High Dive

Jonathan Lee

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Epub ISBN 9781473507883
Version 1.0

Published by William Heinemann 2015

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‘Ars Poetica?’ by Czesław Miłocz taken from Selected and Last Poems: 1931–2004 by Czesław Miłocz (HarperCollins 2006, 2011; Penguin Books 2014).

Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books.

Jonathan Lee has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by William Heinemann

William Heinemann

20 Vauxhall Bridge Road

London SW1V 2SA

www.randomhouse.co.uk

William Heinemann is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9780434023370

For Alfreda May Lee (1915–1996)

About the Book

In September 1984, a man calling himself Roy Walsh checked into The Grand Hotel in Brighton and planted a bomb in room 629. The device was primed to explode in twenty-four days, six hours and six minutes, when intelligence had confirmed that Margaret Thatcher and her whole cabinet would be staying in the hotel.

Taking us inside one of the twentieth century’s most ambitious assassination attempts – ‘making history personal’, as one character puts it – Lee’s novel moves between the luxurious hospitality of a British tourist town and the troubled city of Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the height of the armed struggle between the Irish Republican Army and those loyal to the UK government.

Jonathan Lee has been described as ‘a major new voice in British fiction’ (Guardian) and here, in supple prose that makes room for laughter as well as tears, he offers a darkly intimate portrait of how the ordinary unfolds into tragedy.

About the Author

Jonathan Lee’s first novel, Who is Mr Satoshi?, was nominated for the Desmond Elliott Prize and shortlisted for an MJA Open Book Award in 2011. His second novel, Joy, published in 2013, was shortlisted for the Encore Award. The BBC’s Culture Show recently featured him as being one of Britain’s ‘best new novelists’. He lives in New York.

Also by Jonathan Lee

Who is Mr Satoshi?

Joy

how difficult it is to remain just one person,

for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,

and invisible guests come in and out at will.

– Czesław Miłosz, ‘Ars Poetica?’

INITIATION

1978

WHEN DAN WAS eighteen a man he didn’t know took him on a trip across the border. It was 1978, the last week of June, six days after the British Army shot dead three Catholics on the Ballysillan Road. The car smelt of vinegar from fish and chips and the man had a scarred bald head and two jokes, one about the Brits and the other to do with priests. He seemed to be steering Dan somewhere near Clones, big square-tipped fingers drumming at the wheel, little jolts of surprise in his eyes sometimes as the road invented itself. He had a lavishly ugly cauliflower ear. He touched it several times as he drove. The crowded grey houses of Protestant Ulster gave way to light, to colour. You could feel the wind here and smell the grass. There were Derry buses streaming with red-and-white scarves. Flags in green and white and gold were wrapped around the branches of trees.

The bald man unleashed a magnificent burp as he swung the car onto a dirt track. The dirt track led down to a square of land enclosed by elms. Dan saw daisies, hay bales. A gleam of Coke bottle in the weeds. Beyond the bottle in a margin of shade a dark Land Rover was parked.

‘Don’t you worry yourself about the vehicle,’ the bald man said. ‘No one stops it, see? He’ll be thinking of a Saracen for Christmas.’

Dan tried to smile. ‘So that’s …’

‘Yeah?’

‘It’s Mr McCartland, is it?’

‘Oh,’ the bald man said, ‘I’d reckon so.’ With his seat belt still fastened he began pawing around in his jeans pocket for something, the touchy bulk of his body contorting like he was trapped in a torture chair, but a flattened packet of chewing gum was all that his hand retrieved. He looked at Dan and laughed. ‘Should’ve thrown you a can for the journey, shouldn’t I? A drink would’ve tightened the dung.’

The weather this morning was storybook pure. Big yellow sun. Smooth blue sky. A single white cloud as drawn by a child. It seemed the kind of day when nothing serious could happen. A day to drink eight pints and get burned. There weren’t many days like this in an Irish year; they asked to be remembered. He walked with the bald man towards the Land Rover, sharp grass going flat under their boots. Cottages were scattered around this land, detached places fronted by tilted fence posts and low open gates, window shutters swagging on tired hinge pins, properties that promoted an idea of privacy without ever quite needing to commit, and he too felt exposed, open. Sorely underprepared. He’d had no notice that the car was coming for him. Sweat was already forming at the base of his back. His leather jacket was cool but heavy. He’d heard so many stories about these initiations, the things they put you through before you could properly join, but he knew too that tall tales were Belfast’s stock-in-trade, the false often boosting the true.

A thin guy climbed out of the Land Rover. He wore specs and a smart shirt, sand-coloured trousers. Could this really be Dawson McCartland? He looked like an accountant. He pulled two large dogs out of the Rover on a long forked lead. One was gold and the other was brown. ‘Good morning,’ he said in a nasal monotone, nodding as if to prove that he meant it.

Dan went in for a handshake. Instead he received the dog lead. ‘I’m Dan.’

‘Well,’ Dawson said, removing his specs, ‘that’s a relief.’ His blurry eyebrows were joined and from under their awning he stared. A twinkliness to his eyes. The corners of his mouth upturned. With a hanky he wiped at the lenses of his glasses. The dogs were barking and pulling on the lead. He looked like a man struggling to contain some huge and mysterious amusement with the world and glancing down at his dogs now he sighed. ‘Away in the head they are, Dan. I love them more than my wife, these animals. Is that wrong, to prefer them to her?’

‘Dog lover,’ Dan said.

