He was being mugged and he hadn’t even left the airport. Any moment he would feel the sharp prick of a knife against his ribs, the hot gush of blood, the ebbing of consciousness. He had to fight back, defend himself. But in his confusion he only kicked himself in the ankle and when he tried to land a punch on his unknown and invisible assailant, his elbow cracked against the pavement, sending his arm numb.
Still on his back and under attack, Sandy thought surely someone would come to help him. There must be police somewhere, a good Samaritan. Or would he be left, a wounded and helpless tourist, dying on the pavement, his trip over before it had begun? What was the Indian word for ‘Help!’ Or should that be Hindi? Or Urdu? How could this happen to him, how could he travel so far from his own country, his own home, and not even know what language they spoke?
He scrabbled for a footing and almost made it to a crouching position, but lost his balance and fell again. This time he noticed there was no painful jar as he hit the ground and it took a while to stand up because something heavy strapped around him kept pulling him down. The taxi driver was beside him, out of breath and muttering. So the taxi driver had saved him. What a brave unselfish man, to save a stranger’s life. He would reward him well. Give him a large wad of rupees.
Then it came to him. The heavy something that kept pulling him down was his backpack. He’d forgotten to take it off and it had jammed in the door as he bent to get in the car. He’d lost his balance and fallen backwards, on top of the driver who’d been standing behind him, waiting to shut the door. Sandy couldn’t help it. He started laughing at his own foolishness.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Sandy to the driver, who was scowling and dusting himself off. Being felled by a backpack carried by a pale sweaty 1.8 metre man was probably not what he had in mind at 3 am. Sandy unstrapped himself and clambered into the back seat.
In the taxi, going through the tunnels and roundabouts and then into the wide motorway towards the city centre, Sandy remembered something. The official language of India was English. Shouting for help would have worked perfectly well. He giggled again to himself. It was something he could tell Emily and Matt, make them laugh at their peculiar old dad, how he couldn’t even get into a cab without first falling out of it, how he had flown nearly seven thousand kilometres to a country and he didn’t even know what language the people spoke. He could make a joke out of it. It would be a start.
At the hotel, he gave the man one hundred rupees by way of compensation. The driver grabbed the money, muttered again and roared off into the night, leaving Sandy in the empty hotel foyer. Its marble floors and mirrored columns promised luxury. The concierge, when he finally appeared, still half asleep, spoke perfect English and wished Sandy a pleasant stay before ringing a bell on his desk. A porter appeared. He shouldered the offending backpack and motioned for Sandy to follow him through the carved doors along the corridor to his room.
The hotel became meaner and smaller as they went on. With each turn the carpet became more faded, the walls more dingy. His room, when they finally reached it, was small and smelled damp. The walls were papered violent orange and thick black hairs nested in the corners of the bathroom.
He would not lose heart. He would shower, open the window for some fresh air and go to sleep. But the water, when it emerged from the showerhead, was brown and smelled metallic, the towel had a rank odour of stale milk and the bed was as hard as a plank.
He heaved the window open, leaving the mesh screen closed and tried to sleep. In between the honking horns, the revving car engines and the shouting, there was a dull thudding as suicidal insects smashed against the mesh. The rough pill of the sheets scratched his back. His head sweated on the hard rubber pillow. He turned over. Something was rootling in the ceiling.
Under the cacophony of noise, he could hear his heart racing. The fog of anxiety that had enveloped him at the airport had disappeared, replaced by panic. What was he doing here? Did he imagine that he could compensate for all those absent careless years with one budget trip paid for by his aged mother? Did he think there would be some circle of comforting light to lead him back to his children?
He couldn’t even remember reading Emily and Matthew a bed-time story. What would he talk about? And did they even want to talk to him? In the known territory of Battersea, he had summoned up a cosy image of the three of them eating curry, visiting temples, wandering through markets. Now, he was not so sure.
Penny had told him he was mad. ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit late for a gap year?’ she’d asked. In the background, he could hear someone talking. ‘Never too late for anything,’ he’d replied.
