Human Pages

by John Elliott

  The man at the counter was a raw-boned, skinny individual with a prominent hooked nose and a slight squint in his right eye. He was considerably older than any of the Sunrise employees Sonny had come across in Greenlea. His name tab identified him as Joseph.

  ‘Cold day,’ he said, putting down Sonny’s cup.

  Sonny nodded and unwrapped his Black Cat sugar oblong before upending it into the hot liquid.

  ‘Not unusual for this time of year.’ Joseph seemed inclined to talk. Sonny, at the moment, was his solitary customer.

  ‘I didn’t expect to see you here,’ Sonny said. ‘I’m a regular at your stalls in Greenlea. I didn’t realise the company covered Panalquin as well.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. This site’s temporary, but in the old days they had a franchise in the railway station itself. Of course, it was closed down. Then they demolished the lot, tore up the track and all.’

  ‘It seems an out of the way place to have a station. I mean, it wasn’t connected to the centre or the docks.’

  ‘No, you’re right. There were only two lines south: one to Veldar, the other to Lake Ambret. That’s where I’m from myself. Now there’s a godforsaken hole. Hear a dog bark or a chicken fart and they’d yack about it for days. I couldn’t wait to get on that train.’

  ‘And where we are? What used to be here?’

  ‘Warehouses, I think. Stuff like that,’ Joseph shrugged. ‘Nothing much.’

  ‘A Gallo Mart depot?’

  ‘Might have been, but nowadays it’s all just in time and central haulage.’ Sonny looked surprised. Joseph smiled. ‘I follow the markets and trends. A few careful investments. You never know. Hopefully, everyone can find their niche, or, failing that, their resting place. Excuse me.’ He took the order of two of the young women Sonny had followed earlier.

  Sonny sipped his coffee. He scrunched the sugar wrapper and dropped it into the small waste-paper receptacle affixed to the ledge below. The Black Cat logo was out of sight, but he fancied that its raised warning paw hovered fleetingly somewhere between the garden statuary and the wall of the nondescript office building.

  *

  ‘Mmmum en sus aguas cristillinas aaaahmm la playa donde esta vez mmmumm,’ Antoine Viall jauntily hummed and sang the opening bars of ‘La Isla Encantada’, the rumba that had been insistently reprised at the previous night’s party. Swaying his shoulders to its beat under the feeble wattage of the light on the landing, he grinned as Walter Sembele flourished the bunch of keys in his direction before inserting the one that locked the door of their campaign headquarters.

  ‘The keys, Antoine, the keys of our kingdom.’ Walter slipped them back in his jacket pocket and patted them reassuringly. ‘And now we’ve earned a rest. I’m tired and I must be active soon enough again.’

  They descended the narrow staircase in Indian file, the bare boards creaking under Walter’s light tread, then once more with Antoine’s heavier footfall. ‘You let him go off on his own again,’ Antoine said. ‘Is it wise? Shouldn’t one of us check whether Emmet is actually carrying out your instructions?’

  ‘Each to his own speciality, Antoine. Granted, none of us has clean hands. We are all guilty sinners, but we don’t have to witness everything with our own eyes. Emmet has a list of people to pacify. In front of their families, if it helps. Oh, I know he’s not a believer in the Old Man, yet he follows his code. He’ll do it, rest assured, and when it’s over and we all go our separate ways. Well, I don’t need to draw a picture.’

  Outside, they stood for a moment together on the pavement. Walter winced at the overcoat-piercing stream of cold air blowing down Salonika Street. He pulled up his collar. ‘All these ironmongers,’ he said, burrowing his neck and head deeper into its protective warmth. ‘I don’t understand them.’ He shivered. His gaze took in the identical window displays on either side of them. In the face of their studied duplication and the assault of Greenlea’s rigorous climate, his normal sprightliness seemed to ebb away. He reached out and held on to Antoine’s sleeve, gripping the flesh beneath. ‘You’re right to play the game, my friend, whoever you really are. Pay the money and choose to be Antoine Viall or someone else invented for you. Business with the living grows wearisome sometimes.’ A melancholy smile stilled his usually mobile features until it vanished and a chuckle rose from his lips. ‘Ghosts, now them, I can handle. There’s enough of them to clear these handyman necessities. See you back here.’

