The Face That Must Die (6 page)

No, she’d been pouring boiling oil on people’s heads. “Yes,” she said curtly. She disliked intruders in her kitchen. She refused the joint and said “Will you ask Peter to empty the bin?”

When Peter appeared, he plainly resented being asked in front of the girls. But he grabbed the bin, and shouted to Anne “Ask if there’s any acid.”

Cathy hoped there wasn’t. Grass she didn’t mind so much, but LSD dismayed her. In the park Peter had cried “For Christ’s sake don’t leave me” gazing at a crippled decayed branch; his pupils had been swollen and flickering. She wouldn’t take acid; the idea of losing control frightened her. Besides, she’d never seen anyone made more pleasant by a trip, nor any couple grow closer.

Peter returned. “I emptied it in Harty’s bin,” he told the girls. “Old bugger thinks he owns the place.” He displayed the empty kitchen bin to Cathy, like a hunter’s prize.

“
Jim says he can get some good Canadian acid,” Anne told him. “Purple Pyramid — it takes you right out of your head.”

“
Great. I can keep a tab for summer.”

Sue dawdled in, coughing as she smoked the joint down to the cardboard tip and lit another from it. “I hope you know how lucky you are, leaving the libraries,” she told Peter. “We couldn’t get through the day without a joint.”

Cathy grimaced, sharing her thoughts with the stove. The only time she’d worked with them, the girls had sat stoned and giggling at the desk for most of the afternoon. When the flat across the landing had fallen vacant Peter had told them at once, though Cathy had wanted it for Ben and Celia. Would her friends have split up if she’d been close enough to mediate?

“
Craig was after me to turn the records down. Christ, his flat isn’t even under ours.”

“
It couldn’t have been our records,” Sue said. “We were out last night.”

“
He complained to us once, though. Isn’t he oily?” Anne squirmed and grinned, as though at a disgusting joke. “And the way he tries to be sort of stiff, as though if he lets go he’ll flop all over the floor. We told him to piss off.”

“
I don’t mind him,” Cathy said.

All of them stared at her. “Sure, he’s a very warm and wonderful human being,” Peter remarked in a spurious American accent.

That joke had become a cliché in itself. If she heard it just once more — They were wandering more slowly and aimlessly; they made her kitchen feel crowded and untidy. The girls gazed at the wall-charts of recipes; they might have been in an art gallery. “Pass me the garam masala, please,” Cathy said.

Sue stared as if she were talking a foreign language; Anne turned to the spice rack, but stood looking bewildered. Peter began laughing. “Never mind,” Cathy said irritably. “All of you go in the other room.”

As they did so, someone else knocked at the door. Bloody hell! She made for the door; she wouldn’t put it past them to answer it while smoking. But Peter was already there. It was Fanny from downstairs.

“
Hello, Peter. Oh, there you are, Cathy.” She advanced, stretching out her hands, which were multicoloured as a palette. “I’m sorry to come pillaging. Could you spare any sugar? Oh buttocksbumanarse I, forgot to bring a cup.”

“
I might have half a grain to spare.” Cathy filled a mug from the tin. “What are you painting?”

“
I’ve just finished. Come and see.” When Cathy hesitated, she added wistfully “You can tell me if it’s any good.”

Fanny’s flat looked as though a living-room, a bedroom, a newspaper cutting service and a studio were battling to occupy the room. An easel stood on a wad of paper thick as a carpet; a drawing-board was folded behind the couch, which at night spread its arms and became a bed. Faces clipped from publications gathered everywhere; a mug of coffee defended its island on the crowded table. The walls brandished spotlights. “That’s it,” Fanny said with an uneasy laugh, and gestured at the easel.

The painting teemed with babies. Some sat in prams, some lay in cartons, on yellowed newspapers, on earth. They laughed, cried, dreamed, played with the air or with themselves, looked bewildered, delighted, abandoned. They were many colours. Some were vivid yet false as photographs in a housewives’ magazine, others were drawn in crayon or marker pen and had a child’s truth about them. Some were fat as tyres, some were skeletally thin. A few were bruised or worse.

