Suspended In Dusk

by Ramsey Campbell

  Taming the Stars

  Anna Reith

  Michele

  There was never a good reason to get in a car with Antoine. I should have known better. Perhaps the heat had fried my brain, turned it to a loose mush that filled my head like cotton wool. Of course, that would have made no difference. I was twenty. Whatever my head was or was not filled with, I still did my thinking with my cock.

  * * *

  It was so hot that summer that the tarmac melted and over a hundred old people died in Paris, while their relatives escaped into the lavender-scented countryside. If I’d had money I would have done the same. Unfortunately for me, I was too poor for vacations. I lived hand to mouth then—tirer le diable par la queue, as my grandmother used to say. Pulling the devil by the tail. I didn’t think I’d ever see the day he’d turn around and bite me.

  Antoine found me in a bar on Rue Saint-Denis, a narrow little building chipped out of the dirty limestone that faced much of the third arrondissement. It perched uneasily among the grim, tight-drawn shutters and whitewashed windows of the shops that surrounded it: seedy places that sold porno movies and dirty magazines, and had hookers’ cards wedged under the cash register like so many pieces of forgotten chewing gum.

  It was a cheap local workers’ tavern, untouched by pretension or the march of modernity, and neither the old men nor the migrant Arab boys cared about the greasy pinkish reflections the red light district cast over their beer glasses.

  I didn’t notice Antoine come in at first. I was drinking a cold beer and thinking sour thoughts about the girl I’d intended to marry, who had been inconsiderate enough to fuck my brother and callous enough not to regret it.

  “Michele!” Antoine clapped me between the shoulder blades with his wide, soft hand. He never had done a day’s hard work in his life. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you, mec.”

  Antoine rarely wasted time looking for anyone who didn’t owe him money, so I doubted that. More likely, he was here for the little blonde morue who could sometimes be found on the corner, and who—as Antoine put it—not only knew how to enjoy a good cigar, but also swallowed the smoke.

  I squinted up at him, my lips still wet from the beer. The place his hand had touched felt sweaty and sticky, and the shirt clung to my back.

  “What do you want, Antoine?”

  He smiled broadly, but the expression hung off his mouth like a wet, greasy rag. One thing about Antoine: he never saw the point in pretending he wasn’t full of shit. I almost liked that about him.

  “I was looking for you,” he repeated, sliding onto the stool beside me and still smiling that flimsy lie of a smile. “I want you to drive a car.”

  “A car?” I grimaced as I drew the cool beer bottle from my lips, watching the condensation slide down the dark glass neck, mostly so I wouldn’t have to look at him. “What do you need me to drive a car for, mec? I’m no chauffeur.”

  Antoine caught the bartender’s attention with a wave of his thick fingers. They always reminded me of andouillettes fresh from the barbecue, brown and blunt-ended, but tipped with rounded, pink nails glimmered as if he’d oiled them. Like me, Antoine’s family had made the trip from North Africa a couple of generations ago—mine from Morocco, his from Algeria—making us both petits beurs: French-born melons, instead of the kind grown in the swelter of the Maghreb.

  “It’s just a little trip,” he said, shaking his head from side to side as he smiled at me—a snake dancing its death-trance before it readied to strike. “What, you don’t want to get the fuck out of this heat? Just a little trip to the countryside, mec. That’s all it is.”

  The bartender brought Antoine a beer as I sucked the last life out of mine. I said nothing, and just watched our reflections in the mirrored cabinet behind the bar. Past my shoulder, the grimy window looked out onto the street and little fragments of the world beyond it seemed caught in the mirror the way a puddle nets broken pieces of the sky.

  On the other side of the street, in the lee of a boarded-up tobacconist, two women were walking the awkward, peg-legged, hip-swinging hobble of girls in bad shoes. Dusk had settled over everything, blurring the edges of the buildings; the sun had sunk from the sky, and the city was finally losing the last of its second-hand daylight, those dregs of gold it clung to like a miser. I watched those girls, and imagined the sound of their heels on the sidewalk, the smells of their bodies… the taste of their sweat. I was sweaty. I stank like a butcher and, whether I trusted him or not, Antoine was right. I did want to get out of Paris, and out of this sick, festering heat.

