Fiddles and Violins | Chapter Four | Part Two

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Charlie’s room.

I hadn’t been in Charlie’s room at all since he had gone. Sure, I had stuck my head round the door once, twice or thrice, just to see if he had turned up out of the blue again, half expecting to find him lying on his bed in his customary position, roll-up dangling from his lips, ashtray balanced precariously on his chest, a frown of concentration on his face as he read a book. ‘The Saint’ had been his all-time favourite – he had all the books, all tattered and with cracked spines and yellow pages. “It’s because they’re out of print”, he had told me once, when I had pointed out that his collection was far from pristine. “The only place to find Leslie Charteris nowadays is at a car-boot sale”.

“Who’s she?” I had asked.

“He, you philistine. He, not she. He is the genius who brought Simon Templar to the world. What you, the unlearned, would call an author”.

He had tossed a book over to me – The Saint in the Sun, or something – and said, “Read this. It’ll add a modicum of sophistication to your otherwise uncultured life”.

The book was probably still in my room somewhere, buried under a clutter of everyday life which seems to accumulate no matter how often you promise yourself to clear up as you go. I had never even opened the front cover, and for some strange reason, as Daryl and I walked up the stairs towards the abandoned room now, I felt slightly guilty.

I hesitated as I reached the door. I had this insane picture in my mind of opening the door only to find Charlie’s skeleton lying on the bed, complete with still-smoking tailor-made clenched between his teeth, the ashtray stuck at an angle in his rib-cage, bony fingers clasped behind his skull. As I approach, heart screaming like a freight-train, the sunken bloodshot eyes roll towards me, the jaws grind open, the roll-up falling through the ribs and onto the dusty sheet below, and the skull, in a raspy voice, says “Pray Until Something Happens” as the sheets begin to smoke before catching fire and Charlie disappears in a funeral pyre of roaring flames…

I blinked and shook my head. I’d read way too many Steven King novels.

“You alright?” said Daryl.

I nodded and pushed open the door, which completely failed to creak ominously as was conventional in all the best horror films.

As we stepped into the dimly-lit room, it occurred to me that I had hardly been in here at all since Charlie had moved in seven years ago. In the house, the living-room had been our hang-out place, our get-together place, our chill-out room. Our bedrooms had been our own little slice of privacy.

There was an over-powering smell of stale cigarette smoke in the room, combined with that dusty, empty smell of a room that has been unused for a while, as if the air was frozen in time. I noticed an ashtray on the bedside table, a heap of dog-ends piling up into a miniature mountain. Charlie has smoked like there was no tomorrow, but this was a lot, even by his standards. He must have been up all night before he had vanished the next morning. I found myself wondering why he had been unable to sleep.

There was a swishing sound as Daryl pulled the curtains open, and bright sunshine came streaming into the room through the glass balcony doors. I was thankful – the room was instantly transformed from a shrine, or a tomb, into an ordinary bedroom again.

“This place needs some fresh air”, Daryl commented as he swung the doors open, letting in a cool breeze. Charlie had been chuffed when I’d given him the room with the balcony.

“This balcony is just great for watching life go by”, he had said. I had replied that my room, with the terrace, was just as great for watching my own life go by. In slow motion.

“There’s a story behind everything in here”, I whispered, partly to myself, as I looked around the room. I hadn’t meant to whisper, but sometimes things just come out that way.

“Huh?”

I gestured around the room, trying with one wave of the hand to include all the posters on the walls; the ridiculous lamp on the bedside table, shaped like a boot with an arm coming out of it, the hand holding a torch; the rusty tin ashtray with the legend Cinzano emblazoned on it in red; the Garfield soft toy in white shorts dotted with red hearts; the assorted photos pinned up on the cork notice-board; the chocolate mousse stain on the carpet; and even the neatly-made bed with three legs, the fourth corner held up by a large section of oak branch with ‘Jason loves Rebecca’ carved into the bark that we had found one day while scavenging for firewood up in Franklin’s Grove. The bric-a-brac of someone’s life.

