by Tom Stacey
‘It is true we are both alive, hamd’ul illah. Will you sit, Jonas? Here on the bed.’
There was nowhere else. A skinny right hand emerged from under the bedcover to motion Jones to his side, and scuttled back again. By the time Jones had begun to approach the bed itself, and to settle down on it, the distinction between himself and the other had become uncertain and the illusion supervened that the recumbent swaddled figure was himself.
The Emir went on ignoring his son (always the favoured child) who watched from the rug in the centre of the half-dark chamber.
‘I’m afraid I’ve not come in a tie or a coat,’ Jones murmured.
‘I too,’ the Emir concurred, ‘am not in correct dress, I think.’
Here the doctor – the Punjabi – broke in hurriedly, as if rehearsed. The patient had a flesh wound. A projectile had entered beneath the collar-bone and left the body grazing the shoulder-blade. Only grazing, mind you. There had been some bleeding, naturally. The patient had taken a sedative, and must not be tired. Visitors must be very brief.
The Emir waited for the man drily. ‘You find me as I would not wish to be found exactly,’ he said.
Once again Jones was unexpectedly short of something to say.
‘You have much to do, Jonas.’
‘I may not stay long.’
‘You have seen the proclamation.’
‘It seemed to be your signature.’
‘Ah, yes I signed it of course. You saw that.’
An odd-shaped silence ensued.
‘Your Highness,’ Jones began, making a point of the honorific. He gathered his wits. ‘How are you?’
‘We have grown old together, Jonas. You and I are too old to fear to die.’
Jones searched his mind for a question. The blank pad was in his left hand and the pen in his pocket. He was cross with himself for running out of questions so soon.
‘Perhaps you have a message for your people, and the outside world.’
‘My people?’ The old man seemed to strain for recollection. ‘They are in my thoughts. I wish them well under . . . under . . .’ – his eyes crawled towards the figure of his son but not to his face – ‘the present government.’
‘And the international community?’
‘Ah, yes. Our friends must accept that we must . . . resolve our problems in our own way without interferences.’
Another silence fell, closing them off. The doctor made an ugly officious purse of his lips. Jones supposed he should make a note and glanced at the blank pad. ‘Is there anything else you wish to say, Highness?’
The Emir looked back at his son, this time slap into his face.
‘There is my son,’ he said carefully. ‘He is the one with the right to wish. I am in the hands of Allah, in whom we all must trust, Jonas.’ For the second time God had been invoked for them jointly.
‘Then I will leave Your Highness to rest.’
‘We old men need rest, do we not? You will shake my hand, Jonas. We have known one another so long, in varying circumstances.’
The crabbed hand again crept from the bedclothes. It tightened round Jones’s hand awkwardly as if to keep him there. Jones felt some tiny thing pressing the centre of his palm: and the Emir’s hand twisted so that Jones’s palm was beneath. Something was being passed to him. Jones held the thing against his palm by the ball of his thumb. He supposed it to be a screw of paper. He felt Hatim’s eyes upon them. He stood. As he walked past Hatim to the door he transferred it to his trouser pocket. He wished to say something that hinted of his loyalty, but he couldn’t think of how to put it.
Hatim locked the door behind them.
Jones moved down the corridor by the way they had come. ‘Mr Jones,’ Hatim said behind him.
Jones stopped. He turned slowly.
‘Yes?’
Hatim faced him with an expression close to a sneer.
‘You have seen for yourself,’ he said. ‘My father is quite well.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘He would like the world to know.’
‘I have no means of sending a dispatch.’
Jones turned away. He could not attempt to mask his disgust.
‘Major Mohammed Abdu here,’ Hatim said, ‘will conduct you to a typewriter. Then he will arrange to telex your dispatch. And here –’ they had reached the main stairs – ‘I will say goodbye. And congratulate you on your “scoop”.’
He confronted Jones squarely, holding out a hand as if to trump his father’s. But to Jones, the hand that he took might have been a snake’s head.
