скачать книгу бесплатно
‘It was just a bit of a shock …’ the woman explains, calmer now.
‘Of course.’ Gene grimaces. ‘I really should have knocked. I just –’
‘We have the same torch,’ she interrupts him, pointing.
‘Yes.’ Gene nods.
‘Mine’s a little unreliable,’ the woman confides, flipping it on and then off again.
‘There’s this tiny spring inside the top.’ Gene points to the top of her torch, where the spring is situated. ‘I actually ended up replacing the one in mine.’
The woman studies the torch for a moment and then peers up at him, speculatively. ‘I suppose I should thank you for getting rid of the rat …’ She indicates, somewhat querulously, towards the bins. ‘I ran a bath a couple of hours ago, popped downstairs to fetch the watering can …’ She pauses (as if some kind of explanation might be in order, but then fails to provide one). ‘And when I came back …’
She shudders.
Gene struggles to expel a sudden vision in his mind of her reclining, soapily, in the tub. He clears his throat. ‘It was nothing,’ he mutters, then stares at the corner of her lip, fixedly, where her lipstick is smudged.
‘Well thanks for that, anyway,’ she says, her mouth tightening, self-consciously. He quickly adjusts his gaze and notices a light glow of perspiration on her forehead, then a subtle glint of moisture on her upper lip, a touch of shine on her chin, a further, gentle glimmer on her breastbone …
He quickly averts his gaze again.
‘I’m actually …’ She glances over her shoulder, frowning. ‘I’m actually in a bit of a fix’ – she leans forward and gently tips his clipboard towards her so that she can read the name on his identification badge – ‘Eugene,’ she clumsily finishes off.
Gene can’t help noticing her bare arms as she leans towards him. Her arms are very smooth. Utterly hairless. Slightly freckled. Her skin has a strange kind of … of texture to it and exudes – his nose twitches – a slight aroma of incense (Cedarwood? Sandalwood? Frankincense? Musk?).
Under her semi-transparent plastic apron, she’s wearing a strangely old-fashioned, tight, cap-sleeved khaki shirt (in the military style), unfastened to the breastbone with a jaunty, cotton turquoise bra (frilled in shocking red nylon) peeking out from between the buttons.
Gene blinks and looks lower. On her bottom half he can make out a pair of dark, wide-cut denims, rolled up to the knee. On her feet, some round-toed, turquoise shoes with neat ankle straps and high, straight heels.
‘… I mean I know it’s a little cheeky of me,’ she’s saying, ‘but it’s only eight doors down. The other side of the road – number nineteen …’
‘Pardon?’
Gene tries to re-focus.
‘My niece. I have to go and fetch her. It’s just …’ – she indicates over her shoulder – ‘I really should get back to my client. She wasn’t very happy about …’
She winces.
Gene stares at her for a moment, confused.
‘And if you’re headed in that direction anyway …’
He finally realizes what she’s getting at. ‘Oh. Wow. You mean you want me to go and …?’
‘Would you mind?’ She bites down on her lower lip.
‘Uh, no. No. Of course not. It’s fine,’ Gene insists. He glances up the road, appalled.
‘I’d go myself’ – she indicates over her shoulder again – ‘it’s just that I really should …’
‘Of course.’
Gene nods, emphatically. They stare at each other, wordlessly, in a strange kind of agony, like two distant acquaintances who’ve just met up, arbitrarily, in the waiting room of a VD clinic.
‘So what’s her name?’ Gene finally enquires.
‘Her name? Uh …’ She puts a tentative hand to her headscarf. ‘You know I honestly can’t remember …’ She frowns. ‘Isn’t that terrible? Something unpronounceable, like … like Hokakushi …’ Her frown deepens. ‘Or Hokusha. It’s Japanese.’
‘Your niece is Japanese?’ Gene deadpans.
‘My niece?’ The woman looks mystified, then mortified. ‘Oh God! Sorry …’ She shakes her head. ‘I’ve been up all night. I’m not firing on all cylinders, obviously. My niece … My niece. My niece is called Nessie. Nessa. And the woman who’s minding her is called Sasha …’ She pauses, sheepishly. ‘And I’m Valentine.’
