Mischief (39 page)

‘Sorry not to get back earlier,’ Robbie said. ‘I called but couldn’t get through. I hope you weren’t worried. There was a major security lockdown at the Embassy.’ The new American Embassy, next to Portal Inc at Nine Elms. That great sparkly glamorous prism on the Thames skyline, all facets and angles, that citadel that seemed to hover rather than stand; that miracle of rare device, with its closed-loop water supply, its blast-resistant glass, its controlled climate! Robbie certainly had a thrilling life. To be near to it, close to it, trapped inside it, could justify all eventualities, neutralise all grievances. ‘The big guys flew in an hour early, ahead of schedule. The Portal crew, yours truly included, were stranded the wrong side of the doors and that was it for the night.’

‘That’s awful,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t it alarming?’ But I was impressed. I couldn’t help it. My Robbie, so close to the centre of power! It is dreadful the way status and wealth impinge on the female psyche.

‘A nuisance,’ he said. ‘But we were safer in there than any place else. I’ve cooked pancetta; I prefer it to the back bacon.’

‘I do too,’ I said.

I knew better than to ask who the big guys were, or why their flying in triggered a security shut down.

‘I hope you got some sleep,’ I said.

‘Oh, they looked after us. I’m not used to sleeping alone, though.’ He gave me a little pinch on the bottom. I quite liked that. It’s nice to be owned, good to be acknowledged; I gave him a little pinch back. ‘In fact I’m feeling great – they handed out Juves by way of apology. It was a great honour to be there. I was privileged.’ He looked at me and he smiled. It was the smile of the evangelist, of one who knows he will have eternal life, and deserves it.

‘Juves?’

‘Rejuvenating capsules. CDF hormones, good for heart-function and general wellbeing.’

‘Like Doxies?’

He seemed taken aback. He shook his head.

‘No. Not at all like Doxies. Doxies are extremely complex psycho-pharms. Juves are junior league.’ And then: ‘But what do you know about Doxies? They won’t be let out on sale for a good five years and then only on prescription.’

‘Cynara told me at lunch.’

He said Cynara was a naughty naughty girl, but he didn’t deny the existence of Doxies. The Juves, whatever they were, appeared to me to have the same effect as cocaine; that is to say rendered the taker wide awake, lively and friendly, but without any accompanying anxiety.

He asked me how I had got on with Cynara. He wanted his two favourite girls to be friends.

‘Don’t take that amiss,’ he said, since I must have shown from my face that I did.

‘The most she ever was to me was a bed buddy.’ That phrase again. Were they both talking from the same script? ‘You are my wife and I love you. But she was fun.’

The Juves seemed to be acting as a truth drug, so I took the opportunity of asking him whether he thought Cynara had had an affair with Ted when they worked together at the gallery. I dropped it in casually as a kind of afterthought, but some basic wariness in him lingered. He lived in a top secret world. He was not going to tell me.

‘Phyllis honey,’ he said. ‘I thought we were living our new life together, not forever raking over old times. My predecessor in your bed was an attractive fellow, but what’s dead and gone is dead and gone.’

I said I didn’t think that was necessarily the case and suggested he go upstairs to the bedroom and have a look at what was growing there. He bounded upstairs.

A few seconds of silence. And then a shout.

‘Oh my God, Philly, what have you done?’

That’s right, I felt like saying: when in doubt, fucking blame the woman. But Robbie was already on the phone. I took the pan off the cooker. I didn’t think we’d be getting any breakfast.

By ten o’clock we were on the underground on our way to the new award-winning, art-deco-maroon-and-white-tiled station at Nine Elms, having taken a ticket to Vauxhall. Robbie explained we would not actually get off at Vauxhall, but would stay on the train and pay the extra, the better to forestall watchers. He did not say who ‘watchers’ were. Juve-induced paranoia, I supposed.

Robbie had to use the kitchen scissors to disentangle the roots of the little tree from the carpet – it was a tender sapling scarcely a hand tall but already an inch taller than when I had first seen it – so tightly and firmly had they dug themselves in. He did it with energy and verve. I would have to put a rug down to cover the damage. But it was a small price to pay for getting the thing out of the house. I didn’t like the tree at all, and obviously neither did Robbie. He had placed it, along with its small quantity of muddy soil and some extra tufts of green carpet, inside a sealed zip bag, then put that into his brief case. He carried it with him, rather gingerly now, I thought, as if it was an unexploded bomb. But he remained inordinately cheerful.

