Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! (12 page)

'Hey, stranger,' said a voice behind me.

I didn't immediately turn around, but I had an instant realisation of what was about to happen. It was Jones, the lightness of her voice still etched inside my head. At this point it had been a little over three years since I'd seen her, and three years isn't so long in a matter of the heart, and that voice still did the things that it had always done. I wanted to be in love with Brin, and Brin was about to come and stay with me – forever – and the last person I wanted to see was Jones. Really, the last person, even though when I turned round and looked at her, she hadn't changed, except perhaps that she seemed even more radiantly beautiful, and the look in her eyes still grabbed my stomach and my head and my heart and squeezed so tightly I could barely stand up. Definitely the last person.

'Hey!' I said, tying to muster enthusiasm, and she took me in her arms and embraced me, kissing me on the cheek as she did so. She smelled wonderful. I tried not to breathe

I got her a drink, we sat in a corner of the bar. I told her about my exciting times as a photocopier, she told me about all the people she'd met in the theatre, getting a small part in
Sense And Sensibility
and having a coffee with Kate Winslet, night clubs of London and an acting job in Italy over the summer. I talked some more about photocopying. She seemed to be laughing at my jokes more than I remembered. She touched my arm a couple of times.

God, she was beautiful.

I never mentioned Brin. I meant to. I was telling myself that I wasn't keeping it from her. It just never came up.

'You know what I finally worked out?' she said. She was on her fifth vodka and Coke, I was on my fourth gin. To say that my infatuation had come flooding back, would only be incorrect in that it had never gone anywhere in the first place.

'Go on.'

'I mean, from the old days. And there were two things...'

'Good,' I said, 'that's two things more than I managed to work out.'

She laughed again, but the laugh was light and attractive and intoxicating. She was drawing me in. It didn't occur to me that perhaps it was because she was an actress. She was in training, and was already very good at and getting paid to be an actress.

'Henderson was gay, that was one of them. And, you know, I'm not just saying that because
oh my God, Jones was after him and he didn't want her
... That wasn't it. It was just... obvious. Obvious.'

She looked serious and shook her head. 'Did you know? Why didn't you say?'

'I only found out when the Jigsaw Man pointed it out to me, and that was after you'd left, I think. Not sure.'

'The Jigsaw Man,' said Jones, shaking her head at the memory of him. 'Whatever happened to him?'

She talked about our time at the Stand Alone as though it had been thirty years previously. Maybe her last three years felt a lot longer than mine because she'd been doing more interesting things than photocopying.

'He went off travelling,' I said. 'He had a wife in Laos.'

'Jesus. Laos? I don't even know where that is.'

'Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, around there.'

'Holy shit.'

She drained her drink, but the alcohol didn't seem to be having any effect on her. She had been laughing and flirtatious from the off. Maybe she'd already been drunk when she first saw me.

'What was the other thing?' I said. I didn't think, didn't mean anything by the question. I just liked talking about the old days. The old days that weren't really so old.

'Sorry?'

'You said you'd finally worked out two things from the old days.'

She smiled. One of those smiles that says something, but I had no idea what it was. I just watched her lips as she looked off to the side, her tongue between her white teeth, her finger running round the rim of her vodka tonic tumbler.

'You, em...' she began, then she laughed uncertainly and looked at me from two feet across the table. 'You...' She laughed again and shook her head. 'Jesus, I'm hopeless without someone writing my lines for me.'

'You're fine,' I said. I still stupidly didn't know what she was going to say. I was the dumb-ass bug being sucked into the sweet flower. Not just helpless, but too stupid to realise that it's being played.

'You were in love with me,' she said.

She looked earnestly across the top of her drink, then lifted it and put it to her lips.

So, here it was. The conversation I'd played over in my head at least two thousand times. Except, it was a conversation for three years earlier. I had long since given up on her. I'd made the effort. Pushed her away. I had found someone else.

'You
were
in love with me, weren't you?' she asked. Her voice sounded small and nervous.

