Armadillo

  It happened at a weekend house party in Wiltshire (or Devon or Cheshire or Gloucestershire or Perthshire). On the Saturday night, copious alcohol had been consumed by the guests, all in their twenties (this was a while ago, in the 1980s), young men and women, couples, singles, a few marrieds, escaping to the country for their precious weekends, fleeing their city homes, their jobs, their humdrum weekday personae. Torquil had been possibly the drunkest that Saturday night, knee-walking drunk, he said, mixing drinks with abandon, whisky following port following claret following champagne. He had risen late on the Sunday morning, after midday, when the other guests had already had breakfast, been for a walk, read the Sunday papers and were now forgathering in the drawing room for pre-Sunday lunch drinks.

  ‘I arrived downstairs’ Torquil says, taking up the story, feeling like total shit, serious bad news, hill-cracking headache, mouth like an ashtray, eyes like pissholes in the snow. And they’re all standing there with their bloody marys, gins and tonics, vodkas and orange juice. There’s a bit of jeering, bit of ribbing as I stumble in, feeling like death, and the girl whose house party it was – forget her name – comes up to me. Everyone was looking at me, you see, because I was so late and I looked like absolute death warmed up, all laughing at me, and this girl comes up to me and says, “Torquil, what’re you going to have to drink? G and T? Bloody mary?” Actually, to tell the truth, the thought made me want to puke and so I said, quite seriously, quite spontaneously, “Ah, no thank you, I couldn’t possibly touch a drop of alcohol, I’ll just have a glass of white wine.”

  At this point he stops and stares at me long and hard and says, ‘Now, you’ve heard that story before, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I remember I said. ‘I have. I can’t think where. It’s an old joke, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. It was me,’ Torquil protests, helplessly, voice cracking. ‘That was me. I said it: I was the first person who said it, ever. It was my line. Now any old smart-arse bounds down the stairs on a Sunday morning and gets a cheap laugh. It’s not an “old joke”, it was something I said. I said it first and everyone’s forgotten.’

  The Book of Transfiguration

  He punched out the telephone number that Alan had given him, realizing that he was functioning on a kind of personal automatic pilot; he was acting on pure whim, without reflection or analysis or thought of any consequences beyond the present moment. The phone rang, rang again, rang again.

  ‘Yeah?’

  A man’s voice. He was jerked out of his robotic reverie: he thought fast.

  ‘Hello, could I speak to Mr Malinverno?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘Oh good. I’m calling from –’

  Lorimer hung up. Why had he not thought of this before? How could this probability, or possibility, not even have entered his calculations? So, she was married. No – it could have been a brother, or even a father, or even an uncle (just). All feeble, self-deluding stuff, he realized: a Mr Malinverno had answered the phone – the odds were that this was the man in her life.

  To clear his mind, and calm himself down, he turned to other more pressing matters: he dictated a letter into his pocket memo for Gale-Harlequin confirming that a reduced claim of £10 million would be acceptable to his clients, Fortress Sure. Janice would arrange to have it typed up and sent off in the morning – at least some sort of satisfactory full-stop had been appended to that chapter of his life.

  Dymphna’s eyes were still heavy and pink-rimmed but she seemed to have regained her usual animated and genial mood, he thought. Appropriately, it was happy hour and they were in The Clinic, a newly themed, large pub off Fleet Street – Dymphna’s choice. The barmen wore white coats and the serving waitresses were dressed in skimpy nurses’ uniforms. Dymphna was drinking a cocktail called a Soluble Aspirin which, as far as Lorimer could tell, was made up of a random selection of white spirits (gin, vodka, white rum, triple sec) topped off with a dash of coconut milk. The music was full-throatedly loud and the place was hectic with suited young men and women weary from work and looking for fun. Dymphna lit a cigarette and puffed smoke into the low grey haze that shifted and eddied above their heads. Lorimer had a slight tension headache, the epicentre located an inch above his left eyebrow.

  ‘He’s a complete bastard,’ Dymphna said. ‘He just wanted to make me cry, for some reason. Kept going on at me. Do you know what made me break? I’m so pissed off with myself. Furious.’

