‘Utterly vile,’ said Omar. He picked up the cordless. ‘Now let’s see just how much Madame Frump is prepared to pay for her ashram-cum-lesbian-fuckpad.’
3
The third house they found was on a website that specialised in rural properties in southwest France. They could buy it outright with the money from the sale, and still have enough left over to live on for two years, maybe even three. The house had already been restored, at least in part, and had two bedrooms, which would be more than enough for them both, as things stood. They’d be disappearing, after all. Guests meant friends, and friends played no part in the master plan, if that’s what it was. Sometimes the whole business felt like a stroke of genius to Gordon; at other times, more often, it felt like the most stupid thing he had ever thought of doing. Except that he hadn’t thought of it: Omar had. If there had been time, and opportunity, to pull out, he told himself he would have pulled out. But Omar was behind him, holding his shoulders in place. Ciccio and various relatives of Ciccio’s had flanked him and were covering all lateral means of escape. And there, in front of him, like a Prada-clad Valkyrie, was rosary-wielding Angela Frump, her purse and pockets bulging with cash that would soon be theirs. Cash that, in Gordon’s imagination, had the only way out written across each note of it in indelible ink. Every so often, Gordon would find objections – Angela would recognise Ciccio as the man in the shop, the fake notaio would fuck it all up and spell something wrong, the cheque she’d pay him with would bounce and Ciccio would have them both killed by one of his lowlife relatives – and Omar would immediately have the answer, or would pretend to have it, and Gordon would resist for a moment, and then capitulate. Nothing, he told himself, could go wrong.
The fact was that Gordon could no longer tell truth from fiction. He’d read the account of the accident in the local paper. Mysterious fatality. Dutch resident, cameraman, new to the area. There was no photograph of Cees – he hated having his photograph taken – but, to make up for this, the paper had published one of the wreckage. The final paragraph mentioned the hypothesis of the phantom driver, although it didn’t use the word phantom. Gordon supplied that as he read the piece, over and over again, as if there was something he had missed.
Jenny called them before he’d had a chance to call her. She was crying. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. His parents had told her and then she’d googled for more information and found the article and put it through an automatic translator. ‘Was he with a prostitute?’ she said. ‘Is that what they mean in that last bit? The bit about the unknown partner? I can’t believe he had a new girlfriend, not in the state he was in.’
‘No,’ said Gordon. ‘They do think there might have been someone else in the car, but the police haven’t confirmed it. That’s just the journalist having a guess.’
‘You didn’t go and see him after I spoke to you, did you?’ He couldn’t tell whether her tone was accusing or seeking consolation. He paused.
‘No,’ he said finally. ‘We went to the house, but he wasn’t there.’ Which was the truth, in part at least.
‘He wrote to me, after we last spoke. You know, that time he went on about the pilot? I told you what he said, right?’
‘Yes,’ said Gordon. ‘I remember.’
‘He said he’d been conned. I don’t think I should be telling you this, but, fuck it, Gordon, he’s dead.’ Her voice broke. He could hear her sobbing and scrabbling for something to blow her nose on. He was tempted to put the phone down, but she’d started again before he had made up his mind. ‘He said he’d been conned. He didn’t say it was you two. He said the brothers knew something, that’s why one of them didn’t want to sell and the others did. Flea told him there was a story about the house, but he didn’t listen because Flea’s English was so bad, it didn’t make sense. He didn’t blame you,’ she added, hurriedly. Gordon wanted to ask if ‘you’ included Omar, but, more than that, wanted not to hear that it did; wanted to be the only one to be exonerated. She went on: ‘He said the house had four ways in but no way out.’ She paused. ‘You don’t know what he meant, do you?’
‘I wish I did,’ said Gordon.
‘He said the only person who could help him was Jack Squat.’
‘He what?’
‘It just means nothing, doesn’t it? Jack squat means nothing. But he made it sound like he was a person. I thought he was talking about this person he kept calling the pilot. You don’t think there really was someone there pretending to be the pilot, do you? Perhaps that’s who it was in the car with him.’ She sniffed. She sounded excited, as though something had occurred to her. ‘Maybe it was someone who was trying to rip him off, someone he’d met there. I hated that house from the start.’
‘What did he say about Flea?’
‘What I said. Something about a story.’ She sniffed again. ‘You don’t think it was Flea, do you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think there was anyone there with him. Look, Jenny, I have to go.’
‘You’ll tell me if you find out anything, won’t you?’ she said.
‘Of course I will.’
