The Kings of Eternity (31 page)

“Hi, yourself. Sit down.”

She sat opposite me. Nervously, almost guiltily.

I said, “When was the last time you ate?”

She shrugged and looked away, avoiding my eyes.

“Listen, I have a suggestion to make. You’re an artist, and a good one. I very much like the drawing you did of me. I have it hanging in my front room.” I paused, watching her. She had her head bowed, and was nervously fingering a woven thread bracelet on her slim, child’s wrist. “Can you do street scenes as well as portraits, buildings, things like that?”

She nodded without looking at me.

“How would you like a few commissions? Do me a sketch every day. Scenes in Tangier, people, whatever, and I’ll buy you a meal. How does that sound?”

She said nothing, but reached her hand across the table, looking away. We shook. Her hand reminded me of a tiny bird, the bones thin and vulnerable, the flesh warm.

I bought her the first meal then, in lieu of the following day’s sketch. She ate as though she were starving.

“I don’t even know your name?” I said.

“Sam, Sam Devereaux.”

“Samantha. That’s a nice name.”

She shot me a look. “Sam. Just Sam. My folks called me Samantha.”

“Fine. Sam.”

Through a mouthful of falafel, she said, “What do you write?”

“I wrote novels in the fifties. Now I please myself, keep a journal, make notes.”

“Novels? Far out. That’s cool. Can I read one?”

“I don’t keep copies. You might find some in the secondhand bookshops in the medina.”

“I’ll look. What’s your name?”

“I wrote under the name of Christopher Cartwright.”

She nodded. “But that’s not your real name, right?”

My real name? Jonathon Langham, Christopher Cartwright, Daniel Sellings. They had all at one time been my real names. “I’m Daniel Sellings,” I said.

We met at three o’clock every afternoon, and she would present me with a newly-completed sketch: one day a street scene, the next the portrait of a stall-holder, and the day after that the Grand Mosque.

“What does it feel like to be a professional artist?” I asked her one day as I watched her eat.

“Good,” she said. “What does it feel like to be a patron of the arts?”

I laughed. “I never thought of it like that.”

She stopped eating and looked up at me. “Why’re you doing all this?” she said. “Being kind to me?”

The way she said it, “Being kind to me?” made me want to reach out and take her in my arms. It was pathetic and childish and timorous, and suggested that no-one had ever been kind to her before, at least not for the right reasons.

“You’re a good artist. You need feeding up.” I shrugged. “I want lovely drawings for my walls. It’s a good business relationship.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Business relationship,” she said. “That makes it sound so impersonal.” And her eyes flickered away from my gaze as she said this.

Why was I being kind to her? For all the above reasons, of course... or at least it had started out that way. But there was something about her that brought out in me the urge to cherish and protect.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Twenty in May. You?”

I was sixty-three that year - as old as my father was when he died. My passport said forty.

“Forty,” I said.

She nodded. “I’m young enough to be your daughter,” she said, and then quickly reached across the table and took my hand. “I didn’t mean it like that. You don’t seem old.” She made a goofy I’ve-put-my-foot-in-it-again face.

I smiled. I didn’t feel old, despite my years, just weary sometimes with the weight of experience.

One day, after passing me the sketch she had done that morning, and watching me with a pinched face to gauge my reaction, she said, “Hey, guess what?”

“What?” I asked. She was digging about in her shoulder bag.

She pulled out a creased paperback and presented it to me.
Eternal Safari
by Christopher Cartwright.

I opened the book and read a few words, recalling many times in the past when I had done the same with other books. I was disappointed; every scene seemed over-written, in need of condensing.

She was staring at me with big eyes. “I’m halfway through. Know something, I couldn’t put it down. You’re some writer, Daniel Sellings.”

I took her hand across the table and told her of my travels in Central Africa, and before that in South America.

She was a child. The areas of her ignorance were vast, great uncharted territories waiting to be explored. But she was a willing explorer; she hung on my every word.

It seemed, in her company, that I was illimitably experienced and wise. I found myself thinking about her when I was not with her, which is always a fatal sign. I cared about her: as well as wanting to cherish and protect her, I found myself wanting to educate her, too.

