by Peter James
There were several new congratulatory cards lying on the floor, and she was greeted by the scents of the dozens of fresh flowers that had been arriving all morning.
‘Cora Burstridge!’
The joy at hearing the sound of her own name, and uttered in such a very charming way, was somewhat reduced by the fact that it came from inside her flat, and some moments after she had locked the door from the inside, and secured it with the safety chain.
She turned and saw a tall, fine-looking man with his hand outstretched in greeting. He looked so charming, so at ease, that in spite of all her anxieties, she meekly held out her hand and shook it.
Through her glove she felt a tiny prick in her palm.
The man kept hold of her hand, kept smiling. She began to feel a little dizzy. She heard him say, ‘My name’s Thomas Lamark. I wanted to have a chat with you about a film role you stole from my mother.’
He kept hold of her hand as she sank, gently, to the floor.
Then, from his pocket, Thomas produced a small tin that he had bought an hour earlier from a fishing-tackle shop near Brighton seafront. He opened it and peered in, wrinkling his nose against the sour smell and the solid mass of small, white, writhing maggots.
He blew them a kiss, then closed the lid.
Chapter Twenty
‘So?’
‘So?’
‘Come on! How was it?’
‘What?’
‘Your date. Your second date!’
The Orange signal died. Amanda, in a yellow satin jacket and black T-shirt, heard a couple of shrill beeps, then her cellular phone was silent. She hit the SEND button and, almost instantly, her assistant, Lulu, answered.
The traffic inched forward, stopped. She wasn’t going to make the next green light. A lorry halted alongside her, the thunking of its engine making it hard to hear Lulu’s voice. Diesel exhaust billowed in her face. She raised her voice. ‘I’ll be there in about ten minutes, Lulu. Anyone show up yet?’
‘No.’
Relief!
‘Apologise to them when they do.’
‘Want me to explain you had a heavy date which is why –’
‘I did not have a heavy date, OK?’
‘OK, OK! Relax! Chill out! This is not a good way to start your day, Amanda. You do not want to start off stressed. Stress will find you, you don’t have to go looking for it.’
‘Jesus, Lulu, what the hell have you been reading now?’
‘George Jean Nathan. He said, “no man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.” Are your fists clenched, Amanda?’
‘They’re going to be in a minute,’ she said.
Again, the connection failed. And Amanda’s temper nearly did too. Lulu was small, bug-eyed, big-hearted, but she could be dementing too. The lights changed.
She drove on in silence. Nine twenty-five a.m. was a bad time to be in a hurry across London. Superbad. She had wanted to be in early today: she needed to get prepared for a pitch meeting at Anglia Television with two writers whose series idea she had optioned. Instead she was embarrassingly late.
It was Michael Tennent’s fault.
Fifteen minutes later, puffed and flustered after running a good half-mile from the Poland Street multi-storey where she had parked her car, she let herself in through the front door of the building in Maddox Street, a few yards up from New Bond Street, and stepped into the narrow entranceway where the sign, 20–20 Vision Productions (black on clear Perspex, hip, high-tech lettering), was squeezed into a row containing several others that looked distinctly less smart. One was for a recruitment agency, one for a firm that imported Italian belts, and one, in Arabic, for an outfit run by a plump, rather shabby-looking Middle Eastern man out of a tiny office on the attic floor.
The door swung shut behind her, closing out the fumes of the cars, taxis and vans stretched back from the traffic lights at Bond Street, and she hauled herself up the two flights of stairs that were steeper than the north face of Everest.
Your fault that I’m late, Michael Tennent!
They had been the last diners to leave Aubergine. She could barely remember what she’d eaten. They had just talked.
She had invited him up to her flat for coffee and they were still talking when the windows started to lighten. Michael had left then, first with a stiff, rather clumsy handshake, then with an equally clumsy kiss. At twenty to five in the morning.
