The Optimists

by Andrew Miller

  ‘In time,’ said the doctor. He was Swiss and had been in the country for ten days. ‘Too much sorrow makes the heart like a stone.’

  ‘It’s how the heart survives,’ said Silverman.

  The doctor agreed, and had looked at them then, at Clem and Silverman, knowing—for Silverman had told him on the walk from his office—that they had been the first journalists at the site. Fleetingly, it seemed he might take an interest in them, go through some questionnaire on trauma, check them over, but he was visibly tired and already, perhaps, doing more than he knew how to properly manage. He shook their hands, raised an arm in wry farewell, and left them to find their own way out.

  5

  Two days later (he had seen nothing in the local papers about the Spanish girl; no yellow crime-scene signs had appeared on the streets) Clem spent thirty minutes searching for the telephone number of Zara Jones, a freelance publicist he had slept with in March. He remembered her writing it on the back of a receipt that he had put into his wallet then, evidently—for it was no longer in his wallet—put somewhere else. Looking on the kitchen table, a place where many things were put down and forgotten, he found, dispersed among a sediment of old newspapers and magazines, curious fragments from the weeks and months before Africa. Letters, cuttings, invitations. Lists of things to do and buy. A note, scribbled on the corner of an envelope—Yellow fever, tetanus, malaria. Cholera? There were contact-sheets from a job in Derry in February. A Christmas card from Clare—Brueghel’s hunters—her message: Dundee under six inches of snow!

  The receipt was in the lockable metal box beside his desk where he kept, in loose order, anything connected to the business side of his life. It was a receipt from a cab company he sometimes used to get to Heathrow. On the back of it she had written her mobile number in purple ink, then her name, followed by a question mark and an exclamation.

  He sat at the desk and called her. He did not quite believe he would get through to her, had no clear idea what he would say if he did, but when, after six or seven rings, she answered, he was surprised by how easy it was, how quickly they assumed the necessary manner.

  ‘How are you?’ she asked.

  ‘OK. And you?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Are you in London?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When did you get back?’

  He lied, then asked if she was around in the evening. She said there was an event in the West End, some awards ceremony she had to attend, something dull but unavoidable. ‘We could have a drink before,’ she said, ‘if you want. Do you know the bar at the Soho Theatre?’

  ‘Dean Street?’

  ‘I’ll be there at six.’

  He had met her at a party for the launch of David Singer’s new book of photographs. This was the same Singer who had made his name with pictures of London that made it appear like Calcutta in the rain—sink estates, homelessness, pensioners in high-rise hovels. Images with the formality of Victorian bromide prints, filling a half page in the Mirror or the Guardian, or in those papers abroad that wanted to remind their readers of how empires ended. Then nothing for years. Then this, Overworld (was some pun intended?), a book of subtly coloured abstracts, colour bleeding into colour, the whole thing performed within the walls of his studio in Little Venice. It was art; it would, at least, be sold like art. At the party, Singer was dressed in a chocolate brown Italian suit, a man suddenly glamorous in his mid-sixties, a young wife with him, heavily pregnant, a roomful of people who admired him and wished to be close to him. Prints of his photographs, two yards high, lined the walls like Rothkos. The former work, the former wife, the old ideals were not on view. The story was how he had reinvented himself: now he was the subject of other people’s pictures. He shook hands, kissed cheeks, swilled champagne from a flute. To Clem, he had the look of a man who was growing to hate himself.

  Zara Jones was good at her job. When she walked up to Clem she knew who he was. She complimented him on his pictures (behind the lines) from Desert Storm. She had also seen a photo-essay on the lives of Sri Lankan fishermen that he had done for a Swedish magazine. So beautiful,’ she said, without specifying what it was she had found beautiful—the people or the pictures or both. He thanked her, though declined her invitation to meet Singer. He asked her to stay and talk to him. She said she would try to come back later, smiled, and went off to ask someone else if they would like to spend a few moments with David.

