Thought Crimes (26 page)

Simone didn't mention Ken to Andrew. After failing to make sense of Ken herself, she could hardly expect the boy stranded in timeless melody to get a handle on him.

Although still angry, Andrew was keen to relate the intensity of his Merseyside experiences, but Simone found she had lost interest in provoking him. The couple seemed to know that their relationship would end somewhere between San Francisco and Melbourne Airport. Accepting this allowed them to be more forgiving than they had been before their Liverpool dispute.

‘You realise The Beatles were staying in Bangor when Brian Epstein died?'

‘No, I didn't know that,' Simone told him.

At Foyles in London, she sought out the books Ken had recommended. The assistant took the list to a female superior who pressed her horn-rimmed glasses hard against the bridge of her nose. Mrs Delaney knew none of the books or authors. Simone asked the assistant to check the computer, but the young man politely declined. If the books were on the computer, Mrs Delaney would certainly know about them.

Several days later, during a stop-over in New York, Simone made the same enquiry, first at Barnes & Noble, then at several specialised bookshops. The same result. Computer records found no reference to any of the authors, let alone exotic titles like
The Abattoir at the Far End of the Futures Market
.

When the helpful assistant at City Lights in San Francisco returned waving empty hands, Simone had to concede that Ken's list looked dodgy. Amateur chimney sweeps had more internet presence than Manuel Primm, the genius Ken placed alongside Márquez and Cortázar.

Perhaps the big man had been more desperate to hold Simone's attention than she had realised. She couldn't pretend to understand Ken's behaviour. Maybe the dying twins were no more real than his mystery authors. Maybe honey-voiced Ken was one of those giants who took pleasure in devouring gullible young women for breakfast.

Left-Field Investment Strategies

Simone had never imagined marrying someone so opinionated as Mick. Those who didn't understand Mick saw him as a deadshit whose self-confidence was ill-founded. She knew that many of her friends considered her husband to be a bad investment.

For lawyer Mick, The Beatles were cordial passing itself off as Coke. Overrated. A bunch of sharp-witted pretty boys who should have gone to Hollywood. According to Mick, punk and new wave failed music in one respect only: not arriving fifteen years sooner.

Simone now felt guilty defending the Fab Four against critiques she'd once made herself. Particularly when she thought of Andrew, who'd moved back in with his mum after his father's death. (The equivalent of making camp in Strawberry Fields forever.) Yet Simone managed to see in Mick's assertiveness all the textbook signs of denial. Her man was a frightened puppy. His whole persona was a confidence trick.

Having cottoned on to the rules of the game, she took pleasure stringing Mick along, the puppeteer who allowed her charge the illusion of autonomy. Mick could be made to do absolutely anything if Simone convinced him that he called the shots, that all her ideas were his.

Where did his strange idea to call their unborn child Rose come from? Mick didn't know. He'd never known any Roses, but the name struck him as a good idea and now he couldn't think of calling his daughter anything else. Simone would get used to it, eventually.

Yes, Mick was fragility itself, but Simone found his papered-over vulnerabilities endearing.

Terrified of his wife's pre-history, Mick refused to look at old travel photographs, not wishing to encounter ‘that lanky dickhead'. Mick couldn't cope with the idea that Simone had known romance before meeting him, that she'd found other men to love, and that she might have lived an equally happy life with someone else.

Unpacking after the shift from Elwood to Hampton, Simone found a box of papers she hadn't seen since posting it home from Europe seven years earlier. Maps and guides to obscure museums. Tickets. Postcards. Programs. The front-door key to a bed and breakfast in Canterbury. Notes written on the back of beer coasters. Even a forgotten Polaroid of herself and an equally pissed Danish girl sitting topless in a Heidelberg Youth Hostel. (How Andy must have searched for that photo!) Among a pile of letters she'd received from friends, Simone found the list of brilliant authors and books big Ken had composed over breakfast in Bangor.

She would have thought no more about this list if her eye hadn't caught the name Manuel Primm. What was it Ken had said about the South American's unusual sensibility? She couldn't remember. But Simone knew that Primm had just won a major literary prize. And two other authors on the list, Helen Bain and Miranda Murray, had attained sufficient fame for their names to be known to her. Of course, Simone read nothing these days except books and articles pertaining to her thesis, an inspired attempt to relate the myth of Sisyphus to the American film
Groundhog Day
.

So Ken hadn't pulled her leg after all. The big man's judgement was astute. She then recalled Ken's oddness about his dying twins, and figured the boys must have passed on by now. Ken might have too. His gusto at breakfast was unsustainable.

As Simone re-packed boxes that wouldn't be re-opened for another ten years, she placed Ken's reading list on a coffee table. Mick's birthday was coming up, and maybe she'd give him a book. Jaded from sending threatening legal letters to DJs and samplers, her man needed a new outlet for his vast reserves of disdain.

Grotesquely pregnant at twenty-six weeks, Simone enjoyed the attention from shoppers in her new suburb.

No, so far as she knew, there was only one child, although it felt like two football teams scrambling for a loose ball. Yes, she did know the child's sex.
Oh, but why spoil the surprise?
Not her idea. A paranoid husband refused to let her keep secrets.

