by David Szalay
He turns and Steve says, ‘Do you remember the weekend we went to Sussex or wherever, and you were looking at those houses? Like manor houses and stuff. Me and Isabel and you and your girlfriend at the time—what was her name?’
‘Thomasina.’
‘Yeah, that’s right. How much were you worth then?’
‘I don’t know,’ James says. He is embarrassed to find people staring at him. ‘Honestly.’
‘It was hundreds of millions, wasn’t it?’
‘It was nothing in the end.’
‘Yeah, but for a while it was hundreds of millions. You were in the Sunday Times Rich List, weren’t you?’
‘Was I?’ James says. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
Steve nods. ‘You were.’
Slowly the long table loses its hold on the party. The French windows are opened and some smokers step outside. Then other people start to wander upstairs. Eventually there are only a few left, too intensely into whatever it is they are talking about to notice that they are laggards. Finally they too stand up and leave, and the uniformed waitresses move in to finish their work, speaking Polish to each other over the silently smoking wicks.
James does not want to be the first to leave and for a while he waits outside on the oval lawn. It is a mild afternoon. Some friends of Steve’s are there, smoking what seems to be a spliff next to a small magnolia tree, its sticky-looking buds just starting to break open. Soft-focused with wine, James watches them pass the spliff from hand to hand. They make him think of people he used to see on Brick Lane…
He hears a woman’s voice shout his name.
It is Miranda, walking towards him from the French windows, tottering slightly in her heels on the soft turf of the lawn. She is, he thinks, a nice-looking woman. The white dress she is wearing honeys her skin and her smile is an orthodontist’s masterpiece. ‘James,’ she says, ‘you didn’t finish telling me about… your horse. What’s her name again?’
‘Absent Oelemberg.’
‘You said she would win this week. Where? When? I need the money!’
He says, ‘I did tell you. It’s next week, not this week. She won’t win this week. A week tomorrow,’ he says, ‘at Huntingdon.’
‘Which race?’
‘I don’t know yet. Whatever race she’s in, she should win it.’
‘A week tomorrow, Huntingdon.’
‘Yes.’
She thinks for a moment. ‘That’s the thirteenth!’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that lucky or unlucky?’
‘This isn’t about luck.’
She laughs. ‘Oh isn’t it!’
James sees Mark wander into the garden. When he sees James talking to Miranda, he stops and with his hands in his trouser pockets looks up at the sky. A minute later he is followed by Isabel. ‘Ted’s just leaving,’ she says.
James looks at his watch. ‘I should be off too.’
And Miranda immediately says, ‘Yes, me too.’
And Mark, suddenly at her shoulder, says, ‘Yeah, I have to head as well.’
*
Hugo meets him in the shadowy vestibule, wagging his tail, and they do a slow lap of Mecklenburgh Square in the quiet, sinking light, stopping frequently for Hugo to sniff and officiously micturate. James lets him precede him into the flat, and from the kitchenette hears him lapping at his water bowl. James waits in the hall—the kitchenette is too small for them to be in there at the same time—until Hugo lifts his streaming muzzle and looks unhurriedly around. His weary eyes meet James’s and he waves his tail once or twice. When he has left the kitchen, James has a draught of tepid London tap water himself.
Then he phones her.
She picks up instantly—he is practically startled—and says, ‘Hello, honey. How are you? How was your sister’s lunch?’
‘Fine,’ he says. ‘How are you? What’s up? What are you doing?’
‘Ironing.’
‘Yeah?’
He is pleased that she is ironing—it seems so safe and stable. He hears that the TV is on, and imagines her half-watching the Sunday evening telly while the warm iron vaporously sighs. They talk for twenty minutes and suddenly everything seems okay. Even more so when he asks her when he will see her and she simply says, ‘Tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow? Okay.’
‘Okay?’
It is not until a few minutes later, when he has hung up and is feeding Hugo, that he starts to think about something that happened while they were speaking. He thought nothing of it at the time. He just heard what sounded like the front door of her flat slam shut, and Summer’s voice saying something, and then a man’s voice saying something which he didn’t make out. He thought at the time that it must be something to do with Summer.
Now it occurs to him that what he half-heard Summer say was, ‘Hi, I’m Summer.’ In other words, she was talking to someone she had never met before. He starts to think through the implications of this.
It takes him a few minutes to face up to the obvious implication—the man was visiting Katherine. If so, who was he? Katherine has a brother in London. Unfortunately, he knows for a fact that Summer has met him. A male friend then? Possibly. Though it would seem strangely intimate for a male friend to be turning up at her flat on Sunday night. The fact that she was ironing when he arrived—there would be something strangely intimate about that too. He knows of no male friends, heterosexual or otherwise, whom she would see on those sort of intimately informal terms. Most of all, if this was nothing more than an innocent visit from a friend, why did she not mention it to him? That was specifically unlike her. It was her way to end phone calls by saying what it was that was making her end them, even if it was something totally spurious. So for there to be something so obvious—that someone she was waiting for had just arrived—and for her not to mention it…
Her voice tensed up at one point. It was such a tiny thing that he was not even sure, at the time, that it had happened. First, she lost the thread of what they were saying. He had just said something, and she did not seem to hear it. There was a silence on the line. Then she said, ‘What? Sorry?’ This was immediately after he had heard the door slam, and then the voices, Summer’s voice and the wordless rumble of the man’s voice. It seemed obvious that she had been distracted. That in itself was not surprising or suspicious. They then talked for several more minutes.
