The Catastrophe

by Ian Wedde

  ‘You’re on your own, kid.’

  She grimaced. ‘If you like.’

  ‘But I can go.’

  ‘As you choose.’

  ‘But not with you.’

  She didn’t bother to answer. He sensed that she’d expected more of him. But what?

  ‘Perhaps you would like to sleep. Until daytime.’

  ‘I can’t go now?’

  ‘There is a bed. I show you.’

  ‘That’s a no?’

  She picked up the laptop bag and cellphone and took those long strides to the door. Opened it and jerked her head at him. That ‘moment past’ feeling.

  There was a single bed in the room she showed him, across the landing from the one they’d been in. It was covered with a plaid blanket. She picked up a small elegant cabin bag and a dark overcoat and stood in the doorway with the laptop valise over her shoulder. Then he got it – she and the others were going to leave first, without him.

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Hare,’ she said.

  ‘Christopher,’ he said. ‘You can call me Christopher.’ He felt absurdly sad.

  ‘Yes – Christopher.’ She seemed to hesitate a moment. But then she abruptly closed the door. The lock clicked over.

  He stood there wondering what else he could have said. Then he turned the light out and lay down on the bed. There was nothing else to do. The shutters were open and the city’s distant rumble of chefs’-hour activity entered the room in which he could smell traces of the doctor’s perfume. On the pillow, too, something astringent, pricey – and, he thought, perhaps a hint of garlic. And the vague imprint of what might have been lipstick.

  He lay there with his cheek pressed to the pillow, inhaling the faint, bracing bouquet of Hawwa Habash. It was the confusing aroma of a human being. He remembered a grinning vintner in the marketplace of Malaucène in the Ventoux who’d had the ability to close one nostril of the huge beaky nose he lowered into his glass. He tried doing that: inhaling Habash, to pass the time, never imagining he could fall asleep, not with his mind opening and shutting on a future that seemed possible at one moment and impossible the next.

  CHAPTER 8

  What on earth was she supposed to do with this wretched ‘food is love’ message popping up via her website? And this address in Nice? Bob was looking at her sternly. He kept her at arm’s length these days, but who else could she turn to?

  ‘Have you heard from the silly man, Bob?’

  What had Christopher got himself into? And what about this Maya Yazbeck? If nothing else, she sounded exotic. Was the prick gloating?

  That little pang of jealousy, so stupid.

  ‘Out of the kindness of my heart – truly, Mary, because I love the fool – I gave him the off-season gig. For old time’s sake. He was broke of course. I told him, seek out the little-known bargains, the ones that don’t fleece tourists. What he used to be good at.’

  ‘You mean the ones that can’t get any tourists, even in summer.’

  Once, Bob had thought she was the cat’s pyjamas. Now, as far as he was concerned, she was an ungrateful bitch. But what did he expect? That she’d go on forever being Thé Glacé? Trotting around in lockstep with the husband he’d practically pimped her to, however hard he’d tried to play outraged later on?

  He wasn’t exactly glaring at her, he was probably still quite fond of her deep down. Once he got over his sense of betrayal. But he was going to show her the door soon, if she didn’t stop being snippy.

  ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, I’m sorry Bob. You were always my life-saver. Always will be. But he’s such a moody old fool, our Christopher.’

  Food is love, for God’s sake. Of course she still remembered Christopher’s gorgeous tipsy face leaning across the table at Le Baratin. His eyes shining as if with the same joues de boeuf juices that he wiped from those grinning lips, before he reached across to raid her plate.

  But that was then.

  Bob was fussing about with a file of clippings and print-outs. It was completely miserable outside. Everything the colour of pencil-lead, rain with a bit of late season’s hail plinking at the window. The kind of day when Christopher could get moody. But also the kind of day when he used to make staying in bed with a late breakfast irresistible.

  Up to a point. His dreadful attempts at funny translated curses.

  ‘I spit on the milk of your mother’s work-schedule!’

  ‘For God’s sake, Christopher, shut up, stop being boring and horrible. They’ll come for you.’

  ‘Who – who will come for me? Will you come for me, Pepper?’

  So dreadful. Just desperate, sometimes.

