I Was Dora Suarez Read online

  ‘That comes from the dead I mix with, Jollo,’ I said, ‘so why don’t you try it yourself one day instead of dressing up as a detective chief superintendent and licking arseholes and stamps?’

  ‘Don’t you ever talk to me like that,’ he said, ‘and your first warning’s your last, cuntie.’

  ‘Well, that’s how I talk to most people,’ I said, ‘so don’t bother warning me, it’s breath wasted.’

  ‘How do you get away with it?’ Jollo said. ‘What’s the great secret?’

  ‘The secret’s simple,’ I said. ‘The secret is that I don’t fucking care.’

  He started to open his mouth but I said, ‘Don’t open that, Jollo – you used to be a good detective before you bottled out. Now I haven’t any time, so would you give me an envelope I’m told you’ve got in one of your drawers with a warrant card in it and let me get on catching the Suarez/Carstairs killer – that’s all I’m here for.’

  He said: ‘I’d like to see you outside somewhere, on a piece of waste ground, I really would – any time’d do.’

  ‘Now don’t get hurt in your pride, Superintendent,’ I said, ‘just give me the gear and I’ll get out of here because it smells of rank in here – in fact it smells dead fucking rank.’

  He gave me the envelope because he had to, but he handed it to me as if it were a pistol that he was inviting me to blow my head off with.

  I opened it and there was a warrant card in it. I said to Jollo: ‘Well, fancy that, I’m a copper again.’

  He said: ‘Worse luck, and may it not last, mazel tov.’

  I said: ‘Stack the commentary. By the way, do we still have a Detective Sergeant Stevenson on the strength at A14?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jollo, ‘he’s on a case just now; feller name of Roatta over at Clapham had his head shot off about the same time as your thing happened.’

  ‘Roatta?’ I said. ‘Really? Well, that’s one king-sized filter-tip turd the world can now forget about. And you say Stevenson’s on it? Good, because if there’s one detective capable of working out of this building, it’s him.’

  I left. I raced for the lift to get down to the second floor where A14 lived because I immediately wanted to start reading Suarez. One of Charlie Bowman’s promising young minions, one of these teenage inspectors with the world on his shoulders and glasses that Charlie liked recruiting for Serious Crimes got into the lift at the same time as I did and started down with me; his razor had left three bristles under his chin, but that was his business, not mine.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said, ‘so you’re back again, are you?’

  ‘Well, your keen detective’s eyes must already be telling you that I’m not absent,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve lost none of your charm, have you?’ he said.

  ‘I need all the charm I can get,’ I said, ‘because I don’t know about you, but the bodies I find have lost all theirs.’ As the lift slowed I said to him: ‘You’re an intellectual; one day why don’t you ask yourself why it is that not one tear ever leaks out under those glasses of yours, and no troubled thought ever slithers about in that thing that your Regent Street hat keeps the rain off?’

  ‘Well, we’re rather giving up the footwork; detective work’s more and more computerised nowadays,’ he said seriously.

  ‘Wait till you see your wife’s death come up on the fucking thing,’ I said as the lift doors sighed open, ‘and then speed over to find her with her head cut off, and a swastika smeared over your front door in her own shit, happy programmes, bye-bye.’

  ‘You bastard,’ he shouted.

  ‘The truth is very painful,’ I said. ‘Didn’t any of the thousands of villains you’ve interrogated ever tell you that, or haven’t you ever met any?’

  I got to 205 and kicked the horrible plastic chair into a position where I could sit on it without either wrecking my knee caps on the underside of the table or getting my balls crushed. Luckily for me I didn’t care about the revolting green paint or the rabies posters, and it was a good thing I didn’t care about the heating either, because there wasn’t any; the heating was a special system which was designed to work flat out only in August. The top left-hand drawer of my desk had been turned into a kind of death row by seven of last year’s flies; but except for them that piece of furniture was empty, so I decided to prove to everyone in the place, including myself, that I existed by picking up the phone. The phone sounded dead for quite a while, but after I had dialled zero nine and rapped its grey plastic head very hard on the woodwork several times I finally got a WPC with a bright little voice which said: ‘Who is this, please?’

