Jonathan Coe - The Dwarves of Death

And then, of course, panting up to the bus-stop came the bane of every journey — the passenger who gets on at the last minute and doesn’t have the faintest idea where he wants to go. Usually a tourist who can’t speak much English and has decided to use the driver as a combination of policeman, street map, bus timetable and change machine. So the bus is stuck there for what seems like a million years while he names some street in Greenwich or Richmond where he wants to go, and the bus driver has to get out his A — Z and explain to him which stop to get off at and which bus he’ll have to catch next, and then the bloke tries to find his fare and he only has a twenty-pound note or ninety-five pence in Japanese yen and the driver has to fish the change out of his back trouser pocket and you could have travelled to Glasgow and back on an inter-city sleeper by the time the bus starts moving again.

When we finally got going, I began to relax very slightly. The experience of being on a bus had a comforting familiarity and normality to it, so that the horrible thing I had witnessed less than twenty minutes ago began to seem almost absurd. The world I was in — the world of half-empty London buses on a Saturday evening, carrying young, smartly dressed people off to parties and clubs and cinemas — didn’t seem to admit of anything as fantastic as the spectacle of two screeching dwarves bashing a man to death. It was stupid. It was crazy.

Stupid and crazy… and yet this was familiar, too. Dwarves and death. Why did it strike a chord — where had I come across these words recently? And then I remembered. It went back to a conversation we had had, the four of us, on the morning we recorded our demo tape.

Was this just coincidence, or had I actually stumbled upon a clue?

It had been a fine feeling to wake up on Tuesday morning and know that I didn’t have to go into work. Even though we had to be at the studio for ten o’clock, this still meant an extra hour in bed. There was no sound from Tina’s room. This was a relief, too. For the last few nights, strange noises had been emerging from behind her door: muffled cries and grunts, suggestive of physical exertions which I preferred not to speculate about. The toilet kept flushing as well. But I had been lying awake when she came back in from work the night before, and it had sounded as though she was on her own.

There were no notes for me in the kitchen. I took my toast into the sitting-room, watched Breakfast Time with the sound turned down and decided to catch up on the latest messages on the answering machine. I had come back quite late myself last night and hadn’t got around to listening to them yet.

There were four messages. One of them was from Madeline: she said that she couldn’t see me tonight after all and could we make it Thursday instead? I was disappointed, of course, and also a little puzzled. She was always telling me that she had no social life apart from her evenings with me. Perhaps she was ill or something.

The other three messages were all from Pedro. They had each been left at different stages of the evening and together they made up quite a little narrative. The first one was relatively coherent and the only thing you could hear on it was his voice. He must have been calling from his flat.

‘Hello, Tina, my little breast of chicken, my little piece of fur. Listen, I will be a bit later than my usual this evening because I am taking the night off and going with some friends to paint the town. But I will still come and see you because I couldn’t do without you for a single night of my life. Expect to feel my key in your lock before dawn, then, my love. Adios.’

For the next message he was speaking from a call-box: he was slightly louder and there were some voices and some music in the background. His speech was starting to sound slurred.

‘Hi, Teeny-babes, we’re having a great time here, and I’m just ringing to say… Hope I can make it tonight… I still want to come… Maybe I’ll be pretty late but I hope you’ll still be wearing something nice like that thing I bought you. You know, that cost me a lot of money and it’s not every shop that will sell you something like that, and I’m sure if you had another go at it you could fit — ’

The pips went and the message ended.

The last one seemed to have been left a few hours later. This time the voices in the background were both male and female, and the music, although it was louder, was now slow and sensual.

‘Hi, Tina, we’re having quite a time here, we’re all higher than a kite and it would be just great if you could come over and join us because we have some great people here, all really good friends of mine, and we could do some great things here if we had a girl like you here, so please come over and bring some things over with you because I…’

This time his voice was just cut off without any explanation, and the tape stopped with a click. He hadn’t left an address for Tina to go and find him. Her door remained ominously shut.

*

Vincent was in a particularly cheerful mood when we arrived at the studio that morning. His favourite customers were using one of the rehearsal rooms: not us, of course, but an all-female band called The Vicious Circles. He was, I need hardly tell you, one of those typical music-business technicians who specialize in making the lives of female musicians a misery. When I arrived, one of The Vicious Circles was standing at his desk complaining that she couldn’t get her amplifier to work.

‘Do you think you could come and look at it?’ she was saying.

‘Look at it? I’ll do more than come and look at it for you, darling. I’ll bring my plug along and stick it in, if you like.’

He was wearing a T-shirt on which a picture of an enormous red rooster was accompanied by the words, ‘Nothing like a nice big cock to wake you up in the morning’.

‘Look, I’m only asking you to come and give me a hand.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind giving you a hand, darling. A hand’ll do nicely to start with. Har, har, har!’

‘I’ll go and do it myself,’ she said, turning.

‘Anything else wrong, is there, darling? You wouldn’t like me to have a look at your fuzz box, would you? Har, har, har!’

She was about to go back downstairs, when two small children suddenly appeared through the front door, wearing matching anoraks. Immediately, all Vincent’s joviality evaporated and he stared at them in horror and fury. For several seconds he was speechless; then he exploded.

‘Kids! What the fucking hell are two bloody kids doing in here? Get them out! Go on, piss off!’

The woman ran over to her children and gathered them in her arms reproachfully.

‘Look, I thought I told you to stay in the car.’

‘It’s boring,’ said the eldest.

‘Are these yours?’ Vincent asked.

‘Yes.’

‘This isn’t a fucking kindergarten, you know. Who said you could bring your kids here?’

‘Well what else am I supposed to do with them while we practise? I can’t afford a minder.’

‘Get those kids out of here and lock them in your fucking car, and don’t bring them in here again.’

‘Come on,’ she said, taking them both by the hand. ‘Back to the car. I’ll keep coming out and seeing you, and I’ll bring you some sweets.’

Vincent turned to me after they’d gone, apparently expecting to find me in sympathy with him.

‘Women with kids should stay at home and look after the little fuckers,’ he said. ‘They don’t know a tit from a tweeter anyway, this lot. Totally clueless.’