Intermission

by Graham Hurley

  ‘Knackered, Des. But fucking glad to still be here. A word in your ear: anyone who says this virus is like catching flu is off the planet. It’s a bastard. It’s evil. I kid you not, there were days I’d had enough, more than enough, but you know what?’ He nods towards Taalia. ‘That lovely lady and her mates kept me going. Cost a fortune but I expect it’s tax-deductible. I’ll need to talk to my accountant. Unless you’ve fucking locked him up.’

  ‘Tomorrow, H. He’s on the list. Give him a call. Tell him to leave the country.’

  ‘No can do, Des. It’s fucking closed for the duration. We’ve shut up shop. No more Torremolinos. No more Disneyland. All we’ve got now is crap TV and jokes about Easter bunnies. You got any more in that rag of yours, Taalia?’

  ‘What kind of jewellery do Easter bunnies wear?’ Taalia looks from face to face. We all shrug. ‘Fourteen carat gold,’ she says, delighted.

  It’s nearly midday before Dessie decides to leave. He and H exchange another fist-bump, and then H peers up at him.

  ‘What about that boy of yours? Titch? Did he ever make it big time? Pompey? The Scummers? Man U? Liverpool?’

  ‘No, H, he didn’t.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘He joined the Navy. His decision, nothing to do with me. Doing OK, though, so far.’

  ‘Subs?’

  ‘Maybe one day, who knows.’ Dessie pauses, looking down at the face on the pillow. ‘He still remembers you, H. And he’s still grateful. Like me.’

  Back outside, I ask Dessie for a lift down to Old Portsmouth. The sun is out at last and, despite a blustery wind, there’s a hint of warmth in the air. At my suggestion, Dessie lets me off at the foot of the Round Tower that overlooks the harbour entrance. He says he has a meeting at the Major Crimes suite, otherwise he’d join me for a walk.

  ‘Shame,’ I say. ‘It’s a lovely day.’

  We look at each other for a moment. There’s a question that’s been bothering me since we left H’s bedroom, but I’m not quite sure how to put it.

  ‘You mind if I ask you something?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘H mentioned that godson of yours, Titch. Were they close?’

  ‘In a way, yes.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Titch developed a problem down here.’ He touches his knee. ‘It was unusual – the lad was really unlucky. There was nothing the NHS could offer but I found a surgeon in Turin who knew how to deal with it. He’d developed this operation. Cured dozens of kids. Cost a fortune, though. Thick end of five figures including all the extras, and at the time, what with one thing and another, I didn’t have that sort of money.’

  ‘So, what happened?’

  ‘H stumped up. After Dave Munroe told him all about it.’

  ‘H covered the lot?’

  ‘Yeah, and a bit on top to make me and the lad happy out there.’

  ‘You were with him? In Italy?’

  ‘I was, yes.’

  ‘And his parents? Where were they?’

  Dessie looks at me a moment, then checks his watch. ‘One day, yeah? When all this shit is over?’

  I get out of the car and make my way to the top of the Round Tower. Once again, there’s no one in sight. The wind is blowing a gale up here and already I’m regretting the lack of a coat. The tide is flooding in below me, and upstream I can see H’s pride and joy, the looming shape of our latest aircraft carrier.

  I gaze at it a moment, remembering the fierce pride in H’s voice when he first laid eyes on the monster, and the longer I reflect, the more I realize that this battered old city was bred for violence. Pompey blood, I think, in exchange for foreign treasure. Spanish doubloons? French brandy? Colombian cocaine? The story rolls on from generation to generation, ships plundered, foreigners put to the sword, rival football fans battered, and all in the name of a hooligan England masquerading as the nation’s soul.

  I fumble for a moment in the pocket of my jeans, and then extract Wesley’s mobile phone. I fire it up and swipe my way into his gallery. I recognize Sammy McGaughy at once, and there are more shots that – mercifully – I didn’t see last night. They rolled him into a tatty old carpet, and secured it with binder twine, and drove his thin little body out of the city and buried him in woodland. I never got a proper look at the body on the phone because they never untied the carpet to take a shot, but there were dozens and dozens more pictures, as graphic as the photos I saw last night, violence elevated to an art form: different faces, different angles, different lighting, different takes on Wesley’s brand of sadomasochism.

