by Jack Rylance
Pete never tried to overrule the rest of her life. He knew his place within it and accepted this good fortune. Sometimes he even liked the distant presence of these other men – spending time with her and then paying for it afterwards. He thought of them as Ester’s breadwinners. By way of contrast, he saw himself as siphoning off her affections and this conceit slaked his ego. He was not being rewarded for what he’d made of himself, but what he could not help but be. This was a wonderful situation, well-suited to Pete’s temperament: to be a pampered underdog, fed like a king.
Maybe this same coolness was part of why Ester liked him. Pete believed that you could exert a lot of influence on a person simply by refusing to cramp their style. And Ester did have a style, a certain equanimity, which came from her being a success. It meant that he didn’t feel sorry for her.
“How old is he, your friend?” She asked.
“Twenty two, I think, but he’s still a boy.”
“This is old to be a boy, no?”
“Yes it is.”
“So we cannot go back to your apartment tonight?”
“Tonight, no. I thought we’d go to the Panda Motel.”
“Ah, you want to watch a porno while we fuck? You have troubles getting it up now? Don’t I turn you on any more?”
Pete looked her up and down to refute this idea.
He had taken to the Portuguese language quickly upon arrival in Brazil, encouraged by Rio’s native speakers who very rarely picked up on your mistakes or scolded you for them. Pete realised now that they’d only pretended to understand what he was saying at first, but it was this same deception which had led him on and promoted his learning until he was able to use the language convincingly to crack jokes, flirt, amuse. These vocal gifts no doubt had attracted Ester. She loved to have a good time and Pete could offer her that. He had spent a large part of his life refining this pursuit, turning it into an art form.
Pete Murphy still possessed the last of his looks, despite taking little care of them. He had one of those faces in which half of the attraction is caused by an imaginative leap backwards, causing people to speculate on the face he’d once possessed. You could tell without much difficulty that it had been strikingly handsome at an earlier stage. It was this ghostly impression that Ester still responded to. For her it seemed as clear and bright as day.
Pete thought Ester probably had more money than he did, all told, and he liked this fact as well. Certainly she had better prospects. What money Pete possessed, he had to make last, although he was not succeeding in this at all. His binges didn’t help. At some point during these drunken sessions money became immaterial, his limited means no more than a distant rumour, and he was briefly free to dispense of it as he pleased. This was no doubt part of his broader self-punishment. He wasn’t content with attacking his mind, body, and soul. He also needed to trash his bank account as well.
Pete had explored a few financial avenues in Rio de Janeiro, looked into a couple of opportunities, but not in too much depth. To his eye, they all looked spectacularly flawed. Especially the criminal enterprises. Mostly these were drug capers which focused on new and improved ways to send cocaine back home, undetected, in considerable quantity. He was deterred by the ways in which these conspirators anticipated success. Their confidence relied too heavily on the novelty of their schemes. They thought this gave them a distinct advantage. But Pete knew better, which was why he only listened out of courtesy and always declined to get involved.
The truth was that he’d gone sour on wheeling and dealing, money-making in general. In Rio he had learnt to get by on little by his own standards. He had even grown proud of this fact. And, although his capital was dwindling fast, this was yet to affect Pete a great deal. He had trouble accepting it as a proposition. He did not keep careful track of his finances and would only believe in his imminent poverty once the ATM stopped paying out cash.
Until a few days ago, it had been hard to see what could possibly alter this downwards trend. Certainly he had not envisaged John turning up with a bag full of money as a way for him to replenish his own coffers. And yet he would still have declined this opportunity, given the chance. He had learnt that money spells trouble. He had learnt this the hard way. And Pete was growing increasingly certain that the money in question spelt more trouble than most.
A waiter approached the table and set down a fresh bottle of champagne. Ester took it from its bucket immediately and popped the cork and poured out two frothing glasses for them to clink together. Pete took a large gulp and placed his own glass down. Ester shook her head. “Drink,” she commanded him. “More,” she said. Dissatisfied with his intake, she took hold of his glass, brought it back to Pete’s lips, and only withdrew it once he’d downed every last drop.
And once this bottle was empty Ester would order one more, as if these were the optimum conditions for their romance, which was probably true. It was as though by doing so she’d found a loophole to invalidate the stroke of midnight so that pumpkins stayed as carriages, mice as footmen, and in this way Ester could prevent the night from ever fizzling out.
Now she stretched out her hand and stroked Pete’s cheek and gave him a strange look, at once searching and willingly blind, as if she knew what she wanted and knew where it could be found but preferred to overlook it all the same. This gave her gaze a strange intensity which always tugged at Pete’s heart.
Chapter Seven
It was one in the afternoon and John Mullan was sat at his small kitchen table, eating the breakfast he had just bought: three sweetish bread rolls washed down with a bottle of Coke. It was a fortnight since he’d arrived in Rio de Janeiro and John had already made this life customary – and thus bearable – so that the days resembled one another to a large degree. It helped that he now had an apartment to himself, having moved in a week before. He lived high up on the ninth floor of a building much like Pete’s own and which was only a five minute walk from his friend’s address. It was similarly compact and uninspiring.
