Last India Overland (13 page)

“Eerie city,” said Kelly. “I’m not sure if I like it or not.” “I know I don’t’ I said. “It’s got death vibes.”

“It’s the water, right?” she said. “The water creeping up, inch by inch, every year.”

I said, “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Like sand in an hourglass, and the days of our lives, the way a bar of soap gets smaller and a river widens,” she said.

I looked at her. She smiled. She was trying to be funny, I thought, so I smiled too. I felt like I was walking on either eggshells or razors. The dark reflections in the puddles we walked through looked more like razors.

“I’m a morbid person, Mick,” she said. “You really don’t want to make friends with me.”

“You got that wrong,” I said. “I’m morbid too. All I ever do is think about death.”

“You’re humouring me,” she said.

“No, I’m not,” I said.

We kept glancing at each other as we walked along, which usually isn’t something people do. Usually they look at the ground or straight ahead.

We walked along in silence for a while, gazing up at the high alleys. People’s underwear hanging still.

Finally Kelly said, “Actually, I wouldn’t mind seeing the Bridge of Sighs.”

So we weren’t going to talk about death.

“Have you ever seen the movie,
A Little Romance?”
she asked.

I said yeah.

She said she loved the movie. She said she’s seen almost every movie Laurence Olivier’s been in.

I said I liked him a lot in
Marathon Man.

“He was sinister in that one,” said Kelly. “But convincing. Now I think of his face every time I go to a dentist. Which has made for a nice change.”

It took us a while to find the Bridge of Sighs, and for those people who haven’t seen
A Little Romance,
it’s about these two teenagers who decide they have to go to Venice and kiss on the Bridge of Sighs to seal their love, which is of your basic Romeo and Juliet variety, parents disapprove, etc. and Laurence Olivier helps them do it.

When we got there Patrick was still on the bridge, all by himself, taking pictures of the canal.

Kelly said, “Let’s wait until Patrick’s gone.”

I almost said any particular reason? But decided against it. Instead I said okay. Like the old man always used to say, the two most important words when you’re involved with a woman are yes, dear.

While we waited in the shadows of an alley for Patrick to take off, I asked Kelly if she’d seen
Don’t Look Now.

She said yeah.

I said, “Quite the movie, huh?”

She seemed to freeze for just a minute, didn’t say anything. Finally she said, in this cold voice, “If you’re thinking of the sex scene in that movie—” Then she caught herself. Said she was sorry, then she looked at me.

She said, “Mick, I’m going to be up front with you right from the start. I sense sexual tension here. Which isn’t all that unusual. You’re male. I’m female. And I like you, that’s the first thing I want to say. But I don’t want to mislead you in any way. Something happened to me about a year ago that put my libido on hold. I’m only interested in exploring the realms of the subconscious, not the realms of the physical.”

I shrugged my shoulders as casually as I could. “That’s fine with me,” I said. “I’m scared of sex myself.”

She cocked her head to the left. Her eyes seemed far back in her head, thanks to those glasses. Made them seem weird, like a frog’s almost, except they were still sexy in some way, so I think witch’s eyes might be closer to it, yeah, definitely witch’s eyes.

“Why are you scared of sex?” she said.

I said, “It’s the way women always grind a knee into your groin to check you out as soon as they get your pants off.” I shrugged my shoulders again, wondered where the hell that statement came from. It didn’t sound like something Dave would say. And decided to clam up.

We looked back at the bridge. Patrick was gone. It was just an empty bridge and all that grey sky beyond. I felt the hairs on my skin prickle up and I shivered, the way I always shiver when, as Dave once put it, I brush against a ghost. The way everyone shivers, he says.

Kelly said, “Well, let’s walk across the Bridge of Sighs.” Then she laughed, to herself more than anything else.

“Get the feeling we’re in a play?” I said.

She looked at me. “Always,” she said. “Some macabre puppet play, where the strings are piano wire and there’s these strange beings called the Masters of Karma doing all the pulling. To fully answer your question.”

