Where There's Smoke

by Black Inc.

  ‘Very well, a bedtime story. Once upon a time, but our times, not olden times, there is a man, and he travels to a strange city for a job interview. From his hotel room, feeling restless, feeling in the mood for adventure, feeling who knows what, he telephones for a call girl. A girl arrives and spends time with him. He is free with her as he is not free with his wife; he makes certain demands on her.

  ‘The interview next day goes well. He is offered the job and accepts and in due course, in the story, moves to this city. Among the people in his new office, working as a secretary or a clerk or a telephonist, he recognises the same girl, the call girl, and she recognises him.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I cannot tell you more.’

  ‘But that is not a story, that it is just the groundwork for a story. You have not told a story until you say what happens next.’

  ‘She does not have to be a secretary. The man is offered the job and accepts and moves to this new city and in due course pays a visit to relatives, to a cousin he has not seen since they were children, or a cousin of his wife’s. The cousin’s daughter walks into the room, and behold, it is the girl from the hotel.’

  ‘Go on. What happens next?’

  ‘It depends. Perhaps nothing more happens. Perhaps it is the kind of story that just stops.’

  ‘Nonsense. It depends on what?’

  Now John speaks. ‘It depends on what passed between them in the hotel room. Depends on the demands you say he made. Do you spell out, Mother, what demands he made?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  Now they are silent, all of them. What the man with the new job will do, or what the girl with the sideline in prostitution will do, recedes into insignificance. The real story is out on the balcony, where two middle-aged children face a mother whose capacity to disturb and dismay them is not yet exhausted. I am the one who cries.

  ‘Are you going to tell us what those demands were?’ asks Helen grimly, since there is nothing else to ask.

  It is late but not too late. They are not children, none of them. For good or ill they are all together now in the same leaky boat called life, adrift without saving illusions in a sea of indifferent darkness (what metaphors she comes up with tonight!). Can they learn to live together without eating one another?

  ‘Demands a man can make upon a woman that I would find shocking. But perhaps you would not find them shocking, coming from a different generation. Perhaps the world has sailed on in that respect and left me behind on the shore, deploring. Perhaps that is what turns out to be the nub of the story: that while the man, the senior man, blushes when he faces the girl, to the girl what happened in the hotel room is just part of her trade, part of the way things are, part of life. “Mr Jones … Uncle Harry … How do you do?”‘

  The two children who are not children anymore exchange glances. Is that all? they seem to be saying. Not much of a story.

  ‘The girl in the story is very beautiful,’ she says. ‘A veritable flower. I can reveal that to you. Mr Jones, Uncle Harry, has never involved himself in something like this before, the humiliating of beauty, the bringing down of it. That was not his plan when he made the telephone call. He would not have guessed he had it in him. It became his plan only when the girl herself appeared and he saw she was, as I say, a flower. It seemed an affront to him that all his life he should have missed it, beauty, and would probably miss it from here onward too. A universe without justice! he would have cried inwardly, and proceeded from there in his bitter way. Not a nice man, on the whole.’

  ‘I thought, Mother,’ says Helen, ‘that you had doubts about beauty, about its importance. A sideshow, you called it.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘More or less.’

  John reaches out and lays a hand on his sister’s arm. ‘The man in the story,’ he says, ‘Uncle Harry, Mr Jones – he still believes in beauty. He is under its spell. That is why he hates it and fights against it.’

  ‘Is that what you mean, Mother?’ says Helen.

  ‘I don’t know what I mean. The story is not written yet. Usually I resist the temptation to talk about stories before they are fully out of the bottle. Now I know why.’ Though the night is warm, she shivers lightly. ‘I get too much interference.’

  ‘The bottle,’ says Helen.

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘This is not interference,’ says Helen. ‘From other people it might be interference. But we are with you. Surely you know that.’

  With you? What nonsense. Children are against their parents, not with them. But this is a special evening in a special week. Very likely they will not come together again, all three of them, not in this life. Perhaps, this once, they should rise above themselves. Perhaps her daughter’s words come from the heart, the true heart, not the false one. We are with you. And her own impulse to embrace those words – perhaps it comes from the true heart too.

