Читать книгу Even - Nigel Barley - Страница 3

‘What’s the best way to get revenge on buzzards?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh go on,’ I urged. ‘Take a guess.’

Kevin sighed and frowned, twanged the Dan Dare buckle pensively on his elasticated belt. ‘I don’t know. Oh go on then. Tell me.’

I smirked triumphantly. ‘Glass eyes!’

All right, it’s not very funny. At ten years of age your sense of humour is not at its best. Bodily functions are a bottomless pit of mirth. The fact that every sport involves mention of “balls” is hilarious. And a plastic, fake boil that you can stick on your neck is the height of sophisticated wit. No, I mention the joke simply to show that even at that age I was concerned with living in a just universe.

It’s not just glass eyes that roll up from the depths when you’re in therapy. We are all like those ancient, scarred objects you see in the glass cases of museums, trivial but made portentous simply by having survived so many vicissitudes of life. There’s all kinds of stuff that comes out, as if you’d just lanced that boil. Rhodda, my therapist, has led me to a view of my mind as carefully constructing a secret plan, kept even from me, that explains my whole life. Once you see the plan, she says, you are free from it. Or maybe, I think cunningly, you can follow the plan better, make it explicit and focused, make it control simply everything. She is sitting, as always, in her box-like armchair, turned slightly to face me, sucking her pencil and taking the odd note. Behind herself, she has arranged white lilies in a glass vase like a 1950s TV announcer. Perhaps she has just been to a funeral and they gave all the guests a free bunch as they left. How I wonder about those notes. Why a pencil? To me, pencils imply provisionality, the need to change your mind. Does she sit up all night rubbing me out, revising me? Then, there’s the way she takes the notes. It reminds me of that scene with Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator where he is dictating not to a country but a typist. He produces a great, long sentence and, in response, she hits the keyboard just twice, then a single word that causes her to type furiously for thirty seconds.

‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this,’ I say, irritably. ‘I’m paying you to listen to my bad jokes.’ She has no sense of humour but that doesn’t matter. She once asked me what I did when I came to a fork in the road and I said, with my best boyish grin, that I picked it up as you could never have too many forks. She still doesn’t know what the hell I was talking about. But better a literalist than one hooked on iridescent metaphor. You wouldn’t want a guide dog with an overdeveloped sense of humour leading you through the traffic. That last sentence produces a near minute of writing. I know full well, of course, just why I’m telling her this, sitting here – dramatically reduced - on that great raft of a sofa, like some prop from Alice in Wonderland, my feet barely reaching to the floor. Therapy is a chance to talk endlessly about yourself but I have been doing this for months and have long run out of anything of interest to say. I’m boring even myself. What I thought would be a bursting cornucopia has turned out to be, at best, a half-filled cornetto. But she is a kind woman who wishes me well and I don’t want to disappoint her, eager to please. She is happiest when you can throw her some repetitive nugget of dysfunctional behaviour that she can laboriously point to, so, over the past few weeks, I have fed her “obsessive negative thoughts,” “catastrophic reasoning” and “low self-esteem” and she has gobbled them down like a dog eating toffees. Now she sucks her pencil and gives me a look like a goat looking over a fence.

‘When you say that, what picture comes into your mind?’ The picture of me going home. I look at the clock, the way I looked at the clock during those endless P.E. lessons in school where I deliberately ran into the vaulting horse every week, inviting the sneers of the master, for fear of landing astride it and doing myself and my heirs permanent damage.

‘I think of school,’ I say in a big, clear voice.

She nods wisely and makes a long, complicated note that involves her turning her head sideways, breathing the whole time ‘Aaaah!’ as if I have given myself away and she has scored a crucial bullseye.

‘We’re all scarred by school,’ she says in an irritating, consoling voice. ‘That’s what it’s for, to deliberately mark you for life but the consequences are mostly unforeseen. That’s why we keep coming back to it in these sessions. That’s why we have to work through these issues slowly, one by one, to undo the harm that’s been done. Pain minus acceptance equals suffering. Of course, you may have your own opinion. If you like, we could discuss it until you agree with me.’

‘But that’s unfair.’

She looks up and blinks her Dame Edna-ish glasses back up her nose. ‘Life,’ she says, ‘is unfair.’ Said with pursed lips and undue satisfaction. I see her draw a prim little line across the page, then a box, turning it into an epitaph. ‘And now, I’m afraid, our time is up.’

