The Continuity Girl (10 page)

“What do you mean?”

“That they are a necessary evil.”

“I understand, but for what?”

“For art.”

Meredith thought this over. “I guess in another era you’d be having an affair with some duchess or other.”

“Stealing in the servant’s entrance and ravishing her on the drawing room sofa when the duke is away. This I would prefer.”

“She would expect you to compose works in her honour.”

“Which I would, most dutifully. Pay homage to her everlasting beauty, despite the fact that she is fat and old.”

“And bald.”

“Yes, that too.”

There was a loud collective
whoop
from the bankers that made Meredith and Gunther look up. A Japanese girl in a blue kimono,
who looked to be only slightly older than a child, had entered the room. She did not smile, but bowed and took her place beside
a potted bamboo tree in the corner. Soon a waitress followed, bearing a large platter of sushi, and another after her, who
cleared the glasses and ashtrays from the low glass table in the center. The kimonoed girl bowed again and in one practiced
and elaborate motion untied her sash and let her garment drop to the floor. She was naked and in perfect minuscule proportion,
pubic hair trimmed into a tidy little Valentine’s heart. The song on the sound system was that big hit by Coldplay. An odd
choice for a stripper, Meredith thought, waiting rigidly for the girl to begin grinding her hips in the familiar pot-stirring
peeler fashion. But instead of dancing, the naked girl took two steps forward, arched her back and draped herself backward
over the glass table, stomach to the ceiling, feet and head dangling over the side, her throat exposed and quivering slightly.
She lay there like a flank steak on a butcher’s block. The room was silent as the waitresses began to arrange fish in fans
and swirls over the girl’s flesh. Hamachi sashimi around the left nipple, unagimaki around the right, raw lobster in between
the collarbones, a knob of green wasabi in the belly button, pickled ginger palate-cleanser in each smooth armpit.

“The super deluxe,” Gunther whispered into the nape of Meredith’s neck. “A popular delicacy in Japan. I hope you will forgive
my friends’ political incorrectness. I understand you Americans can be a bit...unamused by such spectacle.”

Meredith and Mish exchanged uncertain, bug-eyed smiles. One of the waitresses began passing around ivory chopsticks. The men
laughed and elbowed one another, making cracks in German. They spread their napkins on their laps. The naked girl giggled,
and goose bumps rose up under their food.

There was a pause. And it became clear that, for all of their noisy jostling, none of the men was willing to be first.

“I’m hungry,” Meredith announced. Clicking a pair of chopsticks, she reached down, plucked a sea scallop from the point of
the girl’s left hip bone, popped it in her mouth and swallowed it whole.

Waking up with a hangover was one thing, but waking up hung over two hours from the time you’d gone to bed by a grinning woman
in a half-slip was quite another. Meredith pushed her face deeper into the satin throw cushion that was doubling as her pillow.

“Good morrow, Moo,” Irma said. “Thought you might like a persimmon before work. I found it at the back of the fridge. How
’bout it, my little corker?”

Meredith raised herself on one elbow and fell back again. Her brain rustled in her skull like a bloated pigeon.

“Time?”

Irma consulted her locket. She rarely slept. “Five-thirty-eight on the dot—you’d better hustle if you want to make it out
there by seven.”

Meredith scowled but managed to retain the bitchy remark that pressed itself against the inside of her teeth. She waved her
mother away and staggered toward the bathroom.

Half an hour later Meredith scrambled downstairs, late for work. “Don’t forget!” Irma called from the door.

“What?”

“Tonight.”

“What’s tonight?”

Irma poked her head over the landing, and her blue kerchief floated from her head and landed on the stairs.

“Blast. Dinner at the club at nine-thirty, darling. I’ve arranged some specimens for you to examine. Bring your little Canadian
friend along. Unless, of course, you’d rather not have the competition.”

Meredith stumped down the four flights of stairs two at a time, hurrying to make it before the light timer went out and left
her stranded in the lightless stairwell. This country! Timers on lights, cold-water flats, coin-operated heaters, pay-as-you-go
public washrooms, the absence of paper towels, napkins or paper products of virtually any kind. Somewhere along the line this
great empire had taught its people to live without Kleenex, and its children to bathe in two inches of tepid water. Why? The
English must
enjoy
physical discomfort on some level that North Americans do not. Meredith wondered if the grottiness—the
chilly, unheated, unpampered misery among the privileged people was the English way of keeping a connection to history alive.
For North Americans it was different. If it was good enough for our ancestors, it
couldn’t
be good enough for us.

