Talulla Rising
Page 53
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I had a vivid re-run of him smashing Hoyle’s skull in. He’d done it with a peaceful face. The face he’d wear sitting alone in a café staring out the window at the rain. It made me wonder what state Walker was in, wherever he was.
‘What’s going to happen to me?’ I asked.
‘Up to Science,’ he said. ‘Research on lycanthropes was shut down a couple of years ago, but recent events have opened it up again. Poulsom’s work, mainly, the anti-virus. The eggheads’ll put you through your paces and take a decision on it. If it were up to me, obviously, I’d cut your head off. Whatever happens, you won’t be seeing the outside world again.’
Sometime in the past women (via a woman) had failed to live up to what he thought they promised. I imagined unappreciated passions, an intensity first awkward, then desperate, then disastrous. He was all wrong for women in just the mysterious way Walker was all right. Which it turned out didn’t prohibit getting married or working alongside female agents. A woman was only a problem if she impinged, fundamentally. The wife, Angela, who’d seemed negligible enough, had in fact turned out to be an impinger. Analysing him and fucking other men. I might be an impinger. He hadn’t made his mind up yet.
‘Do you know where the vampires are holding Konstantinov’s wife?’ I asked him.
‘And your son? You don’t mention him in case we don’t know about him. But of course we do know about him.’
Heat filled my scalp. A sudden fury and sickness and disgust at always being the patsy, at being every minute further behind the information. This was a version of hell: the closer to my son I thought I was getting, the further I was moving away. I imagined Jacqueline watching it, the Talulla Show, wincing with quiet delight at my fuck-ups. I imagined Jake, staring at the footage, unblinking, silent, burning.
‘Your little girl too, obviously,’ Murdoch said. ‘Thanks to Hoyle. Thanks to Walker. Why did Walker think it necessary to give all that information to Hoyle? The answer is he didn’t think it was necessary. He just didn’t think. He’s got a loose mouth.’
Which choice of words he regretted, a tiny shift in the hawk eyes conceded. Walker’s mouth. On his wife’s mouth. On her breasts, between her legs, all over her. Not that that was the root of the enmity. The root of the enmity was that both of them, he and Walker, had the same boredom, the same aloneness, the same certainty that what you did didn’t matter – and yet Walker had a kind of virtue, if only the virtue of being likeable. For Murdoch that was the annoyance that had bloomed into monomania, that Walker casually proved there was another response to the vast mathematical silence. And fucked Murdoch’s wife.
‘Also,’ Murdoch said, ‘his birth certificate was in your backpack. Along with...’ He pulled the journal out of his jacket pocket... ‘Jake Marlowe’s diary. I hadn’t known killing and eating people was sexually arousing for you.’
I wanted to say something flip – but I wanted the book back more.
‘I know the answer to this is probably no,’ I said, ‘but could I have that back? I mean you’ve made copies or scanned it for the files or whatever, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, could I have it?’
The question brought us to a curious silence. There was no reason for him to comply. Except the pleasure it would give him to confound my expectation that he wouldn’t comply. Which he knew I expected. So he’d do the opposite. Which he also knew I expected – therefore the inclination was to confound that expectation... And so on, potentially ad infinitum. It was as if we were having this hypnotic conversation out loud – yet I knew if I actually said anything out loud – Please, just to keep me company while the kid’s asleep – he’d simply stare at me with the calm unhinged dignity... then turn and walk away without a word.
He handed the journal to me through the bars. The mind-reading made the gesture intimate. It was as if he was testing his own hatred. These were the curiosity margins he operated at.
‘To answer your other question,’ he said, ‘no, I don’t know where the vampires are holding your son, or for that matter Konstantinov’s wife. Once we’ve dealt with Walker et al, and the lab-coats have decided your fate, I’ll give this Remshi business a proper look.’
‘You know the legend then?’
