Equivocator

by Stevie Davies

  He clutched it to him with both arms. Like a dead baby.

  ‘That’s his,’ I broke out. ‘It is. I know it is. What are you doing with it? Look – this mark. I made it. With a pin. Dad was furious when I did that. I sketched mountaineers planting a flag. Look. Here. See? I whined, The pin did it, Dad, not me, it was the pin! – And that made Dad laugh and he wasn’t cross any more. Where did you get it, Dr Salvatore? And – I’m sorry but – but why are you – ?’

  A fleet of cabs was parked in the nearby cul-de-sac. And now it was my turn to pursue the visitor. ‘Oh dear no,’ he said, quite coldly, and hugged the briefcase to his chest. ‘You are mistaken. Must fly.’

  2

  I am at no loss for information about you and your family; but I am at a loss where to begin. Shall I relate how your father Tromes was a slave in the house of Elpias, who kept an elementary school near the Temple of Theseus, and how he wore shackles on his legs and a timber collar round his neck? Or how your mother practised daylight nuptials in an outhouse next door to Heros the bone-setter, and so brought you up to act in tableaux vivants and to excel in minor parts on the stage?

  Demosthenes2

  In those days, I remind myself, I was intense and callow. If anyone wanted an aporia, I was a perfect example. Doubtless my memory of that first meeting is coloured out of all recognition. Had Salvatore really filched something from the library as I suspected and run off with it in a briefcase taken from my father? Surely not.

  ‘Rhys Salvatore,’ I say casually to Jarvis Bates of Norwich. ‘What do you know about him?’

  We’re both up early, fuelling ourselves for conference tedium. Jarvis tucks into a fry-up as if he hadn’t eaten for a week: the congealing grease scarcely looks appetising.

  ‘Well, only what people say.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Salvatore’s a riddle wrapped in an enigma. Or at least that’s what he likes you to think. Big reputation, mind, amongst postmodernists. He’s a magpie, spouts the lingo. And since Derrida died, he’s the one remaining oracle aboveground.’ Jarvis mops up the greasy yolk with a hank of bread and lolls back, sighing and patting his paunch as if to sympathise with its bursting plight. ‘You know, Seb, I really shouldn’t,’ he pleads. ‘But the grub is there, isn’t it? It needs hoovering up. Somebody’s got to do it.’ Jarvis looks pasty and tired. I think: you’re my age, but look at you.

  Off Jarvis waddles to fetch toast. Returning, he adds that no two witnesses see the same man. Salvatore’s a charmer all right, and a subtle, devious guy: in a kind of meaningless Cymric way. Since we’re enjoying Welsh hospitality, the foghorning of this sentiment seems less than tactful. I flush, ashamed for Bates, who isn’t remotely bothered.

  ‘Well now, I was guesting at an Oxford college,’ he goes on. ‘The gentry breakfasts at High Table are out of this world. Kedgeree! Who eats kedgeree nowadays? I sampled a bit of everything, just to show willing. Anyway, Salvatore had recently visited. The Fellows were praising his exquisite mind. As it turned out, nobody could reconstruct what Salvatore had been arguing for or against. I mean, who even knows what his subject is? The Terracotta Army? King Arthur? Sheherezade? Salvatore’s a Farsi speaker and nobody at the Oxford talk was: that was probably it. He blinded them with his own brand of postcolonialism.’

  ‘Really, he speaks Farsi?’ I think of Dad’s Iranian passion and how he adored the language and said: If you knew Farsi, Kernel, you wouldn’t want to speak English, Farsi is the most sensual, spiritual of tongues.

  ‘Yes,’ says Jarvis. ‘Rhys spent some time in Iran – BA – Before Ayatollah – and had a lucky escape apparently, come the Revolution. And then he suffered some kind of breakdown, went off the map for a while, fingers bright ginger from smoking. Likewise teeth. He must have got a new set of gnashers in the States. He doesn’t talk about any of that. He has a daughter apparently – he dotes on her – but I’ve never heard of a wife.’

  I dawdle over the international pages of the newspaper when Bates has gone to inspect his notes: he’s chairing all day, ‘for his sins’.

  The situation in Iran looks modestly hopeful: President Rouhani is extending an olive branch to the West, heretofore ‘The Great Satan’. Nobody who visits Iran ever really comes back home, I remember my father saying: I was a child and it stuck in mind because I thought it odd, given that he had come home. But then of course he didn’t. And Salvatore did. At about the same epoch.

