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  Vauxhall: In his damn fluting, know-all, ponytailed, varsity voice Stayley had seemed to suggest that Ralph would have no hope of pulling women; or no hope of pulling women except for leathery elderlies like Mimi Apertine, who’d, admittedly, shown flagrant, unwavering hots for Ralph: embarrassing, but Ralph was extremely accustomed to this kind of thing and would not let it derail him.

  Solo: WOULD THIS HAIRDRESSER’S SHOP PORCH GIVE HIM ADEQUATE COVER?

  Vauxhall: Ralph had certainly never thought ill of women unable to conceal – or subdue, come to that – a fierce desire for him. It was their nature, their unbidden but unstoppable emotional and physical response to him. In some ways it was to their credit. They didn’t bottle up this yearning. They made it apparent. They were unashamed. They were entitled to be unashamed. He’d always shown toleration. He’d always put up with it. He’d always treated such situations light-heartedly so that no woman should feel snubbed and hurt by rejection, if he did reject. Arrogance, unkindness, he’d hated then and still did. Renaissance men had a very humane and kindly side to their personalities. They recognized that as long as there was pussy some women would be pussy-driven, especially if they met someone like Ralph.

  Solo: WHAT THE HELL WAS THIS COP DOING DOWN HERE, ANYWAY?

  Vauxhall: Mimi he’d regarded as a great, talented operator with a terrific CV, no question, but getting on a bit, and short of half an ear after that Israeli army shooting-range accident; probably – more than probably – no fault of her own, but still leaving her lobeless on the left. Ralph hadn’t liked to think of the bullet with this authentic piece of her stuck to its nose rushing on perhaps towards the wrong end, the non-target end, of the range, so that this small blob of her flesh whacked into who knew what or where and remained uselessly there, separated from the body – Mimi’s – where it previously fulfilled a good role alongside her neck, even if only ornamental: lobes had nothing to do with actual hearing.

  She had never spoken of this range incident, but Ralph thought he could visualize the sequence. As a combat veteran she would have been instructing novice personnel in the use of small-arms and standing behind one of them as she or he fired at a target, offering advice after volleys. ‘Squeeze the trigger, not pull.’ ‘Fill your lungs before you fire. Breathing can cause a body tremor and mess up aim.’ Ralph himself had received that kind of coaching on a private range, as a vital preliminary to his preferred vocation in the substances; the way a priest or rabbi would have to go for training at a seminary before taking over a church or synagogue.

  Perhaps the automatic pistol of Mimi’s trainee had jammed. He or she possibly turned, flustered, to ask Mimi for help, and at that moment the pistol cleared itself and started firing. Mimi, alert, experienced, would drop to the ground out of the way when under attack, but, possibly not quite fast enough, even for someone militarily so clued up. A bullet shaved the left side of her face, taking the lobe with it. Maybe she’d been lucky the damage wasn’t worse.

  Ralph could imagine the error causing serious confusion. Blood should never be seen on a range, a place of strictly imitation warfare; but an ear lobe, due to fleshy plumpness, could produce plenty. Also, other recruits, hearing the shouting and even possible screaming, might themselves instinctively turn to see what was going on, fingers still on the trigger, and further accidental shots could fly, oblivious to the official targets.

  Solo: HE COULD VIEW FROM HERE AS THROUGH TWO WINDOW PANES, THE GLASS SIDE WALL OF THE ENTRANCE AND THE MAIN FRONT DISPLAY PLATE, COULDN’T HE?

  Vauxhall: Mimi’s injury had caused a marked imbalance to her appearance. He’d realized some men might find this pleasantly quaint and extra sexy. Possibly this kind of perverse thinking was what had made Quent speak about her as he had in the car. Few could boast of having had a woman showing that kind of unilateral lack. Probably, some would have wondered whether there had been over-enthusiastic, passionate ear-nibbling during a past session of foreplay, and maybe this prospect thrilled them, there still being one lobe to dally with, of course; perhaps the solitariness making it prized all the more. A man on top might have noticed he could see more of the pillow to one side of her than the other, but this would be a minor factor and needn’t at all spoil the evening.

  Solo: WAS SHE WRITING IN A JOTTER? WHAT, FOR GOD’S SAKE?

