Billy told Neil where he was.
“Christ!” Neil said. Billy imagined him sitting up a little straighter on his lumpy sofa. “What’s it like? What’s happening?”
“Actually,” Billy said, “it’s pretty quiet.”
He could sense Neil’s disappointment. Neil was one of those bobbies who like there to be something always going on. He would have wanted scuffles and clashes at the very least, if not a full-scale riot. He would have wanted batons, long shields. Water cannon. Stepping out of the bike shed, Billy turned into the wind. It roared across the mobile’s mouthpiece, which gave him an excuse not to speak for a moment. He had rung Neil, his best friend, because he needed to talk to somebody about what he had seen, but now he had the chance he didn’t think he could do it. He didn’t know how to describe what had happened without sounding a bit unhinged. He wasn’t even sure he could describe it at all. It occurred to him that he might be able to tell his brother—Charlie was a good listener—but it was mid-afternoon in San Francisco, and Charlie would be at work. Besides, he didn’t have enough credit on his phone for an international call.
“Are you outside?” Neil said.
“I’m on my break,” Billy said, shielding the phone again. “How’s Linda?”
“She left me,” Neil said. “She didn’t like me being a security guard. ‘What’s the matter?’ I said. ‘Don’t you feel safe?’ She didn’t think that was very funny.”
They talked for another five minutes, then Billy said he should be getting back.
“Hang on in there, Billy,” Neil said. “Don’t blow it.” And then, with some of his old sharpness, “What were you calling about, anyway?”
“Nothing, really,” Billy said. “I just wanted to say hello. It’s been a while.”
“Maybe I’ll come down and see you sometime.”
“That’d be good.”
“I’ll do it,” Neil said. “I’ll come and see you.”
Just before Neil hung up, the voices and the shooting came back, even louder than before.
Billy put his mobile away and started walking. In the distance he could hear a siren. It seemed to be drawing closer, and then, quite suddenly, it faded. The wind lifted again. Leaves shook on their branches. Feeling the cold now, Billy quickened his pace. Hang on in there. Neil had given him the encouragement he needed without even being asked. Friends could do that.
22
Back in A and E, everything was peaceful, just the low-level droning of the hospital itself, the sense of being inside a vast, benevolent machine. He nodded at Fowler, who was guarding the entrance, then walked on through reception. The cafeteria was closed—a security grille had been lowered over the counter—but there were still plenty of places to sit. He removed his anorak and hung it over the back of a chair, then sat down facing the corridor. Opening his bag, he looked for his sandwiches. To be on the safe side, he had made himself four rounds. He always got hungry on nightshifts. It was the boredom. As he took his first bite, he remembered an evening in Paris when he was seventeen, Raymond handing him one small tomato and a toe-end of stale French bread.
Following the break-in at Weston Point, he had avoided Raymond, and Raymond too had turned his attention elsewhere. For the next three years, Billy only ever saw Raymond from a distance, and always in the company of older boys, but then, inevitably, the chain that seemed to bind them tightened again. A few days after O levels, he was standing outside the school gates when Raymond sauntered over.
“Any plans for the summer, Billy?”
Lighting a cigarette, Raymond tossed the match into the gutter.
“No,” Billy said warily. “Not really.”
He did have plans, though. He was all lined up to work at the animal-feed business his uncle ran. Later, in the autumn, he wanted to take an HGV test. You could make decent money driving lorries. Or he might even apply to the police. His friend, Neil, was thinking of applying too. Their reasons were the usual ones. They thought they might be able to make a difference. Do some good. But these weren’t the kind of things that you could say to somebody like Raymond.
“Why don’t we go travelling,” Raymond said, “in Europe?”
Billy stared at him. “Europe?”
“There’s no need to worry about money,” Raymond said. “I’ve got enough for both of us.”
Billy remembered the fiver Raymond had offered him. It came back so vividly that he could almost feel the stitch he’d had from cycling up the hill without stopping.
