Connery (Part 15)

A Speculative Novel

Do we reveal ourselves as much by our omissions as our admissions? If so, I am aware that I have said very little about what many are obsessed by; what everyone would term a private life. That is a romantic or sexual life. There’s a reason for this. I don’t really consider it my private life. My private life, the internal space wherein I keep what I consider to be the authentic nugatory me, the ‘real’ Samuel Coleridge – the homunculus of my inside life: it was occupied with other things: intimate, certainly, physical and bodily, without doubt, but not sexual. Not in the common way of speaking. That fraud Freud has convinced everyone that we’re always thinking about sex and whatever we do is motivated by sex. Although that begs the obvious question: so, what do we think about when we’re having sex? Murder I imagine.

I will readily admit to a certain prudishness and so you’ll forgive me, I’m sure, if we don’t go into this too deeply. Whenever I watched movies with my mum and dad at home or at the cinema, I always had a basic yuck reflex whenever there was a sex scene or even if a couple started kissing. Could I just note, as well, how disgusting kissing actually is? The mouths we use to eat, to speak, to breathe and then this operation, tongues and saliva and all that old food. Gums, teeth, plaque, cavities, fillings, dental work and that pink fleshy gristle that makes up the inside of the mouth. All of that pressed together, comingled, mutual decay and halitosis cross infected. And the story stops while this goes on and we’re supposed to care. In old back and white films, they would mush their faces together and the hero’s jawline would concertina with wrinkles and folds as they both moved their faces in small semi-circular motions. Mum didn’t like the way Clint Eastwood kissed.

‘All slobber,’ she said.

And there were other actors who were criticised for their poor technique. Sean Connery smushed his face against his various Bond girls and conquests. When he told Barbara Walters that he approved of slapping women, my mother said, ‘You can tell he’s a wifebeater from the way he mushes his face into them.’

Dad said he wasn’t a wifebeater, he just said that when women talk too much, they deserved a slap. ‘He was very clear: he didn’t mean a punch.’

When Taylor told him he was talking nonsense, he slapped her and then punched her.

‘Can you tell the difference?’ he said.

When kissing was happening in a movie, I wanted to look away, to another part of the room or another part of the screen and just wait until it was over. Like the songs and dances in the musical which you just want them to get on with so that the story can begin again. The temptation that I imagine you are not resisting is to read in this new admission some deeper admission which I’m not making. This was Freud’s other great contribution to the world of bad ideas. Repression. That when I talk about disgust and distaste you read it as a repressed predilection for another kind of sexuality. I would be seen as being disgusted with heterosexual sex because I wanted to kiss Clint Eastwood, slobber and all.

Believe me, you are not the first to think about it. I’m sure mum and dad had their moments of doubt and questioning, and yes, homophobes that they were they would have been horrified. I myself was brought up a homophobe, in the way I was always brought up as a sexist and racist. I’ve already said how the word ‘gay’ was everywhere and how it always had negative connotations. I had been curious if my lack of interest in women would extend to men. When I first got to University in Manchester, there were gay nightclubs that were easy to go along to without fear of being called out or beaten up. Without too much fear at least. So, I tried one night. I tried going and dancing and kissing a man and it moved me as little as my experiments with girls had. I felt a curiosity at times. When you feel another man’s penis hardening against your leg, it’s a curious sensation, but that was more or less it. I could do it. And I did do it. But I don’t think it brought me much satisfaction. I will confess I was slightly disappointed by this. If I had been gay, or at least more enthusiastically capable of sex with men than with women, it struck me that that would have been ideal. Men are easier to understand, me being one of them, and companionship would have been a bonus. Plus, all the lacks of my life would now have a set of pegs to thrust into the gaps. A choice of recognisable personalities was available and as far as the oppression was concerned that came with the bonus of grievance and solidarity. Identity in a word.

But none of this is to say that I didn’t have interpersonal relationships of one sort or another throughout the first three decades of my life. I definitely did. But they rarely rose above the level of a credible cover story. There was a girl from school called Mabel who I lost my virginity to. There was my girlfriend – Carolyn I want to say – who I was with at the time I went to Paris. Then the professor in Comparative Literature at Manchester University, who I believe I mentioned, which lasted a few weeks, or perhaps months.

