by Jonathan Lee
Not convinced?
Let me give you another example. Wimbledon. Summer 2005. There is an official version of events, and then there is the reality. The official version is that Joy was queuing for the toilets with her nephew, just the two of them and a bunch of strangers. She took her BlackBerry out of her bag. She looked at it. She felt something at her feet. She thought it was the boy, tugging to get her attention. She looked down. It was just chocolate wrappers. He was gone. There was a huge police search. Public outcry. Some public outcry, anyway. A girl in the Home Counties had gone missing the same week. The papers prefer girls, apparently. But even with this other disappearance splitting the journalists’ resources, there were already photographers outside Joy’s sister’s home when she got back from France. One of the neighbours, a public-spirited little Hampstead busybody with a view into their lounge, rented out her spare room to a few of the more persistent paparazzi. Ten pounds an hour. Long lenses leaning out of windows, trained on a crack in the curtains, checking that the grief was real. These days you always suspect the family, don’t you? And then of course all the freaks came out to play. The constant caller who pretends to be their son, wailing for help. The faith healer who says the body’s buried under the Houses of Parliament. The Egyptian pimp who sold him to a king.
All these pieces of the story – police search, paparazzi, crank calls – are known to those close to Joy. This is the official version of events. But the whole narrative is built on that initial image, isn’t it? Of it being just Joy and the boy, standing in the queue, her checking an email on her BlackBerry, feeling something at her feet, seeing her nephew was gone. But that initial image is false.
Doctor Odd! Come on! You heard me the first time. It isn’t true. It’s been – for want of a better word – doctored.
Do me a favour and put your pen down, will you? We both know this has nothing to do with my so-called trauma. I’m merely telling you how the world works.
I know because I was there. I was taking clients to the tennis. Joy and Christine were having a day of annual leave but I was in the hospitality suite, actually working. And I happened to…well, there Joy was, running up and down the queue, in a complete state, saying she’d lost the boy. But she’d been chatting to someone moments before, when it happened. It wasn’t just her and the kid. There was a third person, a source of distraction. But, as I told her at the time, she would have been mad to say that to the police. Sorry, officer, I left the five-year-old to play with a bit of litter over there while I was having a nice chinwag. Come on. They’d massacre her. Criminal negligence, it could be argued. Her sister, as it turned out, massacred her anyway, but that’s beside the point. The point is I had the presence of mind to look around for a camera and, when I saw there wasn’t one trained on the queue outside the loos, advised her accordingly: Listen, Joy, you were in the queue, just you and the kid, and you may have briefly checked your BlackBerry but otherwise you were focused.
Not one of the witnesses contradicted her. Proof, if you ever needed it, that some people on this earth are revoltingly wrapped up in themselves.
Simple as that. The truth becomes a secret. A lie becomes the truth. And the official version is built up from those shaky foundations.
I predict the same with Cuthbert the Lizard. An official explanation for his disappearance will emerge, and then several counter-explanations will be floored, and soon everyone in the office will be giving their version of the circumstances in which he slithered away. It’ll be fun for a while, everyone trying to be entertaining in the telling, adding their own splash of colour to the few known facts. Like a tireless TV show – crocodile tears, canned laughter, pretend happiness – there’ll be a certain fake energy carrying us along. And then we’ll all get bored and switch off. Even Mother, who with Dad taking to his bed has found herself wedded, instead, to the television, will switch off when the soap writers have recycled the storyline one too many times.
Have I heard from who? Mother?
No. You raise a good point. I need that phone number from her. For Christine’s parents. I must admit, I’m beginning to get the feeling I am at the sore end of some kind of conspiracy. Christine’s hiding out at her parents’ house, refusing to return my calls. My own mother won’t call me back. Emails disappear into cyberspace to no noticeable effect. What’s everyone hiding from me? How am I supposed to get my marriage back on track?
There’s something wrong, something missing. I’m just too busy on Project Poultry to work out what. And…Hang on, I’d better read this.
Oh for fuck’s sake.
Shit fuck bollocks cock.
An email from Charles Jestingford! Saying we should grab a coffee!
Because Jestingford is one of the most feared and revered partners in the firm. If he wants to buy me a coffee, it means he’s got a new case for me, and if he’s got a new case for me, it means I’m not going to see a weekend until spring.
Tiny Tony and I peered into Jestingford’s office this morning. He’s just had it fitted out with all this new stuff. Tony kept going on about the antique mahogany desk and how he’d like something similar for his attic conversion – a domesticated beast at heart, old Tone, an asexual romantic with a fondness for furnishings – but the thing that really bothered me was that glinting whiteboard hanging above it, complete with marker pens and foam eraser, seeming to suggest that the old-fashioned pinboard in my own office was now a reckless relic of less enlightened times. I am going to ask my PA to procure one. Bill it to Office Optional Furnishings. Before this coffee meeting, if I can.
3.05 p.m.
