To Indigo Page 17

  “It isn’t Macbeth.”

  “No, Roy. Macbeth is the Scottish Play, as we both know. I mean the Irish Play: O’Thello.”

  I stared at him. It was possible, if someone else had made this joke elsewhere, I might have laughed, at least – as he always did – smiled. “Very good,” I said, stilly.

  “Not mine. But there. So one disc is your new novel, and the other, was I right, the big unfinished manuscript now in the smaller bag – why else is it so heavy? – and which I found last time anyway, tucked in one of your study drawers under some loose blank paper.”

  My heart knocked.

  I felt a kind of different alarm, inexplicable, together leaden and sharp. The very thing that had made me pursue the bags and so him, back to the trap of the house.

  Silent, I waited.

  As I now knew he now would, he told me, “I read it, Roy. It’s Byronic – but more accessible, more perverse. Bit of a masterpiece. Probably, like so many of those, unpublishable. All that wonderful rambling, murky stuff about his life, the constipated family with their failed fortune, the grisly murders – which remind me of Poe, and sometimes of de Sade – that girl, what was her name – Libenka – with her throat cut, hanging by her hair from the beam, where he’d left her – until her own weight dragged the – what was it? hennaed tresses – out of her scalp, and she fell through the flimsy floor into the room below. And his demented visions of dogs and cattle and fiends and beasts of bone and metal. Purple passages to eat with a spoon – I expect you know, don’t you, Roy, to tell an author he’d written a Purple Passage was to compliment him. It meant the section was unusually rich – like expensively purple-dyed silk. No, it’s one hell of a book. And unfinished. What comes next?”

  I swallowed.

  “It stuck some years ago. And thank you, but I know it’s rubbish.”

  He shook his head. “Nay, do not think I flatter,” he said, “…and that of course is the Danish Play about the pork butcher – It isn’t rubbish, Roy. You should finish it. So there we are. The two things you should do this summer. Finish that novel and shave your bloody head. Your hair is going fast. Steal a march. Get rid of it. You’ll look good, more yourself. We should all, like Vilmos’s creepy alchemic Order, try to become ourselves. It’s about all we can do.”

  I thought, What will he do, drug me again, then shave my hair off while I sleep?

  A huge, heavy, watery terror filled me. I felt, as the Americans illustratingly say, sick to my stomach.

  He read my mind, of course. Perhaps not so bizarre.

  “I won’t do that, Roy. It has to come from you.”

  Then he got up and walked round the kitchen, looking out of the glass of the closed door and window briefly. It was getting on by now for evening. The sky had a thickened amontillado sherry light, the fir black, its needles delineated like spikes on some giant black porcupine. By a similar light, against the fir, I had seen him here first. And earlier today, by the fir, he had jumped up to intercept my escape.

  “That’s a beautiful tree,” he remarked. Then, cutting through me, irrational as I now was, to the quick, “You feature it, am I right? In your untitled work. The tree on the Kolosian Hill, where your hero stabs the thief.”

  After this he opened the fridge, next the freezer, and gazed in. No comment then. He went on to the cupboards, looked at, removed and looked at, various cans.

  “Not much food.”

  “I was going away.”

  “Of course you were. Don’t worry. I can go shopping. Enough shops are open on Sunday. As for tonight…” He was thoughtful. “How about a take-away? Do you have a good local Indian or Chinese?”

  I rarely indulge myself that way, but there was an Indian restaurant at the end of the high street, the Spice Lal.

  “If you want.” Thought clicked. I added, expressionless. “But I won’t join you.”

  “Oh Roy, come on. I can’t drug that. Not if you keep an eye on me from the moment the food arrives to the moment it gets to the table. And then we each keep our hands in sight. I still haven’t quite figured out how you did that trick with the wine that time. I’ll watch you. You watch me. We’ll have a good meal. And don’t worry. I’ll pay.”

  With an inappropriate abrupt rancour I heard myself say “You seem to be rich.”

  “Not exactly. But not poor either. Do you have their number?”

  “No.”

