The Color of a Dog Running Away

by Richard Gwyn

  By contrast, Ric seemed cool, detached and serious. He had the air of a commando leader who has led his detachment on a successful night raid. He spoke slowly, in a measured way, avoided smiling. But he was likeable, and had definite style.

  Ninja boy kept quiet, and remained seated. He looked like some kind of a mascot, but the way he played with a long-handled knife, spinning and catching it with an easy dexterity, suggested otherwise.

  Then again, they were just kids, playing at being outlaws. They inhabited a world in which they were, by their very choice of habitat, looking down on things. The way that Fionnula and Ninja insisted that they “flew.” A community of Peter Pans, in which the subversion of gravity was the starting point, alongside a rejection of everything to do with the earthbound workaday world. Ironic, I mused, that they based themselves in the old town, centred on those two bastions of provincial power: the Presidential and the Mayoral Palaces. The twin centres of administration. The roofline must have been alive with electric circuitry, CCTV, armed security men, heli-pads even, at least in the vicinity of Plaça Sant Jaume.

  Ninja boy tapped my foot and made the gesture for a cigarette, looped thumb and forefinger pressed to his pursed lips, a request that managed to combine subservience with condescension. I handed one down to him and he nodded at me, a grownup nod between equals, which contrasted strangely with the foot-tugging request.

  “Doesn’t say much, your friend,” I commented to Fionnula, working on some tacit notion of Celtic solidarity, which she had given me no reason to presume.

  “He sings poetry in Berber,” she replied, simply.

  Ninja looked up, taking it in.

  “Does he have a name? Do you have a name?”

  Ninja tut-tutted.

  “He has a name, but none of us can pronounce it,” Ric said.

  “Bullanoghiratheriffalachtoyeridobarrandawuyasinstallazazaallaza,” said Ninja boy.

  “See what we mean?” added Fionnula, with a shrug.

  Ric slipped into his rucksack, picking up the rope and grappling hook separately. Ninja shouldered the rabbit sack. Fionnula tried to scrounge a couple more cigarettes off me. I gave her the rest of the pack, which she slipped inside a leather pouch, worn around her neck. Then, without another word they left, Fionnula turning as they climbed onto the roof of the next building, to poke her tongue out and give me an impish thumbs-up.

  As they moved away I saw a fourth figure, a slim girl with long curls, diminutive and unmoving in the pale dusk. She stood waiting on an adjacent rooftop. When Ric had cast his rope across the wider breach to this further building, a distance of some three or four metres, the girl knelt by the grappling iron as if to check its purchase on the brickwork. Meanwhile Ric had tied the loose end of the rope to a chimney stack. Fionnula and Ninja swung down below the rope and pulled themselves over the chasm, arms rotating at speed. Once they had reached the neighbouring rooftop, Ric untied the rope, coiled it into a ball, and tossed it to his waiting companions. He took several steps back, sprinted towards the edge, and jumped, tracing a slight arc against the backdrop of the dark hills behind the city. There was a split second in which he appeared to be suspended in mid-air, and then he landed on his feet, unwavering, on the far side.

  A grey-pink waterstain was unrolling in the sky to the east as I watched the small group disappear into a labyrinth of TV aerials, satellite dishes and the piles of orphaned breeze-blocks that littered the nearby roofline: shrouded raiders disappearing into the last vestiges of night. Unseen navigators of the upper zones. Zonards. The undead returning to their precipitous daytime graveyard.

  Once they were gone it was as if I had hallucinated them, as if I had conjured them from some long-forgotten dream territory of myths about lost children, of kids who run away to join the circus, or who are captured by the gypsies. What was it Ixía had said: that they steal children? Wasn’t it they who were the stolen children? I remembered Nuria’s gift to me of the Romancero Gitano by Lorca, and two lines from the first poem in the book, that speak of the moon lifting a child across the sky:

  Por el cielo va la luna

  Con un niño de la mano.

