Lost for Words: A Novel Read online

  With the impatience of a man who is being rushed by ambulance to an accident and emergency ward, Sonny ordered his driver to take him to Savile Row. He was guided by a new vision of how to remain in black without taking on the appearance of a proletarian thug: a dinner jacket. Why had he not thought of it before?

  By noon he was in a soothingly large, panelled changing room, surrounded by framed bills made out to royal personages and legendary actors, as well as brief letters of condescending satisfaction signed by similar persons. He immediately felt at home. As luck would have it, a proper bespoke dinner jacket, of slimming double-breasted cut, made for a mysterious customer, perhaps dead or ruined, who had never bothered to pick it up, had been languishing in a cupboard reserved for that purgatorial category of half paid but uncollected garments, and was now being brought to him by an assiduous tailor in whose opinion it would suit Sonny very well.

  The tailor’s eye had not deceived him. Sonny gazed in awe at the perfection of the fit. The trousers were six inches too long, but that was the most trifling of alterations. In his excitement, he telephoned his driver and asked him to bring the sweater and the balaclava, specifying that they should be taken out of their plastic bags. Once they arrived, he wriggled into the polo-neck sweater, and after replacing the jacket and doing up its inner and outer buttons, pulled the balaclava over his head. He then turned towards the slightly tilted full-length mirror and looked with admiration, and a touch of foreboding, at the elegant and menacing figure staring back at him. He extended his right arm, clasping it with his left hand to support the weight of an imaginary pistol, and spinning around as best he could in such a long pair of trousers, fired round after round with deadly accuracy into the chests and foreheads of the five Elysian Prize judges.

  With the balaclava covering his ears and his mind filled with scenes of daring and stylish revenge, Sonny didn’t notice the tailor until he caught sight of him standing respectfully at the back of the changing room. What had he seen? Could Sonny count on his silence?

  ‘I did knock, sir…’ the tailor began.

  ‘No, no,’ said Sonny, removing his balaclava and tossing it onto a nearby chair, ‘come in. I, er,’ he struggled for an explanation, ‘sometimes like to ski in just such a costume.’

  ‘I imagine there’s a good deal of formal wear at some of the better resorts,’ said the tailor.

  ‘Absolutely!’ said Sonny, regaining his momentum. ‘One often, you know, schusses to a big party already changed for dinner!’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ said the tailor, turning Sonny gently towards the mirror and running his hands appreciatively down the sides of the dinner jacket. ‘Just as I thought, sir, it might have been made for you.’

  Sonny was so elated by his new purchase that he decided to walk the length of Savile Row, telling the driver to wait for him on the far corner. He strolled down the street, glancing into the broad windows of renowned tailors, each with its trio of headless mannequins, displaying a variety of such alluring costumes that by the time he reached Burlington Gardens, Sonny found his imagination was already drifting towards an alternative costume. Why not take a week’s deer stalking in Scotland? On the day ordained for his revenge, he would have a plane waiting to take him to Inverness. Under the circumstances it would be eminently plausible for him to be wearing a pale green tweed such as he’d seen a few windows down, with a faint sky blue over-check, a cream silk shirt with a simple dark green or golden brown knitted tie. If the police questioned him about wearing these emphatically country clothes in the middle of Mayfair, he need only mention the shooting lodge he had taken in the Highlands and show them evidence of his imminent plane flight, and their suspicions would dissolve. They wouldn’t bother to open the boot of his car, and if they did, what could be more natural than to find a deer-stalking rifle lying innocently in its case?

  A gun! Of course, he needed a gun! Sonny pressed a steadying hand on the roof of his car. He felt like a traveller who arrives at the check-in desk, only to realize that he has left his passport on the dressing table at home. How could he have forgotten? Back in Badanpur he had a splendid hunting rifle: the very weapon with which his grandfather had shot over two hundred tigers. One couldn’t shoot two hundred tigers nowadays without buying them first from several city zoos. There wouldn’t be much sport in releasing a bewildered urban tiger into the wild and magnificent, if somewhat shrunken, forests of Badanpur. The wretched tiger would probably be mobbed by gazelles, like an eligible schoolboy surrounded by insatiable women at his first big dance!

