1998 - Armadillo

by William Boyd

  “Well, not everybody. Two-thirds of us don’t.”

  “Rubbish. All smoking statistics are lies, I tell you, Lorimer. Every government in the world lies about them, they have to. Smoking’s on the increase worldwide and it suits them fine, though they daren’t admit it. So they routinely churn out these figures. But take a look around you.”

  “You’re probably right,” Lorimer conceded. True enough, of the fifty or so people in El Hombre Guapo, ninety-eight per cent were smoking and the other two per cent looked like they were about to smoke any minute, rummaging in pockets and handbags for their cigarettes.

  “How was your day?” Torquil asked, lighting up himself. “I hope it was more exciting than mine.”

  “Same old stuff.”

  “What?”

  “SAME OLD STUFF!” Lorimer raised his voice to a half-shout. Everyone was obliged to talk louder in order to be heard above the music.

  “I tell you, Lorimer, if it wasn’t for the money I’d be out of this game in a shot.”

  Torquil ordered another whisky and a plate oicroquetas which he proceeded to eat one after the other in rapid order, offering none to Lorimer.

  “No sups for Torquil,” he said, leaning close. “Binnie’s with her ma and pa.”

  “Binnie?”

  “My darling wife.”

  “In Gloucestershire?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Kids with her?”

  “They’re all away at school, thank Christ.”

  “I thought your youngest was seven.”

  “He is. He’s at a prep school near Ascot. But he comes home at weekends.”

  “Oh, fine.”

  “Well, it’s not fine actually.” Torquil frowned. “It sort of unsettles him. Started wetting his bed. Not fitting in. I keep telling Binnie it’s all this coming home at weekends. He doesn’t want to go back, you see. I say he should stick it out.”

  Lorimer looked at his watch. “Well, I should be—”

  “There she is.”

  Lorimer turned to see a young girl in her early twenties, wearing a suede coat buttoned up to her neck, pushing her way cautiously through the raucous crowd. She had thin sandy hair and heavily made-up eyes. She looked vaguely familiar.

  “Lorimer, this is Irina. Irina, young Lorimer, m’colleague.”

  Lorimer shook her weak hand, trying not to stare as he sought to place her. Then he had it: the waitress from Cholmondley’s.

  “You remember Lorimer, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t think. How are you?”

  Torquil ignored her and turned away to order her a beer while Lorimer reminded her of their first meeting and asked a few polite questions. It turned out Irina was Russian, over here studying music. She said Torquil had assured her he could help with her work-permit application. She accepted one of Torquil’s cigarettes and dipped her head to have it lit. She plumed smoke at the ceiling and held the cigarette awkwardly, her beer bottle in the other hand. Lorimer felt her melancholy soul reach out to encircle him. Then she said something but neither of them could hear.

  “What?”

  “I say this is nice place,” she yelled. “Where is ladies’ room?”

  She edged off in search of it and Torquil watched her go, before smirking at Lorimer, and leaning forward to put his mouth uncomfortably close to Lorimer’s ear.

  “I thought I’d been a bit grumpy at lunch,” Torquil explained. “So I went back the other day to apologize, asked if I could buy her a drink. She’s a flautist, apparently. Firm, pliable lips I should imagine.”

  “She seems nice. Something intrinsically sad about her, I feel.”

  “Bullshit. Listen, Lorimer, you wouldn’t mind sort of buggering off now, would you? I think I’ve done the decent thing. I’ll say you were called away.”

  “Got to go, as it is.”

  Relief propelled him out of the bar but Torquil caught him at the door.

  “Almost forgot,” he said. “What’re you doing next weekend? Come to dinner, Saturday, stay the night. And bring your golf clubs.”

  “I don’t play golf. Look, I—”

  “I’ll get the Binns to drop you a line with the details. Not far away, Hertfordshire.” He slapped Lorimer affectionately on the shoulder and pushed his way back to the bar, where Irina was now waiting, shrugging herself out of her suede coat. Under the bluey lights of El Hombre Guapo Lorimer glimpsed pale arms and pale shoulders, white as salt.

