“What?” Stuart asked.
Mick didn’t reply. He got out of the car and walked away. As he left Stuart and the car behind he heard a grinding of gears and a wild revving of the engine. It occurred to him that Stuart might be drunk enough to kill himself on the way home. If that was what fate wanted it was fine by him. He walked for a few minutes before admitting to himself what he’d known all along, that he was as lost as ever. He would have asked for directions but there was nobody on the street. Then, as he looked round, a black cab appeared out of nowhere. Mick heard himself shouting, “Taxi” and he ran after the cab as it stopped twenty yards up ahead of him. He heaved the door open and threw himself into the back.
“I want Park Lane,” he said, and he was about to launch into an explanation about which of the many Park Lanes of London he wanted. But the driver said, “Is that Park Lane, Hackney?” and Mick gratefully said it was.
“Yeah,” the driver said as they moved off. “I didn’t think you looked the type for the Park Lane.”
BACKERS
Stuart drove home, no longer feeling either drunk or celebratory or, for that matter, suicidal. The day’s expedition had been lurid, almost hallucinatory, and already some of the events were starting to slip away from him, their texture becoming more muted and mundane. If pressed he could not, have proved that any of it had really happened. It was all behind him. The mugging, the stranger, the gun, the botched suicide attempt; they were all gone and had left no trace.
The traffic wasn’t heavy. In fact Stuart thought that London traffic was never quite as terrible as people liked to pretend. By asserting that driving in London was a sort of hell people were allowed to feel that their own driving was brave and heroic. Stuart did not feel even remotely heroic. He felt like a buffoon and a bungler. The attempt at suicide had been laughable as well as futile. Fate had indeed let him down. But why had he needed fate at all? Why this desire to be passive? Why couldn’t he have found a high place and taken the matter into his own hands? It no longer seemed to be simply a matter of cowardice. Indeed, if he was keen enough or brave enough he could still do the deed right now, but he knew he wouldn’t.
Another problem then occurred to him. Was he going to record the day’s events, the day’s walk, in his diary? If he did, he would completely destroy his plan to leave a great unfinished work. He had imagined a printed text that would end abruptly and there would need to be some editorial insertion, a scholarly note about the exact circumstances of his death. Now he was in a position to write the final page himself, a page that was much more trashy, much less monumental than he’d wanted. But having survived the rough, confused, shambling events, he felt totally unequipped for transforming them into a diary entry.
He drove on and was home sooner than he wanted to be. As he parked the car he looked up at the house and saw that some of the lights were on. That was strange. Anita should have been at work, and he was pretty sure he’d turned everything off when he’d gone out. Still, a little wasted electricity didn’t seem worth worrying about.
He entered the house and shouted hello in case Anita was in. He thought his voice sounded perfectly normal and steady. He thought there was nothing in his demeanour that betrayed what he’d been through that day. The house was silent and nobody returned his greeting, but he wandered through the ground floor, and saw Anita’s coat and bag cast aside in the kitchen. He saw signs of coffee having been made, but he still heard nothing and he had to go up to the spare bedroom, the one they used as a home office, before he found her. She was sitting in the swivel chair, but she had it turned away from the desk and was reading a sheaf of loose pages. The computer screen was illuminated and the printer had recently been used.
“Didn’t you hear me come in?” he asked.
“I was engrossed,” she said.
“Did you decide to work at home?”
“Yes. Did you?”
“Yes.”
On any normal day he would have left it like that, gone downstairs and found himself something to do. But he wasn’t feeling back to normal yet. In fact he was feeling unexpectedly warm towards Anita. He knew that she had been spared. If there had been a bullet in that gun, then instead of dealing with paperwork in the spare bedroom she would now be dealing with the news that her husband had blown his brains out. He couldn’t quite conjure up a scene of Dickensian woe and grief but he still felt glad not to be putting her through such an ordeal. She may have been Boadicea to the staff but she could still be a soft, vulnerable thing in his eyes. He wanted to be with her, to stay in the room with her for a while and talk.
“What are you reading?” he asked.
“I’m reading your diary,” she replied nonchalandy.
It took a moment for him to understand what she’d said, but then he looked at the screen and recognized his own words there. Anita had found his disk, and the sheaf of papers she was holding was the print-out. Well, yes, that was all part of the plan. The disk was meant to be found, but not yet. It was intended to be a posthumous discovery. He felt as though he had been punched in the stomach, as though he was falling down a mine shaft.
“It’s not really a diary,” he said hastily and awkwardly. “It’s just sort of research I was doing for the business.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Anita. “What possible use could the business make of knowing that a woman in Archway asked you to define the seven-year itch?”
Stuart launched into a number of rapidly abandoned explanations before felling into a judicious silence. He wondered how long Anita had been there, how much she’d read, how many of his secrets she knew.
“I can explain,” he said, and he tried to, he really did. He tried to tell her about his desire for knowledge, for completion and ultimately for obliteration, and Anita listened politely though not with great interest. When he could think of no more to say he picked up one or two of the printed pages, looked at her imploringly and said, “You believe me, don’t you?”
“There should be more of it,” she replied.
For one joyous moment he heard this as a sentence of praise, as though she loved what he had written, and he was starting to say thank you before he realized that the expression on Anita’s face wasn’t compatible with a demand for more of his prose.
“What I mean,” she said, “is that if you’ve really been walking ten miles a day, five days a week, and if you’ve now finished, having covered eight and a half thousand miles or so, then there should be a hell of a lot more than this. There would be at least three and a half years’ worth of diary here, probably much more. There should be thousands of pages.”
“Not necessarily,” he insisted. “There were lots of streets I had nothing to say about. There was no point forcing an observation. In those cases all I did was mark the street in the A — Z”
“Ah, yes,” she said. “The famous A — Z.”
Stuart now realized that the blackened A — Z was bulging in his pocket. Anita put out her hand for it and he meekly passed it over. She looked at the pages with even less curiosity than Mick had displayed, and when she was done with it she dropped it on the floor like a discarded banana skin.
“Yes,” said Anita, “the A — Z is a nice touch but it’s hardly proof of anything is it? Any fool can sit down with a map and pen and black in streets.”
“Any fool can, but I didn’t,” he said. He was sounding a little desperate now, a little panicked. He added, “Anyway, you’ve only got one disk. There are others.”