‘So what, this is his place then?’
Red set the bottle down on the floor and unscrewed the lid slowly.
‘Nope, nope, though I ain’t had it long. There’s quite a story to that, seein’ as I sort of won it in a poker game, but perhaps that’s for another time.’
‘You won this place?’ The sunlight square had receded across the boards towards the back wall, picking out the French windows fossilized in clapboard. ‘What the hell did you put up?’
‘Oh don’t be like that, I kind of like it.’ He set the cap next to the bottle. ‘Sometimes a man needs a place where the phone don’t ring and the walls don’t stream twenty-four hour news, somewhere he don’t got to be …’ he poured a golden thread into the shot glasses. ‘… he don’t got to be found, if he don’t wanna be.’
He held out one of the glasses to me, and against all my better judgment, I took it. Hell, nothing I’d done so far struck me as a good idea, not what I could remember nor what I couldn’t.
‘Bottoms up,’ he said and we drank. I let the liquid moisten my lips and it crept hot and smoky into my mouth.
Red drank his and shifted a little, arranging the sleeping bag so he could look up at me.
‘Course, one don’t need no pole to catch a fish.’ The gloom of the hot wet room softened his face nearly to a silhouette. He laid back, left hand behind his head as he leant against the couch.
‘No?’
‘Nope. Sure I’ve seen a man stretch out on the bank of the river, and dip his arm in, hardly makin’ a ripple. Then he lies there for a while, lettin’ the river kinda get used to him.’ Red closed his eyes. ‘He just waits, bides his time. Catfish are wary things, but with him just sittin’ there …’ He looked at me again. ‘After a while, they kinda forget. Some get so used to his hand, they just snuggle right up to it.’
‘Snuggle?’ I pursed my lips.
‘Sure thing, fish snuggle, they snuggle right up once they got used to you …’ He drew his knee up and rested the hand that held his glass on it. ‘They get real comfy, if you take your time with them.’ I leant against the arm of the couch, gingerly stretching my side as far as I could before angering my wound.
‘What about your brother?’
‘My brother?’ Red sipped his whiskey.
‘Yeah, your brother, that’s how he catches fish?’
Red grinned. ‘My brother – no, he ain’t so cunning. He just uses fishing poles, darlin’.’ The grin melted into the darkness of his face. ‘He don’t have the touch.’ I sipped the whiskey, wondering which one of us was the fish.
‘What ‘bout you?’ Red leant forward to open the bottle again. ‘You reckon as you have a family? Someone missing you?’ I inhaled, feeling the torpor of the warmth and the whiskey settle into my limbs. It wasn’t that I couldn’t remember them, more like they were in another room, sunlit and far away. It was as if I pressed my ear to a keyhole and tried to recreate my history from a snatch of laughter or the sound of feet running on a wooden floor.
‘I’m not sure. I mean, I know I must have, I guess?’ Something was forming in my mind, moving like it might have woken but then fell back into a dream. ‘I think I can see things, but like they’re far away, down the wrong end of a telescope, you know?’
‘You do have a way with words,’ he said, but I wasn’t listening.
‘I’m sure I had sisters, and a brother … one brother, older? And a … a sister, two sisters, hell, maybe more. No one sister, I’m sure, only—’ I laughed, and then my laugh died away. ‘One … one I remember … perhaps?’ The room around me faded to monochrome, I could barely see Red’s face as it waited in darkness, just a slice of light on the edge of his cheek, then that too faded.
‘She had … a name. I mean, I know she must have a name, but there was a name we called her. Not me though, I never liked it … buzz.’ I focused on him again. ‘That was it, they used to go buzz at her, make buzzing sounds because, because Mom used to say she’d get a bee in her bonnet, and then she’d get angry because they were laughing at her. All of them, buzz, buzz, that’s what they’d do when she wanted to say something, make a point. I’d hear them say it, buzz, buzz, buzz, and I hated it, I hated that they would say that to her.’
He leant a little toward me. ‘I guess all families are a law unto themselves, with all their own peculiarities,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry, this is …’ I rubbed my eyes, the ghost of the memory lingering inside my eyelids.
