Patchwork Man (18 page)

Win had been insistent about Kimmy and the reference to the party had brought a vaguely remembered face back to me. But was it the same face? The girl in the photograph and the girl at the party could have been the same, I suppose. I was as certain about that as I could be given the amount of alcohol I’d consumed by then. And I’d had sex. That was a given. I rarely went without then – before Margaret. On the way up after our landslide victory, the groupies hoped to follow in our wake. Jeremy, Francis and I had been in our element. Heather had indulged her fantasies with shoes and cosmetic surgery. I was still actively separating my lives as I had as a child – school and the home – in fact never more so than then. In the inflated arrogance that success brings I hadn’t even considered that someone would take the pair and empty out the contents of the two boxes so they could mingle. It was inconceivable. I was Lawrence Juste – a success. We were all so much older and more sedate now. Cautious; dead.

Did it really matter? So I might have met my sister when she was an adult – although I somehow couldn’t see the fag-puffing bitch I’d interviewed earlier in the diffuse memory of the pretty girl at the party. Even through a drunken haze, that girl had seemed – classy – as I’d described Margaret. It had probably been that which had singled her out for me that night, incapable of any other judgement as I’d been. I had little doubt Kimmy Hewson would have come across – even ten years younger – as a second-class escort girl or a full-scale prostitute. But no matter how much I tried to stuff it back in the box, I had to admit there was something I should remember about that party and Win obviously thought he had something on me because of it.

Success had gradually painted a different picture after that crazy party. Trompe l’oeil. The baroque artists had used it to deceive the viewer; we used it to deceive our public. The wild men were apparently tamed and tempered to trustworthy mavens; the outward cloak of dour respectability covering previous excesses. Indeed, the excesses diminished rapidly after that time. Success was its own reward – and the affluence that allowed us style and sophistication in place of cheap excitement. It’s the difference between the nobility and the proletariat. The richer you are, the less you need to display it. Margaret assiduously polished the well-wrought façade and it became a fait accompli. We carefully built me a reputation for stolidity and propriety after those wild years and I grew into it like it was a second skin cultivated to replace my own damaged one. Eventually there was no difference between the cultivated persona and me. It had taken over me. And after all, I’d been learning how to dissemble and separate lives like a master myself since the age of ten. Why not make a complete split between them? The unsavoury episodes of pre-success went into the box, and with them the details of that night. Now I needed to withdraw them again.

The hotel we’d moved to after the party in Chambers – genteel, respectable, mannerly. Who had been there? The hierarchy, who’d dropped in for their mandatory courteous single drink in celebration at Chambers, had retired early. The jubilation that we’d nailed the case, and our future, was carefully masked by obsequious conversation, and restrained courtesy until the dignitaries had gone and only the hard-core remained: Jeremy, Francis, some of our colleagues, the girls they invited over, and me. Of course the party didn’t continue in Chambers. We’d gone to the Majestic and a suite of rooms on the top floor generally used for informal business meetings and cocktail parties. Had I taken the girl in the photograph to the hotel with me, and to bed? Or did I just remember her from the party itself? I would have to find out. I toyed with Win’s business card, sitting squat and ignorant in the middle of the polished cherrywood desk. Brutish block-black lettering on aggressive red against the rich burnished brown sheen of the wood; base versus sublime. After the phone number he’d drawn an arrow shape in blue biro, the ink blobbing where the pen stroke launched its missile across the red target. It pointed overleaf. I wondered what was on the back.

‘Can’t remember her name? Kimberley.’

Danny’s mother. Then the klaxon horn directed me to the other alarm that was ringing – the one of arithmetic. The memories coalesced as I did the sums and whether I wanted to believe it or not, there seemed only one real possibility. Woman, sex, kid. My head swam.

Fuck.

I ran to the downstairs cloakroom and threw up.

I
spent most of the rest of the day alternately vomiting and drinking. Neither helped the other. As fast as I poured oblivion in the form of brandy down my throat, I brought it straight up again. It could barely make me merry, let alone pissed. It had resolved by early evening into the uncomfortable acceptance that I was going to have to face the possibility of disaster head-on. I went to bed, exhausted, but all I did was dream.

