by Jonathan Coe
‘Everything OK?’ she asked.
‘I’m fine.’ He smiled and put his arm around her briefly, rubbing her back in a clumsy gesture. ‘Thanks for my present, by the way. So thoughtful.’
‘You don’t really like him, do you?’
Sophie had given Benjamin a copy of Fallopia that she had bought on the night of Sohan’s interview with the two famous writers. It was inscribed, ‘To Benjamin – All the best, Lionel Hampshire.’
‘Well, the reviews for this one have been a bit … mixed,’ Benjamin said. ‘But I’m looking forward to it. What was he like, in person?’
‘Just what you’d expect.’
‘Oh dear.’
They had arrived at the Tolkien museum, and behind it the little stretch of grassland that had recently been designated ‘The Shire Country Park’, both of which set off a train of thought in Sophie’s mind. ‘That was the night,’ she said, ‘that Sohan pointed out how “Sarehole” was an anagram of “arsehole”. How could we all have missed that for so long?’
Benjamin didn’t answer. He was looking ahead at Lois and Christopher, walking arm in arm in a way which almost gave them the air of a happily married couple. He was annoyed with his sister for making that sarcastic comment about the dearth of TV channels in the 1970s, which undermined (without her realizing it, probably) one of his most cherished early memories. It was still a cornerstone of his belief system that Britain had been a more cohesive, united, consensual place during his childhood (all that had started to unravel with the election result of 1979), and the fuzzy glow he still got from watching seventies comedy shows was proof of that, somehow. But of course, for Lois, none of that could be expected to register: for her, that decade had been a time of tragedy, of horror. He told himself that he must never forget that, and never stop making allowances for it.
A sharp reminder awaited him when they returned home, in any case. Colin had given up on Morecambe and Wise and was watching the BBC news. He looked stricken. Lois sat down beside him, while Benjamin went into the kitchen to put the kettle on.
‘You all right, Dad?’ she asked.
‘It’s that woman,’ he said, tonelessly, eyes not leaving the screen. ‘That girl in Bristol. The one who went missing last week. They’ve found a body now. They haven’t said it’s her, yet, but … Well, who else can it be?’
Lois said nothing, but her whole body tautened. Christopher sat down on the arm of the sofa and put his hand on her clenched, twisted shoulder. This was the tableau Benjamin saw when he re-entered the room: his sister frozen, with a man on either side of her.
‘What her parents must be going through,’ Colin said, looking up at Christopher now, his eyes pale and liquid. ‘I know exactly how they feel.’ Now he clutched his daughter’s arm with a quick, violent passion. ‘Years ago, we almost lost her, you know.’
Benjamin watched, hesitated, realized that he had no role, and withdrew. As he made silently for the kitchen, he could hear his father repeating: ‘We almost lost her.’
6.
January 2011
After the sex, Sophie fell into a deep sleep, and when she awoke she did so very slowly, late in the morning, becoming aware first of the grey light filtering through the curtains, and then the satisfying ache in her tired limbs and then the rough, sandpaper-like texture of Ian’s unshaven face as he brushed against her cheek and kissed her.
‘Morning, sweetie,’ he said. ‘I’m just popping out to get some stuff.’
‘Mm-hm.’
‘Sleep well?’
‘Very well.’
‘I was going to get bacon, eggs …’
‘Sounds lovely.’
‘… mushrooms, tomatoes, fresh orange juice …’
‘Do you spoil all your girlfriends like this?’
‘Want a Sunday paper?’
‘Why not?’
‘Sunday Times OK?’
‘I’d prefer the Observer.’
‘I’ll get them both.’
He drew away and sleepily she reached up, placed her arms behind his neck and pulled him back towards her for another kiss. In the process, the duvet slipped away from her body, a reminder that Sophie was naked, while Ian was fully clothed. The situation excited them both. As a consequence, it was another twenty minutes before Ian went out on his shopping expedition.
