Dead Man Upright Read online

  Praise for Derek Raymond’s

  Factory Series

  “There remains no finer writing—crime or otherwise—about the

  state of Britain.”

  —DAVID PEACE, AUTHOR OF THE RED RIDING QUARTET

  “More Chandleresque than Chandler. . . [Raymond] could write beautifully . . . and, more importantly, what he is writing about in this novel are nothing less than the most important subjects any writer can deal with: mortality and death.”

  —WILL SELF, AUTHOR OF THE QUANTITY THEORY OF INSANITY

  “A pioneer of British noir . . . No one has come near to matching his style or overwhelming sense of madness. . . he does not strive for accuracy, but achieves an emotional truth all his own.”

  —THE TIMES (LONDON)

  “The beautiful, ruthless simplicity of the Factory novels is that Raymond rewrites the basic ethos of the classic detective novel.”

  —CHARLES TAYLOR, THE NATION

  “A sulphurous mixture of ferocious violence and high-flown philosophy.”

  —PROSPECT

  “A mixture of thin-lipped Chandleresque backchat and of idioms more icily subversive.”

  —OBSERVER

  “Hellishly bleak and moving.”

  —NEW STATESMAN

  “He writes beautifully, and his sincerity cannot be faulted.”

  —EVENING STANDARD

  “Raw-edged, strong and disturbing stuff.”

  —THE SCOTSMAN

  Derek Raymond was the pseudonym of British writer Robert “Robin” Cook, who was born in London in 1931. The son of a textile magnate, he dropped out of Eton and rejected a life of privilege for a life of adventure. He traveled the world, living in Paris at the Beat Hotel and on New York’s seedy Lower East Side, smuggled artworks into Amsterdam, and spent time in a Spanish prison for publicly making fun of Franco. Finally, he landed back in London, working in the lower echelons of the Kray Brothers’ crime syndicate laundering money, organizing illegal gambling, and setting up insurance scams. He eventually took to writing—first as a pornographer, but then as an increasingly serious novelist, writing about the desperate characters and experiences he’d known in London’s underground. His work culminated in the Factory novels, landmarks that have led many to consider him the founding father of British noir. He died in London in 1994.

  Dead Man Upright

  First Published in Great Britain in 1993 by Little, Brown and Company

  © 1993 Estate of Robin William Arthur Cook

  First Melville House printing: February 2012

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY, 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-61219-062-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011942038

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise for Derek Raymond and the Factory Series

  About the author

  Title page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  For Marie

  Tous les criminels sont des jésuites . . .

  1

  Jidney put a finger in his ear and withdrew some wax.

  ‘Sixteen,’ he murmured, studying it, ‘that’s one every one point two two years recurring.’ There was a need to accelerate. He shut his eyes and the face of his new love, Ann, appeared. ‘For sixteen you can say seventeen soon,’ he whispered. He gazed into the sitting-room mirror; he was a man exalted, in a hurry.

  Flora’s tin might as well join the others this evening. He found it in the trousers he had worn last night; it had once contained acid drops. He opened it, put his lips to the contents and touched them for a while; then he sealed the tin with tape, smiling and talking to himself. He marked the spot on the carpet with his heel where it had to go; then, turning back into the bedroom, straightened his tie yet again in an effort to maintain his good humour. After doing what was necessary in the country and driving back to London he had gone to bed, slept soundly and woken in a state of tranquillity at first; yet now, even though he had only been up an hour, his euphoria was already eluding him. The harder he tried to catch it the more it wriggled out of his grasp; his pleasure, his sense of power, was so agile that it ran away from him laughing, looking back to see how close he was to catching up; then it vaulted gracefully out of reach and, no matter how carefully he stalked it, drained away through a leak in his mind as expertly as a goldfish slipping through the fingers of a child.

  He needed happiness more than ever just now, too, because the immediate past seeping through him was going bad. Like everything that was bad the trouble required contemplation, the balm of re-experienced achievement to soothe it away; for the only way to coat doubt over lay in satisfactory feelings and explanations.

  All the same, though, anxiety, barely out of sight, waited to jump him as he searched for his capricious happiness; he felt despair coming for him. He muttered, to ward it off: Remember the orgasm – but it was already as flat as a postcard. All that preparation, the deferred, languorous anticipation, and it had still gone wrong somehow. He blamed everything on Flora, but that didn’t help. She was beyond his reach now; otherwise he would gently have chided her, scanning her face for any signs that his spell over her was not working.

  Yet for the time being at least he managed to go on whispering to himself as if nothing were the matter and he were not out of sorts at all, giving his tie yet another formal twitch, pinching his cheeks to bring colour into them and whistling on at the bedroom mirror. But he was conscious of a void inside him nonetheless, a depression as menacing to his ego as a gash in the side of a boat.

