Christopher Fowler is the award-winning author of more than forty novels – including thirteen featuring the detectives Bryant and May and the Peculiar Crimes Unit – and short-story collections. The recipient of the coveted CWA ‘Dagger in the Library’ Award for 2015, Chris’s most recent books are the Ballard-esque thriller The Sand Men and Bryant & May – Strange Tide. His other work includes screenplays, video games, graphic novels, audio plays and two critically acclaimed memoirs, Paperboy and Film Freak. His weekly column ‘Invisible Ink’ was a highlight of the Independent on Sunday’s arts pages. He lives in King’s Cross, London, and Barcelona.
Visit www.christopherfowler.co.uk
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First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Serpent’s Tail
This edition published in 2017 by Transworld Digital
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Christopher Fowler, 2003
Extract from Roofworld © Christopher Fowler 1988
Cover art/design: Martin Butterworth
Christopher Fowler has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473540149
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‘Absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder; it makes people think you’re dead’
–James Caan
I read the other day that English writing is dead, which came as a bit of a shock, because I thought I still had a pulse. What the article meant, I imagine, is that the kind of English writing the critic would like to read is dead. True, we rarely produce those expansive Homeric sagas which US novelists publish with such regularity, but English writing is very much alive and well; it’s just not always where one expects it to be. Many English authors I admire work outside the mainstream categories, and perhaps the true picture of anything lies in its barely registered peripheries.
What you have here is a dispatch from what has become a strange side-alley to the house of fiction. After enjoying well over a century of immense popularity, tales of mystery and imagination have spread their wings and transmuted into Dark Fiction, a genre that allows far greater freedom to explore new themes. The English fascination with black humour, cruelty, cynicism and leading men of weak character places us in a strong position to lead the left field. Yet, right now, it’s hard to find editors who will buck the company line to venture into darker territory.
Our great-grandparents had ghost stories; peculiar tales narrated by clubbable men who commenced after knocking their pipes out on mantelpieces and pouring themselves large brandies. ‘And he never spoke another word to the end of his days,’ says the narrator meaningfully at the end of such tales. Now they have gone the way of the western or the locked room mystery, consigned to the second-hand book stalls of history. Quite right too; the world’s a frightening place and nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. There are plenty of darker new tales to write, especially in a nation that obsesses about celebrity sex, the price of cocaine and new shades of nail varnish while its secret population sleeps on deadly streets.
This collection sets out to provide a little more darkness in short form. Darkness of the soul, of the cynic, of the less-than-happily ever after, because Bridget Jones doesn’t always find her prince and life tells you tongue-swallowingly terrible lies. I seem to have set up my stall as the literary equivalent of Guinness or Marmite; something you didn’t think you’d like, but hopefully become addicted to. The first trick is to make each short story cheerful enough to keep you from slitting your throat. The second is to take you with me as I gently move the goalposts.
Aristotle said, ‘Hope is a waking dream,’ and as we search for new things to demonize, the line between wakefulness and nightmares is blurring. Ideas for stories can arrive after particularly circuitous routes through fact and fantasy. Before I wrote the first tale here, an old schoolfriend sent me an old end-of-term photograph with the eventual destinies of our classmates added beneath each face. The three most popular categories were ‘In His Grave’, ‘In Prison’ and ‘In Insurance’. A few days later, a journey across France in a collapsing classic car resulted in a nightmarish trip around the hairpin bends of the stormswept Mont Blanc with a puncture, no alternator and no lights. Somehow these unrelated events conflated into ‘We’re Going Where the Sun Shines Brightly’, although I wonder how many people will still appreciate the movie references.
Some stories were commissions. ‘Dealing with the Situation’ began as a Christmas story for the Big Issue. Few magazines buy fiction these days, and I rarely turn down the opportunity to produce something if asked. The Big Issue has certain rules you need to follow, the main one being Do Not Write About Drugs. This is because the vendors get knocked down by easily confused readers looking to think the worst of them. Another was commissioned (and written in record time) for the Dazed & Confused Annual, who published the piece and forgot to pay me, threw a launch party for the book and forgot to invite me, and forgot to send me a finished copy. I tell you this in case you’re thinking of becoming a writer.
As in previous collections, there’s an ‘Odd One Out’ tale, in this case ‘Emotional Response’, written for my friend Sally, who asked ‘Can’t you write a nice love story, just for a change?’ Sally, I gave it my best shot. The story ‘Personal Space’ was written in a single sitting, something I’ve never done before and wanted to try as an experiment. Unfortunately it happens to be based on fact, and the true-life ending was much grimmer.
