Wolves Read online

  This evening, as I negotiated the fence and walked up to the hotel across the lawn, I saw that Dad had come home on time for our meeting. The lights were on in our apartments and, walking into the living room, I saw that our visitor had already wedged herself uncomfortably into the smallest of our wicker bucket chairs.

  She had put on a lot of weight since she had bedded me. Such generous breasts, such ungenerous nipples. While she talked, putting my father straight about the wiles of the female psyche, I imagined her great vampire breasts, sucking the lifeblood from the unwary feeder. What on earth was she thinking of, coming here in these circumstances? Well, she was the mouthpiece – this much I knew – of a local outfit which for the most part trawled the hinterland estates, persuading feckless teenagers into a termination. Here though she was purely ‘a friend of the family’ – this is what she said – someone Mum knew and whose hand she had held (all the while making eyes at Dad and, when that failed, at me). A self-appointed honest broker.

  She seemed totally oblivious to me.

  ‘Because, painful as this is,’ she said, a dentist preparing a nervous patient, ‘I think we have to entertain the possibility that Sara felt threatened here. By you, Ben, I mean.’

  Ben collected visits from missing-persons charities the way a lonely pensioner invites builders in to estimate for work he cannot afford. These endless interviews gave Dad the illusion of progress in his search for Mum. He imagined a network of intelligence radiating across the country.

  I stayed out of the way of these visits as much as I could.

  No one vanishes, a splash, then gone. No one. Impossible.

  Mum’s rooms. Make-up and dresses and easels and unopened paints. Dad said, ‘If you’d rather I did this on my own, I’ll understand.’

  In the end, after the first shock of her disappearance, Dad had settled in his own mind that Mum had absconded, fleeing the pressures of marriage and family. After so many years with her, I suppose he found it impossible to imagine a world without her in it. He packed Mum’s things up in boxes and carried them out to the garage.

  Living with Dad, surfing the roll and spin of his moods, his grief, his sense of having been abandoned and his slow-building anger (he was learning, in his nervous, clumsy way, to hate the thing he had loved) I found it difficult to resist his version of events. I didn’t forget what had really happened – but it was hard for me to imagine that the episode was ever a part of my waking life. Dad’s anxious speculations were so much more believable. I would catch myself, from time to time, imagining what Mum was doing, away from us; among her Wiccan friends, perhaps, or in sheltered accommodation somewhere, free of what she had probably convinced herself by now was an abusive marriage.

  I no longer spent all my free time by the river. One lazy weekend afternoon I got Dad’s walking maps down from the shelf and, spreading them out on the conservatory tiles, I found the river and I traced it with my finger, through towns and villages, round chalk hills and across reclaimed pasture, out to sea. Impossible.

  How much easier to imagine that she was sitting in some B&B somewhere, extemporising her sexual and domestic oppression for the benefit of some credulous social worker.

  We were free now, Dad and I. We were weightless. We were falling, and it felt good. I didn’t want it to end, and it didn’t end, it just went on and on. I no longer seemed to need any sleep. At night I lay awake, listening to the radio under the covers. I was never tired. Things acquired an unnatural clarity. The walk to school. The cool scratchiness of a clean shirt each school-day morning.

  But things were flying apart and I could not pick and choose what I held onto and what I lost. Some nights, Dad didn’t come home at all. I didn’t know who he found to be with. I felt him shucking off shackle after shackle and I waited, with a growing calm, for the moment when he freed himself from me.

  At the beginning of the spring term, over dinner, Dad had news. ‘There’s this new job,’ he said.

  ‘Right.’

  He looked at me. I watched the anger rising within him: anger from nowhere. ‘We have to talk about this.’

  ‘We are talking about this. I’m sitting here. I am talking about this.’

  He wanted a fight. After so long at Mum’s beck and call, so many years manning the safety valves, watching pressures rise and fall, he imagined that any particle of self-interest was bound to trigger a disaster. He needed the sound of breaking glass to convince him that he was getting what he wanted.

