Mischief (33 page)

‘Not that we weren’t tempted,’ Cynara added, ‘but I wouldn’t.’ By which she wanted me to know Ted had made advances and she had repelled them. Oh, thanks a lot! ‘I’d met you, and that always makes a difference. You had children with Ted, and I hate upsetting children.’

I had no children with Robbie, she was reminding me. Well she was welcome, the cow.

‘That man over there,’ she said. ‘He’s one of them. NSA. Smile and look cheerful.’

I did my best. ‘That man over there’ looked like so many of the Caprice’s customers. Well-dressed and well-fed with one of those slightly anarchic lopsided faces; someone doing well in the entertainment business, or with artistic pretensions. The kind who would sleep with a female art dealer to get a fake Vermeer cheap. Yes, he might well be NSA.

‘I’m off,’ Cynara said, and rose up in front of me, brown and tawny, a vision of soft beauty and high fashion. ‘Any dessert for you? Coffee? No? Sorry this has had to be so quick, but we’ll do it again, shall we? And soon. I’ll be in touch. Remember someone’s always listening. If not Robbie, one of his minions. They have so much invested in all this. And be careful, darling. Dream well, with me!’

That startled me. What did that mean? Did she too dream of Ted? I rose to my feet and touched her arm. A tiny charge, a tremor of electricity passed from her to me. Static, it must be. Her dress was a man-made fibre. The carpet was nylon. She felt it too and laughed.

And then she was gone, without paying the bill. A hundred and fifteen quid for two fish and chips; no wine, no coffee. It seemed excessive. But we’d had two martinis, they’d bought us mixed breads which we hadn’t asked for or touched, and I’d had water, I suppose, when I choked. It was still an outrage. Or perhaps it was me, suddenly so thoroughly outraged by fate and fortune I would take offence at anything at all.

I went home. There was nowhere else to go. There was the same front door, as it had been since Ted and I moved in with the twins – then aged fourteen – but now painted dark blue, not black. The same stairs Ted and I had climbed, but a different stair carpet; the same master bedroom – the same bedhead but at least not the same mattress Ted and I had once shared. I still have some sensitivity. Robbie had gone along with my home décor whims happily enough, while being rather surprised at my various insistences. He was a tad autistic, he told me, a single-tasker; he needed help in knowing what other people felt, especially creatives like me: fuzzy thinkers.

I lay on the bed. I looked up at the same ceiling I had looked up at with Ted. I could hear his breathing beside me. It steadied mine. What had I been doing? I was some kind of fixture and other people’s dramas and happenings swept over me and carried me along in their wake, and nothing was anything to do with me. But what Cynara had said about Ted’s death stayed with me, spoken almost in passing, thrown away amid a jumble of facts and suppositions; words I still struggled to interpret.
‘I’m not saying they bumped Ted off just to try it out, but it wouldn’t surprise me.’

Who did she mean by ‘they’? The universal ‘they’ so favoured by paranoiacs everywhere, of course, but now not just ‘the State’ or ‘the Jews’, or ‘the CIA’, but the kings of the digital world, so animating to a new breed of conspiracy theorists. The mysterious lab at Portal Inc where you can score Doxies, linked by an NSA cable to ADA’s even more mysterious data bunker in San Francisco, where the great search engineers, the social network emperors, the giant software dispensers, the Hadron colliders unite and conspire – the big boys in it together, all those garners of information who having milked this world just about dry are now (if Cynara is to be believed; and I must remember she is a mine of misinformation) putting their feelers out into alternative universes. Portal Inc being their shared point of contact, unscrupulously doling out its passion pills, its dream potions, prepared to analyse at a moment’s notice soil samples from the Moon, or Mars, or another cosmos, whatever, and using brilliant left-brainers, unimaginative men like Robbie, fired up by Big Pharma culture, as their tool.

And what about me? So addicted to sex I had noticed nothing? Could Robbie perhaps be an android? No, that was going too far – robots didn’t have toothache, of which Robbie occasionally complained. A robot who seeded his wife with bonding hormones nightly, and gave her a hallucinogenic pill twice a day to even out her oestrogen levels – thus making her susceptible to visionary dreams? No, too far by far. Cynara told lies: she was afflicted by some kind of infectious paranoia and I had lunched with her. That was all.

