Vail (3 page)

It seems sound policy to concentrate on one girl in particular. Besides, he can't talk to them all at once, it would be too confusing.

For a tall willowy blonde English girl Angela is extraordinarily short, dumpy, dark-haired and Australian. She works as an editor for BBC Publications, speaks with an Aussie accent and prefers to be called Angie. Vail enters into conversation with Angie by the simple expedient of overhearing a reference to an author called
John Folwes and expressing his liking of and admiration for said author's works, even though he has never read a single word John Folwes has written, much less heard of him.

There follows an animated dialogue concerning Folwes which Vail, for his part, makes up as he goes along. Angie doesn't appear to notice any glaring omission or discrepancy: apparently Folwes is an author you can discuss in considerable depth without ever having read a line.

But Angie has read all his works, some of them several times over in the continuing search for a meaning to life, and in Vail believes she has found a like mind, a soul-mate, of course exemplified by their shared literary taste. Expressing an admiration for Folwes, Vail discovers, is like belonging to an exclusive club or society whose members wear revolving beacons on top of their heads. You can easily spot them fifty metres across a crowded room and, should you be so minded, home in like a motorway sparrow hawk pouncing on a small furry rodent.

Thus it is that in a cramped corner next to a rubber plant and a Munch woodcut reproduction in a stainless steel frame on an off-white rough-cast wall, pushed chest to chest by the crush and holding their glasses of wine underneath their chins, they explore the labyrinthine symbolism and essential message of Folwes while their eyes delve into the murky hidden recesses of the other, noting in passing his unshaven paleness, lined mouth and blank grey eyes and her brown freckled skin and small breasts with dark prominent nipples.

The din and clatter all around shrinks to a blur of sound; the music heard as a reverberation through the soles of their feet; the wine and heat and sensual attraction swimming in their heads like lazy goldfish.

‘Have you noticed that people at parties seem to have no past?' Vail nods, then shakes his head. No, he never has.

‘Well,' Angie says, licking wine from her upper lip. ‘They
arrive out of nowhere, – literally. Materialise from the abyss. Know what I mean? As though they've been instantly created for the occasion. Normally they're kept stacked flat in airless storerooms and only brought out and assembled and arranged about the place as required, – like those kids' pop-up books which as you turn a page erect themselves into a scene complete with people and furniture.

‘I mean, think about it:

‘All these people turn up here tonight, who you've never seen before, and it takes a supreme effort of imagination to convince yourself that their lives were going on before you laid eyes on them. Well, doesn't it? They were created the instant they walked in. Never existed before, – stacked flat in airless storerooms.

‘Take the extremely tall guy over there with the spotted bald head, pink glasses and velvet bow tie. He's just this minute been invented! He doesn't exist at any other time! Impossible to believe he got out of bed this morning, had a wash, ate his breakfast of muesli and toast, ran for the train at Sutton, arrived at the office, had a stand-up lunch in the pub (cheese and pickle sandwich, half a lager), went back to work, so on and so forth.

‘Even you, – or me,' Angie goes on and on, gazing up fiercely into his eyes. ‘We're like characters in a novel who only come into being the moment the author sets pen to paper. They have no past, and neither, for one another, do we. We could be stricken out by a swipe of the pen. I don't believe you have a past and you don't believe I have one either. Why, until just a few minutes ago you didn't even know I existed, – and I didn't!'

Vail wafts himself, saying, ‘It's very hot in here,' not knowing what else to say. (He was doing great with Folwes, holding his own, but events seem to have taken a turn for the worse. Is he meant to respond to this, and, if so, with what?)

‘For all you know I could be one of the ready-made people stacked flat in an airless storeroom just waiting to be assembled!' – triumphant!

‘Well, yes,' Vail is prepared to concede, not entirely sure where this gets them. ‘You could be.' Angie might be fictitious (even though she works for the BBC) but his own past is inviolate. He knows full well where he came from and precisely where, – sidetracks, dead ends, wrong turnings notwithstanding, – he's going.