  “How far into the country are you going?” I asked, seeking out Antoine’s reflection in the mirror’s fractured gaze. “I can’t take time off work.”

  “Bullshit, Michele!” He laughed companionably at me. “That old fuck you work for at the warehouse? He’s so ancient he’s probably too blind to know whether you’re there or not. Get someone to cover for you, mec! Or does he watch you so closely, eh? Staring at your ass all day, just waiting for a bite?”

  Antoine’s elbow dug into my ribs, and I winced.

  “Va t’faire!”

  He grinned all the wider and, despite every sensible thought I had left in my head, I said, “Well, maybe I could take a day.”

  “That’s the spirit, Michele!” Antoine beamed. “It’s only as far as Nantes. A bit farther, perhaps. A nice little gîte, belongs to the father of a friend of mine. Tres bon chic, bon genre. You know the type.”

  I nodded slowly. I did. Yuppies with cellular phones and gold watches. Who knew what they did with their spare time. I didn’t ask why Antoine needed someone to drive him to Nantes. Not right away, at least. He bought me another beer, and asked about my girl, and agreed with me when I called her a bitch.

  “There’s a lot of pussy in Nantes,” Antoine said as we watched one of the old men totter out of the bar and off down the darkened street, pausing only to glance furtively around him before he darted into the doorway of the porno store beside the old tobacconist. “The guy whose place it is? Always got plenty of pussy on tap, you know? Black, brown, white, yellow… you ever fuck an Asian chick, Michele?”

  I shrugged again. “They’re all pink inside, no?”

  He laughed at that, and clapped me on the back with that soft hand of his. The air felt grainy, as if the heat had made it swollen and stale, and it was an effort to force it into my lungs.

  “All I’m saying,” Antoine said, very deliberately uncurling a finger from the neck of his beer and pointing it at me, “is we take a day, drive out there, I see Radouane, we get laid, we come home. You try to tell me that doesn’t sound good.”

  It did. I swallowed the last of my beer and wrinkled my nose.

  “I still don’t know why you need a chauffeur,” I said, a trifle petulantly.

  Antoine smiled his sad rag of a smile… the one I should have known better than to trust. “The fuck do you think, branleur? I don’t want to be bored on the drive. Besides, I want you to watch my back. You can do that, can’t you, Michele? You know I’ll make it worth your while. I’ve always been good to you, no?”

  I nodded reluctantly. True, I could do what he asked, though I didn’t see why he’d asked me. I guessed it was about drugs—it often was, with Antoine—but it puzzled me why he should need to go all the way to Nantes for blow and pussy. Then again, if I was getting a little holiday out of it and all I had to do was drive, what the fuck did I care?

  “All right,” I said. “You got a deal, mec.”

  Antoine grinned and—somewhere, somehow, at the very back of my mind—I would like to say I had a bad feeling.

  Unfortunately, I was an idiot when I was twenty.

  * * *

  Esther

  She straightened up, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth. Under the streetlamp’s thin, ravaged glow, the last smear of red lipstick looked like black oil, and the faint orange light painted an eerie, ashy tone over her skin. There was no moon to speak of tonight, just a slender
gold-stained echo of its edge suspended between clouds that tore across the sky like black rags. No stars. The so-called city of light all but blotted them out, numbed them, bathed the whole of the heavens in the reflection of its polluted glory.

  In the pretty, touristy parts—the Bois, the Champs-Élysées, the fin de siècle facades and trendy nightclubs—everything was different. There, light pooled on the cobbles and the pavements, and the night made paintings of it, daubing impressionistic swathes of colour that outdid nature and decried the daylight.

  Here, Paris slept. Here, the multi-storey car parks and the hypermarkets were square concrete carbuncles amid desolate streets, and the glamour was tucked away in boxes, kept for dreams and holidays. The lights still played against the sky—the Tower, with its blinking crown and coruscating scaffold, could be seen from certain attic windows—but, here, she saw them from the city’s shadow. Apart, away… standing just beyond the glass, as she had always done. It was the same everywhere. It had been for as long as she remembered. Every place, every name, every time. Always the same. All of them.