She holds out a gloved hand. Gene reaches out his own, in automatic response, but before their fingers can touch, she quickly withdraws hers, apologizing, and starts trying to remove the plastic glove, muttering something about ‘needing to maintain hygiene’.
‘Don’t worry.’ Gene smiles, taking a small step back. ‘I should probably …’
‘Yes …’ Valentine’s eyes are now lingering on his wedding ring. ‘Well I suppose I’d better …’ She thumbs over her shoulder. ‘My poor client …’
‘Absolutely.’ Gene takes another step. He inspects his watch. She remains where she is, though, still gazing at him. He isn’t sure why, exactly.
‘You have the original glass,’ he mumbles, pointing, somewhat uneasily.
‘Pardon?’
‘The original glass panels, in the door …’ He can gradually feel his colour rising. ‘You’re one of the only houses left on the street.’
‘Oh. Yeah. Yeah. The glass …’ Valentine peers across at it, fondly. ‘My dad always loved it. He was completely obsessed by this period of design. I guess you could say it was his …’
Gene suddenly turns – while she’s still talking – and hurries down the short path, then out of the garden (the gate swings gently behind him). He knows it’s a little strange. He knows it’s a little rude. And even as he’s walking – just as soon as he starts walking – he’s reproaching himself for it (‘What is this? What are you playing at? Are you crazy?!’).
Valentine watches him go, surprised. He senses her blue eyes upon him, and feels – possibly for the first time in his adult life – an excruciating awareness of all his physical shortcomings. He automatically lifts his chin and pushes back his shoulders. He tightens his stomach. But even as he does so he’s haranguing himself for it, lambasting himself for it (‘You bloody fool. This is ridiculous. This is laughable’). His body feels leaden and yet light, all at once. His chest feels too small to contain his breath. He longs – above everything – to escape, to bolt, to flee. It’s as much as he can do not to break into a sprint.
‘They’re Gene’s,’ a sullen voice announces. ‘All of them.’
‘Huh?’
Ransom glances up, startled. He’s just been idly rifling through a deep drawer in a heavy, dark (and profoundly unfashionable) Victorian sideboard in a somewhat cramped and boxy sitting room. In one hand he holds a bowl of cereal (mini shredded-wheat, drenched in milk, which he’s eating with a fork), in the other he holds a medal. The person sullenly addressing him is a boy – a short, thick-set teenager with a dense mop of black hair (carefully arranged to hang, with a fastidious lopsidedness, over one eye) and a copy of Bruce Lee’s Artist of Life propped under his elbow.
‘I don’t know why he keeps them there,’ the boy continues, stolidly. ‘He’s got dozens of the stupid things. Mum’s always nagging at him to display them properly.’
‘I was looking for a spoon.’ Ransom quickly drops the medal back into the drawer, adjusts the towel he’s wearing (a pink towel) and turns to engage with the boy directly.
‘You finished the milk,’ the boy mutters, darting Ransom’s cereal bowl a petulant look before silently retreating.
Ransom glances down at his bowl, shrugs, devours another forkful, saunters over to a nearby bookshelf and casually scans the books on display there. After a brief inspection he soon deduces that the books are divided – by and large – into two main categories: the military and the spiritual. Ransom instinctively shrinks from the religious side and focuses his attention on the military end instead. Here, his eyes run over Clausewitz’s On War, Conrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, Richard Holmes’s Acts of War, then rest – for a brief interlude – on Wendy Holden’s Shell Shock. He carefully places down his bowl and pulls it out, opening it, randomly: ‘Too many people are jumping on the trauma bandwagon,’ he reads, ‘in a society where to be a victim confers on people a state of innocence.’
He scowls, tips the book over and inspects the cover, then slaps it shut and shoves it, carelessly, back into the shelves again. Next he removes the Clausewitz. ‘The element of chance, only, is wanting to make of war a game,’ he reads, ‘there is no human affair which stands so constantly and so generally in close connection with chance as war …’ He scratches his head, intrigued. ‘War is a game both objectively and subjectively …’ he continues, and then, ‘Every activity in war necessarily relates to the combat, either directly or indirectly. The soldier is levied, clothed, armed, exercised, he sleeps, eats, drinks and marches all merely to fight at the right time and place.’
