Knowing Joy, she would shortly be coming round to The Spanker office to give him a seeing-to, but not in a good way, rather, in a Glaswegian way. Unless, of course, she was wearing her fox fur at the time. Then it might be a good way, but he couldn’t take that risk. He rapidly made his way back across the roof, climbed through his office window, deposited the Super Nuker, told Greg he wasn’t feeling well and he was going home early, and was out of there. He’d be feeling extremely unwell if he met up with Joy.
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He decided to hang out at The Hoop and Grapes over the road, then, once all the Fleetpit staff had gone home, climb the fire escape to the top floor, let himself into the building with the duplicate keys he had cut, and go up to his turret in the roof.
Over a pint, Dave wondered about telling Joy of his strange preference for fur. How much could he get across, and how much would she believe before she delivered her first punch or headbutt?
He had recently confided his story to Greg. Dave had been editing The Spanker Wild West Annual at the time, and had held onto the Davy Crockett hat used for a photo feature. He stroked it fondly. ‘A coonskin cap as worn in Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.’
‘And John Wayne in The Alamo,’ reminded Greg.
‘Yes,’ said Dave dreamily, looking far away. ‘It reminds me of my first love …’
‘A girl you went to see The Alamo with?’
‘No, I went on my own.’
‘Your first love wasn’t John Wayne …?’ Greg asked suspiciously.
‘No, I leave the bum-boy stuff to you. When I got home, I went up into the loft for the hat.’ Dave’s eyes gleamed as he remembered. ‘It was up there with my Davy Crockett moccasins, lunch-box and cap gun…’
‘I had a hat, too,’ recalled Greg.
‘But yours came from Woolworths, right?’ said Dave.
‘Everyone’s did.’
‘Oh, no. My mother made mine specially,’ said Dave triumphantly. ‘She loved anything to do with fur.’
‘It meant a lot to you?’
‘Oh, yes. I actually lost my cherry to my Davy Crockett hat.’
‘To a hat …?’ Greg was gobsmacked, this was weird, even for Dave.
‘It was the best night I’ve ever had. It wasn’t exactly the opposite sex – it was the opposite species.’
‘That is … unusual,’ Greg said diplomatically.
‘Yes,’ Dave reminisced, continuing to stroke the coonskin. ‘I also dated my mum’s fur coat for a while.’
‘What did your mother say about that?’
‘It happened after she disappeared.’
‘I remember you saying. One Saturday she just …vanished?’ Greg asked curiously. ‘So is she actually dead then …?’
‘No one knows,’ said Dave lost in thought. ‘Her body was never found.’ He sighed and shrugged his shoulders. He had told the story so often, it was no longer painful to him. Or, rather, he told himself it was no longer painful.
‘It sounds like she could be dead?’ said Greg gently.
‘We never heard from her again, so I suppose she must be.’ Dave grimaced, despite himself.
‘That’s really tragic,’ said Greg, feeling some rare sympathy for Dave.
‘So …I was looked after by my big sister and my dad.’
‘You seem okay about it?’
‘You’ve got to be, Greg. And it was a long time ago. Nearly twenty years ago now. You can’t go on grieving forever. I don’t like grief, you see?’ Dave struggled to explain feelings he resented. ‘It makes me feel …sad.’ He was starting to look very sad.
‘Well, yes, it would do.’ Greg tried to distract him. ‘So what did they think of your interest in fur?’
‘My sister first noticed when the nap of the fur went a bit flat …’ Dave said meaningfully. ‘We never discussed it, but she left the key to mum’s wardrobe out …’
‘That was thoughtful of her.’
‘Then my dad saw what I’d been doing with it and he went mad: “You never even took it off the hangar!” He said there’d never been anything like that in his family.’
‘What did they do about it?’ Greg was curious.
‘They talked about sending me for treatment. But the doctor had never heard of it.’
‘I suppose it’s not really bestiality,’ said Greg, reassuringly, ‘because it’s not alive.’ Then added, as an afterthought: ‘It’s having sex with a dead animal.’
‘The doctor preferred not to talk about it,’ recalled Dave. ‘There was no pamphlet for what I had. And he didn’t want to write one either. I was very disappointed when I grew up to discover that women weren’t all furry like a grizzly bear. I would long for a woman with a back like a Turkish deck-hand. I wasn’t sure I was alone with these feelings, but apparently I am.’
‘So what happened to the fur coat?’
‘It packed me in,’ Dave frowned. ‘It was pretty terrible. The wardrobe dumped me.’
‘Dumped you?’ Greg’s eyes widened.
‘Oh, yes.’
‘How?’
Dave shrugged. ‘She just said I don’t want to see you anymore.’
Greg’s interest was definitely piqued. This could be useful for future ‘Dave stories’ down the pub. His odd ways were already the subject of considerable gossip. ‘Wait a minute. Let me see if I’ve got this right. Your mother’s fur coat actually spoke to you …?
Dave nodded, as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
‘What did it say?’
‘It told me it was over.’
‘You actually hear voices …?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Dave without a trace of embarrassment. ‘All the time.’
‘You’ve never thought of seeking professional help?’
Dave shook his head. He’d seen what the psychiatrists had done to his dad. ‘I also have fond memories of her crocodile-skin handbag. From Nigeria.’
‘Her handbag?’ Not just mammals then, but reptiles, Greg thought. This was getting better and better. This was more than office gossip, it was valuable ammunition. If Dave kept this up, he might be able to get him sectioned and take over his job as editor.
