by Ian McGuire
‘Next Thursday,’ she said. ‘We’ll pay your expenses. Here’s the number to call.’ She looked at him again. ‘You’ll need a shirt. Whatever you’re doing with your hair please stop it, and I’ll warn make-up about the eye.’
Morris looked up. He was, she thought, the embodiment of failure, and not the glorious, reckless, sexy sort of failure she had been hoping for, but rather the dull, grinding, hopeless and embarrassing Rumpswick kind of failure. The Demis Roussos and boiled beetroot kind of failure. Morris, she realised with a start, was probably the most English person she had ever met.
‘Will I see you on Thursday?’ he asked.
‘Thursday?’ She was already thinking how this could be avoided. ‘Oh I should think so.’
‘We could have that drink.’ He smiled. She saw the teeth again.
‘A drink. Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s what we could have.’ Zoe looked at her egg-shaped digital sports watch. ‘I have to dash.’
Morris was still looking at the fifty-pound note. He stood up suddenly as if hoping for a hug.
A hug? Christ no. The thought that parts of him had actually been inside her was already causing Zoe some dismay.
‘Listen Morris,’ she was backing rapidly away. ‘Buy that new shirt and don’t get pissed.’
Morris nodded eagerly.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Sorry about this mess by the way. I had people over for drinks last night, and one thing just led to another.’
Zoe nodded and waved. She was dialling for a taxi.
‘And you’re right about the feature,’ he shouted after her, the words echoing around the lavatorial stairwell. ‘My Life as an Asylum Seeker – it’s The Road to Wigan Pier meets Seven Years in Tibet. I’m hoping for the cover of the Sunday Times magazine.’
Chapter 29
Zoe’s fifty-pound note was Morris’s return ticket to the land of Wee Hamish, a land from which he had already endured two days of tormented exile. As soon as she had gone he started searching frantically for his shoes. After five brutally frustrating minutes, he remembered that two days earlier he had thrown them at a honking minicab parked in the communal car park.
Unheedful of the stew of contaminants which paved the stairwell, he dashed down to look for them. For several minutes he jogged and hopped around the perimeter of the communal car park like a down-at-heel morris man.
‘Where the fuck are you?’ He screamed at the missing shoes. He then stopped and stared at the foul coagulating brew which now filled the gas-cooker crater. Without hesitation, with a kind of Arthurian bravery, he dropped to his knees and plunged his arm in up to the elbow. He came up with a shoe. It was laceless and covered with slug-grey silt. He slipped it on to his foot. It was chilly and slick, like the anus of an ancient cold-blooded beastie. After a further period of noxious dredging, Morris gave up on the other shoe and decided to hop. It was less than a mile and the pavements, well, they were covered in broken glass, syringes and dogshit, but there would surely be the odd spot where he could stop to rest. He hopped across the Isaiah Berlin Parkway with some alacrity. With the fifty-pound note in his pocket he felt suddenly buoyant, capable of tremendous feats. As he passed the Albert Schweitzer Primary School his hops became long and confident, like the hops of a triple jumper, like the boings of a disabled-but-still-up-for-it kangaroo. He could all but taste the Wee Hamish now, the memory of its long, thoracic burn filled him with cheer. He hopped past the Rumpswick Scout Hut, the disused Max Beekman carpet showroom, the prefabricated Church of the Ever-Rising Jesus. The Chaudhary Brothers’ off-licence was just round the next corner. His right thigh was dense with pain and he was experiencing hot, needle-like jabbings in his knee, but Morris was confident that he could make it. He was a winner. As he took the final bend, however, the sole of his laceless, still-wet shoe caught on the edge of an uneven slab. The shoe came off and Morris, who was still full-throttle in his quest for inebriation, stumbled badly. His unshod foot came down hard on a spike of red translucent plastic – the remnant of a recent nearby car crash. Morris, yelping, tumbled forwards and leftwards, his shoulder, elbow and finally forehead cracked into the dog-toothed edge of a low-lying concrete wall.
Morris was half-concussed and bleeding from several places when Mahmood Chaudhary came out to see what was going on. He looked at Morris’s foot and winced.
