The 2084 Precept (59 page)

Not very convincing, I told my neurons; the
backup for the logic is extremely shaky. We agree on that, they
replied, but there is no other possible explanation. The only
alternative, that alien powers are at play, is impossible. Don't
forget, they continued, that it was Jeremy himself who justified
the choice of Mars, admittedly not very difficult for him to do,
and let us not forget that it was also Jeremy who named the date.
He simply happens to have
the requisite knowledge
.

All of this took me through the shit, shave
and shower routine. I am not going to worry about it. With all due
respect to my neurons, both explanations are ridiculous. And on top
of that, there is nothing else that is possible. So I am not going
to let the subject ruin my day, or any of my other days come to
that. No point.

I asked Mr. Brown to accompany me to the
petrol station and we had just reached the bottom of the stairs
when Monika came bursting out of her apartment.

"Peter," she said, fighting off Mr. Brown's
morning greetings as best she could, "It's good that I caught you.
I heard you on the stairs. My sister has been taken to hospital.
She says she has cancer. She will be operated on. I told her I
would be with her by this afternoon. She lives in Leverkusen."

I never knew she had a sister, the subject
had somehow never arisen. Cancer being one of the nastiest
possibilities arising from the many incompetent blunders committed
while designing the human being, the only thing you can do is hope
that it happens to other people; like all of the other potential
disasters lying in wait for you as you try to make it through your
allotted time. Had I been allowed to manage the draughtman's office
at the time, things would have turned out differently. But I wasn't
asked, and so life, as Woody Allen once said—I think it was him—is
short and hard and then you die. That is a factual statement and he
gets full marks from me for that.

"I am so sorry…" I began.

"Peter, thank you. I'll see how it is when I
get there. The question is, do I take your car? You are leaving
tonight."

"Yes," I said and I went back upstairs to
pick up the vehicle documentation and the keys and the key for its
garage and we made the swap.

She gave me a very long kiss. A very long
loving kiss, not an erotic one.

"What about Mr. Brown?" I asked.

"Don't worry, I'll be back home some time
tonight. Definitely."

"But what if you can't? What if you have an
accident?"

"Then I'll make sure Marie-Anne takes care
of him. She loves dogs."

"But what if you are injured, what if you
can't call her?"

"Peter, don't worry," she replied. "I am
going to give her my key to your apartment right now. She will take
him for a walk tonight and she will keep him with her until I get
back. And if I don't get back, she will keep him with her for as
long it takes until
you
get back. But I would need your
hotel details in Spain. She or I would have to let you know if a
problem arises. And in the worst case scenario, we would make sure
he ended up in the dogs' holiday home. Don't worry, Peter, Mr.
Brown is my friend, I love him, I'll make sure nothing happens to
him."

Yes, and he is my friend too, and I also
love him. His well-being is as important to me as anything else in
my life. And that would have remained the case even if Céline had
come into it, which she hadn't. I checked my mobile's address book
and gave Monika the hotel name and address and the telephone
number. I told her to please not give any of the details to
anybody, including the police, and to tell Marie-Anne the same. She
gave me a querying look and then she gave me another very
affectionate kiss and then she was gone. I would, I knew, miss her
greatly as usual.

I lit up a cigarette and Mr. Brown and I
headed off to the petrol station. Then we went down to the river
and I had two coffees and three more cigarettes at Marie-Anne's and
I read my newspaper—exactly ninety conflict deaths today—while Mr.
Brown bounded, jumped and sniffed his way around the park area. And
then we went along to my bank and I picked up a large amount of
cash. I didn't want to assist anybody by having to use my cash card
or my credit cards during the next few weeks.

Back at the ranch I checked my mail and my
bank account. The latter showed me that the €25,200 from United
Fasteners had arrived. Life was good.

Delsey called. He was polite this time. Very
polite.

"Mr. O'Donoghue, good morning," he said.

"Ah, Mr. Delsey, good morning," I
replied.

"I am sorry to trouble you," he went on,
"but there is considerable concern at the highest level."

I didn't say anything.