‘I MEAN,’ says her second driver of the day, ‘people will assume a certain ignorance of your basic cabbie. No, no, hear me out. Not everyone. But some. Many. The snobbish or selfish. Whereas in fact I know drivers – we’re not talking the minicab boys, of course – with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. I myself have qualifications in ancient writings. I did a course on the Romans and I still find – we’ll do a left here, it’s chocker to Cheapside – that Seneca’s writings are a whopping great reserve of strength.’
‘Seneca’s bollocks,’ Joy mutters.
‘He’s the bollocks all right, couldn’t agree more.’
His face hangs big and rosy in the rear-view mirror, a pink planet of people seen and people judged. With a twitch of its twenty-five-foot turning circle, an engineering feat he’s already explained in lavish detail, the black cab banks into a thin dark street. Death-shaped cameras are poised on posts. Her heart beats distastefully in its chest. How has she failed at this, the easiest of pursuits, the long falling into nothing? She’ll go to the office, pick up the second tub of pills from her desk drawer, head back to the Heath and see the job through. Maybe buy a knife too, in case she needs it as a fallback, or for killing troublesome squirrels.
‘Of course,’ he continues, ‘Seneca remains one of the few popular philosophers of the period. There are many works since in which he’s referenced. Many works.’
‘Appears in Dante,’ she says, feeling the need to show a little knowledge.
‘He’s in Chaucer, he’s in Dante. Very quotable, like Virginil.’
‘Virgil.’
‘My set reading included the old Erasmus edition. Yeah. Found it bloody fascinating.’
Joy has unclipped her seat belt. She is trying to use a wet wipe on her shoe. The portion of properly swallowed sedative is making this tricky. She has begun to see double of everything: twenty polished pink toenails, four ankles, and two signs about the fouling charge. She may well have to pay if they continue through dizzying backstreets, tyres hiccuping over welts in the road, the whole vehicle inviting her to vomit.
‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ he says, ‘but you seem messed up. Is that blood on your shirt?’
‘Mud.’
‘And in your hair?’
‘Moss.’
‘Moss?’<
br />
‘Moss.’
‘I see…’
Why isn’t everyone blowing their brains out? Why don’t they make bigger wet wipes? With the driver forced to pause at traffic lights she asks him for another one from the glove compartment, and with his face bathed in a red glow which with dreamlike speed becomes amber, then green, he passes it through the perspex window like that Chinese client of hers always gives his card: two-handed. A small fly, one of those that’s little more than a speck of dust, hitches a ride in the wet wipe’s airspace. She claps it dead mid-flight. You kill the things that bug you. The taxi driver is beginning to bug her. She wishes she could get her old driver back, the mysterious taciturn dreadlocked guy who condensed the entire history of human thought into three smiling, unsettling words: ‘everybody have problem’. She decides her best tactic with the current chatty cabbie is to tee up a soliloquy, turn their patchy interaction into an ignorable white noise.
‘Tell me about Seneca,’ she says, and hears, as she sometimes does, her sister’s tone of tart disinterest. It is how her family approaches conversations with strangers – from a distance, scared of suffocation.
With an edge of scepticism he says, ‘Yeah?’
‘Go ahead. Please. I have unexpected time on my hands.’
‘OK. Seneca. Right. Well, in lesson one of these classes of mine…’
Dennis made reference to Seneca one night. They were – that’s it – sitting fireside on the rug, with Riesling and carrot cake, one creepy jazz track shy of a romcom cliché. She’d recently had an abortion, and as they sat there talking she felt surprisingly untroubled, grateful to have her body back. The conversation began with Othello; they’d been to a matinee earlier that day. Her own recreational instincts tended towards Heat magazine and Häagen-Dazs, or at most a subtitled film and reduced-fat hummus, but under Dennis’s influence she was starting to take pleasure in becoming (in his phrase) a Proper Culture Vulture.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘one thing about Shakespeare: he was rather keen on suicide. Like Seneca, he saw exit routes everywhere.’
This interested her. Dennis had things to say and, back then, he took less time to say them. ‘Othello kills himself, but who else?’
He listed some: Cleopatra, with the venom of the asp; Juliet, with Romeo’s dagger; Mark Antony, with his sword; Romeo himself, with poison. ‘It’s like Elizabethan self-murder Cluedo,’ he said. ‘Ophelia with the willow branch in the brook.’
‘Ophelia fell! It was an accident.’
‘She made no attempt to swim.’
‘Lessons were scarce, Dennis.’
He looked at her expectantly – a hint of the rapt, nervy child she’d later come to see him as – and, at that moment, the subtext sank in. She took his cue, talked to him about her father’s death those years ago, and he listened, nodded, fetched more of Christine’s cake, and they were fine for a while, more than fine at times, on that rug in their Islington home, newly married, living within civilised walls. The house was large and simply furnished. They liked to keep space for their own pretensions.
‘We need more Riesling.’
‘It really is a fine Riesling.’
