by Baker, John
‘If I arrive at that decision,’ Sam said, ‘I’ll tell my client how I feel.’
‘That’s all I ask,’ said Reeves. ‘And I’ll see to it that you aren’t out of pocket. I and my wife are the only family that Angeles has, Mr Turner. She would have you think otherwise, but she does need looking after a little.’
Sam eyed the guy squarely. ‘My business is with Ms Falco. Not with you or anyone else, Mr Reeves. If I end up out of pocket, I’ll chase her for it or take the loss.’ Reeves nodded. ‘Of course. Forgive me. I’m something of a clodhopper. When you’re touched by tragedy, you sometimes become his student.’
‘Tragedy. You refer to Isabel?’
‘Yes, Isabel, my wife.’
‘Do you know where she is, Mr Reeves?’
‘No, but I’ve a good idea what she’ll be doing. It’ll be a young man with a big dick and a surfeit of energy.’
‘You knew she was having an affair?’
Reeves laughed ironically. ‘I don’t remember a time when she wasn’t.’
‘But I understood that her present affair was serious. That she was in the process of leaving you.’
‘All of Isabel’s affairs are serious. But not so serious that she’ll get around to leaving me. She needs the illusion of being in love. She flits from lover to lover in the same way that a bee flits from flower to flower. She takes what she wants, and moves on. I accepted the situation long ago. Had affairs of my own from time to time. Ours is a modern marriage, Mr Turner. We are both errant, but we know which side our bread is buttered on.’
‘And her boyfriend, the present one, is no different to the others?’
Reeves shook his head. ‘They’re going through the making-plans stage, swearing undying devotion to each other. But they haven’t got to the point where she has to make the actual decision. Once that time arrives, Isabel will back out. If she hasn’t already.’
‘D’you know why she’s gone away?’
‘She thinks she’s going blind. It may well be true. There’s this wretched disease they have. Retinitis pigmentosa. Hereditary. She’s seen what it’s done to Angeles, and she can’t face the same thing happening to her. I think it’s been playing on her mind, she’ll have gone away with her boyfriend.’
‘Does she think she’s being watched?’
‘If she does, she hasn’t said so. I think if Isabel was being stalked in any way, she would have mentioned it to me. We don’t live in each other’s pockets, as I’ve said. But we are married.’
Time to go. Sam got to his feet and said goodbye. He blazed a trail through the carpeting to the front door. It was true and he’d always known it: the chain of wedlock is so heavy that it takes two to carry it, sometimes three.
When he left the house, Sam passed a pond in the garden, its surface frozen hard. Someone had broken the ice with an iron bar that leaned against the fence, but it had frozen over again. Now the surface was ridged, the fresh ice welded around chunks of the old, forming peaks and an opaque natural patchwork which hid everything beneath it.
It triggered a memory which took time to surface, and Sam hesitated, watching the crystal patterning to give it time. Angeles’ response to his question about ice skating. Other physical activities she’d been open about, glad of the chance to show that she was fit and able, but as soon as he mentioned ice skating she’d clammed up.
Sam turned towards the house, thinking to ask Reeves why she would do that. But he stopped and made his way back to the car. He’d had enough of the guy for one day.
So the lady didn’t like ice. People are allowed to have their little phobias. Even private detectives have no-go areas, subjects they’d prefer not to talk about.
It wouldn’t leave him alone, though. There was a frozen pond in his mind, and the picture of the lady sucking in her breath when he mentioned ice skating. Had to shake his head real hard to get it out of there.
But Quintin Reeves’ last words carried on working in Sam’s head as he drove back to York. Sam had had more partners than his own sense of credibility allowed. It’s » always possible to make a fundamental mistake in the choice of a woman, and with more or less average luck at this point in history, you could get it wrong twice. But Sam Turner, if he had the space and thought really hard about it, had set himself up with almost as many partners i as the fingers on his hands.
Some of them were dead, and others had walked off into the distance. A couple of them he’d abandoned for what seemed like good reasons at the time. And there were two - or was ft three? - he couldn’t immediately remember their names.
