Ernie hadn’t heard me.
“How long will you need to pick the lock?”
“You’ll have to ram the gates.”
“What?”
“Nice big Range Rover at fifty miles per hour should do the trick.”
“What? You said you could pick the lock in your sleep!”
“A state-of-the-art electric thing? No way!”
“I wouldn’t have locked up Noakes and stolen a car if I’d known you couldn’t pick the lock!”
“Aye, exactly, you’re nesh, so you needed encouragement.”
“Encouragement?” I yelled, scared, desperate, furious in equal thirds. The car tore through a shrubbery and the shrubbery tore back.
“How terribly thrilling!” exclaimed Veronica.
Ernie spoke as if discussing a DIY puzzler. “So long as the center pole isn’t sunk deep, the gates’ll just fly apart on impact.”
“And if it is sunk deep?”
Veronica revealed a manic streak. “Then we’ll fly apart on impact! So, foot to the floor, Mr. Cavendish!”
The gates flew at us, ten, eight, six car lengths away. Dad spoke from my pelvic floor. “Do you have any inkling of the trouble you’re in, boy?” So I obeyed my father, yes, I obeyed him and I slammed on the brakes. Mum hissed in my ear: “Sod it, our Timbo, what have you got to lose?” The thought that I had slammed not the brakes but the accelerator was the last—two car lengths, one, wham!
The vertical bars became diagonal ones.
The gates flew off their hinges.
My heart bungee-jumped from throat to bowel, back again, back again, and the Range Rover skidded all over the road, I gripped my intestines shut with all my might, the brakes screeched but I kept her out of the ditches, engine still running, windscreen still intact.
Dead stop.
Fog thickened and thinned in the headlight beams.
“We’re proud of you,” Veronica said, “aren’t we, Ernest?”
“Aye, pet, that we are!” Ernie slapped my back. I heard Withers barking doom and ire, close behind. Ernie wound down the window and howled back at Aurora House: “Waaaaaaazzzzzzoooooo-cccccckkk!” I touched the accelerator again. The tires scuffed gravel, the engine flowered, and Aurora House disappeared into the night. Ruddy hell, when your parents die they move in with you.
“Road map?” Ernie was ferreting through the glove compartment. His finds so far included sunglasses and Werner’s toffees.
“No need. I memorized our route. I know it like the back of my hand. Any escape is nine-tenths logistics.”
“Better steer clear of the motorways. They have cameras and whatnot nowadays.”
I contemplated my career change from publisher to car rustler. “I know.”
Veronica impersonated Mr. Meeks—brilliantly. “I know! I know!”
I told her it was an uncannily accurate impression.
A pause. “I didn’t say anything.”
Ernie turned round and yelled in surprise. When I looked in the mirror and saw Mr. Meeks twitching in the rearmost compartment of the vehicle, I nearly drove us off the road. “How—” I began. “When—who—”
“Mr. Meeks!” cooed Veronica. “What a nice surprise.”
“A surprise?” I said. “He’s broken the laws of ruddy physics!”
“We can’t very well do a U-ie back to Hull,” Ernie stated, “and it’s too cold to drop him off. He’d be an ice block by morning.”
“We’ve run away from Aurora House, Mr. Meeks,” Veronica explained.
“I know,” the sozzled old duffer bleated, “I know.”
“All for one and one for all, is it?”
Mr. Meeks leaked a giggle, sucked toffees, and hummed “The British Grenadiers” as the Range Rover wolfed down the northward miles.
A sign—PLEASE DRIVE CAREFULLY IN SCOTCH CROSS—shone in the headlights. Ernie had ended our route plan here with a big red X, and now I saw why. An all-night petrol station servicing an A-road—next door to a pub called the Hanged Edward. Midnight was long gone, but the lights were still on. “Park in the pub. I’ll go and get us a can of petrol so nobody’ll spot us. Then my vote’s for a swift pint to celebrate a job well done. Silly Johns left his jacket in the car, and in the jacket—tra-la.” Ernie flashed a wallet the size of my briefcase. “I’m sure he can stand us a round.”
