Fascinated Read online

  ‘What is it?’ Frank looks suspicious and pulls back his head as the button is waved beneath his nose.

  ‘Fowler’s Old-Fashioned Acid Drops,’ says Webster, pushing the button into his mouth and rolling it against his teeth. He breathes a deep and satisfied sigh. ‘Do you want one?’

  Frank accepts an acid drop and sucks at it slowly, feeling the sweetness dissolve on his tongue and trickle against his throat.

  ‘Who were those men?’

  ‘The Cocker brothers.’

  ‘Why did they push you from the car?’

  ‘I wasn’t pushed,’ said Webster indignantly. ‘I jumped!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They were trying to kill me,’ he says softly. He glances up at the moon and smiles as a large green Bentley glides silently to the edge of the ditch.

  ‘Look. Here’s Valentine.’

  She stands at the foot of the bed and stares down at him. She is tall and lean with waxed black hair and a brightly painted face. She is wearing a charcoal chiffon dress and a pair of long satin evening gloves. Her perfume fills the room with a sweet incense of roses, jasmine and cloves. Whenever she moves the perfume wafts from her limbs, makes the air shimmer around her head like heat haze on a desert road.

  Frank groans and tries to unglue his mouth. He doesn’t know how he reached this place. He doesn’t recognise the bed, the candy-striped pattern on his pyjamas or the woman who is standing there watching him.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I brought you home.’ The woman smiles. A flickering curve on her crimson mouth. Her eyes glitter in their scoops of darkness.

  Frank drifts back to the land of the living. He remembers being hauled from the mud, wrapped in blankets and carried away in the back of the Bentley. The bed and pyjamas remain a mystery. The pyjamas are huge. He pulls an arm from beneath the covers and peers up the sleeve at his missing fingers.

  ‘We had to scrub you down. You were filthy.’ She raises a hand against her breasts as if protecting herself from the spectre of his nakedness. The long satin fingers are covered in rings. Emeralds and amethysts. Rubies dark as blood clots.

  ‘Where’s Webster?’

  ‘He’s with the doctor.’

  ‘Is he badly hurt?’

  ‘The doctor’s for you.’

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Around midnight.’

  ‘I have to phone home!’ He tries to shake off the sheet and clamber from the bed but the pain in his chest stakes him securely against the mattress.

  ‘You want to phone Jessica?’

  He flinches, shocked by the sound of his wife’s name. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘You were calling her name when we brought you here.’ She shrugs, charging the air with more of that sweet, narcotic perfume. ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Yes.’ He yawns. His eyes feel heavy and he can’t raise his head from the pillow.

  ‘She’ll be worried.’

  ‘Yes.’ His voice is no more than a whisper.

  ‘Wait for the doctor.’

  She turns quickly and walks from the room, making the chiffon swirl around her as if she were wearing nothing but shadows.

  When Frank opens his eyes again he is staring into the face of a man with a dainty pencil moustache and a pair of soft blue eyes. One of the eyes is small and rheumy, the other is a monstrous fish swimming in the bowl of a monocle. He is dressed in a plain dark suit and a fancy white silk shirt. He smells of whisky. He is wearing a stethoscope as a necklace.

  ‘Are you the doctor?’

  ‘Do I look like a doctor?’

  ‘No,’ whispers Frank. He grins, unbuttons his pyjama jacket and lets the stranger prod his chest. He is waiting to be asked questions about the cause of his injuries. He is waiting to explain the circumstances of the fight and give a description of his assailants. But the doctor examines him in silence.

  ‘What’s the damage?’ he demands, when every part of him has been thumbed, turned, twisted and tweaked.

  ‘Minor abrasions to the legs, upper arms, neck and chest. Some extensive bruising to the ribs, throat and shoulders. Nothing serious.’

  Frank sighs. He was lucky. Nothing torn or broken. He pulls the big pyjamas closed and wraps himself in the sheets. ‘My throat is sore,’ he complains, pressing his fingers against his neck.

  ‘Are you thirsty? Here. Drink.’ The doctor produces a waxed paper cup filled with a measure of bitter milk.

