Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  ‘The earth was disgusted,’ I say.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Apocalyptio.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He sits away from me. He has a blanket around his waist and another around his shoulders, covering all his marks. I remember how in Venice he didn’t want me to look at him, wouldn’t let me take off his shirt. At first.

  The fire is building. Black smoke is drawn away on a slow slipstream. The smell of wood resin fills the hut, clears my head. The shadows of the flames move across the wall. The sky is the colour of old milk, feeble and hue-less. I keep thinking it is nearly night-time, that they would be looking for me, but it is still the middle of the day. The light seems to be receding. Time is slowing down.

  The light undulates across the old logs. Snowlight, thunderlight. It isn’t warming me. I am shaking so much the blanket keeps slipping.

  I hug my knees to my chest.

  ‘Now we know what happened to Pietr’s father,’ says Devlin.

  ‘Yes.’ My teeth are chattering.

  ‘The cold alone would get you. Never mind toxic water.’

  ‘Yes.’ I am rubbing my hands together under the blanket, trying to restore circulation, the way he had done. But my skin is cold. I think of him leaving. I am colder still.

  The logs crack and pop, the shadows writhe across the wall, long silences running between them. Through the window, snow falls from the frozen sky. I put my head on my knees. My forehead is chilled, the cold spreading through my head. My fingers are numb. The blanket loosens and slips, I sway.

  ‘Wait a minute.’ He takes the blanket from his shoulders and wraps it around me, sitting cross-legged behind me, putting his arms around me, rubbing my arms and forearms and legs with the same impersonal chafing he had done earlier.

  ‘I’m cold, Dev.’

  ‘For God’s sake.’

  My mouth quivers and I turn away but he pulls me so that I am lying against him. He rubs my arms again. But he has lost the previous rigid touch. He is rubbing into the skin now, not across it. His hands are slowing, lingering.

  ‘Don’t,’ he says, ‘call me that stupid name.’

  I feel the warmth of his chest through the back of my neck. I turn my head slowly, expecting him to move. He is still. My lips touch the base of his throat, the blackest marks. I feel the ridge where the needle made of bone had jabbed in, time and time again, under his skin. Where the mixture of ashes and coal had been forced in. I imagine it all done by firelight, under a cold blue moon, the jungle nearby, waiting.

  He still hasn’t moved. I turn my face, disappear into his black rivers, let my lower lip travel over the terrible absences. He shudders.

  ‘I’m cold,’ I say.

  I slip a hand around his neck and wait. I think of the night we met. I will him to think it too.

  He breathes out, slowly, and lowers his head. This time, I think, this time.

  His lips against mine. As I turn fully against him, I feel the warmth finally at my hip. His arms are around me. The heat runs up my spine. I am triumphant. I press myself against him, open my mouth. I want all of his black marks inside me. Like before.

  I must have said it out loud because he goes rigid and says, ‘Venice?’

  ‘I knew,’ I say drowsily. ‘The first time I saw you.’

  But he is already withdrawing, contracting. It is as if he is programmed to lash out at any tenderness. ‘Knew you could make a patsy of me?’

  For a moment I see him standing under a huge dark wave, but not running from it or raising his fist like Trident on the shore. ‘You want to torture yourself,’ I say. ‘You want to suffer.’

  ‘Isn’t that what you like about me?’ he says. ‘I’m – ’

  ‘Damaged.’

  ‘Careless. Like you.’ He wraps the blanket around his rigid shoulders. ‘I don’t get involved,’ he says. ‘Not after Borneo.’ But I see a faint line of sweat on his upper lip and I think, I haven’t lost you yet.

  ‘It was a mistake,’ he says. ‘It could have cost me my job.’

  Dark water begins falling around him. I am furious suddenly, if only to summon up the courage not to retreat.

  ‘Oh, come on, Dev. I bet you’re the only one in that pack of wolves who doesn’t fuck for his country.’

  His eyes are completely black in this light. ‘That’s what Mitch said. He never understood why I didn’t take – advantage – in Borneo.’

