Chapter One

A detective’s first thought when someone disappears is murder. His second is acquaintance-involvement.

There is usually a body in cases of murder; in cases of mysterious disappearance the missing person is simply that, missing.

Detectives, in the main, are ill-equipped to deal with this kind of problem: solutions cannot be found by scanning news reports or CCTV footage or by searching the computer hard-drives of the disappeared for email contacts.

They’ve been levering away for hours now and still they don’t get any answers. I’m not deliberately holding anything back; I really don’t have anything to tell them.

I think there are five, maybe six guys, but only two at a time. They all have different routines and the pairs are mixed and matched, but they all look the same.

On the desk are several objects I’ve never seen before: a green disposable lighter, a Clipper; a British Passport; an open wallet containing a driver’s licence and some cash and credit cards.

They keep shuffling them around, changing their positions on the desk as if to prioritize the significance of each one.

I’m struggling just to understand the questions.

Who is Gerald Anthony Cox? How did I come by his passport? How come it bears my photograph? It’s a fake passport, why do I have it?

Gerald Anthony Cox flew business class from JFK to London Heathrow on February 25th. There is CCTV footage of me checking in for the same flight and going through immigration at Heathrow.

I used this passport.

It’s a serious offence to enter the UK using false documents.

I’m a British citizen, not wanted by either UK or American or any other law enforcement agencies, they’ve checked.

‘So why would you want to assume a false I.D., Jon?’

‘Did you use the passport to obtain the credit cards and the driver’s licence?’

‘Who supplied the phoney I.D., Jon? It’s a good job, very professional, high quality. How much did you pay?’

‘Didn’t come cheap, I’ll guess.’

‘Must have had a pretty pressing reason to want to be somebody else, huh, Jon, a guy like you?’

‘Why, Jon?’

I tell them, look, this has happened before, it’s all medically documented, vital information is missing, like where I’ve been the past few months, who I’ve been, what I’ve been doing, who’s been doing what to me.

I’m sorry, I just don’t know. I was in New York. Someone drove me to the airport. After that, nada.

There’s a Doctor Wayne-Grove, my family shrink. Maybe he can explain.

Then they leave me alone for what seems like hours but probably isn’t. I have no concept of time anymore.
____________________________________

The young, dark guy with the bootlace moustache and the brown linen suit comes in. This time he’s doubling up with the fat middle aged guy whose trousers don’t fit.

His voice is confident but soft. I file him as media-trained. If they were playing good cop / bad cop he’d be the former.

‘I’m a fan, Jon. I like your work,’ offering me a cigarette.

‘Yeah,’ says the fat guy, but without the sincerity that is clearly his partner’s favourite shtik, ‘without you Tommy Devine would be a nobody.’

This may be true. Tommy Devine is ugly. You want to know how ugly? I’ll tell you. When he’s born (series one, episode one) the midwife, a twenty-eight year old gay sudoku enthusiast from Ohio, threatens to assassinate his mother.

When he sees it he just falls apart, it’s like he takes it personally, you know? Like little Tommy has pissed all over his parade and it’s the mother’s fault.

‘How could you do this?’ he screeches at her. ‘I mean, how?’ tossing his facemask and surgical gloves to the floor with pantomime-dame-theatricality. ‘I mean, at some point during the last nine months… well you must have had some idea. You had scans, didn’t you? Surely you couldn’t have carried that thing around for nine months and not known, suspected even… Couldn’t you have done the decent thing? Have you never heard of termination?’

The mother, a giant hover-fly, passes out. Her wings collapse, creating a huge draught, which blows the anaesthetist off his feet and scatters instruments, swabs, wipes, anything that isn’t tied down, all over the theatre.

‘Ho hum,’ sighs the midwife, ‘you chase a horse and you catch a dog. Story of my life.’

Tommy plays all the parts. That’s Tommy World. Every character in every show looks like some version of Tommy.

That first script earns me a personal assistant called Dragona Hartly.

