Armadillo

Chapter 2

As he turned the corner into Lupus Crescent, Lorimer saw Detective Sergeant Dennis Rappaport spring agilely from his car and take up a studied, lounging position, his back against a lamp-post, as if to indicate that this was a casual encounter, with little of the official about it. The day was one of pronounced greyness and coldness, with a low sky and a dead light that made even Detective Rappaport’s unlikely Nordic looks appear drab and under attack. He was happy to be invited to come inside.
‘So, you didn’t come home last night,’ Rappaport observed genially, accepting a mug of steaming, well-sugared, instant coffee from Lorimer – who managed to suppress his quip about the detective’s uncanny powers of deduction.
‘That’s correct,’ he said. ‘I was participating in a research project, about sleep disorders. I’m a very light sleeper,’ he added, pre-empting the detective’s next observation. In vain.
‘So, you’re an insomniac,’ Rappaport said. Lorimer noticed he had dropped his obsequious use of ‘sir’ and he wondered whether this was a good or bad sign. Rappaport smiled at him, sympathetically. ‘Sleep like a top, I do. A spinning top. No problem. Out like a light. Head hits the pillow, out like a light. Sleep like a log.’
‘I envy you.’ Lorimer was sincere, Rappaport had no idea how sincere he was. Rappaport went on to enumerate some epic sleeps he had enjoyed, citing one sixteen-hour triumph on a white-water rafting holiday. He was a regular eight-hour-a-nighter, it transpired, so he claimed with some smugness. Lorimer had observed in the past how a confession of sleep dysfunctions often provoked this good-natured bragging. Few other ailments elicited a similar response. An admission of constipation did not engender proud boasts of regular bowel movements. A complaint about migraine, or acne, or piles, or a bad back generally produced sympathy, not a swaggering testimonial about the interlocutor’s own good health. Sleep disorders did this to people, he noticed. It was almost talismanic, this guileless braggadocio, as if it were a form of incantation, protection against a profound fear of sleeplessness that lurked in everyone’s lives, even the soundest of sleepers, such as the Rappaports of this world. The detective was now expounding on his ability to enjoy restorative catnaps if the demands of the job ever interrupted his restful, untroubled nights.
‘Is there anything I can do for you, detective?’ Lorimer asked gently.
Rappaport removed his notebook from his jacket pocket, and flicked through it. ‘This is a very nice flat, you’ve got here, sir.’
‘Thank you.’ Back to business, Lorimer thought. Rappaport frowned at something he had written.
‘How many visits did you make to Mr Dupree?’
‘Just the one.’
‘He had you booked in for two hours.’
‘Quite normal.’
‘Why so long?’
‘It was to do with the nature of our business. It’s time-consuming.’
‘You’re in insurance, I take it.’
‘No. Yes. In a manner of speaking. I work for a firm of loss adjusters.’
‘You’re a loss adjuster, then.’
And you are a credit to the force, Lorimer thought, but he said merely, ‘Yes. I’m a loss adjuster. Mr Dupree had made an insurance claim as a result of the fire. His insurance company –’
‘Which is?’
‘Fortress Sure.’
‘Fortress Sure. I’m with Sun Alliance. And Scottish Widows.’
‘Both excellent firms. Fortress Sure felt – and this happens all the time, it’s almost routine – that Mr Dupree’s claim was on the high side. They employ us to investigate it to see if the loss is in fact as great as it is claimed, and, if not, then to adjust it, downwards.’
‘Hence the name “loss adjuster”.’
‘Exactly.’
And your firm – GGH Ltd – is independent from Fortress Sure.’
‘Not independent but impartial.’ This was written in letters of stone. ‘Fortress Sure does pay us a fee, after all.’
‘Fascinating line of work. Thank you very much, Mr Black. That is most useful. I won’t trouble you no further.’
Rappaport is either very clever or very stupid, Lorimer thought, standing hidden at the side of his bay window looking down at the detective’s blond head as he descended the front steps, and I cannot decide which. Lorimer watched Rappaport pause in the street and light a cigarette. Then he stared frowning at the house as if its fa?ade might hold some clue to Mr Dupree’s suicide.
Lady Haigh clambered up from her basement with two gleaming empty milk bottles and as she set them down by the dustbin at the top of the basement steps Lorimer saw Rappaport engage her in conversation. He knew, from the way Lady Haigh nodded her head in vigorous assent, that they were talking about him. And, although he also knew that his character would receive nothing but the staunchest backing from her, the discussion – it had moved on, Lady Haigh was now pointing crossly at a gigantic motorbike parked opposite – for some reason made him strangely uneasy. He turned away and went to wash out Rappaport’s coffee mug in the kitchen.
37. Gérard de Nerval. On my first visit to the Institute of Lucid Dreams Alan asked me what I was currently reading and I told him it was a biography of Gérard de Nerval Alan then instructed me that, as a conscious sleep-inducing device, I should either concentrate on the life of de Nerval or else indulge in sexual fantasies – one or the other. These were to be my choice of ‘sleep triggers’ and I should not deviate from them during my treatment at the Institute – it was to be de Nerval or sex.
