Cannonbridge (3 page)

“Yeah?”

“What brings you to Ashbury?”

“Visiting a... dear friend. And you?”

“I live here.”

“You do?”

“I do.”

“Well, good for you.” Was that a smirk, Toby wonders? “I mean... why not? Why wouldn’t you want to live in a place like this?”

“I’d better get going. My wife will be waiting.”

“Of course. Yes. I’m sure she will be.”

The two men shake hands. The line moves forward again, Salazar now one space away from his ride. Toby nods farewell. Turning from the station, without looking back, he begins the familiar walk towards home.

There isn’t much to see in Ashbury, little to recommend it to the traveller. A high street, the station, a couple of pubs and as many dusty, echoing churches, a single café, (called, with bourgeois archness ‘The Pantry’), an Italian restaurant run by a couple who’ve never been to Italy and, inevitably, plenty of chain outlets, watching, with crocodile eyes, their dwindling independent rivals. But, mostly, Ashbury is just street after street of neat terraced houses, of still and silent roads, of homes with small, well-tended gardens and clean tarmac drives. All is solemn and uneventful and tame.

It is towards one of these streets—largely indistinguishable from the rest—that Toby trudges as the station recedes behind him. His destination is another nondescript house in another sober avenue: Number Forty-Three, Akerman Road. As the house comes into view, he sees that the lights are on and that his wife is home and at these realisations Dr Judd feels a little upswing in his heart, an understanding of his own good fortune which suddenly renders all the petty irritations of the day of no significance whatever.

Approaching home, in sight of happiness, he is reaching into his pocket for keys when he notices something unexpected and not altogether welcome—a black cab idling, its engine growling, opposite the house. The driver he has not seen before but the passenger is immediately familiar.

Judd stops short and considers crossing over, asking Salazar what it is he thinks he’s doing loitering so close to Toby’s home. But, lacking the requisite energy and figuring, in any case, that to beard a colleague in such a way might come across as overly cranky, he simply walks on by, inclining his head slightly to one side so as to avoid eye contact. Toby’s last thought as he slides the key into the door of Number Forty-Three is that Salazar’s friend must live on Akerman Road, a detail that proves to be oddly disagreeable to him.

He closes the door and calls out. “Hello! Sweetheart!”

“In here.” Caroline sounds nervous and on edge.

Toby strolls through to the house’s tiny sitting room, with its walls lined with books, its ancient sofa and too-big TV, its framed prints, its rugs brought back from inexpensive foreign holidays.

She’s a small woman, Caroline, curvaceous, with dark hair cut into a 1920s bob. She’s dressed as if for an evening in town with a friend she hasn’t seen for ages—a summer dress of dark green, both practical and stylish, showing a little but not too much of her pale, freckled skin. As Toby enters the room, she’s getting to her feet. Beside her, he sees that there is a single suitcase—the one he bought last year after its predecessor had been lost—the bulging contours of which suggest that it has been filled to the very limits of its capacity.

“Hi.” There is a look on her face he’s never seen there before—equal parts guilt, pity and deep, slow-burning anger.

“Are you... going somewhere?”

She lowers her head, not quite a nod yet no denial either. “You must have known... That this has been coming for a while.”

“Known what?”

Pity is uppermost. “Come on, Toby.” Now anger. “Come on. Surely you can figure it out. Why don’t you... Yeah... Why don’t you make one of your famous
deductions
?”

Toby takes it all in then, perhaps for the first time. He inspects each element: the dress, the look, the bulging suitcase, the man with the cheekbones in the cab outside. He forges connections and fits his theory to the facts—a process which, in other circumstances, he would certainly have found enjoyable—before, in a rush of cognition, he arrives at the only possible conclusion. “I... had no idea.”

A flicker of sorrow before the pity returns. “You must have done.”

“No. No. None. And—”

“Yes?”

Outside, a car horn, loud, mocking and insistent.