Raking up the past is never a good idea. I had stirred up old memories. I should not have been in touch with Cynara. The passage of time is nature’s great gift to the distressed and traumatised, or so I always believed. Remembrance does not heal, in spite of what the therapists say; it merely scrapes scar tissue from wounds best left alone to mend; forgetfulness is the quickest path to tranquillity.

This morning I had called up Cynara – madness, madness! And true to form she’d re-awoken in me the sexual jealousy that had spoiled my last days with Ted and might threaten my happiness with Robbie. She had persuaded me not only that Robbie had not fallen in love with me on first sight as I had with him (‘sent in’, for fuck’s sake!), and worse, that I’d fallen out of love with Robbie. Cynara was the witch, if anyone was. The breathing I could hear beside me on the bed was Robbie’s, not Ted’s. I did not dare look. I moved my hand and there was no-one there. Nothing. I looked. No-one. The breathing had been my own.

All at once I was happy again. I’d just been unnerved by lunch with Cynara, and had a fit of the wobbles. Robbie would have the soil analysed and find it was perfectly ordinary garden soil from our flower beds. Perhaps Portal Inc did have something to do with the NSA; perhaps it was just normal surveillance protocol to have any unusual substance analysed. Robbie had bought paintings from Cynara in the past and probably would again. She had probably simply invented his text message about lunch. Sex was just sex, not a drug, not a medication, not a fix. Anyway I was no addict: I did not drink, take drugs or gamble. Robbie was just Robbie, and I loved him. When he eventually came home from work I would warn him about Cynara – she was no friend but a malign force trying to come between us. But then, again, I might not. It might all be better left alone, undisturbed, like a heap of rotten leaves.

I half slept. A silly song came into my head:
There was an old man called Michael Finnigan, he had whiskers on his chinigan, the wind came up and blew them inagain, poor old Michael Finnigan. Beginagain!
Ted would mutter ‘Oh Finnigan!’ when things went wrong, holding back (for the twins’ sake rather than mine) the ‘Oh fuck!’ which sprang more naturally to the lips. I thought perhaps Ted was in my head, trying to tell me something.

My phone burst into life. It was Robbie, in a rush, saying he was delayed; there was a security clamp down; he would sleep in the office and be back for breakfast. Then his phone went dead. The circumstances were such that I trusted him to be telling the truth. I did not think he would be off with Cynara. I got up and made myself some strong coffee. I searched amongst my bureau drawers and found what I was looking for – a few stray wake-up pills in a bottle I’d had for years, which sometimes kept me going when I worked through the night. I took two. I needed to think.

‘
I’m not saying they bumped Ted off just to try it out, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
’

I went back to the beginning, and re-thought the circumstances of Ted’s death, reviewed my case notes as it were.
Beginagain!

The Night before Christmas
a
nd all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse
... just the blood clot, creeping silently up from the bottom of Ted’s leg to his brain. Did it? I had doubts at the time, I remember now. But everything that happened was so sudden and incredible that when eventually a death certificate arrived, by post, from the Coroner’s Office, I opened it, glanced at it, and did my best to forget it. It meant that after weeks of delay I could go ahead with the funeral. The corpse had finally ended back with the local undertaker. There had been an autopsy which involved slicing off the top of Ted’s head, taking out his brain, inspecting it, and putting it back in its case again. This is not the kind of thing you want to think about too much. But needs must.

‘I’m not saying they bumped Ted off just to try it out, but it wouldn’t surprise me’.

Murder, then, not SADS at all: not Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome, which can so suddenly strike down the apparently healthy. Ted did not just fall, he was pushed. No ordinary assassins, Cynara’s ‘they’, but ones who follow you after death. But who was the assassin? How? A ricin pellet? A poisoned umbrella tip? Ted might well feel resentful, snatched from his comfortable life by villains, to be dumped in a dark forest and punished for sins he would hardly realise he had committed. He might well feel inclined to carry mud back from an alternative universe to his wife’s newly furnished bedroom, even months after his death. If that wife of twenty years is now besottedly in love with another man who sleeps in his bed and fucks her out of her brain nightly and her head is all over the place, he might well feel aggrieved. Enough to tell her sleeping self to ‘for God’s sake leave me alone’ – and then change his mind and plant the idea of beginagain in her waking head, so she can at least in due course avenge him.

