by Sarah Hall
‘Not farouche,’ said Henri.
Norm stated it clearly. ‘How can we discuss, with a girl like that, all the latest surface-to-air weapons systems?’
*
Wednesday night at my place, immersed in National Geographic channel, tucking into a six-pack of mini pork pies from Iceland; Henri telephoned the land line. He would only say it was urgent and better if I could come directly, Norm was picking me up in five.
King Crimson were mercifully silenced outside Henri’s garden wall when Norm twisted the ignition off. I was disappointed to see no silver Range Rover parked there.
Henri sat at his kitchen table staring down at what lay before him in full sparkling silver. It was the freshly minted F-86 Sabre he’d given to Josephine. Henri had placed the model on a piece of mirror so we could fully appreciate the workings on the undersides. For the unpainted aluminium factory-finish effect, she had used silver foil and pre-grained it; she had sanded the raised lines flush, working to give each piece of metallic skin which formed the aircraft a distinct and flawed identity. I noticed she had used a galvanic, goldish piece of discoloured foil to simulate the overheated metal around the jet pipe. A technique I’d heard of but never dared attempt.
In a quiet voice, Henri told us, ‘She is building them for sure. I had to ask what techniques she used and she explained some to me. Ideas I have never considered. She dropped it off one hour ago. The quality itself is barely credible but that she did this in less than four days. She cannot have slept.’
I tipped my head down to look in the mirror at the hand-painting on the drop tanks. They were each perfectly matched.
Norm sighed, ‘She has even got some of the raised rivets to show as worn-through silver, on the painted wing band sections.’
I nodded.
Henri leaned backwards and extended his two arms out before him, his unlikely, strong, short fingers gripping the table edge. ‘Gentlemen. To my mind, we have the privilege of being in the presence of one of the greatest scale modellers I have ever witnessed. Perhaps who has ever lived.’
*
Next Saturday, the males of Porto Baso Scale Modellers all became visibly nervous as the silver Range Rover crunched in on the gravel beneath the portico. A rare privilege, Henri had parked his Mercedes in his garage to clear the turning place; his main gates had remained flung open in welcome all morning.
It was also difficult not to note sudden transformations in our own physical appearances; gone were the baggy tropical shirts, darkened with the gelatinous tug of underarm sweat stains, cast aside were the bum bags strapped onto each of us, stuffed with watch tools, receipts, old barley sugars and magnifying glasses. We were all wearing suspiciously ironed slacks and chinos, in preference to the baggy tropical cut-offs that normally revealed our pale, skinny and shapeless legs, or Norm’s ankles, hammered into a blue cheese by varicose veins. Despite the warmth, Jesus sandals – often with black socks – were now replaced by deck shoes or in Henri’s case, Gucci loafers. We all seemed to have paid unmentioned trips to the barber for a tidy trim to what was left of our vanishing, yet still unruly hair.
Henri was extremely attentive; he shadowed Josephine, hovering at her right shoulder like a president’s translator on some state visit; nodding and speaking quietly, always in agreement. Often, when she was not looking, I caught Henri gazing steadily at her bleached eyelashes. Norm kept his distance and directed his shyness towards his MiG-15. Without sisters, educated from an early age in various obscure, male-only independent English boarding schools, and a lifelong bachelor, Norm viewed women with mixed fascination and suspicion – but never distaste.
We had – each of us – rather shameful works in progress: Norm his MiG, I had started in on the Sunderland, and Henri – from his vaults – had produced a big Airfix Mustang P-51 in 1:24.
She had surprised us by arriving with no work in progress. Instead, already, she now toured and examined our own sorrier efforts, pointing out and praising a nifty piece of paintwork on Norm’s, or suggesting to me – despite the fact it would be concealed inside the fuselage – that a rogue blob of hardened adhesive, which just showed, could be smoothed down. She produced her own pink emery board from the soft leather bag she had swung round her torso and which bounced upon her buttock. The emery board was stained with the colour of her painted fingernails.
