Fourteen

 

I spent the rest of the night standing at the window, staring unseeingly down on Griffith, trying to remember. It wouldn't come. It was going to take something else, something concrete, for me to be able to break through. Some different way of seeing.

The phone rang at five minutes past six. I grabbed it and said: ‘You read the message?’

‘Jesus, yes,’ Travis said. He sounded tired. ‘I just don't know whether to believe it. I met Schumann once. He seemed like a regular guy.’

‘They all do, Travis. You know it's true.’

‘So who are they?’

‘Who?’

‘The names on the other pieces of paper.’

‘You don't need to know.’

‘Hap, I've been at the station three hours already. I've been through Schumann's bank records and had someone who understands these things check out the state of Schumann Holdings. It's solid. The guy had more money than you or I can even imagine, and his business was on the up.’

‘So what?’

‘So Schumann committed suicide after Hammond was murdered, and the “financial difficulties” line is bullshit. Something else pushed him over the edge, and I don't believe it was sudden guilt. You see what I'm saying?’

I did. ‘You think someone else has taken up the reins. Schumann thought it was all over when Hammond died, then he gets a call and finds out it's only getting worse, and kills himself.’

‘I already have five guys pulling Hammond's study apart. I need to know who the other victims are. They might be able to give us something on the new guys.’

‘I'm not sure they're new,’ I said. ‘I talked to one of the other victims last night. This person said that in the end days Hammond was getting strung out, like he was being forced to do something against his will. I think there was always someone in the background.’

‘I disagree. It's the guys in the suits. They whacked Hammond, took over his racket. Either that or they just decided they didn't need him any more. You've met them: they're not exactly polite. If anyone refuses to pay them I'm going to have a famous dead person on my hands, and that I can truly do without.’

‘They'll pay,’ I said, ‘and no way will they have anything useful on the bad guys. You don't leave a contact number when you're shaking someone down. Plus it would be very stupid to kill someone you're blackmailing – all that does is cut off the income stream for good.’

‘The names, Hap, or I haul you down here so fast they'll hear the sonic boom in Nevada.’

I told him two – not Jack Jamison.

There was a pause while he scribbled them down. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I want to see you here, at the station, at exactly eleven p.m. tomorrow. You see the suits in the meantime, you call. You do not fuck around with the investigation in any other way, and you do not contact any of the victims. Email me the code, and then we're done.’

Quietly: ‘And the other deal?’

‘Helena walks – you've got my word on that. While we're on the subject: one of my officers has got a new bruise on his head this morning, and he had to take the bus into work this morning because someone stole his car.’

‘I told you to come alone, Travis.’

‘I did. Romer overheard the conversation and followed me on his own recognizance.’

‘His car's outside Applebaum's. Tell him it needs a wash.’

‘His memory of events is a little vague, but he seems to believe that he got knocked out immediately after he arrived in Venice. At around about the same time you were sitting talking to me. Kind of odd, huh?’

‘Time,’ I said, ‘is a strange and confusing thing.’

‘Yeah, right. Make sure you don't get confused. Tomorrow. Eleven p.m.’ He cut the connection.

I turned to see Helena sitting on the sofa looking at me. She wakes the same way she falls asleep, changing state like the flip of a switch. Her hair wasn't even mussed.

‘What deal?’ she asked.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You asked Travis about some other deal.’

‘I told you,’ I said. ‘Getting some time to find Deck and Laura.’

She shook her head. ‘Bullshit. That's the first deal. What's the other deal?’

‘I got him to lose a couple of minor outstanding warrants against Deck,’ I said, avoiding her eyes. ‘You want a coffee?’

‘No,’ she said, glaring at me suspiciously.

‘Trust me, you do. And then you want a shower, and you'd better take it quickly.’

‘Why?’

‘Because,’ I said, ‘I'm going to Florida, and I'd like you to come with me.’

We got into Jacksonville mid-afternoon, and hired a car at the airport. I steered us straight through town and out the other side, then took us down A1A to Cresota. It looked the same as it always did. It's pretty much the land that time forgot down there: when a store changes hands it makes the local paper. Forty years ago they worked out how to be a tourist town, what combination of characterful eateries, well-stocked grocery stores and sleepy streets worked best at attracting and keeping holiday trade. Craft fairs in the summer months; restaurants with decks reaching out into the marshes; little leaflets with directions to the nearest outlet malls. Lot of people have got a downer on Florida: in my view they can just fuck off. I had to move away to see it, but I suspect now that if God ever decides to retire He could do a lot worse than a beach house somewhere down A1A. Watch the waves, eat some crab, maybe play a little tennis – though from what I can gather you'd be advised to let Him win.

