Why the cave? I dont know why. Perhaps because if they were hunting for me Id run to this place. And so might he. The oran-pendic. He could be here. He could be near. Am I grabbing at straws? Louis thinks so. But he would. Hes so methodical. Hes so unforgiving. Hes so marginal. Do you know what I mean?
In the darkness I can dream I see him. This pale ape. This toe-less man. And he, like me, is flattened up against a wall. Not in the main cavern but in an anti-chamber. A crevice. We both feel around blindly, like deep-water fish. Touching, whispering, bumping, retreating.
One day I thought I felt a snake. Hibernating, on a rocky shelf. Thigh-high. And the shock! But then I realized that it was a root. An ancient root from a giant tree that flowered once, far, far above.
Sometimes visitors come. With their torches, their unbearable voices and their sharp-eyed guides. I watch them from my crevices. They dont find me in this labyrinth.
And he is here, somewhere, watching me. I feel it. I am hunter and hunted. I am avoider, avoided. I am complete. Replete.
Men arrive daily to scoop up the bat shit. Louis tells me they make medicines with it. They use it for fertilizer.
One day Louis came himself to try and find me. He called out my name and my name rebounded. I was a spider. I was all eyes. He couldnt see where he was going. He wasnt acclimatized. He grumbled and stumbled and his hands were hungry on the walls. I stood close by him but he couldnt tell. I even smiled at him but my teeth were as black as the darkness that spiked them.
Two weeks in the cave. In before light, out after nightfall. This is a dark world. Louis gives me bitter glances when I return. He gives me the coldest cold shoulder but he doesnt speak. He thinks I know something that he doesnt know. Hes growing distrustful. Last night I heard him taking the film from my camera and then replacing it with another.
My ears have grown so sharp that I can hear my hair and my nails growing. My skin is a soft dough-white and I absorb everything. I eavesdrop, I intercept. And like an exotic woodpecker on a sky-high line I wire tap, tap, tap.
Hear me knocking, Ronny. M.
Twenty-Four
Nathan was rotad on for the Sunday shift with Laura and Lauras dumb friend Karen. The office wasnt open. They were merely sorting; slotting stuff into cubicles, tagging it and then tapping it on to the database. Filling in and keeping on top of things.
Mid-morning, Laura consulted Nathan over some art books. They were in a plastic bag. They came from a specialist art bookshop in the West End. Some were in English, others were in foreign languages; Spanish, Italian. Laura was still stuck at that desperately helpful stage. She had yet to evolve from private eye to clerical worker. Perhaps we should phone the bookshop, she suggested, the receipt says they paid by credit card. Over a hundred and thirty quid, in fact.
Theyll find them here if they want them.
Nathan, stiff-necked and dismissive, waited at the keyboard. He wanted some details so that he could type them in and then abandon the edit.
But Laura had pulled one of the books out of the bag and was turning its pages. Here, after all, was a whole world of art and gloss and gorgeous paper which smelled like high quality furniture polish. Spain. The Prado Museum. El Grecos bloodless gristle. His pale pigments and aching holy ligaments. Then blue. Then red. Goya. All that drowning. Those inky eye-rollers. The lolling.
Look, a dog, Laura smiled, swimming!
The Italian Renaissance. Just smell the paper, Nathan. Karen had sniffed already. Laura offered him the open book. He swallowed hard and took it. He sniffed at it. It was open on a very particular page. He looked and then he looked again.
Whats wrong?
Laura moved closer and peered over his shoulder. She loved the musky scent of him. Man. Soap. Hair oil. And although Nathan wanted to, he just couldnt stop staring. Laura glanced at the picture and then at the adjoining script. Antonello da Messina, she said. Its called the Pieta. 1477.
Then she read: The picture is remarkable in its use of the prominent psychological diagonal which goes from Christs face to his right hand
She inspected the picture. It was Christ with an angel. Christ, crucified, down from the cross, still breathing, perhaps, a wound bleeding profusely under his right nipple. Head back, eyes closed, mouth falling open. A little angel at his right shoulder supported him. Her face shining with tears. And they were all alone. Just these two.
How amazing! she pronounced, feeling uneasy. Because there was something not quite right about the picture. Something amiss. Christ had a tiny sheet on his lap which barely covered him, and his hand, not the psychological hand (which was curled back, all cramped and uncomfortable) but the left hand which rested on his thigh, had its fingers curled in a particular wayit verged on the indecent. It was sex and death and other stuff that Laura didnt much relish contemplating.