I usually rewrite stories when it comes to placing them in a collection, in order to create a ‘definitive version’. Last year I took a walk in an ancient Malaysian jungle, a bookish Englishman poorly prepared to experience the rougher edge of nature. I certainly didn’t expect to emerge with my skin covered in welts and my socks filled with blood. Consequently, I wrote ‘The Green Man’, turning to the once-popular sub-genre of the English tropical story, a tradition that peaked with Kipling and Wells and hasn’t been seen much since Carl Stephenson’s ‘Leiningen Versus the Ants’. Evelyn Waugh’s ‘The Man Who Loved Dickens’ is probably the most reprinted example – it’s a chapter from his satirical novel A Handful Of Dust, but so fine in its construction that it has often appeared as a free-standing horror story. It’s odd how many English writers are sensitive to the surreal and the mysterious. As inhabitants of a grey, damp world, I think one is drawn to seek out the exotic.
In ‘Breaking Heart’, which was written to be performed at an ‘Anti-Valentine’ event at Borders, the character of Emma is my friend Amber, whose experiences as Cinderella I ruthlessly used. ‘Cairo 6.1’ is my one hundredth published story, and I suppose represents some kind of conclusion, or perhaps a fresh beginning. Like many writers, I’ve still never written a story I’m completely happy with, but I hope to continue mining the seam of Peculiar English until I come up with an unflawed gem.
Peculiar English coincidentally describes the annual BFS Christmas bash, held upstairs in the Princess Louise pub, High Holborn, London. The British Fantasy Society is not solely for writers who provide alarmingly detailed maps of elf shires in their novels. It’s a club for anyone who chooses to stray from the straight, narrow path of reality-mirroring fiction. Okay, there’s a preponderance of big jumpers and draught stout at such events, but everyone’s surprisingly sane and likeable, and – unlike some other professions – there are almost as many women as men. Still, they’re all finding that publishers are less willing than ever before to take chances, even though it’s now possible to laser-print ten copies of a book to meet specific demand. This should have led to more choice, not less. All the more reason for me to be grateful to trend-bucking companies like Serpent’s Tail.
Of the stories here, you’ll find five outright happy endings, seven dark conclusions and a number of split outcomes. To me, that seems an even-handed reflection of what life deals out.
It feels like I’ve been away for ages. Actually it was just over two years, during which time I never stopped writing. It’s good to be back in the world of Darker Fiction.
‘No more fairy stories at nanny’s knee; it is all aboard the fairy bus for the dungeons’
–Geoffrey Willans
‘He’s just an innocent,’ said Steve, lighting a grubby dog-end. ‘You have to fall from grace before you can understand anything adult. He had no idea that she wasn’t interested in him. She was really old, thirty at least.’
‘And he was still chasing her around the bar when you left?’ I asked.
‘Cyril will try to shag anyone.’ Steve examined the end of his cigarette with distaste. ‘Because he’s a pathetic virgin.’
‘Thirty, and she still turned him down?’ I wasn’t about to mention that I was also a virgin.
‘She had a face like a rag and bone man’s horse, and it didn’t put him off. The whole thing was creepy.’ Steve swallowed smoke and had a coughing fit. ‘Roll on summer holidays.’
‘Roll on summer holidays.’
We were on our fag break, up near the roof of the Aldenham Bus & Coach Overhaul Works. Through the hangar doors you could see it was grey and raining. Looking to the horizon was like going blind.
‘We’ll have two weeks to get him laid then,’ said Steve, once he’d got his breath back. ‘If he doesn’t get a bird soon he’s going to do himself a mischief.’
If he does get a bird, I remember thinking, she’ll be the one he’ll do mischief to. Cyril had scary energy, undirected, uncontrolled. I assumed it was because he was young; we all were.
The Aldenham Bus & Coach Overhaul Works was built on the site of an old aerodrome. The aircraft hangars that had once housed Mosquitos and Hurricanes had been converted to contain transport machinery. The uneven concrete squares of the runways were pock-marked by pools of iridescent water. Beyond were the wet green hedgerows that shielded the factory from the arterial road. The glory of war days still haunted the horizons of the surrounding meadows, a taunting memory of something noble and exciting.
I was one of the youngest workers. I hated the job, the old men who smelled of roll-ups and sweat, the acrid air of filing-dust and rust, the sinus-sting of spray-paint that hung in the thick air, the machines that shuddered and punched panels from sheets of steel. The sheds churned with the thought-destroying thump of the presses, like the noise of an endless summer storm, its sound condensed and released by the high whine of pistons. Everything around me was black and brown and shades of grey, drained of any sensation other than the slam of the safety barriers and the shake of steel sheeting that vibrated through the soles of your boots.
