The blind man said, ‘There are people who live here and there are people who live there, and there are people who live both here and there.’
‘I don’t understand you, I’m afraid.’
The blind man smiled, and raised his hand, palm outward. ‘Here’s hoping you never do.’
‘You heard somebody following me?’ Michael persisted.
The blind man nodded. ‘Your old friend Mr Hillary.’
‘I don’t know anybody called Mr Hillary.’
Without another word, the blind man went shuffling and tapping off between the trees. Michael watched him go, brushing back his hair with his hand. He felt peculiarly disturbed, as if he had discovered by chance that the world wasn’t at all the way he had always believed it to be – as if there were invisible doors everywhere, through which people could come and go, but which he had never noticed or known about before.
But – nah, the blind old man was just a blind old man, with a wandering mind. ‘Mr Hillary’ was probably somebody he had known when he was young – a schoolteacher or a storekeeper or a family friend. All the same, it was pretty unsettling that he had guessed that Michael was undergoing hypnosis. He had actually said, ‘I was hypnotized too.’
Michael reached Columbus Avenue and hailed a cab. When he was in central Boston, he almost always rode the bus or took the T; but this evening he felt as if he needed to get away from the office as quickly as possible. He said ‘346 Hanover,’ and the grizzle-haired black cab driver in the Red Sox baseball cap pulled out into the traffic without a word.
Another two National Guard Chinooks thundered overhead. The cab driver glanced at Michael in his rear-view mirror and Michael saw that one of his eyes was darkly bloodshot. ‘Looks like it’s war,’ the cab driver remarked.
‘I didn’t hear the latest,’ Michael told him. ‘Is the rioting still going on?’
‘The cops are still shooting innocent bystanders, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Hey,’ said Michael, ‘I’m not getting political here.’
‘Who’s getting political?’ the cab driver retorted. ‘This is the day of atonement, aint it? This aint political, this is biblical.’
‘Whatever it is, it’s a crying shame,’ said Michael.
‘It’s the day of atonement,’ the cab driver repeated. ‘I always knew it was going to come, and now it has.’
He dropped Michael outside the Cantina Napoletana. The late afternoon sunlight filled Hanover Street with molten gold. The Cantina Napoletana was a small old-style restaurant with a red-and-green awning and a shiny window with shiny gilded lettering, and two lollipop bay trees on either side of the front door.
The cab driver handed Michael his change, fixing him with his one good eye and his one bloodshot eye. ‘It’s a burnt offering, that’s what it is,’ he said, with aggressive over-emphasis. ‘An offering by fire of a soothing aroma to the Lord.’
‘A what?’
‘A so – o – oothing aroma,’ the cab driver replied, and steered off into the traffic.
Joe had done him proud. The apartment was large and airy, with a newly-sanded and varnished oak floor, and white-painted walls. The living-room overlooked Hanover Street, with a cast-iron balcony just wide enough to accommodate two folding chairs, an upturned terracotta planter which served as a table, and a plastic potful of dusty geraniums. The furniture in the room was bland and oatmeal-coloured. There was only one picture: a travel poster of a bone-white grassy beach, under an inky blue sky.
Michael hauled up the white linen blinds and opened the balcony doors, and the room was filled with noise and the warmth of the afternoon, as well as the smell from the restaurant downstairs – onions and garlic and tomatoes and basil, gently sweating in golden panfuls of virgin olive oil.
Joe had fetched around Michael’s battered tan leather suitcase and left it in the corridor. Michael carried it through to the bedroom and hoisted it onto the bed. He unbuckled it, and looked at his crumpled polo shirts and corrugated slacks with resignation. He had never been very good at folding and packing, and he always packed far too much. He didn’t know why he had brought that huge maroon fisherman’s sweater that he had won from John McClusky the fishbait-seller down on the beach; or maybe he did know. Maybe it was a kind of security blanket – a reminder of home, and the seashore, and Patsy, and Jason, too, and all of that love and all of that freedom that he had been obliged to compromise for money.
