“I’m only asking for one.”
“Okay, then …” I guess she wants a flash of vulnerable underbelly—it’s like that witless interview question, “What’s your worst fault?” What have I done that’s stupid enough to qualify as a proper answer, but not so morally repugnant (à la Penhaligon’s Last Plunge) that a Normal would recoil in horror? “Okay. I’ve got this cousin, Jason, who grew up in this village in Worcestershire called Black Swan Green. One time, I’d have been about fifteen, my family was visiting, and Jason’s mum sent Jason and me to the village shop. He was younger than me and, as they say, ‘easily led.’ As his sophisticated London cousin, how did I amuse myself? By stealing a box of cigarettes from his village shop, luring poor Jason into the woods, and telling him that to fix his picked-on, shitty life, he had to learn to smoke. Seriously. Like the villain in some antismoking campaign. My meek cousin said, ‘Okay,’ and fifteen minutes later he was kneeling on the grass at my feet, vomiting up everything he’d eaten in the previous six months. There. One stupid, cruel act. My conscience goes ‘You bastard’ whenever I think of it,” I wince to hide my fib, “and I think, Sorry, Jason.”
Holly asks, “Does he smoke now?”
“I don’t believe he’s ever smoked.”
“Perhaps you inoculated him that day.”
“Perhaps I did. Who got you smoking?”
“OFF I WENT, across the Kent marshes. No plan. Just …” Holly’s hand gestures at the rolling distance. “The first night, I slept in a church in the middle of nowhere and … that was when it happened. That was the night Jacko disappeared. Back at the Captain Marlow he had his bath, Sharon read to him, Mam said good night. Nothing seemed wrong—apart from the fact that I’d gone off. After shutting up the pub, Dad went into Jacko’s room as usual to switch his radio off—that’s how he used to fall asleep, listening to foreign voices chuntering away. But, come Sunday morning, Jacko wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the pub. Like some crappy whodunnit puzzle, the doors were locked from the inside. At first the cops—Mam and Dad, even—thought I’d hatched a plot with Jacko, so it was only when …” Holly pauses to stabilize herself, “… I was tracked down, on the Monday afternoon, on this fruit farm on the Isle of Sheppey where I’d blagged a job as a picker, only then did the police start a proper search. Thirty-six hours later. First it was dogs and a radio appeal …” Holly rubs her palm around her face, “… then chains of locals combing wasteland around Gravesend, and police divers checking the … y’know, the obvious places. They found nothing. No body, no witnesses. Days went by, all the leads fizzled out. My parents shut the pub for weeks, I didn’t go to school, Sharon was crying the whole time …” Holly chokes. “You’d pray for the phone to go, then when it did, you’d be too scared it’d be bad news to pick it up. Mam shriveled up, Dad … He was always joking, before it happened. Afterwards, he was … like … hollow. I didn’t go out for weeks and weeks. Basically I left school. If Ruth, my sister-in-law, hadn’t weighed in, taken over, got Mam to go over to Ireland in the autumn, I honestly don’t think Mam’d still be alive. Even now, six years later, it’s still … Terrible to say, but now when I hear on the news about some murdered kid, I think, That’s hell, that’s your worst nightmare, but at least the parents know. At least they can grieve. We can’t. I mean, I know Jacko would’ve come back if he could’ve done, but unless there’s proof, unless there’s a”—Holly’s voice catches—“a body, your imagination never shuts up. It says, What if this happened? If that happened? What if he’s still alive somewhere in some psycho’s basement praying that today’s the day you find him? But even that’s not the worst part …” She looks away so I can’t see her face. There’s no need to tell her to take her time, even though, unbelievably, her travel clock on the shelf says it’s nine forty-five P.M. I light her a cigarette and put it in her fingers. She fills her lungs and slowly empties them. “If I hadn’t run off that weekend—over some stupid fucking boyfriend—would Jacko’ve let himself out of the Captain Marlow that night?” Still turned away, Holly rubs her face. “No. The answer’s no. Which means it’s my fault. Now my family tell me that’s not true, this counselor I went to told me the same, everybody says it. But they don’t have that question—Was it my fault?—drilling into their heads every hour, every day. Or the answer.”
The wind hammers out mad organist’s chords.
“I don’t know what to say, Holly …”
She finishes her glass of white wine.
“… except ‘Stop it.’ It’s rude.”
She turns to me, her eyes red, her face shocked.
“Yes,” I say. “Rude. It’s rude to Jacko.”
Obviously nobody’s ever said this to her.
“Switch places. Suppose Jacko had stormed off somewhere; suppose you’d gone looking for him, but some … evil overtook you and stopped you ever returning. Would you want Jacko to spend his life as self-blame junkie because once, one day, he committed a thoughtless action and made you worry about him?”
