It had been a difficult morning, spilling over to early afternoon. There had not been many clients but they were dispersed over a relatively wide area. He should write Soviet-era spy-thrillers, Gerald thought. Servicing dead-letter drops. Running his joes. Before technology made them all irrelevant.
There had been an unforeseen glitch when he espied the Hampstead Heath Constabulary exercising fearsome dogs with sleuth-like nostrils that quivered for any whiff of illicit substances. He had been obliged to undertake a time-consuming diversion along the Ponds. Last thing he needed: some huge bloodhound leaping onto him, trembling with the scent of contraband.
“Mind if we look in the rucksack, sir?”
The End. Of everything. Marriage, career, fatherhood, family, freedom. And for what? The question was always the same. The clients were small-time, social users, predictable. The cash flow was modest. Routinely, he plowed his potential profits back to ease the strain on the family budget that would soon become apparent if he financed his consumption on the open market. Locked into the cycle of what was beginning to look ominously like what they called a habit, the only escape was to break his dependency, jettison his secret cell phone, take his cold turkey on the chin and risk the retribution of those further up the deadly chain. Even then, if he finally wrote the Big One that propelled him onto the bestseller lists, he would live in constant fear of being exposed by his erstwhile associates. As a user, you could flaunt addiction as testimony to the agony and suffering of the tortured, creative soul. Pushers generally got a worse press. It was at moments like that—when the inner illumination of his plight shone most brightly—that he most needed a quick snort to face the enormity of his predicament. All his working life he had been uneasy about this part of his portfolio. You could pretend it was harmless, but it wasn’t. He had watched enough documentaries to understand the violence and bloodshed compressed into every grain of narcotics. Maybe his clientele could handle what he sold them. But how many lives got ruined by it? How close was he to ruining his own?
He pounded on, along footpaths and sidewalks, halting briefly for the exchange of anonymous cash for diluted product, cut with cheaper powder, handed over at prearranged locations. The narrow path near the big church. The spot away from the security cameras outside the library. The alley next to the kebab shop. Behind the overflowing garbage skips. A place that reeked of urine and defeat.
On his pay-as-you-go phone, he called himself Dougie.
“Cheers, Dougie. Same time next week?”
“Cheers, mate. Sure. The usual?”
In the end, he was so exhausted and short of time that he risked taking the bus home, the class-A drugs in his rucksack replaced by wodges of cash. Laughable, really. Would you see Walter White or Pablo Escobar standing in line with their Oyster cards to swipe across the electronic reader next to the driver’s cabin?
“Novelist Drug Dealer Went by Bus.”
“The Peddler on Public Transport.”
He lived in fear of ridicule as much as arrest.
Once home, he peeled off his sweaty running gear and showered. On his rounds he took nothing that would definitely identify him—no credit card or legit cell phone or driver’s license or utility bill. It was the closest he could get to anonymity in case the heavy hand of the law descended on his muscled, well-toned shoulders. He gathered together the bits and bobs of his existence in the parallel world inhabited by his wife and daughters and lovers.
He clambered into the Range Rover.
The game was in play. Faites vos jeux. Rien ne va plus. His world was spinning on the wheel of fortune, and no one’s luck lasted forever.
After this he would turn over a new leaf. And it wouldn’t be a coca leaf, either. He would clean up his act, revive monogamy, write. One last hurrah and then the straight and narrow.
He thought briefly of ignoring Mathilde de Villeneuve’s demand for chauffeuring and other services. Then he recalled the stories after her husband’s fall from grace—and the likely consequences of disobedience. Acid on the Range Rover. Mathilde ringing his doorbell. Confrontation. Doom.
He noticed a missed call from Dolores on his smartphone, but there was nothing much he could do about it. By now she would be aboard a long-haul flight from Frankfurt to Detroit. Business class. Out of range. Out of contact. Not quite out of mind.
Hot towel, madam? Champagne?
He knew this because her schedule was held in place by magnets on the door of the fridge so that her family could follow her progress through five-star hotels and overnight flights in the flatbed sharp end of airplanes, across continents and oceans, hither and thither, never ceasing, wrapping the planet in the latticework of her successful, executive lifestyle. Transparency, she called it. But sometimes the itineraries looked more like bragging. Or taunts. Look how busy and successful Mummy is, they seemed to say, while Daddy spoons out the spag bol. One day, he thought, I will post my own schedule on the fridge door, from drug den to boudoir. And then we’ll see how transparent she liked it to be: 0830 school run; 0930 screw neighbor; 1030 score drugs; 1130 seduce stranger; 1420 pick up lover (Terminal 5); 1630 pick up daughters. No. Scrub that.
There had been a time, it is true, that idle thought of his own counter-schedule with its stations of self-indulgence and danger gave him some vengeful pleasure, but the more he contemplated the bookends of his daily routine, the more he came to think that it fell far short of what he had promised himself and Dolores. Where was the mention of an interview on Radio 4 with Mariella Frostrup or James Naughtie—those literary gatekeepers; an invite to the big festival in Hay-on-Wye; the Booker Prize short list; a movie deal with Columbia Pictures; a call from his agent to announce the outcome of the auction of his latest rights?
He was not even invited to fill in the gaps between the gigs down the road in Kentish Town anymore.
Dolores’s distant presence, incommunicado at 35,000 feet, would offer some frail protection for his hectic trip to the arrivals gate at Heathrow. At least he would not be required to invent some fiction to cover his tracks—the only kind of fiction he seemed to get round to these days.
X.
Before he grabbed the Range Rover keys to embark on his errand, he had decided to dip into his stash. Then, in one more wild attempt to be rid of X, he had loosened the tape holding the cat flap shut so that, were she to escape, it would seem to be a result of her own initiative. But, as he drove away, buzzing with his product, he could not be sure that he had also undertaken the necessary housekeeping to clear away the evidence. Like people who board their vacation flights fretting about whether they had left the hob alight, or the lights still burning in a tell-tale invitation to would-be burglars.
Had he left the wrapper in full view on the kitchen work surface where he had indulged behind drawn blinds? Had he even sealed it properly? The questions taunted him, like secrets whispered on the outermost limits of hearing. It would not do for his daughters to return to the family apartment before he had obliterated the traces of misbehavior. There was no one he could call for help. The only living being at home was that damned cat.
If the creature was still there at all.
If it had not already sallied forth into the hostile, perilous world from which X had always been sheltered: the trucks and buses rumbling and grinding past his door; the minicabs and people-movers, whispering Uber hybrids and construction company trucks; white vans and plump bankers’ sleek Porsches; howling ambulances and wailing, blues-and-twos police cars; SUVs laden with brats; black cabs with drivers distracted by their own sagas of celebrities they had had in the back and their latest mini-cruise-break to the Med. It was not, he knew, the best of plans. Especially for the final act. If it went badly, his daughters might well arrive home to the trauma-inducing sight of terminal feline smears on the road outside the apartment, red in jaw and paw.
X would be ex.
If it went badly it would be curtains. No encores. No standing ovations. No delirious reviews. No invites to Hay-on-Wye or the Booker.
The timing would be critical. But not impossible.