I pulled into the lot of Tradewinds, and chose from a wide range of parking spaces. The only car I could see was my parents'. Most of the people who use Tradewinds are a consortium of old friends from Gainesville: alligator-hide old people and second-generation dentists. Nice folks, as it happens. They're either there en masse or not at all, and the condo is too small and old to attract much other trade.

‘You can stay here, if you want,’ I said. There were still a couple of hours before I could do what I wanted to do. It made sense to visit my folks first, show them I was still alive, maybe try to hint at the fact it might be the last visit for a while.

Helena looked out the window. She'd been to Cresota five or six times before, and got on with my family well enough, but someone else's home town is always alien territory. You always wonder if there are any strange rites you don't know about, and about past good times you weren't invited to.

‘What do they know about us?’

‘Just we aren't married any more,’ I said. ‘I saved them the details.’ I had, but knew they probably came to their own conclusions. They knew how much I'd loved Helena, and must have figured out that it would have taken something pretty catastrophic to break us up.

‘What are we doing here, Hap?’

‘I'll tell you later,’ I said, opening my door. The alarm dinged placidly in the heat, marking time. ‘Are you coming or not?’

We walked across the hot tarmac, climbed up the steps to the office. Helena hung back as I swung the door open, slipped to one side to hide out of sight. Doesn't matter how old you are, what you do or what you've done. Mothers are mothers, and they can bite.

Ma was standing inside, behind the desk, humming and sorting through envelopes. If there's anything my mother likes to do more than sort other people's mail into neat piles, I don't know what it might be. The walls of the office held a few seascapes of varying talent, complete with prices. I shudder to think how many very bad artists eked out a career through paintings sold to Tradewinds guests. My mother knew just as well as I did how talent-free most of them were, but for her that wasn't the point.

She looked up at me and her face melted into the uncomplicated pleasure you only ever see in one face, that of a person recognizing someone who started life as a part of her own body. She'd got greyer and a little thinner in the last six months, but I still felt what I always had. It's not you who's changing, Mother – the world gets younger but you stay the same.

‘Hello dear,’ she said. ‘What a wonderful surprise.’

I leaned over the counter and kissed her cheek. ‘What's happening?’

‘Oh you know, getting wrinkly. It takes up most of our time. Come on back – your father's cleaning out the pool.’ She raised an eyebrow, spoke a little louder. ‘And tell Helena she's welcome too.’

I turned to the doorway as Helena shuffled into view, looking about twelve years old. ‘Hello, Mrs Thompson,’ she said. A look passed between her and my mother. I don't know what it meant, but then I don't know how Mother knew Helena was there. Women see the world differently, and they know different things. Anyone who thinks we all live in the same place needs to open their eyes.

My mother shut up the office and we walked round to where my father was happily skimming leaves out of the pool. We sat in deck chairs and sipped sour lemonade, laughing while I told my parents lies of omission.

It was the only way it could be. I didn't have the heart to tell them I was going to jail, probably for a long while. There would have been no way back from that announcement, and I felt it was better to just take what time I could. Better for me, and for them. I could write them, when the time came, when it was too late for them to do anything except accept. There's no point in embracing disaster before it happens. If you do that, it merely destroys the present too.

Sure, I could have avoided the rap for a while. I could just not go back to LA, keep moving around the country. Return to the life I'd abandoned, except this time I'd be back to scrabbling for a living, not dreaming for big bucks. I could work bars and stay in motels, growing old with empty rooms and the smell of spilt beer and toilets which had been sanitized for my protection and comfort. Gradually I'd change from transient young man to transient old, and after that there was nothing but a long dusty plane into darkness. I couldn't face it. I didn't think I had it in me any longer, that I had the energy to pretend that I wasn't drowning, but waving. Since I'd seen Helena again that just didn't feel like an option. The question I'd asked myself so many times had been answered: yes, I'd had what I wanted – and then lost it. I'd already turned the right corner once in my life, and then lost my way. Now I felt how you do halfway through a debauched evening when you haven't been drinking fast enough. Run out of steam, suddenly weary and melancholy, with nothing but sleep being attractive or even attainable.

