THE FIRST thing Katherine did on waking was to rouse Harry. To . . . rouse Harry. This, she had now realized, was the least of what she owed him. The fact that she was leaving him, leaving him for sound, complicated reasons that he’d never understand, demanded it. After she had gone, when his bewilderment and conventional distress were over, this would be what he’d remember. This, the sign and proof of her patient love, he would take with him, worth far more than any crude three hundred thousand.
It would end their relationship as she wanted it to end (she had a literary background), not with a whimper but a bang.
At bedtime the previous evening, therefore, she had held him off, damped him down, invoked a headache she didn’t have, and then lain awake listening to his gentle breathing till justice caught up with her and the headache became real. And other things besides . . . He’d slept soundly, however, and her goings-on hadn’t disturbed him.
She wasn’t going to tell him about the money now in their bank, of course: he must find out about it later, when only he himself was around to see his confused reactions; when his guilty delight, his shameful golden dreams, would remain a private matter. Instead, they’d spent the evening sorting through a new batch of travel brochures. It didn’t matter where they went, Harry said: during their conversation, his and Vincent’s, he’d been promised twenty-four hour protection and the necessary TV link anywhere in the world. Also Vincent would be using an interesting new production technique: Katherine wasn’t to worry, he’d said—she’d hardly know the cameraman was there even.
She watched Harry carefully sorting the brochures into piles of probables, possibles, and hopelesses. She realized it must have been pretty comprehensive, that first brief talk he’d had with Vincent Ferriman. Really quite remarkably comprehensive. Terms suggested, papers signed, money paid, protection promised, even production techniques discussed . . . And then, only an hour later, hardly an hour later, when she had got back from the hospital—“What use is money?” he’d said. And—“The idea is obscene,” he’d said. And—“I told him to get stuffed,” he’d said.
With Vincent’s check for one thousand no doubt crisp in his pocket.
Poor Harry. Poor dear Harry.
It wasn’t this that explained her decision to leave him. This was nothing new, nothing really new. People were what they were. It didn’t alter her love for him. And it certainly made no difference to her sentimental determination that he should remember her finally and fondly for a shared, grand yet tender, (and in retrospect ceremonial) fuck. This was a determination that Ethel Pargeter—in different words, of course—would have understood very well indeed. And Ethel Pargeter’s readers also, moist-eyed, with hot lumps in their throats.
So the previous evening she had held him off, and now—at the right, the new day’s dawning moment—she roused him, stroking his habitual morning hard-on, fondling the few sad hairs on his chest. A wakening for him to remember, for him to remember when she was long ago and far away . . . It would end their relationship, their real, wordless, skin-on-skin relationship, nobly, not with a whimper but a bang.
He lurched onto her. He was a slow waker.
“Fight it back, my honey,” she whispered. “Press down. Remember? Press down with your diaphragm. Fight it back.”
So he woke, and pressed down till he could press down no longer.
It was enough. It freed her of her mind. “Godgodgod,” she cried. And (very briefly) meant it.
Afterward she left him getting his breath back and went to make breakfast. Today was her day for doing-not-brooding. Out of the kitchen window she saw that rain was falling, a fine, unspringlike drizzle. Also it turned out to be one of those occasions—they hadn’t had one in weeks—when the electric appliances in her kitchen had died on her. A small bomb in some generating substation, no doubt, or a civil liberties saboteur on the staff of the central grid. She had no idea what they were after this time, and didn’t care. She just wished the authorities would give them whatever it was, and let ordinary people get on with their lives—and deaths—in peace. Meanwhile she boiled water for tea and cooked scrambled egg on her standby gas cooker that dirtied the bottoms of her pans. Neither the rain nor the inconvenience depressed her: today, Saturday, was her doing-not-brooding day. Brooding could, would, even should, come later.
•
They ate breakfast in bed. Life was one long holiday. They discussed their plans. It was good that Harry had lied to her: it made her own lies less troublesome. Except that it didn’t. Today, however, was her doing-not-brooding day. She sorted through the bundle of brochures.
“Capri?” she said. “If there’s a square inch?”
“I rather thought the Bahamas.”
“They’re one big marina.”
“There’s always Pitcairn.”
“At this time of year it’s full of Germans.”
“You’re being provincial, Kate. Besides, everywhere’s full of Germans.”
“Except Germany. Germany’s full of Americans.”
“I don’t see how it can be. After all—”
“A joke, Harry. Just a joke.”
Harry sniffed, and shifted his legs under the bedclothes, and picked a brochure at random. “How about Tasmania?” he said.
He’d spoiled it. How naive they were to be thinking always of islands. As if an escape, a refuge, existed anywhere. She took Tasmania: Home of the Pacific Grand Prix from him and looked at the pictures. “All right,” she said. “We’ll go there. At least it’s a long way off.”
“Are you sure? I mean, it’s not very—”
“We’ll go there, Harry.”
The decision made, Harry immediately got in a fuss. What about the climate? What about clothes? What about currency? What about travel permits? What about—
“Ring Vincent,” she said. “Tell him to fix it.”
