A Bright Moon for Fools (38 page)

Either side of the highway thousands of naked bulbs illuminated the deprivation of the barrios. Pepito turned on the radio and lit another cigarette.

He would visit Emily’s grave. He would make a doctor’s appointment about his chest pains.

A sign for the airport rushed overhead.

He would get older. He would die alone.

He was hovering in the air, a tiny figure above the dark volcano.

Oh, Lola
. Soon he would drop.

They pulled up in front of the terminal building. She wasn’t going to be there. She wasn’t going to appear. Pepito took him inside, watched him check in, and led
him as far as the metal detectors.

Pepito shook his hand. “Goodbye,
amigo
. I hope you take it more easy.” Christmas started to say something, then shook his head. He stepped through the frame.

In the departure lounge, Christmas sat down on a row of empty plastic chairs. He stared at his hands. The airport felt empty. He watched a man mop the floor. He examined a family asleep. He went
to the bathroom. He saw that he had a tan. His face was covered in lines. He had no moustache. He was an old man in a tracksuit. She had come to the jetty to see him leave. She had cried out
– hadn’t she? Would she remember he had saved her son from being electrocuted?

Christmas sat down in front of a monitor and watched the capitals of the world move upwards, blink and disappear. His flight was boarding. He walked down the hall to his gate and joined the
queue. The woman who took his boarding pass didn’t look at him. She was beautiful. Then he was behind her with his stub, facing a plastic tunnel.

Christmas boarded the plane. A steward welcomed him. He took his seat by the window and looked out at the moon, listening to the people settling around him, the security announcements, the ping
and click of the machine readying itself.

An old Indian woman sat beside him. She had sunglasses in her hair and wore a warm jacket over her sari. She stowed her book and took out the in-flight magazine. She rifled through it, put it
away and took out her book. She snapped back the pages, sighing and shifting in her seat.

The plane began to move. She muttered a prayer. Christmas turned to her from the window. She forced a smile, her neck iron with fear. The plane rolled into position. She seized the armrests. It
accelerated. It roared and rose.

Bridget
. He had the rape of a girl on his conscience now, burnt on like a slave brand, something he could not remove or disguise except with drink and he must stay away from drink. He was
an agent for evil. How could he live? How could he still be walking through the world with all that he had caused? There was nothing to fix, nothing to do but accept. He must go and see Diana. He
must at least present himself, and then, whatever she said, work and earn and repay her. What was the price of a dead stepson? Christmas curled in his seat. There was pressure in his ears. He was
being cast out from the human race.
Oh, the drink
. How it would hide his heart. But there must be no drink. The only offering he had left for the dead and the maimed was his torment held
pristine. He saw a road open up in front of him beneath this low moon that offered no rest, no end except death. He must meet this road with a clear mind, with courage. He must conduct himself from
here on without the easy deceits of the past. Emily was gone. Bridget and Judith were destroyed. Slade was murdered. Diana was alive.
Lola
. He must find a way to get back to her. He thought
of her injuries.
Let me drink
, said a voice, and he caught the eyes of a passing stewardess. She smiled. He turned to the window. The moon. The plane was levelling. Christmas looked
down.

Venezuela. It was already just a dwindling constellation, one of many that cover the earth: sparks of mankind in stubborn struggle against the night.

Sarai Rodriguez

Marie-Elisa and Billy Barker

Seorais Graham

Christoph Hargreaves-Allen, king of readers.

Al pueblo de Macuro, Estado Sucre, especialmente a la Señora Beatriz, a la Señora Luisa, Juriana Martínez, su hija Daisy mi ahijada y su padre Pinpon
Kezama, Laurie y su familia, Alve Medina, Jose ‘Nango’ Medina, Adolfo ‘El Pargo’, Reina, Milagro, Caridad, Thomas, Modesto Jose, mi jefe Pedro Pablo y su familia, Luis,
Roberto y a toda la gente de esta comunidad de tal fuerza, dignidad y generosidad.

