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The Mule
David Quantick
For Jenna, Alexander and Laurence
Contents
Part One Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Part Two Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Three Chapter Eleven
About this Author
Thanks
PART ONE
It does not seem to me a common thing for a mere ‘text’ to challenge, still less convert, anyone.
J.B. Phillips, Ring of Truth: A Translator’s Testimony
CHAPTER ONE
I was in a bar. It doesn’t matter where. It’s not relevant to the story. (If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my job, it’s that things that aren’t relevant to the story have to go.) The bar was pretty quiet, which suited me because I don’t like to go to bars that play loud music, where everyone’s shouting to get a drink and it’s so dark you can’t see the prices of drinks. Funny – loud and dark always go together with bars. You never see a loud, brightly lit bar, do you? It’s like not content with numbing our senses with booze, the bars want us deaf and blind as well.
Anyway, this bar was pretty much perfect so far as I was concerned. There was no music at all, the lights were OK – I could see the drinks were a reasonable price for the middle of town – and there were no hen parties or big groups of people making their own racket.
I signalled to the barman, who had his name on a badge on his shirt. ‘Good evening, Don,’ I said, smiling, ‘I’d like a martini, please. Vodka, and—’ But he’d already turned away to make it. I think he didn’t like me saying his name. If I had a job where I had to wear my name on a badge and people said my name, I wouldn’t have a problem. If people said, ‘Excuse me, Jacky, could you look at these pages before the weekend?’ or ‘Hey, Jacky, this is more of a technical pamphlet but we figure you can handle it,’ I wouldn’t mind at all. Of course I’d have to pick a version of my name that I felt comfortable with, which I admit would probably not be Jacky. Jacky is what my mother called me and I have never liked it. I would much rather be a Jack or even a J – ‘Hey J!’ – but there we go. Whenever I say to people, ‘My name’s Jack,’ they always look at me as if to say, ‘Really?’ and before you know it they’re calling me Jacky. If they call me anything at all, that is. I have never had any luck with getting people to call me J.
All these thoughts were going through my mind as I waited for my martini. The barman didn’t seem to be in any hurry to make it and I was wondering if I should call him over using his name – ‘Hey, Don! Where’s that martini?’ – or just do what I always do, which is sort of mumble ‘Excuse me …’ and hope he hears me, when a girl sat down next to me at the bar. Dressed in black, with smoky grey-blue eyes and dark hair cut in a fringe that gathered around her cheekbones, she stood out from the bar’s other patrons like – well, I’m not one for fancy similes, but like a pearl in an ashtray. She looked at me, in that way where you’re not sure whether someone is looking at you with some kind of interest in their eyes, or maybe you just caught their eye because of an unusual or deformed thing about you. I’m not saying I’m deformed or even unusual, by the way, I look pretty ordinary. My eyes are kind of big, though. At school, some kids called me ‘Bug Eyes’, until my mother went in and told the teachers that her Jacky was sensitive about his eyes. All this did was make the teachers start calling me Jacky. I was on the verge of persuading people that I was really called ‘Jay’, but after my mother went into the school one parents’ evening, it was goodbye J, hello Jacky.
I averted my eyes – not so bug-like nowadays – from the girl, just in case I was staring back at her, and lifted my hand to wave at the barman. But I could still see the girl out the corner of my eye and I felt self-conscious – who would she think I was, waving at barmen like a rock star or something? – and tried to turn the wave into a different gesture, as if I were just about to scratch my nose. But as my arm was about eight inches above my head, I had to turn the wave into a stretch.
It must have looked odd, because the girl said, ‘Are you having some sort of cramp?’ She had a nice voice.
I’m sorry if that’s not very evocative and I should have said, ‘She had a voice like hot cream,’ or something but I don’t care for over-cooked phrases (they’re the bane of my professional life), and besides, she did have a nice voice. I put my arm down slowly in a deliberate way as if I did have a cramp, and said, ‘Yes.’
‘Do you often suffer from cramp in your arm?’ said the girl. She was lighting a cigarette, which I didn’t think was legal in bars. ‘Because if you do maybe it’s your circulation.’
‘No, my circulation is fine,’ I said, wondering if perhaps she was a nurse. ‘I jog sometimes and,’ I added, but not in a pointed manner, so she wouldn’t dislike me, ‘I don’t smoke.’
‘Oh, does this bother you?’ said the girl, as the barman appeared and, to my amazement, placed an ashtray on the bar in front of her. ‘I’m sorry. They let me smoke in here when it’s quiet.’
I was about to say that it wasn’t quiet when she put the cigarette out in the ashtray. ‘I’m being inconsiderate,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. And you don’t have a drink.’