It started with the family photograph – the one I wasn’t part of – but this time I was. I was lounging in the back, near Win. Kimmy wasn’t in it. Win handed me the photograph like he’d handed it to me in real life and I took it, off-handed and dismissive. I handed it back.

‘So what? There’s only us in it. Nothing unusual.’

‘Look again little brother.’ He laughed nastily. I took it back and looked at it cursorily before dropping it like my fingers had been burnt.

‘Jesus Christ!’

‘Nothing unusual in it now?’

‘Fuck. When did that happen?’ The family had expanded. Kimmy, Danny and a whole crowd of Danny lookalikes populated the foreground – but somehow they all looked like a cross between me and Danny, apart from one thing. Something about each of them was deformed, skewed, wrong.

‘What do you expect?’

‘No, this can’t be right. Not me. It’s a joke – a trick!’

‘You know what you did and when you did it better than me, kiddo.’ He took the photo off me and put it away. Then he was gone and Danny was looking at me in his place.

‘You ain’t going to let me down are you, Mister? It weren’t my fault. I didn’t do it.’

‘For fuck’s sake! I didn’t know.’

‘You must have done, Lawrence – how could you not know? How could you not know, how could you not know ...’ Kat’s face filtered in and out until I woke up in a cold sweat.

Christ, how
did
I not know? And yet I hadn’t. How could you not know the person you were having sex with was your sister? I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I rushed to the bathroom and was sick again. There was very little to come out, just the rancid dregs of whatever brandy I had kept down. My stomach ached from convulsing and my throat burned with acid bile. I felt ill and old. I crept back to bed and shivered under the duvet. It was a hot night, but I felt like ice. Was hell ice cold? Or did it burn? Ice burn perhaps. Christ, now my mind was wandering. How was I going to face Kat? What was I going to tell Kat? More to the point, how was I going to face Danny? I wasn’t sure I could. The very thought brought nausea with it again. After a night of no sleep, I started the next day exactly the same, but with a headache that reminded me of a pneumatic drill steadily boring its way into my brain.

What did I say? Did I tell her? Or did I keep it to myself and hope it went away. And what about ethics. I laughed out loud at that. Ethics? What ethics could I possibly claim to have now? Wearily I showered and shaved, and went unsteadily downstairs. I made instant coffee, strong and bitter. No milk, no sugar, boiling water. I laughed again – the barrister’s version of scourging himself. Self-flagellation through ingestion of caffeine. Christ I was pathetic – and in the shit. Whatever I might deserve, I couldn’t bring myself to deliberately self-harm, so I waited for the coffee to cool to drinkable. I filled the gap with trying to figure out what to do about Kat. Ironically, she was now the easier of the issues to deal with. My phone buzzed, reminding me I had an appointment at ten. I’d have to go into Chambers, whether I liked it or not. It was one I’d already postponed once. Heather would have my guts hanging off her shiny spiked stilettos if I didn’t get my act together. I put the coffee cup in the sink and left it staining the stainless steel. I wasn’t meant to do that.

Yeah – and you weren’t meant to do ‘that’ either, were you?

Shut up!

When I arrived at Chambers, Louise breezily handed me my post and a phone message, with a meaningful grin. Kat had another surprise for me. An appointment. The coincidence amazed me. I sat twiddling the piece of paper the telephone message was written on wondering if she knew anything of what Win had dropped so neatly and gleefully in my lap. I hadn’t spoken to him yet. If I was having to painfully come to terms with the shameful possibilities, the bastard who’d given me the news could stew for longer too. He was certainly roasting me so we were both having our pound of flesh one way or another. The fact that she’d left a message rather than call back later so she could talk to me could mean anything.
Maybe she’d been trapped into it.
It would have seemed odd to ring on business and then not say what that business was. I teetered on relief.
Or she’d wanted to avoid talking to me.
I tipped over the edge and my head throbbed sickeningly again. I cursed not going into Chambers the day before after all, yet how could I have?

If she was trying to avoid talking to me, why would she take it upon herself to arrange the interview?
Surely she would have turned her back on me if she knew what I now suspected? I played devil’s advocate again. No, she couldn’t do that – it would be unprofessional, and letting the client down.

