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  ‘What sort of thing do you mean?’

  ‘Offering to buy somebody’s death.’

  Desmond’s eyes in the rear-view mirror were hooded and alert. ‘Gentlemen’s gentlemen don’t tell,’ he said.

  5

  The Goneness of Serafina

  I was back at my flat at about half-past three that morning. When I turned on the lights the place came out of the darkness like an animal caught in the headlamps of a car. All the plants whose names I’d forgotten reproached me silently; the Russian vine looked moribund. ‘Sorry,’ I said. I filled a jug and poured water into the vine’s pot but the water ran through the dry soil and dripped on to the floor. ‘I’ll get back to you,’ I said.

  Poofter, whispered the cyclamen.

  ‘I know that’s how it looks,’ I said, ‘but that isn’t actually how it is.’ I went round and watered everyone and topped up the Russian vine, then I poured myself a large whisky. I found it difficult to look my flat in the eye; I felt ashamed, confused, guilty. ‘What can I say?’ I said. ‘Maybe a year from now I’ll be dead and you’ll forget me.’

  I spent a long time in the shower. It’s one of those that comes off the bath taps and there’s never quite enough pressure. I wanted to be sheathed in clean hot water but I could never get myself completely covered by it.

  It was quarter to five by the time I’d ministered to my soreness and got to bed and it took me a long time to fall asleep. I kept thinking about the unsheathed Mr Rinyo-Clacton and seeing newspaper and magazine photographs of rock, ballet and film stars as they looked before they died. I saw also men in hospices keeping vigil by their dying lovers. Listen, I told myself, maybe he hasn’t got anything and you didn’t get anything from him; he’s a millionaire and probably he’s very careful. Oh yes, I answered myself, he was very careful with you, wasn’t he. What if – O God! – what if he’s one of those people who get infected and then they want to pass it on? Stop that, I said, and my mind, like a child clutching a teddy bear, went to Serafina.

  Serafina was cook and baker at the Vegemania Restaurant in Earl’s Court Road. Her body smelled of fear and desire; her voice was soft; her eyes implacable. Her brown loaves were like bread from a fairy tale; her potato pancakes sizzled with lust and tasted of fidelity. At home and when we dined out she went for red meat and she liked it rare. Serafina was unique; she was impressive. I’ve seen the Whitbread Brewery horses standing in the rain with steam coming up off their backs and people plying them with apples and lumps of sugar and speaking privately to them – they wanted to ingratiate themselves with something ancient and elemental in these great animals. That’s how people responded to Serafina. There was nobody like her and that she loved me was a continual astonishment to me. Now she was gone because I’d been an idiot.

  I was an Excelsior salesman. My job was to sit in a little office over the Long Trail Travel Agency and ring people up to sell them the Excelsior Self-Realisation Programme. ‘Hello, Mr Dimbulb,’ I’d say. ‘I’m with the Excelsior Corporation. Our database shows that eighty-three per cent of the people of your age and socio-economic bracket realise only forty to sixty per cent of their personal potential. Of that eighty-three per cent, some twelve per cent have what it takes to do better and go farther and these are the people Excelsior wants to work with. Our computer tells us that you, Mr Dimbulb, are in that twelve per cent and you qualify for a free evaluation and consultation.’ And so on. If the prospect turned out to be a live one the next step was a visit from me with brochures, questionnaires, videotapes, books, and a contract. The Excelsior Self-Realisation Programme Starter Kit sold for £125 but the contract obliged the self-realiser to buy at least six more videos at £25 each from the monthly catalogues.

  The Excelsior logo showed a muscular naked man with a chisel and mallet emerging from the rock out of which he was carving himself. ‘SHAPE YOUR OWN DESTINY’ was the slogan under the chiselling man. There was no chiselling woman on the logo but many of our customers were women and more than twelve per cent of them were interesting, attractive, and available. They didn’t just want casual sex, they wanted meaningful sex with word action: they wanted love. My consultation and evaluation sessions were full of temptation which I resisted only some of the time. I liked crossing that magic line from stranger to lover; I liked the rumpled sheets of strange beds in which new women moaned with pleasure and told me things they’d never told anyone else. They also wrote letters to me, some of which Serafina found in my pockets.

