Armadillo

Chapter 17

Dymphna’s journalist friend was called Bram Wiles and he had said he was more than happy to have his brains picked. Consequently, Lorimer had arranged to meet him in the Matisse at midday where and when Lorimer was duly present, his habitual fifteen minutes early in a booth at the rear reading the Guardian, when he felt the shudder of someone sitting down on the bench opposite.
‘Shite of a day’ Marlobe said, filling his pipe with a blunt finger. ‘Your motor looks desperate.’ Lorimer agreed: there had been a thick frost and the harsh wind had risen again. Moreover, the previous night’s combination of rain and freeze seemed to have encouraged the rust to spread on his Toyota, exponentially like bacteria multiplying in a petri dish, and it was now almost completely orange.
Marlobe lit his pipe with great spittley suckings and blowings, turning the immediate area a blurry bluey grey He inhaled his pungent pipe smoke deep into his lungs, Lorimer noticed, as if he were smoking a cigarette.
‘Your Kentish daffodil grower doesn’t stand a monkey’s in this weather.’
‘I’m afraid I’m expecting someone,’ Lorimer said.
‘What’s that got to do with me?’
‘I’m having a sort of meeting. He’ll need to sit where you are.’
The sullen Romanian waitress slid his cappuccino across the table at him, making sure some of the foam lapped over the side and pooled in the saucer.
‘What you want?’ she asked Marlobe.
‘Sorry darling.’ Marlobe bared his teeth at her. ‘I’m not stopping long.’ He turned back to Lorimer. ‘Whereas… Whereas your Dutchman is sitting pretty.’
‘Really?’
‘State subsidies. Three guilder per bloom. Your Kentman and your Dutchman are not on a level playing field in the world of daffs.’
This was clearly nonsense but Lorimer did not feel like arguing with Marlobe so he said, vaguely, ‘The weather’s bound to improve.’
Marlobe gave a high screeching laugh at this and banged the tabletop fiercely with his palm.
‘That’s what they said at Dunkirk in 1940. And where did it get them? Tell me this, do you think von Rundstedt stood in the turret of his Panzerkampfwagen and wondered if perhaps it would be a bit milder tomorrow? Eh? Eh?’
‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’
‘That’s the problem with this country. Looking on the bright side. Always looking on the stinking bright side. It’s an illness, a sickness. That’s why this nation is on its knees. On its knees in the gutter looking for scraps.’
A boyish-looking young man approached their booth and said to Marlobe, ‘Are you Lorimer Black? I’m Bram Wiles.’
‘No, I’m Lorimer Black,’ Lorimer said quickly. He had asked the Spanish duenna waitress to direct anyone asking for him to the booth.
Marlobe stood up slowly and glared at Bram Wiles with overt hostility.
‘All f*cking right, mate. No hurry. We got all f*cking day.’
Wiles visibly flinched and backed off. He had a long blond fringe brushed straight down over his forehead to meet the rims of his round black spectacles. He looked about fourteen.
Marlobe, with even more deliberate, challenging slowness, edged out of the booth and then stood blocking entry for a while as he relit his pipe, matchbox clamped over the bowl, huffing and puffing, and then moved off in a vortexing whirl of smoke, like some warlock in a movie, giving Lorimer the thumbs-up sign.
‘Nice talking to you. Cheers, pal.’
Wiles sat down, coughing, and flapped his hands.
‘Local character,’ Lorimer explained, managing to attract the attention of the sullen Romanian and order another coffee. Bram Wiles had a small goatee but his facial hair was so fine and white-blond that it was only visible at a range of two to three feet. Lorimer often wondered about grown men with long fringes – what did they think was the effect as they ran the comb down their foreheads, spreading their hair flat across their brow? Did they think they looked good, he wondered, did they think it made them more attractive and appealing?
Wiles may have looked like a fourth-former but his mind was sharp and acute enough. Lorimer simply laid all the facts out before him, Wiles asking all the right questions. Lorimer did not speculate or air his own hunches or suspicions, merely told the story of the Fedora Palace affair as it had unfolded. At one stage Wiles took out a notebook and jotted down the relevant names.