He hung up his clothes in the white closets with the louvred doors. The closets smelled of new chipboard. He wedged his empty suitcase under the bed. The bedroom was just as plain as the living-room, with a white night-table in faux-bamboo and a warehouse bed covered with a white-and-oatmeal bedspread. There was so much oatmeal in this apartment that Michael began to wonder if it had been decorated by a horse. But there were fine net drapes at the bedroom windows, and he could see through them to the brick-paved yard behind the restaurant, where the chefs emerged from time to time to wipe their necks with tea-towels and smoke a cigarette and shout and laugh.
He washed his face and hands in the small white-tiled bathroom, and then he called Patsy again.
‘I just got to Hanover Street.’
‘How is it? Is it okay?’
‘It’s terrific. A big living-room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen. It’s everything I need. Well, let’s put it this way, it’s everything I need for now. It’s a good thing I like Italian food, though. It’s right over a Neapolitan restaurant.’ To the tune of ‘Pennies from Heaven’, he sang, ‘Every time I breathe, I breathe pollo abruzzese.’
She laughed, but then she said, ‘How’s it going? The job? You sounded kind of tense at the office.’
‘Fine, the job’s going fine. The trouble is, I miss you guys already.’
‘You’re not having any problems?’
‘Problems? What problems?’
‘Well, you know ... stress or anything.’
He thought of the fleeting figure that had seemed to be following him through the trees of Copley Place, and the blind man who had known that he was looking for someone. Mr Hillary, whoever he was.
He thought of the cab driver who had talked about atonement, and biblical punishment, and that offering by fire of a soothing aroma to the Lord.
He said, a little stiffly, ‘Everything’s fine. I’m keeping my head together.’
Patsy said, ‘You won’t try to keep it from me, will you, Michael, if things start to come apart? It’s not your fault. It’s nothing for you to feel ashamed about. All you have to do is call me, and we can talk about it. Or call Dr Rice. I know we need the money but we don’t need the money that bad.’
He cleared his throat. The net curtains rose and fell in the sunshine. ‘It’s okay, everything’s fine. Joe’s been taking care of me. He even fetched my case around.’
‘The riots are all on television.’
‘Well, there’s smoke, and a whole lot of helicopters going over; and when I went down to Boston Central this morning they were bringing in casualties. But everything else seems normal. It’s one of those long hot summer things, that’s all.’
‘Just take care,’ said Patsy. ‘I’ll see you at the weekend, okay?’
‘I could be working.’
‘Then I’ll come up to Boston to pay you a visit. You won’t object to a little company when you’re working, will you?’
He smiled. The Boston Globe lay on the corner of the bed where he had dropped it. The headline read: ‘Monyatta Appeals For Calm: Death Toll Rises to 23’. His smile faded as the light through the window faded. He felt strangely responsible, as if the rioting, obliquely, were his fault – as if his unexpected arrival in Boston had disturbed the city’s equilibrium.
Patsy said, ‘Michael?’
‘Still here,’ he reassured her. Downstairs, they were starting to fry fish.
It was still light outside when the telephone woke him up. Not daylight, not moonlight, but the floodlight that illuminated the back yard of
the Cantina Napoletana, while the dishwashers clattered and the chefs laughed and smoked and talked about girls with fettuccine-fed figures. (In an hour, they would be home, in pyjamas, snoring next to their wives.)
He couldn’t find the phone at first in the unfamiliar apartment; but it kept on ringing, over and over, and eventually he discovered it on the canvas sling chair in the corner of the bedroom, under his discarded coat. He picked it up and said, ‘Yes? What is it?’ He felt dizzy, disoriented. He couldn’t even remember what he had been dreaming about. It had been something to do with trees. Something to do with coattails, flapping out of sight. His tongue felt as if it had been sprinkled with salt.
‘Mikey? Is that you?’
‘Who is this?’
‘Joe ... who else do you think?’
‘Oh, Joe. What do you want? What the hell time is it?’
Three-oh-seven. I was watching the news. Weren’t you?’
‘Are you kidding? Who the hell watches the news at three-oh-seven? I was asleep.’
‘Oh, you were asleep, that accounts for it. You took so long to answer, I thought you’d packed your bag and gone back to New Seabury. I was worried you were homesick. I was worried you’d quit.’