They went to see the house in France as soon as the date for the sale had been arranged. They had told Angela she would need to pay some money up front, to ensure that the sellers didn’t pull out. This type of deposit was known in Italy as a compromise, he told her. A compromesso. Gordon had thought this was an unnecessary risk, but Omar insisted that every normal step be taken. ‘You never know who she might have talked to,’ he said. She had flown to Rome, signed the compromesso Omar had copied from one he had found on the net, adapted and printed out, and pushed a wad of cash across the table. Used notes, with an elastic band around them. ‘Untraceable,’ she said, and winked. She’d taken advantage of the visit to light some candles, she told them, and visit the Holy Stairs at St John Lateran. Omar asked her if she’d climbed them on her knees and she’d looked at him as if he’d farted. ‘With my back?’ she said eventually, although it didn’t seem to be giving her any more trouble. Her personal chiropractor had laid his expensive hands on her, she told them. She was wearing enormous sunglasses, Dolce & Gabbana, which Gordon found unnerving. He wanted to see the eyes of the person he was cheating, to see if they had any notion of what was being done to them. He wanted the operation to be painless, he supposed, and for him to be sure of that.
When they had finished drinking double espressos and grappas, she got up and left them to pay the bill, which seemed only fair. They heard her talking to someone on her mobile from outside the restaurant, telling whomever it was that she would just love the place, and that she had to make time before her next film, and that the food was fabulous, she’d adore it, although Angela had barely eaten a breadstick in the time they’d spent together. Gordon was struck by her incongruous bulk as she waved her arms around her head to discourage a couple of insistent flies. He was glad when she had been driven off, in a taxi, to the airport.
The following day they caught the shuttle bus to the other, low-cost, airport and flew, via Paris, to Béziers.
The house was fine. It was just outside a small town, a few miles from the sea, the land low all round it, vineyards. Gordon wanted to breathe, he said; he didn’t want mountains, he wanted sky and air. He didn’t want to feel sealed off, walled in. They could buy it and make new lives for themselves, thought Gordon. New names, new friends. New lives, he repeated to himself, like a mantra, as they walked round the empty rooms, then out into the garden. It took no time. The house was small, the garden only slightly larger. There was a honeysuckle-covered shed they could use for bicycles, a vegetable patch, two apple trees, a bricked-up well. Omar would have looked at other houses, but Gordon insisted there was no need, and Omar, to Gordon’s relieved surprise, deferred to him. They left a small deposit, as Angela had done with them. They were compromised, it occurred to Gordon, as she was. They spent the night in Paris, in a hotel they would normally have thought too expensive, with the towers of Notre Dame visible from the bedro
om window and a canopied four-poster bed, inside which they made love for the first time in months. Everything will be all right, thought Gordon, stroking Omar’s hair from his forehead as he slept, his touch as light as he could make it so as not to wake the other man. Everything will be all right. This will be a new start.
Flying back the next morning, Gordon asked Omar, with a smile, what proof they had that their estate agent hadn’t scammed them. Omar looked shocked.
‘You have to trust people,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how you’d live otherwise.’
Gordon had taken his hand and squeezed it. ‘You’re right,’ he said.
The sale to Angela went through so smoothly Gordon wondered later if he had dreamt it. There had been one anxious moment the previous day when Angela handed Gordon an envelope after they had eaten dinner, or after she had watched them eat. ‘Thank you,’ she said, lighting a cigarette. Her ashtray was overflowing, her glass was empty but soon to be refilled. ‘This is a little extra for you two.’ Gordon looked inside and saw that it contained at least half a dozen five-hundred-euro banknotes. He was unexpectedly overwhelmed by guilt. He was about to give it back to her, to say that they would waive their fee, that she was a friend, to babble whatever came into his head to expunge this awful moment, but Omar had already reached over to take the envelope and was counting the notes out on the table. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without you guys,’ she said. ‘We were happy to be of use,’ said Omar, and Gordon wondered how often Omar had lied to him with that same insouciance. They’d had a row as soon as she was out of earshot, Omar accusing Gordon of almost having given the game away, Gordon reacting badly to this because, of course, Omar was right. He had been stupid. He didn’t sleep that night, and left the business of the actual sale to Omar, who was there in his role as official interpreter. Gordon sat at the back of the room, his hands in his lap, watching the two aged relatives Ciccio had recruited mutter to each other until the notary told them to behave themselves. Ciccio wasn’t there. Angela had no idea the dealer was involved in any way, other than being the guardian of the key, now relinquished and in the new owner’s purse. After the sale had taken place, and sheets of legal foolscap had been printed, folded and signed by Angela and the two old women, the ill-assorted bunch of them – sellers and purchaser, interpreter and moral support, as Angela referred once, with the most painful irony, to Gordon – stood in a huddle outside the apartment block until it began to spot with rain, at which point they all shook hands and walked away, Angela towards the car she had hired, with driver, to take her back to the airport; this extravagance eased Gordon’s conscience a little, as did the fact she showed no interest in seeing once again the house she’d just bought. They kissed her on both cheeks, she pressed a plastic rosary into both their hands, they waved goodbye. Collecting the substantially larger amount of cash from Ciccio that evening had felt like an anticlimax.