After the phone calls, and after he’d showered and found a clean shirt, a fresh suit and a new tie – rather wide and bright yellow, which seemed to echo his cheerful and active mood – he’d suggested I come along with him to the office.

‘It would be good for you to meet everyone,’ he’d said. ‘And my friend Ben Marcus in the neurological department wants to have a word with you about trauma nightmares.’

It seemed as well to co-operate. If Ted had stepped into my reality last night without so much as the courtesy of a dream, and brought with him not just a scrap of mud but a living entity, and this colleague Ben could stop the dreams, then I must let him, whatever else lurked at Portal Inc. I would step into the mouth of the dragon.

‘Because you do love me, don’t you,’ he said, oddly child-like as I helped him with his tie. It took me only ten minutes to get ready: a clean dress, and sandals. No eye make-up.

‘Of course I do,’ I’d said, but I wasn’t sure. An adult Robbie on Doxies was easy enough to love: Robbie, on Juves as well, was fast developing a child-like, trusting quality, which came over as non-erotic, and I wasn’t used to it. But then I’d taken another wake-up pill and they helped me think clearly. I’d only had four hours’ sleep and I could see it was going to be a long, breakfast-less day.

Oddly enough, I rather enjoyed the journey, into the mouth of dragon though it might be. We sat next to each other. I felt at home and safe and liked the feel of his haunch against mine; I was wearing a rather pretty white cotton dress with red poppies on it and I knew I looked good. On our way to the station Robbie had taken another pill from his inside breast pocket, chewed it, and swallowed. He seldom kept things in his pockets, for fear or spoiling the hang of his suits.

‘A Juve,’ he explained, ‘I swiped a couple of extras last night. I’ve had quite a tough time lately; things are hotting up at Portal. Fucking funding priorities.’

‘All the more reason to look after your heart muscles, darling,’ I said. I had never heard him swear before; he was acting like some college boy. But then it was not in my nature to call men ‘darling’. Perhaps it was the wake-up pills. ‘They do say it’s stress that wears them out.’

We were at Archway before he replied. I sat silent. I thought, well, Robbie is a single-tasker. He does not usually talk and catch trains at the same time.

‘It’s not just about fucking heart muscles,’ he said. ‘Juves can make a guy, well, impetuous. But I’m well under control. Not like some I know. I’m not saying a thing. Juves kinda screw up a guy’s ability to keep his cards close to his chest. An anti-lie mechanism kicks in. Not a good idea in this business. They sure put a spring in your step, but they can make you stupid too, so you gotta know how to handle them, d’you get it?’

‘I get it.’ I said. And so I had. I was looking at the psycho-pharma future, where nobody was quite what they seemed. The depressed laughed, the frivolous ceased to smile, pundits believed their own lies. The crazy looked sane and the sane crazy. Doxies made you mistake sex for love and love for sex; Juves made you lose years of wisdom; my little pink pills evened me out into a false serenity. I no longer knew who I was. I’d given up knowing who Robbie was.

At least my wake-up pills helped me think, turned me from passive to active. They were also making me walk fearless into jeopardy. Of course Portal Inc wanted to bring me in. I was their contact with the other side, unwitting and unwilling as I might be, and their robot-slave Robbie had been sent to pull me in. Portal Inc wanted to make the dead walk. Well, fuck them. Maybe I’d rather join the dead than collude. In the meantime I was sitting on a train next to a husband who could not tell lies, and I should make the most of it.

‘Perhaps Cynara had taken a Juve yesterday?’ I asked. ‘She told me all kinds of things at lunch she shouldn’t have.’ Robbie thought about that a little.

‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘Stock control is appalling at Portal Inc – they just dole stuff out. They’re far too sanguine about Juves. They’re dangerous in the wrong hands.’ ‘Are you telling the truth?’ I asked.

‘Probably,’ he said cheerfully. ‘It’s just so much easier to tell the truth: lies are so exhausting. Checking yourself all the time.’

‘I see,’ I said, and then I asked, as casually as I could, ‘are you taking Doxies?’

‘One every night before bed,’ he said. ‘Those are my instructions.’

‘Whose instructions?’ It was like one of those quiz games when you only have so many questions before time’s up. Any moment now and Robbie might decide lies were less troublesome than truth.