I wasn’t stupid. I didn’t think that working in this place was all there was to life. I sensed – but had no way of knowing for sure – that the world beyond the factory was filled with mysteries. I’d been growing increasingly restless at home. I lay on my bed, listening to the strikes and reprisals of my parents’ conversation, and felt that somewhere, away from the odour of unused rooms and beeswaxed sideboards, away from the bitter tang of factory metal, there were beautiful girls who laughed and threw themselves recklessly into the arms of boys the same age as me. I wasn’t going to be like Cyril, getting drunk and chasing world-weary old boilers around pubs all night. I was going to make something of myself.
I wasn’t alone in my dreams. There were four of us; Steve had thick square glasses and worked weekends in a hardware store, saving every penny he earned for plans he had no imagination to realise. Cyril was skinny and blonde and never took off his cap, and went on about girls in a voice that cracked like someone skating on unsafe ice. Don wore his hair in a perfectly greased quiff, and spoke in an attempt at a refined voice. His clothes were always perfectly ironed. He was too worried about what other people thought to ever let himself relax, and insisted on calling us ‘fellas’. ‘Hey, fellas, I’ve got a great idea,’ as though he was in one of those youth films from the sixties that now look as though they come from another world, Planet Polite. But of course it was the sixties, we were teenagers, and none of us had a clue about the corruption of time.
It was Don’s ‘Hey, fellas, I’ve got a great idea,’ that started it. His idea sounded hopeless, especially as we had only seven days to go before the start of our summer holidays. Steve and I were on a fag break, sitting waiting for Don, when we saw him driving toward us through the rain, and at that moment we realised dreams were possible, and our monochrome world turned into Technicolor.
Don had heard that London Transport might be willing to sell one of their old Routemaster buses, and managed to persuade them to let him have it on the condition that we did it up, because its seats were slashed to bits and its engine was knackered. And it was my idea to have some of the blokes at the factory overhaul the engine and convert the interior into something more liveable, so that it ended up looking like a double-decker caravan, even though we kept the red exterior and the number above the destination board that proclaimed it to be a Number 9 heading for Piccadilly.
Suddenly we had a chance to fulfil our dreams, and there was a way to escape the troglodyte days of the English summer. We no longer had to make do with the bandstands, chip-shops and smutty postcard racks of the South Coast. We would fix up the bus and head for the South of France, where the sky was wide, the sea was warm and the promenades were filled with the scented promise of sex.
We only managed to get the bus roadworthy by paying mates to work late, so that by the time we were granted our licence we were almost broke, but we were so determined to escape that nothing was going to stop us. On a drizzling Saturday morning we headed for Calais with some half-baked idea that we might even get as far as Greece before having to turn around. Cyril thought if we proved the journey was managable to the bus company they might allow us to take fee-paying guests on charter trips, but we hadn’t thought any of it through. It just seemed possible; everything is possible when you don’t know the drawbacks. Opportunity can present itself to innocents just as much as it can to the corrupt, and we had an advantage: we were the young ones.
It seemed that the sun began shining at Calais, and as the bus laboured to leave the hills of the town we saw only empty sunlit roads ahead, tarmac dappled in the cool green shadows of the trees. We didn’t reach Paris until dusk the following day (the bus’s top speed was none too impressive), and went bouncing off to meet girls in the bars of Montmartre. We didn’t get to meet girls; we attempted conversations with a few, but they couldn’t – or wouldn’t – understand us, and in the process we became paralytically pissed, probably due to our overexcitement at being somewhere new. The first real way you can separate yourself from your parents is by choosing who to have sex with. It’s an act of rebellion and even betrayal; that’s why it’s so easy to be a coward and behave badly about the whole thing.
That night we slept like the dead, sexless and still innocent, in the bus, and left for the south late the next morning, nursing beer-and-brandy hangovers. It was a beautiful journey. The roads were less crowded then, and you had time to look around. Just outside Avignon, where the distant walls of the gated city could be glimpsed, we saw a pretty young girl seated in a red MG with a steaming radiator, and stopped to help her. The car was old and the seals would be hard to repair, so I suggested that she come with us. We could phone ahead for the parts, I explained, and Don would replace them for her on the way back. The girl, Sandy, agreed so readily that I knew she had her eye on one of us, but which one? She had bobbed black hair and black eye-shadow, a short pleated skirt and white kinky boots. She was so at ease in our company that she made us look like children.
