Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

What?

She’s looking all wide-eyed and innocent but you don’t buy it.

Whatever you might think, you tell her, Johnny is a real person.

Of course he is, I mean, you are.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is just to be me?

Johnny—

You get up from the table and stare down at her.

A lot of people say that Pope Joan didn’t exist, you tell her. You know, modern scholars, they dismiss the whole Female Pope story as a medieval legend. A crazy idea dreamt up to ridicule the papacy. Or maybe a feminist rewriting of history. Wishful thinking. And what’s wrong with that? The fact is that there is no record of a Pope John the twentieth. The succession goes straight from the nineteenth to the twenty-first. So there is a gap there. There’s always a gap in history. And that’s where some of us live.

Anna Guttridge gazes up at you, bewildered. Like she has no idea what you’re talking about. You don’t care. You turn around and walk out with the sincere hope that you’ll never see her again.

You get back to your flat and you’re still full of anger and self-doubt. What really hurts is that you’ve been made to feel false, even though it is you who have been deceived. You’ve been made to feel guilty and that’s unforgivable. There’s a message on the answerphone from Anna, asking you to call her. You ignore it. You’re like some stupid kid. Jenny would never have fallen for this sort of bullshit. She would have seen right through that scheming bitch, you tell yourself. But you? You sigh. You remind yourself that you’re a late starter. And you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

You pick up the phone and call Danny Osiris in Los Angeles. It’s three in the afternoon there, and Danny sounds terrible, scarcely articulate. You ask him whether he still has the document that Vita stole from Marius Trevelyan. He says yes and you tell him to find a safe place for it.

Then you try to relax. You remember what your therapist said: that for somebody to love the person inside of you, you have to have a clear and centred sense of yourself that doesn’t depend on anybody else. You have to be strong there, to know who you are. And you can allow yourself to miss Jenny. You know, getting rid of the body, that was easy. Burying the rest of her, now that was the hard part. You cry a little and it makes you feel better. You manage to get some sleep.

You wake up feeling stronger. You realise that it doesn’t matter what Anna knows about you. Or what anybody else knows or suspects. You can deal with it. There’s another message from Anna. This time you call her back.

You arrange to go around to her place in the evening. You dress casually, but carefully. T-shirt and loose-fit jeans, leather boots, leather jacket, tough-guy stuff. Butch drag, as Jenny would have called it. But you mean to mean business. And you’re packing something special. A little surprise for Anna.

And you take around a bottle of red wine. You know you’ll need a drink. Anna shows you into her little one-bedroom flat; you open the wine. You both get a little drunk. There’s this tension in the air. A buzz of potential charging up.

I don’t appreciate the way that I’ve been used, you say. It’s humiliating.

I said I’m sorry.

The way you flirted with me. What was that? A journalist’s trick to get information?

No. Well, not entirely.

Still playing games.

Why can’t you believe that I might actually like you?

Oh, please. I mean, you know, don’t you? About me.

About you?

About Jenny and me. This ridiculous brother and sister act I’ve been playing.

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

I find that hard to believe. Anyway, you wanted to know about Vita Lampada.

Only if you want to talk about it.

Yeah, well. That poor queen got involved in some serious stuff. Vita was a strange one. She was part of the New Romantic scene but always looked out of place. She was like an old-school tranny in the middle of all these fashionable gender benders. She used to get a lot of stick. Jenny liked her, respected her. They had a fellow feeling, you know? They both felt that they didn’t really belong. Jenny always said that she was stateless, and that’s what made her a pirate. But Vita and her were travelling together. Just in opposite directions. They met halfway. Vita had had an interesting life. A bit of a con artist, but clever with it. She had a great imagination. She was a fantasist really. I mean, she loved the form, you know, fantasy, science fiction, anything other-worldly. It was where she felt at home, I guess.

Is that why she liked the New Romantics?

The funny thing was she said near the end that she knew what Spandau Ballet meant. Robert Elms, the writer, he’d come up with the name of the band after seeing some graffiti on a wall in Germany. But Vita reckoned she knew what it meant. It was something she’d learnt from that Secret Service guy she picked up.

Marius Trevelyan?

Yeah. Silly cow tricked up this old punter in Shepherd Market and stole his briefcase. Turns out he’s high up in British Intelligence. Well, she was really in trouble after that. Anyway, she had heard him say something about Spandau. It was that prison in Berlin where they put all the big Nazis that they didn’t hang. Trevelyan told her that it was like a dance.

What did he mean?

Cold War stuff, I suppose. Spandau was the last institution governed by the Four-Power Authority — you know, the system that the different occupying forces used in Germany after the war. Control of the prison would rotate. That was the ballet, apparently. It made the place an important point of contact between East and West. But look, Vita might have been making all this up. Her imagination could be very vivid. She had this document that had been in the briefcase, some sort of manuscript. She gave it to Jenny to look after.

What happened to it?

Well, after Vita committed suicide, or was killed or whatever, Jenny got scared. She knew she had to get rid of this thing. So she sent it to Danny. He was in the States by then and he had the resources to put it somewhere safe.

And then Jenny disappeared.

Yeah.

Don’t you think that’s suspicious?

Oh come on, Anna, you know what happened to Jenny.

No, Johnny, I don’t.

You look her in the eyes and you know she’s telling the truth.

And you laugh out loud.

Christ, you’re not much of an investigative journalist, are you?

She doesn’t know what to say. Her face opens up with that beautiful curiosity once more. At last you’ve got the upper hand and you know what you have to do.

Do you want to know? you ask her.

She nods. Looks kind of scared. Maybe it’s the expression on your face. You must be looking a bit wild about the eyes.

Come here, you tell her.

You’re standing close together in the room, both of you feeling this intense nervous energy. But you’re in control now and she’s staring at you, bewildered. Fear in her eyes. And desire, you’re sure of it.

You kiss her. She lets out a little gasp as you pull back to look her in the eyes once more. Her hand comes up and strokes your chest gently. You take hold of it. Press it flat against your heart.

You see, you murmur, almost to yourself. I am real.

You kiss her again and let go of her hand. It snakes around to hold your back. You feel her breasts push against you, her hips shifting slightly, rubbing softly against yours.

Wait, you say, and push her away from you.

You pull your T-shirt over your head.

Look, you say, baring your chest to her, showing her the horizontal scars along the lower edge of your pectorals.

You see, Jenny got tired of trying to change the world. So she changed herself.