  The red tape involved in trying to get his grandfather’s rifle sent over from India would no doubt outweigh the atavistic pleasure and lyrical beauty of using it to destroy his detractors. Sonny got into his car and ordered the driver to return him to the hotel.

  He was soon beached on a pink sofa in the Arnold Bennett suite, among the wreckage of a Full English tea. Suddenly feeling the melancholy of those empty plates, he pinched the last few strands of watercress and placed them listlessly in his mouth. Planning a murder was such a lonely business and such a strain on the nerves.

  The phone rang, lifting him out of his torpor. For a moment he wondered if he could face answering it, but the prospect of alleviating his loneliness got the better of him.

  ‘Auntie!’

  ‘Sonny, my dear, how are you?’ said Auntie, without pausing for an answer. ‘I’m planning a little trip to London. There’s been such a hullabaloo about Palace, I thought I should come over in person. Apparently, I’ve written a great novel, which I suppose is true, but really I set out to write a cookery book. It’s too amusing, when I think of all the people who are struggling to write a great novel, that I’ve done it without even noticing.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Sonny drily. ‘Will you be bringing Mansur with you?’ he asked, trying not to sound as inspired as he felt.

  ‘Why would I want that brute to come to London with me?

  ‘Well,’ said Sonny, improvising wildly, ‘my back has completely gone, I mean completely, and I need someone to carry me around.’

  ‘Can’t Claridge’s help?’ said Auntie irritably.

  ‘Well, you know how it is in the West,’ said Sonny, ‘everyone is so spoilt; they’ve lost any idea of service or gratitude. Only this morning a beggar I’d been showering with gifts chased me down the street! Instead of thanking me, she completely lost her temper! I need someone who will sleep on the floor at the foot of my bed, without complaining. I’ll take care of his fare, of course.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Auntie with a click of her tongue.

  When the conversation was over, Sonny clapped his hands with delight. He had always coveted Mansur, Auntie’s ferocious nightwatchman. He sometimes thought that Mansur took more pride in the Badanpur clan than Sonny himself, if such a thing were possible. The man was a human mountain. There would be no need to provide him with a fire-arm; he could tear apart the impudent judges with his bare hands.

  Sonny felt himself irradiated by a divine presence. He saw now that all the trials of the day had been Krishna’s way of protecting him from the strain of personally dispatching Malcolm Craig, MP. His ancestor Krishna had sent him Mansur. Truly, the gods were on his side.

  14

  The only luxury left to Alan was that brief passage before he was fully awake, before the hazy disorientation that surrounded his drugged sleep was replaced by the solid horror of his circumstances. The woman he loved, the woman he had left his wife for, had thrown him out. His pleas to be taken back by Katherine had been utterly ignored, and his humiliating but pragmatic request to be taken back by Marilyn had been angrily rejected.

  He moved into a hotel near his office in Pimlico. It was cheap in every respect, except for the cost of spending a night there. When he returned from work each evening, he pressed the trembling orange light switch in his corridor, buying a few fluorescent seconds to fit the key into his bedroom door. A man at the peak of his training might have opened the door in time, but for the
forlorn and drunken Alan it was out of the question. After feeling around the keyhole in the dark, stabbing his finger a couple of times, and finally unlocking the door, he stumbled into a room that made him long to go out again. The dingy net curtains were disturbed by a draught from the ill-fitting window; the mustard yellow bedspread was made of a synthetic fabric that must have originally been designed for experiments in static electricity; and on a small stained tray, next to sachets of instant coffee that had withstood generations of indifference, there were three little plastic pots of milk whose claims to long life made his own seem all the more tenuous.

