Transition Read online

  Just being useful, really. Like I say, I’m part of the service industry. And once you know a few secrets it’s amazing how you get to know others too. People trade in secrets, and don’t realise they’re giving themselves away, especially if they trust you, or underestimate you, or both. So I found myself in a position where I could call in a few favours, use what our financial friends would call leverage to pick up some training, some recommendations, some patronage you might say, not to mention some working capital.

  Long and short again, I went from being a dealer to being a trader. Swapped the powder for the folding, replaced the stuff that goes up the middle of the rolled note for the note itself. This was a deeply smart move, if I say so myself.

  Don’t get me wrong. Drugs are great, obviously they are. Great business to be in in a lot of ways, and definitely enduringly popular in good times and bad otherwise why would people spend so much of their disposable and risk prison taking them? But it’s all a bit of a mug’s game dealing them, when you really think about it, certainly for any length of time. You have to watch your back constantly and even the profits get eaten into keeping the boys in blue happy. I mean, serious fucking profits, there’s still a lot left, but still, that’s exactly what attracts some very heavy and uncivilised people to the business and you can’t spend fuck all when you’re dead, can you? Get in, make some of the filthy and get out while you still got a set of balls and an unslit throat to call your own, that’s how you fucking do it if you’ve any sense. Use it as a leg-up to get into something just as lucrative but a lot less risky. That’s the smart way. That’s what I did.

  Amazing what you can accomplish by applying yourself and making yourself useful.

  Madame d’Ortolan

  Madame d’Ortolan sat in her orangery, discomfited. She had been accused of being a racist! And by someone she couldn’t take any immediate retributive action against, too. Of course she was not a racist. She not infrequently had black and Jewish people here in her town house, though naturally she was always careful to keep an accurate note of where they sat and what they touched and might have used, subsequently having everything so contacted thoroughly cleaned and disinfected. One could not be too careful.

  But of course she was not a racist. To the contrary, as she could point out, in appropriate company (that would be to say, highly limited and avowedly discreet company), had she not tasted of what she thought of as the Dark Pleasures, with blacks, on more than one occasion? The epitome of such enjoyment was, for her, to be taken anally by such a Nubian brute. Privately, she thought of this act as “going to Sèvres-Babylone,” as this was the deepest, darkest and most excitingly, enticingly dangerous Métro station that she knew of.

  Racist! The cheek of it. She had taken the call here in the orangery. The conversation had gone like this:

  “Oui?”

  “Madame, I’m glad I managed to catch you.”

  “Ah. Mrs M. I trust we can return the compliment.”

  Mrs Mulverhill had chosen to open by speaking English, always a sure sign that she wished to talk business and this was not a social call. It had been some long time since either had called the other for purely social reasons. “May I ask where you are?”

  “I suppose you might, though not to any instructive consequence.”

  Madame d’Ortolan felt herself bristling. “A simple No would have sufficed.”

  “Yes, but would have been inaccurate. Are you well?”

  “I am, as if you care one way or the other. And you?”

  “Tolerably. And I do care, one way. Let me tell you why I’m calling.”

  “Do. It’s been so long. I can’t wait.”

  “Rumour has it you intend to divide the Council.”

  “Beyond my powers, dear. And, anyway, I think you’ll find it already is.”

  “If it is divided—”

  “Oh, it is.”

  “If it is, then it is largely due to you.”

  “As I say, you both flatter and overestimate.”

  “That is not what the people I’ve talked to say.”

  “People on the Council? Who?”

  Mrs Mulverhill remained silent. There was a pause while Madame d’Ortolan – who had taken the call on the house phone, on an extension with a long lead – twirled the extension cord round her longest finger. After a few moments, a sigh sounded down the phone line and Mrs Mulverhill said, “So, what is the thinking on this matter?”

  “The thinking?” Madame d’Ortolan asked innocently.

  “What do you intend to do?” Mrs Mulverhill said, voice suddenly sharp.

  “I think that matters need to be resolved.”

  There was a silence, then: “I hope that is not settled. It would be the incorrect decision.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “It is.”

  “What a pity we did not have the benefit of your opinion earlier, before the decision was made.”

  “Theodora,” Mrs Mulverhill said crisply, “don’t pretend that you’d have taken any notice of anything I’d have said.”

  “And yet you have chosen to call me now, my darling, and I presume you are only doing so in an attempt to influence that very decision, after it has been made. Are you not?”

  A shorter silence, then: “I would appeal to your sense of pragmatism.”

  “Not morality? Decency? Justice?”

  Mrs Mulverhill laughed delicately. “You are a card, Theodora.”

  “Yes, I like to think of myself as the queen of spades.”

  “I have heard something to that effect.”

  “And what do you think you might be? The joker, perhaps?”

  “I could not care less.”

  “I’d imagine something like… the two of clubs, yes?”

  “Theodora, enough of this. I am asking you to reconsider.”

  “Very well; the three.”

  A silence Madame d’Ortolan would have termed “tight” reigned for a moment. It sounded subsequently as though Mrs Mulverhill might be speaking through clenched teeth. “I am attempting to be serious, Theodora.”

