The Gap of Time (5 page)

Pauline stood on tiptoe to give Xeno a kiss.

“You'll see him at the dinner tomorrow, fat-ass,” yelled Leo as Pauline closed the door. “Is it because she's a Jew or is it because she's a woman?”

“Is what?”

“Is the reason I can't control her.”

“Why would you want to control her? She's great for the business and she's great for you. You need someone who stands up to you.”

“She's trying to bankrupt me. Do you know how much Sicilia gives to charity? Save the Children—we're paying for the whole party tomorrow. Dinner for two hundred donors. Top DJ. MiMi's singing for free, and we're donating £100K.”

“You can afford it. Leo, I came to say goodbye. I'm leaving tonight. I need to get back to NuBo.”

“When did they start calling it that?”

“SoHo, NoBo…it was only a matter of time before New Bohemia got it too.”

“Why are you leaving so suddenly?”

“I had a call from the school about Zel. He's not speaking in class again.”

“What's the matter with him?”

“Nobody knows. He's seen a doctor and a shrink.”

“A kid of eight doesn't need a shrink.”

“No? We did.”

“We needed parents.”

“That's my point. I'm going home.”

“Where's his mother?”

“She's there—look, I know you find it odd that I had a child with a woman I don't live with or love, but we know what we're doing.”

“So why is Zel not talking?”

“That's pretty low, Leo.”

Leo looked away. He said, “We have an investors' meeting tomorrow.”

Zeno said, “There are different ways of doing family. OK?”

“Is it really so easy and civilised?” said Leo.

“Marriage is one option of many,” said Xeno.

“Along with adultery and divorce.”

“What's with you?”

“I'm pissed off with you for dumping the meeting.”

“My son is more important than a meeting.”

“You calling me a bad father?”

“No—you just called me a bad father. Can we stop this? We had horrible families. Every generation gets the chance to do it better.”

“You sound like a mindfulness DVD.”

“And you sound like a workaholic psychopath.”

“At least I'm normal. I'm not gay pretending to be straight or straight pretending to be gay and I don't use my child like a human shield.”

“That's enough!” Xeno picked up his bag and turned to leave. Leo wanted him to leave and he wanted him to stay. It was always the same.

“Xeno! Go if you want to but don't make an excuse. That's all I'm saying. You can never put it like it is, can you? You slide sideways every time.”

Xeno dumped down his bag on the white sofa and turned back to Leo.

“You want to look at the game? I made some changes. Let's take an hour right now and go through it.”

Xeno started unstrapping his bag to get his laptop. Leo went to the fountain and took a long drink of water. “You put some balls in it? The investors felt like it was love and peace and flower power in la-la land.”

“You don't get points by killing a hooker, it's true.”

Xeno clicked into the game. “This is not ready and I don't want to be held to it but I've devised something different. It's something I've been thinking about for years, on and off—my Big Game.”

“What you do sells. Stick to it. The soft games don't sell.”

“So I can't experiment because you can't see the ££££ signs?”

“Cut the artist and his philosophy—just show me the game.”

Xeno dropped down a moving screen of cities, their icons recognisable at once—Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Brandenburg Gate, the Harbour Bridge, the Empire State…

“You can choose one of nine cities—London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Barcelona, New York, Hong Kong, Sydney, Shanghai. I'm sick of vertiginous cliffs and cloaks. Dystopian bombed-out landscapes. Trolls. Testosterone. Stolen cars. There are no cars in the game.”

“No cars? Who's buying a game with no cars?”

“The city is occupied by Dark Angels. You can be on the side of the Angels or you can be part of the Resistance. The Angels have two, four or six wings. Some of the wings have eyes. Angels have two dicks.”

“Now you're talking,” said Leo. “So all the Angels are male?”

“No. But they have a double dick.”

“So who do they fuck?”

“Whoever they can. It makes no difference; they're sterile. Angels are made, not born—like vampires, I guess.”

“And the Resistance?”

“Mortals. Some with special powers depending on what they can win. If you fight with an Angel and win, you get stronger, the Angel weakens.”

“What's the story?”

“The story is this: the most important thing in the world is lost. The Dark Angels don't want you to find it. The only hope for the city is that the Resistance finds it before the Angels do—and destroys it forever.”

“What is it?”

Xeno shrugged. “You have to find that out too. There are decoys, feints, herrings of every colour including red. But I think it's a baby.”

“A fuckin' baby?”

“It's been done before, I know. That one was called Jesus.”

“I don't get it.”

“Think about all those fairy tales about babies that get swapped or stolen. Think about
The Omen
or
Alien
. The imposter child, the devil child, and the true child who is the saviour. It's like King Arthur or Siegfried—new life. The shining centre.”

“So where is this baby?”

“Growing up somewhere unknown, hidden. You have to find her…”

“Why's it a girl?”

“Or him—and make sure you're not bringing home the wrong one. There will be plenty of wrong ones on the way.”

“I think the Resistance should have tanks.”

“I know you do.”

Xeno took Leo into the game. “This is Paris.”

“That's MiMi's apartment—what are you doing there?”

“It's where it all starts. In the courtyard.”

Leo was sweating. “Where what starts? Why is it snowing?”

“It isn't snow. It's feathers.”

“What were you doing? Having a pillow fight?”

“It's how the Angels reproduce themselves—but the feathers have to land on water or fire…There are different levels in the game, of course. At Level 4, Time becomes a player. Time can stand still, move faster, slow down. But you are playing against Time too. That's what it's called—‘The Gap of Time.' ”

“What kind of a title is that?”

Leo's buzzer buzzed. It was his wife.

