Damascus (31 page)

Grace blinked at him, impressed and a little confused. ‘So we're not going to do anything?'

'They all know what they want. We shouldn't interfere, just in case they get it.'

‘Get what?'

‘What everybody wants. One moment which changes everything.'

Grace thought about this. ‘It's not everybody,' she said. ‘I'm not like that.'

‘That's because you're too young. Everything you do
is
amazing and it
does
change you forever, because it's always the first time you've done it.'

‘What about you? Are you like that?'

‘It's different for me,' William said. ‘I'm old enough to know that time sorts things out.'

Henry had no choice. If he was a believer he had to bite the bullet, as they liked to say. He handed Hazel the cold mug. For a moment, before he let go, they were joined by it. She had the mug now and she didn't betray him. She didn't pour the soup over his shoes, bragging victory. She put it calmly in the corner with her own mug of soup, also untouched. She replaced the red billiard ball on its spot, and then the white. Henry took the cue and lined up his shot, just like Spencer had. He fired the white ball at the red. It made good contact, and the red rolled diagonally towards the pocket. It missed.

Spencer's shot. Hazel picked up the red ball, wiped it on her dress like an apple, and replaced it. Spencer lined up the white and cursed himself for not paying more attention to his father. Those first missed steps towards £60,000 a tournament seemed a long time ago, and no matter how hard he tried to remember them, they weren't among the moments which stayed with him as clearly as if they'd happened today. The only way the red ball was going to fall into a pocket was through an outrageous stroke of luck. Or, as Hazel would have it, if it was destined to go in, as a sign in itself that they were meant for each other.

He slapped the cue down onto the table.

‘This is ridiculous,' he said.

'It's your shot, Spencer.'

The mugs of soup were behind Hazel in the corner. They didn't have to do this anymore because Henry had given up the poison. They could tip it down the drain and throw him out. Forget the gods. This was Spencer's chance to make a change in things, and one of the memories always available to him was the left-right side-step perfected by Rachel. To reach the mugs, all he had to do was dodge round Hazel, so stopping this stupid game before somebody won and somebody lost, because love wasn't a sport. It wasn't about winning and losing. And then, after seeing off Henry Mitsui, he and Hazel could return to the more familiar torment of godless indecision.

Hazel wouldn't let him pass. He tried the side-step, and she easily moved in front of him, blocking his path to the mugs.

‘But it's stupid,' Spencer said, appealing for her agreement. ‘It
is
stupid.'

‘It won't be stupid if you win.'

There was no changing her mind. It was the gods or nothing. Spencer went back to the table and took his shot. He missed.

Is it raining or is it not? Make up your mind. It was a godforsaken country in which even the weather was indecisive. Mr Mitsui, Vice-President (Design) of the multinational Toyoko corporation, had spent the kind of day from which international promotion was supposed to have made him exempt. He'd walked much further in a strange and reputedly dangerous city than could ever be considered sensible, and the woman at the school had been especially tiresome. Once they'd established that he was genuinely Henry's father (‘the pushy oriental with the evil tooth'), she'd made him agree that all men in general but his son in particular were a danger to women. Mr Mitsui sighed and smiled and agreed, and then asked about Miss Burns.

‘Poor harassed woman.'

‘I'm an old man,' Mr Mitsui said. 'I mean her no harm. We have to find my son.'

'I couldn't agree more,' the secretary said, and because she was confident she knew everything of importance about the school, its distance-learning side-line, and almost everything else, she was able to tell Mr Mitsui where to find Miss Burns.

He pushed at the doorbell again, almost relieved that nobody was home. If the house was empty then there was nobody for Henry to hurt. Unless he'd already done it. It started raining more persistently, and Mr Mitsui turned up the collar of his blazer, at last conceding that he'd failed as a parent. He must have done, or he wouldn't be here, doing this. He'd failed to prepare Henry for the world as it was without the allowances of childhood, where he couldn't have everything he wanted, and not everything was possible. Real life wasn't about constant gratification or great adventures or strong-willed triumphs against the odds. It was this street now, where Mr Mitsui could see any number of people who by the end of the day wouldn't be elected mayor of New York or Salesperson of the Year, who wouldn't be engaged or married or announcing the birth of a child. Real life was all these people not blown up or shot, not exhausted from international contest, not murdered or mugged or with meningitis. Real life was all the accidents that never happened. It was all the people daily unreported. And, it should now be added, all the doors unopened.

He heard the latch turn from the inside.

It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, in Omagh or Haverhill or Lancaster or Runcom, in Newbridge or Exmouth or Hereford or Darlington, Hazel Burns is sitting cross-legged in the bed of her rented studio, wearing her coat, surrounded by a mess of exploded newspapers. She answers her portable phone. She says,

‘Dublin is not in the United Kingdom, no. Yes, Belfast is. It's a long story.'

Or she says,' Yes, there are women priests in the Church of England, and no, the Maastricht Treaty won't change that.'

Or she says, ‘Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, and Welsh.'

