Painkillers (14 page)

'She felt she had to force me into working for her.'

'Stop it.'

'I suppose she didn't have anyone else she could threaten.'

Zoe stirred her coffee with a spoon. She wiped her eyes. She waited. There isn't much you can do with a blanket denial, especially when there's no other evidence to hand. Besides, there's only so long you can feel good about making a pretty girl cry. So though the paranoia was still there inside me I packed it back into its box and put it away and began the long climb down.

'I'm sorry,' I said.

'You can't blame me for being on edge,' I said.

'Friends?'

'Please, Zoe,' I said.

She shook her head. 'It doesn't matter whether we're friends or not,' she said.

'It matters to me.'

''I mean it's not the point.' She looked at me. Anyone else, it would have been what they call a 'significant'

look. But her blind grey eyes were useless for that - they conveyed nothing. 'Did you mean it about your dog?'

'I had to get rid of him before Eva saw.'

'Then it's like mum said, isn't it? Someone somewhere is calling her bluff.'

It had never occurred to me that Boots's death might be intended as a warning, not for me, but for my protectors the Yaus. 'Well, who would want to do that?' I protested. Zoe tasted her coffee, grimaced, and pushed the cup away. 'How am I supposed to know?' she said.

'You're the spy.'

I'd wanted to clear the air, but all I'd done was stir up more dust. So I did my best to crow-bar the conversation back onto its original track. Zoe joined in. But nothing either of us said after that had much to do with what we were really thinking.

'I'd like to go back to Hong Kong one day,' she said. 'Start my own business there. If the bust bottoms out.'

It startled me, how quick she was to forgive my accusations. I wanted to thank her but I didn't know how so I followed her lead and pretended nothing had happened. 'More than half China's trade spills through Hong Kong,' I said. 'Sure the bust'll end.'

'Just so long as I can lose our heinous family reputation.'

Well, I thought, I guess I deserve that. 'If we do our job well,' I said, 'you won't owe anybody anything.'

'God,' she said, pushing her plate away, still half-full, 'they certainly give you enough.'

We walked back along the main road and through a public marina to the car park. The wind was damp and feverish, and lines tinked against their masts, setting my nerves on edge.

'The thing is to keep Brian and Eddie out of it,' she said, picking between the puddles and flotsam. My trainers and socks were soon so sodden through, it didn't make any difference, and I slopped along untidily beside her. 'They wouldn't have a clue.'

'They seem pretty entrepreneurial,' I said, ineffectually polite. Only five minutes before I'd been calling them dog-killers. 'Especially Eddie,' I offered - a limp olive-branch.

'Eddie imports snowboards,' she said.

'There you are.' My feet were so wet, I felt blisters forming.

'He stuffs them with dope.'

I didn't know what to say.

'He has a sculptor from Central St Martin's hollow them out for him with a plaster saw. Meanwhile he sends Brian over on the Dieppe Ferry in a Ford van with a clapped out gas heater in the back. When he returns it's crammed to the gills with beer. No-one ever notices the Calor canister's stuffed with cocaine.'

'Does Money know?'

'Mum's not good at asking the right questions. They keep the empties in her garage.'

'Have you talked to them about it?'

She shook her head. 'I dropped Eddie's mobile phone into the toilet once.'

I laughed. 'That must have given him pause.'

'He's going to land mum in trouble.'

'And you,' I said.

She said, 'They've got this idea Hong Kong's hassle-free, "catch-as-catch-can, mate".' Her impersonation of Eddie was merciless. 'They want to become film producers. The new Heung brothers. They'll be eaten alive.'

There was nothing to say. Brian and Eddie worshipped their father. If they wanted to follow in his footsteps, there wasn't much anyone could do except try and contain the damage. Back at Zhenshu's house, I shed my shoes and washed my feet in the shower. There wasn't a towel, so I made do with a flannel I found, folded up, clean and fresh, on the shelf by the sink. When I came out I found Zoe struggling with a stepladder she had brought in from the garage. 'For the attic,' she explained.

I put that off as long as I could, but Zhenshu had been very organised, and it didn't take long to gather the papers in the ground floor rooms. His insurance and pension certificates were arranged in alphabetical order in a series of concertina files. Even his cheque stubs were kept in a box labelled 'Stubs'.

'Shall we have a look in the loft now?'

It was all a big game to her. She was irresistible.