“Athens, Venice, Copenhagen.” Raymond’s arms opened wide, as if he might actually conjure one of those great cities out of the air. “Monte Carlo…”
On the last day of July they crossed the Channel by ferry, then caught a train to Paris, and it was there, in a park called Buttes-Chaumont, that Billy began to understand what he had let himself in for. He looked over at Raymond, who was stretched out on his back under a tree. Raymond wore a dark-blue suit with chalk pinstripes—it had once belonged to a drug dealer from Moss Side, or so Raymond claimed—and tipped down over his eyes was the grey fedora he’d found in a flea market the day before. Beside him, on the grass, lay a small leather suitcase with gold catches. Raymond wouldn’t have been seen dead with a rucksack. Rucksacks were for students. Billy had a rucksack, of course. His mother had bought it for him when he told her about the trip. She couldn’t afford to buy him presents, especially now Charlie had gone to medical school, but she had wanted to please him. It’s a good one, Billy. He could still hear her saying that. And yet, in Raymond’s presence, the rucksack was an embarrassment, and he took no care of it. Sometimes, as he threw it on to a hostel floor, or kicked it across a railway station concourse, he imagined his mother watching, and shame would sweep over him. He felt an awful, nameless sadness about the way people treat each other.
“Let’s go and eat, Raymond,” he said.
They’d had nothing since breakfast, and it was already early evening.
Raymond pushed the brim of his hat up with one finger. “Did you say something?”
“What are we going to eat tonight?”
“I bought a couple of tomatoes,” Raymond said, “and there’s half a baguette left over from yesterday. That should do us.”
So that was supper.
Afterwards, Raymond declared himself quite full—“replete” was the word he used—and Billy couldn’t bring himself to disagree.
Over the next few days, as they journeyed south, Raymond subjected Billy to a series of lectures on food. It was his belief that food both dulled perception and extinguished desire. Raising his voice above the clatter of the train, he recited lines from Baudelaire, then he talked about how Jean Genet had written most of his books while hungry. He quoted a letter in which William Burroughs describes finding an inch of fat on his stomach and being repulsed by it. He quoted some Chinese poets as well. The only image Billy could remember later was that of an old man surviving on the leaves that fall from a locust tree. He hoped to God there were no locust trees in Monte Carlo. Food breeds laziness, Raymond said. It breeds complacency. Food’s dangerous. If the trip they were making was to be worthwhile, if they wanted to see things, really see things, they should be careful not to eat too much.
“Dangerous?” Billy said in a quiet voice. “Food?”
“Oh yes,” Raymond said. “The danger cannot be overestimated.”
Billy watched a field of vivid lavender float by. “So we have to starve?”
“Think of Rimbaud in Ethiopia,” Raymond said. “Think of St. Francis in that cave outside Assisi.”
In part, Billy brought it on himself, since he deferred to Raymond constantly. It was Raymond who decided where they stayed—doss-houses every time, for their “atmosphere”—and it was Raymond who came up with the itinerary. But then the whole trip had been Raymond’s idea in the first place, so what was Billy to do? Although he did have a little money of his own, he felt awkward using it—and besides, it wouldn’t have been enough to make a real diffe
rence. He was dependent on Raymond, in more ways than one, and Raymond knew it.
In a spirit of defiance, Billy walked over to the snack bar’s vending-machines and bought a packet of crisps and an orange Fanta. He imagined Raymond’s lip curling at this display of weakness. The conversations in the park and on the train had happened at the beginning of their holiday, and it wasn’t until the last night that Billy finally rebelled. It was late afternoon when they arrived in Ostend, and the ferry didn’t leave until eleven. Billy had already imagined a farewell dinner—nothing fancy, just some fried fish and a bottle of local wine—but Raymond had other ideas. He thought they should eat on the boat, or else wait till morning.
Before Raymond could finish outlining his plan for the evening, Billy interrupted. “I need a bit of money.”
Raymond gave him a look that was both baffled and sly, and then took a step backwards. It was possible that he had known Billy would react in this way; in fact, maybe this was the effect he’d been after.
“Please give me some money, Raymond,” Billy said. “I’m starving.”
