by Baker, John
If Angeles Falco was fighting against the police and her doctor, it seemed to Sam that she needed a helping hand. ‘I don’t think you’re paranoid,’ he told her. ‘You don’t seem like the obsessive type. I can’t promise anything, but I’ll take the case.’
Her shoulders relaxed, she leaned against the back of the chair. ‘I brought a thousand pounds,’ she said, drawing a long white envelope from inside her jacket. ‘Will that be enough to get you started?’
Sam blinked, edged up to the line and was first off his mark.
He took her down the stairs and she asked what was wrong with his right hand.
‘Got it caught in a car door,’ he said. ‘It’s not a hundred per cent at the moment. I’m seeing a physio every other day.’
‘Ah,’ she said. Just that one word. A vague smile played around her mouth, as if she was waiting for him to catch up.
Sam looked down at his hand, hoping for a clue. But nothing came.
Except a faint whiff of whisky. She’d tried to mask it with mint, maybe a mouthwash, but there’re some things you can’t hide.
He watched her tap her way across St Helen’s Square. The stick was long, came up to her nose when she held it against her. She refused a taxi, said she had some shopping to do in the town. The crystals of frost that had covered the road earlier in the morning had now evaporated.
Back in the office, Sam gave Celia the money in the envelope and watched while she opened it up. ‘Should keep us buoyant for a while,’ he said.
‘I’ll put it in the safe,’ she said, fanning the notes. ‘There are criminals around. There were bells ringing in the bank this morning. The place surrounded by policemen.’
Sam shrugged. ‘What do you think, Celia? Is it as criminal to rob a bank as it is to start one?’
‘Usury used to be seen as a crime. Now they tell us it’s the only way to run the world.’ She slipped the money back into the envelope and walked over to the safe. ‘When I was a girl, we believed the meek would inherit the earth. Everyone thought that. It was taken for granted. Now it’s the exact opposite. The people who inherit the earth are the cruel and the callous. It seems to have fallen into the hands of people who have no feelings, no heart. Overbearing people.’
‘Hey, what happened to my optimistic secretary?’
Celia smiled. ‘I’m still here,’ she said. ‘This must be the only office in town where everybody believes in losers.’ She put the money into the safe and closed the door.
‘Will you give the sister a ring?’ Sam said. ‘Isabel Reeves. See if I can see her soon as possible. Better have the story from both of them.’
‘I’ll do it now.’
‘And d’you have JD’s number?’ Sam asked.
‘Yes, I’m the secretary, Sam. That’s my job.’
‘Give him a ring, will you? See if he’s free for a few days. I’m gonna need someone to help with surveillance on these two, see if we can find who’s watching them.’
JD Pears was a crime writer, a poker player and a drummer in a band, a voracious dope-smoker, who had come to Sam’s detective agency to do research, and ended by getting himself employed from time to time. JD’s head was full of American noir slang, so he sounded like a gangster in a Bogart film. Sam liked having him around. ‘You don’t think they’re paranoid?’ Celia asked.
Sam shook his head. ‘I don’t believe in paranoia.’
‘Another medical fact goes out of the window.’
He smiled. ‘Oh, people get frightened, start twitching. Doctors call it paranoia, like it’s something inside you. But when you feel like that, you’re just sensing the uneasiness that everybody else takes for granted.’
Celia walked back to her computer, moved the mouse to clear the screen-saver.
Sam said, ‘D’you notice any kind of smell in here this morning?’
Celia sniffed at the air. ‘Can’t say I do. No.’
‘I mean me,’ he said. ‘Can you smell anything different about me?’
She took a step towards him, her nostrils flaring. ‘No, Sam. Are you feeling all right?’
‘Yeah. It was the blind woman. I got the feeling she might’ve got a whiff of something.’
‘Maybe she did. They say that if you’re down one sense, the others come in to compensate. If that’s true, she can probably smell things a mile away you wouldn’t even notice.’
‘Think I’ll just pop out for a new toothbrush,’ he said, shaking his head.
2
JD watched himself in the mirror over the bathroom sink. He wore glasses with heavy frames, the arms of which disappeared into a thick growth of wiry beard and hair. He was forty years old and wore a threadbare suit which he’d recently had cleaned and re-textured. Under the suit he had a sky-blue shirt which he’d washed and ironed. He glanced down at his sixteen-hole DMs, black and buffed to a high shine.
He shook his head and the image in the mirror joined in. He’d scrubbed himself clean this morning, as he did every morning. There was nothing wrong with his clothes, except the suit was hurtling back towards limp. You know you’re OK, you’re a guy who cares about his appearance, takes pains with it. And yet there’s this other thing in the mirror that always looks like a scruff. It was as if they were twins, identical twins, except one of them had a flaw.
JD thought maybe he should get a mirror like they have in the chain-store changing rooms. Mirrors back-lit with a series of filters to make you look bright-eyed and bursting with health. You look at yourself trying on a new sweater, and you never looked better in your life. You could leave the sweater behind and go back to looking like shit, or you could give the sales assistant your last hundred quid. Even while you reach for your wallet you know you’ve been conned.