Thinking about it, there was no doubt she was acting the part and playing me, but at the same time I don't think she knew she was acting and I doubt she would have considered for a second that she was playing anything.

'Yes,' I said.

She nodded. Bit her bottom lip.

'I'm sorry, I should have realised.'

'That's all right. I should have said.'

She laughed again, nervous and insecure.

'Do you still love me?' she asked.

That was the moment. That was the moment to mention Brin. Well, that moment plus all the others that there'd been in the previous hour.

Just as I was about to answer, as I was opening my mouth, she leant forward and put her finger to my lips.

'No,' she said, 'it's all right. Don't say anything.'

I wonder which movie she thought she was in. A romantic drama. An erotic drama. A romantic comedy.

I'd been going to say
yes
. I had tried not to think about her for three years, and since I'd met Brin that was something in which I had almost succeeded. She was gone. And yet, there we were. She was sitting in front of me and I was about to tell her that I loved her.

Strangely that's the thing that I still feel most guilty about, even more than the fact that she came home with me and we spent the next two days sleeping, eating and making love.

––––––––

'W
hy did you write a script about the Jigsaw Man? What did you know?'

They were back. Tango and Cash. Tom and Jerry. Laurel and Hardy. Batman and Robin. Cagney and Lacey. Starsky and Hutch. The Two Ronnies.

I had slept for a while. Woke up with no conception of the time or how long I'd been asleep, to find Agent Crosskill and his no-name partner sitting at the desk. Had they been sitting there for a while waiting for me to wake up, or had they just sat down and made a noise to pull me from my sleep?

I had dragged myself up to the table, even though it felt horrendous just moving, just waking myself up. I didn't want to move. I wanted to stay curled up in a corner of the room, even though I was cold. I felt horrible. An ugly state of mind. Missing Brin and Baggins. And I'd dreamt about Jones and that feeling of guilt was there, the guilt that intruded every now and again. Two days of sex just before Brin had moved in. And I'd never said.

Was I still in love with Jones?

She'd never progressed beyond small parts in Shakespeare, cameos in
Casualty
and
Spooks
and
Teachers
. Sometimes I looked her up on Internet Movie Database or Wikipedia. I wondered if she ever thought about those two days.

I sat at the table. That's what I was doing. They hadn't said anything for a while. I didn't look at either of them. I felt so soulless, so empty. Everything bad that I'd ever done, everything stupid, everything embarrassing, it all seemed to be nestling there in the middle of my head, mixing with the awfulness of my situation and the fact that I hadn't seen my family for over six months, and they hadn't seen me for several days, and they'd be assuming I was dead, and they must be crying still.

Would they still be crying? Brin had seemed off with me for much of those last few months before the crash. But when this me, the me that was sitting here in this cell, had been living those six months with Brin, had there already been another me living up north?

I had thought about it so much since then, and I had no answer. I'd been thinking that perhaps she'd been having an affair, or that she'd worked out that I'd been keeping the secret of Jones from her ever since we'd been married, but maybe she'd just plain known there was something wrong. A disturbance in space/time, that I was somehow leading two lives.

I rubbed my hands across my face. I needed to shave. When had I shaved last? They'd shaved me. It didn't seem so long ago. I looked in the large mirror. I had a beard.

I turned back to look at them.

'Why did you write a script about the Jigsaw Man? What did you know?'

I was feeling so utterly broken and confused that I wasn't sure I could speak, even if I wanted to. Perhaps I could force out some words.

'Why did you write a script about the Jigsaw Man? What did you know?'

Was that the third time she'd said those words? Or just the first?

I found an answer. 'I didn't know anything.'

'Then why did you write about the Jigsaw Man?'

'He did jigsaws,' I said.

'He did jigsaws?' said Agent Crosskill. 'Ha! That's gonna be some fucking movie.'

I shook my head. Partly at Agent Crosskill, partly to try to clear my mind. Does shaking your head actually manage to clear your mind?

'It was a metaphor. I always thought it was a metaphor.'

'You always thought it was a metaphor?' the woman said sharply. 'Even when you were sitting in that café back in Glasgow, you thought the guy was a metaphor? A living metaphor? What did you think he was a metaphor for?'

