Skios

6

Why, though? Oliver Fox asked himself. Why do I do this kind of thing?

His tumbled dishmop of hair was as blond as blanched almonds, his soft eyes as brown and shining as dates. His thoughts, though, were as black as the tumbled black wheelie-bags coming towards him along the carousel. Why? he thought as his eyes jumped from one to the next. Why, why, why? It had seemed so natural to start with. So inevitable, even. But now, with the black bags filing past him like mourners in a funeral procession, he could see that it was going to turn out as badly as all the other adventures he had launched upon so lightly.

Georgie, this one was called. And he scarcely knew her! He’d only ever met her once! And now here he was, on his way to spend a week with her in a villa he’d borrowed from some people he knew even less. Why did he do it?

He’d watched her across the bar for some time, it’s true, over the shoulder of a man he was having a drink with, before he’d introduced himself. He’d also subsequently spent many hours on rather complex detective work to find out who she was and where she lived, on flurries of increasingly frequent messages and phone calls, and on many changes of plan — because her plans depended upon the plans of someone called Patrick, and Patrick’s plans on the plans of the three colleagues from the trading floor he was going yachting with. Now here Oliver was, watching the bags plodding round the carousel, and there Georgie was, waiting for him on the other side of customs, if the plane had arrived on time from wherever it was where she had been seeing Patrick safely out of the way on his yacht. They were going to have to talk to each other for some of the time, and there wouldn’t be anything to talk about. They were going to have to share a bathroom and a lavatory. She was going to find out that he wasn’t as charming as he had seemed for that brief moment in the bar.

So why had he done it? Because he couldn’t help it! It was just another sudden bit of being Oliver Fox. And being Oliver Fox was destroying his life.

As soon as he had seen that the man she was with (Patrick, of course, as he later discovered) was outside on the street, smoking and talking on his phone, and that she was on her own for the length of a cigarette, he had known what he had to do — what he had been born to do — what he was obliged by the laws of God and man to do — what he was going to do. It was stretching out before him as frightening and irresistible as the tightrope before the tightrope walker. Suddenly, once again, the world had darkened, and there was only the narrow spotlit wire above the abyss, the unstable narrow line that had to be walked. And already there he was, just as he had known all his life he would be, sliding his first foot over the dark depths of failure and humiliation, not looking down, his shining eyes fixed on some dim goal he could scarcely see. Already he was slipping into the empty chair beside her …

She was almost as irresistible close up as she had been across the bar, though rather older than he had supposed. But this wasn’t really the point. The point was that the chair beside her was empty, and he had probably only three or four minutes at most before her companion came back to claim it.

What had he said to her? He couldn’t remember. All he could remember was how she had responded. She hadn’t laughed, or ignored him, or told him to get lost. “You’re Oliver Fox,” she’d said.

He had been unable in all honesty to deny it. This was the trouble. He was Oliver Fox. In the kind of circles he moved in, everyone had heard of him even before they met him. Friends of friends — even complete strangers, sometimes — started laughing as soon as they were introduced, waiting for him to be Oliver Fox in front of them. He had tousled blond hair, and soft smiling eyes that fixed on yours, and no one ever had any idea what he was going to do next. Least of all himself. Until suddenly he’d found that something had come into his head, and there he was, doing it already. Whereupon they’d laugh again. Or scream and run for cover, or phone the police.

“Oh, no!” the people he’d met would tend to cry. “This time he’s really gone too far!”

In the baggage hall here, of course, surrounded by fat holidaymakers who had never heard of him, there was no one but himself to be Oliver Fox for. He felt as if he were like the aircraft he had been sitting on for the past five hours, suspended over the void by his own bootstraps, with nothing in his head but the long boring swoosh of nothingness.

So why was he like this? Why wasn’t he doing a job of work like a normal human being? Something where you helped people. On a run-down council estate somewhere. In the third world. There were tens of millions of people in the world out there who needed help. He was too old to go on the way he was. He would change. He would put himself humbly at their service. Train as a doctor, perhaps. Specialize. Become a neurologist. He had always wanted to know how his brain worked, why and how he did what he did. He wasn’t a fool, though — he knew how many years of study and hard work it would take. But he could still do it. He would do it. He would have applied for medical school this very moment, if only he could have found an application form.

Everyone would be astonished. “Oliver Fox?” they’d laugh. “A neurologist? We certainly weren’t expecting that! How absolutely typical!”

On and on the mournful bags processed. Oliver’s eye was caught by the sight of the man beside him, who had his phone in his hand and with his two thumbs was writing a text as long as a doctoral thesis. It reminded him to get his own phone out and switch it back on. Not that there would be any good news.

And no, there wasn’t. The first of the waiting messages was from A. A was Annuka, Annuka Vos, with whom he had borrowed the villa, and who should have been standing here beside him at the carousel if she had not flown into a rage at his coming home with a donkey he had bought off the donkey man in the park, or rather at his proposing to stable it in her flat, whereupon she had found herself abruptly unable to put up a moment longer with his being Oliver Fox, and he had been forced to leave, with nothing but the donkey and a handful of possessions, mostly his, in one of her rather elegant suitcases.

“U wont read this of course,” she wrote, “because u r deaf and blind to everyone except yrself, but…”

He didn’t read it, being deaf and blind at any rate to messages that started like that. He skipped down the list. The next four messages were also from A. Then came one from someone with only a phone number for a name. He couldn’t remember anyone with a name that ended in 0489, but 0489 could evidently remember him.

“I know I am dealing with a moral lunatic,” he (or, more probably, she) began.

But before he had had time to find out what 0489’s grievance was he saw his bag coming towards him. It was easy to spot, because he had had to borrow it from Annuka when he had moved out, and all her luggage had red leather address tags, like staff officers with red tabs on their collars. As he reached out to seize it he saw that the next message was from G. G was Georgie, of course, the woman he was meeting, A’s replacement for the week in the villa. “So sorry missed flight patrick trouble of course next flight is oh buggeration Ive just looked it up not until tomorrow.”

Of course. He could have guessed. The whole adventure had gone off the rails already, before it had even started. He lifted the bag off the carousel and touched her number. “Hi! This is Georgie,” said her number. But it was lying. It wasn’t Georgie — it was a few kilobytes of information stored on a server somewhere that were merely pretending to be her.

So he was going to spend the next twenty-four hours sitting on his own in some dreary villa, which would turn out to have cockroaches and no working sanitation. If, that is, the owners had remembered to arrange the taxi they had promised. Probably they hadn’t. And probably he hadn’t remembered to write down the address anywhere. So he wouldn’t be in a villa at all — he would be stuck here at the airport. Then Georgie would miss the flight again tomorrow, or be unable to get on it. Change her mind, give up, fail to arrive at all.

He should never have come. He should have started his medical studies. He felt a lump in his throat, as if he were eight years old and going back to school again. A whole day — two days — a week — a term — stretching in front of him with no company but the cockroaches and an invisible answering machine with only the same half-dozen words to say for itself.

And himself, the apparently inescapable Oliver Fox. It was funny. Everyone thought it was so wonderful, being Oliver Fox. Everyone but himself.