“I don’t know what a playscript is,” he said.
Right enough, he wouldn’t. Nor did he have any curiosity, to learn. But I explained what I wanted, speaker and dialogue and no possibility of confusion; and he nodded and began, so crisp and fast that I missed the first dozen words because I didn’t have the dictaphone switched on yet.
“Me: Hullo, Jonty, I was waiting for you. You: Of course you were, you always are. Smartass. Me: Sit down and drink. You: No more now, thanks. Luke, you won’t believe this, but I’ve got married...”
And so on, maybe half a day and half a night of talking; and yes, he did compress it into a couple of hours, and it was hard to get him to stop long enough for me to change tapes, and my hands were trembling by then so I nearly made a hash of it; and that was only with the strain of hearing him do this, I wasn’t trying to make sense of the words any more. That would come later, with the transcript.
Except, right at the end, because it was the end my mind went back to, unpicking the final few words from the continuous seam of Luke’s recital. They were my own words, mostly: “‘Bye, then, Luke. And thanks a lot, that’s a real help. I’ll tell you about it sometime, yeah? And I’ll bring Sue over to meet you soon.” And he’d said “No,” and I’d said “Yes, I will,” and I could just hear myself laughing as I said it, defying the angel. And then I’d said, “Tara, then,” and that was that; and those were the last words I said to anyone in my whole mind, except of course for whatever I said to the mystery guy or possibly gal I picked up and drove in the wrong direction; and oh, it felt strange sitting there with that great hole torn in my memory, and trying to darn it with stitches taken from my own words that I had to hear from someone else, that I didn’t remember saying and didn’t understand.
o0o
No more R & R, though I did try. I spent another day with him, writing down all the taped conversation like a playscript: which was exactly how it felt, giving myself lines I had no memory of having said. Doing it in capitals and different colours, his lines in red and mine in green, for clarity; and then trying to compact all the information into a witness statement in my head.
Wishing for once that he’d been a normal human man, afflicted with normal human curiosity. Luke didn’t ask questions, so all I could do was infer as much as possible from the questions I’d asked him, and the few facts I’d volunteered.
But the sun-time, the fun time was over. It rained all day, and the rain drummed like impatient fingers on the aluminium skin of the Airstream, and I couldn’t relax. And I was straining my eyes trying to work in the gloom in there, no lights, not even a candle to help me; and I couldn’t concentrate anyway, what with Luke either sitting out there by the sodden stones of his firepit while the rain ran off his hunched back to pool in his pockets or else coming inside streaming water and standing to drip dry in a corner, saying nothing, watching me.
I was on the verge of giving up, of leaving. I wanted to do that, I was abruptly hungry to move, to leave this drained bucolic idyll and relocate in some kind of active life again. If I’d been Luke, or simply myself but as hard as Luke, sharing that one quality, it would have been easy: on my feet and out, into the car and off with no words, even, no farewells. He’d done that to me before.
I couldn’t do it to him, though. Leaving Luke I’d always found next to impossible, until he explicitly told me to go. I should have been better at it by now, but this was one last late hangover from my teenage days, as if because Luke didn’t change therefore neither could I; as if with him I would always be that difficult adolescent so clumsy in his timings, often hanging around long after a welcome was worn out simply because he didn’t know how to say goodbye.
Acquired social skills shrivelled and died, in a place where they could expect little use and no respect. I sat with my tapes and my pad and pen, scowling in the gloom, wishing for just a little more strength of purpose, just enough to get me on my feet and my tongue moving. Thanks, Luke, I’ll be off now—that would be ample. A perfect compromise: less than I felt I owed him, but more than he would want or expect, my thanks no use to him and the information unnecessary.
So little, and yet I couldn’t manage even that. I wanted out of there, sure, but my desire to leave just wasn’t quite enough on its own with no target ahead of me, nothing to shoot at, nowhere to go.
I might have stayed another day, two days, overwhelmed by apathy; I might easily have stayed to the end of the week, until the hire car had to be returned. But there were suddenly figures moving through the rain as I lifted my eyes for the hundredth time to the smeared window. Kids they were to me, teens and early twenties: half a dozen of them in black and khaki with half-shaven heads or dreadlocks; thin beards or acne or facial tattoos; many piercings with silver through the ears, the eyebrows, the nose and lips and no doubt otherwhere I couldn’t see.
They came single file down into the hollow, and straight to the Airstream door. Opened it without knocking and filed in, shedding jackets to the floor and squeezing water out of their hair, and Luke said, “I’ve been waiting for you,” and as ever I believed him.
As did they, nodding and grunting and sitting in a group at his feet, almost, gazing up at him with something close to awe; and I remembered that so well, wasn’t sure that I’d lost it yet.
But their glances at me were something other, sideways and suspicious, laden with questions: who’s he, Luke, what’s he doing here? Do we need him, do we want him? Can we lose him?
And they made it easy for me, they were the trigger to my latent charge: a second reason not to stay, beyond my own discomfort, they had me up and easy, collecting my stuff under one arm and, “Thanks a lot, Luke, you’ve been great. I’d better be off now, I’ve got to do something with all of this, it’s no good just sitting here tailchasing in my head. I’ll be back soon, though. Soon as I have some answers, I’ll let you know. And I’ll bring Suzie next time, okay?”
