Armadillo (29 page)

‘Are you from Ceylon?’ Lorimer asked as she jotted down a few details.

‘Doncaster,’ she said in a flat Northern accent. ‘And it’s currently known as Sri Lanka, these days, not Ceylon.’

‘It used to be called Serendip, you know’

She looked at him neutrally. ‘So, what happened.’

‘I put it on. I don’t know why. It’s a very valuable antique, almost three thousand years old.’

‘It belongs to you?’

‘Yes. I was feeling… feeling depressed and I just put it on. And obviously it won’t come off.’

‘Funnily enough that little boy had swallowed a teaspoon. I asked him why and he said the same as you: he was feeling depressed so he swallowed a tea-spoon.’ She stood up and came over to him. Topped it in his mouth and down it went.’

Standing, she was barely taller than he was, sitting. She gave the helmet a few tugs and saw how well it fitted. She peered into his eye-slits.

‘We’re going to have to cut it off, I’m afraid. Is it very expensive?’

‘Yes. But never mind.’

He did feel oddly careless – care-less, literally. He would never, in any circumstances, have put this helmet on but the travails of the day had forced him into this act and he felt oddly privileged to have worn it for an hour or two. Walking around his flat, waiting for Slobodan, his mind had seemed strangely lucid and calm – probably because there was nothing he could do about the helmet–problem – but, more fancifully, he now wondered if it were something to do with the helmet itself, its very antiquity, the thought of the ancient warrior for whom it had been designed, some sort of transference –

He stopped himself: he was beginning to sound like David Watts. Sheer Achimota. There but for the grace of God.

The staff nurse, male, who came in with powerful clippers, said it was like slicing through stiff leather. He cut the helmet up the back, half way through the occipital bulge before, with a little easing, it came off.

‘You could solder it back together,’ Doctor Rathmanat-athan said, helpfully, handing the helmet to him.

The world was a suddenly much wider, less shadowed place and his head did feel different, lighter, swaying slightly on his neck. He touched his hair, it was damp, soaked with sweat.

‘Perhaps I will,’ Lorimer said, placing it in his bag, ‘or perhaps I’ll leave it, to remind me of this evening. A souvenir.’

The staff nurse and Dr Rathmanatathan looked at him strangely, as if the thought had struck them that, actually, he might be mad.

‘It still has value for me,’ Lorimer said.

He thanked them both, shook their hands and asked reception to order him a mini-cab. There was much still left to do this evening. He told the driver to take him to the Institute of Lucid Dreams.

Chapter 20

‘I think I may have got to the bottom of your problem,’ Alan said. ‘It’s fascinating, highly complex and still, in its special Blackian way, highly ambiguous.’ Alan began to pace about his lab as he elaborated on the metaphysical roots of Lorimer’s sleep-disorder. ‘Sleep is, in a way, Nature’s preparation for death – a preparation which we experience every night. That’s the real “
petit mort”–
not orgasm. A preparation for death and yet essential for life. Which is why –’

‘Have you got a franking machine here?’

‘No, but I’ve plenty of stamps.’

‘You were saying –’

‘Which is why your lucid dreams are so interesting, you see. In a non-Freudian, non-psychoanalytical sense. Lucid dreams are the human being’s attempt to negate the death element implicit in sleep. For you they’re a place where your dream-reality is controllable and anything nasty can be airbrushed away. The most frequent lucid dreamers are the worst sleepers – light sleepers, like you, and insomniacs. It’s deep slumber, NREM sleep, that you unconsciously fear.’

‘I just press “print”, do I?’

‘Yes. So, you see, Lorimer, for you, in a very profound sense, fear of deep sleep equals fear of death. But in the lucid dream you create a world where you hold sway, which you can control – the opposite of the real world, the waking world. The lucid dream is, in a way, a vision of a perfect life. I believe you light sleepers – and this may have been something you have biologically wrought upon yourself, you personally – have extra REM sleep because, unconsciously, you
want
to lucid dream, more than anything. You want to enter that perfect world where everything can be controlled. That’s the key to your problem. Rid yourself of that desire and deep slumber will return. I can assure you.’

‘You’re very confident, Alan.’

‘I haven’t just been fooling around here, you know’

‘I would swop all my lucid dreams for a good night’s sleep.’

Ah, you say that, but unconsciously you prefer the opposite. Your lucid dreams offer you a glimpse of an impossible, ideal world. It’s in your power to change it, but the lure of lucid dreams is hard to resist.’

Hard to resist calling all this arrant nonsense, Lorimer thought, but Alan was clearly passionate about his project and he did not want to start a row,

‘Somebody once referred to this problem as “indigestion of the soul”,’ Lorimer said.

‘That’s not scientific,’ Alan said. ‘Sorry’

‘But, Alan, how will all this help me?’

‘I haven’t got all the data I need yet. When that’s collected, collated and analysed, then I can tell you.’

‘And that’ll make me sleep better?’

‘Knowledge is power, Lorimer. It will be up to you.’

