Resolution Way (22 page)

Goodness no, Tony said. He was short with a beaming, bright red face, a shiny bald pate and fleecy banks of soft white cumulus moored above his ears, avuncular, unthreatening. Compassion and empathy are what we need more of, what we build our relationships on, collegiate and empathetic co-creativity. What we want to check is that the empathy doesn’t become–

Sympathy?

Ah. Nick winced. Don’t do it Chloe. Don’t get sacked.

A form of interference. A block on full implementation of
USG
protocols and practices. Empowering through Empathy. That’s the phrase, he said with a chuckle, eyes twinkling. Making sure
empathy
, he tells them with an upswing in his voice and raised eyebrows, a beatific smile, doesn’t become, grumpy face, furrowed brow,
compassion
.

Don’t let the memory bugs bite, he says, and there’s a soft pause, an intake of breath and he can hear her smile as he hangs up. He discovers his pulse is racing, finds he has an erection, rock hard, his gut pulsing insistently. He gives it an exploratory squeeze, checks out his testicles, tucked up almost painfully tight.

Well. What’s this, appearing out of nowhere? That voice, the murmured, drowsy intimacy, the thought of her lips, the notion of her, maybe naked, maybe in pyjamas even, in bed. The heat that came flooding down the phone and through him. Last time they met, face to face up in London with Theresa hanging over them he was too anxious, too controlled to really feel anything, though Theresa had been accusing him of being in love with Paula throughout their relationship and immediately afterward berated him for his stupidity when it was obvious, inappropriate and pathetically unrequited love, at your age, like a lovesick puppy, like a schoolboy. He dismissed it all as nonsense, her paranoia, her pathology, repeating again and again that Paula had no interest in him, as she recriminated him for humiliating her with his obvious desire.

Still, an erection, what to do about this then? For a moment he contemplates masturbating. Paula Adonor. He murmurs her name several times, involuntarily,
paulapaulapaulapaula
. My god. Moments well up, freeze-frames, captured scraps and fragments from the treasure trove, the storehouse of erotic moments he finds, suddenly, he has squirreled away in his brain. He was always, he blushes to remember it, positioning himself, unconsciously to be in a position to see her, to be able to focus on some detail of her, have her always in his peripheral vision. Almost as if he didn’t dare to look at her directly, too bright, too dazzling, he would have lost his composure. And then sadness washes through him too, not to have faced certain things head on, to have dared to raise your eyes to the light but always to have stood off to one side, glimpsing and glancing, circling the periphery. He has, he realises, numerous snapshots of her legs, in skirts, trousers, shorts, the back of her neck, her breasts of course. My god, her breasts, her smile, her ears.

He stands up, feels a little feverish, dizzy, and goes into the bathroom to clean his teeth.

An awful, plangent thrill quivers through him, up from his toes, through the top of his head. Why shouldn’t he, now? She’s free, he is too. No, best not to, best not to get into that, it is best to keep Paula at arm’s length so to speak, not to let her into his innermost thoughts or perhaps better to say, not to let himself into his innermost thoughts. He panics slightly, complications he doesn’t need, love, desire. There will be practical complexities, repercussions, dramas, and yet what would any of those things mean compared to the sheer glory of lying beside her in that bed right now. Fear of rejection. Fear of acceptance.

Better to stay dead.

He spits foam and, so distractedly, vigorously has he been cleaning his teeth, blood, into the sink then swirls it all away. He moderates his breathing, feels that his erection is lowering its head in defeat, skulking home, thoroughly admonished. Too much stuff to deal with, no time for all that. No time for you. He shouldn’t interfere in her life; it’s best to just keep it like this, a friendly exchange of emails and messages. What is he doing inviting her down, what is he up to? Spur of the moment stuff, better suppressed. And he fears of course that Theresa will find out, make his life a misery.

Oh well, that’s enough, Nick. Work tomorrow. Save all this speculation for the weekends. You have your
CPD
in four days.