Nobody asked what Helena was doing there. She sat a little distance from me, nodding and listening to my father as he explained the top five things that could go wrong with air-conditioning, their symptoms and the best ways of fixing them. We sat there, like a family, alone in the garden of an old condo which had always been home to me, surrounded by chirruping hoses and the sound of the sea just over the rise. It felt like a life I had always lived, and like some future incarnation of me would forever be seeking this place, as if this was where I should always be. Here, or nearly here. Nearly home.

The air started to cool eventually, and the sky hazed with late-afternoon clouds. Then, just at the right time, my father invited Helena to go look at something with him – the fuse boxes, probably, his pride and joy – and my mother and I were left alone. We didn't say anything for a while, just watched the water in the pool flicker and glint. Storm clouds were building up over the inter-coastal waterway, making the light clear and strange.

‘Ma,’ I said, eventually, ‘when I was a kid, did anything strange ever happen to me?’

She put her hands on her lap. ‘What do you mean?’

‘When I was about eight.’

‘Not that I recall,’ she said, but with a quickening of my heart I knew she was lying.

‘It was a Sunday evening, you were working at the Oasis. You got back and Dad was asleep and we watched a movie.’

‘Sounds like a hundred Sunday evenings.’

‘I'm talking about one in particular.’

‘It's a long time ago, honey.’

‘So was Dad's twenty-first birthday, and don't tell me you don't remember that. Anything to do with us, you're an encyclopaedia.’

She laughed, tried to changed the subject. I just looked at her.

‘Ma, I don't do it often, but right now I'm breaking rank. This is very important. You know what I'm talking about, and I need you to tell me what you know.’

She looked away for a moment, her face pinched. There was a long, long pause.

Then: ‘What do you think happened?’

‘I don't know,’ I said. ‘I can't remember.’

Her eyes flicked up at me. ‘I wondered if this was going to come up someday. I thought probably not. But every now and then I remember it, and I wondered if you did too.’

‘Not for a long time,’ I said. ‘It came back to me yesterday.’

‘Your father doesn't know anything about it,’ she said quickly. ‘I decided not to tell him. You know how he gets. He would have been worried.’

Gently: ‘About what?’

A pause, then: ‘I got home late,’ she said. ‘There was a party in that night, students from the U over in Gainesville, and they made a hell of a mess, like they ordered burgers just to have something to throw at each other. Jed asked me if I'd help clean up before I went off shift, and I did. Then I walked home.’

She stopped, and I was distraught to see that she looked near tears. ‘Ma,’ I said, ‘it's okay. Whatever happened didn't do me too much harm. I'm doing all right, aren't I? Hey – look at this jacket. They don't just give them away.’

‘It's very nice,’ she said, smiling a little. ‘But do they always have to be black?’

I frowned at her. ‘Ma …’

‘You were in the parking lot,’ she said, all in a rush. ‘Behind those big old trash containers. I wouldn't have seen you except I recalled they'd be coming for it Monday morning and I wondered whether Dad remembered to take out our own trash. I looked over and saw something, and realized it was a foot poking out from behind. I ran over and looked and you were there.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Sleeping, it looked like, except your eyes were open. You were lying there, curled into a ball, arms wrapped tight round your chest. Your knees were scratched like you'd fallen over, and your shirt was buttoned up wrong. It was so quiet and I was so scared and I wanted to call out but I just couldn't. I was too frightened. I touched your face and it was so hot but very pale, and I thought maybe you'd had a fit or something, and I didn't know what I was going to do. Then you started to move. You closed your eyes and opened them again, and your face looked better, but you still looked strange. I kept asking you what was wrong but you wouldn't say anything, just kept moving your arms and legs slowly, like you were remembering how. Five minutes later you were sitting up and asking me why I'd been crying.’

‘And I had no idea why I was there?’

‘I asked you all the way over to the apartment, but you still looked far away, and all you would say was you were thirsty. I got you inside and your father was asleep and you went straight into the kitchen and drank one of those entire pitchers of Koolaid you used to like.’

‘I remember,’ I said. ‘Tropical Fruit.’

She shook her head. ‘I started to make some more, still half out of my mind wondering what was up with you, and I turned round and saw you'd gone into the living room and were sitting in front of the television like nothing had happened. I went and sat with you, and we watched a movie together, and after a little while it was like you came back properly and you were my son again. I didn't want to say anything then.’

