In Twenty-One Parts

1 The Reason I Know Roland Kipkin

The only reason I know Roland Kipkin is that I live in this rather secluded valley where it's hard to buy everything one needs, and at one time Kip seemed to be the only source of cannabis.

2 The Hairy and the Smooth

Now before I carry on with this story I'm afraid I'm going to have to tell you a bit more about this secluded valley I mentioned earlier.

The inhabitants here can be divided into Hairies and Smooths. Not long ago, they were all Hairies, leathery-faced goblins with woolly caps and clothes stapled on, who farmed. But lately these have been displaced by a taller, smoother new folk from the towns and cities. Beamed cottages and school-houses were bought up. Their rotting yards were scraped out and their smelly plumbing chromed. Bright-eyed labradors replaced mangy country mongrels. The aboriginal Hairies, therefore, sloped off into reservations with the appearance of state-subsidised housing, concrete boxes known as ‘council houses; they bought videos.

I'm a Smooth.

Kipkin is a Hairy.

3 The Way He Lived

Apart from a cannabis dealer, he was a known petty thief. The newer, smoother residents of Skatlingfield affected to despise Kipkin and might smile at each other behind his back at the village shop or in the petrol station. But in reality, they held him in awe. Especially the men, because Kipkin had a ‘ferocious little girlfriend’ called Ella who would shriek at them that they were ‘stuck-up rich bastards’, and that turned them on. So, far more than they resented each other for their respective Swedish cars, they envied Kipkin ‘that blonde creature’.

Further evidence of Kipkin’s picturesqueness was his being fantastically grimy, evil-looking, foul-mouthed, and gaunt, with a beaky nose, sharp blue jaw and long black locks. Actually, he looked like a sort of crow.

He lived under four distinct sets of arrangements according to circumstances. I gave names to each of Kipkin’s arrangements. The default mode was to live with Ella in the council house she had got when her son Siegfried was born: I designated this accommodation arrangement ‘Ella 1’. There were three further possible states. For instance, when Kipkin and Ella were particularly hating each other, Kipkin would live in a beached-up caravan in a muddy plot at the back of the council house. This was accommodation status ‘Ella 0’. Then a situation might evolve in which Ella would ditch Kipkin outright and take up with a man called Spens, whereupon Kipkin would move out entirely from the vicinity of the council house. Situation ‘Kipkin X’. A fourth arrangement was a derivation of ‘Kipkin X', whereby Kipkin would return to the council house of a dark night and get into an eye-gouging fight with Spens or Ella or both: then spend the night eventually in a police cell. I never decided on a title for this multiplex scenario. I've been toying with the cryptic ‘Kipkin ³’.

4 The Way He Lived (More Specifically)

Kipkin, at the point at which this story about him opens, was in the middle of a very long, bad stint of ‘Ella 0’. Each night, before going to sleep, he would press his beaky nose against the glass of his caravan window hard enough to make the nose utterly downward-pointing and like a ‘j’, and hiss, at Ella's lighted bedroom window above. He would do it again in the morning, first thing. For her part, Ella would often stick her tongue out at the photograph of Kipkin-in-biker’s-suit that was pinned to the cork board in the kitchen.

5 First Intervention of the Forces

Kipkin's professional picturesque character sphere was in a bad state, too, as rumour spread of his difficulties with Ella. From ‘vaguely frightening’, he had slid through ‘faintly comic’, and so down, inexorably, to ‘bumpkinly’. He compensated as best he could by being more obviously bad. He painted his car black, and took care to drive around the country lanes rakishly, spraying pedestrians with roadside slush. He got ruder, too. He called Mrs. Grange-Simms ‘old slag-bag’ and spat on her small dog. On another occasion, in the village shop, he barged a queue of harmless lettuce-buyers, and paid for some nasty processed cheese, his eyes flashing satanically. And somebody, a new face in the village (me, in fact), looked at him. ‘Fuckeryoulookina’. You barmy?’ Kipkin interjected. Awed silence. Kipkin barged out of the queue and out of the shop (the little bells on the door-jamb tinkling crazily), jumped into his car that was just outside and pelted off: vroom- thubthub-vrroomoomoowwmoomvrrroOom.

