Dispossession (7 page)

“That made me smile, at least. And then you asked if I’d go
for a drink with you, right then. So I said the pubs were shut, and you said
you knew this place, sort of a private club we could go to; but I didn’t fancy
that, not with a stranger. I didn’t trust you at all, only you looked so
defenceless suddenly, all broken was how you looked, like Humpty Dumpty. So I
said no, I wouldn’t go to your club, but you could come to mine. I’m safe
there, with people who know me, and I didn’t mind that.”

“What club’s that, then?” I asked. I knew where she meant
when she talked about my club; if I wanted to drink late in the city, I went to
Salome’s. I was curious to know where she went, what circles she moved in.

“I’ll show you,” she said. “Next stop on the tour.”

And she put the car in gear and pulled out into the traffic,
taking her time about it, not going until she could go nice and slow and easy:
sick person’s drive, this was, and very obviously not her usual style. I could
hear her muttering, cursing under her breath, “Come on, get
on
with it, bloody Sunday drivers, what are you
doing out on the road, it’s not even bloody Sunday...”

o0o

Next stop on the tour didn’t at first appear to be clubland.
Next stop was Chinatown.

It wasn’t a big place, this particular Chinatown. Lacking a
large community to serve, it wasn’t a significant factor in the city, unless I
guess if you happened to be Chinese. Or married to a Chinese girl, perhaps...?

Basically what we had here was just one long street, lined
with restaurants. One gable-end overlooking a car park had a neon mural twenty
feet high, a pair of Chinese dragons who glowed brilliantly at night but looked
only dusty and rather drab by day. Pagoda-like arches surmounted the entrance
and exit of the car park; that was about the limit of public decoration except
at New Year, when they hung lanterns all along the street, there were firecrackers
and burning incense and a dragon danced for the punters. Probably nine out of
ten punters were white, and I’d always avoided the festivities myself. Too much
of a feeling of Indians dancing for tourists on the reservation, perhaps,
though my boycott on their behalf was probably as patronising as the TV cameras
and the gawping Caucasian faces. They had their own sensitivity; in my rational
moments, I figured that they probably didn’t need mine.

On one side, all those restaurants backed onto what remained
of the old city wall. There was nothing between but a dark, dank, evil-smelling
alley, slimy cobbles underfoot and blackened stone on the one hand, blackened
brick and high barred windows on the other, fire exits and loading-doors that
were next to useless because you couldn’t get a truck within fifty metres,
everything had to be dragged along on a trolley. Any time I had visitors seeing
the city for the first time, that was always a necessary part of the tour: very
Gothic, very mediaeval, and a delicious contrast to all the glittering, savage
modernity upthrusting elsewhere.

On the other side, the restaurants themselves made a wall, a
final barrier to the encroachment of that rapacious new development. Even here
there were a couple of new car parks, where buildings used to be; visible
through those gaps was pale new housing, built with narrow mullioned windows
and set around a quad of patchy grass in poor imitation of the
fourteenth-century friary just beyond, converted now into a café and craft
centre.

I hadn’t realised that there was anything here bar places to
eat, and a couple of Chinese supermarkets supplying stuff in the raw for those
who knew what to do with it. But Sue twitched the Mini into the kerb and parked
it, then got out before I could ask questions. She walked around to my side,
opened the door and stood there, very obviously waiting to help me up. I said,
“I’d rather not. Really.”

“Come on, Jonty,” she said gently, implacably. “If it’s just
muscles and skin that are hurting, a bit of exercise’ll do you the world of
good. Besides, I want to show you something, and I can’t bring it down.”

Down
didn’t sound so
good,
down
implied
up
and I wasn’t in any condition; but she wasn’t
brooking any denial on this one, so eventually I levered myself slowly out of
the car, she tucked herself under my shoulder for a welcome and necessary
support, and she brought me to a door between
King
Crab
and
The Peking Wall
.

