Dispossession (19 page)

“No, I will.”

“You’ll sodding well do what you’re told, for once. This is
king-size, so are you. The other one’s little, so am I. It’s just physics, or
geography, or whatever. I don’t fit in here, without you.”

She’d been using it, I thought, none the less; but I was
tired of arguing, happy to lose. At my shrug of submission, she beamed broadly,
took my elbow, steered me towards the door. “Come on, then. Towels and
toothbrush, yes? And I’ll show you where your clothes are, too. I mean, for God’s
sake, where did you get this stuff? What is it, the jumble-sale leftovers that
Oxfam wouldn’t take? You look better underneath, mind. Hundred per cent better
than last time. Luke must be good for you. But God, I was scared when you ran
away. Don’t you do that, right? Don’t you
dare
do that again. Whatever happens, we can sort it out.”

We were nearly at the bathroom door by now, and it was
incredibly hard to stop walking, to resist the constant flow of her words and
her intent.

“Hang on,” I said. “I should phone the hotel, at least, if I’m
not going to sleep there.”

“Why?” she demanded.

I shrugged. “Maybe they won’t charge me full rate, if I
cancel now. Maybe they like to know how many guests they’ve got in the
building, in case there’s a fire. Or maybe it’s just a matter of courtesy, but
I won’t feel comfortable, else.”

She snorted. “Didn’t phone me when you bunked off, did you?
Didn’t show me any courtesy. But go on, if you want to. If you must.”

And she waited, and so did I, because I still felt like a stranger
here, I couldn’t go searching while she watched; and it took her a second
before she grunted in frustrated understanding and said, “Just round the corner
there, on the floor. By the hi-fi.”

“Thanks.”

It was a cordless phone, silently recharging. I picked it
up, found the hotel’s number on the key-card they’d given me at reception, and
dialled.

A woman answered after a couple of rings. I said, “Oh,
hullo. My name’s Jonathan Marks, I checked in with you this evening...”

“Oh yes, Mr Marks. Thank you for calling. I’ll just put you
straight through to the manager.”

“No, wait, there’s no need for—”

“He asked me to, Mr Marks. As soon as you called, he said.”

He was expecting a call? Weird. Spooky. I hadn’t been
expecting to make one. But I didn’t have time to puzzle it through, because he
was on the line almost immediately.

“Mr Marks? Michael Hobden, I’m the duty manager tonight.”

“Right, hullo. Look, I just called to say I won’t be coming
back...”

“No, that’s fine, sir. I quite understand, and I do
apologise for this. It certainly appears as though one of our staff tipped off
the press. At the moment our guests are having to run a gauntlet of reporters
outside the door, which is intolerable for all of us, but clearly you’re the
party most injured. There’ll be no charge for the room, of course. If you’d
like to give me a number where we can reach you, then whoever’s on duty can let
you know when the coast is clear for you to come and collect your car, or make
arrangements for someone else to pick it up; but I’m afraid that’ll be tomorrow
morning at the earliest. They know your room number, so they’ll probably have
your car tagged as well, and I don’t think they’ll be going away tonight.”

“Oh. Yes, a number, of course. Hang on...”

I had to yell for Suzie, and ask her; the number wasn’t on
the phone. He vowed without any prompting to keep it confidential, and then he
apologised again and brought the conversation to a tidy and diplomatic end. I
put the phone down, stared at it for a bit, then turned to find her watching me
curiously.

“Suzie? Why would the press be chasing me?”

“Oh. Yes, of course they would. Hold on...”

She disappeared, came back a minute later with a bundle of
papers. One she discarded on a sofa, the other two she passed to me without
comment.

I hadn’t been headline news, apparently, though it was only
a local paper; but front page at least, I’d been, and for two days running. The
first time was a report on the truck and the fire and Oliver’s death,
naturally, and Deverill’s narrow escape. I was in there as a subsidiary, an
also-survived, but they had me down as “Mr Deverill’s lawyer, recovering from a
road traffic accident”, which was interesting. Deverill had many lawyers, but
not one of them was me.

