by Ian Wedde
The impatient shriek of a zip announced the woman’s desire to get out of the car. Her door opened and slammed, propelling a gust of cool air into the back seat. A stink of diesel and culvert sludge came into his bag. Where were they? Nowhere salubrious. Then the driver, he guessed by the curses, opened the door on his side and yanked him out by the arm. The building they were in smelled like an oily, exhaust-fumey garage at first. Then they went through another door into somewhere domestic – there was a homely smell of burned or badly cooked food – and he was pushed up some narrow, creaking stairs. He counted two flights. Then he was thrust down into an armchair. He tried to be compliant, even helpful, but when he reached up, panting, to take the bag off his head, someone smacked his hand away. He felt chilly air on his stomach where his shirt was untucked. He could hear the sound of dense, fast-moving traffic in the distance. Then someone closed some shutters and fastened a window and the traffic noise receded. A door closed. Did that mean there was no one in the room, or that someone was waiting silently in it? He needed to pee. He was very thirsty. It was stifling inside the bag.
‘So,’ said the woman’s voice. ‘You just sit there? With the bag? It’s okay? You are comfortable? You don’t want to take it off? So obedient, it’s very good.’
‘I need water. I want to use a toilet,’ he said. It felt as though he was complaining to himself.
‘What, in the bag?’ The woman’s chesty laugh moved closer. She slowly lifted the bag from his head. ‘Voilà tout!’ she exclaimed. ‘Now I am a magician.’
He took deep breaths. It was as though he’d woken up – everything was vividly present. Certainly, it was scorched chickpeas and garlic that the room smelled of. And cigarettes. Its bare plastered walls were brightly lit. There were two dirty green armchairs in a cluster with his own, a low glass-topped table in the centre, an ashtray filled with filter-tipped cigarette butts, an empty Coca Cola bottle, two used espresso cups. He was facing a closed window with greenish wooden jalousie shutters outside the glass. A brown water stain ran from the sill to the wooden floor. So this was an old building – not concrete, at any rate. The woman was standing behind him. He didn’t turn his head. He didn’t dare to. He guessed she could see his thighs trembling, but he couldn’t stop them. Maybe he was going to throw up after all.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘May I have your personal document? You have it?’
‘The toilet,’ he said. ‘I need the toilet. The lavatory.’
When the bag came back down over his head he cried out and his body, for the first time admitting that he was afraid, betrayed him by emitting a little jet of pee. Then the woman’s hand in his armpit urged him to stand and hurried him forward. The bad cooking smell was stronger outside the room, and he could hear the harsh, argumentative voices of two men downstairs. Then the woman pushed him into the stink of a dirty toilet and a door slammed behind him. He yanked the bag off his head. There was a squat hole in the tiled floor, a hose with a rusty shower-rose hanging on the wall, a silvered mirror, a small grubby hand-basin, a dirty towel.
His hands were shaking. He peed towards the lavatory hole as best he could, then suddenly bellowed loudly and vomited a geyser of rabbit and wine across the floor. That made him feel braver as well as better – even defiant. He washed his hands and face under the tap and stood there dripping. No way would he touch that towel. He wouldn’t put the bag back on his own head, and not just because it had been on the filthy floor. Then he opened the door.
The woman was waiting across the landing under a yellowish light, a look of haughty disgust on her face. Her hand was dismissing a man coming rapidly up the stairs – a thick-set older man, not the angry driver, with a full grey moustache and a balding head. The man shrugged indifferently and turned back down the stairs. The woman was holding open the door of the room with the armchairs in it. He walked past her and sat down.
‘So you can see,’ said the woman, leaning against the wall by the window, ‘that we have now a problem. That you have made for us a problem. What is your name?’ She was ignoring the fact that he’d been sick, or else she didn’t care. He didn’t care, either. He felt as though he’d been moved forward by another decision, one he didn’t even know he’d made until he was in the situation it had created. Until he’d become one of the decision’s consequences. He was someone else. He’d jumped out of his past. Or he’d sicked it up.
