Collected Stories (12 page)

“Were they mafiosi?”

“I think he double-crossed them.”

“But were they mafiosi?”

“He was in his dressing gown. It was the only time I saw him scared. He was scared shitless. They took him away.”

“What did they do to him?”

She shrugged. “He didn’t come back for two weeks.”

“What did you do?”

“I went and hid. I knew a lot of things he knew. Do you want a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines?”

“You said half a million before.”

“What the fuck does that matter. It’s a lot of money, baby.” And her face which had been clouded with frowns burst into a smile of pure sensual excitement as she waved straight-fingered hands and clicked her tongue.

“Where?”

“Come with me and I’ll tell you.”

“Where?”

“Carlos can’t go near it, even if he gets out of jail.”

He smiled at her, wondering. “Why not?”

“You don’t understand Carlos. He wouldn’t tell anyone. He’ll wait.”

He kissed her then, very gently. “I think you’re bullshitting.”

“You think I’m bullshitting because you’ve never known anyone like Carlos.”

“You keep changing your story.”

“Don’t be boring, honey. You’re a boring old man.” And then she would kiss him, as gently as he had kissed her, looking into his eyes to ask him puzzled questions she couldn’t begin to form. “Do you want me to go away?”

“No, not unless you want to go away.”

His skin was younger than his eyes. He lay there languidly, without apparent need.

“I found a photograph of your wife. She looks very beautiful,” she said, asking another question.

“What else did you find?”

“A mouldy sandwich under the bed.”

“Anything else?”

“Let’s go to a club.”

“There aren’t any clubs.”

“Well, let’s go to a bar.”

“I hate bars.”

“You’re a boring old man, Claude.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

And she began then to kiss him, first his neck, then his chest, and then his limp cock until it was stiff and hard inside her mouth. She moved her mouth and tongue slowly, sweetly, and listened with pleasure while he groaned softly.

Outside the frogs croaked beside the river.

They held hands tightly, fucking slowly, feeling curiously happy in their puzzlement with each other.

And then, in the last week of winter, the letters began and each night, it seemed, she had some word of the odyssey of the rock’n’roll band who were now wanted for questioning due to information that Carlos had passed on to the police.

“He’s trying to do a deal,” she said.

“How?” he asked.

“He’s a cunning little bastard,” she said.

Claude read the letters with wonder and fear, wonder at the adventure he was watching, and (to his own surprise) fear that the band would arrive at his house and take Julie from his dull world to their exciting one.

As he detailed the plumbing of the six-storey office block and watched the melancholy streets of the town with their predictable goings and comings, he thought only of the rock’n’roll band and the million dollars’ (half a million dollars’?) worth of amphetamines.

Ho-Chin, the legendary drummer, was coming down from the north and sneaking through borders for an unstated rendezvous with Eric, the lead guitarist. Evelyn, having laid low in Hong Kong, had slipped out to a cattle boat and was heading this way laden with cocaine and a plan to slip in through Daru in New Guinea and Thursday Island.

And each of them, it seemed to Claude, drawing his dreadful plumbing and considering the placement of mirrors for successful typists to lipstick in front of, was a king amongst kings and their coming together would be more thrilling and threatening than the meeting of rivers from the mountains.

And then there were setbacks, delays.

Paul had been arrested in Bangkok for busking. (Claude sent
money.) Evelyn was having an affair with a Muslim in Surabaya and walked amongst pilgrims for Mecca with her infidel’s secrets, blue Muslim cocks on pale mornings, white sheets and slowly turning fans above the vagueness of mosquito nets. She who had once worked the London tube with her twelve-string guitar (click-click-cocaine-click), with her beautiful Eurasian face and blue-black straight hair, as thin and nervous as a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines.

Eric wrote letters about music, drugs and police that Claude didn’t understand.

He came to hate the letters. He also became obsessed by them. And as he concentrated on the method of attaching fire-escape banisters to walls, his mind wandered through impossible concerts in the municipal auditorium. Eric, in fur boots, eyes closed, singing electrical magic with his guitar until audiences were transformed into rivers and white water dispersed down streets where it flooded the houses and left them full of fish.

