The Spoiler

by Annalena McAfee

  Part of her tried to imagine her brother at the end of the line; another part of her, the self-hating, selfish coward, did not want to know, wanted to shut him out, erase the nightmare images of him—haggard, filthy, his skinny body deformed by fear and craving—that were lining up in a grotesque beauty pageant, each contestant more hideous than the next.

  “Only it’s late.”

  “Well, I’ll piss off then if I’m bothering you.”

  “No. No. Don’t go, Ross. I was just worried you were in trouble.”

  “Don’t you worry about me, Tam. I’m doing great.”

  His voice was pitched half an octave higher than usual, borne up by a helium exhilaration. Or perhaps agitation.

  “Have you eaten lately?” Tamara asked.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m good. Taking care of myself.”

  Tamara knew her questions were futile. Ross’s dishonesty was automatic. He lied by default, especially to himself. Other people might let themselves go a little, have a few off days now and again, but Ross’s self-abandonment was total, heroic.

  “Is the flat okay?” Tamara asked.

  “Yeah. Been tricky, though. Those bastards, the Brummies in the flat above, had it in for me. They tried to bug me. Microphones. I sussed them out, though. Found a camera in the ceiling, too.”

  “Oh, Ross.”

  It had started again.

  “No problem, Tam.” His laugh, a hacking variation on his bronchitic cough and calculated to convey carefree merriment, suggested its opposite. “I’m too clever for them. Rumbled their game. Crystal helped me sort it.”

  Crystal—the hopeless junkie ex-girlfriend he had met in a psychiatric unit. She was eleven years older than him: a raddled hippie with an extra decade of substance abuse under her beaded Navajo belt.

  “Crystal’s been around,” he had said with unsavoury relish five years ago when he first described his new girlfriend to Tamara. “She’s a gypsy spirit—studied with gurus in India, lived in a cave on Ios, hung out with Maoris in New Zealand, worked as a snake charmer in Morocco …”

  Her Romany caravan had finally rolled into King’s Cross, where she and Ross had gotten together in detox and cemented their relationship in successive sprees of retox.

  “Is that Crystal as in meth, or as in semiprecious stones with healing powers?” Tamara had asked.

  “Actually,” he’d replied with injured insouciance, “she has highly developed psychic abilities.”

  When Ross first met her, her younger sister had just died of an overdose, which clairvoyant Crystal had failed to foresee. It was a family business, this kind of screw-up. Crystal was bad news. But then Ross was bad news, too.

  Tamara felt a cold spike of anxiety, as if she had just injected some rough speed herself. She remembered how she had found her brother in his flat after his last split from Crystal—was that three times now?—cowering in his own dirt among a pack of feral cats. There was no furniture, apart from a suppurating mattress on the floor, partly covered by one of the bedspreads their mother had crocheted, irreparably soiled and torn. (Tamara’s, clean and nursery bright, was on her bed even now.) The flat was in darkness. Newspapers had been taped over the windows, and the light fittings and electrical sockets had been dismantled in his meticulous search for the cameras he knew were there, filming him and beaming his plight to TV sets all over Britain.

  “Have you been taking your medication?” Tamara asked now, knowing that if Ross were ever to make the mistake of telling the truth, it would not be on this subject. Any pharmaceuticals he was taking would be unprescribed.

  “Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry about me.”

  Tamara felt a helpless swoon of affection; she wished she could make everything all right for him. Ross was her big brother, but most of the time he seemed like her child. Her damaged child.

  “Do you need anything? Are you warm enough?”

  She had tried to find ways of helping him directly—sending parcels, paying his electricity bills, phoning credit-card food orders to his local supermarket. Cash, Tamara learned early, ended up in his dealer’s pocket.

  “No, I’m fine. Sorted. The cooker’s packed up, though. But I’m going to apply for a loan from the social. Get meself straight.”

  “You don’t have a cooker? How are you feeding yourself?”

  Tamara knew she sounded like their mother. She also knew that there was some hypocrisy here; her own dietary habits—her erratic reliance on canteen fry-ups and party canapés—were not exemplary.

