Where was her father? He had left the Mayflower and hadn't returned, and that was all that anyone seemed to know. On the advice of her mother's lawyers, she had hired private investigators, who had interviewed cabdrivers, but the city seemed to have acquired a very specific amnesia with regard to Wingrove Pollard, a man gone so thoroughly and quietly missing that it might be impossible to prove him dead.
The dead, her mother had forever been fond of saying, remember. Remember what? Cayce had never wanted to ask.
"Are you awake?" Damien's stubbled head appearing at the top of the stairs. "We're going out to the Brasserie. You're welcome."
"No," she says, "I'm going to sleep." And desperately hopes it's
- /
Sleep takes her down fast, and very deep, whirls her through places too fragmentary to call dreams, then spits her abruptly back to the surface. To lie there in the dark, heart thumping, eyes wide.
By the light in her watch she sees that she's been asleep for no more than forty-five minutes.
The flat below is silent. She remembers they've gone to the Brasserie, a restaurant in Camden High Street, Damien's favorite.
She gets up, pulls on jeans and sweater, and hobbles barefoot down the narrow stair, moving as she imagines she might move if she lived to be eighty. This is beyond soul-delay metaphors, now; it's into physical collapse.
Glancing into Damien's bedroom, she sees that Marina's luggage is the Louis Vuitton stuff with the repeating monograms, the real and loathsome thing, to which she is intensely allergic. Two very new suitcases are open, spilling what she takes to be black Prada exclusively. On the twisted sheets, the silver oven-mitt comforter tossed aside on the floor, she sees a crumpled military garment in a camouflage pattern that she seems to recall is called tarn—information garnered during her time in the skateboard-clothing industry. She knows most of the patterns, and even that the most beautiful is South African, smoky mauve-toned Expressionist streaks suggesting a sunset landscape of great and alien beauty. Is tarn German camouflage, or Russian? English? She can't remember. It means something else as well. A Poe word. Dead lakes?
In the bathroom she avoids looking at herself altogether, fearing what might seem to be revealed at this level of serotonin-lack. Showers quickly, towels, puts her clothes back on, spreads the used towel neatly on the rack (Marina is clearly a pig) and wrinkles her nose at the number of expensive cosmetic products spread around Damien's sink. But here, she discovers, spotting a bit of non-beauty packaging, is a bottle of fine California melatonin, a prescription drug in the UK but not in America. She helps herself to half a dozen of the large beige gelatin capsules, washing them down with weirdly flavored London tap water, and creeps back upstairs, desperately pretending that she's someone very tired (which she supposes she is) who is about to fall deeply and soundly asleep (which she very much doubts she will).
But she does, to her subsequent amazement: a shallow but mercifully uninhabited sleep, though with a certain sense of sound and fury walled off behind the neurological dryer lint of the melatonin.
SHE opens her eyes and sees Damien's head there again, at the top of the stairs. He's wearing that tarn jacket, buttoned to the neck. "Sorry. Just checking. Didn't mean to wake you," he says, almost a whisper.
She looks at her watch. It's seven in the morning. "No," she says, "this is good. I'm awake."
"Marina's not. She'll sleep in. If we're quiet, we can go out without waking her, have coffee and a talk."
"Five minutes."
His head disappears.
Flecktarn. That's what it's called. Like chocolate chip* sprinkled on confetti the color of last autumn's leaves.
YOU pay more, here, to sit with your coffee. Take-away is less expensive. They probably do that in Tokyo, too, but she hadn't noticed.
It's raining, and Damien's worn a black hooded sweatshirt under his flecktarn. He keeps the hood up, here, seated in the back of this Starbucks clone, and she's glad of that, as his stubbled scalp disorients her. She's always known him as someone with a shoulder-brushing, center-parted shoe-gazer anti-haircut.
It feels like old times, to sit here with him, diagonally opposite Cam-den Town station, wearing damp clothing and nursing large multi-shot lattes.
"What about your father?" he asks, brown eyes peering from beneath the black cotton cowl.
"No sign. My mother's in Hawaii, picking up messages from him on dead-air sections of audiotape, so she's convinced he's gone." This sounds odd even to her, but how do you say these things?
"Fucking hell," he says, with such evident and simple sympathy that she feels like hugging him. "That must be horrible."
She nods. Sips from the tall paper cup. "Problems with the insurance, but that's probably just a matter of time."
"But you think he's dead?"
