Out there to the left was another door that gave access
to what had been the house’s coalhole, now a damp-dripping brick cave under the
pavement.

The
damp must have made the wooden door swell because he had to tug hard to open it
and in so doing a projecting nail tore a huge rip in the three-thousand-pound
Oswald Boateng suit he was wearing. Swearing to himself and wreathed in cobwebs
he rootled through the coalhole until he found a quarter-full tin of the paint
that had been flown in from Germany and used for the mutilated white wall. He
grabbed a big paint brush from a shelf and ran back upstairs to obliterate the
offending word. With big broad strokes he painted over the name, getting
splashes of paint on his Boateng but not caring. After he had finished he
stepped back to admire what he had done. Though his breath was ragged and
shallow the unaccustomed physical effort had filled him with a happy feeling of
fatigue, in addition to which he felt what every man longs to feel, a sense of
having vanquished an enemy.

The
feeling didn’t last long. Something must have happened to the paint while it
was under the stairs in the coalhole because it had come out a much darker
shade of white than when it had coated the wall, or perhaps it had reacted with
the black spray paint underneath; either way it was now grey, quite dark grey
at that, and because rupert had merely followed the contours of the word, the
name, there was now written in much bigger letters on his wall: ‘PATRICK’.

Ruthie’s
dinner rose up in his throat and he vomited all over the pavement, soiling the
few previously unblemished bits of his Boateng. rupert realised he had made a
big mistake, he shouldn’t have let passion seize him. That was the thing about
the big bastards, the Richards and Tonys and Alastairs, they were as cool as a
sorbet, as frosty as a granita, they never got taken over by their emotions; in
fact, come to think of it, they didn’t seem to have any emotions, the only time
they showed emotions was when they were faking them for the TV cameras. He’d
foolishly given in. Well, he could learn. There was nothing for it, he had
learnt an important lesson: patience, the long view, that was the thing. He
would have to get the whole wall re-painted, he knew that now, by
professionals, like he should have done in the first place.

Helen
got home at 2 a.m. crabby and tired. She’d been attending ‘Drycleanex 01’ a
dry-cleaning convention in Glasgow and couldn’t really see why he was so
agitated. ‘It’s only a bit of graffiti for God’s sake,’ she said. At that point
rupert couldn’t see why he had married her, she was his partner, she was
supposed to understand. He would have gone and slept in the spare room if they’d
had one. They didn’t. There had been six bedrooms before he’d turned their
house into a temple of light and space, now there was only one, the boys slept
on a sheet steel landing suspended by wires above the light well, their hands
clamped on the edges of their beds. rupert and Helen’s bedroom looked out
through plate glass doors on to the light well, inconspicuous doors in the wall
led to a utility room, cupboards and walk-in wardrobe for all of rupert’s
identical Boateng suits. They’d had another of their long debates about the
tall strip of clear glass in the outside wall of the attached bathroom, which
admitted extra light but also allowed the neighbours to see them on the
lavatory.

After a
restless night he got on the phone to his painters first thing in the morning
but they were doing up Lord Winston’s place and couldn’t get back till the day
after tomorrow. He would have to spend two whole days with the desecration on
his house.

It was
torture, those two days; though he was in the house with the door slammed
behind him there was no relief. Notwithstanding that he was inside it made no
difference —the wall might as well have been made of his beloved glass for the
violation had given him X-ray vision, he could see straight through it to the
sacrilege on the other side: ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’
‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’. And as
his office was at home he was trapped with ‘PATRICK’ patrolling up and down
outside like an escaped tiger.

After
the long wait the painters turned up in their horrible van at 7 a.m., got Out
their special builders’ portable radio which seemed to be tuned to two stations
at the same time and set it blaring, hissing and honking on the pavement. They
then went off for a fried breakfast leaving the radio yodelling and scraping to
itself. They came back over two and a half hours later, big fried breakfasts
being hard to hunt down in Belgravia. Then they set to work.

About
ninety minutes later the head painter, a tall laconic black man called Tommy,
who always had a copy of the
Sun
in the back pocket of his overalls with
the daily xenophobic headline clearly displayed, rang at the door and asked to
speak to rupert. ‘Mr … erm … Mr … rupert. I fink you should come outside,
we… erm… dere’s a bit of a problem.’ He led the trembling rupert round the
corner.

