It wasn’t until Mr Mitsui was first posted abroad that the real strangeness began. The previous low-point had been in Jerusalem, where for several months Henry had insisted on dressing up as an Israeli, just to attract his mother’s attention. He only stopped when he fell in love with the niece of the editor of the Arabic daily an-Nahar. It was perhaps then that he’d adopted the idea that women existed to save him, and like most boys his age he gave himself several chances at redemption. In Islamabad it was the daughter of the American ambassador, and back in Japan he was briefly engaged to a very beautiful lieutenant in the Asaka self-defence force. On parade her mouth slanted down at the corners, always, as if it was a prescribed military expression, like attention. But something had happened and she’d broken it off, although it was unlikely Henry had ever actually hurt her.
Maybe this time, in London, it would be different and the moment to turn him round. He could have been lucky. He may really have been blessed by the miracle of true love, which would excuse Mr Mitsui the strain of having to find the courage to say no, he’d been wrong all along, and his only son couldn’t have everything he wanted.
Mr Mitsui slowly climbed off the bed, nursing his injured arm. He would phone the Distance Learning School. He would ask them where in London he might hope to find his errant and misguided son.
It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, in Lancing or Great Wakering or Gretna or Ascot, in Toller Porcorum or Merthyr or Richmond or Derby, Hazel Burns is eighteen years old and these are the best days of her life. Her father has given her an allowance and told her so. He has also bought her a car, a small Ford or Vauxhall or Peugeot, so that she can come home whenever she needs a break from her first year, first term, at the University of Warwick or Strathclyde or Oxford or Hull. She is studying English or Medicine or Natural Science or Greats, and therefore is convinced, along with most of the other students, that before long there will be almost nothing she does not know.
Already she misses home, or an idea of home which contains her mother, her sister, and a new pair of china vixens in the corner cabinet. She wishes she was there to see Oily win selection for the disabled luge team or compete in the qualifying heats for the BT-BSAD paralympic swimming championships. This is before she learns that Olive is going out with Sam Carter, which provokes her into driving her car at 60 mph through built-up areas until she remembers it’s dangerous. Her mother often telephones (it’s either her or Spencer), usually full of drugs and occasionally with such a confused sense of time that she treats Hazel like a child. Is she being careful? Does she lock her door at night? Is she avoiding alcohol, soft drugs, ecstasy, heroin? And she wishes she didn’t have to say this, but someone has to, does Hazel know what to do with a condom?
‘Which flavour?’ Hazel asks.
Her mother, ignoring the lessons of her own experience, suggests marriage and announces grandly that marriage is a place safe for diversity. Oh yes, Hazel thinks, it can be so diverse that in some forms you never actually get to see your husband. Her father, Hazel begins to realise, has sold her an idea of a happy childhood which has reached its sell-by date. He needs to make a fresh sale but he wouldn’t know this because he’s never there. As well as his frequent trips abroad he belongs to a thousand clubs, for the sales contacts, to the Detection Club and the Woolmen’s Company and the League Against Cruel Sports and the 300 Group and the trade association Beama and the TocH movement and possibly also the Freemasons. It’s as if his family was just another type of club, with its own tie, and her father only subscribes as a country member.
He is in fact directly responsible for Hazel’s discomfort at University. She lives on a corridor with three other girls, Lynne, Marianne, and Louise, who spend their weekends demonstrating against Serbian aggression or neo-Thatcherism or Gerry Adams or the persecution of the Kurds in Turkey. It doesn’t really matter. Hazel’s mistake is to have let it slip that her father is Salesperson of the Year ‘93, and in the global evil of a capitalist conspiracy there can be little doubt of his implicit guilt.
There is also the disadvantage of Hazel’s unfortunate private education and her crisp RP accent. She is also blonde and unmistakably sexy, if a little on the short side, and even though by degrees she is dropping her accent she feels friendless. She therefore has no choice but to work hard and attend extra-curricular lectures, Leeches and Lancets: Surgical Stories From the Past, or What Maastricht Means or Intensive Therapy in the 1990s - the Cost of a Life. In such desperate circumstances it’s hardly surprising that she breaks up with her first University boyfriend, and then her second and third, all of whom she meets at lectures looking for girls exactly like her. It’s at times like these that she likes to phone her only true friend in the world.
‘Did you love all of them?’ Spencer asks.
‘This is University,’ Hazel tells him. ‘I was seizing the day.’
‘So that’s what they call it.’
None of these brief relationships turn out to be much fun, and although it would have been nice to know this a little earlier, Hazel still repeats the mistake several more times just to make sure. In fact, University is comprehensively failing to provide her with the best days of her life until one afternoon she comes back to the corridor and Marianne says, or Louise or Lynne says:
‘Hazel, there’s a gorgeous policeman waiting to see you.’
He is sitting at the table in the communal kitchen, shifting his uniform cap about the table-top. He introduces himself as a sergeant from the Northumbria or Manchester or Metropolitan police force. He is tall and thin, with short black hair and an aristocratic nose. He has forgiving brown eyes and his pressed uniform is very clean and black. His face is very kind and he smiles nicely and Hazel is terrified. Before she can confess to the fraudulent charity boxes and the phone-cards, he suggests she sit down while he explains quietly that in a series of marked public callboxes, all of which have recently been attacked, several calls have been made both to her parents’ number and to the card-phone in the corridor outside.
