by Stephen May
It feels good to be embraced though, Jez’s wiry frame feeling strong through the battered leather jacket.
But that’s enough of that.
‘Let’s go grab a coffee,’ she says.
‘Oh, right.’
And she knows he is disappointed not to be getting inside the flat, but she can’t quite remember what she’s left lying about. She doesn’t think there is anything too incriminating, but it’d be demeaning to be running around collecting stray underwear from the sofa just because the Fuckweasel was in the building.
They walk in silence for a minute or two and then, of course, begin to speak at the same moment. They both stop. There is a good deal of after you-ing and you first-ing, and, again, Lorna feels irritated. The Jez she had first got to know in The Vesuvio all those months ago, well, he would have just talked over her, wouldn’t he? What had happened to that bloke? She definitely preferred that bloke.
She stays quiet and lets him talk and he just asks how she’s been, and of course she’s been fine, just fine. He says he’s been worried because she hasn’t replied to his texts.
‘And you moved,’ he says accusingly.
‘I did. How did you find where I lived?’
Jez shrugs. ‘There’s an app.’
‘Of course, there’s always an app.’
And as they walk, Jez fills the growing silence by pointing out all the more interesting plants and shrubs, including fruit trees.
‘I’ve actually done a map, a trail that shows all the places where you can pick edible stuff in Berkeley. You know, so people can eat for free.’
Now, that is a surprisingly interesting and useful thing for him to have done. Oh God.
And then they are in the Guerrilla Cafe and he looks at her and she looks at him and they both smile and she feels some of the old chemistry mixing in the air around them. A sort of penumbra of sparkle. Anyone looking over might think what a good-looking couple, what a handsome pair. Her so blonde and him so dark, and both of them so raggedy-stylish. People might think they looked like a young Anita Pallenberg and a young Keith Richards. Or a young Courtney and Kurt. Doomed lovers in a moment of grace in a coffee shop.
So she smiles warmly at him now, and takes his hand and says, ‘So tell me, what have you done with the body?’
And he starts. ‘What?’
‘I mean, where is the real Jez? Because you have to be some kind of replicant what with the flowers, the hunter-gatherer trail and all this polite enquiring after my health and everything.’
‘Oh.’ He relaxes and smiles again. Shit, that is one damn heartbreaking smile. They stir coffee in silence and if he had just sat there a bit longer, looking vulnerable and tired and in need of a good meal . . . If he had let the tension build and then finally just taken her hand and said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ then she might have gone with him back to the apartment and ignored the clothes and the mess. She might have shooed Armitage Shanks off the three-week-old sheets on her bed and done it with him. Yes, she might well have done that.
Only Jez blows it. Blows it by crying. No man ever got a woman to go to bed with him by crying.
It isn’t a pretty thing to see. His face sort of melts and it is all very snotty and gulpy and really quite noisy too. Not Keith Richards now. Not Kurt Cobain.
He is trying to be quiet but not very successfully and Lorna has to ask a waitress for a hankie. The waitress looks at her like she’s a cretin, and then takes in Jez’s collapsing, waxy face and liquid breaths and looks her up and down, as if unbelieving that Lorna could be responsible for such distress, and she asks her if she means a Kleenex.
‘Yes, a Kleenex. Whatever.’
It’s probably less than a minute before Jez gets himself together. Fifty-five seconds or so, while she wishes she were somewhere – anywhere – else. Fifty-five seconds spent looking over his trembling head and shaking shoulders, staring out of the window of the cafe, at the people strolling in the sun. Students smiling, holding hands, dawdling, enjoying the fact that they are the beautiful, chosen ones. Except for the dude picking up soda cans and putting them in his trolley. He isn’t beautiful, and he hasn’t been chosen for anything good. He hasn’t made the team. He has plastic bags for shoes. String for a belt. Maybe he was beautiful once. Maybe he was jogging along, keeping up with the pack in the fun run of life and he tripped and that was it. Couldn’t get up and everyone else just kept right on going, right over the top of him.
