Lights on. Again. Hated the darkness when I was a child and now here I am, back there again. Yet another walk to a small, cracked basin in an adjoining space in this air-conditioned prison cell. A route that is becoming a circadian rhythm all of its own. Sharp, piercing light of a different kind. Shooting out from a horizontal tube above a small mirror. Reminding me that all I am is my father’s son. The same corrugated contoured lines at the eyes. The same greying temples. The same elastic, leathery facial skin. The same paunch at which – every few months – I stare and resolve to remove. But I won’t. It’s a downward slide and I can’t turn the clock back. Can’t recover that feeling from when I looked a lot less like him. From the times when I felt I was made of different DNA. From when I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes. From when I was going to be incomparable to him. Desperate to sleep and – at least for now – relegate regret to the sub-conscious.
The floor is solid not solely because it is easier to maintain, but because people like me would wear tracks in a carpet. Outside it’s getting darker. A fog is draping itself over the canyons of the city. The tops of the buildings are now invisible. But their inhabitants will soon witness the sun rise before me. And I’m jealous of them for that. Time, in this time zone moves painfully slowly. Dripping languidly, like Dali represented it. At least during the seemingly endless hours of the first few nights.
I put some music on. Nothing specific, just a shuffling Hobson’s Choice through a never-ending mobile library. The Durutti’s ‘Otis’, ‘We’re All Going To Die’, ‘Dress Sexy for My Funeral’ … they don’t intend to, but they just depress me more. Music, once so important, only underscores my mood and taunts me with its messages:
‘Said somethin’ I did not mean to say … all just came out the wrong way.’
He was right all those years ago; nothing lasts forever.
Tomorrow will be a bit easier. But perhaps only a bit…
PART ONE
BONFIRE OF THE PROFUNDITIES
Chapter One
October 2014. Shanghai, China
This was a watershed moment. Finally. He glances again at the words written on the folded page of the black A5 Moleskin journal. It might have been three days since the ink dried; perhaps even four. He can’t remember actually composing the sentences, but he does feel a new clarity of thought that couldn’t have been much in evidence when pen touched paper. At its best, Joseph Miller’s sleep pattern is merely polyphasic, no better. He stares at the large clock in the corner of the room. It’s a reproduction copy of an antique, its long hands apparently static, its elaborately enamelled second hand the only indication that it’s still working. Time, for Joseph Miller, is slowing to the point where it feels like the wind-up key has gone missing. Days are like weeks. This isn’t supposed to be the case. At his age, people lament the increasing pace of their lives, conscious of time appearing to accelerate as it runs relentlessly away from their younger selves. For him, it feels like it’s gradually grinding to a halt. Nevertheless, rereading the words prompts a fleeting focus. He has decided on a task that initially seemed beyond him. A sense of responsibility has returned, though. He knows he has to make the best of this clarity before it evaporates in the polluted haze.
‘Mr Miller? Mr Miller; is everything okay sir?’
Joseph Miller glances to his left, towards the origin of a sound that has softly punctured the silence.
‘Mr Miller, your office in Scotland has been trying to reach you.’
It’s a lovely sound, Joseph concedes; female, youthful, life-affirming, Californian: everything he isn’t. He finds it strange that someone from the hotel is calling through a closed door. Housekeeping normally knock once and then just barge in. Why didn’t reception call the room’s phone to let him know about any messages? He glances at the telephone. Its red light is flashing. He also catches sight of envelopes that have been slid under a door he doesn’t even recall locking. It seems likely that the voice out in the hall has been despatched to ensure that this particular guest hasn’t fled; or died.
‘Mr Miller?’
The sound entices him towards the door as if it comes from a siren. He knows the dangers that lie on the other side but he can’t help himself.
The beguiling voice won’t stop: ‘Mr Miller, your colleagues wanted to wish you a happy birthday … and, on behalf of Doubletree Hotels, I’d like to as well.’
‘Ah’m sorry. Just a minute, eh?’ Joseph Miller clears up the various little brown bottles and their scattered pharmaceutical contents. He scans his reflection. Mirror, mirror on the wall; who’s that human car crash looking back at me. Not the fucking fairest in the land, that’s for certain.
He pulls on a white t-shirt. It has a dried coffee stain on it; he can’t remember that happening. He yanks a pair of black Levi’s on. His jaw is maybe a week of rough terrain. He might’ve looked acceptable if he was a mature, touring rock star. Despite his various hang-ups and anxieties, Joseph had always managed to look younger than his age. Until this last year, when the grey has descended down the sides of his head like a sudden avalanche. His skin, his teeth, and – bizarrely – his fingernails have all degenerated as if his body was a squalid apartment recently acquired by Peter Rachman. He turns on the cold tap, uses the water to pat down wild, freeform-jazz hair and sighs deeply.
