Previous Convictions

By Simon Temprell

Tasteless, ghastly, wickedly inventive and very funny, here is social satire at its best. Imagine two sisters, Jackie and Cherry. Jackie is a demented homophobe, though no one has noticed, and she has murderous intentions towards her recently outed brother-in-law. Meanwhile her sister, Cherry, lives in virtual seclusion in her black-painted flat, reliving her heyday as a West End dancer and fearing visitations from her dead father. Psychological thriller or off-beat comedy? You decide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon Temprell
• Release date: Mar 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301309573

Simon Temprell

Simon Temprell was born and raised in Chesterfield, England. he worked as a window dresser at Harrods in London before starting his own interior design business. he moved to Brussels in 1990 and then to Washington, DC which is where he currently resides. The Rich man's Table was his first book published by Pan Macmillan in 2000, followed by Previous Convictions and Bitter & twisted. His fourth novel, Intents & Purposes was self-published.

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Previous Convictions

Simon Temprell

First published 2001 by Pan Macmillan

Copyright © Simon Temprell 2001

The right of Simon Temprell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Smashwords Edition January 2013

Table of Contents

Title Page

Praise for The Rich Man’s Table

Also by Simon Temprell

Dedication

Acknowledgements

SUMMER 1992

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

AUTUMN 1992

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

About the Author

Praise for The Rich Man’s Table

‘A no-holds barred expose of some of the more ghastly aspects of our society, with characters so brittle they set your teeth on edge…and the kind of humour which makes you grimace rather than chuckle in merriment.’

BIG ISSUE

‘With his deft eye for characterization, immaculate sense of comic timing and his ability to navigate the reader through the most outrageous of plots, Temprell could well become Britain’s answer to Maupin, albeit of a slightly darker frame of mind.’

ATTITUDE

Also by Simon Temprell

The Rich Man’s Table

Previous Convictions

Bitter & Twisted

Intents & Purposes

To Mum & Dad

For your unconditional love

Acknowledgements

When I wrote Previous Convictions there were some people who thought I was taking a chance on my lack of good taste. There were others who applauded my daring and it is to those people I offer my greatest thanks. First and foremost to my agent Anne Dewe who proved surprisingly difficult to shock and reassuringly loyal when I needed affirmation of my sanity. Also, huge thanks to my editor at Macmillan, Peter Lavery who always made me feel like part of the Macmillan ‘family’. And finally a huge thanks to my brother Gary and my friend Dominic who read every first draft I write and then refer me to a psychiatrist! Here’s to good friends and bad taste…

SUMMER 1992

Chapter One

There were hundreds and thousands on the trifle. And on the Formica counter beside the bread bin there was a small amount of arsenic wrapped in a twist of brown paper.

The hundreds and thousands were Jackie’s idea and she knew that when Elspeth saw them that she was going to say they were common and that Jackie should have used slivered almonds instead. Elspeth was the kind of woman who knew those things. She made her own rough puff pastry from scratch and always had a lemon handy when gin and tonics were in order. Jackie, on the other hand, was the kind of woman who ate baked beans straight from the tin and licked the chocolate off digestive biscuits.

Chalk and cheese, her mother used to say.

Mother was in the dining room. She was wearing her moss-green two-piece with the fake fur collar and they’d done her hair with heated rollers. She didn’t look quite right and Jackie had been fussing with a comb and a can of lacquer.

The coffin was lined with white satin, the kind that comes inside boxes of cheap crystal. The wooden box itself was some kind of composite material pretending to be oak. Not a dovetail joint in sight, just carpenter’s glue and wire brads. Of course Elspeth had put in her twopenn’orth: ‘Are you sure the insurance money wouldn’t stretch just a tiny bit further? It looks like it came flat-packed from Ikea.’

So Jackie went out and bought the hundreds and thousands for the trifle – just to make a point. She found genuine satisfaction in her pettiness.

The funeral would be the next day. It hardly seemed worth the effort for the handful of people who would attend. Mother had been ill for many years. Bedridden. Bent and broken like the spokes of an ancient umbrella. For eight years Jackie had fed and washed and wiped, scrubbing at her resentfulness with a Brillo pad, bleaching her bitterness with a bottle of Domestos and a shredded J-Cloth. The death of her mother spelt out freedom in bold scarlet letters and Jackie couldn’t wait to tear herself away from the blackness of mourning. For the sake of decency, how long would she have to wait before she could pull back the curtains and look out across the May-washed meadows of her future?

