Fascination: Stories

  ‘I can see you’re a happy man,’ a voice said. ‘A successful man.’

  I recognized the standard pitch of the fortune teller and turned to see a tall, lean man in a black fedora, sashed, fringed and beaded as if he were auditioning for the part of a gypsy soothsayer in a pantomime. He held out a bunch of white heather.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You’re a Scotchman and I have white heather. I knew I’d meet a Scotchman today.’

  Not a fortune teller, I thought, just another Venice nutter. ‘I’m English,’ I said. ‘There’s a big difference.’

  ‘Oh no, you’re a Scotchman. Buy my white heather for fifty dollars. It’ll bring you luck.’

  ‘No thank you.’ I turned and walked away I didn’t need his luck.

  ‘Give it to Sarah.’

  I stopped.

  ‘Give it to your girl, Sarah. Sarah, the one you love.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re all wrong. Look, it’s getting embarrassing.’

  ‘Your daughter Sarah, then.’

  ‘I have two sons. Goodnight.’

  I turned and left him, striding away, then slowed, trying to summon up the serenity I had so briefly experienced, but it did not re-occur. The fortune teller’s absurd certainties had broken the mood, and, annoyingly, his words nagged at me as I walked home. White heather brought you luck – why? Who said it did? But I couldn’t help thinking I should have bought his lucky charm.

  Odell Demarco was waiting for me at the site, dressed in cream shirt and tan trousers and cream and tan correspondent shoes. Cement was being poured into the new foundations of the house that John-Jo had designed for him. In front of it and facing the sea lay a gently sloping seven-acre wasteland that I was meant to transform into his paradise garden. His smile was a little tense as we shook hands.

  ‘Hey, Alex,’ he said by way of hello. ‘The moustache – like it, suits you.’

  ‘Thank you, Odell,’ I said. He hadn’t given me permission to call him Odell but it was the Harrigan-Rief practice not to fawn on clients, however wealthy. If he wanted me to call him Mr Demarco then he would have to call me Mr Rief.

  ‘Where’s Yolanda?’ I asked, Yolanda being the second, or perhaps the third, Mrs Demarco.

  ‘Yolanda is kind of worried, if I may be candid,’ Demarco said, candour shining worriedly from his eyes. ‘She wanted me to take this meeting alone. But she did ask me to insist on the thirty-yard pool.’

  ‘She should have been here,’ I said, smiling. ‘The pool is now sixty yards long.’ I placed my sketchpad on the wide glossy bonnet of his car. ‘Shall we go to work?’

  That night in ‘Moon’ I ordered a bottle of vintage Krug from Leandra and insisted she have a glass. I heard the ‘ting’ of her lip stud hit its rim as she brought the glass to her mouth.

  ‘Oh, I should have made a toast,’ she said. ‘What are we celebrating?’

  I raised my glass. ‘Death to all Philistines,’ I said. Demarco had been remarkably firm and calm as he fired me that morning and I saw the billionaire in him, all of a sudden, all his magnate’s ruthless self-assurance. He ordered me immediately to reinstate my original plans and I refused, politely. He ordered me to hand over the original plans – with their even terraces, their exact symmetries – and I again refused. He threatened a law-suit; I referred him to various clauses in our contract. He said he would halt work on the house and have a new one designed – so I in turn threatened a law-suit on behalf of Harrigan-Rief.

  ‘You are free to accept or reject the design I propose,’ I said. ‘That is all.’

  ‘But this is crazy. Where’s the pool? What’s this hill-thing you’ve put there? And what’s that?’

  ‘An acre of bamboo.’

  ‘Are you out of your fucking mind? I’ll be a laughing stock.’

  ‘You’ve a chance to make your reputation as a man of extraordinary taste and foresight.’

  We traded implicit insults for a little longer before he ordered me off the site and put in a call to John-Jo on his cell-phone.

  In retrospect I think it was the transformation of the pool that most freaked him out – and the thought of Yolanda’s potential response to my design. I had indeed proposed the shaping of an unevenly conic hill (instead of the neat descent of wide terraces) and around the base of the hill I had placed a pool in the shape of an ox-bow lake, irregularly curved, narrowing in the middle and forming a wide pool (with overflow) on the seaward side of the hill. There was not a straight line in sight and the paths I envisaged wound and meandered around gradients and through cut gullies, before losing themselves in the green darkness of the bamboo grove.

