Damascus (17 page)

‘You don't want to end up like your father, do you?'

Pop
. A sigh almost, as if the lock of the cash compartment gives way willingly. It swings open and Spencer carefully builds columns of large denomination coins on top of the telephone, for immediate use. It is Hazel's mother who answers, so Spencer says it's Sam Carter for Hazel. (He once put on an Irish accent, just to scare her, but she cut him off.) Whenever Hazel's younger sister picks up he tells her it's the Pope or the Home Secretary or someone else scary like Anthony Hopkins. This is their code, and he and Olive like a little joke together. Hazel's father never answers.

Spencer pushes in more coins, waiting for Hazel to come to the phone. Today he wants to tell her about his brother Philip, whose wife Alison gave birth only this morning to a baby girl. They have decided to call her Rachel, and Spencer is still trying to recover from the shock of his brother's stupidity. He is safely married. He has a dull but secure job at Computeach International or the Clydesdale Bank or the Equal Opportunities Commission, so why go and ruin it all by openly flaunting the gods and calling his daughter Rachel? Spencer intends to call her by some other name, although he could have discussed this in greater detail with Hazel if Hazel knew that Rachel was dead. Rachel his sister he means. Whenever Hazel asks about his family Spencer says they're fine fine and his sporting sister she's fine too, and then they move on to something else. Now he doesn't know how to explain it to her without making it sound like a chat-up line.

And here is Hazel saying ‘Hi Sam' and sharing some nice-sounding problems about how to amuse herself with her Dad's money before University qualifies her to prosper as a doctor or lawyer or business person. Even her problems reinforce Spencer's idea that wherever Hazel is and whatever she's doing is better than being where he is, doing nothing much except rob phone-boxes. His own life seems so banal to him that he hopefully attributes significance to other people's lives in general, and to Hazel's in particular. She has a scholarship to a private school. She's going to University, and now he's desperate to meet her before it's too late, before success takes her up and away from him and into outer space.

She always puts him off. She says maybe next year, when they can both drive. In the meantime she suggests sending a photograph, and Spencer fingers an incipient boil on his nose.

‘We could do that,' he says, and changes the subject by suggesting they play one of Hazel's games. Apart from Geography Endings, which can go on for ever, they tend to make up rules and games as they go along. One of their favourites is Right Now, where the person in the phone-box has to describe exactly what they can see through the phone-box window, right now exactly as they're describing it. Today, however, they end up playing If Countries Were People Who Wouldn't You Marry? Ireland, definitely not, Russia, Iraq, Israel. England. This leads on to Greatest Living Briton, and while Hazel compares the achievements of Helen Sharman and Frank Bruno, Spencer finds himself wondering why he can't just meet her, settle down, and live happily ever after. He loves her, of course, and she's beautiful even if he doesn't know what she looks like, just as he knows she's rich without knowing how much money she has.

In fact, Spencer is already taking steps to make himself worthy of her. At the library he now heads straight for Fiction A-Z, and Jane Austen or Jack London or Henry Miller. He never knew there was so much in it. He always keeps some of the phone-box money to buy a daily newspaper of the improving kind, and is constantly fed visions of public glory in writing, acting, politics, and even sport (he'd please his father yet). On the whole he tends towards a preference for Spencer Kelly: actor. This is probably because he still likes watching television more than reading books, but also because Hazel might reasonably be expected to love a successful actor. He'll then be able to tell her about his sister Rachel, and if it still sounds like a chat-up line he imagines he'll manage to live with it. After the falling in love there comes the happily ever after in Suffolk or Sussex or Shropshire, with a surprisingly large town house off the King's Road in London. They wouldn't actually do very much. They'd live like retired rockstars or top chefs between restaurants.

Spencer also decides, if he's serious about becoming an actor (and he seriously wants to impress Hazel), that he'll have to go to London. He knows how it goes. You arrive an unknown, usually by coach or train, then hang around for a while waiting for your lucky break. Probably you take on a colourful but menial part-time job, for biographical reasons. Then you get sighted in a public place by Polanski or Minghella or Jane Campion, and the next day you wake up a somebody. It's London and you're an overnight success and it happens all the time. It's a miracle. It's Damascus.

‘So Helen Sharman then,' Hazel says. ‘How much money have you got left?'

Spencer looks at his columns of coins and says he has a little while. He asks her open-ended questions and presses the phone hard against his ear until her voice seems to be coming from inside his head. He wills her to keep on talking, suddenly frightened for the frailty of his connection to a wider world.

11/1/93 M
ONDAY
12:12

Outside in the street again, disappointed by the pearl-grey cover of unmoving cloud, Spencer despaired of ever seeing any meaningful weather. A convoy of circus tracks was jammed in the road. Bright paint on the sides of the vans announced
Billy Smarts Strongman
and
Aladdin's Lamp
and
The Charlie Chaplin Clowns
and
II Mago the Magician
. The convoy crawled forward and stopped again. Now, with the prospect of a family to support, Spencer wouldn't be running away with the circus. Nor would he be looking out for a Jessica to invite back to lunch. He would have to resist buying a plane ticket to somewhere romantic, with romance in mind, or impulsively ordering a horse for his niece, because such fanciful notions were only possible yesterday, back in the good old days.

