by Baker, John
Celia padded through from Marie’s kitchen and put a mug of hot coffee in Sam’s hand. She was a small woman. She wore a ring with a pearl on her middle finger, a gold band with two tiny diamonds on her index finger, and on her ring finger she had a signet ring on the second joint and a bed of assorted jewels in a heart on the third joint. The little finger was bare, poor thing. Celia’s hair had been thinning rapidly over the past months but she still used a bottle of red dye on it every few weeks. Her neck was festooned with a lightly billowing silk scarf to hide the wrinkles and she wore tight velvet trousers. Didn’t look the type to give up without a fight.
‘So, what’s to do?’ Sam asked.
‘Finish your coffee first,’ Marie told him. ‘Maybe you and JD could get the fridge upstairs? The cooker? And the kitchen table if it’ll go. Me and Celia’ll carry on shifting the silver and the Modiglianis.’ She drew the back of her hand over her forehead. ‘Then there’s the antique Spode and my collection of Degas bronzes.’
Sam grinned and JD laughed as though Billy Connolly had done a fart impression. Nearly fell off his chair.
They humped the fridge up the stairs, one step at a time. Looked incongruous sitting there next to Marie’s bed, like a fish in the desert. JD wiped his brow with a red handkerchief. ‘What’re you writing?’ Sam asked.
‘Another novel. About halfway through. I’m past the part where I decide whether to go on or give up.’
‘About cops and robbers?’
‘On the surface, yes. At the heart it’s about exile. About being separated from the thing that feeds you, gives meaning to your life.’
‘You’ve talked about that before, in other books.’
‘I’ve skirted round it once or twice. In this book it’s the main theme.’ He laughed. ‘Don’t know who it was, some writer or other, said we all rewrite the same book over and over again. A writer usually only has one or two things to say and he or she goes on saying it until somebody stops them. The best writers find a new way of saying it with every book.’
‘There’s nothing new in the world,’ Sam said. ‘Only new ways of seeing the same old things.’
JD nodded agreement. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Something like that. Shall we get the cooker?’
One step at a time again, JD above the cooker and Sam lifting from below, remembering all the rules about taking the weight on his legs rather than his back. They left it standing next to the fridge.
‘Exile is when you’re away from home,’ Sam said. ‘When you’re not allowed to go back. Used to be a kind of punishment.’
‘Still is in different countries,’ JD said. ‘To be banished. That’s how America got started, Australia. People the state didn’t want around, shipped them overseas.’
‘This an historical novel you’re writing?’
‘No. I’m using exile as a metaphor. It’s about the places we’re not allowed to go or the places we don’t allow ourselves to visit.’
‘Physical places? Geographic places?’
‘Sometimes. Places can be in the mind too. We’re often exiled from ourselves, from our own experiences, our own memories.’
Sam took a couple of steps over to the window and looked out at the river. ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ he said. ‘When I heard about Katherine the other day. Seems unreal, somehow, that we were married, spent all that time together, intimate time. It’s as if I wasn’t there, or I dreamed it or read about it in a book. Like it was somebody else’s experience.’
‘You were a drunk, Sam. You were exiled by definition. The alcohol kept you away from everything, yourself, your pain.’
Sam shook his head. ‘It didn’t, though. Not really. I always thought it would help, that the next drink would solve something, some longing, that it would insulate me from life. But it never did. It made every day harder to cope with, harder to bear. I can honestly say that I never had a drink that solved a problem.’
‘You’re an outsider anyway,’ JD told him. ‘A natural exile. That’s why you’re a private eye and not a cop. You never opt to accept the defaults. It’s a custom installation every time for you, even if you don’t understand the jargon. It’s almost as if you’re frightened of convention.’
‘Yeah,’ Sam said in a low voice. ‘Convention makes me shiver. I’ve seen what it does to people.’
‘I read about an old Pawnee warrior,’ JD said. ‘Guy called Small Ankles. Somewhere around the end of the nineteenth century he was already an old man and it was near the time of the tribe’s creation ceremony. Small Ankles told his son the ceremony would be hard to perform because there weren’t many wolves around any more. The wolf was a central character in their creation myth. In this ceremony the Indians got together and practised “historic breathing”, they inhaled the past and tried to show how it was contained in the present, in the now. And Small Ankles and the other old men of the village were worried that if they lost the ceremony they’d also lose the past. They’d be undefined, broken. If they didn’t have a past or access to their past they wouldn’t be able to continue. Later, when Small Ankles had gone to his ancestors and the tribe had been moved to a reservation, his son would tell this story, about how his father had seen the demise of the Indian as it became more and more impossible for him to inhale his past.’ Sam looked at JD. ‘Are you trying to tell me something?’
‘I tell stories,’ JD said. ‘That’s what I do.’
The kitchen table wouldn’t go up the stairs. Marie scratched her head but that didn’t make any difference. ‘It’s going to get ruined,’ she said.
‘What we could do,’ JD said, ‘is plastic bags around the legs. Tie them at the top to keep the water out.’ Sam looked at him for nearly a minute, realized why the guy couldn’t be anything else but a writer.
