The Burning Air (13 page)

23

A
S THREATENED, KENNETH collected me on the day of my release. “Hello, kid,” he said. “Came straight here. Didn’t even have time to cash my slip, even though it came in at twenty to one.”

It was the nearest Kenneth would ever get to a declaration of love. But when you have been everything to someone and they have understood you better than you understand yourself, fondness and good intentions are worse than nothing.

Kenneth’s basement flat was a map of his mind. Copies of the
Racing Post
and tattered almanacs were stacked to head height against every wall. The carpet of used scratch cards on the sitting-room floor explained the perfect pewter crescent of scraped foil under his left index fingernail.

In the spare room, the bed linen still held its creases from the packaging. Piled books—my mother’s novels—formed a Manhattan skyline against a papered wall. The Russian dolls and a manicure set were in an open shoebox. “I didn’t know what were your clothes and what were hers, so I just hung all of them up together,” he said, gesturing to a wardrobe I knew I would never open. “Don’t know if they’ll fit you now, anyway. Although I have to say you look better for having a bit of meat on your bones. Well. Shall I open some scotch?”

It was half past three. Kenneth poured us a finger each into cut crystal tumblers. The first small sip rinsed my sinuses with fire but he gulped it like water. The alcohol enabled the small talk that was necessary to prepare the ground for the important things we had to discuss, my plans to avenge my mother’s death, how he must be on my side now that the law was not. I had so much to say to him but none of the right words. There was an awkwardness between us that was new. Of course we were used to hours in each other’s company but always with the stipulation that I would be back in my mother’s care before long. The bottle drained like the world’s slowest hourglass, although I could not go beyond my second tumbler. Presently he raised his glass in a lopsided toast.

“Here’s to your future,” he said. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life, as they say. So glad to see you’re on the mend, put all that nonsense about your mum and that family behind you.”

I was incredulous. It was one thing to dupe Dr. Myerson, but for
Kenneth
not to see through the ruse . . .

“Kenneth, I can’t believe this. We’re not talking about a school place anymore. We’re talking about life and death. We’re talking about
murder
.”

“Oh, Darcy,
no
. I was at the inquest. I know what I heard.”

“And I know what I saw when she framed me for that mugging. She was out to get me.”

Kenneth snorted dismissively.

“You forget that I
know
that family, Kenneth, I’ve been to their house, I’ve read . . . I
know
how they think.”

Now he sighed. “I wish you could see this as an opportunity, Darcy, a chance to make something of yourself. You’ve effectively been your mother’s carer since you could walk. Don’t you realize that? Everything you’ve done has been for her benefit. I’m just saying that now you’ve got a chance to let go of all that crap and—”

“Forgive me if I don’t see my mother’s death as an opportunity for personal growth,” I snapped. Kenneth poured another finger of whisky; his pink eyes made him look more like the White Rabbit than ever.

“You’re twisting my words again. I’m just
encouraging
you to see that there’s more to life than Saxby, and that stupid bloody school. You’re old enough to—well, you’re not that much younger than your mother was when she . . .”

“We’re not going into
that
.”

Kenneth drummed his fingers on the bottle, bit his lip, then retreated into a silence that I could not translate. After a while, he put the television on to watch the racing results, a sedative drone of names and numbers that soon had him snoring in the armchair.

I crashed into the shop-starched bed, my mind whirring. Kenneth had, in his clumsy way, made up my mind for me. He had been wrong to suggest that my mother’s death had freed me to become myself; I knew that I would never truly be myself again, that some vital piece of me was lost forever. If nothing could be the same,
everything
had to change. I knew I could not stay. My ambitions, for so long centered on this city, would have to turn outward for a while.

•   •   •

There was no curtain in Kenneth’s spare room, and dawn broke in at six the next morning. I didn’t take a single book. It was the first glimmer of the ethos that would guide me through the months ahead, the idea that survival depended on becoming another person, not just away from Saxby but away from everything that she had wanted for me. I palmed the smallest
matryoshka,
folded my birth certificate into my pocket, and slipped the uncashed betting slip into a carrier bag full of virgin scratch cards, which I took with me when I let myself out of Kenneth’s dank little flat and joined the first trickle of commuters making their way toward the station.

