Armadillo (15 page)

‘Have you got a cigarette?’ she asked. White, even teeth. What has she done to her hair?

‘I don’t smoke.’ A hint of an underbite gave a pugnacious edge to her beauty, a slight jut to the jaw. He offered to buy her some cigarettes but she declined.

‘It won’t kill me.’ Strong eyebrows, unplucked, dense. Those brown eyes.

‘So,’ she said, setting down her coffee cup. ‘Mr Lorimer Black.’

He asked her, for politeness’s sake, and simply to start conversing, what she had been doing and she said she had just come from a read-through of a friend’s play.

‘Which is a load of crap, really. He has no talent at all.’

Finally she removed her jacket and scarf and finally he was able to look, guardedly this time, at her breasts. From the pleasing convexities and concavities of her vermilion polo-neck he calculated they were of perfectly average size but flattish, rather than protruding, more grapefruit-halves than anything particularly conic. He was glad to have this atavistic, but essential, male curiosity satisfied and returned his full attention to the animated and luminous beauty of her face, still not quite able to believe his astonishing good fortune, as she continued to run down and generally demolish the aspirations and pretensions of her playwright friend’s efforts.

‘What’s this all about, Lorimer Black?’ she said suddenly, more sharply. ‘What exactly is going on here?’

‘I saw you one day in a taxi and I thought you looked beautiful,’ he told her, candidly. ‘Then a few days later I saw you in that commercial and thought, “This is Fate” —’

‘Fate,’ she said with an ironic laugh.

‘And when you came into the Alcazar that lunchtime I knew I had to do something about it. I had to meet you.’

‘You’re saying you fancy me, are you, Lorimer Black?’

Why did she keep repeating his full name, as if it amused her in some way?

‘I suppose I am,’ he confessed. ‘But thank you, anyway, for coming.’

‘I’m a married woman, me,’ she said, ‘and I’ve got to bum a ciggie off someone.’

The other five people currently drinking coffee in the Café Greco were all smoking, so she was spoilt for choice. A plump woman with spiky ginger hair and an earful of rings parted with one of her cigarettes and Flavia returned triumphant to resume her place on the stool. Lorimer was glad of the opportunity to stare at her figure again, noting her height, the length of her legs, the ranginess of her stride and her slim, almost hipless body. Pretty much ideal, he thought, no complaints here.

‘So, you’re out of luck, Lorimer Black,’ she said.

‘I notice you didn’t describe yourself as a “happily” married woman.’

‘Goes without saying, doesn’t it?’

‘Does it?’

‘I would have thought so. You’re not married, I take it.’

‘No.’

‘In a “relationship”, then?’

‘Ah. Not any more.’

‘So what do you do at Fortress Sure? Sounds a deadly dull sort of life.’

‘I’m what they call a loss adjuster.’

‘Adjusting loss… Someone who “adjusts” loss…’ She thought about it. ‘That could be nice – or it could be fucking spooky.’ She looked shrewdly at him, narrowing her eyes. ‘Is your job meant to make people happy? People who’ve lost something, they call on you to adjust it, make the loss less hard to bear?’

‘Well, not exactly, I –’

‘As if their lives are broken in some way and they call on you to fix it.’

‘Not exactly,’ he said again, cautiously, unable to fix her tone – whether naïve or heavily ironic.

‘No. Sounds too good to be true, I think.’

Ironic, then, Lorimer thought. Profoundly.

He stared at her and she looked him back squarely in the eye. It was absurd, he thought, swiftly analysing his feelings, it was almost embarrassing, but true none the less: he could happily have sat there for hours simply staring at her face. He felt light, also, a thing of no substance, as if he were made of styrofoam or balsa wood, something she could cuff aside with the most casual of backhanders, toss him out of the Café Greco with the flick of a wrist.

‘Mmmm,’ she said, reflectively. ‘I suppose you’d like to kiss me.’

‘Yes. More than anything.’

‘You’ve got nice lips,’ she said, ‘and nice, tired eyes.’

He wondered if he dared lean forward and press his lips to hers.

‘And I might have allowed you to kiss me,’ she said, ‘if you’d taken the trouble to shave before coming out to meet me.’

