Hunting Unicorns

by Bella Pollen

  As I headed out through the corridor I remembered something and doubled back.

  ‘Moutabal,’ I said.

  Massey turned from the shelf.

  ‘It’s like an eggplant dip, and hummus is really nice too. Also check out the lamb kebab in pitta but make sure you order it with the chilli and sesame sauce, and don’t touch the mayonnaise.’

  Massey’s brow cleared. ‘Right,’ he said beaming, ‘splendid, thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘Hang on.’ He patted through the debris on the desk for a pen and scribbled a name on a piece of paper. ‘Look, take this … an acquaintance of mine. I can’t guarantee it, but it’s just possible he may be able to help you.’

  I want to see them starving,

  The so called working class

  Their wages weekly halving

  Their women stewing grass

  When I ride out each morning

  In one of my new suits

  I want to find them fawning

  To clean my car and boots.

  – Philip Larkin

  daniel

  It’s wrong to say that time is a great healer. It isn’t. What happens is that you get used to things. It’s a question of survival and to survive you adapt. Rory is only beginning to understand that now. 18 October 1999. The price of petrol rose, a BSE outbreak was confirmed in France, twins were born to a sexagenarian, and a lesser-known journalist went down under a bus.

  For over a year now, Rory’s been living in a state of arrested insanity and how much longer it might continue he has no clue. All points of reference are gone. How many ounces to the pound? How many weeks in the year? How many inches to the foot? Oh God, let someone push back the clock for him because nothing makes sense any more.

  Death results in isolation for the living and there are days when he must resolve to hang on until he returns to the safety of his own home, when it’s all he can do to keep his temper at bay, when he considers himself a danger to society at large and if the authorities only knew what kind of lunatic was roaming the street they’d have him whisked straight off to a secure unit before any damage was done. These are the days that induce much self-pity, but Rory can be excused from wallowing because ask anybody who knows about these things – grief can bend your knees. Grief can bring you down.

  As he sets off to the bakery where he buys his breakfast every morning he wonders whether people can actually see the fuse protruding from the cannonball that doubles up as his head – and if so, whether some mischievous child might do him a favour, take it upon themselves to light it then, cheers, it would all be over. On bad days he wonders why, on looking at his reflection in a mirror, he doesn’t see the actual iron ball or the hand grenade with its accompanying pin, but the face that stares back at him is always the same bland mask and he considers himself a tribute to that great English skill of hiding emotion. Having said that, it’s a bloody unreasonable way to live. If you’re blind, you get a white stick. If you’ve got a gammy leg you get a disabled sticker for parking on double yellow lines. A hand grenade for a head is a genuine disability and it would be easier if the general public were made aware of it. Perhaps he could start a trend – the lovesick could stitch a heart on their sleeve, the bitter, tape a soggy chip to their shoulder. If there were more obvious clues to why people behaved the way they did, the world would surely be a nicer place.

  Tomorrow it’s Rory’s thirty-eighth birthday but he feels ten thousand years old. His life has split in two and the chasm he’s slipped into has fundamentally changed him. Leaving aside the loss of his sense of humour, which both he and I are praying will return shortly, Rory, in his best moments, used to be someone who believed in love at first sight, who thought that the hole in the ozone layer might self-heal. Now fate has flipped him up and landed him wrong side down on the face of pessimism. It’s not that he doesn’t get angry, just that he feels he must restrain it; or that he doesn’t have passion, only that he feels he should conceal it. His irritability is taken out on things and events he can’t control, pigeons that shit on him or stupid phone operators. Only last week, infuriated by drunk party-goers repeatedly ordering a taxi from the phone box outside his window, he took an unloaded shotgun and told them if they didn’t bugger off, he’d blow their heads off. This was no solitary incident. Over the last year the list of people he’d like to kill has been endless and varied, and though gradually diminishing, still includes, for the record, most of his clients, all members of his immediate family, Alison his secretary and, very particularly, the lady in the bakery, who has persisted in asking him every day since the accident whether he’s feeling better.

