Sonata of the Dead Read online

  ‘President,’ I said, feeling faintly ridiculous, like a spy from the Cold War given a contact cue.

  ‘Sit down,’ said the girl. I wanted to ask where Sarah was, but I had to play dumb. She pointed at herself: ‘Odessa,’ she said. And then she pointed at the other members of the group. ‘Underdog, Treacle.’

  Great. More code names.

  ‘Why Odessa?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re in no position to ask questions, buddy,’ Mr Hostile said.

  ‘It’s okay, Underdog,’ she said. He didn’t seem mollified by her intervention but he assumed a seething quiet.

  ‘Odessa because of Jon Voight. I liked him when I was a kid. And I especially liked him in that film. The Odessa File.’

  ‘What about the others?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ said Underdog. ‘This is your interview. Not ours.’

  ‘Interview? This is a writing group, isn’t it? Not a job vacancy.’

  Underdog stood up. Whenever he spoke he dipped his head forward like a heron trying to spot a fish in a stream. I’d seen that somewhere else. A boxer, maybe. An actor. Some tough guy. I bet he had seen it too. And rehearsed it in front of a mirror. He had five inches on me, and fifty pounds or so, but he moved like someone who had learned about violence from watching Tom & Jerry cartoons. I ignored him.

  ‘We never use our real names,’ Odessa said. She passed me the bottle of wine and I took a long, deep swig. Warm white. Christ.

  ‘So what’ll we call you?’

  ‘Corkscrew,’ I said, handing back the bottle and trying to keep the wine down. I suddenly realised I was so nervous my body was shaking. ‘Is this it? A pretty small group.’

  ‘And what if it is?’ Now the other guy stood up, as if being the only person left on the ground meant that he was somehow emasculating himself. As if they all were incapable of speech unless upright. I thought it was a pretty good observation, the kind of thing a writer might put in a novel, but I didn’t imagine it would go down well if I brought it up now. This guy – Treacle – was about the same height as me, but he looked as if he could back up any meanness in the way Underdog could not. Despite her relatively diminutive stature, it seemed that it was Odessa who called the shots.

  ‘We’re a small group because we need to be organised,’ she explained. ‘And the names thing… well, it’s important we retain our anonymity.’

  ‘You’ve lost me,’ I said. ‘I thought writers wanted anything but. Recognition. Sales. Awards.’

  Underdog sneered. ‘Do you know what a pseudonym is?’

  And I thought, Oh, you little cunt.

  ‘It’s not just about the writing,’ Treacle said. ‘It’s important. There is product. But the anonymity is there to protect us during the gathering of materials.’

  ‘I hope you write with more clarity,’ I said. ‘Because what you’re telling me at the moment is so dense it’s bending light.’

  ‘Did President not fill you in?’ asked Odessa.

  Underdog was flexing his fingers, making his knuckles crack like a meathead minion in a Bond film. ‘Did Prez not tell you about IN-IT-I-A-TION?’

  ‘No he did not,’ I said. I didn’t like the sound of that. I thought of Sarah and whether she had performed an initiation. Why wasn’t she here? Had she ever even met these people? I had to say something and I was on the brink of coming clean. But I felt so close to her, despite her absence. I couldn’t bugger it up now, even though I was sailing into uncharted territory. I had to keep reminding myself that to refer to her was to lose her again. ‘I brought some writing with me, if that’s what you’re referring to,’ I said, knowing full well it was not.

  ‘That’s part of it,’ Odessa said, hand held out.

  I pulled the folded envelope from my back pocket. There was a moment of panic as she took it from me, when I was convinced my address was upon it. Too late now, I thought.

  ‘How very guerrilla of you,’ she said.

  ‘You going to read that right now?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing like the present perfect,’ she said, and ostentatiously unfolded the envelope.

  ‘Christ,’ I said. ‘It’s like being back at school.’

  ‘Who do you read?’ Underdog asked.

  My mind went blanker than an amnesiac’s Christmas list. ‘I tend not to read much when I’ve got a novel on the go,’ I said. I’m a comfortable liar, but I was so far out of my comfort zone that I was sure they could see through me.

