Incarnate (3 page)

She was beginning to tremble as the implications of that thought grew clear. The door opposite hers labored open. It was Danny. He clung to the doorframe and seemed to be trying to focus his eyes. When he saw Dr. Kent, he lurched at her. “You made it happen,” he shouted, in a blurred voice that sounded as though he had never raised it before.

Dr. Kent stepped back, and Danny saw Molly. His eyes widened. He staggered toward her and halted himself by grabbing the wall outside her room. The hatred in his bloodshot eyes felt like a blow in her face, and looked very much like madness. He couldn’t be about to say what she feared he would. It wasn’t true, she cried within her panic. Please don’t say it, please.

“And you did,” he said.

Eleven Years Later

2

T
HE RAIN
came slashing across Hyde Park and plastered the traffic at Marble Arch with the leaves it had ripped from the trees. Above the rotary choked with traffic, the November sky was a tidal wave. Bayswater Road was a mass of black roofs that the spiky rain turned pale, taxis full of businessmen stuffed with expense-account lunches; tented cyclists wobbled between the buses on Oxford Street, early Christmas shoppers struggled along Edgeware Road behind the shields of their umbrellas. Molly gazed down at all this from the window of the office on the fifth floor of Metropolitan Television and couldn’t hear a sound.

In six months she hadn’t got used to the silence. It made her think of those moments when she would remember something so intensely that her surroundings slipped away without her noticing. She tried not to have those moments anymore, they felt too much like losing control. She turned away from the window, to the accounts Ben had dumped on her desk.

Their program had gone over budget last month, if she could call it hers as well as Ben’s, or wanted to. Surely not even his dining could have gobbled up several thousand pounds. She skated a ruler down the columns of figures while typewriters chattered in the adjoining offices, and at last she found the culprits, though she had to phone Accounting to be sure what the secretive computer meant: the film extracts Ben had used in his program about corruption in the unions, Peter Sellers as a shop steward, Richard Attenborough suffering the silent treatment for breaking a strike. Ben had said he had contacts in the film companies who would let him have the extracts cheap, but it seemed he had run out of favors.

She sat back feeling justified, staring at his desk opposite hers. It was bare except for program schedules and the afternoon’s memos, two piles of paper flanking the telephone at the exact center of his desk. Her desk was crowded with everything else: newspaper clippings, In and Out trays, an IBM typewriter, the telephone, which had to pass all his calls; there wasn’t room for anything of hers. It must be essential to his image of himself that his desk always be clear, as essential as the calendar girl above his swivel chair, her hip turned just enough to show a hint of curly pubic hair. The trouble was that the calendar was hanging where Molly would see it whenever she looked up, and she knew all too well what that was supposed to achieve. This was where three years at university and eleven in broadcasting had got her. She was sighing fiercely when he came in from lunch with the head of Programming, a lunch that had lasted most of the afternoon. “My God, you sound frustrated,” he said. “You can stop now.”

He looked like his own image of perfection: black blazer with polished gold buttons, steel-gray knife-edged trousers, a polo shirt so white it was fluorescent, blue just-shaved jowls, clipped black moustache, sleek hair combed back. She couldn’t help but enjoy saying, “Your bits of film cost too much.”

“You’re joking. What, that old stuff? They ought to be paying us for the publicity, if any of them are still alive.” But he looked pleased with himself. “Dig out your maps. We’re going North tomorrow.”

When she spread the map on his desk he reached across her to run his finger up the motorway, and she could hardly breathe for the smell of haircream. “We’ll be staying here overnight, so you’ll need to book rooms for us and the crew. Adjoining if possible.”

“I shouldn’t think it will be.”

He straightened up, and the back of his hand touched her breast—backhanded but no sort of compliment, she thought wearily. “Look, Molly,” he said as if he hadn’t noticed, “we have to work together. Why behave like this?”

“I don’t think you can complain about my work, Ben, and that’s all the advertisement said you were hiring.”

“And your personality.” He was trying to be gentle, but that was even more oppressive than the smell of haircream. “We have to get on with each other when we’re together so much of the time.”

“Then try treating me like a person instead of a Dictaphone. You want me to book these rooms and I don’t even know why.”

