The Bullet Trick (15 page)

I’d imagined Sylvie living somewhere compact and modern, an apartment as bright and uncluttered as the bars we had passed. But it was obvious when she opened the door that the years had been unkind to Sylvie’s flat.

The hallway’s unpolished lino and beige wallpaper could have dated from before Soviet times. There was a stack of unopened mail spewed across the hall table and an old slack-chained bicycle propped against the wall. The bicycle sported a man’s battered leather jacket on its handlebars. It looked triumphant, like a redneck truck with roadkill strapped to its bull bars. The apartment had the rundown temporary feel of a place that’s sheltered a succession of tenants and received no care in return. Sylvie gave the mail a quick uninterested glance.

'Well, here we are, home sweet home.'

'Great location.'

She laughed.

'We like it.'

I wondered if the other half of the ‘we’ had anything to do with the leather jacket. Sylvie started to take off her coat.

'Coffee?'

'I think I can do better than that.' I unzipped my suitcase and drew out the bottle of duty-free Glenfiddich I’d stashed there. 'I knew there was a reason I was dragging this bloody bag around with me.'

'Looks like good stuff.'

'I thought you said alcohol was for pussies?'

'I said in America alcohol is for pussies. We’re in Europe now.'

'Ah, America, that narrows it down.'

Sylvie gave me a look.

'Nosy boy.' She draped her coat over the mystery man’s jacket, then took my raincoat and hung it, snug, embracing hers on top of the pile. 'You go introduce yourself to Uncle Dix and I’ll fetch us some glasses.'

'To who?'

She walked through to the kitchen and I positioned myself in the doorway watching her peer into cupboards as if she wasn’t quite sure what she was looking for.

'Uncle Dix.'

She looked up, giving me the benefit of those perfect teeth again and pointed across the lobby.

I muttered, 'Casanova my arse.' And walked into the dimly lit lounge hoping to discover that Uncle Dix was a cat or maybe a small dog of the non-yappy variety.

Whoever had decorated the room had been in a hurry, or perhaps they just hadn’t had enough paint to go round. The walls and ceiling were ransom-note red, the paint applied in uneven swathes, a choppy red sea, pink-foamed and unpredictable, or the interior of a burst blood vessel.

There was a small anglepoise lamp pointing up towards the ceiling, and a half dozen or so tea lights guttering towards extinction on an unused hearth. The walls sucked the light into them making the shadows in the room dark and crimson like arterial spatters at a murder scene.

The man I supposed must be Uncle Dix was sitting on a brown leatherette easy chair. The chair had a rip in its arm that had been mended with gaffer tape. Whoever had mended it probably hadn’t expected the repair to last. They’d been right. Uncle Dix plucked gently at the tape’s edge, as if testing the sticking power of the glue, then, when the strip succumbed unfurling towards him, he smoothed it gently back over the rip, sealing it tight against his next mild assault. There was no TV flickering in the corner, no interrupted book or newspaper placed on his lap, just a deep ashtray half full of dead rollups on the coffee table beside him. Uncle Dix was either a man with something on his mind, or a man giving his mind a rest.

We age people on much more than their faces. We check out their clothes, the condition their body is in, the company they keep. We look at their hair, the way they talk, all of this in the first few seconds of meeting and without even knowing we’re doing it. I’m pretty good at calculating people’s ages. It’s part of the job. I coughed, the man on the chair moved his gaze from the torn arm towards me, and I decided he could be anywhere between thirty-nine and sixty. He gave me a long, uninterested stare. The kind of look a man gives his shopaholic wife’s latest purchase.

'Hi, I’m William.' I stuck my hand out. He waited a beat beyond politeness then shook it softly without rising from his seat.

'Dix.'

His voice had the rusty quality of old keys and broken locks. It was hard to make out the colour of his hair in the gory gloaming of the room, a steel-grey that might be black. His face was studded with stubble, which I guessed was two days’ growth drifting into the third night. He wore a pair of loose jogging trousers and a half-buttoned shirt beneath which I could glimpse tendrils of chest hair. Dix looked unkempt, unwashed and was carrying about half a stone too much weight, but I had a sneaking feeling he was the kind of man that women find attractive.

I lowered myself onto the couch, wishing Sylvie would hurry up.

'Sylvie’s just fetching some drinks.'

Uncle Dix kept his eyes on my face but his hand had gone back to its plucking. Once again there was a brief pause before he spoke, like the hesitation between the wires in a long-distance phone call.

'You’re back.'

Against Dix’s hoarse whisper Sylvie’s voice sounded like the clear chime of a Sunday morning church bell.

'Sure looks like it.'

Sylvie held three mismatched glasses pinched in one hand with my whisky swinging negligently by its neck from the other. She placed herself cross-legged on the floor between us, putting the bottle and glasses on the coffee table, keeping the overfull ashtray at the heart of the arrangement. I sensed some disagreement, past or maybe just postponed, between the two and it crossed my mind that I might yet find a hotel willing to take me in. Sylvie said, 'William’s homeless.'

