The Holiday (37 page)

But, this reservation aside, he was delighted with the way his work was going and wondered what his editor would make of it.

He also wondered what Bones would make of it. ‘What’s this, Mark?
You
writing about love and passion? Whatever next?’

No psychoanalyst worth his Freud and Gestalt can resist the temptation to dissect a client’s sex life, and Bones had been no exception.

‘Women,’ he had said, opening a drawer and rustling a bag of jelly-babies at the start of one of their sessions, ‘friend or foe?’

‘That’s a ludicrous statement,’ Mark had countered. ‘It can never be as simplistic as that.’

‘Okay, let me come in from another angle. How many people have you ever really connected with, apart from Theo?’

‘Why do you assume I have with Theo?’

‘Are you afraid to admit that you have? Afraid to show that you’re capable of caring for another person?’

He didn’t answer Bones. Just stared him out. Then, to annoy him, Bones started whistling another of his tunes — ‘Try A Little Tenderness’.

‘Shut the hell up, will you?’

The whistling stopped and Bones popped a jelly-baby into his mouth. He chewed slowly, the sweet smell of artificial strawberry juice coming at Mark across the desk. ‘And your answer?’

‘As, no doubt, you’ve already concluded, apart from Theo I’ve never been really close to anyone.’

‘Good.’

‘It’s good that I’ve never connected with anyone?’

‘No, good that I extracted that confession from you without the use of thumbscrews.’ He reached for another sweet. ‘Now, then, back to you and women. How do you view them?’

‘Have you ever thought that perhaps you have a serious sugar habit?’

‘Deflecting the question and sending it off course by lobbing a personal criticism is neither original nor constructive, Mark. Does the idea of somebody ransacking your sexual history disturb you?’

‘No.’

‘Then try giving me an answer.’

‘I don’t think I can.’

‘Perhaps you should allow me to do some of your thinking for you.’

‘I thought therapists weren’t supposed to do that. I thought — ’

‘Another attempt to deflect me? Really, Mark, why do you insist on doing this?’

‘Because it’s marginally more interesting than anything else going on here.’

‘You’re bored?’

‘Out of my mind.’

‘Talking of which, let’s get back to it. Would you say that you were a success in bed? A sexual dynamo?’

‘I’ve had my moments.’

‘Mm ... As intrigued as I am by your so-called moments, let’s think about the earth-moving pleasures you’ve given the women in your life. Were you good at that? A thrilling success?’

‘Depends how one measures success.’

‘And still you insist on shilly-shallying around with me. Which, you should have learned by now, only forces me to be more direct. Were you able to make your lovers climax?’

Watching Bones bite the head off a green jelly-baby, he said, ‘Is any man really sure he’s hitting the right buttons?’

The rest of the jelly-baby went the way of its head. ‘I assure you, when the right buttons are pressed, you know all about it.’

This was the first time Mark had viewed Bones as a man who had a life outside the clinic. Was it possible that this little man with his insatiable sweet tooth was a super-stud in bed?

‘Something amusing you?’

‘Yes. You sounded as if you were boasting there for a minute.’

‘Interesting that you should view it that way. But putting the question of my sexual prowess to one side, shall we take a moment to hold yours up to the light and see how transparent it is?’

It didn’t take Bones long to establish the obvious, that Mark’s experience with women was pretty shallow. That he had interpreted emotional dependency as weakness. That he had been unable to commit himself. And that nothing lasted because nothing meant anything to him.

As Kim would have been the first to confirm.

Poor Kim. She really hadn’t known what she was getting into when she had married him. It had been a disaster from the outset. Marrying solely to provide the necessary wings to fly in the face of his parents’ disapproval was never going to be a solid foundation for a lasting relationship. Kim must have known what he had done, but perhaps, and if only to appease his conscience, he had always hoped that she had had her own game plan when she had agreed to go through with the marriage. After all, on paper he looked like he was worth the effort. As the youngest son and potential heir to a thriving family business, he must have seemed a good investment to a girl who had spent most of her childhood being shuffled from one foster family to another, and her young adult years camped out at Greenham Common, before going north to support the miners in her continued search for a sense of belonging.

