Just in Case (17 page)

Agnes glanced at Justin’s parcel.

‘Don’t worry,’ he sighed wearily, ‘it’s for my brother.’
Not some kind of pathetic attempt to win you back
. ‘I don’t suppose there’s anywhere to put it down.’ Justin’s eyes skated off in search of a cloakroom, accidentally encountering twelve large panels mounted with gigantic representations of himself on the way.

He brought his eyes back very slowly to meet hers, emptying them of expression on the way. And then even more slowly, he took in what she was wearing, saw the unravelling scarf round her neck with the tiny hands knitted into each end; the little red holes bound up with surgical silk; the delicate shards of metal and glass tinkling on the dome of her hat. He took in the entire vision of Agnes dressed in postmodern disaster-victim chic, surrounded by portraits of her moody, miserable spurned lover, her discarded, distressed virgin youth, who happened also to
be present here, in the flesh, conveniently clutching (for maximum dramatic, or perhaps comic, effect) an oversized, garishly wrapped soft toy.

Him, in other words.

Agnes had chosen her portraits precisely, presented him sad, confused and blank. She had displayed him at his most vulnerable and beseeching. He looked incontrovertibly pathetic.

Doomed Youth, indeed. When he had contemplated his doom, it never occurred to him it would be like this, would play out here, in a brightly lit room surrounded by people.

Oh god, he thought. How much disaster was he expected to survive?

‘What do you think?’ Agnes chirped, much too brightly.

Justin stood very still. He said nothing. Boy gazed up searchingly at Agnes’s face. Dorothea didn’t breathe, and Peter had to turn away from the spectacle of pain seeping out and pooling at his friend’s feet.

‘Look, Justin –’ she began, but just then heard her name called, and retreated, with evident relief.

‘Do you want to leave?’ Dorothea whispered.

Justin still said nothing.

‘Come on,’ Peter said, with an Englishman’s stoicism under fire, ‘now we’re here, we may as well look around.’

As the little group moved into the gallery, Justin caught sight of a dress sewn all over with tiny red dots. Blood, he
thought, horrified.
It’s spattered with blood.
He shuddered and turned away, to a linen shirt with a jagged tear where one of the arms should be.

Justin froze, his face a mask. A buzz spread through the room; once someone had made the connection between the boy in the coat and the photographs of the boy in the coat, his presence attracted the attention of the entire company. ‘He’s good-looking,’ someone whispered, ‘but obviously
not quite himself.’

On the contrary, Agnes thought, he is
quite himself.

Peter came up beside her. ‘You should have told him.’

She folded her arms, defensive. ‘How could I?’

Peter said nothing.

‘I do love him, you know.’ She paused and looked around the room. ‘Just not in the way he wants me to.’ Her voice had a petulant note.

So that’s how it is, Peter thought. Justin, desperate to be loved, and Agnes, desperate to be absolved of blame.

Despite their cruelty, the photographs of Justin were beautiful. Agnes had captured the hesitant nerviness that lurked just beneath his friend’s fine, translucent skin. The pictures pierced him like X-rays, peeled back the flesh to expose a soul so raw it could have revealed itself only in trust and love.

The way he looked at the camera was the way he looked at Agnes.

Peter moved away, embarrassed, as if he’d witnessed something private.

The plane crash scenes came almost as a relief with their depictions of clear, unambiguous horror. It was a more comfortable sort of voyeurism. How terrible, one could think. How wrong, how painful, how tragic. And how expressive, how courageously witnessed. He had to admit that Agnes had captured something unexpectedly moving in the juxtaposition of tragedy and victim.

He turned back to the crowded room, scanning it for familiar faces, and saw Justin pushing his way through the gallery towards him.

The triptych was surrounded by people, and even before Justin could see the entire work, his brain filled in the missing pieces of the panels from memory. Slipping quietly, insistently, to the front, overcome with something between outrage and fear, he already knew what he would find there.

These pictures. She should
never have…

Have what? Taken them? Printed them? Shown them?

Yes.

He searched the room for Agnes. Shoving his way through to her, he wrapped his hand tightly around her upper arm and dragged her away from a small group of acolytes.