  They find him surly, of course. A year ago he would have flirted with the baker lady good-naturedly, a year ago he would have flirted with the sticky bun had it been the good lady’s day off – Rory’s charm is natural and used to be applied indiscriminately. Now it is held strictly in reserve.

  He shovels a sausage roll into his mouth reflecting that today looks set to be one of those days. He’s just spent the night on the sofa, and on waking this morning found the channel changer wedged between his knees and the screen a buzzing pop art of black and white. He hates these endless nights. In his dreams I am laughing, full of life, always dancing away from him, out of reach while he can neither move nor speak. In these dreams it is Rory, not I, who is dead.

  maggie

  ‘The middle classes view us as profligate and idle, nothing short of money-grabbing buffoons hiding behind our family’s coat of arms…’

  ‘Wow.’ I pushed my glasses further up my nose and took a closer look. I was in the bowels of the BBC watching footage of an old aristocrat, and whoever had executed the camerawork for this piece of film had done a stunning job. You could almost see the spider veins on the man’s cheek pulsing with indignation.

  Massey’s acquaintance had put me in touch with a producer called Simon Brannigan who’d made a documentary about politicians’ wives. ‘Slaves to their Class’. Simon was a defensive left-winger with a media crew cut and a muscular intensity that hinted at daily gym workouts. He reminded me of an activist my mother hung out with for a while when I was a kid, who spent a disproportionate part of his day standing on his head against the wall.

  My mother was one of the original pioneer feminist filmmakers – and when I say pioneer, I’m not joking. Her devastating documentary about female circumcision in Somalia had strong men fainting at its Academy screening. Needless to say, it didn’t win, too controversial or maybe, as Mom always maintained, the board were guilty of anti-female bias.

  Simon Brannigan’s documentary was not exactly partisan itself, guilty of just about every kind of bias – class, wealth and gender – but it was also compulsive viewing. ‘I can’t get anyone to talk to me.’ I told him. ‘Where’s aristo.com when you need it. How did you get this kind of access?’

  ‘With great difficulty. Your problem is that you’re trying to set up a lot of people fast.’ He grimaced. ‘Don’t forget my film took two years to make. You’ve got to keep chiselling away … by the way, what is the thrust of your piece? What’s your hook?’

  The thrust of my piece. Massey had asked the same question.

  The thing was I wasn’t really sure.

  Were the English aristocracy a dying breed who after centuries of appalling behaviour were finally getting their comeuppance?

  I didn’t know, but probably.

  Was I sympathetic to the loss of their immense houses from death duties?

  Not particularly.

  Was I worried that they might forfeit the right to wear sharply tailored red jackets and tear foxes limb from limb?

  It wasn’t keeping me awake at night.

  Would this attitude endear me to the landed gentry?

  Well obviously not.

  ‘Though, funnily enough, what you just said…’ Brannigan was frowning.

  ‘What did I just say?’

  ‘Your quip about aristo.com.’ He tapp
ed his pencil against his forehead as though trying to dislodge some snippet of information. ‘I did hear, well apparently there is now some agency.’

  ‘There is?’ I said hopefully, feeling around in my pocket for a Kleenex. I’d managed to contract a really first-class cold since I’d arrived and had been begging Tylenol stand-ins and hot drinks off the long-suffering hotel staff for the last couple of days.

  ‘What you have to understand,’ Simon said, ‘is that these old farts are increasingly having to face the commercializing of their estates.’

  ‘Yeah right,’ I grinned. ‘Poor destitute things,’ The vast residence of Brannigan’s indignant peer had now filled the screen. ‘So what does this agency do?’

  ‘Takes advantage of just that. The guy who runs this business is supposedly brilliant at getting a foot through the door in return for cash or, in your case, a few million viewers who might—’

  ‘One day be paying tourists?’

  ‘Exactly, that’s about the gist of it.’

  ‘Great. So do you know how I get hold of this guy? What kind of set-up is he running?’