  ‘A novel,’ he said, and he couldn’t have sounded more contemptuous if he’d been trying to get a charge for being in contempt of court. ‘A novel about what?’

  ‘I don’t talk about works in progress. I’m sure you’ll understand.’

  ‘Precious fucker, hey?’ he said, and I knew there was trouble up ahead with him. I wondered if he was the kind of person who was capable of the kind of determined dismantling of a body Martin Gower had been on the wrong end of, but I couldn’t see it. Not quite. ‘I talk about my work all the time,’ he said.

  Yes, I thought. I bet you do. All the time. ‘Are you not worried about story thieves nicking your ideas?’

  ‘Everybody steals everybody’s work anyway. There are no original ideas left.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ I said. I meant it as a joke but it obviously stung him. I couldn’t blame Taft for jumping ship if he had to put up with crap like this every time they assembled.

  Odessa, though apparently absorbed by my work, must have been burnt by some of this friction developing between us. ‘You’ll forgive us for seeming a little testy, a little jumpy,’ she said. ‘One of our members. One of our founders – a friend – was found dead a couple of days ago.’

  I almost said his name. Instead, I held my hands up. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘We have a vacancy, as a result,’ Treacle said. ‘We are a six usually. Always have been. President leaving has made things difficult. Suddenly numbers are down, but we don’t blame him. How do you know him, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘How come there’s only three of you tonight?’ I asked. ‘President, and your dead friend, that makes five. Who’s six?’ My heartbeat threatened to obscure any answer.

  Treacle continued: ‘We have a member – Solo – whose attendance is… irregular.’

  ‘To say the least,’ said Underdog. ‘I’d be tempted to kick her out and find someone more reliable.’

  Her.

  Odessa folded the envelope shut. ‘Treacle asked you a question.’

  ‘I found him when I was looking for a guitar teacher,’ I said immediately. Treacle and Underdog might have been packing some muscle, but Odessa was the one to watch. She was sharp. ‘I had some lessons, we ended up talking about books. About writing.’

  ‘Some coincidence,’ Underdog said. ‘Another guitar-playing writer.’

  ‘Like John Lennon,’ I said. ‘Like Nick Cave. Everyone’s a writer. Are you telling me that’s all you do?’

  ‘That’s all I do,’ he said.

  ‘And you live in London? I’m impressed. How many six-figure deals have you signed lately?’

  ‘You don’t need some cliché job to get by,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s right. So what non-cliché job do you have? Something criminal?’

  ‘What if it is?’ he said, his voice suddenly filling with venom. ‘What are you? What is this with all the questions? You know what? You stink of copper to me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind having a copper on our side,’ Treacle said. ‘Especially after what happened to Needles.’

  ‘Needles?’

  ‘Martin Gower. Our dead… our murdered comrade.’

  ‘I thought you always used code names.’

  ‘A code name cannot help a dead man,’ Odessa said.

  ‘We seem to be playing twenty questions with each other,’ Treacle said. ‘Shall we just get on with what we planned for tonight?’

  ‘You want to be a writer?’ Underdog asked.

  ‘I am a writer,’ I s
aid, trying to play the game. Trying to sound convincing. I could feel things slipping away. Anger was percolating.

  ‘I mean… are you committed? Do you consider it your calling?’

  I was annoyed by the question but I guessed it was him annoying me more than what he’d said. I didn’t want to ruffle his feathers any more, or prolong this damned evening, which felt like a severe going-over by one of Mawker’s IQ-deficient bumchums.

  ‘He is committed,’ Odessa said. I felt my heart again, causing ructions. I thought, I’m too old for this. Sell up and move out. Live in a tent in the Quantocks. But there was nothing to sell. I didn’t know how to pitch a tent. And I didn’t know where the fucking Quantocks were.

  ‘There is fuel for his writing,’ she continued. ‘Inexhaustible, you might say. I think Solo would enjoy meeting you. You have much in common.’

  She knows. She knows. She knows. She knows. She—

  She held out the envelope and I made to take it but she did not immediately let go. A worm of sweat slid down the small of my back.

