The girl looked at her. ‘Freezing,’ she said. ‘You American?’
‘God. Does it show?’
‘The accent,’ said the girl, drawing the collar of her jacket up to her chin.
‘You can’t hide anything.’ Karen Lamb touched the girl’s sleeve and let her hand linger. She was thinking of the man’s parting statement. Take care of yourself. What did that really mean? Stay out of trouble? Keep cool? How typical of him not to ask questions, not to ask after details. Somewhere along the graph of his life he’d developed the capacity for shunting distasteful images into a remote siding of his head where they became unreal. He had places where he was able to park unpalatable matters, as if they were worn-out cars. What he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.
‘You got something to hide, have you?’ the girl asked.
‘Don’t we all,’ Karen Lamb said, and laughed.
The girl smiled and looked for a moment oddly innocent. In the expression you might imagine her background, school drop-out, pregnant, family squabbles, a quick abortion followed by flight from somewhere like Luton or Northampton to the streets of London where the only thing she had going for her was her body.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Candice.’
Candice. Sure. She would be a Rita or an Angela. Candice would be her working name. They always had working names, fanciful or exotic, dream names. ‘Do you have a place, Candice?’
‘Yeh. I got a room.’
‘Where?’
The girl appeared hesitant, licked her lips, looked sideways at Karen Lamb, who wondered: Does she smell blood? Is there danger about me, something of desperation? Maybe the girl saw into a core of loneliness and didn’t like it.
‘This way,’ the girl said. She moved off. Karen Lamb, watching how the leather skirt attracted creases of light from windows, followed.
The girl turned. ‘I don’t get many like you.’
‘Like me?’ Karen Lamb asked.
‘You know.’
Karen said nothing. She walked with the girl down an alley and through the doorway of a narrow building. A corridor led to a wooden staircase. A wall-light in the shape of a clam shell threw out a thin glow. Cans of paint were stacked against a wall. The air smelled of fried bacon, turpentine, bleach. Signs of cluttered lives, scuff marks, footprints on the steps. Karen climbed after the girl. On the landing she put her hand against Candice’s thigh.
‘Now now, patience is a virtue,’ the girl said and stuck a key in the lock of a door.
‘What would you know about virtue?’ Karen asked.
‘You’d be surprised.’
The room was furnished plainly. A double bed, a nightstand on which lay combs, hairbrushes clamped together, mouthwash, a jar of moisturizing cream, an ashtray filled with cigarette ends. A simple brown velvet curtain hung at the window. The girl dumped the ashtray into a rubbish bin.
‘Sandra,’ she said.
‘Sandra?’
‘I share with her. She smokes and I get the dirty work.’
Karen Lamb put her gloved hands on Candice’s hips and drew the girl towards her. She heard the buzz of blood in her head.
‘Let me get out of this first.’ And Candice took off the jacket, placing it carefully over a chair as if it were genuine fur.
Karen sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Take everything off,’ she said. ‘Everything.’
‘You’re in a right old rush,’ said the girl. She stripped briskly, stepping out of the leather skirt, then removing her blouse. She wore dark-green satin underwear, which she discarded quickly. She balanced nimbly on one leg as she slipped out of her panties. With no sign of self-consciousness she stood in front of Karen, who looked at the white breasts, the nipples that were barely visible, the bony angle of hip. She ran her palms across the girl’s stomach, passing over a small appendectomy scar. She moved her hands between the girl’s thighs.
‘You shave,’ she said.
‘It’s healthier,’ the girl remarked.
‘I like it.’ Karen pressed her face against the girl’s stomach and shut her eyes. For a long time she didn’t move. She enjoyed the faintly soapy scent of flesh, the softness. In this place it was possible to imagine you never knew solitude, that your world wasn’t one of disguises and fake passports, that you had no connection with violence and death. A fragile illusion. The trouble was you kept coming back to yourself in the end. All you know is destruction, nothing of love. The blood in her head roared now.
Candice sat on the bed. ‘We need to talk money.’
‘Later,’ Karen said.
‘Not later. Before you go any further.’
