1998 - Armadillo

by William Boyd

  What did you do the last time you felt like that? You went to see Hogg.

  “So you want consoling?” Hogg said, with exaggerated, wholly false pity.

  “You think the world’s a place where only evil-doing and graft get you where you want to be?”

  “Sometimes it seems like that,” you admitted.

  Hogg said: “It depends on where you stand. Let me tell you something: there have always been many more decent folk in the world than bastards. Many more. The bastards have always been outnumbered. So what happens is that bastards congregate in certain places, in certain professions. Bastards prefer the company of bastards, they like doing business with other bastards, everything’s understood then. The problem for people like you—and people like me—occurs when you find yourself, a decent person, having to live and work in the world of bastards. That can be difficult. Every where you look, the world seems a sink, and there seem to be only two options for survival—become a bastard yourself, or surrender to despair. But that’s only because you’re in your small bastard world. Outside in the wider world, the real world, there are plenty of decent folk and it’s run along lines that decent folk can understand, by and large. We’ve got plenty of bastards in this square mile and that’s why you’re finding it tough; but move away, change your point of view and you’ll see it’s not all dark. You’ll see the good in the world. It helps.”

  You’ll see the good in the world. It does work, it worked for you, for a while, until you wondered if Hogg believed a word of what he said.

  —The Book of Transfiguration

  The Cafe Greco was a small, shadowy place, a thin, dark rectangle wedged between a betting shop and an off-licence, with a counter and the Gaggia machine at one end and some chest-high shelves running along the walls where patrons were meant to stand, drink their coffee quickly and go. There were three stools, all currently occupied when Lorimer arrived at 6.15.

  He ordered an espresso and considered what this choice of venue told him. The Cafe Greco would never merit selection for his collection of ‘Classic British Caffs’ because of its recycled Europeanism and its strained-for modishness, however tired: black walls, over-familiar reproductions of famous black and white photos, bare floorboards, Latin American salsa on the sound system. Only variations of coffee were served, or soft drinks in cans; there were some pastries under a plastic bell jar and a half-hearted stab at a selection of panini. No, the decor and its pretensions told him nothing, he realized with weary worldliness, it was the configuration of the cafe itself that was important. This was intended to be a brief encounter. Couples who met at a place where standing was the norm did not intend to linger. Still, smart thinking on Flavia’s behalf, he had to concede; in her shoes he would have done the same.

  He had thought carefully about his clothes. The signet ring was off and a thin silver bracelet was on. Under an old black leather jacket he wore a green trainer top with a hood that hung over the jacket collar like an empty pouch, and under that a white T-shirt with the hem of the neckband unpicked to create an inch-long frayed slit. He had on well-washed black jeans that had turned an uneven grey and sensible, unpolished black shoes with a heavy rubber sole. His hair was deliberately mussed and he had deliberately not shaved. The ambiguities and counter-signals were nicely balanced, he calculated—style, and the deliberate avoidance of style; cost present but impossible to evaluate he could have been anyone—could work in a bookshop or a bar, could be a video-tape editor, an off-duty postman, a pub-theatre actor, the floor manager of a recording studio. Perfectly democratic, he thought, nothing that would surprise Flavia, no unwitting clues.

  At 6.35 the doubts began to crowd in. Telling himself that there was probably a perfectly reasonable explanation for her late arrival, he ordered another coffee and read his way diligently, page by page, through an abandoned Standard. At 7 o’clock he borrowed a pen from behind the bar and began to do the crossword puzzle.

  “Lorimer Black ?”

  She was standing there in front of him, right there, wearing a big quilted jacket and with a loosely woven oatmeal scarf wound round and round her neck. Her hair was different, darker than the last time, almost aubergine, the darkest ox-blood. She was carrying what looked like a typewritten script. He slid off his stool, a stupid smile breaking on his face.

  “You waited,” she said, unapologetically. “You were serious, then.”

  “Yes. What can I get you?”

  He fetched them both a cappuccino and stood by her stool as she searched her pockets and failed to find any cigarettes. His heart was punching violently in its socket behind his ribs and he said nothing, content to be beside her and have this opportunity for close-quarter observation.

