by Stephen May
I think Dr Nate is about to argue. Dr Nate is the artist of the three, the visionary. He is proud of his craft and, like any artist, any craftsman, he wants to show the world. Dr Valerie and Dr Don, on the other hand, are understanding of my position.
‘Discretion . . .’ begins Dr Valerie.
‘Is our watchword,’ finishes Dr Don.
Dr Nate sighs, and to cheer him up I say, ‘Damn fine work. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.’ And, finally, he smiles. Which means the others smile too.
The thing is, it is beautiful. I’d never realised how much I’d hated losing my hair. I mean, I never did anything with it. Short back and sides as a kid, a bit spiky in the late seventies, a bit of Sun In in the 1980s. And that’s it. And my hair loss started early as if, depressed by my lack of any sign of tonsorial development, my hair lost interest in our partnership and began to leave the building.
Not like Russell’s. When he was a first-year student at the Poly his hair was long and spiked and black on top and the sides and blond with blue streaks at the back. Combine that with his very skinny, very white face with its long sharp nose, and he looked like a parrot. He looked ludicrous, but this was the era of ludicrous. Ludicrous ruled. It was the time of The Cure and The Bunnymen, of Kajagoogoo and A Flock of Seagulls. A time when hair was often worn vertical and Krazy Kolor was big. A time when fashion caught Psitticosis. When all the cool cats wanted to look like parrots.
Later, after uni, Russell seemed to travel back through all the ages of hair, moving from this parrot-gothic, through short punky hedgehog spines, to a brief flirtation with a Beatley moptop, then skipping back further towards rockabilly quiffs and flat-tops, before ending up with an artfully tousled grown-out crop suggestive of special ops forces in World War Two. The raffish look of one of the original SAS officers maybe, and that’s how he was wearing it on the day he died and so it’s what I have now too.
Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, the artistry of the three doctors and the sacrifice of Siggi of Iceland, my hair is back and better than it ever was. As I tease and twist it in the mirror, I can practically feel my testosterone count rising. Yes it’s fake, yes it’s absolutely, entirely inauthentic, but what does that mean, really? It means it’s even better than the real thing. Nearly everything good in this world is fake and inauthentic. And nearly everything truly horrible is natural. Microwaves good, smallpox bad. Music good, earthquakes a bit shit. Fake hair good, baldness crap.
Scarlett comes over. Tentatively, she pushes her hand through my new rug. Then she pulls. Then she tugs. Hard.
‘Ow,’ I say. ‘Ow, ow, ow.’
‘Ow,’ she says back. Out loud. This is a game she knows and likes. And then she laughs and almost, but not quite, manages to clap her hands. And then she says a whole sentence. Well, almost. ‘Oh, my actual god,’ she says.
Twenty-four
CATHERINE
What, Catherine wonders, would life have been like if she’d stayed working in the library? She’d liked it there at first. The Hildreth branch library where she’d worked was small and always packed.
People think that libraries are quiet places, but they’re not. They’re full all day every day with people looking for jobs, updating their CVs, or just sitting about flicking through the magazines while their children run around tagging each other between the stacks. Sometimes people even glance at the books. A library is the last public space where you can just sit and be without someone insisting you buy a flat white cappucino and a blueberry muffin.
She had quickly got to know all the regulars. Mr Stooks who read a western a day and whose wife read the same number of Mills and Boons. Catherine liked to imagine them side by side in bed, him galloping across the prairie closing in on the bad man in the black hat, while next to him but in another universe his wife swooned in the arms of a swarthy polo player.
Who else? Jade Feasey, all of eighteen, who looked like a right slapper with her microskirts and make-up, but quietly went through all the books relating to starting your own business. Mrs Denby who kept a goat in her garden. Mr Eagleton who was a Janes Fighting Ships obsessive and knew everything about the world’s navies. You wanted to avoid getting in a conversation with him. Mr Plantagenet who smelt of pot noodles. Mrs Welsummer who smelt of turds.