‘We all know the legend. Everyone goes through a Book of Remshi phase at one time or another. “Phase” being the operative word. It’s an appealing idea, the oldest living vampire – think of the stories he could tell! – but the book’s boring. No one actually reads it.’ Jake would have added (or I would have, or Grainer or possibly even Ellis): It’s WOCOP’s Finnegans Wake. But Murdoch didn’t read. Like women books had failed of what they’d once seemed to promise him. Like women books were sly and false and in the end no kind of antidote to the emptiness he’d been falling through screaming all these years. Like women, books couldn’t stop him.
‘But do you believe he exists?’
His headset clicked. He held a finger to the earpiece. ‘Go ahead.’
Pause.
‘All right, I’m on my way.’ Then to me: ‘Duty calls.’ He crossed the corridor. ‘If he does exist,’ he said, ‘he won’t make any difference. He won’t know where he came from or where he’s going. He’ll have stories... He will have the stories. But that’s all they’ll be. Ultimately he’ll be one more freak living off human beings, which means, in the end, it’ll be my job to find him and kill him.’
He swiped the card, got the sequence of blips and the hydraulic sigh. The door closed behind him with the subdued sounds of precision technology. I rested my head against the bars. Realised, amongst other things, that I was getting used to Caleb’s smell.
39
I read Jake for a while. Self-lacerating escape: Heathrow, the Plaza, the long drive west to Big Sur; love, love, love – but some of the Madeline material too. I couldn’t help it now that I’d met her. Not a good idea in my state. The love hurt my heart and the sex (mine and Jake’s, but if I’m truthful his and hers as well) got me pitifully turned-on. Walker wove in and out of all of it. I wanted to see his face and hear his voice. I contemplated – with an inner smile for how much Jake would’ve sympathised – just biting the bullet, lying down in the corner and having a hand-job. I didn’t, however. I couldn’t stand the thought of Murdoch watching. With the same look on his face as when he beat Hoyle to death. For what felt like a long time I lay on my back trying to think of anything – the formula for quadratic equations, the novels of Graham Greene, the sequence of US presidents – other than sex. Eventually, because even the werewolf body is an honourable machine, I fell asleep.
‘What’s going to happen to me?’ I asked.
‘Up to Science,’ he said. ‘Research on lycanthropes was shut down a couple of years ago, but recent events have opened it up again. Poulsom’s work, mainly, the anti-virus. The eggheads’ll put you through your paces and take a decision on it. If it were up to me, obviously, I’d cut your head off. Whatever happens, you won’t be seeing the outside world again.’
Sometime in the past women (via a woman) had failed to live up to what he thought they promised. I imagined unappreciated passions, an intensity first awkward, then desperate, then disastrous. He was all wrong for women in just the mysterious way Walker was all right. Which it turned out didn’t prohibit getting married or working alongside female agents. A woman was only a problem if she impinged, fundamentally. The wife, Angela, who’d seemed negligible enough, had in fact turned out to be an impinger. Analysing him and fucking other men. I might be an impinger. He hadn’t made his mind up yet.
‘Do you know where the vampires are holding Konstantinov’s wife?’ I asked him.
‘And your son? You don’t mention him in case we don’t know about him. But of course we do know about him.’
Heat filled my scalp. A sudden fury and sickness and disgust at always being the patsy, at being every minute further behind the information. This was a version of hell: the closer to my son I thought I was getting, the further I was moving away. I imagined Jacqueline watching it, the Talulla Show, wincing with quiet delight at my fuck-ups. I imagined Jake, staring at the footage, unblinking, silent, burning.
‘Your little girl too, obviously,’ Murdoch said. ‘Thanks to Hoyle. Thanks to Walker. Why did Walker think it necessary to give all that information to Hoyle? The answer is he didn’t think it was necessary. He just didn’t think. He’s got a loose mouth.’
