Pravda Page 20

  Arkady eventually showed up on the Sunday but did not utter a single word. So Henry, biding his time, retreated to his room and counted out his remaining funds. The Zoya file and his angel both paid for, he had less than two hundred pounds left. He realized he would have to borrow to secure the passport and visa. But so be it, he thought. This is where his long flight had led him. In his right mind or not (he did not care), Arkady was his vocation, and it now no longer mattered how that vocation had begun, whether the vocation was real or imagined, or what purpose the vocation had beyond itself. If this duty hastened him to zero, all the better. He would meet himself there afterward, when Arkady was on his way. He would meet himself there and try his mettle in that clear and empty ring. So be it. But momentum was all. For both of them. Momentum. Keep going.

  He left his peephole at the window and set off on his circling of the room again. The tight dance of love and guilt.

  "In my experience," Henry said, "children often become very curious about their parents after they die. It is part of their grief. Shock, denial, anger, guilt, anxiety, depression. And curiosity. If not—"

  "You have no experience. You are a narkoman."

  The Englishman felt his blood freeze and a chill sweat seep into his palms. He could not look over and meet those eyes. He forced himself to keep moving along the wall. Never, not once, had Arkady called him a junkie. And he did not wish to know if this, at last, was it—the moment when Arkady's scorn finally turned on him. He'd rather not be sure. He'd rather circle the room until the end of time. Keep moving. He squeezed his resolution all the harder to his threadbare breast.

  "Either way, we need to get you this passport. And we need to be doing that as soon as possible." His own voice was loathsome to him. "I am assuming you know the right people."

  Arkady said nothing.

  Henry could hear her trying to open the window. He wondered if she could understand English. He passed Arkady's bedroom door and came around in front of the sofa again. He had the sudden idea that he would shave his head. His hair was lank and ridiculous. Widow's peak, bald patch. Penance.

  "You do know people who can get us a fake passport?"

  Still the Russian said nothing.

  "We should have the documents they need ready—the photos and everything. For the passport. We'll get the visa separately ... when we know if it's Britain or France. Now, the good news is that they didn't get all my—"

  " Grisha did not get all your money."

  "We don't know that it was Grisha. Okay, he's ... he's a dealer. But he's not a ... not a psychopath." Arkady swore in Russian.

  Henry rushed on. "I have around a thousand pounds sterling left in another bank account," he lied. "And we can use this to buy the passport."

  "Whatever you have, you need."

  "Please, Arkasha. Let me finish." Henry drew shallow breath, coming past the window again. "I am not sure how much the passport will cost, but I assume this is enough. And I am not giving you the money. You can pay me back in a few years, when you are taking your huge concert fees. Or maybe right away—when you come back from meeting them! If it goes well. Who knows? Regardless. It doesn't matter. The point is that you have to go now. And I can help you."

  "You need your money for your shit."

  Henry came to a halt at the top of his circuit. He said the words quietly, addressing the back of the Russian's head. "I am stopping."

  Arkady laughed out loud.

  "I am stopping."

  "You are never stopping. Nobody ever stops."

  Henry passed the bedroom door once more and stood at the foot of the sofa, meeting the other's eyes for a second before taking off again along the far wall. He spoke quickly now, his bony arms jerking as if he might sheer off from his desperate orbit at any moment.

  "Arkady, listen to me—I don't want to have any money left. And I don't want to have anything. I... I have a bet with myself. If I have nothing left and I can't buy any more, then I will give up. Pull myself together. Yes, okay, yes ... I will buy enough food and water to last until you are back. I will spend what I need to get that. Water—some food. And we will fix the hole. But that's all. After that, I don't want the money in the bank because I don't want to burn it all—and that's what will happen. I will burn it on the shit. Every penny. So this..."He indicated the room with a throw of his arm. "This is a blessing in disguise. Not the piano. But I mean all my money gone. Everything taken. Because I would only have spent it on shit ... shit, shit, and more shit. And it would have gone on and on—until I ran out of money, anyway. So all that has happened is that I have the opportunity to stop sooner. To stop when you go to find your family. And I don't want to have any more secret money in the bank. I don't want it there. I don't want it, because I tell you: I will go and I will spend it on shit. So you have to take my money. I want you to take it. I need you to take it. It's a loan. That's all. A loan until I am off. And then you can give it back to me."

