by Baker, John
This is how we are organized. We take a man who can’t manage an erection because of a psychological problem, we give him a chemical stimulant and tell him, ‘There, now you can easily get an erection, go and use it, you sexual beast.’ If he doesn’t use it, he’ll feel guilty, which in turn will enhance his original psychological problem.
This is our world. This is how we do things. We live in a surrealist universe.
I took the impostor. He was no problem. As is usually the case, the world had prepared him for me. I live close to my feelings and I listen and respond to the subtle messages of my body and am at one with the world. When I fixed on that man, or perhaps as early as when he fixed on me by using my name, our personal ecologies became intertwined. That spiritual, etheric, astral world by which my life is surrounded sent out messengers, like invisible fingers, to search out the spiritual, etheric, astral world which surrounded him. Our worlds became united, like the worlds of lovers or of the hunter and the hunted, the master and the slave.
We were, for a time, inextricably one.
The tape is wonderful. The sound of the nails driving home. The words he spoke and tried to speak as the drug overcame him are poignant. They will live with me for ever.
Now I am alone again, except for Miriam, my handmaiden; and my enemy, the blind woman.
44
For once Echo was sleeping. Janet had fallen asleep with her arms wrapped around Geordie and it had felt good while she was still awake, the way the contours of her body used every inch of his back. But now she was sleeping he felt confined by her nearness.
He managed to struggle free without waking her and crept down the stairs to talk to Venus and her kittens. He found a can of Caffreys in the fridge and popped it, sitting on the base of his spine next to the cat’s basket. Venus kept all of the kittens close to her, occasionally eyeing Geordie with a look that could’ve killed.
He hoped Ralph would get in touch again. Not straight away, there’d have to be a gap, let things settle down. He pictured him back home with his family in Bristol, a wife and three kids according to Sam. Nice for the kids, that, getting their dad back for Christmas.
I hope it works out for you, he thought, that you all live together and don’t split up again. And then when we meet it’ll be like it should’ve been this time. Ralph with his family and Geordie with Janet and Echo. They could swap houses in the summer, stay in a different town for a couple of weeks. And Echo’d have real cousins...
Geordie took another swallow from the Caffreys can. No point in going back upstairs yet. He was tired as hell but nowhere near ready to sleep. He got a blanket and stretched out on the sofa and listened to one of Janet’s CDs. Dinah Washington, Mad about the Boy. Made you forget who you were, fooled you into thinking everything was all right and the world was benign.
Before Echo was born Geordie had been learning a new word every week. What you did, you got the word, out of a book, say, or off Celia or JD. And every day for that week you found a way of using the word in the right place. Benign had been one of those words, and, hey, look at that, it’d stuck.
Except the world wasn’t benign.
Which was one of the reasons you had to pretend it was from time to time.
Geordie couldn’t work out if he’d been thinking about the world being benign or if he’d been dreaming about it. The CD had finished and the blanket had slipped off the sofa and there was a knocking sound coming from somewhere. Sounded like one of the neighbours was doing a spot of DIY in the middle of the night.
They’d had a mad neighbour once who got up and played the piano before dawn. He couldn’t remember her name now, but she’d had a tumour in her head.
The banging stopped. It had sounded like someone knocking nails into a piece of wood. But the night plays tricks and as soon as the noise had gone Geordie couldn’t be sure he’d heard it at all. If Echo’d woken up, then he could’ve been sure, maybe even done something about it. But there wasn’t a peep out of Echo.
Oh, hell, there it was again. And not far away. He got off the couch and moved over to the window. He pulled back the curtain and watched a shaft of light dart along the length of the garden. There was one more bang, as if the light had been enough to warn off whoever was out there. A single hammer blow, the one that confirms the head of the nail is fully embedded.
