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  We are getting married on the main concourse of Cliftonville Railway station. M explained that this was (a) because his sister liked trains (b) that this was as good as it was going to get and he had rejected his brother and sister’s other ideas which included runway number 3 at Stansted Airport, the landing site of Apollo 11 in the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon, the Bridge on the River Kwai and Hull (c) there are excellent toilet and catering facilities and (d) according to his sister Bathsheba, trains sing to you at night with the voices of the children who live in the waves.

  I think that his father broke him in a way that can never be fixed. You could reassemble M but there would always be three pieces left on the side which you could find no use for; these would be his conscience, his sense of morality and his ability to experience happiness.

  I fear for us if we were to have a child but most of all, I fear for the child.

  She stood, put her journal away in a drawer she would never open again, straightened her wedding dress and made her way towards the rest of her life. There was a single word written on the journal, it was ‘romance.’

  Chapter 24

  ‘I have a very special wedding present for you,’ said Bernice, M’s mother. ‘You won’t like it.’

  They were standing in the waiting room on Platform 3 of Cliftonville Railway Station. Clive and Bathsheba had insisted that the guests should not observe what they had described as ‘Shangri-La meets the 1435mm standard gauge railway system’ until the finishing touches were complete. The station manager had become so distressed when shown the advance sketches of Clive and Bathsheba’s ‘graphic vision’ for the main concourse that he had become doubly incontinent. It had been necessary for M to pop him down to the local A & E to select a ‘pick and mix’ of disabling injuries should he remain demur, before the function was given the green light.

  Adjusting M’s cravat in a proprietorial manner, Bernice sighed. This rudderless craft, careening blindly down life’s waterways, leaving one fatal collision after another in its wake, was all her own work. She had borne him for nine long months, shat him out and watched him melt under the wicked gaze of his father, without lifting a finger to stop the party. What more could you ask of a parent?

  Bernice was wearing a full length amber velour evening dress and walked with the swagger of a victorious barbarian raider. She removed a small square present wrapped in hessian, bound in a silk bow entwined with razor wire from her handbag and handed it, carefully, to M. It was a golden framed photograph of a man who could bleed you dry without opening his mouth.

  ‘You remember your father, I hope?’ enquired Bernice.

  ‘When I was five he tried to cook my brother and I on a barbecue. I went through ten years of intensive weekly psychotherapy after blowing a hole in his head with the gun he gave me as a birthday present, a gun that you let him give me. I still have waking and sleeping nightmares about him – last night I dreamt that the hole in his demolished head sprouted teeth and tried to eat me, so yes, I do remember my fucking father,’ replied M.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Bernice, ‘whatever, anyway, this is my present to you.’

  ‘A picture of my dead father.’

  ‘Well, this is a picture of him not being quite so dead,’ replied Bernice. ‘It was taken last week.’

  M looked at the photograph again.

  ‘Am I pissing on your parade?’ asked Bernice.

  M could not breathe. He sat down heavily onto the floor in the corner of the waiting room amidst the souls of a million dust bunnies.

  ‘The wall was covered with globules of his brain, a shard of his skull lodged in Bathsheba’s hip and had to be dug out,’ said M, ‘how can he be…’

  ‘You were catatonic, you were always such a lightweight, you don’t know what you saw. I scooped up all the bits of head gunk that looked important into a lunchbox with a bit of ice – I always knew that the Girl Guide training would come in handy – grappled him into the boot of the car and we all went on a nice trip to see Dr Mark-with-a-CK. If you are going to make an opium addled, cross-dressing, struck-off brain surgeon the godparent of your children you might as well get the best possible use out of him, I always think.

  ‘While the three of you were screaming sweet nothings in the car, Dr Mark-with-a-CK was proving that you can put Humpty Dumpty together again, although possibly not in the right order. I told you all that daddy had gone to Hades but he was in Hackney, running a cafe all this time. He was a cunt with half a brain and three children before you shot him and he was a cunt with half a brain and a cafe in Hackney after you shot him. If anything, you did him a favour.’

  ‘This is…’ M did not know what it was, it felt like his hands were stopping his head from falling off.

  ‘Evil,’ replied Bernice. ‘Well here’s a newsflash, old sport, I’m not very nice, it’s our collective DNA, it’s like a family tradition. We should have written it on the little tag that was sewn into the back of your school jumper instead of your name. You can run away from it as fast as your little legs will carry you but you will still keep arriving back at the same place – Bastard on Thames.’

  Bernice crouched down so that her face was inches away from M’s.

  ‘You are so much like your father,’ she whispered, ‘you have his sensibility and his insatiably cruel hands. Oh and just before I go, because I’m not hanging around to see the Mardi Gras of shite your brother and sister have conjured up for your wedding day, I have a little prediction. One day when you have a child, M, a child who is not loved despite your indefatigable capacity to love, a child like you, your father, Jonah, will come to your door and you will open it and let him in. He will want to speak to your child and you will let him. Until then, don’t get too preoccupied by this happiness thing – it won’t last.’

  With this, Bernice swept off into the embrace of her very own perfidious Albion, never to enter into M’s orbit again.

