The Last Word Page 19

  ‘What would we do?’

  ‘We have to be somewhere quiet. Somewhere we can hide.’ She began to weep. ‘Not only am I pregnant, Harry, but threatening letters from bailiffs have been arriving while you’ve been down here. I’ve gone a bit over with the spending. I’m terrified that someone is going to enter the flat when you’re down here and seize your Telecaster and the Gibson.’

  For him there was nothing like hearing the word ‘bailiff’ to evaporate all hope in the world. ‘What did you say to them?’

  ‘Don’t scold me. I’ll cut back,’ she said. ‘But now he’s here, please ask Rob for more money.’

  ‘I will. But what have you been buying?’

  ‘Coats, jewellery, dinners with girlfriends and a few pairs of shoes. I’ll show them to you.’ They were by the front door, and she called out, knowing Julia would be nearby. ‘Julia, could you bring out the pumps, please? I think they’re in our room.’ She said in a low voice, ‘Julia’s a lovely girl. We have similar backgrounds. Council estates and single mothers.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘I think you’ve got it from Mamoon, but I wish you wouldn’t answer a question with another. It’s evasive.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Haven’t you noticed Julia?’

  ‘I’ve been preoccupied with the book.’

  ‘She and I went shopping together again. She knows where to go in town. Her brother might give me kickboxing lessons to give me confidence.’

  ‘He knows how to kick, does he?’

  ‘You seem annoyed. Is it because she’s a cleaner that you’re rotten to her?’

  ‘Rotten?’

  ‘Harry, you can be a snob, you know.’

  Julia came out with two boxes. Alice tried on a pair of shoes, and Julia an identical pair. They stood in front of Harry. Rob came out and saw the girls showing Harry their feet.

  He said, ‘I knew it. This is what you do down here – look at girls. Now, I’ve worn out two pencils and I’m done for today,’ he said, not giving anything else away. ‘Let’s talk later.’

  Liana drove Alice to the station, where she waited for the London train. Harry accompanied them, promising Alice he would get a lot of work done, while thinking about their future. He waved her off, before Liana dropped him at the pub, where Rob was waiting. Harry would get the money question settled immediately, text Alice and relax for a bit.

  In the pub Rob was already in a good position where he could see Julia sitting with friends across the bar. Unlike most of Harry’s friends, Rob still felt at ease in pubs where there was nothing to do but drink and talk.

  ‘Thanks for coming down today to see me, Rob,’ said Harry. ‘I need a further advance, my friend. Cash-wise I’m a bit hemmed in and pressured right now.’

  Rob laughed. ‘I can’t organise another payment until it looks like you might not only complete this but make it original. What work are you actually doing?’

  ‘I’m interviewing and planning. But most of it is in my head.’

  Rob shook his head. ‘I’m fighting hard to keep you in place here. Mamoon thought you’d run up an innocuous Reader’s Digest life to increase his standing. He didn’t understand that not only would you be wearing his pants on your face, you’d tell him about it. I might come to regret hiring you.’

  ‘Looks like you made a mistake.’

  ‘Anything to do with art is always a risk.’

  ‘But you over-idealise artists, Rob. There are more interesting and useful people.’

  ‘That is a blasphemy.’

  ‘I’m working well, but you’re undermining me. I feel pretty disturbed by this. Look at my shaking hands.’

  ‘Don’t drop the drink you’re going to be kind enough to get me. You know I never carry any change.’ Harry got up. Rob said, ‘By the way, can you do me a favour while you’re at it? Please ask that girl—’

  He pointed across the bar.

  ‘Julia?’ said Harry.

  ‘Ask her if she’d copulate with me later. I put it crudely to save time. Rustle up some smoother words, word-wanker.’

  ‘Where should she go for the aforementioned copulation?’

  ‘How about on a coat thrown down on a moonlit field? Being in the country makes me come over bucolic. But it might be draughty. How about your luxurious car?’

  Harry said, ‘Consider, Rob, think for a moment how you might appear to her, not having shaved or washed for some time—’

  Rob grabbed his collar. ‘What are you talking about? It’s like Iceland here, they haven’t seen an outsider for decades. They queue up to fuck Londoners.’

