LE CROC IS locked, dark, and there’s no sign of Holly Sykes. Perhaps the bar’s closed tonight, so Holly won’t be in to clean it until tomorrow morning. Why didn’t I ask for her number? I hobble to the town square but even the hub of La Fontaine Sainte-Agnès is in an end-of-the-world mood: few tourists, fewer vehicles, the gorilla-crêpie’s nowhere to be seen, most shops have Fermé signs up. How come? Last year January 1 had quite a buzz. The sky presses lower, the gray of sodden mattresses. I go into La Patisserie Palanche de la Cretta, order a coffee and a carac, and slump in the corner by the window, ignoring my throbbing ankle. Detective Sheila Young won’t be thinking about me today, at least. What now? What next? Activate Marcus Anyder? I have his passport in a safety-deposit box at Euston station. A bus to Geneva, a train to Amsterdam or Paris; across on the hovercraft; flight to Panama; the Caribbean … Job on a yacht.
Really? Do I pack in my old life, just like that?
Never see my family again? It’s so abrupt.
Somehow this isn’t what the script says.
Olly Quinn passes the window, just three feet and a pane of glass away, accompanied by a cheerful-looking man in a sheepskin jacket. Camp-Psycho-German’s right hand, I presume. Quinn looks pale and sick. The duo march past the phone box where our Olly had his Ness-based meltdown only yesterday and into Swissbank’s automated lobby where the cashpoints live. Here Quinn makes three withdrawals with three different cards, before being frog-marched back. I hide behind a conveniently to-hand newspaper. A Normal would feel guilt or vindication; I feel as if I just watched a middle-of-the-road episode of Inspector Morse.
“Morning, Poshboy,” says Holly, holding a hot chocolate. She’s beautiful. She’s utterly herself. She’s got a red beret. She’s perceptive. “So, what sort of trouble are you in?”
I don’t know why I deny it. “Everything’s fine.”
“Can I sit down, or are you expecting company?”
“Yes. No. Please. Sit down. No company.”
She removes her ski jacket, the mint-green one, sits opposite me, places her red beret on the table, unwinds her cream scarf from her neck, rolls it up into a ball, and places it on her beret.
“I just went to the bar,” I admit, “but figured you were skiing.”
“The slopes are shut. Because of the blizzard.”
I glance outside again. “What blizzard?”
“You really should listen to the local radio.”
“There’s only so much ‘One Night in Bangkok’ a man can take.”
She stirs her hot chocolate. “You ought to be getting back—the forecast’s for whiteout conditions, within the hour. You can’t see three yards in a whiteout. It’s like being blinded.” She eats a spoonful of froth and waits for me to confess what sort of trouble I’m in.
“I just checked out of the Hotel Chetwynd-Pitt.”
“I’d check in again, if I were you. Really.”
I do a downed-plane hum. “Problematic.”
“Unhappy families in the House of Rufus Sexist-Git?”
I lean forward. “Their hot totties from Club Walpurgis turned out to be prostitutes. Their pimps are extracting every last centime they can scare out of them as we speak. I exited via an escape hatch.”
Holly shows no surprise at this common ski-resort tale. “So what’s your plan?”
I look into her serious eyes. A dum-dum bullet of happiness tears through my innards. “I don’t know.”
She sips her hot chocolate and I wish I was it. “You don’t look as worried as I would be, if I was in your shoes.”
I sip my own coffee. A pan hisses in the bakery kitchen. “I can’t explain it. It’s … impending metamorphosis.” I can see she doesn’t understand, and I don’t blame her. “Do you ever … know stuff, Holly? Stuff that you cannot possibly know, yet … Or—or lose hours. Not as in, ‘Wow, time flies,’ but as in,” I click my fingers, “there, an hour’s gone. Literally, between one heartbeat and the next. Well, maybe the time thing’s a red herring, but I know my life’s changing. Metamorphosis. That’s the best word I’ve got. You’re doing a good job of not looking freaked, but I must sound utterly, utterly, utterly bonkers.”
“Three too many utterlies. I work in a bar, remember.”
I fight a strong urge to lean over and kiss her. She’d slap me away. I feed my coffee a sugar lump. Then she asks, “Where do you plan to stay during your ‘metamorphosis’?”
I shrug. “It’s happening to me. Not me to it.”
“Which sounds cool, but it hardly answers my question. The buses out aren’t running and the hotels are full.”
“Like I said, it’s a very poorly timed blizzard.”
“There’s other stuff you’re not telling me, isn’t there?”
“Oh, tons of stuff. Stuff I’ll never tell anyone, probably.”
