Notorious (34 page)

There is water in my skin, under my fingernails, caught in bubbles under my eyelashes. There is water in my eyes. Water presses against my mouth, my ears, my clothes are filled with water, spreading out behind me like galleon sails, expanding, lifting. I am being dragged out of the car.

I see Devlin behind the wheel. He is stunned, shaking his head from side to side, water escaping in small silver bubbles from his mouth, his eyes closed. He doesn’t realise where he is. The usual hard line of his mouth is relaxed – the only time that happens is when he is sleeping. He is sleeping in the water and his mouth is beginning to open.

Above me, the waterlogged sun glows behind the world; the reeds murmur by the riverbank. The water plucks me away from Devlin who is trapped behind glass, pearls drifting from his mouth.

The car falls slowly through the dark water, the open passenger door making it turn slightly, as though it were pivoting on a wing. Pressure builds in my throat, my ears, behind my eyes. In my lungs. My eyes feel dry from not blinking. All this water and my eyes feel dry.

I catch the door, haul myself into the car. He is slumped over the steering wheel. I pull at the seatbelt – it doesn’t give and I am suddenly conscious of how much my chest hurts. I feel bubbles spasm in my heart, I am shaking. I wrench at the seatbelt. In another moment I will have to go to the surface. I can’t leave him. The spasms run up my throat, I convulse. I have to open my mouth. I look into the back seat. There is another shadow there, a presence, a man with pale hair. He puts his hand into the shadow of my hand, puts his hand on the shadow of my shoulder and urges me on. I jab frantically at the belt release panel. The car is growing darker. I put my hand over my mouth to stop myself from gasping.

I pull at the seatbelt. It comes free. I grab Devlin, kicking backwards. I put my feet on the outside panel, hauling him. He hangs, too heavy – I will never be able to pull him to the surface – then his mouth opens – air and water rush out in a silver stream. He kicks hard and comes free. I place my right hand in his hand like a shadow and we rise.

In the shallow water, he half pushes me, half throws me up the bank. I feel him fall away and when I turn, he is on his knees. He is so still I think the water is already hardening around him, holding him upright. I push my way through, cracking sounds all around me, grab him. I open my mouth but no sound comes out.

He hunches next to me, eyes closed, chips of ice trapped in his lashes. I pull at his jacket, my hands shaking so much I can barely grasp the leather. I put my hands around his throat, try to find a pulse. ‘Are you alive?’ I shout. My voice emerges as a faint breeze. ‘Are you alive?’

His lips never move but from somewhere I am sure he says, ‘No.’

He is shaking but not as much as me. My body literally sways from side to side. I can’t feel my hands or feet and it is an effort – it is like pushing a mechanical toy – to even breathe. To even be able to help your own body. I hit my leg with my hand. The blow is feeble because my hand is trembling but I sense contact. And now, a rank smell. Something chemical in the water.

Even as I watch, streams of snow fall, beginning to cover us. We are disappearing into the landscape.

‘We need shelter.’ His voice sounds a long way off. ‘Fire.’

I look towards the frozen horizon: nothing but the disappearing trees. No sound but water roaring in my ears. I search for any glimpse of tiles or wood lying against the grain of the forest.

He has closed his eyes. My hands slip into his black marks. ‘I see it,’ I shout, my voice a whisper. ‘A hut. Come on.’

We climb the white-patched bank. When the snow hits our skin, it is soft and damp. ‘It’s warm,’ I say to Devlin. ‘It’s a beautiful day.’ We are half crouching, half supporting each other. Our feet won’t grip the ground and we keep falling.

We climb through the trees.

You never forget those moments when the odds change, when you know you will live. In one moment, across the black plain, a child with short dark hair is saying her mantra: No coward soul is mine. In the next, I think I see the hut. Then I do see it: the lapping of slate in the patch-worked ground. He sees it too and we change course, skirting a mouldy pile of logs, slipping on the wet ground, smelling the damp corroded leaves, the hollow cavities of dead animals. I am just thinking that it definitely feels warmer when skeins of mist begin rising from fissures in the ground, in long languid strands which part and re-join, almost stroking the air. A broken voice rattles next to me. Devlin forces out words through teeth clenched to stop them chattering. It sounds like ‘oil’ but he gives up, defeated.

