by Don Boyd
Chapter Twenty Five
Margot tried to focus on her two morning clients. Saturday clients. Oddly enough, they provided her with a convenient diversion.
Apart from Italian cinema, Anthony loved football. He devoured the sports pages in all the English, Spanish and Catalan newspapers and magazines, absorbing each and every item with any connection to his beloved obsession. In particular, he was a massive fan of Barcelona’s celebrated football team, an unlikely quirk for a boy brought up in Scunthorpe. He went to every home game and for away matches he would ply the Raval for enough ‘tricks’ to give him sufficient cash to afford the plane tickets and hotel costs. Apart from the barest of day-to-day living expenses, and the rent for a very cheap squat in the Barceloneta, his only other luxuries were regular visits to the cinematheque and the two sessions each week he religiously insisted on having with Margot. He had been her first client in Barcelona, and he never doubted that she had saved his life.
Anthony was one of the funniest men Margot had ever come across. If there was one relationship she would have loved to have seen blossom, it would have been a friendship between Ant, as she called him, and Archie. Ant was uneducated but an autodidact with a formidable memory for detail and a hungry appetite for all kinds of information. He was a brilliant prostitute – his clients felt relaxed and he was very good at the ‘fancy waterworks’, as he described his sexual dexterity. He was a good listener but at the same time, he was quite prepared to take over the role of a loquacious storyteller if the occasion suited him.
“Will you come to the Barça match next Sunday with me?” was his opening gambit at ten seconds past ten o’clock that morning. He was also obsessively punctual. “My current number two has cried off,” he continued. “I don’t fancy number three anymore and number one doesn’t fancy me. And so I thought of you.”
“Number four?”
“Number one-oh-one, darling! You don’t have the right bits, unless you have had a sex change since I saw you on the night before your wedding in that gorgeous bridal suite at The Arts. But if I were to be in serious stuck, I could always bring along some kit for you one evening and we could try it out!”
Margot laughed. “I didn’t know that you saw all of me that night, by the way. But I am game for anything. Count me in for Sunday. As it happens, my usual lunch date has been cancelled and I have never been to a soccer game.”
“The Barcelona stadium, Camp Nou, or Barça as I call it, is Paradise On Earth, darling. Imagine two teams, twenty-two gorgeous boys in tight body-hugging strips, all playing for you, for you and for a hundred thousand other people in the stadium, mostly boys. Apart from one in Brazil and one in Mexico, it’s the biggest stadium in the world and was designed by a famous architect. I can never understand why there are so few girls around during the games. I am just a girlie, as you know, and I have to go at least twice each game to that lovely smelly lav so that I can toss myself off! There’s so much exciting action happening in front of me – I go three times if one of the poor dears gets sent off the pitch for a foul.”
Margot had always known that Ant was irreparably compulsive. She had managed to persuade him to understand this, and to understand some of the causes of this sometimes devastating behaviour. He was considerably less damaged now, and much more in control of his life than he had been when he had met her at her wedding five years ago. Perhaps here was an opportunity to probe some of the elements in his obsession for football in a way that could also help her to deal with Xavier. His obsession seemed to be as irrational as her own. She decided to tease him.
“There are all kinds of taboos. You know, of course, that some shrinks never visit their clients outside the consulting room. That is taboo in their book. Then another one is sex with clients. So that one is out too, Ant, I am sorry to say.”
“I know – for them, maybe. Those shrinks are out of date and out of touch. But you are such a grown up girl and us grown up girls can do what we want. What harm could you possibly do to me? I am much more likely to damage you.”
“I think that is why those rules exist.”
“You are so deranged anyway, Margot. You always look so innocently at me when I tell you my naughty stories. Anybody that innocent has to be mad. Barça with me couldn’t make it any worse. Only better.”
“Ok, you win! I will come.”
He jumped and screamed for joy. Margot wanted to ask him some questions, so she allowed him to calm down and then moved onto the area which she hoped could help her with Xavier.
“Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions for a change?”
Margot remembered asking Laura the same thing. It was becoming a habit.