  ‘I’ll come down and introduce myself if you don’t look out,’ I said.

  ‘Line 205 is not in use,’ she said.

  ‘Well, that must explain why we’re both a couple of cunts talking down it then, mustn’t it?’ I said. ‘Now pull your finger out with a loud pop, missis, get it functioning like five minutes ago was a hundred years too late and then I will give you permission to go even further and go totally and utterly mad by stopping all incoming calls while I read up on two murders, which, though you mightn’t believe it, is the bizarre, rather sordid kind of work that goes on in this part of the building.’ I added: ‘And try not to waste my time, because with the current crime rate we never have any.’

  ‘I was just doing my job.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘and that’s what I’m complaining about.’

  ‘Talking to you, I’ve decided I don’t like working in the police,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘Do what I did then,’ I said, ‘leave it.’

  She said: ‘It’s your filthy manners.’

  ‘My manners came in with me from the street, love,’ I said. ‘It’s dirty out there, now get chuffing.’

  The Voice rang. ‘Well?’

  ‘I’ve found some stuff Suarez has written.’

  ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I’ve read it,’ I said, ‘which I will the minute people stop pestering me.’ As an afterthought I added: ‘Sir.’

  ‘Now you watch your tone,’ the Voice said. ‘I’m used to you, but I’ve just had Jollo in this office who isn’t, and the way he went on about you I thought he was going to have a stroke.’

  ‘I know a very good flower shop down the Fulham Road opposite St Stephen’s,’ I said. ‘The lilies are quite cheap but they look really lovely at a funeral.’ I added: ‘I’ll nail the man who killed Suarez and Carstairs and I’ll do it fast, but there’s a condition.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘All unsought-for help to stand absolutely clear.’

  ‘Done,’ said the Voice, and rang off.

  4

  I read:

  Once I was Dora Suarez, but even before I die I am not her any more; I have just become something appalling. Looking at myself naked in the mirror, I see that I have lost the right to call myself a person; what’s left of me now is barely human.

  ‘Why’s that?’ I thought. I picked up the phone and dialled the duty desk. I said: ‘Is that autopsy report on Suarez and Carstairs here yet?’

  ‘No.’

  I said: ‘Why not?’

  The sergeant said: ‘There’s a queue down at the morgue.’

  ‘Then tell them to get it moving,’ I said. The sergeant laughed. ‘Don’t laugh,’ I said, ‘or I’ll run down and do no more but smash your face in. I want it the minute it arrives, and that’s all you need to know.’

  I am marked with a cross; I just have this pause between now and my end. Here at Betty’s I have this last short freedom; I have no more real time. I accept that at thirty I am going to die. I don’t want to be parted from my body – what has happened to it is not its fault. But it says it wants to go.

  I rang down again: I said: ‘Come on – Carstairs, Suarez.’

  ‘Nothing. Why don’t you ring them yourself, Sarge?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to make any more enemies tonight.’

  I don’t know what I sho
uld have done if it hadn’t been for Betty. I was in Kensington by chance the day we met, having left my suitcase at a girlfriend’s not far off who had no room for me because of her boyfriend being there – and besides, my illness made her afraid – and I passed Betty going in the opposite direction along Empire Gate, and seeing that she was having a hard struggle against the north wind with her shopping, I don’t know why, but I stopped and gave her a hand with it, meaning to go on south over the river afterwards to see if I could find a cheap room down there somewhere with people who weren’t too nosey. But it ended up with Betty saying, when we got to her street door, wouldn’t I like to come indoors with her for a moment and get in out of the wind? I didn’t want to be with any strangers, just on my own – still, it was bitterly cold, so I followed her in the end and found myself in this strange, dark flat crammed with clocks, broken-down furniture from another age, and boxes and cases stacked up to the kitchen ceiling. She went out to the kitchen presently and made us a cup of tea. She brought the tea and sat me down in the other chair opposite her by the electric fire. The place was in a dreadful state and smelled the way an old person’s place does smell; but strangely, I soon found that I didn’t care. Besides, I was very tired; it was one of my bad days.

