Armadillo

by William Boyd

  He headed straight to the checkout, where a solitary Ethiopian girl was patiently counting through a mass of brown coins that an old lady was unearthing from a cavernous handbag – but no Flavia. Christ, where was she? Perhaps she’d gone back out the entrance? And he raced back the way he had come. Then he saw her: vanishing down a side alley that led to the newspapers. He decided that a flanking move was the correct choice here and so ducked down breads and breakfast cereals, heading for the spice jar whirligig and the cabinet of dreadful salads.

  He turned the corner at the bottom and she fired a blast of air freshener at him. Pfffft. He caught a farinaceous gust of sweet-smelling violets full in the face and sneezed several times.

  ‘I don’t like being followed,’ she said, replacing the aerosol. She was wearing sunglasses and a bulky old leather jacket with a hood and many zips. He was sure her eyes would be red and weepy beneath the opaque green glass.

  ‘What’s he done to you?’ Lorimer blurted out. ‘If he’s hit you – I’ll –’

  ‘He’s actually been talking about you, or rather shouting about you, for the last half hour. That’s why I had to get out. He claims he saw you at some smart party.’

  ‘You do know that he attacked me. Tried to club me on the head.’ All his old outrage returned. ‘After you had told him about our so-called affair.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your husband tried to hit me over the head with a club.’

  ‘Gilbert? –’

  ‘What did you tell him we’d been up to?’

  ‘He was in a terrible rage and I was frightened. And angry – so, well, I made all sorts of things up, said it had been going on for over a year. Maybe that’s what set him off? He did go thundering out of the house. Was it you who knocked his teeth out? He said he’d been mugged.’

  ‘It was self-defence. He tried to hit me with one of his fucking juggling clubs.’

  ‘There’s a lot of pent-up rage in you, isn’t there, Lorimer?’ She took down another aerosol spray from the shelf and enveloped him in a cloud of something piney.

  ‘Don’t! For God’s sake!’

  ‘We can’t see each other.’ She glanced nervously over her shoulder. ‘God knows what would happen if he came into the shop now.’

  ‘Does he hit you?’

  ‘He’s incredibly fit and strong. Sometimes he gets me in these grips. Shakes me about, twists my arms.’

  ‘Animal.’ Lorimer felt a form of pure rage sluice through him, of the sort crusaders might have experienced at the sight of a holy shrine desecrated, he imagined. He rummaged in his pockets and took out his bunch of keys, threading two off and holding them out to her.

  ‘Take them, please. If you ever need a place to be safe, to get away from him where he can’t find you. You can go here.’

  She did not take them. ‘What is this?’

  ‘It’s a house I’ve bought. Pretty much empty. In Silvertown, a place called Albion Village, number 3. You can go there, escape him if he gets violent again.’

  ‘Silvertown? Albion Village? What kind of a place is that? Sounds like a children’s book.’

  ‘Sort of development near Albert Dock, by the City airport.’

  ‘One of those modern developments? Little boxes?’

  ‘Well… yes. Sort of

  ‘Why do you want to buy a little cardboard house like that, miles from anywhere, when you’ve got a perfectly good place in Pimlico? I don’t get it.’

  He sighed. He felt a sudden urge to tell her, especially as she now reached out and took his keys.

  ‘It’s… It’s something to do with me. It makes me feel – I don’t know – safe. Safer, I suppose. It’s my insurance. There’s always somewhere I can go and start again.’

  ‘Sounds more like a place to go and hide. What are you hiding from, Lorimer Black?’

  ‘My name’s not Lorimer Black. I mean it is, I changed it, but I wasn’t born Lorimer Black.’ He knew he was going to tell her. ‘My real name is Milomre Bloçj. I was born here but in fact I’m a Transnistrian. I come from a family of Transnistrian Gypsies.’

  ‘And I come from a planet called Zog in a far-flung galaxy’ she said.

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Piss off out of it.’

  ‘IT’S TRUE!’

  A few puzzled shoppers looked round. A lanky Pakistani with his name on a plastic badge came to investigate. He gestured at the shelves.

