him, and instead moulded their mud into offers and counter-offers
that they slung at each other with increasing force and velocity,
simultaneously using the calculators on their mobile phones to
make extempore valuations and mortgage calculations. It’d been,
he thinks, a fine small-scale re-enactment of … the fervid London
property market. And as they factored away their patrimony, he’d
stood there murmuring, Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? a sort
of wondering mantra, that, as it persisted grew in volume, Who am
I? Who am I? WHO AM I? until he was belting it out: WHO
AM I?! WHO AM I?! and they all fell silent. Who am I? he’d
then asked them … calmly, quietly, professionally, because I don’t
know the man you’re all railing at – do any of you really know him
either? It can’t be dear old Zack Busner – can’t be him … He’s a
jolly sort of a fellow – bit of a duffer, p’raps, but basically sound …
No … (small moist sniff) … can’t be him … Daniel had been
moved to hug his father … although I sensed his flesh crawling as he
did so and say a few calming words … the way I once did to him –.
How-ow-ow! Busner cries aloud in the ascending lift, How-ow-ow
did it come to this? For he remembers a dear little bundle of curls –
its eyes wide and fixed on the odometer as … we all willed it to click
from thirty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine to …
forty thousand … How-ow-ow the world turns! Zack had stood
there, his son’s arms around him. He’d smelt his son’s hair – could it
be true that it had the same musty, floral aroma as when Daniel had
been a little boy? Can it also be true that this remains embedded,
deep in the most primitive part of my rhinencephalon, while all the
rest of my brain is being choked in a convolvulus of neurofibrillary
tangles … ? He’d stood there some more, while his children and
their partners fell silent – then he’d gently confided, D’you know,
I think I might be losing my marbles … After which a different
sort of hell broke loose: all of ’em weeping, wailing … gnashing
their fluoride-preserved teeth … Ting! Teeth – or so they say – carry
on decaying after you’re dead … therefore I must be … dead. There’re
sheaves of flimsy disposable toothbrushes on top of the maid’s
service trolley, together with a pile of fluffy-white towels, a wad of
teabags, and a tray of individual shampoo and conditioner bottles –
everything, in short, necessary to restock these hundreds of little
luxury cells, each one of which has been the setting for … a thousand
scenes of provincial life. Waywardly, Busner wants to examine
the shoeshine machine next to the lift. C’mon, you daftie, says the
remaining security guard, I’d’ve thought you’d want t’get yer keks
on an’ clear out. But no – Busner shrugs him off and, sticking one
bare foot under the brush, lifts the other to shakily depress …
Button A. The sensation isn’t unpleasant: a scratchy buffeting – No!
Buffing – No! Buffering … for, seen side-on, the whirring brush
would look like the strange on-screen circlet, ever composed and
recomposed by … sheaves of flimsy disposable lines. So there’s no
alternative but for everyone to wait … until the buffeting, buffing,
buffering stops – C’mon, feller, you’ve not even got yer Salfords
on – you’ll mess yer feet up something terrible … Their arms linked
in both of his … le canard enchaîné … the odd trio waddles on,
Busner thinking of all the corridors he’s ever escorted the distressed
down – corridors sunlit or neon-irradiated, corridors latterly with
piss-stained cork, rubber or linoleum tiling, but to begin with pockmarked
herringbone parquet. Now the escort has become … the
escorted, yet Busner hears in the Mancunian whine the faintest of
after-echoes, borne in the slipstream of fugitive memory: Knick-knack
paddywhack, aye, thass a funny old rhyme right enough – lemme
tell ye, Doc, down on the farm they know what it means – taught me,
too … There’ll come a time, Doc, when dottelt or no, you’ll remember all
I’ve told you – then … then … it’ll be the end … There are trays piled
rolled up in condoms dangling from their handles. Busner breathes
deeply, drinking in old perfume, stale air-freshener, rotten cigarette
smoke – and other more cloacal odours, as the great battle rumbles
on between sepsis and antisepsis … toenails grow when you’re dead –
therefore … They pull up short in front of Room Five-Twenty, and
my prop-forward says, Get yer key card out, man. Busner fumbles
in his jacket pocket … smooth and smoother, pulls it out. The security
guard says, Awww, thass not yer card – it’s yer bloody phone!
And to underscore its significance eyearrdoubleyou … the obsidian
screen shines NO CALLER ID, and the old black Bakelite phone
the Superintendent kept in the dead-centre of his resonating desk
rings and wrongs and rings some more, down all the cobwebbed
corridors of Busner’s mind … C’mon, answer the bloody thing, will
yer! The security guard tries to snatch it – but Busner’s too quick:
thrusting the phone back in his pocket, he discovers the key card
with the same grope this old man came rolling … home –. Christ!