Into bed, some restlessness, then sleep, and on the bike the next morning he remembers suddenly, for no reason, a girl he had a crush on at school, Clare Philipson, and how one day, can this be right, he came into school and found she wasn’t there anymore, the family had moved to Broadstairs, not far, of course, but to him, as a child, a distant planet. Just like that. From seeing her every day, from sitting at the same table as her, mock fighting in the playground and having her pull his hair and copy his work to suddenly nothing.

Broadstairs. He used to ask his Mum and Dad to take him over there at weekends on the hope he’d run into her, though he had no idea what he would have said had it happened. Perhaps it was simply to see her, be reassured that she still existed. He became a little obsessed didn’t he, grew more infatuated with her in her absence than he ever would have done, probably, if she had been around. This mystery of her disappearance, the tantalising closeness but seeming impossibility of their meeting again, how hemmed in he was, how trapped by being a child. All he could do was stoically wait and hope for some miracle that never seemed to come.

Remember Nick that panto you went to in the Winter Gardens when you were a kid and how the names of the children got announced from the stage at the end, so they could come up and collect a goody-bag? Remember how her name came up, Clare Philipson, and how a bolt went through you knowing she was there in the same room and how you waited in a state of near ecstasy for her to stand up from her seat, take the stage? Her name was announced again, a pause, fidgeting, a hum of restless children, Widow Twanky casting about, Clare, Clare? Then on to the next name. Not there. And yet you knew didn’t you, Nick, that she was still around somewhere, that your lives were orbiting each other and never colliding, and you felt a deep and painful, bruising satisfaction. And then always, really, damn it Theresa is right, he has, if he thinks back through the relationships he’s had, always with women he didn’t really desire and the infatuations he developed for other women he silently worshipped or began discrete semi-relationships with that could never go beyond friendship, locked in as he always was to his other commitments and then marriage and kids and work. Like this whole Chloe thing now.

And yes, he wheels to a stop; suddenly he is both depressed and elated. Remember that Belgian girl he met in the summer of ’96 back in Margate, helping out at a school as a summer activities leader, how he couldn’t possibly have had a relationship with her, because that would have been unethical, unprofessional and how they began a long exchange of letters and then emails, how he used to dream repeatedly of travelling to meet her, how she was never there when he arrived, or that she had been in Margate and they had missed each other somehow? And how it continued on through his relationship with Theresa where it took on a re-doubled intensity, then finally faded as he developed new attachments, to work colleagues or waitresses or friends of friends.

She’s right, she’s right. He was never there, not really, here is a pattern, an ordering principle then, a long line, he sees it now, a chain of assumptions, stemming back from that moment on the beach when he realised that he didn’t exist, or that their existences were not commensurate.

He squeezes the brakes, pulls up to the pavement, dismounts, reaches up automatically to unbuckle his cycling helmet and find his fingers grappling at his chin; he comically pats his own cheeks and skull in a panic, discovers that he hasn’t put it on. Well. He is distracted today. He searches around again for it, looks back up the road as though it might have fallen off. That’s dangerous, he needs to be careful.

Then all day in work he has a single phrase going through his mind, the missing girl, the missing girl. Yes, he’s both rueful and mildly agitated, chomping distractedly on his £3 meal deal during lunch as Jerome reads out headlines from the FT in a voice of wearied contempt. Yes, always the missing girl, the absence, the obstruction.

He checks his private emails. Rob has got back in touch, already hinting that he might need to crash at Nick’s place for a few days, telling him that perhaps with this sudden upsurge of interest in Vernon they might be able to find out what really happened to him. Nick sends back a response.

If you get any definitive news on Vernon let me know.

Then he worries briefly that he’s been too curt, but really he has a more pressing concern.

Before he has had too much time to think about it he finds he is sending Paula Adonor a message that says

Paula, I have been in love with you for twenty years

and then thinks better of it, but on checking his email he finds he has a message from her anyway that says

Good to talk the other day, really looking forward to seeing you again next Friday. Paula.

He pauses, wonders what the best approach is then just decides to be honest. No point in hiding anymore.

