Keys of Babylon (27 page)

Cheap but good enough for me. Oh yes. Since I arrived, I'm a new man. Or a man renewed. Because at last I know what I should be doing. Yes this is it and this will be it forever.

I am a writer. I am a film maker. I am an artist. I am all of those. Fifty years it has taken me. Fifty years to find the courage to tell the world what I am.

The film is here. All its hours on a table in a room you might say is my kitchen, my film amongst the teabags and winebottles and heels of yellow bread. I'm doing a paper edit, so the time I buy in the studio isn't wasted. That's my main project. You know that.

But since I arrived, I've met many people. So many
klandestins
, as they call them here. Valletta is their capital and I am writing about them, filming, interviewing. Yes, this is my work too. Every morning I awake and cannot wait to start again. Every night I go to bed and immediately fall asleep.

And such a sleep. I know I dream but what those dreams are is not yet revealed to me. Yet when I wake it is if I am wrenched from a radiance. No, I've never worked like this before. Never slept so deeply.

There she lies. Amongst the lead flashing and the lightning rods. The island girl, girl of Triq Zekka. Melitta grows roses in a bowl, she has herbs in Mr Men pots, a washing line with her knickers pinned up with coloured plastic pegs. All over this city there are roofs like that with girls like that. I think of the fishmongers' stalls in the market, the golden lampuki all laid out.

I know Melitta has her own story to tell. We've talked about the strangers arriving, the Africans who cluster under the olive trees, gazing out to sea.

But now I'm at work. This is what I do. I'm transcribing an interview from last week. Not long ago I hated laptops. Today this one contains my soul. Touching the keys is a holy act. A ritual of love. Here's what I type:

The Soldier's Story

There was a man I sometimes saw at Leone's. We would talk, and one day he told me his story.

Yes, I escaped, he said. Came here in the bottom of a fishing boat. The crew threw me out on the north side of the island, not a crust in my pocket, not a word of the island's language in my head.

For months, maybe years, I had stood in the black land. There were the stars, as thick as leopard fur. And below the stars was our platoon. You could predict each one of us: clown, psycho, clerk, coward. Which was I? Apart from such conscripts there was only one real soldier. The sergeant.

We knew that out there in the desert was the madman's army. We could see their campfires and sometimes the plastic wrappers from their rations blew into our camp. Some of our boys would lick the sugar off the cellophane. But we all understood that their army was as poor as our army, as afraid as our army, as badly equipped as we were, our guns without bullets, our boots without laces. And we knew they were as stupid as we knew we were stupid. And like our army we knew the other army would be full of beggars and boys and pederasts.

It seemed that I was always on guard. But there was nothing to guard. We were guarding the border but the border was a straight line. On one side, a grain of sand. On the other side, another grain. I used to look at the ground where the border was written and try to understand. Surely it should be a special place, a border? Maybe it should be a holy place. So why such straight lines? Were the emperors so bored they required their draftsmen to draw the border through mountains and mosques and grazing land, separating the kid from the goat?

No, they weren't so careless. There was oil in the north. There was oil in the south. But in the middle there was nothing. So the people from the middle stole the oil.

I patrolled the wire. Right, left, up, down. Up and down I looked at Rigel. That star was the left foot of the conqueror and that was a cold light. Right, left I gazed at Betelgeuse. That star was the right shoulder of the conqueror, and I found no comfort in its urn of ash.

Out in the dark there was sometim
es
laughter, sometimes screaming. Just like our camp. And some nights the sergeant would appear. It had to be in darkness and he came silent as a sniper, creeping along the wire towards me.

Look, sarge, I would say. I'm on your side.

Though he did not reply his mouth would make a bubble. And then he would laugh, a dark man the sergeant, from some southern tribe, black hair on his belly and his billyclub with a bloody ferrule.

Washed was he? Where was the water to wash in the Badiet esh Sham? There was no pool there, no tarn and no tarp to trap the dew. Even in that dry air he smelt like a mule.

