by Mark Watson
‘Could you not at least have told me he’d suggested coming so we could have had a conversation like adults?’
‘Thanks for letting me know how adults behave,’ Kathleen snapped. She walked right past me, so that our bodies touched for a moment, and on into the bathroom. She slammed the door and the shower began to gush.
I’d got through the day’s trials as if Kathleen’s return was the answer, but it had only brought new unhappiness. I headed for the door and down the corridor, not bothering to count the handles, and stood with my back against the wall. All the day’s inactivity bore down on my muscles. My head throbbed. Some time went by before the door was flung open at the other end of the hall.
‘Chas!’
She sounded shaken. ‘Christ. I thought for a second maybe you’d just upped and gone.’
‘How exactly would I do that?’
‘Look, I’m sorry.’ She took my arm. ‘I didn’t shower. I didn’t get in.’
‘What?’
‘I wanted you to smell it all. All the day I’ve had. The fumes – fuck, it’s smoggy out there – the sweat, everything.’
My heart was galloping. ‘Are you naked now? Out here?’
We drove each other back into the room and staggered to the bed, my palms’ sweaty grip on her sides, and I crash-landed on her and pressed my head into her midriff and came in moments. We lay there, Kathleen talking filth until it was time to start again. We ordered food to the room. When she finally did shower, I made her get dressed for the pleasure of undressing her again, and we lay on the uncomfortable bed, her head on my chest.
‘I’m proud of you,’ I said, ‘with the job and everything. I really am.’
‘We don’t need to talk about that,’ she murmured. ‘Just enjoy this. This moment.’
My body was as heavy as iron; I let sleep shove me under. When I woke up, Kathleen had shuffled away from me. I could hear her breathing.
Things she had said, or tried not to say, began to force themselves into my mind. What did she mean about Howard? Memory fragments fluttered in and out of view. The back of my neck felt hot.
Trying to track away from this avenue of thought, my brain detoured towards a place it was even more afraid of and kept baulking until I forced it to go in. Kathleen had got the job. It was happening.
Kathleen would move to China. It was obvious that I couldn’t move here with her. I belonged in the Alpha. I could not move to China any more than Kathleen could stay at my side. She knew it as well as I did, and what she had said before falling asleep was a way of acknowledging it. It was a way of beginning the goodbyes.
12
GRAHAM
Back the Bid! The phrase, coined by Lara and Chas at a meeting in our hotel, now seemed embroidered into the air of the city itself. It sang out from the backs of buses; it was even uttered by Mr Blair. It was accompanied by spectacular images of athletes hurdling over Tower Bridge, leaping over the London Eye, and so forth. ‘Back the Bid’ appeared on a banner which hung in the spot we normally reserved for festive wreaths, along with a set of graphite Olympic rings which would undoubtedly shatter a guest’s skull if they ever fell down. In a matter of weeks the games would be awarded either to Paris, or to us.
Yes, us! I was getting caught up in all the enthusiasm in spite of myself. But the curious thing about all this was that it did not really matter a dicky bird whether I, or anybody else in London, ‘backed’ the bid. It had been conducted on our behalf and was probably confirmed by now as a success or failure. That result would not be affected by the goodwill which was being so elaborately solicited.
‘It’s about being seen to do all this stuff,’ Chas explained. ‘It’s like Coke. Why does Coke spend a fortune every year on advertising? There’s no one alive who hasn’t had a can of Coke, but …’
‘There is, actually.’
Chas grinned. ‘All right, apart from you. But by spending all that money, they’re showing that they have that status. And this is the same. Even though people might complain about the cost of the bid, they like to feel it’s being done properly. Which means a campaign. Simple as that.’
Jargon like this still struck me as far from simple, and far from desirable, but perhaps it was only what Howard had said all along: it was not enough to do something, you had to do it with a splash. In any case, I was pleased that Chas had something to occupy him.