‘Give me a hand,’ he said. JD followed him out into Marie’s yard and together they brought in about forty concrete paving slabs. They made four columns with the slabs and lifted the table into position, one leg on each column. The top of the table was only a couple of inches short of the ceiling. Looked like an abortive attempt to reconstruct a Greek temple.
‘Clever boy,’ Celia said to Sam.
‘I carried most of the slabs,’ JD told her.
Angeles was managing director and majority shareholder in the soft drinks business which had been founded by her father. It was a demanding job, not made easier by her blindness, but one for which she had been groomed since her earliest childhood. It took her out of the house every day of the week and committed her to a couple of evenings as well.
Sam arrived at her front door shortly after dark. Her lips were tight and the skin of her face was pale, almost transparent around her cheekbones and under her eyes.
‘Something wrong?’ he asked.
She flashed him a smile. ‘Do I look that bad?’
‘No, I just thought...’
‘It’s OK. A hard day. Trying to get everything ready for the Christmas rush. Planning with a couple of line managers who don’t believe in planning. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it.’
She splashed a dollop of Talisker into a cut-glass tumbler and added a measure of Highland spring water. She took a sip and closed her eyes, swivelled her head around to ease the tension in her neck. She took another glass from the sideboard, splashed a dollop of Highland spring water into it and topped it up with more Highland spring water, handed it to Sam who poured it down his throat. He reached for the bottle and poured himself another one. He was a hard-drinking man.
Angeles had slipped down into a cocoon of a chair, lying back on the base of her spine, her legs spread in front of her. One of her shoes had come off but she didn’t bother to retrieve it. Sam knelt and removed the other shoe. He put her feet on his lap and massaged them alternately, kneading the soles, wondering at the tiny perfection of them.
‘You and me,’ he said. ‘It’s gone quiet.’
She sipped from her drink and looked over the rim of the glass. ‘Yes, I know. Why is that?’
Angeles sat up. ‘No,’ she said. She didn’t shout but her voice went into a higher octave. ‘I wouldn’t do that, Sam.’
‘You wouldn’t meet someone else?’
‘Not without telling you. You’d be the first to know.’ She sounded hurt, misunderstood. Sam recognized the territory. An intimate moment metamorphosed into injury and reproach in less time than it takes to sing a love song.
He gave her her feet back. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. But given the same circumstances he’d play it exactly the same again. If there was any chance, and in Sam’s experience there was always a chance, that she was seeing someone else, he wanted it out in the open. What made it harder was the double-bind: that if she wasn’t seeing someone already, his lack of trust and his general insecurity about relationships could easily push her to look for someone with more sensitivity and understanding.
‘Why do you think that?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘The distance,’ he said. ‘The spaces between us.’
‘You’re often distant yourself, Sam. Preoccupied. But I don’t think you’ve found somebody else. I try to work out what’s dragging at you, see how the job is making demands on you. A person can only be spread so thin. When you’re not there for me I hold my breath and tell myself to be patient. Tell myself you’ll be back when you can make the space.’
‘I was out of order,’ he told her. ‘If you’re not seeing some other guy I’m the happiest man alive. I’ll take you dancing, whatever you want. I’ll try to like Robbie Williams.’
She pushed him and he fell over backwards, spilling water on his shirt.
‘Shit.’
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
Sam got back on his knees. ‘No. I’m wet.’
‘As in drip?’ she asked. ‘Or d’you mean like feeble?’
Angeles had gone upstairs and he could hear her running the bath water. He loaded used cups and glasses on a tray and carried it through to the kitchen. He put the crockery in the dishwasher and wondered for a moment if he should take it out again and wash it in the sink. He could see why she needed one, being blind. It must save some angst if you couldn’t see, knowing that things weren’t piling up on the draining board.
But Sam believed in washing up. It was one of those things; he didn’t even know that he believed in washing up until he discovered dishwashers everywhere. Seemed like everybody had one these days. Old-age pensioners living by themselves, with only a bowl and a spoon and a cup with Mother on it, had dishwashers. Families had them. Couples.
That’s what you did these days. Everybody was too busy to wash up. Unless you were poor; then you had plenty of time.
He flicked the remote towards the TV, caught the late news. But his mind was not focused. It had been a long day and he was coasting in neutral, letting his brain wander among images that touched his life. His useless journey that morning, Katherine being found murdered in Nottingham, Angeles upstairs getting into the bath, a crazy guy kicking him in the balls, the river rising. The voice on the television was talking about the economy, how the government needed to cut the interest rate.
Sam switched the lights out, left one lamp lit in the sitting room. He slumped on the couch and watched the flickering images on the box, waiting until Angeles had finished in the bathroom. A coach carrying a party of school children had run off the road in northern Spain, tumbled into a ravine. A rescue party were bringing small broken bodies back up to the road and covering them with blankets. The driver had thrown himself clear and was sitting in the back of an ambulance with his head in his hands.
Sam frowned. He flexed his shoulders and sat up, leaning forward to inspect the new image on the screen. It was the public house, the Taps. Top of North Lane in Headingley, the very place he’d been that morning.
