The Master of Chaos

by Pauline Melville

  She took a last draw on her cigarette and flung the glowing stub away behind her before taking me by the arm and hurrying with me towards the waiting cab.

  The Rivoli is set some fifty yards back from the Highway. A random selection of lighted hotel windows blazed in the dark. The taxi dropped me off at the gate. Grandmother ordered the driver to move further down the road and wait there so that she could remain as far out of sight as possible.

  I walked along the narrow paved path that led to the illuminated hotel entrance. It was a bright moonlit night and overhead Orion straddled the horizon but at a different angle from the one he occupies in the London sky. I sought out and found the two bright stars of the frog’s eyes in the neighbouring constellation. They somehow reassured me. And in my jacket pocket I still had the Crown and Anchor dice Grandmother had given me at the funeral. I fingered them hoping they would bring me luck.

  It seemed that the water feature just outside the hotel entrance had broken and was flooding the pathway. As I approached, I saw the figure of my aunt Selma come stumbling through the swing doors. She was clinging on to her bag. Her face was grey and I could see the pock-marks on her pouchy cheeks where she had once had chicken-pox as a child. Her steel-grey hair had come loose. Two dark circles under the armpits of her dress showed that she was perspiring heavily. She made no attempt to avoid the flowing water around her feet and staring straight ahead splashed right through it, soaking the bottom of her skirts.

  I flicked open the black silk opera hat and put it on, waving at her so she would recognise me.

  Selma stopped in her tracks. I could see her peering at me in the moonlight. Her hand shot up to cover her mouth. She gave a little whimper, looked away and looked at me again as I came towards her. Then, she raised her arms as if to ward me off and staggering slightly, she turned and splashed her way back into the hotel. By the time I got there she had collapsed in the foyer and was lying on the floor unconscious surrounded by people trying to minister to her.

  ‘I think she took a stroke.’

  The hotel management were fussing around and someone called for a doctor. The next thing I knew little wizened Caso was at my side.

  ‘Yuh lookin’ like yuh grampa. Is life in death she see when she look at you. Tek off de hat.’

  He looked grim as he told me what had happened.

  ‘Your aunt lose de house.’

  I barely understood what he was saying. Aunt Selma seemed to be coming round. Someone had administered brandy. She was sitting up groggily leaning against a pillar.

  ‘What should I do? We must get her to hospital. My grandmother is outside waiting in a taxi.’

  Caso turned to me.

  ‘Listen to me nuh. Don’ tell yuh granny nuttin’. It will kill her. I think your aunty goin’ be ok. But dere is no way any of yuh could get nuff money to buy back de house. Yuh mus’ get in there and try win it back. Is what yuh grandfather would do. Time for you to become a big man now. I will stay wid your aunt. Go now. Yuh ain’gat nothin’ to lose.’

  He explained to me roughly the rules of Rouge et Noir and gave me a shove towards the door:

  ‘The deeds is a sheaf of papers. Someone will be holdin’ on to dem. Yuh gat money? Yuh might as well try. Yuh can’t get back de house no other way.’

  I had the few thousand dollars Grandmother had given me for the taxi. At the door of the salon they enquired about my age.

  ‘Eighteen,’ I replied and was shown into the small room.

  A large overhead lamp hung above the green baize card table. I had no idea what I was doing but I could see the deeds were now in the possession of a plump Indian woman with crimson lipstick. They must have changed hands several times adding a certain frisson to the game that evening. The rules were simple. All I had to do was choose between staking on the red or the black. I couldn’t decide, red or black. Then I remembered the little golden frog I’d seen squatting on the hearts sign and I plumped for the red. The game began. At first my mouth went dry as black cards appeared everywhere like sinister sentries. The six of clubs prevented any progress. Unless some red card showed up, I’d had it. And then, suddenly, luck started clinging to the red. Everything upturned was red. First of all diamonds. Then hearts. Soft plush hearts. The world folded smoothly into order. The universe was in place.

  Triumphant, I left the salon with the deeds grasped firmly in my hands. Caso stood in the foyer with my aunt Selma.