To avoid the dramatic farewell neither of them had the stomach for, Chas and Kathleen had gone out for dinner at a French place where Howard had an account that was never called in. I turned up in the Mercedes at midnight and waited outside the restaurant until the two figures emerged. They embraced on the pavement at some length; then Chas got into the back of the car, a brave smile on his face, and Kathleen stood watching us drive away. Chas babbled all the way home, his voice clambering over an unnatural range. At the Alpha, Howard was waiting with a bottle of gin.
Howard’s company and work. Those were the two main narcotics with which Chas kept the thought of Kathleen from his door. Whether this meant that he was ‘moving on’, or merely moving back to where he was before he met her, I did not like to speculate. With Mr Blair’s re-election in May and this Olympic bid to finish in July, he’d had two substantial projects to take his mind off Kathleen.
It was four months now since she had left. There had recently been an all-night bash at the Alpha for the election, and I had stayed until four o’clock or so, by which time it was clear that Labour would win, though by less of a margin than anticipated. Pattie and I did not discuss the outcome until a couple of mornings later.
‘I didn’t really follow it,’ she admitted. ‘I was chatting to Pam – you remember I told you about Pam?’ She was someone’s sister-in-law. ‘Now, Pam has had a shocking time of it over there. Her husband – apparently this is quite common in America – her husband just gets drunk and goes bowling all the time.’
She gave a history of the indiscretions of this man I did not know, the spouse of a woman whose relevance I could not quite place, while I buttered a piece of toast and read the front of The Times, in case Chas needed any extra information today.
‘I suppose Tony Blair won again, did he?’ asked Pattie.
‘He did, although … ’
‘He seems like a nice man,’ she adjudicated, ‘although the wife strikes me as a bit of a busybody.’
Digesting these political observations as I got onto the bus, it struck me that I could not even say with certainty whether Pattie had voted, though I supposed not. There were a great many things we could not say with certainty about one another.
You should be careful what you wish for, though, as everyone knows. Within a few weeks, we did have an item of shared interest to discuss.
It was evening. I had just used the reception phone to call Caroline in Inverness. There was no answer. Pattie had had more luck with emails. But I did not want an email from Christopher; I wanted to hear his voice. I slung the receiver back into its cradle and looked up to see Ed shuffling across the marble floor towards me. At first, given that I had just been thinking about my family, it almost seemed I could be imagining him. As he neared, I rather wished that I was. Ed was wearing a heavy raincoat quite at odds with the season. His eyes would not look into mine.
‘Ed!’
‘I’ve lost my job, Dad.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve lost my job,’ he said again.
‘They have sacked you?’
His face twisted. ‘That’s not how they put it, funnily, funnily, er, funnily enough. They said they had to make some cutbacks. Difficult time for the industry. Online bookings, you see. People like your boss,’ he added with a bitter smile.
‘Howard?’
‘Always goes, goes online now,’ said Ed. ‘Always goes online. Too many people like that, you see. Humans, er. Humans not required in the office. Just computers.’
‘But you are one of the senior agents,’ I protested.
‘Not so good with th
e old spreadsheets, though,’ Ed muttered.
‘Well,’ I said. There was a happy cry on one of the balconies, a playful exchange between friends; we both glanced up towards the skylight, and I could see Ed’s eyes bulging. I hoped to high heaven he would not cry.
‘Well,’ I began again, ‘I’m sure something will … these situations often end up being a blessing in … That is … ’
There was a story about a horse which Howard used to tell – it broke its leg, but it turned out well, or something of the kind – but I was damned if I could remember it. Ed, in any case, was past reassurance. He loomed suddenly into my light, clutching the edge of the walnut desk like a drunkard. ‘Is there anything for me here, Dad?’
He looked pleadingly at me. This was ghastly: a grown man in his mid-thirties begging his father for work. I reached out and put my hands on his shoulders and we stood there, the desk between us, as if we were making a bridge over it. I cast a glance around. This was not what guests wanted to see; or what I wanted them to see.
