Incredible Bodies

by Ian McGuire

  ‘You still believe that?’

  ‘Why the fuck not? What else is there?’

  ‘I think you’ve said that before.’

  ‘You’ll find I have a quite limited set of ideas. I repeat myself a lot, I’m afraid. It’s beginning to attract critical attention.’

  They phoned for food. It arrived: baked potato, pad thai, carrot juice, beer. They ate on the sofa, listening to Al Jarreau. The baked potato proved to be perfect – its temperature and consistency, its degree of buttery saturation.

  ‘This is the perfect baked potato,’ said E.

  ‘Is it really?’ Nick Kidney leaned over for a taste. Their shoulders rubbed. E felt a stomachy shudder break over her uterus like a wave over a seaside boulder. ‘You lucky sod,’ he said. ‘For me this is one pad thai too far.’ He untangled one elasticky noodle and scowled. ‘I thought it might be. Don’t you hate that feeling?’

  ‘You might never be able to eat pad thai again.’

  ‘It could be years.’

  ‘Decades.’

  ‘Familiarity breeds disgust.’

  They looked at each other. E took another yellowy, wet-dry bite. She was trying to ration herself, to hold herself back from gobbling.

  When the food was over E leaned back and closed her eyes. It was warm in there and chemically fragrant, like a greenhouse; she was tippling on the edge of sleep. Kidney had gone back to his sketching. She could hear the soft shushing of his charcoal pencil. All that stopped her nodding off was a familiar spike of worry that jabbed at her like a loose spring. After ten minutes of unsuccessfully pretending it wasn’t there she sat up and opened her eyes.

  ‘But what about Morris?’ she said. ‘I can’t do this on my own. My labour was thirty-two hours last time. There were pools of blood, I mean literally pools, you could have paddled in the buggers.’ Feeling tears coming, she crossed her arms and tried to suck them back in.

  ‘Stay with me.’ He said it casually as though giving refuge to pregnant acquaintances were an everyday thing. ‘Why not? It’s only, what? A month or so? You can switch to Barts. I’m not doing anything. The rain thing’s opening in Frankfurt next week but I’ll be there and back in a day. What do you say?’ He leaned across the back of the sofa and looked at her with comic eagerness like a dog hoping to finagle a walk.

  ‘That’s really a ridiculous idea.’ Was Kidney trying to turn this grotesque situation into an opportunity for fun?

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but look at it this way: I have several spare rooms, I have a cleaner and I’m not your mother.’

  E was noticeably swayed by these arguments, especially the last one. Kidney was certainly not her mother, yet there was something, as she had noticed before, inextinguishably if incon-gruently parental about him. Even if everyone else sank, she thought, Nick Kidney would somehow float. He had that buoyant, polystyrene quality; he was, despite appearances, quite clingable. And given current circumstances, she felt more than ready to cling.

  ‘Do you really have a cleaner?’

  ‘Course I do. After the drugs phase, the cleaner phase. That’s how it works.’

  It was early evening by the time she left. They had talked it all through. Molly would stay in X’s room, her parents would babysit now and then, Kidney would cook (no kelp). They would have separate rooms. It was set. That morning there had been nothing, she thought, and now there was this. This nervousness. It had all been so easy. She was used to Morris’s habit of making things, anything, hard, of digging down for difficulties and holding on to them whatever the cost. As she walked down Petticoat Lane looking for a taxi, her bulge felt like the prow of an ice-breaker crunching its way casually through what had recently seemed so solid, so capable of squeezing her to death.

  Chapter 28

  Zoe Cable was becoming a celebrity. She could feel it happening to her gradually, day by day. She felt ever-bigger, ever-weirder. It was like body-building except quicker and less ludicrous. Now people looked at her oddly in the street. They seemed surprised when she spoke or moved. She had been touched by television. Twice weekly it laid its fat pontifical hand on her head. Adam d’Hote was out for six months with a brutal case of the shingles, and Zoe was the stand-in host of Going Critical. The studio rumour, started by Zoe herself but now gathering steam, was that Adam would not be back, ever, that shingles was the thin end of the medical wedge, that he had finally gin-and-tonicked himself into the ground.

