On discovering that Beluga had shot himself dead I felt huge relief. The astonishing news might have escaped me if it had not been for a friend who lived in Beluga’s neck of the woods where the suicide made a splash. His real name was Benjamin Georg Luger – Georg without the final e in memoriam of his German ancestor who invented the recoil operated, semi-automatic pistol. “Beluga had an incurable cancer,” explained my friend, Pat. “He took the stoical way out. Left all his books to the British Library. Worth a fortune apparently. He was an antiquarian.”

I knew that last fact. It was during one of Beluga’s trips up to the smoke to make a purchase that we bumped into each other again. Or more accurately he bumped into me. Fifty one years later. That’s more than enough time to forget somebody’s existence as I had indeed forgotten his. Some people are more distinctive than others. A ghostly impression lingers. The only bit of Beluga that had left a faded scorch mark on my memory was his name. Correction. My name for him – which is not the same thing. Not by a long chalk as things transpired.

The story begins in a pub called The Crown. It’s run by Martin, an ex soldier who wears his war wounds lightly but starts to get emotional as Remembrance Sunday approaches. “I’m organising a barbecue to celebrate VE day,” he confided one evening.
“We’ll have forties music, jitterbugging and a quiz. Would you be prepared to make a speech, Charlie? Nothing pompous? A few words to remind the younger generation what their grandparents endured?”

People have called me Charlie for years even though I was baptised Carlo. I gave Martin the thumbs up and the event ran smoothly, apart from a problem with the sound amplification system. Only those in the front part of the lounge could hear what I said. The following day Martin rang me. “Any chance you could type your speech up?” he asked. “A few regulars missed it. I’ll pin it on the wall.”

So that’s what we did. Two A4 sheets with my name underneath. It was that piece of vanity, the name underneath I mean, that led to my undoing. About a week later Martin comes on the blower again. “There’s a bloke in here who reckons he went to school with you in Liverpool,” he announced. “His name is Beluga. He’s keen to renew your acquaintance.”

I had nothing on and fancied a drink. “You’ll have to excuse me,” I apologised to the wizened character who confronted me at the bar. “Your name rang a bell but beyond that darkness takes over. King’s School Crosby, was it?”

He held out a limp hand. “You’ve not changed all that much, Carlo,” he observed. “Still got a fine head of hair.”

“I wish I could reciprocate the flattery,” I confessed. Beluga wore a thin grey moustache, a pinstriped suit a size too large and blue tinted spectacles. He was drinking pink gin and tonic so I ordered the same as we headed off down memory lane. Did I remember Pecker and Nunc? he asked and a mausoleum creaked open in my psyche. The first a music teacher who made us suffer congregational practice late on a Friday afternoon when every cell in our bodies simply ached for liberation; the second an ineffectual Latin master who couldn’t control disruptive pupils and used to curry favour by taking them for weekend boating trips on The Norfolk Broads. Was I aware that Nunc had eventually suffered a major breakdown and become the permanent resident of a mental institution at the school’s expense? Beluga asked. No, I wasn’t.

Martin does a good G and T. By the time we were sipping our second the gallery of schoolmasterly ghosts had expanded fivefold. Daisy, Joe Egg, Charlie Blight, – all had their idiosyncrasies. Trog, the outsize PE master, who outlawed underpants, lined us up before lessons and thrust his hand down the front of our shorts to check if we were illicitly wearing any; Gatley, the salivating geriatric Geographer who stank of toothpaste and wielded an aide de memoire he called his Tommy Tickler; Chas Horley, the wistful Historian who fondled the most effeminate pupils while elaborating on the crimes of The Third Reich. Why did everybody have a nickname? I suddenly broke in.

“Why do lifers fall in love with their prison guards?” grinned my companion. I had no idea they did. Beluga nodded his head sagaciously, then said, “You endowed me with a nickname that hung like an albatross around my neck for the duration of my school days. Why did you do that, may I ask?”

“What?” I exclaimed in confusion. “Are you saying it was me who christened you in honour of a species of whale?”

