by Jonathan Lee
“John, my messages don’t seem to be getting through.”
“They’re being passed.”
“Where to?”
“The paves.”
“What?”
“The pavements.”
“What?”
“Yeah.”
He had the feeling John had started smoking the green stuff again. “If my messages to him are getting through, and he’s not calling back—”
“Don’t fret yourself, Danny. Y’know Dawson. He drops out of the old equation now and again. It’s the wee who-ha.”
“Are you stoned, John?”
“Not yet, but it’s a fine plan.”
“I need protection, John. I need to speak to Dawson. I need a couple of D-squad guys in my house. I’ve probably got a few days, only, before petrol comes through my letter box. Do you understand?”
John sighed down the line. “Plenty safe places we got, Dan. I think Seán made it clear, no? Even showed you some places. Get you and your mammy in there in a flash.”
“Seán’s an arsehole.”
“Not a big one, though.”
“How big an arsehole do you need to be?”
“It’s an inverse proportion type-a thing,” John said. “Bigger the arsehole, higher the rank. Squeeze a banana up that hole of yours? Middle-ranking. A melon? Top of the tree! But we’ve probably said enough, if you’re on the home phone. My point being, Seán’ll sort you. Seán’s nice enough.”
“He’s not. He’s not nearly.”
“Relativity,” John said, and hummed a tune. “Relativity, relatives, relative.”
“My mother won’t leave and she won’t let me sell.”
“She’s got a number of nimble moves, eh? Mothers. I know your pain. One of those problems a lot of people have got. But strictly—”
“John, you owe me this.”
Five pounds of Semtex, three detonators wrapped in toilet paper, five battery packs fitted with tilt switchers and timers: this was what John owed him.
“Dan. Listen, Dan. Not to offend a rising star such as yourself, but dealing with family problems, it’s not really my area of the manual, y’know?”
Dan let silence soak down the line. He hung up. There was a world of bottled energy in his arm. Thirst dragged at his throat. In the kitchen he poured himself a pint of water. Outside in the street he dropped the glass; it smashed. Dawson. Knotweed. Silence. Armies. Her name was Freya but it didn’t do to remember names. Names were as bad as faces. Why was nobody answering him? A hero’s welcome was what he’d been promised. Instead a door seemed to have slammed.
With the outsole of his shoe he ushered broken glass into the gutter. Gravel sitting in stony reserve groaned as it went the same way. He saw that all four tyres on his van were still slashed. He’d half believed they would mend themselves overnight. He placed enormous faith in the miracle of materials, in what materials could make and do each day, but rubber wasn’t skin, it would never heal itself, and wishful thinking was the worst kind of thought.
2
Summer was bedding down into autumn. Days had begun to pass with surprising speed. She wondered if she was the only person in the world who preferred trees with no leaves. The branches looked dark and dramatic. Knots and crags were revealed. John’s dad was a botanist so John knew some species’ names. He introduced her to a few on a walk through Stanmer Park. Crab apple, common ash. She liked being able to name them.
Her father was back home now. He was spending two or three hours in the hotel each day and going to bed by eight o’clock each night. Eight was a child’s bedtime but he was better, less pale. Standing up straight and walking without wincing. Fine. He was fine. He was counting down the days to Mrs. Thatcher’s arrival. Less than five days! Less than three days. Staring out of windows seemed to be a new and involved hobby of his.
She yawned and wondered if John was her boyfriend. There seemed to be movement on the matter. She had bought him a new white T-shirt which bore eight words in raised grey lettering: I AM THE WRETCH THE SONG REFERS TO. She was pouring a lot of imagination into the minor nightly lies she told Moose to account for her whereabouts. He had no great problem with staff romances, but she was pretty sure he’d disapprove of one involving her. Exhaustion, though. Complacency. Her string of alibis was losing the taut quality of truth. Maybe she’d just tell him, get it over with. Maybe she’d just say, “Get over it, Dad.” A girl like Sarah made no effort to conceal this stuff: I am a woman; I am a sexual being; I suck cock. The thought of your dad knowing this, though. On balance she’d rather die in a pit of irate snakes. Plus she’d not yet sucked John’s cock, or any other cocks. Putting a penis in her mouth was on her to-do list, definitely, but it was positioned somewhere between Visit Newcastle and Try the Steak Tartare.