  “I’m okay. Like I said. Crystal’s cooking for me.”

  Tamara imagined Crystal in the kitchen. The only dish she would be cooking would be crack cocaine.

  “Oh, Ross. You’ve got to take care of yourself.”

  “Don’t nag. I can stand on my own two feet. I’m doing fine.”

  His tone had changed, as it often did, from chipper defiance to aggression. If she wasn’t careful he would turn on her, accuse her of belittling him and slam down the phone.

  “I’m not nagging. I want to help.”

  “You’re always helping, Tam.” Now he was wheedling, flattering her. “It’s not fair on you. I’ll be all right.”

  “But you weren’t all right in the past.”

  “That’s right. Rub it in. Don’t you worry about me. You’ve got your own life to lead.”

  He was pulling away, rejecting her.

  “Ross, you know it makes me happy to help you out. You’re my brother.”

  She was aware of the language, the therapy-speak. She knew she should not be drawn in, or rather she should not throw herself in. But what was the alternative to co-dependency? The cold shoulder? Let them sink as low as they could, turn your back and walk away, until they could fall no further. Only then, was the conventional wisdom, could they start to help themselves. But what if they disappeared altogether? She could not do it.

  “I’m okay.” That sulky voice again. “Crystal’s helping me out.”

  That was exactly what Tamara feared.

  “Look, let me send you some money.”

  “Only if you’re sure you can spare it.”

  The ready capitulation. Was this the purpose of his call? A little ice stiletto entered Tamara’s heart, then melted. What difference did it make? Her brother needed help; that was certain. Who would choose to live the way he did? She thought again of that hellhole flat, the chaos and grime, the smell. Tamara reassured him; yes, honestly, she could spare it. But Ross had no bank account and the complexities of a postal order, requiring a visit to a post office and the need to produce identification, were beyond him. Tamara would draw out £80 in cash from her building society savings tomorrow, put it in an envelope and send it by registered mail to his address.

  “Thanks, Tam. You’re the best. I’ll pay you back as soon as I get straight.”

  The idea that Ross would pay her back was almost as ludicrous as the notion that he would ever get straight.

  “Don’t worry about it. Just—”

  She never finished her sentence. The phone-box pips broke in. The line clicked, then lapsed into its sinister purr. He had gone. Misery tugged at her, like a horror-movie hand reaching up from a drain to grab at her ankles. She poured another glass of wine. The smoking abyss was a constant presence, but she did not have to stare into it. There was always work. It was a necessity, and it could also be an escape. She opened Tait’s book again.

  Outside one of the huts that had been the scene of such sustained brutality stood the jagged stump of a once mighty tree. This was all that remained of Goethe’s Oak after an Allied air strike only days before, aimed at a nearby munitions factory, had sent incendiary bombs raining on the camp. There were many casualties among the inmates. Goethe’s symbolic tree was another victim of the raid.

  A tree? Did Tait think she was writing for the gardening pages? Tamara could not bear much more of this.

  She tidied the distracting heap of gossip glossies and TV magazines into a neat pile and stuffed them u
nder her futon, logged on to her Amiga, fed it a floppy disk and opened her latest draft. The bright screen of her computer blazed, a chilly hearth, in the darkness of her flat.

  Those eyes, once wide and Wedgwood blue, set in a face of palest porcelain, which had mesmerised some of the leading figures of the last half century, are now potholes in an Ordnance Survey contour map, and are focused flirtatiously on our photographer as he snaps away.

  As I express my admiration for her work and encourage her to reminisce about past glories, her carapace begins to crack, and I can at last see the vestiges of beauty in the ancient ruin of her face.

  “Yes,” she says, smiling almost girlishly, recalling her love affair with Bing Crosby, immortal crooner, “they were marvellous times, marvellous. He had the most wonderful feet, you know. Whenever he held me in his arms, I felt like a gossip columnist.”

  It must have been around 2 a.m. when they finally left, Paul still trying to engage Bobby and his phlegmatic actor friend on the subject of the Sarobi field hospital, the laughter of Aidan and Inigo fading away down the corridor, Clemency and Ruth en route to the bottle bank with sacks of empties clanking like distant church bells. Honor had also persuaded Ruth to take away the hideous flowers that the pushy young reporter had brought.

