Alex Hargreaves sitting in his car outside the flats, wearing a baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses, couldn’t be more conspicuous. He’s had a look at his medical records and he knows he has lost it once or twice before, was prescribed Deveretol back in December but he doesn’t look to have been taking it, judging by his behaviour in Kwofee last week, and now this. Joolzy filmed him getting a key cut a couple of weeks ago, so he’s been expecting something like this anyway at some point, though never certain exactly how things will play out.
Hargreaves has got out of the car now and is walking toward the flats. Joolzy doubles back, unlocks the gate to the construction site with his phone, comes in through the diggers and mounds of earth as Hargreaves gets to the stairs. Out through another remotely unlocked gate and bang, he shoulder charges him into the boarded-up lift. The hat comes off, the shades askew on the end of his nose, his hand goes up to cover his left eye and Joolzy grabs him by the throat, into a headlock, drags him, flailing, back across the site, gets another couple of punches into his gut, hears the air go out of him in a long strangulated hiss, a satisfying, panicked sucking for breath, legs limp, dragged past the inner circle of fencing, Joolzy flicking off the nearby Land Sheriff cameras with his
VIP
app. Another couple of digs in the ribs, a kitchen knife comes out from under his coat into the sand and earth, another couple of punches into the side of the face, nothing too severe, just to stun him, get his eyes swollen up. He drops him, reaches a hand into his inside pocket, brings it out with a ziplock bag over it and gets the kitchen knife in it, transfers it into his outside pocket, puts another bag over his hand and roots for the keys in Hargreaves’ pockets, more evidence if needed, then drags him by his collar a few feet, leaves him half-conscious and groaning behind a pallet full of cinder blocks.
Time: 9.42.
Dominic is in a taxi when he gets the call from Karen. 2.00 on a Sunday morning, it must be something exceptional.
She has the tight gulping speech of barely controlled hysteria. Can he make it to Clapham now?
Certainly, he says and instructs the driver as to his new destination.
This sounds serious and he prepares himself for whatever role he might be obliged to take on, a fixer, a mopper-up, a seeker and finder, a consoler of the distraught.
She is standing in the doorway as the taxi pulls up, dressing gown on, drawn and fretful looking but not tearful. Into the living room, Dominic straight for the fridge to liberate a bottle of wine, wondering if something stronger might be required.
It’s Alex, she says. He’s gone.
You’ve had a falling out.
More than that she says. I am worried about his state of mind.
I thought he was deep in a novel and making extraordinary progress, aflame, inspired as never before.
He’s become obsessed, with a dead Author he–
Well we are all, Dominic begins to pronounce before she cuts him short
Some dead writer called Vernon Crane.
Crane? Crane’s not dead, he says, as he pours himself a substantial glass of Vino Moreno.
You know who he is? Are you sure? She asks.
Yes of course I am, he says, one of my colleagues represents him, numerous bestsellers under the name Alan McFarlaine. Although it’s a little unclear whether McFarlaine is Crane’s current pen name or whether Crane is an earlier
nom de plume
of McFarlaine, but he enjoys indeed, revels in, such mysteries. Has there been some kind of colossal confusion here? He asks.
Alex says he has been dead for years.
That’s curious, because Alex met him at a party a few weeks ago. Of course he doesn’t go around announcing himself as Vernon Crane, obviously.
Karen is still staring at him.
He lives in Islington for Christ’s sake. Yes, he’s done very well for himself, typical example of someone really much smarter and more gifted than the material they produce, I suspect the pseudonym or the double-bluff pseudonym is a result of shame.
Karen sits down.
Did you introduce the two of them?
Well, Dominic, says, yes, if memory serves I did.
Dominic, she says.
Are you in love with me?
Ahhh, Dominic says.
Alex said that you were in love with me.
Did he?
He said that you would kill me to have me.
Would I?
And would you kill to have me, Dominic?
He has stepped back into the shadows by the kitchen doorway.
Mouth stained dark with the wine.
Even myself, he says.
