‘Saves me dealing with the snails, I guess.’
The fish were hours dead, their scales faded, beginning to fur. Julián Gallardo’s printed-out photo lay pasted to the ground, so I knelt and picked it up, placed it to dry on the slashed upholstery of the chaise-longue.
Motita hopped from my arms to the desk, her tail jerking, her fur on end, and swatted some loose pages to the ground, where they soaked in the wet. The upholstery of my chaise-longue had been slashed with what I guessed was a machete, but I sat down anyway to unlock the desk’s bottom drawer, which they’d kicked in, leaving it so buckled I had to grip the sides to jimmy it out.
‘Come on to fuck.’
At last the drawer gave way and clanked to the ground, the handle falling off, tipping the old tapes and notebooks into my hands: small, black, hand-sized, the elastic beginning to wear and snap, their hard covers dinged and faded, and I flicked through pages sallowed by the drag of my hands, breathed in their yellowish smell, and ran my fingers over the tight, neat scrawl, the scribbled maps, the names, the dates, the phone numbers, before standing up to spill the lot into my satchel.
‘There it is, Motita. Our stories. Our interviews. All the stupid shit we did that never made the actual copy.’ I ran my finger over the tape labelled ‘CARLOS // EL PASO // 30 / 12 / 2012’.
Motita coughed.
In my bedroom, the lampstand had been snapped in half and my macramé God’s-eye hauled to the ground to lie pooled with the curtains. The bedclothes were rucked, the clothes in my wardrobe pulled apart at the seams, and a huge letter ‘Z’ slit into my mattress. What was left of my fingernails ground against my hand.
‘We should go,’ I told Motita, collecting Julián Gallardo’s photo from where it dried on the chaise-longue and folding it into my jacket pocket. ‘They might be watching.’ Then I walked to the bathroom, and brushed away heat-killed flies to lift the cistern-lid. The gun was taped to the inside of the water-tank inside a Ziploc bag.
‘Never lift the lid,’ I said. ‘Burglars always take a massive shit after they trash a place. It’s, like, tradition.’ I peeled the Ziploc free of the water-tank and unsealed it, took out the gun, let the bag fall to the floor.
We went to the kitchen, where I propped the fridge on a pulled-over shelf and opened the freezer. The two bullet-filled bags of Café Garat clanked into my free hand. Motita nosed the ice that clung to the inside of the freezer.
‘Come on.’ I picked her up again. She didn’t resist much. ‘Going to see your Aunt Maya, aren’t we?’
Motita coughed, and I kicked my way through the drifted trash as far as the door and headed downstairs through the building’s morning noises.
‘Don’t know how they didn’t hear anything,’ I said to Motita, shutting the door behind me. ‘Although maybe they did.’
When I opened the back car door for Motita to hop in she recoiled from the trash and pages littered over the seats. ‘Come on, Motita, there’s a good girl.’ She gave in, but curled up as small as she could, like she didn’t want to touch anything.
The sun that morning was livid red, round and swollen as an octopus’ head. The tapering red jet contrails could have been tentacles. After not a very long time I couldn’t look at that shape and lowered my eyes to the road, my head empty of everything but the high grey song of my tyres on the blacktop, all the way to Maya’s apartment. She wasn’t in, and Motita didn’t like being dropped off there, but the security guy thought it was all right: his grin showed almost all of his braces.
After that I drove to the airport, past drenched palms and the smashed-ruby glitter of brake lights. When I parked, I locked the gun and bullets in my glove compartment, left the car in long-term parking, and headed inside the airport, where I stood with my back to a pillar, near two security guards, and had to take eight steadying breaths before I could work up the guts to call Dominic. Families, spring-breakers, sports teams all hurried past, hauling bags, surfboards, cardboard boxes. My whole life lay in three bags at my feet.
‘Andrew,’ Dominic said in my ear. ‘How’s the story going?’
‘Ran into some trouble.’
A tall suited man stopped four feet from me, squinting like he recognised me.
My breath stopped.
Then I remembered the flight-times monitor above my head.
‘What kind?’
The man in the suit walked away, his Samsonite rumbling on its little wheels.