And as he worked on the relationship between the lift doors and the placement of the call buttons, he saw the second concert where the people would come and be transformed into large white birds who would circle in slow loops before going to live beside rocky seas, catching fish and making eggs which they would guard against predators.

Stoned on hope and anxiety he saw a concert where the applause became locusts and the audience became fields of grass and were devoured by the locusts and left barren and desolate. Wind came through the municipal auditorium blowing gritty sand into the faces of the rock’n’roll band as they travelled out into the desert, cruel bandits looking for new audiences, coming at last to a city in the north surrounded by orange groves and date palms where they would be taken in and adopted by the people and taught crafts such as cabinet making and net weaving and some would learn how to pick an orange, at what time, by what method, for the people in that place had no music in their lives and didn’t understand the purpose of the band, seeing them simply as vagabonds to be befriended and taught a purpose in life.

Such were Claude’s dreams of the rock’n’roll band, against whom he was already building defences.

She made up her eyes with charcoal in the manner of Indian men, so they suggested secrets and sorcery.

She pored over newspapers, reading between the lines of local news.

The mayor, she suggested, was a Cocairo.

How was she so sure?

“Look at his cheekbones. Cocairos are like that. That’s how you tell them. The skin stretches tight over their cheekbones. They got a crazy look in their eyes.”

A local murder was obviously centred around heroin.

“How? Why?”

“It’s very weird, you know, the guy wasn’t from here at all and the girl was. I think she lured him into the bush where the other guy killed the first guy. He probably double-crossed him. It was a heroin deal, I bet.”

“How?”

“It’s just very weird, that’s all.” And she couldn’t say any more, retreating simply into her own certainty, unable or unwilling to explain why it was a heroin killing or possibly not believing it anyway, but simply wanting to transmit the incredible life she had lived with Carlos.

“This town is a fucking bore.”

“You don’t have to stay here.”

“I can’t afford to go anywhere else … unless …” she flashed wide sparkling Indian eyes and snapped her fingers, click, click, click, “unless you want to come and get some amphetamines with me, honey.”

He thought of Bonnie and Clyde Barrow taking photographs of themselves in hotel rooms, posing as gangsters in a movie, cigarettes dangling from their mouths, guns pointed on camera.

“You’re a French gangster movie,” he told her.

“You don’t make any sense,” she said. “There’s half a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines. We can get them.”

She was chubby. She cried in her sleep. Her palms sweated continually. He saw her cowering in a corner while Carlos beat her up.

“Where are they?”

“I’ll tell you when we’re on our way.”

“I can’t leave anyway,” he said. “I’ve got a building to finish.”

“You’re a boring old man, Claude, come and get drunk.”

“We got drunk last night.”

“We could try and score some coke.”

“You said you didn’t want any more coke.”

And there she was again, in her underwear, the grey hat tipped forward on her curly blonde head, the revolver dangling in her small damp hand. “Just a sniff, honey. Cocaine is a really amazing drug. It’s a really
nice
drug.”

“We could always go and see the mayor,” he said.

“Oh, that mayor. Claude, you don’t know anything about what goes on in this town.”

“Are you really serious about these amphetamines?” he asked her.

“It’s a very heavy scene.”

“Do you really know where they are?”

“Do you think everything I tell you is a lie?”

“No, but you do exaggerate.”

She smiled.

“Are they really worth a million dollars?”

“That’s retail,” she grinned.

“How would you sell them?”

“You’d never come with me, would you? We could go to South America together. It’s a really amazing place.”

“No,” he said. “I’m an architect with responsibilities to my clients. And I won’t come with you because I’m a coward.” They were curled up on the couch in front of the fire listening to Mozart. “Why don’t you go and get them yourself? I’ll wait for you here.”

“People there know me. I was there with Carlos. They know the stuff is hidden somewhere but they don’t know where. It’s very heavy. They kill people for money like that.”

