by Liz Jensen
‘Still waiting.’
I tell him about Jonas Svensson’s renal anomaly.
‘In normal circumstances I’d call it a long shot,’ says Professor Whybray. ‘But given what’s going on . . .’When he frowns you can see the furrows. ‘The whole thing’s unprecedented. Anyway, I’m glad to see you’ve kept your edge, Hesketh. I’m looking forward to working with you again. And you too of course, Stephanie. Ashok praises you highly.’
We start discussing arrangements. Today is Sunday. Our flights are open. I agree to meet Professor Whybray and his team at nine o’clock on Thursday. Stephanie will join us if she is back from Dubai by then. Before that, I’ll find a moment to tell the Professor I can’t work with Stephanie ‘for personal reasons’. And he’ll agree to this because it’s me he wants. I am confident about this. We say goodbye and Stephanie presses End Call.
She takes a sip of her drink. ‘I’m glad we got the contract. Though it’s not a classic Phipps & Wexman case.’
‘Yes it is. Ashok’s a disaster capitalist. He follows the money.’ I finish my drink in one gulp, and signal to the waiter for the bill. I stand up.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To do some research and make notes for Professor Whybray.’
‘Wait, Hesketh. If this thing continues to spread, there’s a lot at stake here and we’ll need to collaborate. So we have to clear the air on the personal front.’
I sit down opposite her and reach for a napkin. ‘Five minutes. Starting now.’ I point at my watch. I begin folding an ozuru. The material is thin, but not ideal.
‘Hesketh?’ Her hand is on my arm.
I shake it off. ‘Don’t touch me!’ It comes out louder than I intend. The waiter has been approaching: now he backs off.
‘OK. OK. Please Hesketh.’ Stephanie is aiming for eye contact but she won’t get it. Kaitlin likes direct people. She admires them and says they have ‘guts’. I like direct people too, but only if they are children. ‘We need to have a conversation about Kaitlin.’
Kaitlin Kalifakidis. The woman who Stephanie drove crazy with love and lust. The woman who told me lie after lie after lie, and turned me into two ugly birds, a cockerel and a cuckoo. At the Phipps & Wexman reception I saw them talking and laughing together, but failed to identify their sudden, intense camaraderie as courtship behaviour. I hadn’t even known that Stephanie was a lesbian. Or that Kaitlin was, to use her repellent expression, ‘bi-curious’.
I say, ‘No. There’s nothing we need to discuss. It’s in the past.’
The best man won! said Sunny Chen, the day he burned his Hell-note effigy. But no one won. It was all wreckage.
She shifts. ‘But that’s the thing, Hesketh. That’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you. It’s not.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Kaitlin and I are back together. I’ve moved in.’
I say, ‘Oh.’
She fingers the spiked shards on her necklace. It’s still mesmerising me. The material isn’t plastic. And it’s certainly not mineral. But it has the sheen of a polymer . Varnish, maybe. It might be more lightweight than it looks.
‘When?’
‘Two weeks ago. Perhaps I should have told you earlier.’
I complete my ozuru and stand it on the table between us. It observes her with its head cocked slightly to one side.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Now is fine. Now is quite early enough.’
The waiter slides the bill on to the table, then melts away. She speaks quietly. ‘You know there was something between us before. Well. We began seeing each other again. She rang me when you split up.’
I’m overloaded. I stand and pick up my briefcase. The whisky has gone to my head. I need to get out of here. Breathe some outdoor air.
‘Hesketh, stay!’ she calls after me. But I can’t.
Men generally find the idea of two women together sexually exciting. This is well documented. The fact that I was no exception only deepened the horror.
There. It is said.
CHAPTER 7
The pool is a relief. They put ice cubes in the water to cool it down. That’s what the attendant told me yesterday. I swim crawl, sloshing the water over the edges, which are flush with the sides. It disappears noisily down sunken runnels. I forget myself. I forget everything except the intense pummelling of my muscles.
I’ve done fifty-three lengths, almost the equivalent of 0.75 kilometres, when a thought strikes me. It should have come to me before. But I was too busy reliving my cuckoldry to see Stephanie’s revelation as an opportunity.
Now that I do, I must act immediately.