Geordie was ready to sleep now, but there was a possibility that someone was trying to break into a neighbour’s house. He put on a pair of shoes and a coat and found the torch that Janet kept in the kitchen. It was still outside and bitterly cold, the ground covered with a glittering layer of frost. Geordie played the beam of the torch over the fence and on to the facade of his neighbour’s house. The windows were tightly curtained and the door was closed and unmarked.
He walked down the garden, shining the beam a couple of feet in front of him. He stopped when he discovered the step-ladder by the side of the shed. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said as he saw that the shed door had been forced. There you go, worrying about the neighbours and all the time there’s somebody breaking into your own shed.
He folded the step-ladder and put it back in the shed. He closed the door as far as it would go and walked back towards the house. They’d probably taken all his tools.
He turned around and looked back at the shed, wondering for a moment if the burglars were still there, watching him from the shadows. They’d probably have the steps away as soon as he got into the house. But there was nothing he could do about it now, not without waking everyone in the street.
As he opened the door and stepped inside the house he heard the long wail that Echo gave when she woke up and wanted to be fed.
45
JD turned the gas fire up as far as it would go. It threw out heat in a six-foot semi-circle and he and Sam pulled their chairs into the confines of the space. This meant burning your shins but JD preferred that to shivering and he knew that Sam had a similar value system to himself, at least in respect to body temperature.
‘I love this room in the summer,’ JD said. ‘In the winter I’m always making plans to move. But I’m slow, so by the time I’ve got around to doing something about it, the winter’s over and spring reminds me what a great room it is in summer.’
‘Me too,’ said Sam. ‘As soon as this case’s over I’m gonna unload Dora’s house. It’s more than I want to carry.’
‘If it wasn’t so big, you wouldn’t have Angeles living with you.’
‘I didn’t say it was totally negative,’ Sam said with a wink. ‘If there were no benefits, I’d’ve gotten rid of it years ago.’
‘Like a peacock’s tail,’ JD told him.
Sam looked at the wall, seemed like he deliberately wasn’t going to ask JD to explain himself.
‘It’s to do with evolution,’ JD said. ‘The peacock’s tail is mostly useless, it uses up energy that the bird should be spending on survival. But instead it grows this massive and beautiful tail that’s only useful for sexual display. Everything is about sex anyway, so the peacock actually knows what it’s doing. We do the same when we go out shopping for designer clothes; the more we pay the greater the pulling power, or so we’re led to believe.’
‘It doesn’t work,’ Sam said. ‘I’ve been doing that for years and it only got me in trouble. Women who fall for that are messed up, so you end up attracting them, and then they mess you up in turn.’
‘But it’s how nature works,’ JD said. ‘You go buy a Porsche or some Bang & Olufsen equipment and what does it mean? It means you’re rich, for one thing, you’ve got taste. It sends signals out into the world about you. Delineates you. You look better than the next guy already, unless he’s got a yacht.’
‘Every move I make is a sexual signal?’ Sam asked. ‘Yeah, if you’re a smart monkey and you want to evolve into a human, you have to learn to transform the raw materials of nature into status displays. If you don’t manage that one, you and your offspring’ll be swinging around in the jungle for millennia.’
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sp; ‘On balance,’ Sam said, ‘I’d choose the jungle. The alternative is madness. According to you, there’s millions of us here all putting out sexual signals. The world is jammed up with synthetic peacock’s tails, and most of ’em get lost. There’s guys out there splashing fortunes on new Porsches, Hugo Boss suits, Leica cameras, and they don’t even get a blow-job for it.’
‘What Darwin discovered was really simple stuff, Sam. He saw that if peahens fall for peacocks with tails that are gaudier and longer than average, then it stands to reason that the tails are always going to get gaudier and longer. The only way that peacock genes are going to make it into the next generation is if they are carried in bodies with long and gaudy tails.’
Sam tried to interrupt but JD carried on talking, getting into it now. ‘Where Darwin went wrong was that he thought evolution was driven by the survival of the fittest, but it isn’t, it’s driven by the reproduction of the sexiest.’
