Astonished Dice

by Geoff Cochrane

  For a period of time. For a period of time, he stands in the doorway of a camera shop and watches the mall. But then a blue midmorning whim flares like a match in him. Prompts him to stir and straighten up, muster and marshal forces.

  Bamboo Grove Apartments are tricky to get into. You have to wait for a citizen to exit, then duck inside with no apologies. On the third shallow floor lives Henry Hawke, the oldest surviving junkie in the realm, notorious and grey.

  Notorious and grey and pigeon-chested. Like some derelict knight of yore, bony and big-knuckled. ‘Look what washes up. Just as I’m about to have my lunch.’

  ‘Lunch? You?’

  ‘I pick. I pick.’

  ‘I’m Eric if you’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Yes. No. I remember you from that Narcotics Anonymous meeting. So how’s the battle, Eric?’

  ‘I slipped. I crashed and burned.’

  ‘So what the fuck is new? But never mind. Would you like a cup of coffee?’

  The man himself, at home. A steely cook and chemist of the old school, ground and sanded to a narrow-shouldered skeleton, a bristly skull with Auschwitz-ashen temples, skin as grey as dishwater. ‘The name of Henry Hawke has entered the textbooks. I’ve outlived any number of quacks, addiction specialists and hepatologists. To say nothing of cops and probies.’

  ‘Hepatologists.’

  ‘I buried my own lovely brother. Also several arseholes of whom I was fond. But Craig lies in a quiet place, and I know I could have taken better care of him.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. And how are you having this coffee of yours?’

  A Buddha here, a crucifix there. Many antique LPs are angle-parked along the skirting-board. The silent Panasonic is tuned to the horse-racing channel, its screen a brilliantly colourful display.

  Henry lives on Nicorette gum, with hogget and tepid gravy delivered by Meals on Wheels. And Eric Jones observes him, and not without respect. ‘I graduated from smack to methadone. I got my shit together,’ Henry continues, ‘and even began to drink. Imagine it. I took to the grog and thought I’d joined the human race. Methadone and Mogadon and wine. With taxis to the pharmacy, the bottle store. Plus also I smoked to the level of national representative.’

  ‘Carbon monoxide. Tars.’

  ‘Where are you stopping now?’

  ‘Here and there. I’m seeing a chick.’

  ‘And you’re keeping your hand in, I suppose.’

  ‘Xylox. I’m moving a little xylox.’

  ‘What can I tell you? You’ve got to get back on the horse, begin again. You should at least continue with the meetings.’

  ‘I could maybe handle a treatment centre. When I’m good and ready, like.’

  ‘Shrinks and cardiologists and kidney guys—they all despaired of me. Said I was in for death or insanity.’

  ‘They love that line.’

  ‘Years passed. Decades. And then one day I couldn’t do it anymore. I was sick of the hideous weight, the unabating demands of my addictions. I was sick and tired of the huge responsibility of being me.’

  As a maker of instant coffee, Henry is not deficient in technique: the milky brew he hands to his guest at last is free from undissolved clots of powder. ‘I need a lucky break,’ Eric ventures.

  ‘You need a lucky break, which is what I got. It was as if a clock had wound itself down and finally stopped ticking. Some sort of inner, organic clock, the thing that had craved and hungered through thousands of days and nights. Silent now, defunct.’

  ‘This gives me hope. No shit.’

  ‘My very own brother lies in a quiet place.’ Henry indicates a framed photograph. ‘The pair of us at the races. Seventy-six, that was. I guess you can tell by the Starsky and Hutch costumes.’

  ‘Disco lives.’

  ‘And what about yourself? Do you have any brothers anywhere?’

  Eric shrugs. Sips at his coffee and makes a face. ‘Christ. Point me at that sugar bowl, Henry.’

  4

  The city grows ever more concrete. The city grows ever more abstract and abstruse.

  He smokes a little weed, shifts a little xylox. And Eric has his hood deployed again; the modelled, Druidical cowl seals and finishes him.

  Wednesday afternoon. A whitish glare replaces shadows, contrasts. This is the whiteness of X-rays and photographic negatives.

  He’s in a mothish mood to maybe go again, trouble the flame a second time, for Henry Hawke has something Eric needs. Not that Eric can put his finger on it. Not that he can know quite what he’s in for.

  Henry’s front door has been left ajar.