‘I’m sorry if I disturbed you Mr. Miller.’ The entrancing voice belongs to a ludicrously healthy-looking young woman. Her naturally blonde hair hangs to just beyond the shoulders of her black business suit. Her teeth beam out, like xenon headlights, from a perfectly shaped mouth. Piercing blue eyes shine down at Joseph. She wears heels, making her taller than him. Her dazzlingly white shirt is open just enough to reveal about an inch of carefully constructed cleavage. She introduces herself as Megan Carter, Guest Relations Manager, but in a way that suggests everyone at the hotel is a manager of something. He notices that the description on her lapel badge puts the words in a different order. She seems nervous, as if this is her first day in the role. She is holding a large, wicker basket of fruit wrapped in cellophane. A purple bow with ‘Congratulations’ written in flowery silver script encircles it. In her other hand she holds a sheaf of notes and some envelopes. She hands both to him at the same time.
‘I’m sorry; we didn’t know it was your birthday, Mr Miller.’
‘How would ye have known?’ This sounds a bit harsher than he intended. ‘Ah’m sorry, I’m just a bit … y’know … buggered.’ He addresses her confusion. ‘Tired. A bit of jet-lag still.’
She smiles. He doesn’t reciprocate. It’s been so long; he can’t really remember how to without it appearing unnatural.
A few languid seconds pass in which neither of them speaks or moves. To the young Manager of Guest Relations, this seems like about an hour. Her experience of unusual or difficult guest situations is limited. She has only been a Manager of Guest Relations for a month – promoted internally to respond to an increasingly waspish clientele. The major World Expo of 2010 had opened Shanghai up to almost seventy-five million visitors during its six months, and The Doubletree Group had carefully plotted their customer demographics. Mainstream Western advertising campaigns followed and this particular hotel had boomed.
Megan Carter considers her training. Generally, residents only lightly brush against her honed, have-a-nice-day persona. She imagines they go about their business without much of a thought about her, save perhaps for a grudging acknowledgement that Americans really do perfect the art of service. A subtle and fleeting interaction: that is her purpose in life and – right now – that suits her just fine. Her polished and manicured veneer conceal a recent past that involves an abusive and criminal husband, his religious zealot of a mother and her own uninterested don’t-come-running-to-me-when-it-all-turns-to-shit father.
She married the man almost six years ago. Madison Megan Carter and Vincent Antonio Sevicci: childhood sweethearts; Prom King and Queen of Albany High School. The façade of the American Dream was celebra
ted in front of family, friends and community in the beautiful little Epworth Chapel of the Holy Father. It was a crisp November day, which would go down in history as the same day her country elected its first black President. Shifting planes of history and optimistic dreams for many, but not all. Before the formal wedding photographs had been returned to them, her new husband had given her a heavily bruised eye socket and a broken clavicle. She’s always been a klutz was the generally accepted analysis, following her complicit explanation that she’d fallen down the steep stairs leading to the basement in their new home. She had been blinkered. Love can do that to an idealistic young woman, she now reasons, to help her dismiss the distressing idea that her own hubris brought these troubles upon her head. She had known he was connected, but the Italians always looked after their women, or so she thought. For months after the wedding, Vinnie and his crew had met in their basement. She acknowledged the over-the-top respect they gave her when she took pizza and beer down to them. But also heard Vinnie’s voice, followed by their loud forced laughter, as she climbed back up the stairs. She found it hard to ignore these hard edges like the other wives seemed to. They were paid for their silence in furs and jewels and dollars, but these things held little interest for her. She didn’t want to be kept like a prized show dog. She wanted her own identity, to be able to follow her own dreams as well as the ones she had once believed they both shared.
She put up with the cocaine and booze-fuelled batterings, the unpredictable behaviour and the suspected – but unproven – sleeping around. Just over a year into this penury, when she announced that she was pregnant, her paranoid husband Vinnie kicked her repeatedly in the stomach, convinced the baby growing inside her wasn’t his. He was a psychopath. It was barely conceivable that he’d been able to hide this throughout their high school courtship. But then hiding things was his speciality.
‘Listen to me, honey. If you don’t get gone, you’ll be gone.’ – The simple, but intuitive words from an experienced nurse, well versed in reading between the lines of those presenting with such distinctive body bruising. Vinnie had only left her bedside to go to the toilet but that one sentence was enough.
Losing the baby was the final straw. For it to make any kind of sense at all, it needed to be a full stop, too. Madison took a cache of his hidden money and, with the covert help of a close, trusted colleague from the bank where she had previously worked, buried it in a new personal account. Together they then manufactured a new identity, new papers and sufficient falsified references for her to get work and temporary overseas residency status, all without Vinnie even conceiving that it was being planned right under his Roman nose.
And then, one day, when Vinnie and his crew were concluding a deal in Miami, she just vanished.
The ‘made’ men Vinnie’s crew answered to initially suspected a hit from a rival, but civilians – especially wives – had always been off limits. What betrayed her was the discovery that the money was missing – Vinnie had thought it was still buried under layers of ash in the solum of the basement. Even now she shudders when she recalls excavating those substantial sums without his knowledge, and shakes when she imagines him destroying the fabric of their house, wishing it was her face.
Maybe he’s dead by now. The deep family values that underpin organised crime extend only so far. If some of that money was payments up the chain, honour wouldn’t necessarily save him. It is a complex consideration for her: she doesn’t ever want to see him again, but that doesn’t mean she wants him dead.