Harry was doubtful. “He’s a very busy man.”
“Like hell he is. As long as I’m alive he’ll be busy doing what I say. That’s what NTV pays him for.”
“You used not to be such a hard person, Kate.”
There were several answers to that one, but she let them all pass. Today was her doing-not-brooding day.
Prodded, Harry rang NTV House. He found Vincent as charming as ever, and helpful, and delighted with the choice of locale. Tasmania was strong on filmic settings; the islanders—as yet unmedia-oriented—would be little trouble; the television facilities were excellent, on account of the annual Grand Prix. His assistant would make all arrangements, and the documentation would be ready for them to pick up when they came to NTV House at four. On the question of suitable clothes, though, he’d prefer Mrs. Mortenhoe to buy her own. Neither he nor his assistant would presume to choose clothes for a beautiful woman. Katherine, standing close to Harry, heard this.
She leaned closer, where Vincent would hear her. “Beautiful Katherine Mortenhoe and her beautiful husband make a beautiful couple doing beautiful things in a beautiful world, while she prepares beautifully to die. It’s all so beautiful . . .”
But she didn’t mind a shopping expedition. She’d made no precise plans for getting away from Harry: a dress shop would be as good a place as any.
They left the flat. She didn’t look back. If she could leave Harry so easily, then of course she could leave these other bits and pieces of her life. Outside in the drizzle the newsstand screens were showing: Record Price to Syndrome Victim + Blast Hits Power Station + NTV Signs Mortenhoe + Riots Chaos Flares in County Town + Ferriman on Is Dying a Dying Art? + She hurried Harry on before he could buy a printout. She’d rather the news of his nest egg in the bank came later, when he needed comforting after the cancellation of his trip to Tasmania.
A reporter picked them up almost immediately, and then two more. She kept walking. Harry, puffing but enjoying himself, gave them an interview on the move. He’d miss all this media chat, she thought, when the NTV exclusive took over at four.
Outside the dress shop, statutorily, they left the reporters, Harry in mid-sentence. Katherine sat him firmly down on a spindly gold chair while she went around gathering armfuls of summery clothes from the racks. Then she kissed him lightly on the forehead and patted his arm good-bye. He looked up, pleased, remembering their morning. She whisked away to one of the trying-on cubicles.
The three mirrors caught her momentarily—Vincent Ferriman’s hot property, Dr. Mason’s terminal case, Peter’s Katie-Mo, her father’s fucking nuisance, Gerald’s armored cruiser, John Peel’s pickup, Harry’s newly hard person, her own . . . her own worst enemy? The phrase, as was the way with clichés, saved her from making any real effort. It even had a certain hideous aptness. She smiled, and watched reflections of reflections of reflections of the smile. Then she broke away—none of them, none of it, lumpy, with elbows, was she—she broke away from the mirrors, dumped the clothes on a chair, and went back out of the cubicle.
She hovered at the back of a tall showcase, then looked cautiously around its end. Harry was no Mr. Mathiesson. He was where she had left him, dutifully, his legs crossed, jiggling his top foot and watching it. He would stay there for a long tune. Half an hour. Longer even. He was patient. And endearingly trying to be smart, legs casually crossed, showing a lot of sock. She evaded an approaching assistant and quietly made her way out of the shop by another entrance. No other good-bye was possible. Or desirable.
She hailed a taxi, climbed in, and asked to be taken to a residential block a few minutes’ walk from the heliport. No doubt Vincent would eventually trace her as far as the heliport, but she saw no reason to make things easy for him. She sat back in the taxi, and relaxed, and watched the people and cars stream by. And was suddenly committed.
Boats burned. Committed. Alone. Literally, metaphorically, alone.
The plan—no, not even the plan, the impossible dream—the impossible dream was now real. Without really noticing it, she had kicked off from the edge of the everyday, kicked off into the dream, kicked off into a world where there was only she. A place where she had only her own word to take for her very existence. If only she could have said good-bye—to Harry, to John Peel, to Gerald, to her father, to Dr. Mason (she’d forgiven him his joke about the dribblers), to Vincent, to somebody—if only she could have said goodbye to somebody, then her going would have seemed less abstract, less self-contained, less of a total cessation. She was alone, and dying, and there was no one to know. No one who did not in some manner regard her as property, to be kept track of and cashed in when the time was right. No one, that is—and she fumbled with the switch on the driver’s intercom, oh God, were her fingers going to fail her now?—no one except Peter.
“Computabook,” she said, getting the switch right at last. “Drive me to Computabook. Then wait.” It wouldn’t take long. “It won’t take long. Will you please do that?”
The delay, any delay, was crazy. This was her only chance to get away. These were her last few moments before the grief-buyers took over. Soon they would be after her. Searching. But she had to say good-bye to somebody, so that there would be somebody who knew.
Computabook was deserted, blank, shut for the weekend. Other people’s lives, of course, still had shape. She suffered a moment’s panic, not knowing Peter’s home address—how could she have worked with him for so long and never inquired, never been interested in, where he lived, and how, and with whom?—but then she remembered phone booths. Phone booths had directories.
