Armadillo, Page 3

  Are we alone tonight, Doctor?’ Lorimer asked.

  ‘We are not. Patient F. is already installed.’ He opened the door to Lorimer’s cubicle. After you, Patient B.’ There were six cubicles side by side in two rows of three at the end of the laboratory. Wire rose from each to be gathered centrally at a metal beam in a loose braid which looped its way across the ceiling to the control area with its banks of tape recorders, stacks of winking monitors and EEGs. Lorimer had always used the same cubicle and had never encountered a fellow lab-rat. Alan liked it that way – no symptom-sharing, no exchange of placebos or special tricks. No gossip about that nice Doctor Kenbarry.

  ‘How are we?’ Alan asked, a solitary strip light somewhere turning his spectacle lenses into two white coins as he moved his head.

  ‘We’re quite tired, actually. The day from hell.’

  ‘Poor baby. Your jim-jams are ready. Do we need to go to the loo?’

  Lorimer undressed, carefully hung up his clothes and pulled on the clean cotton pyjama trousers. Alan reappeared a moment later with a flourished tube of ointment and a roll of transparent sticking plaster. Lorimer stood patiently as Alan busied himself with the electrodes: one to each temple, one below the heart, one on the wrist at the pulse.

  Alan taped down the electrode on his chest. ‘I think another little shave might be in order, before the next time. Bit bristly,’ he said. ‘There we are. Sweet dreams.’

  ‘Let’s hope so.’

  Alan stood back. ‘I’ve often thought we should attach one to the patient’s cock.’

  ‘Ha-ha. Lady Haigh said you woke her up this morning.’

  ‘I was only putting the rubbish out.’

  ‘She was cross. She called you a jackanapes.’

  ‘The Jezebel. That’s because she loves you. Everything OK?’

  ‘Fine and dandy.’ Lorimer crawled into the narrow bed, while Alan stood at its foot, arms folded, smiling at him like an affectionate parent, the tableau marred only by his white coat – a complete affectation, Lorimer thought, wholly unnecessary.

  Any requests?’

  ‘Waves on the beach, please,’ Lorimer said. ‘I won’t need an alarm, I’ll be out of here by eight.’

  ‘Night, Big-Boy. Sleep well. I’ll be here for an hour or so.’

  He switched out the lights and left, leaving Lorimer in absolute darkness and in almost absolute silence. Each cubicle was thoroughly insulated and the noises that filtered through were so indistinct as to be unrecognizable. Lorimer lay in the dazzling darkness waiting for the photomatic flashes in front of his eyes to subside. He heard the tape of ocean breakers come on, the lulling susurrus of foam smashing on rock and sand, the plash and rattle of the pebbles in the undertow, as he settled his head deeper in the pillow. He was tired, what a disastrous day… He tried to keep his head clear of images of Mr Dupree and found instead that they were replaced by the unsmiling face of Torquil Helvoir-Jayne.

  Now that was something else. A director, he had said, looking forward very much, challenging times, exciting developments ahead, and so on. Leaving the Fort to come to us. And he had always thought Hogg was the sole director, the big tuna – or at least the only visible one. Why would Hogg agree to that? It was Hogg’s show, why would he tolerate someone like Helvoir – sorry, ‘heevor’ – Jayne? He seemed all wrong. Embarrassing moment, that. Lazy speaker, elocution lessons required, especially with a name like that. Torquilheeverjayne. Arrogant sort of shit. Snotty. Ego at large. Strange having someone like him about the office. Not quite our type. Seems all wrong. Torquil. Somehow foisted on Hogg? How could that happen?… This had to stop, he realized, or he’d never sleep. Change of subject required. That was why he was here. What to think about. Sex? Or Gérard de Nerval? Sex. Sex it was. Dymphna, sturdy, broad-shouldered, small-breasted Dymphna and her candid invitation. Right out of nowhere, that. Never would have dreamt. Trying to imagine Dymphna naked, the two of them making love. Those silly shoes. Strong, shortish legs. As he felt himself slipping away, going under, another image replaced that of Dymphna – a sliding diorama on a taxi’s glossy door and above it a girl’s face, a girl’s wan, oval, perfect face, eager, hopeful, long-necked and wide-eyed –

  Brutal knocking on the door, two harsh iron-knuckled raps, jerked him awake, alarmed. He sat upright, heart kicking, in impenetrable darkness, to the sound of notional waves breaking on a notional shore.