  He watched her, spied on her for the rest of the evening, then tagged along to the post-party party where Singer got drunk and his wife told Clem that her nipples seeped continuously. After the restaurant closed there was a complicated game with cabs—who was south of the river, who was north. Zara lived in one of the squares behind Oxford Street and Clem went with her, kissing her in the taxi, her tongue tasting of vodka and seafood and cigarettes. Her flat was several times the size of his own, her father some Croesus in the development world. On the bedside table she cut four lines of cocaine with the edge of her AmEx gold card. When he had undressed her she said she was bleeding a little. He said it didn’t matter, and later on stood in the brilliant white bigness of her bathroom wiping blood from his thighs with damp tissues, grinning at himself in the mirror.

  The next time was at his place. The central heating had packed up, she didn’t like the food he’d cooked, and they argued about politics—her right (her father’s right) against his left (his mother’s). The sex was perfunctory. After it, they lay awake for hours, each of them disturbed by the other’s slightest movement.

  The last time was in a hotel on Brighton seafront, a clear evening, blue stars over the sea, the beach dotted with the lamps and little fires of the night anglers. Though Clem was eleven years older than her and had grown up in entirely different circumstances, they bent their histories until their lives assumed a certain likeness. Both had lost their mothers—Clem at twelve, Zara at seventeen. Both had older sisters, both spoke French, both believed the other to be in some way remarkable, if only for the colour and clarity of the eyes. They sat up in the hotel bar getting amorous on drink, and when upstairs they fucked (the headboard clattering the flowered wallpaper) there was an excitement, an urgency that had felt to Clem like the beginning of something good. But the next afternoon, sleep-poor, fogged from the drinking, they parted at the station in London without any firm arrangement to meet again. Three days later she left on a nationwide tour with a snooker player who had written his memoirs. By the time she was back, Clem was packing for Africa. The affair—if that was what it amounted to—already seemed the kind of interlude he had had many times before, an event without much history or consequence. It was then that he must have filed the receipt in the metal box beside his desk, without first bothering to make a copy of her number.

  He arrived outside the theatre at a quarter past six. Zara was already there, sitting on a stool at the curve of the bar. He watched her through the plate-glass doors, her image (her back straight as a dancer’s) a still point against the reflected flow of the street. She was sipping a clear drink from a tall glass. She shook out a cigarette; the barman lit it for her and she smiled at him. She had pulled her hair back tightly from her face, a style Clem hadn’t seen her use before and that made her look thinner, older too, an older woman’s chic. She turned, briefly scanned the street, but looked away without having seen him. He wondered how long she would wait for him. Another ten minutes? Another twenty? There were only a half-dozen others in the bar: the playgoers would not start arriving until later. The barman spoke to her again, coming on to her perhaps, or going through the motions out of professional chivalry. A hand plucked at the sleeve of Clem’s jacket. There was a man behind him, bearded, his clothes bright with dirt. He excused himself, then explained to Clem that he was gathering the fare for a bus to Farringdon. He had friends in Farringdon and would find some relief there. He asked if Clem knew what he meant. Clem gave him the change from his pockets then started walking back up Dean zo Street. He turned into Wardour Street a
nd stopped at the first pub he came to. The air inside was bottle-brown, the customers mostly office workers carrying on their office life in another place. He stayed, drinking steadily at a table on his own. When he came out, two-thirds of the street was draped in shadow, but the tops of the buildings on the eastern side were still brilliantly lit, each detail—the grimed bricks, the blank windows, the uneven lines of moss—vivid and lovely. On Windmill Street he went into another pub. The music there was much louder and the customers did not look like people who ever went to offices. A sign in the toilets read: Thieves operate on these premises. In the bar, a screen was showing music videos, which he watched for a long time with great attention before going out to one of the phone boxes by Shaftesbury Avenue. He had some idea of calling Zara’s mobile but rang instead a number printed on one of the cards stuck to the inside of the box. The woman who answered put him in mind of an actress (he couldn’t recall the name), a comedienne who specialised in old-fashioned Cockney types with fruity voices. She called him ‘deary’, described the girl she was selling, and gave him the address of a building on the Edgware Road. When she asked for his name he thought he should make one up but his mind was blank, and in the end, after a pause that must have sounded as though he were making one up, he gave his own name, twice.

