Human Pages

by John Elliott

‘I didn’t.’ He extended his hand. ‘Sonny Ayza.’

  Emmet held it in a powerful squeeze before letting go. ‘Citizen. We met briefly some moments ago,’ he explained to Agnes. ‘I said then this man’s not going to cause any rumpus. I was right in that drift, wasn’t I?’

  Sonny ignored his threatening glare. ‘Have you a wife called Hallie by any chance? I spoke to her yesterday.’

  ‘Citizen, you’ve got things on file, I know that, but leave my wife out of your shit. This is something you should truly believe.’

  ‘She works in my building. I don’t know anything else about her or you. Agnes, I’ll try to find out who set up your file and your stay here. By the way, you mentioned an accompanying letter. Did it have an individual signature apart from Cresci Foundation?’

  ‘Elizabeth Kerry.’

  Sonny nodded. ‘I see. Till tomorrow then.’

  *

  When he had gone, they moved towards the lifts. Emmet stuffed the envelope into his inside coat pocket for safe keeping. ‘A touch of the rat about our recently departed,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep an eye out for him.’

  ‘I’m not sure, Emmet. I think he was telling the truth. I’ll be okay.’

  An empty lift descended. They got in. Agnes pressed the second-floor button. The door closed. ‘People mention my wife at their peril,’ Emmet said.

  ‘You love her?’

  ‘Yeah, like the sea loves the shore. She counts on that.’

  The Lorelei Suite lay on their right farther down the corridor. The babble of animated chatter drifted towards them as their feet sank in the thick pile of the carpet. More from Cresci and Elizabeth Kerry possibly, Agnes thought, and now I’ve met the elusive Mr Ayza. Disappointing, but then she had been stretching credibility to have imagined he could have been connected in any way with her father.

  Walking beside her, Emmet started to get the feeling the kid was somewhere near. On this carpet, his uneven gait would leave no footfalls. A door opened ahead. A man came out with a key in his hand. Over his stooping shoulder, Emmet had a vision of the room slowly filling with water. He saw it tumble over the rim of the bath, sluice mesmerically across the tiles and inundate the floor and bed coverings. The man turned towards them. His shoes and the bottoms of his trousers were perfectly dry. He muttered a good evening as he finished locking up.

  ‘Can I help you? Do you have an invitation?’ A young Chance Company greeter hailed them once they entered the suite. Agnes handed her the card she had been given. ‘Miss Brown, of course, and Mr Briggs. Welcome. Please enjoy the evening. There are other guides who will help you if you require more information on your way round. Miss Brown, are you alright?’

  Agnes had gone deathly pale. Her legs were wobbly. She leant on Emmet, unable to speak as the young woman fussed about her, for there in front of her, from a huge mounted photograph, staring beyond her into a distance she could not see, was the clear-cut image of her father’s face, exactly as it had been in the drummer’s snap.

  Emmet’s eye quickly travelled to the focus of her sudden consternation as he held her upright. Like Agnes, he, too, recognised the man whom he had met years ago off the Panalquin train at Veldar station. The same face had sat beside him as they drove to the secluded house where Minty Wallace and the Japanese contingent were patiently waiting.

  Three

  No mother ever gave birth

  to one as unfortunate as I am.

  Along the road I am travelling

  run two equal footpaths.

  (Popular Alegrias)

  A static grey mist confronted Lucas Jones when he drew back the bedroom curtains on the following morning. It had dissolved the contours of the hillside opposite and rendered the whole of Tara Village invisible.

  He opened the window a fraction and sniffed the air. It smelt of seaweed and petrol faintly tinged with smoke, as if a bonfire smouldered somewhere in its opaque density.

  Shutting the window carefully so as not to disturb Sylvia’s continuing sleep, he checked the time on the bedside radio clock—6.11 a.m.—then slid his naked body next to hers under the sheet. He laid his hand gently on her haunch and tentatively pinched her gathered skin between his thumb and forefinger. She did not stir. Indeed, she seemed to be scarcely breathing, her mouth and nostrils cradled in the twisted indent of the pillow.