In the hut, wrapped in old blankets while our clothes dry over the chairs next to the fire, he says to me, ‘I hate it that you saved me. Hate it.’ He wouldn’t look at me as we changed, sits as far as he could from me in front of the flames.

He fumbles through his jacket. He takes out the hip flask and gives it to me with an odd expression. All I taste is bracken water, then faint warmth. I hold the flask out to him.

He looks nauseous. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’ve had enough.’

He leans on his knee, gazing into the fire, playing with the slender metal hook he had used to pick the lock on the door. ‘The fissures, they remind me . . . I flew over Iraq when the oil wells were alight. After the first war, when Saddam was retreating and he lit the Kuwait wells. Huge streams of fire shooting up into the sky, black smoke spuming out of the ground.’ He puts the hook back on his keychain. ‘We had to keep climbing to avoid the flames. At fifteen thousand feet we were barely above it. We were in an army cargo plane and the noise was so loud you couldn’t hear what anyone was saying over the vibrations. But I heard a hissing sound.’

‘The earth was disgusted,’ I say.

‘Yes.’

‘Apocalyptio.’

‘Yes.’

He sits away from me. He has a blanket around his waist and another around his shoulders, covering all his marks. I remember how in Venice he didn’t want me to look at him, wouldn’t let me take off his shirt. At first.

The fire is building. Black smoke is drawn away on a slow slipstream. The smell of wood resin fills the hut, clears my head. The shadows of the flames move across the wall. The sky is the colour of old milk, feeble and hue-less. I keep thinking it is nearly night-time, that they would be looking for me, but it is still the middle of the day. The light seems to be receding. Time is slowing down.

The light undulates across the old logs. Snowlight, thunderlight. It isn’t warming me. I am shaking so much the blanket keeps slipping.

I hug my knees to my chest.

‘Now we know what happened to Pietr’s father,’ says Devlin.

‘Yes.’ My teeth are chattering.

‘The cold alone would get you. Never mind toxic water.’

‘Yes.’ I am rubbing my hands together under the blanket, trying to restore circulation, the way he had done. But my skin is cold. I think of him leaving. I am colder still.

The logs crack and pop, the shadows writhe across the wall, long silences running between them. Through the window, snow falls from the frozen sky. I put my head on my knees. My forehead is chilled, the cold spreading through my head. My fingers are numb. The blanket loosens and slips, I sway.

‘Wait a minute.’ He takes the blanket from his shoulders and wraps it around me, sitting cross-legged behind me, putting his arms around me, rubbing my arms and forearms and legs with the same impersonal chafing he had done earlier.

‘I’m cold, Dev.’

‘For God’s sake.’

My mouth quivers and I turn away but he pulls me so that I am lying against him. He rubs my arms again. But he has lost the previous rigid touch. He is rubbing into the skin now, not across it. His hands are slowing, lingering.

‘Don’t,’ he says, ‘call me that stupid name.’

I feel the warmth of his chest through the back of my neck. I turn my head slowly, expecting him to move. He is still. My lips touch the base of his throat, the blackest marks. I feel the ridge where the needle made of bone had jabbed in, time and time again, under his skin. Where the mixture of ashes and coal had been forced in. I imagine it all done by firelight, under a cold blue moon, the jungle nearby, waiting.

He still hasn’t moved. I turn my face, disappear into his black rivers, let my lower lip travel over the terrible absences. He shudders.

‘I’m cold,’ I say.

I slip a hand around his neck and wait. I think of the night we met. I will him to think it too.

He breathes out, slowly, and lowers his head. This time, I think, this time.

His lips against mine. As I turn fully against him, I feel the warmth finally at my hip. His arms are around me. The heat runs up my spine. I am triumphant. I press myself against him, open my mouth. I want all of his black marks inside me. Like before.

I must have said it out loud because he goes rigid and says, ‘Venice?’

‘I knew,’ I say drowsily. ‘The first time I saw you.’

But he is already withdrawing, contracting. It is as if he is programmed to lash out at any tenderness. ‘Knew you could make a patsy of me?’

For a moment I see him standing under a huge dark wave, but not running from it or raising his fist like Trident on the shore. ‘You want to torture yourself,’ I say. ‘You want to suffer.’

‘Isn’t that what you like about me?’ he says. ‘I’m – ’

‘Damaged.’