‘They, uh, they found out where I live. Did a job on the place.’
‘Jesus. Where are you now?’
The two security guards standing nearest to me walked up the concourse, so I shunted my bags over my shoulders and tried to stay in their sightline.
‘Airport.’
The security guards stopped outside a convenience store. One of them went inside. The other turned her back to call out to him what she wanted from the shop.
Dominic’s sigh huffed static in my ear. ‘That’s hardly ideal. They get much?’
‘Ah, they did, yeah. Story’s safe, though.’
‘Well, I hadn’t wanted to ask, but that’s something of a relief.’
‘Yeah. Here – you can’t get me out of here, can you?’
The security guard still had her back turned, and I was sure that now, right now, some kid would sidle out of the crowds, press a muzzle to my navel, waltz off before the burn-circles on my shirt had even finished smoking.
‘Well, we’re not really in the habit of doing that, but needs must.’ Dominic’s nine o’clock shadow rasped on the other end of the line. ‘Where were you thinking? Back home?’
What I wanted to say was, ‘After eight years, “back home” is here.’
What I said was, ‘Anywhere safe, Dominic, genuinely.’
‘OK. Go somewhere public. Give me fifteen minutes. I’ll call the Baron. See if we need a job done somewhere nearish by.’
All the while I waited for Dominic to call I walked within sight of the guards, sipping on my flask, sweat pinpricking all over my skin.
When my phone buzzed this time, Dominic’s voice was almost cheerful.
‘Andrew,’ he said, ‘did they get your cameras?’
‘No, they’re right here,’ I said.
‘Great. Well, you’re in luck. There’s a huge blizzard about to hit the south of Uruguay. First time some parts will have seen snow since 1960.’
The security guards stopped to give directions to a stressed-out older couple.
‘And we need pictures. Our woman in Argentina, she’s held up in the north – something about mining. She can’t get back down to cover the snowstorm, but if you can get us a few shots, that’s our excuse to have you down there. TIFF format, no cropping, nothing fancy.’
‘Dominic, you’re a lifesaver.’ I changed course without stopping and quickened my pace towards the Avianca desk.
‘Don’t be so literal, old soldier. Put it on the credit card. Send the receipt. And –’ he cleared his throat ‘– send the main story when you can.’
‘Will do.’ I was already at the desk, passport open, the credit card’s blue weight between my fingers bringing me back further than I expected, all the way back to my old boss Helen’s fingers tapping on her laptop keys, back to her blond bob lit up in the screen’s bluish glow, back to the night she booked my flight to the city I was now leaving.
The clerk’s voice cut through the memory.
‘Is that your total luggage, sir?’ she said.
‘Yeah, that’s everything.’
‘Have a safe flight,’ said the clerk, handing my tickets. ‘Security’s over there.’
All the way through security, immigration, check-in, boarding, pictures I didn’t expect came bobbing up through my head: snow over the River Liffey on the night that I’d met Callum and Helen; a beach of sand the colour of bone where Helen and I sat toasting my impending escape with a bottle of Sancerre and a couple of stolen Ambien; the scared, lightened feeling when she’d dropped me at the airport.
The air steward handed me a glass of orange juice, and by the time she had served the next passenger I’d glugged it empty.
Even though I didn’t know it then, only fourteen hours remained before I saw you for the first time.
If I’d known, maybe I’d have been something like happy.
Probably, though, I’d have felt the same: scared, and too light, and all alone.
21
We landed in Buenos Aires to rain edged with sleet. My eyes were sticky and my armpits were rank but even still a lightened feeling started to quiver in my chest, one that wasn’t entirely due to the last dregs of the tabs in my flask.
In the arrivals hall the TV weather showed snowstorms circling like tank formations. We’d been lucky: passengers clustered around monitors that read CANCELLED. Within that press of people, oblivious, an older couple, two women, sat hooked up to a shared pair of earphones, watching opera on their laptop while they waited, a single blanket pulled over their knees. I snapped them for Dominic.
‘Well spotted,’ I imagined Carlos telling me. ‘Sentimental, but well spotted.’