  My drawings left nothing to the imagination: I had done two versions, one representing the immediate completion of planting and one as I imagined the place would look ten years hence. Nothing was ambiguous, everything was fixed and sure – exact. The gardens of the Demarco House in Pacific Pallisades would have been my crowning glory.

  ‘May 23rd. I have not left my room for three days. Leandra brings food, drink and cigarettes when she comes back from the bar. We seem to have adopted the habit of making love in the morning – she says she’s too tired after a night’s work. I was disappointed to find that her tattoo is a solitary one and that she removes her lip stud to sleep. Her body is remarkably pale. If I’m not too hungover we make love before breakfast and she is happy to accept the hundred dollars I press on her. Tonight she says she is bringing me some pills – to “juice me up” she says.’

  Leandra and I spent about a week together in this temporary coupledom before she grew tired of me. Or at least I supposed it was fatigue – it may have been sheer disappointment. When she didn’t come back from the ‘Moon’ one night, I went there the next day to seek her out but she told me in no uncertain terms it was over. I offered her a two-hundred dollar fee and she called the manager.

  ‘You’re disgusting,’ were her last words. ‘Look at yourself. Take a bath. You stink.’

  The subsequent days passed in something of a blur. I stopped keeping my journal and I took to serious and steady drinking. There was a girl who caught my eye in a 24-hour 7–11 where, driven out by hunger, I bought my snacks. She was Mexican, I think, and her name was Encarnacion. She had a friendly smile, was plump and had white-blonde streaks in her hair and many fine gold chains around her neck. I cleaned myself up and asked her to dinner. We ate Chinese in Santa Monica and wandered back to my studio. We were kissing in the middle of the floor when the door bell rang.

  John-Jo Harrigan was standing there. I saw his eyes flick by me to Encarnacion, who was smoothing her rumpled blouse unconcernedly.

  ‘Time to go home, Alex,’ John-Jo said, softly.

  Part II. London

  ‘July 21st. London swelters in seasonal heat and torpor and I do not love my wife. I look at her, I see how attractive she is, I can summon up the memory of the love we once shared – and its intensity – but I realize I cannot live in the past. I am sharing the house with a concerned and congenial acquaintance who, apart from pointed remarks about my smoking, my drinking and my indolence, tolerates my presence – indeed, more than tolerates, she does everything she can to make me as comfortable as possible.’

  But I could sense, even in my self-absorption, my absolute selfishness, that her patience and concern were finite. My sons Ben and Conor had left home – Ben was at university, now spending the summer with some girl in Cornwall, Conor was in Zimbabwe with UNESCO – and we were more or less left to our own devices. Friends were discreet: the word was I had become unwell, needed time to recuperate. Only John-Jo was a regular visitor. On those stifling summer evenings I used to sit in the garden, my fist round a cold vodka, and watch Stella’s tall figure move among the plants in the thickening light, pruning and deadheading, and be aware that my gaze was one of utter objectivity, noting merely the way she flicked back a wing of ashblonde hair, or the shape of her rump as she bent to pull a weed free, or her leggy stroll towards me on the terrace, and realized I could have bee
n looking at anyone – at Leandra, even, or Encarnacion. And then with an urgent spasm of irritation and regret I would recall that I had gone no further with Encarnacion than one panting, tongue-tangling kiss and would blame – with adamantine illogic – Stella for that huge and abiding disappointment.

  ‘July 25th. I worry for my future relationship with John-Jo. Yesterday I went out to the landfill site in Slough and the site manager would not let me in. So I called John-Jo and he said that my visit last week (when I had ordered the main valley we had constructed to be deepened) had cost the firm possibly tens of thousands of pounds as we would now not meet the deadline and the penalty clause payments would kick in. I said the landscaping was flawed. He said, and I quote, “It’s just a fucking landfill, Alex.” I said, “But my name goes on it.” “Our name,” he said, “we’re partners, remember.”’

