by Simon Okotie
The conductress had turned to face him, as has already been established beyond reasonable doubt. Further, they were, finally, face to face, which implied that Marguerite had either been facing the conductress, that is, after she had turned to face him and before she turned away from him, assuming that she would, or that he had turned to face her within the parameters, as previously established, of her facing him. This did not mean, as far as Marguerite was concerned, that their current face-to-face constituted ‘face time’ as he thought of it. If, as was possible, the bus conductress became Justice Minister, Minister of Transport, say, President or – and this was even less plausible, the ‘even’ indicating succinctly and skilfully that the first three outcomes were themselves quite unlikely to obtain – the Queen (and he didn’t entertain the idea of her becoming the King, given the already high levels of implausibility of options under consideration) then Marguerite would accept that their time spent face to face in this scenario following his solving of a particularly intractable future case, might then constitute face time; similarly if he found that he became President etc (and presumably he would know to some extent that this was happening to him, in advance, that is, of him taking office as it was known – he couldn’t imagine that the presidency (etc) would be conferred upon him without his prior knowledge or consent), then the conductress might conceivably seek an audience with him, which, given his current interest in her, he thought he would be minded to grant, in which case, when it occurred, she could justifiably refer to it as face time with him, if she so wished. For now, she held his gaze and he held hers. She had such dark brown eyes – both of them – to the extent that he could almost not distinguish the pupils from the irises. After a very short time had elapsed in this way she looked down into her right hand, the one into which the woman in front of Marguerite had placed something. Marguerite also looked down to the same location. The hand contained a number of coins which, as far as Marguerite could make out were genuine; that is they were not counterfeit; further, they were of the currency, as far as he could tell from his vantage point two or three feet above them, that pertained to the land he inhabited – that is the physical rather than necessarily the mental space in which he resided. The conductress put the coins in her low-slung leather money belt, reached into a separate compartment of the money belt and handed Marguerite two coins of a smaller denomination but which nevertheless also seemed genuine and relevant, currency-wise, to his current physical context. In this way Marguerite assuaged his disappointment at not having had the opportunity of squeezing past the conductress, or even brushing up against her, something that he felt was somehow now inappropriate given that they had, so recently, been face to face or near face to face in the way described (although note that face time, interestingly, did not, to Marguerite’s mind, preclude such squeezing or brushing up against, although he personally would not abuse his position in that way, he thought, should he find himself in that situation).
A question emerged, then: why had the woman he was following behind paid his bus fare?
15. It was around this time, then, that my colleagues started calling me ‘Harold’. I was unsettled by it, to start with, but I could see, over time, that my own surprise at being called ‘Harold’ was making my colleagues uneasy. So after a while, I just adopted it. I even took on some of his mannerisms and phraseologies. That seemed to settle the atmosphere somewhat, at least for a time.
16. I saw, in short, how much potential there was in my taking on his persona in terms of advancing my career. That’s why I started doing it, even though I have to say I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with it.
31
This action on the part of the woman in the pinstriped suit – namely that of her paying his bus fare – had the effect of making Marguerite review his operational parameters in relation to her. Hitherto, note, he had simply been following behind her; now, he made the snap operational decision to actively follow her.
Was he being rash, he wondered, as he followed her towards the rear of the bus, in so decisively deleting the word ‘behind’ to simply leave the word ‘following’ within his mission parameters in relation to the woman in the pinstriped suit? Some might accuse him of starting to follow her on a whim, as a result of her small act of kindness towards him in paying his fare. Others might say that he had changed his mission parameters simply on the basis of animal instinct related to the scent that she gave off, whether this scent had been applied by her or had arisen naturally, as it were, from her body, or an admixture of the two, a scent that had only recently entered Marguerite’s nasal passages and fired the neural networks associated therewith. Perhaps the kindness and the attraction had combined, resulting in the unceremonious ditching of his previous parameters; that is, perhaps his unprofessional affections had alighted on this woman precisely because of the kindness she had shown towards him. Still others may accuse him of starting to follow the woman on a different type of whim, that is, a non-sexual one and one unmoved by the kindness that she had so recently shown towards him: perhaps he had simply become bored following passively behind her and had wanted to take a more active role in his investigation and had, on this basis, swiftly decided to start following her, this decision coincidentally taking place shortly after she had paid his bus fare. Was it that he had started to feel like a victim of circumstance rather than an active agent in the investigation of the missing transport advisor?