Whose side? he would whisper.

And I would look at the whipcord in his cock and see that the border ran even there.

Whose side? he would hiss.

Your side, sarge, I would answer, the wind blowing, the sugar papers trapped on the wire, Orion and the madman's stars almost overhead.

Such a story. And everybody who comes to the island has a story like that. So now their stories are my story. Here on Old Mint Street, on Triq Zekka where I live on sour wine, on bread and honey, here at this stained table I have discovered duty.

And did I tell you? I meant to tell you. Melitta is coming tomorrow. She will be the first one to hear what the soldier said. Then she will sit and sip the Zeppi's prickly pear liqueur I have bought and she will see the laptop screen blossom with one white star. And then I will explain to her everything that lies ahead.

August 13, 9 a.m. Anthem, Arizona, USA

Anthem is forty miles north. Not so far. But it is a problem today. And maybe a problem tomorrow. But she doubts it. And the day after? There will be no more problems. Because the day after, at least the Honda will be fixed. Jesus has promised her. Two days max. But he will be repairing it in the street because Jesus doesn't have a garage. So Jesus will turn up this morning and get to work on the avenue where she parked, one hundred yards from the apartment. Jesus is her saviour. And unmarried too. Bless him. The car will be almost untouchable today.

Every morning, when Maria walked to the car, she was surprised to see it still there. But the gangs would never take a Honda Civic. A powder-blue Civic with primer patches? No way. A Civic is an invisible car. It speaks of insignificance. Of poverty. Oh yes, Maria had chosen well. Maria had chosen as she had always chosen. Maria knew how to choose.

This is the place they say the bus will stop. Yet to Maria it doesn't look like a bus station. It is a car park with a few bigger spaces crossed by white lines. But there is an office and the woman there with her orange lipstick and orange hair tells her in Spanish, yes, the minibus will come. Soon. Maria had tried to explain that she needs the bus to stop on the highway, that, for mercy's sake, she doesn't want to go all the way to Flagstaff. The woman had shrugged and rolled her eyes.

Maria thought about where she was going. She was going to Anthem, to 509 East Adamanda Court, off North Fifth Street in Anthem. First day at the job, her new job with the Chernowskis at their wonderful home.

Anthem, Jacob Chernowski had told her, is not merely a town. It's a lifestyle. When Larry died, Maria had gone to the service.

You were so good to my father, Chernowski had told her at the Mortensen King's Funeral Center. So good. And Jacob had taken Maria's fingers in his damp fingers, stooping over her, the wurlitzer CD playing as an accompaniment, ‘The Breeze and I' leaking out of the sound system like old times.

Three months later Jacob had turned up at the Sunset care home in Black Canyon City. They had sat on the bench under the cottonwood, the Goliath Laundry van come to deliver, the sun dazzling off the Chevron sign.

I'll come to the point, he said, looking down at the dead cottonwood leaves. Mrs Chernowski's not so robust. The new place in Anthem is such a big house. Keeping it as she wishes it to be kept is… arduous.

He seemed pleased with the word.

Yes, arduous.

You want me to…?

Yes, he said. Please. And once again he had taken her hand.

Of course, we can offer a fair salary. Perhaps something better than…

The Sunset's been good to me…

As we would, smiled Jacob. As indeed we would.

In the end, Maria had to scream. The driver didn't want to stop. He said he couldn't stop, that there was nowhere on Highway 1-17 he was allowed to stop.

But there is Anthem, Maria shouted. There on the right. And they were passing it. So Maria screamed and the driver braked in a cloud of gravel and the Navistar behind blasted its klaxon, and as soon as Maria's feet touched the road the minibus was moving away, workmen laughing and waving in the back, and she was on a ledge spread with chippings and Wendy's wrappers, and from there it looked a long way down into the as yet unincorporated town of Anthem.

