The Hummingbird and the Bear

by Nicholas Hogg

  ‘That your bag, sir?’ asked a policeman, a sub-machine gun slung over his shoulder.

  ‘Yes, sorry.’ I’d wandered away looking for Kay in the crowd, terrified I’d miss her.

  ‘Liable to get taken away and destroyed if you leave it unattended.’

  I apologized again, stood beside my bag, next to the SWAT team and the dogs. I waited there in case Segur showed before she did. In case he wondered where she was going with a suitcase in the middle of the afternoon. My mind raced with thoughts of him catching her leaving, hitting her, beating her until she told him where I was. I’d seen him angry at the Giants game, seen him snap in a game of touch football. What was he capable of doing when pushed aside by his wife for another man? I didn’t care what he’d do to me, I truly didn’t. I was almost waiting for it. I was tapping my feet thinking what I’d do to him if anything had happened to her. Murderous thoughts of blood. I saw his doppelgänger three or four times, men hurrying for trains, checking their watches. All Segur for one horrifying second. The paranoia of terrorism in the station mixing with my worry for the woman I was running away with.

  So when she came jogging through the crowds, crying with the force of what we were doing, I hugged her off her feet, kissed her and erased the concourse, the police and the guns, the station announcer and the bustling passengers.

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t be here,’ she cried. ‘I ran. I couldn’t stand it, the tension.’

  The SWAT team stared like stone-faced judges. Before I offered to carry Kay’s bag I realized she didn’t have one.

  ‘No luggage?’

  ‘He isn’t working today. He’s at home watching football on TV. I said I was heading out to the grocery store.’

  I held her hand that bit harder, and then checked from which platform to catch a train to Newark airport. In case she changed her mind and returned home with a bag of shopping.

  III

  DID WE REALLY THINK we could board a plane, rise into the clouds then land in a new life? There and then, perhaps we did.

  My own father had. On the train to the airport I wondered about the day he got in a car and drove from the woman he’d pledged to have and to hold, till death them did part. The woman who bore his first son, who was about to give him a baby girl. But he drove from one house to another, and stayed there. For good. The fling that became a divorce, another marriage. The man who became the weekend dad, picking us up every other Saturday and taking us to the park, playing football and feeding ducks, to petting zoos and Sherwood Forest, before dropping us at the end of the driveway as my mother watched from the living room window.

  I truly believe that our father loved us. But from a distance, in a hidden space in his heart. We were always the symbols of his guilt, the son and daughter who reminded him of the woman he’d abandoned. When my half-brothers were born, twins who seemed no more my blood than any other boys, my father removed himself from our life as if he’d tendered his resignation from one parenthood to begin another.

  To save his future he cut the cord to his past. Once we moved in with Les he saw us less and less, till the weeks became months, finally a once a year gathering at Christmas.

  And he was still alive, wasn’t he? He’d survived the break-up. A happy man now, a wife and family. If he could do it, then I surely could too. Neither I nor Kay had kids, and I wasn’t even married.

  These were the thoughts I had as we rode that train to Newark airport. The cold comfort. The two of us stood in a vestibule, too nervous to sit, too afraid, perhaps, to even talk. We kissed and held each other, kept private any misgivings we had about running. I simply took the tightness of her hug as her conviction, and hoped this passion could replace what we were about to lose.

  ALTHOUGH THE IDEA OF my father’s elopement had made mine less difficult, even getting a last-minute flight the day before Thanksgiving wasn’t easy.

  We were hoping for west coast sunshine, but had to take a plane to New Orleans. A hurricane-ruined city wasn’t a tourist hotspot for the holidays, yet busy enough to mean we could only book separate seats. I’d leant over the passenger next to Kay, kissed her as if we weren’t going to see each other for days, then sat three rows back. I studied her dark hair, imagined running it through my fingers. I was thinking about Kay between looking at my watch and working out how long I had before calling Jenni, before she turned up at Heathrow and waited for a man who’d gotten on board a different plane.