‘What were you thinking, Agnes? It’s horrible.’ He glared at her, eyes burning. ‘
You’re
horrible. What have you done? You’ve turned me into some kind of freakish spectacle.
And you didn’t even ask me.’
Fury boiled in his blood. He felt capable of killing her, himself, everyone in the room.

‘I’m sorry, Justin. I should have warned you.’ She sounded defensive. ‘But I
made
something of it. That’s all.’

‘You
made
something? Of
corpses? Of me?’

She followed his eyes over her shoulder to a suit jacket that had been sliced to pieces, then stitched roughly back together with brown string.

Justin collected himself. ‘I have to go now, I just wanted to stop for a minute.’

Someone called Agnes and she turned away, leaving Justin tumbling slowly towards the exit. There appeared to be plenty of time as he fell, time to experience quite distinct waves of anger and disgust.

‘Justin –’ Agnes called after him without much conviction. She didn’t add wait’.

He opened the door, and the gallery coughed him out into the street.

45

Outside, bathed in the faint greenish light of a winter thunderstorm, Justin ducked his head against the frigid wind. From the shadows, puffing calmly on a cigarette, Ivan watched, amused.

So, Agnes hadn’t told him he was the star of her little show? Tch, tch. Shocking omission. Well, there’s no such thing as a free shag, Justin, my boy. There’s a lesson for you, for next time.

Justin raised his head to look back through the heavy plate glass. Everywhere he looked, his own image stared back, twice as large as life, mocking him.

It’s not me,
he felt like shouting. That person isn’t
me.
The need to rid himself of the person in the photographs, to destroy the hideous, pitiable figure in the beautiful grey coat, took him over until there was nothing left but rage. And so as it began to rain, big icy drops that turned the grimy road slick with mud, he peeled off the precious garment and hurled it as hard as he could. It landed flat and heavy under a steady stream of traffic and sleet.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said to Boy, and began to run, head ducked, his brother’s Christmas present pressed to his chest, shirt collar pulled up against the rain. If he’d waited another few seconds, he might have seen Ivan dive into the traffic after his coat with a furious oath. He might have heard the skid and screech of tyres and seen the stormy oblivious world close over the man one last time, seen the sodden coat and its maker become indistinguishable from roadkill.

But Justin’s head was down and it was dark. It was all he could do to keep upright against the driving needles of freezing rain. Which is how he came to collide with a middle-aged woman walking towards him on the pavement. Her head and neck were stiff and painful and she walked quickly, eyes downcast, anxious to be home in bed. The rain stung her face and ran down into her eyes, a tiny percentage pooling and mixing with fluids contained in the conjunctiva.

In the exact moment of the glancing impact of Justin’s body against her own, she blinked, and momentum caused a drop of fluid from the mucous membrane surrounding her eye to traverse the few inches into Justin’s slightly open mouth. It was the sort of event that happens a thousand times a day – on trains, in lifts, wherever strangers in close proximity cough or sneeze or shake hands.

In its entirety, the encounter lasted about two seconds.

Justin, soaked and freezing, regained his balance, mumbled an apology and continued to run. At Peter’s
house, he towelled off his dog, threw a blanket on the floor, placed his brother’s gift on the radiator to dry, stripped off his own clothes, ran a hot bath and lay in it until his bones thawed, his fingertips accordioned into whitish folds, and the water began to cool. Then he dried himself and crawled into bed beneath a pile of quilts, his steaming body warming the cold sheets.

Peter and Dorothea arrived home soon afterwards, and Justin could hear them at the doorway to the bedroom, whispering. They waited for a sign that he wanted company, but he gave none, and eventually the whispering ceased.

The next time Justin woke up he could hear Peter’s calm regular breathing across the room, and the dial of his watch glowed 2 a.m. He lay awake then, disturbed by images of disembodied limbs and torsos riddled with shrapnel, legs with no feet, fingerless hands.

The memory of Agnes’s photographs sickened him.

He came down the next morning thick-headed and depressed, and found Dorothea and Anna already awake, feeding the cats and talking about Agnes. He asked Dorothea, cautiously, what she thought of the show.

