Scared to Live

‘Ah, I bent the truth a little. He was actually a Romanian. But, you see, at that time there was an organized fraud in operation. One person submitted seventy identical business plans to support visa applications from Bulgarian individuals. They made a mockery of your entry control procedures, Diane.’

‘So you’re saying that pretty much anybody could have come into this country?’

Kotsev shrugged. ‘If they could afford it. Yes, it was easy to beat British immigration controls. But this was expensive for a Bulgarian worker. Fraudulent papers might cost up to three thousand pounds. It’s funny, you know — that was about the same amount of money that many British people were spending at that time on buying up cheap homes in my country, to spend a summer month by the Black Sea. Would you consider that irony, Diane?’

‘Yes, that’s irony, Georgi.’

Their feet echoed on the bridge. Fry had been thinking that she’d welcome the lights and the sight of people in the street. But instead she felt suddenly reluctant to leave the darkness and the quietness of the river. She stopped halfway across the bridge and leaned on the parapet. Kotsev came to stand next to her, sharing that mysterious attraction to water.

‘You understand, the process for applying for a visa as a self-employed person became a very nice loophole,’ he said. ‘But there always had to be an invitation of some kind. There were plenty of people who wanted to bend the rules, but they needed a partner in Britain. An individual in your country could set up a company, offer a Bulgarian worker a job, and then look the other way when he slipped off — in exchange for cash, of course. You see, the corruption and greed is not all in Bulgaria.’

‘There must have been risks, though.’

‘Any risks were worth taking. You try to get a hundred individuals into the country and succeed only with forty? You’ve still made a hundred thousand pounds. That’s a great many stotinki for a Bulgarian.’

‘This all blew up into a scandal a couple of years ago, didn’t it? I remember the immigration minister having to resign, and visa applications from Bulgaria were suspended. But it was too late by then, I suppose?’

‘Indeed. Too late.’

‘The words “horse”, “stable door” and “bolted” come to mind.’

‘Now you’re making as much sense as my one-legged roofer.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Kotsev smiled at her, his eyes crinkling again. ‘You appreciate, there is a lot of information I do not have myself. But I’m sharing with you what I know — because I think we understand each other.’

Any answer would have felt awkward, so a moment of silence developed. For a few seconds, it was just the two of them, surrounded by darkness and silence, gazing into the water. Fry looked down at their hands, hers and Georgi’s. They were so close on the rail that they were almost touching. She felt as if she was an inch away from something unexpected, a contact she could so easily reach out for, and hold on to.

Then a young couple appeared on the opposite bank and began to walk slowly across the bridge. Kotsev moved back from the parapet when he heard the footsteps. He brushed against her as he turned, and Fry caught a whiff of his scent when he touched her. She inhaled instinctively, trying to read some elusive meaning in a smell.

‘Kalina Tet-a-tet,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s Russian.’

Fry met his gaze for a moment, wondering how he’d known what she was thinking.

Cooper retrieved his beer and switched on the TV. But the film had already started, and it didn’t look quite so interesting after all. In fact, he thought he’d probably seen it before, and just forgotten the title. So he disentangled himself from the cat and picked up his phone again. He dialled a number from his phone book.

‘Hi, it’s me. What are you doing?’

And immediately it was as if he’d been sucked into some kind of time slip. Time went by without him being aware of it, because he was in a world when time didn’t really exist. When he next looked at his watch, the call seemed to have lasted for nearly an hour. He’d finished his beer, walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and come back with another bottle, all without breaking concentration. It was a miracle the way the mind could focus on the important things.

‘Better go. Are you on duty tomorrow …? I’ll see you, then.’

Finishing the call, he decided to go to bed early. But he lay awake for a while with the cat lying on his duvet, purring like a mobile generator. He always thought a feline in the bedroom was appropriate, in a way. A cat was the Celtic equivalent to the dog Cerberus — the guardian at the entrance to the Underworld. Randy could watch over him as he slipped across the vulnerable threshold between waking and sleep.

Tonight, his brain was already wandering out of his control, following its own path. He was remembering random incidents from his past when reality might have been different from what he’d perceived. There had been moments, of course. There’d been times when he thought he saw things that didn’t exist, when he’d woken to a voice in the night and realized it was only a dream. There had been entire periods of his life when everything had been dark and twisted, and out of proportion. As a teenager, his whole world had seemed out of kilter. But you could only recognize that later, couldn’t you? Reality was a matter of perspective.

Finally, he drifted to sleep recalling how many times his mother had spoken to him when he knew she wasn’t there. He could hear her voice plainly, even now. It was a reality he couldn’t deny, a truth that defied logic. It was a sound snatched from the past, and trapped inside his head.

Four hours later, Cooper woke in a panic. He felt as though he couldn’t move. A great weight was pressing on his chest, pinning him to the bed. He knew he was in that indefinable place between sleeping and waking, and he wanted to cry out, but he couldn’t make his lungs work. Somewhere nearby a voice was speaking to him, but it was mumbling too indistinctly for him to hear the message.

And then suddenly he broke through a barrier, and shot upright in bed with a wordless shout. Randy flew off his chest, a resentful yowl filling the bedroom.

Cooper found he was sweating, and his heart was thumping. There was a burning pain in his arm, too. Was this what it was like when you had a heart attack? Should he phone for an ambulance, or wait and see what happened? He was only thirty, too young to die of heart failure.

It took him a few minutes to calm down. When he was breathing more slowly, he put on the light and checked his arm. He discovered it was covered with little claw marks, where the cat had been mauling him during the night. If the skin was broken, the scratches would get infected. A cat’s claws were never entirely clean.

The mumbling he’d heard might have been the cat, too. Or it might have been the rain he could hear hitting the roof of the conservatory. It must have started while he was asleep.

Half an hour later, the rain eased off, and finally stopped. By then, Cooper was sitting in his kitchen with a cup of coffee on the table, waiting for the light to seep through the windows.

It was barely dark when he got the call. ‘You knowwhat you have to do, Johnny. It’s time.’

He didn’t need to ask any questions. He recognizedthe voice straightaway, and he knew the instruction wassomething he had to act on. And he had to do it now.‘Yes, it’s time. It’s time.’

There had been a train of thought in his mind thathe couldn’t quite grasp. Too many distractions and distortions,that was the trouble. At moments, he almost gota clear view of some mental will-o’-the-wisp that oughtto be followed and interpreted. His thoughts wereconnected, but the connections were slippery, so theyescaped his groping fingers. At other times, he knew theillusion of meaningfulness was just that — an illusion.It was like a blurred or shifting picture puzzle. Thecontent seemed to change the more you tried to defineit, or get it into focus.

Someone had explained it to him once. They said thatincoherence resulted from a loosening of associations, adysfunction at the neuro-cognitive level. He had no ideawhy he should remember that, when he couldn’t recallthings that had happened the day before. Especiallywhen he didn’t understand some of the words that wereused.

Or perhaps that was the reason — he rememberedbecause he didn’t understand. Yes, that could be it. Therewas no solid meaning in the words to escape him. Nosoft, slippery undertones, no blurry significance. Onlyletters and sounds, and nothing else. Like bare earth,with no life in it. No humanity or feeling behind thewords to confuse him. No voices at all, only noise.

But it was a voice that had distracted him again. Hehad no idea what he’d been thinking about