December 31

I CICLES ARE DRIPPING all down the alley, catching the slanted sun. There’s a barstool propping open the door of Le Croc, and inside Holly is hoovering, attired in baggy army trousers, a white T-shirt, and a khaki baseball cap, which doubles as a ponytail scrunchie. A droplet from an icicle above finds the gap between my coat and my neck and sizzles between my shoulder blades. Holly senses me and turns. As the Hoover’s groan dies, I say, “Knock-knock.”

She recognizes me. “We’re not open. Come back in nine hours.”

“You say, ‘Who’s there?’ It’s a knock-knock joke.”

“I refuse even to open the door, Hugo Lamb.”

“But it’s already a bit open. And look,” I hold up the paper bags from the patisserie, “breakfast. Surely Günter has to let you eat?”

“Some of us had breakfast two hours ago, Poshboy.”

“If you go to Richmond Boys College you get ridiculed for the crime of not being posh enough. How about a midmorning snackette, then?”

“Le Croc doesn’t clean itself.”

“Don’t Günter and your colleague ever help?”

“Günter’s the owner, Monique’s hired just as bar staff. They’ll be wrapped up in each other until after lunch. Literally, as it happens: Günter left his third wife a few weeks ago. So the privilege of sloshing out the sty falls to the manager.”

I look around. “Where’s the manager?”

“You’re looking at her, y’eejit. Me.”

“Oh. Then if Poshboy does the men’s lavvy, will you take a twenty-minute break?”

Holly hesitates. A part of her wants to say yes. “See that long thing? It’s called a mop. You hold the pointy end.”

“TOLD YOU IT was a sty.” Like a time traveler operating her machine, Holly pulls the handles and swivels the valves of the chrome coffeemaker. It hisses, belches, and gurgles.

I wash my hands and take a couple of barstools off a table. “That was one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever done. Men are pigs. They wipe their arses, then miss the toilet bowl, and just leave the scrunched-up shitty tissue where it fell. And the splattered puke in the last cubicle—nice. Vomit sets if it’s just left there. Like Polyfilla.”

“Switch your nose off. Breathe with your mouth.” She brings over a cappuccino. “And someone had to clean every toilet you’ve ever used. If your dad had run a pub instead of a bank, like mine did, it might’ve been you. Thought for the Day.”

I take out an almond croissant and slide the other bags to Holly. “Why don’t you do the cleaning the night before?”

Holly unravels the edge of an apricot pastry. “Günter’s regulars don’t piss off till three in the morning, if I’m lucky. You try facing the cleaning at that time after nine hours’ worth of serving drinks.”

I concede the point. “Well, the bar’s looking battle-ready now.”

“Sort of. I’ll clean the taps later, then restock.”

“There was I, thinking bars just ran themselves.”

She lights a cigarette. “I’d be out of a job if they did.”

“Do you see yourself in, uh, hospitality long-term?”

Holly’s frown is a warning. “What’s it to you?”

“I just … Dunno. You seem capable of doing anything.”

Her frown is both wary and weary. She taps ash from her cigarette. “The schools the lower orders go to don’t exactly encourage you to think that way. Hairdressing courses or garage apprenticeships were more the thing.”

“You can’t blame a crap school forever, though.”

She taps her cigarette. “You’re clever, obviously. But there are some areas where you really don’t know shit, Mr. Lamb.”

I nod and sip my coffee. “Your French teacher was brilliant.”

“My French teacher was nonexistent. I picked it up on the job. Survival. Fending off Frenchmen.”

I dig a bit of almond from my teeth. “So where’s the pub?”

“What pub?”

“The one your dad works in.”

“Owns. Co-owns, in fact, with my mam. It’s the Captain Marlow, by the Thames at Gravesend.”

“Sounds picturesque. Is that where you grew up?”

“ ‘Gravesend’ and ‘picturesque’ don’t exactly waltz around arm in arm. It’s a lot of closed-down factories, paper mills, Blue Circle cement works, council estates, pawn shops, and bookies.”

“It can’t all be misery and postindustrial decay.”

She searches the bottom of her cup. “The older streets are nice, I s’pose. The Thames is always the Thames, and the Captain Marlow’s three centuries old—apparently there’s a letter by Charles Dickens that proves he used to drink there. How ’bout that, Poshboy? A literary reference.”

