He Died with His Eyes Open Read online

  Viner sighed. 'I don't remember much about the next couple of days.'

  'And was that the last time you saw him?'

  'Yes, I saw what was left of him onto a twenty-two bus at the bottom of Greek Street. I missed him at the Beeb.' He paused. 'Besides, he helped me out once. I got into a bit of shtuck at the bank; couldn't find the money for the rates. Charles fixed me up—three hundred quid. He was like that—do anything for anyone if he could, even for people who sent him up or downright disliked him. "Don't bother paying it back," he said, "you'll do me a favour one of these days." I never did, of course. Do you want the castle pudding with treacle or the ice cream?'

  'I'll have the ice cream.'

  'Very sensible,' said Viner. 'I do hope to Christ you catch whoever did it.'

  'I don't think I'll have much trouble identifying them,' I said. 'It's proving it, that's the snag. They don't like tapes in a court of law—a good barrister can knock that kind of stuff to pieces. Besides, I'm on this alone. It isn't as if we were after the Yorkshire Ripper.'

  'I just can't understand how he could have got up anybody's nose to the extent that they'd beat him to death like that,' said Viner. Suddenly he was nearly in tears. He pulled himself together and said: 'I suppose it must have been some kind of nut?'

  'Yes, probably. I don't want them to get out of it that way, though.'

  'Whatever else was the matter with Charles,' said Viner, 'he was a lovely man.' He put a lump of sugar into his powdered coffee and stirred it. The liquid swirled darkly as the sugar went down. He drank up his coffee quickly and looked at the wall clock. The lunch hour was over; the canteen had grown quiet and empty. We were both silent; there was nothing more to say.

  After a moment Viner whispered: 'I must go now.' He shook hands with me and hurried away.

  17

  I put on another of Staniland's tapes:

  Most people live with their eyes shut, but I mean to die with mine open. We all instinctively try to make death less difficult for ourselves. Personally, I've got two ways. First, I drink. I drink for oblivion, and then a fall of some kind or a blow, once I'm beyond thinking and feeling. That's how I'd die, with my eyes shut. My other way is to rationalize my experience. But, no matter now logically you think, you soon get in a muddle. Existence is blind— neither for you nor against you. This impartiality contradicts everything in human experience; there is neither love nor hatred, caresses or assault, in your dealing with the everyday. Existence is like a stock exchange—you can make as big a fool of yourself as you like, and go on until you're hammered. Look at Duéjouls. What a gruelling experience that was. To buy that great ruined house in the middle of nowhere, with the last of that money from my brother, and then pray like Micawber for something to turn up, so that I could renovate the place and turn it into something. I couldn't get anywhere with what I wrote; Margo always said I never would. She said flatly that I was too old, too out-of-date and too drunk. We used to have the most frightful quarrels about it in the kitchen at Duéjouls, while the rain leaked through the rafters with the regular beat of a clock. Yet it was all right while she and Charlotte were there. She always cheered me up, always said: 'It'll be all right, Daddy,' coming in from school and throwing her books on the settle, then going up to her room to listen to John Travolta.

  But afterwards. When they'd gone. Loneliness distorts you in the countryside.

  Nothing turned up. No money came. I was at the end of my resources. I was thrown back onto prising tomorrow's money out of the day after. For five years I was a peasant, and switched my brain off. I cut timber on the causses with a chainsaw in the winter. The snow was blue up there against the grey air; at eight hundred metres the clouds came right down on your back among the oak thickets. In the summer I took a harpe and went from one vineyard to another in the great heat, wherever I could get work from the peasants. I look at myself in the mirror here, now, in London, and marvel how I ever could have done it. Déchausser, cutting the weeds away from the root of each vine. Two thousand vines always uphill—a gulp of wine after the next row (eighty metres to a row); no, the next, I can hang on—I must hang on. I worked alone and singing to keep the solitude at bay in the gusting heat and the wind that sweeps up the valley, boiling you to your naked waist. They won't get me out of here, I kept saying to myself; whatever else collapses around you, it won't be you. I was too old for the work; the young men who worked with me kept telling me I was too old. But I kept going—seven in the morning until seven at night with an hour off at midday. I became as hard as whipcord, but with a brain like cottonwool. I just coasted vaguely over the past. To bed exhausted at night, with the alarm clock set for six in the morning, and the next, and the next. A bath occasionally, and my aching legs relaxed against the clean rough sheet. I had no need to think—and not a fuck in all that time, not even with Margo: just the utter quiet at night except for the stream below, panting like an old locomotive in a station. I can do it, I said to myself, even if I'm too old really. My hands bled at first, and I was slow. But I was stolid and painstaking and oh, God, I needed the money for us to eat with, the three of us, and the minimum wage was only seventy-eight francs a day when I started.