  Shirtless in the nudging chill that precedes the dawn, I felt the wind keening on my skin. I vaulted back onto the roof of my own building and trotted up to the top terrace. Climbing back down onto my private veranda, balancing for three or four paces on the parapet high above the street, brought about a rush of vertigo. I thought again of the precarious lifestyle of the roof people. I realised that I was envious of them, envious of their detachment and their appropriation of the unmapped summits of the city.

  Then I saw their calling card. On the outer wall of the bedroom, the vertical line a metre long, the horizontal somewhat shorter, had been sprayed a perfect yellow cross.

  9. INCIDENT AT SITGES

  Nuria and I took breakfast on the terrace and I described to her my meeting with the roof people. I had returned to bed and slept deeply for three or four hours after our encounter. I showed her the yellow cross. She frowned and looked temporarily dismayed, then gathered herself, saying it was an insignia that she recognised. The heretics of the Middle Ages known as the Cathars had worn the yellow cross; though she did not remember whether it had been out of choice, or whether the mark had been imposed on them by the Catholic Inquisition which hunted them down. She knew little of their history, but said that in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries many Cathars had fled the south-west of France, where the persecutions against them were taking place, and had found refuge in the villages of Catalunya. She said there were still places with historical connections to the Cathars in the region around Berga. That, she said, was as much as she knew. When I asked her why the Cathars had been branded as heretics she didn’t seem to know, and suggested, with a touch of scepticism, that I look in the library after the weekend.

  Nuria picked at fruit from a bowl held in her lap on the hammock. Apricots, slices of melon. She sat cross-legged, wearing a short cotton print dress she had brought with her in a shoulder bag the night before. Her hair was wet from her shower and she had about her a feline, sulky beauty. We had planned a visit to the seaside today, and I asked her whether she would prefer us to take the train to one of the quieter beaches to the north, in the Ampurdan, or choose the lazier option of a half-hour ride to Sitges.

  “You choose,” she said, distractedly brushing a fruit-fly away from her bowl.

  I looked at her. She seemed to have retreated somewhere inaccessible.

  “Is something the matter? Is there anything about these roof people that I should know? That you know? Or that yellow cross?”

  She was quiet for a long time, as though struggling for an answer.

  “Lucas,” she began, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, not this, not what happened last night…” She hesitated, and sighed. “But it doesn’t feel right just now. Can you understand that?”

  I remembered very clearly Fionnula’s words of the night before: not the time or place. I felt suspicious, but did not know of what precisely, or of whom.

  “All right,” I answered. “But one thing: do you know any reason why my wall should be singled out for the yellow cross? Is there something you know that I don’t?”

  “No,” she replied.

  I stared at her. She held my gaze, and then looked away, over the rooftops.

  “Well, in that case,” I said, unconvinced, but feeling it would be wise to change the subject, “it’s getting late to travel far. Let’s go to Sitges.”

  It was mid-afternoon by the time we got there, and the resort was thronging with weekenders taking advantage of the warm weather. Although the beach was by no means empty, it was far from being the sweltering, crowded place it would become by July. The sea water was cold at first, but once our bodies became used to the temperature, it was like a tonic: the first swim of the year, a year in which I imagined taking many such trips with Nuria, perhaps exploring little-known bays in the north, and t
aking swims in the lakes and rivers of the Pyrenees. We spent a long time in the water, then lay in the sun for a couple of hours, reading. We spoke very little. My thoughts were still taken up with the events of the night before, and when pressed, Nuria admitted she had heard of the roof people, or rather, had heard rumours of their existence, but had always suspected they were just another weird projection of the ubiquitous Other. The boogy people, as she put it. She seemed to be making light of it, treating it as a topic that she wished would go away. She said she’d never known anyone who’d ever met them. She congratulated me, half-mockingly, on my encounter with them. She was in a strange mood.

  In the early evening storm clouds started gathering to the north-west, accompanied by long rolls of thunder, and we packed up our things just as the first fat drops of rain arrived. Dressing hurriedly, we made our way across the promenade and into a nearby bar, where we ordered coffee and sat by the wall furthest from the door. Outside the rain pelted down.

