The Gap of Time (3 page)

I discover that grief means living with someone who is not there.

Where are you?

Engine roar of a motorcycle. Cars with their windows down and the radio on. Kids on skateboards. A dog barking. The delivery truck unloading. Two women arguing on the sidewalk. Everybody on their cellphone. A guy on a box shouting, EVERYTHING MUST GO.

That's fine by me. Take it all away. The cars, the people, the goods for sale. Strip it back to the dirt under my feet and the sky over my head. Turn off the sound. Blank the picture. Nothing in between us now. Will I see you walking towards me at the end of the day? The way you did, the way we both did, dead tired, coming home from work? Look up and we see each other, first far away, then near? The energy of you in human form again. The atomic shape of your love.

“It's nothing,” she said, when she knew she was dying.

Nothing? Then the sky is nothing and the earth is nothing and your body is nothing and our lovemaking is nothing…

She shook her head. “Death is the least important thing in my life. What difference will it make? I won't be here.”

“I will be here,” I said.

“That's the cruelty,” she said. “If I could live my death for you I would.”

“CLOSING-DOWN SALE. EVERYTHING MUST GO.”

It's gone already.

I reached the street where the hospital stands. There's the BabyHatch. Just then the baby I'm carrying wakes up and I feel her move. We look at each other, her unsteady blue eyes finding my dark gaze. She lifts up one tiny hand, small as a flower, and touches the rough stubble of my face.

The cars come and the cars go between me and my crossing the street. The anonymous always-in-motion world. The baby and I stand still, and it's as if she knows that a choice has to be made.

Or does it? The important things happen by chance. Only the rest gets planned.

I walked round the block thinking I'd think about it, but my legs were heading home, and sometimes you have to accept that your heart knows what to do.

When I got back my son was watching the TV news. Last night's storm update and personal stories. The usual government officials saying the usual things. Then there was another call for witnesses to come forward. The dead man. The man was Anthony Gonzales, Mexican. Passport found on the body. Robbery. Homicide. Nothing unusual about that in this city except for the weather.

But there was something unusual. He left the baby.

“You don't know that, Dad.”

“I know what I know.”

“We should tell the cops.”

How did I raise a son who trusts the cops? My son trusts everyone. I worry about him. I shake my head. He points at the baby.

“If you're not calling the cops, what are you gonna do with her?”

“Keep her.”

My son looks at me in disbelief and dismay. I can't keep a newborn child. It's illegal. But I don't care about that. Help of the helpless. Can't I be that person?

I have fed her and changed her. I bought what I needed from the store on the way home. If my wife were alive, she'd do what I'm doing. We would do this together.

It's as though I've been given a life for the one I took. That feels like forgiveness to me.

There was an attaché case with the child—like preparing her for a career in business. The case is locked. I tell my son that if we can locate her parents, we'll do that. So we open the case.

Clo's face looks like a bad actor's in a budget sitcom. His eyes bulge. His jaw drops.

“Seven days of Creation,” says Clo. “Is that stuff real?”

Crisp, packed, stacked notes like a prop from a gangster movie. Fifty bundles. Ten thousand dollars in every bundle.

Underneath the notes there is a soft velvet bag. Diamonds. A necklace. Not little snips of diamonds—big-cut and generous like the heart of a woman. Time so deep and clear in the facets that it's like looking into a crystal ball.

Underneath the diamonds there's a piece of sheet music. Handwritten. The song says “PERDITA.”

So that's her name. The little lost one.

“You're made for life,” says Clo. “If you don't go to jail.”

“She's ours, Clo. She's your sister now. I'm her father now.”

“What are you going to do with the money?”

We moved to a new neighbourhood where we weren't known. I sold my apartment and I used that money and the cash in the case to buy a piano bar called the Fleece. It was a Mafia place and they needed to get out so they were fine about the cash. No questions. I put the diamonds in a bank box in her name until she turns eighteen.

I played the song and I taught it to her. She was singing before she could talk.

I am learning to be a father and a mother to her. She asks about her mother and I say we don't know. I have always told her the truth—or enough of it. And she is white and we are black so she knows she was found.

The story has to start somewhere.

There was a man lived in an airport.

Leo and his son, Milo, were looking out of the full-length window in Leo's London office towards City Airport and the Thames Estuary. Milo liked to watch the planes taking off. He was nine and he knew all the departure and arrival times by heart. There was a big chart on the office wall of the routes served by the airport—lines of arterial red like a body-map of the world.

“So is this man a Wanted Man?” asked Leo.

“Nobody wants him,” said Milo. “He's run away and he's on his own. That's why he lives in the airport.”

Leo explained that a wanted man isn't the same as a man who is wanted. “It means the police are after him.”

