D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

‘Ring Vincent,’ she said. ‘Tell him to fix it.’

Harry was doubtful. ‘He’s a very busy man.’

‘Like hell he is. As long as I’m alive he’ll be busy doing what I say. That’s what NTV pays him for.’

‘You used not to be such a hard person, Kate.’

There were several answers to that one, but she let them all pass. Today was her doing-not-brooding day.

Prodded, Harry rang NTV House. He found Vincent as charming as ever, and helpful, and delighted with the choice of locale. Tasmania was strong on filmic settings; the islanders -as yet unmedia-oriented — would be little trouble; the television facilities were excellent, on account of the annual Grand Prix. His assistant would make all arrangements, and the documentation would be ready for them to pick up when they came to NTV House at four. On the question of the clothes, though, he’d prefer Mrs Mortenhoe to buy her own. Neither he nor his assistant would presume to choose clothes for a beautiful woman. Katherine, standing close to Harry, heard this.

‘Beautiful Katherine Mortenhoe and her beautiful husband make a beautiful couple doing beautiful things in a beautiful world, while she prepares beautifully to die. It’s all so beautiful…’

But she didn’t mind a shopping expedition. She made no precise plans for getting away from Harry: a dress shop would be as good a place as any.

They left the flat. She didn’t look back. If she could leave Harry so easily, then of course she could leave these other bits and pieces of her life. Outside in the drizzle the newsstand screens were showing: Record Price to Syndrome Victim + Blast Hits Power Station + NTV Signs Mortenhoe + Riots Chaos Flares in County Town + Ferriman on Is Dying a Dying Art? + She hurried Harry on before he could buy a printout. She’d rather the news of his nest egg came later, when he needed comforting after the cancellation of his trip to Tasmania.

A reporter picked them up almost immediately, and then two more. She kept walking. Harry, out of breath but enjoying himself, gave them an interview on the move. He’d miss all this chat, she thought, when the NTV exclusive took over at four.

Outside the dress shop, statutorily, they left the reporters, Harry in midsentence. Katherine sat him firmly down on a spindly gold chair while she went around gathering armfuls of summery clothes from the racks. Then she kissed him lightly on the forehead and patted his arm good-bye. He looked up, pleased, remembering their morning. She whisked away to one of the trying-on rooms.

The three mirrors caught her momentarily — Vincent Ferriman’s hot property, Dr Mason’s terminal case, Peter’s Katie-Mo, her father’s fucking nuisance, Gerald’s armored cruiser, John Peel’s pickup, Harry’s newly hard person, her own… her own worst enemy? The phrase, as is the way with cliches, saved her from making any real effort. It even had a certain hideous aptness. She smiled, and watched reflections of reflections of reflections of the smile. Then she broke away — none of them, none of it, lumpy, with elbows, was she — she broke away from the mirrors, dumped the clothes on a chair, and went back out of the trying-on room.

She hovered around the back of a tall showcase, then looked cautiously around its end. Harry was no Mr Mathiesson. He was where she had left him, dutifully, his legs crossed, jiggling his top foot and watching it. He would stay there for a long tune. Half an hour. Longer even. He was patient. And endearingly trying to be smart, legs crossed, showing a lot of sock. She evaded an approaching assistant and quietly made her way out of the shop by another entrance. No other good-bye was possible. Or desirable.

She hailed a taxi, climbed in, and asked to be taken to a residential block a few minutes’ walk from the heliport. No doubt Vincent would eventually trace her as far as the heliport, but she saw no reason to make things easy for him. She sat back in the taxi, and relaxed, and watched the people and cars stream by. And was suddenly committed.

Boats burned. Committed. Alone. Literally, metaphorically, alone.

The plan — no, not even the plan, the impossible dream -the impossible dream was now real. Without really noticing it, she had kicked off from the edge of the everyday, kicked off into the dream, kicked off into a world where there was only she. A place where she had only her own word to take for her very existence. If only she could have said good-bye — to Harry, to John Peel, to Gerald, to her father, to Dr Mason, to Vincent, to somebody if only she could have said good-bye to somebody, then her going would have seemed less final, less of a total cessation. She was alone, and dying, and there was no one to know. No one who did not in some manner regard her as property, to be kept track of and cashed in when the time was right. No one, that is — and she fumbled with the switch on the intercom, oh God, were her fingers going to fail her now? — no one except Peter.

‘Computabook,’ she said, getting the switch right at last. ‘Drive me to Computabook. Then wait.’ It wouldn’t take long. ‘It won’t take long. Will you please do that?’

The delay, any delay, was crazy. This was her only chance to get away. These were her last few moments before the grief-buyers took over. Soon they would be after her. Searching. But she had to say good-bye to somebody, so that there would be somebody who knew.

Computabook was deserted, blank, shut for the weekend. Other people’s lives, of course, still had shape. She suffered a moment’s panic, not knowing Peter’s home address — how could she have worked with him for so long and never inquired, never been interested in, where he lived, and how, and with whom? — but then she remembered phone booths. Phone booths had directories.

The taxi driver took her to the nearest phone booth, and then on. Peter lived, she discovered, in a block exactly like her own, in a flat exactly like her own. Only the furnishings were different, sitting uneasily, impertinently, against the familiar walls. It seemed that Peter had been in bed when she rang. This shocked her: in bed, wasting the day, at nearly noon. But he belted his dressing gown and asked her in, and made her unquestioningly welcome.

She followed him into his sitting room, her sitting room messed up with all the wrong chairs and the wrong clock. The view from the window was wrong too. She shouldn’t have come.

A man’s voice called from the bedroom, ‘Who is it, love?’ and Peter went and put his head around the door and there was a short, inaudible conversation. Katharine wandered around the room, touching all the horrible furniture. When Peter returned she came at once to the point. Say it, and then she could go.

‘I’m running away. I expect you’ll see a lot about it in the papers. I wanted you to know.’ Know was an inadequate word, but it was all she had.

‘How can I help?’ Peter said.

His question, so gentle, made her cry. She hadn’t expected to cry. She wasn’t a crying person. ‘I came to say good-bye. That’s all. And to explain. I’ve accepted a lot of money. The papers will—’

‘You don’t have to explain, Katie-Mo. You’re your own woman.’

‘That’s what I mean. Perhaps I’m not. Perhaps I shouldn’t be.’

‘You’re dying. That’s between you and it. Not many things are, but that is.’

It was as if he lived inside her conscience. He said things that nobody else could. And he didn’t ask her where she was going, or what she was going to do.

‘You don’t think I’m running away?’

‘If you stayed you’d be running away a whole lot more. Staying would be a sort of suicide.’

She nodded. He was confirming what she had had to question.