The Lying Tongue (36 page)

“You mustn’t let me keep you,” he said. “Look at you, you poor thing, you’re shivering. We don’t want you to catch your death, do we?”

As soon as he walked across the corridor and into his bedroom, I slammed the door and collapsed, shaking, onto the edge of the bath. I couldn’t allow myself to think about what had very nearly happened. I proceeded to dry my body, wiping myself clean of the drops of water that spotted my skin, and as I dressed I tried to convince myself that this was merely another example of Crace’s eccentric behavior. But the way he looked at me when he was standing in that doorway. It was not so much an expression of desire as one of expectation.

In the dream I was in my parents’ house, only the corridors seemed to stretch on forever and the building had a lot more rooms. I was running, searching their home for something, but I was uncertain what it was I was looking for, although I was sure that I would recognize it when I found it. I climbed the stairs, which felt as though they were melting away beneath me, but when I stretched out my foot to step onto the landing, instead of rising upward I felt myself falling for what seemed like hundreds of feet through darkness until I landed in the corridor outside my teenage bedroom. From outside I heard music playing, a CD I knew I had bought but couldn’t place. I turned the handle of the door and stepped inside to see the figure of a boy sitting on the bed with his back to me. He was wearing the same black trousers, blue blazer and white shirt that made up the school uniform and, because of this, I took him to be one of my friends from my year. But, curiously, I didn’t know his name. I took a step closer to the bed, but as I reached out to touch the curve of his cheek and he began to turn his head toward me to reveal himself, I felt something brush against me in the exact same spot on my own face.

I opened my eyes and sat bolt upright, certain that whatever had touched me was not confined to a dream. Outside my room I was sure I could hear footsteps disappearing down the corridor. I rubbed my eyes as I tried to look into the darkness of my room, gradually making out the curved frame at the foot of my bed, the shape of the shutters by the window, the line of the desk and the mound of my rucksack in the corner. I tried to listen for more signs of Crace, but all I heard was water lapping outside the palazzo. I checked my watch by the bed. It was 3:26
AM
.

It had only been a matter of hours since Crace had surprised me in the bathroom. Now he had taken to stealing into my room in the middle of the night. I ran my fingers over my cheek to the spot that I was convinced he had just touched, somehow believing that it might feel different or that he had left a trace of himself behind. The nerve endings still tingled with the memory, almost as if Crace’s hand still lingered over my skin.

I pushed myself out of bed and, as quietly as I could, walked over to the door, which was slightly ajar. I was convinced that I had shut it properly when I had entered the room earlier. I opened the door and stepped into the dark corridor and, running my hands along the wall, felt my way along to the portego. Moonlight streamed into the hall from the window overlooking the canal, casting its eerie silver sheen onto the pictures and etchings. I eased my way down the corridor but stopped outside Crace’s quarters. I was certain I could hear him inside. I was about to turn around and trace my way back to my bedroom when I heard Crace’s door opening and a shaft of light slashed into the darkness.

“Adam? Is that you?” said Crace, standing in his doorway.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“What on earth are you doing?”

“I’ve just been to use the bathroom.”

“Oh, you gave me a terrible fright. I heard someone lurking outside and thought it must be that awful boy again.”

“No, it’s only me,” I said, pretending to yawn.

“I couldn’t sleep,” said Crace, walking out of his room and opening the bathroom door. “I need to get some pills. Now, where are they? I know they’re in here somewhere.”

I turned down the corridor and started to head back to my room when I heard Crace call my name.

“Would you mind helping me?” he said with a note of desperation in his voice. “I can’t find the fuckers. What is it with all this stuff? Where the hell are they?”

In the bathroom he had pulled out all the contents of the medicine cabinet—plasters, empty tubes of hemorrhoid cream, nail clippers, a few sterilized wipes, and dark plastic bottles containing old drugs—and thrown them into the sink where he rummaged about among the mess, occasionally tossing items over his shoulder as he dismissed them from his search.

“Gordon, here, let me,” I said, easing my way by him. “Look, why don’t you go and try to lie down and I’ll find the tablets and bring them to you.”

“Would you? That would be very kind. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I suppose I haven’t been the same since…well, you know.”

He raised his thin, almost invisible eyebrows in a gesture of acknowledgment and mutual understanding, but the manic glint in his eyes and his rictus smile unsettled me.

“Which tablets are you looking for? What’s the name of them?”

“I think they’re diazepam.”

“You go back to bed and I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes.”

