Underground Rivers (14 page)

“I know where you write, don't forget. It wasn't too difficult. Never trust a hack with a black heart, as old Dicky Burton used to say to his friends at the Kingston Hilton. Then I know where you drink with your pals, don't I, after you've put your rag to bed.”

“You did your little bit of research.”

“That's about right, matey,” he grinned dryly.

“What hotel is she staying in?”

“A little bordello off the York Way. The wrong side of King's Cross, you might say. Where the prostitutes used to hang about.”

“You've been meeting with her. You've been talking to her, have you?”

“She gave me access to her hopes and fears.”

“So you're some type of clairvoyant,” Joss retorted.

Joss noticed how this conversation gained puzzled expressions from those other guys.

“What's important is that Karen is sorry and she's ready to give your relationship another try.”

“Gerald, you're joking! I never had you down as an agony aunt.”

“Joss, I've been living with agony for many years ... it comes as a relief to share something.”

“Should I pay any attention to this farrago?”

“Karen is prepared to let bygones be bygones. She's quite as conscious of having made a terrible mistake, as you are.”

“A terrible mistake, but who says I want to correct it?” Joss said.

“An opportunity you shouldn't turn down, Jossy. You still have feelings for her!”

Joss expelled air. He considered the proposition. “I fear that it wouldn't work out, even for a second time. There was a bitter falling out. Foolish to live in the past. You can't bend time,” he remarked.

“Whatever's holding you back, matey? Are you going to leave poor Karen crying into her cuppa and living out of her sordid suitcase? Have a bit of human feeling, try to emote. She doesn't even have a mirror in the bathroom of that hotel. Karen knows that she made a stupid blunder, when she ended your relationship. She never had any feelings for the other bloke she met. She wasn't really serious about that biker guy either. That hell's angel,” recalled The Entertainer.

“This is an obvious wind up.” Joss was squirming, twisting about on his heels and scratching his head.

“She was only teaching you a lesson, looking for a bit of action and excitement. You're too much in your head, matey, with a tin ear for prose and cotton wool for that terrible music you listen to.”

The Entertainer's indeterminately green-blue-yellow eyes crinkled into a cynical smile, under matted copper-red eyebrows.

“Forget about the hell's angel bloke,” Joss told him. “I agree that was a bit of revenge. But she was more serious about the Frenchman, wasn't she? She was engaged to him, as far as I knew. I thought they were in business!”

“Now they're out of business, my dear old mate.”

“I'm not sure that I want to hear anything more.”

“You were destined for each other, and the rest is just slings and bloody arrows.”

“I'm not convinced it's too clever to see her again.”

“Oh no? Life goes on, Joss. What did you expect? What I'm going to do now is arrange a meeting between the two of you, this very night. Karen will be waiting for you at your place. Have a proper heart to heart and iron out your past misunderstandings.”

Goater reached into an inside pocket of the tartan garment, pulling out an antique mobile, held together by masking tape.

Joss held out the palms of his hands. “
Woh
, slow down there, Gerald. You're up to your old tricks! Maybe I don't want to see her again. It's all in the past. It's over. We've moved on. She's in Paris or somewhere and I'm in London. That's perfect.”

“Nobody's asking you to lift a finger. No, save your finger lifting for that nasty pop magazine of yours,” Goater retorted.

“So why don't you give me
her
number. Then I can decide if I want to speak to her again, or not.”

“Have a bit of feeling, Joss. That would be like dumping her by text message. How can I trust you? You've got to have this out with Karen face to face.”

“No, you shouldn't do that,” Joss insisted.

“Too late. I'll let her know you're on your way.”

“Call her back, and tell her not to bother!” Joss replied.

“Why don't you sleep on this during the tube journey home?”

Joss knew it was risky to provoke The Entertainer: a frustrated jape lead to a bigger conceit. “This all sounds too unlikely ... not to say disturbing. How can all this be possible?”

“Life's a funny old game, Jossy. You have to go with the swerves. Who are you to wonder why?”