***

It took me a while to come up with my webname, wrathofgod.co.uk, a wholly-owned subsidiary of my holding company, Expanding Galactic Enterprises. At first I inclined towards Revenge!.co.uk, the most important part of that being the exclamation mark! Then SweetRevenge!.co.uk. But wrathofgod.co.uk it had become when I suddenly caught sight of myself, one late night, in a careworn pub mirror. The theological dimension was initially a problem. Perhaps it limited the range of my clientele and Rhodda would see it as a mark of paranoia - were I ever foolish enough to tell her about it - but it carried the pleasing idea of an implacable, personal force and I could see the commercial possibilities of it splashed across T-shirts and maybe, one day, even as an aftershave in embossed bottles with heavy-metal overtones. It would have been nice to hang the sign somewhere outside a glitzy office with an unsuitably youthful, plausibly blonde, receptionist who would droop languidly over my every word. I would make jokes. ‘The Invisible Man is in the outer office, Miss Brown? Tell him I can’t see him now.’ Or. ‘The Seven Dwarves are waiting outside? Tell them I will see them shortly.’ At which she would giggle and rub her rump on her chair and then... But no. For the moment, my corporate headquarters lay down the hall in the back bedroom, amongst the boxes of rejected memorabilia and back issues of discreditable magazines, just a short, grey-carpeted shuffle from all the comforts of home. I fired up the computer that rumbled and thwacked, then twittered in blue light. It has discothequish aspirations. Ping! I have mail.

How shall I explain the mission of wrathofgod ? Quite simply, it offers a vision of a more perfect reality and a corrective to the world of experience. Quite simply, it douses the fire of rage. It goes back to my objection to Rhodda about the unfairness of life. The modern world is full of suppressed rage, smouldering just under the surface, always ready to burst into flame. Ask anyone – but carefully. Life out there is crammed with resentful women, kids with an absurdly bloated sense of entitlement, terminally greedy OAPs and bosses who are trapped in the space between their own forward job plans and retrospective peer reviews. Expectations are raised but the bar is set ever higher, so that to have everything is no longer enough and we all go around feeling cheated. Some few of us blame ourselves and go into monasteries where we are further done over by the fat bastard who calls himself the abbot as we ruminate on the mystery of divine grace. The rest of us blame others but there’s nothing much we can do about it because of the way the world is set up. Wrathofgod.co.uk promises justice to the oppressed through revenge.

Now I hear you tutting in disapproval. But since you first learned to dribble and drool, you have been taught that revenge is bad, immature, something to be outgrown. How many films have you sat through where the hero finally gets the drop on evil incarnate and instead of blowing its head clean off, lowers the gun and delivers some tired little homily on the virtues of forgiveness or the rule of law? Instead of thinking about that, remember that moment at school where, incandescent with a rage that banished all fear, you finally took a swing at the class bully and punched him on the nose. Remember that delicious impact, the shock on every face, the delight of his dripping, malevolent blood that entirely consumed the interest of your opponent and that glorious moment of soaring triumph that roared in your ears and moved you beyond the reach of mundane reality - before fear of the consequences reared its ugly head again and you turned to flee in terror. Now, for £24.99 you can know that feeling again. For this modest fee, wrathofgod.co.uk can arrange for a beautifully wrapped dog turd to be delivered – fresh and neatly coiled in a box produced without use of child labour in Thailand - to the person of your choice – ex-girlfriend, boss, office rival, whatever. Despatch can be organised from any of 15 participating countries and the fee includes the option of an enclosed message, hand-written in copperplate. ‘I saw this and thought of you,’ is a solid but unimaginative favourite. Personally, I prefer something more intimate such as, ‘One day I will rub this in your face.’ There is nothing immature about any of this. Remember again that hymn they made you sing in school, ‘Hills of the north, rejoice!’ There’s a bit about ‘He comes to reign with boundless sway and makes your wastes his great highway.’ Revenge ancient and modern, recycling, semiotic use of excrement – the green dog turd. It’s all there. Imagine watching your target, how you will snigger to see their sweaty, puzzled discomfort as they take sudden stock of their relationships. See their pathetic attempts to snitch a sample of people’s handwriting, for comparison, without attracting attention, their wild-eyed surmise as they realise that someone out there really, really hates them. It can be an enriching and life-changing experience of deep therapeutic value.