“
Yes, it’s good,” Cathy said. “It’s really good. You’ve put a lot into it.” Her words seemed inadequate. She wondered what features a baby of hers would have: Peter’s teeny leftover of a nose, her eyebrows that met in the middle like a Hollywood werewolf’s, Peter’s beard?

“
And here’s my masterpiece.” Fanny showed her a notice painted in the style of her signature, elaborate as New York subway graffiti: PLEASE KEEP THIS DOOR CLOSED. “Commissioned by Mr Harty, my first patron. I keep forgetting to put it up,” she said. “Come and hold the tacks while I remember.”

On her way to the door, Cathy noticed a metal bird. It was rough as chipped flint, yet gracefully slim. “Are you going in for sculpture now?”

“
Someone gave that to me.” Did her tone imply a new relationship or a treasured memory? “I want to try working in clay sometime,” she said.

At the bottom of the stairs she tapped on Mr Harty’s door. His dressing-gowned shoulder emerged, and then his bald head; two tufts of grey hair perched above his ears like packing, as though he’d just been removed from his box. “That’s right, Miss Adamson,” he said to Fanny. “Too many people have been wandering about. We don’t want just anyone coming in. There are enough criminals without putting a temptation in their way.” He withdrew like a jack-in-the-box; his lid clicked shut.

Fanny pointed at the other ground-floor flat. “I forgot to tell you,” she whispered, “I saw Mr Nameless Bell at work the other day.”

His was the only doorbell that lacked a name. “You’ve found out where he works?” Cathy hissed. “Is he a spy?”

Fanny thumbed tacks into place. “No,” she said mournfully. Her words threatened to collapse with laughter. “He works in Woolworth’s.”

“
Oh dear.” Cathy couldn’t control her voice, which broke into a jumpy shout. “I thought he must be at least a detective.”

They fled upstairs, giggling. The last of the babies were drying. “When’s your exhibition?” Cathy said.

“
Next week. They’ve given me the whole of the Bluecoat Gallery.”

“
That’s good.” Fanny’s grimace made her ask “Don’t you think so?”

“
I don’t know. I hope so. I just don’t know if it’ll reach the people I want to reach.” She sounded embarrassed and self-deprecating as she added “Come and see it if you want to.”

“
Thanks, Fanny. We will.” The smell of curry drifted downstairs, mixed with a hint of cannabis. “I must go and give himself his dinner,” she said.

She’d reached the top landing when Fanny called “Cathy!” She looked down unwarily. The fall plunged away beneath her; the walls shifted, the stairwell gaped like a throat.

“
I’m awfully sorry, I forgot to ask if you had any raisins. This exhibition has me all jumbled up.”

The moment had passed, and Cathy felt better for having survived it. “I’ll send Peter down with them,” she said.

The girls and Peter were reading his comics. They glanced up to see who Cathy was. She felt like an intruder. Sometimes, in unguarded moments, she wondered if Peter preferred them to her. This year she’d cooked her first full Christmas dinner — but he’d seemed more interested in going next door to smoke.

Grumpily he undertook to deliver the raisins. “And then your dinner will be ready,” she said.

The girls looked up, in case that included them. At last they wandered out, saying “See you later, Peter.”

Not here, if Cathy could help it. They cluttered the flat. They weren’t worth resenting: Sue had a big bum that flopped from side to side as she walked, Anne’s hair was like a thatched crash helmet. But she could stand seeing less of them. Were they trying to turn the top floor into a commune? It annoyed her to have to ask persistently for things they’d borrowed. On Christmas Day her mother had come for dinner; on Boxing Day she’d invited her father. Even on Christmas Day, when Peter’s parents had come too, he’d kept sneaking next door.

When he returned from Fanny’s she said “When are we going to see the Halliwells?”

“
Yes.”

She hadn’t time to be infuriated. “I want to see them on New Year’s Eve. We’ll go out for a meal, just the four of us.”

“
It’ll have to be somewhere cheap.”

She was looking forward to seeing her friends, and didn’t feel like arguing. “Did you like Fanny’s painting?”

“
It was all right.”

“
She wants us to go to her exhibition.”

