by Ian Wedde
‘But no people, Bob – no food on plates. No one having fun.’ Because when she pointed a camera at anything yummy her brains fell out. Because no one stayed in her bed any longer than it took to show them to the door before breakfast.
Because what was the point.
Thirty-two years old, trust fund frozen except for treatments, pokey flat on the dreary Wandsworth side of Putney.
She put on Elvis Costello. Get Happy.
‘I can’t stand up for falling down.’
Bob had handed her a folder of Christopher’s clippings. ‘Come on, sweetie. Have a look.’ What he meant was, Or else try spending your day on a park seat not too far from the conveniences.
Six months without using but she scored on the way home. Did he really expect her to run around after some try-hard fucking New Zealander? The bag was pinkish because the coke was cut with raspberry flavouring. Everything had that trivial, try-hard look, even the drug.
What’s it to be? Admit defeat or trot around after Christopher Nobody. And what’s the difference, really? She made a tidy line on the kitchenette bench and got a nice little rush about the time she’d read to page six of the clippings folder.
The Jamaican couple in the flat below were having a row with their six-year-old, that was lively too, and when she laughed out loud she suddenly had to pause and find out why. Then they put on some skank music downstairs and after a while the little girl was laughing at what her daddy was doing to make her eat her dinner. He was being an elephant.
There were only a dozen more pieces to read and by the time she’d finished them she’d worked it out. The little family downstairs was funny and lively all right but she was noticing that because what she’d read was funny too. Did the coke have anything to do with it? Of course it did. But she flushed what was left away. Which was really hard, but what choice did she have? Christopher Who or Serenity Detox in Camden?
The decider was something he’d written about an obscure Paris bistro called Le Baratin run by a female Italian-Argentinian chef. Le Baratin did beef cheeks braised slowly in syrah; how vile could you get? But her mouth flooded with saliva for the first time in months when Christopher Hare’s jaunty five-hundred worder put a forkful of the meat in her mouth.
And that was what she’d seen when he came into the office in Thurloe Place. She saw how he’d slowly closed his lips around the meat and then pressed it with his teeth, feeling its succulent texture while the juice poured out of it.
In Bob’s office he had that jubilant, open-mouthed look – ‘Brilliant, brilliant!’ – but then his face would get sleepy, almost sullen, chewing those tasty lips. His gaze clouded over or out of focus, or looking inward.
She asked him about Le Baratin and the cheeks. When he said ‘joues de boeuf’, his Frenching lips made the absurd, exaggerated shape of a wet, pouting sea-anemone. When that made her laugh she covered her own mouth with her hand. Then realised what she’d done. As if her mouth could ever look as utterly naked as Christopher’s.
‘We’ll go there! First stop!’
Bob’s bushy left eyebrow went up.
The other thing about Christopher was his legs. He was taller than average, but not when he was sitting down. That was because his legs were out of proportion with the rest of him. They were long and skinny. Excessively hairy, she found out later. The waistbands of his off-the-rack trousers were always too big, so he had to pull them in with a belt, but they always looked baggy. And then he’d sit down and seem at once to shrink, because his torso was short by comparison.
In Bob’s office, his legs had stuck out and got in his way. He was wearing huge scuffed Australian Blundstones. Then, the first time she saw him sit down behind a table – she’d asked for Peter Gordon’s new Sugar place in Soho – she laughed because he seemed to shrink dramatically.
‘What?’ he demanded. That sulky look.
‘How did you do that? Fold yourself down?’
He was glaring at her.
‘Sorry, is it a sore point? I mean, you ...’ She made a sliding movement with her hand. Then he kicked her under the table, not hard, but just the same. Their first time out together, pre-assignment, getting to know each other.
‘Oh, sorry,’ he grinned. Next thing he was happily cracking jokes with chef Gordon. Whom he knew, of course, ‘another brilliant Kiwi’.
‘I’ll tell you what the trouble is, Peter, cherub,’ he was drawling. ‘It doesn’t look like food any more. It looks like fucking art. Sensational art, but art.’
He didn’t know what he’d just said, then, but she kicked him back anyway.