‘Careless. Like you.’ He wraps the blanket around his rigid shoulders. ‘I don’t get involved,’ he says. ‘Not after Borneo.’ But I see a faint line of sweat on his upper lip and I think, I haven’t lost you yet.

‘It was a mistake,’ he says. ‘It could have cost me my job.’

Dark water begins falling around him. I am furious suddenly, if only to summon up the courage not to retreat.

‘Oh, come on, Dev. I bet you’re the only one in that pack of wolves who doesn’t fuck for his country.’

His eyes are completely black in this light. ‘That’s what Mitch said. He never understood why I didn’t take – advantage – in Borneo.’

‘It’s because you’re not like them. You’re not, no matter what you tell yourself.’

‘I’m not like you,’ he says sharply.

‘I don’t want you to be. You don’t have to pretend with me.’

He stares at me. There is some indefinable change around him as though an indistinct lightning has snaked through the air.

‘It’s all words with you,’ he says. ‘It’s never doing.’

‘It’s a different way of doing. It’s a prelude to doing – ’ I stand – ‘this.’ The blanket drops to the ground. He looks, then he deliberately raises his head, his eyes not leaving my face.

He says, ‘I’m not being trapped again.’

‘Is that how you remember – ’ I couldn’t say it. ‘You read my diary. Do you think it was planned?’

He hunches his shoulders.

I kneel beside him, slowly, carefully. The thunderlight glints in the burning logs, giving the scars at his neck a red tinge. Even through my coldness I feel the heat from his body. He has warmed up.

‘I knew all about you,’ he says. ‘Before Venice.’

I put my hand on his forearm. His skin flinches through the blanket.

‘I had files,’ he says.

‘I know.’

‘Don’t you understand?’ he says loudly. ‘We were spying on you.’

‘I know.’

He looks disbelieving.

‘My father had more money than God towards the end,’ I say. ‘What do you think he was spending it on?’

‘So you slept with me to find out more information?’

‘No.’ I debate what to tell him, how much he would believe. ‘I slept with you because there was nothing I needed to tell you.’

‘But – ’ he was floundering through dark water – ‘how did you know I wasn’t using you to get information?’

I shift so my thigh rests against his leg. ‘I knew you wouldn’t.’

‘That’s bullshit,’ he says but something writhes below the dark water. In a moment he will figure it out; I have no idea how he will react.

‘There isn’t anything else to know,’ I say. ‘I didn’t know anything more.’

‘You knew I wouldn’t,’ he says slowly. He is putting it together: he is remembering the pages out of order on his desk, the faint clicks on his phone. The things I know about him.

‘I would have thought you would be happy.’ I shift closer, against him. ‘I’m not assuming men are dogs, that you’d sleep with anything.’

He is distracted: thinking, thinking.

‘I know you don’t want to sleep with me,’ I say. He blinks – in shock? acceptance? – but he is rendered immobile, still struggling between past and present. I slip my left leg slowly across so I am sitting on his thighs, facing him. His hands come up automatically to hold my waist. His hands barely rest on my skin but I feel the tension in his fingers. If the conversation goes the wrong way . . .

‘I know you don’t want me,’ I say.

‘No.’

I extend my hand until I am a pulse-beat from the jagged black teeth etched across his chest. He tenses. I don’t touch him, I let my hand stay there, feeling the heat from his body.

‘It’s not going to be like it was,’ I say.

His hands tighten around my waist. ‘I was drunk.’

Now I put my hand flat on his skin, below the collarbone, above the heart, in the deepest shadow.

‘I made you start drinking again,’ I say.

He hesitates. ‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’ He sounds genuinely puzzled.

‘Because then you’d have an excuse. To deny it later.’

‘But that means – ’

‘You knew what you were going to do, Dev. You can’t call me premeditated and not know that about yourself.’ I start easing myself off him.

‘Wait . . . ’ he says. His hands grip me, holding me still.

‘Don’t you think I understand?’ I say. ‘There’s not so much difference between these – ’ I touch his chest ‘ – and these’. I turn my forearm so the firelight plays over the old pinpricks, the lonely words.

‘You think we’re so different,’ I say. ‘We’re not. The only difference is you found drinking to fill the hole.’

‘I read your files,’ he says. ‘I knew you weren’t who they thought you were. It was obvious once you discounted the rumours.’

Here it comes. He is working his way there, he knows the answer, he just doesn’t want to see it yet.