by Paul Slatter
And getting straight to the point, Archall Diamond said, “I was seeing this girl, but she’s gone now. I got this hockey shirt and wondered if you’d like it.”
Then he watched as the girl smiled at him and looked to the back of the basement suite towards the door where her husband was working. Then he heard her say, “I saw you here the other night?”
“Yeah—I got an ice hockey stick in the teeth, knocked out my diamond. That’s why I’m here but I’m glad now ’cos I see you—that’s why I came round to give you this hockey jersey, see if you want to go with me tomorrow so as you can wear it?”
Then he heard her soft voice say, “That’s very kind. I’m sorry though, you see, my back’s injured.”
This was good, Archall thought, looking down and seeing the wheelchair for the first time. He’d asked her out and she hadn’t said she was married to the dentist or anything, and fuck was she beautiful. He said, “You getting better though yeah?”
She was and smiling, she looked him straight in the eyes and said, “I am I think, yes.”
Archall nodded, this was good. The girl needed to be able to at least stand if they went out, as hot as she was it wouldn’t look cool, him pushing her around, even if she was the sexiest chick there. He said, “You like hockey?”
Alla nodded, the slightest of smiles coming from her gorgeous mouth, her eyes alight.
“You like the Canucks?”
“I do yes. Thank you for the shirt.”
Then Archall asked, “The dentist guy, he’s your father, is he?”
And without a hint of embarrassment Alla answered, “No, he’s my husband.”
Archall stood there for a moment not speaking, half looking at the back door to the bullshit surgery and then to Alla; then, pulling his tongue out of the gap in his teeth, he said, “Well I never knew that, so sorry. I asked ’cos you look younger than him, see.”
Alla nodded and smiled this time right at him, her eyes holding his, her hair long and curly hanging loose across her shoulders, those high cheekbones. She said, “It’s okay. I’m happy with what you say—and don’t worry, I can keep a secret.”
Then the door to the backroom surgery opened and Dennis came out, saw Archall, looked at Alla, then the shirt and, as Archall looked at the worn runners of the guy in the surgery’s chair, heard Alla say, “Dennis, love, this gentleman’s brought you a hockey shirt as a gift for you. He was wondering if while he was coming here maybe you could take a look at his wisdom teeth?”
******
Archall Diamond drove back towards his home and looked at his missing front tooth in the rear-view mirror. ‘I can keep a secret,’ she’d said and given him that look. Then the husband had gone and ruined it coming out like that as though he knew. But she wanted him, he could tell; he’d been saying he was busy pulling a guy’s wisdom teeth out back, and her wanting him enough to suggest Archall have his wisdom teeth taken out as well the next day, so as she could see him again. Even if she was in a chair.
He was happy. The conversation had carried on after the dentist had thanked him for the shirt and gone back inside to dig around in some loser’s mouth with a pair of pliers. The girl had told him about her back, how she’d damaged it slipping on the stairs and how they were saving for an operation so as she could walk again. All the time staring into his eyes like a school kid flattered he could be interested in her—her not knowing she was beautiful, him telling her and her blushing and looking to the door where her husband was pulling the guy with the shitty worn running shoes’ teeth out.
Nina never looked at him like that. She just liked clothes, used him to get them and never said thank you after he’d pounded her for a good couple of minutes; giving it to her, making her come like he could, fast and furious.
‘Alla’, she’d said, Alla from Europe, sexy Alla, who’d told him she could keep a secret and then told him he’d made her feel like a woman again after he’d told her about this trick he could do with cocoa pops. He smiled at himself in the mirror, feeling like a million dollars, that plastic Paki Rann Singh out there now all smug thinking he’d done him up by kicking out his diamond tooth like he had, but he hadn’t—he’d done him a favor. How else would he have met this girl, the one who looked at him the way she did and laughed at his jokes and said she felt comfortable with him, like they’d met before some other time in a previous life?
******
Rann Singh picked up his bag and walked through customs, wondering if anyone else had ever smuggled a shitload of money into Kenya in a turban he no longer needed. How long had it been since he’d last come through this airport? he thought. He’d been a boy, gone to the ranch to see his grandfather and been chased by the zebra that roamed free on their land.
He walked further into the arrivals—the army guards half asleep at the doorway, their Royal Enfield rifles hanging loosely in their arms. The air cool and the clouds in the distance low in the sky, black faces everywhere with cropped hair and their clothes worn thin, women in hugely colored gowns scraping the floor with their flip-flops.
He got a cab and headed along the Uhuru Highway into Nairobi, looking to the Acacia trees out there on the plains in amongst the low white clouds. He stopped at the first car lot he saw, got out and bought the best Land Rover there for twelve thousand dollars cash from a Kikuyu man in a brown suit, threw his small case in the back, and headed up north towards the mountains.