He felt a little better then. But the feeling was not to last long. Kipkin had a premonitory sense that the forces ruling his life had it in for him. They did.

6 One Night at Omar's Pad

Three miles out of Skatlingfield village, on the side opposite to my house, was the cottage of Omar McBride, the American genius-cinéaste. Omar was never to be seen around the village. Only the very newest and smoothest residents were ever asked to his little drinks-parties. But one ordinary person, Ella, saw Omar’s house often, as she was his cleaner and gardening hand (though she never saw Omar; he would leave cash on the Tokugawa stool by the back door, and a note, like, ‘Do not speak offensively again to my ficus. He tells me everything after.' Rarely, she might hear Omar, whimpering softly in his upstairs room). Ella had a good eye and appreciated the arrangement of Omar's house, which was in the Japanese style.

Kipkin had a business partner called Percy. Percy was from London, wore after-shave, and was a source of business ideas, which he called ‘unexplored angles.’

One night Kipkin and his business partner Percy were at Omar's pad. They were burgling it. Percy jimmied Omar's safe out of the wall. It went krungg. Then they took the safe away and blew it open in a field. They looked inside.

‘Shite,’ said Kipkin.

Percy, whose curses were urban imports of a higher sophistication than Kipkin's, said, ‘Bunch of arse.’

7 Same Night, Back in the Caravan

Later that night, Kipkin lay sleepless in his caravan. There was a light knock on the little window by his head. It was Ella.

Kipkin flipped the window open and poked his head out. In that unbecoming pose, he and the caravan were like a huge night-tortoise. ‘Yeah wha'?' said the tortoise.

‘How was the job?' said Ella.

‘Ng...great, tasty. Nice one,' the tortoise lied. Ella went round to the caravan door and climbed in.

‘I need a...a new boy,' she said, and started to pull Kipkin's ultra-tight jeans off. As that took a long time, Kipkin made conversation: ‘So, um, what's wrong with Siegfried, then?'

‘Nothing. Just need another one, is all. He'll look like a posh actor. Ralph Fiennes, like.'

Over an hour later Kipkin was still at it, though to small avail. He had wanted to try out some new moves Percy claimed he had innovated with his girlfriend Onya (‘the...the... Christ, man, the agony she was in,' Percy had said, ‘...mystic, wonderful'), but Ella was unmoved. ‘Get on with it,' she said testily.

Nothing doing. ‘It's happened to you before,' Ella pointed out, clinically, in an even voice, worlds beyond disappointment or anger, purely factual.

Kipkin, too, was drained. Tears upon tears of pain and effort had dried on his cheeks. Outside, a bird of morning sang, sweet and fluently. ‘It's-a...the-a...tight jeans I wear. Stress--modern life. Or the processed cheese I eat,' said Kipkin, in the same distant, lab-coat tone as Ella's, accepting the universe for what it was.

They lay in silence for a long time. The light stole across from the colour charcoal to that of smoke-glass; then, dove-grey. The morning bird stopped, flew to his mate. And then a voice, high and angelic, rang in the caravan.

‘Mummy, I'm bored.'

Kipkin sat up. He saw no one. But then he did. ‘Wha'. Th'fuck?!' Five-year-old silver-blond Siegfried was there in the caravan, in miniature college professor's corduroys, and gazing at Kipkin's genitals in polite abstraction.

Ella said, ‘Yeah, he wanted to know how babies are made: I said, like, come along and watch, and he's bored. I mean, are you fucking surprised?’

‘Jesus,' said Kipkin, not accepting the universe for what it was.

8 Bunch of Arse

There had been no cash in Omar's strong-box. Instead, what Kipkin and Percy had found was a sixsome of mysterious rubber monsters swaddled in bubble-wrap. Disappointing. Each latex effigy represented a main character in Omar's cult science-fiction film tetralogy that had made Omar rich: Gorka and Gargoth, the lizard psi-assassins, Sploag, Slann, Oogosh, and Henry. (Kipkin and Percy had, for the sake of form, a row about who got which monsters; Kipkin got the uncool ones)

The next day was a strange one. In the morning Ella said to Kipkin, ‘You're finished.' Kipkin went over to Percy's. Onya had finished with him, too. By lunchtime, Kipkin's hated rival Spens had moved in with Ella, and Spens's counterpart in Percy's sphere, Stoakley, with Onya.

