Turquoiselle (16 page)

Carver
went, (as expected?), up to the bar. It was very clean and well-ordered,
frankly clinical in its own manner, as if alcohol had now become available
inside a UK NHS hospital.

Carver
asked for, and unhurriedly drank, a single whisky.

He
did not want it, but could tell it was a decent one, despite the unknown label
and name.

No
one approached now, in the clinical bar. The bar staff were attentive and
friendly. Anyone who caught Carver’s eye either looked at once away, or smiled
radiantly at him. (Did he imagine this? Again, the residue of drugs?)

Later
he went into the canteen, which resembled, unlike the bar, a plushy and rather
expensive London restaurant, perhaps belonging to a private political club. He
ate a hamburger and salad under the darkly tawny drapes.

He
was not tired, only exhausted. He left about eight-thirty. His room had been,
as before, and as in the best hotel, immaculately hoovered, brushed and dusted,
the bed made up, the bathroom cleaned and aromatic with .flowery bleach. New
clothes had arrived for him also, still in their packaging, shirts, T-shirts,
trousers, underwear. All similar to things he had worn.

Beyond
the window a quarter moon lay sideways on the western rim of the sea. Twilight
and water. He left the blind up.

Would
Anjeela Merville visit him tonight?

Carver
thought not.

In
this he was correct.

Fourteen

A series of
codes began to move through his head. On the black screen of his mind: letters,
numbers. Stupid, simplistic. ABC.
123.
U.R.U.I.M.E.

Sara,
his – Andy’s – mother went entirely mad the day she found out she was pregnant
again. Her madness, until then, had been eclectic, and composed of elements
that might be explained away, put out of sight. Some things she did were only
hysterical – screaming sometimes out of the window of the flat over the off-licence
after drunks, once they had gone – or, skittish always, ‘making sure’ the front
door was properly shut three (even six) times after leaving the flat. Small
things.

It
was just before he took off for the college. Sunderland had come back, and
spent about an hour talking to Andy, explaining transport and routine,
necessities. After he left, Sara began slowly to seethe and then come to the
boil.

“You
get everything, don’t you? Yeah? It all comes to
you
, if you’re a fucking man. You don’t
even get in the family way.” (One of her more prissy expressions.) “Well, I’m
not going to have the little fuck. I had enough shit ‘cuz of you. That was
enough. Or
you
wan’ it, yeah?
No, din’ think so. Just fuck off to your poncy
college
, you little bugger. And I’ll get rid of
this
one that’s been
stuck up me. Once’s enough.” And she flung her mug and then, snatching it, his,
against the wall.

Andy,
despite himself, had been shocked. He had not even known – why, how, should he?
– that she had had recent sex with a man, maybe many men. He knew nothing about
Sara but the outlines of the past, inside which she had still seemed to move.

He
supposed she had cared for, and financially supported him, but she had never
had any lasting interest in him (“Why should I?” she might well say, “I never
wanted
you. And what
have
you
done?”) But she
had protected –
tried
, actually
uselessly, to protect – him, from his father. She had made him skimpy but
regular meals, and washed his clothes and bought him sweets and, when he was
little, walked him to vile schools and left him there, skimmed off some of her
hard
hard
-earned cash to
give him his ‘dole’.

Put
up with his own indifference and absences. Pretended to like his few (ill–devised?)
generosities.

Presumably
she did get rid of the second child. Or else she had never been afflicted by
it, just a fearful mistake put right by her next menstruation.

Once
at the college, he had ceased to see her. He did not need to ‘go home’. He did
not call her ever. They never wrote. Not even cards.

Then
she did write him a letter, when he was sixteen. It was poorly spelled, as by
then he could see, and put its words together less ably than Sara did when
speaking. She told him she was moving north with someone she knew, she did not
specify gender or connection. She called her son, as ever,
Andy
, and she wished
Andy luck. She, however, did not sign it ‘Mum’, as she had with his birthday
and Christmas cards in childhood, but with her name,
this
spelled
correctly and in full,
Zarissa Maria Cava
.