‘Sorry.’ A useless word, he thought, for the awful regret he felt.

‘Do you ever tell lies, Lorimer Black?’

‘Yes. Do you?’

‘Have you ever told me lies? In our short acquaintance?’

‘No. Yes, well, a white lie, but I had good –’

‘We’ve known each other for about five minutes and you’ve already lied to me?’

‘I could have lied about it.’

She laughed at that.

‘Sorry I’m late, honeybun,’ a man’s voice said at his shoulder.

Lorimer turned and saw a tall man standing there, dark like him, fashionably dishevelled, older by five years or so. Lorimer took in, quickly, patchy stubble, long curly hair, a lean, handsome, knowing face, not kind.

‘Better late than never,’ Flavia said. ‘Lucky my old chum Lorimer was here, stop me dying of boredom.’

Lorimer smiled, sensing the man appraising him now, checking out the look, the presence, weighing him up, subtly.

‘I don’t think you’ve ever met Noon, have you, Lorimer?’

Noon?

‘No. Hi, Noon,’ Lorimer said, keeping his face straight. It wasn’t hard, he felt all the mass returning to his body, all his specific gravity, his
avoir dupois.

‘Noon Malinverno, number one husband.’

Malinverno offered a lazy hello then turned back to Flavia. ‘We should go, sweetums,’ he said.

Flavia stubbed out her cigarette, wound her long scarf about her neck and shrugged on her jacket.

‘Nice to see you again, Lorimer,’ she said. Malinverno was already moving to the door, his eyes on them both. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget to give me Paul’s number.’

‘Sure,’ Lorimer said, suddenly proud of her guile, taking up his pen and writing his telephone number, and his address, on the margin of a page of the
Standard,
which he tore off and gave to her. ‘Paul said call any time. Twenty-four hours a day’

‘Ta, ever so,’ she said, deadpan. As they left the Café Greco Malinverno put his arm around her neck and Lorimer turned away. He didn’t want to see them together in the street, husband and wife. He was not bothered that she had arranged for Malinverno to meet her there too – her insurance, he supposed – he nursed instead the warm glow of their conspiracy, their complicity. He knew they would see each other again – there is no disguising that charge of mutual attraction as it flickers between two people – and he knew she would call, she liked his nice, tired eyes.

104. Pavor Nocturnus.
Gérard de Nerval said, ‘Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to pass through those ivory gates that lead to the invisible world without a shudder ‘I know what he means: like everything in life that is good, that nurtures, comforts and restores, there is a bad side, a disturbing, unsettling side, and sleep is no exception. Somnambulism, somniloquy, apnoea, enuresis, bruxism, incubus, pavor nocturnus. Sleepwalking, sleeptalking, snoring, bed-wetting, teeth-grinding, nightmare, night terror.

The Book of Transfiguration

He barely slept that night: he was not surprised, in fact he did not particularly want to sleep, his head was so busy with thoughts about the meeting with Flavia. He analysed its conflicting currents without much success, making little headway in interpreting its shifting moods and nuances – moments of hostility and compliance, tones of irony and affection, glances of curiosity and diffidence. What did it add up to? And that offer of a kiss, what did it imply? Was she serious or was it bravado, an act of seduction or a cruel form of taunting? He lay in his bed listening to the growing quiet of the night, always approaching silence but never quite achieving it, its progression halted by a lorry’s grinding gears, a siren or a car alarm, a taxi’s ticking diesel, until, in the small hours, the first jumbos began to cruise in from the Far East – from Singapore and Delhi, Tokyo and Bangkok – the bass roar of their engines like a slowly breaking wave high above, as they wheeled and banked in over the city on their final approach to Heathrow. Then he did fall asleep for a while, his head full of the odd conviction that his life had changed irrevocably in some way and that nothing from now on would ever be quite the same.

Chapter 10

When Lorimer came into the office he heard Hogg down the passageway, singing, boomingly, ‘I got a gal in Kalamazoo-zoo-zoo’ and he knew that Torquil had been sacked.