‘Are there others?’

‘Others?’

‘In Ireland, who love their dogs. You seemed to be assuming a category.’

Dan waited a moment. ‘Just a thing people say,’ he said.

‘On the whole I think of us more as cat fellas, Dan. Independent. It’s the Loyalists who are the dogs. Got any pets?’

‘Me?’

‘You.’

‘No.’

‘Not a rabbit, or anything?’

‘No.’

‘Chinchilla, maybe? Budgerigar? It’s going to be tough to let you volunteer without something, y’know. Freedom fighters need a mascot.’

There was a long pause.

‘I’m just pulling your chain, Dan. You’re with friends. This interview’s going to be very informal.’

The bald man was yawning happily, eyes sliding towards the trees, and the squirm of nerves in Dan’s stomach began to settle a little. ‘The lad’s not much of a talker, Dawson.’

‘You don’t say,’ Dawson said. ‘Might be a doer instead, eh?’ He took a pack of Newports from his pocket. ‘Want one, Dan? I’m a great supporter of silence.’

‘I’m OK.’

‘You?’

The bald man chewed gum. ‘Given up, haven’t I.’

‘On life?’

‘Fags.’

Dawson lit up and took a drag. ‘Same thing, I’d argue.’ He stood there smoking, crackling with his own peculiar charisma, the kind of self-assurance Dan had only recently learned how to fake. Every movement with the cigarette was well mannered, expert, measured and tight, as if designed to counter rumours that he could be a vicious brute. With great delicacy, as Dan leaned back into the breeze, Dawson tapped some ash away and let smoke escape a smile. ‘So,’ he said to the bald man. ‘Business. Tell me about young Dan here. What’s he got going for him apart from his looks, his height? Who recommended?’

‘Mad Dog,’ the bald man said.

‘Which Mad Dog, though?’

The bald man sniggered at this. Paddy was quiet, diminutive, aways keen to understand, with a careful moustache and small blue eyes he had a knack of keeping steady. He was ten years older than Dan and if he really was known as Mad Dog it would be a joke, Dan thought. Like calling a small man Big Tony. A ladies’ man Gay Sam.

Dawson said, ‘You’ll have to excuse us, Dan. The best nicknames get overused. Same in every army. We forget what the reason was and then there’s this dearth of imagination, isn’t there? A dearth that’s affecting the world. How d’you get to know Paddy Magee?’

‘Collecting bullets,’ Dan told them.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

He had cousins who lived around the Ballymurphy Estate. When the RUC took on Republicans there, news crews from all over the world came to watch. Italians staying at the Europa would pay five US dollars for a plastic bullet. They tried to give you lire but you laughed, told them you didn’t have a big enough bag; they liked the pep in that chat. The Americans would pay upwards of ten. If the bullets were still warm you could scratch names onto them, which the Japanese enjoyed – souvenirs from a dangerous trip, a bystander’s excitement at violence. A personalised bullet commissioned by an Asian and engraved to order could catch as much as fifteeen. On the downside the commissioner might easily disappear and then you were left with something you couldn’t sell on. Dan’s friend Cal had spent half his adolescence looking for a second Haruto. From the Ballymurphy you could see the Black Mountain, a thousand shades of green made dark by all that rain.

‘Not a bad little business, I imagine, Dan.’

‘It was all right. Don’t do it much now.’

‘No?’

‘I’m concentrating on odd jobs, electrics.’

‘So I hear. You and a sham, was it? For the bullet collecting?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Anyone I’d know?’

‘Cal.’

Dawson tilted his head. ‘Has he a surname, this Cal character, or is it a Cher ball-tickler sorta situation?’

Dan laughed. ‘He’s no Cher, Mr McCartland.’

‘Dawson.’

‘His name’s Cal Doherty.’

Dawson considered the sky. ‘Nothing’s ringing,’ he said. ‘I’ve succumbed to impure images of singing angels, is the thing.’

‘He suffers from a –’

‘Oh, I know Cal. Nice lad, altogether. Face like a dose of haemorrhoids but he’s nice despite it, isn’t he? I’m very wary of pretty fellas, Dan, I’ve got to tell you. A pretty guy or girl has something they’re worried’ll get spoiled, y’know? My wife’s dead on – you’d be lucky to have her company, Dan – but she’s only got one eye, there’s the thing.’ He crouched down to screw his cigarette into the ground. Carefully he folded the stub into a tissue, pocketed it and lit another Newport. ‘Wears a patch. Scottish by birth. As for me, I’ve actually got some English blood in me, y’know? Touch of Welsh too. Some say it disqualifies me from doing this job, but that’s the type of wonky thinking that’ll cause wars, isn’t it? Lack of faith in empathy. Tell me: are you a fan?’

‘Of empathy?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’

Dawson’s lips pressed thin, resisting a fresh grin, and his eyes seemed to glitter again. ‘It’s worth pondering on. If you don’t have it, a little of it, you can’t think yourself into another person’s shoes. You can’t countenance, let’s say, that I could wear yours with conviction.’ He bent down to pat his dogs, took a long look at Dan’s boots and stood. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Lack of empathy’s a tragic flaw. Ever read any Shakespeare, Danny?’

‘Why? Did he invent flaws?’

‘Ha. I like you already. You’re warming up nicely. But no. Not even God, the old fucker, could make such a wondrous claim.’ He inhaled and blew a smoke ring. ‘Wonder where He’s holidaying sometimes, don’t you? Not giving Ireland much time, is He?’