  Eric knocks on the jamb—with no result. Calls out Henry’s name—to no effect. But Eric was born to push and probe, to test the elasticity of boundaries and borders, to ease himself forward with pre-emptive stealth.

  The beautiful telly thrives, a colour-oven. Old Spice talcum powder scents the air, and a towel lies on the carpet near Henry’s ivory foot. Henry himself is wearing a khaki bathrobe. He has obviously showered and clipped his toenails, and now he’s resting up. Is sitting on a chair at one end of his Formica table, his back to the wall and his softened eyes in neutral.

  And he could indeed be watching Charlie’s fucking Angels—except that he’s plainly far too dead to be watching anything.

  This is Eric’s first dead body. Seated as if relaxed, its left arm supported by the table, it seems a thing of touching poise and lightness. And Eric is not afraid to bend, incline his ear to the slightly parted lips, glance into the clement, disconnected peepers.

  No breath, no sounds of breathing. No pulse in carotid, jugular. And Henry Hawke’s grey cheek feels less than living, even less than fleshy. No point really in attempting mouth-to-mouth; no point either, much, in ringing for an ambulance. Also, and of maximum importance: the person reporting coming across the corpse is always of interest to the cops. Becomes in fact a popular interviewee, where foul play is suspected. But Eric can detect zero signs of violence.

  Best to do the bizzo and clear off. Best to take what’s up for grabs and fuck off out of it.

  He swishes the $375 he finds in Henry’s wallet, but what else is of value? Henry’s vintage LPs are useless to Eric. Even if he knew what he was dealing with (Iron Butterfly, Jefferson Airplane and Tangerine Dream, for instance), he has no means of playing them. And then he discovers the. And then he discovers oh Jesus yes the gun. He opens a kitchen drawer and there it is, in the roomy part behind the wells for knives and forks: a bluish, satin-finished .38 that fits and fills his hand, making him feel both smart and ballsy as.

  5

  CONFIDENTIAL TRANSCRIPT

  Laszlo Sinclair is twenty-three and works as a theatrical electrician. He was the subject of surveillance from June to September of this year. A number of charges have been laid (see attachment).

  DETECTIVE STELLA GREYBILL: I’m sitting here. I’m waiting.

  LASZLO SINCLAIR: (Inaudible.)

  GREYBILL: Fill me in, Laszlo. Illuminate this mess.

  SINCLAIR: (Inaudible.)

  GREYBILL: You don’t think you can? So make like a thing with a spine and give it a shot.

  SINCLAIR: Xylox is very kind to one at first, but it soon becomes this total preoccupation.

  GREYBILL: Now there’s a surprise.

  SINCLAIR: I went to Larsen’s Crossing in the early hours of Sunday morning. I’d swallowed a tab at final curtain, and I went to Larsen’s Crossing with a member of the cast. And in this actor’s shitty little flat, with a neon sign for beer just outside the window, I saw the gods.

  GREYBILL: You saw the what?

  SINCLAIR: Ken plays Mungo in Walking Tall. We’d gone to a neighbourhood bar, slurped some suds and walked back to his place. Thunder and a deluge just as we got in.

  GREYBILL: And?

  SINCLAIR: Kenneth crashes out, goodbye and thanks a lot. Just me and the cat and the beer sign after that.

  GREYBILL: Just you and the cat. Go on.

  SINCLAIR: I look at my watc
h and it’s four o’clock. When I look again, it’s ten minutes earlier, the second hand’s adopted an anticlockwise sweep, and it’s welcome to psychosis Lasz you sorry fuck.

  GREYBILL: Xylox. The good shit, right? A Day-Glo-orange tablet with a wee X on it.

  SINCLAIR: The beer sign stops flashing and the cat stops breathing. And I myself am dead, stopped and null like a disused abattoir. And then I see the gods in their hundreds, the brown gods in their thousands. Tier upon tier of them, back and back to infinity, a sort of tessellation of sage brown faces.

  GREYBILL: (Inaudible.)

  SINCLAIR: Sage brown faces, back and back and back.

  Tattoo

  Marcus was released from the clinic on a grey, humid, drizzly day in April.

  By five o’clock that evening, he’d found a suitable flat. The block itself was situated in a sodden little gully of a street.