If you check our website, under the animated logo of a Spike Milligan-type figure flicking out thunderbolts, you will see that we do other things of course. I wouldn’t want you getting the idea that dog turds were the limit of our activities. We can arrange for the delivery of a hundred pizzas, the arrival of the fire brigade, a simultaneous visit by the Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists and Holy Rainwater Outpouring Revivalists, even a raid by the vice squad but that’s all very pedestrian. A little more subtle is a slow-ticking letter of denunciation to the Revenue, an untraceable email address that emits insulting messages automatically around the clock both to the target and, under the target’s name, to others, a visit to your office by dancing Indian transvestites or your local Pest Control Officer with authorisation to search for and destroy bedbugs, or a legal warrant distraining upon your goods to be enforced by a bailiff for non-payment of a non-existent bill. Most of this is just about legal but I’m willing to cross the line, for my art, if I can be convinced that justice is being served. I don’t do public figures or members of the royal family – too high profile. And nothing even jokingly involving bombs, fake, real or stink. That’s a button you don’t want to press, believe me. It’s important to remain not worth the trouble of tracking down as far as the guardians of civilisation are concerned. A man, as Mr. Eastwood so correctly said, has to know his limitations.

In fact, I have only ever had one run-in with the law – as an infant, in the company of my joking partner, Kevin. Kevin had taken against a teaching assistant at our school on the not unreasonable grounds that she smelled. He determined to let down one of the tyres of her bicycle and I was a witness. The local policeman, who already knew Kevin’s family well in his professional capacity, decided that the teacher might well have had an accident which, purely theoretically, might have proved fatal. Kevin was charged with attempted murder and I, an eight-year old child who had watched someone letting down a bicycle tyre, was accused as an accomplice to attempted murder. Luckily, the headmistress was herself no shrinking violent and slapped some sense into the policeman but it showed me the enormous gulf that lies between mere law and true justice. I have never forgotten that lesson.

That particular day was not, at first sight, very challenging. Prepaid orders for two dog-turdings from abroad that I forwarded to our affiliates in France (bondieu.fr) and Germany (himmelarschundwolkenbruch.de) for action. But there, nesting in my inbox, was a request for a meeting from a new client who wanted a personal consultation. One of our more satisfying options is revenge-profiling. We try to produce a graduated, escalating programme of action against a target that meets the specific needs of a client and contains enough of a sense of poetic justice to be satisfying to myself. But, as the only point of contact between us and our public, these represent a fundamental chink in our armour that can be dangerous and have to be organised with care. I would have to get out the dressing-up box again.

***

The club was the wrong age, located somewhere near the plastic revelry of Covent Garden. You went downstairs into a black pit from an otherwise respectable shopfront that looked as if it should be selling handmuffs and bishops’ gaiters. I had first known it as an out-of-hours drinking club for world-weary journalists but it was many years since it had figured on the best cellars list. It was all muted thump, thump housey music as if someone was piledriving next door, with solitary teens standing around gyrating with their eyes closed - which seemed only sensible since they were being strafed and raked with randomly hostile lasers from the ceiling. I envied them their self-containment. Young people were all vegetarians or teetotal nowadays and sex was increasingly the next thing on their list of things to see through and give up. Why weren’t they at work or school or outside soliciting or sitting in a corner with a blanket over their heads, worrying about discovering the real them? On the street, lay bland late-afternoon sunlight with all the goodness sucked out of it and poisoned by traffic fumes but here the lights made the dusty air milkily visible like the water in a neglected aquarium. Convention seemed to require that patrons hold glasses of overpriced drinks in primary colours as an alibi but the real intoxicants lay elsewhere. In dark corners, some sort of furtive exchange of substances for cash was taking place below waist level, policed by black men with dancing eyes and empty faces who flitted between transactions and looked into space like bad TV actors. I had mistakenly opted for a long, swishy overcoat and hat, a sort of male version of Roy Strong, that was sweltering in the steamy club and I was anyway a good twenty years too old for this sort of place. She was there, as described – red hair, orange scarf, yellow handbag – conspicuous if not exactly colour-coordinated – also far too old for this place, sticking out like a sore bum, perched on one of a cluster of wobbly stools herded into one corner, a rock of ageism. I sat down beside her and coolly slid my card across – the one with Spike Milligan dispensing thunderbolts. It wasn’t easy. I have all sorts of cards in there. She peered at it, probably needing reading glasses.