  ‘Then tell me what to say next,’ she says.

  ‘Embrace her,’ says Helen. ‘In front of the whole family let him take the girl in his arms and embrace her. No matter how odd it looks. “Forgive me for what I put you through,” let him say. Have him go down on his knees before her. “In you let me worship again the beauty of the world.” Or words to that effect.’

  ‘Very Irish Twilight,’ she murmurs. ‘Very Dostoevskian. I am not sure I have it in my repertoire.’

  *

  It is John’s last day in Nice. Early next morning he will set off for Dubrovnik for his conference, where they will be discussing, it seems, time before the beginning of time, time after the end of time.

  ‘Once upon a time I was just a child who liked peering through a telescope,’ he says to her. ‘Now I have to refashion myself as a philosopher. As a theologian even. Quite a life-change.’

  ‘And what do you hope to see,’ she says, ‘when you look through your telescope into time before time?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘God perhaps, who has no dimensions. Hiding.’

  ‘Well, I wish I could see him too. But I do not seem to be able to. Say hello to him from me. Say I will be along one of these days.’

  ‘Mother!’

  ‘I’m sorry. I am sure you know Helen has suggested that I buy an apartment here in Nice. An interesting idea, but I do not think I will take it up. She says you have a proposal of your own to make. Quite heady, all these proposals. Like being courted again. What is it you are proposing?’

  ‘That you come and stay with us in Baltimore. It is a big house, there is plenty of space, we are having another bathroom fitted. The children will love it. It will be good for them to have their grandmother around.’

  ‘They may love it while they are nine and six. They will not love it so much when they are fifteen and twelve and bring friends home and Grandma is shuffling around the kitchen in her slippers, mumbling to herself and clacking her dentures and perhaps not smelling too good. Thank you, John, but no.’

  ‘You do not have to make a decision now. The offer stands. It will always stand.’

  ‘John, I am in no position to preach, coming from an Australia that positively slavers to do its American master’s bidding. Nevertheless, bear it in mind that you are inviting me to leave the country where I was born to take up residence in the belly of the Great Satan, and that I might have reservations about doing so.’

  He stops, this son of hers, and she stops beside him on the promenade. He seems to be pondering her words, applying to them the amalgam of pudding and jelly in his cranium that was passed on to him as a birth gift forty years ago, whose cells are not tired, not yet, are still vigorous enough to grapple with ideas both big and small, time before time, time after time, and what to do with an ageing parent.

  ‘Come anyway,’ he says, ‘despite your reservations. Agreed, these are not the best of times, but come anyway. In the spirit of paradox. And, if you will accept the smallest, the gentlest word of admonishment, be wary of grand pronouncements. America is not the Great Satan. Those crazy men in the
White House are just a blip in history. They will be thrown out and all will return to normal.’

  ‘So I may deplore but I must not denounce?’

  ‘Righteousness, Mother, that is what I am referring to, the tone and spirit of righteousness. I know it must be tempting, after a lifetime of weighing every word before you write it down, to just let go, be swept up by the spirit; but it leaves a bad taste behind. You must be aware of that.’

  ‘The spirit of righteousness. I will bear in mind what you call it. I will give the matter some thought. You call those men crazy. To me they do not seem crazy at all. On the contrary, they seem all too canny, all too clear-headed. And with world-historical ambitions too. They want to turn the ship of history around, or failing that to sink her. Is that too grand a figure for you? Does it leave a bad taste? As for paradox, the first lesson of paradox, in my experience, is not to rely on paradox. If you rely on paradox, paradox will let you down.’

  She takes his arm; in silence they resume their promenade. But all is not well between them. She can feel his stiffness, his irritation. A sulky child, she remembers. It all comes flooding back, the hours it would take to coax him out of one of his sulks. A gloomy boy, son of gloomy parents. How could she dream of taking shelter with him and that tight-lipped, disapproving wife of his?