  Behold a tiny kitchen like the galley on a trawler, its stinky black stove petite and personable! Marcus was also beguiled by the rest of the mouldy dump—he’d long aspired to living in just such a windowless bunker: a womb without a view.

  ‘It could do with an airing,’ said the woman.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘I’m Mrs Sykes. From the floor above.’

  ‘Goodbye, Mrs Sykes.’

  Marcus wore his wheat-coloured coat in the Continental manner, leaving the sleeves empty. When the Salvation Army van arrived, he directed operations like a caped gendarme, disposing the junk he’d bought earlier in the day. Mattress, blankets, small cuboidal fridge: these and an armchair were all his possessions now. Well, almost.

  He opened his only suitcase. Sandwiched between two of his best shirts, the tastefully gilt-framed oil was small and square; Marcus took the painting from the case and stood it on the seat of the armchair.

  ‘Shall I fetch you down a cuppa?’ the Sykes woman asked.

  ‘No. Enough already.’

  ‘You can tell me to mind my own business, but you shouldn’t wear jeans with a nice coat like that.’

  ‘Should I not?’

  ‘It’s a great mistake, in my opinion. What’s your line of work, if you don’t mind my asking?’

  ‘Demolition. Boom.’

  ‘I don’t know how to take you, I’m sure I don’t.’

  Marcus lifted a bottle from his suitcase. The poison of his choice was Tattoo, a vodka-and-cranberry cocktail with a red-and-green dragon on the label. Bold, romantic, maritime Marcus!—he swigged a mighty swig of dragons and tattoos, toasting distant Shanghai mentally.

  ‘I don’t think much of that painting,’ the Sykes person announced.

  ‘You really must stop barging in like this.’

  ‘A country road with bits of snow and mud. There’s not much to it, is there?’

  ‘Not much at all. Deliciously.’

  ‘Would I know the artist?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. His name was Maurice Vlaminck.’

  ‘?’

  ‘A motor mechanic by trade, he played the violin in the gypsy orchestras of Montmartre.’

  ‘!’

  ‘Derain gives him a pipe. A painter and a poet, was Vlaminck. Billiards he liked, and tennis—and wrestling and cycling and driving racing cars.’

  ‘You seem to know an awful lot about him.’

  ‘In 1945, he published a book called Radios Clandestins.’

  ‘So what are you really? A writer?’

  ‘No no no, Mrs Sykes. My name is Marcus Darke and I’m an actor.’

  ‘Like Peter O’Toole and Al Pacino?’

  ‘Like Peter O’Toole and Al Pacino, yes.’

  ‘But have I ever seen you on the telly?’

  ‘I prefer to work on the stage.’

  ‘Mind what you’re doing with that bottle! You’re slopping your dripper, Mr Darke.’

  ‘So I am. How careless of me. Would you like a snort yourself?’

  ‘I think not, under the circumstances.’

  Marcus considered the cold lights in his bottle. ‘I prefer to work on the stage, but I don’t get the parts anymore. I’m resting, Mrs Sykes, and I have been for some time. I’ve been resting, yes, for years, and now I’m slopping my dripper, and soon I’m going to throw you out and take my medication.’

  ‘Medication, Mr Darke?’

  ‘“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”’

  ‘Nightmares, Mr Darke?’

  ‘But not just at night, Mrs Sykes.’

  2

  BRINDLE EMBERS

  … I would like those who think of themselves as disciples of the flame not to lose sight of the tranquil, arduous lesson of the crystal.

  Italo Calvino

  Down and Saffron

  She didn’t like him much, nor Sis didn’t care for him neither, and what could you do but give him the cold shoulder? Adding a bit of strong to his cup of tea, passing a plate of scones or what have you, she showed him as much coolness as she dared.

  If Grace sometimes smiled at her own stubbornness, Sis would never relent. ‘He picks his teeth,’ said she, ‘—not that there’s many left to pick.’

  He wasn’t ancient, mind. When he came to their feminine board, he brought dainty presents for Ma, coloured soaps and scented French waters. His high collar seemed to bite into his neck. A buyer and seller of livestock, he had an indoors pallor and favoured carmine neckties. You wouldn’t mind him for a distant cousin, but not as a stepfather.

  ‘If he comes at Christmas,’ said Sis, ‘we’ll know it’s serious.’

