by Mark Watson
‘Madman?’
She was coming back very early tomorrow, she said. Might I come and collect her?
‘I would love to, Kathleen. Chas and I will be waiting at—’
‘Ah – Graham.’ Her voice tightened a notch. ‘Chas doesn’t know. I want to surprise him. Is that all right?’
I said that it was, of course, but I could not help wondering what was behind this. Kathleen was not a natural liar, and the notion of the ‘surprise’ for Chas had rung unconvincingly. I could not say whether or not I was looking forward, as I usually would, to picking her up.
The Mercedes’ interior next morning was stale with cold. I coaxed its heater into life and ground the old chariot slowly westwards in thin early-morning traffic. The sky was heavy and dark as the car approached the gateway to Heathrow with its large model aeroplane and lit-up advertising boards. Kathleen was quickly out of Arrivals; she avoided my eye as I took the aged suitcase.
‘How was the trip? Did you sleep on the plane?’
‘Not very well.’
‘Despite the comforts of Business?’
‘Even despite that.’ She came up with a strained smile. ‘Despite the free pyjamas.’
There was a little more conversational circling of whatever was really at issue. We were some way past the brewery when she cleared her throat.
‘In answer to your first question,’ said Kathleen, ‘it went well, very well. I’ve been offered a post out there.’
‘A post?’
‘A correspondent job.’
‘You would be living in China?’
‘Pretty much.’
Click-clock, went my indicator in the pause. Click-clock.
‘Jesus at a barbecue!’ I eventually managed. Kathleen cackled in surprise.
‘Did you say that specially for me? As a homage?’
‘It was an attempt at that, yes. I wish I had made it more Chinese-specific, thinking about it.’
Her eyes twinkled as they met mine. ‘Oh, Graham. You’re lovely.’
‘Never mind that.’ I glanced back fondly at her. ‘Are you going to take it?’
The indicator ticked away again. I heard Kathleen take a breath, saw her lick her lips and shift her position on the back seat, and it was suddenly clear why she had brought me alone to the airport: it was for the opportunity of a private conversation. I could feel her eyes on the back of my neck.
‘Graham, we have to tell Chas.’
I let her continue. ‘He needs to know what happened,’ she said, in a manner which made me think she had rehearsed this speech half the way home. ‘He needs to know the truth about the fire.’
‘I explained before,’ I said, ‘we always felt he needed not to know.’
‘Howard needs him not to know.’
‘Imagine if everyone found out … ’
‘Not everyone. I’m not saying we tell everyone. I’m saying Chas deserves to know.’
‘All right. Imagine that Chas found out this man, Howard, whom he has idolized, trusted – the person he has trusted most – was responsible for his mother’s death.’
‘But I should be the person he trusts most.’ Kathleen’s voice threatened to crackle into fury. ‘I deserve that now. And what about you?’
As we stopped at lights, she leaned across the partition so that her face was almost next to mine. I could smell toothpaste and just about make out the tiniest of light-coloured freckles on her cheekbones.
‘Don’t you ever think,’ Kathleen said, ‘that you should be the one Chas thinks of as his … as his de facto father, if it’s going to be anyone? You saved his life! You saved his life, Graham!’
‘Twenty-odd years ago. It’s the past.’
‘It’s still part of who he is. He’s thankful – he thanks God every day that he’s alive at all. Except it’s not God, it’s Howard. And it should be you.’
‘I don’t need to be thanked,’ I said. ‘I don’t want any special attention. I put the hotel first, always. And I want to honour the promise I made to Howard. I believe it’s better this way, Kathleen.’
I reached for the switch; the windscreen wipers began their shuffle back and forth.
‘I’m not sure you really do,’ she said quietly.
Our eyes met in the mirror with a sort of qualified hostility: neither of us wanted this conflict, but neither of us could move from our position. Kathleen, however, had one card left to play.