Jackie needed a man.

It was a craving that itched and gnawed at her vitals like a yeast infection. She felt it every night in the static electricity of her brushed-nylon sheets. It hardened her nipples and moistened her fingers as she delved as deep as she dared to rub at the insatiable throb of her desire. There was no ointment, no yoghurt-based home remedy to scrub away Jackie’s burning blisters. Maybe now she would stand a chance? Maybe now she could lay claim to some of the personal satisfaction that, until that point, belonged exclusively to the paperback women of Jackie’s cheap novels.

Cherry was not coming to the funeral. Cherry was Jackie’s sister who lived in London. Cherry was once plain old Karen until she changed her name in the seventies. Cherry was married to Chip Freeman, Home Shopping Service’s most celebrated salesman. He was American and he had an American smile. Jackie had never met Chip but she watched him daily on satellite TV and sometimes Elspeth called him and they talked on air.

She was still in awe of her older sister who, despite all the odds, had made a huge success of her life. Jackie didn’t see her sister very often. In fact she hadn’t seen Cherry for almost two years, but they spoke on the phone every few months. Cherry needed to pursue her glittering lifestyle. She needed to focus her attention on her wonderful American husband and her dancing career. Jackie had to give up nothing to look after Mother and so it was only fair that she should be the one to accept the responsibility gracefully. Maybe things would have been different if Billy were still alive.

Oh, but for the grace of God…

Grace was something to be swallowed, over the dinner table with mashed potatoes and scrubbed hands making a circle. And Father. But Jackie knew better than to go back there. She lowered her head and pleaded with God to make her forget.

And God sent her Elspeth.

Cherry wasn’t the only sister who could change her name. Jackie too had a pseudonym, an alter ego she called Elspeth Williams after a particularly popular girl in her typing class at school. Jackie furnished Elspeth with an entire wardrobe of personality traits: Elspeth was a married woman who lived in a semi-detached house with a garage and a converted attic bedroom with Laura Ashley wallpaper. Her husband was a respected employee of the Abbey National and they had two children – Emma and Benjamin. Once a year Elspeth and the rest of the Williams family took a summer holiday in Devon where they rented a seaside cottage with white shutters and wooden floors ingrained with generations of sand. The children ran barefoot on the beach whilst Elspeth and her husband Thomas made love on a crisp cotton duvet that smelled of Comfort. The word ‘fuck’ did not exist in Elspeth’s vocabulary. It would make her gag.

Jackie rarely allowed Elspeth to make a public appearance but she came in handy whenever she needed to call the Home Shopping Service to talk to her American brother-in-law, Chip. She had spoken to him twice, but often when she called she was placed on hold for what seemed like hours and then they cut her off at the last minute or connected her to a receptionist who noted her comments and promised to pass them on the Chip. The first time she actually got through to him she was so surprised that she almost gave him her real name and she had to cough violently to cover up the mistake. Chip was very understanding and asked her if she was all right. All she managed to blurt out was ‘Muffin pans, I’m going to buy the muffin pans,’ and then they disconnected her with a click like a pair of garden shears.

Of course, Jackie realised that all she really had to do if she wanted to talk to her brother-in-law was to call Cherry’s flat on a day when Chip wasn’t working. She had tried that a few times but she always got Cherry’s voicemail with a ridiculously childish message in an assumed voice, and Jackie wasn’t the type to talk to machines. She suspected that they never actually answered the phone, preferring to screen the calls, so Jackie always had to wait for Cherry to call her.

Sometimes she heard Chip’s voice in the background when she was chatting with Cherry. Once she actually heard him ask where his cufflinks were and Jackie conjured up an image of Chip standing in a pair of white boxer shorts with a stripe of tanned, hairy flesh showing through the unbuttoned front of his bright white shirt. It was thoughts like those that sent Jackie flying to straddle the arm of her wing chair where a few minutes of furious rocking would salve the burning in her private parts. Over the years she had worn right through the nubby tweed fabric of that old chair and the wood beneath it gleamed polished and white like a piece of revealed bone.

