Bruno Crane
The Friend
The knock on the door comes at ten p.m. I’ve just finished a delightful meal of tinned pilchards.
Can’t afford to eat in the dining room every night (or any night to be frank) so I smuggled some cans in my luggage.
It’s a usual dinner for me, in fact, in my sordid Bermondsey lodgings.
How did it come to this? I’m a grammar school boy, middle class …
or just about. Thankfully my poor old pa is dead already or he’d die from the shame.
He worked himself to the bone to give me a proper education.
Was so proud that his boy was learning Latin!
The knock comes again.
I let Narracott into the room. ‘You all right, old chap?’ I ask him, as I close the door. ‘You’re wheezing …’
‘I’m fine!’ he snaps. His face pinches. ‘It stinks in here. Smells like … cat food.’ Then he looks me over. ‘Your cuffs, man,’ he says.
‘What about them?’
‘They’re dirty and … are they frayed? Could you not have found it in yourself to buy one new shirt? For God’s sake! Thought you spivs were meant to scrub up better.’
I resent the term, but it’s not altogether wrong.
That’s what I’ve been reduced to: hawking the odd counterfeit bottle of perfume to women in nightclubs, cigarettes at railway stations.
Somewhere along the way I fell through the cracks …
I couldn’t settle to anything, after the war.
And, as I say, I’ve got the wrong face, even for peddling black market rubbish.
The ear doesn’t help. Those women in the nightclubs, they scuttle past me.
Men walk to the other end of the railway platform.
Worse, I took out debts to buy the stuff. And now I can’t shift it …
‘Moping, Crane?’ Narracott’s voice snaps me back into the present. ‘Hurt your feelings, did I?’
I meet his gaze with a small shock. He hates me, almost as much as I hate him. We are bound together by this; him to me as much as I to him. I have a sense of myself as a millstone around his neck. His ugly, shabby shadow.
‘You weren’t at dinner,’ he drawls.
‘Of course not!’ I say. ‘I can barely afford to stay here.’
‘Ah,’ he says. ‘But you’ll be at the Casino tonight, no? Losing what’s left on the baccarat?’
‘It’s no nobler if it’s via the London Stock Exchange,’ I bite back. ‘Or with women.’
‘Sounds like a touch of the green-eyed monster there, Crane.’
‘Hardly. You’ve got your wife and your mistress here under the same roof. And I remember you boasting to me once about all the girls you had on the go … the couple of tarts you’d got in trouble in the past.’
‘Yes, and I always sorted them out. Paid for my sins. Little extra pocket money to take care of it, right as rain. Whereas you – I don’t think you’ve ever paid your debts, have you?
Well, you’ll be able to now if you don’t do anything stupid.
’ He looks at me carefully. ‘What’s that look?
Don’t tell me you’re getting cold feet.’
‘Look, I’m as desperate as a man could be. But I can’t help thinking … do you really think we should?’
‘What on earth do you mean, Crane?’ His voice is dangerous.
‘I suppose … I keep thinking the stuff might be – ah – cursed in some way.’
A long pause passes before he answers. When he does it carries the full weight of his scorn. ‘Cursed?’
‘Yes. Because of how … it was obtained.’
‘Ha!’ A short humourless bark of a laugh. ‘I don’t remember you having too much conscience that night. Didn’t think you had it in you. It was necessary, of course. Here’s a thought,’ he says. ‘I suppose you could say that this was one gamble that turned out all right for us both, no?’
‘Don’t speak of it like that. How can you?’
‘Well you’re here,’ he hisses, turning nasty. ‘Aren’t you? What would you ever have done without me? You’d be dead yourself. Yes, that’s the truth of it. You’d be dead in some dark and godforsaken corner of Europe, if it weren’t for me.’
‘You shot me,’ I hiss.
‘For God’s sake, man! It was over half a decade ago. You’re acting as though it just happened.’
‘You don’t forget such a thing in a lifetime. Your own friend, shooting you in the head. How do you think I’m ever going to trust you after that?’
Every time I look in the mirror I see it. I feel it, too; the white-hot sting of the bullet. I’ll never forget it. He gave me no warning until after it was over.
‘It wasn’t in the head,’ he says. ‘Don’t be so bloody melodramatic. It was your ear.’
‘Which is attached—’
‘And it needed to be done,’ he cuts me off. ‘I shot myself, too!’
‘You lost a toe. No risk that you might kill yourself shooting off your little toe.’
Though of course he plays up to it for all he’s worth: that absurd heroic limp, which has won him so much favour with the electorate.
He’s gauged it perfectly: there never was a more aesthetic injury.
Not like those poor chaps who lost whole limbs, who had half their faces blown off.
No, he’s the noble warrior, slighted, but not bested.
A small reminder at all times of his heroism, his sacrifice.
I wouldn’t be surprised, truth be told, if the wound didn’t give him any trouble at all these days.
‘Meanwhile,’ I say, ‘you were less than an inch from killing me.’
‘Goodness, Crane. The expression on your face is positively frightening. Penny for them?’
‘Sometimes I wish you had killed me,’ I say.
He rolls his eyes. ‘What is this?’
I open the doors to the balcony. Look down at the snow.
Wonder, idly, if the fall from here would kill you.
‘I think every day about what we did. I’ve thought about throwing myself off here several times since I arrived …
’ My voice is rising to a shout now: ‘The S pill. The one they gave us. I still have it.’
‘For God’s sake,’ he says, angrily, scattering sparks and ash from his cigarette. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m not finished. Every day I take it out and I look at it and I think: it would have been better if I had taken mine. If you had taken yours – as we were meant to do in such a situation. And every day I wonder if it might be better if I did take it. Take it now, I mean.’
He follows me out onto the balcony. ‘Why would you say such a bloody morbid thing? And for God’s sake keep your voice down.’
I drop my voice a little, but I’m rather enjoying making him sweat.
‘And the thing I cannot comprehend is how it is that I wake each day with the bone-crushing guilt and horror of it, and you wake each day thinking that you’re just the thing our country needs.
Does it not keep you awake at night? When you are just as culpable as me. No, more so—’
Suddenly I can’t speak as he has seized me by the front of my shirt.
Now the charm has fallen away and I see the lethal ruthlessness that sits a short distance beneath the surface: like a granite bluff beneath fresh snow.
Even though I know of its existence it is still shocking to confront.
He grapples me back into the room and closes the doors to the balcony.
‘I think you would be wise,’ he hisses, spittle flecking my cheeks, ‘to hold your tongue. Either you are in or you are out, here. Which is it, Crane? At the moment you are proving a liability … and I cannot have that.’ He scoffs.
‘You’re far too much of a coward to kill yourself.
No, if you meant it, you’d have done it by now.
You’re just as greedy for the stuff as I am. You know it.’