Karen pushed the girl back across the mattress, straddled her. Just a whore. A streetwalker. Disposable human material. Garbage. She caught the girl’s wrists and forced them to her side. She kissed the chilly unresponsive mouth. The taste of lipstick was strong, candy-like.
‘Wait,’ the girl complained.
‘Wait for what?’
‘You don’t think I do this for free, do you? I’m not running a bleeding charity. Dosh first. Goods later.’
Karen pressed her hands to the sides of the girl’s thin face. Goods later. She was thinking of the Underground again. The man’s eyes, his puzzlement. She saw him being drawn into the darkness of the tunnel on a train going nowhere.
‘You’re hurting me,’ the girl said.
‘I don’t mean to. I don’t want to hurt you.’ The blood hammered, pounded, her brain might have been filled with hot mercury.
‘Then fucking let go of me.’
Karen squeezed her palms harder against the girl’s cheeks. Candice twisted her face away. ‘Hey, I don’t like this. I’m not into this. Why don’t you just leave.’
Making a claw of her hand, Karen pressed her fingertips tightly around the girl’s lips and silenced her. From nearby came the noise of sirens. Ambulances, fire engines, police rushing through the streets of Mayfair and along Piccadilly. Too late.
She stared into the girl’s face. Candice’s eyes registered fear, uncertainty. A volatile customer, the hooker’s nightmare: in bed with the deranged. She struggled to free herself. She raised her legs as if she might kick Karen.
‘Don’t,’ Karen said.
The girl looked at her imploringly. Karen lowered her face, brushed the girl’s forehead with her lips. She had the urge to tell this child about the Underground train, the explosive in the purse. This idiot desire to talk – what did it mean? Guilt? But that was absurd. She never felt guilty about anything. She had nothing to confess. Maybe it came down to something else, the need to shock and impress.
Suddenly she released the girl, who sat upright and moved to the other side of the bed, where she covered her breasts with her hands.
‘I don’t do this. I don’t do this sick shit. I’m not into pain. Get somebody else. Plenty of people do pain. I could give you names.’
‘I don’t want names.’ Karen rose, strolled to the window, drew the curtain back. The alley below was dark save for the yellowy stab of a single lamp. Was it sick to look for a human connection, something to fill the void? She heard the hum of her blood change suddenly; a tumultuous melody echoed inside her skull.
The girl said, ‘I want you to go. Now.’
Karen let the curtain fall and approached the bed. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
‘Right. You didn’t mean to hurt me. But you did.’ The girl touched her mouth as if she expected to find blood. ‘I told you. I don’t do pain.’
‘Everybody does pain,’ Karen said.
‘You maybe. Not me.’ The girl gestured in the direction of the door. Her fear had yielded to sullen defiance. ‘Just go. You scare me. Just get the hell out. Go on.’
Karen didn’t move. The room seemed altogether confining to her now, and the child on the bed plain and unappealing. What was she doing here? It was weak to give in to these yearnings, to seek out these situations. She always came to the same conclusion: she didn’t belong. She w
as a captive in that other world of featureless air terminals and drab railway stations and night journeys, hard concrete and steel, a world of strangers, passengers shuttling through the dark to unknown destinations. It was a place of casual monosyllabic conversations with men who, drawn to her looks, wanted to force themselves on her, men she never encouraged.
She sat on the bed and reached for the girl’s hand, but Candice drew her arm away. ‘Piss off, for Christ’s sake.’ The girl pressed her back against the wall.
Karen caught the girl’s chin and twisted the small face to one side. ‘I leave when I want to. Only when I want to. Do you understand that?’
‘Fuck sake. You’re hurting me again.’
Karen squeezed the girl’s lips between her fingers. A loose crowned tooth popped unexpectedly out of the girl’s mouth and bounced across the back of Karen’s hand. Candice yanked her face this way and that, unable to free herself. She brought up her hands, flailed. She kicked her legs, twisted her body around, tried to bite into Karen’s palm. Again the whine of sirens filled the small room.
She gazed into Candice’s face and she thought: the pain of other people is as near as you ever get to them. She was aware of the girl’s warm saliva in the palm of her hand. The human condition: spit and fear and a sad little broken false tooth. It didn’t amount to very much in the long run.
