Armadillo

by William Boyd

  ‘People can get pretty angry.’ He must stop saying ‘pretty’.

  ‘But no one really gets killed, I hope.’

  ‘Well, there’s the odd sad case checks out.’

  ‘Checks out?’

  ‘Adios, planet earth.’

  ‘Got you. Have some more.’ She poured and held up her glass. ‘Sham pain to our real friends, real pain to our sham friends. Where’re you from, Mr Lorimer Black?’

  As they ate lunch (gazpacho, spaghetti primavera, sorbet) Lorimer gave her the short amended autobiography: born and raised in Fulham, university in Scotland, some years ‘drifting’ before the need for a steady income (aged parents to support) ended him up in the loss adjusting wing of the insurance business. He let it be known that this profession was temporary, that wanderlust was still part of his soul. How fascinating, she said. For her part she told him of some of the acting and modelling jobs she had done, the new movie she had just auditioned for, but the dominant theme in her discourse to which they regularly returned was ‘Gilbert’, who was being ‘impossible, selfish and revolting, not necessarily in that order’.

  ‘Who is Gilbert?’ Lorimer said carefully.

  ‘You met him the other night.’

  ‘I thought he was called Noon.’

  ‘That’s his stage name. His real name is Gilbert, Gilbert Malinverno.’

  ‘Not quite the same ring to it.’

  ‘Exactly. So I call him Gilbert when I’m cross with him. It’s such a feeble name.’

  ‘What, ah, does he do?’

  ‘He’s a juggler. Quite a brilliant one actually.’

  ‘A juggler?’

  ‘But he’s given up juggling to write a musical.’

  ‘He’s a musician?’

  ‘Fabulous guitar player. But consequently he hasn’t made any money for months, which is why I’m calling him Gilbert. He’s multi-talented, but obtuse.’

  Lorimer’s loathing of Gilbert Malinverno was profound.

  ‘Been married long?’ he asked, as if the question had just occurred to him.

  ‘About four years. I think I married him for his name, really.’

  I changed my name too, Lorimer wanted to say. You don’t need to marry someone.

  ‘Flavia Malinverno,’ he said. ‘What was it before?’

  ‘Not nearly so nice. You know it ‘means “Bad Winter” in Italian? Mal’inverno. Talking of which,’ she said, looking out at the snow and actually reaching across and squeezing his arm, ‘let’s have a grappa.’

  They did, and watched the afternoon outside gathering into bluey darkness, the snow growing less insistent until there was only the odd flake helixing down. A couple of inches had settled and the roads were furrowed chocolate.

  They tussled amiably over the bill and negotiated a split: Flavia the champagne, Lorimer the food and the wine. Outside she rewrapped her scarf around her neck and pulled her suede blouson tight about her.

  ‘Cold,’ she said, ‘God, this Pimlico snow’s cold. God, I’m pissed.’

  She took a half step and seemed to hunch into his side as if in search of body heat and Lorimer found, quite naturally, that his arm went around her, feeling her shiver and, quite naturally, they seemed to turn towards each other and they were kissing, not like the kiss in his lucid dream, but her tongue was deep in his mouth and he was about to explode.

  The applause of Sole di Napoli’s serving staff standing, to a man, in the window whooping and clapping broke them apart. Flavia pirouetted, gave a deep cavalier’s bow and ran away.

  ‘Bye, Lorimer Black,’ she shouted, ‘I’ll call you.’

  She was round the corner and out of sight before her name had formed on his lips. He crunched softly over the snow towards his seared and scarified motor, wondering why there was a sudden heaviness in the area around his heart.

  Chapter 12

  ‘He’s a bit peaky,’ Monika said. ‘He wouldn’t get out of his bed, Monday, wouldn’t budge. So I knew he wasn’t feeling so sunny.’

  She and Lorimer were standing in the corridor just outside his father’s room, their voices low, like consultants in a ward. Lorimer shivered: the house felt cold. Outside, the day was raw and freezing, the snow still lying, hard and blue with ice.

  ‘Place is freezing, Monika,’ he said. ‘Something wrong with the central heating?’

  ‘It comes on about six. It’s on a timer.’

  ‘Change the timer. It’s ridiculous to be this cold. Think of Dad.’

  ‘Can’t change the timer, Milo. Anyway, Dad’s nice and warm in bed with an electric blanket.’

  ‘Fine,’ Lorimer said. ‘Can I see him?’

  Monika swung the door open to let him in. ‘Don’t be too long,’ she said. ‘I want to go shopping.’

  Lorimer closed the door softly behind him. The room was small and narrow, large enough for a single bed, a bedside table, a television set and a small armchair. Opposite the bed on the wall was a cluster of cheaply framed portraits of the Blocj family – grandmother, mother, the children at various ages, Slobodan, Monika, Komelia, Drava. And baby Milomre, last born.

  His father’s blue eyes swivelled towards him as he edged up to the bed and drew up the armchair.

  ‘Hi, Dad, it’s me,’ he said. ‘Not feeling so good, eh? What’s wrong, then? Bit of a virus, maybe. Miserable weather out there. Nice warm bed’s the place to be. You get yourself well…’ he went on in this vein of banal prattle for a while as his mother and sisters had instructed him, insisting everything was understood. But it was not evident: his father’s faint smile remained his constant, unvarying response to the world, but at least his eyes were on him today, blinking regularly. He reached over and took his right hand, which was resting on the coverlet over his chest, placed there, doubtless, by Monika, always neat, always wanting things ‘just so’, including the invalid’s posture. He could not understand his father’s condition: he was not paralysed, he was simply very still. He could walk, he could move his limbs with gentle encouragement, but if not encouraged he would remain almost perfectly inert. On the surface anyway: inside all worked as normal, he supposed, pumping, oxygenating, sluicing, filtering, excreting, and so on. But the exterior man made a sloth look agitated and nervy. Maybe he was in a state of permanent hibernation, like a python coiled in a rock fissure or a polar bear in its ice cave? He assumed there was a medical term for it, some kind of ‘vegetative state’. He would rather compare his father to a sleeping bear than a vegetable.

  ‘That’s it, Dad, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You’ve just had enough so you’ve switched everything off. You’re not a carrot or a potato.’ He squeezed his father’s hand and felt, he thought, a small answering squeeze in reply. His father’s hand was dry and smooth, callus-free, the nails clipped and polished, the back dappled with liver spots. It was a good hand to hold.

  ‘Got to get well, Dad,’ he said, a sudden catch in his voice as the prospect of his father’s death confronted him, like a ghost or a wraith materializing in the room, and he felt the tear-sting in his eyes. He realized that he was frightened of being in a world that did not contain Bogdan Blocj, even a Bogdan Blocj as reduced as this.

  To dispel this melancholy mood he irritated himself by recalling his near-unendurable evenings spent in the company of Torquil Helvoir-Jayne, his new best friend. He seemed to do little else but minister to him in various ways: tidying up his routine messes, replenishing the provisions he consumed (three bottles of whisky, thus far) and listening uncomplainingly to his litany of whinges, moans and expressions of self-pity. He had also become the unwilling auditor of the Helvoir-Jayne life story – a terminally bored Boswell to Torquil’s indefatigable Dr Johnson – as Torquil sifted repeatedly through his past looking for the causes of the world’s unfairness to him, trying to analyse what had happened and why his life and career were in such appalling shape. Lorimer had heard endlessly about the distant elderly parents, his miserable decade at boarding school, his aborted attempts to become a soldier, two ye
ars as a subaltern in an unfashionable regiment, his reluctant entry into the insurance world, his assorted girlfriends, his courtship and marriage of Binnie, her ghastly parents and brothers, her intransigence, his modest, unexceptional failings and his dreams of a new brighter future.

  ‘It’s in the East,’ he said to Lorimer, meaning his future. ‘Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic. That’s your new frontier.’ This was the only advice forthcoming from the many phone calls to his chums, his pals in the City. ‘If I could only get some capital together. I could buy an office block in Budapest, a supermarket in Sofia, a motorway service station in Moravia. Dirt cheap. Apparently people – Brits, like you and me – are making a fortune out there. Tons of money, cleaning up.’ The ache of his frustration was almost heartrending. Lorimer suggested an immediate reconnaissance. ‘But I’m broke, Lorimer, I’m skint, without moolah. I’m in debt up to my eyeballs.’ And then the shining aspirations would be replaced by the now familiar plaints: bastard lawyers, bitch-from-hell Binnie, devil incarnate Hogg, venal, selfish so-called friends who didn’t come through when you needed them (‘present company excepted, of course’). He would list them: the Rorys, the Simons, the Hughies, and some American entrepreneur to whom he had once rendered a crucial service called Sam M. Goodforth and whose name he repeated like a mantra, ‘Goodforth, Goodforth, where’s Sam bloody Goodforth now?’ When the level in the whisky bottle dipped below half way Lorimer usually took himself off to bed, where he would lie awake thinking about Flavia Malinverno and listen to Torquil making telephone calls and endlessly switching channels on the television.