Dragona believes in absolutes and, like Tommy she loves to generalise. For example, did you know that gangsters use the word fuck more than any other word, with the possible exceptions of money and no?

And that gangsters in the main don’t have what you could call a good command of English? Yeah, like comics and P.A.s.

‘You know why?’ Tommy asks me at out first meeting, ‘I’ll tell you why…’ breathing cigar smoke and garlic all over my new wool suit. ‘It’s because they’re all spiritual Italians and Greeks. And the ones that ain’t, actually are, in that spiritual sense. You get me?’

I don’t but I nod anyway.

He continues: ‘It’s that cultural thing about body language that the spiritual Italians and the spiritual Greeks share with the Italians from Italy and the Greeks from Greece – the hand gestures and stuff.

It’s the same with accountants – spiritually they’re all Jews.’

Then his eyes narrow, his head tilts to one side like the head of a curious dog and he peers at me square in the face through the miasma of cigar smoke, garlic and bullshit:

‘You want to know something about writers? I’ll tell you about writers. All writers drink in the afternoon. Did you know that? All writers are drunks – even the ones who don’t drink.’

‘When did you last see Tommy, Jon,’ continues Bootlace.

Ill-fitting trousers lights my cigarette.

We meet at happy hour in the Cellar Bar at the Bryant on West Fortieth. I don't know how long ago. I have no concept of time anymore. Dragona is there, and an ex-cop called Marsham.

It’s not a good meeting from the start and it spirals quickly downwards after I outline my plans. I tell Tommy it’s time for me to move on, there’s a novel I’ve wanted to write for twenty years and now is the time. I'm going to kill him off. This series has to be the last.

I’m hung over from lunch so I don’t eat, just order a beer and a large Irish.

Tommy gets angry, talks a lot about breach of contract and lawyers. I remind him that no contract has ever existed between us.

Anyway, it ends badly and Tommy and Marsham leave. Then Dragona tells me she’s going to the washroom. She doesn’t return.

Happy hour is on me.

My beer and whiskey costs me $150 and some change.

‘I’m not sure,’ I tell the cop, ‘I think we had dinner…’

‘Before you drifted?’ interrupts the fat guy. I nod.

Just get Wayne-Grove.

According to Doctor Wayne-Grove, drift is not a psychiatric problem. The way he sees it, there have always been people whose experience of reality differs from that of the majority, and there has always been an overlap between the gifted or insightful and the mentally ill.

A critic once writes that I am ‘rich, famous and strange’. He would no doubt disagree with Wayne-Grove. Nowhere in his piece does he mention talent or insight.

Something extraordinary happens to me when I’m young. It makes me strange.

Then my father dies and his death makes me rich.

Writing for Tommy Devine makes me famous.

I do not recall a time before the strangeness, therefore it is not possible for me to say with certainty that there ever is such a time.

The fat detective gives me another cigarette and Bootlace tells me they’ve contacted the shrink and they’re done for the moment but we’ll need to talk again.

‘Are you going to tell me what this is about?’ I ask.

‘You don’t know?’ He smiles and leaves.

I finish my cigarette and stub it out, the act causing me to ponder the possibility that one day this is all going to end.

Chapter Two

To attempt to detect the subliminal action of peripheral vision reflexes after the perceived threat-movement has been ignored is futile. Only the effect of the repeating subliminal stimulus is experienced; its cause is recondite. The subject may begin to feel that he or she is being watched. This is a form of operant conditioning known as subliminal-random-adverse stimulation of consciousness. As the process continues the consciousness attempts to reconcile the subliminal stimulation with its contemporaneous activity.

There is no beginning or end. I always wake up at the same point, just before the door opens and the tall man is about to enter the room. There is no continuation.

The way it is with dreams: the dreamer is actor writer and director and knows every aspect of the script.

I never see the tall man but I know he's beyond that door. I know his tuneless whistle and his dry cough, the bad tattoo on his left earlobe and the jingling of coins - or are they keys - in his trouser pocket against his thigh as he walks.