"The prime minister's meeting with Mr.
Parker apparently went very well. We have not been given any of the
details, but it appears that the matter could well be one of
national importance and that another…mmm…event is due to take place
next Monday which is likely to confirm that. First of all, I and my
superiors would like to thank you for the role you played in
persuading us to have this matter raised at such a high level. We
would also like to apologize for our initial doubts regarding the
veracity of your assertions and we hope you appreciate that our
reactions at that time were…mmm…logical ones, normal ones.
Understandable ones indeed, in view of the nature of the
circumstances."

"Certainly I understand Mr. Delsey," I said.
"The whole thing is completely outside of anybody's normal
experience."

"Yes. Well…thank you. Now…we have not been
told what next Monday's event will be, but we
have
been
requested to ask for your assistance and cooperation in addressing
a concern raised by the prime minister."

"And that concern is?"

"That concern is how to reestablish contact
with Mr. Jeremy Parker, should contact with him be lost for
whatever reason. In such an event, would you be prepared to provide
us with your cooperation on that?"

"I would be prepared to try, Mr. Delsey. But
you appreciate what difficulties might arise if Mr. Parker were to
decide that he didn't wish to be contacted."

"Yes…indeed, quite clearly. Well, Mr.
O'Donoghue, it is very kind of you to agree to make the attempt
should the need arise. May I assume that I have your agreement for
me to report back along those lines?"

He was certainly being very careful,
possibly the conversation was being recorded as well.

"Yes, Mr. Delsey, you do," I said.

"Thank you, Mr. O'Donoghue. By the way, I
assume you are at home at the moment?" As if he didn't know.

"Yes, I am at home. In Germany." But I
wouldn't be in a few hours' time, my friend.

"Well, then I wish you a pleasant day," he
said, "and thank you for your continuing cooperation in this
matter. It will be much appreciated by all concerned."

And then I went to bed and slept on and off
for as long as I could. Unless you are mentally deficient, you need
to be well rested before setting off on these long night drives.
When I got up, I switched my mobile phone off and stored it in the
linen cupboard, I packed a big suitcase, I put my laptop in my
shoulder bag and I stored the cash in a safety pouch I use when on
vacation and which is worn inside the waistband. I gave Mr. Brown
another walk, I gave him his meal, I gave him the other half of his
chocolate and I hugged him goodbye. My faithful friend and
companion, I will miss him as always.

It was around 9 p.m. when I went down to
Monika's car and stored the luggage. I hung three lightweight suits
and a summer jacket in the back of the car, I checked that all the
lights were working, I adjusted the seat and the mirrors, and then
I drove off. I tanked up at the petrol station and fixed the tire
pressures, always a couple of notches higher, front and rear, than
the manufacturer's recommendation. And then it was onto the A66,
and east toward Frankfurt in order to pick up the A5 going
south.

The A5 takes you straight down past
Karlsruhe and Freiburg to Basel in Switzerland and I would normally
have chosen this route. You then continue on through Bern, Lausanne
and Geneva and that is the point at which you enter France. But I
wanted to avoid Switzerland and the passport check of a non-EU
country. Not a serious matter, but I wanted to leave as few traces
lying around as possible and in any case Monika's car didn't need
to advertise a Swiss autoroute toll sticker on its windscreen (yes,
I know, but have
you
ever tried taking one of those things
off?). And so I cut off the A5 before reaching Basel and entered
France on the A36 to Mulhouse. There is in fact very little
difference in the distance travelled whichever route you
choose.

It is just around 1,500 kilometers by road
from Frankfurt to Barcelona and it is all autobahn and autoroute
and autopista. At night you are quickly through Germany and into
France and after that you can safely travel at just over their
speed limit, say at around 140 kilometers per hour. And so the
total driving time to Barcelona, allowing for reduced speeds here
and there for road works and the like, and for the French and
Spanish toll payments, is about 12 hours. Theoretically, that is.
But add on the two stops needed to tank the car—and possibly
another one just before Barcelona—the coffee breaks, and the time
lost in the heavy morning traffic in Spain, and you are looking at
a realistic estimate of 14 hours total.

