'Really, there's no need.' He did not want to be left alone with this ugly ill-smelling old man. 'I can make my own way.'
'Did I promise you a run back?' Heathers held up one soft white hand in admonishment. 'People have to keep their promises to one another. Otherwise it would be all take and no give. That wouldn't be right.'
As they pulled away, he glimpsed Heathers trotting up the broad steps in front of his building. Success made you healthy, energetic, slow to take offence. Turning, he found that Kujavia had opened his eyes and was watching him. The moment of recognition followed at once.
'Why you look at me like that?' Kujavia growled.
'I've just remembered where I saw you before.'
On Saturday night. Arriving at Heathers' house; as he got out of the car with Irene, the first person he noticed was John Merchant. The tall figure of the Convenor was bent forward with an odd intent stillness. Following his gaze – a car pulled up at the entrance – a big car but shabby, with one wing crumpled. A woman getting out – and Merchant looking not at her but at the man inside, whom you glimpsed, white face, spiked black hair, a lumpy ugliness. But glimpsed only for a moment before your attention was entirely taken by the black woman. It was as if everything Heathers' money might obtain for you had been gathered in a single fleshly image.
'You don't know me.' As he spoke, Kujavia leaned forward and closed the glass panel that shut off the driver.
'You didn't go into the party,' Malcolm said. 'You brought the black girl – Rafaella...' He couldn't remember the second name she had given. 'You brought her and then you drove away.'
'What bloody party?'
'On Saturday night at Mr Heathers. There were a lot of people there, dozens of people. But you just brought the woman and then drove away.'
'Why I do a thing like that?'
'Because you'd brought her for me,' Malcolm said, and something in the other man's stillness told him that what he had suspected was true.
‘– My family are Nigerian’, she had said. The taxi tilted and they rushed down into the tunnel under the river; a lorry hurtled past them in the slow lane, hung the echoing clamour of its wheels over them like some crazy fairground machine; and her eyes shone as she turned to him. ‘My family are Nigerian. My father was killed in an accident, and my mother did not send for me to bring me home. My mother would have sent for me but she was not able though she kept wanting.’
Black satin skin, extraordinary breasts in the low-cut red gown, the delicate luxury of her perfume; but when they got out of the taxi, the pavement was broken and uneven under a litter of glass and soiled rubbish. ‘I thought you were in a hurry’, she had said. Under the
expensive perfume, there was the sudden tang of sweat. In the cold night she smelled of fear.
'I wasn't that interesting – not for a woman as beautiful as that,' he told Kujavia. 'It was too easy. I know I don't look rich.'
And then, too, if from the taxi he had not glimpsed the street sign: Moirhill Road; or if she had taken him to a better district or if they had stopped outside a hotel... Desire and suspicion had pulled opposite ways. If she could have found a familiar phrase to say to him, something he recognised out of his own background, he would have gone with her like one of those toys that march down an incline at the touch of a finger.
‘-You won't regret it,’ she had said. Anything you want.
Kujavia leaned forward and banged on the glass with the edge of his fist. The driver looked round and at a peremptory chopping gesture from his passenger brought the car to a stop by the kerb.
'I want to see the girl,' Malcolm said.
Over his shoulder, as he got out, Kujavia said, 'You don't know what you want.'
But he did. It was as if the policeman's feet had beaten fear out of him and left only the taste of her lips, when she had kissed him in the taxi, and the length of her tongue in his mouth. Next morning, aching and bruised, he wakened with a swollen erection.
'Wait here?' The driver made a sour sceptical movement with his mouth. 'The kids'll have the wheels off the motor if I sit here.'
Jackal children, however, gathering for a fresh kill angled away, ostentatiously unconcerned, as they caught sight of Kujavia. None of them would touch the car.
He registered the poverty of the street as he hurried after Kujavia, but it was different in daylight. What harm could come to him in daylight? As Kujavia turned into a close, however, and he followed and climbed the stairs in pursuit, his legs began to shake under him. Somewhere above, he heard a door close. The noise echoed in the stone box of the stair.