“I know!” enthused Mr. Meeks. “I know!”
“A Drambuie and soda,” Veronica decided, “would hit the spot.”
Ernie was back in five minutes carrying the can. “No bother.” He siphoned the petrol into the tank, then the four of us walked across the car park to the Hanged Edward. “A crisp night,” remarked Ernie, offering his arm to Veronica. It was ruddy freezing, and I couldn’t stop shivering. “A beautiful moon, Ernest,” added Veronica, looping hers through his. “What a splendid night for an elopement!” She giggled like a sixteen-year-old. I screwed the lid down on my old demon, Jealousy. Mr. Meeks was wobbly, so I supported him as far as the door, where a blackboard advertised “The Massive Match!” In the warm cave inside, a crowd watched TV soccer in a distant fluorescent time zone. In the eighty-first minute England was a goal down to Scotland. Nobody even noticed us. England playing Scotland, abroad, in the deep midwinter—is it World Cup qualifier time again already? Talk about Rip van Ruddy Winkle.
I’m no fan of television pubs, but at least there was no thumpy-thumpy-thump acidic music, and that evening freedom was the sweetest commodity. A sheepdog made room for us on a fireside pew. Ernie ordered the drinks because he said my accent was too southern and they might spit in my glass. I had a double Kilmagoon and the most expensive cigar the bar could muster, Veronica ordered her Drambuie and soda, Mr. Meeks a ginger beer, and Ernie a pint of Angry Bastard bitter. The barman didn’t take his eyes off the TV—he got our drinks by sense of touch alone. Just as we took our seats in an alcove, a cyclone of despair swept through the bar. England had been awarded a penalty. Tribalism electrified the audience.
“I’d like to check my route. Ernie, the map if you will.”
“You had it last.”
“Oh. Must be in …” My room. Extreme close-up, Director Lars, of Cavendish realizing his fateful mistake. I had left the map on my bed. For Nurse Noakes. With our route marked out in felt pen. “… the car … oh, God. I think we had better drink up and move on.”
“But we’ve only just started this round.”
I swallowed hard. “About the, er, map …” I checked my watch and calculated distances and speeds.
Ernie was catching on. “What about the map?”
My answer was drowned in a howl of tribal grief. England had equalized. And at that exact moment, I fib not, Withers looked in. His Gestapo eyes settled on us. Not a happy man. Johns Hotchkiss appeared beside him, saw us, and he looked very happy indeed. He reached for his mobile phone to summon his angels of vengeance. A third lout with oil-stained overalls completed the posse, but it appeared Nurse Noakes had so far prevailed on Johns Hotchkiss to leave the police out of it. The oily lout’s identity I was never to discover, but I knew right then: the game was up.
Veronica sighed a frail sigh. “I had so hoped to see,” she half-sang, “the wild mountain thyme, all across the blooming heather, and it’s go, lassie, go …”
A drug-addled semilife of restraints and daytime programs lay ahead. Mr. Meeks stood up to go with our jailer.
He let out a biblical bellow. (Lars: zoom the camera in from the outside car park, across the busy bar, and right down between Mr. Meeks’s rotted tonsils.) The TV viewers dropped their conversations, spilt their drinks, and looked. Even Withers was stopped in his tracks. The octogenarian leapt onto the bar, like Astaire in his prime, and roared this SOS to his universal fraternity, “Are there nor trrruuue Scortsmen in tha hooossse?”
A whole sentence! Ernie, Veronica, and I were stunned as mullets.
High drama. Nobody stirred.
Mr. Meeks pointed at Withers with skeletal forefinger and intoned t
his ancient curse: “Those there English gerrrrunts are trampling o’er ma God-gi’en rrraights! Theeve used me an’ ma pals morst dírely an’ we’re inneed of a wee assistance!”
Withers growled at us: “Come quiet and face your punishments.”
Our captor’s southern Englishness was out! A rocker rose like Poseidon and flexed his knuckles. A crane operator stood by him. A sharky-chinned man in a thousand-quid suit. An axwoman with the scars to prove it.
