B00BCLBHSA EBOK (3 page)

Archie took his notebook with him whenever he left home. The ritual of writing in it calmed him and prepared him for the day, though he rarely looked back over it. It was not a way of making plans or generating ideas. He only wanted to spill the thoughts and then move on. Other than the happy endings, the content was dark and disturbing, a jumble of nonsense punctuated by violent images. There were the shape-shifting, half-remembered, initially rather mundane situations of his dreams:
I was walking down the road and I saw Sheena, and then I realized it was Sookie, and we were supposed to go to the shop on the corner because we hadn’t any milk for our tea.
Then the memory or the imagination burrowed down another layer and uncovered something nastier. There were children’s dirty faces barely glimpsed at an upstairs window as flames engulfed a house. There were violent blows from a man’s big fist. There were screams, cries, a woman pleading for help. There was not enough food. There were babies with nappy rash, their neglected little bottoms soaked in urine. There were attempts to escape, and hands hauling the woman back. On some pages in the notebook there was a throat cut in the night, though on other pages there were descriptions of violent dogs let out of a locked room, doing damage to human flesh with their slobbery, sharp teeth. Sometimes angels or demons were released, and they swooped down and crushed the man, though he fought back violently.

These tormented fragments were followed with longer passages about romantic love that were expressed more coherently, if a little tritely, revealing characters and stories that would be familiar to readers of the popular romance novels that Archie wrote and published under the name of Annie Farrow. These books usually featured a kind, strong man intervening to save a long-suffering woman and reward her travails by offering her a second chance in life. The kind man would be unassuming; she wouldn’t notice him at first, thinking that there was no hope, that no one would intervene to prevent her humiliation at the hands of the violent brute she had married. She would be hardworking, from a low social class, not beautiful but with an inner purity that outsiders sensed and appreciated. She would be almost broken by her troubles. But this kind man would have the courage and the finances to be able to whisk her away—taking her small children with them, if she had any—to start a new life with him a long, long way away, in Canada or Australia or America, or sometimes in the Scottish Highlands. The new life would be tough but rewarding. She would learn to love the kind man. She would forget the other.

Page after page of Archie’s notebook went like this: mundane situations, misremembered fragments, horrible images of a woman and children suffering, retribution, and then the happy-ever-after with a decent life with a kind, loving man, in a land far, far away.

Outside in Edinburgh, in a street silvered with rain, a taxi tooted its horn. Archie went to the window and looked down. The taxi was waiting for him. He closed the notebook. He put the lid back on his pen. He put it, with the notebook, into his hand luggage. The contents of such a notebook might be difficult to explain if the book should fall into insensitive hands. Not everyone believes in the happy-ever-after. There is a certain kind of reader who would be disinclined to try to interpret the dream sequences as dreams, who might concentrate on the horrible images of carving, cutting, stabbing, biting and fighting. To such a person—a policeman, perhaps—Archie’s morning scribblings would be a sign of a disturbed mind, perhaps describing some kind of sick fantasy that he wanted to carry out.

Below, the taxi tooted its horn again. Archie looped the handle of his hand luggage over the metal pull-along handle of his modest-size suitcase. He took a quick look round the flat to make sure everything was switched off that ought to be off, and all the windows closed. He patted his pockets—wallet, keys, a small amount of loose change. He had everything he needed. He went downstairs to get into the taxi. It was to take him to the station where he would catch a train to King’s Cross in London, traveling on from there by taxi to the Coram Hotel in Bloomsbury.