  ‘As I said, the agency wasn’t around when I made Slaves but I imagine he’s some new dot-com e-commerce wide boy who’s bought himself a well-cut suit, learnt his dukes from his earls and is now busy exploiting them both. And frankly,’ Simon looked at me and smiled broadly, ‘the very best of luck to him.’

  daniel

  Outside number eight Connelly Mews, a small street tucked discreetly into a corner of south west London, Rory trips over a bunch of cable lying on the cobbled ground. ‘Mind out,’ shouts the builder switching off his drill. He repositions a sign ‘Incorporating Stately Locations’ under the existing sign ‘R. L. Jones’ and moves aside to allow Rory to enter.

  * * *

  ‘Oh dear, you look terrible,’ Alison says.

  Rory grunts.

  ‘Nice cup of coffee?’

  ‘No thanks,’ Rory throws his jacket on the table.

  ‘How about tea? I’ve just heated the pot.’

  Rory shakes his head.

  ‘Breakfast? I could pop out.’

  Rory doesn’t bother to answer.

  Alison looks crestfallen. Twenty-six going on forty, Alison could almost be pretty if it wasn’t for the slight squint that made her appear as though she was permanently in bright sunlight. Alison is Rory’s ‘assistant’ for want of a better word and every morning she arrives early to open up the studio and tidy the place. Every morning she snaps the blinds, makes fresh coffee, sometimes she even puts flowers, bought out of her own pay cheque, into a vase on Rory’s desk but my little brother, in his current mode of self-pity has yet to notice these minor acts of worship. He has yet to really notice Alison at all, though with her placid brown eyes she reminds him vaguely of an orphaned heifer we once rescued as boys. We named her Ginger Rogers and bottle fed her for nearly two months. Every day we led her round the lake-field on a rope and scratched the velvety space between her ears. One Sunday about seven months later, Rory asked what we were having for lunch. ‘Ginger,’ my mother replied, her upbringing on the West Coast of Ireland having given her an entirely unsentimental outlook on life.

  ‘You’ve had four more calls,’ Alison says. ‘Lord Carnegie, the Marquess of Nanthaven, uh, your mother twice about her dry cleaning and…’ but as Rory takes the messages from her hand she feels the brush of his skin and it starts. Deep inside her the heat wells up, registering first as a tingling in her stomach then around her breasts. Gathering speed, it creeps up her neck before finally hitting her face full on. The colour that suffuses her cheeks can only be imagined because by the time she normally escapes to the loo to check in the mirror it has generally subsided.

  ‘And,’ she says shakily, ‘your ten o’clock appointment is a little bit…’

  ‘Cancelled?’ Rory says hopefully.

  Alison glances warningly towards the office door behind which the sound of muffled crying can be heard.

  ‘Upset,’ she says faintly and, as Rory turns, it takes all her strength of character not to remove the tiny piece of shaving tissue glued by blood to his neck. Instead she takes herself off to the bathroom and weeps three or four mascaraed tears before wiping them away in a practised manner with the palm of her hand.

  * * *

  In Rory’s office a couple in their late fifties perch upright on the tightly upholstered sofa. They look apprehensively to the door as it opens. The Penningtons both wear an identical expression, that of people who don’t deal with disappointments, but instead simply absorb them. They are reasonably new clients for the reasonably new business of Stately Locations. Rory took them on two months ago but since then, they’ve been to see him a staggering nine times. There’s not much to set them apart from Rory’s other clients – many of whom once represented the great names of England, but who are now lost individuals, virtual foreigners in their own country, and the journey that has brought them to Rory’s door is littered with death duties, bitter sacrifices, noblesse oblige and Lloyds. All Rory’s clients have different stories to tell, but their endings are identical and are faced with the same look of bewilderment, the same gentle sense of defeat. They’re all Penningtons, Rory’s clients, and in every Pennington, Rory sees our parents.

  ‘My boy, good to see you.’ Lord Pennington pushes himself to his feet and rings Rory’s hand. ‘You’re looking well.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Rory says, but he has decided the problem of these people must be faced head on.

