The Memory of Blood(90)
Robert Kramer saw that he had lost the motorbike, and doubled back. He turned the sat nav back on and followed its instructions, coming off the M25 somewhere near Dunton Green. He headed south into the Kent countryside. The roads grew narrower, the overhead branches grew denser and soon there was only an intermittent signal on his mobile phone.
His headlights picked up the distant homes of the rich, buried behind hedges, beyond fields. He passed an ancient granite church, a dead pub, a handful of dark houses, then nothing but black and green country roads for miles.
The sat nav told him he had almost reached his destination, but there was nothing to be seen outside: no turnoff, no signpost, only spattering rain and the dark treeline at the horizon. He slowed down, searching the hedgerows, and found a car-width space with a twin tyre track running through it. Nosing the wide-bodied Mercedes along the lane, jouncing over the tufts of grass, the branches snatching at his wing mirrors, he saw some kind of farm building ahead.
He pulled up in front of it and opened the window slightly. He felt the spit of rain, and smelled pig dung. It was several degrees colder here than in town. He rarely made trips into the countryside and would not have come tonight, but for the message left at the theatre.
He was wearing light brown handmade shoes, and did not wish to get them stained. Collecting a torch and treading carefully, he made his way to the barn door and tried the handle. It opened easily. Inside were machine-rolled bales of hay; some kind of farm machinery, all red metal and spikes; and what appeared to be a stage area, surrounded by lit candles in curved glass pots, the ones you could buy in cheap hardware stores.
‘Well, you got me here,’ he said aloud, looking up. ‘Now what?’
Somewhere from the rear of the barn he heard piano music start playing—tinny and unreal, presumably an iPod hooked up to a portable system. He walked forward onto the makeshift stage and squinted into the musty darkness. ‘Is this supposed to frighten me?’ he called. ‘If the music is meant to tell me something, you’re wasting your time. How did you know I would come here?’
‘I knew you wouldn’t be able to stay away,’ sang a strange, distorted voice.
‘What is that—Auto-Tune? Or are you meant to be Mr Punch? Dear God, tell me you’re not using a swozzle. There can’t be two of us, you know. Anyway, I think you’ve misunderstood me. It’s not an obsession, just—a role model. I could have picked Flash-man or Moriarty or Julien Sorel from The Red and the Black. Patrick Bateman. Hannibal Lecter. They all rise above mere morality to make something more of themselves.’
There was no reply.
‘Yes, that’s right, I read books. You didn’t know that, did you? That’s what we have to do these days, find a role model. It’s not easy making a success of yourself anymore. You can’t just sit around waiting for a war.’
He walked while he spoke, trying to work out where his adversary was hiding. He stopped to listen, but there was no sound other than the warped piano music and the patter of rain on the barn’s corrugated iron roof. The candles guttered, extending shadows. He paced in a slow circle around the lights, carefully placing one polished shoe in front of the other, his hands linked behind his back, like Prince Philip attending the opening of a new factory.
‘But a funny thing happened when I was a little boy. I grew up in Brighton, and every Sunday afternoon I used to go to the beach to watch the Punch and Judy show. Not because I liked the show—it was always exactly the same—but there was a girl there I cared for. Her father was the Punch and Judy man, so she had to sit there and wait for him. She had a kind of—what do you call them? A pageboy cut, like French girls have, shiny black hair that came to points below her ears. I used to sit behind her and study that soft white neck. I wanted to reach forward and touch it with my tongue. I suppose she was two or three years older than me. I was ten.
‘Well, one day I was sitting behind her, and it had just started to spit with rain, and Mr Punch had come on and was beating the hell out of his wife with a stick, and everyone was laughing, and I reached forward, closer, and—very lightly—touched her neck with my tongue. And she turned around and slapped my face. And all the kids started laughing at me. Well, they probably weren’t, but you know how sensitive you are at that age.
‘I followed her around for weeks, and she never knew I was there. One day I waited while she bought an ice cream, and watched as she walked down the alley back to her horrible little pebble-dashed council house with seashells set into the garden walls, and I kicked her legs from under her and pelted her with stones I had brought from the beach. I broke her teeth and blacked her eyes with them, and then—well, let’s just say I enjoyed my first sexual experience.