Another car pulled up and was approached by the
big man. Gangly-features was trying to disperse the few remaining stragglers.
Doug started back to his room, wondering again why Cindy had disappeared. Just
then, his mobile bleeped twice indicating another text. It was from a number he
didn’t recognise and simply read “Need 2 talk – Cxx”. It had to be Cindy,
although he hadn’t given her his number. He toggled through the options and
selected call.
Cindy answered immediately. “Are you OK?” she said.
“No, not really. Where did you go?”
“I had to get away from there. I’m sorry. Can we meet by the lake?”
“What? Now?”
“Yes”.
He wanted to ask why? - Why the lake? - But she had hung up. He re-dialled, but
it went straight to voice mail. “Damn it! What’s going on?” he said to himself,
as he turned and set off across the grass. The ground was waterlogged from the
previous week’s rain and soon his trainers and socks were soaked through. A
cold wind blew across the park piercing Doug’s thin sweater like icy needles.
He’d probably catch a cold now and have to miss the match on Saturday. He
stopped. What was he thinking? His best friend had just become part of a Golf
cabriolet and he was worrying about a rugby match?
As he approached the lake, three ducks flapped
angrily into the water. Where the hell was she? He trudged round a little
further and called her name. A couple of geese took flight, startled by the
sudden noise and disappeared under the grey clouds now looming ominously above.
A drop of rain landed on his cheek followed by another. He started to shiver.
“Fuck!” he shouted across the empty park. “Fuck!”
He turned and started running back to the tower, his mind a jumble of
unanswered questions: Had Kal jumped? Could he have been pushed? Where had
Cindy come from and where was she now? The rain picked up and his pace
increased. Despite the sodden trainers, he felt curiously light-footed as he
sped across the damp earth and in no time at all, found himself back at William
Morris. With the lift apparently stuck at the twelfth floor, he took the
stairs. He and Brian often raced each other up the twelve flights after a
session at the gym. They would usually run about five, walk a few and then
sprint the rest, but this time Doug ran the whole way. He burst into the flat,
his heart pounding like some demented jackhammer intent on escaping through his
rib cage, while his lungs screamed out in pain, prompting another silent vow to
stop smoking. On reaching his room, he noticed the door was ajar. Perhaps Cindy
hadn’t shut it properly as they’d left. A cursory glance around showed his
things to be in order, or rather the same state of disorder as before. With
rain and sweat pouring off his body in torrents, darkening the thin beige
carpet tiles around his feet, he headed once more for the shower. Someone had now
mopped up the vomit from the floor of the shower room, although the acrid smell
still lingered. This time, no naked nymphomaniacs were waiting for him as he
got out, so he dried and went for a drink of water.
In the kitchen, he found Brian busy frying scraps of
bacon from a two-kilo economy pack of off-cuts. He glanced up as Doug entered,
but looked away again sheepishly. “Want some?” he offered, as Doug filled a
stolen pint glass with tap water. Doug had expected Brian to be hostile after
Cindy’s sudden change of allegiance, but if he was, it didn’t show. Perhaps he
didn’t know.
“Yeah thanks. I’ve got some eggs if you like.”
Brian tugged at the pack of bacon until a piece the size and shape of a door
wedge emerged from the plastic and fell into the pan. He prodded it around
distractedly. The two were silent for a good minute then Brian turned to him.
“Why the hell would Kal top himself? Especially after such a cracking party
like that.”
“Fucked if I know.”
“You don’t think someone …” Brian’s voice trailed away as he turned to flip
over the door wedge.
“I can’t imagine anyone wanting to kill him, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
It had crossed Doug’s mind too, but Kal was just too popular for anyone to bear
that kind of grudge. Doug opened the fridge, rummaged amongst his flatmates’
stale leftovers for a moment and removed two eggs from the back. Giving them a
quick sniff, he cracked them simultaneously into Brian’s pan. He and Brian
seemed to eat as much as the other seven guys put together. He was constantly
amazed at how little food they seemed to need, as indeed were they at the
quantities he and Brian consumed. Doug washed a couple of plates from the
festering pile on the draining board and set them on the table so Brian could
empty the fatty contents of the pan.
“Best cure for a hangover,” said Brian, carefully easing his bulk into one of
the plastic moulded chairs, testing its integrity before committing all his
weight. “I heard you talking to Cindy in the kitchen this morning. What do you
reckon?”
Doug looked at Brian’s face. He obviously didn’t know. “Cracker!” Doug replied.
“You two must have been banging all night.”
“Like a barn door in a hurricane!” Brian said with a self-satisfied grin. “I do
have a confession to make though.”
You have a confession to make, thought Doug.
