Free Love Doesn't Work by Henning Koch Page B

throw stones at it.”
    “He broke a window. I told you not to speak to him! He’s mad.”
    “You said he wasn’t dangerous, remember! By the way, he said you were a conniving bitch, and I’d find out soon enough.”
    Archie closed the door and bolted it. We threaded our way through a bewildering sequence of open-plan rooms as she spoke over her shoulder: “Of course he did. Men always say that sort of thing when you leave them.”
    “What were you doing with him in the first place?”
    “Do shut up, Chuck.”
    We entered the stainless steel kitchen, which was exactly like a restaurant kitchen except for the show-off fittings, slate worktops, brash and branded appliances and brass grilles sunk into a fuck-off limestone floor. The windows overlooked the boundary of the town, marked out by a high stone wall. On the other side was a hillside garden where old men grew flowers, beans and artichokes. Beyond them a few mountains, then the sea hovering under the sky.
    Everything was a bloody mess, of course. Once people get used to having staff they’re always inordinately lazy. I put the things in the fridge after I had cleared out some rotten items and given it a wipe-down with one of the new sponges.
    Archie seemed oblivious to my bustling activity. She sat on the worktop, frowning. “I’ve just realized I completely hate him,” she said. “I thought he was just an annoyance. My God, I’m starting to think he could be the biggest problem of all. At least Jimmy doesn’t come round to throw stones at the house.”
    “You’d better come back with me to London. Hadn’t you?” I said.
    “What for?”
    “To avoid being killed?”
    “Don’t be silly,” she sniggered. “Bertie’s crazy about me. All he’d do is try and rape me in his very own, inept way.”
    “Oh, rape you, that’s all right then. My God, it’s a seesaw world with you, isn’t it! One bloke can’t get it up, the next one wants to rape you.” I looked round, exasperated. “Archie, do you ever wash up?”
    “What’s the point. Things just get dirty again.”
    “We’ll have to call the cleaner later. I’ll pay her myself.”
    “We can’t. I owe her two hundred euro. Let’s go upstairs.”
    We headed up the spiral staircase. Over my shoulder I said, “So, this Bertie? What was he doing in India?”
    “Finding God.”
    “And in the end all he found was little old you. Poor little mite.”
    “He got confused, didn’t he?”
    She led me into Jimmy’s “thinking room”—that was his name for it. If the room wasn’t exactly bursting with intellectual energy, it was certainly an inflated expression of money, that commodity so desired in the world but only ever obtained by a small minority who, once they’ve attained it, immediately start fretting and convincing themselves they’re broke.
    I stopped in the doorway, impressed in spite of myself.
    The room was large but broken up by a pair of sofas, cream-colored and spotlessly clean. Quite exquisite. Joined seamlessly onto the back of them were flimsy screens of woven silk that stretched up in an organic Spiderman design, until they merged with the ceiling, They were studded with bands of various colors and functioned almost as see-through partitions.
    There was an electric fireplace set into the wall, its silvery back studded with crystals turned on by flicking a switch on the wall. It had two settings, each marked with a symbol, one for heat and another for light. The light it gave off had a sort of rippling, lunar effect. It drove me insane.
    “This is stunning,” I said. “Really!”
    “The thing about Jimmy was that he found it hard to live with normal furniture,” said Archie. “He didn’t like furniture.”
    “Oh he seemed to like it well enough,” I said, with slight venom. “I suppose he got an interior designer to do all this?”
    “No, he hates them as well. He chose everything himself. In New York.”
    I sat down heavily in the sofa, flummoxed by this airy