The TV was switched off.
A Highlander spoke softly: “Aye, laddie. We’ll nort let ye doone.”
Withers assessed the stage and went for a get real! smirk. “These men are car thieves.”
“You a copper?” The axwoman advanced.
“Show us your badge then.” The crane operator advanced.
“Aw, you’re full o’ shite, man,” spat Poseidon.
Coolheadedness might have lost us the day, but Johns Hotchkiss scored a fatal own goal. Finding his way blocked by a pool cue, he prefixed his distress with “Now you just look here, you grebo, you can go shag your bloody sporran if you think—” One of his teeth splashed into my Kilmagoon, fifteen feet away. (I fished the tooth out to keep as proof of this unlikely claim, otherwise no one will ever believe me.) Withers caught and snapped an incoming wrist, hurled a wee Krankie over the pool table, but the ogre was one and his enraged foes legion. Oh, the ensuing scene was Trafalgaresque. I must admit, the sight of that brute being brutalized was not wholly unpleasant, but when Withers hit the deck and disfiguring blows began to fall, I proposed a tactful exit stage left to our borrowed vehicle. We departed via the back and scuttled over the blustery car park as fast as our legs, whose combined age well exceeded three centuries, could carry us. I drove. North.
Where all this will end, I do not know.
THE END
Very well, dear Reader, you deserve an epilogue if you’ve stayed with me this far. My ghastly ordeal touched down in this spotless Edinburgh rooming house, kept by a discreet widow from the Isle of Man. After the brawl at the Hanged Edward, we four blind mice drove to Glasgow, where Ernie knows a bent copper who can take care of the Hotchkiss vehicle. Here our fellowship parted. Ernie, Veronica, and Mr. Meeks waved me off at the station. Ernie promised to take the flak if the law were ever to catch up, as he’s too old to stand trial, which is ruddy civilized of him. He and Veronica were headed to a Hebridean location where Ernie’s handyman-preacher-cousin does up falling-down crofts for Russian mafiosi and German enthusiasts of the Gaelic tongue. I offer my secular prayers for their well-being. Mr. Meeks was to be deposited in a public library with a “Please Look After This Bear” tag, but I suspect Ernie and Veronica will take him with them. After my arrival at Widow Manx’s, I slept under my goosedown quilt as sound as King Arthur on the Blessed Isle. Why didn’t I get on the first train south to London, there and then? I’m still not sure. Maybe I recall Denholme’s remark about life beyond the M25. I shall never know what part he played in my incarceration, but he was right—London darkens the map like England’s bowel polyp. There is a whole country up here.
I looked up Mrs. Latham’s home number at the library. Our telephone reunion was a moving moment. Of course, Mrs. Latham smothered her emotion by lambasting me, before filling me in on my missing weeks. The Hoggins Hydra had ripped the office apart when I failed to show for my three o’clock castration, but years of financial brinkmanship had stood my redoubtable pit prop in good stead. She had captured the vandalism on a cunning video camera supplied by her nephew. The Hogginses were thus restrained: steer clear of Timothy Cavendish, Mrs. Latham warned, or this footage will appear on the Internet and your various probations shall hatch into prison sentences. Thus they were prevailed upon to accept an equitable proposal cutting them into future royalties. (I suspect they had a sneaking admiration for my lady bulldog’s cool nerves.) The building management used my disappearance—and the trashing of my suite—as an excuse to turf us out. Even as I write, my former premises are being turned into a Hard Rock Cafe for homesick Americans. Cavendish Publishing is currently run from a house owned by my secretary’s eldest nephew, who resides in Tangier. Now for the best news: a Hollywood studio has optioned Knuckle Sandwich—The Movie for a figure as senselessly big as the number on a bar code. A lot of the money will go to the Hogginses, but for the first time since I was twenty-two, I am flush.