When he was gone, Sophie waited a few more happy, post-coital minutes before getting out of bed. She noticed there was a white bathrobe hanging on the back of the bedroom door, and, slipping into it, she pulled open the curtains. She had walked home with Ian the night before – or rather, early in the morning – but, being somewhat the worse for drink, and pulsing with anticipation after taking the decision to sleep with him for the first time, she had not taken much notice of where he lived. This morning’s view was unfamiliar, and it took her a few moments to orientate herself. She appeared to be in one of the newish developments of flats behind Centenary Square. She could see the rear of Baskerville House, and the massive construction site where the new Library of Birmingham was beginning to take shape. (The noise from that must be pretty deafening during the week, she thought.) There were few signs of human life out there this morning, apart from a man walking his dog across a stretch of grass and two teenage boys sitting at opposite ends of a see-saw in a children’s playground, looking bored. Traffic hummed past unceasingly somewhere in the near-distance. It was a typical Birmingham Sunday, it seemed: for everyone but her.
She had not slept with many men in her life; for Sophie it was a commitment as well as an adventure. Last night, and this morning, felt like a delicious tiptoe into the unknown. Being left alone for a few minutes in Ian’s empty flat was an unexpected bonus. So far, in the course of three longish but rather one-sided conversations, he had managed not to give too much away about himself. Here, perhaps, was an opportunity to get to know him better.
Her first instinct when visiting someone else’s home was always to look at the books. The academic reflex, deeply ingrained and quite irresistible. It didn’t get Sophie very far today, however. She already knew that Ian was, by his own admission, ‘not a great reader’. She also knew that she herself probably read more than was healthy for her, set too much store by reading, had a kind of neurotic obsession with literature and its supposed moral benefits. All the same, what she found on his shelves was disappointing. A handful of sporting autobiographies, some reference books (also mainly to do with sport), some bestselling novels from a few years back, two or three road-safety manuals. She counted them: fourteen books in all. There were about the same number of DVDs, mainly James Bond and Jason Bourne films. The DVD player was on the floor next to a widescreen TV, and a weird-looking electronic device with handles that was either some sort of elaborate sex toy or (more likely, Sophie realized, with some relief) a games console. She picked it up and turned it around in her hands, briefly curious about this bizarre object whose functions were so mysterious to her. None of her previous boyfriends, it occurred to her, had ever owned anything like it.
There was a square coffee table in the centre of the living space, with a fair number of watermarks and coffee stains on the surface, and one copy of a magazine – called Stuff – on its lower shelf. The sofa and the chairs were probably from IKEA: at least, they bore a marked resemblance to the sofa and chairs in every flat she had ever rented herself, all of which had come from IKEA. There were no plants anywhere to be seen, although there was a large framed reproduction of Van Gogh’s sunflowers on the wall.
The far end of the living space consisted of an open-plan kitchen. There was nothing much in the fridge, apart from beer, butter, cheese, milk and a pack of sausages that were eight days past their ‘best before’ date. The freezer was empty apart from ice cubes and a box of Magnums, of which only two remained.
This was disappointing: Sophie was learning almost nothing here about the man she was in the process of choosing as her new partner. When a quick tour of his bathroom yielded even more meagre information,
she gave up and put the kettle on to make coffee. While waiting for it to boil, she retrieved the copy of Stuff and sat down at the kitchen table to read it.
The front cover showed a young, attractive brunette clutching an iPad to her hip while pouting and staring into the middle distance. Despite the presence of the tablet in her hand, it looked as though she was planning to spend the night clubbing rather than working, since she was wearing a white mini-dress which barely covered her crotch, with sheer panels exposing large portions of her cleavage and midriff. Flicking through the magazine, Sophie could see that this was a recurring pictorial theme, and that she was being invited into a strange parallel universe in which cutting-edge technology was used exclusively by beautiful young women who only liked to work, take photos or play games while wearing lingerie and swimwear. The cover promised a preview of the iPhone 5 (‘How Apple will reinvent the smartphone wheel … again’), a round-up of ‘Killer Tech that will change the future’, a nostalgic survey of ‘39 Gadgets that Changed the World – Starring Sky+, Wii and 10 years of iPod’ and a feature on ‘How to build your own FPS’. Sophie, needless to say, had no idea what an FPS was or why anyone would want to build it: floral-patterned sofa? Freshly painted shed? Turning to the relevant article, she discovered that in fact it was an acronym for First Person Shooter, and this referred to a subgenre of games based around someone firing a gun (obviously) seen from the perspective of the person doing the firing. Once again she felt the mild, transgressive frisson of stepping outside her own comfort zone, and she read on with increasing fascination, stumbling over terminology she had never encountered before – megatextures, game engine, radiosity, latency – and becoming so absorbed in the article that she found it quite frustrating, for a moment at least, to be interrupted by the opening of the front door. But she was glad to see Ian again, especially when, as soon as he set eyes on her, he stopped in his tracks, laden with shopping bags, and said:
‘Wow.’
