Paul filled our glasses: “And we owe it all to you,” he said to the woman. “Stuart, Barry, I’d like to propose a toast. To Cassandra.”
“Cassandra,” we repeated, and we drank. This time I did not nurse my drink. I needed it.
Then, as the name was still sinking in, Paul said, “Cassandra, this ridiculously attractive and talented young man is, as I am sure you know, Stuart Innes.”
“I know,” she said. “Actually, we’re very old friends.”
“Do tell,” said Barry.
“Well,” said Cassandra, “twenty years ago, Stuart wrote my name on his maths exercise notebook.”
She looked like the girl in my drawing, yes. Or like the girl in the photographs, all grown up. Sharp-faced. Intelligent. Assured.
I had never seen her before in my life.
“Hello Cassandra,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
We were in the wine bar beneath my flat. They serve food there, too. It’s more than just a wine bar.
I found myself talking to her as if she was someone I had known since childhood. And, I reminded myself, she wasn’t. I had only met her that evening. She still had ink-stains on her hands.
We had glanced at the menu, ordered the same thing—the vegetarian mezze—and when it had arrived, both started with the Dolmades, then moved on to the hummus.
“I made you up,” I told her.
It was not the first thing I had said; first we had talked about her community theatre, how she had become friends with Paul, his offer to her—a thousand pounds for this evening’s show—and how she had needed the money, but mostly said yes because it sounded like a fun adventure. Anyway, she said, she couldn’t say no when she heard my name mentioned. She thought it was fate.
That was when I said it. I was scared she would think I was mad, but I said it. “I made you up.”
“No,” she said. “You didn’t. I mean, obviously you didn’t. I’m really here.” Then she said, “Would you like to touch me?”
I looked at her. At her face, and her posture, at her eyes. She was everything I had ever dreamed of in a woman. Everything I had been missing in other women. “Yes,” I said. “Very much.”
“Let’s eat our dinner first,” she said. Then she said, “How long has it been since you were with a woman?”
“I’m not gay,” I protested. “I have girlfriends.”
“I know,” she said. “When was the last one?”
I tried to remember. Was it Brigitte? Or the stylist the ad agency had sent me to Iceland with? I was not certain. “Two years,” I said. “Perhaps three. I just haven’t met the right person yet.”
“You did once,” she said. She opened her handbag then, a big floppy purple thing, pulled out a cardboard folder, opened it, removed a piece of paper, tape-browned at the corners. “See?”
I remembered it. How could I not? It had hung above my bed for years. She was looking around, as if talking to someone beyond the curtain. Cassandra, it said, February 19th, 1985. And it was signed, Stuart Innes. There is something at the same time both embarrassing and heartwarming about seeing your handwriting from when you were fifteen.
“I came back from Canada in ’89,” she said. “My parents’ marriage fell apart, and Mum wanted to come home. I wondered about you, what you were doing, so I went to your old address. The house was empty. Windows were broken. It was obvious nobody lived there anymore. They’d knocked down the riding stables already—that made me so sad, I’d loved horses as a girl, obviously, but I walked through the house until I found your bedroom. It was obviously your bedroom, although all the furniture was gone. It still smelled like you. And this was still pinned to the wall. I didn’t think anyone would miss it.”
She smiled.
“Who are you?”
“Cassandra Carlisle. Aged 34. Former actress. Failed playwright. Now running a community theatre in Norwood. Drama therapy. Hall for rent. Four plays a year, plus workshops, and a local panto. Who are you, Stuart?”
“You know who I am.” Then, “You know I’ve never met you before, don’t you?”
She nodded. She said, “Poor Stuart. You live just above here, don’t you?”
“Yes. It’s a bit loud sometimes. But it’s handy for the tube. And the rent isn’t painful.”
“Let’s pay, and go upstairs.”
I reached out to touch the back of her hand. “Not yet,” she said, moving her hand away before I could touch her. “We should talk first.”
So we went upstairs.
“I like your flat,” she said. “It looks exactly like the kind of place I imagine you being.”
“It’s probably time to start thinking about getting something a bit bigger,” I told her, “But it does me fine. There’s good light out the back for my studio—you can’t get the effect now, at night. But it’s great for painting.”
It’s strange, bringing someone home. It makes you see the place you live as if you’ve not been there before. There are two oil paintings of me in the lounge, from my short-lived career as an artists’ model (I did not have the patience to stand and wait), blown-up advertising photos of me in the little kitchen and the loo, book covers with me on—romance covers, mostly, over the stairs.
I showed her the studio, and then the bedroom. She examined the Edwardian barber’s chair I had rescued from an ancient barbers’ that closed down in Shoreditch. She sat down on the chair, pulled off her shoes.
“Who was the first grown-up you liked?” she asked.
“Odd question. My mother, I suspect. Don’t know. Why?”
“I was three, perhaps four. He was a postman called Mister Postie. He’d come in his little post-van and bring me lovely things. Not every day. Just sometimes. Brown paper packages with my name on, and inside would be toys or sweets or something He had a funny, friendly face with a knobby nose.”
“And he was real? He sounds like somebody a kid would make up.”
