The Gun Seller
Hugh Laurie
For my father
I am indebted to the writer and broadcaster Stephen Fry for his comments; to Kim Harris and Sarah Williams for their overpowering good taste and intelligence; to my literary agent Anthony Goff, who has been unstinting in his support and encouragement; to my theatrical agent Lorraine Hamilton, for not minding that I also have a literary agent, and to my wife Jo, for things that would fill a longer book than this.
PART ONE
One
I saw a man this morning
Who did not wish to die;
P S. STEWART
Imagine that you have to break someone’s arm.
Right or left, doesn’t matter. The point is that you have to break it, because if you don’t . . . well, that doesn’t matter either. Let’s just say bad things will happen if you don’t.
Now, my question goes like this: do you break the arm quickly - snap, whoops, sorry, here let me help you with that improvised splint - or do you drag the whole business out for a good eight minutes, every now and then increasing the pressure in the tiniest of increments, until the pain becomes pink and green and hot and cold and altogether howlingly unbearable?
Well exactly. Of course. The right thing to do, the only thing to do, is to get it over with as quickly as possible. Break the arm, ply the brandy, be a good citizen. There can be no other answer.
Unless.
Unless unless unless.
What if you were to hate the person on the other end of the arm? I mean really, really hate them.
This was a thing I now had to consider.
I say now, meaning then, meaning the moment I am describing; the moment fractionally, oh so bloody fractionally, before my wrist reached the back of my neck and my left humerus broke into at least two, very possibly more, floppily joined-together pieces.
The arm we’ve been discussing, you see, is mine. It’s not an abstract, philosopher’s arm. The bone, the skin, the hairs, the small white scar on the point of the elbow, won from the corner of a storage heater at Gateshill Primary School - they all belong to me. And now is the moment when I must consider the possibility that the man standing behind me, gripping my wrist and driving it up my spine with an almost sexual degree of care, hates me. I mean, really, really hates me.
He is taking for ever.
His name was Rayner. First name unknown. By me, at any rate, and therefore, presumably, by you too.
I suppose someone, somewhere, must have known his first name - must have baptised him with it, called him down to breakfast with it, taught him how to spell it - and someone else must have shouted it across a bar with an offer of a drink, or murmured it during sex, or written it in a box on a life insurance application form. I know they must have done all these things. Just hard to picture, that’s all.
Rayner, I estimated, was ten years older than me. Which was fine. Nothing wrong with that. I have good, warm, non arm-breaking relationships with plenty of people who are ten years older than me. People who are ten years older than me are, by and large, admirable. But Rayner was also three inches taller than me, four stones heavier, and at least eight however-you-measure-violence units more violent. He was uglier than a car park, with a big, hairless skull that dipped and bulged like a balloon full of spanners, and his flattened, fighter’s nose, apparently drawn on his face by someone using their left hand, or perhaps even their left foot, spread out in a meandering, lopsided delta under the rough slab of his forehead.
And God Almighty, what a forehead. Bricks, knives, bottles and reasoned arguments had, in their time, bounced harmlessly off this massive frontal plane, leaving only the feeblest indentations between its deep, widely-spaced pores. They were, I think, the deepest and most widely-spaced pores I have ever seen in human skin, so that I found myself thinking back to the council putting-green in Dalbeattie, at the end of the long, dry summer of ‘76.
Moving now to the side elevation, we find that Rayner’s ears had, long ago, been bitten off and spat back on to the side of his head, because the left one was definitely upside down, or inside out, or something that made you stare at it for a long time before thinking ‘oh, it’s an ear’.
And on top of all this, in case you hadn’t got the message, Rayner wore a black leather jacket over a black polo-neck. But of course you would have got the message. Rayner could have swathed himself in shimmering silk and put an orchid behind each ear, and nervous passers-by would still have paid him money first and wondered afterwards whether they had owed him any.
As it happened, I didn’t owe him money. Rayner belonged to that select group of people to whom I didn’t owe anything at all, and if things had been going a little better between us, I might have suggested that he and his fellows have a special tie struck, to signify membership. A motif of crossed paths, perhaps.
But, as I said, things weren’t going well between us.
A one-armed combat instructor called Cliff (yes, I know - he taught unarmed combat, and he only had one arm - very occasionally life is like that) once told me that pain was a thing you did to yourself. Other people did things to you - they hit you, or stabbed you, or tried to break your arm – but pain was of your own making. Therefore, said Cliff, who had spent a fortnight in Japan and so felt entitled to unload dogshit of this sort on his eager charges, it was always within your power to stop your own pain. Cliff was killed in a pub brawl three months later by a fifty-five-year-old widow, so I don’t suppose I’ll ever have a chance to set him straight.
