Blind Date (24 page)

She shook her head. Three multicoloured hairs emerged on the desk. She examined them minutely.

No. That was not true. There was the one side of his brain with perfect memory, incapable of forgetfulness, superb at acquiring knowledge and simulating response. The perfect mimic, who remained silent when in doubt. Then the other side, which could not gauge any feeling but anger and up until now, the dreadful fear of her tears and the sight of her peculiar hair.

Caroline knelt at the door of his flat, clutching the handle and staring at the lock. “Sweetheart, are you there? I need you, darling.” She went back upstairs, to the accusation of the screen in the little box room.

She
knew
how her son had gone to meet Angela Collier, because he had told her in that little boy voice reserved for her alone: she could hear it, now.

“Well, Caro Caro Mummy, I knew John Jones was going to meet someone, 'cos he was like a cat on hot bricks and I knew he'd enrolled with you. I get them to come to you, don't I, Mummy?”

She had
agreed: praised him. Because some of the clients came through him and she was proud of his ability to have male friends. Men were so absurd: they loved the strong, silent, type. She never asked him to recruit unless her enterprise needed new blood as an antidote to the disappointed old men and divorcees of a certain age who were, quite frankly, the bulk of a fragile business.

“And he left the letter on the desk, Mummy. I was angry with Owl: he didn't tell me, so I phoned him just as he was leaving, made him hang on and made him late. And I went instead of him, Mummy. But she didn't like me. And,” this was cunningly added, “she said she didn't like you, either.”

Ah, he was still her warrior. Even though he hated those little blonde role-models she had mentioned night after night. Caroline moaned aloud. Not out of pity, out of dread. Pulled herself together.

She looked at the screen, trying to piece together what he might have done. There were letters she had never written. She tried to think
when
had he done this? The day after she had seen the one called Patsy and the one called Hazel, yes, that was it: she had been out the whole day after. So, he had sent Robert Bircham's profile to Hazel, and he had sent his own to Patsy. Christ, those two women must have thought she was efficient; it usually took more than a week for the first, suggested contact, and there they were on the screen now, just as she was about to look them up, ready to enjoy herself and engineer some splendid mismatch for them both. Evidence on the screen said she had already done it, wishing them luck by return of post.

In the absence of interference, she would first have paired them with someone nice, then with some piece of shit. Then, sat back with acute enjoyment to imagine the miserable fireworks to follow.

Jean, Jenny
, Janice, Jane: John, James, Jarett,
Jack
, (oh yes, she remembered Jack: the only one she had liked on sight) the names melded and rhymed and tumbled round in her head like washing in a dryer. Michael's meeting with that girl Patsy might not occur at all, might not be tonight, but Caroline felt in her bones that it was. Patsy was tough on the outside, but she would need to do more than take care with a Michael Jacobi in the mood he was in.

At least Patsy was not blonde. Fine. Made her safe, didn't it? Caroline looked at her glass. There were messy fingerprints round the rim.

Patsy had friends: she and the girl Hazel
knew
one another: they said so. And if one was hurt, the other would come asking, for sure. Naa they wouldn't, women hated one another, but all the same she was teetering on the brink, all as a result of Michael thinking he no longer needed her to engineer his life, resenting the fact they were no longer allies and he had the nerve to suggest
she
took away his friends. “You wouldn't HAVE friends without me,” she had screamed.

You took away Jack. You liked him better than me.

S
he was calmer now. The full recognition of crisis always made her calm: it was the moments before made her ravenous with shock. Go round to Miss Patsy's upmarket address. If he was there, grab him by the scruff of the neck and haul him off … if he had already done harm, try to scuffle round the evidence … Oh God; it was too late for all that. Too late for God, for that matter.

She imagined the slamming of the door downstairs and the door to his half of the house, closing more gently. She raced to her own, stared down into darkness, shrieked, “Michael, Michael, Michael.” No response. The house vibrated with silence.

