by Glen Duncan
Shut the fuck up, will you? he’d said.
The male receptionist at the Leyland made two assumptions. First, since I went straight to the lifts with barely a glance at him, that I was a prostitute. Second, since I wasn’t attractive, that I was a prostitute of dizzying kinkiness or filth.
“Your concierge thinks I’m a hooker,” I said to Harley by way of hello. He was standing, leaning heavily on the bone-handled stick. “A coprophilia specialist. And these fucking shoes, I don’t mind telling you, are killing me.”
Harley smiled, but we both knew my tone wasn’t up to the task. I’d been in the room five seconds and already the atmosphere was frail. (Don’t come onto the platform with me, we say, knowing how it’ll be: the forced levity, the nonconversation, the minutes that can’t be left empty.) The suite was large, dully corporate, decorated with too much navy blue: drapes, bedspread, corduroy couches. The window looked over puddled roofs, air vents, skylights, the rear yard of a pub with its umbrellas closed and plastic furniture wet. A few dirty scabs of snow remained, irritating now that the big white dream was over.
All the ID documents were crisp, to my eye flawless, but once Harley had tossed them to me where I sat on the bed we didn’t mention them. They’d been his last hope, talismans to bring the dead magic back to life. He’d done everything he could—and proved that nothing he could do was enough. For what felt like minutes we remained in silence, me on the edge of the bed with nyloned legs crossed, him in profile by the window, all but silhouetted by London’s milky grey afternoon light.
“What will you do?” he said.
“Go to Wales. Snowdonia. I never have been back, you know.”
He opened his mouth to say something—an objection reflex—then closed it again. Both of us had imagined there would be things to say, that we’d find things to say, but Harley stared out over the shivering roof-lakes and I knew he was getting the first true flavour of his life without me in it, an effect like the rubbery antiseptic taste of a dentist’s surgery. All those people Marlowe killed.
“The vision I have of you,” I said, “is in South America. White cotton pyjamas. Mango trees. A dusty courtyard. Hot blue sky and half a dozen static pure white clouds. You go where there’s beauty. You think God will never forgive you, but the only God is beauty and beauty always forgives. It forgives with its infinite indifference.” I lit a Camel, watched myself in the mirror, a noirish unattractive woman, sitting on a bed, smoking. Somewhere in the back of our minds had been the belief that my being in drag would leaven the horror. And if I laugh at any mortal thing / “ ’Tis that I may not weep. It had failed in the way that comic music at a funeral can fail. He sat down on one of the blue corduroy couches and set the walking stick between his knees and abstractedly lit a Gauloise and slowly scratched the big dome of his forehead.
“I can’t believe this,” he said.
“Harls, come on.”
“A parent doesn’t expect to bury his child.” Cigarette smoke swirled as if struggling to form a representation of something. The room’s memories were of masturbating sales reps and adulterous couples.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Saying it gave me my first inkling of how sorry, of how exhausting this leave-taking had the capacity to become. It was as if the decision to die had taken the energy required to get me to death.
“I’m leaving too,” Harley said, then with satirical brightness: “A month’s holiday. Don’t want to be here when they cut your head off, do I?”
“Where are you going?”
“Caribbean. Barbuda. A Ballardian enclave. The bored wives of neuro-surgeons. Retired astronauts. Pharmaceuticals executives. The brochure looks like a virtual world. White concrete and ultramarine sky. A pristine end point of modernity. I imagine silence that’s really the low hum of air-conditioning and humidors.”
“Well, you’ve got the wardrobe for it. I still think you should go to Brazil. For the boys if nothing else. You’re not dead, Harls, so live.”
“Yes, well, physician heal thy fucking self.”
A silence began to solidify between us. Unaffordable. I stood up, with a wobble on the high heels, saw him immediately thinking not yet, not so soon, not like this, wait.
“Nothing’s going to be the right thing to say,” I said. He stared at the carpet. Cigarette ash fell on his trousers. “We’re hanging around waiting for this not to seem so painful when the fact is it’s only going to get more painful the longer we hang around.”
