Ever since then — four months now — when I haven’t been able to sleep I’ve sneaked out and let myself into the shop, where I spend the night sifting through old books and papers, only coming home as the dawn breaks to “wake up” in bed next to Miranda. I do that two, maybe three times a week. The other nights I drink. There’s not too much of a smell with vodka. I keep it in a filing cabinet in the study. I hadn’t drunk alcohol since Thailand. It works well enough as a sedative, but it scares me, because it reminds me that what I’d really like to do is score. What I’d like to do is sit at night in the study and fix up and look at the pear tree, wrapped in total indifference: mine to the world, its to me.
At first I thought I’d find something in God’s books. Perhaps a clue to what Miles wanted. It wasn’t logical. I was like the drunk who loses his keys on the way home from the pub and looks for them under the streetlight, because that’s where it’s easiest to see.
In the glass case where God keeps his more valuable stock is a folio of Jeremy Wilson pictures. Complete, Modern People has become a collector’s item, its black-and-white photographs of musicians, artists, and other taste-makers of mid-sixties London reproduced in numerous books and magazines. God’s copy has
John Lennon missing, but is still worth a couple of hundred quid. Looking through it one night I spotted Anna, in the background of a shot of a famous gallerist. She was leaning against a pillar in a white-walled studio peopled by serious-looking hipsters holding dramatic props — an ear-trumpet, a classical bust. In her shiny plastic raincoat and heavy makeup she was barely recognizable as the woman I knew a few years later. Exactly ten years separated that and the second photo, the figure leaning out of the embassy window in Copenhagen. She’d moved so quickly to the end of her journey.
Except it wasn’t the end. I’d seen her. I’d seen her swinging her arms, smoking a cigarette. Little by little I identified what I felt: jealousy, a slow, viscous panic seeping out of my bones. She was alive. She’d been alive all the time. Without my knowledge we’d swapped places. I was the dead one, the old photograph, frozen in time, my blacks turning brown, my whites yellowing with age. And what about Miles? From the start he’d been deader than I could ever be and now he was walking abroad with his rictus grin, lumbering through the tissue-paper screen of my life with Miranda. Miles was after Anna. Surely that was it. The Michael Frame identity was blown and must have been blown for some time, but there was no urgency in the way I was being approached. I was being coaxed, handled. If I’d been important in my own right, armed police would have been at my door: the house surrounded, four in the morning when the body is at its lowest. After so many years, it felt strange to find out I mattered so little.
Whatever Miles needed me for, it seemed to be worth taking care over. Meanwhile he left me entirely alone. I drank in secret; I jumped every time I heard the phone. Otherwise, strange to say, it was a good Christmas. Sam, Miranda, and I did the things people do, ate too much, sat in our pajamas watching It’s a Wonderful Life on television. It was as if we had an understanding, a pact not to shatter the sugar-glass of our holiday. Over the years, the pagan solstice Miranda was celebrating when I first knew her, an awkward personal substitute for her parents’ Judaism, had gradually been sprinkled in style-magazine Scandinavian kitsch. In the front room
stood an enormous tree decorated with rustic straw ornaments she’d bought in London. Every surface twinkled with tea lights. Sam, queen of pester-power, had always craved the Christmas advertised on television, the big family party shot in golden soft focus, the turkey and the plastic snow. So it was amusing to see her roll her eyes at her mother’s “commercialism.” Miranda was confused, wrong-footed by her daughter. I could see her wondering how Sam had changed so effortlessly in two short months away from us.
“She’s growing up,” I whispered, as we picked at leftovers in the kitchen. “That’s all.”
Miranda shook her head, annoyed. “Do you see how she’s dressed? She’s plaited beads into her hair.”
“Listen to you.”
“I don’t mean that, Mike. It’s just she was always so conservative.”
“If she thinks we’re talking about her, she’ll be furious.”
We hugged. Guiltily I kneaded her shoulders, ran my fingers down the ridge of her spine. Perhaps there’s a finite amount of reality in the world, only so much energy flowing round in the circuit. The more I’d thought about Anna, about Sean and Lansdowne Road and all the rest of it, the less real Miranda had come to seem. Despite her physical presence, her body pressed against mine as we stood there in the kitchen, for weeks she’d been most clearly present to me in her traces, the plume of blood in the toilet when she had her period, the underwear puddled on her side of the bed. I tried to suppress the urgency I felt as I held her, the need for greater contact. I was afraid she’d pick up on it and ask questions.
New Year’s Eve was hard. Miranda had invited friends to dinner. Oliver and Rose ran a specialized organic farm and had a vdlkisch rude health about them that I’d always found slightly sinister. As an antidote to Rose’s braying laugh and Oliver’s fatuous opinions about the world beyond his orchard walls, I invited God, telling Miranda that otherwise he’d be on his own (which was true) and
would feel lonely (which I very much doubted). The others were all settled with drinks and snacks when he shambled in, bundled up in a thick overcoat and carrying his customary burden — twin plastic carrier bags stuffed with mysterious papers. Reluctantly he let Miranda prise them from his hands and store them in the hall closet, along with his coat, which she held as if it was potentially infectious. Collapsing into an armchair, he accepted a whisky and looked at me with heartfelt gratitude when I discreetly put the bottle next to him on the side table.
Sam went off to a house party with Kenny and some other friends, kissing everyone good night and wishing them a happy new year. During dinner I savored God’s table talk, intemperate monologues featuring the local council, people who phoned up to sell office supplies, and the makers of television game shows, against whom he nurtured a particular animus. He told us frankly that he despised vegetarians, then without missing a beat complimented Miranda on the risotto. He used the word “cunt” in a variety of inventive contexts. Oliver and Rose were cowed into submissive silence, exchanging panicked glances whenever God’s language became more than averagely degenerate. They took their revenge over coffee by instituting a game of charades. Miranda was already furious with me, so saying no was not an option. As God pretended to doze on the sofa, I found myself trying to mime the title of some American romantic comedy I’d never heard of, while Rose giggled behind her hand with moronic glee.
At midnight we sang a self-conscious verse of “Auld Lang Syne.” The party broke up soon afterward; Miranda stalked off to bed and I drove God home. Much later I was woken by Sam, who’d had a minor disaster, a flat battery, which meant she was stranded at her house party. I pulled some clothes over my pajamas and drove out to pick her up. The music was still booming, and through the door I had a brief glimpse of celebratory carnage, bodies and ashtrays and beer cans. She came running out to meet me, leaving some boy on the doorstep. As we drove home, scattering rabbits on the narrow country lanes, she told me she loved me and I told her I