Damascus (18 page)

Mr Mitsui's arm hurt where Henry had punched him. With the remote control he flipped on the television, and a text screen announced the next feature on the hotel's movie channel. 12:30 The Kitchen (1993 b/w)
A cook tells his fellow workers to dream of a better life
. He flipped it off again and focused on his dull reflection in the blackening screen, remembering how Henry's birth had changed everything. It had been an accident, a surprise, an Act of God. And if only they'd been better prepared, it could all have been so different. Mr Mitsui tried to identify the one single moment when everything had gone wrong. He flipped on the television and flipped it off again. Which present was it, or which kindness or which particular tolerance that had made the difference between love and spoiling? At which exact point did it become inevitable that one day enough home-made poison would be found in Henry's Tokyo flat to incapacitate most of the city's self-defence force? It had been a poison called ricin, so Dr Osawa said, which Henry claimed to have extracted from castor-oil seeds. A small amount of it was later found inside a Jaffa cake intended for his mother's regular afternoon teatime. But nobody had actually been hurt, and it was Henry himself who'd warned them about the Jaffa cake. How far then could he be said to be dangerous?

Dr Osawa had probably overestimated the importance of certain diagrams discovered at the same time in Henry's bedroom, filed neatly in coloured folders. They represented a series of ingenious machines and ideas for committing murder in sealed rooms, including a gun mechanism concealed in a telephone receiver and a poison gas which made its victims strangle themselves with their own hands. There was a system for pulling a pistol trigger using a length of string and the expansion of water as it froze. There was a long-case clock with a chime so hideous it rewarded any attempt to silence it by releasing a slashing stomach-high blade. Another pistol remained hidden in a piano until it was triggered by the opening chords of Rachmaninov's Prelude in C Sharp, and there were several intriguing variations on the theme of the untraceable dagger or bullet sculpted from ice. From a design point of view, Mr Mitsui had been impressed. From a neurological point of view, Dr Osawa suggested an immediate change of environment.

Whenever Mr Mitsui tried to see his son's life as a story with formative moments, he always came back to his own marriage, and Henry's mother. Everyone had warned him not to marry her. They all said she was mad, but being in love with her made it seem less important to actually understand her. Instead, to show his love, he tried to please her. After the accident of Henry's birth he therefore agreed, for example, that Henry should be called Henry after her father and her grandfather and so on. Her great-great-grandfather had been properly British, but the truth was (and this came out when he later tried to please her with an expensive genealogical search) that he'd been transported to Australia for robbery on the highways, and for shooting a woman in the face.

Maybe even this was important, and the single determining factor in Henry's inability to adapt to the world. Like any spoilt child, he expected the world to adapt to him. It was also from his mother that he'd inherited the Western habit of investing hope in sudden changes, or quantum leaps forward, or polar reversals. He wanted to take a chance and be lucky, all because his mother used to gather him up in her arms and tell him he could be anything he wanted to be. He could be a film star or an astronaut or a concert pianist or a British gentleman, as if the simple act of listing the options made each one of them possible. Then they always had to be buying things for him, and doing things, because whatever they gave him next could be the one thing to influence him forever. They bought him a horse called Benjamin. Then to interest him in horses they took him to the Melbourne Cup, where Henry spent the whole day counting seagulls. There followed a trip to Europe, to see Seija Osawa (no relation to the neurologist) conduct
The Miraculous Mandarin
with the Vienna Philharmonic. They flew him to Rome and Berlin to hear Bach and Messiaen and Schubert. They took holidays into the present tense to witness unique historical events like Dinkins vs Guiliani in New York, or Yuko Sato against Nancy Kerrigan in Norway. Each event, history as it happened, should have been a kind of enlightenment which changed Henry for the better, even if all he obviously learnt was the dazzling smile which he sometimes used to say thank you, and always to say sorry.

It wasn't until Mr Mitsui was first posted abroad that the real strangeness began. The previous low-point had been in Jerusalem, where for several months Henry had insisted on dressing up as an Israeli, just to attract his mother's attention. He only stopped when he fell in love with the niece of the editor of the Arabic daily
an-Nahar
. It was perhaps then that he'd adopted the idea that women existed to save him, and like most boys his age he gave himself several chances at redemption. In Islamabad it was the daughter of the American ambassador, and back in Japan he was briefly engaged to a very beautiful lieutenant in the Asaka self-defence force. On parade her mouth slanted down at the corners, always, as if it was a prescribed military expression, like attention. But something had happened and she'd broken it off, although it was unlikely Henry had ever actually hurt her.

Maybe this time, in London, it would be different and the moment to turn him round. He could have been lucky. He may really have been blessed by the miracle of true love, which would excuse Mr Mitsui the strain of having to find the courage to say no, he'd been wrong all along, and his only son couldn't have everything he wanted.

Mr Mitsui slowly climbed off the bed, nursing his injured arm. He would phone the Distance Learning School. He would ask them where in London he might hope to find his errant and misguided son.

It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, in Lancing or Great Wakering or Gretna or Ascot, in Toller Porcorum or Merthyr or Richmond or Derby, Hazel Burns is eighteen years old and these are the best days of her life. Her father has given her an allowance and told her so. He has also bought her a car, a small Ford or Vauxhall or Peugeot, so that she can come home whenever she needs a break from her first year, first term, at the University of Warwick or Strathclyde or Oxford or Hull. She is studying English or Medicine or Natural Science or Greats, and therefore is convinced, along with most of the other students, that before long there will be almost nothing she does not know.