‘You’re not quite what I expected.’ I let that ride. Closer up she had a crumpled, resentful air as though someone had just stepped on her. Mid-forties, thin bitter lips. No wedding ring. Darkness became her. Rhodda would see low self-esteem issues. This would not be about betrayed love, then, but about money. ‘This place was a bad idea. You should have chosen somewhere yourself.’ So now her rotten choice was my fault. I never chose the same place twice for a meet. It gave away too much information about where you lived and what you got up to on off nights. She had probably been married then, once, and acquired the ready instinct of shifting the blame. ‘It’s not really suitable. I haven’t been here for years and it’s changed. I thought you’d be bigger, a sort of bodyguard type.’ Life today was full of disappointments for her.

‘I didn’t even know these places were open at this time of day. As for the bodyguard stuff, most of what I do, I do with a keyboard. I’ve got great hands. Everyone says so.’ I spread them like a concert pianist.

She snorted sceptically and dug in her bag for a cigarette, like a squirrel scratching for nuts, looked up at the ‘No Smoking’ sign, back at the dope dealers and lit up anyway with a what-the-hell toss of the head and talked through her cigarette. ‘Let’s get down to business, Mr…er…God. I have a friend who has issues with her stepmother - at least that’s what she calls herself.’ I put rapt attention on my face like Rhodda in one of our sessions. Perhaps I would take notes. It was all therapy. In marketing, the first thing they tell you is that, whatever it is you’re selling – it is really all just satisfaction in many forms. ‘More exactly, the woman who married my…her father after her mother died. She stalked him, married him, drove him to an early grave and copped the lot. My friend had…reasonable expectations …but she saw to it that he cut her out, the bitch.’ Money, as I thought. There would be no “friend” of course but it was disquieting that a potential client began by declaring herself disinherited – therefore skint.

‘Divine justice can be pricey. It’s a serious matter. What exactly did you have in mind?’

She stuck out a weak chin and puffed pale smoke. There was too much powdery makeup on her face, like a fillet of fish freshly floured for the fryer. ‘The money’s not important. My friend has her own money. It’s the principle of the thing. Life’s been treating her stepmother too well. She’d like to see that stop. What she’d really like is to see her catch cancer and watch her die.’ The voice snapped and crackled and she looked at me evenly as though in small hope I might be a suitable infective agent. ‘I don’t suppose you actually offer to kill people?’

‘It’s not part of the normal service.’ She wasn’t the first to ask. It’s almost always women who do. I suppose men are used to DIY.

‘Too bad.’ She crushed out the cigarette. It, too, had failed her. ‘I’ve put together some information on the bitch to get you started.’ She pushed a couple of typed sheets of A4 across at me, a photograph stapled to the front. ‘I’ll send you an email in about a week, Mr. God, so we can meet again. By then, I would hope you would have some proposals for my friend to look at.’ She started gathering herself together, cigarettes, bag. An executive woman used to organising things, in a permanent professional huff, not wanting to waste time with me. I had noticed a few of my clients recently wanting to get away from my company. I made a note to change deodorant or at least my shirt. ‘I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that discretion is of the utmost importance at all times. A woman in my position has to be careful.’

‘What exactly is your position?’ She had signed her email ‘Ms. Ruth Less.’ Even I had detected a possible nom de plume in that. But if she was telling me who her mother-in-law was it seemed stupid not to tell me her own name.

‘I don’t think you need to know about that. It’s unprofessional. Just call me Ruth. There’s two hundred pounds stapled under the photograph. That should pay the price of your reading the brief.’ Oh dear. Access to office supplies, legal vocabulary – she was giving herself away. ‘Let me make myself clear, Mr…er…God. I want something really nasty from you, something my friend couldn’t come up with on her own and I assure you that’s pretty nasty.’

Now, here you have a problem I’m constantly stubbing my toe on. One of the difficulties of my particular line of work is that wronged people don’t necessarily have to come across as very nice themselves. This is important because we tend to think that niceness should be rewarded in a just world and nastiness punished, so that it overrides all those legalese arguments about right and wrong and takes priority. So now we have to ask whether their perceived nastiness comes from being constantly crapped upon by life or whether it is simply the result of their getting away with nastiness for years - crapper or crapee? She slung her bag over one shoulder, a very feminine gesture. I have never approved of men carrying shoulder bags. ‘I have to go. You’ll be hearing from me.’ And she was off. No handshake. Certainly no peck on the cheek.