*
He had walked into this: he had only himself to blame. He was long past it, of course – he would never have got himself cornered like this in the old days. If he refused to write anything, what could they do? Keep him here? Lock him up? Throw him off the island? The place was finished for him anyway. So was he: he had nowhere else to go . . .
The plump aide’s soft hands had cajoled and fluttered him into an office where a large upright Remington manual typewriter stood on a desk. It surprised him they had nothing more modern. White paper was brought, and carbon. It was fed for him into the roller. He felt like a little boy who if he refused his rice pudding would be presented it every mealtime until he got it down. How could he write what they wanted from him without his vomiting? It would clog his gullet. It would be the last dispatch he would ever write. It would finish him. If he were a child he would cry and stamp.
Did it still matter? he wondered.
The aide had got him up to the desk and was nuzzling a swivel chair against the back of his legs. What could he write? He sat down and typed that the Emir Ahmed al-Asnan had seen him in audience (he did not write ‘private’) following his abdication in favour of his son Hatim, and although slightly injured by a bullet in the shoulder, made a statement. He then quoted the Emir’s words accepting the authority of his slimy son and endorsing the proclamation he had signed. The dispatch was like a death-warrant on all that the island had always meant to him, but strangely he could not get the significance of this death- warrant through to himself. He read it through two or three times. It was a sort of death-warrant but the magnitude of his betrayal still eluded him, either because it was altogether too vast or else because it was of no consequence at all. He knew he could pull it off the roller and screw it up into a little ball and hand it to the aide like a turd. But he didn’t. He couldn’t or he wouldn’t, he did not know which. Instead, he typed the telex number and the usual dateline and the time slug at the top, and he turned the roller back and ended it with the words BUST BUST REGARDS, JONES. P.S. I AM NOT REPEAT NOT IN REACH OF THE TELEX TRANSMITTING THE FOREGOING. DO NOT REPEAT NOT CALL BACK.
The aide fidgeted about in the room, impatient to pull the dispatch off the machine. When he had the single page in his hands he read it with ponderous concentration.
‘Mr Jonas,’ he began, suddenly ominous.
Jones looked up.
‘Excuse me. I think this is rather short.’
‘It is all I have to report.’
‘You do not report of the purpose of the new Government. You do not discuss the new Prime Minister, Mr Fuad Al-Bakr.’
‘Prince Hatim was talking to me off the record, Major. I cannot move freely around the town. I can only write of the interview with His Highness the Emir.’
‘The father of the President-Regent.’
‘As you wish.’ Jones rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. He had had enough of this. ‘It is all there is to write,’ he repeated dully. ‘I have nothing more to offer you.’
The major scrutinised the text again. ‘“The former Emir said his people were in his thoughts,” he read aloud, ‘ “and he wished them well under the present Government.” Is it correct – “his” people?’
‘He hasn’t any others, Major.’
‘Then, tomorrow the people of England will know the truth, yes, Mr Jonas?’
‘They might,’ Jones said. These Arabs hadn’t gras
ped the fact that the Post did not publish on a Sunday. There would be a duty man in the newsroom, some dolt on overtime. The Post wouldn’t go to press again for another twenty-four hours.
‘Excuse me, Mr Jonas. Why you write “bust bust regards”? - You mean “best best regards”.’
‘Funnily enough, I don’t. “Bust bust regards” is how we end messages at the Post. It’s a way of saying “no more for now” and “goodbye” at the same time.’
‘Like that – “bust bust regards”?’
‘Odd, isn’t it? Why don’t we take it to the telex operator?’ Jones proposed. He wanted to assess the danger of the man on duty being familiar with Fleet Street cablese. ‘Bust bust’ meant ‘cancel’.
‘I shall take it.’
‘My message will not be altered?’
‘No one must interfere with what a journalist shall write from here. It would be against the principles of freedom of information. Only if the message was not accurate.’
‘But that is accurate.’
‘It seems accurate. Please wait.’
The aide disappeared with typescript, effusiveness displaced by uncertainty. Jones surmised the dispatch was being put before Hatim. The words ‘bust bust’ could, he supposed, cost him his life. He’d done it as a sort of joke at the last moment.