  “Have you got a cigarette?” she asked. White, even teeth. What has she done to her hair?

  “I don’t smoke.” A hint of an underbite gave a pugnacious edge to her beauty, a slight jut to the jaw. He offered to buy her some cigarettes but she declined.

  “It won’t kill me.” Strong eyebrows, unplucked, dense. Those brown eyes.

  “So,” she said, setting down her coffee cup. “Mr Lorimer Black.”

  He asked her, for politeness’ sake, and simply to start conversing, what she had been doing and she said she had just come from a read-through of a friend’s play.

  “Which is a load of crap, really. He has no talent at all.”

  Finally she removed her jacket and scarf and finally he was able to look, guardedly this time, at her breasts. From the pleasing convexities and concavities of her vermilion polo-neck he calculated they were of perfectly average size but flattish, rather than protruding, more grapefruit-halves than anything particularly conic. He was glad to have this atavistic, but essential, male curiosity satisfied and returned his full attention to the animated and luminous beauty of her face, still not quite able to believe his astonishing good fortune, as she continued to run down and generally demolish the aspirations and pretensions of her playwright friend’s efforts.

  “What’s this all about, Lorimer Black?” she said suddenly, more sharply. “What exactly is going on here?”

  “I saw you one day in a taxi and I thought you looked beautiful,” he told her, candidly. “Then a few days later I saw you in that commercial and thought, “This is Fate”—”

  “Fate,” she said with an ironic laugh.

  “And when you came into the Alcazar that lunchtime I knew I had to do something about it. I had to meet you.”

  “You’re saying you fancy me, are you, Lorimer Black?”

  Why did she keep repeating his full name, as if it amused her in some way?

  “I suppose I am,” he confessed. “But thank you, anyway, for coming.”

  “I’m a married woman, me,” she said, “and I’ve got to bum a ciggie off someone.”

  The other five people currently drinking coffee in the Cafe Greco were all smoking, so she was spoilt for choice. A plump woman with spiky ginger hair and an earful of rings parted with one of her cigarettes and Flavia returned triumphant to resume her place on the stool. Lorimer was glad of the opportunity to stare at her figure again, noting her height, the length of her legs, the ranginess of her stride and her slim, almost hipless body. Pretty much ideal, he thought, no complaints here.

  “So, you’re out of luck, Lorimer Black,” she said.

  “I notice you didn’t describe yourself as a ‘happily’ married woman.”

  “Goes without saying, doesn’t it?”

  “Does it?”

  “I would have thought so. You’re not married, I take it.”

  “No.”

  “In a ‘relationship’, then?”

  “Ah. Not any more.”

  “So what do you do at Fortress Sure ? Sounds a deadly dull sort of life.”

  “I’m what they call a loss adjuster.”

  “Adjusting loss…Someone who ‘adjusts’ loss…” She thought about it. “That could be nice - or it could be fucking spooky.” She looked shrewdly at him, n
arrowing her eyes. “Is your job meant to make people happy? People who’ve lost something, they call on you to adjust it, make the loss less hard to bear?”

  “Well, not exactly, I—”

  “As if their lives are broken in some way and they call on you to fix it.”

  “Not exactly,” he said again, cautiously, unable to fix her tone—whether naive or heavily ironic.

  “No. Sounds too good to be true, I think.”

  Ironic, then, Lorimer thought. Profoundly.

  He stared at her and she looked him back squarely in the eye. It was absurd, he thought, swiftly analysing his feelings, it was almost embarrassing, but true none the less: he could happily have sat there for hours simply staring at her face. He felt light, also, a thing of no substance, as if he were made of styrofoam or balsa wood, something she could cuff aside with the most casual of backhanders, toss him out of the Cafe Greco with the flick of a wrist.

  “Mmmm,” she said, reflectively. “I suppose you’d like to kiss me.”

  “Yes. More than anything.”

  “You’ve got nice lips,” she said, “and nice, tired eyes.”

  He wondered if he dared lean forward and press his lips to hers.

