Who's Who in Hell: A Novel

By Robert Chalmers

“A funny and exceptionally well-wrought romance that starts in disaster, ends in tragedy, and never loses sight of the manic and surreal in life” (Kirkus Reviews).
 
Struggling writer Daniel Linnell is a charming, though hapless, young Londoner until he meets Laura, an unsettlingly feisty American who likes to go skydiving on weekends. In no time at all, Daniel finds himself falling for her. At the same time, he finds a new job as an obituarist, where his editor, Whittington, initiates him into the pecking order of journalists; the annual ritual of the drunken Obituaries Outing; and the secret cache of unexpurgated obits of the less-than-angelic, obits that will never see print—which Whittington keeps in a hollowed-out book in his office.
 
With his editor’s encouragement, Daniel begins to write a Who’s Who in Hell—a mammoth compendium of the evil and damned. Begun for his own amusement, the book takes on a momentum of its own and garners him a publisher’s advance. Meanwhile things with Laura are going so well that he’s accompanying her to Kansas to meet her parents. His life is going swimmingly . . . until it takes a dive.
 
“Thoroughly engaging, delightful and very funny . . . A coming-of-age story set in a post-Thatcherite world.” —The New York Times Book Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9780802199096

Book preview

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

He had noticed at an early age how everywhere looks all right on the map. Peel Park, a brutal wasteland where he had been headbutted, spat at and beaten almost to death, was, on the page of Daniel’s Manchester A to Z, an inviting-looking green rectangle: the kind of place, a foreigner might have concluded – glancing idly at the book in the reference section of some distant library – where a man would linger over a glass of Sancerre before walking his lover back towards the city lights at dusk.

A few pages on in his street plan, Eastern Circle, where Daniel Linnell was born – a road which he had last seen weirdly illuminated by the torched remains of a heavy German car – had a precise, geometric form which suggested scrupulous order and decency. The map was one of life’s more perverse deceptions and Daniel, as a boy, had even come to see it as a source of comfort. Shut up in his room in the wake of some minor beating, he would pick up the A to Z, locate the scene of his most recent torment, then stare silently at the street as it now appeared – unthreatening, timeless, and perfect. It would not be too much to say that in these moments, with his map in his hand, he found a sort of grace. Which made it all the more remarkable that every time he saw it, even on paper, his spirit was broken by Maple Street.

Remarkable too, because – in a balanced inventory of his setbacks in Maple Street, London W1 – incidents involving major violence, terror, and sexual humiliation (among the things which had driven Daniel most swiftly to his map cupboard) were almost entirely absent. But balanced, in Daniel’s experience, was never quite the word for Maple Street.

He had gone there to work at Resolve, a private therapy practice, where he was completing his probationary year as a counsellor. The centre offered a well-intentioned, if expensive, service which, because many clients contacted it over the phone, was unkindly described by one of Daniel’s colleagues as ‘the Samaritans with a swipe machine’.

Resolve occupied the entire ground floor of a Maple Street office block. There were four consulting rooms; each had a door leading off a large reception area, where there would generally be one or two clients creaking anxiously in the cane armchairs. Waiting customers could choose between reading style magazines from the transparent coffee table (current issues bought by the practice, not old, donated copies – a sure sign, Daniel said to himself when he first saw them, of shadiness) or staring at the two angel fish who gaped vacantly back at them from the aquarium. Guy Montgomery, Resolve’s founder and director, had installed the large fish tank in the hope it would inject a feeling of medical expertise, because dentists had them.

And to work at Resolve – Linnell still cringed every time he heard that name – you didn’t need medical expertise. Daniel, who had taught English to business students in Limoges for a year, then drifted in and out of temporary jobs for five years after leaving college, had been surprised and delighted to learn that his degree in French and a Certificate in Humanistic Counselling from a six-month course of evening classes, which he had taken out of boredom as much as anything else, was enough to get him a start as a mental health professional.

And now, as Daniel neared the end of his probationary period, Montgomery and his two partners agreed he was good – even brilliant – at dealing with intense cases of emotional damage. He had an unusual combination of attributes: a keen, if unfocused, desire to assist humanity and a capacity for detachment from other people’s pain. He might have been a GP, a news photographer, or an executioner. He was their kind of man.