MiMi entered the office. Before Leo could get round his desk to kiss her, Xeno was there. Leo saw the way his hand took the small of her back, the way MiMi leaned up towards him. She kissed his cheek and then she put her head in his neck while he hugged her. It was all over in a few seconds.

MiMi went to Leo and kissed his mouth. She was smiling, happy, heavily pregnant. She was on her way to rehearse for the Save the Children dinner. Xeno had texted her to say he was leaving town.

She knew before I did.

MiMi offered to drop Xeno home to pack.

Pop a last ball in the pocket?
was what Leo thought, but what he said was…“Tell him to stay till Monday. I've tried, now you try.”

MiMi pushed Xeno down onto the white leather sofa and perched with pregnant difficulty on the edge. She took Xeno's hand, palm upwards.

“Xeno taught me to read palms,” she said to Leo.

I'll bet he did
…thought Leo; what he said was, “More New Age bat shit?”

MiMi bent over Xeno's hand, running her finger along the lines. Xeno bent forward with her, his dark hair falling as it always did. His dark hair falling. Leo suddenly felt sick because it was Xeno's body he saw falling away from him.

“You are going on a journey,” said MiMi. “Across the ocean.”

They were both laughing. They were intimate, private. Leo, ghost-faced, his beating heart invisible, wondered if he was in the room.

MiMi closed her eyes. “
Mais, je vois un retard. Je vois
…that you will be staying in London for the weekend.
Je connais
…that a friend of yours is singing,
et voilà
!”

Xeno turned MiMi's palm over. “I see a beautiful baby,” he said. “Coming soon.”

When they had both left the office with Milo and Leo was alone, he stood in the long glass window watching them all pile into MiMi's pink Fiat 500.

They look like a family,
he thought.

He went to the computer and flicked to his wife's Wiki page. There was the photo he had on his wall. She was like a laser of energy.

MIMI

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hermione Delannet
better known by her mononym
MiMi
(born November 6, 1977), is a French-American singer, songwriter and actor.

CONTENTS

1 Early life

2 Musical career

3 Personal life

4 Discography

4.1 Albums

4.2 Guest appearances

5 Awards

6 References

7 External links

EARLY LIFE

MiMi was born in New York, USA, and raised in Paris, France. Her father was a Russian diplomat and the family travelled extensively. Her mother was American and she grew up bilingual in French and English. She performed her first original song, “Une Femme Abandonée,” at the age of sixteen, after her parents separated, and while attending a wedding.[1] In the early 2000s, she developed an interest in bossa nova music. Performing at jazz clubs in Paris, she soon began to attract the attention of record companies. MiMi made her acting debut in 2002 onstage at Théâtre National de Chaillot in Deborah Warner's adaptation of
The PowerBook
—a novel by the British writer Jeanette Winterson.

MUSIC CAREER

In 2001, MiMi signed a recording contract with Virgin Records. She released her first studio album,
Les Fleurs du Mals
, in 2002, incorporating new wave and bossa nova music.[2] In 2005 she released the album
Rage
. All of the songs on this album are based on solo voice, with a single instrument accompaniment.
Rage
quickly became a gold album. The song “Dark Angel” is understood to have been inspired by the French poet Gérard de Nerval—who dreamed that an angel fell from heaven and was trapped in a narrow courtyard. Some say it is a reference to her stormy relationship with her husband, Leo Kaiser.

PERSONAL LIFE

MiMi married Leo Kaiser in 2003. The couple lives in the UK.

On April 1, 2004, MiMi gave birth to a son named Milo.

Leo fazed out of MiMi's Wiki entry.
Dark Angel. Dark Angel. Dark Angel.

New Year's Eve 1999 and Leo was twenty-five and in Paris with a bunch of drunk bankers from BNP Paribas. The six of them had spent 4000€ on dinner. Leo hadn't eaten his—somewhere between the courses he had gone out for a kebab and a Coke from one of the vans on the Seine. He sat in his Hugo Boss suit on the stone steps leading down to the river. There was a boy with a tinny guitar singing that song about where do you go to, my lovely, when you're alone in your bed? Leo gave him a 50€ note just to make him shut up.

The bells were ringing at Notre Dame. He could hear canon fire a long way off. The year 2000. Wasn't the world supposed to end soon?

Leo finished his kebab and stood pissing against the wall. He felt a hand on his bum. There was a woman behind him, asking for money. How much? Fifty or a hundred. Depending.

They walked without speaking under the arch of the Pont Neuf. In the dark, the woman backed against the wall and got a condom out of her bag. She unfastened her coat and unhooked her breasts from her bra. Leo pumped them while he got hard. The woman hitched up her skirt, squeezing his dick between her thighs for a minute. He liked that. Then she pulled on the condom and slotted him inside her. She wasn't wearing knickers. He was vaguely aware that the only part of him present was his dick. The rest of him was unnecessary, elsewhere. Still, she was warm and tight and she moved well. He came quickly with his face in her neck and his hands on her breasts. She smelled of jasmine.

As soon as he was done she took her wipes out of her bag, gave him one and cleaned herself up, throwing the used tissues into the river.
He had a thought that he would be the father of mermaids.

He paid her. She kissed him lightly on the cheek and wished him a happy new year, walking away, her heels echoing against the stone.

Leo wanted to call out. To ask her to wait. He didn't know why. Maybe he liked her. Instead he watched her passing out of the darkness, back up the steps. On impulse he followed her.

At the top of the steps he saw her join an older woman, not up for business. There was a sleeping toddler well wrapped up in a pram. The bus came and the women were gone.