A Bed of Scorpions

by Judith Flanders

‘Why?’

  He looked at me blankly. Then, ‘You’re under the impression we work one case at a time?’

  I wasn’t. I nodded and lay back, closing my eyes. My head really hurt. So did my shoulder. A nap was calling to me.

  ‘Will you ring Helena?’

  I opened my eyes again and crossed my single good arm. Pre-emptive crabbiness was the aim.

  Jake was exaggeratedly calm. ‘You hit your head. You have a bloody nose and a badly bruised arm and shoulder. I don’t think you should be alone.’

  Screw pre-emptive. ‘For heaven’s sake. I fell off my bike. I’m fine. Now go away and detect something somewhere.’ I shooed at him, making the kind of gesture that really only gets made to dogs. In cartoons.

  He shook his head at me. Not impressed. ‘Call if you need anything. If I’m not at my desk tell whoever answers it’ll be easy to find me. I’m the one in the corner, banging my head against the wall.’

  ‘I’ll be sure to remember that.’ I closed my eyes again.

  When I opened them, I could tell from the light I’d been asleep for a good hour. Before Jake left to bang his head against the wall he must have gone upstairs, because Mr Rudiger was sitting in an armchair, peacefully reading. He looked up when I moved, but he didn’t close his book, indicating that he was happy to go back to it if I didn’t want to talk. I started to yawn, then quickly stopped when I felt a pulling across my face. I reached up to explore. The grazes had scabbed over. I winced not so much at the feel as at the thought of what it must look like. I sat up.

  As if that were a cue, Mr Rudiger stood and went into the kitchen. More bloody tea, I silently groused. That would be my third cup that day, including the one they’d brought me at the hospital. More than I’d drunk in the previous year.

  I should have known better. Mr Rudiger was definitely going to win the Neighbour of the Year rosette, because he came back with coffee. And with sandwiches neatly cut into triangles, their crusts removed. I don’t know if it was the thought of my elderly neighbour carefully removing the crusts because the injuries to my face might make chewing difficult, or if it was the reminder of childhood birthday parties, but whatever it was, it made me feel cherished.

  I got creakily off the sofa and he was there without seeming to move. ‘Let me get whatever you need.’

  I shook my head. ‘Loo.’ His smile acknowledged that there were some things a girl just had to do for herself, but he trailed behind me to the door all the same.

  I did have to go to the loo, but on the way back I scooped up my handbag and checked my phone. And there was an email from Jim.

  Hi Sam. Presentation done & ready to go. Lucky b/c Stevenson show really getting down to wire looking great tho. Images we chose, why shld I mind? We wanted the one w the naked lunch but any of the bk jkt ones wld hve worked. C u nxt wk. Jim.

  No smiley for me, but he seemed happy to provide the information without thinking I’d had an ulterior motive. I forwarded it to Jake – I’d learnt my lesson – with just a question mark above it. I was staying out of it. Whatever ‘it’ was.

  And then I sat down and, eating my sandwiches, I told Mr Rudiger everything. Why not? The police thought there was no case to answer.

  He was quiet when I finished. I assumed he was thinking it over, but the last thing I expected was his ‘It was a strange time, the sixties’.

  I tilted my head to indicate I didn’t understand.

  ‘From this time, looking back, the sixties were a big break, very different from the fifties. But at the time it didn’t feel that way.’

  Mr Rudiger wasn’t prone to talking for talking’s sake. He was going somewhere.

  ‘The people we now think of as typical – Bob Dylan, or Warhol, or’ – he dipped his head towards me ‘Edward Stevenson, they were the exceptions. And they were the exceptions partly because of their talent, but mostly because of their …’ he stopped, searching for the word he wanted. ‘Because of their vanity.

  ‘When I look at Stevenson’s pictures, I like them, they’re good, but what always strikes me is how they shout, “Look at me!”’

  I sat suspended, sandwich halfway to my mouth. I couldn’t have said why this seemed important, but it did.

