High John the Conqueror, page 27
‘No. When you attack you have to go for where they’re strongest and feel safest…’
‘Meaning, Inspector?’
‘Meaning that if Max doesn’t like me now, he’s going to like me even less tomorrow morning…’
‘That’s my boy!’ says Eileen, sliding her hand between my legs. ‘We’d best all enjoy our last night of freedom, then. Here’s something I didn’t show you when I cleaned Iggy’s caravan!’
‘What, more of that stuff? Eileen, I’ve got to be able to trust you…’
‘No, you old woman.’ She hands me a small paper wrap under the table and whispers conspiratorially, ‘Coke! No, don’t look at me like that, we’ve all been round the block here and your career’s likely to be toast before your next drug test is due anyway! Go and powder your nose and make sure you leave some for the rest of us. It won’t take you over to the other side, but it will allow us to pass the next few hours most pleasantly!’
‘I don’t do powders,’ sniffs Fluffy. ‘Only the natural stuff for me.’
‘Great, more for the rest of us. Best foot forward, Terry. You’ve a big day tomorrow!’
Spontaneity, in a life overruled by patient calculation, can be enviable, and as I have been looking forward to the next few hours with Eileen since I went into work with a painful erection at 6am, I am ready to consider breaking the law.
‘I can’t take this either,’ I say, motioning with my eyes that it is time for us to leave.
*
Being in love helps you notice things that have nothing to do with love. There is a thunderstorm in the night, but I do not hear it at first because I believe Max is in the room with me and has been sat by my bed watching us, breathing beer and sandwiches over my quilt, for some hours. I overhear him say things addressed to me that he wants other people to believe, deflections and excuses, some clumsy and others modestly self-serving, his voice and face eventually blending into that of my father, at first as I remember him, and then as Dad, not a representation but how he really was and still is in heaven, where we can choose the bodies that were the most accurate picture of our souls in life, the embodiments we occupied when we peaked and felt most ourselves… yes, yes, you were my dad, but that was a long time ago… and then I am with Max again, who actually apologises as he knows he is not who I want to see, though now he is here, I repeat some of the lines I have prepared for him tomorrow, which sends him away sharply, before I hear Dad’s approach again; his steps, the way the pavement sounds under the tread of his well-polished brogues, his very presence that can be no one else’s, and that lean, interested face that watched me grow up, coming to my door, and waiting, yet we both know I cannot let him in, because I am in charge now… life isn’t long enough for me to have forgotten you; and if I can’t forget you, I can’t miss you… I hear him walk away, slowly, and it breaks my heart because I could have used his company even though when you are in command you are on your own, and it is Grace telling me this, spitting biscuits all over my shoulder and growing dangerously mauve because he has mixed red wine with cheese and this always leads him to overheat, before Masters himself is standing at the foot of my bed in his dreadful monk’s habit, grinning diabolically and waving a golden blade in the air, singing too of ‘the possessed sword of a thousand deaths’…
Eileen watches him, impossibly serene in the face of potential death, which means she obviously knows something I do not or has learnt something new while I was looking the other way, as I am raising my voice at Masters, threatening him with the puny force of the law and trying unconvincingly to yell, as to actually do so would mean waking up, which I do not want to do, my rare bursts of sleep too precious to risk, warning him that the will of the people always catches up with you in the end, and that he should bugger off before he gets his nose broken, yet we are in his house, not mine, and that impossibly I am having sex with someone who I hope is Eileen but is actually Fluffy, my orgasm the sort that takes you suddenly and by surprise, allowing you to see things you did not expect in its aftermath: the disappeared, our vanished teenagers, all of whom are proceeding in a line up a steep grassy incline, while I ask God to love them like he loves us, the scrawny teenagers turning their backs to me as they approach the old hanging trees on Gallows Hill; parts of me vanishing as they fall over one by one, like they were old friends of mine dying, and it is true that the soul remembers what the mind forgets, the distilled essences of the past, and I am all at once alone here, standing naked amidst the nettles and brambles. Alone with my abiding fear that I will one day lack the motivation to collate all the different clues and act on them or do anything at all except stay in this copse, frightened, bruised, will-less, not even confused but resigned. These experiences filter up into ideas and then back down into experience again. I cannot wake up, all this is really happening to me and sleep cannot render it less real, I cannot let anything go, I must always force the issue, I have never let a sleeping dog lie, my life would already be nothing if I had not met Eileen, I must tell her, I cannot find her, I wake up and she is here on her pillow next to me, still serene and asleep.
