Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! (11 page)

'I can't go home. I'm already there, and that's just going to freak everybody out.'

Amber nodded. She was probably way ahead of me.

'You've got kids? You look like you've got kids.'

'Just the one. Baggins. She's eleven.'

'Won't you want to see her? What about your wife?'

'Good question.' I paused, thought about how much I needed to explain myself. 'Not sure what I'll do. Assuming there's another me actually there, I can't really risk putting myself in the middle of that timeline. Like going to the school and chatting to Baggins at lunchtime or something. What could I say? Oh, don't tell me later that we talked? That's too weird. I could, of course, go down there and hide behind a tree, view her from afar.'

'You might get arrested.'

'Well, maybe. I don't know. I might, but that's going to be pretty painful, watching her with some other dad, knowing that I can't be there. I don't know, I just...'

I let the sentence go, but she gave a small wave to drag the rest of it out of me.

'I don't know how this sounds, but... I know she's happy. I know how those six months go. Nothing exceptional. Baggins is happy, nothing bad happens. I don't need to protect her. So, it's like, as long as I know she's happy, and I don't need to worry about her, then I don't miss her too much. That doesn't sound callous, does it?'

She shook her head.

'So, on balance, I might just leave it. But we'll see. God knows what I might think by November.'

'And your wife?'

'What about her?'

'Do you have the same thoughts about your wife?'

That was an interesting question, and very much drove a nail into the heart of my feelings for her. I'd already had – and quickly tried to dismiss – the thought that six months away from Brin might not be too much of a bad thing, because those six months we'd just lived through hadn't been so great. She'd seemed distant and distracted. Annoyed at me at times, in a way that she would never have been before.

Perhaps seventeen years of marriage had finally caught up with us. Or maybe there was the other thing. Maybe she had finally seen through my guilt.

'I don't know,' I said, letting the words drift away and hoping Amber would pick up on the fact that I didn't want to talk about it.

'OK,' she said. 'What else?'

'Well, I don't want to use my bank card, because then the other me is going to see that he's in Nairn and then have to contact the bank, and so on. I don't need to worry about money for a few days as I had plenty of dollars which I've changed. Booked into the Golf View for two nights...'

'Nice.'

'Then I'll need to decide what to do. Brin, Baggins and I will be turning up here in about ten days, so I need to be long gone by then, and I need to make sure that I don't do anything that has someone recognising me when I come back next week with the family.'

'Lay low,' she said.

'Exactly.'

'What about me?'

'I don't remember meeting you last June.'

'Maybe this is altering your past.'

I nodded. I was drinking a gin and tonic, lots of lemon, lots of ice. She'd taken the same. I was trying to take my time, as I was aware I could have drunk about eight of them in an hour, and that was somewhere I didn't want to go.

'That kind of thing,' I began, and I shook my head. 'That's just a total mind bender. Think of every time-travel movie you ever saw. There's always something that's a head scratcher, that has you thinking, well that doesn't add up. I can't think too much about it. I need to keep my head down.'

'What will you do for money when the dollars have run out? As they will, fairly quickly, if you're staying at the Golf View.'

'Tomorrow I'm going to put on a small bet on the Test match.' She raised her eyebrows, so I said, 'Cricket,' and she nodded. 'And I'll keep doing that, whenever there's some sport or other where I know what's going to happen. Nothing big, nothing to draw attention to myself. Won't use the same betting shop more than a couple of times. I'll likely move around.'

'Like Dr Bruce Banner.'

'Exactly.'

'That's kind of sad, but I think it's a good choice.'

'It's only for six months.'

She made a small movement with her eyes then stared into her glass. There was a slight shrug of her shoulders.

'What?' I asked.

'Oh, nothing,' she said.

'What? Really. You can't insert yourself into the position of my principal advisor and then keep opinions to yourself.'

She nodded, as this seemed a reasonable argument.

'There's not a comfortable available course of action open to you in six months time. I mean, one that will keep you out of prison. So, maybe six months will turn out to be much longer.'

