Black Ice (13 page)

'Pinky's?' My eyes were on the girls- romantic rather than pornographic- who writhed  in smudged  blue and  red beneath the hair  of his arms. It was a fair guess. A lot of Americans in their  thirties had  picked  up  tattoos  at  Pinky's  on R and  R in Hong  Kong.

By way of reply, he pushed  up the short sleeve of his tee-shirt where  it stretched over  his football  of a bicep. There were the two tattooed words  I knew would  be there.

'Some  of the boat  people ended  up here, I believe,'  I said. Slowly,  he nodded  his cropped  and  colourless  head. Casually, I went on: 'I saw the little kid selling newspapers in the  town.'

'I seen him too. First time I was so scared  I started shaking. I was thinking about the kids who used to come up to us carrying grenades.'

He slapped the bar with his hand. The crack was so loud that the  man  who was now proposing to the fruit-machine turned and  glared  at us, then carried on.

'Now  I see him and  I know he's just a kid, like any other kid, nothing  special.  You   know  something?  This   place  is  too damned dull. You know what the guys out at the base call this island?  Icehole. I know what  they mean.  Sometimes when it's been  raining for about  a year and  the wind  takes the goddam coat off your back every time you step out, it can be rough. But you go to the right  place,  it's  Fun City,  coupla  laughs,  coupla drinks, coupla  girls- each.  Fun City,  man.'

By two in the morning we'd had those coupla drinks a coupla dozen   times,  and   he'd   had  all  four  girls  - his  and  mine  - crawling all over him.  Now he was down  to one.

We  were  watching a  strange tribe  engaged   in  a  frenetic fertility  ritual  which  involved  self-dislocation of all the major joints  while  being  tortured by the most advanced sound-and light  techniques. It was a disco,  half-a-dozen floors of it from what  I could see. To me it looked like a high-rise  hell, but then these days I find whist over-stimulating. Palli- even though  he was my age- and  the rest of the young savages  thought  it was wonderful.

'Kids fly in from  London  to this place,'  he told me.

'Can't they  shoot   their  planes  out  of the  sky  before  they land?'

We'd   reached   an  agreement  over  the  booze.  Palli  had stopped  being so punitive  about it and  reverted  to-his brenni and-Coke. He  was  the only  non-native I  knew  who  actually liked  the  stuff. It's known  locally  as  Black  Death, some  say because of the colour  of the bottle  and  some say because  they have to carry  you home in a hand-cart afterwards. I'd settled for martinis, which  they served  in the same  measures as beer and at  the same  price as gold.

'Shall  I tell you about  my daddy?' There was a lot of self-mockery in his question, but something else too.

'Tell  me about your daddy.'

We were spread  all over the table, facing each other. The last of  the  girls  was  sitting   on  the  floor,  looped  disconsolately around his thigh.

'My daddy  was an Icelander.' I tried to make the right sort of surprised reactions. 'So  was my old lady.  They  bust  up. She married a guy from the base, and I ended  up back in Chicago.'

He stopped. To spur him on, I said:  'You  enlisted?'

'Yeah. Afterwards I had problems. Shrinks, all that garbage. Shit,  man,  I didn't know who the hell I was.'  He shuffled  the girl around so he could lean over the table to get nearer to me. She didn't mind.  She didn't even notice.

With  one  scarlet   talon  she  was  tracing the  blue,  blurred letters at the top of his arm. She did the V, then the I, but gave up halfway through thee, and yawned instead. Someone ought to do a study  of the incidence of boredom in beautiful  girls: it's phenomenal.

'I didn't get this off the shrinks, I swear it, and maybe  I don't explain  too good, but  I'll  try. Look. You gotta  know what  you are.  You think,  here  I am,  I'm  a goddam peasant from Chile and  my  pa's  a  fisherman, and   that's what   I  am.  I  started thinking like that,  and  naturally I started seeing  what  I really was. I'm  an  Icelander. My daddy's an  Icelander. So let's  get the hell to Iceland.'

'Did  you find your father?'

He had  turned  his face towards  the band.  They  were doing their best to wake up Greenland. Even so I still heard  him give that sour,  edgy laugh  again.

'I found  him,  okay. That was something. That was  really something.' He  went  quiet  for  a  moment   while  he  thought about that  and  I thought then  that  he wasn't going to tell me. He raised  his glass to me. In a much better  English accent than he  could've managed sober,  he said:  'Sam, you're  a  bloody good bloke.'  He slapped the girl on the rump  and said: 'He's a bloody good  bloke, this Brit.  He's  one of the good guys.'