  “They do say the struggle against adversity is highly character-forming.”

  “Theodora!” Mrs Mulverhill first raised her voice, then dropped it. “Theodora. I am asking you: please do not do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Whatever decisive, divisive step it is you intend to take. It would be a mistake.”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Madame d’Ortolan was losing patience. She sat forward in her cane chair, flicking free the twisted phone cord from her left hand. “Alors, my sweet, my pretty! What do you really care about the fate of people you’ve already turned your back on? People you oppose by opposing the Council. What are they to you? A couple of mealy-mouthed, grinning half-castes and a lesbian Negress?” A thought struck her and she beamed. “Unless she excites you, of course, our crepuscular friend; so well camouflaged, in the dark. One would hardly know she was in one’s bed of a night, would one? Well, until she smiled, at any rate. Don’t tell me; you’re a secret admirer. Has one put one’s finger on something?”

  Another telling silence, then: “You old, racist bitch.”

  And then she put the phone down! Just like that! The nerve of the woman!

  Madame d’Ortolan was unsure who had come out best from the exchange. For most if not all the way through she had felt that she was having the best of it, but then the Mulverhill woman had been the one to hang up on her, which counted for something. Most vexing. And to be called a racist! Not for the first time, she wondered what Mrs Mulverhill herself might have to hide in that regard. She habitually wore a veil; Madame d’Ortolan had always assumed this was mere affectation, but perhaps the lady wished to conceal some angle from which she looked less than racially pure, when the race concerned was human. Who knew?

  But still, to call her a racist. When it was meant as an insult. And, worse, “old!”

  And now she had to meet that objectionable and s
eemingly unkillable little man Oh, or whatever he was called for now (at least they were meeting elsewhere and she didn’t have to suffer his presence in the house; he never looked clean). And meet him not a moment too soon, if the Mulverhill woman had heard rumours already. Madame d’Ortolan smiled to herself. “Divide” the Council? Was that the best, or the worst, that she’d heard?

  “I’ll show you divide,” she muttered to no one present.

  She shooed the white cat called M. Pamplemousse from her lap and rose, smoothing her cream skirt. Madame d’Ortolan favoured her various cats according to the colour of the clothes she was wearing at any particular time. Had she been wearing dark grey or black, the black-haired cat called Mme Frenolle would have been the one allowed to warm itself on her lap. Though perhaps not for much longer; recently Mme Frenolle, who was eight years old now, had started to produce white hairs amongst the black, which was most annoying. Depending on how well she behaved over the next week or two, Mme Frenolle would either have to suffer regular visits to the Maison Chat to have her white hairs plucked or dyed, or be put down.

  Madame d’Ortolan was, she liked to think, of elegant middle age, though to the casual observer this might imply that she expected to live to be about one hundred and twenty. Of course, being who and what she was, this was would have been a perfectly reasonable expectation on her part, had the truth not been much more complicated.

  She used the house intercom. “Mr Kleist, if you would.”

  The gentleman himself arrived a minute or so later, a pale, slightly hunched, somehow dowdy figure despite being, to all appearances, quite smartly dressed in a conservatively cut grey three-piece suit. He looked to be about the same age as his employer, though the same dispassionate observer called upon to judge the lady’s looks might have taken a second glance at him and decided he was really a decade or more her junior, just worn-looking. He came to her side, blinking in the orangery’s hazy sunlight.

  “Madame.”

  “Mrs Mulverhill,” she told him, “is rapidly approaching the stage where she will know what I intend to do shortly before I do myself.”

  Mr Kleist sighed. “We continue to search for her, ma’am, and to look for her informants.”

  “I’m sure we do. However, we must start to act.” She looked up at him. Mr Kleist could contrive to look only half-glimpsed in the brightest sunlight. He carried his own shadows about with him, she was sure. “I am seeing Mr Oh today,” she told him, “for what I have now decided ought to be the last time. I think we set him on his way as fully wound as possible. You catch my drift?”

  “Yes, I do, ma’am.”

  “And we take all further steps to make sure his work is carried on after whatever point he is no longer able to do it.”

  “I’ll have the draft orders finalised.”

  “I shall leave in ten minutes.”

  “That’ll be sufficient, ma’am.”

  “Thank you, Mr Kleist.” She smiled at him. “That will be all.”

  For some moments after Mr Kleist had turned and gone, Madame d’Ortolan sat where she was, staring at nothing and tapping her long pink nails against each other with a hollow, clacking sound. The cat M. Pamplemousse jumped back onto her lap, startling her. She threw him off immediately, hissing.

  She called for her car, left the orangery, freshened up in her downstairs boudoir, collected the orders for the objectionable Mr Oh from the efficient Mr Kleist as she walked down the hallway and then allowed the second most attractive of her Egyptian footmen to place her jacket over her shoulders before she walked out to the car and instructed Christophe to take her to the Café Atlantique.

  The car swivelled on the ribbon of gravel looped in front of the tall town house and exited to the Boulevard Haussmann as the ornate black gates swung silently closed.