‘Well, good luck,’ she’d said. He was beginning to think he might need it and he hadn’t even left Delhi yet.
Chapter 34
‘You just might find yourself in trouble, big boy.’ She had a fake American drawl and smiled as she waved his business card up and down. Her teeth crossed over in the front.
‘Jeremy? So that’s your name. Well, Jeremy, this might cost you. I am, you know, not quite of age.’ She’d jumped onto the jetty next to the Jezebel. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
Of course she’d called him the next day. He thought he’d fixed it. She’d started at ten thousand but he’d whittled her down to less than half of that and got her to sign a non-disclosure statement, carefully worded to ensure nothing would jump back up at him. He drafted the statement himself and kept a copy in his office safe.
Still, he couldn’t rid himself of the anxiety that lodged high and tight in his stomach. He started chewing his fingernails again. He couldn’t stop hearing footsteps behind him as he stepped off the jetty every morning. He was still rattled by his failure to seduce Charlie Gibson. The Russian debacle hadn’t helped, although some clients, surprisingly, didn’t defect. He’d given a rare interview to a columnist at The Financial Times, remembering to appear both contrite and alert, blaming his past success for his present malaise.
‘We got too big too quickly,’ he told the journalist, a man so young that he still had spots. He had booked at Le Gavroche, one of the corner banquettes opposite the stairs. The man, whose column was called Speculator, appeared more interested in the cheese trolley and the dessert menu than Jeremy’s explanations. ‘There is often a negative balance between the size of the fund and its performance,’ said Jeremy as he passed bread and biscuits. ‘Sometimes, small is better. We started that way, we intend to do that again.’
The journalist nodded and took an enormous spoonful of Époisses. He wasn’t taking notes, or recording the interview, which turned out not to be an interview at all, but a dismissive mention in the last paragraph of his column. He had called to apologise about the subheading of ‘Yesterday’s Hero’, but not about misleading him. Bastard. All of them bastards.
Jeremy settled to the business of making money. It was oddly easier without the weight of staff. The floor above his office was empty, waiting to be re-let. There was just him and a secretary now. He felt a satisfaction in returning to the basics he once knew so well without having to pretend he understood his team’s talk of algorithms and probabilities. He took a nice profit on a week of stock exchange jitters, and then on heavy metals. By Friday he was ahead by six figures, for himself as well as his clients.
He needed to maintain the momentum to keep the other stuff at bay: the anxiety about failure, the fear that he couldn’t negotiate yet another successful deal, the suspicion that everything was random, that he controlled nothing.
Scaling down had been the best solution, he told himself in a taxi, crawling around Hyde Park Corner on the way home, caught up in the Friday evening traffic. He’d forgotten how he liked a small operation. Guerrilla tactics, not military might. It was a strategy that worked in finance as well as in war.
All along Knightsbridge, he planned his weekend with meticulous detail. He’d swing past Chelsea Green and do some shopping. He’d cook supper, crab linguine with chilli and garlic, with a glass of Sancerre and then a Monte
cristo on the deck, still warm from the day’s sun. Maybe a small snifter of brandy before bed.
It was at this time, when he could still smell sap and blossom before the leaves sighed under the August heat, that he loved the city most, felt at one with its brash mercantile heart, which beat so harmoniously next to its culture and history.
He ate his supper on the deck, finishing with a rocket salad. He thought about the gelato in the freezer, but decided against it. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d eaten a three-or even a two-course meal without feeling uncomfortably full. Feet up, he contemplated the horizon. His neighbours were out or away. The only sound came from the water slapping at the hull and a crackle of burning tobacco as Jeremy drew on his cigar. His Blackberry rang. He ignored it. This was his Friday night. He’d worked hard, he’d done well, and he was behaving himself. He didn’t want to be interrupted. It rang again. He reached over to turn it off, saw Rosie’s name on the screen and grabbed it, pleased that for once she had called him. He’d persuade her to meet him somewhere this year, if only for a weekend, or else he’d go to Dubai.
