'I just want to get my family back,' I said.
'I know.'
'I need to find him.'
'I can't help you.'
'Can't or won't?' I said lifting my eyes.
What a terrible line. Some hack line from some hack '70s TV show. A line from the terrible movie script, The Jigsaw Man.
'Both,' she said. 'I wouldn't if I could, but since I don't know where he is anyway...'
I sat back, suddenly aware that I had been leaning forward, almost trying to impose myself upon her. Force information from her by strength of will.
Was I tired? No, don't think so. Not tired. Not anything. Six months lost in the UK, several months lost in a small cell, that had seemed nothing but a few days. I had shut down so many of the regular emotional operations of the mind that feelings seemed alien. I was breathing and going through the motions. Would I feel anything the next time I saw Brin and Baggins? Perhaps not. Perhaps that was even scarier than anything else that might happen.
I realised I was staring at the gap where the jigsaw table had been, then looked away, drawn once again to the Sgt. Pepper cover.
'I don't understand,' I said. 'Why is Paul the only one not crossed out?'
'You have to keep searching,' she said.
'That doesn't really help me,' I said, turning back.
'I'm not trying to help you,' she replied, the coffee cup covering her lips.
23
I was sitting in a café at the top end of Byres Road, some time after five. Hadn't been in this area in a thousand years. I didn't feel like drinking coffee. Had a small fruit salad and a glass of orange juice.
It had been a few hours since I'd left the Stand Alone. I hadn't got any more information from Janine, but maybe that didn't matter. It was never going to be so easy that I would turn up there and she would give me an address. If it had been that straightforward, Agent Crosskill and Agent No Name would have been water boarding Janine months earlier.
I'd left the Stand Alone and walked along the Clyde. Every now and again I'd lean on a railing and watch the river flow by. The river, any river, is even more of a metaphor than a jigsaw. The flow of life. The step that cannot be retraced, time ever marching forward. But this wasn't about the river, not this time. The fact that the Stand Alone looked out at the Clyde was coincidental. The Jigsaw Man might have selected this spot so that he could look out on the water, but it didn't play a part in this.
It did help me think, however, and within a few minutes of leaving the café I had made the first logical and obvious connection – a connection I would surely have thought of in my previous confinement if I'd only been allowed time to think. (As if four months hadn't been enough.)
The man in the faded suit, the man in my old Starbucks who had led me blindly down the blind alley, had been Ringo. Ringo from the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. One curious quarter of the Jigsaw Man. I would likely never know why, given the freedom to walk into a café and buy coffee, the Jigsaw Man hadn't taken the opportunity to run. Perhaps he was brainwashed, perhaps they had a sniper trained on him the whole time, perhaps he was tagged or fitted with a tiny remote controlled device in his brain that would kill him stone dead the second he did anything that was off-plan. I could only conjecture the kind of things that I'd seen in movies.
Ultimately, however, it didn't matter. As soon as I'd made that connection, the rest fell into place. The first man I'd seen in captivity, who I'd later identified as the Jigsaw Man, had been wearing a worn light green suit. The second man, a purple suit. John and Ringo. They weren't wearing the same garish, military-style, day-glo satin suits that they'd worn on the album cover, but more conventional representations of them, as if they'd wanted to be able to walk down the street without people pointing at them, but still needed to be individually identified as themselves from the original Sgt. Pepper days.
Somewhere else in that facility, in a room I never entered, would have been the Jigsaw Man in faded red. All of which tied in with the cover of Sgt. Pepper pinned to the wall of the Stand Alone. George, John and Ringo crossed out, only Paul still at large.
I tried to remember what my Jigsaw Man had been wearing, back in the Stand Alone days. A suit, faded from some bright primary colour perhaps. I couldn't remember. Had he always worn the same thing? Had the consistency of him sitting in the same place every day, extended to him being dressed in the same clothes every day?
When I thought back to the Stand Alone, all I could remember were his eyes. The more I thought about him, the more vague his appearance seemed to become.
Nevertheless, I felt a moment of satisfaction when I thought that through, a moment that was immediately tempered by two things. Firstly, that I ought to have worked it out more quickly, and the larger, more perplexing second issue. Why? What did it mean? Could the Jigsaw Man really have been split into four different parts, each of whom was representative of one of the Beatles?
Staring into the river I assembled a more rational explanation, one that ticked the boxes of the known facts and common sense. The Jigsaw Man was four different people, who perhaps all looked vaguely similar. They modelled themselves, for whatever reason, on the Beatles off the cover of Sgt. Pepper. While that may not have been a reason in itself for the American authorities to go after them, they were guilty of some sort of illegal activity which demanded their arrest. The only one of the four still at large was the one dressed in light blue. Paul. Which explained why Paul remained untouched on the LP cover adorning the wall of the café.
Yes, that all worked, yet I knew it wasn't right. There were enough strange things going on – the plane crash, the duplicated six months, the endless corridor, the building in Dubai, the disappearing guards – for me to know that the answer wasn't going to be prosaic.
The only way to progress the entire madness, and to hope to return to some sort of reality, was to find the Jigsaw Man – the part of him that was left – and while I did not wish to do the bidding of Agents Crosskill and No Name, ultimately we were all after the same thing.