“Fire away…”
She framed the questions so that they would seem to concern him, and not herself.
“You have talked about your mother. You have talked about Monica Vitti. You have talked about at least twenty footballers. Is there anyone you have never talked about because you have done something with them that is both shameful in one way, and irresistibly sexy in another?”
“Margot, I can’t believe that you have just asked that question. Every experience I have had is irresistibly sexy, and shameful!”
Ant looked her contemplatively. He was very still. She looked into his eyes and he looked away at first, but when he realised that she was on a serious mission, he looked back at her and without any irony or the customary banter, he said, “Yes! Once, for about six months, I came under someone’s spell and I lost control!”
She wanted to throw her arms around Anthony and kiss him all over, but she also needed to stay focused, professionally. He had just delivered the most comforting sentence he could have uttered that morning, without having the slightest inkling as to why that was the case. She also felt a little guilty, but she was confident that she could make sure that whatever they might unearth of value for her, would have equal value for him. This was a familiar pattern in post-Freudian analysis, and she was superficially trying to convince herself that this strategy had her usual ethical justification.
“What do you mean by ‘lost control’?”
“I couldn’t resist it although I knew it was wrong in every way. It was so pleasurable. I craved the experience.”
“Did it involve anything out of the ordinary for you?”
Anthony was quiet again. Without a trace of his normal ebullience he launched into a description of a teenage affair, a very perverted and violent, Sado-masochistic relationship with a much older woman. A woman he wouldn’t identify at first. The Oedipal resonances seemed clichéd, until he described the initiation, the first time that sex had taken place, and Margot identified from his description the one significant and horrifying fact.
“Dad was next door! I could hear him snoring.”
The woman Anthony was describing was his own mother.
Anthony broke down. He crumbled in the chair like a tiny child. Margot managed to calm him down, and when he recovered, he thanked her profusely. “I have wanted to tell you this for five years but have never had the courage to face it myself. Thank you, darling Margot. Thirty years and five minutes.”
Anthony’s mother had given him life and had stolen his life. Somehow, Margot had stumbled on the opportunity to deal with Anthony’s problems in the context of her desperate need to solve her own.
How did he deal with his shame? Who did he tell? How did he handle his secret?
Of course, there is one vital difference: Ant’s mother was not a murderer, however appalling her behaviour.
These moments of revelation, of ‘breakthrough’ as they are called, are few and far between. Rather like extraordinary co-incidences and moments of extreme intensity, the capacity to give them some external context with a phrase or sensible conversation is usually non-existent. Anthony was capable of a witty solution to almost anything, but on this occasion he could only resort to the one event that was important for him that week, Sunday’s match.
“Are we still on for Bar�
�a?”
“Don’t be silly, Ant. I wouldn’t miss all those boys for anything! Where shall we meet?”
“Elizabets. Lunch. We can take the M to the stadium from Universitat. Twelve?”
“Twelve on Sunday at Elizabets.”
Much to her surprise and disappointment, he leapt up and made it clear that he wanted to leave as soon as possible. He kissed Margot on the lips and left with a chuckle, leaving her without any solutions.
Before she could collect her thoughts beyond being aware of the butterflies nesting persistently deep down in her stomach, she heard her next client’s powerful voice say “Gracias” and a car door slam, firmly. He came puffing into the room, heaving a shoulder bag onto the floor and taking off his long, leather coat. Gottfried was not just oversized, he was Gargantuan. Margot took his coat through to her study area and threw it on the desk.
“I was so sorry to hear about your clients.”
“I didn’t know that you knew they were my clients, Gottfried.”
“I know everything.”
He said this without any trace of irony. She couldn’t resist asking him, “Did you know them?”
“No, but I knew Paolo’s real father. He had a portfolio of investments looked after by our bank. Before he was killed, he would come into lunch with my father from time to time.”
“How is your father?”
“I hate the man of course, and he’s as ever… he’s been annoying me more than usual. My brother came into the city and Father insisted on throwing a party for him. He asked me to organise it and then interfered with every decision I made.”
