What now? Swim? Walk? Read? Think more about this hamstrung existence of his? The latter activity had become a little beside the point, he realized. He supposed he should try to take stock of the immediate situation; start processing what had happened and preparing himself for what was to come. But it was hard to get any lasting purchase on it. Thinking about it was like trying to handle a blob of mercury that broke into slithering beads as you touched it. It was like trying to take stock of a dream, or some strange hallucination.
He’d drifted into the living room, and was sitting on one of the rawhide sofas. George’s words came back to him from the time they’d talked in the kitchen. Absently, he dug a hand down behind the rawhide seat. Almost immediately he found an iPod Mini. For the next several minutes he distracted himself with a methodical search of the deep, faintly oily crevices of the two sofas. By the time he was finished he’d found several Scrabble letters, close to forty dollars in change and bills and a gold-and-quartz Montblanc fountain pen. He considered leaving it all on the kitchen table for Charlie and Chloe to find when they got back with their daughter, with a note explaining where he’d discovered it, but realized this would raise the question of why he’d been poking around in their sofa in the first place. Mildly amused by the predicament, he stuffed the whole lot back down into the crack. For a moment he felt rather noble and honorable doing this. But then he felt hypocritical, as though it had just been an act for the benefit of some invisible observer, and he dug it out again, all but the Scrabble pieces. Why pretend he was anything other than he was? he thought. A teenage delinquent turned fully fledged adult criminal. In which case he might as well start acting like one.
The atmosphere of those grubby, forlorn years came back to him; ages fourteen to seventeen, running his little business with his scales and baggies out of the tiny bedroom in the West Kensington flat he’d moved into with his mother and sister. One incident in particular asserted itself through the drift of memory. It wasn’t an incident he thought about often: it was so bizarre it had a quality of having happened to a third party, and when he did think of it, he could hardly connect it to himself. Dr. McCubbin would no doubt have been highly interested in it, but he hadn’t discussed it with McCubbin; not because he was embarrassed, but because even by then it had already sealed itself off from him, existing more as an article of faith than a living memory.
He’d gone to the flat of his supplier, Rudy, in Hounslow. Rudy had apparently forgotten he was coming and didn’t have the goods, which he kept in a garage in Hatton Cross. He’d told Matthew to wait while he fetched them, saying he’d be back in an hour. Joan, his wife, offered Matthew a cup of tea. She was a gaunt woman with long, platinum-white hair and white-polished fingernails. The two of them sat together at the kitchen table with its porcelain donkey centerpiece, in the paniers of which sat little glass cruets of condiments.
They hadn’t been alone before and didn’t have much to say to each other. Joan asked about his school and he told her about his crammer in Holborn. They discussed the unusually sunny weather. A silence descended on them. Then Joan looked at him-he never forgot the placid calm in her pale blue, crow’s-footed eyes-and said, “Would you like to fuck me, Matthew?” He was startled, and yet the words immediately acquired a kind of fatefulness, as if in some part of himself he had long been expecting them. He remembered walking down a corridor behind her, his forefinger linked with hers, thinking: So this is how it’s going to happen. In the bedroom she took off her top and went to the far side of the bed, kneeling on the gold-brown carpet in her bra and skirt. She lit a menthol cigarette. He hesitated in the doorway, unsure what he was supposed to do. There was a mirror etched with Betty Boop on one wall, and paintings of a woodland scene in each of the four seasons on another. In the corner was a built-in white closet. “Come here,” she said. He went over and she unzipped his fly, taking him in her mouth and putting his hands on her breasts, holding her cigarette off to the side. When he was hard she took off her skirt and bra and lay on the bed. “Is this your first time?” she asked. He nodded. She stubbed out her cigarette and raised her knees. “Take off my panties.” He remembered the thinness of her thighs as he slid her underwear down; the scant black wisps of her pubic hair. He remembered trying to kiss her as he lowered himself onto her, and the abruptness with which she turned her head away, muttering, “None of that.” She brought him into her and they went at it missionary-style for a bit. “Very nice,” she said, and then turned over, lighting another cigarette and thrusting her thin behind at him. “Now hit me. Smack me.” Bewildered-at fifteen he was very innocent in these matters- he gave her a tentative smack. “Go on, I like it,” she told him. “Harder. Harder.” After a while she said, “Now do me again. Put it in.”
Rudy was in the kitchen when they went back, sitting at the table with another man, a soft-looking guy in his forties, with an unshaven double chin. It was this part of the experience that was so strange: so charged and yet so blank. Everyone acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. Nobody asked where he and Joan had been or what they’d been doing. Rudy introduced the other man to Matthew as his new business partner, Don, who’d given him a lift back from Hatton Cross. Joan put the kettle on and made another cup of tea while Rudy weighed out the grass and hash and counted off the acid tabs, and Matthew paid him.
That was all, and nothing ever happened with Joan again. But a peculiar feeling had lingered with Matthew as he left, a sort of confused dread, and for a long time his mind had gone compulsively back over the experience, itemizing every detail, and often recapturing small objects or words he’d overlooked before, but always sensing there was still some large thing that he’d missed.
Later, in his twenties, he’d surmised that Rudy and possibly the other man had been watching through the closet keyhole or some hidden hole in the wall, or maybe through the Betty Boop mirror. Still later, he’d recalled an earlier visit where he’d gone into the room they called the lounge, and had seen, without taking any particular notice of it, a home movie projector on the cocktail cabinet, and it occurred to him that he’d possibly been filmed. But oddly enough even when he interpolated these conjectures back into the memory, they did nothing to diminish its aura of mystery, or reduce the sense of vague dread it still aroused in him.
It was only recently, a year or so ago, that he’d remembered the last part of it, or what he hoped was the last part of it. Without any obvious trigger it had come to him one morning in New York, that Joan had also told him to burn her with the lighted cigarette, and that he had done it: stabbed the red ember, in response to her gasped commands, against her scarred white buttocks. It had seemed a momentous new fact to have discovered, or rediscovered, about himself, full of potential illumination. And yet it too had proved oddly enigmatic, yielding little usable self-knowledge, and adding to his confusion.
Only now, for the first time, did it occur to him that its real meaning might be less in the nature of illumination than of prophecy. For was it not, in its masque-like way, a foretelling of last night’s culminating gesture: the same hand, a quarter century older, thrust out in an almost identical motion, the same bewildered shock at the unexpected weapon in its grasp, as though Joan had reached down through time and placed it there; the same sense of irresistible necessity drawing from him an act of violence as savage and surprising to him as if he had been given a lightning bolt to wield?