  None of these people appear to be dead, just Sammy, but you can see fear in a man’s eyes, and then pain, and then anguish, and after a while, I back out of the gallery, and turn the phone off, and check to make sure there’s still no one around before going to the very edge of the top of the tower that overhangs the boiling water beneath. At school, in Brittany, I was exceptionally good at the French version of rounders. Now, after a practice swing or two, I hurl the phone out into the tidal stream. The wind catches it for a moment, just a glint of sunshine on the little glass screen, and then – with a tiny splash – it’s gone.

  Back at the flat, I let myself in. At first, when she doesn’t respond to my call, I think for one awful moment that Taalia must have left us. Like Mr Wu, I assume, she’s had enough. Then I hear H’s bedroom door opening and closing, and suddenly she’s with me in the living room, getting rid of her visor and untying her mask. She looks, for some reason, radiant.

  ‘What’s happened,’ I ask. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Malo.’ Her smile widens. ‘They’re bringing him back.’

  THIRTY

  It takes both paramedics on the ambulance to help Malo up the stairs. They obviously know about H and the virus because they leave him with Taalia and me on the top landing, and one of them offers Malo a farewell pat on the shoulder before they clatter back downstairs.

  ‘Good luck, son. Stay safe, eh?’

  Malo looks terrible. The swelling around his mouth and jaw has begun to subside but his whole face seems lopsided, and the mass of bruising has yellowed and purpled. I know a trendy couple who run a cutting-edge gallery in Primrose Hill, and they call this particular combination of colours ‘swamp art’. The rightness of the phrase has always eluded me, but now I know exactly what they mean. My son, with his bloodshot eyes and missing front teeth, is a creature from the deep.

  We get him into the front room and sit him down. Walking, he says, is difficult, and talking is a no-no. His jaw is wired in two places and I imagine he’ll be avoiding the longer words for a while. Taalia attends to him on the sofa, holding a plastic mug while Malo sucks fresh orange juice through a bendy straw. She has an extraordinary gentleness – part nurse, part someone else, someone much closer, fonder, needier – and watching them together I can’t help thinking of poor Clemmie. This virus, I realize, is changing everything in front of our eyes. Not once, since Taalia’s arrival, has Malo lifted the phone to the woman he intends to marry.

  ‘Do you remember how it all happened?’ I ask him.

  He shakes his head while Taalia sponges the last of the juice from his lower lip.

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And the hospital?’

  ‘Good.’ He nods. ‘Good people. Kind.’

  Kind? Taalia and I debate whether or not to expose H to his battered son, but it’s Malo who takes the decision out of our hands.

  ‘Dad,’ he says, struggling to his feet.

  We help him into a PPE gown, and Taalia does her best to slip a mask on, but Malo won’t have anything near his lower face. One of the paramedics told me that he tested negative for Covid at the hospital but – to be frank – I’ve lost the plot about whether H is still contagious. Taalia thinks not but insists we shouldn’t be taking any risks and so I garb up before helping Malo along the corridor to H’s room.

  H is sitting up in bed, reading something on his tablet. No one
has breathed a word about Malo being discharged from the hospital, and when he first glances up from the tablet he doesn’t seem to recognize his son. Given the circumstances, this isn’t a surprise. The PPE gowns make everyone look the same, and the old Malo has disappeared behind a mask of lacerations and bruising.

  ‘Dad?’ We’ve steadied Malo beside the bed.

  ‘Son?’ H looks shocked. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Me.’ Malo extends a hand and H takes it, looking closely at the scabs around his knuckles. ‘You fought back? Landed some decent shots? Good boy. Sit.’ He pats the bed. He might be talking to his dog.

  Malo does his bidding and perches himself awkwardly on the side of the bed while H bombards him with questions. What, exactly, happened? Who were these low life? How many of them? And he asks, finally, whether Malo might have recognized a face or two.

  ‘Well, son? Help me out here?’

  ‘He remembers nothing, H,’ I explain as gently as I can. ‘And I get the impression that talking hurts.’

  ‘Bound to for a while. Only natural. Jesus, they did a job on him, didn’t they?’

