A Week in December Read online

  Tranter opened the book and tried another sentence. It wasn’t terrible. It added up; the words were in a syntactical order; it made sense. How hard would he have to work to find a fault-line in this novel – something he could get the end of his knife into and start levering? The guy was nearly forty now, a ridiculous age to be making his first venture into fiction. But suppose it had been, as his bum-chums were doubtless even now preparing to say, ‘well worth the wait’? God.

  Tranter repaired to the kitchen, made a cup of tea and poured some dried food into a bowl for Septimus Harding. He went to look at his e-mails on the white PC, but found it unable to connect to the Internet. This often happened.

  ‘SoftWare Works,’ as Patrick Warrender had irritatingly pointed out to him when he’d had trouble before. ‘A classic oxymoron. A palpable untruth. An actionable breach of the Trade Descriptions Act. Get a proper machine, Ralph.’

  When my biography of Alfred Huntley Edgerton wins the Pizza Palace prize, thought Tranter, that’s the time to upgrade.

  Then, for no clear reason, the egg timer suddenly unfroze and Tranter’s functional inbox was revealed. ‘Hi there Bruno Banks!’

  ‘Oh, piss off,’ said Tranter and hit delete.

  ‘Are you sure you want to del—’

  Delete. God, life was complicated sometimes. The virtual world consumed more time than the real one: much more, in fact, since his connection with the real one was – to borrow a word he’d come across in a sci-fi magazine – asymptotic.

  When he had deleted the junk and replied briefly to an invitation to the launch of a war memoir (‘Out of London that day, sadly’), Tranter felt strong enough to sit down and tackle Sedley.

  With a cup of tea on the table next to him and with Septimus Harding on his lap, he licked his slightly trembling finger and turned to Chapter One.

  For forty-five minutes there was no sound in R. Tranter’s sitting room apart from the rustle of a woody page going over at two-minute intervals. The Bosnian war criminal revved his motorbike unheard; the Polish boys whooped and shouted through a full first half in their back garden. Tranter’s eyes moved steadily, hungrily, from side to side. Inside his head, the neurons went silently about their business, the axons and the dendrites dutifully fired and received.

  But after twenty minutes, a brain scan would have shown, in the part of Tranter’s cortex that registered pleasure, some signs of activity – slight at first, then intermittent, then growing after half an hour to a row of pulsing alpine peaks.

  At page forty-six, he dropped the book with a whoop of incredulous delight. Sedley’s novel was not just bad; it was embarrassingly, deliciously lame. Tranter threw back his head and laughed out loud; it was worse, far worse than he had even dared to hope. He shivered with pleasure – then had a moment’s doubt.

  He reread a few sentences to reassure himself he hadn’t just imagined it. But no. It was that bad.

  He fast-forwarded and read a paragraph from page 219. All clear!

  Tranter felt tears of mirth in the corner of his eyes. Sedley had not invented anything. He had had the whole world – all of history, all of time, to say nothing of fantasy and other worlds – to choose from: people of all ages and both sexes in every country of the earth. But with the cornucopia of material at his disposal, Sedley had chosen to write up ... a few episodes from his own earlier life. It was a posh young man’s coming of age; it even ended with his twenty-first birthday party – in dinner jackets!

  But that wasn’t all, Tranter thought. he’d written it in a style that was meant to be ‘poetic’ or something. There was phrase-making; there were descriptions that begged to be admired; and these purple bits weren’t just intrusive, they were inept. Eye-catching similes were made from items that bore no resemblance to one another. It was arch, it was self-loving, it was impotent; it was so idiotic that Tranter felt a shiver of compassion for poor Sedley when he pictured the critical Culloden, the firestorm of derision that awaited him ...

  He took up A Winter Crossing again and settled back into his chair. Phrases began to form in his mind. His review would write itself; it would strangle Sedley’s career at birth; it would be a cause célèbre – if that was the term he wanted.