I had forgotten how physically busy she always seemed to be. It was difficult to imagine her fulfilling the still, sedentary hours at a work surface required to build scale models to her own dazzling standard. Yet at one point, taking an interest in the cockpit section of Henri’s P-51, she suddenly sat down on the chair beside him with great directness; a tense, tightly controlled, determined stillness overcame her, the pretty face aggressively focused upon the model part.
When we broke for three Tetleys and an espresso for Henri, she sat Christine Keeler-style on a kitchen chair, chin rested on the golden hairs of her arm, joking with us, but she soon stood, spun the chair and sat again with her calf flung over her knee, jiggling a horizontal leathery sandal and golden anklet. Her mouth was working at gum but she still drank her tea down while continuing to chew. It was now clear from various unselfconscious movements which caused her vest to shift and bending in her short skirt, that the suntan was an all-over concern, maintained by private poolside sessions. Sipping her cuppa she suddenly asked, ‘Any you fellas, you ever have problems here and there?’
‘Problems?’ Norm smiled.
‘Yeah. That’s how I got into building model kits stuff; started them when I was in hospital; the last time for three months.’
Norm said, ‘Gosh. I’m, I’m sorry to hear that. Ill health or bit of an accident? Medical insurance was my line before retirement.’
‘No, Norman. My whole life was in a bit of a right tiddle. Put it this way, I was wearing my Sunday socks on Wednesdays. I had a massive cocaine and sex addiction. And a forty-a-day fag habit. Had to go to rehabilitation three different times, didn’t I?’
I bit my teeth down. Norm turned slightly away from her – his views on casual drug use were never located at the liberal end of the spectrum.
‘All puffed up on the devil’s dandruff, me and the ex, running wild round this town for three years on his silver Harley, dawn to dusk riding with god knows who. He couldn’t fulfil contracts by then – could he? – so strung out he took sabbatical. At one point Chucho, our usual coke dealer, was round our villa so much we just asked him to move into the guest apartment and work exclusively for us. Got him cleaning the pool and pottering in the garden too some days.’
Henri sipped urbanely at his small cup. His English was excellent but I wondered if he was fully understanding all of this in her quick-talk accent.
‘Too right I needed a hobby. When I was through the clinic that first time in England, which didn’t work, I talked to this older fellow. Now he was a serious old-timer. About you guys’ age.’
I winced and Norm slightly raised his teacup in protest.
‘Alcohol was his vice, could have poured him straight into the corners and he told me he had once shaken off a long smack habit back in the eighties. Not in a posh clinic or nothing we was in then but just on his jack jones in some bedsit. He tried twenty times but nothing clicked until a little Airfix aeroplane kit. Who would ever have credited it eh? He explained how reading some big long book, or getting aerosols and doing your own graffiti, or watching DVD box sets is all very open-ended, unstructured stuff, not with what you’d call a clear set outcome. Is it? Not when you’re trying to come off and then stay off and your life is in chaos. Now have a ponder: building a model kit is perfect therapy; a way forward. A start, a middle, an end. No matter how bad that old bloke was feeling, long as he went down the instructions, step 1 to 2, 3 to 4, it give him order and he’d get through withdrawals. Long as he had more of them models to build. When he got out he’d been skint, hadn’t he, but he’d shoplift kits to keep him straight: days, months, years, with no urges. Admit it,’ she
indicated Henri’s collection all around us, ‘when we build these models, we’re making a perfect little world, all of our own, the only one that we can control, where we can make this world stop and have stillness and ask it to stay that way, calmed forever and ever. That’s what’s so beautiful about them. Isn’t it? Have to be frank with you though. First time I heard all this from the geezer, I thought it was a right load of old bollocks and I come out that clinic and straight back onto the sniff and – even better – the fags.’
Norm interrupted. ‘If it’s, if it’s not at all an impertinent question, may I ask, may I ask, the drug addiction, the tobacco addictions you appear to have conquered. I am presuming the sexual . . . ? Conquered that yet?’
Good old Norm, straight in there, and this coming from a geezer who had recently told me his only idea of a dream week was to be left alone, naked, just him and his tube of haemorrhoid cream, applying it at will round the house.