Monsieur Cyril Loman sat on a wooden stool behind the counter of his confectionery shop in a Regency Arcade off Piccadilly in London, and read the
Daily Mail
. It was quite early in the morning, and there were no customers in his shop. If there had been, he would have been standing, politely waiting for an inquiry, ready to be of service. This shop was his pride. It was a good business. As well as what was available to passing trade on glass shelves in the shop, M. Loman also supplied hotels, embassies and wealthy private individuals. With enough notice, he could make for your child’s birthday a teddy bears’ picnic created with chocolate bears, and all the fruits in the picnic basket—even the basket itself—made from confectionery. He would remember your wife’s birthday, your mistress’s birthday, your mother’s birthday, your personal assistant’s birthday, your boss’s birthday, your children’s birthdays, your wedding anniversary, even when you were too busy to remember these dates yourself. He could make a filling for a chocolate that was as individual and intimate as a perfume on a woman’s skin. His chocolates told a story. They asked you to remember the taste of summer when you were a child, or the kiss of a woman you loved when you were nineteen years old. They whispered memories of a holiday with your lover in France, or Christmas with the family at home.

With his chocolates, M. Loman created and sold fantasies—even to himself. He found a little fantasy was necessary to get through each day because, up until the age of fifteen, when he reached this country after several failed attempts and was finally able to claim political asylum, he had had a very difficult life.

Even now, granted leave to remain in the UK and with a long apprenticeship at his craft, followed by longer years as a successful businessman, life was not easy. M. Loman read the English newspapers and worried. The articles complained of illegal immigrants and overcrowding. M. Loman had the sense of something closing in. The tax on luxury goods had increased, making his chocolates slightly less attractive to customers than they had been the previous year. There were peaks in sales. Valentine’s, of course, was a good time for purveyors of chocolates. He wished the world were more romantic. French is one of several languages he speaks. The English, so proud of their fair-mindedness, so self-deprecating about their plodding kindness, were in fact very quick to judge. And mean with money. Why not splash out on treats? All they had going for them was their National Health Service, and they were quietly dismantling that. He had suffered horribly in his past. The things he had seen…Mostly he wanted to forget, but he couldn’t forget. Talking helped. Helping others helped. And he had treatment for the injuries to his body from caring professionals. M. Loman paid his taxes and national insurance like everyone else, and was a regular visitor to the outpatient clinic near his home.

The business he ran involved catering to pampered, rich people who had no idea what it was like to try to balance the books every day. He wished he could say that none of them had any idea what he himself had endured, so far away, so long ago. But sometimes he saw someone, an exile from a corrupt regime, or even a current participant in it, and there was something in their eyes—not cruelty so much as
knowing
. They knew there was evil in the world because they had witnessed it or participated in it. They came into the shop and bought bonbons for pretty daughters, or they got out their credit card to pay for a chocolate unicorn ordered by a mistress for an extravagant party, and they looked at Cyril Loman and he looked at them, and they both
knew
. They were in a chocolate shop in an ornate historical covered arcade in Piccadilly. Green Park was in front of them, Hyde Park was just over there. Buckingham Palace was a short walk away in one direction, Fortnum & Mason in the other. Mayfair was behind them. The law was all around them. Fresh air and calm green spaces, shopkeeping, the British legal system—all these things were prized both by the British public and Cyril Loman. It (as well as his admiration for the NHS) was what had persuaded him to make his home here—at great expense; his family had spent everything on his passage here, and there was no safety net. But, in the end, it might not be enough to protect him. Those bullies with the knowing eyes knew it. They looked at him as they bought their bonbons for their pretty daughters and sometimes—choosing at random a half-pound box of chocolate-covered bitter orange sticks, or chocolate-covered maraschino cherries—they said, “Give me one of those, as well.” And M. Loman smiled and added it to the order, knowing they didn’t intend to pay for it. They stood there, in their expensive suits that had been tailored to fit their big, greedy bodies, and they took a pound of chocolates without paying for them, because it was all M. Loman had to give, and because they could. Were they suggesting, by doing it, that they suspected M. Loman had not got here strictly legally? That, though he dutifully paid his taxes and his national insurance on behalf of Cyril Loman, they suspected Cyril Loman might be surprised to know it, having died prematurely around twenty years ago. M. Loman was a man whose shop stood, metaphorically speaking, on quicksand. He was not surprised when he felt his feet sink half an inch or so into the cold mud below him, and he knew it was best not to struggle or he would just go deeper in. But if it came to it, he would throw a rope around something or someone to pull himself out, and if they should fall in beside him, he couldn’t promise that he wouldn’t step on their shoulders to get himself out. Because wherever M. Loman came from—was it the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Was it Haiti? Was it Rwanda?—he had no intention of going back.

