'Well, that's all right if the you that's there doesn't die.'
'But then, what if this me here doesn't die, because then there will be two of me?'
She nodded.
'I think we're going to need a bigger gin and tonic,' she said.
She smiled in a knowing way. I said, 'What?'
'You know, Jaws, I think we're going to need a bigger boat...'
'I never saw Jaws,' I said.
'Sure,' she said. 'Of course.'
Later we ate dinner, then she went back to her place and I went to the Golf View. At some point I wondered if we were going to sleep together, but even the thought of it had me feeling guilty, so I steered away from even the slightest flirtation; she picked up on that, and so by the end of the evening our dinner almost had the atmosphere of a business meeting. There just wasn't anyone taking minutes.
Anyway, we couldn't think of a solution to the problem. I had in the back of my mind that I had six months and that I'd think of something brilliant at some point.
As it was, I never saw Amber again, and I never thought of something brilliant.
16
'You're the Jigsaw Man?' I asked. 'The guy who used to sit in the Stand Alone, doing jigsaws and... you know, telling us what to do with our lives?'
He stared at me in a way that he had never done when he'd been the Jigsaw Man. Yet, it seemed inescapable, this was definitely him. And now that we were here, it also seemed obvious.
This was all about the Jigsaw Man. It had all started with a phone call from my agent saying there was someone interested in the Jigsaw Man script. I'd got on the plane because of the Jigsaw Man script. Somehow I'd managed to get off the plane, and now that I was here, they had been asking me about the Jigsaw Man. At first I'd thought they'd meant the script, but of course they'd meant the man himself. It was obvious they'd meant the man himself.
'That was one of me, yes,' he said.
That was one of me. Funny. That's the kind of thing he would have said in the old days, and we would have nodded wisely as though recognising the great sage, while of course we'd have been thinking, what on earth does that mean? Now it didn't seem funny, sage or interesting. It seemed barbed. Conceited even. One of me. As if there were more than one.
Maybe there was. A couple of days earlier there had been two of me, until one of them died in a plane crash. Or, in fact, thought himself off a plane crash onto Nairn beach. And I had begun to wonder, what if the me on the plane did manage to think himself onto Nairn beach? Did that mean there were still two of us, going round in endless circles? Had it happened before? How many of me could there be, all walking around the planet trying to avoid the other me?
'How many of you are there?' I asked.
'Four,' he said.
'So...' I started to ask, but then for a moment I thought my brain was going to short out. I couldn't compute this. I needed to do that thing where I shut everything down and tried not to understand.
'You came into the café the day the plane crashed? And the day before?'
'No,' he said. 'That was one of the others.'
'Are you all in the cells here? There's one of you three doors along?'
'No, we're not all here. They have three, they need to catch the last one. That's why they brought you in.'
'Because the one they don't have is the one who used to sit in the Stand Alone?'
'Maybe,' he said.
His voice was as shallow and expressionless as his face. It went beyond disinterest in my questions, embracing a complete indifference to all life, lying quite the other side and in the far distance from misanthropy. This was like George not caring what people thought of him. Misanthropy at least requires some strong feeling against humanity; the Jigsaw Man's eyes betrayed a bitter coldness boiled down into a tiny, indefinable nugget of desolation. They spoke of the downfall of emotion.
I was having trouble holding his gaze, as though the infertile pit of his soul was reaching out to those who dared look at him, infecting them, spreading a desertification of spirit.
Had he always been like that, this version of the Jigsaw Man, or had this place sucked the life from him?
'How can there be four of you?' I asked.
'How do you know there aren't four of you?' he said in reply. 'Four of everybody?'
'That's ludicrous,' I said quickly.
The Jigsaw Man did not even shrug. He wasn't interested enough to shrug.
'You're not the dark-skinned guy next door, are you?' I asked.
'I don't know who's next door,' he said. 'Now leave. I've answered enough of your questions.'
'I haven't even begun...'
'Leave,' he said, his voice sharp, cutting me off.
I left.
After that I couldn't face going into any more rooms. I walked back to my own cell, closed the door behind me and lay down on the floor. The vitality of earlier had gone. I didn't understand what was going on, and I couldn't think about it. Couldn't begin to think about it. Didn't want to think about it.
The power of the Jigsaw Man's eyes had worked its evil magic.
*
Brin and I met at a Ringo Starr concert. When relaying this to other people, it's usually considered on a par with meeting at a Eurovision Song Contest party or a Blake's 7 convention, and I always point out that it doesn't matter that Ringo was just an all right drummer who couldn't really carry a tune, or that he'd have been better suited to being one of the Muppets. HE WAS IN THE BEATLES!
That's what counts. Despite all the people that have claims on being the fifth Beatle – Stuart Sutcliffe, Pete Best, George Martin, Andy White, Billy Preston and many, many more – there are only four guys who can say they were in the Beatles when they were a worldwide phenomenon, and Ringo was one of them.