By the time we reached Marseilles, I knew she fancied Don, and that night, stopping on the starlit road to St Tropez, I was sure she would sleep with him. Steve seemed the most put out, and sulked until we took him drinking in a bar that played samba music and was filled – for some reason I now forget – with loud Brazilian girls. They laughed at everything, downing as many drinks as we did, and then picked us off like sharpshooters attacking targets.
The one I took back began to undress me while we were still in the street. We made awkward, squeaky love on one of the bench seats upstairs in the bus. She freed me from more than my parents; she freed me from England, and all of my embarrassing, desperate memories. I can’t remember ever being happier. In the morning she left with her shoes in one hand, and a kiss blown lazily over her shoulder.
On that first morning after my fall from grace, everything looked different; the sky was an angry blue that hurt the eyes, the air was pungent with wild lavender and the sea was filled with whining white motorboats. As we set off toward Nice, Cyril worked out routes that avoided heavy inclines, bypassing the dramatic bulk of the Massif d’Esterel because the bus overheated easily. We avoided the fire-ravaged scrubland surrounding St Raphael and Fréjus, staying mostly to the main roads, but there was a point where the throb of the engine began to exacerbate our hangovers, so we took a turn-off through the pines, firs, olive groves and mimosa trees, looking for a spot where we could buy a beer and a baguette.
‘The Romans planted these trees beside the roads so that their footsoldiers could take shelter,’ Don pointed out. ‘Now motorcyclists keep slamming into them and killing themselves.’
The conversation kept returning to death. The rest of us were no longer virgins. Only Cyril was left, and suddenly it looked like he was the odd one out. He grew nastier as the day progressed. It was as though we were in on a joke that he wasn’t being allowed to share.
The sharp morning air felt electrically charged as we sat in a meadow waiting for the bus’s radiator to calm itself. Steve talked about what he wanted to do with his life. He had no intention of staying in a hardware store forever, selling locks and drill bits. He wanted to go to art college and learn how to paint. He had started drawing, and had been encouraged by the sale of a picture. Cyril liked working at the depot but saw it as a temporary job, something to do before he discovered what really interested him. I wanted to be a musician. I’d traded some time in a recording studio and was in the process of putting together a demo tape, but work always got in the way. Don wanted to set up a business of his own in the city, something to do with owning a chain of bars. He’d worked out a business plan of sorts, and was on the lookout for investors. By the time we hit the road once more, we had sorted out the rest of our lives.
‘So you don’t mind what you do so long as it makes you rich.’ Don and I wound each other up whenever we discussed the future. It was that stupid argument you have about keeping your scruples once you were rich and powerful, as if you had a choice.
‘I’ll still have principles, obviously,’ he replied, resting his arms on the great black steering wheel and taking his eyes from the road to look at me. ‘If you give up what you believe in, you’ll be poor anyway.’
‘Nice sentiment,’ Steve agreed, ‘I only hope you manage to keep it.’
‘I don’t want to turn into my dad,’ said Cyril, ‘pissed all the time and talking about the good old days, like there was some kind of magical time when he didn’t behave like an arsehole.’
‘If we all unite with a single political conscience, the young have enough energy to rebuild the world,’ offered Sandy, in one of those general French-influenced statements calculated to annoy everyone. But there were riots in Paris that year, so I guess she was just expressing a widely-shared viewpoint.
‘You’re forgetting one thing,’ Steve pointed out. ‘The young lack power and money, and once they finally have them, they don’t want to change the world anymore, they want to keep it all for themselves. The rich get away with murder.’
Before we could move onto eradicating Third World hunger, Sandy reminded us that she wanted to visit Grasse because she had heard they made perfumes there, and she wanted to buy some bath salts. According to Cyril’s map the road was too narrow, the bends too sharp for the bus to handle, so we turned around and coasted onto a long flat road that cut between two plains studded with ochre rocks, lined with rows of dark cypresses. For a while we saw scattered farmhouses in the distance. Then there was nothing but meadowland and woods.
It was as we entered the tunnel of trees that the mood changed. The sunlight was fragmented here, and the black tar road, frayed into earth at its edges, was shadowed in wavering green. The air cooled and for the first time I noticed birdsong, not along the road itself but beyond it, back in the sunlight. It was my turn to drive. Don and Sandy were sitting upstairs. Cyril and Steve had finished their card game and were staring vacantly from the windows when the engine started to noisily slip gears. The bus coasted on to the lowest point of the road, and I knew it would not make the next rise. We came to a stop in the deep green shadows, and I put on the handbrake.
‘What’s happened?’ called Steve, springing up into the driver’s cabin.
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘It feels like we’ve gone into neutral. Take a look under the bonnet, would you?’
