Mischief (40 page)

‘When all this is over,’ he asked, ‘can we stay together?’

I read once about a man with a memory of thirty seconds. When his wife visited him he’d embrace her tenderly, crying, ‘Darling, how wonderful to see you, I love you so much!’ before falling back into baffled melancholy. He was on a memory loop and it was an automated response: anterograde and retrograde amnesia, poor man, he was stuck in that loop for ever. Still, it was nice to be asked, and Robbie took my hand again and we were just like authentic lovers.

‘Of course,’ I replied.

We were at Waterloo: only two stops to Nine Elms, and three to Battersea. I tried again with the seminal question. ‘Did Ted sleep with Cynara?’

‘I’m sorry about Ted.’ Robbie’s blue eyes were filling. A final jolt of empathy. ‘It wasn’t meant to happen. Nothing to do with us.’

‘No? Well, that’s good.’

‘It was our neighbour Jill, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. In fact you might say if intelligence was a disease she’d be the healthiest girl in town!’ He laughed heartily, and I sort of laughed along too.

‘She’s one of ours. I recruited her. Your Ted had eyes for her, and we had our eye on you from way back.’

It seemed our house was bugged, and had been for years.

‘Even the bedroom?’

‘Well, of course the bedroom.’

But visitors from the other side had not shown up, though room temperatures could fall dramatically on nights I had Ted dreams. Then Robbie said things that really shook me. When our neighbours the Woodwards had called in at the gallery to buy their Warhol Mickey Mouse Jill had fallen for Ted in a big way. Richard had gone back to his showroom to fetch his debit card and Ted had fucked Jill in the back room in the fifteen minutes the cat was away.

‘Quite a guy, your Ted. Boris Becker had nothing on him. A natural font of SSRI’s. We had his hair combings analysed. A few men are like that. But it wasn’t fair on you, baby.’

It had gone on, on and off, for a couple of years. The night Ted died Jill had taken a Doxy. They’d been out in the moonlight, listening to the nightingales or whatever and having a quickie while they were at it.

‘We don’t know how she got hold of them. Cynara, probably,’ Robbie said. ‘Taken by a woman they can trigger an allergic reaction in the man a few hours later and that’s what happened. We had to get our own post mortem done. I’m sorry for your loss,’ he added as an afterthought. I presumed Portal Inc offered empathy training to all those sixes on its staff.

‘That’s all right,’ I said, but it wasn’t. That it was two years since Ted died didn’t seem to help much. Jill Woodward was so boring: we’d both despised her. How could he? And Jill, with Ted’s death on her hands. Bitch. No wonder she had been so upset when we were stuffing the turkey.

‘Ted did get about,’ was all I said.

We were at Kennington. The station had been redecorated, all silver tiles engraved with discreet stars and stripes. The train glided off smoothly and swiftly to its destination on new rails.

‘I admired your previous husband, Philly,’ Robbie said. ‘I want you to know that.’

‘I’m glad,’ I said.

‘Doxy love,’ he said sadly, ‘is nothing like true love. True love follows a man to the Other Side.’

We stopped at Nine Elms. Next stop Battersea.

‘Was Ted sleeping with Cynara as well as with Jill?’

‘Yeah, of course,’ said Robbie. ‘Cynara was anyone’s. Wouldn’t you if you were a guy? We none of us took her seriously. High maintenance too, mind you: all those dress bills on expenses.’

Robbie’s voice was slowing, his eyes losing their youthful lustre. The Juves were wearing off. But I had what I wanted, even though I didn’t like it. We were at Battersea. We sped on slinky shiny walkways to the return platform, to go back to Nine Elms, a change of plan which would not show up on our Oyster cards.

Ted, murdered by the neighbour he despised but shagged. I couldn’t run to the police. I’d seem delusionary, out of my mind: ‘Phyllis, the white witch next door who hears voices in her head and complained of poltergeists in her kitchen.’ Jill Woodward would look at the enquiring detective with steady, calm, sane, bourgeois eyes opened wide by an expensive plastic surgeon and tell lies and they would believe her.

Screwed by Ted – me, Cynara, Jill Woodward, and no doubt a whole host of others.

Fathered by Ted – Aspergery twins who didn’t tell lies.

Screwed by Robbie – Cynara, me, who else, the twins? It was a possibility.

