(1998) Denial (9 page)

The reporter had run out of names. He stared back helplessly at Thomas.

‘Twenty and a half, that’s not very good, Justin F. Flowering. I think I’d better give your memory a jolt.’

Thomas switched on the rotary saw and stepped forward.

Justin screamed. He thrashed against his bonds in desperation, but he was locked solidly in place. He saw the blade of the saw come down towards his wrist, lower, closer.

The man would stop. He was teasing now he would stop.

He felt a sharp sting along the top of his wrist. Saw a red ribbon of blood appear. He heard the grind of the blade and with it, simultaneously, his mind numbed by shock but his body screaming out, he felt excruciating pain, as if his hand was being crushed in a vice. He closed his eyes, his scream coming out as a gurgling drool, and when he opened them, the man was holding up his severed hand.

‘Silly boy, Justin. Don’t ever make the mistake again of not taking me seriously.’

Justin stared, thinking through his pain and shock that this must be a dream, he would wake up in a moment. And then he saw the flame shooting from the nozzle of the blowtorch. Heard its furnace roar. Saw the man pick it up and move it towards the end of his arm.

He bellowed, his lungs at breaking point inside his chest.

Then the pain exploded through his body. His brain felt as if it was twisting inside his skull.

Then darkness.

thursday, 16 july 1997. 3 a.m
.

Buy a white van
.

Honestly, that’s my best advice. Nothing new or too shiny, nothing that is going to attract attention. Just a plain white van, a Ford Transit is fine. Or a Hiace. Doesn’t matter. Just make sure it’s mechanically sound, that it has good wiring and a decent battery. People will think you’re a workman on call, a plumber or something. They won’t notice you. If you have a white van you become invisible
.

You do
.

And if you’re invisible, you’re in a smart space
.

I’ve been trying to teach Justin F. Flowering about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. But he’s really not in much of a mood for learning – certainly not more than one thing at a time
.

I’ve been trying to explain to him that Heisenberg believed that the very act of observing a scientific experiment changed the behaviour of the objects under scrutiny. So I tried to point out to Justin F. Flowering that the mere act of my watching him in the sauna in turn watching the motion pictures starring my late mother was affecting him in some subtle ways – ways that were probably too subtle even to measure
.

He couldn’t get his head around that at all
.

He’s going to be in that sauna a long time. I’m keeping an eye on the clock. He’s watching
Race of The Devils
right now. It lasts exactly ninety-eight minutes. I’ll go down in a minute and see what he’d like to watch next. There’s a huge choice, she made so many great movies. I think that if he watches every one of her films a few times over, it will help his memory a lot
.

Actually, you don’t just need a white van. You need a white van and a drawing pin – a thumbtack
.

I will explain about the thumbtack
.

‘
If I must die
,

I will encounter darkness as a bride
,

And hug it in my arms
.’

The player exited, stage left. Another entered, stage right. Michael had no idea who either of them was. His body was in the front row of the dress circle of the Globe Theatre. His mind was elsewhere, surfing the ether, but mostly thinking about Amanda.

The mention of death brought it back to the play.

It hadn’t been such a smart idea to come to the theatre. They should have just gone for a drink, or a meal, somewhere they could have talked. Now he had to sit next to her for three interminable hours, unable to talk, unable to concentrate on the play, and unable to get comfortable on his hard seat.

His mind veered from Amanda to Gloria Lamark. He felt guilty that he hadn’t gone to her funeral yesterday, yet how could he? How could he have looked at her son, her friends, knowing he had been responsible for her death? Yet in not going he had been running away. Again, he had done what he always told his patients not to do.

Michael had problems with Shakespeare. He liked the tragedies because he knew them all pretty well, in particular
Lear
, but he didn’t know
Measure for Measure
at all. He should have boned up on it, and had intended to, but had not got round to it. Now he had lost track of who was who.

