All That Follows

by Jim Crace

  Leonard sits and lowers his head into his hands. He squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t want to hear or watch. Nadia sounds so screechy and so British—and so inefficient. Uncool, in fact. Unhip. Unblue. “Shame!”—constantly repeated as she dashes toward the podium in her high shoes—is an aimless slogan. Shame on what? Shame on the war? Shame on the planned withdrawal of troops? Shame on libraries? Does this woman have no sense of what’s appropriate? He’s overestimated her. America has poisoned her. Maxie’s knocked her out of shape. Does she not understand or care that the president’s not here and that this is only the president’s unelected wife, supporting libraries? All Laura Bush is calling for is that kids should read a book in bed at night. Everyone heard her saying as much a minute ago. Now where’s the shame in that? She’s just the meek, accommodating spouse. She could be married to a Democrat or to a pacifist and she would still want dads and moms to read their children nursery tales. This is silly, Nadia Emmerson. This is impolite. Sit down.

  In fact, Leonard almost stands and shouts “Sit down,” as others are doing, rather than the “Troops … Out … Now” that he has planned. But he stays where he is, his face pressed into his hands, while pregnant Nadia succeeds in getting to the podium before any of the Secret Service men stir in their suits to block her access to the president’s wife. Indeed, Nadia has jumped up on the great oak Speaker’s table and has kicked off her spiky shoes before the first protector, a beefy, uniformed state trooper, has succeeded in grabbing her ankle and succeeded too in toppling Nadia off the table and onto Laura Bush. There is an audible clash of heads. Inexplicably, Nadia has not attempted to roll off her victim but is both gripping her by the lapel of her pearl pantsuit and pushing her back over her chair. Laura Bush takes hold of Nadia’s hair but does not tug at it. They’re wrestling. It’s an erotic fantasy made flesh, the blogs will say.

  Now guns are drawn. Almost everybody in the audience is on their feet, shouting for this embarrassment to end. The Secret Service men have come alive at last, as have some men from the audience. Texan Volunteers. Heroes of the Book Festival. Nadia is pulled back across the table by twenty hands and forced onto the floor. Again there is a crash of heads. She screams and tries to shout, “Troops—” but is silenced with a hand across her mouth before she’s lifted up by ankles and by wrists and bundled away, through the governor’s door. Another friend is out of sight, though not immediately out of hearing, and very nearly out of Leonard’s life. Another eighteen years.

  Leonard does not need to stand, or to speak. He no longer has to make a fuss. Any fuss he makes would be too late anyway and buried by the mayhem all around. Everybody else in the chamber is already making an excited fuss. What a historic tale they’ll have to tell their grandchildren. The nation’s first lady is being ushered from the room. She presses a tissue against her face. She holds her head with the other hand. Her nose is bleeding and blood is dripping on her suit.

  Leonard lets his neighbors pass and waits for the chamber to clear round him before he even gets out of his chair. He’s calm but he is shaking. He’ll go back to the loft, remove his makeup, collect his bags and Mr. Sinister, and leave at once, before the police arrive. What other choice is there? He’s being sensible. His only hope is that the child has not been hurt, the child who will be Lucy Emmerson.

  12

  THE EMMERSONS LIVE IN THE SORT of digital Smarthouse designed to satisfy both fashion and environment—slot-in, prefabricated components but cottage-styled and then overbrightened and individualized with pastel StucoLux. They have the corner unit in a block of eight, with gazebo doors, dormered upper floors, an integrated glazed atrium at the back shared with neighbors, a wall-mounted carbon scrubber, and light-seeking energy scanners whirring on the roofs. Their StucoLux is beryl green. The building could be in any new development in almost any temperate city in Europe or New England, apart from the show of tended British evergreens breaking up the architectural lines of the suburban mews in which it stands.