‘I never said anything about what had happened?’

‘I didn't ask, Hap. I was worried about what kind of thing it might be, whether you could have met some bad man or something and what happened was so horrible you just didn't want to remember. I watched over you for a month, but you didn't seem upset, you were just the same, except if I tried to give you Tropical Fruit you wouldn't drink it. We swapped to Grape, and that was all right, and so I just let it be. I'm sorry, Hap.’

‘It's okay, Ma, it really is.’

‘Are you sure? Have you remembered what happened?’ Her hands twisted together, and I put one of mine on top of them.

‘No, but at least I'm sure now that something did. And it's not what you were worried about. I've just got some loose ends to tie up.’

‘You're in trouble, aren't you?’

‘Yes,’ I said, gratefully. ‘What's that? Maternal intuition?’

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘So don't you make fun. Also I talked to your grandmother a few days ago. Said she'd heard a rumour about something or other. She wouldn't say what, exactly, just hinted darkly. You know how she was.’

‘Still got an ear for gossip,’ I said.

‘I don't think there's much else to do where she is.’ As far as I'm aware, my mother has never been in the Net. Don't think she's likely to start now: and she thinks of it as some people used to think of heaven, or maybe of hell. ‘So she looks out for us. You should go visit her sometime.’

‘I will,’ I said, and meant it. As I always did. In the same way you mean to go visit someone when they're dying slowly in hospital, and when you never quite have the time until they're gone and there's nothing to see except an empty bed.

‘I won't ask you what trouble you're in,’ she said. ‘If you wanted us to know, you would have said. But I know it's there, just like I know you'd really like a cigarette about now but you won't smoke in front of me because you know I don't like it.’ I laughed, and we looked up and saw that my father was heading back down towards the pool, Helena walking beside him.

Mother looked at me sternly: ‘She part of it too?’

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘So what's she doing here?’

‘We ran into each other,’ I said. ‘She came along for the ride.’

The sternness went up a notch. ‘You going together again?’

I shook my head. ‘No. She's with someone else.’

‘Shame,’ my mother said. ‘She was the one.’

The four of us sat a little longer, but the sky was beginning to darken round the edges and it was time for us to go. We went back in via the office, and I helped my father with something on the computer, which made me feel better, made me think that I had some chance of paying backward, instead of just forward. The prospects for forward payment weren't looking great at the moment, unless you included working in a prison factory assembling products for multi-national corporations.

I looked at the paintings on the wall again, and instead of irritation felt something like pride. If that's the way you see the world, I thought, all the pastels and white spray and wheeling seabirds, good for you. Long may you look through that window. I only wish all of them gave the same view.

Out through the screen door and into the car park, the hired car lurking in magnificent isolation and saying ‘The real world awaits you, my friend, and it has a lot more stamina than you.’ I clapped Dad on the shoulder, and he kissed Helena on the cheek. Mother hugged me to her, and I faltered and then hugged her back. We're not a physical family. It's just not something that we usually do. But she held my head close to hers for a moment, and I let her, and before she disentangled and I went on to do what I had to do, she whispered something in my ear.

‘I don't care what she's told you,’ she said. ‘She's not with anyone else.’

Then we were apart, and when I looked back at her she was saying goodbye to Helena and I couldn't ask her what she meant.

School was long finished by the time I parked the car in front of the yard, and the last stragglers waiting for a ride were gone. I stood in front of the railings and looked across at the trees on the other side, wondering if there were still Black Knights to be discovered there, and whether anybody looked. I never found one when I was a kid. They always eluded me, no matter how much time I spent sitting up in the branches pretending I was just a large and surprisingly non-green clump of leaves. Earl let his go, in the end. One afternoon we just decided to open the box. It lumbered round the container for a while, evidently not realizing how much bigger its world had become – then took awkwardly to the air and careered off out of sight.

‘So what now?’ Helena asked. She'd been quiet on the short ride from Tradewinds, maybe mulling over my father's advice about how best to deal with flying ants.

‘We walk round it.’

‘Hap, I like a wander down memory lane as much as the next gal, but I wonder whether this is exactly the time for it.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It's exactly the time. And memory lane's just what it is. So walk it with me.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘I'm not sure.’ I had an idea, and it was growing in my mind. But it wasn't close enough yet for me to articulate it to myself, never mind anyone else. ‘Just trust me.’