And shot me a dazzling smile. I unscrewed the bottle and started to pour three measures.

'Temporarily homeless.'

'His hotel locked him out.'

Uncle Dix turned his eyes towards me. They were puffed and bleary, but they could see OK. I wondered again how old he was and watched him take a sip of whisky. He made a grimace of approval, took another sip and said, 'Bad luck.'

It sounded like an ill-omened toast. I raised my glass.

'Prost.'

Sylvie lifted hers in response.

'Bottoms up.'

Dix’s hand left the gaffer tape, went into his pocket and re-emerged with his rolling papers. I took my own cigarettes out and offered them round. Sylvie shook her head, but Dix took one and put it behind his ear for later.

'Not a very auspicious start to my first night in Berlin.'

Maybe it was the whisky, maybe it was the cigarette, or the company, but Dix seemed to be coming out of his fugue. He snapped a couple of cigarette papers from their packet and asked, 'You just arrived?'

For the first time I noticed an American tinge to his German-accented English. I wondered if he’d spent time there or if the inflection came from living with Sylvie. For all I knew he’d picked it up from MTV. I wondered how long they’d been together and what they were to each other. The sound of my name broke me from my thoughts.

'Will was the star of the show I was at tonight.'

I took a sip of my drink and nodded the compliment back to her.

'You were the star.'

Dix put his hand back into his pocket rooting for something. He looked distractedly at Sylvie.

'They gave you a job?'

'Not yet.'

Dix started to feel behind the cushion at his back, he gave an annoyed growl and there seemed a danger he might shift from his seat, then Sylvie reached under the coffee table and pulled out a bag of grass. Dix gave as close as he would get that night to a genuine smile, took the bag from her and untied the knot in its neck. The odour of fresh skunk flooded the room. I asked Sylvie, 'What do you do?'

'I’m a dancer.'

'What kind?'

'What kind you want?'

'She dances good.' Dix finished loading the joint. He sealed the papers with his tongue before lighting up and taking a couple of long drags. He passed it across the table to me. 'Here, it goes good with whisky.'

Sylvie laughed.

'Goes good with everything.'

'Cheers.' I took a long toke, pulling the smoke right down into my lungs then coughed against its goodness. 'Quality stuff.'

My voice had taken on the same dry essence as Sylvie’s uncle’s.

'The best.' He nodded.

I took another couple of drags. I could feel it working on my bones, better than any massage.

Dix squinted at Sylvie through the smoke.

'You should dance for him.'

Sylvie got to her feet, I noticed again how slight she was, how upright her posture. She leaned towards me, taking the spliff, then threw her head back, sucking down a long drag of the joint, twirling her small body into a pirouette. She tumbled out of it laughing, 'You should try this, Will, it surely ups the high.'

'If I get any higher I won’t come down.'

Dix repeated, 'You should dance for him.' He looked at me. 'They need any dancers at your place?'

'I don’t know. I could ask around.' I looked at Sylvie. 'You don’t have to.'

'But I’d like to.' She walked over to a CD player and started flicking through a handful of discs on the floor beside it. 'I need the practice.' Sylvie lowered her voice into a parody of an artist. 'I’m between engagements.'

'She quit her job.' Uncle Dix smiled proudly. 'Told them to stick it up their ass.'

Sylvie looked up from the CD in her hand, 'That kind of job you can get anywhere.'

Dix shrugged his shoulders; he was already rolling another spliff.

I asked, 'What’s your line of work?'

He looked at me and I wondered if he didn’t understand the phrasing of the question, then he grinned and said, 'I mind my own business.'

'Dix can turn his hand to anything.'

Sylvie found the disk she was looking for and slid it into the machine. She kicked off her boots, bent into a couple of stretches, knocked back the last of her whisky, and pressed . The CD started with a lazy saxophone solo. Sylvie was already backing away, shaking her hips to the contra-beat, moving upraised arms against the melody, rolling her eyes as if in ecstasy as she reversed onto the bare floor in front of Dix and me. She eased her hips into a long weaving roll like a Hawaiian girl who’d had some soma slipped in her coconut milk. Then the rhythm changed to a percussive beat and Sylvie cartwheeled backwards into a handstand that was slow and sexy, showing the length of her leg, a flash of secret seam. She drew herself up to her full height, raising her arms till she was posed like JC on the cross and shook into a rhythm that was old and elemental. Sylvie smiled as she altered her moves to meet the tempo, pointing her toes like a ballerina, high-kicking like a burlesque showgirl then dropping to the floor in avantgarde writhings impossible to classify. Dix nodded his head and I fought an urge to look at my feet. At last the music ended, Dix and I clapped and Sylvie broke her final pose, slumping back onto the ground looking like she hadn’t broken sweat. She smiled and said, 'That was my audition piece.'

I woke in the morning with a dread of my forthcoming performance, a sore head, dry throat and only a vague recollection of the night’s end. I rolled over, hoping against hope to see Sylvie’s dark head beside me, but the rest of the bed was empty, the sheets rumpled as if I had been thrashing about, though the stiffness in my back suggested I’d slept like the dead.