Having so summarily and decisively changed his mission parameters in the manner described, he now, equally summarily and decisively, dismissed all those who held that he had done so on a whim. He dismissed all those who would assert that the speed with which he had decided to follow this woman was indicative of a descent down the food chain from the summits of clarity, probity (in a specific sense) and professionalism for which he was rightly, to his mind, renowned. Similarly, he dismissed from his mind those who would hold that his boredom or otherwise was relevant in some way – he might find himself bored by a particular clue relating to Harold Absalon’s disappearance but this would certainly not mean that he would dismiss such a clue, just as he would not follow something up simply because it was of interest, whether sexually or otherwise, to him, if it did not pertain to the investigation that he was engaged in, an investigation that remained unchanged, remember, despite his hasty change in mission parameters. Nor was the speed with which he had made the original decision indicative of the random drifting of his mind from one object – Isobel Absalon, say – to another, the woman in the tight-fitting pinstriped suit, say. He felt that he had established beyond reasonable doubt that his mind did not drift randomly in this way but moved magisterially from one tightly argued and justified arena to another as he remorselessly narrowed in on the circumstances surrounding the disappearance (etc). It was this ability to review his mission parameters, on the spot, within a split second or so, even when he was in what was known in the manuals as a tight spot, that set Marguerite apart from other investigators. The speed with which he changed from following behind to following the woman in question was a distillation of his years of training and experience into a moment that looked instinctive, a moment in which he trusted wholeheartedly that he had made the right decision despite the dangers potentially arising from that decision, dangers that did not, in other words, pertain just to the speed with which the decision had been made but to the content of the decision itself, that is, the dangers inherent in deciding to follow the woman in question who, remember, seemed to have recognised him, instead of simply following behind her. The decision, then, was surely a lesson to all budding detectives who, through whatever means, had managed to observe his mind changing so rapidly in relation to his mission parameters if not in relation to his ultimate objective, which remained unchanged from wishing to unearth, if he could express it in that way, the circumstances surrounding, so to speak, the disappearance of Harold Absalon, the Mayor’s transport advisor.
32
By the time Marguerite’s transaction with the conductress had been concluded, and his nuanced distinctions between following and following behind had been made, the woman in the pinstriped suit was very nearly upon the stairs at the rear of the bus. The man in front of her, who had, of course, not been the subject of Marguerite’s most recent reflections, had paused at the top of those stairs which, to Marguerite’s mind, could only mean one thing: that someone was traversing those very stairs in the opposite direction; that is, that person was ascending (no pun intended), thereby blocking the passage of those, such as the gentleman, the woman in the pinstriped suit and Marguerite himself, who wished to descend. That, at least, was Marguerite’s snap analysis of the situation once he had looked far enough ahead of the pinstriped woman’s rear end to see the man in front poised, somewhat impatiently it would seem, at the top of the stairs. How Marguerite was able to judge of the man’s impatience even though he could not see his face – the seat, if we can call it that, ordinarily, of the outward expression of emotion – he would leave to others to fathom. He stayed focused, instead, on the tableau that had presented itself to his visual (and no doubt to his sixth, that is his sleuth’s) sense which, to reiterate, was the momentary pause between the man’s arrival at the top of the curved flight of stairs at the rear of the bus and the commencement of his descent, a pause that edged its way almost imperceptibly, with each word of Marguerite’s thoughts, towards a proper interval of time, from a lull, interval, short while or juncture, perhaps, to anything up to an age, epoch or eternity. The fact that the man was still waiting there at the exhaustion of this list in Marguerite’s mind should not be taken to imply that the man had been waiting for the length of time indicated by the final item in the list; rather it should be taken as indicative of the startling speed with which Marguerite was able to appraise himself of a situation, this despite the pressure that he felt to deliver results in the case of the disappearance of Harold Absalon17.
