He caught sight of his profile in the glass doors, and didn’t like what he saw. At thirty-seven, his boyish looks were going; he had to face the fact that he was starting to look too used-up for romantic leads. His eyes had bagged; his jowls had sagged. He looked tired all the time. He made the tactical error of appearing in a Conservative party broadcast advocating the rights of fox hunters, and lost his remaining student fans overnight. Then came the drunk-driving ban, and the unsuccessful spell in rehab. He gained a reputation as the tabloids’ favourite drunk.
Now he hated his former fan base, never more than when they shouted “Oi, Garfy!” across busy streets, or bellowed his catchphrases as he alighted from cabs. With the grim predictability of a star on the downslope, he punched a photographer outside Stringfellow’s, and was filmed intoxicated and crying in the Met Bar. Knowing that it was a small step from here to playing villains in seaside pantomimes, he reinvented himself again. He became a bornagain Christian, went to Capetown for a face-lift, and hosted a morning cable show that picked up a surprisingly loyal following. His ghostwritten book
As he pressed the entry buzzer beside the glassed doorway in St John Street, Clerkenwell, he considered the thought of another makeover. He needed to choose a charity, one with a high profile, preferably involving children. His agent could do all the sourcing. He’d agree to sign over a percentage of royalties, attend some photoops, perhaps even adopt a Romanian orphan so that teenagers could see he was sincere. They were the audience that counted; they had the buying power that excited sponsors. Hell, at least it was a game plan.
At his back, the swollen pale green sky prepared to release expectorations of rain. He cupped his hands over the glass and tried to see inside, then checked the address on his printout. The offer of the radio voice-over had come to him directly at his home computer, bypassing his agent, the message merely specifying the time and place. He would have binned the request, but it was for a teen magazine and he couldn’t afford to pass up the chance.
He cupped his hands again – no-one in the foyer, all lights out; it felt like the wrong address, except that the number was stencilled above the door in chrome. He tried the handle, and was surprised to find the door unlocked. As he entered, hard neon fuzzed on overhead. He noted the sign pinned on the deserted steel reception desk –
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Anthony Sarne swam with the same languor he possessed out of the water, his tanned arms lifting and falling through the warm blue shadows. He was most contented like this, on his own in the calm evening gloom. Rolling onto his back, he studied the glass roof as he lazily drifted beneath it. He had swum thirty lengths of the tiled Victorian pool; now he could relax in the last few minutes before dressing and going to dinner.
The tight-fitting plastic goggles dyed his cool green world. Chlorine affected his vision adversely. More than ever he found himself wearing shaded lenses of some kind; his eyes were increasingly sensitive to light. He was forty-eight and in good shape, happy with his body, vain about his ability to maintain a flat stomach. He still had his pick of the girls, and his current mistress, an astonishingly athletic nineteen-year-old from Korea, watched him with a possessiveness that made his enemies hate him even more. His wife pretended everything was fine, of course, and rarely came up to town anymore.
At this time of the night there were usually a few lane-ploughing high-flyers left at the Oasis Swimming Pool in Holborn, but tonight they had showered and dressed, to disperse from the city, where they could hone their aggressive business techniques on their loved ones. One other swimmer remained, a boy with cropped black hair and defined musculature, seated motionless on the edge of the deep end. He leaned back, staring into the sharp mesh of light that filtered from an arabesque of glass bricks set in the side wall. Above the diving board, buttresses of bright light from the overhead neon splintered the refracting depths.
Sarne’s feet reached down and touched the sloping floor of the pool. Standing very still, he allowed the water to settle. The boy rose from the poolside and padded away to the changing rooms.
Now there was nothing to keep him in the water. Lately, to his consternation, he had begun swimming almost every other evening. It had taken him a few months to understand that he was not drawn here by the determination to get fit, but by the thought of boys in their swimming trunks. This sea change in his sexuality was unexpected and unwelcome. He was revolted by the surfacing of this secret objective, but found himself helplessly returning to the baths.
The boy had gone. The water stilled and fell silent. It was time for him to exit the pool and dress. The sense of excitement he had briefly shared with his swimming companion faded away as he rose from the chlorinated water.
The shower was capricious. He had learned by now to hammer the temperature dial with the heel of his hand. The baths had individual booths, but only low tiled walls separated them. He had covetously watched young men soaping themselves from here, prepared to take the risk of someone spotting his sidelong glances. Ashamed by his desires, he knew he deserved to be caught. He thumped the dial and water began to flow. Overhead, rain started to course down the glass panels of the roof. The nearby laser lights in Oxford Street designed to fanfare London’s Olympic bid traced Mobius patterns across low yellow clouds. The sensuality of warm shower water unlaced his thoughts, and his mind drifted.
It snapped back into focus when he saw a cloaked figure in a tricorn hat outlined against the roof glass, illuminated by the reflecting water.
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Paradine alighted at the fourth floor and found himself in a nondescript corridor, dimly lit and decorated in the grey gloss paint and smoked-pink pastels of buildings constructed in the late eighties. He wondered if the whiskies he had consumed half an hour earlier would reveal themselves in his voice. Following the hand-printed signs to the studio, he struggled to imagine who would use such a place – a local radio station, perhaps? Columns of mortar- crusted bricks leaned against the wall to his right. Bare wires hung down from a pair of missing ceiling panels like the roots of forced plants. As he followed the paper arrows, Paradine grew more suspicious.
His suspicion turned to amazement when he saw the leather-clad figure – was he a motorcycle courier? – leaning in shadows against the end of the corridor, motionlessly watching him.
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Absurd. He had to be imagining things. Could his alcoholism have advanced to the stage of hallucination so quickly? Before Anthony Sarne had a chance to think through the answer, the cloak above swept open to reveal a blood-scarlet lining, and a steel-shod boot heel stamped on the glass above the swimming pool, sending sharpness through the still air. Some kind of ridiculous film stunt, he thought vaguely, wondering if hidden cameras were capturing the event. Or a reveller in fancy dress, a drunken fugitive from an office party about to make the kind of mistake that would get him arrested. But the figure was already pounding away across the skylight, and the shower water was turning cold – colder still and reeking – and he glanced up at the battered steel nozzle to be blinded by something that seared his eyes, and he recognised the smell even as its greasy viscosity caused him to slip and land on the tiled floor of the shower stall with a bony crack.
It seemed as absurd as the vision overhead, but the shower nozzle was spraying him with petrol.
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The courier raised a gloved hand and beckoned as Alex Paradine kept walking forward. The caped figure was almost a welcome sight, an indication that someone else here was prepared to risk making a fool of himself. A smile showed beneath his eye mask: a Mardi Gras carnival character, got up as a night rider, but for what purpose? His beckoning right hand slowed and raised itself, so that the black palm showed – the universal symbol to halt – and Paradine found himself responding. Now the index finger alone was raised, and the rider twisted his fist, pointing down to the floor. He followed the courier’s indication with his eyes, and felt the carpet tiles shift ominously beneath his feet.
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Sarne tried to rise, but petrol was flooding across the floor of the booth, and his bare legs were slipping as
