Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

And yet, if Hunter was spooked enough, surely he’d dispose of Vera just as ruthlessly as he’d disposed of Jack? We could only hope that Misha was right about her value to the Common Task.

*

I was desperate to be as much help as possible. Frustratingly, I could feel my rehabilitation progressing, but it wasn’t smooth or linear. There were moments of great euphoria. Together Nicholas and I were able to identify the exact location where I had been held and where I underwent the Procedure. I can say with some certainty that it was in a horseshoe-shaped building near the western bank of the Syr Darya river. The co-ordinates given by Google Earth for the structure are 45 degrees 37’ 27.47’ N and 63 degrees 19’ 24.46’ E. Nicholas was overjoyed to bolster his case with this kind of verifiable detail. He gave me an awkward hug, which we both found strangely repellent.

But at other times, I broke down into dismaying bouts of stammering. There were blinding headaches and a degree of physical discomfort along the length of my spinal cord that no painkiller could assuage.

I think my very eagerness to improve was counterproductive. I think I hurried the pace of my convalescence and my carcass rebelled.

*

On the second afternoon, Nicholas left me alone in the flat and didn’t return until late. He came back guiltily, expressing a forced surprise that I was still awake, but without meeting my eye. He didn’t say what he’d been doing, but I knew. He’d gone to see Lucius and Sarah. I was desperate for news of them, as he must have known. But he said nothing. I held my tongue. I heard him brushing his teeth, and then the sound of snoring from the bedroom.

Nicholas had made me up the sofa-bed in the living room. I lay down, but I was unable to sleep. The amount of sleep I required dropped markedly after the Procedure. It may be a side-effect of the Procedure itself; an indication of my premature ageing; or the altered requirements of my new carcass.

It seemed pointless to lie there brooding, fretting about my children and my slow rehabilitation. So I got up and went outside.

The streets were empty. It was about 3 a.m. I kept walking. Towards dawn, I had the whine of milkfloats for company. There was also a prizefighter who passed me in Battersea Park, jogging and shadowboxing with a surprising lightness of step. He planted his feet almost in silence, but I could hear his breathing and the tinny chorus of the headphones he wore under his hooded sweatshirt.

It was in that first pre-dawn walk that I truly began the long and continuing process of reconciliation with this carcass. The steady rhythm of my footsteps, the calm of the waking city and the slight elevation of my heartbeat not only gave me a pronounced sense of well-being but appeared to speed up my convalescence.

That morning I walked beyond Tower Bridge and as far as Billingsgate, which I reached around six o’clock, towards the end of their trading day. There was something invigorating about the smell of fish and the bright lights glittering over scales and crushed ice. I wandered around staring like a yokel until a porter ran into my leg with a trolley. Instead of abusing me, as I thought he might, he apologised and gave me a pair of smoked mackerel which I carried back home in a plastic bag.

The exercise, my sense of pride in my achievement and the unseasonal sunshine produced in me a joy that I had until then never known in this incarnation. I practised my greeting to Nicholas for the last ten minutes of the walk home, articulating the words with increasing facility. As soon as he opened the door to me, I held up my plastic bag and announced proudly: ‘Look what I’ve got. Foked smish.’

He glanced nervously over my shoulder and yanked me in.

Nicholas was naked from the waist up. He had something oblong in the palm of his hand.

‘Smoked fish,’ I said.

‘Give me a hand with this,’ he said. ‘It’s time to call Hunter’s bluff. We can’t wait any longer. Misha texted me this morning. He says they’re closing in on us.’

It was a miniature recorder. I held it in the shallow valley of Nicholas’s sternum while he fastened it in place with strips of gaffer tape.

‘I’ve arranged to meet him at Butler’s Wharf. He won’t be able to try anything there. All I need is some acknowledgement from him of what he’s up to. Then we’ll go straight to the police.’

At half past ten, Nicholas spread newspaper on the tiles of the hearth in the sitting room and dislodged the package from the chimney. He wiped it clean and put it in his courier’s bag. He handed me a piece of paper.

‘I need you to memorise these numbers,’ he said. ‘This is mine, this is Misha’s. If anything happens to me, call Misha. But use him sparingly. He’s no use to you dead.’ He paused at the doorway. ‘Wish me luck.’

‘Good luck,’ I said.

He looked at me. We embraced, this time with genuine warmth. No words were necessary. I understood.

The wait recalled those impotent and anxious hours before childbirth, tethered to an outcome over which you have no control, trying to cast all the dark possibilities out of your awareness. You would think that at a moment of such tension, Nicholas’s proxy complex would feel something, some sympathetic vibration at a cellular level, as twins are supposed to. But there was nothing.

Outside, the sky brightened. I drank Lucozade and felt its bubbles prick my tongue.

At just after 3.30 p.m. the mobile phone handset on the coffee table burst into life. It rattled on the glass like a hostile insect. The caller was Misha. ‘Go quickly,’ he said. ‘Go now.’

*

So close to my own death, I’m squeamish about dwelling on Nicholas’s. I’m sentimental about the body that formed me. I’m not blind to its inadequacies and imperfections, but it’s what I was. It’s not merely a platitude to say that something of me died that day. And though I’m not superstitious, I find myself recoiling from the details of Nicholas’s death as from a harbinger of my own. But completeness demands it.

Nicholas’s body was retrieved from the front nearside wheel arch of a lorry that had been turning left from Kennington Park Road onto Harleyford Street at 4.28 p.m. on Monday September 28th 2009.

I avoided using the word ‘mangled’ in the previous sentence, fearing that it would cheapen the tone, but now I find that making no mention of the body’s condition deprives the statement of some of its impact. Perhaps it is enough to ask the reader merely to imagine the likely outcome of such a collision.

The inquest was held in Croydon. I couldn’t risk attending, but I was able to find its details online.

The court heard the testimony of a single witness and the collision investigator, a PC Menzies, whose report gives the appearance of scrupulousness. He described the condition of Nicholas’s bicycle in detail. ‘The front fork, down tubes and pedals were all smashed. A wheel was buckled. Paint was flaked off. There was a long groove in the tarmac where the bicycle had been carried along the ground.’ Using careful legal language for quantifying uncertainty, PC Menzies abrogated any responsibility for explaining what might have happened. ‘There were no defects of note in the driver’s vehicle. The quality of the CCTV is such that it is not possible to determine the speed at which he was driving.’

The driver of the lorry, a Liverpudlian called David Test who was working on a short-term contract to a firm of hauliers called Wexford Dairy Refrigeration, claimed he had checked the nearside mirror twice before the fatal manoeuvre; though not the most clearly false element in his account, there is something about the detail twice that stretches credulity with its unlikely excess of driving punctilio.