The farther Saxby receded, the stronger I felt. I resolved to change everything, from my name to the way I looked. I was not running away from my responsibilities to my mother’s memories; I was honoring them in a different way. I vowed to return when I was a match for the MacBrides, more than a match for them. If that turned out to be a life’s work, so be it. I had the patience of a saint, or its opposite.

24

MAY 2001

K
ENNETH’S BETTING SLIP yielded £5,000 cash, which I divided into piles of £100 in the sterile surrounds of the Paddington Travelodge. I used the edge of a coin to work my way through £400 worth of scratch cards. The revenue of £127 undermined Kenneth’s algorithm but bought me my first few nights’ accommodation.

Now what? I couldn’t stay in the hotel room. I was buzzing with a need for action unlike anything I had experienced before. In the nineteenth-century novels we used to read, people were frequently overwhelmed by bereavement, taking to their beds for months on end. I found grief to be a dynamo. I was never busier than during my mourning; the construction of a new life is a full-time job and leaves mercifully little time to dwell on loss. I had money to live on, but I needed to work. I craved busyness, purpose, and physical exhaustion.

At first, I was worried that my inexperience would work against me. The world of employment was as alien to me as it had been to my mother, who had of course never done a day’s paid work in her life. I was equipped only for one thing, and that was to teach, to keep alive the knowledge that she had passed down to me. I had naturally gleaned enough of the system to know that, without qualifications, my knowledge was worthless. In fact, the opposite was true. Adult ambitions and capabilities had been smoldering inside me, growing stronger for being suppressed in favor of my mother’s needs. Who would have guessed that I had it in me to walk the streets until I found an employment bureau, armed with only my name and my National Insurance number. I filled out a form that had boxes for me to list my achievements as measured by the blinkered parameters of examination boards. The blank spaces of my educational record brought home for the first time how badly prepared I was for survival. She had not taught me how to live, only how to know, but I could not blame her: that was all she knew too.

The pretty woman behind the desk looked me up and down for a full minute. She lingered on my teeth for a second too long before saying that she did not think front-of-house work would be for me, and that hospitality would be the best industry to try. Still, I emerged from the agency with a zero-hours contract as a commis chef at a French restaurant on Ealing Green.

The lot of a commis chef involved chopping, cleaning, stirring, and carrying raw meat in my bare hands across a steaming, noisy kitchen crammed with hot bodies. Nobody else in the kitchen had English as a first language, for which I was grateful. Engulfed by my oversized, shapeless chef’s whites, hair hidden under a hat, I was invisible, spoken to in only one-word sentences. After six days of working fourteen-hour shifts I was given one day off. Idle hours were dangerous; no matter how busy I kept there were moments every day I could not control, like the seconds between waking up and opening my eyes when the full force of loss slammed into me.

I got the tube to Oxford Street, pushed through the throng to buy myself a mobile phone and my first ever brand-new clothes. I had my hair washed, cut, and blow-dried in a real hair salon. I was still nobody’s idea of good-looking but if I remembered to keep my lips together I could now achieve a kind of neutrality. Every time I tended to my appearance I was alert for inner change, for the first signs of atrophy of my character and intellect. I felt the stirrings of something, but it did not feel like degeneration. I bought a copy of
Loot
and a
London A–Z
and began to look for somewhere else to stay. I saw half a dozen studio flats in Hanwell and Isleworth, all variations on the theme of my childhood home. None were beautiful, only half were affordable, all were acceptable, but landlords and estate agents all wanted references, copies of bank statements, credit histories. I had nothing but a sob story and a stay in a secure hospital to recommend me.

The seventh place on my list was a big Victorian house, on a quiet street opposite a park with a bowling green. The door was opened by a vast man of Mediterranean appearance and Australian accent. When we shook hands, mine was like a child’s in his.

“I’m Vassos,” he said, and then, gesturing to a tiny brown woman behind him, “and this is Carmel. Come in.”

The house was like a zoo, with a zebra-skin rug, leopard-print cushions, and a jungle of plants in big stone pots. There was leather everywhere—the sofa, the chairs, the bed—even a solid wall of the sitting room had been cushioned then stretched over with hide, and studded, as though the construction of a padded cell had been abandoned. The calmest room was the one they called their office, where the only color came from a solid wall of oversized paperbacks.