Guy Montgomery himself had been a repertory actor until he had a nervous breakdown in the mid-eighties. It came on suddenly, according to the version that circulated in the Resolve staff room, when he first burst into tears, then lit a cigarette, while on stage in Sheffield playing Hotspur in Henry IV. Even then, so the rumour went, it was only when the sprinkler system went off over the stage that the conscript audience of fifteen-year-olds noticed that anything was up. When Montgomery recovered, he took a degree in psychotherapy. After a year’s service with another London counselling centre, he set up Resolve with the encouragement of his less fragile wife Linda, who was in charge of the books.

The perfect elocution Montgomery had retained from his theatrical training made him sound insincere – which, for the most part, he wasn’t – and, though he had never set foot on a London stage, he was prone, especially at social events, to indulge in small, outdated gestures of Metropolitan flamboyance, such as panatella cigars or hats. His real Christian name was Colin.

‘If he knows so much,’ said Deborah, one of Daniel’s fellow probationers, when she heard Linnell defending him, ‘why does he wear that cravat?’

Resolve clients were referred to by their first name only, like saints. For the benefit of customers who were desperate, or abroad, there were four soundproofed booths at the end of a short corridor, each of which contained a telephone and a small desk. The booths were staffed twenty-four hours a day, and were charged to a caller’s credit card by the minute. On the phone, as in one-to-one consultations, Daniel had been taught to remain silent for the most part and, when he did speak, to steer the client towards their own solution or, as Montgomery preferred to term it, ‘resolve’. It was a technique that went down well with most callers who were not, on the whole, great listeners.

‘It sometimes occurs to me,’ said Lynne, one of the senior therapists, ‘that if I just left the phone on the table and nipped out for a dhansak, when I got back they’d be sorted.’

Such irreverence in the private conversations of the staff, like the ‘sin per minute’ league table Daniel had posted on his locker door, would have horrified the customers, but did not necessarily denote a lack of compassion; it was just one way of not going mad. The dangerous gulf in tone between the robust talk in the staff room and the hushed, measured exchanges in the consulting areas had been brought grotesquely into focus a couple of years before Daniel arrived, when a therapist who was on the telephone in reception fixing up a new appointment for a middle-aged psychotic with deviant tendencies, noticed that his fellow counsellors were preparing to leave for the pub. Reaching for the privacy button on the switchboard, he called out, ‘I’ll see you in a minute, I’m tied up with the sheepshagger’ but hit speakerphone by accident, so that he and his colleagues remained frozen in a horrified tableau, as the client’s voice called out his terrible response: ‘I heard that pal.’

Montgomery initially tried to deny that the incident had ever happened, then found he couldn’t, and began to address it directly in his introductory staff seminars. On the front of his plywood clipboard, which was generally hidden by his patient’s notes, Daniel had written the sheep man’s words, as a warning to himself, in red felt pen.

Serious psychiatric cases were rare, though Daniel did see one, Elliot King, on a regular basis. King, who was in his late-fifties, was an American saxophonist. At the height of his success, in the seventies, he’d led his own band in the States, where he enjoyed a cult reputation among fans of contemporary jazz. As his appeal had faded, he’d worked increasingly in Europe, and settled permanently in London in the eighties. Even now, Daniel knew, there was a rack of King’s records in the Oxford Street music stores and, when he was well, he could still fill the Festival Hall.

Daniel’s own attitude to modern jazz – dominated by loathing and ignorance – turned out to be no obstacle, as King never spoke about his career, except in his very early years in Birmingham Alabama, when his parents had trained him to tap dance. ‘I can still do that, you know,’ he once told Linnell, getting to his feet and circling the room, each foot gently tapping out three beats as he walked. It was an effortless movement, and he did it without ever breaking his stride. Sometimes he’d do it when he was waiting in reception, to let Daniel know he’d arrived. ‘When you hear that tap man,’ he said, ‘you know I’m out here for you. You hear that, you get that last damn maniac out of there.’

Elliot had spent periods as an in-patient in psychiatric wards. ‘I don’t ever want to go back there,’ he told Daniel. ‘Here I get you. There, there’s the doctors always messing with me.’

‘Here,’ Daniel said, ‘you pay.’

‘There,’ Elliot said, ‘you get robbed. I got all my music robbed there. And my cigarettes. And my telephone money.’

He tended to view his counselling sessions less as the solution to his problems, more as a diversion from them. He was softly spoken and, unlike many musicians, his hearing had survived unimpaired. He used to complain if Daniel spoke too loud to him. ‘Hey,’ King would say. ‘Easy. My ears are still OK – God knows how. It’s my mind that’s gone.’

