by Louise Dean
Her mobile phone shuddered. She watched it writhe, ignored it, then turned it off.
They drank the rest of the bottle and, when it was dark, he settled the bill and they went to a Thai restaurant she knew, and ordered another bottle and ate very little. He’d made sure to ask for lobster-based curries and scallops; the higher-priced items on the menu. They talked a little about their lives, they agreed that they’d never have imagined, at the outset, being the people they’d become.
She took a last man-sized drink from the glass of dessert wine, drew on a cigarette. ‘It’s a mad world, as they say.’
He asked her why she married her husband, and poured the wine.
‘I don’t know. We were incompatible in every way. I found it exciting then. He’s an Australian. He might be gay in fact. I don’t know. We never clicked sexually. Do you know, the first night we were married I said to him if you don’t give me oral sex I am going to divorce you tomorrow . . .’
He shook his head. ‘You’re a tough lady.’
‘Not tough enough. He never did. He read a book Who Moved My Cheese? or something on honeymoon. He was like a different person afterwards. He gave up work. He made a man of me. I’d rather be at home with our daughter myself.’
He called for the bill.
‘What about you?’ she asked him.
‘Me?’
‘What’s your situation? At home?’
He showed her his wedding ring, splaying the fingers on his left hand.
‘Happy?’
‘We have a son who is thirteen. He’s very bright in an unconventional sort of way. My wife finds it difficult being a mother unfortunately. I won’t bore you with it. It is what it is.’
‘You’re so sanguine. Like with your work.’
‘Oh well, yes. I try,’ he grinned uneasily. ‘It must be nice being me, right?’ He leant forward, whispering in imitation of her, ‘. . . asshole.’ He sat back, and signed the bill with flamboyant disinterest. ‘She was nineteen when we married. Too young. She’s a very unhappy person, intrinsically I’d say. Not that I could see that then.’
‘So you saved her.’
That made him feel uncomfortable. Yes, that was what he was suggesting, but she didn’t have to classify it right away. Put like that, it smelt like blowback from a sausage.
‘Maybe,’ he demurred. She was a good listener, but it wasn’t going right. ‘We were too young to know anything about love.’
‘So do you think you know anything about it now?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I’m not very good at it; love.’ The conclusion. A touch of sincerity, a smattering of confession, a hint of self-knowledge, a sprinkling of bravado. ‘I mean, what if I don’t even know what love is?’ he said. ‘What if compared to most people I’m an emotional idiot? I feel like I ought to love her, you know, unconditionally even, for the sake of the boy, but I can’t. I did try. But I’m not sure I can carry on without love, to be honest with you.’ He was drunk. He was saying too much and for his own sake. It was like driving along and feeling bumps under the wheel and thinking, shit I’ve got a flat, but no, no, I don’t want it to be flat, I’ll keep going. Or like when you lie down and your stomach sends fluid upwards and you’re swallowing like a dog, saying to yourself, oh no I don’t want to vomit. He’d been through it before, this routine, about love and his quest for it; it was stale.
They went back to his hotel for a nightcap in the bar. She was a mess, bending over nearly double, laughing, and hugging herself in the low armchair, then she leant forward, her lips pouting and asked him to come with her to the toilet. He suggested they went rather to his room. The lobby attendant blessed them. They kissed in the lift. She was a dead weight more or less.
When they got to his room, she opened her handbag, and took out a foil wrap of cocaine but she couldn’t quite get close to it, her heels were capsizing under her bendy legs. He used his Amex to scrape the coke into four lines on the glass-topped dressing table and they did a line each and stepped outside on to his balcony from which one could see the lake if one stood on a chair and craned one’s neck. They drank beers from the minibar. He was happy to let her talk some more and she was extraordinarily happy to talk. Then after a while, suddenly, he was not at all interested in listening to her and so they did another line and she talked some more about her work and her husband, sighing all the while, and going from thrilled to stricken, sitting in her bra and knickers, taking off her tights very slowly.