Pain is an event. It happens to you, and you deal with it in whatever way you can.
The only thing in my favour was that, so far, I hadn’t made any noise.
Nothing to do with bravery, you understand, I simply hadn’t got round to it. Up until this moment, Rayner and I had been pinging off the walls and furniture in a sweatily male silence, with only the occasional grunt to show that we were both still concentrating. But now, with not much more than five seconds to go before I passed out or the bone finally gave way - now was the ideal moment to introduce a new element. And sound was all I could think of.
So I inhaled deeply through my nose, straightened up to get as close as I could to his face, held the breath for a moment, and then let out what Japanese martial artists refer to as a kiai - you’d probably call it a very loud noise, and that wouldn’t be so far off - a scream of such blinding, shocking, what-the-fuck-was-that intensity, that I frightened myself quite badly.
On Rayner, the effect was pretty much as advertised, because he shifted involuntarily to one side, easing the grip on my arm for about a twelfth of a second. I threw my head back into his face as hard as I could, feeling the gristle in his nose adjust itself around the shape of my skull and a silky wetness spreading across my scalp, then brought my heel up towards his groin, scraping the inside of his thigh before connecting with an impressive bundle of genitalia. By the time the twelfth of a second had elapsed, Rayner was no longer breaking my arm, and I was aware, suddenly, of being drenched in sweat.
I backed away from him, dancing on my toes like a very old St Bernard, and looked around for a weapon.
The venue for this pro-am contest of one fifteen-minute round was a small, inelegantly furnished sitting-room in Belgravia. The interior designer had done a perfectly horrible job, as all interior designers do, every single time, without fail, no exceptions - but at that moment his or her liking for heavy, portable objets happened to coincide with mine. I selected an eighteen-inch Buddha from the mantelpiece with my good arm, and found that the little fellow’s ears afforded a satisfyingly snug grip for the one-handed player.
Rayner was kneeling now, vomiting on a Chinese carpet and improving its colour no end. I chose my spot, braced myself, and swung at him back-handed, plugging the corner of the Buddha’s plinth into the soft space behind his left ear. There was a dull, flat noise, of the kind that only human tissue under attack can make, and he rolled over on to his side.
I didn’t bother to see whether he was still alive. Callous, perhaps, but there you go.
I wiped some of the sweat from my face and walked through into the hall. I tried to listen, but if there was any sound from the house or from the street outside I would never have heard it, because my heart was going like a road drill. Or perhaps there really was a road drill outside. I was too busy sucking in great suitcase-sized chunks of air to notice.
I opened the front door and immediately felt cool drizzle on my face. It mingled with the sweat, diluting it, diluting the pain in my arm, diluting everything, and I closed my eyes and let it fall. It was one of the nicest things I’ve ever experienced. You may say that it’s a pretty poor life I’ve been leading. But then, you see, context is everything.
I left the door on the latch, stepped down on to the pavement and lit a cigarette. Gradually, grumpily, my heart sorted itself out, and my breathing followed at a distance. The pain in my arm was terrible, and I knew it would be with me for days, if not weeks, but at least it wasn’t my smoking arm.
I went back into the house and saw that Rayner was where I’d left him, lying in a pool of vomit. He was dead, or he was grievously-bodily-harmed, either of which meant at least five years. Ten, with time added on for bad behaviour. And this, from my point of view, was bad.
I’ve been in prison, you see. Only three weeks, and only on remand, but when you’ve had to play chess twice a day with a monosyllabic West Ham supporter, who has ‘HATE’ tattooed on one hand, and ‘HATE’ on the other - using a set missing six pawns, all the rooks and two of the bishops - you find yourself cherishing the little things in life. Like not being in prison.
I was contemplating these and related matters, and starting to think of all the hot countries I’d never got around to visiting, when I realised that that noise - that soft, creaking, shuffling, scraping noise - was definitely not coming from my heart. Nor from my lungs, nor from any other part of my yelping body. That noise was definitely external.
Someone, or something, was making an utterly hopeless job of coming down the stairs quietly.