One of the characters was the Duke of Vienna. Another, called Angelo, was a kind of born-again Puritan who had sentenced to death someone called Claudio for sleeping with his fiancée. A woman called Isabella (Claudio’s sister?
Michael thought that was a possibility) was doing a lot of talking.

There is a smell peculiar to all theatres. It comes with the eddies of cold air from somewhere deep beyond the stage. It’s a smell of wigs and old clothes and make-up and nervous human beings. Michael had been aware of it since he was a small child, going to pantomimes, and it excited him. Even in the open air the smell was here, but above it, tonight, he was even more aware of Amanda’s perfume. The same perfume she had been wearing last week, faintly musky, incredibly sensual.

She was concentrating on the play with the rapture of a child at a magic show. She was really enjoying this! She was laughing at jokes that eluded him, clapping after speeches, deliciously uninhibited in her enthusiasm, and almost scarily knowledgeable. He felt ignorant.

An ignorant, boring old fart. With a dull car. Who no longer knew how to chat up birds.

And she looked lovely. Lovelier than he had remembered, although she was being more distant than he had hoped. The evening had started coolly, a formal handshake when he had gone to her flat to collect her. With equal formality she had invited him in for a drink. There hadn’t really been time but he had said yes anyway, partly out of politeness, but more out of curiosity to see her lair.

The place had surprised him. He had supposed, for no particular reason, that she had a poky ground-floor or basement bedsit, dark, dingy, the kind he and most of his friends had lived in when he’d been a medical student. Instead he was led up into a large, airy loft, with a magnificent view east across Hampstead, St John’s Wood and the whole of the West End of London.

The flat was minimally furnished, with a polished oak floor and limed wood skirtings, doors, dados and furniture, and the walls were hung with a small number of fine original modern paintings, elegant and witty neo-classical scenes; one he particularly admired was a parody of Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus
set in a car park, with Venus emerging from a beat-up Cadillac. Her kitchen was a
stainless-steel high-tech playground, and she served him ice-cold Chilean sauvignon in a tall, fine glass.

She had a standard of elegance far and above the denim-clad rough-and-tumble tomboy that he had met in his office and in the radio studio. And tonight, to match the flat, she looked demure, intensely feminine, drop-dead gorgeous.

He hadn’t known what to expect, but whatever had been in his mind, it was not this. Often people look different the second time you meet them. They look different in different environments; but he could never, ever remember such a change in anyone.

She was one very smart, very together young lady.

And she was making him feel extremely
un
together. His confidence had taken the evening off, and he was stricken by a fear of rejection, by a fear of losing her that was alien to him.

During the past three years there had been no shortage of colleagues and friends trying to fix him up with women, but he hadn’t wanted to know. After a series of embarrassing dinner parties where he had been fixed up with blind dates –
Mike, you’ll adore her, you’ll get on so well together!
– he had stopped accepting the invitations. The entire world seemed peopled with screwed-up divorcées who’d turn to him at the dinner table and say crass things like, ‘How do I know you’re not analysing me now?’

Katy had been special. Beautiful, warm, caring, balanced, a terrific companion, a wonderful hostess, and a hugely talented designer who had made the interior of their modest little house in Putney into a beautiful space, and had worked a miracle in the garden. They had shared so much together, they had been more than lovers, more than great friends, they had been soul-mates.

Why the hell had he fouled it up?

In Amanda, for the first time, he had encountered someone who seemed to have some of Katy’s qualities. But instead of rising to the occasion, he found his tongue tied in a granny knot, a double reef, a round turn and two half
hitches, a figure of eight, a bowline and a whole raft of others all at once. And his brain mushed.

He had stood in her stunning flat, mumbling about the weather, the traffic, the problems of parking in London. If she’d had any suspicions that he might be a sad old Volvo-driving fart last week, that ten minutes in her flat confirmed it. With knobs on.

He wished he’d come on his motorbike. But the red Ducati had stood at the back of his garage under a dust sheet for the past three years. He simply hadn’t felt like riding it any more.

