CHAPTER 25
Eddie had only slept for around three hours and when he awoke, he didn’t immediately know where he was. It took him a moment to realise he was not in his bed in Oxford with his dry, empty cup of Ovaltine next to the alarm clock but in a guest house in Kuala Lumpur.
Mark had told him that he, too, suffered from it. “It’s too much jet travel,” he’d said. “The brain needs a reboot.”
Lying there, Eddie found Mark’s explanation reasonably explicable for simple cases but for him it hadn’t been just temporary confusion about where he was and why he was there but a feeling that, while he slept, an entire set of long held beliefs and opinions had been reset to original settings. while he slept. At 6am nothing felt normal and the most disturbing fact was that he’d been dreaming about Isobel.
They’d been eating coronation chicken sandwiches somewhere and whilst he was eating his as if he’d not eaten for a month and using his hand to wipe yellow curry smears from his unshaven face, Isobel was eating hers with her little finger raised and not a smear of curry to be seen. Next minute they’d been running, hand in hand, in pouring rain frantically searching for the door of the Vital Cosmetics factory, a huge edifice that stretched for miles and miles. And Isobel was holding an umbrella and repeating over and over again. “How terribly depressing, Professor.”
But, if that wasn’t embarrassing enough, the next minute they’d found the door and he’d pushed in ahead of her in such a discourteous manner that he’d then heard the voice of his mother coming from somewhere saying, “You wait till I get you home, Edward, my son.”
Eddie’s nocturnal confidence was already at a low ebb and it disappeared completely when he shook his sandals off and hurled them across Isobel’s plush office. She picked them up and hurled them back at him. “We’ve banned sandals. They leave marks on the floor.” Then she’d said: “Whoever heard of someone dying from an overdose of skin cream, Professor? It’s their choice. If they feel and look better then who are you to tell them they are wrong. You really are the most depressing man I’ve ever met. How you sleep at night I can’t imagine.”
That’s when he’d woken up in a cold sweat, feeling overwhelmed by guilt.
Eddie perched on the edge of the bed in his underwear, drank some water from a bottle and looked around. It was a small room – just a bed, a clothes cupboard and a separate toilet and shower. He scratched his head and began to analyse why he felt so abnormal. Was it the dream which had produced feelings he hadn’t experienced for years? Why did he feel he’d metamorphosed overnight into a different person altogether and why did he think he should go out of his way to apologise to Isobel for his rudeness over her high-heeled shoes?
Could it be jet lag? The change of scenery from Oxford? Was it being away from the daily routine, the university and the laboratory or not having a cup of Ovaltine before falling to sleep? Or was it because he hadn’t yet finished reading the new edition of The Oxford Textbook of Medical Mycology he’d been asked to review?
Was it because he’d been watching the teeming millions through the side window of Bangkok taxis and Jeffrey’s car instead of watching the far more explicable things going on under his microscope?
Should he get out more to mix with this grossly overpopulated world? To try to understand why billions of humans with life spans that might stretch beyond eighty years if they were lucky tried to change their appearance with lipsticks, powders, nail varnish and eye paint in pointless attempts to look more appealing and gain affection? To try to understand why, before the grey hair took over and the aches and pains of the ageing process made life so uncomfortable, they dyed their hair and smeared useless creams on their faces in the futile belief that the wrinkles would disappear? He still believed it was wrong that companies called things anti-ageing creams and used false science but it was not entirely their fault if they exploited human weaknesses.
It was everyone’s human weaknesses that suddenly became clear to him and, he had to admit, he had his own fair share of those. Thinking it was possible to right wrongs, improve the unimprovable and believe in the impossible was like religion. In a godless world were cosmetics the cheap alternative to sacred images, graven images and icons?
Eddie utterly confused now even by his own thoughts walked to the window in his Y-fronts and looked down at early morning Kuala Lumpur coming to life but with a new poem forming and emerging like a horrible creature from the fog.
“To worship the useless is senseless and worthless, but maybe it’s utterly priceless.”
