Equivocator

by Stevie Davies

  Go to S, I told myself. Find Rhys Salvatore. But Salvatore’s oeuvre was incomprehensible. It flitted between languages with mandarin aplomb. It was on the trail of a cosmic aporia, so the blurbs indicated. But what might an aporia be, when it was at home? Apparently it had no home. An impasse, a state of puzzlement, a point of doubt and indecision, a kind of hole, explained a dictionary, where meaning deconstructs itself.

  Right. A hole. And this geezer is actually hunting for this insoluble impasse, I thought? The heroic search for a drain or sump? And he is paid for this?

  I headed towards Travel. Although I owned a copy of everything he wrote, and avoided reading them, I still found myself heading to the shelves in case another imprint might present a different face. All Dad’s books were out.

  *

  ‘I’ve been hoping to catch up with you.’ Salvatore seems ageless, though he must be bordering on elderly. At the same time he doesn’t appear terribly healthy. As if he didn’t sleep. ‘You are rather elusive, you know, Sebastian. Whenever I land, you take off.’

  This is so like what Jesse said last night – ‘You’re never here, Seb – even when you are here’ – that I can hardly breathe. I’m with Jesse under false pretences, is my partner’s theme. He knows: ‘I followed you,’ he blurted. ‘On one of your night-walks.’

  ‘I’ve several times attended conferences,‘ Salvatore continues. ‘For instance, the Cairo conference last year – where I missed you by a whisker! My daughter was with me. It would have been nice to introduce you. Anyway, we had a good conference and afterwards we stayed on a few days at Luxor, a haunt of yours. But I knew you and I would catch up with each other again. How are you?’

  ‘Fine, yes – thanks.’

  ‘Yes, but really. How are you?’

  If you wanted to get in touch, I think, there’s always the internet. There are so many ways of tracing people. Altogether too many. Nobody can hide these days. There’s a sense of déjà vu. You have been peering out of the shadows, I think, and shiver: and somehow with Dad’s eyes. Melting eyes, variable between blue and grey. Why am I thinking that? Ludicrous. I ought to ask point blank. But, if I ask, he might tell me.

  The tide: it’s advancing too swiftly. It waits until we’re not looking and makes a dash forwards.

  And now Salvatore – as he was always going to do – speaks Dad’s name.

  Jack Messenger, he says. He knew Jack. As schoolboys. And later, of course. Your father, he says, was a genius. And I was so sad when. Of course it was the loss to you and your. Yes. Oh, I can’t speak about it, forgive me. We lost touch, Salvatore mourns in a curious piping wail. And then when they brought back his. His remains. From Turkey. Did they ever find out how he?

  ‘No,’ I say, to cut him off, and start to rise. He doesn’t touch me but I feel detained, and sink back down.

  ‘Jack was the only genius I ever knew.’

  Aside from yourself, I don’t say.

  And then Salvatore raises the topic of the shed. The shed, he is saying, when they dug it up. Your father’s writing shed in the garden? The shed. The den. Not the shed itself of course, but what they found underneath.

  Perhaps it was my nightmares that have always convinced me that I saw the cadaver they unearthed. Right down to the smell that over the years has assailed me from time to time, passing a restaurant ventilator shaft or lugging rubbish out to the bin. I couldn’t possibly have seen the corpse. My mother and I had been evicted for the police search and stayed away for weeks. The body was not Dad’s. I never thought it was.

  ‘Everybody assumed …,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, but it wasn’t.’

  ‘No, of course not. And then. Last year. He was found and brought home. A kind of closure for you and your family.’

  Closure? What is this closure they all talk about?

  Salvatore wonders, by the way, whether Dad left a Persian manuscript or any letters from his last visit to Iran? He assumes not. Salvatore has been in touch with Jack’s publisher but the lady who used to edit him is either dead or has moved on (can’t people tell the difference?) and nobody appears to know anything.

  No, I say, there’s nothing. And if there were, wouldn’t it have been published? I think: the old guy’s just a nosy-parker with perfectly false teeth perched on a log pulling on his socks.

