Skios: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

some dim goal he could scarcely see. Already he was slipping into the empty chair beside her …
    She was almost as irresistible close up as she had been across the bar, though rather older than he had supposed. But this wasn’t really the point. The point was that the chair beside her was empty, and he had probably only three or four minutes at most before her companion came back to claim it.
    What had he said to her? He couldn’t remember. All he could remember was how she had responded. She hadn’t laughed, or ignored him, or told him to get lost. “You’re Oliver Fox,” she’d said.
    He had been unable in all honesty to deny it. This was the trouble. He was Oliver Fox. In the kind of circles he moved in, everyone had heard of him even before they met him. Friends of friends—even complete strangers, sometimes—started laughing as soon as they were introduced, waiting for him to be Oliver Fox in front of them. He had tousled blond hair, and soft smiling eyes that fixed on yours, and no one ever had any idea what he was going to do next. Least of all himself. Until suddenly he’d found that something had come into his head, and there he was, doing it already. Whereupon they’d laugh again. Or scream and run for cover, or phone the police.
    “Oh, no !” the people he’d met would tend to cry. “This time he’s really gone too far!”
    In the baggage hall here, of course, surrounded by fat holidaymakers who had never heard of him, there was no one but himself to be Oliver Fox for. He felt as if he were like the aircraft he had been sitting on for the past five hours, suspended over the void by his own bootstraps, with nothing in his head but the long boring swoosh of nothingness.
    So why was he like this? Why wasn’t he doing a job of work like a normal human being? Something where you helped people. On a run-down council estate somewhere. In the third world. There were tens of millions of people in the world out there who needed help. He was too old to go on the way he was. He would change. He would put himself humbly at their service. Train as a doctor, perhaps. Specialize. Become a neurologist. He had always wanted to know how his brain worked, why and how he did what he did. He wasn’t a fool, though—he knew how many years of study and hard work it would take. But he could still do it. He would do it. He would have applied for medical school this very moment, if only he could have found an application form.
    Everyone would be astonished. “Oliver Fox?” they’d laugh. “A neurologist? We certainly weren’t expecting that ! How absolutely typical!”
    On and on the mournful bags processed. Oliver’s eye was caught by the sight of the man beside him, who had his phone in his hand and with his two thumbs was writing a text as long as a doctoral thesis. It reminded him to get his own phone out and switch it back on. Not that there would be any good news.
    And no, there wasn’t. The first of the waiting messages was from A. A was Annuka, Annuka Vos, with whom he had borrowed the villa, and who should have been standing here beside him at the carousel if she had not flown into a rage at his coming home with a donkey he had bought off the donkey man in the park, or rather at his proposing to stable it in her flat, whereupon she had found herself abruptly unable to put up a moment longer with his being Oliver Fox, and he had been forced to leave, with nothing but the donkey and a handful of possessions, mostly his, in one of her rather elegant suitcases.
    “U wont read this of course,” she wrote, “because u r deaf and blind to everyone except yrself, but…”
    He didn’t read it, being deaf and blind at any rate to messages that started like that. He skipped down the list. The next four messages were also from A. Then came one from someone with only a phone number for a name. He couldn’t remember anyone with a name that ended in 0489, but 0489 could evidently remember him .
    “I know I am