  Chapter 6

  That night he slept, even by his reduced standards, badly. Alan had told him he was alone in the Institute and normally that information helped. Also, following Alan’s instructions, he had pondered lengthily on Gerard de Nerval’s fraught and difficult life but his mind refused to obey, dithering skittishly between images of Flavia Malinverno and the prospective adjust at Gale-Harlequin. He forced his mind back to poor tormented Gerard and his hopeless love for Jenny Colon, the actress. De Nerval had hung himself one freezing winter’s night—the 25th January 1855. Now that was the sort of fact one read in a biography with little pause, unless you had seen a hanged man yourself. Mr Dupree, Gerard de Nerval. Rue de la Vieille Lanterne, hung himself on some railings, apparently…Jenny Colon broke off with de Nerval and married a flautist. Irina was a flautist…Were these coincidences or signs? Subtle parallels…There was a photograph by Nadar of de Nerval at the end of his life—he’d never seen such a wrecked, ravaged face…visage burine, the French called it, a whole lifetime of grief and mental anguish etched there…He must have slept at some stage because he did dream…he dreamt about Flavia and Kenneth Rintoul. It was Rintoul who was waiting, dishevelled and glum, at his dinky mews house, Rintoul who ran to embrace Flavia…

  Lorimer had woken and had dutifully jotted the facts down in the dream diary by the bed. Then he had dozed and drifted for a while, his mind intermittently involved with pragmatic details of his work, wondering whether to spend more time backgrounding Gale-Harlequin or simply to march in and play it by ear. At around 4.30 a.m. he made himself a strong cup of tea—two tea bags, a three-minute steep and somehow managed an hour of dreamless slumber.

  “Just the one dream,” Alan said to him later that morning, disappointment heavy in his voice.

  “I’ve got a lot on my mind,” Lorimer protested. “You’re lucky I slept at all, lucky to have anything. Jesus.”

  “This fellow,” Alan looked at the dream diary, “Rintoul. You don’t like him ?”

  “Well, he doesn’t like me. He threatened to kill me.”

  “Interesting. But you couldn’t eradicate him from the dream, this nemesis-figure ?”

  “It wasn’t a lucid dream, Alan.”

  “What about the girl? Do you know her?”

  “I’ve seen her in a taxi. She’s in a TV ad. I found out her name.”

  “You couldn’t sexually interpose yourself in this dream?”

  “It wasn’t a lucid dream, Alan. The last thing I want to see is this Kenneth Rintoul bloke with this Flavia Malinverno girl in his arms.”

  “Damn. Damn and shit. These are promising ingredients, Lorimer. Next time concentrate on them.”

  “I gave de Nerval a whirl, like you said.”

  “Leave Gerard on the sub’s bench, next time around. Next time I want you to fantasize about this girl. Strong sexual fantasies, as perverse as you like. Can you come in tonight?”

  Lorimer said no. He was beginning to have his doubts about Alan’s lucid dream programme. It had all sounded fine initially but now it seemed not to be helping him at all. Light sleepers, Alan claimed, had fifty per cent more lucid dreams than ordinary people and claimed further that in the machinations of the lucid dream the way it was controlled and influenced by the dreamer—lay the solution to one’s sleep disorder. But at this juncture the theory grew a little vague, links in the causal chain sundered, and Lorimer ceased to understand what Alan was talking about, the jargon was too opaque. What was more irritating was that, after six weeks of participation in the Insti
tute’s programme, it was ever more clear to Lorimer that the dream segment of the research, rather than the curative outcome, most intrigued Dr Kenbarry.

  “You don’t really care if I ever sleep normally, do you?” Lorimer accused him as they walked downstairs to the entrance.

  “Nonsense,” Alan said, emphatically. “If you don’t end up sleeping normally my work is worthless, that’s the whole point.”

  His breezy confidence was encouraging and Lorimer felt a little flutter of hope shiver through him as they walked through the building. Corridors were being swept and polished and the air was loud with the plaintive hum of industrial machinery. There was also a fresh smell of mass catering emanating from some canteen or cafeteria and the day’s first sleepy, lank-haired students were assembling wordlessly by the revolving doors, swigging sugary colas from two-litre bottles, patiently rolling their thin fags.

  “How can you be so sure this is working, Alan?” Lorimer said, scepticism returning again. “Because I’m not sure, not sure at all.”

  “I can see the signs,” he said, cryptically. “You’re my best light sleeper ever, Lorimer. Seven bona-fide lucid dreams in five weeks.”

  “Six.”

  “Six weeks already? Don’t let me down, son. Don’t quit while you’re ahead.”

  “Yeah, but I—”

  “Once I work out your lucid dream triggers, you’ll be laughing. Physician heal thyself, sort of thing.” He smiled. “Come back soon, we’re on the verge of great things, my child. Mind how you go.”