It was in the library in Hildreth that Catherine had come across her first writers’ group, not that she’d wanted to join one then. They’d frightened her a bit with their air of barely concealed competition. They would go into the little meeting room on a Wednesday night like poker players trying to look relaxed in the face of a big pot. They would smile and talk about houses, holidays, schools and grandchildren on the way in but there was the giveaway stiffness that betrayed how nervous and keyed-up they were. Catherine saw the same thing years later in soldiers before they went on patrol. The same little tells. For the squaddies the conversation was fanny and football but the tells were the same, the same tension running down the neck and across the shoulders. The same little twitches.
And the staff in Hildreth library were nice too. Three of them worked there more or less fulltime. Anna Knight who’d been there since the library was built; she’d been at the official unveiling on 5 February 1968 and never left. She was the manager when Catherine was there, sternly efficient but you could have a laugh with her when you got to know her. Nervy Bridget Dunkley with her breathless stories of her two handsome, brave and clever boys. It took Catherine several weeks to realise that her boys weren’t boys at all but dogs. Labradors with boys’ names: John the eldest and Paul the smartest. They were, Anna told her, named after the songwriters of The Beatles.
And there was the area manager who popped in once or twice a week. Ted Arnold spoke like he’d been to an English public school though he hadn’t. All the women in the libraries had a crush on Ted, even Catherine. Looking back, Catherine now thought she’d developed one just to fit in with the other two. He was fortyish, had been handsome once but was now going a bit squishy round the edges; still, there was something about him. Bridget said that it was because he had worried eyes; Catherine thought that yes, the eyes might have had something to do with it – the exact colour of chocolate buttons – but it was maybe that he asked questions. He asked about Bridget’s dogs, he asked about Anna’s old mother – ninety-two and going blind – and he asked Catherine about everything. Everything except the obvious. He didn’t ask about boyfriends, which everyone else she ever met was obsessed by. He used to talk to her about maybe taking the library exams and going to college and making it a career. He took her seriously and that – together with the sad eyes – was probably enough to make you the George Clooney of the Suffolk library service.
Maybe she could have wooed and won Ted Arnold. He would have been too old for her really, there would have been an enjoyable fuss about that. There might have been a honeymoon in Spain or Barbados and maybe a child. Maybe two. There would almost certainly have been a divorce – she was too young for it to last after all – but probably not for ten years or so. And you just knew Ted would have been decent about it. He wouldn’t have tried to hide from the CSA or anything.
She knows, however, that the library wouldn’t have been enough. Not even if she’d done as Ted suggested and become chartered or whatever – even if she might have finished writing a book. Surrounded by other people’s books, she would have been in a better position to finish her own, surely?
These days Catherine looks at other people and wonders what they would say or do if she were to lean into their space, right into their personal bubble, and say, ‘Hey, you know I could kill you with my bare hands.’ Probably they wouldn’t do anything. There were so many nutters around now. Probably they’d just smile uneasily and hope she went away. And now here she is flipping jogging, tailing a rich fuck just so she can cull him. Think of it as pest control, Tough’s words from back when she’d first started. Baby rabbits are cute but we kill them. We cull badgers, seals. We fucking eat little baby lambkins and w
hat have they ever done to us? And this guy is no rabbit, no badger, no seal, no little baby lambkin. The data says this guy is a monster. She just needs one clear shot. Then it’s done.
Twenty-five
NICKY
We try but we can’t get her to do it again, but we don’t mind really. Scarlett has proved that her silence can be overcome, that she might one day climb from the swampy grunts and snorts to the firmer country of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ and ‘Can I have a biscuit now?’ This is stuff we’ve hoped for all along, but having actual evidence – well, that’s huge. And it’s frustrating that for the minute she chooses to go back to the nods and the gurgles, but we’re not going to get too hung up on it.