There was a bakery on the corner downstairs. Here John overcame the language barrier to some extent by ordering the same food and drink every day. By the third afternoon of frequenting this shop the staff already knew exactly what he wanted. John would walk in around noon and the man behind the counter would say something John didn’t understand, to which John would nod his head. The man then gathered up his order and handed it to him and John would say “Ta.” in reply. He would take the groceries over to the cash-till and pay the unsmiling woman who sat there the whole day through. Then he would hurry home. John preferred to stay out of the sun as much as possible because it quickly oppressed him. He saw it as his enemy and therefore kept the blinds shut in his apartment. He was happy for the day to end unannounced.
Finishing the last of the bread, John caught the sound of an argument flaring up next door. The lives of his neighbours easily penetrated the walls, especially when they raised their voices, particularly those neighbours to his left. They reached him most faithfully via a vent in the bathroom wall, stretching across an elevator shaft. It was like some ghostly soap opera in which John had little interest, but which assailed him whenever he washed, showered, or used the toilet.
Sometimes John wondered what was happening to his flat back home. He had left it in a great hurry because the theft was completely unplanned. He had even made a shopping trip the day before his sudden departure and loaded up the fridge. Now a whole host of foods were rotting away inside of it, some faster than others, serving notice on his disappearance. Occasionally John tried to remember the entire contents and consider the order in which they were destined to go mouldy.
The rent on the flat was paid up until the end of April. After that there would be a series of letters piling up in the hallway, but it might be months before anything more was done. Unless Riley had intervened. Perhaps he would have kicked down the front door in the meantime, ransacked the flat for clues, ruined it completely.
It was a home which had affor
ded Pete a wonderful view of the city and the river. It looked down on them both from a tremendous height. On a summer evening, spliff in hand, he’d been able to equate this height with great privilege. It was a joy to survey this scene from his small balcony, getting pleasantly stoned. He would watch the sun winding down over Birkenhead, shifting through the last of its colours, throwing them out onto the Mersey river. It pleased John to do this for up to half an hour.
Even better, the flat had cost little to rent. The council couldn’t fill the building because it was rumoured to be full of smack-heads, but this was no longer true. The junkies had all moved out recently and been replaced with refugees from Somalia, and these families were all quiet as mice. This gave the building an added attraction – it was not as bad as what people made out. It was secretly much better.
This peace and quiet was what John had dreamt of for years. It was just as good as he’d imagined. He’d finally had enough of his mother and his mother’s ways and that was why he’d left Jeanette’s home, nine months earlier. She was a major nuisance. She was only getting worse. Every third night she was out on the town. Now it was with a friend, Jacqueline, who was twelve years her junior. Jeanette would get herself all dolled up beforehand, fishing for one particular compliment: that she and Jacqueline looked to be exactly the same age. Having kept back something of her beauty, the notion was not that far fetched. But vanity was not the only reason for his mother’s deceit – just as importantly it continued to excuse her from acting like a woman of forty-five.
Their family home had been an after-hours club for as long as John could remember. It was where the party continued once everywhere else was closed. This persistence drew all sorts of guests: townies, students, hedonists of every stripe, all of them fucked up, united in their refusal to call time on these festivities.
As a child, John had become highly skilled at picking his way over their sleeping bodies the next morning and early afternoon. The lounge was often littered with such casualties, especially at the weekend. These various partygoers, struck down by fatigue, would be draped heavily over the settee, oblivious to their own discomfort; or stretched out on the floor like cats and dogs. They stunk of excess and John never got used to this smell. It always nauseated him. He would go directly into the kitchen and open the back door and sit out on the stoop, gulping down fresh air.
His breakfast over with, John turned his attentions to the first smoke of the day. He took out the cigarette papers and the bag of weed and began rolling up a joint. This action had been postponed from the moment he woke up, allowing for a brief delightful abstinence – less than an hour in length –the end always in sight.
Pete had given the weed to John without his even asking for it. He’d told him it was ‘a moving-in present’. He’d handed the bag over along with the keys to the front door. “Here,” he said. “This should keep you out of trouble for a while.”
It was a large stash. For this reason John had feared the worst regarding the quality, but it was not bad at all: the drug produced its desired effect and under its influence the hours stopped troubling him. They slipped by and he slipped by with them as if he was hitching a ride, stealing momentum. Under these circumstances – with the television at his disposal and the drug to hand – John knew exactly how to live alone and spend most of his time indoors.
Now he moved over to the bed, readying himself for the afternoon. He had his weed and cigarette papers; his lighter, his ashtray, the remote control. John lifted one pillow on top of the other, laid himself down, rested his head against them both. Then he turned on the television and smiled at the very first option he was presented with – an episode of Lost which had only just begun. He lit the joint and drew on it heavily, triggering the process by which his mind was given to mood instead of thought. It was certainly troubled by a lot less questions and John started to feel vague and upbeat now.