I allowed thirty seconds and headed out after her. It always pays to know more about the client than they know about you or want you to know. It’s a crucial part of my deciding whether to act as their angel of revenge or not. She didn’t know it, of course, but she had not been interviewing me, I had been interviewing her and she had not done too well. I, too, have a little money of my own and I only take cases that fulfil my larger mission. She moved off quickly down the shaded street with little pecking, high-heeled steps and the sort of sinuous swaying that giraffes fall prey to when they try to run. In cities, people are walking faster and faster these days. Where once they ambled, they now trot and speed. But my car was parked a little to one side, so I managed to dump the Roy Strong outfit, grab some dark glasses from the dashboard and catch her up as she entered the Underground station. There was a business as she rooted in her bag for the ticket and I dodged past, behind a pretty girl with a broken-winged umbrella, and got ahead and into a nearly full lift, then had to loiter like a sex attacker at the entrance to the platform and pick her up again as the following one clanged open and disgorged its load. Two stops later, she got off and we trundled up the escalator together, across a couple of streets clogged with taxis and towards a datedly glassy building with a sculpture of tormented metal outside. Stein, Fistula and Feinschlong, Solicitors, were on the third floor. That’s where her lift stopped before coming down again - empty. The number of medals on the chest of the commissionaire on the desk said they were expensive solicitors. He was digging in his nostrils, plucking white hairs, having long since given up on those on his head, and holding them up to the light like a winetaster does the new Beaujolais. I pushed the plate glass doors open, walked in and slapped a tenner on the counter. It was a huge and beautiful counter, lovingly sculpted, veneered expensively in thuya wood and someone spent a lot of time polishing it - no sign of veneerial disease. Over my shoulder, the door-closer made a soft farting sound as the commissionaire stopped nose-plucking and looked at me suspiciously through bloodshot eyes, then down at the money and let his eyes linger restfully there.

‘The lady who just came in,’ I said. ‘She dropped this in the street. Perhaps you could return it to her.’

‘Mrs Phyllis Stein? Well, thank you sir.’ He rose tiredly from his chair, medals clinking like an old dog’s chain. Put one hairy paw on the money. ‘I’ll give it back to her at once. Did you wish to speak to the lady yourself?’

I put on the smile of someone a bit simple. ‘Oh no. I don’t know her. I just saw her drop it as she came in.’ He relaxed and grinned as I turned to the door, halo glowing. That cash would be going straight into his own pocket. Chances were I would never be back. If I was, there could always be some tale of slipped memory or misunderstanding.

‘Truly a pleasure, sir.’

***

I was not surprised to find a legal amongst my clients. They have all the injustice of the world rubbed daily in their faces, make a living by it, necessarily collaborate with it. In the long run, legals go the way of honest coppers. Either they come to regard the battle of good and evil as just a sort of computer game, as played by their children on their X-boxes, with no implications for reality, or they get a little vigilantist, correct the evidence here, adjust the course of a trial there, tweak a statement, change a plea. Year by year, the Met plant more stuff than Kew Gardens. It has always been my ambition, and would be my ultimate vindication, to humbly serve a judge. We could do a lot for each other.

