Going Loco (18 page)

She stood stock-still, staring at the speaker on her desk. She heard a chair knocked over. Bits of crockery fell off the table and smashed. And throughout there were gasps and squeals. There was violence in the kitchen!

‘Linda!’ she yelled into the intercom. ‘Mother! Stop it!’

But the scuffle continued, with the sound effects of oven doors and broken plates until a loud ‘Aieee!’ from Mother announced that something very serious had happened.

‘My face!’ Mother yelled. ‘Linda, you bitch! My face!’

Belinda realized it was time to leave the sidelines. Sometimes it’s all right for an author to abandon her desk – for example, when her loyal cleaning lady is downstairs mutilating her mother. So she loped to the landing, puffed and clung to the banister when she saw stars, then struggled downstairs, reaching the kitchen just in time to see Linda wield a side of frozen salmon round her head, like a claymore.

‘Linda?’ Belinda said. ‘Put down the fish.’

Linda’s arms went limp. It had gone very quiet suddenly. Between them on the kitchen floor Mother already lay unmoving, her face upturned and strangely beautiful. She was dead.

Why did she look so strangely beautiful? As Belinda later learnt, a sudden exposure to the heat of the boiled kettle during the scuffle had made Mother’s features drop perfectly into place for the first time since the lift-job. In death, therefore, she looked natural and not a bit surprised, and the irony was profound. Nobody would ever say, ‘Something up?’ to Mother again. In the turmoil she had slipped on a piece of raw squid, banged her head on the corner of the kitchen table and died instantly. By the time Belinda arrived at the kitchen door, the celestial Fenwick’s had already claimed her mother, its cash tills ringing in praise.

Linda’s eyes were round holes in her face. Belinda thought afterwards it was the first and last time she ever saw Linda frightened.

‘Put the fish down, Linda.’

Linda looked at the salmon as if she had no idea where it came from. ‘I didn’t—’

‘I know.’

‘It was her that was angry. It wasn’t me. I told her to go, that’s all.’

‘I heard.’

‘She wasn’t good enough to be your mother, Belinda. She said I was twice the woman you are! What sort of mother says that?’ Linda’s dismay choked her. Tears rolled down her face. ‘Look,’ she still managed to say, ‘I did this for you, Belinda, and if you’re not happy about it, I’ll go.’

Belinda felt her head swim. She had to be happy about this? It was a bit of a stretch from being happy about a daily diet of eels and haddock to being happy about seeing your mother lifeless on the kitchen floor. Linda really didn’t know where to draw the line, did she? The problem with this situation was that neither of them had the faintest idea where to draw the line.

‘Belinda? Don’t say you’re not happy about this. Please. I don’t want to go. How could I live with myself?’

‘Oh God,’ said Belinda. ‘Come here.’

And as she hugged her insanely loyal cleaning lady, who sobbed in her arms, she noticed with a kind of glum horror that Linda was still cradling a slab of frozen fish.

Leon’s fifteen years as a sports writer sometimes meant that people made the wrong assumption about him. They considered him a
career
sports writer, whose life was a perpetual memorizing of results and whose death would be a final whistle of three long blasts. This wasn’t how he saw his own life, however – not at all. True, he liked his job and was good at it. True, he could remember without effort the salient events of Malmö in 1992 or Headingley in 1981. But as far as Leon was concerned, such things did not define him. They weren’t him. The last thing he wanted was to end up like his journalist father (quite a famous chap in certain circles), who became so preoccupied by his own status within the world of sport that by the end of his sad, peculiar life he was arguably deranged.

‘Who was that on the phone? Was it Bobby Moore?’ Dad would call from the shed, while Mother burst into tears, and the boys pretended not to hear. ‘Did I tell you Seve Ballesteros gave me this sombrero? I taught Jack Charlton how to fish.’

The effect on his sons had been interesting, however. While his softer, younger son Leon had decided to try sports writing himself, if only to prove that madness need not be the profession’s inevitable conclusion, the older son Noel became a psychotherapist, to prove that delusional madness is everywhere,
not just in people who swan about at the World Cup without paying. Dad had died without being impressed by the achievements of either child, of course. His last words, dutifully relayed by the mystified night cleaner in the terminal ward, left no message to his family. They were instead ‘Tell Pele I’ll get back to him’, from which the family were obliged to derive comfort of a kind. At least they could tell themselves that Dad had been Dad, right to the end.

