Lime's Photograph

by Leif Davidsen

  “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, and tensed every muscle again, but it didn’t help of course.

  When I came round my mouth was full of blood, and the small of my back and my stomach were aching and it felt as if they had cracked a rib. One of my ears was swollen and my lips and one eyebrow were split. At first I thought my t-shirt was soaked with blood, but they’d thrown water over me when I fainted. Spots of light danced before my eyes and I had that nauseous feeling that accompanies slight concussion. The cosh was sitting at the kitchen table now and they had dragged my chair up close to the edge of it. I could sense the other two standing right behind me. The smaller one held me up. My arms had been untied, but they were numb, and my elbow was burning. They must have finished up by overturning the chair. I rested my arms on the table. They started tingling. My ankles had been tied to the chair. My eyes focused on the bottle of whisky in front of the one I thought of as the cosh, and the two tumblers next to it. He poured a small shot for himself and filled the other tumbler to the rim. The golden brown liquid stirred almost sensually as it caught the light. The aroma of malt and peat filled me with a mixture of lovely memories and awful nightmares.

  “Let’s be friends, Mr Lime. Let’s have a drink together instead,” said the cosh. He smiled, but his strangely colourless eyes were completely dead in his acne-scarred face.

  “No,” I said.

  “But yes, Mr Lime. Friends should have a glass together.”

  “I don’t drink,” I said.

  “In Ireland it’s very impolite, well almost an insult, to say no to enjoying a drink with a friend. It’s sissy too. Only fairies and sissies don’t drink. Real men like their whisky the same way they like their women – unadulterated. Have a glass, Mr Lime!”

  “I don’t drink,” I said, and swept the full tumbler off the table. The liquid ran along the brown wood and the glass smashed onto the stone floor and shattered into pieces. I waited for the punch, but none came. Instead, he shook his narrow head that seemed at odds with his large body. He got up and fetched another glass and half-filled it. The cropped one took hold of my arms and wrenched them back so I sat rigid. The other one held my head back with my damned ponytail in one hand and pinched my nose together with his other hand, as the cosh got up slowly, as if in slow motion, holding the glass. He came closer, the glass grew larger before my eyes, my mouth gasped for air. The glass with its rippling, golden and compelling liquid dominated my field of vision. I could smell the oak casks and the malt and the smokehouse peat. It was a fine Irish malt. It was both compelling and repulsive. He tipped a mouthful into me. It tasted like fire and I was about to vomit, but he waited patiently until I had regained my breath, and then the rim of the glass bit into my battered lips again. Most of it ran down my chin, but I instantly felt the effect of the little that stayed in my mouth. It was impossible not to swallow, despite the coughing fit provoked by the strong drops seeping down towards my lungs. It was as if every cell in my body rejoiced and wept at the same time, but opened up like flowers after rain and sucked in the alcohol. A beautiful, white light infused my brain and the pains in my body were soothed in a second, as if I had been given a shot of morphine.

  I hadn’t touched spirits for nearly eight years. Before that I had drunk heavily for 20 years. Most of the time I could control it, but there were many occasions of which I had no recollection whatsoever, when I had been on one of my grand benders, disappearing into an alcoholic haze for days on end. Amelia had put up with it at first, even though the first time she saw me with a complete blank about what I had been up to it had frightened the life out of her. But when Maria Luisa was born, she had given me a choice. The bottle or them. She loved me, but she didn’t want to witness, or let our child witness, my slow self-destruction. We lived in an alcohol-soaked culture, and Oscar and Gloria had never so much as mentioned my problem, but they backed Amelia up. I realised for the first time how they saw me. It seems so simple to write about that period, but it was hell. Going to my first meeting at Alcoholics Anonymous was one of the hardest decisions of my life. And then slowly, with an air of unreality, walking through the rows of chairs, up to the rostrum and turning to face the gathering and say “Good evening. My name is Peter. I’m an alcoholic.” It was a difficult time, but the choice was actually no choice at all when I looked at Amelia and Maria Luisa. The karate institute was my physical salvation. Meetings at AA a vital crutch. I could keep the demon at arm’s length by pressing myself physically to the limit. But I could never walk past a bar without hearing that tempting call, like a siren promising me good fortune and joy if I followed her and stepped inside, putting myself in her hands once more. Just once. Just a single glass. But I had kept the image of my two miracles in my mind’s eye and gradually it became easier. I had been on the verge of succumbing several times after their deaths, but somehow I felt that my promise to Amelia had even greater significance, meant even more, now that she was no longer here.