Was that love? Who knows? I was not wise enough to say.

One day, after she had finished her meal and squeezed my hand and left, Jerry came to my table and sat down. He had never shown much inclination to chat before, and I was surprised now. “Dan,” he said. “That kid. Wouldn’t get involved if I were you.”

My heart leapt into my throat. I smiled, trying to make light of it. “She seems harmless enough.”

He made a gesture then that I had not seen before, but which I have seen often since. With his thumb he made a plunging motion into the vein of his left arm. “She’s a junky,” he said.

I was not accustomed to the word. I was confused, and a little frightened. “A what?”

“Never read Burroughs?”

I nearly said, “Edgar Rice?” but stopped myself.

Jerry sighed. “She’s a drug addict. Heroin. Notice the track marks?”

“Sorry? Track marks?”

“Where the needle goes into her vein, scabs all the way up her left arm.”

I shook my head, murmured something.

“She gets a monthly remittance from her folks back home, but it all goes on junk. That’s why she never has any cash to buy food.” He said all this with the world weariness of a man who had seen it all a hundred times before. “So be careful, okay, Dan? I just thought you’d better know, is all.”

“Thanks,” I murmured, and sat alone for an hour or two with a cold coffee and my thoughts.

The following afternoon she presented me with a wonderful sketch of a street in the Petit Socco.

I said, “What do you do when you leave here, Sam?”

“Go home. Read a little. Sleep. I’ve got to be up early to hit the streets, find a good subject for the sketches.”

I was holding her left hand, my thumb a pestle in the mortar of her palm, rubbing. I could see a series of scabbed red marks on the inside of her arm.

When she left the café later that day, with a quick squeeze of my fingers and a wave, I followed her after an interval of twenty seconds and pursued her through the crowded streets. She was not that hard to follow: she was the only Western girl in sight, and her white blouse and faded jeans stood out among the hurly-burly of camel-coloured jelabas and dark business suits.

I followed her north through the medina, down mean and narrow side-streets and alleys, and watched her slip into a room on the ground-floor of an ancient three-storied building.

I stood outside, in a sweat of indecision, and wondered what to do next. Should I enter and confront her, or leave well alone and return home? As much as I was attracted to the girl, did I want to become involved in her tragic life?

I look back, now, and realise that I really had little choice in the matter.

Perhaps five minutes later I knocked on the door. There was no reply, which alarmed me. I knocked again, harder this time, and then pushed inside.

I was instantly repelled by the heat and the squalor of the hovel. A naked bulb illuminated a small square room. The only furnishing was a mattress in the corner.

Sam lay unconscious on the mattress, the accoutrements of her addiction scattered about her. I saw a small Bunsen burner, a tablespoon, a twist of silver foil, and on the bed beside her a hypodermic syringe.

I moved across the room and sat down on the mattress. I reached out and touched her cheek, swept her hair back from her forehead.

What struck me then was how anyone with a finite span of years ahead of them could risk death in such a manner. Was life so terrible that they had to seek the balm of ecstasy, irrespective of the risk?

I looked about the room. But for a pile of clothes on the floor, and her shoulder bag, which contained her sketch-pad and pens, she seemed to possess nothing else. I slipped my hand beneath the mattress and found a cheese-cloth bag containing her passport and two Canadian ten dollar notes.

I opened the passport. Her picture showed a smiling, fuller-faced girl. Samantha Elizabeth Devereaux, born in 1944, Ontario.

I placed the passport and the dollars in her shoulder bag, then slipped out and hailed a taxi. I returned to the room, picked her up - she was frighteningly light - and carried her out to the waiting cab. I lay her on the back seat, to the alarm of the driver, and returned to her room, looking for some means to lock the door. There was no lock, which I supposed hardly mattered as there was nothing within the room worth stealing.

Five minutes later I was carrying her over the threshold of my apartment - aware of the irony of the marital ritual - and into the spare room. I arranged her on the bed and placed her shoulder bag on the table beside it. I fetched a chair from the front room and positioned it beside the bed, then sat down to keep watch over her until she awoke.