  Esther ran her tongue along the back of her teeth, hating the stale, salty taste. She pulled her cigarettes from the pocket of her pink leather jacket, patting herself down as she searched for her lighter.

  Shit.

  She didn’t swear in French yet. Not in her head. Didn’t think in the language at all, though she could speak enough to get by for daily living. Donnez-moi le fric was a good start. Her fingers brushed the greasy crumple of notes in the pocket of her skirt—purple, with Debussy’s face on them, because even the damn money was fruity in this country—and finally closed on the lighter. Sparks burst in the darkness; a scatter of fire in the night, morsels of it coalescing into one sharp gout.

  She lit her cigarette, pulled deep on the burn of ash against the cold air, and glanced dispassionately down at the mess she’d made. He was still crumpled against the wall, leaning like a half-crushed soda can, his unbuttoned pants and untucked shirt resembling ridges of creased metal, all careless folds and torn paper labels. She didn’t know his name. Hadn’t asked, didn’t care. He had offered a nervous little cough of laughter along with the handful of banknotes that made her think of Clair de Lune, and she had rolled her eyes at the whole “I don’t really do this” pose.

  It was always the same. Different faces, different names, but the same old shit every time. Months, no, years now… she’d lost track of the time, just like she’d lost count of them and their stupid faces.

  She’d thought it would be easier here. She’d come because she believed in new opportunities, and believed in the man who’d brought her. Paris was supposed to be special; the city of a million blinking stars, even if she was looking at them from the gutter. She had believed the press of the place crowding in would lend her some kind of anonymity, shield her silence with its noise. Plenty of those like her—the monsters in the shadows, those who embraced the bloody night—took that graceless abandon of big-city living as a gift. In places where buildings bit the sky like uneven teeth, everyone was always staring up, and no one noticed the meat go missing.

  It was just the same as anywhere else, though. She couldn’t breathe here, couldn’t see… couldn’t get past the choking sensation of so many minds, so many voices, so many people pushing on in their seamless desperation to exist. And the rot wasn’t dry. There was a wetness to it that seeped under her skin until it met her own corruption, and it called to her irresistibly. It twisted her, swelled her up like a void and a beacon, made her one shrieking, dark flame that burned in the night and itched in the day, and she wasn’t sure how much longer she could hold it back.

  There was no way to calm it. Nowhere to run except back into the shadows, and not even the shadows were helping any more. The man at her feet had been the first in a long time. She knew he wouldn’t be the last. It wouldn’t even matter if she fled. Sure, she could hide away from herself—hide away from this life—but, in the dark, Esther was afraid she would become nothing but a relic, a shard of a creature split away, split open and devoid of what little humanity she had left. She would become a ghost whispering in the ruins, kissed by the moon and desiccated by the sun, part of nothing but her own amorphous madness.

  She didn’t want that. Didn’t want to sink below the surface and leave no trace of herself. She wanted change.

  Plenty of people—plenty of girls like her—believed in new starts. She heard those whispers time and again from the desperate and the optimistic. Dreams of cleanliness, rightness. New beginnings. Maybe it could happen for them—she doubted it, but maybe it could—if they could leave the taint and the rot behind. Most of them couldn’t. Once the darkness bloomed in a person, its petals opened out like a great lotus, cupping souls like raindrops, swallowing them whole.

  It wasn’t fair, of course. It was always the same, everywhere, everywhen. There was never going to be anything different, anything easier, or anything better. Anyone who thought different was a fool. People like her—those rare, infrequent few, fashioned from another flesh—were not given the same grace. For monsters like her, there was no acceptance, no tolerance. No entitlement to the riches of normalcy. Believing anything else was just clinging to a fairy tale.

