Nightspawn

I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man. I think my life is diseased. Only a flood of spleen now could cauterize my wounds. This is it. Hear the slap and slither of the black tide rising. The year has blundered through another cycle, and another summer has arrived, bringing the dogrose to the hedge, the clematis swooning to the door. The beasts are happily ravening in the sweltering fields of June. How should I begin? Should I say that the end is inherent in every beginning? My hyacinth is dead, and will never bloom again, but I keep the pot, like Isabella, and water with my tears in vain the torn and withered roots. What else is there for me to do? They took everything from me. Everything.

The island torments me. I open the box and there it is, an image cut from jewels, quivering between the azure lid and bed of sapphire silk. At dawn the sky bloomed with a warm wet shade of pearl, at evening was suffused with a delicate heartrending lavender. At first I knew no rest there. My life was fitful, disturbed by savage dreams. The land appeared arid and
irretrievably
dead, forsaken by the seasons. The sea was stupefying in the monotonous regularity of its tides. I scurried over the rocks, averting my eyes and mind from the harshness of the desert around me, saying, my life is more than this, the value of
my life lies in the sum of all I have lost by coming here. But always I was left, alone, stranded, gaping at the blazing brown hills, the shattered sea, my brain a bright blank void. I lived on a spit which turned me slowly through the heat of the days, my vision fractured by light from the sky, from stark white walls, by light clattering on the sea in shards. Sometimes even the sheen of sweat on my own skin was enough to scorch my eyeballs. At last I surrendered. At the still centre of a certain day, while a hot wind gasped out of the north, I discovered the desert which lay within me. It was not a totally unpleasant discovery. By inexplicable means it freed me. I began to notice the thousand small signs of the seasons which all along had been stirring bravely but unnoticed on the parched earth. The lines of hill and sky no longer looked to me like the silent reefs of an alien planet, but were perceived to hold within them a thrilling purity and logic, a simplicity of staggering
proportions
. The two constants, sea and sky, now set the rhythm of my days. Time as I thought I knew it was put out of joint. I became a master of improvisation. Peace was the easiest thing to find, and my taste for drama was sated by fits of lust and their consequences. I lost the tedious intensity which had tormented me all my years. I learned to relax. I was happy. That was the island. I sailed there by devious and forlorn ways, and there it was one day in a late spring that Julian and his cursed brood sailed with majestic aplomb into my life. My life. Imagine a wry smile.

Clear sea light blazed upon the harbour that day, upon the water, splintered into swaying columns of fierce blue and gold. A boat with a black sail glided silently across the bar, and down on the beach the fishermen were beating squid on the rocks. The fat pink pelican, mascot of the island, morosely eyed the quayside from its perch on the prow of a grounded skiff. I sat by a table in the little square before Constantinou’s taverna. The place was almost empty at that early hour. There was a mad old
man in a dirty hat, talking earnestly to his dog, a gigantic
one-eyed
beast with slavering jaws. In a far corner, the village barber slept and snored with a handkerchief over his face. I looked at the pelican. The pelican looked at the dog. The dog barked suddenly, and the old man, with a terrible roar, gave it a clout of his stick and sent the miserable animal howling across the quay. The barber awoke, and clawed the handkerchief from his mouth. He rubbed his eyes. His face opened in a yawn.

Boom.

I started in fright. The white liner was already dropping its anchor beyond the harbour bar. There came the grinding of the winch, the ringing shouts of sailors. Four weatherbeaten trawlers coughed their way across the water, and stopped, rearing and rolling in the wash, beside the four step-ladders which came clattering down from the liner’s deck. I left the table and strolled out along the pier. The sun was licking the last patches of dew from the flagstones, and a moist green odour was in the air. The trawlers returned and disgorged their
passengers
on the quay. Hot and flustered tourists wandered groggily among the jumble of baggage. Screaming children’s ears were boxed with furious abandon. The village opened like a mouth and the widows came streaming out, waving little pasteboard cards which described, in decorous though erratic English, the hospitality and splendour of their vacant rooms. The harsh Greek voices and bewildered little squeaks of the tourists grated against each other in the tranquil morning. The boats chugged and spluttered, and the sea birds shrieked, beside themselves at the sight of such potential targets. Above the clamour, the liner’s siren boomed majestically. I was jostled and jabbed on all sides, and a fearsome Scandinavian lady, all ash-blonde plaits and tanned fat calves, struck me on the knee with her suitcase. When I turned to complain, she glared at me, baring her fine strong teeth. I retreated, and stepped up on the sea wall to implement my modest sixty-seven and one half inches. The German was the last passenger to disembark. He was not alone. I fought my way to his side, and touched his shoulder.

