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review.

Chapter One

‘What’s the best way to get revenge on buzzards?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh go on,’ I urged. ‘Take a guess.’

Kevin sighed and frowned, twanged the Dan Dare buckle pensively on his elasticated belt. ‘I don’t know. Oh go on then. Tell me.’

I smirked triumphantly. ‘Glass eyes!’

All right, it’s not very funny. At ten years of age your sense of humour is not at its best. Bodily functions are a bottomless pit of mirth. The fact that every sport involves mention of balls is hilarious. And a plastic, fake boil that you can stick on your neck is the height of sophisticated wit. No, I mention the joke simply to show that even at that age I was concerned with living in a just universe.

It’s not just glass eyes that roll up from the depths when you’re in therapy. We are all like those ancient, scarred objects you see in the glass cases of museums, trivial but made portentous simply by having survived so many vicissitudes of life. There’s all kinds of stuff that comes out, as if you’d just lanced that boil. Rhodda, my therapist, has led me to a view of my mind as carefully constructing a secret plan, kept even from me, that explains my whole life. Once you see the plan, she says, you are free from it. Or maybe, I think cunningly, you can follow the plan better, make it explicit and focused, make it control simply everything. She is sitting, as always, in her box-like armchair, turned slightly to face me, sucking her pencil and taking the odd note. Behind herself, she has arranged white lilies in a glass vase like a 1950s TV announcer. Perhaps she has just been to a funeral and they gave all the guests a free bunch as they left. How I wonder about those notes. Why a pencil? To me, pencils imply provisionality, the need to change your mind. Does she sit up all night rubbing me out, revising me? Then, there’s the way she takes the notes. It reminds me of that scene with Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator where he is dictating not to a country but a typist. He produces a great, long sentence and, in response, she hits the keyboard just twice, then a single word that causes her to type furiously for thirty seconds.

‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this,’ I say, irritably. ‘I’m paying you to listen to my bad jokes.’ She has no sense of humour but that doesn’t matter. She once asked me what I did when I came to a fork in the road and I said, with my best boyish grin, that I picked it up as you could never have too many forks. She still doesn’t know what the hell I was talking about. But better a literalist than one hooked on iridescent metaphor. You wouldn’t want a guide dog with an overdeveloped sense of humour leading you through the traffic. That last sentence produces a near minute of writing. I know full well, of course, just why I’m telling her this, sitting here – dramatically reduced - on that great raft of a sofa, like some prop from Alice in Wonderland, my feet barely reaching to the floor. Therapy is a chance to talk endlessly about yourself but I have been doing this for months and have long run out of anything of interest to say. I’m boring even myself. What I thought would be a bursting cornucopia has turned out to be, at best, a half-filled cornetto. But she is a kind woman who wishes me well and I don’t want to disappoint her, eager to please. She is happiest when you can throw her some repetitive nugget of dysfunctional behaviour that she can laboriously point to, so, over the past few weeks, I have fed her obsessive negative thoughts, catastrophic reasoning and low self-esteem and she has gobbled them down like a dog eating toffees. Now she sucks her pencil and gives me a look like a goat looking over a fence.

‘When you say that, what picture comes into your mind?’ The picture of me going home. I look at the clock, the way I looked at the clock during those endless P.E. lessons in school where I deliberately ran into the vaulting horse every week, inviting the sneers of the master, for fear of landing astride it and doing myself and my heirs permanent damage.

‘I think of school,’ I say in a big, clear voice.

She nods wisely and makes a long, complicated note that involves her turning her head sideways, breathing the whole time ‘Aaaah!’ as if I have given myself away and she has scored a crucial bullseye.

‘We’re all scarred by school,’ she says in an irritating, consoling voice. ‘That’s what it’s for, to deliberately mark you for life but the consequences are mostly unforeseen. That’s why we keep coming back to it in these sessions. That’s why we have to work through these issues slowly, one by one, to undo the harm that’s been done. Pain minus acceptance equals suffering. Of course, you may have your own opinion. If you like, we could discuss it until you agree with me.’