Holly looks as if she can’t quite believe I’m daring to say this. Actually, I can’t either. She’s this far from kicking me out.
“You’d want him to live fully,” I go on. “Wouldn’t you? To live more fully, not less. You’d need him to live your life for you.”
The VCR chooses now to trundle out its videotape. Holly’s voice comes out serrated: “So I’m s’posed to act like it never happened?”
“No. But stop beating yourself up because you failed to see how a seven-year-old kid might respond to your ordinary act of teenage rebellion in 1984. Stop burying yourself alive at Le Croc of Shit. Your penance isn’t helping Jacko. Of course his disappearance has changed your life—how could it not?—but why does that make it right to squander your talents and the bloom of your youth serving cocktails to the likes of Chetwynd-Pitt and for the enrichment of the likes of Günter the employee-shagging drug dealer?”
Holly snaps back, “What am I s’posed to do, then?”
“I don’t know, do I? I haven’t had to survive what you’ve had to survive. Though, since you ask, there are countless other Jackos in London you could help. Runaways, homeless teenagers, victims of God only knows what. You’ve told me a lot today, Holly, and I’m honored, even if you think I’m betraying your trust by talking to you like this. But I haven’t heard one thing that forfeits your right to a useful and, yeah, even a content life.”
Holly stands up, looking angry and hurt and puffy-eyed. “Half of me wants to hit you with something metal.” She sounds serious. “So does the other half. So I’ll go to sleep. You’d better leave in the morning. Switch off the light when you go to bed.”
WHEN I’M WOKEN by the wedge of dim light, my head’s in a fog and my body’s gripped in a tangled sleeping bag. Tiny room, more of a walk-in cupboard; silhouetted girl in a man’s rugby shirt, long, loopy hair … Holly: good. Holly, whom I ordered out of a six-year period of mourning for a missing little brother—presumably dead and skillfully buried—come now to turf me out without breakfast into a very uncertain future … pretty bad. But the little window’s black as night still. My eyes are still gouged with tiredness. My dry, cigarette-and-pinot-blanc-caked mouth croaks, “Is it morning already?”
“No,” says Holly.
THE GIRL’S BREATHING deepens as she drifts off. Her futon’s our raft and sleep is the river. I sift through all the scents. “I’m out of practice,” she told me, in a blur of hair, clothing, and skin. I told her I was out of practice too, and she said, “Bullshit, Poshboy.” A long-dead violinist plays a Bach partita on the clock radio. The crappy speaker buzzes on the upper notes, but I wouldn’t trade this hour for a private concert with Sir Yehudi Menuhin playing his Stradivarius. Neither would I want to travel back to my and the Humberites’ very undergrad discourse on the nature of love at Le Croc the other night, but if I did I’d tell Fitzsimmons et al. that love is fusion in the sun’s core. Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence
and its absence is the difference between life and death. Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you to Holly, who breathes like the sea. This time I whisper it, at about the violin’s volume: “I love you.” No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.
STILL DARK. THE Alpine hush is miles deep. The skylight over Holly’s bed is covered with snow, but now that the blizzard’s stopped I’m guessing the stars are out. I’d like to buy her a telescope. Could I send her one? From where? My body’s aching and floaty but my mind’s flicking through the last night and day, like a record collector flicking through files of LPs. On the clock radio, a ghostly presenter named Antoine Tanguay is working through Nocturne Hour from three till four A.M. Like all the best DJs, Antoine Tanguay says almost nothing. I kiss Holly’s hair, but to my surprise she’s awake: “When did the wind die down?”
“An hour ago. Like someone unplugged it.”
“You’ve been awake a whole hour?”
“My arm’s dead, but I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“Idiot.” She lifts her body to tell me to slide it out.
I loop a long strand of her hair around my thumb and rub it on my lip. “I spoke out of turn last night. About your brother. Sorry.”
“You’re forgiven.” She twangs my boxer shorts’ elastic. “Obviously. Maybe I needed to hear it.”
I kiss her wound-up hair bundle, then uncoil it. “You wouldn’t have any ciggies left, perchance?”
In the velvet dark, I see her smile: A blade of happiness slips between my ribs. “What?”
“Use a word like ‘perchance’ in Gravesend, you’d get crucified on the Ebbsfleet roundabout for being a suspected Conservative voter. No cigarettes left, I’m ’fraid. I went out to buy some yesterday, but found a semiattractive stalker, who’d cleverly made himself homeless forty minutes before a whiteout, so I had to come back without any.”
I trace her cheekbones. “Semiattractive? Cheeky moo.”
She yawns an octave. “Hope we can dig a way out tomorrow.”
“I hope we can’t. I like being snowed in with you.”
