V 02 - Domino Men, The (2 page)

When they got to the door, the older woman reached into her handbag, first for a key and then for a pair of torches.  Once the door was open and the torches were switched on, the man steered the girl over the threshold, whispering declarations of love into her ear, honeyed fictions designed with the sole purpose of keeping her moving, saccharine lies told only to propel her onwards.  Inside, the house was stripped and empty.  The man dragged the girl down the corridor toward the dining room, the bobbing light of his torch picking out their way.  His companion, after surveying the street with baleful eyes, busied herself in locking and bolting the door and ensuring, with the painstaking paranoia of the career professional, that the place was completely free of all listening devices, surveillance equipment and sundry bugs.

In the dining room there was an old white wooden chair, a few unlit candles and a brand-new television set.  The floorboards were bare and seemed to have been daubed with strange signs and symbols in what I can only hope and pray was red paint.  There was a strange quality of power in the room, of energy crackling in the air, its presence understood in the same distant way in which one might sense the throb of an engine or the humming whine of a generator.

The man helped the girl into the chair.  She was moaning a little now, grizzling like a baby in the grip of a bad dream.  He patted her head before producing a length of rope and binding her to the chair, winding it so tightly around he wrists and ankles that he drew blood.  At this, she started to whimper and complain but the man cooed softly, stroked her lips and ran his fingers along the bridge of her nose in the kind of intimately soothing gesture which only a lover can perform, until she fell silent once again.

They had a moment alone together then.  He could have begged for her forgiveness, he could have wept tears of shame and regret, he could, at the very least, have said something to try to make amends.  But he didn’t.  She stared up at him with dull accusation in her eyes and he found himself unable to return her gaze.  Head bowed, he walked across to the other side of the room and began, with sacerdotal reverence and intensity, to light the candles.  A few minutes later, the woman came into the room, closed the door behind her and suggested, with only the barest tremble in her voice, that they begin.

What they did next sickens me to think about, no matter how many times I’ve been vociferously assured of its necessity.

The handsome man stood over the chair and, reaching down to a leather pouch that he kept out of sight and strapped to his flank, produced a knife.  Its blade gleamed in the candlelight.

There may have been a ritual of some kind.  Who can say?  I never understood the specifics.  But I feel certain that the older woman would have said a few words, that, in that clear, precise schoolmarm’s voice of hers, she would have issued an invitation into the dark.

Once she had finished speaking, the man moved closer to the girl and, in a few swift motions, lifted the knife into the air and brought it slicing down.  Just before the blade bit into her flesh, he told her the same thing that, four decades later, he would say to me.

“Trust the process,” he said.

Then again, as though repeating a lie somehow makes it true:  “Trust the Process.”

I don’t want to imagine what came next but I find it almost impossible not to — the cutting of her wrists, the animal screams of pain, the awful, unstaunchable flow of blood.

Once the bleeding had stopped, once the poor girl ought, according to any biological law, to have slid gratefully into death or unconsciousness, she sat up quite straight in her seat with a sticky, fleshy popping sound, like the noise one hears on pulling the heads off shrimp.

Whatever it was which stared out at them from behind that girl’s eyes, it wasn’t remotely human.  When it spoke, it was no longer in the voice of the girl at all.  It would have been impatient, I think, a little peevish and annoyed, as it asked why it had been called to this place before it was time, before the city was ripe.

Then — the springing of the trap.  Realizing too late what had happened, the thing that wore the girl’s skin screeched in rage and fury.  It hissed and thrashed and struggled in its chair as, quite impossibly, the cuts on its wrists began to knit themselves together, the skin miraculously reconstituting itself over the slaughterhouse confusion of flesh and blood until, at last, it came to understand the parameters of its entrapment.

The man and the woman watched until the creature in the chair fell silent and began to change.  Unable to bear witness to the alterations wrought upon the body, they left the girl where she sat and retired to the nearest public house, where, on taxpayers’ money, they proceeded to fortify themselves with a generous martini apiece.

Forty years later, I moved into that same building.  I ate my meals, read the newspaper, kicked off my shoes, leant back on the sofa and watched TV in the room where they cut the wrists of that poor girl.  All the time I was oblivious of what had happened there, foolishly (and, as it turned out, tragically) ignorant of the circle of history which was almost complete.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Until very recently, I knew none of this, and for a long time, I believed that the story of the Domino Men started last year, in slightly more prosaic circumstances, when everything in my life still seemed broadly normal.  I thought that it began with my granddad and with what happened to him in the Queen’s Head.

The first thing you should know is that no one in my family had ever liked my granddad much.  I was always the exception.  My mother’s opinion was typical and may accurately be gauged by the way in which she broke the news.

“The old bastard’s dead,” she said, trying to sound somber but unable or unwilling to remove the last few crumbs of glee from her voice.  Then again, more firmly this time, not bothering to suppress the smirk.

“The old bastard’s dead.”

