An hour or so later the bus swung into a garage, a rest stop. Children offered peanuts and sweets as I stepped down to the forecourt. I walked to the toilet block watching the sky, wisps of cotton on the vault of blue.
I pissed dark yellow. Something was wrong. But what ailed my body seemed irrelevant to my life.
Turning from the filthy pan I noticed a rat sitting in one of the urinals. A tall, brown rat. Watching me walk back out to the sunlit gas station.
Foil bunting rippled from the fence. I thought I should drink something and stood in line with a truckload of Mexican soldiers who bought plastic bags of Fanta which had been decanted from the glass bottles by the stall holder. I sucked up two bags through a straw.
The bus sounded the horn. The passengers headed back to the same seats that they’d arrived here on, myself included, again sliding along the bench to stare from the window at the soldiers clambering aboard their truck, the barefoot children making last attempts to sell their sweets and nuts.
A few miles on the bus shuddered to another halt by a field of maize. And when three policemen boarded in bright baize uniforms, I had no fear. I knew the police robbed tourists in northern Mexico, took watches and money from foreigners. But what could they take from me that I hadn’t already lost?
Armed with automatic weapons they nodded to the driver and slowly walked the aisle. None of the passengers caught their eyes. A baby-faced cadet with the fluff of a first moustache and an Uzi with a butt extension took the seat beside me. I shuffled over. The boy immediately fell asleep with his head rocked back and mouth open. The gun was aimed at my gut.
And the boy had fallen asleep with his hand on the trigger. When I saw that the safety was off I stared at the dark hole of the muzzle as if looking into the black heart of a dying star, waiting to be taken with the light.
But an old man with tobacco-stained hands and a beaten fedora saw the gun and carefully nudged the cadet.
The boy looked at me. Then he looked at the safety and flicked it on with his thumb and slept again.
Dust hung above the highway. Fields and fallen-down shacks of corrugated and rusting steel. A lizard scuttled along the window of the bus. What did it make of the rushing scene beyond the glass? What did it think when the bus stopped on a road absent of houses or people and the three policemen got out and waded into another field of maize?
I watched them as we pulled away. The empty seat.
Above a mountain range to the west, the bruised cloud gathered. Rain flashed in the setting sun. And I thought of Kay, what she said about a river floating a body out to sea.
‘Am I in you?’ she’d asked, on her back, the blood blooming through the front of her dress.
‘Yes,’ I’d answered. ‘Yes.’
She’d smiled, lifted her head to kiss me, before her body went limp in my arms.
I sat holding her until the dusk burned itself out, until the world was more shadow than light. I kissed her lips till they went cold. Her cheeks and the ridges of her eyebrows. I ran my hands through her hair and brushed it from her face and spoke softly to her and told her that she couldn’t leave me because I wanted to live with her in a house by the ocean where the wind sang in the palm trees and waves thudded the shore at night like a beating heart.
Then I said that I loved her and that the word was feeble against the depth of what I felt.
And before the men in uniform came down the bank, guns drawn, lights and sirens wailing, I pushed her into the river.
The white dress billowing around her, glowing.
IT WAS DARK WHEN the bus pulled into Monterrey. Shuttered shops and wide boulevards. Palm trees growing around streetlights, like clawed hands closing on a candle flame. Before we neared the manicured gardens of the lit suburbs the overcast night had pulled a starless blanket over the world. Only the driver, reflected on the windscreen in the glow of the speedo, or the flashes of passing car beams, was proof that he wasn’t the ferryman taking us across the river to Hades.
Then the station, bright and busy, people shuttling through the terminal, families waving at departing relatives, welcoming loved ones. I was the last to file from the bus, watching the other passengers carry off bags, the last of the food they’d cooked for the journey. I had no luggage, no change of clothes for my bloodstained shirt.
Coming down from the steps on to the station concourse, stepping round a husband hugging and kissing his wife, I was hit so hard that new blood splashed upon the old.
