Equivocator

by Stevie Davies

  Yes, Jesse says, he knows that: mechanical. When we were first together, he thought I was sleepwalking. In fact there were occasions in the past when I had sleepwalked. He’d shepherded me back to bed.

  ‘What was I doing?’

  ‘One time you tried to clamber into the mirror. I did my best not to wake you up, just guided you back to bed. You’d do things that were not really in character. Weird. You cleaned the bath with bleach. Another time you made toast and spread it with Marmite, which you normally dislike.’

  ‘You never said, Jesse.’

  ‘No. I didn’t like to. I felt it might disturb you.’ Jesse’s voice is softened.

  ‘Actually,’ I venture, cupping my hand around the weak flame of intimacy. ‘I used to love Marmite when I was a kid.’

  ‘Fuck the Marmite, Sebs. Fuck it, fuck the childhood memories. I’m not interested. You reek of nostalgia, did you know that? I’m assuming you admit to being awake when you go off cruising?’

  ‘I’m awake. Yes, of course I am. Jesus, Jesse—’

  ‘No, Sebs, I’m not Jesus, you see. I’m plain Jesse, with feet of common clay. I value decency. But all the rest of me is clayey too. Perhaps that’s your mistake.’

  He assumes I was bare-backing, he adds. Bringing back shit knows what infections. Bringing death into our bed.

  No, I say, oh no, never – it was only ever –

  ‘Only ever fucking what?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘But that’s it, I don’t know.’

  The shame of having to declare it. The frantic relief of rushing to offer Jesse honest reassurance. I haven’t risked his health or his life, never would. He flushes, his lip quivers – reassured? No. I can hear him thinking, You kissed me with that mouth.

  The joint has burnt down nearly to its tip: I motion him to finish it. He lies back against the cushions and the dressing gown falls open across his chest. Jesse gazes at me impartially as if trying to put his finger on what species of insect I am. A forensic stare. Drawing on the joint, he spits the ember into a saucer just in time.

  ‘So. Is there someone else, Jesse?’

  ‘How can you even ask that? What world do you live in, Sebs? You don’t know me, you don’t know me at all, do you?’

  In bed Jesse turns his back; then somehow, still high, we’re fucking. It feels wrong — it feels right — it hurts like hell – it gratifies – it’s an act of erotic vengeance, accepted in a spirit of remorse. Foul. Some force in my brain seethes and fizzes like a bulb that’s telling you it’s about to blow, it’s been going downhill for some time, and now it’s on the point of …

  When he drags himself off my back, slick skin sucks against skin and comes away with a cartoonish smacking sound. Shaking and bathed in cold sweat, I manoeuvre myself round in the bed, a heavy, yeastless dough of flesh. I flop down beside Jesse on the rucked sheets. Always afterwards we’d kiss, sliding asleep in one another’s arms. He has taught me this tender language of belonging. Now Jesse’s back is turned and we fail to kiss. Which feels – it’s an odd word – profane. The perishing bulb splutters a biblical phrase: If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out. Shivering convulsively, I edge on to my side, dragging up the duvet and placing one palm on Jesse’s back. Pluck it out and cast it from thee, pluck it out.Through the slats in the blinds, strips of dull daylight leak, ripplingover the back of Jesse’s head and bare shoulder. I nuzzle his neck with my forehead and cup his head in my hand. If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee.

  I remember a phrase I’d heard someone use in the dark past. Not to me. ‘If I fail you, take my eyes.’ Whoever said it covered both his eyes with his fingertips and I felt in that moment the pulsing jelly of my own eyes nestled beneath unsafe lids. One poke of a finger has the power to blind. It’s a monstrous forfeit to offer for a broken vow.

  Later, brushing my teeth, I hear Jesse showering. Through the frosted glass I see that he’s lathering his belly and groin repeatedly, as if he feels defiled. He’ll be in the theatre all day, he’s said, working on the set. With his friends.

  ‘By the way,’ he adds as he pads past me, a towel round his waist. ‘I forgot to give you this letter.’

  ‘I need to tell you, Jesse. Everything. Unreservedly. At least, everything I know. Not as an excuse – but as something I owe you. If you’ll hear me, darling, hear me out?’

  ‘Yeah. OK. But don’t call me darling. It makes me itch.’