But this is no dream. It will not end with wakefulness.

Seconds after I wake he will be in the room and the pale, red-haired girl will blanch even paler and the young man in the crumpled linen suit tied by his hands and feet to the chair will scream and though I have never heard that scream I can never forget it.

I'm gone, running through the dimly lit corridors into the lobby, past the fat key-man sleeping at the reception counter, out into the driveway, running into the road, crossing the intersection, caught in squealing headlights, creased by slipstream.

There is no freedom. Freedom is a lie. I'll run this road forever and never be even falsely free.

To run is not to find freedom; it is merely expressive of the desire and desire is of no consequence. We are all protozoa bursting, attempting bifurcation, hopelessly blind to the impossibility of freedom.

And my heart pounds with the relentlessness of a living steam-hammer, shock-waves like bullets tear my synapses as I struggle to take in the scene from my hide somewhere in a non-existent corner of that room that has no right nor reason to exist for anyone but me.

I can't know why those people are in that place, will never hear their names in anything but hellish tongues, will never know why the bed is strewn with spent matches or what makes the girl turn away from the window and smile just before the door opens.

But I will shiver for the chill in that room, the same chill that lives in the marrow of the dwarf's spine.

The amok-man scenario, the Mexican motel-room sequence played in dumb-show by crippled and deformed actors on a broken set to a symphony of traffic whooshing through the rain, meeting and parting at the intersection, the same monstrous tableau with an unmade bed in a smoke filled alcove, its pale, dirty pink candlewick coverlet awry and its faded paisley patterned mattress exposed, a purple wash in a jagged edge of luminosity from the wall down-lighter.

And everywhere that chill, of homelessness and late-night-early-morning train stations, of highways, of strange bedrooms and other lives and other dreams, of commingled breath of unknown lovers, which freezes the semen, murders the seed moments before they come.

Chapter Three

The basic common subliminal signal to consciousness is perceived by the subject as a warning that something is behind her. Over time she may develop hostility towards something or someone with whom she is in current dispute. It is only possible to predict an outcome by close analysis: individual personality traits determine consequent reactions. She may withdraw or she may react with aggression.

It’s just before dawn when I half-wake to the sounds of muffled activity outside the door of my room in the Kensington George Hotel. I lie there for a while, staring at the ceiling and trying to think through the confusion of yesterday and what’s happened in the gap between then and that day nearly three months ago in the Cellar Bar at the Bryant.

I turn over onto my side and extend my arm, stretching out and flexing my fingers, like a junkie getting ready for a hit. A tiny ballerina is dancing on my fingertips to no music. I drag myself over to the desk by the window and open my laptop. As I start to type I can feel her breath in my fingers like a prospect of the cold.

She plays the long game once too often and loses. Her possessions are laid out on a table in plastic bags: a pack of menthol cigarettes, Kleenex, some crumpled banknotes, change, a green clipper, a London subway ticket, keys, a watch with a broken face. There’s a dress, also encased in plastic, neatly folded, and shoes, bright red court shoes with patent leather uppers, ankle-straps and elegant heels.

Early evening, the evening of the night she dies, she gets out of the car in Holland Park and enters the restaurant on the man’s arm – the new dress, the shoes – smiling. I wait for the lights to change then I turn into a side street and park up. Then I’m walking in the rain to find a payphone. There’s no answer. I feel something like a panic. She has to be there. It can’t be her in a dress like that, those shoes, the laughter and the smiles, without me. She must be asleep.

The phone keeps ringing.
___________________________________

The night clerk has left coffee and rolls on a tray outside my door with a morning paper. I pour a cup and sink back on the bed. I stretch out my arm again. The tiny ballerina is in the palm of my hand now, pirouetting along my lifeline, her head held high and her eyes smiling. I watch her for a while then I clench my fist.

