by William Boyd
Flavia Malinverno was kissing him in a way he had never been kissed before. Somehow she had inserted her top lip between his top lip and his teeth behind. Otherwise it was an orthodox, full-blooded kiss but overriding everything was this strange pressure on his upper mouth. It was an exciting first. Flavia broke off. “Mmmm,” she said. “Nice.”
“Kiss me again,” he said, and she did, palms flat on his cheeks, sucking on his bottom lip this time, then on his tongue with a grip like a nursing calf—
It was a lucid dream, definitely and unmistakably, he thought, as he wrote an expurgated version of it down in the dream diary beside his bed. He had wanted to be kissed again and had arranged in his dream for that to come about—Alan would be pleased. He sat upright in his narrow bed in the Institute’s cell, a little breathless and shaken at the vividness of the experience, at the irrefutable evidence of his erection, marvelling once again at the ability of mental phenomena to replicate the most complex physical sensations—better than replicate, invent whole new sets of physical sensations. The way her lip…A kiss of maximum palpability…and yet here he was alone on a high floor of a university building in Greenwich at, he checked the time, 4.30 in the morning. The dream was easily explained, causally. He was due to see Flavia again in a matter of hours, she was practically omnipresent in his thoughts, crowding out all other matters—Torquil, Hogg, Rintoul, the Silvertown house…He shook his head and exhaled noisily, like an athlete after a work-out, then remembered there were two other guinea pigs also sleeping lightly in the Institute that night. He lay back on his cot, fingers laced behind his head, and realized there was no point in trying to go back to sleep, trying to restart his lucid dream. He smiled at the memory of it: the dream had been a bonus, he had not intended coming to the Institute that night but it had seemed a welcome, not to say a necessary, escape.
When he had returned to his flat the evening before, traces of Torquil were everywhere, like elephant spoor. The crumpled duvet was sprawled over the sofa like a Dali watch, the pummelled pillows sat on an adjacent chair, Torquil’s suitcase lay open in the middle of the carpet, its soiled contents exposed like a particularly rebarbative pop-up book, three used ashtrays were perched on various surfaces and the kitchen required a ten-minute wipe-down. Some juggling with the ballcock in the lavatory cistern had finally permitted the flushing away of assorted Helvoir-Jayne turds. He decided to have a lock fitted to his bedroom door: Torquil appeared to have been through his cupboards and chest of drawers and there was a shirt missing. A swift bout of tidying and a whizz round with the hoover restored the place to something close to its normal state.
Then Torquil returned.
“Disaster,” he announced as he came through the door, striding towards the drinks table, where he poured himself three fingers of Scotch. “I’ve had it, Lorimer. I could have killed today, I had evil in my soul. If I could’ve got my fingers round that weasel lawyer’s throat.”
He had a cigarette going now and switched on the television. “Murder one, I tell you. I borrowed a shirt, hope you don’t mind. I’ve got to get my hands on some money. £1,500 this month, school fees due in two weeks. I’m totally fucked. What’s for supper?”
“I’m going out,” Lorimer invented, spontaneously.
“Who’s that old bag downstairs? I could see her peering through the door at me.”
“She’s called Lady Haigh. Extremely nice. Did you speak to her ?”
“I just said ‘Boo!’ and she slammed the door pretty smartish, I tell you. I’ve got to get a job, Lorimer, a well-paid job, a.s.a.p. Where are you going?”
“It’s a sleep therapy thing I go to. I’ll be out all night.”
“Oh, yeah?” he half-leered, then his own troubles crowded in on him again. “Think I’ll hit the phone tonight, call a few chums, get networking, yeah…Is there a decent Chinese in this neck of the woods?”
Lorimer frowned, shifting in his bed, wondering now what the effect of a Chinese takeaway would be in his neat and ordered kitchen. Yet Torquil was the least of his problems…He had taken the Toyota round to the rear of GGH where there were two parking spaces (one for Hogg and one for Rajiv) and a small loading bay. Rajiv had tut-tutted sympathetically at the state of the paintwork.
“Nasty customers, eh, Lorimer? Leave this to me, we’ll get you a nice shiny new one.”
He went to see Hogg, who was wearing a black tie and sombre suit as if he had just come from a funeral, and told him about the blowtorching of his car.
“How do you know it was Rintoul?” Hogg said, bluntly. “Could have been vandals.”