‘Oh, sorry,’ she mimicked.
He and Peter Gordon looked a bit alike, curly-haired, mischievous. The chef was staring at her, trying to remember if he’d seen her before. He had, as a matter of fact, at the Notting Hill place. Photographing the table-settings. Then he turned and hurried back to his kitchen. Her point, exactly.
Back outside the restaurant, a bit drunk, Christopher bent to tickle the head of a miniature Dachshund on a young man’s lap, and the dog snapped at him. He pretended to flee into the posh Soho Sanctum hotel next door. She couldn’t decide if he was an embarrassing show-off or actually amusing.
The next morning, she was sitting in the Paris train as it was about to depart when she saw his red baseball cap bobbing urgently along above the stragglers on the platform. He’d made sandwiches for both of them because the buffet food was ‘complete shit’.
When they got off the train, his suitcase sprang open in the concourse at the Gare du Nord. She stuffed handfuls of his wrinkled clothes into her bag – that horse-leathery smell.
‘Thanks, pal,’ he said. He didn’t seem to have embarrass-ment in his nature.
He hadn’t booked at Le Baratin but the owners made an arrangement when they saw him. She photographed the chef Raquel with a plate of her joues de boeuf; also the jolly interior of the restaurant.
‘Food is love.’ Christopher told her a rambling story about his Italian grandmother back in New Zealand. ‘Food is love, Christopher, she would say. And don’t you forget it.’
Food is love.
Obviously he fancied her. He fell asleep on the Metro and put his big woolly head on her shoulder in the hotel lift. But she closed her door in his grinning face and sat on a chair by the open window. She thought she might be feeling happy. The air from the hotel’s courtyard wasn’t very fresh and a man was snoring in a nearby room. It was all quite vivid. Something encouraging seemed to be happening. The beef cheeks had been delicious but not nearly as good as reading about them or watching Christopher say their name.
Moments after she took the first photograph of Raquel beaming above the plate of glistening meat and carrots she had a sensation. A vivid little shuttering in her mind, a just-right sensation.
When she turned the tap on to brush her teeth back at the hotel, the ancient plumbing groaned loudly; she laughed as she spat the winey taste of their meal. The skinny, shirt-button-breasts leek of a woman in the scruffy hotel mirror didn’t look anything like Myra Hindley in Marcus Harvey’s ghastly painting, the child killer’s smug meaningless smirk, not candour but a kind of sightlessness in her stare, the primped, sticky hair. The woman in the mirror was smiling as if that was what she always did.
When she looked for a T-shirt to go to bed in she found she still had some of Christopher’s stuff in her bag. Of course she didn’t put one of his on, but the thought crossed her mind, and she remembered the way Bob’s big grey eyebrow had gone up, back in Thurloe Place.
And yes, she had a quick sniff at it.
They caught the train to Nice. She made Christopher buy a cheap new trundly suitcase at the Gare de Lyon. He repacked at a table outside the station café. When the waiter chased him with the old empty one he parked it by a rubbish bin and walked away backwards, blowing kisses and waving to it.
‘Au revoir, chérie, tu ne m’en veux pas? Regarde, ma nouvelle biquette!’
‘Biquette?’
&nbs
p; ‘Little she-goat.’ He put a hand to his mouth in mock dismay. ‘Sorry, no offense.’
So, probably, that was how it started, the whole thing, sensational. The whole catastrophe.
The memories. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.
But, maya.yazbeck@hotmail? Who was Maya Yazbeck? Why was Christopher sending a message with her email?
Costello singing: Simple though love is, still it confused me.
‘Message from your husband.’
Since when did he ever say that?
Food is love.
CHAPTER 3
Yes, of course, she could see that he was stupid – what, was she herself stupid as well? His indecision, his docility, but then his impulsive actions and his anger, these were unstable and she would say that they were the signs of an unstable personality. ‘Stupid’ was an easy way to describe this and for the driver Mahfouz that was sufficient. The food writer man was ‘as stupid as a turd’ and so forth, as usual, of course. She did not disagree.