Fearful that she might have died, from time to time I checked her pulse. It fluttered like some living thing, a butterfly, trapped beneath the pale skin of her neck.

At nine o’clock I visited the bathroom, and when I returned she was awake. She lay on her back, blinking up at the ceiling. I stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame, and watched her; I was conscious of not getting too close, afraid of her reaction.

She stared at me with her oversized eyes. “How did I get here?”

“I brought you.”

“Why?”

“Because... you can’t live where you were living.”

“It was okay.”

“It wasn’t okay. It stank. It was filthy. There wasn’t even any running water-”

“There was a communal shower around the corner.”

I stared at her.

“You know?” she said. “You saw the stuff, didn’t you?”

I nodded.

She made to climb from the bed. “I need to go back.”

“Sam, this is insane. You can’t go back there.”

She avoided my eyes. “For the stuff, okay? I need the stuff.”

“And then come back here. I have my own room. You can have this one for as long as you like.”

She looked up at me then, her eyes widening. “You don’t mind about the stuff you saw?”

“We’ll talk about that later.”

She stood, rubbing her eyes with both fists, just like the kid she was. She grabbed her bag and side-stepped past me without a glance, then moved down the hallway to the front door. I didn’t turn to watch her go. The door snapped shut behind her.

I moved to the lounge and poured myself a wine and sat and waited.

I was old enough to be her grandfather, I told myself, and anyway the attraction was not sexual. I cared about her because she was so young and naïve, and the world was an awful place. I could look after her, ensure that she prospered, encourage her... I often look back and wonder if the person I was then understood, in his heart of hearts, that he was trying to deny what he knew to be a simple fact.

An hour passed.

I feared that she would not return. More, that I would never see her again. She would go back to her hovel and get her
stuff
, as she called it, then move out and never go back to Jerry’s Café. She would be just another young casualty abroad in the world.

Perhaps two hours after she left, I heard a small knock on the front door. I remained where I was, waiting. The door opened, and a minute later she appeared around the doorway to the lounge, leaning against the jamb, her eyes downcast.

Her voice was hardly a whisper. “I nearly didn’t come,” she said. “I nearly just upped and quit the city, got on the first train to Marrakech.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” I said.

“I was frightened. Frightened to leave and frightened to stay.”

“Sam, you have nothing to fear from me.”

She stared at me. “Who are you, what do you want from me?”

I gestured to the armchair across the coffee table. “Sit down. I’ll pour you a wine.”

She moved into the room like a timorous kitten, sat down. I poured her a wine. The large glass almost eclipsed her face as she held it in both hands, tipped and drank.

“I don’t want anything from you, apart perhaps from conversation, and friendship. In return I want to help you.”

She laughed at that - she spluttered a laugh that was almost a cry. “How can you help me?” she asked.

I was honest. “I don’t know. Perhaps all I can do is help you to help yourself.” Before she could say anything, I went on, “Why did you start taking that stuff?”

She was silent for a long time, staring at her fingers as they worried the hem of her cheese-cloth blouse. “It was in Canada, just after I failed art school. This guy, he left me when I found I was pregnant, and my father paid for the abortion. I didn’t want one, but you see at the time I wasn’t in a fit state.” She looked up and smiled at me through her tears, her forefinger describing a whirlwind beside her temple. “They had me put away in a psychiatric ward and I had the abortion, and when I came out I wanted to destroy myself, and drugs seemed like the most painless way to do that. That was a year ago. Some friends were going to Europe. I wanted to get away from Canada, so I went with them.” She shrugged. “We split up in Spain and I found myself here.” She smiled at me. “Heroin is cheaper here than in Canada, anyway.”

I smiled. “So you can kill yourself on the cheap,” I said.

Silence. Her fingers worked. She stared down, did not look up, and only after a minute did I realise that her slight frame was shaking with constricted sobs.

“I don’t-” she said, “-I don’t want-” and she was shaking her head, plucking at the hem of her blouse, “-I don’t want to die!”