Gérard de Nerval, Guillaume Apollinaire or Blaise Cendrars. Any one of them would have been apt. I am unnaturally interested in these French writers for one simple reason – they had all changed their names and reinvented themselves under new ones. They started out their lives, respectively, as Gérard Labrunie, Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky, and Frédéric-Louis Sauser. Gérard de Nerval was closest to my heart, however: he had serious problems with sleep.
The Book of Transfiguration
Lorimer bought a hefty leg of lamb for his mother and then threw in two dozen pork sausages as well. In his family a gift of meat was prized above all others. Coming out of the butcher’s, he hesitated in front of Marlobe’s flower stall – just enough time, as it turned out, for Marlobe to catch his eye. Marlobe was talking to two of his cronies and smoking his horrible pipe with the stainless steel stem. As he spotted Lorimer he broke off his conversation in mid-sentence and, holding out a flower, called over, ‘You won’t find a sweeter-smelling lily in the country’
Lorimer sniffed, nodded in agreement and resignedly offered to buy three stems, and Marlobe set about wrapping them up. His flower stall was a small, complicated wheeled contraption of folding doors and panels which, when opened, revealed several rows of stepped shelves filled with flower-crammed zinc buckets. Marlobe loudly claimed to believe in quality and quantity but interpreted this homily to mean lots of limited choice and consequently kept the range and type of flower he sold very small, not to say disappointingly banal. Carnations, tulips, daffodils, chrysanthemums, gladioli, roses and dahlias were all he was prepared to offer his customers, in or out of season, but he provided them in overwhelmingly large quantities (you could buy six dozen gladioli from Marlobe without clearing the stock) and in every colour available. His only concession to exoticism were lilies, in which he took particular pride.
Lorimer enjoyed flowers and bought them regularly for his flat but he disliked Marlobe’s selection almost exclusively. The colours, also, were primary or lurid wherever possible (Marlobe was loudly derogatory of all pastel shades) on the assumption that vividness of hue was the main criterion of a ‘good flower’. The same value system determined price: a scarlet tulip was more expensive than a pink one, orange rated higher than yellow, yellow daffodils fetched more than white and so on.
‘You know,’ Marlobe went on, rummaging in his pocket for change with one hand and holding the lilies with the other, ‘if I had a Uzi, if I had a f*cking Uzi, I’d f*cking go into that place and f*cking line them up against the wall.’
Lorimer knew he was talking about politicians and the Houses of Parliament. It was a familiar refrain, this.
‘Gnakka-gnakka-gnakka-gnak,’ the imaginary Uzi bucked and chattered in his hand, once Lorimer had relieved him of the lilies. ‘I’d shoot every last f*cking one of them, I would.’
‘Thanks,’ Lorimer said, accepting a palmful of warm coins.
Marlobe smiled at him. ‘Have a nice day.’
For some bizarre reason, Marlobe liked him and always took the trouble to pass bitter comment on some aspect of contemporary life. He was a small, burly man, quite bald with a few traces of sandy, gingery hair around his ears and the nape of his neck and he had the permanent, faintly surprised, innocent look of the pale-lashed. Lorimer knew his name because it was painted on the side of his mobile flower cabana. When not selling flowers he would be engaged in loud, profane conversation with an odd selection of cronies, young and old, solvent and insolvent, who occasionally departed on mysterious errands for him or fetched him pints of lager from the pub on the corner. There was no floral competition within half a mile, and Marlobe, Lorimer knew, earned a handsome living and took holidays in places like the Great Barrier Reef and the Seychelles.
Lorimer bussed to Fulham. Up Pimlico Road to Royal Hospital Road, along King’s Road, then Fulham Road to the Broadway. He avoided the tube at weekends – it seemed wrong somehow: the tube was for work – and there would be nowhere to park his car. He stepped off at some traffic lights on the Broadway and strolled up Dawes Road, forcing himself to recall details of his childhood and youth in these narrow and car-choked streets. He even detoured a quarter of a mile so he could contemplate his old school, St Barnabus, with its smirched, high, brick walls and its pitted asphalt playground. It was a valuable exercise in painful nostalgia and was really the primary reason why he sometimes accepted his mother’s standing invitation to Saturday lunch (never Sunday lunch). It was like picking a scab off a sore; he actually wanted scar-tissue, it would be quite wrong to try and forget, to blank it all out. Every fraught memory that lurked here had played its role: everything he was today was an indirect result of the life he had led then. It confirmed the rightness of every step he had taken since his escape to Scotland… No, this was all becoming a little overblown, a little high-cheekboned and intense, he thought. It wasn’t fair to burden Fulham and his family with all the responsibility of who he was today – what had happened in Scotland also carved out a sizeable slice of that particular cake.