  This is the moment I realize that H is as aghast as the rest of us. Behind his gruff ultra-maleness, there lurks a real sense of disbelief. You can see it in the tiny shakes of his head, in those small moments of silence when he runs out of things to say and can only stare up at his ruined son. Who could possibly have done something like this? Who’d ever have the nerve?

  After not very long, Malo wants to go. He looks exhausted. He plaits both hands together, a cushion for his head, miming sleep, and mumbles something about how hard it is to kip in a hospital ward. Taalia understands at once. She’s made the bed up for him next door and I watch them leave before turning back to H.

  ‘We need Wes.’ His face has darkened. ‘We need him here, round the clock, twenty-four hours. Ring him, yeah? Tell him there’s money in it, tell him any fucking thing, just make it happen.’ He gestures for me to use his mobile, and the message couldn’t be plainer. He’s taken a long, hard look at his son, and he doesn’t want strangers at his door. ‘Under siege’ is a big phrase, but that’s exactly how it feels.

  ‘We could leave,’ I suggest. ‘We could all go back to Flixcombe.’

  ‘Over my dead fucking body,’ he growls. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘You mean you want to stay here? Take whatever’s coming?’

  ‘Yeah. One way or another, yeah. Since when did I ever do a runner from this city? There’s a time and place for calling it a day and it ain’t here and it ain’t yet. Wes still has the contacts, he’ll know which buttons to press. We have to get this thing sorted. Else they’ll piss all over us.’

  There’s a brutal logic in all this and it isn’t hard to spot. It goes with giant aircraft carriers and the masts of HMS Victory in the historic dockyard. It explains why thousands of men from this city ended up as names on the seafront war memorial. Never waver. Never bend the knee. Never, in Dessie’s phrase, jack it in.

  ‘You’re mad,’ I tell H. ‘They nearly killed our boy. The virus has nearly killed you. Tell me I’m being girly, but isn’t there a lesson here, some decision it might be time to make, like pack our bags and leave?’

  ‘No way,’ he insists. ‘You want to go back to that lovely pad of yours, fucking London, all the rest of it, then fill your boots. Me and the boy …’

  ‘You’re different?’

  ‘We’re staying put. Make the call. Get Wes round. Put some Stellas in the fridge. This is war, my love.’ He gestures vaguely towards the door. ‘End of.’

  Talking to Wesley again is the last thing I want to do. The thought of him moving in full-time, having to share so intimate a space, fills me with dread. I know exactly what that man’s capable of. Dessie Wren, wittingly or otherwise, has nailed it completely. Wesley Kane is a lunatic. A madman. A psycho.

  To my relief, when I finally get through to Wesley, he hasn’t the slightest interest in coming to H’s defence. His days of snapping to attention and rallying to the fucking colours, he says, are well and truly over. This is nicely put, and makes my heart briefly sing, but it’s what he says next that stops me in my tracks.

  ‘I owe you,’ he says. ‘I just want you to know that.’

  ‘Owe me what?’

  ‘A thank you. You did the job on that phone of mine?’

  ‘I did, yes.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Very seriously.’

  ‘Then thank you. I’m binning the snuff movies, too, getting rid of the lot. I just want you to know that. I trust you completely, and it’s all working out.’

  I happen to know about snuff movies. I’ve even watched a sequence or two from the days when Berndt, my equally psychotic ex, used to get hold of a couple to get in the mood for his next screenplay. People die on camera in all kinds of graphic ways. For real.

  ‘I’ve reformed you?’ I ask lightly. ‘Is that what I’m hearing?’

  ‘Completely. I’ve turned the corner, seen the fucking light.’

  ‘Glad to hear it, Wes. I’ll tell H. He’ll be thrilled.’

  ‘Do that.’ Wesley’s laughing now. ‘And tell the old bastard he’s better off out of this city.’

  ‘Any particular reason?’

  ‘No, but you heard it here first. One good turn? All that shit? I’m watching The Sound of Music just now. That Julie Andrews is something else.’

  Another cackle of laughter, and then he’s gone.

  Back in H’s bedroom, H has trouble believing the news from Wesley. ‘You’re telling me he said no? Why would he do that? You talked money?’

  ‘He didn’t let me. He thinks I’ve turned his life around. God knows why.’