Then I hear it.
The heavens opening up, the rain falling so hard it could chip the tiles off the roof, gutters gurgling with such violence that I imagine frothing rivers of freshwater carrying livestock, Range Rovers and pianos down the street past Saxon Gold, the deluge released by a force too great to resist, so powerful that I do not have to worry about tomorrow. To worry is to blaspheme, while to lie here and accept the storm is the only effective protection from it, of accepting God’s comfortless existence, of his being awake and everywhere so I can sleep at last, my troubles smothered by his heavenly envelopment and attack. I do not have to wait for him: he is already here. When I wake and resume my small role in the universe, I will know what to do, and do it without thinking. Who, after all, can spend the night in the world of sleep and not wake up a little changed?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
COLD
There are mornings, and this is one, when the police ask other policemen for their identification in an orgy of officious self-reference that revels in the absence of exceptions, Her Royal Highness’s imminent arrival here bringing together the aspects of my profession I despise most with those of society at large: the Royal Family, celebrity culture and deferential obsequiousness masquerading as public service. Most of the people out here today are police, the streets leading to our trailer encampment are teeming with them, and those that are not stood po-faced against threats real and imagined are waiting their turn to.
‘Excuse me, sir?’ The PC barks my way, in spite of his knowing full well who I am.
I touch my badge, attached to my belt, which admittedly I feel exposed without, and receive the surreptitious nod and wink of acceptance. To be accepted as a policeman by other police is not the same as having to show any aptitude for the job, though reassuringly the two are not mutually exclusive. As a detective, my uniformed colleagues and superiors must feel comfortable in my presence, whereas all that is required of them to fit in to our state-run cosy club is to conform to the pack behaviour of a closed shop.
Walking past the phalanxes of officers and flags, in this usually deserted space, ignites many of the inescapable debates I prefer not to dwell on, lest I throw my badge into the River Avon. There is not a despotic regime in the world that cannot rely on its police force to defend it to the death. Even that other mob, the army, is more likely to contract emancipatory insanity and join in with the freedom-loving hordes than any of our number. We reflect our governments more than we do our societies, and the worse our rulers are, the nastier we are. We cannot help ourselves — we attract those who obey and who want to be obeyed. That can get in the way of the other half of our job, which is to contain human nature, clean up the mistakes of the economy and preserve and save life. Those that hate us pretend that this part of the job, contrary to whatever they would do in danger, does not exist, and there are those amongst us that wish it did not either. It shames one side to acknowledge the duality of our role, and the other to perform it. Yet if I were a victim of crime, used to waiting until it is too late for the sirens to arrive, I would lose my breakfast over the street today.
‘I’m sorry, you can’t, ahhh… apologies, as you were, sir,’ says a uniformed sergeant that I could probably remember the name of if I thought about it. In places, the line of police is already two uniforms thick. Motorbikes and cars are parked as badly as their riders and drivers are able, drawing as much attention to our presence as possible.
‘Thank you, Sergeant.’
For us to stand bluffly in public view, safe in the numbers we do not always have, taping off ten times as much public space as we need, stopping people we know are perfectly harmless to inform them of the gravity of the situation, have the odd helicopter up there in the clear blue, with constant backup from other forces on overtime, with less personal risk than being injured in a dream, passes as our version of the Royal Tournament, and the joke is on the ones clapping. Seething behind this eager jamboree are the same impulses that would in different circumstances flatten and arrest the very crowds that applaud us — and maintain they started it. I take ownership of both traditions. You cannot separate our good from our bad because we carry the original sin of our cause in us: crime. We exist because it does. As it ought not to exist in a perfect world, because nor should property, nor should we, our continued presence a societal embarrassment that no amount of copaganda or good works will ever be able to exorcise.