And towards the end of those fifty-five seconds Lorna sees her dad.
Of course, she doesn’t actually know it’s her dad right away. For several of those long seconds it’s just some guy, some reasonably handsome middle-aged guy, but while Jez wipes his eyes with his hands and blows his nose on the Kleenex, the conviction takes hold that it’s him.
He is looking hard into the window of the Guerrilla Cafe. Staring right at her. And she meets his eye, wondering where she’s seen this guy before. And then she remembers the photo her mum showed her, the one taken while her dad and his mate were travelling in Europe the year she was born. Two boys. Kids. Arms around one another’s slim bodies, raggedy T-shirts, lean faces beneath spiky hair, laughing into the lens. Venice or Prague or Paris or somewhere behind them.
He hasn’t even changed that much. Looks in great shape. Still slim, hair cropped but slightly spiky, quite funky for a fifty-year-old. A silver fox, like a proper dad. Like the ones you see in the soaps and the movies.
What she should have done was run outside and say, ‘What are you staring at, buster?’ and she’d have known for sure then, but she’s paralysed, glued to her chair. And Jez is reaching for her hand and muttering that he is sorry, so, so sorry. And she mutters back, saying that he shouldn’t worry, there is no need to be sorry, even while she’s looking over his bowed head and defeated shoulders. And the bloke outside, her dad – her possible dad anyway – nods to her and turns away from the cafe window.
And now is the time. She stands up suddenly, upsetting her coffee and snatches her hand away from Jez’s and moves to catch up with possible dad. Their table is quite near to the door, but she has to struggle past some chairs with purses hung over the backs of them, and it slows her up. Even so it can’t be more than a few seconds until she is pulling open the door of the Guerrilla and looking down the street and shouting, ‘Hey! Hey!’ but he’s gone already.
She runs a few yards down the way he went, but he could have ducked down a side street, he could be in any one of these little shops. He could, in fact, have been a figment of an overheated imagination. Already she is embarrassed, wondering if he wasn’t just some random dude. A mentally ill bloke maybe, though in her experience mentally ill blokes don’t look like TV dads. Then again, neither did most dads. Most real dads looked too tired and sad to get anywhere near TV standard.
She heads back into the cafe. Chairs make an irritable scrape as they inch forward again. Girls with swishy, caramel hair and fresh butterscotch complexions purse their plump lips, annoyed, and suddenly look like their mothers.
Jez seems to have got himself together, but he’s looked better. A red nose is not really a good look for him. Would Jack Kerouac have wept in public over a bird? Would Jim Morrison?
The waitress comes over with a rank cloth. ‘Here, you’ll need this,’ she says. Lorna looks at her, looks at the cloth. Doesn’t say anything.
‘I’ll do it,’ says Jez and he takes the rag. The waitress swivels on her Converses. Lorna remains standing while Jez gets on his knees and mops up the spilt coffee. And then he wipes the table with the same filthy cloth.
And finally they sit again and she has to listen while he tells her how he can’t sleep, can’t eat, how he thinks about her all the time, how every song he listens to now seems to be about her, how he realises that she is the one, that he has just been scared of the strength of his own feelings, that he hasn’t felt this way since . . . well, for a long time, and that he has actually started writing poetry about her. Of course it’s probab
ly not very good. And he tries to smile, but it doesn’t quite work. This smile doesn’t come anywhere near breaking her heart.
And when he’s finished, Lorna tells him that he is very sweet and everything but that she thinks they should probably just drift.
Which is when Jez stands and throws his coffee in her face. It isn’t quite a full cup and it’s cold anyway, but still a shock.
‘You fucking heartless bitch,’ says Jez. ‘But don’t worry, Lorna, you’ll get yours.’ And he spits out her name – like it’s a mortal insult. Like it’s something rotten in his mouth. He looks at her for a hard moment. His face slightly pink, that ruby nose dripping. His mouth twisted. She can’t think of anything to say. He turns to leave.