When I was in the army, I made a point of going to the bars where the squaddies would often pick up working girls. That is prostitutes. Whores. I always thought it was funny that the word whore was used to describe prostitutes but also women who were seen as having an unbound sexual appetite. A girl who would do it with anybody. It was like a dirty mirror. It was the men who would do it with anybody. If you wanted a woman who would do it with anybody, then you had to pay her. Which meant she was doing it but didn’t really have the appetite for it. Needless to say, I didn’t voice this idea.

For me, whores were an easy way out. In my experience, prostitutes are used to men who pay for their services and then just asked to be cuddled or to talk with. The girls treat it as a bonus job. I had some real affection from Tiffany. My word, could she talk? And with absolutely zero invitation to. I laid back on the too-smelly bed, the room a fug of carpet shampoo, mothballs and cigarette smoke, and marvelled as she went into a fifty-minute monologue. I was happy to come back and pay for more sessions just to hear what was happening next in her ever so uneventful and yet eventful life.

While I was in America, I had a long relationship with a fitness fanatic called Jill Pentone – I mentioned her but didn’t tell you her name earlier – and we would go on runs together, go climbing and hiking and then have some sweaty sex. Wrapped in that context it was easy enough to do. Just another piece of strenuous exercise, a shower afterwards and we could towel off and go and watch a film or eat somewhere nice. She was very companionable. She also hated kissing but gave me pointers on my performance as if she was commenting on my backswing. Which in a sense she was. She had as little to say as I did about emotions and stuff and was as little in need of a proper relationship as I was. Neither of us said they loved the other and that was fine. No maybe I lie. Maybe we did say it now that I think back. But I’m absolutely sure we said it with the same emotional heft as saying hello and goodbye. I think I mentioned Jill earlier, but I never named her and that is the importance she had as an individual, rather than as a person shaped place holder, in my life. I spoke about her with Dr. Habbermas but that was because I wanted her to get off my back about being asexual. I didn’t bother with Dr. Havelock because she frankly didn’t seem that interested.

When I got back to London from the States after Bart Kirkby got himself killed, it was a few weeks later that I realized I hadn’t told Jill I was returning to England and there was an exchange of baffled emails, but even then, she wasn’t particularly angry. Just disappointed. She just felt I had been a bit rude. Lacking in class. If I’d stayed in the US, I might well have married Jill; we were so emotionally compatible. Also, while in America, I had gone out with Angela, Kirkby’s assistant, but I had filed that under a work relationship and so it had no impact on my emotional life or my relationship with Jill. Angela knew I was in a relationship with Jill, though the two – obviously – never met. It was what people call a fling. I like that word. Something you throw into the air carelessly, not sure if you or anyone is going to catch it.

Back in England, I also went out with Sasha, the woman from work who called me out as a ‘psycho’ during the team building retreat in Wales for over a year. I had met her parents and she wanted marriage to happen, of this I was pretty certain. It took some manoeuvring and in this I was helped that Sasha had a carnal appetite inversely proportionate to mine. She cheated on me with conscientious regularity and we could’ve gone on longer if she hadn’t demanded that we go through scenes of confession, guilt, weeping, anger, counteraccusations of coldness and distance, culminating in reconciliation and nights of athletic sex. Ultimately, I couldn’t play the aggrieved boyfriend much longer. As far as I was concerned, the infidelities left me off the hook, but Sasha was stymied by her stubborn belief in the perfectibility of mankind in general – and me in particular – and though she was a great tennis partner and a smart and funny companion with a throaty laugh I loved listening to, she was too much work and I didn’t really need a wife. I just needed some ongoing story. Someone else that my co-workers and friends could refer to. We broke up and blamed it on the travel and by that point I was in the middle of my courier job which was proving so busy. Incidentally, Sasha was convinced that I was being unfaithful to her all the time that I was away. Taking every opportunity to have sex with all manner of strange, and so returning to her exhausted, guilt-ridden and unloving. We know others through ourselves, I suppose.

