by William Boyd
“That’s it, Dad, isn’t it?” he said. “You’ve just had enough so you’ve switched everything off. You’re not a carrot or a potato.” He squeezed his father’s hand and felt, he thought, a small answering squeeze in reply. His father’s hand was dry and smooth, callus-free, the nails clipped and polished, the back dappled with liver spots. It was a good hand to hold.
“Got to get well, Dad,” he said, a sudden catch in his voice as the prospect of his father’s death confronted him, like a ghost or a wraith materializing in the room, and he felt the tear-sting in his eyes. He realized that he was frightened of being in a world that did not contain Bogdan Blocj, even a Bogdan Blocj as reduced as this.
To dispel this melancholy mood he irritated himself by recalling his near-unendurable evenings spent in the company of Torquil Helvoir-Jayne, his new best friend. He seemed to do little else but minister to him in various ways: tidying up his routine messes, replenishing the provisions he consumed (three bottles of whisky, thus far) and listening uncomplainingly to his litany of whinges, moans and expressions of self-pity. He had also become the unwilling auditor of the Helvoir-Jayne life story—a terminally bored Boswell to Torquil’s indefatigable Dr Johnson—as Torquil sifted repeatedly through his past looking for the causes of the world’s unfairness to him, trying to analyse what had happened and why his life and career were in such appalling shape. Lorimer had heard endlessly about the distant elderly parents, his miserable decade at boarding school, his aborted attempts to become a soldier, two years as a subaltern in an unfashionable regiment, his reluctant entry into the insurance world, his assorted girlfriends, his courtship and marriage of Binnie, her ghastly parents and brothers, her intransigence, his modest, unexceptional failings and his dreams of a new brighter future.
“It’s in the East,” he said to Lorimer, meaning his future. “Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic. That’s your new frontier.” This was the only advice forthcoming from the many phone calls to his chums, his pals in the City. “If I could only get some capital together. I could buy an office block in Budapest, a supermarket in Sofia, a motorway service station in Moravia. Dirt cheap. Apparently people—Brits, like you and me - are making a fortune out there. Tons of money, cleaning up.” The ache of his frustration was almost heartrending. Lorimer suggested an immediate reconnaissance. “But I’m broke, Lorimer, I’m skint, without moolah. I’m in debt up to my eyeballs.” And then the shining aspirations would be replaced by the now familiar plaints: bastard lawyers, bitch-from-. hell Binnie, devil incarnate Hogg, venal, selfish so-called friends who didn’t come through when you needed them (“present company excepted, of course”). He would list them: the Rorys, the Simons, the Hughies, and some American entrepreneur to whom he had once rendered a crucial service called Sam M. Goodforth and whose name he repeated like a mantra, “Goodforth, Goodforth, where’s Sam bloody Goodforth now?” When the level in the whisky bottle dipped below half way Lorimer usually took himself off to bed, where he would lie awake thinking about Flavia Malinverno and listen to Torquil making telephone calls and endlessly switching channels on the television.
Flavia had not yet phoned, some two days after their unforgettable lunch. “Bye, Lorimer, I’ll call you,” she had shouted back at him through the slackening snow. If he shut his eyes he could hear the pitch of her voice exactly, see her tall figure slipping round the corner—
“What’re you holding his hand for?” Drava said, silently entering the room.
“I thought it might be comforting,” he said. It comforts me, anyway, he thought.
“It’s plain morbid, that is,” Drava said with a shudder, retrieving her father’s hand and replacing it on the counterpane.
In the hall the pungent smell of cooking meat was suddenly dominant and he could hear his grandmother and mother banging around in the kitchen, laughing and chattering in their language. Little Mercy was watching a boomingly violent video in the sitting room. A semi-audible layer of music issued from somewhere.
“Hey, Milo,” his grandmother shouted lustily at him. “Stay for lunch. We got pig. Lovely boiled pork.”
That was the smell. He made it as far as the kitchen door and paused there—any further and he would dry-heave. He breathed shallowly through his mouth. His mother was making dumplings, rolling balls of dough between her palms and popping them in a pan of hissing fat.