“But not respectable middle-class architects,” he said thoughtfully.

For one fleeting, terrible moment she thought his interest might be serious. The thought chilled her. “Oh baby, don’t you ever get mixed up with these people. They don’t care about anyone.” She cradled his head in her lap. “Let’s get stoned and watch TV.”

One day he returned home and found that she had swept the house. A stew was cooking on the stove. There was a bottle of wine open on the table.

“Why did you do that?” he asked her. He was astonished. It seemed out of character.

“I cut the grass, too, some of it.”

“What with?”

“The scythe,” she said simply, “only the postman came and saw my boobs because I got hot and took my shirt off. Do you mind?”

“No, I don’t mind. Did he mind?”

“He’s a really nice man,” she said, “he came in for a drink.”

“He came in for a fuck,” Claude said more sharply than he had expected to.

“You really don’t understand twenty-two-year-old ladies, do you?” she said, frowning at him. “All you understand is cheating on wives and getting divorced.”

As usual in matters of sexual morality, he felt she was right. “Was there any mail?”

“Evelyn’s left Surabaya,” she said. “How’s your shitty building?”

“Shitty. Did you fuck the postman?”

“No, baby. I didn’t fuck the postman.”

The house smelt clean and good and the stew made a slow comforting noise. He filled a glass of wine and looked at Evelyn’s letter without reading it.

Julie stood over the stove, thoughtfully stirring the stew with a wooden spoon.

He was going to ask, what happens when the band arrives?

But he didn’t. Instead he said, “Do you want a joint?”

Julie with her T-shirt off cutting grass with a scythe.

Julie planting five small trees and watering them with a plastic bucket.

Claude buying records by the rock’n’roll band and staring at photographs.

“Is that like Evelyn?”

“Is that a good photograph of Eric?”

“Does Evelyn screw Paul? It looks like it from the photo.”

Julie reading
Social Banditry
by the river.

Julie in blinding sun on the roof of the house, removing leaves from guttering.

Julie trying to draw pictures of parrots and Claude and hiding them afterwards.

Claude buying detailed maps of a northern city where a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines are hidden.

Julie with sunburn.

Claude with maps.

In the late spring many things were changing and Julie went into town and bought a long white cheesecloth dress with small blue flowers embroidered on it.

“Feel my hands,” she said.

“Yes,” he wondered.

“Dry.”

They lay on clean sheets nowadays but Claude didn’t sleep well, his dreams were twisted in the tangled roads of his threat and his salvation: the rock’n’roll band and a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines.

She saw him as soft and slow and sleepy as a lizard. She would have dressed him in pale mohair sweaters and soft leather slip-ons. She saw him playing svelte snooker at 3.00 a.m., his dark eyes smiling in concentration. She saw him by firelight. By deep dusk light on warm evenings. She was wrapped in blankets with him and by him. She would have done nothing to unwrap the cocoon they had built. He had asked nothing of her, ever, and she would have given him anything.

Yet he seemed somehow restless and untouchable. His movements, normally so fluid, had become less certain.

They played the amphetamine game now only because he wanted to.

She talked to him about the amphetamines because she had come to love him. She considered, by brown rivers on hot days, saying I love you in the evening but never did. She came to fear that he wanted her to leave, that his restlessness was an indication of this.

“Do you want me to go away, honey?” she asked him.

“Do you want to go away?”

“No.”

“Aren’t you bored?”

“No,” she smiled, “I’m not bored.”

“You keep saying I’m a boring old man.”

“Ah,” she said, “I only say that to flatter you.”

“I have often thought,” he said, not unkindly, “that you perhaps say it to flatter yourself.”

“How do you mean?”

“That it makes you feel dangerous.”

She reacted by making pistols of her fingers and with wrinkled nose, swivelling hips, shooting him with imaginary Magnums. “Zap. Zap.”

“Do you want to rob banks?” he said.

“Only if I can do it with you,” she said. “Come and look at the trees. I think they might need watering.”