Kipkin and Percy sat in the public bar of the Worsley Arms in Skatlingfield through a long, laconic afternoon.

Then Percy had a brainwave so intense that the single naked light-bulb illuminating the public bar fizzed in sympathy. He leaned over to Kipkin and whispered, ‘Islington.'

Kipkin was doubtful about Islington. Dispiriting as the last summer had been, he still felt Skatlingfield was his natural home, where he was a Character and pre-eminent hairy person. Islington, he thought, being a part of London, would be a place full of smooths. He put these considerations to Percy.

‘Fuckeryoutalkinabou'. This place is a dive.'

Percy naturally would say that. He was virtually a smooth. His curly mass of hair and cop-drama stubble were but pathetic attempts to hide this. Furthermore, he evidently had a complex about not being a Character.

9 Smooth Percy

There was a small family flat in Islington tenanted by an ex- of Percy's, named Dawn. When Kipkin and Percy got there, there didn't seem to be anyone in. They were forced to improvise entry through the window of the utility room.

‘The state of this dump,' said Percy. The floor was uniformly covered with brightly-cloured plastic toys, except for narrow wading-channels connecting the main rooms.

They tossed a coin for the choice of Dawn's bedroom or the child's bedroom. Kipkin won. ‘A favourable sign!' he thought. ‘Maybe this is going to be a good one.' As is so often the case, the answer was ‘not necessarily'.

Over the next few months Percy bought new, modish clothes, and six new pairs of shoes, all of them sleek, black and snub-nosed, and builder's boots of the type still fashionable among aesthetes of that time. He got six new girlfriends called Debs, Devorah, Scylla, Benedicta, Joy and Iona (who, being the most exotic, and psychic to boot, was the most prized), so that repeatedly he appropriated Kipkin's larger bedroom until it was so stuffed up with face-cream pots and body-creams and make-up brushes and blushers and waxes, towelettes, towels, cotton pads and fixers, removers, pins and tousle-haired naked women that Kipkin pretty much had to leave off thinking the room was his.

Percy was always out. Kipkin was always in. He sat in front of the television. He smoked joints. He ate Mordor-flavoured crisps. His resemblance to a crow only grew.

10 Kipkin Becomes Smooth Too

Then one day while he was watching the TV gameshow Ultragong he heard a shy knock on the front door. The door, whose lock Kipkin personally had dismantled at an earlier opportunity, slowly opened, as if in the path of a light breeze.

‘The fuck's that?' enquired Kipkin of his visitor. ‘Dawn?'

It wasn't Dawn. There came into the room a young woman--a beautiful one, with long fair hair. It was Iona, on a very good day. Iona smiled.

‘Hi, Kip,' she said. ‘A horrible thing has happened.'

‘Oh yeah - wha'?'

‘Percy's seeing...somebody.'

‘Uh?'

‘Apart from me. Percy's having an affair.'

Kipkin gave an off-hand but nonetheless entirely accurate account of Percy's affairs. Iona shed delicate tears.

‘Fuck,' said Kipkin, with concern. ‘I thought you knew. I mean, Christ, what do you mean you didn't know? All the others, Debs, Devorah, Scylla, Benedicta...even Joy...knew about you...I thought you were meant to be psychic.'

The other girlfriends knew about each other and they knew about Iona. But Iona hadn't known about them. The fact was, every last blusher, fixer, body lotion etc., except one lone bobby-pin that--bizarrely--belonged to Percy anyway, had been Iona's.

‘I thought...I thought,' she sobbed. Then she thought. She thought: ‘I shall have my revenge.'

‘Kipkin,' she said. Her voice was mellifluous, Continentalised. She sat next to Kipkin, among crisp-packets. ‘Kipkin.'

So it was that Iona started going out with Kipkin, thus humiliating Percy, who again was demoted to the child's bedroom along with his remaining five girlfriends.