She was doing a few double shifts, saving money and getting the Grand ready, searching for a succinct explanation for why she felt a happiness now. This thing with John was not love, it could not be love, but it was something, and that was the beauty of it. She still held a desire to travel, but she held that desire more casually now. Why not stay based in Brighton awhile? Going to new cafés and bars. Producing notes on the proper set-up of rooms. The work wasn’t interesting but there were small satisfactions in getting it done. Possibly anything could become an art form if you took the time to do it right.
At home, in the early evenings, before slipping out to meet John, she cooked risottos or soups for her dad, pouring leftovers into old Hellmann’s jars. The jars had half-peeled labels (“Hell”; “man”; “llma”) and she didn’t respond to Susie’s notes. Seeing Susie again would remind her how weak she’d been. Why had she agreed to let that blond boy into the hotel? The occasional first-thing-in-the-morning thought: got to find a way out of that problem. Too much to do, though. The last of Susie’s messages had said: “Sebastian will be by the cook’s entrance 10 p.m. Friday SHARP.” She imagined Sebastian looking over Susie’s shoulder as this was written, twanging his green braces with a concentrated calm, insisting on the capital letters without pausing to think that they would make the word look blunt.
Swimming again. She and John went to the pool together in the early mornings. He had a Volkswagen of which he was disproportionately proud. “74 Scirocco” apparently. The roof rack was decked out with a complicated array of belts and ropes. The car was destined to become a modern classic. She asked him if the definition of a modern classic was a vehicle that started three times out of ten. He told her this issue was unrelated. He owned the car and his surfboard and seemingly nothing else. He still lived with his parents. They had money. They resented having paid for his fine-art foundation course. She had seen some of his work now and could understand, in part, their resentment. None of it was fine and a lot of it didn’t seem like art. An apple that resembled a pear was the best of his paintings. The apple-pear (“papple” he’d said) appeared at breast height on an Asian body. It half concealed a nipple. The other boob was obscured by a doughnut. But he called it art, and that was probably what mattered, and despite what his parents seemed to think, John wasn’t lazy at all. He did more shifts at the hotel than anyone else. He threw himself into cold water. His readiness to exercise and to sit in easy silence afterwards were two of the things she liked about him.
It felt good to be swimming so regularly. She was reclaiming some lost part of herself. It was like finding money in an old pair of jeans. It was like discovering the jeans were actually pretty excellent. It was surprising how much fun swimming could be when there was no one shouting at you to go faster, no one telling you to tighten your technique, just the warm smooth joy of moving from wall to wall.
Long-axis drills, girls!
Streamline, Finch, S-T-R-E-A-M-L-I-N-E.
Focus on the blast-off! Dolphin kicks! Doll, phin, kicks!
A one-metre breakout? I’ve seen ping-pong balls stay under longer.
Which never made any sense, actually, because why would you bring a ping-pong ball into a pool?
John treated Freya like she was a swimming genius. This she also liked. He asked for advice despite his own proficiency in the pool. She could see why people retreated so deep into relationships, forgetting to bother much with friends. There was a kind of creative pressure that came with shutting other people out, even if you weren’t part of a perfect match. You could begin to enjoy a new sense of privacy. Watching TV with John. Being underwater with John. Being on the floor of a room in the Grand.
She’d told him at the end of his shift to walk straight up the stairs, casual. She waited for him on the landing. It was important that she control this small part of the process. Trimmed sunflowers in shapely vases sat on side tables. Little oil paintings looked sticky in their complicated frames.
As soon as she saw him she knew he was excited. Flushed face, sliding eyes. He looked older at work than he did at play. The white shirt and dark jacket never looked neat, exactly, but the attire suited him and he was clean and soft in the eyes, a lack of knives, a hint of stubble on his chin. The skirt she was wearing was faint and light against her legs.