The house I was watching was a big, fake-Georgian brick construction with a pointed roof, three windows on the first floor, a big door with lots of punctuation and brackets, flanked by two more on the ground floor. It was the way I drew a house when I was five years old and before architects started building houses that deliberately did not look the way houses are supposed to look. All the other houses on the street were different, fake-Elizabethan, fake-Edwardian, fake-Victorian but jacked up at about the same period by real but fairly quiet money. They were shaded by big, expensive trees – the sort you found in a real forest, not the leaves on a stick the council will pay for - and bordered by trim hedges and soft, confident lawns. Everywhere was well-maintained in white woodwork and they had a neighbourhood watch sign on the wall that warned of the presence of local busybodies. It was a very nice street, a street from the past, a memory of a bygone age when people used to have their initials embroidered in the corners of their handkerchiefs and the evening paper was delivered to the house. People planted flowers at the foot of the lampposts instead of just having dandelions. A man in a smart, grey suit came out of one up the slope of the hill and walked an unwilling Dalmatian up and down the grass verge, sighing and jerking its lead, encouraging its nose against walls and trees to unleash its bladder. His polka-dot tie exactly matched the Dalmatian. I wondered whether he had other dogs for other ties. It circled and dawdled, snuffled teasingly at a stand of lavender, cocked its leg but produced only a few drips before sneezing and pulling him ever further down towards me. Finally, it jerked up a leg against my rear wheel and gushed at length as the man mouthed apologies, like a goldfish through glass, and the dog sneered at me in the wing mirror. I had been sitting there since seven, early enough to catch any flitting fornicators coming out of Elaine Fromsett’s house before the more dutiful grind of the day. No fornicators. The upstairs curtains had not been drawn back until nine o’ clock. Shortly after that a van had pulled up outside, marked ‘South-East Gas,’ and two charmless, fat men had sat in it for twenty minutes, reading a tabloid and eating what looked like greasy bacon sandwiches, before driving up to the door and banging on it with every sign of boredom and weariness. They laboured reluctantly, doing something involving carrying the same length of copper pipe in and out of the house several times then closed up the van doors and drove away yawning. I waited for ten minutes and got out of the car. The rear wheel was drying off nicely. Then there was a bang overhead and the rain came teeming down. I took a clipboard off the back seat, ran up to the door, holding it over my head, and rang the bell that the gasfitters had disdained. Closer to the house, lush rose bushes were arranged in clumps, each rose bloom heavy with fat, pink petals like lips. The rain tumbled off them like water off lipstick. Raining cats and dogs, lovely weather for ducks.

Elaine Fromsett was wearing a flowered housecoat and a bright smile but looking a good deal older than in the picture Ruth Less had supplied. The hair was edged with blue and in one of those symmetrical, waved styles, framing the temples, favoured by the Queen and George III. I flashed my library card at her.

‘South-East Gas, Consumer Aftercare,’ I intoned, pointing my rainsoaked pencil purposefully. ‘I wonder if I might speak to the man of the house?’ Try that line nowadays and in ninety percent of houses you will get a faceful of feminism for your trouble – even from the men. That’s just the way it is. Elaine was not to be so easily provoked. She was old school.

‘I’m afraid there is no man,’ she fluttered, hand to beating heart. ‘My husband is dead.’

‘My apologies, madam. I understand you have just had some work done by us?’ She nodded. ‘I wonder if I might enquire the nature of the work.’ I made a stiff, imaginary tick on my clipboard.

She looked blank. ‘I think they said it was something to do with re-adjusting the supply feed valve synchronisation with the calibrated input manifold of the optimal pressure-reduction unit.’

‘Could you be more specific?’

‘I’m afraid I’m not entirely sure. I’m not very technical, you see, dear. Would you like to look at the work manifest? You’d better come in.’ She bustled off, leaving me to close the door and stand in the hall where a big barometer helpfully warned me to expect rain and a hollow elephant’s leg offered me a choice of worn umbrellas to deal with the problem. She called over one shoulder. ‘Go into the lounge and sit down, you poor man. Would you like a cup of tea? It’s such a horrible day, as cold as an unloved pussy.’ There wasn’t a whole lot I could say to that so I went through into a big, light room with pale blue furniture and a thick, grey carpet that sucked at my feet and smelled delicately of lavender. From a Georgian side table, photos of a distinguished gent with impressive, grey hair smirked in embarrassment as though- Gosh! - modestly unused to having his picture taken. A three-pipes-a-day sort of chap. On the plush sofa, a cat stopped licking its backside and stared at me in astonishment across a cocked and shapely tabby thigh. If only women could master that pose. Then it struck me that there was something odd about that cat, apart from its flirty look. It only had three legs. Another furry friend hopped across and looked up at me, its front leg encased in plaster and one ear missing. Everywhere were cats, incomplete cats, all staring at me with gimlet eyes. Multiple cat ownership is always associated, in my mind, with the stench of pee, sagging drawers and poverty, like an old folks’ home but this was something entirely different. Synchronisation is one of the odd facts of Nature. Fireflies, all over the world, flash exactly together. When people are walking side-by-side they unconsciously fall into step. Women of polygynous households slowly converge in their menstrual cycles – showing that males are lying about one of the principal excuses used to justify the harem. And cats – I now discovered for the first time – purr in phase when gathered together as if under the baton of a feline conductor. I have always liked cats, rational, self-contained creatures that permit only a limited and negotiated intimacy but are capable of radiating a deep sense of happiness like none other. I remembered from somewhere that a householder is legally responsible for the behaviour of his dog but even a domesticated cat is considered, under law, a wild beast and a free spirit and answerable only to itself. It is curious that the effects of purring and snoring – to which it bears such a close superficial resemblance – are so very different. The room was like a hypnotic chainsaw of free-spirited content. Mrs. Fromsett came in with soft steps, waving the manifest in one hand and bearing a cup and saucer in the other.