Her alarm was set permanently for seven during the week. After Michael had left, she had changed it to seven thirty to give herself an extra half-hour. Fatal error. It was always dangerous to reset her alarm clock when she was tired, because she invariably did it wrong. This morning, she had crashed into panicky consciousness at a quarter to nine when the phone rang.
It had been Brian. He had just hoped to catch her before she left for the office. He wanted to see her, he was finding life hell without her.
She thanked him for waking her. Then she told him to strap himself to a Scud missile and launch himself off a cliff.
As she walked in the door Lulu thrust a mug of coffee into her hand. She sipped it gratefully, then mouthed, silently, ‘Are they here?’
‘They just phoned. They’re stuck on the M4. A jackknifed lorry, won’t be here for at least half an hour. God likes you today.’
Lulu had round glasses, which emphasised her bug eyes. Her hair was black and spiky, and so heavily gelled it looked like a dead hedgehog. At four foot nine, she bordered on being vertically challenged. She was dressed in army fatigues and clumpy black boots, which gave her a seriously butch appearance, although in fact she was man crazy and had made more conquests than Amanda could keep count of. ‘Oh,’ she added, ‘Chris Pye at the BBC called. He won’t be around until this afternoon. Arch Dyson at Flextech wants to speak to you as soon as poss. And Brian just rang.’
Ten people worked at 20–20 Vision, but this morning the place felt quiet. The two partners who owned the business, and the rest of the staff, were on a shoot, and it was just Amanda and Lulu holding the fort. Lulu held the whole place together. Technically, she was Amanda’s production assistant; in reality, she was telephonist, dogsbody, senior researcher and script-reader too.
20–20 Vision specialised in hard-edged documentaries – corruption in the building industry, armaments manufacturers breaking embargoes, government cover-ups over nuclear waste. It had collected a whole raft of awards, and three years back had had an Oscar nomination for a short on Russian nuclear trade with terrorist organisations.
She hadn’t told Michael Tennent the truth about the documentary they were making on psychiatry. She’d told him it was a straightforward look at modern psychiatry and psychotherapy methods. It wasn’t. It was an attack on the profession. They wanted to show how people’s lives could be messed up by therapy; that the whole world had become therapy obsessed – and that practitioners held a dangerous amount of power over their patients. The power, even, of life and death.
Amanda walked through into her own office and stood on the wrong side of her desk, scanning the pile of fresh envelopes. It wasn’t much of an office: a cramped room, with a crummy little window that looked out onto a metal fire escape, but she had brightened it up with a couple of erotic Egon Schiele prints and framed press flyers of the two previous productions for which she’d been responsible – one on the pharmaceutical industry’s attempts to block fast cures for stomach ulcers, the other on artificial intelligence.
Lulu followed her in. ‘So, the second date. How did it go?’
The question hung in the air while Amanda squeezed behind her desk and sat down. Her chair, which had a wonky spring, went boink. ‘Wasn’t a date.’ She tapped her keyboard, logging on to her e-mail.
Lulu stood defiantly in front of the desk, hands on hips. ‘Wasn’t a date, huh?’
‘It was a working supper.’
‘That’s what your voice is telling me. It’s not what your face is telling me. You go out with a guy for a working supper once, and it’s a wo
rking supper. You go out twice with him and that’s a date!’
‘The first time was the theatre. I went with him because I wanted to see the Globe,’ Amanda said.
‘And last night you went to Aubergine because you wanted to see the restaurant?’
Among the raft of new e-mails on her screen, Amanda noticed one from Michael Tennent. She was keen to open it right away and wished Lulu would leave her alone.
‘And,’ Lulu added, ‘he’s your type.’
‘How do you know? You’ve never met him.’ Lulu was really irritating her now. The e-mail was tantalising her.
‘He’s older than you. You lost your father when you were a kid, your mother never remarried. You go for a father figure.’
‘Lulu, give me some space, will you? I’ve got to get myself sorted out before the others tip up.’