Do you like it? She spoke.
No.
Nathan closed the book.
He went home. He caught the Tube. She knew his route. She left the office just shortly after. She found him on the platform. Deep down underground. The Tube arrived. She climbed on with him. It was virtually empty. They didnt sit.
You took the book.
She was not accusing. He breathed harder, restraining something.
Why did you take it?
He shook his head. They didnt speak again. But she went all the way home with him.
In his living room he put down his briefcase. Will you report me for this?
Laura shook her head, almost shocked at the suggestion. I imagined you were planning to return it, she said quietly. As though she knew! She had such faith in him. He nodded.
I just want you to fuck me, she added, astonishing herself almost as much as Nathan, because Im honestly starting to hate you and I really want to flush it right out of my system once and for all.
Nathan was appalled. Against the door, fully clothed, gasping, he did exactly as shed asked.
Later, much later, he spent hours just gazing. He stared in wonder at the thirteenth-century Christ-as-Masturbator. And the angel. A little angel-optician, liny, tearful, bobbing at his shoulder. A languid warmth filled him. From his teeth to his prick to his toes. For the first time in his long life he was truly, unspeakably, ineluctably suffused.
Twenty-Five
The car was the only thing Connie wasnt selling. It was completely her own. She drove one-handed, blinking herself awake, eating a greasy brioche from the services. Her mother had begged her not to go. Sunday morning. Her arm was still in its sling but it felt as normal. She yanked the sling off and used the arm without even thinking. In fact she was almost convinced that all the fuss had been merely a conspiracy to stop her from leaving.
Gravesend to Sheppey was no distance. But she took a diversion to Cobham en route, where her aunt lived. Her fathers sister. She had packed a case. Enough clothes for a week. The letters in their bright ribbon. And also a cheque for the amount of twenty-five thousand pounds. Her mother had signed it in lieu.
It was all so dreamy. The motorway. Crumbs on her lap. It had rained at first and then a shaft of light cut through the clouds and nearly blinded her. She drove on into it, squinting.
Her aunt was exquisitely dithery, which was, Connie felt, just as things should be. She drank some tea. She was loitering.
You look so tired.
Do I?
Are you sleeping properly?
Yes.
And where will you go now?
To Sheppey.
And where will you stay?
I dont know. In a hotel.
But you have an uncle her aunt went and found her address book, he runs a farm.
Connie frowned. But Ive never even met him.
So Ill ring them.
She rang them. Someone was dead. A vacancy. She needed to feel useful, to fill it.
Connie barely registered the conversation. She was idling in neutral. I am free of all ties, she thought, and I have a cheque for twenty-five thousand pounds. I could take my little smart car and head for Sheerness, drive it on to the ferry and then drive it off again at the other side, just randomly.
It wasnt escape. No. She had yearned for the shock of resolution, the force of will, the sense of sacrifice, of application, to complete her obligations to her father. Before this moment it had all been procrastination. A yearning. A waiting. And yet now that she was moving, now that she had that cheque on her person, now that her willpower had finally been located, shaped, funnelled, she felt an overwhelming urge to do something new with it. To channel it elsewhere.
Was that wrong? She could be the girl in the car commercial who just drove and drove. Or she could be like Monica and search for something that was missing. A missing something. But she was too short to be the girl in the commercial and her hair was too curly, and of the many things she had yet to discover that were missing from her life, the main one Was still her own self. Was constancy.
When her aunt handed her a piece of paper with an address on it and specific instructions, Connie slipped it into her pocket, fully intending to ignore it. But in her pocket her hand located something she did not remember packing. Her passport.
In that instant she felt certain that if she had troubled to open her passport and inspect her own pale face in the small grey portrait within, she would have discovered two harsh words boldly inscribed across her sweet, round cheeks: DIRTY FRAUD.
And as luck would have it, this struck her as a perfectly fair assessment.
When Jim awoke his neck aching, his throat sore he found himself still on the sofa. Ronny was sitting close by, on the floor, wide awake, fiddling with some of the embers in the fireplace. He was holding a charred remnant with a red tip. He was blowing on it and watching the heated end brighten.
Jim focused on him, blearily, slowly regaining his senses. He saw Ronny apply the ember to several surfaces. First, to another piece of wood. Then to the bottom of his white shoe. Finally, he held it in front of his nose and gazed and gazed. Then he moved it an iota and set fire to his fringe.