  Zoe now understood how it would be. The Hub was small, but television was big. Television was vast and ineffable and all she had done so far, the purpose of her career to date, was just to bring her to this point, to offer her this vantage. Like Moses on Mount Pisgah she could see the promised land and it was wide-screen and multi-channel. Unlike him, however, she was determined that she would live there herself. She had already passed the daily running of the Hub (and indeed much of the strategic thinking) over to Dirck van Camper. He was the obvious replacement for Morris, plus his appointment had been an easy way of resoftening Donald after the Mordred double-cross. Not that she needed Donald so much any more, but as a long-term enemy he would undoubtedly have been a pain in the arse. Now, with his wheelchair, Dirck was of course big on Disability Studies: it was all supercrips and ableism; he had already spent half the budget on ramps. So be it. Zoe was working on several pilots. She spent her days conferencing with production companies, her evenings, aside from Tuesday and Thursday, beering it up with the créatives. She had a scheme in every pipeline. She was Joan Bakewell with balls.

  Did she ever think of Morris? Hardly at all. After their last phone call – on the day of the hearing – she had realised he was badly damaged. And the more she learned about the events in Committee Room L the worse it sounded. He had been half-devoured by Mordred Evans. There was no way she could let him near the Hub after that: he was lamed, weakened. Failure had entered his bloodstream. It was only a matter of time, she knew, before he was cut down entirely. Not that she had been expecting the manner of his departure, not at all. Indeed, when she had first heard about the plagiarism, her interest in Morris had for a brief while been rekindled. That he was not the author of ‘Total Mindfuck’, which she genuinely admired, was bad, but that he was prepared to quite shamelessly pass himself off as the author of ‘Total Mindfuck’ and to build a whole new career upon that supposed authorship was really, she felt, rather good. It indicated a certain depth of desperation and will, a willingness – which she couldn’t help but respond to – to set aside the claims not only of ethics but of probability. There was a darkness in Morris, she had been right about that, but it evidently had a deeper, thicker tone than even she had guessed. This cost her a moment of regret for the way she had cut him loose professionally and amorously (could the two ever really be distinguished?) – and, when it came to regret, a moment for Zoe Cable was an unusually long time. It occurred to her that if she ever again had the opportunity to help Morris Gutman, in a small, non-committal sort of way, she would perhaps take it.

  In the event even Zoe Cable, with her talent for prophecy, was a little surprised at how soon and how unignorably such an opportunity arose. That the latest film from Yugoslav wunder-kind Dragoslav Rankovic was to be a literary adaptation had been a rumour doing the rounds for some time. Since Rankovic, however, shot all his films on a closed-sound stage in Smederevo using technicians drawn entirely from his own extended family, Zoe had had to wait until the script meeting on the Monday morning of her third week hosting Going Critical to learn that Rankovic had chosen, with spectacular peculiarity, to attempt a filmic version of Alderley’s little-known and less-loved The House at Hough End.

  ‘That’s berserk,’ she said when asked for her opinion of its suitability for the show. ‘Why did he choose Alderley?’

  Pam the producer knocked her reading glasses from her hairline to her nose and rifled through her notes.

  ‘It’s odd I know,’ she said, ‘but believe it or not Alderley is huge in the former Yugoslavia. They read him in
the schools. Apparently there’s a statue in Belgrade, or there was before all that bombing.’ She moved her glasses up again. ‘But listen, the news is that the film is absolutely masterly. I think we have to do it.’

  ‘There’s talk of an Alderley revival,’ chimed in Bathsheba, the assistant producer.

  ‘I imagine there is,’ said Pam. ‘Reprints, tie-ins. He was English wasn’t he?’

  ‘Whitstable,’ said Zoe.

  ‘Well there you go, I can feel an episode of Arena coming on. But for now, do we need a boffin? I’m thinking background, no one’s heard of this bloke.’

  ‘Do you want the boffin on the panel or just for a snippet?’

  ‘I was thinking snippet, but since Geraint’s buggering off to his hermitage for three weeks we could do a twofer. Do you have anyone in mind? I’ve got one name already.’ She looked through her notes again. ‘Conrad Underseel.’