Elliot had built up an encyclopaedic knowledge of the hundreds of small towns he had visited in his years on the road. From time to time, without warning, Daniel would fire a place name at him – Lubbock, say, or Duluth, or Des Moines – and Elliot would have to supply three points of information, like area code, population, or most famous former inhabitant. It had become a game between them. In his darkest moods, which were rare but very frightening, the musician was also a religious obsessive, whose nine-inch kitchen knife (‘Mike’) had been urging him to commit murder. In desperation, Daniel had finally advised Elliot, who was six foot two and weighed two hundred pounds, to bury the knife in the back garden, a proposal that appeared to put an end to the trouble.

If a threatening incident did arise, counsellors were taught to inform reception that there was a ‘Code Six’. Montgomery had got the idea after witnessing an incident at his local supermarket, where store detectives had spotted a man shoplifting. There was a request on the tannoy for ‘Customer Service Eleven’ which, Montgomery explained, was the cue for all the biggest men from the meat counter to sprint out, wrestle the suspect to the ground, and sit on him.

But the majority of Resolve’s clients, especially the telephone callers, were bored, drunk or vengeful rather than clinically disturbed. Daniel, being single, frequently found himself working the phone lines at night. Often, as he struggled past the morning commuters, down into Tottenham Court Road tube station, and back to his small flat in a tower block by Clapham Junction overground station, it would occur to him that he had far more to complain about than most of his callers.

Most, but not all. One of his regulars was Richard, a young pianist from Oxford, who had been pushed backwards over the balcony at the Café Fitzrovia in London by his male lover. Richard fell twenty feet into the main restaurant area, where his landing was broken by a twenty-one-year-old woman who was celebrating her forthcoming wedding. Sitting with her, and not injured, were her fiancé, his mother, and her parents.

‘Her name was Sara Allen,’ Richard told him. ‘She broke her back, and fractured her skull, and she died in hospital two days later.’

Richard, who was in tears, had told him the story at least a dozen times before, and there were no signs that repetition was therapeutic. The only shift in the emotional balance since his first call, Daniel noticed, was that now their conversations were bringing him dangerously close to tears as well.

‘She’s dead,’ Richard told him, as he always did. ‘I had two broken legs and a fractured cheekbone, and I was out of hospital in three weeks.’

‘Every day,’ Daniel said to him, sounding, to his horror, like some MGM padre, ‘is a new day.’

‘Every day,’ Richard said, ‘when I wake up, the memory of it comes to me, as if it was the first time. There’s not a day goes by when I don’t wish she’d been anywhere on earth but in that chair.’

‘Because,’ said Daniel, quietly, ‘she’d still be here.’

‘No,’ said Richard. ‘Because I wouldn’t.’

So it was hardly surprising if occasionally, in the bar after a day shift, Daniel would betray the confidences of Nigel, a fifty-two-year-old sexual compulsive with manic-depressive tendencies who had recently been experimenting with Viagra. ‘He’s the last person in the world,’ Daniel told his colleagues, ‘who needs it. It’s like tossing kerosene into a live volcano.’

‘I took it,’ Nigel had told him, ‘then I sat on my own, downstairs in the kitchen for about half an hour with my Cindy Crawford pictures. Nothing. So I made a cup of tea and went out to lock up the greenhouse. When I came in again I started to read the share prices in the Sunday Telegraph and – berdoing!’

But it wasn’t Nigel or Elliot, or even Sara Allen that had uniquely marked the name of Maple Street in Daniel’s mind. Those memories he could live with. It was something else. It was in Maple Street, one evening just after Easter, that he met Laura.

The first thing he noticed about her were her eyes, which were – though it was not a category of iris allowed by the passport office – jet black. Otherwise she was an unlikely femme fatale, with shoulder-length, straight black hair and an underdeveloped, boyish figure that had caused her agonies in her adolescence at school, when she still cared what anyone thought of her. She smoked heavily, and she had the obstinate strength and the accent of her American father. ‘Impervious’ would have been a good word for her; nothing Daniel, or anybody else, ever said or did would ruffle her aberrant view of the world. She went off in his life like a bomb.