  The lights went on and Alan came in, a resigned smile on his face, a printout in his hand.

  ‘Woah,’ he said, showing Lorimer a jagged mountain range. Almost broke a rib there.’

  ‘How long was I out for?’

  ‘Forty minutes. Was it the knock-on-the-door thing?’

  ‘Yep. Someone’s fist on that door. Bam-bam. Loud.’

  Lorimer lay back, thinking that more and more often it was – for some unknown reason – the heavy noise of knocking, or of doorbells ringing or sounding that woke him these nights. Experience told him that this sort of awakening was a brusque portent of an end to sleep as well; he never seemed to drift off again, as if the shock of that rousing had so rattled and shaken his system that it required a full twenty-four hours to settle again.

  ‘Absolutely fascinating,’ Alan said. ‘Tremendous hypnopompic reveries. Love it. Two knocks, you said?’ ‘Yes. Glad to be of help.’

  ‘Were you dreaming?’ He gestured at the dream diary by the bed. All dreams were to be logged, however fragmentary.

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ll keep on monitoring. Try and get back to sleep.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Doctor Kenbarry.’

  The waves rolled in. The darkness resumed. Lorimer lay in his narrow cell and thought this time about Gérard de Nerval. It did not work.

  Chapter 2

  As he turned the corner into Lupus Crescent, Lorimer saw Detective Sergeant Dennis Rappaport spring agilely from his car and take up a studied, lounging position, his back against a lamp-post, as if to indicate that this was a casual encounter, with little of the official about it. The day was one of pronounced greyness and coldness, with a low sky and a dead light that made even Detective Rappaport’s unlikely Nordic looks appear drab and under attack. He was happy to be invited to come inside.

  ‘So, you didn’t come home last night,’ Rappaport observed genially, accepting a mug of steaming, well-sugared, instant coffee from Lorimer – who managed to suppress his quip about the detective’s uncanny powers of deduction.

  ‘That’s correct,’ he said. ‘I was participating in a research project, about sleep disorders. I’m a very light sleeper,’ he added, pre-empting the detective’s next observation. In vain.

  ‘So, you’re an insomniac,’ Rappaport said. Lorimer noticed he had dropped his obsequious use of ‘sir’ and he wondered whether this was a good or bad sign. Rappaport smiled at him, sympathetically. ‘Sleep like a top, I do. A spinning top. No problem. Out like a light. Head hits the pillow, out like a light. Sleep like a log.’

  ‘I envy you.’ Lorimer was sincere, Rappaport had no idea how sincere he was. Rappaport went on to enumerate some epic sleeps he had enjoyed, citing one sixteen-hour triumph on a white-water rafting holiday. He was a regular eight-hour-a-nighter, it transpired, so he claimed with some smugness. Lorimer had observed in the past how a confession of sleep dysfunctions often provoked this good-natured bragging. Few other ailments elicited a similar response. An admission of constipation did not engender proud boasts of regular bowel movements. A complaint about migraine, or acne, or piles, or a bad back generally produced sympathy, not a swaggering testimonial about the interlocutor’s own good health. Sleep disorders did this to people, he noticed. It was almost talismanic, this guileless braggadocio, as if it were a form of incantation, protection against a profound fear of sleeplessness that lurked in everyone’s lives, even the soundest of sleepers, such as the Rappaports of this world. The detective was now expounding on his ability to enjoy restorative catnaps if the demands of the job ever interrupted his restful,
untroubled nights.

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you, detective?’ Lorimer asked gently.

  Rappaport removed his notebook from his jacket pocket, and flicked through it. ‘This is a very nice flat, you’ve got here, sir.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Back to business, Lorimer thought. Rappaport frowned at something he had written.

  ‘How many visits did you make to Mr Dupree?’

  ‘Just the one.’

  ‘He had you booked in for two hours.’

  ‘Quite normal.’

  ‘Why so long?’

  ‘It was to do with the nature of our business. It’s time-consuming.’

  ‘You’re in insurance, I take it.’

  ‘No. Yes. In a manner of speaking. I work for a firm of loss adjusters.’

