Armadillo

by William Boyd

  The Book of Transfiguration

  Gale-Harlequin PLC resided in a new granite and polished steel building off Holborn. There was abstract art in the lobby and dark clumps of palm, fern and weeping fig. Uniformed security guards sat behind a rough-hewn ziggurat of slate. The harlequin logo was subtly present in the canvases on the walls, variations on its theme painted by eminent contemporary artists, two of whom Lorimer could identify through the plate-glass from the street. This was not going to be a simple adjust, he felt with small tremors of foreboding, there was a whiff of moneyed respectability about this place, the solid heft of solvency and success.

  He checked his notebook: Jonathan L. Gale, chairman and managing director, and Francis Home (pronounced ‘hume’, doubtless), finance director, were the men he had to see, a far cry from Deano Edmund and Kenny Rintoul, he had to admit, but also, he had to admit further, on occasions these sophisticated types could match anyone in the cupidity and venality stakes. He turned away and strolled off in the direction of Covent Garden, trying to clear his mind of worries: the appointment was scheduled for the next day and he had done as much backgrounding as he was prepared to do. This adjust had to be done newborn, slick and shiny – so the expression ran in GGH – just sprung from the womb, innocent, untarnished, slick and shiny.

  Stella had called and left a message on his answering machine: could they meet, with Barbuda, no less, in Covent Garden for a pre-shopping lunch? Her voice had sounded unusually hesitant, not pleading so much as apologetically urging this rendezvous. Lorimer wondered vaguely what was afoot, trying to keep further foreboding at bay – his future was dark enough with foreboding as it was, he had to maintain some light in his life.

  He was far too early he saw, as he stepped down the wide circular staircase into the huge basement room that was the Alcazar. Beyond the generous horseshoe of the bar tables were still being set up and there was a clatter and rattle of glasses and bottles being stacked on shelves or slammed into racks, like shells into breeches, ready for the day’s offensive. A barman (shaven head, chin beard) looked up from his glass-fronted fridge and said he would be with him in a couple of ticks, chief.

  Lorimer sat on a bar stool, sipped at his tomato juice, and selected a newspaper from the layered pile made available to clients. He wondered what the Alcazar had been before its new incarnation as bar-restaurant. Probably a failed bar-restaurant, or nightclub, or storeroom. Yet the ceiling was high and elaborately moulded, the cornice picked out in lime-green and indigo. He enjoyed being in these establishments as they prepared themselves for their day’s business. He watched a young guy, wearing a suit but tieless, carrying a copy of the Sporting Life, come shiftily in and order a bottle of champagne – one glass. He looks even more tired than I do, Lorimer thought. Another light sleeper, perhaps? Should he introduce him to Alan Kenbarry’s Institute of Lucid Dreams, have his sleep disorder solved? Then two other young men sauntered in, fit-looking, also suited but oddly out of sorts in formal wear, as if their bodies were more accustomed to shorts and sweatpants, T-shirts and track suits. They ordered pints of extra-strength lager with a dash of citron vodka – an interesting variation on an old theme, Lorimer thought, making a mental note to try the mix himself when he felt particularly close to the end of his tether. A Japanese family entered, two elderly parents with teenage daughters, and asked to be sat down immediately for an absurdly early lunch. Slowly, the Alcazar accommodated itself to its incoming customers: the music was switched on, the empty crates cleared from behind the bar, the last lemons quartered. Two young women with cold faces and harsh make-up) (style: Berlin cabaret 1920s) took up position by the wrought-iron lectern at the restaurant’s entrance and pored frowningly over the register like cryptologists close to a solution. Sporting Life was joined by a male friend who also ordered his own bottle of champagne. Lorimer consulted his watch: Stella had stipulated between 12.45 and 1.00, the table was booked in her name, she had said, and Lorimer wondered if, given the chilly demeanour of the two seaters, he should confirm that at least one –

  Flavia Malinverno walked in.