‘You don’t need to know my name,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I was stupid. I was bored. You can just let me go. I won’t tell anyone.’
The woman lifted an eyebrow. Then she suddenly smacked the flat of her hand against the wall behind her, making him jump. ‘But you have seen everything. You think I am stupid also?’
‘I saw what everybody saw.’
‘But then you get in the taxi. And maybe everybody see that.’
‘It was a mistake.’
‘A mistake for you, a problem for me.’ The woman took a long stride and sat on the arm of the chair opposite him. She held out her hand. ‘Your document. You have it perhaps in your jacket.’
Close up, in the hard light of the room, he could see that her face was hatched with fine lines which, however, made her skin look papery thin and delicate. There were dark bags under her big, protuberant eyes, and her cheeks were pocked with large pores or the remnants of some disease. Yet she was as striking close-up as she’d been when he’d first seen her across the road from the restaurant, glimpsed in tricky patches of light, moving quickly from shadow to shadow. Could that be why he’d run down the stairs and jumped into the taxi – his ‘mistake’? Was this his ‘problem’?
‘You think this is funny?’ She snapped her fingers. ‘Your document, please. Passport, something like that.’ Her mouth smiled but her eyes didn’t – the fragile skin at their corners remained uncrinkled. Yes, as usual, his snigger had been inappropriate. ‘You are famous perhaps. Mr Free Lunch.’ To him her joke was both surprising and offensive, but she enjoyed it. Her eyes crinkled a little at last and she barked her curt, chesty laugh.
What difference did it make? The price of his foolishness could already have been a bullet. He could have had his head pushed into the foul lavatory. They could have thrown him out of the car once his head was in the bag.
‘My name is Christopher Hare. Hare I am. A terrific name for a food critic you might think.’ She didn’t get either joke – she pinched at one of the bags under her eyes as if to relieve some pressure there, and kept her other hand extended. Anyway, they’d always been lame jokes. He didn’t need TG to tell him that, though of course she had. He took his wallet out of his jacket pocket and extracted the passport from it. ‘I sometimes use a pen-name, do you know what that is? A pen name? Nom de plume?’ The woman flapped her extended hand impatiently. ‘A false name. So most people don’t know who I am. Including me.’ He tried another joke: ‘Or where.’ Still she didn’t smile – her eyes, attentive but moody, watched him steadily. ‘The people at the restaurant – they don’t know who I am.’ He handed her the passport. ‘Or they don’t care.’ She opened the passport and glanced up at him from its photograph; she made a droll ‘Tut’ sound at the comparison. ‘If their terrible hare’s anything to go by.’ Shut up, he told himself. Then he took a deep breath. That fluttering again. ‘So why did you do it?’
Why did you do it? He pressed one hand against his panting chest – of course he was asking himself the question as well. He half expected her to answer it for him.
She was turning the pages of his passport with decisive flicks of her fingers, tilting it on its side to look at visas. She lifted her head and stared at him. Again, she seemed tired, or even bored.
‘That man, he had also a false name. He had many false names. He was false, as you say. But we found him.’ The smile that wasn’t a smile. ‘As you saw for yourself.’ She handed the passport back to him. ‘And why? Because it was necessary. But also to show that hiding is not possible.’
She stood up and he tried to do so also, but she st
opped him with an abrupt gesture, one arm thrust out, her palm held up, big fingers splayed.
‘You are maybe quite famous, Mr Hare, or whatever you prefer. Your false name as you say. A famous food writer. You have a wife? A good cook? Maybe she wonders if you run away with a beautiful woman like me.’ She coughed, or laughed. ‘What we have to do I think is make this problem into a useful thing. That is always what I like to do. Your mistake, yes? Your stupidity. We cook it.’
She crossed the room with that decisive speed, as if she’d rehearsed the move. By the time he got to the door it was locked. He was about to raise his fist and bang on it, and shout – kick it. But then he remembered the moment when he’d stood up in the restaurant and run out after the woman who’d just shot two people. How he’d flown down the stairs. How could he possibly have done that? How? This was something he had done. No one had done it to him. He had done it. He, Christopher Hare. Christopher Where, as TG had begun to say a while back. Where are you Christopher? Christopher Where? What was the point of making a fuss? He must have wanted this to happen. This was the moment he’d wanted to be in. No, impossible. But yes.