Mrs. Latham sorted out my bank cards, etc., and I am designing the future on beer mats, like Churchill and Stalin at Yalta, and I must say the future is not too shabby. I shall find a hungry ghostwriter to turn these notes you’ve been reading into a film script of my own. Well, sod it all, if Dermot “Duster” Hoggins can write a bestseller and have a film made, why the ruddy hell not Timothy “Lazarus” Cavendish? Put Nurse Noakes in the book, the dock, and on the block. The woman was sincere—bigots mostly are—but no less dangerous for that, and she shall be named and shamed. The minor matter of Johns Hotchkiss’s vehicle loan needs to be handled with delicacy, but fouler fish have been fried. Mrs. Latham got on the e-mail to Hilary V. Hush to express our interest in Half-Lives, and the postman delivered part two not an hour ago. A photo was enclosed, and it turns out the V is for Vincent! And what a lard-bucket! I’m no Chippendale myself, but Hilary has the girth to fill not two but three airline economy seats. I’ll find out if Luisa Rey is still alive in a corner of the Whistling Thistle, my de facto office and a wrecked galleon of a back-alley tavern where Mary, Queen of Scots, summoned the devil to assist her cause. The landlord, whose double measures would be quadruples in management-consulted Londinium, swears he sees Her ill-starred Majesty, regularly. In vino veritas.
That is more or less it. Middle age is flown, but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all. Outside, fat snowflakes are falling on slate roofs and granite walls. Like Solzhenitsyn laboring in Vermont, I shall beaver away in exile, far from the city that knitted my bones.
Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.
40
The black sea roars in. Its coldness shocks Luisa’s senses back to life. Her VW’s rear struck the water at forty-five degrees, so the seat saved her spine, but the car now swings upside down. She is trussed by her seat belt inches from the windshield. Get out, or die here. Luisa panics, breathes a lungful of water, and struggles into a pocket of air, coughing. Unhook this belt. She squirms and jackknifes up to the belt lock. Release button. It doesn’t click. The car half-somersaults deeper, and with a wrenching noise, a giant squid-shaped air bubble flies away. Luisa stabs the button, frantic, and the strap drifts free. More air. She finds an air pocket trapped beneath a windshield of dark water. The sea’s mass jams the door shut. Roll down the window. It inches halfway and jams, right where it always jams. Luisa shimmies around, squeezes her head, shoulders, and torso through the gap.
Sixsmith’s Report!
She pulls herself back into the sinking vehicle. Can’t see a damn thing. A plastic trash bag. Wedged under the seat. She doubles up in the confined space … It’s here. She hauls, like a woman hauling a sack of rocks. She feeds herself feetfirst back out the window, but the report is too fat. The sinking car drags Luisa down. Her lungs ache now. The sodden papers have quadrupled their weight. The trash bag is through the window, but as she kicks and struggles Luisa feels a lightening. Hundreds of pages spin free from the vanilla binder, wheeling wherever the sea will take them, wheeling around her, playing cards in Alice. She kicks off her shoes. Her lungs shriek, curse, beg. Every pulse is a thump in Luisa’s ears. Which way is up? The water is too murky to guess. Up is away from the car. Her lungs will collapse in another moment. Where’s the car? Luisa realizes she has paid for the Sixsmith Report with her life.
41
Isaac Sachs looks down on a brilliant Pennsylvania morning. Labyrinthine suburbs of ivory mansionett
es and silk lawns inset with turquoise swimming pools. The executive-jet window is cool against his face. Six feet directly beneath his seat is a suitcase in the baggage hold containing enough C-4 to turn an airplane into a meteor. So, thinks Sachs, you obeyed your conscience. Luisa Rey has the Sixsmith Report. He recollects as many details of her face as he can. Do you feel doubt? Relief? Fear? Righteousness?
A premonition I’ll never see her again.
Alberto Grimaldi, the man he has double-crossed, is laughing at an aide’s remark. The hostess passes with a tray of clinking drinks. Sachs retreats into his notebook, where he writes the following sentences.
Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction—in short, belief—grows ever “truer.” The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent.
The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to “landscape” the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune)
Symmetry demands an actual + virtual future, too. We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up—a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone.