A monotone is the best he can manage, but at least he’s talking. The woman isn’t wearing any make-up, and reminds James of the primary school teacher he yearned for at the age of seven. The pangs of love were sharpest when Miss Morley was vulnerable, when the class was out of control. The face now confronting him is the same.
‘I’m Mike’s sister,’ she says, with a voice like a sulky teenager — sulky but real. ‘Brenda. I live in Scotland.’
‘Ah, that explains it. I’m James. I live up that way too. Well, Yorkshire. What do you do in Scotland?’
‘Estate management.’
‘What does that involve?’ Words keep coming out of his mouth. He doesn’t really care what her job involves, but a direct approach seems to come as standard with the jaded, robotic tone.
She hesitates. ‘Well, I’m more of a — a chainsaw operator.’
The c-word cuts through the background babble of urban sophistication like, well, like a chainsaw. James feels this might be just a scene he’s writing, and laughs. She’s a chainsaw operator.
‘So, your brother does — whatever it is that he does, to feel entitled to all this—’ he waves a hand dismissively ‘—while you dismember the crap out of trees. Interesting. I’d like to hear your story.’ He almost sounds like he means it.
‘My story? What are you, a journalist?’ No hint of a smile. He likes that.
‘No — a novelist, actually.’ Why make that absurd claim? The requisite embarrassment follows swiftly: a piggy-eyed androgyne in purple silk, cradling a trio of garnished highballs, has overheard him.
‘Oh? Who’s your publisher, Zadie?’
Again the sullen monotone: ‘I’m not published yet.’
The interloper smirks, rolls his eyes at Brenda, mouths, ‘Ah, one of those,’ and waddles on his way.
‘I don’t much like the idea of being written about,’ says Brenda. A trace of warmth creeps into her face.
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
Brenda has endured an hour and a half of this hell. People keep trying to talk to her. The drugged-up homeless guy was the least hateful of them, but he slunk off. Probably nicked something — Mike can afford it. Now her decline is gathering pace — the familiar disengagement from her surroundings, the muffled voices, the hallucinations: arcs of blood suspended in the air, a thundering double bass, a keen soprano wail. Jeering eyes are on her sweat-soaked back as she climbs the stairs. It doesn’t matter now. Just get into the room, turn the key. Lock them out. Five more steps. Three. Two. One.
The door has been locked from the inside. She hears a muffled giggling. So stupid. Not to have locked it herself. Didn’t think it would be that sort of party. Can’t knock, make a fuss — God knows who might answer and in what state. Nowhere to hide. Have to get out. She hurries back down the stairs and through the hideous gauntlet of bodies — one woman points, another laughs — snatches her proper shoes and coat from the hall, thuds down the echoing stairwell — no lifts for Brenda — and plunges outside.
A fine rain is now falling, and has softened the earlier etched glitter of the canal to an impressionistic glow. It’s the sort of rain to dampen — rather than quicken with shrieks of laughter and running footsteps — the spirits of the Friday night crowd. Brenda glances back up at the looming apartment block, and thinks she can pick out her commandeered room, six floors up — dim lights behind the blind. Her one refuge in this nightmare city, now invaded.
She walks. The rain is balm. But bare legs make her feel naked, and this is not a place to be naked. The shadows slinking along the towpath are few enough to seem threatening. People are dangerous. On her return she follows the other side of the canal, which is busier and better lit. There’s a figure slumped in the shadows under a road bridge, but room enough on the towpath to give it a wide berth. She walks faster and her body tenses, ready to run.
‘Brenda?’
She starts, and James can see it takes her a moment to recognise him, wrapped as he is in a duffle-coat and a dirty woollen hat knitted by his landlady in Merryman’s Bay.
‘Oh. Hi.’ She still looks angry, or scared. But relieved that it’s him.
‘Sorry if I scared you. Partied out too?’
‘I suppose.’
‘I’m not really homeless, you know.’ He somehow manages to clamber to his feet. ‘I’m just sheltering from the rain.’
‘I’m glad.’ For the first time, she actually smiles. His jaded heart skips.
‘I was just thinking that it’s a shame that I’ll never see you again, and here you are.’ Now she seems to nod and shrug at the same time, as though she both does and doesn’t give a shit. He perseveres: ‘Could I have your phone number?’
She looks him up and down. ‘Okay,’ she replies at last, vaguely.
He slips from his coat pocket the neglected writer’s notebook and biro that he still keeps there as a kind of private joke, and hands them to her. She writes something, closes the book and hands it back.
‘Are you heading back to your brother’s place?’
‘Aye.’
‘It’s a long way round.’ The apartment block is almost opposite them, but there’s no way up onto this road bridge. The canal glints. ‘Unless you fancy a swim.’
She glances each way along the canal to confirm the truth of what he says, and then up at the apartment block. Then she peers up at the underside of the bridge. Huge steel I-beams. She runs a careful eye the whole length of one, wipes her rain-dampened hands carefully inside her coat, and rolls her shoulders.
‘You’re not serious.’
‘Nice meeting you.’ Suddenly, her voice is bolder. ‘Look after yourself — I mean that. You look a mess.’
She jumps up and catches the beam neatly with a hand on each side, and then hefts herself out over the water. She doesn’t waste energy kicking her legs about, but calmly swings her weight from one hand to the other — she’s done this before. He glances down the towpath but nobody else seems to notice, and in about thirty seconds the thing is done. She drops lightly onto the opposite side.
‘You’re mad!’ he shouts. ‘I’ll call you.’ She is brushing something off her hands, and holds them up to display blackened fingers.
‘Pigeon shit!’ And she walks away.
James is buzzing. Without even trying, he has activated his long-abandoned Project Q. A case study. And a conduit, a wellhead for accessing buried treasure. If I have not love. He opens the notebook. What Brenda’s written isn’t a phone number. The letters ‘NH’ are followed by two sets of five digits: it looks like a grid reference.
4. Stacked fragments
‘I speak the truth, not to the full, but as much as I dare.’
Dan Mock pours yesterday’s glass of wine down the sink. It rankles that the television, the PC and several lights were switched on all night in the briefly impregnable house. With a couple of finger-taps he brings up the graph of the Mocks’ past twenty-four hours’ energy usage, overlaid on the daily profile averaged over the last three winters. There is a grotesque nocturnal overspend. He does a few quick sums in his head and, from the same virtual dashboard, tweaks the thermostat to make good: he’ll wear an extra jumper until Nat comes home. It’s not that they can’t afford it — though bills do devour the lion’s share of their salaries — and Dan is neither a raving environmentalist nor a miser. He just abhors waste.
With another finger-tap he summons a Sudoku puzzle. Sudoku doesn’t count as waste, in Dan’s book. At university he wrote one of the first programs to accurately grade any grid on a numerical scale, and he has now linked this to a scanner on his phone to create a handheld Sudoku Geiger counter. He usually focuses on puzzles graded from sixty-five to eighty-five on his scale, only stooping to the fifties (often described by newspapers as fiendish or devilish) if he’s feeling lazy. He occasionally tracks down a ninety or a ninety-two just to prove that he’s still got the Mock magic. He is happy to justify his hobby to the many detractors. No, it is not a narrow-minded obsession but an elegant means to appreciate the beauty of mathematics and human reason. And an allegory, perhaps: the basic components so few; the permutations, the possibilities, so many. It seems pointless only if you’ve missed the point.