Dispossession (31 page)

Suzie looked so pleased with herself, was so patronisingly
pleased with me I wanted to bite her.

Instead, I said, “Ellie?”

“What?”

“Tell us about Lindsey Nolan.”

My deceptive mother turned her narrow, baleful glare onto me
full force, said, “He’s a man, an accountant, a crook. What can I tell you that
you don’t know?”

“For a start, you could tell us what was your interest in
him.”

“What he kept between his legs, of course,” she said. “He
was hung like a donkey.”

Suzie choked; I didn’t even blink. “No,” I said.

“He was.”

Past tense, she used, likely without even thinking about it.
That was the only thing she was telling me here that I was ready to believe:
that he was dead to her, that she had no ongoing interest. Trouble lifts its
head, my mother departs the scene so thoroughly she’d probably swear herself
she was never there at all.

“That’s not what you were after,” I said patiently.

“Listen, Jonty, I know children never like to think of their
parents having a sex-life, but—”

“Mother,” I said, “you can sleep with every thoroughbred
racing animal in the Queen’s stables, for all I care. Do it on Horse Guards, do
it in daylight, I don’t give a damn. Just don’t lie to me, don’t try to put me
off, don’t make yourself out to be more stupid or frivolous than you are. I
think you must have told me once before, so try being honest with me twice in a
row, why don’t you? Tell me what the hell’s been going on?”

And my deceitful, dishonest mother did just that: she came
clean and told us both what her involvement was, in two simple, clear
sentences, and why the hell couldn’t she have done that hours earlier?

“I’m doing Vernon Deverill,” she said, “for the
Journal
. Of course I wanted to sleep with his
accountant, how not?”

o0o

Jonathan’s Journal
she
called it, she named it after me though I never had a hand in its production,
never contributed a word to its copy or a fact or a whisper of gossip to its
proprietor. It sounded trivial, it sounded like a joke and she meant it to; but
subscriptions cost a thousand pounds an issue, and she had dozens of
subscribers. Every national newspaper was on the list and a good number of
foreign papers also, along with every magazine which took a serious interest in
current affairs; all the political parties, and not a few MPs on their own
accounts; Ellie even claimed MI5 and the CIA among her readership, and I
believed her.

Almost no one knew who researched, who wrote, who published
and who reaped the substantial profits from
Jonathan’s
Journal
. That’s why it carried the foolish name: to offer no hostages to
fortune, to give no useful clues to its authorship. Those few who did
know—close friends, her bank manager, her accountant—thought that her louche
lifestyle, her heedless amorality was only cover for the profoundly serious
journalist she was at heart, whose every irregular issue stirred up scandal and
controversy, exposing the bone of British corruption with dates and figures and
names precisely documented, and a withering analysis of causes and motivations.

Myself who knew her better than anyone, I had always
maintained that the profoundly serious journalist was another joke, an
artificial creation, only cover to give some credibility to the chaotic,
instinctive, selfish demon creature she seemed to be, that in fact she truly
was.

Whichever way you read it, she lived two wholly separate
lives: one forever superficial and demanding, the other drilling always to the
core of things, ever questioning, ever wanting to know why. Again demanding,
perhaps the only aspect her bifurcated personality could share between its
divided parts.

“Heaven knows,” she was saying, “he was the world’s most
boring man. In bed or out of it. But he kept a lot of secrets in his house, and
he was careless about security.”

Not like me
, I thought
bleakly, reminded. “Learn much, did you?”

“Plenty.”

“Like, why he’s in jail in Spain? Who set him up?”

“Not that, no. There was something big on his mind for a few
weeks before he disappeared, but that’s where he kept it, in his mind. It wasn’t
money, though. All that about him stashing cash for himself, that’s nonsense.
He was greedy, yes, but not that way. Information was his thing. When he got a
sniff of something, he wouldn’t let it go. Wouldn’t talk about it either,
though, and I couldn’t find anything on paper. Even the note he left me when he
vanished, that didn’t tell me anything except to go home and keep my head down.
I didn’t do that, of course, I searched his house from top to bottom first; but
there was nothing there, I didn’t find a thing.”

