Chinaski Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHINASKI

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  CHINASKI

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Cillian Press Limited.

  83 Ducie Street, Manchester M1 2JQ

  www.cillianpress.co.uk

  Copyright © Frances Vick 2014

  The right of Frances Vick to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, bands, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-909776-08-1

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-909776-09-8

  Set Of Stage Light In A Theater Photo © Jolin - Dreamstime.com

  Author Photograph © Anne Naisbitt

  Chinaski Ticket Painting © Siân Hislop

  www.sianhislop.co.uk

  Published by Cillian Press - Manchester - United Kingdom - 2014

  1

  4th August 1993

  The old lady has been outside all morning, wandering around the roses and adding fresh cat food to the welded remains in the bowls around the door. Eventually she heaves herself up the back stairs, through the kitchen and back to the front room where the TV is kept on at high volume. She rarely leaves this room, and sleeps in her chair. She hasn’t entered the big bedroom since her husband’s funeral seven years before. She will not enter the spare bedroom until the second funeral two weeks later, and then only in response to the confusing urgency of a journalist she thinks she might have known as a boy. He asks questions she doesn’t understand while someone else takes photographs.

  In the spare room there is no sound at all except for the insect ticking of a wrist watch. The watch is wrapped around the moulded wood handle of the bedside cabinet, next to a bottle of pills. It will tick for another two days, stopping only an hour before the young man’s body is found.

  * * *

  Carl Howell died at a quarter to two on a sunny afternoon three days before the plumber broke the door down. He wore jeans and a t-shirt with future tour dates printed on the back. He had one Converse trainer on and the other was lying at the foot of the bed. Once his heart stopped, blood began to pool and stagnate. His body cooled. The side of his face, his right arm, the flung out fingers, changed from pink to red to purple to blue, and each hour his skin temperature dropped until it matched the temperature of the room. One eye stayed open, its dark pupil fixed. Inside his body, in the pockets and folds of the intestines, the chest, the bowels, he was still warm. Things were still alive in here – bacteria, enzymes, things that ferment and bubble and push up through the body, eroding it from the inside. By early evening, rigor mortis had set in and the blue patches on his body began to join up. Two days later, when the ambulance was called, the stiffness had left and he had just begun to soften and swell. A blackish stain spread slowly from the marbled veins. The ambulance crew took one look and called the police.

  The older officer edged his way into the spare bedroom, and glanced at the body on the bed. His younger colleague was in the living room, negotiating with the old lady to turn the TV down. She rocked a little on the edge of her chair, her fingers scratching her knees spasmodically, and didn’t respond. If the younger officer had looked he might have noticed that she was weeping. Instead he backed into the kitchen to use his radio to call the duty coroner, leaving her to the older man.

  Turning off the TV, bringing round a footstool so he could face the old lady, he took both her hands and squeezed them slightly while looking at his knees. Once he sensed her raising her head, he looked into her eyes and smiled. She smiled too, squeezed back.

  “Can I ask your name?” he asked quietly.

  “My name is May,” she answered. “My name is May Howell.” She spoke carefully, like a girl, speaking a language only learned in the classroom.

  “Can I call you May? I am a policeman. Can you tell me who the boy is on the bed?”

  May started, her eyes widened and one tear slipped down her cheek. “He’s Carl. He’s my grandson. He’s not been well. I told him to lie down.”

  “May, Carl is dead.”

  “I know that.” She smiled proudly, as if she had answered a difficult question correctly.

  “Do you know how he died? Do you know how long he’s been there?”

  May’s eyelids drooped and her hands fell slack away from his fingers. “You should ask his friends. They’ll know. They know more about him than I do.”

  “Does he have parents? We need to contact them.”

  May was tired now. She gestured to the drawer on the telephone stand. “Miriam’s his mother. In the book. Bob’s in there too. Bob Howell.”

  He nodded his thanks. “Can I get you a cup of tea, May?”

  A grateful, girlish flutter: “Oh, yes! Three sugars!”

  But she wasn’t interested in the tea by the time he came back. He put the TV back on with the volume low. Then the forensic team arrived with the coroner and everyone forgot about her again.

  It was a dizzying afternoon for May, hunched by the TV in the darkening room. First came the plumber, then the Nice Policeman, then more people, who spoke to the Nice Policeman. Then there were questions, some of which she almost understood, some she couldn’t hear. At one point someone tried to turn the TV off but instead increased the volume, and May blinked at their angry reactions in the light of the screen. She discovered that she didn’t want them to mention Carl’s name, it hurt her. It made the tears come again, and she gestured anxiously at the spare bedroom door. She wanted to say, he’s in there. He’s sleeping. Be quiet or he’ll wake up, but found she couldn’t form understandable words. Then the Nice Policeman offered his arm, and helped her down the front stairs to a waiting ambulance, where a sweet-faced girl gave her a blanket and let her lie down. And then she was speeding away, so quickly it almost made her giggle, I have butterflies! she thought, and fell asleep again, warm, contented.