I get out and dress hastily. Five minutes later I’m banging on her door. There’s a tray on the floor outside. She must have ordered room service. I have read that women often do that in hotels on business trips because they feel self-conscious eating alone in restaurants. It’s half past nine. I bang harder.
‘Open up!’
She opens the door a crack, leaving the chain on. ‘Oh. It’s you.’
She lets me in. Next to the bed is a photo of Kaitlin with Freddy. It looks recent. I haven’t seen it before. It fills me with rage. She stole my family.
She looks nervous, as though I might have come to rape her. Women on business trips worry about that too, according to the same article. It contained a list of Dos and Don’ts While Travelling. Opening the door to me would have counted as a Don’t.
‘How can I help you?’ Her voice is very cold.
I go over to the big picture window and turn to face her. My hair is dripping: I can feel the water running down my neck, chilled unpleasantly by the air conditioning.
‘I want to see Freddy. You can make that happen. Kaitlin’s wrong to stop me seeing him. I was a father to him.’
‘Why don’t you sit?’ She indicates an armchair, but I stay where I am. ‘Look, Hesketh. I know what you mean to Freddy. He talks about you a lot. He misses you.’
‘So you admit that much.’
‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I?’
‘So admit that it’s wrong.’
She takes a breath. ‘Actually I think it is. Wrong.’
‘What?’ She waves again at the armchair, but I stay standing. ‘You think it’s wrong? You admit it?’
‘Yes. You heard me. And you might have heard me say it earlier if you hadn’t stormed off.’
‘So why can’t I see Freddy?’
She shuts her eyes for a moment. ‘Kaitlin has her reasons.’
‘Name me a single one that’s justifiable.’
She pauses. ‘Kaitlin’s a good mother. But she brought Freddy up on her own. And basically, she feels comfortable with that.’
‘That’s not justifiable. And it’s not even a reason. It’s an excuse.’
‘Please, Hesketh. You’re shouting. Sit down.’
She sits in an armchair and points at the other one. Reluctantly, I sink into it. ‘Anyway this isn’t about what Kaitlin feels comfortable with. It’s about Freddy and his entitlement to a father. It’s a question of justice.’
She looks at her hands. When she speaks, her voice is low and I have to strain to hear it. ‘Don’t think I’ve felt good about all this, Hesketh.’
I bang the glass table between us and she jumps. ‘So don’t be a coward! Stand up for the boy’s rights! Do whatever you want with Kaitlin. I don’t care. But don’t let her stop me being Freddy’s dad.’ She turns away, so I bang the table again. ‘Is that a yes?’ She nods again. ‘Then say it.’
‘Yes.’ Her eyes are reddening. I don’t care.
‘I’m going to hold you to that.’
‘You can.’ She gets to her feet quickly, goes to the bathroom and emerges blowing her nose into a tissue. She’s carrying a white hand towel which she chucks in my direction. ‘Dry your hair.’ She sniffs and blows her nose again. ‘Now let’s have a drink.’ She goes over to the mini-bar and throws open the door.
‘Thanks.’ As I start towelling my hair, my head begins to buz
z with what might be joy.
She comes and sits opposite me, pours out our drinks. Whisky. She hands me a generous glass. ‘Well I’ll be honest with you, Hesketh. Things haven’t been easy with Freddy.’ She takes a big gulp and flushes. I see that this must represent a betrayal. I am glad. ‘He’s confused, inevitably.’ I remember Kaitlin’s text: you have left Freddy very confused. ‘I’m not kidding myself. I can’t afford to in my job. I want to do what’s right. The thing is, the thing I wanted to discuss with you is, well . . . The day before yesterday he—’
She breaks off and takes another big swig. Something’s bothering her. And she seems slightly drunk. Did she have another drink after I left the bar? An image hurtles back to me: Freddy aiming his catapult at Kaitlin’s heart. And its signature noise: zoooshhh.
‘Has he been violent?’ My own question startles me.
Her face reddens. Her neck too. The necklace glows white against it. ‘How did you know?’
I shrug. ‘A guess. I’ve barely spoken to him since I moved out. What did he do?’
‘He attacked a teacher. He threw a flint at her in the playground. She was badly hurt. It was . . . pretty shocking. Five stitches.’