  He continued, speaking almost to himself. ‘I remember when the news came that he’d gone to India to join an ashram. That sounded right to me, that the man who’d made those pictures would want to do something that let him think, and talk, about himself.’ He sounded almost bitter, in a way I’d never heard from him before, this man who always appeared so gently amused by the world. ‘But when his body was found, that I didn’t believe. I know suicide is unpredictable. But I still didn’t believe that the man who had made those paintings would make that choice. His work screamed out that he loved himself too much to imagine a world without him.’

  I had no idea what made him feel this strongly. He didn’t say, and I wouldn’t presume to ask. We sat quietly together as the room got dark.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I SLEPT ON AND off through most of the weekend. While Jake theoretically spent it with me, and technically we talked, in reality we both avoided saying anything of importance. He said he’d asked for the local divisional police’s report of the accident, and the statements all said the same thing: a woman driving a blue or green car, maybe a Volvo, who had tried to pass me where the road was too narrow. The only unusual aspect was that she’d driven off. Women, according to Jake, mostly didn’t do that. We left it there.

  It was therefore Monday before we faced off again. When the alarm went off and I hauled myself out of bed he looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. ‘Where are you going?’

  I gave him a who-has-lost-whose-mind evil eye. But it was early and without caffeine I wasn’t prepared to talk more than I had to. ‘Work,’ seemed like more than enough explanation.

  Apparently not. ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘Um-hmm,’ I said mildly, heading for the shower.

  He stood in front of me, arms crossed. ‘No. You’re not.’

  I walked around him without bothering to reply. He was naked, and it’s impossible to look truly ferocious when you’re naked. That’s just a scientific fact. The mirror in the bathroom though did give me pause. I’d seen the grazes on my face several times the day before, when looking in the mirror was unavoidable. But I had managed not to think about the rest. The stiffness had shrieked out at me when I woke up. Being the mistress of denial, I ignored that too. But my shoulder was a mass of bruises, and was swollen too. In fact, I was a mess. But staying at home would just give me time to brood, and I was more anxious to deny the coincidences Jake was seeing than I was to deny the serious mess that was my body.

  By the time I was showered and had dried my hair, Jake was dressed and in the kitchen. Clothed he might be trickier. Coffee was imminent, so I decided attack was the best form of defence. ‘Why aren’t I going to work?’

  ‘You’re ill.’

  ‘I’ve got a sore shoulder and a scraped face. I don’t work in the construction industry. We don’t need to be physically fit.’ I thought about my colleagues. And me. ‘If we did, only four books a year would get published. Worldwide.’

  He brought out the big guns. ‘You’re not going in to work because someone tried to kill you.’

  He thought that? I dropped down into a chair and stared at him. Then, ‘No. No one tried to kill me. You know it and I know it. Stop. Just stop.’

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘You’ve seen the reports, and all anyone saw was an impatient driver. Don’t make this more than it is because my getting hurt upsets you.’

  He didn’t deny that.

  ‘And definitely no one’s going to try to kill me on the way to the bus. The only people who want to kill me are my colleagues, and they’ve wanted to kill me for years.’

  Jake must have realised he was on a hiding to nothing. ‘I’ll drop you on my way in.’

  I nodded. I didn’t believe anyone had tried to kill me. I cou
ldn’t let myself think that. But I’d appreciate a lift to work even if the reasons for it were far-fetched. Whatever I’d said to Jake, my arm still hurt like stink, and the thought of a rush-hour commute was not enticing.

  At the office I stopped to chat to Bernie at reception. If I told her what had happened, she could start the story moving. That way I wouldn’t have to explain it over and over. I didn’t want to because talking hurt, the scabs pulling every time I opened my mouth. And I didn’t want to because I didn’t want to think about it.

  By the time Miranda put her head around my door, around ten, she had already been primed, but I must have looked worse than she’d expected, because instead of a quick hello, as usual, she just stood there staring.

  I held up a hand. ‘It’s all right. It looks much worse than it is.’

  ‘I hope so,’ she said bluntly. ‘Because it looks terrible.’

