by James Meek
Astrid tossed her head hard to the left and Kellas tried to pull her off the balustrade but she struggled and called him a fucking asshole.
‘Come on, honey,’ said Kellas. ‘A little time vomiting under observation, and a lot of water.’ He would find it hard not to remember the reptile stare and the slackness of her jaw.
‘Get me off this fucking island, asshole. Where’s Naomi? I love my girl. Get off me!’ Astrid kicked Kellas hard in the stomach and he fell back winded. His head reminded him how much he had drunk.
‘Hey, I never showed you the pictures of Naomi,’ said Astrid, with sinister clarity. Kellas was taking deep breaths. Astrid dug in her jeans with her left hand and with her right hand lifted up the tumbler. She looked into it and raised it to her mouth, tipping it vertically and hanging her head back, her other hand still squirming inside her pocket. Kellas saw that she was about to lose her balance, lunged forward to stop her and almost toppled over the balustrade after she did. Astrid fell without a word or a cry and the impact of her body in the marshwater spattered Kellas’s face with cold wet filth. The sound triggered an alarm of goose-honks and panicked feathers beating air.
Kellas ran to the stairs and down to the jetty. The din of geese smothered any sound Astrid might be making. Shouting her name, Kellas crouched down at the edge of the jetty, swivelled round, placed his hands flat on the decking, and with a vault as soft as he could make it jumped into the reeds.
His feet were clasped in cold black pap and he sank till the water came to just over his knees. There was no firmness underfoot, only the tightening of the yield of the lower mud to the point where he could lift the foot without the other penetrating much deeper. He realised that he should have taken off his boots. He kept shouting for Astrid as he stepped forward. He could not hear her over the noise of the geese and the splash and suck of his own progress. The lights of the hotel were screened from the marsh by the projecting terraces; they destroyed Kellas’s night vision without illuminating the reeds where Astrid had fallen.
The cacophony of the geese began to diminish and in front of him Kellas heard an evil sound, as if somebody was vomiting underwater. He tried to break from wading to a canter and fell forward into the water and, a foot beneath it, the black mire. For an instant the mud’s dead, passionless softness held his face in its gummy bite. He struggled to his knees and stood again and in two more steps reached Astrid. She was prone, keeping her head out of the water with her arms held stiff, like a woman doing press-ups. Her shoulders shook with the effort and her face was dark and dripping, as if she had only just managed to raise herself up out of the mud. She coughed, whimpered, her back flexed in a spasm and as she retched her elbows gave way and she went down. Kellas squatted, braced, clamped his arms around Astrid’s chest under her armpits and heaved her up. He hadn’t the strength or leverage to get her on her feet so he pulled back and kneeled down at the same time till the two of them were together, on their knees in the mud, the water up to their waists.
‘Get your hands off me,’ said Astrid.
‘No,’ said Kellas, hugging her more tightly. He felt her body stiffen and gag and she retched. A fluid stream of vomit splashed into the water.
‘Get off! Get OFF!’ shouted Astrid, her voice rising to a scream, almost a bark. She twisted in Kellas’s embrace, struck him with her elbows and threw her head back, cracking him hard on the bridge of his nose. She broke free and managed to stand and began to wade in the direction of the creek. Kellas pulled off his boots and went after her. His nose warmed and filled and he felt blood oozing over his upper lip. He wiped it off with his sodden sleeve and began to shiver. The cold was testing him now. Astrid fell and got up but she had a start on him. He yelled at her to come back and she answered with a shriek in which there could have been a word, not one he recognised.
When he reached her, they fought. She struck him with her knees and elbows and the flat of her hand and he wanted to hit her back but couldn’t get a good swing at her. He tried to grasp her, tie off her flying arms with his and start to drag her back to the jetty. While they fought, and Kellas rose to Astrid’s level of fury, hoping it’d help him overmatch her, in the darkness, in the smell of blood and mud and vomit, and while his hysteria spiralled till the crashing of the water and the blaring goose-brass was overcome by a man and woman’s screams of fucking sons of cunting whoring bitches, Kellas could see the lights of the cars passing on the road less than two hundred yards away, following their tunnels of light, which did not reach to the two fools fighting over nothing in a dark, freezing marsh.