“He left a message on my answer machine threatening me, said ‘It wasn’t over yet.’”
“Doesn’t sound much of threat to me. Anyone see anything, any witnesses?”
“The car wasn’t parked in my street, no one would know it was mine.”
“Out of the question,” Hogg said, his hands searching his deep pockets.
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t order an oiling on a vague hunch like that,” Hogg said with unconvincing bluffness, slipping a peppermint retrieved from his pocket into his mouth. He rattled it around on his teeth, making a noise like a stick against railings. “Do you know what’s involved with an oiling? It’s a serious, not to say nefarious, business. We have to be absolutely certain it’s called for. And in this case, Sunny Jim, I’m not.”
“You won’t oil Rintoul?” Lorimer said, not able to conceal his incredulity.
“You catch on fast, Lorimer. If you’re so worried, do your own, that’s my suggestion. Take responsibility: chop onions, fry onions.”
It had not ended there: later in the afternoon Rajiv called him.
“Sorry, laddie, he won’t replace your car.”
“Why not, for Christ’s sake? It’s insured, isn’t it?”
“Ours not to reason why, Lorimer. Bye.”
So Lorimer had driven home in his toasted Toyota, his brain furious with activity, trying to pin down the cause of Hogg’s now overt and provocative hostility. He wondered if Hogg knew that Torquil was staying in his flat—and concluded he quite probably did, for Hogg seemed to know just about everything and he could see how, from Hogg’s point of view, Torquil’s proximity was a little compromising.
226. Lucid Dreams. Lucid dreams are dreams that the dreamer can control and influence. They are a phenomenon of the deeper levels of REM sleep and take place in what is called the D-state. D-state sleep occupies about twenty-five per cent of REM sleep and occurs in short intense bursts.
“The fascinating thing about you,” Alan said, “and what makes you my prize guinea pig, is that your D-state appears to take up forty per cent of your REM sleep.”
“Should I be worried?”
“I don’t know. But it does mean you’re likely to have more lucid dreams than the average person.”
“Thanks.”
“I think that may be another reason why you don’t sleep as much. For someone like you your sleep is too exciting, too exhausting.”
—The Book of Transfiguration
The snow came as a surprise, people volubly aired their astonishing shops and bus queues, testified to their sartorial lack of preparation for it, and lambasted the shamefully inaccurate warnings of the meteorologists. The gusting east wind had turned suddenly northerly and the new currents of air were now surging down Europe from the frozen fjords of Scandinavia, the Baltic Sea, from the icy fringes of the Arctic shelf. By the time Lorimer reached Chalk Farm an inch was lying on the pavements and the roads were a marzipan mush of criss-crossing tyre-tracks. The flakes were big, like styrofoam coins, floating lazily but steadily down from a low, sulphurous-grey sky.
In marked contrast to the day, Sole di Napoli, the restaurant that Flavia Malinverno had chosen, was—unsurprisingly—Neapolitan in origin, painted in tones of pink and lambent yellow, full of images and symbols of the warm south—jugs of dried flowers, sheaves of corn stuffed behind mirror frames, an ill-executed mural above the pizza oven
showing the ultramarine bay of Naples and a fuming Vesuvius and a shelfful of straw hats piled carefully above the bar. Each table was graced with a small spiky agave in a pot and the waiters sported blue T-shirts printed with a golden flaming sun above their left breast.
Lorimer stamped the snow off his shoes, dusted flakes from his hair and was shown to his table. Perhaps customers should be presented with a complimentary pair of sunglasses, he thought, just to sustain the mood, and he ordered, despite the weather, a summery Campari-soda—big brother Slobodan’s drink of choice, he recalled. He was absurdly early, of course, and Flavia turned out to be twenty minutes late. He sat and waited patiently, his brain in a form of unthinking neutral, watching the snowflakes accumulate and drinking his first and then a second Campari-soda. He was refusing to allow any speculation as to why this invitation had been forth—he recognized it simply as a blessing, as astonishing good fortune—and he vainly tried to banish images of his lucid dream from his mind. There was no getting away from it, he realized with quickening pleasure, he was in way over his head here, absolutely gone, a case study to be filed under ‘smitten’. The fact that she was married, the fact there was a saturnine brute of a husband in the frame made no difference. Equally irrelevant, he realized, with a small gnaw of guilt, was the additional fact that he had been having a long-established affair with Stella Bull for over four years…No, now was not the time for moral debate, he told himself, these moments were designed for absurdly hopeful dreams, sweet prognostications, reveries so preposterous, so impossible that—
Flavia Malinverno came into the restaurant.