  Antoine watched him walk away. His stop-go, push-pull rolling gait marked him out from the surrounding pedestrians. His hands swept gently in front of his chest, clearing his path as though he were parting the waters, while his head was tilted attentively towards his left shoulder. The whole body movement incorporated his oft repeated boast, ‘Now I’ll get things a-moovering. You see, brother, I really am the seventh son of the seventh son.’

  Once Walter was out of sight, Antoine turned and made off in the opposite direction. He had decided he, too, would rest for a few hours in the flat provided by Chance Company at Tara Village. ‘Whoever you really are.’ Walter’s words pricked him as he strode along. They had taken him by surprise. In truth, they had done more than that. They had jolted him. It was the first time Walter had openly acknowledged he knew that Antoine Viall was not his true identity. His true identity. Did he have one anymore? He certainly preferred those that had been tailored for him rather than the accidental properties of birth. Their banks of memories especially, and Antoine Viall’s in particular, were much more intriguing and redolent than his own, fading into oblivion, patchwork of now scarcely comprehensible pleasures and muted pains. Riffling through Chance Company’s Appendix 3: Past Situations, in its dark bottle-green folder, before assuming a new role, remained stronger and more satisfying meat than any tepid offering of his own memory. Some of the contents the Company detailed. Others were left deliberately vague so that the client could fill in the details and bridge the gaps for themselves. Like Antoine’s dining table, he thought with satisfaction as, regaining his equilibrium, he reached Annunciation Square.

  He had placed its existence in Viall’s one-time family home at 30 Rue des Houx. A name which Antoine, as a small child, had confused with ‘hibou’, resulting in his father, Pierre, dubbing him thereafter Master Owl though, in fact, neither owls nor holly bushes were anywhere in evidence.

  In those early days, he conjectured, the dining room itself and its most precious object, the mahogany table, exerted a strong fascination on the impressionable boy. A fascination deepened by the fact that the room was usually locked and only opened up for special meals prepared on family anniversaries or favoured saints’ days. The surrounding ritual was always precise. On the preceding morning, his mother, Francine, went to the dresser drawer in the kitchen and obtained the all-important key. He followed her eagerly, clutching at her skirt, ready to dash into the released space when she turned it in the lock. If fortune held, he was allowed to stay and play inside while the room was aired and its dusting and cleaning commenced. The preparations completed, he stood on guard outside when his mother re-locked the door. Next day, they kept him away until the table was laid and fresh flowers were placed in the two ornamental Chinese vases on either side of the mantelpiece.

  How he waited with growing excitement for the guests to arrive: aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws or, on other occasions, business friends of his father with their wives and children. At last, the magic moment drew near. Francine signalled to Pierre that all was ready and the company were ushered through to their allotted places. Extra cushions were piled on selected chairs for himself and the younger kids.

  From this elevated vantage point, the room exuded an exotic mixture of women’s perfumes, men’s unguents, hibiscus blossoms and grown-up food. Half hidden among the arms and elbows of this genial throng, undisturbed by the shifting of cutlery and plates, he dropped his cheek against the white starched tablecloth and dreamed he was in his own true kingdom, whose crown he wore in his ever-expanding beatific smile.

/>   By evening, teetering on the brink of sleep, Francine led him away, while the company dallied, smoked and drank, chatted and played hands of cards on the still festive table. Behind him, before his eyelids finally drooped and sleep completely overcame him, he heard the drifting strains of a habañera, popular at the time, sung by one of the aunts, ‘How many walls will your family build to stop me seeing you again?’

  When the last guest had said their goodnight and the front door was closed and bolted, fast asleep in his bed, he dreamed he stood once more at his mother’s side, watching her lock the dining room door and return the key to its dresser drawer.

  On the eve of his next birthday, he plucked up courage and, unobserved, opened the drawer himself. There was no key inside. Only odds and ends and discarded pieces of bric-a-brac got in the way of his fumbling fingers. He rummaged in the adjoining drawer but found nothing. Years later, after they had moved to another town where his father had opened a dry goods store, he asked his mother about the all-important key. Francine stared at him in surprise. ‘The old dining room was never locked,’ she said. ‘Why on earth would it have been? You’re surely confusing it with something elsewhere. Maybe you remembered some of the silly tales they used to tell at the time of the food riots. Poor people believed then that the rich and the bourgeoisie had every scrap of their food under lock and key and that they kept a savage dog tethered to the fridge for good measure.’