The mood in the house is lighter, happier – pretty goddamn cheerful actually. Though of course from time to time I still seem to feel it watching me, whispering its snide jokes about me, its sly put-downs.
But, you know what? Fuck you house. I’m looking good, Sarah is looking good, and her Spanish accent is coming on leaps and bounds. And my records and my guitar have arrived from England (minus the three most valuable LPs of course). And one day we have sex Sarah and me. In fact we do it twice. Once in the evening and then again the next morning. That hasn’t happened for a while. And ‘by a while’ I mean literally months. And then, when I’m bringing in the post-coital tea, Sarah says we should have a proper chat about where and when we’re getting married.
I put the tea down carefully. And tell Sarah that I’m going for a run. I need to think.
‘I’m surprised you have the energy. I can hardly move.’
And it’s true, we did really go for it. We were like something you might see on RedTube. From nowhere we seemed to find our inner porn-star couple. I was the hard-bodied millionaire playboy, she was the lonely MILF next door. We put the new hair through its paces too. There was a lot of tugging at it from above. It passed the audition.
‘Linwood will be disappointed with me if I don’t keep up the programme.’
‘And we shouldn’t disappoint the architect,’ she yawns sleepily. ‘I’ve a lot to thank him for. Thanks for the seeing to. And the tea.’ And she turns on her side, pulls the covers up.
Yes, I need to think about this getting married business. When would be appropriate, for example? Surely even her mother, her sister and her mates would expect Sarah to wait a decent while before getting hitched to her late husband’s best friend?
I think about our last wedding. All our friends came. That is – all Sarah’s friends and Russell. And some blokes I sat close to at the council. It was OK I suppose. No one ever had to hold an empty glass. Everyone got shit-faced. Except for Sarah.
I remember other things: the amusing, surprisingly generous best man’s speech written for Russell – it turned out – by a former scriptwriter on Days Of Our Lives. Soundtracked by the crying of babies. The first dance. ‘Into The Mystic’. My semi-erection firming up romantically against the exciting bulge of Sarah’s baby bump. Later, all the men casting aside their thin grey jackets and knitted ties to be videoed by their wives, doing the Gangnam-style dance quite competitively to much standard-issue hilarity. Yeah, OK – but there was some Best Western hotel sadness to it all. And then there was the unspeakable shame of what Russell made me do at the stag night.
Mainly though, the very idea of another wedding makes me nervous, like we’re spitting in the eyes of all the gods. And I know this is ludicrous, not just because I don’t believe in gods, but because the fact of taking Russell’s fortune in the way we have would seem to be enough of an outrage to any godly sensibility already. We’re already in so deep, that the odd bit of marrying can’t do any further harm, can it? Especially as those non-existent godly eyes would surely think we’re still married in any case.
And I run, enjoying doing it on my own for once without feeling that I’m holding Linwood back. I stretch out, feeling my stride lengthen, my lungs open.
It was me that insisted on us getting married before, that lifetime ago when we became Mr and Mrs Fisher; Sarah wasn’t that fussed. She certainly wasn’t as keen as she is now.
But I get it. Or I think I do. Before, when we didn’t have much, then it was just a piece of paper. Purely symbolic. Now, of course, theoretically I’m free. As far as the world is concerned Sarah is merely the widow of Nicky Fisher, a status update which has netted her precisely £125,000 in life assurance (the exact sum I wired to Russell’s daughter, not that Sarah knows this), while I’m King of the Universe, able – again in theory – to not worry about the health and well-being of the widow Fisher or her daughter, Scarlett. As far as the world knows they are nothing to do with me. I could just disappear. Be a bachelor again. And one with my pockets full of spending loot.
But in fact that can’t happen. We’re yoked together for all time by our secret, Sarah and I. We’re in a classic state of mutually assured destruction. We have risen together, so we must fall together. If it goes tits up, it goes tits up for both of us.
