What had driven him during his school years and his time at Harvard was his refusal to be cast as second best. He could see that now, with the benefit of hindsight. His father’s failure had sickened him. It wasn’t the getting caught; it was the failure to rise again and continue the fight. He had allowed himself to become a victim of the industry. All those times Miles had found himself in Manhattan on business in the past few years, he had stayed in hotels just like any out-of-towner. He hadn’t visited his parents once. He had met his mother for lunches and dinners, taken her to the theatre. He wanted to provide for her but he also knew that she wouldn’t accept money from him. So he had tried to look after her from afar. She had been to Hvar a couple of times. On her own. There was never any question of Miles’s father coming with her. It wasn’t even discussed between them. He hadn’t seen his father once in all the seven years he had been in London; and now, on this day of days, there was Miles standing on the corner of the street looking across at his father’s shop.
It was closed of course. In the apartment above it, however, there were lights. The television was on, its ghostly reflections bouncing around the walls. His parents would be watching the news, watching coverage of the terrorist attack. They wouldn’t know he was in Manhattan, wouldn’t know that he was covered in the brick dust from the very buildings that had been razed to the ground, wouldn’t know that he was standing outside. It would be wrong to have come this far and then go away again. His subconscious had brought him here; he was driven on by some long repressed homing instinct. He would go over the street and ring the buzzer. There would be an emotional reunion; he could stay there for the night and he might feel as though he belonged, however fleeting and illusory that sense of belonging might be.
He stood on the sidewalk. Every time he went to take the first step, something stopped him. He reached for his cellphone to dial his parents’ number then remembered what Al had done. It felt like a bad dream. There used to be a phone booth on the corner of the street. He used to go there when he was a boy, maybe seventeen or eighteen, when he wanted some privacy. Usually it was girls he was calling. The sense of achievement, accomplishment, when a girl that he liked agreed to meet him for coffee; it was the same feeling he had nowadays when he completed a good trade. The booth was still there. Other aspects of the street had changed but not the phone booth. Picking up the receiver, he dialled his parents’ number. He felt sure that if it wasn’t for the distant sounds of a city in chaos, he might be able to hear the phone ring in the apartment. His father’s shadow moved across the wall as he crossed the room to answer it. Miles struggled with the urge to put the phone down.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi. It’s Miles.’
‘Miles?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s Miles.’ The old man was speaking to Miles’s mother. He sounded proud, as though it was an achievement for him that his son should be calling and this caught Miles off guard emotionally and he wished now that he hadn’t called.
‘I just wanted to make sure that you were both OK.’
‘We’re fine but my God, Miles, it’s the most awful thing I’ve ever seen. All those people. We’ve been here all day just watching it. It’s beyond belief. Where are you?’
Where was he? The one place he wasn’t – the one place he could never be – was in the phone booth on the other side of the street. It was never going to be easy, not with their history, all those years of tension and unspoken truths, all those arguments that they never had and should have.
‘I’m in Chicago.’
‘Oh well, that’s a blessing. It’s good to hear your voice. I’d love to see you some time.’ He sounded so needy, so desperate to be loved.
‘It’s good to hear your voice too. It’s been a long time.’ It felt like a line from a tawdry soap opera. It felt all wrong. But it also felt necessary. Today had changed everything.
‘I’ve missed you, Miles.’
What could he say to that?
‘I know.’
‘It’s times like these that make you realise that families need to be together.’
Miles had often thought about how a conversation with his father might play out after all those years of silence. It was always going to be difficult but he never thought for one moment that he would feel so emotionally incontinent as this. He needed to draw this to a close, needed to escape.
‘Is Mom there?’ It was a question that he had asked his father a thousand times over the years, before he moved to London and stopped calling home. It wasn’t so much a question as a confirmation that he didn’t want to speak to his father; he wanted to speak to the only parent of his that mattered.
‘I’ll get her for you. Look after yourself, son.’ His tone had changed. He knew he was being rejected all over again; his sadness was palpable. He sounded older, just like Miles’s Grandpa.
‘Thanks,’ said Miles. It was over, the conversation that he had worried and obsessed about so much, and whether it changed anything, he couldn’t tell.
His mother came on the line: ‘Miles?’
‘Hi Mom, how are you?’
‘I can’t believe what I’m seeing.’ She had been crying; she employed that exaggerated enunciation that always betrayed her emotions. Miles’s mother was always demonstrative with her emotions. Films, television dramas, soap operas, favourite records, family events, even moments she might witness as she went about her life on the streets of New York, all of them had the ability to set her off. It was something that Miles found endearing, touching in itself, but he was glad that he had not inherited it. He had built a life for himself that relied in no small part on his ability to mask his true feelings.
‘This won’t go unpunished. We’re at war now. Whoever did this to us, they’ll be made to pay.’
‘Thousands of innocent people have died, Miles.’
‘I know. A friend of mine might have been one of them.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s OK. It’s not been confirmed. He was in the World Trade Center when the first plane struck. That’s all we know.’
