Lime's Photograph (20 page)

I tried to get up again, unaided, and this time I managed. I was
drunk and the worst thing was that, although I was in agony, I was enjoying the sensation of alcohol in my blood. I got dizzy again. I could smell my own vomit and piss and tried to pull off my soiled t-shirt, but I couldn’t keep my balance. Tómas put my arm round his shoulders and helped me up the stairs to the first floor. I had shooting pains all over my body, but we reached the bedroom. Tómas helped me to take off my t-shirt and without embarrassment unbuckled my belt and pulled off my sodden jeans. I leant on him while he pulled off my socks, but I took my underpants off myself. I put my arm round his shoulders again and he helped me into the bathroom and held me up under the shower. I had difficulty keeping my balance, but he took it in his stride. He had seen beaten-up people before, of both sexes. He held me up and soaped me gently. My right side was completely livid, and I caught sight of my face in the mirror looking like a swollen mask, a boxer’s beaten face after 15 fruitless rounds.

He helped me into clean clothes and then back into bed. I could still smell vomit and whisky. Cool night air drifted in through the open window.

Tómas fetched some iodine and cleaned my wounds. There was a nasty gash under my right eye. It stung, but not too badly. I asked him to ring Don Alfonzo again, but there was still no answer. He helped me into the double bed and sat on the edge as if I was a sick child who was afraid of the dark. Which wasn’t that far off the mark. I told him about the suitcase. That it contained the most significant photographs I had taken during my life, but there was nothing secret about them. Jacqueline, the Minister and snapshots of my childhood dog. It was my own private world. What could it have to do with anyone else?

“The answer’s in the suitcase,” he said. “Otherwise it doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Forget it,” he said. “I’d have thought the same in your shoes. Forget it.”

“You’re taking a big risk, Tómas. It could have repercussions for your new life.”

“You once took a risk with me, and hid me and helped me and closed your eyes and kept your mouth shut.”

“Then we’re even,” I said.

Tómas smiled. His face was blurred.

“I’ve told you before, Peter. Friends don’t keep tabs.”

My alcoholic haze was beginning to turn into a hangover. My head was aching and throbbing and my stomach seething and rumbling. Tómas calmly fetched a bucket and put it next to the bed and handed me a couple of pills. They would be of no help whatsoever, but I took them with a glass of water without making a fuss. I knew I ought to get up, but I couldn’t.

“I can’t drive the bike. Could you take me to the airport tomorrow? I mean today. I’ve got to go to Madrid. I’ve got to talk to Don Alfonzo.”

“Of course. I’m not going anywhere. Sleep a bit first. Then I’ll drive you to the airport later today.”

“Wake me if you get through to Don Alfonzo.”

“Of course. Now just keep quiet for a while.”

I was more battered and exhausted than sleepy, but I fell asleep and dreamt about Amelia. She was lying in state in the bedroom of our burnt-out flat. The room looked as if it had been rebuilt just as painstakingly and reverentially as the Poles had rebuilt the centre of the old Warsaw. Every single thing was in its usual place. The bedroom was now a museum. Lots of people were wandering around looking at her clothes and jewellery and the photographs of Maria Luisa that we had as good as papered one of the walls with. I couldn’t understand why in death Amelia was suddenly so interesting that people would pay to see her mummified body, and inspect her things as though they
were works of art. There was a queue going along the corridor and down the stairs and out onto the street, where it wound across Plaza Santa Ana just like the one I had seen in front of Lenin’s Mausoleum in Moscow many years ago in the days of the Soviet Union. An ebony-black man was lying next to Amelia, his arms crossed over his chest. At first he was completely still, and I couldn’t understand why he was lying next to my sleeping wife. I wasn’t really jealous, but thought he ought to explain himself.

He lifted his head and looked at me. He didn’t have eyes, just two even blacker holes in his black face. None of the visitors seemed to have noticed him. He got up. He was completely naked, hairless and sexless. He looked like a finely carved statue given life by an unseen God. He rose and slowly dissolved in the air, and I realised that Death had slept with Amelia.

I woke with the impression of two shadows standing by my bed. I had slept for much longer than I wanted to, and now it was mid-afternoon. A low sun shone through the window; soon it would disappear behind the western mountain range. I ached all over. My body hurt from the beating, my mouth was dry but slimy, my head was raging and my stomach burning as it struggled with all the poison that had been poured into me. It was difficult to focus and the thought of sitting up made me nauseous.