  ‘Tee hee.’ Caso clapped and gave a wheezy cheer when he saw me. ‘Yuh done good. Yuh grampa watchin’ over yuh. Yuh come Master of Chaos like he say.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Tek yuh Auntie Selma home. I jus’ got time for a little Blackjack.’ He seemed genuinely pleased at our good luck and handed Selma over to me before scuttling away.

  Selma held on to my arm and remained silent. There was no doubting my feelings at the time. I felt I had undergone a rite of passage and become a man. I led my aunt down the path and guided her to where Grandmother waited in the taxi. Another tropical storm was threatening. Lightning put down its flickering white roots in the sky. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Nothing could dampen my elation. I was now an adult, grown-up and responsible for my aunt. In my hand I held the deeds of the house. I experienced an extraordinary feeling of euphoria. I had put the world to rights, re-established order and balance. I was Phaeton having regained mastery of the sun’s chariot as it careered, out of control, across the sky.

  In the taxi, with great pride, I handed back the deeds of the house to my grandmother. Neither of the two women spoke as the cab raced down the Highway. Grandmother said nothing but cast me a look of enormous gratitude.

  Two streets from home we found fire engines blocking the road. Firemen denied the taxi entrance so we paid the driver off and walked round the corner stepping over the thick rubber hoses that snaked along the street. Nothing could have prepared us for the sight in front of us. Our house was engulfed in flames. Fire had reached the top of the roof and burst into a white fireball with a ragged yellow edge of flames which danced like yellow sea-horses. I remember my grandmother’s screams as we clung on to one another although I barely remember what else happened in the next few hours. A neighbour gave us shelter that night. None of us slept.

  The next morning we returned to the site. In front of us, still in a haze of smoke, stood the grey smouldering ruin of the house.

  When I finally returned to my parents in England, I tried to give them an account of what had happened. No-one had been able to discover how the fire started. It could have been caused by lightning or by the cigarette stub which Grandmother had casually thrown away as we left home for the Rivoli, or maybe by some electrical fault. My parents comforted me as best they could after such a trauma. I thought a good deal about the words Grandfather uttered the night we sheltered under his umbrella waiting for the bus to Lewisham: ‘Chance is random. Fate is not. Fate has a plan and fate wins in the end. But chance allows you to think you are escaping fate for a little while. Look. Here come de bus. We in luck.’

  FABLE OF A LAUREATE

  On the morning of his fateful decision, Noel Dunham was peering through the telescope he kept in the window of his study. His house perched on the Cornish cliffs near Lamorna Cove. Below him, a few holiday-makers could be seen walking along a cliff path. A thick sea-mist had rolled over Mount’s Bay, blotting out the horizon and obscuring his view of the Lizard Point peninsula. It might well have been this disappearance of a familiar landmark, this vanishing into the mist and dissolution into nothingness that prompted the idea. For that was the day, Noel Dunham decided, that he was going to kill himself.

  Six years earlier Noel Dunham had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He’d enjoyed the success, the travelling to speak at international literary festivals, the newspaper interviews, the television appearances, all of which had occupied him fully over a number of years. The problem was that ever since his trip to Sweden he had been unable to write a word. Whenever he sat down to start a new piece of
work, he was paralysed by the fear that nothing he wrote would ever be as good as the work he had already created. A lifetime of working to a disciplined schedule meant that he continued to sit at his desk every morning. To no avail. He still worked, or tried to work, on an ancient typewriter. At the age of seventy-five he felt unable to adapt to new technology. But now he had begun to believe that his typewriter had a life of its own and was nursing malign intentions towards him. It squatted in front of him like a dangerous black insect. Whereas most things about Noel Dunham were well-worn and comfortable – his sagging face and rheumy blue eyes, the silvery pointed beard, his corduroy trousers – the typewriter facing him on the desk looked spiky and malevolent. Once, when he began to type, the keys all rose up at once like the swirling, clattering iron skirts of a furious Dickensian housekeeper and made him start back in fright.

