Stewart, Angus (28 page)

Jay was in a hallway now. His erstwhile companion, he supposed, must have returned the way they had come.

'Ezra, can you make that just one more slice?' the rather petite American Jewess sang out suddenly to someone unseen, like a provincial waitress.

'Slice?' Jay queried politely, largely for something to say. 'They've fried a bat,' the girl said; and added, informatively 'In butter.'

A very old Moroccan lay curled, asleep, on the stone tiles. In an adjacent alcove, immobile, and stark naked, a European girl stood with tears streaming profusely from eyes that stared straight ahead.

'Hammet caught the bat. Sarha's really gotten way out,' the Jewish girl said, as if these things might merit explanation. 'You're British?'

'Yes,' Jay said brightly, only just suppressing any hesitant apology that, actually, he was. Joviality might see the evening out, where ingenuousness had deserted him on the doorstep. 'Eh, what happens if Hammet wakes up?'

'Say!' The girl grasped Jay with an unnerving discovery of enthusiasm, and started toeing the old man into wakefulness. She leant over him coaxingly, jabbing a whispering finger at the statue-like girl, as if persuading an indifferent dog to ferret a ball.

Jay didn't wait to see the outcome. Sounds came from a farther room; and it was Raphael who was supposedly his host. The house was incredibly dilapidated, large, and windowless. Upstairs, slits in the outer wall might admit dusty probes of radiance during the daytime. Now it was unevenly lit by a variety of electrical fittings best not touched, and of which the most basic were bulbs both precariously fed and suspended by the bare wires twisted about their bases. Sure enough Raphael was in the larger room, as were some dozen other curiously assorted people. But it was at none of these that Jay was staring. Cross-legged on the floor, and wearing what looked like a girl's dress of bright yellow material, was Achmed. The boy saw him just as Raphael called out, 'Hi there!'; but it was Achmed who reached Jay first. After a moment's disbelief, a precipitate rush had him clung about Jay's neck in a tight embrace.

'Well, you two must know each other!' said the grinning American, coming up.

'Fus!' Jay exclaimed, laughing when he was able to free himself, '
Labbès
!'

'
Labbès
!' Achmed said, beaming excitedly.

'You found the place okay?' Raphael asked.

'One of your special guides brought me.'

'Great. We moved down here because it seemed like we had its many folks. And more's coming, I guess.' Raphael looked about him critically. 'Here, let me get you something to drink, and I'll introduce you around. Ezra's lot can be kind of funny. For instance, do you
want
bat?'

'I don't want bat,' Jay said; and to the protesting boy, 'I've
not
been in England.'

'It's a ceremony they have,' Raphael said, drawing out the vowels. 'Only don't you let yourself be bullied.' He poured Jay a staggering measure of Scotch, and turned to a sideboard where, with fastidious neatness, a row of sugar cubes was disposed upon it heavy silver salver, together with an incongruously utilitarian dropper-bottle that might once have contained some nasal preparation. 'Now this I maybe don't have to explain . . .

'No, you don't,' Jay smiled, reviewing the little L.S.D. shrine. 'Take that thing off,' he said in an aside to Achmed, suddenly remembering that, however absurdly, Brown and Manolo were due to turn up here.

'Great.' Raphael looked unaccountably embarrassed as Achmed promptly pulled the yellow dress up over his head, and began to unroll the legs of his jeans. 'Then over here,' he indicated a plate of cakes beneath a plastic dome, whose disposition on the sideboard suggested they were held in similar reverence to the L.S.D, 'we have
majoun
cookies.'

'
Majoun
cookies,' Jay repeated.

'WA, in fact, they're not genuine
majoun
.'
Raphael suddenly became apologist. 'They just have hash resin Sarha knows how to bake into them somehow. . .'

'Sarha?'

'That's right.'

'The girl in the hall?'

'Could be.' Raphael looked surprised. Then he clapped a hand to his brow. 'Oh no! Not again! You must excuse me!—Anyway, I've warned you, so you know what's what,' he called back as he rushed off.

Achmed was changed. Jay looked at him closely. 'I heard about Frederick.'

'
Si
,'
was all the boy said.

'You must sleep at my apartment tonight.'

'
Si
!' Achmed was more fervent.

'Poor Fus,' Jay said. 'My poor
aile
Fus!' He glanced critically at his depleted drink, then questioningly at Achmed.