They slipped into the room. John was wearing his sporty wristwatch with a fabric strap. She didn’t like it. His skin carried that lovely fresh cucumber smell. He pressed her against the wall and got onto his knees. Edged her knickers down slowly, a little left and a little right, until they stayed taut around her calves, a thin thread of wetness in the cotton. He began to kiss her there. She didn’t really know what he was doing. He didn’t really know what he was doing. She buckled a little in the moment where he found her clitoris with his tongue, but he lost his place soon enough, like a person reading a book on a beach, all elbows and breeze and no focus. She tried to picture the ocean between the curtains, to make herself come like she could when alone, but in the end she settled for a small fake shiver, a tremor of half-pretended pleasure, and he looked up at her with a smile that was almost shy, an attitude of glad relief. On the apricot rug he moved inside her. It lasted a couple of minutes longer than before. His shoulders felt huge in her hands. His movements were too fast but the room was bright and thrilling. Crisp linen, strange bed. Secrets. Slow down. She felt confident and composed as she stood naked by the window, fastening her hair and watching the sea. She sat back in an elegant chair—pure skin, he wanted her. She understood for a moment that the hotel was gorgeous. They took a bath together, John’s foot between her legs. Tried to make love in the bath but actually that just didn’t work. She would ask Sarah, if Sarah ever got back in touch, if there was a way of doing it right.
On the way out of the room there was a moment of horror. She looked up and saw Marina coming around the corner. Marina’s eyes met hers and flitted to John and with a quick smile she kept on walking. This was bad, seriously bad, a pit of irate snakes.
In the shallow end of the pool John said, “Teach me your tricks, Freya Finch.”
Freya found that when she tried to explain to him how to improve his backstroke—when she tried to break down her instinctive actions into sensible-sounding words—certain technical points that had always been confusing to her began very slowly to unravel. Her underwater breakout, for example, had always been too quick and too messy. She always clutched the side of the pool and threw herself back with vigour, but only briefly slipped under the surface. She tended to emerge into her first stroke after just a couple of seconds, the water agitated by her exit. This was fine when she’d first begun competing in swimming meets. The traditional school of thought was that the underwater portion of the race didn’t matter much; every competitor started as badly as the next. But in her last few months of competing at County level Freya had seen a new breed of backstrokers coming through—guys her age like David “Blast-off” Berkoff, whom everyone at Brighton Swordfish tipped for gold in Seoul. Freya’s swim team had been made to watch videotapes of Berkoff competing at the junior championship in Connecticut. A few coos and giggles. A boy you wanted to meet. In the taped race Berkoff had started with unbelievable speed, gliding forever underwater, a tightly streamlined yellow-capped torpedo of a boy, rapid little dolphin kicks propelling him on and on. Freya couldn’t work out how he did it, could not conjure any version of his magic.
Once she came up with a description to give John, though, dividing Coach Dean’s analysis into four or five simpler steps, in non-technical language, she started to see how the theory might be put into practice. She started to see herself from different angles. Berkoff’s blast-off lost a little of its mystery.
She held on to the edge at the deep end of the pool. Light from high windows made the water glitter. She coiled herself into a backstroke push-off position. The ceiling was panelled and some of the panels were missing.
As she flew backwards she shaped her body into a needle, one hand covering the other. The movement was familiar, the same as always, but now, as her body found its form under the surface, she made sure that the tiny bumps of her almost-biceps actually squeezed her ears. She whipped fast with her dolphin kicks, focused on her feet, kick-kick-kick-kick-kick-kick-kick, and they lasted longer than was normal. She shifted into a flutter-kick she’d never done before. One, two, three. Seemed to be under for ages. With her right arm still stretched in the needle position she flexed her left wrist a little, just a little, having to force herself out of the habit of keeping it straight, so it wrapped around the water and moved into the stroke, slow motion, piece by piece, yes. With her bodyline still long, her torso feeling steely, she found she could slip up through the skin of the water at a more slender angle than before—begging for air now, desperate for it—the liquid feeling quiet and thin. Out into the clamour. Gasping. She couldn’t believe how few strokes it took to complete the length. The wall came too quickly. Her fingers bent back.
“Awesome stuff, Freya Finch.”
She steadied her breathing and hauled herself out of the pool, pulled her goggles down around her neck and took her swimming cap off. She sat beside him, legs dangling in the water. Their feet were fluttering ghosts.
