by Jonathan Lee
She pushes the marked-up paper back to Brian. He is slow to take it.
‘Just suggestions, of course, Brian. I could have Barbara email them to you in track changes?’
‘I think you’ll make an effortless partner,’ Brian says. ‘Effortless.’ Turning to Peter he adds, in a deeper voice, ‘I have no doubt you’ll find Project Poultry in excellent order.’
‘Marvellous,’ says Peter. ‘Happy to help. Not my specialism, not remotely, but a fascinating case. Always harboured a soft spot for chicken libel. Remind me where you’re off to, Joy?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Holiday. Remind us where you’re tottering off to?’
Tottering off. The phrase takes her back to Wimbledon, she doesn’t quite know why, someone must have said it, kids totter around, little tyke can’t have tottered off far, and though in this office on this Friday her tongue is shaping some easy lie about getting sun and feeling sand between her toes her mind has rewound five and a half years of footage and she is there again, joining the search, trying to explain to the police which shades of blue her nephew wore, getting the gates shut down. After the tears a sudden calmness came. People needed her to be calm. They spoke in a series of nervy surges – tell us where exactly; who and when; think, think – and it was as if the panic leaching out of her had found a home in these obscure bystanders, their determined faces. There was an unspeakable collective excitement in the air. Child, missing, we must find the child. People wait their whole lives for such a sense of direction.
There might have been a man wearing army boots that afternoon, wandering between the quieter courts; there might have been a woman with a lost look in her eye, pushing an empty pram; on the CCTV two teenagers make small measured movements around something on the ground, a strawberry or a toy or some innocuous trick of the light.
‘My office,’ Brian says, ‘to chat through that lizard presentation,’ and he and Peter disappear through the door.
When a child goes missing there are daisy chains of images and lies and half-remembered things, all loosely linked. Your brain is a room full of theories, flimsy as the paper pinned to walls: ticket stubs, staff lists, security logs. Pictures too, from cameras in streets, hospitality rooms, waiting rooms. She heard a line once – ‘Every room is a waiting room’ – but until Wimbledon the full force of its meaning eluded her. The hours in which her nephew went missing became bloated by the business of waiting, were made slow and fat with the experiences of others, their hearsay and think-I-saws and hopes. The accounts of each given minute vary in every conceivable way – I saw a man with him; I saw three kids with him; He was alone wandering out through the turnstiles – and it makes you wonder, when someone disappears, whether they were ever really there. Posters in bus stations, shop windows, local papers, his features going soft in the sun. So much paper! Hundreds of pages of testimony, an inhuman haul of tip-offs and mental debris. Anonymous reports and images that expand to fill the space his disappearance has left. No wage slips, tax returns, appraisal forms – none of the documents that make up an ongoing life – just fragments from the past, mind-scatter lying around the event.
Sometimes Joy looks up at the big flat screens that hang in braces outside each Hanger, Slyde & Stein employee coffee pod, installed during the credit crunch to better monitor the markets, and thinks that the twenty-first century is no more than a vast structureless datastream. Oil up. Copper down. Gold holding. Somehow the white spaces on the graphs, cracked by ragged red lines, seem to breathe a kind of sadness. And what would it mean, exactly, to be one of the people both in and out of this datastream, everywhere and nowhere, waiting to be identified or found?
There is no need to invent some convoluted plot or clever conspiracy. There is enough mystery in the facts themselves, their loose ends, dead ends, spaces where the known world fades. Joy knows this now, has known this ever since that tennis match in 2005. She knows that England’s capital, more than any place on earth, exists on film; that in the City of London alone there are around seventy CCTV cameras for every thousand people. She lives in the most watched city in the world (she saw a documentary that said this was so) and yet more than ever she feels there are parts of society which cannot be recorded, which lie outside the frame, lost from view. Cameras caught twenty-seven images of her nephew that day, starting from the moment Joy took him from her Hampstead home, boarded the Tube and then the train at Waterloo, met Christine, silly-hatted, leaning into the ticket machine. But there is no confirmed footage of him after 14.57.