‘Bonjour,’ I said brightly. ‘Je m’appelle White, Ben White. Peut-être vous —’

‘What?’

He whirled about, with one elbow raised defensively, and peered over the top of my head. He was a tall, gangling creature dressed in an extraordinary tubular suit, which must have once been black but was now a shiny bluebottle green. His fearsome yellow teeth stood marooned like crooked tombstones in the midst of an awkward mouth, and the spikes of red hair standing upright on his diminutive skull glittered in the sunlight like severed strands of wire. Through battered steel-rimmed spectacles two small grey eyes peered out with an expression of slowly dawning surprise, as though grappling with the baffling slip and slide of a world continuously changing. I lifted an uncertain hand and said in more certain English,

‘You are Erik Weiss, aren’t you? My name is White. We met once, some time ago, in Doctor Rabin’s shop.’

He nodded swiftly, his head wobbling at the end of its pale stalk of neck.

‘Yes yes, yes, I know you. I remember. How are you?’

His gaze slithered down from my face, crossed the space between us to his large brown mountaineering boots, paused briefly there, and climbed his own legs. Having verified himself, he yawned, and put his head on one side and smacked a cupped palm sharply to his ear. One of the Scandinavian’s sawing elbows poked him in the ribs, and, mistaking the direction from which the prompt had come, he quickly turned and swept his companion forward.

‘This is Andreas.’

Andreas was a dark Greek gentleman with a handsome face, furious eyes, and a hideously crooked back. He gave me a wisp of a smile and crunched my fingers in his pale hand. With a rigid forefinger, Erik inscribed a swift little cross beneath his nose, sniffed, then plunged the finger on to point across the quay.

‘Breakfast.’

We went to my table, matching our pace to Andreas’s
complicated
lurch. The waiter came, a mournful boy with a failed moustache, and Erik ordered coffee and eggs for the three of us. I wanted to say that I had already eaten, but instead I cleared my throat and gravely considered the pelican. It clacked its
beak disdainfully and looked away. The morning was becoming intolerably hot and gummy. Out over the sea a gathering of ugly black cloud was smeared like a grease stain on the sky. Erik unwound the spectacles from behind his ears, folded them carefully, and jabbed his fingers into his eyes. Andreas sat between us in a perfect and unsettling stillness, his thin lips pursed.

‘Did you have a bad crossing?’ I asked.

Erik merely groaned, and shook his head in despair. Andreas said,

‘There was a storm, yes.’

I nodded.

‘Ah.’

The food arrived. I sipped the bitter seedy coffee and watched the others eat. Erik wolfed the mushy concoction of eggs, his little eyes fixed on a point of empty space, while Andreas wielded his fork with dainty and precise economy. A cloud shadow swept abruptly across the quay, engulfing us, but the shade seemed to bring only a deeper intensity of damp heat. Erik leaned back in his chair, cast a wistful eye at my untouched plate, belched, and then looked at me with a frown.

‘They told me your name was … Turbine, or something,’ he said.

I shook my head.

‘No, it’s White.’

The German fumbled in his pocket and brought out a fat worn wallet, from which he fished a tattered scrap of paper, and peered at it myopically.

‘Twinbein,’ he read. ‘James H. Twinbein, yes?’

‘No.’

‘But they said —’

I explained everything to him, in detail, speaking slowly and carefully, as to a child. He listened to the first couple of sentences. To see his concentration waver and slowly crumble was like witnessing the gradual collapse of an intricate, finely wrought mast. He seemed ill, or drunk, or both. My voice faded, and in the ensuing silence, Andreas suddenly laughed.

‘Erik drank too much last night,’ he said. ‘First brandy, and
then ouzo, and … well, you know.’

I looked at the cripple, at his handsome impassive face. There was something about him, a quality of his calm perhaps, which filled me with a vague disquiet. He folded his hands on his breast and lapsed again into silence.

