Nightspawn (22 page)

‘It is very difficult to make things grow here,’ she murmured. ‘The heat, even in spring, and no rain.’

‘It rained last night.’

‘Did it?’

The old days indeed; or almost, for she had hardly heard what I said. That did not matter. I tried to think of the days we had spent together, and of the nights, when she would drive with me in the great car out to Glyfadha, where we would sit enmeshed in our passion and watch the sky, which seemed to echo that passion, in the cold savagery of its stars and clouds, its black winds; but I could think only of dust, and broken glass, of dead matter, and of the island. I cannot explain.

‘You have something which belongs to me,’ I said.

She frowned.

‘What?’

‘A little thing,’ I said, trying sarcasm, to see if that would raise a spark. It did not. She shrugged, and turned away, as one turns away when accosted by a maniac in the street, shut up, I know how they turn away.

‘Wait.’

She waited, asking,

‘Well?’

‘I want it.’

‘Don’t be foolish.’

‘You’ve got it. Is that foolish?’

‘Yes.’

‘He told me you’ve got it.’

‘You should know better than to believe him.’

‘Should I?’

The cut and thrust of this conversation is really something, even in an abridged form. She bent to pick up from the grass a severed shoot, and, as I looked into the roots of her hair, I realized that it was dyed. Why had I not noticed it before? Perhaps I had, perhaps I had known all along, as I knew
everything
else, without admitting it. Now I was shocked. How strange.

‘You should recognize his jokes when you see them,’ she said, with the tone of a nasty little girl saying ya, you got hit an I didn’, sucks to you. Sucks, verily, to me. I turned to the tree and gave it a kick. A leaf fell on my head.

‘I can play jokes too, you know,’ I muttered.

‘You’re a fool.’

She always pronounced ‘a’ as ‘ae’. It was very irritating. I was ‘ae’ fool. She picked up some more of those shoots, and held them in the crook of her arm.

‘Helena,’ I said. ‘What do you think?’

‘What?’

I turned away from her, and looked toward the mountains. Thunder raged afar among the far high peaks.

‘About all this, what do you think? Ever since I knew you, you’ve been inventing things to be dramatic about. But there’s your strange life here, and all both he and I have done to it, and yet you —’

She stamped her foot.

‘I could bear anything from you except your insufferable sentimentality,’ she cried. A little white droplet of her spit landed on my eyebrow. I was not daunted.

‘But I’m just asking you what you think, how you feel about all …’

But the bloody stupid woman was not even listening to me. She stared past my shoulder, with her mouth open. I turned. Julian had emerged through the doorway, and now he tottered toward us across the lawn, carrying one of those huge leather trunks. I took a step toward Helena, for protection, but she took a step away from me. Julian veered, matching his course to our new positions. His big round head appeared at the side of the trunk; his face was purple with effort, but he was grinning, grinning in spite of all. He came at me. His knees began to wobble, three paces, a grunt, two paces, one, halt, and he cried,

‘Whup.’

He gave the trunk a heave with his shoulder, and it toppled slowly forward. There was nothing I could do, absolutely nothing, I insist. I caught the great awkward thing in my arms, was pushed backward, my foot caught in something, and I sat
down on the grass. The trunk jarred my knees, and then keeled over and lay on its side beside me. Julian brushed his hands together, and glanced at Helena with a proud little smile, stepped forward, and offered to help me up. I looked at Helena. She was laughing. With her hands over her mouth, her knees knocking, one foot resting on top of the other, Helena laughed, at last, laughed, and laughed. And in the doorway, a small figure appeared, pale face and shining curls. Was he also
laughing
?

Chronology again, all out of whack. Makes not a bit of damn difference now.

