The Museum of Doubt Read online

  At the sound of the collision Donna looked up from counting her money and drew in breath as if she had been stabbed. She cried out in Bangkokese and ran in clipped stiletto steps to Billy’s body. She knelt down and put her hand on his forehead. She looked at Gordon.

  Hey, said Gordon. Get off the road. You might get hurt.

  Billy’s dead, said Donna.

  Ach, he’ll be fine, leave him alone. There’s cars coming.

  He’s dead! said Donna.

  Clicking his tongue Gordon marched over to the boy, took him under the armpits and dragged him to the pavement. A bubble of blood sealing Billy’s half-open mouth burst and more of it flowed from the corner, risking Gordon’s polo shirt, and you could be sure you’d pay dearly for getting the hotel to tackle that kind of difficult stain. The boy’s arms waggled in their elbow sockets as they swung. Gordon propped him up against the barrier. Donna toreadored a bus, skidding on her heels, to get Billy’s lost Nike, which had come off his foot and sat still pure white, coolly sole down, toes to the motorway, in the middle of the ramp. She handled the shoe like something unclean, holding it from her between thumb and forefinger, but put it carefully back onto the boy’s bare foot and tied it properly.

  You know him? Donna said.

  Gordon shrugged.

  Maybe he has family.

  No idea.

  His real name was Vatha, said Donna. You should go. Maybe police won’t like it.

  Come on, then, said Gordon.

  Donna was squatting next to Vatha, stroking his forehead and cheek with the back of her fingers, brushing the hair back. He let me win, she said. He gave me the money.

  I gave you the money, said Gordon.

  He wanted to win. After he won he wanted to make you angry. He didn’t like you.

  I didn’t care for him.

  Why do foreign men hate us?

  I’m not foreign, said Gordon. I’m from Scotland.

  Why do you hate us?

  Hate. Gordon tasted the word. Hate was what you put between you and the enemy. Hate was a tricky business though and Gordon could never abide tricky businesses. ’Cause there were so many enemies out to get you and you couldn’t be hating them all the time because you needed them for so many things, like sex and meals and drinking with. Hate was what you went for when they were about to turn on you and there was nowhere you could hide.

  I think, said Donna, when you come so far, you fly so many thousand miles to come and fuck us, and then you fly straight back again, you must really hate us.

  Well, we pay.

  Donna took out the wad of dollars and flexed it between her fingers. I must burn them, she said. I should burn your dollars. But I need them.

  She looked up at Gordon. You should go, she said.

  I’ll take you back to your club.

  Donna shook her head. Go now, she said. Gordon walked away. At the foot of the ramp he looked back. She’d gone, and the corpse of Smithie’s boy sat alone at the barrier.

  In the morning Gordon waited for Smithie to find him at breakfast. He sat at a table under an umbrella by the pool and got coffee and toast and butter near-liquid in the heat. They brought a bowl of fresh pineapple, banana and mango. Gordon pushed it to one side. Smithie came seeking towards the pool in swimming shorts, flip flops and a tee-shirt, saw Gordon and slowly, stiff from the night, sat down opposite. He hadn’t shaved and his eyes were red. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and looked round, blinking.

  Came looking for you last night, said Gordon.

  I know, I’m sorry, got lost, said Smithie.

  Gordon took a bite of toast and offered some to Smithie.

  No, I’ll just have a coffee Gordon, said Smithie. What did you get up to?

  You missed yourself, said Gordon. Picked up this lovely young lassie in a bar – have you lost something? – and gave her a real seeing to. Didn’t even have to pay. How come you keep looking round?

  It’s nothing, said Smithie.

  If you’re looking for your laddie, he’s dead. He got run over last night.

  Billy?

  Aye.

  Smithie stared at Gordon chewing toast. Smithie’s eyes filmed over, his mouth trembled, his nostrils flared and the tears came. His shoulders shook and he was biting his lip to stop the sobs coming out. Teardrops swung on his chin and fell on his belly. Nice in the heat. Good if you could switch the tears on when it was too hot, rinse down your face, clean it and cool it at the same time, as long as you had something to wipe it off with. Gordon couldn’t switch on the tears. In fact the tear device went faulty a long time ago. It didn’t work at all and sometimes his eyes itched with the dryness. Ach, you put up with it.

