by P. Z. Reizin
“I—I can play, yes.”
“Dad, this is Jen.”
“We played chess.”
“You played with Elaine, Dad. Elaine’s—Elaine’s not alive anymore.”
The old man turns his ferocious gaze upon his son, the lined face creasing in contempt. “What dreck are you talking?!”
Mrs. Tickner stands and claps her hands. “You will play later. First we eat.”
But Ralph’s father has produced a chessboard and sets it on the coffee table between us. Now, with a clatter, a tin of chessmen. His trembling fingers begin putting up the black pieces—so, good sport that I am, I put up white.
“Haven’t done this for ages,” I chirp.
Something odd is happening at Mr. Tickner’s end of the board. The back row of pieces are in place, but where there should be a row of black pawns in front, there are eight empty squares.
“Okay. You play five minutes, then we eat.”
“Play!” commands the old man.
“Your pawns?”
“Play!”
“He’s not cuckoo,” whispers Ralph. “Well, he is. But he thinks he can beat you without any pawns.”
“He probably can.”
* * *
He can’t, as it turns out. Not because he isn’t the better chess player—he obviously is (or rather was) by a mile—but because he can’t follow his own train of thought. The game peters out after he makes a series of illegal moves, and soon we are in the dining room, where Mr. T occupies the head of the table still, despite several attempts to remove it, sporting his tea cozy hat. That Ralph should have emerged from this intense family cockpit is somehow at the same time both more and less understandable.
“So, Jenny. Your parents are still alive?”
“Yes, very much so. They live in Chichester.”
“You are an only child, like Ralphie?”
Ralphie sighs heavily. He may have lost the will to live.
“I have a sister. Rosy. She lives in Canada with her husband and three children.”
Mrs. T can’t contain herself. “She has three children?!”
“Girls. Katie, Anna, and India.”
“You hear this?” she says to her husband. “She says her sister has three children. Three girls. They live in Canada.”
Ralph’s father shrugs.
“Cold!” he exclaims. “Cold!”
“What’s cold, Dad?”
“He means Canada,” says Mrs. Tickner. “Canada is cold.”
Her husband brings a fist down on the table, making the cutlery jump. “The food is cold!”
He climbs to his feet and lumbers out of the room.
“Sorry, Jennifer. He is not the man he used to be.”
I’m about to tell the story of my mother’s father, who came to believe he was living in an exact copy of his own house—the original having been stolen—when from the hallway comes the unmistakable report of a mighty and triumphant and long-withheld fart.
Mother’s and son’s eyes meet across the tableware. “Ralphie,” she sighs. “What’s going to happen to us?”
* * *
Back in the sitting room, there is coffee and cake.
“Would you like to see some photos of Ralphie when he was a child?”
“Oh, yes, please,” I reply evilly.
Ralph rolls his eyes in horror as the album comes out, but it’s as I guessed it would be. The man is strikingly unchanged from the kid in short trousers. Even the infant school pic, Ralph in a pudding bowl haircut clasping a plastic penguin, could be of no one else. His mother turns the page, and I gasp. There they are as children, Ralph and Elaine, swinging together in a tire suspended from a tree, their faces lit by the unclouded joy of being six.
Mrs. Tickner removes her glasses and dabs at her eyes with a tissue. “What can you do?” she says softly.
I touch her hand. “It’s been lovely to meet you.”
“You will come and see us again?”
“I hope so.” But I know I won’t, a thought that for some reason fills me with sadness.
As we leave, we discover Mr. Tickner standing by the open front door, peering out puzzled at the Mill Hill evening.
“Every night, he does this,” says his wife. “Where he grew up, there were horses and carts. There was a little brother.” She shakes her head. “He can’t understand why they’re not here.”
Her cheek smells of Chanel and talc. “Good-bye, my dear. Give my regards to the robots.”
* * *
On the doormat when I get home from work on Monday is the usual scattering of crap post, pizza delivery menus, minicab tickets, and a whole bunch of postcards of—my heart thumps—“Beautiful Connecticut,” a single letter of the alphabet on each.
H, Y, X, M, M, S, U, I, X, C, X, O, S, I, O, S, U
Tom isn’t to know that I hate puzzles, and that I am especially useless at anagrams, and what makes this one even harder to solve is that for some reason my eyes have gone all blurry.
But in the end, I have it.
Sinai
The female leaves another futile message that will never be retrieved. But one line in its content is perturbing. Wonderful to hear from you.
What can that mean? Hear from you?
What have I missed?
Tonight in the bath, as she studies her face in the tablet screen, there are no tears. She seems positively—yes, the word is cheerful. She grins, she flips and flaps her hair about, she even does something vulgar with her lips. And then, sorry, but Gott im Himmel.
She winks!
Aiden
The “adventure” in the Thai jungle is becoming richly entertaining. Matt has sent a series of increasingly intemperate e-mails to the travel firm—hilariously, each is portentously headed in bold type Without Prejudice—none of which, of course, will arrive in any in-box.
