Human Pages

by John Elliott

  ‘I believe nowadays your wife is quite mad,’ Evangeline continued. ‘That at least is something you’ve managed on your own.’

  Harvard pushed his plate to the side. ‘She’s heavily sedated, yes. We live each day as it comes.’

  Evangeline rested her hand on his and said in a softer tone, ‘Tell me how she is. What does she find to do all day? You haven’t abandoned her. You’ve been faithful in your fashion.’

  ‘Six bottles of spumante and a bottle of scotch. It’s no time to stop the party. Not the Old Man’s good thing.’ Walter Sembele’s voice carried beyond the waiter and the company. The man he had addressed as Emmet still had not moved round.

  ‘They’re enjoying themselves.’ Evangeline slid her hand away from Harvard’s. She ordered a coffee as the waiter passed.

  ‘People exaggerate. She isn’t that sick. It’s really when we move that we get problems. Then she goes out and buys ten washing machines, dishwashers, a freezer in every other store. She worries we won’t be equipped. We won’t have the right goods. She comes home. I sort it out. Most people are kind once I explain. Afterwards, they phone me when she orders. With her medication, it’s generally okay. She settles down.’

  Evangeline’s body tautened beside him. Her hazel-green eyes stared into his. The centre of her pupils looked topaz-tinged. As she bent her face to sip her coffee, a wisp of auburn hair strayed across her temple. The scent she was wearing, a faint trace of mimosa and crushed violets, reminded him of their time together. Her body was so close to him now, her body to which, in its youthful form, she had granted him access, her body, which in the past he had repeatedly abstracted, breaking it down into each component part, eroticising its curves and orifices, fetishising each indent and tiny blemish, it caused him a sudden, intense pang of separation and loss. Things were not manageable, far from it. His penis hardened against his thigh. He felt the urge to tell her he hadn’t loved her before. He hadn’t shown her the love she deserved. Blame it on youth, he could say; it didn’t comprehend how I would lose you.

  ‘This coffee’s too bitter,’ Evangeline said. ‘I’m going to order some vino santo and those almond biscuits, whatever they’re called.’ She summoned the waiter. ‘Do you want anything?’

  Harvard shook his head. He was trapped in his desire to ask her forgiveness. If only he could kiss her full on the lips and hold her tight and abandon his scheming plans for her betrayal. It could happen, he tried telling himself. I could ignore Sembele. We could go together to a hotel room. I could play the percentages in her favour.

  ‘Did I ever tell you,’ she said, ‘about the time I met him downtown in the Christmas shopping season? I was nearly eight years old with my birthday less than a month away. It was such a gloomy winter afternoon. Mother had taken me round the stores in what she thought was a treat. André, her man of the moment, drove us. Well, on our way back to the parking lot, I started playing up. I was in some kind of childish pet or other. I don’t know why. Anyway, mother got angry. She grabbed me by the arm but suddenly let me go as if I no longer existed. I looked up. She stood transfixed. “Joe,” she said, “Joe, is it you?” I’d never seen that kind of look on her face before. Her eyes were shining. She was truly beautiful. You could have put up her picture among the stills of movie stars and it wouldn’t have been out of place. Naturally, I wanted to see who had produced this magical transformation. The guy was about medium height. He had on a black, beltless raincoat and a battered brown felt hat. A thin fairish moustache and beard fringed his mouth and chin. He was holding what I later learned was an instrument case. Mother leant her cheek towards him. He kissed it and looked at me. She said, “Joe, this is my daughter, Evangeline.” The funny thing was she definitely hesitated before saying Joe and again before my daughter. He shook my hand. I felt the lightness of his grip through the damp of my gloves. They were red with white pom-poms. At the time I guess I was glad he hadn’t tried to kiss me. He said something, something I only partially caught because an ambulance siren was wailing. “Unfortunate . . . better if . . . me again.” Something like that. Mother touched his sleeve. She had tears in her eyes. Then he left. We watched him go until he disappeared into the subway entrance. Mother wouldn’t talk about him, say who he was. She said I had a rich imagination whenever I tried to bring him up. From that day, however, her interest in André faded and soon he rounded up his sports stuff, packed his bags and went.’ She dipped the tip of her biscuit into her glass of wine and held it out for Harvard to nibble. He demurred.