  Bob gave her a sheet of paper with addresses circled in red biro.

  ‘Darling, don’t go getting tangled up with all that again. The man’s a tarpit. If you don’t mind me saying so. You know how I loathe your ghastly new work, but I do still adore you.’

  He reached over his desk and put the hand-of-compassion on the one with which she held the print-out. ‘He was good for you. I even take some credit for that. But let him go, treasure. It’ll end in tears again.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s peculiar, Bob.’ Or perhaps not now. She saw him flinch at the prospect of their chat going on much longer.

  How was he to know she’d been up half the night thinking about it, that ‘food is love’? Why it sounded so wrong – off-key, mistimed, out-of-place, clumsy even for Christopher. And the wretched parade of memories it brought plodding through her mind. Food, sex, charm, fun, blah blah blah.

  She couldn’t work, couldn’t put her mind to anything that didn’t recall some absurd image of Christopher. For example, him eating a dripping pistachio gelato in Nice, on that first trip. The original catastrophe. Opening up his shirt so the sticky green drips could miss it and just land on his stupid fuzzy chest.

  Yes, she’d so wanted to lick the icecream off him. Right there. Before they’d even screwed for the first time, on the train.

  But did she have to be reminded?

  ‘Where did you go, dear?’ Bob’s patience wearing thin.

  ‘What’s peculiar – I probably shouldn’t have, Bob, you’ll scold me. But I replied to this person’s message, this Maya Yazbeck@hotmail.com. I said What is this, a joke?’

  ‘What do you mean, “person”? Didn’t I hear you say woman before?’ Getting his spank in. He fetched the open bottle of Rhône villages. Half with lunch and half later in the afternoon.

  Dinner required another class of drink, for Bob.

  Now was later in the afternoon, she thought, and couldn’t stop it. Partly, she was just so tired. She began to cry after the first swallow, feebly, because maybe Christopher had got himself into one of his moods. And done something really stupid this time.

  Even though she couldn’t bear him.

  ‘I tried to reply to this person’s email, and it just bounced. No such address.’ She blew her nose into a tissue from the box Bob put in front of her. She knew how much he hated crying. So did she. A big swallow of the nice kind wine. Another one. ‘Don’t you think that’s ... sinister?’

  She’d handed Bob this one on a plate.

  ‘Could have been someone who doesn’t like your work. You know, one of those cranks – people who love food?’

  ‘Come off it, Bob – “food is love”? It was him.’

  ‘That could have been a coincidence. Admit it.’

  She wouldn’t be provoked. ‘Then I thought, why not? Why not try? I Googled Maya Yazbeck. There was only one obvious person. A Lebanese cabaret artiste for God’s sake. What kind of singer writes food is love?’

  ‘A starving one.’

  She talked on over the top of Bob’s sniggering.

  ‘And it was a woman. Why did that not surprise me, Bob? Then I looked up Maya, it means princess in Arabic.’

  Bob drank.

  ‘Proves without doubt that she was a woman, Bob. Is. Princesses are.’

  ‘Imagine this,’ drawled Bob. He was trying but failing to soothe her, with
his droll, late-afternoon manner, which she could see all the way through. Or perhaps he was trying to provoke her again. ‘Christopher Hare meets an exotic Lebanese singer in an out-of-season dump somewhere off the beaten track in Nice and decides to taunt his ex-wife with a provocative message.’ He raised his glass. ‘Sounds like our man.’

  She nearly threw her wine in his smug face.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t very funny.’

  ‘No, not funny, and not fair either. That was horrible. You know Christopher, he’s a hopeless, self-centred cry-baby, but no malice, Bob. None at all. Unlike most of the people in this wretched city.’

  She looked at the piece of paper Bob had given her. ‘What’s this?’

  Bob’s nasty jibe was replaying in her head.

  ‘Christopher’s draft schedule. For the off-season issue. For his trip. No point giving him more than a draft, he’ll never stick to it. But it might give you some idea of where he was.’ He corrected. ‘Is.’ Again. ‘Could be. He’s supposed to be in Nice now.’

