Consent Page 2

  Then it’s different. At other times it feels like everything happened to someone else, what’s happened recently especially.

  I’m sorry. I’m not explaining myself well. Have I been someone all my life who would do what I’ve done? Or am I just somebody who did? I suppose that’s what I’m asking. Because I’ve thought a lot about how I’ll look when your eyes leave these pages for the final time, perhaps before the final page. I wonder if you’ll see a monster, and if I am one, or if monstrosity is a costume to be tried on.

  Why am I so nervous? I am new to storytelling, it is true. A greenhorn at the inkhorn you might say, but I’ve been ready for nerves and am quite pleased with the start I’ve made, though I do do a lot of doubting. I get so wrapped up in the events I’m making an account of that when I pause to look again it’s like the music stops, the lights go on, and I’m surrounded by droops of bunting and lost coats and forgotten inches of wine. I get self-conscious suddenly. I’ve undone dozens of beginnings. Who knows if even this paragraph will stand? Probably that’s how it always is. Probably all beginnings begin with grief for the lost conviction of intending.

  *

  You’re being very patient. You want the nitty-gritty, and you’re right. Laura: what went on there? Me: who am I? A complicated question about anyone, I’m sure we can agree. Well I am a rich man, as you have heard, and neither young nor old. You know my name. My occupation is not so easy. The word that many would apply to me is stalker, but applying doesn’t make it so. I’d say instead that I practise people studies. Studying people is what I do so if it needs one that can be its name.

  Be assured that I’m not hiding from the facts of things. I do secretly follow strangers on the street. I wait outside their houses and I listen to their conversations, if I can. Look through my notes, which fill a cabinet, and you will find some men named, but on the whole I study women. Which women? I don’t think I can generalise. A subject need only interest me for a moment, as Laura did, and I am on them. When someone more interesting comes along, I switch to them. It’s rare for me to study anybody longer than a month. Most I’m finished with inside a week or so.

  Nevertheless you’ll think – and this is obviously a paraphrase, I don’t presume to know your thoughts exactly – that following women around the way I do is an invasion of their privacy, perhaps worse. That’s partly why I’m telling you about it now, having never told anyone before, so I can show that I expect no more privacy for myself than I grant others. My subjects do not choose to be my subjects, it is true, but only because such a choice is impossible. If you volunteer to be studied, you stop being you.

  Try it yourself. That’s another thing I’m saying. Go out, pick somebody and watch them. Take your phone and a notebook. Persist. You’ve probably already tried, mildly. What begins as a confluence of yours and another person’s journeys, on the train maybe or leaving a cinema, gets into an entanglement. Maybe you both sense it. Maybe just you do. You follow, feeling that it’s not really following because you’re going the same way, then when they at last reach their office you feel the clutch of a goodbye. It’s normal. How many times do you think the person being followed has been you?

  *

  Laura crossed the road. I went with her. She turned into a long avenue lined with characterful brick merchant houses and linden trees. I turned too. I let the space between us lengthen. Soon she was just a dark rhythm and a swinging bag. Then she wasn’t there. Instantly I regretted my coolness and sped up, then ran. I reached a cobbled mews, a beautiful old pub at the end of it. A pub and a few garages and flats. Nothing resembling a grand old lady’s mansion in anyone’s eyes. I stopped to catch my breath, leaning against a panel of doorbells as if about to ring one. Laura took a seat in the pub, by the window. Relief. Joy and relief. The cold brim of a shiver swept across me.

  As best I could, I squared things. There was a chance that Laura had received word of a postponement or a cancellation after I’d lost sight of her, and had gone into the pub to wait. Only a small chance though. Seeing her bustle along, it also seemed unlikely she was early. Meeting in the pub might of course be one of the client’s eccentricities, but Laura had not mentioned it on the phone, and she’d seemed set on mentioning everything.

