see the starkness of it clouding her mind, an oddity about her life
that she hadn’t noticed before.
“So you haven’t kept in touch with the old gang?” Miles asked
me sweetly. I shook my head. “Not even Anna and Sean?”
“Who are Anna and Sean?” asked Sam.
My mouth was dry. Miles left me on the hook for a while, cocking
his head to one side and examining me with a vaguely scientific
air. Then he answered himself: “Just a couple we knew. Although—
weren’t you and Anna, you know? Didn’t you have a thing for a
while?”
Now Miranda and Sam were all ears.
“She was your girlfriend?”
“You’ve never spoken about any Anna.”
Sam smelled gossip. “What was she like?”
“Go on,” says Miles. “Tell her.”
“She wasn’t my girlfriend. I haven’t heard anything about either
of them.”
Sam frowned at me.
Miles rubbed his chin. “Shame,” he said.
Miranda was frustrated. “I don’t know why you’re being so
tight-lipped, Mike. I’m not going to be jealous of some lover you
had thirty years ago. It’s part of you.” She patted my hand, made
big eyes. How hungry she was for this. How I’d starved her.
“Did you go traveling together?” she asked peevishly, when it
became clear I wasn’t going to say anything voluntarily.
“No. We last saw each other just before I left.”
Miles served himself another scoop of ice cream. “So where did
you go, Mike? India, was it? You never told me at the time.”
“I was in India for a while. I went overland through Asia. I spent
several years in Thailand.”
“How very interesting. Bangkok?”
“For a while.”
Miranda cued up her favorite line. “Mike was in a monastery.”
Miles looked wry. “Really, Mike? That surprises me.”
“Why?” asked Miranda.
“Well, he was never really into the spiritual side of things. He was more of a political animal. So you became a Buddhist, Mike?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re still a Buddhist?”
“No — at least, not in any meaningful way.”
“But you don’t eat meat.”
“Neither of us does,” said Miranda.
“Simplicity. Nonviolence. I admire you.” Again that predatory grin.
It dragged on for hours, but at last Miles looked at his watch and decided it was over. He had, he said, a long drive back to London. He ought to get going. Miranda hugged him and gave him some samples of the new Bountessence men’s line. Sam kissed him on the cheek. He handed me a card. “In case you lost the last one,” he said. I walked him to his car, which was parked on the street outside.
“So, you’ll come and see me.”
I nodded, defeated. “When?”
“I’ll let you know. I’ll phone you. Don’t let me down, Chris. You won’t let me down, will you?”
No, I said, I wouldn’t let him down.
“You’re such a dark horse,” murmured Miranda, as we lay in bed. She snuggled closer to me, eager to explore our new intimacy. Thankfully she wasn’t confident enough to say Anna’s name.
* * *
Round and round. The sky’s getting lighter. I’m experiencing momentary drop-outs, instants when my mind is completely blank. When I finally turn off the périphérique I have a near-miss as someone unexpectedly pulls out in front of me. Overreacting, I jerk the wheel and scrape the near-side wing against the crash-barrier. That’s it. No more. I need to sleep, or at least close my eyes. I think I’m on the right route now, somewhere in the southeastern sprawl of the Paris suburbs, heading out of the city. I pull into a rest area, where I piss into a dark corner, broken glass crunching under my feet. Leaning out of the passenger door, I splash my face with bottled water, recline the car seat as far back as it will go and lie down. For a while, headlights continue to pass behind my eyelids. Then they stop.
I’m woken by a gloved hand tapping on the window. Daylight. A pair of policemen are peering at me through the steamed-up glass. I sit up with a jolt and open the door, rubbing my eyes. There’s a certain amount of confusion, but the general gist is that they want to see my passport. I dig through my luggage, wondering if they’re going to arrest me. Perhaps I’m on some kind of list. As they check my details, I get out and look around at the desolate place where I’ve spent the night. Above me looms a row of huge housing blocks, slabs of seventies concrete faced with cheerless primary-colored panels. The rest area is a dumping ground for HGV tires and building waste. The policemen ask me to walk up and down, checking, I think, to see if I’m drunk. I see a row of long black scratches on the car’s paintwork where I hit the barrier. So do they, but finally they let me go, repeating the word hôtel, clearly and patiently, as one would to a child.
I drive away, checking in the rearview mirror to see if they’re following me. A few kilometers down the road I stop at a service station to fill the tank. In the brightly lit café I drink a coffee and eat some kind of plastic-wrapped pastry, all sugar and synthetic apple jam. I watch a truck driver flicking through a selection of pornography at the news concession, carefully making his choice. The sugar gives me a rush of clarity. Out of habit, I just paid with my credit card. I’m angry with myself. So stupid, leaving a trail.
Does it really matter? Perhaps not. They’re going to find me, however careful I am. I have no resources. My choices are limited. I want to speak to Anna before they catch up with me. I want to hear how it was for her. I want her to say my name. After that, they can do what they like.
I take a swig of bottled water, start the engine, and swing back out on to the road. Round and round.
As that first afternoon at Free Pictures turned into evening, people started to drift off to their next destinations and the usher was kept busy climbing up and down the ladder to let them out. The girl who threw the stone left with a black man in a leather jacket. I would have followed her, but I was reluctant to leave the roof, knowing that as soon as I stepped on to the street I’d be back on my own, in depressive limbo. The pirate who’d argued with the other speakers also seemed annoyed to see her go. Sprawled next to me, apparently exhausted, he swore under his breath, then propped himself up on his elbows and announced that he was hungry. I said I was too. “So,” he suggested, “let’s go get something to eat.”
Even now it’s hard to talk about Sean Ward without romanticizing him. He was a handsome bastard, with a fine, rather delicate jawline he hid with a full beard, a crooked nose, wavy dark hair, and heavy-lidded brown eyes. His looks were the first thing everyone noticed about him and he knew what to do with them. Red Sean, fucker of the unfuckable, charmer of the barmaid and the arresting officer. To those who just remember him in the early
days, or who take their history from some of the frothier journalism about Anna, the romance is all that survives. I’m almost invisible in those books, a bearded oval in a couple of fuzzy group photos. Sean is omnipresent — but somehow simplified, bleached out into some kind of revolutionary rock star. The pictures (of which there are surprisingly few) tend to show him with rock-star accoutrements, dark glasses, his battered biker jacket. There he is, smoking a cigarette, throwing an arm casually over Anna’s shoulders. There he is, standing on a hillside in Wales, waving a huge flag. As far as the world’s concerned (if it’s concerned at all anymore), he’s just a footnote to Anna’s story, and since she’s been so distorted, it’s as if the real Sean, the Sean who was paranoid and generous and self-denying and confrontational and just vain enough to have liked those rock-star photos, has almost vanished behind a haze of Byronic bullshit.