And also, of course, as Mahfouz and the others did not need to tell her, it was the stupid turds that were the most dangerous. Why? Because they did stupid actions. Therefore, there was no question. The stupid turd from the restaurant would have to be shot. Yes, of course they were right, that was why they were being patient with her. It was a matter of time. When had there ever been a good reason to hesitate over such a thing? Unlike the taxi, the idiot who had jumped into it could not have his colour or his number-plate changed. He could not turn from a white taxi into the red saloon of the importer of cheap Turkish furniture and leather shoes.
Tomorrow morning, unlike the taxi, he would be the same – white, obvious, with a sign on the top of his head and an identification number on his arse! He would still be stupid and, being stupid, he would still be dangerous. He might as well drive himself around the city with a loudspeaker! Therefore.
Thus, Mahfouz. Of course. But then, the food writer was also not stupid. She had seen from Google that he was also quite famous – indeed, he had written a book about Arabian Nights: 1,001 Middle Eastern Feasts. That did not seem very likely, but however. And unlikely also that the famous food writer’s book mentioned the UNRWA beans and rice or canned Kraft cheese they ate in Baqa’a refugee camp.
And, in some part, he was also not afraid. That, of course, could be another sign of stupidity. But it could also mean that he had a purpose of some kind, though perhaps he did not know it. Perhaps he did not yet understand his direction. It was as though he had been drawn after her by the force of her mission, though he was ignorant of its purpose. And also, if he was merely stupid, he would not be interesting. This Christopher Hare was interesting – stupid and therefore dangerous, yes, but also there was something happening in his mind that he was becoming aware of, and that was interesting. He said he was bored – that made him interesting. His decision to jump in the taxi was interesting, it was an instinct that came from his boredom. Really stupid people were not bored, only people with intelligence. He did not understand it, his decision, but perhaps she could help him with his understanding. What did he know about the present situation in Baqa’a, in Rafah, in Amman New Camp? In Homs, in Ain el-Hilweh? In Shatila? What they ate there, in the camps? Nothing, certainly. What he vomited upstairs did not come from the carte du jour at Shatila.
‘So now, you see, he is empty,’ she said to them. ‘You heard it. Now, we can fill him up.’
‘Now he is full of shit!’ That was Mahfouz the driver, needless to say. But then he had to finish with the taxi, and anyway, he did not matter, Mahfouz. He went out the back, cursing, to do his work in the truck garage. ‘Don’t waste time! Shoot the son of a shit-pants whore now and be done with it! Then we sink him in the harbour for the crabs to eat his shit!’
That left Philippe the older, quiet one – he was drinking a glass of water and watching her with patience. He was tapping with one fingernail against the glass and sucking the water from his moustache with his bottom lip. His eyelids were going up and down very slowly. It was already agreed that the two of them decided, it had to be unanimous, whatever it was that was happening.
‘But you also shot the woman,’ Philippe said quietly. They were eating slices of pita bread with warm oil and thyme and she was drinking a glass of tea. ‘I already heard it from Antun at the restaurant, before he talked to the police.’ He wagged the cellphone that was close to his glass of water. Then he resumed tapping on the glass. Tap, tap, tap. ‘So now, you see, we have three problems, not one.’
‘No,’ said Hawwa. She admired Philippe and trusted him, but there was always the question of leadership. ‘Now we have one problem, Philippe, and that is how you and I will agree.’
‘Let me explain.’ He leaned across the table and counted what he was saying with his piece of pita. ‘How it seems to me, in my opinion only, you understand. Number one, we have your friend upstairs who has become so infatuated he had to jump in the taxi with you. Then, we have the fact that you shot the whore of Abdul Yassou, for which I can’t blame you, but we didn’t agree to do that.’
‘And number three?’ He would already see that she did not enjoy his patronising manner.