“No,” he said, as I’d known he would; and I laughed, quite unforced, and made a gesture that meant yes I will, and you can lump it, mate, and went out into the rain shielding my hard-worked written pages beneath my jacket as I dashed up the slope towards the car with never a look behind me.
o0o
Bumping down the track, feeling as though I were passing through a curtain, a veil of rain into another world, I thought perhaps I wasn’t ready to leave shelter yet, though more than ready to leave Luke.
A few miles down the valley was a village, with what might have been the last classic red phone-box left in England; and they obviously loved their phone-box, or someone among them did, because when I went in there was a square of carpet beneath my feet, a vase of fresh spring flowers on the shelf, directories clean and complete and a telephone unvandalised and working.
I phoned my mother; or at least I phoned my mother’s house, one more building where I used to have the right of residence but which I couldn’t possibly call home.
Surprise, she wasn’t in. It was a machine that answered me, her changeable voice high and bright and artificially cheery: “Sorry, darlings, I simply can’t be had at the moment. Leave a message if you want, so I know you’ve been thinking of me; but you know what I’m like, don’t hang around waiting for a reply. If you need me, phone again...”
And then a long, long string of beeps, so many I thought maybe the tape would run out before her messages did; many friends, it seemed, wanted her to know their thoughts. Nothing new there, then.
At last the longer tone, dash not dot, and I could have added my ten penceworth; but what point? I had little enough to say, and she wasn’t in any case there to hear. She might be anywhere. So many messages, she might have been away for weeks already; but that meant nothing. Sometimes she didn’t come home for months on end.
Love you, Mum I could have said, and didn’t. Never had.
I just listened to the silence for a moment, thinking of the tape going uselessly round and round, and then hung up nice and quiet, not to disturb it.
> And didn’t know what to do now, where to go; so I got into the car and drove without plan or purpose, and in the end old habit or some subconscious intent made the decision for me, because when I came to the first crucial junction I was already in the right-hand lane and indicating before I thought about it, and making that turn brought me round to face east, heading back to the city.
o0o
I let that stand, didn’t fight it; but didn’t hurry either. Again, on a more domestic scale, nowhere to go. Foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests; but the son of my mother...?
I could seek out a friend, I supposed, beg a bed for the night. But all my friends now were Carol’s friends too, most had been her friends first, and I wasn’t any too certain of my welcome. Nick Beatty would be all right, I thought; my best mate for many years, he’d been best man at the wedding, so I could depend on him; only the last I remembered, Nick had got himself a new girlfriend. Whether they were still together or not, either way that could be awkward. And he’d be full of questions, he’d want to talk all night, and I just wasn’t up to that.
Better to gold-card it, I thought, at least for tonight. Find a hotel, somewhere big and concrete, comfortable and anonymous. Tomorrow I’d go to the bank and have a talk with someone, find out just what kind of credit stood behind the card, and just where it had come from. Go into work too, talk to one of the senior partners: discover how I stood, in what bad odour with my former colleagues and employers, whether there was any chance of my being taken back on the strength. After some delay, perhaps. I could offer them that. Physically I might feel okay now, but a man with his recent memory missing hardly counted as well enough to work.
Which reminded me: one other thing I had to do, and the sooner the better. Tomorrow, my soul said, do it tomorrow, with everything else; but that was chicken-hearted. Good sense and good manners both said to do it tonight.
Which was maybe another reason why I didn’t hurry back to town. Resolved on this, I’d still welcome any chance to put it off for another half an hour, another ten minutes, anything at all that I could fit in between this and that.
So I drove back across country and stopped to eat en route, as much meat as a pub could provide and a single cautious pint to wash it down; and picked a hotel in the city centre with a car park underneath, parked and checked in, getting a better room than I was paying for in exchange for a sight of the card; and had a long shower and a careful shave before I reluctantly dressed in those wrong-fitting, wrong-feeling and now dirty clothes again.
And it was still only half past ten, and no way could I persuade myself that it was too late tonight to do this. Try though I might, though I did.
So I drank a complimentary miniature of cognac for courage—not out of the balloon glass provided, just off with the bottle top and glug-glug, straight down my throat—and walked down four flights of stairs to the lobby, out into the street, left and then right and hullo Chinatown.
All along the busy length of it, until at last I came to a discreet door between two restaurants, a door surrounded by brass business plaques and overlit by a transom, Q’s brightly shining from its dark glass embrasure.
And hesitated one last time, and was pushed past by a handful of Chinese lads, arguing loudly and incomprehensibly. At least, I assumed they were arguing; but given the inherent tonality of the language, who could tell? Perhaps they had to sound like that, heated and abrasive, just to say what they wanted to say.
Suzie’s brother, I remembered, had been dragged to death, here we go round the mulberry city and you couldn’t get more heated and abraded than that; and I wondered why it had happened, and I wondered how brave Suzie was being, and how stupid. Whoever had done it, surely it had to be because her brother had got across them in business; and here she was carrying on her brother’s business, and I didn’t know if she’d even considered that they might come next after her.