‘If we don’t tell him, Graham,’ she said – not in a calculating tone, but with an air of considered impartiality – ‘I’m going to take the job in China. I’m going to have to. I just can’t do this. Keep something so big from him.’
I began several replies, none of them substantial enough to finish. Kathleen wound down the window and let the drizzle blow in onto her face; she stared out at the road and the dim scenery. The wipers scraped a path through the fuzzy screen in front of me, and I looked out over flat familiar sights: the eye hospital, the squares of Georgian houses. Chas was waiting, less than a mile away, in the dark.
The next time I was to drive the Mercedes was to pick up Howard, Lara and Chas from a travel ‘expo’ at a newly refurbished place in East London. Lara and Chas were there in the interests of an Internet site they numbered among their clients, Howard in the interests of drinking and shaking hands. Ever since they had gone off, loudly trading witticisms, I had felt an ill mood descending on the Alpha. It was there in Mrs Davey’s curse as the wheel of her trolley caught the edge of my desk and a pile of sheets went flying; it was there in a lovers’ argument, the man pursuing the lady into the lift, she pushing him out and leaving him to hammer on the doors; there was even a tension in the ‘ciao, hello’ Suzie simpered at me as she clocked off.
Were all these things really connected, though? Were they even real, or was I merely projecting onto the hotel what I was feeling myself? Since collecting Kathleen from the airport I had experienced several nights of brittle sleep. The consequences of doing what Kathleen asked and finding some way to tell Chas the truth ran round and round my head like a tune one cannot stop hearing.
Even if it went no further, the story would devastate him – not to mention Sarah-Jane and JD, who would, of course, also have to be told. The obliteration of the York family and their fortress, which I had done so much to protect, would finally come to pass. Chas, whom I had rescued, whom I had secretly thought of as my own son many times, would go somewhere far away, just as Christopher had. But not telling Chas would do a different kind of harm: it would drive Kathleen away from him and from the hotel. One night I had awoken with the phrase rat sandwich’ in my head and had to go downstairs and open the door for some fresh air. Another night I had cried out in my sleep and frightened Pattie so much she put the light on and we both lay there wide awake.
I had almost decided that I would go home tonight and tell Pattie everything, if I could prise her away from the computer: tell her about the long pact of deception between Howard and me, the way things were coming to a head, and the fact that I did not know what to do. It would take a lot of explaining and I was not sure I had the stomach for it, but the secret had been eating away at me these past few days, more than it had for years at a time when it was safely locked away.
Pattie would be asleep, though, by the time I got home. Howard had said he would call me when I was required; as usual this proved to be at a late hour. I ground my way through some time by tidying and retidying my leaflets, which felt rather an empty occupation these days: it was rare that a guest picked one up. Eventually I decided to ring Ed.
It had been a little while since I’d seen my son, and I had good news for him. With Howard’s help I had gained a pair of much-coveted tickets for the coming autumn’s match between Australia and England, who had won last year’s rugby World Cup – an event Howard marked by inviting the whole squad to the Alpha and posing for photographs with people he would not have recognized the week before. It took a couple of attempts before Ed replied, and when he did come
to the phone his tone was rather odd, as if he had just woken from sleep.
‘I don’t think I’ll make it, Dad,’ he said.
‘Bother,’ I said, ‘does the date clash with one of your trips?’
‘No, it’s not that, it’s … ’ He coughed. ‘It’s … it’s … Money is a little tight,’ he said in the end. ‘It’s all a little tight.’
It pained me to hear him speak like this. ‘I will of course buy the tickets,’ I said. ‘In fact, I’m not sure that Howard even wants us to pay for them.’
‘Well,’ said Ed, ‘maybe, then. I’ll have to, I’ll have to see.’
It was one of those nights, all right: nothing was as it should be. By the time I collected my well-oiled passengers from the event near the proposed Olympic site, a confused gloom had descended upon me. I almost considered asking Howard if he wouldn’t mind taking a taxi back; but if I ceased to be useful as a chauffeur on top of everything else, I might as well hand in my notice, paint myself silver and start busking in Covent Garden.