‘Fuck you, Carlos,’ I said.
From the taxi, zipping through the wet fog, past the Plaza de Mayo, I got shots of Malvinas veterans laying down sandbags around their tattered military tents.
Under a big highway overpass I got the driver to slow down so I could take a picture. Rain tipped down from the buckled highway overpass in a phosphor seethe. In the shadow of the overpass, MISSING posters hung on stakes, arranged in a shape like the chalk outline you’ll see at crime scenes, each one glowing in the white light of a single electric bulb.
‘What’s this place?’ I asked the driver, zooming in, raising my voice over the roar of that pre-dawn storm. Bright piles of hail drifted over the names and faces.
‘Used to be the Club Atlético police station,’ she said. ‘Fifteen hundred people disappeared there.’
‘You remember any of that?’
Her eyes met mine in the rear-view mirror. ‘Of course. I was sixteen.’ She looked towards the shape losing its outline to the sleet. ‘Get your picture?’
‘Oh. Yeah. Thanks.’
The word TERMINAL glowed red through the murk. If I’d felt self-conscious at the airport, with my rat-tailed hair and pisshole-in-the-snow eyes, here I just blended in with the backpackers as we climbed through the boarding tunnel onto the deck. The Mar del Plata ramped against the ferry.
Wind chased my cigarette smoke over the bay, and the boat shuddered down the slipway and out of the dock, its motor pulsing. When the cold reddened my knuckles, I ducked inside to get coffee, across a red carpet and stained brass fittings that hadn’t been updated since the years my taxi-driver had talked about. Two families sat at faux-marble tables, counting stacks of credit cards held together with elastic bands, downwardly mobile middle-class types, the men in pilled Ralph Lauren gilets and the woman carrying handbags that they’d repaired more than once or twice.
When the kid at the counter – handsome, with a big ’70s bouffant and a pirate earring – brought me my cup I asked him about the people with credit cards.
‘In Uruguay, the casino ATMs feed out dollars,’ he said. ‘So you bring credit cards from everyone you know, withdraw all their daily limits, then exchange the lot back in Buenos Aires, at these black-market change shops.’
‘Snow doesn’t put them off the trip?’ I pushed aside my coffee to take a note.
The guy laughed. ‘If you lived in Buenos Aires, a plague wouldn’t put you off. Economy there is –’ he gave a thumbs down. He leaned closer to peer at my notebook. ‘What’s this for?’
‘An article. You OK if I quote you?’
He shrugged. ‘Sure. Put my name down as Charly. No big deal. Even the cops do the credit card thing, when they can.’
‘Wow, interviews here are way easier than in Mexico,’ I said.
Charly laughed. ‘Then you should stay.’
I didn’t say anything, and took a seat on a red leather banquette by the window. The horizon was an empty mercury shimmer under the white mell of snow. Zeros of spume spread breaking across the water.
The snow had yet to hit when I arrived, but the sky shone white. After collecting my bags at the terminal I got a bag of roast chestnuts and walked along the beach toward the hotel, the hot bites stinging the cores of my teeth, sand hissing underfoot. Two streams braided across the sand, feeding the estuary with red Virginia creeper leaves.
From my boot I shook a straggle of seaweed brown as film reel. The clean air seemed to rinse the tar from my lungs. More pictures of Dublin broke upwards through my head, from the days after Helen had vanished: drinking vodka from Lucozade bottles on the coastline DART; the mornings spent in class, the evenings with data-entry work open on one tab and juddery football streams specked every forty seconds by ads on the other, a Moosehead in my fist and the ballsack odour of my drying work-pants all around me, my stomach concave from too much drink and too little food; drinking to fall asleep, sleeping to kill the time between drinks. By the time I reached the end of the beach, the memories had me as dizzy as the weed and booze of my Dublin years.
‘Weird to think of you here, Carlos.’ I opened the map I’d screen-shotted, then cut past old colonial buildings whose stucco fronts had that nibbled, undersea look, over cobblestones that gleamed like wet lead. ‘It’s pretty. Quiet. Not very you.’