  *

  The bride threaded her arm through Clive’s at the double doors leading to the station concourse. Her prospective brother-in-law was dressed in what could best be described as ‘period noir’.

  ‘Is that human blood?’ asked the bride, pointing an expensively manicured cuticle at Clive’s crimson spattered dress shirt. ‘No, no, no,’ giggled Clive, ‘human blood, no, of course not.’ He opened the doors allowing her to greet the audacious horror he had knitted from strands of reality. ‘It’s pig’s blood,’ he said, leading her down the ‘aisle’ towards her gaping guests.

  *

  ‘It’s an abattoir,’ hissed M as he and his sister entered the thronged, white silken pavilion which his siblings had erected on the concourse. His guests sat on either side of the interior, flanked by tall poles, and at the far end was the altar, which had been constructed out of small cages. Atop each of the poles was a dripping pig’s head.

  ‘It’s not an abattoir, it’s a charnel house,’ sighed Bathsheba proudly.

  When the bride arrived at the entrance to the pavilion on Clive’s arm, Bathsheba raised her hand and each of the pig’s heads burst into flames. Fat perspired down the poles onto the ground in pools.

  M’s siblings had dispensed with traditional music to accompany the bride. As she advanced, the mice in the cages which made up the altar, all of whom had been mic’ed up to speakers, began twilling and chirruping in unison as an undulating electrical charge pulsed through them. The noise was a stomach-churning cacophony.

  When the bride reached M’s side, Clive released a brace of white doves to whose feet the wedding rings had been tied. They fluttered above the heads of the guests until Bathsheba released the hawk. In seconds the rings had fallen to the ground at the bride’s slippered feet amongst still trembling dove miscellany.

  A number of guests screamed but it was difficult to be certain exactly how many because most of them were already crying.

  The registrar had observed these events unfold before her eyes distractedly. This was partially because she had been marrying people fo
r over forty years and was not easily surprised but mainly because her leg had been chained to a tiger. The tiger had been heavily dosed with cannabis but it had begun to lick the registrar’s foot in a way that might have been either loving or tasting, it was difficult to say which.

  ‘Dearly-beloved-we-are-gathered-here-today-for-the-marriage-of-these-two-people,’ said the registrar with tiger-related rapidity. ‘Any objections? No, rings on fingers, good, do-you-take-him, yep, you-her-right – I hereby-declare…’

  ‘Stop,’ shouted the bride. ‘This is my fucking wedding day. Mine. Never mind the burning pig’s heads and the tiger and the amplified mouse singing and the dove slaughter. Never mind the commuters gawping and the guests throwing up on themselves and my imaginary mother in the bubble and my killer sperm donor father. This is the day that I marry the man that I love, the beautiful man that I love.’ She took M’s hand. ‘And none of this bullshit is going to get in the way of that.’

  ‘Are those your vows, because if they are if we can just wrap this up, I need to…’ said the Registrar who had sensed, more than heard, a low menacing growl emanating from the floor near to her feet.

  ‘No they aren’t my fucking vows,’ screamed the bride.

  ‘M, you have been a terrible boyfriend. You are ill mannered to the point of obsession, a poor conversationalist, a clumsy, perfunctory lover and possibly the most impatient living thing since life first scrambled out of the primordial soup. But when I look into your eyes, when I really look, I know that you are the place I need to be.’

  M lifted his bride’s veil and for a moment, sobs clotted his throat.

  ‘When I’m with you,’ said M, ‘the screaming in my heart stops. I can find a path through the savagery that claims me and seek sanctuary. I love you for what you have shown me I could be and whatever happens to stain that love as the hours turn to tears, it will always, in some form, endure.’

  The bride looked at the ring that M had placed on her finger. Encrusted into the top in diamonds was a number 5.

  ‘Fives are really important,’ said M’s wife, a single tear working its way timidly out of the corner of her eye.

  ‘I know they are,’ replied M, smiling with all the strength that he possessed.

  ‘You-are-now-declared-husband-and-wife-you-may-kiss-the-bride, now get this tiger off my fucking ankle,’ said the Registrar.

  The kiss was a moment of true honesty for M and his wife, which was only replicated when they stood together in silence as M held their dead son Saul in his arms.

  ‘I’m suddenly ravenous,’ said M. ‘I feel as if I haven’t eaten anything my whole life and I need to start right now and never stop.’

  And he never did.

  Chapter 25

  The ‘gut-buster breakfast’ at the Belvedere Cafe in Fetter Lane consisted of fifteen eggs, twelve sausages, ten rashers of bacon, twenty-two slices of fried toast, five black pudding slices, a catering-sized tin of baked beans and a tomato. op had chosen the slimline option which omitted the tomato and was in the process of licking his empty plate clean. He had been crying since taking his first mouthful and the egg yolk that had not yet surrendered to his tongue had dripped down the side of the plate onto his shirt and tie. Only four people had ever consumed the entire gut-buster breakfast and all of them suffered from severe personality disorders. When M ordered the same again, the cafe’s owner’s left hand had hovered over his telephone with thoughts of calling the local Mental Health Service emergency line, but he decided that having yet another customer sectioned for eating his food would, on balance, be bad for business.