  ‘You don’t need to tell me–

  ‘He said, please don’t come in wearing skirts of that length any more.’

  ‘Bloody nerve.’ Lorimer looked down at Dymphna’s caramel skirt, its hem an orthodox couple of inches above her somewhat pudgy knees.

  ‘He said I had fat legs.’

  ‘Jesus Christ. Well, if it’s any consolation he said I was barking mad. He was in a filthy mood.’

  Dymphna drew heavily and thoughtfully on her cigarette. ‘I don’t have fat legs, do I?’

  ‘Course not. He’s just a mean bastard.’

  ‘Something’s really bugging him. He’s always rude when he’s unsettled.’

  Lorimer wondered if he should tell her the news about Torquil’s impending demise. Then with a shock of clear vision he realized that this was exactly what Hogg was expecting him to do – it was one of the oldest traps in the book and he had almost walked right into it. Perhaps he had told everyone, perhaps it was a test of loyalty, who would leak the news first?

  ‘Another Soluble Aspirin?’ he asked, then added, innocently, I think the presence of Torquil may have something to do with it.’

  ‘That wanker,’ Dymphna said harshly, handing him her cloudy glass. ‘Yes please. One more and you can have your way with me, lovely Lorimer.’

  That was what happened when you tried to be ‘nice’, Lorimer thought, as he ordered another Soluble Aspirin and a low-alcohol beer for himself. He was pretty sure Dymphna knew nothing about the firing but, all the same, he would have to snuff out her amorous tendencies pretty –

  Flavia Malinverno was across the room. He stood on tiptoes and peered – someone’s head was in the way. Then she moved and he saw it wasn’t her at all, nothing like her. Good God, he thought, it showed what was on his mind – practically hallucinating with wishful thinking.

  Dymphna sipped at her white drink, her eyes firmly on him over the glass’s rim.

  ‘What is it?’ Lorimer said. ‘Too strong?’

  ‘I really like you, Lorimer, you know? I’d really like to get to know you better.’

  She reached out and took his hand. Lorimer felt his spirits begin their slow slide.

  ‘Give us a kiss, then,’ she said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Dymphna. I’m seeing someone else.’

  ‘So what? I just want a fuck.’

  ‘I’m… I’m in love with her. I can’t.

  ‘Lucky you.’ She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘It’s hard, meeting someone you like. Then when you do, you find they’ve got someone else. Or they don’t fancy you.’

  ‘I do like you, Dymphna, you know that.’

  ‘Yes, we’re great “chums”, aren’t we.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Who is this damn girl, then? Do I know her?’

  ‘No. She’s an actress. Nothing to do with us, our world.’

  ‘Wise. What’s her name?’

  ‘Flavia. Listen, have you heard of a singer, a rock singer called David Watts?’

  ‘Flavia… What a horribly attractive name. Is she very la-di-da? David Watts? I love David Watts.’

  114. REM Sleep. You have a lot of REM sleep, much more than the average person. Could this be because your brain is in need of more repair each night?

  REM sleep. The brain wave patterns are on a far faster frequency, there is a higher heart beat and respiration, your blood pressure may rise and there is significantly more motility of the facial muscles. Your face may twitch, your eyeballs move behind your closed eyelids, there is increased blood flow to the brain,
your brain becomes hotter. Sometimes in REM sleep your brain is firing more neurons than when you are awake.

  But at the same time your body experiences a form of mild paralysis: your spinal reflexes decline, you have heightened motor inhibition and suppressed muscle tonus. Except in one area of your body. A further identifying characteristic of REM sleep is penile erection or clitoral engorgement.

  The Book of Transfiguration

  The steel crescents set in the toes and heels of his shoe soles clicked militaristically on the concrete floor of the multi-storey carpark, the white fluorescent bulbs leaching the primary colours from the rows of shiny cars, the noise of his shoes contributing to the mood of incipient threat which always appeared to brew amongst these stacked decks after dark, with their unnatural luminosity, their oppressively low ceilings, their bays crowded always with empty cars but unpopulated by their drivers or passengers. He was thinking about Hogg and his mood swings, his bully-boy provocations. Behind the bluffness and the banter he and Hogg had always got along and there was in their exchanges an implicit sense – often jocularly remarked on by his colleagues – that Lorimer was the golden boy, the chosen one, the dauphin to Hogg’s Sun King. But today that had not been the case: the huge confidence that allowed Hogg to swagger through his little fiefdom had been absent – or rather, it had been there, but forced and strained for, and therefore uglier. He had seemed, frankly, worried, and Lorimer had never before associated Hogg with that particular state of mind.