“What decisions?”
“Everything. The venue was changed. I wanted to do it at The Arts, or another space which would have no family connections. My father wanted to do it on his yacht. I wanted to have a live DJ – the best in Barcelona, but my father insisted on flying in Julio Iglesias at vast expense. Julio Iglesias, for Christ’s sake! He’s an old friend. Stuff like that.”
“Why on earth did he ask you to organise it?”
“I think he is trying to keep me away from some dodgy deal the bank is involved in to try to save its skin. We have had an army of Bulgarians through the doors. Bulgaria is the new Iceland.”
There had been a constant battle for control of the family banking business. Gottfried was much smarter than his Dad and had proved his financial prowess to the banking community with a series of independently negotiated contracts made with three emergent Chinese industrialists. This precociousness had destroyed his father’s conviction that Hans, Gottfried’s younger brother, was the more talented son. On the back of the Chinese triumphs, Gottfried had been shifted to work on corporate identity and Hans had been despatched to New York where he could shine without his brother’s competitive spirit stealing the corporate limelight.
Margot had been through many theories about Gottfried’s relationship with his father but he still remained an enigma. Gottfried was a virgin. He rarely had any girlfriends, or boyfriends for that matter, but he was very sociable and loved parties and nightclubs. He lived alone in a suite in a tiny boutique hotel. What of his relationship with his mother? She lived in Madrid with her second husband, a famous chef who appeared on television in a very popular food show. At one stage, the idea that he was a repressed homosexual had some credibility, his vocal homophobia supporting this obvious theory. Was he quite simply a ‘closet queen’? He seemed pathologically afraid of that particular line of enquiry and deflected Margot’s probing whenever she had raised it. No matter, today Margot wanted to investigate Gottfried’s apparently perverse need to revolve his life around his father’s business, knowing that he didn’t really need to on any level – financially, he could survive without it. Emotionally, his father caused him so much unnecessary stress. Again, she was using her client to research levels of obsessive and perverse behaviour in an attempt to analyse herself.
The session was fruitless and frustrating. However much Margot battled against it, Gottfried insisted on spending most of his hour describing the party and telling her how much better it would have been if he had been allowed to organise it without his father’s interference. He needed to get this off his chest. Familiar and boring territory. When his fifty minutes was up, to the second, she retrieved his coat, took his cheque and sent him packing.
She now had exactly one hour to prepare for Xavier and walk to his apartment. She re-wound her answering machine.
Archie. Skip. Robert. Skip. Carlos: “Please call me as soon as you can – I hear we have plans but I still need you to come to the police headquarters. Procedure.”
Hugo: “I so want to see you guys. Can we all come to Sunday lunch, please?”
Archie: skip. And then a young woman, a voice she had never heard before, with a French accent.
“Margot, my name is Isobel. I was Paolo’s friend. I was the girl in the yellow dress at the funeral. Please can you call me? I want to see you as soon as possible. It is urgent.”
She said the word as if she was speaking in French, somehow giving the word more punch. Margot dialled the number immediately.
“Isobel?… It’s Margot…”
She listened for what seemed like a very long two minutes.
“Okay. I understand. Can you see me right now, this morning?… I will meet you wherever you want… give me somewhere in the Barri Gotic and I can be with you in twenty minutes, wherever… I know it well… I’ll be there but I can only afford half an hour. Is that okay for you?”
She didn’t want to take the risk of missing Xavier a second time, but she had enough time to see Isobel and make it in time. After ringing Robert to leave him a message to say that she was expecting him as usual at three that afternoon, she went over to the shutters to close them, and yet again she was absolutely sure that a man was watching her studio from the shadows opposite her building. He moved as soon as she caught sight of him. She closed the shutters, slipped off her jeans, showered, slipped into a red summer dress, ran out of her apartment, across the packed Reial, across Calle Ferran, now teaming with midday tourists, and along the tiny street to the old chocolate café Isobel had suggested for their meeting. It was relatively empty, and Isobel was already sitting at the back, wearing the same yellow dress she had worn at the funeral. Margot was struck by her simple beauty. Isobel twinkled at her with a shy, welcoming handshake.