  Neither Daniel’s father nor his stomach actually wanted him to consume this tsunami of calories each day – this was not a diet, it was an assault – but his capacity for self-destruction outweighed his sense of self-preservation and his buttocks outweighed everything else.

  It had not always been this way. As a child he had been sinuous and perpetually in motion, as much to evade his father’s fists as his mother’s embrace. He survived life in his parents’ world where there were a hundred different words for pain. He was not inherently aggressive, yet once he discovered that he could deliver violence as arbitrarily as he received it he could not stop.

  Special occasions came and went as anonymously as pigeons on a telegraph pole in a home without empathy. On his twelfth birthday, he received a jar of marmalade from his sister, a tangerine from his brother and a brief period of armistice from his parents. Jonah had beckoned him over, handed him a package and retired to a safe distance as if it were a small bomb. M reasoned that it might be, but that would have belied the true nature of their relationship. To have made his son explode would have been a tacit admission that he cared enough to disassemble him. It was the absence of caring that made his slaps sting more than the weight of their delivery.

  As M tore gingerly at the wrapping paper, he had to admit that the gift was not what he had been expecting, even from a father who slammed his own head repeatedly into the wall if he got a question wrong on University Challenge. It was a loaded 10mm Glock hand gun.

  ‘I want you to stop her,’ said Jonah, nodding towards Bernice, who stepped backwards as if she had been headbutted.

  Jonah tutted as his son held the gun by the tip of its nozzle as if it were the leg of a tarantula that was rearing up to bite him.

  ‘I want you to stop her now.’ he shouted, yet despite its volume he could barely make his voice heard. Jonah and his children stood at either end of the floral patterned settee with the curry stain on the arm, but it felt like they were a thousand miles apart on a lake of ice which was cracking beneath their feet.

  Shepherding his brother and sister behind him, M placed his hands around the pistol grip and pointed the gun first at his mother and then at Jonah but he was shaking too much to aim it – it was the weight of every broken promise that had ever been made to him.

  Jonah wondered why the children were not crying, but tears were just another symptom of love and they were immune to it. He had devoured them from the inside until they were empty.

  ‘It’s been a while since we went dancing, Jonah,’ said Bernice, smoothing down her dress, her hands smearing a bloodied smile on the bleached white cotton. ‘Dancing is the only time you look at me with joy and hold me without malice.’

  ‘Kill her and then kill yourself,’ demanded Jonah, but when he looked down at the tattered carpet he could see that the ice below his feet had broken. When the bullet hit him in the head, he plunged downwards into frozen darkness.

  The image of Jonah’s expression that night, like the face of his dead son, never left M. They were superimposed one upon the other, the features of each morphing and evolving. Today their eyes were the yolks of two eggs, their mouths were a Cumberland sausage and their noses were a rasher of fried bacon.

  His second gut-buster breakfast only half finished, M looked into the eyes of the police constable who stood over him with the kind of disgust normally reserved for peculiarly spectacular roadkill. ‘Have you finished?’ asked the young officer somewhat uneasily.

  Daniel’s father straightened the lapels of his police sergeant’s jacket with eggy fingers, put on his helmet, pushed the plate away and began the first of the fourteen stages involved in raising his audacious bulk from sitting to standing, each one ushered in with a different verbal obscenity.

  ‘You finish it for me,’ he snarled, grabbing the young officer by the scruff of the neck and smashing his face directly into the remnants of his breakfast.

  For a second, just before his face hit the plate, the policeman thought he saw the face of a child staring back at him.

  Chapter 26

  Prithy Daines lived on Back Beach in Lyme Regis. Every day he would lovingly assemble and interweave the embers of the ocean into an abode, adorning it with curious shells and stones as if he were a sultan and this was his palace. Each morning he raced up and down the beach with brimming arms and fell upon a choice location perilously close to the water’s
edge, his fingers working in a blur of delirious erection.

  When construction was complete, he would fashion a commode and a bench and the fixings for a small door, with which he would close away the world. In those moments he would stretch out his arms and touch the sides of his kingdom and in his heart he knew that this was what freedom meant. He would listen to the querulous gulls and the distant horns of fishing boats jousting for their square inch of tide and gradually, a horror would dawn upon him from which he could not escape. He was a man had who built his home in the lair of a demon who did not share and could not forgive, he was a artisan and an architect, a dreamer and a beseecher but most of all, he was an imbecile.

  Every day he built his home on the beach and every day the tide would come in and destroy it. Prithy Daines hated the sea and the sea hated Prithy Daines. This was not a symbiotic relationship, more the ultimate exercise in futility, but futility was all he had. It was not that he hoped to defeat the ocean, more that one day it might tire of kicking him in the balls and pick on something its own size.

  That morning he awoke at dawn to a cruel northern rain, whipping at his shrouded face with despicable vigour, a wind, bitter and revealing, chilling him to the core, and through a granular mist, where the shambles of his creation should have lain, he saw a woman in a tattered floral swimming costume.