  ‘You’re a loss adjuster, then.’

  And you are a credit to the force, Lorimer thought, but he said merely, ‘Yes. I’m a loss adjuster. Mr Dupree had made an insurance claim as a result of the fire. His insurance company –’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Fortress Sure.’

  ‘Fortress Sure. I’m with Sun Alliance. And Scottish Widows.’

  ‘Both excellent firms. Fortress Sure felt – and this happens all the time, it’s almost routine – that Mr Dupree’s claim was on the high side. They employ us to investigate it to see if the loss is in fact as great as it is claimed, and, if not, then to adjust it, downwards.’

  ‘Hence the name “loss adjuster”.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  And your firm – GGH Ltd – is independent from Fortress Sure.’

  ‘Not independent but impartial.’ This was written in letters of stone. ‘Fortress Sure does pay us a fee, after all.’

  ‘Fascinating line of work. Thank you very much, Mr Black. That is most useful. I won’t trouble you no further.’

  Rappaport is either very clever or very stupid, Lorimer thought, standing hidden at the side of his bay window looking down at the detective’s blond head as he descended the front steps, and I cannot decide which. Lorimer watched Rappaport pause in the street and light a cigarette. Then he stared frowning at the house as if its façade might hold some clue to Mr Dupree’s suicide.

  Lady Haigh clambered up from her basement with two gleaming empty milk bottles and as she set them down by the dustbin at the top of the basement steps Lorimer saw Rappaport engage her in conversation. He knew, from the way Lady Haigh nodded her head in vigorous assent, that they were talking about him. And, although he also knew that his character would receive nothing but the staunchest backing from her, the discussion – it had moved on, Lady Haigh was now pointing crossly at a gigantic motorbike parked opposite – for some reason made him strangely uneasy. He turned away and went to wash out Rappaport’s coffee mug in the kitchen.

  37. Gérard de Nerval. On my first visit to the Institute of Lucid Dreams Alan asked me what I was currently reading and I told him it was a biography of Gérard de Nerval Alan then instructed me that, as a conscious sleep-inducing device, I should either concentrate on the life of de Nerval or else indulge in sexual fantasies – one or the other. These were to be my choice of ‘sleep triggers’ and I should not deviate from them during my treatment at the Institute – it was to be de Nerval or sex.

  Gérard de Nerval, Guillaume Apollinaire or Blaise Cendrars. Any one of them would have been apt. I am unnaturally interested in these French writers for one simple reason – they had all changed their names and reinvented themselves under new ones. They started out their lives, respectively, as Gérard Labrunie, Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky, and Frédéric-Louis Sauser. Gérard de Nerval was closest to my heart, however: he had serious problems with sleep.

  The Book of Transfiguration

  Lorimer bought a hefty leg of lamb for his mother and then threw in two dozen pork sausages as well. In his family a gift of meat was prized above all others. Coming out of the butcher’s, he hesitated in front of Marlobe’s flower stall – just enough time, as it turned out, for Marlobe to catch his eye. Marlobe was talking to two of his cronies and smoking his horrible pipe with the stainless steel stem. As he spotted Lorimer he broke off his conversation in mid-sentence and, holding out a flower, called over, ‘You won’t find a sweeter-smelling lily in the country’

  Lorimer sniffed, nodded in agreement and resignedly offered to buy three stems, and Marlobe set about wrapping them up. His flower stall was a small, complicated wheeled contraption of folding doors and panels which, when opened, revealed several rows of stepped shelves filled with flower-crammed zinc buckets. Marlobe loudly claimed to believe in quality and quantity but interpreted this homily to mean lots of limited choice and consequently kept the range and type of flower he sold very small, not to say disappointingly banal. Carnations, tulips, daffodils, chrysanthemums, gladioli, roses and dahlias were all he was prepared to offer his customers, in or out of season, but he provided them in overwhelmingly large quantities (you could buy six dozen gladioli from Marlobe without clearing the stock) and in every colour available. His only concession to exoticism were lilies, in which he took particular pride.

  Lorimer enjoyed flowers and bought them regularly for his flat but he disliked Marlobe’s selection almost exclusively. The colours, also, were primary or lurid wherever possible (Marlobe was loudly derogatory of all pastel shades) on the assumption that vividness of hue was the main criterion of a ‘good flower’. The same value system determined price: a scarlet tulip was more expensive than a pink one, orange rated higher than yellow, yellow daffodils fetched more than white and so on.