‘It doesn’t make much sense to me, I must say’ Wiles considered. ‘I’ll make a few calls, check a few records.
We may stumble across a clue.’ He put away his pen. ‘If there is something hot then I can write about it, yeah? That’s understood. It would be my story, to place where I wanted.’
‘In principle,’ Lorimer said cautiously, in the face of this freelance zeal. ‘Let’s see what we get first. My job maybe at stake.’
‘Don’t worry’ Wiles said cheerfully ‘I wouldn’t implicate you in any way. I always protect my sources.’ He looked at his notes. ‘What about this Rintoul fellow?’
‘I think Gale-Harlequin are suing him. I’d go easy with him, if I were you. Bit of a wide boy.’
‘Right. Point taken.’ He looked up and smiled. ‘So, how was Tenerife?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Dymphna told me you and she had a few days there.’
‘Did she? Oh. Yeah, it was… you know, nice.’
‘Lucky bastard,’ Wiles said, ruefully. ‘I always rather fancied Dymphna.’
Maybe if you changed your hairstyle you might stand more of a chance, Lorimer thought, and then felt a little ashamed at his lack of charity – Wiles was doing him a favour after all, and only because of his unrequited love for Dymphna.
‘We’re just, you know, good friends,’ Lorimer said, not wanting to close any doors in Wiles’s amatory life.
‘Nothing special.’
‘That’s what they all say.’ Wiles shrugged, his eyes sad behind his round frames. ‘I’ll get back to you. Thanks for the coffee.’
77. The World’s First Loss Adjuster. The very first policy of life insurance was written in England on the 18th June 1853. A man, one William Gibbons, insured his life for the sum of 383 pounds, 6 shillings and 8 pence for one year. He paid a premium of eight per cent and sixteen underwriters signed the contract. Gibbons died on the 20th May the following year, some four weeks short of the period covered in the insurance policy, and his bereaved family duly submitted a claim. What happened?
The underwriters refused to pay up. They did this on the grounds that a year – strictly defined – is twelve times four weeks – twelve times twenty-eight days – and therefore on the basis of this calculation William Gibbons had in fact lived longer than the ‘strictly defined’ year he had insured his life for, and had thus ‘survived the term’.
What I want to know, Hogg used to say, is the name of the man who came up with that calculation to define a year. Who was the clever devil who decided that the way out of this mess was to strictly define a year? Because whoever it was who decided that a ‘year’ was twelve times twenty-eight days was, in fact, the world’s first loss adjuster. Such a person must have existed and, Hogg would insist, this person is the patron saint of our profession. He certainly disturbed the anticipations of the Gibbons family when they turned up to claim their 383 pounds, 6 shillings and 8 pence.
The Book of Transfiguration
Lorimer turned down Lupus Crescent and angled his body into the wind – a snell and scowthering one as they used to say in Inverness – and hauled his coat close about him. Marlobe was right, it was a shite of a day with dense, rushing clouds showing strong contrasts of luminous white and dark slatey grey What was happening to the weather? Where was bloody spring? He felt the wind, or the tiny grains of brick and street dust in the wind, make tears smart in his eyes and he turned his face to one side – to see David Watts’s Rolls-Lamborghini or whatever it was silently keeping pace with him, like a limo behind a mafia don out for a stroll. He stopped and the car stopped.
Terry smiled genially as he crossed the street towards him.
‘Mr Black. What a day, eh? David would like a word, if that’s all right’
Lorimer slid into the calfskin interior and smelt and touched the money implicit in every fixture and fitting. He sat back and let Terry cruise him from Pimlico to the south bank of the river. What in God’s name was going on now? On a Saturday, no less. They crossed Vauxhall Bridge and turned on to the Albert Embankment, straight on through Stamford Street and Southwark Street, down Tooley Street, passing Tower Bridge to the left.
The car pulled up in front of a warehouse conversion a few hundred yards downstream from Tower Bridge. Tasteful gilt lettering affixed to the sooty brick told him they were at Kendrick Quay. The streets around were deserted of people but, curiously were full of parked cars. There were many new traffic indicators and signs, islands of neat landscaping, grouped laurels and phormiums, securely staked leafless saplings, newly cast bollards set in newly laid cobbles. And, on every angle of wall, a camera sat, high and out of reach.