Missing posters; ground searches; tracker dogs; street work; the images of Joy’s sister, fierce with grief, giving the public appeal. Utilities up a touch; telecomms down a tad; consumer goods unchanged. The ordinary recorded written-down world.
14.57, reported lost.
15.24, gates closed.
Mass search throughout the night.
Only five years old.
They often are five years old, she’s learnt, trawling public records of vanished children, searching for some strange comfort or clue. It was said, in one trial transcript she had a paralegal find, that two boys, themselves only children, tried to insert batteries into their victim. This detail, like so many details, she cannot forget.
Dennis
I’M NOT sure, Counsellor – tell me if I’m wrong, of course – but I’m not sure (are you?) whether I ever finished that anecdote I was telling you about the encounter I had in the first-class carriage, you know the one, the day before my wife’s accident, not the William Hague experience (ha ha, sounds like a gruesome fairground ride, does it not, the William Hague Experience), but no, rather I’m talking about, yes, quite, the Beverley Badger encounter.
As I suspected. I was thinking that just as I was working my way through the foreword to a classic yesterday (which was actually a way of putting off rereading the classic itself, in the same way that the idea of rereading the classic itself had sprung up as a means of avoiding rereading the draft text of chapter seven of my highly commercial but hopefully nonetheless insightful study of Shakespeare’s language), I was thinking that even as I hear myself reciting one of my own anecdotes, even as I enjoy hearing myself recite it, I find myself hoping for its (the anecdote’s) end, for it is the same highly modulated but oddly empty experience you have when reading a book, Counsellor, the way however much you are loving the book, loving to linger in its pages, you are also hurrying through it, flicking occasionally to the end, comparing your page number with the final page number, flicking fairly frequently between your page and the end page, flicking pretty much constantly, never wanting it to end but desperately wanting it to end, hoping unreservedly that you never have to put it down but at the same time without contradiction thinking Oh My Merciful Lord I Can’t Wait To See This Story Sewn Up.
Now, come, let me be brief. Half an hour outside London, a mere twenty-four hours before my wife’s accident, I told Beverley I too was an author of sorts.
Oh terrific, she said. Who’s your agent?
No agent yet, I explained. I haven’t managed to find an agent yet, unfortunately, although I’ve barely started sending out material, there are still some agents I haven’t tried.
Did you send it to mine? she asked, meaning her agent, Abby Aardvark (you’ll appreciate I’ve changed the agent’s name, Counsellor, though I hope without cheapening the surrounding facts) of Aardvark Alexander.
I sent an outline and sample chapters to someone there, I said – it was true, I had – but I received nothing back from them.
Looking at the streaks of silver in my hair, she asked me if I had published books before.
Purely academic ones, I explained. My last was Shakespeare and Sir Gawain: Ships Passing in the Knight.6 The current project is aimed, I told her, more at the general reading public. My goal is to make Shakespeare’s language exciting to a new generation, to frame my textual analysis with commentary on developments
in the English language since his plays were first performed, developments which latterly would include, of course, email abbreviations, textspeak, status updates, Tweetings, et cetera.
Interesting, she said, tracing a finger idly down the spine of her book. At the other end of the carriage was a pinstriped, painstakingly tanned man who managed to squeeze the word dickwad into almost every sentence he spoke. His coarseness reminded me of my wife’s colleague Peter.
Now, to get to the crux of the conversation, I explained to Ms Badger over the rat-a-tat-tat of the carriage and the incessant dickwads that I was deeply interested in the means by which inarticulacy in Shakespeare’s tragedies can be linked to the inarticulacies in our daily lives. I had been to Bristol, that morning, to listen to a lecture which skirted around the edges of that very theme. You see, Counsellor, I find that Shakespeare himself, as the examples of Hamlet and King Lear illustrate, does not seem to associate inarticulacy with the failure of reason, with individual madness, but instead identifies it as a symptom of a world in a state of chaos, which is what the modern world is in, yes, no? In chaos, words splintering and spiralling, the physical struggle to heave the name of father pantingly forth, hmm?