He  put  his drink  down  and  rearranged the girl  and  then started again. 'Yeah, I found  him.  We stood  staring at  each other. Just staring. He  was  crying,  for Christ's sake.  Tears pumping down  his cheeks.  So was I.'

'I can  understand that.'

He  shook  his  head.  'No,  you  can't. You  see,  we couldn't speak to each other. He didn't speak any English. I didn't speak any  Icelandic. So what  else could  we do? We stood  and cried like two fucking  big babies. That's something.'

'Do you like living here?'

'Do  I like it? Look at  these girls, for chrissakes! They  don't look like this in Chicago, I'm  telling you. Have  you seen  the country?  All  those   mountains  and   rivers.   It's   a   helluva country.'

I knew why he hadn't answered my question. I also knew he would,  in  his  own  time.  It  only  took  another  half-minute's silence.

'I hate  it,  man.' He  patted  the girl again  as she whispered into his ear: 'Sure, sugar, sure.' Then  he carried on. 'Sure, it is a great  big wonderful  place, I know that.  But do you know what lonely is? I look at those mountains and  I feel so lonely I could cry. Spend  most of my time round  at the Marine House - the guys on embassy security duty give me a game of pool and a few Buds.  Hell, at least  I can  tell what  they're talking about.'

For all his toughness, he was just a little  boy who'd  turned one corner too many  and  lost sight of home. Now he was just very lucky that  he happened to tell me. At two in the morning, with  enough  of the  right  stuff down  my throat, there are few problems I can't solve.  And  this  was one  I knew something about.

'Go  home,'  I said.

'This is my home.'  He stabbed a finger against  his "bicep. 'I got  Icelandic blood in these veins. Pure one hundred per cent Icelandic blood.'

I shut him up with a wave of my hands. 'Blood doesn't have a nationality. It's just the red stuff that fills up your tubes. You're an American. You look like one, you talk like one, you think like one, you are one. Go back and be one.'

'Yeah, but my daddy .. .'

'He's got nothing to do with it. Look, I'll tell you my theory.

Shall I?'

He hitched the girl up a bit higher and gave me a big grin.

'He's going to tell us a theory. My bloody good bloke. Let's hear

it, Sam.'

He was so drunk that if  I'd told him the story of Goldilocks he would've hailed it as the solution to the human  predicament. The story of Goldilocks probably makes more sense than  my theory, but I told it anyway.

'You are alone. I mean, so am I and so's everyone else too, but for the purposes of this drunken explanation, you are alone.’

‘Right?'

'Right.'  He tipped his drink up and somehow managed  to

keep his eyes on me at the same time.

'People are frightened of being alone, and they use anything to try to disguise the fact. They use sex, they use love, they use

marriage, they use friendship, they use all these things to try to kid themselves that they are not by themselves. Most of all they use family. They give them special names like uncle and sister and grandma  to try to bind them closer. Sometimes it works.

Sometimes-say at a family party at Christmas-you really feel as though you belong to a sort of club. Or if you're with one of these girls, or the two of us having a drink.'

He raised his glass. 'You're  a bloody good bloke,' he said again. 'And you're right, I just know you're right.'

'These,'  I said, jabbing  him in the chest, and  that's  not a tactic I'd  risk sober, 'are fairy-stories we tell ourselves so we won't be afraid of the dark. But they don't  mean a thing. In the end, there's just you, Palli Olafsson, that's  all.'

The girl on the floor yawned. 'Too much talking.' Then she curled round his leg again.

Palli was leaning forward again, frowning in concentration.

'It's like a new deal when you're born?'

'That's it.'

'It doesn't matter who your father  is?'

'No.  Not a bit.'

He clapped his hands on his legs to applaud himself as he triumphantly yelled at me: 'Okay, so if your father- your own father- was, say, Adolf Hitler, would you still say all that?'

'As a matter of fact,  my father  was an American.'

At first  he took it for a joke whose  meaning had got misted over  by the booze.

'Well,  don't you go near any of those Klansmen down "in Alabama, not with your hair,  buster  .. .'He stopped as he saw my face. 'Hey. You ain't joking?'

I shook  my head.  'All I know about my father is that  he was an American GI  stationed in Britain.'

'Wow.' He took a gulp  at his drink. 'Wow,' he said again.

