Nightspawn (2 page)

The room was large, with four high white walls and a ceiling above them of bare polished beams slanting down to the window, open now, the grey gauze curtains stirring with a tiny noise, like the dry voice of an insect. Beneath the window a narrow bed stood draped in a blanket of bright island weave. There was a table and two straight-backed chairs which matched neither each other nor the table. The walls were bare but for a small square ikon of a cross-eyed Virgin which hung above the bed. Erik stood in the middle of the floor and peered about him vacantly. Andreas was touching things with his fingertips, verifying them. He opened the windows and stepped out on to what was the black roof of the kitchen below. A bitter breath of tar invaded the room. I leaned in the open doorway with my arms and ankles crossed. Erik gave a grunt and heaved his bag up on the bed, then sat beside it and passed a weary hand over his mouth, his forehead. From the landlord’s quarters below us came the muted sounds of an argument, then the click of a well-placed slap, silence. Erik lifted his eyes to mine.

‘Well,’ he began, and paused to cough uproariously into his fist. ‘How long have you been here, on the island?’

‘Quite a while.’

‘Ah, I see. And you say we met once, somewhere, yes?’

‘Doctor Rabin introduced us. And I know your work, of course.’

Erik was a journalist, and was well known as a political commentator, whatever that may be.

‘My work?’ he murmured, baffled. He turned and peered through the window, and absently stuck his finger into a small brown-rimmed cigarette burn in the curtain.

‘I was twice sick on that boat,’ he said sorrowfully.

Andreas came back into the room and sat down slowly on one of the hard chairs.

‘Well?’ I asked.

The cripple smiled at me.

‘In Greece, Mr White, we have an old saying …’ At least that was what he should have said, he looked so wise and darkly Levantine. But he turned away from me without speaking, and his gaze settled on the German.

‘There are turkeys, Erik, in the garden below. You will have no rest.’

As though to corroborate his words, one of those revolting birds sent up an hysterical outraged squawk.

‘This room is the best I could find,’ I said coldly.

Andreas grinned, and Erik flapped a mollifying paw in my direction. There was a small silence. Erik lit a cigarette. His hands trembled, and he looked at them reproachfully. I unfolded my arms and turned to go, but Erik’s voice, with a new ringing note of authority in it, stopped me.

‘White.’

‘Yes?’

For a moment he stroked his cheek with three blunt fingers and a thumb, considering me the while.

‘When are we to meet this man?’ he asked.

‘Tonight, on Delos, at the festival.’

‘The festival?’

‘Yes. We won’t be noticed in the crowds.’

‘Ah. Very cloak and sword.’

‘Dagger.’

‘Dagger.’

He sucked his teeth, and then abruptly slumped back upon the bed. The springs of the mattress groaned miserably.

‘Good.’

The word seemed to rise, black and bleak, from a pit in the ground below us. Andreas smiled his smile, and bade me adieu. Downstairs, the landlord had begun to slap his wife around the walls.