‘But that’s unfair.’

She looks up and blinks her Dame Edna-ish glasses back up her nose. ‘Life,’ she says, ‘is unfair.’ Said with pursed lips and undue satisfaction. I see her draw a prim little line across the page, then a box, turning it into an epitaph. ‘And now, I’m afraid, our time is up.’

***

It took me a while to come up with my webname, wrathofgod.co.uk, a wholly-owned subsidiary of my holding company, Expanding Galactic Enterprises. At first I inclined towards Revenge!.co.uk, the most important part of that being the exclamation mark! Then SweetRevenge!.co.uk. But wrathofgod.co.uk it had become when I suddenly caught sight of myself, one late night, in a careworn pub mirror. The theological dimension was initially a problem. Perhaps it limited the range of my clientele and Rhodda would see it as a mark of paranoia - were I ever foolish enough to tell her about it - but it carried the pleasing idea of an implacable, personal force and I could see the commercial possibilities of it splashed across T-shirts and maybe, one day, even as an aftershave in embossed bottles with heavy-metal overtones. It would have been nice to hang the sign somewhere outside a glitzy office with an unsuitably youthful, plausibly blonde, receptionist who would droop languidly over my every word. I would make jokes. ‘The Invisible Man is in the outer office, Miss Brown? Tell him I can’t see him now.’ Or. ‘The Seven Dwarves are waiting outside? Tell them I will see them shortly.’ At which she would giggle and rub her rump on her chair and then... But no. For the moment, my corporate headquarters lay down the hall in the back bedroom, amongst the boxes of rejected memorabilia and back issues of discreditable magazines, just a short, grey-carpeted shuffle from all the comforts of home. I fired up the computer that rumbled and thwacked, then twittered in blue light. It has discothequish aspirations. Ping! I have mail.

How shall I explain the mission of wrathofgod ? Quite simply, it offers a vision of a more perfect reality and a corrective to the world of experience. Quite simply, it douses the fire of rage. It goes back to my objection to Rhodda about the unfairness of life. The modern world is full of suppressed rage, smouldering just under the surface, always ready to burst into flame. Ask anyone – but carefully. Life out there is crammed with resentful women, kids with an absurdly bloated sense of entitlement, terminally greedy OAPs and bosses who are trapped in the space between their own forward job plans and retrospective peer reviews. Expectations are raised but the bar is set ever higher, so that to have everything is no longer enough and we all go around feeling cheated. Some few of us blame ourselves and go into monasteries where we are further done over by the fat bastard who calls himself the abbot as we ruminate on the mystery of divine grace. The rest of us blame others but there’s nothing much we can do about it because of the way the world is set up. Wrathofgod.co.uk promises justice to the oppressed through revenge.

Now I hear you tutting in disapproval. But since you first learned to dribble and drool, you have been taught that revenge is bad, immature, something to be outgrown. How many films have you sat through where the hero finally gets the drop on evil incarnate and instead of blowing its head clean off, lowers the gun and delivers some tired little homily on the virtues of forgiveness or the rule of law? Instead of thinking about that, remember that moment at school where, incandescent with a rage that banished all fear, you finally took a swing at the class bully and punched him on the nose. Remember that delicious impact, the shock on every face, the delight of his dripping, malevolent blood that entirely consumed the interest of your opponent and that glorious moment of soaring triumph that roared in your ears and moved you beyond the reach of mundane reality - before fear of the consequences reared its ugly head again and you turned to flee in terror. Now, for £24.99 you can know that feeling again. For this modest fee, wrathofgod.co.uk can arrange for a beautifully wrapped dog turd to be delivered – fresh and neatly coiled in a box produced without use of child labour in Thailand - to the person of your choice – ex-girlfriend, boss, office rival, whatever. Despatch can be organised from any of 15 participating countries and the fee includes the option of an enclosed message, hand-written in copperplate. ‘I saw this and thought of you,’ is a solid but unimaginative favourite. Personally, I prefer something more intimate such as, ‘One day I will rub this in your face.’ There is nothing immature about any of this. Remember again that hymn they made you sing in school, ‘Hills of the north, rejoice!’ There’s a bit about ‘He comes to reign with boundless sway and makes your wastes his great highway.’ Revenge ancient and modern, recycling, semiotic use of excrement – the green dog turd. It’s all there. Imagine watching your target, how you will snigger to see their sweaty, puzzled discomfort as they take sudden stock of their relationships. See their pathetic attempts to snitch a sample of people’s handwriting, for comparison, without attracting attention, their wild-eyed surmise as they realise that someone out there really, really hates them. It can be an enriching and life-changing experience of deep therapeutic value.