  In the bedroom, professionals padded around the body, now examined by the coroner and headed for the morgue. The watch and the bottle were collected, the shoes bagged, the vomit scraped. Bags were put over the head and the hands. And eventually the body was lifted onto a lightweight plastic bag with a zipper running from bottom to top. Some hair caught in the top, and the coroner had to yank the zipper down to free it. Two detectives caught hold of the handles, and heaved the body onto a waiting stretcher. They moved carefully down the steep front steps towards the waiting van, straight into the path of Carl’s parents, estranged for years, now suddenly reunited.

  * * *

  It was Bob Howell who called to tell Peter what had happened, about the plumber who had called the police. The
old lady hadn’t noticed, but she’d left a bathroom tap running and it had damaged the neighbour’s ceiling so the landlord had sent him over to deal with it. She also hadn’t noticed the smell seeping out from under the bedroom door; but the plumber did, forcing his way in, over her bewildered objections.

  “They don’t know how long he’d been there,” said Bob. “They don’t know how it happened. You know the ones to call up and tell, you know his friends. I’ve already told that nice couple who gave him his start, but the rest...”

  So Peter called Chris Harris’ pager, and when Chris called back he was in what sounded like a building site; men bellowed in the background, and Peter could hear a drill being turned on and off, on and off.

  “I’m with that piece of shit band, Gag,” said Chris. “They’re doing some TV show in a button factory. That same one you guys did – remember? They made you all sell broken biscuits on that market?”

  That memory irritated Peter: a Sunday morning music show aimed at teenagers and older viewers who didn’t yet think of themselves as too old. A pert girl and her funnier male co-host interviewed up-and-coming indie bands and established acts more resigned to their own absurdity – all scripted insults and facetious quizzes. Sometimes they would go on location to a nearby kebab shop and make celebrities carve meat, or busk on the street to see if any passers-by noticed them. Or they’d take them paintballing and cut the footage to the theme from Platoon. It was a very popular show and Peter looked on it with an unexamined but pure loathing. Carl had said he liked it. Said it was a laugh.

  He started lamely, “Look, I really think you should go somewhere a bit quieter and maybe sit down. It’s about Carl.”

  “Wait wait, there’s someone at the...door...just let me get rid of them...OK. OK.”

  “Carl died.”

  There was a long pause and Peter heard the drill again. Why would you need a drill in a button factory? he wondered. Maybe it wasn’t a drill, maybe it was a button pressing machine, or something that makes the holes. He imagined the cramped factory floor, the intrusive camera crew, the sound people and the assistants, the runners. He imagined the factory workers amused, maybe starstruck; the sour monkey face of the funnier co-presenter. And he thought about the band, clumsily sorting buttons on the moving belts, wondering what good this was doing them, cursing their manager while putting on a brave face for the cameras. What everyone needed was a proper job really, a sense of self worth...when he had worked in the bike factory that summer...

  He heard Chris light a cigarette, inhale and say, shakily, “Does the label know yet?”

  “Yes, I think so. I think the police told them.” Peter twisted the telephone cord around his wrist, waiting for Chris to make it better, to give him a plan.

  “Don’t talk to anyone. The press. I’ll handle it. I’ll be out of here in an hour, you’ll be able to get me in the office by 4.” And he put the phone down. Only much later did Peter realise that Chris hadn’t asked how Carl had died.

  The last call Peter made that afternoon was to Lydia, Carl’s ex-girlfriend. By this time he was so depleted that he even considered asking her to make the rest of the calls – however inappropriate it might be. Lydia would be a lot better at it, he reasoned. She would make a point of being in charge, she wouldn’t even try to respond to all the intrusive questions. Why was he there in the first place? How long had he been there? Where was the body now? Was there a note? Who’d told the label? Can I help you by telling the label? Eventually, each time someone offered to tell the label, Peter learned to count the seconds between telling them that they already knew, and the disappointed ‘OK’ on the other end. It was, he had to admit, pretty much the same disappointment he’d experienced when he’d asked Bob the same question a few hours ago. He’d been dreading calling her; not because he’d have to deal with the shock – he’d already made a dozen calls that morning – but because he just didn’t like Lydia. Nobody liked her anymore.

  But telling Lydia was the hardest, because she took it in an un-Lydia-like way. There was no music playing in the background when he called. Carl had once told him that she would press play on the stereo as soon as the phone rang, or there was a knock at the door, to give the impression that she always listened to music when she was alone. Today her voice was muffled and timbreless in the absolute silence of her flat. When Peter told her the news she said nothing, but he could hear her breathing shallowly, rapidly, like an animal. Expecting questions, hysteria, the obligatory offer to call the record company, instead he heard only her rasping breath, and then, “I’m not...I can’t talk. I’m sorry.”