  The house had sixteen rooms. After Margo and Charlotte had gone, I would talk to myself out loud all day in the kitchen where I had moved my bed and my gear; the other fifteen were empty (now that I had burned all their clothes), except for the bats. I did the roof in my spare time, so that it didn't leak anymore.

  I didn't ask my brother for anything—at least, not until I got back to Britain. And even then I only dropped a hint or two. Working on the land down at Duéjouls had made me proud. But when I saw I wouldn't get anything from him and my sister-in-law, I went on the dole for a while over the river there in Battersea, where I had found lodgings. All I had left were a thousand pounds' worth of equities which I'd intended for Charlotte, but I was hungry. I cheated; I didn't declare the equities to the Department of Health and Social Security Papers. Why the fucking hell should I? I was nearly fifty, and I'd never claimed anything from the state before in my life—it had all been the other way round. Still, it was interesting, being interviewed at the DHSS. The black man behind the counter asked me if I was really British. I slid my passport across without a word, but I was thinking: I'm a fucking sight more British than you are, at any rate. However, I didn't say anything in case he wrote 'Refused' across my application. I couldn't afford to have that happen because I was broke by then, having had to give my stepson Eric some money, and I needed something for rent and food. I needed a drink, too, but I wasn't in France anymore with wine at two francs a litre— here it was two pounds. This was when I wrote that play for the BBC and got a job there. In the play, which I called 'A Nasty Story', a title I borrowed from the Russian (you can keep Tolstoy), I asked what you were supposed to do in London with the tenner a week that's left over from your supplementary benefits once you've paid the rent. I had nothing left for me in France; I'd made the house over to Charlotte with a local notaire in case something happened to me. As for my rent in Battersea, I had to pay it on the dot as soon as I'd collected my Girocheque, otherwise I'd have been locked out with all my gear inside. It happened to a few people in that house. The landlord just waited his chance—what a bastard! He must have made a small fortune like that: all it cost him was changing the lock.

  It was after I'd gone out one night and got pissed instead of paying the rent that I went to work for Planet. I saw their ad in the evening paper while I was sitting in the Princess Caroline in Battersea Park Road. Planet didn't ask questions—just did you have a current driver's licence, and it was cash. Instead of asking questions, they worked the shit out of you, the Creamleys did. Forty a week rent for the clapped-out old motor they hired you, another forty a week to the office for the business—you pay your repairs, you pay the petrol, you pay the insurance, you pay every fucking thing. Anything you had left over was your own. That wasn't much. The ad promised you could make a hundred and fi
fty a week—they just forgot to say that it was gross. I couldn't take more than a hundred and fifty gross in a good week anyhow. Once the recession started, you'd got two cars to half a punter. The Creamleys didn't care if there were drivers queuing for a job all the way down the stairs—they were taking forty a week off each of them, weren't they? Whether they got any work or not. The ones that didn't like it could piss off; there were plenty more unemployed drivers.

  I might have forty a week to live on if I was dead lucky, say, one week in four, if I didn't get clobbered for my drops. Unlucky, I'd have to try and get a sub from Creamley: 'What's the matter, Two Four? You broke again? Here, here's twenty, have a drink on me.' It was all right for drivers with capital— they'd invested it in Rollers or Mercs, and got all the airport and wedding jobs, also taking Pakistani businessmen up to their factories in the north. But what could you expect to get with a clapped-out rented Maxi? No, you don't get the meaty jobs with a '74 Maxi, not with the upholstery burst on the back seat.