She has developed a particular voice to use on the telephone in her professional capacity as a distance-learning teacher. She tries to project an image of herself as older, spectacle-wearing, with perhaps her only vanity some long greying hair gathered in a bun. Not wanting to seem overbearing, she tries to add to her voice a kind of cat-owning warmth, hoping to sound something like an old-fashioned librarian or an earnest female egghead, with the endearingly-shaped head of an egg. It also occurs to her, now that she spends so much time on the phone, that she might be trying to recapture the satisfaction of the long conversations she once enjoyed with Spencer. Back in the good old days, she means, in the permanent golden age of younger than now. At 23 she is suddenly old enough for nostalgia, and she can remember or regret certain events as clearly as if they happened today. Almost all her memories, at her age, include her parents.

Her father, despite being elected Salesperson of the Year ‘93, and in something of an embarrassment for the Institute of Sales and Marketing Managers, is being investigated for fraud. It's alleged that he pays bribes to the Italian government or exports aphrodisiacs or sells instant soups labelled chicken which contain more salt than meat. He claims innocence, protesting that none of these things are uncommon, even though Hazel and many thousands of others think he's rather missing the point. Her mother, at last, has decided that marriage isn't like a sports team or a place safe for diversity or two nations one capital. Nor is it even very much like an identity card. Without question, it's a hell on earth.

At times like these, Hazel often finds herself nostalgic for the car crash, and how brilliant her mother was. She wishes she'd been old enough to appreciate it at the time, and now that she
is
older she
does
appreciate it more, and from now on always will do whenever she remembers it.

The phone rings, and someone else is about to learn something at a safe distance.

‘The meadow pipit is brown. It's the red-flanked bluetail which is red.'

Or, ‘Yes, that's right. Only talking can end 800 years of violence.'

Or, ‘It's extracted from castor-oil seeds and was widely used by the Bulgarian secret service.'

But if someone were to ask her, thinking it a simpler question, whether her own real life had started, she wouldn't know how to answer. Avoiding the troublesome contact of life she is rewarded with a portable telephone, the mobility to live wherever she wants, and enough money to pay for reference books and her own correspondence courses for a Master of Arts or a Bachelor of Science or a PhD, in English Literature or Marine Biology or Psychology.

Using her experience as a movie researcher she spends most of her time travelling round the country gathering information, wanting to believe that the more facts she collects about life the less inexpert shell become at living. Every day she reads
The Times
and the
Telegraph
and the
Sun
and the
Mirror
. She also skims magazines like
Foreign Affairs
or
Private Eye
or
Strand Magazine
or
Country Life
. With time on her hands, she often attempts to catch the mood abroad by reading
an-Nahar
or the
Corriere della Sera
or the world's most sinister newspaper, the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
. It makes her feel as if she's somehow exploring all the variety of the real world, as it is now. She snatches at it, trying to catch it on the way past, and even as it slips through her fingers she can't help wondering if this is what it means to live life to the full.

She's hoping that the more she leams the less likely she is to be frightened, and like her mother. But then how much does she need to know before she finds out what's truly frightening? She leams facts about birds and trees and flowers and kings and queens, hoping to subdue the world with knowledge. But it isn't subdued, or never stays that way for long. Or she forgets what she leams, and is no better off than before.

Her students are rarely rewarding. She has aspiring professional sportsmen from Asia or Africa or Australasia, who only enrol for their resident's permit. Or she has the bored children of the international rich. Some of them take it far too seriously, but it doesn't really matter. There's no risk involved because in the distanced world of telephones and computers no-one is anywhere. Or everyone is everywhere. Or nowhere. Wherever.

To maintain a meaningful connection with the real world, Hazel likes to call Spencer. Nostalgically, she always uses card-phones, although she now only has five phonecards left from her original and mostly stolen collection. She asks Spencer what she should do.

‘When?'

‘When my phonecards run out.'

‘Steal some more.'

‘Stealing is wrong.'

‘Then come to London,' he says. The streets are paved with gold.'

‘Do you want to meet up?'

‘This is London,' he says, making Hazel think he hasn't heard her properly. ‘Anything can happen.'

And maybe it can. Maybe not all Londoners are like the ones she met at the film company, and it's possible to live in London without becoming an idiot. Perhaps relationships can begin to mean more than her transitory affairs with men for whom she holds out so little hope she even supplies the condoms. But London seems very close, and because distance-learning is like an open admission that things happen elsewhere, Hazel is increasingly tempted by travel for its own sake. She imagines herself abroad, in poor and dangerous places, expecting to learn something from the distress of others. Or she imagines herself anywhere she wants to be in Europe, now that we're all Europeans and all of it's supposed to be home. Eventually, however, she manages to resist the old lie that life abroad is more real. It's just that the stories there are less familiar, and therefore harder to ignore.

She sits up in bed in the middle of the afternoon with her coat on, even though it isn't very cold. She spreads her last five phonecards over the red tartan blanket. Her mobile phone rings, and she decides it's time to take her coat off.