‘Rosie.’ He felt a ridiculous smile on his face. He couldn’t help himself. ‘How’s my baby girl?’ He couldn’t remember when they’d last spoken. She hadn’t replied when he’d phoned and emailed her about the financial hiccup. But she might have been away.
‘Twenty-six at last birthday, Dad, so not so much of the baby anymore.’ She sounded tough and remote.
‘Sorry.’ He was always so quick to apologise to her, the only person he ever wanted to appease. ‘I was thinking of coming out to see you, sooner rather than later, if that suits.’ He heard the plea in his voice. ‘I need to do some business in that part of the world, extend myself a bit.’
‘Dad, forget about the business. What is this website thing? What the hell have you done?’
He held the phone away from his ear and swung his feet down on the deck, nearly spilling the brandy. A fat circle of ash fell off his cigar and settled in the cracks between the planking.
‘What are you talking about?’ he said. ‘I just cooked myself a fantastic supper and now I’m sitting on the deck watching the sun set.’
‘For God’s sake, get your arse into gear and google something called Psst.’
‘Pissed?’ He didn’t understand what she was asking him to do. And he didn’t like the coldness in her voice. ‘Why would I want to google pissed?’
‘No, Dad, Psst, as in psst, I’ve got a secret. It’s a website. It’s full of accusations against you.’
‘What things?’ He stood up and immediately felt giddy.
‘Go and have a look. Then call me back.’
He didn’t move, not until a disembodied voice told him to please hang up, then he carefully stubbed out his cigar, took his brandy, went to his desk and turned on his computer. Psst was a gossip website with a frenetic screen of pop-ups and headlines surrounded by exclamation marks that appeared and disappeared with bewildering speed. He drained the last of the brandy. It burned the back of his throat.
By the time he’d clicked onto a story about a wife who’d been suing her ex-husband fund manager for twenty years and an analyst who claimed cocaine on his expenses, there was an ominous drumming at the back of his brain. He knew what he would find and there it was on the breaking news section, a blind item. But everyone could guess who it referred to. The houseboat was mentioned in an oblique kind of way (‘it seems this mover and shaker likes the river more than most’), the Piccadilly address, the Russian fiasco, and – by now his hands were shaking and his mouth was dry – a video link.
There was a rustling sound behind him, something falling on the floor. He wheeled around, rigid with fear. Was he about to be handcuffed, led away to a police car for everyone to see? But it was only a breeze through the open door, blowing the evening paper and the day’s post off the coffee table. He slammed the door shut and picked up everything. He took a bottle of water from the refrigerator. He stood very still and looked out the window. The gold dome of the Peace Pagoda, just visible above the plane trees edging Battersea Park, glimmered in the evening sun.
When he could procrastinate no further, he returned to his desk where there was nothing else to do except click his forefinger down on his titanium mouse, the one given to him by that divorcee client during her grateful stage.
Somehow, probably through habit or anxiety, he had shut down his computer. Starting it again took forever. It clicked and whirred and buzzed before the little coloured ball appeared at the top of the screen. Stubbornly, almost wilfully, it refused to transform itself into a biddable cursor. The drumming in his brain had turned into a fierce headache, threatening to explode.
Finally the cursor appeared. He double-clicked until he saw her, full screen, holding up her fringe to show the bruise on her temple. The camera lost focus, then zoomed in on her cut lip before travelling down to a close-up of the welts on her thighs. There was that flat nasal voice.
‘This guy is an animal,’ she said. Her chin wobbled, tears coursed down her cheeks. ‘He duped me into going with him. I thought he was safe. I might look older, but I’m only fourteen. He looked so respectable, well dressed and all that. He took me to this houseboat, said he just wanted a chat, someone to talk to, and then he attacked me. He raped me.’
Her voice was angry now, defiant. ‘Then he tried to pay me off. Of course I took the money. Who wouldn’t? But look what he did to me. I’m lucky to be alive.’
