Astonished Dice

by Geoff Cochrane

  A LETTER FROM CARTER

  Dear Jen,

  I seem to be looking for work. Sniffing around for a project. Seeking a star (of either sort) to hitch my wagon to.

  Hollywood is all I don’t know what. Elsewhere, mostly. There’s always 2nd-unit stuff I guess. And there’s always porn, though that’s a crowded field.

  A working definition of Hollywood? Depravity in a tuxedo!

  JENNY

  They found his car parked way up in the hills.

  He’d vanished. Was all we knew. For years.

  MAORI BILL

  Carter had come to see us before he went to America.

  We had a feed and drank some beers and Carter soon had Pania in stitches.

  I was the best, he said. And I agreed.

  JENNY

  He’d disappeared was all we knew. They’d found his car parked way up in the hills, keys in the ignition. And then in ’94 his remains were discovered, miles from where the Chevy had been left.

  No signs of violence. No evidence of foul play. It was simply as if he’d gone for a long walk, walked on and on and up and up until he’d lost himself completely to the light, the blaze of that famous Californian sun.

  White-out and deepest sleep for Carter. And when I try to picture his remains, I’m apt to see a clean white skeleton.

  UNIDENTIFIED VOICE

  Who’s gonna drive you home tonight? But who’s gonna drive you home? Tonight?

  Alex

  The Tramway Hotel is by no means full. George has a crush on one of the waiters. The young man rides a Vespa and can whistle like a guttersnipe.

  George stirs his daily dose of Antabuse (a splash of greyish swill in the bottom of a glass) and drinks it with his breakfast of scrambled eggs and grapefruit juice. He sits in the sun on the terrace and opens a selection of D.H. Lawrence’s poems. The book has a mosaic of tiny pink phoenixes on the cover.

  The courtly old Nazi was a doctor in the SS. ‘We drained the jeroboam of life. We drank deep of all that life has to offer. Down to the lees we drank, then tossed the flagon away.’

  George is George Smith-Cole, the experimental novelist. He stands in the street and watches an elderly Arab artist rinsing his brushes in a fountain. Dating from 1907, the fountain resembles an elaborate Victorian cake-stand.

  A lighthouse once stood on Pharos. The ancient city boasted the Soma (mausoleum of Alexander and the Ptolemies) and the temple of Poseidon. In the time of Ptolemy II, the main library in the Alexandrian Museum held nearly 500,000 masks from the Ivory Coast, carved wooden horrors embellished with beads and cowrie shells and animal skins.

  When the local barber died, several surreal collages were found in his house. In one, Bob Dylan croons I want you to a blonde with a Picasso tattoo.

  George produces books with multiple baroque epigraphs. Some of his paragraphs are innocent of punctuation and uppercase letters; others consist of free verse. ‘Literature is the orchestration of platitudes,’ he writes in his mauve-leaved journal.

  Mrs Prince is keen to make herself known to George. She’s wearing spotless linen and a Mexican sombrero. ‘Why wasn’t I told you were here? Do come shopping with me.’

  ‘Gladly,’ says George.

  When they reach her sports car, they find it covered with urchins who greet them by sounding the horn. And off she drives, darting between camels and trams and cabs and tanks, down the Rue Sultan, spinning left at the Nebi Daniel. Motor-horns compete with police whistles. Her ‘little man’ is enormous, bulging over a stool at his doorway, smoking a hubble-bubble. Turkish slippers of various colours and sizes dangle from strings all over the poky shop.

  The silver-haired old Nazi won’t shut up. ‘Hitler himself designed our puissant flag. Our uniforms were handsome and satanic. We rolled through Europe in an ecstasy of being, our bodies young and full of the very sap of life.’

  George buys a wireless and lugs it back to his suite at the hotel. When he switches the apparatus on, the horny disk of its tuning dial lights up siltily, the music of Guy Lombardo pulses forth, and George is steeped in tons of creamy tone.

  The experimental novelist is smitten. Yusef rides a Vespa and can whistle like a guttersnipe. And George does a sort of slinky Egyptian shuffle, rehearsing the pouts he’ll pout when he next encounters the minx.

  Saturday’s Paper

  Ivan Quinlan no longer had a job. Flying back to Wellington from London, he’d made the final entry in his coded service diary. The life of a spy had suited him, but now it was over. On the second morning of his repatriation, he rode a bus to the armoury in Buckle Street and surrendered his weapon.