I went first up the stepladder. The stairs were warm under my bare feet. There was no lock, and the panel lifted easily enough. I slid it out of the way.

'Can you see anything?'

'There's a pull-cord here.' I reached up and tugged. Nothing happened. 'The electricity's off,' I said, feeling foolish.

'No.' Zoe went and flicked the hall light on and off, proving her point.

'Well the bulb's gone.'

Zoe found a torch and a spare bulb under the sink and handed them up. The socket was live when I pushed the bulb home. 'Fuck.'

'What is it?'

'I hate doing that.' I looked around. The boxes were stacked so close together, there wasn't even space to walk between the stacks. 'Bloody hell.'

'What?'

They were Viking archive boxes. I pulled the lid off the nearest. Inside lay a stack of neatly typed technical specifications; a laminated Nabeshima company brochure from the mid-Fifties; a dot-matrix printout in hexadecimal.

I looked for a way through the stacks.

'Can I come up?'

'Let me make some room.'

An MDF floor had been laid over the joists. I started making a path and found that the stack was only two boxes deep. Beyond, narrow paths of chipboard off-cuts made meandering paths from beam to beam, over fungal, bulbous pools of old insulating felt.

'How's it look?'

'Manageable. Come on up.' There was an old tricycle under a drop-leaf table. 'I thought he didn't have kids,' I said.

'What have you found?' Zoe's voice was bright and excited. She came up the ladder. I made room for her.

'He kept it!' she said. She rushed over to examine it, jumping from board to board. I winced: they weren't even nailed down. She ran her hands over the handlebars. Her fingers almost fitted the brakes, still. I felt something melt inside me, leaving me hollow inside.

Leather trunks and plastic bags, rolls of carpet, a wardrobe rack on casters, jam-packed, the clothes hidden behind dry cleaning bags. I said, 'I don't think he ever threw anything away.'

Behind the table were three tea chests. The first was full of technical drawings, rolled neatly into cardboard cylinders. Zoe helped me unwrap a couple: blueprints for radios, or what looked like radios. The next chest was covered with a blanket. There was no lid. I looked in. It was as if Zhenshu had taken a bunch of old radios to pieces and thrown the bits in here.

I stirred around in the junk; it meant nothing to me. 'You think all those boxes of letters and print-outs are about this?'

Zoe came over to look. 'God,' she said, 'what a depressing idea.'

The third chest contained crockery.

In an old leather trunk we found notebooks written in Cantonese interspersed with mathematical equations, amended, scribbled over and crossed through again and again in angry black ink until surely even Zhenshu couldn't have made any sense of them. There were hardback diaries, used as scribbling pads, and a pile of school exercise books tied with string. When we opened them we found a journal, again in Cantonese, interleaved with photographs, most so faded and blotched we couldn't make out the images.

Old ornaments. Prints. A box full of Goss china. A schoolroom globe minus its stand, wrapped in newspaper. The map petals were lifting off the ball. We smoothed them down and read off forgotten names. Rhodesia. Sudetenland.

Zoe found a pile of 78s wrapped in brown paper, but we couldn't find a player. I opened a Lloyd Loom laundry basket and it was full of silk cheongsams. I held one out for her. She held it against her. 'It's lovely,' she said.

I said, 'Put it on.'

'What?'

'Put it on.' I had completely lost control of my mouth. 'It looks the right size.'

At the bottom of the basket was a Huntley and Palmer's biscuit tin full of her grandmother's jewellery. She laid the pieces out in the silk nest we'd made beside the laundry basket. Jade and silver. Gold bracelets. Rings that might have been diamond, and probably were. A velvet choker with a ruby sewn into the front.

'I never knew her,' said Zoe, sadly, telling me what I already knew: 'She died giving birth to dad.'

'There's probably a photograph of her somewhere,' I said.

But we couldn't find one.

'Jesus, what a mess.'

We surveyed the damage - the pile of old clothes, the papers scattered everywhere, the globe, perched precariously on top of the pile of 78s. 'It was a mess anyway,' she said. 'Only now it looks like a mess.'

'We'd better put it straight.' I said.

But Zoe had noticed something in the junk filling the middle tea chest.

'What is it?'

She was having trouble untangling its wires. 'I'll show you if I can only - there.'

It looked like a Walkman - a bakelite Walkman, with half a dozen cloth-sheathed wires dangling from one end. Each ended in a crocodile clip.