“Here,” he said, smiling. She inclined her head towards him and he kissed her ear. His ear-kisses were dumb. She loved them. Dumb. She put one arm around his shoulders. Put the flat of her other hand on his chest, the hardness of it, a few hairs at the breastbone that looked both old and new, foreign and familiar, squiggles of Arabic script. It was dumb. Even in here she could feel the heat building up behind his skin. She’d spent some time looking at his front, his back, bedding tangled around their intertwined legs, and had never managed to find a single pore. He didn’t sweat when they kissed or touched each other. No part of him seemed to evaporate, no hints left behind, but in the moment you were with him the heat was yours. Clothes fell away, problems fell away. It couldn’t last. He was Surfer John! Dumb.
Two girls walked past, their pale feet slurping on tiles. One of the girls glanced down at Freya. Her breasts were large. In a bad painting, perhaps even a painting by John, melons would be the suitable fruits. It was Sasha from the hotel.
“You!” Sasha said.
Freya responded in kind. She didn’t like Sasha. She was one of those girls who only gave her energy to men. Instead of greeting John with a pronoun and an exclamation mark, Sasha touched his naked back and stooped to kiss his cheek.
“So you guys…” Sasha said uncertainly.
“Swimming,” said Surfer John.
Sasha smiled at them like come wouldn’t melt in her mouth. “Cool. This is Claire.”
“Sure, I remember.”
Freya said hello, niceties were exchanged. With her carefully shaped eyebrows, Claire had no choice but to look surprised.
“Yeah. Catherine loved that movie, by the way.”
“Cool,” John said.
“We should all go out together again.”
John considered this. “Cool,” he said.
“Bye then.”
“Bye.”
“Yeah.”
When Sasha and Claire had trotted away, she and John sat in sil
ence. She edged closer to him and touched a jewel of water on his back—one of the ones Sasha hadn’t ruined. It started to break. It ran down his spine. He shifted, annoyed. He stood and squeezed the ends of his shorts. A stream of water hit the floor.
“Been hanging out with Sasha, then?”
“There was a group,” John said. “Catherine. Pete.”
She shook her head. So many names. What did it mean to live in a world where you lost track of all these names?
“You’ve got nothing to worry about there,” John said.
“I’m not worried.”
John shrugged. “There’s no problem, then.”
“So you haven’t…I’m only asking out of interest.”
“Listen,” John said. “Nothing like that. But you know I don’t want anything serious, right, Frey? I mean, you don’t either. You’re great. We talked about this.”
He was doing that thing everyone in Brighton seemed to do: confusing a conversation they’d had with themselves with a conversation they’d had with her.
She shook her head again. He was dumb. The argument was dumb. Pears and doughnuts and surfboards. When the light of John’s attention was settled on you, everything was warm. When it strobed elsewhere you felt incredibly cold.
Did he want to have dinner together tonight?
That would be great, but probably not, he was helping his cousin with something. She was mental, it was tricky. Which was a shame, because Freya had bought all the ingredients for shepherd’s pie, his stated favourite, her mum’s old recipe, and was thinking she’d cook it in Chef Harry’s kitchen—ruffled potato peaks, Worcestershire sauce dashed into the meat, simple and warm and homely.
—
The next day preparations for Mrs. Thatcher’s arrival went into overdrive. Hordes of special brandy glasses had arrived from Kent. Seven boxes of napkins from Scotland. Staff were given detailed briefing packs containing bios for key guests, starch for the collars of their shirts, and reminders on how to say Hello. The conference had been going on since Monday but everyone was still waiting for the important speeches to happen and the second wave of important people to turn up. One of her father’s new catchphrases—“Got to cut down on unforced errors”—was getting a lot of airtime. Sometimes he elaborated on it with words about McEnroe, straight sets. A slipped shower head had concussed a guest on the second floor, Barbara had inflicted far-reaching injuries on a PR person, and a junior minister had been found asleep behind the bar at breakfast time, his pleated cummerbund draped over his eyes. Other than that, everything was fine. Since the cummerbund incident, the minister had been moving around the hotel gingerly, quietly, like a little girl who’d been told not to spoil her best dress.