by E. M. Brown
From Ed Richie’s journal, 29th November, 2022
I CAN’T WIN. A couple of years ago, T. J. Laisterdyke, reviewing Distant Relations in the TLS, accused me of writing of a future ‘peopled only by a privileged, Western elite…’ little understanding that that was the whole point of the satire. And then this week the ignorant little shit, reviewing A Question of Identity in the same journal, wrote: ‘In his portrayal of Indian life in the 2030s, Richie is guilty of a gross act of cultural appropriation…’ I despair!
In the Bull last night, Diggers told me the cowardly bastards at the Beeb might be pulling the plug on The State We’re In…
CHAPTER NINE
June, 2002
FOR THE SECOND successive time, Richie woke to darkness.
He lay still and considered the events on Crete, and what Emmi Takala had told him. At least, he thought, he wasn’t going mad. He was part of some incredible scientific experiment… or that was what Emmi had told him. Perhaps there was a chance that he might meet her again; she had been sent to ‘intercept’ him, after all, and if it had happened once, then why not again?
Then he saw the flaw in his reasoning. If the phenomenon was of his own devising, then of course he might have invented everything, the events in Crete and Emmi’s explanation included.
So he might still be in the grip of some extraordinary madness…
He lay in the darkness and gradually made outtheshape of a window to his left. He was no longer in his Yorkshire barn conversion: there was no window at the foot of the bed. If not Yorkshire, then where? He had lived in London for twenty years from 1982. Judging by the position of the window, and the early traffic noise, he guessed he was now in the capital. He turned his head; he was in a double bed, but by himself.
He reached out to the bedside table, found a lamp, and located the switch on the flex. He turned on the light and looked around the vaguely familiar room. His memory of it did not match the reality; he had thought the walls a bland magnolia, when in fact they were pale green. The Klimt facing the bed he could have sworn had hung on the landing.
He was in the tiny Notting Hill terraced house he’d rented for six months in 2002. He’d lived with Laura Stephenson, a set designer with the BBC and a very strange woman – not that Richie had realised this, at first. For the last month of their fraught relationship, Laura had insisted on sleeping alone on a fold-out bed in his study.
He realised, as he lay in bed, that he felt physically well. His body was not plagued by the joint pains that would begin a decade later, in his early fifties. Nor did he have a hangover; he had drunk relatively little while living in London. Only later, after his move to Yorkshire, had he hit the bottle, when increased prosperity and dissatisfaction with his writing had proved a dangerous combination.
He swung himself out of bed and stared down at his naked body. His belly was flat and his legs bulged with well-defined muscles. He’d still played squash once a week in 2002, and the occasional game of five-a-side football. He stared at his hands. They were younger, the hands of a man of forty-two, not the arthritic, wrinkled hands of a fifty-six-year-old.
His clothes were folded neatly over a chair: faded blue jeans and a colourful shirt he would never have worn in his fifties. He dressed, pushing from his mind the question of how long he might have in this time before he was dragged away again. But it was impossible; he could no more not think about what was happening to him than he could cease breathing. He felt like getting drunk.
He looked across the room and caught sight of himself in the mirror. The image gave him pause. He was a stranger. Had he really looked so young and slim? His dark hair was trimmed short and he was clean-shaven. He was flat-bellied and well-muscled around the chest and upper arms. Christ, he’d really let himself go over the years.
He picked up a book from the bedside table: a social history of the 1950s. It was the summer of 2002: he’d been doing background reading for a radio play set in 1955.
Laura would be sleeping in his study, their relationship having floundered on her paranoia. She’d eventually leave him in July, and he’d remain here another week and then, with the lease expiring, rent a cheaper bedsit in Southwark until his move to Yorkshire in December.
He looked at the bedside clock. It was 7.55.
He left the bedroom, moved along the landing and paused outside the second bedroom, which he used as a study. He listened, but could hear nothing from within the room. If it were a weekday, Laura would have left for work already: he hoped so, as he really had no desire to meet her again.
He moved downstairs and along the hallway. The newspaper had been delivered. He picked up the Guardian and read the date.
It was Saturday the 15th of June. Laura would walk out a day before her birthday, in early July. It being a Saturday, she would be upstairs.
He took the paper to the kitchen and made himself coffee and toast, moving around the room like a stranger; almost fifteen years had intervened to erase from his memory such minutiae as where things were kept. He was surprised by how much he had forgotten about the small, day to day details of everyday life.
He sat at the table and ate Marmite on toast, the newspaper forgotten before him.
The small kitchen brought back memories of his time with Laura, and especially their last few weeks. She had become, over the six months they had lived together, increasingly suspicious and jealous. She had a fatally insecure personality and saw his every friendship with another woman as a potential love affair; every few days, during their last couple of months, her questions about casual acquaintances would escalate into full-blown shouting matches, with Laura accusing him of infidelity and he questioning her sanity.
The unfamiliar ringtone of a mobile sounded, and it was a few seconds before he realised that the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth was his own phone. He traced the sound to the lounge and found the device, a ludicrously chunky specimen, on the coffee table.