He didn’t move. His eyes were filling. He took an aggressive drag on the Gauloise, exhaled through his nose. A tear fell, with an audible putt onto his lapel. The moment demanded action and all we had was paralysis. The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
“I’ll just ask you this once,” he said. “So I know I did ask.”
I waited. Someone pushed a cleaning cart past the door. Outside, London was set in frowning concentration, dourly focused on getting through the economic migraine. Heavy on me was the weight of the world’s ability to keep going, producing day after unique day, heaving up wars and conversations, bloodily popping out babies and silently swallowing the dead. The collective human unconscious can’t stand it, the thought of stuff going on forever, so has decided (collectively, unconsciously) to bring the planet to an end. Eco-apocalypse isn’t accident, it’s deep species strategy.
“Don’t do this,” Harley said. “Don’t leave me to myself. I haven’t got what it takes for suicide. You know that. What’s another decade to you? I’ll be dead by then. Just stay.”
“I can’t.”
“You’re a selfish cunt, do you know that?”
“Yes.”
Again he opened his mouth, saw the futility, let it go. He pulled out a wrinkled white hanky and dried his eyes. Very slowly put the glass down and stubbed out the cigarette. When he looked at me I saw his fear of everything beyond this moment. The future held a horror—himself—and he wouldn’t look until he had to, until he had no choice, until I was gone. His face shivered like the water on the flat roofs.
“So what?” he said. “We just say good-bye?”
“We just say good-bye.”
“You’ve got another week. You’ll change your mind.”
“Come here.”
He felt like an old man in my arms, skin and bones in a baggy suit, thinned hair and the smell of scalp. Something medicinal too, tiger balm or Vicks. Out of habit I searched my feelings, turned up sadness, regret, something like loss but also undeniably boredom and a kind of impotence of the heart. My inner voice repeated, enough, enough, enough.
At the door I turned and looked at him. He had nothing to say, or too much. He just stared, wet-eyed, hands heavy, filling as I watched with the sand of his future. Every act of leaving feels like a victory. The thrill of this one was tiny, faint, dud, almost nothing.
Harley remained still, unblinking. Leaving him alone with his conscience was like leaving a child alone with a paedophile.
“You’ve been a good friend to me,” I said. He didn’t respond. I turned, opened the door, stepped out into the hall and closed it behind me.
18
I HAD IMAGINED, crossing the border into Clwyd under a low sky of dark cloud, that finding the exact spot I was attacked a hundred and sixty-seven years ago wouldn’t be easy. I’d pictured hours poring over Ordnance Survey maps and picking local octogenarian brains, flailing in bogs, getting lost in the woods. But this is the twenty-first century. I simply hired a car and drove north from London, then west through Snowdonia National Park to Beddgelert (the dd pronounced as a voiced th in Welsh), a village some five miles south of Snowdon and a comfortable three-mile walk from Beddgelert Forest, where after only a single afternoon exploring I found the clearing in which Charles and I had made our camp all those years ago. From there the twenty paces to the stream, the site of the attack, the line the Hunt or Servants of Light had ridden. I sat on a rock by the bank and smoked a cigarette. That’s all there was to it.
Beddgelert hasn
’t much to offer so I booked myself into the Castle Hotel in Caernarfon, a half hour’s drive northwest of the forest, overlooking the unsavoury waters of the Menai Strait.
Five days to kill before dying.
All the practical work was done long ago. The companies pass under the control of their boards. A percentage of profits stream to the charities. Real estate sale proceeds likewise. Personal wealth (I’ve off-loaded the art, the trinkets, the antiquities over the last fifty years) will be divided among certain individuals known to me (though I’m not known to them) by virtue of some outstanding quality: compassion, talent, kindness, humour, conscience. Some of it will go to ordinary folks I just happen to have met and liked. None of it will go to the families of people I’ve killed and eaten for the simple reason that finding out where the money came from (a possibility, no matter how many precautions) would drive them insane, since they wouldn’t want to part with it but would have to and would end up hating the dead person.
