Armadillo (16 page)

He slid
Angziertie
into his C D player and removed it after approximately ninety seconds. David Watts had a reedily monotonous, albeit tuneful voice with no character and the rank pretension of the lyrics was rebarbative. The fatal gloss and polish of the most expensive recording studios in the world stripped the music of all authenticity. He realized this reaction placed him in a tiny minority, was almost freakishly perverse, but there was little he could do about it: it was as if one of his senses had gone, smell or taste or touch, but he simply was unable to tolerate any contemporary British, American or European rock music of recent decades. It seemed fatally bogus, without soul or passion, a conspiracy of manipulated tastes, faddery and expert marketing. He replaced David Watts with Emperor Bola Osanjo and his Viva Africa Ensemble and sat back, brain in neutral, trying to cope with the preposterous sense of elation that was building inside him. He thought of Flavia Malinverno’s beautiful face, the way she looked at you, the way she seemed always to be half-challenging you, provoking you… There was no question, without doubt she –

The doorbell buzzed and he lifted the speakerphone off its cradle, suddenly worried that it might be Rintoul.

‘Yes?’

‘Thank Christ. It’s Torquil.’

Torquil put his suitcase down and looked about Lorimer’s flat in frank admiration.

‘Nice gaff,’ he said. ‘It’s incredibly neat and sort of solid, if you know what I mean. Is this real?’

‘It’s Greek,’ Lorimer said, gently taking the helmet out of Torquil’s big hands. ‘About three thousand years old.’

‘Have you got any booze ?’ Torquil asked.’ I’m gagging for a drink. What a fucking awful day. Have you any idea how much a taxi costs from Monken Hadley down here? Forty-seven pounds. It’s outrageous. Scotch, please.’

Lorimer poured Torquil a generous Scotch and himself a slightly less generous vodka. When he turned, glasses in hand, Torquil had lit a cigarette and was sprawled on his sofa, thighs splayed, two inches of shin showing above his left sock.

‘What the hell is this crap you’re playing?’

Lorimer switched off the music. ‘I heard about what happened today’ he said, consolingly ‘Rotten luck.’

Some of Torquil’s swagger left him and he looked suddenly deflated and shocked for a moment. He rubbed his face with his hand and took a long pull at his drink.

‘It was pretty fucking scary, I can tell you. He’s a vicious bastard, that Hogg. He took the car keys off me too, there and then. By the time I got back home after lunch it had been repossessed. Bloody embarrassing.’ He exhaled. ‘Out. Just like that. I put a call into Simon but I’ve heard nothing.’ He looked plaintively at Lorimer. ‘Have you any idea what it’s all about?’

‘I think,’ Lorimer began, wondering whether it were wise to confide in Torquil, ‘I think it’s something to do with the Fedora Palace.’

‘I thought you’d sorted that all out.’

‘So did I. But there’s something else going on. I can’t figure it out.’

Torquil looked aggrieved. ‘OK, so I cocked up – and I admit it – and was duly shunted out of Fortress Sure. Now I’m shunted out of G G H. It’s not fair. There should be some sort of statute of limitations. I made a wrong calculation, that’s all, I can’t keep on being punished for the rest of my life.’

‘It’s more complicated, I think. I just can’t put all the pieces together. It’s got Hogg worried, though, for some reason. What did he say to you?’

‘He came in and said: “You’re sacked, get out, now.” I asked why and he said: “I don’t trust you,” and that was it. Well, we called each other a few choice names.’ Torquil frowned and winced, as though the act of recollection were causing him physical pain. ‘Bastard,’ he said, and tapped ash absent-mindedly on the carpet. Lorimer fetched him an ashtray and a refill.

‘How did things go,’ Lorimer asked, innocently enough but genuinely curious, ‘after Saturday night?’ He felt, simultaneously, a vague alarm: here they were, he and Torquil, nattering about problems at work, problems at home. They even had a shared history, now, just like two old friends.

Torquil looked glum and threw his head back to stare at the ceiling. ‘It got really bad,’ he said. ‘Nightmare. She became very quiet, Binns, after she calmed down, icy cold, not like herself at all, sort of drawn in on herself. I apologized, of course, but she refused to speak to me.’ He paused. ‘This morning she went to a lawyer – while I was getting the sack. Then she chucked me out. Said I could go and live with Irina. She wants a divorce.’

‘Hence the suitcase.’