‘Look, old man,’ I said, squeezing his shoulders. ‘Why don’t you go to the bar and get a drink. Just ask Ray for what you want. Have a whisky, a double. And I’ll get the desk closed up and join you in a jiffy’
I was getting him out of the way, we both knew it, because I did not know how to make things look all right to him: I only knew how to make the atrium look all right.
Sarah-Jane was in the Alpha Bar ready for just this sort of situation. She gave Ed a drink and flirted with him with the finesse she undoubtedly possessed even now, and by the time I arrived he was beginning to grin and crack jokes with the warped cheeriness of a battlefield casualty. I drove him home; he went to bed in his boyhood room beneath the map of the world.
‘What on earth is going to happen to him now?’ asked Pattie.
I was as incapable as ever, I wanted to explain, of predicting the future. ‘He will come back from this,’ I mustered. ‘Edward is a clever lad.’
‘What sort of world is it,’ asked Pattie, clutching suddenly at my hand as we lay in bed, ‘that doesn’t value a man who’s been in a job for as long as he has?’
I had very little to say. What sort of world was it? An unfamiliar one. And yet, some of it was still so familiar. Pattie fell asleep on her left side, facing me. Her slender shoulders rose and fell; her face took on that aspect of childlike contentment. Outside, Muswell Hill was much as it had been for sixty years since the war. The occasional bus wheezed by; cats tightrope-walked along high fences, jumped down to disappear among undergrowth; a milky moon gazed down on the odd young Romeo reeling home. A couple of miles south, back the way I had come earlier, the Hotel Alpha was in the grip of a hundred different sleeps.
It was the same world I had always known, all right. And yet it felt as if it had become an imitation of itself, somehow, like the Georgian house in Kensington we sometimes directed guests to, once a real home and now a simulacrum for the entertainment of visitors. It felt – and surely my mind would not run on so extravagantly when morning came – but it felt as if somebody had slipped in and removed the world and in its place erected something which looked and felt the same, like my imitation Bakelite telephone, yet was really only a prop.
Perhaps that somebody’ was only time. But in the dreams that my brain finally stirred up – dreams which in some elusive way took up the theme again – the thief had a human face. This may account for the actions I found myself taking four days later.
It was a hot night. The usual characters swarmed everywhere. In the bar, Howard gave a demonstration of sword-swallowing, which an overseas visitor had taught him the basics of. Chas talked to Olympic people. Midnight slipped away like a guest out of the doors. The scene in the Alpha Bar, when I wandered in from my desk, seemed much as usual. But then something curious caught my eye.
Lara Krohl was sitting on her own, her laptop computer pushed some distance away. She was for once not attached to Howard and his court: her vigilance had been substituted for an almost absent manner. By her elbow was a bottle of white wine which, as I watched, she emptied of its final dregs.
At about one o’clock, with febrile noise still coming in waves from the bar, Lara approached my desk with a speed her condition made her ill-equipped for. She folded her arms across her chest. Her appearance had an unusually haphazard character to it: her make-up had slipped and the normally crisp black jacket looked creased.
‘Have you had a laptop handed in?’ she asked.
‘A laptop computer?’
‘Yes, yes, a laptop computer, a Mac laptop,’ said Lara Krohl. Her dark eyes danced with alarm over the items behind my desk: the blocky telephone, the rack of keys, all of it useless to her.
‘Nothing like that, I’m afraid,’ I said.
‘F--- me,’ she muttered. ‘It’s been f---ing nicked.’
‘I don’t think so. I would have seen … ’
‘It’s very urgent,’ she cut in. I almost laughed. Did she think I had merely been waiting for her to pronounce the situation urgent? Did she think she could ‘lean on me’, ‘chase me’, all the other things I had heard her urge over the past few years? ‘I need it back. It has classified information, which … It has extremely sensitive information on it.’
Careless of you to leave it unattended, then, I nearly said. But I was still the head of this establishment, and nobody left dissatisfied with our service. ‘We will move heaven and earth to find it, then, Ms Krohl,’ I said.
She swallowed hard and said: ‘Thank you, Graham.’