He said, ‘I really admired your talk today.’
‘You’re clutching at straws,’ she said, her brow low, as she pondered the floor. She was stuck on the coke, like she’d got her hair caught in a button.
‘I’m serious. I want to do this job with conscience. I want to know what I’m about. I want to do the right thing.’ Was he speaking for her or for him? Was it true? ‘Africa needs us to do the right thing, to know what the right thing to do is. I couldn’t live with myself if it were anything less than right.’
Perhaps it was the coke talking, he felt a ghastly earnestness grip him, his eyes were so distended they hurt. He couldn’t seem to stop wiping his chin with his palm.
‘Well, I can help you with that, Richard. But it won’t make you happy, it will just make you like me, confused,’ she said looking up at him through her hair. Then she lay back on the bed. ‘Make love to me,’ she said.
He pulled his shirt over his head and unzipped his trousers, trod them into the floor. His forearms taut, he closed his eyes as he entered her. He hoped to God he was hard enough and that his dick wouldn’t buckle. Thank God she was wet. He closed his eyes, going through his virtual folder of arousing scenes, images, situations, young girls, old women, legs apart, bending over, he was mentally thumbing through them at top speed. The German woman’s cross face came to mind. This was such a performance! Maybe they should be talking. Then he felt her tighten around him. When he opened his eyes he saw that she was staring at his face and her lips were all tragic and her eyes were wet, and he was taken aback. It nearly made him stop. He should have looked at the eyes before now. What a waste! Looking into her eyes now, he felt drawn to something holy — a fire, life — it was sensational, he strove deeper inside her and felt a surge of excitement. ‘So you think you’ll find God through a woman’s vagina?’
And then he was done and it was as it always was, just a sticky mess. A thin sweat broke out across his back and he felt her move her fingers over him as if finger painting. He had his face squashed right up next to her. He smelt graham crackers, the smell of her and him and the sweat and the sex. He put a hand across her.
She started to talk, and he didn’t mind, he was still a bit coked up, he lay alongside her, enjoying the warmth and peace and he listened to her telling him about her life, then he found himself telling her about the Var, and how beautiful the land was.
He told her how he drove out early mornings with the mist in the valleys making islands of the hilltop towns. He told her about the sky, blue all the year round, like the great Mediterranean Sea turned upside down and hung up above you. How nature there was like a kindly auntie playing cards with a child, losing beneficently. Mimosa, violets, poppies, cherries, melons, roses, apricots, lavender, walnuts, apples, grapes, mushrooms, chestnuts, olives and thyme.
He felt sadness dampening his mood.
‘You’re a very nice man. In fact,’ she said. She squeezed his hand. He shifted and held her in his arms.
‘You’re a nice lady. In fact.’
‘When I sleep with a complete stranger?’
‘That doesn’t matter.’
‘Do you feel like a child again, lying here?’
‘Yes. Everything seems simple, lying here.’
‘Yes, it does. That’s why we do it.’
It occurred to him how the lights that are on at 3 a.m. in hotel bedrooms all over the world are shining on some of the attempts of men and women to go back to the beginning.
He stroked her hair, but he was sobe
ring up, the day would come and he started to think how he’d need to be careful now. She went to the toilet. Perhaps this was not a good start, perhaps this did not augur well for the work. Perhaps he ought not to have done this.
Illuminated. That was the word for Rachel, he thought.
When she emerged, he was lying naked on his back, with his eyes open, his mouth dry, he felt bad, he felt remorseful but for whom — her, his wife, himself ? He told himself it was a chemical reaction, that was all.
She knelt up alongside him, and she whispered into his ear. ‘I love you.’
He pulled her across him so she could not see his face. ‘Shit,’ he said to himself.
Chapter 7
Until he got the Africa promotion his weekly routine hadn’t much altered. He rose at six in the morning on Monday to Friday, put on a suit, and took his briefcase to his BMW like a good boy; with bad breath all that was left of the weekend.