  ‘All these items are for sale, you know.’

  ‘Still making up our mind, thank you,’Flavia said, with a winning smile.

  ‘Milomre?’ She pronounced it carefully.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Transnistria.’

  ‘Transnistria. It’s a real place, or was. On the west shore of the Black Sea. My family call me Milo.’

  ‘Milo… I prefer that. How fascinating. Why are you telling me this, Milo?’

  ‘I don’t know It’s always been a secret. I’ve never told anyone before. I suppose I must want you to know.’

  ‘Think it’ll win me over? Well, you’re wrong.’

  ‘Take your sunglasses off for a second, please.’

  ‘No.’ She reached for a can of spray starch and Lorimer backed off.

  She bought some spaghetti, a jar of sauce and a bottle of Valpolicella. Lorimer walked back up the road with her. A few heavy drops of rain began to smack on to the pavement.

  ‘You’re not going to cook supper for him, are you?’ Lorimer asked scornfully. ‘After what he’s done to you? How pathetic.’

  ‘No, he’s going out, thank God. I’ve got a friend coming over.’

  ‘Male or female?’

  ‘Mind your own business. Male… Gay.’’

  ‘Could I join you?’

  ‘Are you mad? What if Gilbert came back? “Oh, Gilbert, Lorimer’s popped in for a bite of supper.” Crazy fool.’

  They had reached his car, which now looked as if it were suffering from a terrible rash, pocked with dark dots where the raindrops had spattered on the light dusty orange of the rust. With the dampness in the air the Toyota seemed to exude a crude smell of metal, or worked iron, as if they were standing in a smithy.

  ‘Good lord, look at your car,’ Flavia said. ‘It looks worse.’

  ‘It rusted up almost overnight.’

  ‘They were cross with you, weren’t they?.’

  ‘It was a job I was on –’ He paused, something suddenly occurring to him. ‘They blamed me for their troubles.’

  ‘While you were adjusting loss.’

  ‘Yes, I was adjusting loss.’

  ‘I’m not sure if you’re cut out for this life of loss adjusting, Lorimer. Very hazardous.’

  ‘Hazardous in the extreme,’ he said, suddenly feeling very tired. ‘Can I see you next week, Flavia?’

  ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea.’

  ‘You do know, you must be aware, that I’m passionately in love with you. I’ll never take no for an answer.’

  ‘Suit yourself She shrugged as she walked backwards a few paces. ‘Goodnight, Milo whatever-your-name-is.’

  ‘Use the house,’ he called after her. ‘Any time, it’s all set up. Number 3, Albion Village.’

  She turned and trotted across the road to her house and scampered up the steps. He felt like weeping: something important had happened – tonight he had told someone else about the existence of Milomre Blocj. And she had kept his keys.

  *

  He went to sleep at the Institute, hoping he would dream lucidly and lustily of Flavia, that in his dream she would be naked and he would be able to take her in his arms. Instead he dreamt of his father, lying in bed, ill. They held hands, interlacing their fingers, exactly as they had done the final time they had seen each other, except that on this occasion Bogdan Bloçj raised himself on one elbow and kissed him on the cheek, several times. Lorimer could feel the neat white bristles of his beard sharp against his skin. Then he spoke to him and said, ‘You did well, Milo.�
��

  Lorimer woke, drained and vulnerable, and wrote the dream down in the diary with a trembling hand. It was a lucid dream because something had happened in the dream that he had wished for but had never happened in his life, and for the duration of that dream it had seemed real.

  As he dressed later, preparing himself for Sunday lunch with Stella and Barbuda, he reflected that this was one reason why dreams were so important in our lives: something good had happened in the night while he was unconscious – he had achieved and expressed an intensity of relationship with his father that he had never experienced while the man had been alive. He was grateful to his extra dose of REM sleep. This, surely, was the consolation of dreams.