I didn’t know what to say to this. She seemed to be awfully popular in this bar, was my first thought. My second was perhaps she was a hooker. I know that’s a word you tend to see more in print than in real life, but it’s the word that came to my mind first. But she seemed too pleasant to be a hooker, and anyway I could hardly ask her outright, ‘Are you a hooker?’ in case she picked up her bag and walked out. Or worse, picked up her bag and said, ‘Let’s go, stud.’
It didn’t matter that I had no reply, anyway, because she sat up and shouted, ‘Hey you! Dan! This man doesn’t have a drink!’
The barman came straight over and – glaring at me like I’d done a bad thing by actually coming into his bar and actually ordering a drink – said, ‘I forgot what he asked for. I was coming back anyway.’
‘Of
course you were,’ said the girl. ‘You wanted another look down my blouse. What do you want?’ she was asking me now. I repeated my original order, this time in full, and she said, ‘The same for me, only with gin. And hurry up, Dan, we’ve been waiting.’
I said thanks to her, although I knew I could never come into this bar again. Dan would blank me for ever, or spit in my drink. Or maybe he’d just bar me. But when the drinks came (I checked mine for flecks of anything) I just clinked glasses and said, ‘Bottoms up.’
Which she seemed to find very funny. ‘“Bottoms up”,’ she repeated. ‘I haven’t heard anyone say that for years.’ She smiled.
She had a really beautiful smile, classy and a little bit melancholy as if she were a photo model advertising something sophisticated, like a perfume called Regrets. Excuse me. I should have just said, ‘She had a nice smile.’
‘Bottoms up,’ she said, and toasted me.
By now, I was a little confused. I’m not an unattractive man – that is to say, I’m not ugly – but I was unused to this kind of attention from a woman, especially one with a smile like this girl’s. I didn’t think she was a hooker, partly because she looked so nice, and partly because I thought I’d read that hookers don’t buy their own drinks, let alone those of their tricks, and I couldn’t for the life of me work out why she was talking to me. Maybe she was drunk, or high on drugs. Then again, she wasn’t slurring and her attractive grey-blue eyes weren’t dilating.
Maybe, I concluded, she just likes you. Not enough for sex, or to get married, but she likes you. So I smiled back and said, ‘Might I ask your name, if that’s not being too rude?’ This was perhaps a little formal, I realise, but I was being rational as well as polite. I knew nobody could be offended by being asked their own name, because everyone has a name and they should be used to being asked it. And the ‘might I’ and the ‘not being too rude’ were there giving her the option of saying, ‘Actually, I have a kind of stupid name so please call me by my second name which is Perkiss,’ or – as I was hoping – ‘Don’t be silly! My name is Tammy. Here’s my card, look, with my number on it. In fact, forget the card – just come home with me now.’ And she would leave money for the drinks, and we’d go, me shrugging at Dan as if to say, ‘Well, the best man won.’
‘What’s your name first?’ she said, a little coolly. I thought about this and decided it wasn’t rude because after all I was a strange man in a bar and I could be anyone. And she had bought me a drink, so who was I to assume she was being rude?
‘Jack—’ I began, and stopped right there. ‘Jack,’ I said again, more confidently.
‘Hello, Jack,’ she said. ‘Nice to meet you.’ She gave me a slightly cock-eyed look, as if she didn’t believe me.
‘It really is,’ I said. ‘I guess some people just don’t look like their own names.’
She gave me the look again and I thought that perhaps she had been drinking earlier, or maybe her martini had hit her harder than she’d expected. I sipped my drink. It certainly was strong.
‘So …’ I began, and stopped before I could ask my next question. I thought quickly and realised that if she didn’t want to tell me her name, she probably wouldn’t want to talk about her job, or her life or her romantic status or anything personal. This left me with zero questions to ask her, so I decided to talk about myself instead. I know this is a no-no in books of dating and the like, but she wasn’t saying anything so I thought maybe I could draw her out a little.
‘What is it you do for a living, Jack?’ said the girl.
I was amazed. This was exactly the thing I was about to reveal next. ‘Are you a magician?’ I said, making my voice sound jokey. ‘That was exactly what I was about to tell you.’
‘I’m not a magician,’ she said. ‘I have not been granted that particular skill. More’s the pity.’ Now she sounded a little sad, as though she would have really wanted to have been a magician.
I remember as a child reading that only men can become magicians and thinking that this was unfair, although I believe times have changed, perhaps because of those hugely popular books that feature both girl and boy wizards. I said none of this, because it might have made her angry, or bored, or both.
‘Would you care to guess?’ I said.
‘Not particularly,’ she said. ‘I mean, I want to know and you can tell me. There’s no need to introduce a vein of uncertainty, I think.’