His eyes lingered on my face before he turned around and walked back into his room. I searched my way through the bottles of old cough medicine and calamine lotion, tubs of decongestant and dozens of different pharmaceuticals until I found the pills he was looking for. I set them to one side and then placed everything else back into the cabinet. As I closed it, I caught a glimpse of myself—or was it Chris?—in its mirrored surface.

In the kitchen I filled a glass full of water and returned to Crace’s bedroom with the pills. He was sitting in his elaborate bed, surrounded by the red velvet curtains, his head resting on a pillow propped up on the ivory headboard. His bedside light cast strange shadows about the alcove and over the figure of the Madonna.

“What would I ever do without you?”

It was a refrain he had repeated several times to me since I had arrived back at the palazzo. I gave him the sleeping pills and the glass of water.

“Thank you, my dear, thank you,” he said, his thin tongue flicking over his lips.

The loose flesh on his scrawny neck quivered as he swallowed the tablets. He reached out and placed his hand over mine, clasping it in silent appreciation, where it stayed until I could no longer bear the feel of his skin next to mine.

“Here, let me plump up this pillow for you,” I said, reaching out. “We’ll get you nice and comfortable so you can have a good sleep.”

Whether it was from the drug itself or a psychological effect brought about by merely swallowing the pills, Crace’s eyes began to flutter. He tried to engage in snatches of conversation so as to fight the impulse to sleep, but eventually he could no longer resist. I pulled together the thick curtains that shrouded his bed, sealing him into his velvet cocoon, and was about to turn off his bedside light when Crace sighed deeply. I leaned forward and pulled back a little of the thick fabric to hear him whisper the name “Chris.” I left him in the dark, dreaming of the past.

As I walked out of my room each morning, I felt as though I were stepping onto a stage, ready to perform a certain part in front of Crace. Each day I had to tell myself that it wasn’t for much longer; if only I could endure a few more weeks with him, then I would be in a position where I was in ultimate control, free to tell his story in any way I saw fit, able to mold his history according to a pattern I had conceived. The pressure to behave in a certain way, appearing to be constantly courteous and ever obliging, caused my genuine feelings of dislike and disgust to intensify. My only outlet was my notebook, which I took out of its hiding place at the end of each day and used as a means to purge myself of my increasingly poisonous emotions. It became a receptacle of all that was dark in myself.

Occasionally Crace would catch me brooding. He would ask me whether I was all right, and I would have to look down so as not to let him see the hatred in my eyes. I was a good actor, though, able in an instant to lighten my mood and flash him a winning smile. I could always explain my seemingly distant demeanor with the fact that I was having problems with my book. “Writer’s block,” I would say, and he would nod knowingly. He advised me to keep a notebook in which I entered my day-to-day thoughts and observations. That was always a good way, he had found, of keeping the creative juices flowing. But nothing in the world would make him want to publish again, he added; he would rather die than see his name on the front of a book.

Now that I knew the circumstances surrounding his decision to give up writing, I had to admit that, despite the almost visceral repulsion I felt toward him, I admired the fact that he had never been driven to change his mind. I wondered if he knew about the death of Chris’s mother? After all, her existence—and Chris’s note to her telling her what to do in the event of Crace seeking publication of
The Music Teacher
—was the one big obstacle preventing the release of his second novel. I suppose Shaw posed a small risk, as he knew about the existence of the book, but now that I had bought his silence I doubted he would do anything. Ultimately, I was the one who held all the cards, the one with the power to shape Crace’s future. I was the teller of his story, his ventriloquist, his biographer.

Sitting up in bed, writing in my notebook, I listened as the rain lashed against the window. After a delicious supper of
linguine di mare,
Crace and I had done a spot of reading in the drawing room, and then at eleven o’clock, with the storm already raging over Venice, he had asked me to get him his customary glass of water and two sleeping pills. Although I had suggested that he see a doctor, he had refused. He couldn’t bear the thought of a stranger examining him, he said, poking around his body like an unwanted intruder. He had told me that he had quite a stash of pills he had hoarded over the years that should keep him going for some time to come. I wondered why he had gone to the bother of amassing the tablets. The most likely reason, the only motivation I could discern, was a knowledge that one day he might feel compelled to take his own life.

Since my arrival back at the palazzo, his dependence on me seemed complete. From first thing in the morning, when I made his breakfast and stood by him as he got dressed, through the day, when I would read to him or sit by him as he talked about his art collection, to the evening, when I would help him take off his clothes and assist him as he climbed into bed, he demanded that I stay with him. Leaving him for a matter of minutes to get some food from the local shop induced spells of anxiety, which, if not allayed by soothing words and reassurances of a quick reappearance, resulted in hysteria, while the only time I got to myself—when I could write in my notebook—was after he had gone to sleep.