‘Wow?’
‘I can’t believe it’s you. I can’t believe it’s you, here, in my flat. You look … incredible.’
He was not paying her an idle compliment. With her hair still tousled and her body still glowing from their last bout of lovemaking, and the white bathrobe hanging so loose that it was almost falling off her, Sophie looked like every Stuff reader’s masturbation fantasy made flesh. She only needed to be fondling an Olympus PEN EP-3 (‘sleek metal casing and what is apparently the world’s fastest autofocus’), or drooling over her BlackBerry Bold 9900 (‘packs in a touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard, and runs the zippy new BlackBerry 7 OS’) for the vision to be complete. No wonder Ian looked happy. He kissed her again, a long and tender kiss on the mouth, to which she responded with lingering eagerness, before he pulled away reluctantly and said, in the voice of a man who could not quite believe the turn reality had taken, lost in a waking dream:
‘Come on. We should eat.’
During breakfast Sophie confessed to the disappointment she had felt while attempting to probe the mysteries of his flat.
‘I mean, you couldn’t make it any more anonymous if you were some kind of government agent trying to keep his identity secret. Don’t you ever feel the need to personalize it at all? A few pot plants, a bit of colour here and there, some more pictures on the walls?’
‘I know what I’d like to put on the bedroom wall,’ said Ian. He arranged his fingers into a rectangle and squinted through them, as if framing a photograph. ‘A picture of you looking like that. Only then I’d never get up in the mornings.’
Sophie smiled, drawing away slightly and pulling the robe more closely around herself.
Later, back in bed, they made love again and then, after a long while resting in each other’s arms, they stirred themselves and started reading the newspapers together and now their mutual nakedness became comfortable rather than erotic. They sat side by side and Sophie relished the feeling of their points of unimpeded contact: their upper arms pressed against each other, her gently curving hip nestled against Ian’s straighter, more muscular one, the embrace of their feet as she felt her ankle being gently caressed by his toe. It all felt subtly right and inevitable, and the ease with which their bodies dovetailed was mirrored by the relaxed frivolity of their conversation. It was the first Sunday of the year and there wasn’t much serious news in the papers. A giant urban fox had been captured and killed in Maidstone and there was a photograph of a seven-year-old boy holding it aloft – or at least trying to, since the boy and the animal were roughly the same size. A study in the Netherlands had shown that women eating a diet high in fruit and vegetables were more likely to have baby girls. Three pigs were believed to be on the loose on the streets of Southampton, the police mysteriously linking their escape from a local farm with a ‘breakdown in the relationship’ of the couple who owned it. If she’d been alone Sophie would not even have bothered to read most of these stories but it was fun sharing them with Ian, laughing at the oddness and silliness of the world, getting to know his sense of humour. The mood only changed (and even then it was a fleeting change) when he turned to a story about Joanna Yeates, the young woman from Bristol whose body had been found on Christmas Day.
‘I see they’ve released that guy,’ he said, scanning the first couple of paragraphs. ‘Her landlord. The one they took in for questioning.’
‘Good,’ said Sophie.
‘Good? Why’s it good?’
‘Because they didn’t have any reason for holding him in the first place.’
‘Yeah – but look at him.’
He showed her the picture of Christopher Jefferies, the sixty-five-year-old suspect who had been taken in for three days’ questioning by the Bristol police and then released without charge. Unconventional in appearance, ‘eccentric’ even, an English teacher with a fondness for romantic poetry, known occasionally to dye his hair a subtle shade of blue, he was perfect fodder for the English newspapers, who had been persuaded of his guilt from the moment they set eyes on him and had spent the last few days saying as much while keeping within the bounds of the law.