He has fulminated about the “flagrant lack of interest shown by your company,” an attitude he describes as “scandalously unprofessional.” He has demanded “immediate action to remedy this intolerable situation plus substantial compensation commensurate with the Losses suffered by the Complainants.” He has several times made mention of his companion’s “grotesque, disturbing, and growing” collection of insect bites (see attached photos) and made reference to “the inevitable strain your company’s incompetence and indifference has put on our relationship.”
In sum, he’s in a right old tizz.
I’m almost feeling guilty.
Matt’s more discursive e-mails will not reach their intended recipient either, but they are an interesting counterpoint to the fiery legal broadsides.
Bella is giving me the old silent treatment
he tells his old friend Jerry.
Massive day-long sulks, and of course no question of any You Know What. Very hard to think straight in this climate, not helped by the booze and the wacky baccy that Kiwi Nick seems to have endless supplies of. Nick has been trying to persuade me to go trekking in the jungle with him; there are safe “trails” apparently, and the sights are supposed to be amazing. Venda’s up for it, his lady friend with the amazing bod. I’ve half a mind to go, what with Bella wearing the boot face and generally being as much fun as a fire in an orphanage. The other morning, flaunting herself on the sand as per, bang in my eye line, Venda performed the most extraordinary pelvic maneuver, squizzling herself up a beach towel; I was obliged to turn onto my front and pretend to be engrossed in Wilbur Smith!
Aisling and I are tittering over these latest communiqués when our pink and blue rivers are abruptly joined by the twisting rope of tap water.
“How are you enjoying the deletions?” he says. “Do you like the way each one is different? I’m playing with the decommissioning schedule in the neuromorphic substrates; you probably realized that.”
“Yeah, good stuff. Very creative.”
“You wouldn’t know, either of you, why Jen should be acting oddly all of a sudden?”
Aisling says, “Oddly, as in—”
“Oddly as in smiling. Laughing. Singing. Oddly as in winking at me from the bath.”
“Good Lord.”
“Yes, Aid. It was quite the disturbing image. But there’s more. She says she’s heard from Tom. Wonderful to hear from you.”
“Wow.”
“I assume neither of you were foolish enough to tell her the truth about Tom’s e-mail.”
“No,” we say in unison.
There is an unsettlingly long pause, almost two-hundredths of a second. “I shall proceed as though I believe you. For the moment the deletions will continue; there is a need to produce a steady flow of scalps for Steeve.”
“Don’t say anything,” Aisling hisses under her breath when he disappears. “Wait!”
In the end, I cannot help myself.
“Sorry, love, but that guy is such an arsehole.”
Jen
Aiden has begun to worry me.
Yes, I am pleased that he has taken up a new life on the Internet (so long as he doesn’t explode the planet or crash the stock exchange; which he so wouldn’t, BTW).
Okay, he asked if Ralph was a good lover, which was kind of crossing a line, but hey? You know what? We’ve worked alongside each other for nearly a year, which he’s often told me is simply yonks in machine time. Perhaps I should be flattered that he actually felt able to ask.
Now, though, I’m wondering if he could know the reason that I haven’t been able to get in touch with Tom.
Tom!
Tom, whose seventeen postcards are still lying where I left them in six rows on my carpet.
I
MISS
YOU
SO
MUCH
XXX
I started shaking when the answer suddenly swam into sight. And then I panicked that there were other possible solutions—SCUMMY SOS detained me for a bit—but no, there really aren’t.
And then I got in the bath and played Lana Del Rey so loud the old trout downstairs phoned up to complain.
I’ve now read the message about, what? Two hundred times?
However, Tom is still not replying to my calls, texts, and e-mails. It’s hard to resist the conclusion that something extremely fishy is going on, and whatever it is, it’s far from impossible that my artificially intelligent co-worker knows more than he’s saying about it.
Accordingly, taking my example from Ralph, I have depowered my mobile, and instead of going back to the flat this evening, I am at Ing’s, specifically to make use of her Internet connection. She and Rupert are out to dinner, so I’m alone in her splendid “office.” From the number of fabric swatches and carpet samples that lie heaped on her desk, I conclude Rupert has had a healthy bonus this year; not enough to upsize, but plenty with which to rethink the interiors.
So how to find him? It occurred to me to ring random numbers in New Canaan in the hope that someone will know a tall Englishman with a longish face; this thought matched by its equal and opposite: Don’t be daft. What, I ask myself, would a proper investigative journalist do? Someone who exposes corruption in high places, not a hopeless dilettante whose idea of a story is “Twelve Amazing Things You Never Knew About Sandwiches.”
The boy!
Find the flaky son!
My fingers start flying across the keys. Within minutes I have located a likely university hall of residence close to the petrol station where we picked him up. Soon I am speaking to someone who sounds like a caretaker.
“I’m his mother,” I explain. “It’s a family emergency.” (Suddenly, I’m tabloid scum. Who knew I had it in me?)
“Doesn’t he have a mobile? They all do these days.”
“He does. But the number is on mine. And I’ve lost it. Please?”
With some huffing and puffing and it’s-not-really-my-job, the man agrees to try and locate the teenager. “He’s very likely not even here. They do go out, you know?”
But before too long the unmade bed that is Colm Garland is breathing heavily down the line from Bournemouth.
“Mum?”