Meredith made her way through the urban dawn toward Notting Hill Gate. The pastel-painted town houses seemed dull and two-dimensional.
It was the tail end of spring and the sidewalks were covered in fetid brown blossoms, glued to the pavement by rain and fixed
there by feet.

She felt surprisingly okay, despite her lack of sleep, and realized it was possible she was still drunk.

The tube rumbled toward Piccadilly, roiling Meredith’s stomach inside her. The previous night returned to her in strobe-lit
glimpses. Mish slurping a sliver of barbequed eel directly off the thigh of the nude girl. Both of them dancing on top of
a single chair until it cracked and gave way. Some commotion involving a car. An overlit flat somewhere in South Kensington
with polished concrete floors and hardly any furniture. Dancing again, but this time to something terrible—UB40? The smell
of kebab sauce. Talking intensely with Gunther on the couch about his photography while Mish locked herself in the bathroom
(to throw up?). A blurry bit. Then home.

She couldn’t remember if she had kissed Gunther goodbye, whether they had exchanged phone numbers or even affectionate words.
She did recall him begging her to stay, pinning her to the sofa in a half-playful way. She had resisted—though now she was
not sure why. What was it with the Pollyanna routine? If she wanted a baby, she was going to have to get tactical.

As she traveled east into the city, the car filled up. Across from Meredith a hot-dog-shaped man in a three-piece suit was
reading the
Times
folded meticulously into eighths. Watching him, Meredith suddenly wondered how her own father had read the
newspaper. Was he a spreader or a folder?

The train surged above ground into the daylight and suddenly the car was loud with the sound of cell phones ringing, beeping
messages from loved ones and colleagues who’d been momentarily out of contact. All around Meredith, people dove for their
bags and coat pockets. Just then her own phone, which she kept in the special compartment on the outside of her knapsack,
began to play the Ode to Joy at an intense volume. (One of the Germans must have switched it from the usual ring last night
for a joke.) A message she hadn’t noticed earlier. Meredith plucked the handset out of her bag, flipped it open. The voice
mail had been left from the night before, a Toronto number. She pressed one and entered her password:
SCRIPT
.

“Hello, this is a message for Meredith. It’s Joe Veil calling—the doctor. I got this number from your file. I hope you don’t
mind my checking up on you. I just, well, I just wanted to call in person to see that everything is okay. I’m not sure if
you’ve rescheduled your appointment, but if you haven’t, call the office anytime, or even if you just want to come in and
talk. Or talk on the phone. I’d be glad to answer any...anything. Okay, so I hope you’re well.”

Without pausing to consider, Meredith pressed the call-back key. Within four seconds a phone was ringing somewhere in Toronto.

“Hel-lo?” A man’s groggy voice.

“Is that Dr. Veil? It’s Meredith Moore. Calling from London. I guess I kind of forgot about the time change—God, sorry. What
time is it there, anyway?”

Muffled pillow noises, followed by a phlegmy grunt. “Uh, 1:37.”

“I’m sorry to wake you. I should let you sleep. This is so rude of me—I completely forgot. I’ll let you go back to sleep.”

“Don’t be sorry. I’m used to it. I actually feel neglected if the phone doesn’t ring at least once in the night.” Another
cough. “How’s London?”

“It’s okay. Super busy.” The train pulled into an outdoor station. Beyond the outdoor platform Meredith could see a woman
on the balcony of her high-rise building hanging a flowered bedsheet out to dry. “To be honest? Not so great. I’m pretty mixed
up.”

“Mixed up how?”

“I’ve decided I want to have a baby.”

“Congratulations.”

“No, wait—which is crazy because I’m not even in love or in lust or
anything.
I mean, isn’t that wrong? Shouldn’t a baby like—I
don’t know—grow out of love?”

“Meredith, babies grow out of stem cells. The love part comes later.” She could hear his head shift against a pillow.

“Do you think I could do it on my own?”