  If at first I had been curious, now I was obsessed. I had to move away from the doorbells when an elderly man walked out and gave me a look. This left just the street to wait on. It was odd to loiter outside on a cold day, though I was glad of the excuse to keep my face in my lapels. (Now I always carry cigarettes, which make immaculate pretexts for hanging around on the street. You can also bury yourself in your phone, or pretend to be talking on it, but this calls for more boldness than I had at the time, and can be distracting.)

  Presently, a man came to sit with Laura. A well-dressed man, expected by her, but older than I’d guessed. She had white wine. He chose mineral water, and got the conversation going. She said little, but was flirting, you could see. It was in her long stares and in the scale of her laughing. Flirting meant that they were not already lovers. On the table she had a pen and notebook, which she was hardly using. She wanted something from him but he wasn’t giving it, or not giving all of it, that’s what I inferred. I’ve noticed since that you can sometimes see people more plainly without speech to misdirect you. The man stood up, shook Laura’s hand, said Good luck, I think, and left. They’d been together for ten minutes at most.

  What had I witnessed? The lying to her friend, the notebook and her flirtatious ways made clear that the occasion was important to Laura, but less to him. He seemed like someone powerful, though light with it, and gracious in the obdurate art of being petitioned. I can’t say why, but to me he also appeared decent. Like someone she should trust. Ducking behind a van, I watched her leave soon afterwards. I felt I had no choice but to follow her home.

  *

  I’ve been doing a lot of physical work recently, more than I’m used to, and I seem to have wrenched something in my shoulder. There was no one incident, or not one that I noticed. When I woke up a couple of days ago it just went stiff, and since then has been given to spasms. It’s not terrible. I only feel it if I reach for something at the wrong angle, or lift much weight. Then a belt of pain flashes down my neck. The rest of the time I feel nothing. Like at the moment, typing is fine.

  The odd thing though, the reason I bring this up, is that I find I can’t help looking for the pain. I wave my arm around trying to find the exact bad angle, or probe the muscles with my left hand. When I succeed it hurts, so I stop. Then I drift into the search again. Versions of this self-torture are quite common, I believe. I’ve often been like this over pulled muscles or mouth ulcers, flicking the pain on and off like you might play with a hair clip. But only with certain kinds of pain. I’d never aggravate a cut on my finger, or a burn. Once I broke a rib. Have you ever broken a rib? In most cases there’s no treatment. The intercostal muscles hold the bones in place and eventually they set. After the first few days they smoothly rise and fall with normal breathing and you don’t feel anything. Then you laugh. Or worse you sneeze, and the pain is terrible. Terrible. When I had that broken rib and I felt a sneeze coming I’d start trying to sneeze, hoping to trick it into fading away, as sneezes like to do.

  What is it about some pains that makes you fidget with them, even while you avoid others? It’s to do with hiddenness, I think. I’m anxious about this shoulder because I don’t know quite where the pain is, so I could make the wrong move and it might strike. It’s like the threat of being afflicted is worse than the affliction. The threat starts to rule you, which changes what you think about who you are. Personally I’d rather be the cause of my own pain than live as it dictates.

  *

  I worried horribly about being seen by Laura on her journey back across the city, and between times I worried horribly about losing her again. All I needed to do was keep a calm distance, as I know now, but instead like some capering cartoon I lurked and peeped and fiddled with my shoelace
s the whole way to her house. Too large a house to be hers alone, it seemed to me, and too suburban and well tended for a rental between friends. It was her parents’, you had to guess, the scene of a childhood outgrown, or overdue to be. No way was it Laura in the front garden deadheading the narcissi. I felt I’d known her long enough to be sure of that.

  From here the thing was easy, but not quick. The next morning I returned and waited outside a postal depot checking my phone. It was the nearest plausible place to stand but not too near. I had to stare hard to be sure I wouldn’t miss her leaving. But I did miss her leaving, I can only suppose, because at ten o’clock I decided I could wait no longer and gave up.

