When Max finally drove back to the Corienne, it was definitely a greyer kind of twilight than anything he was used to at this season and latitude. One or two of dog-walkers and white-flannelled strollers along the breezy promenade had paused to point out to sea, towards the dark tear at the near horizon. There was even a queue for the coin-in-the-slot telescopes beside the awnings of the beach bars. But the sun was still shining and the air was still warm, and the thing out there on the horizon really didn’t look much different from a storm cloud. As Max turned up the road past the smart shops away from the promenade, he took final glance in the rear view mirror. He smiled. A few real storm clouds were now actually gathering to join with the rent in the sky. Max pondered whether it was worth putting some music on the stereo for the few minutes of the drive he had left. Decided, no. He felt pleased with himself. He wasn’t—and had never been—a greedy man. All he wanted was Nina. A little of her love.
Back at the Corienne, Nina, of course, was still out in the hills with Vernon. Max threw his package down on the bed. The little label said SOUTH OVER EAST, TAILORS FOR THE DISCERNING.
Checking on the balcony, he saw that the sky was now turquoise sapphire grey. He looked down when he heard the putter of an approaching scooter on the road below. It was Vernon, with Nina holding on tight, her head thrown back and laughing.
Vernon saw him first. “Hey, there’s Max! Hello Sir!” He gave a jolly wave, balancing the scooter against the kerb as Nina climbed off.
Max raised his hands. Nina gave Vernon a carefully fraternal kiss on the cheek. Max shrugged as if he didn’t care. Then—moving quickly for his age as Nina headed towards the Corienne’s entrance—he ducked back into the room. He opened the box containing the suit. By the light of the evening, he pulled it on. Then he waited for Nina’s footsteps, the sound of her key in the lock.
Nina was awed, inspired. She stepped right into his arms. Max was the sky, closing over her with turquoise sapphire grey wings. The room filled with the scent of their passion and all the colours of the evening. And the secret smells of alleyways, too. And flowers closing. And seagulls. And the bells of ships clanging as they came in on a late tide towards the harbour.
Later, they drove down to the casino, dressed in their new outfits. Clothed in the night. A storm was coming in off the sea. The trees were dancing, flapping their branches like mad flightless birds. Lightening flared along Max’s shoulder as he reached to touch Nina’s cheek. He felt the wind in his face, the wind from her hair. When they parked the car, people were already gathering round to admire, to touch and draw away with little shrieks and laughter at the chill electric feel of the gathering storm that came off them.
There was no need that night for Max and Nina to dance. They just swayed in the ballroom. The drapes billowed. The chandeliers chattered their teeth. Max was filled with a joy and terrible power. Who cared about looks, age? What the hell could Vernon do to answer this?
The storm was at its height. He was surrounded by the grainy phosphoresce, flapping curtains, black streamers of wind. With the stars wheeling in his eyes and thunder rolling from his shoulders, he looked for Nina amid the bars and tables, and the other cringing guests.
There was no sign.
He found her eventually. After the storm had died and the others had gone home, leaving him with angry backward glances, muttering about jokes being taken too far. He found her when the first flush of morning was spreading across his back and chest.
He picked his way through scattered glasses and uptilted chairs. Out onto the balcony. He saw Nina, standing with Vernon, kissing. The sunrise was on her skin. So were Vernon’s hands. Her dress was a shimmering pool around her feet.
Vernon saw him, and smiled over Nina’s perfect shoulder.
“That was some evening,” he said, “Sir.”
Back beneath the leaning sign marked SOUTH OVER EAST, TAILORS FOR THE DISCERNING. NIGHT AND DAY WEAR A SPECIALITY. Through the doorway with the bell that tinkled and fell off, then rolled across the floor.
“How much of the sky do you have?” Max asked. “You must keep a stock—otherwise why bother to advertise? And don’t call me Sir.”
“I’m sorry. It’s merely a politeness that most customers prefer.”
“Stop stalling, and give it to me.”
“What?”
“Everything. Everything you’ve got.”