  But Julia had left and Rob was delayed by his drinking. Harry listened to him for too long about interesting events in the world of literature before saying he was going back to the house. He needed to phone Alice and talk calmly. She’d be at home by now; sometimes she could be kind and would listen to him.

  It was arduous getting Rob to his feet. Having been consuming duff speed to enable himself to drink for longer, by now his brain appeared to have been drowned, like a Ferrari driven into a pond.

  Harry was helping Rob along the lane when Scott and some mates, with their heads covered, stepped out in front of them. Harry and Rob stopped. Scott was in shorts and, as they were near a rare working street light, Harry was able to notice that he had a grey police tag around his ankle.

  ‘You went too far. You banged my sister and stole my stuff,’ said Scott. ‘You laughed at me. What’s all that about?’

  ‘Who is this?’ said Rob to Harry, in a low voice.

  ‘The brother of the girl you were going to fuck.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Rob, leaning forward to vomit.

  ‘What stuff?’ said Harry to Scott.

  Scott and his mates made a move towards Harry and Rob. Harry fancied giving the little shit a slap; he thought it would help the kid see straight. But Rob was swaying and the boys probably had knives; Harry wouldn’t be able to take the three of them on. Anyway, his legs were trembling.

  Scott was swinging a piece of wood. ‘I’d love to kill a nigger tonight. I’m in the mood for a dune coon. Failing that – there’s you.’

  ‘Look here, chaps,’ said Rob. He took another step forward and dropped his phone, which one of the thugs stamped on.

  Harry said to Scott, ‘I can’t imagine you’d have anything I’d want to steal.’

  ‘Them drugs. In our Julia’s room. You think you can come down from London and take our stuff?’

  Harry put his hand in his pocket and offered a couple of twenties to Scott. ‘How much?’

  Scott spat on the ground and rubbed his trainer in it. ‘I’m going to remember that you are a stupid boy.’

  In the car Rob said, ‘No chance with the girl then? You’re well embedded down here. It’s racy, innit? I haven’t had such a good time for ages. It’s not England or Britain, but another place altogether. Ingerland they call it, and Ingerland it is.’ Rob sang, ‘Ingerland, Ingerland, Ingerland . . .’ all the way to Prospects House.

  Twenty-four

  Everything good in art came from seeing a new thing and saying it, Harry said to himself. So when it came to the book, what mattered most was that he liked it. And despite the fact the world seemed be exploding in his face, with everything suddenly shifting and moving in ways he couldn’t comprehend, Harry knew that to write he needed time and regularity. He worked all day and, at the end of each afternoon, had taken to running in the woods, illuminating his way, when it got gloomy under the heavy trees, with the light of a miner’s helmet Julia had found in a market.

  By the late evening, Harry was glad to get out of the house. He’d meet Julia at the top of the track. Smiling, she’d rush out from the woods, jump into his car, and they’d go for a drink – she knew all the local high spots. She liked it if, after, he accompanied her to her bedroom. Increasingly under siege from her mother and the agitated suitors, she would ask him to read to her, or to play her guitar while she sang.

 
Having issued a severe warning, Rob had gone, flinging his rags into his suitcase and taking off like a Romantic poet, striding through forests and across fields, through streams, across car parks and into pubs. He seemed to believe he would gain knowledge of the countryside if made to suffer by it. To celebrate Rob’s departure, Harry thought he’d take Julia out for an Indian. ‘What do you say to that?’

  She had to say she was pleased about the on-the-way children. She knew her place, shut her mouth and accepted what she was offered. Her family had always been on the wrong side, too. She was, however, slightly bemused by the dinner. Why pay for something when you could have a tuna sandwich and Coke at home? The last time she and Harry had gone out ‘formally’, they’d taken an E each and gone bowling at a floodlit centre called the Hollywood Bowl, just out of town, where there was a mega-cinema, drive-thru McDonald’s and KFC. The evening had been fluorescent, glittering, like a cartoon.

