by Ian Wedde
Somewhere along the line he’d stopped playing the recording. About the time he’d begun to jeer at the book-signings, probably. About the time TG had begun to ask, ‘Where are you, Christopher?’
That’s what he’d been reminded of. The sound of the tall, scary doctor harshly singing down there below him in the house reminded him that he’d forgotten to remember the sound of his pissed aunties, uncles and cousins singing ‘All of Me’, and ‘Memories Are Made of This’, and ‘That’s Amore’: When you walk in a dream but you know you’re not dreaming, signore.
The doctor came quickly into the room, closing the door behind her, waving her big hand at him to shut up. He paused, holding the flamboyant Dean Martin pose with one hand on his heart and the other outstretched towards her.
‘Please,’ she hissed, ‘my colleague, the old man, he is sleep.’
Her English was even odder than before, probably because she was flustered, entering the room hastily with a laptop bag over her shoulder and trying to close the door behind her. But also because she was laughing. He couldn’t believe it. Doctor Hawwa Habash, who’d poked him in the ribs with a gun, smacked him a good one in the face, and not ruled out the possibility that she might kill him, now had her free hand over her mouth and he could see from the way her eyes were creased up, and hear from her attempts to silence her snorts, that she was in stitches.
‘You think this is funny?’ he demanded, gesturing at the room, playing the moment for laughs – of course he was kidding, and she could see that. But the moment had passed, as Bob used to say whenever an issue of the magazine missed the fresh beat with a story: he called it ‘the moment past’. It passed, and her face, which he noticed looked scrubbed and plain, bare of makeup, had that not-funny look again. Only now she appeared older and almost vulnerable, somewhat exposed even, like someone seen in their dressing gown in early morning, in a cautiously opened doorway.
‘No,’ she said, ‘of course it is not fun-ny.’ That phrasing she did. ‘Mr Hare.’ Not looking at him. ‘Please to excuse me, my bad manners.’
This could go on, he thought, but best to leave it there.
Was this the moment to ask her, truthfully, what was it that he might be able to do – for her, for her work? The question went out into that sensation he had of light and space. An opening-out, the bay, the singing, his dream. A balloon of hope filling his stomach and chest. And fear – that he might now do it. Might now be able to ask the question.
And at the same time, he was afraid he might not be able to. So he sat down.
She unpacked the laptop on the grubby table and put her cellphone next to it. Quickly, with the kind of nimble confidence he’d never even attempted, despite Bob’s pleas to get the technology ‘under his belt’ – how many more hidden barbs would he uncover? – the doctor was getting an internet connection, maybe even a phone one.
He felt a conflict of dread and excitement. Was it possible to call the future? Might TG still be there?
He sat there opposite Dr Habash, waiting.
‘Who you gonna call?’ he said, knowing she wouldn’t get the reference. She was concentrating on her quick actions over the keyboard, and he watched her large and somewhat murky eyes swiftly tracking the results he couldn’t see, on the screen. It was his chance to look at her face without her noticing. It had much of what TG somewhat bitchily used to call ‘character’ – the grand nose, the full, downturned, slightly embittered lips, the prominent eyes. The quality of her attention and the speed of her movements were full of intelligence. Despite the obvious signs of weariness or even exhaustion in her face and posture, she conveyed a sense of powerful, abrasive energy. She reached up to her face with the gesture that he’d become familiar with, and pinched at the dark bag under one eye. She was completing her work on the laptop with one hand, in fact one finger by the sound of it. Then, abruptly, she looked up and caught him staring at her.
The steady hardness of her gaze jolted him – not exactly a slap, but the next best thing. She sure as hell wasn’t laughing any more.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Who are you going to call? Must be someone who value you?’
He’d been on the verge of riding over the shock of her return glare and saying something like how much he’d have appreciated the chance to get to know her better, and hear more about her work, supposing that had ever been possible, or might yet be possible. He would have meant it, too, because he was in truth quite captivated by the compelling power of the woman, and was sure that under different circumstances she’d be good company, with much to tell him. The kind of person you could imagine spending an evening with, over a good meal perhaps, enjoying the listening, someone who was both serious and, he’d seen, equipped with a sardonic sense of humour.
But now he just felt slapped again, blushing, hot, and his face must have shown the heat, because she repeated her question, flatly, awkwardly recalibrating her language.
‘We contact someone who have for you a value.’ She clicked her tongue in frustration. ‘Somebody who need to restore you.’ She was looking at him closely, shaking her head at her own question. ‘You understand what I am saying, Mr Hare?’ The pause. ‘Christopher?’
‘Oh, so it’s Christopher again, is it?’ Some of his spit landed on the lid of the laptop.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Now that we’re finally down to it. Cut-the-crap time.’
She sat back somewhat carefully with her hands on the armrests of the chair. He could see the weight of the gun in her jacket pocket.
He made a derisive gun with two fingers of his right hand and fired it into his head. ‘For fuck’s sake. Do you really think I’m going to try something?’
‘I am asking if there is somebody you like to contact. Why this makes you angry?’