Paula.

I have been thinking about you a lot recently, about the past and our circle of friends at the time. I always envied Vernon, because he was the kind of person he was and because he was with you. Maybe it’s only now, twenty years on, that I have the courage to tell you that. But I thought I should tell you. I don’t want there to be any hidden agenda when you come down here. I am sorry if that’s too direct, but I don’t want to waste any more years hovering in the doorway of my own life.

Nick.

He clicks send in a heated blur and in a moment of utter liberation he sits back in his chair, lips pressed tight, nodding. He turns to Jerome skulking by the filing cabinet, marking time. A moment he says, just that one moment will be enough for me. Jerome raises an eyebrow.

I am with you all the way, he says, diplomatically, nonplussed.

Just for that one moment, to occupy your own life. That’ll do me, that’s enough, one moment. Just to say those words that have sat, weighing on your heart, from back before you were even born. Just to say them finally. That’s enough.

My life, he says, is disappearing before my eyes.

CPD
day, what a day, so wrapped up in it all he forgot all about Graeme Ferris coming down to collect his records till his diary pinged a message at him, luckily before he’d left the house. Then when Graeme does show up Nick’s other alarm goes off, hearing that he’s a Tier Three Claimant with an SE10 postcode.

He doesn’t want to be the one to tell him, but who else is there? Squinting at the screen, checking back through his spreadsheets, yes there he is.

Graeme, he says. Brace yourself. He tries to explain that he should have been down here a week ago anyway, that he has had a Giveback summons, that he really should have checked his post, his emails. He’d love to try and explain it more fully, doesn’t want to be terse, exasperated, but he’s barely had time to get Graeme Ferris onto the bus up to the Walpole clutching his bag full of cassettes and white labels before he has to be outside The Clone’s office, sitting waiting expectantly like a school kid. That expression on Graeme Ferris’s face as he left the office, clutching his rucksack, with its few forgotten scraps of someone else’s past as though they were riches beyond the dreams of avarice, the taste of it, the sheer fatigue at having to repress his anger, his despair all day, everyday. Be sociable, bright, collegiate, deploy all those vital soft skills even as he sticks the knife in.

The 17 page
CPD
self-assessment document he was up until 2 last night completing is loosely furled in his hand as he sits waiting outside the office. He’s bumped into The Clone once or twice as he has strode in and out of the office, made small talk at the coffee machine, The Clone implying that the fact that he has worked there for eight years already is enough to make them suspicious about his character. My timeline is five years max on any project before I am on to the next one, The Clone said. Anything more than that looks bad on the old CV. And yet of course at the same time they talk about the importance of retaining staff and providing training, updating skills.

How’s Nick’s CV looking in the brave new business climate he strongly suspects he’s about to enter into?

The door sweeps open; The Clone is there in a cloud of odourless air and static.

Nick, he says, and gives a dead eyed smile, ushers him in.

Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?

They have got him, they had him from the start, for a while he thought he might hang on but that was never a part of their plan.

To be honest, I’m not looking past this weekend.

Lewis says she would take on the debt.

What can you do, where can you go without debt? She wants that University place, she wants to study Political Science, or Law, or both, fuck the cost. She wants revenge for what they did to her brother, for what they have always done, for what they are going to do now to what’s left of her family.

In the gym every day working out, plenty of protein shakes, no alcohol, no weed, in bed early every night, hitting the books at home. She keeps quiet, keeps her head down and boils with rage.

Revenge consumes her. In the gym as she strains for the last rep she thinks of her brother. When she wakes up aching and has to plough through
The Republic
or
The Prince
or
Leviathan
she thinks of her brother. When she has to go into
DEP
workshops and listen to all that bullshit, she thinks of her brother.

And she thinks of her father, of course.

She has a girlfriend now and they refuse to be cowed. Laura is three years older and the most beautiful, powerful woman she has ever seen. They caught each other’s eye at a demo in Peckham and immediately she knew. The same evening they began an affair of such intensity that she felt she could crush the world into dust; she got that much strength from it.