A Private Haunting (16 page)

A large, half-open mouth with a row of bright white teeth and rose-pink lips had been painted across the white brick entranceway. The mouth stuck out a lurid, flame red tongue, painted across the wall and doorway and unfurling down onto the paving slabs in front of the entrance. To the top left of the mouth were the words
Soft City
in bold black lettering.

‘Check it out!' Mary said, a tone that made her wonder if an impostor had taken over her powers of speech. Jonas seemed a bit wary, as if he didn't know how to react to this new,
relaxed
Mary. She thought how brusque she'd been in
The Mayor
and felt a bit embarrassed.

Forgive me, Jonas
, she thought about saying,
for the erratic nature of my behaviour
, stifling a laugh and realising she was more drunk than she thought. Only men in cravats said things like
erratic nature
. Yet she was in a university town which maintained a small but probably statistically significant population of cravatted fogeys, young and old. A cravat shouldn't be able to influence a choice of words but somehow did. Or was it a choice of thoughts?

‘Jonas?'

‘What?'

‘Can you choose your thoughts?'

‘Thoughts? I suppose so.'

Mary turned, stuck her tongue out, mirroring the image on the gallery wall. ‘I... agree,' she said, as certain as she could be but later wouldn't be certain at all. ‘Do you like cravats?'

‘Not really, why – '

‘Me neither. Not on your nelly.'

‘What's a nelly?'

She was pleased that he didn't know what
nelly
meant but realised she didn't have a clue either. So instead of answering she pushed him through the doorway into the gallery vestibule.

They wandered the exhibition for a while before she put a finger on what she thought about it until she realised that
finger
was right on the money. Pushwagner pointed a finger.

Soft
City
was a dystopian graphic novel written in the 1970s. The original drawings had been laid out in long exhibition cases. Anonymous everymen wake
en masse
at the same time in identically drab, Soviet-style tower blocs, take the same pills and commute with rigid choreography in identical blue suits, hat and briefcase, clocking in to Soft Inc., a corporation-cum-agent of control, bombarding the worker-drones with martial, materialistic images.

In another room, the novel had been animated, sound-tracked by dissonant electronic percussion,
Eraserhead
meets Aphex Twin
, said Jonas, and who was she to disagree?

Messages flashed.
If you don't make it you are fired... Who
controls the controller? Roll Dollars...

‘You Norwegians are a happy bunch.'

‘Blame the winters.'

‘What, and
we
don't have winters?' Almost spat out, a swift return of harshness that surprised her.

The second floor showcased Pushwagner's paintings, occasional canvases in cavernous space.

Jonas and Mary were the only visitors, the lighting dim and shifting, slow-motion disco spots across the room. Their footsteps clipped, moving through the recurring themes of alienation and paranoia, duped humans as complacent machines, dancing on a building roof in
Apocalypse Frieze
with symmetrical ranks of tanks on either side, the sky crammed with rockets and parachutists,
Self-Portrait
an outline of a lozenge-shaped head but instead of a face it was a cathedral-like building, row on row and level on level of box-like compartments.

She stopped in front of the bending, liquid skyscrapers of
Klaxton
, filled with thousands of windows and the same face peering out of each. It reminded her of windows overlooking Jonas's back garden and she felt a quick unease, the odd one out among the identikit people she'd lived among for decades, years of familiarity and comfort and a horizon accepted as final, who all looked at Jonas in a different way, who all thought differently.

He appeared at her side, looking directly at the painting. After a moment she took his hand.

‘What do you think?' he asked.

‘That you're a strange man.'

‘Not me, the painting.'

‘I know what you mean, Jonas.' She still hadn't looked at him. ‘You know what? I'm going to believe you.'

He just nodded.

‘It just seems too obvious.'

‘Thanks for the ringing endorsement.'

‘I'm drunk, good as you're going to get.' He pulled his hand away. ‘Or maybe I don't believe you.' She grabbed his hand and kissed him, then abruptly turned away. ‘So what now?'

Jonas looked perplexed, as if he didn't know if she meant right now, or now in general, as in
them
. ‘Do you want to get another drink?' he asked, a tad pathetically, she thought.

‘Do you want to fuck me?'

He flinched.

Mary almost flinched too.

It didn't suit her but she persisted, trying not to look embarrassed. ‘Well, do you?' She was having an affair. She should be saying things like this. That's what risk was. ‘Cat got your tongue?' And she kissed him again, pulling him towards the disabled toilet in the far corner. Inside, she checked the door, quickly discarded her skirt and panties and sat up on the sink unit.

Jonas was very hard very quickly. She braced herself with one hand and put the other on his backside, pulling him in. He'd hardly begun before her eyelids were fluttering and her hips jerking. She let out a strangled moan, keeping her eyes tightly shut until long after he finished and the only sounds were the buzz of the fluorescent light and his slowing breath.