Holly looks away, making a decision …
WHEN WE LEFT the town square there were just a few scratchy snowflakes prowling at roof height, but a hundred yards and a couple of corners later it’s as if the vast nozzle of an Alp-sized pump is blasting godalmighty massive coils of snow up the valley. Snow’s up my nose, snow’s in my eyes, snow’s in my armpits, snow howls after us through a stone archway into a grotty yard with dustbins already half buried under snow, snow, snow. Holly fumbles with the key and then we’re in, snow gusting through the gap and the wind whoo-whooing after us until she slams the door shut, and it’s suddenly very peaceful. A short hallway, a mountain bike, stairs going up. Holly’s cheeks are hazed dark pink. Too skinny; if I were her mum I’d get a few fattening desserts down her. We take off our coats and boots and she gestures me up the carpeted stairs first. Above, there’s a light, airy flat with paper lampshades and varnished floorboards that squeak. Holly’s flat’s plainer than my rooms at Humber, and obviously 1970s, not 1570s, but I envy her it. It’s tidy and very sparsely furnished: The big room has an ancient TV and VHS player, a hand-me-down sofa, a beanbag, a low table, a neat pile of books in a corner, and that’s a near-complete inventory. The kitchenette, too, is minimalist: a single plate, dish, cup, knife, fork, and spoon wait on the drainer. Rosemary and sage grow in pots on a shelf. The top three smells are toast, cigarettes, and coffee. The only nod to ornament is a small oil painting of a pale blue cottage on a green slope over a silver ocean. Holly’s large window must offer an amazing view, but today it’s obscured by a blizzard, like white-noise static on an untuned telly. “It’s unbelievable,” I say. “All that snow.”
“It’s a whiteout.” She fills the kettle. “They happen. What did you do to your ankle? You’re limping.”
“I left my old accommodation à la Spiderman.”
“And landed à la sack-of-Spudsman.”
“My Scout pack did the Leaping from Buildings to Escape Violent Pimps badge the week I was away.”
“I’ve got some stretchy bandages you can borrow. But first …” She opens the door of a box room with one window as big as a shoebox lid. “My sister slept here okay, with the sofa cushions and blankets.”
“It’s warm, it’s dry.” I dump my bag inside. “It’s great.”
“Good. I sleep in my room, you sleep here. Yep?”
“Understood.” When a woman is interested in you, she’ll let you know; if not, there’s no aftershave, gift, or line you can spin to make her change her mind. “I’m grateful, Holly. God only knows what I would have done if you hadn’t taken pity on me.”
“You’d have survived. Your sort always does.”
I look at her. “My sort?”
She huffs through her nose.
“F’CHRISSAKES, LAMB, bandage it, it’s not a tourniquet.” Holly is less than impressed by my first aid skills. “Obviously you missed the Junior Doctor badge too. What badges did you get? No, forget I asked. All right,” she puts down her cigarette, “I’ll do it—but if you make any idiotic nurse jokes, your other ankle gets cracked with a breadboard.”
“Definitely no nurse jokes.”
“Foot on the stool. I’m not kneeling at your feet.”
She unravels my cack-handed attempt, tutting at my ineptitude. My sockless swollen foot looks alien, naked, and unattractive against Holly’s fingers. “Here, rub in some arnica cream first—it’s pretty miraculous for swellings and bruises.” She hands me a tube. I obey, and when my ankle’s shiny she wraps the bandage around my foot with just the right degree of pressure and support. I watch her fingers, her loopable black hair, how her face hides and shows her inner weather. This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a dictator. I know this, yet the blast furnace in my ribcage roars You You You You You You just the same, and there’s bugger-all I can do about it. The wind attacks the window. “It’s not too tight?” asks Holly.
“It feels perfect,” I tell her.
“LIKE SNOW IN a snow globe,” Holly says, watching the blizzard. She tells me about UFO hunters who come to Sainte-Agnès, which somehow leads on to working as a strawberry picker in Kent and a grape-picker in Bordeaux; why the Troubles in Northern Ireland won’t end without desegregated schools; how she once skied through a valley three minutes before an avalanche swept through. I light a cigarette and talk about how a bus I missed in Kashmir skidded off the Ladakh road and fell five hundred feet; why townies in Cambridge hate students; why roulette wheels have a zero; how great it is to row on the Thames at six A.M. in the summer. We discuss the first singles we bought, The Exorcist versus The Shining, planetariums and Madame Tussaud’s. We spout a lot of rubbish, but watching Holly Sykes talk is a fine thing. I empty the ashtray again. She quizzes me about my three months’ study program at Blithewood College in upstate New York. I give her the edited highlights, including getting shot at by a hunter who thought I was a deer. She tells me about her friend Gwyn, who worked last year at a summer camp in Colorado. I tell her about how Bart Simpson phones Marge from his summer camp and declares, “I’m no longer afraid of death,” but Holly asks who Bart Simpson is, so I have to explain. Holly talks about the band Talking Heads, like a Catholic discussing her favorite saints. The morning’s gone, we realize. Using a half bag of flour and bits and pieces from her fridge I make us a pizza, which I can tell impresses her more than she lets on. Aubergine, tomatoes, cheese, pesto, and Dijon mustard. There’s a bottle of wine in the fridge, too, but I serve us water in case she thinks I want to get her drunk. I ask if she’s a vegetarian, having noticed that even the stock cubes are veggie. She is, and she tells me how when she was sixteen she was at her great-aunt Eilísh’s house in Ireland, “and this ewe walked by, bleating, and I realized, ‘Sweet fecking hell, I’m eating its children!’ ” I remark how people are superb at not thinking about awkward truths. After I’ve done the dishes—“to pay my rent”—I discover she’s never played backgammon, so I make us a board using the inside of a Weetabix box and a marker. She finds a pair of dice in a jar in a drawer, and we use silver and copper coins for pieces. By the third game she’s good enough for me to plausibly let her win.