  He drew from his pocket the most slender of phones, the colour of matt steel. It was more up-to-date than the last one he’d had at our third meeting. He must change them every week. “Tell me the name and address, Roy.”

  “Why should I? I don’t particularly want an Indian meal.”

  “Yes, you do,” he said.

  I tightened my mouth. Stupid. Redundant.

  Sej smiled. “Don’t worry, Roy,” he falsely reassured me again. “I remember a place in your high street – The Lal – yeah, the Spice Lal.” Then he called one of those directories we now use, at great cost, to learn unknown telephone numbers. Next he dialled, and held the mobile out to me.

  I refused to take the phone.

  “I’ll tell you what to order,” he encouraged me. I let the phone ring in his grip, and when a voice answered I did and said nothing. I sat, he stood there, while the man’s voice buzzed out of the phone, and Sej watched me. I wouldn’t take the phone, or speak, wouldn’t play the game. The voice ended. The connection was broken. What used to be the dialling tone sounded.

  Sej’s face fell. He looked both upset and resigned.

  He put down the phone, leaned in across the table and slapped me violently across the side of the face with the back of his hand. The blow was meaty, it stung, numbed, blanked a second of time, brought me back to pain, my right eye watering, my right nostril running so I thought for a moment my nose bled. But it didn’t.

  He said, “Sorry, Roy. I’d much rather not. But we do have to get this sorted out.”

  Beaten women learn how to negotiate, where at all possible. Or so I’ve read. Any woman I’ve known had not been beaten, or if she had, never confessed it.

  I said, “All right. I’ll do what you want.”

  The side of my mouth seemed inert. But it was only rather like what you feel at the end of a dentist’s appointment, as the cocaine is gradually wearing off. He hadn’t seriously damaged me. But he had made me understand.

  He rang the number again. I took and spoke into the phone. I ordered, politely, what he requested, then at his urging ordered a meal for myself. I can’t remember what. I knew I wouldn’t eat much of it. Unless of course he insisted.

  Sej sat on the table, smiling and once nodding approval. He said, “Ask if they’ll send a couple of beers, too.”

  I asked. They would. Then I had to ask him, for them, if he wished to pay by credit card over the phone. And airily he told me the number of his card, even the security number on the back.

  But I didn’t try to record it. I had also now stopped ruminating on the idea of his going shopping and maybe leaving me locked in the house, and if this offered any hope. I didn’t care.

  Deal done he took back the phone and switched it off. “Brilliant, Roy. Just right.” He looked closely at me. “Better put some TCP on your lip – yes, just there. I don’t wear a ring, but I seem to have caught you. It’s nothing much but better disinfect it just in case. Then maybe, let’s see, you stay upstairs. They said twenty minutes, pretty optimistic for a Saturday. Perhaps they don’t get a lot of custom until later. The thing is, if you’re upstairs I can answer the door. But if you stay at the top of the stair you can also watch me. Once I close the front door, you come down and we both come back in the kitchen. That way there’s no chance I can mess the food up. Or you. Fair enough?” He hadn’t even warned me not to try to persuade the delivery man to assist me. And I – I hadn’t even considered it.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I rose and he smiled. “You’ve been a real trooper,” he said. My father had once or twice said that.
“No hard feelings, eh? Good. These things happen. Now we can move on.”

  My father’s advice on bullies was shit. There are many things that, unless you have either great power of some sort, or vast help from some abnormal and constant quarter, there is no point at all in facing up to, let alone trying to combat.

  Denial is one of the healthiest physical states discovered by Man.

  Following my scrap with Ben Oggey, after which, penless, I had to have a tooth capped, I abandoned confrontation as a modus operandi.

  Decades after, and only with Sej, I briefly blotted my well-learned copy book. His swift action had saved me from any more mistakes, thus punishment. Meanwhile the stunning aftershock of his blow wore off quickly. The lesson adhered. From now on I would be a model prisoner.

