Russell Hoban - Linger Awhile

I never meant to kill Rose Harland, she was the only sweet thing that’s happened to me since I became undead. I remember the softness of her lips and how she clung to me while I held her to keep her from falling.

There’s no sweetness for me any more. That fucking Chauncey.

4 February 2004. The emptiness left by Rachael’s death was bigger than whatever else there was around it. All those years of her gone! After I saw Detective Inspector Hunter I went home and arranged for my foreman to run the farm for me, then I booked a room for two weeks at the Regent Palace Hotel near Piccadilly Circus. Every morning I woke up and looked out of my window at a row of orange wheelie bins with a row of scooters and motorbikes in front of them in Glasshouse Street. Eros was not part of my view. Every day I walked up Brewer Street to Lexington near the corner of Beak, the spot where Hunter thought Rachael had been killed. I had a feeling that the person or thing that had killed her might return to it. I knew that Rachael was with me and I sensed that I could tune into her killer through her.

People came and went. Day after day and night after night nothing happened until yesterday evening. The dark came early and the street lamps didn’t so much illuminate as just give everything a yellowish cast. I could feel a lurking presence — I could almost see a dim shape as if I were wearing night-vision goggles. Whatever it was was coming closer. I had no weapon but there was a skip full of rubbish and I saw the legs of a wooden chair sticking out of it. I broke off a chair leg and waited. Somebody got between me and the dim shape and I said, ‘Get out of the way!’ but he didn’t, and it was on him. Everything went into slow motion then, I couldn’t see very well and it took me a long time to get to where it was happening. I saw it clearly then, a young woman bending over the man on the ground. She had her teeth in his neck and she looked up at me with blood running down her chin. It was like a Hammer horror film. I knocked her away from the man with the chair leg, then I grabbed her by the hair and jammed the chair leg into what I hoped was her heart. She let out a terrible scream and a geyser of blood shot up out of her. Then she became black-and-white, then flat, then nothing but dust blowing in the wind. There was no blood on the pavement. The chair leg was lying there but she was gone and the man was dead. He was Chinese.

‘Was that the one that killed you?’ I said to Rachael, and I felt a heaviness go away from me so I knew I’d got it right. I walked back through the noise and dirt of London to the Regent Palace Hotel and in the morning I checked out and went home.

3 February 2004. ‘Shall we put the score at Vampires three, Plod nil?’ said Burke.

‘A true Briton would not support Vampires,’ I said.

‘Who said I was supporting them?’ said Burke. ‘I’m just telling it like it is. Here’s poor old Chauncey Lim missing all of his blood and found in the neighbourhood of our usual suspects. That makes a hat-trick for the other side. Have you got a clue?’

‘You can be very irritating at times, Harry.’

‘I’ve been told that before,’ said Burke. ‘I can’t think why. Have you got a suspect?’

‘Well, there are two Justines out there now and my money’s on Justine One.’

‘I suppose you’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of being right. What’s your next move?’

‘That’s on a need-to-know basis, Harry.’

‘Oh, yes. Who needs to know?’

‘I do.’

I looked at Chauncey Lim’s dead face, at his bloodless body, at what remained of whatever he was and whatever he wanted and hoped for. All of that had been drained out of him with the blood and now he was something small and left behind. Might he still be alive if I’d kept him in the nick another day? Probably she’d have got him sooner or later now that she’d come out. There was a tattoo on his chest, a line of Chinese characters. There were no relatives in this country so Rosalie and Lester Chun came to view the body and Lester was kind enough to translate the tattoo. ‘Form, emptiness,’ he said. ‘Emptiness, form.’

‘Is that a quote from something?’ I said.

‘I think it’s a Buddhist thing,’ he said, ‘but I’m not sure. I’m an atheist, myself.’

5 February 2004. Irv’s dead. What do I do now? Just the other night he said he loved me but even then I didn’t know what he was to me. Now that he’s gone there’s an Irv-shaped empty space that’s bigger than he was.

And while mourning him and missing him I’m really pissed off at him because it was his thing for Justine that started all this. How fucking old does a man have to be before he stops being an adolescent? There were four of us involved in the Justine business. Now half of us are gone and Rose Harland’s dead and there are two Justines out there.

Artie is Irv’s only living relative and when Irv was in intensive care at St Eustace he told Artie that he wanted to be cremated in a cardboard coffin and his ashes scattered at sea. No funeral procession, no service of any kind, just him in a box to the crematorium. So those were the arrangements Artie made.

From Fulham the streets unrolled behind the hearse through the everydayness of the living; from south London to North London and Hoop Lane with Irv in his cardboard coffin. The day was cold and grey. At the crematorium our footsteps on the gravel had a funereal sound. Some buildings stand, some sit; Golders Green Crematorium abides. It abides in its red brick and the seniority of the bodies it has swallowed. The cloistered entrance to the chapel looked as if hymns should be coming out of it but Irv had said no music so there was none.

When we were inside the chapel and Irv was ready to roll Artie put on a yarmulke and said Kaddish : ‘ Yiskaddal ve’yizkaddash she’may rabboh …’ The words had the colours of strangeness and the strangeness was heightened by the guttural sound. It was as if Irv were all dressed up in Jewishness for his final disappearance. We watched the coffin slide through the doors. No music, just the hum of the mechanism. See you, Irv.

The next day we collected the ashes. When we got back to my place I threw out the plastic urn and put them in a biscuit tin.

‘It might take me a couple of days to get the next part sorted,’ said Artie.

‘Where at sea are we going to scatter the ashes?’ I asked him.

‘Knock John,’ he said.

‘What’s Knock John?’

Artie handed me a postcard. ‘It’s a sandbank in the Thames Estuary,’ he said, ‘and that thing you’re looking at is a derelict World War Two fort that was built there.’

‘I guess it must have meant something to him.’

‘Must have. I’ll ring you up when I know more.’

I pictured the Thames Estuary: grey water widening to the sea. The fort in the picture looked sad in the postcard sunlight, pale and faded, a gunless platform standing on two hollow legs that were the round towers where the crew had lived. It looked haunted. I imagined the creaking cries of gulls wheeling over it but there’d be nothing to eat so they probably wouldn’t. I guess we all have oceans in our minds. Now Irv was all gone, all his days and years and the oceans in his mind.

And in the meantime there were two Justines out there and I’d probably have to deal with one of them pretty soon. The last I saw of J Two she was snoring away in a chair at my place but she woke up and saw Irv standing over her ready to knock her out of the park with my Louisville Slugger. She did a real vampire snarl, sent us both sprawling, and was gone. We were bound to meet again one way or another. I thought I’d go looking for her before she came looking for me.