Here in the apartment he was able to watch all the hit-shows on cable: 24, Alias, Lost, CSI. Better still, these American channels were screening new episodes which he hadn’t seen before back at home. This meant that John could frame his days and nights around questions of what happened next in the case of each series, and it was a great relief to have all these fictional surprises lying in store.
After the episode of Lost had ended, John picked up the remote control. The more weed he smoked and the more wide-ranging his viewing pleasures became. He moved away from his regular fare of comedies and crime shows on Sony and Fox and started looking at the homegrown channels. He turned towards Brazil, as a country, and wandered the spectrum of its programming.
John stared now at two men in white coats leading a black bull round and round a dusty ring for a bunch of farmers to admire. Some of these men leant against the surrounding fence, nodding, tipping their hats, bidding for the beast.
Next up, there was a large religious event, a huge congregation outdoors. They were going wild in the sweltering heat, swaying in celebration. The sun was shining in their eyes but none of these people seemed to care. They were far too busy giving praise. They wore great big wide smiles which looked capable of soaking up punishment or else repelling it altogether. The sweat they could do nothing about.
John changed the channel again and reached the real life crime show that was his favourite Brazilian entertainment. It was all the more enthralling and disturbing for his not understanding what was being said, and yet the crimes were easy to piece together from the footage, the frenetic narratives. The show leapt back and forth between the time in question and the present day. It was the kind of storytelling that John was used to. He was an old hand at seeing the world in this way.
He soon realised that the current show concerned a robbery gone wrong. A lad had pulled out a gun and started firing at the police once they’d cornered him in the street, but he had missed them all and killed an innocent bystander instead. A young woman in her twenties. There was a short glimpse of the funeral, a flock of mourners, a mother’s tears. Then it was back to the crime scene and the sight of the boy being led away into custody, bundled into a van. After this, they focused on the custody itself: the same lad put on show in a large room with pale green walls. His hands were cuffed behind his back. He looked like a prisoner in a film faced with a firing squad, about to be shot. Instead it was a bank of cameras which confronted him. They took aim at five or ten paces.
Three police officers were stood by the lad’s side. They took turns talking softly in his ears. They wanted him to look straight ahead for the cameras. One of them used his hand and took a hold of the lad’s chin, lifting it up, aiming it towards the media.
The lad must have been the same age as himself, John reckoned. He was beyond remorse, looking in vain for somewhere to hide, some place deep inside himself, but clearly unable to find it. Too many people wanted him to face the hideous truth.
The programme cut back to the television studio where a burly presenter was avidly watching the same images as his viewers on a large monitor. He looked absolutely revolted and started wagging his finger at the killer from a great distance, getting himself all worked up, insulting the prisoner from afar. “Vagabundo!” He boomed. “Vag-A-Bundo!!”
*
John’s life back home had come to an end on that Tuesday night when he’d been summoned to Riley’s house. It was not made clear why his presence was urgently required, although the note of insistence in the recorded message disturbed him already. Arriving at nine pm, Riley greeted him at the front door with a wide grin: “Alright Johnny lad, in you come…” The grin appeared genuine and John knew that this could only spell trouble as there had never been any love lost between himself and this horrible prick.
Inside, he was led directly into the lounge and found them all waiting there. The whole crew. Robbo, Bim, Lacey, Topper, Mcfly. Together they stared at John without a word and refused to acknowledge his general greeting, looking for all the world like a tribunal which had already met in close session and made up its hateful min
d.
“I tell you what,” said Riley, standing close behind him, breathing down John’s neck. “Why don’t you go and grab all the lads another beer?” The bastard was in his element, happy to stretch the threat out before he brought it to a head.
John went into the kitchen and took his time in removing the cans from the fridge, trying to figure out what he was being charged with. It was by no means clear. He had done nothing wrong as far as he could see. And yet the verdict appeared to be in.
Returning to the lounge, laden down with Red Stripe, John handed out the tins to all those present only to be met with even more silence.
“We were just talking about your mate, the grass,” Riley said finally, pulling the top off his lager.
“Fuck off, I don’t know any grasses,” John replied.
“Pete Murphy.”
It was such an unlikely accusation that John struggled to form a reply. “As if!”
“That’s what I’ve been told.”
“By who?”
“Someone who would know.”
“Well you better tell me who it is.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything.”
“Fine. Just wait until I tell him then…”
“And what do you think he’s going to do? Fly home? The way I understand it, he wouldn’t last a minute if he set foot back in town.”
“Well we’ll see, won’t we…”
“Yes, we will see, Johnny lad; we will see.”
Now Topper stood up abruptly and jerked his head and upper body forwards in John’s direction as if tied to a tight leash. He was a squat, powerful lad, ripped on steroids. “Can I give him a smack? Can I knock the fucker out now?” He boomed. It was vintage Topper: aching for provocation, vibrating with rage.
“Easy, Topper. Plenty of time for that,” said Riley before turning back to John. “I tell you what, why don’t you do us all a favour and ring the prick now and see what he’s got to say for himself.”