Somewhere the Opportunity lies in wait for him. It might come from any direction, from any slight quirk of events or random juxtaposition of circumstances. He is prepared to explore all possibilities.

Already, in the space of a few hours, a number of interesting avenues have been revealed, come to light, as it were:

1. He has been mistaken for a copy man.

2. He has become acquainted with an incomprehensible television producer.

3. An American has asked a favour of him in exchange for certain information.

4. An Australian girl with small breasts and dark prominent nipples has come into his life.

For a fictitious character Vail reckons he is doing all right.

In the normal course of events there ought to be a sex scene here between Vail and a tall blonde willowy English girl who happens to be small, dark-haired, Australian and works for the BBC.

We can all imagine such a scene for ourselves. It will no doubt feature certain named portions of male and female anatomy, quiescent and in motion; it will be either soft and rapturous or hard and brutal, or possibly a combination of both. He (Vail) will perform certain acts upon her (Angie) and she will reciprocate in kind, insofar as their physical dissimilarities allow. There might even be net curtains billowing gently in the humid breeze (it is a hot night, remember) and soft-focus prose about heaving mounds and entwining limbs and sheens of reflected light on damp skin. It might also include, God forbid, elements of erect allegory and limp symbolism.

Instead of this titillating sideshow let us press on.

Some women like to know everything there is to know about a man, and the more he goes against the grain, the more he fails to fit or resists the accepted patterns of behaviour, the more insatiably voracious they become in pursuit of knowledge, to possess him, control him. Perhaps Angie is attracted to strays and fringers, who knows? At any rate she finds him ‘interesting', a man with a mysterious and alluring past, and this because of rather than despite his long and matted hair, crumpled evil-smelling clothes, the hollow defeated look about him, especially noticable in the sag of his cheeks and the puffy dark bags under his eyes.

Even the difference in ages, – Angie is twenty-three, – could be said to be another factor in his favour: a further disparity, departure from the norm, which excites her worst dark thrilling suspicions.

They leave the party and go back to her room, which isn't very far away (Sheffield Terrace), walking through the prowling streets after midnight, a risky thing to do in this day and age. She makes coffee (no milk for Vail) and they listen to a black singer called Joan Armourtrading while Angie sits cross-legged in the classic pose at Vail's disreputable feet, her small round face upturned attentively, dark eyes watching his mouth, comfortable in the knowledge that he is to stay the night and therefore happy that the sexual potency quivering in the air between them will be discharged in good time, leaving only an interim period to be filled with pleasant non-combative conversation.

‘I get so
depressed
.' Angie tells him, ‘looking for a deeper meaning to life. There must be one and yet I can't find it.'

‘Where have you looked?'

‘Everywhere.'

‘At the BBC?'

‘In Australia, at the BBC, sitting on the lavatory,
everywhere
.'

To Vail she sounds desperate and at the same time complacent, as if looking and not finding a deeper meaning to life is an enviable state to be in; smug confirmation of one's proper intellectual status.

‘There must be more to it than
this
,' Angie goes on with some vehemence. ‘I mean, look at it. Orthodox religion up shit creek, we're poisoning ourselves with toxic waste, Dallas has more murders per year than England and Wales combined, the universe is expanding out of control, you can't get fresh milk delivered to your doorstep any more, we're slaughtering baby seals to make eyeshadow, leaded petrol is making children into morons, we've stockpiled enough nukes to kill every man, woman and child on the planet fifty times over, billions of people are starving in the Third World, you can't walk down the street without being grabbed and raped, in Russia they put dissidents into psychiatric wards and pump them full of Majetpil, we force-feed animals to get a juicy steak, there's too much violence and pornography on television, entropy is increasing exponentially, you can't get a decent meal in a restaurant under £20, they're chopping down all the trees in the Amazonian Basin, everybody's in it for what they can get, the trains are filthy and don't run on time, you can't go outside the wire without getting shot, old people die of hypothermia, people spend more on gambling than they do on health care, wives are being battered, there's less than ten percent real meat in sausages, shoals of haddock have been wiped out by nuclear runoff, – '

Vail ventures a timely interruption.

‘I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausages and haddock by writing them down.'

‘You do?'

‘Yes.'

‘I wouldn't know about that, – all I know is that I'm sick to death. Everyone thinks it's wonderful working at the BBC but it isn't. Fagwir from it. The canteen meals are disgusting. I gave better slop to my dingo back in Perth.'

Vail says, ‘You've got your yellow card and you're not plagued by
gwiches.'

Angie's interest perks up at once. ‘Did a
gwich
ever shop you?'

‘Not yet. But I have to be careful.'

Her eyes gleam. ‘Because you haven't got a yellow card?'

‘That could be one reason,' Vail says carefully.

‘The others?'

Vail examines his dirty nails.

‘I won't mind if you don't tell me but I'd love to know, – have you killed somebody?' Parted wet lips breathless.

‘No of course not,' Vail says immediately.

‘Swindled the SS?'

‘Not yet.'

‘This is like a guessing game. Er, let me see, – you handle drugs and hard-core porn.'

Vail holds up both arms and looks from one threadbare sleeve to the other.

‘No, I guess you don't. I give up. What do they want you for? What have you done?' Her hand creeps underneath her dress and along her inner thigh. ‘Something bad? Is it bad? Very bad?'

‘What would you like it to be?'

Angie inserts the tips of two fingers into her vagina and slides them up and down. ‘I bet it's something really nasty, isn't it? A horrible sex crime.' She rocks slowly back and forth, a flush entering her cheeks. ‘What I think you did was to get a young innocent schoolgirl and force her to undergo certain perverse practises. Made her hold it, I bet, and masturbate you, sticking up in front of her face, veined and swollen, didn't you?' She holds her breath for a moment and lets go a whimper. ‘And when it started to pulsate you aimed it right into her face, I bet, didn't you, and made her keep wanking you harder and harder till you shot it all over her perfect rosebud mouth.' She moans softly, breathing fast and shuddery, and expels all her breath at once and falls back onto the rug, eyes shut, legs splayed.

‘If you like,' Vail says, unmoved. ‘In fact it's nothing like that.'

There is a law operating somewhere in the universe to the effect that unconnected events and random happenings conglomerate arbitrarily around a common centre.

[Vail doesn't know why this is, simply feels it to be true.]

Having rid herself of the ache in her loins (seeking a meaning to life in masturbatory fantasies concerning older disreputable men with mysterious, alluring pasts) Angie is prepared to listen to him in a calmer frame of mind. She still finds him intriguing even though the pulse of bloodheat has ceased to beat; if anything the fact that he could sit so dispassionately has sharpened her curiosity about this shagged-out empty-groined masturbation-watcher. She had come so quickly that it even took her sliding fingers by surprise.

She makes fresh coffee and resettles herself on the rug at his feet. ‘Do you know where to begin?' Angie asks him.

‘I think so,' Vail replies. ‘Do you want to hear it all?'

‘Every last word.'

‘Parts of it are fixed in my brain while others are patchy and hazy. But I'll do my best.'

There were three of us in the Bedford 22cwt van, – Mira, Bev and me, – and we'd already broken down twice between Zuttor Estate and junction 19 of the M62: the tremendous distance of six miles. The second breakdown happened on the gently declining slip road leading onto the motorway itself. I was underneath the van with an adjustable spanner trying to loosen something that had seized up when the black boots and leggings of a motorcycle policeman came into view and plonked themselves about eighteen inches from my oil-smeared nose. A bass rumble of a voice, and I heard Mira reply, ‘I don't know. Overheated I think. We'll get it going, we have before.' Not very smart. The policeman would get the idea it was a regular occurrence (which it was) and have us towed away to the scrapyard. Lying on my back I prayed that he wouldn't ask to see the MOT test certificate, which I didn't possess, having bought the van from a Pakistani who wanted £250 but settled for £200 because the van didn't have its MOT. Wisely, I stayed where I was and let Mira work her feminine charm on the policeman. She was good at this, being an attractive woman with a warm smile and sympathetic manner, both of which were natural and unforced. She was also well blessed in the bust department.