“How frustrating for you.”

“Darling, you’ve no
idea
.”

That was stupid; of course I had a very good idea, and she
knew it, and she was trying to blanket herself in a distorting image again, so
that I wouldn’t see her straight. Automatic I thought that was, the defences
developed over many years cutting in because that was what they did, any time
anyone penetrated close to the heart of her.

I would have dug deeper, to be sure. There were many
questions I wanted to ask my mother, a great deal I needed to know about
Lindsey Nolan. Suzie spoiled the moment, though, saying, “I don’t know how you
can do that. Sleep with a man, I mean, just to get something you want. If you
don’t want him, I mean. It’s like volunteering to be raped or something, I just
can’t get my head around it.”

“Not at all,” said my mother, slipping into slut-mode with
gratitude and grace. “It’s a business transaction, is all; he may not know it,
but I do. I give him what he wants, I take what I want. I’m a natural whore, I
suppose. I’m very good at it.”

She’s also very good at self-portraiture, she does it often,
and every separate portrait is a lie. “Come on, Ellie,” I said, for Suzie’s
sake. “Be straight with the girl. How often have you done this, twice in twenty
years? Or was there a third time, was there one I didn’t hear about? She does
most of her work in public records offices,” I told Suzie directly, “not in
hotel rooms on her back. She’s not that kind of spy, she just wants you to
think she is. Mostly, she sleeps around just because she likes it.”

My mother looked at me, pushed her bowl away and took out a
cigarette, blew a cloud of smoke across the table at me, made it exceedingly
obvious that we would learn no more from her tonight.

o0o

Neither from my computer, which no more than she was in a
giving mood. I battled it for another hour after dinner, feeling that the whole
endeavour was increasingly pointless, that I must have chosen some random
sequence of letters or numbers or both for precisely this reason, to stop
anyone who knew me—Suzie, perhaps? my mother, perhaps?—from working out the
password and cracking the file open. Then I wasted another hour searching
through papers in the spare bedroom in case I’d written the sequence down, but
the same logic applied. If I’d gone that far to keep my secrets safe, I wouldn’t
have left the key to them lying around where any snoop might find it.

o0o

Back in the living-room they were smoking and drinking tea
and still talking about sex, trying to bridge a gulf that was philosophical,
generational, impossible. To Ellie a tool, to Suzie still a revelation: no,
they weren’t going to come together anywhere on this one.

I sat and listened for a while, had nothing to say and
couldn’t settle. So I lied to Suzie, told her I was just going down to the club
for half an hour, a drink and boys’ talk with Lee, I said; and instead I went
all the way down and out onto the street, into the evening clamour of a young
city having a good time with itself.

There was a pub at the end of the street where I’d been
drinking on and off for years, whenever I was meeting people for a meal this
side of town. Even in the crush, they knew me: “Pint of Guinness, then, is it?”

“Please, yeah. And a smoke, and a box of matches.”

I found a seat, a high bar-stool in a dark corner; and I sat
sipping slowly and sucking on a rare cigar, and decided that the advertising
was all wrong: happiness was a foolish, an unapproachable ambition. Not to be
wasted time on.

One more pint for luck, standing at the bar and watching
carved wooden mechanical heads turn and gape above the mirrors, one of the
landmarks on any pub-crawl in town but curiously fitting tonight, symbolic of
something even if I couldn’t understand the symbols. There thanks to a
graceless God, I thought, sit Suzie and Ellie and I, and perhaps Deverill also:
each of us only a staring doll, turning and working at the promptings of some
machine unseen, operated by we none of us know whose hand...

Such thoughts in my head, and I wasn’t even stoned: time I
was in bed, I thought. In futon.

o0o

So I turned and went back to the flat, barely in time to
intercept Suzie, who was on the point of coming down to the club to find me.
She tugged the cap off my head and tossed it aside, ran her fingers gently over
my soft fuzz and the lines of my scars, said, “Your mum’s gone to bed.”