The taxi driver took her to the nearest phone booth, and then on. Peter lived, she discovered, in a block very like her own, in a flat very like her own. Only the furnishings were different, sitting uneasily, impertinently, against the familiar walls. It seemed that Peter had been in bed when she rang. This shocked her: in bed, wasting the day, at nearly noon. But he belted his dressing gown and asked her in, and made her unquestioningly welcome.
She followed him into his sitting room, her sitting room messed up with all the wrong chairs and the wrong clock. The view from the window was wrong too. She shouldn’t have come.
A man’s voice called from the bedroom, “Who is it, love?” and Peter went and put his head around the door and there was a short, inaudible conversation. Katherine wandered around the room, touching all the horrible furniture. When Peter returned she came at once to the point. Say it, and then she could go.
“I’m running away. I expect you’ll see a lot about it in the papers. I wanted you to know.” Know was an inadequate word, but it was all she had.
“How can I help?” Peter said.
His question, so gentle, made her cry. She hadn’t expected to cry. She wasn’t a crying person. “I came to say good-bye. That’s all. And to explain. I’ve accepted a lot of money. The papers will—”
“You don’t have to explain, Katie-Mo. You’re your own woman.”
“That’s what I mean. Perhaps I’m not. Perhaps I shouldn’t be.”
“You’re dying. That’s between you and it. Not many things are, but that is.”
It was as if he lived inside her conscience. He said things that nobody else could. And he didn’t ask her where she was going, or what she was going to do.
“You don’t think I’m running away?”
“If you stayed you’d be running away a whole lot more. Staying would be a sort of suicide.”
She nodded. He was confirming what she had had to question.
“So you’ll know I’m all right? When the papers start screaming, you’ll know I’m going on? You’ll know I’m somewhere, and all right?”
“I’d never have doubted it.”
He put his arm around her and comforted her. He was so young, and he didn’t know a plot loop from a denouement phase. Oddly, for Gerald had been as hetero as they came, he reminded her of her first husband. But she and Gerald had both been young then.
“I’m not an armored cruiser,” she said. “I don’t think I ever was.”
He patted her, and moved her gently away. “Come along now. If this goes on much longer”—he pointed at the closed bedroom door—“we’ll be making Somebody jealous.” He found a crumpled handkerchief in his dressing gown pocket and gave it to her for her face. It had moisturizing cream on it, but she didn’t mind.
“Good-bye then.”
“Good-bye, Katie-Mo.”
Going down in the elevator she looked at her watch. The half-hour she had allowed Harry was long expired. If Harry found she was gone, and rang Vincent, then Vincent might put out a general alarm. She wished now that she had chosen somewhere other than the heliport—it swarmed with policemen at the best of times. She gave up any idea of covering her tracks and got the taxi driver to take her straight there. The sooner she did what she had to do and got away out of it, the better. She told him, as an afterthought, that she was hoping to catch the twelve-forty-five to Amsterdam.
For all she knew, there might even be a twelve-forty-five for Amsterdam.
The driver set her down at the main entrance. Beyond the edges of the awning drizzle fell in a steady gray screen. Fumbling in her handbag for the fare money she had never felt more conspicuous. She had run up an enormous bill on the meter and had scarcely enough money. She emptied out her purse down to the very last coin and gave him the lot. The tip turned out to be quite generous—as the last taxi driver in her life he deserved it. She was leaving the money world behind.
He accepted it with little joy. “I hope NTV knows where you’re off to, Mrs. Mortenhoe.”
“Of course.” She smiled at him brightly. Up to then he hadn’t spoken. Perhaps he was a Vincent spy. “I’m not staying. I’m going to choose some bulbs. Pretty daffodils in pots.”
“You won’t like Amsterdam,” he said, signaling to drive off. “It’s full of these Americans.”
She laughed, more than the joke demanded, if it was a joke, and watched him drive away. He wasn’t a spy, she decided, just one of her public jealous of his rights.
She was recognized again just inside the foyer.
“Need any help, Mrs. Mortenhoe?” Two policemen, friendly, before she had time to run, time to be afraid even. She told them the Amsterdam story, which they believed. “Bet it’s raining there too, Mrs. Mortenhoe.” But their radio-phones might at any time betray her. “Well, ma’am, ticket office over there. If you need any help, just say.”
She thanked them calmly and walked, did not run, away in the direction they indicated. She changed direction only when she was sure she was lost in the crowd. There was a notice on the wall of the left luggage office. It told her what she should have known, what she really did know, already: Passengers Withdrawing Luggage Should Place a 50 in the Slot Provided.
She did not have a fifty. Her whole wad of fives was gone. She had rushed into symbolic poverty ten minutes too soon.
Her first crazy impulse was to run out after the taxi driver and demand her money back, her tip that his surliness did not deserve. Then she took herself in hand and wondered instead what she had with her that she could possibly sell—in the environs of the heliport probably nothing, not even her dear old fanny. Well then, if you needed money in a hurry, and the banks were closed for the weekend, and you had nothing to sell . . . well then, you begged or borrowed or stole. Of these three she decided briskly that the last would be the least emotionally demanding.