I was nine when the letter came. As soon as I opened it, I felt my nerves  sizzle.  I  don't know  why,  but  I  remember that  quite clearly.

'Dear Samuel,' it  began,  and  no one,  not  even  the superintendent, called  me that.  'I thought I would drop you a line to say that  we hope you are getting on all right. You'll be ten next month, won't you? Quite the young  man,  I expect.  I want you to know that  your mum  had to put you in the home because of the problems it would  have caused  in the family.  I expect she thinks about you a lot and  I know I do. I was thinking the other night  that  you  don't want  to grow  up  thinking you  weren't loved,  so  I  decided   to  write  this  letter. All  the  best.  Your grandma.'

Looking   back   now,   I  suppose  I  was  devastated.  I  was excited, but  it  was excitement with  a  touch  of terror  in it,  I think.

Although  she   had   written   her  name   and   address quite clearly,  I never made any attempt to reply to it or to get in touch with her. Now I'm  not quite sure why. Perhaps I never thought of it. Perhaps I did, and  rejected  it. I don't know.

And I never told anyone about it either. I kept it, folded in its envelope, as a secret.  Often  when I was alone I took it out and reread   it,  testing  each  word  for  different  meanings and interpretations. Eventually, it disintegrated.

It wasn't until three  years later,  when  I was thirteen, that  I went to the superintendent and said I wanted  to know who my parents were. He told me my mother had  been a local factory girl and  my father  was a US serviceman. 'As far as we can establish,' he said,  'they  only  met  on  the  one  occasion.' He warned   me  against digging   too  deep.  People  who  did  were almost  always disappointed, he said. His advice was to let well alone.  When  I said  that  was what  I'd  do, he looked  relieved. After that  I never asked again.

Not that  I told one word of that  to Palli.

'Wow,' he said, for a third time. 'Don't you know who he was?'

'No.  I don't know who my mother  was either.'

'Can't you find out some way?'

'I could- I don't want  to.'

'That is very, very cool.' He shook his scrubbing-brush head, grinning and giggling.  'You don't want to know and you carry on as though  nothing's happened?'

'Nothing did  happen to me, did it?'

'I guess not. That's it! Christ, you are right!' He reached  over and  grabbed my hand  and  started shaking it. I thought mine was coming  off at  the  wrist.  'So  what  the  hell does  it  matter about  your old man, you're here and you're having a good time. It's a new deal.  Every  time, every life, it's a new deal.'

As  he  was  calling   up  some   more   drinks,  he  suddenly

remembered something. He leaned  over the table  and  put  his hand  on my arm.  'You  know what  I said ... you know, about the Alabama Klansmen, shit,  I was only joking.'

'That's okay,  Palli.'

'I mean,  fuck, you don't look anything .. .'

'Forget it, Palli.' Somehow, through the seas of booze, I managed to recognise  that as the key moment. 'You  know that Solrun's done  a runner, don't you?'

'She has?' He tried to look surprised but failed. He knew. Without a doubt he knew.

'Look,  I know you've  got to be loyal to your  pal but do you think she could've gone to him?'

'No  chance.' I could see the effort it took for him to face me with steady  eyes. 'He's back in the States, working in a muffler

shop  in Jamaica. You know, near  Kennedy.'

'Where you should  be? Back in the States?'

'Oh, yeah.' Again the slow smile softened his face. 'I'm going fishing  tomorrow. Why don't you come along, Sam? Few beers -real American beers- see what  we can  haul in?'

'Why not?'  I replied, in  that  easy-going  carefree  way that means you haven't the faintest  intention of doing it.

But then  what  a dull old world it would  be if we all told the truth all  the  time.  Like  that  business  over  the  AC  badge.  I wasn't in  any  rush  to  tell  Petursson but  I'd  recognised  the badge the minute I saw it. It was a miniature of the US Marines breast  insignia for Air Crew. The  real one is about  four inches across   but   this  smaller  version   was  the  one  they  gave  to girlfriends to 'pin' them.  In  the same  way  that  little  boys at parties stick  their  fingers in the tastiest  cakes to reserve  them. That was the badge.  Somehow  that  slotted  in neatly  with a spare name  I'd  got rolling around in my mind unclaimed. I'd been fed two names. Solrun  had talked about  two men. One of the   names,  Kirillina,  fitted   the   young   Russian   diplomat. Logically   then  ... Oscar Murphy ... or  was  I  jumping to conclusions?