  But drugs were fatuous, he found, as he got older. This time they would talk – about what, he had no idea. Why would he worry? If love is loquacity, in bed they liked to discuss her body and its vicissitudes, as well as her weight and hair colour; and, he had to admit, he learned more about present-day England from her than he did from anyone else. In bed, while he thought about the book, she would ask questions, not wanting to waste the resource she had beside her.

  ‘Friendly Harry,’ she would say, ‘how many prime ministers have there been since the war? And who was the best? Which is the most interesting newspaper and why? What do you think of Canary Wharf? Will you take me there? Who was Muhammad Ali? Why are men unfaithful to their wives? Will you dump me?’

  What tormented her now, she told him, was that he was like a circus which came to town for a while, and then went away. ‘When you and Alice go, I’m scared of being left behind. Mum’s getting worse. More men come to the house. I’m always in her way. She says I put people off loving her.’

  But Julia loved Harry, and there was something she wanted to give him, a special treat to remember in exchange for the kindness he had shown her. And, as she said, ‘It isn’t every day your lover’s girlfriend gets pregnant.’

  And so, that evening, when they walked into the Indian restaurant where Mamoon had had his party, a girl stepped out from behind a screen. Julia had arranged for a friend to join them. Prettier than Julia, like her she wore eye shadow, lip gloss and platform shoes, as if they were going out to meet footballers. ‘This is Lucy,’ she said, as the girl went to kiss him. ‘We both congratulate you.’

  Lucy gave them each some MDMA, and took them to a club where an obese woman vomited over the floor. Julia suggested they go somewhere else – not Julia’s, as her brother could be there, no doubt tattooing himself on the forehead with a penknife; and not Lucy’s, because of her child. The girls were keen for him to take them to a hotel in town. They bought alcohol and cocaine, closed the curtains, turned off their phones and didn’t emerge until the next afternoon.

  However, some time in the late morning, while the girls slept on either side of him, Harry, who didn’t sleep at all, recalled something Mamoon had said with regard to Marion. ‘The truth is, everything we really desire is either forbidden, immoral or unhealthy, and, if you’re lucky, all three at once.’

  ‘What follows from that, sir?’

  ‘Don’t forsake your desire, even if you’re punished. Take the punishment gracefully, as a tribute, and never complain.’

  In the afternoon, he and Lucy stood outside the hotel, waiting for Julia, who had misplaced her bra in the room. Lucy kissed him; he held her tight.

  ‘Three’s always a party,’ she said.

  ‘You are irresistible, Lucy,’ he said. ‘Last night was so much fun I can only contemplate an eternity of regret and self-recrimination.’

  ‘For not having a laugh more often?’

  He fumbled in his pockets. ‘Here. Perhaps the closing of the abattoir ruined your life too.’

  He gave her almost £100 and she handed it back, saying, ‘You’ll need it to buy clothes for the babies. Your partner, Alice, she’s having two, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. Twins.’

  ‘When did you find out?’

  ‘At the scan the other day, the nurse said, “There’s your baby – oh, and there’s another one. Looks like you’ve got two there.”’

  ‘You’ll cope,’ she said, putting her phone number in his phone. ‘You’re a joker, and you’re never happier than when you’re with a woman. It’s like you want to suck us right up. Didn’t your mother have twins?’

  Usually he said as little as he could get away with. Like his father, he wanted to be a listener: it seemed safer. But the drugs had undone his tongue and condemned him to the truth, at last. When Julia came out and joined them, he found himself telling them that his older brothers were identical twins, and his mother had been a paranoid psychotic. Distracted by voices, she had gone to the river and drowned herself.

  ‘“Fear death by water,” the Tarot says. She haunts me, and I think of her floating, like Ophelia.’

  ‘How bloody awful,’ said Julia, kissing him.

  ‘It’s the easiest death – you can be gone in thirty seconds if you keep your mouth open.’ He added, ‘What is the desire for death the desire for? Wasn’t my mother always going in that direction? We three boys, who would have maddened a stone, were lucky to have her for as long as we did. I’d say she was too obedient.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘I guess to one fascist voice speaking in her head. Far from being too mad, as some people said, she was too orthodox.’