  He continued however to haunt his Alma Mater, the building in Stout Street. Or did until he was challenged. ‘I’m sorry, old chap, but you know the rules,’ said Strong. ‘Even the library is off limits to any but warranted guys.’

  Quinlan went to the canteen, slipped Louise the pittance he owed her and quit the building for the last time. A beating in Brussels, a bullet in Bangkok—thus abbreviated, his story sounded trite, even risible. At only forty-nine years of age, he felt himself to be entering an inimical twilight.

  Wandering through the city with his tie in his pocket, Quinlan rode escalators and glass-walled lifts. He traversed public spaces of Babylonian scale, admired gigantic saucers brimming with water.

  An inimical twilight? Rather, a perilous daylight of the broadest sort.

  He’d taken a room in a boarding-house in Thorndon. He swam at the local baths, explored the Botanical Gardens. And Ivan soon discovered in himself a taste for arboreal gloom. There were sodden paths with ceilings of wet fronds, smelly paths sloping down into the past; with sweat on his brow and his brain starved of blood, he glimpsed greeny steams and primitive altars.

  He rang Megan Wolff from a box on Lambton Quay. She agreed to meet him for a drink or two. For six years and a bit, in the hip, hippy Wellington of the 1970s, they had been somewhat unconvincingly married; they’d also shared the lesser sacraments of hashish and Black Bombers and occasional, inhibited group sex.

  A distant pianist puddled about brightly. Quinlan lit a panatella. ‘So what are you up to, girl?’

  ‘Talking books. I’m voicing talking books.’

  ‘Do me a bit of something.’

  ‘“Fear of the dark can be synthesised in the laboratory. Fear of the dark is an arrangement of fifteen amino acids.”’

  ‘Who dat?’

  ‘Didion. Joan. A Book of Common Prayer.’

  ‘And this you inflict on the blind?’

  ‘It gives them a rest from Dickens.’ Megan winked and popped a peanut into her mouth. ‘And where are you pretending you’ve been for the past ten years?’

  ‘London. Mostly London. But I worked in the film industry, buzzing all over the globe in search of locations.’

  ‘Sounds plausible.’ Her big yellow hair was as New York as ever. Nor had her figure dated at all. And Quinlan found himself remembering her breasts: though sexily vivid (or vividly sexy), they had also had a grave and dolorous aspect, had seemed to direct a sad, reproachful gaze at him.

  When he touched the disturbing woman’s hand, she contrived to withdraw it. ‘Oops,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘A couple of vodkas for old times’ sake—I thought that was the understanding here.’

  ‘It was and is,’ said Ivan, sober and contrite.

  The following morning, he went for a swim, then drank a cup of coffee in a newly opened bagel franchise. Saturday’s paper was replete with features. They told of nerve gas, the Doomsday Clock and the TB bacillus. They told of Druids and bulletproof windscreens. Ivan also read (and what the hell was this?) of restraining chairs in gas chambers for baboons.

  Returning to his boarding-house, he was met by his landlady. ‘Shall I take your towel and togs and hang them out?’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Sloane.’

  The bookcase in the hall was crammed with condensed books and boxed jigsaw puzzles. Parking his thin cigar in a s
mall, triangular, baize-bottomed ashtray, Ivan rang Megan for the second time in a decade. ‘I never really got over you,’ he told her answering machine. ‘I sweated blood and wrestled fucking angels, but I never really got over you.’

  Dak

  Zane is doing the driving. He fancies himself as an expert, an adept. His hands are brown with greenish veins and he drives with a certain floaty insolence. He’s wearing a yellow baseball cap and shades with bronze lenses. When the highway passes through some pissy half-arsed town, he slows, then slows some more. ‘Why’re we stopping?’ Dak asks. ‘We were always going to have to stop somewhere,’ Zane answers. So Dak grabs up the pistol from the floor while Zane parks with cocky sly aplomb on the hot gravelly whatsit, the shoulder, and the two men leave the car and saunter back to the soiled mustard hutch of the tyres-and-petrol place.

  The swoony slow-mo whiteout of noon. When Zane and Dak return to the Holden, they’re in no more hurry than when they left it. ‘It got outta hand,’ says Zane. ‘No it didn’t,’ says Dak. ‘There’s gunk on your shirt. Matter.’ ‘I shot him in the face. You shoot them in the face, you end up with matter.’