‘Why hell no, we’re conversing with the hope of making … making sense out of your darkness as it were.’
‘I’m telling you memories, and I’m not even sure whose they are.’
He tilted his head toward me. ‘All conversation … all conversation is just layin’ out a memory for another, but half the time you don’t know if it’s true, or just what you thought was true. Amnesia or …’ He tapped the whiskey bottle. ‘No amnesia, Margarita.’
‘I can see things, things from the past but I can’t make sense of them, and I can’t remember anything from three days ago even, nothing. It’s so stupid!’
‘Hell, the aunt I told you of, Amarita.’ He laughed ‘Why she, she’d remember the war and the men going off to fight, but she couldn’t remember when her eyeglasses were sat on her head…’
‘Amarita? I thought you said she was called Margarita?’
‘No,’ he said, raising his head as my question jerked him out of his reverie. ‘No, she liked the margaritas, so that was my name for her; that was all I meant.’
‘Oh, my mistake.’
‘Suits you better too, you don’t look nothin’ like an Amarita anyhow.’ He moved again, adjusted his back rest. ‘Another one?’ He extended the bottle towards me.
‘I’m good, thanks.’
‘Are you now?’ He smirked.
‘You tell me … how many good people get shot?’
Red laughed and settled back again.
‘Darlin’, I shot a great many people in my time, I ain’t ever bothered with finding out if they were good or bad. Seems as a bullet wound says more about them that made it, than received it.’
‘You shot people, when you were in the army?’ I asked.
‘Mostly.’ Red winked. ‘I shot people wherever Uncle Sam had cause to send me.’
I straightened up and tried to make it a casual enquiry.
‘Red, you ever been to Paris?’ He frowned at me.
‘Now how come you had cause to ask me that?’ Red turned the glass in his hand, peering through it before he looked up at me. ‘You mean Paris, France?’
‘I guess I do.’ I smiled. ‘Sorry, all sorts of things rattling round my head.’ Red raised his glass and took a sip.
‘Whatever, no, I ain’t never been to Europe, I’m sorry to say. Been to the French quarter, not sure I need get any closer. Sure, half the white folks round hereabouts claim to be French, hell, my aunt was real hot on the idea, though I took to playin’ it down in the Gulf. Truth be told, my mother had more claim to be French than she ever did.’ He coughed.
‘Do you remember your mother?’ I asked, though I wasn’t aware of how the question sounded until the words were hanging in the air between us. I bit my lip, straightened up. The bottle chinked on the mouth of his glass.
‘You say that as if she were departed.’ He watched me as he lowered the bottle again.
‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure why, I just …’
‘She is dead,’ he said.
I touched my hand to my mouth.
He shook his head gently. ‘That was ungallant of me, you’re not to know.’ He sipped from his glass. ‘She died, when I was seventeen, I think. She was a little like you …’ He looked at me. ‘Dark I mean, she had long dark hair. I must confess that I’m old-fashioned, in that I like a woman to have long hair, though I mean nothing by that you understand. I’m a man of my time.’
‘You aren’t that old,’ I said, which he took for flattery.
‘I am older than you. I’d
surmise you ain’t a tick over twenty-five, sure as I’m forty.’
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ I said, but he was watching the whiskey in his glass, swirling a vortex in the amber liquid.
‘There is a large and ornamental lake at the rear of our property; we have a great and dignified house. It is quite renowned in the county. She was in the lake, which I now fear is left rather to its own devices.’
‘I’m really sorry,’ I said in the way you do, when you know there’s nothing else you can say.
‘There’s nothing you have to be sorry for,’ he said as he focused on me. ‘In this instance, I was merely …’ He waved his hand. ‘Merely remembering.’
I sipped the last of my whiskey. ‘What do you remember of her?’ It sounded a lot more impolite than saying I was sorry, but Red didn’t seem to mind.
‘She was in the water.’ He tilted his glass again, squinted through it. ‘In a white dress, which had risen up to cover her face …’
‘You saw her?’ The coldness of the realization sliced through the evening. I’d meant her cooking or the way she dressed, not how she’d died.