Earl's Court, late spring 1996. We were standing together at a merchandise stand. I was looking at t-shirts, and ignoring all the ones with just Ringo on the front, trying to decide which Beatles one to go for. I'd noticed Brin straight away, wanted to speak to her, but had been instantly handcuffed by my fear of and discomfort with small talk. Anything I had to say would sound trite and obvious. But then, I was hardly likely to open up with a question about the disintegration of Yugoslavia and NATO's part in a post-Cold War world.
Then she spoke to the vendor and she had a Scottish accent, and the walls of fear and awkwardness fell away. It wouldn't have helped if we'd been in Scotland, but we were abroad. London. Somehow it felt like I had an in. Of course, long-term partner selection based on the other person having the same nationality isn't exactly guaranteed to work out. On that basis, I might as well have tried to hit on Lulu.
'The dark green one would suit your better,' I said, for all the world like I knew what I was talking about. I just happened to be right.
'Hmm,' she said. Very non-committal.
It was an in. Turned out that she hadn't been able to find anyone else with whom to attend the concert, so we stood together, and at the end of it we went out to dinner and then she came back to my hotel room, as it was marginally closer than her apartment. Maybe she was more comfortable about that, as she didn't yet want to show me where she lived. It didn't matter, as she showed me the following day.
When we met she was already thinking about moving back to Scotland. I made her mind up. For a couple of months we saw each other at weekends, including a few magically romantic days in Budapest, then she moved back to Glasgow and into my flat.
*
One Tuesday evening, the week before Brin was due to come to Glasgow, I was in Bar 91 on my own for a drink after work. At the time I had a short-lived job in a small advertising agency, photocopying pieces of paper that were dull even before their tediousness had been replicated ten-fold. I'd gone in for a gin and tonic, or maybe two, before I went home for the night.
'Hey, stranger,' said a voice behind me.
I didn't immediately turn around, but I had an instant realisation of what was about to happen. It was Jones, the lightness o
f her voice still etched inside my head. At this point it had been a little over three years since I'd seen her, and three years isn't so long in a matter of the heart, and that voice still did the things that it had always done. I wanted to be in love with Brin, and Brin was about to come and stay with me – forever – and the last person I wanted to see was Jones. Really, the last person, even though when I turned round and looked at her, she hadn't changed, except perhaps that she seemed even more radiantly beautiful, and the look in her eyes still grabbed my stomach and my head and my heart and squeezed so tightly I could barely stand up. Definitely the last person.
'Hey!' I said, tying to muster enthusiasm, and she took me in her arms and embraced me, kissing me on the cheek as she did so. She smelled wonderful. I tried not to breathe
I got her a drink, we sat in a corner of the bar. I told her about my exciting times as a photocopier, she told me about all the people she'd met in the theatre, getting a small part in Sense And Sensibility and having a coffee with Kate Winslet, night clubs of London and an acting job in Italy over the summer. I talked some more about photocopying. She seemed to be laughing at my jokes more than I remembered. She touched my arm a couple of times.
God, she was beautiful.
I never mentioned Brin. I meant to. I was telling myself that I wasn't keeping it from her. It just never came up.
'You know what I finally worked out?' she said. She was on her fifth vodka and Coke, I was on my fourth gin. To say that my infatuation had come flooding back, would only be incorrect in that it had never gone anywhere in the first place.
'Go on.'
'I mean, from the old days. And there were two things...'
'Good,' I said, 'that's two things more than I managed to work out.'
She laughed again, but the laugh was light and attractive and intoxicating. She was drawing me in. It didn't occur to me that perhaps it was because she was an actress. She was in training, and was already very good at and getting paid to be an actress.
'Henderson was gay, that was one of them. And, you know, I'm not just saying that because oh my God, Jones was after him and he didn't want her... That wasn't it. It was just... obvious. Obvious.'
She looked serious and shook her head. 'Did you know? Why didn't you say?'
'I only found out when the Jigsaw Man pointed it out to me, and that was after you'd left, I think. Not sure.'
'The Jigsaw Man,' said Jones, shaking her head at the memory of him. 'Whatever happened to him?'
She talked about our time at the Stand Alone as though it had been thirty years previously. Maybe her last three years felt a lot longer than mine because she'd been doing more interesting things than photocopying.
'He went off travelling,' I said. 'He had a wife in Laos.'
'Jesus. Laos? I don't even know where that is.'
'Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, around there.'
'Holy shit.'
She drained her drink, but the alcohol didn't seem to be having any effect on her. She had been laughing and flirtatious from the off. Maybe she'd already been drunk when she first saw me.
'What was the other thing?' I said. I didn't think, didn't mean anything by the question. I just liked talking about the old days. The old days that weren't really so old.
'Sorry?'
'You said you'd finally worked out two things from the old days.'
She smiled. One of those smiles that says something, but I had no idea what it was. I just watched her lips as she looked off to the side, her tongue between her white teeth, her finger running round the rim of her vodka tonic tumbler.
'You, em...' she began, then she laughed uncertainly and looked at me from two feet across the table. 'You...' She laughed again and shook her head. 'Jesus, I'm hopeless without someone writing my lines for me.'
'You're fine,' I said. I still stupidly didn't know what she was going to say. I was the dumb-ass bug being sucked into the sweet flower. Not just helpless, but too stupid to realise that it's being played.
'You were in love with me,' she said.