“There’s a story behind everything in here”, I repeated in a normal voice. I turned to face Daryl with a grin. “Do you remember trying to get that bloody bed up the stairs when he first moved in?”

Daryl mirrored my grin and nodded. “And that goofy lamp”, he said, pointing to the object in question, “from the La Vallette market”.

I looked around the room again, and walked up to the notice-board. There were glossy photos all over it – pictures of me and Charlie at The Eye In The Sky, a popular rock bar in Capeville, a picture of Claire beaming into the camera with Daryl behind her, giving her ‘rabbit ears’ with his fingers, another of us all at the beach, with Amy on Charlie’s shoulders waving a bucket and spade.

“Do you realise”, I asked, grimacing at yet another photo, one of me after a night of heavy drinking, butt-naked on the floor with a paper Coca-Cola cup covering my privates and as pissed as a newt, fast asleep with a dumb grin on my face, holding a sign with ‘Fucked’ penciled on it by Charlie. “Do you realise that almost everything in here was bought after he met us? There’s nothing in this room that belonged to Charlie before… well, before us”.

Daryl nodded and sat down on the bed.

“Well, you know what he was like. He used to buy anything he wanted, and then instantly forget about it. The guy was loaded, Joey. He didn’t even have to work, for God’s sake! Well, not to make a living, anyway”.

“True”, I admitted as, in my mind, I travelled seven years back into the past…

***

“So, what do you do?” I asked Charlie. We were out on my terrace, smoking and drinking beer. Well, I was drinking beer, and Charlie the teetotaller was pouring Coke down his throat. That morning had been the morning of the Hollywood movie break-up, and we had just got back from Olive Hill, having collected Charlie’s clothes and other odds and ends from a less than pleased Amber. We were taking a breather before getting Charlie’s new room in a liveable state.

“About what?” Charlie asked smartly, gulping down another mouthful. It was only the end of spring, not even summer yet, but the temperature was already soaring.

“About earning a living, wisearse”.

“Oh, this and that. Whatever takes my fancy, really, when I get bored”.

“You mean you don’t have a job?”

“Nope”.

“Um… nope, you don’t mean that, or nope, you don’t have a job?”

“I don’t have a job”.

Then how the hell are you going to pay the rent? I wondered silently.

“You’re not worried about the rent, are you?” Charlie said, casting me a sidelong glance.

“No, not at all”, I lied, “I was just wondering how you managed”.

“Don’t need a job”, he answered, “I’ve got an inheritance. My living’s already been earned for me. How did you think my father bought the Porsche? Coupons? He was… well, let’s say he was rather well-off. I was born with a silver ladle in my mouth”.

“Ladle?”

“Bigger than a spoon, but not quite a bowl”, said Charlie. “How about you?”

“I was born with sod all in my mouth”.

“I mean, what do you do for a living?”

“I um… I sell toys”, I told him. I hated telling people what my job was – it sounded so Willy Wonka meets Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I waited for the usual ‘Really?’ of disbelief.

“Cool”, said Charlie, and that was it.

We drained our drinks and flicked the remains of our cigarettes over the terrace and into the empty plot below. Charlie struggled out of his deckchair with an exaggerated groan, and stretched his legs.

“Well, I’m going to wardrobe my robes and cupboard my cups”, he said.

I smiled at his odd way of speaking. I was beginning to realise how he did it – he would take a perfectly innocent noun and turn it into a verb. In other words, he would Charliefy it. Parts of speech meant nothing to him. Shakespeare would have flipped in his grave.

I took the empty bottles down to the kitchen and then climbed the stairs again and joined Charlie in the bedroom. He was on his knees in front of a large cardboard box, extracting the contents one at a time and placing them on the floor beside him with exaggerated care. The box had ‘This Way Up’ printed upside-down on it in red. It was the only thing of Charlie’s that Amber hadn’t lobbed out of the window. Probably because it was too heavy.

