Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon? Read online

  Were the woman in the pinstriped suit to be correct in thinking that she did or does know Marguerite (and he had the sense, as he continued to follow behind her, that she was still racking her brains, as it was known, to try to place him, as it was known), then Marguerite was holding that, given that he wasn’t famous, but was, in fact, well known for not being recognisable or famous, then it was likely or, perhaps, extremely likely that he also knew her.

  A number of premises had stacked up; these Marguerite took as a starting point for this part of his investigation into (etc) but it did not follow that he held these premises to be true; in other words, he was moving or had moved into a part of his investigation that required him to hold, momentarily, a set of assumptions to which he had not and perhaps would not subscribe until, perhaps, the final analysis, until, in other words, Harold Absalon had been found and had been returned to his beloved (another assumption) Isobel Absalon11, assuming that this would be the end of the analysis and that the premises that Marguerite was momentarily holding to be true, at that moment of following behind a man and a woman on the top deck of a bus as they collectively moved towards the conductress who, note, was also moving towards them with a slow side-to-side action governed more by the location of passengers on either side of the aisle than by the swaying of the bus, more accentuated on the top compared to the lower deck, as the bus slowly slowed down again with what one could call a mournful sigh of the brakes, even though this, clearly, would be an anthropomorphic projection onto an inanimate (in the absence of human operation) object, were (that is, the premises that he was metaphorically holding as he followed behind, etc) indeed true. The premises, by way of recap (etc) were, succinctly, that: a) the woman that Marguerite was following behind knows (or is it ‘knew’?) Marguerite; b) Marguerite was well known for not being famous, and c) only famous people could have found themselves in a situation where they were known by someone whom they do not know themselves. A dictum emerged which encapsulated succinctly his line of reasoning: ‘The famous are those people who defy empirical reciprocity.’ He didn’t know whether the dictum was true even given the premises; further, he wasn’t sure that he was capable of having the thought as it was finally expressed. Nevertheless, the conclusion that he drew from the surprisingly short, given the foregoing thought processes, list of premises, and the even shorter, and possibly unlikely given the range of his previous thought processes and mental vocabulary, dictum, was that he knew (etc) the woman that he was following behind, the woman, in short, who had appeared to recognise him. That was how he had got to the conclusion, in short.

  He hoped that his conclusion in this area was sufficiently clear, now, for him to proceed with other areas of this part of his investigation, leaving aside, that is, questions of what it really meant to be famous in the sense that he had used that term; what it meant, also, to be known or well known; thirdly, what one meant by the word recognition; finally how these three terms related to each other, what it meant, for example, to know a famous person exclusively by means of their fame, that is, assuming that one wouldn’t know them, so to speak, if they were not famous; what it took to be well known without being famous or recognisable, as in Marguerite’s case; whether this was even possible, or whether it was based on a misreading of one or more of the terms; these and other matters he would leave to others – his subordinates, peers, superiors or, indeed, any other enthusiast who perhaps didn’t fit into any of the preceding categories – to look into, so that he could concentrate, once again, on the more principial aspects of his investigation into the disappearance of Harold Absalon, the Mayor’s transport advisor.

  11. I finally resolved to do something about him. But before I could act, he followed me into the washroom – this was a few days later. As we stood beside each other, he asked me, in a quiet, conciliatory voice, whether I would do him a favour. I didn’t respond, but after a while he simply said to me: ‘Follow my wife.’ That was what he said. ‘Follow my wife.’ I swear.

  26

  Marguerite took it to be self-evident, as the gentleman in front of him came within touching distance of the conductress, that the Mayor would not want his advisors constantly to provide advice to him relating to their specialist areas. The Mayor would surely become quickly overwhelmed if this were to be the case. But at the other end of the scale, surely there was a minimum amount of advice that an advisor had to provide in order to remain an advisor and, if so, how was this minimum to be agreed and measured, Marguerite wondered, as the gentleman paused, inexplicably, before the conductress, leading Marguerite to question whether actual physical contact with her would be possible in their passage past her? And what could it mean to remain the Mayor’s transport advisor when one had disappeared – as in Harold Absalon’s case – and, for this reason, not to be providing any advice relating to one’s specialist area – transport in Harold Absalon’s case – to the Mayor?12