“Carmel’s my partner in business as well as in life,” said Vassos, showing me a mirrored room containing a small trampoline, exercise bike, and treadmill. “We’re fitness instructors at the big tennis club up Chiswick.”

His shoulders filled the narrow stairway to the attic. The room had a double bed with a peacock-feather print on the cover, a widescreen television, and an ensuite wetroom. “You’re probably wondering why a room this good is as cheap as it is. Truth is, you’ll be more of a house sitter than a lodger. We work pretty mad hours and we go away a lot, a hell of a lot—we’re branching out into boot camps, yoga retreats, detox breaks, and all that—and we need someone to make the place look lived-in, and to look after Misty for us.”

On cue a horrible, hard gray cat sauntered into the room and started to wind itself around my legs.

“How lovely,” I said, internalizing my shudder.

“Aw, she likes you, she does,” said Carmel. Her broad Irish accent came as a shock after the rich mahogany of her skin tone. Zooming in, I noticed patches of white in the webbing between her fingers and around her hairline.

We all followed Misty back downstairs, where Carmel and I had herbal tea and Vassos had a protein shake.

“Are you named after the Darcy in the TV program or the ballerina?” said Carmel.

“The novel.” She looked blank. “
Pride and Prejudice
was based on a book by Jane Austen.”

“
Was
it?” she said, wide-eyed. “I didn’t know that. I’ve only seen it on telly.”

“So, what do you think?” said Vassos, somehow managing to make it sound like a threat, but from what I had seen of the London property market, I wasn’t going to get a better offer.

“I like it, I’d like to live here. But I’ve only just left home after losing my mother . . .”

“Ah, bless,” said Carmel.

“So I haven’t got references or anything like that.”

Vassos looked solemn. “I’m sorry about your mother, although I am taking a punt on giving board to someone without background.” He stroked his chin. “Now. I’m a neurolinguistic programming master practitioner. Do you know what that means? That means I can read people as well as inspire and manipulate them, and spot a liar from ten paces. It’s like trusting your instincts, but on an
informed
level. And my gut”—he punched his solid abdomen—“is telling me you’re good for it. What do you think, Carmel?”

“Oh yeah,” said Carmel. “Grand.”

“Welcome to the madhouse!” said Vassos.

“Thanks, Vassos,” I said.

“Call me Vass,” he said. “I’m a busy man. Life’s too short for two syllables.”

I took a deep breath. “While we’re on the subject, I prefer to go by my middle name, Matthew,” I said. “Matt, for short.”

25

SEPTEMBER 2001

I
HAD CHOSEN THE ideal place in which to rebrand myself. Vass and Carmel were the most fascinating people I had ever met, although not for the reasons they thought. On the fridge they had pictures of themselves in their late teens. Carmel’s adolescent complexion had an eau-de-nil tinge, while Vassos had been skinny and knock-kneed. Their shared goal was self-improvement, and their vast library of books were all to this end—not the enriching literature I had read with my mother, not even the sanctimonious, cod-spiritual texts that Lydia MacBride had favored, but books that taught the reader how to become a better person in a
quantifiable
way that showed results to the outside world. Their authors were CEOs, dieticians, and psychologists and their subject matter body language, manipulation, business strategy, and endless,
endless
diet and exercise guides. I read a book every other day, and on Vass’s laptop taught myself to use the Internet.

Vass was big on a process called “modeling”—identifying someone whose qualities and achievements you admired, then aping their behavior until it became second nature. I looked to Vass himself, not because he was someone I longed to be—he was, for all his self-importance, just a nothing person with money—but because he was there and he was, in his own way, a success. It was far easier to start again from scratch and adopt wholesale Vass’s alien values than try to pursue my mother’s ambitions for me. This was the way men acted, I realized, although I often wished I could ask him why, like an actor asking the director for his motivation.

