by Glen Duncan
It’s then, as a brilliantly sunlit silver-domed mosque looms up on her left, that she knows she’s going to have to kill him.
CHAPTER NINE
lies
(London, 2004)
What’s depressing about Janet Marsh is that she’s a much less attractive Tara Kilcoyne. The resemblance (she has the same thin blonde hair and very white skin and an older, snoutier version of Tara’s porcine sexiness, but she’s carrying weight round her hips and thighs with a posture that says she’s down to the last reserves of fighting it, pretty soon she’s going to give in to being what the Americans would call a big-assed old broad) shows up my delusions: this is the Tara-type in my league, not Tara. I’m reminded of those people who are obsessed with celebrities to the point where they go out with someone who looks like them, that dismal glamour gap between the lookalike and the real thing.
‘Look, as I said in the letter, my father’s not up to it. He’s eighty-three next month. I did ask him when we got your letter, but he’s not interested. I can’t believe you’ve come here, frankly.’
Frankly, neither can I. But I have. I sat on the District Line through Wimbledon all the way into town. Embankment. The walk up Charing Cross Road took me not just through London’s after-work disgorgement but past the Limelight, Break for the Border, the George, the Astoria; none what they used to be but the ghosts of Scarlet and those mid-Eighties nights linger…Information Management Services turns out to be three slender tinted-window floors in the middle of a long tinted-window block on Rathbone Place. Halogened horseshoe reception desk in what looks like walnut staffed by a freckled woman in a toffee-coloured trouser suit body-guarded by a paunchy six-four black security guard with dark brown outward-pushing lips showing enough moist pink gum to make me think whether I like it or not of the close-ups in inter-racial porn. It’s always the same reception flirtation double act, the black guy, the white woman, that whole thing.
No, I don’t have an appointment, but could you tell her I’m the person who wrote to her about her father? A considerable pause, all this going from receptionist to PA to Janet Marsh and back again. The security guard makes a quick silent assessment–not for my threat potential but for my racial type–concludes (losing interest immediately the conclusion’s made) that the dark blood’s out of Asia or maybe South America, nothing African, no sexual competition; the women who go for black guys aren’t interested in Pakis or Wops or Spics, and this is even before we bother with my being a short-arse he could beat up while smoking a spliff and drinking a cup of tea and languidly porking Freckles here. Eventually, a little sandy-headed nod and the phone returned to its cradle, Go up. First floor, someone’ll come out for you.
‘I know,’ I say to Janet Marsh, once I’m admitted to the adytum of her fat-carpeted and low-lit office. ‘I understand. It’s just that your father’s perspective would be invaluable: he was in India, mixed with Indians, wrote about them, and had his books published—’
‘Book.’
‘Had his book published in the UK at an incredibly interesting time, both in terms of what the changing boundaries were in the pulp fiction market but most significantly at a time when “race” and its representation was becoming a huge social and cultural issue.’
This feels the way I imagine it feels if you have to blurt out an ad hoc explanation to your wife of what you’re doing in bed with her best friend: Well, you see, she’s got this pain in her shoulder and there’s this Balinese yoga technique that involves…
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘You must think I’m eccentric. Possibly mad. Believe it or not, people write PhD theses about these things and I’m one of those people. I realize I’m being a nuisance. He really wasn’t interested?’
Janet Marsh is a businesswoman. The first thing was for her to decide whether I had power over her or she over me. She’s done that. She has power over me. Money. Also control over what I want, her father. I could beat her up, true, but she’s already decided I don’t have what it takes for that; I’d always be too scared of the consequences. Therefore a layer of her physical formality drops away. I get the feeling there’s something else–some big thing–on her mind. She sits back in her spaceshippish leather swivel chair, pinches the bridge of her nose, moves her fingertips out around the shallow orbitals, exhales. It’s been, I infer, a day. Her make-up has the look of fine fracture, erosion. Under the short pinstripe jacket her black silk blouse buckles when she reclines, flashing a slab of burgundy-bra’d breast. Despite her desk, my only slightly less commanding chair, a coat-stand and the two oxblood leather couches at right angles in a corner behind me, the office still feels roomy. There’s a wall-mounted (and muted) television to my right, showing CNN footage of George W. Bush at a press conference splashed by camera flash, speaking first with the inimitable expression fusing tickled smugness and intellectual vacancy, then, both hands gripping the edges of his lectern, animatedly delivering what might be news of the Second Coming. The feeling I always get when I see him (or for that matter any other person active in the political sphere) bubbles up: this is your world and you’re watching it go to shit…Yes, I know. But…
Janet Marsh squeezes her eyes closed for a second, gives a slight grimace, then opens them. ‘How do you even know about my dad’s book? It was donkeys’ years ago.’