He hung back, waiting for him to move on before slipping unnoticed into his room, where he sat quietly and assiduously going through the newspaper clippings in the David Watts file and speed-reading his way through a slackly written, instant biography called
David Watts – Beyond Enigma
that had been published a couple of years previously. The most intriguing fact about David Watts was that ‘David Watts’ was his stage name. He had been born Martin Foster in Slough, where his father had worked for the Thames Water Board as assistant manager of the vast sewage works to the west of Heathrow airport. It was curious, Lorimer thought, to exchange one bland name for another. All the other details of his life and progression to eminence were unexceptionable. He was a bright, withdrawn only child with a precocious talent for music. He had dropped out of the Royal College and with a friend, Tony Anthony (now, was that a stage name?), had formed a four-man rock band called, first, simply Team, which had metamorphosed into David Watts and the Team. Their first three albums had gone double-platinum; there was a protracted dalliance with a girl called Danielle, who worked on a music paper before becoming David Watts’s live-in lover; they had enjoyed two sell-out tours to the USA… Lorimer found he was nodding off: so far, so predictable. The biography concluded with a fanfare of bright tomorrows: the world was there for the taking; rumour had it Danielle was pregnant; the creative juices were flowing in veritable torrents. Anything was possible.

That had been two years ago and now the newspaper clippings took up the story where the biography ended. The romance with Danielle hit the reef: she left, became ill, became anorexic, disappeared, probably aborted the baby (this provoked abiding tabloid fodder: the lost child of David Watts). The band split with satisfying acrimony; Tony Anthony sued and settled out of court. Danielle was discovered in Los Angeles, washed-up and haggard, on detox and living with some other unsuitable rock hasbeen. She denigrated David Watts with routine and tireless venom (‘egomaniac’, ‘control-freak’, ‘satanist’, ‘nazi’, ‘communist’, ‘martian’, ‘nerd’ and so on). David Watts released his first solo album with a select bunch of the world’s best session-musicians,
Angziertie,
which, contrary to all expectations, outsold everything previous to it. A thirty-five-nation, eighteen-month world tour was mooted. Then David Watts had a nervous breakdown.

Here the newspapers gave way to insurance policies. A £
2
million claim was filed for costs incurred over the cancellation of the tour. As Lorimer riffled through the documents he came across many affidavits from Harley Street physicians and psychiatrists testifying to the genuine nature of David Watts’s
crise.
A series of increasingly angry letters had started coming in from DW Management Ltd, signed by Watts’s manager, one Enrico Murphy, as Fortress Sure’s first set of loss adjusters doggedly queried every expense and invoice. A compensatory loss of earnings claim was submitted for £1.5 million and one or two of the larger arenas (a baseball ground in New Jersey, a dry dock in Sydney, Australia) and bona fide foreign impresarios were paid off. By the time Lorimer reached the file’s final letter, Enrico Murphy was angrily demanding outstanding settlement to the tune of £2.7 million and threatening litigation as a result of all this ‘incredible hassle’ which was further undermining his client’s fragile health. Moreover, he was ready and willing to go public: the press was permanently avid for news about David Watts.

Shane Ashgable rapped gently on Lorimer’s door and sidled conspiratorially into the room. He was a lean, fit man whose relentless work-out programme had squared his face almost perfectly with bulging jaw muscles. He walked as if he had his buttocks permanently clenched (Hogg said once, memorably, ‘D’you think Ashgable’s got a fifty pence piece held between his cheeks?’). He once confessed to Lorimer that he did a thousand press-ups a day.

‘Helvoir-Jayne’s been canned,’ Ashgable said.

‘Jesus Christ! When?’

‘This morning. He was in and out of here like shit through a tin horn. Never seen anything like it. Ten minutes.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘No idea. Hogg’s like a man pissing on ice. What do you make of it?’ Ashgable was no fool, Lorimer knew; he had spent a year at the Harvard Business School, hence his penchant for American slang.

‘Haven’t the faintest,’ said Lorimer.

‘Come on,’ Ashgable said, with a sly smile. ‘He’s your friend.’

‘Says who?’

‘Says Torquil Helvoir-Jayne, constantly. You spent the weekend at his house, didn’t you? He must have had wind of it. No one’s that insensitive.’

‘I swear he never gave a sign.’

Ashgable was clearly sceptical. ‘Well, as he left he kept asking for you.’

‘Maybe I should see Hogg…’

‘We want a full report, Lorimer.’