Terry pressed a code into a keyboard mounted on a stainless steel plinth and glass doors slid open. They rode up in a lift smelling of glue and glazier’s putty to the fifth floor. Exiting the lift, Lorimer saw a printed sign with an arrow saying ‘Sheer Achimota’ and a weary, zemblan premonition took root in his head.
The ‘Sheer Achimota’ offices were empty apart from some unpacked computer hardware and an ebony desk with a slim, flat phone. The floor-to-ceiling plate-glass curtain wall on the river side looked out on the turbulent and ebbing Thames, the sky still wrought with its billowy juxtapositions of brightness and dark and, square in the middle of the view, was Tower Bridge’s silhouette, irritatingly too familiar an outline, Lorimer thought, and irritatingly too omnipresent. Working in this office for any length of time you would come to hate it: a cliché in your face all day.
Watts stood in a corner, jogging and swaying, headphones plugged in his ears, eyes tightly closed. Terry coughed several times to interrupt the reverie and left them alone. Watts fiddled with his boogie-pack and eventually managed to switch it off. He removed the left earphone and let it dangle on his chest. Lorimer noticed that his hairy cheek patch had gone.
‘Lorimer,’ Watts greeted him with some enthusiasm. ‘What do you think, man?’
‘Very panoramic.’
‘No. “Sheer Achimota”. That’s the name of the management company, the record label, the new band and probably the new album.’
‘Catchy.’
Watts roamed the room towards him. ‘F*cking amazing, man. I sent Terry up to that place in Camden you told me about. He came back with eight carrier bags of C D s. I listened to African music non-stop for… for seventy-eight hours. And, this’ll finish you, guess what?’
‘You’re going to Africa?’
‘He’s gone.’
‘Who?’
‘Lucifer.’ He tapped his left shoulder, tapped his left cheek. ‘Old Satan got pissed off and left.’ Watts was close to him now and Lorimer could see his eyes were bright. Lorimer wondered if he was on anything or if it was simply the relief of the recently exorcized.
‘Thanks to you, Lorimer.’
‘No, I can’t take –’
‘– Without you, I’d never have heard Sheer Achimota. Without you I wouldn’t have got that ju-ju working for me. Strong African ju-ju scared the shit out of Satan. Thanks to you, Sheer Achimota did it.’
Lorimer checked the room’s exits. ‘Whatever it takes, Mr Watts.’
‘Oi. Call me David. Now, I want you to come and work for me, run Sheer Achimota, sort of chief executive type kind of thing.’
‘I’ve already got a job, um, David. But thanks very much.’
‘Quit it. I’ll pay you whatever you want. Hundred grand a year.’
‘It’s very kind. But –’ But I have a life to live.
‘Of course I’m still suing bastard Fortress Sure. But that’s nothing against you. I’ve told them to say nothing against Lorimer Black.’
‘I recommended they pay you.’
‘Sod the money. It’s the mental wear and tear. I was out of my mind with worry, what with the devil on my shoulder, and all. Someone’s got to pay for that stress-load.’
Lorimer thought it best to break things to him easily. ‘I could hardly leave my job and come and work for you if you are suing the company I was representing in the case.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well…Not ethical?’
‘Where’s your home planet, Lorimer? Anyway, no hurry, think about it. It’ll be cool. I’ll pop in from time to time. We could hang out.’ He refitted the left earplug. ‘Could you send Terry in? You can find your own way home, can’t you? Looking forward to our association, as they say.’
In a pig’s ear, Lorimer thought, as he trudged the deserted streets looking for a taxi, and wondering vaguely if ‘Sheer Achimota’ might exorcize his own set of demons and set some powerful African ju-ju to work on his behalf for a change.
397. De Nerval’s Tray. There is no doubt that de Nerval’s love for Jenny Colon was overwrought and obsessive. Jenny Colon was an actress, and Gérard used to go to the theatre night after night to see her. She had been married, in Gretna Green of all places, to another actor called Lafont. That marriage ended and she had a protracted liaison with a Dutch banker called Hoppe and many other men before de Nerval arrived in her life. Jenny Colon was described as a ‘ type rond et lunaire’. Lunaire ? My dictionary only supplies ‘lunar’ and the name of a flower, moonwort. Lunar… That speaks to me, naturally enough, of madness. Enough to drive a man mad.