  His housekeeper in real life, Mrs Edwards, was the benign and friendly opposite of this threatening machine. She was enormously overweight. The fatness of her cheeks pushed her eyes up into a permanent slant. Her husband owned the best dairy in Penzance and she helped him to run it, while continuing to clean for Mr Dunham because she had worked for him before she married and did not like to let him down.

  As Noel Dunham looked through his telescope at the heaving swell of the sea below and the eddying shapes of mist outside his window, Mrs Edwards pushed open the study door and entered the room sideways with his elevenses on a tray.

  He put down the telescope and turned towards her.

  ‘Mrs Edwards—’ He hesitated, overcome with a sudden need to unburden himself. ‘I am having some trouble with my work. I’ve got a little stuck.’

  Mrs Edwards gazed at him, appalled . She had noticed for some time now that there had been no lively tap-dancing of the typewriter over her head as she cleaned and dusted downstairs. But she kept her counsel. It was no business of hers. All the same, somewhere in her mind she had always dreaded the day when something would be expected of her from this distinguished figure that she would be unable to deliver. That day, it seemed, had arrived.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said. Her troubled breast rose and fell. Her mouth puckered and her weight caused her to pant a little as she spoke. ‘Oh dear,’ she repeated, then turned and left the room.

  He knew immediately that he had breached some unspoken rule of etiquette between them. From upstairs he could hear Mrs Edwards speaking on her mobile phone.

  ‘Why couldn’t he ask me about milk-churns or ice-cream?’ she was saying indignantly. ‘Or butter-pats. Home-made cheese in muslin. Clotted cream or something I could help him with.’

  Disappointed with himself for involving her in his dilemma, Noel Dunham, with great clarity of purpose, took some headed paper from the drawer, wound it into the typewriter and settled down to compose a suicide note.

  ‘To whom it may concern . . .’ That sounded a bit formal. Too legalistic and impersonal. He screwed up the paper and tossed it in the wastepaper basket. ‘Life has become an intolerable burden.’ Jesus Christ, he muttered to himself, how banal. I’m a Nobel prize-winner. I should be able to knock up a decent suicide note. He sprang up and went over to his bookcase. What kind of note did Ernest Hemingway write? He thumbed through one or two biographies. No mention of a suicide note. How inconsiderate. Novelists Yasunari Kawabata and H. Martinson the Swedish poet, were two other Nobel suicides who had neglected to write farewell notes. Infuriating. Well, what about Sylvia Plath? She wasn’t a Nobel winner but what did she say? He approved of the brevity of Sylvia Plath’s note: ‘Call Dr Horder’. Succinct and practical. But she had already written it. He wouldn’t like to be accused of plagiarism. The same went for Virginia Woolf. She had written a beautifully expressed suicide letter with not one jot of consideration for those who were to come after and might have liked to have written something similar themselves.

  The old typewriter faced him like an implacable enemy, a metal gin-trap waiting to snap shut on his fingers. He gingerly inserted another piece of paper and tapped out a few words. ‘Barometer plummeting. Stormy weather.’ Too Ella Fitzgerald. He tore the paper out and flung it across the room. He considered doing something witty like leaving a full stop in the middle of a blank page. But people might not notice it.

  Noel Dunham then decided to pull himself together and tackle the problem methodically. He would write every type of suicide note in every possible style and then go through them all until only one striking and inevitable farewell remained. For the rest of the morning he wrote an avalanche of suicide notes: magical realist suicide notes, a long epic suicide note, a brutal realist goodbye, a children’s fiction suicide note, a series of post-modern adieus, an epigrammatic farewell, a suicidal limerick, a Haiku cheerio. They fell off his desk one after the other and began to pile up on the floor. The sun came out and dispelled the morning mists. He bent down and read everything he had written. After a while he groaned out loud and threw it all into the wastepaper basket. Nothing worked. He put his head in his hands. Like Prometheus he would be forced to continue living with his innards being constantly and agonisingly gnawed by his inability to write a good enough suicide note.

