Philip Kerr - A Philosophical Investigation

With Tourette’s Syndrome there exists such a disorganisation of thinking that the individual finds himself shouting out obscenities wherever he may be. Billy Liar describes the adventures of a young man who, strictly speaking, is not a liar at all, but merely suffers from an unfettered imagination which constantly causes him to construct elaborate fantasies — to alternate upon reality, as George Steiner has described this.

Consider then a combination of these two: Tourette’s and an uncontrolled fantasy world. Consider me.

A trip to the macromarket is a walk on the wild side. Mentally armed with a selection of military hardware I maim, rape and murder my way along the High Street. A dog tied to a lamppost and barking for its master makes an easy target for my Magnum.47. An old lady dragging her shopping-trolley behind her like a miniature chariot and impeding my self-important path is blasted aside with the hand-held rocket launcher. A grenade dropped into a busker’s guitar-case makes mincemeat of him and his instrument: the neck of the guitar, flying through the air, crashes through a car windscreen and then the head of the driver who has had the temerity to sound his horn at me. A child’s balloon is easily burst with a dab of my cigarette. A woman in a short, tight skirt is bent over the macromarket’s checkout desk, her underwear ripped off her quivering backside and then raped mercilessly from behind. A black man, dropping a handful of litter onto the pavement, is toasted with a short burst of my flame-thrower.

A series of pictures which Goya might have painted, or Michael Winner might have filmed.

A picture is a model of reality. A picture is a fact. It is impossible to tell from the picture alone whether it is true or false. All right then, I can compare it with reality. But there are no pictures which are true a priori. Whatever it is you happen to be thinking about.

To look at me of course you would think that I was probably a well-adjusted sort of person. Well we’re not talking Mr Edward Hyde here, let’s face it. Catch me trampling over some innocent child’s body to leave her screaming on the road. No way. I am courteous and well-mannered, opening doors for ladies and helping young mothers with their push-chairs on the escalators. The usual stuff. And though I say so myself, not bad looking, if a trifle thoughtful.

In Victorian times, Cesare Lombroso, the Italian criminologist, thought that criminality could be explained anatomically, using ethesiometer and craniometer to weigh and measure the skull. Not enough forehead or too much lower jaw were the visible indicators that you might be a wrong ’un. He was the first criminal anthropologist.

Nonsense of course. But while Lombroso was misled in attempting to explain criminality in relation to things like the size of a man’s nose, mouth and ears, subsequent neurological research has demonstrated that he wasn’t so very wide of the mark. When he laid open the skull of an Italian version of Jack the Ripper and perceived, on the internal occipital crest, a small hollow — a hollow which related to a still greater anomaly in the cerebellum (the hypertrophy of the vermis) and to which he later ascribed the propensity to degenerate criminality, he was onto more than even he could have realised.

Of course, Lombroso had still not grasped that the real pointer towards a man’s criminal tendencies lay not on the surface of the skull, but on the surface of the brain. What a pity he got sidetracked with all that nonsense about the habitual criminal’s earlobes.

As it happens my own earlobes are large and Lombroso (the first one) would very possibly have classed me as the criminal type. It’s perhaps just as well that no one can tell what’s going on inside your head. That is no one except the second Lombroso. And this is a kind of tautology.

Jake’s hotel, at least the exterior, reminded her of a detention centre she had once visited in Los Angeles. Outside, there was only a doorman and a taxi-rank to remind you that it was a hotel at all. She would not have been surprised to see a machine-gun nest on top of the knot of the bowtie-shaped building.

She went into the bar and sat up at the counter, ordering a whisky sour and twenty Nicofree, and munching a handful of pistachio nuts while the pale-faced barman unwrapped the cigarettes for her. He lit her silently and then set about mixing her drink.

Jake glanced over her shoulder and checked the room, careful not to make eye-contact with any of the lonelyhearts business travellers who, seeing an attractive single woman, might think they could get lucky with her.

Like the interior of an expensive German car, the hotel bar had a relentless, almost Spartan modernity about it. Charcoal-grey carpet covered the floor and the walls up to the sills of the toughened tinted windows. The black leather seats might have met with a chiropractor’s approval but were hardly relaxing to sit in. The handsome, polished walnut counter displayed a variety of small screens informing guests, at the flick of a cue-button, of everything from the bar-tariff to the evening’s programme of films on cable in the hotel bedrooms.

Jake turned back to face the sharpshooter’s array of bottles behind the bar and fetched her drink off the counter, trying to ignore the hopeful who was already standing next to her in his smooth Italian suit.

‘Is anyone sitting here?’ he asked, in halting German.

‘Nobody but the Lord,’ she replied with greater fluency. She fixed the man with a smug beatific smile of the kind she had seen deployed by the most sickly sweet televangelists.

‘Tell me, friend,’ she asked him quickly. ‘Are you saved?’

The man hesitated, his confidence fading fast in the face of this apparent display of religious zeal.

‘Er, no...’

Jake smiled to herself as she reviewed his likely thought processes. How lucky could a man get with a woman who seemed interested only in the state of his immortal soul?

‘Some other time perhaps,’ said the man, retreating.

‘There’s always time for Jesus,’ Jake remarked, her eyes widening like a madwoman’s. But he was gone.

Jake sipped her drink and laughed. The missionary routine: it never failed. She was an old hand at drinking alone in bars. Unwanted male approaches (and for Jake, all male approaches were unwelcome) seemed no more of an irritation than mosquitoes for some hardened South American explorer: easily swatted and, after a while, you got used to them. She knew that she could have avoided them altogether if she had only frequented lesbian bars. If only things had been that simple.

‘Can I buy you a drink?’ He was an American and naturally assumed that the whole world could speak English.

Jake, who spoke good German, flirted with the idea of pretending to speak not a word of English and then rejected it: she knew that when a man wanted to get into a girl’s pants, conversation could count for very little.

‘I don’t know whether you can or you can’t,’ she said dully.

‘What?’ said the man, wincing.

Jake took a square look at him. Short-haired, fresh-faced, he seemed to be not much older than his collar-size. If he had appeared a little more intelligent, she told herself, she might have fucked him.

‘Yes, it is hot.’

The young American smiled bitterly. ‘What is your problem?’

‘Right now it’s that aftershave, sonny.’ Jake shifted on her stool. ‘Run along before it affects my contact lenses.’

The American’s face took on a nasty look. His lips pursed several times before he thought of something to say back to her.

‘Ball breaker,’ he snarled and then stalked away.