‘It’s very clever in some ways,’ she answered coolly. ‘And the photographs of you are beautiful, even when you look your worst. Most people won’t care that it’s all very horrible as well. They’ll just think it’s new and different and terribly original.’ Dorothea’s eyes were unsentimental. ‘I’m not wild about her angle on friendship, if that’s your question. She’s treated you very badly indeed.’

And that was that. The next minute she was making him a cup of tea and describing a snow leopard documentary she and Anna had seen on TV.

Dorothea’s appraisal of Agnes was a revelation. She was so definitive and matter-of-fact that Justin felt the terrible shame inside him begin to dissipate. Agnes’s power was flawed, so flawed that an eleven-year-old could defy it.

Peter came into the kitchen. ‘Have you seen the paper today?’

Later that day Justin thought back on their conversation and wondered whether the things that kill you were not just the crashes and explosions from without, but the bombs buried deep inside, the bombs ticking quietly in your bowel or your liver or your heart, year after year, that you yourself had swallowed, or absorbed, and allowed to grow.

46

A few days after the opening, Agnes telephoned.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch.’

Justin said nothing.

‘What with the funeral and the inquest. And everything.’

There was a long silence.

‘Justin?’

‘Yes.’

‘You just don’t give a damn about anyone but yourself, do you?’

‘You think
I
should be weeping over Ivan?’

‘A man died, Justin. It’s a great loss.’

‘A great loss to whom? To you, maybe. To you and your career. You’ve lost your precious two-faced mentor.’

‘It wouldn’t hurt to show a little remorse. After all –’

‘After all what? I killed him? Tell me, what kind of genius jumps in front of a car to rescue a coat?’

‘Justin –’

‘But while we’re on the subject of remorse, let’s talk about
you’

Agnes inhaled sharply. ‘Justin, look, I
am
sorry. I should have warned you. I should have asked you about using the pictures.’ She hesitated. ‘It was stupid of me.’

‘But you had more important things to think about.’

‘Well, as a matter of fact I did, but it’s not that. It’s just that I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea.’

‘And what would that have been?’

Agnes hesitated. ‘That I was using you.’

‘Oops. Too late.’

‘Justin.’ Her voice shook. ‘Don’t be like that.’

‘OK, I won’t be like that. Let’s simplify things. You tell me exactly how to be and I’ll be
like that.’

She said nothing.

‘Oh dear,’ he said, ‘don’t tell me I’ve hurt your feelings.’

‘Justin.’ Her voice was quiet. ‘I’m sorry I hurt you.’

‘IT’S-NOT-THAT-EASY’ He was furious, menacing.

‘I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.’

‘Do you think I
care
whether you talk to me or not?’

‘But I still care about you. I want to know what you’re doing, how you’re feeling.’

‘How do you
think
I’m feeling?’

‘A little angry, at a guess.’

‘How perceptive.’

‘Stop it, Justin –’

‘Don’t tell me what to do.’

Her voice caught. ‘Look, I know I behaved badly. But I wish you would stop being such a –’

‘Such a what? A prat? A child? A
virgin?’

‘You make it impossible to explain.’

‘Do I? How rude of me.
Please
explain.’

‘Whenever I think for a
moment
I might be talking to someone sensible it just ends up as an
idiotic
discussion about –’

‘Yes?’

‘About invisible dogs and fate and things I can’t even begin to cope with.’

‘So don’t.’
He spat the words.

There was a silence.

‘Why exactly do we have to be enemies?’

‘Why exactly did you think it was OK to use my unhappiness for your personal gain?’

Agnes said nothing.

‘Why exactly would you have sex with someone and afterwards think it’s OK to ditch them, pretend it never happened and then use their worst nightmares to further your own reputation?’

And by the way, why don’t you love me any more?

‘I
said
I’m sorry.’

‘Oh well, that’s just
fine
then.’

‘And I didn’t ditch you, and I
didn’t
pretend it never happened.’

‘It?’

‘Our little sexual encounter.’

‘A little encounter, was it? You’ve had bigger, no doubt?’