She hailed a taxi, climbed in, and asked to be taken to a residential block a few minutes’ walk from the heliport. No doubt Vincent would eventually trace her as far as the heliport, but she saw no reason to make things easy for him. She sat back in the taxi, and relaxed, and watched the people and cars stream by. And was suddenly committed.
Boats burned. Committed. Alone. Literally, metaphorically, alone.
The plan — no, not even the plan, the impossible dream -the impossible dream was now real. Without really noticing it, she had kicked off from the edge of the everyday, kicked off into the dream, kicked off into a world where there was only she. A place where she had only her own word to take for her very existence. If only she could have said good-bye — to Harry, to John Peel, to Gerald, to her father, to Dr Mason, to Vincent, to somebody if only she could have said good-bye to somebody, then her going would have seemed less final, less of a total cessation. She was alone, and dying, and there was no one to know. No one who did not in some manner regard her as property, to be kept track of and cashed in when the time was right. No one, that is — and she fumbled with the switch on the intercom, oh God, were her fingers going to fail her now? — no one except Peter.
‘Computabook,’ she said, getting the switch right at last. ‘Drive me to Computabook. Then wait.’ It wouldn’t take long. ‘It won’t take long. Will you please do that?’
The delay, any delay, was crazy. This was her only chance to get away. These were her last few moments before the grief-buyers took over. Soon they would be after her. Searching. But she had to say good-bye to somebody, so that there would be somebody who knew.
Computabook was deserted, blank, shut for the weekend. Other people’s lives, of course, still had shape. She suffered a moment’s panic, not knowing Peter’s home address — how could she have worked with him for so long and never inquired, never been interested in, where he lived, and how, and with whom? — but then she remembered phone booths. Phone booths had directories.
The taxi driver took her to the nearest phone booth, and then on. Peter lived, she discovered, in a block exactly like her own, in a flat exactly like her own. Only the furnishings were different, sitting uneasily, impertinently, against the familiar walls. It seemed that Peter had been in bed when she rang. This shocked her: in bed, wasting the day, at nearly noon. But he belted his dressing gown and asked her in, and made her unquestioningly welcome.
She followed him into his sitting room, her sitting room messed up with all the wrong chairs and the wrong clock. The view from the window was wrong too. She shouldn’t have come.
A man’s voice called from the bedroom, ‘Who is it, love?’ and Peter went and put his head around the door and there was a short, inaudible conversation. Katharine wandered around the room, touching all the horrible furniture. When Peter returned she came at once to the point. Say it, and then she could go.
‘I’m running away. I expect you’ll see a lot about it in the papers. I wanted you to know.’ Know was an inadequate word, but it was all she had.
‘How can I help?’ Peter said.
His question, so gentle, made her cry. She hadn’t expected to cry. She wasn’t a crying person. ‘I came to say good-bye. That’s all. And to explain. I’ve accepted a lot of money. The papers will—’
‘You don’t have to explain, Katie-Mo. You’re your own woman.’
‘That’s what I mean. Perhaps I’m not. Perhaps I shouldn’t be.’
‘You’re dying. That’s between you and it. Not many things are, but that is.’
It was as if he lived inside her conscience. He said things that nobody else could. And he didn’t ask her where she was going, or what she was going to do.
‘You don’t think I’m running away?’
‘If you stayed you’d be running away a whole lot more. Staying would be a sort of suicide.’
She nodded. He was confirming what she had had to question.
‘So you’ll know I’m all right? When the papers start screaming, you’ll know I’m going on? You’ll know I’m somewhere, and all right?’
‘I’d never have doubted it.’
He put his arm around her and comforted her. He was so young, and he didn’t know a plot loop from a denouement phase. Oddly, for Gerald had been as hetero as they came, he reminded her of her first husband. But she and Gerald had both been young then.
‘I’m not an armored cruiser,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I ever was.’
He patted her, and moved her gently away. ‘Come along now. If this goes on much longer we’ll be making Somebody jealous.’ He found a crumpled handkerchief in his dressing gown pocket and gave it to her for her face. It had lipstick on it, but she didn’t mind.
‘Good-bye then.’
‘Good-bye, Katie-Mo.’
Going down in the elevator she looked at her watch. The half-hour she had allowed Harry was long expired. If Harry found she was gone, and rang Vincent, then Vincent might put out a general alarm. She wished now that she had chosen somewhere other than the heliport — it swarmed with policemen at the best of times. She gave up any idea of covering her tracks and got the taxi driver to take her straight there. The sooner she did what she had to do and got away out of it, the better. She told him, as an afterthought, that she was hoping to catch the twelve-forty-five to Amsterdam.
For all she knew, there might even be a twelve-forty-five for Amsterdam.
The driver set her down at the main entrance. Beyond the edges of the awning drizzle fell in a steady gray screen. Fumbling in her handbag for the fare money she had never felt more conspicuous. She had run up an enormous bill on the meter and had scarcely enough money. She emptied out her purse down to the very last coin and gave him the lot. The tip turned out to be quite generous — as the last taxi driver in her life he deserved it. She was leaving the money world behind.