Then, on Saturday mornings, a different man, he’d wind the window down on the Mitsubishi four-wheel drive, pull his cap forwards, feel the tug of the engine with his feet, as he moved off to spend his own time.
On the occasional Saturday during the hunting season, like the Varois men, Richard put on the camouflage trousers and green waistcoat of the chasseur and went off in the four-wheel drive to meet his fellows round the back of the out-of-the-way villages. In some lay-by or other, they’d stood about with their guns, smoking and giving consideration to a plan to track, hunt and kill the sanglier, the black pig, if seen, arranged by size in family format.
Inevitably they failed, joyfully they failed, and then they spent the rest of the Saturday drinking in one of the little bars that were obliged to close at eight since the area became a crossroads in drugs trafficking. They went home somehow incomplete, not quite drunk enough; ill humoured by the time they got indoors.
They could afford to be. ‘Your wife’s for life’ was the mindset round there. Each was given his dinner, and would no doubt gesture with anger at the television, no matter the programme, and spoil his wife’s enjoyment. On Sunday the man endured the family meal with an eye to the window, an ear to the driveway, hoping for one of his crowd to pop by so he could go outside on to the terrace to drink and talk about the previous day’s hunting; about where they went wrong.
Richard amused his comrades with his concessions to family life.
‘The Englishman’ he remained to them, despite his eloquence. The commonest theme of their drunken banter was that whilst they hated Englishmen, Richard was OK. His grandfather always said the French were a bunch of two-faced cowards, but he never mentioned that.
Now and again he’d skip going hunting — accepting Valérie’s point about him having been away all week — and then he took Valérie and Max to Aix or to Cannes; shopping. He turned himself off for the day, used the credit card. Her purchases were futile, she’d hate them next week, and he stood in various doorways with Max, between extremes of temperature, consoling the pair of them. Lunch was the highlight. She liked to eat palourdes and oursins and the kid liked calamari, and they usually drank a bottle of Cassis and got Max a grand ice-cream extravagance.
Max, at thirteen years old, never had anything to say about school or anything relating to his actual life, but he might occasionally ask something poignant — ‘Do parents love their children when the children get older?’ Or something meaningless, ‘It won’t be last week again next week . . .’ And when they pushed him to clarify, he baulked and sulked, he would just allow the ditch to widen between them. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said darkly, desperately, ‘you don’t understand.’
Valérie liked to talk about how she’d lost her looks.
Family life, thought Richard on one of the long silent drives home, is one of those things that is very bad for you but which is accepted as something nifty, in the way smoking was once recommended for your throat. First, you form attachments, which once broken can kill you, or worse — and there was worse. But before you got there, there was the day-to-day wear and tear on your sense of humour and your patience; the kid’s feet in the back of your car seat; the reminder that you’re low on the tank of bribes and about to hit punishment and that punishment came with a suicidal accessory, a double-barrelled gun with one nozzle twisted back at you.
He could reach the kid when it was just the two of them. He dropped the hunting now and again to spend time with Max. He cut the discipline crap when they were together, he knew that it was much for show, to make the older generation feel like they were in safe hands. He liked to say to Max: Ask me anything, anything and I’ll tell you the truth.
One Sunday in June, just back from the Geneva trip, he sat under a tree, down at the bottom of the valley near the ruins of a bastide, and closed his eyes to better hear the shouting of his boy running down the hill. When he opened his eyes he saw the midges dancing, the boy’s ears red with the sun shining through them, he saw the green moss like a lake around the trees, springing and soft, the holly bushes squat and glistening, the big firs and pines, the scrub oak with lichen, silver-barked, secret gardens inside secret gardens and he thought: I’ve fallen on my arse here. He saw with an old man’s gaze, how the afternoon rose, with the light moving up the hillsides, and the sun bowed into the valley, tipping its hat to it all.
The boy flopped down beside him.
Richard rolled on to his side to look at him, one eye open.
‘So go on, ask me anything, Max.’
‘OK. Why do you smoke?’
‘It’s an addiction.’