Astrid tired first and went limp. She began to weep. Kellas held her still for a little while, then led her slowly, sobbing and shivering, to the jetty, which was close. She pulled herself up onto the decking, with his help, and sat with her legs dangling over the side. By the time Kellas was out of the water and standing over her, she had her head thrown back and was howling Mom, and that she was sorry.
‘Your mom’s gone,’ said Kellas. ‘You’re mom now. Get up, you can’t stay here.’ But Astrid stopped crying and lay down on the jetty with her eyes closed and would not move.
It had only been a few weeks since the pre-Iraq hostile environment course and Kellas hadn’t had time to forget the proper way to carry an injured comrade to safety. Of all the skills they had been taught, this had seemed the least useful. He would drag a photographer a few yards behind a wall by their collar, if it came to it. Now he was squatting and hoisting Astrid over his back and carrying her along the jetty rather than have her choke and die alone in the cold while he went for help.
He carried her through the lobby, kicking the doors open as he went, down the steps and across the parking lot, the gravel biting his bare feet. A light was on in the hotel manager’s house. An old wooden toboggan hung with white ice skates was planted upright in front of the house by way of Christmas decoration. Kellas let Astrid slip off his back as far as to let the ground take some of the weight and banged on the manager’s door. Astrid moaned and coughed and Kellas ran his hand over his face to clear what crusted blood and mud he could. The door opened and the manager stood in front of them unblinkingly, wearing a synthetic fleece over a pair of pyjamas.
‘Astrid Walsh,’ she said. ‘Godammit, honey! What is it about my hotel? I thought you were a good girl now. Oh, God!’ She was taking off her slippers and putting on boots. ‘How much you let her drink?’
‘I reckon she had three and a half bottles.’
‘Of what?’
‘Wine!’
‘Wine ain’t so bad. But you, sir, have got no reason to be proud of yourself…Damn right! Jesus Christ, you been in the creek? There’s easier ways of catching duck than chasing them with your bare hands in the phrags after midnight. And bare feet, dear Lord. Hold on there. Don’t think you’re coming in.’ She began going and coming back. She brought them each a blanket, and galoshes, then a large tumbler of something and a bucket.
‘Make her drink this, and throw up in the bucket,’ she said. ‘I’m getting the car ready.’ She backed her car up closer to the house and began spreading newspapers over the seats.
‘You’re very kind,’ said Kellas. ‘I’m sorry for this.’
‘Any damage to the room comes off your card,’ said the manager. ‘For the rest, you can answer to Bastian. Oh, Astrid Walsh, I saw you with your daughter in Parks Market on Saturday and I thought, those two’re going to be OK.’
‘Sleep,’ said Astrid. ‘I want Naomi.’
‘It’s two of the toughest, fullest-timest jobs in the world, being a mother and being a drunk,’ said the manager. ‘I know plenty have tried holding the both of them down at once and it’s pulling day shift and night shift, one after the other.’
Astrid mumbled a set of disconnected abusive syllables and Kellas tried to get her to drink. She gulped down a few swallows, trembled and leaned forward. Kellas got the bucket under her and vomit splashed into it with force enough to spray back over the rim.
‘That’s the way, honey,’ said the manager. ‘Come on, sir! You were enough of a gentleman to cheer her on when she was putting the drink in, you can give her a bit more of a boost when she’s trying to get it out.’
‘Drink some more, Astrid,’ said Kellas, holding the glass up to her mouth. ‘It’s better to be as sick as you can.’
Astrid sipped some more of the liquid, spat it out, and looked at Kellas. A thread of saliva spooled from the corner of her mouth, which hung open. She was covered in drying mud and puke and her hair looked like a bittern’s nest. Her eyes were dull and tarnished, her skin was waxy and she moved clumsily, like a puppet hanging from a single string.
‘Naomi,’ she whispered.
The manager was standing watching them with her hands on her hips. The doors of her car stood open.
