by Robert Webb
Kate ejected the disk and gazed at the memory stick, lazily twisting it on its keyring. ‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’ she mumbled. Grief stricken, suicidal and half drunk, she tried to fathom the deeply unwelcome responsibility that had fallen into her lap.
Charles was peripheral to this particular outrage but more generally he had become an enabler of thugs and crooks: tyrant-curious and wank-happy in his proximity to violent men. He was intoxicated by the money, yachts and gold-plated vulgarity. No, Kate thought with bitter self-reproach, Charles Hunt was not about to donate £50,000 to Camden Women’s Refuge.
What hurt her most was that it all centred on London: a tumour of lies growing unseen in her beloved city.
She should just do it. She should shove the memory stick back into her laptop and send it to five newspapers with a brief tutorial on how to open it, who made it and what it meant.
Her head sank into her hands as the kitchen seemed to turn into an oppressive greenhouse.
‘Why won’t they just let me die in peace?’ she muttered. She jerked her head up and opened the private journal on her laptop, trying not to look at the final few words of last night’s entry.
… because he’s gone he’s gone he’s gone he’s gone.
and began to type, the slowness of her fingers at odds with the energy of her thoughts.
Anyway, why is it my job to save liberal fucking democracy? We’ve had a good run, haven’t we? Seventy-odd years since the last global outbreak of genocidal barbarism? Three score and ten? What is this, ‘the seventy-year itch’? Go on then – scratch it. It’s nothing to do with me. I mean, well done everyone but good things don’t last, do they? Come, friendly Blackshirts, and fall on Clapham! Put a fascist in the White House. Put children in cages. All the good men are dead so, yes … let’s just get it over with.
She paused to light a cigarette, finding a grim comfort in her own cynicism. She knew she was just egging herself on. Where had she read it? ‘A homicide kills one person. A suicide kills the whole world.’ She balanced the cigarette flat across the lip of an empty karate trophy and continued.
Anyway, it’s not as if Charles or Petrov will get away with it. They always screw themselves eventually, these people. Someone will find the memory stick. Probably by the time Wallace or whatever I called him is feasting on my earlobes one morning for breakfast. It’s not my responsibility. I’m busy doing nothing. Or at least busy summoning the courage to become nothing.
It was hopeless. She would find an envelope and post the memory stick back to Charles. Let history take its course. She wanted no part of it. She wanted to sleep.
All the same, she picked up her phone and pondered.
Who was she?
Suddenly it lit up with an unidentified caller, startling her half to death. The cigarette rolled off the trophy and landed silently in a pair of tights, where it began to smoulder. Kate sighed impatiently, putting out the small fire with one hand while answering the call with the other.
‘Hello, Mother.’
‘Kate, darling, it’s my kidneys.’
‘What is? What is your kidneys?’
‘They’re next. The woman doctor in the headscarf confirmed it yesterday.’
‘Right.’ Kate was incapable of ignoring a call from an unknown number and her mother knew it. Some neighbour whom Kate would dearly love to throttle had taught Madeleine the knack of swapping cheap SIM cards into her phone. She must have bought a job-lot from WH Smith and was steadily working her way through them.
Madeleine continued. ‘She says it’s nothing serious but we’ve all heard that before. That’s what they said to Roy Castle. Lovely man, I met him of course, absolute gentleman and surprisingly well-furnished in the trouser region but I didn’t stare. What with the endless liver trouble, I just knew it would be the kidneys next. They’ve never given me a day’s peace since that wretched paella in Clermont-Ferrand …’
Kate settled in for the latest version of the familiar monologue. She called it ‘the organ recital’.
‘… because as we know my pancreas has been missing in action since Princess Diana. The doctors are all quite useless, of course, and just tell me to cut down on the brandy like I’m some sort of street derelict from L’Assommoir. Anyway … you must be wondering why I called.’
Kate tensed slightly. This was a highly unusual question. Madeleine never needed an excuse to call and there was an ominous mischief in her tone. ‘Erm, not really, but do go on.’