‘You’ve got a big bit of brakelight in your foot, mate,’ he said. ‘You want to get that seen to.’
Morris nodded. He pulled the fifty-pound note from his pocket. ‘Bottle of Wee Hamish please.’
Mahmood looked at the note then gave it back.
‘We don’t take fifties, mate. Never have.’
‘What?’ Morris was not sure why he was having this conversation while lying on the pavement, but he pressed on. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Too many forgeries. It’s not worth it.’ Mahmood walked around to get a better view of Morris’s shoulder. ‘That’s a possible dislocation,’ he said.
Sheets of dizziness like panes of double-glazing were beginning to separate Morris from the world around him.
Aziz Chaudhary came out for a look too. He was eating an orange.
‘Brakelight in his foot and possible dislocated shoulder,’ said Mahmood. ‘Better phone an ambulance.’ Aziz nodded and shuffled back inside. Morris smelt orange, saw slippers. As he waited for the ambulance a crowd of feral youths gathered and stared. He could see the spokes of their mountain bikes, the iridescent flanks of their training shoes. His foot felt not so much painful as plaintive. Aziz Chaudhary returned with a pack of cut-price toilet rolls and tried to staunch the flow of blood. Mahmood was smoking. Morris tried to return his fractured and dissolving mind to the pressing matter of the Wee Hamish. On the one hand, he thought muddily, Zoe Cable’s fifty-pound note (crisp, perfumed); on the other, the phlegmatic and risk-averse Chaudhary Brothers. It was a question merely, merely – he felt for a moment that he was bobbing on an ocean of nausea with only merely, the word merely like a piece of broken spar to keep him afloat. Merely (he felt better now) of getting from A to B. A to B? He wondered what that meant exactly. Urrr. He could smell the sharp tobacco breath of one of the feral youths who was leering into his face.
‘I think he’s in a fucking coma,’ said the youth.
Nonsense, Morris thought, coma indeed. It was merely a question of getting from A to … Suddenly the pavement at Morris’s feet hinged, his head dropped away and he pivoted bodily into black unconsciousness.
He came to on a trolley in A&E. His pain was comprehensive – he felt like he had been given pain implants, pain patches. A nurse arrived and asked him a lot of questions.
‘Are you a nurse or a bloody market researcher?’ Morris asked grumpily.
‘I’m a nurse.’
‘I’m in significant pain.’
She raised her eyebrows, ticked a couple of boxes and gave him two large painkillers. The painkillers were rather good. They had a similar effect to the Wee Hamish but without the disadvantageous taste. A doctor stitched up his foot and eyebrow and relocated his shoulder. The nurse gave him a plate of macaroni cheese and an old copy of the Daily Mirror. From outside his cubicle he heard snatches of consultation, diagnosis, condolence. Wails of injury and suffering broke against his floral curtains. He snoozed like a transatlantic yachtsman – anxious but semi-secure – and at some unknown and lugubrious hour they moved him to a ward.
He was woken the next morning by Dr Nono.
‘Good morning Mr Gutman,’ she said briskly. ‘I have questions for you.’
Morris sat straight up; he was amazed by the size and shape of the ward, but most of all by its cleanliness. Dr Nono had black curly hair, olive skin, glasses. She was obviously Greek? Turkish? Italian? Something anyway. And she was terrifically clean too, even cleaner than the ward. Her cheeks shone.
‘How exactly did you injure yourself?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘Well,’ Morris thought, ‘I was walking and then I fell.’
&
nbsp; ‘Is there a longer version?’
‘No that’s it.’
Dr Nono looked openly unconvinced.
‘Were you under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time?’
‘Oh no,’ Morris shook his head. He felt anxious to please Dr Nono, to be on her side.
‘But you weren’t wearing shoes.’ She said it with a sigh like a bored QC, like she had seen it all before.
‘Only one,’ he admitted.
Dr Nono nodded. Her nod managed to express quite clearly the conclusion that Morris was another self-deluding drunk. Morris noticed this with concern – was he being pushed so quickly away from this new world of cleanliness and light, back into grubbiness and dirt, back to Rumpswick? Back to himself?
Dr Nono felt his head. She smelt of wool and talcum powder. She peered into his eyes, took his pulse.
