I had forgotten I was still here. ‘Just into thin air?’
‘No! Onto a Number 36 bus. Off he went.’
‘But I thought that you’d already met Prof—’
Something flew into the window and thwacked. It fell before I saw what it was. A pigeon? Roy came running in trembling, with tears in his eyes. ‘Oh, Jeez, Alfred. I just had a phone call from Morris.’
Was I in a tragedy or a farce?
‘Calm down, Roy, Calm down. I’ve just been telling Marco about my double.’ Alfred lit his pipe. ‘Now, is this Morris Major or Morris Minor?’
‘Morris Major, from Cambridge. Jerome’s been killed!’
Alfred’s fingers forgot his pipe. His voice fell to a croak. ‘Jerome? But he’d been granted immunity.’
‘Morris says the ministry are blaming Petersburg gangsters. They said Jerome had got mixed up in some sort of art theft.’
‘Impossible!’ Alfred banged on the table hard enough to stave elderly fingers. ‘It’s a cover-up. They’re picking us off, one by one. They never know when to stop, those ministries. Damn those vermin to hellfire!’ Alfred unleashed what I’m guessing was the direst oath in the Hungarian canon. The curse of Nosferatu.
I looked at Roy. ‘Bad news?’
Roy looked back, not needing to nod. ‘And there’s coffee all over the kitchen floor. I think I put two filters in.’
A long silence unspun. Alfred pulled out a handkerchief and a coin was flung out. It went round and around in ever-decreasing circles on the wooden floor, before vanishing under a chest where it would probably stay for years, or until Volk next visited.
‘Marco,’ Alfred said, his eyes focusing on the far distance, ‘thank you for coming. But I think I’d like you to go now.’ There was a tremor in his voice. ‘We shall continue next week.’
As I walked from Alfred’s the clouds slid away towards Essex and a warm afternoon opened up, golden and clear. Whatever worries Alfred and Roy had were their business. Me, I nibbled the truffley bits off my strawberry ice cream. Midges hung over the puddles in columns, and the trees dripped dry. They’d be winter trees again soon. An ice cream van was playing ‘Oranges and Lemons’ a few streets away. A couple of kids sat on walls trying to master their yo-yos. Good to see kids still playing with yo-yos. Fi, my natural mother, calls this time of year ‘Saint Luke’s Summer’. Isn’t that beautiful? I felt good. I had a bit of money from Roy, slipped to me wrapped around this strawberry ice. He also insisted that I took a hideous green leather jacket with me. I put up a fight, but he had already put it on me somehow and while he was zipping it up, he remembered to tell me that Tim Cavendish had been on the phone earlier and had asked me to drop in that afternoon if I could. He whispered an apology for not giving me any more money, but he’d had to take someone to the House of Lords that week for running off to Zimbabwe with a suitcase of his money, and the legal fees had come to £92,000. ‘It was a lot, Marco,’ whispered Roy, ‘but I had to do it for the principle.’ The someone was still in Zimbabwe, and so was the suitcase.
Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.
While we were having sex, when the condom broke, Poppy was coming, and she gasped out, ‘Marco, this is better than sex.’ I just remembered.
I headed down to Primrose Hill. I’ll walk to Tim Cavendish’s via Regent’s Park and Oxford Street. I love walking past London Zoo, and peering in. My childhood’s in there. My foster parents used to take me on my birthday. Today even the sound of the aviary makes me taste clammy fish-paste sandwiches.
I’m pretty sure that being a single kid single mother is enough for Poppy. But I’ve known women who’ve believed one thing about abortion, only for those beliefs to swing around when the crunch came. If Poppy’s pregnant, what will I want? Would I want? For her to accept me as a father, I’d have to swear monogamy, and mean it. Many of my friends have got married and done the baby thing, and I can see how completely it changes your life. Taking plunges is no fun when the well-being of two other people depends on how you land. Weird. When I was younger, I thought that kids were an inevitable part of getting old. I thought you’d wake up one morning and there they’d be, nappies bulging. But no, you actually have to make up your mind to do them, like making up your mind to buy a house, cut a CD or stage a coup d’etat. What if I never make my mind up? What if ?
Ah, worry, worry, worry.
The top of the hill. Breathe in, look at that view, and breathe out! Quite a picture, isn’t it! Old Man London, out for the day... Italians give their cities sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London’s middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay. I know its overlapping towns like I know my own body. The red brick parts around Chelsea and Pimlico, Battersea Power Station like an upturned coffee table... The grimy estates down Vauxhall way. Green Park. I map the city by trigonometrical shag points. Highbury is already Katy Forbes. Putney is Poppy, and India of course, not that I shag India, she’s only five. Camden is Baggins the Tarantula. I try to pinpoint the places in Alfred’s nutty story... How am I supposed to put a story like that into a serious autobiography? I’m going to have to do something pretty drastic, or I’ll end up ghostwriting ‘Diary of a Madman’.
It’s too beautiful a day to worry about that. The light is too golden, the shadows too soft.
There’s a lot of things in London that weren’t here when Alfred went round his big loop chasing Alfred. All those aeroplanes flying into Heathrow and Gatwick. The Thames Barrier. The Millennium Dome. Centrepoint, that sixties pedestal ashtray, bloody hell I wish someone would come along and bomb that. Canada Tower over in Docklands, gleaming in the sunlight now, and I think of that art deco mirror in the corner of Shelley’s room. Shelley of Shepherd’s Bush. She moved in with, whatsisname, ah, Jesus, what was his name? The British Oxygen man. Her flatmate Natalie had become a born-again Christian and moved in with Jesus. Shelley, Natalie and I had formed a Holy Trinity one rainy afternoon under Shelley’s duvet. At the time I had filed Natalie under ‘Dangerously Vulnerable’.