“Well, Lucy! Welcome back.”
Lucy looked at her blankly. “Is it rabies?”
“Rabies?”
“Is the kid dead?”
“What kid, Lucy?”
“I ruined my Birkenstocks for her.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Tell the dog I’m sorry.”
“What dog?”
Her eyes closed. As the light slid out of her world and she returned to the comfort of oblivion, the words “Ray Milland” softly floated to the nurse and she wondered if she had heard right.
April 1964
The concerns of fatherhood were never going to apply to me and the sense of connection a father might have to a new child, had to be smothered. But Nature does her thing at key moments, releases a new batch of chemical instructions to divert the mother’s attention from father to child. Mom and the kid cosy up; dad is out. Oedipus arrives with the diapers. This little newborn thing had all Peg’s attention. She possessed her mother and something very deep changed in Peg. It seemed to herald an ending for me.
The night of her birth was a haze. I used Jack Daniels as my own anaesthetic. I felt a complete fraud, joking with the other husbands, participating in their wonder at the miracle of birth, pretending to the nurses that I was washed out with emotion – which I was, but not with joy, with quite the opposite.
They took us to view our children in rows of cots behind glass screens, products of the baby factory, all lined up for us as if we were going to buy one. Mine was pointed out to me and for a moment something unexpected happened; a sense of attachment transcended everything. I felt a weird continuum, that I was part of a line coming from behind and stretching beyond me. This little heap of nerves and flesh was what I was handing on. It was fleeting and, in my condition, deeply disturbing.
Peg asked me to name her; that was the deal, I would name a girl, she would name a boy. I called her Lucy and took them home when she was a week old. She wasn’t born with Peg’s white blonde hair but with a corona of my hair colour that started shedding immediately. Where it went I never knew; no cobwebs engraved the baby bath, no tangles fuzzed the soft brush Peg used to groom and adore her; it seemed to dissolve in air.
I would look at her in bewilderment. All I saw was another weakness in me. Around her sleeping head the gas chamber danced.
Peg’s mother had moved in for the early weeks as I had to be at work and Peg would need help. It was just another opportunity for her to interfere. Normally I might have been grateful but because of the peculiarity of my circumstance, her presence was a further strain. Peg could do nothing around Lucy without her mother poking her nose in as if she were the only woman ever to have a baby. But at least she would be there for support when the news arrived with the official knock.
On Sunday the 26th of April, 1964, we took lunch in the garden. By midnight the following Tuesday I would be crossing the border into Canada under the name of Dr Greg Hanson. That Sunday was warm, spring was charging through, and I set the table under a neighbour’s tree that conveniently spread its leaves and shade into our patch. My beloved mother-in-law busied herself in the kitchen. Peg was with Lucy.
Lunch under the neighbour’s tree was a success from certain perspectives. Lucy slept on a little mattress at our feet in the shade. The food was good, the conversation mindless and a few wines slowed me down and I fell asleep. Looking at us over the garden fence we were just another American family with a small but special reason for joy.
It was Lucy’s wailing that woke me to the sight of a giant seagull standing over her. The thing was picking up food that had fallen from the table but to little Lucy it must have been her first vision of hell, a giant yellow beak drilling down at her. I launched myself at it and picked her up, but she bawled with such intensity that Peg and her mother came out from the kitchen at a gallop.
“Something scared her, I think.”
“What?”
Peg took her. Lucy was in a terrible state; that such a little creature could make so much sound astonished me. The neighbours must have thought we were barbecuing her.
“What scared her?”
“I don’t know.” I couldn’t tell them I had fallen asleep on duty.
“What did you do?” asked my mother in law. I would be so glad never to see her again.
That night I took final orders from Yura. It was too late now for any deals. I was going across that Tuesday, the Twenty-eighth of April. Peter would give me the nod if plans had to be changed. When I returned home I did not know how to connect to Peg.
“You okay?” She asked.
“Yeah. How’s Lucy?”
“She’s asleep.”
I crossed to the cot. She was doing what babies do best – resting from the strangeness of this new world; I remember being struck how the sleep of a child is so pure, so uncontaminated. I sat on the bed with my back to Peg; I just couldn’t look at her. “Macbeth hath murdered sleep.” It just slipped out, a vocalised thought.
“Why do you say that?”
Her face was hard, worried. She knew. At some level. She would tie all the loose ends up later in one blinding moment. I must have left clues all over the place.
“Nothing, naw, just… Quote, you know, school.” I couldn’t think of any other quotes about sleep.
“What’s up, Max?”
“Nothing.” Again it slipped out. I had no control left.
Georgia, April 1999
The bus terminus was among the run down high-rise blocks to the edge of Batumi. The driver gave him instructions how to get to the suburb.
“How long?”
“Twelve minutes.” Impressed by his precision, Max got off with the huddle of women and their shopping, feral teenagers and sullen men carrying kids on whom the imprint of anxiety was already clear. Several pointed in the direction he should take, but other faces stared from the tower blocks with the unblinking, malign curiosity of those on the edges of survival. Across these vertical labyrinths all the marks of poverty were visible: broken windows, boarded up doors, detritus littering the stairwells and roads; bottles, plastic bags, smashed furniture, the roughly erected power lines playing out of the substation like long confusions of black spaghetti.