When I reached the exhibition hall, people were streaming out already. Howard bundled himself and Chas into the back. He was pink and loud, his tie knotted halfway down his shirt; he and Chas reviewed the event in excitable exchanges, while Lara talked on her telephone. ‘Yah, just get a car and put it on the tab,’ she said. ‘Oh-five-oh-six.’
‘How was the event?’ I enquired.
‘Went pretty well,’ said Chas. ‘The site’s hits are up a thousand per cent on this time last year.’
‘I would have thought,’ I said, stepping on the accelerator with a little more force than necessary, ‘that more than a hundred per cent was impossible.’
‘Howard got busy schmoozing with some of the guys from Travelocity,’ Chas volunteered.
‘I’m going to need more proper words than that.’
Howard laughed, clapping his hands as he sometimes did, like a king to a court jester. ‘You kill me, Madman. It’s a website that plans out holidays for people. They work hand in hand with Lara’s client. So I made sure they’d, how shall I put it, look favourably on the Alpha from now on. Website recommendations are the reviews you want to get, these days. They’re the ones that count.’
I thought about Mike Swan labouring over his typewriter. Lara Krohl lit a cigarette and smoked out of the window. Her other hand kept the telephone pressed to the side of her head, and the ever-present laptop computer was across her knees. ‘Just tell them, they get it done or they lose the business,’ she commanded some person somewhere.
We stopped at lights; somebody hesitated in front of us, and since I did not like to honk my horn without a very good reason, we were soon caught up in two merged lanes of traffic. ‘This is slow,’ said Lara Krohl; it took me a moment to realize she was addressing me and not somebody on the phone.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s because—’
‘Are we sure this is the quickest way?’ she asked without looking up from the computer. I doubted that she noticed any of the seedy landscape lit up around us: the colourful squalor of the high streets, the now incongruous tile mosaics at Underground station entrances, the warehouses reborn as artists’ studios, the gangly youths gawping at the Mercedes when we came to zebra crossings. The landscape of her computer screen, the invisible people down invisible phone lines, were more real to her than the physical environments she shuttled between. But that did not stop her from having an opinion, from assuming she knew my business better than I did.
‘This is certainly the best way,’ I said. ‘The traffic’s just unusually heavy at the moment, and—’
‘There’s a little gadget you can get,’ Lara interrupted – confound it, I thought to myself, did nobody ever tell her it was rude to do that? ‘You put it in the front of your car and it tells you which way to go.’
‘It sounds clever enough, if you don’t know the roads already …’
‘Well, even if you do.’ Lara Krohl’s voice took on that note of polite, as-if-accidental challenge which she did so well. The upward inflection was so slight, the ice so lightly sprinkled onto the words. ‘I mean, anyone can make a mistake.’
‘Not Madman,’ said Howard. ‘They’ll never make a gizmo that’s better than this man’s brain. Honestly. Bloody miracle-worker. Did I ever tell you about the time we had about thirty cops combing the hotel looking for one of the Stones, and Graham hid him in a wardrobe … ’
It had been three policemen, not thirty, and the musician had hidden himself while I merely stood guard. There were many other embellishments; and yet as he went on, I began to feel that perhaps I was misremembering things. Heat crept into my cheeks, that pleasantly uncomfortable flush one felt when, for a minute or two, Howard made it feel as if you were the only thing worth being enthusiastic about. It was as hard as ever to resist it, that feeling, and as hard as ever to imagine destroying the world he had created. It might not be the real world, but it was the one we lived in.
11
CHAS
‘What is it? Jesus, Chas.’
‘Are we crashing?’
My mind was punch-drunk from the stream of new experience.
‘You want something, sir?’
Kathleen interceded, her voice low and scratchy. ‘He’s just worried the plane is going to fall out of the sky.’
The stewardess laughed. ‘No, no. Plane has just had little turbulence. But will remain in sky.’