‘OK,’ Sam said. ‘I’m getting there. This’s why the advertisers never tell us anything about the stuff they’re trying to flog; they just put a pretty girl next to it, or a guy with a cheesy grin?’
‘Exactly. Everyone’s given up trying to sell their wares on product features; they go for image, just like the peacock. If you want to sell coffee, you have to show it as a consensual object of desire. If the advertiser gets it right, we all come to believe that his or her brand of coffee will automatically lead to a romantic liaison with someone wonderful.’
‘This’s awful,’ Sam said. ‘I dunno if I want to hear any more. It’ll put me off sex.’
‘You’re all right,’ JD told him. ‘You have the right mixture of cynicism and poverty to bypass these things. You’ve still got a sense of humour. Guys like you can get away with hitching up your pants and breathing down your nose. You use real signals. But most people are brainwashed into responding to virtual signals. They watch television all night, save up their pennies to buy the right T or the latest trainers.’
‘Oh, cheers, JD. That your way of saying I’ve got no style or finesse? I attract women through some base animal signalling technique, like not changing my socks?’
‘Don’t make it personal. What I’m saying is that each product, if it’s going to be successful, the advertisers have to create an independent sexual signalling niche for it. OK?’
‘I’m listening.’
‘And that creates problems. People watch the ads, they see that the guy who buys the product gets the girl. And they then spend more time and energy displaying virtual signals, using these products, than they spend displaying real, biologically validated signals, like humour or gentleness or creativity.’
‘So they lose,’ said Sam. ‘They get frustrated, maybe buy more or different products. Deodorants, aftershave, frilly knickers. Rather than improve their personalities, they buy something else that the Man tells them will work wonders.’
‘Yeah,’ said JD. ‘They go out looking for more sexual signalling systems.’
‘But they just end up with more products.’
‘This is alienation, Sam. Welcome to the millennium.’
The psychoanalyst in JD’s novel was a professional watcher. A deconstructionist heavily influenced by Derrida and Lacan, he daily focused his trained gaze on the stream of patients visiting his clinical practice. JD was torn about labelling the character with bisexuality. He preferred to keep his murderers well within the confines of the white heterosexual community, practising a kind of literary positive discrimination. But he had been unable to resist the echoes of a post-modern killer’s bisexuality. A character who spends his time questioning the traditional boundaries between the categories that we assume to be distinct could not be enslaved within those boundaries. The critics would complain that JD was politically incorrect again, but he didn’t write for them.
A secondary problem with the character was technical. JD wanted his psychoanalyst to be understood in human terms. He didn’t want the reader to write him off as a monster. The murders had to be seen, of course, as the brutal and destructive acts they were, but JD was concerned that the entire blame for the violence didn’t fall on the individual. He wanted to show the substantial contribution of the environment in which the individual lived and worked. JD was a political animal and he didn’t want to write a novel in which the individual’s failure was condemned while the institutionalized violence of the state was ignored.
Most fictional murderers were presented in stereotypical terms, described as having the puffy eyes and absorbent skin of a boozer, perhaps, or as a burned-out schizophrenic with shaking and trembling hands. They smoked cigarettes continually. When JD described his psychoanalyst’s thin, grey, Presbyterian conscience, his instinct was to cut the two adjectives. He highlighted them in the text and pushed the delete key, watched the computer do its magic.
He shook his head, read the sentence over and over again. Finally he reached for the undo key and pressed it quickly. As the two adjectives reappeared JD felt the ghost of a First World War ambulance driver move closer to his right shoulder.
He was at that stage in the writing of the novel where it would be good if he could bring in a man with a gun. He could introduce another murder, but it seemed facile, somehow, upping the body count just to keep a reader’s eyes glued to the page. He felt something for all of his characters in different ways, sympathized with their individual plights and could not justify bumping one of them off without a good reason. The only reason that would suffice would be if the death somehow furthered the development of the plot.
