Not Forever, But For Now by Chuck Palahniuk

Author:Chuck Palahniuk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

35

AS A MOTHER, MUMMY HASN’T made any great success. But as a wee slip of a girl she once went skiing and steered a washed-up singer and would-be presidential candidate bang into a tree. Just as Grandfather had taught her. That had been near her first job, the Sonny Bono Job, and she took to the work with great relish. A great killer, yes she is, but as for being a mother, she’s left much to be desired.

She used to tell Otto and me, as she tucked us in at night she’d say, “My lovely boys, my sweet innocents, why when I was your age I’d already drowned Natalie Wood, hadn’t I? And I’d smacked on the head William Holden, I had.” Goodness knows she could set up a patsy like that Mark David Chapman person. A rube to pick up the slack during a busy season. She’d tell us, “I could wind that Hinckley person round my little finger, couldn’t I?”

Grandfather used to call them temps, these young men and women who might be hired on for a single job. They were never very bright. No bright stars, they. Why, they could scarcely shoot a Kennedy before getting pinched. Mummy had only to meet such men before she could suss out the ones with killer instincts. It’s how she met Daddy, it is. “My darling boys, your father had such aspirations.” She’d lean over the crib, the jewels and the perfumed scent of her. “Your father hadn’t any people to speak of, but he’d possessed an animal charm.”

Here she’d stop talking and a look would get on her face, a look like got on her face when that deranged woman flung herself on the windscreen of our Bentley as we were driving on holiday. This same look as got on Otto’s face a time back when he took me to visit the Buckinghamshire Asylum for the Homicidally Insane. Oh, this was nannies and nannies ago, soon after Daddy’s vanishing. Far too many nannies back to count.

The asylum looked a fortress stacked out of great grey stones, it did. All the windows iron-barred with the pale hands of lunatics clutching the bars from the inside. Picture spidery-thin fingers wound round the iron like insane vines, they were. And pallid faces framed between the bars. Leering, toothsome, hollow-eyed. Haggard, gimlet-eyed, caved-in faces. Stammering mouths. A whole façade of such faces waited to greet us upon our approach by the Pembroke Road.

You see, Daddy had only weeks prior gone missing at the beach, and Otto had questions he wanted answered, so he marched me to the stout door of that murmuring, stuttering bedlam and rang the bell, and told them who our Mummy was and her place among the county families, and who Grandfather was, and the old rector who ran the unhappy enterprise asked us in to tea: a miserable assortment of tinned biscuits and bilge presented to us with lofty formality and papier serviettes by a hunched housekeeper who seemed not one degree above being an inmate herself.

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