  Barbuda looked at her mother pleadingly and said, ‘Please may I leave the table, Mummy.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ Stella said and Barbuda left with alacrity. Stella reached over and poured the rest of the Rioja into Lorimer’s empty glass. She had had a lighter blonde rinse put through her hair, Lorimer thought, that’s the difference; she looked healthier and she was wearing all white, white jeans and a white sweat shirt with an appliquéd satin bird on the front. And did he detect a sheen of sunbed bronze?

  Barbuda had left the room without a backward glance, a further sign that she had returned to her familiar mood of sour hostility. The Angelica name-change had finally been vetoed and the moment of solidarity that had existed between daughter and her mother’s lover appeared forgotten. As far as Lorimer could recall she had not addressed one word to him throughout the three courses of Sunday lunch – smoked salmon, roast chicken and all the trimmings and a bought-in lemon meringue pie.

  Stella recharged her coffee cup, reached over and took his hand.

  ‘We’ve got to have a serious talk, Lorimer.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, telling himself there was nothing to be gained by further procrastination. He liked Stella, and in a way the mutually beneficial, respectful nature of their relationship suited him ideally. But its continuance presupposed a world without Flavia Malinverno in it, and thus it was impossible and would be best concluded in as decent and hurt-free a way as possible.

  ‘I’ve sold the business,’ Stella said.

  ‘Good God.’

  ‘And I’ve bought a fish farm.’ ‘A fish farm.’

  ‘Near Guildford. We’re moving.’

  ‘A fish farm near Guildford,’ Lorimer repeated gormlessly as if he were learning a new phrase in the language.

  ‘It’s a going concern, guaranteed income. Mainly trout and salmon. Fair amount of prawns and shrimps.’

  ‘But, Stella, a fish farm. You?’

  ‘Why should that be any worse than running a scaffolding firm?’

  ‘Fair point. You’ll be closer to Barbuda’s school, as well’

  ‘Exactly’ Stella was running her thumb over his knuckles. ‘Lorimer,’ she began slowly, ‘I want you to come with me, be my partner, and my business partner. I don’t want to get married but I like having you in my life and I want to share it with you. I know you’ve got a good job, which is why we should set it up properly, as a business venture. Bull and Black, fish farmers.’

  Lorimer leant over and kissed her, hoping the smile on his face concealed the despair in his heart.

  ‘Don’t say anything yet,’ Stella said. ‘Just listen.’ She began to go over the figures, turnover and profit margins, the kind of salary they could pay themselves, the prospects for major expansion if they could break into certain markets.

  ‘Don’t say yes, no or maybe,’ Stella went on. ‘Give yourself a few days to mull it over. And everything it implies.’ She grabbed his head and gave him a serious kiss, her lithe tongue flicking in and out of his mouth like… like a fish, Lorimer balefully noted.

  ‘I’m excited, Lorimer, it really excites me. Out of the city, in the country….’

  ‘Does Barbuda know anything about these plans?’ Lorimer said, gladly accepting the offer of a celebratory post-prandial brandy.

  ‘Not yet. She knows I’ve sold Bull scaffolding. She’s pleased about that, she’s always been embarrassed by the scaffolding.’

  Revolting little snob, Lorimer thought, saying, ‘The fish farm will go down better,’ without much confidence.

  Stella hugged him fiercely at the door as he left. It was only four o’clock but already the streetlamps shone bright in the gathering murk. Lorimer’s depression was acute, but there was no way he could burst the bubble of her fishy dreams here and now. He kissed her goodbye.

  He stood on the pavement by his car, reflecting a while, looking across at the high, lit cliff faces of the sprawling housing estate a few streets away, thumbtacked with satellite dishes, washing hanging limply on balconies, one of the great ghetto colonies of the city’s poor and disenfranchised which arced east, south of the river, through Walworth, Peckham, Rotherhithe and Southwark, small slum-states of deprivation and anarchy where life was lived in a manner that would be familiar to Hogg’s Savage Precursors, brutish and nasty, where all endeavours were hazardous in the extreme and life was one gargantuan gamble, a cycle of happenstance and rotten luck.