He accepted it with little joy. ‘I hope NTV knows where you’re off to, Mrs Mortenhoe.’
‘Of course.’ She smiled at him brightly. Up to then he hadn’t spoken. Perhaps he was a Vincent spy. ‘I’m not staying. I’m going to choose some bulbs. Pretty daffodils in pots.’
‘You won’t like Amsterdam,’ he said, signaling to drive off. ‘It’s full of these Americans.’
She laughed, more than the joke demanded, if it was a joke, and watched him drive away. He wasn’t a spy, she decided, just one of her public jealous of his rights.
She was recognized again just inside the foyer.
‘Need any help, Mrs Mortenhoe?’ Two policemen, friendly, before she had time to run, time to be afraid even. She told them the Amsterdam story, which they believed. ‘Bet it’s raining there too, Mrs Mortenhoe.’ But their radio-phones might at any time betray her. ‘Well, ma’am, ticket office over there. If you need any help, just say.’
She thanked them calmly and walked, did not run, away in the direction they indicated. She changed direction only when she was sure she was lost in the crowd. There was a notice on the wall of the left luggage office. It told her what she should have known, what she really did know, already: Passengers Withdrawing Luggage Should Place a $op Piece in the Slot Provided.
She did not have a 50p piece. She had rushed into symbolic poverty five minutes too soon.
Her first crazy impulse was to run out after the taxi driver and demand her money back, her tip that his surliness did not deserve. Then she took herself in hand and wondered instead what she had with her that she could possibly sell — in the environs of the heliport probably nothing, not even her dear old fanny. Well then, if you needed money in a hurry, and the banks were closed for the weekend, and you had nothing to sell . . . well then, you begged or borrowed or stole. Of these three she decided briskly that the last would be the least emotionally demanding.
For a quarter of an hour or so she wandered vainly around the public departments of the heliport, looking for a pocket she could pick or a purse she could snatch. Then she tried banging coffee machines for rejected coins. The situat
ion was rapidly tipping over into farce. In her head she was screaming with laughter. Screaming with screaming.
In the end she did what she had once actually seen another woman do, and been too astounded to intervene. She walked quickly into the nearest shop, took a packet of stockings openly from a display rack and went with it to the busiest counter. Desperate situations called for desperate remedies.
‘Excuse me,’ she said grandly. ‘I bought these here about ten minutes ago, and—’
‘Not from me, you didn’t.’
The face across from hers was a rat-trap. ‘No, from one of the other girls. When I got them out into the daylight I saw they were quite the wrong color.’
‘Where’s your bill, then?’
‘Bill? I suppose it’s still in the bag.’
‘Let’s have a see then.’
‘Oh dear.’ She did her best to sound fluffy. ‘Should I have kept it?’
‘You should.’
There shouldn’t have been a rat-trap. There should have been a nice motherly woman who would pay up without question. That was what there’d been on the other occasion.
‘. . . I’m afraid. I put it in one of those bin things. I suppose I could go and dig it out . . .’
‘Yerse. I suppose you could.’
The rat-trap was examining Katherine, her clothes, her nice expensive handbag (an engagement present from Harry, the handbag), her face. Her face made the rat-trap tighten, hesitate, then open. ‘Give ‘em here, then.’
The stockings were snatched out of her hand. ‘Can’t have Mrs bloody fancy Mortenhoe dirtying her bloody fancy hands in the litter basket now can we?’
‘They were one twenty-eight,’ Katherine said, keeping her voice steady. She was a thief. She was planning to cheat Vincent. She was planning to cheat the shop. She could expect humiliation.
‘Innit bleeding funny? The more some people got, the more they bleeding want.’
The money came back across the counter, tossed insultingly. Katherine scrabbled it up and went. Behind her somebody was being told loudly about Mrs bleeding Mortenhoe who could afford a hundred pairs of bleeding stockings, and anyway who was going to look at her bleeding legs, her with this bleeding nasty disease and all?
Back in the left luggage department Katherine leaned against her locker and counted the hard round coins in her hand. One twenty-eight. Her humiliation had been worth it. Incidental. She had never felt so rich. She retrieved her sleeping bag holdall and still had seventy-eight. Even after the lavatory cubicle slot she still had seventy-three. She was rich.
Changing in the confined space was awkward. On either side of her women came, and flushed, and went. She’d seen sinisterly shut cubicle doors herself, and heard inexplicable noises, and imagined uncomfortable lesbiana. Now at last she knew what had really been happening. Behind the closed doors women had been taking off their old lives and shrugging themselves awkwardly into the new.