Yet, as he turned off Filmer Road he felt a familiar heat, a searing, in his oesophagus – his indigestion problem, his heart burning. One hundred yards from his family home, his natal home, and it kicked in, the stomach acids started to bubble and seethe. For some people, for most people, he fondly supposed, such a return home would be signposted by a familiar tree (much shinned-up in childhood), or a carillon of church bells from across the green, or a cheery greeting from an elderly neighbour… But it was not for him: he sucked on a mint and gently punched his sternum and he rounded the corner to face the thin, wedge-shaped terrace. The small, mean parade of shops – the post office, the off-licence, the Pakistani grocer, the shuttered, out-of-business butchers, the estate agent – tapering to the pointed apex, number 36, with its dust-mantled pride of double-parked saloon cars and, on the ground floor, the frosted windows of ‘B and B Mini-cabs and International Couriers’.
Some new fancy plastic name tag had been screwed above the bell-push since his last visit – black copperplate on smoked gold: ‘FAMILY BLOCJ’. ‘The J is silent’ would have been the motto blazoned on the Blo?j family escutcheon, if such a crest could be imagined, or alternatively, ‘There is a dot under the C’. He could hear, coming through time, his father’s patient, deep, accented voice, at innumerable post-office counters, holiday hotel reception desks, car rental franchises: ‘The J is silent and there is a dot under the C. Family Blocj.’ Indeed, how many times had he himself apologetically muttered the same instructions in his life? It did not bear thinking of – it was all behind him now.
He rang the bell, waited, rang again and eventually heard small feet pattering rhythmically down the stairs in irregular anapaests. His little niece, Mercy, opened the door. She was a tiny girl, bespectacled like every female member of his family, who looked about four years old, though in fact she was eight. He worried unceasingly for her, for her diminutiveness, her unfortunate name (short for Mercedes – which he always pronounced the French way, trying to forget that it was because her father, his brother-in-law, was the co-partner in the mini-cab firm) and her dubious destiny. Hugging the door, she stared at him, shy-curious.
‘Hello, Milo,’ she said.
‘Hello, darling.’ She was the only person he ever called ‘darling’, and then only when others were out of earshot. He kissed her twice on each cheek.
‘Have you got anything for me?’
‘Lovely sausages. Pork.’
‘Oh, lovely.’
She stamped up the stairs and Lorimer followed wearily. The air in the flat seemed tart and briny with steam and spices. Apparently a TV, a radio and another source of rock music were playing simultaneously somewhere. Mercedes preceded him into the long triangular front room, filled with light and sound, at the sharp end of the terrace directly above the ‘B and B Mini-cabs and International Couriers’ control room and the bull pen for the drivers. The music (middle-of-the-road country/rock fusion) was playing in here on a dark, winking stack of audio equipment. The radio (shouting advertisement) emanated from the kitchen to his left, accompanied by the clatter and bang of energetic cookery.
‘It’s Milo,’ Mercedes announced and his three sisters looked round lazily, three pairs of eyes dully registering him through three pairs of lenses. Monika was sewing, Komelia was drinking tea and Drava (Mercy’s mother) was eating – astonishingly, given they were ten minutes away from lunch – eating a nut and chocolate bar.
As a child he had parodically burlesqued his three older sisters as, respectively, ‘Bossy’, ‘Silly’ and ‘Sulky’, or alternatively as ‘the big one’, ‘the thin one’ and ‘the short one’, such crude appellations strangely becoming ever more apposite as he and they aged. Being the baby of the family, he was routinely ordered around and importuned by these, to his memory, always-women. Even the youngest and prettiest, sullen, petite Drava, was six years older than him. Only Drava had married, produced Mercedes and then divorced; Monika and Komelia had always lived at home, working intermittently in the family businesses or part-time jobs. They were now full-time carers and, if either or both of them had a love life, it was lived secretly, somewhere far afield.
‘Morning, ladies,’ Lorimer said with feeble jocularity. They were all so much older than him: he saw them more as aunts rather than sisters, reluctant to believe the blood tie was so proximate, trying vainly to establish some genetic distance, some congenital breathing space.
‘Mum, it’s Milo,’ Komelia bawled into the kitchen, but Lorimer was already heading that way, toting his solid bag of meat. His mother’s wide frame blocked the doorway as she wiped her hands on a dishcloth, beaming moistly at him through the fogged lenses of her spectacles.
‘Milomre,’ she sighed, the love in her voice palpable and overwhelming, and she kissed him vigorously four times, the plastic frames of her glasses smiting his cheek-bones two glancing blows each. Behind her, amongst the shuddering, steaming pans, Lorimer could see his grandmother chopping onions. She waved the knife at him, then pushed up her spectacles to knuckle away tears.
‘See how I cry for joy to seeing you, Milo,’ she said.
‘Hello, Gran. Lovely to see you, too.’
His mother already had the lamb and sausages out on the work top, weighing the leg admiringly with her coarse rosy hands.
‘He’s a big joint that, Milo. Is they pork?’
‘Yes, Mum.’
His mother turned to her mother and they spoke quickly in their language. By now Grandmother had dried her eyes and shuffled forward for her kisses.
‘I say to her, ain’t you looking smart, Milo. Ain’t he smart, Mama.’
‘He’s a handsome. He’s a rich. Not like them milkcow out there.’