‘Headaches, dizziness, insomnia?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘OK,’ she turned over the form and noticed a gap. ‘What do you do for a living?’
‘I’m a lecturer,’ said Morris without thinking.
Dr Nono looked at him over her glasses.
‘Really?’ she said.
‘I teach at the university. In the English Department.’
Dr Nono looked quite confused. Morris felt an urge to help her out. Dr Nono, he thought, does not deserve confusion.
‘I’m currently doing research on asylum seekers. That’s what took me to Rumpswick. It’s more journalism than literary criticism, really, but I like to do a little of both.’
‘Aren’t you teaching at the moment?’
‘I’m on sabbatical.’
Dr Nono actually smiled.
‘Amazing,’ she said. ‘So you’re writing a book?’
Morris felt quite elated by the success of his lies. ‘Well, I hope to work it up into a book eventually,’ he said. ‘For now I’m just gathering material.’
‘It’s quite a topic,’ she said.
‘Yes it is.’
‘Well we can discharge you later today. I’ll give you a prescription for painkillers and dressings. And we’ll set up an appointment to have the stitches out. I’m sure you’re keen to get back to your research. I look forward to reading the book when it comes out.’
‘I’m on television next week,’ said Morris, more to delay her departure, to milk her approval, than anything else.
‘Is that so?’
‘Yes, in terms of the appointment I mean. I’m away on Thursday. It’s Going Critical.’
‘Uh,’ Dr Nono’s mouth opened, she looked for a moment quite girlish. ‘I love that programme. They’re so clever. Don’t worry about the appointment. I’ll sort it out. What will you talk about?’
Morris hesitated a beat, unwilling to lose his so recent gains.
‘Arthur Alderley,’ he said with some reluctance.
Dr Nono frowned in recollection.
‘Mmm. I just read about him in the paper, I think. Isn’t there a film out?’
‘Yes there is.’ There were few astonishments as great in Morris’s experience as finding a normal person with a knowledge of Arthur Alderley.
‘It sounded fascinating,’ Dr Nono continued, unaware of the effects on Morris of her casual enthusiasm. ‘I don’t read as much as I should, but if I ever got the time. What’s the title again? The House at Hough End?’
‘That’s it.’
She wrote the title on her pad. ‘I’ll try to get a copy.’
‘I’ll send you one.’
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘I have lots of copies at home.’ (He did.) ‘I’ll send you one.’
‘Well thank you very much.’
There was a moment of conversational stalemate. Morris felt like a man who had been half-pulled from quicksand. He was much better off than he had been, but there was still a danger of being sucked back in. He needed something more.
‘The interview was quite last-minute,’ he said. ‘Zoe Cable just came to see me yesterday.’
‘Zoe Cable? Oh I think she’s terrific. I liked Adam d’Hote, but Zoe Cable is just so … so vibrant.’
Morris agreed. ‘Vibrant,’ he said. ‘And funny.’
‘Funny, yes. Do you know her very well?’
‘Zoe? Oh yes, I’ve known her for years. We’re like this.’
‘Great,’ said Dr Nono.
‘Great,’ said Morris.
‘I’ll be seeing you when you come back in then.’
‘Thank you,’ said Morris. (I’m on dry land, he thought. I’m back.)
Dr Nono flicked the curtain aside and turned to leave. She was putting final touches to the form.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘So is it Mr Gutman or Dr?’
‘Dr.’
Morris didn’t return to the bedsit. He bought a T-shirt and a pair of flip-flops from the hospital shop and took a taxi back to the house. He was expecting E to be there but she wasn’t. He knew she couldn’t bear her parents for more than two weeks. Had it been two weeks yet? He didn’t know.
Morris checked the cupboard under the sink for Wee Hamish. He made do instead with a bottle of the marginally more expensive but significantly less incendiary Glen MacRuffin. As he wandered through the dusty house the only sounds were the chink of ice (ice!) in his whisky glass and the soft splat-splat of his flip-flops. E had evidently tidied up before she left – the rooms presented themselves with a chilly orderliness as though arranged, he thought, according to a particularly officious school of feng shui.
