Suzerain: a ghost story

by Adrian John Smith

  "I don't remember," Brad said, dropping his gaze.

  I smiled and took another drink. I was feeling a little woozy but I knew I could go on. I had stamina after all. "You don't remember," I said. "That's funny Brad, because it was only three days ago and, well - please look at me when I'm talking to you, Brad."

  Brad looked at me. His mouth was set in a challenge, which of course, I was ready to accept. "Do I get my essay, Dr Moor, or what? I've got to go. I'll be late for-"

  "You haven't got a class Brad. We know that much."

  "The library. I'm supposed to meet someone in the library."

  "Really?"

  "Really."

  "Who?"

  "Helen."

  "Stansfield?"

  "I've got to go," Brad said. He stood up, and I stood with him.

  "Helen can wait," I said. "She needs to learn patience. Are you screwing her Brad?"

  "Dr Moor. Karen," Brad said. "Are you drunk? Because if you are, I can go now and we need never mention this again."

  He said it as if he meant it, but when I kissed him he responded eagerly enough. I remember it clearly, that he responded with eagerness.

  The rest, however, remains hazy. I remember that when David popped his head around the door I was running my tongue around the tip of Brad's penis. I remember laughing at the look on David's face and I remember haranguing him in the corridor, my accusations of intrusiveness somewhat undermined by the fact that I was naked.

  "I think," David said, when he visited me at home that weekend, "that we should reconsider that sabbatical. Don't you?"

  "Yes," I said, grateful for this benign bureaucracy. There had been monsters in my dreams. Things without shape or dimension.

  I did not hurl myself into the arms of the Fellowship, took no steps toward the twelve step plan. There had been a single meeting with a grief councillor - an appointment I had made and kept to go some way toward assuaging David, who of course was very angry. Who of course was very kind. How do you feel, the councillor said. Outraged, I told her.

  Knowing that my best route back to work, to reading, to writing, to teaching, was to not read for a while, I covered my bookshelves with some old bed-sheets, and fought off the mild panic that this induced. Jaded, tired and disillusioned I may have been, but a text-junky I remained. To stave off withdrawal I walked a lot. I would drive up onto the Downs and walk for hours at a time, no matter the wind, no matter the rain. When the daffodils came out along the roadsides I felt better. Tiring of the Downs, I walked bridle-ways and tow-paths. I walked myself into the best shape I'd been in for some time. I walked as if I could out-distance myself, and I walked like a pilgrim in search of myself. I spent entire days out of town and out of doors. I took lunch in country pubs, quixotic bus rides to surrounding market towns. When I drank, I did so enthusiastically but infrequently, always on a weekend, only when Suzy came over. I never drank alone, if, that is, you discount the half a pint of lager that might accompany a ploughman's lunch. I declined several invitations of drinks/dinner/sex. Except for Suzy's of course. I still craved pleasure - the blood-rush of alcohol, the brain massage of drugs, the other-world burn and the seismic shift of orgasm. Discipline was all.

  When, as spring tumbled headlong into summer, David had called to offer me the use of the cottage (which he'd bought for his retirement), I accepted the offer immediately.

  Suzy swims, pale, almost luminescent in the dissolving light, the darkening river. The lights have come on in Yarlmouth and a handful of stars prick the bruised ether of the sky. The breeze has dropped, a hushed intake from the gape of the river mouth. Up-river, someone plays a trumpet, a rising blast and then a fall into the arms of a drum roll - itself a frenzied launch into silence. A jazz-party on one of the cruisers that steam up the river from Torquay. Quiet descends. I look for more stars. Wish upon a star, Karen, I think. Wish, wish, wish. But what should I wish for? Something from the textual bric-a-brac of my mind rises into verbal consciousness, a quote from Thomas Mann that I have been interrogating intermittently for far too long, a quote which speaks of grief at not wanting to call back the dead. Would I call back the dead if I could? And would I thrust an angry dagger into Steve's dead heart?

  I drink my wine. I drink slowly, mindful of having to re-cross the river. Watching Suzy, I admire her long, slow, powerful breast-strokes. The tide is standing at high water, which means that there is no or little current for Suzy to fight. This is something that Suzy, who used to surf, has studied. She swims in circles, then out fifty yards or so, and then a duck-dive turn that stops my heart. I think of the way the muscles in her back bunch and stretch and I want to touch her.