  ‘You know,’ Marlobe went on, rummaging in his pocket for change with one hand and holding the lilies with the other, ‘if I had a Uzi, if I had a fucking Uzi, I’d fucking go into that place and fucking line them up against the wall.’

  Lorimer knew he was talking about politicians and the Houses of Parliament. It was a familiar refrain, this.

  ‘Gnakka-gnakka-gnakka-gnak,’ the imaginary Uzi bucked and chattered in his hand, once Lorimer had relieved him of the lilies. ‘I’d shoot every last fucking one of them, I would.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Lorimer said, accepting a palmful of warm coins.

  Marlobe smiled at him. ‘Have a nice day.’

  For some bizarre reason, Marlobe liked him and always took the trouble to pass bitter comment on some aspect of contemporary life. He was a small, burly man, quite bald with a few traces of sandy, gingery hair around his ears and the nape of his neck and he had the permanent, faintly surprised, innocent look of the pale-lashed. Lorimer knew his name because it was painted on the side of his mobile flower cabana. When not selling flowers he would be engaged in loud, profane conversation with an odd selection of cronies, young and old, solvent and insolvent, who occasionally departed on mysterious errands for him or fetched him pints of lager from the pub on the corner. There was no floral competition within half a mile, and Marlobe, Lorimer knew, earned a handsome living and took holidays in places like the Great Barrier Reef and the Seychelles.

  Lorimer bussed to Fulham. Up Pimlico Road to Royal Hospital Road, along King’s Road, then Fulham Road to the Broadway. He avoided the tube at weekends – it seemed wrong somehow: the tube was for work – and there would be nowhere to park his car. He stepped off at some traffic lights on the Broadway and strolled up Dawes Road, forcing himself to recall details of his childhood and youth in these narrow and car-choked streets. He even detoured a quarter of a mile so he could contemplate his old school, St Barnabus, with its smirched, high, brick walls and its pitted asphalt playground. It was a valuable exercise in painful nostalgia and was really the primary reason why he sometimes accepted his mother’s standing invitation to Saturday lunch (never Sunday lunch). It was like picking a scab off a sore; he actually wanted scar-tissue, it would be quite wrong to try and forget, to blank it all out. Every fraught memory that lurked here had played its role: everything he was today was an indirect result of the life he had led then. It confirmed the rightness of ever
y step he had taken since his escape to Scotland… No, this was all becoming a little overblown, a little high-cheekboned and intense, he thought. It wasn’t fair to burden Fulham and his family with all the responsibility of who he was today – what had happened in Scotland also carved out a sizeable slice of that particular cake.

  Yet, as he turned off Filmer Road he felt a familiar heat, a searing, in his oesophagus – his indigestion problem, his heart burning. One hundred yards from his family home, his natal home, and it kicked in, the stomach acids started to bubble and seethe. For some people, for most people, he fondly supposed, such a return home would be signposted by a familiar tree (much shinned-up in childhood), or a carillon of church bells from across the green, or a cheery greeting from an elderly neighbour… But it was not for him: he sucked on a mint and gently punched his sternum and he rounded the corner to face the thin, wedge-shaped terrace. The small, mean parade of shops – the post office, the off-licence, the Pakistani grocer, the shuttered, out-of-business butchers, the estate agent – tapering to the pointed apex, number 36, with its dust-mantled pride of double-parked saloon cars and, on the ground floor, the frosted windows of ‘B and B Mini-cabs and International Couriers’.

  Some new fancy plastic name tag had been screwed above the bell-push since his last visit – black copperplate on smoked gold: ‘FAMILY BLOCJ’. ‘The J is silent’ would have been the motto blazoned on the Bloçj family escutcheon, if such a crest could be imagined, or alternatively, ‘There is a dot under the C’. He could hear, coming through time, his father’s patient, deep, accented voice, at innumerable post-office counters, holiday hotel reception desks, car rental franchises: ‘The J is silent and there is a dot under the C. Family Blocj.’ Indeed, how many times had he himself apologetically muttered the same instructions in his life? It did not bear thinking of – it was all behind him now.