Nightspawn (7 page)

‘Have you ever been to France?’ she asked idly. ‘We went there last year. It was the end of winter, and very cold, we had not thought of that. On our last day there, the sun came out. We went to Versailles, and it was spring just in one moment, with a bird singing. In the gardens of the palace there were such trees and flowers. Perhaps you need to come from a barren country like this to appreciate such things.’

‘Greece is not barren,’ I said.

She did not look at me. One eyebrow twitched in annoyance, and then she was smiling again.

‘But the flowers, they were magnificent.’

She cupped her hands before her face, delineating a wondrous bloom. I watched her silently, with a fist against my teeth. She went on,

‘And I bought one of those little books, to read about the king. When he was dying, he said how everyone had told him it was difficult to die, but no, he knew it was easy. The women were crying, and he told them that he was nothing, that they should not cry. And then he was afraid that he might cry himself, but he didn’t.

With her fingertip she traced designs on the table, vainly trying to capture the patterns of leafshadow.

‘And so the king died,’ she murmured.

I lifted my glass.

‘Long live the king.’

We drank; or at least, I did. She looked at my ironic smile, and did not seem to like it very much. But she laughed anyway.

The dull sound of an explosion came to us. A little cloud of dust floated half-way up the hillside behind us, another rose, and a moment later came the sound,
crump.
The taverna keeper,
a burly old man in a cummerbund and a sailor’s cap, was drawing his boat up the beach. He jerked his head toward the hill, and called,

‘Some day he will blow us all up.’

He left the boat and came to our table, smoothing his heavy white moustache with the backs of his hands.

‘My son,’ he said, and laughed. ‘A grown man and he stays all day up there, playing with his fireworks.’

‘What is he doing?’ Helena asked.

The old man shrugged histrionically.

‘He says if we blow all the rocks away the olives will grow. Blow all the rocks away, have you ever heard such a thing?’

He shook his head, and tramped away into the taverna. Helena looked at me and smiled. She began to say something, but stopped, and bit her lip. We laughed, and fingered our glasses, and looked out over the bay. A breath of wind crossed the water, wrinkling it like shaken green silk, came on and stirred the leaves above us, stirred the reeds, the wild dry reeds.

‘There’s going to be a storm,’ I said.

She nodded. I went on.

‘I hate storms. Lord, there’s always something, something always happens, just when you think that you’ve found it.’

‘Found what?’

I took one of her cigarettes and lit it, and watched the smoke disperse.

‘The little thing,’ I murmured. ‘The little thing which means so much.’

She looked at me warily, somewhat distrustfully, annoyed, I thought, that I should compel her to question me. One cannot put very much poetry into a question, and the one who has the answer has also any mystery which may be around.

‘What is it?’ she asked, ‘this little thing.’

I grinned, and showed her my empty palms.

‘How would I know, not having found it yet?’

Her hands stirred on the table before her. She stood up, saying,

‘It’s time for my swim.’

She pulled off her trousers and her pullover, revealing an intricately made body covered in places by a tiny black bikini. If people really do gulp, as it is said they do, then I gulped. A dark cicatrice was inscribed under her left shoulder blade, which heightened the pale lucidity of her skin. She walked across the beach, hopping on the hot sand, and slipped into the sea. She was a good and graceful swimmer. From my pocket I took a scrap of paper and looked at it. When again I lifted my eyes, she had left the water, and stood now with her back toward me. The little waves lapped at her feet. For a time she stayed motionless, her face turned seaward, and then began to wade through the shallows. Her long hair hung down her back, and her shoulders gleamed. She came to where the sun burned on the water in a golden mist, and the light took her form and blurred its outline, so that she seemed to tremble on the brink of sea and light. She paused, and turned from the waist to look back at me, lifting her hand in a strange small gesture, languidly.

She came back to the table, tossing her head, running her fingers through her hair. Damp dark fern-strands gleamed in the pits of her arms.

‘Do you not swim?’ she asked.

I closed my mouth, and cleared my throat, and said,

‘No.’

She smiled, showing her small white teeth.

‘Another thing you fear, yes?’