  Leonard is surprised: he has envisaged an ill-kept, narrow terrace house with peeling timber and cats, something batty or subversive, behind the times. Francine is disappointed; these increasingly ubiquitous Compact Intelligent Households are not cheap to buy or rent or run, so why choose one? Both expected the house to be more spirited than this bland and voguish eco-pod, and more in keeping with the hot-headed Sniper and the willful, sparky daughter described during the drive south in Leonard’s scrupulously selective account of his few days in Austin. “I like the sound of Nadia,” was all Francine offered, when he was finished and inviting her lenient response. She kept any thoughts on Comrades Gorky and Trotsky to herself, only nodding at her husband’s familiar frailties. She laughed out loud three times: when someone threw the dime at Mr. Sinister, when Laura Bush was floored, and when Leonard pissed on his own shoe.

  They have left the Buzz in the local shopping precinct, recharging at a fuel unit in the rooftop car park, and walked the last five hundred meters not quite arm in arm but shoulder to shoulder. When they reach the Emmersons’ block, they do take hold of each other, though, posing as a blandly contented couple, unhurried and companionable, simply walking down the street and going about their errands. At first there is no evidence of any police or security services outside the house, but the residential parking spaces are all occupied, and in a side road opposite two photographers are sitting on the bonnets of their cars, waiting for some “show.”

  “Let’s ring her bell,” says Francine at once. “Why ever not?” Leonard hasn’t seen her look so energized or so amused for months.

  “I can’t do that. What if she isn’t on her own?”

  “You can’t. I can. She won’t know me. I can always say I’ve got the wrong address. Walk on. I’ll catch you up.” She pushes him in the ribs, halfway between an impatient shove and a playful prod. “Buck up, Leon. Ain’t we the warriors?”

  Leonard’s heart is racing as he continues up the mews. “I can’t do that” is one of those phrases that Francine has often teased him about. He knows he should at least have gone up to the door with his wife, or, better, volunteered to ring the bell himself, alone. He could pull his scarf and collar up. He’d not be recognized. It’s too late now, however. What’s the point of beating himself up about it on his birthday? He’s already been beaten up enough today and, on present evidence, can expect to be teased and prodded for many hours more. Even so, he cannot help pretending, as he walks along the street while Francine takes the risks, that he has volunteered and that he is alone on Nadia’s step, where he is recognized by her at once, though his face is masked. For a moment Leonard has her standing at her door in the same pajamas she wore in Texas on the day the Bushes came to town.

  This Nadia, this one who knows him straightaway, is not the Red Nadia of old, plucky, stocky, and attractive, and, like her daughter, just a little mad; nor is she the hardly recognizable plump, sobbing mother from this morning’s news; nor the sofa socialist of Lucy’s description. She is Leonard’s own creation, but idealized and updated over time. She has matured into handsome middle age but, like Francine, is still strident and exciting. He has visualized making love to her countless times, because he never did make love to her at all. She is unfinished business. She is his road not taken, as it were. Mostly, when they are having sex in his imagination, they are fugitives, holed up in the woods or sharing floorboards in some radical squat, passionate and breathless, waiting for the timbers of the door to splinter or the wail of sirens to bring their loving to a halt. He has also sometimes—too often to admit—thought of her dressed up for the Capitol. She’s at her sexiest, as he remembers it. She’s put on lipstick for a change. She has a brooch. She has heeled shoes. Her linen pantsuit hugs her bottom well. A fiery, pregnant woman deliciously disguised. They’re waiting for the first lady to say child. And when she does say child, both Nadia and Leonard will be on their feet and heading for the podium. Yes, both of them. Now it isn’t Laura Bush who’s bumping heads with her, i
t isn’t Laura Bush who takes hold of though does not tug her hair, but Comrade Leon Lessing. They will have a future in each other’s arms. Ten pairs of hands take hold of him. Ten pairs of hands are pulling him. But all those Secret Service men and Texan Volunteers will not have the strength to drag him free, until Francine catches up with him and he must shake away the thought.

  As it turns out, Nadia is at home but not alone. The door is answered by an officer in uniform. “Ah!” Francine lets her mouth fall loose and arches her eyebrows, faking her surprise. “Is this the right address?”

  “Depends. Who are you looking for?”

  “Ms. Sickert. Celandine,” she says instinctively. “My daughter’s place.”

