Yesterday's Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  “It’s just…” I shake my head. “Coleman’s been here less than twenty-four hours and already it seems like he’s calling all the shots. You’re the boss. Not him. It’s bullshit you letting him strut around the way he is.”

  Felicity sets down the orchid, reaches a hand out to me. “Coleman is really not worth worrying about, Arthur,” she says, pulling me up to my feet. “He’s a little man who likes to throw his weight around. MI6 was not a promotion for him. And he’s only back here because everyone else from the eighties has managed to move on to something bigger and better. He’s the tail-end of the good old boys club, nothing more. I need to tread a little carefully around him for a while. Give him enough rope to hang himself. Just remember, if anything, he’s intimidated by you.”

  I laugh at that. A caustic bray. I’m comfortable enough to be honest here. “Me? How on earth would I intimidate him?”

  I stand, grab a bundle of folders and put it in the box. I grab another and then I notice Felicity still hasn’t answered. I don’t have to be an ex-detective to spot she’s holding out on me.

  “Felicity?” I say, half-formed anxiety nudging my stomach. “Why would he be intimidated by me?”

  Her back is to me.

  “Oh,” she says, then stops there. “Well.” She clears her throat. “I mean… It’s just… You know…”

  It’s like Clyde’s taken over her speech patterns.

  Jesus, that’s suddenly become something I feel like I might one day actually have to worry about…

  “Felicity?” I say for the third time. In the fairy tales they have to answer you the third time you ask.

  “Well,” she pauses again, then takes the plunge, “you know how I mentioned I had worked with exes before…?”

  And just… no. No. She can’t mean that. She can’t. She mustn’t?

  “Coleman?” I say, and my voice climbs to a pitch I haven’t managed to access since I was eight years old. “No.” I shake my head. “Not Coleman. Not Coleman. Please tell me—”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  She’s still not facing me.

  And that’s it. The final kick to the nuts that this day can deliver. The lowest of the possible blows.

  Didn’t I save the world the other day?

  “You have to be kidding me.” I’m begging really. I don’t care if she lies or not. I just want her to take it back.

  “I was young. It was a bad mistake. I’d just come into MI37. And, well, he presented a certain aura of confidence. And I was taken in by that. Literally taken in. It was essentially a confidence trick. He duped me for a while. But I see him now. I learned. That’s what we do when we make mistakes. We learn. We learn not to repeat them. And what he and I had…” She hesitates again. And the horrors I fill that pause with. “It was just a stupid physical thing, really. That’s all.”

  And even I didn’t go to those depths of depravity.

  “That’s all?” I say. “That’s all? That’s all?” I’m a record skipping. I want to get past the phrase, past this, but I think I’m going to be stuck here for a while. All I can picture is the ends of Coleman’s mustache flopping rhythmically up and down.

  I think I’m going to be sick.

  “No, Arthur. No.” Shaw steps forward, puts a hand on my shoulder. I almost flinch away. “I meant…” She trails off. She’s flustered, searching for words. It should be adorable. This should be a moment where I smile and feel the warm and fuzzies take over my soul, but instead all I can do is listen to the claxon siren in my head screaming, “Mistake! Mistake! Mistake! This was a mistake!”

  “What we have, Arthur, it’s more than that. It’s the physical thing and more. That’s what I meant. Coleman has nothing that you don’t also have. That’s what I meant.”

  And that’s a nice thing to say. A sweet thing. I look and meet her eyes. Her face is unguarded, a little defiant.

  “This doesn’t change who I am, Arthur. This was all as true yesterday as it was today. This doesn’t change where you should sleep tonight.”

  There’s an invitation there. And… I don’t know.

  Some things are worth fighting for. Worth sacrificing for.

  I swallow, and I nod. She steps forward and holds me.

  And still in my head I see the ends of Coleman’s mustache. Flop. Flop. Flop.

  TWENTY-THREE

  One night together later

  Felicity and I take her minivan down to London. She double-parked outside my apartment last night while I threw things into a suitcase. Jackets, pants, shaving kit. Simple enough. Easy enough. But it was an evening defined by us working in parallel rather than together. The companionable awkwardness of the previous night was missing. Coleman seemed to loom over everything. His mustache draped over the night.