At least she was wearing the right shoes. That was how she saw it. When God gave a woman big feet he made sure she learned about shoes. You give, you take. Maria went sideways down the hill, past a fallen saguaro the colour of bad teeth, over broken kerbstones and piles of cement. The ground was loose. She slid through the goldenbush in a slurry of Heineken bottles. But at the bottom the earth was baked firm.

Maria crossed a culvert where an arroyo might run, yellow plastic tubing coming out of the ground, empty oil drums everywhere. She climbed up the other side of the stream bed, and stood where she hoped a sidewalk might start. But there was only the road. And no road sign.

She looked around and breathed out. It was hot. Maria knew how hot it was. It was 116
o
F hot. She was usually correct about such things. And she thought about Jacob Chernowski's hands, clammy as the air conditioning at the funeral center.

So, this is Anthem, she smiled to herself. Anthem was completely silent. Not a soul. Above, far above, a hawk was a black cursor in the blue.

You live, she thought. You learn. A lifestyle experience. A lifestyle like the grave.

Maria turned to the right on nothing more than a hunch. Somewhere nearby was 509, East Adamanda Court. The blinds closed, the air cool. Mrs Chernowski would be lying in her bedroom. Soon Mrs Chernowski would require Maria's tomato soup. Yes, soon that soup would be a vermilion shadow on her lip.

And downstairs, Jacob Chernowski would sit at a computer, waiting for his software update. He would come out to the kitchen and enquire about
nopalitos
. There was lots of prickly pear, he would venture, in the back yard. Sometimes he stooped to sniff their pink fruit.

Maria's shoes were dusty but she was humming to herself, humming ‘The Breeze and I' and adjusting the grip of her modest overnight bag. Next time she comes there will be no such trouble.

August 13, 11 p.m. Theodore's salvage yard, Bridgend, Wales

The Captain says I can burn some of the wood in this oildrum. Those rotten spars, he says. The chapel wainscoting that was already wormy when he pulled it out of Nebo.

So tonight I do it. Chill in the air, summer mist like a spider's web. Soon there's a fire and it's alive in the stained glass, the windows they took from a pub in Cardiff, the Brain's blue diamond flashing indigo at the night, the glass in the yard leaping out at me, yellow these stars, the red almost black, red as that girl's black blood I once saw on the roadside in Chechnya as we marched past.

I melted the dinosaur today. Jason's let me go, he says there's nothing on. So I'm in the fairground full time. Rides, odd jobs, whatever they want. Unscrewed a Sky satellite dish this morning, off the Showman's Motel. Up a ladder so it was hard to get a grip. In the end I had to jemmy the bracket away, and the dish came off in my hands. But so light, it had rusted through. I didn't think they were supposed to do that but the sea air eats anything. Gets behind things, the boys say. Gets inside you. And then we did the dinosaur in the wood.

There used to be a model village there, houses, shops, blue-painted bay. But no one's interested now so we bust it up with mauls and shovelled the tiles into the skip. Over in the trees there was only one dinosaur left. The fairground people used to charge trippers to wander round this prehistoric park, there were even cavemen the boys told me, and the trees like tropical trees. Tall ferns, sharp leaves. But that's mostly gone. Some bigshot's building a house there for his kids.

I looked at this dinosaur. It had eyes like traffic lights. Like these salvaged traffic lights here winking in the firelight around me. Huge thing, that dinosaur. Life size. But made of plastic, so I could pick it up myself. I got the chainsaw, cut its head off and put it in the incinerator. Watched those eyes melt away, the teeth dissolve, the smoke all black and yellow, me coughing, throat stinging. Then those spines on its neck, its armour, then the green-painted belly and then the long tail, the very long tail I sawed into strips like firewood. And apart from the ballast it was hollow inside.

So that was it. The dinosaurs are extinct. Just a pool of plastic left on the firebricks. Somebody came over complaining about the smell till the boys persuaded him to leave. And it was the boys told me about this place. Because although the fair's busy now at peak time, the money's not there. Plenty of people passing through, the boys say, but they're looking, not stopping. One of the rides has been playing ‘Money's too tight to Mention', blasting it over town.