The boy raised his eyebrows, impressed.
‘Do you know what I mean by that?’
They were lying there just as he’d once lain with his son’s mother on a beach; they had a photograph of it framed in the living room, the same pose; he on his right elbow, she on her left, facing each other. To him it was the image of happiness; talking and listening, side by side.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Well go on then, smart arse, what is it then?’
The kid sparked up a grin, and this was how Richard loved him most, when he took an expression from elsewhere — this one like something stolen from a bride — and Richard could see how he would be, the kid, all things going well, when he was grown up.
‘Yes, I have the same thing. It’s like with chess.’
‘Being addicted to chess?’
‘It’s like when I walk away after playing it, I can’t stop myself walking like the knight moves. You know?’
‘Yeah, it’s like that, Max. Ask me another.’
‘How much money do we have?’
‘I don’t know. About five hundred thousand, maybe more, but I couldn’t use it right away, some of it’s in the house.’
‘Is that a lot?’
‘Well. It depends on your point of view.’
‘It sounds like a lot.’
‘Ask me what you really want to know, Max. About women. Girls. You know.’
‘Oh that.’ The kid sat up. ‘I know what happens. But you need your balls to drop, right?’
‘Well, yes. Yes. You’ve heard about it at school then.’
‘Axel’s done it with his cousin.’
‘He’s just having you on, showing off.’
‘No. He did it. I know he did.’
‘Absolute rubbish, Max. He’s too young. You can’t.’ He remembered with some embarrassment his own efforts at that age.
‘No. I know the words. Pussy. You know.’
‘Yes. Right. Well, all in good time. No need to rush. The sex thing’s a piece of cake. It’s the rest of it that’s difficult. Ha. Life.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Not much bloody use, am I?’ He laughed nervily and shook his son’s knee for reassurance. ‘You can ask Axel for the grubby details!’
‘Do you think Jesus was the Son of God? I don’t.’
‘No?’
‘No. Not as in the only son of God. I spoke to the priest about it the other day.’
‘Y
ou went to church?’
‘Yes, it was empty. It always is. I like it. You know, Dad, I am the Son of God.’
‘Max . . .’
‘No, I am. I am. You too. We all are. It wasn’t just him. Maybe he was trying to give people a clue, but he didn’t have to be so like look-at-me about it. I mean we can all do miracles and heal people and stuff. If we want. Magic. After all, you know, we invented God, he didn’t invent us.’
‘OK.’ Richard didn’t know what else to say.
‘I mean, I have seen him. Christ. He told me he was just a man.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘In a dream.’
‘Oh. OK.’
‘The other thing is that I wish I had a different mother because she’s not on the light side. You know, like in Star Wars. She’s gone over to the dark side. I don’t want her to take me with her so I’m going to have to do something to stop her.’
‘Well, we all feel a bit cross with each other sometimes.’ Richard chanced a look at his son, he could see the vein in the side of his boy’s head, pulsing. ‘You’re a big thinker, Max.’
‘She doesn’t read, does she, Mum? She ought to have at least read the Bible. I’m doing that and I’m only thirteen.’
‘Well, not everyone does read. It doesn’t always help. Look at your grandfather. Since Grandma taught him to read he’s been totally confused.’
‘Putain, this makes my head hurt . . .’ Max swung his head low, in imitation of Guy.
Richard laughed.
‘It’s a shame. But she’ll have to go. Mother. She doesn’t love us.’
‘Oh, Max. Just be a kid. Stay cool, as your grandfather would say. Cool.’
They rose and dusted themselves down and Richard put an arm around his son’s shoulder as they walked back up the hill. He felt a mix of wary emotions, and a touch of elation, because his son was estranged from her too and now they were complicit.
Chapter 8
He was looking smart casual, wearing a suit but no tie, at the Four Seasons hotel bar in Cairo. His company was the main sponsor of the African Psychiatry Conference. The barman pushed olives, crackers and hot nuts his way and Richard consumed three cold beers.