‘Somebody had a visitor yesterday afternoon,’ Madeleine warbled with a girlishness that had Kate reaching for another cigarette.
‘Oh yes?’
‘Oh yes. A handsome visitor bearing flowers.’
‘Monty Don?’
‘Someone from your past.’
‘Heathcliff? She-Ra?’
Undeterred, Madeleine put on an excruciating Scottish accent. ‘A bonny young man from the Firth of Forth!’
Okay, you win this one.
Kate was genuinely astonished. ‘Toby?’
‘The very same! Wonderful Toby. Carnations. All white, hand-tied. I can’t bear a mixed bouquet, as you know. Someone like Toby understands these things instinctively.’
‘Well, that’s nice,’ said Kate slowly. She was having to think rather harder than she wanted to and tried not to be distracted by her mother’s snobbery. If her dad, Bill, used to like Toby for his prospects and common sense, her mother liked him for his correct use of the subjunctive and the fact that his father was a vice-admiral in the Royal Navy. It had always been hard to blame Toby for this kind of thing. He didn’t apologise for his background but neither did he confuse it with ‘merit’. There were plenty who did, and Charles Hunt was one of them.
But what the hell was he playing at? She had last seen Toby Harker at Luke’s funeral but since then he’d performed one of his customary disappearing acts. Strictly high feasts and festivals, our Toby. Funerals and a few birthdays …
And weddings, of course.
‘Stay there!’ Toby said, and she watched as he darted round the front of the car to open the door. In 2003, they were just young enough to still find the formality of a wedding ridiculous but just old enough to get the thing done well. ‘Thanks, Keith,’ Kate said to her dad’s old mate in the driving seat.
‘The honour’s all mine, Katie. You look fackin’ beautiful, if you don’t mind me saying. The old man would be proud.’
Toby opened the door of Keith’s black cab, which had been polished to its shiny bones. He did so with mock-military precision and offered his hand with a broad smile. She took it and stepped out of the cab to the sound of the bells of St Nicholas.
Toby stood back as a gaggle of Kate’s bridesmaids materialised to start fussing with her simple off-white dress. Amy adjusted a shoulder strap and glanced down at Kate’s waist. She leaned in to say, ‘I told you not to bother with knickers.’
‘I can’t not wear knickers in a church.’
‘Why not?’ Amy said rather more loudly. ‘It doesn’t bother Toby.’ She gestured at their friend’s splendid green tartan kilt.
Toby was well-used to the quaint English preoccupation with his genitals at times like this and was content to play along. ‘You’ll never know.’
‘That right, Tobes?’ Amy replied, inspecting Kate’s shoes and taking both hands in hers. ‘I reckon Toby might lose his mystique if we get him doing the conga later.’
Kate raised her chief bridesmaid’s hands and kissed them both. She grinned, fighting down her nerves and glad of the distraction. ‘I’m not sure that a gentleman does the conga.’ They both looked at Toby.
‘You’d have to ask a gentleman,’ said Toby and offered Kate his arm. ‘Let’s go and find one.’
Moments later, Kate and Toby stood inside the entrance to the church, waiting for the wedding march, or in this case ‘Today’ by the Smashing Pumpkins. ‘Any last-minute instructions?’ Toby asked.
‘Just don’t say anything my dad would have said.
I don’t want to cry.’
‘Right.’ They faced forward, both smiling at the nearby rows of the congregation who were looking back and throwing double thumbs-ups and kisses. ‘So, what might he have said? That I absolutely must not say at a moment like this?’
‘I’m obviously not going to tell you,’ Kate replied, slightly craning to see Luke at the front. He was facing resolutely forward, slightly bouncing on the balls of his feet while Kes talked animatedly to him.
