“I’m talking,” Tim said, “about the fact that you’re getting married, having decided— I s’pose— that taking it up the shoot from a bloke got you what you’d wanted from the first and now that you have it, you’re ready to move on. You reckoned the farm is a good enough payment for what you had to do to get it, so you can bring on the wife and the kiddies now. Only, of course, there’s the problem of me and what I might say in front of the wife and in front of the parents, like ‘What about you and blokes, Kaveh? What about you and my dad? Why’d you change over to ladies, then? Arsehole getting stretched out of shape or something?’”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kaveh said. He glanced over his shoulder at the coming traffic. He signaled his intention to rejoin the stream of cars.
“I’m talking about you taking it from my dad,” Tim said. “Up the arse, night after night. You think some woman’s going to want to marry you if she knows what you’ve been up to, Kaveh?”
“‘Night after night,’” Kaveh said, his brow furrowing. “‘Taking it’ from your dad. What are you talking about, Tim?” He began to move the car to the edge of the lay-by.
Tim reached over and killed the engine with a twist of the key. “You and my dad fucking each other,” Tim said. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
Kaveh’s jaw actually dropped. “Fucking… What’s wrong with your head? What’ve you been thinking? That your father and I…?” Kaveh made an adjustment to his seat, as if with the intention of settling in for a proper natter with Tim. He went on. “Your father was dear to me, Tim, a close and dear friend. I held him in the highest esteem, and we loved each other as close friends do. But that there might have been more than that… That he and I were… Are you thinking we were homosexual lovers? How could you have come to think that? I had a room in his house, only as his lodger. You know that.”
Tim stared at the man. His face was perfectly serious. He was lying with such skill and such grace that for a moment Tim could actually almost quite nearly be poised on the edge of believing that everyone including himself had been completely wrong about Kaveh and about Tim’s father and most of all about what they’d been to each other. Except Tim had been there the night his father had declared his love for Kaveh Mehran in front of his wife and his children. And Tim had seen his father with Kaveh. So he knew the truth.
“I watched you,” he said. “Through the door. Didn’t know that, did you? Makes your situation a bit different, doesn’t it? You up on your hands and knees and Dad giving it to you in the arse and both of you liking it just fine. I watched you. Okay? I watched you.”
Kaveh looked away from him for a moment. Then he sighed. Tim thought he was going to say something along the lines of being caught out and Tim needing to keep mum on the subject round Kaveh’s family please. But Kaveh, it seemed, was full of surprises. He brought out another for Tim’s entertainment. He said, “I used to have the same sort of dreams when I was your age. They’re very real, aren’t they? They’re called waking dreams. They generally happen at the moment your body is making the transition from waking to sleeping and they seem so real that one actually thinks what’s happening in them is life itself. People believe all sorts of things because of waking dreams: they’ve been abducted by aliens, they’ve seen someone in the bedroom with them, they’ve had a sexual experience with a parent or a teacher or even a mate, and on and on. But all the time they’re merely asleep. As you were, of course, when you saw what you think you saw between your father and myself.”
Tim’s eyes widened. He wet his lips to respond but Kaveh went first.
“The fact that what you dreamed you saw between us was sexual in nature comes from the age you are, Tim. At fourteen a boy is all hormones and desire. And this is due to how his body’s changing. He has dreams of sex, often. Often he ejaculates during them. And this could be— and probably is— an embarrassment to him if no one has explained it’s perfectly normal. Your dad did explain this, didn’t he? He ought to have done. Or perhaps your mum?”
Tim’s next breath felt like a stab, not only in the lungs but in the brain and right to the centre of who he knew he was and not to the centre of whoever Kaveh was making him out to be. He said, “You fucking liar,” and to his horror, he felt tears rising and God how he knew that Kaveh would use them. He could even see the endgame now, how it would all play out no matter which way he turned or what he threatened or what, indeed, he said to anyone, but especially what he said or might say to Kaveh’s parents and his intended bride.
And there was no one else to tell those people the truth about Kaveh. No one would be motivated to do it, and even if that were not the case, Kaveh’s relations would themselves not be the least motivated to believe what strangers reported to them without a shred of proof. Plus, Kaveh was the consummate liar, wasn’t he. He was the consummate con man and the consummate player in the chess game of life. Tim could speak the truth, he could rant, he could rail. Kaveh would know how to twist his words.
You must excuse young Tim, Kaveh would declare solemnly. You must not worry what he says and does. He goes to a special school, you know, for children who are disturbed in one way or another. There are times when he makes claims, when he does things… He ripped his little sister’s favourite doll to pieces, for example, and just the other day or week or month or whatever I found him trying to kill the ducks in the village stream.
And people would believe him, of course. First, because people always believed what they wanted and needed to believe. Second, because every bloody word he said would be the truth. It was as if Kaveh had planned his whole game from the first, the very moment he locked eyes on Tim’s dad.
Tim reached for the handle of the door. He grabbed up his rucksack and jerked the door open.
“What are you doing?” Kaveh demanded. “Stay in the car. You’re going to school.”
“And you’re going to hell,” Tim said. He leaped out and slammed the car door behind him.
VICTORIA
LONDON
Raul Montenegro certainly wasn’t a dead end, Barbara Havers concluded. An hour or more of following various links connected to his name could easily have gleaned her half a ream of paper eaten up with printing stories about the bloke, so she tried to be selective. It was all in Spanish, but there were enough words similar to English for Barbara to be able to make out that Montenegro was a very big nob in industry and the industry in which he operated had something to do with natural gas in Mexico. From this she concluded that somehow Alatea Fairclough, neé Alatea Vasquez y del Torres, had got herself from Argentina to Mexico for reasons that remained unclear. She had moved herself either from a town still unknown to Barbara or, what was more likely considering the reaction of the woman to whom Barbara had attempted to speak in Argentina, she’d disappeared from Santa Maria de la Cruz, de los Angeles, y de los Santos. There, perhaps, she had lived as a member of the mayor’s extended family as a niece or a cousin or, equally perhaps and probably more likely, she had been married to one of his five sons. At least that would explain all the excited quiens and dondes Barbara had heard on the other end of the line when she’d managed to get someone within the mayor’s house to speak to her. Had Alatea done a runner from her marriage to one of the sons of the mayor, that son of the mayor might well like to know where she’d ended up. Especially, Barbara thought, if he and Alatea were still legally married.