by Alexei Sayle
‘I do,’ Harriet replied and handed over the sheet of paper Patrick had printed out on his computer with Martin Po’s requests on it.
She’d been fairly certain that he would laugh at it, this long catalogue of ludicrous items, yet Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro, after studying it for a few seconds, simply said, calmly folding the list and putting in his top pocket, ‘Hmm … These things are not easy to come by and I do know they will be expensive but I think at least half of them are possible.’
That morning Toby had sent a text message to Harriet’s mobile phone; he never used any of the abbreviations commonly employed so she reckoned it must have taken him over half an hour with his big hands to type in: ‘Dear Harriet, today I am having numerous injections in preparation for my Papua New Guinea trip in a privately owned travel clinic situated just off Regent Street and was wondering whether you would you like to join me for a relatively late lunch. Kind regards, your friend Toby.’
‘OK Gr8.2’ she’d sent back. To which an hour later Toby replied with the full name of the place including what floor of the building it was on, its complete postcode and complex directions for how to get there.
As Harriet walked towards the train station she passed the woman from the gift shop standing in her doorway staring up and down the road. Seeing her she said, ‘Oh, hello, Harriet, how are you? I was beginning to think you’d moved. You used to be in here all the. time buying presents but you haven’t paid us a visit in ages.’
‘No, well,’ she replied facetiously, ‘I don’t have any friends any more.’
‘Oh, I know, did they get pissed off when you got too pretty?’
Recently she’d stopped carrying any kind of handbag; when Harriet had been obese her bag had been almost as overweight as its owner. Looking back she didn’t know why she thought she needed to carry a spanner around with her — Harriet imagined the feeling of liberation achieved in getting rid of it was similar to what a man might experience the first time he got his head shaved. Now all she took with her was some money, her phone and a comb.
She sat on the clammy blue-chequered moquette of the train feeling light and free. Harriet hadn’t been out with Toby since they’d gone to the Italian restaurant and she told herself she was looking forward to chatting and laughing with him just like they had in the old days.
Since the railway companies had in recent years managed to stop vandals daubing their tags in spray paint on the outside of the rolling stock they’d instead taken to scratching their names on the carriage windows. Though the train in which the passengers swayed towards King’s Cross was relatively clean, the window through which she attempted to see out was as deeply etched as that of a Victorian gin palace. To Harriet it was as if they were travelling along with a smoke cloud of names that blew down the track with them.
As Harriet walked down Regent Street, slipping in and out of the bovine crowds of tourists, she caught sight of Toby standing outside the building where they were due to meet, staring across the road, looking for her in the wrong direction. The injections he’d been given had frozen his mouth so she could see his face was lopsided, and dribble oozed from his lips to drip over his chin. She stopped and after a few seconds went to stand in the doorway of a tartan shop. Harriet took her phone out of her jacket pocket and texted Toby: ‘Soree Tobes, got urgnt repair at shop, cnt cum. Hat xxx.’ She saw him start jumpily, then after searching through all his pockets take out his own mobile and stare down at the screen, read the message and then after half a minute’s thought begin to thumb in a reply.
She slid away down a narrow side street and walked east. Harriet had not been into the centre of London for months; the parties she went to with Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro were always in places like Tooting and Walthamstow, places that, like them, weren’t at the centre of things. The thundering, relentless traffic and the foetid diesel-soaked air made her feel like a character in a Thomas Hardy novel who’d taken three days to walk into the big intimidating town to buy a wife at the Michaelmas Fair. Though lunchtime was over all the cafés still seemed to be crammed full of office workers and tourists. Along the main streets there was a continuous dreary succession of chain sandwich bars followed by chain coffee shops, mobile phone shops and ugly building society branches, yet once she got out of the centre, on the side streets there was a more varied and attractive life. The cafés and sandwich bars with tasteful tables and chairs outside were family-run places, the delicatessens and grocery stores managed to be both modern and old-fashioned at the same time and it was the owners of the isolated, empty American franchises who stood on the step and stared up and down in a despairing way.