‘Go and see your papa,’ his mother said. ‘He’ll be pleased to see you. In his parlour.’
Lorimer had to ask Mercy to move so he could open the door, as she was kneeling in front of it playing a computer game. As she slowly shifted Drava took the opportunity to sidle up to him and ask in a petulant, graceless voice if she could borrow forty pounds. Lorimer gave her two twenties but she had seen the slim wad in his wallet.
‘Couldn’t make it sixty, could you, Milo?’
‘I need the money, Drava, it’s the weekend.’
‘It’s my weekend too. Go on.’
He gave her another note and received a nod of acknowledgement, no word of thanks.
‘You handing out, Milo?’ Komelia called. ‘We’d like a new telly, thanks.’
‘Tumble drier, please, while you’re at it,’ Monika added. They both laughed shrilly, genuinely, as if, Lorimer thought, they could not take him seriously, that the person he had become was a subterfuge, one of Milo’s curious games.
He had a short panic attack in the hall, practised his restorative breathing again. The television was also hollering from his father’s ‘parlour’ down the corridor. Six adults and a child lived in this house (‘Six females in one house,’ his older brother Slobodan had said, ‘it’s too much for a man. That’s why I had to get out, Milo, like you. My masculinity was suffocating’). He paused at the door – a sports programme, loud Australian voices on satellite (had he paid for that?) thundered beyond. He bowed his head, swearing to himself that he would not break down, and pushed the door open quietly.
His father seemed to be watching the screen (on which the green-blazered experts loudly debated); certainly his armchair had been placed squarely in front of it. He sat there motionless, in shirt and tie, trousers sharply creased, palms flat on the chair-arms, his unchanging smile framed by his trimmed white beard, his specs slightly askew, his thick, springy grey hair damp and flattened on his scalp.
Lorimer stepped forward and turned the volume low. ‘Hello, Dad,’ he said. His father’s unreflecting, uncomprehending eyes stared at him, blinking once or twice. Lorimer reached forward and straightened the spectacles on his nose. He was always amazed at how dapper he looked; he had no idea how they did it, his mother and sisters; how they ministered to every need, bathed and shaved and pampered him, walked him about the house, parked him in his parlour, attended (with huge discretion) to his bodily functions. He did not know and he did not want to know, content to see this smiling homunculus the odd weekend in three or four, ostensibly happy and well cared for, distracted by daylong television, tucked up in bed at night and gently roused in the morning. Sometimes his father’s eyes would follow you as you moved, sometimes not. Lorimer stepped to one side and Bogdan Blocj’s head turned as if to contemplate his youngest son, tall and smart in his expensive blue suit.
‘I’ll put the volume back up, Dad,’ he said. ‘It’s cricket, I think. You like cricket, don’t you, Dad.’ His mother claimed he heard and understood everything, she could see it in his eyes, she said. But Bogdan Blocj hadn’t spoken a single word to anyone in over ten years.
‘I’ll let you get on then, Dad, take care.’
Lorimer stepped out of the parlour to find his brother Slobodan standing there in the hall, swaying slightly, his gut tight against his stretched sweat shirt, a smell of beer off him, his long silvered hair lank, the loose switch of his ponytail lying on his shoulder like a flung tie.
‘Heyyyy, Milo.’ He opened his arms and hugged him. ‘Little bro. City gent.’
‘Hi, Lobby’ he corrected himself. ‘Slobodan.’
‘How’s Dad?’
‘Seems fine, you know. You having lunch?’
‘Nah, busy day. Match at Chelsea.’ He put his surprisingly small hand on Milo’s shoulder. ‘Listen, Milo, you couldn’t lend me a hundred quid, could you?’
17. A Partial History of the Blocj Family. Imagine some ancient fragments of stone unearthed in the desert, eroded, windblasted, sunbleached, upon which can be discerned some cryptic, runic lettering in a forgotten alphabet. Upon such tablets of stone might have been incised the history of my family, for the effort of deciphering them, of reconstructing meaning, has proved almost impossible to attain. Some years ago I embarked on months of dogged questioning of my mother and grandmother which allowed the story to advance a little further, but it was hard work, the oral history of my family was recalcitrant, barely comprehensible, as if uttered with huge reluctance in a language barely understood, with many gaps, solecisms and demotic errors.
We should start, because I can go no further back, in World War II, in Romania, Adolf Hitler’s favourite ally. In 1941 the Romanian army annexes Bessarabia, on the northern shore of the Black Sea and renames the region Transnistria. It is used for the permanent resettlement of tens of thousands of Romania’s Gypsy population. Forced transportation begins almost immediately and amongst the first to be dispatched is a young Gypsy girl in her late teens called Rebeka Petru, my grandmother. ‘Yes, I am in train, in truck,’ my grandmother told me, ‘and I become Transnistrian. My papers say Transnistrian but in fact I am Gypsy, Tzigane, Rom.’ I have never been able to glean any information at all about the pre-Transnistrian phase of her life, it is as if consciousness only evolved, her personal history began, the moment she jumped out of the cattle-truck that day on the banks of the river Bug. In 1942 she gave birth to a daughter, Pirvana, my mother. ‘Who was her father, Gran?’ I ask and watch with alarm as the tears form in her eyes. ‘He’s a good man. He killed by soldiers.’ The only other fact I could learn about him was his name – Constantin. So Rebeka Petru and little Pirvana live out the war in routine terror and discomfort along with tens of thousands of other Transnistrian Gypsies. In order to survive they formed alliances of mutual help and support with other Rom families, prominent amongst whom were two orphaned brothers named Blocj. The youngest of the two brothers was called Bogdan. Their parents had died of typhus in the first transportations from Bucharest to Transnistria.
