A Twist of the Knife

Two minutes

When he was a small boy, Rod Wexler loved to hang out on Brighton’s Palace Pier — long since renamed Brighton Pier. He liked looking down, through the holes in the metal gridding of the walkway, at the sinister, shadowy dark green water fifty feet below. And he was fascinated by the escapologist, the Great Omani, whose act (which the strange man repeated hourly, on the hour) was to tip a gallon of petrol into the sea below, drop a lighted taper to create a flaming circle, then tie himself up in a straitjacket, jump off the side of the pier into the flames, disappear below the surface, then emerge a minute or so later, triumphantly holding the straitjacket above his head, to a small ripple of applause.

From an early age Rod had always been obsessed with trying to work things out; there were so many mysteries in the world, and the Great Omani’s escape act was one of the first to consume him. What, he wondered, was so clever about escaping, when you had tied yourself up in the first place? Now, if someone else had tied him up, that would be very different!

But he never got a chance to study the act for long. When the Great Omani spotted him, he would shout at him angrily that his act wasn’t free, and people had to pay to watch him by putting money in his hat. ‘I don’t take pennies, son. Minimum a shilling on this bit of the pier — so pay up or clear off!’

Rod did not think the act was worth a penny, let alone a shilling, which was an entire week’s pocket money. For him, there was much better value inside the amusement arcade. One row of wooden slot machines there, in particular, fascinated him.

They had their names displayed on the outside, such as Haunted House! Guillotine! Gulliver’s Lilliput World! You pushed a penny coin into the slot and things would start to happen. The interior would light up behind the glass viewing window. He liked the haunted house. A coffin lid would rise up to reveal a glowing skeleton. A spider would drop down and rise up. Doors would open and apparitions would appear and disappear. The lights would flicker. It was like a cross between a very spooky doll’s house and a miniature ghost train.

Rod had never been on the real ghost train, further down towards the end of the pier, because he’d seen people coming off it looking terrified; it scared him too much. Also, it was too expensive for his tiny budget. He could have six goes on these slot machines for the price of one sixpenny ghost train ride.

But the machine he liked the most, on which he spent most of his shilling each week, was the Guillotine!

He would push his penny coin into the slot, and then watch as a blindfolded Marie Antoinette was dragged to the guillotine, placed face down, and then after some moments a character would pull a lever, the blade would slide down, slice clean through her neck, and her head would drop into a basket. Then the lights would go out again.

Every time he watched, he wondered, was she still conscious after her neck had been severed and, if so, for how long? And what, if anything, did she think about while her head was lying in that basket, in those final moments of her existence?

Years later, as a forty-year-old adult, the attractions on the pier, like its name, had changed. The wooden penny-in-the-slot machines had been moved to a museum underneath the Arches, close to the pier, where they were maintained in working order. You could buy a bag of old penny coins and still activate the machines. He took his own kids to see them, but they weren’t impressed; they were more interested in computer games.

But his own fascination never went away. He was enjoying a successful career as an actuary for a reinsurance group, in which his natural curiosity was able to flourish. His job was to calculate the odds, much like a bookmaker might, of accidents and disasters happening. One role, for instance, was to calculate the odds against rainfall happening in particular regions. In some parts of the south of England, much though the country had a reputation for being wet, he was able to demonstrate that, in fact, there were only ninety-four days a year when it actually rained — he defined it as there being precipitation at some point during the twenty-four hours of the day.

Some of his friends called him a dullard, obsessed with facts and statistics. But he really, genuinely, loved his work. He liked to refute the saying that ‘No man on his deathbed ever said, “I wish I had spent more time in the office.”’

‘I would say that,’ he would announce proudly in the pub and at parties. And it was true. Rod loved his work, he really did. Facts and statistics were his life; these were the things that gave him his bang. He loved to analyse everything, and break it all down to its component elements. He loved to be able to tell people stuff they didn’t know — such as what was the most dangerous form of travel, what your percentage chances were of dying of a particular ailment, or how long you were likely to live if you reached fifty.

It used to infuriate his wife, Angie. ‘God, don’t you ever feel anything?’ she would ask him.

‘Feelings are dangerous,’ he would retort, which angered her further. But he wasn’t being frivolous, he genuinely believed that. ‘Life is dangerous, darling,’ he would say, trying to placate her. ‘No one gets out of here alive.’

Once at a dinner party, he had raised the subject of his childhood fascination with the slot machine with the guillotine. A neurosurgeon friend, Paddy Mahony, sitting opposite him had said that he reckoned after being guillotined, people could remain conscious for up to two minutes. Or was it ninety seconds? Rod could not quite remember, although it was pretty relevant now, since one moment he had been texting his mistress, Romy, and the next he had looked up to see all the traffic ahead of him on the fast lane of the M4 had stopped dead.

He was surprised at just how calm he felt as the bonnet of his Audi, bought for its safety points after analysis of crash statistics, slid under the tailgate of the truck. He frowned, thinking that there had been a law passed, surely, that they needed a bar to stop his car doing just what it was now doing — sliding under the tailgate while the occupants are decapitated. Like the guillotine.

Funny, he thought, to be lying on a wet road, looking up at exhaust pipes and bumpers and number plates and brake lights. Not the way he would have chosen to exit this world, but it certainly was interesting to see if Paddy was right. Although, of course, he could not see his wristwatch. That was still in the car attached to the rest of him.

‘Hello,’ he said to a woman who climbed out of one of those little Nissan Micras, a bilious purple colour. ‘Could you tell me the time?’ He mouthed. But no sound came out.

She screamed.

This was not going well. Then she vomited. Fortunately she did not splash him. His sense of smell was acute at that moment. He felt no pain, but smelled diesel and puke. It was normally a smell that instantly made him puke too. But not today. He heard a siren.

Suddenly, he remembered that old nuclear bomb thing of his youth. The four-minute warning. The warning you might get in the event of a pending nuclear attack. People being asked what they would do if they had only four minutes left to live.

That threat had sort of faded away and been forgotten.

He remembered another dinner party he’d been at a while ago. Everyone was asked what they would do in their last four minutes. Then someone, he could not remember who, had suggested just one minute. ‘That would really concentrate your mind!’ he had said.

Now, by Rod’s calculation, he would be lucky to have another minute. Strange, he thought, our obsession with the time. Here I am, able to count my future in seconds, and I’m not worrying how my wife and kids are going to cope. All I want to know is the bloody—