Double Blind

Double Blind

By Tony Smith

Balancing a tray in his arms Cecil mounts the stairs, muttering: ‘I’ve strangled the cat, poisoned the fish, put glass in the toothpaste and spat in the cocoa’. He pushes open the door with a shoulder. “I’ve brought your breakfast, dear. The cocoa’s just as you like it.”

“Don’t stand there, idiot. Put it down . . . not there, on the table, fool.”

“I’ve run your bath, dear.”

“Don’t mutter. I’ve told you about muttering.”

“Sorry, Agnes.

The bedroom has that cloying fetid smell of sleep: a witch’s brew of unwashed armpits, mothballs, and stale fart. He closes the door behind him with care as if to prevent fumes from escaping, crosses the creaking landing, then leaps down the stairs like a schoolboy at the end of term.

He is escaping to the sanctuary of his shed. Birds feeding on the lawn scatter, he reflects that it’s the early worm that got caught by the bird. Cecil slows as he reaches the jungle of bind-weed, nettles and golden-rod which act as a moat to his castle: he jams a wedge under the door, takes a fag-end from a drawer, his hand shaking he lights-up, sparks fly and smoke percolates through gaps between the timber of the shed walls. Now he has regained his composure he boots the computer and waits while it runs through its opening paces.

It had begun in the dim mist of memory with the supremacy of hope over experience when he coaxed a reluctant bride, and now it's twenty years since he got his leg-over. Cecil, balding and slight of stature is about the size of Agnes’s lunch-box. It is difficult to understand why he married Agnes; her greatest assets were jutting breasts, of a size that in time would succumb to gravity. With thin lips and a determined jaw she commands a tight grip on life and a tighter grip on Cecil. With a diet of chocolate and cheese-cake, Agnes has become a mountain of flesh suspended on a wire coat-hangar. Cecil Black had long ago waved the white flag of appeasement, expecting 'peace in his time’ but like a pig once it tastes blood doesn’t stop until it reaches the snout. If love and kindness come from heaven, Cecil lives in that other place.

Dr Cecil Black is a professor. He was awarded a chair in accounting for his research into accounting methods in Australian coal mines. Academics sink deeper and deeper shafts to mine narrower and narrower seams of knowledge.

In the privacy of his shed Cecil pursues another field of study: murder. It has taken him two years to complete the literature search. He leans back in his chair and lets his imagination fly into darker regions of the mind, taking vicarious pleasure in contemplating, chain-saw dismemberment, acid bath immersion, and beating heads with hammers. However he is discombobulated by thoughts of detection, body disposal is not easy. Dark shadows crouch down, and the shed walls close in. There came a knock on the door. He had prepared for this emergency and quickly switches the screen to chess and kicks the wedge from under the door.

“Is that you, dear?” He opens the door a crack. “What the hell!” It was a black face and two large moon eyes stare at him. “What the hell! Get out! This is private property. What are you? Insurance, Jehovah’s Witness?”

“I just want a quiet word, sir.”

“A word? About what . . . ?”

“We know about you, we’ve hacked into your computer.”

“You’d better come in.” Cecil removes a pile of books from a decaying armchair. The stranger, about the size of a rugby prop-forward, sits down and dust dances in shafts of light. The stranger places a briefcase on his lap with a salesman’s flourish. “Let’s talk.”

“Talk about what?” Cecil asked weakly.

“About murder.”

“You are police.” Cecil said tentatively.

“My name is Jonathon Stickleback. I represent the Double Blind Organization.”

“The what?”

“As an academic you will be familiar with the concept of the 'double blind'.”

Cecil is irritated. Jonathon Stickleback? A black man is supposed to have a name like: Mbongo-mbongo or Kunta Kinti, and he speaks with a pseudo-posh accent, like Del-boy trying to impress a vicar.

“I’ll explain.” said Mr Stickleback, “The double blind is used in research. None of the participants know which is the control group and which is the experimental group - nor does the researcher – we have extended this concept to murder.”

Cecil was beginning to understand. “You mean . . . you murder Agnes and I murder a total stranger.”

“Not quite, Cecil. I am only the ‘facilitator’. There is a fee of course. I recommend the Platinum Package.” He undoes the buckles of his briefcase, takes out a parcel and taps it with his middle finger. ”Completely safe. Untraceable. Remember the: Ashburton case? Mrs Balham, Ivy Pendleton? All are unsolved murders. Pouf! They were ours.”