Max was in no mood to argue. But the little man nodded anyway, and as he went off behind the bead curtain, Max realised that he still hadn’t asked for payment, hadn’t even mentioned a price. Max decided that he must have signed up to some system of credit without realising, even though that would be have been totally unlike him. And he realised when he had spoken that his voice was high and uneasy, that his hands and eyes couldn’t settle. He was breaking the first rule of business, which was also the first rule of life: Never Give Yourself Away.
But, even after leaving the shop, there was still so much to do. First, Max went to the bank. The manager seemed surprised at the amount he wished to withdraw, but not wildly so; he’d grown used to the whims of the rich and elderly on this island. Then Max drove down to the harbour, where those who made a conspicuous show of their wealth kept their yachts moored. He walked past the gangplanks, the lounging bodies and the flaccid flags and the bright brass fittings and the hissing champagne, until found the largest ship, the whitest ship, a great solid ghost of a ship, the one with the widest spars, the tallest masts, that creaked and glowed on the polished water. The owner was an old man like himself, surrounded by riches that had worn so thin that he could barely see or smell or touch them. Max made an absurdly high offer for the yacht, then several higher still. Eventually, they settled.
Max climbed back into the car and drove up from the harbour to the old boatyard that lay in the wooded bay across the hill beyond town, where the scents of freshly cut wood and tar carried on the air. The hammerings and the planings ceased as his fat tyres scrunched the shingle. The weathered men gathered around him, grinning, rubbing sweat from their eyes. They shook their heads at his request, and at the money he offered. They told him it was simply too difficult, and that there wasn’t enough time. Then he offered more money. So much that the men they began to look afraid, to make the sign of superstition against the evil eye. So much that they had to agree, and promise on the souls of their mothers that the yacht would be ready to sail by midnight.
Max arranged for all the cloth he’d ordered from South over East to be delivered to the yard. And he told the men that he wanted her re-christened. A simple paint job. He wanted Nina-With-The-Sky-In-Her-Hair.
Max sat in the bistro at a tin table in the square that afternoon, drinking coffee. He felt more relaxed, now that almost everything was in hand. Pleasantly weary from all that he’d done. Relaxing was usually a problem he had with holidays. He always felt more at ease when he was busy.
Max guessed that Nina would have got back to the Corienne eventually, expecting to find him curled up on the sheets there, having the one of the naps that always left him feeling sour and slack and disgusted. But Vernon would be full of himself, keyed-up after the soft excitements of Nina. He’d want to talk to his friends.
Max heard the chatter of a scooter coming down the bends through the slow afternoon. He closed his eyes. It was Vernon’s scooter. He could tell that, even listening with his dodgy right ear.
Vernon turned into the square, and saw Max almost instantly. He pulled at the brakes. He swung the scooter round in a billow of dust. He dismounted.
“Nice day, Sir.”
Max pointed to the empty chair he’d placed at the other side of the table. “Would you like a drink?”
“Don’t mind if I do, Sir. Good of you to ask.”
Max watched the way the young man moved. The ease. The grace. The absence of worry or thought. It made him all the more certain that he had to take Nina away.
“I have a proposal to put to you.”
“Well,” Vernon straddl
ed the chair. Stretching out his arms, he yawned like a cat. For a moment, Max could smell Nina. “Let’s hear it, Sir.”
“You’re screwing Nina.”
“I’m sorry to hear you using a word like that, Sir.” Vernon looked truly wounded. “Nina and I love each other.”
Max scowled at him. “What do you know about love?”
Vernon watched and said nothing as the waiter emerged from the bistro’s interior and wiped the table before a placing a chilled carafe of white wine and two glasses between them. When the waiter stooped to pour it out, Vernon waved him away. He tipped the dewy carafe into both glasses himself, and raised one to his face, half-closing his eyes as he breathed in the vineyard bouquet of some golden summer in the past. A summer, Max thought, when Vernon probably still had scabs on his knees.
“What I know about love, Sir” Vernon said eventually, placing the glass back on the table with a slight bang, then raising a finger and tapping his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his heart, his belly, his groin. “Is what I feel here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here.”
