Dispossession (17 page)

“I don’t know what a playscript is,” he said.

Right enough, he wouldn’t. Nor did he have any curiosity, to
learn. But I explained what I wanted, speaker and dialogue and no possibility
of confusion; and he nodded and began, so crisp and fast that I missed the
first dozen words because I didn’t have the dictaphone switched on yet.

“Me: Hullo, Jonty, I was waiting for you. You: Of course you
were, you always are. Smartass. Me: Sit down and drink. You: No more now,
thanks. Luke, you won’t believe this, but I’ve got married...”

And so on, maybe half a day and half a night of talking; and
yes, he did compress it into a couple of hours, and it was hard to get him to
stop long enough for me to change tapes, and my hands were trembling by then so
I nearly made a hash of it; and that was only with the strain of hearing him do
this, I wasn’t trying to make sense of the words any more. That would come
later, with the transcript.

Except, right at the end, because it was the end my mind
went back to, unpicking the final few words from the continuous seam of Luke’s
recital. They were my own words, mostly: “‘Bye, then, Luke. And thanks a lot,
that’s a real help. I’ll tell you about it sometime, yeah? And I’ll bring Sue
over to meet you soon.” And he’d said “No,” and I’d said “Yes, I will,” and I
could just hear myself laughing as I said it, defying the angel. And then I’d
said, “Tara, then,” and that was that; and those were the last words I said to
anyone in my whole mind, except of course for whatever I said to the mystery
guy or possibly gal I picked up and drove in the wrong direction; and oh, it
felt strange sitting there with that great hole torn in my memory, and trying
to darn it with stitches taken from my own words that I had to hear from
someone else, that I didn’t remember saying and didn’t understand.

o0o

No more R & R, though I did try. I spent another day
with him, writing down all the taped conversation like a playscript: which was
exactly how it felt, giving myself lines I had no memory of having said. Doing
it in capitals and different colours, his lines in red and mine in green, for
clarity; and then trying to compact all the information into a witness
statement in my head.

Wishing for once that he’d been a normal human man,
afflicted with normal human curiosity. Luke didn’t ask questions, so all I
could do was infer as much as possible from the questions I’d asked him, and
the few facts I’d volunteered.

But the sun-time, the fun time was over. It rained all day,
and the rain drummed like impatient fingers on the aluminium skin of the
Airstream, and I couldn’t relax. And I was straining my eyes trying to work in
the gloom in there, no lights, not even a candle to help me; and I couldn’t
concentrate anyway, what with Luke either sitting out there by the sodden
stones of his firepit while the rain ran off his hunched back to pool in his
pockets or else coming inside streaming water and standing to drip dry in a
corner, saying nothing, watching me.

I was on the verge of giving up, of leaving. I wanted to do
that, I was abruptly hungry to move, to leave this drained bucolic idyll and
relocate in some kind of active life again. If I’d been Luke, or simply myself
but as hard as Luke, sharing that one quality, it would have been easy: on my
feet and out, into the car and off with no words, even, no farewells. He’d done
that to me before.

I couldn’t do it to him, though. Leaving Luke I’d always
found next to impossible, until he explicitly told me to go. I should have been
better at it by now, but this was one last late hangover from my teenage days,
as if because Luke didn’t change therefore neither could I; as if with him I
would always be that difficult adolescent so clumsy in his timings, often
hanging around long after a welcome was worn out simply because he didn’t know
how to say goodbye.

Acquired social skills shrivelled and died, in a place where
they could expect little use and no respect. I sat with my tapes and my pad and
pen, scowling in the gloom, wishing for just a little more strength of purpose,
just enough to get me on my feet and my tongue moving.
Thanks, Luke, I’ll be off now
—that would be
ample. A perfect compromise: less than I felt I owed him, but more than he
would want or expect, my thanks no use to him and the information unnecessary.

So little, and yet I couldn’t manage even that. I wanted out
of there, sure, but my desire to leave just wasn’t quite enough on its own with
no target ahead of me, nothing to shoot at, nowhere to go.