About twenty-five minutes later she got the message: ‘Dear Harriet, I am so sorry that we couldn’t meet for luncheon, nevertheless I will see you on Saturday at the Admiral Codrington for my leaving party. I sincerely hope your emergency repair went well. Regretfully yours, Toby.’
It had been hard to tell from the facial paralysis but to her the expression on his face when Toby got her message had been one of relief.
Of late when attending all the film premieres, restaurant openings, charity events, Helen tried hard to make sure she didn’t get her picture taken. At all these parties there was always the same photographer from the London newspaper, a swarthy little Armenian man whose pictures were featured in the Friday magazine that came free with the paper. A little while ago when she scanned one of his spreads of a Warbird-sponsored polo match to see if she’d been featured it suddenly seemed to her that there was a quality in these pictures that made everybody in them appear to be dead. Actually dead wasn’t the right word, maybe doomed was a better one. Somehow she felt there was a melancholy property that infused these images, a feeling that she was looking at people who died fifty years ago, passengers having a last drink prior to boarding an ill-fated airship, grinning cadavers partying while all the while under their table an anarchist’s bomb ticked away the seconds, stiff and starchy regimental dinners captured on the eve of First World War slaughter.
As Lulu rampaged around the Admiral Cod, her digital camera flashing like lightning, Helen recalled seeing in the London paper a grabbed photo of the author Martin Amis ‘dancing’ at a party. She had always really liked Amis’s books, even the ones nobody else did, but this photo did for all that. First of all there were the clothes: some sort of wrinkled linen-jacket worn over a pair of jeans with a neat crease pressed in them. Then there was the pose: Martin was facing a corner obviously dancing away by himself and appearing to be totally absorbed in the track; for some reason she was certain it was ‘You Spin Me Right Round Baby Right Round’ by Dead or Alive. Then there was the dancing itself: though it was a still photo you could tell Martin Amis was one of those middle-class white guys who form shapes with their bodies so disharmonious that dogs start howling on the Isle of Man every time they take to the dance floor yet who still believe deep in their hearts that they are really, really great dancers. After seeing this photo Helen was unable to read any of his books or even look at their covers without feeling queasy.
She didn’t know why Toby thought he needed a leaving party: he was only going to be away for three weeks and if he did need one why not a nice dinner at home with their good friends, Oscar and Katya and Martin and Swei Chiang, or perhaps a drunken do at the community centre with those guys from football or a few drinks at the office. But he had been insistent that he only wanted to go to the Admiral Codrington on a Friday night with Harriet, Lulu and Rose. Helen had said to Harriet, ‘Would you like to bring your friend Patrick along?’
She replied in quite a nasty voice, ‘Why would I want to invite him?’
‘I don’t know — he seemed good enough to bring to Christmas dinner.’
‘Oh, that was ages ago.
‘Yes,’ Helen said. ‘It feels like it was ages and ages ago.’
“Ello, Dollface!’ Toby heard Cosmo the waiter shouting, and turning saw Harriet sashaying between the chairs as she crossed the heaving
floor towards them. Somehow his sister-in-law seemed able to slide through the tiny slivers of space left by the shouting, waving drinkers without touching any of them.
Sometimes like, say, the other day in Regent Street, if he’d seen her then, he thought catching sight of her wouldn’t have affected him that much because he was prepared, whereas now the vision of her caught him unawares and he felt like he’d just donated two litres of blood: light-headed, silly and afraid. She was wearing combat pants low on her hips, a tight white vest (worn with no bra so that her nipples were outlined against the material) that didn’t quite reach the top of her pants and dull black chunky walking boots. Harriet slumped down at the table where Helen, Lulu, Rose and Toby had been drinking white wine for about three-quarters of an hour already, the muscles of her tanned arms shifting under the skin as they rested lightly on the candle-wax-coated pine surface.
‘Hey, Cos,’ she shouted back over her shoulder, then looking around said, ‘Christ, it’s busy in here.’
‘It was quieter earlier, when we got here,’ Helen replied.
‘Yeah, well … I’m here now so gimme a drink.’
‘There you go, Dollface,’ said Rose, passing her the bottle.