A period of almost unnatural calm and plenty followed for Kipkin. When he was going out with Iona he rarely if ever literally went out. He stayed in. Iona went out and bought colourful fruit for him which she piled on platters and served while she and Kipkin watched TV, reclining on cushions through hours of Newscurd, Under Downers, Doomdough and Ultragong, which last was ‘their gameshow'. Their conversation was placid, barely existent, so close were they. ‘Peach?'--‘No peach.'--‘Mango, then?'--‘Fuck mango.'--‘Maracuya, surely?'--‘H'm. Kiwi?' If Percy, on the way from the kid's room to the utility room, should slope past their idyll, he would frown sourly; but Iona would only stick a little tongue out or spit grape-pips at him.

Iona bought lots of clothes for Kipkin, too, so that he became sleeker and more fashionable with each week without even moving from in front of the TV. And then, as apart from being psychic she was also a brilliant hairdresser, Iona shaved Kipkin and cut his hair. ‘A smooth at last,' thought Kipkin, without resentment or doubt about his new state; at peace with the world.

‘Oh, you're beautiful. You're my work of Art,' said Iona (who was also an art student).

11 Terminal

But one day, Iona informed Kipkin that Pluto had moved stealthily into Scorpio.

‘Wha'? Oh yeah? Fuck,' said Kipkin. ‘How long for?'

For the duration, it seemed. ‘I think it's time,' said Iona, in that voice, ‘you made a commitment to stability and balance. I should like you to get a job.'

Kipkin was gape-mouthed, disbelieving.

‘B-but Pluto...he's, like, well: a sort of dog.' This was his best reply. Iona was unperturbed.

‘Precisely,' she continued, ‘why you should heed his changes, creature of instinct and courage as he is, and are you.'

She proposed that they consult the Tarot to decide on a new life for the smooth, new Kipkin. Iona darkened the TV room, lit all the candles and bowls of incense, applied psychic unguent on her belly and wore a cotton shift, coloured saffron. ‘Right,' she sighed, and played the Tarot cards, for ages.

Something was wrong. Iona, very quietly, started to cry.

‘Wha'. Wha's up,' said Kipkin.

‘The cards, they...Oh, Kip!' she wept, and rested her shaking hands on his shoulders.

Kipkin looked at the cards, arranged in their picture-acrostics. Unversed though he was in the subject he had to admit it did look pretty bad.

‘Hell. What does it mean?'

‘It means, Kip'--weep--'that you have nineteen days to live, at the outside. No more.'

Kipkin felt weird, empty inside, floaty. ‘Oh shit,' he mused. A card caught his eye.

‘What's that?' he said, pointing.

‘Seven of Hearts. Broken Promise, Betrayal, Disappointment.'

‘M'm, yeah. I suppose nineteen days is a disappointing life result.'

‘Kip. I'm so sorry.'

12 A Second Opinion

The news of Kipkin's impending death took a while to sink in. Percy, for example, shouted, ‘Ha!'. Kipkin himself shouted ‘Ha!', if nervously. Iona didn't shout ‘Ha!'. And Debs, Devorah, Scylla, Benedicta, even Joy, all were silent and watery-eyed whenever they saw Kipkin, would stroke his face compassionately. By the fifth of the nineteen days stipulated by the Tarot Kipkin was in a deep depression. The electronic video-clock, that flickered away his life's seconds, brought it on.

‘I want a second opinion,' he croaked. ‘I mean, how about tea leaves?'

Percy behaved wonderfully. ‘You shall have your tea leaves divination! The best in the country!' He and Iona drove Kipkin solemnly to the London suburb of Surbiton, to consult Mrs. Snape, who had divined for Churchill and Count Ciano.

Mrs. Snape was a little slow to answer the doorbell. She breathed with difficulty. Her strange aspect, which was unutterably foul, lent credence to her professed powers.

‘Right,' said Percy. ‘There's no time to lose.' He strode efficiently into the kitchen, and made tea. Iona in the meantime heaved Mrs Snape into her divining-armchair in the frilly morning-room. ‘Mrs. Snape,' Iona said, ‘Kip and I are so grateful you're doing this.' Percy brought the tea in its tea-set on a tray, clinkingly, and set it down on the long-skirted table in front of Mrs. Snape. He helped her hold the tea-cup and drink the tea. She shook with emotion. She went yellow. Then she began to sink downwards in her armchair, into the skirts of the little table, until presently she was out of sight.