  But what was troubling him? What could Hogg see coming down the pike that he couldn’t? There was a bigger picture here but Lorimer was not staring at the whole canvas. He was right, too: the news about Torquil’s sacking was an attempt at entrapment, a blatant one. Hogg was waiting to see whom he told, waiting to see, Lorimer realized, if he would tell Torquil himself. But why would Hogg think this of him, his golden boy? Why would Hogg test him in this way?

  Lorimer’s steps slowed as the answer came to him. Hogg, troubled, unsettled, aware of these larger dimensions that Lorimer could not yet grasp, saw – or thought he saw – a role in them that was being played by Lorimer himself. Hogg, Lorimer realized with a genuine shock, was suspicious of him. He stood still now, some yards from his car, his brain working. What was it? What could Hogg see that he could not? Something was eluding him, some pattern in recent events… This uncertainty was alarming and it was even more alarming when he considered the natural consequences of suspicion: if Hogg was suspicious, then that implied only one thing – George Gerald Hogg no longer trusted Lorimer Black.

  Someone had done something to the front of his car. Most curious. He saw as he drew near that letters had been made from sand, sand poured on to the bonnet and moulded into two-inch-high ridges to spell – BASTA.

  He looked around him. Had the perpetrator been alerted by the martial click of his shoe steels and fled, or was he, or she, still hiding somewhere near by? He saw no one, nothing stirred, so he swept the cold sand from the gentle slope of the bonnet. How to explain this? Was this directed at him or was it random, his bad luck? BASTA – it meant ‘enough’ in Italian. Or was it an incomplete slur on the marital status of his mother? Basta. Enough. Enough already. Enough questions. He hoped he would sleep tonight, but he doubted it, his mind was already full of his next project: he was going to telephone Flavia Malinverno in the morning.

  Chapter 8

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Could I speak to Flavia Malinverno?’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Hello. This is Lorimer Black. We met —’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Lorimer Black. We –’

  ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘We met very briefly the other day. In the Alcazar. I was the one who was so taken with your performance. In the Fortress Sure advertisement.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ Pause. ‘How did you get my number?’

  ‘I told you – I work for Fortress Sure. All that information is on file.’ He was floundering a bit. ‘From the company who made the film. You know, call sheets, ah, transportation records…’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘They’re very keen on files. They’re an insurance company, remember. Everything filed away somewhere.’

  ‘Oh. You don’t say.’

  ‘Yes.’ In for a penny. ‘I was wondering if we could meet? Drink, buy you lunch or something?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because… Because, I’d like to, is the honest answer.’

  Silence. Lorimer swallowed. No saliva in his arid mouth.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m free Sunday evening. Where do you live?’

  ‘Pimlico. In Lupus Crescent,’ he added, as if that made him sound more alluring and upscale.

  ‘That’s no good. I’ll meet you at the Café Greco in Old Compton Street. 6.30.’

  ‘6.30, Café Greco, Old Compton Street. I’ll be there.’

  ‘See you then, Lorimer Black.’