  Was this all there really was, in the end, he wondered? Beneath this veneer of order, probity, governance and civilized behaviour – aren’t we just kidding ourselves? The Savage Precursors knew… Stop, he told himself, he was depressed enough as it was, and bent to unlock his car. He heard his name softly called and looked round to see Barbuda standing ten feet away, as if restrained by an invisible cordon sanitaire around him.

  ‘Hi, Barbuda,’ he said, the two words overburdened by all the friendliness, pleasure and genuine good-natured blokiness he could force upon them.

  ‘I was listening,’ she said, flatly ‘She was talking about a fish farm. Near Guildford. What’s she gone and done?’

  ‘I think your mother should tell you that.’

  ‘She’s bought a fish farm, hasn’t she?’

  ‘Yes.’ There was nothing to be gained by lying, he thought, seeing Barbuda’s bottom lip fatten as she pushed it forward.

  ‘A fish farm.’ She made it sound vile, horror-filled: a vivisection laboratory, the dankest sweat-shop, a child brothel.

  ‘It sounds like fun,’ he said, urging a chuckle into his voice. ‘Could be interesting.’

  She looked skywards and Lorimer saw the shine as the streetlamp caught her teartracks.

  ‘What am I going to tell my friends? What will my friends think?’

  It seemed not to be a rhetorical question so Lorimer answered. ‘If they think any the less of you because your mother owns a fish farm, then they’re not true friends.’

  ‘A fish farm. My mother’s a fish farmer.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with a fish farm. It could be very successful.’

  ‘I don’t want to be the daughter of someone who owns a fish farm,’ Barbuda said in a desperate, whining voice. ‘I can’t be. I won’t be.’

  Lorimer knew the feeling: he understood the reluctance to have an identity thrust upon you – even though he could not bring himself to sympathize with the brat.

  ‘Look, they know she runs a scaffolding firm, surely they –’

  ‘They don’t know. They know nothing about her. But if she moves to Guildford they’ll find out.’

  ‘These things seem important, but after a while –’

  ‘It’s all your fault.’ Barbuda wiped away her tears.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She’s done it for you. If you weren’t in her life she would never have bought the fish farm.’

  ‘I think she would. Anyway look, Barbuda, or Angelica, if you like –’

  ‘It’s all your fault,’ she repeated in a small hard voice. ‘I’ll kill you. One day I’ll kill you.’

  She turned and ran, on light, quick feet, back into the house.

  Well, you’ll just have to join the queue, Lorimer reflected with some bitterness, exhaling. He was becoming fed up with this role of fall-guy for other people’s woes, he was reach
ing the end of his tether; if life didn’t ease up on him he might just possibly break.

  There were four fire engines outside the ShoppaSava when Lorimer drove past and a small crowd had gathered. Some fitful wisps of smoke and steam seemed to be issuing from the rear of the building, Lorimer could see, parking the Toyota and wandering along the street to discover what had happened. He peered over the heads of the onlookers at the blackened plate-glass doors. Firemen, draped in breathing apparatus like deep sea divers, were wandering around in a relaxed manner, swigging from two-litre bottles of mineral water, so Lorimer assumed the worst was over. A policeman told him it had been a ‘ferociously fierce’ fire, with everything pretty much consumed. Lorimer mooched around for a few more minutes and then headed back to his car and realized, after a moment or two, that he was following a figure that was vaguely familiar – a figure in pale blue jeans and an expensive-looking ochre suede jacket. Lorimer ducked into a shop doorway and watched the figure covertly: was this what it was like being a secret agent in the field, he asked himself with some bitterness, a life of eternal vigilance the price demanded? Gone forever that unreflecting amble through your own particular quartier of your own particular city, always edgy and alert like –

  He watched the man climb into a glossy new-model BMW – Kenneth Rintoul. No doubt he’s been sniffing around number II, trying to catch him off his guard. A little bit of grievous bodily harm of a Sunday afternoon, just the ticket. Lorimer waited until Rintoul had driven off and then loped diffidently to his rust-bucket. The mobile rang as he opened the door. It was Slobodan.

  ‘Hi, Milo, you haven’t heard anything from Torkie, have you?’

  ‘No. Why?’