“How much?”

“To you Professor: twenty thousand. In installments, two thousand a month. A big cash withdrawal is suspicious. What d’you say?”

The conversation is interrupted by a sound like an elephant crashing through undergrowth.

“Quick, go out through the back alley, she's coming!”

Mr Stickleback leaves his calling card and makes a makes a raped exit while Cecil jams the door shut. A sudden battering on the shed door. The wedge held in place but the barrage of blows bent the top of the door to reveal Agnes in full rant.

“I thought you’d be hiding in the fucking shed – more shit about coal mines. Where’s my lunch?”

She wields a length of electric cable which she uses to whip Cecil as he retreats to the kitchen. There would be wheals but she always beats him where it can’t be seen.

After cooking lunch, Cecil retires to his bedroom. Along one wall are piled plastic boxes, each three feet long by two feet wide. We all carry memories of childhood – but Cecil maintains his in hard copy: christening candles, first feeding cup, swimming certificates, cub badge, woggle, every birthday card he ever received, a fort with a canon at each corner, plastic soldiers, Mickey Mouse, wind-up fire-engine, old seventy-eights, a broken cd player. His tangible past fills all twenty-three boxes: these are Cecil’s comfort blanket. On his knees, he pushes along the fire engine and reflects on the meeting with the Vice Chancellor tomorrow. He will be harried again to take early retirement. He has a contract for life but he hasn’t published for years and it's a drag on the department’s Research Assessment. Cecil has resisted all efforts to unseat him – he shudders at the thought of ending his days with Agnes. The bell on the fire engine starts to ring. There’s a hefty thump on the wall. “At those bloody boxes again Cecil? I’m taking them to the dump tomorrow.”

“Don’t, Agnes. Please don’t,” he pleads.

“I bloody will.”

Not wanted at work and bullied at home, the humiliation is complete.

Cecil is waiting outside the Vice Chancellors office. Once, the university had been a Senatorial democracy but the new VC is burrowing away, slyly placing his minions in key positions and it has become an authoritarian regime. Bullied, harried, excluded, unloved, Cecil is close to tears. With an imperious finger the secretary motioned him to enter. He listened stoically as the VC reiterates: “You retire at fifty-nine on full pension; imagine all that free time - golf, bridge . . . .”

Cecil tunes out – the VC doesn’t bloody know Agnes.

“We have made a partnership arrangement with a university in Australia?” Cecil tunes in: “They want someone to head up a research project: accounting in the Australian mining industry. A three year contract. What d’you say?”

There is a long silence: Cecil sits dazed.

“Well man. Will you take it?”

“You mean . . . me?” A beatific smile explodes.

“HRM, will arrange everything . . . And good luck,” the VC hurls after him.

He staggers out and runs whooping down the corridor – the prison door opens: he smells fresh air – all those sad empty years are over. He breezes into the secretary’s office, “Cancel all my lectures” and breezes out. One hand on the wheel, he sings all the way home; the songs from Gilbert and Sullivan his mother used to sing. He sneaks in through the alley at the back of the house into his bedroom – they’ve gone! All his boxes have gone. He takes a suitcase from the wardrobe and starts to throw in clothes. He stops – the door frame is filled with a menacing occluded front.

“You’re not going anywhere. You belong to me!”Agnes screams.

He asks quite calmly: “Why, Agnes? Why did you do it?”

“It was all rubbish, Cecil. They had to go.”

He detects not a mite of penitence. “A conference in Birmingham. I’ll be back in two days.”

But a black cloud blocks his exit: the door closes: the key turns. “Stay there ‘til you come to your fucking senses. You’re a mouse not a man.”

Stretched full length on the bed Cecil holds Mr Stickleback's calling card in one hand: in the other a letter from the Australian University offering him a professorial post. He muses on Agnes's words: ‘ A mouse not a man’, there’s a ghostly outline left by the boxes against ancient wallpaper; the river that ran through his life has gone.

The dream returns: Jonathon Stickleback said a double blind – it's quite safe - no past and no present, and I have a job in Australia. He opens the window, steps out onto the top of the bay window, tests the iron guttering and shins down the drain pipe into the bustling street below.

THE END