Before Raymond could walk away, Billy reached out and grabbed him by the collar. As Raymond tried to jerk himself free, his suit jacket split right down the back. Letting out a string of swearwords, he hit Billy on the side of the head with the back of his hand. Billy felt a flicker of triumph: Raymond so rarely lost control. He still needed money, though. As they wrestled on the quay, Raymond’s ankle turned on the cobbles, and he fell over. One knee on Raymond’s chest, Billy pinned him to the ground. Raymond stopped struggling and closed his eyes. Billy found Raymond’s wallet and removed a few notes, then stood up quickly and dropped the wallet next to Raymond’s outstretched hand.
Raymond lay quite still for a few seconds, then opened his eyes and shouted, “Thief!”
At first Billy thought he must be joking—it was Raymond’s sense of humour exactly—but then he saw the fear and hostility in Raymond’s eyes, and in that moment he had the feeling that he didn’t know Raymond at all, that the two of them had never met before and that he had, in fact, attacked and robbed a total stranger.
Raymond shouted the word again, in French this time, and Billy stared in disbelief as Raymond sat up and pointed an accusing finger. Passers-by were looking at Billy now, and at the money in his hand; some of them seemed to be about to intervene. Snatching up his rucksack, Billy started running.
That night he ate by himself, and the old couple who owned the bistro let him sleep in a small room next to the kitchen. The following morning he caught the ferry to Dover. He was home by midnight. He didn’t see Raymond again for years.
23
For the last few minutes he’d had the sense that he was being watched. A light sweat broke out on his forehead as he remembered the figure in the hospital grounds, and how her gaze had seemed to linger on him even after he had moved away, into the trees; there had been a kind of weight to it, as if her eyes were thumbs and they were being pressed into his back. Warily, he glanced over his shoulder. Sitting behind him, two tables away, was an Asian man in a dark-grey suit and an open-necked blue-and-white-striped shirt. Although the man appeared to be staring downwards at his hands, which were resting on the table, Billy still felt as if he was being scrutinised. Facing the corridor again, he started on another sandwich. He now knew what he should have said to Raymond in that pub in Cheshire. I still owe you forty francs. That might have put paid to his irritating smile.
A staff nurse walked past, jingling a bunch of keys. Billy was about to open his newspaper when the Asian man finally spoke.
“You’re guarding that woman, I suppose…”
The man’s voice was genial, and a little careworn, but it had no false notes in it. Clearly, he was no threat to security. Billy turned in his chair. The man was still looking at his hands.
Billy adopted the same innocuous tone. “That’s right. I’m on duty all night. A twelve-hour shift.”
Only now did the man look up. There was a pale cast across one of his eyes, as if candlewax had been smeared over the iris. “You work hard,” he said.
“Pretty hard. What line of business are you in?”
“Hi-fi. I own a couple of shops.”
“I’ve had the same system for twenty years. Ever since I joined the force.”
“Come to me,” the man said. “I’ll upgrade you.”
“I probably wouldn’t be able to afford it.”
“I’ll give you a special price.”
The two men smiled at each other.
Billy raised his can of Fanta to his lips and drained it. “So what brings you here?”
“My wife’s having an operation tonight.”
“Nothing too serious, I hope.”
The man looked away for the first time, his eyes moving across the cafeteria. “I don’t know. Something to do with her bowel.”
“I hope she comes through it all right,” Billy said.
“Thank you,” the man said. “Me too.”
There was a silence during which he appeared to be trying to decide whether or not to go further, and Billy glanced down at his paper. In interviews he often used this technique. If you stepped back, it had the effect of allowing the other person to come forwards, almost involuntarily, and occupy the space you’d just vacated. It was one of the more subtle methods of eliciting a confession.
“I have been listening to Mozart,” the man said.
Billy sat sideways on his chair, one forearm resting on the back. This wasn’t what he had expected.
“Do you listen to classical music?” the man asked.
“Not much.”
“I listen to Mozart,” the man went on, “and I have trouble understanding how someone could have thought of something so beautiful. I try to imagine the world before that music came into being, and then I try to imagine someone creating it from nothing—all those sounds…Impossible.” He shook his head and then allowed himself a brief sad smile. “And yet it’s just as impossible to imagine the world without that music in it.”