My blood’s zinging with coffee. “Is your mum Irish?”

“What leads you to that deduction, Sherlock?”

“You said ‘with my mam,’ not ‘with my mum.’ ”

Holly exhales a fat loop of smoke. “Yeah, she’s from Cork. Don’t your friends get annoyed when you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Sifting what they say for clues instead of listening.”

“I’m a detail nerd, that’s all. Have you started the clock on my twenty minutes, by the way?”

“You’re down to”—she checks—“sixteen.”

“Then I’d like to spend the remainder playing bar football.”

Holly scrunches her face. “Bad idea.”

I never know if she’s serious. “How come?”

“ ’Cause I’ll scalp your arse, Poshboy.”

• • •

THE TOWN SQUARE is patchy with melting snow and busy with shoppers, and a red-cheeked brass band’s playing carols. I buy a fund-raising calendar from some school kids and their teacher at a stall by the statue of St. Agnès, and get a chorus of “Merci, Monsieur!” and “Happy New Year,” because my accent tells them I’m English. Holly Sykes did indeed scalp my arse at bar football; she scored rebound goals off the sides, she can lob, and her left-handed goalie’s a lethal weapon. She didn’t smile but I think she enjoyed her victory. We made no plans, but I said I’d drop by the bar tonight, and instead of answering Eeyore-ishly or sarcastically, she just said I’d know where to find her. Stunning progress, and I almost fail to recognize Olly Quinn in the phone box by the bank. He’s looking agitated. If he’s using a phone box instead of Chetwynd-Pitt’s phone, he doesn’t want to be overheard. Would I be fully human if curiosity didn’t get the better of me occasionally? I hide behind the solid wall of the booth where Olly can’t see me. Thanks to a bad line and his angst, Olly’s voice is loud and every punched-out sentence is pretty clear. “You did, Ness. You did! You said you loved me too! You said—”

Oh dear. Despair is as attractive as cold sores.

“Seven times. The first was in bed. I remember … Maybe it was six, maybe eight, who cares, Ness, I … So what’s that about, Ness? Was it one big lie? … Then was it some—some mind-fucking experiment?”

Too late to slam on the brakes now; we’re over the edge.

“No no no, I’m not getting hysterical, I just … No, I’m not, I don’t get what happened, so … What? What was that last bit? This line’s shit … No, not what you said—I said the phone line’s shit … What’s that? You thought you meant it?”

Olly punches the glass of the phone box, hard. “How can you think you love someone? … No, Ness, no, no—don’t hang up. Look. Just … I want things back to how we were, Ness!… But if you’d explain, if you’d talk, if you’d … I am calm. I’m calm. No, Ness! No no no—”

A phony peace, then an explosive “Fuck it!”

Quinn hammers his fist on the glass a few times. This attracts attention, so I slip back into the stream of shoppers and loop back around the way I came, sideways as I pass, for long enough to see my lovesick classmate folded over, hiding his face in his hands. Crying—in public! The unedifying sight sobers me a tad with regard to Holly. Remember: What Cupid gives, Cupid takes away.

THE AUSTRIAN-ETHIOPIAN DJ is silent and hooded, won’t take requests, and, in the last hour alone, has loped through remixes of the KLF’s “3 A.M. Eternal,” Phuture’s “Your Only Friend,” and the Norfolklorists’ “Ping Pong Apocalypse.” Club Walpurgis is housed in the basement annex of the vast and elderly Hôtel Le Sud, a six-floor, hundred-room angular labyrinth converted in the 1950s from a sanatorium for the tubercular and very wealthy. A recent refit has stripped Club Walpurgis down to a bare-brick Bowie-in-Berlin look, and expanded the dance floor to the size of a tennis court. Submarine lights are strobing and a decent percentage of the two to three hundred dancing skeletons clad in young flesh and high-end apparel is young and female. A snort or two of devil’s dandruff has reerected the Mighty Quinn from his emotional crash earlier, so all four of us have come clubbing. Unusually, I’m the only one who isn’t in the act of pulling; my three fellow Humberites are sitting on a horseshoe-shaped sofa, each nursing a young, attractive black girl. No doubt Chetwynd-Pitt is playing his nineteenth-in-line-to-the-throne card—the drunker he gets, the bluer his blood—Fitzsimmons is flashing his francs, and presumably Quinn’s squeeze just finds him cute and fluffy. Fair play to them all. Any other night I’d go fishing too, and I won’t pretend my Alpine glow, Rupert Everett sultriness, charcoal Harry Enna shirt, and Makoto Grelsch jeans wrapping my rower’s torso aren’t drawing long-lashed attention, but this New Year’s Eve I’d rather get blown by a dance track. Could I be on to a Temptation of Christ deal whereby an act of continence at Club Walpurgis tonight earns me credit in the Bank of Karma to be redeemed by a certain girl from Gravesend? Only Dr. Coke has the answer, and after this archangelic remix of “Walking on Thin Ice” by somebody or other, I’ll go and consult with the good medicine man …