  2

  Patient 8262

  It is amazing what you can tell even with your eyes quite tightly closed. I can tell, for example, what season it is, what sort of day it is, which nurses and orderlies are on duty, which other patients have visited my room, which day of the week it is, and whether someone has died.

  None of this is difficult and certainly none of it is in any way supernatural. It simply requires that one keeps one’s ears open and one’s senses attuned to everyday reality. A good memory for previous experiences helps too, as does a decent imagination. The imagination is necessary not to make things up – that would be wrong – but to come up with plausible scenarios for what one’s senses are detecting; theories that might explain what is going on.

  Sometimes I spend entire days with my eyes closed. I pretend to sleep – I do sleep, longer than I would otherwise – and I allow my other senses to paint the scene around me. I can hear wind and rain against the window and birdsong outside, I can tell from the faint draught and the definition and detail of the sounds outside that the window is ajar, even if I missed the creaking, scraping noise of it being opened, and from the scents that reach me from it and the feel of the air I know immediately whether it’s a summer’s day or an unusually warm interlude in either spring or autumn. I can smell the identifying body odours and perfumes of the nurses and doctors who attend me and so can tell who is there even without hearing their voices, though I know those too, of course.

  Occasionally other patients wander in and I know they are there from their institutional, medicinal smell. I don’t mix with them sufficiently to have built up a reliable database of them all as individuals, though one or two do stand out through body odour or what they do; one man smells of a particular cologne, one old lady carries with her the scent of violets, another always runs her fingers through my hair (I can peek through not-quite-closed eyelids and so see who is responsible when something like this happens). One small, gaunt man whistles aimlessly more or less all the time and another chubbier fellow never visits without tapping absently on the metal frame at the foot of the bed with his fingernails.

  The rhythms of the hospital day, week, month and year are also obvious without recourse to sight and the place, of course, feels and sounds quite different at night; most noticeably, far quieter. During the day, meals are regular, drug rounds too (there are two drug trollies – one has a squeaky wheel), doctors perform their various rounds according to a certain timetable and the cleaners have an entirely predictable set of rotas that cover every temporal scale from daily dusting and wiping to the annual spring clean.

  So, very little escapes me as I lie here, even with the most informational of my senses deliberately denied.

  I can see perfectly well, though. This is really just a game, something to help occupy my time while I wait out my self-imposed exile and bide my time before returning to the fray.

  I will, most assuredly, be back.

  The Transitionary

  Once, I watched her hand move above a lit candle, through the yellow flame, fingers spread fluttering amidst the incandescing gas, her unharmed flesh ruffling the very burning of it. The flame bent this way and that, guttered, sent curls of sooty smoke towards the dim ceiling of the room where we sat as she moved her hand slowly back and forth through the gauzy teardrop of fire.

  She said, “No, I see consciousness as a matter of focus. It’s like a magnifying glass concentrating light rays on a point on a surface until it bursts into flame – the flame being consciousness. It is the focusing of reality that creates that self-awareness.” She looked up at me. “Do you see?”

  I nodded, though I was not sure that I did see. We had taken certain drugs, and they were still affecting us. I knew enough to realise that one could talk utter nonsense in such circumstances and that it could seem unutterably profound at the time. I knew it but at the same time felt that this was quite different.

  “There is no intelligence without context,” she continued, watching her hand go through the flame and back. “Just as a magnifying glass effectively casts a partial shadow around the point of its focus – the debt required to produce the concentration elsewhere – so meaning is su
cked out of our surroundings, concentrated in ourselves, in our minds.”

  One summer when I was a teenager some friends and I were walking into town, saving our bus fares to have more money to spend on sweets, burgers and slot machines. Our route took us down a quiet suburban street of houses with small front gardens. We came to one garden – mostly paved, with a few mismatched pots holding dry, bedraggled-looking plants – where a fat grey-haired man was lying asleep in a deckchair. We all stopped to look, sweating. A couple of the guys had taken their T-shirts off and were bare-chested, like the old man. He had lots of curly grey hair on his chest. Somebody whispered that he looked like a beached whale. The garden was tiny; he’d had to angle the deckchair across it to fit in. He was so close that you could smell the coconut oil on his skin, so close that we could almost touch him.

  We stood there watching him sleep and somebody else said they wished we had a water pistol. The sun was behind us, light beating on our backs. I was the tallest and the shadow of my head was putting the man’s feet into shade. I remembered I had a magnifying glass with me. I’d been using it to burn holes in the leaves of my stepmother’s prize flowers.

  “Watch this,” I said, and took the magnifying glass out. I held it so that it focused the sunlight on the skin of his chest, then moved it along and up through the forest of glinting grey hairs to concentrate the light on his little puckered left nipple. Some of the guys were starting to laugh already. I began to laugh too, which made the small, bright point of light waver, but I held it steady enough and long enough for him to shift a little, and for a frown to appear on his face. I still think I saw a faint wisp of smoke. Then his eyes flicked open and he bellowed, sitting up suddenly, his eyes wide, one hand flying up to his singed nipple. The other guys were already running, howling with laughter, down the street. I sprinted after them. We heard him shouting after us. We avoided that street for a few weeks.