“Yes. Two, please,” I answered as she noisily located a jar of Gold Blend in one of the back cupboards. The kettle was already beginning its moan.
It was barely ten minutes later that Johnny emerged from the office carrying a handful of thin files. They were neatly kept and simply bound in soft plastic folders, each one holding no more than a dozen sheets of paper.
By then Mil had milked and sugared my instant coffee and presented it before me on the bar top. “Olga will be here by ten - five past at the latest. Mick will be here before quarter past. We’ll lock the door behind us, but you can always open it from the inside using the latch if you need to. Given what we saw when we arrived, I reckon you should stay put until the others come. We have to go now, but we’ll probably see you again later.”
And the two of them left. I heard the door shut and then the Lexus doors close. I heard the rattle of its starter, but nothing more because its engine noise was nothing against the backdrop of the nearby road. Suddenly everything seemed so quiet. I was alone, sitting at the foyer bar in Paradise, a cup of coffee quietly steaming its coils across the down-lighter beams that mottled the counter and suggested an hour somewhat earlier than nine in the morning. Around me all was dark in this windowless space, the shadows that denied the day imposing their own control of time. Mil’s watch had read 09:45 as she closed the outside door. I had a quarter of an hour to myself.
The quiet also suggested I be wary. Already I had suffered a near beating at the hands of Dan’s Army, a second courtesy of the green-and-white, a third from their combined forces and a potential fourth from the two bouncers that saved me. I was rescued, I reminded myself, by a pair of the most threatening heavies I have ever seen. With friends like them, who needs enemies? At least I was on the right side of them. If I fell from grace, however, there’s no doubt that they would be more efficient in their treatment of me than the disco crews.
But then, I was alone in Paradise. I had fifteen minutes. All forms of knowledge fascinate me. I could not resist. The door to the office was not quite closed. In his haste to make his meeting on time armed with the necessary files, Johnny had not quite pulled the door at the back of reception fully into its frame. A slight gap indicated to my mechanical awareness that a slim card could easily be inserted between door and jamb to spring the latch that I recalled was the only closure. Momentarily, I regretted leaving my wallet back in Rosie. The credit cards it contained would have suited the job well. But then thank goodness for beer-mats.
XXXXXXX, if my memory served me well, was Mick’s predictable seven digit code that opened the false panel door that hid the safe. I was somewhat surprised to find that the remote control keypad lay exposed on the desk, rather than locked away in a drawer. Perhaps, in his haste, Johnny had left it there by mistake. Or perhaps, and more likely, the whole operation had become blasé about security since it had paid off all possible serious threats.
Thus, just twenty seconds after leaving my stool at the foyer bar, I had the safe exposed. Sure enough, confirming my impression the first time I visited Paradise, the Chubb key for the mortise lock did live in its keyhole. The six digit code, XXXXXX, again Watson-like, had also not been changed and the heavy square door swung gently open with the merest tug at the brass handle.
I had needed only a further five seconds to complete the task. Just thirty seconds after leaving the bar, I stood in Mick’s office with the main secrecy of the operation of Paradise exposed before me.
There wasn’t much to see. There were the cash boxes you would expect in such an establishment, and next to them were a couple of cut-away cardboard boxes of files, all neatly stored and stacked, apparently colour coded in plastic folders. The organisation certainly did not suggest Mick’s slap-dash method. This clearly was a product of Olga’s hand.
Prominent because of their anonymity on the lower shelf were two cardboard boxes. They weren’t large. One was photocopier paper size and the second was just half as big. The flaps were unevenly interlocked, indicating that they had been opened and closed repeatedly and frequently. Here was something very much in use. I pulled up the flaps of the larger box and they came loose with almost no effort. A heavily used resource, I thought.
The moment my hand touched the contents I knew what I had found. The size, shape, plastic feel, thickness and rounded corners were unmistakable. I retrieved one of the specimens from the interior and held it up to the light. It was, of course, a maroon-backed, new and also quite blank passport, its front proclaiming the name of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I checked a few more of the hundred or so blank documents. They were not all the same, but they all conformed with the format required to proclaim an as yet unspecified identity from within the European Union.