  Three weeks previously he had met Ann Meredith in the Anguria, an Italian bar in Soho. It had been love at first sight, and from that moment on his desire for her had driven him as fiercely as the love-pangs of a young man which meant, sadly, that Flora’s time was over; she must be displaced even before she was gone. But it was impossible for him to put any of his feverish plans for Ann into action yet, it was too soon; therefore, to distract himself from his fantasies of her, and because the pangs of desire they aroused in him were so sharp that they physically hurt him, he spread his hands in front of the mirror in a wry, self-deprecating gesture of resignation and tried to think about something else. But nothing came to mind except an evening he had spent recently with a book he had found on handwriting, and his surprise at finding that his writing bore the classic signs of a psychopath; Flora and he had laughed out loud over it as he hurled the book jocularly across the room. But inwardly he was worried, for he had to admit that quite often now, espec
ially when he was on the edge of sleep, he was aware of something like a small diseased animal burrowing in his brain, patiently carrying on some obscure kind of work there.

  He smiled into the mirror but it didn’t succeed. Undeceived, his eyes looked back at him coldly as he told them, winking: You two haven’t seen me out of the wood yet! We still haven’t found out how to deal with each other, not even after all these years!

  He was dissatisfied with his face today; it gazed at him, sallow and without expression. He pinched it and narrowed his eyes, but they – even though women insisted that they were ‘mysterious, an artist’s eyes, Ronnie’ – looked back through him flatly, at a flat world; he meant no more to his own eyes than anyone else did. Subaqueous, the eyes of a detached watcher in the depths of a lake, they were not interested in him but in the past; they were still reliving and cautiously catching up with the chaotic situation of a few hours previously.

  He tried to correct their lacklustre glaze, but it was a waste of time. Their inky dispassion, his smile, his stereotyped views – mastered and learned by heart in jail – on art, death and relationships, formed part of a fixed set of gestures and passed for wisdom; any attempt to tamper with them contradicted his mask, which immediately loosened, threatening to slip aside like a scrap of plastic dangling from the ear of a drunk. The only reassurance he could extract was the knowledge that the mask had never betrayed him yet; it had deceived all his victims, beckoning them archly into a trompe-l’oeil parlour of sanity, when in reality he was staggering to keep his balance in the roaring slipstream of events, clutching the mantle of his self-mastery round him in the frozen delirium of hatred, living to the limit only at the apex of the death he brought the other, and dead to the world thereafter, as well as before.

  Without warning, strident music struck up in his brain like the jangling of a banjo in the hands of a disturbed child; voices strode about in his head shouting, roaring out incomprehensible orders. The experience reached a crescendo until a massed, untuned band was sawing, blowing and droning inside his skull; he stood still, shutting his eyes until it stopped. This it did as he remembered how, in a dark West End bar, he had overheard a man he knew was a detective saying: ‘What I can never match is the concentration a killer brings to what he does. Whatever I do, his mania leaves me looking ordinary.’ Jidney derived permanent satisfaction from that; the opinion of his enemy confirmed his own and he remembered it now with joy.

  He turned back to the mirror again: ‘Let’s go out,’ he whispered to it.

  He looked anonymous; that pleased him. That was how he wanted to look; you had to take pains to look normal. As he had often said to Flora, and before her to Anna, Mandy Cronin, Judith Parkes and others, one of the greatest attributes of a god is that he condescends to resemble man. Nothing could take this rapture from him – he soared at the topmost flight of existence, he was a super-being. Oblivious that he was a living nightmare he thought only of how important it was for him to relax after the exhausting events of last night, so he sucked air noisily into his lungs, concentrating on the image of his mind as a giant’s body – flesh, muscles, sinews, courage and resolve swelled mightily as the precious oxygen of affirmation bubbled through.

  He locked up and went downstairs, putting on a sprightly energetic step, forcing his body rather, and aware of a tight sensation in his head. He walked out into the street, still whistling, and turned left up Thoroughgood Road towards the tube station.

  And yet his whistling was shrill, because he still felt haunted, pursued even, wondering when he had last had good dreams. ‘What?’ he thought. ‘Still moping over her? Even though she’s wept herself dry?’ He felt a fleeting regret for Flora, the faint sadness a man might have for some minor loss suffered years ago – a fingertip, or the hearing in one ear.

  He sighed, jiggling his testicles in his pocket, on the brink of arousal all over again at the thought of her: All the same – what memories!

  Memory could be dangerous, though. It was well trained – indeed it was usually as subservient as a footman – but he never really trusted it even so, faced as he was with the daily and virtually insoluble problem of having to forget whole tracts of what he remembered. His memory took him unawares when he least expected it, playing tricks on him, suggesting in the indistinct voices of the dying that he was utterly unlike what he was determined to be in other people’s eyes. Where he wanted memory, like a serf, to bring him his version of the past like a brand new coat, it would arrive instead holding something sodden and bloody which bore no relation whatever to the elegant garment he wanted to shrug on. Yet there it was, appearing unbidden with this disintegrating bundle of filth, humid as a shroud, foul-smelling as if someone had left shit in the pockets, offering it to him and insisting deferentially that it was his. Thus memory in its gentle, terrible way translated his own soaring, orchestrated vision of his activities into straight fact, blunt, unsparing and direct, disclosing the infinite to him as a chasm that was terrifying in the extreme; for instead of dutifully confirming the majesty of what he had done it came up with a crazy pile of bones swilling under decaying blood – a version which completely undermined his glittering structure of the past and reduced it to a shambles.