He met her in the Café Leon, a wine bar three doors up from Resolve, on a Monday at the beginning of April, a few weeks before his final assessments began. Daniel had gone down there around eight in the evening with a group of ten or so, mainly recent recruits to Resolve like himself. She was on the other side of the table with her boyfriend Robin, who acted as a consultant to the company. He was a practising psychotherapist – a real one, who helped detectives construct profiles of suspects. Robin spoke, with a quiet authority, about his police work. The great weakness about hardened criminal organisations, he said, was that their behaviour patterns were, to a certain extent, predictable.

‘There are some professions, such as that of gangster,’ he said, ‘which naturally attract the psychopath. Fighter pilots,’ he added, ‘not airline pilots. Deep sea divers. Mercenaries. Coal miners…’

By this point, Daniel wasn’t listening. Everything about her, from her torn canvas trousers to the way she smoked cigarettes, curled back into her palm like a football hooligan, semaphored the quality that Daniel found most captivating in a woman – the knowledge that his parents would have despised her.

On his left was Andrew, a softly-spoken young landlord with psychiatric ambitions; on his right, Deborah, who had attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College and come to Resolve for something to do. Deborah was talking to her friend Maria about her recent liaison with a tennis professional.

‘…and he’s from Argentina,’ Deborah was saying, ‘and he’s twenty-four, and he’s called Santos, and of course he wants sex.’

‘And?’ Maria asked.

‘And,’ Deborah replied, ‘I don’t. You know…’ she paused. ‘I sometimes think I never really do.’

Daniel stared down at his almost-empty glass of lager. Andrew, he noticed, was pretending to watch the football, which was impossible to make out from this distance, on the television set which was fixed high on the wall in another room across the bar.

‘He must be in tremendous shape,’ ventured Maria.

‘It’s amazing actually,’ said Deborah. ‘He’s got these incredible shoulder muscles, and he runs eight miles every morning.’

‘And I would imagine,’ a woman’s American voice interrupted, ‘that he has quite a remarkable cock as well.’

Daniel raised the line of his gaze to follow Andrew’s, still fixed on the opposite wall, where he found that suddenly he too had no difficulty at all in making out Aston Villa. ‘Whoops,’ said Laura.

On another evening, in another group – with just one person to make some second, irreverent sort of a comment – Laura’s remark might have simply broken the ice. As it was, it lingered in the atmosphere like poison. It bonded them together as strangers, but not in a good way. Deborah was seething. Her friends, who did not include Daniel, felt like Underground passengers who had just witnessed a minor assault and done nothing to intervene.

Curiously it was Robin who appeared most disturbed by this exchange and he was the first to leave, closely followed by Deborah and Maria who, as she was getting up, told Laura she was going to pray for her. By half ten, the last of the group drifted away, leaving Daniel alone with Laura. Normally, for decency’s sake, he would have made some token gesture of getting up to go himself, but he was with her now.

‘Drink?’ she said.

‘Could do,’ said Daniel.

You know that woman was right actually,’ said Laura.

‘Woman?’

‘The prayer woman. The lady preacher.’

She got up, leaving him alone at the table and returned a couple of minutes later with a bottle of fierce Spanish red. ‘She was right,’ she told him, ‘because I am bad.’

‘You mean I was bad,’ Daniel told her. ‘Or I have been bad.’

She picked up the wine, ignoring the two delicate tulip glasses on the table, and pouring it into the large water tumblers.

Halfway through the second bottle, Daniel, whose upbringing had left him with strong traces of Puritanism and gentility, began to worry about her boyfriend. ‘How did you meet Robin?’ he asked.

‘He asked me out,’ she said. ‘So I went. You see the thing is, I’m easy. The thing is, I’m a pushover.’

She’d been in England since she was thirteen; her parents, she told Daniel, had since moved back to the small Kansas town where she was born. She started to talk about her father. ‘Robin,’ she told him, ‘says I’m his fault.’ He was a technical adviser to an oil company and he had never forgiven her, she said, after she had an affair with a gardener named André. ‘He was from Port-au-Prince,’ Laura told him. Daniel looked puzzled. ‘That’s in Haiti. My father went crazy. He thought André was an asshole. As a matter of fact, he was right about André. Even your father can’t be wrong all his life.’