  I smoke two cigarettes before Suzy boosts herself onto the rock to join me. Her teeth begin to chatter and I wrap her in a towel. I tease her hair free of the towel and I kiss her in the fold of neck and shoulder. Which is to say that she is forgiven. Are you hungry, I say. Yes, she says. Let's eat.

  Maybe tomorrow, I say, while Suzy pulls on her jeans, we could walk along the coast path.

  I'd like that, Suzy says. A walk will do us good.

  When she has finished dressing, I hand her a glass of wine. We chink our glasses together, smiling in the dark.

  We sit in the waiting room of the casualty department of Paignton hospital while the 2CV bleeds oil over the car park. Suzy maintains that it was a jelly-fish. No, I say, it was hard. I felt it. It had fucking plates on its back. It was some horrible, malevolent little marine mutation and it drove a fucking spirochete into my toe. I've been poisoned for Christ’s sake!

  If Suzy is concerned and amused in equal measure, I'm having trouble seeing the funny side. The big toe on my right foot is swollen to twice its usual size and a purple stain - too deep to be merely a rash - is spreading across my tendons. Christ, look at it, I say. If they have to amputate, you and I are through. Finished.

  How is it my fault? Suzy says, wide eyed.

  I told you I don't do boats. I wish you'd listened to me.

  But it wasn't the boat was it? You were fine while you were in the boat. You didn't even get sick -

  Yes but - oh, never mind. Fuck, it hurts. Christ, how long have we been here?

  Does it sting? Suzy enquires. Or is it more a kind of ache?

  It's fucking pain, Susan, is all-

  But Suzy nudges my elbow. Fucking hell Karen, she says, look at this guy. He looks like he picked a fight with an industrial process.

  I look. The guy's drunk. There's blood on his shirt - actually, it might be more accurate to say that there's a shirt in his blood. Evidently his ear will fall off if he takes his hand from the side of his head, which is why it's clamped there as surely and permanently as if he were a teenage girl conducting a cell-phone romance. At the duty desk, he says, somewhat redundantly: I need to see a doctor. The blood wells between his fingers.

  Take a seat, the nurse says.

  Maybe there is some nightlife around here after all, Suzy says, thoughtfully.

  I ignore her, thinking back to that moment when, having survived the crossing, relieved and happy and a little drunk, looking forward to the return of equilibrium in our (power) relationship which would come once terra firma was beneath my feet, I step into the water - and why had we landed the boat there and not three feet to the right? - and I feel it squirm beneath my foot, the wriggle of its scabrous back and then Ow, Ow, Ow, it fucking bit me, surprise and outrage quavering my voice.

  The guy turns from the duty desk, his eyes glazed and stupid, looking for an empty seat - and anyone who's been in a casualty department on a weekend night will know exactly where he chooses to sit. Which is why, hobbling back to the cartoon car with my cartoon toe in a bandage - Suzy carrying the crutches which I, for the moment, have eschewed - my mood is exacerbated by the fact that my jeans are spotted and smeared with the blood of the bar-room warrior, who, after telling me how it feels to have an ear almost cut off, invited me out clubbing. I'm married, I told him. To a police officer, I added. So fuck
off, Suzy pitched in.

  Did he say what it was? Suzy says, unlocking the car, wrestling the crutches into the rear seat.

  He says it wasn't a jelly-fish.

  No? Suzy says. Then what was it?

  He thinks some invader species coming north on the warmer currents, I say. Fucking evil little bastard was on holiday. Shit! I'm the victim of global warming.

  Which is when Suzy cracks up. I'm sur-sur-sorry Karen, she giggles. But here we are on holiday and now you can't walk or even fur-fur-fucking drink.

  Oh how we laughed, I say.

  It's two-thirty AM. I'm starting to feel sick. I wonder now if it was such a good idea to tell the doctor that I'd only had half a glass of wine before swallowing the two tablets he'd handed me. I guess I'm just in the habit of lying about my drinking.

  Jay (February 2003)

  Two bags of groceries and he's bursting for a piss because he'd finally worked up the courage to have a pint on the way back from the shops. Not the Baxter though. He'd never set foot in there again. He puts the groceries on the doorstep to fish his key from his jacket pocket, unlocks the door, shoves it hard because it's swollen with rain, kicks it shut to keep the wind out, dumps the groceries and key on the table, doesn't lock the door (though lately he's careful to keep it locked at all times) because he really needs a piss.

  He hasn't pissed like this in a fortnight. It's hugely enjoyable except that as he's squeezing out the last wee drop the phone rings. He doesn't get many calls and a ringing phone is a kind of exciting novelty and he's had just enough beer (no tequila) and is sufficiently buoyant from the hot, well-aimed gush of it all after two weeks of fearful sprinkling that he quells the possibility of bad news, danger or threat. Hurrying down the stairs he feels a drop of piss dribble down his thigh while he thinks: Maybe it's Moira because -

  But it isn't Moira. It's his wife. "Wife" he thinks. Inverted commas. He'd almost forgotten he was "married" to this ghost of holidays past. Twenty years old he's sitting in a bar in Christchurch, New Zealand. Jane is sitting on the next table. He likes the look of her. She's not exactly beautiful and she has thin lips but she's got something in the eyes all right and when she says, Hey, neat hat, he smiles and thinks, I'm going to fuck you tonight. Which, after listening to a verbal torrent of non sequiturs hanging precariously from the garbled rush of her personal history, he does. Goes on fucking her down through South Island. Fucks her through a tour of the Sounds, fucks her back across North Island up to Auckland, where they fuck for three nights in a cheap hotel under the roaring flight path for the airport. (Fucking her stops her talking, which is good.) Fucks her into Thailand where they get "married" with a bunch of pissed-up, blissed-out strangers for witnesses - a sunrise ceremony presided over by a grizzled American hippy au fait with credit cards and endowed with wandering hands; a guy with cosmic light in his smile and a beatific bubble of non-thought buzzing pleasantly behind his eyes. They fail to tell their parents and all but annul their "marriage" at the luggage carousel at Heathrow. Let's do our own thing for a while, he says. Keep in touch my love, she says, kissing her fingertips, pressing them to his lips. He gives her his hat. It used to be his lucky hat but now he's not so sure. Through the bus window he sees her sharing cigarettes with an American half-wit in a Nirvana T-shirt. He can see by the way the American stands that it's already too late for him. They'll probably "marry" (the faithless whore) and Nirvana boy will wind up wearing a Prodigy T-shirt as a sign of undying love. Jesus. What a pair of idiots. He's glad he no longer has to be an idiot himself. He doesn't want to hear that voice again as long as he lives.

  Fat fucking chance. Standing here with a dribble of piss running down his leg and he can't do up his flies because one hand's holding the phone and the fingers on his other hand have been smashed to fucking pieces. That voice.

  Hi Jamie, she says, I'm going to Antigua. I've thought about it a lot and I'm going back to Antigua. It's where I've been. In Antigua you ask someone the time, they just shrug - the sun rises, the sun sets. In fact, the sun sets real fast in Antigua. That's how she puts it. Real fast. In Antigua you just buy a plot of land and build your own house. It's easy. She's going to build two shacks, one for herself, one for visitors. She'll have a lot of visitors in Antigua. You don't even need glass in the windows in Antigua because there is no cold to keep out. Bars for burglars and mosquito screens for mosquitoes, but no glass. Camel or elephant she can't decide, but she wants some kind of novelty animal for the tourists to ride on the beach. She doesn't know where she'll get either, camel or elephant, but the market for horse rides is cornered. With a camel you could make two hundred and fifty sterling in a tourist weekend. If you have a camel. Let her have a camel, that's a week's wage in two days. Money goes a long way in Antigua. Anything you want, you just pick it off a tree. It's like Eden, only with tourists. They night-fish for red snappers in Antigua, using old sparkplugs as sinkers. Half Moon Bay and English bay. They've got exactly the same amount of bays on the Antiguan coastline as there are days in the year. You can walk around the island counting off the calendar. If you started at the north of the island, Half Moon Bay would represent the fourteenth of June. Something like that. They've got a prime minister who was elected on a utilities ticket. His English is bad, his speeches crafted by professionals. He reads his speeches, cues and all. Tells his audience to pause, look the audience in the eye. It puzzles them at first, being told to pause and to look the audience in the eye. Now it's a source of national amusement. The prime minister, who runs the sewage works, promises to electrocute the entire island, and to improve cooking facilities - to barbecue every household by the rainy season. In addition, his shit trucks will call more often. This is what he calls them; shit trucks. Sometimes, while fishing for red snappers, they catch stingray. She's never seen anything as beautiful as the stingray which flapped onto the deck of the flat-bottomed boat in the moonlight. (He'd go a long way to see a stingray in the moonlight. Maybe as far as Antigua.)