‘I think I might quit, if you keep on calling me at this time of night.’
‘Michael ... this is a one-time-only. Switch on the news.’
‘I don’t have a television yet. You’ll have to tell me.’
‘Oh ... in that case, listen to this. They just found Sissy O’Brien.’
Michael sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘They found her? Sissy O’Brien? Who found her? Where? Is she alive?’
‘The coastguard found her in Nahant Bay. She’s very much dead.’
‘They found her where? In Nahant Bay? That’s more than a dozen miles north of Nantasket Beach.’
‘That’s right. And if her body had floated from the helicopter crash site on Sagamore Head to East Point, just where they found her, she would have had to float through Hingham Bay, or Quincy Bay, missing Peddocks Island and Long Island and Georges Island and all the rest of the islands and all the rest of the tides – out across Massachusetts Bay, and then back into shore.’
‘Was that all they said? That they’d found her; and that she was dead?’
‘That was the length and breadth of it.’
Michael caught sight of his skinny pale naked reflection in the mirror, tousled brown hair, loose-wristed arms and legs, cock hanging down. He cleared his throat, and then he said, ‘Nahant Bay, that’s Essex County, right? So who’s handling it? Not Wellman Brock, surely?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ said Joe. ‘But I very much doubt it. Poor old Sheriff Brock couldn’t find a turd in a sewage plant’
Michael said, ‘Pick me up in twenty minutes. Let’s go take a look at Nahant Bay.’
‘What? It’s only a quarter after three.’
‘What are you worried about? It’ll be light by the time we get there.’
Michael and Joe parked at an angle amongst the dunes and climbed out of the car. Joe turned back and said, ‘Shit. You know what that goddamned sand can do to your paint finish?’
They slid – walked – slid down the dunes. Joe cursed when the sand got into his Gucci loafers. He cursed when the sand blew into his eyes. Michael was used to the sand, and had a way of turning his face away when the wind gusted.
For two hundred feet north of East Point the beach had been cordoned off with fluttering orange pennants, even though there was nothing left for anyone to see. The morning sky was pale mauvish. The Atlantic Ocean was mauvish, too, but broken up, and a little angry, and it bitched at the shore, and sulked, and bitched again, and dragged up seaweed, and dragged it back again.
Michael’s nostrils were all scoured out with salt, and cold, and the air-conditioning of Joe’s Seville. He was wearing his maroon fisherman’s sweater and he was glad of it, while Joe was shivering in his emerald-green Italian jacket and his sand-stained Gucci shoes.
Two patrol cars from the Essex County Sheriff’s department were still parked here; as were three unmarked automobiles, including a dark-maple Caprice and a pea-green Buick Century with a spectacular dent in the offside fender. Close to the shoreline stood a very tall man in a crumpled fawn raincoat, and a younger man with a sweptback hairstyle and a suit, and a heavy-built, blodgy-looking man with a Boy Scout hat, whom Michael recognized almost at once as Sheriff Brock.
Joe lifted the pennants and an acne-blotched deputy came toward him and lifted his hand.
‘I’m sorry, sir, restricted area.’
‘Tom!’ Joe shouted, and gave a wide-sweeping wave to the very tall man in the crumpled fawn raincoat.
The very tall man in the crumpled fawn raincoat waved back, and Joe dropped the pennants behind him and continued to walk across the sand.
‘Hey, I’m sorry,’ the deputy repeated. ‘This area is really restricted. I mean, that means that it’s – ‘
Joe turned and glared at him and snapped, ‘Screw you,’ and continued to walk towards the shoreline. He turned again, and snapped again, ‘Screw you!’ The deputy shouted, ‘Stop!’ and unfastened the snapper on his holster, but Michael came up and laid a hand on top of the deputy’s hand. In spite of the cold – or because of it – the boy was trembling.
‘Listen,’ Michael told him, out of the side of his mouth, as if he weren’t talking to him at all. ‘We all get caught in no-win situations. This is one of them. You’re doing your duty and you’re doing it good, but none of those people will see it that way. That tall guy in the raincoat is Lieutenant Thomas Boyle, right?, of the Boston Police Department; and that’s your boss Sheriff Wellman Brock, right?, whose every whim is your command; and that’s Joe Garboden of Plymouth Insurance who doesn’t actually own me, balls and all, but everything but. So let’s think of our pensions, you and I, and let the big guys tromp around the sandbox. Our turn will come, believe me.’