The voice-over was saying: ‘Police were called to a house in the Headingley district of Leeds tonight where the bodies of a man and a woman are believed to have been discovered. Neighbours were alerted when they noticed water flooding out of the house.’ The image cut to a close-up of the face of a middle-aged man with a bald head. He looked into the camera and said, ‘There was water seeping under the front door. It was as if the house was full of water and it was coming down the step and running into the road.’
Another shot of the Taps and then the camera swung into North Lane. Sam saw the house he had been to that morning and across the road, almost directly opposite, there was the familiar yellow scene-of-crime tape that the police used to isolate the area they wanted to keep uncontaminated for forensic investigation.
Sam was on his feet. The reporter on the spot was signing off. He said, ‘The police are treating the deaths as suspicious and just a few minutes ago a spokesman said that it was obvious as soon as the bodies were discovered that a horrific crime had been committed. The names of the deceased will not be released until the next of kin has been notified.’
He looked at the screen again, blinked as the image shifted back to the studio. The newscaster was smiling and announcing that a celebrity couple - cut to a photograph of the woman in a scanty dress; a man with blond hair, his arm protectively around her waist - had decided to separate in order to devote more time to their respective careers.
Sam picked up the remote and hit the kill button. He went to the phone and keyed the number pad.
‘Yeah?’ Geordie’s voice said in his ear.
‘Did you see the news?’
‘I’m still watching. Trying to. I mean, I was watching it and then the phone rang. Now I’m on the phone. The news is history.’
‘The house in Leeds. The bodies, you catch that?’
‘Yeah. Sounds nasty.’
‘Geordie, that’s where I was this morning. The same street.’
Silence.
‘You still there?’
‘Yeah, I’m still here. The house? You mean you went to the same house?’
‘No. The address I had was across the road, opposite the house with the bodies.’
‘It could be a coincidence, Sam. No need to panic.’
‘OK, let’s look at it. Last week I was in Nottingham and Katherine was killed. The cops pulled me in and I had to lie to get out of it. Now this Bonner guy rings and asks me to meet him in Leeds. I go to the house and the same day a couple of bodies turn up over the road. People know I was there. The guy in the house. I went to another house, to make sure I hadn’t got the wrong address. My car was parked in the street.’
‘But why would they think of you, Sam? We don’t even know who these people are, the dead guy and the woman.’
‘That’s why I’m ringing. Can you find out?’
‘How do I do that? It’s the middle of the night.’
‘Drive out there. Walk along the street. Ask the neighbours.’
‘At midnight?’
‘Nobody’ll be sleeping, Geordie. The place will be buzzing with reporters. Just hang around and listen to what they’re saying. When you find out ring me at home.’
‘You sound worried, Sam.’
‘I need to know the score. If the bodies belong to people I know, how long will it be before the cops come knocking on my door again?’
‘You think it’s a set-up?’
‘I think I need to be careful. I’ll wait for your call.’
‘OK, I’m on my way. But here’s a thought for you.’
‘I’ve got enough thoughts, Geordie.’
‘Who do you know who lives in Headingley?’
There was a gentle click as Geordie put the phone down at the other end of the line.
Sam went upstairs and walked into the bathroom. Angeles was lying in the bath, her skin glistening in the rising steam from the water.
‘You looking for me?’ she asked.
‘Listen, something’s come up. I have to go out.’
‘Oh, Sam, I thought you were s
taying. What is it? Can’t it wait?’
‘I’ll explain later,’ he told her. ‘Got to get moving.’
He kissed her on the lips and she ran a damp hand over his head. He closed the bathroom door behind him and shook his head. ‘Who’re you gonna miss the most?’ he asked himself as he ran down the stairs.
Back at his own house, Sam thought about Geordie’s question. He didn’t know anyone in Headingley. He knew a couple of pubs there, or he used to know them in the old days. Places he’d gone looking for a good time but only scored a length of oblivion. He’d once woken up on the floor of a flat in Headingley. No one around but there was a three-legged cat, student posters on the walls and some naive artist had painted stars on the ceiling.
And way back in the mists of time, when Elvis was still alive, there’d been a house in Headingley with a guy who did embroidery.
There was such a thing as coincidence, of course, everyone knew that. It was statistically possible that Mr Bonner had given him the wrong address in North Lane and asked him to go there at the same time as a murder was committed. The two things could be unrelated. But Sam didn’t believe that. When you’d worked the streets for as long as he had worked them you were suspicious of coincidence. It could get you into trouble. Better to dispense with it as a theory altogether. Concentrate instead on the near certainty that if two things happened simultaneously it was more than likely that someone was orchestrating them.
Maybe the guy at number thirty-seven was Bonner after all? Or he was a guy who called himself Bonner when he was setting someone up on the phone? Sam tried to recall him, think if he’d seen the guy before. He’d worn a track-suit and trainers. And he was good-looking in that modern way; his head and face like a successful product of Hitler’s experiments in genetic engineering while his mind proved that the concept was a fallacy. Couldn’t have been him, he’d have had to read from a script. When he’d opened the door and Sam had enquired, ‘Mr Bonner?’ the guy had had to think about it.