‘I took some holidays,’ said Anselm.
The knee was not good. It was sending signals up and down. He looked at her. She was looking at him.
‘What kind of holidays do you shrinks take?’ he said. ‘Or do you just stay at home and introspect? Keep in touch with your inner selves. Do some mental scoping.’
‘Scoping?’
‘You could scope your anima. Do an animascope. An animoscopy. That’s got a nice medical sound to it.’
‘So you didn’t take holidays?’
‘What is this about holidays? Since when were holidays the measure of people? Did Marie Curie take a lot of holidays?’
‘I don’t know. Do you?’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Your memory loss. Has that been permanent?’
‘How did we get on to that? What’s permanent? Permanent is a retrospective term. I’m still alive. Just.’
More cyclists, no leanness or androgyny here, a group of overweight women, bikes wobbling, breasts alive, jostling inside tracksuits.
‘Precision,’ said Alex. ‘It is important. Do you still experience the loss of memory? Correction. The absence of some memory.’
‘Some. Yes. I’ve lost all the good bits, the holidays. I’m left with the crap.’
Both knees were hurting now. He would have to stop, walk the rest of the way. He did not want to do that.
They ran for another hundred metres.
‘I’m tiring,’ she said. ‘Can we slow?’
He felt relief, he’d outlasted her, he didn’t have to be humiliated. ‘It’s just a kilometre,’ he said. ‘I was thinking we should pick it up.’
The yellow glance, a shrug. ‘If you like.’
She went away from him without effort, no sign whatsoever of fatigue. He watched her backside and could make no effort to go after her. The path turned and she was gone.
Anselm stopped, walked. She had tried to be kind to him, to spare him embarrassment. She had pretended to a weakness she didn’t have.
His response, wired into his brain, was to go for her throat.
She was waiting at her car, grey tracksuit on, yellow glasses off, breathing normally.
‘I found a reserve of energy,’ she said.
‘I noticed.’
They didn’t speak until she stopped outside the office gates. She didn’t look at him.
‘Perhaps that is not a thing we should do together,’ she said. ‘It might not bring out our best natures.’
Anselm took his bag from the back seat. ‘I don’t have a best nature,’ he said. ‘Least worst, that’s my best.’
40
…LONDON…
The request from Lafarge to find a motorcycle was on his desk. He was tired, not just his knees hurt now, his left hip sent splinters of pain up and down. He summoned Inskip and explained.
‘It’s Mission Hopeless,’ he said, ‘but they’re paying. Carry on, Number Two. Or is that Number One? No, I would be Number One, surely?’
‘Number two,’ said Inskip, ‘is a crap in toddler talk.’
Anselm nodded. ‘I shouldn’t distrust my instinct for the language. Carry on, Number Two.’
In mid-morning, Inskip stood in the door, his egg head to one side. Anselm thought he saw a faint flush of blood in the pale skin. Also, Inskip was wearing a red T-shirt. He hadn’t noticed that earlier. Had fashion changed? Was red in the ascendant?
Inskip said, ‘Would you like to listen to something, Number One? Number One being a piss.’
Anselm nodded, rose and went to Inskip’s workstation, sat beside him.
‘I’ve found this person,’ said Inskip. ‘In a company that’s doing closed-circuit TV trials in London. Roads, stations, shopping malls. The football. A minion of the coming total surveillance state. I haven’t been entirely straightforward with him. Forgivable, is that?’
Anselm looked into the black eyes, looked away.
Inskip touched the key.
Asked and we could’ve fucking looked, couldn’t we?
They didn’t know. Inskip’s voice.
Asking’s how you find out what you don’t fucking know.
They didn’t know to ask.
What? Is this fucking philosophy? This what I fucking missed by not going to fucking Oxford?
George, what could you have told them?
What? Every fucking pushbike and Porsche and cunt on a skateboard that went through the check, that’s what.
Can we get that now? It’s a small window, five, ten minutes.
I’m waiting. We serve you lot, don’t we. Only to ask. Say again?
Four-fifty on. The passenger might be leaning on the rider. He might have a bag, a sports bag, that would probably be on his lap, hard to see. No helmet, the passenger… No helmet. That’s where you start, sunshine. Hang on.
I’ve got an offender here, five-three, that’s a nice bike, he looks like he’s gone to sleep, the bumboy, not at all alert, no helmet, shocking disregard for the law.
Plate? Can you run that?
Running, my lord…Yes, this is your person…I can give you an address, see how fucking easy it is when you simply ask?
Point taken. A salutary lesson, George. Name and address?
‘He thinks you are?’ said Anselm.
Inskip put a hand to his naked scalp, lay fingers on it. ‘MI6,’ he said.
‘You may go far in this line of work.’
‘And owe it all to my teachers.’
‘Give it to Lafarge.’
41
…LONDON…
She found a person to start with, at the London School of Economics, in the School of Oriental and African Studies.
They sat in a small study that smelled of cigarette smoke. He was an overweight man in his fifties, head shaven, black polo-necked shirt. He looked like a Buddhist monk gone bad, in thrall to things of the flesh, the ascetic life a memory. His eyes were red, he smoked Camels in a hand that trembled a little, and he jiggled his right foot without cease.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘Americans are not strangers to the region.’
‘But massacres?’
‘Massacres? A difficult term. Massacre. Imprecise. Like genocide. Used very loosely.’
‘Killing civilians. Lots of them.’
He started to laugh, coughed, kept at it for a while, produced an unclean red handkerchief, crumpled like a tissue, tore it open and covered his mouth.
She looked away. He recovered.
‘Sorry. Terrible tickle in the throat. Dust. Place never gets cleaned. So, yes. Killing of civilians? Common practice in the region. For about three hundred years.’
‘But not by Americans.’
‘Depends. Depends on what you think is the causal chain, I suppose. In Angola, for example.’
‘For example?’
‘You’re not connected with television, are you?’
‘No.’