I might have stayed another day, two days, overwhelmed by
apathy; I might easily have stayed to the end of the week, until the hire car
had to be returned. But there were suddenly figures moving through the rain as
I lifted my eyes for the hundredth time to the smeared window. Kids they were
to me, teens and early twenties: half a dozen of them in black and khaki with
half-shaven heads or dreadlocks; thin beards or acne or facial tattoos; many
piercings with silver through the ears, the eyebrows, the nose and lips and no
doubt otherwhere I couldn’t see.

They came single file down into the hollow, and straight to
the Airstream door. Opened it without knocking and filed in, shedding jackets
to the floor and squeezing water out of their hair, and Luke said, “I’ve been
waiting for you,” and as ever I believed him.

As did they, nodding and grunting and sitting in a group at
his feet, almost, gazing up at him with something close to awe; and I
remembered that so well, wasn’t sure that I’d lost it yet.

But their glances at me were something other, sideways and
suspicious, laden with questions:
who’s he, Luke,
what’s he doing here? Do we need him, do we want him? Can we lose him?

And they made it easy for me, they were the trigger to my
latent charge: a second reason not to stay, beyond my own discomfort, they had
me up and easy, collecting my stuff under one arm and, “Thanks a lot, Luke, you’ve
been great. I’d better be off now, I’ve got to do something with all of this,
it’s no good just sitting here tailchasing in my head. I’ll be back soon,
though. Soon as I have some answers, I’ll let you know. And I’ll bring Suzie
next time, okay?”

“No,” he said, as I’d known he would; and I laughed, quite
unforced, and made a gesture that meant
yes I
will, and you can lump it, mate
, and went out into the rain shielding my
hard-worked written pages beneath my jacket as I dashed up the slope towards
the car with never a look behind me.

o0o

Bumping down the track, feeling as though I were passing
through a curtain, a veil of rain into another world, I thought perhaps I wasn’t
ready to leave shelter yet, though more than ready to leave Luke.

A few miles down the valley was a village, with what might
have been the last classic red phone-box left in England; and they obviously
loved their phone-box, or someone among them did, because when I went in there
was a square of carpet beneath my feet, a vase of fresh spring flowers on the
shelf, directories clean and complete and a telephone unvandalised and working.

I phoned my mother; or at least I phoned my mother’s house,
one more building where I used to have the right of residence but which I
couldn’t possibly call home.

Surprise, she wasn’t in. It was a machine that answered me,
her changeable voice high and bright and artificially cheery: “Sorry, darlings,
I simply can’t be had at the moment. Leave a message if you want, so I know you’ve
been thinking of me; but you know what I’m like, don’t hang around waiting for
a reply. If you need me, phone again...”

And then a long, long string of beeps, so many I thought
maybe the tape would run out before her messages did; many friends, it seemed,
wanted her to know their thoughts. Nothing new there, then.

At last the longer tone, dash not dot, and I could have
added my ten penceworth; but what point? I had little enough to say, and she
wasn’t in any case there to hear. She might be anywhere. So many messages, she
might have been away for weeks already; but that meant nothing. Sometimes she
didn’t come home for months on end.

Love you, Mum
I could
have said, and didn’t. Never had.

I just listened to the silence for a moment, thinking of the
tape going uselessly round and round, and then hung up nice and quiet, not to
disturb it.

And didn’t know what to do now, where to go; so I got into
the car and drove without plan or purpose, and in the end old habit or some
subconscious intent made the decision for me, because when I came to the first
crucial junction I was already in the right-hand lane and indicating before I
thought about it, and making that turn brought me round to face east, heading
back to the city.

o0o

I let that stand, didn’t fight it; but didn’t hurry either.
Again, on a more domestic scale, nowhere to go. Foxes have holes, the birds of
the air have nests; but the son of my mother...?