  ‘We were at school together – he was the friend of my youth, Sebastian. And I have access to papers of his – I’ll be happy to share – I want you to meet my daughter – ’

  I consult my watch. The sea has sidled nearer. Waves are tonguing in, making progress with every surge. How they covered all that ground is a mystery, unless we’ve been here far longer than I’m aware. Without answering, I excuse myself and, turning away, retrace my steps across the sand.

  ‘Don’t run off, Sebastian,’ he calls, as if I were a child escaping from leading reins, and he hurries behind me, panting, apologising for touching a nerve, if he has, he’s terribly sorry: what is my talk about this evening?

  ‘The Abomination of Monthu!’ I call, without slackening pace, and even to me this sounds thoroughly inane and my behaviour appears infantile. And I think: I’ll go home to Jesse now, and offer him some clarity. I’ll ask him please to forgive my follies, which is all they are, and to stay, for he’s all the world to me. I’ll say: it’s not so much falsehoods we live with as the habit of silence. Let me bring truth out into the open between us. And I know I won’t, because I’m shot through with all these voluptuous arrows and tied to a tree.

  *

  Manchester, 1986. It was, I think, the following day when I again spotted the Spanish Welshman from Princeton, in the library foyer where they exhibited a sixteenth century printing press. The machine resembled a mediaeval torture instrument, I always thought: a dual purpose thumb-screw and rack. Salvatore stood with folded arms, a scuffed briefcase at his feet. Dad had owned one like it, bought in Germany. He’d been hiking in the Schwarzwald searching out old Nazis to interview. Not finding any, he’d made some up off the top of his head, so I overheard him drunkenly boasting to some pal – and they both cracked up laughing. That book – that fiction – had sold well and it kept on selling, even or especially when its methodology and conclusions came into question.

  I sought the briefcase after he’d disappeared. I was thirteen. At first I accepted – and my mother bitterly believed, for reasons she never precisely disclosed – that Jack had deserted us. Without a word. Jack liked people to think he was working for the Soviets, she said, or the Shah, or the Bolivians; makes out he’s Philby and Maclean all rolled into one. And perhaps he was, how do I know? I’m changing my name, she said. Her eyes were half closed with weeping. (Don’t, I said, don’t change your name – it’s my name too). My mother sobbed, I heard her, into her pillow in the night. I sobbed too. There were no sightings. Dad’s bank account remained untouched.

  Jack Messenger had hung out in some of the world’s most iffy places. He’d become persona non grata in most of them. He gravitated towards turmoil and conflict, especially the kind of conflict that’s volatile, where spurious alliances twist and turn on one another. Jack haunted murderous frontiers and acquainted himself with gangsters, drug-pushers, people-smugglers. I understood none of that at the time. But I sensed the high-voltage excitement of Dad, waves of electricity streaming off his skin. I felt his charm when he flashed the searchlight of his attention on me. Dad was the one whose bedtime stories I hankered after, despite the fact that they kept me awake and seeded themselves in my imagination as lifelong nightmares.

  Books remained, and his second pair of specs, an Olivetti Lettera typewriter, but not the briefcase. It was intimately Dad. As a kid I’d enjoyed rooting around in its secret pockets. It had accompanied Jack wherever he went.

  He left eleven major works, the most famous being Swimming across theDesert as well as a big book on postcolonial Africa, Sunset, Sunrise. They are darkly witty, ironic, anecdotal – poised between devil-may care and diffidence. Jack presen
ts himself as an innocent abroad, in a state of permanent surprise as he barges into one revealing mishap after another. Chameleon Jack invents himself differently wherever he finds himself, and never as the father of this son. A sorrowing son who would once upon a time have followed him to the ends of the earth. It was years since I’d looked into Dad’s writings. The last time I’d dipped in, the book seemed to exhale at me with scalding breath. It hurt to read his suavely jaunty words about terrifying things – fratricide, massacres, trauma. I kept the books. I kept them closed.

  He wasn’t in the books anyway. A real self (if there was one) hunkered behind the Jack Messenger persona. Returning with his traveller’s tales, Dad would study my response and I began to appear in humorous preludes and codas. Well, a version of me. I featured as Kernel, the lad next door over the narrator’s fence, with scarred knees and a missing front tooth, given to uttering unintended ironies that cut the heroic wayfarer down to size.