“Sorry, my mistake. I’ve been talking to one of the protesters who got inside the nuclear base. He can prove they were, whatever the Navy says.”

“Thanks.” She folded the map and went back to her desk. “Now I know.”

“Friends?”

“I suppose so.”

“Fine. That’s what I like to hear.” He began to leaf through the program schedules. “Adjoining rooms then, yes?”

“Not for us, Ben. Not now or ever.”

He gave her a long expressionless stare and looked away, as if he’d seen nothing worth seeing. “Just do your job, then. Get the hotel.” He pretended to ignore her as she dialed, but she knew he was listening intently, and it was stiffening her words even before she spoke them. So this was the prospect Leon had found for her, the opportunity he’d convinced her she was looking for.

That wasn’t fair to him. Metropolitan had looked to both of them like her chance to achieve something at last. Six years in parochially local radio had helped her sleep at night without starting awake in a panic, but the experience hadn’t been much use when she’d moved to London and television. She’d worked two years as researcher for a chat show hostess whose sole distinction was to sound less intelligent than any of her guests, and nobody in the audience knew that was the truth. Thank heaven for BBC and the job assisting Leon! She’d enjoyed those years once she had got used to him. She had been as disappointed for herself as she was pleased for him when MTV had offered him his own arts program but wouldn’t keep her on as his assistant, and then he’d found her the job as assistant on the news program. The show was going to be independent and fearless; it had sounded like her chance to be that too. And by God she was, as far as Ben Eccles was concerned. Thinking about her ambitions while she waited for the hotel receptionist to answer made her want, however sadly, to laugh.

So did what the receptionist said. “If there’s only one single then of course I must have that,” Molly said, smiling sweetly at Ben. “Mr. Eccles and his crew will sort out the doubles between them.”

Ben made to speak, but glared at the schedules instead. He ignored her when she said, “Anything else I can do?” Perhaps he meant her to feel useless, which, infuriatingly, she did. She had been reduced to gazing out at the lake, a slab of jagged slate amid the sodden park, by the time Leon came up from the studio.

The sight of him, of his chubby good-natured face beneath its ashblond hair and the rest of him bearlike in his sheepskin coat, cheered her up even before he said innocently, “How are you, Ben? What are you investigating now?”

Ben clearly wanted to ignore him but couldn’t resist a retort. “Maybe I should be investigating you and your bloody silly titles.”

“Oh, Ben, I didn’t know you cared.” Leon’s campy wriggle was barely a glimpse, a throwaway joke. “Nothing wrong with a bit of irreverence. We shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously in this game.”

“Irreverence? You call calling a program ‘Any Farty‘ irreverent? Infantile, more like. If I’d had my way you wouldn’t have got away with it, and I don’t mind telling you I let them know upstairs. There’s enough gossip about us as it is.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve been reading
Private Eye
on the newsstands again.”

“I wouldn’t wipe my arse on it.” Ben’s face was darkening, and Molly found she was wishing once again that she’d read the magazine’s lampoon of him before she had applied for the job at MTV: “Ben Eccles, investigative journalist noted for his close-up investigation of any female staff who stray his way…” “I’d like to know where they’re getting their information about us,” Ben said with a glare at Leon.

“Not guilty, your honor.” Leon raised his eyebrows, which made his chubby face look even more amiable. “Why, I thought you were a champion of investigative journalism.”

Ben’s glare went blank. “Did you want something here, Leon?”

“Molly, when she’s ready. We’re due at the London Film Festival.” He glanced at his watch. “I can wait a few minutes if you like. I’ll chaperone you two and Molly can chaperone us.”

Ben looked down, dismissing them both. “She can go. She’s done enough for one day.” As they left, Molly buttoning her quilted Finnish raincoat, he muttered, “About lime you went back to the BBC and wasting the taxpayers’ money.”

He meant Leon, not her. She was stuck with working for a man she didn’t like at a time when jobs were growing scarcer. The weight of six months of Ben and who knew how much longer suddenly made her feel exhausted. “Would you mind very much if I don’t come with you this time?” she said as the lift took them down to the lobby.

“I really would appreciate your company.”

He looked so disappointed and anxious that she gave in. “But I don’t want to hang around after the film. I know you, you’ll be talking for hours.”