The second paper, the next day’s edition, had me again front
page, and second only to a nursery sex-abuse scandal where the protagonist was
coincidentally one of my own clients. This time, at least I was the focus of
the story.
THE LAWYER VANISHES
, the
catch-line ran,
Missing-Memory Man Goes Walkabout
.

I scanned the story swiftly, grimaced, glanced at Suzie.
“The police too, huh?”

“Afraid so. Maybe you should tell them that you’re here,
yes? Before they come looking? They don’t find you at the hotel, they’re going
to come back. I bet most of those messages are them already, press or police,”
nodding towards the answering machine, where a blinking counter told of a dozen
calls waiting.

“Back? You mean they’ve been already?”

“
Everybody’s
been. I
made a list. Two lists: phone calls, and personal visits. You can look at them
in the morning. Not now.”
Tonight’s for us
,
unspoken but very much there in her body language, half diktat and half appeal.
Please?

To me that was as much a threat as the press, the police and
the sensation-seekers combined, but—hell, I’m slow, but I get there in the end.
She’d been through shit, this girl who seemed to love me, and that was
substantially my own fault. I owed her one night at least, on her own terms.

“Can you turn the phone off?”

“Sure can.” Her fingers moved on the handset, and, “There,”
with another of those huge smiles, far too large for her fine-featured face to
encompass.

“And not answer the door?”

“Better than that, I can lock the fire door at the bottom of
the stairs. They won’t get up further than the club.”

“What if there’s a fire?”

“We’ll get into the bath together, turn the shower on, and
if they don’t rescue us in time we’ll be soup by morning,” but she didn’t look
at all distressed by the idea. Content to die with me, she was, this girl, at
least in fun; and I wouldn’t, couldn’t even call her by a pet name or anything
approximating to it, and I didn’t see how we were ever going to bridge this
gulf between us.

o0o

She ran off down the stairs, jingling keys; I went to look
at the paper she’d kept but hadn’t shown me. Found myself reading the top story
this time, about a body discovered, a man burned to death in a stolen van. For
a moment, I didn’t see the connection; but the report went on to imply—simply
by admitting that the police had refused to confirm it—that this dead man was
being sought at the time of his death two days ago, for questioning with regard
to the burning truck that had killed Oliver, had so nearly killed Deverill and
Dean and me.

Reading between the lines, then, presuming that the reporter
and the police both had good information, this guy had tried to assassinate
someone, Deverill or me; he had failed; and now he was dead himself, in a way
that horribly echoed his bungled attempt. Locked into the van, he’d been, no
accident. Which made it an execution. For trying, or for failing? I couldn’t
say, couldn’t guess, even: didn’t have enough information. I just heard Suzie
coming back up the stairs, and put the paper back quickly where she’d left it.
If she didn’t want to talk about that tonight, then emphatically neither did I.

o0o

I didn’t recognise the toothbrush that she showed me, on a
quick where-to-find-things tour of what she called my property. It was not the
splayed, broken-bristled old thing, Boots’ finest, that I’d been using in
defiance of my dentist for a year or more. She’d thrown that out, she said, the
morning after I moved in. She’d taken me shopping, she said; and hence this
sleek and streamlined designer object that felt strange in the hand and would
surely feel stranger in the mouth, though doubtless it slayed plaque at fifty
paces.

Must have been some shopping trip, that, and too bad I didn’t
remember it: you spend so much money all at once, you should have it logged for
life. The toothbrush was nothing, but the futon she told me I’d bought, I’d
insisted on. She’d been sleeping till then in her brother’s bed, and we’d
needed shelter from her ghosts, I’d said. Apparently.

Privately, I doubted it had been quite like that; I’d never
slept on a futon in my life and would never have thought to try. More likely I’d
said,
we need a new bed
, and left it to her
to choose. But if she chose to remember it otherwise, I was in no position to
argue.

And then she took me into the second bedroom where I found
ghosts of my own—books that had been mine since university, folders from the
office, sheets and sheets of A4 covered with my scratchy hand—and she threw
open a wardrobe to show me where my clothes were, and that must have been some
shopping trip indeed, because I knew none of them.