“
Oh Christ, you didn’t say yes, did you? They’re all a con, those exhibitions. Full of posers pretending they know what they’re talking about.”

But it was Fanny’s. Her look of reproof must have reached him, for to break her silence he said ‘‘Anything interesting happen today?”

Interesting? She was no longer sure. She’d meant to tell him how the park had looked that morning, grass and bushes painted with light and rain — everything had glowed, and the tears it brought to her eyes had made the landscape crystalline — but he seemed to resent her ability to see these things without drugs.

“
Nothing special,” she said, hoarding the memory. “Come and help carry the plates.”

When she brought the rice from the kitchen he was peering through a crack in the curtains, like someone made wary by loneliness Before she could join him, he let the crack fall closed. “Just some guy watching the house,” he said. “Probably one of Craig’s boyfriends. I thought he might be fuzz. He’s gone now.” Perhaps he was reassuring himself as he said “Nothing to worry about.”

* * *

Chapter III

Lime Street Station was thick with queues, sluggishly advancing on the ticket windows while trying to avoid the rain that dripped through the roof. Horridge edged towards the bookstall. “Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me.” Sometimes he had to shout. He felt absurd and irritable, as though caught in a dance in a dream.

Police were patrolling, and seemed on the lookout for someone. They needn’t look at him. Overhead the names of destinations clicked and changed, as though on a game board. Light exploded silently in a photo booth. Above the squealing of metal on rails a great vague voice boomed, echoing within the long iron shed. Horridge could never see where its owner was hiding.

He hurried past the Gents’. It was too public: there were always men watching surreptitiously, or moving behind him — and always a stench like perfumed urine, which must cling to one’s clothes. He’d use the toilet in the cinema. He bought a newspaper: sHocK REvELATIoN IN LIVERpooL mURDER hUNT, its headline said.

The pavements looked slippery and unstable, glittering and wriggling with rain. Light lay glistening outside a pub, like slops. He hurried up the street beside the Odeon. Side streets made him nervous. Submarine glows drifted before him to be engulfed by the multicoloured glare of London Road.

The Odeon’s four cinemas were offering a Peter Sellers comedy, a Disney full-length cartoon,
Murder by Death
and
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
. That was the one he wanted to see. Horror films took you out of yourself — they weren’t too close to the truth.

Children raced about the foyer, knocking squat ashtray pedestals awry; others stood screaming, lost or frustrated. Children clamoured for sweets and hot dogs and Pepsi-Cola. A salesgirl watched two boys furtively handling bars of chocolate. Horridge gave his ticket to a harassed usher, who tore it and gestured him vaguely onwards, frowning at the children.

No time to use the toilet. He wanted to reach Screen 3 before the show began; he didn’t like groping about in the dark. Once he’d touched a face, and a tongue had stirred like a worm within the cheek. After the blaze of the foyer the passage was dim. The large Screen 2 was in the middle; 3 must be on the left.

The small cinema was bright and empty: not even an usherette to be seen. Good — there would be nobody shouting and laughing at the monsters as a proof of masculinity. His seat creaked in the silence. Were they waiting for the cinema to fill? Wasn’t he enough of an audience?

Beneath the red lights, the blue-green pelt of the floor and the seats threatened to turn violent. Floor and seats were tilted slightly to the right, though the screen was horizontal. He felt seasick. He shook open the newspaper, loudly and furiously.

The man whose mutilated body was found in a Liverpool flat was a male prostitute, police revealed today.

That made him more sick. He didn’t want to read on. But he must know all.

The body of Norman Roylance (21) was found in a cupboard in his flat in Toxteth, Liverpool, on December 24. He had been bound and gagged. Police say that there were more than 30 razor wounds on the body.

In a series of shock revelations, police gave us details of Roylance’s life as a homosexual prostitute since the age of 15. (Full story on page 2.)

Last month, also in the Toxteth area, the body of a young homosexual as found in a flat. He had also been bound and mutilated, and his body had been locked in a cupboard.

Police are anxious to interview a man in his forties. He is described as being of medium height and stocky build. From descriptions, police have been able to issue this identikit portrait.