“Well, you see, last night at Kal’s flat, I had just gone into the kitchen to
grab a couple of beers, when in walks Cindy. I’m just staring at her ‘cos she’s
so tasty, you know. Anyway she eyes me up and down, as though she recognises
me, walks up and says, “You must be Doug,” like you’re famous or something. I
was about to say no, Doug’s the drunken fart in the corner with a bottle of
whiskey in his lap, but instead I say, ‘Who wants to know?’ With that she
flings her arms around my neck and says, ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’ Then she
kisses me. After that we come back here and well, you can guess the rest.”
“You bastard! So she thought you were me.”
“Up until this morning. When I woke up, she was sitting at my computer
searching through my files. She said she was just checking her email, but I
know she wasn’t ‘cos she had Windows Explorer up on the screen. Anyway, she
switched it off - at the switch instead of shutting it down properly, which
pissed me off, and then she went off to the kitchen to make some coffee. I
think that’s when she twigged I wasn’t you and when she came back in, she got
all bitter and twisted about it.”
“Well in that case, I’ve got a slight confession to make too,” Doug ventured
hesitantly. “Shortly after that, I met her in the shower and – well - after she
left your room she came straight round to mine.”
“No shit!…You bastard!”
“We didn’t get very far though. Just as things were getting interesting…”
“Kal!”
“Yeah that’s right. We went over there and I saw him.”
“Shit! Are you OK?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t a pretty sight.”
The two friends finished their breakfast in silence, each trying to make sense
of it all. Doug put his plate back on the pile and started for the door.
“Hell of a girl though,” said Brian.
Doug turned to look at him, grunted and went back to his room.
Sitting at the large oak
desk, Peter swivelled round on the high-backed leather chair to survey his
work. With the floor clear of debris, books returned to shelves, and papers
piled neatly, there seemed twice as much space as before. The large airy room,
painted in a fresh creamy white, was fitted, on two of the walls, with
dark-wood bookshelves from floor to ceiling, while a selection of watercolour
landscapes adorned the remaining wall-space. It was the sort of study of which
he had always dreamed. Over the desk, two sash windows looked out across
the front garden towards the gate. When Martin and Isabelle had first moved in,
the grounds had been little more than uneven lawns bordered by shrubs and
annuals. In the ensuing years, these had been transformed into a symphony of
constantly changing colour, texture and scent. The front was Peter’s favourite.
Now awash with the first colours of spring, it had a natural, almost wild feel
to it, belying the years of soil preparation, planting and cultivation he knew
to have gone before. It had been Isabelle’s idea to create a cottage garden
here, and she who had chosen most of the plants. Martin, with his natural sense
of aesthetics had concentrated on the overall design, his pride and joy being
the hardwood pergola, which, planted with several varieties of clematis and
climbing rose, extended the length of the driveway and in the summer created a
shaded, meandering, tunnel of perfume and colour. Peter thought of his own
study in Bracknell. The seven-by-ten box room on the first floor, overlooking
the neighbours’ compost bins had always seemed adequate before, but compared to
this, it was nothing short of a hovel. Martin had had it all: the successful
career, fame - at least within the world of chamber music, the beautiful house
in the country, and the stunningly attractive wife. It was a life straight from
the pages of a Sunday colour supplement, yet in spite of it all, he had sat at
this very desk and chosen death.
Determined to make more progress before lunch,
Peter took the pile of papers and started sorting them into ‘rubbish’, ‘to file’,
and ‘action’. This worked fairly well, although choosing between ‘to file’ and ‘rubbish’
proved harder than anticipated, prompting the creation of a ‘Probably Rubbish’
group, to which he assigned an old cardboard box in the corner by the door. In
the ‘action’ pile were numerous bills, some of which, reminders of reminders,
threatened legal action, or discontinuation of service. It was clear his
brother had not attended to any paper work for several months. With Martin’s
former income and Isabelle’s family money, Peter doubted there would be any
problem paying, and a glance at the latest bank statement confirmed this. He
would later ask Isabelle for her chequebook, and write out all the cheques
ready for her to sign. He would then draft a standard letter informing of
Martin’s death and requesting all further correspondence be addressed directly
to her.
He leant back against the leather and looked
around. He had hoped to find more of a pattern to his brother’s obsession, but
the remaining papers seemed to be pulled from the Internet almost at random.
They appeared to cover every subject from religion and philosophy, to
mathematics and astronomy. The sheer breadth was quite astounding, and judging
by the date stamps, most had been printed within the last few months. “What on
earth were you up to, little brother?” he muttered under his breath.