“Yeah well, some of us have these job things. Günter’s expecting a full house. Flirty-flirty tourists want to party-party-party.”
I bury my head in the crook of her bare shoulder. “No.”
Her hand explores my shoulder blade. “No what?”
“No, you can’t go to Le Croc tomorrow. Sorry. First, because now I’m your man, I forbid it.”
Her sss-sss is a sort of laugh. “Second?”
“Second, if you went, I’d have to gun down every male between twelve and ninety who dared speak to you, plus any lesbians too. That’s seventy-five percent of Le Croc’s clientele. Tomorrow’s headlines would all be BLOODBATH IN THE ALPS and LAMB THE SLAUGHTERER, and as a vegetarian-pacifist type, I know you wouldn’t want any role in a massacre so you’d better shack up”—I kiss her nose, forehead, and temple—“with me all day.”
She presses her ear to my ribs. “Have you heard your heart? It’s like Keith Moon in there. Seriously. Have I got off with a mutant?”
The blanket’s slipped off her shoulder: I pull it back. We say nothing for a while. Antoine whispers in his radio studio, wherever it is, and plays John Cage’s In a Landscape. It unscrolls, meanderingly. “If time had a pause button,” I tell Holly Sykes, “I’d press it. Right”—I press a spot between her eyebrows and up a bit—“there. Now.”
“But if you did that, the whole universe’d be frozen, even you, so you couldn’t press play to start time again. We’d be stuck forever.”
I kiss her on the mouth and blood’s rushing everywhere.
She murmurs, “You only value something if you know it’ll end.”
NEXT TIME I wake, Holly’s room is gray, like underneath a hole in pack ice. Whispering Antoine is long gone; the radio’s buzzing with French-Algerian rap and the clock says 08:15. She’s showering. Today’s the day I either change my life or I don’t. I locate my clothes, straighten the twisted duvet, and deposit the tissues in a small wicker bin. Then I notice a big round silver pendant, looped over a postcard Blu-Tacked to the wall above the box that serves as a bedside table. The pendant is a labyrinth of grooves and ridges. It’s hand-made, with great care, though it’d be too heavy to wear for long and it’s too big not to attract constant attention. I try to solve it by eye, but get lost once, twice, a third time. Only by holding it in my palm and using my little fingernail to trace a path do I get to the middle. If the maze was real and you were stuck in it, you’d need time and luck. When the moment’s right, I’ll ask Holly about it.
And the postcard? It could be one of a hundred suspension bridges anywhere in the world. Holly’s still in her shower, so I pull the postcard off the wall and turn it over …
Hugo Lamb, meet Sexual Jealousy. Wow. “Ed.” How dare he send Holly a postcard? Or—worse—was it a string of postcards? Was there a follow-up from Athens? Is he a boyfriend? So this is why Normals commit crimes of passion. I want to get Ed’s head fastened into stocks and hurl two-kilo plaster statues of Jesus of Rio at his face until he doesn’t have one. This is what Olly Quinn would want to do to me if he ever found out that I’d poked Ness. Then I notice the 1985 date—deliverance! Hallejulah. But hang on: Why has Holly been carting his postcard around for six years? The cretin doesn’t even know “spinarets” are “minarets.” Unless it’s a private joke. That’d be worse. How dare he share private jokes with Holly? Did Ed give her the maze pendant, too? Makes sense. When she had me inside her, was she imagining I was him? Yes yes yes, I know these snarly thoughts are ridiculous and hypocritical, but they still sting. I want to feed Ed’s postcard to my lighter and watch the Bosphorus Bridge and its sunny day and its sub-sixth-form reportage burn, baby, burn. Then I’d flush its ashes down the sewers, like the Russians did to what was left of Adolf Hitler. No. Deep breath, calm down, keep Hitler out of it, and consider the breezy “Cheers, Ed.” A real boyfriend would write “Love, Ed.” There is the “x,” though. Consider also that if Holly in 1985 was in Gravesend receiving postcards, she wasn’t being gobbled by an Ed on a squeaky European mattress. Ed must’ve been a not-quite-lover-not-quite-friend.
Probably.
“HELP YOURSELF TO the shower,” she says round the door, and I call back, “Thanks,” in a neutral tone to match. Normally I admire uncommitted matter-of-factness the morning after, but with this wooden stake called “Love” whacked through my heart, I want proof of intimacy and have to ignore a strong urge to go and kiss Holly. What if it’s a no? Don’t force it. I have a skin-scalding shower, change into fresh clothes—what do fugitives do for clean laundry?—and go to the kitchenette, where I find a note:
Hugo—I’m a coward about goodbyes, so I’ve gone to Le Croc to start the cleaning. If you want to stay over tonight, bring me breakfast and I’ll find you a feather duster and a frilly apron. If you don’t show up, then such is life, and good luck with your metamorphisis (is that how you spell it?). H.