  ‘The Yazbeck I found on Google is a top Lebanese singer based in Beirut. With an international following of men with gold chains. What’s she doing in Nice in the off-season? For that matter, why would she send me a street address? It stinks, Bob.’

  Now Bob was looking slightly interested. He refilled them.

  ‘I’m telling you, Christopher would run a mile. This is one thoroughbred camel. What on earth would they find to talk about? If he could get past the bodyguards.’

  ‘Well, then, it wasn’t her. He’s pulling your leg.’

  ‘But if it wasn’t her, that’s even odder. For example, why was he using her email? And why wouldn’t her email work when I tried to reply?’

  Bob was getting bored. ‘Odd is what you get with Christopher. You know that. It’s what he does. Passé, but terribly hard to miss.’

  Now he was being vengeful. Frowning his big eyebrows. He pushed the cork back into the bottle without topping her up.

  She couldn’t help noticing one of her photographs framed on the wall, and the three books she’d done with Christopher stacked tidily on the coffee table. Along with Christopher’s guide to Italian wines.

  Oh, they’d been an asset, Christopher Hare and Mary Pepper. The photograph was of the mansaf they’d been treated to in Wadi Rum in Jordan. Without the sheep’s head, for the benefit of delicate readers.

  A circle of swarthy wrists and hands reaching in toward the food, some with expensive wristwatches on them. There was Christopher’s paler hand, with the wedding ring on it.

  ‘I’ll tell you what was really odd.’

  But it was too late. Bob had had enough. Enough of her and enough of Christopher. Christopher was washed up, and she was making pictures Bob loathed.

  She finished her glass and accepted his perfunctory pecks on both cheeks. Lovely to see her, she didn’t think so, not really.

  ‘Tell me when you find out what this is all about, Mary. Check the review schedule. There was one in Nice. Maybe they do an exotic floor show?’ Bob’s weary expression said he didn’t know or care.

  ‘No, you tell me when you hear from him, Bob. When he gets back. He doesn’t talk to me any more.’

  In the South Kensington underground there was a billboard advertising her next exhibition. She looked at it through the gaps between people standing four-deep on the rush-hour platform. She was going to be showing at White Cube. ‘Mary Pepper: Idyll – New Photographs.’

  There she was, very thin and pale in front of huge prints of outsize phallic gourds. ‘Mary Pepper keeps it simple’, one critic had written. She’d taken it as a compliment.

  A young woman with earphones was uttering uncanny, off-key fragments of the song she was listening to, staring at the billboard with a look of blank bliss on her face.

  The celebrity Mary Pepper pushed her way back up to the exit and caught a taxi instead. The driver seemed to recognise her.

  ‘Haven’t I seen you, Miss?’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t want to talk. No offence.’

  ‘Please yourself, Miss.’

  She put her earphones in and listened to Franz Ferdinand being rather wet. It made a change.

  There was an odd smell of cloves in the cab, quite nice. She thought it might come from the driver’s skin, rather sexy. She rebuked the thought.

  But then she couldn’t help it. The image of the gorgeous, sultry-looking Lebanese singer kept coming back. Along with unworthy, jealous thoughts about her aromas. The ones that changed with body temperature, mood, bathing.

  Oh, please, how could she be jealous? Christopher was gone. She was glad.

  The day he’d left the flat, he hardly took anything. He didn’t want any useful things like sheets. He stuffed his clothes into a suitcase and his laptop into a rucksack with about three books. His toiletries in a Sainsbury’s plastic bag. He threw it all into the back of a taxi and climbed in.

  From the upstairs bedroom window she saw one ridiculous long leg retract into the taxi and then shoot out again. He seemed to be grappling with something. Probably at least one of the bags had burst open. Then he got his leg inside and slammed the door.

  Later, she found odd socks under the bed and threw them out. There were two little brown Moleskine notebooks down the back of the sofa. She posted them to Bob.

  She didn’t know where he’d gone. Didn’t want to, didn’t care.

  He’d left all his cooking gear except the knives.

  ‘You really expect me to lug this around, Pepper?’ A great big paella pan, a couscous steamer, a glazed brown tajine pot.

  Not that she ever cooked.