For a quarter of an hour or so she wandered vainly around the public departments of the heliport, looking for a pocket she could pick or a purse she could snatch. Then she tried banging coffee machines for rejected coins. The situation was rapidly tipping over into farce. In her head she was screaming with laughter. Screaming with screaming.
In the end she did what she had once actually seen another woman do, and been too astounded to intervene. She walked quickly into the nearest shop, took a packet of stockings openly from a display rack and went with it to the busiest counter. Desperate situations called for desperate remedies.
“Excuse me,” she said grandly. “I bought these here about ten minutes ago, and—”
“Not from me, you didn’t.”
The face across from hers was a rat-trap. “No, from one of the other girls. When I got them out into the daylight I saw they were quite the wrong color.”
“Where’s your bill, then?”
“Bill? I suppose it’s still in the bag.”
“Let’s have a see then.”
“Oh dear.” She did her best to sound fluffy. “Should I have kept it?”
“You should.”
There shouldn’t have been a rat-trap. There should have been a nice motherly woman who would pay up without question. That was what there’d been on the other occasion.
“ . . . I’m afraid I put it in one of those bin things. I suppose I could go and dig it out . . . ? ”
“Yerse. I suppose you could.”
The rat-trap was examining Katherine, her clothes, her nice expensive handbag (an engagement present from Harry, the handbag), her face. Her face made the rat-trap tighten, hesitate, then open. “Give ’em here, then.”
The stockings were snatched out of her hand. “Can’t have Mrs. bloody fancy Mortenhoe dirtying her bloody fancy hands in the litter basket, now can we?”
“They were one twenty-eight,” Katherine said, keeping her voice steady. She was a thief. She was planning to cheat Vincent. She was planning to cheat the shop. She could expect humiliation.
“Innit bleeding funny? The more some people got, the more they bleeding want.”
Coins came back across the counter, tossed insultingly. Katherine scrabbled it up and went. Behind her somebody was being told loudly about Mrs. bleeding Mortenhoe who could afford a hundred pairs of bleeding stockings, and anyway who was going to look at her bleeding legs, her with this bleeding nasty disease and all?
Back in the left luggage department Katherine leaned against her locker and counted the hard round coins in her hand. One twenty-eight. Her humiliation had been worth it. Incidental. She had never felt so rich. She retrieved her sleeping bag holdall and still had seventy-eight. Even after the lavatory cubicle slot she still had seventy-three. Enough for a bus into town. She was rich.
Changing in the confined space was awkward. On either side of her women came, and flushed, and went. She’d seen lengthily-shut cubicle doors herself, and heard inexplicable noises, and imagined uncomfortable lesbiana. Now at last she knew what had really been happening. Behind the closed doors women had been taking off their old lives and shrugging themselves awkwardly into the new.
The under-robe fitted fairly well, but the outer one was much too long, so she hitched it up at the waist and let it hang down over the plaited belt. The necklace looked really quite pretty. She wondered if fringe women wore panties and bras. She decided she didn’t care very much either way: they wouldn’t show under the rest of the copious outfit, and she’d feel safer with them on. She found she still had Peter’s face-creamy handkerchief, and used it to wipe off most of her makeup, leaving her face suitably dirty-greasy. She folded her Katherine Mortenhoe clothes and put them in the holdall, together with her handbag and shoes. She’d have liked to be rid of the clothes, and with them all reminders of her old self, but there was no point in telling Vincent’s men that she was now revised, reformed, made over. She’d dump them later, somewhere they wouldn’t be so easily found.
She tried walking in the clogs: two tiny paces forward and two back. The thick socks helped her to keep them on. She thought she’d manage. She slid her arms into the vast survival jacket, put on sunglasses and sou’wester, and was ready.
She was a freak, a shambling grotesque. Opening that cubicle door, facing the world, took more courage than anything else on that courage-demanding day. She was overdone and disgusting. If she wasn’t picked up for being Katherine Mortenhoe in breach of a three hundred thousand pound contract, she’d be picked up for being a danger to public health and morals . . . She reasoned with herself, reminded herself of the Fringe People about the city, weird, self-absorbed transients to be stared at or not stared at depending on how you were brought up, but never on any account to be spoken to. Even the police, seeing them as booby-trapped, liable to go off at any minute, preferred when possible to pass by on the other side.
So Katherine drew a deep breath, opened the cubicle door, picked up her holdall, and walked out. She was free. Free from Harry, free from Vincent, free from Dr. Mason, free from everyone except herself. And thus free, exultantly, to explore that particular bondage.
On her way out across the heliport concourse, clattering still awkwardly on her wooden soles, she sought out the policemen who had been so kind. She walked past them slowly, brazenly. One of them looked steadfastly the other way. His companion shook a playful, appeasing truncheon. It came to her that in them she was seeing her one-time, ordinary self. Both of them, unconsciously, in their own different ways, were warding off the evil eye.