“I had been excused from PE classes due to my weight and bronchitis problems,” recollected Beluga. “But come Lent term the Headmaster decided I was healthy enough to suffer the Trog humiliation. ‘And who may you be?’ roared the tyrant as he stood over me, hovering a podgy ready-to-grope hand. ‘Ben Luger, sir,’ I stammered nervously. To which you, who I learnt later had been consecrated as the star gymnast and so enjoyed a degree of rhetorical licence, retorted ironically, ‘Beluga? That’s a fishy name. But come to think of it, you’re fat enough to pass for a whale!’ Trog and his entire squadron fell about laughing. Thus I arrived as a performing clown within the circus of freaks that elitist direct grant schools loved to incubate. Fair game for every sadist to tease and bully at will.”

“I’m so sorry,” I spluttered. “That was an unforgivable jibe to make.”

“Yes it was,” agreed Beluga, “but it was a long time ago. One’s ego finds a way to cope. The reserves of human tenacity are remarkable, don’t you find, Carlo?”

I hastened to endorse those sentiments before quickly changing the subject back to the present contingencies. “What exactly has brought you to town today?” I asked. “And in particular to this of all pubs?” He produced a slightly battered hardback from his satchel entitled Le Comte De Monte-Cristo.

“This is a first edition published in 1846,” he answered “I’ve been looking for one for a while to add to my collection. As for this pub, I just fancied a drink before heading off to Waterloo and happened across one with your moniker in it. Coincidence or what?”

He went on to tell me how he had made a career out of buying and selling rare books. Against that my reciprocal offering to Beluga was a professional life spent in advertising, copy writing and television soap operas. “Yes, I’ve seen your name on several end credits,” he confessed. The other stuff we chatted about is inconsequential so far as this story is concerned. It involved my two acrimonious divorces and estranged grown up sons, living overseas, and Beluga’s confirmed bachelorhood.

Before he left I found myself enriched with his business card and an invitation to visit him in the Bramley area of Surrey. We shook hands and it felt like any residual hard feelings had been resolved. Which is why when the invitation to lunch arrived a few weeks later I stupidly accepted. A scenic drive through the Surrey hills would blow a few cobwebs away. Beluga’s rustic cottage greeted me in a state of genteel dilapidation and a fusty smell of archived manuscripts filled my nostrils as he opened the door.

The walls were lagged with books from rickety floor to low sagging ceiling and he left me to examine them while he toddled off to the kitchen to prepare the grub. One section contained editions of Greek and Roman classics including Oresteia, Medea, and Thyestes, not just one copy of each, mind you, but many. Another appeared to be devoted to Hitler. Mein Kampf – four of those – plus biographies, psychoanalytic studies and the like. Elsewhere the fading plasterwork had been shored up with Shakepeare plays including Hamlet, Othello, Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar together with numerous learned commentaries. Nearby I counted eight different editions of Wuthering Heights and as many again of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Moby Dick and The Count Of Monte Cristo.

Unfortunately the meal turned out to be as unimaginative as Beluga’s taste in literature. A first course of pate followed by a microwaved supermarket lasagne. At least the Merlot he served hit the spot. I restricted myself to two glasses. As for the conversation I allowed the chef to take the lead. It followed a familiar anecdotal pattern as if our previous rendezvous had just been a warm up for more intensive schoolboy nostalgia. “Do you remember the way Taffy Evans used to slipper us if we got less than seven out of ten for our French homework?” he typically observed. Or else “I’ll never forget that time you judo yanked Gomez over your shoulder for nicking your favourite seat in Latin. The shock on Nunc’s face!” Then he revisited the scandal caused by parents complaining about house prefects teaching juniors how to masturbate in the bogs. Did Beluga live permanently in a goldfish bowl of that remote childhood past, I wondered, or had I accidentally been the catalyst of it?

Over coffee he showed me a dog-eared photograph of the under sixteen rugby team which I had captained. “Taken just before we played Manchester Grammar. You scored three tries,” he smiled, then running his index finger along the rows, reeling off the names and playing positions. What a memory he had! All fifteen of us without hesitation! It was when he reached the sixteenth, a rotund tracksuited slob on the periphery of the team proper that the scales fell off my eyes. Beluga had been our menial fag and water carrier. Obese and unathletic, that must have been his chosen way of fitting in, of gaining a semblance of recognition. Better to be a slave within the brutal hierarchy of sporting prowess than a cipher outside.