Having restored the box and its contents to its original state, I checked the smaller carton. It too opened easily, its upper flaps also showing the diagonal creases of frequent use. Passports again, but this time with names, personal details and photographs, all new, all pristine, all perfectly laminated, all made out to young women, young beautiful women whose insistently alluring smiles belied the expected passport mug-shot. There were just four of them, bound neatly with a doubled elastic band, its green stretch having lightly depressed the still springy binding, so it had to be replaced in exactly the position I had found it.
I replaced all, checked for signs of disturbance and then closed the safe, locked its mortise and left the office, carefully closing the door behind me, thus betting that Johnny would not remember he had failed to close it completely. The investigation had taken just three minutes and my coffee still coiled its steam into the downlight. It was cool enough to sip now, however, and, as the taste of Nestlé granules laced with milk and sugar coated my mouth, I thought long and hard about The Castle and its upper room, with its photography equipment, laminators, desk-top publishers and professional quality printers. I also calculated quickly how much profit there might be in a two-euro laminated photo key ring sold to a tourist. I had to multiply that by several thousand to reach a figure I might reasonably imagine a young, fit and eligible young woman might pay for a new identity, new citizenship and a job she could do lying on her back at a couple of hundred an hour, fees that were no doubt earmarked for some considerable time to pay off the presumably cash-less initial investment.
“Hello, Mr Donkey,” said Olga as she closed the outer door behind her. “Johnny tell me you are here. Are you at home in Paradise?”
“Oh yes,” I said, pointing to the now cold, froth-dried coffee cup before me, the sight I had contemplated for almost a quarter of an hour. Personally, I much preferred the fulsome sight that this new entrant presented. Though she may have lacked the requisite wings, her angelic charm seemed perfectly placed in Paradise.
Sixteen
It was in one of the higher level literature courses - Donald reflects on the nature of stardom endowed by history. He questions the basis upon which the terms good and bad are applied. He implies that certain interested parties arrogate the right to define who are the good guys.
It was in one of the higher level literature courses, L552, A Hypocritical Dialectic Of Superficial Elitism In Twentieth Century Quality Fiction, where I first encountered the words that changed my life. Some might cite such an epiphany as evidence of the writer’s power, the artist’s ultimate and universal perspicacity. Being prouder than most, and a convinced believer that beauty is firmly rooted in the eyes of the beholder, at least in his politico-linguistic facility to magnify its virtue, I claim greater powers for both the imagination and insight of the reader. The twenty-two characters of “I think therefore I am,” could, after all, be typed by veritable tribes of chimpanzees, whether seated at a Remington’s mechanical qwerty or dancing before an iPod’s electronic touchpad. But the seven volume intellectual analysis of the context, consequence, completeness and compurgation of the idea that made the name of Kowalewsk
i, the otherwise obscure Austrian professor of philosophy, who might also by chance have perfected the potato dumpling, could only have been penned by a completely misguided moron. The status of genius that was later ascribed to the achievement was, of course, solely the product of subsequent acclaim by parties interested primarily in promoting their own esoteric critiques of his otherwise tediously inconsequential work.
If, however, our army of chimps had successfully typed, “I think I am Horatio Nelson, therefore I am Horatio Nelson,” we might have rightly and aptly applied Unsworth’s theory of multimodal semiotics to label them a bunch of apes. Most significant celebrities, that is those celebrities that are most noticed for being utterly inconsequential, on the other hand, would be applauded for their candour if they were to substitute Mickey Mouse for the admiral, though they might find themselves subject to breach of copyright litigation by certain identifiable commercial interests.