One of the shadows turned into Tómas, the other one was a stooping, middle-aged man with a little grey moustache under a pointed nose and dishevelled, thin hair. I tried to sit up.

“Stay where you are, Peter,” said Tómas gently. “You look dreadful.”

“Thanks. Who’s your friend?” My voice was husky and rasping, and my lips hurt when I spoke.

“Doctor Martinez. He’s a friend. You were completely out of it,” said Tómas.

I was naked apart from my boxer shorts. One side of my body was blue, mixed with various shades of red.

“May I take a look at you, señor Lime?” asked Martinez. His voice was light, almost like a woman’s, and his slender, white hands were effeminately soft and cautious as he examined me. My face was
swollen and I had an ugly gash under one eye and a badly bruised rib, but he didn’t think he could detect any internal injuries. He wanted me to go to hospital for further tests, but I refused. He sighed, but didn’t argue. I doubt I was the first patient he had seen who didn’t want to be written up in case notes.

“Then I’ll have to stitch you here,” he said.

He filled a syringe and injected my cheek, and we waited for the anaesthetic to work.

“Don Alfonzo?” I said.

“He’s still not answering.”

“Try again.”

“I keep trying,” said Tómas, and punched in the number. He held the little black mobile phone against my ear so I could hear it ringing.

“I’ve got to go to Madrid,” I said through the fog of my hangover.

“Not today. You’ve got slight concussion on top of everything else,” said the doctor and pricked my cheek cautiously. It felt numb and alien, but it still hurt as he inserted five small stitches with fine thread and covered the gash with a plaster. Then he gave me a handful of painkillers and a sleeping pill.

“You look like someone who heals well. Rest and sleep assist the process better than anything else,” he said, and left the room nodding briefly in my direction and shaking hands with Tómas. My old friend Tómas still had connections in many circles. I tried to sit up, but couldn’t. I noticed that the bucket by the bed had been emptied and rinsed out. I vaguely remembered throwing up at some point. Maybe it was the indignity of it all that made me accept what Tómas said, and so I didn’t insist on being driven to the airport. He handed me a big glass of water, which I drank. It nearly came up again. He fetched more water and I took the pills he gave me. They must have contained some hard-hitting substances because I fell into a dreamless sleep and woke to a grey darkness with just the beginnings of shimmering light.
My headache had gone and, although it hurt down my side and across the small of my back when I got up to go to the toilet, the pain was bearable, like when I was young and got knocked about playing football. It hurt, but was all part of the job. I couldn’t tell whether the faint light indicated that we were starting a new morning or if I had slept only for a couple of hours and dusk was bringing the day to a close.

I put on my bathrobe without too much difficulty, went down the stairs and saw Tómas, asleep and fully dressed, on the sofa. The kitchen was clean and tidy and I couldn’t smell the whisky or my vomit any more. It was as if they had never invaded my life and beaten me up, got me drunk and made me talk. Tómas lay on his back with his mouth half-open, looking like a young boy. The glass in the door had been replaced and I looked out at the dawning, grey light creeping in from the east. I heard the tinkling of bells from Arregui’s sheep and realised that I must have slept for the better part of 12 hours at a stretch; that now the third day after the attack was about to begin. I looked across at Tómas and felt touched by his friendship. He was taking care of me as if I was a child. I went to the telephone and dialled Don Alfonzo’s number. There was still no answer, but the sound woke Tómas and he sat up with a start.

“Good morning, señor,” I said. “And what would the gentleman like for his breakfast?”

He laughed in relief and ran his hand through his hair.

“A shower. I didn’t want to disturb you, so …”

“Breakfast will be waiting on the table when sir has finished his shower.”

“You must be feeling better, even though you still look like a brawler,” he said.

He went upstairs and I wasted no time before rummaging through the cupboards looking for the booze, but if the Irish thugs had left
anything then Tómas had thrown it out. My hands shook slightly and my throat was dry, but water didn’t help, even though I swilled down three glassfuls. I brewed coffee, found some ham that Tómas must have got from his father and made two omelettes, which I knew he liked. While I was preparing breakfast, I saw Arregui coming up the hillside with his sheep. He looked just like every other elderly Basque shepherd whose way of life was slowly vanishing, and his small, compact frame gave no hint of the strength it harboured, the ferocity which could seize it. The two dogs worked the sheep briskly, but still in a strangely lazy fashion, rounding them up and driving them towards better pasture. Maybe the human race could do with some kind of dog to lead the way forward.

