‘Get into his clothes,’ he said when I’d finished, Guy and I both naked now, the two men facing each of us, all of us standing for a moment like statues in some obscene ballet, two nude and two blue-suited dancers.
We changed clothes. And I realised then what was happening to me, simply a more violent change of role, from George Graham into Guy Jackson now. But what was happening to Jackson? I put on all his things, and he mine. And they fitted both of us surprisingly well. Except for the smell — the faint odour in Guy’s clothes; his hair, his skin, his sweat mixed with the rumour of some old-fashioned hair oil. There was something awfully unreal about that for a moment — his shirt and underclothes warm about me — still warm from his warmth: a properly stolen life, this time; violently robbed in front of me, so that I felt I was part of the crime.
They had taken his wedding ring off him last thing, the brassy signet ring that he wore like a memento of failure, and I put it on, the prizefighter handing it to me, poking it up towards my face, like the best man in a nightmare wedding.
And Guy, I saw, had everything of me — or rather of George Graham: his old black Mentmore fountain pen, the gold square-faced Hamilton watch, the long-stemmed briar pipe and the aromatic Dutch tobacco. Guy became George Graham in front of my eyes, the lover replacing the husband, who in turn was replaced by me. Three men had gone into two; and one of us was going to be caught without an identity when the music stopped. Finally, they checked everything, went through all our pockets, to see that Guy had all my papers, my wallet and UN identification and so on, and that I had all his.
Then the prizefighter said to me, ‘Now watch. Watch this carefully.’
And there is that moment now which one doesn’t care to remember, which one simply doesn’t, because it is like recreating the death of oneself, seeing the extinction of my body with his, the death of both of us, so that my memory of it, in some ways, is that of a ghost looking back on his own funeral. I went with Guy then and what was left of me afterwards was an angry wraith.
One of the men opened the aluminium casement looking out over the East River with a key and a muggy breath streamed in from outside like a door opening into a furnace. And suddenly then, at the same instant, Guy and I both knew what the whole thing was all about, when the prizefighter took him by the shoulders, turned him round and faced him towards the window. We both knew it all then, very quickly and completely — when I looked at Guy, when he knew he was dying, was going to die: when he crumpled up on the floor; when they picked him up and I shouted, and the other man gagged me and held me from behind: when Guy was dragged over to the window, and started to cry, a great sobbing cry, a disastrous anguish on his face: when he clung to everything on the way, every bit of furniture, being dragged now, feet-first across the room; and finally — his head out in space yet still, like a trapeze artist, trying to hold on desperately to the metal window-ledge until his fingers were prised up — the faint squeak he gave as he fell away.
We both knew everything then, shared everything as the men intended, Guy’s eyes fixed to mine during all that awful passage across the room — violent, outraged eyes: and yet somehow with love too, a desperate and unseemly gentleness glowing through his normally austere and cynical features, a statement of love and redemption that had only now suddenly become clear to him at this last moment, and which he wanted to pass on to me before he died, in a great hurry to get rid of it before the music stopped and he went. He was pulled across the office floor, a dead man, yet full of life. Exactly as they had intended, the two men left me with a unique taste of death in my mouth — not only his death, any death, but my own as well.
And then we were away, one of the men on either side of me, pushing me down the empty corridor towards the elevator banks in the middle of the building, where a third man was waiting for us, holding the doors apart from the controls inside, and the four of us went down without stopping to the underground car park giving out on to the East River side.
They had a car there next to the elevator ramp. And there were several other groups of people around, getting their keys and cars out, going home. And I shouted and tried to run. But they had me in the back of the car before I got anywhere, hitting me with something over the ear as I was being pushed in. And when someone came over towards us I could hear the prizefighter speaking as I drifted into a dark world of ringing stars: ‘He’ll be all right. Had a few too many. We’ll get him home.’
Home, I realised when I regained consciousness going up First Avenue, would of course be the Jacksons’ modern apartment on East 57th Street and Second.
‘Ah, Jackson,’ the little man said, welcoming me into Jackson’s large but now almost empty apartment six floors up in a modern co-operative block looking down Second Avenue.
‘Good evening, Mr Jackson.’
He was standing in half shadow over by a drinks tray in the corner of the main room just off the hall. The carpet had been taken up and most of the furniture pushed into another corner waiting to be crated. The floor was of blocked pine and slippery. A stack of pictures, Redouté rose prints for the most part, had been piled up on a huge oatmeal sofa in the middle of the room. On one arm of it were a number of Jackson’s overcoats and mackintoshes, all the perfectly tailored summer and winter protection that Guy had acquired against the varying rigours of the New York climate. What a careful man he’d been, I thought, prepared for every sartorial eventuality — except changing clothes with me.
The only light in the room was from a standard lamp, with a huge pumpkin-like Chinese paper lantern on top, and this had been placed in front of the sofa, between me and the small blue-suited fellow fiddling with the drinks so that I could make out hardly anything of his features.
He spoke in Russian and the prizefighter cleared the Redouté roses off the sofa and moved me over towards it.
‘Sit down, Mr Jackson. Relax,’ the voice came from behind the lamp. Ice fell into a glass. ‘Whisky? Or cognac? All there is, I’m afraid.’
I didn’t reply. The prizefighter left me and returned with a glass of amber liquid. ‘Take it. Have some,’ the voice advised. ‘You need it. It’s not an easy business this, I know. And yet,’ he added carefully, turning towards me in the shadows, a strange, soft, sympathetic tone coming into his voice, ‘you’ll have to admit you do have some experience of it all — this changing roles, characters. It’s not the first time, is it? So this shouldn’t be too difficult.’
I sat down and at once I started to shake. My stomach and the inside of my arms seemed to vibrate together, and then my shoulders, and I felt a violent nausea rise inside me, a long-delayed sickness now come to full term. I leant my head back hoping to stay it. But the first spurt of vomit rose up anyway and lay in my mouth, a lumpy bitter fluid. And then I couldn’t help myself with it and I bent forward hopelessly. But they’d seen what was happening and as I retched I found the prizefighter holding one of the deep-framed Redouté roses in front of me like a tray, and I came on it, puking violently, sweating, my stomach going inside-out, seeing the stream of seedy yellow fluid covering all the red flower. I slipped off the sofa then and was down on my hands and knees on the blocked pine floor, and another print was pushed in front of me, a fine sprig, some golden thorny species, and in a moment it too was like a dog’s breakfast.
‘This is a farce,’ I said when the sickness was over and they were helping me back on the sofa, one of them sponging my forehead with a damp cloth. ‘Utterly stupid, impossible. I’m sorry.’ Suddenly, I found myself addressing these thugs quite openly, in almost a friendly way, as if they were colleagues. It seemed I wanted to thank them for their help in my sudden travaiclass="underline" I had done something stupid, taken too much drink at a party. I was not angry; I was apologetic.