She looked earnestly across the top of her drink, then lifted it and put it to her lips.
So, here it was. The conversation I'd played over in my head at least two thousand times. Except, it was a conversation for three years earlier. I had long since given up on her. I'd made the effort. Pushed her away. I had found someone else.
'You were in love with me, weren't you?' she asked. Her voice sounded small and nervous.
Thinking about it, there was no doubt she was acting the part and playing me, but at the same time I don't think she knew she was acting and I doubt she would have considered for a second that she was playing anything.
'Yes,' I said.
She nodded. Bit her bottom lip.
'I'm sorry, I should have realised.'
'That's all right. I should have said.'
She laughed again, nervous and insecure.
'Do you still love me?' she asked.
That was the moment. That was the moment to mention Brin. Well, that moment plus all the others that there'd been in the previous hour.
Just as I was about to answer, as I was opening my mouth, she leant forward and put her finger to my lips.
'No,' she said, 'it's all right. Don't say anything.'
I wonder which movie she thought she was in. A romantic drama. An erotic drama. A romantic comedy.
I'd been going to say yes. I had tried not to think about her for three years, and since I'd met Brin that was something in which I had almost succeeded. She was gone. And yet, there we were. She was sitting in front of me and I was about to tell her that I loved her.
Strangely that's the thing that I still feel most guilty about, even more than the fact that she came home with me and we spent the next two days sleeping, eating and making love.
17
'Why did you write a script about the Jigsaw Man? What did you know?'
They were back. Tango and Cash. Tom and Jerry. Laurel and Hardy. Batman and Robin. Cagney and Lacey. Starsky and Hutch. The Two Ronnies.
I had slept for a while. Woke up with no conception of the time or how long I'd been asleep, to find Agent Crosskill and his no-name partner sitting at the desk. Had they been sitting there for a while waiting for me to wake up, or had they just sat down and made a noise to pull me from my sleep?
I had dragged myself up to the table, even though it felt horrendous just moving, just waking myself up. I didn't want to move. I wanted to stay curled up in a corner of the room, even though I was cold. I felt horrible. An ugly state of mind. Missing Brin and Baggins. And I'd dreamt about Jones and that feeling of guilt was there, the guilt that intruded every now and again. Two days of sex just before Brin had moved in. And I'd never said.
Was I still in love with Jones?
She'd never progressed beyond small parts in Shakespeare, cameos in Casualty and Spooks and Teachers. Sometimes I looked her up on Internet Movie Database or Wikipedia. I wondered if she ever thought about those two days.
I sat at the table. That's what I was doing. They hadn't said anything for a while. I didn't look at either of them. I felt so soulless, so empty. Everything bad that I'd ever done, everything stupid, everything embarrassing, it all seemed to be nestling there in the middle of my head, mixing with the awfulness of my situation and the fact that I hadn't seen my family for over six months, and they hadn't seen me for several days, and they'd be assuming I was dead, and they must be crying still.
Would they still be crying? Brin had seemed off with me for much of those last few months before the crash. But when this me, the me that was sitting here in this cell, had been living those six months with Brin, had there already been another me living up north?
I had thought about it so much since then, and I had no answer. I'd been thinking that perhaps she'd been having an affair, or that she'd worked out that I'd been keeping the secret of Jones from her ever since we'd been married, but maybe she'd just plain known there was something wrong. A
disturbance in space/time, that I was somehow leading two lives.
I rubbed my hands across my face. I needed to shave. When had I shaved last? They'd shaved me. It didn't seem so long ago. I looked in the large mirror. I had a beard.
I turned back to look at them.
'Why did you write a script about the Jigsaw Man? What did you know?'
I was feeling so utterly broken and confused that I wasn't sure I could speak, even if I wanted to. Perhaps I could force out some words.
'Why did you write a script about the Jigsaw Man? What did you know?'
Was that the third time she'd said those words? Or just the first?
I found an answer. 'I didn't know anything.'
'Then why did you write about the Jigsaw Man?'
'He did jigsaws,' I said.
'He did jigsaws?' said Agent Crosskill. 'Ha! That's gonna be some fucking movie.'
I shook my head. Partly at Agent Crosskill, partly to try to clear my mind. Does shaking your head actually manage to clear your mind?
'It was a metaphor. I always thought it was a metaphor.'
'You always thought it was a metaphor?' the woman said sharply. 'Even when you were sitting in that café back in Glasgow, you thought the guy was a metaphor? A living metaphor? What did you think he was a metaphor for?'
'How did you know about that?' I asked. Head beginning to clear, focus coming with conversation. 'How did you know that I used to sit in a café in Glasgow?'
'You told us,' she said.
'And we've got CCTV,' said Agent Crosskill.
I couldn't remember if I'd told them. And did they really have CCTV from a Glasgow café two decades ago? What did I know about these people and how they worked?
'I don't know,' I said. 'I don't know what I was thinking back then. He was a guy doing jigsaws. It's that piecing together thing. That's what jigsaws are. Taking the big picture that's been broken down and putting the pieces back together again. It's metaphorical. Innately metaphorical. For all kinds of things.'
Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! Page 9