I cast a curious eye over the assorted bits and pieces that Charlie was laying out. There were two large ice-cream containers which rattled and clicked as he moved them – “My badge collection”, he told me proudly soon after, “four hundred of them. Give or take a couple”.

There was a teetering pile of about two dozen CDs – ranging from Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp to the slightly more obscure Primitive Radio Gods, who I’d never heard of. There was a battered Sony Discman which looked as if it could have been the first CD player ever invented; his collection of Saint novels; a couple of out-dated diaries; a picture frame containing a photo of a much younger Charlie, without the pony-tail, in a navy T-shirt with ‘My Other T-Shirt Is Yellow’ printed across the chest; a tangle of Walkman headphones; and an orange desk organizer. A sleek black canvas carrying case. And several large, varnished wooden boxes, decorated with metal clasps and brass corners. They were rectangular in shape, and rather flat. They looked like the kind of boxes you could buy really expensive cigars in, provided that the cigars were sixteen inches long. And they looked heavy, as Charlie used both hands and grunted as he lifted them out of the cardboard box.

“My father’s pride and joy”, he told me, noticing my inquisitive look. “And the only things I kept. Everything else I auctioned off before selling the house”.

“How come you sold the house?”

“Because I’m twenty-one and single. What the hell would I do with a sixteen room converted farmhouse with a swimming pool, a five car garage and several acres of land?”

I said nothing, my mind conjuring up all the wonderful things that I could do if I had a sixteen room converted farmhouse with a swimming pool and so on.

Charlie sighed, and swiveled round on the floor to face me, his arms stretched out behind him, hands palm down on the carpet.

“Besides, I hated that house. It was way too big. It was ridiculous, really”. He sighed again, then continued, “My father worked so hard to have a dream-house that he never got to enjoy because he was too busy working so hard to have a dream-house that he never got to enjoy… etcetera etcetera etcetera. One of life’s stupid little vicious circles. I never really knew my dad. Do you have any idea how much it sucks, to live in a huge house with every luxury at your fingertips except for the one thing that you really want?”

I shrugged, wishing I hadn’t asked about the sodding house. It had just been a polite question, and I hadn’t been expecting any sentimental skeletons to come dancing out of closets. I wasn’t very good at handling outpourings of emotion. But Charlie looked as if he needed to get it off his chest, so I gave him what I hoped was an understanding look, and waited for him to go on. Which he did…

“So, when my dad died last year, I was quite shocked to find that I didn’t really miss him at all. My mother, yes, but not him. I loved him, of course, but for me, he had been long gone. I was used to him not being there”.

Charlie paused to remove the rubber band that held his hair back in a pony-tail. He shook his head, letting his hair fall forward to curtain his face.

“Must get a haircut”, he muttered, “pony-tail gives me a headache”.

He brushed a stray hair from his face and, reaching across for his tobacco pouch, started expertly rolling a cigarette.

“Anyway”, he continued, lighting the roll-up and puffing out a cloud of smoke, “the house is gone, the company taken over, the fucking pointless ornaments and shit that were supposed to make up for his absence have all been flogged off to the highest bidder, and the ghosts of the past are buried. The only things that are left of him are a pocketful of vague memories, the Porsche outside, and…” he waved a hand over the lustrous boxes by his side, like a magician about to pull a rabbit out of a hat – “… these. Call them unsentimental value, if you like”.

He fixed me then with his icy blue gaze, inviting me to ask the question he knew was coming.

“So”, I asked, as coolly as possible, “what’s in the boxes?”

Unfolding his legs, Charlie reached over and lifted the smallest box onto his lap. He flicked open the clasps and turned the box away from him, then slowly, no doubt for dramatic effect, he lifted the lid.

The second thing I noticed was that the box was lined with midnight-blue velvet. The third was the gold print in the lid which simply read ‘Made In Germany’.

But the first thing I noticed was the gun itself, nestling in the blue crushed velvet and gleaming like moonlight on a guillotine’s blade.

***

Forward to Chapter Five | Part One