In the darkness, crammed in between crates, the
HGV
rattling and thundering north, stopping now and then. Terrifyingly, at some point the back doors opened and a flashlight was waved around, documents checked, pulled over by fuck-knows-who, the police,
USG
, some contractors, volunteer anti-immigration squad. He is an illegal immigrant in his own country, but then, this was never your country anyway Graeme, it has always belonged to someone else.
He has a different Claimant Card now, they asked him what name he would find it easy to remember and instinctively he said Vernon Crane.
They told him no, no, it needs to be your own name plus a bogus surname, otherwise your reaction time will be slow if someone calls out to you, but Graeme insisted, no, no, I will be alright I think I’ll be alright with that. Your decision, they said. They pulled a printer out of a rucksack, plugged in a battery and ran off a Claimant Card that said Vernon Crane.
We have got plants in certain places, get you a minimal credit and Giveback history which should keep you off the USG, the police radar if they pinch you.
A different name. He came round sometimes repeating the name to himself: I am Vernon Crane, I am Vernon Crane. He found at some points, jolting into a semi-sleep, another voice, urging, insisting, yes, your name is Vernon Crane now.
He awoke as the lorry slowed and turned in somewhere. He was thirsty, hungry, had fifty pounds in his shirt pocket, enough to survive on till he could get an emergency payment, find some kind of job somewhere.
The doors opened onto concrete and a chain link fence, the grim, disinterested face of the driver. He struggled forward and hopped down onto the ground, stamped the pins and needles out of his legs. A low red brick building behind him, a dog barking somewhere,
That’s where you’re heading, the driver said, pointing out over the factory roofs to three tower blocks. That’s occupied, the big one in the middle, main road’s over there.
Where am I? He asked.
The driver half smiled.
North enough for it to count, he said.
Joolzy’s knuckles are grazed and starting to swell, so he goes into the bathroom and runs them under the cold tap. Regrettable assault on a private individual there but a necessary pre-emption, the disabling of someone out to commit a crime, he has the ziplocked knife and the house keys both covered in Hargreaves’ fingerprints as evidence to cover him if they decide to push matters. Keeping his voice low and backing into the bedroom he makes a quick call out to one of the private ambulance services he knows locally in order to get Hargreaves picked up and seen to, backing into Louise’s bedroom and half closing the door, he has access to an operatives hotline and discretion is assured plus
USG
will pick up the tab.
Busy, busy. 10 minutes, he needs to get down to the demo. He hopes Louise isn’t going to be late.
There’s a photo on top of the chest of drawers that he doesn’t recall having seen there before. Joolzy picks it up and looks at it. Paula Adonor with her arm round some pale and skinny youth in a black t-shirt looking slightly off to one side, Paula beaming, grass all around them, a park, or field, the muted colours, the fuzzy edges of an old photograph, a sliver of some arcadian summer long past. Jesus, they look so young. She sure does like her skinny white guys.
So that’s Vernon Crane. He has a sudden surge of recognition. He knew this guy, didn’t he, wasn’t it, around ’95, ’96 when he was with the travellers, wasn’t he around, too? Something stirs. They met, he’s sure of that, one night, getting wrecked, they were in some field out by, my god his memory, he can even remember the name, Todmorden was it, and the date was, sometime in April yes in ’95 not long before he disappeared, he was thinner than he was in this picture and paler.
And he, that’s right, Joolzy remembers it as a night when he freaked out, too many pills, too much spliff, ridiculous bong hits, hot knifing through a two litre cider bottle with the bottom chopped off, someone must have scored and it was impossible to say no and Crane was saying imagine you just fell out of this life you have now, this person you are now and into another world, instead of being what you are, imagine you might get so scrambled you can’t come back.
And he said, I’ll show you, I’ll show you, perhaps you’ll be sucked into it with me, we’ll come out the other side transformed, in a different world, and he raised his hands up over the fire and Joolzy thought it must be the drugs but he could swear he saw the hands growing fainter, more transparent, and Joolzy raised his hands up too and saw the trees blanch, begin slowly to fade to ash, the ground start to evaporate, and with a great rush and a cry he didn’t know was his own the blackness was on him, in him, of him, and then the next morning he awoke face down in a tangle of roots and mud with no memory of what had gone on the night before, nothing but a terrible scream reverberating through him.