The doorbell jangled, and M. Loman put the newspaper down and leaped lightly to his feet. The customer was one he recognized and was cautiously fond of. A slightly eccentric, elfin woman in a blue angora beret who stretched out both hands to him (rather awkward—a handshake was more businesslike, the two-hand grasp implied that one of them had just won a BAFTA, and that wasn’t ever going to happen).

“Monsieur Loman,” she said, in her smoky Marianne Faithfull voice, “I have the most marvelous sponsorship opportunity for you. Are you busy now? Can we talk about it?”

M. Loman knew what this meant. This lovely lady, who lived in material comfort in her tidy little million-pound townhouse in Highgate, was not going to stiff him for a box of handmade chocolates. No indeed. She was going to stiff him for forty boxes. And he was going to pretend to be happy about it. Business was business. Something might come of it.

“Is it time for the conference already, Mizz Blakely?” he inquired. “How the days go by so fast.” He took her two hands in his, bowed, and kissed them. He was the perfect French gentleman. The creator of fantasies.

Zena was lying in the bath in her flat in Muswell Hill in North London. Not
lying
in it: she was luxuriating in it. Her fingers, with their purple-painted nails, hung loosely over each side of the enamel rim at the top of the bathtub, ensuring the skin stayed wrinkle-free. Her hands and her mind were perhaps the two most important parts of Zena, because they helped her to earn her living. She needed her fingers for typing, and she protected them from potentially damaging household chores, like cleaning and cooking. She didn’t like to open so much as a can of tomatoes for fear of slicing her fingers and slowing her progress at the keyboards. Paper cuts were an unavoidable injury in her line of work, but she tried to avoid all other possible injuries to her hands, so far as she could. Her mind was to be treasured more than any physical part of her. She visualized it as a beautiful dove that nestled most of the time in a jeweled cathedral (the high domed ceiling of the cathedral was created by the bones of her skull; the jewels that decorated it were her brown tourmaline eyes and her pretty white teeth), but some days she sent the dove flying off beyond the physical limits of its existence by expanding her consciousness, then brought it home again bearing some magical gift for her in its beak. Zena was a person who was unembarrassed about thinking of herself as the center of the world, and being showered with gifts.

This morning the dove was still perched in its cathedral, its soft breast fluttering as it dreamed the stories that fed her imagination, while Zena’s body swam safely in the waters of the warm, silky, scented artificial lake she had created within the porcelain shores of her bathtub in North London.

The bathwater covered most of Zena’s body and all of her modesty. There were just the two dark brown islands of her knees above the milky sea that she lay in, and of course her neck, face and head, her hair hidden away beneath a puffy, purple bath hat.

Zena hummed. Why not? She was happy. It was midmorning and she was in the bath. It was part of her job to lie here and prepare herself to write her sensual stories. She was an indolent person, but when she thought of her preparations for her writing day, she compared herself to an athlete—in those few moments before a sprinting race when the fingertips touch the ground, when mind and body are in tune, and then—whoosh!—all the power of the body is unleashed. In her case, as she lay here, fingertips touched to the enamel of her bathtub, water cooling, she was preparing herself for the moments afterwards when her mind would be unleashed.

Zena liked to rehearse the events of the day in her mind before she carried them out. It was an exercise in positive thinking, but it also helped to reinforce her sense of herself as some kind of North London goddess: she imagined something, and then it came to pass. And, a little like the gods and goddesses of ancient mythology, if something didn’t come to pass exactly as she had imagined it, she could sometimes be a little cranky, to say the least.

This morning, she imagined receiving a call on her mobile phone. And, lo, the phone started to ring. Of course, this was because Zena had booked a call with a local journalist. But in imagining it, she was prepared for it.