Jim
No sense in being paranoid and ridiculous about these things. There's no reason to be paranoid about the flat, it's ridiculous. But I can't just sit in either, waiting in case she's just outside the door. Can't give her that satisfaction, not in good conscience. No, why would I? If it should happen to be a nice day and I should happen to fancy pasta for lunch and there should happen to be a small Italian round the corner where I can make a couple of discreet calls if I should wish to so do, so fecking be it. I'm not staying in on her account.
And if said small Italian should happen to have the walls plastered with reproduction Renaissance paintings, that's just a bonus I wasn't even thinking about.
So under a print of Titian's Salome I order the arrabiata and get to work. There's a lady, for instance, in the City, who'll do about anything for me if I call her in person, because she likes my accent. I tend to email her because I'm never all that sure what she's getting out of it. Heard some odd noises down that phone, times since… But, needs must, and not only has Constance got access to credit records I can't get my hands on personally right now, but she's quite good at tracking down aliases.
And because I called her in person I know by the time I'm finishing my lunch she'll be back to me.
David studies The Head Of Goliath directly across from me. It's Baroque, not Renaissance, but we'll forgive it that, because it's these horrific images that hang around and protect me. Saint Sebastian, lashed to a pillar and full of strategically placed arrows, has never been so useful to anyone. Cain kicking his brother to death on pointy rocks never served anyone's purpose but God's until now.
Second phone call, this one to a gentleman called Hugo, who I understand to be Miss Mies' Fagin, a sort of criminality pimp who never tells me anymore than I strictly need to know and the very thought of whom sends my skin creeping off in a big jellyfish to shudder in the corner. We've met twice. Once was too much. He's closer to seven feet than six, and still has all his teeth, or at least the fetid brown stumps of them. He looks like a piece of chamois leather hanging on a meat hook on a hot day, and smells about the same.
He's usually very cheery on the phone and has been known on occasion to call me Jimmy. Two occasions, actually, that's slipped out.
Hugo has eight fingers. Not to sound like I'm still considering America, but you do the math.
But today, there's not even a hint of that. Today he greets me as, "Moriarty."
"Hugo. Listen, don't ask but, I bumped into a girl works for you and-"
"Danielle, yeah."
"Oh, you heard."
"…Fuck's sake, Jim, what'd you do it for?"
"What? Come on, you have to admit it's funny. It's fucking hilarious." The guy at the next table is reading G2. Today's How-To-Sound-Pretentious-and-Condescending sidebar is a quick fact-file on Stendhal Syndrome. Which means even The Guardian think it's funny and they've got no sense of humour I'd care to align myself with. The Daily Mail, of course, are taking everything straight, po-faced seriously, but you know, you just know they're all biting their nails or laughing into paper bags or whatever people with sticks up their arses do when something's funny.
My pasta comes to the table, making the moment beautiful, but that Hugo manages to time its puncture perfectly. "Bloody cops, though, innit?"
Pastapastapastapastabombshell. "Wait; what?"
"What'd you go and giggle to them for?"
"You think I told the brass?"
A dead, trembling silence on Hugo's end, which just makes me think he's done something fucking terrible and I'm going to want to kill him in a second. "Are you at home?"
"Not currently, no."
"Do you think she'd know where to find you? Is there any way she could know where to find you?"
The Last Supper, that's a good painting. It's not even violent. There's no pasta in it but if Jesus had been alive today and the Passover lodgings had been over a Caffe Nero, there would have been. Anyway, the sentiment is there. Part of me doesn't want to eat anymore. Part of me knows I might want to keep my strength up.
"What are you telling me, Hugo?"
"Last fella she thought grassed her up? He's shambling about Soho with no tongue-"
"Ah, well, that's pretty standard for informers, I suppose-"
"-He's been wearing the same anorak since the night she did it and he's living off nothing but soup kitchens and White Lightning, his former wife's whoring herself for crack, one of the kids is in care and the other, though this is second-hand and I don't know it for fact, is said to have joined a cult in Florida."
He's probably exaggerating. That's probably all at least third-hand information. At any rate, there's no way Miss Mies is responsible for all of it, probably. Nonetheless my throat closes on the penne and I choke, "Jesus, Hugo, what kind of fucking psychopaths are you dealing with?"
Again, he goes quiet. I like the implications of this pause even less than the first one.
"Just be careful, yeah?"
Disgusted, I hang up.
Constance calls back, like I said she would. It didn't take very long at all because the only place a card under the name Mies or any associated alias was used was in a B&Q just up the road from here.
Arrabiata looks bloody. David and Salome stop being my guardians and start being two slightly creepy, oversexed adolescents, both carrying severed heads, who bracket me into my seat.