Simone answered these same friendly questions when they were put to her by the woman who owned Kidna's Bookshop. Then she asked if Kidna's had the latest novel by a South American author, Manuel Primm.

‘Yes,
Worthless Lives
,' Barbara answered, pointing to an expensive hardback on the shelf immediately behind Simone.

When Simone suggested that
Worthless Lives
couldn't be the writer's latest work, she was assured that Primm's most recent prize was for first-time novelists under the age of thirty.

Unable to make sense of this, Simone gave Barbara Ken's list of hot tips. Most of these names meant nothing to her. Not long ago, she'd had multiple copies of
Collusion
by Miranda Murray, but she'd sold out. Despite being an avid reader of Helen Bain, Barbara had never heard of
The Abattoir at the Far End of the
Futures Market
.

The name that most intrigued the book woman was Michael Fouks. Fouks was a Hampton local who frequented the shop. The previous year he'd won a competition with his story ‘Illusory Density'.

When Simone asked if Barbara had a copy of
Marginal Behaviour
, she looked perplexed. So far as Barbara knew, Fouks hadn't published a book. Just now, Fouks was writer-in-residence at Melbourne University, and she understood him to be using this time to finish a collection of short stories. She'd ask about
Marginal
Behaviour
when he next came in.

Simone handed over thirty-five dollars for the hardback copy of
Worthless Lives
by Manuel Primm, but she never gave the book to Mick, or read it herself.

Previous impulses and epiphanies had taken Simone a long way. They'd once taken her to a bed and breakfast in North Wales. There she'd determined that life was too short to get stuck in a groove halfway through ‘Maxwell's Silver Hammer'.

Simone now felt certain that one of the worthless lives Manuel Primm wrote so brilliantly about would belong to Ken, a charming, obese radio producer whose days were shadowed by a half-baked genetic transfer. Another of those lives was very likely her own. Or a version of her life as she'd come to see it fifteen years hence. Primm's magical control of tense would bounce sentences off the wall marking the end of time.

As a postgraduate student at the same university where Michael Fouks was in residence, Simone could have approached the writer to ask about his work in progress. But she was ‘a woman with child', a woman who remembered the curse that had already befallen the unnaturally farsighted Ken and his twins. To praise Fouks for the quality of his unfinished book,
Marginal
Behaviour
, would be like kicking sand in the face of a sleeping dragon. Or discovering too late your duties with regard to a crucial switch.

SUSPENDED ANIMATION

Charles Brown, still boyish in appearance, enters the set to loud
applause. He is wearing glasses, a black T-shirt with a red Snoop
Doggy Dogg insignia, black trackpants, and trainers. He shakes
hands with Ypres, celebrated Afro-American talkshow host. Being
short and two-dimensional makes it difficult for Charles to find a
comfortable position on his seat
.

Ypres:
Wow, that's a warm welcome, Charles. We feel as if we know you. We grew up with you.

Charles:
You grew up, and I didn't!

Laughter.

Ypres:
And that's what this return to public life is about, isn't it?

Charles:
Yes … Folks feel like they know me, and that's nice most of the time … But that makes you a slave to preconceptions. People act like they own you. You're expected to be that little boy …

Ypres:
They want you to say ‘Rats!'?

Charles:
Good grief!

Laughter.

Charles:
… But I'm not an artwork. I'm entitled to be my own man now.

Ypres:
You're growing …

Charles:
I'm wearing long pants.

Applause.

Ypres:
And you're talking about it …

Charles:
I have to. Everything that happened to me is still happening to other kids.

Ypres:
Yet you were telling me before we came on that you still think you had a wonderful childhood.

Charles:
Absolutely … But being a kid was all I knew. You think,
Hey, what could be better than being six or seven forever?

Ypres:
It never felt like you were being … abused?

Charles:
Never. Not while it was going on. To outsiders, it might look like we were abused or brainwashed. To me, those terms aren't useful … I was playing games with my friends, playing with my dog, discussing the big religious and philosophical questions …
‘But Charlie, you were always losing. Nearly every
day you were humiliated.'
… What was I going to do? Complain to the union? … I never saw it as exploitation. Kids don't think that way.

Ypres:
Not when they're kids.

Charles:
No.

Ypres:
But now?

Charles:
Now, I see we were held back. We were never allowed to think outside the frame … Lucy and Linus want to start a class action … A therapist told me I'll be in denial until I accept that what was done to me was evil … I say it was wrong. And because folks didn't see it as wrong at the time, it got out of hand.

Ypres:
Meaning that you remained the same age, wore the same clothes, were made to associate with the same friends for fifty years?

Charles:
Yes.

Ypres:
And you now believe it shouldn't have happened?

Charles:
That's why I'm talking about it. Bart, Lisa, Eric Cartman … Even though they're in family environments, exactly the same thing is happening to them. I'd hate for Bart to get to fifty-nine and feel that crucial things have passed him by.

Ypres:
You were so cute, Charles …

Charles:
‘Strangely wise beyond our years.'