  The meal arrived in fact half an hour later. We played it as he had outlined. He was charming to the delivery man, had a laugh with him, (I couldn’t catch what about), tipped him with a ten pound note. Off the man went, laughing. In came Sej, laughing, with the bag of food. He shut and double-locked the door again, with his own keys, then pocketed them.

  Then I came down from my old childhood haunt of the top stair and progressed behind him into the kitchen.

  Naturally he had no dread of my attacking him from the rear. Nor did I have any intention of doing so.

  I remember what he ate: Chicken Jalfrezi, stuffed Naan, vegetable curry, egg-fried rice, two Poppadoms, a small tub of Raita. What I ate, or did not eat, as I’ve said, I have no idea.

  He drank an Indian beer decanted into a tall glass. I had the same and sipped it. He’d suggested I rinse both glasses thoroughly before we used them, in front of him, which I did. The taste of the beer was appealing, slightly bitter, with a hint of chilli. In the end he finished mine too. The remains of my dinner, most of it, I believe he ate for breakfast the following morning.

  There were no insidious drugs. Indeed, despite the washing, he insisted halfway through the repast we have each a few swallows from the other’s glass.

  He said I was to leave the washing-up, so I left it, it goes without saying.

  It was after this, though rather further on, nearer midnight, he broke in my bedroom door, for me.

  “You get a proper night’s rest,” he said. He told me he would ‘crash’ on the sofa downstairs. At least, he said, he wouldn’t have to suffer the ‘fucking row’ of neighbourly bad music current in the flats, which ‘got on his tits’.

  Between one and two I heard the strains of Bach sprinkle from the piano.

  Upstairs, the broken door leaning on the uprights to give me partial ‘privacy’, I sat up on the bed in my clothes, my two bags, which he had brought in, lying by the wardrobe, the light off, unsleeping, going over everything, on and on.

  Our conversations of the afternoon and evening I examined now more fully.

  I found I was inclined to date them BB and AB – Before the Blow and After the Blow. In fact the blow, when he hit me across the face, was neither devastating nor intrinsically dividing. It was rather, instructive, a guide-line. I’d been, on some level, expecting his violence. Who would not? It was a benchmark, not an advent.

  We had also talked, superficially at least, in that most spontaneous and episodic way persons use who know each other well. By superficial I mean, of course, if we had been observed by an outsider. And now I tried, upstairs, to put myself outside, to look and learn. Writers do attempt that, some of us, even when personally deeply involved. The ability is a gift, and a curse.

  I re-ran the conversations methodically. To begin with, I had asked him again, why he did this to me. His reply was the recurrent one – out of interest; I was interesting. We had established that he – not the girl with the car presumably, as she really couldn’t have had time or access – had wiped some liquefied Rohypnol around the kitchen glass. I could have used the glass at any time during his absence.

  Next we had returned to our guessing game as to whether he was or was not my son. He had said he was brought up in an orphanage, could not recall his mother’s name. I didn’t believe either of these confidings. Even BB I had become three-quarters convinced he wasn’t Maureen’s child. It might be plausible but somehow didn’t fit, and definitely AB I refused to entertain it. He was not hers. I wouldn’t allow him to be. Although naturally if he, AB, started to assure me he was, I would nod and agree. I would even call him my son, if that were required.

  When he saw to the bedroom door he told me about the car-girl and her strong pianist’s hands with the bolts. And prior to that, when the mobile rang out on the path, he told me I couldn’t bring it in, nor would he. That was after the Indian meal. Even then, propped up on the bed, I could hear the rain falling quite heavily on everything, and on the mobile.