  Flavia Malinverno walked in and there was a rushing in his ears as of surf foaming and fizzing on a sandy beach. Curious portions of his body – his nostril flanges, the little webs of skin between his fingers – seemed to grow unnaturally hot. For an instant he felt – stupidly – that he should avert his face, before remembering in a second instant that she would not know him, would not know him from Adam. So, covertly, innocently, shifting slightly on his bar stool, he watched her over the top of his newspaper. Watched her have a brief word with the ice maidens at their lectern and watched her take a seat in a far corner of the bar area and order something to drink. Meeting somebody? Obviously. Early like me, over–punctual, good sign. He shook out his newspaper ostentatiously, turning and flattening a flapping page. Extraordinary coincidence. To think that. In the flesh. At more leisure he took her in, drank her in, imprinted her permanently on his memory.

  She was tall – right, good – slim, wearing different shades and textures of black. A black leather jacket, sweater, black shawl-scarf thing. Her face? Round, almost blandly even-featured. She seemed neat and clean. Her hair parted, straight, shortish, cut sharp to just below the jawline, glossy dark brown hair, chestnut shot with a purplish-red – some sort of henna? In front of her on the table a fat leather notebook diary, a packet of cigarettes, dull silver block of a lighter. Her drink comes, big glass of yellow wine. She drinks but does not smoke, interesting. Something faintly tomboyish about her. Flat black cowboy boots, small raked Cuban heels. Black jeans. She was looking round the room and he felt her gaze wash over him like the beam of light from a lighthouse and keep on going.

  He loosened his tie, very slightly, and with his fingertips mussed his hair, untidying it. Then, to his astonishment, he found he was crossing the room towards her, a voice in his ear– the inner man – shouting, YOU ARE OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND, as he heard his own voice saying to her, quite reasonably:

  ‘Excuse me, are you by any chance Flavia Malin-verno?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, I thought –’

  ‘I’m Flavia Malinverno.’

  Ah. Flahvia, not Flayvia. Idiot. Fool.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ he proceeded, ‘but I saw you on television the other night and —’

  ‘In Playboy of the Western World?

  What the hell –? Quickly now.

  ‘Ah, no. An advertisement. A Fortress Sure advertisement. That, ah, advertisement you did.’

  ‘Oh, that.’ She frowned. He liked her frown immediately, enormously. A serious, unequivocal buckling of the forehead, an inward coming-together of her eyebrow ends registering huge doubt. And suspicion.

  ‘How do you know my name, then?’ she said. ‘I don’t think they run credits on ads, do they?’

  Jesus Christ. ‘I, ah, I work for Fortress Sure, you see. P R department, marketing. There was a screening, a presentation. Um, these things stick in my mind, names, dates. I saw it on cable the other night and I thought how good it –’

  ‘Have you got the time on you?’

  ‘Five past one.’ He saw her eyes were brown like unmilked tea, her skin was pale, untanned forever and her nails were bitten short. She looked a little worn out, a little tired, but, then again, didn’t everybody? We all look a bit tired, these days, some more than others.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘I’m meant to be meeting someone here at half twelve.’ It seemed to signal a change of tone, this change of subject, a partial admission of him into her own day’s routines.

  ‘I just wanted to say you were great, I thought, in that ad.’

  ‘You’re most kind.’ She looked at him flatly, sceptically, mildly curious. Her accent was neutral, unplaceable, the city’s demotic middle-class voice. ‘I must have been on screen for a whole five seconds.’

  ‘Exactly. But some presences can –’

  ‘Lorimer.’

  He turned to s
ee Stella waving at him from the lectern. Barbuda stood beside her, looking at the ceiling.

  ‘Nice meeting you,’ he said, weakly, hopelessly. ‘Just thought, I’d, you know –’ He spread his palms, smiled goodbye, turned away and crossed the bar area to join Stella and Barbuda, feeling her eyes on his back and hearing in his head an inarticulate, strangely joyous jabber of accusation and exhilaration, of shame and pleasure and regret – regret that the moment was past, was gone forever. Happy – amazed – at his audacity, though. Furious, seething, that he had forgotten to look at her breasts.