Fucked by me – Ted, Robbie , and yes, others. I was the self-righteous bitch. I wasn’t without guilt. I hadn’t been totally faithful to Ted during the marriage – a passing Swedish professor when I was a student, a boss when I was an intern, a meeting on a train, a colleague at a conference. Sex with the stranger was always a draw, how you got to know the world outside your little circle of acquaintance. But always for me with the greatest discretion, never as a threat to the marriage. I’d always had a little doubt about the fatherhood of the twins. The Swede was a possible contender, though it was far more likely to have been Ted; we were young at the time, at it all day and every day, and the professor was only the once. Actually it had been one small source of relief when Ted was finally cremated and his DNA destroyed – the twins might well at some stage have wanted to have Ted’s paternity scientifically proved. I hadn’t reckoned on Robbie getting hold of an ancient hair-combing. But this was the old paranoia, a fear too far. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about. We’d arrived at Nine Elms and the new American Embassy was just across the way.

It was good to be above ground again. We walked together to Robbie’s workplace. It turned out to be a very ordinary-looking office block, four-square and a mere four stories high, sheltering in the lee of the great glittering prism of the new Embassy. ‘
Forward into the Future * Shrine of Science
’ was engraved in stone above the entrance. I had begun to imagine something far more sinister.

This was just a visit to my husband’s office for a consultation with a colleague about the oppressive dreams I had been having lately. I even looked forward to it – it would be a kind of confessional. I had nothing to be ashamed of, much to be proud of. And of course it went without saying that the sooner the dreams stopped the better. The last thing one wanted was for one sapling to lead to another – for the dam between the dimensions to be carelessly breached, and oneself to be in any way responsible. I could imagine a hundred US Marine security guards having to battle and chop away at a forest of encroaching trees – the same kind poor Ted faced nightly on the other side – as they took root and flourished in the Embassy grounds. It didn’t bear thinking about.

Security at Portal Inc was agreeably unobtrusive. I did notice that the amiable girl at reception sat behind a typewriter, not a computer. Indeed, during my stay in the building I saw not one single computer, just card indexes and paper files. Here secrets stayed secrets, one supposed, and were not susceptible to hacking: knowledge was exchanged verbally. Everything seemed relaxed and normal, and rather old fashioned. Only when I got to the diagnostic centre, with its futuristic screens and state of the art equipment, was I conscious of any intrusion by the modern world. Our arrival had been anticipated: cameras had noted our approach. The only thing that struck me as quirky was a small automated trolley of moulded plastic which rolled forward to meet us as the glass doors slipped open at our approach. Robbie dropped his briefcase and cell phone into it and the trolley moved swiftly and silently back and disappeared through a hatch into the bowels of the building.

Robbie was let through by iris recognition, but a verbal
my wife – she’s with me
wasn’t enough to get me past reception. The building swallowed Robbie up and I was left to have inked fingerprints and these were checked by a human being not a scanner taken – heaven knows where they’d got the originals for comparison. This took an irritatingly long time, and it was half an hour before I was shown in to a waiting room: it was of the formal kind that Harley Street doctors still have, unchanged since the fifties in order to soothe old ladies, all velvet curtains and chintz sofas. Almost at once a red haired and bearded man in a rather dishevelled suit bounced in and introduced himself at Robbie’s colleague Professor Ben Marcus. It seemed he’d been expecting me.

He led me down corridors to his office. Robbie was all lean and angular and tidy: this man was fleshy and large and enveloping and looked more like a lumberjack than a neuropsychologist. I liked him at once. I have a weakness for large burly men into whose clasp it seems natural to melt, but now was not at all the time or place.

The office looked like any doctor’s consulting room – a desk, a couple of chairs, a photo of a dog, a coffee machine – apart from a typewriter and a big old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder. My breathing came a little oddly. I felt short of air.

‘You’ll get used to it,’ Red Beard said. ‘We’re climate-controlled, vibration-protected and dust-free. Make yourself at home. I’d like to talk a little with you and take a few notes. After that we’ll go into the lab and do a test or two.’

‘I’m all yours,’ I said. But I felt wary. Robbie might have lured me into this place to hand me over for experimentation. Scientists will be ruthless in the pursuit of knowledge.

