Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon?

by Simon Okotie

  There are some acts that people will not perform if they are being observed by anyone; other acts are only performed by people if they are sure (or reasonably sure) that they are not being observed by a law enforcement agent. Mugging, rape and murder are examples of the former category, with cycling the wrong way down a one-way street (or down an alleyway) an example of the latter. There are various means by which one can undertake surveillance of people suspected in each category – different methods are required for each. For the latter more minor offences it may be sufficient simply to hide one’s face behind a newspaper as one surveys the scene – that, at least, was the traditional method. You can, if it’s useful, tear a small hole in the newspaper to enable you to observe the scene (the alleyway for instance) more easily, as long as it doesn’t draw attention to yourself. Other essential accoutrements of this form of surveillance are dark glasses (except, perhaps, at night), a long overcoat (in autumn, winter and perhaps early spring) and a hat, preferably a Fedora rather than a Stetson. The hat has the added advantage of providing shelter against a storm. In the case of a heavy storm it is best to put the newspaper aside – perhaps fold it up under your arm and whistle a tune so as not to draw attention to yourself.

  So much for the practicalities of surveillance. Anyone could learn from his experience in this area, Marguerite thought.

  7

  Having cased the rear of the hotel and observed that at ground level it consisted of a series of closed fire exit doors recessed into the façade, Marguerite found himself at the steps of the colonnaded church at the front and to one side of the hotel. He immediately noticed that the entrance to the hotel was set back from the road so as to make a space for a taxi drop off and ‘kiss and ride’ drive through. This meant that the left-hand wall of the adjacent building provided the boundary of the right hand side of the dropping off point for the hotel. This could be the first place where many tourists staying at the hotel set foot in the city – actually within the city limits – wherever those limits were. The main airports purported to be part of the city, but in fact they were not. The reason that they included the city’s name in their name was to aid the foreign tourist – and indeed the foreign travel agent, that is the travel agent in a foreign land rather than the foreign travel agent in this land – who may not know any better. They (the foreign, or at least distant tourist) may be in their own city, town or village and want to come to Marguerite’s city, or more accurately perhaps, at least to Marguerite’s mind, want to come to the Mayor’s city, and if the name of that city did not appear in the names of the airports that surrounded the city then it might cause a good deal of confusion in the minds of potential travellers, confusion that was dispelled by including the name of the city in the name of the airport, although this appellation did not always strictly hold true.

  So it could be the first time that the tourist touched their foot or feet or wheelchair wheel or, in some cases, hand (Marguerite wasn’t sure which these latter cases would be yet, but he would look into it) to the ground within the city limits. In fact it was highly likely that it would be the first time that the tourist touched their personal means of propulsion, whether that be foot or feet or wheel (in the expanded case of wheel- or pushchair or, more exceptionally, pram) or crutches or zimmer frame to the ground within the city limits. It would almost certainly be the first time that they set foot (etc) in the city if their means of travel from their point of entry to the country, which most likely would be either a port, airport or rail station, were a road vehicle – a hire car or taxi, to give the most common examples. Certainly, in the case of the latter it would be most unlikely, if they had been picked up by the taxi at the airport, port or railway station, that the taxi would have stopped to allow disembarkation between their point of setting foot (etc) into the country and the point of stepping out of the taxi outside the hotel, which would mean that their stepping out of the taxi outside the hotel (for those people staying at that hotel – other determinants would clearly become active if they were staying elsewhere) would be the first time that they had set foot in the city, at least on that particular trip to that city.

  There were, though, troubling exceptions that flooded Marguerite’s mind at that moment as he turned to watch a woman in a short pinstriped skirt leave the hotel. Consider, for example, this: that the foreign tourist may have arrived in the country without the cash to pay for the taxi he was taking from his point of arrival into the country (that is, his place of first setting foot, etc) to the hotel, but he may have (he must have) the means of securing the funds to pay for the no doubt expensive taxi into the city. And it could be that they were not a tourist but a businessman, a man, that is, who is coming to the city on business – this does not mean that this man is never a tourist or has never been a tourist in that city or elsewhere, it just means that the purpose of that trip is exclusively, or primarily, business, as he may have had to write on his immigration card, depending on which country he was travelling from and the agreements (reciprocal or otherwise) that the two countries in question had in place for such matters. It might be that the tourist or businessman would ask the taxi driver to stop at a bank or a cashpoint or a bureau de change on his (their) route into the city that morning, afternoon, evening or night time (the latter two perhaps ruling out the bank or bureau de change, given their shorter opening hours when compared to the cashpoint, if one can talk about the cashpoint as having opening hours) and that, if the cashpoint (24 hours) or bank or bureau de change (during their opening hours, which may differ as to service and to location) was within the city limits then it could be that the first step of the walk (or equivalent) from the taxi to the cashpoint (etc) would be the first step that the person had made in the city during that trip, Marguerite thought, as the woman in the pinstriped skirt passed him, with a sideways glance at him.