“He drove a post-van inside the house. It wasn’t very big.”
She began to unbutton her blouse. It was cream-colored, still flecked with splatters of ink. “What’s the first thing you actually remember? Not something you were told you did. That you really remember?”
“Going to the seaside when I was three, with my mum and my dad.” “Do you remember it? Or do you remember being told about it?” “I don’t see what the point of this is . . . ?” She stood up, wiggled, stepped out of their skirt. She wore a white bra, dark green panties, frayed. Very human: not something you would wear to impress a new lover. I wondered what her breasts would look like, when the bra came off. I wanted to stroke them, to touch them to my lips.
She walked from the chair to the bed, where I was sitting. “Lie down, now. On that side of the bed. I’ll be next to you. Don’t touch me.”
I lay down, my hands at my sides. She said, “You’re so beautiful. I’m not honestly sure whether you’re my type. You would have been when I was fifteen, though. Nice and sweet and unthreatening. Artistic. Ponies. A riding stable. And I bet you never make a move on a girl unless you’re sure she’s ready, do you?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t suppose that I do.”
She lay down beside me.
“You can touch me now,” said Cassandra.
I had started thinking about Stuart again late last year. Stress, I think. Work was going well, up to a point, but I’d broken up with Pavel, who may or may not have been an actual bad hat although he certainly had his finger in many dodgy East European pies, and I was thinking about Internet dating. I had spent a stupid week joining the kind of websites that link you to old friends, and from there it was no distance to Jeremy “Scallie” Porter, and to Stuart Innes.
I don’t think I could do it anymore. I lack the single-mindedness. The attention to detail. Something else you lose when you get older.
Mister Postie used to come in his van when my parents had no time for me. He would smile his big gnomey smile, wink an eye at me, hand me a brown-
paper parcel with Cassandra written on in big block letters, and inside would be a chocolate, or a doll, or a book. His final present was a pink plastic microphone, and I would walk around the house singing or pretending to be on TV. It was the best present I had ever been given.
My parents did not ask about the gifts. I did not wonder who was actually sending them. They came with Mister Postie, who drove his little van down the hall and up to my bedroom door, and who always knocked three times. I was a demonstrative girl, and the next time I saw him, after the plastic microphone, I ran to him and threw my arms around his legs.
It’s hard to describe what happened then. He fell like snow, or like ash. For a moment I had been holding someone, then there was just powdery white stuff, and nothing.
I used to wish that Mr. Postie would come back, after that, but he never did. He was over. After a while, he became embarrassing to remember: I had fallen for that.
So strange. this room.
I wonder why I could ever have thought that somebody who made me happy when I was fifteen would make me happy now. But Stuart was perfect: the riding stables (with ponies), and the painting (which showed me he was sensitive), and the inexperience with girls (so I could be his first) and how very, very tall, dark and handsome he would be. I liked the name, too: it was vaguely Scottish and (to my mind) like the hero of a novel.
I wrote Stuart’s name on my exercise books.
I did not tell my friends the most important thing about Stuart: that I had made him up.
And now I’m getting up off the bed and looking down at the outline of a man, a silhouette in flour or ash or dust on the black satin bedspread, and I am getting into my clothes.
The photographs on the wall are fading too. I didn’t expect that. I wonder what will be left of his world in a few hours, wonder if I should have left well enough alone, a masturbatory fantasy, something reassuring and comforting. He would have gone through his life without ever really touching anyone, just a picture and a painting and a half-memory for a handful of people who barely ever thought of him anymore.
I leave the flat. There are still people at the wine bar downstairs. They are sitting at the table, in the corner, where Stuart and I had been sitting. The candle has burned way down but I imagine that it could almost be us. A man and a woman, in conversation. And soon enough, they will get up from their table and walk away, and the candle will be snuffed and the lights turned off, and that will be that for another night.
I hail a taxi. Climb in. For a moment—for, I hope, the last time—I find myself missing Stuart Innes.
Then I sit back in the seat of the taxi, and I let him go. I hope I can afford the taxi fare, and find myself wondering whether there will be a cheque in my bag in the morning, or just another blank sheet of paper. Then, more satisfied than not, I close my eyes, and I wait to be home.
Monsters don’t just happen. We make them, day by day, choice by choice. Francis Ford Coppola adapted Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness and re-set it from the Congo Free State at the turn of the century to 1968-1969 Viet Nam and Cambodia for his 1979 movie Apocalypse Now. Neither included zombies. Simon Green does.
HE SAID, LAUGHING
SIMON R. GREEN
Saigon. 1969. It isn’t Hell; but you can see Hell from here.
Viet Nam is another world; they do things differently here. It’s like going back into the Past, into the deep Past—into a primitive, even primordial place. Back to when we all lived in the jungle, because that was all there was. But it isn’t just the jungle that turns men into beasts; it’s being so far away from anything you can recognize as human, or humane. There is no law here, no morality, none of the old certainties. Or at least, not in any form we know, or can embrace.
Why cling to the rules of engagement, to honorable behavior, to civilized limits; when the enemy so clearly doesn’t? Why hide behind the discipline of being a soldier, when the enemy is willing to do anything, anything at all, to win? Why struggle to stay a man, when it’s so much easier to just let go, and be just another beast in the jungle?