There was also the possibility that Jones was involved. I wasn't entirely sure how that could be, but she'd been looking for me recently, and there were no coincidences in all of this. However, I didn't know where to find Jones, so I started with the only thing I did know.
Twenty years earlier, Henderson had been working at an accountant’s at the top of Byres Road. He'd already been there a couple of years, and he was determined to stay, rising up through the firm as time passed. His ultimate goal had been to retire with his name on the door as one of the partners.
People change, plans change, but I had a feeling that Henderson would have been true to all those things he'd dreamed of, and so here I was, sitting in a small café, waiting for him to appear on the street, hoping that he'd clung to his original aspirations, and that he didn't have the day off.
At six-thirty the café closed and I was pitched out onto the street. The day was mild and dry. I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and a light black jacket. I stood staring across the road for a while, then started looking in a few shop windows. There was nothing to look at. I can't do this for more than a few minutes, I thought.
I was avoiding going in the front door and asking for him. I had a notion that the fewer people who were involved in this, the better it would be for everybody.
Nevertheless, I was getting to the stage where crossing the road and walking into the reception of the office appeared to be my only option, when Henderson appeared at the door and immediately turned and started walking towards the top end of Byres Road. He was carrying a briefcase and wearing a navy blue suit, a light blue shirt and no tie. His hair looked exactly the same as it had twenty years earlier.
I waited for a gap in the traffic and ran across the road.
'Henderson!'
*
I placed the drinks on the table, sat down, and then we lifted our glasses and clinked.
'Cheers,' we said in unison.
; 'To the old days,' said Henderson.
I nodded. The old days. It reminded me of Jones.
He laughed. He'd been surprised, slightly wary, had almost made an excuse, and then had seemed to relax into the thought of seeing an old friend and agreed to come for a drink. I wondered if he might have heard that I'd died in a plane crash. Maybe he'd even been at my funeral. But he was merely slightly surprised, rather than shocked at seeing a ghost.
'So, what the Hell?' he said. 'You're back, from outer space. What gives? Wife kick you out?'
'No, nothing like that. Wife and kid safely at home. I'm just...'
I'd been sitting waiting for him for nearly three hours, and in all that time I hadn't thought about how I was going to present this.
'You remember the Jigsaw Man?'
Henderson laughed. Maybe he was just laughing because I hadn't even allowed us the requisite amount of small talk. The how are you and the what the Hell have you been doing for the last twenty years and the are you married?
'Of course,' he said, as though it was obvious why I was here. 'I didn't... you know, I didn't, like, think he was cool the way you guys did. Always thought it was, like, kinda sinister. You know, like there was something going on. Some weird kind of shit. You looking for him?'
'You talk differently,' I said.
He laughed again. 'Sure, I know. It's because of Chipper.'
I asked the question with a pair of raised eyebrows.
'He's my husband. He's from San Fran. We were one of the first couples to get married out there.'
'You married someone called Chipper?'
He smiled and nodded.
'His name's Chippendale?' I asked.
'Field. Chipperfield.'
'That's his first or second name.'
'First name. He took my second name.'
'Nice. What does he do?'
'He's at home. He keeps the place clean. Wonderful cook. I sent him a text when you were at the bar. I've really only got like twenty minutes, sorry.'
'Of course.'
I took a sip of g&t. It was mostly t, but at least there was plenty of ice and it was crisp and fresh.
'I always used to fancy you, you know,' said Henderson.
'No way!' I said. Really, that was not something I'd ever spotted.
He laughed again. At least I seemed to be a cause of continual amusement for him, so my turning up out of the blue was doing him some good.
'Of course. I'm not surprised you didn't notice. You were too wrapped up with hopeless love for Jones.'
'And she fancied you...'
'Precisely. A classic love triangle formation. It's a wonder that it didn't all come to some sort of, like, dramatic conclusion, rather than us all just drifting off in our own little directions.'
'Holy shit,' I said. 'I'm sorry, I didn't...'
My words ran out, as really, what was I apologising for?
'You don't have to feel bad about not banging me,' he said. 'I don't feel bad about not banging Jones. You had a lucky escape though. Lucky she never turned her eye on you.'
'Why?' I asked. And in that moment I wondered if I wore my guilt from those two days like some sort of transparent mask, a mask that hides nothing and at the same time emphasises and highlights every little twist and turn of shame and unattractiveness.
'She was... someone else. A born actress. I don't know who that person was that we talked to every day in the Stand Alone, but she wasn't real. It was like there was someone else living inside her. Or something else. I'm not sure.'
I covered up my sudden feelings of ill-ease by taking a long drink of gin and tonic.
'You seen her recently?' I asked. 'Janine said she'd been in the Stand Alone last week.'
'No way,' he said.
I nodded.
'Wow. The Stand Alone? I thought that place closed down years ago.'
'Still there,' I said.
'And really, I thought, you know I genuinely thought that Jones would be dead by now, or, I don't know, that she'd have, like, changed back into what she was originally. She was Jones again?'