Milo thought about this. He was writing a story for school. The teacher had told them to try and write an opening line that contained all the rest of the story—like in a fairy tale that starts “A King had Three Sons” or “There was an Ogre who loved a Princess.”

“He's not a murderer, this man who lives in the airport,” said Milo. “But he hasn't got a home.”

“Why not?” asked Leo.

“He's poor,” said Milo.

“Maybe he should work harder,” said Leo, “then instead of living at the airport he could afford to catch a plane. Look—British Airways to New York City via Shannon.”

They watched the plane rise from the runway like an impossible bird.

“When the dinosaurs became extinct,” said Leo, “they didn't really die, they went into hiding until they could come back as aeroplanes.”

Milo smiled. Leo ruffled his hair. Leo's softness was here, with his son.

“When we die, do we go into hiding until we can come back as something else?” asked Milo.

“Your mother thinks so because she is a Buddhist. You should talk to her about that.”

“But what do you think?” said Milo. “Look, CityFlyer to Paris.”

“I never think about it,” said Leo. “Take my advice: don't think about anything you don't have to think about.”

Leo had been fired from his bank the year Milo turned four: 2008 was the year of the global crisis and Leo had helped it along, accumulating what his CEO termed “reckless losses.” Leo thought this was unfair. Everything he did with money was reckless, but no one wanted to fire him for his reckless profits.

As he left the bank for the last time, in his chalk-stripe Hugo Boss suit and Lobb shoes, some anti-capitalist kids demonstrating outside had thrown eggs at him. Leo stood for a moment, looking down at the omelette of his suit. Then he tore off his jacket and grabbed two of the kids, throwing them down onto the pavement. He punched a third against the wall and broke his nose.

Another of the kids was videoing the whole thing and Leo was arrested the next day. His CEO identified him from the footage.

Leo was convicted of common assault, but his lawyer got him off a jail sentence on the grounds of diminished responsibility (being fired) and provocation (eggs). In any case, his victims were unemployed troublemakers. No one seemed to notice that Leo was unemployed too.

It was the unfairness of it all that Leo resented as he paid his fine and court costs. Leo hadn't invented capitalism—his job was to make money inside a system that was about making money. That meant losing money too; the crash was really a game called musical chairs—while the music was playing no one cared that there weren't enough chairs. Who wants to sit down when you can dance? In the past he had lost amounts the size of a small country's GDP but he always had time to get it back and more. When the music stopped he had—temporarily—leveraged all his chairs.

After three months drinking himself into a rehab clinic, and three weeks drying himself out, he had been advised to seek counselling for loss of self-esteem.

For six months twice a week he took a cab from his home in Little Venice to a well-known Eastern European analyst in Hampstead. He hated the soft-clicking door into the therapy room. He hated the kelim sofas and the clock and the box of tissues. He hated the fact—two facts actually, one for each foot—that the analyst wore black socks and brown sandals and kept talking about what he pronounced as AMBI-VAYLENCE.

“You love your mother and you hate her,” said Dr. Wartz.

“No,” said Leo. “I hate her.”

“It is a metter ov the gud brist and the bad brist.”

Leo thought about breasts while the analyst was talking about Melanie Klein. The following week Leo brought a copy of
Nuts
magazine to his session. He gave Dr. Wartz a Sharpie and asked him to circle the good breasts and put an X across the bad breasts.

“Objectification of the simultaneously loathed and loved object,” said Dr. Wartz.

Leo remembered that Dr. Wartz had written an important book called
Objectifying the Object
. He began to drift over a brief History of the Object in History because he was learning that a word has to be used twice over to sound smart.

First there were no objects—just energy. Then after Big Bang or Creation, depending on your point of view, the world itself became an object (a meta-object?) filled with other objects. These needed to be named—the Naming of Objects. Later on, quite a lot of objects were invented: the Invention of Objects. Then, he supposed, with wars and general human idiocy, there was the Destruction of Objects.

And there were Objects of Desire. His stomach tightened.

Then he thought of inventories, archives, stock sheets, catalogues, lists, taxonomy: the Index of Objects. There was a book his wife liked, by some American writer, called
The Safety of Objects
. Leo himself knew all about the Status of Objects, by which he meant Objects of Status, like his helicopter (sold). Since quantum theory there was the Oddness of Objects, and, if you were a deep thinker, the Meaning of Objects. And what about the Meaninglessness of Objects?

Yes. When you had so much money that you could buy anything, everything, then you could know what Buddha and Christ knew: that worldly goods were worthless. It entertained him that this knowledge could be got by going in exactly the opposite direction to the great spiritual traditions of the world.

He said, “Can you ever really know another human being?”

“You cannot separate the observer and the observed,” said Dr. Wartz.

