But if it wasn’t, if I really had done it, what could I do?
I felt sick. I felt really sick. My head was spinning, I was getting the tunnel vision thing. Roaring in ears. I got up and stumbled to the loo.
Ten minutes later, still getting the occasional dry heave, my throat raw, my mouth vile despite the mouthwash, my teeth with that stripped stickiness that comes from having recently been bathed in stomach acid, I sat back at the living-room desk and tried the mobile again. My face had still been white in the mirror. My hands were shaking uncontrollably. I had to rest the mobile on my lap so that I could hit the right buttons. I started crying with the awkwardness and the hopelessness of it all.
The little phone buzzed awake on my thigh. It only had a single bar of battery capacity showing but that was all I’d need. Just keep going for a minute or two, you little piece of shit; you could have fucking died on me last night before I made the call that might get me tortured and killed and my beloved too, you silvery be-buttoned turd. Yes, I know you’re fucking Searching… Just fucking stop it and get on with it. Menu; Phone Book, OK, Voice Dialling, Personal Numbers, Last Ten Calls. My mouth went dry. OK. Last Calls Made. Select? OK.
Here we go.
I stared at the number. I jumped up and got my wallet, where Merrial’s card still was. I checked one number against the other. I checked again and again, willing one, just one, just one lousy single fucking little digit to be different. For fuck’s sake, it wouldn’t have been difficult to make a mistake; I made mistakes all the time. Even when I’m sober. Constantly. Just this one time let this be a mistake.
Call? said the little bit of script at the bottom of the screen. No. No, I don’t fucking want to call it again, you worthless stupid piece of crap. I want to Undo. I want to press F1 or go to the relevant menu with a mouse arrow and Undo, totally fucking Undo what I did last night, rewind the tape, oh yes, wipe the chip, reformat the disk, rewind that fucking little deadly tape or whatever the hell it was sitting in a house less than a mile away from here, rewind and erase. Better still, take it out and fucking burn it and mash the ashes into a fine paste and flush it all down a waste disposal unit somewhere in Outer fucking Mongolia.
I read the numbers out from the phone’s screen, comparing them to the numbers on Merrial’s card. They were identical. They weren’t going to change now. I closed the phone.
Maybe he wouldn’t guess who it was. I’d said it was Ken, I remembered that – I thought – but maybe he wouldn’t think to link that drunken Ken with the guy he’d met once in the courtyard of Somerset House… Oh, shit, what was I thinking of? I’d said Naughty Ken or something equally pathetic and incriminating, hadn’t I? Or had I?
It didn’t matter; I was a fucking radio DJ; I was proud I had a distinctive voice. Even if Merrial didn’t ever listen to the show and had missed my high TV and radio presence over the last few weeks or never heard an ad with my voiceover, somebody he knew would recognise me. And anyway, I didn’t bar my mobile number; his answering machine would have remembered the number, the way they all did, didn’t they? Or maybe his didn’t; maybe Merrial was one of those Early Adopters and he had a really old machine he’d never got round to replacing and it didn’t keep a note of the incoming numbers.
Yeah, right.
But even if he had the number, how would he know it was mine? I hadn’t given him my number, he couldn’t… Yes, and of course as a big crime lord he’d have absolutely no way of finding who a mobile number belonged to. Of course he would.
I know! I thought. He owed me a favour. Merrial; he’d said to call him if there was ever a favour he could do for me. I’d phone and phone and phone until I got an answer, or go over there and slip a note through the door, ask him to just not listen to his messages, as a favour to me; just trust me. Heavens, yes, that was bound to work. And OJ was innocent and al-Megrahi was guilty.
Phone now! I thought. Of course! Phone now and find out if the fucking answering machine was still switched on. Why hadn’t I thought of that first? Because I was still drunk, hung-over and panicking under the influence of the most catastrophically fuckwittish mistake ever made in the long history of catastrophically fuckwittish mistakes.
I reached for the land-line. Oh fuck, what if he answered? What if he said something like, Ah, Kenneth, you again. I received your earlier message. Very interesting. I’ve just sent some of my colleagues round to your place to invite you for a little chat…
Oh fuck, oh fuck.
I took three attempts to press the number into the phone, my hands were shaking so much.
Ceel’s voice, recorded. Her beautiful, clear, calm, perfect voice. Leave a message after the tone… then a series of beeps signifying the message or messages already left – mine! mine was there, that dirty, drunken, rambling shite being spooled past right now! – then the beep. I didn’t leave another message. I put the phone down. So – probably – nobody had listened to the message. The worst had not yet happened. Unless, of course, Merrial was being clever and only pretending that he hadn’t listened… but that was even more paranoid than reality demanded, and fuck knew that was bad enough.
Maybe I could sort of half own up. I could say I’d become obsessed with Celia after seeing her on the ice that day. I was living out this fantasy where we were lovers, stalking her… No. No, he’d still do something horrible to me, just for that, and more likely he’d want to check that nothing had been going on, so he’d still have me tortured to get at the truth. And I had no illusions about my ability to hold out under severe pain, not for Ceel, not for myself, not for anybody.
My palms were very sweaty. My mouth was so dry I couldn’t swallow. I got up unsteadily and went to the kitchen for some bottled water. The land-line phone rang on the second swallow, and I sprayed water over the carpet.
‘Yes?’
‘Kenneth?’ It was her. Thank fuck. Her; still alive, still not screaming in agony, still able to talk; now able to talk. ‘What’s wrong?’
I told her. In all my life – and there might not be much more of it to come – I had never known anybody stay so calm in the face of a disaster as utter and unmitigated. She had every right to scream and cry and bawl, but she just asked a couple of sensible, measured questions to clear up some of the holes I’d left in my semi-hysterical account of what had happened. Then I heard her sigh. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Well, I’m in Scotland, staying with some friends near Inverness. John is caving in the Peak District. He’s due back tonight or tomorrow.’
‘Tonight? Oh, Jesus Christ.’
‘Depends on the weather; if there’s been too much rain the system will be flooded and they won’t be able to do much. It was touch and go, last I heard.’
I ran a hand over my face. ‘Can you access the messages on your answering machine from outside, from a different phone?’
‘No. John specifically did not want one which could do that, in case somebody else found out how to access it.’
‘Okay, okay, well, that gives us until he gets home, at least.’ I closed my eyes and stood there shaking my head. ‘Oh, Ceel, I am so, so sorry. I can’t, I just can’t begin to tell you-’
‘Kenneth, stop. We have to think. Right. Bien. I can claim an emergency and ask to be run straight back to the airport. I’ll get on the next flight. I can get home before him, wipe the tape.’
‘Oh, please, yes; please, please.’
‘I’d better let my hosts know.’ I heard her exhale. ‘This should be interesting. I’ll call you back as soon as I know what’s happening. ’
‘Ceel?’
‘What?’
‘I love you.’
This time it was an in-taken breath. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Well. Talk to you soon.’