by Graham Joyce
I felt faint as I took the thing from Fraser's hands. You see, it was quite familiar to me. The book belonged to me. What's more, I was the author of the supplementary manuscript.
Chapter 15
We drank five or six glasses of wine each in the Plumber's Arms that afternoon, and we talked about I know not what. After the second glass I'd said I had work to get back to; and Yasmin said so had she. But I said oh heck let's have another and she said heck why not. After that third glass she dialled her employer on her mobile phone and said she'd eaten something at lunchtime that had disagreed with her and that she wouldn't be in. She looked me in the eye as she made the call.
That's youth for you. The cavalier lie. The irresponsible fib. The offhand disrespect for consequences. The casual dishonesty that conjures the excitement of an open narrative for their lives. I took out my own mobile and dialled Val, and told her I was feeling a little under the weather and that I probably wouldn't return to the office that afternoon.
Neither of us commented on what we'd just done, or the significance of the fact that we'd just cleared the next few hours simply to be together. But we'd changed into a smoother, less grinding gear, and we both felt the pleasure of the open highway ahead. We celebrated by ordering a fourth glass of wine.
Is it possible to fall for someone because of the way they hitch the strap of their dress? Why would that bundle of contingencies we call love fasten and feed on such a small thing? But as we talked I kept waiting, almost impatiently, greedily, for her to do it again. And there was another thing: this feeling that she reminded me of someone. Yet I didn't take that too seriously because it had happened when I'd got mixed up with Fay. It's a conjuring trick of nature, a phantom and a deception. You somehow feel that you must have known this person in another life; that you were waiting for them to slot into your world, like a missing jigsaw piece, or a lost chord. It's in the eye: there in the compression of the pupil or the glitter around the iris. You recognize that person and yet you don't, so therefore it can't be the hideous randomness of biology; it has to be destiny, it has to be a spiritual reunion of some kind, a rediscovery, a planetary alignment, a coming home.
This is the fraudulent demon of falling in love. It is categorised by Goodridge as demon number five hundred and sixty-seven. Almost everyone is prey to this demon at some time in their lives; for some fools, several times over. (And do not be tempted to attribute any special significance to its number, because if you do so you will fall victim to the numerologist's demon, which weaves its vicious web out of mere coincidence.)
I don't believe in this notion of "falling in love." I think we fall in sex, and after sex we have to either stand up for love or scarper. By which I mean love won't take things lying down. By which I mean the four glasses of wine were affecting me more than they would normally, and the things I was thinking were alarming me.
Most of all I was thinking: please don't let this turn into a love story at my time of life. Anything but that, because noone has any sympathy for that any more. And anyway I'd been banned from being in love. I'd inoculated myself.
"How old are you?" I asked her.
"Twenty-nine. But inside I'm older. Wiser."
"How did you come by your wisdom?"
Ah, then she did that thing: lightly hitched the strap on her shoulder, and looked round at the slowly emptying pub. Lunch-time was over, and most of the customers were not stuck there, like I was, like a fly in a spoon of honey. She said, "Do you think it's possible that some people could live a full life, let's say live through wars, fall in love many times, see regimes change around them and go on to die without being any the wiser?'
"I'm sure it happens."
The thing is, we were saying all these things but it wasn't like a real conversation. We were just making noises. Singing to each other, almost. Finding points of harmony. Exchanging old jokes. It didn't have to mean anything. After the sixth glass of wine—or was it the fifth or the seventh?—we were the only people left in the bar besides the staff. Tucked in a little corner. Her graceful, pale hand still lay flat upon the table. Mine too, fingertips a few centimetres from hers. Yet the gap between those fingertips was a canyon, a rocky desert. I knew that like a superhero I could leap that chasm in a single bound. I also knew that I must not. Would not.
I stumbled out to the toilets at the back of the pub. There I washed my hands and threw some cold water on my face. I stood there for a minute or two regarding myself in the mirror. For some reason I thought of how it would sound to Stinx and Diamond Jaz; or to my secretary Val; or to Fay and the children for goodness sake.
"What? What?"—and here's the mad thing: I actually said this to myself in the mirror, as if I was having a real argument with the man reflected there—"We had a few glasses of wine together, that's all!"
This robust defence with self was interrupted by a barman who swung into the Gents. He'd clearly heard me barking because he looked at me oddly before disappearing into one of the stalls. I pretended I'd been singing some death metal rock lyrics of the kind my son used to play in his bedroom at maximum volume. I don't think I convinced the barman in the stalls.
And of course it was nothing. Just a few drinks with a strange and pert young woman, about whom I knew nothing. I pulled myself together and returned to find her in the bar.
"Thought you'd abandoned me," she said lightly.
"I wouldn't do that."
Because it wasn't nothing. It was too much of something. I could feel myself going into a crash, so I had to pull out. I sat back in my chair. I looked at my watch.