  Lucas withdrew his massaging fingers and lay on his back. He felt his erection slowly loosen and shrink to flaccidity. Antoine Viall would not have resisted its urgings. He would have awakened Sylvia no matter what and put her still half-asleep body immediately to the question. Lying here, however, in the dark beside her, he did not need to be Antoine Viall. He had time. They both had time. Lucas Jones and Sylvia Manjon had time; time to have sex, time to be together, time even to be apart and yet to conjure up and dally in each other’s existence.

  In spite of the window being shut, the strange, pungent smell of the mist outside, which presumably still persisted, began to insinuate itself into his further thoughts of Sylvia. It brought back hints of the clammy feel of one of the rolling Atlantic mists he knew from his childhood, which had been partly spent on the desolate seaboard of northern Patagonia. The stronger rank odour of bracken after the rain joined the mix, and, with recovered clarity, he watched as a boy ran out of the family house into the faltering dawn whose uncertain arrival twitched and winked against the dim horizon. On the slippery ground of the cliff path, his feet splayed away from under him, sending him crashing down in a bracken clump. Its icy fronds brushed his face. Amid its entanglement, an acrid reek assailed his nostrils. The seat of his trousers and his shirt were soaking wet. Below him, as yet barely illuminated, lay the elongated sweep of Horseshoe Bay. Above, hidden from view, gulls, gannets and kittiwakes added their repeated cries to the muffled boom of the ocean breaking on the shingle bank. He got to his feet, a figure emerging silently from his fall.

  Sunrise, Lucas reflected, a neglected stupid moment from his real past which had waywardly resurfaced. Sunrise Tea & Coffee and now Sylvia. He turned his eyes towards her sleeping head. What was in her sleep? He did not know. Leave it rest. It did not matter to him what dreams she had, neither what she let go nor what she retained. She was here with him. They lay together. He was Lucas Jones who now could come to grips with who he was.

  Sylvia snuffled twice into the pillow. She jerked her knees up to her stomach and wriggled over. Lucas adjusted his legs to give her room and closed his eyes.

  Lucky, his father’s brindle German shepherd bitch, jumped up and licked his cheek with her rough tongue. Feeling the force of her paws on his chest, he struggled to push her away. She bounded on ahead, her tail wagging, this time to a clearer shore, where, with a single bark, she turned and waited for his arrival. Pebbles rocked and tilted beneath his sandaled feet. Buds of bladderwrack popped under his soles. He felt the wind buffet his face with the promise of more rain to come. Who had he been when, through half-shut bleary eyes, he had taken in the rocky confine of the bay? Who had he been when he listened to the hiss of the breaking, exhausted waves on the beach and saw the confident glimmers of light steadily banish the darkness from the sky? Who was it who, his body and brain permeated by the elements around him, finally stopped running, out of breath and with a stitch in his side, to stoop over Lucky as she obsessively rolled and rubbed her spine among the mounds of rotting seaweed? Had it been then, while disturbed sandflies hovered over her muzzle and flanks, while he scanned the sea for sight of a ship, that the possibility nagged him that he was destined, like everyone else, to be alone in the world, cut off from the pretended normal connections his parents and other adults espoused? If not then, then some time shortly after, certainly before he left school, well before his flight to Santiago and his subsequent ignominious return to the fold of the family shipping business in Valparaiso, a veritable lifetime before the few years later when his father and mother were killed in an automobile accident and he had the means to sever all so-called ties and leap into the endless liberti
es and variations afforded by Chance Company.

  The magnetic pull of being someone else, the casual slipping on and slipping off of invented histories, the lure of acting in ways inimical to his upbringing, of consciously subverting and sabotaging his own predilections and moral scruples, had fed and sustained him from one set of acquaintances to another as he shuttled first across the Americas and then to Europe and Greenlea. Here and now, however, was the important thing: a place and time to hold firm and be himself in bed with Sylvia, who, without thinking, was herself, and who would continue to be herself, a continuance which, if he got it right, might include Lucas Jones as a permanent fixture.

  He opened his eyes, knowing he was too wide awake to sleep, yet somehow he must have slept because he was alone. There was nobody beside him. The room was in darkness. The curtains pulled back, 7.05 showed on the clock. ‘Sylvia?’ he called out, fearing she had already left.

