The Murdstone Trilogy (17 page)

Slut, although barely an hour’s drive from Dubrovnik, has been less ruthlessly improved by Russian Mafia money or British private equity slush funds than other places on the Dalmatian seaboard.

This is because Slut is not quite on the coast. The town is an irritating thirty-minute taxi drive from its beach, and the road is not good. You can, of course, get there by boat. A slow boat will leave from Slut’s riverside quay at unpredictable times (and at unpredictable cost) and deposit you, dizzied by diesel fumes, behind the shingle bar that separates the Slut lagoon from the Adriatic. For these and other reasons, Slut has been spared. No cranes loom over its motley buildings, and the occasional Mercedes-Benz with darkened windows pauses but passes by.

Nonetheless, tourists come, attracted by the magnificent Greek amphitheatre and the remains of the Temple of Priapus just the other side of the service station on the main road. They stay for a day, sometimes even two, eating at the restaurant where Vanda works, poring over
their copies of
Lonely Planet
or
The Rough Guide
, congratulating themselves on finding The Unspoilt Croatia, and struggling with the menu that Vanda has tried vainly to get Mirko to rephrase. Has tried to explain that ‘Lamb Sin Cocked in its Own Hair’ is unlikely to sound attractive to non-Croats. Nor yet is ‘Tongue of Goat Choked in Sauce’.

Vanda knew these things because she had spent two and a half of her teenage years as an asylum seeker in Cromer, a town on the coast of Norfolk, England. The experience left her with two things: a working knowledge of English and a repertoire of bad dreams in which she flees through the squalid corridors of a crumbling and labyrinthine hotel built in 1906.

She spoke in English to the Englishman who had been, inexplicably, in Slut for more than a week. He was staying at the Vrt, the resort’s only two-star hotel. (She could not for the life of her understand why the town’s other hotel did not also paint stars on its sign board.) Every day he ate lunch and dinner at The Feral because he had discovered, like other tourists, that the alternatives were worse. He would arrive soon; it was almost twelve twenty-five. She prepared the table he always used, the small one on the terrace in the deep shadow of the awning. She positioned his chair with its back to the wall. And sure enough, here he came now, strolling along the riverside in his light suit and Panama hat as if Slut were Nice. If he wore pince-nez instead of sunglasses, he would look like
Death In Venice.
Vanda was fairly sure he was an
artist of some sort, a composer, perhaps, or a poet. Not a painter. Never a spot of paint on his hands or clothes. Or perhaps he was something more interesting. A criminal evading Interpol. A man recovering from a disastrous love affair or scandal.

She had considered having sex with him; he was not that old, actually, and almost certainly more inventive than the local options. He was always drunk when he left at three o’clock, but not that drunk. She could overtake him on her bicycle, dismount provocatively, and discuss her discontent. She pictured his soft and neatly trimmed beard sliding down her belly to intertangle with her own more luxuriant one.

‘Good afternoon, Mister Cockling.’

‘Good afternoon.’

Philip would have used her name if he could remember it. He was almost inclined to call her Francine or Merilee; these hirsute Croatian women sometimes provoked an unwelcome nostalgia for Flemworthy.

Unbidden, Vanda fetched and uncorked a bottle of the infamous local red. Philip, as usual, scanned the menu and chuckled sadly.

Vanda said, ‘We have two good fish, brought in last night, but Mirko will fuck up them. I recommend lamb and kidney kebab. I know you had two days ago, but is a different lamb, and not goat. I make the salad personal.’

‘Fine,’ Philip said, pouring the wine. ‘Thank you.’

‘No worries.’

He shuddered as the first gulp of wine went down.
Subsequent mouthfuls would be less bad. Later, there’d be the so-called cognac, which he liked. He also liked being addressed, approximately, as ‘Mister McCoughlin’.

The Feral had as yet no other customers, which pleased him. At this time of vertical sun the view from the terrace had a pleasing incorporeality which he preferred to relish undistracted. The river, which was actually sluggish and brownish, danced with light and the harsh cliff on its far side seemed insubstantial as tissue paper. The blue and white boats moored at the quay were shapeless in the glitter except where their awnings cast dense shadows onto their decks. It all had the tipsy imprecision of an Impressionist painting, of dreamy nowhereness.