And thus, when in L552 the student body found itself struggling personfully with the hundred and fifty words ascribed by plan to analyses of the subtext of an essay entitled, “Inverted Class Consciousness As A Tool For Sub-plot Deconstruction: Discuss” I was led, by mere diversion, to explore. The words I discovered assisted immensely. They shot off the page in my direction, as if the writer, some thirty-five years beforehand and, indeed, even then describing a society and its relations that were not merely history, but also possibly fiction as well, had penned them specifically for my own personal consumption at that very moment, in that very place, within that specific context, as part of some fiendish plan to facilitate the interpretation of the future present. Here is what they said. “In human life, the individual ultimately dominates every situation, however disordered, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.” The aphorism seemed cut in stone, so utterly apposite it changed my view of life.
It was recollections of a famous discussion about the merits, demerits or otherwise of two apparently initial brothers that brought home the relevance, nay truth, of the above. The two names in question were, of course - and referred to yesterday explicitly by Mick Watson in Paradise - Messers A T Great and A T Hun.
History, that great summation of the currently summable, or, as one character once summarised, one furcal thing after another, has cast these two individuals as significant contributors, one for better and the other for worse. One, we are confidently told by the judgment of ages, was a psychopath, obsessed with violence, war, conquest and self-aggrandisement. The other, on the other hand, was pretty much the same. A T Great, a good guy on one side of the individual interpretation of history is a ghoulish fiend on the other. As Iskander, making him I T Great, he is the curse a mother uses to threaten an unruly child, “Behave or the bogey man will get you!” - and just look at what he used to do to little Persian boys!
A T Hun, on the other hand, is a universal bad boy. He got rid of the Romans, the literate, literary, latrined Latins to whom we owe everything we do not already owe to the Greeks and A T Great. Thus A T Hun’s individual contribution to history has been a paragon of the despicable, casting him as the vandal who wrecked all that was civil. His mate, T T Ostrogoth, clear relative of T T Manx, was just as culpable, but then he settled in Ravenna and revealed himself as quite civil in the end because he had paintings done to decorate his death, so we let him off.
Thus, as we applaud A T Great as he marches his massed men in files between the separated halves of a dead dog, we chastise the pig-tailed A T Hun, with his Viva Zapata moustache, because he sacked the remnants of Rome, themselves descendants of those who never raped a single Sabine Woman - it was all a lie.
Seventeen
Perhaps I got out of bed... - Don publicises Suzie’s new venture. He muses on Britishness and then suffers a fall. He makes several bad moves and finds his judgment at fault. He tries to affix posters to advertise The Castle. He ruins some new shoes while recycling glass and the purchase of a crucial spice destroys both the product of graphic design endeavour and the recently acquired method of fixing.
Perhaps I got out of bed on the wrong side. It was a phrase much used in our house during the time that Dulcie began her onslaught on her parents’ sensibilities. It signified one of those days when nothing progressed, when feet seemed inexorably attracted to mouths and stuck solid or were swallowed whole. Today has been such a day.
Not that I have attempted much. I sit now over my late morning coffee on a grey January morning. It’s too cold to sit out and the locals are all wearing wool jumpers and fur coats. The Brits, as ever, are parading along the prom in cut-away t-shirts and shorts, emblazoned with the names of American football teams, hotels where they’ve never stayed and resorts with which they may have identified televisually. Alternatively, they present the ideology of their chosen, nay adopted football identity via their participation in corporate merchandising. Meanwhile, three dreadlocked hippies, if such things still exist, are determinedly using the beach. The girl is swinging a pair of exercise weights around while the two blokes, having stretched a wire from a meeting point to a flagpole are trying to teach one another tightrope walking. There’s a man with a jackhammer just outside digging up the pavement. He is almost drowning the sound of the game-show on the bar’s tele.
Its first manifestation, this debunking in the wrong direction that has characterised my unsuccessful start to the day, was an unwise choice of footwear. Branded, well known and quite traditional, my new shoes of just a few months had stayed in the bottom of the cupboard, untouched since we arrived here. It’s a bit cooler today, I thought, not the day for flip-flops or pumps, despite my national identity’s requirement that I should maintain that the weather is always like it looks in the tour brochure. The new shoes seemed to shout their presence when the cupboard door swung open. On they went, along with a pair of socks, garments whose enclosing feel my feet have almost forgotten.
