by William Boyd
‘That is us, Lorimer. This is the analogy to hold on to. Like them we are specialists, the specialist loss adjusters. Everyone knows what a loss adjuster does in the wider, above-the-board, larger world. But, just like the élite forces, no one really knows what us specialists get up to. But that large world needs us, Lorimer. Oh, yes. Just as the armed forces have to rely in certain circumstances on the SA S or the bomb-makers or the assassins. You see, only we can do certain jobs, the difficult jobs, the discreet jobs, the secret jobs. That’s when they call the specialist loss adjusters in. ‘
The Book of Transfiguration
‘Mr Rintoul?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Lorimer Black. GGH.’
‘Oh yeah. How you doing?’
‘Fine. I thought I should let you know that we are going to contest the claim on the Fedora Palace.’
‘Oh. Right.’ Rintoul paused. ‘What’s that got to do with me?’
‘It’s got everything to do with you.’
‘Don’t get you.’
‘You set fire to that hotel because you didn’t want to pay the penalty charge.’
‘Fucking lie. Lies.’
‘We are going to contest the Gale-Harlequin claim on the grounds of your arson.’
Silence.
‘I thought it only right to let you kno.’
‘I’ll kill you, Black. Fucking kill you. Say nothing or I’11 kill you.’
‘This conversation has been recorded.’
The phone was slammed down and Lorimer hung up, his hand trembling slightly. However many death threats he had received in this job – a good half-dozen or so – they still unnerved him. He took the cassette from his answer machine and popped it in an envelope, marking it ‘Fedora Palace. Rintoul. Death threat’. That would go up to Janice for the master file which was kept in Hogg’s office. On the tape Rintoul had not actually admitted he had started the fire so it would not stand as legal evidence – it did not explicitly incriminate him. The death threat was unequivocal, though, and Lorimer hoped that would make him safe – it usually did. When they knew they had been recorded it stayed their hand. It was a useful bit of extra insurance.
93. Two Types of Sleep. I have learned through my conversations with Alan that there are two types of sleep: Rapid Eye Movement sleep (REM) and Non-Rapid Eye Movement sleep (NREM). R EM sleep is paradoxical, NREM sleep is orthodox. Alan told me, after studying my EEG patterns, that I was experiencing far more REM sleep than is the norm, which, he said, makes me very paradoxical indeed.
He told me about the stages of NREM sleep. Stage I – sleep onset. Stage 2 – deeper, we see changes in the EEG patterns, sleep-spindles, K-complexes, but you are still aware of outside stimuli, your brain activity taking the form of short sequences of waves. Stages 3 and 4 plunge you ever deeper, showing decreased vigilance, this is what we call ‘deep slumber’. We believe, Alan said, that NREM sleep in the deep slumber phase is essential for body repair. REM sleep is for brain repair.
The Book of Transfiguration
El Hombre Guapo was a large tapas bar just off the Clerkenwell Road, lined with sheets of carefully distressed stainless steel. The floor was stainless steel too and portions of the Berlin Wall were hung horizontally in chains from high beams creating a distinctly different kind of false ceiling. The staff wore grey boiler suits with many zips (of the sort favoured by combat fighter pilots) and the driving, relentless music was played punishingly loud. It was popular with young journalists from the style pages of broadsheet newspapers and with futures and derivatives traders – Lorimer thought it a strange place for Torquil to choose.
As ever, Torquil was already installed at the bar and halfway into his drink – whisky, judging by the smell on his breath. He offered Lorimer one of his cigarettes and was politely turned down. Lorimer ordered a triple vodka and soda with plenty of ice – Rintoul’s last words were still echoing in his inner ear.
‘That’s right, you don’t smoke,’ Torquil said incredulously. ‘Why not? Everybody smokes.’
‘Well, not everybody. Two-thirds of us don’t.’
‘Rubbish. All smoking statistics are lies, I tell you, Lorimer. Every government in the world lies about them, they have to. Smoking’s on the increase worldwide and it suits them fine, though they daren’t admit it. So they routinely churn out these figures. But take a look around you.’
‘You’re probably right,’ Lorimer conceded. True enough, of the fifty or so people in El Hombre Guapo, ninety-eight per cent were smoking and the other two per cent looked like they were about to smoke any minute, rummaging in pockets and handbags for their cigarettes.
‘How was your day?’ Torquil asked, lighting up himself. ‘I hope it was more exciting than mine.’
‘Same old stuff.’
‘What?’
‘SAME OLD STUFF!’ Lorimer raised his voice to a half-shout. Everyone was obliged to talk louder in order to be heard above the music.