  He put the empty glass in front of me and poured another measure. He nodded, and they let go of my arms and my nose.

  “Let’s have a drink together, Mr Lime. Like real men,” said the big Irishman in his peculiar, almost comical accent.

  I swept the glass onto the floor and it shattered with a loud crash as the wonderful aroma of whisky filled the kitchen.

  But I was just delaying the agony. He fetched a new glass, filled it, and the procedure was repeated. They managed to force a few more mouthfuls into me. My body began to relax. After the third dose I realised that I was beginning to swallow voluntarily. My throat and stomach were burning from the unaccustomed, pure spirits. My body hadn’t forgotten. The alcohol was received like an unexpected gift. It went straight to my head which became light and airy and the longed for, familiar feeling of pleasant drowsiness and relaxation set in as if it was only yesterday that I had stood at a bar with my una copa. It wasn’t the taste, even though that was also instantly recognisable, but the effect. It was like a comfortable glove which wrapped itself round my body and soul and warmed me up on a cold winter’s day. It was like coming home to a reassuring place after a long and perilous journey. It was so horribly familiar and pleasant.

  The cosh fetched another glass. The others were lying on the kitchen floor in a sea of whisky, along with the smashed bottle which I had managed to knock over during the last dosing. My throat and nostrils were burning and my battered body was hurting. My head was buzzing and I was dizzy. In my drinking days, I had been able to take copious quantities of alcohol, now it was as if I was 15 years old and drinking my first strong lager. He fetched a new bottle and filled the glass again and nodded. They let go of my arms and I lifted up my right arm unsteadily to sweep this one onto the floor too, but my arm had ideas of its own. As if it didn’t belong to me any more. It was as if I was standing alongside watching it approach the glass. I told my hand to hit out hard and sweep it away, but instead it closed around the glass and picked it up slowly, guiding it almost sensually to my mouth, and poured in a little of the liquid which lay like a soft membrane on my tongue and then slipped down my throat like a gentle, yet firm caress, down to my stomach and out into my blood-stream and on towards my consciousness, as if carried along by a beautiful, calm river. Tears came to my eyes, but not because of the whisky. They were the tears of self-contempt. I was a pathetic sight – snot, blood, tears and whisky all over my face and down my t-shirt. I drank again, emptying the glass, and slammed it down on the table.

  “Arsehole,” I said. “Fucking arsehole!”

  “Cheers, Mr Lime. It’s pleasant drinking with a friend, isn’t it now?” said the big Irishman. He emptied his own and gave us a refill with a cocky, scornful expression which should have made me throw my glass in his face, but instead I watched my hand move downwards, grasp the glass and guide it to my lips, switching on the familiar light behind my bruised eyes.

  “Why are you interested in that suitcase?” I remember asking at some point. I have only
fragmented, foggy memories of what we talked about. I can see only that pockmarked face and the narrow mouth, and the glass in front of me from which I’m drinking.

  “We ask. You answer,” he said.

  “It’s nothing more than memories, you fucking arseholes. It’s nothing other than my own lousy, trivial damned memories of a wasted life,” I said, and began swearing in Danish from rage and self-pity.

  I can’t remember what else I said. I can’t remember what I told him. At some point I began singing in Danish too. I rambled on and on and must have talked in a big jumble about my suitcase, Amelia, Maria Luisa and Don Alfonzo, about Oscar and Gloria; and about the time I was on a Greek island and quite by chance noticed Jacqueline Kennedy walking along with a bathing towel over her arm, accompanied by a woman of about the same age. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was in shorts and a thin blouse and still had a lovely body. She was wearing large sunglasses and a white hat, and no one seemed to recognise her without make-up. Or was this unspoilt island paradise still a place where people minded their own business? There were very few tourists there.