Jennifer was – despite this history or perhaps because of it – the first serious relationship I had ever embarked on. She was clever and idiosyncratic, perverse in some ways, astonishingly conventional in others. She enjoyed cigarettes, food, lipstick, her own body and a certain application of power which involved putting people in their place, even if that place was a little further down than they habitually saw themselves. She really liked lipstick. I’ve never seen her without it. Her hair always looked good. She always wore the right clothes. Smart and elegant. Buttoned down and zipped up and never looking uncomfortable. She enjoyed cruel jokes; loved descriptions of other people that would have appalled them; savoured betrayal. When she heard there was some terrible news she said ‘goody’. She was someone who felt out the limits of her own freedom by always pushing and sometimes by quick sudden and daring leaps

Like the evening we met, when I stepped into the corridor to get my coat – it was hung in a kind of walk-in wardrobe – and everyone was passing down the stairs, including her fiancé, whatshisname, and she came in after me and grabbed my head and mashed her face against mine. And as she did, I could see the door she had tried to close begin to swing open behind her. All he had to do was turn his head and we would have been discovered and she knew that. She had done it carelessly and with a good chance of discovery. She let go of the handful of hair she had almost torn from my scalp.

‘Wipe your mouth,’ she told me. Then she put her palm of her hand in my face and pushed me backwards.

I had expected a further interview with Mr. Arrow, but it didn’t happen. In the newspaper the next day, I read about the murder of a famous journalist as I ate a brioche and an espresso. There was to be a scandal. He was a famous investigative reporter whose stories had angered the Mafia to such an extent that he was supposed to be under police escort. His other work included exposés of the underhand dealings of the Italian secret service, connections between the higher echelons and certain figures of organised crime. I read deeply, understanding most of it via my Spanish and French. I began to piece together why Mr. Arrow had wanted him dead, but if I am honest, now knowing Mr. Arrow to a much more intimate extent, I honestly believe that Luigi Santini’s fatal mistake had been his choice of colourful trousers.

On returning to London, I received several messages. One was from Jennifer. She would be in London in a couple of weeks and wanted to meet up. At first, I considered ignoring the message, or brushing her off with some polite flimflam, but then I wondered if perhaps she was a courier, a cut out for Mr. Arrow, and so I made some vague promises in the usual overblown language of casual friendship. Yes, that would be wonderful. I’d be delighted. How marvellous etc. etc. It made sense that Mr. Arrow wanted to approach me at an angle, but it was also frustrating. Add to this work was becoming intolerable. It was as if I was being assigned with punitively tedious tasks. Though the tedium was no doubt exaggerated by the fact that I had just returned from an assignment that involved killing a man. And I did start thinking of it as a mission, albeit a training mission. It taught me something very valuable. I had moved further and further away from earlier obsession with meticulous preparation and planning, but on those occasions, it had either been an accident – in the case of Kirkby – or some sort of justifiable risk – thinking once more about the young woman in Johannesburg. Here, there had been method to the madness. The challenge had been to kill someone quickly and with a high risk involved. There was an invigorating directness to the murder. It showed how much could be done if one walked in a straight line without looking right or left and acted without hesitation or tremor. I fancied that perhaps there had been an intended lesson here as well as the obvious test of nerve and skill and devotion. A deeper point about the operation of the universe. The strangest thing is that it never occurred to me until I was back at the airport watching an unfortunate passenger before me trying to squeeze his backpack into the small cage provided by the budget airline to prove it was within their arbitrarily strict baggage policy and failing, that I of course could have simply refused. I mean that was an option. And yet it wasn’t’ an option. I hadn’t even considered it for a second. Mr. Arrow had pulled a lever and I had gone down the chute sliding happily towards murder, shouting ‘weeeeeeeeee’. It could just as easily have landed in a tank full of piranhas. He could have wanted me dead. I could have assassinated myself just as easily. If the police escort had been a bit more alert – after all it was their job and they were armed – I could have been shot down during the commission of the crime or immediately subsequent to it.  

