Serious Sweet (31 page)

Jon leaned his legs out ahead of him and pretended to stretch, rejoiced in the fact that Chalice could not possibly know (and wouldn't, in any case, like) the speech in
Pimpernel Smith
where the quiet and mild and clever and overlooked professor of archaeology politely lectures the Nazi holding a gun on him.

Smith predicts that what is wrong must plod onwards, grind down its own wrong road until it has destroyed almost everything and can only continue destroying, can only destroy itself.

And I actually – fuck – do believe that.

He inhaled like a man who wanted to do business.

I am a creature of long memory and immoderate belief.

He wanted, actually, to shout out, ‘Captain of Murderers' in Leslie Howard's 1940s English accent – one of the many you no longer hear, one filled with an English way of thinking which has also been extinguished.

Captain of Murderers …

That's one, or both of us …

‘This Milner thing …' Jon felt his head twitch, which was unfortunate, because it indicated stress – but it wasn't so fatal a tell now they were friendly, well accommodated, ‘I really can't help you that much with him, Harry. I don't know the man and I don't see … I may be mistaken … what purpose my getting to know him might serve. He seems very much a spent force. In other times, he could have regrouped and been a problem, but these aren't other times. He's a dinosaur.'

Chalice licked his lips. ‘Takes one to know one … No offence.' And he strolled to look out of the window at the broad and high and dark and evening stillness of Pall Mall. ‘Milner's not quite the problem, not exactly. The leaks are the problem. There are too many. And they're too targeted. They are strategic. Some shifty little shit is kicking up dust, stamping his feet.'

From you, that's a compliment – you shifty little shit. The boys – and girls – from the Darknet, the shadowy 4chan types, they called me a Moralfag.

Jon speaking as his thoughts gallop past him, ‘And Milner's the contact for that?'

Moralfag's a compliment, too.

‘He doesn't seem quite up to it …'

‘Milner's had none of them, but he's running with them once they're out. He seems to be actively avoiding any close connection, which seems slightly … odd. And he's digging – we heard
him spooning out his little tunnels, late at night – test shafts … And as he's the loose cannon, as he's got the big mouth, we feel he'd be the best line to pursue back to the source. He's a horny old hack, a pre-Wapping drama queen – loves big reveals and purple prose.'

‘And you really think he's holding something, knows sources? That he would tell me?' This being a legitimate question, asked in a legitimate tone.

Chalice avoided making an answer, ‘We'd like to know if he's holding something – other than his sweaty, alky dick, that is. We'd like you to check his hairy palms, Jon … Have a regular look at him. Just lately he's walking around like a man with a platinum knob – as if he is finding himself more than averagely precious. He broke a little something today – but not much, not quite what he seems to think he's holding.'

‘Is he holding, though? Is he bluffing?'

Jon stared at the man's back, felt secure in loathing the curve of his skull, the slightly low left shoulder, the undefended view of a liar.

They never look quite the thing – the liars – not unless they can give the full-frontal view. Not even very good liars can lie with the back of their head.

‘What do you think, Jon?'

‘Me?' Jon sighed as a tired and overstretched public servant might. ‘As I've said. I don't see that he's got a light in his eye about anything. He is a show-off, as you say, and he'd at least have hinted this afternoon – he was genuinely quite drunk. He would have wanted to let me know he was sitting on at least a straight flush before the flop.'

Chalice fancies himself at poker, yearns for the days of the Clermont Club and the glamour of white-tie losses.

Jon played his own kind of bet.
‘
God knows … you'd think someone would have leaked about me, that he'd have heard something of it. He'd have been bound to mention, it would make a fun story for a slow Sunday morning – senior civil servant enjoys …'

‘A harem? Hot and cold running
cunt
?' Chalice turned neatly on his heel and pressed back into the room. There was no smile this time.

No. I made a bad bet. I take it back.

But I am all smooth.

But I've offered the wrong fucking bluff …

But I can breathe easy … visibly easy … I'm OK.

Nevertheless, Jon's arms and legs lost their muscle tone for a horrible plunge of cold time.

Your feet go numb first with hemlock …

Meanwhile he thought softly what Chalice said aloud, ‘Ah, Jon, but if Milner
did
know about you – if any of them did – you'd be just the man to lean on for information …'

Jon sinking into his breath, keeping his breath, still and still and still and calm. He produced a frown, an evident instant of distaste, anger. ‘And you think that? Of me?'

