He had finished his whiskey when Susan Purvis arrived. She was wearing a suit jacket, with a skirt and heels. Her walk was purposeful and even, and the fabric of her skirt stretched slightly across her hips with each step. Over her shoulder was her embroidered bag. Her hair was tied up. Her neck was elegant and pale. She smiled as she approached. He stood and pulled out her chair.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry I’m late. Just organising everything before my trip. Details can take up so much time.” She reached into her bag. “Shall we—”
“Sign now?” said Martin.
“Before we eat?”
“Yes, let’s.” Martin beckoned to the waiter and smiled at Susan Purvis as he came over. The waiter stood straight and attentive. Martin ordered champagne without looking at him. Susan Purvis took her papers from her bag. They exchanged papers and signatures. After the waiter had poured they held their glasses to each other and he looked into her emerald eyes.
“May this be the beginning of a long—”
“—and prosperous”
“—a long and prosperous relationship. Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
As the evening turned Susan Purvis talked about her travels, her business, her plans. Martin found himself wanting to get closer. Maybe, he thought, people are at their most attractive when they talk about their aspirations, their ascendant futures, when they are filled with the blank wonder of possibility. She had a confidence, a glowing promise, that Martin was now a part of. His signature was next to hers.
Susan Purvis talked about the innate goodness in people. The child in everyone that needed a guiding hand, how uncomplicated the good truth was. It only had to be presented to them in terms they understand. He leaned closer. People’s attention spans are so much shorter now, she said. The language used must be so much more emphatic. These handbooks can provide a more immediate understanding of god so ordinary man can form a relationship with the creator much quicker. Everyone needs redemption, and only the creator can redeem. Goodbooks can help.
Martin felt comforted and lonely at the same time. He found himself focusing on her lips, her eyes, the crucifix which hung around her beautiful neck catching and reflecting the light, and her hands, always in motion when she spoke.
The waiter was returning with a bottle of wine when Martin mentioned that he had been a writer, had written a book. Susan Purvis said, “I hadn’t guessed.”
“Yes, but I got better.” They both laughed so loud the noise they made took them by surprise. The waiter stepped back for a second then leaned in to pour. He smiled at them both. By the end of the meal Martin counted that they had got through a bottle of champagne and a bottle of wine, as well as a couple of brandies each with their coffees. He put his card on the silver tray without looking at the bill and nodded as the waiter smiled and took it from their table. There was no-one else left in the restaurant.
“Well, if you have to be away early in the morning—” Martin began.
“No, well, the afternoon, but there is still so much to do before I go. I should get my head down. I am glad that we have had the chance to get—”
“—to know each other. Let me get you a taxi,” Martin said as they stood up.
“It’s not far, I can walk.”
Martin thought for a moment about offering to walk her home, but a clean good-bye now would be better. As he held open the doors of Twin70 Martin said, “No really, let me get you a taxi, it’s late.”
It was quiet on the street but for the sound of muted music coming from The Blues Club. Martin could just hear a dull steady thud and a three note bass line repeated over and over. Soon people would pour from its doors, some of them arm in arm, with rhythms and movements of music still in them.
Martin and Susan Purvis walked together down the narrow streets leaving the noises of the club behind and onto the wide main street. Martin waved a taxi down. He held the door open for her and said good night. He stood watching the lights of the taxi getting smaller as it drove away. Then he walked back to his car. He climbed in and put his briefcase on the passenger seat and rested a hand upon it. He was touching a future. A trajectory. Action which would cause consequence. Something that could make a difference. When he had asked Susan Purvis did she not feel that she was interfering with the word of god in some way, she shook her head. The word of man, interpreting god, she said. The word of man, which stands between god and man. The fewer words the better.
* * *
When Martin got out of his car at New Acre he could see the shapes of the diggers and scaffolds popping up behind the fences in silhouette.
He could feel the touch of the moonlight on his skin. A wind had picked up, slow and insistent, like a wave coming in to break. The noise was like a train in a tunnel, approaching, finally reaching him. Martin stood listening for a minute to the growing sound before unlocking the front door and stepping in, closing the door and locking himself into the silence of the house.
As he entered the kitchen he flicked on the light. There, standing on the other side of the kitchen, leaning against the worktop, was Henry, in his black suit. Martin closed the door. Henry didn’t move. His neck was thin in his collar and his face had aged so much it seemed that his bones had withered. Martin opened the fridge and took out two bottles of beer. He opened both and gave one to Henry. Henry took it and nodded.
“Thanks. I didn’t like to help myself.”
“You look older.”
“I am. I’m near the end, but there’s just one more thing.”
“One more thing? Well let’s sit.”
Martin turned the light off. All of the sharpness and definition disappeared. Henry let out a sigh. Martin pulled out two chairs and they both sat. Henry rubbed his forehead, tilting his hat back, and Martin saw his eyes blink slowly. Martin drank from his beer.
Henry looked so old, so old. Martin saw an old man with a wasted life behind him. A life spent chasing after other people’s problems, revealing answers to other people’s questions, finding out other people’s secrets, making money from the misery of people’s lives. The moonlight slipped through the swaying branches of the trees outside and onto the countertop.