‘H'm,' said Percy. ‘Doesn't look too good, Kip.'

They drove Mrs. Snape to hospital, where she was pronounced ‘dead on arrival'. This, said Iona and Percy, couldn't be good news for Kipkin's prognosis.

13 Iona Deals a Donor Card

What joy could there be for Kipkin in the few days he had left? His world had become tepid, and all colour gone from it. Slack-mouthed, he turned to look at his bedroom window; it seemed to him like a grave, though no stillness was behind it, nor silence.

Iona took him to a party given by the significant artist Joshua Kelp at his high-ceilinged studio flat. Joshua, Kipkin saw, was like himself a former hairy turned smooth. Joshua's boyish head swung lazily from side to side as he made a way around the crowded room; to each witty remark that was said to him he replied only with a sweet near-smile, as though to contain within himself the quiet ecstasy he had derived if for a fleeting second until the next witty remark; and should he come across a flat surface, as occasionally he did, he snorted drugs off it. And so, carrying on in this way, he came eventually to where Iona and Kipkin stood.

‘Josh, hi! Remember me? I'm Iona.'

‘Um...'

‘This is Kipkin, my new man. Unfortunately, he's only got thirteen days left to live.'

Joshua went a little blank. Then he half-smiled sweetly. ‘Hur-hur-hur,' he began--but he stopped, because he had seen that on a divan immediately behind Iona an admirably flat surface had occurred, the bare, smooth tummy of a female guest who had momentarily come to rest there. Joshua made a dive for the tummy, deployed drugs on it, and snorted them hungrily.

‘He's brilliant, isn't he?' said Iona to Kipkin, as they mingled deeper into the party.

Kipkin left Iona there and went home to watch Ultragong. He didn't see Iona until the morning. Her face was serene and mystical. When she spoke it was in the honeyed, Frenchified voice again.

She said: ‘Kipkin, dear heart. I should like you to come with me to Joshua's place at this very instant, right now. There's something you need to talk about with him.'

They needed to talk about Kipkin's future. Twelve days of it remained. But wouldn't Kipkin wish for something more - in fact, wish for something like immortality? If so, Joshua's help would be invaluable, suggested Iona. ‘Oh yeah?' mumbled Kipkin thoughtfully, ‘well, how?'

The door of the studio flat was wide open. They found Joshua lying on the dust-sheets on the floor, seemingly unconscious, or asleep. Iona shook him.

‘Uh?...oh...it's you, I s'pose,' said Joshua.

‘Iona. And this is Kipkin, of whom I spoke to you last night.'

‘Right - yeah. I'd better show you the, um...'

Joshua got to his feet to show Iona and Kipkin around the studio and the works of art in it. Presently they got to a very big empty cube with walls of glass. The tour seemed to stop here. They stood gazing at the cube.

After a long silence, Kipkin essayed, ‘It's...a great work of art.'

Joshua turned to face Kipkin with an expression of academic scrutiny, as though Kipkin himself were an artistic product labelled ‘prob. shamanic mask, Papuan primitivism. Date: unkn.'

Joshua said, ‘Eh?'

‘Your empty glass square is...well, great. It's saying, like, "life is empty", yeah?'

‘No.'

‘Oh. Sorry. OK.'

‘No, this vitrine,' Joshua clarified, ‘is where you go, when you're dead.'

‘Wha'?'

‘You see, Kip,' Iona intervened, ‘I had thought--and Joshua had thought--that in view of your special...crossroads, you might agree to being immortalised as a work of Art: that is to say, donate your body to Art. Kip, it would be so wonderful.'

And so it was agreed. Joshua cracked open a bottle of champagne he kept in the fridge for this kind of special occasion.

14 At Mr Abdoul Hanif Jabal's Surgery off the Pentonville Road

Now that his mortality problem was solved Kipkin felt a weight lift from his shoulders. He was light-headed and carefree. So he said yes to Percy's plan that they burgle a house on one last occasion together, for old times' sake.

