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  Eventually I run out of change and go back to the kiosk and while the man is counting out my money I glance over to see if my favourite machine is free yet.

  It isn’t.

  But it’s no longer occupied by kids.

  It’s being played by a girl with long dark hair. Wearing an Afghan coat. And dark glasses.

  THE SMOKE

  I PARKED THE MERCEDES in the car park and waited. A light drizzle drifted across the dark night sky and around the sodium of the street lamp like swarms of midges on a summer evening.

  Eventually headlights appeared, slowed down, swung slowly on to the car park. As the car drew level with mine, I shifted in my seat, so that my arm dangled over the back, within easy reach of what lay underneath the car rug on the back seat.

  The door of the other car opened and closed and my passenger door opened and Collins got in and sat next to me. Immediately certain that everything was as it seemed, I removed my arm from the back of the seat and took out my cigarettes.

  “Nice night for it,” I said to Collins.

  “Yes,” he said.

  I lit my cigarette.

  “Well?” I said.

  Collins breathed in, like a manager who’s just seen his centre-half put in his own goal.

  “I’ve not come to tell you what I know,” he said.

  I blew out cigarette smoke.

  “I see,” I said, like the blind man.

  “I’ve come to tell you what I want. When I’ve got that, then I’ll tell you.”

  I considered things all round. Finally I decided I’d get quicker further if I didn’t do what I wanted to do.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “The reason for all this is very simple; it’s not because I wouldn’t trust you if we worked out a deal.”

  “That’s nice to know, Dennis,” I said. “After all these years.”

  “It’s because when I tell you what I know, knowing you, all hell will be let loose, one way or another. And I don’t want to be any part of it. I want to be out of it, before it happens.”

  I didn’t say anything. He continued.

  “I’ve got some leave due,” he said. “On Friday, I’m taking it. Going abroad. And I’m not coming back. I’m going to spend the rest of my life where my money is. I’ve got too much at stake to risk going down with you.”

  “Dennis,” I said, “what are you talking about?”

  “I’ve told you,” he said. “Before I tell you, I want some more money transferred into the account in Lucerne.”

  “Assuming I was prepared to do that,” I said, “what sort of amount had you got in mind?”

  “Fifty,” Dennis said.

  I inhaled.

  “You’ve already got a lot of money out there, Dennis,” I said, “What are you going to do with an extra fifty thousand?”

  “Consolidate,” he said.

  “And what makes you think I’m going to give you fifty grand for telling me fuck all?”

  “Because when you know what it is you’ll be glad to have paid it.”

  “Sort of what you might call an impasse,” I said.

  “I think you’ll pay me,” he said. “Because you know that I wouldn’t be getting out of what has been up to now an extremely good situation for me.”

  “What makes you think the things you know are bad enough to send you off to pastures new?”

  “In themselves, they’re not. It’s what you’ll do, when I tell you. The way you’ll react. Quite in what form that reaction will manifest itself, I don’t know. All I know is I don’t want to be around to find out first-hand.”

  I stubbed my cigarette out in the ashtray.

  “And who do I deal with when you’re gone?” I said.

  “There’ll be no problem there, will there?” he said. “They’ll probably have a sweepstake.”

  I thought about things.

  “All right,” I said. “Phone your account and check it on Tuesday morning. I’ll meet you here same time Tuesday night.”

  “I’ll do that,” Collins said, and opened the car door.

  “And Dennis,” I said.

  “What?” he said, half out of the car.

  “I’ve got a shotgun on the back seat,” I said. “Under a blanket. I brought it just in case. Know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” said Collins. “I know what you mean.”

  He got out of the car and closed the door.

  THE SEA

  I SIT IN THE Marina and cradle the flask in my lap and stare at the bollards on top of the ramp and the sky beyond them.

  That I’ve just seen her, there was no doubt. There was no doubt it was Lesley Murray, Mablethorpe’s answer to Carly Simon. But Lesley was the girl from Grimsby, the girl I’d seen crumble to ashes in the Cortina.

  Wasn’t she?

  I take another drink.

  Now think rationally. You’ve just had a shock, seen something you hadn’t expected to see. You’ve seen a girl playing a pinball machine who you thought you’d seen burnt to death in a salesman’s Cortina.

  That’s all.

  I try and focus on the faces, the way they’d become different in the different circumstances, the different gear, the different hairstyles.

  I can’t separate the two images. They keep coming together like the images when you focus a telescopic sight; the contours and features keep coming together and fitting one over the other with complete accuracy. They keep matching up. I shake my head, to re-jumble the elements of memory, but they keep reforming in the same twin patterns.

  Which is, of course, completely irrational. There is only one rational answer, that answer being that I was wrong. The two girls were in fact two girls. That is the evidence. But to my own eyes that evidence is inadmissible. My retina continues to retain the two images as one.

  Think.

  When I saw her, ten minutes earlier, I’d been too bottled to move; I’d just stood by the kiosk, watched her as she’d given the pinball machine a final disenchanted shove as the tilt sign had lit up, and then she’d drifted off, out of the arcade, seeming to be going nowhere in particular.