If you check our website, under the animated logo of a Spike Milligan-type figure flicking out thunderbolts, you will see that we do other things of course. I wouldn’t want you getting the idea that dog turds were the limit of our activities. We can arrange for the delivery of a hundred pizzas, the arrival of the fire brigade, a simultaneous visit by the Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists and Holy Rainwater Outpouring Revivalists, even a raid by the vice squad but that’s all very pedestrian. A little more subtle is a slow-ticking letter of denunciation to the Revenue, an untraceable email address that emits insulting messages automatically around the clock both to the target and, under the target’s name, to others, a visit to your office by dancing Indian transvestites or your local Pest Control Officer with authorisation to search for and destroy bedbugs, or a legal warrant distraining upon your goods to be enforced by a bailiff for non-payment of a non-existent bill. Most of this is just about legal but I’m willing to cross the line, for my art, if I can be convinced that justice is being served. I don’t do public figures or members of the royal family – too high profile. And nothing even jokingly involving bombs, fake, real or stink. That’s a button you don’t want to press, believe me. It’s important to remain not worth the trouble of tracking down as far as the guardians of civilisation are concerned. A man, as Mr. Eastwood so correctly said, has to know his limitations.

In fact, I have only ever had one run-in with the law – as an infant, in the company of my joking partner, Kevin. Kevin had taken against a teaching assistant at our school on the not unreasonable grounds that she smelled. He determined to let down one of the tyres of her bicycle and I was a witness. The local policeman, who already knew Kevin’s family well in his professional capacity, decided that the teacher might well have had an accident which, purely theoretically, might have proved fatal. Kevin was charged with attempted murder and I, an eight-year old child who had watched someone letting down a bicycle tyre, was accused as an accomplice to attempted murder. Luckily, the headmistress was herself no shrinking violent and slapped some sense into the policeman but it showed me the enormous gulf that lies between mere law and true justice. I have never forgotten that lesson.

That particular day was not, at first sight, very challenging. Prepaid orders for two dog-turdings from abroad that I forwarded to our affiliates in France (bondieu.fr) and Germany (himmelarschundwolkenbruch.de) for action. But there, nesting in my inbox, was a request for a meeting from a new client who wanted a personal consultation. One of our more satisfying options is revenge-profiling. We try to produce a graduated, escalating programme of action against a target that meets the specific needs of a client and contains enough of a sense of poetic justice to be satisfying to myself. But, as the only point of contact between us and our public, these represent a fundamental chink in our armour that can be dangerous and have to be organised with care. I would have to get out the dressing-up box again.