  And if only that had been the end of Sedley; if only Tranter’s review had finished his career. But enough of Sedley’s old school friends had gathered round; although the reviews had been ‘mixed’ (mostly poor) there had been a couple of good ones; the book had not died of shame. Sedley still haunted him; over the intervening time, their lives, in fact, seemed to have become more and more entwined.

  And now, Tranter reflected at his desk that Monday evening, the stuck-up little bastard stood between him and the Pizza Palace Book of the Year award.

  At six o’clock, Gabriel said goodbye to Samson and the other clerks, then crossed the Temple to the Underground and took the Circle Line to Victoria.

  At the other end of his short overground journey, he had to walk fifteen minutes from the suburban station to the hospital. He knew the way from five years of visiting his brother Adam in Glendale. He barely noticed the bookmaker’s garish temptation, the pizzeria, the low-cost supermarket and the clothing chain; the surprisingly numerous pubs, some with Thai food and karaoke but most unregenerate and drab; the park, the dual carriageway, the famous red and gold burger outlet, once a single stall at San Bernardino racetrack; and then the forest of roadside warnings: camera, speed limit, hump and restriction. The bare chestnut trees were the first he saw of Glendale, their leafless branches dripping on the rusted iron rails. There was a porter’s cabin with a raisable pole inside the main gates, where Gabriel was no longer asked to sign the visitors’ book, but was simply waved through by Brian or Dave.

  He held a cheap umbrella over his head as he walked up the tarmac drive, between the lime trees and the lawns beyond. Glendale was a relatively modern place, built mostly in the late 1960s, and its architect had avoided any suggestion of its famous Victorian precursors. There was no Italianate bell tower or home farm; no sound of locking doors and footsteps fading into half-mile corridors. Its first building had been planned as a unit of a still-functioning but older general hospital, to which it remained connected by a corridor.

  The brick buildings were many and low, with bright orange or scarlet curtains. Double doors swung freely under fierce strip lights. Most of the houses were single-storey, double at the most, and took their friendly names from benefactors of the hospital: Collingwood, Beardsley, Arkell ... In the rainy darkness, the whole complex might have passed for the barracks of an unconventional tank regiment or the headquarters of a government listening post, had it not been for the signs at the mini-roundabout, with their NHS logos, and then the smaller arrows on the buildings: X-Ray, Long-Stay Unit, Secure Wing, Rainbow Room (for the terminally ill, Gabriel presumed) and Electroconvulsive Therapy.

  Adam was in Wakeley, a low house towards the back of the plot in the shade of half a dozen pine trees. Gabriel made his practised way through the staff parking and the canteen delivery area with its giant cylindrical dustbins. The door was open on to the steamy kitchen behind, and he caught a whiff of a long-boiled gravy dinner as he passed.

  Rob, the muscular charge nurse, was in the glass booth by the door of Wakeley when Gabriel went in.

  ‘Evening, Rob. I called ahead. Did you get the message?’

  ‘Yes, Dr Leftrook told me. If you’d like to come with me ...’

  Gabriel followed Rob down a short passage and into the dining area of Wakeley. One or two patients sat in chairs round the edge of the space; these were people who had wanted to escape the television that played constantly in the day room beyond.

  At one window was Violet, as she had been every time that Gabriel had ever visited: a thin, hunchbacked old woman, her skirt folded over at the waistband to keep it up, who stood gazing out into the darkness with her right arm raised in permanent greeting – or possibly farewell.

  She didn’t notice Rob and Gabriel as they
went by. In the day room, the television was showing a celebrity competition with the sound turned up loud. There was a scuffle taking place for possession of the remote control between an elderly man, who wanted to change the channel, and a loud young woman with blonde hair showing black roots who wanted to stick with the celebrities. The central heating had made the room so hot that most of the patients were in tee shirts. It was too dark to read; a single table lamp lit up a level, surging fog of cigarette smoke, through which Gabriel was just able to see his brother.