  ‘What is it?’ gasps Frank, draining the cup and scraping his teeth against his tongue. His mouth is suddenly sprouting hairs.

  ‘Something to make you sleep. Something to help the aches and pains.’ The doctor smiles, plucks the stethoscope from his neck and throws it into his leather bag.

  ‘No …’ Frank yawns and finds that he cannot untangle his arms.

  ‘You should rest,’ says the doctor gently. He steps away from the bed. His monocle glints like a silver medal.

  ‘I must get home …’

  ‘It’s too late.’

  ‘I have to call my wife …’

  At midnight Jessica calls the police.

  A woman answers the phone, surprising her, demanding to know her business, finally takes her name and number, transfers her to the duty sergeant.

  ‘Can you describe him?’ asks the duty sergeant, when Jessica has been made to repeat her story. His voice isn’t old or mature enough to inspire a sense of confidence. He sounds like a rather bored shop assistant. She feels cheated. She wanted a voice in uniform.

  ‘Average height … average build …’

  It sounds so stupid. It sounds like the sketch of a stranger. Why can’t she describe her own husband? He is tall and lean with a slow smile and a touch of early frost in his hair. She is proud of him when they walk in the street. He bears no likeness to the wheezing, wheedling, swag-bellied husbands of the other women she knows. These men, softened to fat, losing their hair with the rest of their teeth, have thickened into monstrous babies.

  ‘Is there anything in particular?’ prompts the duty sergeant. ‘Does he have any distinguishing marks?’

  ‘What kinds of marks?’

  ‘Birthmarks. Tattoos.’

  ‘No.’

  His body is printed with several fine scars, an intimate history of boyhood battles. She knows the coarse white thread that copies the curve of his shoulder blade, the raised red crescent beneath an elbow, the small silver moons punched into his knees.

  ‘Is he an epileptic or diabetic? Does he take any form of medication?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘This afternoon. He went out to post a letter at the top of the street. I waited. He hasn’t come home …’

  ‘Did you have a disagreement?’

  ‘I was asleep. No. There was nothing.’

  ‘Had he been drinking?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said you were asleep. Had your husband been drinking?’ There’s an edge of impatience on his voice to let her know that she’s wasting his time.

  ‘No.’

  She has never seen him drunk. When she breaks into a bottle of wine she becomes a shrieking, rubber-faced harpy, the kind of drunk you try to avoid. She shouts and sings and dances on tables, opens her dress and flaunts her tits, falls down and vomits on carpets. He stands impressive, superior, bored. She does not admire his moderation.

  ‘Perhaps he went to visit someone …’

  ‘I’ve phoned everywhere. I’ve tried everything.’ She rakes at her hair with her fingernails. Why doesn’t he want to help? What’s wrong with the fucking system! People can’t disappear! When she’d phoned the local hospitals they’d treated her with the same suspicion, refused to check their casualty lists, left her hanging on an empty line.

  ‘Are you sure he didn’t meet a friend?’

  ‘People don’t vanish into the rain! The ground doesn’t open and swallow them!’ She is suddenly shouting, blinking back tears, frigh
tened by all these senseless questions.

  The duty sergeant falls silent for several moments, leaving her time to regret the outburst and giving him an opportunity to take a sip from a cup of instant coffee beside him. The coffee is cold and contains too much sugar. He swallows and sucks at his teeth. ‘If he met a friend,’ he begins again, ‘there’s a chance he’ll be home in the morning.’

  Jessica winces and tightens her grip on the telephone. What’s that supposed to mean? Does Frank have some little tart waiting for him in a rented room? Is that it? A popsy in leg-spreader underwear? Is she supposed to remember the smell of cheap perfume on his shirts, his strange moods, the late nights he spends at the office, the whispered weekend telephone calls? It’s crazy! She can’t believe it. Other women find him attractive because he seems not to notice them. At parties they surround him, flashing their eyes and their naked shoulders, while he stands patiently, smiling but distant, waiting for her to rescue him.