The victim was to be an old man called Count Letko. Percy knew about him because they both visited the same drug-dealer off the Pentonville Road. From time to time Percy would bump into Letko in the drug-dealer's waiting-room: he was a hunched, antique, small foreigner, chest-high to Percy, and he emitted a ceaseless low rattle as he shuffled from place to place. Percy had been curious. ‘What's he into, then?' he asked the drug-dealer, ‘Morphine?' The dealer told him how Letko only ever bought extremely rare drugs, special orders of leaves, puff-balls and cured toads' hides from South America, beetles' wings from Africa. Letko was a hardcore enthusiast; his expenditure was vast.

It was this last datum that had set Percy off thinking business. And, recently, it seemed Letko was in a particularly feeble condition; he no longer went to the dealer but arranged for the dealer to make house-calls, instead. To Percy's mind, the time could hardly be better for violent crime.

15 Count Letko At Home

Letko lived in a tall white house in a cobbled square in Knightsbridge. He had a mansion flat on the first floor.

Percy and Kipkin went to a pub in a mews behind Letko's house, there to sketch out their burgle-plan. They thought to bluff their way into the house by assuming a harmless, un-burglarish air.

‘But what's it to be, then?' asked Kipkin. ‘Gas inspectors? Plumbers? TV repair-men? Meals-on-wheelses? Social workers? Outpatient carers?'

‘No,' said Percy. ‘Canadians.'

Kipkin and Percy wore brand-new checked shirts, canvas shorts and white trainers they had bought in Haakons of Knightsbridge. By the black front door of the tall white house were five buzzers. Percy pressed the one called ‘Jean-Baptiste Schneider'.

‘Hein?' it squawked.

‘Hi,' said Percy. ‘We're Canadian?'

‘Oui: et puis, quoi?' said the buzzer.

‘We'd like to leave a personal message for Mr. Letko?'

There was a long pause. Then, ‘Fuck oeuf,' the buzzer replied.

Percy pressed another buzzer called ‘Kit Fielding + Caroline Cassel'.

‘Ng,' it said.

‘Hi. Mr. Kit, we're Mr. Letko's friends from Canada? We--'

The buzzer buzzed the door open without further ado. Percy gave Kipkin the thumbs-up sign. They climbed, past man-sized jars of dried mimosa blossoms, up the stairs to Letko's door. A bronze knocker in the shape of a reptilian head protruded from it. Percy knocked.

Thokk. Thokk.

Nothing.

Thokk. Thokk.

There was a shuffle within. A voice, a fabulously rattly, old, and somehow secret one, said, ‘Sylvia?'

Percy waited, then knocked again.

THOKK. THOKK. THOKK.

‘Sylviaah?!'

Kipkin, in the grip of a creepy feeling, said, ‘Hey, Perce. Why don't we just leave it, eh? Perce?'

Percy was having none of that. He jammed his face right up to the door, and said, ‘Open up. The fucking door. Y'old turd.'

The door opened. The small, obscure figure of the old turd was in the doorway, in a dressing-gown. His face was wholly without expression or life; it was a concentrate of mummified expressions from his past; each of which, Kipkin surmised, had in its day in any case been inscrutable, and rather strange.

‘What a strange man!' Kipkin commented.

‘Yeh,' Percy replied, and, with the lower section of the palm of his hand (where it joins the inside wrist), he cracked a sharp economical blow to Letko's head that knocked him to the floor.

‘O.K.,' said Percy in the light Canadian voice. He and Kipkin stepped over Letko's body into the hall. There was an odd smell. It combined wood-smoke, patchouli and loam. Kipkin could feel the smell crawling into him like an invisible worm (which was, as Kipkin envisaged it, green). It made him dizzy. The walls of the hall were rust-coloured and the ceiling yellow, so that Kipkin imagined he had got inside an old lung, possibly Letko's lung. ‘It's the weird drugs he smokes,' said Percy, aware of Kipkin's uneasiness.

