Death in the Morning

Hugo had hoped to spend the morning in bed reading another PG Wodehouse novel, but this morning his neighbour had decided to make as much noise as possible. Since about 8am there had been a constant cacophony of clangs and bangs, as if she – he thought it was a she who lived in the flat next door – were wrestling with the Saucepan Man from Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree books. Several times he had settled back again the purposefully plumped pile of pillows, propped the book on his knees, which were drawn up towards his chest, but still under the plum coloured quilt, and read the first line.

‘As I slid into my chair at the breakfast table and started to deal with the toothsome eggs and bacon which Jeeves had given of his plenty...’

In fact, he’d never actually made it through the entire first line - Bertie Worcester was a loquacious narrator – because each attempt would be foiled by another percussion solo performed in the adjoining flat.

‘All I ask for is a few hours peace on a Sunday morning to enjoy a read in bed,’ he muttered – he often chatted to himself, sometimes he would even argue, one side chastising the other defending a particular action or error. Today, however, his anger was definitely directed at someone else – at her, the murderer of mornings.

After an hour of the racket, he had considered banging on the wall, but he didn’t know the type of personality he was dealing with. This was Holloway, after all, and while many of the flats and houses had been bought up by the middle-classes, there were still some remnants of the indigenous population grasping onto flats with protected rents or lucky enough to have found old character properties still owned by the council. Most of that type was confined to the estates these days, which Hugo thought best for everybody. They were happier because they got to mix with their own kind – gossip on those concrete walkways, do their drug deals in the stairwells, or stab each other over a game of football on the special play areas. Those estates really were ingeniously designed.

Saucepan Woman had finally fallen silent. But Hugo had lost interest in reading now. He needed to be relaxed to read and the constant bombardment of discordant sounds had set his nerves on edge – probably for the rest of the day. He decided to take a stroll to his favourite cafe near Tufnell Park tube station. He liked this particular cafe because its walls were lined with books, and patrons were invited to read them while they supped their coffee or tucked into a filled baguette. And while the unsettled morning had spoilt his desire to read, he still liked to be surrounded by volumes of tasteful literature.

***

If she didn’t find the stash of resin in the next ten minutes, Bethany decided she would just accept it was lost and settle for smoking a normal fag. She remembered putting it inside a saucepan the day before for safe keeping – she always hid her drugs in weird places so that Dave and Glen wouldn’t nick them. Dave and Glen were her younger brothers and their appetite for drugs – pretty much any kind of drug – was insatiable. These days she was happy with the occasional puff and maybe a snort of coke on special occasions. She was twenty-eight, she couldn’t go on caning it for another ten years, not without losing her looks like Shana Lewis. Poor Shana, she’d been the prettiest girl in school, but 12 years later she looked like shit. Bethany had heard that Shana was into meths, and that stuff really fucked you up.

Bethany slammed the cupboard door and slumped onto the kitchen floor – defeated. How could a lump of resin the size of her thumb disappear? Unless Dave or Glen had let themselves in while she was at work. Would they be that sly? Probably – Glen would anyway.

“Shit.” There was nothing worse than fancying a spliff and not having any gear. She didn’t ask for much out of life, just a relaxing smoke on a Sunday morning – the only day of the week she didn’t work, and now that little shit Glen had ruined that for her.

She was so pissed-off she even considered working an extra shift at the cafe – Rob had said she could if she wanted. The money would come in handy – if only to buy more dope. But the thought of serving all those pompous middle-class twats who though that Rob’s cafe was something special because it had books on the shelves was more repugnant to her than sitting her flat with no spliff and watching Hollyoaks.

Bethany lit a cigarette and drew heavily on it, still sitting on the kitchen floor. She stared

across the open-plan living area – littered with dirty mugs, overflowing ashtrays, and piles of books - at the window which was filled with blue sky. She wouldn’t go into work, but she would get out the flat. She’d drunk the best part of two bottles of wine the night before and needed to clear her head. She glanced at the cheap round clock on the wall above the sink. It was nearly ten o’clock. It had been about half eight when she’d started looking for the dope. Why hadn’t she just stayed in bed?

She considered crawling back under the clammy quilt in the small humid bedroom and sleeping through to mid-afternoon, but the thought of it being close to dark when she finally got up provided the incentive she needed to get dressed and head for the front door.

***

Hugo replaced the copy of Much Obliged Jeeves on the bookshelf next to the bedroom window. It was sandwiched between two other Wodehouse novels, arranged in order of publication date. All the Ws were housed on this shelf along with the Ys, one X and a handful of Zs. Warm sunlight settled on his cheek and he felt a rush of contentment, which went some way to quashing his irritation. He gazed at the tree-lined road, the – mercifully – distant tower blocks and the merest hint in the horizon of Hampstead Heath, his spiritual home. He was having a brief London moment, a realisation that he loved the city where he lived; for all its dangers and undesirable areas and residents, it protected people like him – people who didn’t quite fit in. There were so many odd people here that one more didn’t stand out. He smiled contemplatively. She was a jealous protector, though, London. There were conditions to her love. She didn’t like her charges to mingle; there were strict rules about ignoring anyone you passed in the street, only having cursory conversations with the staff who served you in shops - even if the same staff member had been serving you for 20 years - and never popping round to borrow a cup of sugar from a neighbour. That only happened in stories, and usually poorly written ones.

Hugo took his favourite tweed jacket from the hook on the bedroom door and actually started to whistle – something by Chopin – as he headed out to welcome London’s conditional embrace.

***

The pavement was an obstacle course of dog shit. The heat was making the smell so over-powering, Bethany had stopped twice to check the bottoms of her trainers to make sure she hadn’t stepped in a pile. She lit a cigarette to keep her company on the walk to the tube station. She hadn’t decided where she was going yet.