***

The club was the wrong age, located somewhere near the plastic revelry of Covent Garden. You went downstairs into a black pit from an otherwise respectable shopfront that looked as if it should be selling handmuffs and bishops’ gaiters. I had first known it as an out-of-hours drinking club for world-weary journalists but it was many years since it had figured on the best cellars list. It was all muted thump, thump housey music as if someone was piledriving next door, with solitary teens standing around gyrating with their eyes closed - which seemed only sensible since they were being strafed and raked with randomly hostile lasers from the ceiling. I envied them their self-containment. Young people were all vegetarians or teetotal nowadays and sex was increasingly the next thing on their list of things to see through and give up. Why weren’t they at work or school or outside soliciting or sitting in a corner with a blanket over their heads, worrying about discovering the real them? On the street, lay bland late-afternoon sunlight with all the goodness sucked out of it and poisoned by traffic fumes but here the lights made the dusty air milkily visible like the water in a neglected aquarium. Convention seemed to require that patrons hold glasses of overpriced drinks in primary colours as an alibi but the real intoxicants lay elsewhere. In dark corners, some sort of furtive exchange of substances for cash was taking place below waist level, policed by black men with dancing eyes and empty faces who flitted between transactions and looked into space like bad TV actors. I had mistakenly opted for a long, swishy overcoat and hat, a sort of male version of Roy Strong, that was sweltering in the steamy club and I was anyway a good twenty years too old for this sort of place. She was there, as described – red hair, orange scarf, yellow handbag – conspicuous if not exactly colour-coordinated – also far too old for this place, sticking out like a sore bum, perched on one of a cluster of wobbly stools herded into one corner, a rock of ageism. I sat down beside her and coolly slid my card across – the one with Spike Milligan dispensing thunderbolts. It wasn’t easy. I have all sorts of cards in there. She peered at it, probably needing reading glasses.

‘You’re not quite what I expected.’ I let that ride. Closer up she had a crumpled, resentful air as though someone had just stepped on her. Mid-forties, thin bitter lips. No wedding ring. Darkness became her. Rhodda would see low self-esteem issues. This would not be about betrayed love, then, but about money. ‘This place was a bad idea. You should have chosen somewhere yourself.’ So now her rotten choice was my fault. I never chose the same place twice for a meet. It gave away too much information about where you lived and what you got up to on off nights. She had probably been married then, once, and acquired the ready instinct of shifting the blame. ‘It’s not really suitable. I haven’t been here for years and it’s changed. I thought you’d be bigger, a sort of bodyguard type.’ Life today was full of disappointments for her.

‘I didn’t even know these places were open at this time of day. As for the bodyguard stuff, most of what I do, I do with a keyboard. I’ve got great hands. Everyone says so.’ I spread them like a concert pianist.

She snorted sceptically and dug in her bag for a cigarette, like a squirrel scratching for nuts, looked up at the ‘No Smoking’ sign, back at the dope dealers and lit up anyway with a what-the-hell toss of the head and talked through her cigarette. ‘Let’s get down to business, Mr…er…God. I have a friend who has issues with her stepmother - at least that’s what she calls herself.’ I put rapt attention on my face like Rhodda in one of our sessions. Perhaps I would take notes. It was all therapy. In marketing, the first thing they tell you is that, whatever it is you’re selling – it is really all just satisfaction in many forms. ‘More exactly, the woman who married my…her father after her mother died. She stalked him, married him, drove him to an early grave and copped the lot. My friend had…reasonable expectations …but she saw to it that he cut her out, the bitch.’ Money, as I thought. There would be no friend of course but it was disquieting that a potential client began by declaring herself disinherited – therefore skint.

‘Divine justice can be pricey. It’s a serious matter. What exactly did you have in mind?’

She stuck out a weak chin and puffed pale smoke. There was too much powdery makeup on her face, like a fillet of fish freshly floured for the fryer. ‘The money’s not important. My friend has her own money. It’s the principle of the thing. Life’s been treating her stepmother too well. She’d like to see that stop. What she’d really like is to see her catch cancer and watch her die.’ The voice snapped and crackled and she looked at me evenly as though in small hope I might be a suitable infective agent. ‘I don’t suppose you actually offer to kill people?’

‘It’s not part of the normal service.’ She wasn’t the first to ask. It’s almost always women who do. I suppose men are used to DIY.

‘Too