As she speaks, I find myself staring at her necklace again. Those shapes: bones. Vertebrae. Knuckles. Something like that. I made a printout. A4. Sunny Chen’s suicide note is in the side pocket of my laptop case. I reach for it and open it. I pull it out and when I see the thing confirmed I feel instantly sick and shove it back. I help myself to another swig of whisky and bang my glass down too hard, so that some of it spills out. Stephanie wipes it with her napkin. I make a mental ozuru, and then another. I feel the horrible swoop of vertigo. I’m overloaded. And still too hot. There’s no breeze here. Not even a breath of wind.
‘Hesketh, who on earth gave you that bruise?’ She is looking at my arm.
‘Jonas Svensson. In the hospital. He grabbed me.’
‘But those aren’t adult finger-marks. What’s going on? Are you OK?’
No. I am not OK.
I clear my throat. ‘Where does your necklace come from?’
‘Hesketh, you’re changing the subject.’
Can’t she see this is urgent? ‘I said, where does it come from?’
She sighs, then reaches up and fingers it. ‘Do you like it?’
‘That’s irrelevant. I need to know exactly where you got hold of it.’ She’s smiling. Doesn’t she realise I am incapable of making small talk? She leans forward, as if to divulge a secret. But I know the answer before she says it. Of course I do. Even so, I feel my chest tighten when I hear it confirmed.
‘Hesketh, what’s the matter?’ I pull out the piece of paper again from my laptop case. It’s crumpled at the sides. I flatten it out on the table and spread it out in front of her so she can see it properly. But she doesn’t look. She needs to. She should. ‘He’s so clever with his hands,’ she’s saying. Then she stops and sees what I’m showing her. ‘What’s that?’ She looks puzzled. ‘How – did Freddy draw it?’ She picks it up. ‘But it’s ink. Freddy doesn’t use ink, does he? And this hand-print here, how could he—’
‘Freddy didn’t do it. Do you remember Sunny Chen?’
‘The Taiwan whistle-blower.’
‘He left this for his wife before he killed himself.’ The sheet starts trembling in her hand. With care, she sets it down on the table between us and shifts back in her seat, as though the paper is contaminated. ‘His wife insisted he couldn’t have done it. The hand-print’s too small to be a man’s. Can you see that this pattern here matches your necklace? Exactly?’ I point to the spiked circle.
She clears her throat and begins to fiddle with the clasp at her neck.
‘Help me here, will you?’ I can hear the panic. She wants to get rid of it. She can’t do it fast enough. ‘Please. Just get it off me.’
She bows her head, and I reach over. It feels very intimate to look at the nape of this woman’s neck. This might be a place that Kaitlin has kissed, while cupping Stephanie’s breasts from behind. The place an executioner’s blade would target for a clean kill. The clasp is the classic kind, a metal one which locks on to a plain ring. Freddy cannibalises Kaitlin’s old jewellery for beads and fastenings. I undo it and free the necklace. It weighs surprisingly little. Papier mâché. Of course. Not the pulp variety, but small shreds of paper glued on in layers. Freddy has tiny fingers, like the claws of a bird. The workmanship is accomplished, even for him. Most of the paper is plain white beneath the varnish, but looking closer I can see a few yellow streaks of a different texture. It’s origami paper. The shapes – you can’t really call them beads, though that’s their function – are reminiscent of skeletal fingers, connected by a length of nylon fishing line. I lay it on the table next to Sunny’s suicide drawings.
There’s no doubting it. The configuration is the same.
‘There’s no way Freddy could have got hold of this and copied it?’ asks Stephanie. ‘I mean, that would explain—’
‘Not unless you gave it to him.’
‘But I’ve never seen it before.’
‘Did you look at the Chen file?’ I ask.
‘I read your report, that’s all. But it didn’t mention this.’
‘No. I hadn’t seen it. Not then. And when I did, I didn’t know what it meant. I still don’t. When did he give you this?’
‘Last month. For my birthday. On the twenty-second.’
‘That’s before Sunny Chen died. It’s before he even exposed Jenwai.’
‘And what about this eye?’ she points.
‘I don’t know.’
‘And this hand-print?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Can’t you hazard a guess?’
‘It might mean stop.’
‘Stop what?’
I slam my hand on the table. ‘I don’t know!’
I’m getting overloaded. Stephanie must be too because she just says softly, ‘Jesus, what’s happening here, Hesketh? What the hell’s going on?’
And once again I don’t know. I rock and rock. I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.