He wandered away to make some coffee and Lorimer looked at what he had written. Alan was right, knowledge was power, of a sort, and partial knowledge bestowed limited power, true – but it was still up to him to exercise it or not.

He had typed out on one of the Institute’s word processors a short history and interpretation of the Fedora Palace Affair, as he now mentally referred to it, and he thought he had caught its essence succinctly enough over the three pages he had compiled.

As far as he could determine there was an initial phase: a simple conspiracy to over-insure the hotel, and this was where Torquil came in as innocent dupe figure. The fool’s errand, the fool proving more useful than a wise man. This was done – according to Bram Wiles’s dates – prior to Gale-Harlequin’s flotation on the stock market, to what end he was not entirely clear, but doubtless it looked impressive – a huge, new, very expensive luxury hotel – and made the company’s assets seem healthier in the short term. He assumed that the building would be re-insured later for a figure that reflected its true worth. If, of course, the building was ever meant to be finished. It made a kind of sense: over-insuring was not a crime but there might have been an element of fraud in the desire to make Gale-Harlequin stock appear more desirable than was really the case. The floating and subsequent buyout of Gale-Harlequin was at the heart of all these manoeuvres. It merely had to look like the genuine article for a year or so – the time it took to almost build a new hotel. However, this clever but relatively straightforward plan went seriously awry through an event that no one could have predicted or pre-empted. All anticipations were seriously disturbed when a firm of sub-contractors, Edmund, Rintoul, started a small fire on an upper floor in order to escape penalty clause payments that were about to fall due. The small fire spread, became a large one, caused much damage, an insurance claim had to be filed and the anomalous nature of Gale-Harlequin’s insurance policy with Fortress Sure was accidently revealed.

The processes of claim assessment and loss adjustment automatically moved into action. An adjustment of the loss was proposed and instantly accepted in order to have the incident blow over as quickly as possible, because the large cash-for-share takeover bid was in the offing from a firm called Racine Securities. And who benefited from the Racine Securities buyout? Why, the shareholders of Gale-Harlequin, all bona fide investors, it seemed, according to Bram Wiles, all except for one mysterious offshore entity called Ray Von TL.

Lorimer would bet good money that the figures behind Ray Von TL would include, amongst others, Francis Home, Dirk van Meer and, quite probably, Sir Simon Sherriifmuir.

Further, Dirk van Meer’s Boomslang Properties bought the fire-damaged, partially demolished hotel at, Lorimer would guess, a very reasonable price.

Dirk van Meer, Lorimer would further wager, probably had a stake in Racine Securities. In other words, to untangle the knot somewhat, one part of his empire had simply bought a smaller part – money appeared to be changing hands, and large profits ensued for key participants.

Contemplating the outline of what went on, and who bought what, adding some smart guesswork to known fact, Lorimer concluded that this just about sketched out the outlines of the Fedora Palace Affair. Doubtless there were other ramifications he would never discover but some construction of this order began to shed a dim but revealing light on the mysterious events in which he had been peripherally involved.

What was more, he couldn’t even swear that any of this was illegal, but the fact that he had been kicked out of GGH, had been set up
vis à vis
Rintoul, and was clearly functioning as scapegoat in waiting, made him almost sure that there were secrets here that important people wished to remain secret. It followed certain classic structures – notably the sending in of a fool – Torquil – confident that the fool would be true to his nature. Torquil was meant to foul up the insurance of the Fedora Palace and, with a little indirect nudging and pointing by Sir Simon, duly had.

Except, the other classic rule also applied: if you can think of a hundred things that can go wrong, and factor them into your plan, you will be struck down by the hundred and first. No one had calculated on the humdrum duplicity of a small firm of Peckham builders. But there had proved enough swift resourcefulness, enough strength in depth and power and influence to provide efficient damage-limitation: a culpable party was set up (Lorimer) and George Hogg bought off and brought in. An extra snout at the trough was a small price to pay. Gale, Home, van Meer and Sir Simon had all cleared at least ten million, so Lorimer had roughly calculated, probably more. God alone knew what Dirk van Meer was making out of the deals.

Lorimer printed ten copies of his ‘Report into Certain Malpractices to do with the Insurance of the Fedora Palace Hotel’ and placed them in envelopes he had already addressed to the Serious Fraud Office and the financial editors of the daily and Sunday editions of the broadsheet newspapers. Alan, as promised, produced a sheet of first-class stamps and Lorimer set about licking and pasting them down.

‘Will you post these for me?’ he asked. ‘In the morning?’

‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?’

‘No.’

‘Well, that’s all right, then. Of course I will.’

Lorimer had said only he was revealing a suspected fraud – he added in further explanation, ‘Everyone’s assuming I’ll say nothing and I just hate being taken for granted.’

‘You’ll be cast out from paradise.’

‘It doesn’t seem quite so paradisaical these days. Anyway, I got what I wanted.’

Alan took the pile of envelopes from him and put them in his out-tray.

‘I was sorry to hear about old Lady H.,’ Alan said. ‘But I think she was always a bit suspicious of me.’

‘Never. Why do you think that?’

