You see, Tim, Larry is life continued. He will never let me down. He is life made real again, and just to be with him is to be travelling and taking part, because where Tim avoids, Larry engages. And where Tim ...
Signal ends again. Where Tim what? What was left of me to destroy that she hadn't destroyed already? And if Larry was life continued, what was Tim in the gospel according to St. Larry, passed down to us by the disciple Emma? Life discontinued, I supposed. Better known as death. And death, when she found herself living with it, became a bit infectious, presumably—which is why she plucked up the courage to bolt that Sunday morning while I was at church.
But I am not guilty, I thought. I am the deceived, not the deceiver.
* * *
"Make me one person, Tim," she implores me on our first night in Honeybrook. "I've been too many people for too long, Tim. Be my one-man convent, Tim, my Salvation Army. Never let me down."
Larry will never let you down, you simpleton! Larry's going to dump you in the deepest pit you ever saw! That's what he does! Don't preach to me about your love for him! Larry as life? Your sacred feelings? How many times can you be true to your feelings and have any feelings left to be true to? How many times can you consign yourself to the sweet blue sky of eternity, only to come slinking home in the small hours of the morning with your dress torn and two teeth missing?
Yet the protector in me was on full alert, even as the bonds of guilt and ignorance fell away. Every page and every word I read injected me with fresh urgency, spurring me forward in my desire to free her from her latest, greatest folly.
* * *
Emma as artist. Emma as mistress of the Freudian doodle. Emma as the echo of Larry's eternal outcry against a world he can neither join nor destroy. "For us," she has written. A lighthouse is the most charitable description of it. It rises proudly up the centre of the page. It has four slender, tapering walls with windows not unlike my arrow slits. It has a conical tip like a helmet and like other conical tips. On the ground floor she has drawn a soulful cow, on the first floor Larry and Emma are eating out of bowls, on the second they are embracing. And on the top floor, naked as in Paradise, they are keeping watch from opposite windows.
But for when? For what? Now it was Cranmer, her saviour, who scrambled after her, calling Stop! and Wait! and Come back!
* * *
An indignant Larry dissertation, all for Emma, on the origin of the word ingush, which turns out to be a Russian notion, imposed by the invader. Ingush, it seems, is simply the Ingush word for people, as chechen is the Chechen word for people (cf. the Boer colonialists' use of bantu for the black people of Africa). The Ingush word for the people of Ingushetia is evidently Galgai. Larry is incensed by such insensitivity on the part of the Russians, and naturally wishes Emma to share his anger...
* * *
I was reading burned paper.
Sometimes I had to hold it to the light. Sometimes I was obliged to use a magnifying glass or complete a garbled sentence for myself. Paper burns badly, as every spy knows. Print survives, if only white on black. But Emma was no spy, and whatever security precautions she had imagined she was taking, they were not those recommended by the likes of Marjorie Pew. I was reading letters and numbers. Her italic handwriting was clear despite the flames.
25 x MKZ22. . . . . 200 appro
500 x ML7. . . . . . 900
1 x MQ18. . . . . . 50
Against each entry, a tick or cross. And along the bottom of the page the words: Order confirmed by AM, Sept 14, 10.30 a.m., his phone call.
I heard Jamie Pringle: Mathematics not up Larry's street . . . Brighter than Larry by a mile, when it came to numbers. I had a vision of her sitting at the desk in Cambridge Street, her black hair tucked sternly behind her ears and into the collar of her high-necked blouse, while she works out the arithmetic that her musician's brain is good at, and waits for Larry to hurry up the hill from Bristol Temple Meads station after another tiring day at the Lubyanka, darling.
Grand total 4 1/2 approx, I read at the foot of the following page. Her numbers were italic too.
Four and a half whats, damn you? I asked, angry with her at long last. Thousands? Millions? A few of the thirty-seven and rising? Then why did Larry have to sell your jewellery for you? Why did he have to give away his office gratuity?