The client. I would have to start re-categorising him. The boy. No, that didn’t work either, but I couldn’t use the other term which hovered on my tongue. It was no good. I couldn’t concentrate here. Gregory hovered irritatingly outside my door every time I went to the cloakroom, which was often as the brandy and puke routine seemed to have upset whatever normal balance I should have, and the clerks chirped too brightly as they delivered post and papers for ongoing cases. The turgid financial mismanagement brief that Francis landed on my desk with a thump that made my head reverberate was the last straw.

‘More you than me, old bean,’ he announced cheerily, the ever-attendant waft of cigarillo ash making my stomach revolt yet again. I’d have an ass as raw as it had ever been after one of Jaggers’ ministrations at this rate, I thought sourly as I made my way to the cloakroom for the fifth time and side-stepped Gregory floating aimlessly around on the landing.

‘I’m going home after this,’ I told him acidly as I passed him. ‘Get one of the girls to cancel my ten o’clock with apologies and just leave anything else you might have for me on my desk.’

‘Indisposed, sir?’ he asked silkily. Whatever genealogical similarity I still shared with Win took over at the unctuous over-servility which I knew wasn’t real.

‘I’ve got the shits, Gregory, if you must know.’

‘Ahhh,’ he faded away, face like a squashed vegetable. I went home before anyone else could ask.

I tossed the case folder angrily across the desk in my study. Christ what a mess! It hit Margaret’s photograph and knocked it flat, but I could still see her laughing obliquely at me. Damn you! Did you know too? Or were you meddling for some other reason? My attention returned to the phone message. The appointment was with Kimberley Hewson. Christ! What else could she want to talk about – other than what I wouldn’t want anyone else to hear? I would have to ring Kat. I didn’t even know if she intended being present at the interview. Given the sensitive circumstances it seemed sensible to have a witness to what was discussed, but who exactly could that be? None of my partners in Chambers. Too close to business. Not Win. Too dangerous. There was only Kat left, and that meant giving up on whatever there might have been between us. I would have to tell her everything in case Kimberley Hewson took it upon herself to pre-empt me. And who would get involved with a pervert – even an unknowing one.

Or could Kat be present without ever knowing the full background to the situation? Perhaps Kimberley wouldn’t want it known either? Maybe she’d told Win purely for leverage on me. That would mean that Margaret hadn’t known either, or given what I now knew about her, she would almost certainly have disposed of the finer footwork in trying to
persuade
me. She’d have gone straight for the kill, before it got to her instead.

I put the folder back in the drawer I’d hidden it in when Win had unexpectedly visited, and locked it. Until I reached the sidings my thought train had sidled into, I had been undecided whether to openly seek the pink-ribboned package marked CLOSED languishing in the basement at Chambers, or track it down in private. After today, anticipation of the busy hum of the clerks everywhere and Gregory watching me slyly from his position presiding over all routes in and out – apart from the basement – decided me. Maybe I was being paranoid and no-one was watching my movements but I felt exposed in a way I’d never felt before – not even in the home. Guilt did it, I guessed.

They all thought I was indisposed, languishing between toilet and bed, no doubt. Gregory would have borne the mournful news joyfully around the whole of Chambers by now, so there was no likelihood of anyone trying to get hold of me, or expecting to see me out. I parked in the multi-storey car park three blocks away from the offices and walked in from there, entering the back door as shiftily as a thief. Underfoot, the tarmac felt soft, like a cake just under-baked and still volcanic inside. The sun had already scorched what little grass kerb there was to shrivelled brown where it met the lava flow of the pavement. Dust crevassed in the gutter, along with abandoned cigarette stubs and sweet wrappers. Not even the lightest of breezes stirred them today. One of those immaculate blue-sky, yellow-sun days that exhaust you with their perfection whilst fulfilling all the promises you ever asked of the weather, and are surprised when they’re finally realised in Britain. It seemed this text-book summer was going to stay the distance – the way I’d always wanted it to as a child. Now I was an adult I craved the temperate spring or the gently golden autumn in its stead after already six solid weeks of heat and hubris. Things are never as you want them at the time, are they? Perhaps it’s the human condition to be permanently dissatisfied.