Five minutes later the aide returned, primed again with cheer, and chattering about the hot weather escorted Jones down the main stairway.
‘Mr Jonas,’ he announced on the palace steps, ‘you are our friend. Call back whenever you like. Whenever you like.’
Jones had the palace forecourt to cross first.
He walked towards the gates very slowly so that if someone had rumbled the meaning of the words ‘bust bust’ they could summon him back and lock him up or shoot him at once. He would feel a comfort, going out under the same roof as the old Emir. If he was to be shot, he would prefer the palace. He had a most idiosyncratic distaste for obscurity, he was aware of that.
He was looking at the fat holster on the thigh of the soldier at the gates when all of a sudden the soldier became agitated. He and a fellow had sprung into lively expectation of an imminent happening. They were about to open the main gates. For Jones? Yet he could leave by the little pedestrian gate at the guardhouse. The soldiers were trotting with the long arc of the main gates as they swung them open. And here was an armoured car approaching at speed, and behind it a white Mercedes.
As the two vehicles swept into the forecourt the soldiers saluted. Jones was only a yard or two from the gates then. He caught sight of the occupant in the back of the Mercedes: a black-and-white chequered head-cloth, and beneath it a familiar bespectacled ill-bred face. For a moment the passenger’s eyes met Jones’s, but then the car had gone by . . . yet not quite so fast-motion a replay of ancient glances as to have denied Jones and Al-Bakr the stab of recognition.
So Jones left by the main gates. And in that last stretch to his old car parked beyond the roundabout where the fountain danced, he felt a little surge of elation. He had made a fool of that pair of usurpers with his ‘bust bust’. He had taken the trick.
He got into his old Packard and started up. As he moved off he switched on his cassette-player, and turned the knob to full volume so that even at the gate they would receive a distant blast of the Pilgrims’ March from the Tannhauser.
5
When he got home he went into the kitchen and opened a tin of evaporated milk. He sat down to a large plate of cornflakes. He brought the sugarbowl over from the sideboard and, when he spooned on sugar, agitated ants sprinted all over the table. After several mouthfuls, he opened a can of beer and drank directly from it. Then he put his right hand into his trouser pocket and felt around for the little screw of paper. It was there among his loose change. He opened it out under the light. It was only two inches square, torn from a flyleaf of a Koran, with a message written in ball-point in Arabic and difficult to make out. He recognised the Arabic signature of the Emir.
He glanced at his watch. One hour to curfew. They could come for him any time – inveterately idiots were employed on the Foreign Desk who, if telephoned at home, would tell the Saturday duty man to query the ‘bust bust’. Either that or they would print the dispatch tomorrow for Monday. That would be dreadful. Of course, he didn’t even know for certain whether the palace telex operator had transmitted the ‘bust bust’ verbatim: he had allowed himself to be ushered from the palace without asking for a copy of his own telex. He hadn’t even brought out the carbon of his typescript.
The elation was quite gone now. He could see Al-Bakr strutting through the staterooms, and Hatim sliding across to tell him how he’d made a poodle of old Jonas.
He had lost his grip, he could see that: if he hadn’t lost his grip he would never have let them persuade him to write anything at all. It seemed to him now so easy to have defied them and to have taken the consequences. He’d really rather they came for him right this minute and got it done with: somebody in the palace would know where he lived. They could wheedle it out of the Emir himself. Maybe if they didn’t come now he could take himself back to the palace and somehow get to the telex machine on the pretext of adding to his dispatch and he could tell those fools on the Foreign Desk outright not to give that dispatch to the Back Bench, not on any account to print tomorrow for Monday.
He was the idiot, that was clear enough. It was just that he couldn’t any longer bring himself to engage in heroics. He was too old for heroics: he was washed up – the slang was descriptive. He saw the old Emir, yellowed and cadaverous: it was as if they were lying there together on the tide-line, bleached and lifeless, halfway to becoming sea and sand.