  I began to worry that the medication I was being given was affecting my mood – I felt either lethargic and surly or else irritable and wired-up. After John-Jo had flown me home to London I went to a clinic for a week’s convalescence – apparently I was dehydrated and malnourished, my metabolism seriously out of kilter. I was tranquillized and slept for seventy-two hours. When I awoke, fuddled, but clean and relatively calm, I realized that while I had been asleep I had been bathed and shaved. On Stella’s instructions my moustache had been shaved off. I missed it, my upper lip felt vulnerable and etiolated: I knew that I had to begin to grow it again immediately. I asked for cigarettes. I had not smoked for twenty years but for some reason had felt the craving begin in California – that smokeless zone – and was up to two packs a day before very long.

  Sometimes I sensed Stella’s covert stare on me and felt her sadness snaking out to enfold me. Even in my rare moments of lucidity, I resented her pity and incomprehension, resented her compassion. From time to time she tried to talk to me about it: what was happening? was I unhappy? why – in more fraught moments – was I trying to destroy our lives? She summoned Ben home for a weekend from Cornwall and we spent a tense few days. I found Ben suddenly gauche and unfunny, his undergraduate humour (my moustache was the subject of many a sally) became increasingly offensive. I saw that my coldness disturbed him, quite profoundly, and he decided to leave. I made no effort to see him off, though I noticed that Stella was red-eyed and teary all day – and I heard her later that evening talking urgently to Conor in Africa.

  ‘August 2nd. I was in an optician’s in Kensington High Street yesterday morning buying my third pair of sunglasses in three days from a sly-looking dark girl with a love-bite on her neck – whom I had just learned was called Megan – when a transformation occurred. It was as if I had shed something, or something had left me. For an instant I felt quite faint and shaky and drew a concerned inquiry from Megan. I breathed deeply and looked around me with suddenly clear eyes. I remembered I had come to this shop because I was becoming obsessed with this girl in the same way as I had with Leandra and Encarnacion. I apologized to her and left.

  ‘I went home and apologized to Stella – the relief in her eyes was heartrending. We talked into the small hours, deciding that I must have been having some kind of breakdown, that perhaps the medication was finally beginning to work and some equilibrium was returning, finally, to our lives (I called Ben and apologized for my boorishness – poor lad). And yet, this morning, as I lathered my face with shaving cream and tried to shave off my moustache, my arms locked rigid once more. One step at a time, Stella said, easy does it. At least you’re thinking straight.’

  It was Petra Fairbrother, my psychiatrist, who encouraged me systematically to look at the evidence and lay out the clues. She was a fleshy, loose-lipped woman with large, soft hands that she flapped around a lot. She was also deeply intelligent but, like a lot of intelligent Englishwomen (and men, come to that) she took great pains to conceal her intellect beneath a fog of genial dilettantism. She would hear nothing of vague diagnoses like nervous breakdown, mid-life crisis, schizophrenia. ‘Sounds, you know, more interesting than that – too, you know, sort of precise,’ she said, pointing a pencil at me. She was particularly fascinated with the pages of my notebook where the elongated x’s had been written, particularly intrigued by the fact that this sign-writing had never reappeared. She asked me to write the sign in front of her – which I did without pause.

  ‘It triggers nothing?’ she asked, disappointment tingeing her voice. ‘Not a tremor, not a shiver?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, writing half a dozen more x’s.

  ‘I just feel it must be the key somehow,’ she said, frowning, tugging on an earlobe and making popping noises with her lips.

  ‘I think it’s a sex thing,’ I said, with some shame. ‘Something buried in my psyche – to do with a certain type of woman.’

  ‘But there was nothing sexual going on in the aeroplane, when it all started.’

  I assured her there wasn’t. Then I remembered about the headache.

  ‘August 5th. Headache. Elongated x’s. Moustache. Cigarettes. Sexual fantasy. Fantasies of prostitution. Women of lower class. Anomie. Lack of personal hygiene. Aggression. The Demarco garden. The landfill. Hostility to family. Alcoholism… Could the headache be the simple answer? Do I need a brainscan? I have had three days of normality – near normality. Stella shaved my upper lip last night. I felt nothing. We made love. Why do I feel this is some sort of phony peace, a false dawn?’