‘I tell you, Lorimer, if it wasn’t for the money I’d be out of this game in a shot.’
Torquil ordered another whisky and a plate of croquetas which he proceeded to eat one after the other in rapid order, offering none to Lorimer.
‘No sups for Torquil,’ he said, leaning close. ‘Binnie’s with her ma and pa.’
‘Binnie?’
‘My darling wife.’
‘In Gloucestershire?’
‘Absolutely’
‘Kids with her?’
‘They’re all away at school, thank Christ.’
‘I thought your youngest was seven.’
‘He is. He’s at a prep school near Ascot. But he comes home at weekends.’
‘Oh, fine.’
‘Well, it’s not fine actually.’ Torquil frowned. ‘It sort of unsettles him. Started wetting his bed. Not fitting in. I keep telling Binnie it’s all this coming home at weekends. He doesn’t want to go back, you see. I say he should stick it out.’
Lorimer looked at his watch. ‘Well, I should be –’
‘There she is.’
Lorimer turned to see a young girl in her early twenties, wearing a suede coat buttoned up to her neck, pushing her way cautiously through the raucous crowd. She had thin sandy hair and heavily made-up eyes. She looked vaguely familiar.
‘Lorimer, this is Irina. Irina, young Lorimer, m’colleague.’
Lorimer shook her weak hand, trying not to stare as he sought to place her. Then he had it: the waitress from Cholmondley’s.
‘You remember Lorimer, don’t you?’
‘No, I don’t think. How are you?’
Torquil ignored her and turned away to order her a beer while Lorimer reminded her of their first meeting and asked a few polite questions. It turned out Irina was Russian, over here studying music. She said Torquil had assured her he could help with her work-permit application. She accepted one of Torquil’s cigarettes and dipped her head to have it lit. She plumed smoke at the ceiling and held the cigarette awkwardly, her beer bottle in the other hand. Lorimer felt her melancholy soul reach out to encircle him. Then she said something but neither of them could hear.
‘What?’
‘I say this is nice place,’ she yelled. ‘Where is ladies’ room?’
She edged off in search of it and Torquil watched her go, before smirking at Lorimer, and leaning forward to put his mouth uncomfortably close to Lorimer’s ear.
‘I thought I’d been a bit grumpy at lunch,’ Torquil explained. ‘So I went back the other day to apologize, asked if I could buy her a drink. She’s a flautist, apparently. Firm, pliable lips I should imagine.’
‘She seems nice. Something intrinsically sad about her, I feel’
‘Bullshit. Listen, Lorimer, you wouldn’t mind sort of buggering off now, would you? I think I’ve done the decent thing. I’ll say you were called away.’
‘Got to go, as it is.’
Relief propelled him out of the bar but Torquil caught him at the door.
‘Almost forgot,’ he
said. ‘What’re you doing next weekend? Gome to dinner, Saturday, stay the night. And bring your golf clubs.’
‘I don’t play golf. Look, I –’
‘I’ll get the Binns to drop you a line with the details. Not far away, Hertfordshire.’ He slapped Lorimer affectionately on the shoulder and pushed his way back to the bar, where Irina was now waiting, shrugging herself out of her suede coat. Under the bluey lights of El Hombre Guapo Lorimer glimpsed pale arms and pale shoulders, white as salt.
Chapter 6
That night he slept, even by his reduced standards, badly. Alan had told him he was alone in the Institute and normally that information helped. Also, following Alan’s instructions, he had pondered lengthily on Gérard de Nerval’s fraught and difficult life but his mind refused to obey dithering skittishly between images of Flavia Malinverno and the prospective adjust at Gale-Harlequin. He forced his mind back to poor tormented Gérard and his hopeless love for Jenny Colon, the actress. De Nerval had hung himself one freezing winter’s night – the 25th January 1855. Now that was the sort of fact one read in a biography with little pause, unless you had seen a hanged man yourself. Mr Dupree, Gérard de Nerval. Rue de la Vieille Lanterne, hung himself on some railings, apparently… Jenny Colon broke off with de Nerval and married a flautist. Irina was a flautist…Were these coincidences or signs? Subtle parallels… There was a photograph by Nadar of de Nerval at the end of his life – he’d never seen such a wrecked, ravaged face … visage buriné, the French called it, a whole lifetime of grief and mental anguish etched there… He must have slept at some stage because he did dream… he dreamt about Flavia and Kenneth Rintoul. It was Rintoul who was waiting, dishevelled and glum, at his dinky mews house, Rintoul who ran to embrace Flavia…
Lorimer had woken and had dutifully jotted the facts down in the dream diary by the bed. Then he had dozed and drifted for a while, his mind intermittently involved with pragmatic details of his work, wondering whether to spend more time backgrounding Gale-Harlequin or simply to march in and play it by ear. At around 4.30 a.m. he made himself a strong cup of tea – two tea bags, a three-minute steep – and somehow managed an hour of dreamless slumber.