‘Probably He’s got a lot on.’

‘Depressed or drunk, like everyone else. But no, I like a bit of Shakespeare, Danny. That’s all. I don’t read it any more, but it’s in me, you know, like the Irish lingo. Seirbhís. Slán. Now. Mick. Will you go fetch the bags from the Rover, please? The ones with the gear in them. That’d be grand.’

Mick. Gear.

Dan watched Mick receding and returning, settling the bags on the grass, shirtsleeve riding up around his grudging wrist and flashing part of a blue tattoo. Tongue of a hanging snake, maybe, or flick of a mermaid’s tail.

Dawson said, ‘Do us a favour, will you, Dan? Play with the animals awhile. They don’t get out much, they’re like old Mick here. And Mick and I have deep stuff to discuss.’

At Dawson’s instruction Dan unzipped the green bag. It contained three tennis balls, a baseball bat, a warm six-pack of beer. He walked towards the trees with the tennis ball that looked least chewed.

Branches leaning and relaxing. The whispered resistance of leaves. Thinking: first stage of the interview must be over. Doing as he was told.

He threw the ball up high and retrieved it from their jaws. Amazing the amount these dogs drooled. The brown dog had patches of yellow on its tongue but it moved, on the whole, quicker than its golden friend. They competed to catch the ball on the bounce, weaving in front of one another – slipstream, overtake; slipstream, overtake – never clashing but always seeming like they would.

Should he be asking more questions? Showing more initiative? He’d been advised by Cal to stay silent unless spoken to. Probably that was right.

Every few minutes he looked back. Dawson and Mick were paying him no attention, which had to be a good thing. In his days of reading the pulps he never hankered after flight or the ability to cling to buildings. Invisibility was the most precious of the superpowers.

He tired of the damp tennis ball, exchanged it for a hunk of dried-out bark. The dogs chased it down and brought it back. Dan sprinted alongside them with the bark dangling from his hand, stopping and starting, lifting it up and lowering it down. After a while it burned to breathe. He knelt down to scratch their ears and watch the bob of their tongues. Some people said dogs were stupid, pure dim need and pure dim gratitude, but he saw in the spark of their eyes a special intelligence. Footballers calculating angles, movement without doubt.

‘Here we go!’ Dawson shouted. ‘Round ’em up.’

Dan clipped the dogs to the lead and jogged. The two men were nodding and laughing, squinting in the sun.

Dawson said, ‘Was just sharing an anecdote a guy called Clinkie told me. He’s straight out of the blocks, is Clinkie. Want to hear it?’

‘Sure,’ Dan said.

‘Clinkie says to me, he says Jesus is on the cross and the guys either side of him aren’t thieves. So, what are they?’

Dan shook his head.

‘Well, Dan, if you knew Clinkie you’d want to say they’re gays. But no. Clinkie explains to me they’re political activists, working against the Roman authorities. You’ve a pair of Republicans either side, getting crucified. And Clinkie says –’

‘I’ve heard this.’

Dawson raised his big eyebrow. ‘What’s that, Dan?’

‘I’ve heard it,’ Dan said, ‘from a couple of people. I remember now. Romans are Brits. Samaritans are Catholics. Jews are Protestants. First person welcomed into heaven today would be a paramilitary, Jesus talking to Dismas the thief, You will be in Heaven with me today, et cetera.’

Silence.

‘Well,’ Dawson said. ‘Talk about spoiling a story.’

There was the lazy sound of a bumblebee. Mick spent some time scratching his face. As Dan looked down at the grass Dawson said, ‘I enjoyed watching you with them, Dan. My dogs. Beautiful beasts, eh?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Myself, I’m not much of an athlete. A wee bit short on the breath, you know? I need a little can of special air.’ He took an asthma inhaler out of his pocket and revolved it in his hand. For a moment he looked utterly lost. ‘Anyway, I’d better head. Sadly I’ve an appointment with a fella who’s lived too long.’ He waited a beat, shook the inhaler, took a puff and held the air in his mouth. ‘Birthday party. Fortieth. Bloke’s mad as a bottle of chips, y’know, but we’ve got him a ping-pong table.’

‘That’s it?’

Dawson laughed. ‘Well, we’ll throw in a couple of bats and a ball, for sure.’

‘No, I meant –’

‘Yeah?’

‘I’ll just – I’ll wait to hear something, will I? Wait to hear whether I’m in? I’m keen, Mr McCartland. I’ll work hard. I – I want to help the cause.’ He could feel another future going grey.

Dawson raised his chin and blinked. ‘Listen, Dan. I’ve heard –’ One dog barked and the other dog whined. ‘I’ve heard that you’re useful. Is that right? Chaps at that Matt Talbot Youth Club. They say to me, as Patrick did, Now there’s a useful guy.’

‘Pool,’ Dan said. ‘Snooker. That’s probably all they meant.’

‘Come on now. No games. Ireland’s been modest too long. What are you good at, besides spoiling a story? An example. Let me think. My wife, the one-eyed one, she’s your bona fide whizz in the kitchen.’

Had they really brought him here to talk about hobbies? He chewed his lip, lined up some thoughts.