‘I’ll pray for him, Miles. I’ll pray for you too.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You spoke to your father, just now?’
‘Yeah, I did.’
‘That’s the first time in a long time.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m glad.’
‘Me too. Listen, I’d better go but I just wanted to make sure that you were OK.’
‘Both of us, Miles? You wanted to check that we were both OK?’
‘Yes Mom. Both of you.’
As Miles watched the apartment, he caught a glimpse of his father. He looked old, stooped.
‘I love you Miles. God bless you.’
‘I love you too. God bless.’
Miles turned away from his former home as a lump rose in his throat. He coughed it back, swallowed hard. Slamming down the receiver, he snatched it up again and called London.
*
Al walked into a fleapit motel off Broadway on the Lower East Side. The man behind the reception desk, a rotund Italian American in his mid-fifties, was watching the coverage of the attack on a wall-mounted television as Al approached him, his suit still ash grey.
‘Can I help you?’ asked the man.
‘I need to use a telephone.’
‘Sure, there’s a booth over there by the elevator.’
Al turned, muttered thanks and made his way towards it.
‘Say, were you in the Trade Center?’
‘No but I was nearby.’
‘You English?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well I’m sorry.’
‘You’ve no need to be sorry. Sorry for what?’
‘That this should have happened here. I guess some people don’t like us as much as we like ourselves.’
‘I guess they don’t.’
‘It’s going to get pretty crazy now. You’ll see.’
‘I’m sure it w
ill.’ Al gestured to the phone booth and the man behind reception nodded his head and waved him on. Al lifted the receiver and inserted his credit card into the slot. It took a long time for his card details to be verified and while he waited for the connection, he could see that the man behind reception had taken an interest in him and kept glancing across. Finally, Al got a dial tone and an automated voice instruction to start dialling. He keyed in the numbers and waited. The phone rang out.
Please be in.
‘Hello.’
He felt a surge of adrenalin as she answered.
‘It’s me.’
‘Oh Jesus, Al, oh my God. You’re all right?’
‘I’m fine. I tried to call you earlier but I couldn’t get any mobile reception.’
‘Were you nearby?’
‘Not far. Fergal was there. I think he’s gone.’
‘Oh Al.’
As Al spun around, he could see the man on reception watching him still. As their eyes met, the man turned away to the television on which the towers were collapsing all over again.
‘Krystina, I love you.’
‘I love you too, baby. More than anything.’
‘Marry me.’
The man on reception had given up any semblance of watching the television and chewed his thumbnail as he watched and waited.
‘I thought you’d never ask,’ said Krystina.
The expression on Al’s face at that moment was enough. While he and Krystina concluded their conversation – somewhat awkwardly, neither really knowing what to say – the man on reception fetched two glasses and a bottle of bourbon. He poured them both a glass and as Al hung up and made his way out of the booth and across the lobby, he held one up to him.
‘Here’s to you.’
- BOOK FIVE -
22 Departure
Dow Jones Index: 8630
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‘I take it George sent you,’ said Rob, looking up from the beer mat that he had been picking at nervously for the past five minutes. They were sitting in the corner of The Flask pub in Highgate. Imogen had never seen him like this, not in all the time she had known him.
‘She didn’t send me. She asked me if I thought it was a good idea me coming to have a chat with you. And I said yes. I need to try and understand what happened and why it happened. Just like she does. Now you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I guess I have no right to ask but I like to think that we’re friends ...’
‘It’s all right, Imo, I’ll tell you. You have a right to know and if there’s any way that you can convey to George that it was an – I don’t know – an aberration, it was insane, then please do. I can tell you what happened but I can’t explain why I did it. That I can’t do because I don’t really know that myself.’
Rob took a big drag on his cigarette and blew smoke against the oak-panelled wall. He went to speak, thought better of it, seemed to wince and then took a big gulp of his beer and began.
‘I don’t know how much George has told you but let me just give you my side of the story. I couldn’t get home. All the flights were fucked up, as you know. I was going to be at least two or three days in Singapore. I was all on my own. I was homesick.’
Rob shook his head as though it all sounded ridiculous then ground his cigarette out in the ashtray.
‘It sounds like I’m trying to justify what I did. I’m not. I’m just telling you it like it is.’
‘Just tell me what happened, Rob. Do you want another drink?’
‘No. It’s fine. I’ll have one in a minute. I was homesick like I said. All I wanted to do was get back to George. But I couldn’t. I’d heard about Fergal. It just did my head in. It just seemed so unfair. Of all the people. Fergal. He was so full of life. I thought of what he would have done in my situation, alone in Singapore. This sounds really nuts, right, and I don’t think that I even thought about it like this at the time but it was almost like I was acting out some sort of homage to Fergal, paying tribute to him in a way that I knew he would understand. I started drinking. There was nothing else to do. I ended up in a club – you know, one of those sorts of clubs.’ Rob rolled his eyes and rubbed his hand across the stubble on his face. ‘You’re not going to believe this but I didn’t intend to do anything. I just wanted to have a few more drinks, think about Fergal, and I just didn’t want to be on my own.’
