Jubilee (18 page)

He thinks about the garage, the briefcase, the bottle.

There is light in here, too; he has had time to take stock of it. Yellow streetlight slides under their blind, and the phone in its cradle emits a blue glow. There’s even – he’s spent several minutes trying to find the source – a circle of white on the ceiling. It must be a reflection of something, only he can’t work out what. And amongst the darkness and the shapes and the light there are his thoughts; they are elliptical, curving away from him then slicing back towards him until he is desperate to sleep, if only to stop them coming.

It’s about the diazepam, and his thoughts go something like this: he calls it medicine, a dose, and then he tells himself, come clean – it’s a
drug
, it’s
your
drug. He lets himself think in terms of his usage, he risks the word reliance; am I becoming reliant on it, he asks. And then he taunts himself: admit it, it’s an
addiction
, and then he sends that thought away from him because it’s ridiculous, and when it comes back it has changed, and this time it’s about Colette, and what action to take, and why she’s doing this to him.

His first thought was to go straight to her and have it out. But that doesn’t make sense yet; he can’t work out why she wants this particular thing so much, why the photograph matters to her enough that she’d blackmail him. It can’t be the money, for this is as precarious and indirect a route to money as he can think of, and troublesome too. It is hard work. The note is cruel (Colette’s not cruel) and underhand (she’s not that, either).

Maya shifts beside him and he lies still, waiting for her to settle again. Her feet move away. They move back. There’s a thought tapping at him, but he’s batting it away.
What if Colette is using again?
When you’re using, irrationality is normal, cruelty easy. The blackmail doesn’t make sense if she’s straight. But what if she’s hooked?

We both are then, he thinks, and this is an utterly unacceptable thought, because he is not like her at all.

This is unbearable. He needs something else to do.

Satish has new mail: a message from Colette. It’s short: Cai would love to see Satish – their own reunion, regardless of the photograph. She’s taken the liberty of giving Cai Satish’s number.

Bloody Colette! All she does is take liberties. Satish can’t think what to do about this new message so he dumps it in his Action folder. It’s all closing in on him. He remembers Sarah, materialising at the hospital.

Time to take some control. Knowledge is power. There’s nothing you can’t find out on the net, he reminds himself, as he puts her name into a search engine. He types carefully, pressing on the keys, trying to keep the noise down. He knows only her maiden name and there must be a thousand Sarah Millers. He knows nothing about her now, that’s the problem. Or, almost nothing. What was the name of her son? Leo? Leon? God, his memory. Louis. He inputs
Sarah Miller Louis
and scrolls down, sifting the references. There it is.

‘Miller Stevens Productions’, they’ve called their family website. It’s slick, no rough edges, more like a company site than a family one. There’s an extensive gallery devoted to Louis – his birth, his early weeks, various family members cooing over him (is that woman, chic and greying, pearl earrings and a black polo-neck, Sarah’s mum? Is that the formidable Mrs Miller?). There’s a restlessness in Satish’s fingers. He shakes them out, jazz hands over the keyboard. On screen there’s a jump-cut, a sudden leap forward in time, and Louis is six months, seven months. He’s being held by a smiling Sarah outside Satish’s hospital, he’s being fed in a bouncy chair.

They wouldn’t have operated straight away. And until they did … well, in this gallery there’s no record of what happened. There’s nothing, no pictures of the time in between, when Sarah didn’t know how it was going to turn out. That void is full of bad things, he thinks; parents too scared to take a photograph in case it’s the last one, in case their child dies and his picture waits in the camera, waiting to take them unawares. Satish feels a creep of compassion but pulls back from it. On the homepage there’s a link to ‘our other great collaboration’. He clicks on it.

Sarah is in PR, it seems, and here’s all the guff you’d expect: she ‘navigates a rapidly changing society’. She ‘engages in two-way conversations with clients’. Had Satish thought about it, this is exactly the future he’d have mapped for her.

The study feels close around him. There’s no elbow-room. Satish finds himself rolling his shoulders, stretching his arms, trying to get a bit of space. Good, long strides, that’s what he needs, not this cramped little box. Maybe he should go for a walk.

