He could hear a tap running in the bathroom and the tread of feet along the hallway and down the stairs. Peter/David was making airplane noises, fighting the Luftwaffe single-handed. Martin heard him say, “Take that, you filthy Nazi!” before making the ack-ack sounds of a machine gun. He was a good boy, he would grow up like his father, not like Martin. Yesterday evening when they had been sitting in their cozy living room (roaring fire, etc.), Martin toasting crumpets, his wife knitting yet another Fair Isle pullover, after Peter/David had kissed them both good night and gone up to bed, his wife paused over her needles and said with a smile, “I think he deserves to have a little brother or sister, don’t you?”A moment to treasure in a life of treasures.
He stretched again and put his arms round his wife and smelled her lily-of-the-valley hair. She wriggled a little, a sign that she was awake and willing. He put a hand inside the folds of her night-gown and found the apple roundness of a breast and pressed his body against hers. He should say something loving at this point, something tender. He always had trouble with the intimacies of conversation with her for some reason, perhaps if he gave her a name it would help. She rolled over and returned his embrace. “Marty,” she said.
He woke with a start. The cheap digital clock radio on the bed-side table informed him that it was six o’clock in the morning. He wondered if he should check under the covers to make sure he hadn’t turned into a giant insect.
Daylight had already overtaken the streetlamp outside and fil-tered through the thin orange curtains, bathing the room in the glow of a postnuclear sunrise. The lurid Lucozade light washed over Martin’s face. He couldn’t imagine how he would get back to sleep again. The walls of the room were tissue thin. Every toi-let flushed, every hawking phlegmy cough, every sexual act attempted or achieved, all seemed to be finding a direct conduit to Martin’s room.
What if somehow he was stuck here, if he had entered some surreal loop where he must wake up every morning in a different room at the Four Clans? How many rooms were there in the hotel? What if it was an infinite number, what if it was one of those Twilight Zone places with a nonexistent thirteenth floor and a staff who were really the ghosts of previous guests? A hotel you could never check out from.
He knew, in the sober light of day, that it was not Richard Mott who had phoned him last night. Which was most likely, after all- that Richard Mott was phoning him from the afterlife or that the person who killed Richard Mott had stolen his phone? A mur-derer phoning him was preferable to a corpse phoning him. Of course this was something he should tell the police about, but the idea of having to encounter Sutherland again was too depressing. He wondered what Richard Mott’s killer would have said to him if his phone hadn’t run out of battery power. “You next,” perhaps. An eye for an eye.
He had said to Melanie last night that he was going to cancel his appearance at the Book Festival, but now it struck him that it would be a badge of courage to turn up. “Pull yourself together, boy! Face the thing you’re frightened of.” He might have been reduced to a plaything of the gods, but he was still Alex Blake. This was his life, this was his arena, it may not have been a very noble one, but it was all that was left to him.
He had lost his laptop, his wallet, his novel, his home, and his identity over the course of the previous forty-eight hours. All he had left was Alex Blake.
Reception was now being manned by a boy in a striped satin waistcoat and a bow tie who looked as if he belonged in a bar-bershop quartet.
“Can I use the phone?” Martin asked, and the boy said, “Cer-tainly, Mr. Canning. My mother’s read all the Alex Blake books, she’s your number one fan.”
“Thank you, thank her. That’s very kind.”
From his pocket he fished out the flyer that had been given to him a lifetime ago. “Can I help you?” he had said. Well, he did need help. He needed just one person to be on his side. “Face the thing you’re frightened of. Pull yourself together, you fucking fairy.You’re an old woman, Martin.”
He was not going to be cowed by unfounded suspicion, nor by dead men phoning him. He was going to hold his head high and carry on. Cosmic justice could come and get him, but it would be on his own terms.
He dialed the number and, when it was answered, said, “Mr. Brodie? I don’t know if you remember me?”
37
Jackson rolled over in the bed and spooned Julia’s hot body. She usually slept naked but was now wearing a pair of horrendous pa-jamas that were much too big for her and might at some point have belonged to her sister. Jackson knew the pajamas were sig-nificant, but he didn’t particularly want to think what that significance might be. He missed the feeling of skin on skin, the peachy roundness of Julia. He fitted himself into the familiar curves and cambers of her body, but instead of pushing back and settling into his shape, she shifted away from him, murmuring something incomprehensible. Julia talked a lot in her sleep, all of it gibberish, but nonetheless Jackson had taken to listening intently in case she divulged something secret and hidden that he would feel better (or, more likely, worse) for knowing.
He moved closer to her again and kissed her neck, but she remained steadfastly asleep. It was difficult to wake Julia up, short of shaking her. Once, he had made love to her while she slept, and she’d hardly even twitched when he came inside her, but he didn’t tell her about it afterward because he wasn’t sure how she would react. He couldn’t imagine her being particularly put out (this was Julia, after all). She would probably just have said, “Without me? How could you?” Technically it was rape, of course. He had arrested enough guys in his time for taking advantage of drunk or drugged girls. Plus, if he was honest, Julia was such a sound sleeper that there had been a touch of necrophilia about the whole thing. He’d put a necrophiliac away once, the guy worked in a mortuary and didn’t “see where the harm was” because “the objects of my affection have moved beyond earthly matters.”
Between Amelia’s pajamas and necrophilia, Jackson had pretty much managed to kill off any desire he might have woken up with. Julia was probably still annoyed with him, anyway. Jackson placed his ear to her back like a stethoscope and listened to her rattling breath. He had done the same for a three-year-old Marlee when she’d had bronchitis. Julia’s lungs would kill her in the end. There was something about her that suggested she would never make old bones, that long before she was drawing her pension she’d have emphysema and be lugging around an oxygen tank as tall as herself. She wriggled farther away from him.
Everything was subject to entropy, even sex, even love. A slow era-sure of passion. Not his love for his daughter, obviously, that was the one unbreakable bond. Or his sister. He had loved his sister with a true heart, but Niamh was too far “beyond earthly matters” now for him to feel the tug and urgency of love. The sadness was all that was left.
He propped himself up on an elbow and studied Julia’s face. He had a feeling that she wasn’t really asleep, that she might be acting.
“Don’t,” she said and rolled over, pressing her face into the pillow.
When he woke again, Julia was kneeling on the bed next to him, wearing only a towel and holding a tray on which he could see coffee, scrambled eggs, toast. “Breakfast!” she announced gaily. Jackson’s watch said seven o’clock.
“For a minute I thought you were Julia,” he said.
“Ha, funny. I couldn’t sleep.” Her damp hair was bundled into a demented ponytail on one side of her head, and she smelled soapy clean. She was naturally spotlighted by the sun, caught in a lozenge of light, and he could see the dark rings around her eyes, the shadow of something mortal on her brow. Maybe it was just disappointment. She settled cross-legged onto the bed and read out his horoscope to him. “‘Sagittarians are having a tough time at the moment.You feel as if you’re getting nowhere, but never fear-there is light at the end of the tunnel.’ Are you? Having a tough time?” she asked.