This is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 1996
Copyright © Tristan Hawkins 1996
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006550112
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2017 ISBN: 9780008200862
Version: 2017-06-28
To Yuko
Contents
There was an announcement.
It began, ‘This is an announcement’ … then nothing. Then everything crunched to a halt.
The bald man with the lavish ears peered up from his paper and took in the other passengers.
It was bad news.
Insouciant skirts and brave suits. Youth, handsome looks and wealth.
All of them mocking his bad suit and pie-crust shoes. Smirking at his simmering blood-bag of a face. And was it possible? All of them in full knowledge of the unfortunate episode.
Perhaps there could be no question about the bald man with the lavish ears who sat perspiring on the Victoria Line tube train that afternoon.
No question that he was the genuine article. A bona fide sex offender. Your actual nonce. A moral bankrupt cowering in unpressed pinstripe and noose-fast tie. For why else would his face burn cerise at a stranger’s glance?
A pair of recently holidayed legs lay draped in the walkway. Parted arrogantly and wiped across the thighs with little more than the rumour of a skirt, it seemed she was almost daring him to take a peek. Filch a glance at the unpossessable, then at once experience all the wretchedness of his age; his sex; his off-the-peg, all-weather suit; his Tory broadsheet; his bald head and lavish ears; his everything.
He re-reddened at the inadvertent volume of these peculiar thoughts.
Then he swallowed – but the obstreperous, mucoid gas in his throat stayed put. And it seemed to him that he was now wafting outside his body, as if in some other dimension, and that the stubborn gas had transformed itself into a great liquid and the bald man with the lavish ears was now drowning.
In a single spasm he scrunched up his paper and moaned.
A resonant belch of a moan. The clamour of a randy bullfrog. Or a sluggard mastiff. The exhalation of a new corpse.
‘You all right, mate?’ someone from this dimension asked.
‘Yes, thanks,’ he thought he managed to grunt.
But Sheridan Entwhistle was not all right at all. His entire body was squeezing out sweat and he trembled like a rodent lifted from its cage. His field of vision was fast colliding into itself and his chest felt as if it was being compressed into the mass of ball bearing. And though he was breathing hard, gasping even, the air refused to enter his body. As if deflated, his head dropped and his vision was momentarily sucked along the delicious vale of her thighs.
Then … nothing.
When he came to a second or so later he was somewhat giddy yet in full possession of his faculties and his life. Forsaking decorum, he fiddled the pebblish knot of his tie loose and popped open the button below.
The tube wheezed into motion and coughed on to Victoria. Adeptly Sheridan folded up his paper, slotted it into his briefcase and joined the swarm of summer suits and shirts being sucked away by overground trains. And he thought, with mild and deliberate amusement, that apart from a heart attack it been a rather unremarkable day.
Sheridan flopped down and the cool armchair drank him into it.
‘Three, three, five?’ A momentary smile zipped under her big nose as she unscrewed the bottle cap.
‘Perhaps I’ll refrain tonight,’ he said reflectively. Then, not wanting to arouse premature suspicion in his wife, he laughed. ‘Go on, just a wee-un then.’
‘I,’ Jennifer announced as if heralding something of which she were supremely proud, ‘spent most of this afternoon lounging in our new conservatory.’
‘Good God, woman. I’m surprised you’re not sautéed.’
‘Oh no, darling,’ she seemed to echo as if in another room, ‘there was the divinest of breezes with both doors open.’
‘So now I take it, we’re playing host to every airborne bug in Edingley. Charming.’
He slipped a hand inside his jacket and counted the steady, rhythmic beats of his life. Still he couldn’t be sure of this. Not with things in slo-mo as they were.
His wife smiled and he smiled back and thought: yes, I’m doing well here.
Tinkling out the pleasant refrain of the outer life with one hand.
Mutely thumping out the