All he
had ever done was copy her, like a shadow on the wall copying a figure of substance, learning to hate what she hated, but Angela and Patsy, they were purposeless frolics of his own. She should never have befriended Jack, but Jack was a lovely son without a mother; someone who talked her own language. Surely she was allowed to love other people apart from her own flesh and blood? Find them easier to like? She looked at the rings on her hands. Then she took them off, carefully.

Oh, it would hurt. Denying Michael's existence. Denying that she even had a son who used his father's name.

J
oe sat in the half-light of a street lamp and read what he could. All these officials talked in code. There were more recriminations in this report than there was praise: the whole thing ended in a witch hunt, the word “disgraceful” repeated often. A dreadful reflection on supervision that a man of Jenkins' rank could be allowed to do what he did, so secretively; something must be done, etc, etc. Damnation on his head, and the only, remote blessing of the murder of Emma Davey was the fact that neither her family nor the disowning family of the suspect had any instincts towards litigation while the Press had given it second place. Whenever poor, bungling, unprepossessing Jack had made his brief appearances, he coincided with a serial-killing pedophile or a piece of Royal scandal and was relegated to page five, every time. The story of his life, one could say. Thus had Jenkins kept some kind of a job. And the world forgot the fates of Emma, Jack, Elisabeth.

Joe could not stay angry for long. It was that tolerance of his
which others deplored as lethargy. As soon as he saw the reason, he saw the excuse. He could see why they did as they did and why they were wrong. Only cruelty made him angry.

He shivered as he unlocked the door and went up the stairs. She had been a hoyden, a temptress: a vicious angel of revenge; she had driven a man to death, for nothing, not much of a man, but then who was? Elisabeth Kennedy was a nasty piece of work, all skin, two-inches thick, the soul inside shrunk and rattling round against those skinny ribs. Thus she was portrayed. Thus she must be.

The living room, straight ahead, was full of light and radio music. He stopped, imagining the chandelier in place. There was a letter exposed on the table, which he read, beginning with “Dear Mother,” noting how she could not write straight yet, and crossed out every other word. He stored away the fragments of history revealed there; more messages in code. Joe regarded himself as having a right to read any piece of paper which the owner had forgotten to hide. He remembered the boy, Matthew, he had talked to on the phone. The voice saying, “Shall I go and dig her up?”

There was a sound of running water and muffled swearing from the bathroom, next to the kitchen.

“This right arm gets tired, see?” Elisabeth had told him. “There aren't any muscles in it. It's nothing but a bunch of string, all of uneven lengths, beginning to knit. Trying to control this thing is like learning to work a puppet.”

He followed the sounds. The bathroom was rudimentary, namely a bath, a basin and a lavatory. No shower and little space for manouevre, clinical white fixtures. It was chilly, even now: it would be an ice-box in winter. The hot water came from the kind of wall heater of indeterminate age which a public health inspector would have condemned for delivering, in gulps, water which varied between boiling and freezing. Elisabeth was stripped to a bra and a towel round her middle. With the right hand, she was attempting to control the tap, while the left made a clumsy business of pouring water from a mug over the foam on her head.

Like open
letters, Joe regarded unlocked bathroom doors as far from private. The slippy lino floor was awash.

“Hello,” he said loudly.

She half-turned, revealing a mess of damp hair, dropping the mug. I am not only clumsy myself, Joe thought, I inspire it.

“Get out of here!”

But he could not, not quite, eyes rivetted to the puckered back, the scar an insult to the gentle curve of her spine, each wrinkle in it representing pain, pain and more pain. No-one deserved that. The skin had the pink rawness of the newborn. Joe backed out and found another mug.

“Stay still, will you?”

“Get out!”

“Oh, shut up.”

His hands were so large they were able to encompass her whole head. He filled the basin, testing the water, then pouring it, working out the foam, pouring, massaging gently, tussling the thick hair which looked like sticky honey. He repeated the process, deftly. He could sense that her arms, braced against the edge of the basin, trembled slightly: he knew there was a moment when she truly feared he was going to push her head into the water, and hold it under. She was always, always waiting for punishment.