Don and Sandy came down from upstairs, and watched as Steve stripped off his shirt and slid beneath the bus. After a couple of minutes he emerged wiping grease on his jeans.
‘There’s a small rubber grommet that holds all the gear cables together,’ he explained. ‘It must have perished, so that when you shifted gears it broke and the cables came loose.’
‘Is it fixable?’ I asked.
‘If you can find me a length of flex I can tie the cables together temporarily. It’ll be fine so long as you don’t put it into neutral. If I can find a truck garage in Nice I’ll probably be able to get a ring of about the same diameter. Maybe I can make a temporary one.’ He climbed back under the bus to take another look. The mistral tugged at the high branches above our heads. The trees made a strange lonely sound.
‘Did it suddenly get cold?’ Sandy hugged her thin arms. Don came over and wrapped a sweater around her shoulders. ‘It’s going to be dark soon. Look how low the sun is.’
‘Nothing to worry about,’ I promised cheerfully. ‘If Steve can’t fix it we’ll get a lift from someone.’
‘Who?’ asked Sandy. ‘We haven’t passed another vehicle in at least an hour. There’s no one around for miles.’
‘Don’t be such a worryguts,’ said Cyril, swinging around on the platform pole. ‘There’s bound to be someone along eventually.’ He cocked his head comically, but there was nothing to be heard except the rasp of crickets. Steve’s legs stuck out from under the bus. Every once in a while there was a clang of metal and he swore. Finally he emerged, smothered in thick black grease.
‘I’ve managed to tie the cables up, but I don’t know how long it’ll hold.’
‘What did you use?’ asked Don.
‘I found a packet of rubber johnnies in your bag.’
‘You’ve been going through my stuff?’
‘You’d only used one. It said “Super Strong” on the box. Let’s hope they’re right.’
A pale mist was settling across the fields like milk dispersing in water. We set off carefully, determined to change gear as little as possible. ‘How can we best do that?’ I asked Don, who was driving.
‘Stick to this low route, I guess. It looks flatter, but if anything comes the other way they’ll have to go off-road to get around us.’ Tree branches continually scraped the roof of the bus. We crawled through a number of derelict villages, past peeling stucco walls, dark doorways and dry fountains. The road became even narrower.
‘We could get stuck and not be able to turn around,’ warned Cyril, scrutinising his map. ‘This road isn’t even marked.’
‘What else can we do?’ I asked. ‘If it gets too much, we’ll have to stay here the night and walk to a town in the morning.’
‘You’ll be lucky. There’s fuck-all for miles around and we’re out of food.’
The bus crept around a tight bend into another tunnel of trees. ‘What’s that up ahead?’ I pointed to the side of the road. A dusty silver Mercedes saloon was badly parked there. I could make out some movement in the shadows.
‘What?’ Don peered through the windscreen. ‘I can’t see anything.’
‘Neither can I,’ complained Steve.
‘You need your eyes tested. It’s got English number plates.’ A sticker on the boot of the car read: ‘Come To HOVE’. There was a straw hat on the back window ledge, the kind Englishmen buy when they go to France in the mistaken belief that it makes them look sophisticated. I nudged Don’s arm. ‘Pull over. It’s our lucky day.’ He pulled up the brake handle and left the motor idling.
‘I’ll go and talk to them.’ I jumped down from the rear platform and ran on ahead. Evidently the two men inside had not heard me approaching because they looked startled when I knocked on the window of the car. The driver, red-faced and pot-bellied, wearing a blue striped shirt that was too tight to adequately contain him, jerked his head around and studied me with unfocussed eyes. His face was broken-veined and doublechinned. He collected his wits for a moment before partially lowering the electric window. The other man was grey-haired and thin, with a prominent sore-looking nose and a sharp Adam’s apple. He remained hunched over the back of the passenger seat with his arms extended to the floor. A chill blast from the air-conditioned interior fanned my face.
‘Yes, what is it?’ asked the driver in English, as though impatiently answering the door to an unexpected neighbour.
I’d been about to ask him for help, but from what I saw it looked as though the situation might be reversed. The overweight man looked angry and frightened. Clearly, my intrusion wasn’t welcome.
‘You’re English,’ I said stupidly, as if this made us all part of the same club. I peered across at the other man, who now raised his head. He looked ill, or drunk, or both. A livid gash on his cheek was spackling blood onto his yellow T-shirt and the leather seat back. Both men were in their late forties. Having caught them doing something they didn’t want anyone to see, I could only ramble on with my original request for help.
