Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!

by Douglas Lindsay

  I stood there, naked, in the middle of the room, for a long time. Long enough that it grew obviously darker outside. Fighting the urge to get in a taxi and head back to the park to find Jones. That would have been just too small. To turn up there, to stand and watch her in pathetic, shallow impotence.

  A long, uncomfortable evening lay ahead of me, and then I could wrestle with the question the following day. Wait here to see if she'd come back, or get in a taxi and go over to the shoot?

  Of course, I already knew the answer.

  Finally I forced myself to move. I got in the shower, then dressed and headed down to the bar.

  I ordered a bottle of wine. I ate some nuts, then a second bowl, and then, as the wine started to taste a little bitter, ordered a sandwich. All the time I sat in a position that allowed me to see the main entrance to the hotel, so that I would see her if she turned up to surprise me, something I wished for and yet dreaded.

  I knew she wasn't coming.

  30

  I woke up to the lights going on. All of them at once. I'd fallen asleep with the curtains open, and it was dark outside. Jones was standing at the end of the bed, wearing a coat, a bag over her shoulder.

  'Come on,' she said. 'We're leaving.'

  All the lights, plus the arrival of Jones and the shock of being rudely awoken, ought to have startled me out of sleep in an instant, yet I lay there, head on the pillow, eyes not quite open, staring at her.

  'Sleepyhead,' she said, smiling. 'Come on, flight's leaving in an hour-and-a-half. You need to get a move on. If you're quick, you can jump in the shower.'

  I'd started to lift my head, then I let it rest back on the pillow and rubbed my eyes. Stretched my legs. Life began to pour back into me, as if the sleep dam had been breached. Took a moment, half expected her not to be there when I opened my eyes again, then leaned up on my elbows, the duvet falling from my chest, revealing the fact that I'd got into bed wearing yesterday's t-shirt. Looked at the clock. 4:29a.m.

  'Where are we going?'

  'Seattle.'

  She smiled. The fully engaged, I'm all yours for the foreseeable future smile, even if that future could not be foreseen for very long.

  'How did you get in?' I asked, not quite ready to move yet.

  'I'm gorgeous,' she said, with a shrug. 'People do things for me.'

  Despite having just woken up, I managed to pick up the lack of confidence behind the words. She didn't quite have the courage of her conviction, but she smiled her way through it.

  Gave my head a shake, like a dog after it's been in the sea, and straightened up. Stretched and put my legs over the side of the bed.

  'Why are we going to Seattle?'

  She giggled. 'Where else would we be going?'

  Seattle. I couldn't see any sense in that. Yet, that hardly mattered. The movie had decided to up sticks on its production – as if Jones had been in charge of the entire operation, and had taken them off on some crazy caprice, to film elsewhere – and now she'd come to take me with her, that was all.

  There seemed absolutely no reason why I should find the Jigsaw Man in Seattle, but neither had there been a reason why I would ever have found him in Warsaw. This whole, mixed-up crazy thing was leading me again, and I just had to follow it until it had played itself out, while hoping that I didn't miss the obvious moment when I ought to jump off the ride.

  'James,' she said, 'move your arse. I'll still be here when you get out the bathroom.'

  Right there, that was it. For the first time she acknowledged the mendaciousness, that I couldn't trust her from one moment to the next.

  Was I to thank her for the acknowledgement? It didn't matter. I was getting on a plane to Seattle with her, and the effect of this could be entirely seen from the fact that it never even crossed my mind to worry about once again flying across the Atlantic. The last time it hadn't gone so well, after all.

  She smiled again, then sat down on the comfy chair beside the window.

  'I'm not washing your back for you. We'd miss the plane.'

  31

  I had no fears about the flight to Seattle.

