‘If you don’t stop, right now, I’m calling the cops,’ shouted Helena. ‘I mean it. Right now.’
The owner turned to face her again. A grin creased his face. ‘You think so, cunt?’
By now, the engineer was trying to pull her back to the door, but she was strong and he didn’t want to hurt her.
‘I’m going to call the ambulance,’ she said, standing her ground. ‘Stop now and I won’t call the cops, too. I mean it, asshole.’
H never swore. Hardly ever. It took a lot for her to betray herself like that. She hated foul language.
For a moment, it seemed as if the owner had considered Helena’s threat, had assessed the consequences, and determined that it was time to back off. He stood there slack-jawed, obviously awed by what he was seeing.
That’s right, the engineer thought, just walk away now, idiot. This can still end well. But it never did go that way with them, him and Helena. They never seemed able to find the easy path. If there was a hole to fall into, a trap to spring, they’d do it. And so, when the guy started moving towards Helena, hand raised for a strike, part of him wasn’t surprised at all, had been expecting this from the moment he saw her disappear into that kitchen.
Helena drew in a breath, coiled back her head and shoulders, braced herself.
Restaurant Owner seemed surprised that this woman hadn’t backed down as soon as he started moving towards her, but again, bullies are always like that. He hesitated a moment, stopped dead.
And then she let it go. The force of it seemed to blow the guy back in his tracks. A hurricane of sound that tore from her lungs, silencing the whole place. One word. No.
Before DRO could recover, the engineer grabbed Helena by the arm and dragged her out of the kitchen, pushing her coat into her hands. ‘Put this on and let’s get out of here,’ he said, hustling her towards the door.
‘Did you see what he was doing?’ she said, still pulling against him, reaching for a payphone on the wall near the entrance. ‘I’m going to call the cops.’
‘Please, Helena. Let’s go, now,’ he said, pulling back.
They were almost at the door when the owner appeared. He was standing at the kitchen entrance, chest heaving, crazy-eyed. ‘You fucking cunt,’ he screamed. ‘Coming into my place, telling me what to do. Get the fuck out.’
That’s what did it. She’d had enough of the language, the attitude, the cruelty. She never could tolerate stupidity and ignorance, Helena. She whipped her arm away from the engineer’s grasp, paced back to the payphone, picked it up, started dialling. ‘I’m calling the cops,’ she shouted, so everyone in the place could hear her.
‘Put that down,’ he said, moving towards her. By now, everyone in the restaurant was watching.
At this point, he didn’t really have a choice. What else could he have done? He’d tried to be the peacemaker, get them out of there before anyone else got hurt. But now she was punching the numbers in on the pad with one hand, the telephone receiver held to her ear in the other, her hair wisping elegantly across her bare neck. DRO was closing fast, fists bunched at his sides, glaring.
The engineer stepped between them, blocked his way. He was quite a bit taller than DRO, probably about the same weight.
The owner stopped dead in front of him. ‘Get the fuck out of the way,’ he growled.
‘If the lady wants to make a call, that’s her business,’ the engineer said. ‘Not yours.’ He may have added an asshole there at the end. It was all he could think of. He remembered thinking at the time it sounded like something Bogart might have said, minus the asshole, of course. He may have smiled then, because of it, and it was like a trigger switch. The guy charged. Just put his head down and came on like a bull. The engineer’s back was to the front entranceway windows. The guy caught him in the hips with his lowered shoulder and ploughed him back, legs pumping. When the engineer’s back hit the glass, he felt the pane flex behind him, just for an instant as it took the combined mass, and then explode as they flew into the parking lot.
They landed on the ice-covered tarmac in a shower of glass, DRO on top. The force of the impact knocked the air from the engineer’s lungs, and for a moment, he lay gasping for breath, his body adjusting to the sudden onslaught of minus thirty. But the other guy had taken the worst of it. Facing the window as they went through, he’d caught the shard edges on his arms and face. As he staggered to his feet, enraged now, whatever drugs he’d been doing really starting to kick in, he looked at the blood dripping on to the snow from his face and arms and he laughed.