He knotted a string tie around his neck and pulled his fingers through his hair.
His mobile rang and he plucked it from the bathroom chair, hit the talk button.
‘JD Pears.’
‘JD? It’s Celia.’
‘Yeah. How you doing?’
‘I’m fine. Listen, Sam was wondering if you could spare us some time.’
‘I’m on the brink of a new novel. I suppose I could put it off a few more days. What’d I have to do?’
‘Mainly surveillance, but you’ll have to talk to Sam. We’ve got a blind woman and her sister who think they’re being watched.’
‘Watched? Followed? So I’ve got to watch them as well, see if I can find out who else is watching them?’
Celia laughed. ‘Something like that. Can you come in to the office?’
‘Pronto, my dear. Soon as I get myself together.’
He put the mobile down and looked at the messy guy in the mirror. He took his glasses off and the image took a step back into a mass of pixels. Looked better for it, too. Must tell Celia that we don’t use the word ‘blind’ any more. Some people are ‘partially sighted’ these days.
JD closed his eyes, and the scruff disappeared altogether. Must be weird to be completely blind. He concentrated on keeping his eyes closed for a couple of minutes. Listened for sounds inside and outside the building, the sounds made by his own body. Felt the lip of the wash basin, the subtle texture of the porcelain, the low temperature it maintained. He ran the cold tap and scooped up water, drank from the palm of his hand. A few drops went into his beard, found their way to his cheeks and chin.
When he was younger, still at home with his brothers, they had argued about which sense they would rather lose. ‘Would you rather be deaf or blind?’ Jack would say. ‘Come on, you have to choose.’ JD had always thought deafness would be worse than blindness, but he wasn’t sure any more. The novel he was about to write had an artist who was going blind as its central character. The half-blind man was an essential eye-witness to the murder of his wife. JD relished the thought of playing with the metaphor of blindness. He had been researching how expressionism developed out of naturalism, and how the naturalists were insistent on getting the object down on the canvas in complete clarity
, while the expressionists were more interested in observing it with half-closed eyes.
There was a kind of faith in expressionism, a distrust of the obvious, of the objective. Expressionist artists and writers wanted to use distortion and exaggeration for emotional effect. Like Hammett. He would write an expressionist novel like Hammett.
When he opened his eyes and put his glasses on, he couldn’t hold the world still. It danced away from him. While his eyes adjusted to the light, the scruff in the mirror could have been someone else entirely, some thing, an angel or a devil.
3
I’m going to be quiet and remain hidden, and remember the first rule of a policeman: ‘Never forget to keep your eyes open.‘
She is a silly woman. She has no eyes, but neither does; she have insight. She begins to suspect that she is being watched. For the past week or so she has felt my eyes on her. But she has no idea that my eyes have been on her for almost all of her life. How could they not be? Where else; would I look for satisfaction?
I am the watchman, the sentry. I have kept my vigil, and will remain at my post until the scales are balanced.
We have to learn how to value a human life. People I don’t care about this. They say that they care, and the people who run the organizations that prop up our society, they say the value of a human life is the most important thing in the world. Politicians and churchmen, especially, always have something to say on this point. But they are talkers, propagandists. They don’t believe what they say. They don’t have a tool with which to measure the value of a human life. They haven’t taken the time to develop, to invent a tool that would do the job. That is how serious they are.
God makes those judgements every day. Two people are on a motorway. They hurtle towards each other in separate vehicles, each unaware of the other. When one of the vehicles crosses the central reservation there is a moment, before they plough into each other, when the eyes of each driver make contact. They have never seen each other before. As far as they are aware, they have nothing in common. And a second later one of them is dead. We don’t know why. It isn’t because of a lack of seat belts or SIPS or air-bags. In our materialistic way we pin all our hopes on the mechanics of the situation, believing we can avoid future occurrences if we understand how metal and rubber and plastics react in relation to each other and to velocity and mental stress.
But the answer to why one human life is saved and another taken away lies in the mind of God. God can look down on the people in those vehicles hurtling towards each other, and He can say the one heading north is worth more than the one heading south, therefore He will save the one heading north.
God is the one in control. He is an artist. The rest of us are characters He has created. This world is God’s fiction, and He has created each of us to provide the narrative and the drive and the interweaving plots that make up His final vision.
The church doesn’t know this.
Neither does the government.
They both believe that God is dead.
But I am the watchman, and I know. I can value a human life.
For example, take Miriam. I go in this tourist-trap on Pavement most days, buy myself an all-day breakfast for a few quid. I get two sausages, egg, bacon, hash browns, fried bread and beans. When I’ve had that I have a cup of tea. And Miriam serves me. If one of the other girls tries to serve me I wave them away. Usually they don’t try any more, because they know I want Miriam to do it. And they know that Miriam would rather serve me than anyone else. Miriam belongs to me. This is not entirely of my own making, this situation, this state of affairs. When I first went to that place one of the other girls served me. I think it was Debbie, the one with long hair in a pony-tail. But Debbie never looked at me. While she was working there, in the café, she was always somewhere else.