The Entertainer watched Joss sink back into his troubled cast. “Don't waste any more time, Jossy. Don't turn down your big second chance. Karen will be waiting for you, back at your pad, this time.”

Joss had palms to his forehead. “You can't hurt me now. That's all gone. You've always had a sick sense of humour.”

“Beautiful, beloved Karen. Don't make a fool of yourself two times,” The Entertainer advised, as he turned to leave. “Are you a two timer, matey?”

“You're leaving now?”

“Show some charity, as I've also got a home to go to. Although it isn't as good as this place,” he remarked. He turned large hands around the toilet as if greeting an audience at the Palladium.

With this parting shot Goater had gone, with the alacrity of a music hall magician going through a false door.

Joss understood how these dark tricks were achieved, yet he was left bewildered. He wasn't sure if Gerald wasn't bearing some kind of grudge. Maybe he had invented this story merely to humiliate Joss: to show how he could beguile, seduce credulity. Even if Gerald had truly met Karen, as she alighted from a Eurostar train, then why would she open her heart to him, or wish to return to a shattered adolescent affair?

When he returned shakily upstairs to the bar, racking his brains, Joss's friends were in an even more buoyant mood. They loudly celebrated the completion of another month's magazine, hitting their copy deadline, with drinks and anecdotes.

Not surprisingly Joss had lost the mood. He made his excuses and turned away. To the puzzlement of friends he pressed through the bar and departed.

Wouldn't it be difficult for a guy in a tartan suit, with winkle-pickers and a beret, to melt into a Friday night crowd? Gerald achieved that trick, without so much as an impression of his colourful threads. People sometimes vanish from the most conspicuous public places, as their very conspicuousness allows them to vanish.

Joss dashed along Frith Street with anxious thoughts, through the West End revellers and tourists. He cut back into Shaftsbury Avenue, intending to return home quickly. Joss wanted to prove to himself that Goater was merely trying to trick and humiliate. He had to show himself that the proposal was untrue - his old flame Karen had not returned to the country to come back to him - although he risked submitting to the joke.

He could live down Gerald Goater's mockery, the jeering at his lovelorn gullibility, so long as he might confirm this was just a vengeful jape.

If the tall tale was true, then it was hard to judge if this would make him happy.

Bookmark

by Mike French

The noise in the shop was a jumble and scramble of stories as if the customers' conversations had taken flight and were fluttering around the room. Snippets of sentences bulged out from the medley then retreated back until finally Jason, tiring of it all, pushed through the sound sending words spinning off his shoulders as if white froth from the sea.

The shop was quite unlike anything Jason had seen before. Every shelf was filled with bookmarks. There was no prices, no bargain bins, just row after row of bookmarks all lined up neatly on shelves of marble.

“Can I help you?” said a young woman, pushing a loose strand of hair away from her face.

“This is extraordinary,” said Jason.

“Wonderful isn't it,” said the woman, smiling.

“How on earth do you survive just selling bookmarks?” asked Jason.

“We're always busy,” said the woman, reaching out and straightening one.

“Excuse me,” said a man from the top of a ladder near them, “coming through.”

Jason stepped back as the ladder glided along a copper coated rail above the shelves towards him. “Arh,” cried the man with a flourish of arms, “found you.” He slid down clutching in his blue fingertips a small bookmark. “Yours, I believe,” he said, presenting it to Jason. Without waiting for an answer, he walked away blowing on his fingers.

“Do you like it?” asked the woman.

Jason turned it over in his hands. It felt cold, a design was embossed upon it of a woodland scene.

“I don't know,” said Jason. “It's quite nice I suppose.”

“Smell it.”

Jason held the bookmark under his nose. It smelt of coffee, vanilla, cut grass.

“Would you like it gift wrapped?” asked the woman.

“I haven't said I want it yet,” said Jason.

The woman raised an eyebrow, “You don't know what it is do you?”

“A bookmark?”