  After about an hour she started asking me about myself, something I usually don’t like – only she didn’t do it in a stupid, pressing way, but mixed up with stories of her own past, taking my hand and stroking it absently while she talked. She spoke softly, in a low Highland voice that reminded me of fine rain; and later on she brought some whisky and a plate of cakes to make it a social occasion. She had a quarter glass herself, and before she went to bed in the kitchen under the window sang snatches of Highland songs in Gaelic as though she had forgotten that I was there:

  ‘Take me to the house with many windows

  And I will stay with you forever …’

  She had the high, glorious voice of a young girl.

  In the course of the evening I said: ‘I really must be getting on, Betty – I’ve found nowhere to sleep yet, and it’s getting dark.’ Betty said: ‘I wish you’d stay with me here, Dora; I’ve been so lonely since Reg went.’ And I said at once: ‘I will, Betty’ – and that wasn’t just because it suited me, or because I felt ill and tired; at that moment I didn’t really know why I was so happy to stay, but I know now, of course, that it was because she offered me peace.

  I had long ago forgotten what it was like to be treated so gently, so that in the following days, whenever she took my hand and looked into my eyes, saying: ‘Now you’ve your place here, Dora, and it’s such a wonderful thing for me that you’re here, you’ll stay on awhile, won’t you?’ something jagged came up into my throat. But I could not tell her much about myself, with her aged eighty-six. All I said to her one night, after a few whiskies, when she asked me: ‘Where do you think you’re going to live in the end, sweet?’ and I answered: ‘Wherever I can hide,’ she took my hand and squeezed it hard, saying calmly: ‘Well, whatever you’re hiding from, you know you can always hide here’ – without ever once going any further, never wanting to know anything I couldn’t tell her.

  She’s pure gold.

  The other day, though, she got up from her armchair by the electric fire, took me by the shoulders and held me away from her a little so that she could focus me properly. She said: ‘You know, I don’t like the look of you, Dora, you don’t look right to me.’ I wanted to cry and tell her everything, but I didn’t and just said: ‘I’m perfectly all right, Betty.’ She said: ‘Dora, I’ve this bit of money, now I want you to take it and go to the doctor’s just for a checkup. You could go to my doctor, Doctor Mathers; he’s ever so kind, and his surgery’s only just round the corner.’ But I said: ‘No! No, no!’ and only stopped myself just in time from telling her that I was beyond the help of doctors. All I said was: ‘No, Betty, I really am all right, you know, I swear it. I’m young.’ She didn’t believe me, of course; but, seeing the kind of person she was, she just turned and went into the kitchen for the whisky and the hard little cakes she liked, and she never mentioned the subject again. All I said to her during that period was: ‘Betty, do you believe that apart from you, somewhere beyond all the people who only seem to be people, there truly are still some people left, real people?’ And she said: ‘Ah, you darling pretty woman, don’t you know that my Reg, though he’s been gone so many years now, still comes in to see me quite often to know if I’m all right? It’s true he drank hard, Dora, but he was always a gentleman – even in drink he was nearly always collected and correct, and there could never have been any other man in my life but him.’ She was silent for a time, staring at the floor, then she looked up at me and said: ‘As I think of it, have you no more luggage here than what you’ve brought?’ I started to cry and said: ‘No, I’ve only my heart, Betty, and that’s heavy enough.’ After she had comforted me in her frail arms she said: ‘For you know, Dora, I’ve all sorts of clothes here, in the boxes in the kitchen, and though they’re old and out of style, I know, they’re all handmade, for Reginald was a major in the war, and so I had to dress correctly for the officers’ mess on ladies’ night.’

  But I told her I had all I needed. Later I said: ‘Betty, don’t you find it’s funny how when someone isn’t there with you, the least thing they’ve ever sent you, a postcard, a photograph, assumes an importance that you wouldn’t think twice about if the person were there?’ She said: ‘The people who loved you never go away, Dora.’ I said there was one case where I hoped she was wrong there, without going any further.