  Arkady was watching Henry closely.

  "Do you understand, Arkasha?"

  At last the Russian sat up. "You say this now because you know there is so much more hidden in your room. But when the time comes, when you have no more, you will do anything. The money or the no-money is not the difference. When the time comes, you will do anything—you will sell your body, you will kill if you have to."

  "If it makes no difference, then take it. If the money is not the difference, then take it. Please. Let me try."

  She came out of the bedroom barefoot, wearing nothing but one of Arkady's T-shirts. Henry tried to nod a greeting, but her expression reflected only a sudden aversion back at him. He walked quickly past the sofa and entered the wreckage of his room.

  The faster he used, the faster he ran out, the faster he would get to zero.

  22 Self-Help

  There comes a time in every man's life when the fucking around just has to stop. Operating (as ever) in the murky, muddy, potholed, all-sides-fired-upon, no man's land of modern secular ethics (which might, of course, be no ethics at all), Gabriel could not be certain whether it was his mother's death, his life stage, or the quasi-religious ache of some ancient human gene that had brought him abruptly to this realization. But once beheld, this flinty truth, he realized, could no longer be avoided. And he knew for certain that he must now make some decisions about his life—ideally, good ones, though he recognized with stolid candor (as he faced down an unnecessarily confrontational lunchtime sandwich) that any decisions at all would likely be greeted with much emotional bunting as a sign of progress.

  The telephone interrupted his thoughts.

  "Hi, Gabriel. Francine."

  "Hello, Francine. I was about to call you. How are you?"

  "Fine, fine, fine."

  He detected more than the usual vinegar in the various acid ratios of her voice.

  "Hang on ... I'm in the car." There was the sound of an ill-timed and aggressive gear change. "You know, I'm not being funny, but I really don't think that the ... the Indians know how to drive."

  He twisted the proofs around so he could read them. No, she was not being funny. Francine O'Brien was never being funny.

  "Gabriel, I wanted to say that I personally am really looking forward to 'Toxic Parents.' And that—get this—Randy himself is taking an interest in this one. His assistant called last night from Los Angeles. Have you met her? Caroline. Lovely girl. She's had surgery, of course, and I think it's affecting her skin, but she's got such a great smile in her voice. Do you know if they've shut the M40?"

  "Haven't heard anything here, Francine. Are you off to somewhere exciting?" His eye fled to a quarter-page advertisement for one of Randy K. Norris's herbal "rescue remedies." "Fight Stress," it screamed. But surely, he thought, that's exactly what stress wanted—a fight.

  "I've got this half-day of brand-new treatments. Sumatran Indulgence Therapy. It's that seventies singer's ex-wife—God, you know who I mean, she's in all the mags at the moment—it's her new place."

 
; "Can't think who you mean, offhand." Gabriel knew exactly whom Francine was referring to. He'd spoken to the woman in question on the phone. Yet another avaricious, harrowingly insecure, narcissistic little claw-wielder who had recently about-faced into a guru of well-being and life balance. How did any of these people expect to be taken seriously? At least Francine let the toxins flow.

  "Davina Trench That's her But anyway, they're trialing in bloody Maidenhead. I mean—hello?—who ever wants to go to Maidenhead? It might as well be in..."

  "Indonesia."

  "Wherever."

  "Be great when you arrive, though. You can really relax and pamper yourself." He hated the word "pamper" almost as much as he hated the word "indulgence," which in turn was almost as much as he loathed the word "treatment," with its wretchedly inane pretension toward medicine. Even more dispiriting was that this kind of idiotic vocabulary had become his daily vernacular; most of the people he dealt with these days could not even imagine him employing such words sarcastically, never mind noticing any nuance in his voice. No more than they could imagine the seven solid years of round-the-clock blood-and-agony life-and-death slog that it actually took to become a doctor. "Are they just an indulgence outfit, or do they do other stuff too?"