  They burn a little rubber taking off, a bad-boy flourish Zane can’t resist supplying. Dak returns the Webley to the floor, then counts the money, the ‘takings’. ‘Three hundred bucks we scored,’ he announces. ‘It’ll keep us moving,’ says Zane. ‘Yeah.’ ‘It’ll keep us moving.’ ‘Yes.’ The landscape they’re driving through is flat, with fences dividing the brown from the gold, the gold from the brown. The crude hardy crippled little trees have all been bent in the same direction, smeared over by the wind. ‘It’s hot in here,’ says Dak. ‘So crack a window,’ says Zane. ‘Like I haven’t already, penis head.’ ‘So shut the fuck up and light me a smoke.’

  They stop to succour a babe, a hitchhiker. She’s very fine indeed in her hippy cowgirl jeans, her halter and caramel midriff, and she wants to sit up front, be one of the boys. ‘Where to?’ asks Dak. ‘I’ll tell you when we get there.’ ‘Got a name?’ ‘You can call me Tess.’ ‘I’m Dak and this here’s Zane. We’ve been inside for many moons. You want to do us both?’ ‘Sure.’

  She plucks the cigarette from Zane’s lips. Puts it between her own but doesn’t inhale. And the country, the countryside slides by, as drab and had-it as an old khaki whatsit, an old army quilt if there is such a thing, if there ever existed such an item. The blue sterile sky is somehow cooking the land, and Dak could do with a Coke, a lemonade. Says Zane, ‘I know a guy who runs a motor camp, it’s handy to the beach et cetera blah blah, we could park up for a bit and do the business.’ ‘Forget it,’ says Dak.

  A cop car’s belting toward them from up ahead. Its siren mute but its beacons spinning palely, it wallops by phliBUSH with tremendous rocketing force.

  Dak says nothing. Zane says nothing. ‘Did you ever wonder why humans don’t eat horses?’ Tess asks.

  Russians eat horses thinks Dak. Russians and Mongolians perhaps.

  The babe continues to follow her train of thought. ‘I’d like to go to one of those old-fashioned tearooms? Where the tables have those gingham tablecloths and they serve you scones with jam and whipped cream? And maybe there’s a field just right next door, a paddock with a nice old whitey horse you can feed carrots to?’

  Include me out thinks Dak. Time’s a fiery torrent and there’s matter on my shirt. It’s only castles burning but there’s matter on my cheek.

  Webley and Scott, Birmingham. Zane’s hands are brown with greenish veins. And the futuristic city’s coming up, is visible already as a watery mirage, a wobbly liquid vision of skinny towers and lofty viaducts, of aquariums and operating theatres, of helicopters and rogue shopping trolleys, of Bristol Freighters and silent eyes and peach-coloured cellphones. We’ll be docking soon thinks Dak.

  Drink turpentine. Buy money. Mortise & Tenon will make your dream wardrobe a reality.

  Ecuador

  ‘The river’s looking pretty again today.’

  ‘Crimson. A crimson river.’

  ‘The paint factory’s doing crimson today.’

  ‘Yesterday, chrome yellow.’

  ‘Tomorrow, Day-Glo orange.’

  ‘Still and all I’m buzzled.’

  ‘You’re buzzled?’

  ‘I’ve got a headcold. Forgive me. But I’m buzzled as to why we never see black.’

  ‘Black? Perhaps they do their black in the dead of night.’

  ‘Thad’ll be it. I dare say thad’s the reason.’

  ‘You can stop being buzzled.’

  ‘I can stob being buzzled, on thad score ad least. And turn my thoughts to other, related gwestions.’

  ‘Other, related gwestions?’

  ‘Indeed. Such as why there isn’t a law.’

  ‘Laws abound. There’s any number of statutes. There are regulations, codes, enactments and ordinances.’

  ‘Bud the paint sods ignore the bloody lod?’

  ‘Their contempt for the courts is as gaudy as the river.’

  ‘It’s the frogs I feel sorry for.’

  ‘The frogs and the ducks. The riparian denizens.’

  ‘The riparian denizens, both gread and small.’

  ‘Are you taking anything? For that nasty cold of yours?’

  ‘Hondey and aspirind.’

  ‘Aspirind and hondey?’

  ‘Don’t mimic and mock. I’m dying here.’