  Larger than life despite his small stature, Jack was the teller of tales, dancer of dances. He’d visited the Sufi whirlers of Turkey and spun in our sitting-room wearing a flared skirt of my mother’s, rotating on the ball of one foot, faster and faster, like the wheeling planets, he said. He’d pick me up and spin me with him, till I was almost sick with a rapture of giddy giggling. – This is how the cosmos turns and now we are the cosmos, we – Jack and Sebastian Messenger – are the planets and the space between, we are all that is! Can’t you feel it? This would end in his tossing me up and catching me three times, ‘in a holy fashion’. He’d studied judo in Japan, the way of gentleness, the soft way, he’d say, upending me with one hand and showing me the trick of throwing him.

  At other times my father was remote, rancid. He sucked at the bottle into the early hours; next day we’d tiptoe round him. He might not get up till late afternoon: leave me fucking alone for fucksake. He’d lumber into his shed and reappear with a growth of stubble, snarling. He’d vanish altogether for weeks at a time. My parents were more often apart than together. And who was Jack when Dad wasn’t with us?

  Don’t be like your father, Seb. Don’t.

  I understand – and did, imperfectly, at the time – that my mother had no intention of blackening Dad’s name to me. Her plea burst out when her heart broke and afterwards I saw her, intelligent and just woman as she was – is, despite the frailty of age – attempting to rescind or soften what she’d said. But once the acid has spurted on your face, you’re condemned to wear the scar and confirm it daily in the mirror.

  I was free of them both, I told myself once I escaped to Manchester. Now for my own life.

  But Rhys Salvatore unleashed dark memories and presentiments. Here he was in the library foyer. He turned to the lift, without acknowledging me. Trailing him to the Rare Books and Manuscripts Room, I watched through the blinds as he settled his briefcase on the chair beside him and pulled on the obligatory white gloves to handle the documents. As he worked, he seemed to be grinning to himself. I think at this point I must have taken myself off to the reading room. That day turned out to be one of the most important of my life, or so I thought for the next few weeks and months and years, because of what happened with Justin Knight, taking the pair of us to the refectory for lunch and afterwards up to his mysterious room in the Tower.

  I was so flabbergasted when Justin sat down next to me, draping his arm across my chair-back, that I could hardly reply.

  ‘Sebastian, aren’t you? Wow, Egyptology! That is cool. Mummies and so on! I adore mummies.’

  Mummies do have allure. In point of fact I’ve never been particularly fascinated with Pharaohs’ processed cadavers. Their relentless carnality leaves me cold. It’s the ordinary folk that hold me bound – the artisans who dug and decorated the tombs. But I chatted to Justin about mummification as if it constituted the passionate centre of my intellectual life. I offered him a guided tour of the Egypt Centre. And Dr Rosalie David was unwrapping a mummy this very week. Would he like to observe?

  ‘Cool,’ he said. ‘But what about a bite to eat on the way?’

  The day began to whirl. It all happened so quickly, too quickly. That morning I was a virgin, hatefully a virgin, shamefully a virgin, and by late afternoon I had been (as I put it to myself) loved by a man.

  I am loved, I thought, I’m loved, Justin loves me, he loves me.

  That was my mistake, of course: Justin was wiling away an afternoon in the nicest way he knew, which involved giving as well as taking pleasure. Later I stood on Oxford Road and observed the flow of traffic, while tides of students broke and reformed around me. Life had opened its arms to Seb Messenger. He’d never be the same. I wanted to laugh and cry but did neither: just stood and observed the workmen, perched high on scaffolding, sand-blasting generations of soot off the Whitworth Hall and the Egypt Centre, revealing surfaces of pale, sunlit stone.

  Don’t spoil it for yourself, warned an inner voice. Don’t put pressure. Give him space. You have no call on Justin. Be satisfied.

  Be satisfied with hunger?

  You know what the wise course of action is, of course you do, but your feet direct you otherwise. My whole existence up to that afternoon felt drearily unlived. I lurked in the library, in case Justin returned. Maybe he’d be at a loose end and we could go for a drink or make that deferred tour of the mummies. Just as I was getting to my feet, there was a sizzling sound like rashers in a pan and all the lights went out. The library lay in twilight.

  ‘I’m not standing for this,’ muttered the Geek to himself. I hadn’t noticed him there, cruising the stacks alone, minus his parasite. ‘I’m just not. It’s beyond a joke.’