The young spotty deputy stared at him as if he were mad. But then he said, ‘Okay ... ‘ as if he hadn’t quite understood, and fastened up his holster.
Michael squeezed the boy’s arm. ‘Your time will come, believe me, when those guys are ail sitting in sunset homes, and forgetting they ever ate food out of aluminum saucepans.’
The deputy nodded, and toothily grinned. ‘Right,’ he agreed. He turned right around on his heel, and kept on grinning.
Michael walked across the moist sand towards the shore, his left cheek turned against the wind. ‘Giraffe,’ he said, extending his hand to Lieutenant Boyle. ‘How’s Megan keeping? I saw her article in Boston magazine. The one on pot roasts, or whatever.’
‘Well, well, Mikey Rearden,’ said Thomas, smiling. He looked tired. His cheeks were white and his nose was pinched red by the wind. ‘They told me you’d given it up.’
‘Psychological problems,’ Michael admitted. ‘A simple case of the fruitcakes.’
Thomas sniffed, and dragged out his handkerchief. ‘I heard that,’ he said.
Michael tapped his forehead. ‘It wasn’t too serious. I just couldn’t stop the outside from getting inside. Know what I mean? But I’m pretty much cured. I’ve been going through hypnotherapy.’
‘Yeah? Does that really work?’
‘It depends. I guess you have to want it to work.’
‘I was wondering about hypnotherapy for Megan,’ said Thomas. ‘You know, just to make her feel more positive. She gets pretty damn down sometimes. She doesn’t tell me. But I would, if I were her.’
‘I don’t know,’ Michael shrugged, and he really didn’t. ‘I guess she could discuss it with her doctor. But sometimes I think that hypnotherapy can open up more cans of worms than it’s worth. I didn’t even know that I was afraid of the dark until I was hypnotized.’
Joe looked uncomfortable. So did Sheriff Brock – a huge, wobbling jelly of a man in a sandy uniform and a blatantly artificial toupee. His eyes flicked from side to side and he looked like a man who desperately wanted his br
eakfast, and his office chair, and a lengthy continuation of last night’s sleep.
Thomas squeezed Michael’s elbow. ‘Let’s talk about this later, okay? These guys have been up since three.’
‘Where’d they find her?’ asked Joe, in an unnaturally loud voice.
Thomas led the way down to the smoother sand of the shoreline. There was a simple wooden marker in the surf – a stick, no more. Every trace of Sissy O’Brien’s arrival here had already been washed away by the sea.
‘Did you talk to the coastguard?’ asked Michael.
Thomas looked up at him and nodded. ‘You’re thinking about winds and tides and currents, right?’
‘That’s right,’ said Michael.
‘Well ... the coastguard have promised me a tidal survey right from the moment the helicopter came down. They may even try floating a dummy body from Sagamore Head to see what happens ... you can judge the winds and the tides mathematically, but a floating body won’t always do what you expect it to do.’
‘You’re telling a fisherman,’ said Joe.
Michael looked around. There was something oddly familiar about this curve of beach, although he couldn’t think why. He walked down to the shoreline until the surf seethed around the welts of his shoes. He shielded his eyes with both hands and stared out toward the horizon. He had been here before, he was sure of it. When he was a child, maybe, with his father. Every time his father completed a whaler that he really liked, he would sail it up to Marblehead, or down to Plymouth, and take Michael along with him. They carried hot chocolate in Thermos flasks, and brown bags of cheese and baloney sandwiches, and they had sung sea-songs together, old traditional shanties, or silly sea-songs that they had invented themselves.
We sailed on the good ship Bum
With a huge supply of rum
The Bum didn’t sink but it sure did stink
We should have called her some-
thing else that wasn’t so rude
But that’s our problem, we’re just crude.
He smiled to himself, although he felt like crying, too. He looked back up the beach towards Joe and Thomas and Thomas was lighting a cigarette.
The Sleepless Page 17