Because…’ Alan wiggled a spread palm. ‘Once an old colonial always an old colonial.’

‘Because you’re black? Ridiculous.’

‘There was always some reserve.’

‘Nonsense. She liked you. She was proud to have a Doctor of Philosophy in the building.’ Lorimer stood up. ‘Where can I get hold of a mini-cab at this time of night?’

399. Irrationality.
I do not mind contradictions, paradoxes, puzzles and ambiguities. What is the point of ‘minding’ something as inevitable and entrenched in our nature as our digestive system is in our body? Of course we can be rational and sensible but often so much of what defines us is the opposite – irrational and nonsensical l am defined by the fact that I consider Jill to be beautiful and Jane to be unattractive, by the fact that I prefer blue-coloured things to green, by my taste for tomato juice and disdain for tomato sauce, and that sometimes rain falling will make me sad and at other times make me happy. I can’t explain these choices but they and their kind contribute to the person I am as much as anything more reasoned and considered. I am as much myself ‘irrational’ as l am ‘rational’. If this is true for me then it must be true for Flavia. Perhaps we are all equally irrational as we blunder onwards. Perhaps, in the end, this is what really distinguishes us from complex, powerful and all-capable machines, from the robots and computers that run our lives for us. This is what makes us human.

The Book of Transfiguration

The downstairs lights were on in his Silvertown house, he was excited to see and, unlocking the front door quietly, he smelt spices, cooked tomatoes, cigarette smoke. There was a bunch of freesias in a jar in the kitchen and a dirty plate in the sink. He put his bag down and crept upstairs, his heart struggling in its cavity as if desperate to break out. Pushing open his bedroom door a few inches he saw Flavia sleeping in his bed. She was naked and one breast was exposed, the nipple small, perfectly round and darkly pigmented.

Downstairs, he switched on the television and banged about in the kitchen making tea. In five minutes or so Flavia appeared, in a dressing gown, hair mussed, sleepy. Her hair was the colour of raven’s wings, with a shimmer of inky blue and bottle green, making her skin seem so pale it was almost a bloodless white, the natural pink of her lips lurid and rose-red beside it. She accepted a mug of tea from him and sat there for a while, not saying much, letting consciousness reclaim her.

‘How long have you been here?’ he said.

‘Since late last night. It’s not exactly homey, is it?’

‘No.’

‘So, how was your day, darling?’

‘Terrible.’

‘I’m going to Vienna in the morning,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a job.’

‘What?’

‘A British Council touring production of
Othello.
’

‘Are you Desdemona?’

‘Of course.’

‘Sounds nice. Shakespeare in Vienna.’

‘Better than life at home, I can tell you.’

‘He didn’t hit you or anything, did he?’

‘Not quite. He’s just vile. Impossible.’ She frowned, as if the notion had just struck her. ‘I’m not going back.’

‘Good.’

She reached out and took his hand. ‘But I don’t want to sleep with you tonight. Not tonight. I don’t think it would be wise.’

‘Of course.’ Lorimer nodded many times, hoping his disappointment wouldn’t show. ‘I’ll be in the spare room.’

She stood up and moved slowly to where he was sitting and put her arms around his head, folded her arms round his head and pulled his face to her belly. He closed his eyes and drew her warm bed-smell into his lungs, like a sleeping draught.

‘Milo,’ she said, and chuckled. He could hear her laugh reverberate through her body vibrations on his face. She bent her neck and kissed his forehead.

‘Will you call me when you get back from Vienna?’ he said.

‘Maybe. Maybe I’ll stay out there for a while, let Gilbert stew’

‘I think we could be very happy’

She pulled back his head so she could look at him better, her fingers gripping the hair behind his ears. She clicked her teeth together a few times and stared at him deeply.

‘I think… I think you might be right. It was fate that brought us together, wasn’t it?’

‘I’m not quite so sure where I stand on fate these days. I would have tracked you down, one way or another.’

‘But I might not have liked you.’

‘Well, it’s a point, I suppose.’

‘Lucky for you I do, Milo, lucky for you.’ She bent her head and kissed him again, gently, on the lips.

Lorimer unwrapped a new blanket and spread it on the spare bed in the little room upstairs under the roof. He took off his clothes and slid between the mattress and the prickly wool. He heard her in the corridor and for a brief moment fantasized that she might knock on his door – but after a few moments there was the sound of the toilet flushing.

He slept the night through, uninterrupted and completely dreamless. He woke at eight o’clock, parched and hungry, pulled on his trousers and stumbled downstairs where he found her note in her large and acutely slanting hand.

You can come with me to Vienna if you like. Air Austria, Heathrow, terminal 3, 11.45. But I can
’
t promise you anything. I can
’
t promise anything will last. You must know that – if you decide to come. F.

What was it with her, he thought, smiling, always these tests, these challenges? But he knew at once what he would do: this seemed far and away the best deal life had ever offered him and he accepted it unreflectingly and instantly Unequivocally He would go to Vienna and be with Flavia Malinverno – this would make him happy