by Jonathan Coe
For personal reasons, in any case, he would erase these tapes after he got home.
Louis was the first to disappear upstairs with his waitress, between the first and second courses. They were away for nearly half an hour. As soon as they came back, it was the Dutchman’s turn. While this was going on the party had still managed to consume, by Graham’s reckoning, eight bottles of champagne. He could sense Lucila’s puzzlement that he was not behaving towards her as his companions would have done. She was not as conventionally attractive as the others: her skin was slightly blemished and pock-marked, and she wasn’t as good at hiding her sadness behind a façade of blank-eyed gaiety. She was nervous and sometimes spilled things while serving the food. Graham knew that if he could have relaxed more himself, it would have helped to put her at ease, but this was difficult because he was trying hard to remain sober.
Just as the main course – a shoulder of beef – was about to be served, Mark turned to him and said: ‘I hope you won’t think us rude, Mr Packard, but there are a few private business matters we have to attend to at this point. I think this might be a good moment for you to withdraw.’
‘Withdraw?’
Mark pointed towards Lucila and made a gesture with his eyes. Graham nodded and left the table.
They went upstairs to a small uncomfortable bedroom where the bed was unmade and dishevelled from recent use. The room was clean but dimly lit and inelegant. There were bloodstains on the carpet which seemed to have been there for some time. As soon as the door was closed Lucila began to undress. She looked bewildered when Graham asked her to stop. He explained that he did not want to make love to her because he was married and did not think it was right that women should be expected to go to bed with men they hardly knew. She nodded and sat down on the bed. Graham sat beside her and they smiled at each other. He could tell that she was both relieved and offended. He tried asking her a few questions about where she came from and what she was doing in Iraq, but her English wasn’t good and she seemed, besides, a little resentful of these inquiries. They both knew that a decent interval would have to pass before they went back downstairs. Then Lucila remembered something and, opening one of the drawers in the cupboard, she took out a pack of cards. Neither of them knew any proper card games, so they played a few hands of Snap. There was some more champagne in a bottle on the bedside table, and before long they both became hopelessly giggly. After all the subterfuge, the watchfulness, the perpetual tension of the last few days, Graham felt suddenly liberated: there was nothing on earth he would rather be doing than playing this mindless card game with a tipsy and lovely young woman in a strange room, and all at once he felt a wave of desire, which Lucila recognized as soon as she saw it in his eyes. She looked away. They finished the game on a quieter note and then it was time to go back to the restaurant.
He found Mark and his friends arguing with each other noisily but in a teasing vein while drawing a number of pencilled circles on their napkins and on the tablecloth. Each of these circles was divided up into four unequal segments, with the letters GB, D, NL and B written inside. With a bit of effort, Graham was able to coax a drunken explanation out of Louis: later on, the details would be confirmed by his own researches. AESOP, it turned out, had nothing at all to do with research into safety measures. It was an informal cartel of European arms dealers set up to tackle one of the biggest problems posed by Iraq’s military requirements: how – given that the demand was so enormous – could the munitions companies meet it without raising their production quotas to the point where government suspicions were aroused? AESOP was the answer: a forum in which leading dealers from each of the member countries could get together and share the work out equitably among their own manufacturers.
‘We have decided that these are the figures,’ said Louis, handing him a napkin and pointing at the segmented circle, ‘which will represent our commissions. Our commissions for the next year.’
‘But they don’t add up to a hundred,’ said Graham.
Louis laughed wildly.
‘These are not percentages,’ he said, his eyes shining. ‘These are millions of dollars!’ He laughed even louder when he saw Graham’s undisguised astonishment, and his whole body shook as he extended his arm in an expansive gesture which took in the room, the waitresses, his three friends and the gutted carcass of beef on its silver platter. ‘What a carve up, eh, Mr Packard? What a carve up!’
Over the next half hour, the atmosphere around the table grew more and more hilarious, and Graham knew that he had begun to seem increasingly out of place.
‘Your lips have a look of pursed disapproval,’ Mark Winshaw remarked, at one point. ‘I don’t see why. I’ve just secured your company the lion’s share of the Iraqi market for the foreseeable future.’
‘I’m a little tired, that’s all,’ said Graham. ‘It’s all been a bit much.’
‘Or perhaps, like me, you find this orgy of celebration all rather loud and vulgar.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘And yet I understand you were quite the young firebrand at college, Mr Packard.’
Graham paused in the act of sipping his coffee.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Oh, I’ve made a few little routine inquiries, just as any sensible businessman would. You’ve grown up quite a lot in the last few years, it would seem.’
‘In what way?’
‘Politically, I mean. Let me see: now was it the Socialist Workers, or the Revolutionary Communists who enjoyed your services as treasurer?’
Graham smiled bravely even as his spirits started to plunge. ‘It was the Socialist Workers.’
‘Quite a long journey, then, isn’t it, from that hotbed of revolution to this restaurant in Baghdad?’
‘As you say,’ Graham answered, ‘I’ve grown up a lot.’
‘I hope so, Mr Packard. We are playing for high stakes here, after all. I’d like to think you were a man I could trust: a man, for instance, who can keep a cool head in a difficult situation.’