  Vauxhall: Ralph, though, had considered Mimi’s loss unnerving. He’d felt that to suggest she should get the remaining lobe taken off to even things up would have been heartless and offensive. Also, that could lead to problems with her passport photo, which might have been taken when she had one lobe. Perhaps border officials somewhere would claim she wasn’t who she said she was. A diplomatic incident might result, with publicity. Pasque Uno naturally avoided all publicity if it could and Gladhand certainly would not want involvement in controversy about an ear.

  In Ralph’s opinion, many women suffered a dire life, and he hadn’t wanted to cause any of them more discomfort, by, for instance, speaking tactlessly about the torn-off lobe. Another point concerning men on top was that some liked to grip the woman’s ears to aid forward bodily propulsion during bonking upthrust. Ralph had considered that enough of the left ear was still OK to offer this facility.

  Solo: DID SHE WAVE AT SOMEONE IN THE APARTMENT BLOCK?

  Vauxhall: And then, as well as Quent’s cheap hints about Mimi, there’d been all his miserable talk forecasting disaster in the scheduled shoot-out with Opal Render. That also had gravely distracted Ralph. Stayley had taken the front seat alongside Gladhand as if plainly entitled to the nearness and princely status, and then had wilfully abused that position. He’d seemed to regard it as an appointed duty to highlight the idea of catastrophe. Morale? He sabotaged it, but apparently didn’t care. He loved yakking and yakking that craven bilge. It had made Ralph wonder what would have happened if Winston Churchill had spoken like that, rather than rallying Britain with his oratory in 1940: capitulation instead of magnificent resistance. Haig, Churchill, the same resolve.

  Stayley’s performance had contained, of course, a definite hint that Gladhand was short of the generalship needed to make a triumph of this coming conflict. And Ralph had detected another hint – that he, Stayley, would do it better if he had charge: Oxford, age and the greying ponytail turned him into Genghis fucking Kahn, did they?

  So, there’d been at least a pair of influences that might have unsettled Ralph and, yes, possibly made him less attentive to the serious work they were on – that work closely to study a vital slice of townscape. It could be called No-Man’s Land, and therefore Every-Man’s Land, though Dale Hoskins had meant to put an end to that by eliminating Opal Render. Then, it wouldn’t quite be every man’s, just Pasque Uno’s. Yes, Uno, Uno, Uno, and not the United Nations Organization, either! One gorgeous, prevailing flower would bloom on this turf: Pasque. It had been a bright and necessary ambition.

  As Gladhand mentioned, the words ‘cleanse’ and ‘cleansing’ had taken on a dark significance after some of those Balkans incidents. But they also kept their original sense – to purify, to decontaminate. Gladhand had simply wanted to cleanse the city by once and for all killing off Opal Render.

  Solo: HADN’T SHE ENGAGED IN SOME KIND OF DAFT PRETEND LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE ALDERMAN?

  Vauxhall: Of course, Ralph realized that, when he considered those two types of gross behaviour by Stayley, the one that had especially infuriated him was not Quent’s blandly commandeering the front seat, and persistently mouthing his palsied, alarmist defeatism, but the vile slur about Ralph’s negligible prospects with women. Stayley’s malign suggestion that Ralph couldn’t attract younger, double-lobed, tastier lovelies than Mimi had blatantly ignored his widely noted resemblance to the young Charlton Heston. Chuck, as he was fondly called, had performed impressively not just as El Cid, but also Moses, Ben Hur, Mark Antony and Heathcliff, the wildly romantic character out on the moors in a classic love tale, regardless of harsh weather. As Moses, Chuck had brought the Ten Commandments down from a mo
untain inscribed on stone tablets. Ralph considered several of the commandments quite sensible and worth the effort.

  He’d reckoned that some years ago many a bedroom wall of young girls in the United States, and possibly in Britain, too, would be decorated with a poster picture of Chuck, possibly stripped to the waist in Ben Hur. But Stayley behaved as if none of this had any relevance to Ember. Ralph reacted with a mixture of anger, injury and disappointment. He wasn’t sure which had been the strongest element – anger, injury or disappointment – but each very justified, he believed. Any one of them could have unforgivably preoccupied him. Ralph had felt more hostility to Stayley than to any of the Opal Render personnel. This was a dreadfully sad outcome of the Vauxhall operation.