I wandered without purpose, listening to the teeth grinding in my head. Cataleptic noon pressed down upon the village out of a hot white sky, bruising the parched earth, torturing the trees, pouring light like acid through the streets. I thought of going home, but home was an armchair with ape-tufts of horsehair under its arms, a broken bed, and a window looking down upon the rear of a café. In the open at least, it was possible to join battle with the sun. There, in the violet splashes of shadow, one could find release. High in the heavy air a bell tolled slowly, and a pale man with horn-rimmed glasses, hovering by a gift shop window, peered owlishly at me as I went past. Sweat ran unheeded into my eyes, and my hair was hot and damp. I came to a little square with dusty olive trees. The tiny bright white houses were closed against the day. The sun came down there at its angle like a burning blade, and to cross from one side to the other was to feel the hot sky fall. I shuffled to a halt in the shadow of a balcony, and stood with my mouth open, panting slowly. In the hills, the cicadas throbbed relentlessly. An ugly black bird with a sick look in its little eye stumbled from the roof tops into the tree beside me. Thunder crepitated faintly in the distance, and then the silence returned. Something began to happen in my ears, a strange sensation, as though the minute fur of hairs inside them were stirring, realigning itself to a
variation
in the silence. I realized that I was listening intently for a sound, a word; I knew only that it was about to reach me. I was rewarded. A sharp crack set the air aquiver like a dancing
nerve, a little noise that was, in its crisp precision, oddly at variance with the plump moist heat, the crystal light, that cat asleep on the windowsill, and for a moment I thought that I had imagined it. I looked across the square, and the mouth of an alleyway revealed momentarily a fat man in a red shirt dancing a jig. He hopped out from behind the angle of a wall, lifted his knees in a few high-kicking steps, and then retreated backward out of my view. Some seconds of complete silence followed, during which I was conscious of my left eyebrow travelling in rapid jerks up my forehead, then came another crack, and a roar, and the fat man shot out of the alley and charged toward me across the square, his arms flapping, ankles wobbling, a scarlet blossom bursting in his throat. Suddenly he halted. I swear I could hear his breathing. Time passed. He looked from right to left, leaning slightly forward, with his head bent. A crafty gleam flashed from his spectacles, and one of his plump hands stole to the back of his neck. What his fingers found there was too much for him. He rose up on his toes, threw back his head and let fly at the sky a howl of woe, groaned, gagged, there was blood in his mouth, came a tinkle of glass and six spilled coins as he spun through a pirouette and crashed to the ground spraying dark gore and the contents of his pockets before him into the dust. His legs twitched. The bird above me in the tree flapped its wing and sang a little song.

I did not move. It was not that I could not move, no, none of your paralysis of shock or any of that nonsense, just, I did not move. I was waiting for something, as I had waited for the sound of the first shot. Once again my patience had its prize. It must have been one of my better days. Another figure came from the alleyway into the square. He was short and stringy, with a scarred mouth, and the blank still eyes of a bird. A sailor certainly, he brought no hint of the sea, but of the back streets of a hundred seaport cities, the mean bars, the whores, the gutters rife with discarded prophylactics. A great deal to perceive in a split and violent second? I came upon him again, of course, of course. He did not see me, or if he did he chose to regard me as an hallucination. He crept across the square and knelt beside the fat man, and his hands went scurrying swiftly
from pocket to pocket. Then I moved. The sailor lifted his head at my slow approach, and we gaped at each other in something like astonishment, though why I should have been surprised, I could not, and can not say. He turned, crouched like a sprinter, and fled soundlessly.

I showed a threatening foot to the drowsy cat which had left its windowsill to investigate with sly sidelong glances the figure upon the ground. The fat felled man lay on his back with his legs flung wide and both arms trapped under him. One of his shoes had come off, and stood now beside the deserted foot, where a plump pink toe sprouted from a hole in the sock. He wore a baggy pair of trousers, and a gay red shirt, across which a troupe of dusky maidens danced, evoking the far south seas. His
spectacles
, shattered, dangled from his ear, and his wide eyes stared heedlessly at the luminous sky. There was a neat round puncture in his chest, which left a dancing girl decapitated, and a second ragged mouth gaped in his throat, marking the last bullet’s exit. His attitude was one of extreme embarrassment, at being caught in such a helpless and undignified position. An angry red stain was spreading beneath him in the dust, and an ant with a broken leg staggered through the mire. Bright coins lay scattered around him, and there was a little phial of blue-tinted glass, violet almost, the lid and neck of which had been shot away. The broken points were tipped with beads of blood, like a tiny crown of rubies. The memory of a drowned man seen long ago came to me. Querulous and strident voices approached, in the streets or in my head, I knew not which, it was all one, I turned and ran.

