Damascus (19 page)

Hazel is no different, and she goes out and waits, waiting on a conspicuous miracle. She comes home. She pulls a chair up to the card-phone and calls Spencer. She doesn't tell him about her visit from the police because maybe they're listening in. As a more subtle way of showing how much she appreciates him, and the risks he's prepared to take, she finds herself asking what happens if he ever runs out of money, and she also means what happens when I ran out of phonecards? She's stolen nothing since she left home.

‘Easy,' Spencer says. ‘We move in together, settle down and have children. Think of all the money we'll save.'

‘I mean really.'

‘I don't know. What do you think?'

Get a job, Hazel thinks, get a phone of my own. It seems a long way away. ‘I don't know,' she says, and then Lynne or Marianne or Louise is tapping her on the shoulder, silently with grand hand gestures inviting her out to sabotage a fox hunt or to smoke some drugs or to put through a hoax call to the bursar about explosive statues.

Hazel tells Spencer she has to dash. This is now, after all, and she only gets the one go at it.

11/1/93 M
ONDAY
12:18

‘So Grace,' Hazel said, hands on knees, good with children. ‘Why aren't you at school?'

They were in the kitchen, where Hazel had been hoping to speak to Spencer alone. She wanted to know exactly what Henry Mitsui had said on the phone, as well as what Spencer really felt for her. Instead, she'd been introduced to his ten-year-old niece, Grace.

‘You have a choice,' Grace said. ‘It's either because there's school fireworks this evening and Dad thinks it's too risky, or I get a day off for my birthday, or I'm not allowed into school today because yesterday I dressed up as a vampire and tried to bite the neighbour.'

'It's an annual school holiday,' Spencer said. In honour of the Duke of Wellington's brother, an old boy.'

'This year it's also for the beginning of Europe,' Grace said. I'm only here until tea-time, but I want to stay longer because I hate my Mum and Dad.'

‘Of course you don't. You shouldn't say that.'

‘I like Uncle Spencer and William much better.'

‘Only sometimes,' Spencer said.

‘All the time. I can always tell you proper things, like what happened to my friend Nadine.'

'I'm sure you could tell your mother.'

‘She'd go berserk. You don't know what happened to Nadine.'

Spencer lifted Grace up and sat her on the table. He pulled out a chair for himself and Hazel leant against the wall. When Grace was sure they were both ready, she let them know that one day her friend Nadine had been followed home from school by a man. She was absolutely terrified. She heard footsteps behind her and they followed her all the way home. Eventually, when she reached her front door, Nadine turned round, determined not to let him in and probably to scream. The man stopped by the front gate and stared at her.

Grace did some life-like staring.

'Then what?'

‘You promise not to tell Dad?'

‘Promise. What did the man do?'

‘He asked her if she was alright.'

‘And?'

‘And then he said if she was so frightened she should have told him.'

‘And then what?'

‘He said sorry and went away. Nadine went inside and had her tea.'

Grace pushed herself off the table and landed solidly on both feet. ‘Can I go and see William now?'

‘I don't know where he is,' Spencer said.

‘I bet he's in his shed.'

Grace simply couldn't believe that Hazel had never seen William's shed. She grabbed her hand and said she just had to see it, because it was brilliant.

Spencer leant on the table, closed his eyes, and prepared himself for some time-travel. He was going to go forward in time and consider his predicament like an adult, imagining every tomorrow as if it included Hazel, accepting the fact that this moment marked the end of his ambitious construction of a chequered past. He could still become a hundred different people, of course, but once he was committed to Hazel then the only person he could never be again was the person he was now.

Time-travel was hot and difficult work, so he took off his suit-jacket and shaped it over the back of the chair. He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and then, fully prepared, sat down at the table and opened William's newspaper at the employment page. He stroked the paper from centre to edge, flattening it out, thinking that in any realistic vision he had of tomorrow, including Hazel, including their child (and if not tomorrow, then the next day, or the day after that), he would have to hold down a proper job.

As of today, or so he learned from the newspaper, he could apply for a Senior Research Fellowship in Law and Education at Manchester University. Failing that, he could suggest himself as the next Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, or try out for the Chair in Law at Bristol. Dizzy from travelling so far and so fast, Spencer quickly demoted himself to assistant bursar of a private school, realised he still didn't have the qualifications, so fixed eventually on a more settled career as an enthusiastic and efficient secretary at a reputable/progressive company. All he needed to pick up before the interview was a bit of shorthand or mother-tongue German or his own transport or, as a basic minimum for most of these secretarial posts, some basic secretarial skills. If, on the other hand, he preferred to sell his services abroad, there was currently an opening for an Academic Director at the Indira Ghandi National Centre of the Arts, New Delhi.

Spencer failed to encounter a single offer he couldn't refuse. The idea of a tomorrow with Hazel seemed to drift away, no easier to imagine as an adult than as a twenty-four-year-old child. Perhaps she- was right, and they should just go back to bed. At least that way they'd eventually fall asleep and at some stage wake up to find it was tomorrow anyway, whether they liked it or not. No special effort was required to get there, no previous experience or extraordinary enthusiasm or mother-tongue German.