I met Ollie at his dreadful club – I keep trying to remember the name of it but the dullness of the place works almost like a general anaesthetic for the memory, no doubt a defence mechanism – and we had an evening where I watched him get drunker than I’ve ever seen him before. Towards the end he was dribbling, incoherent and reeking fumes of alcohol that had the weight of the flammable to them. I longed for the old days of the pubs and the gangsters. The more libidinous Ollie who relished the crafty deal and the hunt. He was becoming more successful in the Service and as he was our circles were becoming disentangled, like those metal rings amateur magicians use. But then again, I felt that I was becoming more successful in the Service underneath the Service. He was the corporate face of the Service. He mastered PowerPoint and conference calls, the buzzwords and the presentation full of self-deprecation and bold humour. ‘How on Earth does he get away with it?’ resentful elders would ask. But they missed the point. He wasn’t creating his own momentum he was riding a wave the fetch of which began at the time of the robber barons.

I was rising too. In the underneath Service. The service behind the Service. The real secret Service. The things we weren’t supposed to do, I did. The uglier more exciting side. And as such my actual role became gratingly incoherent. Heaps of reports to write, data to crunch and endless courses to attend. Some of these courses were online, some were deep in the Yorkshire or Scottish or Welsh countryside, but most were in airless conference rooms with an overweight woman and a bald man with a beard taking turns to write on white boards with different coloured markers as they referred incompetently to their photocopied notes. In the meantime, I resumed my running, my work outs at the gym, my swimming when I had time and my yoga. I went to the range and picked up my target statistics. I took another couple of jumps from a private flying company that usually organised jumps for birthdays and such. I also took Italian lessons and continued to read novels in French, German and Spanish so that they wouldn’t go rusty. As I’ve already said, I’d also go and see foreign films whenever possible and close my eyes to avoid the subtitles.

I took Jennifer to one of these when she did turn up, disappointingly with no message from Mr. Arrow and a look of obvious lust shining in her eyes. She was curious that I wanted to see the Spanish movie but seemed happy enough with the suggestion. Once the lights were out and the film started, I closed my eyes the better to concentrate only to feel almost immediately Jennifer undoing my trouser front and with deft confidence kneading and manipulating me into a state of erection before pulling me noiselessly to orgasm and then cleaning me with wipes that stank of hand sanitizer. I muttered a quick thank you, at a loss what else to do and hoped the film would get better. (It wasn’t one of Almodóvar’s best.) About forty minutes went by before I felt Jennifer’s fingers at it again and the whole process was repeated, although for obvious reasons of depletion, it took me longer to reach the agreed upon point when everything is considered done. This also caused someone to notice that something was up, although precisely what hopefully wasn’t apparent and there was some polite South Bank shushing.

We went to a noodle restaurant afterwards – ‘If you’re not too tired’ she said – where they greeted you at the door and asked if this was your first time and then gave a rundown of how the place operated which was unsurprisingly exactly how you imagined a noodle restaurant operated: you ordered noodles and the waiter brought them, and then you paid and left. Jennifer went to wash her hands and I ordered for both of us. When she came back her lipstick was freshly applied: ‘I don’t do blowjobs,’ she said. ‘And I keep a strict tally of orgasms, so you already owe me two.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘Don’t fret,’ she said. ‘There’s no time limit. But I might show up and demand them somewhere inappropriate, so you’d be well advised to keep solvent.’ 

‘I…’

‘Yes.’

The food arrived and we ate. She asked me what I thought of the crowd at her uncle’s and this is when I learned of her pleasure in waspish, acidic vignettes. The paedophile psychiatrist who only married his wife because he misunderstood what it was a paediatrician did. The Countess with the bulging eyes of a strangulation victim who got her pleasure from servicing truck drivers at a motor grill outside of Mantua. Her own fiancé whose ability to mispronounce words was only matched by his confidence in using them all the time. I tried to keep her entertained, matching her commentary with tart observations of my own, but she was looking over my shoulder for much of the meal. Still, when she did turn that attention on you, it could almost knock you off your seat. It was like the Martian heat ray in War of the Worlds. There’d be a puff of smoke and your tattered clothes would fall lifelessly to the ground. I don’t think I’ve ever been looked at quite the way when Jennifer looked at me. Of course, I’d been stared at enough and inspected over and over again, minutely even. But with Jennifer she seemed to look both through and into you. She could see past the bland outer disguise and note the cathedral emptiness inside. Drop a stone in your well and count to see how far it fell before she heard the splash. I would learn that her wandering attention was actually a blessing. There was only so long a moth like me could survive under the burning intensity of those blue eyes. She asked me all about work and was soon unpicking my cover story and getting to the things we absolutely weren’t supposed to talk about. As well as common decency, by the end of our first ‘date’, I’d violated the Official Secrets Act at least five different times.