Not a good record. But one he couldn’t do much to change. Usually he’d lie about it. If it came up in conversation, he’d make reference to ‘my first partner’ or ‘my second partner’, but he never got around to talking about his ‘eighth partner’. Christ, people would think he was Bluebeard.
He felt better about it at the moment, because he hadn’t been involved with a woman for nearly twelve months. Since Dora died. A pragmatist, Sam had dealt with the problem of his emotional life in the same way he had dealt with his alcoholism. Abstention.
The blind woman had picked up on it. He couldn’t remember her exact words, something about doubting if he made his women happy. What was it with her, anyway? Was she some kind of seer? No one had ever before suggested that Sam might have a fundamental flaw. Except Sam himself, who’d always suspected it.
There was always the chance, of course, that Reeves was right, that she imagined things. Sam didn’t think so, but there had been times in his own life when he had lived with visions stoked by booze.
He liked thinking about Angeles Falco. Putting her image together inside his head. It was warm and comforting and exciting at the same time. He liked the ambiguity of her vulnerability and fierce independence. He’d once or twice fallen for weak women, kittens who needed constant attention, and known suddenly, just after it was too late, that he would never manage to carry them.
But that wouldn’t happen again. Next time he’d... refuse the drink. Find a good book. Eat an apple.
‘You ever read Descartes?’ JD said, when Sam had climbed into the passenger seat of his van.
‘Cogito ergo sum?'
‘That’s the guy, yeah.’
‘What about him?’
JD’s van was in the middle of the parking lot outside the! Haxby Road offices of Falco’s soft-drinks factory. He had a camera with a large zoom, a pair of binoculars, two A4 notepads and a selection of different coloured pens. ‘I was thinking,’ he said. ‘That business about “I think therefore I am”, it must’ve made people insecure.’
‘They wanted to burn him at the stake,’ Sam said. ‘Guy must’ve got up their noses.’
‘Theologians. Sensitive crowd at the best of times. They’d have had him as well, if he hadn’t escaped to Sweden.’
‘Dunno,’ said Sam. ‘I know about cogito ergo sum, and that he wasn’t the flavour of the month, but I don’t understand why.’
‘We’re talking seventeenth, eighteenth century here. Everybody assumed that they lived in an ontologically consistent universe. There were problems of life and death, people died with horrendous diseases and sometimes starved, but they all felt good about themselves. ’ They knew who they were, and they didn’t have any ' doubts about their place in the world. About being. They were absolutely secure: God was in the heavens, the king was in his castle, and the poor man was at the gate. There were squabbles occasionally, know what I mean? But there wasn’t any really serious angst, not concerning the self. Psychoanalysis hadn’t been invented yet, because there was no need for it. The only people who were in real mental anguish were lunatics, heretics: a tiny minority of the population.
‘Then Descartes comes along and lays this “I think therefore I am” thing on them, and there appears a tiny crack in the known universe. Suddenly, just for a moment, there is the possibility of an evil genius running the world, and we catch a glimpse of this monster through the chink made by those
two words “I think”.’
‘You’re losing me,’ said Sam.
‘No, hang in there. What happened was that people ceased to be people. A man stopped being a man, and became instead the thing that thinks. Everyone was reduced. They weren’t men and women any more; they were things that think. And that allowed all kinds of doubts and uncertainties to gain dominance over us.
‘So now we have people saying, Christians, for example, who say, “Do I believe in God, or do I just think I believe in God?” They don’t know any more, not really.’
‘Is that right, JD?’
‘Yeah, and it’s all down to old Descartes.’
‘So what are you actually telling me here?’
‘Nothing you don’t already know. We live in a shithole universe. God’s dead, and we’re all replicants with preprogrammed memories and emotions. All we can do to escape it is to fly off into a fantasy world, but then we have to wonder if the fantasy world isn’t the real world, and all the horrors we thought were the real world are just thought patterns that the devil torments us with.’
‘You want us to stop thinking, right?’
