A Delicate Truth A Novel

Schiller’s grandiose statement that human stupidity was what the gods fought in vain. Not so, in Toby’s opinion, and no excuse for anybody, whether god or man. What the gods and all reasonable humans fought in vain wasn’t stupidity at all. It was sheer, wanton, bloody indifference to anybody’s interests but their own.
    And that, so far as will ever be known, was where his mind was drifting as he entered his house, climbed the stairs to his flat, unlocked the door and reached for the light switch, only to have a bundle of wet rag shoved down his throat and his hands wrenched behind his back and bound with plastic strip, and possibly – though he could never be sure, he never saw or afterwards found it, and only remembered it, if at all, by its gluey smell – a piece of prisoner-quality sacking pulled over his head, as a prelude to the worst beating he could have imagined.
    Or perhaps – only an afterthought – the sacking was there to mark some sort of no-go area for his assailants, because the one part of his body they left intact turned out to be his face. And if there was any clue, then or later, as to who was administering the beating, it was the unfamiliar male voice with no identifiable regional accent saying ‘Don’t mark the cunt’ in a tone of self-assured, military command.
    The first blows were undoubtedly the most painful and the most surprising. When his assailants held him in the lock-grip, he thought his spine was going to snap, then that his neck was. And there was a period when they decided to strangle him, then changed their minds at the last moment.
    But it was the hail of blows to his stomach, kidneys, groin and then his groin again that seemed never to end, and for all he knew it continued after he had lost consciousness. But not before the same unidentified voice had breathed into his ear in the same tone of command:
    ‘Don’t think this is over, son. This is for appetizers. Remember that.’
     
    *
     
    They could have dumped him on the hall carpet or tossed him on the kitchen floor and left him there but, whoever they were, they had their standards. They needed to lay him out with the respectful care of morticians, pull off his trainers and help him out of his anorak, and make sure there was a jug of water and a tumbler beside him on the bedside locker.
    His wristwatch said five o’clock but it had been saying it for some while, so he supposed it had suffered collateral damage during the skirmish. The date was stuck between two numbers, and certainly Thursday was the day he’d fixed to meet Shorty, and therefore the day on which he’d been hijacked and driven to St John’s Wood, and perhaps – but who could be sure? – today was Friday, in which case Sally, his assistant, was going to wonder how long his wisdom tooth was going to be acting up. The darkness in the uncurtained window suggested night-time, but whether it was night-time just for him or everybody else as well seemed to be in the balance. His bed was coated with vomit and there was vomit on the floor, both old and recent. He also had a memory of half rolling, half crawling to the bathroom in order to vomit into the lavatory, only to discover, like so many intrepid mountaineers before him, that the journey down was worse than the journey up.
    The human and traffic sounds in the street below his window were turned low, but again he needed to know whether this wasa general truth or one confined to him alone. Certainly the sounds he was getting were muted sounds, rather than the raucous evening variety – assuming that it was indeed evening. So the more rational solution might be: it was a grey dawn and he had been lying here for anything between, say, twelve to fourteen hours, dozing and vomiting or simply dealing with the pain, which was an activity in itself, unrelated to the passage of time.
    It was also the reason why he was only now, by stages, identifying and gradually locating the caterwauling that was issuing from beneath his bed. It was the silver burner howling at him. He had secreted it between the springs and the mattress before setting out to meet Shorty, and why on earth he’d left it switched on was another mystery to him, as it was apparently to the burner, because its howl was losing conviction and quite soon it wouldn’t have a howl at all.
    Which was why he found it necessary to rally all his remaining strength and roll himself off the bed and crash to the floor where, if in his mind only, he