She went and lay down in the sand beyond the shadow of the tree. After a while I followed her, and sat beside her on my heels. With her chin on her hands, she gazed at the white sand before her.

‘What do you write about?’ she asked.

‘Things.’

‘Not people?’

‘As seldom as I can.’

‘Tell me,’ she persisted.

I would say nothing. She frowned, and pushed damp hair away from her cheek with the pale soft underside of her wrist.

‘If I wrote, it would be about people.’

I shaded my eyes and looked out at the holy island on the sea.

‘Yes, I write about people too,’ I admitted. ‘But you have to be careful with them. They always want to have meanings, or be symbols, always something more than they are. They want to think, while all that matters is what happens in the little space between one person and the next.’

I bit my lip. She noticed nothing.

‘Like electricity and metal,’ she said, pleased with herself. ‘Or is it magnets? I never know. I shall buy one of your books.’

‘There is only one.’

‘Well I shall buy it, and if I do not understand it, then you can explain it to me.’

I shook my head and said solemnly,

‘That wouldn’t do at all, Mrs Kyd.’

I was eager to end the conversation. Helena sat up, and her swim suit sagged with the weight of damp sand which clung to it. Silver beads of water lay between her breasts. I left her, and went back to the table to finish my beer and curse at myself for a while, for no particular reason, apart from the eternal one of knowing myself to be a fool.

The afternoon went imperceptibly away into the enormous sky. The heatstorm raged briefly on the horizon, with lightning, and distant understated thunder. Nothing of that rage came to the beach but for a fitful murmuring of the olive tree, and a moment while the sea was alive with ghostly glimmers of phosphorescence. Helena put on her clothes, smiled at me, took up her bag, and started slowly away up the road with her head bent. The sun slipped down the sky above the headland, and the light ebbed on the beach. The old woman, sighing and nodding, came and asked me if I would take another drink, or a salad perhaps, a nice roasted fish. I thanked her, and refused, and went to the road. Purple shadows were flooding the sea. The wild reeds were clacking. There was the voice of the sea. I found her sitting on a low stone wall some distance up the hill. We said nothing, but moved away together. The sky turned through its colours, pale rose to blue, a wild soft purple shading to white on the horizon. The burnt barren fields around us were touched with gold, and the bushes gave up their shadows lingeringly
from among the leaves and thorns. A cloud of white glittering light exploded slowly on the sea below us, as though a huge invisible hand had smacked its quiet surface. Somewhere a cock sent up a querulous and irritated squawk. We crossed the spine of the island. A fresh breeze sprang up, and a hawk climbed the liquid air.

Well, well, a new day.

Noonday burned above the olive grove, in the trees among the boughs, on the ground where the little lizards stalked with their fragile and considered tread. Crazed with heat and the wild blue light, we rolled and writhed on the clay, grappling, joined at thigh and mouth, but she would not yield, and would not speak, and fought me in a savage silence. All round about us the air was singing, and through the leaves and the bitter fruits, something slowly moved. The lizards saw it and were still, transfixed by a hypnotic throbbing of the air and light, the yellow sun, the music and weird chanting high in the limitless sky. The limp leaves stirred, and the lizards watched, and the sun-drunk piping song grew loud and cried, and cried, and receded, slowly, with a dying fall, and died, into the trembling distance. I released her, and lay on my back in a silence of my own. She sat with her arms around her legs and her chin resting on her knees. With a quivering lower lip clenched in her teeth, she sifted a handful of dust through her fingers. There were leaves in her yellow hair. I got to my feet and went away,
stooping
under the branches and plucking the dull green buds. She took up her towel and followed me.

On the road, I turned my face away from her, whistling
carelessly
. The cicadas sang in the fields, and somewhere, distantly, a dog was barking. A far clear silence was abroad on the air. She said,

‘Mr White — Ben, I have something to say. If you want us to remain friends then you must never do that again.’

‘Fuck.’

‘What —’

‘Look, you can see the yacht from here.’

‘That is not what you said. I heard what you said. I think, Mr White, it would be better if we do not see each —’

‘Listen, lady.’

‘Well?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

One pace, two, three paces through a tight silence, and then,

‘I am a married woman,’ she said.