  Flavia had not yet phoned, some two days after their unforgettable lunch. ‘Bye, Lorimer, I’ll call you,’ she had shouted back at him through the slackening snow. If he shut his eyes he could hear the pitch of her voice exactly, see her tall figure slipping round the corner –’

  ‘What’re you holding his hand for? ‘Drava said, silently entering the room.

  ‘I thought it might be comforting,’ he said. It comforts me, anyway, he thought.

  ‘It’s plain morbid, that is,’ Drava said with a shudder, retrieving her father’s hand and replacing it on the counterpane.

  In the hall the pungent smell of cooking meat was suddenly dominant and he could hear his grandmother and mother banging around in the kitchen, laughing and chattering in their language. Little Mercy was watching a boomingly violent video in the sitting room. A semi-audible layer of music issued from somewhere.

  ‘Hey, Milo,’ his grandmother shouted lustily at him. ‘Stay for lunch. We got pig. Lovely boiled pork.’

  That was the smell. He made it as far as the kitchen door and paused there – any further and he would dry-heave. He breathed shallowly through his mouth. His mother was making dumplings, rolling balls of dough between her palms and popping them in a pan of hissing fat.

  ‘When’s the doctor coming?’ he said.

  ‘Tonight, I think, six o’clock.’

  ‘You think? He must come, insist. Make sure Dad gets the best of everything. All the tests, I’ll pay’

  ‘Oh, he’s fine, just a bit poorly.’

  ‘Stay for lunch, Milo,’ Komelia said coming up behind him and poking him in the ribs, ‘Skinny. You need some lovely boiled pork.’

  ‘And dumplings,’ Mercy said, skipping out of the sitting room. ‘Dumplings! Dumplings! Dumplings!’

  ‘Isn’t she clever?’ his mother said. ‘Plenty dumplings for you, darling. When you going to give me some more clever grandchildren, Milo?’

  He saw Drava emerge from his father’s room with a chamber pot and realized it was time to go.

  ‘I’ve got a meeting,’ he said weakly. ‘Where’s Slobodan?’

  ‘Where d’you think,’ Komelia said with a sneer. ‘The Clarence.’

  The Clarence, the Duke of Clarence, to give the pub its full name, was a couple of hundred yards away down the Dawes Road. Lorimer carefully picked his way through the frozen snow, Clarenceward, his condensing breath snatched from him by the numbing wind, the light threatening and baleful to the north. It was only lunchtime but it seemed night was coming on already.

  The problem with the Clarence, Lorimer thought, was its utter absence of charm, its unequivocal charmlessness – which might have done duty as a form of charm, in this the day and age of the themed pub – but not even the most nostalgic drinker, Lorimer thought, could summon up much affection for this sorry watering hole. It boasted every pub minus-point, ancient and modern: a meagre choice of fizzy beers, muzak, no edible food, many clattering, flashing and pinging gaming machines, an adhesive, patterned carpet, satellite TV, a smelly old dog, surly old regulars, drunk young regulars, minimal heating, laboratory-bright lighting – and it was his brother’s local, Slobodan’s pub of choice.

  Lorimer pushed open the swing doors to be assailed by the reek of a million extinguished cigarettes and two decades of spilt beer. An old man seemed to have passed out behind a table in the corner, his mouth wide open, his greasy trilby slipping off his head. Perhaps he’d just decided to die, Lorimer wondered, the Clarence could have that effect on you, as if they dosed their carbonated beer with additional Weltschmerz.

  Slobodan and Phil Beazley were at the bar, where a young barman with walrus whiskers and a chain collar tattooed round his neck washed glasses in a sink of turbid grey water.

  ‘Milo, my main man,’ Beazley said for possibly the thousandth time.

  ‘Here, Kev, this is my little bro. He’s a millionaire.’

