by Mavis Cheek
Oh, he had been caught by this sort of thing before. Strident women. Those short-haired androgynous types. He sorted through his brain to find a useful suggestion. One that would not offend. Then, thankfully, he noticed her cute little beaded shoes. The perfect example.
'You will find,' he said, picking one up and tapping a beaded dragon playfully, 'that women are more dexterous than muscular. They have an eye for detail. Bridges are large, awkward, brawny -often disturbing things - and use hard, masculine materials. Women understandably shy away from them for the gentler forms of design. And of course, there is a place for that too -'
'Of course,' she said, and wrote again. This time he did not ask, which was just as well as she had written, 'Patrick Parker you do talk shit.' She really wanted those trousers.
'You know that he bankrupted several companies he used in the building of his designs?' she said.
'Who?'
‘I have a list of them here -' He waved the notepad away. 'And he did it for no good reason except that old pig-headedness again. Money due to one of the engineers on the GWR, for example, was never paid to them. It was allocated and all Brunel had to do was write the cheque - and he never did. He kept nit-picking. They pleaded. He remained immutable. Out of business they went, and at least one man died broken-hearted.'
'Hah!' said Patrick.
She got the trousers.
She got the shirt with her defence, quite correct, of the valueless-ness of the seven-foot gauge over the four-foot gauge for the railway. Brunel said it would make a smoother ride, and it did not. It also cost vast and unnecessary sums of investors' money to convert.
Which only left him his - somewhat sketchy - underpants.
He, however, fought back.
'And his Great Bridge of Clifton,' she began confidently, 'with its vast span - how long was it now? So very, very big ...' 'Nine hundred and sixteen feet,' said Patrick firmly. 'In metres?' she said. 'He worked in feet and inches.'
'Ah yes. He won the commission by saying that he would make a bridge that spanned nine hundred or so feet - much longer than his rival Telford's. But when it came to be built the span was modified and made smaller anyway. He brought it down to six hundred after all.'
'Six hundred and thirty,' said Patrick. 'And I don't think any of this is fair.'
'Fair, fair?' she said, laughing wickedly. 'How would you like to be promised nine hundred feet and only get six, Mr Parker?' He wanted that robe.
"The point is, my lovely Koi-Koi' (she quite liked the way he said this, kind of commanding), 'that he could have made it the original nine hundred-plus but Telford - in his umbrage at not getting the commission - withdrew some of the funds. So Brunel was forced to cede all that - length.' He reached over and pulled the cherry blossoms apart. She let him and she sighed. Even quasi-geishas do not wear anything next to their skin.
Underpants. They had to go.
'And was it,' she said, running her fingers up and down his leg, 'was it fair that Mr Brunel opposed any legislation to regulate engineering techniques? So that when Robert Stephenson's bridge over the Dee collapsed - where as you know he had been experimenting in the use of cast-iron beams -' She went on stroking his leg. A familiar leg, a leg that looked almost exactly the same as it looked thirty years ago (except the knees were a bit balder) - quite a desirable leg, really. A little trickle of sweat ran down between her breasts. Patrick watched its course, fascinated. 'Your Isambard would not condemn Stephenson's use of untried and untested methods, would he? No. Despite the loss of life he supported Stephenson - on the grounds that imposing any condemnation or legislation would "embarrass and shackle the progress of improvements of tomorrow by recording and registering as law the prejudices and errors of today..." In other words, Mr Parker, nothing must get in the way of progress - his progress - genius - of his genius - and that included a few expendable rail travellers ...'
She paused.
She smiled again.
Very charmingly.
Though it proved to be the charm of a snake.
'Isambard Kingdom Brunel stood up at that tribunal and faced husbandless women, fatherless children, bereaved mothers and the whole phalanx of those left desperately grieving behind - and his message was as follows: "The cause of great building never comes cheap and included in the reckoning there are always human lives.'"
'Like any woman,' he said, 'you bring the emotive into the calculation.'
'No. No. I bring reason. I bring humanity. Your Mr Brunel was saying that death must be part of the engineer's calculations. In the name of progress. Just as it was calculated in by the Egyptians, the Carthaginians - and your favourites - the Babylonians. Just as it was calculated in when they flew to the moon. All's fair for the cause.'
'What cause would that be?' asked Patrick, irritably.
'Heroics,' she said dreamily. 'Glory. Which is exactly what you aim for yourself.'
'Hah,' he said.
She blinked at him, sleepily, like an exotic cat. Then she held out her hand. 'Underpants, Patrick, please.'
‘I win,' she said, tapping her earrings. She wriggled towards him. 'And now - for pleasure, I think.' 'We can soon see to that,' he said.
He lowered his voice and began stroking the nape of her neck. She prayed the wig would stay in place. He seemed not to notice it and almost - she did not care if he did. She was twenty and under his spell again.
'Do you’ he breathed into her ear, 'know the meaning of the word "quirks"? In architecture?'