  Esther sucked in her cheeks, sucked on her cigarette and let the gritty burn of it fill her up, drawing in the smoke just as she drew in the beast, remaking her body in a shell of innocence. She hadn’t intended to kill him. This crumpled remnant of a man with his clothes awry and his limp dick hanging like a sad, lost sock… she’d only meant to take his money. One brief suck, one fleeting business transaction, and that would have been everything she needed. Even the dead had to pay rent, after all, unless they were prepared to waste away in the shit-stained, cardboard-walled hellholes that offered sanctuary for the penniless whores and crackheads. Men like Radouane kept their acquisitions in line by those methods: powdered white lies and cheap backhand blows, a dozen girls to one flat, hot-bunking or sharing space on the floor. You let him do you one favour and then you owed him, and he would never allow you to forget.

  She supposed she should have known better. Perhaps she had. Perhaps she’d never trusted him in the first place. Perhaps all of this had simply been a choice. And this life did serve its purpose. It gave her the things she needed, the pretence at functioning within a part of the world, but it should never have lasted.

  Now, she looked down at the body, and wiped the last flecks of blood from her cheek. Her time of penance was over. If it wasn’t enough anymore, what was the point? Why keep pretending to be his pet, if he didn’t keep her safe from herself?

  No. It was over. Radouane Sehere could go and get fucked. Esther was leaving, and he could not stop her. He would not stop her, whatever she had to do to get away. She owed him nothing. Not anymore.

  The light still painted her grimly, though now the shallow glow of the streetlamp outlined a face more human than not, the twisted shapes of hunger and need hidden beneath dull skin and an empty gaze. She put the cigarette to her lips again, tasting tar instead of blood, and she gave one more glance to the dead man by the wall, his throat ragged red lace and his left eye gnawed away.

  Perhaps she should have felt guilty. Perhaps, once, she might have been able to, but there was nothing left in her now. No guilt, no shame. Just the dull ache at her centre, punctuated with the screaming pain of need. It filled her, gave her life where life had once been, and it drove her onward.

  Esther zipped up her jacket, despite the night’s warmth, and began to walk home. A few cars drifted past—one or two drivers sounded their horns for her attention, or called from their open windows—but she ignored them. She only needed a few hundred francs more, and she could go. Fuck Radouane. Fuck this city. She didn’t know why she’d ever thought it was a good idea. There was no point in trying to hold onto the past, no point in trying to find something new. There was no secret paradise out there, no sudden key to unlock a perfect life, and she was as stupid as the rest of them f
or ever thinking it could happen.

  She walked on, the cigarette smoke a dirty halo around her head, and the clouds continued to streak across the starless sky.

  * * *

  Michele

  I met up with Antoine two days later, outside the pool hall that he liked to call his base of operations. He’d found a car: an ugly grey Citroën Visa with rust in the wheel arches and only one working headlight.

  “The fuck is this?” I asked as I surveyed the wreck. “This thing is foutue before we start!”

  Antoine just shrugged and smiled his unsmiling smile, so I got in and hoped the engine held out until Nantes, or wherever the damn place was supposed to be. We drove for almost four hours. The air in the car was stifling, hot metal and plastic stinking of rubber and staleness. Sweat ran down my back and the waistband of my jeans grew damp, my seat on the worn upholstery becoming a boggy swamp. Antoine rolled two joints and put a cassette on, blasting IAM through the open windows as we ripped along the autoroute. I enjoyed that early part of the journey—rap music and weed and one giant “fuck you” to the blue-haired little biddies and wrinkled old men we passed in the suburbs—but, as we neared the toll roads, Antoine broke out the whisky and attitude.

  He started to talk, to complain and bitch about this guy, Radouane, and what a dummy he was. Antoine knew better, Antoine was going to run rings around him… all of that shit. He sat there, sprawled in the passenger seat, one foot up on the dashboard, smoking and swigging the booze, and I started to think that maybe I wasn’t going to get a nice holiday. I started to feel afraid, and the pounding of the music against the beat of the sun and the road grit that blew in through the open windows began to give me a headache.

  I couldn’t complain, of course. You didn’t complain to Antoine, because he would only respond by laughing at you.