  *

  The inscription on the envelope reads: Ava Salvatore – Translation Services – Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Turkish.

  Ah, the stalker’s daughter. Just what I needed! Chip off the old block? Ye gods, how many more Salvatores are going to come creeping out of the woodwork? Isn’t one of you more than enough? Sitting in the cafe at Paddington Station, near the sushi circling on its conveyor belt, I break the seal with my thumb, though I’m hardly interested. It’s Jesse who fills my mind’s horizons and imprints himself on every thought.

  Salvatore’s daughter writes briefly that she feels I should see the enclosed, which has just come to light. There is doubtless more, she says. She gives an address in Bristol and a phone number: I may get in touch if I wish. The enclosed is a scanned copy: the original, which of course I’m welcome to see, is not much clearer; in fact she would say that, counter-intuitively, it is less clear.

  When I open the enclosure, yes, I’m interested.

  Minute scrawl spiders down both sides of the sheet and, finding its path blocked, creeps into corners, then doubles back on itself, as the writer turns the page upside-down to write from bottom to top; the writing crams the margins, until scarcely a morsel of blank remains. He’s writing in pencil – and I know which pencil – and his paper supply has apparently run out.

  I smell something that cannot possibly be present: Turkish cigarette smoke. At home in Fulham, rays of compromised sunlight penetrated the blue-black swirl of toxins that passed for air in our living room: you saw how choked we were with Dad’s smoke. From his lungs into my own poured the rank breath of my childhood. He smoked above my crib. They both did. Ash fell on my pillow. Perhaps I shall die of it.

  The smell clung to his jacket, tweedy and bristly against my childish face. Dad! Daddy! What have you brought me? I’d leap up into his arms. The memory of this is so violent that it eclipses all thought of Jesse. Come home, I think, come back. There’d be some keepsake for me in his pocket, a fossil, a pebble, a pumice stone – something unique and precious. My boy eternal! Dad said, hunkering down to my level, cupping my face in both hands to inspect it before whirling me in the air.

  I smell the smoke and see the propelling pencil in his jacket pocket alongside a matching tortoise-shell fountain pen – the tools of his trade, to which Dad’s fingers would stray, to check that he was armed. This is my gun, he said. The long, fragile leads were kept in a tobacco tin, in a bulging lower pocket. These are my bullets. Woe betide a child who touched the forbidden tin.

  Where’s the mouth and where the tail of this letter? It’s written in fragments, illegibly dated. I’ll start here, with what looks like Azizam. Beloved. The endearment he used with my mother. How Salvatore’s daughter got hold of a letter to Elise I cannot imagine. I take a run at the whole screed before attempting to decode in detail.

  Jack cajoles. He’s just Azizam’s ‘hopeless shambling old Neddy the Donkey, led by the nose through the world by curiosity, hee-hawing all the way.’ Can his darling ever forgive him? Jack promises: never again. He tried to resist the wanderlust but obviously not hard enough, for here he sits, in yet another tight spot, awaiting transport. He asks Azizam to kiss their little one for him.

  Escaping the Ayatollah’s Revolution, Jack has hitched his wagon to an Iranian grandee with a plump wallet and a network of contacts. ‘Keep this letter safely – I’ll need to use it for THE Persian book, azizam.’ This book he confidently expects will make Jack Messenger one of the greats of all time. Walter Thesiger, Martha Gellhorn, Patrick Leigh F
ermor, eat your hearts out. And of course this letter is meant as copy. Life for my father was worthless unless written about.

  Ex-official of the National Iranian Oil Company, Mirza’s swinish activities under the Shah hardly bear thinking of: no wonder the guy needs to disappear. As Jack waits in Mirza’s opulent apartment (his servants will strip it of valuables when they leave, that’s their cut) the oilman bemoans his vanishing privilege. Bred in a harem, Mirza insists that the eight wives all got on a treat – and their sixty-odd offspring ditto. Those were the days, Mirza says. Our women were happy then.

  Dad’s Great Book will be entitled Man in a Burqa. He’ll be travelling as Mirza’s wife. Don’t worry, Mirza reassures him, nobody will violate your modesty. Jack finds this piquant. Visibly invisible, he’ll be a roaming eye. His Better Half hands over to the people-traffickers an eye-watering wad of cash, receiving in return false passports and detailed instructions. Keep your eyes down, Wife. No talking. Walk small. Mince. Like this. That’s the way. And hide your hands and wrists. Mirza, even in this emergency, chortles at Dad’s pantomime aptitude for his camped-up role. Happily, as an old pen-pusher, Dad’s hands are rather feminine.