The waiters fell upon her: “Bellissima!”, “Flavia, mia cara!”, “La più bella del mondo!” and so on—she was clearly well known. The manager took her coat and bowed her to the table like an Elizabethan courtier, where Lorimer sat, his sphincter clenched, some sort of asthma attack going on in his pulmonary system and some sort of potent imbecile virus neutralizing his brain cells. The hair was different again, some variation of reddish umber somehow layered with dark gold, the shine on it, in the iridescent sun-tones of Sole di Napoli, making you want to blink. Her lips were browner, not so red. He had not really noticed what she was wearing—suede jacket, scarf, ribbed baggy sweater thing.
She ignored his proffered trembling hand and slid quickly into her seat.
“Brought the snow with you, I see.”
“Mnwhng?”
“Snow, darling. White stuff him fall from sky. Pimlico snow. It was nice and sunny here this morning.”
“Oh.”
“Did you see that car outside? Champagne please, una bottiglia, Gianfranco, grazie mille. Someone must have set fire to it. Almost a work of art.”
“It’s mine.”
She stopped and gave him her head-cocked, narrow-eyed frown. He felt a silly, neighing sort of laugh rumbling behind his teeth and managed to turn it into a bad cough.
“Steady on,” she said. “Have some water. What happened?”
Lorimer glugged water: perhaps he should tip the rest of the glass over his head just to complete the picture of total arsehole? He gently pounded his chest and tried to compose himself.
“Somebody did set it on fire. Took a blowtorch to it. It’s just the paint that’s gone. Everything else works fine.”
“Do you mind if I smoke? Why would somebody do that?”
“Not at all. Occupational hazard,” he said. Then, correcting himself, “Probably vandals.”
“Dangerous job, yours,” she said, taking a puff at her cigarette and stubbing it out. The champagne had arrived and two glasses were poured. “Cheers, Lorimer Black, we’re celebrating.”
“We are?”
“I’m gonna be inna movies,” she drawled. “Two days’ work, one thousand pounds.” She put on an expression of pop-eyed astonishment. “But Tyimotheh, Mummy told me you wah a stock-brokah!” Then she burst into sniffling tears for a second. “See, I’ve even learnt my line.”
They touched champagne glasses, Lorimer noticed his hand was still trembling.
“Here’s to the job.”
“Here’s to your car. Poor thing. What’s it called?”
“A Toyota.”
“No, I mean its name.”
“It doesn’t have a name.”
“How boring. You’ve got to name things. Adam’s task and all that. Name things in your life from now on, Lorimer Black, I insist. It makes everything more…more real.”
“I’m not really interested in cars.”
“But imagine taking a blowtorch to it. Is that the worst thing that’s happened to you in your job?”
“I’ve had death threats. Pretty alarming.”
“I’ll say. Jesus, imagine. This while you’re out adjusting loss?”
“People can get pretty angry.” He must stop saying ‘pretty’.
“But no one really gets killed, I hope.”
“Well, there’s the odd sad case checks out.”
“Checks out?”
“Adios, planet earth.”
“Got you. Have some more.” She poured and held up her glass. “Sham pain to our real friends, real pain to our sham friends. Where’re you from, Mr Lorimer Black?”
As they ate lunch (gazpacho, spaghetti primavera, sorbet) Lorimer gave her the short amended autobiography: born and raised in Fulham, university in Scotland, some years ‘drifting’ before the need for a steady income (aged parents to support) ended him up in the loss adjusting wing of the insurance business. He let it be known that this profession was temporary, that wanderlust was still part of his soul. How fascinating, she said. For her part she told him of some of the acting and modelling jobs she had done, the new movie she had just auditioned for, but the dominant theme in her discourse to which they regularly returned was’ Gilbert’, who was being ‘impossible, selfish and revolting, not necessarily in that order’.
“Who is Gilbert?” Lorimer said carefully.
“You met him the other night.”
“I thought he was called Noon.”
“That’s his stage name. His real name is Gilbert, Gilbert Malinverno.”
“Not quite the same ring to it.”
“Exactly. So I call him Gilbert when I’m cross with him. It’s such f a feeble name.”
“What, ah, does he do?”
“He’s a juggler. Quite a brilliant one actually.”