There are probably a dozen things you could think of to do if you only had five days left to live. I doubt they’d include visiting the Inigo Jones Tudor Slateworks, or the Caernarfon Air Museum, or Foel Animal Park, or the Sea Zoo. Nonetheless, partly in an act of self-ridicule, partly out of unexpected vacuity, I spent a day taking them in. I ate an ice cream in the drizzle. Fed coins into a delirious fruit machine. Drank a cup of tea in a café full of damp pensioners. I brought this journal up to date. All feeble distraction from the quickening Curse, which, indifferent to the winsome farewell drama, foreplayed my blood in obedience to the swelling moon. And on the subject of swelling and blood, my libido was going nuts. I had thought, given the near failure of my last date with Madeline and the days of sexual quiescence in Cornwall (nothing, not even a hand job), that desire was finally done with me. Thanatos advances, Eros retreats. Not so. By the end of my second day I was walking around in a more or less permanent gurn. To join a queue was to risk arrest.
Pocket Internet consultation revealed Caernarfon served by not one but four escort agencies, with which I made do until, around midnight of Day Three, incredulously taxied two hundred miles at my expense and toting a Louis Vuitton overnight bag, Madeline arrived. I’d promised her triple time and a generous sayonara bonus. Yes, I was Going Away.
“You are so one can short of a six-pack, babes,” she said, when I opened the door. “What are you doing here?”
“Dying. Here’s some champagne. Drink it and get into bed.”
“Crikey. Can I take my coat off first?”
“If you think it’s necessary, but please hurry.”
Maddy wasn’t the only thing up from London. I’d practically advertised my departure from the capital, so naturally WOCOP surveillance had followed. I’d clocked agents everywhere, though Grainer and Ellis declined to show themselves. I wondered what they thought I was doing, this swanning, this insouciance. To them it must look like prep for the biggest fugitive sleight of hand in history. Visibility this brazen could only be the dummy to an extraordinary escape. God alone knew what machinations they imagined I had planned.
“Ow,” Madeline said, having rolled over on something not soft in the bed. “It’s your bloody phone.” It was late afternoon on Day Four and we’d just woken up. The curtains were closed and what was left of the light was going. The night had been taxing, for Madeline because I’d fucked her six times with preposterous staying power, and for me because no amount of fucking her could suppress the psychic quartet of fear and boredom and sadness and hunger that took turns being me and sometimes didn’t take turns but nauseously swelled together like a mesmerising special effect. I had a champagne head and cocaine guts, but more pressingly the first blood-shudders and muscle-hiccups of wolf, of the coming transformation. The Last Curse.
“You’ve got voicemail, by the way,” Madeline said. “Here. I’ve got to pee. God, I feel like death.”
The phone, of course, was the phone, the Harley phone. Battery almost dead. Message icon flashing. The clipped nonperson female voice (a slightly retarded descendant of the Speaking Clock) said: Message. Received. Yesterday. At. Seven. Fourteen. a.m.
It was Harley.
“Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s—”
That was all.
I played it again, pointlessly since I’d heard it perfectly the first time. The cutoff was absolute, technological. I dialled the number. Voicemail. I dialled again. Voicemail.
A little more of the light seemed to go. The room smelled of hotel carpet, flat champagne and sex. Adrenaline shimmied and bucked in my shoulders and wrists, went through my scalp, balls, knees. I stood there staring at nothing, trying to see through walls, miles, hours, other people.
I dialled again.
Voicemail.
Maddy emerged from the en suite. She’d washed her face and brushed her teeth and pinned her hair up with clips. In ten minutes she’d look as good as a new car. Her recovery time’s astonishing. “Look at that, thank you very much,” she said, turning her cheek and showing me a tiny love-bite on her pliable young neck. “That’s a mark, isn’t it?”
“Get dressed,” I said. “I’ll give you an extra thousand but only if you get dressed and go down to the restaurant right now. I just need a few minutes.”
“I can’t go down looking like this.”
I found last night’s dress and tossed it to her. “A grand on top of the rest. Go on. I’ll be down in a bit.”