  Looking back now from his Monty perch, Ember recognized that the only comparable insolence to Stayley’s during Ralph’s classic business career would, yes, come from the brass-necked, braying sod of sods, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles, though, of course, Ralph hadn’t met him or even heard of him at the period of Mondial-Trave, south-east London. Such a treat for the future! Iles and his sidekick, Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur, often looked in at The Monty for free drinks, and so that Iles could mock and rubbish Ralph – ‘Someone asked me the other day how dear Panicking Ralphy was getting along, Ember. “Exemplarily,” I at once and gladly replied. Could any other term suit?’

  Iles also liked to terrorize all club members present for being the kind of crooks or fellow-travellers that Ralph would admit most of them were, at this merely pending stage in The Monty’s development. Ralph had recently come across another interesting phrase, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day,’ and he’d adapted this to, ‘The Monty can’t get into The Athenaeum or Garrick class in a day, either.’

  Solo: BUT HAD THERE BEEN ANY RETURN WAVE FROM WHAT SEEMED TO BE FLOOR FOUR?

  Thinking of Iles, Ralph’s brain moved off on a completely new route, not Vauxhall or Solo. He recalled a film entitled Planet of the Apes. Chuck Heston had starred as a space traveller who returns to earth after a bit of a sci-fi time-jump and finds civilization as he’d known it a couple of aeons ago completely obliterated and apes running the shop instead. These turned out to be good apes, though, possibly superior to humans, especially as humans had suckled and raised Iles. It would take more than aeons to civilize that dung-beetle.

  If Iles heard now about the bullet hole in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, most likely his first reaction would be to guffaw and/or whoop with callous, indecently prolonged merriment. He’d make it prolonged to show he regarded the damaged Blake as typical of disasters certain to fuck up Ralph’s life continually; and, therefore, the cackling at this specific Blake episode should be enlarged, expanded, to cover a whole context of hilarious pain, bound to have come Ralph’s way already, or sweetly ready to scrag him rotten in the future. There might also be bodily convulsions to accompany the laughter, as though the joke was so enormous it had twanged all his ligaments, tendons, muscles and vertebrae, getting him very close to helplessness and collapse.

  Then Iles would probably invite more detail so he could really wallow in the vast distress and humiliation the potshotting was bound to have caused Ralph, and treat himself to further cruel, booming, wet-his-pants chortles. From years of studying Iles, Ember reckoned he could itemize the ACC’s rub-Ralph’s-nose-in-it demands now.

  He’d want Ralph to repeat, as if on oath, a full narrative description of events, starting with:

  (i)The drawing and flourishing of the .38 Smith and Wesson, and noisy, rat-arsed encouragement from his friends to fire.

  (ii)Holster or pocket?

  (iii)The cocking of the .38, if a .38 S. and W. had a cocking device.

  (iv)The aiming up at the art, perhaps only a daft, pistol-waving threat at first.

  (v)Any hate-words, philistinisms, curses, jokes, warnings, obscenities, commiserations, yelled by the gunman at the Blake figures such as, ‘It’s a marriage, is it? Well, here’s a hallmarked lead wedding pressie!’

  (vi)One-handed or two-handed grip on the .38?

  (vii)Firing from stiff-armed shoulder height or at Jesse James hip level?

  (viii)An account of the shots and the clang of bullets on bonny, life-protecting steel, followed, possibly, by a liberated screech of ricochets.

  (ix)Flying glass spears from the Worcestershire sauce bottle.

  (x)T-shirt and pool table staining.

  (xi)Thuds as the bounce-off bullets reached a wall and had finally to quit circulating.

  Most probably, he’d require Ralph to imitate these later sounds, particularly the sauce bottle fragmenting and the brief, busy, sharp hullabaloo of the gadabout ricochets. He’d listen, grinning, until the performance finished and then gleefully call for an encore, or more than one, the grin in place throughout but occasionally developing into a guffaw re-run and bodily jackknifing, especially at the disintegration of the sauce bottle and piquant drenching of a customer’s upper body. He might cry out in a kind of evil ecstasy, ‘Brilliant!’ ‘So, Monty!’ ‘So Ralphy’s Monty!’ ‘Trim your whiskers, sir?’ That’s the kind of flippant bastard he was.