Okay. I could be almost blasé about this now; unfamiliarity
was becoming commonplace. But it was strange none the less, trying to imagine
the state of mind I must have been in, to have done this. Losing the bed of a
dead brother-in-law, yes, that was more than reasonable, that was right; but to
have left or thrown away everything,
everything
I used to wear seemed so extreme, it was one more thing that I simply couldn’t
connect with, on any level.

I didn’t ask, but I must have made some questioning,
doubtful noise, or else my face was asking for me. Suzie chuckled, stroked my
cropped hair and said, “Carol assassinated all your old clothes. Went at them
with pinking-shears, then sent them round here in a taxi, in boxes, in bits.”

Very thorough, she must have been. Not only my old, despised
court clothes were gone, displaced by smart Italian suits; not only my shabby
muckabout jeans and my faded check shirts and my sensible M & S underwear,
with designer denims in lieu and silk shirts, socks, boxer shorts and black
mini-briefs that looked like they probably cost an extraordinary amount per
square cotton centimetre. Every belt and every pair of boots, every tie and
every set of cuff links had been replaced. This was another man’s wardrobe I
was confronting here, picked with another man’s dress-sense, unless Suzie had
made all the choices and our relationship had been so lopsided that I couldn’t
once say no.

It had all been bought with another man’s money, also. There
was thousands of pounds’-worth of clothing on those hangers and in those
drawers.

Deverill presumably had done the paying, directly or
otherwise. Why he should do so, I still didn’t understand; why I should let him
was another question, and becoming more urgent by the hour.
Tomorrow
, I tried to soothe myself,
tomorrow, we’ll turn detective in the morning...

“Do us both a favour, get changed,” Suzie said. “Those
things are smelly. What are you like underneath?”

“Had a shower before I came.”

“Good. Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Have you
eaten
?”

“Yes,” I said, infinitely patient.

“Okay, then. Find something to wear and come through. If you
want your kimono, it’s on the back of the bedroom door. And it’s twice the size
of mine, so you can’t get muddled.”

And then she was discreetly gone, leaving me to raid another
man’s clothes. I was too tired to play dressing-up games with those smart
suits; and in all honesty, once I’d shucked off the second-hand stuff I’d been
wearing all week I really didn’t want to get properly dressed again, however
new and clean the clothes.

So I picked up on Suzie’s suggestion, only surprised that
she hadn’t made a command out of it,
wear this and
this, come on, hurry up, or shall I stay to strip you?

I pulled on a pair of boxer shorts, suppressing a grunt of
pleasure at the feel of good silk settling against my skin; and then I scuttled
shyly down the passage to the big front bedroom, where there were indeed two
kimonos on hangers on the back of the door. The larger one was underneath, grey
and pink, silk again but a completely different grade, heavyweight and
protective for all that it was fraying a little at the hems. You couldn’t call
this second-hand, though certainly it had been worn before; the only proper
word was antique.

It hung to my ankles when I slipped it on, wrapping me
around in reassurance. I tied the belt, resisted the siren call of the nearest
mirror, and went barefoot through into the living-room. In this flat, on that
floor, splinters were hardly a concern.

Suzie had made Chinese tea again, there was a steaming pot
on the coffee-table and cups with; but there was also a bottle of Macallan and
a couple of glasses.

So happens that Macallan is my favourite drinking whisky. I
did not think this coincidence or a lucky guess, I was well past that now.

She gave me an approving smile, and patted the cushion
beside her on the sofa; smile changed to scowl when I sat instead on the floor
opposite, with the table between us.

“Jesus, don’t do me any favours, will you, Jonty?”

“I’m here,” I said.

“Big deal.” But that was only a mutter with her eyes
averted, giving her away: because for her it
was
a big deal, that was clear, simply to have me safe back again. For all that she
had only the least part of me, the physical body she’d married but not at all
the man inside; and for all that even that much wasn’t cooperating, the body
wasn’t sitting where it was told and doing what she wanted. She’d settle for
this grotesquely difficult situation sooner than what had gone before, the
total loss of me.