Mystery Man (25 page)

There was an awed hush around the table.

As he took a deep breath, preparing to launch into the second verse, Brendan nodded gravely around his audience. His delivery had been so intense and profound that his listeners would surely die of grief before he got much further. But just as he opened his mouth to assault our senses anew, Alison cupped her hands together and shouted through them: 'Wanker!'

There was a moment of shocked silence, and then an explosion of drunken giggling. Brendan, flummoxed, didn't know whether to laugh or cry. In a desperate attempt to retrieve the situation he nodded quickly to Kyle, who had stopped playing. Kyle counted him in again, but as Brendan began to sing, one of the poets shouted, 'Big wanker!' and this time
everyone
laughed.

A third poet, one I'd not previously spoken to, barged forward, spilled half his drink over the keyboard and then announced in an American accent, 'It's a fuckin' party, man, let's party! Beach Boys!'

Kyle looked lost for a moment. He looked to his father, who raised his fist, hesitated, then, like Nero, raised his thumb skyward. Kyle began to play 'California Girls'. Once it got going, almost everyone began to sing along. There were two exceptions: Brendan, glaring along the table at Alison, who smiled triumphantly and nestled back into my arms.

And me, obviously.

Alison held my head up over the rim of the toilet. She was saying, 'Who shook you up and then took your top off? Bloody hell, I didn't know you really could sing.'

'Uggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhh . . . ?'

There had been more wine. A lot of it. It had interacted with some of the strongest medicines available on prescription, and many herbal remedies that were not. Sometimes when you say herbal remedies people think it's just code for dope, but I don't take dope. When I say herbal remedies I mean remedies made from Mother Nature. I take extract of artichoke to reduce cholesterol, cranberry for urinary tract infections, echinacea extracts for colds, elderberry for avian influenza, feverfew for migraine, black cumin to fight off cancers, pawpaw for worms, pokeweed for acne, peppermint oil for irritable bowel,
Rauvolfia serpentina
for sleeplessness and anxiety and high blood pressure and St John's wort for depression. There are others I couldn't think of right there and then, a deficiency I'm now trying to cure by taking
Salvia lavandulaefolia.

But
singing
? That wasn't me. That definitely wasn't me. She was drunk and confused. A lot of people had sung, I remembered that much, but I hadn't sung. I couldn't have sung. I only know the lyrics to one song, and only those because my father played it repeatedly, and I mean
repeatedly,
when I was a teenager. I think it was his attempt to exorcise the devil in my soul, or to at least force me to move out.

'I've heard of songs being reinterpreted,' Alison said, patting what was left of my dank hair, 'but that was incredible. I came all out in goose bumps.' I threw up again. 'That's it,' she said, 'get it all up.'

She thought I was drunk. She had no idea. I was suffering an extreme reaction to my medication. I could quite easily have died at that moment, or descended into an irreversible coma. I needed an ambulance and a drip and a stomach pump. But then, through the confusion and dizziness and nausea, I also had to consider the fact that I was lying in her lap, just the two of us, and it was quite comforting, and if I was going to die, then this was the way to go, resting on the svelte thighs of someone I loved and not in some barely sterile hospital bed or on my face in the mud at the hands of Fritz and his paratroops.

'I love you,' I said. 'I really, really, really, really, really love you.'

She smiled down at me.

'And you're my best friend. And you're the best private eye in the business. We'll show them, we'll fuckin' show them.'

Alison mopped my brow with toilet roll. She said, 'You sang it for them. Now sing it for me.'

'What about Fritz?'

'Screw Fritz. Sing it again, Sherlock, sing "Lady in Red".'

I looked up into her red eyes and dark fillings. It was just the two of us, lost in music, on a bathroom floor, in Banbridge. My voice was a dying rasp, but it didn't matter – I knew that I would never be happier.

'
Lady in bed
. . .'