The waitress came back with bread, a saucer of olives and some of that oily pulp that resembled hummus but wasn’t. She set these things down and, since there was seemingly nothing else she had to do, lingered at his table. Cautiously, Philip looked up at her. To his relief, she was not looking at him. She appeared to be sharing his pleasure in the view. Taking it in. Inhaling it, actually, so that her not inconsiderable breasts rose and fell. Her hands rested on the flesh extruded by her low-cut jeans. Philip applied himself to the not-hummus.

‘Slut,’ she said, startling him. ‘What a shit-hole. Remind me of Cromer. Know Cromer, Mister Cockling? In Nuffuck, England?’

‘Um, no. Never been there.’

‘I was in Cromer.’

‘Really? Were you? Is that where you learned English?’

Vanda sighed. ‘Where I learn English, where I learn sex abuse also.’

‘Ah. Well. I’m sorry that …’

‘No worries. All in the past. I like English men, in spite.’ She pulled up a spare chair and sat down on it; a single, surprisingly fluid movement. She helped herself to one of his olives and licked it before popping it into her mouth. ‘I guess, but I think you are a writer, for example. Maybe you do research. A book of love and sex and the wars that break the soul of my people.’ She protruded her tongue with the olive stone nestled in its folds.

A memory uncoiled inside him, low down.

‘No,’ he said.

Vanda furled and flipped her tongue, shooting the stone over the low wall of the terrace. She turned her melting gaze upon him.

‘All right, no. You want to be mystery. I like. But you want a story, I tell you one. A fantastic one. Maybe later I will tell you. Somewhere private. OK?’

‘Um. Yes. That would be nice.’

‘Thank you. Now I go make sure Mirko don’t fuck up your kebab.’

Dessert not being an option at The Feral, Philip enjoyed slooshing the treaclish cognac around his mouth then picking the softened meat fibres from between his teeth with the nail of his little finger. His pleasure was diminished by the arrival of four young tourists. They spoke Australian English. Vanda went over to them and bent to their table to translate the menu. The red T of
her thong peeked over the waistband of her jeans. After a while he looked away. Memories crowding in. Memories that Ian McCoughlin should not possess.

Then her hand was on his shoulder. ‘Another one?’

‘Yes, please.’

Her hand stayed where it was. He turned and looked up at her.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘One more. Then finish, OK? You know why. Don’t want Roger Red Hat to fall sleeping in the middle of my story.’

‘Right,’ he said, suddenly dry-mouthed.

Her fingers tracked lightly across his nape, then she was gone.

Two of the Australians had taken books from their backpacks. One was a travel guide. The other was
Dark Entropy.

Conscious of Vanda’s eyes on him, Philip held himself steady as he left the restaurant and walked to the quay. He would sit on the last bench, the one in the shade of the trees, and wait for her. Why not. Bit of a stiffy on, actually. Been a long time. Definitely on offer. Moustache no problem, really. Staff at the hotel on siesta, get in there no trouble, no questions asked. Push the crusty socks under the bed. Then …

Then a fierce heat in the middle of his chest.

Christ! Heartburn? That let’s-be-honest terrible wine?

No. The Amulet.

Not again. Please.

Not now.

But yes. The fucking thing had woken up again. A meteorite searing his breastbone. His brain hissed. His sight turned bright as burning magnesium around a central darkness. Scary things at the periphery. He stumbled to the bench and tried to blink them away.

The Amulet trembled, then settled and cooled. His sight clarified. His upper body felt concave and wet, like a flushed urinal.

He looked back and Vanda – he remembered now – was wheeling a bicycle from behind The Feral. She waved to him, then threw a leg over the crossbar. Philip, with an effort, raised his arm.

Something fell through the air and landed with a faint slap on the flagstones by his feet. A severed finger with a blueish nail. Maggots in its pulpy stump.

Vanda wobbled to a halt. She watched the Englishman jump up and run away, losing his hat, bleating like the goat he ate for lunch. She was disappointed but unsurprised. She considered setting off in pursuit, but she had her dignity to consider.