  The entrance to the Rag Market loomed ahead. The last twist of not finding the key had been another of his own ironic additions to the Chance Company memory blueprint. Thinking about it now helped ease the sting from Walter’s parting remarks. Neither a 4 nor an 11 tram, the two he needed, were waiting. A coffee stall this side of the lines proffered a more congenial waiting place than the exposed stop beyond, and, more interestingly, there was a young woman with very short brunette hair, dressed in a black leather blouson and black ski-pants tucked into calf-length black boots, drinking at the counter. As she turned her back, he took in her high apple-cheeked behind with approval. Approaching closer, he imagined how he would feel cupping each buttock in turn in the palms of his hands. Different from holding Corinne’s. Hers were tapered pear. He had entered her persistently fore, and once, with her consent, aft, his psyche still smarting from Emmet’s snub. Her pudendum was shaved. Her eyes were dead. He knew they had stayed dead even when she summoned the fake sense of pleasure her trade demanded. No doubt, she had thought of something else, someone else, the moment when she would be rid of him, perhaps even she had escaped into false scenes and memories parallel to his as Antoine Viall. The difference was he had money. And a gun, he reminded himself. She lacked both.

  His target was conversing with an older man, who stood slightly apart at the corner of the counter. She probably knows him, Antoine guessed by her body posture, but they are not together. He stepped up and ordered a cappuccino. When it arrived, he edged his saucer nearer to hers. She was still talking in a low voice to the man on her right. While she kept her back to him, he studied her short, on the verge of being cropped, hair. It invoked in him a series of coalescing images both erotic and ambivalent: a young supplicant in an enclosed religious order spreadeagling herself in abnegation on a tiled floor, a Japanese woman with wet hair, he had seen in a movie, kneeling obediently before her master’s crotch, women’s heads being forcibly shorn like suspected collaborators in old Second World War newsreels. As always, to the victor the spoils.

  He eavesdropped on her conversation as he drank the coffee. Her accent did not sound local. The vowels were evenly stressed, the consonants harder. The man she was speaking to wore a tightly belted, oatmeal-coloured heavy winter coat. A grey astrakhan Russian-style hat covered his head down to his temples. A blue patterned silk scarf was knotted carelessly around his throat. ‘I know what you mean,’ she was saying. ‘When I first arrived I often had the feeling you’ve just described. I’d turn a corner, and, instead of the busy streets I’d walked along, I’d find myself in a gloomy backwater with nobody else around.’

  ‘These are the gifts given to youth, Sylvia. A recognition of the unexpected. At my age, everything has already happened.’

  Her name was Sylvia. Antoine repeated it silently to himself, anticipating the possible moment when she might let him undress her and he could whisper her name in the revealed reality of her nakedness. He finished the cappuccino and wiped away any lingering froth with the corner of a paper napkin. If her acquaintance, he did not want to describe him as her friend, expected a rebuttal of his remark, such as ‘You are not old’, it was not forthcoming. Instead, she moved over to him and said something Antoine was unable to catch.

  ‘There’s no need,’ the man said audibly. His hand alighted on her shoulder. She spoke again. Once more it was too soft to be made out. The man removed his hand, nodded briefly, said goodbye to the woman serving behind the counter then walked away.

  Sylvia returned to her cup. A satisfied smile turned up the corner of her mouth. They were complicit. There was complicity between them. Antoine forced himself to calm down. What did it matter? Many men, many young men, must have been attracted to her in the same way as himself. He ordered another cappuccino.

  ‘Too much coffee is bad for you.’ She looked straight at him for the first time, and in that second he was lost. He was undone. Everything that had protected him before, everything he had accumulated or perceived, was swept away in the serene power of her casual gaze. Her face, he realised, was ‘The Face’; the face he was fated to contemplate in wonderment and humility. She spoke again. ‘Although I wouldn’t have said it a moment ago when Mr Guthrie, the owner, was here.’