  ‘Turned his life around? Wesley fucking Kane? Is he ill? Temperature? Bit of a cough?’ H rolls his eyes and settles back against the pillows. ‘What the fuck’s going on here?’

  What, indeed? I spend the early evening in the living room, watching TV. H has, once again, refused to abandon the flat until he’s good and ready. This means being out of quarantine and having the energy to face the journey home, and so I comfort myself with Channel Four News. Another 786 people have died in the last twenty-four hours. Transport for London has announced new protective measures for its drivers after a spate of virus-related deaths. And a rather fetching psychologist shares the news that Covid-19 views us all as ‘big, yummy chunks of food’. Half an hour of this stuff is deeply dispiriting, not least because I appear to be banged up in this hideous flat until further notice, and in the end I turn off the TV and opt instead to try and finish Typhoon.

  Full-length on the sofa, I catch up with the story, the essence of which is very simple indeed. Huge storm. Tiny ship. Every prospect of coming to grief. Conrad himself was at sea in vessels like these, poorly maintained, hopelessly vulnerable, and the writing is beyond vivid. Then comes a paragraph that seems to echo – with an alarming exactness – our own predicament. I read it for a second time, then a third, filleting Conrad’s prose for the choicest morsels. Excessive tumult. A numbness of spirit. A searching and insidious fatigue that penetrates deep into a man’s breast to cast down and sadden his heart.

  I lie back for a moment and close my eyes. How come Conrad, so long ago, should have put his finger on the way I’m feeling now? Was it prescience? Did he hear voices? And if he was here now, a survivor from the storm, what would he suggest in the way of advice?

  ‘Ms Andressen?’

  I look up, startled. It’s Sunil, and he’s arrived for his last shift with us.

  ‘What’s that?’ I’m looking at the bottle in his hand.

  ‘It’s for you, Ms Andressen. From all of us.’

  ‘A present, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Quite why I deserve a bottle of Prosecco is beyond me, but it’s a lovely gesture. While Sunil puts on his PPE, I explain about Malo’s return. Taalia, I explain, is insisting on staying the night to keep an eye on him. Given that she can check on H at the same time, Sun
il might as well have the evening off.

  Sunil gives the proposition a moment’s thought, then shakes his head. He’s been on the phone to Taalia already, apologizing for being so late, and he’s sure that she and Malo will have lots to catch up on. No, H will remain his responsibility. Despite everything, he’s grown very fond of the man. Difficult, yes, but definitely worth it.

  I shrug. Maybe we could share the bottle later? Together? Just the two of us?

  Sunil looks at me, suddenly thoughtful, and then nods. He’s brought something else with him and he unpacks it from his day sack. It turns out to be a baby alarm, Wi-Fi linked to a tiny monitoring screen.

  ‘It might be useful, Ms Andressen. When we’re not here anymore.’

  It’s a nice thought, deeply practical, and I love the idea of H, our grouchy curmudgeon, finding himself at the business end of a baby alarm. Sunil disappears to set up the alarm and sit with H while I get to finish Typhoon. Thanks to Captain MacWhirr and the gods of the China Sea, Conrad makes landfall intact, the kind of deliverance I can only dream about.

  I put the book aside and fetch a couple of glasses from the kitchen. One peek around Malo’s door finds my son asleep in Taalia’s arms. Poor Clemmie, I think again, but what on earth am I supposed to do?

  Sunil joins me in the front room a little later. Mr H, he says, has gone to sleep. All his vital signs are still good, but Sunil warns me not to expect miracles.

  ‘We’re finding this virus goes on and on.’ He accepts a glass of Prosecco. ‘You think you’re through it, and the worst is definitely over, but then you get wave after wave of something not feeling right. Muscle pains, getting hard to breathe again, being fit for nothing? I’m just letting you know, that’s all.’

  I’m watching the little black and white screen of the baby alarm, H’s sleeping face on the pillow, and I tell Sunil I’m grateful. The Sri Lankan has excellent English, totally idiomatic, and after I ask a question or two, he starts to tell me a little about his background. He was raised in Sri Lanka, attended a top school in Colombo. His father, a merchant, had money but Sunil needed to get away from the sub-continent and spread his wings. He went first to Paris, and then Berlin, but finding work in Europe wasn’t easy, until he made it to the UK. At this point, I’m scenting problems.