A.B.C.
 1.2.3.  1.4.  1.4.  
1.4.

Another
day arrived, flared blue, green and gold, and sank to darkness in the sea.

Carver
spent it, as he had substantially the days before. He had, though, some company
in the afternoon.

Following
breakfast in
the kitchen, Carver lingered. The others, including the non-communicative
Anjeela Merville, gradually ebbed away, she in company with the boiler-suited
Fiddy. It was a different boiler suit today in deep orange.

Ball
was the last to leave. He and Van Sedden seemed scowlingly to have fallen out,
did not exchange a word with each
other or
with anyone else. When Ball rose he
glared also at Carver and said, “Have a
nice
day, Car, why
don’t
you.” Carver
nodded and went back to reading the ancient copy of
The
Independent
he had found
lying at an empty place on the table. He continued to read a while after Ball
had also gone. The paper seemed fairly fresh and crisp, but that must be some
treatment – it was dated
2009.
(He had noted such or more out-of-date news-sheets and magazines in the bar,
but that was strangely in keeping with the bar’s hygienic hospital ambience.)

The
kitchen was vacant then aside from Carver.

He
was, he had concluded, expected –
meant
– to steal something. So he picked up
the black mug he had drunk from and walked out with it.

In
the cloakroom off the hall below the stairs, Carver annexed an unused bar of
hand-soap, dressed in its white wrapper.

Going
through the appropriate corridor that he now knew led out to this side of the
grounds, one passed a cupboard for office-type stationery, and left unlocked.
Carver selected three pens, some batteries and a ringbacked notepad.

Carrying
everything openly, he went out. There was never any human security on any of
the doors, at least, not to be seen.

Outside,
it was remorselessly there again, the Wonderful Weather. But this place was
some sort of movie-set after all. Conceivably they had finally cracked the
scientific formulae for weather control, just as the USA and Russia had been
rumoured to have done as far back as the 1960’s. Weather control: people
control. And here, just sufficient rain, endless warmth and light. Keep the
leaves green. Keep summer up and running.

Carver was
walking back along the rise towards the line of railway-carriage sheds when the
fat cycling enthusiast burst from the trees below, and called out to him.

“Hi!
Car!”

They
all used the office abbreviation of his name now. It would have been in the
inevitable file on him.

Carver
turned, stopped, waited for the out-of-breath young man to reach him. This
morning Charlie, if that
was
his name, wore jeans, overstretched
from hip to knee, too loose at calves and ankles – he did not, certainly, have
a cyclist’s legs. Additionally he had on another white tent of T-shirt, this
one written over by the optimistic motto
Long Life
. As before, under duress, he was
scarlet, and puffing from exertion.

“Some
hill,” puffed Charlie. He reached out and clapped Carver on the arm, man to
man.

Carver
waited.

Charlie
regained his breath. “How are you doing?”

“Fine.”
Carver paused. “How’s your bicycle?”

“Oh
God, she’s lovely. Did nearly thirty miles on her yesterday. Getting there. No
lie. Getting... Where you headed?”

When
Carver did not comment, Charlie decided. “The sheds. I’ll trot up there with you.”

They
trotted very slowly.

“Shame
you can’t see the sea this side,” said Charlie.

The
sea lay to the south, the sheds northerly.

“Should
you be able to? Is this an island?” Carver asked.

“An
isle of adventure, old mate,” gasped Charlie.

“I
meant, is this place surrounded by sea?”

Charlie
stopped, so Carver stopped. Charlie frowned at him and for a moment Carver
thought something useful might be said. But then Charlie exclaimed, “You know,
old son, you’re the spitting image of my dad – I mean, about sixteen years ago,”

“What
year was that, then?”

“Oh,
when he was younger. You know what I mean.”

“So
I look like your father. When younger.”