‘That team of ours went unbeaten for five years,” announced Beluga proudly. “We were feared throughout the North of England grammar school circuit.”

“What happened to all that excess weight you carried around?” I asked him. “You’re almost on the scrawny side of thin now.”

This seemed to amuse Beluga. “You always had such a tactful way of putting things, Carlo,” he laughed. “I became bulimic and left school after the GCE year to recuperate on the Isle of Wight. I wrote you a letter from there but you never replied. More coffee?” I shook my head. “One big match, I think it was at home against Wakefield,” he reminisced, “you tore me off a strip because I forgot to bring the halftime oranges. You called me a dozy fucking oaf and asked me if I had blubber in my head as well as on my ugly carcass.”

“That was very graceless of me,” I admitted remorsefully.

“Graceless? And the rest!” he scoffed. “Never mind, we whipped them twenty-one to six all the same!”

I drove back home the arterial way via Guildford, intermittently reflecting on the zigzagging direction my life had taken. If nothing else that posh boys’ school taught us how to be bullied and to retaliate in kind, how to grin and bear indignity, how to sneer and disparage. It drummed into us the complicated politics of belonging and the rewards of male entitlement. Around nine o’clock I began to feel bilious, whether from the sourness of my musing or a physical ailment was not clear. I took to bed early and eventually drifted off to sleep listening to the radio coverage of the ongoing Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Several hours later I woke up in a cold sweat. Every part of me ached. When I switched the bedside light on the room buckled then moved rapidly in and out of focus as if being filmed by a demented cameraman. Something in the pit of my guts seemed to be alive and devouring me. It took my fingers a long time to find sufficient stability to ring the emergency services. They promised to dispatch an ambulance and it arrived before I had finished crawling and sliding headfirst down the stairs.

The following days passed in a nightmarish blur. I later discovered that the medics had diagnosed poisoning, pumped out the contents of my stomach and put me on a drip. Gradually the earnest faces of the staff came back into focus and eventually I saw a smile form on the jet black face of a nurse. “You’re out of danger,” she said, mopping my forehead. How close a brush I’d had with the boneyard came home to me when a consultant gastroenterologist dropped by. He told me they had found amatoxins in my stomach, that they caused severe damage to the kidneys and liver and were potentially fatal.

I couldn’t take it in. “Amatoxins are found in a type of mushroom that doesn’t grow in our country,” he explained. “Have you just come back from abroad?” I shook my head. I wanted to say, ‘Not unless the North Downs fall into that category’ but the words wouldn’t issue from my parched mouth. “Can you tell me what you last ate and where?” the doctor persisted. For some intuitive reason I shook my head. “It’s Important you remember in case this happens inadvertently to someone else,” he added. “I’ll return tomorrow to see if you’ve recollected.”

He must have forgotten. Either that or the medics got their wires crossed because by noon the next day I had been discharged. There were three possibilities confronting me. Beluga was dead. Beluga was very ill. Beluga had deliberately poisoned me. I mulled it over carefully before making my move. “Hullo, mate!” the landlord greeted me as I strode into the pub. “I’ve been missing you. Been back to the Pool?”

“Stomach bug,” I lied. “I’m off the juice for a few weeks. Tonic water please and maybe a favour?” He poured the drink and positioned his good ear as close to my mouth as he could. “You remember that Beluga geezer who came in a few weeks ago?” I began. Martin’s a good sort. I gave him a script and he never batted an eyelid. Beluga answered Martin’s call instantly. “Is that Mr Luger?……Excuse me for disturbing you, sir. I’m worried about our mutual friend, Charlie. He’s not been in all week, not answering his mobile either…… Really? Tell me more.”

“Reckons he’s never felt better,” Martin smiled mischievously afterwards. “So what now, Sherlock?”