  ‘It’s because you’re not like them. You’re not, no matter what you tell yourself.’

  ‘I’m not like you,’ he says sharply.

  ‘I don’t want you to be. You don’t have to pretend with me.’

  He stares at me. There is some indefinable change around him as though an indistinct lightning has snaked through the air.

  ‘It’s all words with you,’ he says. ‘It’s never doing.’

  ‘It’s a different way of doing. It’s a prelude to doing – ’ I stand – ‘this.’ The blanket drops to the ground. He looks, then he deliberately raises his head, his eyes not leaving my face.

  He says, ‘I’m not being trapped again.’

  ‘Is that how you remember – ’ I couldn’t say it. ‘You read my diary. Do you think it was planned?’

  He hunches his shoulders.

  I kneel beside him, slowly, carefully. The thunderlight glints in the burning logs, giving the scars at his neck a red tinge. Even through my coldness I feel the heat from his body. He has warmed up.

  ‘I knew all about you,’ he says. ‘Before Venice.’

  I put my hand on his forearm. His skin flinches through the blanket.

  ‘I had files,’ he says.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Don’t you understand?’ he says loudly. ‘We were spying on you.’

  ‘I know.’

  He looks disbelieving.

  ‘My father had more money than God towards the end,’ I say. ‘What do you think he was spending it on?’

  ‘So you slept with me to find out more information?’

  ‘No.’ I debate what to tell him, how much he would believe. ‘I slept with you because there was nothing I needed to tell you.’

  ‘But – ’ he was floundering through dark water – ‘how did you know I wasn’t using you to get information?’

  I shift so my thigh rests against his leg. ‘I knew you wouldn’t.’

  ‘That’s bullshit,’ he says but something writhes below the dark water. In a moment he will figure it out; I have no idea how he will react.

  ‘There isn’t anything else to know,’ I say. ‘I didn’t know anything more.’

  ‘You knew I wouldn’t,’ he says slowly. He is putting it together: he is remembering the pages out of order on his desk, the faint clicks on his phone. The things I know about him.

  ‘I would have thought you would be happy.’ I shift closer, against him. ‘I’m not assuming men are dogs, that you’d sleep with anything.’

  He is distracted: thinking, thinking.

  ‘I know you don’t want to sleep with me,’ I say. He blinks – in shock? acceptance? – but he is rendered immobile, still struggling between past and present. I slip my left leg slowly across so I am sitting on his thighs, facing him. His hands come up automatically to hold my waist. His hands barely rest on my skin but I feel the tension in his fingers. If the conversation goes the wrong way . . .

  ‘I know you don’t want me,’ I say.

  ‘No.’

  I extend my hand until I am a pulse-beat from the jagged black teeth etched across his chest. He tenses. I don’t touch him, I let my hand stay there, feeling the heat from his body.

  ‘It’s not going to be like it was,’ I say.

  His hands tighten around my waist. ‘I was drunk.’

  Now I put my hand flat on his skin, below the collarbone, above the heart, in the deepest shadow.

  ‘I made you start drinking again,’ I say.

  He hesitates. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t
know.’ He sounds genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Because then you’d have an excuse. To deny it later.’

  ‘But that means – ’

  ‘You knew what you were going to do, Dev. You can’t call me premeditated and not know that about yourself.’ I start easing myself off him.

  ‘Wait . . . ’ he says. His hands grip me, holding me still.

  ‘Don’t you think I understand?’ I say. ‘There’s not so much difference between these – ’ I touch his chest ‘ – and these’. I turn my forearm so the firelight plays over the old pinpricks, the lonely words.

  ‘You think we’re so different,’ I say. ‘We’re not. The only difference is you found drinking to fill the hole.’

  ‘I read your files,’ he says. ‘I knew you weren’t who they thought you were. It was obvious once you discounted the rumours.’

  Here it comes. He is working his way there, he knows the answer, he just doesn’t want to see it yet.

  I try to move away from him, but he gives me a little shake. The black tide is rising again.

  ‘The files,’ he says.

