Damascus

by Richard Beard

  She carried two chairs through into the hall. He took one of them, trying to help, and she made it clear he should sit on it exactly where he was. Only after he sat down did she position her own chair, facing his but far enough away to make them have to project their voices, like actors.

  She then remembered the tea, which Henry took as a good sign. It meant she wanted him to stay, and while she poured, he allowed himself the luxury of imagining her as a child, as a series of smiling photographs. She was in vivid colour and very beautiful, usually on holiday, lighting up the seashores of Britain. It was a shame she’d put her chair so far away.

  ‘Miss Burns,’ Henry said, clearing his throat. ‘Miss Burns, I was hoping we might enjoy some lunch together, outside.’

  'I'm very busy,’ Hazel said. ‘I have a lot of work to do.’

  A man came in. He was also carrying a chair, which he put down close to Miss Burns. He was wearing a suit which flapped open and a brown shirt with no tie. His hair needed something doing to it. He brought Henry his mug of tea and shook his hand.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Spencer Kelly, I live here. Pleased to meet you.’

  He was Spencer Kelly, a marine broker at Lloyds (his suit). No, not even close. He was Spencer Kelly, an interviewer for the British Forces Broadcasting Service (his voice), or a lifelong train buff and leading opponent of the government’s plans to privatise British Rail (his refusal to make small talk). But none of these harmless lives seemed to fit him. He was Spencer Kelly, Hazel’s lover. That couldn’t be right. He was Spencer Kelly, who fell horribly while climbing near Mochnant, who made Henry nervous and when Henry was nervous he put his hands in his pockets. He slipped his fingers across the consoling plastic envelope of powder, wishing he knew what to do with it, and how it could help him.

  In the meantime he tried to break the ice (with Spencer Kelly, tragic victim of a Syrian-backed terrorist attack), with some man-talk. He asked whether anybody knew the price of a professional footballer these days? No response. Had they heard about the Chinese women runners who drank a potion brewed by their coach, Ma Junren, which turned them overnight (in one fell swoop) into world-beaters? They had.

  'In the 3,000 metres.’

  ‘And the 10,000 metres,’ Spencer said.

  ‘And the marathon, I think. I read it in the paper.’

  'I think we all did.’

  Other people. If everything wasn’t just right it was always their fault. Them and their long intricate lives which refused to make way for his.

  It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, in Lowestoft or Thurrock or Kinloss or Solihull, in Llanharan or Nottingham or Mangotsfield or Dewsbury, Spencer Kelly is a convicted criminal. Paying his debt to society he is working unpaid as a steward at a qualifying gala for the BT-BSAD national paralympic swimming championships. There is a single area of banked seating half-full of spectators, many of them children, but Spencer chooses a seat next to a blonde girl with light brown eyes who seems to be alone. He guesses she’s about nineteen, the same as him.

  For a while, exercising caution, he just sits there. He lets her get used to his presence while opposite them a huge timing clock by Seiko or Brietling or Heuer times the swimmers. It has no numbers and when the single hand smoothly passes its highest point, at the top where the twelve and the sixty should be, it’s as if time just starts up again without anything meaningful like a minute or an hour having passed.

  Spencer clears his throat, and then nudges the girl with his elbow.

  ‘Haven’t we met somewhere before?’

  She leans away and looks at him down her nose.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ she says, very well-spoken.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Spencer says. ‘I thought we had.’

  Spencer blames Hazel for this general discomfort he feels around other women, who all suffer by comparison. Over the phone she is so perfectly disembodied that he can easily imagine her embodying perfection. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work both ways, and she keeps phoning him up and telling him how dreadful it is to sleep with arts students or course professors or the younger brother of her next-door neighbour. Spencer then suffers melancholic visions of her brown hair splayed across a pillow and her glistening violated eye. Such thoughts do him no good at all, and he’s decided that the best remedy is to seek out proper contacts of his own, girls with bodies. This one, the blonde one, suddenly turns and asks him if he makes a habit of talking to strangers.

  ‘Definitely not,’ Spencer says.

  ‘Me neither.’

  She looks longingly down at the pool. ‘Did you ever want to be a swimmer?’

  Spencer shakes his head. The girl frowns. Spencer nods his head emphatically, meaning my mistake of course I wanted to be a swimmer. She purses her lips. Spencer sits on his hands, and wishes she was Russian. She is now watching a well-built, casually-dressed young man by the pool-side. He can’t be much older than Spencer, but he acts a lot more grown-up.

  ‘I’m doing community service,’ Spencer says. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Rob a bank?’

  ‘Poisoned someone who made fun of me,’ Spencer says, and that makes her look. ‘Only took a few nights in the library.’

  As it happens. Reference section. He found out how to make a dangerous poison called ricin with castor-oil seeds, mixed up a non-fatal dose and attached it as a

  pellet to the end of an umbrella. Then he stabbed his enemy in the Menswear section of Marks & Spencer. Or it might have been Simpson’s or British Home Stores. He forgets.

  'It can’t be true then. You’d remember it if it was true.’

  ‘I was very excited at the time.’

  ‘How were you caught?’