  That’s one of the times this could have ended. I’d been hesitant anyway when I awoke that morning. With a layer of sleep dividing me from the events of Monday, they had become like a dream – strange, interesting, a concern, perhaps cathartic, but soon enough buried beneath subsequent events, if I allowed it. That’s why I was partly glad when I failed to find Laura in the morning, because I knew that gradually my zeal for the whole thing would fade. I did not want a secret life. At this stage I could still have returned to my old job, claiming ill health. It would have been cowardly but I might yet have found a way to prefer my old unhappiness. I was also sure that many men liked looking at Laura, and I did not like the thought. I won’t say that her shape or her smile had no pleasurable effect on me, but I wanted more than those. It was my hope that she and I would share something, so I needed to know there was a path towards it. I decided to give her all my efforts for one more day.

  So Wednesday I arrived at dawn and this time saw her leave almost immediately. The salon where she worked was in the financial district and opened early for morning trade. Thenceforth I had no hope of losing her, and indeed it became quite pleasant to sit in the cafe opposite over the weeks that followed. I read a lot. I have always read a lot. I also pretended to be writing at my computer, and as a result did write a few screwy essays. You might expect this period to find me out at last, as my new life became routine. I think I expected that myself, but it didn’t happen. My plate-glass windows, hers, that road between us, tea. It was a daily delight to sit and watch Laura and her colleagues.

  She was the salon junior, which meant she clocked a lot of broom time, but when she did cut hair she was quick and confident, and chatty with her clients’ reflections. There was more of that laughter, inaudible this time, and she had a nice way of grinning and clutching sections of her own hair to demonstrate choices, a great compliment to most clients, making them feel they qualified for the comparison. Nevertheless I formed the impression that Laura was not happy. The chattiness vanished with her colleagues, a surprise given her adeptness socially and all the lulls. More often she’d read her phone, or go outside and talk on it. In short, she gave off little eagerness for anything but distraction until she had a customer. At lunchtime in good weather she brought in sandwiches. When it rained she got some from a cafe – not, fortunately, my own. She’d leave the salon to eat, come what may. It was rare to see her share even a cup of something with the others. She seemed elsewhere in a number of ways.

  I considered it but I never did go in to have her cut my hair. It would have been a hard thing to make seem natural, I knew, though making the decision stick was just as hard. Over and over I called the matter closed, each time finally, but soon I’d catch myself again imagining the feel of that seat, her fingers in my hair, rehearsing the routes our talk might take from being young to being busy to freelance work to private clients and their big houses … In the end I shaved my head to shut temptation away.

  I knew, you see, and it is one thing my instincts have been right about from the beginning, that if I talked to her everything would change. After that she’d see me. It’s hard when you get stuck, and I was stuck with Laura for longer than I’d tolerate these days. It’s not the waiting itself that’s hard, it’s knowing that one quick conversation could deliver the answer. It’s hard not to think about that pretty much all the time, which drives you crazy. These days I generally adopt what you might call a fatalist attitude. Let what will happen happen. If somebody else appears and I want to give up on a subject, I give up. Back then I had it yet to learn that other subjects would appear. Back then I did not know that there would be other subjects. Now I enjoy switching. I’ve got quite breezy about it. You know you can always go back to someone later if they stay in your mind. It became a great pleasure, after the first couple of years.

  The point is that accosting a subject has to be the last resort. You can discover much indirectly, if you’re cunning. Try this for instance. Approach somebody who knows the subject well. Choose someone trusting and garrulous, and say you are sure the two of you have met. Or don’t say, if you have the nerve. Just act like you expect to be remembered. Increase the awkwardness until they ask to be reminded how you know each other, and at this point say you met at the subject’s birthday party once, or in a bar with them, or at a conference with them, or at university with them. Whatever you think suits the situation. The important thing is that they hear you use the subject’s name and give correct details about them, establishing that the subject is your mutual friend. In my experience this will be enough to make them tell you, in answer to your question, how the subject is these days. Above all be confident. Because you can be confident. A hard thing to believe, but true. Remember that your real motives, however uneasily they sit with you, will seem impossibly far-fetched to anyone who contemplates them, so people never do. If you’re accosted by a subject and actually accused, by the same token they’re probably past listening to your stories and it’s best just to walk away. I’ll talk more about this later.