‘This is real stop-out week for you, Amanda. Monday night, the BAFTA awards. Tuesday night . . . hunt-the-shrink! I’m going to run you an eye-bath. You don’t want the Anglia bigwigs to think you had a sleepless night because you were worried about the pitch, do you?’ And Lulu marched out of the room with a cheeky grin.
Amanda pulled out the pilot script and the series proposal. It was for a documentary series on how pesticides in farming were threatening the whole world’s ecosystem. She read the first paragraph.
Then she read Michael Tennent’s e-mail. It had been sent half an hour ago. It said, simply: ‘Four hours since I saw you. I’m missing you.’
Chapter Twenty-one
Sometimes in his den, late at night, Thomas Lamark basked in the glow of his computer screen, imagining he was basking in tropical sunlight.
He wondered what it would be like to visit his friend, Jurgen Jurgens, in Clearwater Springs, Florida, with whom he played chess over the Internet but whom he had never met. He did not even know what Jurgen Jurgens looked like.
Tonight he was sending him an e-mail.
Jurgen,
Thanks for your kind words about my mother, they were of much comfort to me. I hadn’t realised how terrible it would be without her. I was always afraid that if she died I would miss her, but it is much more than that: it is like she was a buffer zone between myself and oblivion – that there was a generation between myself and extinction – or the abyss. Now there is nothing.
And I have all kinds of guilt going on inside me about whether I was a good son to her. In my heart I know the truth is that I wasn’t. I could have done so much more to make her happy. All I can do now is try to make up for that in all the ways I can. I guess it’s not going to help her – but at least it will help me come to terms with my grief.
Actually, I am really angry today. I am angry at the state of Mother’s grave. I went to the cemetery this evening, to give her some good news, and I was not at all pleased with the condition of her grave. This is no way to treat someone just because they are dead.
For a start, still no headstone – I’m told that is going to take months – but, really, does the grave have to look that awful? This great ugly mound? It doesn’t look like a grave at all, it looks like an allotment, just a mess of turned-over earth. I’m going to speak to someone about this, I just do not find this acceptable. It isn’t dignified.
I’m not letting Mummy lie looking like some root crop that’s just been planted.
I met a bearded nerd in the graveyard (you know the type I mean – anorak, knapsack, socks, sandals, hostile personality) who started telling me the reason they dig graves so deep is that a decomposing human body is dangerously infectious. All the chemicals and gases and bacteria. It can take over a hundred years, in some soil conditions, before a human corpse ceases to be a health threat.
I really don’t like this idea at all. She’s my mother. I want to think of her as a dignified human being, not some decomposing fucking health threat.
It’s probably politically incorrect to be dead now, anyway. You’re bound to be offending some minority group by being dead.
We live in a weird world.
Your friend.
Thomas
Chapter Twenty-two
wednesday,23 july, 1997
The only real friend I ever had is dead. It feels as if the lights in this house have gone out for ever.
Justin Flowering, down in the sauna, is still alive. At least, he still has vital signs, if you can call that being alive. He was whimpering earlier but he isn’t whimpering any more now. I don’t feel remorse for him the way I feel it for Tina Mackay. Am I becoming hardened?
It feels cold in this room. The cold has its own beauty, and there is such beauty in front of me. Such power. Such knowledge. Such wisdom. This machine is so smart. You have to respect computers, you really do. I do, and mine responds to this. It repays me handsomely. It gives me anything I want. And tonight it gives me a doctor in Cheltenham and one of his patients.
The doctor’s name is Dr Shyam Sundaralingham and his patient is called Dr Terence Goel. Sundaralingham is a great name! Tamil, common in the south of India, not unknown but less common in England.
I don’t think I mentioned before that I am a great mimic. I used to entertain Mummy for hours mimicking voices of characters in films and on television. She loved it. I hear a voice just once and that’s it, I have it. I wouldn’t mind a career as a mimic. I like that guy on television who’s so good at voices. Can’t remember his name right now. It’s late.