‘My worldly goods. It gets worse. I had to speak to this lawyer. He says I’ve got to start giving Binnie money, regularly, some sort of maintenance while the divorce goes through. I told this lawyer chappie that I’d just got the sack so they could whistle for it. Apparently he and Binnie went over the bank statements, credit cards, building society passbooks, the works. Turns out I’m £54,000 in the red. Thank Christ I don’t have a mortgage.’

‘How does that line go? When sorrows come they come not as single spies but in battalions.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Shakespeare.’

‘Oh. Right. Thing is, Lorimer, as it turns out, you’re the only friend I have.’

‘Me? What about Oliver Rollo?’

‘Can’t stand him. Mindless idiot.’

‘What about your family?’

‘They’ve all rather sided with Binnie, say I’m a disgrace. I’m a bit of a pariah, to tell the truth. Shunned all round.’

‘I side with Binnie, too.’

‘Yeah, but you understand, you were sort of involved.’

‘Involved? What’re you talking about? You climbed into bed with Irina, not me.’

‘But you’d met Irina. And she was meant to be your girlfriend.’

‘The key word is “meant”. I’d only spoken to her for two minutes.’

‘I don’t think, Lorimer. That’s my trouble in life, I don’t think ahead.’

Lorimer knew what was coming next, that premonitory heaviness weighing on him again.

‘I was wondering’, Torquil said with a weak smile, ‘if I could kip down here for a night or two, until it all blows over.’

‘Blows over? What do you mean?’

‘Binnie’ll take me back, once she’s calmed down.’

‘You sure?’

‘Course. She’s a forgiving person, old Binns.’

‘Well, all right, but just for a night or two,’ Lorimer said, telling himself with scant confidence that Torquil knew his wife better than he did. ‘I’ll get you the duvet.’

211. The Television Set.
Yon felt cold because you were naked and you pushed yourself up against Joyce
’
s pale, freckly body, your eyes tight shut to keep the colours out Joyce said, you
’
re wet, you’re greasy, keep away from me, don’t touch me. When you opened your
eyes the colour changes had calmed down but your small boxy room pulsed like a beating heart in its socket, contracting and expanding as if the walls were pliable rubber. Noise was a problem now, and you yearned for the perfect silence of the bus ride. All you could hear was the ear-batteringyammer of a television set from the floor below and boorish, loutish cheers and shouts. You looked at your watch but your eyes wouldn’t focus. Joyce turned into you now, her long breasts falling and squashing into your side and you felt, dully, absurdly, alarmingly, a distinct sexual thrill – although you knew enough to realize that sex under these circumstances could have life-altering side effects. Still, maybe –

Why are they shouting and screaming, Milo? Joyce said, and you could feel the wiry prickle of her pubic hair pressed against your thigh. Make them stop, Milo, make them stop, my darling.

Joyce had never used endearments before, never articulated affection, you thought, and you liked it, filled with love for her, and an intense desire that fuelled your rage against the television set and its ill-mannered booming voice. You were out of bed, snatching up your shirt and clawing it on.

THIS IS MAKING ME FUCKING ANGRY! you shouted, I’M IN A FURY, I’M FUCKING ENRAGED!

Make them stop, Milo, sweetheart, make them stop, Joyce said, sitting up in bed, tears streaming.

Furious, you opened the door of your boxy little room and strode off down the corridor, your shirt tails flying in the air behind you, heading furiously for the source of the din, the roaring noise, furiously determined to silence the television set for ever.

The Book of Transfiguration

He found it impossible to sleep with another person in the flat, the space shared, another source of unfamiliar noise. He would doze off from time to time but every time Torquil coughed or grunted or shifted on the sofa he was roused instantly adrenalin-charged, brain working, eyes wide, alarmed – until he remembered his guest’s presence in the sitting room.