‘Is there somewhere else you’d rather be?’ Helen asked her sister.
‘Well, no, there was a thing in Dagenham I was invited to but I’m happy to be here instead. With my beloved friends and family.’
‘So how long will you be away?’ Lulu enquired, turning to Toby.
‘Well, the trip there will take nearly a week. We fly to Perth in Australia, then on to Darwin in the Northern Territories, take a smaller plane to Port Moresby, then a Land-Rover and finally we walk up into the Southern Highlands. After that it depends on how negotiations go, but I expect to be back within three weeks.’
‘Isn’t it dangerous? Aren’t there cannibals and stuff?’ Rose enquired.
‘Oh no, there used to be years ago but that’s all died out. The towns can be a bit rough actually but once you’re in the jungle it’s fine.’
After that there were more drinks, toasts to Toby Harriet gave him a tropical hat with corks dangling from it. He thought there might have been dancing at some point.
He did recall he said to Harriet, ‘Hat, you know when something bad happens to a couple? Say one of them is arrested for some terrible crime, like those women who were convicted of killing their kids on the say-so of that mad old paediatrician and all the husbands said, “I’ll stand by you forever, darling. I believe totally that you’re innocent, I know absolutely you didn’t do it.”’
‘Yeah?’
‘I really admire those men but I don’t think I’d ever do that. Personally, I think I’d pretty much believe anything bad about anyone that anyone told me. If somebody came up to me and said you were a murderer or Helen was a robot or was having an affair with a horse I’d more or less believe them right away, even if they weren’t somebody I knew particularly well.’
Harriet laughed, which made her look more lovely than ever to Toby, then said, ‘You’re giving yourself away there, Toby Because what you’re saying about other people is what you believe about yourself. You would never believe somebody else no matter how dose they were to you would be incapable of doing some terrible thing because you believe that you’re capable of doing something truly awful yourself.’
‘Oh, Christ, does it?’ he exclaimed. ‘I just thought it was a funny quirky thing I was telling you so you’d find me amusing.
I didn’t think I was accidentally giving stuff away, shit! But, Hat, I just sort of assumed that those men, say, who stuck by their wives they were doing it for other reasons. That they didn’t really believe their partners were innocent.’
‘No, they really believed their partners were innocent.’
‘Blimey, do they?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you feel you’d behave like that?’
‘Yes, I do. See, you’ve just told me you think that you’re a potential killer or something worse. But I won’t believe it of you, even if there’s documentary evidence backed up with CCTV footage and sworn statements from members of the clergy and the House of Lords.’
‘I don’t know whether to be pleased or not, you’re saying that you don’t think I’m capable of anything above the banal.’
‘Yes, but in a good way, Toby.’
‘Night, night, Angel,’ the Tin Can Man was saying as they came out of the pub long after midnight, ‘give the kids a kiss for me and tell them I’ll see them soon.’
From across the pub seeing Toby and Harriet talking with their heads so close together like they shared some sort of secret made Helen feel somehow horribly alone; the irresistible urge rose in her to talk about Julio so since there was nobody else around she was forced to speak to Lulu and Rose, even though they were both rubbery with drunkenness.
‘This erm … friend of mine,’ she said, ‘guy I know, he says that women when they have a crisis in their lives they want to run away and work in a hotel. How weird is that?’
‘Oh yeah, sure …‘ said Rose, trying to focus on her, ‘it’s in Eastbourne.’
‘No, it’s not,’ Lulu contested hotly, ‘it’s in the Lake District about five and a half miles outside Keswick on the A66. Big half-timbered place, I’m going to be looking after the plumbing once I go nuts.’
‘Well, my place is definitely in Eastbourne,’ Rose persisted, on the seafront, painted a sort of rusty blue. I’ll work on reception after I go mad.’ Then, putting on the sort of fluting voice she thought a receptionist might use, said, ‘Do you have any baggage, madam? Can I order you a newspaper in the morning? Could I take the imprint of a credit card for room service items?’ She smiled triumphantly at the two other women. ‘See, I could do that.’
