‘ “Quite often I was sick, I had a note excusing me from games, but you mocked me for it. What right did you have? Are you a doctor?”
‘He flashed with indignation. “A note from your mum, you say? Let me tell you the truth of this world, boy. If you take a lion cub and separate it from the pride and bring it up in a marble palace, if you feed it milk and dainty roasted goat flesh each day of its life such that it never learns to hunt, is that a kindness? No! And if you then turn it loose into the wild, having no comprehension of the struggle that awaits it, will it survive, do you think? Has your kindness, your diet of milk and kid, helped the lion to make its way in the world? Just so does it come to pass with men. When I was fighting in Patagonia, I learned that on the field of battle, which is but a metaphor for life, there is no note from your mum!”
‘ “But this is Aberystwyth,” I shouted. “We’re miles away from Patagonia!”
‘ “There is no distinction in the geography of the soul. All places are one. In Patagonia when I thirsted I drank the tears of the penguin; when I felt the ravening pains in my belly I chewed on the tapir’s foot. When I was weary I did not take the chinchilla for my pillow, but the armadillo! Not once did I cry out in the night for a note from my mum. When I fell into captivity I did not waste time cursing my fate, my thoughts were only for escape. I did not petition the commandant with notes from my mum! You know what would have happened if I had done that? You know what he would have said?” Herod Jenkins sneered and shouted, “You want to know what a note from your mum got in Patagonia? This!” And he ripped his shirt off to show us the stripes on his back.’
We wandered down to the wooden steps where they post the tide tables. Out in the darkness the end of the Pier hung over the water, studded with lights like an ocean liner. Is there any sight more calculated to thrill the heart than a big ship at night? There is something deeply affecting about those lights floating over the watery wilderness. Maybe it is the contrast, the interface of two worlds separated by a membrane of painted steel. Outside salt, and flung spume, endlessly dark, an abyss so profound it would take you twenty minutes to reach the bottom. On the other side of the steel, men and women in evening dress, warmth and light and a theatre performance in which they act out the play called Don’t Mention the Iceberg. We carried on walking until the harbour. The jetty brooded and the beacon standing proud at the end flashed like the light of an angler fish. The symmetry of the concrete was broken by the silhouettes of two fishermen, a man and a boy; the dark lines of their rods waved like the whiskers of a dim-bodied crustacean. A breeze rose, fish-scented, from the water and raised goose bumps on Miaow’s arm. She shivered and pressed herself against me. I linked my arms behind her and she turned to look up at me.
‘Do you know why they call me Miaow?’
‘No.’
‘Because of my green eyes.’
‘They’re nothing like a cat’s eyes.’
‘Why not?’
‘The green is the wrong shade. Cats’ are more like the digits on a luminous watch.’
‘What are mine like, then?’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Of course!’
I pushed a filament of hair away from her cheek as if it were blocking my view and stared intently into her eyes. ‘The green is paler, like a phial of seawater held up to the light, and there are flecks of grey radiating like the striations in a slice of lime. At the rim of the iris there is a thin dark band that acts as a frame around a grey-green disk . . . it’s like watching the full moon through a bottle of absinthe.’
‘Do you want me to cry tears of absinthe?’
I shook my head. In the black waters of the harbour the town lay inverted like a nebula; skeins of shining gas hung like a necklace from the street lamps of the Prom. It was beautiful. Miaow peered into my face, her hair drawing forward like curtains to block out the world. She kissed me lightly on the lips. ‘I won’t let Herod Jenkins hurt you.’
Chapter 11
I slept badly and arrived late at the office next morning. The new desk had been delivered. It was already installed, and a man, who probably hadn’t been delivered with it, sat on the client’s chair with his feet on the desk. His shoes were black leather, badly scuffed, his trousers turned up and shiny with age. He wore a mackintosh that looked like it had spent six months tightly rolled up at the bottom of a packing case; his thin brown hair was congealed in a slick of police-issue hair cream. It was the cop who had sat sneering in the interrogation room the night I was taken to see the Aviary. He was eating an ice cream.
I slapped his feet off the desk. They fell to the floor with a thump.
He grinned. ‘I knew I wasn’t wrong about you.’
‘I like to be introduced before I let a man put his feet on my desk.’
The grin widened. ‘You can call me Sauerkopp.’ He raised a foot and crossed his leg. ‘They say the chief of police has a good relationship with you. That’s always a mistake in my book.’
‘Mistake for who?’
‘Everyone.’
‘And what makes you think I give a damn what’s in your book?’
The phone rang. The visitor picked up the phone, listened and said, ‘It’s a girl, wants you to find her lost handkerchief.’ He spoke to the receiver. ‘Sorry lady, he’s a dick, not a Boy Scout.’ He hung up and smiled. ‘Another big case slips through your fingers.’
‘Did you come for a reason or were you just passing?’
He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a Polaroid. He threw it towards me. I picked it up. It was the corpse of a woman, hair wet, face bloated.
‘Recognise the party?’
‘It’s Mrs Lewis.’
‘Someone tied her to one of the supports under the pier night before last, just before the tide came in. Ain’t that a shame!’
Something clenched in my loins, it was like an angry baby kicking against the wall of its womb; I didn’t let evidence of it reach my face. ‘She should have known better, the tide tables are clearly posted. Where did you get the snap?’
‘From my camera.’
‘Am I a suspect?’
‘I would say so, wouldn’t you?’
‘Are you arresting me?’
‘Why would I want to do that?’
‘You look the type that might enjoy it.’
He made a sour grin. ‘Not really. Arresting people is boring. It looks fun in the TV cop shows, but in real life it’s just paperwork and spending a lot of what the Americans call quality time with people who don’t wash very often. Sometimes they try and bite you. They never show that on TV, but that’s what it often comes down to. Being bitten by a fully grown man is a very unpleasant experience. Sometimes they struggle in such a way that they threaten to injure themselves. That’s not necessarily a big deal, but it means more paperwork, so you have to spray a little something in their eyes; nothing calms a man down faster than a little something in his eyes. Trouble is, it makes them produce a lot of mucus – from their eyes, their nose, out of the mouth. You’d be surprised how much the body can pump out in a situation like that. Believe me, grappling with a man producing loads of mucus isn’t fun. I don’t arrest people, I get the flatfoots to do it.’
‘You can arrest me, I wash every day.’
He smiled. ‘You are forgetting one thing: I like you. How are you getting on with Raspiwtin? Anything you want to tell me?’
‘There’s nothing I want to tell you.’