As I watched Abbey take delicate, surgical stabs at a puny bowl of salad, I decided that I had to ask her again.
You’ll probably think this is bizarre, given the mystery of my grandfather, given that people had started dying, that society was tumbling down around us and that there were a couple of mass-murderers on the loose who actually had a nickname for me. You’ll probably argue that I should have been concentrating more on the war and less on some imbroglio in my love life. But, then what do you know? You weren’t there.
“Abbey,” I asked as she speared an anemic tomato. “I want you to tell me who Joe is.”
The tomato bounded away from her fork. Abbey looked angry enough to snap the cutlery in two.
I persisted. “I need to know. You said his name twice this morning. Say I misheard. Say it’s the name of your cat. Just tell me something.”
Abbey pushed away her salad. “Joe was someone I used to go out with. Just an ex.”
“I see.”
There was a man on the other side of the canteen, dark suited and crop haired, a copy of Martin Chuzzlewit held conspicuously out in front of him, the outline of a weapon clearly visible in his jacket pocket. He looked over at me and nodded. One of Dedlock’s jackboots, of course. He didn’t look like the sharpest tool in the box. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he was holding that book upside down.
Abbey hadn’t noticed him. “I was with Joe for a while,” she said. “Quite a while.” She seemed to be choosing her words very carefully, deliberating over each one. “But not anymore. We haven’t spoken in months.”
“You still have feelings for him?”
“God, no.”
“But you whispered his name this morning in your sleep.”
“Habit, Henry. Don’t read anything into it.”
“How did you meet him?” I asked. “How did you meet Joe?” I couldn’t help but inflect that word with a bitter spasm of contempt and immediately I disliked myself intensely for it.
Abbey didn’t meet my eye or challenge my tone, but just gazed ahead of her at the salt and pepper on the table. “He lived in the flat,” she said.
Something wobbled in my stomach. “In the flat? In my room?”
Abbey nodded. “It had to finish.” My beautiful girlfriend chewed her lower lip at the memory of a time about which I knew nothing, and I felt the steel-capped kick of jealousy. “He’d lost his way. He was getting into something dangerous.”
“Tell me more.” I knew that I was interrogating her now but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to stop. Some grubby curiosity in me wanted to know it all.
“He was unpredictable,” she said. “Crazy, sometimes. Dangerous. Not like you. Not like you at all. You’re not dangerous. You’re…” She searched for an adjective. “You’re sweet.” At last she looked up at me, tried a smile, thrust her hands across the table to clasp mine.
“Sweet,” I said softly, and never had the word sounded so damningly joyless. I swallowed hard and asked the biggest question of all. “Do you miss him?”
With the screech of metal on linoleum, Abbey pushed back her chair, suddenly bustling and irritable. “I have to get back to the office. Don’t bother to see me out. I’ll get a cab.”
After that, all that was left for us to do was to swap frosty goodbyes and vague promises to meet up in the flat.
I trudged back to sit with my grandfather. I sighed. “You’ve got all the answers, don’t you?” I said, but all I got was the usual dead-eyed stare at the ceiling, the irritating bleeps of life support. I lost my temper. “You old bastard!”
By the time Barbara returned to the office, she was feeling queasy. By 2:30 P.M., she was feeling physically ill. Down in the basement, when it got really bad, she had to steady herself against the fat woman’s chair until the nausea subsided.
By three P.M., the poor girl thought she might throw up at any moment. Peter Hickey-Brown had slunk in whilst she was at lunch, muttering some sheepish excuse about a dentist’s appointment. She had no choice but to knock on his door and ask him to let her go early. Too distracted by something on his computer to offer much resistance, he just nodded, not even looking up from his spreadsheet, meaning that Barbara was free of the office and heading toward the station not more than ten minutes later.
The tube journey must have been difficult. In addition to the violent ructions of her stomach, she would have had a piercing headache, her vision would have been blurred and uncertain, and she would have found herself perilously unsteady on her feet. Once she had got off the tube, it was only a short walk home. She lived with her father and two cats.
Or, at least, that’s who I’ve always imagined it.
The old man — and he would have been old, I think, an elderly father some years into a mostly miserable retirement — would have emerged from his study to find out what his daughter was doing back from work so early. Not wanting to bother him, she would have said that she was feeling a little poorly but that it was nothing to worry about, nothing for him to fuss over. Always uneasy around female illness (all that oozing, all that bleeding and perspiration), her dad would have ducked gratefully back into his den. Perhaps I’m being unjust to the man but I’ve always imagined him turning his music up loud to cover the sounds from upstairs as his daughter cowered in the bathroom, first the sounds of vomiting, the tears, the stifled moans, the swallowed cries — then much, much worse. I imagine him with a large collection of LPs, and for some reason, when I torture myself by picturing what happened, it’s always an old Elton John song I hear: “The Bitch Is Back.”
Poor Barbara, trying to be quiet in the bathroom. Poor Barbara, who’d do anything not to be a burden to her dad. Poor Barbara, trying to be quiet as she threw up what felt like half her stomach lining, as something impossible took hold of her body and poked and pulled and twisted. Poor Barbara, who didn’t even scream when her bones started to stretch and elongate of their own accord, as her flesh alternately boiled away and swelled up, as her eyebrows shortened, her lips grew bulbous and her cheeks shrank away to almost nothing. Fully expecting to discover now that this was death, she somehow managed to crawl into her room and lie down, whimpering, on the bed. Eventually, when the pain had just begun to recede, she got up the courage to look in the mirror. Only then, only when she saw what they’d done to her, did she finally scream.
And then, at 5:30 P.M., Mr. Jasper came to call.
Silverman came running as soon as he heard, dashing along the corridor, skittering down hallways, practically bouncing off the walls, panting, perspiring, raggedly breathing. He knocked on the door to the prince’s private suite and walked in without waiting for an invitation. They had been friends for too long to worry about protocol, been through too much together to let etiquette stand in their way.
Even so, the prince looked annoyed at the interruption. He sat on the edge of his bed, breathing deeply, his face the color of semolina and wearing the look of a bunny on the motorway who knows that he will never make it to the verge in time.
The ghoul Streater stood over him, one hand placed, with casual proprietarialism, upon the royal shoulder. Silverman thought he even noticed a gentle squeeze.
“What is it, Silverman?” It was barely lunchtime, yet the prince sounded exhausted.
“We were all so worried about you, sir. You were out on your own without any kind of security detail-”
“Why does anyone give a fig how I choose to spend my time?”
“The tree-planting ceremony at the school, sir? The children were most disappointed.” At this, Silverman gave the prince a mildly reproving look — an expression which had often done the trick in the past, tweaking the royal conscience when they were both serving in the regiment and Private Wales had contemplated feigning sickness to wriggle out of training. Today, however, the prince scarcely seemed to notice that Silverman was in the room at all.