  He shakes his head. “Wrong house, I think. I’ll ask.” He turns away from the front door to reveal a woman—Nadia—standing at the dark end of the hallway, her face scumbled by shadow, her shoulders down. What had she hoped for when the doorbell sounded? “Anyone you know called Sickert Celandine—”

  “Celandine Sickert,” Francine corrects him, automatically, and looks directly at Nadia, offering a smile to the woman. A smile of solidarity, of course. She knows exactly what it means to be fearful for a daughter, how the throat and heart are gripped by some keen torturer every time there is a caller at the door, or the trill of incoming e-mail, or someone on the phone, how the shoulders mass and sag, how the shadows gather round, how even talking is at times such a punishing and heavy task that it is easier just to shake your head than say, “Nobody of that name is here.” Just naming Celandine out loud, as Francine has just done, is painful still, even after eighteen months of getting used to it. Three syllables of pain. At once the memories stack up: that final, shocking, violent clash, that unsigned farewell note (“Dear Family, I’m moving out & moving on. No need to be in touch. X”), the early days of constant hope and bursting into tears and being practical, topping up her daughter’s phone until the number was discontinued, the weekly text messages she sends, the no-replies, the e-mails that are blocked or failed, and then the months of nagging dreams in which Celandine herself is blocked or failed or discontinued. She is floating facedown in a canal, or padlocked in a room, or working on the streets, strung out and pale, or—hard to swallow, this—she’s safe and well and happy in her life. No need for Mummy now. Or Unk.

  “What names again?” asks Nadia, stepping forward and peering over the policeman’s epaulettes at the stranger on her step.

  “Celandine Sickert?”

  “No.”

  Later there is better luck, although it does not seem so immediately. After killing an hour over coffee and more questions about Nadia and Maxie at the local Starters, Leonard and Francine are walking toward the Emmersons’ front door for the third and, they have determined, final time. They have a plan. If all is clear, Leonard will distract the photographers with some bogus query while Francine delivers an envelope marked “Nadia/Personal,” containing the unsigned note that she has written spikily with her left hand on the back of a Starters coaster: “Lucy safe. With friends. Not kidnapped. Teenage escapade. Tell nobody. DO NOT WORRY.” But in the event there is no need for any note. Much to the relief of the now four waiting photographers, Nadia Emmerson, dressed in a gratifyingly adventurous multicolored overcoat, steps out of her front door and gets into a silver citicar driven by a heavily built police minder, out of uniform. The uniformed officer that Francine spoke to earlier takes up sentry duty outside the house. He pops a sweet into his mouth. He looks as if he means to make it last.

  “That’s it, then, I suppose,” Leonard says, both disappointed and relieved that the note is now undeliverable and that, for the time being, Nadia Emmerson is out of reach. He’s done his best; it’s not his fault—the usual chorus line. “It is my birthday, after all,” he reminds Francine. “What do you say we find ourselves a country pub, with a restaurant?”

  “We could.”

  Back at the rooftop car park, though, while Leonard is disconnecting the charger leads and settling the bill with his fob, Francine spots the silver citicar again, parked two spaces forward. The officer is sitting with the window down and with his in-screen switched on, tuned too loudly to a football channel, and muttering fan rant to himself. It’s midafternoon on a Saturday. The football season’s hot-ting up, and here’s an opportunity. He’s on duty, but he doesn’t have to miss the match.

  “She’s only gone shopping, wants to take her mind off things,” Francine says, clapping her hands with satisfaction. “And she’s on her own. How lucky’s that? Her ape would rather sit up here and watch the game than do his job. Thank heavens for slackers.”

  “What now?”

  “Come on. We’ll sleuth her down,” she says, clearly enjoying herself.