  A few months later, he sent her a card with one of her own photographs on it, from an exhibition of her work that he’d seen while in Tokyo. She didn’t believe him. Not the part about being in Tokyo, but the words of congratulation on the card.

  ‘Saw your show. Stunning!’

  He’d have hated it. The lying toad.

  Then he stopped contacting her. She heard the salacious gossip about women and ignored it.

  What was really odd about this email from the latest one, the part that would have shut Bob up, was the subject line. It read, ‘Message from your husband Christopher Hare’.

  Christopher hadn’t written that – never, never, never – he just wouldn’t. Not even if he was playing with her. And he didn’t do that anymore. He hadn’t since their row over her first exhibition. Two years ago. And if he hadn’t sent it, then that fucking Lebanese cunt must have. And why did she need a message from her ‘husband Christopher Hare’?

  Over and over.

  When she got out at her flat she gave the taxi-driver a big tip, to apologise for her rudeness.

  ‘Good luck with the exhibition, Miss,’ he said. ‘I’m an artist myself. Got to make ends meet, don’t we?’

  Maybe they could have had a nice chat on the way home about her time taking photographs of table settings. Ten years. And subsequently, after meeting up with Christopher Hare, of food that exemplified the maxim, if you can’t eat it fuck it.

  About another ten.

  ‘Sorry, Miss,’ said the taxi driver, shutting his smile down. ‘No offense. You enjoy yourself now. You be sure to do thaa-at.’

  As he drove off he gave her a fuck-you two-finger salute out the window. She deserved it. What a miserable cunt she was turning into.

  There was a message from Bob on her home phone. ‘Mary – phone me. Or turn your mobile on.’ But she couldn’t be bothered with one of his drunken apologies. She’d ring him in the morning when he’d had time to get over it.

  She poured herself a large glass of wine and watched the Channel 4 news. Jon Snow was tearing strips off someone. He’d interviewed Christopher once. He’d been terrific, Christopher had. He’d made Snow laugh with a puerile joke about curry and farting.

  The phone rang again but she let the machine answer it. Probably Bob again, begging her to phone him so he could feel better. He’d have broached a new b
ottle by now.

  No, she couldn’t. Phone him.

  She was sick of all this. He’d practically kicked her out.

  She got her bag and found Christopher’s schedule. She knew it was going to make her feel sad, and it did.

  She put on a CD: Michel Legrand playing Eric Satie’s Gymnopédies.

  Who was she kidding? Want to get miserable, go all the way.

  She took it off, and put on Gram Parsons & the Fallen Angels. Live, with Emmylou Harris. ‘We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes’: I didn’t mean to start this fire and neither did you.

  Christopher’s last schedule, his swan song. These were places they’d been. The narrow band of cheap rail links and budget flights. This time, Paris, Lyon, and Marseille, and he should be in Nice, so the email had probably come from Nice. Unless he’d changed the schedule.

  Which was likely, knowing Christopher. Off on some tangent. For example, back to Genoa. For the Cappon Magro.

  Then he was going to a budget ski-resort in the Alpes-Maritimes, at Limone, over the Italian border. What in God’s name was he supposed to do there?

  She laughed at the thought of Christopher in his baggy clothes at a ski resort. His shirt hanging out, his scuffed on-the-road Blundstone boots. Picking his way through a plate of small mountain trout. Making them be something, or crash into each other.

  Without her there, so he couldn’t say, ‘Look, Pepper – a trout-wreck!’

  While hearty, tanned skiers replenished themselves and boasted.

  And then what was he going to do?

  She pictured him getting on the bus to the airport at Nice. In a small polite queue outside the gare routière. He’d be charming someone or other with his fluent but peculiar French. There was bound to be laughter.

  Then, in her mind, he just seemed to evaporate.

  And of course, now the Fallen Angels were singing Love is like a stove, burns you when it’s hot.

  It was the end of the road, for Christopher, with Bob and the magazine. The books had gone off the boil. And anyway she wasn’t ‘available’ to do the photographs. The television show had been canned, total disaster, he was history there. Likewise the summer schools in Provence. Self-destruction as an art form.