Billy watched the man carefully, but said nothing. One of the vending-machines behind him shuddered and then fell silent.
“If something should happen to my wife…” Forearms still lying flat on the table, the man’s hands lifted off the surface and then dropped back again. He had come as close as he dared to saying what he wanted to say.
Billy looked up as an elderly woman in a pink dressing-gown hobbled past. Noticing him, she raised one fragile fist and shook it in the air beside her ear. I’m giving it everything I’ve got, she was telling him. I’m not bloody going quietly.
“There are things we don’t understand,” the man said, staring at his hands again. “This woman that you’re guarding, for instance. The things she did…”
Billy made sure that the wariness he now felt didn’t reach his face.
“What do you think about that?” the man asked.
“I try not to think. I just do my job.”
“But thoughts still occur to you,” the man said seductively, “despite yourself.”
Rather than express an opinion of his own, Billy fell back on the conversation he’d had with Phil a few hours earlier. “I never met the woman,” he said. “A colleague of mine met her, though, on several occasions, and he told me that it was difficult to connect the things she did then with the woman he saw in front of him.”
The man nodded slowly. “Perhaps it was difficult for her too.” He paused. “Even at the time it was difficult, perhaps…”
“Yes, perhaps,” Billy said. “But you or I would never go so far.”
“Wouldn’t we?” The man’s good eye seemed gentle, as though it were contemplating another, far more selfless world, while his damaged eye, by contrast, had a critical, even accusatory gleam to it. “Who really knows how far we would go,” he said, “if the circumstances were right?”
They both fell quiet again. In a nearby ward a man laughed—or it could have been a cough.
�
�If you were in love, for example,” the man said. “Not ordinary love. A love that takes you over, turns you upside-down. An absolute dependency. A kind of trance.”
Billy thought of Venetia and her father, their two faces overlapping, merging into one. He felt unsteady, giddy. He felt as if the world was accelerating away from him in all directions. At the same time, everything had remained exactly where it was.
“The things she did,” the Asian man went on, “they weren’t natural to her—not at the beginning, anyway. They became natural, though.”
“You don’t know that,” Billy said. “You’re just guessing.”
He had assumed that the man would argue the point, but the man just looked at him and said, “Of course.”
At that moment, Phil appeared with two other men, one of whom was a detective inspector. They were so deep in conversation that they didn’t notice Billy, but the mere fact of their presence prompted him to glance at his watch. Eight minutes to one.
Rising to his feet, he wrapped his last remaining sandwich in silver foil and tucked it into his bag. “I have to get back to work, I’m afraid.”
The man reached into his jacket pocket, brought out a card and handed it to Billy. “My name is Vijay Prabhu. If you’re ever looking for some new equipment…” His smile told Billy that he needn’t take the offer too seriously: he had simply wanted something tangible to pass between them.
Billy pocketed the card, then leaned across and shook the man’s hand. “I’m Billy Tyler.”
“PC Tyler,” Mr. Prabhu said, as if correcting him. “A pleasure to have met you.”
“I hope everything turns out well for your wife.”
The man inclined his head in thanks.
Billy gathered up the crisp bag and the can of Fanta, both empty now, and dropped them in the rubbish bin, then he started back towards the mortuary. The small hours. It was so quiet that he could hear his own footsteps. They had a measured, dependable sound, and contrasted strangely with his thoughts, which kept flitting from one subject to another. It could be fatigue, or it could be the eerie suggestibility of a hospital at night. It could even be the influence of Mr. Prabhu. The good eye, dark and gentle. The other with its lavish swirl of white. A little like being looked at by two people at once. That subdued, intriguing way of talking around a subject, then closing in on it and capturing it with elegant precision. At some fundamental level, Billy felt they had understood each other perfectly. Mr. Prabhu had implied that he was there for his wife, as any caring husband would be, and that was almost certainly true, but Billy knew that Mr. Prabhu was also there for himself. There was a tremendous fear in you at times like that. There was the need to stay close to whatever was going on. You had to try and hold things together, even though it seemed to be their natural tendency to fall apart.
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