Actually, I have a problem with my memory and I can’t blame it on tiredness, because it isn’t only when I’m tired. I just keep forgetting things, lists, names, events. Sometimes it feels as though whole blocks of time have been removed from inside my memory. Other times, I’m fine.
Zippidy-do-dah.
The thing about this electronic world is that it creates new reality. If a computer record says that we exist, then we do exist! We exist through our birth records, our banking records, our credit records, our driving records, our postal codes. Our biological bodies, these days, are merely hard copies of these electronic records. We are moving from the era of Biological Man into a new era of Digital Man.
It is very easy to use this new technology to create new people. Almost too easy. Just a rudimentary ability to hack computers is really the only requirement. Just insert the new character into the digital records. Ensure that you fill in a little credit history, a little academic history, a little medical history, perhaps even the occasional motoring misdemeanour to add a touch of authenticity, and there you have it. A human being able to come and go as he pleases, able to operate a bank account, to have a driving licence, a passport, credit cards, a telephone.
Anything at all.
For instance, just a few days ago, there was no such person as this doctor, Shyam Sundaralingham of Cheltenham, or his patient, Dr Terence Goel.
Now, at 3.30 a.m., Wednesday 23 July, Dr Terence Goel is an impressive character. A cousin of the famous British astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell, Dr Terence Goel, 38, is a member of the Scripps Research Institute, prior to which, from 1986 to 1995 he was a junior professor of astronomy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Select Presidential Advisory Committee on the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence for Ronald Reagan.
In 1993 he had a paper published in Nature magazine, arguing that there was incontrovertible proof showing the existence of extra-terrestrial life.
His last car in the US was a ’94 Infinity. He made one parking violation, in January 1995, which he paid promptly. In June 1995 he moved to Britain to take up an advisory post at the secretive government listening and monitoring installation GCHQ.
In 1993, his wife, Leah, died in car crash when he was driving.
Dr Terence Goel now resides in Cheltenham. In December 1995, he made a five-year deed of covenant for £600 to the Imperial Cancer Research Foundation. He’s a pretty caring guy.
He has joined a local chess club. He drives a Ford Mondeo 16 valve – it’s a bit of a comedown from an Infinity, but he finds it suitable for the narro
w Gloucestershire roads.
He has just applied to join Mensa and taken the home test. His IQ was 175. (I’ve been modest there, mine is higher.)
His e-mail address is [email protected]
He has a neat website.
Terence Goel is the kind of guy I could become really good friends with. I am confident he will serve me well. But first, I must make absolutely sure that he is the right man for me. I’m going to submit him to the most important test.
I’m going to flip a coin.
Chapter Twenty-three
‘Georgia On My Mind’ was playing on the Volvo’s radio as Michael drove up the rhododendron-lined drive of the Sheen Park Hospital. He mouthed the words and turned it up loud.
It was coming up to eight thirty. The song was still playing when he pulled into the car park and he kept the ignition on, listening to it, not wanting it to end, shutting his window in case his colleagues wondered if he had finally flipped.
And he was wondering whether Amanda had got his email. He was thinking hard about whether he should have sent it.
It had been an impulse. That was how he had felt. And still felt. He was missing her. Badly.
And Georgia was on his mind. In his heart, his soul, the beat of the song was the beat of his heart. The slow, husky voice of Ray Charles was making his heart ache.
It was a fine morning. Amanda had played this song, it had been on a CD some time during the hours they had sat talking. He hadn’t heard it in maybe twenty years and now he was hearing it twice within a few hours. Some kind of omen?
He didn’t believe in omens, but he didn’t disbelieve in them either. It was just that if there was a God, Michael thought He had better things to do than fart around arranging crows into strange patterns in the sky, or sending black cats scurrying across roads in front of people to spook them, or fixing ladybirds to land on people’s bare arms so they’d think they were going to win the lottery. Or maybe that was what God got his kicks doing. Just farting around, messing with people. He had taken Katy away and now maybe He was going to give Michael Amanda instead. Or maybe He wasn’t.