‘I think I can do that,’ said Graham. ‘I think I’ve shown that already.’
Mark grabbed one of the waitresses by the edge of her miniskirt and pulled her towards him.
‘Apples,’ he said. ‘We need some apples.’
‘Yes, sir. You want them baked, or perhaps glazed in some way?’
‘Just bring five apples.’
‘And turn up that music!’ Louis shouted after her. ‘Make it loud, make it really loud!’
When she returned, Mark got all the waitresses to stand up against the wall.
‘Oh, it’s the game!’ said Louis, clapping his hands delightedly. ‘I love this game.’
Mark rested an apple on top of each of the waitresses’ heads, then reached inside his jacket and took out a revolver.
‘Who’s going to be first?’ he said.
Although drunk, the others turned out to be excellent shots – with the exception of Louis, whose bullet went some three feet wide of the mark and shattered one of the light fittings. The women screamed and whimpered, but they did not move, not even after their own apples had been targeted.
Finally it was Graham’s turn. He had never even known the feel of a gun in his hand before; but he knew that Mark Winshaw was putting him to some sort of monstrous test, and that if he were to back down, if his nerve were to fail, then his cover would be blown and before long, in a matter of weeks if not days, his own life would be taken. He raised the gun and pointed it at Lucila. Tears were streaming down her face and in her terrified eyes he could also read incomprehension: an imploring echo of the laughter and intimacy they had shared in the upstairs room. His hand was shaking. He must have stood like that for some time because he heard Mark say, ‘In your own time, Mr Packard,’ and then he heard the others clapping their hands and starting to sing the William Tell Overture, buzzing it through their lips as if they were playing on a kazoo. And then just as Lucila let out her first compulsive sob, he did it: the thing for which he would
always hate himself, whenever he woke up in the middle of the night, chilled and sweating with the recollection of it; whenever he had to leave the room in the middle of a conversation, or pull over abruptly to the hard shoulder of the motorway, the gorge rising in his throat at the sudden clarity of the memory. He pulled the trigger.
Graham blacked out almost immediately, so he didn’t see his bullet split the stalk of the apple and lodge in the wall behind Lucila, or see her sink to her knees and vomit over the polished floorboards. He was dimly conscious of loud music and voices, of people slapping him on the back and making him drink more coffee, but he didn’t fully come back to his senses until he found himself sitting on the toilet, his head in his hands and his trousers around his ankles, the air thick with the stench of his diarrhoea, the tiny windowless room silent but for his robotic intonation of one word, toneless and mechanical.
Joan. Joan. Joan.
∗
Graham had earned Mark Winshaw’s respect. It came in the form of twenty months’ silence, followed by an invitation to a New Year’s party at his house in Mayfair.
∗
December 31st 1990
Eleven o’clock was about the earliest Graham thought he could politely make his excuses and leave. He told Mark that he was driving home to Birmingham that night, to be back with his wife and their eight-month-old daughter.
‘But I haven’t introduced you to Helke yet,’ Mark protested. ‘You really must say a few words to her before you go. Is your car parked near here?’
It was. Mark took the keys and gave them to one of his drivers, who was told to bring the car round to the front door immediately. In the meantime, Graham was obliged to swap a few pleasantries with the new Mrs Winshaw, whom he was surprised to find dauntingly attractive. He had wanted to dislike her – knowing that she was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist and notorious Nazi sympathizer – but her pale beauty and oddly coquettish manner made this difficult, even during such a brief meeting.
A few minutes later, as he slumped into the driver’s seat, Graham breathed a sigh of relief. He was damp with sweat. Then he was knocked unconscious with a blow to the back of the head.
He was driven to a lock-up garage in Clapham. The driver pulled him out of the car while the engine was still running, and laid him on the ground near to the exhaust pipe. He kicked him four or five times in the face, and once in the stomach. He stripped him of his trousers, took the camcorder, and jumped up and down on Graham’s legs. Then he left the garage and locked the doors behind him.
That kick in the stomach had been a mistake, for it had the effect of shocking Graham into semi-consciousness. But he was unable to move for several minutes, during which time even as his body got stronger, his brain was fast running out of oxygen. Eventually, with tremendous effort, he dragged himself back to the driver’s seat. He put the engine into gear, and reversed back into the garage doors. It wasn’t enough to smash them open, so he tried again. It still wasn’t enough: and that was as much as he could manage.
But the noise had caught the attention of a group of drunken passers-by, who succeeded in forcing the doors open and getting the car out into the street. One of them ran off to find a phone box.
Graham was on the pavement, surrounded by strangers.
He was in an ambulance. Lights were flashing and there was a mask on his face.
He was in a hospital. It was very cold.
Big Ben was chiming midnight.
January 1991
I took the beakers of orange juice and carried them back to the cubicle. Fiona drank hers slowly and gratefully: then she drank half of mine. She said that I looked a bit distracted and asked me what had happened.
‘This guy’s just been brought in. He’s unconscious, and he’s in a pretty bad way. It just gave me a bit of a shock.’