“For him? Really? I mean—sweet Jesus!—for
Salazar?
”

T
HE PLEASURES OF
Toby’s life might, until this point, be itemised as follows—literary, of course (since boyhood), gastronomic (red meat and chicken wings; Indian; Italian; Thai), erotic (though not with so great a frequency or with the diversity that he might have wished) and even narcotic (on three or four occasions without any urge for revisitation). But alcohol has never been a particular friend of his. He has drunk socially, of course, but in moderation, not feeling the need that he has heard about from others for inebriation and for its concomitant boons of softening and forgetting. He can count on two fingers the number of times that he has ever vomited from over-indulgence and he has not been truly drunk since the Sixth Form when, in the company of friends and hoping to impress Alison Cartwright from the year below, he’d made a fool of himself with a crate of supermarket cider in a garage that had belonged to the family of a classmate. Tonight, however, once the front door has been opened and then closed again, once the taxi has moved grumblingly away and the house is still, Toby sets to drinking in earnest.

He drinks everything that he can find. A bottle of screw-top red wine. A can of gin and tonic bought on a whim at Waterloo a month ago and its partner, one of cola and rum. These things dealt with swiftly, he moves on to obscurities—a miniature whisky bottle purchased as a Christmas present for an uncle who’d died before the day, a single bottle of continental lager given to him by a friend he didn’t really see any more with a name that was unintentionally rude in English, half a bottle of raki brought back from a holiday on Crete, found not to taste so good after all, not away from the sunshine and the sea, and, finally, a rotund bottle of whisky cream acquired as a necessary constituent of some long-devoured supermarket offer. It is sickly and cloying with an aftertaste that burns, although by the time that Toby gets to it, the last of the alcohol in the house, none of this seems to matter anymore.

Halfway into this ultimate bottle, he is seized by a sudden desire to be outside, away from home. So, whisky cream in hand, he leaves, slamming the door behind him with an unneighbourly flourish and stepping out into the night. It is dark and Ashbury is silent and sleeping, its streets empty as in some science-fiction film in which the human race has been eliminated at a stroke. Toby glances at his watch—the hands of the device swimming a little before him—and sees that it is just gone midnight. He turns left and starts to walk into the heart of suburbia, soon becoming lost. Both streets and time seem, in his condition, to be in flux, ebbing and flowing around him, dream-like and unnatural.

The experience is not altogether unpleasant. He feels numbness and an agreeable floating sensation. Grey roads unspool before him. In the warm, thoughtful light of the streetlamps his shadow stretches out. He passes few cars and fewer pedestrians and, happily, nobody at all whom he knows. Occasionally, a cat or a fox crosses his path. Such creatures pause for an instant, seeming (to him, at least) to give him a sympathetic look before scampering away into the shadows. Once or twice, Toby feels an almost overwhelming desire to sing as he walks but, mercifully for the people of the town, this urge he succeeds in quelling.

There are moments of darkness—blanks in the evening’s chronology. Several times he finds himself in a new and unfamiliar road or standing on somebody’s driveway or peering up at a lighted window with no memory at all of how he has got there. In such situations, he merely swigs piratically from his bottle and moves on, each slug making him feel both a little better and far, far worse.

He must have been walking for more than an hour when, after another short period of near-unconsciousness, he finds that he is sitting down. The chair or bench feels curiously unstable, as though he has somehow gone to sea, and, at first, he is inclined to blame the alcohol until, the significance of his surroundings impinging gradually upon his sodden senses, he understands that he is sitting on a swing.

It is a swing meant for children. A deserted playground. Toby looks around and takes all of it in—those swings and that slide, the climbing frame and the roundabout, everything painted in primary colours yet dulled and made melancholy by the night. He starts to move to and fro a little but, rapidly feeling unwell, soon stops and rights himself.

He reaches for the bottle but cannot find it. Mislaid, perhaps? Or else abandoned on his journey. Feeling at a loss he gazes ahead at the wall opposite, to which a basketball hoop is attached. As he takes in the lines of regular red brick he feels, unexpectedly, a sob—the first of the evening—swell within his chest and break, leaving him with a single, moist moan. Alarmed, even slightly sobered by the sound, he bites his lower lip and strives to think of other things. He feels a weight in the pocket of his jacket.