  'I turned myself in. The police said they’d be lenient because I wasn’t a gang.’

  'I was once in trouble with the police,’ the girl says. ‘At college once.’

  ‘Is that your boyfriend?’

  She is still peering down at the big blond grown-up by the side of the pool, who is helping a competitor from the water. It’s the girl who’s just won the 100-metres breast-stroke or the 200-metres backstroke, or possibly both. She doesn’t have the use of her legs, which makes her swimming and winning quite phenomenal.

  ‘He belongs to the swimmer,’ Spencer’s brown-eyed sad sexy neighbour says. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Spencer says, and because there’s no race immediately scheduled and no urgent stewarding to be done, he and the girl find themselves testing each other out with some basic questions, because nobody wants to be stuck with a psycho. They start with what’s your name?

  ‘Why?’ she says.

  ‘Well,’ Spencer says, ‘it’s generally considered standard practice. When two people meet they swap names. For future reference.’

  ‘I see,’ she says. ‘But the name itself doesn’t really matter?’

  ‘I don’t suppose it does, no.’

  ‘My name could be Emma, for example.’

  'If you wanted. It would have to stay the same though, or it doesn’t work.’

  ‘Or Grace. Or Anita. Any preferences?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll be Emma then. You be River.’

  'Fine, whatever you say.’

  She’s definitely good-looking, in an alluring blonde sort of way, and Spencer now knows from this name conversation that she’s also a bit of a nutcase. It’s always best to find out early on. He tries her out on her age and whether her parents are married and who’s her favourite famous person. And does she think that life is more about the pursuit of pleasure or the evasion of pain?

  Putting that one aside for a moment, Emma answers the other questions almost normally. Her parents are still married, she says, unlikely though it seems these days, and because she’s obviously telling the truth Spencer resists making up a story about his adoption. He was going to hint that his real father was a roguish
actor from the black and white era, Rock Hudson or Marcello Mastroianni or Ronald Coleman. But instead he surprises himself by telling her the truth. He hasn’t seen his mother since she remarried to a twenty-eight-year-old homosexual Kurd who would otherwise have been deported to Turkey. They met at the airport. Spencer’s Dad went completely berserk. He was at work, carrying several boxes of furniture belonging to Dirk Bogarde. He smashed them all up into little pieces and became the second member of his family to experience non-voluntary community service.

  ‘He must really have loved her,’ Emma says.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Well he must have, otherwise he wouldn’t have minded.’

  The idea that his father might actually love his mother comes as something of a shock to Spencer. He finds it embarrassing, as if on Christmas afternoon in the middle of a Disney video they’d come across a wide-eyed, softly-spoken fuck.

  ‘Brothers?’ Emma asks. ‘Sisters?’

  And why not? Spencer suddenly goes sad, or pretends to be sad. He hardly knows the difference any more, and this Emma hasn’t known him long enough to tell. He once had a sister. He sees in great detail the hatched white lacing on his trainers. His sister died in a car crash. It still sounds like a chat-up line.

  ‘If I think about her today,’ Spencer says, ‘then somehow she’s still alive, today while I’m thinking about her. Do you think that’s right?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘Except whenever I remember her she’s always doing the same things. Playing football. Running. Boring for her really. I’m going to be an actor,’ Spencer adds, and the girl looks at him sharply.

  ‘You’re an actor?’

  ‘Not yet. I will be. I want to be.’

  ‘You’re at college?’

  ‘I work in a warehouse.’

  ‘I know someone who works in a warehouse.’

  They both look at each other, but no, Spencer’s never going to get anywhere until he learns to put Hazel out of mind. ‘Lots of people work in warehouses,’ he says, and Emma nods her head vigorously (yes, yes they do) and then smiles, making Spencer think things are really swinging along now. ‘I’m only there until I’ve saved enough money to go to London. Then I’m going to be an actor.’

  Emma laughs, which isn’t kind of her. ‘Let me guess,’ she says. ‘You go to London, audition, get discovered, become famous.’

  ‘Well yes,’ Spencer says, ‘and I might go to College in the evenings.’

  ‘Boys,’ she laughs. ‘You’re all the same. Every one an overnight sensation, tomorrow night.’

  ‘Well pardon me,’ Spencer says, thinking he shouldn’t have said that about College. It seems unlikely that Tom Cruise or River Phoenix or Keanu Reeves ever went to a City Tech, even though it’s just a way of passing the time until he’s singled out for something special. It’s to keep him occupied while he waits for the Act of God which is owed to him, but this isn’t the easiest of things to explain to a stranger in a swimming pool. What started out as a good idea, making friends with the nice-looking blonde girl, is quickly turning into another humiliation Spencer may never forget. He tries to change the subject:

  ‘So what plans have you got for your life then?’

  ‘I’m going to be a lawyer or a doctor.’

  11/1/93 MONDAY 13:48

  Henry was almost the exact opposite of Spencer. He looked at her all the time, as if hoping to see something extra which required great concentration. Hazel stood up and went to the telephone table where she’d left The Woman in a Car with Glasses and a Gun. His eyes followed her, without blinking. And again (unlike Spencer) she could tell that Henry was always thinking about tomorrow.