‘No, we can’t do that anyway. And if I could, I wouldn’t go that way. It’s just a great adventure to me. I really like it here in hell.’
‘And what you like best about it is describing how we got here.’
‘Yeah, you’re reading my mind.’
‘So, perhaps you could tell me how we got to be sitting in your van in the middle of a car park outside a lemonade factory.’
That’s easy.’ JD smiled. ‘I followed a blind woman here. A car picked her up from her house around ten-thirty this morning, delivered her here with a briefcase, and she disappeared through the swing doors. She looked gorgeous, little black suit with a short skirt, made me feel like I’ve been asleep for a hundred years. She hasn’t been out since. One or two shady-looking characters have gone in (I got photographs of them), but they’ve all come out again. None of them seemed in a hurry, no bloodstains on their clothes, far as I could see.
‘The lady’s up on the third floor, second window from the right. Sometimes comes to the window, as though she’s having a look at the world. Leans on the windowsill. She’s in the room by herself, or at least I haven’t seen anyone else at the window, and she doesn’t seem to be talking to anyone.
‘Oh, and she promotes libidinal urges within me.’
‘Does she do that?’ asked Sam. ‘Or do you just think she does that, but in fact those libidinal urges are entirely your own, and not related to her in any way whatsoever?’
‘Now that’s an interesting topic you’re raising there,’ JD said. ‘There is in fact a school of thought which declares that all sexual activity is masturbatory. It doesn’t really make any difference if you do it with your hand or a man or a woman or a goat or an organic vegetable. The sexual partner is wholly imagined, a sexual fantasy. A sexual partner is never a woman or a man in the whole kernel of his or her being. You don’t get the other person, you get what you imagine the other person is.’
‘Yeah,’ said Sam.
‘Yeah, what?’
‘I know you don’t get the other person. I’ve known that all my life- The real problem is when you don’t get anything at all, you don’t get reality and you can’t catch the illusion either. What d’you do then?’
‘Easy,’ said JD. ‘You write a book.’
8
Marie Dickens didn’t sleep well that night. Dreams littered with erotic, sometimes horrific images left her in a misty, lemurian landscape from which there seemed to be no escape. A cup of hot chocolate at three o’clock seemed to help, but when she went back to sleep a warm dream involving her new boyfriend turned into the sadistic gang-rape of a blind child between two goalposts. More hot chocolate, watching the clock grind its way from a quarter after four to the croak of dawn. Then, as inexplicably as before, two-and-a-half hours of deep, uninterrupted sleep.
When she’d finished breakfast she put the cereal bowl in the sink and took her coffee over to the window alcove, looked out at the river. She picked up the phone and dialled Sam’s home number. He answered on the seventh ring.
‘Did I interrupt something?’ she asked.
‘Yeah. I was in the shower.’
‘Alone?’
‘That’s how I seem to do it these days, Marie. I’m still dripping here. Something I can help you with before the carpet rots?’
‘Yes, I thought I’d talk to Isabel’s boyfriend, Russell Harvey, but I wanted to check if she’d turned up yet.’
‘No sign of her. I talked with Angeles about half an hour ago. She’d already rung the husband, Reeves.’
‘Quintin?’
‘Quintin Reeves, yeah. You find that funny?’
Marie laughed. ‘You know how words give rise to images, especially names? There’s something decidedly porcine about Quintin.’
‘When’re you thinking of seeing him, the boyfriend?’
‘I’ll give him a ring now. See if I can go this morning. Maybe Isabel’s there?’
‘Hope so,’ Sam said. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about her. If she doesn’t turn up soon, I’m gonna tell Angeles to bring the police in.’
Russell Harvey didn’t answer his telephone. Marie tried five times in the next forty minutes and each time she got the engaged signal. If Isabel had decided to leave her husband and set up house with the boyfriend, that would explain why the guy didn’t answer his phone. They wouldn’t want Quintin Reeves ringing in, looking for his wife, and maybe they were playing at being the only people in the world. Living together on sex and French bread and sex and booze and sex and whatever it was that turned them on.