  I had gone to the island to escape the horrors that had chiselled themselves into my mind after a tour in the hell that was Beirut. My nerves were in tatters. I was finished with putting my life in danger to take photographs that none of the newspapers would print anyway, because the media in the West had long since lost interest in the unending Lebanese civil war. The island had been recommended to me by a young stringer from A.P. who, like me, was tired of sending reports home which few sub-editors could be bothered to read, let alone publish, while we spent our days lying in the dust, caught in the crossfire between the warring factions.

  Jacqueline was walking along, vulnerable and private with a friend, in a place where she clearly felt at ease. I followed them down to a little sheltered cove a kilometre from the village. She removed her shorts and blouse. She wasn’t wearing a bikini, and as she rubbed suntan oil on her naked body, I lay behind a rocky outcrop with my Nikon and took the series of photographs that turned Oscar and me into millionaires and OSPE NEWS into an internationally renowned agency. She didn’t realise I had been there until she saw herself in magazines all over the world. It was so easy and so lucrative. Why run around taking journalistic photographs which give prestige among colleagues, but hardly butter on your bread, when the world is craving photographs of the rich and famous going about their private business? I became a paparazzo by chance and over the years I became one of the best, the most proficient and the wealthiest, because I never showed any mercy. I didn’t look at my victims as people, but as commodities.

  I know that I rambled on about that story, because I remember the cosh saying:

  “We’re not interested in rich women’s bare tits, but in another photograph, Lime. We’re interested in the whole suitcase. We’d like to choose for ourselves, like when you choose which negatives you want printed. So where is it?”

  He asked over and over. I can’t remember if I told him, but I must have done, in light of what happened. I remember that I talked and drank and that then there was an enormous crash, and a huge stone flew through the glass door leading to the garden, and that the door smashed into the wall, and two greyish-brown shadows with bared teeth leapt in and went for the Irishmen’s throats. My chair toppled over and I fell into the whisky and broken glass and, from a strange distorted angle, I remember seeing Arregui come in behind his dogs and swing his stout shepherd’s crook, smashing it into the skull of the cropped one who was pulling a gun out of his holster. There was snarling and yelling and swearing in English and Basque and then I went out like a light. It was getting to be a nasty habit.

  I woke up on the sofa where we used to sit to watch television. I hurt all over, but I was also still very drunk, so the pain was strangely distant and unreal. The sofa and the room reeled when I tried to get up, and I couldn’t get the face in front of me into focus. It was Tómas, gently pressing me back down. He handed me a glass of water. I was terribly thirsty and drank it in one. I could smell myself.

  “Lie still, Peter,” said Tómas.

  “Where are they?”

  “Two of them have gone. I’ve dragged the third outside. He’s dead.

  Suddenly it came back to me.

  “You shit,” I said. “You lousy shit.”

  He let go of me and stepped backwards. His face began to sharpen up. I could feel the alcohol pumping round my body, but it was more like having a skin full in the old days. My head was clear, and I was bristling with whisky-induced belligerence.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said.

  “You got hold of your IRA terrorist chums, you fucker,” I said.

  “It’s not what you think,” he repeated.

  I tried to sit up, but that wasn’t a good idea. The room and Tómas whirled round and landed again. Then I remembered some more snatches.

  “I’ve got to ring,” I said.

  “Just stay where you are. They really worked you over.”

  “Telephone.”

  He gave me his mobile, but I couldn’t hit the right keys, so I dictated the number and he called Don Alfonzo in Madrid.

  “No one’s answering,” said Tómas.

  “What is it with that suitcase?” I said. “Why are you all interested in that suitcase?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s not what you think, Peter.”

  “How long have I been lying here?”

  “A couple of hours.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Tómas. “Just be glad that my father decided to come down from the mountain with a sick sheep. They’d parked their car down by the bend. The dogs were restless so he came up to see what was going on.”