Those aren't arrows sticking out of St Sebastian, y'know. They're big fucking nails from B&Q.
Sherlock
There is nothing even left to count. Not that counting works. It used to work better, before I discovered oblivion. Now counting is almost part of the problem, just another admission to the hideous fact that life is arranged so that sometimes there is just nothing to think about. But you can't think nothing, can you? How can you think nothing? How can your brain just stop doing anything?
Without help, I mean.
Does that happen? Other people, real people, does that happen to them? Do they think nothing?
I think Mycroft is asleep. Tonal shift in his breathing about ten minutes ago, though I'm always surprised to find that he does, in fact, breathe. Until he sniffs or sighs you hardly notice it, and he only ever does those things for effect. For a long three weeks when we were children I was fairly convinced he had some sort of osmotic gills. I think I'm still barred from that swimming pool…
I think I could probably get up, if I thought very hard about it.
First things first, get a foot on the floor, figure out where that is. Roll over so that the other can follow it, peeling off the leather sofa with great discomfort and sensitivity of the skin, thank you Mycroft. Slowly, so as to avoid headrush, push up from the elbows and raise remainder of body gently above the established base.
Forty-two torn out newspaper articles pasted to the wall over the mock-fire. From a previous count, seventeen minor flaws in the fabric of the curtains. You don't forget counts. Counts stick, good facts, solid, unchanging, understood numbers.
Arms for balance and ballast, lean forward, over the knees, shifting the centre of gravity, Jesus, is this what happens in normal heads? It can't be. How many people in the street, if I asked them to describe standing up, would have a clue how to do it properly? We're talking here about heads that simply act, which don't understand the process of anything.
How can they think of nothing? Because they know nothing.
If I hold onto the back of the couch I can just about lean in to get a decent look at Mycroft. He's sleeping, yes, and not so lightly or I'd have wakened him by now. But he's parked that chair good and tight against the door, so there's that gone as an exit. To hell with him. He can't keep me here. Whatever he does, he can't keep me here. I hate this place. It was all his idea, you know. One moment I'm happily oblivious to everything in a cupboard of a room over a cheap Indian who never bothered with me and it's bliss and the next I wake up here, this stripped, Scandinavian hell. He'd moved my books in before me. My clothes, my scientific apparatus. Leaning in the corner, nonchalant, 'just putting this here in case you fancy a go', the violin in its case.
Well, I'd been getting along just fine without all those bloody useless bloody things, needed no more from them, still don't, don't need this place, and just because he's sleeping in front of the door on a metal chair I can't move doesn't mean I'm going to fucking stay.
I want to tell him that. I want him to know that, want the pleasure of saying it to his face. But I don't want to wake him. Maybe I'll leave a note to that effect, because I'm not staying here.
I'll need sustenance before I can try the window. The sheer thought of the physicality almost puts me back on the sofa, but that's worse. No, I need fuel, and some clear idea of where to go, what to do, something to do. Something to think about so I don't think about how the seemingly hundreds of shades-of-grey tiles on the floor of the kitchenette are actually just twelve tiles patterned to give that effect. Given that the one directly in front of my toes is at the perfect rotation, there are four the same as it, three are at ninety degrees, two at one-eighty and one at two-seventy, but they are all the same tile, identical. Mosaic used to be a craft, you know. Even the art's a bloody cheat these days. I have to get away from it. Either I'll go somewhere where I can score and get away from it that way or I'll go somewhere that's real, that isn't a cheat, but I don't know where, can't think where.
All of this depends on the window. And, since nobody lives here until Mycroft takes it upon himself to drag me back by the scruff, the window ends up depending on a lonely bag of cheesy Wotsits from the back of a cupboard. That's alright, I've had worse. Quite like cheesy Wotsits, actually.
Twenty-nine of them.
You don't count your cheesy Wotsits, do you? You have those first few thoughts, yes, about how you've eaten worse shit at some godawful four in the morning, about how you actually quite enjoy cheesy Wotsits, that peculiar nuclear orange colour of them, the way they turn so quickly from an easy, gratifying crunch to that pleasurable mulch on the tongue. But you don't go on then, do you? Do you count them as you eat through them and compare in your mind the calorie counter on the back of the bag to the remembered numbers on other similar products, and then think about those products and work up a quick estimate of just how quickly you'd drop dead if the human body wasn't quite so clever about putting all the nasty things away in little pockets and sacs and fleshy cupboards, do you? Do you? If you don't, then why not? If you don't, why do I? And if you do, really, any old tips, I'll give anything a go once.
Twice if I survive it. Of course, by the time I've had to do something twice I'm usually not enjoying it anymore. Best tip; something you only ever get to do once.
Yes, maybe, but not right now.
Right now, full of nuclear orange, time to have a go at the windows.