  ‘I gave you everything I had,’ she said, ‘and you shat on it.’

  I said I was sorry. I said it many times and in many different ways but to no avail; pleas were useless. There was a whirlwind of things being flung into bags. ‘I’ll come back for the rest of it,’ she said, and was gone. The orphaned Russian vine hung by the window unwatered and the cyclamen cursed me in a tiny Serafina voice.

  How could I have forgotten what she was to me? From the first moment when she spoke to me in the Vegemania four years ago I knew she was my destiny-woman, my everything-woman. She was strange and mysterious, and although after a while I could predict what she’d say and do in many situations, I never altogether understood her. We liked much of the same music, from Monteverdi to Portishead, but her reading taste ran to thrillers which bored me and she was also keen on such things as the Australian TV soaps, Neighbours and Home and Away, which I had no time for. She kept up with them on the TV in the kitchen at the Vegemania while preparing the evening menu; she liked Oprah Winfrey too, and various sitcoms with canned laughter, but I reminded myself that nobody was perfect.

  Like every couple we had rows sometimes but we didn’t argue by the same rules and I often wasn’t clear about the outcome until later, when her actions would give me a clue: if, for example, she brought me a cup of rose-hip tea on a camomile night I knew it for a reminder that we were still each other’s destiny-people no matter what. I’d never thought of how it would be if Serafina left me, and when she did, the effect was such that Mr Rinyo-Clacton found me sitting on the floor in Piccadilly Circus tube station.

  At home I found that some things were no longer possible; I put on one of our favourite Purcell tracks, ‘Musick for a while’, sung by Michael Chance, and not only did it not all my cares beguile, it made me want to jump out of a window. Most of our music collection was now nothing I could listen to.

  Post addressed to Jonathan Fitch came through my letter-box and that was who I was. I had a National Insurance number and an account at Lloyds; I had a shoe size and a blood type and a bunch of keys. I was twenty-eight years old and not too bad-looking; in the past, when things came to an end with a woman, I’d always been able to find someone new. But now that Serafina was gone I realised too late that I was possessed by her – I had no self to offer anyone else. The house of my self is built on a rock of panic. Now the house was gone and only the panic remained.

  My mind sorted desperately through its souvenirs of Serafina: her voice; her body; her potato pancakes. The look of her as she stretched to water the Russian vine; the slanty smile she gave me with the sunlight through the leaves haloing her hair. Destiny! That was the word that kept repeating itself in my head, and I remembered our beginning.

  6

  Our Beginning

  Four years ago I went into the Vegemania for the first time, through a little hallway where a bulletin board offered several kinds of yoga and meditation, International Healing Tao, Creative Movement and Dance Improvisation, shiatsu, acupuncture, full body massage, rooms to let, vans for sale, Urdu tuition, and recorder lessons.

  The Vegemania Restaurant and Whole Food Shop was in Earl’s Court Road between a bureau de change and a one-hour photographic service. The place was full of sunlight (particularly bleak that day), stripped pine, and blackboards with the menu written in a bold round hand. I sat down facing the window with a view of the street and passers by, all of whom seemed to be free of any fixed routine and with better places to go than I. Many of them were strapped
and belted into great bulging rucksacks that they bore effortlessly and most of them carried plastic bottles of mineral water that sparkled in the sun as if they’d been filled at the Fountain of Youth.

  Not that I was old – I was only twenty-four back then – it was just that the man in the Excelsior logo was so much further out of his rock than I was. The first video in the Excelsior Starter Kit began with Dr Gunther Rumpel, our consultant psychologist, fixing the viewer with a steely blue eye and saying, ‘Be honest. In the matter of realising your potential, how would you grade yourself on a scale from one to ten?’ At that time I had no idea how to grade myself because I hadn’t yet worked out what my potential was.