One should not take the loss of one's virginity lightly, but one should also acknowledge that no matter how meticulously one plans for it, those plans can be overtaken by circumstance, from fire, flood or hurricane to the shifting of tectonic plates or the application of large amounts of alcohol. One should not expect that the loss of one's virginity should necessarily follow in the wake of a white wedding, but may pre-empt it or precede it, or both. One's virginity is as priceless as a rare first edition of Poe's
Fall of the House of Usher,
but unlike the Poe, it can never be replaced. Also, unless you have the reading speed of Charlie in
Flowers for Algernon,
you cannot read a Poe in one and a half minutes, but you can lose your virginity in that time, from first fumble to sincere apology.

In case there is any confusion here, I am not talking about Alison's virginity.

Having herself been married, and being, and continuing to be, attractive, I had absolutely no doubt that she had divested herself of her virginity at some earlier point; I did not directly address the subject, nor indirectly; I took it as a given.

On the subject of my own virginity, rest assured, this is not
that
type of book. I simply believe there is no place for that kind of detail between hard or soft covers. It is an odd world indeed where one does not so much as blink as the serial killer carefully removes the skin from his victim in order to make a fashionable suit, but one can still blush to the core when anything goes on in that geographical area one might refer to as
south of the border.
Suffice to say that I did not expect fireworks to go off, but as I lay back, my head throbbing and my stomach still tumbling from the wine, I was a little surprised to discover that the price I was paying for the gift Alison had bestowed upon me was a mild form of tinnitus in my right ear, a perfect match for the constant
drrrrriiiiiiing
I experience in my left. It was as though she had upgraded me from broken mono to broken stereo. It was only when this ringing in my right ear stopped abruptly thirty seconds later that I realised that what I was hearing was a phone ringing in the room next door, and my only thought then was that if I could hear the phone ringing so clearly, then what had whoever was in that room heard of our sex making?

We lay back on the bed, perspiring. The room was apparently on the top floor of the Beale Feirste Books retreat, although I'd no memory of getting there. I think Alison may have carried me. I could not remember removing my clothes. I think Alison might have completed that task as well. We lay in the semi-darkness, for it was very late, or very early, and the blinds were open, and the dawn was creeping towards us. I wanted to bundle her up and squash her down and carry her around with me in a pendant around my neck. That way I could take her out whenever I met an acquaintance or a stranger and say, 'This is my girlfriend, we've made love and all,' and they would pump my hand and say, 'Well done, old man, splendid performance,' and I would glow.

'Tell me about your mother,' said Alison, stroking my arm.

'No.'

She gave me a little pinch. 'Go
on.
Tell me about your mum.'

'There's nothing to tell.'

'When you had your orgasm, you shouted out,
Thank you, Mother
.'

'I did
not.
What did you shout out when you had yours?'

She was silent on this point. I couldn't be entirely sure that she had shouted anything, because of the tinnitus. After a little while she said, 'You know, whenever I call your house, she never answers the phone.'

'She has an aversion.'

'The couple of times I've been to your house, she's never there.'

'She is, she stays out of the way.'

'Do you know something, I like you for exactly who you are. I wouldn't want to change you. I've had normal before.'

I pondered this for a little bit.

She said, 'If there's anything you want to tell me about your mother, then tell me.'

'There's nothing I want to tell you about my mother,' I said.

'Okay.' She kissed me on the forehead, and continued to stroke my arm. In a while I drifted off to sleep. For once I had a happy dream, about getting married. It would be just the two of us, in a register office. Obviously, what with the travel, there would be no need for a honeymoon. We could trawl Belfast's less smelly second-hand bookshops for rare first editions and order comics for Alison on-line. In fact, there mightn't be time for any of that: she was probably pregnant already. We had not used any form of protection. I am allergic to rubber. I presumed Alison was not, as they say,
on the pill.
That would have suggested an amazing amount of foresight, or lax morals. Although, now that I thought about it, it was quite possible that her luring me to Banbridge had been part of a plan, that all along her interest had not been in trapping Fritz but ensnaring me. She had not warned Daniel of the renewed danger he was in, nor taken any measures to safeguard him. That was twice she had failed to take responsibility for protection.