Something is definitely going on for her other than me and my visit. I’ve only been in the room five minutes but it’s long enough to know there’s been some seismic shift (today?) in comparison to which I’m a detail, tolerable only in its aftermath. Any other day I’d have been turned away via telephonic proxy at reception. I wonder if she’s just started an affair, or won the lottery, or knocked someone down in her car, or been told the lump’s benign, or had some sort of Blakean vision under one of London’s streetlamps.
‘I came across a copy in a second-hand bookshop in Wimbledon,’ I tell her. ‘Just blind luck, really, unless you believe in there being a Divine Plan.’
I meet her eyes. She’s looking at me but still, manifestly, suffering or relishing the effects of that earlier event. Whether she’s conscious of it or not, these effects have drawn her mouth into a slight smile. Oi, I want to say. Look at me properly. I’m sitting here lying to you. I have a scheme. My father wants revenge. Pay attention for Christ’s sake.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, coming back into current time and space with a visible effort. ‘I really don’t think my dad wants to talk to anyone. He’s got his little routine and he doesn’t like it disturbed. I don’t’–she frowns with pleasant incomprehension rather than suspicion, some of the faculties switching back on–‘I don’t really see what you’d expect to get from talking to him, anyway. The whole thing sounds a bit…’ She doesn’t finish, offers instead the crumpled mercantile smile of pity for the harmless, unremunerative (but, if she thinks about it too long, annoying) world of academia. The whole thing sounds a bit small and pointless, she means. I don’t blame her. What was I thinking? I should have just tailed her. I should have gone in for surveillance, which is what I’m going to have to do now in any case; a joyless prospect, first because now she knows what I look like, which will make shadowing her tricky, and second because reality’s narowed my scope for whatever fantasy I might have projected on to her: she’s no longer a blank canvas.
‘Do you mind my asking,’ I say, ‘how good your dad’s memory is? I mean, hypothetically, would I be able to have a conversation with him about his past? About the book, I mean?’
She’d leaned forward, elbows on desk, hands (which without the vampiric nails would be mannish) toying with a corpulent fountain pen to give me the previous brush-off; now she sits back again and relaxes. A soft double chin. ‘His memory’s all right,’ she says. ‘Ish. I mean, lousy for present-day things, short-term, but, yeah, you could have a conversation. It’s not that, it’s just he doesn’t like his routine interfered with. It’d be a bother to him, you know? Sorry.’
‘I understand,’ I say, raising my hands. ‘No p
roblem. Just thought I’d try, you know. It would have been…Well, never mind. I’m sorry to have—’
There’s a knock at the door.
‘Yes?’ Janet Marsh says.
The door opens and a sharp-faced girl in her twenties with short and complicatedly cut black and gold hair pops her head round it. ‘Oh, sorry,’ she says to Janet. ‘All right if I shove off?’
‘Yes yes you’ve got your thing tonight,’ Janet says, getting up. ‘I forgot.’
‘See you Monday,’ the girl says, and without looking at me withdraws her head and closes the door.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ Janet Marsh says, as I, taking the hint, get to my feet. ‘I’ll ask him again. If the answer’s still no, then that’s your lot. Okay?’
That she walks me out of the office and that we board the lift together is further evidence of something else on her mind. You don’t share space with a stranger unless you have to. My ego angles for the flattering reading, that she, Janet, is attracted to me. She is, after all, sufficiently not good-looking, sufficiently not Tara. But that isn’t it. She’s pleasantly throbbing from something big having been lately settled. Her limbs (I imagine her bare white arms and thighs possessed of Botticellian asymmetry and heft) have shucked their tensile apparatus; I can’t help thinking of a horse walking free of its harness, the giant, sad liberty. She’s almost, but not quite, too tired to enjoy it.