  As we sat at our table in silence, a woman approached the glass café-front, peering in. Her gaze seemed to linger on our table, on us. She was dressed in a long plastic rain-cape with the hood pulled up, dressed, unlike anybody else, as though she were prepared for wet weather. Having settled her gaze on Nuria and myself, she made for the door of the café and came straight toward us. She was of medium height, with unkempt black hair poking out from under her hood. She stood close by, staring at both of us in turn. It occurred to me that she might well be mentally unhinged and I felt myself becoming tense, ready to move suddenly. Rain streamed off her plastic coat, forming a little puddle by our table. She had a pronounced squint, a feature which contributed further to her wayward, demented appearance. Her dark eyes seemed to have difficulty in focussing, as though she were viewing us through a mist.

  Nuria was clearly disturbed by this sudden apparition. She fidgeted with her coffee spoon and looked at the floor. The woman tapped Nuria, poking her shoulder with an extended finger, smiling at her as though in recognition. I winced, knowing how Nuria would hate being poked like a Serrano ham. She turned her face away, biting her lip. Then the woman spoke to her, in Spanish.

  “I saw you on the beach. I watched you both. But you, especially. I was thinking, What can I give them as a gift? There are so many people here at times. I had not thought there were so many. Lying in the sun. So many. And yet some stand out. Their auras, I mean. I don’t see very well, but I can judge an aura. This girl, I thought, she suffers. She doesn’t know that I can see. But it is a gift with me, nothing special. Like some people can run fast and others hear the sounds that bats make. What could I give you that would help you, my dear, sweet creature. I don’t have much. But you might like this.”

  From the folds of her plastic cape she produced a shell the size of a small cat. It was grey and marble-streaked. I looked at Nuria, who seemed to be shrivelling up within her summer dress, visibly shrinking, and, I thought, shivering. She was looking blankly out of the window at the distant sea.

  Then everything was abruptly transformed. The woman’s disjointed and melodious babbling, which had lulled me into a quiet sense of the speaker’s eccentric but essentially harmless nature, had stopped, and the silence that preceded her next utterance was one of dense, suffocating panic.

  “It’s a shell with an angry voice,” the stranger said, sharply, and as she turned aside, I saw that her whole bearing had changed. She was no longer in the role of quaintly offbeat; instead her face was a smouldering, violent mask. “Here,” she said, laying the shell down on the table. “It’s yours. Take it.”

  Nuria was already on her feet.

  “Witch!” she screamed after the woman, who was now heading rapidly for the door. Nuria leaped out of her seat and followed, and I saw her running through the rain in pursuit. The shell lay on the table between our coffee cups. I picked it up and admired it. It was beautifully shaped, with spiral overlaid on spiral, of darker and lighter shades of grey.

  I was still inspecting the shell, looking inside its oyster-smooth hollow part, when Nuria returned, short of breath. Her eyes were red and she looked dishevelled. She said simply, “You can give me that,” and without any explanation she snatched the shell out of my hands and took it outside. I saw her through the glass shop-front as she raised the shell and then brought it down with both hands, hurling it to the concrete at her feet. It was like watching a piece of silent film. I could only imagine the sharp crack as the shell smashed apart. She left it lying in pieces on the sidewalk. Then she came back inside, took some money from her purse, and left it on the table for our drinks, picked up her shoulder bag, and said to me, “Let’s go.”

  Heads had turned in the café during the exchange with the crazy woman, and the solitary waiter was observing things with great interest. He leaned on the bar near the till, and I turned to him, muttering a word of farewell. He nodded back at me.

  I followed Nuria outside. She was standing under the canopy of the café, trying to light a damp cigarette. The rain had almost stopped. I should have known better, but was too intrigued by the sudden unfolding of events to hold myself in check. Feeling oafish, I asked, “What was that all about?”

  “Nothing,” she replied. “Absolutamente nada.”

  “Who was that woman?”

