Nightspawn (6 page)

I looked at the still figure before me. Now in the moonlight I could see a little better, but not well enough, no.

‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Did you like that fairytale?’

There was a short, and, it seemed to me, a thoughtful pause. The figure stirred, and slipped down like liquid shadow to the ground. The voice spoke, indifferent and drowsy.

‘Who have you ever killed?’

‘That I’m not able to tell you,’ I said, and put my head upon
the carpet of pine needles.

Time passed.

‘Ah, dear god,’ said I.

So we lay, somewhat together, sighing and shifting, listening to the voices of tree and grass, the whisper of the wind stealthily dismantling the forest floor, the murmur of things, and beyond that, the deeper sounds, the far wild silences and music of the night.

Dark, dark.

Leave this place. Too many fanged and flesh-devouring beasts are slouching through the undergrowth. I have not the courage.

The day was crazed with the wind tearing the rocks and bushes, and the land tormented by a thundering purple sea. The sun was well off the horizon, touching the sky, in spite of the storm, with a brave and delicate blue, the burnt hills with gold. A fine salt spray was threaded in the air. It stung my lips and eyes as I slowly climbed the hill. My skin was suffused with a dry fire, burning yet with the sour dregs of too much alcohol, and the roots of my hair pained me when the wind shook it. I was dressed in faded denim, and the shirt was open at my throat. Sandals bound my dust-soiled feet. I needed a shave. There is nothing else. What my thoughts were is my own affair. As to the method by which I was returned from the holy island to this profane one, I had only vague and dubious recollections.

The house was built into a recess of the hill, so that the rear side of the roof was always shaded, while the front wall blazed in the sunlight with a bluish blinding ferocity. The original had been a two-roomed structure of severe simplicity, but Julian had added to it year by year, and now it clambered up and down the hillface in a confusing jumble of planes and ledges. I stopped
by the gate, my hand on the crumbling stone pillar, and took a deep breath to clear the wool from my eyes. Around the corner of one wall, an ear, a ragged curl of hair, and a fat hand holding a cane were visible. I walked toward that corner over the quiet dust. Julian stood there, very still, peering down into the ground at his feet, like someone waiting for the punchline of a joke, for the arse of the fat man’s trousers to burst. I think he knew that I was there, watching him. I think he was waiting for me.

‘Good morning,’ I said, but the words did not come out of my mouth. I coughed and tried again, and produced a slightly more successful croak. Julian started melodramatically and turned, a smile already forming on his goatish jowls.

‘Ah, Mr White, you came. How are you? Recovered from last night, eh?’

‘Somewhat.’

‘You shouldn’t drink so much, you know,’ he said roguishly.

We looked at each other for a moment of awkward silence (at least my side of the silence was awkward) and then our gazes slipped elsewhere. Julian cut with his cane three neatly
considered
lines in the dust beside his malformed foot. He said something, but the wind whirled his words away.

‘What?’ I cried.

‘I said, have you seen my well? I had it dug —’

Another blast of wind severed the sentence. A hole, not more than eighteen inches in diameter, was open in the ground behind him, ringed with a ledge of flat stones. It was down into its depths that he had been peering when I found him. I watched him, wondering if this were another trick to set me up for his mockery, but his eyes were innocent.

‘That’s nice,’ I said.

He nodded complacently.

‘Yes, I’m fascinated by these things.’

There was a sound behind us, and we turned. A slight, pale man in horn-rimmed spectacles stood in the doorway of the villa. He seemed ill at ease, and looked at us with an aggrieved moroseness, as though we had no right to whirl about so suddenly and catch him like that. His neat dark suit (jagged teeth of a frayed trouser cuff clenched on the back of his shoe)
Struck an incongruous note against the fierce wind-blasted landscape about him.

‘Ah, Charles,’ said Julian. ‘This is Mr White, the writer I spoke of.’

He turned to me.

‘This is Charles Knight, a fellow-countryman of mine.’

I shook a moist warm hand, while Julian looked from one of us to the other, beaming. He said,

‘Charlie wanted to meet you, didn’t you, Charlie? Charlie is very interested in literature.’

There was the faintest hint of a pause before that last word … at least, there should have been some hesitation. Charlie Knight’s blue jowls registered a further depth of gloom.