When she opened her eyes he was staring at her. He seemed troubled and she felt self-conscious. She thought of Pushwagner's windows, all those faces staring at disaffected Mary, the odd one out.

Fletcher's aunt would disapprove. She disapproved of everything he did while indulging his little sister. As both a bigot and a po-faced obsesser about the correct, he wondered if she'd be more livid with him for being back in the Catholic Church or that he'd just dipped a finger in the font.

Nothing happened, his finger didn't dissolve. He saw his aunt's sour-faced reflection and stirred the water until she fragmented.

Across by the altar, the priest was watching. Fletcher found nothing troubled in the man, no sense of a self-examination made and even one thing found wanting. The Taliban touched the void. They took the Sharia and stepped way back to before the division of the Absolute. You couldn't argue with them and that was the point. You had to respect the Salafi crazies.

He maintained eye contact with the priest as he walked towards the side altar and the portrait of the Virgin.

On a whim, he lit a candle and attempted a prayer that became a memory of End Point. He and his grandfather, all those near-silent meals. The old man was the only one Fletcher kept in touch with after he left, the only one who knew he'd changed his name. It was his grandfather who told him his aunt had moved away. He didn't tell Fletcher where she was and Fletcher never asked. You draw the line and you stay on your side.

Couple of years back he told McQueen about the old man. McQueen was a decent sort, identikit mouthy Scot and ex-Black Watch, two fucked-up tours in Iraq. They'd run into each other down Victoria and bounced around for a while. They were sitting in some God-awful December soup kitchen off Tottenham Court Road, Fletcher flushed with the goodwill that comes of a full belly and going on and on about this
country house
that had been left to him.

McQueen screwed his eyes shut and shook his head, saying
go
fuck yourself and your fuckin fairy tales
.
And Fletcher laughed again now as he had then, until McQueen was screaming, throwing his tray at him, loud as the priest was silent, standing by the altar and staring.

McQueen was always on about the nine thousand homeless ex-servicemen, lost in the fog of PTSD and whatever cocktail of booze and drugs was closest to hand. Fletcher never felt like he was one of them. He had a place to go to, after all, and felt bad for laughing at McQueen.

But McQueen never got the full story from Fletcher, same as McQueen had his own secrets. He told Fletcher about the Basra detainee one evening when he was drunk, what he did and how he got away with it. As with McQueen so with Fletcher, always the next, crucial detail left unsaid.

It was overcast when Fletcher left the church. He went to the library and watched a sad-looking young woman read a story to a group of screaming toddlers. He left when he tired of the glances from the counter woman, who seemed to be trying to place him.
The Black Lion
was just around the corner but he was getting better at dealing with booze. Instead, he headed for the café.

 

Andrew Gladstone. Fletcher had finally placed the fat red face a few days back. Gladstone was in the year above him, good at football. This made him popular with the girls, someone to be admired. Now he owned a greasy spoon and had a wife fatter than himself. He didn't admire Gladstone anymore. He made him think of a school reunion on a wet November Tuesday in the back room of a provincial pub, over-loud music and the stale tang of despondency.

He stayed in the café for three hours and drank two Americanos. Gladstone always stared but would never recognise him, lost to any awareness including that of the self. His only other sign of life was to glare at him for picking the black bits from the sugar bowl, a pathetic flaring of pride from a man who'd long since stopped taking an interest in his business.

On April 17th, 1991, seven thirty in the evening, Gladstone had glared at him for a very different reason. The memory didn't upset him, because now had nothing to do with then.

It was a mistake to go down to the Sports Club, a few drinks to relax. He sat in a corner table and drank pint after pint, turning over the questions the police had asked him about his sister's disappearance. She'd been gone thirty-six hours and for twelve of them he'd been sitting in an interview room. He didn't think he'd said anything to contradict himself.

Gladstone came in with a few of his football buddies. They dragged him round the back of the club and kicked the shit out of him. The next morning, when Fletcher looked out of his bedroom window, they were waiting along the street. That's when he moved to End Point, his grandfather a near-recluse who had only recently moved to the village. No one knew him.

Across by the till, fat Gladstone of the present day was staring into space, mouth hanging open. Fletcher took a sip of cold coffee and remembered they didn't have any left in the house.

The thought was almost amusing.
They
, the familiarity of it, Fletcher and Mortensen as housemates. Now that the police had locked on he wondered how the Norwegian would deal with it. Fletcher remembered the trauma of ‘91. The unravelling.

That morning he'd heard the Norwegian on the phone, taking the day off. Soon after he followed him to the bus stop. Only then did Fletcher realise he was on Tanner Avenue. A film crew had set up outside number nineteen, a small crowd watching. He should have just walked away.