‘We’ve broken down and, well, I was hoping you might be going near a village where I could call out a mechanic, and get him to fix—’
‘I don’t know, hang on.’ The fat man turned to his companion, who was struggling upright in the passenger seat. ‘Michael, this chap wants a lift.’ He gestured impatiently at the man’s head.
Michael looked in the wing mirror and hastily wiped his bleeding face with an oil rag. ‘No, we’re not going there,’ he began in some confusion. ‘Fucking hell, Sam, can’t you deal with it?’ He turned back to me. ‘Now is not a good time, kid, so piss off, will you?’
Sam, the overweight driver, shifted uncomfortably in the driving seat. ‘Look, I’m sorry, we’re a bit tied up and, ah, can’t really help you.’
Their attitude annoyed and puzzled me. They were the ones in the brand new air-conditioned Mercedes and they couldn’t even give me a lift? ‘It’s just that I think we’ll be stuck here all night if I can’t get a lift to a town,’ I explained, ‘because no cars have been past for—’
‘What part of this conversation didn’t you understand, you little prick?’ shouted the sickly man suddenly. He writhed about in the seat and kicked open the car door, storming around to my side. He made a grab for my shirt but I ducked back. As I did so, I saw that the rear passenger door was open. A large material-wrapped bundle on the back seat seemed to be slowly sliding out of the car and into the ditch at the side of the road. Something smelled bad.
The fat man manouevred his way out of the car, and pulled his partner aside. ‘For Christ’s sake, he’s just a kid, leave him alone.’
I stared back at the moving bundle, half in the car, half in the road. There were brown leaves and arrowhead-shaped pine needles stuck to it, and it had begun to make a low gurgling noise.
I looked back along the avenue of rustling cypress trees, but the others must have stayed on board, and it was now too dark to even see the outline of the bus.
‘Go back to your vehicle, pal. There’ll be someone along soon. Just forget you ever saw us, all right?’
‘Sure, no problem.’ I backed cautiously away. I didn’t want trouble. These guys looked burned out and messed up about something, and I really didn’t want to know what they’d been doing. Secret cruelties occurred in lonely spots like this.
But as I turned and passed the rear of the Mercedes I couldn’t help looking back at the shifting sack, only now I saw that it was a person unballing itself from a foetal position, because a head had appeared. It was a middle-aged woman in a grey cardigan and a dark blue flower-print skirt. Her hair was the same colour as the leaves in the ditch she was heaving herself into. I realised that she was making the gurgling noise because when she looked up at me and tried to speak, blood swilled over her yellow bottom teeth and ran down her chin, forming a scarlet stalactite. She looked desperate and determined to crawl out of the car by dragging herself forward on her elbows. ‘What’s wrong with her?’ I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
Now the fat guy, Sam, was coming at me with his thick Mont Blanc wallet open. He was pulling out notes, separating them and counting them at the same time, the way bank tellers do. His breath was hot and sour with brandy. A blood vessel had burst in his right eye, clouding it crimson. He thrust the cash at me. ‘Just take these and move on, son.’ He checked himself, made a quick calculation, decided he had under-bribed and added several more notes from the wallet. He held his hand further out, like a child trying to feed a zoo animal that’s known to bite. ‘Go on, take it.’
‘I don’t want your money,’ I said. It was his quick recalculation of the amount that disgusted me. ‘What the hell have you done to her?’
‘It’s his wife.’ Sam gestured over at his bony-faced companion. ‘She drank too much.’
‘What’s wrong with her face?’
‘He hit her.’ The companion’s protests were overriden. ‘It was sort of – a game – that got a bit out of hand, that’s all.’
I looked down at the woman as she pulled herself forward on her elbows, her fat rump slipping off the leather seat and toppling her into the ditch beside the car. It crossed my mind that if I bent down to help, I might be overpowered by the two men. The skinny one had a screwdriver in his hand. We stood silent in an awkward stand-off as she whimpered and spat between us.
‘We can take care of this ourselves, sonny.’ Sam’s money-hand hung half-proffered at his hip, as though he was still hoping I’d take the cash, but was also reluctant to part with it.
‘Just tell me what happened. I’m not going until you do.’ I kept an eye on the other one, sensing he was the more dangerous of the two. I was just a kid making brave noises, trying not to betray my fear.
‘She was fucking me about, that’s what,’ shouted the skinny companion. The gash on his cheek had reopened, and was dripping on his T-shirt. ‘Now either you help us, or you join her.’
‘We’re not going to make this worse, Michael.’ The overweight driver dragged a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his sweating forehead.