She sensed the line go slack, so started talking about the television. She said she might have been mistaken but she thought she'd seen my face picked up by the news cameras the night before, outside Buckingham Palace.
"Bloody awful business," was all I could think of saying about it.
There was an uncomfortable pause and then, "Shall we go for a stroll along the Embankment? It's what I like doing best in all the world."
I was relieved, and eager to leave the Plumber's Arms, but the question of where to next was more than I could resolve. I was so way out of practice with women—and certainly with women of her generation—that I feared the obvious. If she'd said, Your place or mine? I would have needed to turn her down without knowing how. Then again, I was thrilled by her proximity: I'd spent the last few hours wanting to trace the blue veins on her pale white arms; plus something about her scent was maddening me; plus I wanted to taste on her mouth the wine we'd been drinking. But I wasn't ready or willing for any of this. The curve of descent was too steep.
But neither did I want to stop the conversation, whatever it was about. So we walked along the Embankment, from Lambeth Bridge, past the Houses of Parliament and on. It was cold, but dry cold. She linked her arm in mine, quite naturally, and though I stiffened at first I quickly relaxed. There was a diffuse sun, spinning a hint of lime on the Thames. London hurtled along at its breakneck business on either side of the river, but not where we were. We strolled all the way up to Blackfriars Bridge and it seemed but a few steps. I've walked there a hundred times, but on this occasion it was all new-minted. The chill wind from the water only made me more sensitive to the warmth of her body beside me; the winter light flaking the air seemed like a bright stage radiance; the engine of the city diminished to a purr, far away, harmless to our inviolable space.
At Blackfriars we stood for a while, trying to say goodbye, not knowing what to do next. I saw the flapping ghost of the Vatican banker hanged by his enemies under the arch of the bridge at low tide just a few years ago: it was just a phantom, mere history, fading.
"Shall we see each other again?" she said.
"You want to?"
"I just said so, didn't I?"
"When?"
I wanted to say, In five minutes. Now. I wondered if the next night would be too soon. Then I remembered it was the Candlelight Club the next night. I felt a stab of irritation that I had to see Stinx and Jaz
when I wanted to be with Yasmin. I hadn't even left her company and already I was prepared to ditch my good friends to be with her again. Where is the sense in that? "Thursday? Can you do Thursday?"
"Where?"
"Do we have to decide now? I'll call you."
"Okay."
She stood with her arms at her sides, looking at me without blinking. I leaned over to offer a farewell peck on her cheek, but in my clumsiness, or maybe our clumsiness, our lips grazed each other's. A dry-lipped kiss, a kiss on lips made cold by the chilly air. But I felt something pass between her lips and mine, a fine thing, like smoke but sweeter, like a promise but less precise.
And yet it wasn't even a kiss. If she was Ellis's spy, she was taking the game all the way.
A tugboat on the river hooted its pleasure or derision at us, I didn't know which. The light was fading fast as I watched her hail a passing taxi and climb in. I already envied the cab driver her company.
Chapter 16
Naturally I didn't say anything about all this to Stinx and Diamond Jaz when I met up with them in the Viaduct Tavern the following evening. I say "naturally," when in fact the Candlelight Club was formed, and ostensibly still met, as a talk-shop; a tool for charting the contours of our respective romantic lives. That is to say, Jaz persisted with his chronic treks through green valleys and glittering mountain peaks of a Shangri-La that always turned overnight into some wind-blasted icy crevasse of doom; Stinx adhered to the rolling hills and dark forests of his affair with Lucy; and I stalked the flat, arid planes, reporting on nothing but my intermittent communication with Fay and the children. I didn't want to tell them about Yasmin. Not yet anyway. I wanted to protect her, us, from the gallows laughter that characterized an evening with the Candlelight Club.
Stinx looked at me, wiping creamy Guinness foam from his upper lip. "Somethin' different about him," Stinx said to Jaz.
Jaz took a light swig from his bottle of designer lager and squinted at me. "You're right. There is."
I glanced around the pub in a futile effort to dodge their attention. Wrong move. It only confirmed for them that they were onto something.
"Come on, my son. Out with it."
The Viaduct Tavern is definitely one of my personal favourites, not so busy in the evenings, and an original gin-palace. Dark mahogany carved wood made airy by gilt, silver mirrors and engraved glass. On the marble wall are huge paintings of three busty maidens representing Agriculture, Banking and the Arts. The Arts is wounded, bayoneted in the buttock by a drunken solider during the First World War. The pub is built on the site of the old Newark hanging prison and the cellars are former prison cells for the cut-throats and scum of Victorian London.
And it has ghosts, of course. Loads of 'em. What with the vile prison conditions and the hangings and so on. Builders and cellarmen and plumbers are always complaining of someone unseen tapping them on the shoulder. Do I need to point out to you that ghosts and demons are not the same thing? Ghosts are the spirits of the dead, I guess. Not that I believe in them. Demons, on the other hand, are the spirits of the living.