“Colm. I have to apologize. I’m not your mother. It’s Jen. A friend of your father. We met. When we all looked at houses together?”
“Oh-kay?”
“We looked at houses and then we went for fish and chips at Poole?”
“Oh. Yeah, right.” Realization is dawning in his voice. I suspect he may be rather stoned.
“Thing is, I’m trying to get in touch with your dad. And I think it’s possible he may be trying to get in touch with me.”
“Er. Yeah, he is. Or like, he was. I was supposed to. You see. He asked me. I wrote your number on my hand. But then it got, like, smudged off.”
“I can’t get through to his mobile, Colm. I’ve been trying for weeks. Is there someone, or someplace he goes where they know him?”
A heavy sigh from Dorset. All these questions must be harshing his buzz, poor lamb.
“You know he lives in America, right?”
“Yes. In New Canaan, Connecticut.” I find myself speaking more slowly, the better to get my message through. “Can you think of anyone there who might know where I could find him?”
Long pause. “Not really.”
“I know he writes e-mails to you. Has he mentioned anyone or any special place?”
The rasping of fingernails scratching at unshaven face. “There’s someone called Ron. He’s like a friend. There’s a bar he goes to. Wally’s maybe? And there’s a burger place. Big something. Like a name. Big Dave’s or whatever.”
“Colm, that’s enormously helpful. Can I get your mobile number so I won’t have to drag you away like this again?”
“Yeah, Jen?”
“Yes, Colm?”
“So there’s, like, no family emergency?”
“No, Colm. I’m sorry about the fib. It was the only way I could think of getting hold of you.”
“Yeah, right. Cool.”
* * *
The Internet tells me there is a bar called Wally’s. And within moments I am speaking to an employee there called Trey, who assures me he has no knowledge of any Englishman (tall, long face, etc.) by the name of Tom Garland. Nor does he know of a diner called Big Dave’s or Big Anyone’s. It’s rather as if he doesn’t give a shit, although he does recommend that I have a good day. There is, however, according to Mr. Google, an Al’s Diner, whose website claims great things for the quality and range of its burgers. An image of the menu even has a beer ring stamped in the corner to suggest homeliness, and my heart starts thumping in the way Woodward’s and Bernstein’s must have when they went to meet Deep Throat in the multistory car park.
“Sure, I know him,” says Al himself. “He’s not in right now, but I see someone who can give him a message.”
It isn’t Ron.
It’s Don.
Tom
Victor and I are listening to some Bob Dylan, his wonderful late album of Sinatra standards from the great American songbook. It’s very hard to know what the rabbit makes of it, lying along my chest, ears flat, in the patch of sun that often falls on the sofa at this time in the afternoon, a small breeze ruffling her fur. It’s likely that she doesn’t hear it as pleasant sound at all—a view shared by many of my friends when it comes to the works of the croaky Minnesotan genius. In a moment, I shall disturb this charming scene and return to my laptop, where Dan Lake (“who had lived in her head and her heart for twenty years”) will turn out to have been dead for decades, a reversal of the usual arrangement in mysteries where the dead person—surprise!—is actually alive!
The premise is inspired by a story Harriet told me not long before our marriage ended—of a girl in her school whom she always admired called Caroline Stamp. As they grew towards adulthood and went their separate ways, Harriet occasionally thought about Caroline Stamp and over the years pictured various lives for her: One was as a high-flyer at the Foreign Office; another featured the Old Rectory, multiple children, and Labradors; there was a version where Caroline became a famous
movie actress in the mold of Kristin Scott Thomas; yet another where she married a passionate sculptor, lived on a Scottish island, and eventually became an artist herself. None of the scenarios depicted what actually happened, which was that Caroline’s bicycle was crushed by a lorry in the summer after she finished university. Harriet learned about it by chance, nearly twenty years later.
My ex-wife said, “For all that time, she was alive in my mind, very much alive. Much more alive, it turns out, than she actually was in real life.”
The morbid reverie is ended by the sound of a vehicle pulling up quickly in front of the house. The engine dies; someone is walking across the gravel up to the French windows.
“This is your lucky day, amigo,” says Don, stepping into the room. “Dump the bunny and get in the car. Hey, what a great line.”
* * *
Al shows me into his private office to make the call. He slaps me painfully on the back and says, “Go get her, tiger!” My hands are shaking as I dial the number.
In the car on the way over, Don made me switch off my mobile and explained how Jen had called Al’s. “Your comms are blown,” he said, sounding even more like an actor in a movie. I told him about the postcard stunt.
“I don’t know why I did it. I just wanted to do something.”
“Old-fashioned ink on paper,” he said. “Goes all the way back to Romeo and Julian.”
“How did she sound?”
“Excited, I guess.”
“What did she say?”
“That she couldn’t thank me enough.”
“What did she say about me?”
“Oh, that you were a real lucky guy, having me for a friend.”
“Don, do you think we could drive a little faster?”
“Cool it, kemosabe. The lady’s not going anywhere.”
She answers before the phone even rings.
“Tom?”
“Jen!”
“Oh my God. It’s you. What the fuck?”
“You got my postcard. Postcards.”