THE CUBICLES IN the Gents are as commodious as Le Bog du Croc is not, and seemingly designed for the insufflation of cocaine: frequently cleaned, spacious, and sans that incriminating gap between the top of the door and the ceiling so common in British clubs. I seat myself upon the throne and produce my compact mirror—borrowed from an elfin Filipina who was angling for a spouse’s visa—and Foo Foo Dust, won from Chetwynd-Pitt at blackjack this very night and stored in a little plastic wrapper inside a bag of menthol Fisherman’s Friends to confuse any canine investigators in the unlikely event … My tooter is a straw made from coarse paper and Sellotape. With superb precision I deposit the last of my coke in a swirl on the mirror and—kids, don’t try this at home, don’t try it anywhere, Drugs Are Bad—toke it up my left nostril in a powerful snort. For five seconds it stings like a nettle being threaded down my throat via my nose, until …

We have liftoff.

The bass is reverberating in my bones and godalmightythat’sgood. I flush the paper straw away, dampen a sheet of loo paper in the cascade, and wipe my mirror clean. Tiny lights I can’t quite see pinprick the hedges of my field of vision. I emerge from the cubicle like the Son of God rolling away the stone, and inspect myself in the mirror—all good, even if my pupils are more Varanus komodoensis than Homo sapiens. Exiting the bogs, I encounter an Armani-clad stoner known as Dominic Fitzsimmons. He smoked a joint earlier, and his habitual sharp-wittedness has bungee-jumped from the bridge and is yet to return. “Hugo, what’s a shit like you doing in a nice place like this?”

“Powdering my nose, dear Fitz.”

He peers up my nostril. “Looks like a blizzard blew in.” He does a melted grin and I can’t help but think of his mother wearing the same smile and nothing else. “We met girls, Hugo. One for CP, one for Olly, one for moi. Come and say hello.”

“You know how shy I am around women.”

He finds this too funny to laugh at. “Pants—on—fire.”

“Really, Fitz, no one loves a gooseberry. Who are they?”

“This is the best part. Okay. Remember that African pop song “Yé Ké Yé Ké”? Summer of … 1988, I think. Massive hit.”

“Uh … Not well, but yeah. What’s his name—Mory Kanté?”

“We are a-wooing Mory Kanté’s backing singers.”

“Riiiiiight. And doesn’t Mory Kanté need them tonight?”

“They did a big gig last night in Geneva, but tonight they’re free and they’ve never learned to ski—lack of snow in Algeria, I presume—so they’ve all come to Sainte-Agnès for two or three days to learn.”

I find this story semi-plausible, more semi than plausible, but before I can voice my skepticism Chetwynd-Pitt rocks up. “It’s the season of lurrrve back at chez CP. There’s a still a slab of Gruyère in the fridge for you to impregnate, Lamb, so you won’t feel left out.”

Southern Comfort, cocaine, and horniness turns my old friend Chetwynd-Pitt into an A1 shithead and compels me to retaliate: “I don’t want to shit in your baguette, Rufus, but hasn’t it occurred to you you’re pulling a trio of tarts? They have that air of paid sex about them. I’m only asking.”

“You may be better at cheating at cards than us but tonight you’ve failed to pull.” Chetwynd-Pitt pokes my chest and I imagine ripping off the offending index finger. “We’ve got three dusky maidens zero-to-gagging for it in less than sixty minutes, so Lamb decides we’re paying them. Well, actually, no, they’re discerning women, so you’d better put your earplugs in: Shandy’s a screamer, I can tell.”