Anxiety was not something that Minerva Cinch went in for, as a rule. It was bad for her business, her digestion and, most significantly, her complexion. She therefore declined anxiety, much as other women declined saturated fats. So it was extremely vexing that Philip Murdstone was causing her stress.
Again
.

He’d really cranked her handle, going right to the wire with the delivery of
Warlocks Pale
. And now that the damned bloody brilliant thing was in, he was cranking it again by going all incommunicado on her. Since the terse – well, sarky, really – note that accompanied the emailed text there’d not been a peep out of him. She must’ve left a hundred messages on his home phone, the Paddington phone, and on his mobile. Ditto emails. And nothing.

At first she’d assumed that he was slumped in his farty den exhausted by the rigours of creativity. Or just pissed all the time. Fair enough. But now that several weeks had passed it was getting beyond a joke. And she had
nice
things to tell him. That Gorgon had phoned and waxed
rhapsodic
about
Warlocks Pale
. That the senior editor
had said that it was the cleanest text she’d ever received; that apart from typos and such, it needed almost nothing doing to it. That the cheque for half a mill, payable on receipt of manuscript, was in. That Ahmed Timbrel had phoned from LA offering to double the film option fee in order to secure the rights.

I mean, it’s all
joyous
, darling, she would have said, if only the sod would pick up the phone.

Despite herself, she began to entertain the extremely vexatious notion that Philip had died. At diminishing intervals a grotesque image flashed upon her mind. His body decomposing in his armchair, the flesh turning purplish, his viscera churned by maggots. She told herself this was ridiculous. He’d have been found by now, surely. But then quite possibly not; he had no neighbours and she doubted that he had much in the way of visitors.

On the morning she discovered a zit budding alongside her nose she climbed into the BMW and fed his postcode into the satnav.

During this stressful interlude Evelyn padded through the days like a horse with muffled hooves. She fielded calls, surreptitiously switched the coffee to decaff, made sure there was always a hundred cigarettes in her desk drawer. She called Murdstone’s number on the hour every hour and hung up as soon as the answer machine kicked in.

Until today when, shortly before her employer’s return, all she’d got was a strange warbling whine in her ear.

‘Good morning, darling. What’s new? How’s Cuthbert?’

Evelyn looked up, smiling bravely. ‘Well, the vet’s lanced the boil. Says I can pick him up later today. Would that be OK? Sort of fourish?’

‘Don’t see why not.’ Minerva leaned against the door frame, seemingly reluctant to enter the room.

Evelyn said, ‘Well? Was he … there?’

‘No.’

‘Ah.’

Minerva drew in a breath that lifted her shoulders. ‘I want you to call Perry Whipple, darling. Lunch, ASAP. He can name the place.’

Evelyn raised her eyebrows.

‘I know, darling. But things have got weird. I need to talk to someone who does weird.’

Sumtip Hucan Tsay shifted down a gear as the terrible minibus approached the last bend in the pass. Despite everything, the timing was perfect. They’d begin the final ascent to Phunt Kumbum just as the late afternoon light hit it. He turned to his cousin, the tour guide Notip Yucan Bett, and smiled.

‘In a minute the Americans will all say “Ossum”.’

Notip shrunk deeper into his parka and grunted. The Americans said ‘Ossum’ all the time. And they would say it again when they saw the monastery’s white, red and gold tiers clinging to the slopes below Shand’r Ga. At the last tea shop, Sumtip had asked Sherri, the American with the nice long tits like a goat’s, what the strange word meant.

‘Well,’ she’d said, ‘it’s like
Wow
, you know?’

It was interesting that Americans sometimes sounded like the Chinese.

He coaxed the bus around the bend, and for a couple of seconds lifted his gaze from the untrustworthy road. The snow on the peaks of Tangulaj was a lurid pink, like
blood mixed with milk. Its shadows were the colour of wet Levis. Then Phunt Kumbum itself hoved into view, glowing.

‘Wow,’ someone gasped from the back. ‘Ossum.’

Another said, ‘OMG, isn’t that truly ossum?’

