Suzerain: a ghost story

by Adrian John Smith

  Notwithstanding the fact that she'd once bitten my neck deeply enough to draw blood, leaving a very ugly - if superficial - wound (as told), Suzy's abhorrence of eating meat - of eating flesh; mammal flesh - is not affected. I'd once seen her passing a butcher's shop with gaze averted and pace quickened. How can you eat that shit, she'd asked me - not far into our relationship - as I crammed a burger into my too-hungry-for-sensibilities mouth. How can you eat that shit, with all that blood?

  Nevertheless, sweetly I suppose, she had schlepped into town and returned with some steak. Only a couple of minutes each side Suze, I'd yelled my instruction from the living room, where, using the remote control to idly alternate between the two TV channels that didn't feature ghostly murmuring from the heart of a static blizzard, I sat with my foot propped on the coffee table, the bandage on my toe still white and fresh. One channel informed me of an up-coming duck race in Totnes; the other, with of course more gravity, told me that it was now a year since a student - Melissa Brewer, or Melanie Barber; something like that - had gone missing from the Torbay area. Melissa/Melanie (smiling through a grainy film, youthfully pretty in a Helen Stansfield kind of way) has not been seen since her arrival at Paignton station (cut to still from CCTV footage, Melissa/Melanie with rucksack on back, holding what looked like a wedge-pack sandwich). Poor Melissa/Melanie. "Dead" is the word they won't use.

  I could smell the steak. Could hear it sizzling in the pan. It would be spitting fat turned grey-brown with blood. I can't believe I'm cooking flesh, Suzy stormed and slammed. Are you sure you can't stand for long enough - what? four fucking minutes? - to cook this …this… thing?

  Doctor's orders, I reminded her. I usually like my steak well-done, but I wanted some blood on the plate for Suzy to wash up.

  Suzy came in from her shower, wearing only a military-green T-shirt and white knickers. She folded herself into the chair opposite me to comb her hair, tilting her head first to the left, then to the right. She has the kind of hair which is best combed wet. There was still some red in the whites of her eyes but she seemed rested, if a little introspective. She set down the comb, finger-raked her hair clear of her forehead, then popped a slice of cucumber into her mouth.

  Hungry? I smiled.

  Peckish, she conceded. Are we still good Karen?

  We're still good, I said. But we did agree that I would do some work - I did remind you that for me, this is not, strictly speaking, a full-on holiday. That it's more of a sabbatical. And you did say that you'd be happy to do your own thing for some of the time. Which you're doing. We're just both making good on the agreement. That's all.

  Suzy admitted a silent nod.

  And, I added, it'll be all the sweeter catching up. I reached across the bowl of salad and tweaked her nipple - the un-adorned one - playfully. I felt it harden. Suzy let out a squeal, followed by the tiniest hint of a groan which betrayed a fleeting sexual pleasure. So, I said, let's eat. Then you can go to your class - which you'll probably enjoy - and then, tonight, we can maybe smoke a little. Then, if you're a good girl, I'm going to do things to you.

  Ohhh, Suzy said. What kind of things?

  The kind of things you'll thank me for, I whisper-breathed, mock-coquettishly.

  I used two forks as a pincer to dish out the salad, feeling better for having Suzy smile again.

  I just don't want to feel us drift, Suzy said.

  Neither do I, I said, though I didn't (don't) really know how I feel about that. I knew that work, if I ever truly managed to re-immerse myself in it to the required extent (and the signs were hopeful) would necessarily dictate a shift in our relationship, perhaps, as with Steve, to the point where I could be accused of out-right neglect.

  We even synchronise our periods, Suzy said.

  Like good children of the moon, I said.

  I just don't want to lose that closeness, Suzy said. That's all.

  And you won't, I said. I promise.

  I'm sorry about your foot, Karen. Really.

  Don't worry, I said, it's healing up fine.

  Is the dog working?

  I looked down at the henna dog on the side of my foot. I flexed and wriggled my toe. I wasn't sure.

  Suzy peered under the table. Oh fuck, she said. It's facing the wrong way.