Hazel wanted him to make the decision to move on to tomorrow, and Spencer wandered along the high street still praying for signs and a sudden revelation, in which everything instantly connected and it all made sense and he would
know
what to do next. And then he thought that to have the road to Damascus experience you probably had to be on the road. He should go travelling, to Malta, the Algarve, even Syria, anywhere it was common knowledge that even the ugly women were beautiful and many of them were Russian, or the equivalent. It wasn't because he didn't like Hazel. In fact she was as good-looking as any girl he'd ever met. She was also kind and funny and clever. It was just that he still wanted to flirt with the infinitely tantalising possibility of all the girls and off-duty nurses he
hadn't
yet met. He didn't understand how she could make a decision before a) seeing a sign, or b) knowing everything about his past, especially if they were going to have a baby and make a life together. But the question, put simply, remained: was he ready to step into the future with Hazel?

He didn't know.

He wanted the eight-year-old Rachel hands-on-knees feeling. He wanted the what will be will be, thinking that with big decisions like these there really oughtn't to be so much choice. That, in short, big decisions should present themselves as no decision at all.

At the bus stop Spencer was unsurprised to see the lime trees still bleeding their sticky black unlucky stuff. Bad luck. Bad omens: Hazel had been acting very strangely just before he came out. It was as if she didn't want to be left alone in the house, even though William was always around somewhere.

'It's Henry Mitsui,' she said. ‘The man you talked to on the phone.'

‘What about him?'

‘Nothing.'

‘What?'

‘Nothing. Forget about it.'

Out loud, she told herself it was wrong to be ruled by fear, and picked out another of Spencer's library books,
The Woman in the Car with Glasses and a Gun
. She started it at the beginning, even though she still had a long way to go on
Sir John Magill's Last Journey
.

At the library, the steps had been overrun by people in climbing helmets squinting up at the stopped clock. Spencer heard the words rain and Miss Havisham but saw neither, remembering that the abseil wasn't scheduled until lunch-time. Grace's coach wasn't due to arrive for another few minutes, so he crossed the road towards a phone-box. He was considering calling the hospital, because if the morning-after pill only worked the morning after then time was running short. But the cash-box of the phone had been smashed beyond repair, and who would choose to bring children into a world like this?

Grace's coach pulled in at the bus stop. Spencer jogged back across the road, and by the time he made it round to the far side of the coach she was already on the pavement waiting for him. She was wearing a green Spartan tracksuit and a rucksack which said European Space Mission. She had her hands on her hips.

‘You're late,' she said, pretending to look at a watch which she didn't have. ‘Well done.'

She had growing brown hair and dark intelligent eyes, and it quickly became clear that on her tenth birthday, as well as a full set of River Phoenix videos and a rucksack, she'd picked up the gift of sarcasm. ‘I see you've remembered my present.'

‘Happy Birthday, Grace.'

‘Great start.'

‘We could go and look at the chess sets.'

‘I want a horse. And a cake. How am I doing?'

‘Sorry?'

‘At being assertive. Mum said being assertive was the best way to avoid dangerous situations. Am I any good?'

Spencer laughed. ‘You're a natural.' He did a playful pinch and punch first-day-of-the-month thing and then they held hands. Grace skipped every other step to keep up with him, at the same time asking whether he'd heard the news about River Phoenix. ‘He's dead,' Grace said, ‘it was drugs and you know what? Only this morning when I woke up he was in my dream. He was just hovering there and I knew he had something important to say, like an oracle or something.'

Past the registry office, past the fire station and no obvious signs.

‘Alright then, Grace, tell me what River Phoenix had to say.'

‘First he tried to focus his lazy eye. He has a lazy eye, you know. Had one.'

‘What did he say?'

‘He did the thing with his eye and then he opened his mouth.'

‘And he said what?'

‘He said: Hey Wow Man, Cool.'

‘Is that it?'

‘And today he's
dead
. I can't believe it. He was supposed to be a vegetarian.'

Grace shook her head in disbelief and Spencer took a firmer grip on her small hand. He felt sorry for River Phoenix because of all the things he'd never managed to do, just like Spencer would now never set up his own pirate radio station, hardly a job for a married man one child. And it seemed unwise to settle down before he'd taken his epic year-long walking holiday. It was also possible that any day now he might feel obliged, for the sake of his moral well-being, to leave in a food-filled truck for Central Bosnia. Not to mention the pilgrimage he'd always intended to make to Fellini's Cinecitta, and his ambition to wade fully-clothed into the Trevisi fountain in Rome, with or without Anita Ekberg. And he'd be losing his freedom to do all this in exchange for what? Nice things.

They crossed the road between the slowly rumbling circus trucks, and Spencer wondered why he'd never gone abroad. Why on earth had he never stolen a motorbike and whacked down to Milan with Grace Zabriskie on the back? Why had he never made a night of it at the Viper Room in LA or explored tropical waterfalls or joined a luge team? Why hadn't he hung around trainee secretaries complimenting them on their 80 words a minute or their mother-tongue German or their very special organisational skills, just to get them into bed? I mean at least once he should have made a proper effort to contact Emma Thompson. Now he'd never know.

To make up for lost time therefore, and taking into account, like crimes, all the many other things he'd never done, Spencer decided there and then to abandon his ten-year-old niece and join the circus. As for Hazel, he never set eyes on her again.

11/1/93 M
ONDAY
12:14

Loitering in the lounge of the hotel, Mr Mitsui felt like a loiterer, even though he'd changed into a blazer and RAF club tie. Several young men in morning-suits, wearing cardboard badges saying Philip and Alison, were discussing the rearrangement of the furniture. Mr Mitsui went back to his room, locked himself in and sat on the bed. He should go and find Henry and bring him back.

Or he should leave him, wait for him, trust him. He was twenty-three years old and he couldn't be fathered all his life.