“When’s the doctor coming?” he said.
“Tonight, I think, six o’clock.”
“You think? He must come, insist. Make sure Dad gets the best of everything. All the tests, I’ll pay.”
“Oh, he’s fine, just a bit poorly.”
“Stay for lunch, Milo,” Komelia said coming up behind him and poking him in the ribs, “Skinny. You need some lovely boiled pork.”
“And dumplings,” Mercy said, skipping out of the sitting room. “Dumplings! Dumplings! Dumplings!”
“Isn’t she clever?” his mother said. “Plenty dumplings for you, darling. When you going to give me some more clever grandchildren, Milo?”
He saw Drava emerge from his father’s room with a chamber pot and realized it was time to go.
“I’ve got a meeting,” he said weakly. “Where’s Slobodan?”
“Where d’you think,” Komelia said with a sneer. “The Clarence.”
The Clarence, the Duke of Clarence, to give the pub its full name, was a couple of hundred yards away down the Dawes Road. Lorimer carefully picked his way through the frozen snow, Clarenceward, his condensing breath snatched from him by the numbing wind, the light threatening and baleful to the north. It was only lunchtime but it seemed night was coming on already.
The problem with the Clarence, Lorimer thought, was its utter absence of charm, its unequivocal charmlessness which might have done duty as a form of charm, in this the day and age of the themed pub—but not even the most nostalgic drinker, Lorimer thought, could summon up much affection for this sorry watering hole. It boasted every pub minus-point, ancient and modern: a meagre choice of fizzy beers, muzak, no edible food, many clattering, flashing and pinging gaming machines, an adhesive, patterned carpet, satellite TV, a smelly old dog, surly old regulars, drunk young regulars, minimal heating, laboratory-bright lighting—and it was his brother’s local, Slobodan’s pub of choice.
Lorimer pushed open the swing doors to be assailed by the reek of a million extinguished cigarettes and two decades of spilt beer. An old man seemed to have passed out behind a table in the corner, his mouth wide open, his greasy trilby slipping off his head. Perhaps he’d just decided to die, Lorimer wondered, the Clarence could have that effect on you, as if they dosed their carbonated beer with additional Weltschmerz.
Slobodan and Phil Beazley were at the bar, where a young barman with walrus whiskers and a chain collar tattooed round his neck washed glasses in a sink of turbid grey water.
“Milo, my main man,” Beazley said for possibly the thousandth time.
“Here, Kev, this is my little bro. He’s a millionaire.”
“G’day, mate,” said Kev, unimpressed and indubitably Australian. Lorimer wondered what had brought him all this way, from his hot, sun-filled country, across hemispheres, oceans and continents to wind up behind the bar of the Clarence, in Fulham. He also realized that the ostentatious mention of his alleged wealth was Slobodan’s code for “Don’t ask for your money back.” He had in fact been planning a vague inquiry about the return of his loan as the morning’s mail had brought a note from Ivan Algomir, complaining about an ‘importunate and untimely demand from the Revenue’ and wondering when he could cash Lorimer’s cheque. Which reminded him: he would have to chase up that Gale-Harlequin bonus, everything was becoming a little stretched.
“What’s your poison, Milo?” Beazley asked.
“Mineral—” He changed his mind, the only water in the Clarence flowed from a tap. “Pint of Speyhawk.”
Speyhawk Special Strength Lager, designed to make a long afternoon slip by. Lorimer brought the foami
ng tankard to his lips, gulped and felt his brain yield. Beazley and Slobodan were drinking double gins and Coke. Lorimer insisted on paying for the round.
“Dad’s…not well,” Lorimer burped. He hicked and coughed. Strong stuff.
“He’ll be fine.”
“Constitution of a yak,” Beazley said, and for some reason punched Lorimer in the upper arm, unnecessarily hard. “Hey, Milo, good to see ya.”
“How’s business?” Lorimer asked.
