High Dive

by Jonathan Lee

  “My name is immaterial,” she said.

  “That’s a pretty name,” said Rincewind.

  Light teased the lobby walls with slowly shifting mysteries. More clouds arrived outside. The patterns vanished. She checked the Band-Aid supply in the second drawer down in case Barbara decided to maul more guests. Barbara was on her back on the rug with her legs in the air, yellow eyes shining, a trap. Her purrs were alive with staticky crackles.

  Fran came up. “How’s your dad doing, Frey-doe?”

  “On the mend, thanks, Fran.”

  “That’s what I heard. Awesome. Give him my love, OK?”

  People wanted the bare minimum of information. Something that wouldn’t eat into their day but would nonetheless leave them feeling kind. Fran was kind, but she was also bored and busy, and in that respect she was like everyone else who wasn’t famous, and maybe even some who were.

  Freya looked down into the grainy swirls of the desk and thought about hearts. Felt the inside of her head loosening to sherbet, becoming a purring whiteness, a long bright corridor reaching out into the distance that was music-video pretty, pure. She wanted to tiptoe through it lighting candles as she went. Madonna. Borderline. What would it be like, to be that awesome?

  She blinked. One of her thumbs, today, looked slightly bigger than the other.

  The notepad was decorated with dandelions and bits of seed that were forever blowing sideways, trying to escape the page. She flicked past the message about Susie trying to get hold of her and also the message underneath about requested rearrangements to Margaret Thatcher’s room. The key thing, apparently, was to have a number of low-wattage lamps close to the desk, so that her husband, Denis, mysteriously missing a second “n,” could get some sleep while she did last-minute amendments to her speech. Dad thought this was a perfect detail: that someone would plan to do last-minute amendments.

  She’d need to get out of here in the next few weeks. More than enough temporary staff to take her place. Even if it wasn’t Spain. Even it was just, like, Bognor. Her father said that meeting Margaret Thatcher would amount to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but what actually was the point in doing something you’d never do again? It sounded very much like what her mother called Novelty Value.

  Surfer John sidled up to the desk, looking unusually shifty. Could Freya, um, by any chance, um, cover his shift this afternoon? 4 p.m. behind the bar. You know I’m good for it. Didn’t I repay your shift the other day?

  “I’m visiting my dad again.”

  “Oh. Right.” Surfer John rearranged his handsome hair and allowed a moment to pass. “And that would be a long visit, would it?”

  She sighed. “You would owe me, John.”

  “I love you!”

  “Four until eight, right? You’d owe me.”

  “You’re the best. I’m going to…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Something nice. I’m going to buy you—”

  “A car? A castle?”

  “A fancy dinner,” John said.

  She laughed.

  “No, I am. I’ve got to grab a lift to Camber Sands, and then I’ll book you up.”

  With this mysterious promise, John left. A summer-staff kid came to the desk. He leaned on the oak all casual and said, “Hi, Freya, how’s your dad?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Shit! Really?”

  “No,” she said, and saw the excitement drain from his face.

  —

  On her break she took a walk and got annoyed. She was annoyed with herself for accepting the bar shift instead of visiting her father. She was annoyed that she had preferred the idea of the bar to the reality of the hospital. She was annoyed with the Royal Pavilion for looking too much like pictures of the Taj Mahal. She was annoyed with the predictably bright fabrics in the bohemian shops on North Laine. She was annoyed with the dismal iron canopy of the station, the fiddly white arches over side streets, the small sleepy bandstands, the half-melted look of the wavy seafront railings. She was annoyed by Surfer John and she was annoyed, most of all, by the Grand. The whole thing looked absurdly self-indulgent. The painstaking brickwork. The well-spaced windows. The cast-iron twirly bits on balconies. The flouncy sections of supporting white stone. Squint and they revealed their silly floral patterns, silly leaf patterns, silly seashell patterns. The whole facade seemed just that: a facade. It was the over-engineered, dramatic film-set frontage for 201 absurdly overpriced rooms in which the only concession to imagination was, what, the slightly varying configuration of the furniture? The building had the quaint lacy look of her grandma’s flat in Hove. Did her grandma even know that Moose was ill? She charged through the revolving door and said hello to no one.