  At that moment Mrs Edwards appeared at the door. She was flushed. It was one of their unspoken rules that she did not come into his study again after she had brought his elevenses. Normally she would just finish her work and leave. But she felt that something untoward had happened. The rules had been broken. Some sort of chaos had entered the household. And she wanted to make amends for not being able to help him out of his impasse. For once she thought she would defy their code of conduct and say goodbye.

  ‘I’m just going to fly off,’ she said. ‘I’m away now.’

  Noel Dunham turned and looked at her in surprise. Slowly an expression of delight spread over the writer’s face.

  ‘Goodbye, Mrs Edwards. Thank you.’

  He put a fresh piece of paper in the typewriter. He typed out the words: ‘I’m just going to fly off. I’m away now.’

  That would do. Simple. Direct. Touching on the poetic. Minimally humorous. The problem was solved.

  He picked up his pen to sign his name. It occurred to him then that other Nobel laureates had been blessed with much more interesting and dramatic names than his own: Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Yasunari Kawabata. Svetlana Alexievich. Kazuo Ishiguro. Olga Tokarczuk. How dull the name Noel Dunham sounded in comparison.

  His pen hovered over the paper but seemed unable to make contact with it.

  REASON HAS ITS LIMITS

  Of the five of us seated around a low table playing cards, I was the only one in civilian clothes. The other four were in military uniform. Whatever bad judgement had brought me there, I could see no immediate way of extricating myself. The room was austere and showed no hint of luxury. On one wall hung the official photograph of the bearded Colonel, now head of state, wearing his military beret with the badge in front. The single storey wooden house where we sat was situated some hundred yards from a sluggish creek that feeds into the Palumeu River. Outside, palm trees stood sentinel along the length of the creek, forming sharp black cut-outs against an evening sky streaked with pink and pistachio green. The sergeant dealing the cards wore the collar of his scruffy uniform unbuttoned. A damp cigarette hung from his lips as he collected the cards up from the table.

  The Colonel leaned back in his chair with folded arms and waited for his hand to be dealt. He wore his familiar fatigues and boots. It is a dictator’s duty to get up in the morning and make sure he looks exactly the same as the day before. There were tiny maggoty grey curls at the bottom of his beard. Some years after independence, the Colonel had led a military coup. He had elevated himself overnight from army sports instructor to Commander-in-Chief and head of state. ‘Colonel Do’ was how he liked to be known. He disliked intellectuals and considered himself a man of action. So they called him Colonel Do, or Do-Man or sometimes even Dr Do. At one point, under international pressure, the Colonel had been forced to give up his position and ste
p aside but that was only temporary and with the now infamous ‘telephone coup’ he had stepped back into power again. Since then a court in The Hague had convicted him in his absence of narcotics offences and fraud and sentenced him to a term of imprisonment. Consequently, he was reluctant to travel abroad. He grew more reclusive and spent swathes of time in his retreat, fishing and playing cards but keeping an eye on the various militias in the bush who were mobilising against him. We had been there for two weeks. Boredom was setting in. Apart from the chirping of tree frogs outside, there was no sound except the shuffling of the pack, the slapping down of cards and the occasional groan from a player who had been dealt a bad hand.

  How did I become so intimately involved with the Colonel? Well, I was working as a civil servant in the Ministry of Finance. The coup did not have much effect on our working lives. We just carried on as usual. Then one day the Colonel asked for someone from the ministry to come and help him deal with some matters regarding his personal finances. We all laughed in the office and joked about how we would have to teach him his two-times table. For some reason I was the one chosen to go.

  I must say I was a little apprehensive when I entered the white colonial presidential palace. All sorts of stories had grown up around the Colonel during the civil war. It was said that once a skinny man wearing only camouflage army pants and a pair of sandals had come running out of the bush towards him brandishing in his right hand the three-inch-long purple finger of a dead man. Gasping for breath, he had offered it to the Colonel.

  ‘We will win,’ he said. ‘This finger can make you invisible to the enemy whenever you need to be invisible. A djukka gave it to me.’ He gave the trophy to the Colonel and ran back along the rough track road into the bush. The Colonel was said to keep this memento somewhere on his person and his rumoured ability to become invisible at will was one of the factors which demoralised his opponents.