“It’s my favourite dress! Promise! Thank you for coming so quickly. I know where you live…”
Margot was breathless, but she knew instantly that this was a woman she could trust with her life. Isobel shook her hand affectionately.
“I am so sorry but I only have half an hour!”
“Xavier?”
It was almost as if she didn’t need to ask the question.
“How do you know?”
Isobel smiled and began her story. She had a quiet, attractive voice. She spoke English fluently with a light French accent, which reminded Margot of Marie Christine. Margot allowed her to speak without interruption, practised as she was with listening to confessions and personal histories.
Chapter Twenty Six
“Have you ever been to Niger? Non. We learn le Français in school… There are very few tall, beautiful white men in Niger except the arrogant pieds noirs. I like tall, beautiful English and Scottish white men. I fell in love with Xavier at first sight, which was a big problem for me because I am married to a very jealous man, also from Niger, which is my home country. I was married to him when I was fifteen.
“I met Xavier at the language classes. He was teaching English, and other languages. Catalan. He asked us all to stand up and tell everybody who we were and where we came from and why we were in Barcelona. (Paolo and Tilly were there – I didn’t really understand why Tilly was there at first). I told the Catalan class, I suppose about twenty of us, the truth, that my English was poor, and they laughed at my clumsy words which I mixed with my perfect French. Xavier was very kind and corrected each mistake. He was very sensi
tive. He gave us all names. He called me ‘le rossignol’, the nightingale. Niger was a French colony which is why I speak such good French, but my husband is a King and he is very proud about his culture. In his kingdom, the King would have several wives. Obe only has me and I speak French, which makes it very difficult for his family!
“My family lives in Agadez, a small city in the north of my country. It is on the ancient salt route close to the Sahara desert. My father is an imam, my mother is a teacher and they gave me a great education. I won a scholarship to Le Sorbonne and I met Obe in Paris. He is very handsome and gave me a great time. He had money. When he asked me to marry him, I told him ‘yes’ but I wanted to be his only wife. He told me that he would accept, but if he could be my only husband. He told me that his family would kill me if I was ever unfaithful to him. He would kill me. He was not joking. He explained his position with all sorts of highly complicated religious and sociological justifications which I challenged – I thought that they were stupid – but finalement I said yes because I loved him so much, and so we were married in my home village. Until I met Xavier, I had never been interested in another man, physically, sexually. In Niger, in many homes, the young women have traditional sexual initiations when they are virgins. These can ruin a woman – they still circumcise many young girls. But my mother and father are progressives. They are what Obe calls radicals. Of course, he was surprised that I was a virgin but he liked that so much.
“After my first class with Xavier I had a coffee with Paolo and Tilly. They were so obviously interesting. Most people there were boring. Banquiers. Hommes d’affaires. Tilly had told us during the class that she was an artist, a film-maker. She made installations. Paolo had also been very funny. He said that he was the apprentice to the sorceress Domatilla. He made a joke about her name. More Dom than Tilly he said. We all laughed without really knowing why. Xavier explained the significance of Paolo’s use of the word ‘dom’ to us. I had guessed. He did this in English, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian and German. He explained ‘domination’. He explained ‘submission’. He explained sadism. He explained masochism. This was such a revolutionary way to teach us English. Incredible. Anyway, I decided to get to know Paolo and Domatilla. They fascinated me. They were so attractive. Fun. Dangerous, too, which I find interesting. So many people are so predictable. And so I asked them to come for a drink with me at my favourite cocktail bar. Gimlet? It is in the Born, a very small bar called Gimlet. Gimlet is an English drink made from gin and limes. Gordon’s Gin and Rose’s Lime juice! I love it so much. Gimlet has this beautiful teak bar which looks like a very long – you call it sleek? – highly polished piano. It is also usually very empty at nine o’clock when our classes finish, and they play some great jazz music. They didn’t know it then, but I know that they loved it too.