  He sang under his breath, in desperation:

  ‘Oh just remember this,

  A kiss is still a kiss,

  A sigh is still a sigh . . .’

  He pattered on, his lips moving as he walked: ‘Oh kissable you . . . How glad I am I spent the whole of our last day with you, Flora. You told me such beautiful and enduring things; not many people can ever have had such wonderful things said to them. And you can be sure that everything I told you as we parted is true; you were wrong to give me such a disappointed look as we separated.’ He knew it was all lies. ‘I shall do as I told you I would while we discussed Us together, cheek to cheek, I shall review our position daily with its sadness and joy – I shall always find time to put myself in your place and say: Now what, I wonder, would my Flora have done, in this or that situation?

  ‘Until the very last moment you raised me in my self-esteem; but then you criticised me – so that then, sadly, it became necessary for us to take sudden leave of each other.

  ‘What a strange time that last night of ours was, Flora! The only jarring detail was the sperm; I thought it looked wrong as I left, as if a slug had crawled over a lettuce; it left a sadness in me, and I’m sorry now that the fruit of love’s joy went all over the place like that. Well anyway, here I am, back again in our nest, and I felt you last night somewhere nearby to welcome me on my return. As for me, the least I can say is that the “Event” didn’t just “go off all right”, you know – it was a triumph!

  ‘Indeed, my sweetest and loveliest Flora, I never was more pleased with you in my life than I was last night, and I can only hope that the love I have for you shone through my every word and gesture during the foreplay leading to our union – oh, how I hope so!’ (This was much better.) ‘Nothing I did seemed to be pressing you or forcing you, did it? Nothing in my behaviour gave you the impression that anything in our courtship (“Trailing our feathers in front of each other!” Do you still remember how we shared that little private phrase, just the two of us?) was in any way in bad taste, I trust? Something you wrote off as merely some shabby routine on my part?

  ‘And how could either of us ever forget the moment where I said, Here we are, the two of us sitting up together on our last night?’ (This was quite untrue; things hadn’t happened like that at all.) ‘And then, when the time came, the way you said: Now it’s all right, Ronald, try to control yourself, please don’t be so eager, we agreed I could choose the time – please give me a moment, don’t fluster me. And then, when I had arranged the camera to record us for posterity and you were finally ready, your throat bare, you stretched your arms up like a child bride on the verge of experience, your years dissolving, and said, Guide me Ronald, help me, be kind. And somehow I m
anaged to wait, and then you said, your eyes shining up into mine. Am I the way you want me now? Will you give me a kiss goodbye? You know, I didn’t really want to do that, I was in such a hurry – and I realise now that I kissed you (Did it show? Oh I do hope not!) too quickly and clumsily. But it was the best I could do, and then you said, Follow me afterwards, immediately, Ronald, the way you promised, I’m very tired now, take me for a long sleep, so then at last we were united and I found out that I didn’t like you at all – I hated being inside you and I remember looking down at you and rushing everything, and it wasn’t till afterwards when I took you again – what heaven the second time in spite of the mess! – and held you and said, Oh my darling, I’m sorry, sorry, sorry – but of course it was all over by then, too late, and I was so disappointed.’

  The great game; how to assemble a million shattered fragments as a presentable front.

  He had the film he had made of the scene to look forward to; he had a sudden longing to watch it straight away. Unable to, and ruefully shaking his head in frustration, he left the cramped little stage, brilliant with lights, where Flora was waiting, and instead searched through other parts of his interior theatre, wandering finally into the ground-floor room in North London, bathed in the dark yellow light of its drawn curtains, where twenty yeas ago he had finished Mandy Cronin off. It was just a treasured oldie to set off the fresh magnificence of Flora’s act, but yet again, ritually, he turned Mandy’s face to the wall because the look in her eyes disturbed him even after he had covered them with her red hair, and stood looking down at her, surprised, while she continued, with the blood-soaked back of her head towards him, to slap her right arm stiffly up and down against her side well after she was dead.

  It was a Rembrandt of a scene.

  That reminded him of his painting sessions with Flora at Thoroughgood Road; of his sudden great burst of artistic creativity while they had been together. He remembered how he had thought as he stood behind his easel, I watch your face living, Flora, and paint it dead. There seemed nothing curious to him in that reflexion, no disparity; he knew simply that he could never let her see the result of his work, no matter how often she pressed him. The point was that fantasies were private; they were destroyed if others saw them.