I knew all this at once without ever having to be told, finding goodness in its elemental form too shocking a force to survive very long without institutional assistance. Where else could I have gone, if I wanted to be one of the good guys, who exist, however seriously we take our politics, now that the cowboys have been found out as Indian killers, other than the police? Every work of critical theory excoriating the state could be right, yet a policeman responding to a single distress call has already done more for the needy than a militant on a demonstration, the writer of outraged pamphlets, or the chorus on multiple rallies ever could, or so I believed. The police were my trade-off between cynicism and decency, and in me they saw what they needed too: the kind of recruit that could become a poster boy for crime-fighting in the twenty-first century.
Today our journey of mutual convenience has finally run out of road. Having risen as far as I can on reason, novelty and prematurity, to qualify for the next level I must show the Neanderthal characteristics of my enemy, which is perhaps what my colleagues saw all along: my patient career arc and compromises simply the superficial concessions of one holding his nose, whose real self was basically indistinguishable from their own.
‘Do you mind if I see some identification, sir? Spot on, go right through.’
My first surprise is that Orridge is looking more than ready for me. He is the first thing I hear and see: mansmelling, manstale, manspreading and mansplained, an adoring crowd of uniforms huddled round his corner of the trailer, practically fawning over him with relief.
Tamla brushes past me and whispers, ‘God help us. He’s been a busy boy.’
‘That can’t be good?’
‘Roger that.’
I have committed the cardinal error, again, of believing I am the only one who can make plans, and as I catch Orridge’s leery and bloodshot eye, I know that my response to whatever he has pulled will determine which of us will look back on these next few minutes as the beginning of our glory years, or their end.
‘Ahhh, we’ve just been waiting for you, Terry. Fashionably late to the party as usual!’ Orridge calls.
His posture and tone would be right for the closing act of a heroic bender; he is dressed in his old tweeds, when I expected him to show up today clad as a Beefeater, resplendent and royal-ready. Instead his soiled shirt is unbuttoned, tie unknotted, and in place of his loafers are scuffed and muddy walking boots. All this while I cannot remember him looking more triumphant or sure of himself. Swallowing uncomfortably, I feel the fear of failure narrow my trachea. My foremost hope is that this curious display of nonchalance is a signal that he has finally gone mad.
‘Where is Grace?’ I ask hoarsely.
‘In a briefing with the Royal Security team,’ replies Tamla. ‘Just to clear the roofs of snipers, probably.’
‘Forget the chief for once!’ Orridge belches, beckoning me towards him.
‘He can’t claim credit for this one, oh no. This is Max’s contribution to the party, Terry!’
The air is fetid with the silty stink of a dried-out caffeine river, the cigar Orridge holds aloft like Liberty’s torch, a soggy fat stump that several have sucked on. ‘Sorry, Terry. Would have saved one of these beasts for you. Cohibas. I know you like a smoke, but we didn’t know when or whether you’d show up.’
‘I’m here now,’ I say too quietly.
‘Then welcome to the war, though just like the Yanks, you’re already too late for our finest hour!’
I wince. ‘Yank’ was a nickname he tried on me for a little while hoping it would catch on, after I had foolishly lent him my box set of The Wire.
‘And, as a Yank, you can’t really, not this time, take credit for the lion’s share of the glory. Though, granted, you’ve grafted a bit.’
The small crowd of uniforms around him chortle moronically, and I rule out a nervous breakdown as the cause for this latest twist in our fortunes: Orridge is in full possession of the initiative and the room.
‘I know you’ve been “burning the midnight oil”, Terry, we’ll always have to grant you that, but you haven’t been the only one who has this time.’