Then the war was finally over and the Gypsy diaspora was further dispersed in the massive, dispiriting migrations of populations in 1945 and ‘46 that occurred all over Europe. The Petrus and the Blocjs found themselves in Hungary, ending up in a small village south of Budapest, where the Blocj boys showed some elementary initiative as ‘merchants ‘, enabling the Rom in that corner of Hungary to survive, if not flourish. Ten years later, in 1956, Bogdan, now in his early twenties and an enthusiastic revolutionary, exploited the chaos of the Hungarian uprising to flee to the West with Rebeka and the fourteen-year-old Pirvana. ‘What about his brother?’ I questioned once. ‘Oh, he stay. He happy to stay In fact I think he go back to Transnistria,’ my grandmother said. ‘What was his name?’ I asked. ‘He was my uncle after all.’ I remember my grandmother and my mother looked sharply at each other. ‘Nicolai,’ said my grandmother. ‘Gheorgiu,’ said my mother simultaneously, then added disingenuously, ‘Nicolai-Gheorgiu. He was a bit… funny, Milo. Tour dad was the good brother.’
In 1957 Rebeka, Pirvana and Bogdan arrived in Fulham via Austria as part of a quota of refugees from the Hungarian revolution given a home by the British government. Bogdan wasted no time in resuming his entrepreneurial activities, establishing a small import-export business with the communist states of Eastern Europe called EastEx, trading in whatever meagre toing-and-froing of goods that was permitted – cleaning fluids, aspirins and laxatives, kitchen utensils, tinnedfood, vegetable oil, tools—a clapped-out reconditioned lorry making the difficult run to Budapest, initially, and then expanding modestly over the years to Bucharest, Belgrade, Sofia, Zagreb and Sarajevo.
It was inevitable that Bogdan should marry Pirvana after what they had been through together. And it was Pirvana who stood by his side in the early days of EastEx, wrapping cardboard boxes in brown paper, stacking them on pallets, loading the truck, labelling the cartons, supplying the Thermos of clear soup to the driver, while above them in the tiny flat Rebeka cooked meat, stews and goulash, salted hams and made a spicy variation of blood sausage which she sold to other immigrant families in Fulham who yearned for an authentic taste of home.
Slobodan arrived in 1960, duly and speedilyfollowed by Monika, Komelia, Drava and, eventually, after a longish gap, little Milomre. EastEx gamely flourished in an unexceptional way and over the years Bogdan diversified, adding a small haulage division, a smaller van and truck hire company and a mini-cab firm to the EastEx’s roster. A larger apartment was required for the growingfamily and the kids werefervently encouraged to become English men and women. Bogdan decreed that no Hungarian or Romanian was to be spoken – although Pirvana and Rebeka would still chat covertly to each other in their special dialect which even Bogdan could not understand.
And this is how I remember it: the big, crowded, triangular flat, the ever-present smell of cooking meat, thefrowsty, chilly reek of the EastEx warehouse, school in Fulham, promise of a role in one of the family’s always somewhat struggling businesses, the constant incantation of, ‘Now you are English boy, Milo. This is your country, this is your home.’ But what of the enigmas that remained? My grandmother’s early youth, grandfather Constantin, my shady uncle, Nicolai-Gheorgiu? I read a rare history of the Transnistrian Gypsies and came to understand a little of the horrors and the hardships they must have endured. I read also of the gendarmerie commanders in Transnistria, cruel, petty tyrants who dominated and exploited their transplanted populations, and who Hived in debauchery with beautiful Gypsy women’. I looked at my wily old grandmother and thought of the beautiful teenager who must have stumbled from the cattle-trucks by the banks of the river Bug wondering what had happened to her life and what fate lay in store for her… Perhaps to be confronted by a handsome young gendarmerie officer named Constantin… I will never know, I will never know more than this. All my questions were met with shrugs or silences or sly deflections. My grandmother would say to me as I pestered her for more information: ‘Milo, we have saying in Transnistria: when you eat the honey do you ask bee to show you the flower?’
The Book of Transfiguration
Ivan Algomir’s shop was on the north side of Camden Passage, behind the arcade, to the left. Its two windows contained one spotlit object each – a studded painted chest in one, and a small brass cannon in the other. The shop was called VERTU and emanated such a daunting aura of the exquisite and pretentious that Lorimer wondered how anyone dared to cross its threshold. He remembered his first visit well, how he had dithered, hummed and hawed, visited the Design Centre, circled back, searched for excuses to go elsewhere, but had finally surrendered to the irresistible lure of the dented Norman basinet (￡1,999) which stood on its high pedestal, starkly lit in the sepulchral gloom of the vitrine (which he had sold last year, finally and reluctantly, but for a considerable profit).