I began to laugh. I could not stop. She stood and glared at me, quivering with fury, said something which I did not hear, stamped her foot and stalked away. I galloped after her, flapping my hands.

‘Helena, listen, I’m sorry. Helena.’

I caught her arm, but she wrenched away from me and strode on down the hill, arms stiffly flying, knees bouncing, an angry little soldier. I trotted by her side.

‘I’m very bad. The lady is very good. I’m nothing but a big stiff prick.’

‘Do not think that I do not know these words.’

‘Yes yes, but listen, I love you.’

Whoops, she halted. We stood and faced each other, panting. With her head on one side, frowning as she tried to absorb what I had said, she stared at me, absently fidgeting with her hair. I shrugged, and threw out my arms, grinning helplessly.

‘How can —’ she began, but I gave her no time to finish. Spiderlike, legs and arms crook’d, I took a leap at her. We crashed into the ditch among the stones. Helena screamed. I had been a little too enthusiastic. A stab of pain shot through my leg, and then I found myself lying on my back, clutching my knee, and Helena was running headlong down into the village with a small angry cloud of dust following on her heels. Gone, gone forever. I took up a rock and gave my already wounded knee a fine new wallop. I was left with a crushed slab of
chocolate
and a burst bag of grapes. I laid my face into her fragrant towel and wept bitter tears of rage and pain.

Like salt-sea-washed grapes on the tongue, her first kisses, fierce through their unwillingness, stayed with me for days, a memory, a tiny desolation, tangible as the pain of a hot tear in a wound. I could not rid myself of her taste, her smell, the sound of her voice. She clung to me, a phantom of the earth and air. I crawled about the village, the island, yearning for a sight of her, and I think that had I seen her, in a distance of miles even, I would have fainted. And why, why such frenzy? She was, after all, a banal, tiresome little woman. The reasons were too devious for me to recognize then, and too devious for me to admit them yet. I must creep toward them by circuitous routes. Watch me closely.

So much happened before I was to see her again.

I climbed the steps and went down the dim corridor. The door stood open an inch. I knocked. There was no reply. Small, strange sounds came from the room. I put my toe to the door and pushed it open. Chairs were overturned, and the table on three legs leaned drunkenly against the wall. The fourth leg had been ripped off and used to smash small breakables. A tape recorder lay with its guts uncoiled all over the floor. The sheets were torn from the bed, and the mattress slashed. Papers were scattered everywhere, like a flock of slaughtered white birds. Erik stood in the midst of the carnage, gazing thoughtfully around him, while he in turn was scrutinized by the doubtful eyes of the Virgin on the wall, one of the few survivors, which was only fitting. I stepped into the room and closed the door. He glanced at me vaguely. I opened my mouth to ask a question, but thought better of it.

He set the chairs upright, and stuffed his clothes back into the disembowelled wardrobe. From its top shelf he took down a battered briefcase, and, sitting with it in the middle of the floor, he began to sort his papers into it. Silence lay around him, and,
beyond the window, the day was filled with little sighs and shouts. He worked steadily, smoothing out the sheets and lining up the edges, pinning them together, weeping silently,
unconsciously
, lugubrious great tears falling in torrents around him. When the last papers were retrieved, and the last cutting gathered, he slipped his passport into a side pocket of the case. There was also a cheque book from a Swiss bank, an official form of some kind, and a packet of musty fruit sweets. Satisfied, he took the lot under his arm and went past me into the corridor. I followed him. He carefully closed and locked the door, and then, as an afterthought, drew back his foot and kicked a gaping hole in the flimsy panels. He limped out into the street, wiping his eyes.

‘Erik.’

He would not listen. We raced through the streets, Erik bounding along on his long legs with me trotting in his wake. People turned to stare at us. A yacht lay at anchor by the end of the pier. We made toward it. For one fearful moment, I thought that it was Julian’s, but it was smaller and grubbier than that magnificent craft. In the stern, a sailor with a peaked cap was sprawled on the deck, a bottle of beer in his paw. Erik halted at the top of the landing stage, and the sailor gave us both a look. My mouth was open. The sailor was quite calm.