  A waiter came and asked Smithie if he’d like any breakfast. Smithie turned to him, held it back for a moment, shook his head, said no thanks and broke again, squeezing his eyes shut, shaking his head and letting the sound of his misery out in bellows of sound. How do you know? he said to Gordon.

  I saw. I came into your room last night and the boy came with me. We went for a walk. He was hit by a car. A bloody great Landcruiser with bull bars on the front.

  Where is he?

  I don’t know, said Gordon. Didn’t you pick him up on the street?

  Yes.

  Well, that’s where I left him.

  Smithie lifted his tearblind head. I loved him. I know it was wrong. He was so kind to me.

  You had to pay him.

  I loved him. I loved him. He didn’t have any money. I didn’t care. I know it was wrong. I wanted to take him home. I was going to adopt him.

  You’ve got to go for a lassie, said Gordon. You’re a man and that’s what we need. Forget the wee poof and we’ll go to that bar together tonight. You can’t be dipping your wick in boys. You’d be right out of Rotary for a start, and I’m not even talking about the Lodge. You’ve got to put the perversion out of your mind with a 14-year-old girl. They’re lovely and cheap and gagging for it.

  I can’t help it. I loved him. I think he loved me. He left his sandals behind in my room.

  Loved. What they believed in now instead of whatever it was before, the gods who never turned up. Mary had an interest in other people’s love, star love and royal love and children love, but’d had the sense not to try to convert Gordon, who didn’t require it. He had the pal, Smithie, and now a place they could practise together the thing they didn’t get enough of at home, didn’t get any of at home, sex with young girls. They always had their own corner in the club of men, you just went in and you got shown to your seat, opposite Smithie’s seat. Smithie just needed a wee bit of help with the membership committee and he’d be fine.

  So what d’you fancy doing for lunch? said Gordon.

  Smithie went on weeping and shaking and nodding his head. He whispered: I want Billy.

  No you don’t.

  I do. I loved him.

  Gordon wrinkled his nose and fidgeted with the bowl of fruit. He said: Sweltering, eh, right enough.

  It’s Thailand, whispered Smithie.

  Oh, said Gordon. Is that where this is. It’s good because the other folk, they can’t spell cock, can they?

  I’m going to find him. Maybe he didn’t die.

  See those tears, said Gordon. Are they actually cooling you down?

  Smithie took a napkin from the table and wiped his face dry. He looked at Gordon with an expression Gordon hadn’t seen before, like a rogue bouncer smitten by the revelation that the thing to do is not to stop them getting into the club but to stop them getting out.

  Smithie got up. I’m leaving, he said. Make your own way home. Goodbye, Gordon.

  Northern Soul

  Gordon finished his story and struck the optic with his glass to win another whisky. The bottle was empty. Out there beyond the bar it was no longer possible to tell where the bonfire ended and the dance floor began. The flames snapped at the varnished wood, mottled dark with heelprints. Cankerous rises of black smoke confounded the lasers. The beautiful gia
nt walked through the smoke, coughing, Gordon’s gun in one hand and a stack of vinyl in the other. She laid the records down carefully and moved towards Gordon, pointing the gun at him. There was a sound of horns, trumpets and a thumping bass line.

  That’s my gun, said Gordon.

  Come out from there, said Sheena the Northern Soul Monster, grabbing him by the collar and hoisting him into the air. She boosted him into an arc and he flew over the bar, into the fire. He landed on his side, on a spar of charred barstool leg, felt the pain of the impact bark through his ribs and understood that the bright spirits which ran to dance on his jumper were flames. He cried out and rolled away, smothering the burning wool, and crawled to the foot of the bar. He sat there with his back against it and started to taste the agony of his burns with his skin.

  Give me the gun back, said Gordon. Leave me alone. I’m an old man. He looked up at the girl’s legs rising high above him, smooth and honey coloured, scattered with tiny golden hairs. If only she was Gordon’s size. She was too young to have such beauty and such strength to control men older and wiser and more desperate than she was. He reached out his fingers to touch her and Sheena kicked him in the kidneys hard enough to flip him over. He lay on his back on the ground, knees up, hands protecting his face, keeking through his fingers at the giant’s face far above him, haloed with smoke. Closer, the nostrils of the shotgun quivered, pointed at his head.