I didn’t understand what she meant, and now I think she was trying to say something about a ‘Venn diagram of uncertainty’, but had abandoned the thought as too complicated. Plus she had a good point. Why should I conceal the information I had when all she wanted was to know it?
‘I’m a translator,’ I said.
She just looked at me.
‘A translator is a guy who—’ I began.
‘I know what a translator is,’ she said. ‘Do you think I’m an idiot?’
You see? People just think I’m obnoxious when I’m trying to be nice. I guess if I’d thought faster, I’d have realised that of course a girl like this would know what a translator was. But instead, because she didn’t say anything, I assumed she didn’t know, and now here she was, thinking that I thought she was stupid.
‘I don’t think you’re an idiot,’ I said, ‘I just …’ And I tailed off, which probably to her meant I was silently adding, ‘Actually, I do think you’re an idiot.’ But she looked angry now. I was kind of angry too. I mean, I was just trying to be helpful.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I was just taken aback.’
I didn’t know what to say. But what I was thinking was, All right, you snap at me and then apologise and that’s fine, but how would you like it if I called you a great big horse and then said sorry? Not that she was a great big horse, and that’s not an expression I would ever use, but you see my point. So I said, ‘Why would you be taken aback?’
‘Because – no, this is crazy.’
When she said that, she did something that only attractive women do, where she turned her head away as she was talking, as if she were addressing her words to someone on the next bar stool. You never see men do that, or old ladies, or anyone who doesn’t look good in profile. Also it’s a good way of making sure people are listening. Try it. Turn away from someone when you’re talking and nine times out of ten they’ll lean in to hear what you’re saying.
‘What’s wrong?’ I said.
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she said, but this time even as she said it I knew she was going to apologise again. It’s called ‘emotional turmoil’. That’s an expression I come across a lot in my work. The girl was thinking. She was doing it with her eyes, looking at me, and at the bottles behind the bar, and at the counter, as though she were taking tiny photographs with her eyes. She finally stopped scanning the bar and said, ‘Can you keep a secret?’
‘Of course,’ I said. In actual fact, I had no idea if I could keep a secret. Nobody tells me any secrets. Maybe they just figure I can’t keep secrets. Sometimes I try to imagine a secret and work out how long I could keep it. But it’s like pretending you’re underwater and you have to hold your breath; after a while your brain realises you’re not underwater and it tells you to stop being a dummy and breathe in. My brain says, you have no secrets, and anyway who are you going to tell? Your mother?
While I was thinking this – and it takes a lot longer to write it down than to think it – the girl was fishing through her bag. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed with girls and bags but there seems to be a rule that the smaller the girl, the bigger the bag. And vice versa. You see big ladies in fancy restaurants wearing fur coats and they have bags that you could just about squeeze a wasp into. And you see girls in taxis and when they have to find some money for the driver, they’re rooting through bags that would be suitable for a large family’s laundry. This girl was no exception. Whatever she was looking for wasn’t coming out any time soon. If she had been looking for a vole, for example, the vole could have run around in the bag for
minutes before she grabbed it. Not that she was looking for a vole.
Finally she found what she was after. She pulled it out. It was a tatty-looking hardback book, the kind you find on a stall with other tatty-looking hardback books. It had no dust-jacket, and it had obviously been on a shelf next to a smaller book because the front was faded by the sun down one side, from a deep red to a kind of weak pink. There was some writing in gold on the pink cloth, but I couldn’t make it out.
‘Translator, right?’ she said.
I nodded agreement, in case actually saying the words ‘I’m a translator’ would get her angry again.
‘OK,’ she said, sounding tired, ‘see if you can translate this.’
She held out the book to me and I reached for it. Then she pulled it back again.
‘I’m just going to lay it on the bar and open it,’ she said. ‘Is your eyesight good?’
‘My eyesight’s fine with these,’ I said, taking out my reading glasses and wondering what the hell was going on. Did she think I was a book thief? That I was going to steal her old red hardback and run out, laughing my face off? I put on the glasses in silence and she opened the book at random and slid it across the bar.
‘Don’t pick it up or touch it,’ she said. ‘Can you see it all right from there?’
‘I’m going to have to get off this stool to look more closely,’ I said. ‘Otherwise I may topple.’
‘Don’t topple,’ she said.
I got up and leaned over the book as if it were a rare antique I was valuing. I put my hands behind my back so I wouldn’t accidentally reach out and touch it (for a moment I wondered if she thought the pages were poisoned) and I looked at the open pages. After a few seconds, I said, ‘Is it all like this?’
In answer, she picked it up and opened it at random about sixty pages further in. Then, when I had looked at those pages, she went back to an earlier section and I looked at that.
The Mule Page 1