‘YOU FUCKER,’ SHE SAID, hitting me again. ‘Fucker, fucker.’ On the third blow I realized it was her. I never guessed that a fist striking my face could feel so vital.
‘You stupid, stupid man.’
She only stopped hitting me when the Mexican husband who before had been holding his wife’s hands now held hers.
‘Please, señor,’ he said to me.
WHEN I HUGGED JENNI she kept her arms by her side. Rigid and taut. But there and then, I was grateful for that much contact.
And we were a garish sideshow to the audience of the bus station. On the bright concourse, Jenni, immaculate as I’d ever seen her, and me, the dishevelled man, the dirty bandage on my hand, new blood leaking from a cut lip. Not one soul who set eyes on that scene didn’t know that another woman was involved.
‘Thank God you’re here,’ I remember saying. And ‘Sorry’, a hundred times. A thousand. And each utterance of the word as useless as the one before, the one after.
Before the station security guards came over and ushered us towards the exit, Jenni lifted her chin and walked away, with me following, the slinking dog. I asked her a banal question about how she got here, but she simply shook her head in disgust and strode ahead.
As we climbed into a taxi a beggar unwisely approached us with his hand out. Jenni cursed. ‘One is enough,’ she spat before I sat on the seat beside her.
SHE LOOKED OUT OF the taxi window, not at me. City lights shone through her hair and across her face, the first, gleaming, silent tears. When I reached out to put my hand on hers she snatched it away. ‘Please don’t touch me.’
So instead of another useless sorry I said, ‘Thank you.’
‘For what?’ she said, darting a look at my eyes with a flash an anger that could either set fire to whatever was left of me, or rekindle it.
I told her she’d probably saved my life.
When the taxi slowed for red signals I was terrified of the silence. I had the sensation of shrinking, getting smaller and smaller on the wide leather seats, sitting beside a woman who suddenly seemed to tower over me.
‘Just imagine,’ she began, staring through the windscreen at the traffic, ‘for one second, for one split fucking second, that this had happened the other way round.’
I started a reply, but again she turned and blazed a look, shouting, ‘I’m fucking talking right now. Not you. Imagine, I said. Imagine you’re asleep in our bed while I’m, as far as you fucking know, rushed off my feet on some urgent project, when you’re woken by a phone call at four o’clock in the morning, a serious and concerned man announcing that he’s from the British Consulate in Mexico. Mexico? The last thing I heard, well, read, in what turns out to be a lying gutless text, was that you were needed in New York for another week.’
Then she paused, seemed to fight the air for her breath, rapidly inhaling, exhaling. When I asked if she was okay, if she wanted me to open the window, she screamed again, ‘Fucking imagine it. From when you actually loved me. Imagine that call. A voice on the phone in the dead of night telling you I was in prison in a country you had no idea I was going to.’
Before I even formed the word with my mouth she warned me not to apologize.
‘Because the next man I get on the phone, this fucking comandante, is telling me that yes he could let you go, but that I should know another man had a vested interest in your release. He said the security arrangements would be an additional cost. A fucking bribe.’
Jenni had told the comandante where to go, that s
he’d be speaking to the British Embassy and that they’d pay him a visit. Before she hung up the comandante had subtly asked her if she knew about the ‘other woman’.
‘Other fucking woman. Oh, he had my attention then.’
The comandante, as he had done to me, spun her tales from the information he left out. The glowing dress, the reasons one man fires a gun at another. And that if he looked from the police station window he could see a man sitting across the road on his third coffee, the same man who’d already offered to pay for my release. Jenni didn’t hang up the phone. Because she cared about me, because she loved me, she put aside the thoughts of why I was swimming across a river with a woman not her, paid the bribe, then flew out on the first flight she could get to make sure I really was safe.
‘I’m ready to spend my life with you, my whole fucking life. Then this.’