  Careful, hen, he said. I’ve seen that gun do terrible things to beasts today.

  I let you join my club, said Sheena’s deep distant voice, and I explained the rules to you. There were only three of them, and you broke one. The last one.

  I’m a guest, said Gordon, and a pensioner.

  Everyone’s a guest, said Sheena. Some leave of their own accord and some get asked to leave.

  I’ll go. Your club’s burning.

  Clubs don’t burn. Only venues burn.

  I’ve got friends.

  You’re lying. You haven’t got any friends.

  How did she know? She knew. Who’d told her? The giant had clearly been at the centre of it all along, the only question being how she’d kept herself hidden. She was working with the wife-creature and the son-creature, she was working in Gordon’s mind to blur the names of things, she was, hardest to bear, it was scooping him out inside, she was the prize disguised as Julie and Donna, the youngness girldom he’d only wanted to press his erect fear inside, and all the while the young girls had been powerful giants.

  With the boy it was an accident, he said. Cocky wee chap.

  You made it happen, said Sheena. Now I’m going to make it happen. She pulled the hammers back on the shotgun.

  She started lifting the gun to her shoulder. As it rose it moved more slowly, and froze midway. The giant was swaying. She had a coughing fit. Her eyes shut in the smoke. Water streamed from them. She dropped the gun and fainted, falling straight to the floor without bending, like a tree. The building trembled.

  The fire was spreading handily. The way Gordon came in was blocked. Curtains of smoke furled up the walls. His throat was stinging and from the far end of the room he began to hear an intermittent roar, like gusts of wind.

  He dragged the giant over to the floor by the bar, furthest from the flames, and fetched the bag from the garden centre. He put on the baseball cap saying Team Bosch, took out the power drill, selected the fattest bit, locked it and plugged the tool into a socket at the foot of the bar. He pulled the trigger. The device throbbed with possibility. Could’ve made some fantastic holes with that. Could’ve spent a whole day experimenting with walls and doors and fruit. Gordon shook his head, clicking his tongue, knelt on the floor and drilled a clean, perfect hole through it. He made a series of holes, in a rough oval shape. He unplugged the drill and reached for the second tool, the one with forty different attachments. He sighed over the sanders, screwdrivers and polishers, but was stuck in the circumstances with the narrow-bladed saw. He poked the saw through one of the holes he’d made and began to cut the floor away. It was hard with the crossbeams but when he’d finished there was a gap in the floorboards easily big enough to drop through. He drilled and cut away the ceiling of the room below, kicked through the clinging petals of plaster, and looked down into cool darkness. The fire roared louder as it found a fresh source of oxygen and a sucking breeze blew over his head.

  C’mon hen, he said, and tucked Sheena’s feet and calves through the gap. Going round to her head end, he pushed to make her slide through the hole, but her thighs were coming in at the wrong angle. She wasn’t bending at the trunk. Coughing now like an asthmatic, Gordon pushed his arms in under Sheena’s bum and tried to lift. Still her legs wouldn’t straighten. The lights went out, the music died, and the only illumination was the flames. Gordon lifted again and gave a sideways shove to the body. Sheena’s thighs dropped clear of the edge of the hole. Gordon pushed gently from the shoulders, and her body began to slide, until gravity snatched her through the sawn-off floorboards and dropped her, with an impact which snapped burnt-through rafters over the dancefloor, on to whatever surface lay below.

  Gordon looked down through the hole. He couldn’t see or hear anything. It was troubling. If her body had hit the floor wrongly, it wouldn’t be in the right place to break his fall.

  It was getting hard to breathe. Gordon let his feet dangle over the edge and pushed himself off. In the moments of falling he guessed many times when the ground would begin. His feet thudded into yielding flesh, his knees folded and he toppled. He’d come down on the back of Sheena’s thighs. It wasn’t the softest of landings, but better than bare floorboards. The girl didn’t move or make a sound. He got up. There was a faint light shining through the hole in the ceiling from the fire upstairs. They were in a wood-panelled function room, with a small low stage and chairs stacked to one side. Gordon squatted down and shook Sheena by the shoulder.

