This was too much for her to resist. She fell into my arms with the delicacy of warm enfolding plasticine, and by the time she reached the bedroom she was indeed showing the most divine nakedness. She flaunted her gorgeous figure, no inhibitions left, smiled when she turned to see if I was ready. It no longer mattered that she pretended to dislike me. A day that starts badly invariably ends well.
Chapter Twenty-One
What to do, that was the life and death question. Sun sharpened through the sharded windows and half blinded me. “Fucking Moggerhanger,” Parkhurst was saying. “Fancy getting sent to boarding school with a name like that. The other kids made my life a torment. They called me Moggers, Moggy, Muggers and Buggers, then Tomcat, till one day at home I came across some cartons of hashish cigarettes, and took a couple back to school. The lads stopped giving me a hard time when I handed around four hundred fags.”
At the zenith of his power over me Parkhurst had turned as garrulous as his father, and because I was still alive I had to listen. He held the gun so steady that Jericho Jim saw no need to brandish his.
“But they liked me at school then, didn’t they? It was good old Moggers, shit-hot Moggers, Moggers the Great.” I thought he was going to cry, though no such luck. It might have made things worse. “I hated every single fuckface, but I had to survive. The corridors didn’t stink of shit and carbolic anymore. They smelled all nice and vegetarian, and I don’t exaggerate when I say we walked on air. Funnily enough, though, whenever a teacher asked a question a lot more of us knew the answer. We sharpened up no end. Even the teachers begged a few ciggies when they twigged from the pong what was going on. It was the sixties, so they weren’t going to shop me, were they? As long as I left a pack on the head’s desk now and again we were all right anyway. All I had to do was make sure I got some more when I went home, and there was plenty lying around. When I told the old man that I wanted to come home more often he thought it was because I’d suddenly started to love my parents. I sucked up to the bastard, didn’t I? I even straightened my tie when he told me to, and stopped wearing my hat backwards.”
“Later, when he bribed the headmaster into letting me stay on in the sixth form at St. Ogg’s I took some cocaine after one exeat.” He laughed, which wasn’t promising for my safety. “I nearly had the whole school flat on its back. Got chucked out, didn’t I? He played hell with me, because he’d thrown away a few grand.”
“And you didn’t appreciate his generosity?” I said.
He waved the gun at my nose. “Fuck you, Cullen. I’m only telling you all this because you’re his favourite. He thinks you’re the tops. You’re a man after his own heart. He’s told me that for years. What a pity it is I’m not like you, he says. But you’re too much like him, which is why he likes you, you bum-crawling bastard. I hate your guts.”
I wasn’t about to argue, though I wanted to strangle the pathetic worm because I’d heard too many people telling me I resembled someone I either despised or found contemptible.
I just let him talk. “He always disliked me. For three months after fetching me from the orphanage a social worker came to check how I was getting on. Moggerhanger just fawned over her. She was new in her job, and ended up saying how lucky I was to have such a perfect haven. Perfect haven! Like hell it was. More like perfect hell, as it turned out. But they were her words, and I suppose it looked like it. Whenever Moggerhanger started laying toys around me on the living room floor, and having me waited on hand and foot, I knew she was on her way for a visit.
“He soon saw what a mistake he’d made. As the years went on he got to hate me, and couldn’t hide it. He’d kick me about as soon as I’d done something wrong, which I didn’t know I’d done, so after a while I just had to give as good as I got. When I crumbled up fifty of his best cigars I got a good kicking, but it only made me do something else to get my own back. It was ding-dong all the way.
“He turned into a savage, so I got fed up with defying him. You can’t win with somebody like that, so after I was thrown out of school I tried to be as he wanted me to be. It was never good enough, though. He went on criticising, and I couldn’t stand being criticised. If I’m criticised I get worse.”
His eyes were enflamed, lank hair flailing as he shook his head, but he kept the gun at a proper angle. I hoped that whatever drug he’d taken wasn’t the sort that would send him completely off his trolley. “Nobody can take criticism,” I said, as much to myself as to him, wondering whether it was after all better to be shot to death rather than bored to death. Because the silence went on longer than I thought good for me I added: “Life is never easy.”
“You see?” he shouted. “That’s just what my so-called father’s always coming out with. ‘Life is never easy, Malcolm,’ he always says.” He waved the gun, and I thought my time had come. “He says it all the fucking time. It’s the same tune over and over.”
He put out his tongue to wet the tip of his finger, and drew it across his throat. “I’ve had it up to here with him.” I only wished there’d been a superfine Gillette attached.
He went on with a perfect mimicking of Moggerhanger, but it would have been stupid to applaud. “‘I pushed my mother’s mangle when I was three.’ That’s the least I got out of him. But he did no such thing. I went through his secret papers one day and found that his father worked on the railway and earned fair money, till he was caught slitting open registered mail and got sent down for five years. He’d kept the newspaper clippings, and I read them. It left him with a grudge against society that turned him into the crookedest bastard on earth. He never turned his mother’s mangle at any age, not him, though he would have done if shillings had dropped out every time the wheel went round.”
A laugh from me would mean a bullet, and I felt too young to die. Moggerhanger groaned from his armchair, and shouted: “You’re a liar, Malcolm. None of it’s true. I come from a good family!”
Malcolm — I’ll use his real name — told Jericho Jim to keep me in line, then walked calmly to his would-be father and bashed the side of his face with the handle of the gun. I was enraged at him hitting a man — even Moggerhanger — while he was down, but I stayed cool. At least he didn’t empty half the magazine into him — or me — but it was the sort of family party I couldn’t bear being a guest at. It was hard to think what Malcolm in his paranoid state expected to gain by murder, except the rest of his life in Broadmoor, and therefore a new nickname.
Satisfaction at the vicious attack on his helpless father put a terrifying expression on his already demented clock, his mood for further violence suggesting that the next person he’d have a go at would be me, because however many he murdered wouldn’t mean a longer sentence than staying inside for the rest of his life. “You’re shitting yourself, aren’t you, Cullen?”
I wasn’t, though felt too near it for either comfort or pride.
“Yes you are. I can tell. You won’t be Lord-fucking-Moggerhanger’s golden boy much longer.”
I heard a barking which Malcolm, if he registered it, must have thought came from a sheep dog on a nearby farm. “It’s up to you,” I said. “Do what you like.”
“A hero, are you? Moggerhanger’s sort to the end? You’re scum, that’s all I know. And I should know, because I’ve met a lot like you in my life.” He pressed the trigger, an enormous crack, the shell passing almost close enough to sizzle the top of my head. I ducked a couple of feet, at least, which pleased him.