  With Laura the thing that made the difference in the end was a phone call, because she loved a phone call, Laura did. I’d begun letting myself queue behind her at the bus stop, and one time heard her tell an old school friend that she had a drink with Edward Beasley. That phrase exactly, with the surname. Not Ed or Ted or Eddie. The odd formality meant either that she and her friend had several acquaintances called Edward, with the result that one of them needed the designation Edward Beasley, or that she was referring to a figure of some importance that neither of them knew well. The words had a drink also suggested seriousness, as opposed to the more social went for a drink, or so it seemed to me. Internet research revealed a film producer called Edward Beasley. I found a photograph of him at an awards event which quite closely matched my memory of the suave mineral water drinker. A few days previously I’d been confused to hear Laura say during another phone call that she’d had no training, when I’d already established that she’d completed her hairdressing diploma recently. I therefore began to work with the theory that it was dramatic training that she hadn’t had, and was considering, which tallied with how often she went to the cinema, three times in the first nine days I studied her, despite the expense. It was a vindication not only of my patience but of my assiduous record-keeping, without which I’d not have had her past remarks to scan for clues. This is an important principle. Don’t write down what seems important. Write down everything.

  Because Laura had acting dreams. I won’t make this more mysterious than it is. She’d taken delight in plays at school but never told her parents how much delight, and instead told herself that drama college was expensive. It’s not that they were tyrannical, Mr and Mrs D, not in the least. Laura spoke only kindly of them, that I heard. But they were stiff-minded. I followed them shopping one Saturday afternoon and you could see from their obedience to their list that these weren’t people who dove into life off the high board. (Why else are there steps down into the water?) We’re afraid that you’ll lose interest in it, I expect Laura believed her mother would say about acting, after conferring with her father, a softened version of their real fear, that acting would lose interest in her. And so, part-pragmatist herself, I’m sure she’d skipped the whole encounter and resolved to give defeatism a chance, which for a while meant wai
tressing, then for a while longer, with travel and university intentions that just would not set. Because dreams are seeds. They’re growing machines that will not stop unless you break them. And the young have not had time to learn this. So Laura’s life stalled, as lives often do at twenty-two, before stalling’s fatal. She accepted hairdressing college at her parents’ suggestion and expense, and for a time her higher hopes abated.

  I like to imagine Laura serving the canapés when she heard Edward Beasley give advice to a young actor at an industry event. It would have been during her waitressing years, and she would have lingered all she could, offering and re-offering rabbit croquettes to everyone within earshot, which perplexed a few in that dense crowd. At last with her tray empty she returned to the kitchen and thought no more of it, but she could not forget Edward Beasley from the badge. There would have been many months of gloomy toying with the name until she emailed him. I did admire Laura for that, perfumed Laura, going so far off her turf to ask about getting into movies. I don’t know what she thought awaited her in the pub, but she was ready for anything, I think, except the anticlimax that she found. Besides getting work as an extra, which she knew led nowhere, Beasley had only drama college to recommend. Expensive indeed, if she were accepted, on top of the debt for learning to cut hair. Plus twenty-three was kind of late.

  Had things gone differently Laura might have made an actor. That’s my view. Because not once did she visit the cantankerous lady client during the weeks I studied her. I believe she invented the old woman, and her grievances, as a sudden and high-spirited improv piece for her old college mate, and loud enough for an audience of eavesdroppers. The truth was just too true for her to talk about, poor thing. I also believe she wanted to be tactful with a friend still eager about hairdressing. She was a thoughtful girl, more than you’d think, a born considerer of feelings.