There were three doors on the landing, two with brass nameplates beside the old-fashioned bell pulls. He did not recognise the names and so it was on the third bare door that he knocked. Almost instantly, it was opened but only for a few inches. Across the gap he saw the dull line of a chain. From inside, a woman's voice, thin and piping like a girl's, asked, 'Who's there? What do you want?'
'Mr Kujavia?' he wondered hesitantly. 'Is this where Mr Kujavia lives?'
In the silence, he could hear her breathing, odd little gasping sounds.
'If he's there, would you tell him I'm willing to pay for the information - where she is - the person I mentioned to him?'
A man's voice muffled from inside shouted something, the chain rattled coming off and the door swung wide. From the woman and the passage beyond her, there came the same smell, oily, sweet, and unmistakable, of human dirt. Her bare forearms shone like larded sides of bacon. She was enormously, obscenely fat.
In the lobby the outer door closing made the worst sound in the world. He understood that he had tricked himself. There was no way that the elegant black girl from Heathers' party could be in this place. Soiled light spilled from a door at the end of the passage and as he went towards it he was startled by a hellish outburst at his back.
'It's just the dog in the back room,' the woman wheezed. 'He can't get out.'
The room was small, a kitchen of sorts with a sink under the window and a cooker loaded with dirty pots. The shape of it put into Malcolm's head a memory of his brother's flat, his brother's poverty – This is my only chance, he would tell Murray. Don't spoil it for me.
When he turned his head, the bed was in the recess where he might have expected to see it, and the black girl Rafaella across it with a sheet thrown over to cover her from the waist. It was nothing to do with his will, it was automatic, that he saw the nakedness of her breasts - and would have his response to their size and shape as part of what he felt when he remembered – before he realised what the stain on the sheet was at the junction of her parted thighs. In the stillness of her face only her eyes moved watching Kujavia.
'Miss Palamas had a job to do,' the ugly little man explained.
'She was supposed to be very good. I don't like monkeys, so I didn't care how good she was. And she wasn't one of my girls. And then she's not good after all. So now she'll be one of my girls. Even if I don't like monkeys.'
He picked a bottle up from the table. It was a wine bottle and the long neck stood out from his fist. At the sight of it, the girl whimpered.
'Even a monkey can learn.' He leaned on the bed with one hand and bent over her. 'Because she wasn't one of my girls then, I teach a little lesson. Only have a few friends in and make some fun for them.'
Malcolm had risked himself for this girl before. On the Saturday night with the two plainclothes policemen, 'lovers' quarrel? ‘You go home, sir... You're seeing the young lady home? Know her well, do you?.. What close dose the... lady live in along there? The number? What's the name on the door? ... You leave the young lady to us. We'll see her home... Don't give us a hard time... sir!’
‘Joe! He's had enough! He's had enough! Knock it off you daft bugger!'
Clockwork man, he had marched down the incline, defying them; they couldn't treat a man who had come from one of Blair Heathers' parties as if he was nobody. 'I'll see the young lady home,' he had said. The younger man, thin faced, sharp
nosed, had watched him and grinned. The older one, beefy and smelling of drink, had stared at the girl, smacking his lips as if tasting something sweet. It had been the young one who had used his fists and then his feet, shoe caps like black gleaming hands that flew at him as he curled tight, tight, until everything that was black flowed together and the voices stopped.
–This is my chance, he would tell Murray. Don't spoil it for me.
It was the decisive moment of his life; but it did not feel as he lived it that he had any kind of choice at all. He had thought of himself as greedy and had dramatised it to himself as an adventurer's greed for life and possessions. In this squalid place, he learned that his greediest need was for something as shabby and uncertain as security.
–This is my chance.
But he tried.
