The Hollow Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

scratchings.”
    “OK.”
    “Sorry if we’re being a bit rowdy,” he said, as she fixed the vodka.
    “Someone leaving?”
    “Someone leaving, someone joining. Everyone’s celebrating. It feels like everyone’s moving somewhere. How long have you been working here?”
    “Three weeks.”
    “How are you finding it?”
    “Fine.”
    “It’s one of my favourite places.”
    Belsey drank the vodka tonic at the bar and took the pints and pork scratchings to his table. He felt, momentarily, a longing for his phone; felt the impossibility of being contacted, like a static charge. Incommunicado, he thought. He would have liked to contact his bank, more than any of his friends and family. It was a morbid longing; he did not know what he would say. At least the bank already knew his shame. He could apply for bankruptcy. Moral bankruptcy too. But he wasn’t convinced he wanted to be saved. His predicament was a force at his back and he wanted to be propelled. Not a crime last time I looked . To vanish. To start again. He could sense an extraordinary option growing on the horizon.
    Belsey drank the pints in quick succession. While he drank he tested his soul for a sense of failure, pressing gently inwards like a crash victim touching his ribs. But he couldn’t feel it. He needed sleep. Images of bus shelters, railway stations, shopping centre doorways passed through his mind like a sequence learned in childhood: the body-sized surfaces of the city in which a man may lie and not be disturbed. The platter arrived: chicken wings, garlic bread, cocktail sausages, potato wedges, nachos, some sour cream and barbecue sauce. He ate steadily.
    There was always Iraq, of course. An old acquaintance from training college had tried to persuade Belsey to go out there. Simon Nickels worked for a private security contractor in Baghdad. Belsey had got a call out of the blue.
    “Drinks at the police club. On me. All the old boys.”
    Who were the old boys? Belsey wondered. When he got there it was only Simon, standing at the bar. He had grown a moustache. Belsey possessed a vague memory of him passing out in a bath at a party.
    “You should come over. Sunny there. Choice of three swimming pools.”
    “Three, you say.”
    “And we give you weapons training. Beautiful gear they’ve got. Top of the range.”
    “That’s not very enticing.”
    “There’s a golf course, a cinema. Everything you could want.”
    “There’s a golf course and a cinema in Finchley.”
    Nickels wiped the froth off his moustache. He had a tan line on his ring finger where a wedding band had been.
    “It’s City banker money. You say to yourself: play a bit of squash, stay in shape, don’t hit the bottle too much, in a couple of years you’ve got the mortgage paid off and the kids’ university fees sorted.”
    “I don’t have any children.”
    “You will.”
    “Who else are you seeing while you’re over here?”
    “Only you,” he said. “Only you.”
    That was three weeks ago.
    The barmaid went to clear tables. Belsey stared at the slot machine. Each pub’s small monument to chance. To supposed chance and the machinations behind it. He studied the game and make. He took a pound out of the tips saucer, considered calling the security contractor, then put it in the slot machine instead and lost.
    At eight-thirty he was in the North Star, a small, functional pub with flat screens over its Victorian trimmings. He watched the news over the shoulder of one of the local after-work alcoholics who was talking about anal sex and derivatives. The news showed a young dark-skinned man moving in slow motion over a chain-link fence. The businessman was buying drinks for everyone and then he stopped and Belsey moved on to Ye Olde Swiss Cottage.
    “Was I in here last night?” he asked.
    “You were in, for sure.”
    “Did I leave a phone?”
    “No.”
    The Cottage was built like a Swiss chalet, abandoned in the centre of a bad-tempered traffic junction. Few risked