He opened the window and then the wooden jalousie. The chilly air was smelly but felt fresh, like an old-fashioned sorbet between courses. He sucked it in through the bilious taste in his mouth. The window faced old apartment buildings across a dark, nondescript street. Between the buildings across the street he recognised the profile of hills behind the city, pricked with lights. So he was facing inland, perhaps from somewhere down towards the docks. There was a smell of drains, maybe the harbour. He’d run down the restaurant stairs – could he climb out the window?
He pulled the shutters back together and fastened the glass behind them, shutting himself in. He felt himself moved forward by another decision, another one he hadn’t really made by himself. He was reflected there in the window, a dim phantom, thickset, his dark shirt hanging out under his jacket, his hair a mess, his full-moonish face tinged with pallid light reflected from the green jalousie slats. He seemed to be pouting. That was what everyone always said he did.
‘Malade de jalousie,’ he said, exaggerating his out-of-focus pout, watching himself do it, remembering the French phrase. ‘Christopher Where.’ When he said his joke name aloud he knew exactly where he was – he was Hare, now! – and at the same time he knew he was completely lost.
CHAPTER 2
Food is love.
There it was, out of the blue, the email via her website message board, taunting her. Their secret code. And in the subject line, ‘From your husband Christopher.’ Her what? How many months had it been? And who the hell was this cunt Maya Yazbeck whose email address he’d used? What kind of catastrophe had the silly fool got himself into now?
Food is love! Christopher, you dolt.
Oh for God’s sake. Did she need to be reminded of what drove her crazy about him?
‘You know what drives me crazy about you? You horrid man?’
My God – where to start?
Straight away, the nostalgia bit. She’d put on Joe Jackson. The songs made her flat less empty.
Is she really going out with him?
Is she really going to take him home tonight?
Christopher’s curly hair that always needed a trim, his shirt always hanging out. The way he either tipped too much, or forgot to. His suitcase that pinged open and spilled unwashed stuff on the way to a late check-in. The way his mouth was rather rose-buddy and he seemed to be smooching his food sometimes, not eating it.
She’d adored that, and the little kisses he popped into the space between her chin and collar bones, as though the part of her he loved best was where she swallowed. Little moist popping kisses that made her shiver while goose-bumps appeared all over her.
He called it her ‘chicky skin’.
Sometimes he made it happen by walking his fingers up her bare arm, across the back of her neck, and up on to the top of her head.
‘The Southern Alps,’ he would murmur. ‘Arthur’s Pass – lucky old Arthur.’
So corny; she was old enough to know better. But she couldn’t help it, the bumps rose up and then his lips descended on them, pop pop pop. They rose up all over again, more than ever. But it wasn’t true that he loved her throat best. He loved all of her. That nibbly rosebud mouth – ‘Christopher!’
Joe:
’Cause if my eyes don’t deceive me
There’s something going wrong around here
For God’s sake – the songs were already ten years old when she met Christopher, but they still pushed all her weepy buttons now.
She loved the way he mostly didn’t eat very much at all. How he tasted things with an expression on his face like a child at a party, serious and thrilled at the same time. Then, sometimes, he’d say ‘Yum!’ and bolt a plateful. Such a greedy-guts. Then ask for more, but not eat it. He’d build a Dogon cliff village with his polenta while the waiter glared. He liked talking and playing games while they ate.
He played with his food. He talked with his mouth full. His manners were shocking. He was funny. He utterly charmed people, even when he was rude. He didn’t care.
*
On that first epic trip together he was always asking her what she thought. Was he interested, or just having fun? Towards the end of that trip, the squalid little Venetian place.
‘Do you like it? Really? On a scale of one to ten? About a four?’ He ate about six grains of sticky Venetian risotto nero off the end of his fork, then made his fingers into a tentacle squid shape and flew them away from his plate across the table, blowing a childish raspberry noise with his tongue.