Which choice of words he regretted, a tiny shift in the hawk eyes conceded. Walker’s mouth. On his wife’s mouth. On her breasts, between her legs, all over her. Not that that was the root of the enmity. The root of the enmity was that both of them, he and Walker, had the same boredom, the same aloneness, the same certainty that what you did didn’t matter – and yet Walker had a kind of virtue, if only the virtue of being likeable. For Murdoch that was the annoyance that had bloomed into monomania, that Walker casually proved there was another response to the vast mathematical silence. And fucked Murdoch’s wife.
‘Also,’ Murdoch said, ‘his birth certificate was in your backpack. Along with...’ He pulled the journal out of his jacket pocket... ‘Jake Marlowe’s diary. I hadn’t known killing and eating people was sexually arousing for you.’
I wanted to say something flip – but I wanted the book back more.
‘I know the answer to this is probably no,’ I said, ‘but could I have that back? I mean you’ve made copies or scanned it for the files or whatever, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, could I have it?’
The question brought us to a curious silence. There was no reason for him to comply. Except the pleasure it would give him to confound my expectation that he wouldn’t comply. Which he knew I expected. So he’d do the opposite. Which he also knew I expected – therefore the inclination was to confound that expectation... And so on, potentially ad infinitum. It was as if we were having this hypnotic conversation out loud – yet I knew if I actually said anything out loud – Please, just to keep me company while the kid’s asleep – he’d simply stare at me with the calm unhinged dignity... then turn and walk away without a word.
He handed the journal to me through the bars. The mind-reading made the gesture intimate. It was as if he was testing his own hatred. These were the curiosity margins he operated at.
‘To answer your other question,’ he said, ‘no, I don’t know where the vampires are holding your son, or for that matter Konstantinov’s wife. Once we’ve dealt with Walker et al, and the lab-coats have decided your fate, I’ll give this Remshi business a proper look.’
‘You know the legend then?’
‘We all know the legend. Everyone goes through a Book of Remshi phase at one time or another. “Phase” being the operative word. It’s an appealing idea, the oldest living vampire – think of the stories he could tell! – but the book’s boring. No one actually reads it.’ Jake would have added (or I would have, or Grainer or possibly even Ellis): It’s WOCOP’s Finnegans Wake. But Murdoch didn’t read. Like women books had failed of what they’d once seemed to promise him. Like women books were sly and false and in the end no kind of antidote to the emptiness he’d been falling through screaming all these years. Like women, books couldn’t stop him.
‘But do you believe he exists?’
His headset clicked. He held a finger to the earpiece. ‘Go ahead.’
Pause.
‘All right, I’m on my way.’ Then to me: ‘Duty calls.’ He crossed the corridor. ‘If he does exist,’ he said, ‘he won’t make any difference. He won’t know where he came from or where he’s going. He’ll have stories... He will have the stories. But that’s all they’ll be. Ultimately he’ll be one more freak living off human beings, which means, in the end, it’ll be my job to find him and kill him.’
He swiped the card, got the sequence of blips and the hydraulic sigh. The door closed behind him with the subdued sounds of precision technology. I rested my head against the bars. Realised, amongst other things, that I was getting used to Caleb’s smell.
39
I read Jake for a while. Self-lacerating escape: Heathrow, the Plaza, the long drive west to Big Sur; love, love, love – but some of the Madeline material too. I couldn’t help it now that I’d met her. Not a good idea in my state. The love hurt my heart and the sex (mine and Jake’s, but if I’m truthful his and hers as well) got me pitifully turned-on. Walker wove in and out of all of it. I wanted to see his face and hear his voice. I contemplated – with an inner smile for how much Jake would’ve sympathised – just biting the bullet, lying down in the corner and having a hand-job. I didn’t, however. I couldn’t stand the thought of Murdoch watching. With the same look on his face as when he beat Hoyle to death. For what felt like a long time I lay on my back trying to think of anything – the formula for quadratic equations, the novels of Graham Greene, the sequence of US presidents – other than sex. Eventually, because even the werewolf body is an honourable machine, I fell asleep.