‘That’s it, keep using my fucking name. This is all your fault, you’re never man enough to see it through, I always have to finish everything you start.’ He gave the crawling woman a vicious kick in the gut, and another in the head. She began whimpering more loudly, and tried to draw in her arms and knees as protection, but the amount of haemorrhaged matter she was leaving behind her as she moved suggested that her internal injuries were already serious. She was missing a sandal, and the back of her skirt was caught up in her pants. She was dying, and it was so undignified.
Michael dropped to his knees and started to do something that caused the woman to shriek. When I dared to look, I saw that he was banging a screwdriver into her ear with the flat of his hand. I gave a yell, ran forward and stood beside her, flinching with indecision as Sam opened the car boot and removed a large yellow sponge. He returned to the back seat and began wiping smears from the cream leather upholstery while Michael kicked at the end of the screwdriver with his foot.
The scene was tripped into my memory like some distant, grotesque photograph of a forgotten crime; the red-faced driver carefully wiping the seats, his stomach pushing over the belt of his trousers, studiously ignoring his screaming companion who, deranged with anger, was leaping around a body with a screwdriver sticking out of its head, a pathetic victim-thing that looked no longer human, just a squirming sack wrapped in pleated floral material. The shiny silver Mercedes still gleamed in the dying light of the day, half lost in the deep cool verdure of the arched trees. Beside its rear tyre a stream of crimson was filling the ditch beside the road.
I ran for help.
I told myself that there was nothing else I could do. I ran without looking back, into the deeper darkness of the tunnel, then out onto the brow of the road where the bus had stopped. Its engine was still running, and its headlights suddenly came on. Sandy and Don were standing beside the boarding platform as Cyril and Steve ran forward.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ asked Steve. ‘We came looking for you.’
‘Just beyond the end of the road there.’ I gestured back into the darkness.
‘That’s where we looked,’ said Cyril, who clearly didn’t believe me.
‘I was beside the Mercedes.’ I barely knew how to start explaining what I had seen, how I had hopelessly failed to intervene.
‘What Mercedes? There was no car.’
‘Don’t talk shit, it’s right there.’
‘No, mate.’
‘Come with me.’ I grabbed at Steve’s sleeve, pulling them all forward in turn. ‘Before they get away.’ We walked through the tunnel of branches to the spot where I had encountered the travellers and their victim, but there was no sign of the Mercedes, and now it was too dark to find the bloody ditch.
‘They must have pushed her body into the woods,’ I cried. ‘Help me. She could still be alive.’
I was still shoving into the brambles when I felt their hands on my arms, pulling me back toward the bus and the star-pierced night.
Nothing went right after that. We slept in the bus and searched the road again the next morning, but found nothing. Don hitched a ride to the nearest town and got the bus repaired. I argued with the others, went to the police and eventually convinced them to listen.
Two doubtful gendarmes took me back to the place where I thought I had seen the Mercedes, but we couldn’t find the spot. One stretch of road looked just like the next, and after a while they stopped pretending to believe me. The rest of the holiday was a disaster. Sandy angrily returned to her car without us. We went on, drunkenly rowing until the bus broke down again. This time it defied all attempts at being repaired, and we had to leave it behind. The last time I saw the big red bus it was sitting in a lay-by near a cement factory, abandoned to the corrosive air.
We took trains and a ferry home.
After that, the four of us drifted apart. We went back to our real names. Those others belonged to characters from the film we were copying.
‘Don’ died of a drug overdose when he was twenty-eight. ‘Steve’ just disappeared. Only ‘Cyril’ and I are still in contact, although now he goes by his real name – Michael. I’m still plain Sam. I’m no longer a skinny kid, and have put on quite a bit of weight. I have to buy a lot of business lunches to keep my clients happy. Our company’s deep in debt, and once the auditors start investigating, we’ll all be in trouble. Michael has gone grey and looks ill. He’s married to a woman he hates, and I’m having an affair with her behind his back. We drink too much. We lie too much. We’re going on holiday together in the Mercedes, driving through France.
I was seventeen when I met my degraded mirror-image. I am forty now, and hardly a day passes when I don’t think of that sunset evening in the forest. I have already created the circumstances that will return me to that dark spot. I saw the man I have become, and there is not a damned thing I can do about it now. Once you fall, you never get back up.
But as the shadows of fate close in around me, how I miss the bus, the freedom, the laughter, the purity that lasted until my first summer holiday.
It was a good deal prettier than I had imagined. The schloss is above a deep green valley surrounded on three sides by verdant Austrian territory. In the distance I could see the great blue double-hump of Mount Watzmann, its crest thick with the first snows of approaching winter. To the south lies the Königsee, a picturesque Alpine lake of the kind that finds favour in the Führer’s paintings.