“I don’t know you well enough to say one way or the other, but let me ask you this. Of all the other things in your life you’ve
set out to do on your own, which ones have you failed at?”

The train rocked her from side to side. “None, I guess,” she whispered. “But sometimes I wonder—”

“Daddy?” A girl’s voice in the background. Muffled noises, then Joe’s voice saying gently,
Go back to sleep.
“Hi. Sorry, you
were saying?”

Meredith lowered the phone and stared at the digital mini-screen on her handset. She watched a timer ticking off the seconds
of contact.

“Hello?” came his voice from somewhere on the other side of the ocean. “Meredith? Meredith, I think I’m losing—”

The windows went black as the train was sucked underground again.

Hello? Hello?
said the passengers on the train, as Meredith stared at her screen. A new message flashed on it:
SEARCHING FOR SIGNAL
.

Barnaby Shakespeare stood at the bar drinking his second pint of lager and vowing to pace himself. Tomorrow morning he was
driving back to the Cotswolds and he didn’t want a hangover. On the last trip back from London his hands had been so shaky
on the wheel he had nearly swerved into oncoming traffic while changing gears on the motorway.

Overall, he was a much better driver the night before than the morning after. Although he tried not to make a habit of driving
pissed in the city (he’d been done twice for operating a motor vehicle under the influence already—the next time they would
take away his licence and throw him in the hole), in the countryside it seemed unavoidable. Everybody simply
did.

Barnaby was not one of those lushes whom no amount of liquor seems to slow or sicken. He invariably woke up shattered the
morning after. The trick was predicting when the devil was coming to visit so he could clear off the calendar for the following
day. Not that he generally had anything much to do—living, as he did, in the country, without an occupation or a wife. Unfortunately
there never seemed to be any rhyme or reason to his benders. Unlike other people, he did not drink to celebrate his triumphs
or kill his woes. He simply drank. And, for reasons that remained a complete mystery to himself, on some days Barnaby drank
significantly more than on others. The problem of predicting his own behavior was getting worse as he got older (he turned
thirty-three last December).

He vowed to begin keeping a diary of his daily movements starting tomorrow. His father, Nigel Shakespeare, a nonpracticing
barrister, had kept a diary religiously his entire adult life. After brushing his teeth and before turning off the light in
the evenings, Dad would jot down exactly what had happened that day in point form. The outcome, Barnaby discovered when he
unlocked his father’s nightstand the day after his funeral and flipped through the small leather-bound books (there were stacks
and stacks of them), was impressive. Mundane details of daily chores or digestive complications were given equal weight with
events of massive personal significance. The result, Barnaby thought, was a terrible, inadvertent joke. One entry in particular
stayed with him: “June 15th, 1975. Kippers for breakfast. Popped in at the motor shop. Rosa in labour upon my return. Girl—stillborn.
Cook’s half day—scrambled egg for dinner.”

Barnaby, however, planned to keep quite a different sort of diary, one with far more colorful anecdotes and jokes and even
the odd sexy bit. His diary would be read aloud at his funeral, and everyone would laugh and say what a bright, jolly fellow
he had been. How he had lived life to its fullest despite his flaws. Possibly (and this was an especially private thought)
someone would want to publish it.

While Barnaby knew he drank too much, he wasn’t particularly worried about being an alcoholic. He had read somewhere that
real alcoholics don’t get hangovers. He knew this to be true, since his own father had consumed at least twenty ounces of
Famous Grouse with soda every single day of his life and yet bounced out of bed each morning at five-thirty on the dot. Barnaby,
however, was reduced to a quivering, retching muck. The more he drank, the more he found himself perversely reassured each
morning when he woke up to find the old symptoms were still there (if anything, they were getting worse!): rolling thunderclaps
of nausea, jitters, a crushing head and a mysterious acrid peppermint smell everywhere he went. What he secretly feared most
was the morning he would wake up to find his hangover gone.

That morning, he conceded now while ordering his third pint, would probably not be tomorrow. It was not yet six, and he had
the whole night ahead of him. Soon people would start arriving at the club for cocktails, and then there would be dinner in
the dining room with more wine, and who knows what sort of nonsense after that. Part of him wished he could stay on in London
an extra day. And he would too. If only he didn’t miss the birds so much.