But the idea of furthering the development of the plot brought a smile to JD’s lips. There was little or no plot to the novel anyway, only a main theme supported by tributaries and echoes, by humour and ideas and dialogue. His novel, like the case of Isabel and Angeles Falco, was at an impasse. All the groundwork and the research had been done, the usual suspects had been identified and the witnesses primed. Now the miracle had to happen. JD waited; and someone on the street outside rang the doorbell.
Pancake make-up. Huge virtual eyes. The gap between jacket and skirt and the flash of silver and quartz from a navel ring. Christine Moxey had gone blonde since the last time he saw her but the make-up and schmuck with which she adorned her body couldn’t hide the underlying brash vulnerability.
‘Come in,’ he said. ‘You must be freezing.’
‘Thought you’d never ask.’ She brushed past him and marched down the hall and up the three steps to JD’s workroom. He followed, trying to put together the monstrous Reeboks, which reminded him of Minnie Mouse, and the skirt that was so short he could see right up to the maker’s name.
‘I’ve seen my bike,’ she said.
He could have kissed her. JD took a moment out to consider if he’d rather have heard her say anything else. But he couldn’t think of a thing. It was as if she’d lived out her fifteen years with only this one utterance as the objective.
‘Tell me,’ he said. She was blue, goose pimples colonizing her midriff. He wanted to gather her up in his arms, wrap her in a blanket of warmth.
‘It’s at work. This café on Pavement. I work there weekends. All the girls leave their bikes in the back.’
‘It was there?’ said JD, dismayed. ‘You’d left it there. Forgot about it?’
‘Not me,’ she said. ‘I told you, it was stolen. But it turned up again this morning, back of the café. One of the other girls must’ve left it there.’
‘You don’t know who?’
‘You’re the detective, not me. But it’s my bike. Green Raleigh and CAM on the saddle. Christine Annabelle Moxey. There can’t be two bikes like that.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘What I wanted to do, I wanted to ask who’d brought it and scratch her eyes out. But I controlled myself. I told the boss I’d got period pains and came round here damn quick to collect the reward.’
‘Reward?’
‘Yeah, you told me if I found out who stole it, you’d give me a hundred
quid.’
JD didn’t remember making that promise. He took out his wallet and extracted two twenties, passed them over to her. ‘All I’ve got at the moment. When we get the guy you’ll get the other sixty.’
‘It’s not a guy,’ Christine said. ‘There’s no guys work at the café. We’re all girls.’
‘OK,’ JD said. ‘It was a girl rode the bike to work, but there’s a guy behind her.’
‘So what do we do now?’
‘You go back to work. Tell the boss you’re feeling better and keep your eye on the bike. Don’t ask any questions but at closing time make sure you see who takes the bike. I’ll be outside, and whoever it is, I’ll follow her, find out where she lives.’
‘What if you lose her? It’ll be dark.’
‘I won’t lose her. But if I do, you’ll already know who it is, so we can trace her.’
‘This is exciting,’ she said.
JD did a double-take. For a moment or two he went with the fantasy, then reality came back to claim him. ‘Just routine,’ he said. ‘All in a day’s work.’
46
When he left the AA meeting Sam saw himself as one of hundreds of thousands of people who were leaving similar meetings all over the world. Most of them had seen death close up. Some of them had been talking but the majority had been listening, seeking for that extra ounce of strength that can only be supplied by another.
JD was waiting on the corner of Friargate. Sam detached himself from his sponsor, Max, and walked over to join JD. He’d never seen him on a bike before and the man and machine somehow didn’t fit. Without each other the bike and the man had, respectively, style and dignity. But together they excited only a comedic pathos.
The meeting had gone well and Sam was convinced he’d never drink again. A danger sign in itself for an alcoholic. In a culture that reaches for ethanol whenever it feels a celebration coming on, any feelings of elation are to be watched with caution. One drink sounds innocuous, even tame, and it is for most people. But there’s a fairly sizeable tribe of others in the world for whom that one drink is a virtual death sentence.