  He crossed the room and stood in front of him. ‘Hi, Adam. Fancy a chat? Come into the other room?’

  Adam showed no sign of recognition. He was eighteen months older than Gabriel, though looked more. He had developed a large belly and his uncut hair was shot through with grey.

  ‘I’ve got something for you, Ad. Come on.’

  Adam followed Gabriel out of the fug, back a short way down the corridor and into a glass-walled room that was used by day for group therapy.

  They sat down, alone in the room, where Gabriel opened a window on to the dark lawns behind. Wakeley was a low-security building and there were no extra locks or bars.

  ‘How are things?’ Gabriel held out a box of dates and a packet of cigarettes to his brother, who took them wordlessly.

  When he was with Adam, Gabriel behaved towards him as though there was nothing wrong. There were a number of reasons for this. He thought Adam might appreciate it, might prefer not being talked down to or addressed as though insane. It made Gabriel feel better, too, as though the tragedy was contained and his brother was not ruined, wrecked. And how else was he supposed to carry on, in any case? What better form of speech might there be than the normal and respectful? And finally, most irrationally, he hadn’t quite extinguished the hope that Adam might ‘snap out of it’; that since the corporeal shell remained his brother’s, even if it had grown fat and shabby, somewhere inside it, like a thin flame still flickering in a deep, protected crevice, the man himself might still exist.

  ‘Have you been able to get out at all? Have you been for walks? You should try and play some squash again. You used to like that.’

  Adam pulled a cigarette from the pack and lit it with an old gas lighter he kept with him at all times.

  ‘You used to be too good for me,’ said Gabriel. ‘Remember how you thrashed me when we played at that club in London once?’

  Adam inhaled greedily. When smoking had been outlawed in public places, banned outdoors and deemed unacceptable in every house in England, when cigarettes had been removed from sale in shops, Gabriel sometimes thought, the schizophrenic population would still find a way to light up.

  ‘Are you married?’ said Adam.

  ‘You know me. Not one to rush things,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘You can marry. You can take up to three wives. But then you must be faithful.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘If you are unfaithful, if you sleep with another man’s wife, that means you’ll be punished.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘You’d be punished for all time. In the flames.’

  ‘Have you been receiving more instruction?’

  Adam ignored the question.

  ‘Who’s been talking to you?’ said Gabriel.

  In the early days of Adam’s illness, before anyone knew how ill he was, Gabriel had believed him when he spoke of meetings, visitors, instructions. When the details of the stories contradicted one another or became far-fetched, he had at first thought Adam was just exaggerating. Then, when it became clear that his brother was delusional, Gabriel had tried to get to the bottom of his private mythology, on the grounds that this imagined world must have a structure, and that by first knowing, then interrogating it, he might better understand and help him.

  Over the long years, however, the hierarchy of Adam’s control had remained elusive; what was beyond doubt was how real the people in it were to him. Whatever Eustace Hutton or Samson the clerk, whatever landlord, taxman, police and Parliament might have been to Gabriel, they didn’t organise his life or bear down on his waking thoughts with such powerful and compelling credibility as the figures of authority in Adam’s world. Gabriel sometimes felt that, in comparison, his own existence lacked conviction.

  ‘The Messenger told me,’ said Adam in the same flat, affect-free voice he might have used to say ‘The nurse told me.’

  ‘I see,’ said Gabriel. ‘And on what authority?’

  ‘You know,’ said Adam.

  Gabriel didn’t know. The ultimate self-grounded truth-holder in Adam’s mythology had been given various names at different times over fifteen years, but lately had shed them all in favour of something ineffable – yet inevitable: something just There.

  ‘He destroyed your cities. He destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. He killed the Jewish people because we told them what they believed was not lawful.’

  ‘What does all that old stuff matter, Ad? We’re living here in Britain in the twenty-first century, in the here and now. We can’t go on worrying about the cities of the plain and whether they deserved what they got. There ’s a lot of good stuff going on now.’