Upstairs there was a cardboard box in the hallway containing bits and pieces from Torquil’s rapidly cleared desk. Lorimer caught a glimpse of a studio portrait of a smiling, pearl-collared Binnie and the three scrubbed, plump children.

Janice raised her eyebrows helplessly, and gave a short piping whistle as if that were the only way to illustrate her incredulity. She beckoned Lorimer over and whispered, ‘It was brutal and sudden, Lorimer, and the language was unseemly on both sides.’ She glanced towards Hogg’s closed door. ‘I know he wants to see you, he keeps asking if you’ve left the building.’

‘Come,’ Hogg barked when Lorimer knocked. Lorimer stepped in and Hogg pointed wordlessly at the chair already placed before his empty desk.

‘He had no idea what hit him, not a clue,’ Hogg said, manifest pride colouring his voice. ‘Most satisfying. That look of total disbelief on someone’s face. Moments to cherish, Lorimer, moments to recall in your dotage.’

‘I told no one,’ Lorimer said.

‘I know. Because you’re clever, Lorimer, because you’re not thick. But what intrigues me, though, is just how clever you are.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Do you think you’re so clever you can outsmart us all?’

Lorimer was begining to feel offended and hurt by Hogg’s recondite innuendoes: Hogg’s paranoia was registering off the dial. Lorimer also sensed his own ignorance once more, a feeling that he was in possession of only a few of the facts, and those not the most crucial.

‘I’m just doing my job, Mr Hogg, that’s all, as I always have.’

‘Then you have nothing to worry about, do you?’ Hogg paused, then added breezily, ‘How was your weekend with the Helvoir-Jaynes?’

‘Ah, fine. It was purely social, purely’

Hogg clasped his hands behind his head, a faint sense of amusement causing his eyes to crinkle at the edges and his thin lips to twitch, as if there was a laugh behind them trying to bubble forth. What had Ashgable said? Like a man pissing on ice.

Lorimer rose from his chair. ‘I’d better get on,’ he said. ‘I’m working on the David Watts adjust.’

‘Excellent, Lorimer, tip-top. Oh and take Helvoir-Jayne’s odds and sods with you when you go, will you? I’m sure you’ll be seeing him again sooner than I will.’

210. Shepherd
’
s Pie.
We had nearly finished the shepherd
’
s pie, I remember, because I was contemplating putting in an early claim for seconds, when the room went yellow, full of yellows – lemon, corn, sunflower, primrose – and refulgent whites, as in a partial printing process or silk-screening, waiting for the other primary colours to be overlaid. Some sort of aural dysfunction kicked
in too: voices became indistinct and tinny, as if badly recorded some decades before. Turning my head extremely slowly, I registered that Sinbad was telling some rambling and inarticulate story, flinging his big hands about the place, and that Shona had started to cry softly. Lachlan (Murdo was away) seemed to lurch back from his plate as if he
’
d discovered something disgusting on it but then started to poke fascinatedly around the mince and potatoes with a fork as if he might unearth something valuable like a gemstone or a golden ring.

I took deep breaths as the room and its contents leached to white, all the yellows gone, and then shimmered and stirred into shades of electric, bilious green.

‘Oh my God,
’
Joyce said quietly. ‘Oh oh oh.
’

‘It’s fantastic, isn
’
t it?
’
Sinbad said.

I could hear the blood draining from my head, a bubbly death rattle, like water whirlpooling down a too-small plughole. Joyce reached trembling fingers across the table to me and squeezed my hand. Junko had risen to her feet and was swaying about, as if on the pitching deck of one of her fishing boats. Then Shona seemed to pour, as if molten or boneless, off her chair and reformed in a tight foetal ball, weeping loudly now in clear distress.

‘Brilliant,
’
Sinbad opined. ‘Wicked.
’

For my part the green had given way to deep interstellar blues and blacks and I was becoming aware of some kind of shaggy fungoid growth forming on the walls and ceiling of the kitchen.

‘I
’
ve got to get out of here before I die,
’
I said, reasonably, sensibly, to Joyce. ‘I’m going back to the hall.
’

‘Please let me come with you,
’
she begged. ‘Please don’t leave me, my darling one.
’

We left them – Shona, Junko, Lachlan and Sinbad – Sinbad laughing now, his eyes shut and his wet lips pouting, his hands fumbling at his fly.