The one regret in Jackie’s life was that she was never invited to the wedding. ‘We didn’t want any fuss, Jackie,’ was how Cherry put it when she called Jackie to inform her that she had a new American husband. It was a simple registry office ceremony with two witnesses and a luncheon for ten people afterwards in a swanky London restaurant. Jackie read about it in a small ‘occasions’ column torn from a London magazine and sent to her by Cherry two months after the event.

Jackie had glued the article into her scrapbook, along with all the other photographs and memorabilia from Cherry’s show-business career. It was the very last entry she made in that scrapbook until Chip joined the HSS team. Jackie purchased a second scrapbook because every week there seemed to be something new about her brother-in-law to clip and paste. Cherry no longer appeared in the newspapers or on TV but Jackie didn’t mind because it seemed only right that a wife should step aside to allow her husband to take the spotlight. Famous show-business couples never last – just look at Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. First they adopted a whole host of ‘rainbow children’ and then Woody allowed his sexual perversion to rise to the surface and it made Jackie feel quite sick to see that withered old man with his twenty year old stepdaughter.

Jackie Theresa Rennet couldn’t find it in her heart to sympathise with perverts or homosexuals. She had come to terms with drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes and people with thyroid problems but she just couldn’t shake her deep-rooted hatred of the so-called ‘gay community’. Jackie always used the invisible inverted commas whenever she choked on that phrase because she just couldn’t see how people like that could be granted a community of their own. It just sounded too cosy, too self-satisfied – they should be in a ghetto or a concentration camp. Hitler may well have been a fascist but at least he had the right idea when it came to sexual deviants.

There was a knock at the door and Jackie was wrenched from her daydreaming. She was cutting through her newspaper clippings with a large pair of dressmaking scissors. They had belonged to her grandmother, and Jackie got them sharpened regularly at the While-U-Wait key-cutting kiosk in the precinct.

There was a second knock at the door. For three days it had been a constant attack of phone calls and visitors. Elspeth said that Jackie should let Mother go to the funeral home, but Jackie respected her mother’s wishes and left her laid-out in the dining room with an Airwick and a headscarf draped over the lamp.

The visitor rattled the letterbox. Jackie put down her scissors impatiently. It was Mr Hardcastle from two doors down and he slipped into the hallway before anyone could see him. Mr Hardcastle was an ex-marine with a tattoo on his forearm and a roguish twinkle in his eye.

‘Hello, love. I was wondering if you could let me have a drop of milk, only we’ve just run out and I fancy a mug of tea.’ He was wearing a string vest and an entire bottle of Brut splash on. He looked around Jackie to peer inquisitively down the darkened hallway.

‘Oh, Mr Hardcastle,’ said Jackie, ‘did your wife forget to get some in for the weekend?’

‘She’s just nipped out to get some. I used up the last pint on my cornflakes this morning and forgot to go down to the Pakis’ shop on my way back from the DHSS.’

Mr Hardcastle wore his thin cotton shirt open to the navel. He had a deep hairy cleavage between his breasts and a ripe swollen stomach beneath. The flesh did not sag or wobble; it was packed hard and tan like muscle that doesn’t know when to stop growing.

‘You’d better come in then,’ said Jackie, stepping aside, brushing uncertainty from the front of her skirt as though it were cake crumbs. ‘Mother is in there,’ she explained, nodding in the direction of the partially closed door. Mr Hardcastle hunched his shoulders and raised his eyebrows as though he was about to start circumnavigating a minefield. He put his finger to his lips and followed Jackie to the kitchen. It was a dull afternoon and Jackie switched on the fluorescent light. It took a moment to flicker into action. The kitchen was as bright and sterile as an operating theatre.

Jackie looked in the fridge. ‘I’ve only got a pint and a half myself.’

‘That’s all right, love. I just need enough to make my tea. Brenda’ll be back by five,’ said Mr Hardcastle, smoothing back his dirty blond hair with the palm of his hand. His shirtsleeves were short and Jackie noticed the way his tanned bicep bunched into a surprisingly firm knot, pulling his cotton sleeve at the seams. She turned away quickly. It felt as though she was buzzing like a light fixture. She experienced a violent urge to go to the toilet and she had to clench her muscles to fight the sudden spasm in her bowels.

‘I must say that you keep this place spotlessly clean, Miss Rennet, or may I call you Jackie?’ he asked, pulling out a mean little chair from beneath the glittery blue breakfast table. He sat down as though he was about to order bacon and eggs. Jackie looked at him and ironed over a wrinkle of a smile as it formed on her face. She could see the entire kitchen in fish-eye miniature if she looked into the chrome body of the electric kettle. The backs of her knees were sweating and something like indigestion was lodged in her chest. She hoped that she wasn’t going to belch.

