Piranha to Scurfy (14 page)

He would attract attention to himself. In fact, it was hard to think of any way to attract
more
attention to himself. He would have to describe what he had seen, identify Mr. Russell—a customer, a good customer!— and say he had seen Mr. Russell put his hand in the middle of his wife’s back and push her down the escalator. He alone had seen it. Not Nigel, not the customers, but himself alone.They wouldn’t believe him; he’d get the sack. He had had this job just six weeks and he would get the sack.

So he wouldn’t tell. At least, he wouldn’t tell Mr. Costello. There was only one person he really wanted to tell, and that was Fiona, but when they met and had their drink and talked and had another drink and she said she’d see him again the next night, he didn’t say anything about Mr. Russell. He didn’t want to spoil things, have her think he was a nut or maybe a liar. Once he was at home he thought about telling his mother. Not his father—his father would just get on to the police—but his mother, who sometimes had glimmerings of understanding. But she had gone to bed, and the next morning he wasn’t in the mood for talking about it.

Something strange had happened in the night. He was no longer quite sure of his facts. He had begun to doubt. Had he really seen that rich and powerful man, that tall middle-aged man, one of the few men who had ever talked to him while he had his shoes cleaned, had he really seen that man push his wife down the escalator? Was it reasonable? Was it
possible?
What motive could he have had? He was rich, he had only recently married, he was known for being devoted to his wife.

Ross tried to re-create the sight in his mind, to rewind the film, so to speak, and run it through once more. To stop it at that point and freeze the frame. With his eyes closed, he attempted it. He could get Mrs. Russell to the top of the escalator, he could turn her head around to look back at her approaching husband, he could turn her head once more toward the escalator, but then came a moment of darkness, of a blank screen, as had happened once or twice to their TV set when there was a power cut. His power cut lasted only ten seconds, but when the electricity came on again it was to show Mrs. Russell plunging forward and to transmit the terrible sound of her scream. The bit where Mr. Russell had put his hand on her back and pushed her had vanished.

They were back that morning at the foot of the escalator. Things were normal, as if it had never happened. Ross could hardly believe his ears when Mr. Costello came by and said he wanted to congratulate them, him and Nigel, for keeping their heads the day before, behaving politely, not attracting unnecessary attention to themselves. Nigel blushed at that, but Ross smiled with pleasure and thanked Mr. Costello.

Business picked up wonderfully from that day onward. One memorable Wednesday afternoon there was actually a queue of customers waiting to have their shoes cleaned. The accident had been in all the papers and someone had got a photograph. Just as there is always a doctor on hand, so is there always someone with a camera. People wanted to have their shoes cleaned by the two professionals who had seen Mrs. Russell fall down the stairs, who had been there when it was all happening.

Fall
down the stairs, not “get pushed down.” The more Ross heard the term “fall down,” the more “pushed down” faded from his consciousness. He hadn’t seen anything, of course he hadn’t. It had been a dream, a fantasy, a craving for excitement. He was very polite to the customers. He called them “sir” and “madam” with every breath, but he never talked about the accident beyond saying how unfortunate it was and what a tragedy.When they asked him directly he always said, “I’m afraid I wasn’t looking, madam. I was attending to a customer.”

Mr. Costello overheard approvingly. Three months later, when there was a vacancy in Men’s Shoes, he offered Ross the job. By that time Ross and Fiona were going steady, she had given up all ideas of modeling in favor of hairdresser training, and they had moved in together into a studio flatlet. Karen had disappeared. Fiona had never known her well: Karen was a deep one, never talked about her personal life, and now she was gone and the window where they had sat and pretended to read best-sellers from the book department had been given over to Armani for Men.

While in Men’s Shoes, Ross managed to get into a day-release scheme and took a business-studies course at the metropolitan college. His mother was disappointed because he wasn’t a professional anymore, but everyone else saw all this as a great step forward. And so it was, because two weeks before he and Fiona got engaged, he was taken on as assistant manager at a shop in the precinct called The Great Boot Sale, at twice the salary he was getting from the Marsh Partnership.

In all that time he had heard very little of Mr. Russell beyond that he had let the house on The Mount and moved away. It was his mother who told Ross he was back and having his house done up before moving into it with his new wife.