I don’t want to know about the future; I want to know about the end of the past. I know the beginning: it starts with the meaning of profanity. In the beginning is the word and the word is profane and black and forbidden.

I’ve lost three months of my life and I can’t get them back. Where was I? What was I doing? What was being done to me? Who is Gerald Anthony Cox? Is he me? Is that where I was, in his body, in his life? And is he still out there somewhere, living, walking around without me?

My refection in the mirror as I shave at first bewilders me. The eyes are mine, the same eyes that had stared back at me as a boy. Sure, they’re set now in an older face, but it’s recognisably the same face.

But then I realise that it’s not the face itself that puzzles me and estranges me from my own image; it’s the scar. The razor traces it’s barely visible course from cheekbone to corner of lip. I have absolutely no knowledge of how I came by that scar.
_____________________________________

Another morning, neither past nor present. A man lies on a dirty pink candlewick coverlet on a bed in the Amokhan Hotel in Finsbury Park. Rain patters on the window glass. The heater has burned all night and the room is stifling. At some point in the night he has undressed.

He slides his hand anxiously down the greasy wall and feels beneath the mattress. His wallet and passport are still there. He checks the wallet’s contents for his cash, credit cards and driver’s licence, then he sits up on the side of the bed, takes a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table and lights it with a green plastic lighter.

There is a piece of paper tucked under the ashtray. It’s a note from the girl. He's to meet her in Stepney at four-thirty.

On the other side of the wall a man and woman argue. There is a smell like rotten meat frying in rancid butter doctored with cheap perfume. The man feels sick. There are people moving about on the stairs and in the hallway, not going anywhere, just moving about as if enjoying the sounds the creaking floorboards make beneath their feet.

The bathroom is across the hall. Someone has been running a bath for what seems like eternity. He remembers the key man telling him the night before that the water runs slowly.

They're waiting for a plumber.

He imagines the bath gradually filling up with slowly congealing blood in tepid, rust-coloured water and his stomach starts to heave and he's going to be sick but he don’t want to leave the room, doesn’t want to see the people in the hallway or be forced to converse with the prospective bather-in-blood or look at the blood and dirty water in the bath.

He lights another cigarette.

The girl tells him that Lucian is a man who needs a place to keep secrets. That’s why he needs Ruth. And she tells him about the gun. Is it real or just a cheap lie at cocaine twilight, a safe deceit between short time lovers? He shrugs, playing cool. She can’t possibly know he's looking for a weapon. Thanks for the confidence, honey, but so?

You have to play the game, have to keep the psychological advantage. It’s the tenacity of gangsters. He knows she might be lying but he has make her believe she’s fooled him. Lies can be magic. Lies are gifts from gangster heaven. Besides, perhaps she’s telling the truth.

The sickness is gone. He lies back on the bed, decides to meet her. If there is a gun he needs to have it. He falls asleep feeling its smooth metal in his hand.

The man dreams about Ruth. It’s Sunday morning. She and Daniel are dressing for church, the sun streaming through the bedroom window, catching suspended dust particles that shimmer like sequins.

It’s a special day, a Christening. Daniel in a black three-piece mohair suit struggles with a collar stud in the full length mirror on the closet door, sucking his teeth. Ruth is in Lucian’s room, the room she keeps just for him, with a white sheepskin rug thrown back and a loose floorboard prised up.

She’s wearing a floral patterned dress the colour of cheap wall paper, holding the gun out in front with both hands, gnarled, old lady’s fingers curling like plant-stems around the butt and the trigger.

There’s a flash and the atmosphere in the apartment implodes, a smell of cordite and blue-grey smoke thickens the air.

A corpse is stretched out in the Sunday morning hallway with the top of its head gone and a halo of blood and bone and yellow brain-mess oozing, expanding outward from what is left of the head.

The man wakes up with a sense of having been cheated.
____________________________________

There is a dark blue Octavia at the top of the rank in Seven Sisters Road. The driver, a big Nigerian in a loose fitting brightly patterned shirt and sunglasses too big even for his huge face, sits in the back listening to a jazz CD with the bass cranked up too high for the speakers.