The engineer pushed himself up, leaned against a car, steadied himself, tried to breathe. He decided to laugh, too. ‘Look what you did to your restaurant, you idiot,’ he said, pointing at the blown-out window.
The guy looked up, all the guests now crowded at the windows looking out at the two morons in the cold. ‘You’re a dead man,’ he bellowed, a little melodramatically, the engineer thought. Then the idiot stripped off his shirt and stood there flexing his bare torso in the cold.
‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ the engineer said. A couple of people in the restaurant laughed. DRO glanced up at his guests plastered up against the windows, and then he charged.
The engineer let him come. The snow was hard-packed and slippery. It was difficult for him to accelerate. Just as he reached the car, the engineer sidestepped him and drove his lowered head into the car’s front bumper. The guy hit with a blunt thud, collapsed to the ground. The engineer jumped on top of him, in mount position, hips pinning his midsection, and pounded his face. At least four rights connected. On the second one, he felt the guy’s nose go, that raw cauliflower crunch as the cartilage shattered. His face gushed blood. It was over.
The engineer jumped up. Helena was there with Planet, standing in their coats in the snow, staring at him with open mouths.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, not wanting to risk any of the guy’s friends having a go.
‘Jesus, Warren,’ said Planet. ‘What’d you have to go and do that for?’
He ignored her and led Helena across the parking lot.
‘How are we going to get home?’ Planet continued, trudging after them. ‘It’s New Year’s Eve, for God’s sake.’
That’s when he spotted it. A taxi cab, filling up at the gas station across the street. ‘Come on,’ he said, upping the pace. The driver was just getting back into his car after having paid for the fuel when they strolled up. ‘Can we get a ride?’ he asked.
‘Sure,’ the cabbie said, his breath thick in the sub-zero air. ‘Climb in.’
And that was it. The engineer gave the guy Planet’s address. He started driving.
After a while the cabbie said, ‘Pretty crazy, eh? New Year’s. Did you guys hear about the riot at that pizza place back there?’
Helena smiled at him, reached for his hand. It felt good, that smile.
March 16th. London
Had to get out of the office. Fucking Robertson, hypocritical bastard. I can’t believe he did it. I really can’t. I mean, all that shit he’s always spouting about this being a meritocracy. Numbers don’t lie, he says. Whoever delivers the goods, gets the rewards. The only thing that matters here is results. The problem with aphorisms is that people start to believe them. Memes. They make things easy. Perfect for the lazy idiots who roam the social-media wilderness in sleepless discontent.
I like it here, by the river. I come here sometimes when I need to think, get out of the office. The water flows past me, smooth and brown. There are buds on the trees. We should get away this summer, me and – I was going to say Maria and Rachel, but no, I can’t think that way. Those days are over. I have to think about Constantina. She really is great, in so many ways. We can go up to the Lake District, do some walking, stay in little B&Bs, eat in pubs. Maybe drive to France, go to Normandy. Always liked it there. I can’t even remember the last time I took a holiday.
Robertson picked Grobelink for the senior partner role. Fine, he’s the boss. I just wish the bastard
had at least had the balls to tell everyone the truth. But that would have exposed all his bluster about performance as the bullshit it is. And that smug look on her face when he made the announcement. She knows that I brought in the most and the biggest deals last year. And the year before that. So does he. He even told me so. Brought me into his office just three months ago, and said it himself. Ethan, he said, you’ve got the best record in the firm. Keep it up, son. The rewards will come. Yeah, right.
Well, you know what? Fuck him. OK, I lost the Borschmann deal. But her sales and profits are still less than half mine. If that’s what he wants, I’m gone. That’s what my old man would have done. My mum, too. I know that, now. It’s his loss. I can work anywhere.