  Lucy banged Harry on the arm. ‘Julia told me you’re weird.’

  ‘If I’ve been granted a flicker of madness, I’ll be sure to take care of it.’

  ‘She said at breakfast you were making a list of people with a parent who killed themselves.’

  ‘And of those who are drawn to suicides. All Hitler’s women – I think there were seven – killed themselves. It is a very particular sort of death to live with. The worst thing that could happen has already happened. I’ve been wondering what sort of psychology it makes.’ He said that if you have a parent who kills themself, you never lose the fear that everything you most loved could be taken from you. ‘This morning, as you beauties slept, it occurred to me that I should attempt a small book about suiciders and those who love them. I’ll talk to Dad about my mother, meet her friends and the writers she was supposedly fond of. Be her biographer.’

  When Harry’s car rolled up at the house, Julia’s brother Scott came out into the front yard and stood there, looking at Harry sitting in his car, the two girls silent and watchful.

  Julia whispered, ‘He’s protective, but he knows what you mean to me.’

  Harry lowered the window. ‘Good afternoon.’

  ‘All well?’ said the brother.

  He made a gesture at the girls and they scuttled inside the house. Scott stood in front of the car. Harry went to seal the window once more, but couldn’t manage it.

  ‘You have a good one?’ Scott asked again, without raising his voice, but unable to resist a little gob on the ground.

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ said Harry. He thought he might reverse away fast, but wondered if that might seem impolite. The two of them looked at one another until at last the brother stood aside.

  Twenty-five

  ‘Is there something seriously wrong?’ Mamoon said. ‘Why are you humming a cheerful tune?’

  ‘Could I pour honey on your yogurt?’

  ‘It would be the first time, but thank you, Harry,’ said Mamoon, sitting down at the kitchen table and smiling at the younger man. ‘What is the source of your good cheer, my biographfiend friend? Is it because you have discovered I am a homosexual with several love children – thus ensuring you have the scandalous bestseller you require to secure your coming career as a television presenter?’

  ‘I will go for a long walk and contemplate your life, before returning to London to write it all down in as filth
y a fashion as I can, with Alice by my side.’

  ‘Thank God I will never read it. And Liana and I shall have some peace at last.’

  Julia rushed into the house and flung a large bag onto the floor, followed by another. ‘Sorry, had to wait for my brother to give me a lift.’ And indeed Harry could see the scowling sibling through the window, before he took off. She said, ‘Are you ready? Shall I put my bags in your car?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ she said. ‘To London. Didn’t Alice tell you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She’s big and tired now, and I’m going to help her clear out the flat and get you into the new place you’re renting. You’ll be writing; she says you won’t lift a finger and she can’t do it herself. Be sweet, Harry. Don’t worry, no one will say anything. We get along. We’ll have the time of our lives.’

  The last time Harry and Julia had gone together, in the fields a few days before, Julia had once more begged Harry to take her away with him. It had to be now, she said; there was not one thing left for her here. Liana was cruel, and Ruth was wild with hatred for herself and everyone around her. She had never liked Julia, and wanted her to leave the house: Julia’s ‘disapproving’ stares were dragging her down, and repelling her boyfriends. Likewise, Julia’s spirit was deteriorating; she dreamed people were trying to kill her; she was afraid to go to sleep. ‘I’m a blink away from being a cleaner,’ she said. ‘I’ll always work, Harry, I’ll never be a burden to you.’

  Harry said it was impossible; she didn’t know London, which was too fast, big and expensive for her. How would she survive? To her credit, she’d taken no notice.

  ‘What’s going on? Is everyone leaving?’ said Liana, sweeping in, in her dressing gown.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Even you, Julia, surely not? What about the ironing? Who gave you the right?’

  ‘I went and punched my own ticket this morning, Liana. Mum’s upstairs, doing the bedrooms. She’ll cover for me.’

  ‘No, sorry, won’t allow it.’ Liana wailed, ‘Alice isn’t here – both my daughters have left! The place will seem stone cold and silent, and I love the voices and cooking and activity! Mamoon, what will I do?’