And so we walked. I didn't know if this was going to work, just that it was the only thing I could try. It might have made sense to do it alone, replicate it exactly, but I figured I needed someone else there to make it real. Our own past always lives on, to some degree, within ourselves: we need the gaze of others to make it concrete. The light was about right by then, and it was the same time of year. We went the long way around, as I had about twenty-five years ago, and I told Helena what I could remember.

As we turned into the second side the lamps clicked on and I shivered, feeling suddenly younger, almost as if it was a walk back in time and at some point Helena would disappear, leaving just a small boy in shorts. I was aware of how much taller I was now, of the extra pounds I carried, the scar tissue. Everything I'd done felt like accretions around an earlier self, moss gathered by a stone whose progress was now slowing to a halt. I stopped for a moment as we turned into the long back straight, staring at the lamp in the distance.

Helena waited, knowing there was nothing she could say or do to help. I didn't get anything as we walked that stretch, even when we stopped to look in at the trees, closer now, only twenty yards from the corner.

But as we passed under the lamp I felt something, almost like a thickening in my head. The sensation was elusive, and slipped out of my fingers like a fish if I tried to concentrate on it. Blanking happens when you use a memory so many times that you wear it out, like rubbing a sheet of metal for so long and so often that it fades to nothing, and you can see right through it. Attempting to touch it again just makes things worse. You have to come at it from an angle, see it from the side, make the most of what is left. I tried, but couldn't capture it, and glanced at Helena, already shrugging.

Then it burst out of nowhere, like chrome gleaming at the torn edges of a car after a wreck:

I had turned and seen the man standing under the light. I started to run but then stopped, knowing I couldn't escape him. Strange I should have thought that, in retrospect. I was a fast kid, and could dart over fences and dodge like a chicken. He was closer suddenly, but the footsteps I could hear were not his, but mine, echoes of something which had already happened, as if things were being presented in the wrong order, and causality was breaking down.

Then he was right there, a yard away, looking down at me. I saw his face for the first time: it was not unkind, but it was not a usual face. ‘Quickly,’ he said. ‘Come.’

I saw six men approaching from the other side of the street, from where a silver car was parked. They were all dressed the same and all walked together, and they didn't look right. They didn't seem bad, it wasn't that, but I knew who I'd rather go with.

The man grabbed me by the arm and I let him drag me down the pavement, still staring back at the other men and wondering why they didn't run. They could have caught us if they wanted to, but they seemed to be getting slower instead, though their movements looked just the same.

I had to turn round again to keep from falling over, and I saw something weird was happening. The street was sparkling, like someone had turned on a million tiny spots of light embedded in the nicks in the tarmac road; and also strange lights in the sky, oddly shaped, moving. There were now two people ahead of us on the sidewalk, just standing, as if waiting for us to pass. They were motionless, but their bent shapes looked a little familiar. Then I realized who they were.

My grandparents, on my father's side, the ones who were already dead. As we got closer they started to move, like film cranking into motion: Nan smiled, and Grandad reached out towards me. I saw the hairs on the back of his hand, the distinctive pattern of liver spots, and looked up to see his eagle face, the few combed-back grey hairs.

Even at that age I knew that these were not mere images. They were actually there. I wasn't in the least afraid, though I would be if I saw the same thing now. I thought: ‘That's cool – I'll be able to tell Dad they're all right.’ And then we were past them, and everything was white. The world switched off like a light, and I was somewhere else. It wasn't that I couldn't remember what happened, more that it simply didn't exist. It was gone; it was different; it was somewhere else. The memory stopped there for good.

As it faded I saw a wipe pan of verdigris and ice, as if it was something I was passing on the way back to the present day. I heard a voice, and realized it was Deck's. He was talking quietly, reassuringly. I was afraid for a moment, twitchy, and I wanted a Kim. Most of all I wanted someone to come and either kill us or set us free.

Then I was standing on the corner of the school yard again, a little way from the lamp. I blinked and shivered, realized I was back in the real world, back in my time.

And that we weren't alone.

Helena was standing two yards away, gun trained steadily on a man standing in the glow of the light. I recognized him properly now. He looked the same as he had back then, and as he had in the diner and Hammond's study. He looked calm, unafraid, beyond every and any thing.

‘It's okay, Helena,’ I said. ‘He's one of us.’