She released Candice, who gasped for air and tried to scramble from the bed. She looked undignified, undesirable, her white buttocks upraised. Karen caught her, dragged her down, pinned her to the mattress. Tears flooded the girl’s eyes.
‘Stop crying,’ Karen said. ‘I don’t like to see anyone cry. Stop.’ The melody had changed. There was a drone in her skull. She imagined a graph of her brain, an unbroken green line on the screen of a scanner. She heard sounds: beep beep beep beeeeeep.
The girl opened her mouth to speak, but then – seized by an inappropriate sense of vanity about the missing tooth – closed her lips and turned her face to one side.
‘I won’t hurt you again,’ Karen Lamb said. ‘I promise.’ She drew the bedsheet round the girl’s shoulders, then picked up a pillow which she smoothed between her fingers. She listened to the freezing wind roaring through the streets of Mayfair, rattling shop-signs, window frames, fluttering ribbons and scraps of rubbish.
Later, she sat in a chair by the window and took off her gloves and laid them in her lap. With her eyes shut, she rocked very slightly back and forth. After a time she got up and walked toward the bed. The lampshade was askew. She adjusted it carefully. She noticed how a few spots of blood adhered to the surface of the cheap shade. For a moment she saw them, not through her own eyes, but as if from a policeman’s perspective of clues and signs. She put her gloves on and, tapping her hands against her thighs a moment, she smiled and gave in to an impulse that hadn’t been any part of her original plan.
THREE
DUBLIN
SIX WEEKS INTO A LEAVE OF ABSENCE HE HADN’T ASKED FOR, FRANK Pagan sat at one a.m. in the lounge of the Shelburne Hotel on St Stephen’s Green. Here and there groups of wearied tourists, many of them Americans seduced by off-season prices into visiting glacial Europe, sat over pots of tea or glasses of stout which they drank with exaggerated lip-smacking – as if they’d discovered the exlixir of life. The lounge had a dislocating sense of unreality; in this place clocks meant nothing. Only the darkness pressing upon the windows reminded you that it was night outside, and wintry.
Pagan sipped his Guinness. His fifth. Pack it in, he thought. Go upstairs to your room and sleep. But he didn’t get up from the table. He took a picture postcard of Bantry Bay from the inside pocket of his beige woollen jacket and scribbled a message to his associate, Robbie Foxworth, in London. He wrote: What The Yard calls a leave of absence is probably more like a mid-life crisis. My future is about as bright as that of a man selling gynaecological instruments door to door. He put aside his pen and realized the tone of his language came off as more self-pitying than flippant. Flippant was what he wanted. In truth, he was a little dejected. And the Guinness, although it had befuddled his senses somewhat, hadn’t elevated his mood.
He was still an unemployed cop, and you could dress that fact up in any euphemistic phrase you liked, it didn’t alter the reality, the savagery of office politics, power struggles, departmental warfare. When Martin Burr, Pagan’s guardian angel, had retired as Commissioner, he’d been replaced by a brutal upstart called George Nimmo, whose ‘radical reconstruction’ of departments had amounted to a Stalinist purge. Heads had rolled and more than a few people had bloody hands and Nimmo, contriving to rise above the mayhem, had conducted press conferences where he spoke officiously of necessary reforms. And these so-called reforms had resulted in Pagan’s banishment. You’re due some vacation time, Frank. Why don’t you have an extended leave of absence and we’ll figure out your future when you’re gone, old boy.
I never kissed the right ass, Pagan thought. And I never liked Nimmo.
So, rejected, he’d driven for six weeks around the frozen wastes of Europe in a purposeless way, a man chasing unreachable destinations. In a rented Nissan, so unlike the red Camaro convertible he kept in London – a car to which he was irrationally attached – he’d played his vintage rock-and-roll cassettes at maximum volume as he’d driven through Germany from Hamburg to Frankfurt and down to Munich, where he’d spent too many nights in one beer-hall or another, vast tabernacles of lager consumption in which people became more and more sentimental as the hours wore on. Songs were sung, jokes told; there was laughter that would sometimes disappear inside moody silences, as if a sudden cloud of collective sorrow had descended. When he found himself imagining the beer-halls were filled with boisterous Brownshirts and that Hitler was about to make a triumphant entrance, he knew it was time to move on again.