  There is nothing I can do to stop it. I wonder how bad it will be. It is unknowable, how deep his pain is.

  We look at each other. We both remember how he channelled his pain before. At the thought of it, a shiver runs up my body, under his hands. I force myself to stay still.

  ‘You think you have no control when you lose control,’ I say. ‘Don’t you see losing control controls everything?’

  Deliberately, carefully, he rests his head against my heart. I feel his lips against my skin and I can’t help myself, I throw my head back. He opens his mouth, presses his teeth into my skin. I grip his head, run my fingers through his hair. I feel every strand, longer than my own. He pulls me down to him, so I am lying across him, looking up at him as he kisses me. I feel his tongue at the base of my throat. I am swimming in molten water. I cry out, a low humiliating sound. ‘Yes,’ I say. Then, ‘Yes.’

  He kisses me again, his hand running slowly down my back. He says, his fingers digging into my shoulders, ‘How much did you know about me?’

  I know I can’t lie. He would feel it. I am being dragged back into the cold. I resign myself. ‘Everything,’ I say.

  His face is as rigid as when he put the electronic bracelet on me.

  There is nothing to stop it. ‘Before Borneo.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘No, no.’

  He shoves me away.

  I say, ‘Why is me knowing about you worse than you knowing about me?’

  ‘Because I didn’t know you knew.’ He pushes me off his legs and stands, wrapping the blanket around his waist, staring into the fire.

  I am cold without him. I am sitting in a pool of darkness; dark water in my bones. The light trembles across the outline of his lower ribs, the hollow of his spine. He is cold too but not as cold as me. Anger always keeps him warm somehow.

  An ember falls onto the stone and he kneels to flick it back in. The firelight makes his body a frightening place of jagged cliffs and shadows. I pull the blanket around me and say, ‘I thought the one across your shoulders meant Forgive me.’

  He stiffens. ‘You got that out of me.’

  ‘That’s right, Dev. To blackmail you. Or talk you out of arresting me. Except that – gee, I forgot to do any of those things.’

  ‘If you knew from the start, then – ’ He can’t see the whole picture. It is beyond him. All he can do is fall back on what he knows, on what Mitch and his goons believe. I feel like saying to him, How much do you know about your own people?

  He’s shaking his head. ‘All this,’ he says slowly, ‘must be some kind of elaborate revenge.’

  The warmth he has given me is extinguished. But I refuse to pursue him. I sit back, against the wall. I give up, I think. Maybe this is how it is meant to end. It was always meant to be a punishment.

  ‘From the first moment,’ he says, ‘you knew it was me.’

  ‘The first moment I saw you,’ I say as evenly as I can through my shaking jaw, ‘I thought you had the blackest eyes of any blue-eyed man I had ever met.’

  I close my eyes. I see the garden, the light from the palazzo’s ballroom spilling onto the tiled terrace, the images of the great works of art projected on the high stone wall, the moonlight caught in falling stars in the fountain, the boats rocking in the black water at the jetty. The bells tolling in San Marco square, the vaporettos growling in the lagoon.

  Tremors run up my spine. I say, ‘I remember you sitting on the bench across from me. In the darkness past the fountain. You weren’t drinking. You were watching me.’

  ‘You knew why I was watching you,’ he says, his voice coming from a long way off.

  I shake my head, stiffly. ‘Not at first. The lawyers only gave me one photo of the man on the case. It wasn’t very clear.’

  I am sliding down into chilled water.

  ‘I thought you had lost too much weight for your build,’ I say drowsily. ‘Like my brother – eaten away by shadows. I thought you were ill under your tan. So a time spent in illness maybe. You should have been heavier. Cuddlier.’

  ‘I was never cuddly.’

  ‘Everyone’s cuddly, Dev.’

  ‘Don’t call me that.’

  I slide into ice. I try to remember his hands on me but the ache and throb of it are a long way away now. It isn’t going to happen again, I accept that.

  There is a long silence. I want to see whether he is looking at me but it is too much effort to raise my head. I feel like a clock running down.