After Mulhouse you drive past Besançon and
switch onto the A6 down to Lyon,
La Route du Soleil
, and you
just stay on the autoroutes all the way to Montpellier and
Perpignan. And then you coast through into Spain and past Gerona
and on down into Barcelona.

Driving at night suits me. I have good
eyesight and I don't tire easily and you get to where you want to
get to much faster than you can with daytime traffic volumes. Of
course you miss a lot of the French countryside until the planet's
anticlockwise spin exposes this particular section to the sun's
rays again, but that's the price you have to pay. And it is a
price. Whether it's the Massif Central, the Alps, Provence,
Brittany, the Loire valley, the Côte d‘Azur, the Pyrenees, the
Basque country around Biarritz or wherever else you go, France is
just one beautiful country.

And that is not the only thing I like about
France. I like their language, I like their
chansons
, I like
their food, I like their movies, I like their wine and I like their
women. I love their women in fact. French women are very conscious
of the fact that they are female and they are very conscious of the
fact that you are male, and they like to keep it that way. They
don't try to change themselves and they don't try to adopt or copy
male characteristics. If a man stares longer than he should at an
attractive French woman, mentally undressing her as usual and
having his customary sexual dreams, she takes it as a compliment
and not, like many of her mutated western counterparts these days,
as an insult. She is more
au fait
with life, sexually and
intellectually. And even if she only has twenty Euros with which to
buy a blouse and a skirt, she still manages to look chic and
feminine and female. Don't ask me how or why, it's just the way it
is. And I like the French people in general also. This is
admittedly only possible if you take the trouble to learn their
language properly, rather than wandering around
their
country spouting a load of unintelligible, grammatically incorrect,
Birmingham-accented junk. Because then they don't like you and you
do not, correspondingly, like them. Nor do they have a problem with
that; the problem is yours if you want to make it one.

I had some great classical music going as I
drove on down into Spain. The sun was shining merrily in its
habitual Spanish manner and I was feeling pretty good. The Céline
ache continued to recede inexorably further into the very depths of
the archives of matters past, albeit the section reserved for
painful ones.

Spain is a very different kettle of fish
from France. It is—except for the north-western area and part of
the Pyrenees—a much browner place, a more parched and dusty
country, which even the stunted pines to be found in this
north-eastern coastal area cannot fully disguise. There are also
plenty of dilapidated, uncared-for or abandoned buildings—although
not nearly as many as in Italy of course, the Italians rival the
ex-Soviet Union countries in that respect—and this tells you that
you are in a different environment from the moment you cross the
border. The culture is totally different also, not surprisingly in
view of the fact that most of the country was dominated for
centuries by the Arabs. The Spanish language still contains
thousands of words derived from the Arabic.

In fact it is the language, more than
anything else, which is the distinguishing feature of this
country's culture. Someone once said—and I concur fully with
whomever it was—that in order to be able to have a conversation
with a Spaniard, you need to learn how to shout while you listen.
To this we have to add the use of the hands and the arms and
sometimes other body parts, all of which play an important role in
both grammatical punctuation and descriptive syntax. And finally,
we must include the frequent usage of obscene—but in Spain, not
necessarily offensive—nouns and verbs such as 'cunt' and 'fuck',
spoken, as already indicated, at loudspeaker volumes irrespective
of where you happen to be. '
Hola, coño
' is a friendly way of
greeting an acquaintance.
'Joder!
' is an amicable expression
of concurrence and/or wonder. '
No me jodas!
' translates
literally as 'don't fuck me', but is a polite enough assertion of
surprise. '
Hijo de puta
' can be a friendly greeting you
receive, or it can be used as a direct insult of the kind involving
your mother and yourself. And the latter is also true for '
La
leche
' which refers to your mother's milk rather than a cow's,
but politely refrains from advising in which context or exactly
what may have been wrong with it—polite omissions which in fact can
stoke the recipient's imagination to the point where irritation and
displeasure mutate into a passionate display of uncontrolled wrath.
These delightful expressions are accepted in restaurants and in the
presence of women and the list is a long one. A different culture,
you understand.