The atmosphere in the flat was much lighter that evening, because Rachel had gone out. We tried not to, but after a while we found ourselves drawn to discussing her faults. It was inevitable. In any group, there always has to be a scapegoat, and in our house, that was Rachel. Lisa would do her best to stand up for her, but it was no use. Rachel’s little idiosyncrasies had been winding us all up for the last couple of weeks, and we needed to let off steam. It’s only when you share a common enemy that you can really become friends with someone. There has to be a Them in order for there to be an Us. There aren’t many things more satisfying than being annoyed about a person, and realising that there is someone who shares your dislike of a person, then going on a ping-pong rant about how much of an arsehole that person is. For once, we were eating together, drinking together, and having a laugh, just like I’d always imagined housemates did. “Why the fuck are we watching Crimewatch? I don’t want to depress myself.” “Ooh, don’t have nightmares, Rich.” Adam and I would always take any opportunity to make some lame joke, take the piss out of each other. Exchanging ever more imaginatively obscene insults was as close as we would get to a display of affection. We were blokes, after all. “No, bollocks mate. Why are we watching this? It just makes you think the whole world is full of fucking serial killers. Change over.” “Shut up. I’m watching it.” When Lisa had made up her mind, she took some shifting. It probably came from being around seven-year-olds all day. “It’s not like we’re going to help solve any crimes. If I’d seen somebody kill someone, I’d have told the police already.” “Yeah, but it might jog your memory about something you didn’t think was important at the time.” There was no way I was going to win this one. When Lisa was in a determined mood like this, it was usually best just to let her have her way. I held my tongue. On the screen, an over-earnest young woman, trying too hard to prove that she was a serious journalist and not just a pretty face, was interviewing an old dear who’d been tricked out of her life savings by a conman who said he was from the gas board. “Thirteen thousand pounds! How fucking stupid can you be?” I exploded. “Anybody dumb enough to keep that kind of money lying around the house deserves to get robbed.” Lisa felt compelled to show some compassion. Adam had sense enough not to get her started, and was pulling faces at me to warn me that she was about to go off on one. “Don’t you think you’re being a bit callous? This is her life savings we’re talking about here. What if it had been your gran?” “My granny isn’t so feeble-minded that she can’t cope with going to the bank, and she isn’t so stupid that she’d let some random bloke into the house like that. These people are fuckwits. There should be an IQ test on your seventieth birthday, and compulsory euthanasia for anyone who fails it.” I waited for the outrage. Adam made a swift move to try to intercept her with semantics. “It isn’t euthanasia if it’s compulsory.” “You know what I mean.” Lisa paused for a moment to take a breath before launching into an indignant defence of the right to life, taking in the contributions to society made by the elderly, the need to respect tradition, and a wide gamut of reasons why a cull of the elderly was morally indefensible. I considered continuing to play devil’s advocate, but she didn’t seem in the mood for my facetious crap. She was coming over all moralistic and superior again. I hated it when she did that. She’d done it earlier, making a big show of how appalled she was when I’d said that I didn’t bother voting, that I didn’t care about politics. She had trotted out the usual arguments; the ‘no right to complain’ thing, the protest vote thing, the apathy thing, and the one about how it was people like me who had stood by and allowed the Fascists to come to power. She was right, of course, but it didn’t change my position. I was going to stick to my cynical wilful apathy, my educated choice of ignorance. Faced with an argument I couldn’t be bothered to have, I retreated into mockery. “Look at how bad the actors are!” The next case was far juicier. The serious-looking woman put on her extra-concerned face, and began to recount the salutary tale of some unfortunate young woman who has been raped and murdered. The voiceover conjured up an image of the bastard child of Vincent Price and Kate Adie, a drama school journalist doing her best Gothic bit, gurning and grimacing over the gory account of terrible misdeeds. A suitably appalled hush descended on the lounge as the reconstruction began. Slow fade to grainy photo of a young woman, blonde, smiling. “Dawn Arthurs, aged twenty-six, was a vivacious young woman with a happy life ahead of her. She moved to London from her native Lancashire four years ago, when she got a job as a graduate trainee with a new media company. She shared this flat in Camberwell with her friend Vicky.” “Fucking new media. What a sack of shit. She probably deserved to die.” Lisa wasn’t taking the bait. A stalemate ensued, as she stopped listening to me, and I stopped saying anything. Cut to two actresses, neither of whom bears any resemblance to the photo, standing around a kitchen talking in bad accents about their plans for the weekend. “On the night of Wednesday, December the third, Dawn and Vicky went out to celebrate Vicky’s birthday, visiting a number of bars in the Old Street area of London, before going to this night-club in nearby Shoreditch.” Cut to footage of the outside of a fairly scabby-looking club, the kind of place that had probably been the coolest place in town six months ago, until people had actually started going there. I’d been dragged there a couple of times by some of my friends who read The Face or Wallpaper, and liked to think they work in the media. Cut to footage of actress A getting into a taxi. “At half past twelve, Vicky decided to go home. Dawn stayed at the club.” Cut to footage of actress B collecting her coat from the cloakroom, with a man’s arm around her. “Shortly before two o’clock, Dawn was seen leaving the club with an unidentified man. That was the last time that anyone saw Dawn alive.” I think about making a lame joke about the dramatic tone of the voiceover, or the quality of the acting, but catch sight of Lisa and reconsider. She’s captivated, watching in horror as the crime is described, robotically moving her hand up and down between her mouth and her plate of chips. Fade to man walking his dog in a park. “ At 8.30 the next morning, Dawn’s body was discovered in this nearby park.” We’re returned to the studio. The serious-looking young woman has been replaced by a very serious-looking, slightly older man and a paternal policeman whose uniform bristles with impressive insignia. They introduce the photo-fit description and the phone number to call. “Police are anxious to speak to the man who was seen leaving the club with Dawn that night. He is described as being in his early to mid-twenties, between five feet ten and six feet two inches tall, with short to medium length dark brown or black hair. He was wearing a dark grey or black coat.” We are shown indistinct CCTV footage from the club of two blurry shapes moving towards the bottom of the screen. The description is ludicrously vague, the picture barely recognisable as a human being. Lisa is released from the spell, and we are allowed to be flippant again. “That description fits half the blokes in London, including me and Adam. How is anybody possibly going to identify the killer from that? And how long ago was it? Three months. For fuck’s sake. Even if you did see anything, you’re not going to remember it now. Who the hell’s going to remember what they were doing on whatever date that was?” “The twenty-second of September.” “OK, what were you doing?” She thought for a moment. “What day of the week was it?” “I can’t even remember that from five minutes ago.” “Thursday. No, Wednesday.” “I had a parents’ evening, I think. Yes, I had to tell thirty sets of parents that their little darlings could do better. God, what an ordeal that was. Then I went to the pub and met Adam, and I think we went for a Chinese.” “Yeah, yeah, I remember. I’d been watching the match. Man United against some foreign team. How come you weren’t with me?” Normally, Adam and I watched all the big European games together, criticising United and taking it in turns to go to the fridge. It had become something of a tradition for us, and we’d only missed two matches, once when he’d had to work late, and once when I’d been obliged to put in an appearance at a work party. “Beginning of December. European football. I was busy. Um… Oh god, that bloody work do. That was horrible. I was so pissed.”
Always doing what you are told doesn’t mean you’ll succeed in life
Jiro Dreams of Sushi