The van was there, empty, the daylight revealed a quarry, a lake, some kind of dark partition in his mind that it took days and weeks to grow used to and which he knows sits there still and that something, someone was left, unrecoverable on the other side.
He remembers how he wiped his hands on the grass immediately, instinctively wouldn’t look at them, then stumbled over, plunged them into the lake.
This can’t be right.
Was that blood on his hands?
Whose memories are these?
He is staring at the photo, held delicately at the corner between thumb and forefinger, trembling slightly, shell shocked, the sound of a distant implosion that he suddenly realises was the sound of the front door slamming
Louise? How long has he been standing here?
Time? He looks at his phone, buzzing its warning there on the bed, 10 on the dot. His tablet and the box are still on the table. OK. He’s got distracted, somehow, 10 minutes of his life sucked into a black hole. His mind races for a credible story. There’s no sound from the living room. Did he lock the tablet?
This is a fuck up, if she’s looking at that. He’s still got the surveillance feed from The Enclave on there and a few profiles up.
A major fuck up. OK, training. Don’t remonstrate with yourself. Focus on the problem.
If she hasn’t seen anything he needs to get in there and make sure she doesn’t. He can say he was helping pack, clear things out, her Mum asked and he got curious, and started reading the stuff in the box. And what if she has seen something? That’s his cover blown, thirty years in, a year away from retirement.
Several scenarios flash through his mind, including the most extreme. Always think the unthinkable.
Certainly he has Alex Hargreaves’ knife and set of keys, covered in his fingerprints, he will have been picked up now, disoriented and obviously having been in an altercation. Ah these moments, when you feel the fabric of time fray, find yourself at a point of confluence where all rivers meet, where everything is suspended and the next moment may resolve into a smooth continuation of the expected flow or tumble forward into bliss, into nightmares.
Louise, that you, he asks? He waits for a reply that doesn’t come. He can sense her out there, in the other room, poised, tense, mind racing, hear her heartbeat almost, smell her sweat and fear.
Ah now, where will the moment take us, Louise?
Photo still in his hand, he steps out into the dark corridor.
Paula Adonor steps out into the dark corridor.
There she is, her daughter, stretched out naked on the bed she looks so small, almost like a babe in arms again, her smooth shaved skull, Laura next to her, her lover embracing her poor, dead girl.
Louise, she says.
Cursed, Paula, cursed, cursed down the generations.
Louder. Louise.
Who has put this curse on her? What could she have done to deserve it?
Louise, Louise. Almost a cry.
Louise opens her eyes.
Shit. Guilty. What? Who? Laura too, waking up with a snort, making a half-hearted effort to cover herself with the quilt.
Louise! Are you OK? What’s happened in the living room?
Louise looks nonplussed.
The blood.
Not mine, she says. Sitting up, looking groggy. Joolzy is a cop, she says.
A cop?
Yeah. He’s a cop. So I kicked his arse.
Laura is reaching back for her cigarettes with one hand while trying to pull the quilt up over her breasts with the other. She lights one, blinks at them both through the smoke, her eye make-up, already heavy enough as it is, smeared over her face, her lipstick too so that she looks like a big, tousled, contented fag smoking clown, a Pierrot. Her lipstick is all over Louise’s face and Paula resists the impulse to reach over and start wiping it off. On her teeth, under her nails, as though they had been clawing at and chewing on each other.
Which they almost certainly have.
What? Paula sits down on the bed. The blood.
I pepper-sprayed him in the face, she says. He ran straight into the door, bust his nose.
I
gave him that t-shirt to hold over his face, and then he just sat on the floor crying and confessing it all. We couldn’t get rid of him till half two.
Laura takes the cigarette out of her mouth. He says sorry.
Lewis is smiling. Paula smiles back, breathes out. Louise, she says, I thought you were dead!
Nah, Louise says. You’re my Mum. I wouldn’t do that to you.
He comes in, sits down in the living room, head bowed, hair thin, hands clasped, angled down between his thighs. He’s not aged too badly, got a tan, must have been looking after himself. On the TV beside him paused, vibrating, his own face twenty years before, turned up to the sky, eyes rolled back, ecstatic.