  I winced. I’d been hoping for ‘not great’, or, at worst, ‘fairly bad’. ‘I’ve moved a bunch of appointments. Talking is hard, so I’ve cancelled whatever I could. I’ll give you the dates when they’re rescheduled. But I’ve got to keep the two meetings for the Culture Committee panel. It’s only five days away and I’ve got at least another ten minutes to fill.’

  I spent a quarter of an hour fooling around in the kitchen, listening to various theories about Olive’s mysterious breakfast sessions, and then, unable to postpone anymore, I set off. I was meeting Neil Simonson at his office on the South Bank, before Emma came to me later that afternoon

  Neil was the director of London’s biggest literary festival. It was only recently that book events had begun to take off in London in an organised way. You’d think that if literary festivals could succeed in the wilds of Wales, the way the Hay Festival did, then they’d do even better in densely populated urban areas. Lots of people had gone broke thinking that. It turned out that people went to festivals in the country, driving for miles, because there wasn’t that much live entertainment near them. London had more live entertainment than you could shake a stick at, if stick-shaking was your hobby. So literary festivals had risen and died over the years. Only now, at arts venues that already had established audiences and great programming, were they beginning to find their way.

  Neil’s summer neighbourhood festival was in full swing as I got off the bus on the bridge and headed down the stairs to reach the centre’s offices. London was having one of its prolonged fits of good weather, showing what it could do if it really tried, all designed to taunt us the other forty-nine weeks of the year. I walked past several school groups planting herbs in wheelbarrows which, signs said, were going to decorate the pavements and terraces of the surrounding streets for the rest of the summer. Residents could ‘adopt’ a barrow, keeping it watered and weeded, and in exchange they were welcome to use the herbs. And, said the same notices, this would be accompanied by talks from gardening and cookery writers, demonstrations from television chefs and more gardeners, and a competition to find the next big cookery blogger.

  So by the time I reached Neil’s office, a combination of sun and good-neighbourliness had put me in a better mood. That only increased as Neil bounced out to meet me. We were friendly without being friends, in the way people are in small but sociable professions. I’d known him for years, liked him very much, and knew nothing about him or his life, and cared less. And I was quite sure he felt the same about me. In an industry where friendship and work are so tightly entwined, it’s very enjoyable not to have to ask after somebody’s partner, or child, or dog, or breakdown.

  I’d be willing to bet that Neil had never had the latter, though. He was like Tigger, all energy and exuberance, as though, if anyone thought to suggest it, he would happily wrangle those gardening schoolchildren singlehandedly into planting the entire riverfront. Now he pushed his glasses up his nose with a characteristic gesture, using the back of his hand, stared at me for a moment, and carefully kissed the single unscabbed bit of my face. Then he acted as though I looked the way I always did. I considered asking him to marry me on the spot, but then I remembered I was already going to marry Denise-with-the-wonderful-voice. Denise who worked with Celia. That punctured my mood of general benevolence.

  Neil said, ‘Do we need to be in my office? Or would you like to get coffee and sit by the river?’

  On a day like today, that was a rhetorical question. We collected the coffee and sat like an old married couple, staring out at the tourist boats as they went past. I was conscious of taking up his time, though, so I quickly laid out the aims of the panel, and my need to produce a twenty-minute talk that didn’t make me sound half-witted. ‘I’m shamelessly picking the brains of people who do need subsidies, and, in exchange, I’m offering to be the conduit to get across the points they want to make,’ I ended.

  He grinned. ‘If you put forward the points I want to make, I’ll even write that section for you.’

  ‘Deal.’

  He snorted a mouthful of coffee at the speed with which I’d replied. ‘Don’t you even want to know what my points are, and if you agree with them?’

  ‘Neil!’ I’d explained this. ‘I haven’t got any ideas for your points to agree with. I’m on this panel because I wasn’t paying attention at the committee meeting; I wasn’t paying attention at the meeting because I’d drawn the short straw at the office to attend in the first place. I’m sure there’s lots to be said about subsidy and publishing, but I’m not the person who knows. You are, so tell me what needs saying.’

  He didn’t hesitate twice. ‘I’ll email it over to you by tomorrow. And I owe you one for presenting our case.’