  At least, she thinks, they do not treat me like a fool. At least my children do me that honour.

  ‘Enough of quarrelling,’ she says (Is she coaxing now? Is she pleading?). ‘Let us not make ourselves miserable talking about politics. Here we are on the shores of the Mediterranean, the cradle of Old Europe, on a balmy summer evening. Let me simply say, if you and Norma and the children can stand America no more, cannot stand the shame of it, the house in Melbourne is yours, as it has always been. You can come on a visit, you can come as refugees, you can come to réunir la famille, as Helen puts it. And now, what do you say we fetch Helen and stroll down to that little restaurant of hers on avenue Gambetta and have a pleasant last meal together?’

  GUNS ’N COFFEE

  A.S. PATRIC

  I work in the middle of the damned city. I start when every other son of a bitch is about to clock in as well. It doesn’t matter where I go, I can’t get a coffee without waiting for fifteen minutes in a queue. No one likes lines, right? I’m not saying I’m different, but lately, these coffee lines seem to be slowly moving us along like a hissing snake, swallowing all our minds in a milky swirl of white poison.

  These days there’s less space in front and behind. The breath of those who haven’t eaten or brushed since the day before, spiced up with a cigarette or two before coming into the crowded café and snuggling up right behind my shoulder, is the kind of stuff that is going to challenge the most equanimous. Me? I only know what ‘equanimous’ means because it was word of the day on my screensaver yesterday.

  If it’s not that, then it’s those women with that angry industrial-strength perfume that burns like a corrosive through my nasal passages and leaves a chemical taste on my tongue. I used to think they had lost their sense of smell. Now I know it’s an attempt to get some space in these coffee queues.

  None of this is going to explain why I brought a handgun along with me today. I’m just saying, there’s too many people in this damned city, and they’re all starting work around the time I need a coffee.

  *

  It’s a modest gun. I’m not a closet Dirty Harry wanting someone to make my day. I only want someone to make my coffee.

  When I pull it out for the first time the woman in front of me blinks sleepily and goes back to daydreaming about her strong latte with two sugars.

  ‘Hey,’ I say to her. She’s ignoring me so I give her a wave of black steel near her right ear. ‘Hey,’ I say again. ‘I’m not kidding.’

  I fire the gun through the wide doors of the café and out into the street. The shot travels above the heads of the masses of people pushing along the footpaths. The bullet shatters a pane of thick glass in the fashion store across the road. People get a bit cut up from the crashing glass and a man begins screaming like someone has cut off his toes. The pedestrians keep passing, barely pausing, crushing the glass beneath their shoes as they make their way to work.

  My wrist is limp from the kickback. I transfer the gun to my left hand as if it’s all the better to display the weapon. The double-sugar-latte woman steps aside. The rest of the folks in the line follow her example.

  Bradley the Barista knows how I like my coffee. His arms move with speed and precision – a perfection of machine engineering in human form. It’s as though I press his fast-forward button and then the stop button when he finishes my ristretto-strength long black with three grips and three sugars.

  I pay him and tell him he can keep the change on a ten-dollar bill. It’s only polite to show an appreciation for good service.

  ‘How’s your day been, Brad?’ I ask after my first satisfying sip.

  ‘It’s been pretty busy, Mr Bushnell. This is the first time I’ve had a moment of stillness for two hours.’

  ‘Are you enjoying it, Brad?’ I ask.

  ‘I am indeed, Mr Bushnell,’ he replies, and adds, ‘There’s something about a loaded gun that makes one appreciate a moment like this. Thanks for that, Mr Bushnell.’

  ‘Glad I could do that for you, Brad. I’ll now have the pleasure of strolling to work rather than the unwelcome power slalom through those frustrated crowds outside. I’m going to have a lovely amble to work today.’

  As soon as I move away from the counter the line resumes its shape, longer and angrier than ever. A rattler of a line extending outside the front doors, the furious tail shaking with the anger of twenty smartphones going off simultaneously. It’s a soothing sound when you have discovered the ways of the snake charmer as I have.