Tucked into the bookshelves on the wall to the
right was a midi HI-FI system. Around this were hundreds of CDs and tapes, all
stacked neatly and sorted alphabetically by composer. Peter was surprised by
the orderliness, which seemed in stark contrast to the rest of the room.
Perhaps a little music would help him think more clearly. He started searching
for something familiar, then noticed a self-recorded cassette lying in the open
tape deck. Could this have been the music to which Martin had popped a bottle
of tranquillisers and drained half a bottle of whiskey? He powered on the
system and hit play. The tape turned silently in the machine. Peter looked
around for the speakers, but there were none. Of course! Martin had always
preferred listening through headphones, claiming the acoustics to be truer to
the original performance. Scanning the room, he caught a glimpse of yellow foam
between the desk and computer base unit, sat on the floor beneath. It was an
old pair of Sennheisers, the lead from which was plugged into the audio output
of the PC. Interesting, he thought, Martin must have been listening to digital
audio files when he died. Peter hadn’t touched the PC yet. Knowing Martin to be
a bit of a technophobe, he assumed it had served as little more than a
glorified typewriter, but the headphones were a surprise. He would check this
out after lunch. Placing the foam pads over his ears, he jacked the cable into
the midi system. On starting the tape, the pure, crystal clear voice of a
choirboy filled his head. It was Allegri’s Miserere, a piece once the exclusive
domain of the Vatican, and for a while, considered so special, no copy was
allowed to leave the Sistine chapel. The extract on the tape was the point at
which the solo treble rises to a top “E”, falls away, and then resolves the
chord with a drawn-out turn. Peter leant back, shutting his eyes. He could feel
goose bumps rising along his neck and spine. It was one of those magical
moments discussed with Martin during their debate about music. The sound
stopped abruptly, there was a slight pause, and then it jumped to Samuel
Barber. He couldn’t remember the name of the piece, only that it had been theme
to the film, “The Elephant Man” centred on the sadly deformed real-life
character of John Merrick. Again it was a passage which seemed to arouse
something deep inside. After about twenty seconds, this also stopped, only to
be followed by another equally evocative sample of some violin solo unknown to
Peter.
For nearly forty minutes, the tape continued with
snippets of music from a wide and varied repertoire of classical works, some
familiar, others not, but all possessing that same goose-bump quality which
Martin had claimed was the key to the soul. He had argued that moments of such
extreme beauty, which, he added, were not limited to music, but extended to art
as well as the natural world, provide a brief window through which we glimpse
heaven itself. Peter had been characteristically dismissive of the idea, and
assumed Martin had eventually dropped it, but perhaps not. The tape finally
came to an end and Peter removed the headphones. The sound of voices could be
heard down the hall and Peter’s stomach was starting to rumble.
In the kitchen, Isabelle was seated at the table
with a young man dressed in black shirt and dog-collar. “Peter, you remember
Roger, our curate? Roger, this is Peter, Martin’s brother.”
“Ah yes, the physicist,” said the curate with a grin, “we never got to finish
our chat. I hear you’re tackling the den.”
“Just clearing up mainly,” replied Peter. He turned to Isabelle, “There are a
few bits of correspondence we need to catch up on later.”
“You mean bills to pay,” said Isabelle, frowning. “Martin used to handle the
paperwork, but I was afraid he might have let things slip over the last few
months.”
Peter didn’t want to discuss this in front of Roger, but Isabelle looked
anxious.
“It’s nothing to worry about. I’ll write the letters and fill in all the
cheques for you to sign - it’s nothing really - just a few small bills and the
usual subscriptions for renewal.”
Isabelle placed a hand on Peter’s forearm as tears welled in her eyes. “Peter,
you’re such a strength. Thank you so much.”
Peter touched her cheek with the back of his hand, then gently rubbed her
shoulder. He wanted to wrap her in his arms - to hug her tightly, but stopped
himself. Roger, who suddenly seemed a little embarrassed at his own presence,
had developed an interest in a row of copper-bottomed pans hanging on the far
wall. Isabelle regained her composure and stepped over to the Aga.
“Well, I’d better be going,” said Roger. “You must both be very busy.”
“No, please. Why don’t you stay for lunch?” offered Isabelle. “It’s just
chicken soup and fresh bread, but there’s plenty here, and you’d be very
welcome.”
Roger turned towards Peter, obviously trying to gauge whether he supported the
invitation. Peter would have preferred to be alone with Isabelle, but there was
something intriguing about this young curate. Perhaps he could throw some light
on Martin’s final months. “Yes, why not?” he said. “We can finish what we
started.”
Roger eyed the stove then looked at Isabelle. “Well if you’re sure it’s no
trouble - it does smell wonderful.”