5 October
“So you’d like me to dish all the dirt on Scott, is that what we’re saying here?”
Ray Palmer sparks a cigarette and winks, actually winks. He and I have settled around a heavy stone table in the front beer garden of the Amsterdam Hotel. A short walk from the Van Spencer, this place looks out over the seafront. A huge beer-branded parasol keeps steady rain off us, while an overhead heater fends off the cold.
I’m still recovering from the shock of seeing “Scott” at that front door.
When I laid eyes on Ray’s face, I physically recoiled, because the resemblance is un-fucking-canny. He has the same eyes as Scott, which annoyingly means I find myself gazing into them for a little too long. His accent might be more harshly East London than Scott’s, but the voice itself is the same, which leaves me with the uneasy sense that I really am talking to my ex. What if Scott went mad for a few days, cut his hair off, joined a cult alongside Gwyneth Cooper…
… Joining The Death Grip Cult…
… then got brainwashed into thinking he was his own twin? Or what if he’s consciously pretending to be his brother? Could this be the next step of his plan to terrorise and humiliate me?
Pah, sheer paranoia. What did I ever do to Scott to deserve such punishment? And besides, it would be ludicrously brazen of Scott to masquerade as his own twin.
Would it be any more brazen than the combined weight of the lies he already told you? How do you know that Scott Palmer isn’t a dangerous sociopath – a real wild one?
If so, then he’s doing a very convincing job of impersonating his twin. Besides the shaven head, Ray carries himself so differently. His grey suit, snazzy-collared red shirt and pointy shoes all create the look of a Las Vegas pimp, or a poker player fallen on hard times. And whereas Scott’s default facial position was an open smile, Ray’s natural manner feels far less trusting. From the second we met, he’s been shrewdly looking me over, as if trying to work out what makes me tick… while blatantly glancing at my chest.
Back at those front doors, there had been awkward introductions. Interestingly, whereas Maureen had clearly never heard of me, Ray actually said, Oh, Kate! I’ve heard so much about you. This could so easily be drunken bullshit, of course. His tell-tale glazed eyes and slurred words belong to a wino straight out of a Laurel and Hardy film.
When Ray inflicted a big, overly familiar hug upon me outside the Van Spencer, I’d made a snap decision to keep my story consistent with the one I told his mum. That story was basically the truth, after all, apart from having omitted the little matter of Scott leaving me.
What I must do here is capitalise on Ray’s inebriation and drill him for info. While taking care not to say too much, I’ve switched on whatever charm I might have, and used my last reserves of energy to make my eyes all keen and bright and sociable. Ray is enjoying the attention and especially the large Jim Beam on the rocks I’ve bought him.
He’s already surrounded by so much cigarette smoke, it looks like he’s on fire. “So how did you guys meet?”
I’m supposed to be asking the questions here. Pretty sure I can turn this one around with only one cunning word. “Guess.”
Ray ponders the challenge. “Okay… let me see… you were in a bar and he sleazed up to you with one of his dodgy chat-up lines? Something like, Am I dead? Because you look like an angel?”
The words Am I dead? echo in my head, followed by the words You Will Die. Shaking them off, I try to summon a convincing image of Scott as a cheesy bar-butterfly. Never saw him that way. When he approached me, after Tomm’s poem, it had felt so natural. He’d seemed almost shy.
“Nope,” I say. “He can be pretty cheesy though, right?”
Ray sniggers. “He learnt all them lines off a Kindle pick-up manual! But I ain’t saying no more. Don’t wanna get myself in trouble.”
I store the words pick-up manual for later use, glug on my G&T, then snap back into focus. “Scott and I actually met at a digital detox retreat.”
The wind puffs Ray’s cigarette out. “What the bloody hell’s one of them when it’s up and dressed?”
I can’t be bothered to explain. “So, has he mentioned me much?”
He tries to relight the cigarette, without success. “Are you kidding? The legendary Kate Collins?”
Jesus. Scott not only told someone about me but told them my surname? This comes as a genuine surprise. “Legendary, eh?”
Ray cups his hands around his smoke and finally fires it back up. “He definitely made you sound legendary when we met for a drink. This was a few months back. The afternoon of our fortieth birthday, in fact. I know you must be shocked to hear I’m forty, but what can I say?”
True age alert! So, Scott hit the big 4-0 this summer. Could this fact have any bearing on his behaviour? People do often lose the plot when they reach a round number. Putting on a pitch-perfect display of casual forgetfulness, I say, “Oh yeah? God, when’s his birthday again?”
“Naughty naughty,” says Ray, waggling a finger at me. “Forgetting your fella’s birthday? It’s May the fourth. Scott told me it’s easy to remember, cuz of all that geeky Star Wars bollocks. ‘May the fourth be with you’, or something.”
Ray must be wrong about Scott having mentioned me back then, because I didn’t even meet him in deepest darkest Wales until the first day of June. Ray is, after all, quite tipsy.
When I tune back into the conversation, he’s saying, “… have to admit, he told me quite a few things that day that he probably came to regret. Drunk as fuck, he was, all confessional like I was some kind of priest. Ooh! Do pardon my language. I really shouldn’t have said ‘priest’.”
He laughs heartily at his own gag, and I chuckle along to keep him on side. “So what was he saying about me that day?”
Ray taps the side of his nose, cartoon confidential. “Now that would be telling. You’d have to buy me a drink.”
“Er… I already did?”
Ray considers his Jim Beam. “Oh yeah. But I probably already said too much.”
“Are you sure it was me he mentioned that day?”
“After a few shandies, he couldn’t stop saying your name. Evangelical, he was! Kate Collins, Kate Collins, Kate Collins. Insisted you were gonna sa—’
Forcibly cutting himself off, Ray mimes zipping his mouth shut. Sabotaging my own casual façade, I lean forward, urgent. Damn this drunkenness, robbing me of subtlety. “He insisted I was gonna… what?”
Ray’s laugh wafts smoke phantoms my way. “Sorry, Kate. Me and Scotty ain’t been seeing eye to eye this summer. Don’t wanna make things worse by getting indiscreet.”
“Ah c’mon… you and me, we’re family now. There should be no secrets here. Chances are, this is probably something Scott’s told me himself anyway.”
Ray’s zip-mouth mime proves even more irritating the second time around – especially now that he accessorises it by placing the tip of one little-finger against his mouth like Dr Evil, which nobody’s done for at least a decade. His cackle deteriorates into a gruesome cough.
“Can I buy you another Jim Beam?” I say, willing to try anything now. Well, almost anything. “I’d like to hear what’s up between you and Scott. Perhaps I can help?”
Ray’s already checking his flashy wrist-watch. Alarmed by what he sees, he drains his glass. “Sorry, Kate Collins. I’ve got somewhere to be.”
His eyes flit boob-wards once again as he says, “I don’t mind saying, my brother’s really punching above his weight. Just don’t tell him I said nothing about nothing.”
I can barely disguise my exasperation. “What did you even tell me?”
Ray says, “Don’t be a stranger, sweetheart,” then swaggers back out onto Marine Parade, as I blurt out how we should swap numbers. Either he ignores me, or the wind scoops up my words to sweep them out over the foaming mayhem of the sea.