  Zoe put out feelers, but it proved harder than she had expected to locate Morris. She had not realised how few friends he had, how slender and breakable were his links to the world. She thought of his mother in … Doncaster? Sheffield? But directory enquiries revealed an unsurmountable glut of South Yorkshire Gutmans. She had Mabel call his wife, but there was no reply and the answerphone was switched off. His mobile was dead; his Coketown email account had been immediately cancelled. She found her way eventually to Bernard, who was clearing out his office. He was coated in dust. The drawers of his filing cabinet gaped open, their yellowy contents spilling out like the half-chewed breakfast of a toothless OAP.

  ‘Ah,’ said Zoe, ‘the place where memos go to die.’

  Bernard didn’t smile.

  ‘It’s like being made to dig your own grave,’ he said. ‘The final fucking indignity.’ He stopped sorting and looked at her. ‘What brings you to the outer rim anyway? You’re not after my office are you?’

  She looked around, there was a smell of decaying paperbacks and pigeonshit. The windows looked permanently breathed on.

  ‘Why should I want your office? It’s minging.’

  ‘I don’t know. To house another of the transportationally challenged? Van Camper’s filling every cranny with Tiny Tims. They can hardly muster a full set of limbs between them. It’s one leg good, two legs bad out there. They were picketing the front steps the other day – the actual steps.’

  ‘Do you imagine that retirement will mellow you at all, Bernard?’

  ‘Do not go gentle into that good night, Ms Cable. I’ll tell you, a gallon of four-star and a packet of Swan Vestas and this place is a smoldering ruin. And I’m that close.’

  ‘I’m looking for Morris.’

  Bernard started sorting again – WEA pamphlets on Samuel Johnson; Health and Safety Regulations from 1973.

  ‘Morris is all right,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve seen him then? I need his address.’

  ‘You’re surely joking.’

  Zoe looked at Bernard. He was wearing a cap-sleeved T-shirt and bum-hugging shorts. He had arms like an old woman. She found him amusing but not that amusing.

  ‘Listen Bernard. I slept with him. You told his wife. I’d say that makes us about neck and neck. Now I’m sure you two are lovely together but I’m offering him six hundred quid for a two-minute interview. And if the rumours I hear are true that’s a little more than he makes at Sir Savalot.’

  ‘You know about Sir Savalot?’

  ‘A box of Ferrero Rocher and Mabel babbles like a coke fiend. I thought you’d know that by now.’

  Bernard winced.

  ‘Have you got that address?’

  After a minute or two of dusty searching Bernard found his university pocket diary and passed it over to Zoe. She began keying the address into her Palm Pilot.

  While she keyed, Bernard pondered.

  ‘Is this interview for the television?’ he asked.

  Zoe nodded.

  ‘How is Adam d’Hote anyway?’

  ‘They say his liver looks like a spam fritter. I’m viewing flats in Chiswick next week.’

  Below Bernard’s bum-hugging shorts his pimply hams tightened involuntarily. He looked for a moment pale and friable, as though confected from dust and scraps of ancient paper.

  ‘Did you know we were at Downing together?’ he asked. ‘He was a year below.’

  ‘Hmm, strange he never mentioned you.’ Zoe dropped the Palm Pilot into the depths of her purple Gucci bag. ‘I look at it this way, Bernard,’ she said with a wink. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of man. And surf is definitely up.’

  Zoe stood in the communal car park next to the gas-cooker crater – which now, filled with grey rainwater, looked like a brutalist water feature – and looked up at the blasted façade of Hattersley Court. It was, she thought, truly grim. Not that grimness bothered her per se; indeed, certain sorts of grimness she liked a lot (the whole inebriation project testified to that), but Rumpswick, Jesus, it was the most sexless place she had ever seen – it was as though the lust had been sucked out of it with a pump. What was Morris doing here? She felt vaguely annoyed with him for taking failure so literally.