“Congratulations,” I tell her. “You’re a fast learner.”
“Ought I to thank you for letting me beat you?”
“Oh no I didn’t! Seriously, you beat me fair and—”
“And you’re a virtuoso liar, Poshboy.”
LATER, WE TRY the TV but the reception’s affected by the storm and the screen’s as blizzardy as the window. Holly finds a black-and-white film on a videotape inherited from the flat’s last tenant. She stretches out on the sofa, I’m sunk into the beanbag, and the ashtray’s balanced on the arm between us. I try to focus on the film and not her body. The film’s British and made, I guess, in the late 1940s. Its opening minutes are missing so we don’t know the title, but it’s quite compelling, despite the No?l Cowardy diction. The characters are on a cruise liner crossing some foggy expanse, and it takes a while for the passengers, Holly, and me to twig that they’re all dead. Each character gets deepened by a backstory—a good Chaucerian mix—before a magisterial Examiner arrives to decide each passenger’s fate in the afterlife. Ann, the saintly heroine, gets a pass into heaven, but her husband, Henry, the Austrian-pianist-resistance-fighter hero, killed himself—head in a gas cooker—and has to work as a steward aboard a similar ocean liner between the worlds. The wife tells the Examiner she’ll exchange heaven to be with her husband. Holly snorts. “Oh, please!” Ann and Henry then hear the sound of breaking glass and wake up in their flat, saved from the gas by the fresh air flooding in through the broken windows. String crescendo, man and wife embrace each other and a new life. The End.
“What a pile of pants,” says Holly.
“It kept us watching.”
The window’s dim mauve except for snowflakes tumbling near the glass. Holly gets up to draw the curtains but stands there, under the spell of the snow. “What’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever done, Poshboy?”
I fidget in my beanbag. It rustles. “Why?”
“You’re so megaconfident.” She draws the curtains and turns around, almost accusingly. “Rich people are, I s’pose, but you’re up on a different level. Do you never do stupid things that make you cringe with embarrassment—or shame—when you look back?”
“If I worked through the hundreds of stupid things I’ve done, we’d still be here next New Year’s Day.”
“I’m only asking for one.”
“Okay, then …” I guess she wants a flash of vulnerable underbelly—it’s like that witless interview question, “What’s your worst fault?” What have I done that’s stupid enough to qualify as a proper answer, but not so morally repugnant (à la Penhaligon’s Last Plunge) that a Normal would recoil in horror? “Okay. I’ve got this cousin, Jason, who grew up in this village in Worcestershire called Black Swan Green. One time, I’d have been about fifteen, my family was visiting, and Jason’s mum sent Jason and me to the village shop. He was younger than me and, as they say, ‘easily led.’ As his sophisticated London cousin, how did I amuse myself? By stealing a box of cigarettes from his village shop, luring poor Jason into the woods, and telling him that to fix his picked-on, shitty life, he had to learn to smoke. Seriously. Like the villain in some antismoking campaign. My meek cousin said, ‘Okay,’ and fifteen minutes later he was kneeling on the grass at my feet, vomiting up everything he’d eaten in the previous six months. There. One stupid, cruel act. My conscience goes ‘You bastard’ whenever I think of it,” I wince to hide my fib, “and I think, Sorry, Jason.”
Holly asks, “Does he smoke now?”
“I don’t believe he’s ever smoked.”
“Perhaps you inoculated him that day.”
“Perhaps I did. Who got you smoking?”