12
Soft grey cloud the colour of gravel hung low over the rainforest. The platoon of Australian SAS soldiers, their sweat-rimmed tropical hats, baggy shorts, knee-length socks, unshaven chins and black MI6 rifles cradled in their arms making them look like a troupe of dissolute boy scouts on a high school killing spree, had walked with Helen across the mountains from where the road from Port Moresby had run out, hacking their way through the malodorous, leech-dripping foliage for three long days. As they pushed through the clinging jungle Helen was pleased to discover that although admittedly not carrying a heavy pack she was more or less able to keep up with the Aussie soldiers; she guessed that natural fitness must run in her family.
When she had seen Toby off in the minicab to Heathrow Airport Helen had felt no concerns for his safety. The plan had been for Toby and the rest of the negotiating team, protected by a detachment of the Papuan New Guinean army, to trek to a ‘village in the Highlands where they would meet representatives of the rebels who’d taken Polly Williams. Warbird had been through negotiations of this kind a number of times before and they’d always been able to buy the natives off with the equivalent of a bag of balloons and a pencil. Helen had spoken to Toby once from Australia and again on a landline from Port Moresby, but since then nothing. She wasn’t disturbed by this — communications were bound to be difficult.
So when the director of Warbird had come into her office looking all serious she had suspected nothing. ‘Helen,’ he said, ‘we’ve just had a message from the UK Consulate in Port Moresby that Toby’s party may have been taken hostage by rebels and the troops who were supposed to be protecting them have fled.’
She sat silent for a second. The thing was that since her last meeting with Julio at the Pointless Park County Show it had become much, much harder for her to know what to think about anything; she was adrift now without Julio’s guiding voice telling her she was right all the time. She felt like the population of one of those little Baltic countries that had gone overnight from communism to unrestrained capitalism, and the one clear message of the government radio station had been replaced with a thousand different exhortations.
To Helen’s shame the first thing she could think to
ask was, ‘Any news of Polly Williams?’
‘For God’s sake, Helen,’ he said, ‘aren’t you worried about your husband?’
The days and nights were at their hottest now, the pub folded back its doors and drinkers often carried bottles and glasses across the road to sit sprawled in groups on the edges of the park where the uncut grass was as glossy as the brushed coat of a racehorse and in places grew waist-high. Rose bay willow herb and foxglove hung heavy with swollen red flowers, there was ragwort, wild parsnip and yellow buttercup in profusion. In the middle of the night, as a recently arrived owl hunted for rodents, Harriet saw from her living room window the Tin Can Man creep from his hiding place somewhere in the centre of the park to feed himself on the wild strawberries that grew in abundance. In the night-time silence she heard him tell Lynn, ‘They’re tinier but many times more delicious than the commercial variety’ To her mind the two of them seemed to be getting on much better these days, maybe there’d be a reconciliation; how would that work?
One of Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro’s underlings came into her overheated shop, where she was staring hopelessly at a dinner jacket as if it was the corpse of a beloved pet that she needed to bury in the-back yard, and said, ‘The boss says he’s having another party tomorrow night and why don’t you bring your friend who wants the things so we can talk about it.’
‘Oh, OK, great,’ Harriet said, putting the jacket aside. ‘I’ll phone him and tell him it’s on.’
Nobody was particularly happy for Helen to be attached to the rescue party as liaison but she had insisted and since Warbird was paying for a Hercules transport aircraft, which should have been delivering famine relief to the Sudan, to be kept on permanent standby at Port Moresby and for the soldiers’ ammunition no one felt able to stop her, especially given her determined but demented demeanour. In the churning washing machine of her mind a tiny degree of certainty was beginning to return. Now she had a project to concentrate on, a project that was to restore the world completely to the way it had been. If she could just get Toby back safe then everything would follow; maybe at a later date she might even be able to seek out Julio and heal his unhinged mind. She castigated herself that she should have realised the devastating effect torture can have on a person. It was clear to her now that the old man’s experiences in the Chupaderos had given him an unpleasantly negative view of the world; it was hardly surprising given the terrible things that had been done to him and she should have understood this.