  The buzzer was broken but the front door was swinging open anyway. There were children eating dirt and chasing each other with broken toys. The hairy smell of mould, like a large and continuous fart, assaulted her. She wondered for a second whether all this was an elaborate joke by Bernard, but quickly decided he wasn’t clever enough for that. She put on her mirrored goggles and lit a cigarette. The walls of the stairwell, gouged and graffitied in languages Zoe didn’t recognise, resembled the Rosetta Stone. From the first-floor landing came the sound of Demis Roussos and the smell of boiled beetroot. She shook an empty Pot Noodle carton from the heel of her yakskin boot. Flat nineteen. Morris had better be bloody grateful, she thought. If she had known it was going to be this much trouble she would have stuck with Underseel. She knocked, waited and knocked again. The door opened and she saw half of Morris’s face – it looked ghastly. The door closed again.

  ‘If it helps, Morris,’ she shouted at the peephole, ‘this is business. Going Critical needs an interview on Alderley. It’s six hundred quid.’

  The Al Houja family drifted past. They were all wearing identical trainers.

  Morris opened the door again. The second half of his face unfortunately matched the first.

  ‘Have you had a stroke or something? And where’s your hair?’

  ‘No one,’ he said, ‘has ever needed an interview on Arthur Alderley. Have you come here only to mock?’

  There were smells coming from the bedsit which Zoe preferred not to identify. She looked Morris up and down. He was shoeless, his charcoal suit trousers were torn at the knee, and his white T-shirt was so comprehensively stained that she thought for a moment that it had been tie-dyed. Glancing past him she took in a slice of the bedsit: the floor was cobbled with empty whisky bottles; the bed was a foul swirl of soiled sheets and dried-up food; the kitchenette looked like something salvaged from a wreck. Zoe wasn’t sure whether she wanted to go in; she was actually experiencing revulsion.

  ‘Haven’t you heard?’ she said, trying not to breathe through her nose. ‘Dragoslav Rankovic has filmed The House at Hough End. There’s going to be an Alderley revival. I’m serious.’

  Morris stood back and put his hand on his forehead. It was as though he were trying to remember how to think.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said after a while. ‘He’s big in Yugoslavia. I believe there’s a statue in Belgrade.’

  ‘There used to be. They bombed it.’

  He nodded as if he may already have known that. He stood for a while in the middle of the bottles and wrappers, just breathing.

  Zoe took a small step forward. She noticed the wok in the toilet bowl, the state of the shower. She was used to abjection, it was her stock-in-trade, but this was severe even for her.

  ‘If you’re not up for it that’s OK, Morris. There’s always Under seel.’

  ‘Underseel? That bastard.’ Morris sn
arled. His teeth, Zoe noticed, were the colour of antique pine. She lit another cigarette. She noticed the curtains.

  ‘What is this, Morris?’ she said finally. ‘A book project? A feature? Down and Out in Rumpswick? My Life as an Asylum Seeker? Because that’s the only way I can see this making sense.’

  He looked blank and slightly fearful.

  ‘I guess not,’ she said. She could hear the growl of the Isaiah Berlin Parkway, the rotund whitterings of Demis Roussos.

  ‘I saw you on the TV.’ Morris nodded towards the defunct set. Zoe felt an incongruous tingle of pride. ‘What did you do to d’Hote?’

  ‘Do to him?’

  ‘I was wondering how you got rid of him. What particular method you used?’ As he said it Morris stumbled slightly; there was a second of raucous clinking.

  Zoe crossed her arms.

  ‘Don’t get shirty with me Morris. All this,’ she nodded at the bedsit, ‘is you, not me. You made your choices.’

  ‘Choices?!’ Morris moved suddenly towards her with a fierce, red-faced scowl. His eyes, even the blackened one, bulged like boiled eggs. Zoe thought it possible he would hit her. She had never been hit before, not deliberately. She felt a sudden irrational desire to cuddle her own face, to care for it the way you might care for an abandoned hedgehog or a baby bird. She braced herself. Morris sniffed. He sniffed again.

  ‘What’s that?’ he said.

  ‘What’s what?’

  ‘The smell.’

  ‘Oh that. It’s er … cumin and formaldehyde. It’s new.’

  Morris nodded. His face had paled to the colour of an old banana. He dropped on to the bed.

  ‘Could you buy me a drink?’ he said.

  Zoe’s throat was still stiff. She swallowed and shook her head.

  ‘I need to get the train.’ She rummaged in the purple bag. ‘Here’s fifty quid.’

  Morris took it with a nod.

  ‘When’s the interview then?’

  Zoe had forgotten about the interview.