“It’s a funny thing,” she said, “but I’ve noticed it time and time again. A man who’s been married to a woman a lot older than him will always marry a woman a lot younger than him the second time around. Now why is that?”

No one knew. Ross thought very little of it. He had long ago convinced himself that the whole escalator incident had been in his imagination, a kind of daydream, probably the result of the kind of videos he had been watching. And when he encountered Mr. Russell in the High Street he wasn’t surprised the man didn’t recognize him. After all, it was a year ago.

But to see Karen walk past with her nose in the air did surprise him. She tucked her hand into Mr. Russell’s arm—the hand with the diamond ring on it and the wedding ring—and turned him around to look where she was looking, into the jeweler’s window. Ross looked at their reflections in the glass and shivered.

THE BEACH BUTLER

THE WOMAN WAS THIN AND STRINGY, burned dark brown, in a white bikini that was too brief. Her hair, which had stopped looking like hair long ago, was a pale dry fluff. She came out the sea, out of the latest crashing breaker, waving her arms and crying, screaming of some kind of loss. Alison, in her solitary recliner, under her striped hood (hired at $6 a morning or $10 a whole day), watched her emerge, watched people crowd about her, heard complaints made in angry voices but not what was said.

As always, the sky was a cloudless blue, the sea a deeper color. The Pacific but not peaceable. It only looked calm. Not far from the shore a great swell would bulge out of the sea, rise to a crest, and crash on whoever happened to be there at the time, in a cascade of overwhelming, stunning, irresistible water, so that you fell over before you knew what was happening. Just such a wave had crashed on the woman in the white bikini. When she had struggled to her feet she had found herself somehow damaged or bereft.

Alone, knowing nobody, Alison could see no one to ask. She put her head back on the pillow, adjusted her sunglasses, returned to her book. She had read no more than a paragraph when she heard his gentle voice asking her if there was anything she required. Could he get her anything?

When first she heard his—well, what? his title?—when first she heard he was called the beach butler it had made her laugh; she could hardly believe it. She thought of telling people at home and watching their faces. The beach butler. It conjured up a picture of an elderly man with a paunch wearing a white dinner jacket with striped trousers and pointed patent shoes like Hercule Poirot. Agustin wasn’t like that. He was young and handsome, he was wary and polite, and he wore shorts and white trainers. His T-shirts were always snow white and immaculate; he must go through several a day. She wondered who washed them. A mother? A wife?

He stood there, smiling, holding the pad on which he wrote down orders. She couldn’t really afford to order anything—she hadn’t known the package didn’t include drinks and midday meals and extras like this recliner and hood. On the other hand, she could hardly keep pretending she never wanted a drink.

“A Diet Coke then,” she said.

“Something to eat, ma’am?”

It must be close on lunchtime. “Maybe some crisps.” She corrected herself. “I mean, chips.”

Agustin wrote something on his pad. He spoke fairly good English but only, she suspected, when food was the subject. Still, she would try.

“What was wrong with the lady?”

“The lady?”

“The one who was screaming.”

“Ah. She lose her...” He resorted to miming, holding up his hands, making a ring with his fingers round his wrist. “The ocean take her— these things.”

“Bracelet, do you mean? Rings?”

“All those. The ocean take. Bracelet, rings, these...” He put his hands to the lobes of his ears.

Alison shook her head, smiling. She had seen someone go into the sea wearing sunglasses and come out having lost them to the tide. But jewelry... !

“One Diet Coke, one chips,” he said. “Suite number, please?”

“Six-oh-seven—I mean, Six-zero-seven.”

She signed the chit. He passed on to the couple sitting in chairs under a striped umbrella. It was all couples here, couples or families. When they’d decided to come, she and Liz, they hadn’t expected that. They’d expected young unattached people.Then Liz had got appendicitis and had to cancel and Alison had come alone. She’d paid, so she couldn’t afford not to come, and she’d even been excited at the prospect. Mostly Americans, the travel agent had said, and she had imagined Tom Cruise look-alikes. American men were all tall, and in the movies they were all handsome. On the long flight over she had speculated about meeting them. Well, about meeting one.