  “And I might have allowed you to kiss me,” she said, “if you’d taken the trouble to shave before coming out to meet me.”

  “Sorry.” A useless word, he thought, for the awful regret he felt.

  “Do you ever tell lies, Lorimer Black?”

  “Yes. Do you?”

  “Have you ever told me lies ? In our short acquaintance ?”

  “No. Yes, well, a white lie, but I had good—”

  “We’ve known each other for about five minutes and you’ve already lied to me ?”

  “I could have lied about it.”

  She laughed at that.

  “Sorry I’m late, honeybun,” a man’s voice said at his shoulder.

  Lorimer turned and saw a tall man standing there, dark like him, fashionably dishevelled, older by five years or so. Lorimer took in, quickly, patchy stubble, long curly hair, a lean, handsome, knowing face, not kind.

  “Better late than never,” Flavia said. “Lucky my old chum Lorimer was here, stop me dying of boredom.”

  Lorimer smiled, sensing the man appraising him now, checking out the look, the presence, weighing him up, subtly.

  “I don’t think you’ve ever met Noon, have you, Lorimer?”

  Noon?

  “No. Hi, Noon,” Lorimer said, keeping his face straight. It wasn’t hard, he felt all the mass returning to his body, all his specific gravity, his avoir dupois.

  “Noon Malinverno, number one husband.”

  Malinverno offered a lazy hello then turned back to Flavia. “We should go, sweetums,” he said.

  Flavia stubbed out her cigarette, wound her long scarf about her neck and shrugged on her jacket.

  “Nice to see you again, Lorimer,” she said. Malinverno was already moving to the door, his eyes on them both. “Oh yes,” she said. “Don’t forget to give me Paul’s number.”

  “Sure,” Lorimer said, suddenly proud of her guile, taking up his pen and writing his telephone number, and his address, on the margin of a page of the Standard, which he tore off and gave to her. “Paul said call any time. Twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Ta, ever so,” she said, deadpan. As they left the Cafe Greco Malinverno put his arm around her neck and Lorimer turned away. He didn’t want to see them together in the street, husband and wife. He was not bothered that she had arranged for Malinverno to meet her there too—her insurance, he supposed—he nursed instead the warm glow of their conspiracy, their complicity. He knew they would see each other again—there is no disguising that charge of mutual attraction as it flickers between two people and he knew she would call, she liked his nice, tired eyes.

  104. Pavor Nocturnus. Gerard de Nerval said, “Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to pass through those ivory gates that lead to the invisible world without a shudder.” I know what he means: like everything in life that is good, that nurtures, comforts and restores, there is a bad side, a disturbing, unsettling side, and sleep is no exception. Somnambulism, somniloquy, apnoea, enuresis, bruxism, incubus, pavor nocturnus. Sleepwalking, sleeptalking, snoring, bed-wetting, teeth-grinding, nightmare, night terror.

  —The Book of Transfiguration

  He barely slept that night: he was not surprised, in fact he did not particularly want to sleep, his head was so busy with thoughts about the meeting with Flavia. He analysed its conflicting currents without much success, making little headway in interpreting its shifting moods and nuances—moments of hostility and compliance, tones of irony and affection, glances of curiosity and diffidence. What did it add up to? And that offer of a kiss, what did it imply? Was she serious or was it bravado, an act of seduction or a cruel form of taunting? He lay in his bed listening to the growing quiet of the night, always approaching silence but never quite achieving it, its progression halted by a lorry’s grinding gears, a siren or a car alarm, a taxi’s ticking diesel, until, in the small hours, the first jumbos began to cruise in from the Far East—from Singapore and Delhi, Tokyo and Bangkok—the bass roar of their engines like a slowly breaking wave high above, as they wheeled and banked in over the city on their final approach to Heathrow. Then he did fall asleep for a while, his head full of the odd conviction that his life had changed irrevocably in some way and that nothing from now on would ever be quite the same.

  Chapter 10

  When Lorimer came into the office he heard Hogg down the passageway, singing, boomingly, ‘I got a gal in Kalamazoo-zoo-zoo’ and he knew that Torquil had been sacked.