'
Si! Pocito!
' Achmed laughed. He took the tumbler and poured it half full with whisky, supposing it perhaps to be wine.

Jay looked about him. Apart from a bearded youth flat on his back on a table, legs casually crossed as he smoked
kif
and stared. at the ceiling, and another, French probably, crewcut, with squared, rimless spectacles, who was intent upon moulding a rubberily doped, and consequently unco-operative girl, into the difficult muscular co-ordination of Rodin's
Kiss
,
the company appeared well conducted. Its members were perhaps reluctant to expand much beyond the immediate preoccupations of individual consciousness. Perhaps this simply meant he himself felt no great urge to talk to anyone present. Jay surveyed them, aware only that he didn't quite belong to their world; that there was an excluding bias at that moment even in his critical assessment, and thinking. He couldn't see Naima in this company. He couldn't see himself here. His drifting was done alone. Partnered, he would want something more. He looked over at the figure of Achmed, withdrawn, as if sensing himself unwanted at that moment. The boy leant against the sideboard, abstractedly polishing his flute with the yellow dress he had removed. Tomorrow Jay would seek out Naima again. They would be happy, as they had been that afternoon, childishly fingering jewellery he could not possibly buy in the
suq
of
the silversmiths. And he must think. He must begin to think.

A rambling youth appeared at his elbow. He carried a plate, that proclaimed itself as being the property of the Rif Hotel, and on which were two charred kebabs.

'Eat?' he invited Jay, somehow threateningly. 'I'm Ezra. Only I don't know I can be sure of that. Maybe you can help me, see. I have this fantasy. And in this fantasy it was like I went over Torremolinos or Ibiza some place and I rape one dozen
girls. All at once, you follow? Then most likely I kill 'em. Now what do you think of that?' Very slowly Ezra drew the kebab skewer through his mouth, stripping it of its eight or ten cubes of meat with the single swoop. He continued to stare intently at Jay, while juice trickled from his overloaded mouth.

'Perhaps you're sex-starved,' Jay hazarded.

'Oh, but I'm not!' The beat who thought he was Ezra chewed manfully. 'Here you can have just any goddam person you see in the street. But anyone. It's
different
from L.A.' He looked puzzled, pathetic.

'Yes,' Jay said helplessly.

'But then I have this other fantasy.'

'Oh?'

'That's right. I see maybe a mosquito some insect way the other side of the room? And I know I can throw this plate and kill it right off. That's in the air, mind. Now what do you think about that?'

The haunted eyes still bored into him. Jay nibbled nervously at his own kebab. 'It's very skilful,' he said.

At that moment Ezra's eye was caught by a Moroccan in a far corner. Perhaps she would be required to temporarily stay the fate of the dozen Spanish girls. He ambled off only slightly more purposefully than he had come, stripping another kebab skewer unthinkingly into his mouth as he went. Jay watched curiously after him. Had there been a spare girl in the bedroom and a leg of mutton in the kitchen, Ezra would have fucked and eaten. Not necessarily in that order, Jay thought. It would have depended simply upon which room Ezra happened to stray into first.

Jay addressed himself seriously to his whisky. When he looked up he wondered whether he hadn't had too much, or whether the kebabs too hadn't perhaps been subtly infused with some extract of hemp. It was less that Brown had entered the room with a girl, than that the whole appearance of Manolo struck some faintly familiar chord in him. 'Bloody hell, Simon!' he blurted out, placing the flannel suit, the tie, and even the elastic belt the boy was wearing. 'My old private school!'

'Why, hallo!' Brown came forward anxiously. 'I'm terribly sorry. It's simply what Harrods sent. I wanted this sort of image, and asked for something powdery pink for the belt and tie. Actually he has a cap too, and socks for when he's wearing shorts.'

'The hell he has!' Jay was unmollified, peculiarly disturbed for some reason. '
Muy, MUY correcto
!'
he
said ironically to Manolo, as he came forward a little in advance of the girl, whom the Jewess was helping remove her coat.

'Oh, and he has a message for you—good news,' Brown said quickly, before turning to introduce the girl, who now joined them. 'Caroline, this is Jay . . .'

'Who makes bird-tables,' the girl interrupted, laughing.

'And Caroline Adam,' said Brown.

'Who divides her talents between the Pastoral Orphanage and an adventurous film-maker called Lom,' Jay came back.

