The Pier Falls: And Other Stories

  Martin is turning over old memories. If the man had shorter hair and no beard…

  The stranger nods. The mince pie is good. The room relaxes. He takes a second sip of the brandy and steps forward to put the glass and the mince pie down on the table. Emmy and Sofie scootch their chairs back a little to avoid being touched. The damp hem of the stranger’s coat brushes Emmy’s knee. He steps back into the centre of the room. There are pastry crumbs in his beard. “Who wants to play a game?”

  “None of us want to play a game,” says Martin firmly. “We want to get on with the pleasant evening we were having before you arrived.”

  The stranger ignores, or perhaps fails to hear, the edge in Martin’s reply. “Surely someone wants to play a game.”

  “You’ve had something to drink,” says Martin. “You’ve had something to eat. I think that now it might be a good idea if you were to continue with your travels.”

  “I was on my way here,” says the stranger.

  There is a short silence while everyone digests this, then Gavin says, “Stop dicking us around, all right?”

  “Gavin,” hisses Sarah. “Jesus Christ.”

  The stranger opens his greatcoat. There is a deep poacher’s pocket on the left-hand side which sags open with the weight of a sawn-off shotgun. Anya’s intake of breath sounds like a hiccup. David says, “Wow.” The stranger lifts the gun out of the pocket, pushes the After Eights and the cheese plate to one side, slides the spare wicker mat into the cleared area and lays the gun gently on top of it so that it doesn’t scratch the polished walnut veneer.

  “Oh my God,” says Madeleine.

  Leo’s mouth hangs open.

  Anya begins to cry.

  “Is that a real gun?” asks David.

  “Let’s assume it is, shall we?” says Martin.

  But David’s question is apposite, because there is something odd about the gun, a hint of steampunk about it, the faintest possibility that it could be a theatrical prop, despite the weight everyone could sense when it touched the surface of the table.

  “Oh my God,” says Madeleine again. She is hyperventilating. “Oh my God.”

  “Someone really, really needs to call the police,” says Sofie.

  “Have we met before?” Martin asks the stranger. He has decided that this is, ultimately, a medical problem and this has allowed him to step back into a role he hasn’t filled for a long time and which feels very comfortable indeed.

  “Surely one of you wants to play a game,” says the stranger.

  Emmy gets to her feet.

  “Stay with us,” says the stranger.

  Emmy sits down again. Gavin pats her hand reassuringly.

  “I’m afraid you need to leave,” says Martin, “and you need to leave now.”

  “Are we in a hostage situation here?” asks Gavin. “Just out of interest.”

  “Are none of you brave enough to play my game?” asks the stranger.

  “Fucking hell,” says Gavin. “This is not about being brave. This is about you interrupting our hitherto very enjoyable festive family meal and assuming that we want to take part in some deranged pantomime of your own creation.”

  “Gavin?” says his father calmly, meaning, I’ll take it from here. He turns to the stranger. “Time’s up, I’m afraid.”

  The stranger smiles. He looks slowly around the room, as if assessing each of them in turn.

  Sofie squeezes Anya’s hand and says, “It’s going to be OK, darling.”

  “That’s it,” says Gavin, getting to his feet, irked not just by the stranger’s intrusion but by the way his father’s relaxed competence has placed him in a subordinate position.

  “Gavin,” Sarah half growls under her breath.

  Gavin picks up the gun.

  “No,” says Emmy. “Gavin, please.”

  Gavin steps away from the table and pushes his chair back under.

  “Holy fuck,” says Leo, putting his face in his hands.

  Gavin himself has not thought about what he will do with the gun, only that it is the source of power in the room, the sceptre, the conch. Now that it is in his hands, however, he is less sure about this. Should he hand the gun back to the stranger and order him to take it away? Should he confiscate it? Should he use it to threaten the man? “Time to go, I’m afraid.”

  Martin has been wrong-footed. The most dangerous person in the room is now his older son. He was not expecting this and is not immediately sure what to do about it. Family has always been so much more complex than work.