"There was a kind of spring in his step when he came in tonight," Jaz says.
"Just what I thought," says Stinx. "Springy. Bouncy. Boing!"
Stinx was already flying when I got there, and Jaz was just winding him up higher and higher. I kept waiting for an opportunity, a lull in the conversation when I might ask about progress on the forgery. The fact that Stinx hadn't mentioned it himself wasn't a good sign. I found myself looking hard at the colour of his nose, to see if I could detect any extra burst capillaries or softened cartilage.
"Boing!" went Jaz.
They did a decent claret in the Viaduct. I drained my glass. "My round," I said, and I got up to go to the bar.
When I returned with a tray of drinks, Stinx and Jaz were regarding me steadily, but had fallen into silence. They both blinked. I blinked back. A few more minutes went by in complete, blinking silence. I think it was the longest silence I could remember since we'd first met.
"Right," I said, "if that's how you're going to play it, I will tell you. But not until the big hand is on the ten, by which time I will have drunk at least a full bottle."
"He's back with Fay," said Stinx. "That's it!"
Jaz shook his head. He was the more perceptive of the two. "No, it's something else. I think he's got a new squeeze."
Despite my poker face, some microscopic tic, or a tremor from a tiny nerve in my jaw, or the stiffening of a single hair in my eyebrow betrayed me. Jaz leapt to his feet and clapped his hands in delight, kicking his stool over in the process.
"Nonsense," I barked, too quickly, giving myself away again. Jaz was dancing now: an infuriating little exhibition of a dance that used to be called the Twist, with his arms held tight at his sides. Stinx was staring hard at me, a man both amazed and deeply impressed.
Jaz righted his stool and fell back into it. "Come on, William: the evening is yours."
"It's nothing," I said. "Nothing." I told them about my lunch with Yasmin, and our walk along the Embankment.
I was tossing them the bare bones to chew on, but they weren't satisfied. "Where did you say you had lunch?" Stinx objected. "Plumbers?" Then how comes, how comes you're going down the Embankment. After lunch you should be going the other way. Right?"
"I had the afternoon off."
"You had the afternoon off?" said Jaz. "And she had the afternoon off? What time did you part company?"
"Christ, this is like a police interrogation!"
"Guilty!" Stinx roared. The pair of them were hooting at me, nearly falling off their stools. I didn't see what was quite so funny, but they were riffing on my discomfort. Then Stinx got serious. "Why you being so cagey?"
I darted a glance over my shoulder. No one was listening to us, but I lowered my voice anyway. "It's going nowhere."
"Nah nah nah," said Stinx, wagging a nicotine-stained finger at me. "Don't fall for it. He's just trying to deflect attention."
So I went back and told them the whole thing, which remarkably wasn't much more than what I'd already disclosed. I mentioned the parting kiss. They listened like it was all hard news. Then they started to offer advice, as if they were suddenly and passionately dedicated to getting me laid.
Naturally the idea had crossed my mind—of course it had. It had been over three years since I'd had sex with anyone other than myself, and images of Yasmin naked had been rippling across the back of my retina with disconcerting variety. What I failed to tell them was that I didn't think that I needed any strategy or guile or cool or programme to make it happen. I hadn't admitted it to myself until that moment, but I felt that there was a shocking inevitability about it. I might make two jumps to the side or one on the diagonal, but it made no difference: if I wanted it to happen, it was going to happen.
But it couldn't be allowed.
Jaz was on his feet again. The prospect of me breaking my three years of celibacy called for champagne, he said.
"Oh lord," Stinx protested, "we'll probably end up in that sticky club with the footballers and the tarts. Speaking of which, Jaz has another mark."
A "mark" was Stinx's word for a prospective buyer of one of our fake books.
"Oh?"
"Only I want to tell you this: someone was asking round the other day. Did I know William Heaney? Did I know Jaz Singh?"
"Really?" I wondered if this was also something to do with Ellis. And possibly Yasmin.
"Look, William, I might be being paranoid, but it didn't smell right. I can't say more than that."
I took a deep sip of the noble and beneficial juice. We'd never had the police sniffing around before, but we'd all agreed it would come one day. It had to. I could explain it through the law of demonology, but for the time being think of it as the police protecting you night and day. "What does Jaz say about it?"
"He says you decide."
I'd never thought of myself as the "leader" of our little enterprise, but I suppose I was
. I coordinated the buyer and the product; I advanced the money for materials to Stinx; I negotiated the price and ultimately delivered the product. I guess I was the capo.
When Jaz returned with the fizz, I let him fill three glasses before I asked him, "When did you identify the customer?"
He twigged instantly what we'd been talking about. "A week ago. That is, I told him I'd put him in touch with you."