  Financial disaster could strike you easily on my margin, I remember the night—I knew I had rust in the wheel arches—when the rear suspension collapsed when I was POB to Dollis Hill with three Turkish waiters from the Ef-Es Kebab on board. They were good about it—said it was only a ten-minute walk to their place now anyway. They even tried to give me the money for the fare. I wouldn't take it, though, because they'd been good about the breakdown and because I hadn't got them home. Well, it was three in the morning when they left with news-papers over their heads, it was pissing with rain, the way it only seems to in North London—-really cold, really hard, really wet. I had to phone a garage to tow me in. Creamley said: 'Christ, you again, Two Four.' I had to pay for a new back axle, two weeks' wages. It was throwing money away on that wreck. Creamley said: 'You gotter understand, Two Four—if I started paying my drivers' repairs, where'd my profit be, mate?'And he had to lecture me. He said: 'The trouble with you is, Charlie, you don't work long enough hours. You can't hope to make cabbing pay if you don't sweat at it.' I said: 'I am sweating at it; I got a private life too, though.'

  'So've I,' he said, 'only I keep it where it belongs'

  'Where's that?'

  'In bed,' he says, 'or else doing the books—it's common sense, Two Four.'

  Some of the punters, when you did get them, were no good, either. Not like the Turks. After the Jewish businesswomen, the worst of the lot were the Africans and the Japanese, in my experience. 'Don't you know your fuckin way, man? You white, an you don't know your own city?' 'Don't you know the short cut to Camden Square, driver?' 'I don't like this nasty old car, it smells. Stop, driver. Radio for another.'

  The tough drivers just used to tell them to fucking well get out and walk...

  I rewound Staniland's tape and put it with the pile on the kitchen table, whose Formica glittered back at me blue under the central light. Then I opened a cold can of export beer and tried to think back to the castle that Staniland's sister-in-law had said they had once had, and from there through the tortured points in the course of his life that had led him to cabbing a rusty old Maxi five nights a week for Planet, and from that to this Spark woman, and from that to the terrible way he had died—in agony, and then contemptuously kicked and dragged by his killers into that wet shrubbery in Albatross Road. Where I identified with Staniland, what I had inherited from him, was the question why.

  Mind, I had always asked it myself—but this why was not a copper's why. Staniland's question was the question I had once read on a country gravestone erected to a child of six: 'Since I was so early done for, I wonder what I was begun for.'

  Though Staniland had died at the age of fifty-one, he still had the innocence of a child of six. The naïve courage, too— the desire to understand everything, whatever the cost.

  This fragile sweetness at the core of people—if we allowed that to be kicked, smashed and splintered, then we had no society at all of the kind I felt I had to uphold. I had committed my own sins against it, out of transient weakness.

  But I hadn't deliberately murdered it for its pitiful membrane of a little borrowed money, its short-lived protective shell—and that was why, as I drank some more beer and picked up the next of Staniland's tapes, I knew I had to nail the killers.

  Not just know them. Nail them. I switched on the player:

  On the terrace at Duéjouls, sixty feet above the road. Boiling hot, sitting in a wicker chair, A great butterfly, the biggest I've ever seen, lands in front of me. It's black, gold and purple; it must be nearly ten centimetres across. Its wings shuffle in the roaring south wind which will bring rain in two days. The butterfly clings to the sunlit stones with difficulty; then it's whirled away over the roof, its flight mindless yet circumstantial, like the pleasure of singing. A lizard darts from under the vine that shades me. It is primitive, yet an exact purpose in itself. Its tongue flickers; it stares sideways, poised for food or flight. It gasps with excitement under its scaly skin—it runs towards me unafraid, its existence elsewhere as long as I don't move. But I cough over my cigarette and its head shoots up, the eyes and tongue flutter in a blur of movement—it is gone.