True to their word, Vass and Carmel were rarely at home but the time I did spend in their company was intense. My efforts to make myself a blank canvas had been so successful that they could not resist making me their pet project; she designed me a nutrition program, supplementing three balanced meals a day with nutrient-rich shakes and powders while he took me to his gym and taught me how to use the weights. There was nothing either of them could do about my height—I never got past five-foot-six—but they masterminded an otherwise complete transformation of my body below the neck. With every pound I gained, I commanded more respect. Strangers no longer spoke to me as though I was a child.

So that I could save enough money for the orthodontia we all agreed was necessary, they found me a part-time job, for my days away from the restaurant, manning the reception in their gym. They called it cash-in-hand and I wondered if they knew quite how true that was, as I pocketed the odd pound here and there that people paid for pure protein in chocolate-bar or milkshake form. Two or three times a month, sales reps came to flog new miracle muscle builders or fat burners. I was fascinated by the low rhetoric of their sales patter, and took their business cards with curiosity. Their world of glamour and profit was so far from the life I had been groomed for that it held an exotic appeal.

One white-skied Tuesday afternoon, a rep called Bradley Rider barreled through the double doors, intent on persuading me to invest tens of thousands of pounds in a variety of machines from a laser that promised to tighten upper arms by means of cryogenic freezing to an “ultrasound massage” that purported to be a painless way to melt fat. He didn’t stop to think that a receptionist might not have access to funds beyond what he could take from the register and didn’t listen when I tried to explain that; he had spread his catalogs across the counter and was a few minutes into his pitch when Vass came in. When Vass saw what Brad was peddling, he virtually threw him out by the collar.

“Not in
my
gym! Piss off to Knightsbridge or somewhere else people have got more money than sense. Don’t insult me, mate.”

“All right, all right. Your loss.” Bradley Rider left with an upturned collar and a defensive shrug.

“What was all that for?” I said, or rather I tried to say: I had only been wearing my new dental plate for a few days and my tongue had yet to accustom itself to the false ceiling in my mouth. “You should’ve seen the figures he had. If his projections and those returns are true you’d have been printing money after the first few months.”

“It’d be a fucking goldmine,” conceded Vass. “But that’s not the
point
. He’s selling dreams, not results. People are desperate to believe there’s a magic bullet, but the
only
way to reduce body fat is by nutrition and exercise, or to have someone to cut you up on the operating table and suck it all out.” He banged his fist on my counter. “Anything else is just exploiting when you should be
educating
. It shows contempt for the body, contempt for human intelligence. What that bloke’s doing goes against everything I stand for.”

“
He
seemed pretty convinced by the science behind it all,” I said. “He reckons he can extract fat through the skin.”

“Bollocks! The only thing he’s extracting from people is money. I might not have a penthouse, but do you know what I have got?” He put his paw on his massive chest, looking near to tears. “Integrity, Matt. Integrity. It’s the one thing they can’t steal from you. People like him make me . . . man, I need a run.” He shouldered the doors to the cardio suite.

Bradley Rider had left a single brochure behind on the counter. It had a business card stapled to the front of it, which I slipped into my pocket. I kept that card in my wallet for months, fingering it every day until it became creased and then ragged. I think that even then I recognized that in my short meeting with Bradley Rider, I had glimpsed in him something alien, ambition without integrity, that had called out to something similar in me.

•   •   •

In spring 2003, Vassos and Carmel finally departed for Australia, leaving me in charge of their house and their cat. Misty’s food allowance—it ate only wild, line-caught fish and free-range organic chicken—was more than enough to feed a human being. Like a car, it had a kind of log book that acted as proof of pedigree and ownership, and a bold idea came to me. I took a series of photographs of it in various poses all over the house, and once I was sure I had enough to slowly feed them a diary of it, sold it to a rare-breeds dealer for six hundred pounds. The ease of this emboldened me to sublet the house to a family, placing an advert in
Loot
and drawing up a contract from a boilerplate on the Internet so that there was no estate agent to ask for my proof of ownership or to take a cut of the cash. It was simple, but that did not mean it was easy. On the morning the contracts were signed, I was sick twice, although after it was done I felt only euphoria. I rented a studio a few doors down for one-third of the income I received. With that money, I could afford to leave the restaurant and the gym and work full-time for Bradley Rider, selling his fat-busting ultrasound machines to beauty salons and health farms all over the southeast.