It seemed obvious to him now that he should have listened to his father, and apprenticed as an overpaid sportsman. Or he should have rebelled more efficiently and become a man of business, a captain of industry, the director general of gas or the BSI chief executive or chairman of the TSB group and president of the British Bankers' Association. Thinking like this was close to panic. It reminded him of his childhood, with everything still possible and nothing decided yet, when the need to make a decision was even more distant than the various triumphs imagined to follow it. But he wasn't a child anymore, and not everything was an option.

Spencer gave up on jobs. On the way to Sport he saw a small advert in the Personal Column for a birthdate copy of
The Times
, which would have been a good present for Grace if only he'd thought of it earlier. It was a bit like astrology, he supposed, believing that events reported on the day you were born somehow had a particular significance. Spencer, however, needed guidance of a less speculative kind.

He tried something which had worked for him before whenever a decision was needed. He made a conscious effort to remember his sister Rachel, and passed back through the crash, beyond Rachel running at the seaside, all the way back to Rachel very young and somewhere on a large playing field, wearing a number 8 shirt, kicking a football through the mud. Spencer was hoping that the past had something to teach him, and that certain memories would offer him signs and guidance if only he knew how to look. He therefore tried to fix down as many details as possible, but they remained elusive around the central event. Rachel was wearing a football shirt, for example, but Spencer couldn't remember what team they used to support at exactly that time. It was the same colour shirt as his, but he still couldn't remember. Was it important? Perhaps the details were what mattered most, and anything of importance to be discovered in memory lay hidden exclusively in the detail. So what were the games they used to play, and what were the scores?

Or the detail was irrelevant. Any guidance to be had was to be found in the events themselves. These were the defining moments of the past, the peaks in the hazy range of his memory, the significant events to be singled out, but still it wasn't clear what was there to be learnt.

He must have learnt something, surely. That's what mistakes were supposed to be for.

It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, in Morecambe or Ebbw Vale or Epsom or Musselburgh, in Hounslow or West Bowling or Gloucester or Rugby, eighteen-year-old Spencer Kelly throws himself into another game of Right Now.

‘Right Now,' he says to Hazel, ‘looking out of this telephone box I can see some friends of mine. In fact a whole crowd of them. Many of them are potential international standard models and girlfriends. They want me to come out and play guitar for them. They want me to do one of my special funky dances. They're making faces
pleading
with me to join them, right now.'

‘What are they saying, exactly?'

‘I can't hear a word, it's too windy. It's so windy even the seagulls are walking.'

Outside the phone-box it is dark. A single spotlight across the road glares between a stranded post-box and a swinging pub sign for the White Hart or the Rising Sun. There is no-one out there, though it's true about the wind. Two seagulls walk ludicrously along the road. It's cold and Spencer is wearing his work jacket, the warmest one he has.

Hazel laughs. ‘Alright then,
inside
the box. What's it like, right now, on the inside.'

‘Lovely and warm,' Spencer says, ‘in my brand new RAF leather bomber jacket.'

‘What about right now,
inside your head?'

Easy. Spencer plans to tame the future by training as an Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon so that he'll never have to worry about money again. In his spare time he'll become an invaluable Private Secretary to a member of the aristocracy, to the Countess of Minto or the Duke of Kent or Viscount Goschen, all of whom tolerate his frequent trips to London because he's also a world-famous actor working the London stages opposite Emma Thompson or Alice Krige or Fiona Shaw. That, right now, is what occupies his head.

Hazel is still laughing out loud. ‘Spencer, you're absolutely brilliant and I love you to bits.'

Right now, however, she has to dash, and not displeased with the effect he's had Spencer smiles and puts down the phone.

It rings again almost immediately. It has to be Hazel so he snatches it up, and a man's voice says hello there you terrorist enemy of law and order. Spencer puts it down. It rings again. He stares at it and lets it ring. This is new. He bites his lip. The cash-box, refilled after his conversation with Hazel, swings open. He closes it gently. The phone continues to ring so he picks it up. ‘Hello?'

‘Hello there. This is Operation Clean Hands.'

‘Hello?'

‘Hello hello hello. I'm Robert Walker and I'm a British Telecom undercover agent. No joke. This is Operation Clean Hands and you have recently broken into the cash-box of this public telephone. True or false?'

‘I don't know,' Spencer says, ‘did I?'

‘All boxes at risk are now connected to a central system. The moment you rob one an alarm goes off. We know where you are and I can phone you up, see?'

‘I didn't know they could do that,' Spencer says.

‘We've had complaints from the Director of Property himself.'

‘Thank you,' Spencer says, and then adds: 'I haven't hurt anybody.'

He puts the phone down. He gets out of the phone-box fast and tumbles his bicycle upright and pedals home like a maniac, helped madly on his way by the wind. Weirder things have happened, he decides, but not often to him.

At home he finds his Dad, the one parent in his new one-parent family, sitting on the sofa drinking beer and watching
Eurogoals
or
Trucks ‘Tractor Power
or
Ringside Superhouts
. The divorce is now official, and Spencer knew it was finished when his Dad said: