A Bright Moon for Fools (12 page)

“I can fix this,” said Slade. He put in some change. He looked again. It still didn’t work. He rattled it.

“No problem, no problem,” repeated the father. His wife said something in Spanish. Slade hit the telescope with the butt of his hand. He looked. He hit it again a few inches further
up. He looked again. He went round the other end and looked into it. The family was talking to him. He hit the telescope harder. Nothing. He shook it and kicked it and cursed.

The family was walking away.

He watched them go. He put another coin in. He looked. Nothing. He hammered it with his fist. He looked. Nothing.

There was nothing.

C
hristmas arrived at Judith’s hotel with his second new suitcase. He had not paid his bill at the Jolly Frankfurter. Despite the painkillers,
his headache was still acute, his body ringing out with distress. They had breakfast. Judith was in a very good mood. She sang ‘Happy Birthday’ and had the waiter bring him a croissant
with a candle stuck in it. Her own birthday was in three weeks. “That means we’re both Geminis, Harry. Isn’t that funny?”

“Spooky,” he smiled. His real birthday wasn’t for months.

They were in the car before nine, shunting through Caracas before joining the highway going east. They drove along the northern coast of South America, from one traffic jam to the next,
threading between mountains and the sea. The potholes cracked pain through his hip and up his arm. They shifted alongside fields of sugar cane and roadside stalls, beneath gannets and cormorants,
past weirs and patchwork shelters and cars that were becoming part of the ground. Chávez appeared on billboard after billboard embracing diminutive state governors: ‘
POR AMOR A
VENEZUELA
!’

“So you’re a potter. What sort of things do you pot? Pots and so on?”

“It’s more like ... I create thoughts. I mould ideas, objects, forms – I really try not to put a label on them.” Christmas saw her knuckles twitching. Had she not been
holding the wheel there would have been quote fingers pumping all over the dashboard. “I just let my hands communicate with the clay. Try and find where our energies meet. And once I’ve
found that place I just let the energies take over.”
Ah
, thought Christmas,
so they’re shit
. “I have my wheel right at the edge of the garden. It used to be in the
most wonderful gazebo but the insects munched it to death so now I’ve got an open-sided tent. We’re quite high up so you can look straight out over the sea. Oh, it’s a wonderful
place for creativity, Harry. So
vital
. I’m sure it’s just what you need to get your juices going, though I’m afraid we don’t have a computer or anything like that.
We’ve been waiting to get the internet connected for months and months.”

“Wonderful news. I’m a paper and pen man.”

“But for the typing process – are you Mac or PC? I simply can’t decide which way to go.”

“I use a typewriter.”

“Isn’t that rather slow?”

“It comes with a secretary.”

“You’ve got a secretary that uses a typewriter?”

“It’s historical fiction, this next one. I’m trying a kind of method acting-writing thing. Stanislavsky. Drive myself up the fourth wall.”

“But I thought you didn’t know what you were going to write?”

“Have you read my other books?”

“Not yet.”

“Oh good.”

“Good?”

“They’re almost as dreary as the Noo-Naa whotsit. Anyway, fed up with my own dreariness, I decided to take my work in a radical new direction, experimental, you might say.”

“Interweaving narratives?”

“Victorians with removable vaginas.” Christmas eyed her, wondering whether he had pushed it too far.

“I beg your pardon?”

“A gothic experiment conducted on insane women by a gynaecological Dr Frankenstein.”

“Oh Harry, be
serious
. Are you serious?”

“It’s a work in progress that’s currently out of progress. Thought myself into a cul-de-sac. Probably going to abandon it.”

“And what are its, you know,
themes
and so on?”

“Multiculturalism.”

“But insane women with removable minnies ...? I mean aren’t you objectifying ... I mean won’t people, the critics and so on ... won’t people think that’s kind of
anti-women?”

“It is anti-women! It’s anti-men. It’s anti-children. It’s anti-blacks and it’s anti-whites. It’s anti-God and it’s anti-the unbelievers.”

“Well, what’s it pro?”

“It’s not pro anything. What the devil is there to be pro about?” Then Judith started to ask him all sorts of odd questions. His head, his neck, his backside, his upper body
clamoured with injury, yet this woman refused to shut up. Did he like beetroot? What was his favourite type of jacket?