  ‘In the kitchen,’ she shouted back. ‘You’ve nothing in the fridge. Don’t you eat here? All I’ve found is coffee.’ She appeared naked in the doorway and turned on the light.

  ‘Come back to bed.’

  She knelt beside him and kissed him. He kissed her breasts and began to pull her down. She moved away. ‘The coffee’s ready. I don’t like sex in the morning. It’s too predictable.’

  ‘You didn’t mind last night. Wasn’t that more conventional?’

  She got up. ‘I’ll bring the coffee. I’m going to shower and dress. You are not unhappy are you?’

  ‘No, I’m not unhappy.’

  She returned with two cups: one large, one small. She handed the small one to Lucas. ‘I’ll drink out of yours,’ she said.

  Lucas propped himself up. The liquid was lukewarm with no sugar. He drained his cup, set it down on the floor and took her free hand in his. ‘Stay. It’s still early. There’s a thick mist outside.’

  ‘For a little while, then I’m going. I want to go home before I start work in the Rag Market.’

  ‘I’ll drive you. Don’t worry.’

  ‘No. I’ll catch a tram. I’d rather go by myself.’ She removed the cups and went back through to the kitchen. A moment later, he heard the splatter of water on the floor of the shower cubicle. His instinct was to follow her in, but a sense of caution held him where he was. No sex in the morning—what kind of regulatory whim was that?

  The flow of water ceased and Sylvia emerged, wrapped in a yellow bath towel. She dried herself, dropped it and began putting on her underwear. Neither of them spoke until she was fully dressed.

  ‘I’m glad you came to Greenlea,’ Lucas said. ‘I count yesterday my lucky day when we met. Why go on with the coffee stall though? I’m sure you could do a lot better. I could help you.’

  Sylvia sat down in the chair where her clothes had lain. The mist outside was as murky as before. ‘It all started at the airport,’ she said, as if he required an explanation. ‘I was waiting for my luggage at the carousel when I noticed a weird person paying me exaggerated attention. She or he, it was difficult to tell which, was done up in a style I’d never seen before. A mishmash of fabrics had been stitched together to form a sort of waist-length tunic. Beneath it, what at first I had taken to be a cherry-red velour skirt proved to be, when the creature moved, a pair of culottes. Then a voice in my ear said, “We are all seen. Some, like our friend over there, however, decide to guarantee our gaze.”

  ‘The speaker was a stocky middle-aged man I remembered seeing on the flight. I asked if he knew him or her. “No,” he replied. “A rara avis, yet see how quickly people look away. They soon take the originality in their stride and resume their own concerns. Talking of which, here comes our luggage.”

  ‘Alongside us, arms and bodies stretched out to pick up cases and bags, but there was no sign of mine. Purely to be polite, I asked him if he was from Greenlea. “Nowadays,” he said, switching into Mirandan and handing me his card. “If you ever need assistance, please call. I’ve often been able to straighten out the little bumps and bends in the road which inevitably await someone like yourself who is trying to get acclimatised.” We didn’t speak anymore. He duly collected his belongings and left. Eventually, my cases arrived. I loaded them on a trolley and wheeled them to customs.

  ‘Through the days and weeks that followed, I never imagined I would look at his card again, let alone take up his offer. I had interpreted his “straighten out” as at best ambiguous, at worst manipulative. If I thought of him at all it was as a shadow, a footnote, which went with my recollection of the strange person’s exotic dress.

  ‘Then two calamities hit me, one soon after the other. Both of them undermined my decision to stay in Greenlea. The relationship I was in turned cold and unresponsive. It became unbearable for the two of us to share the same space. We avoided each other as best we could, but in the end there was no point, so I moved out of his flat. I went to lodge in a succession of cheaper and cheaper dingy hotel rooms where, even in the poorest, I had difficulty in raising the rent. At the same time, the authorities turned down my application for a work permit. Before completely writing off the whole sorry episode as a disaster area and going back home, which I heartily didn’t want to do, I rummaged among the odds and ends I had accumulated, dry cleaning tickets, discount offer vouchers, mini-cab firms’ phone numbers, to unearth the card the man at the airport had given me. It said simply, “Andrew Guthrie, Sunrise Tea & Coffee Co.” The telephone number below belonged to Panalquin.