  Flop. Flop. Flop.

  Stop it.

  We pull up outside the hotel Her Majesty’s government has deigned to pay for. From the looks of it, it’s time to raise taxes again.

  “The Virginian” appears to have been press-ganged into wedging itself between a long chain of grease-stained restaurants, and an industrial-sized pet store which I suspect supplies them with their better cuts of meat.

  A teenage boy, who appears to have had all his personality surgically removed, stands, pasty-faced and impassive, behind a crumbling Formica desk in a lobby that makes a postage stamp seem roomy.

  “Shaw,” Felicity informs him. “We’re sharing.” She uses what available space there is to turn and nod in my direction.

  My eyebrows bounce up. I suppose I hadn’t really thought about sleeping arrangements. Or if I had, that Coleman would have booked us separate rooms.

  And… Well it’s not exactly that I object, or that she really needed to consult with me, I suppose. Except, aren’t we only on two dates? Shouldn’t there be the courtesy, “you want to shack up?”

  The boy grunts, in what could be a profound insight into the effect of the liberal attitudes of the sixties upon modern culture and acceptance, or a belch. It’s hard to say.

  “Need a hand with bags?” Clyde appears on the stairs. Or at least as much of him as will fit in the lobby. He has his hood cinched so tight only a square inch is open. I have the feeling that just wearing the mask openly would be less suspicious.

  Then we all take part in an odd shuffling dance which involves getting poked in the ribs by as many elbows as possible as I try to get the bags to the stairs and Clyde attempts to ascend them without breaking his neck. I think the Russians might actually be less hazardous to our health than this place.

  The room I’ll be sharing with Felicity turns out to be slightly smaller than the lobby. Through some space-folding trick twin beds separated by a shared bed-side table have been crammed into it.

  “Shaw amenable to the whole cohabitation thing?” Clyde asks, twisting his head about in the confines of the hoody as he dumps Felicity’s bags on one bed.

  “Her idea, actually,” I say, opening my own bag to see how many of my possessions have been ruined by a spilled shampoo or soap or some such. An unavoidable byproduct of travel in my experience.

  Clyde nods and hums a bit. “Bit touch and go, my end,” he manages eventually.

  “Really?” I say. Could there be trouble in paradise this early? Not that my relationship is free of its early day screw-ups.

  “The whole reading at the table thing.”

  “The what?” I ask. Clyde is being oddly minimalist in his answer.

  “Definition of rudeness.” He makes a circling gesture with his hand. Something almost impatient. Waiting for me to catch up. A very un-Clyde-like gesture.

  “Oh right.” I remember the conversation at the museum.

  “Well, you know, it rather turns out, the whole digital thing—” He taps the mask. It’s unlike the other times he’s tapped it, I notice. Not a sullen gesture. It takes me a moment to place the emotion. But in a story about how Tabitha’s pissed at him, Clyde’s abruptly excited.

  “I can speed-rea
d,” Clyde says.

  This story is taking an odd tack. “Congratulations?” I try.

  “I mean, I don’t wish to brag,” he continues, clearly lying, “even worse habit than the table reading. But, well…” Clyde actually rubs his hands together. Only Clyde could have a Scrooge McDuck moment over the number of books he’s read. “I may have read one thousand seven hundred and thirty-six books last night.”

  “Holy crap,” I say in a moment of great eloquence. That’s… It’s not a possible number. It’s… Jesus, it’s…

  Inhuman.

  God, I’ve been trying to avoid that word.

  I see that tiny square of wood peeking out from the pinched hood.

  “You know what I found really fascinating though?” Clyde asks me, bringing me back to the conversation.

  I shake my head. I have no clue what Clyde found fascinating. I don’t have a clue about anything any more. About how to define the existence of my friends.

  “How very good John Grisham is.” Clyde nods. “Blew me away. The Pelican Brief. Impressive stuff.”

  That snaps me out of it right there.

  “Grisham?” I say, failing to keep the incredulity at bay.

