Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! (3 page)

'Can I get a doughnut from the shop?' asked Baggins.

'At the beach?'

'Yes.'

'Sure,' said Brin.

Baggins nodded, then turned back to me. She had polished off a huge plate of mac and cheese as she'd talked.

'Daddy?' she said. 'What about you? We've got mum's happy place, but she doesn't really need one...'

'Because I'm never stressed.'

'Daddy?'

'Can I just have mum's?' I said.

'Mum?' she said, as if needing official endorsement from the original happy place provider.

'Why not?' said Brin. 'Why don't we all have the same happy place?'

*

I
was sitting in BA's first class lounge at Heathrow. I'd never been in a first class lounge before. We'd toyed with it when flying to Australia, but hadn't been able to afford it in the end.

I was feeling relaxed, which is one of the points of a first class lounge I suppose. It wasn't the free alcohol and food, nor the peace and quiet, nor the many people on hand to attend to my every need, that was relaxing me. I was relaxed because I'd checked the weather forecast for London and LA, and both of them seemed set fair. Not too hot, not too cold, little or no cloud cover, light winds.

Take off and landing were going to be fine. I'd just have to worry about the bit in the middle when I got there, but for the moment my nerves had been eased.

I'd printed off the film script so that I could make notes during the flight. Reading it again in the past few days, several lines made me wince, and I was wondering what on earth Marion Hightower saw in it.

Brin said that when I had moments of such insecurity I ought to remember every Adam Sandler film I'd ever seen, and that should convince me of Hollywood's desperation, and how they'd make any old shit if the right person took a notion to it. Any old shit was how I'd come to view my work, yet she was right. It just took one person to get interested and we'd be off.

I'd brought along the latest edition of Hunter Davies's biography of the Beatles, which I was reading for the third time. Nevertheless I liked to think that I'd be distracted by the many enticements of travelling on BA first class, and probably wouldn't need it. And, of course, I had my iPod full of the Beatles. Comfort music. I know them all, every song, back to front and inside out, even though in some cases I haven't actually listened to them in ten years.

I wonder if I'd have liked the Beatles if I'd been around in the '60s. Probably not, because so many others did. It felt different, however, getting in to them years after they'd split up, when everyone else had moved on and all my friends were listening to the Police and Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran.

I thought the Anthology thing devalued the brand somewhat. There was too much. Too much of the Beatles. The six-part documentary might have been needed to tell the story the way they wanted to, but it far outlived the interest of non-Beatles fans. The viewing figures for the last episode were around a couple of hundred. And those three albums felt bloated, the whole enterprise seeming to drag on.

If anyone had asked me, I would have said a single CD of all the best unreleased stuff, including those two new ones the boys knocked up in the studio over a spliff and a bottle of Chardonnay; a single four-hour documentary, of the type Scorsese's done for Dylan and Harrison; and a bumper 200 CD package for the diehard fans – like me – who wanted to hear every minute and every single note the lads had recorded in the studio. All bases covered. A one-time publicity shot.

No one asked me.

Since then we've had the Cirque du Soleil CD and the iTunes launch and more BBC archive material and Paul McCartney breaking into "Hey Jude" every time someone so much as opens a local supermarket, and it all feels a bit old. It's impossible to be surprised by the Beatles anymore.

I try, by going long periods without listening. But there I was, sitting in BA's first class lounge, listening to
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
– an album I hadn't heard all the way through in years – and it all sounded so familiar.

Comforting nevertheless. I didn't turn it off.

We were called to board forty-five minutes before take-off.

Twenty-four hours later I was sitting in an interrogation room.

––––––––

I
think I was in America, but maybe I only thought that because my inquisitors had American accents.

It was a plain room, much as one would see in any US TV crime drama. One door, one large mirror along the wall. I guess there were people on the other side of the glass, but I was barely thinking even that. I was barely thinking at all.

I was sitting at a desk. All my clothes had been removed and I was wearing a plain, dark blue jumpsuit. I hadn't been given any underwear. Between undressing me and allowing me to put on the jump suit, they had X-rayed me, shaved off my beard, and given me a full body cavity search. That was possibly the most unpleasant thing that had ever happened to me, except I couldn't think straight and so wasn't in a position to compare it to other unpleasant things that had happened.