De Nerval and Jenny Colon started a love affair but it was not long-lived. It ended, according to my biography, when de Nerval, surprising her one day, lunged at her trying to kiss her lips, her lunary lips. Startled, Jenny reflexively pushed him away and Gérard, trying to stay on his feet, clumsily reached out for support and accidentally broke a tray she owned, a precious tray. The relationship never recovered after the silly incident of the broken tray. A few weeks later Jenny left him and married her flautist. But a tray? To let a tray be the final straw, the breaking point. Who knows what deeper motives existed, but I can’t help feeling that more could have been done, that de Nerval could have done more to bring about a reconciliation. It seems to me that Gérard de Nerval didn’t try hard enough – no lovers should let a tray, however precious, come between them.
The Book of Transfiguration
He filled the afternoon with the mundane business of modern life: paying bills, cleaning his home, shopping for food, tidying things away, visiting launderette and dry-cleaner, retrieving money from automated teller machine, eating a sandwich – banal activities that had the curious property of being immensely satisfying and reassuring, but only after they were over, Lorimer realized. He telephoned his mother and learned that his father was to be cremated on Monday afternoon at Putney Vale crematorium. His mother said there was no need for him to attend if he was too busy and he had felt hurt and almost insulted at her needless consideration. He told her he would be there.
It grew dark early and the wind angrily rattled the window frames of the front room. He opened a Californian Cabernet, put some meditative Monteverdi on the C D player, then changed it for Bola Folarin and Accra 57. Bola was renowned for his excessive use of drummers, utilizing every combination known to Western groups but supplementing them with the dry bass of the talking drums of the West African hinterland and the staccato contralto of the tom-toms. Something in those atavistic rhythms combined with the wine made him restless, made him indulge in a fit, a seizure of pure painful longing – ‘Sheer Achimota’ at work, he wondered? –and, spontaneously, he hauled on his coat and scarf, corked the wine bottle and jammed it in a pocket, and headed out into the wild night to find his rust-boltered Toyota.
In Chalk Farm the wind seemed even stronger, explained by Chalk Farm being higher, he supposed, and the lime tree branches above his parked car creaked and thrashed in the gale-force gusts. He swigged Cabernet and stared at the large bay windows of what he took to be the Malinverno flat. There was a kind of fretted oriental screen that obscured the bottom third of the window pane, but the head and shoulders were visible of anyone who stood up. He could see Gilbert Malinverno pacing about – indeed, he had been watching him for the last half hour as he practised his juggling (perhaps the musical had been abandoned?), flinging handfuls of multicoloured balls up into the air and changing effortlessly the patterns and directions of their flow. It was a real talent, he grudgingly conceded. Then Malinverno had stopped practising and from the focus of his gaze Lorimer assumed someone else had entered the room. He had been pacing to and fro gesticulating wildly for ten minutes now and at first Lorimer had imagined this was some form of juggler’s exercise, but then had concluded, after a series of angry jabbing pointings, that Malinverno was in fact shouting at someone, and that someone was, doubtless, Flavia.
Lorimer wanted to hurl his wine bottle through the window and take the brute on and break his bones… He gulped at his Cabernet and was wondering how much longer he could realistically spend out here in his car when he saw the front door of the house open and Flavia run down the steps and go striding off down the hill. In a second Lorimer was out of his car and closing on her.
She turned a corner before he could reach her and entered a small parade of shops, going into a brightly lit 24-hour supermarket called Emporio Mondiale. Lorimer followed her in, after only the briefest of hesitations, but she was nowhere to be seen. Blinking in the brilliant white light, he carefully checked a few of the labyrinth of tall aisles – teetering battlements of sanitary napkins and toilet rolls, kitchen towels, disposable nappies and dog biscuits. Then he saw her bent over an ice-cream freezer, rummaging in its lower depths, and backed off, a little breathless, then composed himself, but when he advanced forward again she had gone.