And he then has to do the negotiation past the other customers and their purses, and they tut and look like their mothers again, and the chairs squawk and it all spoils the effect of his storming out somewhat.
Now the waitress comes over with another Kleenex and says that’s seven dollars ninety. Eight dollars nearly for two cups of coffee, one of which went on the floor and the other in her face.
Lorna leaves a twenty-dollar tip on her table, even though she doubts the waitress will pick up on the sarcasm. Those were, thinks Lorna, bloody expensive tissues in the end.
When she gets home Armitage Shanks is waiting for her just inside the door. First thing she does is toss the flowers out onto the sidewalk.
‘Sometimes, Armitage my boy, ambrosiac can still be foul, can still be nauseous. Mr Zwaardemaker didn’t think of that, did he?’ And she thinks that if, God forbid, Armitage Shanks is ever knocked down by a motor, then her next cat might be called Zwaardemaker.
And even though things have been a bit weird between them recently, she wishes Megan was home. She could do with some of her funny little ways right now.
Thirty-five
CATHERINE
If you asked her when and where she was happiest, she would think for a while and then she would probably say the time they went to Grettislaug, Iceland in 2004. In other words the day she spent with Tough in a natural hot tub in the first weeks of this job.
No one knew about Iceland then, how the economy was going to go down the toilet. Except Tough. He explained it as they sat naked in the volcanic hot spring looking beyond the snow-covered turf huts to the Arctic Ocean as it fizzed and foamed against the frigid scorn of the wind.
It wasn’t just greed, he said. And it wasn’t just about Iceland – it was the same with all these small countries on the edge of things, places where for a thousand years it has been a struggle just to get enough to eat. Thing is, now, somehow, they feel rich. Iceland, Ireland, Greece. They are like neglected, deprived foster kids who have found a bag of used twenties. They are going straight to the sweetie shop to spend it all on dolly mixtures and Mars bars. Of course they are. And they are not really caring too much whose twenties they are, who the bag really belongs to.
‘And it turns out it’s our bag,’ Tough said, stretching so she could see all the long muscles of his arms, ‘and it contains all our food money, all our mortgage money, the money that was going to put our kids through college.’
‘So that’s what we’re here for? To get our bag back?’
‘After a fashion,’ said Tough.
And they stayed like that for a while. Just sitting there, not saying anything. It was hard to get your head round the fact that the water, as hot as a hotel bath, never ever cooled while all around a thin layer of snow lay over everything, making everything look pristine like the old Norse Gods have got out the tablecloth they reserve for best.
And Tough told her the story of Grettir, an Icelandic warrior who got into scrapes. Occasionally he was heroic, defeating the undead for example. The original zombie slayer. Or he was saving villages from weird and gruesome monsters, Beowulf style. At other times he was just a yob. His temper getting him into serious bother with the authorities. He was always going too far in bar fights, that kind of thing. Glasses got smashed, pubs got trashed, innocent bystanders ended up a tiny bit dead. He got a bit wasted on super-strength mead and took an axe to people he thought were looking at him a bit funny. Or he burned down the houses of people who disrespected him – while the owners were inside. With their children.
Catherine knew the type. She was always having to pepper spray them in her time in the military police.
‘Eventually they declare him an outlaw, which means anyone can kill him without legal penalty.’
Anyway, there are various adventures and then, after twenty years, he’s chased to Drangey. ‘Which you can just see today.’ Tough pointed at a clenched fist of black rock punching its way out of the water on the horizon. ‘And his enemies think he’ll die there because he’s wounded and there is nothing to give him comfort – no food, no shelter. Only, being actually, you know, a hero, he swims the whole nine-mile stretch between there and here and – nearly dead – manages to revive himself in this very pool.’
Catherine raised herself up a little on the stone bench that ran around the edge of the pool, a bench worn smooth by centuries of bums. It made her smile. She felt the exhilarating tattoo of fresh Arctic air on her bare shoulders.