  He tried to sound like he cared about how she felt, while waiting for the sobs, bracing himself for Lydia’s large, stormy emotions. “I’m sorry Lydia. I know that you still cared a lot for him, and...” and what? Lie? Say something like, ‘I know he felt the same way’? No, that wouldn’t do. But if a lie won’t work, then what will? And he felt sudden panic – what can I say to this woman who isn’t the woman I was expecting? How to handle this quiet stranger? And then he heard her bottomed-out voice say, “Thank you. I hope I can get to the funeral.” Then the click of the receiver being replaced. That was the call that finished him. It was exhausting to feel so much pity mixed with such contempt.

  2

  Lydia

  After she had put the phone down, Lydia sat perfectly still, breathing noisily. Her chest felt crushed, weighted. It was one of the few times in her life that she didn’t feel as if she was being watched and assessed. She didn’t suck her belly in, or practise smiling to disguise her crooked eye tooth. She didn’t worry about her breath, roll a cigarette, pour a drink or pull her hair over her cheeks to hide what she thought was a double chin. She didn’t notice how her bitten-down fingernails throbbed, how cold her feet were or how long she’d been staring at the floor. She didn’t think of getting dressed. Once or twice the phone rang but she didn’t answer it. “Carl’s dead,” Peter had said, and life had simply stopped for a while, and the room pulled in around her, like a cool, heavy shroud.

  It was a long time later, dark, when she took the pills. Fifteen Prothiaden, all she had left, with a cold cup of tea. When the headache came on, she lay down on the sofa under the satin eiderdown her mother had always wrapped around her when she was off sick from school. Later, when she tried to run to the toilet, she stumbled against the door frame, banged her ankle, and was sick on the floor. That’s where her mother found her an hour later, wedged up against the door, her head between her knees, limp fingers trailing in vomit.

  They took her to the hospital, the same paramedics who had been called when Carl’s body had been found. They took her to the same hospital where his body was waiting in the mortuary. She found this out later, and took it as a sign.

  The practised hands of the paramedics opened her eyes and shone lights. They called her name and asked what she’d taken, looked for the empty bottle. As she was picked up by the shoulders and ankles her robe fell open and the large breasts that she hated so much fell under her armpits, her too-tight underwear barely held together by its popped elastic. Her mother sobbed and tried to pull the robe back over her, tried to tie the belt around her waist, but one of the paramedics spoke to her sharply and heaved Lydia out of the door.

  In the ambulance they spoke to her, asked her mother to speak to her. They stuck something in her arm and rolled her to the side, placing her unresisting chin in a cardboard bowl, hoping to catch vomit.

  “Darling? Darling?” said her mother, “Darling, I’m fastening your robe. I’m just going to fasten your robe now, don’t worry.”

  Lydia was choking when they reached the hospital and the paramedic hurriedly shoved some fingers down her throat, “Passageway’s blocked.” They put her onto a gurney and rushed her into a curtained corner. More practised hands fed a thin tube up her nose. Her mother winced, and waited outside the curtain, clenching her hands together, bunching up the rings and trying not to listen to the sound of the suction.
r />   Some time later, after they’d rinsed out her stomach a few times, pulled out the tube and dealt with the bleeding, they let her mother back in. Lydia was lying on her side with the robe clumsily wrapped around her; her mother tied it over one hip in a firm double knot. Dried blood stained Lydia’s right nostril, her face was swollen and there was a carpet burn on her chin from being dragged up off the floor. She cried when she saw her mother, and they held each other awkwardly. Her mother, mindful of her silk shirt, rearranged the sweater tied around her shoulders and moved Lydia’s head onto it.

  “There’s my darling. There’s my darling. Who’s my darling?”

  “I am,” a clogged choke.

  Mother took her firmly by the chin. “What a silly thing to do darling! How did you make such a mistake?”

  Lydia looked at her with dull eyes, “I didn’t make a mistake.”

  “Oh yes you did.” Her mother tugged on her chin to make Lydia nod with each syllable. When she tried to look down, her mother pushed firmly up again until their eyes met. “You must have done, darling. You must have been very, very tired.”

  “Carl died.”

  “I know, darling, I know. That’s why I rearranged my afternoon so I could come and see you. I thought you might be in a funk about it.”

  Lydia began to cry again. Her mother drew her in and positioned her face onto the sweater. Lydia allowed herself to be pushed into her warm, Chanel-scented shoulder; the amber necklace digging into her cheek; Mother’s voice telling her that she was just tired and needed looking after; Mother telling her what a silly mistake she’d made; Mother saying, “You’ll bounce back, you always do.”

  She was to be kept on the ward until she’d spoken to a psychiatrist, and then overnight for observation. In a bed in the corner of a hot ward, she wanted to draw the curtains but the nurse who was changing the drip said no.