  I'd always been scared of flying, and every time I got on a plane there hadn't been anything else for me to worry about, so I'd worried about that. Like the flight to see the non-existent Marion Hightower. Life had been not too bad. Had been enjoying my work, Baggins was happy at school, things weren't great with Brin, but they hadn't been apocalyptic, and whatever it was that was troubling her, I usually managed to persuade myself that we'd be able to get past it. The prospect of the film script happening had also been at least interesting, even if I'd done my damnedest to deny myself any actual anticipation and excitement. So, I'd needed something to push back against, something to counteract the fact that things were going well, to bring equilibrium, and so my basic fear of flying became exaggerated, and I started to catastrophise the flight (it being entirely coincidental that the catastrophe played itself out).

  Now things were so screwed up, I had no need to worry about anything unnecessarily. I didn't need to invent any worries. My whole damned life was screwed up, so why did I have to worry about doing something that millions of people did every day without anything bad happening to them? And what were the odds of it happening to me twice in a row?

  We flew from Warsaw to Charles De Gaulle, had a two-hour wait, and then caught Air France club class to Seattle. I bought my ticket at Warsaw, feeling a peculiar pleasure in using the agency's credit card for something that was so stupidly expensive. Not that it would make any difference to them. I had no idea who they were, but I saw them as some shadowy organisation that most people in the government hadn't even heard of, who appeared as a one line afterthought in the gargantuan US Defence Budget under the heading Other Items or Miscellaneous Security Services or something so dull that people were trained to barely even see it; yet they would account for some four or five hundred million dollars of spending each year. My flight to Seattle would be an afterthought.

  At some point in the taxi between the Hyatt and the airport, I again asked Jones why we were going to Seattle. She smiled, gave me a look that said you're not really asking that, are you, silly? and squeezed my hand. We barely talked after that, not until we were over the north Atlantic, up above the clouds, flying through a perfect blue sky.

  'Really, why are we going to Seattle?' I finally asked.

  We'd just finished lunch, three glasses of white wine each. Neither of us was interested in the in-flight entertainment. I'd had chicken in white wine, Jones had eaten a few vegetables and two desserts.

  She smiled again, squeezed my hand. Sometimes I wondered how long I'd have to spend with Jones for me to find the smile irritating, yet however long it was, I was never going to get anything like that amount of time to spend with her. Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to be married to Jones, but those thoughts never went well. I couldn't even imagine a happy, long-term relationship with Jones, and anyway, the very thought usually included a shot of Brin, curled up in a corner, crying, looking at me like she'd always known.

  'Filming switched to the west coast. They're not actually shooting in Seattle. In the woods outside. Doubling for Russia. Hey, it's the movies.'

  That same line. She delivered it as though it was an in-joke. Anything goes. Any old shit goes.

  'I thought you just had a small part in the thing?'

  'Piotr wants me there, and I don't have anything for the next couple of weeks anyway. His wife is going to be in London the whole time, so you know...' and she let the sentence drift away through the cabin with an unconcerned hand waved casually in the air.

  'So...' I began, but stopped myself. I wondered if what I'd been about to say might offend her. Or, at least, give her a reason to pretend to be offended, which was something of which I lived in fear. Every second with her needed to work, but God it was such an effort.

  I never realised I didn't actually need to make any effort. It never made any difference.

&nbs
p; 'Go on,' she said, 'out with it.'

  'It's fine.'

  'I'll go and sit in economy.'

  'No, you won't.'

  'What were you going to say?'

  I stared at the seat in front, silent for a moment, but inevitably I was going to do her bidding.

  'I was thinking that firstly it was odd for some bloke to ask you to join him so that you can continue having an affair, but then you take someone along with you.'

  'Reasonable,' she said. 'And second?'

  'That... maybe this is just me, but it seems beneath you. That's all. You're this beautiful, funny, sexy woman. You could have anything, do anything. Yet you're running after some married guy who's probably not half the actor you are. What are you doing?'

  'Well, for a kick-off I'm sitting next to another married guy who's not half the actor that I am.'

  I glanced at her, waiting for the smile. This time there was no smile.

  'I'm not the girl you think I am,' she said. 'Or, you know, no one else sees me the way you do. You're still hanging on to some old infatuation, and two wonderful days a long time ago.'