Hazel suddenly discovers that she’s unable to help this gentle policeman with his enquiries. She draws on all her schoolgirl acting experience and says: ‘I get lots of calls from phone-boxes.’
‘From the same person?’
Hazel coughs into her hand. ‘I was at private school. It could be anyone from anywhere in the country.’
'They certainly do come from anywhere.’
The policeman lists, without referring to the notebook he’s supposed to carry, all the phone-boxes which have been broken into and the amount of money taken. Stolen, he corrects himself.
By the end of the list Hazel feels quietly flattered by Spencer’s obvious devotion.
‘I have lots of friends,’ she says, and the policeman looks at her in a way she’s learning to recognise and says,
‘Yes, I imagine you do.’
He carefully studies the cloth on top of his cap. He picks off a thread of red cotton. He tells her that if anything else occurs to her she should contact him. He looks her directly in the eye.
‘You do realise this is a serious matter?’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘yes I do.’
And after this visit Hazel’s credibility soars. Rumours abound. Hazel works for MI6, she’s a drug dealer, she’s a violent feminist out on parole bound over to keep the peace. Her secret lover is a copper. Anyway, once the police are involved there can be no doubt that this is real life, and Hazel is in it. She’s not just stuck up and blonde, and Hazel thanks heaven for Spencer, her own secret designated Act of God. As a peace-offering Louise and Lynne and Marianne make a collection to buy her a poster of a seagull smoking a joint. Hazel puts this in the space previously occupied by a Van Gogh print, or a Vermeer or Lowry or David Jones, anyway by something so boring and staid that all the girls agree it should be replaced immediately. She is allowed to keep her poster of River Phoenix in the arms of Grace Zabriskie from My Own Private Idaho. River is a cult from the moment he died, to
day, forever.
The girls now take Hazel out to parties, and together they all discover that at University every student has a problem. Fortunately, these are usually the kind of problems they’d always hoped to have, mostly boys and girls (love comes into it) or philosophic discourse or the politics of conscience. Hazel finds it strange that here they are among ten thousand students, all free and equal in a godless world, most of whom spend their days praying for the glamour of Acts of God. These will come in the form of an amazing boy or a fabulous girl, or a fantastic exam result on zero revision. Everyone is hoping for a miracle, for a direct painless hit from a metaphorical thunderbolt, a kind of supernatural smart bomb to explode the start of their lives in the right direction.
Hazel is no different, and she goes out and waits, waiting on a conspicuous miracle. She comes home. She pulls a chair up to the card-phone and calls Spencer. She doesn’t tell him about her visit from the police because maybe they’re listening in. As a more subtle way of showing how much she appreciates him, and the risks he’s prepared to take, she finds herself asking what happens if he ever runs out of money, and she also means what happens when I ran out of phonecards? She’s stolen nothing since she left home.
‘Easy,’ Spencer says. ‘We move in together, settle down and have children. Think of all the money we’ll save.’
‘I mean really.’
‘I don’t know. What do you think?’
Get a job, Hazel thinks, get a phone of my own. It seems a long way away. ‘I don’t know,’ she says, and then Lynne or Marianne or Louise is tapping her on the shoulder, silently with grand hand gestures inviting her out to sabotage a fox hunt or to smoke some drugs or to put through a hoax call to the bursar about explosive statues.
Hazel tells Spencer she has to dash. This is now, after all, and she only gets the one go at it.
11/1/93 MONDAY 12:18
‘So Grace,’ Hazel said, hands on knees, good with children. ‘Why aren’t you at school?’
They were in the kitchen, where Hazel had been hoping to speak to Spencer alone. She wanted to know exactly what Henry Mitsui had said on the phone, as well as what Spencer really felt for her. Instead, she’d been introduced to his ten-year-old niece, Grace.
‘You have a choice,’ Grace said. ‘It’s either because there’s school fireworks this evening and Dad thinks it’s too risky, or I get a day off for my birthday, or I’m not allowed into school today because yesterday I dressed up as a vampire and tried to bite the neighbour.’
'It’s an annual school holiday,’ Spencer said. In honour of the Duke of Wellington’s brother, an old boy.’
'This year it’s also for the beginning of Europe,’ Grace said. I’m only here until tea-time, but I want to stay longer because I hate my Mum and Dad.’
‘Of course you don’t. You shouldn’t say that.’
‘I like Uncle Spencer and William much better.’
‘Only sometimes,’ Spencer said.
‘All the time. I can always tell you proper things, like what happened to my friend Nadine.’
'I’m sure you could tell your mother.’
‘She’d go berserk. You don’t know what happened to Nadine.’
Spencer lifted Grace up and sat her on the table. He pulled out a chair for himself and Hazel leant against the wall. When Grace was sure they were both ready, she let them know that one day her friend Nadine had been followed home from school by a man. She was absolutely terrified. She heard footsteps behind her and they followed her all the way home. Eventually, when she reached her front door, Nadine turned round, determined not to let him in and probably to scream. The man stopped by the front gate and stared at her.
