Kelly showed the phoenix that was flying up from between her buttocks. Sally demonstrated the female warrior fighting a dragon that surrounded her belly button, and Layla showed the tiny butterfly on one of her buttocks.
“I’ve got one just like that,” said Trisha, outraged. “The bloke who did it told me it was a unique one-off.”
Coleridge nearly choked on his tea. It had never even occurred to him that one of his officers, one of his lady officers, was tattooed. Particularly Patricia, whom he had thought such a steady girl.
Layla then proudly spread her legs and showed off the other butterfly she had, which was fluttering about right at the top of her perfectly lovely, smooth, groomed inner thigh.
“I keep it there,” Layla said, “to remind my lovers of the importance and the beauty of delicacy and lightness of touch.”
Coleridge groaned and looked away from the screen.
“Got one of those, Trish?” said Hooper.
“No way, not there. It’s bad enough having a bikini wax without some hell’s angel getting up you with his ink needle.”
“Be quiet, both of you!” barked Coleridge.
Now Layla was showing the little Eastern symbol on her shoulderblade. “It’s Tibetan,” she explained. “A Buddhist symbol indicating a tranquil inner light.”
Everyone agreed that this was particularly lovely.
Except David.
“Tibetan?” he asked, a hint of indulgent surprise in his voice.
“Yes, Tibetan,” said Layla defensively.
“Oh… OK, right. Whatever.”
Layla wanted to kill him. “What do you mean ‘Whatever’? It’s fucking Tibetan!”
“Steady, Layla,” grinned Jazz. “Hang on to your tranquil inner light.”
“Look, Layla,” said David gently. “It’s very beautiful and it can and should mean whatever you want it to mean. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Tibetan or Thai, which is what it actually is: it’s your tattoo, and it means whatever you want it to.”
Who would have thought that Layla’s fabulous calm could have been shattered so easily. Her face was red with embarrassment and anger. “It’s Tibetan, you bastard,” she repeated. “I know it’s Tibetan.”
David gave an annoying little smile and shrug as if to say “You’re wrong, but it’s beneath me to argue.”
“It is Tibetan! It means tranquil inner fucking light!” Layla shouted, and stormed off to get herself a soothing cup of herbal tea.
“I heard about this bloke, a gay bloke,” Garry said, “who had this Chinese proverb put up his arm which meant ‘gentle seeker after truth’. Anyway, one day he pulls this poofter Chinkie at a noodle bar in Soho, and his new boyfriend says, ‘Actually it means you are a stupid, gullible, round-eyed cunt.’”
Garry, Jazz, Sally and Kelly laughed hugely at this. Hamish and Moon smiled. Layla, standing over by the kettle, bit her lip, red-faced with fury, and David closed his eyes for a moment as if gathering strength from his own stillness.
Then Hamish showed the Celtic Cross on his forearm, and finally it was David’s turn. He had been waiting for it.
“I have only one tattoo,” he explained, as if this in itself was evidence of his exquisite taste and heightened perception. “And it is very, very beautiful.”
With that David lifted the leg of his baggy silk trousers and revealed, inscribed upon his left ankle, wound three times around his leg, the first four lines of the “to be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet.
“No butterflies, no Tibetan shopping lists, no fiery dragons. Simply the most perceptive investigation of the essential absurdity of man’s existence ever committed to paper.”
“Or in this case skin,” Jazz pointed out, but David ignored him.
“Existentialism three hundred years before existentialism was invented. Humanism in a brutal and barbaric world. A tiny light that has illuminated every century since.”
“Yeah, all right, but why have it written on your leg?” asked Jazz, speaking for the nation.
“Because it saved my life,” said David with clear-eyed, unblinking sincerity. “When I was in my dark time and saw no possibility of living in this world I fully intended to end my own life. Believe me, I had entirely resolved upon suicide.”
“Except you didn’t do it, did you?” Garry said. “Funny, that.”
“No, I didn’t. Instead through one long night I read Hamlet three times from cover to cover.”
“Fuck me. I’d rather fucking kill myself,” Garry said, but David pressed on regardless.
“That sad prince also contemplated the terrible act of self-murder just as I was doing, but he rose above it, rose above it and achieved a grand and private nobility.”
“Is that why you didn’t do it yourself, then, David?” asked Moon, obviously trying to be supportive of David’s confessional. “Because nothing that you were feeling could ever be as bad as Hamlet.”
“We did it at school,” said Garry. “Believe me, nothing is as bad as Hamlet.”
“Oh, fookin’ shurrup, Garry,” said Moon. “David knows what I mean, don’t you, David?”
“Yes, I do, Moon, and the answer is yes and no. Without doubt the sombre princeling’s torment taught me much. But in fact I resolved against suicide because I realized reading that play that I did not wish to leave a world that could contain something as beautiful as Shakespeare’s verse, or indeed a flower, or a sunrise or the smell of fresh-baked bread.”
“Now you’ve lost me,” said Moon. “What’s fookin’ bread got to do with it?”
“I believe, Moon, that once a person recognizes beauty they become alive to the possibility of beauty in all things. And so I decided to keep the words which the young Prince of Denmark spoke at his time of deepest sadness about me always. Just to remind me that the world is beautiful and to despair of it is an insult to God.”
Jazz wanted to tell David that he was a pretentious prat, but he didn’t. There was something about David, something so handsome and compelling, something so utterly blatant about his colossal conceit that Jazz could not help but be a little bit moved.
None of them were sure about David. The obvious sincerity of David’s self love was quite compelling. A love as true as the love David had for himself could not be simply dismissed, it was almost noble. They stared, unable to decide what to think about David.
Except Kelly.
The incident hadn’t been noticed in the monitoring box on the night it happened because the editors were concentrating on the wide-angle shot, and Kelly’s back had been to the camera, but the police had all the available video coverage of the scene: for once they got a little lucky. One of the live cameramen had been taking a reverse angle, and the disk had not been wiped. It was a three-shot of Kelly, Moon and Hamish on the orange couch.
Kelly was smiling, a big broad wicked smile. Hardly the reaction she would normally have had to David’s tale of suicidal angst, no matter how absurdly pompous it might have sounded.
“She’d seen that tattoo before,” said Hooper.
“Yes, I rather think she had,” Coleridge agreed.
DAY THIRTY-FOUR. 10.00 a.m.
While various junior officers went off to run the phrase “Far corgi in heaven” around the Internet and through various voice decoders, Coleridge and his inner team put David to one side for a moment and returned to the subject of Woggle.
“It seems to me that, for all that the public knew, there really was only one housemate in week two,” Coleridge said, glancing through the digest of the broadcast edits that Trisha and her team had prepared for him. “Woggle, Woggle, Woggle and once more Woggle.”