The screen went black. He turned off the computer. It felt like an illusion or dream. A hoax. Things like this did not happen to people like him. People like him were too clever, too embedded in fortunate gene pools, to be destroyed by people like her. He couldn’t even remember her name.
He was so tired. It was all so exhausting and monotonous; the discipline necessary to keep everything at bay. Alcohol had to be rationed. Ditto cigars. One a day, never more. The games of squash, the swimming three mornings a week. The prompt sweating off of extra kilos in the steam room. Until the Russian debacle, he’d run a conservative and profitable business. He was well on the way to doing so again. He’d married two suitable women, and had one beautiful and successful daughter. Post divorce, the Jezebel was an acceptable eccentricity, and he was envied for the constant parade of pretty girls like Amy.
Except Amy was twenty-nine, and this one was fourteen. Those years made the difference between envy and disgust. Any solvent adult could get as much sex as they wanted these days, so why would you seek out a child? Why would you do that unless – unless what? Unless you were sick and there was a part of you that was black and rotten. Jeremy knew that was what people thought. Now, terrified that people he knew would know, he began to act as his own defence counsel, outraged at the slurs against him.
He had done little wrong. He had not raped children in third world countries. He was not getting his rocks off by throttling himself with women’s pantyhose. He’d had no idea this girl was under the age of consent. Had he known this, he would never have approached her. Never.
Jeremy’s thoughts ran on. Compared to the activities of so many people, this was nothing, a sexual trifle, a bagatelle of the flesh. A weakness. And he paid, he paid well for something he wanted to do every now and then without the world knowing about it.
Now, sitting at his desk, noting the flecks of dust on his computer screen, it came to him why he picked up those girls. It wasn’t the sex so much. He could get that anywhere. He did it because it made him feel powerful and feeling powerful made him feel alive. He wanted to introduce some risk to his life.
Laughter and shouts from a passing riverboat interrupted his thoughts. Music began. ABBA, ‘Dancing Queen’. If Sandy had been here, he’d have gone on about Bjorn and Benny, why they were masters of the pop song, that there was a sad darkness under the bubbling harmonies. But Sandy wasn’t here. Sandy, the one person who would excuse everything, understand anything, was no longer his friend.
His back ached and he hunched his
shoulders, then let them drop. It just made the ache worse. From the Embankment, he heard a sudden screech of car brakes, the scrape of metal against metal, then a furious barrage of horns. He blinked and in that fraction of a second before he opened his eyes, he saw it all. He saw himself staggering from his car as the rain hissed against his ears and he turned away from Polly’s crumpled body, rivulets of blood seeping from the cruel gash in her head and dissolving into the mud and leaves; Sandy grabbing him and telling him everything would be all right as he wept and shouted again and again: ‘I’ve killed her. I’ve killed Polly.’
And afterwards, the cover-up, and then the vow to expunge it from their memory, as they covered Polly’s body with a coat and waited for the ambulance and the police to arrive, all the while Sandy’s hand on his back, rubbing up and down as if to soothe a fractious baby, repeating that he wasn’t to worry, that they would sort it out, that it was a terrible accident. All the time their eyes never met, because they knew it was a lie.
From that moment up to the present, if Jeremy had thought about it at all, late at night or in a moment of weakness, he had referred to it as Polly’s death. Abstract, removed, a phrase absolving anyone of responsibility. A statement of historical fact.
In the computer screen he saw a reflection of himself: bags, jowls, beetle eyebrows, hairy nostrils. He was so tired. But he had to call Rosie, had to fix things up with her. Maybe it had been a bad dream. Maybe he’d imagined everything. He looked at the website again. There it was, with red letters flashing over the item. ‘Breaking News … Police investigation into city figure’s under-age sex scandal. Man to be named soon … We already know.’
His mobile kept ringing. He ignored it. Six new messages waited in his personal email, all from newspapers and television channels. Jeremy put his head in his hands. He decided to deny everything. People would believe him ahead of a girl like that. He dialled Rosie’s number.
After Everything Page 21