knew she would call, she liked his nice, tired eyes.
104. Pavor Nocturnus. Gérard de Nerval said, ‘Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to pass through those ivory gates that lead to the invisible world without a shudder ‘I know what he means: like everything in life that is good, that nurtures, comforts and restores, there is a bad side, a disturbing, unsettling side, and sleep is no exception. Somnambulism, somniloquy, apnoea, enuresis, bruxism, incubus, pavor nocturnus. Sleepwalking, sleeptalking, snoring, bed-wetting, teeth-grinding, nightmare, night terror.
The Book of Transfiguration
He barely slept that night: he was not surprised, in fact he did not particularly want to sleep, his head was so busy with thoughts about the meeting with Flavia. He analysed its conflicting currents without much success, making little headway in interpreting its shifting moods and nuances – moments of hostility and compliance, tones of irony and affection, glances of curiosity and diffidence. What did it add up to? And that offer of a kiss, what did it imply? Was she serious or was it bravado, an act of seduction or a cruel form of taunting? He lay in his bed listening to the growing quiet of the night, always approaching silence but never quite achieving it, its progression halted by a lorry’s grinding gears, a siren or a car alarm, a taxi’s ticking diesel, until, in the small hours, the first jumbos began to cruise in from the Far East – from Singapore and Delhi, Tokyo and Bangkok – the bass roar of their engines like a slowly breaking wave high above, as they wheeled and banked in over the city on their final approach to Heathrow. Then he did fall asleep for a while, his head full of the odd conviction that his life had changed irrevocably in some way and that nothing from now on would ever be quite the same.
Chapter 10
When Lorimer came into the office he heard Hogg down the passageway, singing, boomingly, ‘I got a gal in Kalamazoo-zoo-zoo’ and he knew that Torquil had been sacked.
He hung back, waiting for him to move on before slipping unnoticed into his room, where he sat quietly and assiduously going through the newspaper clippings in the David Watts file and speed-reading his way through a slackly written, instant biography called David Watts – Beyond Enigma that had been published a couple of years previously. The most intriguing fact about David Watts was that ‘David Watts’ was his stage name. He had been born Martin Foster in Slough, where his father had worked for the Thames Water Board as assistant manager of the vast sewage works to the west of Heathrow airport. It was curious, Lorimer thought, to exchange one bland name for another. All the other details of his life and progression to eminence were unexceptionable. He was a bright, withdrawn only child with a precocious talent for music. He had dropped out of the Royal College and with a friend, Tony Anthony (now, was that a stage name?), had formed a four-man rock band called, first, simply Team, which had metamorphosed into David Watts and the Team. Their first three albums had gone double-platinum; there was a protracted dalliance with a girl called Danielle, who worked on a music paper before becoming David Watts’s live-in lover; they had enjoyed two sell-out tours to the USA… Lorimer found he was nodding off: so far, so predictable. The biography concluded with a fanfare of bright tomorrows: the world was there for the taking; rumour had it Danielle was pregnant; the creative juices were flowing in veritable torrents. Anything was possible.
That had been two years ago and now the newspaper clippings took up the story where the biography ended. The romance with Danielle hit the reef: she left, became ill, became anorexic, disappeared, probably aborted the baby (this provoked abiding tabloid fodder: the lost child of David Watts). The band split with satisfying acrimony; Tony Anthony sued and settled out of court. Danielle was discovered in Los Angeles, washed-up and haggard, on detox and living with some other unsuitable rock hasbeen. She denigrated David Watts with routine and tireless venom (‘egomaniac’, ‘control-freak’, ‘satanist’, ‘nazi’, ‘communist’, ‘martian’, ‘nerd’ and so on). David Watts released his first solo album with a select bunch of the world’s best session-musicians, Angziertie, which, contrary to all expectations, outsold everything previous to it. A thirty-five-nation, eighteen-month world tour was mooted. Then David Watts had a nervous breakdown.