He hadn’t been a success at school but he was good at some things, small things. He had a talent for remembering. He was confident he’d be able to recite the right bits of the Green Book if all this went well and they swore him in. He could give them whole passages from the Bible, too. Lines from the pulpit seemed to lodge in his head; he liked the slant and pop of bygone language. He could draw a map from memory, replace a tyre without a jack, run a decent hundred yards and lift some heavyish weights. He could masturbate three times a day and still tug out a fourth before sleep. He was good in the garden, good at sorting his mother’s drugs, good at making bets with other kids and good half the time at winning them. He did some DIY for the community: bits of plumbing, guttering, electrics like his father used to do after the job at Gallaher had gone. He was proud of his country and he thought it was OK to be proud.

‘I’m not modest,’ he said. ‘I’m just shy with new people.’

They chose to take this as a joke. One of the dogs bit playfully at the folds of skin around the other’s neck.

‘Do y’know how to use an auto, Dan?’

He found himself looking to Mick for an answer. ‘No,’ he said.

Guns. A lot of the boys he knew wanted to join the Provos so that they could play with guns. Whereas his own reasons for wanting to join were … What were his reasons? To make a difference, long-term. To end the occupation, change people’s minds. To help fix up gutted businesses and protect the Catholic corner shops. To do service to the circumstances of his father’s death and to the fact that two of his brother’s friends, James Joseph Wray and Gerry McKinney, had been killed by the British Army on Bloody Sunday. Gerry unarmed with his hands in the air saying ‘don’t shoot, don’t shoot’, after which he was shot in the chest. James Joseph unable to move.

‘One at home,’ he said. ‘For protection. But it’s not an auto, and I never fired it.’

‘Interesting. Hear that, Mick? Prefers picking up bullets to popping them. I bet you Danny’s the guy at a party who sticks to the hard H₂O.’

With a snigger that seemed stolen from television Mick zipped up the bag that had contained the balls. He opened the other one, took out a shotgun and a handgun. The handgun he gave to Dan.

‘Feel it,’ Dawson said. ‘Lovely weight, no? Tend to jam, the autos, is the only thing. And now, if you don’t mind, you’ll shoot the dogs.’

Dan laughed. No one else joined in. Their faces were flushed and attentive but there was no hint of humour at all.

‘Or,’ Dawson added, ‘you can shoot one of them. Fifty per cent. You seem to be a left-hander – is that right, Dan? I could probably look after one dog. The thing is, looking after two, I don’t have the time, y’know? It’s cruel to have them.’

Still their expressions gave nothing away. Dawson blew his nose.

‘I’d keep hold of the lead with the other hand,’ Dawson said. ‘When you fire, I mean. Otherwise we’ll have a dog running around causing mischief, covered in wee bits of the other dog. Ugly, it’d be.’

Mick snapped open the shotgun. He looked inside and closed it again. His eyes settled on the ground and his bald head shone.

‘Is this a joke?’ Dan said.

Dawson shrugged. ‘I’m asking you to stiff two dogs for me, my friend. I could do it myself, but they’re my dogs, and I’ve had them exactly a year. So, do me a favour, save me from having to kill my own, will you?’

‘Is it loaded?’

Dawson smiled again. ‘I was told you were useful, Dan. Have I been misinformed?’

‘Like I said, I never used an auto.’

‘Same principle. Automatic. Manual. The thing they have in common is, you point them at something, squeeze the trigger, and the something stops being a problem.’

‘These dogs aren’t a problem.’

‘They’re a problem for me, Dan, you see.’ Hard and low in the voice now. Grave. ‘I’m starting to wonder at your team skills. I’m starting to think you lack a bit of the interpersonal.’

Dan looked at the two dogs and they looked back at him. Wet eyes. Wet noses. Excited. ‘I could take one home. Or both. I’ve got time to look after them, Mr McCartland, and money for food.’

‘I like to get tight, Dan, but that doesn’t mean I’m tight.’

‘No, of course.’

‘You’ve just joined an army. Time to wind your neck in, Dan.’

‘All I meant was –’

‘You want to take on some new dependants right now? Your ma not enough? The brother in the special home?’ Dawson shook his head. ‘You think the British Army hesitate when they shoot dogs on our streets, corpses on the Falls to show us they’re keeping an eye? Nothing was ever changed by squeamish men, Dan. History clears away the blood, records the results, but that doesn’t mean the blood wasn’t there. An Ireland occupied by the Brits will never be free. An Ireland unfree will never be at peace. Do you believe otherwise? Do you prefer to stand back and observe? Are you a watcher, Dan, is that it, you like to watch?’

Mick looked shifty now, embarrassed to be here. Again he touched his ruined ear. There was something newly benign in the calm sag of his mouth. A vulnerability, surely. It was Dawson who’d become the more brutish of the two. His thin neck had reddened, his thin lips had parted, his silver tongue was whipping up more words.

Maybe the brown one, with the patches on its tongue. Maybe that one is sick. He wants me to kill the sick dog. He’ll tell me afterwards that it was sick, leukaemia or whatever, and I’ll have passed the test.

With a steady left hand Dan lifted the gun and pointed it at the brown dog’s head. Be a person who does instead of says. With his right hand he gripped tight at the dog lead. Go on.

He thought, This would be easier if the dog was ugly, if the dog was a rat, if the dog looked angry or unkind, and these thoughts made him sure he was being weak.

If he got it between the eyes – the complex eyes, keen, watery they were – he’d kill it quickly. But if he aimed for the body he’d reduce his chance of missing. A body shot and then a follow-up? That’s what the RUC tended to do with guys they could label terrorists. But the other dog would be tugging, trying to get free, maybe covered in blood? Scared.