  ‘What happens if he doesn’t come back in the morning?’ she snaps back at him. What happens if he’s been involved in an accident and he’s hooked to a life-support machine? What happens if he’s gone crazy and tries to walk into the sea? What happens if his life depends on their finding him tonight?

  ‘If he’s not there in the morning we’ll ask you to come down and make an official report.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘It’s not a crime to leave home.’

  ‘Thanks for nothing!’

  Jessica bangs down the phone and sits alone in the empty house, praying for Frank to step from the darkness. It’s two forty-seven by the clock on the bedside table. Something past midnight by the watch on her wrist. At daybreak she’ll walk down to the police station, confront the duty sergeant and enter Frank’s name in the Book of the Disappeared.

  Frank wakes up to find Valentine sitting on the edge of the bed with a breakfast tray in her hands. The room is large and filled with sunlight from a long window. The window is dressed in gold braid and fat swags of purple velvet. The surrounding walls are bare. The floor has been stripped to polished planks, on which a threadbare Persian rug seems to float like an empty raft.

  ‘How do you feel this morning?’ she asks as she places the breakfast tray in his hands and helps to prop his shoulders with pillows.

  ‘Fine. I feel fine,’ he says, wiping the sleep from his eyes and checking his pyjama buttons.

  ‘You look like shit,’ Valentine says cheerfully, pouring coffee from a silver pot.

  She is wearing a long silk dressing gown tied with a richly embroidered sash. Crimson flowers on a dark green band. Her black hair, still damp from the shower, has been pulled from her neck and tied in a knot.

  ‘I always look like shit in the morning,’ says Frank. He grins and studies the breakfast tray. A rack of toast, curls of butter in a silver dish, boiled eggs, madeleines the colour of honey, hot milk and soft, brown sugar.

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Eight o’clock.’

  ‘I’ve got to leave! I’ll be late for work!’ He looks around the room in dismay and grasps the sides of the breakfast tray. He doesn’t know where they’ve hidden his clothes but his wristwatch and keys have been placed within reach on the bedside table.

  Valentine looks startled, catches him by his pyjama sleeve and gently squeezes his wrist. ‘Take it easy. Drink your coffee. My father wants to meet you.’

  Frank sinks back against the pillows and measures sugar into his cup. He glances around the room again, hoping to find a telephone. He must phone Jessica – he has to let her know that he’s safe.

  ‘Do you mind if I make a phone call?’

  ‘You want to phone your wife?’ asks Valentine, stealing a slice of toast and snapping at the crust with her teeth.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK. Finish eating and get dressed. You’ll find fresh clothes in the wardrobe. Your old clothes were disgusting. I told Webster to burn them.’

  She gestures at a huge wardrobe, carved from oak and set with panels of stained glass.

  ‘It’s old. Genuine antique.’

  She stands up, hands deep in her dressing-gown pockets, and swaggers towards the bedroom door, where she pauses to glance back at him.

  ‘Have you ever been to Rangoon?’ she demands, for no apparent reason.

  Frank shakes his head, watching her turn and walk away disappointed, the silk washing against her shoulders, catching softly between her legs, shimmering where it catches the sunlight.

  He waits until she has left the room and then looks down at the breakfast tray. He’s hungry! He devours the eggs and toast, takes a second cup of coffee and plugs his mouth with a madeleine, before setting out at last to explore the wardrobe.

  The doors are as heavy as tombstones. The handles are dancing skeletons, cast from copper, eyes made from polished ivory beads. But when the doors are flung apart, the wardrobe is turned from a funeral vault into a carnival attraction, a travelling tailor’s window display. The interior is packed with fine underwear, shins, suits and shoes, arranged according to season and colour. Everything is new. Nothing has been touched. The shirts, with their arms folded behind cardboard backbones, are still sealed in polythene wrappers. The shoes are gleaming from factory boxes. The suits of every weight and measure, paraded on polished wooden hangers, still wear their price tickets on their sleeves.

  Frank steps back in surprise and stares. He’d expected to find gardening clothes, a few old sweaters, an assortment of boots and carpet slippers, cobwebs, mothballs and walking sticks. What’s happening here?

