Thought Crimes (28 page)

‘A mate of mine knows a bloke at a gym who says that he fucked her and her sister on consecutive nights. Totally fried his brain.'

‘Wouldn't mind seeing the sister … That's prime breeding stock.'

Eric didn't want to hear this, didn't want to entertain even the possibility that Emma and her still more fetching sister delighted in picking up muscle-men and taking them home to fry their brains. What could such gossip mean to him, the man who'd tasted Emma's slice?

‘Hey, if you're not going to finish those chips, mate …' Eric slid the bowl across the table to Maggot.

2. Excision

Eric was capable of forgetting most dates and anniversaries, but he would always remember that June 20th. He'd taken a call from an employee who was distraught about the treatment she'd received from the company's insurer. Since this call shouldn't have been put through to him, Eric was about to complain to the switchboard operator when Emma arrived as if wanded into existence by a benevolent wizard.

‘There's an article I need from this morning's
Age
.'

‘Go for your life,' Eric said, removing the paper from the drawer in his desk.

‘Are you sure you don't mind?'

‘I've already read it on the train.'

‘That's very kind. Thank you,' she said, emitting her warmest smile before disappearing behind the partition.

All thoughts of blasting the switch-girl vanished as Eric's imagination shifted into top gear.

An ex-lover had accepted the lead role in a Hollywood blockbuster. Her mother had been savaged by a drug-runner's pit bull.

When Emma returned the paper, Eric riffled through the front section to find the point of excision. On page eleven, he discovered a rectangular hole. As page twelve carried a full-page car advertisement, Eric deduced that Emma's interest concerned a brief, three-column piece on page eleven.

This was an unusual hole.

Emma's hole hadn't been torn with fingers, or sloppily hacked with scissors. Emma's excision left an exceptionally neat rectangular gap, a hole so meticulous in its creation that the deed must have been done with a Stanley knife, or a scalpel.

The more closely Eric examined it, the more he was taken with the hole's clean-edged perfection. Great painters like Kandinsky and Malevitch became so practised in the production of geometric shapes that they had no difficulty in suggesting exactness, but not even Mondrian knew Emma's degree of precision.

A ruler confirmed Eric's suspicions. Emma had excised a geometrically perfect rectangle from page eleven. It was craft-mastery of the highest order. This was – as any Scotland Yard detective would conclude – the work of an immensely gifted Harley Street surgeon.

Sitting in the train, newspaper carefully folded inside his briefcase, Eric considered all the things that might have prompted this unnatural precision. He saw Emma adding the extracted article to a scrapbook where perfectly cut rectangular reports were patched together in such a way that context utterly transformed content. This project was all about the shape of the thing, or the way she had already shaped it in her mind's eye.

That evening, unable to concentrate on his favourite television comedies, Eric removed the newspaper from his briefcase and raised the individual sheet for closer examination. While doing so, his attention shifted from the paper to the realities it framed.

Seen through Emma's hole, Eric's chaotic domestic life began to make sense. Now the randomly arranged spines of paperbacks in his bookcase, the CD cases strewn across the table, images on his dusty television screen, were transformed. Eric was seeing the world through Emma's eyes and, through her eyes, everything in creation took the form of an expertly composed still-life.

The perfection of this world was overwhelming. Nothing was superfluous. Nothing was accidental.

A sensible man would have left it at that. Eric had experienced revelation of a kind usually known only to great mystics. But his yearning for an insight that would bind his sensibility to that of the ineffably lovely Emma wouldn't permit him to leave well enough alone.

That weekend, Eric consulted the local library's newspaper file. Hastening to page eleven, he discovered a three-column piece under the headline:

COUNCIL DECIDES PAGANS ARE RAVING

According to an agency report, a Borough council in Suffolk was using legislation enacted to prevent large-scale rave parties to ban pagans from practising their ancient tradition of naked ribbon dancing.

And that was pretty much it. The pagan nudists intended court action to defend their rights under common law. Of all the items in the day's newspaper, this was the one that the inscrutable Emma had been so precise in removing.

Eric now saw it all. He saw ribbons attached to a pole erected in the hollow between green hills, and the uninhibited Emma, breasts and buttocks ashimmer as she and her posse of maidens cavorted. Each young beauty sported nothing more than a single garter and a crown of chained wild-flowers. Naturally, this fantasy soon came to govern Eric's thoughts.