  Dad had been invited to work as a technician at a private hospital, crafting new eyes for old. It would not pay well, though it was what he’d been longing to do for years. His hobby, he said finally, had at last thrown up the chance of a modest second career.

  ‘You want to take this job.’

  He gaped at me, hopelessly. ‘The thing is,’ he said.

  I said, ‘I don’t think we can keep living our lives as though Mum’s just going to step back through the door. Can we?’

  Dad studied me, hunting for a clue, a cue. He was a hair’s breadth away from telling me not to speak so heartlessly. My chest was heavy, and heaving with the need to scream my confession in his face.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to sell the hotel.’

  I stared at him. ‘The hotel?’

  ‘This new job, it’s a long way away and it doesn’t pay very well.’ He made a sound like a laugh. ‘It doesn’t pay well at all. And to afford it – well . . .’

  ‘But my exams—’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s all sorted.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘You can go stay with Michel,’ he said.

  SIXTEEN

  ‘Of course I remember your mother.’

  Bryon Vaux’s office is as sumptuous as a living room, with a fire in the grate and a decanter of brandy at my elbow.

  ‘Sara.’ He casts his blindsighted eyes into the middle-distance. ‘I remember the soap she made. It made us feel so almighty hungry!’

  Coconut, honey and beeswax scrub. God help me, it is him. There is no mistake.

  Eventually, I find the strength to come out with it. What I saw. The railway station. The platform. The figure there. Albino-white hair. A canvas bag. Gabby found the records. The dates match up. There is no longer any doubt. No wriggle room. No avoidance.

  ‘And you’re sure it was me? I did have a canvas bag like that. A big canvas bag. I remember it. The station, though – I mean I remember the rail station, but heading off on my last day . . .’ He shakes his head. ‘Man, it’s more than twenty years ago, I can’t remember something like that.’

  ‘Of course you can’t. Of course. Forget about it.’

  He cannot forget about it. ‘Sara. I remember her.’ He remembers whole conversations with her – conversations I never knew they’d had. Sara wasn’t an easy person. Not an outgoing person. Yet Vaux remembers her rooms: the gauzy scarves she’d throw over every surface. Her day-bed, and under it, bag after bag of unopened paints. ‘I always thought it was a shame, the way – hell, do you mind me saying this? The way her gears kept slipping.’

  Who is he, that he remembers these things? What was he doing in her rooms?

  When we’re done Vaux comes out with me, sees me to the atrium, and there, in time for his next appointment, sits Michel.

  He looks different. Bigger. His face is weathered. He sees me and smiles, but it is not an easy smile. He walks over. ‘Conrad. Hi.’ He shakes my hand – an odd formality, but it’s not the gesture that surprises me so much as the feel of Michel’s palm. The skin is rough and broken. After ten years tapping and stroking glass, he has once again been working with his hands.

  ‘Well, you know each other,’ Vaux exclaims. ‘Of course. Mick, you’re a dark horse, keeping this guy under your hat.’

  ‘Conrad?’ Michel looks at me. ‘What’s there to hide? He’s an idiot.’

  ‘This idiot has built the best damned AR platform my R&R people have ever seen.’

  There’s a deal m
ore of this bullshit to weather before Vaux bears Michel off to his roaring real fire and VSOP hospitality.

  Before the week is out, Bryon Vaux calls to tell me he has hired a private detective to gather all surviving records relating to my mother’s disappearance. Is this a blind – a means of distracting me from my suspicions about him?

  Or is this simply what he does? This is, after all, what makes him who he is, and makes him as successful as he is. He digs and digs and digs, living out the lives of others, so that he can eventually realise them in light and sound.

  I am his research project. Perhaps I am his next script.

  There are veterans working the city’s bars and clubs: soldiers invalided out of the service. Land-mine victims. Purple hearts with missing limbs. Metal hands and carbon fibre feet. Chrome women. Cat women. Upright, tall, fast, oh, so desirable.

  She says, ‘What do you want me to do?’

  I tell her, ‘Take your lenses out.’

  She smiles as she undresses. ‘No.’ Small, hard breasts and black plastic straps wound round her legs, and carbon fibre blades for feet. Dead eyes. ‘Not that.’