Daniel noticed to his surprise that she was drinking almost as fast as he was, though with some incredible finesse which meant that he never seemed to catch her with the glass to her lips. He swallowed his own wine like a Labrador. She told him how she was born in Bedford Kansas and he noticed how the name already had a dizzying charm, even though he had no clear idea where Kansas was. She was twenty-eight, like he was, although she looked younger. Her mother was originally from Wales. When her father was first posted to Britain, the family moved to a house in St John’s Wood. Laura was sent to Freshfields, a progressive boarding school in Oxfordshire. Before she came to England, her father’s work had meant that Laura and her brother Paul had also attended schools in Houston and Bahrain.

She talked easily about herself. It was a quality he’d found to be rare in English people who weren’t very drunk or suicidal, though on a normal day at Resolve Daniel listened to plenty of both. He wondered if that meant she was flirting, and decided it didn’t. It was the American in her. Quite why Americans ever needed to drink was a mystery to him, since most of the ones he had met behaved as if they’d just had three large brandy and ports.

After Freshfields, she’d been to Bristol University. But it was school, she explained, that had confirmed her revulsion for everything her father stood for. ‘The headmaster was this creepy ex-monk,’ she told Daniel. ‘When I was seventeen he wrote me these passionate love letters. This is a man of fifty. This is my headmaster. So anyway, when he wouldn’t stop I sent them to the editor of the local paper. This guy turned out to be his son-in-law, and he drove round and handed them back to him. That kind of cooled his desire. He’s a therapist now,’ she said. ‘Like Robin. Like you.’

‘What do you do?’ he asked her, desperate to change the subject.

‘Do? You mean for work?’

Bugger, thought Daniel, who would have preferred to be damned as a therapist than bracketed with the millions of his compatriots who had been led to believe that a person had no worth if they weren’t in paid employment. He nodded.

‘I run a bar,’ she said. ‘It’s just up the road.’

‘A bar like this one?’

‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘It’s called The Owl. It’s a little weird, if you want to know the truth. And I take pictures,’ she added.

‘Of people?’

‘Of dogs,’ she told him. ‘I like dogs. Dogs don’t give themselves up easily.’ Not, she was thinking, like me.

She fumbled in her bag and pulled out a Saturday supplement and began leafing through the perfume adverts. She had slender, elegant hands. ‘Look at her,’ she said, opening it at a picture of a half-naked woman leaning back on a bed, staring up expectantly at the reader. ‘Look at her eyes. Bold and submissive at the same time. That’s easy.’ Daniel smiled. ‘You’re laughing,’ she said, ‘but you try and take a good dog. Elliott Erwitt spent fifteen years on his dog book.’

She’d been to places like Beirut and Vera Cruz. Her memories of her past consisted of a stream of foreign city names – each, no doubt, harbouring its own kind of trouble, each with its own consoling street plan. Curiously, he noticed, it wasn’t the places she spoke of with great enthusiasm, so much as the journeys between them, especially by air. She’d been to school in five different countries by the time she was fourteen.

‘Is there anywhere you haven’t lived?’ he asked her. The only significant upheaval he could have mentioned if he’d wanted to boast about his own early years, which he didn’t, was his move to university in Liverpool when he was eighteen. And that was a journey – down the M62, a road that seemed permanently shrouded in rain or low, grey cloud – that didn’t give anybody much to write home about. His father had worked as a surveyor on the motorway. His earliest memories were of being taken out to watch the road being cut out of the clay by the yellow earth-moving trucks with their huge pneumatic tyres. If one exploded, one of the excavator drivers had told him, it could kill a man. He remembered almost nothing from those very early years of his life, but he could recall every feature of the driver – his sallow skin, his muscular build, his dark features; even the unfiltered cigarette that he kept in his mouth as he spoke – and those words had stayed with him like a curse.

The year after the road was completed, his father, coming home one November evening, was struck from behind by a speeding mail van which forced his car under the wheels of the heavy goods vehicle in front, killing him instantly. The crash happened when Daniel was seven, in the years before the British had adopted the continental habit of laying flowers at the scene of an accident. Even so, he knew the place well: the central lane on the eastbound carriageway near Warrington, close to a strange-looking water tower. Every time he looked at the building after the accident, it had held out the threat of some new catastrophe which was never quite delivered, until one day he was driven back from college by his uncle, to visit his mother, who had been suffering from cancer, in secret, for two years. When they drew up outside the hospital’s main entrance, Daniel’s aunt, never the most tactful of people, walked up to the car. He’d wound down the window, letting in the steady drizzle, to hear her say with affected stoicism, ‘She’s dead then.’