The soles of said shoes might function well on Kiddington’s cracked pavements, but on drizzle-dampened marble they are just a degree less than lethal. I went posterior over mammary as I turned the corner on the way to the bottle bank. Passers-by approached and seemed shocked until I cursed effusively in English, at which point they retired, presumably because what I had just illustrated was merely predictable behaviour for one of my nationality. A quick, angered delivery of ‘crepusculating Hades’ out loud identified Britishness and stilled all concern. I had, after all, also rattled a plastic bag that was obviously filled with alcohol empties. Luckily, both bag and bottles remained intact, as did I.
My next performance was at the bottle bank itself. A one litre brown beer remnant with a green label was, I thought, firmly grasped and directed towards the adequately-sized hole. But I was suddenly and randomly reminded of those slowly oscillating goose necks that used to come every year to Kiddington’s feast in October. You bought three balls for a tanner and attempted to lob them down the birds’ gullets. If you won, you got a goldfish in a little clear plastic bag. It would either die before the next morning or get washed down the kitchen sink plug hole when you changed its water. I used to win at least one each year. I could have taken to painting little fish by the side of the backyard steps as a token of every ichthyoidal life spent, just like American pilots used to decorate their fighters with counted Japanese flags in Hollywood war films, but I was too attached to the dears. My aim, because I loved my little fish, did improve and I became a dab hand at stuffing projectiles down moving goose throats at distance in order to win them. Imagine, therefore, my surprise, nay remorse, when my projected bottle missed the perfectly stationary gaping gap atop the green bottle bin.
It bounced off, of course. There followed one of those mind-stopping moments when the universe seems to pause around one. In the instant that my beer bottle stayed airborne, my mind’s eye saw it hurtle to earth and smash to lethal shards at my feet. Not only that, my conscience was already planning how I might undo my misdemeanour, already trying to imagine where, for
instance, a foreigner with inadequate vocabulary might beg a dustpan and brush. I had even registered the nearby Punslet Bar, run by Alice and Geoff, offering a Yorkshire welcome, real Bisto gravy and Super League on Sky, as a potential source of assistance.
But then, day of days, the bottle hit the ground and bounced, rolled, and then bounced again as it found the kerb edge. Initial relief at the lack of broken glass was immediately tempered by the sight of my glochideous container sinking into a deep muddy puddle where last night’s rain had accumulated to fill a taped-off hole within an unfinished drain reconstruction project. I, of course, chased it, thinking I could retrieve my precious rubbish and dispose of it correctly, responsibly, in the environmentally sensitive manner demanded by the kind of twenty-first century citizenship that is only to be encouraged amongst the world’s population, let alone the planet Zog! In I went, immediately ankle deep, to successfully grasp the now slippery article at the second attempt. On lifting, it immediately began to glug and spew out its newly acquired orange colloidal contents. It was when I proudly rammed it into the bottle bank’s goose mouth that I looked down to see a pair of new shoes that were suddenly and distinctly no longer new. Expletives, I uttered, as I flung with some considerable frustrated force the rest of my bag of bottles into the void beyond the round black hole.
What I began to realise as each one found its rest was that not one of them broke. There was no glassy splash, only bumping bounce. I was tempted to lift the whole thing up, empty out the contents and then ram them all back in on the grounds that it was beyond the laws of probability for not one of them to have broken. I thought better of it.
Thus sodden-footed, I could now start to distribute the carrier bag full of posters and fliers that Phil Matthews and Karen had printed. I had left Rosie that morning with that promotional task as my main objective: the foray to the bottle bank was supposed to be no more than a sideline. The material aimed to advertise The Ribthwaite Castle’s new management - Suzie’s new management - and thereby drum up interest in its reinvention amongst the package tourists.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 18