  From a shelf under the bar she took a segment of lime and dropped it in her drink. Acid mood. Swirling citrus thoughts. The smell of nicotine competed in the air around her with the sharp vinegary scent of brown sauce squeezed into ramekins. Narrowing her eyes into a kind of safari squint, thinking that she’d much rather be at home watching David Attenborough tapes, she studied the half-dozen drinkers arranged around her. A few of the beige-jacket crowd sitting at a low table, playing bridge and making jokes about their wives. Also a local writer who liked to drink real ale while making notes in his bloodred notebook. (“Waves are amazing” was the only sentence Freya had seen.) And closer, sitting at the bar, a crossword laid out between his arms, was an eccentric guy everyone called the Captain. “The Captain of what?” Freya occasionally asked, but no one seemed to know. Her attempts to get some sense out of the Captain himself on this simple but apparently intimate issue had, as yet, yielded no success. He looked like the love child of badgers. White whiskery sideburns. Liver spots on his skinny cheeks. She stared now into the high frizz of his hair, bluish and electric, separate threads of it startled by light. His age was somewhere north of seventy. The high numbers merged into one another, top floors of a skyscraper, distant.

  The one undisputed thing about the Captain was his natural habitat: Brighton’s charity shops and second-hand stores, places where he could indulge his remarkable need to rummage. The Captain had an insatiable appetite for memorabilia. The very best of his discoveries found their way into a small enterprise three streets back from the beach: a “cultural institution” he called the Museum of Lost Content. To most, the museum—of which the Captain was Founder, Acquisitions Manager, Curator and the sole member of staff—was an attic flat filled with junk. But to Freya sometimes it seemed a place of liberating disarray. When the weather was bad she went there on her lunch breaks. The Captain never charged her an entry fee. He never seemed to charge anyone an entry fee. His ability to stay financially afloat was one of several mysteries that orbited his person.

  “The eighth wonder of the world,” he was saying now. The tatty leather elbow patches on his red jacket squeaked against the bar as he shuffled on his stool. Freya assumed he was talking about his museum, or reciting a crossword clue, but she was wrong. He was referring to Marina. She entered the bar area pink-cheeked, pneumatic, holding a dusty lidless plastic box topped with crayons and Lego. The card players at the table to the left became tremulous of eyebrow and low of voice. The Captain cracked his fingers. A silver pendant bobbed helplessly on the swell of her breasts. An unusually low-cut little number. Lately Freya had felt herself slipping into a rivalry of delicate dimensions.

  “Freya, darling, do you mind if I leave this box behind the bar?”

  She shrugged. “We’ve got kids staying?”

  “No, it’s my little nephew. My sister is ill. I’ve got him with me later today.”

  “I didn’t realise you had a sister.”

  “Seven,” Marina admitted.

  “You’ve got seven sisters?”

  “Yes. And one brother. But he adds nothing.”

  “Zone Three,” the Captain said, tapping his knuckles three times on the bar.

  “I’m sorry?” Marina said.

  “Seven Sisters. Between Finsbury Park
and Tottenham Hale, in Zone Three, if I’m not mistaken. London Underground. Also a term to describe a loosely linked collective of Stalinist skyscrapers in Moscow. Yes, an unusual combination of Russian baroque and Gothic. Saw a couple of them after the war.”

  Marina, rarely flustered, looked flustered. It was interesting to observe. She blinked and gave the Captain a quick strategic smile. “See you soon!” she sang.

  “When you say ‘during the war,’ ” Freya said, “which war was that, Captain?”

  The Captain coughed.

  She looked at the Walkers Crisps order form in front of her. A little job left by John. How was she supposed to know what flavour crisps Conservatives preferred? In his Memos With The Bad Puns In The First Paragraph, the GM kept telling everyone to “bolster supplies” and be “ready for anything.” He made it sound like they were going to war. It was the most boring war she’d ever been involved with.

