Conrad Williams - Decay Inevitable

“I hope you’re right, Vernon,” Ronnie warned. “We’ll break through before long and end it all. We could do without any interference.”

“If there’s any interference to be done, Ronnie, this woman from London will be doing it. For us. She... according to those in the know... is special .”

“So you say. So they say. Whoever. Whatever. I just want to be sure, that’s all. Nothing wrong with that.”

Vernon patted his arm and went to the bar. When he came back with more drinks, Ronnie said, “So the fires mean we’ve got two doors sealed. Any news on the third?”

SALLY CAME THROUGH with the information for him after just half an hour.

“Are you not busy enough?” Sean asked, when she called.

“Do you want this or not?”

“Go ahead.”

Sean made notes in a pad as Sally told him about de Fleche. He seemed to have been an interesting man, if completely insane. When she had finished, Sean made smalltalk and she answered him non-committally. When he asked her what was wrong, she told him she was feeling a little poorly. Her period was due, Rostron was being a wanker, and her new partner, a wet-nosed pup called Firmstone, was more interested in chatting her up than nailing villains.

“I wish I was still there, in a way,” Sean said, only half-joking.

“From what I gather, you’re busier than when you were in uniform. What are you up to?”

“Can’t say,” Sean whispered. “Phone might be bugged.”

Sally cut through him with a clipped, serious tone. “If there’s something going on up there, something serious, I want to know, Sean. I can help you.”

Sean said, “I know.”

“Why can’t you talk to me?” Sally asked. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“I’m just going over Naomi’s past. That’s all. Seeing what I can dig up.”

“These men you were telling me about. At her funeral. Who are they?”

“Not sure. Not sure about anything really. I’m just mooching about. I’m being careful.”

Sally’s sigh, 200 miles away, made him feel good to have her as his friend. He could picture her expression: tired, kind of happy, kind of sad. “You’d better,” she said, finally. “Call me. If things get rough. I can be there in two hours.”

“I’ll do that. I will.”

Sally said, “There’s more on this guy. Stuff about what he was into. Designs, you know. Too much to tell you over the phone. It’s in the post.”

Sean read through his notes as he made his way outside to the car. Peter de Fleche had been born in Helsinki in 1934. He studied at Helsinki Polytechnic and ended up lecturing there in the 1960s when he taught a student, Adrienne Fox, who would later become his wife. Nothing that Sally had told him pointed to any suicidal tendencies. Successful man who had modest tastes. No children. He had moved to the Northwest of England when he was commissioned to design a cluster of intelligent buildings for the Warrington-Runcorn axis during the boom years of the 1980s. Coincidentally, his Dutch father had roots in Merseyside and persuaded him to stay in the region. After the death of his father two years later, the year in which the de Fleche buildings were completed and his wife left him, the architect disappeared, or at least became a recluse. No address for him. No second-hand testimonies about him. No nothing. Apart from Ronnie Salt’s aside that he used to drive around at the dead of night, crawling past his constructions, one hand on the wheel, the other keeping an open bottle of brandy warm. Slowly going insane.

Sean got in the car and joined the late-morning traffic dawdling along the College Road, north out of town. A mile shy of Sloe Heath, he saw the old bell tower rising from the clutch of hospital buildings, capped with its roof, the arched windows black, sad eyes surveying the grounds. Whenever he saw Sloe Heath mental institute, Sean shivered. He remembered playing in the fields here with a friend whose father was a doctor. What was his name? Snarled up in traffic, Sean racked his brains for a face. A Pakistani, he was, who joined his school around the time that Naomi and he were becoming fast friends. Good at chess; they used to play during rainy playtimes, with a roll-up board and plastic pieces that packed together like Russian dolls.

Naeem. That’s it. Sean burst out laughing when he remembered. How could he forget? – it had tickled him because it sounded so much like Naomi’s name. He used to frustrate them by calling out Naeem’s name and when he turned round say, “No, I wanted Naomi,” or vice versa. Really funny.

The traffic came to a standstill. There had been a crash further up the road, towards the motorway traffic island, a shunt that had caused the two-lane carriageway to become hopelessly strangled.

Naeem had lived with his two brothers and two sisters in a big house on Hollins Drive. He was the youngest, Sean’s age. It was a good place to go to play. They would take their bikes and a football into the grounds of the hospital and kick it mindlessly back and to until it was too dark to see. Or they’d take their fishing rods and a few slices of bread for bait down to the gravel pit at the side of the M62 and try to tempt the tiny roach and perch to give themselves up while cows ambled over to watch.

Thursday nights, there was a film shown in the recreation hall, deep inside the hospital. He and Naeem would creep in, especially if it was an X-rated movie, and sit on the ping-pong table that had been moved to one side to accommodate ranks of plastic chairs for the patients. A fug of tobacco smoke hung around them, and something thin and antiseptic, as, slack-jawed, pyjama-clad, they watched what Naeem called “boo” movies: Jaws or Friday the 13th or Still of the Night . While Sean and Naeem jumped in all the right places, the audience’s reactions were disarmed by their dosages. There would be the odd moan, the zombified turn of a head, a cough that seemed too wet for anybody’s throat, but it added to the pleasure of the illicit viewing. Before the lights came up at the end of the film, the boys would leave, ostensibly to avoid capture by the projectionist, but mainly because the slow dance of the patients as they unwound from their seats was too horrible, too languid to observe.

It was nice, it was good to remember this stuff, but there was something unpleasant there too, as if another memory was itching to be seized upon, a memory that Sean had purposefully kept hidden because of the damage it might do him. The changes it might wreak.

It was too seductive though, this business of remembering, to be able to stop now. He had not spoken to Naeem for nearly twenty years, but his voice was loud in his head now, his features clear. The way he Brylcreemed his hair to one side. The shirt and trousers and shoes, no matter what the occasion. Stealing through the windows of the lodge house to play interminable games of snooker. Finding a hospital gown and taking it in turns to wear it, pretend to be a patient, lumbering out in front of the traffic. Bored one day, they had followed a couple for a mile to a field full of haystacks and, giggling until Sean was sick, watched them make love.

A police car had arrived and its occupants were now directing traffic around the collision. Feeling cheated, yet oddly relieved, Sean forced his mind back to the road and accelerated away from the accident. He steered the car around the large church, with its smoke-black masonry, and parked at a pub nearby, the Swan.

He walked up and down Myddleton Lane, the street where, according to what Sally had told him, Peter de Fleche had built a house for his lover back in the 1980s. Yet none of the houses on this long street bore the hallmarks of the multi-purpose blocks that de Fleche had designed. An hour later, the air filling with flecks of rain, Sean went back and sat in the car where he tried to read through his notes again. But the words would not settle before his eyes. Little bits of the past were forcing themselves into his consciousness. How he had never shared any of the meals that were cooked in Naeem’s house because he had been scared of spicy food. He used to have beans on toast, or biscuits and milk. Or cream crackers, crumbled into a mug of coffee. He’d kill, now, for some of the dishes Naeem’s mother assembled in that large kitchen, infused with cumin and coriander and turmeric.