This hunting pack kind of laugh, a hound's laugh, escaped Chalice as he patted his hands together – so, so, so – and then chuckled on with, ‘We thought it a possibility. That's why – for goodness' sake – we made sure all the heavies already know about you and your sad little headfucks on paper and your sad little marriage. We told them it's no kind of news and that they all have it, so why bother running it? We stopped their guns.
Bedroom frolics
they would have loved, a man in his forties, a credible man, that would be different …' Chalice tilted his head to one side. ‘But no offence, Jon, but a thinning memo-shuffler who's outlived his hopes of promotion penning damp little letters, writing down his wanks, the scraggy old lad keeping busy … All rather too disgusting. You're not a story. You're more a cry for help …'

Jon kept his fists – he suddenly had fists – in positions of violent stillness, cramped at the ends of his arms. He nodded neatly, like a memo-shuffler. He kept his mind in suspension, locked away from all activity and harm.

Stillness.

I will meet you.

Stillness.

I will …

Jon kept nodding, drifting his head down so that he could not see Harry Chalice, not even his feet, and so that it was possible to say, ‘I do have an appointment now, though, Harry, and I would like to keep it if you wouldn't mind.'

A pause floated in and made the air taste slightly metallic, unwholesome.

There was the sound of a jacket being buttoned – that tiny disturbance.

I will meet you.

I'm all right.

I'm a good man.

I do my best.

‘All right, Jon. Off you trot.'

A young man, possibly a student, stands in a Circle Line subway train. The car is half empty and he could sit if he likes, but he may not be aware of this. His eyes are closed and he wears headphones which are leaching the ghosts of music into the space around him. He holds tight to an overheard rail and rocks only gently, slowly, with the motion of the floor under his feet, even though the passengers near him can hear the driving speed of the beat, that rapid and tinny insistence, which must be something almost overwhelming in his head.

Eyes turn to him, irritated, disapproving.

At St James's Park three girls enter the carriage, brushing past him and opening his eyes.

They also choose not to sit and, instead, gather opposite him. They look at each other. They smile. They begin dancing to what they can gather of his spilling music: arms lifting, bodies swaying, answering the thin call of what he offers, perhaps in spite of himself, perhaps as a demonstration of his general thoughtlessness.

He watches them as they shuffle-walk closer, swing and bump.

They don't meet his eye. They dance as though they had always intended to, as though they always do, as though it is only coincidental that they're keeping his second-hand beat. They shift and spin, change places, as if they have realised they are beautiful, are human beings in their twenties and therefore effortlessly lovely, unable to do anything other than shine like this and be in the world with a perfect bloom like this and show the tranquillity of easy muscle like this. They are languidly delighted, ignoring the man in a way that means he becomes so aware of himself that he blushes and a sudden jolt of the moving car makes his feet stumble, while his arm snaps up and clings to the overhead rail and saves him, lets him hang.

The young man, possibly a student, watches the girls as if they are a miracle, a wonderful humiliation that he can't mind, that he loves. It seems they have suspended his breathing. It seems he doesn't mind that, either.

JON HAD REACHED
South Kensington Station. He rose up from the platform with the purposeful frown of a man in a hurry. That seemed a hopeful choice. He mounted the escalator with fierce and obvious strides as the grey-toothed metal steps lifted beneath him, reeled him forwards to the exit and ground level. He was his own ministry in motion.

I progress.

When the treads subsided, meshed and flattened at the end of his climb, they offered the usual illusion of mildly gliding dominance and things sinking before his will, going his way.

Even though quite a number of things were not.

I ought call her. Again. Explain myself, everything, something.

I need explaining. That second time, in the restaurant … I was a disaster. I was unmitigated in my total fucking failure. And I'm aware that's a criticism framed in terms unsuited to a supportive and functional workplace.

But I am not a workplace. Or supportive. Or functional. I am only a person. I am a fucked-up person.

He coped with the station's final steps while shaking his head like a swimmer, freshly emerged.

Or maybe I'm not quite totally screwed – I'm simply not perfect at once. Even the greats, they'd have a few takes at each song. The version you finally hear, it's had work. And I need time to work. I don't improvise. I can't get away with rough and ready. I will not ever be a feasible live show. I'll always be the hideous semi-pensioner, thrashing about with his fork like some care-home resident, suddenly baffled by pasta in an empty restaurant.

Not empty – full of her.

Talking to her about goats, about tongues … As if all I could think about was … As if I was constantly in a state of …

Lurking – I was lurking somehow – spattered with olive oil and tepid bits of parsley, opposite a not-so-much-younger woman, but for God's sake there is a gap – mind the gap – a discernible gap and one feels that one has no right to expect …

I mean, the letters are one thing …

Dear Mr August

He kept at least one of them folded in his pocket when he went out and about. Always. For ever. Two folds of cream paper were in there today, snug by his heart and full of tiny, hot motion. Like a pacemaker he couldn't quite keep up with.