•
When Harry rang to tell Vincent his wife had skipped it I was sitting there, right across from the Ferriman telephone on the Ferriman desk. We’d only just got in from the police station, and I was scarcely gay. Bailing me out had taken a terribly long time and a great number of buff forms in triplicate. Even if I’d been as innocent as a lamb I wouldn’t have felt it, not by the time they’d finished with me. So goddamned civil, every one of them.
Harry was in a state. I could hear every word, even from where I was sitting. Vincent smiled at me, at Harry, and held the receiver well away from his ear, so that I’d feel I belonged.
“ . . . And now she’s disappeared. No luggage or anything. Just disappeared.”
“Taken her handbag?”
“I expect so. Yes—of course she’s taken her handbag.”
“That’s all right then. We don’t have to worry.”
A great one for essentials, Vincent was. A long pause followed, long enough for him to cut and light one of his cigars. A pause during which Harry breathed, audibly screwing himself up.
“I . . . don’t know what you must think of us—of her. I mean, she signed a contract, and now—”
“So did you, Harry. You signed a contract too.”
“I’ve stuck to it. We were planning for Tasmania. I’ve done my part. I wouldn’t be ringing you if—”
“You’re worried about all that money, Harry. Of course you are.” Vincent sounded so very kind and gentle and understanding.
“Not at all. I’m worried about my wife.”
I’d never imagined I would like Harry. Now I was certain I wouldn’t. Vincent, on the other hand, loved him more and more with every moment. The more people failed, the more he loved them. He loved them for confirming his judgment. And he was my boss. I worked for him. I chose to work for him.
“We’ll look after your wife, Harry. You mustn’t worry. And we’ll make sure she sticks to the contract.”
“Need it be the police?”
“Who said anything about the police?”
“Well, she’s broken the law, hasn’t she?”
“I can understand your concern for her, Harry.” His anger against her. “Look, old man, she’s not even in breach of contract until four. And after that it’d take a court order, an injunction, and God knows what else, before we could call in the police. So you don’t have to worry.”
“I’m glad. Thank you, Vincent. Thank you very much.”
Again he breathed. The questions really important to him were no longer askable. Possibly, just possibly, he believed he didn’t want to ask them, believed he hadn’t even thought of them. Vincent tried to knock the first quarter-inch of ash off his cigar but it wouldn’t come away. He frowned at it.
“Harry? You still there?”
“I—” Of course he was still there.
“It was good of you to call, Harry. Keep this between ourselves, shall we? Just till I’ve thought what to do?”
“Of course. But how will you—?”
“Good man. Leave the whole thing to me, then. And Harry? You mustn’t worry, Harry. There’s absolutely nothing to worry about.”
He rang off. Even if Harry hadn’t been worried before, he certainly would be now. Vincent leaned back in his chair and stared contentedly at the ceiling. Katherine Mortenhoe had skipped it, had placed herself outside the law. She should have known better. Men like Vincent, corporations like NTV, didn’t cheat all that easy.
“Thanks to those idiotic marchers,” Vincent said, “she never met you. You can go to her as a stranger. As a friend . . . It’s the opportunity of your professional career.”
“You mean, not tell her?”
“Not for the first few days. She’ll find out for herself then. If she doesn’t know we’re on to her she’ll be much more open.”
“You must be joking.”
“She needn’t have signed.” “I don’t believe it.” “She took the money. Breach of contract. I’ve talked to legal. We’d be perfectly justified.”
I thought about it. “And when she does find out? Where does that leave me?”
“You’re a pro, Roddie. You’ll think of something. Play it by ear. You wanted to break it to her gently . . . She’s in a church refuge at the moment. If we simply send the heavies to reel her in she’ll be cheesed off anyway.”
I liked that. Cheesed off . . . how un-Vincent of him. She’d be destroyed. In either case, when we catch up with her she’ll be utterly destroyed. Oh Katherine, Katherine, why are some people’s lives so fucking hopeless?
“Perhaps I can help her.”
“Of course you can.”
A church refuge? I wondered, just for a second, how he knew.
“I can help her through these first few days. She’ll be so alone. You said it. I can break it to her gently.”
“Nobody better.”
“Time. That’s what she needs. I can talk to her. I can lead her up to it in stages.”
Did I believe that? Did I really believe that?
We talked some more. Vincent was patience itself, newsman, therapist, friend, now that he knew he’d hooked me.
•
When I eventually arrived at the church on Coronation Square it was late in the day, and I was glad of my shabby anorak against the damp, gray evening. The anorak and duffle bag were mine, and the two old gardening sweaters from my days with Tracey, but the agitator’s jeans had been Vincent’s idea. An assistant had borrowed them from Wardrobe. They had them in all sizes and colors and stages of decay, and they’d made me sign for them in their little book.
I checked in at the church vestry—the vicar just waved me through and made a mark on a board—and followed arrows down an aisle to the main dormitory transept. If I fitted into any pigeonhole, it was that of a transient. The lights were already lit, yellow bulbs under tin shades on the end of long cords—all-nighters, Vincent’s research girl had told me, to discourage petty theft—and I saw Katherine Mortenhoe almost at once. I’d come equipped with camping mini-lantern and a pack of chargeable batteries, but I wasn’t going to need them.