  “Master of suspense,” Clyde replies.

  “Out of seventeen hundred books, Grisham was the author that stood out?” I really can’t let that lie.

  “Oh yes.” Clyde nods. “Totally engrossing.”

  I cannot believe we’re having this discussion. I cannot fathom any aspect of it. I cannot believe Clyde enjoys such tawdry crap.

  Somehow I need to find a way out of this conversation, back to some sort of comfortable ground.

  “But Tabitha wasn’t so impressed?” It’s a low blow, but it’s for the sake of my sanity so I’m going to call it fair play.

  I imagine Clyde’s face falls beneath the mask. Assuming his face does anything beneath there. He shuffles his feet at least, picks at the baggage handles. “Yes,” he says. “While reading… The whole talking thing, I sort of fell down there. Arse over elbow to be precise. She…” He shrugs furiously. “She doesn’t sleep as much as, well, as Devon did. Which is not a criticism. As I explained to her last night. Repeatedly in fact. Thought I was quite clear on the matter. But anyway, that was always reading time for me, and, of course, I recognize that with the advent of never sleeping ever again, spare time will be more abundant, but I just… well, let’s just say I was excited. Like a small child on his birthday, for example.”

  “Tabitha, not so much?” I’m not comfortable with any of this. I can’t even imagine the response of someone dating him.

  “Not so much.” Clyde nods.

  I think about that. About Clyde. About what he is.

  What is he?

  A friend. I need to treat him like the friend he is. Stop tripping over myself. “It’s early days.” I clap him on the arm with the sort of camaraderie that seems to be natural to people cooler than me. “Teething problems is all,” I tell him.

  Clyde nods. “Yes. Negotiating new terms and all that.” His knee gives an involuntary shake. “Living together is just a period of adjustment. I read that. Tried to explain the whole thing to Tabitha actually. Never been one for self-help books before, but the author seemed quite insightful on the subject. Tabitha wasn’t overly receptive to the theory.”

  “Just give it time,” I say. Another platitude. But I’ve got nothing of substance here. I need time to clear my head.

  “Plenty of that.” Clyde taps the mask again, not so excited this time.

  We begin the complicated maneuvering that will allow us both to escape the room. I head downstairs, Clyde to his room.

  In the lobby, Felicity is waiting. “That took a while,” she says. “Everything OK?”

  “Clyde read seventeen hundred books last night.”

  She raises an eyebrow. “The mask?” She looks concerned. I find that reassuring. Concern seems like a more appropriate reaction than excitement.

  I nod.

  “You worried about him?”

  And yes, I am. But maybe I should be more supportive of a friend.

  “I don’t know,” I hedge.

  Felicity nods. “He’s been through a lot. We should keep an eye on him. Make sure he’s OK.”

  I nod again. It’s a simple enough solution. Except it doesn’t feel like a simple problem. But how do I just come out and say that I’m scared my best friend is losing his humanity?

  “Would you stop fussing!” A booming voice from the top of the stairs interrupts my mental circling. Devon’s voice.

  There’s a muttered response. Then she booms again. “I am telling you that this is how shoelaces work. How it has been done for thousands of years. Well not thousands. But for a very long time. I imagine Robert Browning did this exact same thing just before writing his godawful poetry, not to insult a Scottish legend, of course, except well… what do you lot see in him?”

  There is another pause, another barely audible response.

  “No I do not need a cookie!”

  Silence.

  “Yes, I do like cookies. Obviously this figure does not come without a certain amount of help from the Pillsbury dough boy, delicious little bugger that he is. But now is not the cookie moment. Eleven o’clock—yes, that would be lovely. Right now, I am digesting an ample breakfast. About the only healthy meal I have in the day.”

  Another pause as we collectively digest this surfeit of information.

  “Well, if you insist I shall take the cookie and eat it later. Probably at eleven. As I mentioned.”

  Felicity and I exchange a look but no words. And I think I know who Devon’s talking to but I can barely believe the conversation.

  There’s a clatter of feet on the stairs. Felicity and I quickly try and find something to stare at.