His eyes flicked to mine. ‘I was the one who discovered her. And that is not what a young man needs to see, when he’s at an impressionable age.’ He reached forward and seemed to draw the edge of something over my face.
‘You saw her,’ I said softly.
‘She was beautiful.’
‘When she was alive?’
‘She was beautiful …’ His hand paused in the air between us. ‘But hell,’ he said, his voice suddenly bright and businesslike as he slumped back against his pillows. ‘I don’t mean to dwell on such unfortunate events now. What’s done is done.’ He closed his eyes.
We lay silent for a while, the room fogging with the smell of grey water and clapboard. The house moaned and cracked as it cooled, twisting against the wet earth as if it were caught in a bear trap and the water in the lake seemed to rise up within me, casting white silk across my face.
‘White silk, ma Cherie – spreadin’ out over the dark water, runnin’ deep…’
Red sat up and the whisper was lost. He ruffled his hair, leaving a little of it standing up at his temples.
‘Ain’t much in the way of light,’ he said, stretching his shoulders. ‘But there’s a lamp in the kitchen.’ I nodded, remembering that I’d seen one in the cupboard under the sink when I’d searched earlier. Red clicked his neck, stood up and sauntered off.
When I heard a click from the kitchen, I looked up. Red had nudged the padlock on the back door – such a small thing – checking it was closed against the night. I could have looked away but something stopped me. I saw him slip the key from where I’d left it into his pants pocket.
Trying to give no visible hint that I’d seen him, I mentally checked my exits. The front door was barricaded and locked, the windows on the ground floor were boarded up and the ones by the door were glazed in safety glass embedded with a grid of wire. Through them I could see a line of dead fire bruising the sky as the sun set. I swallowed against the unease that trickled over me. The only way out without making a lot of noise would have been through the kitchen door, until Red had slipped that key into his pocket. If I wanted to get it without him knowing, I was going to have to get a lot closer to Red.
He put the lantern on the side table with its wide-mouthed grin, and adjusted a lever at its foot. When the warm pool of light expanded, I realized how dark it had grown and how quickly, and how loud the whine and throb of cicadas now was.
‘Guess we’re in for a long night,’ Red said and kicked the sleeping bag into shape before sitting down. I glanced back at the door, the lock, the only way out. The way to a man’s heart might be through his stomach, but through what was the route to his back pocket? Animals gnaw through their own feet to get out of a trap, I thought. Just how desperate was I? I glanced around the room. Desperate enough.
I swung my feet round to the floor, let myself slip from the couch and pressed my back against it, stretching my arms above my head and arching my spine.
Not if he was the last man in the world …?
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m stiff as hell after sleeping on that couch, and everything.’ I nodded toward the bottle. ‘Can I get another?’
Red slid a grin across his face, the lamplight glinting off his teeth.
‘Sure thing, darlin’, be my pleasure.’ He passed me the bottle by its neck. ‘Do the honours?’
I filled the glasses and set the bottle down by my feet. We drank and I let the liquid seep into my mouth. When he turned to reach a handful of chips, I let most of the whiskey back into the glass then tipped it away under the couch.
‘This is so crazy,’ I said, hooking my elbow on to the seat. ‘We’re sitting here and I don’t even know my own name, let alone if any of this is real.’
‘You think I ain’t real?’ Red leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees and glancing back at me. ‘Maybe this is the only thing that is real; maybe we’s the two last livin’ souls on the planet, you and me, Margarita?’
‘That really would be scary.’ I smiled. Maybe he was the last man on Earth after all?
‘Really?’
‘Sure …’ I was aware of the proximity of our feet, our shoulders inches apart. ‘I don’t even know who I am, let alone who you are.’
‘Do I … cause you concern?’ Red asked slowly. ‘Do I make you uneasy?’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘But you have killed people.’
‘Line of duty.’ Red shrugged, but his grin lingered over his teeth.
‘Following orders?’ Something cracked in the darkness behind me. I shivered. The sound of the tortured house was like hearing a stranger’s pain in the bed next to mine.
‘I always do,’ Red said. ‘I always did,’ he added.