Such a strange country, Iceland. She wondered if she could live here. Not in Reykjavik, that reminded her too much of Ipswich oddly, but out here where it looked like the surface of the moon, where the wind still sang of trolls and the bad-tempered heroes that fought them. And where you could sit in the exact same place where generations of Vikings had sat, looking at the exact same lunatic landscape they saw.
And Tough and Catherine stayed there in that water that didn’t cool, under the sky that didn’t darken and talked of their childhoods and the different ways in which their fathers and mothers are mad – because all fathers and mothers are mad in their own way. They talked of the blind, unthinking cruelties of school, because all schools are cruel. And when they did finally get out of the pool, unselfconsciously naked with each other as they towelled down briskly, they shared strong black coffee from Tough’s flask – the one that had survived the bullets and the shrapnel of every peace-keeping mission from the Lebanon to Sarajevo.
And late that night, they drove through dusk back into Saudarkrokur. This was Iceland’s eleventh biggest town and basically a single street of punch-drunk houses, homes bullied the year round by weather but refusing to ever quite give up or give in. Refusing to go down.
They walked into the bar like characters from a bad old joke, where Tough ordered two Irish whiskies. It took minutes for the word to spread that there were Irish in town and it did no good for Tough and Catherine to protest that they were from Kent and Suffolk respectively. The people in the Sportbar just wouldn’t hear it. They wanted them to be properly Irish. They wanted craic and they wanted it immediately. The people of Saudarkrokur wanted storytellers and poets in their bar. They wanted singers and fighters and wisecracking charmers, and Catherine watched as Tough gave them all that. He told jokes, he bought drinks, he beat the locals at pool, he flirted with their girlfriends, he got into a ruck, then accepted a drink from the guy he laid flat out on the floor.
He got up and sang a beautiful lament for the auld country. A song in the ancient tongue of the Celts that filled the whole bar with an ache for the things that they have loved and lost and will never see again. Tough made sure no one in the Sportsbar would forget them.
All Catherine had to do was drink and laugh and slap the face of a twat that groped her arse. And then accept another drink off him. ‘No hard feelings?’ he said anxiously. He must be six foot six, with a massive nose and a funny eye. Catherine felt sorry for him.
And in the early hours of the morning with the party still going on, and with no sleep and with Tough surely many times over the limit, they started back through dusk towards Reykjavik.
Catherine asked how he knew Irish and Tough looked at her and said, ‘You mean the song? That was Georgian. Who was going to know though, eh?’
And they drove through the Elvish mists and whispers of Iceland, the rumours of ancient steam, listening to disco hits of the seventies because, bizarrely, that is what Tough insisted on. That landscape, that music, it was an unsettling clash, but it worked somehow.
Catherine dozed and, as they approached the city, Tough ran through it all again.
They were going to do a piece of work on a guy who had four daughters aged between eight and eighteen. He wasn’t a bad man either. He’d done nothing illegal. He was kind. Everyone said so. He was a good dad. He was a senior guy at a bank. Had worked there twenty years. He was a governor at the local elementary school, he was in the amateur dramatic group, the men’s choir.
But if they didn’t do this work then hundreds of thousands of British jobs would go, children would go hungry, or be forced to eat supermarket ready-meals made of donkey eyelids. Transplant operations would be postponed or cancelled.
And the effects would hit the Third World too. No one would be buying trinkets from India or Africa, no one would be going on holiday, the international development budget would have to be cut. And if that happened babies would sicken and die. Millions of them maybe. All those potential doctors, lawyers, teachers, actors, pop stars. All those possible Mandelas, all those tiny Gandhis. All of them starving to death. Flies crawling on their eyeballs. We’ve all seen the pictures.
This was the hard choice. One wife, four crying children, versus suffering and misery for millions. No choice at all really.
‘I know, Tough, I know. I’m OK.’
‘’Course you are. Maybe I’m just reassuring myself.’
They made it look like a freak accident. Einar Jonsson went out for his regular early morning jog, when he stumbled over a fallen power line that was still live. At least the police were able to tell his brave and dignified wife that he died instantly and painlessly.