If I am honest with myself, I’ve seen this coming for a long time. Like everyone, I’ve been hearing the rhetoric, the steadily increasing pressure from boards and watchdogs, seen colleagues in other companies go down for the same reason. I know I’m supposed to agree with it all, suck it up, and say nothing. Most blokes do. Hell, I’m even supposed to applaud it, support it. As a father, I get it. I want Rachel to have a good life, to get all the opportunities she wants. But I also hope she’s strong enough never to accept anything she doesn’t deserve. One thing I know is that somewhere along the line, if it keeps going this way, it’s all going to break. People, women and men, are just going to finally say, enough bullshit. And I worry for her that way, too. That it’s all going to break on her. Wasn’t it Tolstoy who wrote: ‘if anything is possible, then nothing is true’? Always liked Tolstoy.
I realise now, as I watch the clouds darken to the north, that the only reason I’ve stayed with the firm as long as I have is because of the money. When did I get like this? Something happened to me. When I was in my early twenties and just starting out, I had nothing. I never worried about money. There always seemed to be enough, somehow, to do the things I wanted to do. But now that I have had it and lost it, I worry about it all the time. It’s as if, suddenly, the money owns me.
I’ve read ahead. Just now, sitting here on this park bench overlooking the river, like some old guy contemplating his life gone by. I promised myself I would read all the stories in order, as he had arranged them. Until now, I have. But I read the first few paragraphs of the next two stories and decided to skip ahead. They were about Yemen, where my old man worked a lot when we were living in Cyprus, me and my brother, in the early days, before he died, when my mum was still around. I remember it was a happy time. Maybe I just don’t want to be reminded of that now, of the good times we had. It was the title that grabbed me. I read it, and I just knew. ‘Muskoka’.
And now, I can’t quite believe what I’ve just read.
The rain has started, and I watch the drops opening little black holes in the pavement, dissolving the ink on the front cover of the manuscript and spreading it blue through the fibres of the paper. I brush the water away. My heart is beating so hard I think it’s going to blow my chest apart. I put my head back, look up at the clouds and let the rain fall on my face, drop into my eyes and run like tears. Slowly, my breathing steadies.
I will sit here awhile and then go back and read the two Yemen stories. And then I’m going to go back to the office and talk to Robertson.
Time Bomb
The pumps ran night and day, pulling life from the ancient aquifers under the city. Water which fell as rain during far-off thunderstorms in centuries past, and then found its way into the deep Cretaceous sandstones of the basin, now fed a growing city. Without it, no one could live here. This is a land of stone and rock and barren hills. There are no rivers or lakes. In this time, it rains rarely, perhaps once in a year. The few trees and shrubs that dot the hillsides cling to clefts in the rock, driving their roots deep, and in the old city, there are still the palms and gardens of the oasis.
The engineer stood on the balcony of his room and listened to the diesel pumps chugging in the distance. The sound echoed from the nearby cliffs. As the sun moved behind the hills, he undressed, hung his dusty work clothes over the back of a chair, and walked to the shower. In the mirror, he saw what he wanted to see – skin tanned from weeks in the sun, broad shoulders, trim torso, still free of fat, the heavy pendant testicles and, if he turned his head to just the right angle, he could think for a moment that he was reasonably good-looking. He was still young, he supposed.
Today he had walked the old wadi through the centre of the city. A dry cobblestone riverbed choked with garbage. Plastic bags, old car tyres, dead animals, more plastic. There were old, hand-dug stone wells all through there. Ismail, his guide from the UN-sponsored Water Commission, said that some of the wells were more than a thousand years old. ‘Until about twenty years ago, they were the only source of water in the city,’ he’d said. ‘But the city was small then, a town, full of gardens. You can still see some of them, but most are gone, now.’ He’d pointed towards the sprawl of new buildings outside the old city walls. ‘All of this was gardens,’ he’d said. ‘Orange groves, fields of vegetables and watermelon, palms, orchards. All of it was irrigated with shallow groundwater. It was very beautiful.’ He walked on, seemingly lost in the memories.
They took water samples from a few of the old wells, marked their locations on a map. The water was murky and foul and smelled of chemicals and rot. ‘Twenty years ago, we first noticed this,’ said Ismail, holding his nose as he decanted a sample. ‘We warned the government, but nothing was done. Now it is all like this, unusable, even for watering gardens. That was when they started drilling down to the deep aquifer.’