I went home. It must have been morning still. Yes, it was morning. I am not sure. Andreas sat in my armchair, by the window, completely motionless but for his eyes, which flickered restlessly from my head to my feet. There were three long parallel red weals down his jaw, from tip of ear to chin, as though some animal had clawed him. I felt light-headed suddenly. The floor swayed, and it seemed that I might faint. I put my hands over my eyes. He is not there, I told myself, he is not there. I stepped across the floor to the sink, filled a saucepan with water, and put it on the little gas stove. There was no coffee. I swore. Half a bottle of yesterday’s milk remained. I took it from the cupboard (mouseshit on the shelves) and sniffed it. Only slightly sour. I emptied the water from the saucepan, poured in the milk, and set it on the flame. While it was heating, I broke bread into a cup, and doused it liberally with sugar. It was a comforting sound, the sound of sugar, soon to be melted, rattling on dry bread, soon to be sodden. There was a hiss. The milk had begun to boil over the edge of the saucepan. I snatched it from the stove, holding the hot handle
in my fingertips, and saying ah, ah. The bread subsided, and the sugar, with a sigh, under the scalding white stuff. I mashed the mixture with a fork, stuck a spoon into it, then took the warm cup in my cupped hands and carried it to the bed, where I sat curled against the wall, and shovelled the glop into my face. It was nice. There is nothing so cheering as the preparation of pap. I think I might even have smiled. Andreas said,

‘Where have you been?’

I almost swallowed the spoon. My eyes tried to bulge out of their sockets. He had turned his head toward me, but, apart from that minimal movement, he still sat as I had first seen him, with his legs twisted about each other, his shoulders up around his ears, his hands coiled in his lap.

‘You again‚’ I said, when I could speak. ‘I thought you were an hallucin—’

I did not want to say that. That had already been said. Andreas continued to stare at me.

‘Where have you been?’ he asked again, his voice rising.

I recommenced my collation. What did I care?

‘Been minding my own business,’ I mumbled.

‘It has begun. Did you know that? Is it in your business to know that?’

‘What’s begun?’

‘Don’t play with me,’ he shouted.

I shrugged. It occurred to me that he might really be a beast conjured up by my imagination which seemed, of late, to be going its own way, irrespective of my wishes. Well, what of it? I was past caring, as they say. Humour this doppelgänger. I captured a nice soggy lump of light gold crust, slopped it into my mouth, and asked,

‘Did you know, friend, that Erik was arrested last night? Well, smartarse, did you know that?’

He laughed. It was a nasty sound, nasty in the sense that one applies to a cough, meaning that it hints at something rotten in the lungs. Andreas’s lungs were all right, I suppose, but the heart was not so good.

‘Who told you that?’ he asked.

‘I was told.’

‘And you believed it.’

‘Why not? I believe what I’m told these days. I have no choice.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know.’

I did not know. Or care. I finished the pap, and put the cup and spoon on the table, came back to the bed, and lit a cigarette. I grinned at the cripple.

‘Well Andy? You look a bit upset.’

But Andy was not listening to me. So few people seemed to listen to me now. He kneaded his hands. The joints cracked. He stared at the door, grinding his teeth. Suddenly he burst out,

‘He was a traitor, I always knew it.’

‘What —?’

‘I always suspected, when he told me so often how we needed Sesosteris. I could forgive him his betrayal, because I believed him. But it’s true, what you said. He wanted the coup. “Keep it,” he said. “Not yet,” he said. “White will hide it forever if we ask him, and I shall decide the moment to bring it out.” The liar. He was scheming and lying, laughing behind my back.’

There he paused, and touched, indeed, with a fingertip, that back of his. Yes, it was still there. I yawned. He slipped from the chair and sat beside me on the bed, so close to me that I could smell his breath, and he caught my arm in his claw.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘He told me once, long ago, that if we could win here, we could take the world. Latin America, Asia … doh, the pig. But listen, listen, don’t move away from me, you must listen to this.’

He fell silent.

‘Well?’ I asked.

He shook his head, and flung himself away from me, and went lurching about the room, blundering against the furniture, as flies do, in the first frost at the end of autumn, as now, as they are doing, here, now, in this place, the flies … what? Andreas. He blundered. About the room. I cannot go on. I watched him. On, on, you cunt.

‘What did you do?’ I asked.

I asked him nothing. Yes I did. I asked him,

‘Where is he?’

He stopped by the table, and picked up the spoon which I had used, and clutched its warmth in his palm.

‘I shot him,’ he murmured. ‘He betrayed me, us, everything. He sold the document.’

I said,

‘He didn’t. I gave it away.’

He nodded his head up and down, up and down, his eyes closed.

‘I know. I know you did. I knew.’

‘Then why …?’

I did not ask such a stupid question. He stood and gaped at me, his shoulders drooping, hands shaking, his mouth mutely working.