Rob saw something in Imogen’s expression, some opinion or thought that she didn’t even know was there. But whatever it was, he took it to be disdain.
‘I know, I know, it’s pathetic. I was drunk but you have to believe me that at the time, all I wanted to do was just carry on drinking.’ Rob gave up holding Imogen’s gaze; his shame was too much to bear. ‘Anyway, I got talking to one of the girls. She gave me something, a pill. It was speed I think.’
‘She slipped it into your drink without you knowing?’
‘No, nothing like that. I took it of my own volition. It didn’t really do much other than make me want to drink even more. And my inhibitions and conscience went out of the window. This sounds crazy, I know, but it almost felt as though I was channelling Fergal in some way.’
Imogen worried that Rob was going to cry. There were tears in his eyes. Since she’d heard about Fergal, she’d done a lot of crying. She had thought she was all cried out but if Rob started now, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to hold it together. Part of her wanted to reassure him but part of her knew that what he was going to tell her was not going invoke any empathy at all. He picked another Marlboro out of the packet on the table, lit it and continued.
‘Mad really. I’ve never been unfaithful to George and there, in the space of an hour, I was unfaithful to her with two women. At the same time. I can’t even work out whether that makes it doubly reprehensible. I guess it does. It didn’t feel like anything at the time.’
‘Oh come on, Rob, you had a threesome. You were off your face. You wouldn’t have done it if you weren’t turned on.’
‘I guess I was turned on. But it was purely physical. You know how dog-like men can be at times. It didn’t mean anything.’
‘You’re kidding aren’t you? It means all this, it means you and George splitting up, you and me sitting here in a pub talking about it. It means everything.’
‘You know what I’m trying to say, Imo. What I’m trying to say is that it didn’t mean anything to me at the time. What happened last Tuesday in New York seemed to change everything. It was like the normal rules no longer applied.’
‘Until you woke up the following morning.’
‘Exactly. You have to believe me, Imo. I’ve never felt so bad about anything in my entire life. That’s why when I got back, I told George about it straight away.’
‘Only it wasn’t straight away, was it?’
‘It was a couple of hours. I didn’t feel as though I could tell her as soon as I got through the door.’
Imogen watched Rob. He wasn’t a bad man. She felt sorry for him. She couldn’t help but twist the knife a little out of loyalty to her sister but she hoped that once he’d done his penance, they could make things work. She knew that George didn’t want to split up with him. They were so right together. Imogen had been shocked by his infidelity. Not as much as her sister of course, but it had shaken her. Rob and George felt like a second set of parents in a way. Equally strong, unbreakable and resolute. Now that illusion had been shattered.
‘You told her, I guess that’s the main thing.’
‘And she kicked me out.’
‘Oh come on Rob, what do you expect? How would you have felt if George had come back from an overseas trip to tell you that she’d had a threesome with two men?’
Rob closed his eyes and shook his head. The point was made.
‘What am I going to do, Imo?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you think she’ll take me back?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘You must have a hunch?
You know her better than anyone.’
‘I don’t want to give you false hope, Rob. That wouldn’t be fair.’
‘Whatever happens, I’m getting out of this fucking business.’
‘Are you sure you aren’t just deflecting your own guilt onto your job?’
‘No. I’m not blaming it on the job. But what happened in Singapore was a car crash: the terrorist attacks, Fergal, my state of mind. They all came together and caught me at a vulnerable moment and I did something totally selfish and stupid. Now I can’t do anything about terrorism and I can’t bring Fergal back but I can do something about my state of mind and the reasons for it. I’ve come to a decision, whether George stays with me or not, I’m getting out.’
‘Did you say that to George?’
‘Yeah, I did.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Pretty much the same as you, that I was being pathetic blaming it all on my career, that it wasn’t that that had made me screw those girls. It was so awful, Imogen, I can’t tell you.’
‘I presume you’re going on Sunday?’
‘Of course. You’ll be going with George I take it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I thought Le – sorry – Francois might come along.’
‘It’s all right, Rob, I know you guys called him ‘Le Coq’. You were right to. He is a cock.’
‘I take it things aren’t going well.’
‘It’s over. I’m glad. He just wanted to control me which is fine if you want to be controlled, I guess. I didn’t, and certainly not by him.’
‘When you speak to George, can you do me a favour?’ Imogen nodded and the tears returned to his eyes. ‘Can you tell her that I love her, I’ll always love her. And I’m sorry. I’ll do whatever it takes.’ Rob stubbed out his cigarette. ‘It’s difficult talking about stuff like this without it sounding like some sort of cheesy film dialogue. But it’s important that she knows that what happened in Singapore was a moment of insanity. I want to spend the rest of my life with George; I want us to have children. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.’
Imogen reached out and put her hand on Rob’s. He seized it and gave it a squeeze.
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