3. Heart Surgery

Eric now knew Emma in a way that not even her most intimate acquaintances knew her. He certainly knew her more completely than the lawyers who lusted after her from a distance.

When she next entered the caf to buy an apple, Johnno drooled, ‘Look at that … I'd give two toes and a kneecap for a night with her.'

‘What about you, Ezza?'

Eric was so much in the habit of letting these questions pass that fellow lunchers ignored his failure to answer.

‘What would she get up to of a weekend, a princess like that?'

Max asked.

‘Sailing … hang-gliding,' Maggot ventured.

Then, speaking in advance of any considered intention, Eric told the gathering that Emma Ray was a nude Morris dancer.

‘What?'

Eric must have believed the story that then emerged, because he told it with rare conviction. Emma was descended from a long line of East Anglian pagans who'd expressed their spirituality with naked dance for many centuries.

‘
She told you this?
' Maggot asked, removing his jaw from the chip-bowl.

‘Only as much as she's allowed to.'

A chorus of moans preceded a wave of speculation about goats, rabbits and orgies involving sexual sacrifice. The men wanted to know where this dancing took place, and whether the females were maidens whose virginity had been preserved for sacrificial offering to the priest.

The young graduates became so engrossed in these thoughts that hot chips went uneaten.

‘Who would've thought that?' Johnno said.

Eric then stood up and said he'd better be getting back to work. None of the gang said anything, but their eyes said, Yeah, you'd better do that. They all envied him and his desk just the other side of a partition from Emma Ray.

Perhaps this subject was too difficult or revealing to be raised again. When nothing more was said about Emma's nude Morris dancing, Eric knew that the gang's sudden preoccupation with superannuation and the new factory in the northern suburbs indicated studious avoidance of the matter.

Each morning, he scoured the papers and internet for news of Suffolk's pagan nudists. Typically, there was no follow-up to the original piece. From time to time, Emma passed Eric with a smile, but there were no more requests for his newspaper. Nothing out of the ordinary occurred until Emma suddenly appeared at his desk, her expression a mirror of the raw distress Eric's mother used to show when he alienated school friends.

‘It was you that told them, wasn't it?'

‘What? …' ‘
What?
About the dancing. You told them about the dancing.'

‘Only as a joke …' ‘It was fun, was it?'

‘I never meant to hurt you.'

‘You … I thought I could trust you. I could have borrowed anyone's paper … We'd taken those messages. We trusted each other.'

Returning from a meeting next day, Eric found Emma cleaning out her desk. He spoke her name to no response; when he tried to approach her, she turned her back. He wanted to write a note, but couldn't think what to say. By mid-afternoon, she was gone, and Eric found himself hiding from Declan O'Riordan's fierce scowl.

Emma Ray's departure coincided with a broader shift in mood at the office. The new financial year brought another crop of graduates, and the old lags began to split off from the discreet lunchtime gangs.

The brightest of these arrivals, Karen Holt, took Emma's job with Publications. Although Karen was a pretty brunette who loved to perch on one corner of his desk to exchange gossip, Eric couldn't feel for Karen as he had for her mysterious, self-contained predecessor.

Some nights, Eric thought about searching for Emma. Troubled by what he'd done to her, he considered quitting his job as an offering, but, since no one would see the meaning of such a gesture, he stayed put.

From time to time, Eric raised that sheet of newspaper and looked through the gap, trying to rediscover Emma's magical perspective, but he'd fouled his connection with the ineffable. Though moved by the flawless lines, one had to be careful not to touch the rim of Emma's perfect, geometrical absence. A man could cut himself and never stop bleeding.

FOREIGN EXCHANGE

I remember Mum saying I wasn't to blame in a way that made it sound like it was my fault not hers. Hana wasn't to be blamed either. She had serious problems, and needed help. Other people – her people – were better placed to help her.

And I told Mum to be careful when explaining the situation to Hana's parents. Sending her home early might constitute a loss of face. Maybe that's something I meant to say but didn't. By then, Mum and Dad had spoken to her parents twice without me knowing. They'd taken the trouble to book a flight to Frankfurt, and all her parents cared about was the interruption to their Nile cruise. They hardly asked about their daughter.

I accused Mum of exaggerating, trying to make them sound callous, so she had some way to explain why Hana was so fractious. So far as I could tell, there was no simple explanation. Except that we were in this spot because I chose to study German when everyone knew the future was Chinese.

Back then, we consoled ourselves by saying we were doing our best for Hana.