Katherine was wearing big sunglasses, sitting on her bunk, wrapped in some sort of gypsy clothes, isolated from the listless grumbling of the others by her obvious distress. As far as they were concerned, she might not have been there at all. This was no fringie commune—if you were in trouble here nobody knew you. Their troubles were their own. They fed them, and were fed by them. Otherwise you could be damn sure they wouldn’t be here. It was well known that Vicar Pemberton took in those whom none of the government agencies would have.
How Vincent had found her here so quickly I’d no idea, but it didn’t surprise me. He had his sources. Everybody knew that.
Most of the Pemberton people here were men, but there were a few other women, and not even they took any notice of Katherine Mortenhoe. They sat bundled in layers of greatcoats, tying and untying the strings around their various paper parcels, busily not seeing Katherine Mortenhoe. Not seeing her trouble.
D.T.s, you’d have said. Meths, surgical spirit, oven cleaner . . . you name it, she’d been drinking it. She had the worst shakes anybody in that noble company of shakers had probably ever seen. So they kept away. Lived and let live. Died and let die.
I looked at her. Vincent had warned me about her disguise. It was pretty good. And so sad. All that ingenuity, all that courage, all that determination, after the first show was screened it would all be wasted. She’d be The Woman Who Tried To Cheat NTV. She already was, but only a few of us knew it.
Vincent had said we could give her till then. Break it to her gently. After that we could use it. Be friendly. Make it a game. I’d be his point man. Play it by ear. Nobody could do it better, he said. I’d had my doubts. Telling her at once would get the whole thing off on the right foot. It was my decision, Vincent said. Play it by ear.
Looking at her now, her disguise was all she’d got. She was tired and sick and frightened and lonely. She’d feel better in the morning. I’d tell her in the morning.
I picked a bunk four away from hers, sat down, took off my boots. If I was angry with her, it was for making things so easy for Vincent. I didn’t know how, but his people had found her in a matter of hours. If I was angry with myself, it was for allowing Vincent to play me so neatly. Nothing pushy. He’d let me talk him into it. Now I was stuck with the guilt bit and I’d do far better for all concerned if I simply got on with the job. I was a reporter. And there was always the chance that I might actually be able to help her. I clung to that.
At least she wasn’t flailing and wailing. Her shakes were most discreet. I watched her in long shot. Nobody’d be surprised if I went over and spoke to her. Though I wasn’t dressed like her, wasn’t quite a fringie, we were obviously neither of us hard-core Pemberton property. Transients, more like, on the way from somewhere to somewhere. So nobody’d be surprised if we sort of teamed up . . . First though, I needed some establishing shots. Something for the opening sequence. If I chose my angles she wouldn’t have to look too miserable. Just caught in one of Dr. Mason’s rigors, and waiting for it to go away. I panned around the dormitory. Ex-army two-tier bunks, bentwood chairs, worn paving stones, people. People shambling in, people sitting around, people coughing and scratching and groaning. Such wonderful people. Get behind me, Hogarth. I was glad it wasn’t Harry Clegg’s Tasmania. Beside this sort of social realism Tasmania would have been mere travelogue. The nave of the church was given over to eating and cooking arrangements. A sign pointed the way to Ablutions through a door behind the pulpit. While beyond the screen the sanctuary was dark and silent, a single red flame burning, a tiny spark of mystery in this most unmysterious of worlds . . .
A tiny spark of mystery—it was a good phrase, one I’d like to get back to Vincent. I made a note to dub it in later. I could hardly sit there on my bunk in the crowded dormitory and talk handsome tellyese to nobody in particular. The ablutions, later on, would give me the privacy I needed.
Hot air blasted up through grilles in the floor, making the place smell of sweat and cheap dinners and scorched dust. High above us the medieval vaulting had been painted and richly gilded in some last-stand moment of magnificence, but it was at the grilles that we visitors warmed our hands and hearts. And we kept our voices low, knowing that the echo acoustic would take them up and expose them to Vicar Pemberton’s god . . .
I wasn’t watching Katherine Mortenhoe at the precise moment when she fell off her bunk, but the small noise she made, and the chain reaction of short-lived silence that followed it, immediately attracted my attention. Anyway, panning back to the bed and suddenly finding it empty was technically more interesting. I got up and went in my stockinged feet over to the floor where she now lay. Her rigor appeared to have eased. Evidently she was on to Day Two in Dr. Mason’s guided symptoms tour.
People were watching me. And listening. “We all go to hell in our own ways,” I said. “But I think mine’s better.”
They were my first words to her ever. If I was playing a game, even if only until tomorrow, I must play it properly. I was a transient and she was a middle-aged woman, dirty, indescribably dressed, paralytic, dishonest, lying on the scrubbed paving of a down-and-out’s church dormitory. She was lying, I saw, on the memorial stone to one Suzann Pierce, beloved wife of Samuel Pierce, mother of Jonathan, Mary, Cathcart, Borden, and Sumner, born 1793, died 1867. Seventy-four years, a husband and five children. Lucky Suzann Pierce. I stooped, and lifted Katherine Mortenhoe off the stone, and put her back on the bed.