Torquil slept on, dead to the world, as Lorimer, with deliberate clatter and door-bang, noisily prepared his frugal breakfast in the kitchen. He peered into the dark sitting room and saw Torquil’s wide, bare back pale in the gloom, heard the troubled snort and rasp of his breathing, and the unwelcome thought struck him that Torquil might be naked under the spare duvet – but surely no one slept naked on a sofa? Slept naked on someone else’s sofa in someone else’s house?…

He drank his tea and left a note explaining some of the operational idiosyncrasies of the flat and stepped out into the icy greyness of another Pimlico dawn. He carried with him a small grip containing an assortment of clothes and key props for the David Watts adjust, whenever that might arise. He had not found a parking space in Lupus Crescent the night before and consequently had something of a walk to his car, parked outside a Methodist church in Westmoreland Terrace. He could feel the cold biting at his cheeks and forehead and found himself longing vernally for some sunshine, some soft green days. The gusting east wind that had been blowing the night before had not dropped at all and he felt it tugging at the skirts of his coat and heard it thrashing the bare boughs of the sycamore and cherry trees at the corner of the street. Leaves were being whirled along the pavement and flicked into the sky, thick, dark, irregularly shaped leaves – maple, perhaps, or ginko – flung dancing and skittering into the rows of parked cars. The last leaves of last year, he thought elegiacally, suddenly ripped from their branches after a tenacious struggle all winter, to be sent burling along – hang about, he said to himself, there’s not a leaf left on a tree in the country that isn’t evergreen. What were all these things filling the air? He stooped and picked one up, a jagged rhomboid shape, thick like holly but which snapped in his fingers like shellac or brittle enamel…

Lorimer had no affection or nostalgia for the many cars he had owned in his loss adjusting career. A car, as far as he was concerned, was just an efficient device for getting from A to B: he was not interested in cars, in fact he cultivated a deliberate lack of curiosity in them so that Slobodan had no excuse for starting to talk to him about ‘motors’. However, it was oddly disturbing to see his Toyota with its top coat burnt off, scorched and blistered, with the occasional patch of racing green still adhering. Flakes of paint were still being snatched from it by the wind but the car was almost wholly paint-free, looking as if it had been specifically camouflaged for some flinty tundra – a grey terrain of rock and lichen with a rare patch of grass. A blowtorch, Lorimer thought, running his fingers over the now cool, roughened steel, of the camping gas variety that painters and decorators use, or chefs to brown the sugar on their
crem
é
s brul
é
es.
Quick work too, he assessed, a couple of men, or three, could do the car in ninety seconds. He imagined pale blue flames, a powerful smell, a spit and bubble as the paint ignited. What had Rintoul said? ‘It isn’t over yet.’ There was no choice now: Hogg and his oiling crew had to be called in. If Rintoul and Edmund wanted to play hardball, as Shane Ashgable would have said, they had no idea what lay in store for them.

The Toyota was fine in every other motoring regard and Lorimer drove easily – though a little self-consciously – through the hesitant beginnings of the rush-hour to Silvertown. He was aware, at traffic lights or waiting at junctions, of the curious looks his torched car received. He turned up the volume on his radio and some soothing Dvořák took him most of the way from Westminster to Canning Town while he kept his eyes fixed on the road.

The furniture van arrived with surprising promptness at half past nine and by ten o’clock his house was capable of supporting life. There was a bed and blankets and bed linen, a sofa, a divan for the spare room, a telephone, a portable television, a cherrywood table that could double as a desk and four dining-room chairs. He had bought some modern-looking cantilevered standard lamps so that he did not have to rely exclusively on the central lights in the ceiling and the kitchen was fitted out with a minimum of pots and pans, half a dozen wine glasses, a corkscrew, tin-opener and a young-married’s start-up set of cutlery and crockery. Now all he needed was a supply of lavatory paper and provisions and the place would be ready.

He stepped outside his front door and walked down the flagged concrete path that bisected the levelled square of mud which one day would be his front lawn and contemplated his new neighbourhood. He seemed to be quite alone in Albion Village this morning. A brindled cat flowed up and over a wooden fence, there was a car parked outside number 2 and some damp washing flapped and cracked on a whirligig behind number 7, but he was the only sign of bipedal life. Then there was the sudden blaring, ripping noise of a motorbike starting and one duly emerged, carrying a pillion passenger, and as it accelerated past him two bug-eyed heads turned to stare briefly at him. Hello there, Lorimer said to himself, half raising his hand, I’m your new neighbour. Then they were gone and the noise died away and he was left alone in Albion Village and the near-silence again.

That was fine by him: everything was new here, and he felt new also, a new species of man, as if he were in a newer city, different altogether, more anonymously European, somehow. He turned to the east towards this more proximate Europe and filled his lungs: that keen wind in his face had rushed and buffeted its way across France or Belgium or the Netherlands – he felt a little bowel-shift of excitement now he was established here in his new domain. He did not know a soul and, better still, not a soul knew him.