It’s mingin’ in ‘ere – and ‘angin … Pete-the-Podium-Restaurant-Manager
screws up his eyes and grimaces into the glare blaring
from the full-length windows, while the security guard – who,
Busner now realises, is … a very young man indeed – slumps against
the wall, clamping a hand over his mouth and nose … he played
knick-knack on my thigh – which is what sensible Pat had done that
afternoon at Redington Road: sat him back down on the sofa,
soothed and stroked him. The others then came forward sheepishly,
one at a time, and offered their own instances of his forgetfulness
and otherwise aberrant behaviour, so’s to confirm … my own self-diagnosis.
Realising how subdued he was, they drew closer and …
chewed over my misfortune. For a while he’d been content to sit there,
sopping it all up … Oscar, tears in his eyes, describing some strange
charade Zack had performed for a posse of outraged mummies
in the Starbucks on Hampstead High Street – miming the thing
he’d just done in the smallest room … with the largest commode,
because he’d temporarily forgotten the name of it. Pat, still patting
away, felt it incumbent on her – as a qualified, if under-employed,
psychiatric social worker – to give the rest of the family a potted
lecture on Alzheimer’s, its etiology, progression and – she’d been
weirdly gleeful – inevitable outcome. He’d withstood being Patronised
for a while – then began struggling to rise. Lottie had hung
on one arm, Frankie on the other – for a moment it’d seemed
they’d … forcibly detain me. Staring at the bright light of … the
void outside Room Five-Twenty, Busner remembers this unca
nniness:
a black crow flying past the tall windows by the staircase. Zack
had thought then – Busner thinks again, now: This isn’t my true
home … I’ve got a home on high … For years I’ve run my eyes
along egg-and-dart cornicing … L’Origine du monde, but there’ll
come a time, surely, when I’ll be … reborn. But Lottie’s words had
seared him – are searing him still: You – You can’t possibly be
allowed to sign away all your assets when you can’t even remember
where your mobile phone is! The effect on her father had been
violent: I hope not one drop of the semen they pump into you is
MOTILE! he’d bellowed – then, in the ensuing ruckus he became
aware of … pill-dust … fag smoke, and Simon’s arm shielding him
from the warring factions of … my own family! Pat, Daniel, Oscar
and Lottie pushed for him to be removed, post-haste, to a place of
senile sequestration, there to be confined to a sun lounge … for the
rest of my natural life, and may my insurers have mercy on my soul!
Frankie and Vigo had at least cavilled at such outright cruelty,
because: If you lot seriously believe Dad’s senile, then legally speaking
whatever bit of paper he’s signed is invalid! Yes, indeed – yet
Busner fears his invalidity is more profound than mere legalities:
looking at the chubby blonde woman in her arty and asymmetrical
clothing – felt patches, crocheted squares and woolly panels, all
in shades of utter, beige neutrality – he’d been unable to suspend
disbelief … Is she my blood-relative? Even as she stamped her well-shod
foot and fulminated, he’d seen her regress and regress, until
she was small enough to be smeared with sun cream and tears
and placed in … that paddling pool we had – the red one. Lottie had
always had the fairest and the thinnest of skins: Daddy! Daddy! She
took my – But, really, had her childhood been that bad? Could any of
my own derelictions, or her mother’s dopiness – which at least had
the virtue of being utterly consistent – be a justification for this, his
own daughter, shouting at Zack in what’d been the family home
since her Great-Uncle Maurice bought it in nineteen forty-six for
three thousand and seven hundred guineas: Let him! Let him give
it all away! So what if he’s only doing it ’cause he’s bloody senile – he
never paid any attention to us when we were kids – now, at least,
we’ll benefit from his pathological inattention … Simon must’ve
secreted them somewhere nearby, because he’d simply handed Zack
his staff and begging bowl: it’d been time to go. Vigo came out into
the road after them and tried remonstrating – not profound and
heartfelt entreaties, though, only … the sort of ineffectual twaddle
you’d expect from a Danish acupuncturist, who, for what seemed to
Busner to’ve been aeons, has been … my son’s bum-boy … toenails
grow when you’re dead … therefore this old man, he played five, he
played knick-knack on my … For Christ’s sake! Will you answer that
bloody phone? But no – he won’t answer it in Room Five-Twenty,
any more than he would in the Podium Restaurant, the lobby or
Mister Marshalsea’s office. Instead he stands in the debris of the
hotel room – for it’s been comprehensively wrecked – and stares
down at the blinking, pulsing BEN CALLING … BEN CALLING …
BEN CALLING … not seeing this writing on a small and glassy
wall, but the cold and drenched privet hedges he’d slashed at with
his staff, as, together with his ragged company, Zack had jinglejangled
towards the Heath, passing beneath the curtained eyes of
other … highly desirable detached properties. BEN CALLING … BEN
CALLING … BEN CALLING … or is it London? He remembers
going to view the house with Maurice for the first time – there’d