Some of my happiest times on the island were spent sniggering in secret at the newly-arrived tourists wandering through the maze of the village, in lost blithe circles, toward a harbour they would never reach, unless deflected by someone in the know. How precious was that look of surprise dawning on the face of a blue-haired matron, clad in indecent shorts, as she glimpsed
for the third time my solemn face (only a tic in the eyelid to betray the boiling glee) caught like a minor moon in the shadowed pane. Confronted everywhere by such an unsettling abundance of twins and triplets, what conclusions they must have reached, those poor wayfaring strangers. Did the islanders have a genetic strain, unknown to science, which multiplied to grotesque abundance each little fish within the womb? Was the ground a warren of passageways by which these grinning urchins scurried from corner to identical corner, intent on driving the foreigner away gibbering and mad? Oh, the times I had. Consider, then, my plight when I found myself hopelessly lost in the very streets where I had laughed at the helplessness of others. Covered with sweat, nerves in tatters, a hot scald squeezing my bladder, consider all this and pride besides and there I was, reeling through the village, calm confidence twitching on my haughty mouth while my little strabismic glinty green eyes searched on all sides for a set of steps, a rickety but welcoming doorway. At length I could go no further, and sat down in the burning dust beneath a ruined tree. I was finished. In a moment they would arrive with their glittering gats. My bowels writhed in anticipation of the bullets. Then I lifted my head and looked to the other side of the street. These things are so simple. I climbed the steps, on my knees I suspect, crawled along the corridor and flopped into the room. Erik lay spreadeagled on the bed like a dead horse, his mouth open and eyes closed. He was naked. I looked at his great pink lolling sex where it reared out of its bush, and then I went galloping across the room, through the open windows and out to the roof. I struck the parapet of the wall with a soft plop, and found myself gaping down into a ragged garden two storeys below. A startled turkey gobbled and fled out of my range, crimson comb aquiver, a wise bird but too wary, for my stomach was not yet ready to give up its treasures, not yet. I turned away from the garden and wiped the sweat from my eyelids. Andreas sat in a deckchair beside the window and gazed at me placidly, his hands folded in his lap.

‘Ah,’ he murmured. ‘The white man.’

I nodded to him.

‘Hello.’

I went back into the room, my lips forming the German’s name. He was gone. The bed still bore the imprint of his bones, but of the man himself, there was not a sign. In the second or two while I stood there staring, my mind went back to search for a lapse in the time I took to gag above the garden. Andreas came in and found me with one finger raised, the smile of the ‘r’ in Erik still lingering on my jowls.

‘Has something happened?’ he asked.

I turned to him, and my teeth, of their own will, clenched themselves. I was not capable of telling him about that blood and death. It was a shyness almost.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing, I felt sick for a minute. Where has he gone? He was here a minute ago.’

‘Was he? You are very pale.’

He was humouring me. I wanted to kick him in his fine
gleaming
teeth.

‘For Christ’s sake yes, he was here, on this bloody bed.’

He went to where their bags lay in a corner with their guts out on the floor. I watched his fingers scrabbling inside one of them, and for an instant I glimpsed the beasts. Later they were to come in herds. He drew out a flat leather flask, unscrewed the cap (
eek
eek
)
and filled it to the brim with tawny liquor.

‘Here,’ he said, bringing to me the little cup. ‘Drink this.’

The brandy spread its thin hot roots along my nerves. I sat down on the bed.
Eek
eek,
said the cap. Andreas watched me with a sidelong look as he put away the flask. I began to whistle soundlessly, tapping a finger on my knee. The cripple sat down on one of the straight-backed chairs and carefully arranged his misshapen limbs to fit the severity of the wood.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked irritably.

He continued to study me with mild curiosity. At length he said,

‘I am trying to … to place you, is that the word? But you do not fit. Tell me about yourself. You are Irish? They said you were a writer.’

‘I was.’

‘Not any more?’

‘Yes, yes, I’m still a writer. Is that all you want to know?’

My impatience amused him. He smiled and clasped his hands. The chair cracked its joints.

‘You don’t like me, Mr White, do you?’

‘I don’t dislike you. I have no reason to dislike you.’

‘Ah. You should be a politician.’

‘I leave that to others.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Nothing. It sounded right.’

Now it was my turn to smile. He touched the corner of his mouth with a fingertip, and said,

‘It is a pity you don’t speak Greek.’

‘How do you know I don’t?’

‘I do not know, of course, but you always speak to me in English.’

‘Always? This is the second time I’ve met you.’

‘Well, yes. But my English is not equal to yours.’

Ice crackled among his words.

‘You do all right,’ I said. ‘Of course, I’m keeping it simple for your sake.’

‘You are very kind.’