  When I look up, Salvatore is in the breakfast queue, chatting with Mary Jones, that other anomaly, who, to the not quite universal disdain of her peers, claims to have teased surviving biological material out of dinosaur fossils sixty-five million years old. My attention snags on his briefcase. Salvatore cuddles it as he chats, as if he can feel it purr. Outside seabirds keen between the buildings, a desolation of gulls.

  I fold the newspaper, with the idea of returning to my room, skipping the morning’s presentations. I’ll ring Jesse and leave immediately after my own paper, or at least first thing tomorrow. I begin to text: I miss you so badly, let’s talk, really talk when I —

  But no. The guy materialises with his tray. ‘Now, don’t rush off, Seb. Coffee? I hope that’s how you like it?’

  Salvatore unloads his breakfast – croissants and several miniature pots of honey, for he’s telling me he has a sweet tooth and can’t get through a morning without a sugar hit.

  ‘Chatting to your good friend, Mary Jones,’ he says. ‘My fellow Welshwoman, so she claims. Ten generations back! She’s travelling west, to Fishguard and Haverfordwest, to trace her ancestors. Firstly, their memorials and monuments – in remote churchyards on the western edge of Wales. Then she plans to scout amongst the Joneses of Pembrokeshire for branches of her family that might share her DNA. What she’s done for dinosaurs she plans to do for Joneses! Told her there are a tidy lot of Joneses in Wales. She grinned and said: yeah, I know, Rhys, but the magic is in the quest. I can’t disagree with that.’

  Pleased with the southern drawl he’s produced to mimic Mary, Salvatore lodges the briefcase beside him and settles his jacket over the chair-back. ‘Let me remind you,’ he says, breaking open a croissant, ‘of where and when we first met.’

  ‘Manchester. 1986,’ I come in. ‘There was a fire in the library. And it turned out that valuable manuscripts had gone missing from the Rare Books Department.’

  ‘If memory serves, they thought it was an IRA bomb,’ Salvatore says in a measured way. ‘But I wasn’t meaning that. I knew you long before, Sebastian.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘I’m not saying that you can be expected to remember me. Oh dear. Are you quite yourself, Sebastian? Nothing wrong, is there?’

  Dad peers at me out of Rhys’s eyes. The voice seems to travel back across continents. Salvatore comes apart into flocks of whirling dots. Dread overwhelms me. Hang on, I tell myself: migraine aura, that’s all.

  Was there ever a time when Salvatore wasn’t looming? Deep in my childhood, yes, you were there.

  At the next table they’re discussing, with reference to Bishop Berkeley and Ludwig Wittgenstein, whether Tony Blair is a real person. Explosions of mirth.

  ‘Bit of a headache coming on.’

  Through the generalised hubbub, I overhear Salvatore breathing. Very loud, it seems. What’s the word? Stertorous. Getting worse. It’s offensive, the way he breathes. Intimate acts should remain just that, intimate acts. Keep yourself to yourself, I think. My distaste mounts, for now he’s introducing a morsel of honeyed bread into his moist mouth and I hear Salvatore swallow. He chafes his fingertips fussily to rid them of flakes of croissant. I hear that too, magnified. Then he goes on masticating. More and more invasively. Can he not control this obscene breathing, this in-your-face fuck-you breathing: I have to run or do him violence. I manage neither, fists wedged in my jacket pockets.

  It’s that bloody thing you used to get in your teens, I tell myself. Adolescent disgust wrought to a pitch of morbid intensity. Misophonia: the te
chnical diagnosis St Thomas’s Hospital revealed to my mother. At least there was a name for her son’s weirdness. It will pass, said the consultant, with adolescence. Probably.

  Salvatore’s nails scrape across the table-top as he rises to fetch more ‘reviving coffee’. Just go, I think, piss off. Go and breathe on someone else. He has left behind his jacket and briefcase.

  As I quit the refectory with long strides, my father’s briefcase under my arm, the blood-boiling rage subsides. There’s something badly wrong with me, I think. I need help, I have always needed it. The feeling I have is murderous. Turning round at the door, I see Salvatore approach our table with the coffee, pausing to pass the time of day with Jarvis Bates – and I recognise afresh Jack Messenger peering from his face.

