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  Bernice’s list was forgotten in a fold of her wedding dress, to be rediscovered a dozen years later when the fighting became so intense that a squall blew it from its hangar in the wardrobe where such sacred artefacts resided. They read it together sitting on the bedroom floor and it was restorative, so much so that they glimpsed the love that had entwined them on their wedding day, but they could not touch it.

  There was a restaurant in London, a spectacularly exclusive restaurant, where people went to be seen and heard but not to eat. As a consequence, the owners of the restaurant had decided that there was no need to actually serve food. Food would be ordered, glorious food of unimaginable complexity and ingenuity, and empty plates would arrive and leave. This was a secret of the rich. It was impossible to book a table in such a restaurant but Jonah had called in a favour that had been bequeathed to him in his father’s will. He was making an effort for their anniversary, in order to prove that he was the kind of man that he and Bernice knew he could never be (had never been).

  In the restaurant, seated, they stared at each other in silence across an acre of pristine tableware, whilst the empty platitudes that filled the room to bursting point circled around Bernice’s head and burrowed behind her eyes where they shrivelled and died. She rose from the table wordlessly in a quest for the toilet and almost immediately collided with a man of athletic build and an abundance of complicated facial features, redolent with celebrity iconography. He nodded a head adorned with a mantle of perfect greying curls in apology and followed her.

  When Bernice returned she was unable to catch her breath. Jonah stared for a minute, something about her had changed inextricably. ‘That man who collided with you, wasn’t he…’ Jonah left his words twisting in the conceptual breeze.

  ‘Adam West,’ Bernice replied. Her eyes scouted the room but there was nowhere to take cover in any direction.

  ‘Your dress is inside out,’ said Jonah, mainly with his hands. He was becoming animated. That was the way it always began.

  ‘I saw you follow him into the men’s toilet and he’s on your list.’ He was shaking now, his eyes blinking in the glare of her betrayal. ‘Did you fuck him? On our anniversary?’

  ‘It isn’t that kind of list,’ replied Bernice, playing with her cutlery, trying to disengage from the evening.

  Jonah pushed his chair back from the table. This was escalating. He had no reverse gear.

  ‘If you didn’t fuck him, then what did you do with him, Bernice? What did you do that meant you had to get out of your dress and back into your dress in a men’s toilet, I’m all ears?’

  ‘I killed him,’ muttered Bernice. ‘I killed him and because of all the blood and there really was a great deal of blood, more than you could imagine, I washed my dress and turned it inside out so you wouldn’t notice, but you did notice so that didn’t work. Can we get the bill please?’

  ‘You killed Batman.’

  ‘I killed Batman.’

  ‘Where is he now?’ hissed Jonah.

  ‘In one of the toilet stalls, well that’s not quite true, his torso is in one of the toilet stalls, his head is in one of the cisterns. I suppose I panicked a little.’

  Jonah sat back in his chair. The sheer enormity of scale of their current situation was one which life up to that point had left him somewhat ill equipped to cope with.

  ‘You decapitated Batman,’ Jonah whispered, shooting a glance at the direction of the last resting place of the caped crusader. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, it’s like you said,’ replied Bernice calmly, smoothing down her dress. ‘He was on my list.’

  Chapter 9

  M’s memories of his life with Saul and his wife suggested that he lived a very different version of reality to the other participants.

  ‘You appear to be living a very different version of reality to the other participants,’ said M’s wife (who was in the process of manufacturing Daniel in her womb), as she navigated Saul’s buggy around the fronds of early morning frost that decorated the fringes of the paving slabs in Camden Market.

  M bent down to pick up Saul’s favourite toy ‘face-face’ which was a cross between a giraffe and a turtle and placed it back into his son’s hand. M noticed that each tiny cuticle bore a mark which resembled the heliosphere of a diffused supernova. His son’s smile was untainted by human frailty but more importantly there was no sign that he had inherited the affliction of unbridled rage.

  M’s wife brushed an illusory crumb from the lapel of her coat for the three hundredth time since leaving home that morning, clenched and unclenched her hands and tried to bring the world back into focus. Every item of her clothing was an identical shade of crimson but to her, her clothes were glaringly unmatched to a degree which made her feel nauseous whenever she caught sight of her reflection.

  Saul threw face-face on the floor again where it garnered several muddy leaves.

  ‘He keeps doing that,’ she said without opening her teeth.

  M picked the toy up again, flicked the leaves off and handed it back to Saul. He ran his fingers through his son’s hair and he remembered the way that Saul had ensnared his heart when he was placed into his arms, seconds after he had been born. He would have been handed to his mother but she was being restrained by three hospital orderlies, having chinned her midwife with a flawless right hook when she had demanded that she ‘push’ one time too often.

  ‘He likes the game,’ said M.

  ‘He likes irritating the fuck out of his mother. Did you know there are 2.2 million germs living on the average leaf?’

  ‘No but I’m sure our two-year-old son does. He learned about biomechanical diversity right after singing baa baa black sheep whilst sitting in a nappy full of his own shite.’

  Saul waved face-face in the air above his head, giggled and threw it towards the ground where it was caught in mid-air.