  Ma remained tight-lipped, given to a solemn introspection. Attempting to forget her late husband, she forgot her daughters too. And Mother was prey to fits of stillness, her sudsy wrists suspended above the copper. Coming to, she’d fret. ‘With my hands all chafed and red, what man will have me, Grace?’

  Beside the meat safe hung an Advent calendar. Each morning when the cow had been milked and the new-lain eggs fetched in, Sis opened a papery window. Drummer boys and snowmen, chimney sweeps and magi appeared, a fresh revelation every day.

  And soon the holy event was upon them. Mother and daughters trudged through scraps of snow to midnight mass in the village. And Mister Dignan in his carmine tie whisked them home in a trap, coming inside for whiskey and a slice of Christmas cake. He had something for Mother, of course: a parcel of linen all the way from Dublin. What could you do but answer when spoken to, pass the cruet of toothpicks to his end of the table?

  Early in the year of 1884, on Grace’s twelfth birthday, Ma announced her engagement to Mister Dignan. Her tone was doubtful—awed but sceptical.

  ‘And when will you wed, Mother?’ Gracie asked.

  ‘When Mister Dignan settles, I imagine.’

  Now, the county of Eire was all very well for some. But Grace, the elder daughter and spit of her dark-eyed mother, had begun to long for warmth and bloody sunsets. She’d read about the yellow rose of Texas, the blue grass of Kentucky; she even fancied her chances in the fecund canyons of New York City. Lying abed with her sister, aware of the gentle rain licking the stones in the yard, it was as if she questioned the darkness. ‘Shall you come with me to America, Sis?’

  ‘But I’m only eight, Gracie.’

  ‘We’ll study elocution. We don’t want people thinking we’re greenhorns.’

  ‘What’s a greenhorn, pray?’

  Dublin was noted for its biscuits and stout. In Phoenix Park there dwelt exotic animals. At the wharves of Dublin or Dun Laoghaire, Grace would find a ship. Bedazzled, passionate, she pictured the tall three-master. To ride the sixteen mile on Connor’s dray would cost nothing. And if you ignored the need for money, holding fast to pluck, determination … The girls broke open their piggy banks, nonetheless.

  The appointed morning came. The sky was livid, the paddock a mire.

  ‘We’re going to town for the day,’ Gracie whispered. Connor seemed unmoved. ‘It’s no business of mine. Just don’t
be seen.’

  When the carter pushed Sis up onto the dray, Grace drew her down between the bales. And pity for Ma was somehow smothered—in naughtiness, resolve, dislike of Mister Dignan.

  The sisters sang for coins on a Dublin pavement. An ostler bade them sleep in a loft above a stable. To a Jewish silversmith with silver in his teeth, Grace sold her brooch, the ‘heirloom’ her granny had bequeathed her, never to see it again and good riddance. At the end of an enterprising week, the girls went to the harbour hand in hand. And there amid the spars and figureheads they gave a sailor their money and were soon aboard a ship.

  The handsome tar had pointy black whiskers. ‘And where would you like to be put off?’

  ‘Our hearts are set on America,’ said Sis.

  ‘We’d settle for New York,’ Grace allowed.

  The tar winked mightily. ‘When I speak to the Old Man next, I’ll make particular mention.’

  Below decks, a salt and heaving gloom, bowls of tepid swill and vomiting. There in the sloshing bin of steerage, Grace began to menstruate. And in the shadows, and not always at night, the pizzles of the dour husbands jutted.

  ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain.’ Though Grace tried to modify her speech, the down and saffron of her lilt persisted. If she spoke like a goombah, so be it: she’d throw her little book into the wash.

  The sea was blue but the vessel’s wake was green. That happy circumstance seemed to bode well for the sisters. But when at last the ship dropped anchor, Grace was to hear unpleasant news. As she stood at the rail with Sis beside her, it wasn’t Manhattan’s skyline she beheld, nor yet the spiky aura of some titanic statue. What lay before her was the harbour at Bluff, New Zealand. And when the cook had told her where they were, explaining their incredible location, her grievous disappointment struck her dumb.

  Working with Coppola

  1976. The Philippines. We’re engaged in a muddy mock war, grotesque simulacrum of the real thing.

  Plastic apocalypse. Violin spiders. The drenching monsoon slicks our ponchos and tarpaulins. We’ve got helicopters, crates of M-16s, smokes in all the colours of the Max Factor range. There’s no shortage of Purple Haze and Clear Light, either.