The top of the desk was clear. There were two people sitting across from me. So far they didn't seem to be good cop/bad cop. They were just hard and humourless. I think it was their utter humourlessness that was the most striking thing about them. One gets too used to TV cops having a nice turn in glib remarks. Maybe they were saving the glib remarks until they had an audience on the other side of the mirror.

The woman was in her forties. Hair swept back off her forehead, tied tightly. No make-up. This combination had no effect on whether or not she was attractive – I was in no fit state to make that judgement – it served to make her look hard, business-like and formidable. Her partner, a small African-American man with thick dark hair and a small moustache, had a friendlier look about him, yet there had been nothing friendly about his words or tone. The woman was the lead interrogator.

'Tell us about your family,' she said. The words sounded innocuous, but every question was delivered as if she was asking why I'd flown the plane into the World Trade Centre.

'I've got a wife, Brin. Bryony. I call her Brin. And there's Baggins, our daughter. She's eleven.'

'What kind of name is Baggins?'

I was finding it hard to concentrate, even though this particular line of questioning was fairly straightforward. I had a pain in my anus as a result of the body search. Sometime I was bound to get angry about that, but at the moment I just craved Nurofen, a telephone and somewhere to lie down.

'It's a nickname,' I said, when I'd thought of the words. 'Her name's Amanda.'

'What kind of nickname is Baggins?'

What kind of nickname is Baggins? Was that even a question? I tried to think of something to say, but nothing other than the obvious occurred to me.

'It's from
The Lord of the Rings
...
The Hobbit
... The name of the Hobbit is Bilbo Baggins.'

'Why did you name your daughter after a character in a film?'

I made a slightly dismissive movement with my right hand.

'Don't move your hands,' said the guy with the moustache. 'You want us to 'cuff you?'

I shook my head.

'Well, don't move your hands. Or we'll 'cuff you.'

'Why did you name your daughter after a character in a film?'

I straightened my thoughts, tried to get words to come out in the right order.

'She was short. One of her friends said she wasn't growing and must be a hobbit... That's all.'

'When was this?'

'When?... I don't know, about four years ago, maybe.'

'What age would your daughter have been then?'

'... seven...'

'Aren't all seven-year-old girls short?'

I didn't answer that. She waited another couple of seconds.

'You thought it was all right to give your child a name that mocked her size?'

'It was a joke. She liked it. It wa—'

'Why weren't you on the plane?'

It was the guy with the moustache, cutting in. The rest of it was just small talk. Background. They really wanted to know why I hadn't been on the plane. Except I had been on the plane. I know I was on the plane. I'd eaten chicken fricassee and drunk a Californian white and wiped my face with a hot towel and had strawberry cheesecake and a cup of coffee, and I'd watched
The Hobbit
and thought of Brin and Baggins, and I'd looked over the script, and I'd folded the bed out and tried to get to sleep but I hadn't really been tired, I'd just been folding the bed out because I could and I'd wanted to see what it was like, and I'd tried reading Hunter Davies but hadn't been able to concentrate and I'd listened to the Beatles and I'd finally found a song –
Baby You're A Rich Man
– that I'd almost, but not quite, forgotten and which took me a little by surprise, and eventually I'd slept with the seat upright. I'd done all of those things, on the plane. I knew I had.

I'd given a lot of thought to how I came to be on the plane before it crashed but not on it afterwards, but I was no nearer an explanation. And I wasn't even going to start trying. It was so absurd, so far-fetched, so utterly out of the ordinary, that the very idea of it subverted all kinds of notion of time.

'I was on the plane,' I said. My voice sounded weak, despite all my efforts to be strong. Would I even believe myself? Did I really believe that I was on the plane?

'What's your name?' asked the woman.

'James Kite,' I said. I'd already answered that question a hundred times.

'Who were your parents?'

'I said. Mr and Mrs Kite. My dad was William, William Kite.'