  *

  I come in the next morning with a smile in my stride and a spring in my face. I’m eager to display my Kimber 1911 Compact again. I want to get that snake dancing out of my way.

  I don’t have a problem until I arrive at the head of the line and a high-powered exec smiles like his teeth are made out of diamonds and he eats crystal croissants with his coffee. He’s been held in the purgatory of the line for the last fifteen minutes and can’t swallow me moving past everyone with a royal wave of black steel. Maybe he didn’t see my warning yesterday but I can tell he is a natural-born hero.

  ‘You are not going to shoot me for a coffee. That’s ridiculous! It’s only a few dollars and a few moments. You can’t kill a human being with such little motivation.’

  ‘What’s your game, Mr Suit?’ I ask him.

  ‘I don’t want to play. I’m just going to get a coffee and go to work.’

  ‘Well, Mr Suit, I’m not going to go into a lengthy analysis of the situation here. But I will say this – it’s not about a few minutes or a few dollars. It’s about an accretion of time that mummifies my brain and turns my thoughts into sand. More than anything, it’s about the brief, black, bitter taste of liberty in those cups. You’re standing in the way of my freedom, Mr Suit. I advise you to step aside and give me a moment with Bradley the Barista.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Mr Suit tells me with his diamond grin.

  ‘Mr Suit,’ I say and step forward. I raise the gun to the height of his heart. ‘Reconsider, please,’ I say and wiggle the Kimber 1911 Compact. I polished it last night and I know it has a lethal gleam.

  He looks at it like it’s a water pistol and turns around and asks Bradley for an affogato. It’s more of a dessert than it is a coffee. An affogato! It also happens to be the most time-consuming thing he could have asked Bradley to make him. I take it as a personal affront. Mr Suit says he also wants two scoops of icecream and not just one. I give him two bullets instead and I’m not sorry.

  Mr Suit dies in a very elegant creaseless crumple of the best Italian fabric and design. A macchiato stain of blood spreads across the immaculate collar of his white shirt and drips onto the black marble of the café’s flo
or. Everyone lines up behind me. Bradley’s hands fly to the handles and dials of his Gaggia Deco D espresso machine.

  *

  The next morning I walk into the café and feel sure there will be no more need for gun-waving and I won’t have to kill anyone to get a coffee. I had a difficult night getting to sleep. For hours I tried to rest my mind and body. Even when I managed to drift away I found myself waking in a fevered state, my sheets wet right through and my pillow soaked. In short, too much coffee. There have to be limits even to these dark pleasures, I suppose.

  The line is long and I can barely get through the doors of the café. I announce myself but no one moves.

  The double-sugar-latte woman stands before me again and I tell her, ‘Surely, my mettle has been tested. My resolve can’t still be in question.’

  She turns around and a wash of her perfume breaks over me in a dizzying ocean of petals and pollen, bouquets of sweet-smelling chemicals rushing down my throat. I take a step back but I stumble and grab a chair to steady myself.

  ‘You don’t look good,’ she tells me.

  ‘I didn’t sleep very well,’ I explain. ‘Frankly, my experiences in the toilet haven’t been too pleasant either. I’m sweating a lot and my stomach feels uneasy. Queasy, I feel very queasy.’

  ‘Coffee’s not for everyone. Perhaps you should drink tea instead. Take a few moments every morning, perhaps – treat yourself to a pot of Orange Pekoe leaf. You’ll find it’s better suited to your nervous system. Our culture has so many problems and diseases that stem from stress and anxiety, and there’s nothing that generates and promotes these things like the addiction to the coffee bean.’

  I’m starting to feel disorientated. People are pushing past me to get into the store and others are coming out with steaming takeaway cups filled with the delicious beverage that will give me the boost I need to get through the next few hours of my life. ‘Shut up, you scandalous hypocrite. You’re here for the same reason I am. You need the coffee bean as well.’