  Of course, Ember saw the resemblance between the two uncongenial shooting episodes and thanked God Mimi and her lobe were from a different time, a different place, or Iles would have demanded a comparison with that gunplay and require Ralph to do a careful inventory check on all ears present, right as well as left, although Mimi’s lobe loss had been left only. Iles would put on a special caring thoroughness about lobes so as to feed his mickey-taking, mischievous programme. Decorum? He’d piss on it, if he knew what it meant. He’d find fucking comedy where others would see only suffering, sadness and devastation. Very possibly he’d point out that Mimi could economize fifty per cent by buying only single earrings, perhaps advertising online for anyone who’d lost one to get in touch for possible purchase by her of the other.

  Everybody else, thinking of those sharp, glass missiles roving at devilish speed, would recognize the acute, doodlebug hazard they caused. For Iles they were just something to get a reverberating, vandal chuckle from. Ralph imagined him telling his wife or colleagues: ‘And then, guess what, one of the bouncing bullets smacks into a Lea and Perrins bottle and tasty, jagged fragments go whizzing around the bar looking for a throat to cut! Such sauciness!’

  FIFTEEN

  That was Iles, and before him came Stayley. Perhaps the disgusting malice from Quent on the day hadn’t greatly mattered. What had mattered was that soon after the Vauxhall trip Ralph decided he’d seriously skimped his examinations of the likely combat zone, pushed them down to second or third priority. This shortfall badly troubled him. He’d judged it an unforgivable, treasonous failure. Gladhand had considerately laid on an instructive sortie, yet Ralph’s response was disgracefully poor, inadequate, severely divided. Although he heartily despised ingratitude, this was what he had shown at Mondial-Trave in the Vauxhall. He’d needed to get back there confidentially and remedy these shameful omissions.

  Although, quite probably, Gladhand Hoskins would never have discovered Ralph’s appalling, vanity-based slackness on the Vauxhall trek, it didn’t matter: his return had not been meant to satisfy Gladhand, but chiefly to appease Ralph’s personal, sensitive, wakeful conscience. He loathed the notion that he might have put his own concerns above those of Gladhand and the firm. This would be intolerable egomania, and, yes, a kind of treachery. The lovely wholeness and continuing health of Pasque Uno, that noble, emblematic flower, counted for more than a quibble about whether Stayley provocatively ignored Ralph’s glorious Chuck aspects. The solo pilgrimage to Mondial-Trave had represented a kind of penance and recompense, a session of self-scourging.

  He’d parked in a side street and then gone on foot towards the converted warehouse and the statue of the alderman. At once he’d felt terrific relief. It was a plain, wonderfully physical matter. The pavement relayed a signal of welcome, and of commendation, up through the soles of his trainers an
d his patterned socks. ‘You’ve done very well, Ralph, to make this corrective, compensating second look-around.’ That had seemed to be the comforting message now, not via a red and white banner, but as if from the trodden-on, confederate concrete. He’d sensed in it the suggestion that this additional, private call had been expected, because Ralph’s uprightness and honesty were famous, and uncontaminated yet by the obstreperous snidery of those nicknames, sick-names, fuck-you-Ember names. His slovenly behaviour in the Vauxhall was not forgotten, but had been at least filed away.

  He would do some proper research and make notes, so that his walkabout was more than simply a gesture of respect for Gladhand, though it certainly was that; primarily was that. Didn’t Dale deserve this? Merit – he had it by the skipful. The so-called, extremely exclusive, ‘Order of Merit’, for being pretty OK at something, such as theatricals or getting jungle creatures on to TV, was in the private gift of the monarch, and Ralph could remember thinking that, although Gladhand would probably never get one of those, owing to his modesty and reluctance to push forward for recognition, it was the Queen’s loss, not Dale’s. All who knew him closest, day-to-day, could observe his merit for themselves, in what was often very tricky commerce, and benefit from it: Buck House endorsement superfluous.