‘That is a flattering dress you’re wearing, Jackie – it’s nice to see a woman who knows how to be feminine these days with jeans and sweat suits being so popular. I like a woman who knows how to keep herself pretty.’ His eyes lifted up the hem of her black seersucker skirt so that he could leer at her knickers. It was disgracefully obvious why Mr Hardcastle liked his women in skirts.

Jackie felt his compliment warming her cheeks and she suggested that maybe he would like her to make him a cup of tea. He thought that that was a generous suggestion and accepted her hospitality only too readily. Jackie filled her Russell Hobbs with fresh water and brought out the best teapot with the violets on the lid. She wished that she had some biscuits to offer her guest but everything she had in the cupboard was for the funeral the following day. She wondered if Elspeth would notice if she stole a couple of marshmallow teacakes from the box.

Jackie stared out of the kitchen window while running the cold-water tap. There were poppies growing between the cracks in the asphalt. She had no garden. She lived in a rented flat above a supermarket and the view from the kitchen window was a rippled, petrified sea of bubbling asphalt. Over the edge of the flat roof Jackie could just make out the woods at the far side of the botanical gardens.

‘I have some special teas if you’d like something other than Tetley’s, Mr Hardcastle,’ suggested Jackie, holding up a little wooden box full of herbal teabags that her sister had sent to her two birthdays ago.

‘None of those sissy teas for me, Jackie – most of them taste like rat’s piss anyway – I’m happy with a regular brew if you don’t mind. And please stop calling me Mr Hardcastle – it makes me feel like a tax collector. It’s Bert to my friends.’

‘What do your enemies call you then?’ asked Jackie, leaping recklessly on an impetuous swing of flirtation.

‘Now that would be enough to make a lady blush,’ he replied coyly. ‘Can I use your lav?’

‘It’s through there,’ said Jackie, pointing to a door in the hallway. He got up and lumbered through to the bathroom. The kettle was reaching its cut-off point and Jackie could hear the forceful jet of Bert Hardcastle’s piss as it whipped up foam in the toilet bowl. It was a noise that made her uncomfortable and excited at the same time. She got the same feeling when she saw men’s underwear in Marks & Spencer’s or when she encountered a young bare-chested jogger on the bicycle path. It was a tense, almost stricken feeling that made her recklessly irresponsible. Not the kind of feeling she should be entertaining with her mother’s corpse laid out in the next room.

Jackie slipped the bag of arsenic into the cutlery drawer. She washed her hands.

‘You’ve done up the bathroom a treat,’ said Bert Hardcastle as he returned to the kitchen on a fresh burst of Brut. Jackie wondered if he was actually carrying a bottle of the stuff in his pocket. ‘That’s very pretty wallpaper and the towels to match and everything.’

‘It all came together,’ said Jackie, pouring boiling water on to the tea bags. ‘I bought the whole lot in a box – towels, shower curtain, wallpaper, the lot. It’s new. I got it from the shopping channel.’

‘Yes, I noticed your satellite dish. Can you get the sports channels and everything?’ asked Bert.

‘Oh yes – I can get everything,’ replied Jackie, implying to Bert that he need wonder no more about the availability of non-stop pornography. Bert gave her a look that implied that he had caught her drift and they nodded together in silent appreciation of the wonders of satellite television.

‘Shall we go through to the lounge?’ suggested Jackie, hearing Elspeth in her voice because she, Jackie, usually called it the living room. ‘I’ll let you watch the Brazilian football if you like.’

It looked as though Jackie had found herself a new friend.

A man just a few years her junior.

A man with a wife on the night shift at the bra factory.

A man with connections in the armed forces.

Jackie plied him with tea and coquettish laughter.

‘That’s a striking colour,’ observed Bert, nodding at the pink walls with an appreciative smile. ‘What do you call that?’

‘It’s Dulux. It’s called Flamenco. I didn’t realise it would be so pink but I couldn’t be fussed taking it back so I decided to live with it.’

‘It’s cheerful,’ said Bert, taking a seat on the edge of the Ercol sofa and placing his tea on the side table. ‘A perfect colour for you.’

