Damascus (25 page)

11/1/93 M
ONDAY
13:48

Henry was almost the exact opposite of Spencer. He looked at her all the time, as if hoping to see something extra which required great concentration. Hazel stood up and went to the telephone table where she'd left
The Woman in a Car with 
Glasses and a Gun
. His eyes followed her, without blinking. And again (unlike Spencer) she could tell that Henry was
always
thinking about tomorrow.

He smiled at her, showing off his brown tooth. He asked her what the book was about.

‘There's a lady in it,' Hazel said.

Looking at his tooth was only centimetres away from looking at his lips, wondering what it was like to kiss him. She looked at the tooth. The lady has a car,' Hazel said. ‘She wears glasses. She carries a gun.'

‘You are very beautiful,' Henry said, and Hazel glanced across at Spencer, who managed a frown and not much else. No, that wasn't fair. He also crossed his arms, and then his legs. Hazel went to put the book back on the table, then found she wasn't happy with the idea of Henry looking at her from behind. She turned round again, facing him.

‘More beautiful than I expected,' he said. ‘I hadn't expected you to be so young.' He smiled again. ‘Or so blonde.'

‘Spencer was just the same,' Hazel said, and with his frown wavering at about sixty percent compression Spencer told Henry how much he must be looking forward to his flight back to Japan. Henry's gaze never once left Hazel, and she was increasingly keen to escape. She wasn't frightened, and she didn't want to label Henry as something he wasn't, but she'd also quite like a few moments on her own without being stared at. She surprised herself by saying she was going to make some soup. She surprised everybody.

'I'll help you,' Henry said.

‘No, you stay here. You can have a chat with Spencer.' The two men both looked at her. ‘You can talk some more about sport,' she suggested, and before either of them could think of dissuading her, she'd already left them to it.

Back in the kitchen, Hazel felt an enormous sense of relief. She avoided examining this feeling too closely by keeping herself busy, unnecessarily so, and it wasn't long before she found herself reading the nutritional information on the backs of packets of various brands of soup. Although it was probably useful to know that they all contained less chicken than salt, she'd been hoping for more practical types of information, like how should she deal with a dangerous maniac and was feeding him this soup recommended by the manufacturer? She already knew the answer: not everyone was a maniac. Life would be unliveable if she thought like that.

There was no need to be frightened. He was most likely and most of the time a decent and honourable human being, like everyone else. She wasn't going to condemn him just because he had limited small talk and a funny tooth. He was certainly very polite. And if she really thought there was something wrong with him she wouldn't be making him lunch. She didn't think. So then why was she hoping Spencer would do something spontaneous and male and perhaps even violent, securing their instant rescue from any danger? Only these days she wasn't allowed to think like that, not if she ever wanted an invitation to the Woman of the Year lunch.

She had to make up her mind. Henry wasn't dangerous or even unpleasant; he was a minor inconvenience in the middle of their day. All the same, he
might
be dangerous. He had the fixed gaze and the funny tooth. He had the patterned sweater. He'd tracked her first to her house and now here, although admittedly without any obvious axe. Hazel wished there was some kind of infallible test for murderous psychopaths, but in the absence of such a useful invention she was still convinced it was best not to be frightened. This wasn't a conviction ever likely to be supported by newspapers, or television. Instead, with everything which so palpably
could
go wrong in life (brought daily to everyone's attention), it was more an act of faith, in God or in good luck or in her observation that for most people things turn out bearably in the end.

All the same, she and Spencer would have been safer staying in bed.

Miss Burns, who knew everything, had deliberately left him alone but with someone else in an unfurnished entrance hall, having offered him no encouragement except for a
Cromer, My Kind of Town
mug of cooling tea. An uneasy thought occurred to him: she knew all along that as soon as he had his diploma he'd have to leave the country. She didn't want him and she would never love him and that's why she'd left him alone with Spencer Kelly, a manual worker shot to death after he attacked his employer with a knife. What kind of involved madness was that? Why did the lives of other people complicate themselves so thoroughly? Still nervous, Henry had one hand in his pocket. He pressed and moulded the packet of powder between his fingers, wondering who to poison first.

Ridiculous. Preposterous. Drink the famous British tea. Think like the people you have chosen to live among. Or failing that, remember the difference between thinking a thing and doing it, and behave like everyone else. He didn't, anyway, want to poison anyone. Except perhaps himself, because if Miss Burns didn't love him then it wasn't worth living.

It was all getting out of hand again. Of course she could be persuaded to love him. It was destined. The very fact that he was here was proof of it, and Henry excluded any other possibility by narrowing everything down to the present moment. It was something he could always be sure of. He had a cup of tea. It was in a mug which said
Cromer, My Kind of Town
. The present moment, he thought, sifting through his collection of idiomatic phrases, is my cup of tea. And the wall which is painted a cream colour. And arriving with a big smile, carrying in both arms a fruit bowl full of water, a small girl-child, life undecided.

‘Hello,' she said. 'This is my new fish. Try and guess his name.'

She was followed in by an old man, and both Henry and Spencer stood up. Spencer introduced them all and then made it clear he was leaving.

‘This is Henry Mitsui,' he said. ‘He has lots of interesting things to say about long-distance running.'

Henry watched him leave, stared between his shoulder-blades knowing he was going to join Miss Burns. The treacherous Spencer Kelly, deservedly fed a lethal speedball of drags in a nightclub toilet, left to convulse and die on a pavement somewhere, like America. The old man was asking him a question.