  The hotel’s proximity to his office lost its charm once the Russian proprietor of Page and Turner sacked Alan for his failure to submit Consequences to the Elysian committee, and for Katherine’s subsequent threats of defection. It had long been rumoured that Yuri (as everyone chose to call him, preferring not to embark on the polysyllabic slalom course of his surname) had been drawn to the august and bankrupt firm of Page and Turner by his fascination with Katherine Burns rather than his passion for English letters. Either way, he had acquired it, and its debts, for one pound. The world was evenly and quite heatedly divided over the question of whether Yuri and Katherine had slept together. Alan had the misfortune of knowing the truth. Katherine had granted Yuri a few nights and then manufactured a stricken conscience over going to bed with a married man. Mrs Yuri was known to be the merciless partner, who took care of the brutalities of her husband’s business, freeing him to be relatively gallant and agreeable. During the breakup of their brief affair, Katherine had known that Yuri would not make any reckless gestures, or even mendacious claims about leaving his wife. Instead, he softened Katherine with a persistent rain of opera tickets and orchids, as well as a gigantic advance they both knew she would never earn out.

  Alan realized that he had really been fired for making Yuri jealous. To be punished for his intimacy with Katherine just as she ceased to acknowledge his existence deepened his sense of injustice. Not only had the incompetence over the typescript not been his, the competitiveness with Yuri had not been his, and now the intimacy with Katherine was not his either. Yuri, on the other hand, could count on Katherine’s meticulous thank-you notes and prompt replies, and the fact that she would eventually be persuaded to stay at Page and Turner by another preposterous advance for a still more distant book.

  Without his salary, Alan could no longer afford his room in the Mount Royal Hotel. He had guiltily handed over his savings to his abandoned wife, but he still had enough money in his current account and a good enough credit record, he hoped, to rent a room somewhere in outer London. He told the hotel that he was leaving, but to his surprise, on the morning of his departure he was suddenly overcome with lethargy. He wanted to be practical, to search for a room to rent, but somehow everything was too much, and he sprawled on the bed all morning, dressed but unable to leave. He tried to rationalize the feeling as a need for the hotel’s central location, the convenience of a single bill compared with a plethora of household bills, broken boilers and toasted toasters in a rented room, but the truth was that he felt terribly tired. Why not stay a few more days? He had three credit cards, after all, with a combined overdraft capacity of fifteen thousand pounds. Perhaps, in the end, the best thing to do was to stare at the ceiling of his bedroom and sleep as much as possible. If only he could get to sleep, he would sleep for a thousand years.

  At first Alan resisted the cliché of an unshaven depressive, but then, reflecting bitterly that he was no longer being paid to uproot cliché, he abandoned shaving with a certain vicious pleasure. The initial energy of his self-neglect depended on a barely acknowledged theatricality: he expected someone to notice, to be shocked, to offer to wash his clothes or run him a bath, but after a week or two his expanding sense of loneliness vaporized these imaginary friends. His actions were no longer gestures, and without the incentive to communicate, they were engulfed by his all-consuming fatigue. As he lay on his bed, the basin seemed so far away that the idea of brushing his teeth made him think of Livingstone’s search for the source of the Nile. He imagined the terrible mountain ranges of his yellow bedspread; native bearers falling off the cliff of his mattress with piercing cries; the delirium of a tropical fever; his excruciating boots slippery with blood; the forbidding overhang of smooth white porcelain in the final ascent. He was so small that he might disappear at any moment, so little able to move that the inertia might spread to his heart and stop it beating.

  There was a sheer fall, not at the end of things where it belonged, at the end of thought, or language, or at both ends of the visible spectrum, like horizons to our cognitive capacities, elegant, expected, almost reassuring; there was a sheer fall in between the things he used to take for granted, between instinct and desire, between desire and will, between will and action, between this and that, between one thing and another; gaps, crevasses, open wounds, broken circuits. How could he not have noticed before? What had he been doing all his life? Zipping along as if the ground were not groundless. He was like a toddler who has just been taught the word for something ubiquitous, and sits in his chair on the motorway, saying ‘car’ every time there happens to be one in view.

