Believing the Lie

2 NOVEMBER

BRYANBARROW CUMBRIA

Because of the hour of the day, Zed Benjamin had been able to score a good table at the Willow and Well, and he’d been sitting there for fifty minutes, waiting for something to happen on the other side of a window whose lead mullions were in need of replacement. The cold seeped past them like a visitation of the angel of death, but the benefit of this discomfort was the fact that no one would question the knitted ski cap that Zed was thus able to keep planted on his head. The cap was his bow to making himself less memorable since it fully covered his flame- coloured hair. There was nothing he could do about his extreme height save slouching whenever he remembered to do so.

He was managing just that at his table in the pub. He’d been going from hunching over his pint of lager to slumping in his chair with his legs stretched out till his arse was as numb as the heart of a pimp, but in all the time he’d maintained one posture or another, nothing suggesting that illumination was in the offing had occurred in what he could see of the village of Bryanbarrow just outside of the window.

This was his third day in Cumbria, his third day of searching for the sex that would keep his story on Nicholas Fairclough from being binned by Rodney Aronson, but so far he’d come up with nothing except fifteen lines of a new poem, which, God knew, he wasn’t about to mention to Aronson when the odious editor of The Source made his daily phone call to ask meaningfully how things were going and to remind Zed that whatever costs he was incurring would be his own. As if he didn’t know that already, Zed thought. As if he were not staying in the most modest room in the most modest bed-and-breakfast he could find in the entire region: an attic bedroom in one of the multitudinous Victorian terraces that lined virtually every street in Windermere, this one on Broad Street within walking distance of the public library. He had to duck to get through the door of the room and practically do the limbo if he wanted to walk to the single window. The loo was on the floor below and the heat was by means of whatever came up from the rest of the house. But all of this made the price extremely right, so he’d snapped it up upon a single glance once he learned how little it was going to cost him. In recompense, it seemed, for the myriad inconveniences of the room, the landlady provided sumptuous breakfasts involving everything from porridge to prunes, so Zed hadn’t had to eat lunch since he’d arrived, which was just as well since he used the time he would have otherwise spent in a cafe trying to suss out who — besides himself — was prowling round the death of Ian Cresswell. But if Scotland Yard was indeed here in Cumbria in the person of a detective on the scent of the unfortunate drowning of Nicholas Fairclough’s cousin, Zed had not been able to locate that person, and until he saw him, he wasn’t going to be able to mould The Ninth Life into the Nine Lives and a Death that Rodney Aronson apparently wanted.

Naturally, Aronson knew who the Scotland Yard detective was. Zed would have put a week’s meagre wages on that. He would have put a further week’s wages on Aronson’s having a master plan to give Zed the sack upon his failure to unearth said detective, which would equate to his failure to sex up his story. That was what this was all about because Rodney couldn’t cope with the combination of Zed’s education and his aspirations.

Not that he was getting far with his aspirations and not that he would get far with them. Oh, one might survive artistically in this day and age by producing poetry, but poetry did not put a roof over one’s head.

That thought — a roof over his head — put Zed in mind of the roof in London under which he lived. It put him further in mind of the people beneath that roof. Lodged among those people were those people’s intentions, his mother’s foremost among them.

At least he didn’t have to worry about those intentions just now, Zed thought, for one morning soon after the first night of Yaffa Shaw’s presence in the family flat — which had been effected with a rapidity astounding even for his mother — the young woman waylaid Zed outside of the bathroom they were going to be forced to share, and sponge bag in hand she’d murmured, “No worries, Zed. All right?” His mind on his job, he thought at first she was speaking of what lay in front of him: yet another trip to Cumbria. But it came to him that Yaffa was actually talking about her presence in the family flat and about his mother’s determination to throw them together as much as she could until she wore down their resistance and they succumbed to an engagement, marriage, and babies.

Zed said, “Eh?” and fiddled with the belt of his dressing gown. It was too short for him, as were the trousers of his pyjamas, and he never could find slippers to fit so he was wearing what he usually wore on his feet in the morning, which was a pair of mismatched socks. He felt all at once like what Jack found at the top of the beanstalk, especially in comparison to Yaffa, who was neat and trim and all of a piece with everything on her a coordinated affair in an appealing colour that seemed to enhance both her skin and her eyes.

Yaffa looked over her shoulder in the general direction of the kitchen, from where breakfast sounds were emanating. She said quietly, “Listen, Zed. I have a boyfriend in Tel Aviv, in medical school, so you’re not to worry.” She’d pushed back a bit of her hair — dark, curly, and hanging down below her shoulders quite prettily, whereas earlier she’d worn it pulled back from her face — and she gave him a look that he’d had to call impish. She said, “I didn’t tell her that. You see, this” — with an inclination of her head towards the door of the bedroom she’d been given — “saves me heaps of money. I can cut back my hours at work and take another course. And if I can do that each term, I can finish uni earlier, and if I can do that, I’m one step closer to getting back home to Micah.”

“Ah,” he said.

“When she introduced us — you and me — I could see what your mum had in mind, so I didn’t say anything about him. I needed the room — I need the room — and I’m willing to play along if you are.”

“How?” He realised he seemed only capable of one-word responses to this young woman, and he wasn’t at all sure what this meant.

She said, “We develop a pretence.”

“Pretence?”

“We’re attracted, you and I. We play the role, we ‘fall in love’” — she sketched inverted commas in the air — “and then conveniently I break your heart. Or you break mine. It doesn’t matter except considering your mum, I’d better break yours. We’d probably have to go on one or two dates and maintain some kind of enraptured contact on our mobiles while you’re gone. You could make kissing noises occasionally and look soulfully at me over the breakfast table. It would buy me time to save the money I need to take the extra course each term and it would buy you time to get your mother off your back for a bit about getting married. We’d have to play at a little affection now and then but you’re off the hook having to sleep with me as we wouldn’t want to show such disrespect to your mum. I think it would work. What about you?”

He nodded. “I see.” He was pleased he’d advanced to two words instead of one.

“So?” she said. “Are you willing?”

“Yes.” And then in a graduation to four words: “When do we start?”

“At breakfast.”

So when Yaffa asked him over the breakfast table to tell her about the story he was working on in Cumbria, he played along. To his surprise, he found that she asked very good questions and her pretence of interest in his affairs caused his mother to beam at him meaningfully. He’d left London with his mother’s ecstatic hug and her “You see, you see, my boy?” burning in his brain, along with a note from Yaffa in his pocket: “Wait thirty-six hours, phone the flat, ask your mum if you can speak to me. I’ll give you my mobile number while she’s listening. Good hunting in Cumbria, my friend.” He’d phoned at the thirty-six-hour mark exactly, and he’d ended up again surprised to find that he actually enjoyed the brief conversation he had with Yaffa Shaw. This was due, he reckoned, to the fact that everything was out in the open between them. No pressure, he thought. And he always operated best when there was minimal pressure.

He only wished that were the case with regard to this damn story. He couldn’t think of what to do to unearth the Scotland Yard detective aside from planting himself in Bryanbarrow and waiting to see who turned up at Ian Cresswell’s farm on the scent of the man’s untimely death. The Willow and Well afforded him an unobstructed view