'What do you mean comfortable course of action?' I asked.

She stared across the table for a few moments, and then let it all out. 'You're going to have to kill the other you before he gets on the plane, then not get on the plane, and then... whatever. You let it crash, or try to make sure it doesn't crash by some means that I really can't figure out.'

She looked like she was ready to burble on, but I guess the look on my face made her slightly abashed and she finally nodded in acknowledgement at the outrageousness of the suggestion.

'You want me to kill myself?'

'I don't want you to do it, it just makes sense.'

'No it doesn't.'

'Why?'

'Because I'm on that plane until it's just about to crash, then I come here. If I kill myself before getting on the plane, then I'm never in a position to wish that I was on Nairn beach, so maybe I never come to Nairn. Maybe this other me, the me that I am now, just vanishes the second I murder the first me.'

'Ha!' she said.

'What?'

'That's just kinda cool. I mean, I can see your point, so you probably don't want to do it.'

She had a way about her. Nice smile. Even though the contradiction didn't seem that cool to me I still found myself thinking it was cool because she'd said it was.

'And doesn't that apply to everything?' I said. 'If I do anything to change things up to the point where that plane crashes, then don't I just vanish? This me here right now, maybe this never happens?'

'Well, that's all right if the you that's there doesn't die.'

'But then, what if this me here doesn't die, because then there will be two of me?'

She nodded.

'I think we're going to need a bigger gin and tonic,' she said.

She smiled in a knowing way. I said, 'What?'

'You know,
Jaws
, I think we're going to need a bigger boat...'

'I never saw
Jaws
,' I said.

'Sure,' she said. 'Of course.'

Later we ate dinner, then she went back to her place and I went to the Golf View. At some point I wondered if we were going to sleep together, but even the thought of it had me feeling guilty, so I steered away from even the slightest flirtation; she picked up on that, and so by the end of the evening our dinner almost had the atmosphere of a business meeting. There just wasn't anyone taking minutes.

Anyway, we couldn't think of a solution to the problem. I had in the back of my mind that I had six months and that I'd think of something brilliant at some point.

As it was, I never saw Amber again, and I never thought of something brilliant.

––––––––

'Y
ou're the Jigsaw Man?' I asked. 'The guy who used to sit in the Stand Alone, doing jigsaws and... you know, telling us what to do with our lives?'

He stared at me in a way that he had never done when he'd been the Jigsaw Man. Yet, it seemed inescapable, this was definitely him. And now that we were here, it also seemed obvious.

This was all about the Jigsaw Man. It had all started with a phone call from my agent saying there was someone interested in the Jigsaw Man script. I'd got on the plane because of the Jigsaw Man script. Somehow I'd managed to get off the plane, and now that I was here, they had been asking me about the Jigsaw Man. At first I'd thought they'd meant the script, but of course they'd meant the man himself. It was obvious they'd meant the man himself.

'That was one of me, yes,' he said.

That was one of me
. Funny. That's the kind of thing he would have said in the old days, and we would have nodded wisely as though recognising the great sage, while of course we'd have been thinking, what on earth does that mean? Now it didn't seem funny, sage or interesting. It seemed barbed. Conceited even. One of me. As if there were more than one.

Maybe there was. A couple of days earlier there had been two of me, until one of them died in a plane crash. Or, in fact, thought himself off a plane crash onto Nairn beach. And I had begun to wonder, what if the me on the plane did manage to think himself onto Nairn beach? Did that mean there were still two of us, going round in endless circles? Had it happened before? How many of me could there be, all walking around the planet trying to avoid the other me?

'How many of you are there?' I asked.

'Four,' he said.

'So...' I started to ask, but then for a moment I thought my brain was going to short out. I couldn't compute this. I needed to do that thing where I shut everything down and tried not to understand.

'You came into the café the day the plane crashed? And the day before?'

'No,' he said. 'That was one of the others.'

'Are you all in the cells here? There's one of you three doors along?'

'No, we're not all here. They have three, they need to catch the last one. That's why they brought you in.'