  He kissed Stella and half waved at Barbuda, as he suspected strongly she did not like being kissed, by him or any male over twenty.

  ‘Hello, Barbuda, half-term, is it?–

  85. The Seven Gods of Luck. At the end of one term in Inverness Junko gave me a present She gave all the household gifts (she was returning home to Japan for the holiday), gifts of food or articles of clothing that were markedly personal, the result, one assumed, of Junko’s particular assessment of the character of the recipient Shona received a single earring, for example, Joyce a full set of thermal underwear including a thermal bra, while Sinbad was given two bananas. ‘Why two?’ he asked, wrinkling his nose with a baffled smile, flicking back the corkscrew tendrils of hair that he liked to have fall in front of his eyes. ‘One for each hand,’ Junko said with a polite smile, which silenced him.

  She gave me a postcard, bought in Japan, stiff and shiny, a bright picture of seven symbolic figures aboard a junk in an extravagantly stylized choppy sea.

  ‘Who are they?’ I asked.

  ‘The Shichifukujin. The seven gods of luck,’ she said. ‘What you must do, Milo, is put this picture under your pillow on the night of January first and in this way your first dream of the year will be lucky.’

  ‘This will bring me luck?’

  ‘Of course. I think you are a person who has much need of luck, Milo.’

  ‘Haven’t we all?’

  ‘But for you, Milo, I wish you special luck.’

  She told me who the seven gods were and I wrote down their names: Fukuro kujo and jurojin, the gods of long life; Benzaiten, the only female, goddess of love; Bishamonten, warlike, armoured, god of war and good fortune; Daikokuten, god of wealth; Hotei, god of happiness with his bulging belly; and finally Ebisu, the god of self-effacement, carrying a fish, the deity of one’s job or career.

  Junko said, ‘Ebisu is my favourite.’

  That New Tear I did as she suggested and slipped the card under my pillow and tried to dream a lucky dream, endeavoured to force good luck into my life with the help of the seven gods. I dreamt of my father – was that good luck or bad luck? The year turned out to be a bad one for him and a momentously bad, life-changing one for me. The seven gods of luck. Not the seven gods of good luck. Luck, you must remember, like many things in life, is two-faced – good and bad – something I think the seven gods implicitly recognized, adrift in their little boat on their stormy sea. I left my card from Junko behind during my harassed and rushed departure from Inverness. For a while that loss perturbed me more than it ought to have done.

  The Book of Transfiguration

  He sensed her leave just as their first courses arrived, he glanced over and saw in the corner of his eye a fleeting dark figure for an instant at the stairs’ beginning. He looked around but she was gone.

  Stella was talking: she seemed upbeat, cheery today. ‘Isn’t this nice?’ she kept saying. ‘The three of us.’ At one stage she reached under the table and surreptitiously ran her hand up his thigh until it touched his cock.

  ‘Barbuda’s going to her first proper party –’

  ‘Mum, I’ve been to tons of –’

  ‘And I think there’s going to be a certain young man present. Mmm? So we have to find something very ultra mega glamorous, don’t we?’

  ‘Mum, for God’s sake.’

  Lorimer refused to join in. He remembered this mortifying adult banter all too well from his own hellish adolescence. It was only the impending purchase of expensive clothes, he knew, that explained Barbuda’s sullen tolerance of this leering speculation at all. In his own case he recalled similar hours of prurient inquiry from Slobodan about his non-existent sex life, but with no promise of reward to sweeten the pill: ‘Who do you fancy then? Got to be someone. What’s her name, then? She got specs? It’s Sandra Deedes, isn’t it. Doggy Deedes. He fancies Doggy Deedes. Disgusting.’ And so, endlessly, on.

  He smiled over at Barbuda in what he hoped was an understanding, non-patronizing, non-avuncular way. She was an ungainly girl, made more lumpy by pubescence, with dark hair and a sly, pointy face. Her small, sharp breasts caused her huge embarrassment and she was always swathed in the baggiest of jumpers, layers of shirts and jackets. She was wearing make-up today, he noticed: a smear of grey above the eyes and a violet lipstick that made her small mouth smaller. She looked a darker, bitterer version of her mother, whose strong features spoke instead of confidence and will-power. Perhaps it was the mysterious Mr Bull’s genetic contribution that brought this out in her – hints of low self–esteem, a mean spirit, destined to find life a disappointment.