Some may be wondering why it had taken so long, in fact, for Marguerite to notice again the man in front of the woman in the pinstriped suit. Certainly (and he would refer back in his thinking if he could) the man in front, so to speak, had not been part of his deliberations for some time, so focused had he been on the woman in the pinstriped suit and, more specifically, on the rear end of that woman, in its closely tailored pinstriped skirt and, more importantly in relation to the disappearance of Harold Absalon, the triangulated transaction, as he now thought of it, between her, the bus conductress and himself, which had resulted in his bus fare being paid. Some may think, somewhat cynically, that the re-emergence of the man was rather convenient, that without some progress along the top deck by one of the triumvirate of Marguerite, the woman (as before) and the man (again, as before) then Marguerite might find himself atop the top deck almost indefinitely. The cynics, in other words, might accuse Marguerite of conveniently remembering the man in question to get himself out of a hole or, more specifically given the genre and tradition that he was thinking in, the tight spot that he found himself in atop that bus. To be even more explicit and blatantly accusatory – and don’t forget that this is all just the unfolding of Marguerite’s own mind, his lower self accusing his higher self perhaps, whatever that means – that his investigation had been going nowhere until this man had reappeared in Marguerite’s consciousness, helpfully and he hoped suspensefully drawing attention to the top step, at least to the general vicinity of the stairs and the expectation that someone of central importance to Marguerite’s investigation into the disappearance of Harold Absalom might imminently appear (someone like Isobel Absalom, you say? – it’s possible), thereby enabling Marguerite to retain the attention of his funders and followers, such as your good self. After all, he needed to be funded somehow, the few coins that he now had in his possession only taking him so far; he was conscious, then, of needing to give his faithful subscribers what was known in some circles as value for money; he had confidence in his own investigative abilities, that much was apparent; however, he was conscious that he must also keep his subscribers informed of progress, otherwise they might withdraw their subscription. He did not begrudge doing this and he wasn’t just saying this to keep his subscribers on side. Without them, in short, his investigation would not have got off the ground in the first place. He was conscious, in short, of the need to demonstrate the progress that he was making in his investigation and that, to some – whether they be subscribers or borrowers – it would seem that his investigation had entered into a zone of stasis, incapable perhaps of moving meaningfully forwards. He wanted to assuage those doubts, keep those doubters on-side and he knew that the emergence of a vital clue or, were what he was engaged in to be fictional, which of course it is not, a startling twist in the plot, would go some way to doing this – how could a sleuth of his acuity not know this? What he was denying – and he was willing, if called upon, to do so under oath – was that he had engineered the situation in his mind so that the gentleman suddenly, after so much slow-moving action (according to some reviewers) attained the top of the stairs and had to wait there, pregnantly (using that term metaphorically) whilst someone (or some thing?) moved up the stairway towards him, soon to appear in Marguerite’s perception of the scene. What he was denying, then, was fabricating this scene – or any of the scenes so far witnessed by him – as a means of keeping his investigation into the disappearance of the Mayor’s transport advisor alive.
He reflected that the term ‘cliff-hanger’ had presumably been coined to evoke the situation in which a person, following a dramatic set of circumstances, plot twists and other devices on the part of the producer, writer and/or director, finds themselves hanging from a cliff either: a) from a conveniently placed shrub, bush or other tenuously attached item of vegetation, or b) from the eroding cliff-edge by their fingernails, the toenails not really lending themselves dramatically in the same way, except perhaps in the case of our simian cousins whom we can and do care for to some extent but not to the extent of a fully human human perhaps, especially when said fully human human happens to fall into the somewhat ill-defined category, to Marguerite’s mind, of ‘damsel’ about which more, perhaps, later.
So much for the origins of the terminology. What of the accusation of him engineering such a cliff-hanger by placing the man at the top of the stairs – his cliff, so to speak – and making him wait there? In short he would unequivocally and unreservedly deny that this was what he had done, assuming he had the capacity to see that this was what had been needed at that moment and that he was able to fulfil this requirement, which he also denied. Quite simply he had noticed the man in front of the woman in the pinstriped suit again as a result of the geometry of the upper deck: he had been taking a professional and, he admitted it, personal interest in said woman – especially in her rear end, so to speak – and this meant that there was but a short distance between him and her to the extent that her body, so much the focus of his attentions, had served to obscure what was in front of it further down the aisle. This situation had suddenly and dramatically changed when the gentleman had moved onto the landing at the top of the stairs, which happened to be to the left of the aisle and the woman within it, from Marguerite’s perspective, and had thereby come, as it were, once again, into Marguerite’s purview. Granted there was nothing to prevent the man from having been within Marguerite’s mind up until that point ie within the purview of his imagination. That he did not appear in this way expresses something of the assiduousness with which Marguerite had been pursuing, more recently, in all senses of the word that he could think of, the woman in the pinstriped suit. In other words it was the reappearance, given the geometry of the top deck, and other circumstances too numerous to enter into, of the gentleman in actuality rather than in his imagination that had triggered Marguerite’s reflections on the cliff-hanger ending of episodes: he had not imaginatively put the man there waiting pregnantly (etc) at the top of the stairs so as to bring about such a cliff-hanger, knowing i
n a way difficult to ascribe to him, that such a cliff-hanger would be most timely. It may seem too convenient but who can deny the firm analytic foundation given by Marguerite relating to the geometry of the situation?
Marguerite’s accusers may accuse him further of protesting his innocence a mite too vociferously. Further, they might, he imagined, accuse him of desperation in his appeal to geometry as the firm foundation for what he claimed was unfolding on the top deck of the bus. Finally, at least for now, they might accuse him of implausibility in glimpsing the blonde shock18 of Isobel Absalom’s hair momentarily at the top step, as he did at that very moment. It disappeared almost as soon as it had appeared, leaving the gentleman to commence his descent and leaving Marguerite questioning the veracity of his initial identification of a momentary flash of brightness as the person of Harold Absalom’s wife. After all, if she was pursuing him then what had precipitated her immediate retreat? Had the woman in the pinstriped suit signalled to her in some way? Or was it simply the knowledge that Marguerite would soon be passing down those very stairs? All would be revealed in the next episode, perhaps.