  But what if Harold Absalon had been providing transport advice to the Mayor since his disappearance? What if the Mayor had been dissatisfied with the amount of transport-related advice hitherto provided to him by Harold Absalon in his advisory capacity, and had incarcerated him in City Hall to encourage him, in more or less subtle ways, to provide a more continuous stream of advice as befits a more literal interpretation of the title Mayor’s transport advisor? That would certainly provide a much more difficult mission brief for Marguerite in his investigation into the disappearance of Harold Absalon given that he felt that this mission had been set, albeit indirectly and without clear written or verbal instructions, by the Mayor, in that the Mayor, as well as looking after, in a sense, the transport networks in the city, at least those networks that belonged, in a sense, to him as Mayor, which was the majority of them, also oversaw, sometimes in a literal sense (for example, when viewing CCTV images at headquarters), the city’s police force and a number of other law-enforcement agencies; not that the members of the city’s police force and the other law-enforcement agencies within the Mayoral remit were the only investigative officers operative in that city, of course – there would also be national, extra-national (whether diplomatically friendly or unfriendly), intra-national, perhaps, and international forces in operation in the very city that Marguerite was located in at that moment. Given this dual transport/legal role that the Mayor had, which, of course, did not exhaust all of the Mayoral functions by any means, Marguerite felt that it would make his investigation significantly more difficult if the scenario pertained in which the Mayor had unlawfully detained Harold Absalon in City Hall or elsewhere as a means of obtaining a more or less constant stream of transport advice – transport advice on tap, so to speak – based on this narrow interpretation of the role envisioned, perhaps mistakenly, by the Mayor. The reason that it would make Marguerite’s investigation significantly more complex and difficult was that it would entail a covert investigation of his superiors, one that he would be prepared to make for the sake of justice and transparency; but, in short, if he couldn’t take the counsel of his superiors as more or less read, it would leave him even less firm ground to stand upon than he currently had. It would involve, in theory, a perhaps infinite regress of surveillance and counter surveillance, a situation that has been alluded to earlier in a somewhat different context.

  But Marguerite took this scenario to be highly implausible. Marguerite was devoted to the Mayor, and refused to believe that he would act in this way. He had only entertained this scenario to limn its implications in relation to what it meant to be an advisor to the Mayor. He had rehearsed the situation of a possessive Mayor thirsty, so to speak, for advice, as one theoretical extreme, one that he thought highly unlikely to obtain in the practical, that is real life, investigation that he was engaged in.

  The other extreme – that of the Mayor’s transport advisor providing no advice to the Mayor on transport matters – he took to be more or less equally implausible. But wasn’t this the situation that did, in fact, obtain at th
at precise moment in relation to Harold Absalon, he wondered, as the stand-off between the gentleman and the conductress inexplicably continued, whilst Marguerite and the woman in the pinstriped suit continued to approach them? This assumed that Harold Absalon had not just gone undercover into and onto those city transport networks that were part of the Mayoral remit in order to provide covert advice to the Mayor. But what would be the purpose of providing advice in this way, Marguerite wondered? When the supervisor appears on a factory floor then it is perhaps probable that productivity goes up, thereby precluding an accurate assessment by the supervisor of the productivity of the factory workers in that instance. Could it be that the Mayor had sent Harold Absalon underground in more than one sense to provide what he hoped would be an objective assessment of how efficiently the city’s transport networks were operating, an assessment, in short, that could not be made by Harold Absalon under normal circumstances, whatever that means, given the modicum of fame and notoriety that he had as the Mayor’s transport advisor? In other words, the drivers, conductors and conductresses, including the one that Marguerite fervently hoped to make actual bodily contact with before too long, might change their behaviour if they knew Harold Absalon and saw him on their particular bus, train, tram, taxi or boat (leaving to one side, yet again, and regretfully to Marguerite’s mind, what, precisely, constitutes public transport and what does not), thereby preventing Harold Absalon from obtaining objective data on their performance, which, in turn, would prevent him from providing reliable advice to the Mayor relating to the city’s transport networks. Was it this, then, that precipitated Harold Absalon’s ‘disappearance’ – a desire to travel the city undercover so as to provide more reliable transport-related advice to the Mayor, advice that had hitherto been unavailable to the Mayor given the modicum of fame that his transport advisor had obtained qua transport advisor? Under this scenario it should be clear to almost everyone with access, in this mysterious way, to Marguerite’s thoughts, that Harold Absalon would have remained the Mayor’s transport advisor despite even protestations to the contrary by the Mayor himself and/or by the Mayor’s spokesman or -woman (who, note, would remain the Mayor’s spokesman or -woman, just as Harold Absalon would remain the Mayor’s transport advisor under certain circumstances, even if he or she did not speak on behalf of the Mayor or anyone else – indeed even if they refrained from speaking at all – for some period of time, still undefined, for what could actually be quite a long period of time, such as a month or two or even, at a stretch, a year, given certain conditions, that is), the protestations to the contrary by the Mayor and his coterie, that is, including his spokesman or -woman, being a mere smokescreen, perhaps, created to ensure that Harold Absalon remained incognito on the city’s streets, trains and buses, etc.