  ‘Mum, tell Lorimer, will you?’

  Stella sighed theatrically. ‘Load of nonsense,’ she said. ‘Still, listen to this. Barbuda doesn’t want to be called Barbuda any more. She wants to be called – wait for it – Angelica.’

  ‘It’s my middle name.’

  ‘Your middle name is Angela, not Angelica. Barbuda Angela Jane Bull. What’s wrong with Jane, eh, Lorimer? I ask you.’

  Jane Bull, Lorimer thought, bad idea.

  ‘The girls at school all call me Angelica. I hate being called Barbuda.’

  ‘Rubbish. It’s a beautiful name, isn’t it, Lorimer?’

  ‘It’s the name of an island not a person,’ Barbuda/Angelica said with passionate loathing.

  ‘I’ve been calling you Barbuda for fifteen years, I can’t suddenly change to Angelica.’

  ‘Why not? More people call me Angelica than Barbuda.’

  ‘Well, you’ll always be Barbuda to me, young lady’ She turned to Lorimer for support. ‘Tell her she’s being silly and stupid, Lorimer.’

  ‘Well, actually’ Lorimer said, carefully. ‘You know, I sort of understand where she’s coming from. Excuse me, I must make a phone call.’

  As he rose from the table he caught Barbuda/Angelica’s stare of candid astonishment. If only you knew, girl, he thought.

  At the payphone by the stairs he punched out Alan’s number at the university.

  ‘Alan, it’s Lorimer… yeah. I need a favour. Do you know anyone at the BBC?’

  ‘I know them all, darling.’

  ‘I need to find out the telephone number of an actress who was in Playboy of the Western World the other night. BBC2, I think.’

  ‘It was Channel Four, actually. Fear not, I have my sources. An actress, eh? Who’s she sleeping with?’

  Lorimer was inspired. ‘It’s the girl in the dream. From the ad. Turns out she was in this play. I think I may be on to something, Alan, dreamwise. If I could see her, meet her, talk to her, even. I think I could lucid dream all night.’

  And I thought you were going to say you’d fallen in love.’

  They both laughed at this.

  ‘I just have a hunch. She’s called Flavia Malinverno.’

  ‘I shall “procure” her for you. In a jiffy’

  Lorimer hung up the phone suffused by a strange feeling of confidence, confident that if there were one motive force likely to galvanize Alan Kenbarry it was the prospect of a spouting silver fountain of lucid dreams.

  381. Market Forces. This evening Marlobe said to me, pointing the wet stem of his pipe at my chest, ‘It’s dog eat fucking dog, my friend. Market forces. You cannot buck the market. I mean, face it, we are all, like it or not, capitalists. And the amount I pay in fucking taxes justifies me, personally, in saying to those whingeing fucking scroungers – PISS OFF. And you, matey,
fuck right off to your own sad fucking stinking country, wherever it is.’ Two old women waiting for a bus moved huffily away, saying loudly they were going to a nicer bus stop. Marlobe appeared not to hear this. ‘You understand these matters,’ he said. ‘You in your business, just like me in mine. We got no choice. Market fucking forces rules. If you go to the wall, you go to the wall.’ So I decided to ask him what he felt about the recently installed flower stand in the ShoppaSava. ‘Load of fucking rubbish,’ he said, although his grin looked a little sick. ‘Who wants to buy a flower from a checkout girl? You want personal service. Someone who knows flora, the fluctuations of the seasons, the proper nurture and attention of the flower. I’ll give it a month. They’ll lose a fortune.’ I made a worried face and said, I thought, bravely, ‘Well… Market forces?… He laughed and showed me his surprisingly strong – looking white teeth (are they false?). ‘I’ll give them market forces,’ he said. ‘You wait.