She barked that hard and experienced laugh of hers. ‘Don’t you fret, Norman, I’m like a nun these days. The sex stuff came from cocaine the way hay fever comes from pollen. But things did get wilder and more out of hand up at the old villa with my ex. Even Chucho made for the hills – didn’t he – coke paranoia and the fears, right convinced he was that the Guardia would come calling what with the consumption amounts, all our car-key parties, prossies in the swimming pool and out on the speedboat all that summer. Dogging. Me and the ex got into that too. A right proper little buzz. We was into what they do here in the summer moonlight – jet-ski dogging at night, out behind Tanga Island. There’s people out there from all over Europe and bleedin’ beyond; but the nationalities break down, don’t they just? I’ve had a few cross-border experiences behind Tanga Island, haven’t I? I can tell you.’
Henri confirmed my translation fears, frowning benignly towards her. ‘You are fighting dogs on jet-skis behind Tanga Island?’
‘I’ll explain later, Henri,’ I said softly and tapped his shoulder to allow Joe to continue. ‘I’ll explain later.’
‘That’s me. I like to feel exhilaration and shame at the same time. One’s no fun without the other, that’s for sure. This’s what I found out about myself, nights in the bay and the beach behind Tanga Island. Didn’t I?’
Norm helplessly spoke again. ‘If I may chip in with a not impertinent question, just a question, my dear, but from for instance the medical insurance point of view, if I could say, on a, on a, on a practical level. How do you. On a jet-ski? Does one face one way or perhaps another way?’
‘Norman. Aren’t you just chock-a-block with curiosities? So was I, once. Watch out now, ’cause they have three- and even four-person jet-skis these days and I’ve seen it all in the field of personal water craft, haven’t I? Dogging’s not really swinging, mostly, it’s more about watching and being watched, isn’t it?’ She called this loudly, projecting her words through the open kitchen window as if she was expecting an answer from someone out there – working in the garden perhaps, pruning the swaying faces of pink poinsettia beyond the insect screen. She shrugged. ‘Or that’s how it starts, then I do more coke and it gets more swingy and I want a bit of everyone. But for beginners, a two-person jet-ski is a secure place to be. No one can climb up very quick, folk float around in circles out there, and jet-skis float round them, so everything that does happen is very consensual. On the beach: lot more comfy in this climate, isn’t it, all bikinied up like the other gals – but not for long of course. Different class, isn’t it, than a steamed-up Mondeo in a forest near Braintree, some heavy breather white-van-man, leaning in through your wound-down rear window? Mind you Norman, I seen some gruesome sights out there on Tanga Island in August that would put you right off your lunch. Monster of the Black Lagoon meets The Jeremy Kyle Show. But sometimes there’d be lovely-looking young couples out there. Or girls. Wouldn’t there? Get so high I didn’t care. Some nights I’d let them all have a shot at me while my husband and others watched like the paparazzi on a convicted celeb. Having it on with some right old gas men, wasn’t I, and a lot of us given up bothering with condoms by then. Main prob’ was just keeping our snorting grammes dry among all that bloody water. And bodily fluids round the nostrils and what have you?’
There was something of a pause.
I asked. ‘Literally gas men?’
‘Nah-nah. That’s just an expression we had, didn’t we: they’d serviced a right load of old boilers every night. Then me. Don’t forget. Exhilaration plus shame equals happy Joe! Thank you for successfully pumping up all my tyres.’ The harsh laugh, then she leaned over, opened the cupboard beneath the sink where the hinge movement both swings out a small litter bin and flips up its lid; here she spat a great pink-coloured gob of gum.
I reached and touched my forehead.
‘Third time the husband sent me through rehab in that big place in Hampshire. Realise now he was so keen on packing me off to English health farms to give himself more time with that bitch Marie Carmen from Churchill and Crozer; tucked up together in our king-size, cooking the books among other things. I felt a little bit of a prat over there but I eventually thought of that old fella, asked about an Airfix-type model to pass the time and the staff in the rehab rec room thought they had one. They dug round up the back of some old cupboard and sure enough, there it was. Been there years, hadn’t it; that same one I brought round here last week. Got my cement and paint and went to work; wised up that I had a bit of a knack for it as well. Stopped cocaine two years seven months and fifteen days ago; building them kits ever since and if I didn’t, one toot of the jizz and I’d be out behind Tanga Island with my bum up in the warm moonlight,’ she laughed joyously, completely forgiving and understanding of herself.