  There is no immediate sign of Nadia’s loudly colored overcoat in the avenues of the ground-floor concourse, so Leonard and Francine separate. She takes all the shops and cafés in the southern wing, at a dash, in what must seem a familiar panic to passing women. She’s just another scatty shopper who has left a bag behind or misplaced a child. He strides north with measured steps, peering into or briefly entering shops but trying not to draw attention to himself. There’ll be security cameras and precinct guards. Despite his care, he’s breathless soon, and sweating. He searches amongst the shelves of a B&N bookshop, not quite expecting he’ll discover his old comrade indulging her passions in “Politics and History,” but being logical and thorough. Now he’s squeezing between the aisles of a pharmacy, his shoulders brushing customers and, embarrassingly, toppling rows of shampoos and conditioners. He’s in the Java Café lounge, turning on his heels and scanning every circle of sofas for a glimpse of Nadia. He’s checking an energy advice agency—no luck—and then crossing the concourse toward a food store. He does not even reach the automatic doors. Francine is here. She grabs his coat. “Got her,” she says triumphantly.

  “Show me.”

  “Not me. You’re going on your own. This is something you must do.”

  “Where is she, then?”

  “In Maven’s, treating herself to a pair of pants.”

  “Not underpants?” Leonard puts his hand to his brow. He can’t be expected to approach her on his own while she’s buying underclothes. He wants to say, “I can’t do that.”

  “No, trouser pants. You idiot.” Francine shakes her head dramatically. She adds, “Are you afraid of everything, including clothes? Just go.” She pushes him. She’s pushed her husband quite a lot today.

  This Maven’s department store is just like every other Maven’s in the country: cluttered, cheerful, cheap, and understaffed, with an overriding smell of cardboard and cloth and an unbroken sound track of music, offers, and announcements. As usual, Male Box is to the right of the doors, close enough to the entrance for men to find easily and be tempted to buy before they are tempted to bolt. Women shoppers are expected to be more focused and even to prefer to go beyond the menswear, kitchenware, bedding, and electronics sections to the more private carousels and racks of women’s clothes at the back end of the store. The deeper Leonard ventures, trying to look purposeful, the less purposeful he feels. He’s not rehearsed. He’s not decided what to say. But when he reaches the far end and quickly prowls all corners of the section, there is no sign of Nadia. He’s looking for her coat. She might be carrying it by now or might have hung it up somewhere. So now he prowls again, looking for a face to recognize.

  She comes out of the changing rooms just ahead of him, wearing her coat and carrying two pairs of trousers over her forearm and another pair on a hanger. It’s easy, then. He’s walked straight into her. Now that he sees her in the flesh, even from behind, he can recognize Lucy in her: that boxy build and pale, scrubbed skin. Her height. Her walk, even. It seems just hours ago, rather than days, that he has been clipping this woman’s daughter’s heels with just the same uncertainty, plucking up courage in his yellow beach cap to blurt out, “I knew your father” at her back. This time he just says, “Nadia.” She is either
too deep in thought to hear him or she has simply buried Leonard’s greeting in the noisy mayhem of the store. He tries again, closer but more lightly: “Hi, Nadia.” It’s as if he is a familiar neighbor. No big deal. Certainly that is what she takes him for. “Oh, hi,” she says. “How’s it going?”

  “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

  “I know the voice.”

  “We spoke the other night. On Thursday night.”

  “Where did we speak?” She looks about her, uneasy now, but reassured by the nearness of a pair of women in the next aisle and a shop assistant at the till.

  “On the phone.”

  She shakes her head and tucks her chin. She’s doesn’t know what he means.

  “I phoned about the bike. Your daughter’s bike.”

  She’s thinking now and making fast connections. She looks at him again, steps back a pace, looks round to check that she can get away if need be, glances at his hair, then looks down at his hands. “Leon … Lessing?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I’ve told the police.”

  “I know you’ve told the police. I’ve spoken to the police.”

  “I have a policeman with me now.”

  “He’s on the roof, watching the match. He won’t trouble us.”

  She backs away a further step. One more step and she’ll be out of reach. He stretches out to hold her arm or sleeve. But she’s too quick, and getting angry now.

  “Jesus, Lennie. Is that what you call yourself these days? What is going on? What do you want?” She edges round behind a display of skirts.

  “I want you to know that Lucy is all right. She’s safe. She’s not been kidnapped. Not at all.”