He thinks of looking up Cai or Peter Brecon, and doesn’t think he can, just yet. Who then? Someone safer. This one’s easy. Satish Patel. UK only.
Dr
Satish Patel. Dr Satish Patel cardiology. There he is.

There are so many hits: a conference on paediatric cardiology (Dr Satish Patel presenting on ‘The Physiology of Congenital Heart Defects’), his listing on the Central Children’s website, a cardiac intensive care course (Dr Satish Patel presents on ‘The Blue Baby in A & E’), his listing on the advisory panel of a medical charity (Dr Satish Patel: Cardiac Disorders). This is serious stuff. The references go on to a second page. No need for personal websites or blogs or any of those other vanity projects.

Some fresh air might help. He leaves his desk, rolls up the blind – quiet, slow – and hefts the sash to shoulder height. There’s a soft thump as it settles.

This is all he needs: a spring night, the cool of it, and the dark. The road outside is empty and he can lean right out into the dark and breathe, and breathe. Behind him there is comfort, the accumulated evidence of his success: framed qualifications, family photographs, the books and journals he’s contributed to. He can control anything that might threaten these things. He’s done so in the past. Stephen Chandler’s letters, for example. He controlled them.

They started three years after the Jubilee, long after the Chandlers had gone to live up north. A Manchester postmark landed on his parents’ doormat, giving Satish the terrors. Andrew Ford had made it big by then. It was after the Riot Act cover, after Ford had left the local paper and you could see his photos in the Sunday magazines. That first letter was full of adolescent outrage. How dare he, asked Stephen, how dare Ford make his money off the back of them all? How come they got nothing for it? They should get together, challenge him. They should …

Satish had torn the letter up, sweating. A year or so after that, he got the second letter, and a few years later, the third. They continued like this, on and off, making their way to Satish from a different town each time. One even came from Australia. Satish was also moving around in these years, of course: to university, to hospital, to a new one, but somehow the letters always found him. He thought they were probably going to other places, as well: to Colette, to Mandy.

He couldn’t always tell what had prompted them, why they should come
now
, rather than at any other moment. Sometimes, he could guess. There was an arts programme featuring an interview with Ford at his New York loft. Two weeks later the next letter came. When Ford’s autobiography was published, Satish received another one. As time went by, Stephen’s nebulous fury coalesced into a plan, then reformed into another. His prose veered from vitriol to project management: they would all hire a lawyer; they would launch a class action suit; they would picket an exhibition of Ford’s work.

Satish had talked himself down: these were just bits of paper. They weren’t Stephen, and Stephen wasn’t about to come for him. He tore them up, every one. Satish controlled them.

He breathes, and breathes. There were good things about the past, he tells himself. There was Mandy.

The thought lifts him and he returns to his desk, enters ‘Mandy Hobbes’ in the search engine, and there’s a Mandy Hobbes straightaway, top of the list. It’s something French, a language school: ‘école supérieure de langues étrangères appliquées’ it says, all very trendy, lowercase. The site offers him the choice of French or English text. When he selects
English
the words fragment into one of those irritating slow intros. He slides the mouse around the screen, searching for a ‘skip’ button, but can’t find one. He wonders whether this really has anything to do with Mandy,
his
Mandy, and if it does, what turns her life has taken to bring her here. The company offers translation, management training, events and facilitation services. ‘Where do you want to be tomorrow?’ it asks.

Her name’s there in the ‘people’ list – ‘staff’ being presumably too stodgy – but there’s no photograph. He still doesn’t know if it’s her.
This
Mandy Hobbes founded the company in 1998. She could be his Mandy Hobbes; she could be a stranger.

He searches again: ‘Mandy Hobbes’, ‘Amanda Hobbes’, looking in social networking sites, scrolling through the photographs of American teenagers and hoping he might find her among them. It’s useless. He tries ‘Paris Hobbes blog’ and ‘Mandy Paris blog’, but she’s not there. He searches pictures of people who share her name, closing the pages before the images have fully downloaded. He can see already: they’re all wrong – too young, or too old, their hair the wrong colour. He remembers that hair.

He looks at the clock on the computer; it’s nearly 3 a.m.

May as well do Cai. Do it quickly. He finds him straight away, on the Animal World website. Satish clicks on the reference.