‘Just the one dream,’ Alan said to him later that morning, disappointment heavy in his voice.
‘I’ve got a lot on my mind,’ Lorimer protested. ‘You’re lucky I slept at all, lucky to have anything. Jesus.’
‘This fellow,’ Alan looked at the dream diary, ‘Rintoul. You don’t like him?’
‘Well, he doesn’t like me. He threatened to kill me.’
‘Interesting. But you couldn’t eradicate him from the dream, this nemesis-figure?’
‘It wasn’t a lucid dream, Alan.’
‘What about the girl? Do you know her?’
‘I’ve seen her in a taxi. She’s in a TV ad. I found out her name.’
‘You couldn’t sexually interpose yourself in this dream?’
‘It wasn’t a lucid dream, Alan. The last thing I want to see is this Kenneth Rintoul bloke with this Flavia Malinverno girl in his arms.’
‘Damn. Damn and shit. These are promising ingredients, Lorimer. Next time concentrate on them.’
‘I gave de Nerval a whirl, like you said.’
‘Leave Gérard on the sub’s bench, next time around. Next time I want you to fantasize about this girl. Strong sexual fantasies, as perverse as you like. Can you come in tonight?’
Lorimer said no. He was beginning to have his doubts about Alan’s lucid dream programme. It had all sounded fine initially but now it seemed not to be helping him at all. Light sleepers, Alan claimed, had fifty per cent more lucid dreams than ordinary people and claimed further that in the machinations of the lucid dream – the way it was controlled and influenced by the dreamer – lay the solution to one’s sleep disorder. But at this juncture the theory grew a little vague, links in the causal chain sundered, and Lorimer ceased to understand what Alan was talking about, the jargon was too opaque. What was more irritating was that, after six weeks of participation in the Institute’s programme, it was ever more clear to Lorimer that the dream segment of the research, rather than the curative outcome, most intrigued Dr Kenbarry.
‘You don’t really care if I ever sleep normally, do you?’ Lorimer accused him as they walked downstairs to the entrance.
‘Nonsense,’ Alan said, emphatically. ‘If you don’t end up sleeping normally my work is worthless, that’s the whole point.’
His breezy confidence was encouraging and Lorimer felt a little flutter of hope shiver through him as they walked through the building. Corridors were being swept and polished and the air was loud with the plaintive hum of industrial machinery. There was also a fresh smell of mass catering emanating from some canteen or cafeteria and the day’s first sleepy, lank-haired students were assembling wordlessly by the revolving doors, swigging sugary colas from two-litre bottles, patiently rolling their thin fags.
‘How can you be so sure this is working, Alan ?’ Lorimer said, scepticism returning again. ‘Because I’m not sure, not sure at all.’
‘I can see the signs,’ he said, cryptically. ‘You’re my best light sleeper ever, Lorimer. Seven bona-fide lucid dreams in five weeks.’
‘Six.’
‘Six weeks already? Don’t let me down, son. Don’t quit while you’re ahead.’
‘Yeah, but I –’
‘Once I work out your lucid dream triggers, you’ll be laughing. Physician heal thyself, sort of thing.’ He smiled. ‘Come back soon, we’re on the verge of great things, my child. Mind how you go.’
It was an abnormally dark morning, the mass of cloud seemed to have settled, still and unmoving, about fifty feet above the surrounding rooftops. It did not threaten snow or rain but the light was absurdly feeble for the time of day, tired and puny, greying everything it touched. Perhaps he was suffering from Solar Deprivation Syndrome, or S A D – Seasonal Absence Deficiency or whatever it was called, Lorimer thought, easing himself into his car. Perhaps he should sit for an hour in front of a high-wattage light bulb as, reputedly, melancholy Scandinavians did to revive themselves from their hibernal torpor, a blast of ultra-violet dispelling their winter blues?… At least it wasn’t raining.