  “She was nobody. Nothing. She disappeared. She vanished. There are some people who are nobody. Didn’t you know that?”

  We walked back to the station without speaking. Sure, the strange woman had been intrusive, with her speculations about the state of Nuria’s soul, but she was, after all, probably insane. Through her response to the stranger, though, I had glimpsed an unfamiliar aspect of Nuria’s character, and wanted to find out more. But I kept quiet because she evidently had chosen not to talk about certain things today. I felt, in a clumsy sort of way, that I should respect that, that it was expected of me.

  When we got back to Barcelona, we were on our way to my place when Nuria said she wanted to sleep in her own flat, as she needed a change of clothes for the morning. She asked me to come with her and stay the night. So we walked south across the Ramblas, and had wandered into the Barrio Chino on the way to Poble Sec, where Nuria lived, when we passed a restaurant that she knew, behind the Boqueria market. She suggested that we eat there, as she had no food at home. Once we were seated in the back room, looking at the menu, Nuria’s demeanour changed from one of hostile silence to sudden and silky contentment. She chatted with the waiter, whom she knew, ordered a good wine, and recommended items from the menu. She insisted that she was treating me tonight, and wanted to make up for her behaviour at Sitges. We sat in candle-light, and whatever reticence or sadness had been with her during the day was simply cast aside, lifting a shadow from her face. The room was quite dark, but the flickering light ignited the space between us with a subdued intimacy.

  After our meal we set off towards Nuria’s place, crossing Parallel, and into the quarter of Poble Sec. Her apartment was on the ground floor. I had visited her here briefly during the week, but had never stayed overnight. It was quite spacious and very clean. All the rooms were painted white and were decorated with a Japanese minimalism. In the living space were some beautiful small prints and bamboo wall hangings. There was also a futon and a low table of very dark glass, surrounded by cushions. Nuria sprinkled essence of orange into an incense burner, and switched on a Miles Davis recording. I liked being in her home, and enjoyed the sight of her private things, of being surrounded by objects that she touched every day.

  We sat drinking mint tea and smoked some exotic grass, then, at Nuria’s suggestion, showered together. The warm spray splashed over our bodies, and after she had washed me thoroughly, I took the sea-sponge from her, lathered in a herbal gel, and did likewise, washing her shoulders, her neck, her chest, circling the brown buds of her nipples, sponging her in slow, sweeping cadences. A solo trumpet hovered for an eternity, tremulous and distant, over a sonorous underswell, as the music followed on the wave of incense. I soaped
the hollow space behind her knees, washed her slender feet and toes, a silver anklet nestling above the right foot.

  That night we set about each other’s bodies with a ravenous intensity. I remember thinking, weeks later, that it must be this way before a woman’s lover leaves for war.

  10. DYING WITH YOUR EYES OPEN

  The door to the big wardrobe at the foot of Nuria’s bed was wide open, and so was the connecting door with her living room. Two men had manifested like characters encountered at the threshold between sleep and waking. I had a muddled memory of something damp and pungent being held against my nose and mouth. Almost simultaneously, I felt the prick of a needle in my lower arm, followed by the certainty that I could no longer feel or move my limbs.

  The men were currently intent on wrapping me in a sheet, trussing me like a parcel. I tried to cry out, but could make no sound other than an inane muffled grunting. My mouth had been bound with tape, but worse, I seemed to have lost the capacity to vocalise at all. I was, in a double sense, struck dumb. It is a pathetic thing to be shouting, bellowing for all your worth, only to acknowledge that you are making no sound at all.

  The sensation of being voiceless and limbless might have convinced me that I was still asleep and dreaming, were it not for the fact that one of my assailants had no nose, only the flattened segment of what might once have been a nose, and this detail impressed me as one which had no place in the wistfully erotic dream which I was still attempting to guide and control. He began wrapping carpet tape around my wrists. I fought against each new turn of events, trying to steer the dream back towards my own sleep’s territory, but with each development, each unwanted detail, it drifted further beyond my grasp.