‘It’s really just a perpetually updated database,’ she says, when I ask her what IMS does. ‘We match the top advertisers with the top five hundred UK companies. The database means any brand manager can pinpoint any advertising executive–and vice versa, obviously–at the touch of a button. Clients are subscribers. You pay so much a year, you get twenty-four/seven online access to the information you need. The object was to make a tool the industries couldn’t afford not to have.’
‘It’ll probably come as no surprise to you that I have absolutely no idea what any of that means.’ Since I’m playing the academic I try to sound the part.
She’s not too far gone to smile, though with obvious tokenness. The whites of her eyes are pinkish. Suddenly my own eyes feel exhausted. ‘You see a TV commercial,’ she says, ‘and you want the person or team who designed it for your new product. The database will tell you who they are, where they are, and how much it’s likely to cost. Or you’re an ad company. The database means you’ll be among the first to know if Mars is planning a new chocolate bar, which means you’ll be among the first to pitch a campaign. Yes?’
‘Incredible. Who thinks of these things?’
‘Me and my ex-husband.’
‘Looks like you’re doing well.’
Her response is a lifted chin and a wobbly smile in the manner of Goldie Hawn.
(I remember Scarlet years ago wondering aloud why writers still bothered describing a character’s physical appearance. There are only so many types of face, she said, and we’ve seen them all on screen. Why don’t they just say, She was a bit like a young Sharon Stone, but with dark hair? Or he was like Larry Hagman with a beard? She insisted that everyone could be seen, if they had to, in terms of looking like someone famous. In the pub she’d go through every person; she wasn’t satisfied until she’d wrung resemblance to someone famous from each of them. It morphed, naturally, into the game we came to call Celebrities. ‘Rutger Hauer’s over by the bar,’ she’d say quietly, interrupting me. I’d have to turn and look. The object was to find someone who looked like a famous person only if you applied the widest and most absurd latitude. Thus ‘Rutger Hauer’ would be a rheumy octogenarian with a rinsed quiff, dentures and a cravat, but also with, if you really reached, a look of Rutger Hauer.)
A wobbly smile. To indicate what? Irony? Understatement? Either way this smile is the first that brings her–that is, her, Janet, the woman rather than the professional–into play. It’s the first acknowledgement of me–that is, me, Owen, the man rather than the irritating chore–she’s offered. It’s such a shift–the guaranteed aphrodisiacal clout of moving from the formal to the intimate–that I get a little twinge of lust. All her heavy-bodied appeal suddenly intrudes. The long day’s left horizontal creases in her pin-stripe skirt just below the abdominal tyre. Her armpits will have the rousing mix of deodorant and sweat, the nyloned zones their own foxy heat, all her body’s responses to the day’s provocations, the spent chemicals, a lovely text written in the hours since her shower this morning.
‘Oh, we’ve done okay,’ she says. ‘It was timing, really. It’s always timing.’
On the other hand, our briefly meeting and hurriedly looking away eyes concede, she did say ‘ex’. She didn’t need to say that. In the glance she seems hyperconscious of our erotic potential. It’s not me. It’s her mood, the post-ravished state she’s been left in by whatever it was. I know it’s not me. She knows, too. We know a lot in this lift, which has one mirrored back wall and three others of something which looks like black onyx but which I assume isn’t. Like the rest of the corporate world it smells of nonsmoking: Pledge, floor wax, Windolene. I imagine a hidden camera sensitive not to infrared but to unsaid things registering all ours like a cat’s cradle of lasers stretched between us. Just as the lift comes to a stop on the ground floor Janet Marsh and I glance at each other in the mirror a second time. Another wobbly smile and the watery eyes awake. The space is so confined it’s as if we’ve just flashed our parts at each other. I’m convinced that if I ask her what, exactly, I’m doing here she’ll have forgotten. The doors open. I do the after-you gesture and she steps out into the gleaming atrium. Freckles has gone home. The black security guard stands alone with his back to us looking out of the tinted automatic doors like someone longing for his lost home on another planet. He turns, smiles gummily, lazily at thick-calved Janet tuck-tucking towards him on her high heels. He points a gizmo at the keypad and does a satirical doorman bow as we pass. ‘Goodnight, Mrs Marsh.’