  ‘G’day, mate,’ said Kev, unimpressed and indubitably Australian. Lorimer wondered what had brought him all this way, from his hot, sun-filled country, across hemispheres, oceans and continents to wind up behind the bar of the Clarence, in Fulham. He also realized that the ostentatious mention of his alleged wealth was Slobodan’s code for ‘Don’t ask for your money back.’ He had in fact been planning a vague inquiry about the return of his loan as the morning’s mail had brought a note from Ivan Algomir, complaining about an ‘importunate and untimely demand from the Revenue’ and wondering when he could cash Lorimer’s cheque. Which reminded him: he would have to chase up that Gale-Harlequin bonus, everything was becoming a little stretched.

  ‘What’s your poison, Milo?’ Beazley asked.

  ‘Mineral –’ He changed his mind, the only water in the Clarence flowed from a tap. ‘Pint of Speyhawk.’

  Speyhawk Special Strength Lager, designed to make a long afternoon slip by. Lorimer brought the foaming tankard to his lips, gulped and felt his brain yield. Beazley and Slobodan were drinking double gins and Coke. Lorimer insisted on paying for the round.

  ‘Dad’s… not well,’ Lorimer burped. He hicked and coughed. Strong stuff.

  ‘He’ll be fine.’

  ‘Constitution of a yak,’ Beazley said, and for some reason punched Lorimer in the upper arm, unnecessarily hard. ‘Hey, Milo, good to see ya.’

  ‘How’s business?’ Lorimer asked.

  ‘Diabolical,’ Slobodan said, his face going long. ‘You know old Nick and young Nick?’

  Father and son, drivers at B and B. ‘Yeah. What about them?’

  ‘They got nicked.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Selling drugs down Earls Court station. ‘Parently they got a field of marijuana at their place in Tonbridge. An acre and a half

  ‘So,’ Beazley said, disgustedly, ‘we’re two drivers down. I’d like to root my boot up old Nick’s tradesman’s entrance, I can tell you. We’re going mental, aren’t we, Lobby?’

  Lobby agreed, vehemently, mental wasn’t in it.

  The glimmerings of an idea, a dangerous idea, a Speyhawk idea, began to take shape in Lorimer’s mind.

  ‘Listen, Phil,’ he began. ‘There’s a guy been giving me a bit of bother. If I wanted, you know, to put the frighteners on him, do you think, you know, you could give him a word in the ear?’

  ‘You want him sorted.’

  ‘Warned off.’

  ‘Well, we do owe
you a favour, don’t we, Lobbs?’

  ‘What’s he done?’ Slobodan asked, genuinely curious.

  ‘He blowtorched my car.’

  ‘Not seen that in ages,’ Beazley said. ‘Very time-consuming.’

  ‘What’s he drive?’ Slobodan asked.

  ‘BMW. Big one, new model.’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, Lobby,’ Beazley said with real excitement. ‘An eye for an eye, a motor for a motor.’ He leaned towards Lorimer, confidentially. ‘Lobby and me goes round to this guy, right? We got a couple of scaffolding poles – bash, wallop – we’re out of there – one seriously fucked-up Beemer. Doddle.’

  ‘Doddle,’ Slobodan agreed. ‘You tell us when, chief.’

  Lorimer said he would and wrote down Rintoul’s particulars, feeling a little nervous at what he might unleash but reassuring himself that his action was purely precautionary and that he was only following Hogg’s instructions. ‘Arrange your own oiling,’ Hogg had said, in so many words. So, if Rintoul started playing silly buggers he’d have to deal with Beazley and Bloçj, the enforcers, with their scaffolding poles.

  He took another sip of his effervescing Speyhawk, feeling the alcohol surge almost immediately through his veins. He set the glass down, shook his brother’s and Beazley’s hands, nodded to Kev and walked carefully out of the terrible pub seeing, as he did so, reflected in a foxed mirror by the door, Phil Beazley avidly lean across the bar to claim his undrunk lager.

  Outside the light was purple, like a bruise, and the air stung with ice crystals. He strode off to find his carbonized car, slipping the weight of the Clarence’s melancholia from his shoulders like an unwanted rucksack.

  Unfortunately Lorimer found a parking space not far from Marlobe’s flower shack.

  ‘What kind of car’s that, then? ‘Marlobe asked. His stall was colourfully ablaze with many varieties of carnation.

  ‘Fire damage. Vandals, I think.’

  ‘I’d castrate them,’ Marlobe said, reasonably. ‘I’d castrate them and then I’d cut their right hands off. Wouldn’t do much vandalizing after that. Fancy a nice bunch of carnations?’