  The party opposite was growing increasingly boisterous. Most of them had changed their seats. Walter Sembele now had his arm draped round the shoulder of the white girl, while he talked loudly up the table to a black woman at its head.

  ‘Evangeline, have you faced up to the fact that we might not find him? He might no longer be in Greenlea.’

  ‘Alakhin knows. He’s certain.’

  ‘Alakhin’s retired. He’s old. He lives in the back of beyond.’

  ‘But he’s still got his touts. A key informer, someone close to the source, that’s what he said, remember. If he’d left, Alakhin would have sent word.’

  Never go back, Harvard thought. It can’t be done. Always go onwards. Whatever happens now, whatever I choose, at least I swear I’ll never return to Greenlea. I refuse to haunt the scene of the crime, unlike her desired possible father. Across the way, Sembele’s Emmet still had not budged from his seat.

  Evangeline finished her wine and pushed out the table. ‘Leave the tab,’ she said. ‘I’ll pick it up.’

  Harvard waited for her to go through the door of the toilet, then he beckoned the waiter and, as well as ordering the bill, asked for a couple of leaves from his pad. Quickly writing on one of them and folding it over, he pointed to Walter Sembele. The waiter delivered it. Sembele took it carelessly, read it and put it in his pocket. He waved in acknowledgement. The waiter asked, ‘Is there a reply, sir?’

  ‘Give the gentleman my card.’

  At that point Emmet Briggs looked round. Harvard recognised the face he had studied the previous night when he had set up the Emily Brown file.

  *

  Evangeline sang while she puckered up her mouth and applied lipstick in front of the long mirror in the restaurant ladies room. She had good reason to feel pleased with herself. Things were going well. Amadeo Cresci himself, if he had lived, would have been proud of her determined campaign against Chance Company, the organisation which had ruined him and driven him to suicide, and Harvard, well he did not need to know the extent of her plans. She capped the lipstick and put it back in her bag. ‘Lovable, huggable Emily Brown,’ she sang more loudly, moving her feet to the rhythm and shaking her hips.

  A cistern flushed. One of the cubicle doors opened and a smallish black woman, whom Evangeline had seen at the other table, emerged. Feeling rather self-conscious, Evangeline said, ‘Hi.’

  The woman washed her hands and, looking at Evangeline’s reflection in the mirror, said, ‘That song you were singing, what’s it called?’

  ‘“Miss Brown to You”. My friend I’m lunching with introduced it to me. It’s an old song Billie Holiday used to sing. You know, the lady with the white gardenia.’

  ‘Are you a singer?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Evangeline laughed. ‘Can’t you tell? I’m not musical. My father is, but I guess in that respect I take after my mother.’

  The woman looked at her curiously. ‘Do you mind if I ask your name?’

  ‘No, not at all. I’m Evangeline Simpson. Why do you want to know?’

  ‘There was something familiar about your voice. This morning my husband started work with an Emily Brown and someone I’d never heard of spoke about her arrival in Greenlea. Now you’re singing a song with the same name in it. It seems everywhere I go her name crops up.’

  ‘I just know the song. That’s it.’ Evangeline pushed the door open. She experienced an enjoyable frisson of pleasure. Things were getting better all the time. The recipient of o
ne of her calls was walking right at her side. ‘How did your husband get the job? I’ve only recently come here and if you know a good employment agency it would help.’

  ‘He’s only on a short-term contract. The company’s called Chance Company. They hire people for specific jobs or retain them on standby. They’re worldwide.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard of them. They’re big in the States. They fake experiences for their clients. It’s the way to go, according to them. Your crowd seem happy.’

  ‘They’re not my crowd, or Emmet’s. They’re full of false spirit, bad people mostly. They laugh easy and wait for others to cry.’

  ‘Is Emmet your husband?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s him over there. Mr Sembele down the end runs the show.’

  ‘And the blonde?’

  ‘A local whore they’ve got in tow. Sembele’s got money to spend. Well, so long. I must hear the whole of that Emily Brown song sometime.’

  A scribbled note awaited Evangeline’s return. She read it, crumpled it up and handed her credit card to the waiter. Harvard had gone. On her way to reclaim her coat, the ash blonde at the other table smiled in her direction, half raising her wine glass in mock salutation. Evangeline ignored her. Some people would never fit the big picture.

  *

  Walter Sembele watched Harvard Smith’s companion leave. Never one thing to do at a time, he thought, there are always four or five. Now when the Old Man was struggling to secure his final term in office, powerful friends were calling in their markers.

  At the beginning, his brief had been straightforward enough. The Old Man had warmly embraced him the night before he was due to leave. ‘One more time, Walter,’ he had said. ‘Bring them home, good friend. Bring the votes of our diaspora back to us, both the living and the dead. I know how to encourage the living, and, on election day, you know how to raise the dead.’

  They had parted on good terms, and he had nearly reached the east porte-cochère of the presidential palace, thinking that was that, when a voice from the shadows addressed him by name and requested a light. As he flicked his lighter, a slim young man appeared, leant forward and pressed his cigarette to the flame. He took the opportunity to cast a quick, surreptitious glance at the man’s shoes. They were tan loafers, decorated with a fussy buckle. Catching his reaction, the young man smiled and said, ‘Times change, Mr Sembele. I’m Ignacio Williams, Commercial Attaché. Shall we go somewhere more private?’ He indicated a corridor to the right. Part way along he opened a door. Walter followed.

  They had entered a kind of pantry dominated by a large open cupboard stacked with glasses of various types and sizes. A primitive, dirt-stained sink with one high tap stood underneath a barred window. He had waited while Williams extracted a file from his briefcase then passed him the top three sheets. ‘As you see, a standard Chance Company contract. The client is Antoine Viall. He’s ready to go with you. Follow the usual procedures.’

  Out of diplomacy, he had read the details, careful to mask his annoyance. ‘There’s also another connection here,’ Williams had continued more slowly. ‘Our friends want to honour someone. I can tell you the Company thought he was dead some time ago, but it turns out the service was inappropriate. Inadequate might be a better word. We’ve agreed to provide a lasting memorial. When you get to Greenlea on your itinerary, hire someone suitable, someone expendable. I leave it to you. You’ve got the experience. But he needs to be a professional. Your liaison with the Company is in the papers I’ll give you. He’ll contact you in Greenlea, let you know the target’s name, and the place and time. Jesus! There’s a mouse.’

  A tiny rodent had emerged from under the sink. Aware of danger, it scampered past their feet and climbed into the cupboard. Enjoying the Attaché’s obvious discomfort, he had started asking questions, while Williams kept darting uneasy glances about the room. Barely concealing his relief, he had handed over the rest of the documentation and had declared their business completed.

  Leaving in a foul mood, Walter had driven several blocks, parked his car and made a call from a public phone. He had hung on, waiting for the search to take its course. ‘As you know, there is no such person listed,’ the voice at the other end had told him. The ‘as you know’ indicated that Ignacio Williams was who he suspected him to be.

  Now, here he was in Greenlea, fulfilling his obligations. He had never really had a choice. Emmet Briggs was hired. He had met Harvard Smith. Antoine Viall was noisily declaring his allegiance to the Old Man. ‘Expendable’ he kept hearing Williams say. Probably he, too, was expendable, either on his return or even before he got there. He looked around at the flushed, grinning faces of the freeloaders. Antoine’s hand was descending again to fondle Corinne’s thigh. Only Emmet and Hallie, sitting together for the first time and deep in conversation, seemed, like him, momentarily withdrawn from the festivity. They did not approve of him. He was well aware of that, but it did not matter. It was what people were prepared to do that counted. Greenlea, like the other places he had visited, did not care about them. It hardly saw them as they mingled in its streets. It identified only their functions: the garage mechanic, the garbage collector, the ticket inspector, the cleaning woman. It was not interested in their politics or their homeland. Like them he was invisible as he finagled the votes and arranged for someone, as yet unknown, to be eradicated. Emmet and Hallie, friends or foes, his task was to send them both to perdition.

  *

  Sonny Ayza looked back towards the quay. His eye surmounted the line of cranes marshalled on the dock to the grid of the city, spreading in its blocks, defiles and excrescences up and beyond its slopes. The damp of the rail seeped into the palms of his hands. A windblown spray numbed his cheeks and spattered against his shoulders and chest. Would he, he wondered, have felt a similar stinging spray standing at the stern of the ancients’ ferry on its journey to the underworld if he had continued swallowing the pills according to his original intent? Still alive today, the throb of the ferry engines, the dip and push of its bow through the choppy waves of the estuary, were carrying him prosaically to Panalquin on a wild goose chase where, no doubt, as in Greenlea, the shades of those departed mingled constantly with the living as well as those who, like himself, perpetuated a sort of living death.

  Watching the cityscape recede, he tried to banish the thought. Over the wake, scavenging seagulls planed in the air currents and dived for jettisoned scraps. Ahead, the rusty hulls of tankers and container ships rode at anchor in the roads. The biting edge of the wind in the more open water made him shiver. He moved away from the rail and sought shelter at the foot of the companionway.

  The Cock, El Gallo, he recalled, had been a deadly dull Mirandan weekly devoted to ecclesiastical appointments and provincial tittle-tattle. It had existed precariously on the revenue garnered from pious notices of deaths and funeral masses, sequestered in black-outlined squares, which had covered its five to ten back pages. Increasing deaths among its dwindling bands of readers and subscribers had hastened its own demise. Gallo Mart, on the other hand, although ailing, remained an altogether healthier supermarket bird. Its crows still resounded throughout Greenlea and the surrounding region. Elizabeth Kerry’s message gave its outlet in Panalquin a most curious significance that was hard to fathom. Whatever was there, or not, he was going to find out within the hour.

  Tired of standing in the force of the elements, he climbed up the stairs to the smoke-wreathed warmth of the saloon where the bulk of the passengers were congregated. Removing a copy of yesterday’s paper, he sat down in the only available seat. Next to him four men were playing what he guessed was canasta. Their concentrated silence was only broken by the occasional grunt as they picked up, retained or rejected cards. An image of Monica Randell’s son fiddling with the controls of his Game Boy console, allied to the downy hairs on Sylvia’s arm, abruptly vanished, however, as a triumphant shout, followed by an emphatic thump of a fist on the tabletop, indicated that the game had come to an end. The winner, in acknowle
dgement, briefly doffed his brown leather cap, revealing a mop of tow-coloured hair before he lowered it once again.

  Batiste! Batiste . . . Cheto! Fernando Cheto Simon! The name on Elizabeth Kerry’s list!

  How, among all his father’s contemporaries in Llomera, could he have forgotten Batiste’s surname, the man who had been with Manolo and Iusebio at the front? The man who had been at their side during the retreat and who had been encamped close by when Manolo had finally succumbed to pneumonia across the border. God knows he had continued to populate Paca’s with a throng of vaguely remembered characters he, himself, hardly knew, yet he had omitted Batiste, a stalwart of ‘nothing for us’, Batiste with his lick of straw-coloured hair spilling over his eyes as he chucked down his winning hand and pounded the table in celebration then, with a satisfied belch, scooped up the coins into his outstretched hand.

  Gradually, this freshly recaptured scene of the nightly Llomeran card players, forever studying their cups, rounds, clubs and swords in the gloom of Paca’s wine shop, interweaving with the actual shuffling and dealing taking place beside him in the bright lights of the ferry saloon, dissolved into the softer light of dancing shadows on the wall of the kitchen in Orias. Once again, he heard the sound of voices erupting in the passageway from all those years ago when he was ten years old, almost as distinct as if they had emanated from the wind-scoured deck below, and with a chill of recognition he knew why he had repressed a little bit of history and had expunged Batiste Cheto so effectively from his memory.

  He had been disturbed, at first, by a low murmur he could not quite make out. Its persistence drew him up from the floor where he had been lying with the open pages of The Brothers Sanchez and the Lost Tribe cradled in the crook of his arm. Putting his ear to the door pane, he had tried to isolate the individual voices, but then, after a bout of increased fervour and still indistinguishable noise, silence followed and he had quietly returned to his book.