  My worries were valid. I seemed to be fluctuating between a form of tense, watchful normality – family life restarted, I even went into the office – and moods that I only recognized were aberrant and dangerous in their aftermath.

  One day, after leaving the practice in Notting Hill, I stopped to buy a newspaper and I saw a girl working in a butcher’s shop (why do women who work as butchers or fishmongers wear so much make-up?). She was dark with a slightly prognathous jaw and a mass of dense, dry hair pulled back from her strong face in a bun the size of a cottage loaf. Her lips were cerise pink and her mascaraed eyes studied me beneath skyblue lids as I ordered enough meat to feed a platoon of soldiers. As she sliced rump steak, and bagged dozens of sausages I stared at her avidly – noting the bloom of dark hair on her forearms, her sturdy calves as she turned to reach for the cleaver, the hairbrush handle jutting from the pocket of her nylon overalls. I leant up against the glass of the counter feeling my erection flatten against the pane, wondering if this burly girl was the daughter of the small, bald man mincing veal along the counter, and what she or he would say if I asked her out for a drink. I paid for my meat with two fifty-pound notes – betokening immense wealth, I hoped – and said,

  ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking but I’ve just moved into this neighbourhood and I was wondering if there was a good pub around here – you know, one you’d recommend…’

  She scratched her arm and frowned. ‘What d’ you think Frank?’ she asked the veal-mincer. There was a short debate on the merits of the local pubs until one called the Duke of Clarence was elected as the most salubrious. I thanked them, smiled at her, my eyes full of messages, and left.

  As I dropped my heavy bag of meat in the nearest litter bin a depressing wave of insight washed over me and I saw my sexual obsession in all its weaselly shame. But in the butcher’s I had had only one thought in mind, all my snouty desire focused on this strapping girl with her rosy, bloodstained hands. I felt salt tears prick at my eyelids as I drove home to my long-suffering wife.

  ‘August 9th. It seems I hit John-Jo yesterday morning in the office, swung a series of haymakers at him, one connecting with the side of his jaw, breaking the ring finger of my left hand. I remember nothing of it. Apparently I was incoherent with drink. For the third night running I had spent the evening in the Duke of Clarence waiting for my butcher-girl to show, in vain. So as the pub closed I bought a bottle of vodka and settled down in my car to drink it. I must have made my way to the office, somehow, the next morning. Stella says I accused John-Jo of betraying me, of systematically stealing my ideas over the y
ears, taking credit where none was due… Then launched myself at him. Poor Stella.’

  ‘It seems to be changing,’ I said to Petra Fairbrother. ‘It’s not like California, where it was constant, now it comes and goes, as if something’s being switched on and off.’

  ‘Might I bum a ciggie off you?’ Petra asked. She took one from my pack and I watched her light it awkwardly, as if it was the first time in her life she’d attempted such a thing, and then saw her inhale smoke deep into her lungs. ‘Lovely,’ she said, ‘So, do you think the grip is weakening?’

  ‘The grip?’

  ‘Whatever has you in its power.’

  ‘You sound like some sort of necromancer, witchdoctor.’

  ‘I’m speaking metaphorically, Alex dear. But, then again, I suppose we could, not unreasonably, be seen as witchdoctors, modern ones,’ she smiled, then plumed smoke out of the side of her mouth in a noisy gust, ‘trying to drive your demons away.’

  ‘Demons…’I repeated slowly. ‘A demon.’

  ‘A handy metaphor. But you are warring with demons, Alex, make no mistake.’

  I frowned, thinking. ‘All the girls are dark, and they all had jobs. I don’t just want to buy sex, I’m sure.’ I told her how I had stood in a London phone box, the glass sides darkened with dozens of prostitute’s cards, illustrated with improbable nubile beauties of all races, plying for trade. ‘I felt nothing. I could have called any one of them up. It’s something to do with the type of girl, a working girl…’ I looked at her helplessly. ‘Maybe I should be hypnotized?’