Not a love letter, but this note of Holly’s is more precious than any piece of correspondence I’ve ever owned, bar none. That Zorro-like three-stroke H is both intimate and runic. Her handwriting’s not girly, it’s a bit of train wreck, really, calligraphically speaking, but it’s legible if you squint and it’s hers. Discoveries. I fold the note into my wallet, grab my coat, clatter down the stairs, and I’m out, treading in Holly’s ten-minutes-old footsteps through knee-deep snow in the courtyard, where the morning cold is a plunging cold; but the blue sky’s blue as Earth from space, and the warmth from the sun’s a lover’s breath; and icicles drip drops of bright in steep-sloped streets from storybooks whose passersby have mountain souls; the kids are glad to be alive and snowballs fly from curb to curb; I raise my hands and say, “Je me rends!” but a snowball scores a direct hit; I turn to find the little shit and clutch my heart—pretend to die—“Il est mort! Il est mort!” the snipers cry, but when I resurrect myself they fly away like fallen leaves; around the co
rner here’s the square, my favorite square in Switzerland, if not the world; Hôtel Le Sud, the gabled eaves, with Legolandish civic pride, the church clock chimes nine golden times; an Alp rears up on every side; the crêpeman’s setting up his stall across from the patisserie where yesterday this all began; “I’m Not in Love,” claim 10cc but, au contraire, I know I am; the crêpeman looks as if he knows that Holly’s face is all I see on every surface, there transposed; plus nape, lips, jaw, hair, and clothes; I hear her “Sort of,” “Bullshit,” “This is true”; recall her slightly elfish ears; her softnesses; her flattish nose; her guarded eyes of strato-blue; Body Shop tea tree oil shampoo; she’s nearer now with every step; I wonder what she’s thinking … Wondering if I’ll really show? The traffic’s moving pretty slowly, but I’ll wait until the man turns green …
A slush-spattered cream-colored Land Cruiser draws level with where I stand. Before I can feel miffed at having to walk around it, the mirrored window of the driver’s door slides down, and I assume it’ll be a tourist after directions. But, no, I’m wrong. I know this stocky, swarthy driver in a fisherman’s sweater. “G’day, Hugo. You look like a man with a song in his heart.”
His New Zealand accent gives it away. “Elijah D’Arnoq, king of the Cambridge Sharpshooters.” There’s somebody else in the back of the car, but I’m not introduced.
“Your lack of surprise,” I tell D’Arnoq, “suggests this isn’t a chance encounter.”
“Bang on. Miss Constantin sends you her regards.”
I understand. I get to choose between two metamorphoses. One is labeled “Holly Sykes” while the other is … What, exactly?
Elijah D’Arnoq slaps the side of the Land Cruiser. “Hop aboard. Find out what this is all about, or die wondering. Now or never.”
Past the patisserie, down the alley, I can see the crocodile pub sign hanging over Günter’s bar. Fifty paces away? “Get the girl!” counsels the love-drunk, reformed-Scrooge Me. “Imagine her face as you walk in!” The soberer Me folds his arms and looks at D’Arnoq and wonders, “What then?” Well, we’ll eat breakfast; I’ll help Holly clean up the bar; lie low in her place until my fellow Humberites have flown home; we’ll hump like rabbits until we can hardly walk; and while our breaths are coming hard and fast, I’ll blurt out “I love you” and mean it and she’ll blurt out “I love you too, Hugo” and mean it just as much, right then, right there. Then what? I’ll phone the registrar at Humber College to say I’ve suffered a minor breakdown and would like to put my final year on hold. I’ll tell my family—something, no idea what, but I’ll think of something—and buy Holly a telescope. Then what? I find I’m no longer thinking about her every waking moment. Her way of saying “Sort of” or “This is true” begins to grate, and the day comes when we understand that “All You Need Is Love” is rather less than the whole truth. Then what? By now Detective Sheila Young has tracked me down, and her colleagues in Switzerland interview me at the station and only allow me back to Holly’s flat if I surrender my passport. “What’s this about, Poshboy?” Then I’ll have to confess either to stealing an Alzheimer victim’s valuable stamp collection, or luring a fellow student at Humber so deeply into debt that he drove himself off a cliff. Or possibly both, it hardly matters, because Holly will give me back the telescope and get the locks changed. Then what? Agree to go back to London to be interviewed but pick up Marcus Anyder’s passport and book a cheap flight to the Far East or Central America? Such narrative arcs make good movies but shitty existences. Then what? Eke out Anyder’s money until I succumb to the inevitable, open a bar for gap-year kids and turn into Günter. I notice a silver parka on the passenger seat next to D’Arnoq. “Can I just ask for an outline—”