  He hung back, waiting for him to move on before slipping unnoticed into his room, where he sat quietly and assiduously going through the newspaper clippings in the David Watts file and speed-reading his way through a slackly written, instant biography called David Watts—Beyond Enigma that had been published a couple of years previously. The most intriguing fact about David Watts was that ‘David Watts’ was his stage name. He had been born Martin Foster in Slough, where his father had worked for the Thames Water Board as assistant manager of the vast sewage works to the west of Heathrow airport. It was curious, Lorimer thought, to exchange one bland name for another. All the other details of his life and progression to eminence were unexceptionable. He was a bright, withdrawn only child with a precocious talent for music. He had dropped out of the Royal College and with a friend, Tony Anthony (now, was that a stage name?), had formed a four-man rock band called, first, simply Team, which had metamorphosed into David Watts and the Team. Their first three albums had gone double-platinum; there was a protracted dalliance with a girl called Danielle, who worked on a music paper before becoming David Watts’s live-in lover; they had enjoyed two sell-out tours to the USA…Lorimer found he was nodding off: so far, so predictable.

  The biography concluded with a fanfare of bright tomorrows: the world was there for the taking; rumour had it Danielle was pregnant; the creative juices were flowing in veritable torrents. Anything was possible.

  That had been two years ago and now the newspaper clippings took up the story where the biography ended. The romance with Danielle hit the reef: she left, became ill, became anorexic, disappeared, probably aborted the baby (this provoked abiding tabloid fodder: the lost child of David Watts). The band split with satisfying acrimony; Tony Anthony sued and settled out of court. Danielle was discovered in Los Angeles, washed-up and haggard, on detox and living with some other unsuitable rock has-been .She denigrated David Watts with routine and tireless venom (‘egomaniac’, ‘control-freak’, ‘satanist’, ‘nazi’, ‘communist’, ‘martian’, ‘nerd’ and so on). David Watts released his first solo album with a select bunch of the world’s best session-musicians, Angziertie, which, contrary to all expectations, outsold everything previous to it. A thirty-five-nation, eighteen-month world tour was mooted. Then David Watts had a nervous breakdown.

 
; Here the newspapers gave way to insurance policies. A £2 million claim was filed for costs incurred over the cancellation of the tour. As Lorimer riffled through the documents he came across many affidavits from Harley Street physicians and psychiatrists testifying to the genuine nature of David Watts’s crise. A series of increasingly angry letters had started coming in from DW Management Ltd, signed by Watts’s manager, one Enrico Murphy, as Fortress Sure’s first set of loss adjusters doggedly queried every expense and invoice. A compensatory loss of earnings claim was submitted for £1.5 million and one or two of the larger arenas (a baseball ground in New Jersey, a dry dock in Sydney, Australia) and bona fide foreign impresarios were paid off. By the time Lorimer reached the file’s final letter, Enrico Murphy was angrily demanding outstanding settlement to the tune of £2.7 million and threatening litigation as a result of all this’ incredible hassle’ which was further undermining his client’s fragile health. Moreover, he was ready and willing to go public: the press was permanently avid for news about David Watts.

  Shane Ashgable rapped gently on Lorimer’s door and sidled conspiratorially into the room. He was a lean, fit man whose relentless work-out programme had squared his face almost perfectly with bulging jaw muscles. He walked as if he had his buttocks permanently clenched (Hogg said once, memorably, “D’you think Ashgable’s got a fifty pence piece held between his cheeks?”). He once confessed to Lorimer that he did a thousand press-ups a day.

  “Helvoir-Jayne’s been canned,” Ashgable said.

  “Jesus Christ! When?”

  “This morning. He was in and out of here like shit through a tin horn. Never seen anything like it. Ten minutes.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “No idea. Hogg’s like a man pissing on ice. What do you make of it?” Ashgable was no fool, Lorimer knew; he had spent a year at the Harvard Business School, hence his penchant for American slang.

  “Haven’t the faintest,” said Lorimer.

  “Come on,” Ashgable said, with a sly smile. “He’s your friend.”