  "Yoga."

  "Expensive?"

  "Very."

  "Well, three-sixty inner calm is priceless, I suppose."

  "Oh, you cow — that fat cow just cut me off." There was the sound of a horn. "This is a freebie. Said I might do a write-up for them."

  And he hated the word "freebie." And the thought of Francine never doing any of the write-ups for all the million "freebies" she accepted, and the thought of how excruciating it would be to have to run one of her pieces if ever she did.

  "Anyway," Francine said, "I just wanted to be sure that you are taking the feedback on board from the last issue. I know both of our teams agreed to move on—"

  And "feedback." And especially "team"; he never ever wanted to be on anyone's team for anything, ever. But it was his own fault: clearly the rest of humanity was on a journey to some other place he did not understand.

  "This is going to be a top-level-watched issue, Gabriel, and I need to be sure that the lessons we learned from 'Depress Your Depression' are going to be implemented for 'Toxic Parents.'"

  The engine note was climbing. "Francine, I'm looking at the proofs right now and I can tell you that all the design concerns have been dealt with. This is a much more readable edition. I think my team just got a little bit too ... too creative—and maybe we left some of the readers behind. So, yes, we have made sure to ... well, to row back with this one."

  "Great. Good. Excellent. Okay, we'll speak again Friday. Have to dash."

  The line went dead. And with it, another fraction of his soul.

  Without ever for a single minute intending to, Gabriel Glover worked for Roland Sheekey Ltd., a medium-sized contract publishing outfit operating in the nether regions of the Paddington sump, responsible for some thirty-five titles, ranging from in-flight and supermarket tie-in magazines to trade press via corporate brochures and cat-club newsletters—each unnecessary in its own way. But to all intents and purposes his immediate boss was Randy K. Norris, or rather the Randy K. Norris Organization. Gabriel was the editor of Self-Help!, a monthly spinoff from the embarrassingly successful series of Randy K. Norris self-help books, "translated into sixty languages and the first step on the road to recovery for millions."

  Francine O'Brien was the woman in charge at Norris HQ UK (South Kensington). Gabriel was pretty sure that even her own blood cells loathed her. All the same, it was now Tuesday afternoon, and it was to Francine O'Brien by Friday at 0900 hours that Gabriel had to deliver the twenty-four deliriously interesting pages of next month's Self-Help! In Association with Randy K. Norris.

  The job in hand: Self-Help! Number 29: The Toxic Parents Issue. As yet, all but eight pages of the two dozen were nowhere. Four were so badly written that they would have blushed to serve as toilet paper during the siege of Leningrad. Another four, likewise the work of ridge-browed illiterates, seemed to be about things entirely unrelated to the professed subject of the cover (itself in need of radical attention). The eight pages that were okay were all prepaid ads, mostly for variously lamentable Randy K. Norris products (as if every line of the whole magazine weren't pushing his crap already). As to the remaining eight, they were as yet entirely and formidably blank.

  He sat back from the layouts on his desk and once again considered running away. (Mexico? Skye? Shepherd's Bush?) How did it happen this way every single time? Did he have the courage for the second sandwich? No.

  Instead he opened up his e-mail screen: something from his friend Kolya, about a 1920s party (remember to grow a mustache); something from Larry about a new TV show ("Fuck and Run"? Surely not?) that Larry's company had just commissioned for some TV channel he had never heard of and a celebratory drink being in order. An internal round-robin message, someone from one of the travel magazines advertising a room to let in a shared house in Chalk Farm. Some bulk mail inquiring as to whether he needed help maintaining an erection (no, it's the getting rid of them that's problematic). Something from Isabella about could she crash in a few weeks' time? (Was she coming to London? She hadn't mentioned this. Odd. Very odd.) And something from an address he did not recognize.

  Dear Gabriel Glover,

  My name is Arkady Artamenkov. I was a friend of your mother, Mrs. Maria Glover, here in St. Petersburg. I am hoping to come to London in December and wondered whether I might meet up with you.