  The stranger smiles. “So you are willing to play my game?”

  “What, precisely, is this game you want us to play?” Gavin does not want to be asking questions, he wants to be giving orders, but he is being outplayed.

  “Shoot me,” says the stranger.

  Madeleine yelps, the kind of noise you might make if you fell down a flight of stairs.

  Gavin laughs. “Oh, I don’t think that’s going to happen.” How odd it is to be holding a weapon yet to have no control over the situation.

  “Gavin,” says his father, “I think it might be a good idea for you to put the gun down.”

  He agrees with his father and he would very much like to put the gun down but he does not want the stranger to see him doing something his father has asked him to do.

  The stranger walks very slowly towards Gavin. He seems utterly unbothered by the gun. It is the most menacing thing he has done since his arrival.

  “Whoa,” says Gavin. “Whoa, whoa. Stop right there.” His voice is not as low or as calm as he would like it to be.

  The stranger comes to a halt a couple of metres away from Gavin. They are two magnets of identical polarity pressed into close proximity. You can almost see curved lines of force penned on the air.

  “No closer,” says Gavin.

  “Gavin,” says his father, “you need to be very careful.”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” says Gavin.

  The exchange makes both men seem smaller.

  The stranger makes the tiniest of moves, perhaps no more than shifting his weight from one foot to another. Gavin responds immediately by raising the gun. He is not aware of having taken this decision, only that it has happened and that he cannot now undo it.

  “Oh fuck,” says Sarah. “Fucking fuck.”

  Gavin is now pointing a gun at another human being. He has occasionally imagined doing such a thing but he has never imagined it coupled with this level of anxiety and unease.

  Anya gets up and runs from the room. No one follows her for fear of doing even more to upset the precarious balance upon which everything seems now to depend. David has no thought of leaving. He is gripped. He senses no danger. He wonders if it is all part of Grandpa’s Christmas extravaganza. Perhaps the stranger is a friend of Emmy’s. Later on, when he gets up to his room and digs out his phone he is going to have the most amazing story to text to Ryan and Yah ya.

  “You’re going now,” says Gavin to the stranger.

  It is quite obvious to everyone that the stranger is not going.

  Leo softly pushes his chair back, half stands and reaches out towards Gavin, intending to nudge the barrel of the gun towards the carpet. But Gavin swings the gun towards Leo. He does not think about how the gesture might be read. It seems obvious to pretty much everyone in the room that it means I could shoot you, too. Leo sits back down.

  Martin can think of nothing more that he can contribute. He would rather David, Sofie, Sarah, Emmy and Madeleine were not in the room but otherwise he finds the situation perversely fascinating.

  “Pull the trigger,” says the stranger.

  “This man is not well, Gavin,” says Leo. “Gavin? Listen to me.”

  “I don’t think it’s a real gun,” says Gavin. “That’s why our friend is so relaxed.” He doesn’t quite believe this. The gun feels real. He simply needs something to say. If he keeps talking then maybe he can find a way to get a grip on the situation.

  The stranger says nothing
and does not move.

  “Put the fucking gun down, Gavin,” says Sarah, “and stop playing this stupid, bloody childish game, all right?”

  “I don’t think shouting is helpful,” says Emmy.

  “Well, gentle persuasion is not working out terribly well,” says Sarah.

  Gavin steps forward and pokes the stranger in the chest with the barrel of the gun.

  “Brilliant,” says Sarah.

  Madeleine’s face is white. Sofie’s hand is over her mouth.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” says Martin quietly, holding his index finger up, like a schoolteacher wanting a pupil to pause so he can redirect them towards the correct answer. “That’s a very bad idea, Gavin.”

  Emmy says, “Gavin, this is really scaring me. This is really scaring all of us.”