  The water is in my chest now. In my heart. How odd, I think, I never had any thought of giving up in the lake.

  I force my lips apart. ‘Everyone’s lovable, Dev. No matter what you think.’

  The waters close over my head. I see the moon moving away from me through the dark water. I want it back – I want something. What did I want?

  ‘Ash,’ I say. ‘Ash.’

  I am back in the garden under the swollen yellow moon. It is late. The jetty is nearly deserted – just a few security guards minding the motorboats; all the other guests are inside. Voices escape in scraps through the tall windows of the marbled ballroom. Occasionally the spray from the five-tiered fountain floats on the breeze, falling across me like a cold veil. I raise my glass and imagine the two hundred guests seated at their tables, the tall red candles in silver holders, the waiters changing the crystal glasses between each of the nine courses. The smokers would be lingering on the upper balcony, admiring the view across the lagoon, pointing at the moonlight touching the wings of the golden lions lining San Marco square.

  Everyone is inside except for me and the man who sits across from me.

  I close the book in my lap and look at him. Did I know then? I think so. I recognised something. A way out of misery, perhaps that was all it was.

  He gets up and comes towards me. He is more sinewy up close. Gaunter, older.

  ‘Your guests are a rude lot,’ he says. ‘Eating while the party-giver goes without.’

  ‘I thought maybe you were welded to that chair.’

  ‘I heard your accent earlier.’

  ‘Really.’ I pick up the champagne bottle next to me. ‘Drink?’

  He smiles tightly and sits. ‘I’m at a stage where it doesn’t agree with me.’

  ‘I’m not hanging out with you then.’

  His mouth twists in what is supposed to be a smile but is more of a grimace. He raises his arm. ‘Waiter!’

  ‘Go on.’ I hold out the glass. He looks at it, with a look I had seen on my brother’s face. I am ashamed. I put the glass down.

  ‘I can get you a mineral water,’ I say. ‘Or orange juice. There’s caviar too. Russian purple. And smoked salmon thingies.’

  ‘Don’t try to be a hostess,’ he says. ‘It’s obvious your heart’s not in it.’

  ‘And I thought I was putting up a good pretence.’

  ‘I’m an expert,’ he says apologetically.

&
nbsp; ‘At hostesses?’

  ‘At pretences.’ He half turns away, as though the crack has been surprised out of him, as though he has surprised himself.

  I look up at the blue mist threaded across the yellow moon.

  ‘Maybe this should have been a masked ball,’ I say. ‘You can tell a lot about someone by the masks they wear.’

  He turns towards me on the bench, his face serious. ‘What mask would you wear?’

  ‘What mask would you?’

  ‘You first.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘All right – together. Three, two, one – ’

  ‘A happy face,’ I say just as he says, ‘Something happy.’

  ‘Well,’ he says. His fists are clenched on his knees. I am a little disconcerted myself.

  ‘It’s the goal of adult life,’ I say. ‘Pretending to be whole. Learning to get through life with the cracks. That’s what everyone does.’

  ‘That’s insane.’

  ‘I know.’ And we look at each other and laugh.

  Above us, Edward Steichen’s painting The Pond-Moonlight is projected on the high wall. A picture of darkness and light, the trees doubled by their reflection in the quiet water, the light breaking through radiantly in the centre, like the flare of a new day, like the flare of birth. Doubling the hope.

  I refill my glass, lift the champagne bottle at him. He turns his head.

  ‘Right, I forgot,’ I say. I run my fingers through my hair. A long dark clump comes away in my hand. ‘Stupid extensions,’ I say, throwing it away. It lies like a black snake in the flowerbed behind us. ‘That’ll give the gardeners a thrill,’ I say.

  ‘Another front page story.’

  The champagne sourly slicks my throat. ‘So you’ve come to have a look at the infamous Miss K?’

  He shifts back into the darkness. ‘I’m an Embassy drone,’ he says, trying to sound meek but not succeeding. ‘You sent us an invitation. I was dispatched to – ’

  ‘Spy?’

  ‘Find out why you invited us.’

  ‘What’s your verdict?’