The map sent me as far as an empty square lined with plane trees, a statue of the independence hero Artigas standing at the centre, and I stood outside a converted warehouse built out of rough limestone blocks.
You stood in the driveway, stooped over a brown Labrador who had a stick clamped in her jaws. With one hand you held back your long black hair. With the other you tried and failed to wrestle the stick from her.
‘Good luck with that,’ I said to you from the gate.
Way you looked in that brassy strike of morning sun, the shine it put on your hair, your poppy lips, it tightened my chest like I was back in Poza Rica.
‘Joke’s on her,’ you said, not looking up. ‘I’ve got plenty of wood. And she’s got only one set of teeth.’
Behind you, beside the door, stood a pile of chopped logs, their rinds of frozen sap shining like orange zeros.
‘Good point.’ I shucked my rucksack and red rubber sailor’s bag from my shoulder. ‘She a real Labrador?’
‘Oh, yeah.’ Finally you gave up, but threw aside the stick so hard that the Labrador rolled over on her back and huffed out a disgruntled noise. ‘One of those wood-eating ones. Very rare.’ You wiped your hands on your jeans and looked up at me. ‘So you need a room, then?’ Your skin was shellacked with health and your boots were as scuffed as mine. ‘I’d shake your hand but –’ you held up your palms ‘– very doggy. Need help with your bags?’
‘Ah, no. It’s just these.’
‘Someone travels light.’
‘Lately I tend to,’ I said, and followed you through the door into the dim, cool hall. The floorboards were dark knotted oak, and from a fire glowing orange in the brick fireplace smoke spooled upwards, thick and dark as your raw wool jumper. The deep bay windows looking out over the park were lined with red leather banquettes and cushions, and near the centre of the room stood a huge maple table lined with neat rows of tourist brochures.
‘Nice place,’ I said. ‘Floor’s cool.’
‘It’s real easy clean.’ You stepped behind the desk and flipped open your laptop. ‘What you do is you tell yourself the grime is part of the aesthetic or whatever.’
‘That work on the owner?’
‘Works on the guests.’ You held out your hand. ‘Passport?’ When you looked at the front page I said, ‘I go by the middle name.’
‘Who calls you your first name, then? Just your family?’
‘My family doesn’t call.’ I scratched the back of my neck. Lifting my arm made me remember that my last shower had been in Poza Rica. ‘Bit wiped out after the flight and all – water pressure any good here?’
You handed back the passport. ‘Yeah, super strong. You need laundry, too?’
‘Very much so.’ I slung you the red sailor bag.
You looked at the passport photo a little more.
‘Yeah, so I’ve aged terribly.’
But you just smiled and handed it back, then took a set of keys from the row of hooks behind you. ‘And, since you’re the only one here, we’ll give you an upgrade.’
You led me through the hall as far as a flight of dark wood stairs that creaked underfoot. At the top floor you pushed open the door on a bright, white-walled room. The skylight’s blue square was right above a fat bed, and a screen door opened onto a bright terrace.
‘Bridal suite. You look like you need a good week’s sleep.’ You opened the bathroom and leaned into the dim, terracotta-tiled space. ‘Roll your sleeve back.’
Hot white needles stung down from the showerhead, dimpling my skin.
‘Strong enough for you?’
‘Yeah, I think so.’
‘There.’ You switched off the water. ‘I’ll let you unpack. You need anything, I’ll be downstairs. Oh, and technically you can’t smoke in here.’
‘Oh. Sorry.’
You smiled. ‘Technically, though, I’ll bring you an ashtray later.’
Then you left me alone to empty out my bags: the notebooks, the worn copy of Proceso with Carlos on the cover and Julián Gallardo’s face folded up inside, the tape recorder, the cassette holding mine and Carlos’ first meeting.
The plan was to listen to it again, all the way through this time, but when I lay down on the bed, I had barely enough time to get my phone plugged in before the blood in my arms and legs felt as heavy as the water in my old fish tanks, and when I shut my eyes the dark behind my lids became a dream of Carlos, of snow over a floodlit cove, of his cover-photo rippling and softening in the water, and the sleep that came afterwards held no further pictures.
Call Him Mine Page 14