‘Yes,’ he moaned. ‘I’m very interested in literature.’

He blinked slowly, sadly, behind the powerful lenses of his spectacles, and heaved a tiny sigh. His voice, vivid and thrilling as a Lancashire smog, was utterly without cadence; the voice of a weary executive contemplating the arrival of his second ulcer. I began to laugh. I could not help it. The scene was ridiculous.

‘Oh,’ I cried, somewhat unsteadily, to stifle the boiling glee, ‘you’re interested in literature?’

‘Yes.’

He nodded slowly. A thought seemed to stir in his brain, for his left eye began to flicker, and a vein ticked in his forehead. I had a vision of him slowly falling to pieces before me, like a clockwork man gone wrong. My hilarity could not be checked. I gave a muffled sneeze of joy.

‘Bless you,’ Charlie murmured absently, and began to turn away. ‘You’ll be on the island for a while, I suppose, Mr White?’

‘Yes indeed.’

‘Ah.’

I glanced at Julian. He stood a step away from us with his hands clasped on his stomach, grinning, in a rapture of delight. I thought he might wink, but instead he swung away across the garden in the wake of his friend. At the gate he halted.

‘Do say hello to Helena,’ he called, waving a hand toward the house.

Then they were gone around a spur of the hill. I stood pulling at my lip, and looked into the well. The water lay ten feet down, like black shining steel. From its surface, my own eyes stared back at me, cold and unwavering, changed by depth into the eyes of some animal. What vengeful urges were stirring in that bile in the bowels of the earth? I shivered. Julian was on my mind. I had never met anyone like him before, and never will again. To be in his presence was to glimpse the infinite possibilities of laughter which the world could offer. He carried always a great cauldron of laughter trapped within him, which at intervals released little jets of merriment. Absurdity was his drug. Whether such a sense of humour was of value, or was anarchic and vicious, that I could not decide. But it occurred to me, standing by the well, that death, death indeed was the great joke which Julian sought. A massive heart attack, I decided, would be the most hilarious thing of all, and Julian would die with laughter bubbling in the blood on his lips. A very pretty notion, but unfortunately mistaken. Julian’s joke of a lifetime was something quite different from death, and I, surprise surprise, was the one who set it up for him.

But that is enough of Julian for the moment. On, on to his charming wife, if that is not too precise an imperative.

‘You too, Mr White?’

She stood behind me with one hand, palm inward, fingers splayed, resting on her hip. The blonde hair was gathered into a loose knot at the nape of her neck, held by a large gold pin. She wore a tight blue pullover without sleeves, and a worn pair of white cord trousers. Her toes were out through battered tennis shoes. Standing there before me, with the wind shaking the hills around her, she seemed a Cycladean queen, the patrician line of each small bone formed by a millennium of aristocrats. Aye, and a lady into whom this poor peasant could never hope to plunge his hairy claws. She advanced, smiling, her eyes on mine, fully aware of the effect she had on
me, and pleased with it.

‘Me too?’ I asked.

She glanced at the well.

‘Do you also have a fascination with holes in the ground?’

‘Not in the ground, no.’

I tried to bite off my tongue. She was good enough to ignore that remark. I studied the hand which she lifted to her forehead to brush away a strand of hair, and a whole night of forgotten drunkenness came flooding back to me. Her nails were badly bitten.

‘Julian says that his greatest ambition is to buy Syntagma Square, dig an enormous crater in the middle of it, and then spy from the palace windows on the people who come to gape into it …’

She wheeled around to face me, and considered me curiously.

‘I wondered if you have the same kind of mind.’

I did not know what to make of that question. I giggled, and then looked gravely down into the well, giving her the benefit of my dignified profile. The wind roared around us.

‘There was a man driving alone one night on a country road in Ireland,’ I said. ‘He was going home. He crashed, and was thrown through the windscreen into a field. Various important bones were broken. At the other side of the field there were lights. He crawled toward them. It was a farmhouse. He got so near to it that he could see the farmer sitting by the fire with a newspaper, and the farmer’s wife bathing a child in a tin bath. With a great effort he started forward for the last few yards. Nearer and nearer, almost there, he began to laugh with relief, and laughing fell into a pond, and was drowned.’