Thank you, Counsellor. Too kind. Ms Badger said something similar.
Your book sounds very interesting, she said, polite and considerate and musical of voice, eyes asquint against the gust-rush of a handbag brushing past her button nose, the train pulling into Paddington.
You haven’t even heard the twist, I said. Have a guess. What’s the twist?
No, no, not you, Counsellor – though you are welcome to join in if you wish – but I mean to say I directed the question to Beverley.
She was stumped, no idea, so I told her.
Iambic pentameter, I said. The whole book. I’m writing it in iambic pentameter.
Needless to say she (Ms Badger) was suitably gobsmacked.
You really like the idea? I asked. My wife – top City lawyer – says it’s silly.
Oh don’t listen to a City liar! Beverley said, chuckling.
To this I responded, a little annoyed, just a little, by reminding her that we are lucky, she and I, that we know we want to spend our lives wrighting words.7 I explained to Beverley, Counsellor, that my wife is highly intelligent, and imaginative, but she has never really found the thing she would love to do, and has gone the way of many of her generation, becoming trapped by the dark treasure that is her own talent, and the more her employers recognise that talent through pay and praise, making her feel it is lived up to not lost, the more fenced off she feels from that feral beast Failure, and the harder it is for her to find a way out.
Beverley was silent awhile, but when she saw me gather up my coat she said, Let me scribble my agent’s email address on this.
She handed me a tattered receipt for two magazines and a Curly Wurly.8 Email my agent, she said, and mention me. She’ll think it’s a bit highbrow, but if you’re keen to break away from the university presses she might suggest some suitable publishers.
And that, pretty much, was the last thing Beverley Badger said to me.9 I ended the journey feeling rather sad to see her go, but also a little uplifted, changed in some small way.
I stood waiting for the 205 hoping, hoping against hope, that Ms Badger’s literary agent would like my manuscript, and would help me sell it for a fair sum of money, at which point I could look back on the last few months and say to myself, Dennis, Dennis old boy, something good has come out of your suspension.
Pardon?
Ah.
I meant sabbatical, of course. This is the true condition of Western civilisation in 2011, is it not, everyone caught between two or more inadequate words for the experience itself, nobody quite sure if they are on sabbatical or suspension, torn between free will and circumstance, ending up using different words with different people ha ha ha?
Well, it’s more that the Dean tends to use the word suspension. Him and, well, yes, everyone else at the university.
I see.
Granted.
Yes.
Now technically, Counsellor, it is a suspension, but only in the sense that a Jaffa Cake (which is good for you, I’ve read) is technically a cake when, in fact, most self-respecting tea-drinking snack-dunkers know it is in essence a biscuit, for they are not satiated by just one Jaffa in the way they would almost always be content with one slice of cake, yes, you see my point, yes?