  I’d seen too the tiny intense wound in the palm of his left hand. Was he prone to stigmata? I wouldn’t put anything past him, even something like that, although I would suspect it of being self-induced, either by extreme cerebral concentration or (more likely) a creative use of self-harm. (Not to build this aspect up unduly, he would reveal during the next week that he had driven a long needle into his hand. He’d needed to look white and sick when he brought the ‘dead dog’ back into my hotel, and this was how he’d managed that. He explained too that, had I followed him to the Gents, he would have put his fingers down his throat to induce the genuine sounds and act of retching. Told this, I’d made little comment. Perhaps the authorial mind was pleased to slide last pieces of that single puzzle into place. I didn’t then ask him if the dog had been real. It was AB. And also something more. I was certain by that first night the dog was not real, but suppose it had been? Suppose he had killed it, or she had, that other weeping woman and accomplice surely, suppose she had killed it for him? Aside from any urgent RSPCA issues, to kill an animal can, in certain cases, be the preliminary knack of those then able to slaughter their fellow men.

  We had also discussed my work, of course.

  Over subsequent days we would discuss it again and again. He would read my books, sitting before me either in the library or the kitchen, sometimes the front room. He read fast and with a look of total absorption that might have been gratifying, even with him, BB. But which, AB, was no longer so. Sometimes too he would send me off to my study. “Go and do some work, Roy.” And I would go, and hack that I am, manage even to turn out some soulless verbiage, five hundred, a thousand words. In case he checked on me. But he never intruded ‘uninvited’ into the study, would only come to the door, with a polite knock, to ask me how it went.

  My demeanour throughout was always as normal as I could make it. When we discussed my published books we did so in a civilised manner. Even AB, his criticisms were, I must admit, often valid. His praise obviously revolted and offended, but I took it with a courteous calmness, thanking him, disagreeing now and then. I had ascertained for now those areas where resistance was allowed, even wanted, as proof of our quite spurious normalcy.

  There were no more blows. He needed to offer me none.

  I’d said to myself I was to be a model prisoner.

  It’s the first thing the seasoned criminal tells you, at least those of the disempowered class of criminal. You must be obedient and respectful. Don’t aggravate the warders. Take any cruelty or injustice without undue flinching or any complaint. Don’t smarm, maybe flatter a bit, hide nothing but your true self, and keep your head down. As one I spoke to during my researches had once told me, “You gets a better chance to pull a fast one if you never done it before. And if you don’t neither, you still get less of the crap if you behaves like a good boy.” It was the same to some extent with the more dangerous fellow inmates. Unless they were ‘mental’. Then probably you had problems. You couldn’t predict, only stay neutral, merge with the dark.

  Sej, equally jailor, criminal and mental, would have to be played on all three lines.

  Some of our ‘talks’, macabrely, were actually quite fascinating. And as long as I did everything he told me to ther
e was to be no resurgence of threat.

  To return however to that first night, sitting up on the bed, I had no means of knowing he would be there through the rest of May, approximately three weeks. I had no apprehension I would have to maintain my life as a model prisoner so long.

  But then, what else had I imagined could happen?

  In some incoherent way, frankly, I must have known it might well go on. Or had I only, down in some dim recess that my swift, healthy, human talent for Denial instantly smothered, believed he would kill me? Regardless that was of my conforming and docility. I had no real notion of what other tests lay before me through the rest of May. If I had, would I have doubted my own ability to comply? Maybe not. Mortal things are generally programmed to attempt survival. Left with one plank in the sea, we cling to it. So much in life is destructive, is deadly, that without this built-in mechanism, less bravery than cowardice, less cowardice than resentment and rage, most of us would vanish long before my father’s touch of a Grim Reaper mowed us down. Sleepless there, I must have known this too. And finally I did fall asleep, near five in the morning. I hadn’t meant to, or thought I could. Sej woke me at 8 a.m. with a mug of tea, milk, no sugar, as I drink it. “Regardez,” he said, and drank two swallows of it, to demonstrate it wasn’t drugged.

  By the third morning, my mobile phone was gone from the path. It had been possible to see it from my study window, which faced the front. I’d at no time thought I could get hold of it. No doubt it was more sensible for someone else to have the use of it, if it still worked. Nobody that I’d detected had called me since that first unanswered ringing. Duran, for example, would think I was now on my trip up north. As for Matt, swimming in his own ocean of depression he’d simply give up on me. What did I matter? Perhaps the woman he’d picked up had stayed on, and even if I’d arrived he would have put me off.