I noticed Miriam because I saw her watching me. She’d give me a glance as she walked past my table, another one when she was coming back with dirty pots. And it wasn’t just a look she’d give me, what she’d give me was a look that said something.
I’ll tell you this as well. There is no such thing as sexual morality. Sex is just sex. Sex is two people or two animals, birds, fishes, whatever, that are brought together by a chemical rush. There’s no morality involved. Morality becomes involved in cases of life and death, in social and personal conduct. Two people having sex, that’s something else. God is not a Victorian prude. He doesn’t judge someone who acts out of perfectly normal instinctual behaviour.
She isn’t a glamour girl, Miriam. That first time I saw her I thought she was about twenty, but it turns out she’s twenty-three. All the girls in that place wear white blouses, and it isn’t until you see them together that you realize how many different kinds of white there are. Miriam never gets around to ironing her blouse, so it looks as though she’s slept in it. Anyway, she had that on. I can’t remember anything about the skirt, I think it was probably nondescript. Black? What was most striking about her was that she had no breasts. She does actually have a pair of small pigeons, but that morning, what with the wrinkled blouse and everything, she seemed to have the chest of a young boy. She has short hair, curly, but the greasy atmosphere of the café makes it shine. And she has this weird jaw: her bottom teeth and chin protrude.
She’s not ugly. I know she sounds ugly from my description. But she isn’t. I wouldn’t say she was beautiful, either. She’s pale, though. Without make-up, her eyes are small, and her lips are the same toneless shade as the rest of her face. That’s what I noticed about her that first day.
We have to take notice. We have to be aware. We have to watch. That is why He gave us eyes. That is why the elect are never blind.
For two months after Marilyn Monroe’s suicide in 1962 there were over three hundred more suicides than would have been expected during that period. I know things like this because my research was directly concerned with the association between the media and crime. What specifically interests me are the images of violence portrayed on television and in films and the relationship between those images and the violent behaviour that is endemic in our society.
Many of my colleagues insisted that there is no proven relationship between the images and the reality, but that does not explain why so many more people committed suicide in those two months following Marilyn’s death. We also know that when a major heavyweight boxing match is televised, reported murders will tend to increase by 12 to 15 per cent over the following three days.
Not all scenarios are as simple as the one on the motorway. Life is a complicated business. Life and death are as complicated as heaven and hell. This is because we have free choice. We can be good or we can be evil. It’s up to each one of us to decide. We can watch a child die, or we can decide to sacrifice ourselves so that the child might live. We can make those kinds of decisions. God will stand back and watch us while we make those decisions. He will not interfere.
He will hope in His creative mind that the child who is saved is of more value than the one whose life is sacrificed for the child. We will all hope that. None of us would like to think that a good man has given his life so that an evil child can live and grow into an evil adult.
But suppose something like that happened, what would be the reaction of those in power on the earth, the rulers and the priests? Just suppose. And don’t think for a moment that it hasn’t happened, because in this world fact and fiction are completely interchangeable. To you it might well be fact, but to God it is all fiction. Everything stems from an idea He had.
Miriam didn’t have a boyfriend, so she was glad to get me. She’d had a boyfriend for a year once, but he got depressed and all the fun went out of it. She’d had a couple of one-night stands since then, just for the sex, but that’s no way to live your life. With me she gets it regularly, and I never get depressed. She wants us to get married, and I can’t think of any reason not to do it. We’ll have to wait, of course. I’ve still got other things to attend to.
This isn’t simply an anim
al thing; Miriam and I are on the same wavelength. We are spiritual pilgrims. I am an emissary, and she is my handmaiden.
Listen. The rulers and the priests would do nothing. They never do anything. Their function is to invent platitudes, to make us forget our responsibilities. They want us to work and to create capital and to believe that our duty is to serve them, and not our maker.
Actually, they are insane. We are ruled over, both on the material and the spiritual planes, by lunatics.
That is why I have had no choice in my life but to become the watchman. That is why I have to watch the woman and her sister with no eyes.
And when I have watched enough. When I am absolutely certain.
Why, then, the hand of the Lord will be with me.
4
Geordie was watching Janet watching the television with their baby daughter, Echo, on her lap. Echo had been changed and fed and she was burping and farting gently, talking to herself and the world in some primitive language nobody had ever bothered to translate. Janet was not looking at Echo. Her hands were running over the child, and Geordie thought there must be a kind of communication going on between them. But Janet’s conscious mind was taken up with whatever was spewing out of the television.
Janet had had ten hours’ sleep through the night while Geordie carried Echo around the flat. As long as she was being carried, Echo slept. But every time Geordie laid her down on the couch or in her cradle, she’d open her eyes and her mouth and her lungs and scream until he picked her up again. The result was that Geordie hadn’t shaved or got around to washing his face or teeth yet. The inside of his mouth felt like shit. Janet had had a shower and changed into fresh clothes and she looked wonderful, like one of those impossible women in the posh magazines.