  In the clubs, even the dancers have silver eyes. I suppose that for them it is a kind of clothing. What they find to watch behind their lenses I cannot imagine. When I first paid my money and went inside one of these places and saw all those eyeless people, the dead-eyed, the seceded, I couldn’t bear it. I walked straight out again.

  I’ve hardened up since.

  ‘Conrad.’

  Bryon Vaux is sat at a table near the door. This is not the first time I’ve run into him in a place like this, and there is no escaping him now. His lead-eyed smile. His teeth. His hands. He hugs me. I know these hands, this pressure, this smell. I have been here before.

  He lets me go and his silver lenses glitter in the neon of the bar. He says, ‘A funny carry-on, this is.’

  Vaux’s easiness around sex – his transparent appetite for all this thigh and tit – is faintly clinical. We watch a while as a dancer works the end of the bar. A tall Japanese. Her steel-lensed eyes, so cold, so anonymous, are a protection for her. However exposed she is to our gaze, yet she remains in her private world. What is she watching? What does she know that we don’t?

  ‘How did we seem to you?’

  Vaux’s question takes me by surprise.

  ‘It must have been strange. No? When you were growing up. To be surrounded by the blind?’

  Vaux’s willingness to discuss the hotel rubs so very badly up against what I remember of him – his bright hair and brute and shuttered face, his fly, his erection. Why can I not simply confront him with what I remember? Even a flat denial would be a relief. As Gabby would say, ‘Just talk to him. Idiot.’

  But while my mother’s death remains a mystery, I cannot talk to him about it. Who wraps a bag around their own head? Who locks themselves in the boot of a car to die? Mum was on her way to the protest camp. She was happy. Vaux was there on the platform with her. The next day she was dead. There is no reason – no reason at all, that I can see – to suspect Vaux of Mum’s murder. His present behaviour flatly contradicts the idea. And yet.

  I rack my head for anecdotes – anything to defuse this moment. I remember coming home to the hotel with Michel one afternoon and finding the floor of the conservatory strewn with pornography. I can’t help but smile, telling Vaux about this. The innocence of it, and the weirdness. My comically eccentric dad and his madcap experiments.

  Vaux doesn’t laugh. He remembers this. ‘We were loudly disappointed,’ he says, with a bitterness, an undercurrent of anger I have not heard before. Once again, I am afraid of him. This smiling man. This middle-aged man with his open demeanour and his open chequebook. There is, after all, a darkness here. A core of anger. Not towards me. Not towards Mum.

  Towards Dad.

  ‘He pissed us off.’ Vaux tries to laugh. He’s trapped inside a tale he does not want to tell. It reveals too much of him. But it’s too late to back out now. ‘We were angry with him.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well.’ He tries to shrug this off. But the memory has come to the surface, and will not be supressed. ‘Those vests. Now they seem so crude, of course, but then—’ He stares into the distance with his plastic eyes, his man-made retinas. Technology – how it marches on! No one wears a vest these days. ‘To read a road sign. To watch TV! Simple stuff, but your dad’s vests, his inventions made us feel whole again. We were so pleased to be able to move around a room again and not fall over stuff! And then your dad comes up and rips our balls off.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you know he wrote up that pissy little experiment of his? I’ve read it. It’s written in this weird, floaty, I’m-not-really-responsible kind of language, but basically it says there’s a minimum optical resolution to lust. Pixellate filth too far and the erotic impulse will fail. And you know what?’ His hand clamps tight upon my arm. A strong hand. ‘Daddy was wrong.’

  He grins. His steel eyes rake the room. ‘Look.’ Around us table dancers flaunt their curves, their youth, their health, their missing limbs. ‘The other guys, the grunts, they’d already had girls. Those poor blind slobs knew what they were no longer seeing. I didn’t. When my eyes were stole from me, I’d never even touched a girl. You know that? Never touched one. Never seen.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Fuck off.’ He laughs. ‘Fuck off. A virgin, anyway. I was a virgin. A Bible Belt innocent. I hadn’t got a clue.’