For a while they spoke like this. But then work got busy. She decided she would love it. She would do well. They’d been good to her after Wimbledon, when she needed compassionate leave, and finally she could stop worrying about raising the prospect of maternity cover, could focus on showing how good she was. She swapped cake on the carpet for desk-bound dumplings. The noodle place at the Icarus delivered to reception. They started giving her free spring rolls with every order. She had money and no time to spend it. So, she thought, let’s invest in refurbishing the house. It made sense to have more comfort in her few hours at home. It made sense to have more colour.
‘…Raining again. Even Seneca couldn’t explain the rain, the way it can get you down. Same everybloody-where I drive today. Woking. Wimbledon. Wandsworth. All rain…’
She got up early to buy paint online. They tried it on a wall. It wasn’t quite right. She bought more. It didn’t quite work. She reassessed the palette. With their home in a state of stalled redecoration Dennis spoke of best-sellers with brains and having kids when the time was right, but his presence had become an abstract thing all around her, like mood-lighting, or the sky. And in truth she didn’t appreciate the sky any more, only noted its colours. Teal Tension, First Frost, Mint Whisper, Sugared Lilac. The names themselves were colourful. Who needed sky when you had paint like this? He spoke only of Shakespeare, and children, and impressing the Dean.
‘…I wish I could say this job doesn’t get to you sometimes. My cab’s my life. People shit in my cab, or puke in it, or wank in it, or throw their kebab over the floor, that’s my life they’re soiling, littering…’
She had Barbara block out her lunchtimes: one colourful hour in each thin grey day. She went from hardware shop to hardware shop, showroom to showroom, buying pinks and reds and violets, blues and greens, oranges. There was always another colour, a shade with more depth and personality, stylish yet comfortable, vintage but modern. She purchased paint with reckless abandon, causing Dennis to fear for his retirement fund. She reminded him how much she earned. He looked depressed and pleased, mentioned only once the six thousand she’d paid to a con man promising to rescue her nephew. She admired Dennis the way you might admire a well-made French film, one where everything’s shot from odd angles. He was unashamedly intellectual; he believed the mere act of thinking could redeem things. At the start a mutual possession had given their marriage momentum, but now it was this quality – detached admiration – that kept the relationship chugging along.
‘…Sleep in this cab half the week, trying to make enough. When people foul up the back seats it’s fouling up my bed, like a drunk student pissing on a tramp, laughing and pissing on his sleeping bag on Lavender Hill, mates with camera phones, laughing…’
She purchased for urgent fantasies and remote contingencies. He said she was becoming self-absorbed. Self-absorbed! Her! After the walls were just right, she’d get sleek new furniture and a washing machine that didn’t make a noise. These were the things that would make her feel at home. And, for a while, curtain fabric and doorknobs and phone calls from needy clients lit up her eyes and flushed her face. She wanted so badly to feel at home. She found reserves of determination and ambition that her few remaining friends, making quick visits, mistook for happiness. She was sick of her friends, wanted to see Peter again, so she did, another drunken night ruining her resolve, his heedless teasing making her feel edgy once more, his stare emitting an unpredictable flicker as they sipped champagne, as she let it wash and warm and flatten on her tongue, her throat alive with its hot sweet bite. He never seemed to doubt his right to live.
The driver’s single supine eyebrow floats up and he says, ‘Sweet fucking Seneca, I’ve had enough of this arse in front,’ and – for a moment, a long casual moment, lying in wait for the whole journey, casting a shadow over the whole cab – she sees what will happen. Blinking to blot out the doubling effect of the pills she sees that, having weaved a route in and out, having swerved here, having swung there, her philosophising cabbie will veer back in, into the bus lane, hand on the wheel, hand on his shoulder, scratching an itch, fingering fabric, and, picking up speed, the number 100 to Elephant & Castle will stay dead straight, will put its big red nose right in their path, will –
Impact. Joy somersaults over all four feet. Dirty heads over dirty heels. The screeching birdsong of brakes and tyres; streets tangled; the dirty double world all upside down. Horns. Headlights. Wheeling shapes where she had sat. The City all shuddering colour: wine, carrots, rusty blood.
Another long moment. Tennis ball at the top of its arc. Energy waiting, withheld.
Big big car comes into view, spinning spinning on its side, a giant coin shedding light. This second car has, must have, clipped the bus
, and it comes wildly towards them, looking strangely wavy as it spills, heads and tails. Waits, it waits, expanding one corner of her vision with its glow, and then, here it comes, holding her own body in a knot she sees it, sees it will crush her and her driver, that they both will die, that she’ll go to hell with this driver, that he’ll talk all the way through the afterlife, that he’ll talk talk talk through nine turning circles of suffering until they go skinny-dipping in the lake of fire. Redskins redskins redskins – Smash. Sort of sound that’s always an impersonation – button on a radio deck – Smash. Side caves in. Lack of space all around. Melted-looking metal. Tinfoil trap. No room to breathe or swallow. Joy’s tongue like a rug rolled back, back into the dark space where her dad’s gun tickled, back, back to the black waters where lost syllables bubble, back, back to all the silly deep-pitched shit you’ll maybe never say. I’m sorry, it’s my fault, keep going with your book.