Edmund Cooper - Kronk

Camilla downed her own whisky and refilled the glasses. “Let’s sit down,” she said. “The cats make a mess of everything. But the settee is still sittable. They will have to go, of course.

I can’t live alone with a menagerie.”

“The best place to begin,” he suggested, “could be the beginning.”

“That means Eustace. At least for this beginning. There were other beginnings, but they didn’t involve cats and suicide.”

“They will keep until this one ends. That reminds me — where did you get that five-kilo weight? It has been worrying me. I think we left it on the bridge.”

“Eustace used it for weighing cat meat… It was quite romantic, I suppose. We met eighteen months ago in St. James’s Park when I was feeding the ducks and being attacked by a swarm of prepubes. I didn’t realize they came out before sunset. But it was winter, and that might explain it.”

“Did the little people want something special?”

“Just the usual. Money, jewellery, clothes. I don’t think they really wanted to hurt me. The eldest was a terrifying child with two great scars on her cheeks, about ten years old.”

“What did Eustace do — call the procs?”

“No, he dropped a gas egg. He always carried one or two with him. He was a very gentle person. He just couldn’t stand violence… The gas hit us all, I think. When I woke up, I was here, still half undressed, and Eustace was watching Marilyn Monroe on the plate. I told you it did things to him. He saw I was awake, then he just looked at me and went mad.” Camilla took another sip of whisky and laughed. “Poor Eustace! White hair, a Siggy Freud beard, striped trousers. He hadn’t had a woman ever, I think. What a mess he made of it! I didn’t know whether to mother him, show him how to do it or sit in the deep freeze. Afterwards, he spent practically all night crying and saying how sorry he was and how rich he was and conning me into a two-year marriage agreement.”

Gabriel drank some more whisky to slow down his confusion. “And you married him because you felt sorry for him?”

“No, Gabriel. I married him because I felt sorry for myself. Before Eustace came along, I’d had a sort of drifting time. With men, I mean. Everybody seemed to want to bounce me, but nobody wanted to keep me. A lezzylove I used to sleep with when I was off the hot rod kick hit it right on the dildo. She said I was too intelligent and too stupid.” Camilla also drank more whisky. “Too intelligent for the meat men and too stupid for the think tanks. I was the little doll they took to bed at night and put away in the morning. The trouble was, I could never afford a bed of my own.”

This time it was Gabriel who poured the drinks. “I hope we are not more than half a bottle away from the pacifist tiger bit.”

Camilla yawned. “Shouldn’t think so. But there’s a problem. I’m in the prommy phase, which is phase one, and whisky makes me more prommy, anyway. But you can’t do it because of the dread disease.”

“What disease?”

“V.D. Actually V.D. P 939, silly.”

Gabriel felt dazed. Very dazed. It seemed long long ago since he had been innocently corrupting a raven at the Albert Memorial. He thought it high time he got a grip on reality. He thought it high time, also, that Camilla resolved various mysteries before too many others accrued. Eustace was a key word. So was marriage. He tried them.

“Eustace. Marriage.”

“Yes, well, it was a two-year thing with five thousand on signature and five thousand on completion. Completion, by the way, is/was two or three months off. I told Eustace I wasn’t going to renew.” Camilla sighed. “Perhaps that’s why he sliced himself on the Circle Line… I thought it was a reasonable offer, because ten thousand pounds will buy a fair amount of time and freedom and things, when you consider. Besides, I wasn’t going to spend anything during the two years. Eustace had promised clothes, holidays, everything. He was a dear, really. I didn’t even mind the Marilyn Monroe tapes and the fabulous fumblings. Left to his own devices, he could usually manage an orgasm after an hour or two. No, the one thing that really threw me was when he started turning the love nest into a refuge for bent animals.”

“Where did he get them?”

“Coming, coming, coming to it,” announced Camilla. She rolled her eyes. “Better not give me any more whisky, archangel mine, otherwise the wondrous tale will fizzle… Yes, he stole them. That’s why top shriek — top secrecy. Do you know anything about mollycollybology?”

“Try again.”

She tried. Hard. “Molly-cular-by-ology.”

“Molecular biology. No. There was something about it, I think, on the buttock of my last reclining nude. But I didn’t trouble to read.”

“Ever the gentleman. Well, do you know anything about D.N.A.?”

“To surprise you, yes. It’s a nucleic acid containing a sugar called deoxyribose. Further it lives — if one may flog the term — in the cell nucleus. Moreover, it is a double helix molecule which is the very stuff of life… I read that bit on the breast… D.N.A. Yes, I’m for it, on the whole.”

“Don’t confound me, Gabriel. Because I don’t know anything at all about molecular biology, D.N.A., enzymes or anything else that goes bump in the lab. But Eustace did. In fact, when he wasn’t getting hot about Marilyn Monroe and sweaty about me, he was away in his stunt house practising all sorts of perversions with bacteria, hard radiation, Petri dishes and God knows what other sex substitutes… But the message is as follows: he finally designed — he was fond of that word design — an interesting little creature called P 939. Its base model, he told me glowingly, was the bacterium that causes syphilis — a spirochete, I think he called it.

But according to Eustace, P 939 was the best and latest venereal disease in the business. No really nasty effects. Except that if you caught it, you couldn’t be beastly any more. I’ve changed my mind. I need another drink before I lose it all.”

Gabirel poured some more whisky into each glass, and was saddened to find that, as a result, the bottle was empty.

“What do you mean, you can’t be beastly any more?”

“The aggressive instinct goes phut. P 939 inhibits aggression. You can’t make war, you can’t knock people about, you can hardly bear to upset them, even. That’s what P 939 does to us. Fiendish, isn’t it? When Eustace was sure he’d pulled it off, he thought he was Jesus Pasteur and Mahatma Einstein all rolled into one.”

Gabriel drank some more whisky and looked at Camilla. He was in no shape to concentrate further on the saga of P 939. He was, however, able to decide that it would be a good and charitable act to offer Camilla Greylaw some consolation for her recent bereavement.

He kissed her. Camilla dropped her glass.

“It is all immensely interesting, but the rest of the story will keep. I fear I have an urgent engagement.”

“Where?”

“In bed with you.”

“The cats. You promised to help feed the cats.”

“What will happen if we don’t feed them till morning?”

“They’ll cry. I couldn’t bear them to cry. I suppose it’s because I’ve got P 939 myself. And that’s another reason why we shouldn’t make love.”

Gabriel sighed. “All right, the cats first. As for the dread disease, my dear mother at the Yurkuti Embassy used to say that a trouble shared is best shared in the most enjoyable way possible… Eustace had a limited imagination. You are more than Marilyn Monroe. You are Ayesha, Helen, Cleopatra, Elizabeth of Austria.”

Camilla stood up, swaying a little. She felt weak at the knees, but it was a weakness not entirely due to the whisky. Gabriel held her close, remembering how he had held her on the bridge. Suddenly he was full of fierce possession. He had saved her from death and now she would repay with life. Big joke.