They’d talked about London’s changing architecture in the car all the way to the theatre. They both liked the Lloyds Building and hated Canary Wharf. It had been an improvement, but damage limitation rather than progress.

She had terrific legs. And he wasn’t sure whether her skirt was simply a fashionable length, or whether it was deliberately provocative. That showed how far out of touch with fashion he was.

Sad bastard.

On stage, a man was proclaiming,

‘Ay but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence about
The pendent world; . . .’

His chance for redemption came during the first interval. They fought their way through the crowd at the bar and found the drinks he had ordered. They clinked glasses and Amanda’s eyes were alight.

‘So,’ she said, brightly, ‘how was your day? What did you do?’

He nearly blew this chance, big-time. ‘I was out early this
morning collecting dog faeces.’ Instantly he regretted telling her this: it was not the stuff of romance.

‘I used to have a dog,’ she said, with a vehemence that startled him. ‘And I always used a pooper-scooper.’

‘I didn’t mean I object to dog faeces,’ aware he was digging himself in deeper. ‘I was collecting them for a patient.’

She gave him a seriously strange look.

‘An OCD sufferer,’ he added hastily.

‘OCD?’

Someone jostled him, spilling beer over the top of his glass and down inside his shirt cuff. He pretended to ignore it. ‘Obsessive compulsive disorder. She’s panicked by dirt – uh – by the thought of dirt. I was collecting dog faeces in specimen bottles to bring into the room as part of her therapy.’

Amanda lightened up. With a startling burst of enthusiasm she asked, ‘Could we include this in the film segment?’

‘I’d have to ask my patient, I don’t know if she’d agree.’

‘We could use an actress.’

He nodded.

‘So what kind of things do you make her do with these faeces?’

‘Exposure is the conventional treatment. Facing up to fear. She’s obsessed with contamination – she’s frightened to touch door handles, taps, public telephones, and she’s a compulsive handwasher, gets through several bars of soap a week. And one of her problems is that she’s incapable of walking down a street past dog faeces. She has to turn back. So we start with easy things, like getting her to touch the door handle. I have to try to get her to recognise this is a
thinking
problem rather than contamination.’

Amanda grinned and drank some of her lager. ‘I love the idea of dog turds in glass jars.’

And Michael liked how she drank the beer, how she swigged it with gusto; there was something about the way she enjoyed this simple pleasure that turned him on even more. Katy had loathed beer.

I’m comparing them
.

There was an earthiness he really liked about Amanda. She was elegant, pretty, yet he could sense a wild streak in her, and, not for the first time tonight, he found himself wondering what it would be like to make love to her.

He was getting a hard-on standing here at the bar. He wished he had the courage to put his arm around her, but right now he was so nervous she might think he was being forward that he kept moving away every time their bodies touched.

He wanted so much to give her a signal, to touch her hand, or just stroke back the cluster of blonde hair that had tumbled down over her forehead. Her face and arms and legs were lightly tanned. A few freckles nestled in the soft-looking golden down on her arms and he found the colour of those hairs deeply sensual.

You are gorgeous, you are seriously, seriously, gorgeous. I love the way you look, I love where you live. I want to know you better. I am smitten, I really am!

‘I can draw you a habituation curve,’ he said.

‘A what?’

‘It’s a graph. We measure
anxiety
and
time
. The first time I introduce her to the glass jar, we’ll see the highest curve, the second time, it will be less, and so on.’

God I’m hopeless
, he thought, suddenly.
The great seducer. Talking to my date about dog turds in jam jars
.

Later, as they left the theatre, Michael told her he had booked a table at the Ivy, in Covent Garden.

‘Hey!’ she said. ‘That is one of my
favourite
restaurants. How did you know? Are you psychic?’ It was a coincidence, also, she thought. The Ivy was the sister restaurant to the Caprice where Brian took her. The Ivy was more low-key, less brash. And Michael was far more low key and less brash than Brian.