  ‘I have a problem with this,’ she said. Her voice was low and slow and sly. Up close I could see the gleam of light reflected in her eyes. She was tiny, but in that moment I felt I was looking up at her.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. I was ready to make a bolt for it. There was no physical danger here – not much, nothing I hadn’t dealt with before – but I had never felt so naked, so exposed, so vulnerable.

  ‘There are a lot of parentheses,’ she said. ‘I don’t trust writers who use brackets. It suggests a great deal of concealment. A hidden channel of thought.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, snatching the envelope from her fingers. ‘I wrote it fast, from the heart. I didn’t plan it first. Maybe I should have done. Maybe that way there’d be less afterthought, fewer brackets. It doesn’t strike me as that important.’ I tucked the envelope into my pocket. I felt rejected. My face burned.

  ‘Maybe it isn’t,’ she said. She smiled. ‘It was a beautiful letter, I should say, once you forget about the technicalities. That’s all that matters, I suppose.’

  My palms were greasy. I resented having my feelings – still raw after all these years – picked apart by someone who was probably dealing in poo jokes at the time of Rebecca’s murder.

  Any other time and I might have argued the toss but this was a test of my restraint. ‘I’ll work on the brackets in future,’ I said flatly. ‘So what now?’

  ‘We are called the Accelerants for a reason,’ Treacle said.

  ‘Are you sure President didn’t clue you up about our selection process?’ Underdog asked, incapable, it seemed, of concealing the disgust from his voice.

  I shook my head, imagining that Taft enjoyed this trick he’d played; his way of getting back at me for wheedling information out of him.

  But Odessa said: ‘It isn’t vital he knows. In some ways it is better he doesn’t. No time to prepare. His responses will be pure. Human. Unrehearsed.’

  I didn’t like the sound of that. I said so.

  Odessa smiled. She had an attractive, crooked smile. She was enjoying herself. ‘As Treacle pointed out, we are called the Accelerants for a reason. We write from lived experience.’

  ‘Write what you know,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘But you are looking at some very cosseted writers. Only recently have we managed to escape our cotton-wool prisons. Adults with no great history. Clean slates, to all intents and purposes.’

  ‘Accelerants,’ I said. I was thinking of Neville Whitby’s photographs taken in Archway the previous winter, of the pitched battle with police, a demonstration turned ugly and Sarah in the thick of it. ‘You… manufacture experience.’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Odessa said. ‘Another would be that we throw ourselves at life, eager to catch up on what we have missed. We have become our own catalysts.’

  ‘Throw yourselves at life how?’ I asked.

  ‘We have a manifesto,’ Underdog said. ‘You can read it if you like.’

  ‘I’m older than you,’ I said. ‘Maybe I don’t need to create experiences. I’ve lived much of them.’

  ‘Then fuck you and good night,’ Underdog said.

  ‘What about you?’ I said. ‘You’re what? Late twenties, early thirties? You’re telling me you haven’t lived? No travel? No girlfriends? You ever had a vindaloo? Gone to bed past midnight?’

  ‘You think that’s experience?’

  I spread my arms. ‘I’m ready to be enlightened.’

  ‘Have you ever been afraid? I mean, afraid for your life? Have you ever been in prison? Have you ever meted out violence? Have you suffered pain?’

  ‘Prison? No. But I can put a tick in all those other boxes.’

  ‘You’ve never been in prison?’

  Who was this Underdog? Early thirties going on ten? He seemed moments away from ner-ner-ne-ner-ner. ‘There are hundreds of writers out there,’ I said. ‘Successful published writers’ – a reaction to that, a barb that found its way under his armour – ‘who have never been in prison. If they want to write about a prison, or a convict, they do some research, pay a visit, talk to people. Hey, maybe they make it up.’

  ‘But you lose something,’ Odessa protested. ‘You must agree that authenticity is compromised if you don’t possess the authority of lived experience.’