‘Have you met my little menagerie? I’m afraid I’ve got rather a lot of them, dear. You see, I give a loving home to wounded and abused pussies. If I don’t take them in, they put them down, you see, and there’s so much love left in them that we can’t have that, can we? My, you’re very young to have such a responsible position.’

Twenty minutes later I had two cats in my lap, the story of her childhood in Devon, her early life as a terrier-breeder’s daughter – destroyed by distemper - her husband’s demise – destroyed by dementia - the end of her relationship with her stepdaughter – destroyed by bad temper - her email address, bank account number and sort code and three jammy dodgers eaten off a real lace doilie. When did I last see a doilie? I liked her. More, I loved her. I wanted to adopt her as my mum and I had just donated twenty pounds to her favourite cat charity.

***

It was official. A retired policeman in Surrey had secured Elaine Fromsett’s DVLR printout and carried out a thorough Criminal Records search under her name. Nothing. No driving under the influence of indecent exposure. Our affiliates in India, where her bank outsourced its IT, had emailed a detailed copy of her current bank account. She lived a totally blameless life that would have made Mother Teresa look like an egocentric slapper, and probably only left her house to kiss babies in the street. Regular payments from the account included membership of the RSPCA and a charity that cured blindness in the Third World. She maintained a small but honest credit but, as I ran my finger down the column of figures, one thing stood out. She had been overcharged by South-East Gas by the sum of three hundred pounds more than the amount on the manifest, as attested by one, Wayne Biscotti, certified gas fitter. Clearly, Wayne and the other cowboys were violating the sacred oath that binds all gas-fitters and running a scam on little old ladies. When she received her own copy of the statement, in a few days’ time, Elaine Fromsett would scrupulously recycle it, but without carefully checking every payment. I sighed. Anonymity is important to my mission but sometimes risks must be taken. Three hundred pounds buys a lot of cat food in a hungry, feline-filled world. I hacked into the sloppy South-East Gas website, sent Mrs Fromsett a weasel-worded email from the head of security explaining what had happened, how the scam had been done, an offer of compensation and suggestions on how to best initiate criminal proceedings. That should be enough to get her money back when she presented it all to puzzled employees of the utility company but I knew in my heart that any investigation would be slapdash and superficial and that it would probably conclude that any irregularity was all due to the mysterious but phoney Customer Aftercare representative who had called on her that day and not Wayne Biscotti and his sidekick.

***

I drank tea, doubtless out of solidarity with Elaine Fromsett. In her own unconscious symbolism, Ruth Less drank black and bitter coffee without grounds or added sweetness. Her eyes were little pools of acid hate. She stirred. ‘Let me get this right. What you’re saying is that you have come up with precisely nothing, despite the fee I paid. Moreover, you now presume to judge me and my friend and, not only do you refuse our commission, you outrageously presume to warn her off from further protecting her own interests in this matter. Who do you think you are, Superman, using your powers only for good?’ The coffee house was crowded. It was a place of Italianate pretensions and Ukrainian waitresses where it seemed to take the staff about fifteen minutes to drain each cup of coffee from the death rattle of the Gaggia machine and then it tasted just like instant.

I couldn’t really argue with any of her summation. ‘That’s pretty much it. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.’ I took a Scottish shortbread from its cellophane sheath, crumbled it eloquently and sucked down the crumbs. ‘I warned you at the start that this was about justice, Mrs.Stein, and likely to prove costly.’

She started at the use of her name. ‘How did you..?’

‘I might return the fee but there have been expenses or you might perhaps prefer to view it as a fine levied on your bad attitude.’ She began sputtering in her coffee like a drowning woman doing an impression of a Gaggia.