‘And we won’t talk about her ferret stole,’ continued Dave, lost in his memories. ‘I couldn’t bear those dead, accusing eyes looking at me on the pillow. It didn’t have the glint I was looking for. But at least it was something. I gave it a French kiss and nearly choked on the mothball.’
Greg nodded understandingly.
Dave looked bitter. ‘My sister stopped me taking it to the pictures once.’
Greg nodded again, successfully hiding a smirk behind his hand.
This was brilliant, he thought. If his secret plan to produce a new comic didn’t work out, getting Dave certified would be an excellent alternative.
* * *
Later, sitting in his rooms at the top of Fleetpit House, Dave was still in a melancholic mood. He looked out the window towards St Paul’s to cheer himself, but there were two 1960s brutal, shimmering glass office blocks in the way.
He had one of those annoying chains of thoughts he could have done without. Joy’s Arctic fox fur reminded him of his mum’s furs and how much he missed her.
Then he thought of how his father, Peter, had lavished those furs on his wife, and this set him thinking how much he missed his dad, too.
To make it worse, the past had been carefully censored by his sister Annie, his aunt and his dad; they would never discuss it, so he only had a vague idea of his family history.
He leafed through a photo album Annie had passed onto him, trying to make sense of it.
He knew his mother Jean had met Peter during the war in a Soho club, where she’d been working as a singer and there was a photo of them together. It was fairly obvious she was a hostess, although the family always said she was a singer. It was his David Niven looks and manners that first attracted Jean, according to the agreed history and he was very handsome in the photo, before he started drinking heavily.
There were more photos of their wartime marriage before they went out to the colonies. Peter was a scientific adviser to the Department of Agriculture, and there was a nice shot of Annie just after she was born in Nigeria in 1945. But then a quarter of the photos in the six pages of their time in Africa had been carefully removed for no apparent reason. The remaining images were just typical, colonial sight-seeing images of Africa and told him nothing.
Two years later, they were sent home and Peter was dismissed for reasons that no-one would ever explain properly to Dave. All they had to show for their stay were a few carved African statues and the crocodile-skin handbag.
Jean never talked about Nigeria, but when Dave had been naughty she would sometimes say, ‘Go to your hut, boy’ instead of ‘Go to your room.’
Peter got a new job as a chemist in a laboratory at a grain merchant’s, M&R Pell. There were rows with Jean, but there were happy memories too, and Dave needed to hold onto them. There was a photo of Dave excitedly unwrapping his first chemistry set one Christmas – The Radioactive Laboratory – bestowing him with a love of science that would prove useful in later years. He treasured it alongside his Electrodes Set (‘Fun with Electricity’) and Glass Blowing Set, which involved softening glass to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (blow torch supplied). The Radioactive Laboratory really did live up to its name. It contained isotopes of polonium, ruthenium, uranium ore, a Geiger counter, and a cloud chamber to check radiation levels.
There was a photo of Peter patiently showing seven year old Dave how to avoid a nuclear meltdown.
Then Jean vanished, and everyone said she’d gone off to start a new life with one of her mysterious lovers. Peter fell apart and got heavily into debt. He spent periods in hospital where they fried his brains. In between hospital stays, he would make home-brew beer with a high alcohol content. M&R Pell unwittingly supplied the cereals, hops, yeast and laboratory equipment.
He took over a derelict, bombed-out house just down the street from their home for his illicit factory. An out of focus photo, doubtless taken by a drunken customer, showed him proudly brewing a Bockbier there with secret malt combinations and an impressive 18% alcohol content. He jacked it up to 30% through fractional freezing using the ‘mad-scientist-ice-in-the-bath’ method. The result was popular amongst friends, neighbours and pubs. A pint of the local strong stuff was easily eclipsed by Peter’s ‘blackout’. It was the crystal meth of its day.
The trouble was, he was drinking ‘blackout’ faster than he could make it. Under the influence of still-fermenting beer, in September 1968, Peter finally exploded. He and Dave were watching Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan on the BBC. The effect on Peter was electric. He staggered drunkenly to his feet, lurched forward to the television screen, shook his fist at the Inquisitor who had sentenced Joan to death and hissed, ‘You bastards. You evil bastards.’ Dave was mystified, even though it was a brilliant performance by Sir John Gielgud as the Inquisitor. With angry tears streaming down his face, Peter started to punch and kick the set. When that proved ineffective, he went and found Dave’s old cricket bat and smashed the screen.
This time, they really fried Peter’s brains. He was gone for two months. Dave had some idea what he went through – he had once tried out the electrodes from his electricity set on himself.
Two years later Peter blacked-out forever in the derelict house, surrounded by sacks of wheat and barley, after sampling his revolutionary new 40% brew. Some local Germans had come up with a rival toxic Doppelbock: ‘Von Ryan’s Express’ and Peter had been determined to top them. His answer to his home-brew rivals was ‘From Here to Eternity’. It carried out its promise. It was a cereal killer.
Serial Killer by Pat Mills & Kevin O’Neill is the first book in the Read Em And Weep series and is on sale digitally or as paperback.
My inaugural comment on substack!
This is pretty neat Pat and Lisa.
I'm going to have re read this book in preparation for the latest instalment in the series. Full of dark humour that had me cackling and guiltily peering over the top of my copy in equal measure!
Top stuff :)