  ‘Look, Lord Pennington, as I mentioned before, you really mustn’t trouble yourself coming in so often, I’d be more than happy to discuss potential bookings on the telephone.’

  ‘No trouble at all, dear boy,’ Lord Pennington says blithely, ‘I’m sure you’re far too busy to waste time telephoning clients all day long.’

  Rory grinds his teeth and stretches for a file on his desk which is, I note, strewn with sob story letters from ‘Venice in Peril’ and ‘Friends of Highgate Cemetery’ etc. It’s hard to believe Rory has become a soft touch for this sort of thing – but then let’s be honest, Rory views his life differently now – and this is just as well. These days he has inherited the role of eldest son and all the fun and games that go with it.

  ‘Right well. ITV are looking for a location for Middle-march,’ Rory reads from his file. ‘A couple from New Jersey will die happy if only they can sleep in a king’s bed. Apparently any old king will do … the splendidly loaded Mr and Mrs Lieberman from Palm Springs are interested in buying a title and are willing to pay really exciting amounts of money for it … and an American TV team are researching some icky Anglophilic piece.’

  The Penningtons bow their heads, predictably uncheered by Rory’s unique brand of sarcasm. ‘Dell computers are looking for somewhere to host a retreat.’ There’s no attempt to keep the boredom from Rory’s voice, ‘and finally some gossip magazine needs a ballroom in which to photograph a “quality” soap person.’

  He glances up. Until now he’s managed to avoid the ludicrous expression of misery on Lady Pennington’s face, which is taut with the effort of not crumpling.

  ‘Look,’ Rory relents, ‘I know it’s a nightmare having strangers in your home but…’ Rory tries in vain to dredge up the mitigating circumstances that have forced him to commit to this hellish job but finds himself at a loss.

  The truth is the business of Stately Locations has not panned out exactly as Rory foresaw. When conceived eight months ago in a reckless bid to help the parents, it made sense. People like the Penningtons desperately needed money if they were to keep their homes. In return interested parties with cash would be able to appreciate the history and beauty of some of England’s great houses, not normally open to the public. This notion proved depressingly naïve. The reality is that Stately Locations appeals to rich Americans prepared to pay for their slice of culture, or worse, scabby journalists intent on a scoop. Oh the business is lucrative all right, but it’s repellent.

  �
�It’s not that,’ Lord Pennington interrupts, ‘it’s … well … you see…’ He falls into an uncomfortable silence.

  ‘The thing is…’ Lady Pennington attempts to clear her personal puissance for the second time.

  I hope and pray with every fibre of my body she will not burst into tears. Last time the Penningtons came they brought with them an envelope of receipts. ‘Life is so costly,’ they said, ‘bills so high, capital almost gone.’ Tears had flowed, handkerchiefs had been wrung out. When Rory suggested they write down their major expenses it transpired they still had a cook, a chauffeur, a housekeeper and a butler. When he instructed them to fire three out of four, I thought the paramedics might have to be called.

  ‘We’ve tried to economize as you suggested. We got rid of the car,’ Lord Pennington finally gets it out, ‘oh … this is all so embarrassing,’ he hangs his head.

  ‘The thing is,’ Lady Pennington looks beseechingly at Rory, ‘taxis home have proved surprisingly expensive.’

  ‘But Lady Pennington,’ Rory is aghast, ‘home is over two hundred miles away.’

  ‘Yes, of course it is,’ she says, wide eyed, blinking rapidly, ‘but you said—’

  ‘When I suggested public transport, I had in mind uh,’ he looks at their uncomprehending faces, ‘well … uh … a coach.’

  Lord and Lady Pennington could not look more shocked had they just been informed of the second coming of the Lord.

  ‘A coach?’ they repeat blankly. It really is a revelation to them that this degree of cost cutting might exist.

  ‘Well, well.’ Lord Pennington gets to his feet. ‘What a weight off the old shoulders.’

  He grips Rory’s hand, ‘Always feel so much better after these little sessions, don’t we, my dear?’ He pats his wife clumsily on the shoulder. She, in turn, beams mistily at Rory.