Grace did some life-like staring.
'Then what?’
‘You promise not to tell Dad?’
‘Promise. What did the man do?’
‘He asked her if she was alright.’
‘And?’
‘And then he said if she was so frightened she should have told him.’
‘And then what?’
‘He said sorry and went away. Nadine went inside and had her tea.’
Grace pushed herself off the table and landed solidly on both feet. ‘Can I go and see William now?’
‘I don’t know where he is,’ Spencer said.
‘I bet he’s in his shed.’
Grace simply couldn’t believe that Hazel had never seen William’s shed. She grabbed her hand and said she just had to see it, because it was brilliant.
Spencer leant on the table, closed his eyes, and prepared himself for some time-travel. He was going to go forward in time and consider his predicament like an adult, imagining every tomorrow as if it included Hazel, accepting the fact that this moment marked the end of his ambitious construction of a chequered past. He could still become a hundred different people, of course, but once he was committed to Hazel then the only person he could never be again was the person he was now.
Time-travel was hot and difficult work, so he took off his suit-jacket and shaped it over the back of the chair. He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and then, fully prepared, sat down at the table and opened William’s newspaper at the employment page. He stroked the paper from centre to edge, flattening it out, thinking that in any realistic vision he had of tomorrow, including Hazel, including their child (and if not tomorrow, then the next day, or the day after that), he would have to hold down a proper job.
As of today, or so he learned from the newspaper, he could apply for a Senior Research Fellowship in Law and Education at Manchester University. Failing that, he could suggest himself as the next Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, or try out for the Chair in Law at Bristol. Dizzy from travelling so far and so fast, Spencer quickly demoted himself to assistant bursar of a private school, realised he still didn’t have the qualifications, so fixed eventually on a more settled career as an enthusiastic and efficient secretary at a reputable/progressive company. All he needed to pick up before the interview was a bit of shorthand or mother-tongue German or his own transport or, as a basic minimum for most of these secretarial posts, some basic secretarial skills. If, on the other hand, he preferred to sell his services abroad, there was currently an opening for an Academic Director at the Indira Ghandi National Centre of the Arts, New Delhi.
Spencer failed to encounter a single offer he couldn’t refuse. The idea of a tomorrow with Hazel seemed to drift away, no easier to imagine as an adult than as a twenty-four-year-old child. Perhaps she- was right, and they should just go back to bed. At least that way they’d eventually fall asleep and at some stage wake up to find it was tomorrow anyway, whether they liked it or not. No special effort was required to get there, no previous experience or extraordinary enthusiasm or mother-tongue German.
It seemed obvious to him now that he should have listened to his father, and apprenticed as an overpaid sportsman. Or he should have rebelled more efficiently and become a man of business, a captain of industry, the director general of gas or the BSI chief executive or chairman of the TSB group and president of the British Bankers’ Association. Thinking like this was close to panic. It reminded him of his childhood, with everything still possible and nothing decided yet, when the need to make a decision was even more distant than the various triumphs imagined to follow it. But he wasn’t a child anymore, and not everything was an option.
Spencer gave up on jobs. On the way to Sport he saw a small advert in the Personal Column for a birthdate copy of The Times, which would have been a good present for Grace if only he’d thought of it earlier. It was a bit like astrology, he supposed, believing that events reported on the day you were born somehow had a particular significance. Spencer, however, needed guidance of a less speculative kind.
He tried something which had worked for him before whenever a decision was needed. He made a conscious effort to remember his sister Rachel, and passed back through the crash, beyond Rachel running at the seaside, all the way back to Rachel very young and somewher
e on a large playing field, wearing a number 8 shirt, kicking a football through the mud. Spencer was hoping that the past had something to teach him, and that certain memories would offer him signs and guidance if only he knew how to look. He therefore tried to fix down as many details as possible, but they remained elusive around the central event. Rachel was wearing a football shirt, for example, but Spencer couldn’t remember what team they used to support at exactly that time. It was the same colour shirt as his, but he still couldn’t remember. Was it important? Perhaps the details were what mattered most, and anything of importance to be discovered in memory lay hidden exclusively in the detail. So what were the games they used to play, and what were the scores?
Or the detail was irrelevant. Any guidance to be had was to be found in the events themselves. These were the defining moments of the past, the peaks in the hazy range of his memory, the significant events to be singled out, but still it wasn’t clear what was there to be learnt.
He must have learnt something, surely. That’s what mistakes were supposed to be for.
It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, in Morecambe or Ebbw Vale or Epsom or Musselburgh, in Hounslow or West Bowling or Gloucester or Rugby, eighteen-year-old Spencer Kelly throws himself into another game of Right Now.
‘Right Now,’ he says to Hazel, ‘looking out of this telephone box I can see some friends of mine. In fact a whole crowd of them. Many of them are potential international standard models and girlfriends. They want me to come out and play guitar for them. They want me to do one of my special funky dances. They’re making faces pleading with me to join them, right now.’
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