Toby spotted Madeleine giving them a regal wave from the front row and returned it with a humorous little bow. He continued: ‘So I mustn’t say anything like, “You look lovely today and I’m so proud of the extraordinary woman you’ve become”?’ he asked. ‘That’s the kind of thing I really mustn’t say in case it makes you feel in future like your father was somehow present on your wedding day.’
Kate understood what Toby was trying to do but found it bloody inconvenient. ‘He wouldn’t have said anything of the sort,’ she announced, maintaining some semblance of reserve even though Toby’s words had touched her. ‘You were good at distracting me in the cab with your terrible Russian but you mustn’t feel that you now have to channel Bill.’
‘Absolutely right. Sorry.’
‘No problem.’
Toby was still waving at well-wishers as if he was the Queen Mother. ‘It was stupid of me. I’ve never seen you interact with your father and I have no idea of what he might have said.’
‘Well, you have and you probably do but …’
The pretty introduction to the Smashing Pumpkins’ offering to the marrying wing of Generation X echoed through the church speakers and the congregational hubbub subsided.
At which point, Kate froze.
Toby glanced at her and said, ‘By the way, I think Luke is literally the nicest guy I’ve ever met.’
Kate turned to him in a daze. ‘Yes.’
‘And infuriatingly good-looking.’
‘Well … there is that, yes.’
‘And he loves you like mad and needs you like a flower needs sunshine.’
‘Yes.’
‘Shall we go and see him? I mean, there seems to be a party happening down the other end and he can be quite good company. What d’you reckon?’
‘Yeah,’ said Kate, recovering herself and pulling Toby’s arm in just a fraction tighter. ‘That’s a good idea.’
‘Jolly good,’ he said. And then just as he leaned gently to take his first step: ‘Best foot forward, Katie.’
Kate’s ribs juddered for a second but the sheer rightness of what she’d just heard emboldened her. Only a maniac and a weirdo wouldn’t collapse at that but luckily her great friend knew she was both a maniac and a weirdo. She took a breath, holding on to Toby as they walked. She smiled to the guests on her side of the aisle and ventriloquised to him: ‘Toby, you’re such an appalling shit.’
‘Aye, true enough. But the world needs appalling shits like me.’
‘And what did Toby have to say once he’d found a vase for the flowers and heard all about your duodenum?’
Madeleine replied, ‘Well, I asked him about work and he was full of news. Some very funny stories about people in his office and the restaurants in Bonn and the workload in the civil service, which sounds outrageous by the way …’
Kate resented being sucked into this but had heard quite enough of Toby’s career in ‘the civil service’.
‘Mother, sorry to interrupt but it’s been perfectly obvious for years that Toby is a spy.’
‘Oh Kate, not again. You and your imagination! Not everybody who works for the Foreign Office is a spy!’
‘Agreed. And not all spies claim to work for the Foreign Office. Toby, however, is quite clearly a spy. Nobody else disappears for months because of “work” and then comes back with chronologically perfect and memorably amusing stories about what they’ve been up to. Nobody from a military family with Toby’s sense of purpose would be content to shuffle papers about exactly how to ruin the country.’
‘Oh Kate …’
‘And more than anything, a single man in his forties on what he claims to be a great salary does not drive a Skoda Octavia. Nobody needs a boot that big unless they’ve got kids with buggies. I’ll take any odds that he has a bright red MG in the garage which he doesn’t take to friends’ funerals because that would make him look like a spy. Which is what he is.’
A note of acerbity came down the line. ‘He’s told you, I take it?’
‘No, of course he hasn’t told me. He wouldn’t be a very good fucking spy if he did, would he?’
‘That’s a circular argument and I’m surprised at you.’
There were moments when Kate got a sharp reminder of her mother’s intelligence. Madeleine was only in her early seventies but the loss of Bill had contracted her horizons. She had many friends, as well as a brisk procession of unchallenging ‘gentlemen callers’, but the truth was that nobody argued with her any more. These days, she liked it that way.
‘Okay, maybe I’m wrong about Toby,’ Kate said with her eyes closed.