It is those minutes he is thinking of now. There was something tense about her voice, as if she was talking with someone else there, someone standing there, standing over her, waiting for her to finish.
4
The next afternoon, Monday, he meets Freddy. James and Freddy were at school together, twenty years ago, at a famous school on the fringes of London. On Monday they meet in Earls Court—one of those streets of trucks stampeding past exhaust-fouled terraces, of youth hostels, and veiled, slummy houses full of subletting Australians, and other houses with tarnished nameplates in Arabic on the doors and the paint falling off in stiff pieces. There, under a two-star package-tour hotel, they meet. Freddy is piquey and jaundiced. In one of his down moods. His hair looks like it has slipped off his head—there is none on top, where the skin has the look of a low-quality waxwork, or the prosthetic scalp of a stage Fagin, but plenty further down, where it trails like the fringe of a filthy rug over his collar—the old collar, white-edged with age, of an otherwise blue Jermyn Street shirt stolen from his landlord.
They are meeting today to talk about the horse they part-own, and the ‘touch’ that is planned for next Monday. It is Freddy’s fault, all the horse stuff. It was he who introduced James to Michael—the tipster, the ‘pro’ James mentioned at Sunday lunch. Freddy was ‘seeing’ Michael’s sister, who was still at school at the time—this was nearly two years ago—and he quite often went to the house in Shooter’s Hill when her parents weren’t there. Sometimes, while Melissa was having a shower and Freddy was in the kitchen pilfering food from the fridge, Michael would emerge
to pour himself some Coke, and Freddy would talk to him. He asked him, for instance, what he did all day. Michael was in his late twenties, still lived with his parents, and did not seem to have a job.
His answer was—‘Systems testing.’
‘What sort of systems?’ Freddy said.
When he heard what sort of systems, Freddy started to take more interest in Michael. He pressed him for more information about his systems—monosyllabic Michael was not very forthcoming—and finally managed to persuade him to send him their selections by email every morning. For a week, Freddy just monitored these selections. Michael himself had said he did not put money on them, in spite of the fact that he kept a tally of their performance, which showed them to have made a profit over several years. And they made a small profit in the first week that Freddy monitored them. In the second week they made a large profit and Freddy plunged in. Soon he was making several hundred pounds a week. It was then—very full of himself and his several hundred pounds a week—that he told James. It had obviously never occurred to Freddy, as it quickly occurred to James, that there was the potential here to make much more than that by selling the tips on the Internet or through a premium-rate phone line.
One afternoon, they took the train down to Shooter’s Hill to see Michael. He was a large man, putty-pale. There was something odd about him. James explained that he wanted to pay him for his horse-racing tips. He had had in mind to pay Michael a percentage of subscription fees, or winnings, or something like that. However, it was obvious that Michael would prefer a flat fee, so James offered him £200 a week. James also wanted him to work in an office—he wanted the tips, the spreadsheets, whatever there was, on a hard drive he owned, in a space he paid for. Though this Michael was initially less keen on, he was soon spending an enormous amount of time in the office. Most of the time, in fact. The following scene was fairly typical.
Michael is sitting at his desk, working. The door opens. Michael does not look up or say a word. James shuts the door. ‘Morning,’ he says. ‘How’s it going?’ Still Michael says nothing. ‘How’s it going?’ James says again. This time Michael says, ‘Have you got my Coke?’ With a thud James puts the two-litre plastic flagon of Coke on Michael’s desk. Michael does not thank him. Without taking his eyes off the monitor in front of him, he opens the Coke and pours some into a plastic cup. ‘So how’s it going?’ James says again, sitting down at his own desk. When Michael still does not answer, James tries a more specific question. ‘Lots of selections today?’ Purposefully mousing, Michael does not seem to hear.
Michael’s systems, of which there were many, were purely quantitative—for all James knew, Michael had never seen a horse in his life. He seemed to have no idea that horse racing is something that actually happens, that the names of the tracks are the names of actual places, that people and horses and money and mud are involved; to him it seemed to be nothing more than an endless supply of new numbers on a screen—numbers in which to search for patterns, a puzzle that was never finished. For the first two months these numbers—marketed by James under the name of Professional Equine Investments—showed a nice profit, and the service soon had a few dozen subscribers. Unfortunately the first few months turned out to be unusual. More typical was a situation in which one week’s profit was offset by the next week’s loss, and the service just scraped along. Then started a monstrous sequence of losers, and James would sit at his desk while the rain fell outside, waiting for some antediluvian version of Windows to appear on the smouldering monitor and staring with something like hatred at Michael’s slack face, his sensuous mouth hanging open as he worked mechanically through the fiddly statistical analysis of his systems. He did not seem to notice that he was on a monster losing spree. That the subscribers were losing money while he still picked up his £200 a week. At such times, his wanting a flat fee seemed sly and even dishonest to James, who was unable to help feeling that this strange man, this hulking idiot in his nylon jacket and milk-white trainers, had somehow swindled him out of thousands of pounds.