Already she misses home, or an idea of home which contains her mother, her sister, and a new pair of china vixens in the corner cabinet. She wishes she was there to see Oily win selection for the disabled luge team or compete in the qualifying heats for the BT-BSAD paralympic swimming championships. This is before she learns that Olive is going out with Sam Carter, which provokes her into driving her car at 60 mph through built-up areas until she remembers it's dangerous. Her mother often telephones (it's either her or Spencer), usually full of drugs and occasionally with such a confused sense of time that she treats Hazel like a child. Is she being careful? Does she lock her door at night? Is she avoiding alcohol, soft drugs, ecstasy, heroin? And she wishes she didn't have to say this, but someone has to, does Hazel know what to do with a condom?

‘Which flavour?' Hazel asks.

Her mother, ignoring the lessons of her own experience, suggests marriage and announces grandly that marriage is a place safe for diversity. Oh yes, Hazel thinks, it can be so diverse that in some forms you never actually get to see your husband. Her father, Hazel begins to realise, has sold her an idea of a happy childhood which has reached its sell-by date. He needs to make a fresh sale but he wouldn't know this because he's never there. As well as his frequent trips abroad he belongs to a thousand clubs, for the sales contacts, to the Detection Club and the Woolmen's Company and the League Against Cruel Sports and the 300 Group and the trade association Beama and the TocH movement and possibly also the Freemasons. It's as if his family was just another type of club, with its own tie, and her father only subscribes as a country member.

He is in fact directly responsible for Hazel's discomfort at University. She lives on a corridor with three other girls, Lynne, Marianne, and Louise, who spend their weekends demonstrating against Serbian aggression or neo-Thatcherism or Gerry Adams or the persecution of the Kurds in Turkey. It doesn't really matter. Hazel's mistake is to have let it slip that her father is Salesperson of the Year ‘93, and in the global evil of a capitalist conspiracy there can be little doubt of his implicit guilt.

There is also the disadvantage of Hazel's unfortunate private education and her crisp RP accent. She is also blonde and unmistakably sexy, if a little on the short side, and even though by degrees she is dropping her accent she feels friendless. She therefore has no choice but to work hard and attend extra-curricular lectures,
Leeches and Lancets: Surgical Stories From the Past
, or
What Maastricht Means
or
Intensive Therapy in the 1990s - the Cost of a Life
. In such desperate circumstances it's hardly surprising that she breaks up with her first University boyfriend, and then her second and third, all of whom she meets at lectures looking for girls exactly like her. It's at times like these that she likes to phone her only true friend in the world.

‘Did you love
all
of them?' Spencer asks.

‘This is University,' Hazel tells him. ‘I was seizing the day.'

‘So that's what they call it.'

None of these brief relationships turn out to be much fun, and although it would have been nice to know this a little earlier, Hazel still repeats the mistake several more times just to make sure. In fact, University is comprehensively failing to provide her with the best days of her life until one afternoon she comes back to the corridor and Marianne says, or Louise or Lynne says:

‘Hazel, there's a gorgeous policeman waiting to see you.'

He is sitting at the table in the communal kitchen, shifting his uniform cap about the table-top. He introduces himself as a sergeant from the Northumbria or Manchester or Metropolitan police force. He is tall and thin, with short black hair and an aristocratic nose. He has forgiving brown eyes and his pressed uniform is very clean and black. His face is very kind and he smiles nicely and Hazel is terrified. Before she can confess to the fraudulent charity boxes and the phone-cards, he suggests she sit down while he explains quietly that in a series of marked public callboxes, all of which have recently been attacked, several calls have been made both to her parents' number and to the card-phone in the corridor outside.

Hazel suddenly discovers that she's unable to help this gentle policeman with his enquiries. She draws on all her schoolgirl acting experience and says: ‘I get lots of calls from phone-boxes.'

‘From the same person?'

Hazel coughs into her hand. ‘I was at private school. It could be anyone from anywhere in the country.'

'They certainly do come from anywhere.'

The policeman lists, without referring to the notebook he's supposed to carry, all the phone-boxes which have been broken into and the amount of money taken. Stolen, he corrects himself.

By the end of the list Hazel feels quietly flattered by Spencer's obvious devotion.

‘I have lots of friends,' she says, and the policeman looks at her in a way she's learning to recognise and says,

‘Yes, I imagine you do.'

He carefully studies the cloth on top of his cap. He picks off a thread of red cotton. He tells her that if anything else occurs to her she should contact him. He looks her directly in the eye.

‘You do realise this is a serious matter?'

‘Yes,' she says, ‘yes I do.'

And after this visit Hazel's credibility soars. Rumours abound. Hazel works for MI6, she's a drug dealer, she's a violent feminist out on parole bound over to keep the peace. Her secret lover is a copper. Anyway, once the police are involved there can be no doubt that this is real life, and Hazel is in it. She's not just stuck up and blonde, and Hazel thanks heaven for Spencer, her own secret designated Act of God. As a peace-offering Louise and Lynne and Marianne make a collection to buy her a poster of a seagull smoking a joint. Hazel puts this in the space previously occupied by a Van Gogh print, or a Vermeer or Lowry or David Jones, anyway by something so boring and staid that all the girls agree it should be replaced
immediately
. She is allowed to keep her poster of River Phoenix in the arms of Grace Zabriskie from
My Own Private Idaho
. River is a cult from the moment he died, today, forever.

The girls now take Hazel out to parties, and together they all discover that at University every student has a problem. Fortunately, these are usually the kind of problems they'd always hoped to have, mostly boys and girls (love comes into it) or philosophic discourse or the politics of conscience. Hazel finds it strange that here they are among ten thousand students, all free and equal in a godless world, most of whom spend their days praying for the glamour of Acts of God. These will come in the form of an amazing boy or a fabulous girl, or a fantastic exam result on zero revision. Everyone is hoping for a miracle, for a direct painless hit from a metaphorical thunderbolt, a kind of supernatural smart bomb to explode the start of their lives in the right direction.