  'You were acting like it was just last week,' I said defensively.

  'Because I was embarrassed. It was seventeen years ago. I walked out on you and never called, and you, like an old obedient hound, can't even bring yourself to be annoyed at me for it. And what have I done in those seventeen years? Spooks? Casualty? I look like this and I still can't make a decent career out of it.'

  She paused, but she wasn't finished. It was a letting-the-words-sink-in pause.

  'To be honest, I don't have something else in two weeks. I have no other definite work, just a series of possibles and let's meet over coffees and a couple of auditions where I'll be up against three hundred other women, most of whom will be younger than me and considered to be on their way up. So what's my latest offer? A few weeks staying in a nice hotel, free to explore the coffee houses of the city and anything else I can find, and all I have to do is be available to be fucked every now and again. Really, if I was better than that I wouldn't be on the damned plane.'

  She gave me another glance then lowered her eyes. A cabin steward appeared with the bottle of white. Jones accepted another glass; I refused. Once again she had demonstrated the dominion she held over me. I looked at her for a moment, then stared at the rear of the seat in front. Her voice had been quiet, almost conversational in tone, but her words so forceful that there was no argument to be had. And what would I have sounded like, how pathetic, had I tried telling her how talented she was?

  Had I really thought she was great in Spooks, or had it just been wonderful to see her on television? It had been a small, uninspiring part, could have been played by anyone.

  'So, I'm here as your bit on the side?' I said, my tone and intention nothing like as small and petty and bitter as the words might have implied. 'Am I staying in your room?'

  She held my gaze for a while, and eventually she smiled ruefully, sympathetically, and once again she squeezed my hand.

  'You need to find your own way,' she said. 'You're looking for the Jigsaw Man, and I can't help you. But I don't think he was in Warsaw, so there was no point in you being there. Maybe you can get your own room in the same hotel, and we'll see each other. Who knows? I thought perhaps we'd have some fun and hang out in chic bars, and maybe you'd get carried away and get over your guilt and we could fuck. But, you know, maybe those two days seventeen years ago was it for us. Maybe you were right to turn me down. Hey, we'll always have Glasgow.'

  Her words cut right through me. I had myself to blame, of course. I was the idiot who had forced the conversation. What had I been expecting her to say? That she was taking me to Seattle because she loved me? That this was us running away together, the start of a long, beautiful relationship?

  All I wanted was five minutes. To turn back the clock five minutes. I'd been given six months before, why not five minutes? How would I do that? Go to the bathroom, emerge some time later, and we'd be back where we started, not having said anything since the plane took off?

  Time doesn't work like that. But how does it work? No one knows. Even physicists don't know. Even if they think they know, how was anyone going to explain me turning up on Nairn beach the previous summer?

  But I wasn't thinking about Nairn beach, or Brin or Baggins, or my quest for the Jigsaw Man. All I had was an empty feeling in my guts, like some part of me had been sucked out. There was a reason for all those airhead, flighty conversations with Jones. It was truth avoidance, because the truth was so insignificant. We weren't some great and tragic romantic couple. There was no Cathy and Heathcliffe, Romeo and Juliet story to be written. God, we weren't even Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in some '90s romcom.

  I wanted to retrieve the conversation, I wanted to force the mood back in time, back to the frivolous air of inconsequentiality with which we had departed Warsaw in the early morning. Nothing had mattered. If there had been a reason to think, well, we hadn't been thinking about it.

  But there was nothing to say. Words came and went in my head, a hundred conversations. They all sounded so sad. I had been crushed so many times by Jones, but never before because of anything she'd said. This time the weight came from her words and was so much greater as a result.

  The plane continued its smooth passage across the Atlantic and down across Canada. Neither of us spoke for the remainder of the journey.

  *

  We sat in a taxi together. Piotr was booked in to the Hilton for two weeks. The bulk of the crew were staying at a small hotel out of town, close to the shoot. Piotr, however, being the star had managed to get himself detached. Presumably it meant he'd have to get up a little earlier in the morning, but also one could presume that he had a car and driver waiting to whisk him away as soon as he appeared each day.