  Physically I am here in Lewisham, but I am remembering the time when I worked at the hotel in Duéjouls. It is early January, half-past six in the morning, and the thermometer when I got on my Mobylette to go down to work said minus twelve. Behind the hotel, which is shut up for the winter, four of us are assembled to kill a pig. There is one dim light in the sty, and eight uneasy pigs.

  'Not that one,' says the patron, Jean, 'she's on heat. Any of the others yes, that one, fine, the male.'

  We surround and grab it; I get the rope with the noose round its hind legs and pull it tight. The pig is squealing; it knows all right.

  'Makes you feel like a criminal, doesn't it?' says Loulou, one of the men. He is squat, dark and young, with a broken nose. I work for him sometimes, and he reminds me of an engraving I once saw of Napoleon after the incident at Toulon early in his career. I agree with him. I feel like an executioner, too. It's to do with the atmosphere in the sty—the dark, the single dim bulb, the intense, still cold. The only thing missing is the shot of cognac to give the victim before we do it to him.

  'Up on the bale with him,' says Jean, pulling the other rope tight on the animal's forelegs.

  It takes all of us; the pig weighs a hundred and ninety kilos. Loulou and I hold the back legs I have lassoed; the others hold it by its front legs, and it writhes frantically on the straw. Somebody tugs on its ears, dragging the head back to expose its throat to the knife. Shut off in the next sty, over a low brick wall, the other pigs shuffle around grunting with fear, infected by the approaching death in their midst. Ours snarls and squeals. If only it were stupid! But nothing is.

  'Quickly, now,' Jean says to the slaughterer.

  I can smell death mixed with the smell of pig shit; it is a sharp, pungent smell, but not clean. The slaughterer approaches slowly in his rubber apron, a sixty-five-year-old peasant with rheumatism, sharpening a long knife on a steel sharpener.

  'Now then!' says Jean sharply.

  In goes the knife, a single thrust, point first, low into the right side of the throat down by the collarbone; the blood instantly starts to whistle out into the casserole that the slaughterer's wife is holding against the wound. They want to catch the blood to make black pudding with—a little garlic and mixed herbs with it, a sanquette, delicious. At first the pig screams louder than ever. The blood spurts out, a deep scarlet with bubbles in it; it steams in the cold, heavy air. Now the pig shits over my legs in its throes, then pisses into the straw bale. Loulou next to me gets a kick on the elbow and shouts: 'Ah, putain de mettle? The blood spatters feverishly, irregularly now, into the tin pot; now the animal's struggles weaken. Still, it takes it ten minutes to die, and even then—

  'You can leave go now.'

  I come round and look into the pig's eyes where it lies on its side. Its big body is bloodless, has gone white. Dying, its jaws are half open
and it shows its yellow teeth; it looks up and beyond me with an expression of disgust.

  'It's still alive.'

  'No, no, it's dead, Charles.' The slaughterer's wife has already started cutting into its snout; they've got another one to do before lunch.

  But I was sure it wasn't dead.

  'That's just its nerves,' said the slaughterer. 'All right, let's get it onto the big ladder and carry it out. Easy, now.'

  'Couldn't you electrocute it?' I said, when we had got outside. The sun was coming up at last, glaring yellow through the naked branches in the hotel garden.

  'Of course not,' said the slaughterer. 'You've got to get all the blood out. As long as the heart's beating, that acts as a pump, that's what gets all the blood out, see? The animal's working for you like that.'

  I said to Loulou quietly: 'That was awful.' I didn't feel faint or sick, just cold inside.

  'Yes,' said Loulou, 'well, but what's the use? If you don't kill the fucking thing, you can't eat it.'

  So we carried the carcass out into the open and shaved off its bristles with cutthroat razors and hot water. Then Jean and the slaughterer started on the charcuterie, and I carried the slabs of meat, the chops, the ribs, the cutlets, the lights and all the rest of it down to the kitchen, where the women were waiting. Jean went off to salt the hams and twist the nerve and muscle out of them, and I stayed on to help in the kitchen, where there was a big fire going with marmites of boiling water over it. I listened to the women chattering away, exchanging village gossip while they worked.