The under-robe fitted fairly well, but the outer one was much too long, so she hitched it up at the waist and let it hang down over the plaited belt. The necklace looked really quite pretty. She wondered if fringe women wore panties and bras. She decided she didn’t care very much either way: they wouldn’t show under the rest of the ridiculous outfit, and she’d feel safer with them on. She found she still had Peter’s lipsticky handkerchief, and used it to wipe off most of her makeup, leaving her face suitably dirty-greasy. She folded her Katherine Mortenhoe clothes and put them in the holdall, together with her handbag and shoes. She’d have liked to be rid of the clothes, and with them all reminders of her old self, but there was no point in telling Vincent’s men that she was now revised, reformed, made over. She’d dump them later, somewhere they wouldn’t be so easily found.
She tried walking in the clogs: two tiny paces forward and two back. The thick socks helped her to keep them on. She thought she’d manage. She slid her arms into the vast survival jacket, put on goggles and sou’wester, and was ready.
She was a freak, a shambling grostesque. Opening that cubicle door, facing the world, took more courage than anything else on that courage-demanding day. She was disgusting. If she wasn’t picked up for being Katherine Mortenhoe in breach of a three hundred thousand pound contract, she’d be picked up for being a danger to public health and morals . . . She reasoned with herself, reminded herself of the Fringe People about the city, weird, self-absorbed transients to be stared at or not stared at depending on how you were brought up, but never on any account to be spoken to. Even the police, seeing them as booby-trapped, liable to go off at any minute, preferred where possible to pass by on the other side.
So Katherine drew a deep breath, opened the cubicle door, picked up her holdall, and walked out. She was free. Free from Harry, free from Vincent, free from Dr Mason, free from everyone except herself. And thus free, exultantly, to explore that particular bondage.
On her way out across the heliport concourse, clattering still awkwardly on her wooden soles, she sought out the policemen who had been so kind. She walked past them slowly, brazenly. One of them looked steadfastly the other way. His companion shook a playful, appeasing truncheon. It came to her that in them she was seeing her one-time, ordinary self. Both of them, unconsciously, in their own different ways, were warding off the evil eye.
~ * ~
When Harry rang to tell Vincent his wife had skipped it I was sitting there, right across the Ferriman desk. We’d only just got in from the police station, and I was scarcely gay. Bailing me out had taken a terribly long time and a great number of buff forms in triplicate. Even if I’d been as innocent as a lamb I wouldn’t have felt it, not by the time they’d finished with me. So goddamned civil, every one of them.
Harry was in a state. I could hear every word, even from where I was sitting. Vincent smiled at me, at Harry, and held the receiver well away from his ear, so’s I’d feel I belonged.
‘. . . And now she’s disappeared. No luggage or anything. Just disappeared.’
‘Taken her handbag?’
‘I expect so. Yes — of course she’s taken her handbag.’
‘Then we don’t have to worry, do we?’
A great one for essentials, Vincent was. A long pause followed, long enough for him to cut and light one of his cigars. A pause during which Harry breathed, audibly screwing himself up.
‘I . . . don’t know what you must think of us — of her. I mean, she signed a contract, and now—’
‘So did you, Harry. You signed a contract too.’
‘I’ve stuck to it. I’ve done my part. I wouldn’t be ringing you if—’
‘You’re worried about all that money, Harry. Of course you are.’ Vincent sounded so very kind and gentle and understanding.
‘Not at all. I’m worried about my wife.’
I’d never imagined I would like Harry. Now I was certain I wouldn’t. Vincent, on the other hand, loved him more and more with every moment. The more people failed, the more he loved them. He loved them for confirming his judgment. And he was my boss. I worked for him. I chose to work for him.
‘We’ll look after your wife, Harry. You mustn’t worry. And we’ll make sure she sticks to the contract.’
‘Need it be the police?’
‘Who said anything about the police?’
‘Well, she’s broken the law, hasn’t she?’
‘I can understand your concern for her, Harry.’ His anger against her. ‘Look, old man, she’s not even in breach of contract until four. And after that it’d take a court order, an injunction, and God knows what else, before we could call in the police. So you don’t have to worry.’
‘I’m glad. Thank you, Vincent. Thank you very much.’
Again he breathed. The questions really important to him were no longer askable. Possibly, just possibly, he believed he didn’t want to ask them, believed he hadn’t even thought of them. Vincent tried to knock the first quarter-inch of ash off his cigar but it wouldn’t come away. He frowned at it.
&n
bsp; ‘Harry? You still there?’
‘I—’ Of course he was still there.
‘It was good of you to call, Harry. Keep this between ourselves, shall we? Just till I’ve thought what to do?’
‘Of course. But how will you—?’
‘Good man. Leave the whole thing to me, then. And Harry? You mustn’t worry, Harry. There’s absolutely nothing to worry about.’
He rang off. Even if Harry hadn’t been worried before, he certainly would be now. Vincent leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. Katherine Mortenhoe had skipped it, had placed herself outside the law. The poor thieving dope should have known better. Men like Vincent, corporations like NTV, don’t cheat all that easy.
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe Page 16