  *

  The first evening lecture, by Professor Jones of Montana, is controversial. Last year Mary published her sensational discovery of microscopic quantities of living tissue surviving in dinosaur bones. That should, of course, be impossible, for bones turn literally to stone over the millennia, absorbing the minerals in the surrounding rock. Orthodoxy holds that the marrow would all have decayed and disappeared, millions of years ago. Her findings will radically change palaeontology, Mary insists, when her colleagues update their Victorian mentalities.

  Question-time swells into uproar. Mary’s expression is beatific: let asses bray, it’s what they do! The Chair calls for order. After all this drama, my post-migraine remarks on Monthu will appear a specious footnote to centuries of academic nitpicking. The dinosaurs are the real thing.

  I hardly care. I’ve got the briefcase, whose compartments I scoured until my fingers found the memory stick. In my pocket, it feels hot. Here is a find, disinterred from a deep stratum, potentially holding cryptic living tissue. But what am I looking for and how will it satisfy me to track that anachronistic stranger, my father? Yes, it will matter. I’ll have to halt my endless digressions and look into the face of truth, taking stock and considering the future. For Jesse and myself.

  I introduce the topic of the ostraca. Mary, in the front row, exhibits a repertoire of nervous tics, repressed during her talk. I praise her revolutionary work, adding that my own find might be thought modestly analogous to cellular tissue in ancient rock – well, clay, in this case. The ostraca have everything to tell us about the builders of the Pharaohs’ tombs.

  The letter I read aloud is from an unknown woman to a man whose wife she accuses of adultery: ‘Your wife’s crime,’ she spits, ‘is the Abomination of Monthu! I will make you recognise this continuous fornication which your wife has committed against you.’

  Jarvis Bates, in the Chair, rests folded arms on his paunch and ruminates; his eyelids droop and he slumbers. The lecture theatre is less than half full, conferrers having sloped off to the bar after the ritual stoning of Mary. She plucks at her pink cardigan, as if removing one by one the goads slung at her in the course of the evening. Rhys Salvatore sits forward intently, chin on hands. Perhaps he ponders the whereabouts of his briefcase.

  Although in point of fact, he all but offered it to me. A mnemonic and a lure.

  How long have I paused? The memory stick is a chip of ice. Rhys Salvatore’s face, I see, resembles that of a mourner. His expression is harrowing. His eyes grasp at mine and pull, hard. Looking down at my notes, I break his hold.

  Monthu, I explain, was a mighty god whose name appears on Egyptian marriage certificates. A force to be reckoned with. Who’d want to tangle with a Power originating in the murderous heat of the sun? One glance from Monthu might fry you to a crisp. Was the falcon-headed war god perhaps himself deceived by one of his three divine spouses? It is in the nature of men and gods to betray and be betrayed, I reflect. The face of Rhys Salvatore, the mourner in the black suit, twists with pain. But in general the expressions on the faces of those who might loosely be called my listeners advise, ‘Wake us up when you’ve something to say that means anything. Anything at all.’

  I take a few desultory questions. Someone explodes in spasms of sneezing and seems fated to keep it up to eternity. Weariness engulfs me: all this self-important blather I’ve devoted my life to. About beings who not only don’t exist but never have. Figments. Fragments of figments.

  And then it’s time to lead my party into the bowels of Egypt. In the college’s little Egypt Centre, the Room of the Dead is dim, precisely as it should be, for light licks the lustre off ancient paint. Each issued with a wind-up torch, we squint through glass at mummified shrews and kittens. There are rows of shabti figures, doll-like clay models representing the servants on whom the dead must depend in the Underworld: the Field of Reeds will require tilling and sowing and reaping. Each lazy dead person needed 401 labourers to complete a year’s work on his behalf, so these little guys are legion. The mummiform figures, equipped with hoes and mattocks and sacks, look tired out already. They are mud men, not faience, and fashioned for use not ornament.

  On a wall is a diagram of the Pyramid of the Pharaoh Unis in Saqqara, featuring the burial chamber and the room containing Unis’s Ka-statue, the perfect double of the Pharaoh. When you died, I explain, your soul split into two, the Ba departing every morning to keep an eye on your family, the Ka swanning off to the Land of Two Fields, to enjoy the luxury fruits of the shabtis’ labours. Every night Ka and Ba popped home for a night’s kip in the mummy. But what if your mummy had been raided or your Name erased? The Ba and Ka would be cut off. There was no way home. You would lose yourself forever.