From Germany he’d gone into Austria where, in Vienna, he’d passed his time uneventfully in dark coffee-houses flicking the pages of foreign newspapers in the manner of a man stripped of language. It was eerily comforting, he thought, to scan newspapers he didn’t understand; it was as if the events of the world were filtered through an awareness from which he was excluded. Greek newspapers, Hungarian, Italian; he avoided the French and German press because he had a working knowledge of those languages. He might have been marooned in a space station orbiting earth, quite forgotten by those who’d sent him zooming into the heavens in the first place.
He drove into Italy without a particular destination in mind. It was another country on the map, that was all. He went to Milan, and to Florence, and found himself one night in an inexpensive hotel room in Rome, pacing up and down, walking back and forth from door to window, a man trapped in a silent box. What the hell was he doing here? he wondered. What was he looking for? Even the small Christ on the wall gazed at him with neither understanding nor pity, more a kind of puzzlement.
He spoke to no-one. He lived deep within himself. Four nights ago in the town of Alba – why in God’s name had he travelled to Alba anyway? – he’d come belatedly to the conclusion that his disaffection lay in the fact that he was running from his own history, from anniversaries, from memories of loss.
He’d watched a full moon sail in the direction of the Mediterranean and he’d thought how obvious it was: he was a fugitive from himself. The moon, charged with all the desolation of the season, was as indifferent to him as the Christ in the hotel in Rome. He’d driven back to France and taken a ferry to Ireland, imagining he might try his hand at fishing, but a few days on a numbing West Cork riverbank had persuaded him that the fish had succumbed to winter kill and that he didn’t have the patience in any event. The solitary angler, demented in the cold, stubbornly watching his float vibrate to the drumming rain – that wasn’t for him.
He didn’t finish writing the postcard. He stuck it back in his pocket, rubbed his eyes, stretched his arms. He realized he was more inebriated than he liked. The condition tended to arouse a maudlin streak in him. I want the impossible, he thoug
ht. I want things the way they were. Roxanne resurrected from the dead, his job back, everything reassembled and welded together, history rewritten. He stared into his glass and contemplated the sombre fact that old sorrows were never quite buried, and more recent grudges hadn’t lost their bitter sting.
Irritated by the tide of his thoughts, he lit a cigarette, then immediately crushed it out. Get a grip, Pagan. Face it. The world isn’t the way you want it to be. You’re not the architect of the universe. And five pints of Guinness aren’t going to make you so. Five pints of Guinness: he was half-jarred. He had no great capacity for the black stuff.
He rose a little unsteadily – the old Guinness shuffle – left the lounge, walked to the elevators, pressed a button, the doors slid open immediately. He rode up to the sixth floor. He unlocked the door of his room, stepped inside, flicked a light-switch. Kicking off his shoes, he lay down on the bed. He didn’t feel sleepy. He picked up the TV remote control and pressed a button and gazed at the picture. He hadn’t looked at TV in days, nor had he felt inclined to buy newspapers.
There was an item on the screen that depicted a street corner in Belfast surrounded by scene-of-the-crime tape and cops whose faces were red from the cold. A Catholic taxi-driver had been shot dead by Ulster Loyalists.
The same old sorry story of sectarian violence. The same lust for blood-letting. Pagan remembered his last experience with Irish terrorism when he’d been in pursuit of the strangely discriminating Irish-American assassin known as Jig. He hadn’t thought about Jig for a long while. Jig represented the acceptable face of terrorism – if indeed such a thing existed. Casual violence, the random killing of taxi-drivers because of their religious affiliations, the butchery of innocent people caught in bombings and crossfire: these things were beneath Jig. He regarded them with contempt. There was, Pagan thought, a certain nobility of purpose to the young man; in a sense he was a throwback to the days of the old IRA. His targets were always political. He always made sure that innocent bystanders were never caught up in his activities.
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