‘We’re talking about hostage money, aren’t we. My value?’ He was trembling again, after having been calm for so long. The fluttering sensation in his chest. ‘Somebody to restore me, did you say? You could have spared me the waiting.’ His disappointment – his grief – was choking him.
He saw her get it – at first a look of disbelief. Then the hand to her mouth, a chesty bark of laughter.
‘Yes, of course, excuse me, this is what we do, Arabs, especially Palestinians, we hostage a famous food writer, you are right, I should have explain. This is what we always do.’ She was really enjoying herself. ‘You hear perhaps what happen to that famous restaurant at Biarritz, it gets bombed. What we do with cooking when,’ she spoke the phrase with ironic care as if quoting a news report, ‘our demands are not met.’
Yes, he knew about that one. It was another of Ducasse’s. Some kind of resort. Ducasse had had to shut it down.
‘That was Basques,’ he said. ‘Not Arabs. What are you talking about?’ Clearly, he’d got it wrong. This wasn’t about ransoming him. Not that he was about to apologise.
The woman passed a hand over her eyes and muttered something in French. He caught the word imbécile.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘You must think I’m pretty stupid. What I did. But what do you expect? You could have just let me go.’
‘No – you are not stupid. To the contrary. When I say “imbécile”, I describe myself. Now I will be clear. Before I ask you what you would like to do, who you like to contact. Not to talk, it’s too dangerous. But to leave a message. For example, like here.’
She turned the laptop towards him and, leaning in, he next jumped back at the sight of an image of TG. It was her website. There she was, Mary Pepper, Pepper herself, the one and only, that wisp of hair. He could clearly imagine her little head-flick, to get it away from her eyebrow. She was standing in front of one of her huge, 150 x 200 cm photographs, this one with vague towering shapes, yellow and tan, maybe gourds.
That cool Pepper smile.
‘Please,’ said Hawwa Habash. ‘Do not upset yourself. I know that this is your wife, an artist. Before you don’t like to mention her. But now we have little time. Your relationship is not my busin
ess. But please. I think you should send a message to this woman. She is what I can find. I find her before, not hard. Often you are together when I Google. Now we can do it, it’s simple.’ She hesitated, her lips pursed as if considering a diagnosis or something doctorish – looking at him carefully, thinking. ‘Then, after a while, perhaps you can go.’
‘I can go?’ He couldn’t believe it.
‘Perhaps. In a while. I think so.’
Where would he go? This was the first thought that entered his head, which was ringing slightly as if from a loud noise. He’d imagined that the day he’d see when he was turned loose would have Dr Habash in it – he ran out, crowing.
‘But where are you going?’
The woman’s look of incredulity was quickly replaced by one of annoyance, then her familiar stonewall expression.
‘Please,’ she said curtly, gesturing at the laptop with the image of TG on its screen, ‘something for your wife. On her contact.’ She grimaced as if at a distasteful word. ‘We have not very much time.’ She turned the laptop back towards herself and held her hands over its keyboard.
‘But what do you expect me to say? Having a great time, wish you were here?’ He didn’t get it.
She didn’t lift her head, or snap at him this time. Her gaze was downward, her large eyelids blinking rapidly.
‘I think maybe you should tell her where you are. If she don’t know.’
‘What if she doesn’t care?’
Then she did lift her face towards him. She looked like a doctor at that moment, he thought: her expression calm and attentive, as if she was explaining something frightening to a patient.
‘Please,’ she said softly. ‘I think you should do this.’
‘But you said I could go. So what’s the point?’
Still, that doctor’s look. He guessed she was offering him something, a warning – they were going to lock him up? But that wasn’t what she’d said. You can go. Perhaps. In a while. And anyway, he’d decided.
‘Okay, what the hell. So where am I, for a start?’
‘That, I will write. From you, just a message. Something ... intime. For her.’
‘Food is love.’
She hesitated, as if not believing him, or that she’d not heard correctly. Her doctor’s look replaced by the derisive one.
‘She’ll know what it means. Who it’s from.’
‘Food-is-love.’ She typed, making the shapes of the words with her scornful lips. ‘But still I have to say it is from you. From her hus-band. From Christopher. Otherwise she will reject.’ She shot him a look. He could see that she was guessing quite a lot, but not really interested. ‘And that is all?’
When he didn’t respond, she unleashed a curt flurry of keyboard-taps and then closed the laptop. A strange silence. That direct look of hers, her heavy eyelids going up and down.
‘It was what my grandmother used to say, Food is love.’ He felt he should explain – hesitating only because he’d become accustomed to the doctor’s impatience. But this time she waited, politely, as if they’d entered the space of conversation she’d mocked last time they talked. ‘She was from Italy, around Chiavari in Liguria. She came to New Zealand after the war, with my grandfather. He was Maori. She was my first teacher. Of cooking. And Italian.’
‘But why you send this to your wife? This speech of your grandmother?’
He had the feeling that she was thinking about her next move, having been so busy with him before. But her face was calm and tired, not haughty, as if something had resolved itself during the business with the laptop.
‘Because I told her this story at the beginning. The story of my grandmother’s saying. When we ...’
‘When you fall in love with her, I think.’
He was astonished – Doctor Hawwa Habash was smiling at him, without mockery, even with weary sentimentality.