‘Look at him?’ said Sophie, leaning over. ‘What about him?’
‘I mean, what a weirdo!’
Sophie was taken aback. ‘Well, for a start,’ she said, ‘I can’t see anything especially weird about him from that picture. And apart from that, it’s quite a leap from being a “weirdo” to being a murderer, isn’t it?’
Ian glanced at her and saw that her cheeks were flushed and at the base of her neck a little patch of skin had darkened to red. Without further comment, he quickly turned to another story on the same page. ‘Look at this: “A clothes shop in Lisbon has promised free clothes for the first hundred people who turn up on the first day of their sale wearing nothing but underwear.” ’
Sophie relented and smiled. This time she took the paper from his hands and studied the photo of shivering customers as they stood in a crowd outside the shop, waiting for it to open.
‘Nice bum,’ she said, pointing to one of the men. ‘Not as nice as yours, though.’
At which point she put the newspaper aside, and they moved on to other things.
7.
February 2011
Midway between Shrewsbury and Birmingham, not far from the M54 and considered such a geographical fixture that it had its own official sign on the motorway, there stood one of the district’s main attractions and, indeed, one of its principal glories. Woodlands Garden Centre. It had begun life, back in 1973, as a mere shop: a compact, humble emporium selling plants and earthenware pots and bags of compost. Today, almost forty years later, it had blossomed and expanded into a kingdom, a mighty empire, whose subjects could roam for hours – for an entire day if they wanted to – through a succession of different purlieus and provinces in which every aspect of human life was represented, catered for and commodified. Outside, it is true, stretched a vista of plants, shrubs, ferns, flowers, vines, cacti and all other manner of vegetable life which, though amazing in i
ts extent and variety, was exactly what you would expect to encounter in such an establishment. It was only when the customers entered the covered area of Woodlands that the true scale and inclusivity of the place became apparent. You were confronted, first of all, by acres – limitless pastures – of garden furniture, stretching as far as the eye could see. Not just chairs and tables but entire four-piece suites that would not disgrace the sitting room of a country mansion, to say nothing of benches, divans, rocking chairs, loveseats, ottomans, Chesterfields, dining tables, drinks tables, coffee tables, occasional tables and everything else that might conceivably be required to turn a back garden into an outdoor living space. And even then, even taking into account the dozens of enormous barbecues, far more elaborate and sophisticated than anything most people would have in their kitchens, and the astonishing array of garden lighting – floodlights, spotlights, fairy lights, solar-powered lights, flashing lights, glowing lights, twinkling lights – even then, you would barely have begun to scratch the surface of Woodlands’ possibilities. There was a kitchen furniture department; a pet shop selling everything from goldfish to rabbits; a clothes shop dominated by Barbours, wellington boots and racks of polyester shirts and trousers; a huge section devoted to crafts and hobbies – painting, embroidery, needlework, crochet, miniature railways, model aircraft, anything the human mind could conceive to fill the empty hours of childhood or retirement; an extensive grocery shop selling everything from Cheddar cheese to English wine; a section devoted to CDs (with an emphasis on Frank Sinatra, Vera Lynn, Johnny Cash and other stars of yesteryear) and DVDs (with an emphasis on British war films, Ealing comedies, John Wayne movies and other nostalgic items); a toyshop with a particularly impressive array of jigsaw puzzles depicting farmyard scenes from pre-industrial days, Spitfire and Hurricane aircraft in mid-flight, scenes of traditional English village life, vintage cars and the like; and even a bookshop, again with a backward-looking slant, since besides the inevitable thousands of titles devoted to gardening there was also a thriving market in books of local history. Many of these were collections of old black-and-white photographs or sepia-tinted postcards and boasted titles such as Images of Bygone Dudley, Chaddesley Corbett in Pictures or Bridgnorth as It Used to Be. A good number of them, if you checked their spines carefully, were published by an imprint called Chase Historical.