  She poured a drink and settled back in her chair. Thanks to Ruth, the ashtrays had been emptied and the flat was now cleaner than it had been before they had arrived. Cleaner, and sadder too. Their departure had sucked all sound and life from the place.

  She switched on the wireless. The World Service. How debased it had become. A man with the deliberate speech and oscillating tone of a children’s entertainer was patronising a group of African women about a clean water project. Once, Honor had been a regular contributor to the service, broadcasting news and features from what were then—before the influx of airborne sightseeing parties and credit-card-carrying backpackers—some of the most remote regions of the world. She could be accused of many things, she was sure, but she had never patronised listeners, or readers. Nor could she be indicted for cheeriness.

  Tad was the one for bonhomie. Though he had his dark moments, too. But only Honor was party to those. As a director Tad was known for the convivial atmosphere he encouraged on set, if not for the intellectual rigour of his filmmaking.

  “He was a lovely man,” one broken-nosed gaffer had said to her after the funeral.

  “A real gent,” said another.

  She had thanked them sombrely, but tonight, remembering, alone in her icy flat, she laughed aloud, and was startled by the eeriness of the sound, an echoing cackle. She struggled to her feet to fetch her shawl from her bedroom. The busy hum of the evening had not entirely done the trick. Bobby’s wine and the pleasingly disputatious conversation had temporarily warmed her core as effectively as Glenbuidhe’s Rayburn, but now she was shivering, and her fingers were stiff with cold. She had found herself, despite the evening’s distractions, like an infatuated schoolgirl, constantly returning to that recent phone call, mentally replaying it, word for word. A ghost of times past. She was a rationalist by conviction but superstitious by nature—the legacy of an Anglo-Scots background, she supposed—and felt that it was only her fervent wishing, and its more judicious counterpoint of dread, that had generated this visitation. Here she was again, racing towards the ravine.

  In bleaker moments her entire life—even her work—had seemed a sequence of Lilliputian diversions, futile displacement activities. The flights and fights, the sleepless fevers of writing, the manoeuvres and machinations, the dogged progress across the planet, like Robert the Bruce’s spider, millimetre by millimetre—and for what? The pleasures of success and catastrophes of failure, sexually as well as professionally, all the incessant busyness, to weave this cobweb in a dusty corner. She was shivering again. If she were to succumb to remorse now, she would have a seventy-year backlog to get through.

  As for kinship, real or assumed, it had always been poisoned by betrayal and estrangement. And motherhood, the saintly state—who would ever admit the desolate truth about that? Not poor Lois, whose unconditional love for Daniel and her bitter loss had sent her tumbling over the edge. Even the pleasures of music and landscape seemed tainted to Honor now. The hills were scarred by tarmac and infestations of tax-break pine plantations, the lochs disfigured by fish farms, and music, once consolation and delight, had largely become an irritant, an audible manifestation of anxiety.

  She poured another drink and set it down on the table by Tad’s picture. Their marriage, if not quite “open,” as they used to say in the sixties—Tad had been too babyishly jealous for that civilised arrangement—had been far from closed. There had been an unspoken understanding, or at any rate an assumption on Honor’s part, that the occasional fling was permissible as long as it did not interfere with their marriage. The passion of their affair—he had been a vigorous and attentive lover—had, five years after the wedding, subsided into a comfortable, if spiky, sibling affection that neither of them wished to relinquish. But a receipt from a French lingerie shop, carelessly dropped by Tad on the bedroom floor, had been the first indication of a seismic shift in their domestic arrangements.

  Honor assumed he must have a regular mistress, and she rebuked herself for caring so much, and for being so surprised. She herself had been his mistress, drawn to him, after their first meeting at a screenwriters’ cocktail party, by his kindness, his uncomplicated optimism and his canine devotion. She had tired of complexity, and Tad’s Labrador temperament seemed marvellously exotic after a succession of affairs with tormented egomaniacs and miserabilists. His work reflected his nature—lighthearted and warm, with a blitheness that tipped over into silliness. Honor had, against her inclinations, liked his silliness.