Before she had reversed her Range Rover out Henri’s drive that weekend, he had presented her with yet another gift. ‘Take your time with this one, do please,’ he told her. It was a De Havilland Mosquito, the same updated model Henri himself had built at age fourteen and still displayed in the glass cabinet. ‘Go carefully now,’ he said. ‘This is balsa-wood body, not plastic, so a bit harder to start off – like the real aircraft had a wooden body too so this is a tribute to accuracy – what do you say – a way to come very close to controlling the world. Follow the instructions. Enjoy. Delight,’ he smiled. He opened his arms but got it slightly wrong, ‘Be exhilarate.’
Balsa wood modelling was damn tricky but I reckoned it took more than a toy plane to exhilarate and shame Josephine.
We waved her off from the balcony as she backed out of the gravel drive and then the Range Rover accelerated uphill. Henri turned directly towards me, saying quickly, ‘Explain, explain,’ and when I did a look of hurt came upon Henri’s face and he groaned, ‘She’s not even French.’
*
The Thursday night following, my apartment buzzer sounded and when I put on my trousers and answered, Henri was right there in the communal corridor shoving a piece of paper at me. ‘It was crushed into my letterbox. Perhaps you need to translate but I believe I understand.’
I frowned, walking back in toward my living room and Henri followed leaving the front door wide open. He is taller than me and had to move his head from side to side with irritation to avoid my model aircraft hanging from threads on the ceiling. On lined paper featuring coloured macaws printed at each corner, in a childish hand, big looped circles over the i’s:
Listen here Henry the 8. Two years 7 months 18 days – your balls all model I couldnt do and thats me back on the bloody sniff. Arent I. Thought toot wd help me along to finish the thing but did not. Shouldnt have joined your PortoB Modellers.
goodbye Joe x x
‘Isn’t kidding on is she?’
Henri stared, astonished. ‘Kidding on? Non, non. I have been to her villa ringing the video phone. Talk to her neighbours. They tell me they have not see her and on Tuesday night, a commotion, the garage door remained wide open as she drove off down the hill in her Range Rover and she hasn’t been back. That’s not all.’ H
e opened his eyes wide. ‘The neighbour permitted me in, to look over the wall which separates their properties. Those are very large villas but you can still see into her rear gardens. Just floating there in her very big infinity pool with its rock waterfall.’
‘What?’
‘Thirty or forty plastic kits. All just beautifully constructed things as well – absolutely perfect but now ruined, floating in there. It is a real, real tragic thing to see, John. I wanted to remove them with the pool net.’ He paused. ‘I noticed the balsa-wood Mosquito floated there too. Half complete.’ He gave a wry smile, which angered me. He had obtained satisfaction at last.
‘Where has she gone?’
‘John. Behind the Range Rover she was towing her jet-ski.’
‘Oh I see. Like she said.’
‘She will destroy herself. We’ve got to get out there and after her. For the sake of scale modelling.’
‘I beg pardon.’
‘To find her.’
‘Out where?’
‘To the back of Tanga Island,’ he pointed to my front window. I hadn’t even bothered to put my blinds down though the tennis court apartments overlooked me. I stepped across. In the parking area of my residency below was Henri’s Mercedes. And there was Norm sat in the passenger seat wearing his King Crimson tour T-shirt. And behind the Mercedes on an aluminium trailer was a long, lime-green-coloured jet-ski.
‘Henri. You must be joking, where did you get that bloody thing?’
‘Antonmeister.’
‘What? Where?’
‘Antonmeister. My Austrian friend. A three-seater; took me out this afternoon for several hours to show me how to operate. It’s easy to conduct. In fact it’s wonderful. The throttle is like bike brakes on handlebars, vroom, vroom, in case you fall off so the power is cut. It even has a brake. Don’t tell Antonmeister we are using it in night times though.’
‘Henri, I am detecting the mother of all bad ideas here – it’s dangerous at night. You’re not even meant to take jet-skis out on water in darkness.’