But there were no men. Or, rather, there were plenty of men of all ages, and they were tall enough and good-looking enough, but they were all married or with partners or girlfriends and most of them were fathers of families. Alison had never seen so many children all at once. The evenings were quiet, the place gradually becoming deserted, as all these parents disappeared into their suites—there were no rooms here, only suites—to be with their sleeping children. By ten the band stopped playing, for the children must be allowed to sleep, and the restaurant staff brought the tables indoors, the bar closed.

She had walked down to the beach that first evening, expecting lights, people strolling, even a barbecue. It had been dark and silent, no one about but the beach butler, cleaning from the sand the day’s litter, the drinks cans, the crisp bags, and the cigarette butts.

Now he brought her Diet Coke and her crisps. He smiled at her, his teeth as white as his T-shirt. She had a sudden urge to engage him in conversation, to get him to sit in a chair beside her and talk to her, so as not to be alone. She thought of asking him if he had had his lunch, if he’d have a drink with her, but by the time the words were formulated he had passed on. He had gone up to the group where sat the woman who had screamed.

Alison had been taught by her mother and father and her swimming teacher at school that you must never go into sea or pool until two hours have elapsed after eating. But last week she had read in a magazine that this theory was now old hat, that you could go swimming as soon as you liked after eating. Besides, a packet of crisps was hardly a meal. She was very hot; it was the hottest time of the day.

Looking at herself in one of the many mirrors in her suite, she’d thought she looked as good in her black bikini as any woman there. Better than most. Certainly thinner, and she would get even thinner because she couldn’t afford to eat much. It was just that so many on the beach were younger than she, even the ones with two or three children. Or they looked younger. When she thought like that, panic rushed upon her, a seizure of panic that gripped her like physical pain. And the words that came with it were
old
and
poor.
She walked down to the water’s edge. Showing herself off, hoping they were watching her. Then she walked quickly into the clear, warm water.

The incoming wave broke at her feet. By the time the next one had swollen, reared up, and collapsed in a roar of spray, she was out beyond its range. There were sharks, but they didn’t come within a thousand yards of the beach, and she wasn’t afraid. She swam, floated on the water, swam again. A man and a woman, both wearing sunglasses, swam out together, embraced, began a passionate kissing while they trod water. Alison looked away and up toward the hotel, anywhere but at them.

In the travel brochure, the hotel had looked very different, more golden than red, and the mountains behind it less stark. It hadn’t looked like what it was, a brick-red building in a brick-red desert. The lawns around it weren’t exactly artificial, but they were composed of the kind of grass that never grew and so never had to be cut. Watering took place at night. No one knew where the water came from, because there were no rivers or reservoirs and it never rained. Brilliantly colored flowers, red, pink, purple, orange, hung from every balcony, and the huge tubs were filled with hibiscus and bird-of-paradise. But outside the grounds the only thing that grew was cactus, some like swords and some like plates covered with prickles. And through the desert went the white road that came from the airport and must go on to somewhere else.

Alison let the swell carry her in, judged the pace of the waves, let one break ahead of her, then ran ahead through the shallows, just in time before the next one came.The couple who had been kissing had both lost their sunglasses. She saw them complaining and gesticulating to Agustin, as if he were responsible for the strength of the sea.

The tide was going out. Four little boys and three girls began building a sand castle where the sand was damp and firm. She didn’t like them— they were a nuisance, and the last thing she wanted was for them to talk to her or like her—but they made her think that if she didn’t hurry up she would never have children. It would be too late; it was getting later every minute. She dried herself and took the used towel to drop it into the bin by the beach butler’s pavilion. Agustin was handing out snorkeling equipment to the best-looking man on the beach and his beautiful girlfriend. Well, the best-looking man after Agustin.

He waved to her, said, “Have a nice day, ma’am.”

The hours passed slowly. With Liz there it would have been very different, despite the lack of available men. When you have someone to talk to, you can’t think so much. Alison would have preferred not to keep thinking all the time, but she couldn’t help herself. She thought about being alone and about apparently being the only person in the hotel who was alone. She thought about what this holiday was costing, some of it already paid for, but not all.

When she had arrived they had asked for an imprint of her credit card and she had given it—she didn’t know how to refuse. She imagined a picture of her pale blue-and-gray credit card filling a computer screen and every drink she had and slice of pizza she ate and every towel she used and recliner she sat in and video she watched depositing a red spot on its pastel surface, until the whole card was filled up with scarlet. Until it burst or rang bells and the computer printed NO, NO, NO across the screen.