‘I think you are, darling, but we can’t all be right all the time, can we?’
‘No, Mother.’
‘Anyway, I can tell I’m disturbing you and you’d rather be doing anything than talking to me.’
Now that the usual passive-aggressive sign-off had been initiated, the comment was suddenly and implacably true. ‘That’s not true,’ said Kate.
‘No, I don’t like to bother you at work. Give Charles my best. Such an impressive man.’
Kate stubbed her fag out on the table with her eyes still closed, grimacing as she scorched the front of her index finger. ‘I can see him through the office window and he’s blowing you a kiss.’
‘Oh, now that’s sweet. He once told me his father used to be David Cameron’s fencing instructor, you know.’
Kate was defeated. ‘Yes.’
‘Yes, he was. Oh, before I go, darling: Toby said that he would call round to see you today. About lunchtime.’
Kate opened her eyes wide. Also her mouth.
‘Maybe you’ll get carnations too!’ Madeleine exclaimed, adding, ‘But then you’ve never really cared for flowers, have you, darling? Oh well.’ There was a tiny click as Madeleine hung up.
Kate stared at her iPhone as it reverted to the home screen featuring a sepia picture of Luke playing the trumpet.
And the time: 11.24 a.m.
She tried to think through her rising anxiety: 11.24 a.m. was surely nobody’s idea of ‘lunchtime’. She could get out of the house. She didn’t want to see Toby. Not like this: half naked, a third pissed, surrounded by all the evidence of utter decline and total surrender.
She could pretend to be out? But Toby was absurdly persistent when set on an idea. He would lean on the doorbell for a day. She could easily disable the circuit but that would be pointless. He’d just knock at the door or throw gravel at the window until the end of the world.
She twisted in her chair and gazed up through the kitchen window at the sky and unfocused her eyes.
She was being trolled.
‘The world needs appalling shits like me,’ he had said on her wedding day. And now, once again, he was trying to be the indispensable appalling shit. He had waited until all her other friends had been dismissed. And now he would prestigiously swoop in to make the World’s Best Intervention. No, he was never going to just turn up on her doorstep with a pained look and a homemade cock-a-leekie. Yesterday he had visited her mother in the full knowledge that she would announce his imminent arrival with exactly the kind of snobby fanfare that would annoy the hell out of Kate. He would spike her aggression, rouse her from torpor; send her into the shower.
‘Well, fuck you, Toby,’ she said out loud. ‘Nobody makes me wash.’
Even Luke had sometimes called her a soap-dodger and she had reluctantly joined in with the teasing while privately thinking that personal hygiene was some kind of patriarchal construct.
‘B
ring it on then, Mr Harker,’ she said. ‘Come and see me in my shit-pit. Witness the freak show. I’ll let you through the door and then sit right back down again, right here, putting one leg up on this chair, flashing you my vag and watching you cope. Make a witty remark about that, you … my … nice friend. You … shit.’
She took another slug of wine.
She checked the time again.
She looked around the kitchen.
‘OH, FUCK YOU, TOBY!’ she yelled at the top of her voice. She got to her feet, rolled her eyes at the pain of her immediately inflamed throat and headed upstairs to the bathroom.
It was all perfectly logical. She was not at home to visitors. The house would remain a disgrace but no one would see that because she herself would be out. Going out to anywhere except stupid BelTech might involve making herself presentable. But she wasn’t doing that for some bloke. She might, for example, go to the bookshop down the road. It would be disrespectful to turn up at a little independent bookshop looking and smelling like a Dickensian grotesque. Danielle was the owner of Northcote Books and Kate liked Danielle. She was an older woman with a nice line in mocking her ruder or stupider customers on Twitter while serving them with impeccable manners. Kate would wash for Danielle. Sort of. It was only reasonable. Yes, thought Kate as she gingerly stepped over the side of the bath and felt the hot water on her feet and hair for the first time in many days, I’ll go for a very long walk.