  After two weeks the hotel management insisted that he let the maid in to clean the room. Alan, who had not eaten for several days, found that his aversion to staying in the room with the maid outweighed his aversion to moving at all, and so he went out, bearded, dishevelled, unwashed, and muttering his new word, ‘Gap … gap … gap,’ as he hurried hungrily down the street, close to the railings, avoiding the cracks in the paving stones.

  15

  The text that was dominating Vanessa’s thoughts, as she sat at home, looking out at the bird feeder hanging from the apple tree in her back garden, was not one of the Elysian Prize submissions, nor indeed was it the PhD thesis she was supervising, in which the semi-colon had just arrived obscurely from Italy and was being disseminated into English literature by the erudite Ben Jonson; the text she couldn’t get off her mind was written by her daughter.

  In a perversion of filial piety, Poppy had asked Vanessa to use her critical skills to improve the little manifesto she was writing for a ‘pro-ana’ website, extolling the hidden ecstasies of her suicidal eating disorder. Vanessa felt that her relationship with her daughter had now gone irretrievably through the looking glass – the very same looking glass in which Poppy saw her skeletal and hirsute body as a repellent mass of white flab. The piece was hand-written, with no corrections, in a pink notebook, with a brass clasp holding its covers together. It rested on the small round table next to Vanessa, looking more like the diary of a fourteen-year-old girl than the exercise book of a grown woman. Vanessa didn’t need to read it again, couldn’t face reading it again. It was a defiant prose poem on the subject of emaciation and the beatitude of extreme hunger, the ‘breakthrough’ when the ‘gherlin gremlin’ (gherlin, it turned out, was the hormone for hunger) turned into ‘the radiance’, the single-pointedness, the febrile quickness, ‘the humming wire’. Ranged against these incisive mental joys was the cunning enemy and intolerable temptation of food, as if every scrap were as tragic as Eve’s first bite of the forbidden fruit – a fall, a rush of shame, an exile from the luminous sphere of control and self-sufficiency; a self-sufficiency that would one day go beyond the rejection of food and liquid, and perfect itself by discarding air as well.

  If only this constriction in her chest and throat could be expressed in tears, but Vanessa had never found it easy to cry and she knew that there was little point in looking for relief in that direction. She heard the front door open and close. It was Tom, who was at home revising, coming back from a ‘walk’. There was no point in greeting him, or offering him anything. He always returned from his walks reeking of grass and bolted back to his bedroom as soon as he came in. The boy in the coma from the ayahuasca weekend had died, but far from making Tom wake up from his stoned life, it seemed to have become the pretext for smoking elegia
c joints with mutual acquaintances. He had asked Vanessa to recommend a poem he could read at ‘a kind of wake thing’ they had organized.

  ‘I didn’t really know him,’ Tom told her. ‘But it was really bad luck. It must have been some sort of allergic reaction – I mean everyone else had an amazing time.’

  ‘You can’t imagine how happy it makes me to hear that,’ said Vanessa, with what she assumed was devastating sarcasm.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Tom with a survivor’s laugh. ‘I could have done without the snakes. I mean there were snakes everywhere, coming out of the walls, out of the eye of the little cockerel in the cornflakes package, pretty weird stuff, but then they kind of died away and it was all about light, about everything being basically light.’

  She was reluctantly flattered that he chose to share his hallucinations with her, but only in the context of being appalled that he was cultivating hallucinations in the run-up to his A-levels. She felt parentally paralysed; anything Tom did could be cast in a recreational or exploratory light compared to his sister’s illness. Besides, hadn’t she and Stephen taught him that the best way to secure their attention was to be in trouble?

  They were all sticks in the whirlpool of Poppy’s ferocious will, the weaker she became physically, the stronger her psychological pull. A principled hunger strike, like Gandhi’s, which was aimed at achieving something in the outside world, looked very impure and compromised compared to a hunger strike whose sole object was to stop eating: this was the white on white of the hunger strike, the moment when it became abstract and transcended the clumsy literalness of merely representing one thing or another.