He had not planned to come up to Islington; it had been a long and tedious ride from Fulham, landing him with a ￡23.50 taxi fare, impeded and harassed by Saturday shoppers, football fans, and those strange souls who chose to take their cars out only on weekends. Up Finborough Road to Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, on to the A40, past Madame Tussauds, Euston, King’s Cross, along Pentonville Road to the Angel. Half way through the journey, as the cab driver gamely tried and abandoned a route north of Euston, he had wondered why he was bothering, but he sorely needed cheering up after his lunch at home (a meal that had cost him, in various loans and donations, some ￡275, he had calculated) and, furthermore, Stella didn’t want him to come over until after nine. Turning north and then south, accepting the taxi-driver’s baffled apologies for the traffic (‘Nightmare, mate, nightmare’), he realized that, increasingly, his life was composed of these meandering trajectories across this enormous city, these curious peregrinations. Pimlico-Fulham, now Fulham-Islington, and two more awaited him before the journeying could stop: Islington-Pimlico, then Pimlico-Stockwell. Up North of the Park and then South of the River – these were boundaries, frontiers he was crossing, not merely itineraries, names on the map; he was visiting city-states with their different ambiences, different mentalities. This was how a city routinely appeared to its denizens, he considered, rather than to its visitors, its transients and tourists. If you lived in the place it existed for you as a great matrix, an ever-more-complex web of potential routes. This was how you grappled with its size, how you attempted to make it submit to your control. Come to dinner in… There’s a meeting at… Pick me up from… See you outside… It’s not far from… And so on. Each day threw up its set of route conundrums: how to get from A to B, or F, or H, or S, or Q – a sophisticated formula that factored-in local knowledge, public or private transport, traffic conditions, roadworks, time of day or night, priorities of speed or calm, brutal expediency or more relaxed sagacity. We are all navigators, he thought, quite pleased with the romantic associations of the metaphor, millions of us, all finding our individual ways through the laby-rinth. And tomorrow? Stockwell-Pimlico, and then perhaps he should stay put, though he knew that he should really go further east, to Silvertown, and start thinking about the décor and furnishing for the new flat.
Ivan had spotted him and stuck his death’s head out of his smoked glass door.
‘Lorimer, my dear fellow, you’ll freeze.’
Ivan was wearing a biscuity tweed suit and a floppy, oyster-grey bow-tie (‘You have to dress the part for this job,’ he had said slyly ‘and I think you know exactly what I mean, don’t you, Lorimer?’). The shop was dark, walls covered with chocolate-brown hessian or else darkly varnished exposed brick. It contained very few, hilariously expensive objects – a globe, a samovar, an astrolabe, a mace, a lacquered armoire, a two-handed sword, some icons.
‘Sit down, laddie, sit down.’ Ivan lit one of his small cigars and shouted upstairs, ‘Petronella? Coffee, please. Don’t use the Costa Rica.’ He smiled at Lorimer, showing his awful teeth and said, ‘Definitely the time of day for Brazil, I would say’
Ivan was, to Lorimer, the living, breathing representation of the skull beneath the skin, his head a gaunt assemblage of angles, planes and declivities somehow supporting a pendulous nose, large, bloodshot eyes and a thin-lipped mouth with a partial set of skewed brown teeth that seemed designed for a larger jaw altogether, an ass’s or a mule’s, perhaps. He smoked between twenty and thirty small, malodorous cigarlettes each day, never seemed to eat and drank anything on a whim – whisky at 10 a.m., Dubonnet or gin after lunch, port as an aperitif (‘Très fran?ais, Lorimer’) and had a rare, distressing, body-racking cough that seemed to rise from his ankles and made its appearance at roughly two-hourly intervals, after which he often went and sat quietly alone in a corner for some minutes. But those rheumy, bulging eyes were alive with malice and intelligence and somehow his feeble frame endured.
Ivan began to enthuse about ‘almost an entire garniture’ he was assembling. ‘It’ll go straight to the Met or the Getty. Amazing the stuff coming out of Eastern Europe – Poland, Hungary. Turning out the attics. Might have a couple of things for you, old chum. Lovely closed helm, Seusenhofer, with beavor.’
‘I’m not so keen on the closed.’
‘Wait till you see this. I wouldn’t wear a white shirt with that tie, my dear old china, you look like an undertaker.’
‘I was having lunch with my ma. Only a white shirt will convince her you’re in gainful employ.’
Ivan laughed until he coughed. Coughed until he stopped, swallowed phlegm, patted his chest and drew heavily on his cheroot. ‘God love me,’ he said. ‘Know exactly what you mean. Let’s have a look at our little treasure, shall we ?’