The brown dog looked at Dan, expectant, breathing through its mouth. The other had gone flat, nose nuzzled into the grass. Mick seemed – could this be right? – to be putting bits of toilet paper in his mouth. He was sticking the damp wads in his ears.

‘I’ll incentivise,’ Dawson said. ‘If you don’t shoot one of my dogs, Mick here is going to kindly shoot you.’

‘Kindly?’

‘He’s not unkind. Watch him around the bars of Belfast. He’s kissed all sorts of horrors.’

‘This is a wind-up.’

‘Is it?’

‘Why would you shoot me? I’m asking to join!’ It was a wind-up. It was. He lowered the gun. ‘I’m not shooting any dogs.’

‘It’s your choice,’ Dawson said. ‘I’ve made the three options clear.’

‘Three?’

‘Shoot a dog, one. Get yourself shot, two. Number three, you can shoot us. Although, for that option, you’d have to get cracking.’

‘This is stupid.’

‘We’ll give you three seconds to finalise your thoughts, Dan.’

‘This is, what’s the point of this?’

‘Three.’

‘Come on.’

‘Two.’

‘Please.’

‘One.’

Mick lifted the shotgun. He pointed it at Dan’s chest and fired.

The slam of impact. Shock of his body thrown back. A noise that put him deep inside himself.

As he hit the ground his senses ceased to function. There was darkness, silence. Only the slightest light swirling through the old dim world, sluggish as the cream his mother put in coffee.

He was groping for where the wound must be, the wound. Block the blood. Should have killed the dogs.

The leather of his jacket felt smooth. Nothing wet. Nothing ripped. Entry. Where was the entry? Slowly certain things came into focus: wind-swollen trees, a bird in blue sky.

He rolled onto an elbow. The Land Rover was pulling away, its tyres giving up dust. Mick was standing over him, holding out a massive hand. There was sand and white stuff on the ground. Grains? Rice? Some on his jeans too. Dry white rice.

Mick’s cool shadow. It looked from his face like he was shouting, a muscle jumping in the jaw. ‘Doctor the partridge,’ he seemed to say. The ringing in Dan’s ears changed in pitch. His chest hurt, his skull hurt.

‘We fiddle with the cartridge. Pack it with a bit of basmati.’

‘What?’

‘Ruining the local carb market, the rice, so we steal it from the Indian importers. Slows the flight of the thing right down. Sorry if you hit your head.’

Dan spat. ‘I might’ve. But I might’ve shot the dog.’

Mick laughed. ‘Yeah. But as initiations go, not so bad, eh? Next time a gun’s pointed, you’ll up your game.’

He had no clue where the handgun was. It wasn’t in his hand or anywhere near his hand. The dogs were moving wildly, happily, the lead snaking through the grass.

‘Useful to confirm his initial impressions,’ Mick said. ‘There’s that too. Thinks you’re more of a distance man, doesn’t he? Your DIY skills. Devicecraft. More and more he’s looking to the mainland. First lad to call his bluff.’ He pulled Dan up into a warm embrace.

Dan blinked and tried to hide his shaking hands.

‘It’s over.’

‘What is?’

‘Welcome to your new life.’

PART ONE

UNACCOMMODATED MEN

1984

I

AFTER HER WEDNESDAY-MORNING swim Freya bumped into Mr Easemoth. He was her old History teacher at Blatchington Mill, the benevolent dictator of Classroom 2D, a man always striving for facts. You got the sense it was pretty important to him to feel he was misunderstood.

They exchanged a few words about the hotel. He grinned palely in the sunlight and said her future was bright. Mentioned also, awkwardly, that her father had given him a call. They’d discussed university options.

‘Very proud of you,’ Mr Easemoth said. ‘As well he should be.’

‘Thanks, Mr Easemoth.’

‘Some of those marks were among the best in Brighton, I’d guess.’

She smiled. ‘Thanks, I appreciate it.’

‘No,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Thank you. A pleasure to teach.’

Overhead a seagull screamed and wheeled. ‘Well, I guess I’d better …’

‘Oh, of course.’

‘It’s just.’

‘No no, don’t let me hold you up.’

The quality of his smile in this moment made her sad. ‘See you soon then, Mr Easemoth.’

‘And give my best to your father.’

Walking. The breeze on her legs. Brine in the air. She was wearing a brand-new electric-blue miniskirt. And would she ever actually see Mr Easemoth again? What had undermined him above all in the corridors at school was not his sinusitis, or the stains in the weave of his tie, or even his anti-charisma. It was the unfortunate rumour that he possessed a micropenis, and probably that part wasn’t true.

On rare September days like this, people in Brighton didn’t hang about. They threw off their drizzled raincoats and raided drawers for gaudy shorts. They cooked themselves on towels and bobbed about on waves. Gulls tottered across rocks, heads dipping low and feet lifting high, the motion mirrored by a kid checking his shoe soles for chewing gum. Old men watched the water through wavy iron railings and old women sipped tea outside cafeterias.

The purple-and-pink signage of the hair salon was up ahead. Also the ice-cream guy. She could murder a 99 with double flake, but there was a long queue on the left side of the van.

Wendy Hoyt was the second-cheapest stylist at Curl Up & Dye, a curvy hypochondriac whose own bleached locks – an advert, a warning – took up a massive amount of airspace. With Wendy, headaches were often imaginary tumours. Back pain amounted to osteoporosis. She’d had suspected failures in all the main organs, suffered a non-productive cough caused by contact with livestock, and her neck bore a hairspray rash that she preferred to blame on sea breeze. Freya didn’t pay much attention to Wendy’s catalogue of invented catastrophes, but at the same time had an instinctive sympathy for people whose catastrophes didn’t get much attention, so it was a sort of draw and she kept coming back.