  In the case of the hire car, it could be that the foreign visitor (to use that generic term) would make their first steps in that fine city walking across the forecourt of a petrol station (provided, of course, that the petrol station was within the city limits or, at least, that the part of the forecourt of the petrol station that the foreign visitor was walking across was within the city limits), or just simply making the two or three steps (however many it would take) to walk to the petrol or diesel pump to fill up (or less than fill up) their hire car, and it would almost certainly, almost without exception, be a car – motorcycles could not be hired as far as Marguerite knew – but how unfortunate bicycles could be – at railway stations, say – this meant much more reflection time to Marguerite’s mind, more troubling exceptions. But in the case of the foreign visitor travelling with their spouse, colleague or friend, say, just to give the main categories, it could be that, in both cases (that is, the taxi and the hire car, leaving aside the other vehicles that could be hired in different locations around and within the city for the time being), that one (or more, if there were more than one person accompanying the main (if we can call them that) foreign visitor (from that party of foreign visitors – it could be that there were other more important foreign visitors setting foot, or about to set foot into the city on that day, indeed, at that moment)) of that group would be setting foot in the city for the first time outside the hotel, ie those who had not got out of the taxi to go to the cashpoint (etc) or got out of the car to walk to the petrol pump, to use just the two examples that have been cited thus far.

  Some people might do like the Pope and kiss the ground as they walked down the steps from the aircraft, but Marguerite had never seen anyone do that.

  For those coming by public transport, the area outside the hotel would not be the first place where they had set foot within the city limits. There were a number of reasons for this, none of which Marguerite was in a position to explore. The reason Marguerite was in no position to explore them was that Isobel Absalon had appeared in the doorway to the hotel and he needed to turn his attention back to her. He noticed immediately that she
was wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing on entering the hotel. This did not mean that she had not taken her clothes off when she was in the hotel, it just meant, quite simply, that at that moment she was wearing the same clothes that she’d been wearing on entering the hotel. She was wheeling the baby in the pushchair in front of her, as is traditional, with the girlfriend that she’d met in the restaurant walking beside her. They’d turned right out of the hotel, and were now walking towards Marguerite, as he stood leaning against a pillar – without a newspaper, alas – at the top of the steps into the church. As they continued moving towards him and he slipped behind the pillar, remaining on the far side of it as they passed so that they wouldn’t see him and thereby compromise his surveillance of them, he noticed that she – Isobel Absalon – had very recently been crying.

  8

  Marguerite thought about jumping into a taxicab and saying ‘Follow those people’, but he knew that just wouldn’t work. The reason it wouldn’t work was that, unlike most bus fares, taxi fares stretched according to distance travelled, and he estimated that his funds would run out long before they got to their destination, wherever that was. The other reason – and this was the primary one – was that they were walking and he would be in a taxi. It would mean that the taxi would be travelling at walking pace not far behind them. This might arouse suspicion. Instead he started to trail them on foot, as it is known.

  He wanted to keep a respectable distance from Isobel Absalon, in particular. But how was he to judge that distance? He decided he would measure from his chest to the nearest part of her body. With sprinters, they specified that it was the chest that had to cross the line first, he reasoned, and they had sophisticated means of checking that. But what was the nearest part of Isobel Absalon, he now wondered? There were various feminine, which is to say, motherly protuberances about her body which he admired as best he could from the rear. Perhaps he should measure to one of those. Whilst he was considering this he noticed that this branch of his inquiry was having an unfortunate effect upon him: he was becoming aroused4. He wondered whether he felt attracted to her because she was a young mother, or in spite of that fact. It had to be one or the other, or another possibility – that went without saying. One of those other possibilities was that the fact of her being a young mother didn’t enter his consciousness, at least not in relation to his attraction or otherwise to her. Whatever the trigger, the stirrings in his groin that are traditionally associated with arousal meant that if he and Isobel Absalon were a set and unwavering distance apart (give or take a few centimetres) and if the experience of apprehending her were particularly agreeable, let’s say, or better – exciting or stirring – then he (or that physical part of him that responded most visibly to seeing her) would slowly move towards her; an involuntary stirring would, in short, take place in his sexual organ. Were this organ unrestrained by his trousers (or shorts) (not to mention his underwear) and, were it given full rein to do so, then it would end up pointing straight (more or less) at her face (if, in a different scenario, they were seated within touching distance of each other, say, but not too close). If they happened to be standing opposite one another, at a nightclub, say, or at a bus stop, and that level of arousal happened, then his sexual organ would point more or less straight at her stomach, if they were within touching distance that is, but not too close. These are just very rough approximations. They are just rules of thumb. They should be taken with a pinch of salt.

