by Toby Litt
I couldn’t wait that long – it would have to be lunch. I gave them a pseudonym – my given middle name and my mother’s maiden name: Bartholomew Young. I also informed them that I might need some help with the stairs.
I spent the evening without Anne-Marie. She had something she couldn’t get out of – it involved, according to her vivid description, an opening party for a bar, and models and shouted gossip and smoking until she lost her voice.
‘You can read about it in next month’s Tatler,’ she said, on the phone. ‘Much the best way of doing things.’
‘I’ll miss you,’ I said.
I meant it – sort of: it would be good to have someone solidly there for when the nightmares woke me up.
(One which particularly disturbed me: myself gone asymmetrical with flesh, a huge oblong growing down the right half of my chest.)
30
Thursday.
It was time to see my Victim Liaison Officer. Though not on call twenty-four hours a day, she was supposedly there for me whenever I might need her. From our previous interviews I’d come away with the impression that the seriousness of the crime against me, the glamour of my co-victim, the promise of a press-covered trial – that all these Lily-gildings had bought me (dearly oh so dearly) a certain prestige within the hierarchy of victimhood.
I’d come back from the verge of becoming the ultimate victim – the dead person – and therefore I was worth paying attention to.
Vicky had given me all the details of how to contact her whilst I was still in hospital, in case of emergency.
I did twenty press-ups, twenty squat-thrusts and twenty more press-ups, then dialled her mobile number.
This was an emergency, my heart was racing, I was panicking.
She picked up.
‘Can you come round? Please, can you?’
‘Conrad? Is that you?’
‘Can you come?’
‘Are you okay?’
‘Please.’
‘Take a couple of deep breaths and tell me about it.’
‘Come to see me, please. I’m scared.’
‘Hang on,’ she said.
She put her hand over the mouthpiece. I heard a door, footsteps. The background ambience was different when she came back – more open, echoey: from room to corridor, maybe.
‘Hang on. Relax. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
‘Please,’ I said, then clattered the phone down as roughly as I could.
She arrived in less man twenty minutes.
As I let her in – maintaining my distraught act – it secretly pleased me to think that, in order to get over to me so quickly, she must have broken the law (speeding).
Once into the sitting room, I closed my eyes and – in front of her – halted my emotions completely.
‘I know about the baby,’ I said.
Vicky sat down on the edge of the sofa, uninvited.
‘The baby?’
‘That Lily was carrying.’
There was a distant mental thud from Vicky as this penetrated, hitting a wall of thick Oops.
‘How did you find out?’ she asked.
‘That isn’t the point,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
On came Vicky’s good-with-people voice: ‘Many reasons – all of them to do with you and your current state of mind. We thought you might find it too distressing. We are doing our best right now to keep it out of the newspapers – partly out of compassion for Lily’s parents. In many ways, it isn’t actually relevant to the case. The hitman was only trying to kill Lily and you. It is highly unlikely that he knew that she was pregnant.’
‘And when were you planning on telling me?’
‘We were going to observe –’
‘Does we mean you?’
She was reluctant to leave the shelter of third person plural.
‘Mostly. To observe your progress – see how you were getting back to normal life – and then –’
‘Come in and fucking destroy it.’
‘Who told you?’
‘You are here to answer my questions. Your job is to deal with me, not other people. I’m your victim.’
‘Of course, Conrad. Of course.’
‘Was DNA-testing done on the baby?’
A deep breath, preparatory to coping with my response to her saying: ‘I’m sorry, Conrad, but I can’t tell you that.’
‘They have or they haven’t? Not whether I’m the father or not.’
‘Really, whoever it was shouldn’t have told you. You’ve been set back weeks.’
‘That’s the most unprofessional thing you’ve ever said to me, Vicky.’
‘Vicky?’ she said. ‘But my name’s –’
‘I call you Vicky, because you’re a Victim-person. It’s my nickname for you. And I’d prefer to use it rather than your real name.’
‘Whatever you want.’
‘What can you tell me now that you haven’t told me before? Is there anything else that’s going to leap out of the grave and bite me?’
‘Conrad,’ she said, disgusted by the image.
‘I know, it didn’t necessarily have teeth. Although I have no idea how old it was – anything between six weeks and twenty-six. I don’t know if it had fingers or whether its skull had begun to seal over –’
‘Please,’ she said, looking very distressed.
‘This aspect of the case obviously disturbs you, doesn’t it? Personally. Autobiographically.’
I made an educated guess.
‘When did you have your abortion, Vicky?’
She looked at me, stunned – all her jobness gone.
‘We are telling you all that we can.’
‘No, you are telling me all that you see fit to tell me. But you seem to be forgetting that the person you have in prison isn’t actually the one who wanted Lily and me dead. That person is nowhere near caught. And you don’t seem to be doing much to find them. What are you doing?’
‘We’re doing everything possible. Be patient. They’re a lot closer to an arrest than you might think. Very senior officers are involved.’