Three days later, Gordon and Omar were in France. The house they had chosen would be theirs the following week. They had rented a flat in Béziers for ten days, to tide them over. They had business to sort out, accounts to open, SIM cards to buy. Omar had set up a new website to tout for work, using his favourite uncle’s name. They’d talked for long days about changing their identities; Ciccio had offered to find them counterfeit passports; Omar had even investigated the underbelly of the net and emerged, shaken but unscathed. In the end, they’d decided Angela would be too scared of the tax authorities in Italy and the States to look for them, assuming she discovered that she had been cheated. There was always the chance, after all, that the real owners – sisters in their separate continents, at opposite ends of the world – would never find out, or not find out for years, by which time Angela might have been admitted to some more luxurious convent, where potatoes were cut by other hands, or died. Because, yes, thought Gordon, there was always that. One day, she would be dead. Still, he would wonder: Had they forgotten something obvious? Had they been stupid? Had they done wrong? He asked himself these questions, and others, a dozen times a day, but then he would break off the end of his baguette and spread it with butter studded with crystals of sea salt and a nonpareil cherry jam he had bought in a local shop. He would listen to people speaking French around him, a language in which he was more fluent than Omar, and brush the thought aside. He felt happier than he had done for years. Omar would learn to like it too. For the first time since they had met, Gordon felt that he was in control of his life, of both their lives even. Of their life together.
They spent the first days in their new house cleaning and painting in a sort of honeymoon, the rooms transforming themselves under their hands into bright new life-boxes, waiting to be filled. They hired a van and drove to the Montpellier IKEA, bought furniture for the first time in their eleven years of being together; every house before this one had been rented. Omar watched Gordon compare prices, bounce on armchairs, weigh kitchen knives in the palm of his hand, silent, as though he were standing behind a pane of glass. At the till, with their cart stacked high, Gordon waited for Omar to pay, still not used to having money himself. Omar shook his head. ‘It’s your stuff,’ he said, in a not particularly friendly way. ‘You chose it.’
That was the start of a row that modulated into silence as they drove the van back to the house and that then blew over, miraculously, while they assembled a kitchen table and a sideboard from flat-packs and tested the fold-out slatted chairs for size and height and weight-bearing strength. They jostled playfully, teasingly, against each other as Omar stirred the pasta sauce and Gordon laid the table with brand-new plates and glasses, and opened a bottle. After eating, they made love for the first time in the house, clumsily at first, as though they could barely remember how to do it, and then, with a surge of passion, on the rapidly cleared table. At one point, Gordon thought it might break beneath them and he began to giggle. Omar rolled off him, landing on the floor. ‘Christ,’ he said, rubbing his bare hip, ‘that hurt. We need a rug if we’re going to do this sort of thing in here.’ But he was laughing too. Gordon tried to help him to his feet, stumbling as his ankles were caught in a tangle of jeans and pants. ‘This never happened to Jack Nicholson,’ said Omar.
‘And I would be Jessica Lange, I suppose,’ said Gordon.
‘Well, yes,’ said Omar. ‘Obviously.’ Which made them laugh again.
They were in their nearest town the following afternoon, shopping for food for that evening, when they heard a piercing yap come from a closed cardboard box outside a shop. The shop sold pet food and, perched on branches in the large glass tank in the window, various types of snake and lizard. They looked at each other and then towards the box at their feet, which moved a little. The yapping continued. Before they had time to decide what to do a woman came out of the shop and lifted the flaps of the box. A small brown dog, short-haired, no more than a puppy, leapt at the side, struggling to get out, its paws scraping the edge. She scooped it up and held it out to Omar with a persuasive smile. Omar stepped back, waving his hands in horrified refusal, but Gordon, reaching across him, took the puppy and lifted its muzzle to his face. The puppy licked his nose, scrabbling against the hand that held him to get closer, wriggling for greater purchase. Gordon pursed his lips into a kiss for the eager wet tongue. The woman said, ‘Voilà!’