I sat down in the snug, my brain whirring on the adrenalin of indignation. How had Beluga done it and why? He had eaten exactly the same food as me, imbibed the same drinks. I recreated the visit in my mind’s eye, frame by frame. He couldn’t have slipped me a Mickey because I never left the room til late on, even for a pee. The lasagne was brought in from the kitchen and we randomly helped ourselves from the platter. So that left the pate – and even as that word, pate, entered my head the wild beast inhabitating my guts nauseously lurched up again. Stomachs are rarely wrong in my experience. Suddenly I had located the truth. “This is a terrine I made myself today,” he had declared as he carried two identical plates of it in and placed one in front of me. “Help yourself to toast and butter.” When I’d finished the bastard even had the audacity to ask me if I would like some more! A double dose of mashed vegetables laced with amanita phalloides. I probably owe what’s left of my life to the fact I declined. Where the hell did he obtain the stuff?

“Another tonic water?” inquired Martin who had wandered into my vicinity dispensing fresh beer mats.

“No thanks,” I replied, “but I’ll stand you a pint. It’s no more than your performance deserves.”

Martin shook his head. “No need, Charlie,” he assured me. “The seniors love your war speech. Favour in, favour out.”

“Take it,” I said with a grin. “You haven’t heard the second part of the favour yet…….”

When he opened the door in response to my triple thud of the iron knocker, Beluga’s eyes widened and he squirmed backwards as if he had seen a ghost. Yes, I know it’s a hackneyed phrase but what do you expect from a hack writer? “May I come in?” I said and barged aside his petrified body without waiting for the answer. I got the weird impression the ceiling had sunk even lower. Then I noticed it, the under sixteen rugby photograph stabbed through the midriff with a kitchen knife, glaring out from the gallery of books.

“You must be wondering what that’s doing there?” he mumbled behind me.

“Actually I’m wondering where you got the mushrooms from,” I retorted. “On e-bay? Or do you grow your own?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Carlo,” he whimpered.

“Yes you do!” I bawled. “Don’t you dare play dumb with me, you faggot!”

Tears actually formed in his eyes. Then the decades seemed to crumble away like so much extraneous dereliction from his physiognomy and I saw a trembling, discomfited kid slouching before me. “Why didn’t you phone first?” he muttered. “If I’d known you were coming I’d have – “

“Baked a poisonous cake?” I butted in. “Served it up with clotted snake’s venom?”

Beluga was struggling to compose himself. “If you’ve come down here to hurt me,” he managed at last, “can you get it over with as quickly as possible?”

That question took the wind out my sails. Why had I impetuously driven down there? I wasn’t a headstrong pugilist – at least not for a long time since. I slumped into a chair to give it some long overdue consideration. “I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?” piped up my host incongruously. By the time the tea tray came in, delicate china cups and all, I’d almost unbelievably begun to feel pity for the hapless wretch.

“I won’t insult your intelligence by saying sorry,” he broke the silence. “It would only be fractionally true anyway. Milk?”

“For Christ’s sake, Beluga!” I sighed wearily. “Just tell me why. It’s a simple question.” He made to hand me a cup and saucer. “No,” I ordered him. “Leave it on the table. Why did you want me dead?”

“But it’s not at all simple, Carlo,” he replied. “Very few questions relating to human behaviour are simple, are they?” Here we go, I thought. Some abstruse rationalisation. A nearby vase crammed full of wilting red roses caught my febrile attention and I found myself entertaining the fantasy of crashing it down on his skull.

My irritation appeared to have frozen his larynx so I left him sipping his beverage in nervous silence while I pretended to examine the books. They all concerned people, imagined and real, in pursuit of retribution, so dedicated to taking revenge nothing else mattered to them. Gradually I walked to the Fuehrer’s end of the room. What was it that fascinated Beluga about that Austrian psychopath? Maybe the increased distance between us emboldened him because Beluga continued suddenly from where he had earlier left off. “I didn’t want you dead, not really,” he said. “What I wanted dead was my undying attachment to you. My love, if you prefer that term.”

I must have swung round towards him a bit too aggressively because he fumbled his cup, spilling tea down his shirt. “Yes, I mean it,” he continued. “You alone determined my identity. You christened me. Turned me into this beluga thing, this ludicrous, gauche, half youth half animal figure of fun. Not once did it ever seem to matter to you the humiliation I suffered. You were my Frankenstein and I was your tame monster.”