But you can
, thought Leo, back in his office.
That is what a surveillance system is for.

Soon Leo realised that he did not need to pay £500 a week for two sessions of fifty minutes to understand that he had not been loved as a child. Or that he had filled the emptiness with “Grosz Gain,” as the doctor put it.

“We all self-medicate,” said Leo to Dr. Wartz. “I do it with money. The drinking was a reaction. I'm over it now.”

Leo left therapy, gave up drinking and started his own hedge fund specialising in leveraged brokered buy-outs of businesses that could be asset-stripped and loaded with debt, making a good profit for his investors, and, of course, himself. He called it Sicilia because he liked that it sounded just a little bit Mafia. He was Italian on his mother's side.

Sicilia soon had £600 million of managed funds and Leo was going for the billion. There was nothing better than cash shortages on the ground for making money out of thin air.

Back in his office Leo saw that he had confused Milo. Milo was darker and more reflective than his father—more like his mother. Father and son came together over simpler things than life and death. Leo took Milo to football and swimming. He didn't do homework with him or read to him—MiMi did those things.

“Mummy will be here soon,” said Leo, for want of anything better to say.

“Shall I go and write my story?” said Milo.

Leo nodded. “Take your school bag into the kitchen—get some milk and one chocolate biscuit, OK?”

Milo liked his father's offices. There were always people to make a fuss of him and things to eat, and best of all there were the planes.

Leo hugged Milo. They loved each other. That was real. Milo was all right again now. “There was a man lived in an airport,” he said, going out.

Leo turned back to his desk—made by Linley out of long planks of Russian birchwood sanded fine as glass. The office was white space: virgin walls, polar leather sofa, Eskimo carpet. There was a big blown-up black and white photo of his wife on the wall. He kept the digital version as his iPhone screen. The only colour came from a red neon wall sign designed by Tracey Emin.

The neon said “RISK=VALUE.” It was part of a quote Leo had seen at an OCCUPY demonstration:
What You Risk Reveals What You Value
. The quote had bothered him until he changed it. When he started his new company he had commissioned the neon.

Leo leaned forward into his intercom. “Web-Cameron! I want to talk to you!”

Leo was laughing at his own joke when Cameron closed the door. Cameron was ex-army. He knew how to take an order.

“Cameron. I want you to install a webcam in my wife's bedroom.”

Cameron took this in but he didn't understand it. “You want a visual surveillance system in your wife's bedroom?”

Leo looked impatient. “You are in charge of Security and Transport at Sicilia. This is delicate. I don't want an outsider doing the job. I want the camera to link through here to my personal screen.”

Cameron was uncomfortable. “I have seen these things on adult viewing sites—but…”

“I'm not jacking off on my wife's pixellated tits if that's what you're worrying about. And we're not pimping her for twenty quid every seven minutes to a construction worker on an iPhone with his hand down his trousers. This is marital. This is divorce.”

“You are wanting to divorce your lady wife?”

“Why do you talk like that? Is it because you are Scottish? She's my wife, not my lady wife. I don't have a man wife.”

And then Leo thought of Xeno. And he thought it in a bubble of insight that he burst.

“The truth is, Cameron, that I think MiMi is having an affair. And I want to catch her at it. You know why they call it a webcam?”

“It is a camera linked to the web,” said Cameron slowly.

“It's a spider's web, Cameron, for catching insects. I can't sleep at night because my bed is crawling with insects.”

“Your wife is pregnant,” said Cameron.

“You think the sow can't squeal with pleasure because her belly's swinging with piglets?”

Cameron felt his face go hot. His polka-dot tie was hurting his throat.

“You are speaking of your wife and child.”

“My child? My bastard.” Leo snapped a pencil in half.

“Have you any material reason to believe that MiMi is having an affair?”

“You mean, have I seen her with anyone? No. Did the private dick who's been trailing her for two months find out anything I don't know already—where she goes, the man she sees, her emails, texts? No.”

“You said you hadn't seen her with anyone.”

“Anyone? No.”

“Then surely this is madness?”

“You calling me crazy, Cameron? You calling me crazy?”

Leo slammed the halves of the pencil onto the desk and came round to Cameron. Cameron squared his feet, relaxed his knees, locked his stomach muscles and stood quite still as Leo walked up to him. Cameron knew how to handle himself. And he knew about Leo's temper. Leo's face was so close that Cameron could see his pores. He was careful not to make eye contact.

Leo stepped back and swung his body to look out of the window.

“Amsterdam,” he said as the plane took off. Then, without turning round, he said, “She can see the man she's seeing every day of the week and no one thinks about it twice. Except me. I think about it sixty times a minute.”

“I can't follow you, Leo,” said Cameron.

“It's Xeno.”

There was a pause while Cameron took this in.