Dispossession by Chaz Brenchley Page B

me,
obviously. I’d been reacting, perhaps, to a change forced upon me; and Sue was
right in the frame there, as the only known agent of change in my recent life.
Though she’d at least given me the impression that she knew little of my work
and nothing of my connection with Deverill beyond the fact that it existed and
she didn’t like it, none of that was necessarily true. Maybe she was the
undercover spy here, exploiting my memory loss now as she might have exploited
an infatuation earlier, feeding me disinformation to have me up and dancing to
her tune...
    What tune that might be, I didn’t know and couldn’t guess.
Nor who would be paying her to pipe it. There were no reasons that I could see,
nothing was reasonable; wheels turned within wheels, and all perspectives were
awry. I felt as though I were living in an Escher engraving, where impossible
relationships appeared true and things sat side by side that could never have
shared the same space.
    But Escher only works, he only gets away with it because
people are content to play to his own rules, the accepted conventions of
pictorial art. Our eyes are lazy, and hence easily deceived; there’s less work
in labelling a paradox than there is in unravelling it.
    And this was not a print to be admired for its technical
ingenuity or its psychological acuity, this was my life. If one perspective
could show me nothing but paradox and incongruity, I was in no position simply
to throw my arms up in wonder or surrender or despair. I had to analyse and
explore, to shift my own position and examine other people’s until I found
another perspective, from where things would fall into place and make sense. It
had to exist somewhere, I was sure of that. I might be floundering, even in
danger of foundering at the moment, but there must be solid ground out there if
I could only discover it. People no less than particles have distinct patterns
of behaviour. Nothing is truly random or chaotic, it only ever seems that way
because we lack information or insight, or we’re trying to force what facts we
know into a false interpretation.
    If I’d been playing detective for or against Deverill—or
both?—then I could do the same on my own account. Though it would be my own
recent life, my own forgotten motives that I needed above all to detect...
    I took the stapled sheets with a nod of thanks, perhaps my
first material clue; and was glancing through them, trying to look intelligent
under Deverill’s assessing eyes, when the minder took two or three quick paces,
across the room to the window. Something was odd there, that took me a moment
to figure: it had been darkening outside as it ought this time of night, this
time of year, but the minder was moving into light, seemingly, brighter than
the rest of us.
    “Jesus!” he yelled, staring. “Get out, Vern! Out now !”
    Vern, I thought, must have taken a course, How To Be
Protected. By the time I’d turned my head to find him, he was already at the
door and yanking it open. No hesitation, no questions asked.
    Not so the lackey on my left, who was fumbling to close his
briefcase before his feet dared move. Graduate of a different course, perhaps,
How To Protect Vern’s Secrets.
    Not so me, either. I didn’t want to linger, though I didn’t
understand; but my body simply wasn’t up to speed here. Out of bed , my head was crying; wait was the message that came back from my legs.
    Crisis-time: and like Luke coming out of his tree, I could
respond only in slow motion, and what had been a maximum benefit to him was
disastrous to me.
    Would have been disastrous, if I’d been left alone. If the
minder had been doing his job, looking after his principal.
    He was fast in his head and fast on his feet both, he had
time to dive out of there and save himself to save Deverill later, from
whatever threat came next. He might even have had time to hustle his colleague
the lackey out of the room, and save them both. But his head snapped round