As he drove back to Pimlico – up Church Street and Creek Road, crossing the river at Tower Bridge and on to Lower Thames Street, across Parliament Square to Vauxhall Bridge Road – he wondered again about the credibility and validity of Alan’s programme. True, it was highly, not to say impressively, funded: the sleep lab and the monitoring machines had all been paid for by a Department of Education research fund and Alan had two postgraduate assistants logging and collating the data as well as a contract from a university press for the eventual book – Timor Mortis: The Lucid Dream Phenomenon (working title). There were even whispered hints of a television documentary. Yet Lorimer still could not rid himself of this feeling of aggrievedness: for Alan he was simply an interesting specimen, an exemplary set of symptoms. He felt as he imagined rats in a psychiatrist’s maze might feel, or Pavlov’s salivating pooches, or a chimp being soused with perfumes and aftershave. Frankly, Alan did not really care about his troubled nights, in fact as far as he was concerned the more troubled the better.
At the front door in Lupus Crescent a thin black man with waist-length dreadlocks, thick as coaxial cables, was talking animatedly to Lady Haigh. He was introduced as Nigel – the Santafurian from number 20, Lorimer surmised, the mulch-provider. Lady Haigh said she was considering an herbaceous border and Nigel knew where to lay his hands on some excellent compost. Nigel, it turned out, worked for the Westminster Council’s Parks Department, tending Pimlico’s few forgotten squares – Eccleston, Warwick, St George’s, Vincent – its floral roundabouts and roadside plantations. He seemed amiable enough, Lorimer thought, as he clambered up the stairs to his flat, realizing that he really should quell his instant suspicion of all those who worked for municipal parks departments. It was unjust: one rotten apple did not spoil the
whole barrel, not every local authority gardener was like Sinbad Fingleton, after all.
54. The House at Croy. I went to Scotland to escape, to be alone and, I suppose, as convention dictates, to find myself. All I knew, after I left school, was that I had to go far away, far from Fulham and the family Blocj. So I sought out the most distant institution of higher education in the land that offered a course I was qualified to take and, after some research, decided that the North Caledonia Institute of Science and Technology provided me with the perfect geographical and academic conditions I required. I took the train north and travelled eagerly six hundred miles to the neat and tidy city of Inverness, with its castle, its cathedral and its clear, shallow river and the enfolding purple hills beyond. It was, for a while, everything I had asked for.
I lost my virginity in my second term at college to Joyce McKimmie, a mature student (mid-twenties) who sat in on some of the art history seminars I attended. Joyce was a fresh-faced, blowzy redhead who looked full of confidence but in fact was the opposite, her answers to questions in the seminar rooms beginning in an uncertain small voice and swiftly diminishing to a hushed whisper or sometimes even terminating in total inaudibility, leaving us all straining to hear, or creatively interpreting her almost–silence and rounding off her sentences on her behalf. She wore voluminous, improbable combinations of clothes, long, lacy skirts with cleated trainers and a nylon anorak, or in summer went bra-less beneath a man’s waistcoat with blue pedal-pushers and flip-flops on her dusty feet. She had a three-year-old child, a boy, Zane, who lived with her mother in Stonehaven during term-time. While she was at college she rented and sub-let rooms in a fair-sized house in a village called Croy to an odd selection of tenants.
Joyce, like many shy people, found liberation in alcohol and our first coupling took place – while we were both drunk – in a back room at someone else’s party. We bussed back to Croy at dawn and I spent the next three days there. Joyce seemed to have more money than the rest of us – child benefit? Zane’s absent father contributing? – and this had allowed her to rent the house, which she ran, surprisingly, as a kind of prissy, strict commune, introducing washing-up rotas, waste recycling, a partitioned fridge with prominently labelled milk bottles and coffee jars as well as permitting a tolerant attitude towards sexual activities, alcohol – and drug-consumption. At the centre of this routine was the evening meal, served promptly at eight o’clock, which all members of the house currently present beneath the roof were expected to attend. Amongst the shifting tenants was a hard-core of regulars, two genial, moon-faced brothers from the Isle of Mull, Lachlan and Murdo, a postgraduate Japanese girl called Junko (studying life sciences, to which mysterious end she spent many days out at sea on fishing boats quantifying and analysing catches), Joyce’s cousin Shona (thin, wiry, promiscuous) and Sinbad Fingleton, the feckless, gormless son of a local laird, recently expelled from his public school with one GCSE in biology to his credit, who worked for the Inverness Town Council Municipal Parks Department. To my vague surprise I found I liked Joyce’s uncomplicated company and the curious regimen in the House at Croy with its blend of licence and order and preferred to spend more time there than alone in my boxy cell in the college hall of residence, with its drab view of muddy football pitches and the dark, impenetrable green of the pine-clad hills beyond.