  Better go and lock the door, he reminds himself.

  Later that same night, Carlos caught a barracuda. Hose fell out of the boat. The kid in the shack next to the one she rented calls her father Daddy-Sweet. No wonder she loves the Antiguans. They call her the mad English Girl. They cook the snappers down with lime and lemon juice and ochre. It looks like snot. You spread the snot on dough bread. She couldn't shit for a week. In Antigua the shit runs out of the backs of the houses and into the streets. This is why the prime minister promised to send his shit trucks round more often. Antigua is part of the Lee-Ward Islands. The Windward Islands are to the south. This must be the way the wind blows. He has no idea how much of this is true. It sounds like a bunch of shit.

  Because A) he suddenly wants sympathy, B) because he's got his pride to consider, and doesn't want to say how he really sustained his injuries and C) he is actually finding this wide-eyed wonderment in one so travelled surprisingly endearing; endearing enough that he's started to contemplate inviting her down so that he can fuck her again (which takes us back to A) he interrupts, says: "Listen, I've had an accident."

  "Really," she says. "How bad?"

  "Pretty bad. I fell off a gantry."

  "A gan tree? What the fuck is-"

  "A gantry. On a boat. A trawler. I'm a fisherman now. I fell onto the deck."

  "Really? Hey, that's neat. Tell me about it."

  "The accident? Well-"

  "No, silly. Tell me about the fishing."

  So he tells her about fishing, how the fog comes in, how in a rough sea it's like falling into a hole in the water, a hole in the world. Doesn't tell her about his night at the hospital being stitched and bound. Three days scared and stoned, listening to voices in the rain. Does tell her that his jaw isn't broken. That his fingers are. The plugs of dried blood in his nostrils which whistled when he tried to sleep. Doesn't mention the glass they'd picked from his scalp.

  I really should lock the fucking door.

  Describes how porpoises and dolphins sp
ort at the prow of the boat. Doesn't describe the shuffle and scrape of boots on the doorstep one night, the cold fury of his waking dreams in front of the TV (his developing fondness for Columbo re-runs), the cold wet fear of his nightmares.

  Finds himself recounting the angling trip he joined in the autumn - a kind of test to see if he had adequate sea legs. Spurdogs and smooth hounds, which, he tells her, are small sharks. Emphasises the fact that they are sharks, more than the fact that they are small. How they catch a pregnant smoothie (sharks, he explains, give live birth like mammals) and kill it before they realise its condition and then slit open the belly (womb) and pour all the little sharks with a plop into a bucket where they swim around until the skipper tips them unceremoniously back into the sea.

  Neglects to detail the first time he ventures out since his beating (which of course, he also neglects to detail). How he buys a newspaper (to take his mind off things), some milk (because he's sick of black coffee), some painkillers (because he's in pain), some cigarettes (because he's given up giving up) and a baseball bat (because you never know). How every step is a quick and furtive eye-dart. Twice he thinks he sees him; once smoking against the crates outside the fish market, once mocking him with a raised cup through a café window.

  "That's barbaric," she says, referring to the post-mortal caesarean.

  "Yeah," he laughs, "that's how it is down here."

  He tells her what he makes from a fishing trip (£1200 with luck and a fair wind), how he roomed above the Poker Face before he could afford this out-of-season holiday cottage. The drunken riot of the first night ashore. About the novel he's writing.

  "I didn't know you wrote," she says.

  "I think I probably mentioned it once or twice," he says.

  "Oh," she says, "maybe you did. Am I in it? That would be cool."

  "I haven't decided yet," he says.

  Omits to adumbrate how he hates this fucking town in winter. The way the houses step up the cliffs around the harbour, terraces of windows staring down at you, watching you go about your daily business. Like that fucking thing Foucault writes about - the prison panoptican - only in reverse. Talk about your carceral society. Talk about surveillance. Gulls fighting over fish heads on the quay. Dog shit and dead dogfish in the street. A cold wind.