‘Are you sure that’s the same girl you wanted so bad last night?’ said the manager. ‘Are you sure? Maybe they got switched.’ She laughed. ‘That’s what you’re thinking, ain’t it? Took your pretty girl away while you were sleeping and left you with some crazy shrew lady from the swamp.’
‘Give me a break,’ said Kellas.
‘You’ve had your breaks,’ said the manager. ‘Get in, the two of you.’ She put Kellas and Astrid in the back of the car, Astrid with the bucket on her lap, Kellas instructed to keep her on target if need be. They drove off. Kellas’s hangover was now in place and the smell of sick from Astrid’s bucket made him fear that he might have to add to it. He looked at Astrid and looked away. He didn’t see Astrid in this one. What he’d thought was her was a costume over a husk of a woman. Bastian! Sly, wanting this to happen, the self-made monk. And where had the other Astrid gone? She’d seemed so real. He remembered her so well, and yet it turned out that she did not exist. He’d been in love with her. He still was in love with her, and he could never find a woman to love in the broken sot on the seat next to him. It was hopeless. He’d never entered into Astrid and had never left himself.
‘You need that bucket?’ said the manager, who’d been checking him in the mirror.
‘No. I’m fine.’
They arrived at the house and the manager left them standing a few yards from the door. Kellas thanked her and the manager bade them look after themselves and not to come back to her hotel and drove away. As they walked towards the door, lights came on and the door opened. Bastian had been listening out for a car. He reached into the border between the darkness and the light spilling out of the door and took Astrid from Kellas, easily and lightly, and began to lead her away. As Kellas followed inside, he heard Bastian murmur to Astrid that Naomi was sleeping and Astrid saying, with a rising, petulant note which nonetheless contained a note of submission, that she wanted to see her. Bastian looked over his shoulder and asked Kellas to shut the door.
‘Don’t you want to know what happened?’ asked Kellas.
‘If you tell me now, will it get you or Astrid cleaned up quicker?’
‘Where are you taking her?’
‘To get her cleaned up.’
‘I’ll do it.’
‘You need to take care of yourself first.’
Kellas went after them. He followed them to a bathroom and watched Bastian lead Astrid in by the hand and sit her down on the closed seat of the toilet. She slumped and her head fell forward.
‘How much did she have?’ asked Bastian, starting to take off Astrid’s clothes.
‘Three and a half bottles of Merlot.’
‘And you?’
‘One and a half. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Why didn’t I tell you what?’
‘That she was an alcoholic.’
‘I don’t care for that word.’
‘Fastidious, aren’t you? If you’d told me, this wouldn’t have happened.’
‘You mean you would have left straight away, like you were asked to?’
‘I didn’t say that.’ Kellas saw Astrid stripped of her underwear in front of him till she sat there, thin, white and naked in bright light, her hands clasped between her thighs, her vertebrae sticking out of her hunched spine like the buds on a twig in winter. Her filthy clothes were piled on the glossy white floor tiles. ‘Should you be doing this? You’re not her father. You’re not her partner.’
Bastian turned on the shower. ‘I offered you the choice to come or go before you crossed the causeway,’ he said. ‘And Astrid told you that you had to leave.’ He took Astrid’s wrist. The casual way that the knuckles of his big weathered old hands touched and pressed into Astrid’s upper inner thighs as he pulled out her hand caused Kellas’s heart to begin to thud and the anger begin to rise in him.
‘I should be doing that,’ he said, as Astrid stood up and tottered towards the shower, led by Bastian. Bastian was wearing a baggy old sweater over a pair of striped pyjamas.
‘Go upstairs and get yourself cleaned up,’ said Bastian. ‘Think it over. Come on, sweetheart. Put your head under it.’ The water hit Astrid’s head behind the half-closed shower curtain. Bastian unhooked a bottle of shower gel from the rail and flipped it open with his thumb. Kellas couldn’t see what he was doing with his other hand through the curtain. He saw a beast in the mirror and it was himself.
‘Not a fucking alcoholic!’ yelled Astrid through the steam and water.