  ‘I think this belongs to the little girl,’ said a man whose expression was as resolutely desolate as a child’s mitten abandoned in a field.

  ‘Boy,’ replied M.

  ‘I see,’ said the man, his tone laden with sarcasm. He knelt down and reached out a sullied hand towards Saul’s pram which was swiftly intercepted by M’s wife’s stockinged calf.

  ‘Trying to give the little girl back her toy,’ said the man.

  ‘Not going to happen,’ said M’s wife, snatching face-face from the man’s grip by the ends of her fingertips and wondering whether Camden Markets Authority offered a quarantine facility to members of the public.

  ‘No need to be like that,’ said the man, raising himself to his full height like a giant smudge on a fading film poster.

  ‘Cunt off and die, wank sack,’ said M’s wife with a high degree of proficiency.

  A Magellanic cloud passed across the man’s expression. He glanced at M who at this point in time (before Saul’s death), weighed little more than a damp spaniel and fixed upon M’s wife. He reached into the inside of his orange Puffa jacket and pointed a convincingly long kitchen knife in the direction of Saul’s face.

  ‘Give me your purse or I will stick the little girl, bitch.’

  M observed the scene as if it was a cartoon strip. He watched a speech bubble emerge from his mouth and float above his head and in it were written the words ‘put the knife down, I am a policeman’.

  The man punched M in the face, the ring on his finger unzipped M’s eyebrow and left it flapping like an errant caterpillar.

  ‘If you say another word, I swear I will cut you so badly that the little girl won’t be able to recognise you, now tell your slag to give me her purse before I stab up the child.’

  Saul began to cry and reached out his arms for his mother and father. M’s wife leant towards him and the man pushed her hard in the chest, causing her to fall backwards into an icy puddle.

  M was familiar with the concept of rage. Given that his father had killed the best man at his own wedding with a Corby Trouser Press for forgetting the ring, and his mother had disembowelled
a member of the crew of the Starship Enterprise before her twentieth birthday, it would be fair to say that he was aware that he may have inherited something of a short temper but thought he had always managed to keep it under check. He was determined to break the cycle and knew that if Saul glimpsed the darkness in his heart for even a second, it would spread like a virus to his son and to the generations to come. This little boy, this perfect little person was still a blank canvas. He knew every day as their eyes met that Saul was drinking in his father’s persona, that every mannerism, every gesture was germinating the tiny shoots that would grow tall and proud into the man he would become. To uncork the bottle for even a moment would be a betrayal of the father M was determined to be. But M knew, as he felt his son’s eyes fall upon him, that occasionally one has to make a tiny exception and cause really fucking severe physical damage to another person’s body.

  ‘I am really sorry,’ said M, more to his son than the man whose leg he had just kicked so hard that the kneecap had spun around 360 degrees. As the man turned towards M with his knife, M’s wife stood up and headbutted him. She noticed that the blood splattered from his ruined nose was almost imperceptible on her crimson jacket.

  ‘Daddy is just going to take this man for a little walk,’ said M’s wife.

  M picked the man up in a fireman’s lift and dumped him onto a stall selling tiny opaque jars of artisan preserves, which were thrown scuttling across the Camden Town cobblestones in a thousand directions.

  Saul had stopped crying but this expression was far worse. He looked calm, as if what he had witnessed was normal. M swore to himself that he would teach his son the vocabulary of patience and forgiveness but it was a language that M simply did not speak and had he tried, no one would have listened.

  Chapter 10

  Hampstead Police Station

  July 23rd

  Police interview with Mrs M.

  Recording re-commences.

  14.26 Detective Sergeant Ulstram enters the interview room to join Detective Sergeant Arnold.

  DSU: Mrs M, I have heard your account of the events of the 16th July but would like to go over it one more time.

  DSA: For the benefit of the recording, Mrs M shrugs her shoulders.

  DSU: Can you explain why it was you travelled to Sainsburys supermarket in Swanage to do your shopping when it was 138 miles from your home in Kentish Town?

  MM: They sold macaroons. Sainsburys in Kentish Town had run out.

  DSU: You drove 138 miles for macaroons?

  MM: I like macaroons.

  DSU: And there was nowhere closer?

  MM: That’s exactly what my husband asked at the time, which is why I chose Swanage.

  DSU: In order to be facetious?

  MM: I wanted to see how far I could test his patience before he snapped.

  DSU: And how far was it?

  MM: On the North Circular, just after joining a line of stationary traffic on Hanger Lane – that’s when he first tried to get out of the car. I didn’t want him to get out of the car, so I kicked the central locking button so hard that it disappeared into the engine cavity. That pretty much meant he was never going to be able to get out of the car again. It all went downhill quite quickly from there.

  DSU: Please deal with the confrontation with Mr Masumba.

  MM: I had just parked up outside Sainsburys in Swanage, climbed out of the car window and got on to the car roof with a spade. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary. This parking attendant told me I couldn’t stop my car diagonally across the entrance to the car park and I told him I obviously could because that’s exactly what I had just done. I told him if he didn’t like it he should get on to the car roof and tell me he didn’t like it to my face.