  He took out the money he would need from a cashpoint on Regent Street, then walked slowly along Oxford Street, imagining that some distraction would lead him towards a better hour. He had paid for sex once before, a hotel in Washington DC five years ago, an autumn dusk when, suddenly afraid of his own company, he had looked in the phone book under ‘Escorts’, and known, at the girl’s discreet knocking—known for an appreciable stretch of seconds—an entirely normal happiness, as though the sound announced the half-expected visit of a friend, and not the advent of some utter stranger for whom a car was waiting in the street below.

  The building on the Edgware Road was a mansion-block between a coffee bar and an Arab newsagent’s. He rang the bell, the catch was released remotely, and he went inside. In the corridor ahead were rows of white doors, all shut. The lift was out of order and he started on the stairs, concrete steps with a metal rail, a fire-door on each floor giving access to another corridor. On the fourth floor he tapped at one of the white doors. It was opened, quickly, and he stepped into a small hallway, empty except for a single chair with its back against the wall. A woman, whose voice he recognised from the phone call, invited him to sit down. She asked if he wanted a drink of orange juice. He said he didn’t. She gave him the laminated card she was carrying. ‘The young lady won’t be long,’ she said (not a comedienne now but a shopkeeper in a failing business). She retreated to her room, to the low-volume bubbling of a television. The card she had given Clem was a menu of services. The cheapest was hand relief; the most expensive—though none was particularly expensive—described simply as Sex. He placed the card under the chair. A few minutes later the door on his left was opened. A girl, a young woman like any he might have passed in the street half an hour earlier, smiled at him and led him into her place of work, a small, low-ceilinged room with a chest of drawers under the window, and next to the bed a lamp with a pink, tasselled shade. Beside the lamp was a radio, a bottle of baby oil, and the ready-torn foil envelope of a condom.

  ‘I am Irena,’ she said.

  ‘Clem.’

  ‘Claim?’

  ‘Clem. After Clement Attlee. My mother was a Fabian.’

  She nodded, perfectly used, it seemed, to not understanding what people said, perfectly untroubled by it. She was wearing a tight black dress, and a pair of white slippers of the sort nurses in old-time sanatoria might have worn, and which Clem guessed she had brought with her from whatever country she had recently come from. He gave her the money. She counted it, thanked him, stashed the notes in a drawer.

  ‘I express myself through dance,’ she said. She turned on the radio and twisted the dial until she found a tune she could move to. Clem sat on the bed and watched her. She closed her eyes, swung her hips, ran her hands over her little breasts. Her favourite move was a spin with which, having danced a moment with her back to him, she would suddenly turn, as though towards a bank of lights.

  When the track finished she switched off the radio and stepped out of her dress. She was wearing panties but no bra. She took off his jacket and undid the buttons of his shirt. When she started trying to undo the belt on his jeans, tugging at it, he said he would do it himself. She reached for the baby oil. Clem lay on the bed in his underpants. She asked if he was shy. He said no and took off his pants. She turned him on to his belly, knelt astride him and rubbed his back with the oil. When his back was coated he turned over and she smeared his shoulders while rocking herself against his crotch. He touched her breasts. She clambered off him, pushed her panties down her skinny thighs, and rolled the condom over his half erect cock. She had shaved her pubic hair to an inch wide strip but had burned the delicate skin there with the razor. She stretched beside him, her legs spread. When he touched the opening of her vagina she was completely dry. He leaned over to kiss her. ‘No tongue,’ she said quickly, tightening her face as though he might bite her. He sighed and leaned back, then moved down the bed until his head lay between her breasts and he was listening, drowsily, to the patter of her heart. Was this what he had come for? Her skin, despite the trace of some inexpensive body spray, smelt good, and was cool and soft against his cheek. For a minute she let him lie there, even, briefly, stroking his hair with a stray, forgetful strumming of her fingers, but the mood, the posture, was inappropriate, unpaid for, unbuyable, and she pushed free of him, swinging herself to the edge of the bed and scooping her dress from the floor. ‘What are you doing?’ she demanded, scowling at him and holding the dress up in front of her. ‘You are sick? You are sick, or what is it?’