‘Portal’s of course. I have my bosses, like everyone else on this earth. Bob Dylan got it right,’ and he began to sing Dylan’s
Gotta Serve Somebody
, with a bit of air guitar. He was well away.

He stopped and looked at me earnestly. Along the half-empty carriage people shuffled and took up their print or e-reading matter. A well-dressed and handsome man with his cleft jaw and rosy lips and springy clean hair, on drugs or drink or both, and behaving strangely. But no-one did anything. All on psycho-pharms too probably.

‘But it’s nice being in love, Philly, isn’t it?’

‘Oh yes, very,’ I agreed.

‘Strange stuff, Doxies. Pass it through the man and the woman falls in love. The Vikings used to pass fly-agaric mushrooms through their womenfolk, drink their urine and end up with berserker rages. The women did the twitching and got the head pains but mostly lived to see another day.’

‘Just great,’ I said. ‘But with the Doxies the man doesn’t get head pains?’

‘Oh no,’ Robbie said. ‘Just a good fuck.’

‘Doesn’t seem quite fair,’ I said.

‘Whatever was?’ he asked. ‘They were right about one thing. The dreams came thick and fast. Doxy sex seemed to bypass the thalamus and get right through to the epiphysis cerebri, where all that hallucinogenic stuff is stored. It was a screwy theory but it got the funding.’

‘I’m so glad,’ I said. ‘So Cynara was right: you’re my minder.’

He looked troubled, like a child trying to remember.

‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that,’ he said. ‘You always looked so pretty and nice. I do love the dress. Lucky you, being a five. We sixes have our problems. At least you can be happy. I like to make you happy.’

‘Are we talking IQ points here, Robbie?’

His hand was creeping round to my bosom. He fingered the nipple and gave it a tweak. I subdued a little scream.

‘What else? Sixes are too clever for their own good, I’m a six. 140 plus. I have trouble with empathy. University entrance is only four, 120 plus. You’re a five, I reckon: that’s between 130 and 140. Lower end, I should think. Most mediums are three’s: below 110. You’re an exception. Fives are nice. I love you.’

‘Okay. What’s Cynara?’

‘Five veering to six, that’s why she’s so difficult.’ I moved his hand. He didn’t seem to notice. Up and down the carriage people relaxed.

‘Female sixes are very rare. They’re not easily employable. Lost in their own clouds. At seven Asperger’s drifts into autism. So no female eights. The female bell curve is steeper. You don’t get the extremes either end of the scale.’

‘And the ones who flew in yesterday and triggered a lockdown?’

‘Little Miss Curious,’ he said, frowning and suddenly suspicious.

Sooty tunnel walls of impacted London dirt and ancient brick flashed past the windows. We held hands. His mood lightened. He raised my fingers to his lips and looked at me with slow, dreamy, teenage eyes. I felt absurdly flattered.

‘I adore you,’ he said.

‘What does Portal Inc
do
exactly,’ I asked.

‘That’s easy,’ he said. ‘We study the links between the new psychoactive substances and such traditional paranormal phenomena as fall within the scope of entheology and neurobiology. Keep your voice down. We’re being watched, you realise? That guy standing over there by the door is the NSA.’ He was whispering, but smiling at the same time. It was an odd combination.

‘What is Portal’s connection with the NSA?’ Robbie didn’t take fright as I thought he might. He was too far gone.

‘None, really. We’re currently most favoured company, that’s all. They fund, we deliver the research. We’re the old CIA’s Stargate resuscitated. Within certain constraints we’re independent.’

‘That’s really good,’ I said, brightly. ‘What’s entheology when it’s at home?’

‘Entheogens – oh you little five, I adore you – are any psychoactive substances used in a religious or shamanic context – all that incense and chanting, all those voodoo drums and smoky fires and dancing about. You don’t even need the props, you sweetheart.’

I supposed I would get home again. They might prefer me as an in-house specimen, a guinea-pig, monitor me like an egg about to hatch something rare and valuable. On the other hand my credentials were in Robbie’s brief case: a plant, one could only infer, from the other side. Keep me in familiar surroundings, and who knew what I might not produce? A sapling today, a revenant tomorrow? I would play innocent, case the joint, go home, divorce Robbie and dream no more.

Robbie took off his glasses and polished them on the sleeve of my dress – it was a nice soft cotton and would do the lenses no harm. His unshielded eyes looked very blue and kind and luminous. He had a full, curved, sensuous mouth. Ted’s had been rather thin and could look mean.