Two hours later, he was there rolling into the small town of Nyeri sitting at the edge of the Aberdare Mountains, driving around in his new ride with its spare tire bolted to the top of the hood and its tough plastic dashboard. One street, then the next, back around again through puddles and chunks of road worn thin, revealing soft red earth. Locals staring with their jet-black faces and cropped hair as they hung out under the shade of a tree or leaned against the front of a store in their trousers and shoes with no socks. The estate agent premises he’d used to seal the house deal there now, its windows clean, covered in pictures of people trying to move on. Getting out, he walked to the window and looked through them all, trying to find his grandfather’s ranch, feeling the weight of the ceremonial spear he’d bought from a vendor when he’d stopped to take a piss. He moved his eyes from left to right, scanning the single dwellings, houses large and small, two shops, a small shithole of a hotel, and one ranch, which his grandfather once used to own and which was about to become his.
Smiling, he pulled out his phone, which still worked over here, and called to the shop, listening to the phone ring through the window pane and watching as a colonial came from the back still doing up his fly and answered.
He was at the right place, almost there, he said, “I’m here to buy the ranch.”
He hung up the phone, walked inside still carrying the spear in his right hand, and said it again—but this time putting it different.
“I’m here to buy the ranch in cash— and don’t worry, I’m just carrying this in case anyone tries to rip me off.”
That’ll do it, he thought, let them know he meant business. Then he turned to see a man looking at him through the storefront window, his hair cropped tight and his dinner jacket long in the sleeves; and before he could ask, he heard the agent say, “This is your man servant, Joseph, sir. He comes with the home.”
******
They drove along the edge of the forest away from town, Joseph in the back of the Land Rover, the estate agent ahead driving his Peugeot, a lawyer sitting next to him now. Rann Singh driving, feeling the road underneath the machine as it ground along, the steering wheel with a life of its own.
It was just as he remembered it—green forest, bush, red earth along the roadside, sunny but not hot, with lower clouds than in Nairobi, and the terrain was flat, even though they were high above sea level. No one for miles, and then just a single figure standing at the side of the road, watching as they passed. Where the fuck do they come from, these people out there standing doing nothing? He thought, as they passed another, standing i
solated from the world.
“You know that guy?”
Joseph shook his head and answering back in Swahili said, “No Bwana.”
Then Rann Singh looked to Joseph saying, “He lives here?”
“No Bwana.”
Rann Singh held onto the steering wheel and swung onto the other side of the road avoiding a dead animal. Then asked in English, “How’d you know that if you don’t know him.”
And Joseph replied, “It is because I know his brother.”
Then he does know him. If he knows his brother, he knows him, Rann Singh thought—he couldn’t not know him. He looked at this Joseph guy, his new ‘man servant’ as the real estate man had called him, the guy sitting in the back of his Land Rover like he belonged there and hadn’t even been invited for the ride. He said, “If you know his brother how come you don’t know him?”
And Joseph answered, “Yes, Bwana this is correct.” Then he carried on, taking Rann by surprise, saying, “I know you also Bwana. You have grown but you look just like your father.”
They drove for a while longer heading east, the road seeming to never end as it took him along twisting long curves dropping down to quickly rise again until they’d pass another brow of the hill where the forest grew thin, exposing the sharp jagged peaks of the Aberdare Mountains. He asked his new man servant, “You live in the town?”
“No, I live in the ranch, Bwana.”
“You get the bus?”
“No bus, Bwana.”
“You walked?”
“Yes, Bwana.”
Then Joseph smiled, showing off a set of brilliant white teeth, and said, “I left the same day you called to say you were coming.”
They reached a small path cut into the ground to the right at the bottom of a hill, a trail started by horses as their hooves ripped at the grasslands, slowly widening over the years once the horses died and the rubber of tires took over, its banks dug deep, smooth from when the rains came, the earth hard, baked and cracked by the sun, a deeper red than back in town.
Rann followed the Peugeot as it carefully wound its way along through the grasslands, the pathway lined by posted wire opening out into occasional gates. It must have been at least a couple of miles now, Rann thought, the forest small now in his rear-view mirror, the mountains high in the sky in the distance. He said, “Who owns this land?”
And Joseph smiled again and told him as he pointed all around, “You do Bwana, you own all this land, this land here, that land there. All the land from the ranch since we left the road.”
And then it came back to him, the road and the lane, and how he’d passed along it years ago sleeping as a kid in the back of his grandfather’s truck, warm in his mother’s lap. Yeah this was it, the bumpy road where he’d smacked his head on the window looking out and after another mile passed, he saw in the distance the outline of the thatched roof of the ranch, its pillared front deck, its manicured garden, the small mud hut village to its right where he’d chased chickens with the local African kids and giggled as they’d hidden from the crazy zebra as it passed through.
They pulled up outside the front of a ranch that was smaller than Rann remembered but still big, the ground beneath them gravel now. The rocks around the flower beds painted white, the grass mown short and precise with a small light aircraft sitting on the lawn. Its owner standing there with a bodyguard on the deck in a safari suit not a lot whiter than his sun parched skin. Calling out to them as they got out, he said in an accent that was unmistakably South African, “So, you the one who’s coming to take over the fort?”
They shook hands, the man in his late fifties not looking him straight in the eye and his suitcase ready at the door. The bodyguard ignored them all. The South African said, “Malcolm Blou, I knew your grandfather. How is he?”
“He’s good thanks,” Rann Singh answered still holding his spear in his right hand.