“I must have misheard,” I challenged him sarcastically. “I thought you initially said that you loved me?”

“Yes, that’s what I said,” he whined. “I loved you and resented you in equal measure. I wasn’t anybody till you came along. I was a big fat bronchitic zilch. I may have been just a pet whale to you but to me you were both my creator and protector. You were my Sir Launcelot, my paramour.”

“What on earth are you babbling on about?” I reproved him.

“But you were also my torturer and persecutor,” he continued heedlessly. “How do you think I felt living in that state of ambivalence? Not understanding how the confliction worked, being powerless to resolve it?” I turned my gaze back towards the musty stacks of old books. Did he ever dust them let alone re-read them? . Did they provide a bastion against chaos? Cavity insulation? “How do you think I felt, Carlo?” Beluga insisted. “Come on, I’m waiting for an answer now.”

“Whatever you felt, whatever my lack of empathy,” I answered, “it doesn’t justify you trying to murder me some half a century later!”

“Oh, you’ve never resented anyone then?” he harangued me. “You were never hurt so badly by a loved one that you would gladly have killed them? Be honest now.”

I instantly thought of my two ex-wives. Julie, the one who had accused me of being a manipulative, emotional bully and turned the children against me. Belinda, who had a secret affair with my closest friend before the cat accidently got out of the bag. Of course in my worst moments I could easily have butchered all three of them given the opportunity, given a guarantee of impunity – but this wasn’t an equivalent comparison, not by a country mile. “You’re sick, Beluga,” I replied. “You’re deranged. And if I’ve contributed to that I’m sorry. But – “

“Are you really sorry?” he whimpered

“It’s like you’ve become poisoned yourself – by your obsessive reading habitsl,” I ploughed on. “Feelings of resentment and revenge are perfectly natural but they cannot be the way of the world. They can’t be indulged and cultivated – “

“Which world are you referring to, pray may I ask?” he interjected facetiously. “Some utopia that exists invisibly in another dimension? Since the end of world war one, which was supposed to be the war that ended all wars, there have been a hundred and fifty major conflicts worldwide and that’s a conservative estimate. It’s not just me who’s deranged, to use your word. It’s all of us. Including you.”

I chose to ignore that one. “Look, I can just about concede you may validly see a similarity between yourself and Frankenstein’s monster – vengefully pursuing his maker round the world,” I said. “Or compare yourself to Captain Ahab and his vendetta against the leviathan that had bitten off his leg. But Adolph Hitler, for God’s sake! Okay, the Germanic peoples got pretty roughly manhandled at The Treaty of Versailles but it doesn’t begin to justify six million Jews exterminated and an Aryan assault on the rest of Europe, does it?”

“Of course it doesn’t,” he objected. “But that’s all the more reason why we have to try to understand the complexity of Hitler’s motivations. Otherwise human beings will remain like carnivorous fish, swimming in an ocean of resentment and vengefulness, instinctively killing.”

“There wasn’t any complexity,” I barked back. “Just hatred and racial prejudice and an incurable, messianic desire to be the top dog. Hitler was a psychopath. And – oh, never mind.”

“And what?” he retorted. “Go on, say it.”

“Are you quite sure you’re not a psychopath too?” I obliged him. “Albeit in very tatty sheep’s clothing? Hiding behind the delusion that you’re a serious student of the dark side of human nature?”

“It’s not a delusion. That’s exactly what I am,” he insisted. “Shouldn’t everyone be? Because if they – “

“I’ll give you that Dantes and Hamlet – and even Heathcliff and Othello have a certain heroic quality to their nature as well as crazed obsessiveness,” I galloped on without paying him credence. “But Medea killing her own children to spite her adulterous husband? Atreus slaying Thyestes sons and serving them up to him at a banquet? These are beyond the pale acts of lunacy! They defy academic study. Are you not the least bit curious about why these monomaniacal freaks have so consumed your interest over the years?”