“Oh, how funny!” she laughed, “How funny you are!”
What is this bloody woman on about
? he thought, unable to find humour in anything that had been said in the last
hour. He shifted in his seat. His breakfast had taken a wrong turn in his guts and he needed to force a re-direction.

“There,” he said, spotting a roadside restaurant. “Why don’t we pull over and stretch our legs a bit. I’ll take a turn with the driving.”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said, going straight past it and continuing with anecdotes about her ex-husband.

“There!” said Christmas, spotting another, “Judith, you must let me take a turn at the wheel. Let’s stop at this place here.”

“Really, Harry, don’t worry. I’m enjoying it.”

“Well, I’m afraid we need to stop anyway. I need to use their conveniences.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” she said, shuddering to a halt. They were on the side of the road. “Out you pop.”

“Judith, the restaurant is just up there.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” she said, squeezing his leg. “I won’t peek.”

“Judith, I require a cubicle.”

“A number two? Why didn’t you say? Oh, how funny!” Judith started laughing. She started the car up again.

As with all roadside restaurants in Venezuela there was rubbish everywhere and a three-legged dog. Uniformed waiters stood behind a counter that announced a vast array of
arepas
, and Christmas left Judith admiring the choice as he went off to find to the toilets. They bore no sign, were completely hidden from view, and by the time he had located them
Christmas was desperate.

A filthy shed housed a couple of buckets and a contingent of insects straight from the Old Testament. He barged into the only cubicle to find a toilet bowl in the middle of some profound
alchemical transformation. With trousers down and actual contact out of the question, Christmas assumed the Johnny Wilkinson position, his podgy discoloured thighs shaking with strain and
disagreement. Then a cockroach crawled up his ankle at exactly the wrong moment. A flurry of batting, squeezing and shouting ensured that Christmas left the toilet more agitated than when
he’d entered it.

“Harry,” said Judith as he rejoined her at the food counter. “Whatever is the matter? You look awful.”

“I saw a ghost. What have you ordered?”

“Bits and bobs, Harry, darling, but a ghost? What was it doing in the toilet?”

“I think it had quite understandably mistaken it for a portal back to hell.” He scanned the board overhead. As long as you wanted an
arepa
, anything was possible.

“Give me an
arepa
with bacon,” he asked in Spanish.

“We don’t have bacon today.”

“With prawns?”

“No.”

“With quail eggs?”

“No.”

“With beef? With chicken?”

“No and no.”

“With sausage? With fish? There are fifty options here, man, are you telling me you don’t have a single one of them?”

“Cheese. We have cheese. Don’t you like cheese?”

Judith refused to let him drive. “Don’t be ridiculous, Harry. You’re completely black and blue, you’re in a state of shock, it’s your birthday and
you’re my patient now. I’m taking care of you.” Back on the road, they drove on through Barcelona and Puerto La Cruz, through mud flats and beaches of salt. They saw flamingos,
the sky in sudden blossom. They drove past painted stones announcing the revolution while roadside Santa Maria’s prayed in their boxes. A refinery shone and flared. It began to rain. They
entered a desert of rusting hills and hit another traffic jam. It dragged them past a crowd standing over a body on the road next to an upturned car emitting black smoke. Then the rain stopped and
the sun came out. The rocks and scrub became fields of corn and
ocumo
. The hills rolled with jungle. Christmas thought of Emily.

It was late afternoon. They stopped and bought fish
empanadas
and cold beer from a child. The road overlooked a bay, overgrowth and flowers sweeping down to a fingernail of sand.

“We’re in Estado Sucre, darling. Not long now.” Christmas nodded. He couldn’t take his eyes from the coastline. He felt for the poetry book in his jacket pocket.
We’re here, Ems
, he thought, giving it a squeeze.
See how beautiful it is
?

Two hours later, the traffic stopped dead between Carúpano and Rio Caribe. Drivers hung from their windows, shouting ahead to find out what was happening. Another accident. No one was
going anywhere. As soon as the news broke, all the car doors opened, everybody spilling out onto the road. Salsa music burst into the air. Boots were popped open and people began to mix drinks.
“Come on!” said, Judith, jumping out.