  She was hungry. The Captain reached into a jacket pocket. He pulled out a yo-yo and a curled Post-it note. The Captain’s pockets were renowned throughout Brighton as sinkholes of buried treasure and sedimented knowledge. In pub quizzes at the Cricketers he was on occasion asked to leave his jacket behind the bar. There was a fear that the weight of encyclopedic wisdom lurking in its various compartments might tempt him to cheat (or, as the Captain himself put it, fleece, hose, bilk, diddle, rook, gyp, finagle, cozen, swindle, hornswoggle, flimflam). He pressed the Post-it note onto a London Pride beer mat, wrote something on it with a biro borrowed from Freya, and then put the note and the biro in his pocket.

  “Um, I kind of need that pen?”

  He pushed the yo-yo in her direction. “Swapsie?”

  Why not. This was the new Freya. Yo-yoing. Impulsive. Soon-to-get-a-cool-boyfriend-whose-skin-wasn’t-scorched-by-Clearasil. She took the yellow yo-yo and tucked her middle finger into the loop of string. With a backwards flick of her hand she sent it down towards the ground. Instead of whirring back up the thing left its string, hit the floor with a clack, and rolled away.

  “The Games section of my museum is getting unwieldy,” the Captain explained.

  She’d liked Blatchington Mill. She had been OK at all the sports. The school had a reputation for being rough, but that reputation was spread by people who unfairly compared it to St. Catherine’s. St. Catherine’s was, as everyone knew, the kind of top-notch penitentiary where students took home the BBC Songs of Praise Choir of the Year trophy three years running. She made herself another lime and soda and gave the Captain another bowl of nuts. When the nuts were finished the Captain looked up.

  “Are you going to come by tomorrow, Freya? To the museum?” He appeared to have retrieved the yo-yo from the floor. With surprisingly nimble fingers he was reattaching it to the string.

  Maybe, she told him. It was a genuine maybe. There had been a time when she’d wondered if he might be a bit creepy, but that had given way to a sense that he was one of the more interesting people she knew. She suggested two thirty.

  “Too bad,” the Captain said. “Two fifteen tomorrow I plan to be at St. Paul’s. A man without a schedule may as well be dead.”

  “I didn’t know you were religious.”

  “I am interested in fictions of all sorts,” he said. “Novels. Poems. Stories. Tales politicians tell. I’ve never found much that’s fruitful in straight-faced facts. I don’t enjoy them, you know? Can’t make myself believe in them. Second-hand is what they are, they lack the raw stuff of absurdity, and people make the mistake of trying to be all-serious, as if life isn’t funny, or all-funny as if life isn’t serious. You can only get at the world if you do both. Life’s a tune that accommodates a great many tones. Of course”—he yawned—“most people are desperate bores. Lucian Freud once said to me—I know him a little, not to name-drop, and he once said to me this—he said, ‘Captain, sometimes painting is like one of those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting the duck to one side and only using the skin.’ ” The Captain slapped the bar and laughed. “Good old Lucy! Terrible hunger for flesh, but…Life’s the things people keep, the things they throw away. Here, good as new. I’ve lost my train of thought.”

  She took the yo-yo. “Who’s Lucian Freud?”

  “Prolific is what he is. You’re probably one of his love children.”

  “If he’s got money, that could be useful.”

  “I’ll put in a good word,” the Captain said. “If you’re not going to galleries, keep up with your reading. I’ve been ploughing through some paraphernalia by this chap Joseph Mitchell. Know him? Bernard MacLaverty also. Not a better writer alive. If you read things, you have views on things. You never want to become one of those people who believe in nothing. It leads to the itsy-bitsy misery. A time to dance. I’m the second-greatest authority in the world today on the language of the seagull.”

  She asked him if he wanted another drink. She thought it might bring some colour to the unwhiskered portions of his cheeks. Her idea of old people was that they should look a bit autumnal. Did the Captain ever eat a home-cooked meal? Did he ever sleep in a proper bed? Did he really know Lucian whatsit? She didn’t know; she had no idea. More mysteries, more hidden habits. More things pocketed within his private self.

