by Neil Cross
After leaving the army, he found a job training to repair lifts. He took a room in the Harold’s, a Headingley estate of back-to-back tenements. Laundry dried on lines strung across narrow streets.
Late November 1978. Beans on toast on his lap, watching The Two Ronnies with Ted and Dot, the couple with whom he lodged. Ted was off on the sick: emphysema. He wore Brylcreem and a grey cardigan with brown leather buttons. Dot’s hair was dyed black and lacquered into a beehive. As far as Will could tell, she was almost perfectly spherical. Will’s own crew cut had yet to grow out and, too short to style, it sprouted ragged and uneven at his nape and round the ears.
After tea, he stepped outside into the cold wind, turned up the fleecy collar and set off like Shackleton, hands buried in pockets, to meet his mates in the Faversham.
He stepped through the door into a burst of pub noise, blue smoke and moist body heat. The Faversham was crowded with university and polytechnic students. Greasy hair, National Health spectacles, military greatcoats. Hippies in tatty crushed velvet and greasy denim. Punks. It didn’t take much to qualify as a punk in 1978; short hair and drainpipes were enough to do it. But there was a preponderance of black, too. The occasional safety pin, a mohair sweater or two. One or two daring mohicans.
Tony was there, and Ian, and whoever else. (His memory was full of half-remembered Tonys and Ians.) They’d be moving to town later, where they would sit round the edge of a discothèque dance floor, supping pints and watching girls.
He’d been there perhaps half an hour when Kate arrived. She was in a group that gathered noisily at the bar, counting out change in their palms and yelling and laughing and pushing. Her hair was short and shone blue-black (she would cringe now, to think of it). She wore a black mohair sweater that slipped alternately from each shoulder.
Looking at her made Will hurt. He told the story often, in later, happier years: at Christmas and birthdays and on holidays. Honest to God. It was like being punched.
He snatched glimpses of her during breaks in the conversation. He followed her progress to the lavatory.
He resolved to follow her to the bar and stood, too abruptly, shaking the table. Not unkindly, he was told: fucking watch it, that was a full pint. And he was called a twat. But he didn’t hear. He clapped his hands and said: ‘Right.’
The bar was four deep and he had Bambi legs. It took some time to push in alongside her.
He said: ‘Can I get this one for you?’
She turned and considered him through narrowed eyes. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said: “I’ll buy the next one.”’
‘No thank you.’
She turned away. He didn’t move.
She clicked her tongue against her pallet, turned again. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Yes.’
(Chemistry, she would say, later. Pure pheromones. Two dogs in the street.)
‘With?’
‘Your name.’
She laughed. Her eyes crinkled. She told him.
‘And your phone number.’
‘I have a boyfriend.’
‘One day you might not.’
‘Well. If that day comes, you’ll have to ask me again.’
‘If that day comes I might.’
‘Don’t hold your breath.’
‘I won’t. What are you studying?’
‘Law.’
‘I’ll remember that.’
‘Why?’
‘So we’ll have something to talk about.’
He excused himself, bid her goodnight and walked away. It was the bravest thing he had ever done.
It was necessary to force his friends (swearing quietly through gritted teeth: Lads, just fuck off out of it. Please. Fucking hell.) through the pub doors. He exited only after shoving the last of them into the cold night. They went to a disco and, unlikely as he knew it to be, he kept an eye on the door all night, in case she walked in.
He suggested with great frequency that they drink in student pubs. His mates didn’t mind. They professed to hate students, but didn’t tire of student parties where they might be offered a joint by some undergraduate terrified of their petulant class antagonism.
Will was able to bump into Kate twice, sometimes three times a week. She wasn’t lying about the boyfriend. His name was Sam. He looked like Bryan Ferry’s rebellious younger brother and had what Will imagined to be the bearing of a radical poet.
Will found some classmates of Kate who, in exchange for a couple of pints of Tetley with a whiskey chaser, were happy to acquaint him with her timetable. They outlined campus geography for him and he waited for her after class one crisp morning in February. She saw him there, paused long enough to disengage from her companions, then hugged books to her breast and walked on.
He jogged a step or two in her wake, stopped. Called out to her.
She stopped, without turning.
He said: ‘Well?’
‘Well, what?’
‘Are you still going out with him?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Still?’
‘Still.’
‘Shame.’
Now she turned.
‘Why a shame?’
‘You’re too good for him.’
She laughed.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘What I said. You’re too good for him.’
‘But you’d like me to go out with you instead?’
‘Yes.’
‘So I’m not too good for you?’
He thrust his shaking hands in the tight denim pockets and set his weight on one leg.
‘Oh, you’re too good for me,’ he said. ‘You’re far too good for me. That’s the point. Why would I go to all this effort if you weren’t too good for me?’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Very smooth.’
‘I’m not being smooth. Look at me. Do I look smooth?’
He took his hands from his pockets.
‘See. I’m shaking.’
‘It’s cold.’
‘Not that cold. And my mouth is dry.’
‘You’re probably hungover.’
‘That too.’
She put her head to one side and regarded him from an oblique angle. By spring they were together.