‘Have you come to look at the house?'

‘I've come to see Miss Burns.'

William Welsby looked a bit like the film director Federico Fellini. Fellini had been in the news and Welsby was dressed in black. William Welsby, Fellini's bereaved and forgotten cousin. As for the little girl, she could be anyone because she was still young enough to be capable of anything. One day she'd grow up to be a member of both the MCC and the Surrey County Cricket Club.

‘Are you sure you haven't come to look at the house?'

Henry wished they'd both go away. They were just more people between him and Miss Burns, and he didn't have enough powder to poison them all.

‘You look a bit pale,' William said. ‘What you need is some fresh air.'

It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, in Macclesfield or Dorking or Gainsborough or Harwich, in Hawick or Keynsham or Milford Haven or Norwich, Hazel is wondering what's a nice girl like me doing in a place like this. She expects her very own River Phoenix to ask her exactly this question any second now. It's his class of line. He is medium-build, black hair. He is nineteen years old and a Scorpio like she is, and he claims to be a criminal. If her accent has dropped slightly during their conversation it's only in search of the authentic, and she quickly discovers how much fun it is to talk to a stranger she knows she'll never see again.

They've moved from the swimming pool to the bar, partly because Hazel is disgusted by the way Olive gets handed towels by Sam Carter, but also because a new set of races needs to be stewarded and River Phoenix is hiding from his supervisor.

'I thought you wanted to be a swimmer?' he says.

They sit right in the comer of the bar, beneath a speaker playing selections from Mozart or Bartok or Rachmaninov by the London Symphony Orchestra or the Vienna Philharmonic or the Ungarica. The bar manager has ambitions for a sideways move to the Arts Centre. Perhaps by way of compensation the television screen shows highlights from the British Lions against New Zealand, or Bath against Leicester, or England against Australia.

‘People change,' Hazel says. That's what people do.'

‘But a lawyer? A doctor? That's quite a change.' Hazel recognises this from University. It's the syndrome of the ruffled boy trying to get his own back, which in this case he ought to do quickly before he's lured away from his community service by Quentin Tarantino. She's not complaining, but she wonders why her body has yet to learn a language which tells men she isn't interested. Dying her hair brown or black might just work, but in the meantime her college experiences, not to mention the cautionary example of her own parents, have made her properly careful of men's friendship.

Her father, as it turns out, is having the affair her mother always suspected. With his new secretary
and
an airline hostess
and
an exotic swan-necked foreigner who doesn't speak English. It all counts. He has taken full advantage of Virgin Freeway or Continental OnePass or SAS Eurobonus to collect air miles for his lovers to travel free to foreign sales conventions, where he hands over more accumulated air miles in exchange for hotel reservations. This explains why his bank statements have never betrayed him. Hazel asks her mother why they stay married, and not under the influence of drugs she says that marriage is like an identity card. It reveals who you are, both to other people and yourself.

‘Why would someone like you want to be a lawyer or a doctor?'

‘To be happy,' Hazel says, which is such an unsatisfactory answer it annoys her. She also sees that River Phoenix isn't going to let her get away with it. He says:

‘Happy in what way exactly? You mean your parents' idea of happiness?'

‘My mother thinks happiness is Nembutal. Yours?'

‘God. For Mum, happiness is God. And hanging on to the right memories.'

‘Ï forget things all the time,' Hazel says, remembering Sam Carter drying Olive's long brown hair. She'll soon forget it, she hopes, hoping that the things you forge'I don't matter any more.

'It's hardly very ambitious, is it?'

‘What?'

‘Doctors. Lawyers.'

‘Twenty-five percent of candidates fail the bar exams.'

‘What are you frightened of?'

‘I'm not frightened.'

‘You're young,' he says. ‘You're gorgeous. Don't you ever dream of a life more exciting than that?'

Hazel remembers, just in time, that she's allowed to retaliate. She mentions that she used to like River Phoenix, until she grew out of him. ‘You know you're dead?'

‘I read it in the paper.'

‘Sad.'

‘Tragic'

‘At your age.'

They both think of River Phoenix fixed in time, captured on film, never getting any older. No more tomorrows for River, which in fact is often how Hazel feels. She doesn't actually register time passing. She believes she's going to live forever, and that forever will always look very like today, which she knows is wrong. Time passes and people grow old and accidents happen. That's why she has to be a lawyer or a doctor. That's why she has to be responsible and act her age.

‘You have to live in the real world,' she tells her own private River Phoenix, who's doing community service. He must have committed a crime and she bets he didn't go to a private school, which still sounds to her like a more real world than her own. He's now telling her to imagine a parallel universe where there are always several options and everything is always possible. She can be anywhere she wants to be and do anything she wants to do.

‘No I can't. There is such a thing as reality, you know.'

'I bet you learnt that from your mother.'

Hazel is almost too angry to reply. There
is
such a thing as reality, whether they like it or not. It exists and you can see it, smell it, sense it, touch it, remember it, even take bits of it home with you in a box. There is the unique moment in which life is real, and that moment is always now. Here they are at the pool, in the bar, music, television, and there's only so far they can bend it to suit themselves. Real life keeps insisting on its own shape, and a million ifs or buts or eithers or ors don't make a blind bit of difference. This is what there is and we have to stand up and get on with it and grow old in it. It won't let us go anywhere we like or do anything we want, quite the opposite, which is why it makes sense to be a lawyer or a doctor, and fully insured by General Accident or the CIS or Commercial Union. Things will go wrong. That's how you know that they're real.