‘Don’t even think about it,’ said Omar.
But Gordon was beyond thought. The final touch, he said to himself. The final, fatal touch.
‘Dogs are the new children,’ he said to Omar. ‘Everyone says so. You must have seen the T-shirts.’ The woman smiled, curling the fingers of one hand around those of the other, like links in a chain. ‘Vous êtes anglais,’ she said, with deep satisfaction. Omar looked at Gordon, as if to say, You got us into this, now you get us out. That’s just what I intend to do, thought Gordon. When he reached round with his free hand for a wallet, the woman tut-tutted and went back into the shop.
They spent the rest of the afternoon and evening deciding how their lives shoul
d accommodate the new arrival. Omar thawed slowly, sulking on the drive home, then warmed to the idea of their sharing the house with a mongrel puppy when it was clear that Gordon wasn’t going to change his mind. They called her, after much thought, and too much wine, Lolita. They chose a bowl for her water, and another bowl for the chicken they had boiled and chopped into bite-sized pieces. When she started to pee they picked her up and stood her on the vastness of an open copy of Libération. She would learn, they told each other. Tomorrow, they would buy puppy food, and a collar, and start her training. They sat together and watched Lolita explore the kitchen, which all at once seemed immense. She wasn’t much larger than their cupped hands; to judge from her small neat paws she would never be a big dog. Gordon was worried they might lose her or, even worse, tread on her by mistake. She was too young to be without her mother, surely, but nothing could be done about that now. She was theirs, as they were hers. They took her into the garden and watched her stumble, with inexplicable determination, towards the well at the far end. At the slightest irregularity in the earth, she fell back, landing on her rump, with a squeak of surprise. Eventually, she squatted and produced a tiny, perfect stool. When they went upstairs to sleep and she struggled to climb the bottom step, Gordon went back down and carried her with him. She had to be lifted onto the bed. Almost at once, her head on the pillow next to Gordon’s, she was asleep.
Gordon was woken that night by voices, or that was what he thought. He lay on the mattress they had bought two days before, straining his senses to work out where he was. There was a thin vertical bar of light from the street outside where the shutters didn’t quite close but, otherwise, total darkness. Silence, apart from his own breathing and Omar’s, heavy, regular, beside him, and then, in counterpoint, the lighter breathing of Lolita, which startled him until he remembered what they’d done. There were three of them now, he realised, with a rush of anxiety and joy, in a life that had been made for two, a life he had thought complete. Her fur was soft and warm against his shoulder. For a moment he wondered what had woken him. But then there were the voices, and what they might have said. He held his own breath to listen. He tried to recall what he’d heard, and where it had come from, reaching out to where Omar lay. The weather was warm already; they were sleeping beneath a duvet cover without the duvet. He touched his lover’s skin and Omar grunted and slightly lifted what must have been his shoulder, as if Gordon’s hand were a fly or some other small irritation, easily dislodged. Then Omar made a noise that sounded like a word, but was unidentifiable, and Gordon recognised it as the voice he’d heard before, or one of them. Omar had been talking in his sleep. He lay there, not breathing, waiting for Omar to speak again. His eyes had begun to see, although there was nothing, really, to be seen. The room was four bare walls, a window, a door, a naked bulb dangling from the centre of the ceiling, the light switch by the door. Omar mumbled something else. Lolita shifted in her sleep. ‘I’m here,’ said Gordon in a low voice, half hoping that Omar would wake. Omar stirred, then started to moan, quietly at first, soon with increasing anguish. He turned towards Gordon as Gordon turned towards him. They held each other and Gordon wasn’t sure if Omar was awake or not until he heard him say that he was sorry. ‘There’s no need for you to be sorry,’ he whispered. Omar struggled to free himself from Gordon’s embrace. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, his voice breaking. Gordon fumbled for his cell phone, the nearest thing he had to a light, waking Lolita, and pressed it. Lolita growled, a puppy’s high-pitched growl. Omar’s eyes were closed. His face, briefly visible, was damp with tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, a third time. ‘Please, let me out.’ Dropping the phone, Gordon pulled him back into the embrace, not speaking, holding Omar as tightly as he could, rocking him backwards and forwards until he was quiet, Lolita warm and soft against his back.
Two Dark Tales Page 6