  Martin reaches towards his son. And this is when it happens. Everyone’s attention is momentarily distracted by Martin’s movement. Everyone, that is, except David who has no interest in his grandfather and eyes only for the gun. So it is only he and Gavin who are looking directly at the stranger when he is hit in the chest at point-blank range by two barrels of shot. He has no memory of the noise because the sight is so extraordinary. It is like a huge, invisible airbag going off between the two men, lifting them and hurling them away from each other, the stranger’s torso propelled by the shot, Gavin’s torso propelled by the butt of the gun which punches him hard in the ribs. He has seen this kind of image in films. What he has never seen in a film is the way the spray of shot passes instantly through the stranger’s chest, shredding and liquidising its contents and splashing them all over the curtains and the grandmother clock and the hand-coloured map of Bedfordshire while the stranger himself is still airborne.

  Then the stranger is no longer airborne. He is lying on the floor on his back, his head hard against the base of the clock which is still rocking from the impact, his greatcoat spread to either side like a great pair of bat wings. Mirroring him on the opposite side of the central rug Gavin, too, lies on his back, arms thrown to the side, unconscious but with his eyes and mouth open as if he has just noticed the amazing pattern of blood on the ceiling. A fat S of sulphurous grey smoke disperses slowly in the air between the two men.

  Madeleine screams, stops to catch her breath then screams again as if she is in a screaming competition.

  “Gavin…?” says Emmy, but she is wary of getting too close. “Gavin…?”

  There is blood on the sofa. There is blood on the standard lamp. There is a growing pool of blood beneath the stranger’s body. It is viscous with a plump, rounded outline, the colour of good port. There is blood on three of the dining chairs. There is a thin lasso of blood across the dining table, bisecting the cheese plate exactly. There is a little marble of blood sinking very slowly in a glass of Sauternes. Sofie has blood in her hair. She is wiping it robotically with a napkin, keeping her eyes fixed on the light switch on the far wall.

  Anya appears at the doorway. Granny is screaming. She sees two men lying on the floor. She sees oceanic amounts of blood. Her assumption is that the stranger is killing everyone in the house. She turns and runs, as quietly as she can, upstairs and into the guest bathroom on the second floor. She has imagined this happening many times. She thinks, often, about the car crashing, about bombs on the train, about tsunamis, about volcanoes, about ISIS, about Boko Haram. Whenever she finds herself in a new building she works out escape routes and hiding places. She finds it comforting, imagining the jackboots on the floorboards overhead and the sad cries of the foolish children who have failed to plan for this eventuality. It’s not comforting now that it is happening in real life but at least she is prepared. There is a panel beside the bath. She slides her fingernails under the rim, pulls it away and squeezes through the hole into the little loft above Granny and Grandpa’s bedroom, pulling the panel back into place behind her. The cramped, triangular space between the water tank and the roof is thick with cobwebs. It is also shockingly cold. She has only been in here once before, at the height of summer two years ago when she read an entire Tracy Beaker by torchlight. She had assumed it would be the same temperature all year round but she is sitting on the insulation which keeps the rest of the house warm. She should have grabbed a coat or a jumper. It is too late now. She hugs herself and starts to shiver.

  Downstairs, Martin puts his hand on his wife’s shoulder. “You need to stop that now. Go into the kitchen and take some diazepam.”

  She does not hear her husband. She hears a doctor talking. She stops screaming, gets automatically to her feet, walks into the kitchen and takes the foil pack from the shortbread tin behind the chutney. She pops out three 2mg tablets and swallows them with a glass of milk. She wonders if she has woken from a particularly vivid nightmare. She will sit and wait for someone to come and find her and tell her what is going on.

  In the living room Gavin groans, rolls onto his side and contracts slowly into a foetal curl, nursing what will turn out to be two broken ribs. Emmy kneels beside him and rubs his shoulder, alternating between relief that her husband is still alive and horror at his having shot someone.

  “Dad?” Leo pushes the abandoned gun to the skirting board with the tip of his right shoe. “You’re a doctor. You need to do something.”

  Martin is looking down at his older son. His older son has killed someone.

  “Not for Gavin,” says Leo. “For him.” He points at the stranger but can’t look at the body directly.