It was a long walk and hot. He had never ventured into these broken parts of Batumi; his territory had been the downtown and port bars, the parks and the grander avenues where a whiff of nineteenth century opulence still perfumed the evening air. Between the concrete warrens rising behind him were glimpses of the distant sea, and the banging in the docks punctuated the horns and traffic that thickened the air in downtown Batumi into a soup of sub tropical heat and pollution.
Looking back at the rags of sea beyond the apartment blocks, he indulged a feeling of detestation. Sometimes the earth and mankind disgusted him. He had fought hard and long to love humanity but had a suspicion he had done nothing but batten down a natural loathing with a synthetic ideal. He loathed authority, though he had held plenty in his time and loved it. And he loathed and loved the beaten masses with equal passion. “Moods. Just moods,” he said to himself as he stumbled on the cracked road, “Today’s a tough day, Maxie. You’ll feel differently tomorrow.”
He twice asked the way and received contradictory instructions but eventually found himself in the right suburb, a place that may have had a certain charm a hundred years before. The road was ridged with the cracks that latticed all roads across Georgia like branches of a national nervous system. The trees were peeling and depressed, but the houses were small villas with walls and large gates that were the badges of long lost bourgeois aspiration.
He found Irakli’s house in a wide deserted avenue, far away from the noise of dockland Batumi and the hideousness of the tower blocks. A shabby peace lay on its dead elitism. No noises broke from the unkempt trees and bu
shes that hid the houses, and the tired bougainvillea that leaned against the broken stucco walls. Irakli’s gates had once been splendid examples of art deco style, sweeping down from high pillars to fuse a symmetrical display of floral shapes. Now wisps of old barbed wire tangled the tops like stained lace on a low-cut dress, and metal sheets had been riveted onto the ironwork so no one could see through into the home behind. This was a neighbourhood whose citizens shut themselves away.
The bell brought no response. When he struck one of the gate’s metal panels it rattled down the avenue like a thunder sheet and the only response it provoked was from some chickens somewhere behind the walls. In time he heard a rhythmic tramp of feet, then a break in the stride, a curse, and another chicken crescendo. The spy slot opened and a pair of long lashed eyes that Max found disarmingly beautiful stared at him, but before he could announce himself the slot shut and the gates were dragged open with a noise that would have wakened Hell.
“Mr Agnew,” said the man.
Max stepped inside while Irakli set himself to closing the gates, a task which threatened to fail till Max lent his shoulder too. The gate issued metallic groans of resistance, but with a final iron wail and clang, the street was shut out. This achieved, Max stood, feeling his pulse climb to the red band and reflecting how the Scaean gates of Troy would have required little more effort to close. In blanks of stress he would often retreat to private streams of classicism and hide there.
Irakli’s eyes were his best, indeed his only attractive feature. Several teeth had been left behind somewhere and his body had the gnarled toughness of a man who subsists on nicotine and willpower. Inside the walls of his little kingdom it looked like a peasant’s farmyard. Anorexic chickens pecked around discarded engine parts. A car body was planted near the front door and weeds grew into the wheel arches. A kid’s swing hung limply from a broken tree.
A walnut hand was offered and they shook. He smiled at Max as if awed by his guest’s presence and Max became self-conscious as the handshake extended until he thought Irakli was holding him there for some sinister purpose and found himself scanning the sad, dust blown trees and the filthy windows for the shadow of a gunman. But it was just the overstated welcome of an overstated man and he was released and ushered to a conglomeration of metal chairs around an old wooden table covered with chicken shit. Max perched his bottom delicately on the edge to minimise the amount of guano that would press itself into the fabric of his trouser seat. A brown palm tree hung on to a thin trickle of life above them. Irakli plunked himself opposite and offered Max a cigarette. Max declined.
“I wish I didn’t smoke. Started when I was eight.”
“I’m lucky, I never started.”
Smoke rose lazily in a blue cloud towards the palm fronds then turned sharply and fled over Irakli’s walls. That smoke knows something I don’t thought Max. The begging chickens were kicked away in a flurry of wings and clucks. They came back. Irakli kicked up another fountain of flapping chickens. A teenage girl appeared with a tray of coffee and small cakes and laid it on the table between them. The chickens gathered again by Max’s feet.
“My daughter. This is Mr Agnew.”
“Hello.” She shook his hand and Max was unsure his identity should have been disclosed so casually. “Hello.”
Delicate hands set out the coffee and poured. She was slim and gorgeous, rather aristocratic in looks, hardly the offspring one would expect from a sinewy branch like Irakli. But she had her father’s eyes, glowing with intelligence and softened into feminine beauty. Max could feel her father’s pride irradiate the chicken shit.
“Thank you,” said Max. She smiled and left the men to their business lightly trailing a sense of grace and modesty across the trash.
“Sixteen and doing well at school. She’ll make the university. Speaks German like a native.”