  It was an abnormally dark morning, the mass of cloud seemed to have settled, still and unmoving, about fifty feet above the surrooftops. It did not threaten snow or rain but the light was absurdly feeble for the time of day, tired and puny, greying everything it touched. Perhaps he was suffering from Solar DeSyndrome, or S A D—Seasonal Absence Deficiency or whatever it was called, Lorimer thought, easing himself into his car.

  Perhaps he should sit for an hour in front of a high-wattage light bulb as, reputedly, melancholy Scandinavians did to revive themfrom their hibernal torpor, a blast of ultra-violet dispelling their winter blues?…At least it wasn’t raining.

  As he drove back to Pimlico—up Church Street and Creek Road, crossing the river at Tower Bridge and on to Lower Thames Street, across Parliament Square to Vauxhall Bridge Road he wondered again about the credibility and validity of Alan’s programme. True, it was highly, not to say impressively, funded: the sleep lab and the monitoring machines had all been paid for by a Department of Education research fund and Alan had two postgraduate assistants logging and collating the data as well as a contract from a university press for the eventual book—Timor Mortis: The Lucid Dream Phenomenon (working title). There were even whispered hints of a television documentary. Yet Lorimer still could not rid himself of this feeling of aggrievedness: for Alan he was simply an interesting specimen, an exemplary set of symptoms. He felt as he imagined rats in a psychiatrist’s maze might feel, or Pavlov’s salivating pooches, or a chimp being soused with perfumes and aftershave. Frankly, Alan did not really care about his troubled nights, in fact as far as he was concerned the more troubled the better.

  At the front door in Lupus Crescent a thin black man with waist-length dreadlocks, thick as coaxial cables, was talking animatedly to Lady Haigh. He was introduced as Nigel—the Santafurian from number 20, Lorimer surmised, the mulch-provider. Lady Haigh said she was considering an herbaceous border and Nigel knew where to lay his hands on some excellent compost. Nigel, it turned out, worked for the Westminster Council’s Parks Department, tending Pimlico’s few forgotten squares—Eccleston, Warwick, St George’s, Vincent—its floral roundabouts and roadside plantations. He seemed amiable enough, Lorimer thought, as he clambered up the stairs to his flat, realizing that he really should quell his instant suspicion of all those who worked for municipal parks departments. It was unjust: one rotten apple did not spoil the whole barrel, not every local authority gardener was like Sinbad Fingleton, after all.

  54. The House at Croy. I went to Scotland to escape, to be alone and, I suppose, as convention dictates, to find myself. All I knew, after I left school, was that I had to go far away, far from Fulham and the family Blocj. So I sought out the most distant institution of higher education in the land that offered a course I was qualified to take and, after some research, decided that the North Caledonia Institute of Science and Technology provided me with the perfect geographical and academic conditions I required. I took the train north and travelled eagerly six hundred miles to the neat and tidy city of Inverness, with its castle, its cathedral and its clear, shallow river and the enfolding purple hills beyond. It was, for a while, everything I had asked for.

  Host my virginity in my second term at college to Joyce McKimmie, a mature student (mid-twenties) who sat in on some of the art history seminars I attended. Joyce was afresh-faced, blowzy redhead who looked full of confidence but in fact was the opposite, her answers to questions in the seminar rooms beginning in an uncertain small voice and swiftly diminishing to a hushed whisper or sometimes even terminating in total inaudibility, leaving us all straining to hear, or creatively interpreting her almost-silence and rounding off her sentences on her behalf. She wore voluminous, improbable combinations of clothes, long, lacy skirts with cleated trainers and a nylon anorak, or in summer went bra-less beneath a man’s waistcoat with blue pedal-pushers and flip-flops on her dusty feet. She had a three-year-old child, a boy, %ane, who lived with her mother in Stonehaven during term-time. While she was at college she rented and sub-let rooms in a fair-sized house in a village called Croy to an odd selection of tenants.

  Joyce, like many shy people,found liberation in akohol and our first coupling took place—while we were both drunk—in a back room at someone else’s party. We bussed back to Croy at dawn and I spent the next three days there. Joyce seemed to have more money than the rest of us—child benefit? pane’s absent father contributing?—and this had allowed her to rent the house, which she ran, surprisingly, as a kind of prissy, strict commune, introducing washing-up rotas, waste recycling, a partitioned fridge with prominently labelled milk bottles and coffee jars as well as permitting a tolerant attitude towards sexual activities, alcohol—and drug-consumption. At the centre of this routine was the evening meal, served promptly at eight o’clock, which all members of the house currently present beneath the roof were expected to attend. Amongst the shifting tenants was a hard-core of regulars, two genial, moon-faced brothers from the Isle of Mull, Lachlan andMurdo, a postgraduate Japanese girl called Junko (studying life sciences, to which mysterious end she spent many days out at sea on fishing boats quantifying and analysing catches), Joyce’s cousin Shona (thin, wiry, promiscuous) and Sinbad Fingleton, the feckless, gormless son of a local laird, recently expelled from his public school with one GCSE in biology to his credit, who worked for the Inverness Town Council Municipal Parks Department. To my vague surprise I found I liked Joyce’s uncomplicated company and the curious regimen in the House at Croy with its blend of licence and order and preferred to spend more time there than alone in my boxy cell in the college hall of residence, with its drab view of muddy football pitches and the dark, impenetrable green of the pine-clad hills beyond.