been an Anderson dug into the sunken garden and nothing entertaining
in the bomb-damaged minstrels’ gallery. Built before the
last war, Maurice had muttered as he prodded fallen lumps of plaster
with his shooting stick … the shooting stick! Busner saw him now,
propped up by it in the corner of the hotel room, just as he’d once
been in the paddock at Plumpton, ogling the jockeys, so seductive in
their bright-billowing silks. In the twenties this would’ve been a family
home for some prosperous broker or bon-bon manufacturer … Maurice
had crunched over the broken glass in his immaculate handmade
shoes … never skimp on shoe leather, my boy – begin polishing at the
sole if you want to shine when you’re on your uppers … And Zack,
aged eight, had crunched after him in his own serviceable winter
boots, his navy-gaberdine school mac tightly belted. Maurice had
gone on: Then came the slump, and some flash-Harry developer
must’ve carved the place up into flats – but it’s taken a pasting,
it’ll need a great deal of work … They’d been standing in the
shattered scullery by then, Busner thinks … suetty stuff rotting in an
enamelled basin – mangled mangle toppled on its side … incy-wincy
spiders picking their way over peeling paint … but anyway, his uncle’s
clincher had always been the same: It’s a keen price … a very keen
price indeed. – She’s a snake, that daughter of mine – a duplicitous
snake! He’d made this judgement, Busner imagines, as they’d
gained the brow of the hill and begun stumbling down towards
the massy blackness of West Heath. Ann had been dragging
her feet in the gutter – she wore bargain-basement jeans and a
charity-shop hooded top. She’d stopped, turned her raw pink nose
up and sniffed the evening air judiciously … posh woodsmoke from
decora-tive stoves – cloves and other esters of mulled wine … And?
she’d queried, And? It’d been this And, he thinks, that … spurred
us on, compelled them all to keep on going, joining one defunct
moment to … the next dying one. Yes, And! Zack had expostulated.
And I happen to know she and Daniel had a valuation done
before Christmas … I saw the letter – usual estate agent bullshit:
Six Beds … Five Recep’ … Games Room … Windows Leaded
Lights … Unique … Premier Hampstead location … Former
Literary Residents … Superb Views … Surrey Hills to the south
… Sunken Garden … Generous Three-Car Garage and turning-circle
drive with original brickwork porte cochère – And? the very
picture of pathological entelechy had … put in: And? So that
Zack had counter-queried: And? Leading Simon to interpret: She
wants to know what the asking price’d be if it was put on the
market now, like … Months later, standing in Room Five-Twenty,
looking down at the little slab in his hand graven with BEN CALLING
… BEN CALLING … BEN CALLING … Busner considers
that of all the oddities whirling around his foggy-old head recently,
this has to’ve been the strangest: the preternatural sensitivity to
fluctuations in the fervid London property market of those …
diagnosed with peetee-essdee! But at the time he’d simply told them:
Eight-point-five million pounds! No, really – a cool eight-point-five
million quid! He’d cried it out to the cricked necks of the
streetlights – shouted it into their mistily haloed faces, not forgetting
to add: Or near offer! – And he’d gone on … of course I did:
Which means, together with a seventh part of Maurice’s entail –
which I may not’ve added to, but I haven’t subtracted from – all of
the ungrateful whelps are as RICH AS BLOODY CROESUS!
Whereupon Simon had sniggered, If you were my patient, Doctor
B, I’d’ve you shot up wiv enough ‘aloperidol to stop a bull-elephant
in ‘is tracks. Why? Zack had shot back. To treat me for what,
precisely? A smile plays around his froggy lips, as he stands in the
swampy mess of Room Five-Twenty and summons up Simon’s
foolery: Not to treat you, Doctor B – to punish you. Punish you for
lettin’ yourself go, man – big cheesy-thing you are, emi-whasit …
eminentish … Should be dingifacky-facky and imposing, like.
‘Stead yer actin’ like a fuckin’ idiot – eight-point-five million
squid? Thass a lot of Big Issues … Whereupon Ann, who’d been
standing stirring leaf-mulch with the toes of her trainers, said,
And? – What the hell did you do in here? Pete-the-Podium-Restaurant-Manager
really is holding his nose. This place is a shit-hole
… Indeed it is, Busner concedes, peering at the stripped bed:
the top sheet, a creased canvas, has been painted with brownish
arse-strokes and reddish blood-ones. Pete-the-Podium-Restaurant-Manager
and the cauliflower-eared security guard advance along
the short corridor into the main body of the room: inexperienced
gallery-goers … looking for some sort of plaque that will explain …
what the hell it is they’re looking at. Drained gin miniatures and the
jars which once contained a selection of Mister Porter’s Luxury
Nibbles are scattered across the long strip of desk, skipping over the
rope of the hairdryer’s flex – which is still on and whirring away,
its warm jet agitating the quiver of slim, white cigarette butts in
the ashtray, each bearing the smoosh of scarlet-painted lips. Busner’s
aware of a vernal riffling, as of fresh foliage in equinoctial breezes.
The Gideon Bible has been removed from the bedside table, shredded,