  He said no to another drink. “I’ll lose my senses,” he explained. As he did so, a shape emerged in the lobby. The shape resolved itself into Roy Walsh.

  She swallowed and tried to write a quick script in her head. Witty things to say. Interesting things. Where were they? He saw her and waved. Came towards the bar. “Nice to see you again,” he said.

  “I thought you were…”

  “Yeah. Had to extend my stay.”

  She asked him if he was staying because of work.

  He shrugged and said, “What isn’t?”

  “Is your friend still with you?”

  “Friend?”

  “The guy on the stairs. He seemed—”

  A smile. “Colleague. He had to leave, unfortunately.”

  “That’s a shame,” she said. “I mean…” she said, and gave up.

  The Captain studied the wall. The card players stared at their cards.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Captain, this is…well, he’s—”

  “Hi,” Roy said, shaking the Captain’s hand.

  Time got fat on silence. The Captain leapt to his feet with unlikely speed. He offered Freya a pound coin. He always offered a pound coin. It was his best and only offer. According to the Captain, if you presented a pound coin in exchange for food and beverages and any other services rendered, it was a civil matter. Theft and a whole gambit of other criminal offences only came into play if you walked off without paying anything at all.

  As the Captain’s red jacket receded, Freya’s eyes moved to a chunk of blue plastic in Roy Walsh’s hands. “What’s that?” she said.

  “This?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Satellite pager. A beeper thing. If someone wants to contact me about a job, they call a computer, then the computer notifies a satellite, then it bounces back or something like that and—who knows—this thing, it beeps.” He smiled again.

  “Intelligence,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Artificial intelligence. All that stuff. I read an article about it.”

  He rubbed his eyes. There were new dark arcs underneath. “I guess it’s not quite that,” he said, “but yeah. Clever things.”

  Freya looked at him and looked at the pager. He knew stuff, owned stuff, had a proper life. Dr. Haswell and Mr. Marshall could fix hearts—that was how their adulthood was defined—and it seemed to her that Roy was also, probably, in the business of improving others.

  “What is it you do again?”

  “Me? Electrician.”

  Well, that made sense. Technical but practical. Everyone needed lights and…toasters. People needed toasters. She tried to hide her disappointment.

  “What’s your boss like?” she said.
<
br />   “My boss? I guess you’d say I’m the boss, probably.”

  “Oh, right. So would you say you sort of own a…?”

  “Yeah, a small business, exactly. This thing’s useful. The office lets me know about jobs when I’m on the move.”

  “You’re a businessman, then.”

  “In a way.”

  “And your friend…”

  “Colleague.”

  “He left because—”

  “He had to go back to his other half.”

  “His other half?”

  “Yeah. She wears the trousers. He’s very under the thumb.”

  She shook her head.

  “You don’t know that phrase?”

  There were these weird embarrassing holes in the things she knew, areas to patch over or fill in, and you never could guess when you’d fall into one.

  “Siamise cat girl,” he said.

  She shook her head again.

  “Rolling Stones.”

  “Ah.”

  “Under the thumb just means…well, what does it mean? Someone else controls you. I can’t imagine that happening with you.”

  The compliment was only small, if in fact that’s what it was, and she tried to control the heat in her cheeks. If Roy’s friend was in a relationship with a woman who wore the trousers, then maybe both Roy and the male friend really were bisexual instead of homosexual, or maybe—this was a simpler, sturdier theory, and yet it required more erasure of assumptions—she’d misread every moment to date, and both men were only interested in women, in which case—

  “I don’t suppose you know a gym round here?”

  “We don’t have an arrangement. But there are a couple of places you could try for a one- or two-day pass. I could write them down?”

  “That’s kind. That’d be great.”

  “I suppose you exercise quite a bit, do you?”

  “I do when I can,” he said. “Used to do more. I like to run. Walk my dogs. You’re a swimmer, right?”

  “How did you know?”