The house had changed. He looked up to his old window, top left. He remembered bright white frames, ever-clean windows that he had to scrub every third Saturday. Now the window frames were peeling and the glass grubby, the neat garden replaced by a sun-parched lawn bisected by a path with weeds between the concrete slabs. Two bright-painted gnomes sat on either side of the front door. It would have appalled his aunt; she didn't do whimsy.

Fletcher stood beside kids who weren't alive back then, parents who told themselves they remembered, moth-drawn to the TV lights as years before they would have flocked to public executions, eager to be part of an event they'd talk about later with the authority of
being there
. Because it was the taking part that mattered, not the authenticity of the experience. And the reconstruction wasn't quite there. The producers had got the clothes right, the blue jacket and the red and white dress, but the girl was a bit too skinny, the hair too dark.

He talked to the cameraman when they were re-setting the scene. The programme was called
Cold Cases
and re-visited unsolved crimes. They were filming in Leeds when they were told to get back south. A teenager had gone missing in the same village where another girl had disappeared twenty-three years ago. They'd bumped the planned episode for this one.
There's never any connection
, the cameraman said.
It's all in the suggestion. We call it Project
Fear.

‘We're closing in ten minutes.'

Gladstone's pasty face brought Fletcher back to the present. He was holding out a piece of paper, the bill. In a film, Gladstone's eyes would narrow. He'd say,
don'
t I know you?
Instead, his eyes moved towards the window. Fletcher followed his gaze across the street.

The rain was heavy. Through the rivulets on the glass he saw Mortensen, the front door of End Point open and the Norwegian throwing things onto the pavement, Fletcher's things.

‘What's he doing?' said Gladstone.

‘Beats me.'

‘He's a funny bugger,' said Gladstone.

‘Know much about him?'

‘More and more these days.' Gladstone fixed him with a meaningful look.

‘That right.'

‘A right
funny
bugger.'

 

Fletcher and Gladstone watched from the covered arcade between the café and the hair salon.

The spectacle was theirs alone, the hairdresser had closed up long ago and the rain swept off every passer-by. Fletcher considered the most effective way of shutting Mortensen up if he noticed him standing there watching him. He felt oddly liberated at watching his possessions being scattered, ready to blow away, no proof at all of his existence.

Gladstone slowly shook his head when Mortensen slammed the front door. With a last drag on his cigarette he flicked it into the street, clapped his new buddy on the shoulder and disappeared into the café. Fletcher flinched. Twenty years a Marine and he still jumped at that fucker's touch. He'd see to that particular issue in time. Or maybe not, it kinda depended.

By the time Fletcher walked down the street and back again the café windows were dark. He gathered up his sleeping bag and roll mat, the only witnesses a couple of passing cars, the rain so heavy he didn't worry about the occupants noticing too much. He took his things round the side of the house and flung them over the fence into the cypresses. When he returned for his rucksack he saw his aunt's Bible face down in the pavement muck. It had landed open at Luke: 15, something tedious about tax collectors. He flicked through the pages in the pouring rain until he found something more fitting. Leviticus: 24.
Punishment of blasphemy
.

 

Fletcher came at Mortensen from the back garden. The Norwegian was sitting at the kitchen table and didn't notice him until he'd reached the sun room. He barely had time to stand up before Fletcher was on him. He swept Mortensen's left leg and caught him as he fell, one arm tight under his neck and the other free to plunge the knife under the ribcage. As he had been trained.

Instead, he propelled Jonas through the sun room and into the garden. When the Norwegian tried to run past him Fletcher swept his leg again, Mortensen landing heavily on the grass. He did this five more times. He wanted Mortensen to feel the futility of trying again and again to do something he would never succeed at. No yelling and no anger, nothing but distant thunder, timpani rattle on the sun room roof and Mortensen's rasping breath.

The rain let up. The Norwegian lay unmoving on the grass. Fletcher sat on the bottom step of the sun room and looked up to the lightening sky. He'd known the monsoon in Belize, streets turned to mud rivers, white eyes in black doorways. Bangkok too, always a troubling memory, on leave and stripped to the waist, full of Sang Som and Singha, screaming into the deluge. He remembered the sudden easing, the tension draining from his shoulders just as swiftly, leaving behind a vacant vulnerability, the odd sense of a question un-posed.

He leaned back on his hands, watching Mortensen sit up slowly and look cautiously around, bracing for the next kick that wouldn't come. Fletcher let his breathing settle and thought of Mary, a sentimental image of her dabbing at the Norwegian's bruises with a clump of bloodied cotton wool, brushing back the wet hair. That kind of concern, it never lasted.