Now that he couldn’t live here on this island any more, he mused vaguely as to what he should do. He knew he had burned his boats – years and years ago he had burned his boats. Out of the vagueness, he identified the exact moment of boat-burning: when he handed the letter to the postman. It was a minuscule occurrence in itself – more like the moment when a heart chooses to stop. It began with his flying in to London from the Middle East without telling Liz and going straight from Heathrow to the dingy London bed-sit the Post let him keep on a fourth floor just off the Strand. A stray cat has got in and at the moment he opens the door the creature leaps to the top of the window and then out into the half-darkness and drizzle. He is just peering out into the well of the flats to see what happened to the cat when the telephone starts ringing.
He sits on the unmade bed to take it. It’s the Foreign Editor saying, ‘You’ve got to do something fast, dear boy.’ Some fool on the Desk has called home asking to speak to him and of course Liz has answered not knowing he was due back. They said they thought the plane must have been late. Now here’s the Foreign Editor telling him he didn’t think Liz swallowed it. She’d be trying to ring him at the flat any moment now. ‘If you’ve got your lady-friend there get her out quick.’
Jones is still in his tropical suit and his felt hat, with the unpacked suitcase and knocked-about portable with the remains of innumerable labels dumped in the threadbare armchair.
‘What lady-friend?’
Romy’s never been here.
‘Oh Gran. Don’t imagine all your chers collègues are deaf and dumb. I hear she’s a glittering lady, dear boy, some proconsular offspring, right? I’m making no moral judgments. All I’m saying is, Pack her out of the flat and fast. It’ll end in terrible tears.’
Jones reaches out a long hand to take a photograph from the mirror frame. It’s a small black-and-white snapshot of Liz with the boys when they were about six and eight, beside a plastic paddling pool in the Lamarsh garden, grinning into his camera. The boys are virtually grown-up now.
The Editor wanted to talk to him about the Commonwealth PMs’ conference, the Foreign Editor says.
‘What about it?’ Jones asks.
‘They’re all arriving in London next week.’
‘Oh, is that all? A piece for tonight?’ It is already four p.m.
‘Tomorrow for Wednesday. They’re going to try to throw out the South Africans. You’d better come in.’
‘One was vaguely aware,’ Jones says in the mock-languid way he had when he felt people trying to stampede him. ‘Look, d’you suppose Liz has picked up anything?’
‘I haven’t any evidence she has, Gran. There’s talk here, in the newsroom, I’m bound to tell you.’
‘It hasn’t been a marriage for years.’
He is looking at the snapshot in his fingers. Liz has just had her hair styled in a new way, without warning, a surprise for him on his return from somewhere.
‘There are marriages and marriages, dear boy.’
‘Nobody’s stealing me away from Liz.’
‘Whatever you say, Gran.’
When he rings off he does not hang up; instead he pushes the receiver under the rather greasy pillow to muffle the dialling tone. He tries to turn the knob of the radiator but it is too stiff. The cactus seems to have survived but the potted plant has died of thirst, dark and neglect. The room stinks of cat.
He partially unpacks his suitcase. Under a crumple of socks he finds a batch of receipts, and these he smooths and sorts out, setting aside the hotel receipts that are made out to ‘Mr & Mrs Jones’, or ‘2 pers’. He begins to burn these over the gas ring.
He sets up his typewriter on the cheap table. At a typewriter he can think. He types, ‘Dearest Liz, I am best on paper and that’s why the sad things I have to say are coming to you on paper.
‘Gavin once said, “If you love Mummy, you would have given her a divorce” . . .’
He types in short paragraphs on white A4 paper in double spacing, like a dispatch. Tears well in his eyes and he gets up to pour himself a whisky in a tooth-mug. He reads it through carefully, correcting as he goes, and then he takes another sheet of A4 and laboriously copies out the whole letter in freehand. He glances at his watch because he wants to catch the post. He rummages about for an unused envelope, and finds one. It has the name of a Lebanese hotel on it, one that he and Romy have been to together, but it will have to do. He rereads the letter and seals it.