He turned to look at Laura again and noticed she was staring at him, clearly expecting a response to something she’d said and that he’d missed.

‘Pardon?’ said Daniel.

‘I said, where are you from?’

He told her.

‘Salford,’ she repeated. ‘Well I’ve never lived in Salford.’ The way she said it, Salford sounded exotic, almost thrilling. With Laura in it, he thought, Salford would be capable of anything.

She went off to use the phone. God, thought Daniel, who’s she calling? Robin? A cab? He watched her, standing there at the payphone at the other end of the bar. She hooked her thumb into one of the belt loops on her canvas jeans, a habit that she had. He had to admit he was becoming – to borrow the sort of phrase he used to avoid the cloying language of sentimentality – rather keen.

The stereo was playing a mindless country song: ‘If I fall, I’ll take you down with me…’ He found himself wondering if a song would become irreversibly linked with Laura in his mind, and hoping that it wouldn’t be this one. He tried to think of a tune that she did remind him of, but all he could think of was a line from ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’, a nonsense song he had heard on the radio as a child, about a billygoat who swallowed a case of dynamite. ‘He sat down by the fireside, he didn’t give a hang.’

‘I had to call Brendan,’ Laura said, as she sat down again. ‘He’s running the bar. I’ve locked myself out. Anyway, he says he’s going to be up till three so that’s OK.’ Three, thought Daniel, looking at the wreckage of cigarette ends, old glasses and two wine bottles, one empty, one almost empty, on the table in front of them. It was just past midnight. By three, he’d be on a trolley in Accident and Emergency.

‘Where do you live now?’ he asked.

‘I have a flat…’ she began, but she was interrupted by a waiter who came with a new ashtray, placing a third, clean ashtray on top of the old one, an action which for some reason always commanded Daniel’s entire attention, whatever else was happening around him. ‘I have a flat,’ she said again, ‘in Crouch End.’

‘It sounds nice,’ said Daniel, lamely, his mind still reeling from that splendid singular pronoun.

‘Yeah, that’s right, Daniel,’ she said. ‘It sounds nice. It sounds so nice, I think there’s a Stephen King story called Crouch End. It has a clock tower, and twenty-three Indian restaurants.’ She paused and turned her black eyes on him. ‘Like to see it?’

Her look said it was at that moment, in that sentence, that she had chosen him.

Daniel struggled to think of some reply that would show he had grasped the enormity of that dark look. ‘OK,’ he said.

‘Shall we?’ she said, mock English, mock-polite.

They walked out into driving rain on the Tottenham Court Road. The cold air hit him and, with it, the sobriety he had been shocked into was instantly extinguished. Laura flagged down a black cab. She had that easy way with waiters and cab drivers, an unmistakable sign of privilege. Daniel, like most of the people he knew, still couldn’t order a coffee in McDonald’s without wanting to apologise. On the Euston Road, when they stopped at some traffic lights, another cab ran into the back of them. Its owner started to rage furiously at their own smaller, older driver. They all got out and Daniel heard Laura say something half-audible to the other driver.

It had sounded like ‘dickhead’ – an impression that was confirmed when the larger driver began to walk towards Daniel with a look that suggested he, as her apparent escort, was the nearest legitimate person to punch; at which point the police arrived.

The cab pulled up outside the café where she worked. The front was all glass; tall, thin windows set in narrow wooden frames like an old greenhouse. Inside, he could see lighted candles and the occasional movement in the background, although all the tables looked unoccupied. In the café’s front window there was a stuffed barn owl on a pedestal, delicately lit with small spotlights, as if it were an object of great value.

She went into the bar and collected the key, then led the way round to the back entrance, where they walked up the fire escape and across a flat roof, the approach to her own outside door. She let him in, then disappeared back down to the bar for some more cigarettes. The first thing he noticed was that all the lights and the coal-effect gas fire in the living room had been left on in sustained, futile defiance of her father, who was frugal in such matters. He wandered round the large living room to take his mind off the anxiety of whether, and how, he was going to make that formidable transition to intimacy, a journey that, in his life, always seemed to be marked by some moment of unforgettable awkwardness.