He headed straight to the checkout, where a solitary Ethiopian girl was patiently counting through a mass of brown coins that an old lady was unearthing from a cavernous handbag – but no Flavia. Christ, where was she? Perhaps she’d gone back out the entrance? And he raced back the way he had come. Then he saw her: vanishing down a side alley that led to the newspapers. He decided that a flanking move was the correct choice here and so ducked down breads and breakfast cereals, heading for the spice jar whirligig and the cabinet of dreadful salads.
He turned the corner at the bottom and she fired a blast of air freshener at him. Pfffft. He caught a farinaceous gust of sweet-smelling violets full in the face and sneezed several times.
‘I don’t like being followed,’ she said, replacing the aerosol. She was wearing sunglasses and a bulky old leather jacket with a hood and many zips. He was sure her eyes would be red and weepy beneath the opaque green glass.
‘What’s he done to you?’ Lorimer blurted out. ‘If he’s hit you – I’ll –’
‘He’s actually been talking about you, or rather shouting about you, for the last half hour. That’s why I had to get out. He claims he saw you at some smart party.’
‘You do know that he attacked me. Tried to club me on the head.’ All his old outrage returned. ‘After you had told him about our so-called affair.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Your husband tried to hit me over the head with a club.’
‘Gilbert? –’
‘What did you tell him we’d been up to?’
‘He was in a terrible rage and I was frightened. And angry – so, well, I made all sorts of things up, said it had been going on for over a year. Maybe that’s what set him off? He did go thundering out of the house. Was it you who knocked his teeth out? He said he’d been mugged.’
‘It was self-defence. He tried to hit me with one of his f*cking juggling clubs.’
‘There’s a lot of pent-up rage in you, isn’t there, Lorimer?’ She took down another aerosol spray from the shelf and enveloped him in a cloud of something piney.
‘Don’t! For God’s sake!’
‘We can’t see each other.’ She glanced nervously over her shoulder. ‘God knows what would happen if he came into the shop now.’
‘Does he hit you?’
‘He’s incredibly fit and strong. Sometimes he gets me in these grips. Shakes me about, twists my arms.’
‘Animal.’ Lorimer felt a form of pure rage sluice through him, of the sort crusaders might have experienced at the sight of a holy shrine desecrated, he imagined. He rummaged in his pockets and took out his bunch of keys, threading two off and holding them out to her.
‘Take them, please. If you ever need a place to be safe, to get away from him where he can’t find you. You can go here.’
She did not take them. ‘What is this?’
‘It’s a house I’ve bought. Pretty much empty. In Silvertown, a place called Albion Village, number 3. You can go there, escape him if he gets violent again.’
‘Silvertown? Albion Village? What kind of a place is that? Sounds like a children’s book.’
‘Sort of development near Albert Dock, by the City airport.’
‘One of those modern developments? Little boxes?’
‘Well… yes. Sort of
‘Why do you want to buy a little cardboard house like that, miles from anywhere, when you’ve got a perfectly good place in Pimlico? I don’t get it.’
He sighed. He felt a sudden urge to tell her, especially as she now reached out and took his keys.
‘It’s… It’s something to do with me. It makes me feel – I don’t know – safe. Safer, I suppose. It’s my insurance. There’s always somewhere I can go and start again.’
‘Sounds more like a place to go and hide. What are you hiding from, Lorimer Black?’
‘My name’s not Lorimer Black. I mean it is, I changed it, but I wasn’t born Lorimer Black.’ He knew he was going to tell her. ‘My real name is Milomre Blo?j. I was born here but in fact I’m a Transnistrian. I come from a family of Transnistrian Gypsies.’
‘And I come from a planet called Zog in a far-flung galaxy’ she said.
‘It’s true.’
‘Piss off out of it.’
‘IT’S TRUE!’
A few puzzled shoppers looked round. A lanky Pakistani with his name on a plastic badge came to investigate. He gestured at the shelves.
‘All these items are for sale, you know.’
‘Still making up our mind, thank you,’Flavia said, with a winning smile.
‘Milomre?’ She pronounced it carefully.
‘Yes.’
‘Transnistria.’
‘Transnistria. It’s a real place, or was. On the west shore of the Black Sea. My family call me Milo.’