  Before I poured myself some wine, I'd set my pen on my closed notebook, set Dickinson on top of that, and lit the paraffin lamp that we had noticed in David's shed when we liberated the boat. The sun is down now, the river dark and smooth with no breeze, the gentle lap of rising tide on the beach. The lamp suffuses the balcony in a warm glow, flickering shadows of the tabletop filigree onto the patio slabs. I empty my glass, feeling pleased with myself for working hard for so long. While I'm in the cottage fetching another glass of wine I take a blanket which is draped over the back of the couch and wrap it around my shoulders. Back out on the balcony, I sit and smoke and watch the gnats hiss and burn against the blackening glass of the lantern. As it grows late, then later, I finish the bottle of wine. It was already opened, so I have only drunk just over half a bottle. I feel no ill effects, detect no impending reaction to the pills. True, there is a growing stiffness at the back of my neck, but that could just as easily be caused by my having spent a good deal of time poring over Dickinson. There is more wine in the fridge, and, though I'd quite like another glass while I wait for Suzy - because that, if I'm honest, is what I'm doing - I want to make sure that a) I can stop when I want (something I'm practising) and b) that there will be wine for Suzy when she returns home. This is a resolve which lasts about twenty minutes. I return to the fridge. If I just have one more glass, there will be plenty left for Suzy. I look at the clock on the kitchen wall as I pull the cork and I'm surprised to see that it's 11.15. Trying not to let emotion creep into my speculation, I wonder where the hell Suzy has got to. With my work done, a pleasant wine-lift in my head, the mild throb in my toe reduced almost to zero, I want Suzy home. I want her in bed. I want to run my hands and mouth all over her.

  I suck down about two inches of wine and then climb the spiral staircase to the bedroom. I sit on the bed - on Suzy's side - and check the drawers in the nightstand, looking for grass, looking for resin. Looking for anything. Nothing doing. Shit. I know this is where Suzy has been keeping her stuff since we arrived. Did she take it with her? Something to help quell her nerves. I imagine her standing outside the church, sucking frantically on a joint, waiting for teacher. And where the hell is she now? Class started at eight, which means, in my experience, that it should be all over by nine-thirty. Ten at the latest. Had she gone for a drink? And if so, had she gone alone, or with someone else? Who? Her tutor? I doubt that. The tutor of an almost-free writing class, in a church-turned-junk- shop, was almost certainly bound to be a redoubtable middle-aged practitioner nourishing a fading talent; her reputation built upon a slim body of slim, locally-published volumes of poetry. Or perhaps a forty-something new-age dude with beads in his thinning hair and a reverence for Jack Kerouac lighting his soul - a novelist manqué with a history of publishing solipsistic stories in now-defunct magazines. I could see Suzy with neither.

  She had joked, before she left, about picking up a guy for us to share. This is something we sometimes talk about, but have never done. I don't know why. The idea is not un-appealing, and back in the carnival period, let's be honest, I would have done just about anything to increase my pleasure, to not have to face up to the awful, spirit-sapping quotidian reality of what my life, my half-life, had become. Which is to say, anything to hasten my fall. But then perhaps I had come to value our intimacy too much to have it intruded upon. Perhaps Suzy, for all of her sexual braggadocio, felt the same way. And yet, sitting on the holiday bed (which is how it seems tonight), feeling (okay, I admit it) a little drunk, anticipating a dope rush (hopefully, Suzy will have plenty left), spying one of Suzy's hairs on her pillow, I know that if Suzy were to bring home a well-hung stranger to fuck us both, I would be thrilled. I study the thought. The vagaries of mood, the
pendulum swing of intent, passion and resolve, are things of infinite surprise.

  I return outside - pausing to refresh my glass on the way. I light a cigarette and then I roll my head back against my clutched blanket to fend off the increasing tightening of my neck muscles. It feels as if a hand is clamping me there.

  Oh Christ, I say aloud, I need a massage. Then, with a muted groan, I tilt my head back far enough to view the stars and what constellation is that? and horribly, cruelly, I think of Steve, who climbed mountains, who cooked stir fry with smoked sausage, enjoyed Clint Eastwood westerns and played guitar badly, with feeling.

  The first time I met him he was lying in a dry bath with a cream pillow under his head and a bottle of Heineken in his hand. It had been one of those parties that feel vaguely like the end of the world, the end of time, where you don't really know anyone, where you're not sure if the house is or isn't a squat, where you can't remember why you're there in the first place. There was early sun in the bathroom window and the birds were singing. I was still slightly high, slightly hung-over in that pleasant, soporific way. There was a dirt-streaked bar of Imperial Leather in the grimy sink and a rusty razor blade on the window sill. Toilet paper unravelled on the floor. I remember my walking into that bathroom as a moment of exquisite beauty.

  I'd finished peeing and was zipping up my jeans when I heard the chink of glass on porcelain behind the shower curtain. I pulled back the curtain. Steve's booted feet were resting on the mixer tap. They were American-style biker boots to go with his scuffed leather jacket. Hi, he said, I'm Steve. He held out the bottle of Heineken and I took a long swallow. It's warm, I told him. I'm Karen, I added. Do you often sleep in the bath?

  First time, Steve said. He yawned against the back of his hand. It's not as bad as you'd think. In fact, it was quite interesting. That friend of yours, the one with the purple streak in her hair -

  Kirsty, I say. Acquaintance, I clarify.

  Kirsty. Right. Well, she was in here with Bob. You know Bob? They had a fine time. I thought they were going to fall in through the curtain at one point but they didn't. Kirsty called Bob a bastard when she came. I think she slapped his face.

  Kirsty's hard to please, I said.

  You look like you need some sleep, Steve said.

  I need something, I said. Coffee. Bacon. Toast.

  You know, Steve said, that's exactly what I've been thinking about. I know a place that does real English coffee - you know, tepid dish-water instant with that oily swirl on the surface. Real English bacon, dripping in grease. Eggs cooked too fast with crisp edges and bubbles in the whites. T-Rex on the jukebox. Any newspaper you want so long as it's the News of the World. A perfect Sunday morning shit-hole. Interested?

  I was. Very. The café was everything Steve had promised, with the ashtrays still full from the previous evening. Afterwards, I'd slept in the shade of an apple tree in Steve's garden. When I woke up, a song-thrush was singing just above my head.

  Steve was sitting on the doorstep drinking tea and reading Slaughter House Five. There was white paint on his hands and in his hair. I've been painting the toilet ceiling, he explained. I saw the look on your face when you came out of there. He laughed. You were right.

  That evening we'd driven to the Thames with a landing net and a bag of herring heads to fish for crayfish. We set up beneath a weir, where a heron stalked and probed on the concrete ledge beneath the sluice. When the moon came up Steve pointed out the mares. It was a full moon, pregnant with light. That one on the edge, Steve said, if you can see it, that one is the Mare Crisium. Sea of crisis, I said. Correct, Steve said. The first into darkness when the moon wanes. I shivered. The observation seemed premonitory in a larger sense. When Steve lifted the net the crayfish snapped their claws and clicked their legs, like alien life-forms blackly articulating against the moon.

  You put them in the freezer for twenty minutes, Steve said, which puts them into a coma. Then you can boil them alive, guilt free. In Steve's kitchen we used tongs to lift the crayfish red and steaming from the boiling pot. We peeled the bone plates from the pink tails and dipped the tails in mayonnaise. Juice ran down our chins. I tell Steve about my PhD. He tells me about a rock band he's trying to manage. When we run out of words we make love. He breaks me in two.

  Why did you leave me you fucker? I say, and then, putting a hand to the nape of my neck, I think: Where the hell is Suzy? I decide to ring her on her mobile and as I stand to fetch my own phone I realise that the stiffness in my neck has pushed an ache down between my shoulder blades. On top of this, I feel suddenly nauseous. Avoid alcohol, warned the doctor. Avoid alcohol, it had warned on the white label of the pill bottle - hardly an ambiguous, un-contextualised text.

  My mobile is on the coffee table in the living room and I bend to pick it up with difficulty. There is now a throbbing behind my eyes. I take the phone outside to get a better signal and drop heavily into my chair. My neck feels like a fence post driven into the base of my skull. I dial Suzy's number. It hurts to lift the phone to my ear. When the connection is made I hear Suzy's phone - a Jumping Jack Flash ring-tone - playing through the open bedroom window. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I set my phone on the table. The table doesn't seem real. Then the world pulses inward and snaps back again with big-bang expansion. I make it to the balustrade and vomit hot wine onto the sand below.

  I'm lying prone on the bed, wondering how long this semi-paralysis will last when I hear my mobile phone bleeping away from where I left it outside on the table. I push myself up a little but I'm defeated immediately and my cheek sinks back into the pillow. My phone stops ringing. I open my eyes and close them again. Roughly ten minutes later, when David's house phone rings, I manage to get myself upright. The nausea has subsided a little but I move as if I have a board strapped to my back. I use the handrail to steady myself as I slowly descend the spiral staircase. The phone is on a small, purpose-made shelf beside the living room window. Because David has no message system on this phone, I'm able to get to it before it stops ringing. It's Suzy of course. Sick and half-paralysed as I am, I can tell immediately that Suzy is drunk. I can hear her words but they lack meaning and context. Wow, Karen, she says, you should see this place. Then she embarks upon a long and convoluted explanation of why she can't come back to the cottage tonight. There were drinks in a pub. A trip across the Yarl on the ferry, wine in a country house, the realisation that she's missed the last ferry back across and I'm sorry Karen and how did your work go etc etc and all. Of course, I tell her that I'm fine (and I'm sure I will be after a couple of hours), that work went well, that I'm glad she's enjoying herself. That I'll see her in the morning. Presumably, I add. Love you, Karen, she smooches. I hang up. Then I use the downstairs toilet to throw up in. I retch against an empty stomach until I gasp and groan like an animal, until I beg and pray like a fervent convert, blinking away the hot tears. When I'm able to stand I wash my face and rinse my mouth. Then, with the remainder of my strength, I enter David's study - because it's easier, quicker and closer than going back outside - and take a notepad and pen from his desk. There are jottings on the pad but there is space enough at the bottom of the page. I dial 1471 and record the number Suzy has used. If I get any worse, I will have to call her.

  Cine Fernando (May 2003)

  Frank Costigan. Frank's in Madrid, living like a shadow. He doesn't go to the Grande Via to get his shoes shined or to pick up smokes from the little tabacs. He doesn't go to the edge of town to visit the corrida and he doesn't stroll down past the cinema where the whores line up for display. He doesn't wander the white galleries of the Prado seeking out El Bosch or Bruegel, nor idle away the hours outside corner cafés where the men drink espresso and smoke thin cigars and watch the women rise like miracles from the metro station. No. What Frank does is stay in the hotel, which is in a part of town he thinks is full of terrorists, actual and potential. The kind of place where if a gun goes off no-one gives a shit. Which suits Frank. He doesn't give a shit either.


  In the evenings he drinks too much while watching TV and in the long hot afternoons he sits in an ash-stained easy chair smoking cigarettes and chasing flies from his sweaty, thickening torso with a three-day-old but unread copy of the Herald Tribune. Sometimes he reads through his hand-written journals to make sure he hasn't missed anything or misconstrued something. He hasn't.

  Tonight, however, Frank leaves the hotel. He could take the metro but, with a superfluous herring-bone coat draped over his right arm, he walks.

  Into a narrow street of evening shade with iron-railed balconies and cataclysmic fissures breaking open the painted facades. The upper floor apartments to his right are a block of slanted sunlight. Frank hears a bird singing. The song is high and mellifluous, full of rising arpeggios and intelligence. Two canaries caged on a balcony from where an old woman stares down at him. She spits from the cracks of her face and draws her finger across her throat. Then she slams the shutters closed.

  Frank enters the shadow of a doorway and climbs the stairs. A man in a grimy, once-white vest watches him without acknowledgement from an apartment doorway and a skin and bone cat shrinks into a corner.

  Cine Fernando it says on the opaque glass of the office door, written in gold lettering like a logo from cinema's glory years, which for Frank summons up The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Frank knocks.

  "Quien es?"

  The door isn't locked and Frank opens it. "Quien es? It's me you tub of prime Spanish lard." This is not Harvey Weinstein. This in not Louis B Mayer or Darryl F Zanuck. This is Fernando, struggling to rise from his desk and failing miserably. His chair creeks beneath his resettled bulk. In the light of the reading lamp Frank sees the recognition and relief on his face. "I was as worried as you looked," Frank says, "I'd keep the damn door locked."

  "So, Senor Costigan. Frank. How are you my friend? My companero? Every year I look for Frank Costigan in Oscar nominations; every year Frank's genius, it is overlooked."