'Mr Heathers would never tell you to do anything like that.' Kujavia did not deny it 'Nobody tells me what to do,' touching his chest with the tips of his fingers. 'Mister Heathers is a rich man. But there isn't anything I don't know about women.' He showed his yellow teeth in a smile. 'Next time I break it off inside her.'
The fat woman blocked the lobby. She did not move aside and for a sick instant he thought she was trying to stop him from leaving. As he squeezed past, she nudged him with her belly.
'I thought you were going to pay,' she said.
When he got outside, there was no sign of the car. In his mind, ideas plaited like colours making one thing out of light: he had not been afraid of Kujavia; there had been too much at stake; the girl, the poor girl; he was not a coward; he was a coward; not afraid of being hurt himself, afraid of sharing in what Kujavia might do... anything you want, she had said; the girl, the poor naked girl. Out of the muddle, a strange idea; Irene and I have made a world in which Kujavia can exist.
Irene and I...
As he walked the long street among the watchful children, he kept expecting the car to appear until it occurred to him that the driver had never intended to wait.
4 Tasting Blood
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 29TH 1988
In the car, Blair Heathers was unwise enough to close his eyes. Blood in his temples leapt in tiny explosions of forked lightning. In fright, he popped open his eyes and stared at the back of the chauffeur's head.
'You were quick back, Denny.'
'You said to make it fast, Mr H.'
Heathers caught the chauffeur's glance in the mirror, and wondered if the man had seen him open his eyes so suddenly. He had been with him for a long time; perhaps he had remarked on that movement before and speculated about it. Heathers found that thought unpleasant and said abruptly, 'So I did. You'll be looking for a productivity bonus, Denny.'
The chauffeur laughed dismissively. He practised an exactly calculated independence since both of them knew that was the form of obsequiousness Heathers found most comfortable. He kept silence then until the car drew to a halt. 'That's it on the left, the house should be about half-way down going by the number, it doesn't seem all that long a street.' He squinted at the house on the opposite corner. 'I can't read the numbers from here.'
'Bloody little people,' Heathers said. 'They hide their number in wee iron knots on the gate. Put bloody silly names over the door. Pretend they're in the middle of an estate park hoatching with sheep and gamekeepers.' This time it seemed to Heathers his chauffeur's laugh was genuine.
'I'll carry on straight ahead,' the man said. 'Find the first place on this side of the road.'
'You do that,' Heathers said, preparing to get out.
'One of these days when I'm sitting reading my paper, somebody'll think I'm getting ready to bag his house – and call the police.'
'That'll be right,' Heathers said drily. 'First thing that would occur to anybody seeing a car like this.'
The joke put him in a good humour with himself as he processed between the semi-detacheds, small family houses built in the thirties. Some had put a dormer window in the attic to get a third or fourth bedroom; at one time, somebody had set a fashion for adding a porch. The garages took up most of the space between neighbours. 'Ravenscraig', 'Beechcroft'. In Gaelic: 'Sky and Sea'. It was easy to miss the numbers.
When she opened the door, he could smell the mingled scent of flowers and furniture polish. Inside there was a fitted carpet with a hard-wearing dark pattern, a low table for the telephone fitted with a padded seat, a stand bearing a vase of yellow tea roses. There was even a barometer on the wall. In the living room, looking at a piece of polished wood that seemed to be an imitation of the kind of tourist junk he had seen for sale in African airports, he said, 'Malcolm's a lucky man. I hadn't realised – I hadn't expected you to be the perfect housewife.'
'You don't know anything about me,' she said.
'Malcolm – does he know all about you? How long have you been married, a year is it, two? I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot about you he doesn't know.'
'If you want to wait until he comes home,' she said, 'you can discuss it with him.'
'It was you I wanted to see. That's why I phoned to find out if you'd be in.'
'Not you,' she said. 'It was your secretary who phoned.'
He shrugged then, as a thought struck him, smiled. 'Confidential secretary. She knows when to keep her mouth shut.'