  ‘When I rang, a woman’s voice answered. Eventually, he came to the phone. Yes, he did remember me. Yes, he was only too glad to help in any way he could. Plucking up courage, I suggested we might meet. No, it would not be possible. He was departing on business for the next few weeks, but, as my situation was urgent, he would take immediate steps to find a solution. I was not to worry. His colleague with whom I had already spoken would ring me back before the day was out.

  ‘Two days later, I had an interview with the personnel manager of Sunrise. I started work the following morning. They advanced me a month’s wages as a loan, which I could pay back interest free over a year. Three days into the job, the firm informed me that my work permit had come through.

  ‘Mr Guthrie’s assistant also found me an attic flat near the Belvedere. The owner was on a long secondment to Senegal, and, as she preferred spending her leave in Australasia or the Caribbean, I had the place to myself. I paid the bills and a nominal rent. Don’t look like that, Lucas. I know what you’re thinking, but until yesterday I hadn’t seen him in the flesh since we crossed paths at the airport. Okay, occasionally I got small gifts, a box of chocolate truffles, a bunch of chrysanthemums, a set of wine glasses along with a short note of best wishes and encouragement, perhaps direct from him or issued on his instruction. He’s helped others in the company in similar ways. They all say the same, men and women. He opens doors. He shows interest in a discreet way but never asks for anything in return. “We have him in our thoughts,” Marta, my workmate, says, “that’s his reward.”’

  Sylvia fell silent. She looked at Lucas pensively and gave him a melancholic smile.

  ‘Screw him,’ Lucas said. ‘I don’t want to hear or know anything more about him.’

  Sylvia rose. ‘I’m going. I enjoyed it. You gave me a bit of yourself. You didn’t need to, but I’m glad you did.’

  ‘No, hang on a minute,’ Lucas slipped out of bed and retrieved his boxer shorts. ‘Don’t go yet. There’s things we need to fix.’

  ‘Say then.’ She looked at her watch. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I want to see you. I want to go on seeing you.’ He was interrupted by her giggles. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Nothing. It always amuses me the way men put on their socks. So earnestly, as if they’d never encountered them before. Don’t pay me any heed. Yes I’ll see you. Come to the Rag Market this evening.’

  The telephone rang in the hallway. Lucas embraced her. She let him hug her, but her body did not respond. ‘Aren’t you going to answer
? I will if you won’t. It’s not right to let it ring while you are here. Someone’s waiting to get in touch.’

  He let her go reluctantly, left the room and picked up the phone.

  ‘Antoine.’

  It was Walter. Annoyance mingled with relief that he had answered it and not Sylvia. ‘Walter, this isn’t a good time.’

  Sylvia pecked his cheek as she went past. He called out to her, but she was already gone. He stared at the closed door.

  ‘Sorry to intrude on your amours, but I won’t be long. You’ll be back in the sack in a twinkling. This is important, however. We’re set to cast the ark adrift, brother. Our appointment in Greenlea is nearly over. Everything tells me the sheaves are going to be full and fat. They’re gathering in for the Old Man’s table. Most of the local philistines are now discomfited. One more attention to detail and we’ll be there. Tomorrow you and I will be on our way. Now listen, brother, we never met Emmet. We didn’t have any truck with him. He was just a bad dream, Antoine. A name they scare children with. He’s no person. You know, the old Polyphemus hoodwink jive.’ He cackled at his own joke.

  ‘I’m not going. I’m staying here.’

  There was a long pause at the other end of the line, then Walter continued in a measured tone, ‘Of course, that’s entirely up to you, but consider this particular place, Antoine. You’ve been jumpy ever since we arrived. It’s only a façade for us. There’s nothing here to sustain us. There’s no life for us behind its doors or between its walls. Look at this fog now. Take it as an omen. You and I need some heat in our limbs. Leave before you’re hurt by some imagined attachment. All right, you needn’t come with me. That’s not what I’m saying. Simply take the advice of an old percentage player.’

  ‘My mind is made up. You go. Antoine Viall now is a thing of the past.’

  ‘Very well then, if I can’t persuade you I’d better say farewell for it’s unlikely we’ll meet again. Tell me your new name if Antoine Viall’s no more. Give me that privilege at least.’