‘I loved him,’ he whispered.

Erik? Arrested? No? Shot? Dead? Dead?

‘Is he dead?’

His head was still nodding. He had begun to sway from side to side, crooning softly to himself.

‘Ah,’ he sang. ‘Ahhh.’

‘The lying cunt,’ I said.

But it was not Knight, writer of false notes, who was the object of my rising rage. No. I went scrabbling across the floor, on all fours, to the wardrobe. I tore open the door. A long thin dribble of spit slipped from my lips. It was there. I took it up. It would not fit into any pocket. There was a paper bag. It sufficed. I slipped the death-dealer into it, and bounced out of the room, across the Plaka, through the square, toward that hill, off to deal out death.

The tanks were rolling into Syntagma Square. Believe it or not, I was surprised to see them.

There was an army lorry parked by the roadside at the bottom of the hill. Two soldiers sat smoking on the running-board, with rifles slung across their knees. I took to the shrubbery, and made my way past them, crawling on my stomach, and feeling extremely foolish, with an idiotic grin fixed on my face. The murmur of the soldiers’ voices came to me. I caught sight of the white wall rising ahead, and I had to stop, confused and puzzled, to wonder where it was that I was going. My mind would not work very well; my thoughts were fragmented and dispersed, and I had a vertiginous sensation of planes of
awareness
slipping and sliding uncontrollably, running into each other and locking, like loose, shuffled pages of a book. One of the soldiers laughed. It was a dry, distant sound, like the voice of a bird across water. The paper bag and its bun was pressed against my chest. I clenched the package in my fingers and set off again.

I took to the road, having rounded a bend, away from the sight of the soldiers. Now I was nearer to the house than I had thought I should be. The gates were open, and the car stood outside, with all its doors open, and its boot. Suitcases and bags were stacked on a rack on the roof. I lay down on the pavement and slipped the gun from the bag. Slipped? The dorsal sight kept sticking, and, at last, in rage, I tore the bag to bits. I looked around, and wondered why I was lying full-length like that. I got to my feet and crossed to the white wall. It was warm, with the sun on it, and I pressed my ear to it, and closed my eyes, and listened to strange muffled thunder, to the words of the world rumbling in the stone. There were voices. Helena, Julian, and Charlie Knight came out through the gate and stopped before the car, pushing and pinching, giggling and shrieking. At last they were in line. They put their arms around each other’s waists and danced out into the road, doing a wild can-can, wagging their arses, kicking their legs, first to the left, then to the right, swaying and laughing. Helena threw up a hand and waved it high above her head. They sang,

Away they went, through the gate, into the garden, gone. There was silence. Heat was coming off the wall in ripples, and, as I looked along it, I saw figures, elongated, black, rippling by the gate, appearing and disappearing; they would not be still, would not be individual, but merged and flowed through each other, like amoeba. I clawed at my eyes, and shook my head. Why do I do such things? They never work. There was a
deafening
roar somewhere near me, and I opened my eyes to see the front left tyre of the car collapse. The gun I held had fired. Had I pressed the trigger? The car listed to one side, and settled into its new position with a disgruntled flop. The undulating figures moved out into the middle of the footpath. I lifted the gun. A trickle of white smoke drifted from the barrel. Someone shouted. I aimed at Julian’s broad back. He began to turn. Helen’s face came at me, with teeth bared and blood in its throat, grinning, spectacles glittering. I pressed the trigger and pressed it, while thunder roared around me. I gave up, and flung the gun away. On the pavement, Julian, Helena and Knight lay snapping and kicking, clawing at each other in agony,
wallowing
in blood. They faded. Something was wrong with this farce. A wing collapsed. No creatures writhed on the ground, but Yacinth stood there, with his head thrown back, and one hand lifted near his face, for a long moment, and then he drooped languidly to the ground, his forehead a shattered crimson mess. Someone was howling. It was me. I began to run. Julian stepped out from the gateway, with a rifle raised to his shoulder. He fired, and I halted. Feeling departed from my right arm, as though the nerves had recoiled in horror from some terrible intrusion into their world. Julian retreated, and the gates slammed. The boy’s eyelids were fluttering, and I could see the whites of his eyes, disappearing under the blood. Get away, get away from this, I cannot …