And that was the full stop to all she wanted to say right then. Next she turned to the window and cried. The entire way back to the hotel the taxi driver and I listened to her sobbing. All I could do to punctuate her tears was say her name over and over.
I sat on the floor in the hotel room. Knees pulled to my chest, back against the wall. On the bed rested Jenni’s suitcase, yet to be unpacked. She was standing at the window, looking out on the lights of Monterrey, a frame of black and neon.
‘How,’ she said, splitting the chrysalis of silence growing since we’d walked from the taxi and into the reception where she’d clinically booked me in with the concierge as if I were a visiting conference guest.
‘How did I get here?’
Finally, when she turned from the city to the room, to me, I presumed she wanted me to tell her.
‘Can you do it without lying?’
I told her I could and she shook her head. ‘Bullshit.’
When I started talking about the wedding she said, ‘Stop.’ She was again looking at the Monterrey rooftops, the wavering lights. I was an unbearable sight. And not until she moved from the window to open her suitcase was I again physically present, tolerated in her space.
‘Stupid fucking thing.’
Because the zip jammed I had a reason to stand up. For a few brief seconds, as I pulled out the strip of material snagged in the teeth, we occupied the present, together. Not the unbearable weight of the recent past, pressing so hard against the future it had broken it into pieces.
‘You stink,’ she said.
I did. Of river and prison. I suggested I should run a bath. She didn’t answer. She just sat on the bed and twisted and untwisted an elasticated hair tie round her fingers.
I said, ‘I do love you, you know.’
She shook her head again. Told me to wash.
In the bathroom I avoided the mirror, dared not look at myself. Every act took a monumental effort. Pushing in the plug, turning the taps. Taking off my tired and bloodied clothes. I sat on the toilet seat and rolled off my socks, unbuckled my trousers and let them fall when I stood up and removed my underwear.
Then I sat in the bath and cried. Felt my face contort like an inconsolable child’s. I curled into a ball and put my head in my arms, eyes scrunched closed, and once more saw the red blood flower through the front of her dress, the fear behind her dying smile.
When the water went cold I sat up and realized Jenni had been watching me weep, sitting on the tiled floor against the door frame. And for the first time since hitting me at the bus station, she looked at me. With more pity than malice.
WITH A TOWEL WRAPPED round my waist I sat on the very corner of the bed and told her what she didn’t want to hear, reciting the story backwards, from the bus to the prison. The river. Segur and a gun. And when Jenni wept for Kay, I did too.
She was lying on the bed, cold in the air-conditioning I couldn’t work out how to adjust for her. Fully dressed under the covers. First crying into the pillow, then head back staring at the ceiling, blankly listening to me confess.
Soon she was demanding details. The trip to the Catskills, New York. When I got to that day in August she suddenly said, ‘If the other woman weren’t me, and I were just hearing about people I didn’t know, I might be sympathetic. If that’s the right word, the right feeling for two adulterers.’ She paused and sat up on her elbows. ‘But I’m the one who was supposed to be left behind.’
I said something nebulous about fate, that I was here in a room with her. Not Kay.
‘Oh how fucking poetic. And if she’d made it across the river with you? Then what?’
Before I defended myself she said, ‘Poor Kay.’
I stood from my corner of the bed and walked over to the window. My pale, nearly naked phantom reflected on the black glass, the city neon pulsing through my transparent flesh.
NO COMFORT IN THE blue dawn. Craggy mountains emerged from a wash of pale sky in the hotel window, the jagged range touching sunrise hours before the plains. I’d tried again to sit with Jenni, to feel the warmth of another body. But she turned on to her side and tensed up, a back as hard as stone when I put my hand on her.
I looked out of the window, saw the mountaintops glow as if beacons had been lit on the barren peaks.
I dared not sleep. Fearful of whom I might dream, whether I’d wake from a world with Kay, conjured or not.