  If I'd thought about it, it would have seemed peculiar that they were using American woods to double for Russian woods, especially as they'd already been filming in Poland. One would have thought that Russian woods would have been cheaper. As it was, I didn't think about it.

  I had no idea whether Piotr would be keeping Jones in his room with him. I presumed not. He was more likely to be personally paying for another room, where he would keep his mistress. Sunk in my depression, I wanted to walk away from her the second we got through immigration, but we stuck together through the ninety-minute queue at passport control, and then we walked to the taxi rank and I automatically got into the same taxi to take me to the same hotel.

  Without really thinking about it, my intention was to pitch up at the hotel, wave my agency card around and book myself into the best room available. And what then? Sit around the hotel bars and restaurants and lobby hoping that Jones would walk by?

  Sitting in the taxi, for the first time since leaving Warsaw, I thought of Agent Crosskill and his female buddy. Were they following me to Seattle? Perhaps they were behind me, in economy, resentful of my bottomless pit of a credit card. Presumably they wouldn't leave me to sit around the hotel for too long. They had found me in Warsaw easily enough, they would find me in Seattle.

  The taxi stopped outside the hotel, early afternoon. Defying all convention of the Pacific north-west, the sun was shining, the sky a picture-perfect blue. As we pulled up, Jones glanced at me, a look that said, you're the one living the government gravy train dream, you can pay for the taxi, and hopped out, her bag slung over her shoulder.

  Even then I imagined that she'd wait for me, or at least we would stand next to each other at reception, and finally the ice would be re-broken.

  I paid the driver, took some small pleasure in tipping him twice the original taxi fare at the agency's expense, then followed Jones in through the grey-edged glass doors, my backpack hanging off one shoulder, and stood in the lobby of the hotel.

  And there she was, already having met her beau. Piotr, the famous actor, the Pole about to make it big in Hollywood. There was no one else around from the film crew, and I wondered if he'd manag
ed to swing the afternoon off so that he could be waiting for her. They'd been filming in Warsaw just two days previously, so perhaps they were still setting up.

  They were not obviously flirting with each other or even just hugging each other. He was wearing a shirt and tie, an expensive suit, and although I wouldn't have thought from the way she'd travelled that Jones was dressed for a business meeting, seeing her next to him, suddenly she looked as though she had come for some executive consultation, and that they were standing there discussing their strategy for the forthcoming board meeting being held in a conference room on the top floor.

  He touched her lightly, almost formally on the arm, and then headed towards the elevator, Jones a pace behind. I watched them, waiting to catch her eye as she looked, apologetically, over her shoulder.

  She never looked. They waited briefly for the elevator. They got in. She did not turn. The doors closed.

  Jones was gone.

  The lobby was busy, a real bustle. Tourists, businessmen, people meeting for lunch. Any reason you can think for people to be in a hotel lobby or to meet in a hotel, they were there. I did not stand out, as I stood in utter dejection, my insides having been drawn out and sprayed around for all to walk upon.

  The plane had been bad. The conversation devastating. Yet still I had imagined that there would be some salvation at the other end. That we would arrive in Seattle in early afternoon, Piotr would be working, and that Jones and I would have some time together. The conversation and the crippling feeling of loss and hurt could be assuaged.

  And then she'd gone, whisked off without a word, without a glance. Not even Goodbye, Jones, because she hadn't been interested enough to hear the words.

  No one noticed. The hotel lobby bustled around me. Perhaps I was so empty, so distraught and strung out, that I was invisible. They were looking through me. Walking through me.

  I don't know how long I stood there. No one bumped into me, no one spoke to me. Perhaps I wasn't there. I looked at reception the entire time. Was that where I was headed? Reception? 'Can I have a room, please? I'm going to sleep there, but actually what I'm intending to do is sit around the lobby like some wretched lost puppy.'