  Since university I’d had two jobs before Excelsior and been sacked from both. At Harmattan Academic Press I’d made myself redundant by differing with Dr Auguste Birnaud on seventeen points in his Hermetic Modes of Semiosis in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke; my next job was writing copy at Folsom & Deere Advertising which lasted until a client meeting with Big Boy candy bars in which I suggested the line, ‘Get your mouth around a Big Boy’. Shortly after that I answered an ad with the headline ‘REALISE YOUR POTENTIAL’ and I became part of Excelsior.

  It was lunchtime and the Vegemania was filling up with hungry people and the healthy smells of wholefood cuisine. I was looking at a blackboard and trying to decide whether I wanted tofu-fried tortellini with carbonara sauce and a green salad or tagliolini with pesto and sun-dried tomatoes when I became aware of a new smell that made the others fade to nothing. This smell was in its crispy golden-brownness the ultimate expression of the art of frying; it was earthy and transcendental, seductive and spiritual. I had to swallow my saliva before I could speak. ‘What is that smell?’ I asked the waitress.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she said. ‘The extractor fan’s quit on us.’

  ‘Please don’t be sorry, just tell me what it is.’

  ‘Potato pancakes.’ She pointed to the blackboard where they were listed, served with sour cream and apple sauce, for £3.50.

  Potatoes! Growing in the earth, achieving self-realisation underground, waiting to be dug up. ‘That’s what I’ll have, please,’ I said.

  In due course they appeared, three of them crispy and golden-brown on a white plate with a blue-and-gold border. Two little tubs as well, one with sour cream and one with apple sauce. The pancakes tasted more than good; they tasted of destiny: I knew that I had come to a time and a place that had been waiting for me. The sunlight seemed less bleak and my plate was empty.

  As she cleared my place the waitress, a tall blonde all in black with a very short skirt, said, ‘How were they?’

  ‘Great. Same again, please.’ I waited, feeling the thing build. This time I turned in my chair and saw a woman appear in the kitchen doorway. She had her black hair tucked up inside a scarf but a few wisps escaped. She was wearing a white apron over her jeans and jumper. She was only there for a moment, then her absence became the single event in the room – nothing else was happening. I tried to see her face again in my mind: a long face, beautiful and intense and concentrated as if trying to remember something. Three more potato pancakes appeared with sour cream and apple sauce, then once again my plate was empty.

  ‘Had enough?’ said the waitress.

  I belched quietly behind my napkin. ‘Do it again, please,’ I said.

  The third order of potato pancakes was brought to me by the cook herself. She gave me that concentrated look, smiled slantily, and said, ‘Nice juicy potatoes this time of year.’

  I smelled her sweat that had in it fear and desire and frying. ‘Today is the beginning,’ I said.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Everything.’

  And it was.

  7

  Herbert Sledge

  Serafina and I usually woke up facing away from each other, and the first thing I always did on coming out of sleep was reach behind me to lay a hand on her hip. Then the day could begin.

  But this was the morning after Mr Rinyo-Clacton; when I reached behind me there was no Serafina, the October sunlight was coming through the blinds and the desolation and dread that were always waiting rushed in on me. The events of last night insisted on being real and not a dream and I was no longer sure who or what I was – it was as if I was clinging to a tuft of grass on the face of a cliff and the grass was coming away in my hands. I’d sat on the floor in Piccadilly Circus tube station and now here I was, dangling over empty air.

  I rang up Chelsea & Westminster Hospital. ‘Where do I go for an HIV test?’ I asked.

  ‘The John Hunter Clinic,’ said the man at the switchboard. ‘It’s just next door to us.’ He gave me the number.

  ‘I think I need an HIV test,’ I said when the John Hunter Clinic came on the line.

  ‘What sort of risk factor are we talking about?’ said the man at the other end.

  For a moment I thought he wanted some kind of number, then the penny dropped. Despite my sore bum, I tried to be as refined as he was. ‘I might have been exposed last night,’ I said. ‘It was the first and only contact of that kind I’ve ever had.’

  ‘It’s too soon for anything to show up in a test —’ he said, ‘there’s a three-month window.’

  ‘A three-month window!’ I imagined the ledge of that window; looking down past my feet I saw the street far, far below, where tiny faces looked up expectantly. Some of them shouted, ‘What are you waiting for?’