Christmas leant against the car and propped up his Panama hat with a cowboy finger. He smelt the sun and the sea salt. A man leant beside him. He gave Christmas a plastic cup filled with rum,
ice and lime juice. The two men toasted each other. Barefoot strangers were dancing to invisible pianos and trumpets and drums, and there was Judith, in the middle of it all, laughing and swirling.
A teenager in nothing more than shorts and a bra took his hand and he twirled her round once before he had to give up. His shoulder was too painful. Someone new filled up his glass. They all wanted
to know him. Where was he from? Where was he going? What did he think of Venezuela? Judith swayed past and patted his cheek. Cars came up the other lane beeping and whooping as they rolled slowly
by, drinks poured into the passing mouths.
These people
, Christmas thought to himself,
are magnificent
. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. Doors shut, the cars began to
move. The jam moved on.

“Wasn’t that fun!” said Judith, breathless as she jumped back into the car. “Rio Caribe just coming up. Then we’re onto the Paria peninsula proper. My place
isn’t far.” A blackened chassis appeared on the side of the road.

“Not another accident?” asked Christmas.

“Nope. Some fellow from Caracas came down here for the weekend and got so drunk he had a fight with one of the locals, pulled out a gun and shot the man in the leg, so they all beat him to
within an inch and set his car on fire.”

Pelicans perched on beached fishing boats. Families sat in front of their doors drinking beer. Every house was a different colour and men with big bellies strode around in shorts.

Once through Rio Caribe, they headed inland, meandering between hills and villages, carried up for a view of the lumpy valleys before dipping back to follow the coast. They passed huts selling
balls of cacao and bottles of chocolate rum, bowls of avocados for sale on the road, donkeys grazing, old men sitting outside, bright flowers and groves of short
cambur
bananas. After an
hour or so they turned up a track into the hills, the car bouncing between potholes until they went through a gate and began to wend up a steep slope. “And here we are!” she said as
white walls became visible through the trees. “
Casa mía
.” It was completely isolated. Harry Christmas felt a thunderous urge for a drink.

A
hacienda in the colonial style, Judith’s house sat high on a plateau burly with jungle. The house itself was rectangular, built around an
inner courtyard, the first floor balustrade pausing at one end to deliver a staircase down onto mosaic floor tiles, frayed wicker chairs and piles of old magazines. Outside, her carefully tended
flower beds followed a colonnade around the house to the portico and main door. Here two hammocks swung between the columns and steps led down to the lawn. Sprinklers fought the heat. Trees and
bushes, flowers and fruit dotted towards the sea, the tropical forest sloping sharply away on either side into the sound of crickets.

Judith pulled up to the side of the house. They got out of the car and a mosquito bit Christmas on the neck. It was a rich, pink evening. Two cats trotted out of the bushes and Judith crouched
down to meet them.

“Hello, darlings, we’ve got a guest! This is Harry. Harry this is Alexei and Gregory.”

“The Orlov brothers?”

“Oh, how clever of you!”

“Catherine the Great’s henchmen who helped her get rid of her husband.”

“Digby was allergic to cats, which was a great problem for him. He was also allergic to bonking, which was a great problem for me. Now then, let me show you around the house.”

“It’s been rather a long drive, Judith, I’m sure you’d just rather go to be—”

“Nonsense! It’s your birthday! Let me fetch a couple of gins and a sandwich or something and we’ll do a quick tour. It’s the perfect time. The evenings here are so
...” she gave a little shudder, “
vital
.”

“And this is the dining room,” she announced, pushing open some double doors at one end of the courtyard. Christmas was nearing the end of a gin so stiff it could
join the army. He felt much better. The woman might be a loony, but what a house! The drinks cabinet was well stocked and there were plenty of comfortable spots where a man could snooze away the
afternoons and think about important stuff.

“Do you recognise the colour?”

“Green?” Christmas surveyed the room. It was covered in British hunting scenes. Every piece of furniture was a grumpy antique.

“Harrods green. Took me bloody ages to get it right. Digby insisted, the toffee-nosed prat.”