What
must have happened was that there appeared to have been some chemical reaction
that had gone on between the paint underneath and the paint being put on top,
so that rather than obliterating the offending name, it was now rather
splendidly picked out in bright orange against an immaculate white background.
And it seemed to have got bigger: ‘PATRICK’. It shouted as if rupert’s house
was some new kind of bar called ‘PATRICK’ or something. ‘We give it tree coats,’
said Tommy. ‘But de damn ting keep comm true.’

rupert
went back through the front door quite calmly then turned into the kitchen
dining area which led off the main entrance. He lay down full length on the
nice cool stainless steel floor. A stainless steel kitchen with a stainless
steel floor. They used to have a cat but it went to live over the road because
it got sick of sliding and skidding all over the place on the slippery floor. rupert
was frankly glad it had gone because it had made the place look messy, lying on
its back with its legs open in hot weather. The boys must have loved it though
because they spent a great amount of their time now over the road with the
Saudi Arabian family who had taken it in. From his nice place on the floor rupert
looked up at the wire Bertoia chairs he had insisted on for the kitchen. They
were originally without cushions, as they should have been, so that dinner
guests were left with savage criss-cross lines on their bottoms, as if they had
spent the evening with a particularly savage dominatrix. On this one, this one
time, Helen put her foot down and went out and bought cushions for the chairs
from Liberty and rupert let her and was secretly relieved she’d done it, after
all he didn’t want people to be getting the wrong idea about Baroness Jay from
marks his chairs had given her on her bottom.

‘There’s
sharks in the deep end of my think tank,’ he found himself thinking, and then
he thought that he no longer understood his own thoughts. He had to get off the
floor, he knew that, it was extremely important; Tony wouldn’t like him lying
on the floor. At that point his mobile phone rang and seeing it was in his
pocket, down there on the floor with him, he got it out and answered it.

As if
he had sensed his distress it was Tony ringing him in his hour of need.

‘Awright,
geez?’ Tony said in the funny wide-boy voice he used sometimes when he was
larking about.

‘Yeah
sound geez,’ replied rupert.

‘Listen,’
said the Prime Minister reverting to his normal tones. ‘We’ve got the President
of Indonesia over here and he’s a bit sick of being a dictator. Alastair was
telling him about your ideas. Wanna come over and tell him yourself? Marco
Pierre White’s doing us all Nasi Goreng.’

He
still mattered. ‘I’ll be there in twenty, Tony.’

Then he
went back outside where his workmen were perfecting their oafish
impersonations. He had a special cockney voice he used with his workmen. ‘Listen,
yew cunts,’ he said, ‘I just want you to get rid of this fucking word. Do you
understand me? I don’t care what you have to do. Get shot of it, chop it out if
you have to, but get the fucking job done!’

Then he
went to Number 10 Downing Street for Nasi Goreng.

Coming
back later in his own car, swinging into the street, rupert turned his
headlights to high beam to look more clearly at what his workmen had done.

What
they had done was this. With their sharp chisels and their little hammers the
workmen had chipped the name out of the brickwork, painfully they had hacked
away the plaster leaving the rest of the wall completely untouched, so that now
there was carved into the wall in huge letters, perhaps eight foot high, the
one word, the one word: ‘PATRICK’.

More or
less without thought rupert drove his foot almost through the floor of the car
as he pressed the accelerator pedal and drove the Audi straight at the word,
the wall, the word was the wall, by now so big that he couldn’t miss the word
wall.

They’re
known for their safety, big Audis are, so he walked away without a mark on him,
the German car’s crumple zones having crumpled and all its airbags dangling
like big used condoms. Inside the kitchen he hunted under the sink for a bottle
of bleach then sat down on the nice cool stainless steel floor to drink it. As
it poured down his gullet he felt it scouring him, reducing the untidy tangle
of his insides to a minimalist shell.

He
would have died if the varnished pine-coloured Finnish au pair hadn’t come in
looking for some polenta for a late night snack. Being Finnish and with suicide
being so common in that country that they teach antidote administration at
junior school, she immediately knocked the bottle out of his hand and poured
bottle after bottle of Evian down him till the paramedics came.

After
he got out of hospital rupert and Helen and the kids went to stay in a
whitewashed farmhouse just outside a lovely little walled town in a valley in
Southern Spain. All the time he’d been in the Chelsea and Westminster none of the
government had come to see rupert, though Gordon Brown had sent some balloons.
Now the family was back together. They went walking through the orange groves,
swam in the pool, had simple dinners on the Arabic-style terrace. Over the
phone Helen sold her flag cleaning business to the Granada Group and they were
free of all worries, the money she got allowed them to live in delirious
clutter, the kids running in and out all day.

rupert
let his hair grow and tied it in a little pony tail at the back. They talked
about buying a small farm and raising sheep and goats. But then slowly rupert
began to return to the world; he bought a radio that could pick up the BBC
World Service and would impatiently sit through reports of government
reshuffles in Malawi, falling groundnut prices in the Congo and requests to
play Celine Dion records for teenagers in Damascus (‘I am most wishing to hear
the marvellous Canadian songbird trill her hit song from the film
Titanic…
’)
all so he could catch a fragment of news from back home, a sliver of
information of his former pals, Gordon and Jack and Tony.