  Hubby explains that the traffickers will not receive full payment until they’re safely in the West. He trusts the Kurdish loathing of the Turks, the Arabs, the Shah and the Ayatollah. You can rely on hatred. Hatred is sound. Hatred is glue.

  The cars arrive. In the burqa there’s a torrid microclimate and you breathe your own fiery carbon dioxide. A black-framed grid limits your view. Peripheral vision: nil. The thick fabric gusts in and out. It smells in here of fusty, ageless female misery. Jack trots through the airport in his master’s wake, as a wife must. A short-arse like him comes into his own. Nobody looks at Jack, for the simple reason that he is nobody.

  Once you’re on the plane, the Kurds have advised, fall asleep instantly, OK? Wake up as you’re landing. Dad’s wedged in a row of shrouded females. All nod off as soon as heads touch seats. What if they’re all males in drag? No way to find out.

  They taxi, lift off, bank; leave Teheran behind.

  As they land in Rezaiyeh, Hubby does not turn to acknowledge Wifey, who scuttles humbly in his wake. A Kurdish car takes them to the Turkish border. Up, up and up. At a shack on the mountain-side, a ravaged woman in rags – no teeth – wearing a turban – comes out carrying Russian automatic submachine-guns.

  Jack’s given a rifle; hides it in his burqa. I can feel him enjoying every moment, flying high. He has disappeared into his disguise and feels crazily safe. There’s snow in the hills, only a light dusting so far. They pass through a kind of – what can he call it? Arms fair! Never in his life has Jack seen such a gallimaufry of guns – antiques from British colonial days, Soviet stuff, old Nazi gear. Hubby’s Kurds, traders themselves, pause to hail others but then, with night approaching, they press on.

  I make out that they’ve reached a Kurdish Village, close to the Turkish border. Grubby barefoot kids; two haggard wives; soiled mattresses; upwards of forty guns leaning against the walls, museum-pieces. Hubby, used to fine dining, turns up his nose at the rice and meat they’re served; Jack hoovers up every scrap, coaxing his Other Half to eat. More snow is expected and they may have to hang around for weeks. As Hubby shivers, Jack sheds his burqa and is thrilled by cold and freedom.

  Three of Hubby’s brothers have been relieved of fingernails and genitals before being executed. Hubby weeps and Jack tries to offer comfort. ‘It’s strange, azizam, you start to care for one another. Intimately.’ Hubby blows his nose and, pulling himself together, graciously enquires after Jack’s family, his children; does he have sons?

  ‘Am choked, can’t reply at first. I say: I have a daughter.’

  Both men are bathed in tears. Hubby asks her name and age. Jack goes all to mush and it’s Mirza’s turn to comfort Jack.

  What? I must be misreading. Jack is asked – Have you a son? And my father replies that he has a daughter.

  My father is writing a letter to – Christ, I don’t know any more. I’ve no fucking idea. I’m confused, I must have misread. I look up and the station rocks with a thunder of wings. There’s a bird, a trapped pigeon.

  It definitely says daughter, I have a daughter.

  Who are you writing to, Jack? This cannot be Elise. There’s a knife in my chest. I feel the blade there, a raw pain in the trachea. I breathe shallow; my fingertips probe the burning bone. Thirty years ago Jack Messenger on the Iranian-Turkish border plunged a blade in his boy-child’s chest and left it there.

  No sons. Only a daughter.

  Mirza takes Jack’s hand and squeezes. And Jack is moved, it’s the strangest moment. The two of them burrow down under the cover together and share body-warmth. Jack dreams appalling dreams.

  Azizam is so young, he laments. He has lived a motley life. Is ashamed. He needs to unlock his heart about secrets he should have shared with her long ago. With azizam he can at last be wholly himself. Her heart-melting eyes. Her grace of being. He found her late in life and she accepted him with all his blemishes.

  ‘I was – am – mortally afraid to lose you.’