'In fact she's no longer wanted by either,' Caroline said. 'I couldn't help overhearing the row. This isn't an Etonian tie, is it?' she went on, fingering Manolo's, to the boy's annoyance, and deliberately in order to discomfort Brown, Jay saw.

'It's a prep school one, and not that sort of crime at all,' Brown said. 'Yes, Caroline and I are seizing the opportunity of her unemployment to whizz south for a few days.'

Jay simply looked at him.

'I have to go to Gibraltar,' Manolo put in.

'You'll look more in keeping there,' Jay said; and, unkindly joining in the persecution of Brown, 'But, Simon, I could put him up for a bit.'

'Two toothbrushes,
hombre
,'
Manolo backed this unexpectedly.

'No, no. Many thanks. It's all arranged.' Brown was abrupt.

'Which reminds me,' Jay said. He reached into his pocket and produced the infallibly sealed toothbrush he had bought.

'
Muchas gracias
!' Manolo laughed. 'All right,
hombre
?'
Without irony he handed it to Brown for inspection. 'Passed,' Brown said agitatedly. 'Put it away. Nice of you, Jay.'

'
De nada, hombre
.'

Not surprisingly, the girl called Caroline was looking tried. Raphael approached with a tray of drinks. There was a choice of whisky and wine this time. He was buoyantly anxious to bring ordered hospitality to his party's adoptive home. 'What can I offer the British clique?' he asked a little drunkenly. 'Oh, my! But have we gone conservative!' He glanced from Brown to Manolo, who looked pleased at the attention. Jay remembered the scheduled 'Renaissance page'. 'Pleased to have you along,' Raphael said, when introduced to Caroline. 'Jay here will tell you what not to eat.'

Manolo was dearly under prior orders. He looked questioningly at Brown before accepting either wine or a kebab.

'Oh, they're okay!' Raphael laughed, intercepting the look. 'I rescued her. Just in time, I guess. And right off old Hammet's knee,' he said to Jay.

'Mummy!' Achmed had appeared playfully at Caroline's elbow.

Manolo, Jay noticed, looked distastefully at the boy's grubby shirt and jeans; then, with an irritating, quite pitying scepticism at himself. Jay glowered back at him, to be met now with a coquettish smile. From his breast pocket Manolo produced a folded piece of paper and handed it to him. Brown appeared at that moment unduly preoccupied with Raphael. Jay read 'Repair effected 6.30 p.m. Deep thanks for listening. Simon.'

Wildly, automatically, Jay looked at Caroline, who was deep in conversation with Achmed. But Manolo was shaking his head with slow, self-satisfied reproach. He tapped his own chest.

So Brown had overcome his impotence, yet was proposing to disappear next day with a strange girl? Where Jay had been suspicious before, he now felt certainty. Equally suddenly he realised he was slightly drunk. Profoundly, he raised his glass to Manolo, who did likewise. Then, dazedly, he found himself wondering what their old headmaster would have made of the look on Manolo's face.

'I see your prodigal's returned,' Brown was saying. 'If to "riotous living", rather than away from it'

'And I've just been toasting your more dramatic reunion,' Jay said absently. 'Perhaps the illusion of something kidnapped from a "schools special" at Waterloo Station helped.'

'Do you know, I think you might have some
enormously
subtle point there.' With Caroline talking to Raphael a little distance away, an expansive Brown looked set for an abstruse analysis. But he checked himself momentarily. 'Incidentally! There's even
better
news on the horizon. If it comes off, we must celebrate it together.'

Uncertainly, Jay looked at him.

'But about this particular image of Manolos,' Brown executed a tipsy bow '—
potage école Gadston
—'

'I suppose you've heard it
was
Dan Gurney last night,' Jay cut in, looking steadily at him.

Caught both mentally, and at that moment physically off-balance, the reorganising of Brown's features was comical. From a complete and intense preoccupation with camp, they stiffened into the mask of is tragedian. Yet thus far it was no act. Gurney's death was clearly something he was desperately concerned to forget.

'Yes. Yes, I did hear,' he said. 'It's a ghastly business.'

'You knew last night'

Slowly Brown shook his head. 'I didn't
know
.
But I was terribly afraid—had been for some time—lest he might . . .'

Take his own life?'

'Yes.' Brown frowned into his glass. 'He was mortally ill. Hence, of course, his repeated trips to the Colonial Hospital in Gib. I suppose, well . . . he just wasn't a man who could wait passively for anything . . .'