The helmet was of average size and the bronze had tarnished and aged to a dirty jade, encrusted and flaky, as if it were covered by a vibrantly coloured form of lichen. The curved cheek plates were almost flush with the nose guard and the eye holes were almond-shaped. It was more like a mask than a helmet, a metal domino, and Lorimer supposed that was another reason why he instantly coveted it, why he desired it so. The face beneath would be almost invisible, just a gleam from the eyes and the lines of the lips and chin. He stood staring at it, some ten feet away from where it had been placed on a thin plinth. A small two-inch spike rose from the centre of the cranium.
‘Why’s it so expensive?’ he asked.
‘It’s nearly three thousand years old, my dear friend. And, and it’s got some of its plume left.’
‘Nonsense.’ Lorimer approached. Some strands of horsehair trailed from the spike. ‘Come off it.’
‘I could sell it to three museums tomorrow. No, four. All right, twenty-five. Can’t say fairer. I’m making almost nothing.’
‘Unfortunately, I’ve just bought a house.’
‘Man of property. Where?’
‘Ah… Docklands,’ Lorimer lied.
‘I don’t know a soul who lives in Docklands. I mean, isn’t it just a teensy bit vulgaire?’
‘It’s an investment.’ He picked the helmet up. It was surprisingly light, one cut sheet of bronze, beaten thin, then shaped to fit a man’s head, to cover everything from the nape of the neck and the jawbone up. He knew infallibly whenever he wanted to buy a helmet – the urge to put it on was overpowering.
‘Funerary, of course,’ Ivan said, breathing smoke at him. ‘You could chop through this with a bread knife – no protection at all’
‘But the illusion of protection. The almost perfect illusion.’
‘Fat lot of good that’d do you.’
‘It’s all we’ve got in the end, isn’t it? The illusion.’
‘Far too profound for me, dear Lorimer. It is a lovely thing, though.’
Lorimer replaced it on its stand. ‘Can I think about it?’
‘As long as you don’t take for ever. Ah, here we are.’
Petronella, Ivan’s remarkably tall, plain wife, with a rippling swathe of thick, dry, blonde hair down to her waist, came percussively down the stairs with a tray of coffee cups and a steaming cafetière.
‘That’s the last of the Brazil. Good afternoon, Mr Black.’
‘We call him Lorimer, Petronella. No standing on ceremony.’
270. The current collection: a German black sallet; a burgonet (possibly French, somewhat corroded) and, my special favourite, a barbute, Italian, marred only by the absence of the rosette rivets and so ringed with holes. It was the strange music of this lost vocabulary that drew me first to armour, to see what things these magical words actually described, to discover what was a pauldron, a couter, a vambrace and fauld, or tasset, poleyn and greave, beavor, salleret, gorget and besague. I derive a genuine thrill when Ivan says to me: ‘I’ve an interesting basinet with letten fleurons and with, astonishingly, the original aventail – though of course the vervelles are missing,’ and I know exactly – exactly – what he means. To own an armour, a suit entire, is an impossible fantasy (though I once bought a vambrace and couter of a child’s armour, and a shaffron from a German horse armour) so I settled instead for armour of the head, on helms and helmets, developing a particular taste for visorless helmets, the sallets and kettle hats, basinets, casques, spangenhelms and morions, burgonets, barbutes and – another dream, this – the frog-mouthed and the great helms.
The Book of Transfiguration
Stella shifted beside him, her knee touching his thigh, making it hot almost immediately, so he slid another couple of inches away from her. She was asleep, soundly, deeply, a small snore gently emanating from time to time. He squinted at the luminous figures on his watch dial. Ten to four: the endless dark centre of the night, that period of time when it is too early to get up, too late to read or work. Perhaps he should make a cup of tea? It was at moments like these that Alan had told him consciously to note and analyse what was going on in his mind, systematically, one by one. So what was going on in there?… The sex had been good enough, sufficiently prolonged to send Mrs Stella Bull off to sleep almost immediately, Lorimer reflected. He had been intensely irritated by the visit to his family but that always applied, and, equally true, seeing his father like that always unsettled him, but that was hardly out of the ordinary… He enumerated other subject headings. Health: fair. Emotional? Nothing, as it should be. Work? Mr Dupree’s death – very bad. Hogg, Helvoir-Jayne – all a bit uncertain, unresolved, there. Hogg seemed more than usually on edge and that communicated itself to everyone. And now the Dupree business… Solvency? There would be no bonus now on the Dupree case even if Hogg had been prepared to share it with him; Hogg wouldn’t let him deal with the estate – that was normal practice, it would go through now, unadjusted. The house in Silvertown had swallowed up almost all his capital, but there would be more work along shortly. So what was it? What was there in that macédoine of niggles and worries, shames, resentments and preoccupations that left him alert and tireless at four in the morning? Standard anxiety-insomnia, Alan would say too much going on.
He slipped out of bed and stood naked in the bedroom dark wondering whether to half-dress or not. He pulled on Stella’s towelling dressing gown – the sleeves ended in mid-forearm and his knees were showing but it would do as precautionary decency. Stella’s daughter Barbuda was still away at school so the coast was clear, in theory. Barbuda had walked into the kitchen late one night, sleepy and pyjamaed as he had searched the fridge, naked, looking urgently for something savoury to eat. It was not an encounter he wanted to repeat and it was fair to say that things had never been quite the same between them since then, in fact he thought Barbuda’s previous indifference had turned, after that chance meeting, to a peculiar form of hate.