Max gazed at him for a moment. “You didn’t point to your brain,” he said. “Assuming, that is, that you’ve got one.”
“That was uncalled for, Sir.” Vernon sipped at his wine. Then he looked up, over Max’s head and the branches of the fig trees and the roof, towards the sky. “Will you look at that cloud? Exactly what kind of thing would you say that is?”
Max turned and looked. Almost one quarter of the sky was dark, as though everything in it had been extinguished. It was neither night nor day—nor even truly black—but the kind of grey darkness that Max imagined lay waiting to take him a few years hence.
“It’s probably some pollution that’s come over from the mainland,” Vernon said. “Caused by people like you. People using their brains.”
Max shrugged. This was no time to argue. He said, “How much would I have to pay you to keep you away from Nina?”
Vernon looked surprised, but—like the bank manager—not wildly so. By now, Max was used to the process of bargaining, and Vernon rapidly got into the swing of it, too. As they soured higher and higher, circling and bickering like two swallows in the blue upper reaches of wealth, Max couldn’t help wondering whether Vernon hadn’t done this kind of thing before. But he felt that it was incumbent upon him to offer a fearfully high price. After all, Nina was Nina. And love was love.
The two men finally shook hands. Vernon climbed back onto his shooter. He smiled and waved. Shouted Goodbye Sir over the clatter of the engine. Max watched him until there was nothing but silence and afternoon dust in the square.
He felt a shadow at his back.
Looking up, imagining wings of darkness spreading over him, he saw that it was actually the waiter, with a bill for two coffees and a carafe of wine crumpled in his hands. Rummaging in his pockets, Max found that he had just enough change left to cover it.
Back at the Corienne, Nina was asleep. Her hair still damp from the shower, soft as the rain. He sat watching her as the light deepened. Finally, she turned on the pillow, and opened her eyes.
He asked, “You had a good time with Vernon?”
She sat up and nodded and pushed the sheets away. Everything about her still slow and sleepy, an invitation to dream.
“But I’ve settled things with him now, Darling. He won’t bother you again. And tonight, we’re leaving the island. Alone, together. I’ve got a boat.”
“A boat?”
“It’s not just a boat.”
“Where is it?”
“It’ll be ready at midnight.”
“At the harbour?”
“Yes.”
“And Vernon?”
“He’s a rich man.”
She walked across the room. Stepped into her knickers. Reached into the wardrobe for a blue dress he’d never seen before.
“Nina, where are you going?”
“I’ve got until midnight, haven’t I?” She pulled the straps down over her brown shoulders, smoothed the cloth over her hips. “So you’ll let me have until then. Just one evening...”
She opened the balcony doors. The darkness was settling more quickly than ever, and the sea was whispering and the streetlights along the promenade were starting to shine and the stars were pricking through to join them. She threw back her head and breathed in a way that made him think of Vernon, lifting that glass of white wine. Then she turned back to him.
“It’s not much to ask, is it?”
Max spent the evening wandering the streets above the port. He didn’t feel hungry, but then he didn’t have enough money for a meal anyway. He found himself pleasantly lost in the back streets, in the dog-barking, litter-strewn alleys where the real people of the island lived their lives. Breathing in the cooking grease, the stale refuse, the bruised purple odour of bougainvillea that spilled over from a tiny walled garden, he thought of the future and of Nina. Nina and the future. The future. Nina.
Further along in the darkness, he found a row of shops, their windows clouded with grime. He peered in, whistling faintly, hearing the sound of some half-remembered tune disappearing up the chill and empty street. There were pale hooked sides of pork hanging like cadavers. Beside that, a shop sold artificial limbs. Arms and legs lay scattered in display like some terrible accident. The half-tune on Max’s lips vanished entirely. The wind was against him now, moaning faintly, tumbling empty cans along the gutters, clattering towards him like an huge, unseen train.