The kitchen was part of the large living room, though there was no sign that it had ever been used for cooking. The flat was not so much what you would call untidy as unattended to. On the couch, he noticed a CD of Elvis Costello’s The Juliet Letters. He opened the case, and put it on. Her few other possessions were scattered around in a haphazard way, as if she was camping. On three shelves in an alcove she had piled her clothes: a few folded T-shirts, a couple of pairs of black jeans, two sweaters and a bright green dress.

He went to use the small bathroom, where he was more vigilant than usual because, he realised to his shame, he was furtively looking out for traces of Robin. There were none. He did notice, to his surprise, a collection of cosmetics, something he couldn’t imagine her using, but which – in scarcely noticeable flesh-toned shades – she did. Prominently positioned on the bathroom shelf, in an amber-coloured container, was an aromatherapy tonic called ‘Optimism and Focus’. Next to it, in a slightly smaller clear glass bottle, was a preparation the label described as ‘Anti-Mating Oil – For Animal Use Only’; it was produced by Hatchwoods Limited of Apex Mills, Blackburn, and carried the brand name of ‘Scram’.

He was sitting on a chair by the window, looking down into the street, when she reappeared – not from the front door as he’d expected, but through a trapdoor in the floor that led down to the bar by way of a fixed metal ladder. ‘You know Deborah,’ she said, as she approached him.

‘Deborah?’ he said.

She came and sat on his lap. ‘Deborah. Well I’m not Deborah.’

She kissed him with a kiss that, he noticed, had none of the usual signs of tentativeness. Daniel slipped his thumb inside her belt loop, like she had, and she sat there until the CD had almost finished, her head on his shoulder. Below them, through the window, a huge yellow industrial refuse truck drew up to pick up the rubbish from outside the bar. It pulled up just as the CD player had reached the last track – a mournful, deeply evocative song called ‘The Birds Will Still Be Singing’. It began with two pairs of rising triplets on a viola and even on her cheap machine they had a resonance that seemed to go straight to his soul.

‘Summertime withers as the sun descends,’ the song began. ‘He wants to kiss you, will you condescend. Before you wake and find a chill within your bones; under a fine canopy of lover’s dust and humerus bones…’

He felt himself taken over by an unusual mixture of exhilaration and great sadness. It was a moment he would carry with him for ever.

‘Banish all dismay,’ the chorus went, ‘extinguish every sorrow. If I’m lost or I’m forgiven, the birds will still be singing.’

He’d heard this song before but never listened to it. In his mind, it bonded them like an exchange of blood. He looked down at the refuse truck. He could just make out the words ‘Haringey Council’ on the passenger door.

‘Well, your cab’s here,’ said Laura. ‘Are you going or not?’ Daniel looked at her. ‘Shall we?’ she said.

Laura disappeared into the bathroom. Daniel went and sat on the edge of her bed – a double mattress on the floor. She’d left the bathroom door ajar. Glancing past it he noticed, to his alarm, that she was undressing in a matter-of-fact, practical way, as if for a medical examination. Daniel hadn’t known her long, but he could hardly imagine she was the sort of woman who wore a nightdress. He still had his rain-soaked jacket on. In a panic, he tore it off, pulled his loose jersey and T-shirt over his head with the clumsy haste of a child and frantically wrenched off his boots. As the bathroom light clicked off he was still in his socks. He just had time to take them off and to lie down on the bed, on his back, in his boxer shorts, before Laura walked in. She was naked, but he hardly noticed. He was trying to look nonchalant, but his face had the frenzied, guilty look of a man who might just have committed a murder. She lay down next to him, on his left, lying on her side, facing him but not touching him. She put her left hand on his right shoulder and leaned her head on his left. It was hardly an intimate gesture, but Daniel felt as if he was going to blow up. She kissed him again. ‘Like I told you,’ she said, ‘I’m easy.’

Laura was different from other women, and when she made love – as he would never tell anyone, anywhere, at any time in his life (though, as he would later reflect, he might as well have, enough of them must know) -she became delirious, like a ham actress feigning a fever. Passion – a devalued word used in its true sense – gripped her like madness, or death. She chattered in mumbled, half-formed sentences. ‘Jesus,’ said Daniel, ‘Jesus.’

‘You know,’ she told him later, ‘I don’t have quite as much fun as I look as if I’m having.’ She had her left hand on his right shoulder again and her head back on his left. He looked down at her and noticed for the first time a small scar, three-quarters of an inch long, above her right eye. He touched it, gently. ‘I got that in Salina Kansas when I was five,’ she told him. ‘I got bitten in the face by Mr Noble’s dog.’