The reason the job sounded too good to be true, I soon realized, was because it was. Without my income from Vass and Carmel’s house I would have gone under: Bradley employed me on a commission-only basis, and it took me a long time to perfect my sales patter and turn a profit. When I did make a sale, Bradley’s royalty as licensee swallowed the lion’s share of the proceeds. My frustratingly meager accounts were submitted quarterly to Bradley’s accountant, a Southall wide-boy called Rikesh, who was, in Brad’s words, “just the right side of dodgy.” Rikesh had been delisted from the Institute of Chartered Accountants for some nebulous borderline fraud, since when his popularity with clients like Bradley had reached an all-time high. I met him just once, the day we set up my limited company. “For when you hit the big-time,” said Rikesh. “You want to be able to funnel your cash through a company. Trust me, self-employment is for part-timers, losers, and women. What are you going to call it? You can make up a brand name, or just your own name followed by Ltd.” If I could not escape my association with Bradley, I might as well capitalize on his reputation. “Matthew Rider Ltd.,” I decided.

Although Rikesh knew my birth name, he never once referred to me that way. The only people who wrote to me in my own name were banks and utilities. No letter from Kenneth ever came. Every few months I would be pulled up short by the awareness that he had made no effort to find me, but I was too busy to let that sting.

The growth of my little company was accelerated in 2004, when Bradley was sent to prison for trading while bankrupt. Rikesh transferred his loyalty from Bradley to me with admirable speed and offered to put up the capital to help me buy the UK distribution rights for the entire range of machines at a fraction of their market value. “I’ll give you a better rate of interest than any bank,” was how he sold the arrangement to me.

“I don’t get it. What’s in this for you?”

“You wait till you see my bill,” he said.

“But you don’t want a stake in the business?”

“Nah. Cash flow, mate. Cash flow.” Cash flow, I was learning, was Rikesh-speak for “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Bradley’s incarceration added a zero to my company’s turnover, and the next year another. I evicted the family in Vass and Carmel’s house, moved back in while I looked for somewhere to buy, and wrote to Australia with the double-barreled bad news of my intention to leave and of Misty’s demise (a hit-and-run: people are
bastards
).

I soon found and bought outright a good two-bed, two-bath flat in a gated community in Ealing with a gym and a pool in the basement. I worked out for two hours every morning, slowly assuming the sculptured shape that is modern society’s idea of neutral. When the dental plate came off it left me with just a millimeter’s overbite. My new smile transformed everything from the size of my nose to the set of my jaw and my journey to fully inhabiting the flesh was almost complete. Rather than my mother’s intended immunity to beauty, I had a heightened vulnerability to it. I felt a flicker of betrayal every time I was moved by a pretty girl in summer clothes. But I could not ignore the truth that the further I turned my back on the ideals that had been instilled in me, the more successful I became. Why should sex be the exception?

The first few times I paid, a premium price for a premium product, a red-haired girl in a good room at the right end of the King’s Road. It was confirmation that a parallel dimension of pleasure had always existed alongside the ascetic world of my upbringing and if, afterward, I felt the urge to apologize to my mother it was more in a spirit of commiseration than regret that I had crossed this threshold. I always used the same agency but rarely the same girl twice. Although I could not imagine reconciling the sweat and power of sex with the tender understanding I still missed, I eventually found the confidence to complement the professionals with amateurs. Many of these girls were keen, but when adoration is the benchmark, admiration seems so weak and watery. What was worse, none of them seemed to have a spine, a purpose, a creed, and as such, their expectations and demands were mercurial and bewildering. My mother’s linear, constant approach to life, I soon realized, was the exception rather than the female rule.
This
, I thought, was what she ought to have warned me of: not the harmless transaction of the physical act but the bewildering power struggle that accompanied it.

Despite this, I did want to find someone. A woman seemed to be the only thing missing. I had the business, the property, the car; and after all, the truth that a single gentleman in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife is so universally acknowledged as to be the only Austen most people can quote. In that sense, I was a victim of my own success. Being a self-made man has its drawbacks. I had so carefully constructed Matt Rider, the outer doll who enclosed all the others, that the casing had sealed permanently. Darcy Kellaway, and all his childhood avatars, were in there, but the only way to access them would be to smash the outer shell.