He slumped on the sofa and took the call.
“Ed,” Digby said. “Just ringing to wish you good luck.”
“Good luck?”
“You know,” his friend said, “that arbitrary state that fate sees fit to bestow on individuals from time to time: the antonym of misfortune.”
“Right, but…”
“Christ, did you hit the sauce last night?”
Richie clutched at a possible get-out. “Just a bit.”
“Where did you go?”
He floundered for a second. “Oh, just around the corner…”
“Thought you hated the Grapes?”
“You know, any port in a storm.”
“Laura been playing up again?”
“Tell me about it.”
“Anyway, good luck with Morrison this afternoon. I think your outline will bowl him over.”
Awareness crashed over him. Max Morrison was the American director who’d shown interest in a film synopsis, provisionally entitled VR, which Richie had pitched to his production company a year earlier. The director was in London this weekend and wanted to see Richie. Even now, so many subjective years down the line, he felt bitter about his treatment at the hands of the director.
“We’ll see,” Richie said.
“What time are you seeing him?”
“Ah… Good question. I’ll check my diary.”
“Ed, you’re sounding a bit out of it. Don’t go into the meeting hungover, okay? Morrison’s a shark; he’ll have you for breakfast. Take a couple of paracetamol and have a cold shower, hm?”
“Well… I don’t know about the cold shower bit.”
“Oh – before I go, what are you doing tonight?”
“Nothing planned.”
“How about coming over to ours for dinner? We’re having a few people around. I have a little announcement to make. Oh, and don’t bring Lulu.”
Richie blinked. “Lulu?”
Digby sighed. “You really are on another planet today, Ed. I was quoting the song, you know: ‘You can bring Pear
l, she’s a darned nice girl, but don’t bring Lulu…’? I mean, don’t bring Laura. Recall the last time she was here? I thought she was going to throw our best china at you.”
“No Laura,” Richie said. “See you tonight.”
He killed the call and stared at the phone.
All in all, he recalled now, the 15th of June 2002 had been a shit of a day. He’d met Max Morrison at an expensive bistro in Chelsea and the big-shot director-producer had proceeded to humiliate him and shred his outline, calling for farcical changes that Richie, desperate for a movie break, had abjectly agreed to make.
Then he had gone to Digby and Caroline’s dinner party and his friend had announced that, on the back of landing a lucrative contract to write for Yorkshire TV, he and Caroline had found a place up north and were moving in the autumn. Richie had congratulated his friend on his luck, but had been aggrieved that Digby would be living so far away. They met up a couple of times a week in London, and the idea of not seeing Diggers for their regular sessions was unthinkable.
Little did he know, at the time, that a few months down the line a good word from Digby would land Richie a regular writing job with Yorkshire TV and he’d move to the converted barn later that year.
He’d be able to enjoy the dinner party tonight, this time, and his congratulations would not be hedged with resentment.
He returned to the kitchen, finished his coffee and toast, then considered the imminent meeting with Morrison.
He had only a vague recollection of the film synopsis he’d slaved over on and off for months. He would have to locate the file on his PC and get himself up to speed on the ‘latest’ version: he must have emailed at least a dozen different outlines to LA over that summer, each one re-jigged and altered at Morrison’s overbearing insistence.
The problem was that his PC was in his study, and Laura was famously vitriolic about having her sleep-ins disturbed.
He looked at his watch. It was almost nine. Surely she wouldn’t mind if he crept in and quickly turned on his computer? But knowing Laura, that would be enough to set her off.
He was about to make himself a second cup of coffee when a sudden recollection hit him. On the morning of his meeting with the American director, Laura had confronted him with the photograph of Annabelle…
He heard Laura’s footsteps on the stairs. The door opened and she walked past him and into the sitting room without a word of greeting. The sight of her, for the first time in nearly fifteen subjective years, was a shock. She was hunched over in a chunky pink dressing gown that emphasised her anorexic slightness, and her thin, pinched face was studiedly turned away from him.
“Make me a coffee, would you?” she called from the sitting room.
He made the coffee on auto-pilot.
The criterion of beauty, he knew from experience, was very subjective. Had anyone asked Richie, years later, if he’d thought Laura Stephenson beautiful, he would have answered with a reserved affirmative, adding the rider that her beauty was of a peculiar variety. He recalled a line from Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, describing Fuchsia Groan as ugly, but that a small twist would make her suddenly beautiful. Now, seeing Laura again after many years, he realised that her face merely required that small twist…
“Toast?” he called.
“You know I don’t have breakfast.”
Had known, he thought. And forgotten. Come to that, he’d also forgotten how she liked her coffee.
He took a gamble, added a splash of milk, and carried it through to the sitting room.
She was curled on the sofa, her feet drawn up under her small bottom, and was staring with determination into the far corner of the room.
He passed her the mug and moved to his armchair, knowing that she had the photograph in the pocket of her dressing gown and knowing, too, what he was about to endure.
She looked up from her coffee and stared at him. Her thin face was lopsided, the long lips skewed; her left eye was larger than the right. He wanted to reach out, re-arrange those features, and make her beautiful. If only it could be that easy.