“OFF I WENT, across the Kent marshes. No plan. Just …” Holly’s hand gestures at the rolling distance. “The first night, I slept in a church in the middle of nowhere and … that was when it happened. That was the night Jacko disappeared. Back at the Captain Marlow he had his bath, Sharon read to him, Mam said good night. Nothing seemed wrong—apart from the fact that I’d gone off. After shutting up the pub, Dad went into Jacko’s room as usual to switch his radio off—that’s how he used to fall asleep, listening to foreign voices chuntering away. But, come Sunday morning, Jacko wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the pub. Like some crappy whodunnit puzzle, the doors were locked from the inside. At first the cops—Mam and Dad, even—thought I’d hatched a plot with Jacko, so it was only when …” Holly pauses to stabilize herself, “… I was tracked down, on the Monday afternoon, on this fruit farm on the Isle of Sheppey where I’d blagged a job as a picker, only then did the police start a proper search. Thirty-six hours later. First it was dogs and a radio appeal …” Holly rubs her palm around her face, “… then chains of locals combing wasteland around Gravesend, and police divers checking the … y’know, the obvious places. They found nothing. No body, no witnesses. Days went by, all the leads fizzled out. My parents shut the pub for weeks, I didn’t go to school, Sharon was crying the whole time …” Holly chokes. “You’d pray for the phone to go, then when it did, you’d be too scared it’d be bad news to pick it up. Mam shriveled up, Dad … He was always joking, before it happened. Afterwards, he was … like … hollow. I didn’t go out for weeks and weeks. Basically I left school. If Ruth, my sister-in-law, hadn’t weighed in, taken over, got Mam to go over to Ireland in the autumn, I honestly don’t think Mam’d still be alive. Even now, six years later, it’s still … Terrible to say, but now when I hear on the news about some murdered kid, I think, That’s hell, that’s your worst nightmare, but at least the parents know. At least they can grieve. We can’t. I mean, I know Jacko would’ve come back if he could’ve done, but unless there’s proof, unless there’s a”—Holly’s voice catches—“a body, your imagination never shuts up. It says, What if this happened? If that happened? What if he’s still alive somewhere in some psycho’s basement praying that today’s the day you find him? But even that’s not the worst part …” She looks away so I can’t see her face. There’s no need to tell her to take her time, even though, unbelievably, her travel clock on the shelf says it’s nine forty-five P.M. I light her a cigarette and put it in her fingers. She fills her lungs and slowly empties them. “If I hadn’t run off that weekend—over some stupid fucking boyfriend—would Jacko’ve let himself out of the Captain Marlow that night?” Still turned away, Holly rubs her face. “No. The answer’s no. Which means it’s my fault. Now my family tell me that’s not true, this counselor I went to told me the same, everybody says it. But they don’t have that question—Was it my fault?—drilling into their heads every hour, every day. Or the answer.”
The wind hammers out mad organist’s chords.
“I don’t know what to say, Holly …”
She finishes her glass of white wine.
“… except ‘Stop it.’ It’s rude.”
She turns to me, her eyes red, her face shocked.
“Yes,” I say. “Rude. It’s rude to Jacko.”
Obviously nobody’s ever said this to her.
“Switch places. Suppose Jacko had stormed off somewhere; suppose you’d gone looking for him, but some … evil overtook you and stopped you ever returning. Would you want Jacko to spend his life as self-blame junkie because once, one day, he committed a thoughtless action and made you worry about him?”
Holly looks as if she can’t quite believe I’m daring to say this. Actually, I can’t either. She’s this far from kicking me out.
“You’d want him to live fully,” I go on. “Wouldn’t you? To live more fully, not less. You’d need him to live your life for you.”
The VCR chooses now to trundle out its videotape. Holly’s voice comes out serrated: “So I’m s’posed to act like it never happened?”
“No. But stop beating yourself up because you failed to see how a seven-year-old kid might respond to your ordinary act of teenage rebellion in 1984. Stop burying yourself alive at Le Croc of Shit. Your penance isn’t helping Jacko. Of course his disappearance has changed your life—how could it not?—but why does that make it right to squander your talents and the bloom of your youth serving cocktails to the likes of Chetwynd-Pitt and for the enrichment of the likes of Günter the employee-shagging drug dealer?”
Holly snaps back, “What am I s’posed to do, then?”
“I don’t know, do I? I haven’t had to survive what you’ve had to survive. Though, since you ask, there are countless other Jackos in London you could help. Runaways, homeless teenagers, victims of God only knows what. You’ve told me a lot today, Holly, and I’m honored, even if you think I’m betraying your trust by talking to you like this. But I haven’t heard one thing that forfeits your right to a useful and, yeah, even a content life.”
Holly stands up, looking angry and hurt and puffy-eyed. “Half of me wants to hit you with something metal.” She sounds serious. “So does the other half. So I’ll go to sleep. You’d better leave in the morning. Switch off the light when you go to bed.”