So yeah, Kelly was one weird chick.

I always fall in love with weird chicks, as Rice-Eater once put it.

And so Kelly and I walked out across the Bridge of Sighs, and when we got to the top of the bridge we stopped and looked out at this one lonely gondola at the far end of the canal, coming towards us.

We leaned on the stone rail and watched it come. And while it came, Kelly said to me, “Since you’re a psychic, you probably know why my id has fled.”

I looked at her out of the comer of my eye. She kept staring straight ahead.

I didn’t say anything, I called up Dave. And against the back of my eyelids, in this small room, that’s the sense I have of it, this TV screen suddenly switches on after a brief explosion of white light and I see this darkness, and the darkness quickly gives way to what looks like a candle flame and the flame gets brighter and I see it’s a bonfire, and I see two figures around it. I see the bonfire reflected in Kelly’s glasses and the sides of some glasses, wine glasses maybe, getting tipped up, and then there’s something like flash bulbs going off.

I can’t make any sense of it.

“I don’t know,” I say to her. “This psychic stuff, it’s what they call inexact. All I’m getting is a bonfire, wine bottles and a camera, on what looks like a beach. You and this other guy. Looks like a professor or something.”

“My photography professor,” says Kelly.

I turn to look at her. All the blood has drained from her face and there’s just skull left there, covered by skin, and those glasses and those eyes.

She looks away. That gondola’s gotten a whole bunch nearer. It’s Tim and Teach coming at us, I can see that now, and Kelly and I don’t say a word the whole time they get nearer. It’s just a little uncomfortable, because they recognize us and we can’t walk away and so we stay there, and when they get close we wave, and Teach shouts up, to Kelly more than me, enjoying Venice? and Kelly says yes, you? and Teach says oh, very much so, and then they disappear underneath the bridge, and Kelly says, “They’ll be kissing now, and we spoiled it for them.” In this low whisper.

I knew she was right. I knew exactly what she was talking about.

I said, “They’ll likely forgive us.”

Kelly said, “Never completely.”

Can’t remember what we talked about after that. I remember the way her cheekbones looked beneath her skin, her gawky walk, toes out. The way the world seemed to float up from the Venice puddles.

I guess we weren’t paying attention to where we were going because we ended up getting lost. Every alley we went down ended up in a drop-off into some canal.

I tried phoning up Dave. But the line was busy.

Finally Kelly took out this nickel and flipped it whenever we had to choose an alley to go down, and eventually we ended up at a dock where people were waiting for a canal taxi.

“I’m impressed,” I told Kelly.

“That was the whole point,” she said.

The canal taxi back to the bus was so crowded we had to stand up and Kelly ended up having to press her body against me.

I didn’t mind.

She didn’t seem to mind much either.

When we got to the bus, Pete said to Kelly, “I wouldn’t hang around much with this guy, Kelly, if I were you. He’s got bad habits and they might be contagious.”

Kelly looked back at me and smiled and then she looked at Pete. “Thanks for the advice,” she said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

from Kelly’s diary

Oct. 18

We’re finally on the bus. C thinks we would’ve been better off with the Fr. pervert. Major thing is, F.’s on the bus. C’s still not sure how she feels about that, or so she says. She’s relieved more than anything else, & it shows. Mars is hitting my Venus, & I have a feeling a guy named Mick would like to hit on me, or vice versa. It’s early morning. Just left Venice. We’re driving along the craggy Adriatic coastline. The sky is turquoise, edged with peach, garnished with a few cherry-coloured cloud swirls. The driver, a matinee-idol type, who’s cohabiting, of course, with the one cover-girl candidate on the bus, looked at our medical books this morning, & told C. she needs another cholera vaccination for Iran because her previous ones were only 7 days apart. Other negative notes: Rob & Suzie, Aussies both. The former has a crazy bend of mind & the latter wants to be my friend. This morning the former walked past me & licked his lips while looking at my crotch: a first. This afternoon the latter sat down next to me & told me what it’s like to be a sex surrogate for sexually confused people. I have a feeling she’s sexually confused herself. Tho I’m probably not the best one to judge.