Then she muttered that she would stay in the building and I should tell her, please, if it showed up. The please’, and the use of my first name, testified to her weakened state. I watched her walk back into the bar, where the voices would seem too loud, as they always did when one was alone with a misfortune. A certain sympathy brewed inside me. But another less worthy emotion was ahead of it in the queue. I was rather thrilled; that was the truth of it.
The news spread, and the hotel changed shape with it. The chatter in the atrium, the eyes of those passing the desk, all took on a character of suppressed excitement: the ordinary person’s relish for the murder on the village green. Lara Krohl was scouring the bar, looking in places where the computer could not possibly be. Before long this lost its appeal for the casual observer, and the party began to break up at around two o’clock, people spilling in disorderly fashion out into the night. Lara, though, would not be going anywhere. To leave the building would be more or less to give the computer up for lost. As Ray locked up the bar and went wearily on his way, leaving me almost alone in the Alpha, I was not surprised to see her approach.
‘I’m going to stay here the night,’ she said. ‘Can I have a room? Any room?’
Her hand, brushing against mine to take the A-shaped key, felt like a dead thing. Even as she walked across the floor towards the lifts, she seemed every few moments to glance back to the bar, or up towards the pitiless array of balconies, as if a solution were there.
But it had been in front of her nose all along, for I had the laptop computer. I had gone into the bar while she was strutting about on her phone and removed it calmly, and now it was safe and sound behind the desk. Would anyone in the whole place have credited this if they’d seen it? They would not. I scarcely credited it myself. But here it was, by my foot, in the bottom of a laundry bag which was firmly zipped up, and as Lara went miserably up to her room I emerged with the bag over my shoulder and stood in the empty atrium, my heart beating quickly. I, too, would spend the rest of the night in the Alpha.
For the first time in these forty years, I checked myself into a guest room. I walked up by the back staircase. It was years since I had trodden here; but it was the only way I could be sure of avoiding Lara.
Room 62 looked out backwards over the jostle of brickwork and pipes. Outside it was surprisingly light already, or perhaps it never really became dark at this time of year. The sky looked purplish, the upward swirl of the city lights seeming to s
hine right through it as if it were only a canopy put up until the real sky re-emerged. I unwrapped the computer with cold hands and worked out how to put it on, then relieved the room’s fridge of a miniature whisky. The screen was asking for a passcode’. I had only one guess, but it was a good one. The passcode unlocked an invisible door, and I permitted myself a low laugh of satisfaction. The screen swirled and the internal engine chugged. I swigged the whisky. Here at my disposal, in all likelihood, was information enough to ruin half of Lara’s illustrious contacts. Some of it might be protected by further codes; but by the way she had panicked, I suspected plenty of it was not. Here was a great vault of secrets, sensitive information by the gallon, if you knew how to get at it.
I, of course, did not. The computer seemed to have sensed this: it was amusing itself by drawing geometric shapes on its screen and wafting them around. I had no more idea of how to access its treasures than an ape let loose among the Crown Jewels. But there were people in this building who did know: that was the point. Lara could easily believe – would be thinking even now – that someone was about to get at everything on her PC. If I stood and listened, I almost believed I could hear her pacing the carpet of her room two floors below.
I got into bed, in the end, at around half-past four. My heart had barely slowed since I’d executed the theft – as I supposed it was. I still preferred not to regard it in those terms. I had taken the computer, it was true, but it was not as if I meant to keep or sell it. It was merely a case of setting a thief to catch a thief. I would give the laptop back as soon as Lara Krohl had given me what I wanted in return.
At half-past seven in the morning I used the room’s phone to call Pattie. Nothing to worry about, I said: I had stayed at the Alpha overnight to deal with a crisis.
A crisis it is indeed, I thought, glancing wryly into the bathroom mirror. But not for me. All the same, as I reached again for the telephone my hands were trembling a little. I put this down partly to the muddling effects of sleeplessness and adrenalin, and partly to a chess-player’s anticipation of victory. There was also the feeling that victory might not be what I hoped. That I was not going to like what I learned.