Red Beard offered me coffee from the machine, but I was cautious. I asked for hot chocolate if there was any. It was less likely to have been tampered with – to contain a powdered Doxy or Juve than the coffee which they expected me to choose because I’m a girl and hot chocolate is fattening. When it came it was suspiciously sweet. I thought what the hell, and drank it. A phone rang and Red Beard was called away. I was grateful; I could just sit there for a little in neutral surroundings and think.

What Robbie had told me on the train was beginning to register. I was fairly certain he had been telling the truth. He had confirmed what Cynara had told me over lunch, that I was indeed part of an experiment. I was watched, spied upon, drugged up to the eyeballs. The hot chocolate probably contained some fucking truth drug. Red Beard’s absence was probably calculated to give it time to work. I no longer quite knew who or what I was, or trusted the validity of anything I remembered as happening to me, or whether I could even tell the difference between dream and reality. Jill Woodward had caused Ted’s death. Ted had betrayed me with both her and Cynara. I had been mistaken in him: believed in the self-congratulatory illusion of ‘I love Ted, therefore Ted loves me’ for twenty years. ‘Love’, I realised, had been the staple of my existence. I had defined myself as a woman who loved men. Without that anchor I was adrift in a sea of meaningless sensation; a fluttering of SSRIs in the head did not add up to an identity. I was almost sorry for Robbie: it must have been difficult for him during all these months of Doxies and Juves to keep track of who he was. Somewhere beneath the surface lurked a real self I had never met. Red Beard returned.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘The last thing I wanted to do was keep our most important client waiting.’

It occurred to me that he was treating me rather as one treats royalty, with a mixture of deference, fawning, and an intense desire to manipulate. It was quite fun to be at the receiving end of such unaccustomed respect. But he asked myriad questions, and I talked and talked: he took down my answers in what I assumed was shorthand. My adoptive mother, a trained secretary, sometimes used these strange squiggles for grocery and laundry lists. Perhaps Red Beard was so clever that he could diagnose my mental and emotional state with a single squiggle. I was being recorded on the creaky old tape machine too, its twin spools quivering in a bath of climate-controlled air.

Red Beard’s questions involved the frequency and intensity of the dreams, whether they were recurring – I told him recurring but with variations, and he listed the variations. Why did I describe them as dreams not visions? What traumas had I had in my life? I referred to my birth parents, which seemed to rather startle him; I realised I probably hadn’t mentioned the manner of my adoption to Robbie, all so long ago and dire besides that none of it seemed relevant and all of it too daunting for an ardent suitor. That must have gone on for at least an hour. I felt very relaxed and happy and had some more doctored hot chocolate. Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.

Then we went on to list and classify the various minor paranormal experiences I usually kept quiet about, and he seemed particularly interested in the jumping rubber episode. I was about ten and had trained an Indian rubber on my school desk to leap into my hand. I’d been pencilling in the names of all the towns in Britain, and spending a lot of time reaching for my eraser because I’d got them wrong or not written them neatly enough; I was bored and frustrated so I taught the rubber to jump into my hand. Beth Audley in the desk beside me saw it happen and had hysterics and refused to sit next to me anymore. So I stopped training things.

‘When you say taught, Mrs Whitman, what exactly do you mean?’ I was pleased he called me Mrs Whitman, not Phyllis, Phil or Philly. ‘Mrs’ might carry the tang of age, but also of due respect. I thought over his question.

‘A mixture of concentration, will and impatience.’

‘Impatience? Can you clarify?’

I explained that I’d been annoyed with the whole situation. It just saved time having the rubber come to me rather than me having to search for the rubber. In the end I’d been licking the rubber so often and hard the map disintegrated over the city of York anyway. I realised there was always a downside to taking shortcuts between ordinary procedures; knowing what a letter said before it was opened meant it brought bad news: knowing what the cinema was showing before you got round the corner meant the film would be a disappointment. I was late for a dancing lesson and stopped the town hall clock just by wishing, but then it wouldn’t start again for months. Once or twice a tin of tuna or something would end up in my hand when I was looking for it. And then there was the wedding ring. That was really odd, but I could have been mistaken. I’d been on a diet and the ring slipped off in the sink when I was peeling potatoes and went down the waste disposal. I turned it off at the wall and put a hand – I have small ones – down it to fish around for the ring but I couldn’t find anything. When I gave up and manoeuvred my hand out the ring was back on my finger, only now on the middle finger, where it fitted better. That was considerate of whatever it was: just sometimes it was on my side.