‘Yes, although I didn’t tell her that part until later. But I knew. It was our first assignment, you know what that means? Notre mission. I was the writer, she was the photographer. We had a meal – in Paris.’
The doctor’s ‘Ah’ was quiet, and a furrow appeared between her eyes.
‘My grandmother also used to say, “Who can cook and not drink the cooking wine?”’ He was watching the look of unease on the woman’s face. What was he saying that might be bothering her? He blundered on. ‘“Who can eat and not make love to the cook?”’
‘Where I come from, the Bedouin say, “The woman died of exhaustion and the mansaf lasted but a day.” My grandmother used to say it.’ Her contribution was somewhat perfunctory. She seemed about to leave, or to move on – that ‘moment past’ sensation again. But he wanted her to stay a little longer, in the room but also in the moment, in this conversation. He so badly wanted her to stay in this present, after which he’d probably never see her again, however much he imagined leaving towards a future she’d made possible; a future in which, perhaps, they could work together. With the children, with food. They’d never be in this situation again, on the very edge of whatever was going to happen next. So he went on talking towards her by-now-formal smile, whose politeness he could see was in preparation for whatever she had planned next, which might be her departure, since she was packing up her laptop.
‘That meal, that food is love one, it was at a restaurant in Paris called Le Baratin, a little one, Argentinian, twentieth arrondissement, that’s when it happened. That I fell in love with her. Boy, did I ever. Boom!’ He clutched his heart and was going to continue, just babbling really, to keep the moment, to stall another of her abrupt, efficient exits. But her face had suddenly gone a pale khaki colour and she made a guttural ‘Uh!’ sound in her chest. She looked sick, as if she might be going to faint.
‘Le Baratin, tamam!’ Her voice hoarse, the angry foreign word drawn out in a groan.
‘You know it?’ How stupid that sounded, when she looked as though she’d seen a ghost.
Her hands had flown to her cheeks, as if holding her face together. ‘Yes, I know this place. Maybe twenty years ago, we often go there. It just open, Le Baratin. On rue Jouye-Rouve, yes? We live near there.’
‘We?’ He’d seen how she immediately stopped herself. ‘Don’t tell me you also fell in love at Le Baratin! Now that would be bizarre.’
‘Yes, bizarre, as you say, like a mad dog.’
Whatever that meant. But now she was the hard Hawwa Habash again. Outside in the distance a police siren started up and sped away. They watched each other noticing it.
She awarded him a grim smile. ‘No, not coming here. If the police come here they do not make a noise.’
Then she moved the laptop case aside and leaned forward, as close to him as she could get across the table. He could smell aniseed on her breath. She spoke urgently, as if the siren had reminded her that time was running out.
‘That man in the restaurant, that I shoot. He was my husband. Now you have to know this. But yes, we also are in love at Le Baratin. Or I think we are. Then, I think we are.’ She shrugged. ‘I was young.’
He couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘Now I have begun to answer your question. Why did I do it? Now I will tell you.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Please. It doesn’t matter. I don’t have to know. I don’t even want to.’
‘But when you jump in the car with me, what do you do? You think it was empty? This place from where, as you say, you can go forward? You can just jump in and then jump out again?’
He stood up from his chair to avoid the hiss of her scorn, and began to walk around the room, but she continued, following him with her harsh voice, snapping the words out at the front of her mouth – one after the other, the shit her husband had done. Arms deals, ripping off medical supplies, stealing aid money, trafficking kidneys, ‘adoptions’. He really didn’t want to know – if he got out of here, this stuff would surely put a bullet in his head.
‘Please,’ he begged. ‘Please. I really don’t want to know.’
�
��But, Christopher, now you do. Now you know it.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘And even the Gucci bag,’ she said. ‘The one you put your head in.’
‘I put my head in? I like that!’
‘Was meant to be left behind. As a message to the associates of my husband. Was a fake, from New Jersey. That my husband imports. But then you return it. Like a good dog. But this bag – shall we say it was full of what I tell you. Much information. And now you have it, when you leave this place, the only one from which you can go forward, as you say yourself.’
‘What do you expect me to do with all this?’ But he knew the answer. He’d started to know it when he ran out of the restaurant and jumped into the white taxi.
‘My husband that I shoot was for a long time a criminal and a murderer – now I know this, but then, at Le Baratin, maybe I choose not to know. So now I have to be responsible for this. For my choosing not to know. And also for the death of my son.’
Now she stood up and pursued him to the far side of the room, by the window. Aniseed breath, one strong hand on his arm. ‘His name was Boutros. He was seven years old. We go to Beirut, everybody believes the war is finished finally. He has grown up in Paris and in Amman after the fedayeen have gone. He has never heard the sound of guns, of bombing. When the Syrians attack Aoun he went to the roof to see it, though I have forbidden him. So someone shoot him. Maybe they think he is a sniper, maybe just an accident. But also because Boutros does not understand danger.’
‘I’m very sorry,’ he said.
‘Yes, I believe you. But now, also, you understand what I am trying to say. That there was much danger in the bag you decide to pick up. So you will be responsible for what happen next.’