‘Aren’t you supposed to – you know – keep this stuff under wraps?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I rely on your discretion.’

‘Ha!’ she barked. ‘You’re hilarious.’

‘Why don’t you do blowjobs?’

‘You pee out of it,’ she said. ‘I’m not putting that in my mouth. Aren’t you going to ask about my fiancé?’

‘I’ve forgotten his name.’

‘Hector.’

‘That’s it,’ I confirmed usefully. Stupidly.

‘Do you want to come to the wedding?’

‘There isn’t a chance in hell you’re marrying him,’ I said.

‘You think so?’

‘I’d eat my hat,’ I said.

‘Where do you keep your time machine?’ she finished her beer and waggled the empty glass in the air until a waiter came and took an order for another round. At least another beer for her I was still on my first, but she insisted I have another.

‘Time machine?’

‘You must have a time machine that you use to zip back to the 1920s and grab these phrases you use.’

‘I read a lot when I was young.’

‘And you worked a hell of a lot on trying to get rid of that accent.’

‘A little.’

‘A lot. You sound like Bertie Wooster. I bet you used to sound like a coal miner.’

‘Close. I got rid of it at university.’

‘Me too. Finally!’ She took up her fresh beer and drank half off in one go and then beckoned for me to drink up.

Weirdly, I did.

‘Not a drinker, huh?’ she said, patting my bent back as I vomited into the drain.

I waved a finger at her and straightened up and then went back down for the regurgitation version of seconds.

‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘We’ll find something useful for you to do. Vodka paradoxically will sober you up. This is the sort of blue sky thinking that makes me quite the catch in the boardrooms of some major blue-chip companies. Let’s go.’

And so, we did. We went to a cocktail bar which looked over the Thames from several stories up and the Christmas decorations and lights bobbing on the river. And I drank vodka. Why was this woman able to do this to me? She knocked me off balance and she forced me to surrender my will to her. Maybe it was a family trait. Her cousin Ollie – who by the way we never mentioned – had a similar effect on me, but much less dramatic. And her uncle had of course ordered me to commit a murder within moments of us meeting. Now I was drunker than I had ever been in my life, or at least since my first childhood experiments with alcohol, encouraged by my father. But she was right. The vodka cleaned me up like a blast of fire that burns all the oxygen and puts the gentler flames out. Someone was playing Tom Waits on the piano and the Australian barman kept growling out lyrics as and when he remembered them. A man in a business suit read a copy of the Big Issue and three girls who looked way too young were going through the cocktail menu with the apparent intent of trying everything. Every time a round came for them, they all swapped drinks to taste the different flavours and took photographs on their phones.

‘I was born in Berlin,’ Jennifer said. ‘East Berlin to be precise. I don’t remember much. I was seven when the wall came down. Daddy worked for Uncle Tom and killed himself when I was nine. I think it might have had something to do with the Wall coming down. He was compromised, I think. Or maybe just bored. It left him twiddling his thumbs. I was sent to school in Scotland. I spent some time in England but not much. I like Italy and France more. The States I can take or leave. Where do you feel at home?’

‘Home?’ I was still a bit woozy, but the vodka cut through it and that vodka clarity had been further enhanced by the cocaine Jennifer had told me to snort, shoving a vial under my nose, without any attempt to disguise the gesture.

‘It is a moveable concept,’ Jennifer said. ‘You are bright. I’ve been told this and yet I’m struggling to see much beyond a low animal cunning which fortunately is matched by a generously proportioned physique. Uncle likes you and that should count for something though. I am definitely inviting you to the wedding.’

She wanted her orgasms, but she didn’t want penetration. ‘That belongs to my future husband,’ she said. But she would accept cunnilingus.

‘Don’t you pee out of there?’ I asked.

‘It’s worse than that,’ she said. ‘I also bleed.’