  You mother shared a great deal with me before she died and I would very much like to talk to you. Unfortunately, I am not sure where I will be staying just yet but I will get in touch when I am in London.

  Hope to see you then.

  Yours sincerely,

  Arkady Artamenkov

  Jesus. Some friend of his mother's ... Now that was interesting. He typed an immediate reply. And for the thousandth time, he tried to imagine her life out there. What did you do all day, Ma? Where did you go? Why didn't I come and see you more often? He blinked. She was gone, forever gone. And he missed her so very much.

  Like his sister, from the moment he had returned home after the funeral, Gabriel had become sensible of the feeling that he had left the reserves, that he was suddenly frontline, and that it was all about to become a great deal uglier and more real. (How ugly could it get?) But he also knew (when the recollection of Isabella's last half-hour of graveside intensity came to his mind) that he did not have his sister's singular sense of psychological purpose, her focus, or her fury. Instead the war his mother had bequeathed him seemed vast and vague, fought across many fronts, stretched out across time zones, idiotic, agonizing, senseless, and terrible by turn, locally fatuous, everywhere critical.

  Most immediately there were his conscious wars—sectarian, inane, and petty. There was the war against cigarettes, for example, a war of hard-won and commendable open-air victories overturned in seconds by cellar-sprung ambush and subsequent rout. Or there was the war against food—a trench-trapped grind through the calendar, the fat canons of greed facing the sniper rifles of fitness across the elaborate slop of a million senselessly expensive eating occasions. There was the war against booze—a game of false friends and alliances betrayed, in which he vowed over and over never again to trust the sleight hand of camaraderie (offered with a lopsided grin) and yet found himself somehow suckered like an ingénue three times a week. There was the chemical war on drugs, the war on terror—two or three episodes of utter annihilation every year and a lifetime of anxious vigilance and security checks the never-ending price to pay.

  But these were only the conscious wars, the phony wars. Deeper down, closer to his heart, the real war was now pressing: the war against his father. And here hung the shadow of the mushroom cloud. For this was indeed a cold, cold war, all about areas of influence and control, posturing, troops massed, invisible borders drawn, crossed, and redra
wn, blanket-smuggled exchanges on shivery bridges by night, years of watching, listening, propaganda, betrayals, chronic suspicion, and the endless, endless silence. A war that felt as though it too were now shifting toward some new point of crisis.

  But deeper than even this, at the very bottom, never spoken, never admitted, was the loneliest war of all: the war against despair. This last a solitary staggering struggle that took place in the freezing darkness of the polar night, a struggle from which he could not rest but for which he must be forever on the lookout, perpetually exhausted and perpetually tensed, peering hard into the blizzard, ready for the shape of that hooded foe emerging, ready for the three furious minutes of nail, tooth, and blood that would decide it.

  The worst of it was that these wars (and many more) were all being waged simultaneously. Had he been fighting any single campaign in isolation, he would have required all his available resources to prevail. But en masse, he had no chance. And so, like every other human being alive, Gabriel now found that his only free time was filled with craving for more free time so that he could gather the space and energy to engage his foes. Pick them off. (Deal with the cigarette problem at the very least.) Since he had returned from Petersburg, though, he had found that day-to-day distractions pressed in on him from all sides all the more. Considered thought, intelligent resolve, emotional balance—there was no chance. Weaknesses faced, dilemmas considered, relationships weighed—there was no time. No chance and no time for anything other than the blind and foolhardy living of it all.

  And the nightmare scenario was already happening: since the death of his mother, his enemies had started talking. Smoking, for example, seemed to hijack his evenings under the casual pennants of his mother's lung cancer (for that, he was sure, was what she had been suffering from), and then, just as he was raising his arms in surrender, some leering little corporal would swing the main banner around and he'd be looking at the insignia, not of his poor mother, but of his father. Yes, cigarettes now reminded him of his dad. Simple as that. A cigarette in itself—white, thin, blithely toxic—said "father" to him as noisily as if it were able to speak out loud. Worst of all—and irony's perfectly curved scimitar this—his father had managed to give up. Easily.