When Marie drove out to Russell Harvey’s house in Fulford and knocked on the door she fully expected it to be opened by Mrs Isabel Reeves clad in little more than an apron.
What she got, however, was something quite different. First, the sound of an uncurling chain, and then what might have been a grizzly bear hitting the other side of the door, followed by a rattling series of snarls and barks. She took a step back as the invisible, but seemingly huge canine presence on the inside of the door tried to break its way through to her.
The rumpus was momentarily quelled and superseded by a high-pitched, but masculine voice. ‘Emperor, shut the fuck up. Get back in this basket. NOW.’
The scratching at the door continued, and the hound let go with a howl of rage and frustration that would have scattered a colony of ghouls. There was a loud slapping sound, like the crack of a whip, and the human voice came through the door again. ‘Emperor. Basket. Now.’
The canine sounds were muted. Small whimpers receding from the door, the links of a chain dragging over a paved area. Finally the door was opened two or three inches, and from the gloom inside the house there appeared a thin, chiselled, unshaven face. ‘What’s up?’ the man said.
Marie took a hesitant step forward. ‘My name’s Marie Dickens,’ she said. ‘I’m looking for Isabel Reeves.’
The man opened the door wider and motioned her to follow him. Marie stepped inside, closed the door behind her and followed his hunched form down the narrow corridor. A leather strap hung from his right hand, longer than a belt, more like something one might use to keep a trunk fastened. With each step the odour of old dog grew in strength. Harvey turned into a large Victorian kitchen, the main feature of which was a solid-fuel range which was pumping out more heat than the space could handle. Within seconds of entering the room Marie was aware of a thin film of sweat on her forehead and upper lip.
Emperor was a cross between a black Alsatian and a wire-haired terrier. A runt of a dog with tiny black eyes and chiselled features, not unlike his master. His chain had been hooked short to a metal peg on the wall so he couldn’t lie down. He avoided eye contact and gazed off into the middle distance, never betraying his optimism, the certainty that his day would come.
‘What d’you know about Isabel?’ Russell Harvey asked. His gaunt features
and slack posture made him seem old, but he could not have been more than thirty-five. He had a wild crop of black hair on his head, and a day’s growth of beard. His eyes were quick and active, flashing as they measured Marie’s legs, her breasts and hair.
‘I was hoping to find her here,’ Marie said. ‘Or that you’d tell me where she is.’
Russell Harvey was sitting on the edge of a pine chair. His body was wasted like that of a Muslim fakir or someone suffering from anorexia. His large, grubby trainers seemed grotesque in relation to his stringy muscles.
‘She was supposed to come yesterday,’ he said. He stared at the dog for a moment. ‘Thought you was her till Emperor started.’ He looked directly at Marie as if trying to penetrate behind her eyes. ‘Has something happened?’ Marie shook her head. ‘We don’t know. She went out the day before yesterday, and she hasn’t been seen since.’
‘She would’ve come here if something was wrong.’
‘You haven’t seen her?’
‘No.’
‘Or heard from her?’
He looked towards the windowsill, where the phone was unconnected. He plugged it into the socket and replaced the handset in its cradle. Then he put his head against the glass and closed his eyes. Marie moved closer to him, instinctively at first, perhaps to put an arm around him, offer some kind of comfort. But the angularity of the man, the odour that surrounded him, the sheer size of his despair all conspired to keep her at arm’s length. ‘We don’t know that anything’s happened to her,’ she said. She’s under pressure. Maybe she’s gone away for a few days? To rest, to think, to get some perspective on her life?’
Harvey turned to face her. He looked at and seemed to speak to her breasts. ‘We were in love,’ he said. ‘That’s not pressure. We were going to live together. Everything was settled.’
‘For you, maybe,’ Marie told him. She refused to join him in his use of the past tense. It was as if Isabel Reeves was already dead and buried. ‘But Isabel still has to make the break with her husband. Whatever their relationship, that’s not an easy thing to do.’