CHAPTER 8
Kaitlin’s house, built in 1910, is part of a classic London terrace of faded red brick off Fulham Palace Road. The front door is the same French Grey I painted it when I moved in. But the metal containers with trailing ivy and miniature box trees are new, and the blinds have been replaced by curtains. I arrive at 11.16, fourteen minutes earlier than agreed. I’ve been staying at an airport hotel in London since my return from Dubai two nights ago, so I’ve brought my suitcase with me. It’s Wednesday 26th September. Temperature, fifteen degrees centigrade. Moderate to light winds. They’re shuffling branches, stirring up dust, making litter dance.
Freddy must have been looking out for me because I don’t even need to ring the bell: as I approach, he throws the door open wide, yells ‘Hesketh!’, launches himself at me like a monkey, and clings. ‘Freddy K, Freddy K, Freddy K,’ I laugh into his hair. He feels heavier, more substantial than last time. I get a surge in my chest, not dissimilar to pain. Wellbeing. I am bien dans ma peau. I carry him through the narrow entrance hall into the kitchen and sit him on the table to take a better look. I inhale the old-fashioned floor-polish smell of Kaitlin’s house. A brand called Pledge. My mother used it. The boy’s mop of dark curly hair is the same, but his face has altered subtly: its angles more defined, its planes cleaner, and there’s a sprinkle of freckles on his nose, the colour of muscovado sugar.
‘Hi Hesketh.’ I swing round. Stephanie’s paler than ever. ‘Kaitlin’s visiting her mum at the hospice. She’s gone all day.’ I have no idea what she has told Kaitlin about my visit. It’s an irrelevance. ‘Why don’t you guys go through to the living-room while I heat us up a pizza?’ Before I left Dubai we had a short, practical conversation about how to proceed with Freddy. The strategy we agreed on: food; Lego; questions.
‘Hey, Hesketh. Come and see what I can do,’ says Freddy. And he’s
dragging me through to the living-room to show me his ‘nearly’ headstand on the sofa. He makes ten attempts, each of which requires a star-rating from me, on a scale of one to six. Then he’s perched on the back of a chair almost doing the splits and holding forth in his sparky, energetic way, flexing the power of being a boy aged seven. I’d forgotten his grasshopper mind, the eccentricity of his questions. If I had to decide between being tied to an ant’s nest and being stuck in a giant spider’s web what would I choose? Can people microwave themselves?
The Kawasaki rose I made for Kaitlin when I moved in has disappeared from the alcove by the mantelpiece. But it’s easier than I anticipated to function within the new parameters.
‘If you stuck your hand in a volcano, you’d get a ninth-degree burn,’ he’s saying a little later, through a mouthful of pepperoni pizza. ‘From the lava. It can kill you. And it’s glow-in-the-dark. Sometimes red and sometimes orange and then it’s blue at the edges. Blue fire. You can get that.’ He reaches for another slice and does the archaeopteryx voice. ‘Huloo, Froodoh, wooda you lika anootha slooce of poopporoni pooza. Yos Ploz.’ Then he throws back his head and laughs at his own entertainment: a throaty, dirty laugh. He spills his juice; Stephanie mops it up without complaint. His flow of speech is directed largely at me.
‘Did you bring me a present then?’
‘As a matter of fact I did. Guess where it is.’
‘Up your bottom. Jokes. Suitcase, duh. Foonk-you-fonk-you-fank-you!’
Soon we’re at work on a Lego cruise ship. Principal colours: red, white, blue, beige and grey. It has a swimming pool, a tennis court and a mini-golf course. On the top deck there are ranks of solar panels, a wind turbine and a helipad. Under my tutelage, Freddy has learned the importance of studying the instruction pamphlet before beginning a job like this, and of arranging the small plastic bags containing the different elements in the right order. But he likes to improvise. It’s secretly a pirate ship, he insists. So we need barrels of explosive. Weapons. Rigging. A flag. Potted palms. He has a box of Lego pieces from which to add to the basic template. Occasionally, we look out of the window and check the sky for changes. Today there are the flattened cumuliform elements that characterise stratocumulus. I’ve long been trying to teach him the scientific terms for clouds, but Freddy prefers his own. Bacon rashers. Popcorn. Fuzzaluzz. Double blob. Mega-poo. Ha ha ha.