Over four years – and a few detours – later and here she is in Shanghai, using her middle name as her first. The Pacific Ocean separates her from a past existence, and she will never go back.
Chapter Two
June 1986. Benidorm, Spain
‘Ah’m fucking totally sick ae this Bobby.’
‘Whit, aw the sparkling conversation an’ jokey repartee? How could anybody be sick ae that?’
‘If ah wanted constant bitin’, cuttin’-edge sarcasm, ah’d fly back tae Ayrshire.’
‘Well, maybe it’s time up for it here then.’ Bobby Cassidy said this under his breath but he was certain Lizzie King, his girlfriend of four years, had heard him. If she had, she wasn’t acknowledging it, though. More times than not these days, it felt to Bobby like they were an old married couple. Being ignored by her wasn’t so out of character in that context.
Bobby and Lizzie had been through a lot together since they had met back in Kilmarnock in 1982. Lizzie had been instrumental in setting Bobby’s fledgling DJ career on its tottering way. Her eighteenth birthday party had been the first booking Bobby had taken in pursuing his dream of establishing a mobile DJ business with his then best friend, Joey Miller. She had been a shoulder – and an emotional release – for him during the surreal times of summer 1982, and for that he’d always be grateful. But their now overfamiliarity – a result of living and working long, tiring hours in claustrophobic proximity during the annual Benidorm summer seasons – was taking its toll on both of them.
They had headed to Spain four years earlier, both seeking escape, but for different reasons. Bobby’s intention was simply to shrug off the pressures of life in the aftermath of his dad’s untimely death and his brother’s stressful return from the Falklands War. Lizzie had wanted to get away from an overcrowded council flat and the factory worker’s destiny that seemed predetermined for her. She wanted to live her life away from daily family arguments about whether the rent would get paid before the bookies that month; about whether her unemployed father might eventually find something more productive to do with his life than impregnate Lizzie’s step-mum. Christ Almighty, if reproduction was a specialist subject, Frank King would win University Challenge as a solo entrant. She lived with well-meaning people, but their life choices and the brutal steel of Thatcherism kept them struggling joylessly. Lizzie had only been eighteen then but she was already worn down by it all. She might not have had unrealistic dreams of being an air hostess, but Lizzie still wanted to experience a more colourful part of the world, even if it was one that seemed to have been transplanted from more familiar places in England; Blackpool wi’ sunshine an’ a wider choice ae sexually transmitted diseases being the way Benidorm had been described to her by a friend who’d gone out the year before them. That was enough though. It offered opportunities for personal development that none of those Tory, slave-labour redundancy displacement schemes could compete with.
Lizzie and Bobby had travelled out together for a few weeks in August 1982, and then returned for the whole season the following year. They worked long, tiring, but largely enjoyable hours: Lizzie as a junior rep for Twenty’s and Bobby as an assistant bartender. Like everyone else, though, they also indulged like it was the last days of Caligula. Bobby’s close friend, Hamish May, had come out sporadically – a week here, a long weekend there; but despite Bobby’s attempts, Joey Miller – his best mate since schooldays – had always declined the offer. So he simply stopped asking. Lizzie liked Joey, but she could see that he had become a constant reminder of the things Bobby was fleeing: in particular his depressed and unhinged brother, Gary, who was unable to comprehend the madness of a war that he had survived; and Hettie, his younger sister – an insistent moral conscience at a time in his life when he wanted to act without such constraints.
Bobby Cassidy and Lizzie King ambled aimlessly along the Playa de Levante. Bobby surreptitiously checked his watch. He desperately wanted to head back to the bar. He had two thousand pesetas on Argentina to beat England in the World Cup quarter-final. Hamish – or Hammy as he preferred to be known – would be waiting for him, the San Miguels lined up. It felt to Bobby like he and Lizzie were already on their last waltz around the floor, but still he was reluctant to put the relationship out of its misery. If the end had to come, it would have to be Lizzie King that put the pillow over its face.
Even this late, the sun having long since departed, holidaymakers still lay on the gentle sandy slope of the beach. They we
re a mix of those trying to look like Madonna – both the young New York singer and the religious icon – and Andrew Ridgeley from Wham!. String vests predominated. Older men wore them because they always had; younger men because they were de rigueur. Some rebels favoured white espadrilles. Others bore the scalded, flaking signs of having lain far too long defying the big orange orb to try harder, as if daring it to fully char their pale, blueish British skin. Some, on the other hand, looked like they had just turned up, perhaps preparing to remain on the beach in the absence of any alternative roofed structure being available to them. More often than not sleeping under the Spanish stars was more pragmatism than romanticism.
Bobby and Lizzie strolled amongst those who may have been considering these options – as they had done on many occasions over the last three years – observing them in silence.
Finally Lizzie broke it. ‘Don’t be so bloody awkward, we need tae talk,’ she said. ‘Ah’ve barely seen ye for a fortnight. We’ve got stuff we need tae think aboot.’
The Man Who Loved Islands Page 2