‘I love you,’ he said.

She gave no sign that she’d heard him. He thought about saying it again, then didn’t.

‘I thought you were dead,’ he told her. ‘You know the Elizabethans used to say die for…’

‘Orgasm,’ Laura interrupted. ‘You know, Robin – you do remember Robin, don’t you.’

Daniel, who was unprepared for this, swallowed audibly, like a cartoon character.

‘I see you do,’ she said. ‘Robin is my ex. So anyway, Robin is – was -a man who knows a lot of things. I used to tell him – all those words, all those long, therapist words are wasted on me. I used to tell him hey – don’t forget – I have trouble remembering the meaning of any word with more than three syllables. Anyway, one of the things that Robin knows is the full range of meanings of the verb to die. He told me all about that. I said, I died, Robin, but I didn’t get to heaven.’

A brief new wave of guilt broke over Daniel. ‘You know,’ he told her, ‘I’m pretty attached to monogamy.’

She got up without speaking and went to the bathroom; she pulled on a T-shirt and started brushing her teeth. Daniel watched her affectionately as she did it, with fast and deliberate up and down movements of the brush.

‘You remind me of somebody,’ he shouted, ‘and I can’t remember who.’

‘Carole Lombard?’ she called back, then spat toothpaste loudly into the bowl.

‘No’.

‘Ava Gardner?’ She spat again.

‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘I think it’s Top Cat.’

She laughed, a great, open, sonorous laugh. He lay back on her cheap pillows.

‘Hey, Daniel,’ she said. ‘You know what I was saying about words of more than three syllables?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s monogamy again?’

CHAPTER 2

When he woke up it was light and he was alone. He sat up. On the pillow next to him there was a single yellow rose. He stared down at it. The stem still had its thorns and the petals, which were glistening with drops of rainwater, appeared to have been partly eaten by an insect. He looked around for a note, but didn’t find one.

He pulled on his jeans. His leather jacket, still damp, was crumpled in the corner of the bedroom where he’d thrown it. He walked into the living room and looked on, and under, the telephone and answering machine for a number. There wasn’t one. On the table there was a paperback book called Fireworks and, next to it, a large sheet of sketching paper, which he couldn’t remember having seen the night before. Roughly daubed on it in huge letters, in red acrylic paint, he read: ‘I remember when you kissed me, when I kissed you, in the Pare Montsouris which is in Paris; in Paris which is in France; in France which is on the earth. On the earth, which is a star.’

He opened a door he hadn’t noticed before, opposite the bathroom. It led into another small room, which had been stuffed floor to ceiling with empty packing crates and suitcases.

Daniel left a note with his address in Clapham, where there was no phone, and his number at work. He left, closing the door after him, and walked across the flat roof, down the fire escape and out through a cluster of industrial waste bins.

He went round to the front of the building and into The Owl. Even though it was only eleven in the morning and the place was almost empty, the stereo was playing loud ranchero music and, once you were a few steps inside, it felt like midnight.

The main bar was long and narrow, with the counter and stools on your right as you came in. To your left, in this cramped passage, was a row of five small tables. Once you reached the end of the long zinc bar, the place opened out into a spacious dining area on bare floorboards. Daniel walked down to the far end of the bar and sat on a stool. The floor in this narrow part of The Owl was laid with rough stone flags, like a church, and the café’s lighting came from dim electric bulbs hanging low over the dining tables.

The barman was more secular-looking: sallow, and in his late-thirties, his head had been shaved with a cut-throat razor, and his sleeves were rolled up to reveal muscular forearms tattooed with nautical motifs.

‘Tea,’ said Daniel.

The barman didn’t seem to understand. ‘Caffellatte?’ he asked, in a bizarre accent which Linnell, who had a GCSE in Italian, took to be some obscure dialect: Treviso, perhaps, or rural Sicily.

‘Tea,’ Daniel repeated.

‘Senza latte?’

‘Normal. Do you know,’ he asked, enunciating with exaggerated clarity, ‘where Laura is?’

‘Laura?’

‘La ragazza,’ said Daniel, pointing up at the ceiling, ‘al piano di sopra.’

‘No idea pal,’ said the barman, in an accent that betrayed the origin of the exotic element in his Italian – Bradford. ‘She was in a couple of hours ago; she just said