  The reason that Marguerite felt this new scenario unlikely to obtain related to certain key differences between workers on shop or factory floor and transport workers on the city’s streets, rails and waterways, if the preposition can be followed through elegantly enough, perhaps, in that way. Marguerite was aware that there were certain key distinctions between the two work environments, as the conductress and the gentleman loomed larger and larger, just in perspectival terms, that is, rather than in actuality. The key distinction related, he thought, to the level of control over ‘output’ that the factory worker had compared to the transport worker. There were, in short, many more factors beyond the transport worker’s control in relation to their efficiency than there were in the case of the factory worker. Take, for example, the issue of congestion or signal failure. Were the transport worker’s supervisor, operating under- or overcover, to discipline the transport worker for not meeting their timetable slot under conditions of signal failure or excessive congestion, then that could be taken to tribunal, to Marguerite’s mind, by the transport worker and could be held up as being grossly unfair, he thought. The equivalent in the factory of chatting too much, say, and this slowing down the work, or of being too hungover to complete one’s tasks for the day, would be quite different and might more appropriately be treated as a disciplinary matter given certain other documented or verbally expressed previous warnings which, in turn, depended on other, relatively tightly defined circumstances. In short, it was much easier for the factory supervisor to judge of those inefficiencies that were the responsibility of the worker rather than due to external (to the worker) factors than it was in the case of the transport supervisor, if, indeed, such an operative existed. A whole new field of inquiry emerged into Marguerite’s mind then; this related to covert action on behalf of the employees relating to their working conditions, rather than by the employers in relation to the employee’s working efficiency. He refrained from looking into that area at that moment, interesting though it seemed, given that the gentleman in front of him was involved, finally, in squeezing past the conductress, with all that that implied.

  12. No-one else was in there. After we’d washed our hands, side by side, he gave me that photo of her. Something I’d always wanted. It was so simple. And then he was gone.

  27

  The bus continued to slow down, the woman in the pinstriped suit continued moving towards the conductress, and Marguerite feared, now, that he would still be on the top deck after the bus had stopped. There were a number of reasons that he feared this. Before he went into these reasons he wanted to make a distinction in his own mind in relation to the word ‘feared’: its use in the context of ‘fearing that he would still be on the top deck after the bus had stopped’ had at least two interpretations and he wished to be clear that he did not mean to use both of them. In fact, he wouldn’t prejudge the number of different interpretations, meanings or definitions of the verb ‘to fear’, provided the number of interpretations (etc) was a whole number greater than one; that is, if further emphasis or clarification of this point is needed, which it is not, a whole number greater than or equal to two. This caveat was necessary, to Marguerite’s mind, because he had said that he wouldn’t prejudge the number of available interpretations of the verb ‘to fear’ in this context, whilst at the same time being aware of two such interpretations. Two, then, was the absolute minimum number of interpretations that he would countenance; anything above that he had an open mind towards. His open mind only extended, however, to the possible existence of more than the two interpretations of the verb ‘to fear’ that he was aware of; it did not extend to him accepting that he was actually experiencing fear in these tertiary, quarteriary (if that was the right word) and higher (or wider) senses of the word. All he was prepared to concede, in this latter instance, was that he was experiencing fear in terms of the variant of the verb that had initially come to mind.

  The variant of the verb that had initially come to Marguerite’s mind was fearing in the sense of just worrying that he wouldn’t be able to get off the bus at the next stop given the speed at which he was journeying behind his two co-passengers compared to the rate at which the bus was decelerating. He was constrained, of course, by the speed at which his fellow passengers were moving in front of him. He wondered, now, whether they were planning to disembark at all or whether they were hoping to disembark after the next stop, thereby blocking Marguerite’s disembarkation at the next stop and impeding his investigation, a criminal act that he couldn’t warn them of given the covert nature of his operation.

  The first sort of fear, Marguerite now realised, could be held to relate, quite simply, to the fact of one’s missing one’s stop; that is, it could be held to be a generalised anxiety about missing one’s stop, without any specific object, without, at least, any conscious specific object for the fear to attach itself to, as it were; the second type of fear related, he felt, to the consequences of missing one’s stop which, in his case, ranged, he thought, from feeling exposed, potentially, to the wrathful gaze and, he suspected, malign intentions of Isobel Absalon, who he feared was still lurking on the bottom deck13; or to whatever the woman in the pinstriped suit might
do to him having had sufficient time, given the respective speeds alluded to earlier, to put a name to his face, as it is known.