Somehow that was not what I had meant to say. Helena made a gesture of distaste, and stepped away from me.

‘Oh no,’ I cried. ‘Listen.’

I caught her by the arm, but released her instantly. She stood with her back to me, her head bent, waiting.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Kyd. That story sounds differently, it should sound … I don’t know. I’m sorry.’

She smiled at me over her shoulder, and without a word went into the house. I moved toward the gate, and met the boy,
Yacinth, coming in from the road. He moved slowly, with his hands plunged in the pockets of his shorts. He seemed bored. I watched him, searching for Helena’s face in his, but, strangely, could not find it.

‘Hello,’ I said brightly.

He looked at me from under his lashes, tossing the black curls away from his forehead with an angry turn of his head. He muttered a greeting of sorts, and went quickly past me, through the dim doorway. A short laugh sounded in the house, the wind blew, and then Helena appeared, carrying a bundled towel under her arm.

‘I don’t think your brother likes me,’ I said.

‘Yacinth? He’s a strange child.’

We walked down the hill to the village. Helena bought chocolate and grapes, while I stood in the doorway kicking my heels. Above the heads of the crowd, a familiar thatch of red hair approached. I slipped into the shop and stood behind Helena.

‘Hide me,’ I said.

‘What?’

She looked at me, at the street, at me again, and smiled.

‘Your German friend?’

‘Not so much a friend.’

‘Oh’

Already, it seemed, I had traded an old love for a new.

The road took us away from the village, and along the coast high above the peaceful sea, the rocks, the rubbish dump, the shambles. Lizards lay torpid in the dust, too drugged with heat to stir at our approach. My shirt was damp and dark with sweat, and Helena now and then drove her hands into the heat of her hair. We followed in the silence of our steps the winding road, and at last, the hill crest crossed, we found the little bay and the deserted beach, the taverna at the water’s edge, and the tall parched reeds behind it. A great gust of wind met us, and died away. The day was growing calm. I found Helena smiling at me.

‘Everything,’ she murmured, and shook her head in wonder and amusement.

‘What?’

‘Everything, you said that everything frightens you.’

We took a table in the shade of the olive tree before the taverna. The beach was at our feet. The old woman of the place approached us warily. I asked her for beer, and she smiled, and nodded, and backed away. Helena said,

‘Are you writing a book now?’

‘A wha—? Oh yes, indeed, yes, like a beaver I am.’

She searched in her bag, her small bright tongue touching her lip, and brought out a crumpled packet of fat sweet Turkish cigarettes. I shifted, sitting sideways on the chair, for god, it would not do to have it nudge her knee under the table.

‘We had difficulty in bringing you back last night,’ she said, and picked a piece of tobacco from her lip. ‘From Delos, you know? You were very drunk, and sick. Do you remember?’

‘Not very well.’

‘I am not surprised.’

I turned the matchbox end over end on the table. The old woman of the crazed smile returned and set the beer before us. While I counted my money, she slowly wiped her hands in her apron, watching me. I paid her, and then said sharply,

‘Wait.’

Her smile wavered. I retrieved one of the coins from her palm and replaced it with another.

‘This is for luck, you see.’

She said something, which I did not catch, and went away. I slipped the coin into the pocket of my shirt.

‘For luck,’ I told Helena.

‘Of course.’

We drank our beer, and watched the water, the comings and goings of the little waves, wrestling with the silence. I dared to eat a grape. A boat rounded the headland and turned toward the beach. The soft liquid sound of the oars came clearly to us. Helena put a hand against her cheek and looked down at her glass. Light through the leaves above her had cut a tiny jewel on the rim. She was very still, and suddenly, without provocation, all her hair came loose and fell about her. It was long, and of one colour with the sunlight, it fell over her arm, over the table.
I bent and picked up the gold pin which had fallen to the dust. The point pricked my finger and suddenly I paused, wondering how I had come to be there. No force of my own had carried me down the hill, along the road, to this beach with this woman whom I did not know. I looked at her with a new curiosity. She was grinning at me through delicate blue wreaths of smoke. A woman whom I did not know. She dropped her cigarette into the sand, and lowered her eyes.