  Of his blinding, he says little. There is little to be said. There are international laws against blinding soldiers on the battlefield, but some armies do not care about such laws. Even those who do care have found ways around the rules of engagement. You can fire a laser at a targeting system – and you can miss.

  ‘So, afterwards,’ he says, ‘after your dad proved I would never get excited that way, I headed into town. Bought magazines. With the vest I could see well enough to find a newsagent’s, but not well enough to see the titties on the covers. I just had to reach for the top shelf and pray.’

  A dirty story. He laughs. ‘I studied those pictures. I mean, really studied them.’ He stares into his empty glass. The music dies. The girls retire. The lights come on, flattening everything. Closing time. ‘You do that often enough,’ he says, ‘appetite will do the rest.’

  The thing about low-resolution vision, he says, as we climb the stairs back to street level, is that everything looks pretty much like everything else. ‘A box is a book is an oil can is a picture in a frame.’ He’s drunk, and he wants to be understood. ‘You see.’ He sweeps his hand across the street. ‘I see them everywhere now. Everywhere. Always have. Right now. Naked women. Buttocks raised. Cunts dripping. The works.’

  ‘Goodnight, Bryon.’

  ‘Everywhere. Shadows beneath a table. Fuck your AR – my head’s got better pictures in it than you’ll ever know.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘Light playing on bathwater.’

  ‘Bryon. Let go.’

  ‘A flag snapping in the wind. This place—Jesus, look around!’

  He’s hanging off my coat, hardly able to stand. Just how much has he had to drink?

  There’s the predictable mix of tourists and business people on the pavements, tottering around, blank-eyed, purblind, their movements choreographed by in-eye software that’s more conscious of the real world than they are themselves. ‘Look at them! Look!’

  What is he seeing? This man who has had to assemble his own erotics by himself, from twenty pixels and a prayer? Where is this flesh he sees, this thigh, lip, arse, neck, tit?

  ‘Let me get you a taxi.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘Come on, Bryon. It’s late.’

  ‘Fuck you, I know what you think.’ He digs in his pockets suddenly and for a brief moment I have this crazy idea that he’s going to pull out a gun. But no, it’s his wallet. He waves it open. Jesus.

  ‘Bryon, you’re going to get us mugged.’ />
  ‘Ha!’ He pulls out a business card. He shoves it in my face. ‘I know what you think, Connie, and fuck you, so I made a mistake. But they’re here.’ He stinks of whisky and fear. ‘They’re here if you know how to look.’

  I wave down a taxi for him and settle with the driver in advance. God knows, Vaux is hardly capable now. I get him snapped into his seat and swing the door shut on him. The taxi U-turns and disappears. I set off home on foot. In my hand is the card Vaux gave me. I pause under a streetlight to read.

  ‘AMBER’ and a number.

  Since these silvered contact lenses became the fashion I have been succumbing, more and more often, to a skin-crawling hunger for human contact. With the sale of Loophole, and the contract I have signed, I have the leisure now, as well as the money, to indulge myself. But the act, however well choreographed, cannot assuage this longing I have for someone, anyone, just to look me in the eye.

  I wonder: does Amber wear lenses?

  They’re here if you know where to look.

  What the hell did Vaux mean by that? There is only one way to find out. I hold my phone in front of the card, and it reads and dials the number.

  Without love, lust blooms. It slides about, fixating on the strange, the wild.

  But I am, after all, just like everyone else, wielding my disappointments like a club. I talk and expect her to listen. I grumble and expect her to comfort me.

  Amber. Her answering service said, ‘Hi, I am a genuine young independent homegrown escort, twenty-nine. Size twelve to fourteen, natural 36F. I can provide a sensuous massage or something more. I’m a normal, everyday, sane kind of person who enjoys a chat to put you at ease – if you want to chat, that is.’

  So much for revelation, or a deepening mystery. Though the address, when finally she gave it out, was better than her prices suggested and the house, when the taxi drew up outside, was so big, so white, so ostentatious, I was convinced Vaux had played a joke on me.