A surprise, that; she was a nightbird, was Ellie. But I looked
at Suzie looking at me from bare inches away, and a chill struck my heart. With
Ellie in the spare bed, Suzie and I would be sharing again; and Suzie by the
look of her meant business tonight. Which was perhaps why my mother had taken
herself so conveniently, so unconvincingly out of the way. Perhaps they’d even
talked about it, moving from abstract to specific, from sex in general to sex
and Suzie and me. Neither one of them, I thought, would have had inhibitions
about that. Ellie would have asked, and she would have been told.

“You should do the same,” I said, “you look knackered.”

“Yeah. You coming, then, or what?”

I shook my head: buying time, prepared to pay dearly for it.
“I’ll just get the computer, and have another crack at it out here.”

“Jonty...”

“I’ve got to get into that file somehow,” I said, entirely
reasonably, “and it needs to be soon. We can’t go on wallowing in ignorance.”

“Well. Okay, then. But don’t be long. You’ll wreck your
eyes, staring at that thing all hours.”

o0o

Not only my eyes but my mind also, all capacity for rational
thought. I was so sick of that message box,
Enter
Password
and the flashing cursor, it was turning physical; I thought I
might actually throw up if I sat with it for another hour. On the other hand,
another hour would maybe buy me the night. Suzie would fall asleep waiting for
me, and I could crash out on the sofa, and we’d both be miserable and stroppy
as hell in the morning but at least I’d have made it through unviolated, with
the banner of my integrity snarled into knots maybe but still flying, still
flapping above my head...

o0o

I could always pretend, of course. I could use the computer
as cover only and not even try to legitimise the excuse; I could just leave it
sitting on the table in front of me humming and happy and telling lies, while I
found something else to do with my fingers.

Almost did it, too. I was casting around the room for
inspiration—something else to do with my eyes, that was, and very welcome on
its own account—when my gaze fell on Suzie’s cap, the logo almost glowing at
me, blinking like neon in my head.

I reached for the keyboard, my fingers stumbling with
certainty as they typed
Q’s
.

The password is incorrect. Word cannot open the document.

Okay, no trouble.
Jack Q’s
.

The password is incorrect. Word cannot open the document.

Not a worry. I was only building up, creating a sense of
climax, not to peak too soon. There was really no doubt at all in my mind; this
was too beautiful, too clever, too appropriate to be anything other than the
answer.

J’accuse
, I typed; and
of course I had accused, and this file was the list of accusations and the
proof both at once, and everything was going to be all right now...

The password is incorrect. Word cannot open the document.

o0o

No. I couldn’t believe it. This was too much, too cruel. I
tried the same sequence again, in case I’d mistyped one of them, but I only got
the same responses.

It had to be right, though. Surely it had to be right?
Everything fitted, and I famously loved puns. Maybe the program was corrupt,
maybe it was failing to recognise a true password...

Maybe I was floundering here, trying to blame a machine for
my own shortcomings, my failure to think efficiently.

Try again. The pun was lovely, and it was relevant; I wouldn’t
have overlooked that. Could I have buried it one layer deeper, for security’s
sake? Given that the pun had been Suzie’s own, and therefore accessible to her?

Hide a tree in a forest, a letter among other letters; bury
a pun in another pun. I’d been, what, fourth form when we learned about Dreyfus
and Zola and
J’accuse
. There’d been another
boy two desks over from me, not a friend exactly but we had a love of words in
common, we did crosswords together sometimes and created incredibly complex
puns for each other’s amusement.

And I remembered that history lesson well, how our eyes had
been suddenly, irresistibly drawn to each other, how we’d snapped
simultaneously, sniggering and choking, trying to swallow the howling laughter
that seizes boys sometimes; how we’d only survived because the teacher had
dropped a dry little joke of his own at just that point, and he of course
assumed it was his wit that was convulsing us.

Grinning again at the memory, I leaned forward and typed
that other boy’s name:

Jack Hughes
.

The password is incorrect. Word
cannot open the document
, and again I couldn’t believe it. My reasoning
seemed impeccable to me; I had nowhere to go from here, no more ideas, no hope.