  I said to myself: ‘What case? Who was it?’ But I could see already that Dora wasn’t a woman to drop names. Staring at the horrible green wall of 205, I recalled the unseen presence that I had felt around me in the flat all the time I was there – a great pressure of grief close to me and weighing me down with hands, bodies, unable to reach mine, an aching desire to speak, a little sonata for which there had been no words until I found them in Dora’s hidden box.

  ‘I’ve never really loved anyone in my life like you loved Reg,’ I told Betty, ‘I never have had.’ But Betty stroked my cheek and said: ‘Oh yes you have. Because you’ve got me now. I’m here with you now and I always shall be.’

  I said: ‘Betty, don’t the 1980s feel strange to you?’ ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘for I live more in the past, and my memories are wonderful – imagine how fine it was the evening Reg first arrived in our village in the spring of 1940; he walked up from the way station looking so mighty grand in his uniform, posted to Argyllshire for a reason he must never name even to me, for fear that if I were caught by the enemy, I should be hurt. Oh, it was very exciting for me to know he was so important – girls half my age were mad with envy of me, and women were such romantics then. I can see now, Dora, how our eyes met as he turned to look at me as I passed him the first time he ever strode up our one street with his batman carrying his big officer’s valise to the McGrath house where he was billeted, and how my heart sang at once, for I knew I was in love with him, though I was never beautiful. Ah, but that didn’t matter, Dora, girl, and wasn’t the whole village amazed when the banns were called by the minister and we took each other in marriage, and myself already thought an old maid, since I was born in ’04? I tell you, love is so beautiful; besides, there was a great deal of drink after we came away from the house with windows – even the minister tottered towards the evening in the front room – ah, that was one day we forgot the war.’ ‘Don’t you ever feel that we’re all of us just mirages, Betty?’ I said. ‘No, never,’ she said. ‘I’m a Scot and too hardheaded.’ I said: ‘I want to talk about something else, Betty – the rent. I can’t go on staying here like this with nothing said or settled, but I have to tell you that I haven’t any money right now.’

  ‘You silly, darling girl,’ she said: ‘Don’t you understand? Just stay here with me, and I’m forever repaid.’

  Betty is very frail and I know that her heart hurts her all the time; she often groa
ns in the night and I hear her immediately every time and go to her where she has her bed in the kitchen under the window. I fetch her her pills then take her to the bathroom and afterwards sit with her to talk on the side of her bed and soothe her, with an eiderdown over my shoulders till she sleeps again.

  Yes, Betty is the only person who loves me, or ever has. I never thought that love would come to me in that way, through her. But there it is.

  I laid Dora’s book down. I went over to the steel window and stood looking out at Marks and Sparks opposite. Through Dora’s words I heard voices now for the two women; I could hear them talking to each other, see them talking, even. Below me the wind suddenly raced along the grey pavement of Poland Street, whipping the rain round people’s legs, shrieking through the top latch which never shut properly, then roaring out as a draught under the door.

  No, it had never occurred to me that love would come to me through Betty. My former lovers paid for my face, thighs, hands, breasts and sex, then entered me. If I said anything for the sake of the ritual, they were shocked; for to them my lips existed as nothing but an encouragement to fuck me. One told me I was too beautiful to think, whereupon I turned my back on him and watched him in the mirror anxiously washing his prick in the bathroom. I accepted him in my arms when he cantered down the room towards me because I had to – a thin, hoarse man of sixty, rich, mean and gone in the hams. Sparse hairs curled without elegance round his crushed nipples, and in the morning, after a cold shower, I lay in bed watching him don a pair of pink-and-white striped knickers three times too large for him. When he was dressed, he left at once to catch his plane back to the Midlands; he was cold and didn’t speak except to remind me as he shut the hotel room door behind him that everything had been paid for. He had had his orgasm, but the closest I could get to mine was by bursting into tears. At dinner the night before in a medium-priced restaurant off Leicester Square he had said to me: ‘I’m going to leave my wife for you, Dora!’