'Because the one they don't have is the one who used to sit in the Stand Alone?'

'Maybe,' he said.

His voice was as shallow and expressionless as his face. It went beyond disinterest in my questions, embracing a complete indifference to all life, lying quite the other side and in the far distance from misanthropy. This was like George not caring what people thought of him. Misanthropy at least requires some strong feeling against humanity; the Jigsaw Man's eyes betrayed a bitter coldness boiled down into a tiny, indefinable nugget of desolation. They spoke of the downfall of emotion.

I was having trouble holding his gaze, as though the infertile pit of his soul was reaching out to those who dared look at him, infecting them, spreading a desertification of spirit.

Had he always been like that, this version of the Jigsaw Man, or had this place sucked the life from him?

'How can there be four of you?' I asked.

'How do you know there aren't four of you?' he said in reply. 'Four of everybody?'

'That's ludicrous,' I said quickly.

The Jigsaw Man did not even shrug. He wasn't interested enough to shrug.

'You're not the dark-skinned guy next door, are you?' I asked.

'I don't know who's next door,' he said. 'Now leave. I've answered enough of your questions.'

'I haven't even begun...'

'Leave,' he said, his voice sharp, cutting me off.

I left.

After that I couldn't face going into any more rooms. I walked back to my own cell, closed the door behind me and lay down on the floor. The vitality of earlier had gone. I didn't understand what was going on, and I couldn't think about it. Couldn't begin to think about it. Didn't want to think about it.

The power of the Jigsaw Man's eyes had worked its evil magic.

*

B
rin and I met at a Ringo Starr concert. When relaying this to other people, it's usually considered on a par with meeting at a Eurovision Song Contest party or a
Blake's 7
convention, and I always point out that it doesn't matter that Ringo was just an all right drummer who couldn't really carry a tune, or that he'd have been better suited to being one of the Muppets. HE WAS IN THE BEATLES!

That's what counts. Despite all the people that have claims on being the fifth Beatle – Stuart Sutcliffe, Pete Best, George Martin, Andy White, Billy Preston and many, many more – there are only four guys who can say they were in the Beatles when they were a worldwide phenomenon, and Ringo was one of them.

Earl's Court, late spring 1996. We were standing together at a merchandise stand. I was looking at t-shirts, and ignoring all the ones with just Ringo on the front, trying to decide which Beatles one to go for. I'd noticed Brin straight away, wanted to speak to her, but had been instantly handcuffed by my fear of and discomfort with small talk. Anything I had to say would sound trite and obvious. But then, I was hardly likely to open up with a question about the disintegration of Yugoslavia and NATO's part in a post-Cold War world.

Then she spoke to the vendor and she had a Scottish accent, and the walls of fear and awkwardness fell away. It wouldn't have helped if we'd been in Scotland, but we were abroad. London. Somehow it felt like I had an in. Of course, long-term partner selection based on the other person having the same nationality isn't exactly guaranteed to work out. On that basis, I might as well have tried to hit on Lulu.

'The dark green one would suit your better,' I said, for all the world like I knew what I was talking about. I just happened to be right.

'Hmm,' she said. Very non-committal.

It was an in. Turned out that she hadn't been able to find anyone else with whom to attend the concert, so we stood together, and at the end of it we went out to dinner and then she came back to my hotel room, as it was marginally closer than her apartment. Maybe she was more comfortable about that, as she didn't yet want to show me where she lived. It didn't matter, as she showed me the following day.

When we met she was already thinking about moving back to Scotland. I made her mind up. For a couple of months we saw each other at weekends, including a few magically romantic days in Budapest, then she moved back to Glasgow and into my flat.

*

O
ne Tuesday evening, the week before Brin was due to come to Glasgow, I was in Bar 91 on my own for a drink after work. At the time I had a short-lived job in a small advertising agency, photocopying pieces of paper that were dull even before their tediousness had been replicated ten-fold. I'd gone in for a gin and tonic, or maybe two, before I went home for the night.