It was just getting light and Eddie could see motor cycles and buses below. Oxford wasn’t like that. At 6am in Blake Street it was usually pitch-black unless it was the middle of June. At 6am on Tuesday mornings the only sound to be heard was the Oxford City Council refuse collection truck edging its way down the middle of the road between parked cars.
So why was he, a professor of botany, in a hot and stuffy Malaysian guest house, involved in a complicated investigation involving Russian and Chinese mafia that he did not remotely understand and with a feeling of guilt weighing heavily on his mind? Why did he suddenly feel homesick for the familiarity of his laboratory?
“Because you phoned Asher & Asher,” a voice in his head said. “You phoned them in a state of mind where you attributed everything unusual to the evil actions of a cosmetics company. In your anger you blamed them for everything - the theft of a bag of krabok nuts, the copying of computer files and even trying to set fire to the house. Do you really think Vital Cosmetics were so desperate for what you’ve got that they’d break into your house? You’ve still not grown up, Huggy. You’re still behaving like that long-haired idiot of forty-five years ago who got angry about everyone and everything and pointed accusing fingers to everywhere except himself.”
He thought about Mel. “So, what’s the problem with losing a few nuts?” Mel had said in his kindly way.
“I needed a friendly ear, Mel. Someone with a soft shoulder and a dry tissue.”
“Come now, Huggs. Be brave. It’s only nuts. Did you report it?”
“I spoke to a commercial crime investigator.”
“About a bag of bloody nuts?” Mel had yelled.
Mel was right to yell of course. Why get upset over a lost bag of nuts?
And then, to compound his guilt, he remembered telling Mark about his talk to the Vital management team. “I used krabok nuts as the discussion opener,” he’d said.
“I thought you’d lost your nuts,” Mark had replied.
“Not all of them,” he’d said. “I had a bag in the downstairs loo.”
And then Eddie remembered. That was the bag he’d thought was stolen. He’d planned to take it to the laboratory but stopped off in the toilet on his way out of the door and left it there. There had only ever been one bag of nuts.
And Isobel had almost yelled at him when he’d told her he’d trodden in a blob of chewing gum.
“Chewing gum? Outside your front door? It was probably the postman.”
And she was probably right because, afterwards, Eddie saw him spitting a blob of gum at next door’s dog that always snarled at him. Guilt compounded Eddie’s guilt. Should he tell Mark? Should he apologise to Isobel not just for the high-heels but the nuts? For everything?
Then there was the small fire on the Welcome mat when he’d been in the bath. The police had said it was probably children. “We’ve had a spate recently,” the policeman had said and yet he’d imagined Peter Lester creeping around with a box of matches.
“There you are,” said the voice in Eddie’s head. “You’re a classic example of a mad professor who’s getting old and forgetful and losing his marbles. You’re too willing to blame others, too focussed on day to day routine and you’ve lived on your own for far too long. You have no-one to share things with and you’ve still not grown out of that teenage obsession of cooking up private vendettas as a way to challenge the way the world actually is. Like it or not you jump to wrong conclusions, convincing yourself you’re the only one who sees the truth and then you shout it from the treetops. That’s extremely unscientific if I may say so.”
Eddie nodded to himself. That was it. No wonder he’d had a nightmare and felt so guilty. At age sixty-two and a half he needed to grow up.
He flung a towel over his shoulder and headed for the shower to try washing away the guilt before bucking up the courage to tell everyone.
But he didn’t get far. He’d not even switched the tap on. It wasn’t all his imagination. The illegal logging was fact. It was also a fact that there were problems within Vital Cosmetics. Isobel had admitted that and Mark had been convinced enough to take up the case. Mark also saw links with his Taiwanese case. And then there was the Bio-Kal connection and Italy and Pascale and Peter Lester who was panicking for some reason. And Isobel was also arriving sometime soon. Yes, private vendetta or not, he was not entirely devoid of common sense. Because of him, things were happening.
He put his hand on the tap once more and then Jeffrey called to ask if he wanted an early breakfast. Eddie then forgot he’d badly needed a shower.