‘I’m coming back down,’ Kellas said, and went upstairs to the room where he had slept the previous day. He took off his clothes, made a bundle of them and put them by the door. He showered and watched the dissolved swamp mud and flecks of dried blood spin into the drains. The water flowed through his matted hair for minutes before it ran clear, and he put shampoo on. His headache had settled to a clear, simple pain. He drank a glass of water and put on a black towelling dressing gown he found hanging on the back of the shower room door. He gathered up the dirty clothes, added the shirt he had left London in, and went downstairs. The bathroom where he had left Astrid and Bastian was empty, the light switched off. Kellas listened. There was no sound in the house. He went to the kitchen; it was dark. A digital clock on the stove read one-forty-five.
Still carrying the clothes, Kellas padded down the hallway in his bare feet. The bare, varnished floorboards yielded and creaked. He opened doors and felt for light switches. He found Bastian’s library, a broad room on two levels, lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. It had a window seat and leather armchairs, with patches worn pale, by an open fireplace. A single live ember glowed in the ashes on the grate. There was no desk. A laptop lay charging on a rug. He found Astrid’s study, with framed A4 photographs of refugees in Kosovo on the walls, piles of magazines and open notebooks that looked as if they were being transcribed onto the computer. In the clutter on her desk he saw the electric blue of an uncut, unpolished lump of lapis lazuli. He found the utility room and saw Astrid’s clothes in a laundry basket on top of the washing machine.
He went back upstairs and found the room where Astrid and Bastian were sleeping. It was at the far end of the hallway from his room. The door was not completely shut. Kellas pushed it open and when his eyes had adjusted to the darkness he saw a double bed with two figures under a quilt. He moved closer and stopped to listen. He could hear them breathing. He couldn’t tell how close they were to each other. Why did it matter? He was leaving. He would leave now, if he had shoes.
He found the switch and pressed it. Astrid whimpered, rolled over and pulled the quilt over her head. Bastian sat upright, blinking. Now that the light was on, Kellas could see that there had been space between them. Bastian was wearing his pyjamas.
‘I was looking for the washing machine,’ Kellas said. ‘I couldn’t find it.’
‘It can wait until tomorrow,’ said Bastian, rubbing his eyes.
‘Astrid said you didn’t sleep together.’
‘We don’t.’
‘You shouldn’t take advantage of her.’
‘She needs to be watched.’ Bastian yawned. ‘There’s still a lot of alcohol in her body.’
‘I should be sle
eping with her, and not you.’
Bastian’s eyes widened a little and he looked at Kellas, awake now. ‘Seems to me you wrote my friend and roommate off tonight as an alcoholic.’
‘You’re not denying that’s what she is?’
Bastian swung his legs out of bed and went past Kellas, nodding at him to follow. Kellas went after him to the utility room and they put the dirty clothes in the washing machine and switched it on.
‘I’m going back to bed,’ said Bastian. ‘If I were you, I’d do likewise.’
‘I’m not tired. I was asleep most of the evening.’
Bastian regarded Kellas. ‘I know it’s tough for you,’ he said. ‘It’s tough when someone isn’t the way you imagined. It’s a powerful temptation to believe that the deficiency lies in the object of your plans, and not in you.’
‘You’re full of wiseassness tonight.’
‘Having you as a guest in this house is hard merit to acquire.’ Bastian clenched his fist, held it up to his face and turned it in the light, as if appraising an antique. ‘I used to use this,’ he said. ‘I had two of them, and I used to use them both. That’s not a threat. I don’t use them any more.’
‘Try me.’
‘No. With a man like you here, I remember what I used them for, and how I used them.’ He looked at Kellas. ‘I really think you should go to bed. Otherwise, sooner or later, Naomi will wake up, and I’ll get up to look after her, and we’ll see each other again.’ Bastian turned his back and went out. Kellas put his hands in the pockets of the dressing gown and leaned his back against the machine. He was a little sleepy. His eyes hurt now as well as his head. If he went to bed, he would wake up after an hour. Locked into a cold, heavy suit of fear, the suit they fitted you with for the nights after you had lost everything, your hope of love, your hope of good work, your money and your friends. Your dignity and decency. No matter what Kellas did now, it could never be said that Kellas had been decent in the face of his host’s merciless charity. Men started out looking for love, and ended up looking for dignity.