“I’ve had it before,” she said. “It passes.”
“I hope you’re right.” It occurred to me that if she was aiming to pass as a wino she ought to smell of the stuff. “What are you using?” I said. “Horse? Or just bennies?”
She stared at me. Clearly the need for an acceptable story hadn’t entered her head. “Something of the sort,” she said finally.
I sat down on the bed. It creaked unpleasantly beneath our combined weights. On the pillow lay her handbag, the invaluable handbag. The old joke was true. Even in extremis a woman and her handbag would never be parted. Hers hardly fitted with her present outfit, but nothing much in that fitted with anything else anyway.
“Why not let me take off those shades?” I said.
“Just leave me.”
“Please yourself.” The viewers needed a proper look but I reckoned it could wait. “Where you from?”
She just stared.
“Where you going?”
If there was a rule among our sort that these things weren’t asked, she didn’t know it. “Out of town,” she said.
“So am I.”
“Not in my direction.”
“The way you look you could do with company.”
“No.”
I waited, but nothing else was coming so I got up and went back to my own bunk. This was her show. If she wasn’t ready, she wasn’t ready. Tomorrow was another day. Instead I tried, for local color, to get into conversation with the man on the bunk overhead. “Not a bad old place,” I offered in his general direction.
After a pause I offered it again. One idea at a time, not to strain him. He leaned down over the edge of his mattress.
“A bloody fine lot you know about it. Greenhorn.”
So it showed. “Never too late to learn,” I said.
“Never said a truer word, mate.”
“So teach me.”
He hesitated, then surprisingly produced my boots. “Lesson number one. Yer boots is yer best friend. Never let yer mince pies off of them.”
“Thank you very much.” I reached up for them.
“Hoi, hoi . . . Thank you very much, he says.” He dangled my boots higher. “These boots is going to cost yer.”
“How much?”
“A five.”
“Haven’t got it.”
“Haven’t got it?”
“You heard me.”
I had the rest of the night to spend in that dormitory. If I admitted to money I was sunk. I could have snatched the boots and pounded the old wreck to a pulp. Except that by now we had gathered an audience, and I doubted if they’d love me for it.
“Haven’t got it?”
“Would I be in this dump if I had that sort of money?”
“Dump, he says. Not a bad old place, he says. Ought to make his bleeding mind up, I say.”
“A five is all I’ve got. And that’s tomorrow’s dinner.”
“Five? Do me a favor.”
Against all common sense I was losing my temper. “Look, you’re an old man. I—”
“And you—” He leaned over farther, showing me the rusty blade of a surgical scalpel. “And you, sonny, are a flaming nig-nog.” There was laughter. He dropped the boots into my lap. “Go on,” he said, “have the flaming things. They was too big anyway. Thing is, you might of been a spy from the Benefit. Get up to all sorts, they do.”
I put the boots on. They were missing their laces but the lesson was cheap at the price. I punched the bulging mattress above my head. Not too hard. My mentor was delighted.
“You watch it, mate. Just you watch it.” He threw down the laces. “Lesson number two—never take the bottom bunk. Where’ll you be when I pisses me pit come morning?”
“Same place as you, friend. Up shit creek without a paddle.”
There was more laughter. But the repartee wasn’t mine (I was cautious that evening), it was Katherine Mortenhoe’s. Seemingly her paralysis went as quickly as it came. She was standing, leaning on the bunk support, her face inches away from the gent’s upstairs. He glared back.
“Fuck me,” he said, “I do believe it’s a woman.”
“I wouldn’t fuck you, friend, not if the future of the human race depended on it.”
“Think I’d trust my cock to your pox-shot old fanny?”
It was a new insight into the continuous, the only true Katherine Mortenhoe. She’d been around. She was, in this, her father’s daughter. Though why she had come to my assistance I couldn’t imagine . . . Anyway, I’d kept her in picture—Vincent could buzz out any of the words he didn’t like. I saw now that she had no more left. She had come out that day with only just so much ammunition, and a shield only just so thick.
I stood up, and led her away, back to her bed-space. Jeers followed us. But the old man could be allowed his victory. They could all be allowed their victory. Mine was an entrance into the only true Katherine Mortenhoe. And hers . . . well, I didn’t suppose she had one.
•
She’d thought him very kind, and—in this order—sensitive, intelligent, and not bad looking. The beard did not hide his fine bone structure. He had a strange accent, not quite American, but pleasant all the same. And she’d sent him away because there was no room in what was left of her life for people, no, not even for men who were kind and sensitive and intelligent and not bad looking. And young. She’d added that out of honesty, as she lay on her back waiting for the paralysis to go away. Then a further honesty corrected her again, and she found room on the bed beside her and rescued him, and he rescued her too. She was forty-four, and dressed like a freak, and dying, and her new freedom meant she could make friends of whomever she chose. Could, in fact, make friends.