The man feels he's intruding but the driver smiles and gets into the driver’s seat and opens the passenger door. The car reeks of palm-oil commingled with something else he can’t quite place.

The smell threatens to reprise his nausea.

He traps it and seals it in a pressurised jar labelled unmentionable fetors.

Then he tells the cabbie to take him to Stepney Green and the car rolls away.

Holloway Road, Upper Street, The Angel, Old Street Underground, some back streets, blank faces in doorways, shuttered-up shop fronts, bagel bakeries, curry houses, back into traffic, turning into Whitechapel Road, past the Blind Beggar, where Ronnie Kray shot Jack Cornel.

Mosque coming up on the right, history, a funeral cortege through Bethnal Green, it’s not a good day, all days are the same here, always that way, days of rain and guys hanging around, waiting for money that nobody has.

A cinema on that vacant lot, Scarface, Al Pacino, romance memories out of nothing and nowhere, movie gangsters, wet kisses and warm breasts cupped in anxious hands beneath a loose blouse, fantasies in the dark on summer afternoons collapsing into reality on the fetid streets like flowers on a bamboo blade. Stepney Green Underground.

London is a city of stations, each one at the centre of a small village. The east end. Decay is everywhere, it’s in the air they breathe and it stinks.

The Ocean Estate begins on the eastern corner of the intersection of the Mile End Road and Whitehorse Lane, just across the street from the station, its outer wall a phantom grey colossus ten levels high with windows so small you don’t realise they’re there at all until you cross the street.

A worn grass verge and some rusting, latticed metal fencing protects the sidewalk from it, forty years of keeping the dogs off the highway.

He takes a dive into the Global lounge. It’s changed, used to be a spit and sawdust pit, now it’s gone all continental bar, with video screens and an espresso machine. He orders a large Irish and it’s gone quicker than he can pay for it and collect his change.
_____________________________________


The phone rings. I put the razor back on the shelf and rinse the lather from my face.

The phone keeps ringing.

Slowly I dry myself. Then I squeeze some after shave moisturising balm into the palm of my hand, just the right amount, not too much, and apply it carefully to my face and neck, massaging it well into the fading scar.

The phone keeps ringing.

I step out of the bathroom and approach it slowly, like a man stalking a tiger that he hopes to hell will turn and run. I pick up the receiver.

‘Mr Hilltown?’

I’m unsure at first how to answer. Mr Hilltown? Is it a question? Or is the voice telling me or asking me who I am or demanding that I should summon Mr Hilltown to the telephone if I’m not him?

‘Mr Hiltown?’

I’m paralysed. I don’t know how to respond to the voice, the sound, the question, request, demand or whatever it is.

Whatever else is in doubt, the one thing I am searingly sure of is that I have lost my ability to separate what is real from what is imaginary or counterfeit.

And I have no idea how I got that scar.

‘Hello, Mr Hilltown? Are you there, sir?'

As a boy I am small, I remember that, and I remember our house and my father’s special room with its terra-cotta walls and the paintings and I remember feeling instinctively that humans are incidental there, that it does not exist for them but for the others, the people in the paintings: the cobbler in his scarlet fez, the veiled women haggling with a rug seller in the souk, kif smokers drowsing at their pipes, the beautiful dark haired girl gazing out from the cliffs high above the beach at Merkala, I remember them all in searing detail but I can’t remember how I got that scar and I can’t remember how to respond to my own name.

Fakirs and snake-charmers and holy men, all that remains of my father is in that house, it’s a shrine to him, a vault for his treasures. A prison for his seed?

‘Mr Hiltown?’

‘Yes?’ at last I manage to say, a single word that betrays me.

‘Ah, good morning, sir, your driver, a Mr Silverstein?' Pause. I say nothing. 'He’s waiting for you in the lobby.’

I remember Ted Silverstein.