He was in a pub when it happened.  Nowhere flashy or picturesque, just another link in a chain, one of those places with the décor of an airport waiting lounge and the ambience of an NHS dentist.  It was four weeks from Christmas, the stores were oiling their tills in readiness for the season of consumption and when I picture what happened I always imagine “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” or “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day” echoing tinnily in the background.

The old bastard stood at the bar, clasping a pint, flirting with the barmaid, grandstanding for the regulars.  Well into his seventies, he looked even older — puce faced and rheumy eyed, his nose stippled with smashed capillaries, those good looks which in his youth had magnetized the attentions of more women than he could count now barely discernible beneath the palimpsests of hard living, old age, regret.

Granddad had a way of drawing people into his orbit, a talent for acquiring an entourage.  After he retired to devote the rest of his life to booze, the quality of his hangers-on underwent a vertiginous decline until by the end it was only the deadbeats who flocked to him, the idlers and the dropouts, the skiving masters and the loafing champs.  They were the kind of human jetsam who wash up in the pubs the moment its doors are unbolted and stick at their stools throughout the afternoon, their natural habitat the post-lunch lull, the boozy quiet before the suits trample in.  My story started for me at just this time of day, when men like my granddad rule the pub.  It began in the hour of the pensioner.

He started to tell a joke, something corny which began, in his favorite formulation, with that whiskery triumvirate of comic stand-bys — an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman.  It is a source of endless regret to me that he never got as far as the punch line.  I often think that if he had then everything might have been different.

Granddad collected bad jokes, had even written a few of them in his time, and he would have been spinning this one out, hamming up the details and relishing the accents.  The courtiers chuckled along with him, sufficiently beered up even at that time of the afternoon to laugh at almost anything, tugged along by the promise of another drink once the joke was done, because Granddad — despite his casual treachery and deceit — could always be relied upon to stand his ground.

This, then, as near as I can reconstruct it, is the joke that he told.  As things turned out, it was to be his last.

An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman are summoned before the Queen.  They stand there at Buckingham Palace, lined up before her, gawping at the finery of the place like a trio of slack-jawed yokels on a daytrip.  The Queen has a commission for them — a kind of favor — and she asks if there’s anything they wouldn’t do for her.  It’s the Englishman who steps forward first.  “Nothing,” he says.  “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my Queen.”

“Nor I,” says the Irishman.

“Nor I,” says the Scotsman.

To which the Queen replies:  “Would you kill for me?  Would you maim and hack and slit for me?”

The witnesses agree that it was at this moment that my granddad’s mood changed completely.  It was as though all the good humor had been vacuum-pumped from the room.

He winced.  A shadow passed across his face.  Everyone swears blind that this is what he said next, his voice quaking with emotion:  “This is not a joke.  This is a secret.”

Another wince.  Or rather, an expression which began as a wince before growing into a spasm and was well on its way to becoming a convulsion when he pitched forward on his stool and sprawled face-down in the sticky carpet.  His companions gaped blearily at him.  One or two even wondered whether this might not be part of the fun and were starting to wish that he’d hurry up, get back on his feet and order another brace of drinks, when it became apparent that this was more than play-acting.  A murmur of disquiet.  A small but noticeable sobering up.

A stranger stepped forward from the back of the pub, where he had been sitting, silent and unobserved, nursing a lemonade with a couple of similarly unobtrusive friends.  In a flat, prim voice, he told them that he was a doctor and asked, politely but with the air of someone used to an attentive audience, whether he might be of some assistance.

He wore a dark, old-fashioned suit, a skinny tie and a grubby white shirt with a peculiarly high collar, and he looked completely out of place in that pub, absurdly, embarrassingly incongruous.

No sooner had he appeared than one of his companions, dressed, so far as anyone could tell, in exactly the same quaint way, abandoned his lemonade and trotted up beside him.

Without the slightest trace of emotion, he announced that he too was a doctor and wondered aloud whether he could help to alleviate the situation.

Then, with the woozy logic of a recurring dream, a third stranger, identically attired, strolled up to the bar to casually announce that he’d trained at Barts and that his services were unequivocally at their disposal.

Everyone shuffled back, too befuddled to do much else, as the strangers knelt beside Granddad like the magi turned up by mistake at an old folks’ home.

The first of them rolled him onto his back and reached for his wrist, groping for a pulse with forefinger and thumb.  After a few seconds, he announced that Granddad still lived.  It was only then that any chink of emotion entered his voice.  The entourage told me later that it sounded like disappointment.

As the second man speculated about a stroke, a heart attack, an embolism, the last of the strangers took a handkerchief from the top pocket of his jacket, wiped his brow and suggested that someone call a bloody ambulance.

When Mum told me this story, I stopped her here, my heart cartwheeling in hope.  “You told me he was dead.”

I could hear the sneer in her voice.  “Well,” she said.  “As good as.”

There’s something more you ought to know.  Each of those men, each of those so-called doctors, spoke with a different regional accent, each so pronounced and distinct as to be immediately recognizable.