“I won’t make you hang around unless you have a reason to,” he said, so slyly that she would have asked what he meant if the lift hadn’t opened just then. The lobby was deserted except for Mr. Wick the commissionaire, who wished them good-night in a voice thick with shag. Everything around his circular desk—back-to-back chairs, thick carpet, even the welcome mat big as a single bed— was green: the color of expectation, she had felt at first, until she’d learned what working with Ben involved. She turned up her fat collar as she followed Leon out through the revolving doors.

There were new graffiti on the nine-story concrete facade, Iranian with English subtitles. Green light swept repetitively over the rainy forecourt from the rotating sign on top of the portico, the “M” sharing a leg with the “V” and sprouting the “T” like an aerial. A taxi swung into the forecourt in response to Leon’s wave.

Queues were forming outside the National Film Theatre for tonight’s last performances, a Nigerian fantasy and an American independent film called
Bierce.
“SOLD OUT” was plastered across a poster for the restored print of
Greed.
She hurried after Leon through the black-walled corridors, past the bowls of sand and cigarette butts, into NFT 1.

The lights were still up. A film reviewer from the BBC gave Leon a copy of his novel about John Wayne, a woman next to Molly was complaining that nobody knew how to trim a poodle these days, an Australian was holding forth behind her: “The only vertigo I got from Hitchcock was falling off my seat from boredom,
The Big Sleep
was one big yawn… .” Molly skimmed the program notes. All she knew about
The Spin
was that it was a documentary about Las Vegas, but now she realized that she’d seen another film by Martin Wallace,
The Unamericans.
She remembered its fierceness, the shock of a scene where a march of draft dodgers had been clubbed down by police. “Wallace is wiser than Wiseman,” the
Village Voice
had apparently said. “He confronts Las Vegas without fear or loathing… .” It was hoped that Mr. Wallace would answer questions after the screening, and now the lights were dimming.

The film was powerful enough for her eventually to turn on the Australian and tell him to shut up. It wasn’t so much the technique that impressed her—the intercutting of small-town penny arcades called Las Vegas with the real thing, a tracking shot through deserted Las Vegas streets from church to silent church, a protracted panning shot around a casino that picked up winners and losers at random—as it was the people in the film. The faces of the heavy losers looked as if they’d collapsed inside themselves; the eyes of children were bright as Christmas; the gamblers talked to the camera as if they couldn’t stop, any more than they could stop gambling. A woman traded jewels from her throat and her liver-spotted arms for chips, lost, came back and tried to trade her watch, turned to the camera and begged whoever was behind it to lend her money, just a hundred dollars, okay, fifty, she’d pay it back in half an hour—she knew this time she was going to win. Her voice began to fade until there was only the withered colorless face, lips still pleading, and then, abruptly, darkness. No sound, no music. The dedication—“For my parents”—appeared and faded, and the lights came on.

The silence gave way to applause, but at first Molly was too moved to join in. “You liked it, obviously,” Leon said, and when she nodded, “Now that you’ve given me your unbiased opinion I can tell you the good news. MTV has hired Martin Wallace to make a series.”

“They’re welcome to him,” the Australian muttered as Molly stood up quickly—she would feel rude if Martin Wallace saw her leaving. “Thanks, Leon,” she said, and ruffled his ash-blond hair. “See you tomorrow.”

The people between her and the aisle were getting up. Leon shook his head, gestured her to sit down so that he could whisper. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the director of the festival said into a microphone, “Martin Wallace,” and it was too late for her not to feel rude—but that wasn’t why she sank back into her seat. As Martin Wallace came on stage, she took slow deep breaths to calm herself, as she’d learned to do at meditation class eleven years ago. She couldn’t leave until she knew why the sight of Martin Wallace had brought her so near to panic.

3

M
ARTIN
W
ALLACE
didn’t look like the director of his films. His thick black eyebrows were the fiercest thing about him. His broad smile looked surprised and even a little uncomfortable between his small nose and large chin, as if he hadn’t been prepared for such applause. His hair was rumpled, his complexion dark; he was tall and slim and dressed in a suede jacket, high-necked black sweater, black corduroys. When he spoke, there was a touch of the American South in his voice, and a cold.