  In his company, in the early years, the horrors of the day and terrors of the night receded. He was not entirely indifferent to suffering, and shook his head at her stories of famine from the Horn of Africa, or child poverty on the Indian subcontinent, but he never seemed to truly feel it. Mortality did not perturb him, not because he was wisely resigned to it, or saw it with a philosopher’s equanimity as part of life, but because it never occurred to him that it had any relevance to him. Death, like unhappiness and poverty, was something that happened to others. He was devoid of misanthropy and his frivolity was a sparkling foil to her brooding Sturm und Drang. At bottom, he had been a far better human being than she could ever be. He did not have to work at it. There was no hinterland, no undercurrent of resentment or regret. Only his jealousy, irrational and all-consuming, had given her any sort of moral advantage.

  She felt shame, now, to admit that at first she had found his jealousy flattering. She did not even have the excuse of youth or innocence; she had been an urbane fifty-year-old when they first met. But he had been so handsome, with a broad, safari-suited virility (a look that Paul could only aspire to) that made her feel—and she would confess this to no one—protected. It was a novelty. The straightforward affair, without a trace of existential anguish. It was then, in their first year of stolen meetings, that he had bought her pastel silk-and-lace underthings, flimsy clichés of male fantasy wrapped in pink tissue, from the same bespoke Paris atelier.

  But six years into their easy marriage, looking more closely at the discarded receipt, she saw that the bustier he had bought, in vulgar rouge et noir, was built to accommodate a belle poitrine of 117 cm, a 46DD. Was Tad in the grip of a helpless passion for a giantess? Was obesity now “his bag”? As a man with a certain status in the film industry, he had always enjoyed the attentions of pretty young actresses. But had his tastes, jaded by the predictable amusements of slender-hipped ingenues, grown more arcane?

  After much interrogation and many tears (she asked the questions, he wept) it finally emerged: Tad had a secret hobby. The lurid corset, with its integral garter belt, was for him. Tad Challis, the bluff and affable American gent of Pinewood Studios, liked to wear women’s clothing. Red eyed and begging forgiveness, he brought
out a tin trunk, concealed in a cupboard in the spare room of the flat. He unlocked it, and a tangle of brightly coloured silks, satins, brocades and floral cottons spilled out, like the contents of a monstrous child’s dressing-up box.

  Even in her rage—Honor could not bear that he had concealed all this from her—it would have seemed cruel to point out that at six foot three, weighing two hundred pounds, with the physique of a dissipated rugby player and an out-thrust jaw stippled with grey bristle, he would make the most implausible woman. He was nothing like a dame, unless the dame was appearing in a pantomime.

  Under the pretext of trips to discuss film projects that never materialised, while Honor was pursuing her own work, or assignations, he would check into a corporate hotel at an airport and, in the harsh lighting of his hotel room, proceed to transform himself, with an immense padded bra, floral frock, wig and copious makeup, into what he saw as Gina Lollobrigida in her prime. Widow Twankey would have been nearer the mark. Thus attired, he would—by his account, and Honor chose not to press him further—go down to the bar, drink a couple of cocktails, eat a solitary meal in the restaurant and retire inviolate and alone to bed in peach chiffon nightwear.

  For all that, it had been a happy marriage. Tad’s confession had left her freer to pursue her own interests. They asked fewer questions of each other, and Tad curbed his jealousy, or at least was a little more abashed when he expressed it, and when they were together it was an agreeable reunion of old friends.

  She picked up the photo again and looked at it closely, as if her stare could charge the image with life. She took in the familiar expression of delight, the little twist of pleasure in the corners of his mouth. He was one of the privileged few, and he gloried in it. His status had nothing to do with economic advantage: Tad had the gift of happiness. But there was something withheld, too, a cast of secretiveness about the eyes that she came to recognise later. No matter. Vanished. She traced the outline of his lips with her finger, set the picture back on the table and fetched another drink. The flats opposite were in darkness, and she was seized by a sense, thrilling and irrational, that she was the only person awake in a city of sleepers.