‘Thought any more about it?’ Wendy said, tightening the gown around Freya’s neck. There had already been a discussion about why her hair was ‘pre-wash-wet’, a connected warning about the coarsening effects of chlorine, and a bonus tip about a girl who got pregnant when swimming because a boy had been masturbating in the shallow end. The hairdryers had been on. Wendy was breathing hard. The neon beads of her necklace shifted as her bosom rose and fell. From the top corners of the mirror hung two squiggles of silver ribbon that had survived the nine months since Christmas.

‘I’m thinking maybe not,’ Freya said.

‘We have more fun,’ Wendy said, winking. ‘Works like catnip in discos.’

‘Huh.’

‘I’m practically harassed. Blonde would flirt with your skin tone, too.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Different, I thought you were after. But if you want to stick with the flat brown look, we could always go side-ponytail, or fringe. Your friend Sarah – uni now, is she? – I gave her a lovely Cyndi Lauper.’

Wendy took a sip of cranberry juice, a drink she claimed was effective in warding off infections. The wall behind the mirror was the colour of a fine lime. Another wall was pink, a third was purple. A girl sweeping up hair clippings was humming a chorus-only version of ‘Borderline’ by Madonna, an undeniably awesome song, and her T-shirt said ‘All the Way to Wembley’ under a picture of a gliding gull. Freya closed her eyes and imagined, for a moment, sitting here at Mr Easemoth’s age, having the same conversation, counting the same neon beads around Wendy’s neck: three overlapping strings, twenty on the bottom, eighteen in the middle, sixteen on the top.

A lot of time passed. At least half a minute.

‘OK,’ she said. There was new heat in her skin. Live dangerously, right? ‘Cut it all off, Wendy, and turn me blonde.’

Wendy raised an intensively pencilled eyebrow. A customer from Hove walked in. Several things told you a person was from Hove. In this instance it was the explosion of silk scarves around the neck.

‘You’re sure?’ Wendy said.

‘Yep.’

‘All?’

‘No! To here, basically, and then bleached. Or highlights. Yep, highlights. But nothing that will look ginger.’

Wendy’s features formed a grimace. She was an expert grimacer.

‘On a skinny little girl like you,’ Wendy said. ‘A girl who’s pretty in that waify sort of way …’ She took a further slurp of juice. With great caution she placed the glass down on a ledge. ‘Here’s what I’m thinking. This is the question on my mind. It’s whether you have the neck for it, Freya. Because, as your adviser, I’ve got to say a lot of light is going to be falling on that neck, is the thing, and – with your cute little features – going shorter might make you look a bit, how to say it …’

‘Boyish?’

‘Ethiopian orphan,’ Wendy said.

Freya lifted her chin and studied herself. What orphan-like qualities would a bob cut reveal? She was pale, brown-haired, brown-eyed, ordinary, but in the mirror now a starving Ethiopian stared back at her. She crossed and recrossed her legs. Barbed comments were Wendy’s brand of friendship but they could also be a kind of contagion. You walked out of there worrying about problems you probably didn’t have.

She thought about the Grand, her impending shift behind the reception desk. Her father, the Deputy General Manager, generally managed to fix it so that on Wednesdays she only had to work the afternoons. He too was a customer of Wendy Hoyt. On a quarterly basis he got his head, eyebrows and ears done, a 3-for-1 deal the barber refused to do.

‘Tell you what,’ Freya said. ‘Just the usual trim.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

The decision cast a spell: her heartbeat slowed. She felt herself relaxing back into the comfy disappointment of her life since leaving school.

‘Better safe than sorry, eh?’

‘Probably,’ Freya said.

‘Let’s get you washed, then, with that strawberry stuff you like, and you can tell me your plans for Maggie Thatcher.’

II

PHILIP FINCH, KNOWN to everyone but his aged mother as Moose, was driving to the hotel in his fail-safe Škoda 120, a car the colour of old chocolate gone chalky. His window was wound down so he could tap ash onto the street and blow smoke out of the side of his mouth. It was important that his daughter shouldn’t have to inhale his mistakes. She was in the passenger seat wearing her classic early-morning look: black skirt, white blouse, an elegantly expressionless corpse. Her hair had been cut yesterday. He saw no discernible difference. He told her it looked very good.

They passed the Dyke Road Park and the Booth Museum. Freya started rummaging in the glove compartment, a minor landslide of cassettes. There was a system and she was spoiling it. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘Music.’

‘We’re five minutes away, Frey.’

She yawned. Blinked. Considered the windscreen. ‘It’s hot,’ she said.

‘There’s some Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders in there. That one I played, where were we?’

She sighed.

‘You’re sighing.’

‘Nothing good has ever been produced by a Wayne, Dad.’

‘Untrue,’ he said, and fell into a long dark reverie from which he emerged with the name Wayne Sleep.

‘Who?’

‘Or …’ Where were all the other famous Waynes? ‘John Wayne.’

‘Surname,’ she said.

‘That makes him a deeper form of Wayne. His Wayneness is in the blood.’

‘Probably a stage name,’ she said. Which, now he thought of it …

He changed down another gear – these conversations were precious – and told her she shouldn’t write things off until she’d tried them.