  I hadn’t moved until the kiosk man had nudged me and put my change in my hand.

  Of course, I have to be wrong. There is no connection between the two girls, not in the way I have imagined. They are two separate entities. There is no other explanation.

  But try explaining that to my eyes.

  I take another pull from my flask and as I’m doing that there is a great thunderclap of noise and the Marina shakes as if it’s been struck by several thunderbolts and then there’s Eddie’s face grinning in the window at me as a postscript to his having battered on the Marina’s roof with the flat of his hand.

  I recover somewhat and roll the window down.

  “Morning, Mr. Carson,” he says. “Hope I didn’t interrupt your breakfast.”

  “Actually,” I say, “it’s an early lunch.”

  Eddie shows his appreciation of my great wit and when he’s done that he says, “Did Howard tell you I was looking for you?”

  I nod.

  “I wanted to tell you; you must be lucky for me. Lesley turned up and she’s decided to give it a go with us for the season. That’s great, isn’t it?”

  “Terrific,” I tell him.

  “I’m just off to the South; come with us and let me buy you a drink. That’s the least I can do.”

  “Well, as a matter of fact—”

  “I’m meeting Lesley there. It’s my chance to do you a good turn for the good turn that you done me. I mean, you did want to get to know her, didn’t you?”

  THE SMOKE

  ON TUESDAY EVENING, AT the same time and at the same place, I waited for Collins.

  His car arrived and he got out of it and into mine.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t have done it?” I said.

  “No,” Collins said.

  “Well,” I said, “I hope it’s worth it.”

 
“I think you’ll think so.”

  Then Collins told me what I’d paid him fifty thousand pounds to tell me.

  When he’d finished, we sat there in silence for three or four minutes. Then I said, “I’ll only ask you once. This is straight up, isn’t it? I mean, you’re not going into retirement because I might at some point discover you’ve been selling me a load of shit.”

  “I think you know that I’m not.”

  I lit a cigarette.

  “All right,” I said. “Just, as you might say, to reassure me. How did you get to know all this?”

  “One of Farlow’s grasses.”

  “And you’d call that a reliable source, would you?”

  “In this case, yes. Because he’s not Farlow’s grass at all. He’s mine. He has been for nearly six years. How do you think I’ve got you some of your information over the years?”

  “I imagined you must have had some sort of method, Dennis,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “But,” I said, “how did your grass get to know? I mean, it’s not the kind of thing that’s going to get shouted about even in whispers.”

  “Not in the normal course of events, no. But in this case, we have our friend with the wooden leg to thank. If he hadn’t swayed into my grass at the Aerodrome Club in the small hours of last Thursday and needed a hand home, we’d never have known a thing.”

  “Highly fortuitous,” I said.

  “It happens,” Collins said.

  There was another silence.

  “What are you going to do about it?” Collins said.

  “Right at this moment, I’m not quite sure.”

  “I’m fucking positive,” Collins said.

  “And that’s why you’re geting out.”

  “Too right.”

  “Well,” I said. “I doubt very much if I’ll be seeing you again.”

  “There’s no doubt about it,” Collins said, and got out of the car.

  THE SEA

  I FOLLOW EDDIE ACROSS the industrial carpeting of the South to the bar. Eddie is now in his element; yesterday, all was doom and despond. Today, the sunshine is bringing the season, his element, that little bit closer. And now he has transport, and a new lead singer to give that transport added purpose. And he is going to buy me a drink, to demonstrate to whoever may be in the South that he is the kind of fellow who is used to buying a fellow like myself a drink. When we reach the bar there is great heartiness from him to Jackie, which Jackie receives with all the enthusiasm that he would normally reserve for a representative trying to push a new brand of cigarettes. Eddie, naturally, is unaware of this. His own kind of central heating leaves him impervious to that kind of chill.

  “Lesley not been in yet?” he says to Jackie, as he gives us our drinks.

  “Lesley? Oh, you mean the bird. No, not that I can recall.”

  “Women,” Eddie says to me. “You can always rely on them, can’t you?”

  “Yes,” I tell him. “That seems to be a fact of life.”

  “Anyhow,” he says, “your very good health, and to your generosity.”

  As he’s saying that, one of the doors is pushed inwards, and Lesley appears.

  She crosses the floor towards us. Dark glasses glint with the rose colours of the bar behind us.

  “Lesley,” Eddie says, before she’s anywhere near us. “You proved me wrong.”

  When she gets to us she says, “In what way?”

  “I was just saying to Mr. Carson that if there’s one thing in this life you can be certain of, that is you can never be certain of women.”

  “And did Mr. Carson agree with you?” she says.

  Both of them are looking at me.

  “Your arrival makes any comment I might have made superfluous,” I say.

  “Well,” she says, “now I’m here, I’ll have a drink. If that isn’t superfluous too.”

  “Jackie,” Eddie says. “Vodka and whatever goes with it.”

  “Ice,” she says. “And lemon. I can’t abide it without lemon.”

  “So I understand,” I say.