Frances and Hugh Gibson, Effie and Phiz Phizackalea, Amelia and Paddy Lyndon-Stanford, Patrick Gibson, Bea Gibson, Nick Gordon, Orlando Hermandez, Aldo Centeno, Salvador, Tael
and Laura, Rosie Flint, Dom Minns, Peta Kennedy, Bill Curtis, Shauneen Lambe, Will Goodlad, Anne-Marie and Mathew Court, Matthew Clark, Ellie Wyatt, Kam and Lloyd Hudson, Richard
‘Speedy’ Byrne, Farah and Miles Cleret, Rachel and Roland Marks, Jane and Ben Maschler, Rachel Oakes, Mr and Mrs Squat Boy, Pawna and Mike Spencer-Nairn, Toby Tripp, Becky and James
‘the Baptist’ Razzal, Chris Milton, Niall Griffiths, Tracey Rogers, Nat Turner, Lulu and Mick Sadler, Laurence and David Ambrose, Chloe Aridjis, Cath and James Herring, Lee Bramley,
Lana Henry, James Haddon, Nick Fuller-Sessions, Buster Turner, Carla Rodamilans Castillo, Ed Maklouf, Max Bayer, Claudia Zimmerman, Elizabeth Carrillo, Pablo and Virginia Silberschmidt, Bing
Taylor, Pam Rose.

The people of Barceloneta, Catalonia. Jose-Maria and his family at La Cova Fumada. Margarita, Susanna and everyone who works at the New Orleans Café, Plaza Poeta
Bosca.

Everyone who works at Le Chien Qui Fume, Boulevard Montparnasse.

Natalie Bennett, Nick Gillett.

Lewis Heriz, Zissou Limpkin, Olivia Wood, Scott Pack, Caroline Gorham, Laura Kincaid, Jenny Todd, Sian Gibson, Alan Jessop, Payhembury Marbled Papers, Genoveva De La
Peña, Bookcunt, India Waters, Jamie Byng, Sam Hart, Peter Ho, Jeremy Wood, Raffaella De Angelis, Claire Harris, Nick Marshal, Mark Ollard, Jo Dickinson, Matt Bates, Ruth Killick.

In particular I would like to thank Crispin and Rowan Somerville for their belief and energy, without which this book would not exist.

Finally, for all her support and insight, I would like to thank Daisy Sadler, whom I love so very much.

Thanks for reading my debut novel. This being the paperback version, Simon & Schuster asked me to write something extra they could stick in the back. After several failed
attempts at starting a short story, and then starting a nap, I’ve decided I’m going to tell you a true story instead, not about writing this book, but about writing one of the others
that Simon & Schuster and many others failed to publish; about how I came to hear a screech of tyres behind me, turn around, and see two Armed Response Unit vehicles emptying their guts of
policemen with machine guns. They were screaming orders. The guns were all facing in my direction. Then I was on the floor being arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

Most ideas writers have are bad. I’d recently had one of my very worst ideas: a novel about modern-day pirates on the Thames, set in a world where everyone has removable
genitalia. Stage one of my research was buying a plastic vagina and leaving it in a bowl on the kitchen table. How I wish I’d remembered to remove it before my mother came round. Stage two
was meeting T– .

T– was a captain for hire who bought boats to London from other European ports. We arranged to meet in one of the capital’s greatest drinking establishments: the Wibbly Wobbly, a
floating pub moored in Surrey Quays. After a boozy evening of me asking questions about how the Thames was policed, we said our goodbyes and within a couple of minutes I was in handcuffs, and
assuming this was an unfortunate case of mistaken identity. I was wrong.

Counting white tiles in a police cell is difficult. You lose your place. You get back to the top corner and start again. You lose your place. You become discouraged and look
around for inspiration. I found mine in a message scratched on the gurney frame.
Fuck the Shit
, said the nameless philosopher.
Yes
, I thought,
fuck the shit!
But I was too
thirsty to maintain such impressive levels of rebellion. I was sobering up. It was three in the morning.

I rang the bell and asked for water. When it came the officer told me that T– had been arrested and was in the cell block. “T–!” I shouted through the hatch once he had
gone. “T–!” someone shouted back in a girlie way.

I lay back on the plastic mattress. Unsettling thoughts began to creep across the hour. I’d only just met T–, what did I really know about him? Maybe I’d been arrested because
of him. He’d just bought a boat back from Amsterdam – perhaps it was stuffed full of drugs. Perhaps he was an arms smuggler. Perhaps he was one of those Nazis they still ask you about
on your way into America.

At midday, I was visited by two CID detectives. At last! Now this whole mess would be sorted out. I stood up.

“So,” said Detective P., “are you going to tell us about the weapons-grade plutonium?”