  —The Book of Transfiguration

  Gale-Harlequin PLC resided in a new granite and polished steel building offHolborn. There was abstract art in the lobby and dark clumps of palm, fern and weeping fig. Uniformed security guards sat behind a rough-hewn ziggurat of slate. The harlequin logo was subtly present in the canvases on the walls, variations on its theme painted by eminent contemporary artists, two of whom Lorimer could identify through the plate-glass from the street. This was not going to be a simple adjust, he felt with small tremors of foreboding, there was a whiff of moneyed respectability about this place, the solid heft of solvency and success.

  He checked his notebook: Jonathan L. Gale, chairman and mandirector, and Francis Home (pronounced ‘hume’, doubtless), finance director,
were the men he had to see, a far cry from Deano Edmund and Kenny Rintoul, he had to admit, but also, he had to admit further, on occasions these sophisticated types could match anyone in the cupidity and venality stakes. He turned away and strolled off in the direction of Covent Garden, trying to clear his mind of worries: the appointment was scheduled for the next day and he had done as much backgrounding as he was prepared to do. This adjust had to be done newborn, slick and shiny—so the expression ran in GGH—just sprung from the womb, innocent, untarnished, slick and shiny.

  Stella had called and left a message on his answering machine: could they meet, with Barbuda, no less, in Covent Garden for a pre-shopping lunch? Her voice had sounded unusually hesitant, not pleading so much as apologetically urging this rendezvous. Lorimer wondered vaguely what was afoot, trying to keep further foreboding at bay—his future was dark enough with foreboding as it was, he had to maintain some light in his life.

  He was far too early he saw, as he stepped down the wide circular staircase into the huge basement room that was the Alcazar. Beyond the generous horseshoe of the bar tables were still being set up and there was a clatter and rattle of glasses and bottles being stacked on shelves or slammed into racks, like shells into breeches, ready for the day’s offensive. A barman (shaven head, chin beard) looked up from his glass-fronted fridge and said he would be with him in a couple of ticks, chief.

  Lorimer sat on a bar stool, sipped at his tomato juice, and selected a newspaper from the layered pile made available to clients. He wondered what the Alcazar had been before its new incarnation as bar-restaurant. Probably a failed bar-restaurant, or nightclub, or storeroom. Yet the ceiling was high and elaborately moulded, the cornice picked out in lime-green and indigo. He enjoyed being in these establishments as they prepared themselves for their day’s business. He watched a young guy, wearing a suit but tieless, carrying a copy of the Sporting Life, come shiftily in and order a bottle of champagne—one glass. He looks even more tired than I do, Lorimer thought. Another light sleeper, perhaps? Should he introduce him to Alan Kenbarry’s Institute of Lucid Dreams, have his sleep dissolved? Then two other young men sauntered in, fit-looking, also suited but oddly out of sorts in formal wear, as if their bodies were more accustomed to shorts and sweatpants, T-shirts and track suits. They ordered pints of extra-strength lager with a dash of citron vodka—an interesting variation on an old theme, Lorimer thought, making a mental note to try the mix himself when he felt particularly close to the end of his tether. A Japanese family entered, two elderly parents with teenage daughters, and asked to be sat down immediately for an absurdly early lunch. Slowly, the Alcazar accommodated itself to its incoming customers: the music was switched on, the empty crates cleared from behind the bar, the last lemons quartered. Two young women with cold faces and harsh make-up (style: Berlin cabaret 1920s) took up position by the wrought-iron lectern at the restaurant’s entrance and pored frowningly over the register like cryptologists close to a solution. Sporting Life was joined by a male friend who also ordered his own bottle of champagne. Lorimer consulted his watch: Stella had stipulated between 12.45 and 1.00, the table was booked in her name, she had said, and Lorimer wondered if, given the chilly demeanour of the two seaters, he should confirm that at least one—