God alone knows how many times I’d walked that street, and
never seen the door. No major surprise, perhaps. I was always hungry, coming
down here, always in a party and arguing where to eat: there were probably a
dozen, two dozen similar doors I’d never thought to look at, to notice or
remember. But it was big enough, in all conscience, and it had half a dozen
business plaques screwed to the wall around it, and not all of them were in
Chinese. The transom was of darkened glass, with a silver-blue
Q’s
cut into it; lit from behind at night—and it
always was night, when I came down here—it would blaze like a beacon.

And I’d been so cocky,
you can’t
show me anywhere new, not in this city...
I winced a little at the
memory as we shuffled sideways through the door, and for penance didn’t even
groan when I saw nothing ahead of me but a steep flight of stairs, rising.

There were a couple of doors on the first landing. One was
blank, the other held a sign picked out in ideograms, with an English
translation below:
Oriental Herbalist
, it
said,
Please ring buzzer and wait
.

“Uncle Han,” Sue said in my ear. “As soon as you’re out of
hospital, I’m taking you to see him. He’ll fix you up.”

As soon as I’m out of hospital
,
I thought,
I’m going home to Carol.
But I
said nothing, only grunted and turned my attention to the next flight of
stairs.

On the second floor, I had to stop to rest. I leaned against
the banister, breathing hard, and tried to disguise that with a question. “So
what’s
Q’s
, then, what does it mean?”

“That’s the club. It doesn’t mean anything to you? Snooker
club?”

I shook my head. “No, nothing. Sorry. Why
Q’s
?”

“Look,” she said, sighing hugely, “just because you’ve lost
your memory doesn’t mean you can act stupid. It’s a pun, get it? Snooker cues?”

“Oh. Right.”
Sorry again
,
but I wasn’t going to apologise for missing that. I didn’t play snooker, and
even my mind wasn’t looking for puns just now. Wasn’t looking for anything,
really, was only trying to make sense of what it saw. “Do you work there, or
something?”

Her face twisted, just a fraction, before she nodded.

“And this is where you brought me, that first night?”

Another nod.

“So that’s what you’re taking me up to see, is it?” She was
wasting her time and more, wasting what little energy I had. If nothing had
rung any bells so far—hell, if her
face
rang no bells with me—then no snooker club was going to work the magic. That
much I was sure of, and so should she have been by now.

And maybe she was, because this time she didn’t nod, she
said no.

“No, not that. Come on, up we go. Be a hero, be a man, you
can make it...”

I could and I did, though not without her help. On the third
floor, dark double doors had the
Q’s
logo
again, but we didn’t go through.

“That’s work,” Sue said, with a sideways motion of her head.
“This is home,” with a forward motion, a nod towards one more bloody flight of
stairs.

At the top of that was a single door, blank and unrevealing;
to one side was a bellpush, with a name engraved on a wee plaque below it.

I bent closer, to see.

Jack Chu
, it said. Not
Sue Marks, or even Susan Chu.

“So who’s Jack, then?” I asked, as she worked keys in locks
to let us in.

“My brother,” she said. “
Jack Q’s
,
get it?”

I got it, though I didn’t think I got it all. It was a pun
again, and presumably it meant something to her because her face was fierce and
intent and dangerous as she said it; but I couldn’t see the point myself. From
Q’s
to cues to snooker, sure; but
Jack Q’s
gave you
J’accuse
,
which was properly groanworthy but nothing else, not relevant.

Not as far as I could see, at any rate. And neither
presumably could her brother, or he’d have used the whole thing on his logo.
No, I thought this was a private, a personal pun, peculiar to Sue and with a
meaning that she didn’t mean to share.

“So does he live here, then? Your brother?”

“No,” she said flatly. “We do. Welcome home.”

Home to Sue—to us?—was the building’s loft expensively
converted, more New York than Newcastle: it made an extraordinary flat, all odd
corners and angled ceilings, light and air and space you wouldn’t need to swing
a whole coven of cats.

There was no hallway. The door from the landing led directly
into the living-room, long and broad and bent in an L-shape around the
stairwell. There were windows in two walls, front and back; there was an open
fireplace, with a massive cast-iron surround; the floor was stripped and
polished and scattered with Bokhara rugs and kilims. There were also a couple
of gaudy beanbags and enough books and magazines lying around, enough used
teacups and ashtrays to make the place look lived-in.