‘Milo… I prefer that. How fascinating. Why are you telling me this, Milo?’
‘I don’t know It’s always been a secret. I’ve never told anyone before. I suppose I must want you to know.’
‘Think it’ll win me over? Well, you’re wrong.’
‘Take your sunglasses off for a second, please.’
‘No.’ She reached for a can of spray starch and Lorimer backed off.
She bought some spaghetti, a jar of sauce and a bottle of Valpolicella. Lorimer walked back up the road with her. A few heavy drops of rain began to smack on to the pavement.
‘You’re not going to cook supper for him, are you?’ Lorimer asked scornfully. ‘After what he’s done to you? How pathetic.’
‘No, he’s going out, thank God. I’ve got a friend coming over.’
‘Male or female?’
‘Mind your own business. Male… Gay.’’
‘Could I join you?’
‘Are you mad? What if Gilbert came back? “Oh, Gilbert, Lorimer’s popped in for a bite of supper.” Crazy fool.’
They had reached his car, which now looked as if it were suffering from a terrible rash, pocked with dark dots where the raindrops had spattered on the light dusty orange of the rust. With the dampness in the air the Toyota seemed to exude a crude smell of metal, or worked iron, as if they were standing in a smithy.
‘Good lord, look at your car,’ Flavia said. ‘It looks worse.’
‘It rusted up almost overnight.’
‘They were cross with you, weren’t they?.’
‘It was a job I was on –’ He paused, something suddenly occurring to him. ‘They blamed me for their troubles.’
‘While you were adjusting loss.’
‘Yes, I was adjusting loss.’
‘I’m not sure if you’re cut out for this life of loss adjusting, Lorimer. Very hazardous.’
‘Hazardous in the extreme,’ he said, suddenly feeling very tired. ‘Can I see you next week, Flavia?’
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea.’
‘You do know, you must be aware, that I’m passionately in love with you. I’ll never take no for an answer.’
‘Suit yourself She shrugged as she walked backwards a few paces. ‘Goodnight, Milo whatever-your-name-is.’
‘Use the house,’ he called after her. ‘Any time, it’s all set up. Number 3, Albion Village.’
She turned and trotted across the road to her house and scampered up the steps. He felt like weeping: something important had happened – tonight he had told someone else about the existence of Milomre Blocj. And she had kept his keys.
*

He went to sleep at the Institute, hoping he would dream lucidly and lustily of Flavia, that in his dream she would be naked and he would be able to take her in his arms. Instead he dreamt of his father, lying in bed, ill. They held hands, interlacing their fingers, exactly as they had done the final time they had seen each other, except that on this occasion Bogdan Blo?j raised himself on one elbow and kissed him on the cheek, several times. Lorimer could feel the neat white bristles of his beard sharp against his skin. Then he spoke to him and said, ‘You did well, Milo.’
Lorimer woke, drained and vulnerable, and wrote the dream down in the diary with a trembling hand. It was a lucid dream because something had happened in the dream that he had wished for but had never happened in his life, and for the duration of that dream it had seemed real.
As he dressed later, preparing himself for Sunday lunch with Stella and Barbuda, he reflected that this was one reason why dreams were so important in our lives: something good had happened in the night while he was unconscious – he had achieved and expressed an intensity of relationship with his father that he had never experienced while the man had been alive. He was grateful to his extra dose of REM sleep. This, surely, was the consolation of dreams.
Barbuda looked at her mother pleadingly and said, ‘Please may I leave the table, Mummy.’
‘Oh, all right,’ Stella said and Barbuda left with alacrity. Stella reached over and poured the rest of the Rioja into Lorimer’s empty glass. She had had a lighter blonde rinse put through her hair, Lorimer thought, that’s the difference; she looked healthier and she was wearing all white, white jeans and a white sweat shirt with an appliquéd satin bird on the front. And did he detect a sheen of sunbed bronze?
Barbuda had left the room without a backward glance, a further sign that she had returned to her familiar mood of sour hostility. The Angelica name-change had finally been vetoed and the moment of solidarity that had existed between daughter and her mother’s lover appeared forgotten. As far as Lorimer could recall she had not addressed one word to him throughout the three courses of Sunday lunch – smoked salmon, roast chicken and all the trimmings and a bought-in lemon meringue pie.