As a result of their divergent paths in life, Leon rarely saw his brother these days – they had so little in common. But each brother was perfectly aware of the other’s existence. When Maggie first told Noel he looked exactly like a man called Leon, he could (and should) have cleared up the mystery at once. But he didn’t. He chose instead to be mystified and sceptical, because he enjoyed exploiting Maggie’s confusion, and delighted in insisting that Leon did not exist. This was why the sight of her stroking that bloody fluffy racing car made him irrationally angry. It would be true to say that he didn’t like Maggie at all, in fact. She just represented something about his annoying younger brother, whom he had discovered (as all older siblings discover sooner or later) he could not literally murder without the risk of incurring awkward questions.

So trashing Leon’s girlfriend was a more subtle means of exercising his jealousy, and had the benefit of not being criminal. One should try to feel sorry for Noel, really. It can’t be easy when your younger brother is always in Nevada watching sell-out fights with apocalyptic overtones (‘Judgement Night III’ ‘Resurrection Night IX’ ‘Seven Bowls of Wrath Night’) while you spend most afternoons passing tissues to snivelling inadequates in a basement off Tooting Broadway.

‘I’ve got to go out somewhere,’ yelled Leon above the basketball din, putting his coat on.

‘You can’t,’ yelled Tanner. ‘You’ve got to cover the match.’

Half-way through the evening was indeed a bad time for
Leon to desert his post, but there was no alternative. ‘File it for me,’ he told Tanner.

Tanner pulled a bad-smell expression. ‘Sorry, don’t write about
sport,’
he said.

‘It’s easy,’ Leon assured him, ignoring the put-down. ‘They only want four hundred words, and I’ve done most of it already. Call it
LEON
when you file and they’ll never guess. Mention lots of statistics and get the names right. How many words can you do in an hour?’

Tanner made a wild guess. ‘Two or three thousand?’

‘Really?’ Leon raised an eyebrow. He was impressed.

‘I mean, two or three hundred.’

‘Oh. Right.’

‘I mean, twenty or thirty.’

‘Well, whatever,’ said Leon. ‘Have you used one of these?’ He indicated his laptop.

‘Of course,’ scoffed Tanner. ‘My dad’s company pioneered the software.’

‘Then have fun. I’ll see you back at the hotel.’

Outside the sports hall, Leon consulted his Malmö map, straining to hold it against the icy wind. By his reckoning, the University Hospital was an easy walk from the Baltiska Hallen. He gathered his coat against the biting gale and stomped north, wishing he knew more about genetics or, indeed, more about insanity. Blagging his way into unlikely places he was good at. You just carried a coffee in a foam cup, consulted your watch in an exaggerated manner, and shouldered through swing doors as if you knew exactly what to expect on the other side. But what do you do when confronting an insane Swedish woman who holds the key to a genetics mystery? Unless she had the particular delusion that she was the first person Gordon Banks phoned up after the 1966 World Cup final, Leon’s first-hand experience would be sorely inadequate.

‘Bugger,’ he said, leaning into the wind and adjusting his
earflaps. Was this really such a good idea? His toes were numb already. Was it possible for eyeballs to freeze this far south of the Arctic Circle? Inside the hall it was cosy and warm and bright. Out here it was like being X-rayed by weather.

But he thought of Maggie and a surge of romantic sappiness warmed his toes and carried him onward. How helpless the poor girl was! In love with a man who had taken cynical advantage of a terrible tragedy in this poor Ingrid’s life. Stefan must be exposed; there was no doubt about it. As he plunged into the neighbouring area known (unpronounceably) as the Möllevången, he tried finally to gather his thoughts. ‘Nice statue,’ he commented absently, as the appalling boulder-and-bums confection in the Möllevångstorget came into view. And with that excellent critical judgement behind him, Leon forged on against the wind.

‘I must see Ingrid Johansson,’ demanded Stefan, in rather good Swedish, at the hospital reception desk on the ground floor. ‘I have come all the way from England, and I won’t take no for an answer.’

The dumpy duty nurse looked at him as if he were speaking Urdu. The order of some of the consonants made sense, but the vowels had been picked at random by a chimpanzee. It was a bit like reading someone else’s shorthand. ‘I mist sew Oongrud Johinssin,’ was what it sounded like. ‘Oy hyve cim oll the whoa fram Inglound.’

‘Do you speak English?’ asked the nurse, at last.

‘Of course,’ said Stefan.

‘Thank God,’ she said. ‘What is your name, please?’