The full moon hung over the sagging rooftops. He saw that there was a place of darkness close by it where there were no stars—no emptiness, even—or any sense of space. He walked on, hands deep in his empty pockets, trying to think of his beautiful yacht, of the men he’d set to work, of the smell of paint and glue, of the great shimmering bolts of sky-sail lying on the white shingle between the seaweed and the rocks. And by tomorrow, him and Nina, they’d be swooping over seafoam towards an empty blue horizon. But the image wouldn’t come. Not properly. All he saw was the dark shadowed space on the water left by sails, and the cold chasm beneath the hull, and the shade that was without colour at the heart of Nina’s eyes.
Max checked his watch. Past eleven. He’d been dreaming, and time had slipped by the way it always seemed to do. But even as his feet clopped on the damp steps leading down to the harbour and his hands trembled on the loose iron railing, he knew that he’d left it too late.
The yacht was everything that he’d ever imagined. A white dream. The starry night sky billowed and tautened from her spars, filling with a dark breeze as she turned out from the harbour.
Standing breathless in the moonlight at the lapping edge of the quay, Max could easily identity of the two figures standing at the helm. Nina, with Vernon beside her. They could only have cast off a few minutes earlier. In fact, Max guessed that they’d put off leaving the island until they could be sure that he’d see them. Nina-With-The-Sky-In-Her-Hair tacked against the wind and keeled a graceful twenty degrees, spinning a wake of phosphorescence. Nina and Vernon had seen him now, and were waving. Faintly, he could hear their voices, carrying over the restless water. Love. I’m sorry. Always Remember. Sir...
The Nina was out beyond the old lighthouse, and Max ran up the breakwater steps to watch as she turned into the wide sweep of the bay. Away from the lights of the town, the moon gleamed on the tips of the black-hooded waves. Max saw that it now lay at the very edge of the starless black rent in the sky. He saw, too, that even as her bright halo was swallowed in shadow, the brilliance of the Nina’s sails increased.
She was going fast now, cleaving the sea, entangled on the wind. And the brilliance of her sails increased as the moon and everything else began to darken. Max could still see Nina, her arm around Vernon, the two of them outlined against the greyly blazing sails. She was waving a final goodbye. It should have been a scene of beauty, yet, wrenched from the sky, the moonlight trapped in Nina’s sails made Max think only of arid canyons, of seas of dust without
air or water, of bones. Of a dead world.
As the moon was bitten out of the sky, stone by stone into greater darkness, the Nina glowed madly. She became a ghost ship, casting ghostly light from her sails. And she began to lean, slowed and tipped by the weight of those howling canyons, reaching an impossible angle as more and more of the moon dropped into her sails. A spar crashed to the water, was dragged roiling in her drunken wake. Another broke and stuck out and up like the wing of a wounded bird. Over the slap of breakwater waves, Max believed he could hear panicked screams. And splitting fabric, snapping ropes, splintering wood. Suddenly, the Nina keeled over entirely.
Briefly, her sails boiled in the water, spreading a wake of milky light. In another moment, she was gone.
The morning tide bore what was left of the Nina-With-The-Sky-In-Her-Hair into the bay below the casino. Max was standing on the shore, watching as his dreams came in as driftwood. The skysails lifted and fell in the rocky shallows. He waded in, and grabbed dripping handfuls of the stuff. The fabric tore like wet newspaper. The colours dissolved. Faded and darkened in the bright air. Still, he lifted a clump of it to his face, and for a moment he thought he could still detect the damp secret smells of alleyways beneath the reek of the ocean. And flowers opening to the sun. And seagulls’ cries. And fresh coffee on a hot tin table. And wine. And laughter. And the clanging bells of ships as they came in towards the harbour. Then he looked up, and realised that what he felt was all around him: that it was nothing more than the stirrings of the island.
He found Nina along the shore, wrapped in a shroud of sail. He chased the seagulls away, and untangled her, then turned back her head so that he might look one last time. The currents had dragged her naked, swollen her belly and twisted her limbs. Her eyes were open, glazed sliver like those of a fish. Her hair was the most beautiful thing about her now. Gleaming dark and wet like something still alive.
Max wrapped Nina back up in the sail so that no one else might see her this way, then lifted her—astonished by her lightness, and by his own strength—and carried her up the cliff steps, along the empty road past the casino. On into town.
Nowhere: Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 25