Ransom ponders this for a moment and then places the book under his arm, grabs Richard Holmes’s Acts of War, and quickly flips through it, pausing for a moment, beguiled, at a section that discusses how man’s aggressive drive is inherited from his anthropoid ancestors. This genetic legacy apparently inclines him to fight members of his own species. Most other creatures, he discovers, avoid lethal combat with their own kind by employing a series of simple mechanisms like a pecking order, the ritualization of combat etc. Piranhas generally prefer to attack other piranhas with their tails rather than their teeth. Rattlesnakes air their grievances not by biting other rattlers but through bouts of wrestling …
‘Brilliant!’
Ransom chuckles to himself as he carefully turns over the corner of the page (for future reference), closes the book and shoves it under his elbow along with the Clausewitz.
His eye now settles on a tiny copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War, which has been secreted, sideways, on top of a row. He pulls it out with a small, wry smile of recognition. It’s a miniature hardback – under three inches in width – wrapped, like an expensive chocolate, in shiny black, red and silver foil-effect paper. He enjoys the sumptuous feel of it in his hand. He opens it up.
‘Simulated chaos is given birth from control,’ he reads. ‘The illusion of fear is given birth from courage; feigned weakness is given birth from strength.’
He muses on this for a moment, his attention briefly distracted by the sound of a phone ringing in a far corner of the house. He can tell from the distinctive ringtone (Queen’s ‘We Are The Champions’) that it is his phone. He scowls. The ringing stops. His eye returns to the Sun Tzu and he slowly re-reads the previous sentence: ‘Simulated chaos is given birth from control; the illusion of fear is given birth from courage; feigned weakness is given birth from strength.’
Ransom considers this for a while, then he smiles, almost sentimentally, closes the book, carefully slots it under his elbow (alongside the other two) and is about to grab his cereal and move away when his eye alights on a distinctive-looking beige and black hardback with an old-fashioned drawing of an open palm on its spine. He pauses. His mind turns – very briefly – to the previous evening and to Jen.
Ah yes, Jen. Jen with her pale arms, her chapped upper lip and her infinite lashes. Jen with her ponytails and her pierced – and piercing – tongue. Jen. He winces. He draws in closer. Written above the illustrated hand he reads: Cheiro’s Palmistry for All; 2/6 NET.
‘Cheiro?’ He pronounces the name out loud, as if trying it on for size.
‘Cheiro.’
He pauses. Then, ‘Goll-uff,’ he murmurs, quizzically. ‘Gol-ol-ol-ol …’
He shakes his head. ‘Cheiro! Cheiro! Cheiro!’
He tweets the name like a canary, then snorts, pulls the book out and opens it up, randomly, to ‘an autographed impression of Lord Kitchener’s hand given to “Cheiro”’ –
‘Eh?’
– ‘on the 21st of July, 1894 (hitherto unpublished).’
As he gazes down at the photograph, two important things happen. The first is that the boy – the stroppy, dark-haired teenager – enters the room, holding out a dripping mobile.
‘I just found this in the toilet bowl,’ he’s saying. ‘Is it yours by any chance?’
The second is that a loose wad of papers falls down from within the pages of the palmistry book – an old letter, a dried flower, a couple of photos, the order of service for a funeral …
Ransom curses, loudly, as the order of service and the photo slide down on to the floor, but the dried flower and the letter plop into his cereal bowl. He instinctively snatches for the letter – keen to preserve it – but, in his panic, he clumsily knocks his knuckle into the fork and tips up the bowl, sending it (and all its contents) cascading down on to the carpet.
Ransom stares at the milky, wheaten mess, agog.
‘Wow!’ The boy is impressed (and Ransom can instantly deduce that it takes a fair amount to impress this kid): ‘You really fucked up,’ he announces, delighted (like all teenagers, immeasurably enlivened by the prospect of a catastrophe), ‘that stuff belonged to Mallory’s dead mum.’