Sweet Mr August

Inside his jacket, held safe, were whole remarkable sentences of kindness, meant for precisely him. Bespoke.

You get me through.

And she gets me through and once I've tried a few rehearsals, I can write that to her. I have told her that truth, but she simply gives it back again. The whole process is bloody well unending, apparently – and then you have to bloody meet her.

You get me through, Mr August. And you've changed things that happened a long time before I met you. Now everything can seem to be the route that led to you. So I make sense. I never expected to make sense.

I know her off by heart. Her music.

But I can't play my own tune, not now, not under my fucking circumstances.

Heading away from the station, Jon understood he was fine on paper. A person of around sixty – genuinely, technically not quite sixty – could be, in their absolute absence, possibly impressive and – if not attractive – then agreeably lived-in.

If you're bluesman cool, any kind of cool – then you can get away with being lived-in …

I'm not bloody lived-in. My face has squatters. My premises have been ruined by moral subsidence and stress – I'm all crumbled façade and squinting little windows.

Why does the skin around one's eyes collapse with age? Exuberant eyebrows, endless sodding vigour in your ear hairs, nose hairs – but your eyelids turn entirely apathetic. Is this a type of natural mercy? Do the slumping lids join the fading eyesight and spare one the pin-sharp details of one's personal decay?

Jon's vision was, in fact, still quite serviceable. He only needed glasses for the work on paper.

Papers of colours appropriate to their function, memos, reports, emails – and letters.

I wear the glasses when I'm trying to write letters back, to match her, to correspond, to be
 …

Jon cradled the back of his neck with one cooling hand and stood beneath the sodium lights and tactful surveillance cameras of South Kensington. He had this sensation of weakness in his legs which made him believe that his brain was being damaged. If perhaps he could think less …

What the hell should I have said to her? What warning should I have posted in advance?

We do live in an age of prior warnings. We have less and less real safety, but there's hardly a human experience now that isn't introduced by catalogues of cautions: walking routes, furniture, sandwiches, films …

I may contain scenes of mental collapse and sexual …

This evening may end with … Myself, everything, something.

Jon spun slowly, sighting along the voluptuous, straight perspective of Exhibition Road and its central, prickling spine of futuristic street lamps. It seemed for an instant to lead his eye along towards a great emptiness, a devouring space.

I do want her to be happy.

A kind of hot cramp ran down from between his shoulders and crouched at the small of his back. Chalice's voice was somehow still rooting about and doing harm within Jon's inner ear.

Chalice, you are a thing with an inhuman scent.

Jon felt himself becoming shadowed, essentially naked and ready for display in a suitable case, exuding just the air of melancholy that would prefigure an extinction. His reflection in the window of a tiny Chinese restaurant apparently agreed. He was this stricken outline, tall but round-shouldered – this old-school monkey man lost inside a good coat.

You don't know me, though, Harry fucking Chalice. You haven't noticed we're not the same species. I'm not a modern man who's chosen to unevolve, slide back to the days of blood and territory. Your kind – you're out for wild cries and hunts through darkling forests in like-minded troupes.

Not far away in the dark was the Natural History Museum, dozing inside its swarming terracotta ornaments and creatures.

One day last year Jon had made an entirely innocent visit – no notes to leave for anybody. He'd trotted upstairs to visit the hominid cases, wanting to contemplate the skulls and faded dioramas and to be with the vanished dreams inside his forebears' skulls.

They might have imagined all kinds of humanities: strange musics, dancing and setting one's palm tight to a wall and painting around it to show the cleverness of fingers, keep a record of the tenderness that might touch other skin, might care when someone reached for care, might be their warmth and their shape of safety.

I really do want her to be happy.

He'd perhaps also liked the idea of standing with a fresh letter flickering in his hand and showing the models of his silent relatives how he had prospered and advanced.

I try to progress.

But all the displays on the origin of his species, that entire section, had been removed.

They'd been replaced with odds and ends about Darwin and a weasel-worded panel for the kids to read on evolution – heavy emphasis on the theory. The panel avoided ever stating whether we've evolved, or just been pressed out by God, like fresh little gingerbread babies. Gingerbread, rib bones and mud.

In a palace built to celebrate the scientific method and the safeguard of information in a world full of dangerous dreams … In case they offend opinions, they tucked away their facts.

Evolved human beings had thought this was the proper course to take. In the Natural History Museum.

It was like – in a small way, a tiny way …

I don't want to see this.

It was like coming home …

I don't want this.