It was during the miners’ strike, and in a leaking, bone-shaking Bedford van on his way to help Arthur Scargill beat Ian MacGregor and
la
Thatcher, that Mark had met Kim. He had come upon her as she was trying to hitch a lift. Her hair was braided into rainbow-coloured dreadlocks and she was dressed in dungarees several sizes too large for her with a donkey jacket turned up at the collar to keep out the rain. She was grateful to climb in alongside him to escape the downpour when he stopped to offer a lift, but street-wise enough to let him know she was no fool. ‘Don’t think you can try anything on with me,’ she had warned him. ‘I’ve got a knife and I’m not afraid to use it.’

‘And good morning to you, fair maiden,’ he had said.

‘Oh, fancy yourself as a clever dick, do you?’ she had responded. ‘Well, like I say, make a move on me and I’ll cut it off for you.’

Their whirlwind romance, as he had sarcastically described it for Bones’s benefit, consisted of several months of communal living until the miners’ strike came to an end. Then he wrote to his parents to inform them that he was getting married. ‘The least you could do for me is be there at the register office,’ he had written.

‘That was really telling them, wasn’t it, Mark?’ Bones had said, when he recounted the scene of his marriage vows being witnessed by his stony-faced parents and brothers. Kim had dressed for the occasion by getting her nose pierced and wearing one of those multi-coloured, hand-knitted Peruvian hats with ear-flaps, while he had excelled himself with a pair of dirty combat trousers and a T-shirt with a picture of Lenin on the front.. ‘You badly wanted to rub their noses in the mire of your unhappiness, didn’t you?’ Bones remarked. ‘What better way than to say, “Look, this is what you’ve driven me to do.”?’

His parents gave him some money to put down on a small flat. Guilt-money, every penny of it, he had convinced himself, as he and Kim set up home and played at Mr and Mrs Domestic Harmony. But within a short while he had lost his job, his wife and the flat. Gone, too, was every scrap of his political ideology. There seemed no point in it. What difference did it make anyway? The void he was left with he filled with booze. When things got out of hand he tried a stint of going on the wagon, but it didn’t help. He got the shakes and depression kicked in. And to beat the depression he upped the amount of cocaine he was taking to give him the lift he needed. But all that happened was that the drug used up what little energy he had so when the comedown hit him he felt worse than ever. His depression deepened, he became jittery and paranoid, and as panicky as hell. And though he was exhausted, he couldn’t sleep, not with his brain racing at full tilt. He knew he needed help, but he was powerless to seek it. It was easiest just to keep on drinking.

‘And where was Theo when all this was going on?’ Bones had asked him. ‘Wasn’t he summoned to your wedding like your family?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I didn’t want him there.’

‘Didn’t want him to see how fast you were sliding out of control?’

‘Something like that.’

‘And what was his reaction when you finally got round to bringing him up to date?’

‘He asked me if I was happy.’

‘And were you?’

‘I told him I was.’

‘That wasn’t what I asked.’

‘Well, of course I wasn’t happy. I was having a blast of a time shoving corpses into cheap plywood coffins by day and avoiding my wife by night. A real recipe for joy.’

‘I’ll come back to your wife in a minute, but for now, tell me why you took a job surrounding yourself with the dead. Was that a satisfying career move, or a brilliant piece of macabre irony on your part? Or was it a mental reminder like one of those we stick on the fridge with a cute magnet — “Must remember to pay the television licence.” Except in this case it was “Must remember what a dead body looks like, lest I forget the horror of Niall’s death”?’

‘I needed a job — ’

‘With a first-class honours degree in criminal psychology you could have got something more appropriate than working in a small-town undertaker’s.’

‘It seemed appropriate at the time.’

‘Yes, I think you probably did see it as appropriate, particularly the element of macabre irony. A society dying on its feet, and you there to help bury it. Was that the big joke?’

‘If you say so.’

‘And who did you share this joke with? Kim?’

‘No.’

‘Theo?’

‘No. No one.’