‘Is it clear now?’ I asked of Erik.

He scowled at us both, and buried his nose in his coffee cup.

‘Pah,’ he grunted.

The passengers from the liner were still struggling on the quay, vainly trying, under the harassment of the widows, to sort out their belongings. Something moved behind the pier, and a yacht, a gorgeous thing composed of sleek spare lines, came slipping between the beacons, into the harbour. The rattle and crack of stiff cloth sounded peremptorily across the water, and the tall sail crumpled and slowly fluttered to the deck, leaving the needle-slim mast splendidly alone to pierce the sky. The babble of voices on the quayside faded, and all turned, captivated by the glimmering white presence of the craft. An anchor plopped into the water, and the upturned pointed prow turned its disdainful gaze all along the length of the quay, seemed profoundly repelled by the vulgarity it saw, and went on to contemplate the ocean from whence it had come. And a fat black cloud, lying low in the middle distance, sent a livid shaft of lightning plunging down into the sea. Oh yes, indeed yes, only the trumpets were missing.

Erik was singularly unimpressed by this arrival. I do not think he even noticed it. He rubbed his spectacles with a dirty handkerchief, clipped them back on his nose, and, having sucked a tasty morsel from his tooth, he asked of me,

‘Is there somewhere for me to stay?’

‘Yes. I have a room for you.’

I glanced uncertainly at Andreas, and, seeing my glance, Erik’s gloom lifted for the first time. A wicked grin contorted his face, and he snickered and said,

‘Andreas will be all right, he will dig a hole in the ground, it will be all right.’

The cripple calmly smiled, and his claws stirred in anticipation on his breast. They gazed at each other for a moment,
during which I had the distinct, uncomfortable sensation of becoming transparent. Then Erik’s laugh rang out, a high-pitched squawk falling abruptly to a frantic snigger. He stood up, and picked up their bags, the straps of which were being devoured by growths of green mould. He said,

‘All right.’

I was left to pay the bill.

A skiff bobbed by the landing stage, a daughter to the great yacht out on the water turning slowly around the axis of its anchor chain. Three passengers disembarked on the quay. There was a short, fat man with a club foot. Yes, a club foot. The other two looked like his son and daughter. The boy was perhaps thirteen, with a mass of wild black curls and the delicate pale face of a sullen angel. The girl I thought to be four or five years older than her brother. All three of them had large, strangely beautiful blue eyes, the blue of crystals in the sea. They advanced across the quay, the father in front, supported by a heavy stick, the children some paces behind him, each staggering under the weight of a heavy, brown leather trunk. I felt the ghosts of caliphs smiling upon the procession with nostalgia and approval. I hurried in the wake of Erik and the cripple, trying to force my wallet into a pocket which, I
discovered
, I had forgotten to unbutton. I paused for a moment, a fatal moment, and wherever that button is now, and that wallet, I fervently hope that they have souls with which to suffer the unmitigated agony of an eternity of thoughtfully assorted hells. The father limped past me without a glance, puffing and snorting, but the girl, as she drew near me, began to totter, clawing wildly at the straps of the trunk. Being a
gentleman
and an idiot, I sprang to her aid. She saw me coming, and with a great gasp of relief she let go her hold of the thing. It toppled slowly into my waiting arms, and I was thrown back a pace, hearing, as I went, an ominous creak from one of my thumbs. The girl and I started into a little dance, weaving our way back and forth on the flagstones and affording some
amusement
to the onlookers. The boy set down his trunk, with an ease for which I could have bitten him, and watched us with a faint smile. At last she was loaded again with her pack. I heard a
Strange noise behind me, and glanced over my shoulder to find the father leaning on his stick, chortling in high amusement. He bowed to me, and turned, and stamped off on his way. The girl gave me a brilliant, false smile and said in a slightly accented English,

‘Thank you, thank you so much, you are very kind, thank you.’

I simpered, and turned away to follow my two loyal friends, who by now had reached the other end of the quay, where they lounged in wait for me with their hands in their pockets. I cannot now say how I knew, but I did know, and was distinctly conscious of somewhere a strut tightening, a wheel squeaking, and the great fragile contraption, like an antediluvian bicycle, beginning to wheeze and whir.