‘Too much advance prep. Dead giveaway.’ He made his mouth into a pink pout. ‘Too much foreplay. Much better fresh and hot, wouldn’t you say?’
They’d done a succession of cicchetti bars before dinner, and he was already quite sloshed.
His naked foot crept up her leg under the table and she saw the nice elderly waiter watching them. He was standing by the kitchen serving hatch and he lifted one of his bushy grey eyebrows at her, just like their editor Bob did, then turned and shouted something into the kitchen, ‘La bionda!’ needless to say, what else?
A sweaty cook’s grinning face appeared at the hatch. They were making lewd jokes, of course. But they didn’t know who he was, the flirty man with his toes making squiddly progress up her calf. They didn’t know he was writing his review notes on the menu he’d asked to keep as a souvenir.
‘Come oggetto! Ricordo! Souvenir!’ Waving it and laughing.
‘Christopher!’
‘So – the big question.’ He was giving her a moist look while he filled their wine glasses.
Her heart gulped in her chest. She felt the blush invade her neck and face. God, he was awful. He was pursing his lovely top lip into the wine and the liquid glistened on his tongue when he smiled at her with his mouth a little open.
‘The big question, Christopher?’ Surely the fool wasn’t going to propose to her!
‘You’re blushing!’ he exclaimed, thrilled. His eyes usually watered when he laughed, as though crying and laughing came just as easily to him. As though all his emotions were impulsive, tender, vulnerable. He wiped away a tear with the corner of his napkin. ‘Blushing!’
Then he put a serious expression on his face. She saw him do it deliberately, as if he were acting. But he was acting the acting. The effect was a bit mocking.
‘Yes, the big question, my little quail.’
She waited. So did his foot under the table. So did the waiter and the cook, who’d noticed something was up. They were watching what was happening expectantly. They looked happy and proud – proprietorial – as if their restaurant and their food had been responsible for romance.
‘What are we going to call you?’ he asked.
What to call Christopher Hare’s accessory?
He leaned across the table and took her hand. His eyes had filled up again. That was maybe why he didn’t see the God-aw
ful icy chill that followed her blush. Her face felt stiff suddenly, and there was a kind of ringing in her ears when he said, ‘What about Thé Glacé? That seems perfect. Pale and cool and, oh my God, so ...’
The creeping toes again.
When he came in to their hotel room a couple of hours after she got back, she pretended to be asleep. She could hear him trying not to breathe loudly while he undressed.
He’d be leaving his clothes all over the floor. In the bathroom he tried to pee without making any noise as well. He pissed like a cart-horse and his attempts to hush it up were just comical. Any other time it would have made her laugh out loud. Then he crept into bed and didn’t come anywhere near her. He could be sweet like that, too, so surprised and sorry, making it up to her, ashamed and crestfallen, really sincere.
But oh, what a kissy little shit sometimes.
Don’t say she hadn’t been warned.
Later during the night she woke up and heard him trying hard to breathe really quietly again. She knew what he was doing – the bed wobbled. Typical, all about him, just like at the restaurant where he’d sat sulking while she stormed out and found her own way back to the hotel through all those dark alleyways, past slurping backwater canals.
In the morning when she woke up he was lying as far away from her as possible, looking at her with puppy-dog eyes and a pout, ashamed, apologetic, indecisive. His hair was sticking up in tangled clumps. A narrow stripe of bright sunlight crossed his stupidly hairy bare chest like the sash of a uniform.
He looked ridiculous. She could see the words ‘I’m really sorry’ taking shape in his expression so she smacked him as hard as she could across the face. Just walloped him with her best tennis arm.
Don’t you dare tell me you’re sorry.
She didn’t say the words but he saw them. He kept his eyes wide and waited. There was a kind of ticking noise from the sunlit wall of their room as it began to heat up, as though the world outside had a secret it had to tell them in code. But now he wasn’t silencing his apology any more, he was trying to stop a grin from getting out. She’d made a big red mark on his cheek, good riddance.