  DSU: And what happened?

  MM: He got onto the car roof and told me he didn’t like it to my face.

  DSA: I’m sorry, where did you find a spade?

  MM: In the boot of the car – Mr M always has a spade in the boot in case he needs it – he has never really explained why and it’s not the kind of thing you ask Mr M about.

  DSU: And where was Mr M during all this?

  MM: He was still in the car – you’ve seen the size of him – he isn’t climbing out of a car window any time soon.

  DSU: So Mr Masumba and you were on the car roof.

  MM: Yes, and I told him, sometimes you get a feeling inside you and it just grows and grows until it’s burning your throat and screaming into every facet of your existence to get out and it becomes so big that all that is left of you is that feeling, but it makes you afraid because you know it is too big and if you let it out there will be nothing left of you. It is horror and it is hope and it is everything that identifies you and everything that wants to destroy you. It is every mountain and every climber and every avalanche all at once. So I told him to let me be on that car roof because that was all that there was of me.

  DSU: And did Mr Masumba understand?

  MM: No, he didn’t, so I twatted him in the head with the spade and he fell off the car roof. He didn’t say very much after that.

  DSU: Didn’t your husband try to intervene?

  MM: He did try to slide over into the driver’s seat, presumably to drive off with me on the roof but at thirty-two stone, that arse hasn’t seen much sliding action over the past few years.

  DSU: So Mr Masumba was lying on the ground and your husband was stuck in the car.

  MM: And I stayed sitting on the car roof until someone came, which didn’t take long, what with Mr Masumba screaming and the continual sound of the car horn, caused by my husband’s left arse cheek having been wedged against it.

  DSU: Can you explain why you hit Mr Masumba? It seems to have been very much out of character.

  MM: I was angry, angrier than I have ever been in my life. It was nothing to do with the parking issue really, just what my husband had said to me a few minutes before.

  DSU: Which was?

  MM: Which was that I had killed our little boy, our first son, well, more that he told me that if it wasn’t for me, he would still be alive. Which wasn’t true. Well, maybe it was true but I had never allowed myself to think that way before and once I did, after he had opened the bottle and let out that genie I could never, have never been able to stop thinking it.

  DSU: Your youngest son was killed in a car accident?

  MM: Yes, he was only two, nearly three but never quite three. I was on my way to hospital to have Daniel and I was late, I’m always late, The Late Mrs M they call me. My husband was already at the hospital and I dithered and went back to check that the house was locked and the gas was off and the dog was locked in the back garden, except we didn’t have a dog, he died the year before, my fault as well. But that’s another one of my issues, this checking thing and if we had just left thirty seconds earlier perhaps I wouldn’t have been in so much pain from the birth and…

  DSU: But it wasn’t your fault.

  MM: There are a thousand degrees of fault, Detective Sergeant and one less would have kept my little boy alive. I know I made my husband angry, very angry, but what he said to me could never be unsaid, I could never be un-blamed and there we sat, Mr Masumba on the ground, me on the roof of the car and my husband, arse wedged on the horn of a car he never wanted, all of us hating each other more with every breath we took. He stole everything from me with those words, he stole my family and he stole my life and in that moment I knew that all I had left was the sea.

  DSU: Mrs M standing up and removing her microphone. Mrs M, would you please sit down, Mrs M walking towards the interview room door and – she has collapsed, Mike, get her into the recovery position, interview ends at 2.42pm

  Chapter 11

  The adults in Daniel’s life – the largely absent manic mermaid and the murderous blubber fest who were masquerading as parents – had long since abandoned any pretence of engaging with him positively. His existence merely added volume to their rabid disputes, fuel to the raging forest fire of their mutual
contempt. It was therefore somewhat unfortunate that the remainder of Daniel’s extravagantly dismal existence was dominated by Dorsal Grellman.

  Dorsal Grellman was not a conventional school bully. His proficiency, his sheer despicable aplomb, was such that he commanded gratitude from those whose lives he systematically decimated. Dorsal was a pestilence, he inflicted himself on others, was wistfully destructive, impressionistic in his awful creativity. He was familiar with remorse as an abstract concept, just not one he had ever experienced. Teachers, rules, pain thresholds, laws, were irritating obstructions to be traversed. He had developed a second sense, a bat-like radar for victims and a hunger for their ruination which grew wilder with every taste.

  Those who encountered Dorsal Grellman fleetingly as he unleashed his peculiar cruelty upon them might reasonably have assumed that he had been born in ancient Sparta, abandoned on a mountainside to perish, only to be discovered and raised by a pack of wolves. It was impossible to imagine that this determinedly poisonous, emotionally feral bastard had been the progeny of socially mobile and respectable parents who once loved and cherished him, as opposed to wild beasts who feasted upon the steaming innards of their victims.

  There is an ill-conceived assumption that only an upbringing redolent with abuse could create a Dorsal Grellman. It isn’t always violence which begets violence – in Dorsal’s case it was the withdrawal of love which had hitherto been unconditional. He was not to know that there was a ‘best before’ date stamped on his parent’s affections, an expiry date on their investment when they would withdraw all and leave him emotionally bankrupt.