Jackie could feel the colour rising in her cheeks. Flamenco pink.

‘Rain beetle,’ said Bert, pointing to a black insect scurrying across the windowsill.’

‘But there’s no rain,’ observed Jackie, taking a cardboard insert from one of her magazines so that she could persuade the beetle to hop on board. ‘Poor thing is obviously lost.’

‘Horrible looking thing,’ said Bert, screwing up his nose with disgust.

‘All God’s creatures, ugly or beautiful.’ And Jackie took the piece of cardboard out into the hallway with the beetle stunned into temporary immobility.

She opened the door and flipped the beetle onto the concrete.

It moved around in a small semicircle, in an attempt to find its bearings.

‘All God’s creatures,’ repeated Jackie.

And she brought down her foot with a determined stomp.

Chapter Two

Cherry Renée was waiting for her husband to come home.

It was sunny outside but the sunlight had no passage into the flat on Archway Road. Cherry kept the shutters closed and the lights on in every room. She had painted the walls black, even the ceilings were black, and the blackness swallowed up the light like a hungry sponge might soak up spilled ink. Cherry painted the walls herself when Chip was in America. She threw out the Designer’s Guild curtains and replaced them with solid plywood shutters. She pulled up the Sisal carpet and installed black industrial rubber – the airport kind with raised circles like blisters on the surface. She stapled reflective silver PVC over the entire kitchen ceiling and spray-painted the Smallbone kitchen with zebra stripes. Chip didn’t spend much time at the flat any more.

Cherry was sitting in the living room listening to her Starlight Express tape – ‘Original London Cast’. On the back photograph it was just possible, with the aid of a magnifying glass, to pick out Cherry’s face in the chorus line. It was the last time she appeared on stage. The last time she had a job. The last time she had a life.

She wasn’t bitter any more. She had accepted her fall from grace and was more interested in her interior decoration than her erstwhile dancing career. Her friend Samantha told her that she ought to open a shop like Anouska Hempel. A shop kitted out with black velvet and filled with expensive vases and topiary trees. Her friend Samantha lived with Rupert Foster, a BBC sports announcer, and they had a big house overlooking the Thames with quilted curtains and concealed lighting. Samantha, like Cherry, was once a dancer with The Next Generation but had been reduced to selling Missoni knock-offs at Brick Lane market.

In the living room of the shuttered flat it was stifling. There was no longer any conventional furniture – the overstuffed sofas and the Indonesian coffee tables had all gone to the second-hand shop. Large floor cushions, like giant used tea bags, drooped across the black industrial rubber, surrounding several raised platforms that had been covered with black shag-pile carpet. Chip described the room as a ‘sensory deprivation chamber’ but Cherry knew that he just didn’t understand her concept – he was too conventional to appreciate the subtle textures of her creativity. He was too caught up in his bloody boring Home Shopping Service world to appreciate anything that didn’t come on a six-month credit plan. He told her that she should see a psychiatrist and tried to insinuate that she was depressed, but Cherry was perfectly happy in her self-made darkness. Like a spring bulb beneath the soil she was waiting for April to arrive.

***

Chip Freeman had just become a minor celebrity. At a black-tie award ceremony at London’s Dorchester Hotel he received a gold-plated sculpture as cable TV’s Salesperson of the Year. The award appeared tawdry surrounded by mirror and light in the display cabinet he had just bought from Habitat. The cabinet was distressed with a beige patina to co-ordinate with the walls of his newly painted South Ealing living room.

He was putting on his favourite blue polo shirt. It brought out the colour of his photogenic eyes and was just tight enough to allow the contours of his chest to show through without appearing (God forbid) vulgar. Chip acknowledged the fact that he was vain. He had always been very proud of his appearance and thought of his vanity as an invaluable attribute. Too many men allowed themselves to become complacent with regard to their appearance. They practically flaunted their disregard for common decency with their so-called ‘designer stubble’ and athletic footwear. Chip was proud of his own constant attention to detail. He believed that it was this obsession, above all others, that had pushed him to the pinnacle of his cable TV career.

Chip Freeman was American but he had lived in England for almost ten years so he thought of himself as English. He hadn’t become a citizen but he was a permanent resident and he paid a ridiculous amount of income tax. When he went back to America supermarket cashiers asked him where he came from. Elocution lessons had shaved the edges off his Baltimore