“What the hell is this?”
Hell, the coffee… “I’m sorry?”
She held out the mug. “The coffee. It’s white. You know I take it black.”
He sketched a smile. “Sorry. I forgot.”
“Forgot? Christ, how long have you known me?”
That was a good question. He’d forgotten that, too.
She said, “Does she take it white?”
This wasn’t quite how it had happened before – he’d not got the coffee wrong – but it would lead to the same result.
“I’m sorry?”
She stared at him and said, very deliberately, “Does the woman you’re seeing take her coffee white?”
He sighed. “I’m not seeing anyone.”
“You lying little…”
“Laura –”
“Don’t you dare say my name in that forbearing, patronising tone, you bastard!”
“This is ridiculous.”
He should get up and walk out. He almost did so, but stopped himself. If he enraged her, then who knew what she’d do with the photograph? He wanted it back, wanted to see the woman it depicted again, after so long… If he sat tight, weathered her tirade, then he knew she’d throw it at him and storm back upstairs to the study, wailing her pain.
She dug into the pocket of her dressing gown and pulled it out. “Who’s this?” She waved the photograph at him.
He took a breath. “I’ve no idea. I’m too far away.”
She surged to her feet and stood over him. “Who the fuck is it, Ed? I found it in your wallet. I needed a fiver to go see Christina yesterday…” She held out the picture of the slim, smiling girl.
He reached out to take it, but she snatched the photo away.
She paced up and down before him, hunched in her dressing gown, barefoot, the photo clutched in her thin fingers. He watched her, willing her not to rip the picture into two, as she had on the first occasion.
“It’s the bitch you met at that launch party, isn’t it?”
“Launch party?” Then he remembered. His script-writer friend Alan’s first novel had launched a few weeks ago, and there’d been a party in Piccadilly. Richie had gone along, and taken Laura, and during the course of the evening he’d got into conversation with a woman he’d known years ago when he’d worked at Waterstone’s. They’d chatted for fifteen minutes, catching up on their respective lives, and Richie had made the mistake of allowing Laura to see that he was enjoying the woman’s company.
“And a few days later… you didn’t come back till late –”
“I told you, I had a session with Digby.”
“And on Friday? You were out all day when you’d told me you’d be working here…”
He floundered under her gaze. He had no idea what he’d done on that far-away Friday, and in Laura’s eyes his silence condemned him.
“Jesus!” She stood over him, her face twisted and ugly. “Jesus Christ, Ed! You bastard! You’re seeing her, aren’t you? You’re fucking the little bitch!”
“Of course not! Don’t be ridiculous… The woman I met at the launch, she worked with me years ago. We were catching up.” He pointed at the photo still clutched in Laura’s fist. “And that isn’t even her.”
“Then who the hell is it?”
He sighed. He recalled, dimly, that years ago he hadn’t even bothered to explain who it was. This argument was the culmination of a dozen such confrontations with Laura, and he’d not been in the mood to placate her.
“It’s a girl I knew, a long time ago.”
“You liar! It looks like the Waterstone’s bitch.”
“It doesn’t look anything like her. The woman at the party was much older than this. And if you look at the photo closely, you’ll see the girl’s wearing flared denims and a cheesecloth blouse, hardly the height of fashion these days.”
Laura gave the photo a cursory glance. For a second she looked convi
nced, then her expression turned to suspicion, quickly followed by rage. “Christ! That ’sixties party you were invited to the other week… You said you we’re going out for a pint with Digby instead – but you went to the party and took this bitch, didn’t you!”
Richie made the mistake of laughing.
She screamed at him. “You bastard, Ed. You’re fucking her!”
She looked at the photo, then compressed her lips and with quick deliberation tore the picture in half and threw it at him.
He caught one piece and retrieved the other from the carpet. As she watched, he pieced the picture together. By good fortune she had not ripped the photograph cleanly in half, so that the image of the slim smiling girl in the flares and blouse was still intact.
Laura stood in the centre of the room, breathing hard, her face red with rage.
Looking up from the photograph to Laura, Richie said quietly, “She was called Annabelle. I knew her twenty years ago. I was in love with her, very much in love. She was nineteen, just a kid. We lived together for a few months. She was the first woman I really, truly loved.”
Laura asked quietly, “And… what happened?”
Taking a breath, Richie told her all about Annabelle and her death.
He slipped the two pieces of photograph into the back pocket of his jeans and stood up.
Years ago he’d not bothered to explain who Annabelle was, when Laura had ripped the photo in two. He’d let her race upstairs in tears and could not be bothered to follow her and explain.
Now she stood before him, her head hanging as she quietly sobbed.
He hesitated, then reached out and took her into his arms, kissed her forehead and held her for a long time.
“I’m sorry, Ed.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I hate myself.”
“Don’t,” he murmured.
“I’m stupid and ugly.”
“You’re far from stupid, Laura, and I think you’re lovely.”
She hiccuped on a sob. “No, I’m ugly. Every… every morning I look in the mirror, and do you know what I see?”