“I still don’t know why you’re really here,” Martin said.
Henry said in a quiet voice, “Yes, you do. You deny everything. All of your life, you have blocked things out, terrible things.”
“Listen.” Martin leaned forward. “I made you, you sad old man. And I can break you. There’s nothing to remember. You, you are a fiction, looking for a mystery to solve. Well there’s no mystery here, no matter how hard you try and cook something up, there’s nothing, just me. Me, stuck in this place I don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with me, doing things I don’t want to do. This is me, there’s no fucking mystery.”
“There is only one mystery I’ve never resolved. Do you know what that is?”
Martin sat back again and drank from his beer. “No, why don’t you tell me.”
“The Fly Guy.”
“The Fly Guy is just a story.”
“Like the others? Like the other stories? That’s where you hide them, in your stories? Do you even know what you’ve done? What you’re denying?”
“There is no fucking Fly Guy, that’s the secret, you fool! Everything you’ve been chasing, there’s nothing! It’s all nothing. So you are nothing!”
“Then why am I here? You have tried to block it all out, but you can’t any more. I found you. The time has come. You’ve been begging for change. Well, open your eyes. Now is the chance. I am revealing you to yourself, and now is the time. You have the power to stop, to change, to save. If you could save anyone, who would it be?”
“Myself. If I could save anyone I’d save myself.”
Martin stood and filled a pan with water. He turned the knob for the gas hob. A hiss and click. Then there was a blue flame shivering. He turned it up full. He had to go to work in a few hours. He had to sit in traffic. He consider
ed putting his face on the blue circle and wondered how it would feel. He put the pot of water on the flames.
When he turned back to Henry he could still see a blue circle in the dark. Henry was sitting rubbing his forehead. His hair had receded, his face had dropped some more, and there were deep shadows under his eyes. His hands were like claws protruding from the darkness of his suit. Martin saw how weak he was. He saw how easy it would be to break him.
“You had no-one to love. Is that it? Have you come here to get love from your creator? Have you come here to die? You’re the one with the fucking baggage, you’re the one who needs to come to terms with his past. I don’t have a past. No baggage. See? Empty-handed. You’ve got the past I gave you and you’ve never made any connections, that’s what’s wrong with you. You’re the one who has never had anyone.” Martin opened the fridge and peered inside. “I thought we had eggs.”
Henry still didn’t say anything. The light from the fridge was soft. What Martin really wanted to do was lie down on the kitchen floor and feel it wash over him. Where could he find comfort now? How could he reach through all of the walls, the windows and doors, the frames, the constructions, the barriers between? Everyone was separated like specimens in their jars. He straightened up and walked over to Henry, stood in front of him. Martin could feel anger now. He felt it like it was the first time; it surged through him, filling up the empty vessel that he had become.
“What good are you here?”
“You must remember. What you did to Zoe, what you did to Anna.” Henry’s voice was old, too. It came creeping from his throat, barely audible. “Think again, if there was one person you could save, if the power was given to you. If you could save just one, who would it be? If you remember just one, the rest will follow. Allow yourself to remember.”
“There’s nothing to remember! You’re a fiction and you are making fictions. This is all in your head. All in your fucking head. It’s all fictions, everything I’ve done! And you are wrong! I have power, and I’m going to break you.”
Martin drew his arm back and with all the strength he had, hit Henry on the side of the head with his beer bottle. The sound was loud and thick. The bottle didn’t break. Henry’s head wobbled and flopped. His hat tipped to a sharp angle. A sound like a door creaking open escaped his mouth. Martin dropped his bottle and grabbed Henry around the neck. He began to squeeze, hard. A red wound opened like a mouth above Henry’s ear. Blood started to pour down his neck.
Henry suddenly threw his arms around, knocking the beer from the table. He tried to stand. He choked out the word Stop. Martin pushed down and squeezed with everything he had in him. Henry’s hat fell off. He was choking and his feet were scrambling beneath the table. Martin could feel his fingers digging deeper into Henry’s neck. He felt how frail his windpipe was and felt a surge of power when he knew he was crushing it. His hands seemed to grow the more he squeezed. Martin felt all of the hours and hours, all of the sharp edges, blank spaces and waste, all of the words and the yearning gaps between, all of it was rushing from his shoulders down his arms and into his hands. All of the past, real and imagined, everything he has done and has not done, everything he will do and not do, will converge onto this one act, and concentrate the pressure, the power, the real power he can feel in his hands.
I will kill you, Henry. I will it, I will it, I will kill. I will kill you, Henry, I will kill you.
And then he realises he has.
* * *
Alison pushes open the door.
“Who are you talking to?”
Martin is standing in the middle of the kitchen with the light off, with his back to her. He does not turn. Steam thickens the air. The fridge is open, spilling yellow light, oozing across the linoleum. On the stove, gas flames grip a pan with blue flickering fingers. The noise from the bubbling water rises and spreads. The blind is open. Through the window she sees the silhouette of the bare tree shaking manically in the wind and the moon through the agitated branches. The shadows in the kitchen move and shake, darting over the counters and tabletop, brushing Martin’s slumped shoulders and the backs of his legs, sliding off the shelves and retreating into the corners, twitching.