“Diabolical,” Slobodan said, his face going long. “You know old Nick and young Nick?”
Father and son, drivers at B and B. “Yeah. What about them?”
“They got nicked.”
“What for?”
“Selling drugs down Earls Court station. ‘Parently they got a field of marijuana at their place in Tonbridge. An acre and a half.”
“So,” Beazley said, disgustedly, “we’re two drivers down. I’d like to root my boot up old Nick’s tradesman’s entrance, I can tell you. We’re going mental, aren’t we, Lobby?”
Lobby agreed, vehemently, mental wasn’t in it.
The glimmerings of an idea, a dangerous idea, a Speyhawk idea, began to take shape in Lorimer’s mind.
“Listen, Phil,” he began. “There’s a guy been giving me a bit of bother. If I wanted, you know, to put the frighteners on him, do you think, you know, you could give him a word in the ear ?”
“You want him sorted.”
“Warned off.”
“Well, we do owe you a favour, don’t we, Lobbs?”
“What’s he done?” Slobodan asked, genuinely curious.
“He blowtorched my car.”
“Not seen that in ages,” Beazley said. “Very time-consuming.”
“What’s he drive?” Slobodan asked.
“BMW. Big one, new model.”
“I know what you’re thinking, Lobby,” Beazley said with real excitement. “An eye for an eye, a motor for a motor.” He leaned towards Lorimer, confidentially. “Lobby and me goes round to this guy, right? We got a couple of scaffolding poles—bash, wallop—we’re out of there—one seriously fucked-up Beemer. Doddle.”
“Doddle,” Slobodan agreed. “You tell us when, chief.”
Lorimer said he would and wrote down Rintoul’s particulars, feeling a little nervous at what he might unleash but reassuring himself that his action was purely precautionary and that he was only following Hogg’s instructions. “Arrange your own oiling,” Hogg had said, in so many words. So, if Rintoul started playing silly buggers he’d have to deal with Beazley and Blocj, the enforcers, with their scaffolding poles.
He took another sip of his effervescing Speyhawk, feeling the alcohol surge almost immediately through his veins. He set the glass down, shook his brother’s and Beazley’s hands, nodded to Kev and walked carefully out of the terrible pub seeing, as he did so, reflected in a foxed mirror by the door, Phil Beazley avidly lean across the bar to claim his undrunk lager.
Outside the light was purple, like a bruise, and the air stung with ice crystals. He strode off to find his carbonized car, slipping the weight of the Clarence’s melancholia from his shoulders like an unwanted rucksack.
Unfortunately Lorimer found a parking space not far from Mar-lobe’s flower shack.
“What kind of car’s that, then?” Marlobe asked. His stall was colourfully ablaze with many varieties of carnation.
“Fire damage. Vandals, I think.”
“I’d castrate them,” Marlobe said, reasonably. “I’d castrate them and then I’d cut their right hands off. Wouldn’t do much vandalizing after that. Fancy a nice bunch of carnations?”
Lorimer’s loathing of carnations had not abated so he bought a bunch of ten daffodils, their buds tightly closed, breathtakingly overpriced.
“There’s two men in a Roller sitting outside your house. Been there for hours.”
It wasn’t a Roller, it was a Maserati-Daimler or a Rolls-Bentley or a Bentley-Ferrari one of the limited edition deluxe hybrids that set you back somewhere in the region of £200,000—certainly it was the priciest motor vehicle ever to grace the tarmacadam of Lupus Crescent. Sitting at the wheel was fat Terry, David Watts’s factotum/gofer/major domo.
“Hi,” Terry said, ever genial. “David would like a word with you.”
The smoked glass rear window on his side hummed downwards to reveal David Watts in a Wolverhampton Wanderers track suit sitting on cream calfskin.
“Can I have a word, Mr Black?”
“Do you want to come in?”
Watts stood in Lorimer’s flat looking about him as if he were contemplating an exhibit in the Museum of Mankind.