“That’s wonderful,” said Max.
“If they’ve got the brains these days you have to set them on their way, eh? These days, huh? What a fucking mess they’re making of it, huh? Excuse my language.”
“That’s fine.”
“But what are they building for our kids, uh?”
“Yes, it’s a responsibility,” said Max, “I’m sometimes relieved I don’t have children.” It slipped out with an ease that took him aback, but he found no reason to correct himself.
“Ah, children are great.”
“Yes.”
“But there’s no future for them here. That’s why an education is important. To get out. With a good degree, they’ve got hope in Germany, or even your old country.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
They sipped coffee and Irakli crushed a cake and threw it to the chickens.
“Can I ask what you need?”
Max lowered his voice; the neighbours were only a wall away. “I’m not specifically sure. You probably know better than I.”
“Anything can be got.”
“Whatever it is, it needs to be simple, reliable, easy to operate. I’m not an expert. Quite the opposite.”
“What specifically is the problem?”
“I might just be suffering from paranoia...”
“Paranoia keeps us alive. The way things are these days.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“It’s becoming like the Wild West.”
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“So, how would you define your problem?”
There was an impression of running, short calls, hard breathing from the other side of the wall. Max seized up, the openness of this whole transaction just inside a suburban wall among starving chickens struck him as casual to the point of carelessness. But he supposed Irakli knew what he was doing. The sound passed and they fell back into run down suburban peace.
“Sorry, I’ve never done anything like this.”
“I know you haven’t. That’s why I’m asking the nature of your needs so I provide the right thing.”
“I think someone is after me. Someone dangerous.”
“Right. Self-protection.”
“Yes.” Max was relieved it was out.
“Something you can carry around with you at all times?”
“Probably best.”
Irakli poured another coffee and stuffed a couple of small cakes into his mouth. His jaw worked with an erratic movement as it manipulated the cakes to the parts that still had teeth.
“Is it to do with that carpenter?”
Now Max felt the blow of mortality, and the sickening realisation that he had led himself into a trap. Every abominable scenario of destruction had glutted his imagination at some time, but death on a chicken run was never one.
“It happened in your village?”
“Yes.”
“You witnessed it?’
His speechlessness declared it. He may as well hang a ‘Shoot me’ sign round his neck.
“The way they left him, huh?” Irakli insinuated a false sincerity into the exchange. Max coughed limply. “Calling card.” The world focussed down to a single, tunnel view of Irakli’s Adam’s apple recoiling up and down his neck as he swallowed his cake. “That’s the Russian way. The face and the tackle.”
“Russian?”
“Russians.”
“Russians?”
“From Moscow.”
“From Moscow?”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“He’d been horsing around with their women.”
Suddenly huge breasts and a dark beauty drilling contempt down at him from a starless night, ghosted among the chickens and car wrecks. All the pieces fell into place. Something callous peeping beneath their gold bangled vulgarity had always disturbed him. Theirs was the over dressed trashiness of the horizontal es
cape from the Moscow gutter, their gaudy jewellery and cars coming to them courtesy of torture, murder and extortion. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?
They had rented one of Shota’s cottages and he would still have their details. Connections could be made. Identifying the killers would give him options. Among the chickens, in this sad and awful place, his life leaped again with purpose. The reaction was stuffed down; nothing was to be given away. He still wasn’t sure he would see the other side of Irakli’s ramshackle gate – so he stared at him as if all this news was meaningless.
“Moscow, eh?”
“Behind most of man’s trouble is a woman.”
Max smiled courteously. “How did you come by this information?”
Irakli smiled courteously back at him. Max felt a little foolish, “Of course I…” and it trailed off into the strutting and the clucks and the weight of an empty afternoon.
Irakli took another deep pull on his cigarette, and at the end of a long exhalation spat a dot of tobacco from his tongue tip. “I think I’ve got what you need,” and Max was left staring at his feathered admirers, pecking round his shoes for crumbs.
“Those bitches” he said to them, then crushed the last cake over the guano earth. “Eat up, girls.”
He had come to the chickens for protection and had found information, but the oddness of it left him shaky; he was paddling in a world in which he knew none of the rules. If Irakli knew about it, then the Georgian underworld knew about it and that put him in a very dangerous place. Irakli himself might pass on the information; despite the reasonable tone and gangster graciousness, he did not ply his trade under the terms and conditions of the equal opportunities scheme. Life was cheap; a contract could be taken out for a few Georgian units or American dollars.
All the edges of the world closed in and the struggles and concerns of his life were nothing more than a cavalcade of pointlessness. He was finished; the clock was ticking. What use was a gun? He could put a bullet in both those Slavic eyes and someone else would just come after him. Chance had condemned him. Time and place. Misfortune, bad serendipity. God. Fate. Flight was the only hope. But where and to what? Drink and suicide bustled forward as options. “Gia, you and your dick have got us all into trouble,” he sighed to the pecking chickens and became jealous of their primitive state. “We’ve something in common. We’re both waiting for the plucker,” and he swept the last cake crumbs off the shit-spattered table.
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