Fiona said: ‘I’m sorry. This is a terrible way to start the New Year.’
I said: ‘Don’t be silly.’
She was getting weaker, I could see. After her drink she lay back on the trolley and didn’t try to speak again until the nurse reappeared.
‘Progress report,’ she said brightly. ‘The sister’s trying to find you a bed, and as soon as we’ve got one, you can go on to the ward and Dr Bishop will give you your antibiotics. Dr Gillam, our registrar, is very busy at the moment, so she’ll have to come and see you in the morning.’
This didn’t sound very much like progress to me.
‘But they’ve been looking for a bed for more than half an hour, now. What’s the problem?’
‘Things are very tight,’ she said. ‘There were some surgical wards closed just before Christmas and that has a knock-on effect. It means that a lot of the surgical patients are now on the medical wards. We keep a chart of all the beds available but it has to be updated all the time. We did think we’d found one for you just now, and we sent the sister along to check but she found there was already someone in it. Anyway, it really shouldn’t be much longer.’
‘Fine,’ I said, with a touch of grimness.
‘There is one problem, though.’
‘Oh?’
There was a pause. I could tell it was something she felt bad about.
‘Well, the thing is, we need this cubicle. I’m afraid we’re going to have to move you.’
‘Move us? But I thought you didn’t have anywhere to move us to.’
It turned out that they did. They wheeled Fiona’s trolley out into the corridor, pulled up a chair for me to sit beside her, and left us there. It took another ninety minutes to find the bed. We didn’t get to see any more doctors in that time: both the houseman and the elusive Dr Gillam were fully occupied, so I gathered, dealing with the new arrival – the man I’d half-recognized – who it seemed they had somehow managed to revive. It was almost two o’clock when the nurses came to take Fiona away, and by then she looked helpless and frightened. I clasped her hand tightly and kissed her on the lips. They were very cold. Then I watched as they wheeled her off down the corridor.
∗
The staff had insisted that I went home and got some rest, but I was only able to carry out the first half of this instruction. Physically I was exhausted, not least because I walked all the way back from the hospital, reaching the flat some time after four o’clock. But I’d never felt less like sleep, knowing as I did that in a darkened ward three or four miles away Fiona too was lying awake, her gaze fixed blankly on the ceiling. How could it have taken them so long to get her there? After I’d found her kneeling in front of the wardrobe, it had been more than five hours before she was put safely in that bed – hours in which her condition had clearly worsened. And yet nobody had been negligent, as far as I could see: the atmosphere had been one of frantic, resolute efficiency under pressure. So how could it have taken them so long?
I lay fully clothed on my bed, with the curtains open. A bed was a simple thing, or so I’d always thought. As far as I could remember there could hardly have been more than a dozen nights in my whole life when I hadn’t slept in a bed somewhere or other. And hospitals were full of beds. That was the whole point about hospitals: they were just rooms full of beds. It was true that my faith in medical science had always been limited. I knew there were many ailments which it was powerless to treat, but it would never have occurred to me that a bunch of highly qualified doctors and nurses could have such difficulty simply transferring a patient from one place to another: from a cubicle to a bed. I wondered who was responsible for this state of affairs (yes, Fiona, I still believed in conspiracies), what vested interest they might have in making these people’s lives even harder than they already were.
I’d been told to phone the hospital at about ten o’clock in the morning. Was there anyone else I should contact in the meantime? I got up and went into Fiona’s flat to fetch her address book. It was full of names she’d never mentioned to me, and there was a letter folded inside the back cover, dated March 1984. Probably most of the people in this book hadn’t heard from her in
about six or seven years. One of them, presumably, was her ex-husband, the born-again Christian. As far as I knew they hadn’t spoken to each other since the divorce, so there was no point involving him. She always spoke quite fondly of her colleagues at work: perhaps I should give them a call. But of course they wouldn’t be in for another day or two.
She was alone: very much alone. We both were.
The table in my sitting room was still laid for our candlelit dinner, so I cleared everything away and then watched the first day of the New Year dawn feebly over Battersea. When it was light I considered taking a shower but settled for two cups of strong coffee instead. The prospect of waiting another three hours appalled me. I thought of my mother, and how she had done her best to fill out the empty days while my father lay in hospital. There were plenty of old newspapers in the flat so I gathered them together and started doing the crossword puzzles. I did half a dozen of the quick crosswords in no time at all and then got stuck into a jumbo-sized cryptic puzzle which required the use of dictionaries and reference books and a thesaurus. It didn’t actually take my mind off anything, but it was better than just sitting around. It kept me going until twenty to ten, when I phoned the hospital.
I was put through to a nurse who told me that Fiona was still looking ‘pretty poorly’, and said that I could come in and see her now if I wanted to. Rudely, I put the receiver down without even thanking her, and almost broke a leg running down the staircase.
∗
The ward was full but quiet: most of the patients looked bored rather than seriously ill. Fiona was in a bed near the nurses’ room. I didn’t recognize her at first, because she had an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. There was a drip attached to her arm. I had to tap her on the shoulder before she realized I was there.