You really think so? I mean really? I’ve heard that one before, Counsellor, and on this subject, with no disrespect to you or to the VAT Tribunal, I do not find it persuasive simply to restate the old entrenched argument that over time biscuits go soft and cakes go hard, but to answer your initial question in the most succinct way possible, without further delay or diversion – it was like this when Joy-Joy’s nephew went missing, every straight route to the facts obscured, eyewitnesses saying this man looked like a paedophile and the next person saying he looked like a kind-hearted chap and the third person saying his eyes were blue and the fourth person swearing blind they were brown, all concision and precision obscured by images from all angles and split perceptions and the force field of inconsistent asides in which every powerful happening is enclosed – it is all down to a mix-up with a female undergraduate. I say mix-up, but in actual fact she (the female undergraduate) has a vendetta against me, is telling all sorts of lies – that I felt her up, yes, that I said lewd things, yes – as a way of punishing me for not giving her the grades which she in her pretty prim misguided mind thought she deserved, and although there is not a jot, certainly not a lot, of objective evidence against me it is my misfortune, my great bad bloody luck, that her father is some bigwig fat cat on the London restaurant scene who has a whole wing of the new Arts and Social Sciences Library named after him and also happens to sit on the university’s Board of Governors. The Dean is on my side, I’m pretty sure he’s on my side, he seemed at first to be on my side, less so now, but he is hamstrung, he says – hamstrung – because it is her (the misguided undergraduate’s) word against mine, and they (the university) are forced to investigate it, and it (the alleged groping) must of course be investigated fully but with this restaurant magnate kicking up an almighty fuss and getting seven of the twelve independent board members and five of the eight co-opted members, one of the two academic nominees, the student nominee and the Vice Chancellor on side, notwithstanding the Board’s alleged commitment to the seven principles of public life as set out in the Nolan Report, Gerald says that at the moment he can’t see me getting through the disciplinary process with my career intact.
Sadly, Counsellor, your sympathy is not what I need. Not unless it is backed up by a fat cheque and a refund on my self-respect.
Joy-Joy? No no, I couldn’t possibly have told her. If she thought I was skulking around the house eating Jaffas in the glow of the television on an indefinite basis she would be unduly concerned for me. Because she has done it herself, you see, the moping and TV watching, and knows how it can gnaw at your self-esteem, just like ailments gnaw at the hirsute, humped, hunched and halitotic people you meet in the street; just like the hands of hospital clocks nibble away at the day.
Beg your pardon?
In 2005, in the wake of Wimbledon, when she needed time off work, Joy-Joy watched a lot of television. All the hot bustle of the prior period, searching for her nephew, all that thinned down and cooled and she barely left her Hampstead home, did not leave her home at all for many many weeks, and I would go over there straight from the university and sit slumped next to her and worry, for we had been seeing each other for several months, long enough for me to worry very deeply, and almost everyone was worried, including her sister, who seemed at that moment ready to forgive her, worried that Joy-Joy might never come out.
She was at her weakest, her most see-through, that autumn. Grief can do that to a person, I think. Drain all colour away. Leave them so
thin that light shines through their skin and out the other side, the way the sun shimmies in and out of a jellyfish. Through madness or miscalculation her hair was shorn unflatteringly short, and the only things she seemed to take pleasure in were cream crackers. I sandwiched them around lemon curd, a snack my mother used to make me when I got one of my killer colds, and Joy ate them staring at the news or a wildlife documentary, hungry for facts not fantasy. Eventually she progressed from cream crackers to soup and mentioned going back to work, and we made love one lunchtime on the sofa, the first time in months, and that very afternoon I went to touch her chin and look meaningfully into her eyes and she swatted my hand away and said, Why has everyone picked up this habit of touching my chin all of a sudden? And in that moment I knew she was segueing back into her old self.
To me it seemed apposite that, soon after her return to the office, we discovered Joy-Joy was pregnant. She greeted the development with a sense of shock and guilt, but to me it felt fitting, redemptive, exhilarating. And it felt similarly fitting that on the weekend after the pregnancy test proved positive, when we went for a walk along Regent’s Canal, all the way from Victoria Park to Angel, I should point to a For Sale sign outside a surprisingly spacious, split-level property and ask her to be my wife.
People questioned our motives, of course. Some went so far as to imply I’d deliberately asked her to marry me when she was still too weak to say no, phrased it (the big question) in a faintly manipulative way, snuck a promise of security into her mind before that mind regained something like its full protective strength, and light no longer went right through her, and she seemed less like a memory of herself…and the lemon curd got struck off our shopping list…and her hair regrew, shiny and thick…and marmalade became our household’s conserve – preserve? – of choice…