“You
really do. Although –” Charlie tilted his head, quizzically, “more like my
uncle, maybe.”

Carver
started to go on up the hill.

A
jolly dog, Charlie scampered after him, just too out-of-breath to bark.

By
now the sheds were clearly in front of them. The sun had not yet topped the
higher parts of the building behind. But light still fell on the golden syrup
shed-wood in thick separated slices, somehow optically doubling several of
them, so seven became eleven.

Croft
had left Carver the three-way keys.

Carver
undid the centre door of the central (light–doubled) shed.

“I
won’t come in, OK...” said Charlie, as if anxious not to offend by not doing
so. “I’m off to get in some cycling.”

“Do
you find you have a lot of time for that?”

“Every
day, old mate. Regular as a clock.”

“What
happens the rest of the time?”

Charlie
would not, as he had not, give a direct answer. Or would he? Charlie said, “I’m
just an errand boy, Car.” And for a moment he looked sly. It was, of course,
how Carver had described himself.

Then
Charlie let out a somehow surprising bray of laughter, spun round and hurtled
off down the slope, waving his arms and ungainly as a drunken windmill so that
Carver too, for a second, was reminded of someone from the past. Heavy.

Carver
went into the shed, and shut and locked the door behind him.

There
was a narrow table in there now. A plain, clean, modern table of renewable
wood. Waiting to receive anything he might want to set down on it. Displaying,
en passant,
they
too had kept
keys.

Carver
put the pens, batteries, notebook, soap, mug, in a group at the centre. The
arrangement seemed very foreign to him. All this was as unlike anything he had
ever done as it could be. He too, he felt, was unlike anything he could properly
target as himself. Whatever caused this effect, it disturbed him only to a
degree. Because perhaps the
different
Carver might find a way out of
this mess.

Lunch was a
sandwich got from the take-out annexe between the canteen and the bar. He had a
small bottle of beer (label unknown) to go with it, mostly for the fluid
content. He ate and drank outside, sitting on the bench he had shared with
Croft.

Carver
sat and thought about Croft, going over all the points he could remember. “London
wasn’t built in a day.” What had been the other off-kilter word or phrase? It
would not come. (Charlie too had said something just off the general
phraseology. Regular as, not clockwork, but
a clock
. But people got mixed up. Or altered
things to be ‘clever’.)

None
of this was remotely like the takes, adornments, extrapolations, transpositions
of someone like Heavy. Theave. Wolfs. Underland for Sunderland. The wind runs backward.

Carver
watched the light breeze dapple about in the leaves. He tried to gauge if any
tiny giveaway blink or shimmer indicated a spying device. He could not detect
anything. Yet he knew they were there. They
had
to be, with such otherwise lax security.
And besides he could sense the faint reflected buzz of their electronics on the
skin of his bare forearms, his forehead. Sometimes at the tip of his tongue. He
had experienced that with women, too, once or twice, when intimately kissing
and licking them. Never with Donna. With the black woman he had, Anjeela. He
had half expected to. Oddly, suddenly, he recalled Silvia Dusa. The pressure of
her hands on his chest, so hot, then the impression of them left behind
afterwards, so
cold
. Like the coded
numbers, letters, that had splintered over his eyes in semi-sleep, he saw again
that terrible image of her mortuary corpse, the inert body eviscerated of life,
her riven and evacuated arm–

Carver
lurched on the bench. He had been sleeping again now. And now, was awake.

He
checked the sky. The sun was deep in the nests of trees. They had not left, or
given him, a watch to tell the time, (unlike Ball?), but he could judge
reasonably well by the sun. Nearly five again? He planned to go in. He would
retreat to his room from the bustle, the beaming smiles and hotelish fake camaraderie
– or reticence. As with the college, they all seemed to live in. When darkness
arrived he would go into the corridor and look out towards the shed. See if it
had begun to glow blue-green. That would not occur, he was fairly sure. But
then. Who could say?