I have the experience, and I am not alone in it, that when people die they return briefly to say goodbye – you sense it: the feel of a touch on the shoulder, a sudden sharp clear awareness of them at your side, or they come to you in a dream. You have to wait for them – they come first to those they are closest to, and it’s not necessarily the order you expected. The merest acquaintance may come to you within a couple of hours, your close relative may take days, to your chagrin, you being low down on their list. Ted took weeks to appear to me. Then when he finally came it was after the funeral, in a dream, but one so clear, sharp-edged, distinct and memorable it was like a vision of something real. It woke me up. It wasn’t even to say goodbye, it was more like a formal rejection. ‘
Know your place. Stay behind!
’

I was in a boat with Ted, and we were scudding along on a sunny lake, with a wind-filled sail, towards a distant shore: we were close, fond, on some kind of adventure together. The sun went behind clouds, darkening the far side of the lake, and I was left in sunlight while Ted was taken off and whisked on over the shadowed lake to a gloomy shore. I watched him trudge up the rocks and sand to where the forest began. I thought he would turn and wave to me or in some way acknowledge me but he didn’t, and that was the most painful thing of all. I was an irrelevancy in his life. He walked on, shoulders bowed, into the forest, and was lost in the trees.

Where it seems he still is.

Robbie said to me when I first told him about the Ted dreams: ‘You won’t forgive him for not turning and looking back at you when he went off into the shadows. Poor bastard. You’re so angry you’re going to keep him marooned in the dark wood forever.’

Sometimes Robbie seems to understand my thought processes better than I do myself, even though he might, as in this case, get them wrong. He is interested enough to think about them: so few men are. Perhaps this is in itself suspicious; perhaps Robbie is really part of the ‘they’ conspiracy of Cynara’s fevered imagination? But I don’t think so. How can he be: he didn’t come into the equation until after Ted’s death.

Cynara’s other bizarre claim about Robbie over lunch: ‘they put him in to keep an eye on you’ might, I suppose, explain why Robbie sometimes took notes about my dreams, and took this morning’s piece of mud off to work, but anything false in Robbie’s concern is far more likely to be that he is humouring me because he loves me, than any kind of elaborate conspiracy involving ‘they’. Well, there are worse things in the world than being humoured – certified as mad being one of them – which is what happens when people claim to see visions or hear voices. And it was Ted’s voice I heard in my head just now ‘Finnigan’. In other words, ‘beginagain’. It came over as an instruction. I must re-examine the circumstances of Ted’s death. Concentrate.

Others think it strange that I live with Robbie in the house where Ted died, but we are both busy people and moving house is traumatic. Dinton Grove’s in a nice bourgeois suburb in North London where houses like ours line leafy lanes, but are so hidden behind hedges you don’t get much glimpse of their front doors unless you are family, friend, delivery man or robber. Only if you make a real effort do you get to see much of your neighbours. Ted saw all but two of our neighbours as rather foolish and on the whole uncultured, so we tended to stay clear of them. Now I’m with Robbie, people drop by and visit us at weekends. Like Ted, Robbie is courteous. Unlike Ted, Robbie doesn’t say or do unexpected things. Ted dressed like the art student he once was, with a taste for interesting fabrics and old clothes. Robbie dresses smartly and conventionally. When I was with Ted I used to worry in case I said something stupid: these days I smile and chatter on like Robbie. How quickly one picks up the attitudes and habits of one’s newly espoused!

At the time the alleged SADS struck Ted down the twins were away at college. I had my work cut out running a small research agency from home. It was called Q&A&Co, had a staff of two women on part time, Luella and Carole, whom I paid well, plus holidays and bonuses. We ran and recorded focus groups on changing patterns in high street fashion sales. My skill lay in asking the right questions, and the staff looked up the answers, often on Google, but my clients, relieved to be spared even this labour, seemed happy enough to pay, if never quite enough. It wasn’t at all what I’d set out to do – I took a degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia, where Ted and I met. Ted was doing a PhD in World Art Studies – and I had vague aspirations of becoming a writer, but ending things and coming to a conclusion was always difficult for me, on the page as in life. I gave up literature, trained as a fashion designer and got a job at
Vogue
, while Ted worked for Sotheby’s. When the twins came along I gave up the day job and started Q&A&Co.