“All done.”

The fear was still there in her face when she lifted her head and let him wrap the towel, turban style around her hair. Fear dissipating with the steam in the mirror, replaced with embarassment. She shrugged into the dressing gown hung on the back of the door, and pushed past him.

“Thanks.”

“No
problem.” He began clearing the bathroom, whistling. Soaking up the slop on the floor with the cleaning cloth, wringing it out.

B
y the time he came back, the cigarette was lit, the smoke curling up towards the tin hat of a light. Thank God I've no aversion to cigarettes, Joe thought: it is my lot to be a passive smoker. The letter was now in a stamped envelope.

“There's something I want you to do for me.”

“Anything you want.” He knew exactly what he wanted to do. Which was cradle her to his chest and rub her hair dry, rubbing away those scars at the same time until her skin was all the same, unblemished white of her face.

“I want you to take me to see a friend.”

“It's midnight and you've just washed your hair, and that's what you want?” he asked, mildly. The strings in her arms appeared to have become rigid.

“It's just a feeling. Been growing on me all evening. I just want to know she's all right. Home safe, that kind of thing.”

“What for?”

She hesitated. “I don't really know. Because I'm getting back my sensations. Normal sensations, that is. It seems to include premonitions and nonsense ideas and the desire to talk to people. Even write to them.”

“She might not welcome you at this hour.”

She looked at him and shrugged. “No, she might not. Anyway, I meant ‘see' as in drive by and see. Not necessarily meet. If her lights are on and her windows open, I'll know she's OK.”

He was
not a man to question eccentric requests. He nodded.

“I'll get my van. Where does she live?”

“Not far. Thanks.”

“Post that letter on the way, I would,” he suggested. “You know how it is.”

They met at the foot of the belfry and he felt this ridiculous concern because her hair was still wet as he ushered her into the old van with the sticking door and the rust almost obscuring the white paint. She directed, he drove; companionably silent and yet with a sense of tension. Perhaps she just wanted to get out of the house; more like, she just wanted
him
out of the house.

“If you just wanted me out of the house,” he ventured, “you could have sent me on my own. Told me drive round, steal that chandelier, check on your friend on the way back.”

“I want that chandelier, some day. And this is where she lives. Stop here … No, on the right.”

The handbrake made a sound like a ratchet chain, Yeeeeerp. Elisabeth was looking out of the open window on her side. She turned her whole body to compensate for the twist in the neck, then opened the door and stood in the street which was stuffed with cars but empty of people, and examined whatever it was she wanted to see, standing with her arms crossed, checking, nodding. Joe craned to see what she saw: the top floor windows, all lit, one open, in the only apartment with any sign of life.

This was all irritating. If she was worried about her friend, why didn't she ring the bell and say she was passing, at least? Even if the friend said bugger off, come back next week, I've got better things to do? Joe had plenty of friends like that. The sort who said, “I'm in pain, look after me,” until he arrived to find some female in residence and himself an embarrassment. Old mates always talked in code.

Then he
noticed a man, standing in the basement area to the right of his despicable van. The area was lit with a bright light and the man stood, half-baked in it, half-hidden by the basement steps, so that the sharpness of the contrast and the light made him look like a bisected, cardboard cut-out, one half black, the other half brightly pale. Joe looked back towards Elisabeth, glanced again to the man.

The shadow disappeared. Into the shadow or into the light, Joe never knew. His van shook as Elisabeth got back inside. He saw a flash of blue moving busily down the road, a measured walk breaking into a run, illuminated and darkened in turn by the lights he passed, the ghost of a perfect figure. Elisabeth was breathing deeply.

“I think it's all right,” she was saying. “Patsy's in. She has to be all right. Why am I worried?”

They stared at one another in mutual incomprehension, the gaze faltering. Her hair was still half wet, hanging in corkscrew curls over her shoulders. She was a shrunken little wretch, and she was wrong. It was not all right whatever all right was. Cigarette lit, she breathed on it, as if it was a source of inspiration.