Through heavy double doors was a huge sitting-room. There were ottomans, purple-trimmed, and squat-legged walnut tables with inlaid ivory salamanders and suns. Amphorae of dark gold stood all around the room at various heights, and tapestries occupied the length and breadth of each wall, depicting Magyars in black armour grimacing in the midst of war; from the ceiling hung evening-blue silk, in billows like sails, and among these a great chandelier--whose crystal tears shivered, as if in a breeze.

Percy walked in and about the whole room, picking things up casually and then putting them down again. ‘O.K.,' he said each time in the Canadian voice.

Kipkin went to explore the next room. The creepy feeling he had been experiencing for some minutes now was only increased, because he saw that this room contained six dinner-party guests sitting at a sumptuously-laid table in absolute stillness. Upon closer examination they turned out to be dummies made of wood. Their bodies were decorated with lapis and gold leaf; some of them wore tunics, or beards of gold wire. On silver dishes on the table, in front of each guest, were cream-white envelopes, and as he opened each in turn Kipkin found that these contained handwritten notes, mordant epigrams that insulted the guest in a heartless way: though why dummies made of wood should be the object of such vitriol Kipkin could not grasp. After reading six of them, Kipkin's attention turned to the two envelopes that remained at the head and foot of the dining-table, which places were un-taken. One envelope was marked ‘Sylvia,' the other, ‘Me'. But before he could open them, Kipkin heard Percy making distressed, un-Canadian noises.

‘Oi! Christ, please don't...' Percy was shrieking. ‘Kipkin! Watch out mate! He's woken up, and the guy's a nu''er [for ‘nutter'], and he's got a piece! Eek. [A sound followed which, though Kipkin--being in the next room--wasn't to know, denoted Percy's leaping behind a purple-trimmed ottoman for cover.] He's coming your way...Iona was right, you're fucked, mate...'

Letko, slowly and silently, like a ghost, came into the dining-room where Kipkin was. He was carrying a huge Mauser pistol which, in contrast with all the other objets in the flat, was extremely new, functional and sleek. Kipkin was excited by dread. He thought, ‘So this is it! It's all over. Shot dead by a crusty drug-fiend.'

Letko, in his rattly voice, said, ‘I don't know who you are. You're not welcome. This is a private dinner-party.'

Then Letko moved round to the head of the dining-table and took his seat, always pointing the gun at Kipkin's face.

In his state of horror, Kipkin was shivering and mumbling.

‘This is the end...this is death,' he mumbled.

‘Yes,' replied Letko.

The ambiguity of this last exchange only became apparent when, rather than shoot Kipkin, Letko put the gun to his temple and shot himself, instead.

16 Disappointing

Kipkin had the sense of an anti-climax. Disappointed expectation, the bizarre death-scene that Letko had made (and which still progressed, blood reddening the white tablecloth and everything on it; the cream-white envelopes and the wooden hands of the guests, apace), the air in the flat that was addled with Letko's drugs: all combined to sink Kipkin in a dream; his mind emptied of everything except a few stray, slow thoughts. He became indifferent, and walked out of the dining-room with a distracted air.

Percy had gone. He had left the double door of the sitting-room, and the front door beyond, wide open. In fact, somebody was on the landing looking in through the open doorway.

The telephone rang. The telephone was an objet. It was black and shiny like a film noir sedan car, even its trill seemed pre-war in tone.

Kipkin wondered who might be calling, but he did not pursue the point. He went out of the sitting-room, through the hall and out of the flat, past the puzzled, frowning onlooker on the landing, down the stairs, out of the tall white house, into the car by the garden of chestnut-trees and away home.

17 Second Intervention of the Forces

When he got to the flat in Islington he found Percy sitting against the wall on the landing outside the front door, with his head in his hands. A woman's voice was screaming at him from within the flat.

‘It's Dawn,' said Percy self-pityingly, ‘back from her job at Disneyworld. She was kicked out. Now she's kicking us out. By the way, glad you're not dead mate.'

Kipkin went in, was screamed at in his turn. He tried to reason with Dawn; explained to her, with equanimity and calm, his situation: that he had nowhere to go, that he was very shortly to die anyway, and therefore could he please stay until then.

‘H'm,' said Dawn, chewing her lower lip, ‘OK. When exactly are you supposed to be dying, then?'

‘Ninth of March at the latest.'