The bottle? No—reaching down, he realises that it is only a book.

Salazar’s book.

He takes it out, flips over to the back cover and looks, for as long as he can bear it, at the smart, groomed face of the author. Incredulous once again, he shakes his head.

He starts to turn the pages, his disbelief increasing. Written for a popular audience in the manner of a don slumming it on a teatime magazine show, the writing is awash with cliché and has no discernible ambition beyond offering feeble synopses of Cannonbridge’s most famous works and dramatising, with hagiographical solemnity, the flashpoints of his long, his improbably long and many-textured, life.

It starts to rain. Warm summer rain. Droplets fall to the paper like tears.

Toby Judd looks up again and stares once more at that brick wall. There is something there he sees now, something that has been troubling him—something not quite in the right place.

Is it just his imagination or does one brick seem darker than the rest?

He goes back to his book, turning page after page, tutting at the predictability of it, not caring about the damage that the rain is doing to the pages, but urging it on. Salazar’s lazy phrases multiply before him: ‘the greatest,’ ‘the most gifted’, ‘belongs to the ages’, ‘literary rock star’, ‘national treasure’.

The rain intensifies. The wall troubles him still further.

That one brick, he sees now, that one brick in particular, does not seem to belong.

Toby reads on and the titles of Cannonbridge’s novels and plays and poems, flutter before him—
The English Golem
,
Ezekiel Frye
,
The Seasons of Sorrow
,
Plenitude
—then the list of all those who knew him, Dickens and Collins, Byron and Wilde, Polidori and Arthur Conan Doyle.

All at once, something seems to bother him about those stories which has never—at least not consciously—bothered him before.

It’s too neat, he thinks.

It’s too... schematic.

Even, yes—
too contrived
.

In fact, the names of Matthew Cannonbridge’s fictions sound more like the fruits of a single afternoon’s work than the output of a long (a fantastically long) literary career.

He looks again before him—at the darker brick.

It’s a downpour now. Seized by a desire to know for certain, Toby gets up and strides—or, more accurately, he weaves his way—across to the wall. His hands reach out in the darkness for that one, troubling brick. His fingers move closer and closer... and touch something soft and slimy and wrong. He jerks away his hands with instinctive disgust.

Then, warily, peers closer.

Paper. Old, damp paper stuffed into a hole in the wall. He understands then that it was only ever the darkness which had made it seem like a brick at all.

Back he goes now, enlightened, Toby Judd, back to his swing and to the book that is growing fat and swollen in the deluge.

The brick and the book.

The brick. The book.

The brick.

The book.

He feels a kind of swelling in his head. More than a mere ache, more than some preliminary hangover. No... this, he thinks, this must be something else. It must be understanding. Realisation. Epiphany?

Newton beneath the apple tree. Darwin in the Galapagos. Archimedes in his bloody bath.

And now... can it be? Toby Judd in a children’s playground with a brick made of sodden paper?

What might some neurologist see at this moment were the brain of Dr Judd to be subjected to a scan? What strange leap of particles? What dizzying surge of mental electricity? What fantastic, unprecedented mutation of thought?

Half-energised, half-nauseous, Toby looks again at the picture of Matthew Cannonbridge, that dark, handsome, saturnine old devil. He looks at the list of his works, at the man’s extreme longevity. He considers everything he knows, everything he’s ever been taught—and accepted, largely without question—about that individual and all of his works—and, in a single, shining moment—he dares to reject it all. Making his second, more complicated and still more terrible deduction of the day, he comes to the following conclusion, spoken, defiantly, aloud: “This is bullshit.”

And again, with more volume, not caring about how it might look, a drunk by the swings at night, quarrelling with the rain: “This is
bullshit
.”

He realises then that he is being watched. A handsome, thick-pelted fox is observing him from over by the roundabout. Toby directs his subsequent thoughts to the animal who, oddly, neither turns nor flees at the attention.

Judd sees it all. “Cannonbridge is a delusion.”

The fox’s ears twitch as if in understanding or encouragement.

“Cannonbridge is a lie.”

The eyes of the creature seem to gleam in pleasure and in pride.