Although it is now a town of leisurely pursuits, Berchtesgaden was once the home of salt mines, and later became the summer residence of inbred Bavarian kings. There has been much mad blood, bad blood here.
My coach brought me to the cable railway linking the town with Obersalzberg, five hundred metres above it. It had been snowing heavily for some minutes by the time we arrived before the elegant façade of the residence. My host’s servants were waiting in the courtyard to greet us, their hands and faces translucent with cold, and the snow that had settled like white epaulettes on their shoulders told me they had been standing there since it started.
I knew that, apart from the Berghof, here were the private homes of Hermann Goering, Martin Bormann and other Nazi leaders, that the grey concrete lumps on the hillside were their air raid shelters, their barracks, their secret installations. The people are told that my host lives a simple, unostentatious life. How easily they are taken in. I have heard his retreat described as a ‘chalet’. Berchtesgaden is as much like a chalet as Dracula’s castle. Red and gold are not so predominant here as they are at the rallies, with their endless dreary banner flags, acres of red stamped with black swastikas.
The liveried houseboys stepped smartly forward and took our luggage. I had but one small leather case, and was loath to let it leave my side, but there was the matter of security. I was told that it would be delivered to my room, but not, I was sure, before its contents had been thoroughly searched.
‘Anthony Pettifer?’ I heard my name called. In the light of what I knew about Hitler’s roll-calls, the sensation was a chilling one. I stepped into the marble foyer, and was greeted by an austere, sharp-faced gentleman by the name of Herr Kettner. Each of us was formally greeted in turn. No English was spoken; no allowance was ever made for the presence of other nationalities.
‘The Führer regrets that he cannot be present for dinner this evening. Urgent business calls him back to Berlin. We hope, however, that he will be able to return tomorrow.’
Kettner informed us that he was the head of the household, but he had the bearing of an SS guard. He showed us into the main dining room. There were four of us: myself, supposedly representing The Times, an American property magnate called Cain, the Berlin press officer Schwenner, and, of course, the radiantly beautiful Virginia Pernand, with whom I had once had an affair.
‘You see, of course, how the Führer appreciates comfort,’ said Kettner. ‘Only the best is good enough for him.’
The dining room astonished me. It was easily sixty feet long and forty feet wide. A huge oak table ran down the centre, and sat upon a vast Persian rug. Four etchings by Albrecht Dürer hung on the softly-lit walls. I had been told that the room in which Hitler usually received his guests boasted a spectacular view over the Alps, and housed his aviary of rare birds, but on this occasion the room was not in use.
‘Berchtesgaden has fourteen rooms for guests, but you four are the only ones invited this weekend,’ said Kettner, with a hint of warning in his voice. ‘Each bedroom has its own private bathroom. Dinner tonight will be served at eight o’clock precisely.’ He stopped at the foot of the great staircase and struck a commanding pose, as though preparing himself to be photographed for some kind of Berlin Nachtkultur magazine. I saw the rest of his staff hold their collective breath.
‘One more thing.’ Kettner felt inside his tunic and pulled out several typed sheets of paper. ‘These are the instructions the Führer demands that his guests obey so long as they are under this roof.’ He handed one sheet to each of us. I glanced down at mine and read:
Instructions To Visitors
There were several other clauses and codicils in the same fashion, all of which left me with a problem – how to get through the weekend alive. You see, I was here at the schloss under false pretences. My identification papers were real enough, but I was no longer employed by The Times. Indeed, they had barred me from ever working for them again, thanks to a little misunderstanding over expenses that occurred on a junket to Nice. I was here to see Greta.
I first met Greta Kehl in a hotel in Vienna, before she came to work here at Berchtesgaden as a housemaid. Over the course of my stay there I had come to know her well, and we had become lovers. At the end of the month I had asked her to come away with me, but, pursuing some strange destiny of her own, she had refused my offer, accepting a transfer to a Bayern-based cleaning company. In the weeks that followed, her face haunted my sleep. I knew that we should be together, but needed to convince her of my heartfelt intentions. My letters, addressed to the agency in the town, were returned unopened.
Luckily my skills as a journalist stood me in good stead, and I located the address of her parents in Salzburg. Mr Kehl informed me that his daughter had become a committed fascist, and longed to serve the Führer, but his wife prevented him from giving me details of her appointment.
It was a simple matter to check with the agency – I flattered the matron who ran the office with the thought that I would like to write a profile on her – and ascertain that Greta was employed at the schloss. I still possessed my journalist’s union card (although it had been cancelled) and was able to pull off a couple of favours, albeit with an element of blackmail, that had me placed on the waiting list of visitors to Berchtesgaden.