The South African saying, “You can leave that at the door, the only bandit here’s Joseph. You’ll have to watch him. You ask for two sugars in your tea, he’ll keep one in his pocket for himself. You know what I’m saying?”
Just like you did when you took this place from Granddad, Rann thought as he smiled and walked around the deck looking in the windows, remembering the rooms inside. As the South African opened his brief case, pulling out some paperwork and looking to the agent, he heard Blou say, “Let’s get it done so as I can get off.”
Rann nodded and walked over and looked at the deeds now spread out ready on the coffee table, and heard Blou say, “I was thinking for another ten grand, you can keep the furniture.”
The furniture which you stole from me in the first place, when you fucked over my grandfather, Rann thought.
And the man had—he knew it as much as Rann did. The man now pretending to do him a favor. Rann Singh saying, “Don’t worry, grab what you can and stick it in the plane.”
Then he looked at the paperwork, the deed of sale reading fifty thousand higher. Rann said, “And you can change that back to what we agreed.”
Hearing the South African saying now, “The extras for the African’s village, we never settled on that.”
Rann took a deep breath. He’d had enough now and he hadn’t been here more than five minutes, hadn’t even stepped inside yet. He said, “You can fit that in the plane and all if you want.” And watched as the Colonial real estate agent stepped away from them both in a bid to stay out of it, then, calmly, the lawyer stepped forward, speaking for the first time, and said, “Mr. Blou, the arrangement was for a quick sale, sir. There are many other properties available, please don’t make our journey to yours ineffective.”
And they signed the deal. Rann was there, he’d made it. His Sikh god Guru Nanak was looking out for him.
******
Megan sat at her desk in the suite Sebastian had rented for her, drinking herbal tea, and wondered how a script so bad had ever gotten this far. She remembered the face of the guy who’d written it and the night she’d waited his table listening to the bullshit, he and the producers spoke of its ‘brilliance’. And now here she was somehow, free of her tight skirt and high heels, trying to make good out of something so bad when she was supposed to be modelling—but what the hell, at least she wasn’t taking orders and smiling at assholes who were worth millions.
Patrick had given her carte blanche to do what she liked, so she was going to do just that—all the alien invasion nonsense would be out and time travel would be in, with emphasis on making an aging star look good by using the beauty of a young woman. She doubted ‘Marshaa’ could remember more than a couple of lines; but at least she looked similar to how Adalia had herself when her skin was tighter than whatever surgeon she was using these days could get it. As for the guy in the silver undies she saw everywhere she looked, time would tell. And as for the nonsense Patrick had last suggested—after he’d been over for another milking session the night before—about making Dan come from another universe, she’d have to lay back and see what the spirits brought to her once she’d breathed some of the scented candles she’d bought from the local herbal store.
Leaning back, she breathed a deep breath, taking in the scent of the candles burning by the window, and took another bite from the last of the special cookies she’d got at the same place. Feeling herself relax, she let her thoughts begin to tumble through her mind as if they were being left there by her own team of time travelers, whipping in and out of her life, dropping gems into a slot in her mind as a child would drop pennies into a piggy bank. And what came to her was just brilliant.
At least it was to her.
Patrick, you see, was beginning to be too much, coming over using her like a sex toy and getting her to use him like one also. Twice it had been now, her watching herself in the mirror, wondering what she was doing there as she milked him like a cow, before taking him as if she was some guy—or one of these butch women she’d seen floating around Vancouver giving her the eye. Why didn’t he go for one of them? But
that wouldn’t work, she thought, would it? After all it was the feminine form they desired, and he was hardly that. And with that in mind, the story built and the words began to tumble, hitting her hard and fast. She knew now what the story needed, a new twist in the time traveler’s tale. It wasn’t about time travel—time travel was just the vehicle to carry the story. The story was ultimately all about love, but not just any love. This love was special, it was feminine love centered around girls who wanted to be boys and a lead who searched through time until she ultimately became the boy she always knew she was.
******
Sadly, Patrick still hadn’t really read the script before he’d said it was simply brilliant after it landed at his door nearly two days later. He’d read it yes, skimming the pages, looking at the words people said and they said good stuff, really good stuff. They used phrases like, ‘I love you, I always have’ and ‘I’ve changed for you so as we can have children together now—our children!’
It was brilliant, he’d seen the bit she’d added that he’d suggested with the beautiful girl who couldn’t walk—fantastic, incredible, dazzling, the best script he’d ever read. Or not read—yet; or, properly that is, but he would when he got time.
He called Sebastian and said, “You read it? It’s brilliant, absolutely amazing. The girls got incredible talent!”
And then listened as Sebastian’s voice came through his telephone, which was laying on top of the script in the middle of the coffee shop at full volume for all and sundry to hear and know, without a doubt, that he, Patrick, was a movie producer.
“Has the guy who wrote the original draft got a copy?”
He hadn’t. In fact, Patrick had completely forgotten about Rupert Mikes. He said, “He loves it—he’s really excited.” Then he threw out some names.
“Adalia Seychan’s just got a copy, Marshaa’s going crazy! And Buffy’s just got off the phone with Tom Cruise.”