  There was a thought in Marguerite’s mind about the applicability or otherwise of what he now dubbed ‘the Sprinter’s Rule’ to this situation, which will be extemporised upon more fully shortly. For the time being he continued following Mrs Absalon at a discreet distance, which he tried to keep constant by monitoring his level of arousal and making minor adjustments to his split-second location in relation to hers.

  He saw that the Sprinter’s Rule did not and should not apply in this case: that much was now clear to him. Where the opposite sex was concerned, if you had a rule where the outermost position of the chest (when fully puffed out, like a cockerel) was the arbiter of where one was at any instant then it could be that, when he was attracted to someone, was in very close proximity to that person, could perhaps feel that person’s breath on his stubbly cheek (and did the stubble mean that he was officially closer to that person, physically speaking, than he would have been in the exact same circumstances, save for the fact of being clean shaven?) and was aroused, which, given the previous conditions (by way of recap: attraction (mutuality remaining moot), close physical proximity such that the breath of that person could be felt on his stubbly or clean shaven cheek) was near certain (his arousal) then, it would seem churlish to argue, when his penis (which, it would follow, would be more or less erect given his state of arousal, which has already been established) could at that moment, be inserted into one or other (but not more than one) of that person’s numerous (numerous?) orifices, that, given the Sprinter’s Rule (or whatever you wanted to call it), that he WAS NOT EVEN TOUCHING THEM – how could he be, given that his chest (including the small amount of wiry chest hair and his goose bumps if it were chilly) (and, hence, he himself) was not in contact with the woman (because, unless he was very much mistaken, it would be a woman)? The whole rule fell apart in the face of such considerations. However, he felt that all was not lost: all one needed to do, he thought, was to exclude from the rule’s sphere of application those cases like the current one that involved judging the physical distance between people who were attracted to one other or, more precisely in which a man was attracted to someone (male or female). He felt sure that he could exclude as negligible the distance that a woman’s mound rose, or the distance covered by her erect nipples indicating, in turn, her state of arousal. That distance in a man (or at least in this man, he thought contentedly to himself) was not negligible, could not be discounted.

  He wondered why he had dubbed it the Sprinter’s Rule in the first place. It was not just in relation to the apostrophe – it was the selection of the possessive pronoun, if that is what it was. Why the sprinter, then, rather than the long- or middle-distance runner, or the decathlete? The decathlete took part in ten different sports and, in each one, there was the equivalent of what he had hitherto termed the Sprinter’s Rule. Granted with the throwing events, which he knew were more widely known as ‘field events’, there was the equivalent of the Sprinter’s Rule. Here, though, it was to do with an indentation in the ground. Were high jump, pole vault, long jump and triple jump field or track events? He would look it up next time he was close to an encyclopaedia. Indeed, were they part of the decathlon? He would look that up too. He was not sure which he would look up first; in other words he didn’t know which was most pressing: the categorisation of the above-mentioned events into ‘track’ or ‘field’ or into ‘decathlon’ or ‘non-decathlon’. It did not matter, he decided. He was just happy that there were such clear demarcations in this instance. He almost didn’t need to know what they were, so sure was he that clear boundaries existed between such categories.

  Satisfied with this conclusion, Marguerite looked up to see that Isobel Absalon, her friend and baby had disappeared.

  4. Harold Absalon’s power stemmed, in my view, from having gone to the right schools, despite being from the wrong background. Going to the right schools, perhaps having the state pay for that right, had, in short, given him the right accent, the right connections. How else would he have found someone of Isobel Absalon’s calibre?

  9

  He suspected that they’d headed down a nearby side road. He followed suit, but saw no sign of them. At the end of this road he’d expected to come upon what is known as ‘a crossroads’. In fact, he noticed, as he continued to approach it, that this side road formed what is known as ‘a T junction’ with the busier road at the end of it. He formed a mental image of a T junction and a crossroads and compared them, to emphasise the difference between them. He instantly wondered w
hy the latter was not called an X junction. He thought the latter was not called an X junction because it would not be sufficiently clear which limb of the X the traveller was approaching from, whereas with the T junction everyone knew, or at least assumed, that they would be journeying up the vertical stem, if one could call it that, to be presented with a choice of two directions: left or right, roughly speaking. He put to one side the difference between the printed capital, with all the flourishes at its extremities, eg T, depending on the typeface or font used in this edition, and that of the handwritten word, which would mostly (or at least often, in his opinion) consist of one straight (or thereabouts) stroke from left to right (or vice versa) followed by a downward (or, in rare cases, upwards) stroke meeting the crossways stroke at its midpoint, in other words, no frilly affectations at the extremities which might confuse the use of the letter as a simile for a particular junction. One knew where one was with the T junction, in short, or at least with the representation of it within the written and spoken language.