  He shakes off the pyjamas and searches his body for signs of damage. One shoulder is stained blue with bruises and a weal still smoulders against his neck. His elbows are grazed and there’s a small cut beside his mouth. His penis, caught in the light, takes his interest for a moment and he gathers it into his hand where it fills his palm like a cow’s teat. It’s a queer sensation to be standing naked in a stranger’s house. He takes a packet of underpants, breaks open the seal on the envelope and starts to dress, glancing furtively at the door. Expensive. Silk against the skin.

  He chooses a pair of tartan socks, a plain white cotton shirt and a dark-brown suit. Everything feels too big for him. He spends several minutes trying to remove the price tag from the jacket sleeve but it’s been secured somehow by one of those tiny plastic threads that he has to gnaw through with his teeth.

  He selects a pair of brown Oxfords, rejects them in favour of heavy black brogues and has scarcely finished lacing them when Valentine returns to collect him.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asks hopefully, raising his arms and turning a circle. He feels like a scarecrow dressed for a wedding.

  Valentine shrugs. ‘It doesn’t fit. I bought all that stuff for my father.’

  ‘I hope he won’t miss it.’

  ‘He doesn’t know he’s got it.’

  She leads him from the bedroom, along a wide empty corridor and down a marble staircase. His shoes creak whenever he presses a foot to the floor. His sleeves dangle.

  ‘I’ll return these clothes as soon as I get home,’ he announces, creaking carefully down the stairs.

  ‘Forget it!’ says Valentine scomfully. ‘We don’t want them now that you’ve worn them.’

  She throws open a door, beckons Frank forward and plunges him into a tropical twilight. The heat makes him stagger and gasp for breath. Great palms rise from the ground and press themselves against the ceiling, their trunks sprouting curious epiphytes, flowers in the shape of painted skulls and grass like fountains of corpses’ hair. Monkeys chatter in the canopy. Parakeets scream. A tiger coughs in the undergrowth.

  Frank creaks down a twisting jungle path, trampling through tangles of ivy and jasmine, fighting through drifting green fogs of fern, until he reaches a sunlit clearing containing an ornamental pool.

  There is a man standing beside the pool. He is wearing a print
ed cotton frock, a string of pearls and bright red shoes.

  ‘What do you know about fish?’ demands the man in the frock.

  Frank creaks to the edge of the pool and stares down at the dark water. A dozen large fish are floating motionless on the surface, their fins fanned and their bloated stomachs turned to the sky.

  ‘They’re dead,’ says Frank.

  ‘Are they?’ frowns the man in the frock. ‘I thought there was something wrong.’

  He’s tall and softly spread with fat. His broad ugly face looks like a badly blemished potato. The folds of his ears and his big marbled nose are choked with quivering silver bristles. His eyebrows are brambles. His blotched brown eyes are full of sorrow.

  The frock, a faded print of daffodils, strains at the seams, pulls at the buttons, as if it were trying to shrink from the horror of being held captive against him. His butcher’s arms bulge from the little sleeves. His bony feet have broken the sides of the red leather shoes, forcing him to walk with a shuffle.

  ‘What do you think of the house?’ he asks Frank, surveying him with a mournful eye.

  ‘It’s big,’ says Frank.

  ‘Damn right, it’s big! This is my house. I’ve got a luxury fitted kitchen, an indoor swimming pool, sauna, gymnasium, cinema, art gallery and jungle hothouse. This is the jungle hothouse. It has automatic climate control and random stereophonic wildlife. Do you want a sauna?’

  ‘No. No, thanks.’

  ‘You can have a sauna if you fancy one.’

  ‘Some other time,’ says Frank. The heat crushes him. He opens the jacket and yanks at his collar.

  ‘The garden has a marble patio, a king-sized barbecue pit and fantasy floodlights that dance to music. What’s your name?’

  ‘Frank.’

  ‘I’m Conrad Staggers. This is my house. You’ve met my daughter.’

  ‘Valentine?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  An ape barks in distant treetops. Frogs are honking like motor horns. Conrad fondles his necklace and absently counts the pearls, a clicking rosary.