  He stopped for more drinks at a place on Baker Street, then hurried towards the West End thinking he might somehow come across Zara ‘bored’ at her event and persuade her to sit down with him for an hour. He would not try to explain things to her. He would not tell her about the Bourgmestre, or invite her to the flat to see the photographs he had there, pictures he had never sent to the agency because no newspaper could ever publish them. He would suggest a club (she would know one) and perhaps they would even dance. Together, they would perform a trick with time, carrying on as though they had just stepped off the train from Brighton. He would pull the thorn from his eye. She would pull the thorn from his eye. He would get free of this thing before he no longer knew how to.

  In Leicester Square the pubs were emptying. A crowd, hooting and singing and scuffling, shambled through the brightly lit doors of the Underground station. He had no idea where Zara’s event was. He stood at a street corner and looked up and down as if, through an open window somewhere, he might see them all gathered round a table. For the first time it occurred to him how very drunk he was, how addled. He was not going to meet Zara; he would not, he thought, even be able to call her again, and it was almost a relief to realise this, to have for a moment the impression of lucidity. There was nothing for him to do now but find his way to the end of the night, and he carried on towards the river, breaking on to the Embankment just above Waterloo Bridge and turning right, following the curve of the river towards Westminster. He ran at first, then jogged (through Parliament Square, along Old Palace Yard, Millbank), then walked, heavily, as though at each step the pavement descended a little in front of him. Across the river from Battersea he stopped and leaned against the wall. He felt dizzy, hollow. He wondered when he had last eaten anything. He needed a bench, a garden, some little grass square to lie down in. On the road behind him a taxi door thumped shut. A man and a thin, tottering woman went on to the jetty where the houseboats were moored. After a few minutes Clem followed them. He walked to a boat in the darkness at the far end of the jetty and stood there, poised for a challenge. When none came he stepped aboard. He went to the bows and squatted on a hatch cover. He was only some twenty ya
rds from the bank but the air was different here, touched with the chill of the water. And there were sounds, secretive though pin-clear from the middle of the river—birds, the splash of an oar, the tide streaming against the piers of the bridge. As his eyes adjusted he moved around the deck. The cabin doors were padlocked but in the stern of the boat he found the folding cushion from a lounger, a ragged thing that smelt of tanning lotion and diesel fuel. He laid it in the cockpit by the cabin doors, smoked a last cigarette (the ember hidden in the cup of his hands) then lay with his jacket as a blanket, shivered for a while, and slept.

  When he woke, a pair of herring gulls were standing on the edge of the cabin roof, large birds on wiry legs, their feathers combed by the dawn breeze. It was high water, slack water, the river lapping against the stone banks, two kinds of grey. He folded the cushion, put on his jacket and stepped over the rail on to the jetty. In the windows of some of the other houseboats orange lights were shining, but no one was out on deck to see him leave.

  He was cold. He thrust his hands into his pockets, walked up Beaufort Street, then along the empty paving of the Kings Road until he reached Sloane Square. The station there was still shut. He found a cafe at the side of it where a man possessing the bearing of a medieval Doge served bacon sandwiches and mugs of tea to taxi drivers and insomniacs. For half an hour he distracted himself with an out-of-date listings magazine, then went back to the station and took a train to Notting Hill.