Why I think of more harm when there's so much harm loose here already …

It was like coming home that first time …

The picture of it was unfurling like a bolt of bloody cloth, tumbling.

It was like coming back to find one's home not as it should be and a man sitting in one's armchair in one's living room and smirking inside an atmosphere which suggested activities had been undertaken. And the man had that particular look – that special, concupiscent, lazy glance – which he turned to your wife when she came through from the kitchen carrying two fresh glasses of beer …

I'd successfully forgotten that on occasions she did drink our free beer. On occasions when I was elsewhere.

And one would rather not believe one is a cuckold, not even in theory, yet here it is – the evidence.

As if someone tore out a hole in the side of the building and let half its contents spill out.

But Meg wouldn't do that.

He punched his fist into his palm, caught his own knuckles clumsily – not a manly gesture, only stupid. The images didn't stop.

Also like – in a small way – coming home one summer holiday and seeing one's mother as one passes the bedroom door – the carelessness of limbs when the sleeper isn't sleeping, is only passed out. The smell of sweetness and sourness and wrongness.

Post-partum depression – my fault.

She was given drugs, repeated drugs, eventually hoarded and then gorged-upon drugs – her doctor's fault.

It wasn't just me who ended up leaving Society Street. Mum went, too. Dad spent years there in the same house with her, but having to live by himself. She was intermittent. She was chilly. She was a ghost's body. She was lots of things which weren't her fault.

One cannot understand an addict when one is a child. When one is older, one reflects and analyses their inabilities, acknowledges their disease …

It makes no fucking difference.

One still feels precisely the same.

As if someone tore out a hole in the side of the building and let half its contents spill out and every neighbour suddenly was able to peep in and find your mother, undignified and overcome.

Women who have wild cries inside and get dark like forests – that isn't their fault, but I couldn't currently stand it.

Jon stopped – inside and out.

He'd been pacing –
like a captive creature
 – to and fro at the back of the station. He made himself angry again about the museum, specifically the museum.

I have become a preposterous old geezer, ranting and raising my hairy knuckles against the decisions of the young.

Moralfag.

Scraggy old lad.

Defending knowledge in the face of evasions and entertainment.

He realised that he'd been holding his breath for some time.

He exhaled.

This is good, this is appropriate thinking. This is better than the thinking I cannot think and shouldn't mention, because then I'll think it.

Fuck.

As if someone tore out a hole in the side of the building and let half its contents spill out and therefore continued the process of handing the world to the humans who have stolen Darwin and portrayed him as only cruel – the ones who feel his theory must be savage, because he describes the working out of powers greater than their own. They find such an idea cruel – these men and women who can value nothing in those around them but fitness and competition, taking and keeping and blood and bone.

Which is a generalisation of a type we would avoid unless we were making an unwise and emotive pronouncement, shouting on television, on the radio, in a paper, on Twitter.

Does it really matter where? It's all shouting.

In media and electoral terms, shouting is a requirement.

One is reminded again of how much – in both senses – one hates.

But one really would rather love, if one could manage.

Jon – inhaling and exhaling as he should – crossed the slightly unnerving paved road now laid out beside South Kensington Station.

You take your luck here with the cruising cars. The aim is to promote coexistence between traffic and pedestrians by removing any clearly defined pavement. Survival of the fittest.

Children might be harmed here, I feel. That would have been one of the risks assessed and presumably discounted during the planning process.

Jon did not approve of harming children. He believed they should be always defended.

I'm also not in favour of risks.

He pushed himself past 20 Thurloe Street, home to the Polish restaurant where Cold War spies once met their handlers – Kim Philby tackling pork knuckle, or pierogies, poppy-seed cake – handing over the goods between courses, one had to presume.

I met Lucy in there once – a joke location that I couldn't find amusing
.
He doesn't care if I get blown. He'd think it was funny, thinks I'm funny.

Everyone, apparently, thinks I'm funny.

Or possibly Meg doesn't and I should phone her. I need to do that. But I keep forgetting.

But instead Jon kept walking, left behind the cheerily fogged glass of the establishment where Christine Keeler once sat being stylishly traitorous, or flirtatious, or whatever else, while her Soviet lover, or client, or confidant, got down to the pierogies. Perhaps.

He went on into Thurloe Square, slipping along beside the well-maintained people carriers that would gather up well-maintained kids in charmingly retro well-maintained uniforms and then ferry them off to their well-maintained schools in the
morning. Illuminated windows showed deftly arranged furniture, investment art, bright fragments of lives, meals being prepared by homeowners, meals being prepared by servants, by nannies, by au pairs: the gradations of posture, costume, comfort. Held in the dim palm of the square, a gated garden was all silences and shapes, polite leaves.