There was a long black leather sofa under the windows to my
left with another at right angles to it against the wall, a black-and-gilt
uplight in the small space between them and a square coffee-table close enough
to both. On the floor by the opposite wall was a snooker-club employee’s annual
salary in a few black boxes and LED displays, the smartest hi-fi set-up I’d
seen in private hands. A big wide-screen television and a video too, all wired
in to give incomparable stereo viewing.

Walls and ceiling were plain and painted white, sweetly
simple and freshly done. No scuff-marks, no nicotine stains. There were
pictures here and there, hung in careful disorder: a couple of abstract
originals in handmade wooden frames, otherwise art posters and photographs,
mostly behind glass.

There was a door in the wall opposite me; to my right the
room changed direction and aspect and intent. Around the corner, there were no
more rugs on the floor. There was a long, heavy table with wrought-iron
candlesticks and a fruit-bowl for an epergne, ten upright chairs around;
against the near wall was a fine Victorian sideboard, which at least presented
every appearance of containing napery and cutlery, place mats and napkin-rings.

In the end wall beyond the table were two doors, each
standing open. Glimpses of a professional-looking stainless steel cooker
through one, sea-green tiles through the other: kitchen and bathroom, but
neither one quite the usual offices, judging by what I could see from here.

On the floor by the sideboard, I suddenly noticed a black
leather shoulder-bag, buckled tight around something chunky and rectangular. I
took half a step towards it, only to be held up short when Sue didn’t move with
me. I suppose I could have pulled free, but instead I just gestured, said,

“Is that...?”

“Yes,” she confirmed, doing an easy mind-reading act. “You
can’t have it, though.”

“What do you mean, I can’t have it?”

“Jonty,” said slowly and with infinite patience, “you’ve
spent three days in a coma, this is your first hour out of hospital and I have
to take you back very soon, you’ve got a bad head and you’ve forgotten
everything that’s happened to you in the last couple of months. Do you
seriously think you’re in any condition to work?”

“No, but...”

“But nothing. If you take that into the hospital,” with a
contemptuous gesture, “you’ll sit up all night fighting with it, trying to make
it tell you what you can’t remember. I haven’t a clue what you’ve got inside
it, you never let me see; but it’d be the worst thing in the world for you just
now. You need rest, you need good food and sunshine and lots of sleep-time here
where I can look after you, not more stress and worry and your brain trying to
crank faster than a bloody computer. Am I getting through to you?”

Up to a point, she was; her prescription sounded infinitely
tempting. Except that if she thought she could provide it, she was only pissing
into the wind. Or the nearest female equivalent, perhaps. Her presence gave me
stress, her simple existence had my mind giddy with effort, trying to
understand.

I made some vague noise, didn’t try to reach for the bag
again. She nodded, slipped free of me and gave me a little push, back towards
the other half of the room. “You get sat down, get comfy. I’ll make some tea.”

“You wanted to show me something, you said?” Not just her flat,
presumably; obviously not my bag, she hadn’t wanted me to see that at all.

“Later. Sit down.”

o0o

She collected up dirty mugs and ashtrays, disappeared into
the kitchen and made appropriately wet clattering noises. I didn’t sit down.

Instead, I walked or hobbled or shuffled over to that door
in the far wall, and went on exploring.

A door to the right, a blank wall ahead of me; to the left a
corridor. At the far end a window, letting in light enough to show me one more
door.

The one on my right stood ajar, so I pushed it wider open
and stepped inside.

Bedroom, no surprise. Master bedroom, surely: the size of a
small swimming-pool and again furnished sparse but practical. The bare floors
seemed to be common throughout; on this one stood a stripped pine chest of
drawers against the near wall, next to another open fire, and a massive
mahogany wardrobe opposite. Centre-stage between them, a king-size futon was
rolled like a loose sausage on a low timber frame stained black. The futon was
dressed in a bright red cotton cover, the duvet tossed over a chair by the
windows was in golden yellow, and the pillows heaped atop it pink and green and
lilac.