Frank’s daybook entry

Today’s day 8, and I don’t have any idea what God did on the 8th day. I know we drove to Zadar. Suzie told me that might be a good place to start, when she dropped the daybook in my lap while I was busy trying to digest my supper. Which was sole of Hush Puppy with a mushroom sauce, or something.

Whoops. I take that back. It might be my turn to cook next. Actually, it was real tasty, whatever it was. So here we are in Zadar. Pete told us just before we got to camp that there’s a mass grave of plague and Holocaust victims not too far away.

I believe it. These are the spookiest trees I’ve ever seen. They look like hangin’ trees. But maybe that has something to do with the saloon brawl that almost broke out today on the bus. Forget that. Like Kelly keeps saying, let’s don’t dwell on the negative. So what else happened today? Well we ran out of eggs and cream and had to make do with black coffee and stale corn flakes for breakfast. Day started out sunny but around about three some scary-looking black clouds raced in from the south and it rained cats and gophers for a while. The trip’s been good value, as Suzie puts it, as far as getting your mark and lira’s worth of sunshine’s concerned but now that we’ve crossed over into Yugoslavia, maybe the dinar won’t buy us as much. But something positive must’ve happened today. Oh, yeah. Pete found enough wood that wasn’t damp to build a campfire. That was nice. Until those huge mosquitoes moved in and drove everyone into the bus. Well, almost everyone.

Mick

Not too much happened the rest of that day. The cantina threw another chicken on the fire for us but afterwards everybody kind of avoided the outdoor veranda for some reason. Nobody was in a party mood, I guess. So I took a walk down along the beach and almost tripped over Tim deLuca meditating. I would’ve tripped over him if it wasn’t for the fact he was chanting to himself, just a bit, while he sat on the beach Buddha style.

I tiptoed away. I didn’t want to disturb him.

What happened the next day? Right. Me and Patrick and Jenkins, sitting at the tables—on the bus, I mean—playing penny-point poker with lire, and there was Rockstar all of a sudden, standing in the aisle, wearing his good T-shirt, the one with the bloodstains on it and the four safety pins holding it together, and he’s saying, hey, you sooks mind if I play?

No one says yes, we do mind, lots. Though Patrick looks like he’s about to.

Rockstar sits down and I deal him a hand.

I was running short on money a lot quicker than I thought I would.

Only problem is, I can’t get Dave on the phone, bastard plays that trick on me sometimes, and so Patrick ends up winning most of the pots.

The Yugoslavian border shows up just in time, since they have a moneychanger there who scalps a few American traveller’s cheques for us which allows us to keep playing poker all the way to Zadar. Thirty clicks from Zadar I finally get Dave on the phone. I offer Patrick double or nothing on the pot in the middle of the table. He looks at me and says no thanks. But I’ve been losing so bad, Rockstar reaches into his pants and pulls out a money belt. A thick money belt. Plucks from it a couple thousand dinars, lays them on the table.

By the time we get to Zadar Rockstar doesn’t have a single dinar left. Most of them are in Patrick’s pockets.

Mainly because Dave played a little trick on me, said Patrick only had two aces when in fact he had four.

Dave doesn’t really understand cards too well, that’s the problem. Or so he says.

Anyway, so Rockstar loses a whole bunch of money to Patrick. Which didn’t exactly please him a whole bunch. I think he called Patrick a bloody poker shark a couple times, along with the usual things. Patrick didn’t let it faze him. I think he was getting used to having Rockstar call him names.

But then Rockstar pulls out Jenkins’s steel-tipped pen and sticks it up Patrick’s nose like Polanski did to Jack Nicholson’s in
Chinatown,
and Rockstar hisses, “Nice little kitty-cat. Nice little poofter. Poofter want to lose his nose?”