I can’t let that pass: “I don’t fucking cheat at cards.”

“Oh, I believe you do fucking cheat at cards, Scholarship Boy.”

“Take your finger off my chest, Gaylord Chetwynd-Pitt, and prove it.”

“Oh, you’re too fucking clever to leave proof, but year in, year out, you’ve fleeced your friends for thousands. Intestinal parasite.”

“If you’re so sure I cheat, Rufus, why do you play me?”

“I won’t again, and in-fucking-fact, Lamb, why don’t—”

“Guys, guys,” says Fitz the stoned peacemaker, “this isn’t you; it’s Colombian snort or whatevertheshit it was that Günter sold you. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon! Switzerland! New Year’s Eve! Shandy’s into lovers, not fighters. Kiss and make up.”

“Cheat-boy can kiss my fat one,” mutters Chetwynd-Pitt, pushing past me. “Get our coats, Fitz. Tell the girls it’s afterparty time.”

The door to the Gents swings behind us. “He didn’t mean it,” said Fitzsimmons, apologetically.

I hope not. For several reasons, I hope not.

I STAY ON the dance floor for DJ Aslanski’s remix of Damon MacNish’s mid-eighties anthem “Exocets for Breakfast,” but Chetwynd-Pitt’s parting shot has disfigured my night by shaking my faith in the whole Marcus Anyder project. I created Anyder not only as fake account holder to own and obscure my ill-gotten gains, but to be a better, sharper, truer version of Hugo Lamb. But if a privileged clot like Chetwynd-Pitt can see through me so easily, I’m not as clever and Anyder isn’t as hidden as I’ve believed up until now. And even if I am a master dissembler, so what? So what if I join a City firm in eight months, and stab and bluff my way to a phone-number income within two years? So what if I own a Maserati convertible, a villa in the Cyclades, and a yacht in Poole harbor by the turn of the century? So what if Marcus Anyder builds his own empire of stocks, properties, portfolios? Empires die, like all of us dancers in the strobe-lit dark. See how the light needs shadows. Look: Wrinkles spread like mildew over our peachy sheen; beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat, varicose veins worm through plucked calves; torsos and breasts fatten and sag; behold Brigadier Philby, French kissing with Mrs. Bolitho; as last year’s song hurtles into next year’s song and the year after that, and the dancers’ hairstyles frost, wither, and fall in irradiated tufts; cancer spatters inside this tarry lung, in that aging pancreas, in this aching bollock; DNA frays like wool, and down we tumble; a fall on the stairs, a heart attack, a stroke; not dancing but twitching. This is Club Walpurgis. They knew it in the Middle Ages. Life is a terminal illness.

PAST THE QUEUE for the gorilla-man’s crêperie on the plaza, under lights strung between the spiky pines, through air shimmering with bells and cold as mountain streams, my feet know the way, and it’s not back to family Chetwynd-Pitt’s Swiss chalet. I take off my gloves to light a cigarette. My watch says 23:58. All Praise the God of Perfect Timing. After giving way to a police 4×4—its snow chains clink, sleigh-bell-like—I walk down the narrow alley to Le Croc and peer in through the round window at the scrum of natives, visitors, and shady in-betweeners; Monique’s fixing drinks but Holly’s not in eyeshot. I go in anyway, and ease myself through flesh, jackets, smoke, chatter, clatter, and phrases of Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage. No sooner do I reach the bar than Günter turns down the volume and clambers onto a stool, whirling a soccer rattle for attention. Our host points at the large clock with the handle of a tennis racket: Less than twenty seconds remain of the old year. “Mesdames et messieurs, Herr und Herren, ladies and gentlemen, signore e signori—le countdown, s’il vous-plaît …” I’m allergic to choruses so I abstain, but as the unified clientele reaches five I feel her eyes pulling mine down from the clock and we watch each other like kids playing a game where the first one to smile loses. A lunatic cheering breaks out, and I lose the game. Holly pours a measure of Kilmagoon over a single cube of ice and slides it my way. “What mystery object did you forget this time?”

I tell her, “Happy New Year.”

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 547