So I worry that people will talk. And by people I mean the FT or The Wall Street Journal. Gossip rags like that. I can imagine the water-cooler conversations. And you say he’s married his high-school friend’s wife? Not a supermodel? Not a Finnish actress or a Vietnamese pop singer? Not the daughter of an oligarch? You’re telling me Russell Knox has eschewed the time-honoured right of the highest high-ballers and not gathered to himself the firmest-fleshed representatives of nubility, but instead married a forty-something lecturer in human resources?
Will people buy that? Will they let something as against nature as that go by without comment? Without digging around for the real scoop? Of course they won’t. Have you read Investors Chronicle lately? It’s like the National Enquirer or Chat. Prurient and obsessed with sex lives of the rich and reclusive.
We all know what the super-rich are like. And what they are like is super-predictable. The more money you have the more predictable you are. When rich men marry they carefully study the market and then select the most appropriate bride. And the most appropriate bride is one almost half their age. Read The Economist. They have an equation. The average multi-millionaire marries a women half his age plus seven years. This is a fact. So in real life Russell would be wanting to get hitched to a thirty-two-year-old. Anything else would look a bit weird.
Money buys you a lot of anonymity it’s true, but even if we could do it without any fuss, and do it somewhere so remote even the hardiest wedding photographer and most imaginative financial hack wouldn’t see us, well there’d still be paperwork. Forms to be filled in. Boxes to tick. If you’re going to get married you have to get into a waltz with the state, you can’t avoid it. Even the Kings of the Universe have to scrawl a name on a record somewhere, leave a paper trail.
And then there are Sarah’s mother and sisters. Her family has become a coven of psychotherapists. These days her mum or one of her sisters is on the phone every couple of hours wanting to know how she’s bearing up and when she’s coming back to dear old Albion. We’re not going to be able to sneak a sudden wedding past their radar.
And I must be beginning to think a little bit like a rich man, because it doesn’t take all that long for my thoughts to turn from marriage to divorce.
Being married to Russell Knox seems to really matter to Sarah. And somewhere, in the deepest most insecure part of my mind, I begin to wonder if getting hitched is, for Sarah, simply a necessary first stage on the way to getting divorced. Because that’s something else the rich do. They get divorced. A lot. A marriage for the rich is rarely for life. It might just be for Christmas, or a summer, or a long weekend even. In the country, where the rich hang out, marriage isn’t a sacrament, it’s an event like Henley or Glyndebourne. Something you go to because it’s what everyone does. And just as you might take milk thistle to minimise your post-event hangover, so you vaccinate yourself against the effects of divorce with legally watertight pre-nups. The rich are very keen to promote safe consummation.
During exercise things
seem to become clearer. Possibilities you hadn’t noticed before take hard shapes in your head. This clarity of thought, as much as the erections and the thrill of the six-pack in the mirror, is what keeps a person going through the hurt. And one of the well-documented effects of sudden wealth is a propensity towards paranoia, even towards those closest to you.
Especially towards them.
This all the more true where money and power are concerned. Think the Borgias, the Roman emperors, the Egyptian pharoahs. Think the Jacksons, think Lacoste. Think about the break up of any major rock band. Think, for that matter, of your own fucked-up kinfolk. Somewhere in your own family right now there are brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins and step-children scheming or feeling that they are being schemed against.
And so now I find myself thinking: if we were married for a year or two in California, and then Sarah went for a divorce, well, she’d get half of everything. More than half because of Scarlett. And she’d have her more than half legitimately. I couldn’t expose her, could I? Not without triggering disaster for myself.
I know we’ve discussed the possibility of getting caught and how sort of OK that would be, but now that it comes to it, I find I don’t actually want to do 10,000 hours practising my scales, even if it is in a low-security facility. In any case, I now think I could be wrong about the kind of time I’d serve. I think that maybe these days you do very hard time indeed for financial felonies. You don’t spend your time at the baby grand, instead you do ten to fifteen years being buggered senseless in Sing Sing.