I swallowed. I knew what it was.

How could I forget?

She misread my expression totally; she smiled, and handed the box over to me. 'Now this would be worth suing over,' she said.

The aliens inside me backed away frantically, bumping against my spine. There was a brass switch on the side of the box, like an old-fashioned light-switch, and a metal knob with numbered settings up to ten.

'My dad had one. It's a stress-relief thing.'

I didn't dare meet her eyes. Stress?

'You know. Biofeedback.'

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it wasn't what I thought it was. Maybe it was all one big jolly coincidence. Maybe I was panicking.

'Zhenshu made this?'

'Yes,' she said. 'The family story goes Nabeshima wanted it but Zhenshu would never agree to a deal.'

She laughed a dry laugh. 'Not very likely, is it?'

'I don't know.' I weighed the box in my hand. It was very light. '"Biofeedback"? Zoe, the word wasn't even invented until the Sixties.'

'Maybe that's why he could never strike a deal. His work was ahead of its time.'

'How does it work?'

'You pinch the clips to your skin.'

I looked at her.

'It doesn't hurt. Dad's version has acupuncture needles, so be grateful.'

She slid off the backing plate. 'No batteries,' she said, disappointed, and put the box back together again. I turned away and stuffed newspaper back around the globe. I had to hide my face somehow. 'Let's get on.'

I threw Zhenshu's journals into the trunk. I rolled up the blueprints. I worked steadily. When I turned round, Zoe had gone.

Downstairs, I heard a toilet flush.

Zoe had thrown the box back into the trunk. Maybe it meant nothing to her, after all. Even if it was what I thought it was, it was probably the first, an early prototype: probably it couldn't do what the models I had known could do.

I ran my hand across my eyes, trying to wipe away the images. Their needles and their eyes. Their mouths, their centres, the taste of them.

The aliens rattled my spine, shaking me awake.

I picked up Zhenshu's little bakelite box and pushed open the backing plate. The case was made to hold size 3 batteries. I crossed to the hatch and picked up the torch. I took out the batteries. I slipped them into place inside Zhenshu's box. I must have put the battery cover down someplace stupid because I couldn't find it.

I examined the casing for a light, but there was nothing to indicate that the machine was working. I dabbed my finger against a dangling alligator clip. Nothing. I threw the switch on the side of the box. The heavy spring snapped the contacts together with a satisfying clack. I touched the clip again. The tiniest charge sprang off my finger, like static off a TV screen.

'Adam?'

She had changed into a cheongsam. It was gold, painted with flowers. She'd had to pull it up above her knees to climb the stairs and the material was still rucked up. She stooped and pulled it down around her ankles, smoothing the silk over her calves. Her breasts moved against the front of her dress. She stood up. Her belly was flat and hard. Her hip-bones jutting sharply against the narrow cut of the dress - two bright points, sheened by the naked electric light. 'What do you think?' Her grandmother's ruby glittered at her throat.

'I think you're beautiful,' I said.

'Yes?'

'You know what I think.'

She saw the machine in my hand. She came over and sat at my feet. As she sank to her knees, the long slit at the side of her dress opened to show me her thigh. She took the box from me. She saw the batteries there, and smiled.

'What?'

'Put your hand out,' she said. She clipped the wires to my skin: one on the web of my forefinger and thumb, two to the skin below my wrist, another two to the loose skin over my knuckles. She got me to squeeze the last one between my third and fourth fingers. The clips were only weakly sprung. They didn't hurt at all - just a slight tingle as they first touched my skin.

She knew what she was doing.

'Zoe?'

There was an old trunk lying next to us. She had me lay my hand, palm down, on the worn leather surface.

'Zoe, please - '

'Do you remember Hong Kong?' she said, and turned the dial.

My hand swelled.

I felt it. It grew and grew. It became heavy. It tugged at my wrist. Pints of blood welled in my fingers. I felt the tips of my fingers filling like balloons, stretching, about to burst. My wrist twisted sickeningly. The sinew and linkage inside puffed and knotted, struggling to bear the heavy hand. The clips were expanding too. No matter how big my hand got, the clips grew at the same rate. Great metal jaws dragged at skin grown leathery and thick, like whale hide, and I could feel the way each layer of dermis tugged and clung, resisting the pull of the teeth.