  ‘Would you like a sandwich?’

  ‘What sord?’

  ‘Fish paste. I think.’

  ‘There’s that dog again.’

  ‘Just look ad the ribs ond him.’

  ‘Here, boy! Here, Devil!’

  ‘You know ids name already?’

  ‘Not really. It probably hasn’t got one.’

  ‘Probably nod.’

  ‘It’s just another brown, anonymous hound, half starved and homeless.’

  ‘It liked that bid of sandwich.’

  ‘Good dog! Good Devil!’

  ‘Have you been to the post office?’

  ‘Nod today.’

  ‘You’re not expecting a letter or a cheque?’

  ‘I’ve quide abandoned any hobe of either.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I wander through the picturesque ruins. I go to the museum and gaze ad the objecds. I ead my meagre subber of pilchards and sago …’

  ‘And wonder what might have been?’

  ‘And wonder what mighd have been. Exacdly.’

  ‘And you seldom open a newspaper?’

  ‘Crossword buzzles were once a hobby of mind. I sid in the blaza and regred the poverdy of my Spanish. Am I misting anythink in the way of nudes?’

  ‘News? The Picayune is full of it. Plundering Peru and Mexico, the conquistadores have come and gone. More recently, the Pope has endorsed the cult of the 17th-century “flying monk”, Saint Joseph of Copertino.’

  ‘Thad lasd’s a name on everyone’s libs, for sure.’

  ‘A simple-minded Franciscan friar, was Joseph. But he stunned congregations by levitating and flying. Witnesses record that after falling into a trance, he would utter a loud cry and rise into the air, sometimes gliding out of the churches in which he preached and across the hills for several kilometres.’

  ‘Way do go, Joe!’

  ‘Put on trial by the Inquisition, Joseph flew over the heads of his interrogators, causing them to refer the case directly to Pope Urban VIII. Who was himself astonished by one of the monk’s ecstatic flights.’

  ‘You’re making this ub, of course.’

  ‘I’m not. Joseph of Copertino was canonised in 1767. He’s the patron saint of aviators and students.’

  ‘Why studends?’

  Coffee

  ‘Bonjour and good morning,’ Penny says.

  The hotelier has armed himself again. His shoulder holster resembles a soiled athletic support. ‘All impending mail has been retarded. I hope you are not expecting missives.’

  ‘Not so much as a postcard,’ Penny fibs
.

  A weird mustard shadow fouls the square. Plantain and palm look darkly vital, luscious. Not to be deterred by the imminence of deluge, Penny sticks to her usual routine.

  A ten-minute walk gets her to the airport. Where she sits on a single cappuccino, not entirely feigning to read a year-old Newsweek.

  Two idle snitches eye her up, clocking her presence here in the Schooner Lounge. The younger one is wearing ‘Gucci’ shades, the fakey chic of which he’s still getting used to. Or so it seems to Penny.

  She tries to light a Chesterfield. How sick one gets of the island and all its bad actors! Even the local matches are shoddy. Explosive, sulphurous. Apt to fuse themselves with the striker on the box.

  ‘Allow me,’ says the cop, extending a biscuit-thin lighter.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It is one of my functions, no? Seeing to the comfort of peeved and frazzled tourists?’

  His face is somewhere between the Chinese and the Mexican. It’s not a face to inspire inordinate dread. ‘I’m much obliged, monsieur,’ Penny purrs, ‘but you seem to have the advantage.’

  ‘Forgive me. I’m Lucien Kimbali, Chief of Police.’

  She offers him her hand. ‘Penelope Ashton. An American citizen. My passport’s in the safe at my hotel.’

  ‘Ah but of course. I have seen it for myself. And your picture it fails to do you justice.’

  Her hand has not been shaken. She withdraws it. ‘Am I in some sort of trouble?’

  A brief moue. A shrug. ‘Mais non, my dear Miss Ashton.’ In his uniform of gold and olive green, Kimbali looks like a glorified zoo keeper. He smells, however, richly floral, fruity—like a gust of fragrances from a jellybean factory. ‘The body in the swimming-pool, the car bomb outside the consulate, the hand grenades and Kalashnikovs found on the waterfront—what can you possibly know of these?’

  ‘Nothing whatsoever,’ Penny says.

  ‘I hope not. Devoutly. But allow me please to sit with you a minute. Do you like my aftershave?’