‘Like travelling, you mean.’

‘Like university,’ he said. ‘Travelling, Frey. There’s nothing special about travelling. This right here is travelling – going to put those back, at all? You can find yourself and lose yourself in this very car, this town.’

‘Thrill a minute,’ she said, but he thought he saw the flicker of a smile.

She was eighteen years and a dozen days old. Just yesterday, it seemed to him, she’d emerged out of an awkward bespectacled adolescence – a phase in which she’d temporarily lost the ability to be appreciative, the ability to be considerate, and the ability to be apologetic, all while causing a great proliferation of opportunities for these states to be warmly deployed. He’d noticed, of late, a big upsurge in the number of masculine glances clinging to her clothes and also in the ways she didn’t need him. Seldom asked his advice any more. Knew how to deal with difficult customers. Would one way or another soon be leaving him behind. Her mood swings had settled into a dry indifference, a much narrower emotional range. At times he felt nostalgia for her earlier anger and found himself needlessly provoking her. University! Careers! When might you learn to lock the door?

With her pale skin and dark eyes and button nose, that fatal way of raising the left eyebrow in arguments, Freya was increasingly a Xerox copy of Viv, back when they’d first got together. There was an awful pregnant pathos to this: your perfect daughter becoming your then-perfect wife, slinking into a future where she’d fall prey to certain enterprising, highly sexed individuals who were suped-up versions of the once-young you. He sometimes overheard summer staff at the Grand talking in an advanced language of sexual adventure, discussing what he assumed to be new positions or techniques. The Cambodian Trombone. The Risky Painter. South-East England Double Snow-Cone. Did anyone still do missionary? The future bares its breasts and laughs, a gaudy county fair.

Truth was, Moose hadn’t had sex in a while. The one great difficulty of his job was the fact of being surrounded, at all times, by people engaged in sexual communion. Guests were having sex against walls and on hushed carpets, in storage cupboards and on sea-view balconies, in gooseneck free-standing baths and walk-in showers and probably just occasionally on beds. Forty-five. Too young, definitely, to have taken retirement from romance. But it was more of a redundancy-type situation, wasn’t it? A severance. Lust running on without opportunity, not unlike a headless chicken. People still occasionally made remarks about his appearance – remarks interpretable as compliments – but he was often too busy to follow up on such leads. He’d had only a handful of flings with women in the years since Viv had left him for a guy called Bob; Freya at that time was thirteen. Possibly he’d have to relax his no-guest rule. There was always someone lonelier than you were. He struggled sometimes to shake the idea that his early life had been all about an excess of sex and a sense of bottled potential, and that these things had, in the rich tradition of life’s droll jokes, been replaced by an absence of sex and a sense of wasted potential.

‘New skirt,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘New haircut, though.’

‘We’ve covered this,’ she said.

He flicked the indicator. Reminded himself to waterproof the passenger window. Masking tape before autumn really kicked in. They passed a Labrador walking a lightweight woman.

Frey mumbled something.

‘You’ve become a mumbler,’ he said.

‘Wendy told me to tell you hello.’

‘Did she? That’s nice. How was she then? Still dying?’

‘Yeah. Bit more each time.’

‘Good hair though.’

‘Hmm.’

‘I bumped into her in Woolworths a few weeks back. Forgot to say. Complained to me about an ingrowing toenail. I thought it might mark a new move into realism.’

‘No,’ Freya said. ‘There was no mention of toes. She was back to brain tumours and surgeries.’

‘Shame.’

They rolled on through Brighton’s breezy, straight and safe-looking streets, lamp posts spaced out and rooflines designed to rhyme. Girls in white denim walking, ponytails flicking. Women in smart dark jackets, narrow at the waist and wide at the shoulders. Crazy baggy T-shirts giving gangly kids space to hide. The summer not yet over. That special summer hum. The Prime Minister was coming to stay in a few weeks’ time. He knew her visit was a route to promotion. To future GM opportunities in Oxford or Bristol or Durham, wherever Freya ended up studying. Money, too. His current £14,000 a year didn’t go that far. He needed to provide and provide. He’d earn more as a doorman or a bellman – those guys built houses out of one-pound coins – but if you were a doorman or a bellman you were a doorman or a bellman for life, addicted to tips and shorn of the chance to advance; he’d seen it happen many times. A salaried position had a future. That was the idea, anyway.

Left onto the King’s Road, a modest milk float trundling past them. On his right, the vast glittering sweep of the sea. Late-season holidaymakers, towels slung over their shoulders, crossed the street to reach a warm swerve of shore. Grey stones and beige stones, some slick and some dry. The British approach to sunburn was simple: get out there and upgrade yesterday’s patchy burns into something of more uniform severity. The recklessness of his own heat-seeking people made Moose oddly proud. Paint was peeling from the candyfloss huts, faded seaside glamour.

The Grand came into view, one of the loves of his life, a giant white wedding cake of a building facing out onto the English Channel. The wide eaves, the cornices, the elaborate brick enrichments. The Union Jack slapping high. He loved the twiddly little features and their special arcane names. One hundred and twenty years of stinging drizzle, of corrosive sunshine, of the salty gales and acidic bird shit it is every coastal town’s cross to bear.