  I sat beside a woman in a business suit reading the in-flight magazine, glossy photos of exotic beaches and foreign climes. Once we’d taken off and Manhattan had shrunk to a model souvenir, I ordered a rum and Coke from the flight attendant and asked her to send a drink to ‘the woman in 22F’.

  The attendant played along, and when Kay took the glass off the tray she twisted in her seat, sat up and silently toasted our getaway. And it was a getaway. Temporarily separated by three rows at 35,000 feet, once the plane touched down in New Orleans we would be together.

  I was terrified. The captain might as well have announced the engines had failed and we were going down in flames.

  My hand shook, rattling the ice in the glass as I knocked back the rum. I stared at the TV on the headrest. The choice of movies seemed ridiculous when I had a drama playing out in my own skin. But when I switched off the screen I saw myself reflected, the leading man, scared and guilty. So I closed my eyes, wondered if Kay was having second thoughts. Wondered if Jenni had chosen the outfit she planned to wear for my Heathrow welcome.

  When my head felt heavy and I rocked forward, I couldn’t tell if I was fainting or sleeping. I fought the sensation only once, jerking upright and looking from the cabin window to the cloudscape.

  How long I slept I wasn’t sure. In my dream I was sitting on a high stool in some Wild West saloon, drinking whiskey from the bottle. A bona fide cowboy. And the girl pouring my drinks was beautiful and dressed up in all that frilled finery of those times. All lace gloves and stocking tops. Kay. It was Kay. Flirting with me and laughing and kissing and pushing away the other men sloping over the bar and crassly trying to pick her up.

  And in this dream a man walked into the saloon wearing a beaten-up top hat and two long-barrelled pistols stuck in his waistband. He was dusty and dirty and spat on the wooden floor. When he looked at Kay he grinned and I could see his foul yellow teeth. I drew my gun and shot the man through the heart as if there were no more substance to him than a paper target.

  Then, as dreams will have it, in the next scene I was suddenly riding a horse. Kay was across the saddle and I wanted to kiss her, but she was looking past me and back to where we were coming from. I asked her what was wrong and she just shook her head before a long shadow advanced from the sunset. I could see that the shadow wore a top hat and when that same cowboy I’d killed in the saloon was level with us I knew it was Death himself, tall in the saddle and laughing.

  I woke and unbuckled my seatbelt, apologized for asking the woman next to me to move, then walked down the aisle and leant over to Kay and kissed her. To know for sure that she was real, that I was.

  WE TOOK A TAXI from the airport to the French Quarter, holding each other tight on the back seat, feeling as small as children in the night. It was too dark to see the shattered houses Katrina had left beyond the highway, but in the shadow and flicker of a foreign city on a car window I saw the flash of a country lane fading into dusk, stone walls and a farm. It was the last break we took together, North Wales, the three of us, my mother and my sister. We had a holiday cottage choked in ivy, damp rooms with musty blankets, a short drive from a golden beach whipped with surf where my mother, alone, would sit and read on a deckchair.

  ‘All this,’ said the Moroccan driver, waving his hands over the rooftops. ‘Water. And this part of the bridge, broken. Like a road into sky.’

  He dropped us outside the Hotel St Marie, a few blocks from the tacky neon of Bourbon Street. Ironwork balconies, unnervingly like my flat in Maida Vale, looked on to the cobblest
ones. I paid the driver, took Kay’s arm and walked into the foyer. A bouquet of fresh flowers sat on a glass table beneath a crystal chandelier.

  ‘I don’t care that it’ll be expensive,’ I said. ‘In fact the more the better.’ An abandonment of all values seemed appropriate, and I wanted a flagrant hotel bill to match the excessive act of eloping. Though what room could have cost that?

  But Kay stepped ahead of me to the counter. ‘Neither of us is paying.’ She waved a credit card, a joint account with Segur. She was so intent on spending his money that I didn’t protest.

  We kissed in the elevator. When the doors slid back I picked her up and carried her along the corridor to our room. Like newly-weds. She opened the door still in my arms, and I kicked it shut with my heel and fell with her on to the bed.

  ‘Lock us in,’ she said, unbuttoning my shirt.