An odd little fat man was walking a few feet ahead of her, talking to himself. She slowed down, giving the man time to get ahead. The way her day was going the freak would try and strike up a conversation with her. He glanced sideways, following the flight of a magpie that had emerged from a garden hedge, and Bethany recognised him. He was a regular at Rob’s cafe. One of the many saddos that came in alone and sat reading either their own book or one from the shelves, taking annoyingly irregular sips from their coffees, eking them out for hours.

There was no need to worry about him trying to talk to her. He’d never said more than he had to – not to her, the girl behind the counter, the girl who wiped the tables.

Bethany was so busy boring a hole into the fat man’s tweed jacket, she didn’t realise just how close the car came to hitting her. She did hear the screech of brakes as it swerved and saw the bonnet scrunch up like used tin foil as it collided with the bollard. She saw the driver tossed forward, back and forwards again, and thought of those crash test dummies that had featured in some old car advert. She saw all this in not much more than a second.

***

At the sound of screaming brakes Hugo flipped his gaze from the flying magpie to the careering car, and as it crunched into the bollard, he has let out a loud exclamation of:

‘Bally Hell!’

‘Fuck me!’ yelped a girl – probably from one of the estates – who had been walking just a few paces behind him.

For a moment, they both stood staring at the crippled car. The girl – actually she was more woman than girl - looked at Hugo who took a tentative step toward the now steaming vehicle. The woman remained fixed to the spot. The driver was prostate across the steering wheel.

‘Hello,” called Hugo, now hovering by the driver’s window, eying the smoking engine warily.

‘Maybe you should keep clear,’ said the woman. ‘It might blow up.’

‘I think that’s just in films,’ said Hugo, but he did take an involuntary step backwards, broken glass crunching under his brogues.

The driver was dead, Hugo was certain of that. Through the side window, which was miraculously intact, Hugo could see his grimacing face, the left cheek flat against the steering wheel, one visible eye bulging and unblinking. His shoulders were hunched at a jaunty angle, as if he’d been caught by surprise in the middle of a bout of laughter or at the prelude to a major sneeze. His left arm was buried under his torso; the hand, curled like a traumatised spider, emerged from under his chin, twisted palm up. The right arm was bent at a right angle, the wrist snapped backwards, the hand waving with inappropriate cheer, at Hugo. The man, Hugo guessed he was about twenty, was wearing a white t-shirt, the front of which now bore a bib of fresh blood, the source of which appeared to be an injury to the back of his head, not visible from Hugo’s vantage point, but there was a swathe of red around the man’s strangely bloated neck and at his nape, the curly dark hair was matted and wet-looking. Hugo stared as if admiring a disturbing art work.

‘Shall I call 999?’ asked the estate woman.

‘Yes, I think you should,’ said Hugo, who didn’t carry a mobile – and didn’t intend to, even after this graphic demonstration of how useful they could be.

***

The weird little man didn’t seem so weird anymore, now he was a human being to share this horrific experience with, someone to stand there while she managed to misdial the energy number because her hands were shaking so violently.

Front doors opened up and down the previously quite road, and people were creeping cautiously towards the crash scene - a man wearing a striped dressing gown and slippers, an elderly woman clutching a ridiculously small dog under one arm, two middle-aged men, one of them hideously overweight and wearing a t-shirt doused with some kind of yellow sauce. And others, all keen for a look at the wreck and, possibly, a mangled corpse or two. They might be disappointed with the single body count – there were no passengers, none that Bethany could see anyway.

‘Is it just the driver?’ she asked the man.

He nodded solemnly, glancing at her and then back at the car as if he might miss something.

‘Oh my God,’ squealed the old lady with the dog. ‘Is he dead?’

The little man tried to answer, but the newcomer, wearing a dressing gown and slippers, talked over him. ‘I’m afraid so,’ he was crouching in front of the driver’s window, hands on his knees as if examining a set of wickets.

‘Tosser,’ whispered Bethany.

‘Pardon,’ the little man was next to her, small, squinty eyes peering through round spectacles.

‘I just think he could be a bit more respectful,’ said Bethany. ‘He’s acting like some-ones just scraped a bit of paint off the side of his car or something. There’s a bloke dead in there. And look at that old bird craning her neck to look at him – is there nothing good on telly, or what?’

‘Yes,’ agreed the man. ‘It does all seem a bit ghoulish.

Mister Dressing Gown and Slippers had now prized open the car door, while this grossly overweight neighbour was talking to the emergency services in a high camp voice at odds with his oafish appearance. Even with his sausage fingers, he’d managed to press 9 three times without cocking it up.

‘I’m not sure there’s much we can do here,’ said her man, glancing at an invisible watch.

‘I doesn’t feel right to just walk away.’

‘No, he agreed, looking at her curiously.

***

The girl was quite a sensitive soul really, thought Hugo – more sensitive than the elderly woman with the whimpering lap dog. She was standing on tip-toe for a better view through the shattered windscreen, and it wasn’t out of concern for the driver - her expression was

hungry and feral.

‘Definitely dead,’ called the man in the dressing gown, as if it was the car battery he was relating news of. A communal groan rose from the thickening crowd gathered on the pavement.

Hugo felt repulsed and redundant.

‘I think I may go home, he said.

The girl looked tearful and maintained eye contact, as if there was something she wanted to say.

‘Goodbye,’ said Hugo. ‘I hope your day gets better.’

‘It’ll be better than that poor sod’s ,’ said the girl.

When Hugo glanced back a few seconds later, she too had moved on, heading on past the crash scene, looking forlorn and vulnerable. Hugo wondered if he should have invited her in for a cup of sweet tea. Mind you, he had quite a few valuable curios and they’d have had nothing to talk about once discussion of the crash had waned.