Kate fell pregnant early the next year, 1980. They argued and separated. Several weeks later, Will turned up at her door bearing daffodils. He asked her to dinner. She refused.
In the hallway, the front door open to the weather, he pleaded with her to keep the child.
He told her he’d applied to join the police force: it was a steady job and it would compliment Kate’s chosen career to the best of his limited ability. That morning he had been accepted as a trainee.
She held him. She stroked his hair, whispered in his ear that he was a strange one, a strange one.
Kate was heavily pregnant when they married at Leeds Register Office. With the exception of Kate’s Auntie Linda, her family didn’t attend. Will asked an old army friend called Geordie to be his best man. His aunt Grace lent him money for the rings and a honeymoon weekend in the Lake District. All together, nine people came.
They held an informal reception in a room above the Cricketer’s Arms in Headingley. Will’s speech was courteous and heartfelt. Kate wished her parents were there to hear it. When the speech was over, Auntie Linda hugged Will to her chest and told him Kate was a lucky girl. Then she offered a toast to the future, in which all present at that moment ardently believed.
Caroline was born late in September. During the birth, Will held Kate’s hand and stroked her sweat-sodden hair, struck dumb with mortal terror at the enormity of what was happening in that shabby cubicle. Later, he cradled the unwashed child, still slick with blood and mucus.
He knew that his love was more powerful, more f
erocious, than God.
III
On the day that Joanne was taken, he returned late to his Bedminster flat: rented, one-bedroom, second-floor.
He showered, wrapped himself in a bathrobe and made a mug of tea before booting up his computer, an iMac that he and Caroline had chosen together and bought from John Lewis. The iMac sat before the sitting room window on an Ikea dining table.
Holloway and his daughter exchanged emails twice daily. It was Caroline’s way of maintaining a presence in his life. She sent jokes, apocrypha, urban myths and JPEGs that had made her laugh: dancing babies, singing penises. She wrote about books she was reading and places she had been and things she wanted to do. He pecked out lower-case replies with an index finger.
He set the mug on the pine table, pushed aside a sheaf of bills awaiting payment and clicked on the Mail icon.
Caroline hadn’t written yet but logged in his inbox were two messages from an unfamiliar address: [email protected].
He took a sip of tea and double clicked on the first of the messages. It contained just a brief video clip. There was no text.
The clip was perhaps twenty seconds long. He played it twice. Although the sight and intonation of his wife’s passion was familiar to him, and precious and fearful, he had not heard or seen it for a long time.
The film was shot from a high angle: perhaps through an upper bedroom window. Kate laughed throatily and called out to God. She brushed the sweaty hair from her brow. The young man she was fucking reached up a lazy hand and squeezed her breast. She slapped the hand away. He muttered a glottal response. She ground her hips. The young man scowled as if in pain, clutched her thighs.
Holloway sat without moving until the tea went cold. Then he opened the second file. It contained a JPEG attachment, a single photograph. No text.
A naked woman lay bound on a dirty timber floor.
Because she was blindfold and not wearing the dark wig he paid her to wear, it took Holloway some time to recognize Joanne Grayling. Her real hair was blonde and cropped boyishly short. Something had been written on her body: one word. The lettering ran from her pubic bush to her breasts but her position made the word hard to decipher. Holloway saw an A and a T, distorted by the soft fold of her belly.
He closed the file. Opened it again.
He cupped his mouth.
The clip could only have been sent by the man who filmed it.
His name was Derek Bliss.
He was a private detective whose services Holloway had contracted following the breakdown of his marriage. His office was located on a Bradford backstreet, above a launderette whose own sign seemed faded by one wash too many. They met in a workman’s café next door, huddled in fixed plastic chairs over a Formica table.
Bliss was a neat, rotund and discretely salacious man with a sparrow’s quizzical, orbicular head. He was perhaps five feet four inches in his stockinged feet. He was charming, deferential, effeminate. Clipped, militaristic diction.
Holloway poured sugar into strong tea. For a long time he stirred it, using a brown-stained teaspoon.
He explained what he wanted.
Bliss was to follow Kate and report back to him every week, advising him of where she had been and who she had seen.
By which he meant who she had slept with.
Two weeks later they met again. Bliss stood in Holloway’s doorway. He wore Farrah slacks and a police-style sweater over a checked shirt. He handed Holloway a video cassette.
Holloway’s stomach went cold and his bowels loosened.
He asked Bliss inside.
He sat and put his head in his hands. He said: ‘Oh God.’
Tenderly, Bliss put the tape in the VCR and turned on the television. His shallow breathing accelerated until it synchronized with the muttered profanities of Kate’s approaching orgasm. She ground her pubis against the boy in a slow sickle motion, moaned as if in pain. The boy muttered something. Slapped her thigh. The tinny impact registered shockingly clearly. Kate hung her head and brushed the wet fringe from her eyes.
In the grey half-light, the boy’s exposed cock shone like Vaseline. Kate lay on her back. Muttered something humourless when the boy slid inside her. His response was too low for the microphone to register. He buried his face in the crook of her neck. He arched his spine and the cheeks of his ass tightened like a fist. Kate’s eyes rolled white, like a predating shark.