  Martin walks over to the stranger. He stands beside what remains of the man, hands in the pockets of his racing-green cardigan. The man’s chest cavity has been hollowed out and is now a rough bowl of red mush, torn membranes and the jagged ends of shattered bone. Martin hasn’t seen anything like this since he was a junior doctor, perhaps not even then. He remembers a motorcyclist who’d gone under a lorry but that was just a crushed pelvis and a missing leg. What was the point of showing anyone in this state to a doctor?

  “Can’t you do CPR?” asks Leo.

  “No C, no P,” says Martin. “Which makes the R impossible.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” says Leo.

  “No heart, no lungs,” says Martin. “Cardiopulmonary. CP.”

  Emmy vomits into her cupped hands. Leo hands her a napkin and she runs to the toilet in the hallway.

  Gavin puts the flat of his hand on the floor and pushes himself slowly up into a sitting position. He rubs his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his free hand. He has the fuzzy, pained look of someone waking to a heavy-duty hangover. He looks over at the stranger’s body. He says, “It just went off.”

  “You killed him,” says Sarah. “You’ve fucking killed him.”

  “That’s not going to help anyone,” says Martin.

  “I’m not thinking about helping anyone,” says Sarah. “The only person who needs help is fucking dead. I’m just getting it off my chest that my fucking brother acted like an arrogant fuckwit, as per usual, except this time he actually ended up murdering someone.”

  Robert touches her arm. “Hey, hey, come on.”

  “Get the fuck off me,” says Sarah. “I’m right. He knows I’m right. Everyone knows I’m right. So don’t you dare try and shut me up.”

  Robert makes the universal gesture of surrender and sits back in his chair.

  Sofie is trying to hustle David out of the room but he is refusing to go, shaking her hand off his shoulder. He is pretty sure now that the man was not one of Emmy’s friends. He feels sick and frightened but he wants to be able to say, “My sister ran away, but I didn’t.”

  “He was an intruder,” says Gavin slowly. “He had a gun. We got into a fight. The gun went off.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Gavin,” says Sarah. “You picked up the gun. You were told to put it down. You refused to put it down. You shoved it into his chest. You shot him.”

  “It was a mistake,” says Gavin.

  “Oh well, that’s fine then,” says Sarah.

  Martin s
its down and rubs his face. He would so much rather be buried in a car overnight.

  Emmy appears in the doorway, drying her ashen face with the little purple towel from the handrail by the sink, remaining just beyond the threshold like a member of the public behind the crime-scene tape.

  Upstairs, in the little loft above her grandparents’ bedroom, Anya cannot stop herself shaking from the cold. She is not afraid. The possibility that her entire family may now be dead has induced a terrible calm. Slowly but steadily her core temperature falls.

  Her mother is not worried about where her daughter is. Her daughter has not crossed her mind. At the moment, for Sofie, the world beyond this room simply does not exist.

  “I’m calling the police,” says Sarah. She walks towards the door. Emmy steps back to let her through.

  “Wait,” says her father.

  She stops in her tracks. It’s one of the things which angers her most about her father, the hotline he has to some primitive part of her brain, the way she has to override her knee-jerk subservience.

  “I think you’re very probably right,” says her father carefully, because he, in turn, has had to learn how to override his own automatic response to his daughter’s periodic outbursts, “but perhaps we should consider the consequences of irreversible actions.”

  “Are you seriously suggesting that we don’t call the police?” says Sarah. She does the words-fail-me face where she blows up her cheeks and shakes her head. “His insides are all over the fucking ceiling.”

  The last time he told his daughter to calm down she threw a dinner plate at him. He says, “Give me two minutes.”

  “One,” says Sarah.

  “Your brother could go to prison for a very long time.”

  Gavin shakes his head. “That is not going to happen.”

  His sister says, “I don’t want to fucking hear from you right now.”

  He clenches his teeth and presses his hand to his pained ribs to excuse his failure to think of a decent reply.

  She turns to her father. “Fifty seconds.”