Ransom’s already on his knees, yelping plaintively, plucking photos and dried flowers from the goo.
‘Kitchen roll,’ the boy announces, sagely, and then promptly abandons him.
‘I don’t understand,’ the woman mutters, peering over Gene’s shoulder. ‘You’ve come to collect Nessa, but now that you’re here you’ve decided to …’
‘Read the meter. Yeah.’ Gene tries to sound nonchalant as he straightens up, switches off his torch and scribbles the relevant digits on to his clipboard. ‘It’ll save me from bothering you twice, that’s all.’
‘I see.’
The woman gives this some thought, and then, ‘But you are actually friends with Valentine?’ she demands (she is short and heavy-hipped, with long, wavy, black hair, down to her waist, and a piercing, brown gaze). ‘I mean you do actually know each other?’
‘Uh …’ Gene frowns. He senses trouble. ‘Uh … Yes. Yes. Of course I know Valentine,’ he insists. ‘Of course I do.’
‘Of course you do.’ The woman laughs, nervously, then smiles up at him, somewhat ruefully. ‘God – I’m getting so cynical in my old age! I mean it’s hardly as if you just turned up at her house to read her meter and then the next thing you know she’s railroading you into …’
Gene clears his throat and glances off, sideways.
The woman pauses, alarmed. ‘I mean she wouldn’t …?’
‘Good gracious, no!’ Gene exclaims. ‘That would be …’ He struggles to find the right word, but can’t; ‘pathetic,’ he eventually manages.
Pathetic?
‘Yes.’ The woman’s keen, dark eyes search his face. ‘Sorry,’ she eventually apologizes (plainly mollified by whatever it is that she finds there), ‘you must think I’m completely paranoid.’ She shakes her head, exasperated, then turns and guides him down the corridor. ‘It’s just that I’ve known Vee since she was a teenager’ – she glances over her shoulder, raising a single, deeply expressive, black brow – ‘and she’s always had this incredible gift – this … this knack – for making people feel …’
She suddenly checks herself. ‘Have you been friends with Vee for long, then?’
‘Long?’ Gene parrots, like the word is somehow incomprehensible to him.
‘Yeah. Long. Long …’ She rolls her eyes, sardonically. ‘As in how’d the two of you first become acquainted?’
‘Uh …’ Gene tries to think on his feet. ‘I work in a bar. At the Thistle. In town.’
‘Okay …’
The woman nods, as if expecting something more.
‘It’s not full-time,’ he elects, ‘I just fill in when they’re short-staffed, sometimes.’
‘Right.’ The woman sniffs, nonplussed. She is silent for a moment and then, ‘Well it really has been incredibly tough on her,’ she confides (determined – in spite of Gene’s best efforts – to broaden the level of their interaction). ‘I mean what happened to her mother …’ She shudders. ‘And to lose her dad like that. Then all the problems with her brother. Then her sister-in-law being carted off into …’
She points her finger to her temple and rotates it.
‘Awful,’ Gene confirms, in studied tones.
‘Devastating,’ the woman persists. ‘And I do think she’s coped extremely well …’ she concedes (perhaps a little grudgingly), ‘I mean under the circumstances. Although in some respects she barely copes at all – just doesn’t have the emotional …’ She rotates her hands, struggling to find the correct adjective. ‘Chutzpah!’ she eventually finishes off.
They arrive at the kitchen door. She pushes it open and waves him through.
‘I blame the parents, obviously …’
She grimaces, self-deprecatingly, after delivering this cliché. ‘D’you have kids of your own?’
‘A couple.’ Gene nods. ‘A boy and a girl …’ He pauses. ‘Both adopted,’ he qualifies.
‘I mean I love Vee,’ she insists (barely acknowledging his answer). ‘Who doesn’t love Vee? She’s a wonderful girl. Very sweet. Very creative. Very genuine. Just a bit of a lame duck, really …’ She pauses, thoughtfully. ‘Reggie’s at the root of it all.’ She sighs. ‘Did you ever have the honour of meeting Vee’s dad?’