I could seek out a friend, I supposed, beg a bed for the
night. But all my friends now were Carol’s friends too, most had been her
friends first, and I wasn’t any too certain of my welcome. Nick Beatty would be
all right, I thought; my best mate for many years, he’d been best man at the
wedding, so I could depend on him; only the last I remembered, Nick had got
himself a new girlfriend. Whether they were still together or not, either way
that could be awkward. And he’d be full of questions, he’d want to talk all
night, and I just wasn’t up to that.

Better to gold-card it, I thought, at least for tonight.
Find a hotel, somewhere big and concrete, comfortable and anonymous. Tomorrow I’d
go to the bank and have a talk with someone, find out just what kind of credit
stood behind the card, and just where it had come from. Go into work too, talk
to one of the senior partners: discover how I stood, in what bad odour with my
former colleagues and employers, whether there was any chance of my being taken
back on the strength. After some delay, perhaps. I could offer them that.
Physically I might feel okay now, but a man with his recent memory missing
hardly counted as well enough to work.

Which reminded me: one other thing I had to do, and the
sooner the better.
Tomorrow
, my soul said,
do it tomorrow, with everything else
; but that
was chicken-hearted. Good sense and good manners both said to do it tonight.

Which was maybe another reason why I didn’t hurry back to
town. Resolved on this, I’d still welcome any chance to put it off for another
half an hour, another ten minutes, anything at all that I could fit in between
this and that.

So I drove back across country and stopped to eat en route,
as much meat as a pub could provide and a single cautious pint to wash it down;
and picked a hotel in the city centre with a car park underneath, parked and
checked in, getting a better room than I was paying for in exchange for a sight
of the card; and had a long shower and a careful shave before I reluctantly
dressed in those wrong-fitting, wrong-feeling and now dirty clothes again.

And it was still only half past ten, and no way could I
persuade myself that it was too late tonight to do this. Try though I might,
though I did.

So I drank a complimentary miniature of cognac for
courage—not out of the balloon glass provided, just off with the bottle top and
glug-glug, straight down my throat—and walked down four flights of stairs to
the lobby, out into the street, left and then right and hullo Chinatown.

All along the busy length of it, until at last I came to a
discreet door between two restaurants, a door surrounded by brass business
plaques and overlit by a transom,
Q’s
brightly shining from its dark glass embrasure.

And hesitated one last time, and was pushed past by a handful
of Chinese lads, arguing loudly and incomprehensibly. At least, I assumed they
were arguing; but given the inherent tonality of the language, who could tell?
Perhaps they had to sound like that, heated and abrasive, just to say what they
wanted to say.

Suzie’s brother, I remembered, had been dragged to death,
here we go round the mulberry city
and you couldn’t
get more heated and abraded than that; and I wondered why it had happened, and
I wondered how brave Suzie was being, and how stupid. Whoever had done it,
surely it had to be because her brother had got across them in business; and
here she was carrying on her brother’s business, and I didn’t know if she’d
even considered that they might come next after her.

In their hands, of course, the lads ahead of me carried
their snooker cues, cased like instruments and just as precious.

I let their hurry draw me in its wake; trudged up the stairs
as they ran ahead, so that I had barely reached Mr Han the Herbalist before I
heard the club doors crashing open, crashing closed some distance still above
my head.

Between the two, between the opening and the closing I heard
a burst of laughter. Quarrel or not, then, what I’d heard had not been fighting
talk.
Just goes to show
, I thought, going
on, going up. Even on your own known territory, appearances tend to deceive;
only cross a border—physical or cultural, linguistic, whatever—and you can’t
trust your eyes to see straight nor your mind to interpret what they say they
see. And the same, of course, for the other senses. Values shift, and reality
shifts to accommodate them.

Here and now, my reality had undergone some shifts deeper
than lingual. Epochal, almost. Walking in through the street door, I’d entered
a world where I couldn’t even understand myself.

Walked up, and up again; came to the club doors and
hesitated, and went on further up. To go in there would only be another
delaying tactic at heart, whatever its result.

And so to the top, the door to Suzie’s flat, still labelled
for dead Jack. I rang the bell, and waited; waited one minute, two, then tried
again.