'Funny,' she said. 'We can't find any trace of your parents.'

'They're both dead,' I said. 'I said...'

'Buddy, Hitler's dead, doesn't mean you can't find traces of the guy,' said the moustache, finding the first glib remark of the day. 'Your parents, on the other hand... vamoose.' He leaned forward. I could smell him. I want to say he smelled of cheap aftershave, but maybe it wasn't cheap. I wouldn't know.

'You want a lawyer?' asked the woman.

I nodded. My first thought was, how expensive is that going to be? I'm never going to be able to afford a lawyer. Nevertheless, I nodded.

'You know how many people know you're here?' she asked.

I shook my head. I looked at the mirror and she followed my gaze.

'Two,' she said, turning back to me. 'Just me and Agent Crosskill here. There isn't even anyone behind the glass. No one else knows. We can do whatever we like to you, and no one will ever know.'

Agent Crosskill?

She paused. Her eyes did not leave me. I withered beneath her stare. I hated that they made me feel like that. I wanted to stand up to her. I wanted to be blasé, I wanted to be like some guy in a film. I don't know, Bruce Willis maybe. Bruce Willis never wilts beneath anyone's stare.

'You're not getting a lawyer,' she said. 'Ever. Chances are, in fact, that you're never walking out of this room. Start telling us the truth and maybe we'll let you go to the bathroom.'

Her words crawled into my head. She hadn't shared her partner's increase in tone and tempo. She had spoken slowly, casually almost, like she was a public servant telling me that I needed to renew my driving licence, or that I'd underpaid my council tax by three pounds. And her words crept inside me and wormed their way down into my stomach, and suddenly the nerves and fear that gripped my insides were a transfixing, physical torment.

I wasn't getting out. I wasn't going to see Brin and Baggins. That was all that mattered. I'd been waiting so long for that.

'You have to let me speak to my family,' I said. I had to cough just to get the words out.

'We
have
to?' she said. 'Did you give the same consideration to all those people on the plane that crashed?'

'What plane?'

She never took her eyes off me. Neither did the guy with the moustache. They did not exchange a glance. They were attached to me, as if they had fired a taser into my head.

'What plane?' I said again. Although, of course, I knew what plane they meant. Of course I knew. I'd been on the plane.

'You were checked in to travel on a plane that, twelve hours ago, crashed into the side of a mountain, killing everyone on board.' She paused, although there was something in her voice that said she wasn't finished. 'Yet here you are.'

It wasn't a question, as such, so I didn't know what to say. There was no answer to give.

'My colleague is right,' said Agent Crosskill. 'Guys like you don't get lawyers. Guys like you disappear and are never heard from again.'

I held his gaze for a moment and then looked past them to the door. Had they been telling the truth? Was there no one out there who knew about me? Could I, just for a moment, be the action movie hero, the guy who takes out his two interrogators, and then walks calmly from the building, straightening his cuffs as he goes?

'You're tagged,' she said. The unnamed female agent, with the tightly tied back hair, who could read my thoughts.

I lowered my eyes. I did not look down at my ankle, but with those words I became aware of the touch of something strapped round the bottom of my leg.

'Do what you like, but cross that door and you'll set off so many alarms the Marines in Okinawa will hear it.'

I glanced at her, and then at the door and finally settled my gaze on the mirror. Was there really no one behind the glass? Why bother putting me in a room like this? I might as well be in a stinking basement with rats and spider-infested ancient brick walls.

I couldn't think. I just wanted to speak to Brin and tell her everything was all right, and then I wanted to lie down.

How could I tell her that everything was all right?

'Tell us about the Jigsaw Man.'

––––––––

T
here was a morning at the Stand Alone. A morning like any other, I suppose someone somewhere might call it. When I arrived Fanque and Two Feet were there, sitting on a sofa. Henderson would have been studying for his accountancy exam, and Jones was otherwise occupied. I might have been feeling all right if I hadn't known what she was doing, or if I'd known she was in Paris with her family or in bed with the flu. However, I knew that she was likely still in bed with the guy she'd met in the bar the night before.