In their hands, of course, the lads ahead of me carried their snooker cues, cased like instruments and just as precious.
I let their hurry draw me in its wake; trudged up the stairs as they ran ahead, so that I had barely reached Mr Han the Herbalist before I heard the club doors crashing open, crashing closed some distance still above my head.
Between the two, between the opening and the closing I heard a burst of laughter. Quarrel or not, then, what I’d heard had not been fighting talk. Just goes to show, I thought, going on, going up. Even on your own known territory, appearances tend to deceive; only cross a border—physical or cultural, linguistic, whatever—and you can’t trust your eyes to see straight nor your mind to interpret what they say they see. And the same, of course, for the other senses. Values shift, and reality shifts to accommodate them.
Here and now, my reality had undergone some shifts deeper than lingual. Epochal, almost. Walking in through the street door, I’d entered a world where I couldn’t even understand myself.
Walked up, and up again; came to the club doors and hesitated, and went on further up. To go in there would only be another delaying tactic at heart, whatever its result.
And so to the top, the door to Suzie’s flat, still labelled for dead Jack. I rang the bell, and waited; waited one minute, two, then tried again.
Tried knocking, in case the bell was hors de combat: first with knuckles, then with fists.
Nothing, no response; so that I did after all make my way back down to the club doors, and through them into the half-dark and the hard sounds of snooker, the soft voices and clinking, drinking noises of its players.
I went straight over to the bar, huffing with relief to see Lee serving, as he had been when Suzie brought me here. No doubt any other member of her staff would have known me, as he had; but not I them, and I was sick tired of having strangers claim me as friend, pupil, employee. Husband.
His moment of recognition came just a moment behind mine; I saw him startle, saw his eyes move sideways in his stiff head, and without looking around myself I had my chief, my only question answered. But I went on over to greet him anyway, and while I was saying hullo he was sucking air through his teeth, shaking his head, glancing that way again and then back to me.
“Wouldn’t like to be in your shoes, mate,” he said. “If you can walk and talk, you’re in big, big trouble.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
He didn’t answer, or not directly: just jerked his head expressively and said, “She’s over there.”
I turned at last and saw her, slim shadow moving among shadows, down the far end of the hall where no players were. She was standing with her back to us, bending and rising, picking balls out of pockets and setting them back in place. I made my way slowly towards her, hovering for a few seconds when that way was blocked by a player crouching low, taking all the aisle’s width to make his shot.
She was filling a wooden triangle with reds, still hadn’t looked around to see me; I called out before I reached her, “Suzie?” on a rising note.
And she stiffened, and had to put a hand down suddenly to the baize surface of the table to catch herself, to hold herself up, it seemed; and it took a second or two of no movement from either one of us before she could turn her head to find me.
Once her eyes had fixed me, once she was focused she straightened and turned, to face me directly across a couple of metres’ distance. Cold and hostile she looked, holding herself up on her toes with every muscle tight, ready to jitter backwards if I made any move to come closer. This I hadn’t expected, and struggled to understand.
“You,” she said, and stopped. And tried again, forcing hard words through a tight throat, “You bastard, where the filthy fucking hell have you been?”
“I went to Luke,” I said.
“You went to Luke. Brilliant. You didn’t think to tell anyone, I suppose, or leave a note, or even phone, maybe, when you got there?”
“Luke hasn’t got a phone...”
“There are phones,” she said, and her voice was all breath and hiss now, she must be on
e of those people who only got quieter as they got angrier, “even in the bloody Lakes there must be phones. You could’ve made the effort. But you didn’t want me to know, did you? You lied to the hospital, you said you’d be staying at Carol’s when you signed out, they showed me the forms...”
“I did—”
“I even phoned Carol,” she said, with a vicious twist to the word, “and she was horrible, she laughed when I said that I’d lost you. But she said you weren’t there. So I tried your mother, I’ve tried and tried,” all those messages, I thought, “but she’s never there and she doesn’t call back. I’ve been right through your sodding address book, and none of your friends could help; and yes, I did think of Luke, but no one could help there either, could they? They don’t know where to find him, they said you’re dead secretive about that, you keep him to yourself...”
Not so; Luke kept himself to himself, more like. Didn’t want visitors, didn’t want to make friends or influence people except in the very limited range of his concerns. He’d taken me into his circle, yes, but always refused to let me expand it further.
“Suzie,” I said, “I didn’t lie to anyone. I did go to Carol’s, because that still felt like home; and when she turned me away, Luke was just a spur-of-the-moment thing, when I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.”
“You’re not supposed to go anywhere else,” she said, her voice cracking suddenly, “you’re supposed to come here. This is home. I told you that, I showed you...”
Home is where the hurt is, I thought, hearing it in her and seeing it now, underlying that dissolving anger; but I couldn’t help her there, I couldn’t give her anything but truth. “Doesn’t work that way,” I said, soft as I could manage. “You must know that. Home’s not an intellectual concept, it’s a feeling thing; and you can’t have feelings for a place you can’t remember. I can’t, at any rate.”
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