I left the Buddha where it was, picked up a hideous alabaster table lighter and moved towards the door, which was also hideous. How can one make a hideous door? you may ask. Well, it takes some doing, certainly, but believe me, the top interior designers can knock off this kind of thing before breakfast.
I tried to hold my breath and couldn’t, so I waited noisily. A light switch flicked on somewhere, waited, then flicked off. A door opened, pause, nothing there either, closed. Stand still. Think. Try the sitting-room.
There was a rustle of clothing, a soft footfall, and then suddenly I found I was relaxing my grip on the alabaster lighter, and leaning back against the wall in something close to relief. Because even in my frightened, wounded state, I was ready to stake my life on the fact that Nina Ricci’s Fleur de Fleurs is just not a fighting scent.
She stopped in the doorway and looked around the room. The lights were out, but the curtains were wide open and there was plenty of light coming in from the street.
I waited until her gaze fell on Rayner’s body before I put my hand over her mouth.
We went through all the usual exchanges dictated by Hollywood and polite society. She tried to scream and bite the palm of my hand, and I told her to be quiet because I wasn’t going to hurt her unless she shouted. She shouted and I hurt her. Pretty standard stuff, really.
By and by she was sitting on the hideous sofa with half a pint of what I thought was brandy but turned out to be Calvados, and I was standing by the door wearing my smartest and best ‘I am psychiatrically A1’ expression.
I’d rolled Rayner on to his side, into a kind of recovery position, to stop him from choking on his own vomit. Or anyone else’s, if it came to that. She’d wanted to get up and fiddle with him, to see if he was all right - pillows, damp cloths, bandages, all the things that help to make the bystander feel better - but I told her to stay where she was because I’d already called an ambulance, and all in all it would be better to leave him alone.
She had started to tremble slightly. It started in the hands, as they clutched the glass, then moved to her elbows and up to her shoulders, and it got worse every time she looked at Rayner. Of course, trembling is probably not an uncommon reaction to discovering a mixture of dead person and vomit on your carpet in the middle of the night, but I didn’t want her getting any worse. As I lit a cigarette with the alabaster lighter - and yes, even the flame was hideous - I tried to take in as much information as I could before the Calvados booted her up and she started asking questions.
I could see her face three times in that room: once in a silver-framed photograph on the mantelpiece, with her in Ray Bans, dangling from a ski-lift; once in a huge and terrible oil portrait, done by someone who can’t have liked her all that much, hanging by the window; and finally, and definitely the best of all, in a sofa ten feet away.
She couldn’t have been more than nineteen, with square shoulders and long brown hair that waved and cheered as it disappeared behind her neck. The high, round cheek-bones implied Orientalness, but that disappeared as soon as you reached her eyes, which were also round, and large, and bright grey. If that makes any sense. She was wearing a red silk dressing-gown, and one elegant slipper with fancy gold thread across the toes. I glanced around the room, but its mate was nowhere to be seen. Maybe she could only afford one.
She cleared some husk from her throat. ‘Who is he?’ she said.
I think I’d known she was going to be American before she opened her mouth. Too healthy to be anything else. And where do they get those teeth?
‘His name was Rayner,’ I said, and then realised that this sounded a little thin as an answer, so I thought I’d add something. ‘He was a very dangerous man.’
‘Dangerous?’
She looked worried by that, and quite right too. It was probably crossing her mind, as it was crossing mine, that if Rayner was dangerous, and I’d killed him, then that, hierarchically-speaking, made me very dangerous.
‘Dangerous,’ I said again, and watched her closely as she looked away. She seemed to be trembling less, which was good. Or maybe her trembling had just fallen into sync with mine, so I noticed it less.
‘Well . . . what is he doing here?’ she said at last. ‘What did he want?’
‘It’s difficult to say.’ Difficult for me, at any rate. ‘Maybe he was after money, maybe the silver. . .’
‘You mean . . . he didn’t tell you?’ Her voice was suddenly loud. ‘You hit this guy, without knowing who he was? What he was doing here?’
Despite the shock, her brain seemed to be coming along pretty nicely.
‘I hit him because he was trying to kill me,’ I said. ‘I’m like that.’
I tried a roguish smile, then caught sight of it in the mirror over the mantelpiece and realised it hadn’t worked.
‘You’re like that,’ she repeated, unlovingly. ‘And who are you?’
Well now. I was going to have to wear some very soft shoes at this juncture. This was where things could suddenly get a lot worse than they already were.
I tried looking surprised, and perhaps just a little bit hurt. ‘You me...
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