  Adam’s eyes held his. ‘Be careful you don’t burn. You can change your ways.’

  ‘Are you two all right?’ Rob was standing in the doorway. ‘Would you like some tea?’

  ‘Ad?’ Adam didn’t respond. ‘Well, I’d like some anyway. Thanks,’ said Gabriel.

  When Rob came back with two cups, Gabriel said, ‘So how’s he been?’

  ‘Pretty good,’ said Rob. ‘Dr Leftrook’s still trying to get the balance absolutely right with the medication. It’s a delicate thing.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Gabriel. ‘She explained to me once.’

  ‘You can control the delusions, but at a price. How does he seem to you?’

  ‘Well ... I don’t know. How you feeling, Ad?’

  Adam lit another cigarette. ‘It’s better to shed blood than not to believe,’ he said. ‘You have your chances to believe. You make the choice. And if you choose not to ...’

  Adam’s fingers made a gesture of rising flames.

  In Holland Park, Finbar Veals was having another evening on his own. His father was at a business dinner and his mother had gone out to a Japanese restaurant with the members of her book group – not for a discussion, she said, just for some sushi.

  Finn stood up unsteadily from the floor. The skunk had not had the usual effect. There was a cold sweat on his forehead and a dryer than usual taste in his mouth. The joy of weed was the feeling of time dislocation that spread from the belly; the sense of the body being too heavy to register the speeding beauty of thought; the failure of words to express the depth of music, when the jaw grew too weighty to move.

  What he felt was none of those things. It was more like a severance. He had moved into the alternative reality the drug provided, but had somehow become detached from the original world. So there was no joyous, comic interplay between the two ways of being – just a sense of separation.

  He was shaking a little and he knew his face would be ultra-pale. He was undoubtedly doing what his best friend Ken called ‘throwing a whitey’.

  ‘Shit,’ he said, and went downstairs to the kitchen, where he struggled with the security locks on the French doors. Eventually he made it out into the garden for some air. Teenage wisdom didn’t go so far as to recommend any cure for a ‘whitey’ apart from just waiting for it to pass. There was nasty sweat on his forehead and in his palms, which the cold night air did nothing to dry.

  He breathed in deeply as he walked up and down the lawn, glancing up at the big expensive houses all about him. He felt an odd sense of envy for their inhabitants – people he’d previously pitied. They were in their boring rooms, watching television or washing up after dinner, reading books or entertaining neighbours with their mind-numbing chat about schools and business and dreary people that they knew in common. But at least they were attached to the physical world.


  To Finn, the piled brick courses of his parents’ £10 million house looked of doubtful solidity. When he glanced up, he saw the giant idle cranes on the Shepherd’s Bush skyline where they were building a monument to greed and possession – Europe’s biggest shopping centre, slap in the middle of the shop-lined streets of the world’s most well-provided consumer city – and he saw above them an airliner dipping down through the clouds, wing lights flashing, as it descended towards Heathrow.

  He felt a clutch of panic in his abdomen. He imagined himself in the tight little tube of the plane’s fuselage, strapped in, going down to hit the ground. He tilted his head back quickly to find a bigger view, but found that the sudden movement made him feel sick, with blood raging up behind his eyes. He sat down on a stone step that led up to his mother’s small rose garden. He put his head between his hands and squeezed his eyes shut. It was no good. There were too many images of light and furious colour. He was better with his eyes open. He leaned against the trunk of a pleached hornbeam that separated the two parts of the garden and trained his gaze up towards the restful infinity of space.

  Something about the light pollution gave a colour-flattening grey to the lower sky, but made the upper reaches seem not infinite but obviously domed. His world was a sphere, inside another sphere, whose curvature was clear to him. He felt a wave of cosmic claustrophobia.

  Shit, this stuff was strong. He just wanted to escape, to un-take it, un-smoke it, go back to what as a child he’d called ‘true life’. Did his mother have tranquillisers? Probably she did, but how would he know which ones they were? And would they help?