Oh bloody well bugger it. That old line again. In the past he was always using it on her, and always forgetting he had done so. Ah well - Water under the Bridge, she thought, and pouting her cherry red lips, she said, 'Quirks?'
'In architecture’ he said, 'a quirk - or quirks - has a very specific meaning, a very specific meaning ...'
'Yes?' she said demurely. 'Would you like to tell me what that is?'
'It means an acute hollow between the convex moulding and the soffit.' He reached out and touched the curve of her neck and shoulder. 'And this is a perfect, living example.'
'Ah’ she said, nodding sagely. ‘I thought that's what it meant.' And she repeated 'moulding' and 'soffit' as softly and as non-committally as if the words were pillow talk. She was wondering - quite idly - if she was going to go through with it. She looked down at her discarded embroidered shoes, such silly pretty things, sewn by little dexterous feminine fingers, were they? The dragons were definitely wild and roaring now.
'You know’ she said, 'it is thought, in Japan, that the reason no women build bridges is because bridges represent - the - er - male. They are considered to be manifestations ...'
They both looked downwards to where she pointed, apologising as she did so to the entire Japanese nation for the further absurd and whopping falsehood she was about to lay at their door ...
'... of that.'
The water dispenser seemed to bubble over, its ripe noise bouncing off the discreetly painted walls. ‘I am in your hands’ he said, quite hopefully
'And you know’ she said, 'that it is likely that the reason our shinkansen - the bullet train - is so called is that it comes from the same idea. Bullets being very - mmm - masculine, penetrating things, you know. Women in Japan are content to ride them, too, rather than design them.'
'And you?' he said.
'Certainly’ she said. ‘I will be your abutment.'
At which she put her wriggly little fingers over her mouth and giggled again. With final, private and heartfelt apologies to the whole of Japanese womanhood.
Something has healed, she thought, pleased. The gap of pain was sealed over. She was just beginning to wonder if that was not enough without any further consummation - when the thought became lost in a series of interesting noises coming from just beyond the locked door. Sounds not unlike the approach of a very modern orchestra in the process of cranking up the timpani. And they grew louder, and louder, and louder.
So much for soundproofing, Patrick thought
idly, stretching, wondering where to begin. And then he sat bolt upright. Reason dawned. What the bloody hell was it?
Audrey wondered likewise.
What was it that crashed and cacophoned outside the door? Well, well.
Never underestimate the efficiencies of timing employed in the singularly good art of French Corporate Catering.
15
Tokyo Cinders
So Apsu sits in an office and she designs for a firm of babyware manufacturers: she thinks up interesting new shapes for baby buggies, baby car seats, babywalkers, babyslings, swings, bouncers and cots. She keeps her head down, she earns good money, and she rents cheaply part of a decrepit old warehouse on a short lease because it is waiting to be transformed into chic and minimalist riverside apartments. When she looks out through its grimy, Dickensian windows, she sees a big glass-fronted building on the other side of the water, which is where Patrick and his partners create their ideas. If she had played the game, as her mother and father say to her woefully (for they have learned to speak the vernacular over the years too), she could have been in there - and laughing now.
At night, on her own, with Mozart playing, or sometimes Dire Straits, she designs and draws and dreams. One day, one day, the world will change. And she will be ready for it.
Almost at the same moment as Koi-Koi and Patrick heard the curiously orchestral noise, it ceased. To be followed by a rattling and a knocking and a general raising of human sounds that all led to a final understanding that Someone Was Trying To Get In. And, from the determination of the sounds they would soon succeed.
Patrick was the first to leap up with the unfortunate result that he landed a little too forcibly and awkwardly on one of his feet, and twisted it. Audrey, for it was now most definitely she, with beating heart held hard to her wig and said, 'Shame.'
Patrick howled and clutched his damaged foot. She said, 'You always did have weak ankles ...'
He looked at her with understandable surprise. So far as he knew he had never had that reported in any newspaper. But to Patrick the faint interest he felt at the odd notion of this Japanese woman knowing about the weakness of his ankles, was as nothing to the strong likelihood he was experiencing at the prospect of his being found in a French museum with his trousers down. Off, even. He might feel the Absolute Rightness of Banishing Bourgeois Sentiment - but it was quite possible that not everyone would see it that way. And certainly - Oh my God, Peggy - not his wife. The sound at the door increased ...
It occurred to him that this would not look good, either, for the Queen's Millennium Bridge Project. Being divorced for this kind of thing would certainly not help. The Queen of England was a little short on sympathy for indulgers in marital hanky-panky and it was rumoured that she deeply regretted the fading of Court Etiquette banning the Monarch from having anything to do with divorcees. As one journalistic wag remarked, presumably, despite the Queen of England's regrets, it had to remain faded or she would never see any of her family again.