  The conference members are fascinated. I recite to them the infamous Cannibal Hymn inscribed on the antechamber to Pharaoh Unis’s tomb.

  The sky rains down.

  The stars darken.

  The celestial vaults stagger.

  The bones of Aker tremble.

  The stars are stilled against them,

  at seeing Pharaoh rise as a Ba.

  A god who lives on his fathers and feeds on his mothers.

  Four thousand years back, Unis had been an unusually big eater. How to gain access to the power of the gods? Devour them! What else? Pharaoh’s mummy consumes one-by-one every god it meets. Only a handful of gods elude Unis’s cooking-pots, these being the divine cooks and bottle-washers. Otherwise down Pharaoh’s gullet they go: big gods for lunch, medium gods for dinner and tiddlers for a little light supper. The engorged Unis, I tell them, is a fantasy of omnipotence. And in the end, what is he? Still hungry.

  *

  At dinner Mary and I match one another glass for glass. She describes the Hell Creek Formation in the badlands of Montana, sketching a map on the back of the menu, in case I visit and feel like digging up a dinosaur.

  ‘Plenty of fossils to go round, Seb. Millions, literally. We make a useful little income for the Centre by charging amateur diggers. Everyone adores a dinosaur, after all.’

  ‘One day they’ll all be gone.’

  ‘Yeah. But by then humankind will have given way to the insects.’

  Rhys Salvatore, penned at a corner table amongst admirers, glances across with an expression of helpless yearning. He’s mouthing something: ‘See you afterwards?’

  Mary and I continue drinking through the speechifying. The main course, announces the head waiter, will shortly be served. There are some quite minor hitches in the kitchens. Salvatore waves; he beckons. He rises in his seat. Come, he seems to say, I want you, I need you. And I almost get up, I almost go.

  ‘Rhys is ogling you,’ Mary says. ‘Don’t look. Unless you fancy him, of course. Sorry. Just joking.’

  ‘Seriously though, Mary – what do you make of him?’

  ‘A friend of mine taught with him at Princeton. Brilliant, he said, charming, but a bit of a hyena – always loping after other people’s kills, was how Ben put it. He noticed that Salvatore’s a mimic. He do the Police in different voices! Watch out for when he’s least Valleys and most Dylan Thomas. And light-fingered, my friend said: no grasp of the difference between meum and tuum. But another friend said that was all surface. Sh
e said that when she heard her husband had died, Rhys happened to be with her. He held her – and cried with her. He stayed with her all night, just holding her. He fed her with a teaspoon when she couldn’t eat. Said he had been there and knew her grief. So take your pick really. Why?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Idle curiosity.’

  At last the main course arrives: risotto that’s been left out in the rain. Before we’ve finished, waiters are removing dishes and side-plates. They do so with baleful courtesy: they’ll not be sorry to see the back of us. One seems to have taken root directly behind me. If I turn my head slightly, I can make out his dark shape.

  Then he places one hand on my shoulder. His other hand comes down on the other shoulder. He gives the gentlest of gentle pushes.

  I swing round. Nobody there. Bloody hell. Too much bad plonk. And bad it is. Why do I never learn? Among the bits and shreds in my pocket, the memory stick seems to buzz. Or was that my mobile? Bed, I think. Then home. But Mary is still puzzling away at Salvatore.

  ‘In the end,’ she says, ‘isn’t he just another sad case? – I mean, look at him now. Does he look well? Even though he’s surrounded by avid disciples, does he look happy? You know what Plato says? – love is lack. Rhys is starved and nothing he swallows sustains him.’

  ‘And me?’

  ‘You’ve got a bit more going for you, Seb dear. The guy’s probably after your ostraca. Wants to relate them to his potty theories of Camelot and – I don’t know – Viking chessmen. God, these conferences,’ she says and yawns extravagantly. Mary doesn’t mind who hears and her voice is carrying. Heads swivel; her serial yawns start others off. The yawns go round and the paroxysmic speaker at the top table passes his hand over his gaping mouth and drones on.

  ‘Why do we do it, Seb? Tell me that! Your face feels like rubber at the end of any conference. Your mind has gone, you’re moronic for weeks, it comes over you to drown yourself in a handy lake. What’s that? A memory stick? You want to open it?’

  She plugs it into her tablet. ‘Your Father Wore a Wooden Collar, by Rhys Iwan Salvatore. Catchy title! After Thucydides. Good grief, four hundred pages of bullshit.’