He reverted to silence again and poured out more tea. Exasperated, unsure what to say or do next, I turned away towards the shelves again and within moments picked out several titles I hadn’t previously noticed. The Art Of Loving by Erich Fromm, If This Is A Man by Primo Levi, plus a maritime tomb about predatory sea creatures. Perhaps he was less of a freak than I thought? When I turned round to ask him what he had learnt from these books Beluga had abandoned his china cup and I found myself looking down the muzzle of a gun. I did a double take. It had the appearance of a luger. Not that I know much about pistols. Was my imagination playing tricks? “Are you intending to shoot me now?” I heard myself ask foolishly. He did not reply. His gaze simply hardened as if the will power directing it remained elsewhere, still undecided. “Because my mate, Martin, from the pub knows that I’m here and he’s under instructions what to do should I fail to return.”

“No, you got me wrong,” Beluga muttered. “I’m inviting you to shoot me, Carlo.” He placed the weapon on the table and nudged the butt in my direction. “If I’m nothing but a vindictive psychopath, as you suggest, that’s surely what I deserve?”

I cannot recall ever being lost for words. This was a first. Previously he had sort of been looking through me but now he engaged my eyes questioningly. “It’s loaded,” he said calmly. “All you have to do is angle the thing to the side of my head and squeeze the trigger. I won’t resist.”

My thoughts at that moment were entirely at odds with the words that came out of my mouth. The voice in my head screamed, “You’re stark staring mad!” The one Beluga heard murmured, “I may have been too hasty in my judgement.”

“On the other hand you may have hit the nail exactly on the head,” he replied ardently. “If you leave me here alive, who is to say that I won’t try to kill you again and the next time succeed?”

I don’t know how long I stood there vacillating, trying to think of a reply, to calculate a strategy. Five seconds? A minute? Five minutes? At some point my stunned senses must have revived. I realized my body was shaking in the grip of a cocktail of contradictory emotions. I turned it abruptly around and walked to the front door which obligingly opened with a shudder.

“This is me, Charlie,” I announced to Martin on the phone half an hour later. “I’m in a pub somewhere near Shalford. The business is finished.”

“You got out alive then?” chortled Martin. “No fistcuffs or nothing, mate? No Mickey Finns?”

“All very civilised,” I prevaricated. “I just need a snifter or two before I hit the road proper. I’ll fill you in on the details another time.”

Four large whisky chasers later I tottered back to the car, put it in the wrong gear and backed hard into a wall. Luckily I found a hotel a few minutes walk away and took refuge. I ate a hearty dinner of roast lamb then watched television for a while – that is until the news came on. A report of more Russian drone attacks on the Ukrainian city of Kiev was quickly overtaken by footage of bombed out houses and displaced civilians in Gaza. “Why are they doing these things to us?” a woman pleaded to a journalist, having just lost her husband and three children in an air attack. “Please tell them to stop! I don’t understand why they hate us so much!”

I switched off and clambered into bed but sleep only engulfed me after a long period of intoxicated soul searching. Had I hated Beluga back in our schooldays? No, I concluded. I had just been mercilessly obtuse in the presence of his suffering – which in a way might have been even more reprehensible. So why had I enlisted him as my slave factotum and doormat? The truth seemed to me that I needed Beluga to plug a gaping hole in my sense of inadequacy, in my vacuous pubescent uncertainty. It could have been anyone. He just happened to be available, to exist on the borders of my sovereign territory. Beluga might have needed me but not one jot less than I needed him.

“Are you going to the funeral?” Martin asked when I told him about Beluga’s death. I shook my head. “Do you think he knew he was terminally ill that time when he invited you to shoot him?” he continued. The same thought had occurred to me too. But pancreatic cancer is reputed to be a sudden and rampant disease, so it remained a moot question like several others concerning Beluga.

Shortly after the showdown I had written Beluga a letter. “Your conviction may be correct that the law of the jungle prevails as much in the human kingdom as the animal one,” was the jist, “that barbarism is a reflex action whose DNA our science has not done enough to decode. But we need to resist the urge to harm the one who has inadvertantly harmed us. We simply have to! Swim with the guppies and angelfish. Leave the sharks and mantras to their own vicious devices.”

I doubted such whimsical self-justificatory drivel deserved a reply, I admitted to Martin, and of course it never received one. “On the other hand,” he smiled, “it may just have saved your life.”