  I did. Then I pulled off her boots, desperate to enter our world of touch and skin, trailed fingers, that strange elation of lovemaking where the body of another can lift you from your own mortal flesh and put you at some height above a bed of twisted sheets and tangled limbs, with no way of knowing where one self starts and the other ends.

  ‘WE HAVE TO TELL them,’ said Kay, naked on her back beside me, both of us staring at the ceiling. Street sounds of taxis and people heading out to drink filtered through the wooden shutters, erasing our refuge. ‘You’re supposed to be getting off a plane in a few hours.’

  I turned, laid my hand on the ridge of her pelvis. ‘And you were due home with groceries.’

  ‘Let’s get it over with, make the calls.’

  I wasn’t feeling brave, and suggested we text.

  ‘Text the end of six years?’

  ‘Shit.’

  Kay sat up. ‘They have a minibar in here?’ She found the fridge, pulled out a can of Coke and two shot-size bottles of Captain Morgan.

  ‘Dutch courage?’ I asked.

  ‘Something like that.’

  We drank, no toast this time. If we’d raised our glasses we’d have been no better than killers toasting a murder.

  ‘I can’t do it in front of you,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll go on the balcony.’

  I turned and walked out through the wooden shutters. Beyond the tiled roofs of Toulouse Street downtown New Orleans glowed. I was wrapped in a towel, in a city trying to resurrect itself from a devastating storm, and about to call my fiancée to tell her I was running away with another woman.

  I scrolled to her name and pressed call.

  On the second ring I hit cancel and looked at the skies above the Central Business District, the clouds illuminated by an electric glow. I could see bats flitting around TV antennae silhouetted like Chinese pictograms. It was humid, but cool. I had a couple of minutes before I’d get cold, and once again flipped open my phone. This time I scrolled to compose and typed: Work has gone haywire, so, so sorry, but I have to be here another week at least … will call later, might have to switch off phone that busy. x

  I was a coward. And a liar.

  But Kay wasn’t.

  ‘He went fucking crazy.’ She was on the chair, head down and crying, sniffing. ‘He didn’t understand at first. He could hear me, but it was as if he didn’t get the combination of words, that I was leaving him.’

  She wiped her nose on her hand, said she was sorry. ‘He just kept repeating, “No, no, no.” And then before he hung up he said, “Who do you think I am?”’

  I pictured his smashed phone fracturing into a thousand pieces. I imagined I was him. What rage would I be capable of if I were the one wronged?

  ‘We knew it wasn’t going to be easy,’ I said, wondering if Kay was saying sorry to me, or to Segur.

  ‘What did she say?’ asked Kay, raising her face, looking up at me with tear-streaked cheeks and bloodshot eyes. ‘You did tell her?’

  ‘Kind of.’ Now I felt guilty twice. Adultery and breaking the pact with Kay.

  ‘Kind of?’

  ‘I said I wasn’t coming back.’

  ‘Ever?’

  ‘Well, not on that plane.’

  ‘Don’t do this, Sam.’ She cried again. ‘Don’t make me feel alone.’ She dropped forward to the floor like a puppet suddenly cut from its strings.

  I had the sensation of my organs melting. I knelt before Kay, cupped her jaw and told her to look at me. ‘I am yours,’ I said. ‘I am you. Trust me. I’m here. I’ve come this far because of you. I’m in this room because you are, no other reason. You.’

  I kissed her wet face. I kissed her eyelids, her cheek and nose. She kissed me back and we rolled over and kissed again until sex was a drug, soma from our selves, the lives of others.

  IT WAS JUST AFTER midnight, officially Thanksgiving, and we were walking towards Bourbon Street for a drink.

  After the meltdown in the room we needed to get out, pretend, no matter how difficult the charade was to believe in, that we were a normal couple for an evening. We walked between the bars hand in hand, together. No threat, we thought, but our own fear and conscience.

  We had chicken burgers in a restaurant waiting to close, the two of us and a room full of empty chairs, before heading back out to Bourbon Street.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ I asked, looking at bartenders leaning in doorways offering two for one on cocktails and shooters.