‘It’s all right for you,’ I said, ‘you’re on a plane twice a week, but I—’
Kathleen shushed me. ‘You’ll wake everyone up. Go back to sleep.’
The plane ground on with its steady drone. I pressed my watch button for the time, but the time made no sense; there wasn’t a time here, we weren’t in a place. I remembered the feeling of lying below JD, hearing him snoring, drifting through an uncharted night.
Two months ago we’d been on the London Eye as a sort of rehearsal for the flight. The November air on the South Bank had been full of language and noise; a quartet played on electric violins. Kathleen pressed my hand against her thigh. I felt filled up by the closeness of her and the music and the pinpoint cold of the night. I raised my face and imagined the giant wheel peering down on us.
‘Now, concentrate, hang on to my arm. They don’t actually stop the wheel, so we need to get in nice and quick or one of us will fall through the gap into the Thames. And then we’ll feel less upbeat.’
The ascent began. Kathleen let out a short excited squeak. I could feel the uncramped dimensions of the capsule. I reached out and ran my hands up the shield that separated us from thin air.
‘Oh, it’s beautiful already,’ she said. ‘The river is all dark and sort of … stately. We can see – I think that’s MI5, and Charing Cross station, looks a bit like a giant photocopier. And lights, lights. So many lights.’
‘Keep going.’
‘When you come to China with me – well, the lights of a city from the air are an incredible sight. You’re just in awe at how humans have made all this. All the millions of lives in little grids, building up into one super-grid. It makes you feel small in the best possible way. I could talk you through it all.’
‘What about now? What’s down there now?’
‘Everything We’re the highest people in London right now. Seriously. There’s not even anyone in the pod below us.’
My hand crept under her skirt and made its way up her leg. She breathed out sharply, grabbed my hand and moved it inside her. We staggered together across the capsule and she groped for my belt. It was all over quickly; we were already beginning the invisible slope back down to land. We stood, a little out of breath, and waited for the rest of the city to catch up with us.
Howard had bought me a set of CDs to learn Mandarin from and Kathleen had corrected my erratic first efforts. Howard had read me Wikipedia entries on Chinese history and Kathleen had corrected those too.
January arrived, and I had grasped the armrests as the plane barrelled along the runway and took off, a
series of worrying noises giving way to the continuous hum of the past few hours. Now we must be within a couple of hours of our descent. We had bulleted through vast empty fields of airspace over strange lands. I was going to make it to what I used to call Peking. It had been unimaginably distant then; or even three months ago. For me this was going to be like landing on the Moon.
Yet all these huge steps had been merely to get to the point I should have begun at. I’d started the race a hundred miles behind the rest. Kathleen loved me in spite of the blindness, the hundred-mile gap; or at best she loved the way I lived through it. She didn’t love the blindness itself – I didn’t want her to. It was the enemy; I was not interested in getting extra credit for overcoming it. But without that extra credit I wondered if I would always be in arrears.
It was a little after midnight, apparently. I produced my passport when Kathleen prompted me. We got into a taxi and Kathleen uttered a number of phrases which I could not even pick apart into individual words. Then we were driving and I thought of Graham, now many miles away. It was bitterly cold as we got out of the car. Strange music breathed through the hotel lobby like a draught: it was a version of ‘Satisfaction’ by the Stones, sung by a woman at half the tempo of the original.
In our room something rattled and buzzed. The mattress was thin to the touch. I’d been in hotels other than the Alpha a few times now, for events with Lara, but never stayed the night in one. This didn’t feel as if it would be a good place to start. I wished Kathleen hadn’t chosen a budget hotel when Howard could probably have got us a room anywhere in Beijing. Recently, her principles had seemed to converge on a point of antagonism towards him.
‘What’s that noise?’
‘What?’
‘The buzzing.’
‘It’s the heating thing.’ She sounded exasperated. ‘It’s normal. I’m going to have a shower, all right?’
As she was getting undressed, I tried to take her in my arms, but she writhed away. ‘It’s not the time.’