Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

According to the coroner, life was pronounced extinct at 4.45 p.m. She recorded a verdict of death by misadventure: ‘… when, just after 4 in the afternoon, amidst a lot of uncertainty, the two came into collision. Nicholas Patrick Slopen, born Singapore, 1970, died of multiple injuries.’

*

It’s not difficult to piece together what really happened. Nietzsche says the liar gives himself away by the shape of his mouth. The story is in the omissions and the minor details as much as the outright untruths.

Leaving aside the strange absence of witnesses on a busy road in South London on a weekday afternoon towards rush hour — with the notable exception of a dubious Serbian called Lenko Voinovic who supported Test’s account in every specific, despite claiming to have been on the phone to Belgrade at the time — and ignoring also the mystifying inadequacy of the traffic cameras in the area, there is a further number of puzzling details that raise questions about the verdict of accidental death, and ultimately about the integrity of the coroner herself, Ms Geraldine Passmore.

More than three hours had passed between Nicholas’s meeting with Hunter and the accident. Three hours is a long time. It wouldn’t take Hunter three hours to say ‘Publish and be damned’ or ‘I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.’ Three hours, I would say, is just about enough time for Nicholas to have laid out his accusations against Hunter patiently and thoroughly; for him to have overcome all Hunter’s attempts at bluff and appeasement; for Hunter to have become genuinely worried that Nicholas had the goods on him; and for Hunter to have set in train the fatal reprisal.

What had he been doing, or rather, what was being done to him in those three hours? Clearly, it was something of so violent a nature that only the convenient fiction of a traffic accident could plausibly conceal it. Notably, there was no mention of the recording device, the microphone or the dossier which Misha and Nicholas had taken such pains to compile.

*

There was no question of staying in the flat. Nicholas’s death had left me with no doubt about the reach and resourcefulness of the conspirators. I was certain they would come for me next. I left London and submerged myself in the transient world of flotsam and rejects. I travelled by bus between out-of-the-way towns. I stayed in hostels and shelters. I kept moving.

The people I encountered assumed that I had had some kind of stroke and after a while I began to encourage them in this belief. I concocted an autobiography in which the stroke had given me an opportunity to take time away from my career and re-evaluate my life. Adding that I had previously worked as a civil servant was normally enough to forestall any further enquiry. The rehabilitation that had seemed so elusive before, now took place inexorably. Each day, I felt more rooted in my carcass, my mind seemed increasingly alert and my speech became clearer. And once I became more confident of my survival, it began to dawn on me that Nicholas’s sacrifice had not been in vain. Perhaps I could become a sufficiently plausible Nicholas to send a tremor through the Common Task. Perhaps I could sharpen myself into an arrow to pierce the heart of the conspiracy.

Once in a while, I checked through my old email account and in this way learned from a circular sent to all alumni of Downing College that a former girlfriend was running a shop in a market town in the Welsh borders. One morning, I went into her shop unannounced. Of course, there were emotional ties between us. I craved any connection with my old life. But it was also a way of assessing my progress. If she believed I was Nicky Slopen, others might too. I glimpsed a chink of light beneath the door of my prison.

She was taken aback to see me and referred almost immediately to the news of my death, but we shared enough common history for me to be able to persuade her that she was mistaken.

I wonder a little at her readiness to accept my word. But then we had both aged, we were both heavier and clumsier; not the lithe teenage carcasses who had shared narrow single beds at university and slept soundly, entwined like snakes.

She was in the throes of a separation and I couldn’t help imagining the life that we might have shared had things turned out differently. In this counterfactual existence, the other Nicholas Slopen lived in this pretty town with this kind and loving woman. I wondered hopelessly as I left her if the last twenty years were simply a terrible mistake, culminating in my being cut adrift in this stranger’s carcass, and with no way back to my loved ones.

*

I returned to London with a renewed appetite for the struggle. What I had not foreseen was the terrible pull that my old life would exert.

Nicholas’s death, terrible as it was, had freed me to love my children again. After my sojourn in the Midlands, all I wanted was a glimpse of them: just to see my flesh alive, all that was left of me. The pressure of this old yearning began to dissolve my singlemindedness.

*

They were living in a big town house, a temple to Poggenpohl and Bose and Aga and all the other deities of Morestuffism, with absurd topiary in zinc bins on the windowsills.

To begin with, I deluded myself that it was reconnaissance. I took to loitering in the area and was rewarded with tantalising glimpses of them through the basement window.

At Notting Hill Gate one Friday afternoon, Sarah took an Evening Standard from me with a fragrant gloved hand. I felt a flash of parental concern when I detected the smell of cigarette smoke mingled with her perfume. She had a mobile phone pressed to her ear. She was taller and walked with a woman’s poise: so beautiful, so like her mother. Her face was pale. I thought of the grief she had suffered. And underneath it all, there was still a fugitive trace of the face she had had as a child. Even in her early teens, when sleeping, Sarah’s face fell into the expression she wore on the ultrasound, twenty weeks from conception, which so enraptured us.

I staggered outside and wept in the slush: the grimy aftermath of this year’s extraordinary snow. I should have made my renunciation then, but like any addict I needed a progressively more potent fix.

At this stage, I was homeless and broke. Nicholas’s ATM card had stopped functioning in the middle of January.

There was a shelter in Vauxhall with all the anomie of the DHU but less actual insanity. I gave away free papers, took food hand-outs and foraged in bins. My carcass, oddly, seemed to flourish under the abuse. This peasant body is built for suffering. It’s slow and clumsy, but indifferent to cold and shocking in its outright strength. One evening at the shelter I came back from the dank bathroom to find someone nosing in the drawer under my bed. I lifted him clean off the ground by the throat until his face went purple, and felt not much more than mild surprise and the detachment of someone operating a powerful crane.

Through January, I stole into their back garden a number of times and watched them in the glass box of the rear extension, performing the numberless mundane rituals that are the weft of family life. I deluded myself that I was in control of my habit, but then the unforeseeable shock came.

Risking the lightening dusk of February to creep along the rear wall around five o’clock one afternoon, I saw Leonora and Lucius and Hunter’s girlfriend, Candy Go, sitting at the granite slab of dining table.

Nicholas, of course, had told me in Crimea that Candy and Leonora were friends. They met at the gym after Leonora decamped to West London. Leonora had been quite open about it with Nicholas. But it wasn’t a conversation she’d had with me. And the recollection of Nicholas’s words did not carry enough force to overbear the injustice of what I seemed to see in front of me: cordiality between Nicholas’s family and his killers. It drove me out of my mind.