What he loved most was walking into the Grand with his daughter at his side. Yes, I created this person, look. A tiny moment of ego in an industry that was all about accommodating others. His favourite doorman, George, waved as they got out of the car. George who always had an umbrella in his hand, forever expecting rain, and touched every bit of luggage the moment a car boot opened, for once your hand was on the handle a tip was almost certainly yours. Then Dave the Concierge with his wide friendly face and breath that always smelt of aniseed, a strategy to conceal his fondness for Scotch. He bowed for Freya in mock-theatrical style, a move that made her laugh each time. Derek the Bellman simply nodded. It was said that he had a picture of Bernard Sadow on his dartboard at home, the guy who’d invented the suitcase with wheels.

Within these Victorian walls, Moose’s style was excessive. The Grand was all about excess. He was living through excessive times. He didn’t have the money or inclination to wear expensive suits, to buy designer gel to sophisticate his salt-and-pepper hair, and although he had a head for maths he lacked the inner shard of ice that was probably required to make it rich in merchant banking. So instead he wore his navy-blue Burton suit – a suit for a man who was neither tall nor short, neither fat nor slim – and created little performances out of thin air, words and gestures that made his guests feel special, his name badge pinned close in on the lapel, his tie hanging over the nearest portion of his title, concealing the word DEPUTY, leaving only GENERAL MANAGER, a promotion without the salary or associated sense of pride. His stage was the lobby’s Persian rug. He liked the thick cream scrollwork of the ceiling, the gleams in the bends of the luggage trolley, the decorative panels that made him think of Malted Milk biscuits, the soft wattage of elegant lamps. He liked the Merlot-coloured curtains keeping the parlour rooms calm. The heart of house was dingy corridors and piles of dirty laundry, but the front of house, the areas guests saw once they had passed through the glittering wings of the revolving door, was full of the warmth of opulence, the mellowing air of antiquity, the fragrance of fresh flowers. First thing you felt coming in – the door’s revolutions slowing – was the hush of wise furniture inside. Duet stools and wing-arm chairs. The Gainsborough nestled under the first dramatic arc of staircase. It was upholstered in Colefax & Fowler Oban Plaid.

‘Mr Barley, how’s that nephew the newscaster doing? Lovely profile in the Argus.’

‘How was that champagne, Mrs Harding? Did it live up to the no-hangover guarantee?’

‘I’ll get that console table replaced, Mrs Mathis. A woman of your stature should not have to stoop.’

‘A sea-view suite?’

‘Some aspirin?’

‘A doctor?’

‘A florist?’

Smell of fresh coffee in the morning. Tea and cakes come afternoon. Toothbrush sets behind the desk. Hundreds upon hundreds of condoms. Knot cufflinks by the dozen. People were very regular in what they overlooked, and also in what they left behind: pyjamas, handcuffs, once a prosthetic leg. Moose was a secular man. He would have liked to remove the Bibles from the rooms, or else to add copies of the Koran, but they were hugely popular among the summer staff – the thin pages were apparently handy for rolling joints – and if a thing made you feel better, and you practised it discreetly, who really had a right to object?

On days when ambition and regret got the better of him, when lost opportunities stuck to his shoes like bubble gum gone to ground and created ugly slouching strings that halted progress, he told himself that all human life was here. Yes, the affairs. The stuff everyone always asks you about. Definitely those things. But people also got engaged and married here. They received phone calls telling them their parents had died. They conceived children. They blew out candles.

He was happiest of all when talking to guests. If it wasn’t for the editorial influence of deadlines and to-do lists, he could easily pass whole days discussing their get-richer ideas and much-mourned ailments, the Platonic ideal of a pillow, its consummate softness and girth. He liked to know every guest’s name and to slowly fill out the lives underneath. When regulars were the kind of people who enjoyed saying hello he tended also to know the names of their children. When they went about their days closely guarding their privacy he nodded and smiled, held a mirror up to their reticence. Hospitality involved an aspect of surface flattery but also of deep familiarity. It was a peculiar combination of density and gauze. You were reading people all the time, reading and reading and reading, and only occasionally was his apparent fondness for people false. The odd smile delivered to a slick pinstriped guy who was really no more than a slippery fish in the sea of his own possessions. The occasional compliment to a woman whose post-operative breasts were even more determinedly inauthentic than her eyes – eyes that were blank screens upon which brief impressions of felt experience flickered. In the main, people were kind if you were kind. They wanted to have a good time. You gave them the best and worst of yourself. The huge lie that you would escalate their complaint to Head Office. Telling the truth, almost always, when you wished them a very good stay.

Mrs Harrington from room 122 was doggedly crossing the lobby, swinging the walking stick she rarely seemed to need. Old Mrs H was one of the Grand’s most reliable regulars, and she only ever stayed in room numbers that added up to five. Many front-desk staff had learned her proclivities the hard way. ‘Room 240 is lovely, Mrs Harrington.’ ‘I’d prefer not to, dear.’ ‘Room 301, perhaps?’ ‘I’d prefer not to.’

‘Punctual as always, Mrs Harrington.’

‘You,’ she said with a hospitable grimace. ‘Still poorly?’

‘Poorly?’

‘Pale.’

‘Me?’

‘Roller coaster,’ she said, and traced a wavy line in the air with the ferrule of her stick.

Moose tried to laugh but managed only the maintenance of his current smile.

‘Arm pain,’ she said.

He felt his smile fail him. ‘How did you know?’

‘You confided.’

‘Did I?’

For a moment her eyes slid sideways towards another regular, Miss Mullan. On every other week of the year she was Mr Mullan, chairman of a FTSE 100 toiletries company.