  ‘Day before Thanksgiving, biggest family day of the year.’

  I thought of my mother, the strange idea that she was for ever frozen in time. Then I put my arm round Kay and brought us closer.

  We walked some more, had two beers in a Mexican place watching an old couple slowly waltz to music twice as fast as their steps. While peeling the label from her bottle Kay asked if we’d ever become like them, two dancers with no cares if we kept the beat.

  ‘Why not?’ I tipped back the end of my drink, veered from the dark thought that a future together was a fool’s paradise. I fought off the plain facts of where we’d live, a new job. ‘Butch and Sundance ran to South America,’ I said, pointing at a portrait above the bar of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, posing in twin bandoliers.

  ‘They got shot in Bolivia,’ Kay reminded me, adding she’d be happy to get stuck on the Gulf somewhere, find a beach and rub suntan oil into my back.

  I hooked my arm round her waist, grabbed her hard. She said I had so much to discover about her, whole novels under her skin.

  There and then, I nearly confessed that Segur had revealed how they met. But I stayed with the thought of stories inside us waiting to be told, and kept this idea running till we finished our beers and walked back to the hotel, past a strip bar.

  I watched Kay stare through the doors, glimpses of legs wrapped around steel poles. She turned to me, and before she repeated something I already knew, I told her.

  ‘He talked about it after the football game, the fight.’

  She shook her head. ‘It was such a secret. He was always scared his Wall Street buddies would find out he’d married a stripper. And then he goes and tells you.’

  We walked on. I said it meant nothing to me and that I’d advertise it to anyone and everyone without a care.

  ‘It was after that guy in the restaurant dropped his card and that fifty as the tip,’ Kay said. ‘And more than the money, it was a way of affirming myself again. I know that sounds fucked up, taking your clothes off in a roomful of strangers builds confidence, but on a night off I went into Manhattan and sat down in one of his clubs. High class places. The women strutted on stage and owned it. Every man in the room was pinned by them, by their bodies. I wanted that primal command over another, over a man.’

  We’d turned on to Toulouse Street, and could see our hotel on the corner.

  ‘Fuck it,’ she said, stopping. ‘Lets exorcise that demon.’

  I didn’t know what she meant.

  ‘I want a drink in that strip club, then I never want to go in one again.’

  We took a table at the back of the club. A circular stage, joined by an illuminated ca
twalk to a pair of velvet curtains where the women emerged, was the island at which everyone looked. Men on their own, college kids and couples. Boyfriends daring their girlfriends to walk up and slip dollar bills into G-strings and garters.

  Kay was quiet to begin with, watching the first two women dance and barely looking back at me. I watched them get naked, too, shedding what clothes they were wearing, skirts and jackets, an Army uniform, finally reduced to honed bodies obsessively taut and tanned.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Kay after a tall black girl picked up her silver bikini and vanished behind the curtains.

  ‘You’re the only woman in the room.’

  She shook her head, smiled. ‘Fake tits ruin a great body every time.’ Walking into the club she’d taken on the air of a different person. Defensive, tougher. A strutting femininity, yet vulnerable, younger. While sipping at her rum and Coke she told me how the girls she stripped with all came from some messed-up background. ‘And nine times out of ten it was something to do with a man.’

  I thought about her own flight from home. The stepfather.

  ‘Or just plain egomania.’

  If Kay was ready to tell me what had happened, a story of abuse, I was ready to find out. Odd as it would be while women danced around us in nothing but high heels. But she carried on talking about stripping, perhaps to avoid the history. ‘And nowhere is it more right now than being completely naked.’ She took a breath with this statement, waved the waiter over and ordered us two more drinks.

  ‘Then you put your clothes back on and walk outside, see your wrinkles in the mirror. The effort of being you. But at the same time wonder how these shiny young women working as secretaries get up every day and do the same shit.’

  ‘And then you met him.’

  Kay swirled the ice in her drink. ‘And a while later an Englishman holds out his umbrella.’ She smiled, took out the lime and sucked up the juice.