The guest master watched the bus approach, slaloming between the lines of wind-tattered prayer flags. He gazed down as the visitors hauled their rucksacks from the vehicle and stood contemplating the flight of sixty-six steps that led up to the gatehouse.

The two couples were young, and climbed towards him like sturdy automata. The fifth visitor made heavier weather of it, halting frequently, bent, his shoulders heaving with the effort of breathing. He was older than the others, bearded and somewhat dishevelled. The guest master silently and smilingly greeted the Americans, but did not speak until this wheezing person had tottered onto the terrace.

‘Welcome, my friends, to Phunt Kumbum. My name is Sandup Gnose. Guest masters of this monastery are always called Sandup Gnose. I am the one hundred and first. You can call me Sandy.’ The monk spoke in lilting but perfect English. Only one of his guests might have identified a slight Glaswegian accent. ‘I will show you to your accommodation shortly,’ he continued. ‘But first things first. You’ve had a long journey, and I bet you could murder a cup of tea.’

He delighted in the spasm of horror that passed over all five faces.

‘No, no. Don’t be afraid. Not yak-butter tea. Proper tea. We get it smuggled in from Assam. You can’t get better in Fortnum and Mason. This way, please.’

In the dimly lit tea room, Sandy sat down next to the bearded
Injie
.

The man held his bowl in both hands, his head bent over it. ‘Christ on a bike,’ he said. ‘This is wonderful. I haven’t had a decent cup of tea since …’ He lifted his face and stared blankly into the gloom. ‘Some time ago.’

The monk clapped his hands delightedly. ‘You are English!’

‘Yes. Well, Scottish, originally. My name’s Ian McCoughlin.’

Sandy’s smile achieved an even greater radiance. ‘Scotland! Where, exactly?’

‘Um, Dumfries.’

‘I know it! I know it! Dumfries and Galloway!’

Bugger, Philip groaned inwardly.

‘I did a degree in Business Management at the University of Glasgow. Upper Second. Then two years at Millar and Millar, stockbrokers.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Yes …’ The monk’s smile faded away. ‘But it played hell with my karma. I found myself contemplating the very real possibility that my next reincarnation would be as a tapeworm. So I came home.’ He was silent for a moment or two. His bifocals glittered in the lamplight. ‘Anyway,’ he said, regaining his alarming cheerfulness, ‘how is dear old Dumfries?’

‘I couldn’t say. I only lived there until I was four. I’ve never been back.’

Sandy nodded. ‘A famously migratory race, the Scots.’ Then he closed his eyes, cleared his throat and declaimed, in a throaty Highland brogue:

‘I’ve seen sae mony changefu’ years,

On earth I am a stranger grown;

I wander in the ways of men,

Alike unknowing and unknown.

‘The great Rabbie Burns, of course. More tea?’

Later, standing in the doorway of the cell, Sandy said, ‘It’s a wee bit less austere than a monk’s, but not much.’

A thin mattress and a quilt. An oil lamp, a bowl and a thermos flask on a low chest. A four-legged stool. A small murky painting (of Dipamkara Buddha, but Philip wasn’t to know that, of course). The window was unglazed but barred and shuttered. The door looked to be a good ten centimetres thick and hung on four huge hinges with elongated hasps.

‘It’s fine.’

‘Our modest meal will be served in twenty minutes,’ Sandy said. ‘Then you and the other guests are invited to join us in the
dukhang
for our evening debate. It’ll be all Greek to you, of course, but it can get pretty lively. Jolly good fun.’

‘Erm … I’m feeling very tired, actually. The altitude, I expect. I might get an early night. I’ll probably feel up
to it tomorrow evening.’ The Spartan bed had become deeply attractive.

The monk tilted his head. His smile took on a tinge of puzzlement. ‘Tomorrow, Ian? But doesn’t your tour depart in the afternoon?’

‘Well, actually, ah, Sandy, I’m not really with the tour. I just persuaded the guide to give me a lift up here. Bribed him, actually. I thought I … I was hoping to stay for a little while.’

‘A retreat?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hmm. Well, there are the proper channels for arranging these things, actually.’

‘I’m sorry. It was a sort of spontaneous decision.’