‘Do you know what sex it was?’ I asked. ‘Yours – was it a boy or a girl? Did that make a difference?’
‘I think I should go. I think I should talk to the social services about getting you some intensive counselling.’
‘I may not testify,’ I said. ‘Oh, I’m sure you can make me turn up in court, but I won’t say anything useful. Not unless I’m satisfied that you have done everything you can to find out who the real killer was.’
Professional distress was added on top of personal.
‘You seem to be quite happy to bang up some hired hand. Perhaps the baby does have something to do with the real motive. Have you thought about that?’
‘Of course we have,’ she snapped. ‘What do you think we are?’
‘I think you’re a bunch of fucking plods who couldn’t make it into the marines – or as proper psychologists.’
‘I’m glad we inspire such trust.’
‘You will keep me properly informed,’ I said.
‘We will tell you whatever we can.’
I sat down.
‘I must ask you not to pursue your own investigation. That would complicate things terribly. The matter is in the hands of professional men and women.’
‘One more thing – do I have the right to receive an inventory of the items these professional men and women have removed from Lily’s flat?’
‘Such as?’ she asked.
‘Her medicines. Her diaries.’
Vicky went all awkward.
‘I am, you know, the beneficiary of her will,’ I said. ‘Anything you took, I own.’
‘You have a right,’ she said.
‘Then why don’t I have an inventory?’
‘An oversight, I’m sure.’
‘Rectify it, immediately, okay?’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now you can go.’
> Vicky took up her purse and left.
I felt a bit guilty about treating her so badly. But she wasn’t family or friends: she was engaged by the State to bring me back to being a happy and fulfilled citizen – and to fob me off with any excuse she could come up with. If finding out the truth meant that I had to give her a hard time, then fine. She should be able to take it. If she couldn’t, she was in the wrong job. I guess she knew that already.
31
Managing the stairs at Le Corbusier was easy but I made out it wasn’t. I’d taken along my NHS crutches, intending to appear as feeble as possible. The ploy worked. I was gently guided up the two flights – pausing for breath, pausing to regain my strength. The help came from the waiter with the shaven head and goatee beard – the one who’d served us the evening we were shot.
‘Mr Young,’ he called me – using the pseudonym I’d given when making the booking.
That he didn’t recognize me was hardly surprising: I was only a lunch-time customer, a sick man on his own, not someone to be worried about over-much.
Slowly, swingingly, I approached the table – the place which had made me slow, made me swing. Or had made it necessary that I pretend.
I felt calm, very calm.
The interior had obviously been renovated since the shooting. However, there had been no change in overall style. Whatever they’d done, it had been a matter of replacement not refurbishment. A new mirror. A new frame. It made me wonder about the other objects surrounding the incident – the cutlery, the tabletop, the chairs, the table. Had the police taken them all away? Did anything escape the taint of being evidence? And, if so, outside what radius? Where did the circle of involvement find its circumference? Surely there had been enough blood flying around to incriminate half the restaurant. Was the man at the next table’s shirt residing – at that moment – in an Ezy-seal plastic wallet at Scotland Yard? Weren’t some of the blood-misted wine glasses merely returned to the kitchen, washed and used in the next sitting that went ahead? (The restaurant had reopened, so I heard, exactly one week after the shooting. Booked solid.)
Closer in, and I could still see no difference between the table I now approached and the table at which I had almost died.
I sat down in Lily’s place, not my own; and, looking all around, looking up and then down, I saw the first indication that something, that anything had happened here.
The floor of the restaurant was pale wood. However, around the table where I now sat – the table – the wood was discernibly paler. Only a shade, but some serious scrubbing had been done – and an attempt to efface had only succeeded in inscribing a more eloquent (though legible probably to no-one but myself and the restaurant staff) memento mori.
Also, now I looked, I could see that the gaps between the planks were slightly darker in the blood-affected area.
A movement in my peripheral vision. I glanced up. A waiter was coming over to take my drinks order. It was not the original waiter, not the one who had helped me up the stairs. It was the wrong waiter.
‘I’d rather I was dealt with by him,’ I told the wrong waiter, indicating the right.
The wrong smiled to himself, assuming homosexuality, then smiled at me, assuring complicity.
He left. A word or two passed between them and, in a few moments, the right waiter was at my table – obviously not too dissatisfied with my special request (from a homosexual point of view).
I had decided, once in the place, once under control, to proceed as quickly as possible.
‘Before I order, I would like to settle up for a previous meal, which I believe was left unpaid for.’
The waiter looked baffled, poor dear.
‘Don’t you recognize me?’ I asked. ‘Maybe looking a little healthier – without the crutches.’
He snorted in a kind of pre-vomit way.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Shit.’
‘Would you like to sit down?’ I asked. ‘You look a bit greenish.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘I think you should,’ I said, indicating the chair opposite me. ‘That’s the lucky seat.’
The next table along was empty, and the waiter pulled away one of its chairs – placing it at right angles to my table. He sat down slowly, in his own temporary zone of zero gravity.