I dozed a little before waking to the question of her really being pregnant, and whether that would then give our unborn child rights over No Alibis? What if those ninety seconds of debatable fun resulted in me losing control of my pride and joy? What if the two of them worked in tandem to asset-strip me at their earliest opportunity?

I had not shouted my mother's name out during sex. That was part of the plot to unsettle me. To make me doubt myself. I had to be on my guard
at all times.
There
are
conspiracies out there, the skill is recognising the real ones from the paranoid ones. Some of them are so glaringly obvious. One glance at Gregory Peck with his dyed black hair and overgrown Hitler moustache in
The Boys from Brazil
was enough to tip
everyone
off to the fact that he was a bad guy. But the secret of a good mystery is that while you suspect all along that it might be the
best friend,
you don't really know until the final chapter.

I woke up in full daylight and with another erection.

I could see how they could become habit-forming, but I willed it away. I have perfected this technique. My father taught it me. I no longer need the bucket of cold water or his strap.

Now the erection was gone.

But so was Alison.

A quieter version of the hubbub was back, this time gently vibrating through the house while the artists ate breakfast. I would probably never eat again. I rolled out of bed and held my head in my hands. I
needed
my medication. You can miss those babies out once, but any longer and it really messes with you. I get the shakes. And I sweat. And my spatial awareness is not good. My palpitations run wild. My teeth ache. My sinuses tug at my brain strings. I needed Alison to run me home. We would have to rush through our Daniel debriefing, or return later, but I had to
go.
I was suffering withdrawal. I could become catatonic, or just as easily manic, or the one followed by the other, or in either order. I would also be car sick. I was not in a good place. The fact that I had lost my virginity was slim compensation, because I could not remember any of it, so in a sense I really had
lost
it, or it had been stolen, pickpocketed by an expert who even now was downstairs stuffing her face, and she would have no sense of shame at all. Perhaps the laughter drifting up the stairs was at my expense. Perhaps when I showed my face they would burst into sarcastic applause. The poets would compose an ode to my lost virtue, and the sculptress would fashion an erection in sarcastic tribute to me from Quaker oats and burned toast.

I struggled down the stairs, but in catching my breath on the first-floor landing I was more than relieved to spot Alison outside, walking by the lake. Though it was a bright summer morning she had her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her zipped-up jacket, and her head was bowed in thought. I had a sudden paralysing notion that her experience in bed with me had been so harrowing that she was walking the lake trying to compose a form of words that would not only let me down gently but also rid her of me for good. But she wasn't a master of words. She could much more easily have drawn me a picture, and how cruel would that be? I would throw it down in tears, and she would reclaim it and display it in a gallery. I would become the poster boy for bad sex. If it were me, I would just get in the car and drive off. But she was classier than that. She would even give me a lift home. She would say, 'We can still be friends,' when she knew it was a lie. She probably knew that I would make a doll of her and stick pins in its eyes and pass disparaging remarks about the provenance of her jewellery and arrange for someone who didn't suffer from vertigo to daub offensive graffiti about her on flyovers. And she didn't care, because she knew she could do better than me. Better than a one-third share in an independent bookshop. She had bigger ambitions. Like Borders.

I slipped out of the front door so as to avoid the catcalls of the kitchen. I hurried, as far as my hardening arteries would allow, after the object of my occasional affections and probable mother of my child. When I caught up with her, on the far side of the lake, she did not look up. I fell into step beside her.

'Morning,' I said.

'Morning,' she said.

'Did you have breakfast?'

'Yes. Scrambled eggs. They're in the bushes about a hundred yards back.'

'Morning sickness,' I said.

'I wish,' she said.

Further on, I said, 'If you want to get it over with, you should say it now. I understand. I'm used to it. Or, when I say I'm used to it, I'm not used to it, because I'm rarely in this position. In fact, when I say rarely, I mean never. I'm never in this position. But you should, nevertheless, get on with it. I have to get home. I have to get my medication. Say it now.'