Outside it was better: the cold, the streetlamps
’
harsh glare
helped, seemed to calm things down. Arms around each other, we waited ten minutes for a bus, not saying much, holding tight to each other like lovers about to be parted. I felt disembodied, muffled; the colour changes modified, shifted, faded and brightened but I could cope. Joyce seemed to be retreating into herself making small mewing kittenish noises. As the bus arrived all sound appeared to cut out and I could hear nothing: no Joyce, no bus engine, no hiss of compressed air as the door opened, no wind noise in the trees. The world became hushed and absolutely silent.

The Book of Transfiguration

There was something grubbily attractive about the sullen girl who opened the door to him at DW Management Ltd in Charlotte Street, Lorimer had to admit. Perhaps it was just her extreme youth – eighteen or nineteen – perhaps it was the deliberately botched peroxide job on her short hair, or the tightness of the leopardskin print T-shirt she was wearing, or the three brass rings piercing her left eyebrow, or the fact that she was simultaneously smoking and chewing gum? Whatever it was, she exuded a cut-price, transient allure that briefly stirred him, along with a combination of latent aggression and a massive weariness. There were many minor skirmishes ahead, he sensed, only counter-aggression would work here; politesse and civility were a waste of time.

‘Yeah?’ she said.

‘Enrico Murphy’ He added a hint of urban twang to his voice.

‘Not here.’

‘This is DW Management, yeah?’

‘Ceased trading. I’m packing up.’

Lorimer looked around, concealing his surprise: he had assumed the office was simply a mess but he began to see traces of order amongst the mess, some documents piled, some pot plants in a cardboard box.

‘Well, well,’ Lorimer said, looking her in the eye. ‘Turn up for the books.’

‘Yeah, brilliant.’ She wandered back to the reception desk. ‘David fired him, Sat’day’

Everybody getting the bum’s rush, Lorimer thought. ‘Where is Enrico, anyway?’

‘Hawaii.’ She dropped her cigarette in a styrofoam cup containing an inch of cold tea.

‘All right for some, eh?’

She twiddled with a fine gold chain at her neck. ‘He must’ve been in here at the weekend – took a lot of files, took the platinum discs.’ She pointed at some darker rectangles marking the hessian walls. ‘Even the fucking phones’re dead.’

‘Enrico do this?’

‘No, David. Thought I’d nick ‘em, I suppose. Haven’t been paid yet this month, see.’

‘Who’s the new manager, then?’

‘He’s doing his own management now. From home.’

Lorimer thought: there were always other ways, of course, but this was probably quickest. He took out his wallet and counted out five twenty pound notes on to the desk in front of her, then picked up a pen and a sheet of notepaper and placed them on top of the notes.

‘I just need his phone number, thanks very much.’

He looked down at the dark cutting her parting made in her white-blonde hair as she bent her head to scribble the figures on the sheet of paper. He wondered about this young girl’s life, what had brought her here, what path it would take now He wondered what Flavia Malin-verno was doing today.

8. Insurance.
Insurance exists to substitute reasonable foresight and confidence in a world dominated by apprehension and blind chance. This has a supreme social value.

The Book of Transfiguration

There were several messages on his answer machine when he returned home that evening. The first went: ‘Lorimer, it’s Torquil… hello? Are you there? Pick up if you’re there. It’s Torquil.’ The second was a few moments of quiet hiss and then a click. The third was: ‘Lorimer, it’s Torquil, something ghastly’s happened. Can you call me?… No, I’ll call you.’ The fourth was from Detective Sergeant Rappaport: ‘Mr Black, we have a date for the inquest.’ Then followed the date and time in question and various instructions relating to his attendance at Hornsey coroner’s court. The fifth was to the point: ‘It’s not over, it’s not over yet, Black.’ Rintoul. Damn, Lorimer thought, perhaps the situation did require cod-liver oil after all. The sixth made him stop breathing for its duration: ‘Lorimer Black. I want you to take me to lunch. Sole di Napoli, Chalk Farm. I’ve booked a table, Wednesday’