Stella recharged her coffee cup, reached over and took his hand.
‘We’ve got to have a serious talk, Lorimer.’
‘I know,’ he said, telling himself there was nothing to be gained by further procrastination. He liked Stella, and in a way the mutually beneficial, respectful nature of their relationship suited him ideally. But its continuance presupposed a world without Flavia Malinverno in it, and thus it was impossible and would be best concluded in as decent and hurt-free a way as possible.
‘I’ve sold the business,’ Stella said.
‘Good God.’
‘And I’ve bought a fish farm.’ ‘A fish farm.’
‘Near Guildford. We’re moving.’
‘A fish farm near Guildford,’ Lorimer repeated gormlessly as if he were learning a new phrase in the language.
‘It’s a going concern, guaranteed income. Mainly trout and salmon. Fair amount of prawns and shrimps.’
‘But, Stella, a fish farm. You?’
‘Why should that be any worse than running a scaffolding firm?’
‘Fair point. You’ll be closer to Barbuda’s school, as well’
‘Exactly’ Stella was running her thumb over his knuckles. ‘Lorimer,’ she began slowly, ‘I want you to come with me, be my partner, and my business partner. I don’t want to get married but I like having you in my life and I want to share it with you. I know you’ve got a good job, which is why we should set it up properly, as a business venture. Bull and Black, fish farmers.’
Lorimer leant over and kissed her, hoping the smile on his face concealed the despair in his heart.
‘Don’t say anything yet,’ Stella said. ‘Just listen.’ She began to go over the figures, turnover and profit margins, the kind of salary they could pay themselves, the prospects for major expansion if they could break into certain markets.
‘Don’t say yes, no or maybe,’ Stella went on. ‘Give yourself a few days to mull it over. And everything it implies.’ She grabbed his head and gave him a serious kiss, her lithe tongue flicking in and out of his mouth like… like a fish, Lorimer balefully noted.
‘I’m excited, Lorimer, it really excites me. Out of the city, in the country….’
‘Does Barbuda know anything about these plans?’ Lorimer said, gladly accepting the offer of a celebratory post-prandial brandy.
‘Not yet. She knows I’ve sold Bull scaffolding. She’s pleased about that, she’s always been embarrassed by the scaffolding.’
Revolting little snob, Lorimer thought, saying, ‘The fish farm will go down better,’ without much confidence.
Stella hugged him fiercely at the door as he left. It was only four o’clock but already the streetlamps shone bright in the gathering murk. Lorimer’s depression was acute, but there was no way he could burst the bubble of her fishy dreams here and now. He kissed her goodbye.
He stood on the pavement by his car, reflecting a while, looking across at the high, lit cliff faces of the sprawling housing estate a few streets away, thumbtacked with satellite dishes, washing hanging limply on balconies, one of the great ghetto colonies of the city’s poor and disenfranchised which arced east, south of the river, through Walworth, Peckham, Rotherhithe and Southwark, small slum-states of deprivation and anarchy where life was lived in a manner that would be familiar to Hogg’s Savage Precursors, brutish and nasty, where all endeavours were hazardous in the extreme and life was one gargantuan gamble, a cycle of happenstance and rotten luck.
Was this all there really was, in the end, he wondered? Beneath this veneer of order, probity, governance and civilized behaviour – aren’t we just kidding ourselves? The Savage Precursors knew… Stop, he told himself, he was depressed enough as it was, and bent to unlock his car. He heard his name softly called and looked round to see Barbuda standing ten feet away, as if restrained by an invisible cordon sanitaire around him.
‘Hi, Barbuda,’ he said, the two words overburdened by all the friendliness, pleasure and genuine good-natured blokiness he could force upon them.
‘I was listening,’ she said, flatly ‘She was talking about a fish farm. Near Guildford. What’s she gone and done?’
‘I think your mother should tell you that.’
‘She’s bought a fish farm, hasn’t she?’
‘Yes.’ There was nothing to be gained by lying, he thought, seeing Barbuda’s bottom lip fatten as she pushed it forward.