  He was staring at her like an idiot, a gauche out-of-town rubbernecker. He prayed she did not need words; that they did not need to start with words. Her nose, he could see now, was a little too long and straight in the overall alignment of her features. Her forehead and cheeks were pale with slight freckles. Her ears were small and delicate, their rims reddened in the cold. She wore no earrings. The only make-up she had applied was lipstick in the shade of pomegranate rind, which moistened her lips as she pursed them in an amused moue. But her eyes! Their gaze was so direct, so beautiful. What colour were they? Greeny-brown? He could not tell for sure. Their colour was immaterial. In their core, they transmit light, he thought. Everything they see becomes transparent, including me.

  She moved her head and began chatting to the server who brought his second coffee. Accept me, he willed. Accept me as you see me. ‘Your name is Sylvia,’ he said. ‘I heard the man who left call you that.’

  ‘Mr Guthrie.’ She turned to face him again. ‘Yes, I’m Sylvia Manjon. Like Marta here, I work for Sunrise.’

  ‘Lucas Jones,’ he heard himself say. ‘I only arrived in Greenlea yesterday.’

  She shook him by the hand. He deliberately let go of it.

  ‘What brings you to the city?’ she asked. ‘Business?’

  ‘Chance,’ he replied, breaking out into an unforeseen laugh. ‘Sheer, wonderful chance.’

  *

  From time to time, Rosario included a page of her son’s drawings so that Antonetta could follow the progress he was making. Once her little daughter, Veronica, also scribbled a note of her own to accompany her mother’s tidings, although her memories of her birthplace must have been well forgotten. Tonetta kept them and put them in the tin with Batiste’s now largely discontinued correspondence; the tin, with its emblem of enamoured bluebirds, into which Fernando delved surreptitiously one morning when Gloria was at the fields and his mother was visiting her ailing neighbour, Auntie Luisa.

  First he took out all of the contents and, after memorising which was the top and which was the bottom, spread them carefully across the blanket on his mother’s bed. His father’s stubby pencilled scrawl was written on thin sheets of paper lined with tiny squares. A date was entered in the top left-hand corner, but without a place name to the right, unlike the way he had been taught at school. Each of them began ‘My D
arlingest Tonetta’ and finished with an initial ‘B’ under the expression ‘one day we will see.’ They were disappointing. Fernando felt cheated. How much better if they had been postcards with interesting stamps still attached! They bore no trace of what it was like to be abroad. There were no pictures of what their houses, streets and towns looked like. Poorer than here in Llomera, obviously, uglier in every way, he imagined, because every day Miss Lopez reminded them how fortunate they were to live in the best of all possible lands, the truest to God’s purpose, the noblest in fulfilling its historic destiny.

  The letters from the woman in Orias, by contrast, were on proper writing paper and were written in a neat, easily legible black ink. He read the last two and stopped. They were boring, full of stuff women went on about: children, school and other women. He was about to put them all back, aware that his mother might return at any time, when the corner of an irregular shaped page caught his eye. It was crammed with small sketches, fitted in higgledy-piggledy. Sifting through the rest, he discovered three more. They were unlike anything he had ever seen before. Turning them this way and that, miniature leaping frogs and apples and men in doorways coexisted with bicycle wheels and donkeys and open chests spilling coins. They were fascinating. How, he wondered, could someone get this detail into such a tiny space? Almost in a daze, he selected two of the pages, folded them slowly, trying not to get them too creased, and put them in his shirt pocket. He then replaced all the rest in reverse order back in the tin and shut it in its drawer.

  When Monday morning came, he could hardly wait to get to school. Right away, outside in the yard, he waved them proudly in front of his best pals, Domingo Arneis and Joaquin Torres, promising them adventures to come. His first impulse had been to claim they were his own work, but he realised, if he did, that they might, not unnaturally, ask him to draw more and his lie would be easily exposed. He, therefore, simply said, when they had gathered round him at break, ‘I found them. They’re a secret code. With their help we can . . . ’ He paused. He had been going to say, ‘Find our gold in Russia,’ as he had heard grown-ups say, but Russia, wherever it was, was out of reach for them, so he simply added, ‘solve the mystery.’