The darkness curled about us as we sat on the floor, as the house shuddered and the heat of the day bled out into the swamp. The lamp threw shadow spectres on the walls as the beat of the night slowed in time with the sound of Red’s breathing, the key in his back pocket, out of reach.
‘How long were you in the army?’ I asked.
‘Hmm?’ Red squinted at me. ‘Too long.’ He emptied his glass. ‘Guess it just suited me, never having much in the way of family.’ He coughed. ‘Army’s like that, it’s your brother, father, mother, everything. Makes a man of you, but it makes you its own sometimes. Like a wife, kicks you when you’re down.’ Humidity and whiskey fought to glue my tongue to the roof of my mouth. Out of the two, the whiskey was winning. I stretched my arm out under the couch and ran my hand over the underneath of its seat absently. Red leant forward, glass in hand. ‘It gives you life, but it can take yours. Hell, that’s a whole other story, someone else’s war. Been out two years now, all done and dusted.’
I looked at him from under my lashes. ‘Tell me about it,’ I murmured, and lolled my head back against the seat.
Red clicked his shoulders and rolled his head before reaching over me for the bottle. The wings of a moth beat and fluttered against the lamplight, the dusty ‘tink-tink’ of the tiny, frustrated impacts audible in the descending calm.
‘Listen, ma Cherie …’
I heard it, somewhere among the sighs and suffering of the house, the voice from my dream, from my memory, perhaps? The world was dragged down with whiskey as I watched Red’s hand reach for the bottle. It slowed, the air seemed to solidify as his strong, knotted fingers opened, as they became trapped in the air, like insects in amber. The tink of the moth’s wings became a thud-thud, the sweep of its movements encompassing the whole world. I blinked, but I alone seemed to be flickering, bright – a splatter of paint against a dull canvas.
‘Listen to him now, ma Cherie, with the ears I give you.’
If I’d had a memory, it would have told me I did not believe, and I would not have heard her. I would not have watched unperturbed as the tick-tock of the universe wound down to the beat of her voice, a smile playing on my lips a
s time stopped around me.
‘Listen what de water’s tellin’ you, ma Cherie …’
I became translucent, made of cinnamon and silk and the scent of a thousand years on an old fur coat. The house became a film stretched over a reality I was not beholden to.
‘Unpick what him have woven, ma Cherie.’
I saw him.
On the floor of the house as the night noises thrilled and crept around him, and the space between us became infinite and fragile.
I saw him.
Walking down a corridor with the thrill of the power and the heat of pain walking with him.
My edge fractured and shimmered into another time and another place.
‘Tell me about it,’ I said to Red, as he sat on the floor beside me and the scent of him breathed over my skin.
‘Tell me about it,’ I said to Red as his feet beat hard, hard, hard on the wet concrete floor of a fetid place more miserable even than the twisted house in the backwoods.
‘Is this real?’
‘Do it matter, ma Cherie?’
‘But the key … I need to get out, I …’
‘Listen to what him not tell you now, ma Cherie. Listen to what you already know.’
Red passed boxes and cages, each with a hooded, trembling figure bound and pinned in corner. He was their overlord, he would not be denied; his feet beat quick-march on concrete washed with fear and darkness.
His brothers were there also, the brothers the army had made for him, formed from the dust and blood of a different land. They yapped and barked as they waited for him, but he was not victorious; he had a clock hanging over his head, marking out its own time behind his stride and it showed him no mercy.
‘It was to save a boy with a good heart, a boy in a man’s body; that is why the clock was so heavy on his back, ma Cherie. What would you do, to save a boy who loved you, a boy you loved?’
The woman was with his brothers. He did not know what to make of her, because she wanted to run with the brothers but was not one. He’d seen her before; she’d made herself known to them, knew the one who was lost. She was eager, dirty; she was ugly. She was so desperate to become a brother he knew she would do anything, everything he asked of her. He knew he could have had her if he wanted, but he found her repulsive; besides, she was more use to him in other ways.
Nemesister: The gripping women's psychological thriller from Sophie Jonas-Hill Page 5