‘You’re very brave to keep working here,’ I said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Michael,’ he said.
The wrong waiter glanced over, archly. It looked as though he was fantasizing some unlikely scenario: that I was a millionaire, offering his colleague a lifetime tenure on my Biarritz-based yacht (uniform obligatory, though minimal).
‘Michael, may I settle the bill I left unpaid?’
‘Are you all right?’ he asked, distracted.
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘How are you?’
‘You’d have to ask the maître d’ about that,’ he said.
‘About you?’
‘About the bill.’
‘Alright, then. I’ll do it when I’ve finished eating. You know what I’d like to have?’
Le Corbusier was one of those restaurants where the waiters are so professional that they remember rather than write the orders down.
‘Yes?’ said Michael.
‘I would like exactly what we had before. I’m sure you know what that was, don’t you?’
‘Puffball and plaice, asparagus and veal.’
‘And the wine?’
‘Chardonnay 1992.’
‘Very good.’
The wrong waiter was now getting impatient with having to deal with Michael’s covers whilst Michael had a sit-down.
‘Are they all still on the menu?’ I asked, a little surprised.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘People want to know which table it was – and they want to have what they, I mean you, what you had.’
‘Almost famous, really,’ I said. ‘Aren’t I?’
He looked at me nervously.
‘Don’t worry, Michael,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to do anything weird.’
Not yet, anyway.
He stood up.
‘And a bottle of still mineral water,’ I said.
‘We’ve changed our brand,’ he snapped back.
‘From the blue bottles?’ I asked. ‘What a shame. Sure you don’t have one lying around somewhere? Just fill it up with tap. I’ll pay the same price.’
‘I’ll have a look,’ he said.
‘Thank you, Michael.’
As he walked away, I thought, This will be difficult, but good for him.
Mineral water came, blue as it should be, and then the starters, bringing back memories.
32
I sat in Lily’s chair. I ate the food she had eaten. I looked in the direction she had been looking. And as I did so, I remembered our conversation – going through it again in my head, verbatim. But I could hear nothing new in it – no further hints as to what Lily would have told me had she lived a few minutes more.
It was unlikely she would have known for definite that I (or Cyril or the older man or another man altogether) was the baby’s father. She wasn’t likely to have had amniocentesis on something she was intending to abort. Nor, I doubted, would there have been time to organize one – unless she’d gone private. And that was something which Lily, trying to retain some vestige of her natural actorly leftism, had always been passionately against. Whatever Lily was intending to tell me it wasn’t ‘I’m carrying your baby, but I’m going to have an abortion.’ Not unless she was prepared to lie – to cover up the fact she’d been sleeping with another man, or more than one other man. (And why do that? Hadn’t the whole thing – last-minute call, expensive restaurant, new frock – been a demonstration of how totally in the past I was for her?) If there was a confusion as to who the baby’s father was, Lily was unlikely to want to argue about it over asparagus and veal.
Veal, I thought, as I sliced into the pale flat flesh, what a cruel thing to order.
(When we met I was a conscience �
� and Lily a health-vegetarian. Her downfall, when it came, was not the archetypal bacon sarnie but a touring production of The Ghost Sonata. It had been Lily’s first really serious rôle: The Colonel’s Daughter, in reality the Old Man’s Daughter. Half-way through, Lily began to have fainting fits. The assistant director spotted her proto-anaemia and thought it very good for Strindberg but very bad for insurance. He therefore ordered her to eat steak and eggs. When she came back from tour, she corrupted me as well.)
A little undue attention came my way, as the other diners noticed I – sitting on my own – had ordered two meals but was only eating one. Michael had obviously told the other waiter, whilst out of sight in the kitchen, who I was and what I was doing there. Slowly, as he buzzed around, the other waiter began to pollinate the further off tables with this golden information. Cutlery clinked, heads turned, eyes narrowed then widened. More stamens of curiosity were tickled. The buzzing came closer. I heard the word shot.
The maître d’ came and stood for a minute or two near the head of the stairs. To his right were the double doors to the kitchen. This was the point at which Lily might have seen the man who was about to kill her, if she’d been looking – but she hadn’t.
Michael served me impeccably throughout the meal. I think he was trying to prove something to himself about his own professionalism. Today, for him, was well on its way from being a torture to becoming a good story; and maybe that in turn would rehabilitate the earlier and unmentionable day. Was Michael an actor, I wondered. Was he trained? Any more than serving the general public in any capacity is a training for disguised megalomania and moderated contempt. Speaking of which, the maître d’ approached me after I’d asked for the bill.
‘Mr Redman,’ he said. ‘What can I say? You are a very brave man. It is a privilege to have you as a customer.’
And all the time his body language was screaming – Get out, low-life scum!
‘I hope you are making a swift and full recovery. And, as an expression of the esteem in which you are held by all at Le Corbusier, please accept this meal – and your tragic last meal – on the house.’
‘Thank you for your generosity, but I am determined to pay for both meals. It’s something I need to do for myself – and for Lily.’