But Jenni slept, maybe an hour. Or she simply closed her eyes and could no longer hear what I was saying. Then she sat up and told me to get off the floor and dress. ‘Fuck if I’m sitting in this room any longer.’
When I went to put on my tired, stained clothes, she threw a shirt from her case on to the bed. A pair of socks.
‘Thank you,’ I said, both of us knowing I was thanking her for a lot more than my clothes. I was thanking her for at least my freedom, and quite possibly my life. I asked her if she knew this.
‘I know what you told me.’ She was rifling through her case for something. ‘But that and reality can be two very different things.’
I told her that she must believe me.
‘Or what?’
‘I have nothing left.’
She stopped looking for whatever she’d lost. When I said it might have been better if I’d died in the river, or been shot by Segur outside the prison, she called me a selfish cunt. ‘If you think about killing yourself, and maybe you have, then you’re a coward.’
I was stunned, had nothing to reply to her with. Because I had.
‘And of all the names under the sun I could call you right now, I never believed I’d call you that.’ She rummaged some more in her case before turning the whole thing upside down, emptying clothes, the detritus of make-up and toiletries. ‘Are you?’
I shook my head. ‘Not if I have something to be brave for. A reason.’
‘Me?’
I answered yes.
AT SOME POINT IN the night I’d called her my rock. In response she’d said, ‘Well every word you say is chipping part of me away.’
In an attempt to parry the blows of intensity, the telling of what had happened, we walked from the hotel room down to the breakfast area, both of us leaving plates of food untouched before stepping out of the hotel foyer and on to the streets of another country, one that neither of us had planned to be in until a few days ago.
‘You should buy more clothes,’ Jenni remarked flatly.
We caught a taxi to a huge shopping mall. ‘I haven’t told my parents I’m even here,’ was the only thing she said on the short journey.
While I bought new clothes from a department store Jenni sat on the edge of a fountain, tossing in coins. I walked over, but she didn’t even raise her head when I stood next to her, instead she just said, ‘And what would you wish on a coin thrown into a fountain?’
On the way out we went past a row of call boxes and I said I needed to do something.
‘Who?’
‘Please listen,’ I begged. ‘No matter how hard it is to hear.’
With my phone broken, and Jenni’s not connecting to a Mexican network, I bought an international dialling card from a ki
osk and finally got the number of the Laredo police department. I told them what had happened, from Segur breaking into the motel room in Corpus Christi to the shooting. Whilst the sheriff I spoke to offered to investigate further, he would only confirm that a Mrs Kay Segur had been registered as a missing person on 29 November, and that until a body was found, or further witnesses came forward, there could be no formal case. He also questioned me, in some detail, as to my relationship with the missing woman. When I swore at him that she was dead, murdered, not simply missing, and that I’d just given him the name of her killer, the sheriff’s tone became suspicious, asking me why I’d left the US illegally, why I was on the riverbank with her in the first place.
I slammed the phone down, furious, leaving him with the words that her murderer was walking free.
Jenni was sitting on the floor of the shopping centre, legs oddly askew.
And I realized Segur was as free as a man could be when he’s responsible for the death of a woman who once loved him.
THERE WAS A PINK palace, old colonial buildings mirrored in the platinum glass of bold new statements of business centres and office blocks. I saw much of Monterrey in the reflections from Jenni’s sunglasses. A grand plaza and another fountain. And always hovering above the city a peak called Saddle Mountain, an empty seat of rock waiting for a sky-sized rider.
When she went to the lavatory in a tourist information office I ate three Mexican doughnuts from a street stand, the first food I’d eaten in nearly two days.
Then we walked the wide avenues, drifted the city as if floating. Occasionally running aground in a park, on a slatted bench.
‘I’m so beyond feeling anything, now.’ She shook her head, looked to that scooped-out peak, the cable cars strung along its green slopes. ‘Maybe guilt. Yes, guilt. Because I compete for your attention when you should be grieving.’
The Hummingbird and the Bear Page 21