Because if you can hang on long enough . . . you get to go home. Being sent to Viet Nam is like being thrown down into Hell, while knowing all the time that Heaven is just a short flight away. But even Heaven and Hell can get strangely mixed up, in a distant place like this. There are pleasures and satisfactions to be found in Hell, that are never even dreamed of in Heaven. And after a while, you have to wonder if the person you’ve become can ever go home. Can ever go back, to the person he was.
Monsters don’t just happen. We make them, day by day, choice by choice.
I was waiting for my court-martial, and they were taking their own sweet time about it. I knew they were planning something special for me. The first clue came when they put me up in this rat-infested hotel, rather than the cell where I belonged. The door wasn’t even locked. After all, where could I go? I was famous now. Everyone knew my face. Where could I go, who would have me, who would hide me, after the awful thing I’d done? I was told to wait, so I waited. The Army wasn’t finished with me yet. I wasn’t surprised. The Army could always find work for a monster, in Viet Nam.
They finally came for me in the early hours of the morning. It’s an old trick. Catch a man off guard, while he’s still half-drugged with sleep, and his physical and mental defenses are at their dimmest. Except I was up and out of bed and on my feet the moment I heard footsteps outside my door, hands reaching for weapons I wasn’t allowed any more. It’s the first thing you learn in country, if you want to stay alive in country. So when the two armed guards kicked my door in, I was waiting for them. I smiled at them, showing my teeth, because I knew that upset people. Apparently I don’t smile like a person any more.
The guards didn’t react. Just gestured for me to leave the room and walk ahead of them. I made a point of gathering up a few things I didn’t need, just to show I wasn’t going to be hurried; but I was more eager to get going than they were. Finally, someone had made a decision. The Army was either going to give me a mission, or put me up against a wall and shoot me. And I really wasn’t sure which I wanted most.
I ended up in a cramped little room, far away from anything like official channels. My armed guard closed the door carefully behind me, and locked it from the outside. There was a chair facing a desk, and a man sitting behind the desk. I sat down in the chair without waiting to be asked, and the man smiled. He was big, bulk rather than fat, and his chair made quiet sounds of protest whenever he shifted his weight. He had a wide happy face under a shaven head, and he wasn’t wearing a uniform. He could have been a civilian contractor, or any of a dozen kinds of businessman, but he wasn’t. I knew who he was, what he had to be. Perhaps because one monster can always recognize another.
“You’re CIA,” I said, and he nodded quickly, smiling delightedly.
“And people say you’re crazy. How little they know, Captain Marlowe.”
I studied him thoughtfully. Despite myself, I was intrigued. It had been a long time since I met anyone who wasn’t afraid of me. The CIA man had a slim gray folder set out on the desk before him. Couldn’t have had more than half a dozen pages in it, but then, I’d only done one thing that mattered since they dropped me off here and bet me I couldn’t survive. Well, I showed them.
“You know my name,” I said. “What do I call you?”
“You call me ‘Sir.’ ” He laughed silently, enjoying the old joke. “People like me don’t have names. You should know that. Most of the time we’re lucky if we have job descriptions. Names come and go, but the work goes on. And you know what kind of work I’m talking about. All the nasty, necessary things that the Government, and the People, don’t need to know about. I operate without restrictions, without orders, and a lot of the time I make use of people like you, Captain Marlowe, because no one’s more expendable than a man with a death sentence hanging over him. I can do anything I want with you; and no one will give a damn.”
“Situation entirely
normal, then,” I said. “Sir.”
He flashed me another of his wide, meaningless smiles, and leafed quickly through the papers in my file. There were photos too, and he took his time going through them. He didn’t flinch once. He finally closed the file, tapped the blank cover with a heavy finger a few times, and then met my gaze squarely.
“You have been a bad boy, haven’t you, Captain? One hundred and seventeen men, women, and children, including babes in arms, all wiped out, slaughtered, on one very busy afternoon, deep in country. You shot them until you ran out of bullets, you bayoneted them until the blade broke, and then you finished the rest off with the butt of your rifle, your bare hands, and a series of improvised blunt instruments. You broke in skulls, you tore out throats, you ripped out organs and you ate them. When your company finally caught up with you, you were sitting soaking your bare feet in the river, surrounded by the dead, soaked in their blood, calmly smoking a cigarette. Was it an enemy village, Captain?”
“No.”
“Did anyone attack you, threaten you?”
“No.”
“So why did you butcher an entire village of civilians, Captain Marlowe?”
I showed him my smile again. “Because it was there. Because I didn’t like the way they looked at me. Does it matter?”
“Not particularly, no.” The CIA man leaned forward across the desk, fixing me with his unblinking happy gaze. “You’re not here to be court-martialed, Captain. It has already been decided, at extremely high levels, that none of this ever happened. There never was any massacre; there never was any crazy captain. Far too upsetting, for the folks at home. Instead, I have been empowered to offer you a very special, very important, very . . . sensitive mission. Carry it out successfully, and this file will disappear. You will be given an honorable discharge, and allowed to go home.”
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