Waiting for the kettle to boil, he tried not to think of that night nor of what degree of tumescence he had or had not displayed. He stared out at a corner of the brightly lit scaffolding yard visible through the kitchen window. A tight row of flat-bed lorries, the enormous shelves of planks and pipes, the skips filled with clamps and extenders… He remembered his first visit here, on business, one of his early ‘adjusts’. Stella walking him coldly round the yard, ￡175,000 worth of material stolen. Everything had been painted the Bull Scaffolding colours, ‘cerise and ultramarine’, she had assured him. She had been away on a Caribbean holiday. The security guard had been pounced on, bound up and had watched helpless as the team of villains had driven off three trucks laden with the requirements of next day’s scaffolding job, an entire tower block’s worth in Lambeth.
It was an obvious con, a clear scam, Lorimer had decided, a cash-flow problem needing to be speedily resolved, and with anyone else he would have been confident that the ￡50,000 cash he was carrying in his briefcase would have proved too tempting. But it soon became equally obvious that this small, wiry, blonde woman with the hard but oddly pretty face was, in loss adjuster’s parlance, ‘nuclear’ through and through. ‘Nuclear’ from ‘nuclear shelter’ – impermeable, unyielding, impregnable. She was proud: a single woman, no support, her own business, a ten-year-old daughter – all bad signs. He returned to Hogg and reported his conclusions. Hogg had openly scoffed and had gone back himself the next day with ￡25,000. ‘Just you watch,’ he had said, ‘those lorries are parked up in a warehouse in Eastbourne or Guildford.’ The next day he called Lorimer in. ‘You were right,’ he said, chastened somehow. ‘A grade-A nuclear. Don’t get many like that.’ He allowed Lorimer to be the bearer of the good news. Rather than telephone (he was curious, he wanted to check her out further, this genuine grade-A nuclear) he drove back to the Stockwell depot and told her Fortress Sure would honour her claim. ‘I should f*cking well think so,’ Stella Bull had said, and then asked him to supper.
He sipped at his scalding tea, one sugar, slice of lemon. They had been sleeping together, off and on, for nearly four years now, Lorimer reflected. It was by far and away the longest sexual relationship of his life. Stella liked him to come to her house (Mr Bull, an obscure figure, was long ago divorced and forgotten), where she would cook a meal, drink a lot, watch a video or late-night television, then go to bed and make fairly orthodox love. The visits sometimes extended into the next day: breakfast, shopping ‘up West’, or lunch in a pub – a pub on the river was what she particularly liked – and then they would go their separate ways. They had spent perhaps five weekends together in three years and then Barbuda went to boarding school near Reigate. Since then, during term-time, Stella had taken to calling more regularly, once or even twice a week. The routine did not change and Lorimer was intrigued to note that its increased regularity had made nothing pall. She worked hard, did Stella Bull, as hard as anyone he knew – there was good money to be made in scaffolding.
He exhaled, feeling suddenly sorry for himself, and switched on the television. He caught the end of a programme devoted to American football – the Buccaneers against the Spartans, or something similar – and watched it uncomprehendingly, happily diverted. He brewed up again when the commercials came on. This time it was the music that drew him back to the screen, a familiar piece, both surging and plangent – rejigged Rachman-inov or Bruch, he guessed – and as he tried to remember he found his attention drawn by the images, pondering vaguely what on earth this clip could be advertising. An ideal couple at expensive play. He: dark, Gypsy-ish; she: laughing blonde, forever tossing and flicking her big hair. Sepia, then heightened colour, much camera tilt. Yacht, skis, scuba-diving. Holidays? A sleek motor on an empty autobahn. Cars? Tyres? Oil? No, now restaurant food, tuxedos, meaningful looks. Liqueur? Champagne? His hair was luminously shaggy. Shampoo? Conditioner? That smile. Dental floss? Plaque detector? Now the fellow – bare-chested, in morning light – smilingly waves off his beauty in her nippy sports car from his mews pad. But turns away, suddenly miserable, angst-ridden, full of self-loathing. His life, despite all this expensive sex, fun, play and consumerism, is clearly a sham, empty, bogus to the core. But then, at the end of the mews, another girl appears with a suitcase. Dark, seriously pale, chic, simply dressed, shorter glossy hair. Music soars. They run to each other, embrace. Lorimer was completely obsessed by now. Sonorous, throaty voice, caption fades up: ‘IN THE END THERE IS ONLY ONE CHOICE. STAY TRUE TO YOURSELF. FORTRESS SURE.’ Good God Almighty. But in the whirling, slow-motion embrace he had seen something that both disturbed and moved him in its serendipity. The slim, dark girl at the end of the cobbled mews. The girl returning to the morose hunk. He had seen her not forty-eight hours ago, he was sure of it: she was, indubitably, mystifyingly, the girl in the back of the taxi.