  Hey, he said. I don’t know the way out of here. He put his head close to her face. The giant was lying on her front. There was a blood-smeared cut on her forehead. Gordon listened at her mouth. She was still breathing. He felt her breath on his ear. He shook her again.

  His eyes were getting used to the light, and the light was getting brighter. He could see red gleaming through cracks in the ceiling. On the opposite side of the room from the stage, there was a door. Gordon ran over to it and turned the handle. The door was unlocked. He opened it. You beauty. A short stretch of unburned corridor, with a couple of emergency lights glowing, and further on what looked like a set of steps leading down. Bit of a flicker of something hot up ahead, but couldn’t be as bad as what was upstairs. He was out and away.

  He glanced back at the girl, lying where she’d fallen through the ceiling. He clapped his hands together. He shouted at her to wake up. She didn’t move. That was what the drugs and the music did to you, sure enough, and what had it been like with the boy Kenneth, trying to get him up in the morning after his late nights out. That generation had no sense of urgency. And with the bonfire out of control: irresponsible.

  Lie there if you like, he called. It’s your lookout.

  He moved off along the corridor and down the stairs. He’d trodden a few steps when a scrabbling, booming sound rose up the stairwell, like a dumper truck tipping stones. He could feel heat on his face, and when he reached the first landing, he could see there were flames ahead. Another flight of stairs took him to a hallway where the ceiling had partially collapsed. The floor was covered in lumps of plaster and ash. Broken lengths of roofbeam, inadequately secured by Victorian builders and weakened by generations of feasting, rallying and dancing, sagged from the ceiling, splintered ends burning with an abundance of fresh yellow fire, ready to droop and make a wick of Gordon’s scalp.

  He’d always loved fire. Fire was the perfect child. There was no bad fire, there was fire or there was no fire, and if you made fire, it took a moment, and you stood back and watched while it made itself perfect in its own fashion. It destroyed anything without the wit
to get out of its way, and stayed perfect, whatever it destroyed. It didn’t need help. If you fed it, it grew, still perfect but bigger, and if you stopped feeding it, it died, without complaint. Only this fire, now, even though he’d made it, frightened him. It was the consequence he should never have had to meet, the great-great-grandchild of the fire he’d made, a generation of fire gone bad, feeding by itself for itself and careless of feeding on its first father.

  There’d been no days before without fear, but this wasn’t the old fear, the fear of the fascists, traitors, poofs, Pakis, cunts, policemen, assassins, priests, tax-gatherers, children, foreigners, women, false friends, mockers, jokers, wives, smart-arsesand spies who crowded the places where Gordon was forced to live, all the ones who were out to rob, cheat and humiliate him, the ones he could comfort himself with the hating of, the ones who wanted to keep him from the prizes he deserved. This was the new fear, the one that up till now had lived inside him, and had no name or shape, and was all the more terrible for it. Now he saw it in the offspring of his fire, a thing without mercy he couldn’t have the relief of hating because it was perfect, it was only there to consume, and you could hate it or love it, it didn’t matter, it didn’t feel, it burned on all the same.

  To run the gauntlet without death by fire what was needed was a shield, some thick, insulating object Gordon could carry over his head for protection while he charged down the corridor.

  He went back to the darkness of the function room, now filling with smoke, and knelt by Sheena. Over the stormsong of the fire upstairs he could hear the ceiling creak.

  Still sleeping it off, eh, he said, and started coughing. He put the back of his hand against the girl’s mouth. There was a little breath. He shook her. No response. He flipped her over so she was face up, took hold of her wrists and dragged her out of the room and along the corridor. Even with the floor supporting her arse and legs the weight was incredible. He pulled her downstairs, knocking the back of her head against the edge of the steps a few times, and laid her out at the threshold of the burning hallway. His heart was trying to bounce out through his ribs, his armpits were sodden with sweat, and each time he tried to draw in air the back of his throat and his nose stung like they’d been flayed. He coughed, piercing, whole body coughs, and each cough gathered all the strands of his back muscles into one rope of pain, and yanked it.