Back in her room, she lay down on the enormous bed and slept. The air-conditioning kept the temperature at the level of an average January day in England, and she had to cover herself up with the thick quilt they called a comforter. It wasn’t much comfort but was slippery and cold to the touch. Outside the sun blazed onto the balcony and flamed on the glass so that looking at the windows was impossible. Sleeping like this kept Alison from sleeping at night, but there was nothing else to do. She woke in time to see the sunset. The sun seemed to sink into the sea or be swallowed up by it, like a red-hot iron plunged in water. She could almost hear it fizz. A little wind swayed the thin palm trees.

After dinner, pasta and salad and fruit salad and a glass of house wine, the cheapest things on the menu, after sitting by the pool with the coffee that was free—they endlessly refilled one’s cup—she went down to the beach. She hardly knew why. Perhaps it was because at this time of the day the hotel became unbearable with everyone departing to their rooms, carrying exhausted children or hand in hand or arms round each other’s waists, so surely off to make love it was indecent.

She made her way along the pale paths, under the palms, between the tubs of ghost-pale flowers, now drained of color. Down the steps to the newly cleaned sand, the newly swept red rocks. Recliners and chairs were all stacked away, umbrellas furled, hoods folded up. It was warm and still, the air smelling of nothing, not even of salt. Down at the water’s edge, in the pale moonlight, the beach butler was walking slowly along, pushing ahead of him something that looked from where she stood like a small vacuum cleaner.

She walked toward him. Not a vacuum cleaner: a metal detector.

“You’re looking for the jewelry people lose,” she said.

He looked at her, smiled. “We never find.” He put his hand into the pocket of his shorts. “Find this only.”

Small change, most of it American, a handful of sandy nickels, dimes, and quarters.

“Do you get to keep it?”

“This money? Of course. Who can say who has lost this money?”

“But jewelry, if you found that, would it be yours?”

He switched off the detector. “I finish now.” He seemed to consider, began to laugh. From that laughter she suddenly understood so much, she was amazed at her own intuitive powers. His laughter, the tone of it, the incredulous note in it, told her his whole life: his poverty, the wonder of having this job, the value to him of five dollars in small change, his greed, his fear, his continuing amazement at the attitudes of these rich people. A lot to read into a laugh, but she knew she had got it right. And at the same time she was overcome by a need for him that included pity and empathy and desire. She forgot about having to be careful, forgot that credit card.

“Is there anything to drink in the pavilion?”

The laughter had stopped. His head a little on one side, he was smiling at her. “There is wine, yes. There is rum.”

“I’d like to buy you a drink. Can we do that?”

He nodded. She had supposed the pavilion was closed and he would have to unlock a door and roll up a shutter, but it was still open. It was open for the families who never came after six o’clock. He took two glasses down from a shelf.

“I don’t want wine,” she said. “I want the rum.”

He poured alcohol into their glasses and soda into hers. He drank his down in one gulp and poured himself a refill.

“Suite number, please,” he said.

It gave her a small, unpleasant shock to be asked. “Six-zero-seven,” she said, not caring to read what it cost, and signed the chit. He took it from her, touching her fingers with his fingers. She asked him where he lived.

“In the village. It is five minutes.”

“You have a car?”

He started laughing again. He came out of the pavilion carrying the rum bottle. When he had pulled down the shutters and locked them and locked the door, he took her hand and said, “Come.” She noticed that he had stopped calling her “ma’am.” The hand that held hers went around her waist and pulled her closer to him. The path led up among the red rocks, under pine trees that looked black by night. Underfoot was pale dry sand. She had thought he would take her to the village, but instead he pulled her down onto the sand in the deep shadows.

His kisses were perfunctory. He threw up her long skirt and pulled down her panties. It was all over in a few minutes. She put up her arms to hold him, expecting a real kiss now and perhaps a flattering word or two. He sat up and lit a cigarette. Although it was two years since she had smoked, she would have liked one too, but she was afraid to ask him— he was so poor, he probably rationed his cigarettes.

“I go home now,” he said, and he stubbed out the cigarette into the sand he had cleaned of other people’s butts.

“Do you walk?”