‘What Max is trying to tell you—’
‘Please, my dear’ — Orridge signals for silence with his cigar like a conductor controlling an unruly string section — ‘this isn’t your good news to tell, Tamla, not this time. This here is Max’s baby, and I say when it cries and when it goes to sleep!’
‘Good to see you enjoying yourself, Max. They’ve decided to give you a knighthood at last?’ I ask.
‘Very funny, Terry! Very funny. No, not this time. This time I’ve gone and cleared up that mystery that seemed to be evading the best detective minds of our generation and the next! Yes, that had us chasing dragons and pointing the finger of blame in all the wrong places, that frankly, was making fucking fools of us all… some of us more than others… heh heh…’ He winks at his fan club. ‘Yes, you might say that I’ve just gone and done you a favour, though knowing how uptight you college types are about real teamwork, you’ll probably not see it that way…’
My stomach is contracting and my voice cannot help but follow its example; I feel like I am losing control. The trouble with control is that it is difficult to believe in once you have lost it that first time; the blabbering anger, the uncontrollable self-pity, the cascading fear of not being properly understood all seem like the truth. And control? Control feels like a con.
With difficulty I ask, ‘What are you talking about, Max?’
‘Sorry, Terry. I can’t hear you?’ Orridge says as loudly as he can.
‘What are you talking about, Max?’ My voice is shaking, and I make a feeble effort to stand to my full height.
‘I am talking about what is so.’
‘This is getting very Kipling.’
‘My favourite writer, Terry.’
‘I don’t think this is the occasion for our first literary discussion.’
Orridge laughs, in my face. I can hear in my voice that forced attempt to maintain grip when I over pronounce my words, which is always proof that I am frightened, my skin simply the seal for the shaking liquid vulnerability beneath that is the real me. ‘What’s this about, Max? Oblique isn’t usually your bag. I thought you’d be waiting at the city limits for the royal cavalcade, not buggering about in here stinking the place out with your cheroots.’
‘I’d love to be thinking of just Queen and country today, Terry. Nothing would have given me more pleasure that that — I’ll tell you that for nothing. And if I hadn’t the misfortune of clearing up the messes, hiccups, and shit-shows others thought they could handle, I’d be all spick and span now, all spit and polish. But when the self-appointed specialists aren’t up to the task, it often falls to ordinary blokes like myself to show up, and show the show-offs how it’s done.’
‘Why don’t you stop beating that chest, put the shirt back on, and tell me whatever you have to tell me, then?’
‘Said you wouldn’t be happy, didn’t I?’ Orridge winks. ‘Your least attractive quality, Terry — an absolute absence of humility in any way, shape or form. Well, isn’t it obvious? What else do you think I could be talking about here? What else have you and her and poor old Dexter too — God, I should never have let you get him involved in this mess, but it’s too late for that now — what else have you all been rabbiting on about nonstop for the last however long?’
‘You tell me, Max. You’re the one relishing the moment.’
‘Your mispers! Your mispers of course! What else could I be bloody talking about? Well, I’ve only gone and practically solved the whole thing for you, haven’t I?’
‘Scale back that sugar rush, Max. You’ve—’
‘Come on, Tamla. Be a big girl about it — I succeeded where you failed, and it’s driving you mad with professional jealously, end of!’
‘Oh grow up!’
‘No, why the bloody hell should I? You people are too used to having it all your own way! Face it for once and take a dose of your own medicine if you please! You can’t handle being bested by an old-fashioned copper who doesn’t give a monkey’s cuss for your theories, reading lists and pals on equal opportunities commissions! Who just wants to get the job done the way we used to do it, before we had to worry about all this rubbish you get these days…’
‘So what is it, Max? You’re drifting. Back on point please. A group shot in Ibiza? A barn full of captives? Your gang theory? What? Don’t hold back. If you’re right, then I am undone and ready to bow to the better man.’