He taped a Sainsbury’s carrier bag to his foot and had a bath. He dipped his head below the surface. His eyebrow smarted; the sour taste of follicles and Lifebuoy reminded him of childhood. He thought of Zoe. She had come back to him, wasn’t it as simple as that? The slightly-too-warm water gripped his skin like a surgical stocking. He felt, as always, the dark lure of cavil and complication. He resisted it. He fought it off. He took a large glug of the Glen MacRuffin. She had come back to him. And now the Arthur Alderley revival. It was eerie, if you thought about it, that at his lowest (he recognised that for a day or two there he had been quite low) he should be plucked up like this, rediscovered, set to work once again. He remembered Bernard’s promise in the Cro-Magnon Arms that the plagiarism would blow over – the ‘long game’. Who would have imagined, though, that the long game would be quite so short?
The following Thursday early in the morning Morris sat in the first-class carriage of the Coketown-to-London Express. He was wearing a jacket and tie, a new blue shirt and a floppy mop-top wig purchased from Shrewsbury and Son on Dunkirk Street. He was still unsure about the wig – he had ummed and aahhed about it for a week, but had decided in the end that there was no other course available. His face was bad enough – it still resembled a topographical map of the Grampians – but his skull! Several of the razor cuts had, despite his best efforts, become infected. They were hot and oozing and around them the hair was returning only in uneven patches. In TV terms it was just unthinkable, plus the mop-top had the advantage, if he arranged the fringe just right, of more or less covering the stitches in his eye. Perhaps they could shoot him from the side anyway.
He opened his briefcase. The train lurched into motion. He began to reread the letter that Bathsheba Ffytche had sent him the day before. According to the letter his interview would form part of a five-minute introduction to the panel discussion of The House at Hough End. They would interview Morris for an hour or so in the morning then edit it down and add a voiceover and some graphics. Bathsheba had wished to confirm that Morris was fine with this.
Morris was perfectly fine with this. There was, however, another part of Bathsheba’s letter that Morris was not at all fine with, and which he was now rereading with care. It was the casual final paragraph in which she invited Morris to join the panellists for a drink in the green room before the show that evening:
Zoe will be there, of course, along with our regular panellists, Toby Royale and Deirdre Pluck, and our special guest whom I a
m sure you already know from your academic studies, Professor Conrad Underseel.
The bastard Underseel! Over the previous few days, most of which he had passed on the tartan sofa deep in thought, Morris had decided that what had seemed like abandonment on Zoe’s part was actually only a tactical withdrawal. She had needed time, he reasoned – time to secure the Hub, time to make peace with the Crocodile – and now those things were achieved she could reel Morris back in. It would have been reassuring to have known her tactics in advance, but comfort had never been one of Zoe’s strengths and, besides, the lack of reassurance was more than made up for by the perks attached to this reunion – the professional rejuvenation, the six hundred pounds, the night (surely not alone) in the luxurious Balmoral Hotel. This suddenly announced involvement of the bastard Underseel, however, had given Morris pause, had cost him several hours of bitter second-guessing. He sensed a plot. He couldn’t immediately guess the purpose or mechanics of such a plot, but that, as recent history amply demonstrated, certainly did not prove that no such plot existed.
As the train whizzed through the West Midlands Morris thought hard. Through his window great flat clouds gathered and divided like tectonic plates, fields of aggressively clipped sheep flew past. He turned the alternatives over in his mind. What possible mutual benefit could there be for Zoe and the Bastard in Morris’s humiliation? (For if there was a plot he was horribly certain that his humiliation would be the pay-off.) He could think of none. Then, in a sickening reversal of his earlier complacencies, it occurred to him that this might be Zoe’s way of ending it forever, of signaling her utter disdain for him and all he stood for. Morris’s head dropped into his hands; his fingers encountered the strange, alien tonsure and he felt a strong urge to smash himself into unconsciousness with the fold-up tray-table. It was, he realised, terribly plausible; Zoe was like that. But then again, he remembered, many things were plausible, there were always a multitude of alternatives to fit the facts. It was only power, will, which made one true and the others false. He urgently needed a better, more cheerful option – one that he could believe in, one that he could bring into being.