I thought about the last few days and knew that now there was no going back. I couldn’t let the matter drop, but I had no idea how I would get enough answers to know which questions to ask. I just knew that I had to look in the suitcase, even though its magic stemmed precisely from the fact that I never had. That it existed, that it contained my life’s secrets, joys and mistakes. But that I couldn’t remember exactly what was in it, because I never inspected the contents when I put in a new photograph or note, wrapped in white paper or in an envelope. Its essence and mystery came from the very fact that it was secret even to me, but I knew that now I had to violate that secret. I had to look at Lime’s photographs.

Tómas came downstairs and we ate my omelettes and drank coffee and the juice he had been out to buy. Maybe Arregui had watched over me while he’d been gone. We didn’t say much, just ate in amicable silence. There was no trace of the two Irishmen – we didn’t mention the fair-haired one – they had apparently vanished from Euskadi. Tómas cleared the table while I had a shower. I still looked like a boxer after a tough fight, but the gash seemed clean when I pulled off the plaster. I put on a fresh one. I was battered, but not incapacitated.
It hurt when I raised my arms to wash my hair, and the shaver had to be used with caution, but with a fresh blue t-shirt, my ponytail in place, clean jeans and my old leather jacket, I was ready to catch the plane back to Madrid. I normally looked an ageing bruiser in many respects. Gloria said that I dressed like a tough guy and Oscar like an affluent fop because we had to compensate for our youth in the mixed-up 1970s, when everyone had looked like each other, irrespective of gender. Now I just looked like a battered, ageing bruiser, and Gloria would say it gave me an enigmatic tinge of danger and romance – or she’d probably say that it fitted the image I tried to project. Another Indiana Jones just home from a dangerous expedition. Image and role were everything in the confused me-culture of the late 1990s. I felt euphoric and cheerful in some way, as if they had knocked both the despair and the common sense out of me. I hadn’t thought about Amelia and Maria Luisa since my dream, and when I realised this, the gaping void opened instantly, but not quite as overwhelmingly as before. As if Amelia was asking me to remember that I had to carry on living. To carry the memory of our short life together as a gift of joy and sorrow, never to be consigned to oblivion, but to remain deep inside, so it would no longer gnaw at my mind like a cancer.

Tómas commented on it when my flight was called in San Sebastián’s little airport. I was lucky. We arrived just in time for the next plane and there were empty seats.

“You look ghastly, but you seem to be in an amazingly good mood.”

“Gallows humour,” was all I said, and handed him the keys to the motorbike. “Take a spin. Fresh air will do you good. I’ll pick it up later.”

“Arregui will keep an eye on the house, I’m sure.”

“Thank your father.”

“Will do.”

“And thank you. For everything,” I said, and there was a brief, awkward silence.

“I’ll make sure your motorbike gets the occasional airing. Be young again, right? Put a girl on the pillion and drive up and down the streets of San Sebastián like in the old days.”

“Yes. They were good.”

“Not really, they improve in the remembering,” he said.

I gave him a hug and he patted me cautiously on my back. It hurt, but felt good too. As did the double vodka which, with neither trembling voice nor trembling hand, I ordered on the plane once we were headed south towards Madrid, and the green Basque hills, the high grey mountains and the Bay of Biscay’s green-blue water and foaming white horses had disappeared below the wings.

From the air, Madrid looked like a scorched heap of yellow stones, an enormous desert fort in the shimmering midday heat. I walked straight out into a sauna, and my t-shirt had stuck to my back before I had reached the taxi rank. It was the stagnant, sweltering heat that drove every Madrileño with the time and means out of Madrid when August struck. I had rung Don Alfonzo from the airport terminal and his phone had been engaged, and I had rung again from a taxi and his phone had still been engaged. A white Policía Nacional patrol car was parked outside his house, and sweat poured off me until I saw Don Alfonzo standing at the veranda door talking with one of the police officers. I paid the taxi with a rush of relief. I had feared the worst. However much I tried, I couldn’t remember what and how much I had said to the three Irishmen.