Alone in the room when she’d gone, I stood (dressed, brutally awake) with all the lights on and the mobile in my hand trying not to panic.
Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s—
There’s what?
It was a risk, but I called the Earl’s Court house. You’ve reached Elite Antiquarian. Please leave your name, number and a brief message, and we’ll return your call as soon as possible. Thank you. “Yes, hello. This is Mr. Carlyle. I’m told you’ve recently acquired a sixteenth-century Malleus Maleficarum, which I’d be very interested in taking a look at. Please do call me back on …” No point not leaving the hotel number. WOCOP knew I was here, and if they were monitoring Earl’s Court calls then they already knew about Harley. I hung up and called the foundation. No, Mr. Harley wasn’t there at the moment. Was there a message?
Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s—
It wasn’t beyond Harley to try a ruse. Drag me back to London for another assault on my resolve. He was desperate. Desperate enough to leave that message? Possibly. You’re a selfish cunt, do you know that? Said in the way we said such things, implying affection. But underneath he’d meant it. Why not? It was true.
I lit a Camel. Parted the curtains and peered out. Dusk. Rain. Car headlamps. Pedestrians under umbrellas. Every now and then you look out at the world and know its gods have gone utterly elsewhere. Its personality shows, the kid abandoned horribly early who’s survived at too great a price.
There was a knock at the door.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me,” Madeline said. “Let me in a sec.”
“For fuck’s sake.”
I opened the door. Had a split second to register Ellis holding a fire extinguisher and Grainer holding Maddy—then the fire extinguisher hit me in the face.
19
I WASN’T KNOCKED out but I was knocked over, and in the aftermath of the blow’s red detonation sufficiently dazed for Ellis to get my hands cuffed behind my back. Grainer steered Madeline at silenced gunpoint over to the couch, sat her down, then stood behind her with the weapon resting against the back of her skull. The room’s furnishings achieved sudden taut sentience. To her credit, Maddy was keeping her mouth shut. I had the impression it wasn’t the first time she’d been around men with guns, which made me feel tender towards her, sorry I hadn’t kissed her more.
Grainer had lost weight since I’d last seen him and looked handsomer for it. Oily thick dark hair flecked with grey, a broad face, small hard brown eyes, pockmarked skin. Native American blood in there somewhere giving the good
cheekbones, the inscrutable distance. In the Dolomites he’d been in lightweight Hunt fatigues and night-vision goggles. Now here he was like a spruce gangster in dark casuals and a quality black overcoat.
I spat out a bloody front tooth. My nose was broken. “Don’t worry, Madeline,” I said through my mashed mouth. “It’s me they want.”
Ellis found the dimmer and turned the lighting down slightly, for no reason, it appeared, beyond his own aesthetic sensibilities. He took the desk chair, placed it opposite me and sat down. In a film he’d start cleaning his nails or peeling an apple. In reality he just sat, elbows on knees, in a state of relaxed readiness. The long white hair was ponytailed today.
“So here’s the thing,” Grainer said. “We know about Harley.”
Instant structural shift. As if a wall or door had gone for good and now cold air came in.
“Is he dead?”
“Don’t try’n drive this, Jake. You’re the passenger.”
You think horror enters spectacularly. It doesn’t. It just prosaically turns up. Even in the first seconds you know you’ll find it a room. I thought (how not?) of Harley’s face at our farewell, of how delicate he’d felt in my arms. Weariness tingled through me, as if the heart had released a stimulant that wasn’t working. Simultaneously there was a dreary bodily certainty that something would be demanded of me, that I’d have to do something.
“We’re aware of your intention for tomorrow night, Jake,” Grainer said. “To take it lying down. We don’t like it.”
“No challenge for you.”
“Exactly. Do you know I’ve been dreaming about it? In this dream, you’re sitting—fully transformed in broad daylight—all alone at one of those picnic tables in a forest. When I come out of the trees you’re pleased to see me. You wave at me, for Christ’s sake. I mean I do it, I cut off your head, but you’re just sitting there, smiling, nodding. It’s depressing as hell. I don’t want that.”