Cai’s mentioned on the Big Cats page. The only pictures here are of animals: a tiger, a jaguar, a pair of lions.
Come and meet our playful lion cubs, Harry, Hermione and Ron
, the copy urges.
Or look in on Tequila, our jaguar. Section head Cai Brecon welcomes you to the world of the big cats, where the wilderness comes to you
.

Wild Cai, prowling Cherry Gardens. You could never guess what he was going to do next. Satish wonders what it’s like for Cai now, handling those fierce creatures. Does he ever feel nervous?

Satish pages back. There was something else, another complete ‘Cai Brecon’ reference. It’s something unexpected: The Red Bean Boys, they’re called, a Cajun band, operating out of Watford. Cai’s the guitarist, apparently. There’s a bit of video, the band playing Gloucester Cajun Festival. Cai on film.

Satish starts the clip and rests his face in his hands. The reproduction’s terrible, as if the band were playing in a biscuit tin. An insistent four-four beat, and it’s a song he knows, ‘Bad Moon Rising’, but with plenty of squeezebox and fiddle. Is the voice Cai’s? He can barely make out the guitar. His fingertips drum against his skull in time to the music. He looks at a curve of brown the shape of a guitar, the light coming off it. The figure behind it could be anyone.

Cai is a zookeeper, and he might or might not be a Red Bean Boy, but this film leaves Satish none the wiser.

He doesn’t want to finish the job at all, but there’s a sort of completist urge in him now. Do it fast, he tells himself. Get it over with.

There’s nothing on any UK-based search, so he looks at South African sites instead. Peter’s name turns up one reference, a golf club newsletter dated about a year ago. It’s too long to read so Satish skips between phrases:
Say goodbye to Social Secretary Peter Brecon … return to the UK … wish him luck in his new project … farewell braai
.

Right, that’s Peter. Swift exit, face-saving ‘new project’. Tell us about that project, Peter, Satish thinks. Tell us! You’re going to work for minimum wage in London to stop your house being repossessed. You’re going to separate from your wife. You’re going to be ostracised by your son. Satish iterates every last humiliation, feeling around inside him for any pity, the tiniest scrap of it. There’s none. What a glorious thing that would be, to pity Peter. What a glorious, powerful thing.

It’s cold in here. He goes over to the window and pulls down the sash. A couple of inches should do it, he thinks: the Goldilocks solution – not too cold, not too warm. But the frame is heavy and he pulls too hard. It travels right down to the sill and lands with a crash. Before he can think straight, he’s followed it with the fist to the glass, a sideways punch that makes the window rattle. Satish prepares for another blow, for catharsis, but in the time it takes to draw back his hand he’s already remembered his sleeping family, how upset they’d be to wake and find him like this, the questions they’d ask.

Quick. He deletes his search history. Two clicks and it’s gone, untraceable. Soon Peter will be wiped from public memory. Whoever updates the golf club website will see that long-ago newsletter and think, it’s time this went. And that’ll be him, gone: just like that.

Satish looks at the clock for justification: Three forty-two. You can’t say he hasn’t tried. Three hours till he’s up, five till he’s working. He could do it, he knows. He could stop any time he wants to, but tonight’s been … tricky.

As soon as he’s decided, Satish leaves the study. He knows the places to step so that the floorboards won’t creak and as he’s making his way downstairs, he suddenly remembers that advert from his childhood. I’m a secret lemonade drinker, he thinks. I’m trying to give it up but it’s one of those nights. He almost laughs.

He opens the garage door, taking account of his own pounding heart, the clench in his belly. He hates this part now: the first sight of his briefcase. He unfastens it and checks the interior, but tonight there’s no note waiting for him: situation normal.

Satish unzips the internal pocket. Part of him is not here at all; he’s scanning the house for noises, for anything that might reveal him. He reaches into the pocket, and his fingers hit an edge of paper.

No no no, he thinks. He peers in, hoping for the bottle, the bag, the spoon. They’re here, but this other thing is too, right in here with them, a second envelope:
read this
.

He rips open the envelope.

I mean it. I will tell about the medicine, do the photograph

He kneels on the concrete floor and tries to produce a clear thought amid the cacophony inside his head. He stays there until he pulls out something coherent: this is enough, he tells himself. It’s time to face her with it. It’s time she stopped.