by Barbara Vine
‘They call this the Emerald City, you know.’
I asked her why. Was it because the rain made it green?
‘That, yes, but in The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy and the Tin Man and the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion look for the Wizard they have to go to the Emerald City to find him.’
The Bradens asked me to have dinner with them that night. They were staying at the Four Seasons, very grand, perhaps the best hotel in Seattle. I told her I was here to look for someone but I’d lost the address.
‘Not the Wizard of Oz?’
I managed a smile and said it was a woman I’d met in Juneau. Pleased with her joke, she suggested this must be the Wicked Witch of the West but apologized immediately and said she had connections in Seattle – was it possibly someone she knew or had heard of? I had this mad idea that she might turn out really to be Isabel’s grandmother, but of course she didn’t.
‘Isabel Winwood? No, the name means nothing. But we’ll ask my husband, he always has good ideas. He is a most resourceful man.’
That evening I went to the Four Seasons Olympic and dined with them, but I think that was the beginning of my losing heart or perhaps of my losing the will to find Isabel. It was bringing it out into the open that began this process. Telling Mrs Braden, or Lillian as she asked me to call her, lifted my objective into the light of day and made it – ridiculous. And something else happened. That was the evening when guilt over Ivo began.
The Bradens were full of ideas. Registers of electors existed. I should try the Seattle Public Library. George Braden would himself find out where and how accessible these registers were. He was, it appeared, a former judge of the Supreme Court. It’s not hard to imagine the effect hearing this had on me. I stared like an idiot or a person pole-axed by drugs. Here were this old gentleman and this old lady, courteous and sweet and deeply innocent, upholders of the law in a significant sense, giving dinner to someone who had murdered his lover; someone who was living on stolen money and a stolen credit card. I stared. I started to feel sick.
George Braden took it for unhappiness, I suppose, and God knows I was unhappy. He made more offers. Winwoods could be looked up, traced, in the same way as we could trace people by studying birth and marriage records at St Catherine’s House. I was to leave it with him. He would do what he could. How long would I be in Seattle? Where was I staying?
Before I could answer, Mrs Braden astonished me. She took my hand that rested on the table and said,
‘I speak my mind a mite too much and George will be mad at me, but a week ago if anyone had asked me, I’d have said that you and Dr Steadman, the – er, geologist, is he? – I’d have said that you were more than friends.’
‘Now, Lillian,’ said her husband. ‘That’s putting it a bit strong.’
‘What did I tell you? It would only matter, as I see it, if what I said was spoken with prejudice or in an arch fashion but since it wasn’t, why should I not air my quite reasonable assumption? You were fond of each other, I think?’
I was silenced. I was stricken with horror. I think I went white. My face seemed to shrink as if it was growing old.
‘I’m sorry if I’ve shocked you. Obviously, since you are looking for a lady, a lady that I think you love, I was wrong. So it doesn’t matter. Shall I ask the waiter to give you more wine?’
I made up a name for an hotel. I made up a phone number: the code for Seattle, my age and a zero, then 22 and 76. When they couldn’t find me they’d assume Lillian Braden’s opinions had frightened me. As they had, as they had, though not in the way she would think. She wrote down the fictitious name, the made-up number. They would be leaving in two days’ time but their assistance in my search need not end because they were elsewhere. They’d write, they’d phone. A daughter in San Diego was mentioned, a son in Los Angeles. In spite of their disabilities, they spent their life travelling. It was only in the early spring that you could be sure of finding them at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Mrs Braden’s assumption of a sexual relationship between me and Ivo made knowing them any better an impossibility. I said good-night, I thanked them, I walked home to my hotel, passing on the way the drunks and junkies that congregate, live, eat, sleep, in a park down there. For a while I sat among them, half-comatose people, truculent, paranoid. Near me on the bench where I sat down was a man wrapped in rags, nursing a bottle of something that would have been methylated spirits at home, was God knows what there, a dark red, viscous-looking liquid. Ivo had been on that island for four days by then. I’d read somewhere that if you drink sea-water you go mad and somewhere else that marooned people, people adrift in boats, drink their own urine. That was before whoever-it-is started instructing me in desert-island lore.
My guilt began down there among the street people. It paralysed me and took from me the will to find Isabel. I suppose I knew that if I found her then I’d have to tell her what I’d done. I longed to tell someone, to ask someone for a verdict, a judgement. If I’d met the Bradens again, especially if I’d found myself alone with Lillian Braden, I’d have told her. The need to unburden myself was almost overwhelming. If he’d woken up and turned his eyes on me, I’d have told it all to that poor bastard with the bottle on the other end of the bench.
It was I who woke. In the middle of the night, to sit up in the darkness and feel the scream rising up inside me and hear myself whimper instead, I can’t have done that, I can’t have. It was like delayed shock. First the days of acceptance, of a queasy hope that I’d got away with it, then the fruitless search, then the shock. I can’t have done that, I can’t have. Things like that don’t happen to me, people like me, I can’t have done that. But I had.
In the morning I went back to the Pike Place market, mainly because I knew that was one place the Bradens wouldn’t go. I went to the little park and sat on the green lawn, I lay there because lying down was the best posture for me. I walked like a zombie, I could hardly see straight. My mind had contrived a veil to hang between me and the external world, a gauzy barrier that was both blinding and deafening. I perceived things at a distant remove, I heard voices as from far away. It was a wonder nothing ran me over, for I hadn’t got used to traffic coming from the right and the noise cars made was dulled to a murmur.
I couldn’t eat and I’d forgotten about drinking. Drinking alcoholic things, I mean. It was as if I knew there could be no escape. I had done this terrible thing and I was doomed to think about it and nothing but it for ever. The day passed in a haze. I wandered from park to park in the city and from green space to green lawn, sitting on benches, lying on grass, even sleeping occasionally, to wake up to the horror of it once more. It was that evening or the next that I began to think of going back to the island to find him.
Get a flight to Juneau, go to the helicopter station and hire a helicopter to fly to Chechin. Or a seaplane. A seaplane might be better. I had the money. I had Ivo’s Visa card. For a few minutes, more than that, perhaps an hour, I thought I’d do this. It buoyed me up, it took away all the pain and guilt. I felt energy returning. I went into a fast-food place and ate a burger with fries, a salad. I even had a glass of milk because I saw that other grown-up people were doing this. While I was eating I planned my strategy, how I’d tell them I just wanted to go back there, the island fascinated me, I wanted to explore it properly.
He would still be alive. It was only a few days. I’d been a fool to tell myself he’d have had to drink sea-water or his own urine. Think how it rained. There would be rain water to drink, collected in pools, on large upturned leaves, in his hands; edible leaves, perhaps edible fungi. Ivo knew about these things, he knew the wilderness and how to survive in it.
He might kill me. I felt brave and strong and reckless. Let him kill me – so what? Anything was preferable to this fear, this guilt, this continuing horror. Death was better.
In my constant walking I’d passed the Alaskan Airways offices. I started heading for it but when I was halfway up one of those streets that r
ise in a gradient of about one in three, I knew I couldn’t do it. I was afraid. I was too frightened of what I’d find when I got there. A dead man or a dying man. The rain, the cold – an injured man wouldn’t have survived that. Besides, how badly had I injured him when I struck him and he fell against that tree? I remembered the trickle of blood on his hair. I couldn’t go back and face that, I hadn’t the nerve.
It was later that same day, evening but not yet nightfall, that Thierry Massin found me. I was in the old part of the city, not where the drunks and the junkies were, but in a remoter more desolate square, empty after the shops had closed. There was a piece of statuary, an animal, maybe a bull, with stone coping round it and I was sitting on this coping, staring up at the purplish sky and the stars. The evenings are hardly ever warm in England, not even after a hot day, but the warmth doesn’t go away at night in Seattle. The air was so soft and so mild that you felt it wasn’t such a bad life for those street people, lying out in the open, maybe with a bottle and a joint, with no cares and no guilt.
I saw this boy of perhaps twenty come into the square. He had a peculiarly graceful walk, he was very relaxed and at ease, a black-haired, delicately made boy, who I thought might be hispanic. I thought those things and forgot him, all in an instant, returning to a notion I had of going down to where the dossers were – I don’t know what Americans call them – buying myself a bottle of that dark red rotgut and joining them.
The next time I was aware of him was when he sat down beside me on the stone coping. He smelt of cloves. In an accent that wasn’t hispanic, that was French, he said, ‘What is wrong?’
‘A lot of things,’ I said.
‘Money.’
It was the way he said it, in a matter-of-fact tone but one that allowed no room for argument, that taught me something. This is what trouble means to most people. Most people, when asked, would come up with that. Not love or loss or bereavement or being misunderstood or ill-treated, but money, basically the lack of money. It had meant trouble for me but no longer. I had quite a lot of money.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m all right as far as that goes.’
‘You are lonely?’
In the lamplit half-dark I looked into his sharp-featured dark face that would be a hatchet face one day. His hair was as black as Ivo’s. A gold tooth, replacing an incisor, glinted when he smiled. His smile was contrived with the lips alone, while the eyes remained still and staring.
‘Lonely?’ I said. ‘I hadn’t thought about it.’
‘Come for a walk.’
It was to his house that our walk took us – his room, rather. The house was in a silent, deserted street and it was a sinister-looking place, very old for Seattle, probably newly built after the fire of 1889. Its front was covered in dark brown shingles that made it look like a slice of decaying, worm-eaten Christmas pudding. There was a wall made of grey breeze blocks and it divided the house and its narrow front yard from the street. For some reason, this was my night for sitting on walls and we sat on this one.
‘I’m Thierry,’ he said. ‘I am Terry here. It is more easy. You can too.’ He lit a cigarette and I smelt marijuana. ‘I am from Toulouse. I am a waiter. I am illegal immigrant.’
If your rendition of a language consists almost entirely of statements made in the first person it must be quite easy to master. He didn’t say these things diffidently or as if he thought there was room for improvement in his command of English, but with a kind of tough confidence. He passed me the joint and I drew deeply on it.
‘I am going round the world,’ said Thierry. ‘This is old-fashioned, it is what my father do, he do it in sixties when he is young, but only for one year. Already I have been five year. Maybe I do it till I’m old, eh?’
I said I was on holiday. In a week’s time I was going home.
‘Home is for old people. I do not want home while I have money. But I don’t have it, not much, money is always the problem. I have wine in my room. I take you up and we drink.’
The joint had burnt down to a half-inch. I was about to drop it and grind it out on the pavement but he stopped me. He produced a pin on which to impale this fragment and sucked it until it burnt his lips. We went upstairs. I expected Indian cushions and joss sticks, drip-hung candles in beaten-brass candlesticks, gays-into-black-magic posters, but his room was stark. A single mattress lay in the middle of the floor with two battered record-player speakers for bedside cabinets. There were no curtains and a three-quarters-full moon filled the upper part of the sash window. On a kind of bench made from a plank supported at each end on two bricks were the materials for making Thierry’s joints, papers, tin of tobacco, an unlabelled tin of cannabis and a white powder laid out in parallel lines. He must have thought me very naive for not knowing at first what this was.
Something had been put in to fortify the wine. I don’t know what but it was fiery and a moment after I’d drunk it my muscles started jumping. Thierry gave me the wine in a pottery mug, stained dark brown inside. He sat on the mattress and took off his clothes.
I did the same. It was a strange thing but I hadn’t noticed the heat when I had my clothes on, yet when I’d stripped off I streamed with sweat. Naked, he was as thin as an anorectic girl I’d seen in pictures, with bones showing where you hardly knew bones were. But he was strong too and as fierce as a starving tiger.
Next day I took him to a Mexican restaurant on the Pike Place Hillclimb and bought him a good lunch. At the diner where he had a job there was never time to eat, he said, and the proprietor kept an eagle eye on leftovers, which he claimed to need for the pigs he kept on his land at Tacoma. Thierry wolfed down chili rilleno and tamales and tacos. In spite of being so thin and no more than five feet eight, he had a huge capacity for drink. The Californian wine on offer was good but he insisted on French and he drank French brandy too. I paid for it all on Ivo’s credit card.
I bought him a denim coat with a sheepskin lining because he meant to go up to Edmonton or Calgary where the winters were cold. Why did I? Because he asked me and because it was a new feeling for me to be admired for my wealth. I told him that at home in England I was a commodity broker. If he’d known anything about it he’d have understood that being in the commodity market wasn’t the most prosperous venture in a recession.
‘One day I come and we share, huh?’ he said.
He was like a greedy, vicious child, and I was talking to him like a child at that point. ‘I keep it all locked up in a safe, Thierry.’
The word was new to him. It was Sergius I’d had in mind but I gave a more straightforward explanation. A world of money and the handling of money was unknown to him – come to that, it was unknown to me. ‘You get me one of those,’ he said, his eyes on Ivo’s credit card.
I gave him back one of his favourite expressions, the absolute negation. ‘No way.’
All day long, except in the restaurant, he sniffed his coke. He smoked his joints and chewed cloves, one or the other to get rid of the smell of the other, I suppose. Most of the money he earned went on his cocaine habit and his marijuana. The cloves cost practically nothing. I was careful not to let him see me sign Ivo’s name to the credit-card slip, but he was too busy preening himself in front of the mirror to look.
Being with him was a way of escape. While he was at work that evening I sat in the cinema and watched A Room with a View twice round. By that time the Bradens would be gone and I came out of the cinema with a sense of relief. I treated Thierry to supper and took him back to my hotel, not being able to face another night in his room. There was no room service, so we took a bottle of champagne with us. It was like me and Ivo, only this time I was Ivo.
He added more brown dots to the burn pattern on the carpet. There was a cigarette of some kind in his mouth all the time he wasn’t actually sleeping. The smell that was like being in one of those Indian spice shops woke me in the small hours. I woke Thierry and told him what I’d done. I told him everything, the weight of guilt was so huge. In the night, wh
en remembering what I’d done was so bad to bear that I couldn’t keep from whimpering and crying, I turned to him and held him, his slippery, corded body of stringy muscles and sharp bones. I sobbed into his knotty spine and I told him everything except about the money and the credit card. I told him about Isabel.
Women meant nothing to him. You could go so far as to say that for him they weren’t there. He reminded me of those men in Genet’s novels who inhabit a women-less world, who never mention women, who seem not to know another sex exists. When I talked about her his face changed. He became as white as wax and he closed his eyes. As soon as I’d finished he said,
‘I don’t know women. I am virgin.’ He laughed and reached for the remains of his joint on its pin.
Once he had gone, by lunchtime, I checked out and asked for my bill. I didn’t want Thierry knowing where to find me. The cash I had with me was a lot less than I’d thought, but in my experience it usually is. I had to pay the bill with the Visa card. I found another hotel, the cheapest after the Seattle YMCA, and sat in my room there (frozen bean-green curtains coming adrift from their rails, green and yellow Peruvian weave bedcover, black and bean-green vinyl floor covering) asking myself what I was doing in Seattle, what was the point of being there.
Another thing I thought was that when I got home I ought to get myself tested for AIDS, that is, to see if I was HIV Positive. I didn’t much care then whether I was, whether AIDS would finish me off. Later on I went out. I was back to drinking again and I walked down those steeply sloping streets, looking for a dark bar where I could be anonymous and relatively alone. And there, ahead of me, I saw Isabel. A taxi stopped and she got out of it, slammed the door behind her and went up the steps to the front entrance of an apartment block.
It was like some worshipper granted a vision of the Blessed Virgin. I could have fallen on my knees.