The woman pulled a pair of glasses from her pocket, rubbed them with a purple cloth, then taking the bookmark, held it at eye level. Jason shifted on his feet, unsure of what was really going on. At the checkout he could see a long queue, each person standing with a single bookmark in their hands. Small paper mockingbirds behind the counter swirled around in an upstream of air, before crumpling up into a ball and falling back to the shop floor as if globules of wax in a lava lamp.

Jason glanced at his watch. It was almost time for lunch; he could sense movement in his stomach as if a cuckoo was about to burst out and announce it was time to eat.

“I'm sorry, I need to go,” said Jason stepping backwards and placing his hand on a marble shelf. He felt a chill, the oil swirling around his fingertips dropped in temperature.

“Well,” said the woman taking off her glasses, “This does seem to be for you.”

“How do you mean?”

“It has your name on it.”

“What?”

The woman warmed the bookmark in her hand, then opening her fingers showed Jason his name printed out in small white letters.

“How did you do that?” asked Jason.

“You'll have to feed it of course, ideally a book a week, but monthly would do. Oh and it needs to be kept chilled.”

Jason looked at the woman as if she had just explained that the world was after all, and much to everyone's embarrassment, flat.

“Think of it as like a pet,” said the woman. “And make sure you feed it good quality books, none of those trashy kind if you know what I mean.”

“A pet?”

“Yes.”

“How do I keep it chilled?”

“Many of our customers leave them in their fridge within the covers of something like a
Herman Melville novel. Helps them fall asleep.”

Jason laughed, “Very funny. Good. Yes, very good. Well, thank you. Interesting sales patter.”

“O it's no joke, I can assure you.”

“Right, well I'm going now. Is that okay with you?”

“Why don't you try it?” said the woman
. “If you're not happy you can return it. Do you really think I'm making all this up to poke fun at you?”

“So when you say pet,” said Jason, “you mean like some kind of electronic cyber-pet that somehow scans the book?”

“If that makes you feel more comfortable then, yes.”

“Well is it or isn't it?”

“I if may suggest a varied diet as well,” said the woman leading him over to join the queue. “A few classics, maybe a Dante followed by a Mark Twain for starters and then a Tolstoy. Sometimes a Yann Martel brings out the shine in them.”

“I suppose you'll want me to take it out for walks next,” muttered Jason.

“Oh yes,” said the woman, “they are particularly fond of travelling on the underground, although any form of outing normally brings out the best in them.”

“Well of course,” said Jason.

“Wait here,” said the woman pointing to the queue.

Jason tried one last time to protest but she was gone, disappearing as suddenly as she had appeared.

Jason sighed and joined the back of the line.

He inched forward watching the mockingbirds.

When finally he reached the front, he paid, replied, “No,” to the question about if he already had some books at home ready for his bookmark and stumbled out of the shop - happy to be free from whatever insanity pervaded within.

Outside, the day seemed to be holding onto something approaching normality and he walked past the old library building. In his bag the bookmark twitched, eager to enter the chamber of books, but Jason carried on by listening to the whispering trees and the sound of feet on cobbled streets.

Eventually he found an empty bench, sat, then peered inside the paper bag. After a while he took out the bookmark and put it on the bench next to him. Taking his sandwich from his coat pocket, he peeled back the top layer of the bread and placed the bookmark inside. Smiling to himself he lifted his lunch just in time to stop the cuckoo within and bit down.

“A pet,” he laughed sending out bread shrapnel into the sweet summer air.

Then a question, like that of a child wondering why it was wrong to speak with your mouth full.

How did the woman know his name?

Had he told her?

He couldn't recall.

For a moment he tasted coffee,
vanilla, smelt cut grass. After another bite his thoughts turned to Shakespeare, Hemingway, Martin Amis, until the memory of novels became chapters, paragraphs, sentences. Then, with the last crumbs on Jason's lips, only single words that fell away as if leaves lost to the wind.

Jason felt a great loss within him as if someone had died. Unsettled he stood and turned: his attention drawn back to the library.

Then he scrunched up his paper bag, placed it in the bin next to him and strode towards the library steps.