  I75. Sinbad’s Folly. Sinbad Fingleton had unruly mid-brown hair, frequently unwashed, that formed itself into thick corkscrews, like planed shavings off a plank of wood, and that hung forward over his narrow brow to just below eye-level. He had a chronic sinus problem which meant he sniffed a great deal and was obliged to breathe through his mouth. Consequently his mouth was open most of his waking day, and indeed his sleeping night. He enjoyed simple physical exertion – chopping, mowing, clipping, digging, carrying – which was why his despairing father (phoning a crony on the town council) had managed to swing him a menial job in the Parks Department. His other pleasure was marijuana and its derivatives and from the tales he recounted it sounded that his colleagues shared similar tastes, passing their working hours tending to the lawns and borders, shrubs and saplings of Inverness in an agreeable drug haze. Sinbad was happy to experiment with other drugs and when a friend sold him some tabs of LSD he had driven off in a Parks Department Land Rover and tripped out in the craggy isolation of Glen Affric for thirty-six hours (necessitating a further round of mollifying phone calls from his father, more markers being called in). It had been, Sinbad told the household, the most, you know, amazing experience of his life and he would like to offer – free of charge – some LSD to any fellow tenants who wished to sample the intensity of perceptual change the stuff provoked. Lachlan and Murdo accepted, saying they would take it back to Mull to try. The rest of us indifferently, but politely, declined (Joyce doing so on Shona’s behalf – Shona was keen).

  Sinbad was disappointed by this reticence and so one evening, as Joyce was preparing our communal meal – a large shepherd’s pie – Sinbad dropped three tabs of acid into the simmering mincemeat to ensure that we did not miss out on the mindbending experience he felt sure, really, that in our heart of hearts we wanted. It was one of the evenings when I happened to be staying over.

  The Book of Transfiguration

  Ivan Algomir looked at Binnie Helvoir-Jayne’s scrawled note, her huge, looping handwriting giving instructions about the dinner party.

  ‘Black tie?’ he said. ‘That’s a bit naff, isn’t it?’ He sniffed. ‘I suppose it’s just allowable these days, there must be someone grand coming.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘If it’s just a bunch of friends then it’s unforgivable. Where the hell is Monken Hadley?’

  ‘It’s in the borough of Barnet,’ Lorimer said, ‘believe it or not.’

  ‘Priddion’s Farm, Monken Hadley? You could be in darkest Gloucestershire.’

  ‘It’s about a mile from the beginning of the A1.’

  ‘Sounds very dodgy to me. Well, if you’ve got to go black tie, remember: no wing collar; a proper bow tie that you tie, a black one too, absolutely no colours; no silly velvet slippers; no cummerbund; no frilly shirts; no black socks; no handkerchief in the pocket. Velvet coat’s all right. I know,’ he said, smiling suddenly and showing his big ruined teeth, ‘you can go in a kilt. Perfect. Black Watch tartan. Ideal, Lorimer.’

  ‘Can I wear a dirk?’

&
nbsp; ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘What’s wrong with black socks?’

  ‘Only butlers and chauffeurs wear black socks.’

  ‘You’re a genius, Ivan. What do you think about fobs? I rather fancy one.’

  ‘No gentleman wears a fob, ghastly affectation. If you don’t want physically to wear a wristwatch then just carry it in your pocket. Far more the thing to do, believe me.’

  ‘Right,’ Lorimer said. ‘Now, about this helmet.’ He spread out three polaroids of his helmet collection and handed Ivan the list of their provenances. Ivan glanced at them and pushed them away.

  ‘Not interested in the burgonet or the barbute, but this fellow looks good. I’ll give you five thou for him. Oh, all right, seven thousand for all three.’

  ‘Done.’ Lorimer was making a profit but it was irrelevant – he never bought his helmets to make a profit. ‘I’ve got them in the car.’

  ‘Write me a cheque for £ 13,000 and he’s yours,’ Ivan said, reaching over to a table where the Greek helmet stood on its stand and setting it in front of Lorimer. ‘I’m barely covering my costs on this.’

  Lorimer thought. ‘I can write you a cheque,’ he said, ‘but you’ll have to hold on to it until I say. I’ve got a rather nice bonus coming in but it’s not through yet.’

  Ivan smiled fondly at him. Lorimer knew the affection was genuine, and not just because he was a regular customer. Ivan enjoyed his role as consigliere and general fount of all wisdom about matters sartorial and social. Like many Englishmen he cared little for what he ate or drank – a gin and tonic and banana sandwich would suit at any hour of the day – but in matters of decorum Lorimer treated him as positively oracular, and Ivan was amused and rather flattered to be consulted. It also helped that Lorimer never challenged a single opinion Ivan expressed or statement he made.