‘Stefan Johansson.’

‘Stefan Johansson?’ She wrote the name down and underlined it.

Stefan had second thoughts.

‘I mean George Colwan. C-O-L-W-A-N.’

She narrowed her eyes.

‘George Colwan?’

‘Yes.’ Her pen was poised for crossing out. ‘Not Stefan Johansson?’

‘That’s right. That’s somebody else. He’s dead.’

‘He’s dead?’

This nurse’s English was irritatingly good, Stefan decided. She could do all sorts of intonations just by repeating everything he said.

‘Will you wait, please?’ she said, and dialled an internal number. ‘Hej!’ she said into the phone, in the brisk salute he remembered from his twenty years in Sweden, and then began to speak too quickly for him to understand.

He had never quite got used to ‘Hej!’, he recalled. When he did business in Sweden, he preferred to say, ‘Hello, how are you, sit down.’ But the Swedes said, ‘Hej!’ and that was it. It was funny how it all came back. Arriving by boat from Copenhagen this evening, he’d gone straight to a shop to buy a map and had found himself in an automatic ‘Hej! Hej!’ exchange with the youthful shopkeeper. It was only when the man carried on in Swedish, commenting lengthily on his choice of map, that Stefan admitted his Swedish wasn’t so good any more. ‘No problem,’ confessed the youth in English. ‘It was yust bullshit.’

‘Do you know Ingrid? Is she – all right?’ Stefan asked the nurse, when she had finished with the phone. It was weird that, here in Sweden, he didn’t need to pretend to be Swedish any more.

‘Yes, Ingrid is well. She is not my patient, of course, because she is my friend. I have known Ingrid thirty years. She worked here, you know, during the years of her marriage.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘When she was suspended on suspicion of stealing cotton swabs and Petri dishes and scalpels and bandages, I spoke up for her. We were like sisters. Ingrid and Birgit! I knew her husband Stefan very, very well.’

Stefan tried not to look too closely, but there was something rather odd about this Birgit. For one thing, she was cubic in shape, and seemed to shrink in height the more he looked at her. For another, her top lip kept twitching. ‘Really?’

‘Ingrid is as sane as you or I. Yust upset by Stefan’s murder, as who would not?’

‘I see. Murder? I see.’

‘All those stories about Stefan’s experiments were made up.’

‘Good. Yes.’

‘So,’ she said, with an emphatic exhalation. ‘Will you wait in here, please?’

Stefan was puzzled, but followed the nurse along a corridor. She opened the door to a small room, ushered him inside, then locked it.

‘Do you know how unhappy Ingrid is?’ she said, through a glass panel in the door. ‘She is
so
unhappy. And you know who she blames? You! Lucky George! You set fire to her husband! You threw her on floor! You get blood on her Carl Larsson reproduction! Your luck yust ran out, Lucky George!’

‘Hey!’ he yelled, through the glass panel in the door. But the only person who heard him just said, ‘Hej!’ back again.

At which point, Stefan saw the inexplicable sight of Leon – from Jago’s dinner party – barge past Birgit and through a swing-door, carrying a cup of coffee.

Back at the sports hall, Tanner was having a few difficulties writing his 400 words. Because, just when he’d settled on a
rather good line about Sidewinders being sidelined, just when his account of the match had reached the important 350-word mark, with ten minutes to deadline, Jericho Jones stopped the match and announced his retirement from world sport. His son had been expelled from school in Cincinnati on suspicion of dope dealing, and it was time to stop bouncing a ball. He apologized to the miffed Meerkats. He apologized to his millions of fans. He recalled the words of his first coach, ‘Strut’ Schwarz, to the effect that ‘No man is in Ireland.’ And then he led his astounded team back to the dressing room.

As all around him reporters grabbed phones and started shouting, Tanner wondered what his precise responsibility was here. ‘They won’t need me to write about this, will they?’ he asked a chap from the
Guardian,
who had been helpful up till now.

‘Get me the news desk,’ snapped the chap.

Tanner looked at the 350 words he had already accumulated, and felt a bit sick. Rewriting the whole thing in ten minutes was out of the question. Whereas if he continued at the current rate, and changed nothing, he could just make it. Much as he enjoyed sport, much as he admired Jericho Jones for his splendid eloquence, he was horrified by the reaction of his colleagues. Was this really so important? Surely only time would tell? ‘News will pick it up,’ he told himself. ‘If it’s important, News will do it.’