She reaches for the light switch.
“Don’t,” he says, not turning around. “Don’t turn the light on.”
“What have you done? What’s that on the floor? Martin?”
“Nothing. This is it. Go back to bed.”
“Martin …” He still does not turn.
Alison steps back out of the kitchen and closes the door. She knows Martin is drunk. It seems that beyond that door the whole room is drunk too, that everything around him is teetering on an edge, just about holding itself up. She doesn’t want to be part of that. She pads back upstairs and back into bed. She knows that there is a natural end to everything, and the secret is to know when to step out, to avoid the cycle repeating.
She pulls the cover over herself and closes her eyes. She sees Martin with his back to her. He doesn’t turn around, and in the place where she used to feel love she now feels pity. She sees Gregor from afar, tall and confident, looking at her from the doorway of an immaculately restored seventeenth century shop front converted into a luxurious three storey townhouse, and gesturing for her to come in, come in. She feels a rush of love, an excitement. It’s suddenly easy to imagine life without Martin.
* * *
The back door of the house unlocks and then opens. Martin steps out. He drags Henry’s old limp body to the back of the garden. He comes back to the house and goes inside. The wind still rolls and roars through the tops of the trees and underneath the shadows deepen and pulse. The moonlight ebbs on the dark suit and swells on the white face of a broken old man. Martin steps out of the house with a spade in his hand. He walks back across the moonlit rectangle of grass and disappears into the shadows at the end of the garden.
* * *
When Alison wakes in the morning, she looks to the other side of the bed. Martin isn’t there. He hasn’t kissed her goodbye. She gets out of bed and goes to the bathroom. The door to the office is closed. She opens it. Martin is there in the suit he was wearing the night before, sitting at the desk, typing on the keyboard. The light is on and the curtains are open. He doesn’t turn his head or acknowledge her in any way. There are streaks of mud and grime in his hair and his hands are grey and chalky. There is a pile of papers on the desk beside him and soil on the floor around him. The pages she can see have thick black marker lines crossing diagonally over the typed text. The computer screen in front of him is filling with words.
“Martin,” she says, but he doesn’t stop typing or take his eyes from the screen. She steps back out of the room and closes the door. From the other side she can’t hear anything. She listens for sounds of his fingers on the keyboard or heavy breathing, but there is nothing. She sees the mud on the floor, the footprints on the stairs. She puts her ear to the door. Nothing. She opens the door again. There he is, the words are moving along the screen.
“What about work?” she says. He doesn’t reply or even make any sign that he’s heard her. It is as if she isn’t there. She isn’t there, or she is there and he is not.
***
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Lucy. Anna. Zoe. Nicola. Marketa. Susan. Lucy. I’ve been watching you for so long. I have always been watching you. I have heard you knock on the walls and wail, I have watched your aching hours pass. Who you have been, who you are, who you can be, the possibilities reverberate around you, all with the tone of tragedy, as if all of the voices you have and will ever have are entwined, threading into each other, crossing over each other, winding into a chord that binds with a song of grief. Even when you sleep the room holds the echo of your sorrow. I have been watching and writing, and my heart breaks every time I write. I have seen and felt everything and yet still I condemn you. If there was one person, just one …
Now your back is to the door. You are sitting on the floor. The room is dark, the only
light on is a small desk lamp on the floor next to you illuminating the tarot cards. Beyond the small pool of light the floor of the room is grimy and the flash of crumpled silver foil reflects from a corner. In the other corner in the shadows is a small bundle of naked plastic dolls, some missing limbs or their heads or with their torsos twisted around. Near the mattress is a cut up set of clothes, strips of a small red dress and tattered cuts of denim lie in a heap.
You have cut the deck into three piles face down, and now you take the top one from each and place them in a row before turning them over. You are singing softly to yourself, the way you wear your hat, the way you sip your tea, the memory of all that, no they can’t take that away from me. Your skinny hands are pale and elegant. Your skin has a luminescence in the lamplight. You see the Magician, the ten of wands and the Chariot. Your hands move delicately over the cards, changing their order. The ten of wands, the Chariot, and the Magician. You stop singing and turn your head.
There in the door is my silhouette. My frame is thin and my shoulders are slightly hunched. My jacket does not fit me and my wrists and hands protrude from my sleeves, hanging loose, redundant. Your eyes are glazed. In a weak voice you say, “Have you brought something? Have you got it? Something?” I hold my hands out, empty. You say, “You said you’d come back with it. You said. I feel like I’ve been dying.” You bend forward with your arms folded and put your face on the ground. I take two steps into the room. My movement is odd, jerky, as if I have extra knees and elbows, or there are frames missing from the film. I speak.
It’s me. I’ve come for you. You look up again and this time rise. You are weak. In the half-light of the room you are like a ghost, almost not real. You float just above the floor and sway.
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