  “He could just have asked you, couldn’t he? You knew what was happening all right,” I said.

  “It’s not what you think,” he repeated.

  “Call that number again,” I said.

  He rang, but Don Alfonzo still didn’t answer. He helped me up and out to the kitchen table. The kitchen stank, but it had been cleaned up. One of the dogs sat in the doorway, its yellow eyes following my every move vigilantly. It was its usual placid, slightly lethargic self. I don’t know where Arregui had got to. At some point I heard a whistle and the dog disappeared from the doorway.

  “Where’s Arregui?” I asked when Tómas had got me onto a chair.

  “He’s getting rid of the trash,” he said with a coldness and nonchalance that I hadn’t noticed in him before, but he couldn’t have got to where he had in ETA without a very brutal streak.

  He put a big mug of black coffee in front of me.

  “I’d rather have a proper drink,” I heard myself saying.

  “Later. Come on, drink,” I heard like an echo from the nightmare.

  “Why are you interested in my suitcase, Tómas? Why didn’t you just ask me? Why did you set IRA thugs onto me? I thought we were friends.”

  I could feel self-pity, my old companion in the land of the drunk, tapping on my shoulder, but I didn’t want it back. I took a gulp of the hot and sweet triple espresso. I was still drunk, but at least I would be an alert drunk.

  “It wasn’t the IRA,” said a voice behind me. A younger man was on his way down the stairs from the first floor. He must have been listening from the landing. I recognised the voice. He had spoken to me on the wasteland in Renteria. He wasn’t much more than 25 years old, with an angular, pale face below his crew cut. He was wearing a thin black leather jacket over a grey t-shirt. He had slender, olive-coloured hands and his pallor suggested that he spent a lot of time indoors.

  “So you’re here too. Are we going to carry on in Spanish now?” I asked.

  “Tómas rang us. We’ll see to it that one of the shitbags disappears in the mountains. He won’t be missed. The other two won’t get out of Euskadi. They carry the scars of Arregui and his dogs. You’d better think about what you’ll tell the police, for Arregui’s sake.”

&nb
sp; “I hadn’t reckoned on talking to the police. Who did Arregui kill?” I asked.

  “They weren’t carrying any identification. He was fair-haired. Does it bother you?”

  “I hope he rots in hell. I’d just hoped it was someone else,” I said thinking about the big Irishman with the cosh. But I was rather surprised that I felt nothing, even though someone had lost their life. Just disappointment that it hadn’t been all three of them. We all wear a civilised coat of varnish. It might be a thick layer, but if you’re pushed far enough, it peels off, and naked aggression raises its ugly head.

  He came to the bottom of the stairs, sat down at the table and took the little cup of coffee which Tómas offered him. He leant across the table and spoke insistently.

  “Peter Lime. I’ve said it before. I’m happy to repeat it. We had nothing to do with the death of your family. Nothing. We have nothing to do with the three Irishmen who were here this evening. They’re not IRA. I can’t tell you where my information comes from. But they weren’t from the Republican Army. They’re freelance. We’ve heard about them. They’ve shown up in Euskadi before and let it be understood that they were part of our Irish brothers’ and sisters’ struggle, but they’re common criminals. They’re hitmen. Their guns and fists are for hire to anyone who asks. So, señor Lime. What is this suitcase you talk about? I have no idea. You do, so you should ask yourself why someone is so interested in it that they would kill you. And who else knows that you have the suitcase. We didn’t know. How could we? Tómas is your friend. He came immediately when Arregui rang. They’re good patriots. In a couple of hours every trace will have disappeared. Every trace!”

  It was a long speech. I believed him.

  “Who says they were going to liquidate me?” I said. “They gave me a beating and got me drunk. I’ve been there before. Just a long time ago.”

  He looked at me and smiled.

  “The others who’ve seen them without their masks on are no longer alive to tell the tale. You are, Peter. So I’d look over my shoulder in the future. Until we get them. At some point we will. We’ll keep an eye on Arregui. Besides, he’s not afraid of anything on this earth.”