  As he scribbles, there on the mountain, fag drooping from the corner of his mouth, there’s something this constitutional liar finds himself wanting to confess to his … whatever she is … azizam.

  How much did this youngster know about him? I notice that he stops short of confessing anything significant. If he can get home from the Zagros Mountains, confession may never be exacted. He prudently keeps his secret – a wife his own age, a son – to himself. Because after all, there’s no chance that his lying can actually be expiated. He’d be required to choose and perhaps neither spouse would fancy living with such a lowlife.

  So off he goes again. He’s near the border now.

  Get up, get up, come on! Now! Jack’s been dead asleep. He thinks it’s Prep School all over again and he’s slept through the bell. Oh shit, a caning offence. Where is Rhys? Rhys, where are you? Not safe, not safe. Jack scrambles into consciousness and finds himself, again, in extremity.

  Burqa on. For a quarter of an hour they drive through snow and dark. – Get out, run, come on, hurry. Jack drags portly Hubby, hauls him, gets behind and shunts him along.

  The Turkish frontier post. The Kurds can be seen through the window of the guard post drinking, smoking and horsing about. Hubby and Jack wait silently. They don’t look at one another. Dawn breaks: a weird snow-light and salmon clouds in the east.

  Their Kurd appears, demanding a substantial bribe for the Turkish guard. An impossible sum. Hubby’s magician’s hand, vanishing into an inner pocket, emerges with the cash. Their Kurd will take yet another cut of this bonus, that’s understood..

  And they’re free to cross.

  If – no: when – they reach Istanbul, Jack will post this letter home and the woman known as azizam and her daughter can start expecting his return.

  *

  When I phone, Ava Salvatore assures me that, yes, sure, this is a perfectly good time. As good as any other. She’s been up all night but there you are, she says. She sounds businesslike, rather formidable, faintly irked by my stammerings. I see her as a starched sort of person, hair scraped back, in a dark suit. The echoes in the station forecourt pulse and the trapped pigeon has alighted to take advantage of the remains of a bagel amongst the polystyrene.

  Ava Salvatore explains that her stepfather has sent her, by Special Delivery, a packet of documents, including his will. She and I are named as joint heirs and co-executors. She thought best to get in touch at once.

  ‘Rhys is your stepfather? He always talks about you as his own daughter.’

  ‘Yes. He would. He’s a terrible plagiarist. Stolen property is his hobby.’

  ‘But your father … and my father …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you are my – ?’

  ‘Half sister, I gather. May I ask: what did you know about us?’

  I’m staring up at the Departu
res notices, in company with a horde of stressed-out passengers. We’re all frowning upwards for light. A train will move, but when, and from which platform, is not revealed. Everything has come to a standstill. Copper wiring, the tannoy announces, has been stolen from the track between Paddington and Reading.

  ‘What did I know about you? Nothing,’ I say. ‘I knew nothing whatever about you. Did you know – about us?’

  ‘Only for four days.’

  ‘Ah. Where did your family live?’

  She reveals her childhood address. I reveal mine. We both gasp. Our father took as his lover a girl not out of her teens. A man with a wife his own age and a son, he relished concealments and told himself: what they don’t know can’t hurt them. O come in, equivocator. And it seems he installed a second little brood a quarter of an hour’s walk from our house in Fulham, for ease of access. And when he died, his friend, having been turned down by my mother, stepped into the breach with the second family.

  Ava has no memory of her natural father. She has only ever known Rhys. Her mother was twenty-one when Jack disappeared; twenty-four when she married Rhys; not quite thirty when she died of cancer.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ My feet begin to shuffle me away from the departures board, to stand in the lee of a florist’s where no one is buying flowers. Passengers whisk past. A woman comes out, wearing a chador, and plunges an armful of lilies in a bucket. She wonders if she can help me and I shake my head.

  ‘Let us waste no tears on ancient history,’ says Ava brusquely.

  Where do we go from here? ‘Do you have any idea why your stepfather sent you the documents at this point?’

  ‘He wants us to make contact? I don’t know. I see him very little nowadays. You’re at this conference with him, I think, Sebastian?’

  It’s the first time Ava has spoken my name. I explain that I took some time out and I’m just going back for the last day – seeing my mother en route.

  ‘Your mother? She’s …?’ She hazards the question tentatively, and in a voice so soft I have to ask her to repeat the question.