‘Yes, well. Spontaneity isn’t something we actively encourage, you know,’ Sandy said a little primly. Then he lightened. ‘I’ll have a word with the Abbot. Ask a favour for a fellow Scot, eh?’

The following morning Philip set out along the
kora
, the pilgrims’ path that meandered, rising and falling, around Phunt Kumbum. So slow was his progress that it might have appeared contemplative. In fact, he was still spavined and nauseated by mountain sickness. After only ten minutes he was forced to support himself on a polished basalt
lingam
that had flown there from India during the First Age of Light. As he leaned on its glossy glans the four Americans, clad in bright Lycra, jogged briskly by in a cloud of their own steam. He was too breathless
to respond to their jocular greetings. He slumped to the ground and rested his back against Shiva’s sturdy organ.

Beyond the great valley a range of mountains loomed, their wrinkled brown flanks topped by a zone of white, blue-shadowed peaks. This ethereal beauty put Philip in mind of the meringue-topped chocolate torte he’d eaten in Zurich soon after leaving his bank. The gnome who administered his numbered bank accounts had turned out to be a brisk young woman wearing pink-tinted spectacles. He had not understood much of what she’d said, but had left with the wherewithal to obtain funds for ‘a protracted period of research travel’, a wad of cash and the address of a place where false (the gnome had preferred the word ‘supplementary’) passports could be obtained.

In a barbershop kitschily tricked out in 1930s Cunard décor he’d got his hair cut and chestnut-rinsed to hide the grey and his beard trimmed into a shape that looked deliberate. Four days later and a few thousand Swiss francs lighter, he – or rather Ian McCoughlin, according to his new but well-used passport – flew south. Then further south. Then east and further east. His peregrination to Phunt Kumbum had been wildly erratic. He had not been using conventional travel guides. He’d been flicking through an atlas of fear.

In various places in three continents he had felt calm for short periods of time. Then the dread would surge. In Slut, he’d been almost happy for ten whole days until the finger. And seen a dark raptor, or its shadow, cross the face of the cliff. He shuddered again at the memory.

In Istanbul, crossing the Galata Bridge under a hot and paper-white sky, he’d felt a stirring at his breastbone and entered a patch of chill darkness. The men fishing from the bridge’s parapet had turned to look at him, rolling up their collars.

In the human turbulence of Delhi, a crowd had parted when a fakir wearing a green and silver robe and a living necklace of snakes had fixed his single eye on him.

A small gaggle of monks now emerged onto the path below. Fussily, they arranged themselves on a level outcrop of stone and sat, cross-legged. After a minute or so of silent contemplation one of the monks produced a large bag of popcorn and passed it round.

Philip knew, at some numb, dumb level of knowing, that flight was futile. It was possible, just, that he could evade the radar of Minerva and Gorgon and all those other fuckers who had a stake in him, a piece of him. But not Morl. Not Morl. Because, he, Philip, also known as Ian, still possessed the Amulet.

Common sense dictated that he should have left the damned thing behind. In a place easily found by a nightmare that came down the chimney or lurched out of the lav. Good advice, that. You take it. But common sense had been not been a feature of his flight from Downside.

At Heathrow, he had been tempted to drop it into a waste bin. But he couldn’t.

It had made him, after all. And he’d earned it. It was, without question, the most important thing that he had ever possessed. To have left it behind would have been
like King Arthur tossing Excalibur aside with a casual, ‘Ah, sod it, I’ll get another one.’

It was also the only thing he had left to trade.

Wearing it, he’d passed through the security arch without a bleep.

Philip grieved for Pocket Wellfair, his saviour, his nemesis, whose small brave life had been cut short in Mort A’Dor. Sometimes Philip entertained a redemptive vision of himself digging the Greme’s grave in a sun-splashed dell and lowering the poor little sod into it while murmuring a valediction in the Old Language.

At other times he worried about developments in the Realm. There was, obviously, an asynchronicity, an interdimensional dateline, between the Realm and here, wherever and whenever ‘here’ was. But things were going on, equally obviously. And they weren’t looking good. A blind goat could see that. Morl was on the up, and that was bad. It was the wrong story. Uneasily, Philip recognized that he was partly responsible for this. The responsibility hung from his neck.