They kept going, through the old Jewish quarter, the mud-brick buildings largely abandoned, and came to the suq, the old market. They stopped at a small teahouse, ordered tea. The proprietor spoke to Ismail a while. His tone was hostile. After a while, he reappeared with two glasses of black, sweet tea. Ismail paid him. The proprietor took the notes, inspected them a moment, as if he suspected they might be counterfeit. Then he closed his fist around the bills, threw them to the ground and disappeared back into the shop.
‘What’s his problem?’ the engineer asked.
Ismail pointed to the blue logo on his shirt. ‘The UN is very unpopular here,’ he said. ‘The people here believe Saddam is the saviour of the Arabs. They are still angry that the UN supported the Americans in the war.’
They had finished their tea and kept going. By the time Ismail dropped him off at his hotel, the sun was low in the sky, blood red in the dust and woodsmoke haze. Back in his room, he’d packed the water samples on ice from the hotel kitchen, checked his notes and field measurements and marked the location of each well on his map.
The engineer turned on the shower and stepped under the stream of twelve-thousand-year-old water, felt it wash the sand and salt and diesel from his skin and hair. He watched the water run down the drain. It was not hard, this water, despite flowing through the rock for centuries, and it lathered readily. And because this was rain that fell long before the start of atomic detonations and testing, it was free of deuterium. He stayed longer in the shower than he should have. Guilt gnawed at him as he towelled himself dry.
Tonight, he would write Helena. He wrote her letters, pen on paper, and waited sometimes three weeks for hers to get to him. He would ask her, as he did in every letter, to kiss Ethan for him, and, as he wrote he would look at the photos of them he carried with him everywhere he went. He would tell her how it felt to be here, in this place, to marvel at this ancient culture and see its beautiful relics and to know that, after centuries, it was dying. He had completed his modelling, he would tell her. He was pretty sure it was accurate, given the data he had to work with.
Since the Gulf War, when Yemen supported Iraq, and Saudi Arabia kicked out more than a million Yemeni workers (mostly young men) in retaliation, the population of the city had skyrocketed. Discontent walked the streets, lurked in the darkness at night, looking for someone to blame. There were more guns here than people, and more than half the people were under the age of thirte
en. It was a demographic time bomb waiting to go off. And they all needed water. This was how revolutions were born.
New water wells were being drilled every day. He could see the rigs everywhere when he walked around the city. According to the finite-difference modelling he had done, if nothing changed, the Tawhila sandstone, the city’s fractured wet nurse, would run dry in fewer than twenty years. And then, the two-thousand-year-old city would die. It made him sad to think of it, that it was happening now, not in some distant past or unknown future time. He would write that to her. He would say how it made him feel, that he was vaguely ashamed that this was happening while he was alive and that he knew that, despite his small efforts to help change things, it was unlikely he would have any effect, and that the destruction would continue. And he knew what she would think when she read his words. She would think him naïve and would write back that people were, after all, parasites. A parasite of the mining, tearing, consuming variety that eventually killed its host. But he wouldn’t write her about the nightmares he’d been having, the ones where, somehow, he was married to his first fiancée.
In those dreams, he would wake and he’d be lying beside her, and he would try to explain to her that there must have been some mistake, that he was married to Helena; but she’d just laugh and reach for his swollen penis and tell him that it was no mistake and not to worry because she’d never loved him either, but that it was all too late now. The dreams were so real that he would wake up covered in sweat, blinking at the deception of walls and windows and the sun-blasted rhyolite cliffs in the distance. Maybe it was the duty-free whisky, he thought, or the altitude. Or just the loneliness.
A few days later, he was sitting in a café near the old city. Ismail had parked the UN-badged Toyota Land Cruiser out front. The engineer ordered tea and Ismail said make it two. They were at the back of the café. It was early evening and most of the tables were occupied. A few women, some unveiled, sat nearby. Through the front windows, he could see the traffic flowing past on Taiz Road, the people in the cars, the shoppers browsing the stores across the street.
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