  “There you are!” Devon booms. “And here I am. All unpacked. All settled. Snug as a bug in a very tight and cramped rug.” She clomps down the stairs. “Hello Arthur!” She flings two meaty arms around me and attempts to crack my ribs. “Lovely to see you. Lovely to be here. Seat of the empire and all that. Not that empires have to sit down, I suppose. Silly anthropomorphism. And not that London would really be that comfortable to sit on. Big Ben poking up your jacksie. Terrible place to rest I imagine. But, well, all the same, excited.”

  She casts a vaguely baleful look up the stairs. “Kayla informs me she will be down in a minute.”

  I nod to myself. I’m in a room with Shaw. Clyde’s in with Tabitha. So… Devon in with Kayla. Just as Kayla seems poised to unleash every ounce of mothering on the poor unsuspecting woman.

  Perfect.

  Someone clears his throat behind Devon. Devon turns. “Not excited to see you, of course. You shit,” she informs Clyde.

  Oh wait… now this is perfect.

  I would move closer to Felicity for comfort but it’s not actually possible in the confines of the lobby.

  And just as the tension starts to congeal the door flies open.

  “What in the name of fuck are you all still doing here?” Coleman booms. He aims an umbrella at us all, then singles out Felicity. “Communication. Command. The basics, Felicity.”

  “I’m sure you’ll grasp them all soon, George.”

  I check the flowers perched on the front desk to see if her scorn has wilted them. It’s good to hear the acid back in her voice.

  “Email, Felicity.” Coleman waves a phone at her. “The twenty-first century. Priority communication.”

  “If you’d set us up in a hotel that had—” Felicity starts, then cuts herself off. She takes a breath. “What’s the message, George?”

  And why did she bite back on the aggression?

  Flop, flop—stop it.

  “Russians, Felicity,” Coleman snaps. “Trafalgar Square. Now.” He looks at me, at Devon, Clyde, at the others jammed behind him on the stairs. “Go!” he demands. “Go now! Go!”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  We bundle out into London and rain. Felicity throws o
pen her minivan door. Tabitha and Clyde pile in one after the other. I step aside for Devon, but Coleman grabs her elbow.

  “This way, my lovely.” He tugs her towards a sleek black penis extension with a BMW logo on the hood.

  Devon resists. Inside the van, Clyde gets his legs tangled with the seatbelt. Devon closes her eyes. Coleman tugs again and she goes with it.

  And Devon had my back in the conference room in Oxford; there’s no way I’m abandoning her to this fate.

  “Wait—” I start, grabbing her other arm.

  Then Kayla comes out of the hotel at the sort of speed that puts the fear of God into world-stability-threatening creatures from every plane of existence.

  “You,” she points a finger at me, “don’t get her wrapped up in your feckin’ trouble.

  “You,” she fixes Coleman with a deadeye stare that would shake even Clint Eastwood on a main street at high noon, “keep your dirty feckin’ hands to yourself.”

  I’m not sure if Coleman or I swallows harder.

  “I’m alright.” Devon’s voice is small, but she meets Kayla’s eye—a feat I’m incapable of. She shakes off my hand and Coleman’s.

  The intensity of Kayla’s gaze slackens from “flame broil” to nonplussed.

  “But,” Kayla says, “the Underground. We can take—”

  “I’m alright.” Devon’s voice has gained in strength. She turns to Coleman, grimaces. “Let’s get on our merry way then.”

  Coleman recovers. “Step into my parlor,” he says. He even manages to leer as he opens the car door.

  “But—” Kayla says to the closing door.

  “But—” I echo.

  “Come on, Arthur!” Felicity calls from the front seat. Coleman slams his door and revs his engine.

  I get into the van. Kayla swings up behind me, settles disconsolately beside Clyde and Tabitha. Felicity stamps the accelerator to the floor. Tires screech. Rubber burns. We spin out into traffic.

  And then the seat belt nearly chokes the life from me as she stamps on the brakes.

  Black taxis. Red buses. Red lights. London traffic.

  “Shit!” Felicity loses control of her temper if not the vehicle.