‘Goodnight, Tony.’
I nod an acknowledgement to him but get only a raised eyebrow in return. You porking her? Jesus Christ. Little beige fucker like you? World’s gone mad.
Two strange things happen out in Rathbone Place. The first is that Janet Marsh and I stand for a few moments, smiling and saying yes thanks okay fine and phatically not quite saying goodbye, though there’s a handshake and me backing and nodding like a lobotomized dog and her standing in the black overcoat with the soft pale-blue scarf loosely looped and one ungloved hand (the size of which surprised me when we shook, its broad, plump, warm apricot-handcreamed palm I imagined manfully masturbating me) holding her tan leather satchel and looking, now that the cold air has tightened her, statuesque rather than baggy. The second is that I end up so close to the kerb that the wing mirror of a slowly passing lorry cracks the back of my head.
There’s a split second of atomic red-black detonation, time enough to register the sound of the blow–a deafening and censorious bok– then I’m out.
When I come to I find myself sprawled on the freezing pavement with Janet down on her haunches trying to roll me from my front on to my side so she can get a look at my face.
‘Oh, my God,’ she says. ‘Are you all right?’
It’s a strange feeling to be suddenly whipped out of time then rushed back in. I’m very aware, as I take my first inhalations, of the sensuous secrets of the pavement, which it turns out have remained faithful these years, the glittering pixels and whiff of stone and old gum delivering without rebuke all the wealth of my childhood they’ve held in trust. A beautiful peaceful salving thing, lying on the pavement. No wonder drunks do it so much. And it’s free.
‘Look at me. Are you all right?’
I blink, open my mouth, experience a curious inner delay and a second wallop of that red-blackness precursory to oblivion. I resist, hear myself say, ‘Jesus Christ,’ from a distance away, but there’s distraction in the form of Janet’s complex perfume and from this angle large nostrils and that doughy double chin. I lift my head and my face bumps the soft w
eight of her breasts. She’s been looking into the lorry’s slipstream at the shrinking number plate I know intuitively she’s missed. I hear the driver downshift, slow, round the corner, pull away. Compensation (against which concept even this state of near unconsciousness isn’t proof ) offers a few sparks, then fizzles like a dud.
She ignores the breast bump, helps me up on to my left elbow–then remembers (as do I, with the first rush of nausea) that maybe I shouldn’t try to get up too quickly.
‘Actually, keep still a minute,’ she says. ‘Let me look at your head. Christ, I can’t believe that just happened.’
Since being able to see is makes me feel sick I close my eyes, but am immediately yanked into a waltz that make me feel sicker. I open them again. The street’s like a bit of looped footage: it lurches from right to left, flickers, jumps back. I know the thing to do is keep watching; it’ll slow and, like the drunk’s spinning room, eventually stop. But tracking it makes my eyes feel like they might vomit all on their own.
‘Anything?’ I ask. Her big black nyloned knees tick as she adjusts position to get a better look at my head.
‘Well, you’re not bleeding,’ she says. ‘But there’s a lump already. I’m going to call an ambulance.’
‘No, no, Christ. I’m all right. I don’t need an ambulance.’
‘Look, you can get an aneurysm from a bang on the head like that.’
‘I’m fine. Just give me a sec.’
‘You’ll be concussed. Let me call an ambulance. Are you going to throw up?’
‘I might. Look, please don’t call an ambulance.’ I don’t know why I’m so resistant, since I feel I might, actually, need one. Some televisually conditioned reflex, presumably. Whenever someone in a drama suggests calling an ambulance the injured person always says no, no, I’m fine.
She’s got her mobile out and her thumb poised for 999 (I wonder if she’s ever had to dial it before) but I lift my hand and place my fingers on her gloveless wrist. ‘Seriously,’ I say, ‘I don’t need an ambulance. Honestly. You’ll be depriving someone who does. Put the phone away.’