“Sorry about the mess,” Lorimer said, collecting aluminium receptacles, scooping up a shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. “I’ve got a friend staying.” He stuffed receptacles, shirt, boxers and the daffodils in the swing bin what was the point? Something blackened and crusty had dribbled down the front of his cooker.
“That’s nice,” Watts said, pointing. “Is it real?”
“It’s Greek, about three thousand years old. Do you want me to draw the curtains ?”
Watts had put on a pair of sunglasses.
“No thanks. You’ve got a ton of CDs. Not as many as me, but you’ve got a lot.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t got back to you, but there’s still a process of consultation to—”
“Don’t worry about the insurance. Take your time. No, it was that group you mentioned, Achimota. Sheer Achimota.”
“Kwame Akinlaye and the Achimota Rhythm Boys.”
“That’s the one. Do you believe in serendipity, Mr Black?”
“Not really.” He believed in its opposite, whatever that was.
“It’s the most powerful force in anyone’s life. It is in mine. I have to find that CD you mentioned. Sheer Achimota. I know it’s going to be very important to me.”
“It’s an import. I got the CD mail order. There’s a shop in Camden—”
Irina came out of the bedroom wearing one of Lorimer’s shirts.
“Hello, Lorimer,” she said and went into the kitchen.
“I’m not interrupting, am I ?” Watts asked, politely.
“What? No. Urn. I just—”
“That girl’s got the whitest legs I’ve seen. Is there any way at all I could buy that CD off you? Name your price. £200.”
“I can lend it to you.” He could hear cupboards being opened and shut in the kitchen.
“Lend?” Watts said, as if the concept was a new one.
“Could you just give me a second,” Lorimer said. “Excuse me.”
Torquil was lying in his bed, propped on pillows, naked and reading, as far as Lorimer could see, a soft-porn men’s magazine.
Happily the sheet was bunched at his groin, between his spread legs.
“Oh, hi, Lorimer, guess who’s here.”
“I just saw her. Just what the fuck do you mean by this, Torquil?”
“Jesus Christ, what was I meant to do?”
Irina returned with a bottle of white wine and two glasses. She sat on the edge of the bed, her legs demurely crossed, and poured a drink for Torquil, who was now sprawling across the mattress, bare-arsed, searching his trouser pockets for cigarettes. In an antique display of chivalry he lit two simultaneously and handed one to Irina.
“Lorimer?” Irina said, blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth.
“Yes?”
“Man in room. Is he David Watts?”
“Yes.”
“I don’ believe I am in house, same house with David Watts.” She started speaking excitedly in Russian. Her legs were indeed amazingly white, Lorimer noticed, and long and thin, the blue veins in her thighs like…He thought for a second, like rivers beneath pack-ice seen from the air.
“Not David Watts the singer?” Torquil said, equally impressed. “In this flat?”
“Yes. I’m lending him a CD.”
“Fuck off.”
“You fuck off.”
“Lying bastard.”
“Come and see for yourself.”
Lorimer rejoined Watts, who was now crouched in front of the custom-built shelves containing his C D collection, his sunglasses pushed up on his forehead. He had already found Kwame Akinlaye—Lorimer shelved his CDs alphabetically and under country of origin.
“Got a lot of classical,” Watts observed. “Masses of Brazil.”
“I used only to listen to Central and South American music,”
Lorimer told him. “I moved on to Africa about three years ago. Started at Morocco and worked south, around the bulge, you know.”
Watts frowned at him. “Interesting. Where are you now?”
“Ghana. Moving on to Benin. Next week probably.”
“This is what you call authentic, is it?”
“Compared to the crap we produce in the West.”
A hastily dressed Irina and Torquil arrived and Lorimer introduced them. Torquil pointed at Watts’ track suit and sang, ‘Come on, you Woo-oolves’. Irina asked for an autograph and so did Torquil, for a person named ‘Amy’. Lorimer realized with some of a shock that this was Torquil’s fourteen-year-old daughter (away at boarding school)—he trusted she wouldn’t ask her father how he came by David Watts’s signature.