Irene Wilson was sitting on the couch in the full light from the deep picture window. From the comfortable chair – which had a fitted cover, of course, in a floral pattern and tied underneath with tapes – he studied her legs and was pleased with what he saw. She's better looking than I remember, he thought; like an actress.
'Most people will do what you tell them,' Irene Wilson said.
'And not just because you're rich. They can see you expect to have your own way.' Taking him by surprise, she laughed.
'What is it?'
'When I said that, you put your head on one side. You were like a cat having his ears rubbed.'
'You rub and I'll purr,' he said; but could not resist adding, 'I'm the same man I've always been. I've never changed.'
'Just after I met Malcolm,' she said, 'we'd just got married, and he brought me here from London. You were almost the first person I saw on the local television. You were talking about your childhood in Moirhill, and how poor you had been.'
'We were all poor then.'
'That's right,' she said, delighted. 'You said that then. I remember.' Her voice took on the faintest colouring of the broad drawling accent of Moirhill, which he knew he had never lost. 'We were all poor then, but we were happy. There was a great sense of sharing. I think that's what the young people have lost.'
'I say more than my prayers,' he said, not hiding his pleasure. 'But if you ask me my philosophy, I'll tell you - make time for people. I'll pass the time with a brickie's labourer, if I feel like it. I can tell what foot a man kicks with – what religion he is, understand? –Just by looking at him. It's a kind of instinct. Crack a joke. I can tell a Paddy before he opens his mouth. And I talk to them the way I talk to you. They respect me for it. I can get on with the highest and the lowest – that's good business – and it's not bad Christianity either.'
'It's odd,' she said. 'You remind me of a man I knew – oh, years ago.'
He stood up, very easily for a man of his age considering that the chair was low and well cushioned; but then he had had the foresight to manoeuvre himself to the edge first. Things were going well. She would not be the first wife of an ambitious man who, while the driver Denny read his paper somewhere, had obliged him. Only, with changing places to sit beside her on the couch, he found himself looking at the chair he had been in and the little bookcase beside it and the window behind. Side by side on the three cushions, facing the same view, they might have been a couple sitting together on one of those long seats just by the entrance when you got on to one of the old tramcars. The idea distracted him, but he could not share it; even if she had belonged to the city, she was too young ever to have seen the high trams sway and rattle through its streets. With an effort, he rem
inded himself of what she had said.
'I hope you liked him.'
When she laughed, the little muscles moved in her throat. Something sharper, less willed, less under his control, added itself to his usual anticipation. His mouth dried.
'He was a businessman too. I thought he was rich, but living in a village what did I know? Once we were in London, the money soon went. “Rich one day, poor the next,” my sister told me later he'd left debts everywhere round the village. He'd have been bankrupt if he hadn't run off with me. Or they'd have put him in jail.'
'Your sister?' He was surprised. For some reason, he had taken it for granted that she was someone alone, without ties from the past.
'That was years later,' she said casually. 'I didn't see her for years after I had run off.' 'What age were you then?'
'Sixteen. I was sweet sixteen.' Had she been drinking? She seemed different from the woman he had met on Saturday night at his party. He had known wives who drank to pass the endless boredom of afternoons.
'I can't picture your sister,' he said. 'Is she like you?' He laughed out of his dry mouth. 'If she was here, I could sit between you on this couch. It's big enough. It's the right size.'
'No, that wouldn't be possible. My sister is dead.' Her mouth turned down as if she would weep. 'I'm sorry.' And she laughed. 'I don't have a sister. A friend told me that – about running off with a businessman. I never had a sister.'
He stared at her in bewilderment. He became angry. Behind all this assurance, his body knew that it was old. He did not understand this change in her. She glittered with suppressed excitement. It made him angry that she should remind him he was old.
'You didn't stay long on Saturday. Too many people for you? I like a lot of people round me on a Saturday night. You left early. Were you fighting with Malcolm?'
'I didn't really feel like going at all.' She looked at him thoughtfully. 'Malcolm felt I should.'
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