  I was on a tightrope. I had to be careful. Treacle and Odessa seemed to be relishing the debate; Underdog less so. If he owned a suspicion gland it would be red and swollen and weeping by now. The others didn’t seem to be paying much heed to his probing; maybe he was like this with everyone. Maybe they were sick of him. But if I kept arguing they’d show me the door. They were seeking an ally, not a dissenter. But I couldn’t back down. Mawker would have recognised this cussedness in me; Rebecca too. It was one of the reasons I couldn’t hack it as a policeman.

  ‘But this attitude presupposes that your readership, such as it is, has the same level of experience.’

  ‘We don’t write for publication,’ Odessa said, and there was triumph there in her voice. ‘We don’t crave readership.’

  I snatched a glance at Underdog. Bollocks you don’t, I thought.

  ‘I like that,’ I said; I had to throw a sop. ‘There’s an admirable purity to it.’

  ‘We don’t self-censor,’ she said. ‘Anything goes. There are no market forces. No editor to please. Peer appraisal only.’

  It struck me that any writing, though pushed to the fore in this ‘public’ forum, seemed secondary. It was an excuse for criminal acts, it seemed. A way to make nihilistic behaviour appear justified. Christ, Sarah, I thought. What are you into? Just you wait till I get you home, young lady.

  ‘What are you smirking at?’ asked Underdog, eyes fast on me.

  ‘As I said, I like it.’

  ‘Yeah, well. You might change your tune. What are your fears?’

  ‘I’m not good in lifts,’ I said. ‘Or with heights in general. I don’t like dogs. I’m not a big fan of aubergines. Pick something out of that lot. I’ll write you a sonnet.’

  Odessa seemed decided. Her movements had a finality about them, or at least the drawing of a line. She drank wine, finishing off the bottle, and tossed the empty at a wastebasket. It dropped neatly in. I resisted the urge to tell her to write about that.

  ‘We meet twice a month,’ she said. ‘Nothing planned in advance. You come or you don’t. But three absences on the trot and you’re out.’

  ‘Is that what is going to happen to Solo?’ I asked, but I put too much sauce on it. Odessa didn’t seem to notice, but Underdog certainly did. He was observant too; I had to give him that. Treacle was bored. I noticed he seemed put out that Odessa had drained the bottle. Maybe he was a drinker; maybe I could use that to my advantage at a later date.

  ‘Solo’s missed one session. But she has special dispensation. An unfortunate anniversary, I’m led to believe.’

  Another lurch in the chest. I fe
lt that I’d become utterly transparent; that Odessa, Underdog and Treacle could see the bruises on my heart, the fissures of suspicion like black splits in my mind. Surely not. Surely not. My mind struggled with dates and places. How could I forget? But of course I couldn’t. I could block though. I could fight, subconsciously, to keep that terrible door shut.

  ‘Shall we get a wiggle on?’ asked Treacle. ‘I’ve had too much bed lately, and not enough sleep. I need an early night.’

  The mood seemed to have lifted where Odessa and Treacle were concerned. I’d miscalculated; obviously they had been nervous about this meeting too.

  ‘So when will I know where and when the next meeting is?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ll leave you a message. Once you’ve passed the initiation.’

  ‘All needlessly Le Carré isn’t it? You could just text me.’

  ‘No phones,’ she said. ‘No emails. We go face-to-face or write letters. No printers. No computers. No word-processing packages. Typewriters, pens and pencils.’

  The way she spoke made the words bounce around. It was like performance poetry. It was, I supposed; I was sure she had recited this litany before. For a nominally liberated group they seemed to be beset with a lot of rules and regulations and restrictions. I said as much as we began walking north-east, towards Marble Arch.

  ‘A friend of ours was killed, Corkscrew. We suspect it might have something to do with the group. Do you think it would be wise of us to let all of our defences down? We have no idea who you are. The only way we can hope for an inkling of trust is to take recommendations. President was well-loved, but he couldn’t stay.’

  ‘Why not? His leaving looks a bit suspicious, doesn’t it? If you were inclined to look at it dispassionately.’

  ‘If he’d killed Needles, the stupid thing to do would be to draw attention by leaving,’ said Underdog. His lip was so curled by disgust it was threatening to become a Möbius strip. ‘He was scared. He’s older than the rest of us. It was an experience he could do without.’