‘So, it was a side-splitting laugh a minute with yourself? Except it wasn’t funny, was it? It was, and please excuse the pun, a deadly serious affair. There was to be no escape from the spectre of your childhood. Rubbing shoulders with all those rotting corpses was your reward for failing Niall, wasn’t it? Couldn’t you have come up with something more subtle?’

‘It was the best I could do in the circumstances.’

‘Well, now, the sharpness in your voice tells me that you’ve had enough. But to finish with, let me leave you with this thought. You’ve never held down a job for more than seven months and your track record for staying in a lasting relationship is laughable. Is this a coincidence? Laziness? Or a fear of failure?’

It went without saying that every word uttered by Bones scored a bull’s-eye. Since Kim had left him, when she couldn’t put up with his drinking any longer, he had lost all interest in forming any kind of relationship, let alone a lasting one. He also felt disgusted with himself that he had treated Kim so badly, and the scant remains of any decency he still had held him back from doing the same to anyone else. As for work, he didn’t want to do anything that might stretch him or give him a sense of achievement. By not accepting the challenge in the first place he could be sure not to fail. But it went a little deeper, as Bones took the trouble to point out to him.

‘This is standard-issue stuff from the school of survival, Mark. Ever since Niall’s death you allowed yourself nothing of any real worth, only the dregs of the barrel that nobody else was interested in having. It meant that if they were taken away, as Niall was, you wouldn’t get hurt.’

It was a harsh summing-up of his brief marriage, but sadly it was true. If he hadn’t been so self-absorbed he would have realised that Kim was chock full of her own emotional problems from her childhood, and that she needed his help, not his drunken black moods.

Looking back on those days — days and nights when she had stayed away from the flat because she had been terrified of what he might do next — it all felt like a terrible dream sequence. None of it seemed real. The shame of it was, he had never had the opportunity to say how sorry he was. Not long after their divorce he had read of her death in the local paper. She had got her life together far better than he had at that time, and was working in a supermarket, stacking shelves. She had finished her shift late one night, stepped out into the road to catch her bus home and was knocked down by a stolen car being driven by a fourteen-year-old boy. Death had been instantaneous. One minute she had probably been looking forward to her supper of beans on toast — one of her favourite meals, especially if the beans had those funny little sausages with them — and the next she was lying face down in the gutter, surrounded by a group of strangers checking her for any vital signs. Her untimely death should have given him food for thought, forced him to take stock. But no. What grief he had felt for her he obliterated by going on a three-day bender. As always, his response to anything that might touch him was to get drunk.

He let out his breath and leaned back in his chair. Yes. It was done. He had finished the chapter. Objective achieved.

He replaced the cap on his fountain pen — a gift from Theo when he had started work on his first novel — and stretched his arms up over his head. He could feel a day’s worth of tension in his shoulders and neck, the muscles taut after sitting still for so many hours.

To help him unwind, he decided to go for a walk to the shop to buy another film for his camera. As he strolled along the hot, dusty road, he tried to decide what to do about the Sinclair party that evening.

Theo’s parting shot when he had left for the airport had been, ‘Fifty of your strong English pounds says that you are such a miserable killjoy you won’t go to Max and Laura’s tonight.’

It was tempting to let Theo have the last word and be done with it. A quiet evening alone would not be such a bad thing. He was used to his own company. But from nowhere a picture of Thomas Zika playing chess with himself to get through the long, lonely hours came into his mind.

It was as though he was being shown a glimpse of what the future held for him.

It was a future he didn’t much care for.

While she was fetching a drink for Virginia Patterson and taking time out from her annoyingly overbearing manner, the roar of conversation and laughter told Laura that the party was a success. Not only had everybody made the effort to dress up, but they all seemed to be enjoying themselves. They made a curious gathering, and she didn’t mind admitting that initially she had had misgivings about one or two of their guests getting on with each other. But it seemed that there was nothing like a change of identity, albeit a superficial one, to help lower the social mask one normally hid behind. And, looking at everyone on the terrace, who had come similarly wrapped in a white cotton sheet, she pictured the stripped beds they must have left behind in their villas.