He said his name was Roddie. She told him her name was Sarah—the American stepmother’s name had been Sarah. Surnames among their sort were obviously never used. Neither was the past. As for the future, who knew? He admired her clothes, calling them klutzy, but without the scorn of the young woman in the container depot. She wished she knew more of the mores of the people she had joined. His group wasn’t quite her group—perhaps under different circumstances, with his beat-up anorak but really quite respectable jeans and sweater, they would have been sworn enemies. She was glad he accepted her. He was young and strong and confident, all the things she wasn’t. Tomorrow frightened her. He’d said he was leaving town. If he’d still have her, she’d tag along, just till they were out of Vincent’s watchful city. What would happen then she’d no idea.
•
I’d given her my actual, baptized name without thinking. Luckily my beard was new, post implant, not the old TV me at all, and the name rang no TV bells for her either. Although friends called me Roddie, my professional name, then as now, was Jack. Jack Patterson. The Patterson I’d been born with but Roddie had sounded lightweight. Rod had other, possibly unappealing meanings, and Roderic Patterson was too much of a mouthful, so I’d settled on Jack. It was manly. To the point. No-nonsense. My father had been a Jack.
In any case, for as long as this game lasted there’d be so many lies between Katherine and me—it was good that something would be true.
Game? Game? I’d caught myself talking Vincent talk. Shame on me. This was someone living, someone dying.
•
At lights-out a single lamp was left burning yellowly high up under the vaulting. For late-comers, the vicar said, and she was grateful for it. Her day of doing-not-brooding was nearly over. She knew she would not sleep for a long time and she feared the darkness. In darkness brooding would be all that was left.
She lay and stared at the sagging mesh of the bunk above. She thought of the woman lying on it. Would she piss her pit, this woman for whom she should have had some fellow feeling but who was blankets tied with string, old beyond guessing, with poor swollen hands and a way of drinking her tea as if it were in that moment everything? Katherine could not begin to imagine the connections that made her move and stop moving, eat and stop eating.
She thought instead of Vicar Pemberton, made real in the walls about her. His hostel had been the nearest in the Yellow Pages, an obvious staging point. He had let her in without question, had accepted her just as he had accepted her unhappiness, that other woman’s unhappiness, over the telephone. Perhaps indeed he needed worries not his own. Though now that she had seen him, awkward, forcing himself, unprotected by the distancing device of the telephone, she thought not. He was driven by a larger need. In his vestry, above his table, a card: Come to me all ye that are heavily laden. At some time he had looked for such a person, such a place, and had found it. Now he was working to answer its demands.
She understood his connections very well. And felt happy for him. And slept.
Her very early morning rigor was becoming something of a habit. She woke, saw night and was irritated. After breakfast she had a long way to go, and she needed every bit of sleep she could get. She found she was sweating also. That was new. But no incontinence yet. Not hers nor, she sniffed, apparently from above. She glanced along the beds and was relieved to see that last night’s Roddie also was sleepless, sitting propped up against the wall behind his bed. Then suddenly her eyes seemed to diverge, and there were two of him, and then a steady movement of the two of him from left to right that she couldn’t check. Dr. Mason’s words rang in her ears: rigor, paralysis, sweating, coordination loss, double vision, incontinence, hallucination, progressive autonomic breakdown bringing on . . . Rather that than Lord of Upper Egypt.
She closed her eyes, hoping that the incontinence would at least hold off until she was out of the hostel.
Then Rod was sitting on the bed beside her. She wondered why. “Did I make a noise?” she said.
“Not a sound. But I don’t sleep much. I saw you were awake, so—”
“It’s not drugs.” She wanted him to know that. “Just a thing I’ve got. A . . . sort of malaria.” Malaria was an Aimee Paladine disease. It was tidy: you worked in romantic India and lay and shook, and then got bravely better.
“Don’t talk,” he said. “You’ll wake up the others.”
She got her hand out from under the bedclothes and reached for his. With her eyes shut it was easier, less of an admission. After a tiny hesitation he let her take his hand. She didn’t mind the hesitation—she was hardly appetizing—but she was glad he overcame it.
She held his hand for a long time. A picture of Harry came into her head, of his hand in hers as she sat beside him on a bed and he slept. Situations recurred, permutated, expressed endlessly the same few pathetic human needs. She wondered, without guilt, what hand if any Harry would soon be holding. And, tired out, with the figure three hundred thousand circling in her dreams, slept again.
In fact the hand Harry Clegg was holding had cost him rather less. It was stout and motherly, and he had sought it in resentment. Resentment that Katherine could make him the husband of a liar and a cheat, could make him ridiculous before a crowd of shop-women and then unworthy before the all-seeing Vincent. He had sought out a pair of breasts not hers, and legs not hers between which he could exercise the skill that had been her special delight. When the skill had failed him he had been folded in such care and professional tenderness that his purpose had faded, and he had sighed, and had found in the dark a hand, stout and motherly, that asked nothing he could not afford, and gave him, in the dark, everything that he needed.