I sat down. “If you can tell me what weapons grade plutonium looks like,” I sighed, “I’ll tell you if I’ve got any.” The two detectives looked at each other.
Somewhere, somehow, there had been one enormous cock-up.

They took me to search my flat. The atmosphere had relaxed and, as we drove across town, Detective S. was telling me about his love of real ale. The relaxed atmosphere, however, had not extended
to a third officer in the car, who looked just like the singer Tricky, and insisted on saying everything very close to my face. We pulled up at traffic lights. My mother’s cousin was loading
shopping into her car.

“That’s my mother’s cousin,” I said.

“Do you want us to stop and say hello?” said Detective P.

“Yeah,” said Tricky, who was sitting next to me in the back. He leant close to my face. “And give you a slap?”

“No thanks.” I said. We drove off.

Outside my flat I made a request. “I’ve just moved into the building. Any chance you can take these cuffs off?”

“Yeah, no problem,” said Detectives S. and P.

Tricky came up very close to my face. “If you try and run,” he hissed, “I will personally knock you down.”

“I’m wearing Timberlands,” I replied, “and you’ve got my shoelaces.” Tricky looked down and grunted with satisfaction.

Once inside the flat, they quickly satisfied themselves that I was what I purported to be: an untidy writer. Tricky sat me on a stool in the corner of the kitchen, folded his arms and stood
watch. Ostensibly this was a search for weapons-grade plutonium, though I was still in the dark as to where the idea had come from that I was involved in black market nuclear arms dealing. My flat
had a secret room behind the back of a cupboard. They failed to find it. They did, however, find some rather private photographs of my then-girlfriend Peta.

“Who’s the brunette?” shouted Detective P. from the bedroom.

“Hey!” I shouted, standing up. “Leave those alone!” This was the moment Tricky had been waiting for. He shoved me back on the stool and started bawling threats into my
face. The other detectives carried on floating around my flat, picking things up and having a bit of a chat. This wasn’t how I imagined a counter-terrorism search would be. It felt more like
an episode of
Through the Keyhole
.

“My name is Jasper Gibson,” I said into the microphone several hours later. “And I’m writing a book about removable vaginas.” The detectives were giggling. They
were ready to start the interview. One left the room to fart. Then, finally, they were ready to tell me what had happened.

An off-duty traffic policeman from Leeds, who owned a boat in the marina, had been listening to our conversation in the Wibbly Wobbly. He was either half-deaf or a complete fantasist, and had so
selectively handpicked individual words from what we were saying, that he had convinced himself he was in a Die Hard movie and I was Alan Rickman.

Where had the plutonium idea come from? Suddenly I remembered:

T–: “The other option is your characters could use a radar jammer, like they use in jet warfare.”

Me: “Yeah, but that would make them more conspicuous, not less, right? If the radar was suddenly jammed.”

T–: “True. Also they probably couldn’t get their hands on a radar jammer.”

Me: “That doesn’t matter. This is fiction. They can get their hands on whatever they want; weapons-grade plutonium, light sabers, you name it. They’ve got removable penises.
Sky’s the limit.”

But instead of calling Darth Vadar, this man had called the Met.

With the interview terminated and my shoelaces returned I was finally released. The door to another interview room opened. Tricky walked in and behind him was T–! Only it
wasn’t T– . They had managed to arrest the only other person in the pub that night who had a beard. I burst out laughing. Tricky didn’t seem so keen to get close anymore.

The custody sergeant exhaled and shook his head. “Don’t,” he said, “please don’t.” The not-T– burst into a torrent of expletives.

When I returned to the Wibbly Wobbly the following week, more details emerged. The manager told me how the pub had suddenly flooded with fake couples who ordered gin and tonics and only drank
the tonic. Despite such massive amounts of surveillance, when T– left the pub, they had somehow managed to lose him and, in a panic, had raided all the houseboats until they finally found
someone with the right facial hair. A waitress trying to get home had found her car surrounded by machine-gun toting officers screaming at her to get out. She was so scared, she collapsed and hit
her head.

The off-duty traffic policeman and boat-owner was known to the publican and they had barred him for life. Someone stuck a policeman’s helmet on the bow of his boat and graffitied
‘pig’ along the side.

I didn’t feel sorry for him, but I did feel sorry for the detectives – except for Tricky, of course. They were under an enormous amount of pressure and that call had put unstoppable
wheels in motion. Plus, they never found my plutonium. If anyone wants some I’ll be down the Wibbly Wobbly next Friday.