  He smiled at her, showing off his brown tooth. He asked her what the book was about.

  ‘There’s a lady in it,’ Hazel said.

  Looking at his tooth was only centimetres away from looking at his lips, wondering what it was like to kiss him. She looked at the tooth. The lady has a car,’ Hazel said. ‘She wears glasses. She carries a gun.’

  ‘You are very beautiful,’ Henry said, and Hazel glanced across at Spencer, who managed a frown and not much else. No, that wasn’t fair. He also crossed his arms, and then his legs. Hazel went to put the book back on the table, then found she wasn’t happy with the idea of Henry looking at her from behind. She turned round again, facing him.

  ‘More beautiful than I expected,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t expected you to be so young.’ He smiled again. ‘Or so blonde.’

  ‘Spencer was just the same,’ Hazel said, and with his frown wavering at about sixty percent compression Spencer told Henry how much he must be looking forward to his flight back to Japan. Henry’s gaze never once left Hazel, and she was increasingly keen to escape. She wasn’t frightened, and she didn’t want to label Henry as something he wasn’t, but she’d also quite like a few moments on her own without being stared at. She surprised herself by saying she was going to make some soup. She surprised everybody.

  'I'll help you,’ Henry said.

  ‘No, you stay here. You can have a chat with Spencer.’ The two men both looked at her. ‘You can talk some more about sport,’ she suggested, and before either of them could think of dissuading her, she’d already left them to it.

  Back in the kitchen, Hazel felt an enormous sense of relief. She avoided examining this feeling too closely by keeping herself busy, unnecessarily so, and it wasn’t long before she found herself reading the nutritional information on the backs of packets of various brands of soup. Although it was probably useful to know that they all contained less chicken than salt, she’d been hoping for more practical types of information, like how should she deal with a dangerous maniac and was feeding him this soup recommended by the manufacturer? She already knew the answer: not everyone was a maniac. Life would be unliveable if she thought like that.

  There was no need to be frightened. He was most likely and most of the time a decent and honourable human being, like everyone else. She wasn’t going to condemn him just because he had limited small talk and a funny tooth. He was certainly very polite. And if she really thought there was something wrong with him she wouldn’t be making him lunch. She didn’t think. So then why was she hoping Spencer would do something spontaneous and male and perhaps even violent, securing their instant rescue from any danger? Only these days she wasn’t allowed to think like that, not if she ever wanted an invitation to the Woman of the Year lunch.

  She had to make up her mind. Henry wasn’t dangerous or even unpleasant; he was a minor inconvenience in the middle of their day. All the same, he might be dangerous. He had the fixed gaze and the funny tooth. He had the patterned sweater. He’d tracked her first to her house and now here, although admittedly without any obvious axe. Hazel wished there was some kind of infallible test for murderous psychopaths, but in the absence of such a useful invention she was still convinced it was best not to be frightened. This wasn’t a conviction ever likely to be supported by newspapers, or television. Instead, with everything which so palpably could go wrong in life (brought daily to everyone’s attention), it was more an act of faith, in God or in good luck or in her observation that for most people things turn out bearably in the end.

  All the same, she and Spencer would have been safer staying in bed.

  Miss Burns, who knew everything, had deliberately left him alone but with someone else in an unfurnished entrance hall, having offered him no encouragement except for a Cromer, My Kind of Town mug of cooling tea. An uneasy thought occurred to him: she knew all along that as soon as he had his diploma he’d have to leave the country. She didn’t want him and she would never love him and that’s why she’d left him alone with Spencer Kelly, a manual worker shot to death after he attacked his employer with a knife. What kind of involved madness was that? Why did the lives of other people complicate themselves so thoroughly? Still nervous, Henry had one hand in his pocket. He pressed and moulded the packet of powder between his fingers, wondering who to poison first
.

  Ridiculous. Preposterous. Drink the famous British tea. Think like the people you have chosen to live among. Or failing that, remember the difference between thinking a thing and doing it, and behave like everyone else. He didn’t, anyway, want to poison anyone. Except perhaps himself, because if Miss Burns didn’t love him then it wasn’t worth living.

  It was all getting out of hand again. Of course she could be persuaded to love him. It was destined. The very fact that he was here was proof of it, and Henry excluded any other possibility by narrowing everything down to the present moment. It was something he could always be sure of. He had a cup of tea. It was in a mug which said Cromer, My Kind of Town. The present moment, he thought, sifting through his collection of idiomatic phrases, is my cup of tea. And the wall which is painted a cream colour. And arriving with a big smile, carrying in both arms a fruit bowl full of water, a small girl-child, life undecided.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. 'This is my new fish. Try and guess his name.’

  She was followed in by an old man, and both Henry and Spencer stood up. Spencer introduced them all and then made it clear he was leaving.

  ‘This is Henry Mitsui,’ he said. ‘He has lots of interesting things to say about long-distance running.’

  Henry watched him leave, stared between his shoulder-blades knowing he was going to join Miss Burns. The treacherous Spencer Kelly, deservedly fed a lethal speedball of drags in a nightclub toilet, left to convulse and die on a pavement somewhere, like America. The old man was asking him a question.