‘That'll be today.'

‘Wha'?'

Dawn coolly showed Kipkin the date printed on her Evening Standard .

‘Christ!'

‘Time does just fly when you're enjoying yourself,' Dawn commented.

Kipkin sat down next to Percy, outside, and put his head into his hands too. Then the telephone rang. Kipkin was blurrily aware of Dawn picking it up and being rude down it.

‘It's for you.'

‘Wha'?'

‘It's for you!'

Dawn chucked the whole telephone, which was a white one in the shape of Garfield´s girlfriend Arlene, out onto the landing at Kipkin's feet.

‘ 'lo?' he said.

‘Roland. Thank God it's you,' said Ella.

‘Yeh.'

‘You've got a new son. Maurice.'

‘Wha'?'

‘Maurice! He's just been born.'

‘Oh. Yeh.'

‘He's in the incubator. You've got to come home.'

‘OK. Right. What about Spens?'

‘I kicked him out.'

‘Oh. Yeh. I'll be coming home, then. To see my son.'

‘Maurice. Oh, and Roland.'

‘Wha'?'

‘I love you.'

‘Oh. Yeh.'

18 Cut to Iona

Meanwhile, Iona was in Joshua Kelp's studio flat, in bed with Joshua Kelp. Nothing was happening, as Joshua was unconscious.

Iona shook him. ‘Josh. Josh. The most dreadful thing.'

‘Uh?'

‘It's just dawned on me. Kipkin. It's his last day...Josh, Kipkin, can't you remember?'

‘Not really.'

‘You were meant to be immortalising him as Art.'

‘Oh, right...And you are...?'

‘Iona.'

Iona slunk out of bed to ring Kipkin's flat and enquire whether he was dead. Dawn took the call and was rude; then Percy came on the telephone, and explained that Kipkin had just that minute left for the country to see Maurice in his incubator.

‘Incubator?' said Iona, in a fragile voice.

Percy filled in the background about who Maurice was, and about his incubator.

Iona screamed. She put the telephone down gingerly as though it were an awe-inspiring insect. She swallowed, reclined on the floor gracefully, and in a dying-swan voice said, ‘O God, what an hideous error I've made.' She cried then, and said she had misinterpreted Kipkin's Tarot--had not seen he was to have a son--who was to die, that very night--she had created even greater suffering and waste by making Kipkin believe he was going to die, when it was his son. Poor Kipkin. Poor Maurice.

‘Uh?' said Joshua.

19 Kipkin Is Clear-Headed And Really Cool

A few days later, Kipkin was walking in the field opposite Ella's council house, detecting signs of spring in the brittle sunshine. He was reflective and clear-headed. He thought about the Tarot cards. There had been the Death card, and, sure enough, Letko, and before him Mrs. Snape, had bought it.

Kipkin's thoughts were interrupted by Ella clattering out of the council house porch opposite with Siegfried, in tweeds, and Maurice, who was perfectly healthy and two days fresh out of the incubator, in a pram. Ella smiled and waved at Kipkin. Kipkin went over to worship Maurice.

‘Doesn't he look just like Ralph Fiennes,' said Ella.

20 Actually Please Ignore the Preceding Chapter Head

Maurice did look like a posh actor. Kipkin stooped over the pram to worship Maurice more closely. He saw the finely stencilled gold eyebrows and the girly pout. It was clear that, in a class sense, Maurice rather looked down on Kipkin. Ella had given birth to a Smooth.

‘H'm,' Kipkin mused, ‘The Seven of Hearts. Disappointment, Broken Promise, Betrayal.' He resolved to ask a few discreet questions around the village and maybe murder someone.

21 Like I Give a Fuck

I really don't. For a certain period I was, perhaps, a little afraid, and wondered whether to behave reclusively, much as Omar. But as things turned out I never had but a civilised relationship with Kip, as I think I have implied at some point earlier on.

Maybe he isn't terribly bright. Maybe he is blind to a certain smooth perfection of face and mind that make Maurice and me resemble two cards of the same suit. Our transactions remain as friendly as ever, I pay him well, and it seems to me that within the soft contours of our secluded valley even betrayal is a gentle thing.

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