'She was always Jones,' I said, sounding a little annoyed, but really I was disconcerted by this talk. 'I saw her a couple of years after the Stand Alone. I've seen her on TV sometimes.'
'You saw her after the Stand Alone? Where was that?'
Palpable hesitation from me – as if I hadn't had enough practice at dealing with interrogation – then I said, 'Met her in a bar.'
He looked at me curiously, then nodded, looking slightly disappointed.
'You slept with her then,' he said. It wasn't even a question. 'How was that?'
Maybe it was as a result of all the previous interrogation. It hadn't made me impervious or improved my avoidance skills. It had crushed me until I was happy to answer anything. If I ever got to see Brin again, would I tell her about Jones? After so much time, perhaps it would be all right. If nothing else, it would lift the crippling guilt that I'd dragged around for so long.
'It was the kind of sex you think about when you masturbate,' I said.
He nodded and smiled weakly. 'Sure, maybe not the kind of sex that I think about, but I know what you mean. That's what I get with Chipper.'
Well, that was my fault, I'd started it, but I didn't want to think about Henderson and Chipper.
'So, you're married now,' he said. 'Just the one kid? Sorry, maybe you're separated. You have a look about you.'
'Yep, married, one kid. Not separated, just haven't seen them in a while.'
'Something going on?' He shook his head. 'Of course there is. You haven't looked me up to hear about Chipper. What can I do for you?'
I shrugged and suddenly felt the weight of sadness and hopelessness upon me. That was all it had taken. That little offer of help, the slight sound of concern in Henderson's voice, and I realised that I hadn't had an iota of positive human interaction since the evening with the waitress in Nairn, which seemed a long, long time ago. Ten months, by all reckoning, yet it seemed longer.
'I need to find the Jigsaw Man, that's all.'
He looked saddened by that, as if my sudden melancholy was getting to him, and shook his head.
'Jones? Two Feet?' I said. 'I just need to speak to the old gang, see if anyone knows anything.'
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and started looking through contacts.
'Janine couldn't help you?'
'Wouldn't, more like,' I said. 'But I genuinely don't think she's seen him in six months, doesn't know where he is.'
He turned his phone round to show me. Under the name Norman there was a mobile number.
Two Feet's real name was Norman. He'd hated Norman, and had been known as Two Feet from the age of five. Henderson had always called him Norman, whether he liked it or not.
'Not sure where he lives, and we haven't had any contact in... I don't know, like five years, six maybe. But this was his number back then, so as long as he hasn't changed it, I think he'll still be in Glasgow.'
I took the number down on a piece of paper. I was operating without a phone, as the agency hadn't provided me with one and I didn't consider it an essential. The phone had never taken over my life in the way that it seemed the rest of society had allowed it to.
'Jones?' I asked, looking up.
He shook his head.
'If she's looking for you already,' he said, 'she'll find you. She found you before, didn't she?'
'I met her in a bar,' I said. 'Total accident.'
He didn't say anything, then he took a long slug from the glass. Downed about half of it in one go. We weren't anything near the twenty minutes, but I could tell that he was getting ready to leave.
'There are two types,' he said, laying the glass back down. His lips were moist. 'There's you and me and Norman. Maybe we make shit up, maybe we hide things, it's not all there, playing out on the surface. But we're people. Ordinary people, full of subtlety and complexity, every aspect of life dwelling inside us in some small measure, different aspec
ts of that bubbling to the surface at any moment. That's how it is.'
He paused to take another long drink, not quite draining the glass. I waited to hear about the second type.
'And then there are those like the Jigsaw Man and Jones.' He hesitated again, although this time he didn't lift the glass. 'Didn't you think sometimes... didn't you think, this guy sitting here at the table, doing his jigsaw... he looks like the same guy that was sitting here yesterday, and if he bothers opening his mouth he'll sound like the same guy... but it's not him. This is someone else. And Jones was the same. I don't know who Jones was, I really don't, and I haven't, like, thought of her in the longest time, but... you know, it seemed like there was more than one of her, that's all. I can't explain what I mean by that, or how that might have happened.'
I didn't speak. He lifted his glass and downed the rest of his drink.
'But that's how it was. So be careful. I might say that I hope you don't find what you're looking for.'
'Maybe there's more than one of all of us,' I said.
He looked across the table, his face indecipherable. What was that look? Sadness? Pity? Did he feel sorry for me because I couldn't understand what was going on?
'It's nice to see you again,' he said. 'Take care. Really. I'm sorry this has been so quick, but I'd be lying if I said that seeing you again has not disconcerted me somewhat. I'm going to go home, get outrageously drunk and, if I still can, fuck my husband.'
*
I spent the evening sitting in the hotel bar. I ate a sandwich and some crisps, and drank excessively. I didn't seem to be able to get drunk. It seemed that meeting Henderson had disconcerted us both.
I had gone through a lot to unearth the notion that there was more than one Jigsaw Man; or, at least, there were four manifestations of the one man. How had Henderson been able to see that just sitting in the café all those years ago? Why had he been sensitive to that? And where did Jones fit into this? Was she some other representation of the Beatles, or something else, something completely different?
Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! Page 14