“A juggler?”
“But he’s given up juggling to write a musical.”
“He’s a musician?”
“Fabulous guitar player. But consequently he hasn’t made any money for months, which is why I’m calling him Gilbert. He’s multi-talented, but obtuse.”
Lorimer’s loathing of Gilbert Malinverno was profound.
“Been married long?” he asked, as if the question had just occurred to him.
“About four years. I think I married him for his name, really.” I changed my name too, Lorimer wanted to say. You don’t need to marry someone.
“Flavia Malinverno,” he said. “What was it before?”
“Not nearly so nice. You know it means ‘Bad Winter’ in Italian? Mal’inverno. Talking of which,” she said, looking out at the snow and actually reaching across and squeezing his arm, “let’s have a grappa.” They did, and watched the afternoon outside gathering into bluey darkness, the snow growing less insistent until there was only the odd flake helixing down. A couple of inches had settled and the roads were furrowed chocolate.
They tussled amiably over the bill and negotiated a split: Flavia the champagne, Lorimer the food and the wine. Outside she rewrapped her scarf around her neck and pulled her suede blouson tight about her.
“Cold,” She said, “God, this Pimlico snow’s cold. God, I’m pissed.” She took a half step and seemed to hunch into his side as if in search of body heat and Lorimer found, quite naturally, that his arm went around her, feeling her shiver and, quite naturally, they seemed to turn towards each other and they were kissing, not like the kiss in his lucid dre
am, but her tongue was deep in his mouth and he was about to explode.
The applause of Sole di Napoli’s serving staff standing, to a man, in the window whooping and clapping broke them apart. Flavia pirouetted, gave a deep cavalier’s bow and ran away. “Bye, Lorimer Black,” she shouted, “I’ll call you.” She was round the corner and out of sight before her name had formed on his lips. He crunched softly over the snow towards his seared and scarified motor, wondering why there was a sudden heaviness in the area around his heart.
Chapter 12
He’s a bit peaky,” Monika said. “He wouldn’t get out of his bed, Monday, wouldn’t budge. So I knew he wasn’t feeling so sunny.”
She and Lorimer were standing in the corridor just outside his father’s room, their voices low, like consultants in a ward. Lorimer shivered: the house felt cold. Outside, the day was raw and freezing, the snow still lying, hard and blue with ice.
“Place is freezing, Monika,” he said. “Something wrong with the central heating?”
“It comes on about six. It’s on a timer.”
“Change the tinier. It’s ridiculous to be this cold. Think of Dad.”
“Can’t change the timer, Milo. Anyway, Dad’s nice and warm in bed with an electric blanket.”
“Fine,” Lorimer said. “Can I see him?”
Monika swung the door open to let him in. “Don’t be too long,” she said. “I want to go shopping.”
Lorimer closed the door softly behind him. The room was small and narrow, large enough for a single bed, a bedside table, a television set and a small armchair. Opposite the bed on the wall was a cluster of cheaply framed portraits of the Blocj family—grandmother, mother, the children at various ages, Slobodan, Monika, Komelia, Drava. And baby Milomre, last born.
His father’s blue eyes swivelled towards him as he edged up to the bed and drew up the armchair.
“Hi, Dad, it’s me,” he said. “Not feeling so good, eh? What’s wrong, then? Bit of a virus, maybe. Miserable weather out there. Nice warm bed’s the place to be. You get yourself well…” he went on in this vein of banal prattle for a while as his mother and sisters had instructed him, insisting everything was understood. But it was not evident: his father’s faint smile remained his constant, unvarying response to the world, but at least his eyes were on him today, blinking regularly. He reached over and took his right hand, which was resting on the coverlet over his chest, placed there, doubtless, by Monika, always neat, always wanting things ‘just so’, including the invalid’s posture. He could not understand his father’s condition: he was not paralysed, he was simply very still. He could walk, he could move his limbs with gentle encouragement, but if not encouraged he would remain almost perfectly inert. On the surface anyway: inside all worked as normal, he supposed, pumping, oxygenating, sluicing, filtering, excreting, and so on. But the exterior man made a sloth look agitated and nervy. Maybe he was in a state of permanent hibernation, like a python coiled in a rock fissure or a polar bear in its ice cave ? He assumed there was a medical term for it, some kind of ‘vegetative state’. He would rather compare his father to a sleeping bear than a vegetable.