Holloway asked who the boy was. It took him three attempts to get the words out.
Bliss smiled with fraternal sadness.
‘He’s a student. David Bishop. University of Leeds. First year, engineering.’
Bliss said he must go. He excused himself to go to the lavatory. Then, in the hallway, Holloway counted cash into his smooth palm, fragrant with soap.
Bliss left him a business card. He shook Holloway’s hand, wished him luck for the future, and left.
Holloway closed the door. He wiped the palm of his hand on the wall, screwed up the business card in his fist, and dropped it into the kitchen bin.
Later, he found beads of semen on the toilet seat.
Some months later, Holloway had occasion to go looking for Derek Bliss. He found that he lived alone in a pretty, stone-built cottage on the edge of Harrogate. Holloway arrived at his bedroom window under cover of darkness. Up the sleeve of his jacket was concealed a tyre-iron.
Shortly after he broke in, it became apparent that Derek Bliss was gone.
The wardrobes were full. There was milk in the fridge, dating to the previous week. Last Monday’s Telegraph. Junk mail had massed like a snow drift on the coarse mat beneath the letterbox.
Perhaps Bliss had intuited that Holloway would not tolerate having him around, knowing what he knew. Perhaps not. For whatever reason, he’d gone and he never came back.
A full winter passed before somebody, a neighbour, grew curious about some unattended snow damage to the cottage and called the police.
Through the cold, dark months, Holloway’s necessarily tentative efforts to locate Bliss had failed. It was summer before he learned via some offhand copper’s comment, that Bliss had died shortly before Christmas. He had been several weeks into an extended Australian vacation.
Holloway never learned the full story. Soon, he relocated to Bristol. Since then, he’d thought about Bliss at most infrequently. Sometimes, not often, he truly believed him to be dead. Other times, he imagined him, leering and reddened and glazed like a suckling pig, smirking at girls on Bondi beach.
But Derek Bliss was not dead. And Derek Bliss was not in Australia.
Derek Bliss was back to get him.
His mind was blank. He sat there, clicking the file open, clicking it closed.
Eventually, he hit REPLY.
derek, he tapped, is that you?
He listened to the squeal and pop of the modem.
But although he checked his inbox every few minutes for several hours, there was no further communication.
7
On the morning of the massacre in America, Shepherd confessed his precognitive nature to Lenny.
In the early light, with the news reports still coming in, Lenny didn’t laugh. He’d pulled on a pair of tracksuit trousers, and padded blearily about the kitchen, making tea. His torso was naked and it was cold. From the laundry basket under the stairs he removed a dirty bath towel and wrapped himself in it like a cloak. He hugged his knees to his chest. His naked feet were pallid and hairy. He was gaunt and unshaved, and his eyes were circled deep blue, as if bruised. His hair stuck up and out in all directions.
Like Dr Scobie before him, he had to accept the facts. Something terrible had happened in America.
Shepherd obviously wasn’t a deliberate fraud. Lenny had seen the state he was in. It had been a pretty Linda Blair moment.
But was Shepherd an unknowing charlatan? Lenny
had studied this stuff. Most apparently psychic phenomena, he said, were connected to the normal function of human memory. Memory contextualized experience, framing it within a person’s understanding and expectation. Psychics tended to play down errors in their predictions and greatly to amplify small accuracies. They probably didn’t even know they were doing it. You remember the times you just missed the bus, but not the times you just caught it. Chronic gamblers remembered the long-odds winner and forgot the many sure-fire failures. That was just the way the mind worked. Stuff happened: the mind filled in the gaps and inconsistencies. People who believed in ghosts saw ghosts. The rest saw shadow and reflection.
He set his feet on the cold, grubby tiled floor and began to roll a cigarette. He looked like a refugee.
When we lifted the receiver before the phone rang, he said, it was because our responsive, animal brain acted more quickly to a stimulus than our conscious mind. We only became aware of hearing the phone after we’d picked it up. But it did ring first, and at some level we did hear it. Dream states, migraine or epilepsy could lead to visionary experience. The presence of God (or the Devil) could be invoked in a laboratory with a couple of grand’s worth of electrical equipment.
Just because you were really seeing weird stuff, it didn’t mean you were seeing weird stuff that was real.
Coincidence was another possibility. Statistical laws could be wildly counter-intuitive. What looked extremely unlikely might in fact be mathematical certainty. It was staggeringly improbable that a randomly selected individual would win the Lottery that week—but it was a practical certainty that somebody would win it. All Shepherd remembered was waking and saying: ‘Something terrible has happened in America.’ At any given time, there were millions—maybe billions—of people asleep all over the world. Enough bad things happened in America for somebody’s dream, somewhere, to correspond to one occurrence of it—just as somebody had to be dreaming of Diana the night her car slammed into a tunnel wall like a meteorite. (Lenny put the unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth and clapped his hands, to illustrate the impact.) Perhaps Shepherd had merely framed a conventional nightmare within his expectation of precognition.