  What the hell was he playing at? He held a cigarette lighter up to the book titles, squinting. The cap clicked, the lighter sparked and there was a hiss. The flame held steady and then, as if a draught had found it, it leaned sideways and there was a stink of singed leather.

  ‘Oh shit. No! ’ He snapped the lighter off and scarpered. Alarms rang. The library began to evacuate again. Following the crowd, I made up my mind to let Justin take the next step in our affair (if it was an affair). Don’t look pathetic. You are pathetic but he doesn’t know that (probably) and you don’t have to advertise it.

  As I approached the exit, I thought my way around the wonders of Justin’s study bedroom: an emerald satin counterpane (or silk, was it?); a trio of African heads in polished wood, a carriage clock and an acoustic guitar.

  Was this Taste? Or was his room basically a bit of a junk shop? I brooded upon it all. How could I possibly invite this sophisticate round to my squalid pit, the two-roomed flat in Platt Lane, rich in nothing but my father’s books? Last night I’d encountered in my kitchen a cockroach in a crusted spillage of sugar. The insect crouched under the bilious light as if it owned the place. And there was I, bent over it, not in the least disgusted by my tenant, thinking of the god Khepri, associated with the scarab or dung beetle – and how the dung beetle’s antennae seemed to clasp the dung ball, rolling it over the sand, like the solar disc flanked by a pair of horns. The Egyptians had believed that the scarabs’ young emerged spontaneously from dung balls, self-generated. Khepri was key to rebirth and resurrection.

  I’d actually carted a chair into the kitchen and sat down to study this verminous visitor. A kind of Egyptian field-trip in deepest Rusholme. The insect’s forequarters were furiously busy. Fetching a magnifying glass, I observed the cockroach grasping the base of an antenna with its spiny little feet and threading this through its mouthparts. It was grooming so as to be able to sniff out the sugar-coated world festering around it, provided by myself for its family and friends.

  I’d have to clean, perhaps even fumigate, before I could invite my lover round. In the end, I’d flicked the roach off with my fingernail and it scuttled for cover in the wainscot. Too late, pal: I crunched it under my sole. Who knew what smashed cadavers lay on the mortuary world of my linoleum? Not that I never mopped that floor – but the soapy water did not, I suspected, penetrate
far beneath the surface muck.

  Despite the fire alarm, I lingered in the library. It was a way of pegging myself down. But then it happened.

  The flash and crash, a billowing of smoke, scared the crap out of me and I took to my heels. Outside amongst swirling crowds, a weird sense of repetition took over. For here, precisely where he’d stood at the time of the first exodus, was the visiting professor. Everything reels round; everything repeats itself, I thought, and gave a little jerk as you do when waking from the verge of sleep. In the afternoon’s excitements, I’d forgotten the guy. Salvatore had not forgotten me. He greeted me like an old friend, with the same look in his eyes – melting, endeared. ‘My dear Seb,’ he said, and reached out to touch my hand. Every nerve was still alive from Justin’s love-making: Salvatore’s touch seemed to scald my skin.

  Was I all right? Was it an IRA bomb this time, he wondered? It wasn’t so very long since the Brighton Bombing and the attempted assassination of the Thatcher cabinet. I shook my head but said no more. For some reason I was going to keep the Geek’s secret. I gaped at the scuffmarks on the professor’s briefcase. It was bulging – fuller than when he’d gone in.

  Every alarm in the city was going off. People were running. Fire engines and ambulances. Police. Cordons. Lights were set up in the quad, trained on the library, bright as those in a football ground.

  I thought, in my melodramatic way, of the Royal Library of Alexandria going up in flames: it had held a copy of every book in the world, or so they boasted. A hundred scholars resided there full-time, teaching and studying. The world’s intellectual heart pulsed in the city – a kind of university, with gardens and eateries. Whereupon along comes some lunatic Geek and torches half a million unique works. All incinerated in a moment. Can be done.

  ‘Well,’ said Salvatore. ‘I’m glad you’re unhurt, Sebastian. Let me buy you a meal. Look here, I want to come clean. About your father.’

  ‘Yes, and – excuse me – but – surely – your briefcase – ‘.