‘You don’t want me for an enemy,’ she hissed or perhaps it was the milk-steamer.

‘Well, we don’t have to get into a fist fight about it but if I’m the most scary form of revenge you can find, then I really have no reason to be frightened of you, have I? Then again, the Law Society have some quite demanding ethical rules and regulations – admittedly far from universally applied – but I suspect that someone who cuts corners in her private affairs very probably does so in professional matters too and wouldn’t want any close scrutiny.’ I could see that one went home. There was a bit more hollering and posturing of course – insults rained down upon my poor mother, my face and my genitals and then we were done. I left enough to pay for my tea and half a judicious tip and then I adjusted my false moustache and left, ducking round a woman with a backside of tragic proportions to block off pursuit. I took particular care to make sure I was not followed and headed home. I must cut down on facial interactions. Any job that involves contact with members of the public is so draining.

***

‘And then there is the matter of your appearance,’ Rhodda is saying. ‘Every time I see you, you look different.’ She looks down at her notes. ‘I see that for our last session you were blond and had a beard and dressed like a scruffy hippy. Low self-esteem minus doubt equals affirmation of self.’ So that’s the sort of stuff she writes down.

‘No one says “hippy” any more. Anyway, I would have given my jeans another quick once-over with the iron but you keep saying I shouldn’t re-press anything.’

She ignores that. ‘Today you are red-haired, clean-shaven and every inch the city gent.’ Beneath the notes, her lap looks forlornly empty. Perhaps she needs one of Mrs. Fromsett’s asymmetric cats to complete her. The light glints evilly off her glasses. ‘It’s absolutely classic. You can’t desperately run away from yourself like this by adopting a series of disguises. Whenever you look in the mirror, it’s still going to be you. You must see who you are and embrace it. It’s the only way to find the peace of mind you claim you are looking for.’ She, on the other hand, always looks exactly the same. I diagnose this as an attempt to claim invariance and objectivity, to deny the see-sawing of these unsatisfactory sessions.

‘There are good reasons for all that. How do you know I don’t work for MI6 or maybe there are a dozen people out there waiting to slap paternity orders on me?’

For a moment, I think she is about to throw her pencil at me, then she sighs and pulls down the hem of her tweed skirt. That must be really itchy against her legs. I become aware of how much black sock I am showing and uncross my legs to ease my trousers down from the knee.

‘Do you sometimes think that people are spying on you, reading your mail, intercepting your telephone calls? Do you think people are plotting against you at home or at work? I’m not sure I believe your denials. These are deep issues and we shall have to work our way to a resolution of them but it strikes me as significant that you immediately link identity and paternity. I would suggest that’s strongly diagnostic. Does the absence of the one imply the absence of the other to you? Do you see having children as the only way to attain adulthood and stability of self? It’s not uncommon in men of your age. Or women either.’ Said a little sadly. She’s broody, pining, poor thing. An incomplete cat would be a good idea. It would fill in the blank. She doesn’t want to say any more but she can’t help herself. ‘Then there’s the matter of your leg.’

I’m not sensitive about my legs but the left is slightly shorter than the right or maybe the right is longer than the left. Without corrective shoes, it gives me a limp. Like the Labour Party, I naturally lean, just a little, to the left. Apparently, in such cases, it is normal for the right to be shorter than the left so, even in my asymmetry, I am a deviant. With the shoes, it’s virtually undetectable, my first disguise then.

‘Ultimately, it’s all part of the fear of death that is natural to our human condition.’ A shadow flits across her face and I am momentarily startled until I realise it is just that. The sun, through the curtains, has ducked behind a cloud. ‘Your absurd dressing-up is just like an inversion of those hooligans who go round scribbling their names on Underground trains. You are claiming different identities to hide in.’

Meaning what? That all those babies tumbled from the ready wombs of the world are really just splodges of graffiti executed, not with spray cans but the nozzles of erect penes? ‘Do I fear death? I would say I never think about it.’ The funereal lilies over her shoulder mock me. They have started to turn black and sweaty from the inside, like the face of a corpse decaying from within, the bugs bursting through the membranes of the digestive system and turning their own container to sludge.

She pounces triumphantly. ‘Then I would suggest you should think about it. Does the idea of your own impending and unpredictable mortality bother you? I’m afraid our time is up.’

***