'How did you know about that?' I asked. Head beginning to clear, focus coming with conversation. 'How did you know that I used to sit in a café in Glasgow?'

'You told us,' she said.

'And we've got CCTV,' said Agent Crosskill.

I couldn't remember if I'd told them. And did they really have CCTV from a Glasgow café two decades ago? What did I know about these people and how they worked?

'I don't know,' I said. 'I don't know what I was thinking back then. He was a guy doing jigsaws. It's that piecing together thing. That's what jigsaws are. Taking the big picture that's been broken down and putting the pieces back together again. It's metaphorical. Innately metaphorical. For all kinds of things.'

I was getting annoyed as I spoke. I assumed they were just continuing to push me, but perhaps they were just stupid. Or pedantic. Perhaps that was it. Pedantic. Americans like everything explained to them just so there's no doubt over the exact meaning. That's why American journalists always ask those utterly banal and simplistic questions.

'How do you mean the sun will rise in the east?'

'Talk me through it,' she said. 'At what precise moment did you sit down and think, I'm going to write a film script and it's going to be about the Jigsaw Man?'

Deep breath. Brain fully in gear now. It had emerged strongly from the mire, which would have seemed unlikely only a short time ago.

'There were a bunch of us used to meet there. Five of us. We talked about the Jigsaw Man, about how it was kind of weird but cool at the same time. We imagined him as some sort of, I don't know, warrior-poet type of guy. Like something out of a Chinese epic. One of those ancient guys who does calligraphy as his job, and then in his spare time kills the emperor or protects the emperor or whatever's required of him in the plot. I used to think, there's a film script in that guy. One day I'm going to write it. And then, I don't know, years later, I was telling my wife about the Jigsaw Man and how he'd be perfect for a movie, and she said, go ahead, write the script, why not? Won't do any harm. So I did. Thought about it for a while, made up a really banal story to fit him into, and then had this guy who was like our Jigsaw Man, but who was a kind of, I don't know, a one man A-Team, turning up wherever and righting wrongs, standing up for the little guy, that kind of thing.'

'You talked to him?' she said, cutting me off. I'd been going to continue, although whatever it was that I'd been intending to say was quickly forgotten.

'I talked to the Jigsaw Man?' I asked.

'Yes.'

'Yes. You know, not often. Every now and again I'd sit down and chat, but he disappeared not long after I started doing that. Think he went to Laos.'

As soon as I said that, I wondered if I'd said too much. I only knew one secret about the Jigsaw Man, and I'd just blurted it out.

'Yes, it's been a while since he was last in Laos. Don't worry, you won't have to go to Laos.'

'What?'

'Anyway, that's not what we meant,' said Agent Crosskill, and his partner with no name gave him a sharp glance as if she hadn't wanted him to say anything.

'What did you mean?' I asked.

'Did you talk to him one of those times you went walkabout? Next door.'

I looked between the two of them. The whole thing had to be so structured. The interrogation, the unlocked door, the guards and then no guards.

'You know that I spoke to him,' I said.

I had come to that point where hopelessness and recklessness are indistinguishable.

'You think it was the Jigsaw Man?' she asked. 'The Jigsaw Man that you remember from Glasgow?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'It could have been. There was something familiar. I need to call my wife.'

'You can't, you'd only scare her. On a scale of one to ten, how much do you think he was your Jigsaw Man?'

'What? I don't know. That's just stupid. I need to call my wife. What does that mean, I'd scare her? What does that mean? I need to call her and let her know I'm all right.'

Agent Crosskill barked out a laugh.

'What makes you think you're all right?' said the woman.

'It's only been a few days. I need to let her know before... Jesus, I don't know. Before the funeral. I don't want there to be a funeral.'

'The plane crash was four months ago,' said Agent Crosskill. 'Everybody on that plane was buried, or whatever, you know, their remains swept up and put in an urn on the spot. It wasn't like any of them had to be cremated, they were all toasted right there.'