As for Peggy - if last night was anything to go by he had been nurturing a jealous wife in his bosom. She was all Coventry, that one, and would easily be fooled into talking to the tabloids if the unthinkable happened. And the tabloids were never happier than when they could knock Johnny Foreigner. And Johnny Foreigner had been commissioning most of Patrick's major works for the past thirty years, so to get both him and the French in one go would be irresistible. Mix Japan up in it, too, and they'd reckon to have achieved a bullseye. Despite the pain he began to dress and as he struggled to don his underpants without standing on his damaged foot he wondered, again, how she could possible know about that particular weakness. Mark Mack told him Japanese women were special. Perhaps, in some mystical manner, she had spotted the way his joints were put together? They were known to be spiritual - and - inscrutable - mysterious. Which is what made them so exotic and alluring . . . He'd never know now - shame, he thought.
He was just about mid-leg with the underwear when the door behind him finally swung open. He looked across at Madame Koi. Somehow she had managed to get herself quite well covered, if a little askew, and was even now doing up the belt that held her strange garment in place. Her hair, too, looked oddly lopsided and her makeup had gone rather patchy. Not, after all, the porcelain seductress.
But at least she was decent. He felt sad. He did not want their meeting to end like this.
'Will we meet again?' he asked her as he stumbled and struggled. She pushed her wig about a bit and said, 'One day, perhaps.' And gave him another of those smiles.
'Your phone number?' he said, desperate as a juvenile.
But it was too late.
Bursts of laughter told him that several people had entered the room. The rattling, chunking, clanking timpani continued. He turned round to see a row - yes - a row of those state-of-the-art trolleys again - being wheeled by impeccable young men in grey zip-up suits who looked as if they had just landed from Mars. And were on laughing gas.
Behind them, wheeling a different style of trolley (he knew them so well) all perfectly arranged with canapes, came two elegant, long-legged young women in white, their black hair coiled on their heads in a peak giving them a remarkable resemblance to Mrs Whippy. But the whole effect of their cool superiority was also spoiled by the fact that they had tried - and very obviously failed - to stop laughing. And pointing. As were the young men. The bottles, the glasses, the plates of canapes fairly tinkled and jangled with hilarity.
With great dignity Patrick turned away and replaced the remainder of his clothes. The catering staff went about their business at the far end of the room, saying nothing, laughing much. Then Madame Koi was at his side - she tucked something into his pocket before helping him into his jacket. She then smoothed his hair and planted a dainty kiss on his cheek. All he had to worry about now was his tie and his shoes. He bent down to these latter, and when he straightened up again - she was gone. Nothing remained in the room to say she had ever been there but the sofa with its roughened pile, her pencil and a slowly closing door. She had even remembered to take her notebook. Cool or what?
He felt a pang. A very strange pang. And he made a rush for it - she could not go - he did not know why he felt she could not go - but feel it he did. He stepped out to catch up with her, forgot about his ankle, groaned in pain, and limped and hobbled instead. Something tapped against his hip as he tried to make his painful way to the door. He patted his jacket pocket. Strange shape. He took it out. It was a beaded shoe, its dragon gently roaring at him. He reached the door just as several people from the outside also reached it.
'Patrick’ shouted a masculine voice. It was Rennie, his partner. Reality. 'Where the hell have you been? We've been scouring the place.'
Behind him he saw Peggy, very pink in the face, anxious and angry. Guiltily he stuffed the shoe back in his pocket and stood back to let them enter.
'Time for our interview with Nexus Tokyo,' Rennie said.
He ushered in the Japanese man to whom he had been speaking earlier. The Japanese man - on catching his eye - bowed. He held both a small recording machine and notebook. He did not look remotely like Madame Koi.
'Patrick,' said Peggy, in a voice that made him wince. 'You left me completely alone for nearly an hour.'
Had it really been that long?
She looked him up and down. He did not appear exactly as he had appeared when she last saw him. Indeed, he looked distinctly different. 'What have you been doing?' she said, more curious than hysterical now.
Well - yes - what had he been doing? With a sudden brainwave he said, 'Oh - I've sprained my ankle - quite badly -' He lifted it up to show a suitable swelling and bruise - not really a sprain as such -more of a rick - but it added credence.
Peggy, if she thought anything odd of it, knew that it was neither the time nor the place. She went over to him and smoothed down his hair. It reminded him of his mother, long ago and far away - suddenly he rather wanted to be back in that land. He let his wife steer him towa
rds the rumpled sofa. Was it his imagination or did it feel still warm?
‘Ice’ called Peggy to the caterers, who were by now pretending to be getting on with things at the other end of the room. A bucket of ice was produced, together with a large, pale grey napkin, which Peggy expertly wrapped around several melting chunks and held to the ankle. The caterers smirked.
Peggy knelt there. 'I thought you might have met up with Audrey’ she muttered.
'Audrey?' he said.
'Audrey’ she said. 'Wapshott?' And gave the ankle a twitch. Patrick nearly shot off the couch.
'I've been stuck in here with a Japanese journalist as you very well know. What's Audrey Wapshott got to do with anything?'
'She lives in Paris.'
'She can live in bloody Timbuktu as far as I'm concerned.' Peggy was more gentle with him after that.