Michael was spending less time in the office too. He was in later—sometimes quite late, and looking like he had not slept—and he left earlier. Indeed, he seemed to have something on his mind. For instance, he had started to stare out the window. That was not something he had ever done in the past, and now he would sit there for minutes at a time, while the Coke hissed in his cup, staring out the window at the East End sky.
‘Michael,’ James would say.
And Michael would not seem to hear.
‘Michael!’
And finally he would turn his oversized, unkempt head—exactly the way that Hugo did—unhurriedly and with a vacant expression in his docile chocolate eyes.
None of this prepared James for the phone call he received one Monday morning in early November.
He was out with Hugo when Freddy phoned. This was surprising in itself—it was not even eight.
‘I thought you might want to know,’ Freddy said, with a smile in his voice, ‘that Michael is in police custody.’
‘What?’
‘I thought you might want to know,’ Freddy said, even more slowly than the first time, ‘that Michael is in police custody. I’m not joking.’ He started to laugh. ‘He’s in a cell in Thamesmead Police Station.’
‘What are you talking about? Why?’
‘You’ll love this. Some sort of sexual assault.’
A long silence. Then James said, ‘You’re joking…’
‘No I’m not! That’s the point. I’m not joking! I just found out myself.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘Melissa. She sent me a text. I just spoke to her…’
‘What did she say?’
‘Just what I told you. Michael’s in a police cell, and it’s some sort of sex offence. I don’t know what he did exactly,’ Freddy said. ‘I just thought it was quite amusing.’ He seemed frustrated that James did not share his amusement.
‘You’re not joking?’ James said.
‘No.’
‘What’s Melissa’s number?’
‘Why?’
‘I need to speak to her. I need to find out what the fuck is going on.’
Melissa was on her way to work.
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ she said. She didn’t sound particularly put out. ‘Michael’s in the nick.’
He was apparently arrested on Sunday morning at the house of a woman who lived a few streets away in Shooter’s Hill.
The facts emerged at the trial the following summer. What seems to have happened is this—some time in September Michael was in a supermarket near his home. As he was paying, something startled him and he dropped his money onto the floor. The woman who was next in the queue had helped him pick it up. She smiled at him. Their hands momentarily touched. That was the first time he saw her.
Starting the next morning, he waited near the supermarket, hoping to see her again. When he did, he followed her home. It was a few days later that she first noticed him. She started seeing him in unexpected places, sometimes far from Shooter’s Hill—on the tube, in shops in the West End—and it was obvious that he was following her. When he followed her home and stood waiting outside, she phoned the police.
The next day they stopped him in the street and issued an informal warning. They told the woman they expected he was ‘scared out of his wits’ by their intervention—he had looked scared out of his wits when they walked up to him—and that he would now leave her alone. And he seemed to, until a week or so later she spotted him outside her office and he followed her onto the Docklands Light Railway. It was typical of Michael that when the police told him he’d be in trouble if he kept hanging around outside her house, he started hanging around outside her office instead. The second warning was more formal than the first. This time they took him to the station and made him sit in an interview room for an hour while they said things like, ‘You don’t want to go to prison, do you, Michael?’ The
y said that if they had to have him in again they would tell his ‘mum and dad’. ‘And what would they think, Michael, if they knew about this? Eh?’
For a few weeks there was no sign of him.
Slowly she stopped expecting to see him everywhere.
(This was the time of maximum listlessness in the office, of prolonged window-staring through sleepless eyes.)
Then one Sunday morning she was in the bath and thought she heard a noise downstairs. She stayed very still in the water, listening. There was a long, tingling silence. Then there was the sound of something smashing. To the hollow thump of footsteps on the stairs, her wet hands fumbled tremblingly with the lock. There was only one tiny window, which did not even open properly. Terrified, in tears, she was wrapping herself in a towel when someone tried the door. The pathetic flimsy lock had no hope of withstanding his weight. It surrendered at the first meaningful shove.
What was strange was that he did not seem to know what to do—not even what he wanted to do. A shocking male presence in the small pink-tiled space of the bathroom, he had her in his hands and did not seem to know what to do with her. When he started to move his hairy face towards hers—perhaps he was trying to kiss her—without thinking, with a sort of instinct, she sank her teeth into his forearm—he was pinning her shoulders to the wall—and immediately tasted his blood in her mouth like an old iron nail. He yelped and unpinned her, and she pushed past him and locked herself in her bedroom, from where she phoned the police.
She would not leave her room while he was still there—and for some reason he was still there when the police arrived, at speed and with wailing sirens. She threw the keys out the window and they let themselves into the house, where they found him still sitting on the linoleum by the toilet, holding the wound on his arm. (The puncture marks made by her teeth were plainly visible in the meat of his forearm, like a pair of dotted parentheses in a purple bruise.) He did not seem to understand what had happened, or what was happening.