‘A fish farm.’ She made it sound vile, horror-filled: a vivisection laboratory, the dankest sweat-shop, a child brothel.
‘It sounds like fun,’ he said, urging a chuckle into his voice. ‘Could be interesting.’
She looked skywards and Lorimer saw the shine as the streetlamp caught her teartracks.
‘What am I going to tell my friends? What will my friends think?’
It seemed not to be a rhetorical question so Lorimer answered. ‘If they think any the less of you because your mother owns a fish farm, then they’re not true friends.’
‘A fish farm. My mother’s a fish farmer.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with a fish farm. It could be very successful.’
‘I don’t want to be the daughter of someone who owns a fish farm,’ Barbuda said in a desperate, whining voice. ‘I can’t be. I won’t be.’
Lorimer knew the feeling: he understood the reluctance to have an identity thrust upon you – even though he could not bring himself to sympathize with the brat.
‘Look, they know she runs a scaffolding firm, surely they –’
‘They don’t know. They know nothing about her. But if she moves to Guildford they’ll find out.’
‘These things seem important, but after a while –’
‘It’s all your fault.’ Barbuda wiped away her tears.
‘What do you mean?’
‘She’s done it for you. If you weren’t in her life she would never have bought the fish farm.’
‘I think she would. Anyway look, Barbuda, or Angelica, if you like –’
‘It’s all your fault,’ she repeated in a small hard voice. ‘I’ll kill you. One day I’ll kill you.’
She turned and ran, on light, quick feet, back into the house.
Well, you’ll just have to join the queue, Lorimer reflected with some bitterness, exhaling. He was becoming fed up with this role of fall-guy for other people’s woes, he was reaching the end of his tether; if life didn’t ease up on him he might just possibly break.
There were four fire engines outside the ShoppaSava when Lorimer drove past and a small crowd had gathered. Some fitful wisps of smoke and steam seemed to be issuing from the rear of the building, Lorimer could see, parking the Toyota and wandering along the street to discover what had happened. He peered over the heads of the onlookers at the blackened plate-glass doors. Firemen, draped in breathing apparatus like deep sea divers, were wandering around in a relaxed manner, swigging from two-litre bottles of mineral water, so Lorimer assumed the worst was over. A policeman told him it had been a ‘ferociously fierce’ fire, with everything pretty much consumed. Lorimer mooched around for a few more minutes and then headed back to his car and realized, after a moment or two, that he was following a figure that was vaguely familiar – a figure in pale blue jeans and an expensive-looking ochre suede jacket. Lorimer ducked into a shop doorway and watched the figure covertly: was this what it was like being a secret agent in the field, he asked himself with some bitterness, a life of eternal vigilance the price demanded? Gone forever that unreflecting amble through your own particular quartier of your own particular city, always edgy and alert like –
He watched the man climb into a glossy new-model BMW – Kenneth Rintoul. No doubt he’s been sniffing around number II, trying to catch him off his guard. A little bit of grievous bodily harm of a Sunday afternoon, just the ticket. Lorimer waited until Rintoul had driven off and then loped diffidently to his rust-bucket. The mobile rang as he opened the door. It was Slobodan.
‘Hi, Milo, you haven’t heard anything from Torkie, have you?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Well, he went home, Saturday, to sort out some sort of lawyer business but he never came back. I’d cooked him dinner and he’s missed a ton of work. I wondered if he’d shown up at your place.’
‘No. No sign. Tried his home number?’
‘Nothing but answer machine. You don’t know if he’s turning up Monday morning, do you?’
‘I’m not Torquil’s keeper, Slobodan.’
‘Fair dos, fair dos. Just thought you might be in the loop, is all. See you tomorrow, then. Three.’
Lorimer had forgotten. ‘Oh yeah, right.’
‘Shame about old Dad, eh? Still he had a good –’
Lorimer interrupted before he could round off the homily. ‘See you tomorrow.’
‘Cheers, Milo.’
When he reached home, and as he crossed the hall to the stairs, he heard Jupiter give a brief, gruff bark from behind Lady Haigh’s door. He was usually the most silent of dogs and Lorimer chose to interpret this exception as a fond, canine ‘hello’.