  He knew perfectly well that I owed him equally, for taking the work off my hands, so I didn’t bother to reply. Instead we sat enjoying the sun. Ten minutes later, coffee and gossip finished, he walked me back to reception, where I’d left my bag. As we got to the door, we merged with a large group that was filing into the venue’s main auditorium. Someone pulled at my elbow and I turned. Jim Reynolds.

  ‘Hey,’ he greeted me, with the enthusiasm of Stanley discovering Livingstone. ‘I didn’t realise you were coming. That’s great. I’ve got to do the presentation, but will you wait for me at the end, and then we can talk about the panel?’

  Before I could ask what presentation he was called away by a woman with a clipboard who looked as if she’d either cry or hit someone with it, or possibly both. I figured if I stuck around, I’d find out. I thanked Neil for his time, warning him that if he didn’t produce the material he’d promised I’d hunt him down and press-gang his firstborn into the navy. He seemed relatively unperturbed.

  I slipped into the back of the auditorium and looked around. Fifty or sixty people, and from their scruffy clothes and their general aura of having got lost on their way to the job centre, I made a guess that they were arts journalists. On stage, four people stood in a little huddle. One I recognised, the director of the Tate. He was standing with a young, round, anxious-looking man, as well as an older woman with silver-white hair, and very elegant silver-white trousers and a jumper to match. She stood beside – I swallowed hard – she stood beside Celia Stein, as immaculate as before, in the only pair of linen trousers I’d ever seen that had not a single crease in them. She probably willed creases out of existence.

  I decided that if I could produce mental commentary on her clothes, I couldn’t be frightened. Frightened of what? the little voice taunted. Since I had no idea, I willed myself to be calm, and looked around. Jim was standing beside the stage with three others, and I guessed that I had stumbled across the press conference for the Tate’s Stevenson show. Jim was gesturing towards a laptop, which must have controlled the AV, because at that moment the director nodded at him, and on the screen behind him appeared Poppity Princess, Stevenson’s most famous work.

  It is so ubiquitous, and used so frequently as a shorthand to say ‘pop art’, or even ‘the sixties’, that I hadn’t really looked at it in years. I did now, and was reminded involuntarily of Mr Rud
iger’s comments. With Warhol, the pictures were superficial because the artist wanted to reflect the superficiality of the world around him. Looking at Poppity Princess, I didn’t feel that. It was as clever, funny, and subversive as it had always been, but it was also – I groped, not really sure. It was interested only in itself, I decided. It was an odd way to think about an inanimate object, but it almost smirked, as if saying, Look at how lovely I am. Once I’d seen it that way, I couldn’t un-see it.

  And as I moved my eyes down from the screen as the director of the Tate began to speak, I looked again at Celia Stein. She stood very quietly at the side, doing nothing to draw attention to herself, but she said the same thing as the painting. Look at how lovely I am. Look at how much I matter.

  The director handed the microphone over to the silver-haired woman. I’d missed the introduction, but from her words she was Delia Stevenson, the artist’s widow. Her speech was bland, generic – she was so pleased to etc. etc. – so I tuned her out, and watched Celia some more. She looked very much like her mother. Both were very lovely. Both were very elegantly, but quietly dressed. But the resemblance was only skin-deep. Despite their chilly beauty, they couldn’t have been less alike. Delia was very plainly unhappy to be onstage, unhappy to be the centre of attention. She was there because her husband, and his work, in that order I thought, mattered to her, but if she could have avoided playing a public role, she would have. Celia, by contrast, had officially no public role – the presentation was over and she had not said a word – yet she had chosen to stand on the stage. Did she like being looked at, as Mr Rudiger thought her father’s work did?

  The journalists dispersed, and Jim ambled towards me. Celia and her mother had been walking to the exit, talking quietly to each other, but she followed Jim’s path, and as she looked up and saw me, she paused in mid stride. Then she continued. It was nothing, fleeting, but the odd part was, she looked frightened too.

  I had no time to think about it. Jim and I did the hellos, and then the extra yes-doesn’t-my-face-look-terrible-I-fell-off-my-bike. Then he said he was heading back to his office, so once more we walked back together.