  ‘Three months! I’ve got to wait three months before I know anything?’

  ‘That’s right. We’ll be happy to test you at any time before that but it won’t be conclusive. We can test you for other sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhoea and herpes simplex and so on and we can give you counselling. Our walk-in clinic is open every day from eight-thirty to four-thirty except Wednesday when we open at eleven-thirty.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, and rang off. Counselling! That’s what I should have had before I started shaping my destiny in strange beds. Three months! I had no appetite for breakfast but I forced myself to have my usual grapefruit juice, muesli, and coffee. The sky was grey, the day looked doubtful and unsure of its potential as I set out for the Excelsior office, only a few minutes from where I live in Nevern Place. On the way I stopped at the Vegemania: it wasn’t open yet and nobody was visible through the window. Where was Serafina staying? She’d no place of her own any more. Was there already someone else waking up beside her?

  I still wasn’t ready for Excelsior but I didn’t want to be alone so I crossed the road and went on to the tube station. With a sinking feeling in my stomach and a tingling at the back of my neck I moved through the human swarm that poured out into Earl’s Court Road. Where were they going, that they were all in such a hurry? Not just the young with their rucksacks and mineral water but middle-aged and old people as well, all with places to go that they were eager to get to. A young man at the entrance gave me a handbill:

  **** KATERINA ****

  MODERN PSYCHIC AND CLAIRVOYANT

  No crystal ball, no bullshit. This is the real thing.

  You pay nothing if I can’t help you.

  **********

  There was no address but the telephone number was a local one. Who knows? I thought. Maybe this is part of my destiny too. I stuck the handbill in my pocket, turned back towards Benjy’s, picked up a takeaway coffee and a Danish, walked back to the corner, turned left into Kenway Road, continued past Al-Rawshi Take Away Lebanese Cuisine, Launderama, Hi-Tide Fish & Chips, and other international enterprises, opened the hallway door at Long Trail Travel, slowly climbed the stairs to Excelsior, said good morning to my colleagues Phil and Gary, both of whom observed that I looked terrible. I checked the first name on my list, and dialled the number.

  ‘Hello,’ said the voice at the other end.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Am I speaking to Herbert Sledge?’

  ‘Yes. Who is this?’ He sounded young and short on patience.

  ‘My name is Jonathan F
itch, Mr Sledge, and I’m with the Excelsior Corporation. We’ve got a list of people with potential and you’re on it.’

  ‘Get to the point. What are you selling?’

  ‘Our database shows that eighty-three per cent of the people in your age and socio-economic bracket realise only between forty and sixty per cent of their personal potential. Of that eighty-three per cent …’

  ‘Stop,’ said Sledge. ‘You sound like an educated man, Mr Fitch. How old are you?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘You don’t want to answer the question, do you.’

  ‘I’m twenty-eight.’

  ‘I’m twenty-four and I’m Head of Genetic Research at Omni Laboratories. Right now I’m investigating hierarchal language analogues in non-coding DNA. What are you doing besides peddling some bullshit self-improvement course?’

  ‘We can’t all be investigating non-coding DNA,’ I said, feeling an upsurge of gastric acid. ‘Some of us have to sell bullshit self-improvement courses.’

  Sanjay Prasad walked in just as I said that: my boss, owner of Excelsior Corporation, Long Trail Travel, Prasad Printing and Copying Services, and Kashmiri Garden Furnishings. Gold Rolex, blue and white striped shirt with a white collar, and some really awful aftershave. ‘That’s quite an original sales approach,’ he said. ‘I hope you have a lot of luck with it at your next place of employment.’

  ‘I have to go now,’ I said to Herbert Sledge. ‘It’s been great fun talking to you. Have a nice DNA.’

  ‘See Yasmin in Accounting downstairs,’ said Sanjay, looking at his watch. ‘She will settle up with you.’

  ‘Are you telling me this is goodbye? I’ve consistently scored more sign-ups than anyone else in this room.’

  ‘I know. This isn’t business, it’s personal – I just happen to hate your guts. You read Classics at university and you think what we do here is shit.’