He put his piece of bread down on the table and took a sip of water. Sometimes he liked to go very slowly, Philippe – he was sucking his moustache again. ‘Number three, Oum Boutros,’ he murmured, putting a knife in her heart with that mention of her son, ‘is that I fear you and I will not agree about this matter of your friend upstairs before Antun gets here, which will be in the morning after he is sure the police have not followed him and after he has not had a good night’s sleep. It is a question of timing. At this moment this obliging maître d’ is talking to the police and sending them in the wrong direction. But he will be very angry and afraid because you shot the woman and also because of the complication with the stupid man who has become infatuated. So, trust me, when Antun gets home after the police he will not be sleeping, and when he gets here he will want to hear a good decision. One that will help him with his fear. With his future.’
Hawwa watched her friend Philippe consider how he was going to say the next thing – the important part. She already had a sense of what it could be. While she was waiting, she was noticing that the place was disorderly. The cups and plates had not been washed recently, there were cigarette butts that had not been cleaned away, and there was a smell of scorched chickpeas, as if someone had forgotten that a pot was cooking on the gas burner. All this was careless and not like Philippe, who was in charge of the house.
‘What,’ he said, mildly, catching the direction of her survey, ‘you think some dirty Arab truck drivers are going to keep a maid in their house to clean up their mess? A cook, perhaps, as well? You spend too much time in Geneva, my friend. When we are gone, we the truck drivers, that is all they will notice, the ones who come to clean up. As usual, the filth. The “Arab filth”.’
But this was trivial. He leaned forward and touched the back of her hand respectfully with one finger, the one that had his wedding band on it. ‘What of course you know, Hawwa, my comrade, is that when you shot the woman of Abdul Yassou, for which who could blame you, but without our agreement, you placed yourself in debt. You placed yourself in debt to me, your comrade, in the terms of our agreement. Now let us say you owe me a life. Surely you can see that this must be the life of your new friend who even now is beginning to think what he should do, upstairs? That is not only the honorable thing in the terms of our agreement, it is also the sensible thing, and it is what Antun will expect to have happened when he comes here tomorrow morning with a fear about the police and about the well-known friends of Abdul Yassou making him unreliable also. Or angry in the way that will make him ask for more money to stop him going to talk to somebody. Or perhaps he will talk, anyway, to save his skin. You see how this new friend of yours upstairs has begun to unpick a thread at the end of our blanket so that soon we will all be uncovered.’
Yes, it was true. She remem
bered the look of disbelief and rage that was not play-acting on the maître d’ Antun’s face as she left the restaurant where the screaming had begun to mix with the sounds of chairs falling over. She saw in an instant that Antun did not know what to do. And then, he had not stopped the fool from chasing after her down the stairs. Why not? Because he did not know what to do but also because he did not know how to act. He was incapable. So who was more dangerous – Antun, whom the police might already have seen was a man with a nervous problem, or Christopher the food writer upstairs here in the ‘truck drivers’ house’ whom the same police might conclude was a zealous member of the public? Whom the gangsters had kidnapped? More likely, who had simply run away, quite sensible under the circumstances? Leaving behind no credit card details, since he had not paid? So who was he? Certainly, the police knew who Abdul Yassou was, and good riddance. Perhaps they would be glad to see the last of him. And now, they also knew who Antun was, the maître d’ with a nervous disposition.
‘Yes, Philippe, of course you are right,’ she said, moving her hand away from his finger. Inside her chest her heart was thudding strongly and she knew she would have to try hard to keep her breath calm. ‘But let me ask you a question, since you have given me the benefit of your thoughts.’
He inclined his head a little, courteously. He would always be calm. ‘Of course, bint Habash.’ Daughter of Habash – another knife in her heart. First the wound of her dead son, then that of her dead father. Yes, this was the way Philippe did it.
‘Yes, I am a Habash, as you unnecessarily remind me – and like my father’s cousin al-Hakim, I prefer to look at the whole tric trac board before I move a piece. That is what George used to say, as you surely remember, Philippe. No doubt you heard him say it, that other Habash, that George, that al-Hakim.’
‘Another piece,’ murmured Philippe. ‘Yes, he did say something like that, from time to time. He used to say, keep something back, a piece, behind the line, to be a nuisance. I think I heard him, may he rest in peace. He lived a very long time.’ Philippe crossed himself but without emotion, and she had to wonder if he was trying to provoke her.