  “I beg your pardon,” she says.

  “That night you paid me a visit you mentioned that.”

  Eddie goes over the top at doing a hello hello routine.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “But I don’t understand.”

  “See what I mean,” Eddie says to me, “about women?”

  “You’re saying I came to your house?” she says.

  “Well, I haven’t seen you since, but—”

  She smiles.

  “Are you trying to impress Eddie?” she says. “And Jackie? Is that what you’re trying to do?”

  “Now look—”

  “Jesus,” she says, shaking her head.

  “Excuse me,” Eddie says. “I got to see a man about a dog.”

  He leaves us and makes his way towards the toilets.

  “All right,” I say to her. “Forget it.”

  She moves a little closer. Jackie is called to the far end of the bar to attend to one of his geriatrics.

  “Look,” she says, “don’t come all that shit in front of Eddie. I’m going to do the stint, for my sins, all right? He already thinks it’s a one two three four and into bed. You understand?”

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “It didn’t occur to me.”

  “Well, it occurred to him, and it occurred to me. Now he probably thinks he can have me between numbers.”

  “And you don’t want him to think that.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know what you want.”

  “Don’t you?” she says.

  She looks at me.

  “I think you do,” she says. “I think you think you know what I want.”

  THE SMOKE

  I TOLD JEAN WHAT Collins had told me. She listened and then she got up and went over to the drinks and came back and sat down opposite me. Instead of saying what she’d every right to say, she said, “What are you going to do about it?”

  “What do you think I’m going to do about it?”

  There was a silence.

  “Don’t you think you ought to talk to James first?” she said.

  “Fuck James.”

  “He’s got to be told.”

  “What for? What difference would it make? He’ll come in and drink his brandy and tell me what you know he’ll tell me.”

  “Well, he’d be right, wouldn’t he?”

  “This is different. This isn’t a square dance. There’s only one way to stop this kind of thing. And that is to stop it. Not to pass it over to the Oxford Union and wait for a show of hands.”

  “James ought to be told.”

  “He’ll be told.”

  “I mean before.”

  I drank some of my drink.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “What do you think I’m going to do about it?”

  “I don’t have to answer that, do I?”

  “No.”

  “But there’s a question, bearing on that.”

  “What?”

  “Who are you going to use? Because in something like this there’s no one you could trust, is there? Not for certain.”

  “No,” I said. “Except you.”

  She looked at me.

  “You’re joking.”

  “No, I’m not joking.”

  “I mean, what exactly would you expect me to do?”

  “What you usually do,” I said. “What you’ve done in the past.”

  THE SEA

  IN THE EVENING, THE Dunes is fuller than it had been for Amateur Night. But I doubt if it’s because word has got around that Eddie’s got a new singer with him. It’s like everything else; it’s just that it’s that little bit nearer to the season. In fact, Howard is moved to say:

  “The turn-out makes one feel positively gay.”

  I’m not in the mood for feeding lines to Howard so I nod and, like the rest of the punters, I loo
k at everybody else and wait for the evening’s entertainment.

  Which tonight should be of special interest.

  After Lesley said what she’d said in the bar at lunchtime, Eddie had returned from the gents and even if I could have thought of a reply I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to say it, because a minute or so after Eddie’s return she downed her vodka and left and told us she’d see us at the Dunes this evening.

  And now it is this evening.

  At lunchtime, after she’d gone, Eddie’d been very pleased with himself, at the way he thought things had turned out between Lesley and me. He’d done everything but nudge me in the ribs, which, like Howard’s repartee, I could have done without, at a time when I’d been propositioned by a girl I’d thought I’d seen burnt to death the previous day.

  Now it is evening and I still haven’t exactly got used to the idea.

  After she’d gone, at lunchtime, I’d left the South and driven back to the bungalow and walked down to the beach and sat on the tank and drunk from my refilled flask and thought about all the possibilities. But all I could come up with was the facts as they appeared to be. That I’d been mistaken about Lesley and the girl from Grimsby being the same. Naturally. No other explanation. That I’d been totally wrong in suspecting that both or either were from the Press. Understandable, considering the alternatives and that the girl fancied me. Simple. After all, from just a look around the bungalow, I’d be the best offer she’d get in this area. And so, not to seem to make things easy, she’d decided on a catch-as-catch-can game, to leave me guessing and keep my interest.

  Well, she’s certainly succeeded in keeping my interest, although not quite in the way she imagined. And, like I say, if her source had been the aftermath of what had happened in London, I wouldn’t be standing at Howard’s bar speculating about anything at all.

  So. Whatever her game is, I’ve decided to play it. I’ll let her think she’s let me catch her. I’ll go along with whatever she has in mind. That way, I’ll find out what it is she has in mind. I’ll appear to play the role she wants me to play in order to discover why she wants to play hers. After the show I’ll continue to appear to pursue her and take it from there. And when the show begins, after Eddie’s done a half-dozen numbers and he introduces her on the stage, done up in her gear, in her wig, I have to shake my head, because it’s still uncanny, the resemblance to the girl from Grimsby.