Damascus

by Richard Beard

  Is it raining or is it not? Make up your mind. It was a godforsaken country in which even the weather was indecisive. Mr Mitsui, Vice-President (Design) of the multinational Toyoko corporation, had spent the kind of day from which international promotion was supposed to have made him exempt. He’d walked much further in a strange and reputedly dangerous city than could ever be considered sensible, and the woman at the school had been especially tiresome. Once they’d established that he was genuinely Henry’s father (‘the pushy oriental with the evil tooth’), she’d made him agree that all men in general but his son in particular were a danger to women. Mr Mitsui sighed and smiled and agreed, and then asked about Miss Burns.

  ‘Poor harassed woman.’

  ‘I’m an old man,’ Mr Mitsui said. 'I mean her no harm. We have to find my son.’

  'I couldn’t agree more,’ the secretary said, and because she was confident she knew everything of importance about the school, its distance-learning side-line, and almost everything else, she was able to tell Mr Mitsui where to find Miss Burns.

  He pushed at the doorbell again, almost relieved that nobody was home. If the house was empty then there was nobody for Henry to hurt. Unless he’d already done it. It started raining more persistently, and Mr Mitsui turned up the collar of his blazer, at last conceding that he’d failed as a parent. He must have done, or he wouldn’t be here, doing this. He’d failed to prepare Henry for the world as it was without the allowances of childhood, where he couldn’t have everything he wanted, and not everything was possible. Real life wasn’t about constant gratification or great adventures or strong-willed triumphs against the odds. It was this street now, where Mr Mitsui could see any number of people who by the end of the day wouldn’t be elected mayor of New York or Salesperson of the Year, who wouldn’t be engaged or married or announcing the birth of a child. Real life was all these people not blown up or shot, not exhausted from international contest, not murdered or mugged or with meningitis. Real life was all the accidents that never happened. It was all the people daily unreported. And, it should now be added, all the doors unopened.

  He heard the latch turn from the inside.

  It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, in Omagh or Haverhill or Lancaster or Runcom, in Newbridge or Exmouth or Hereford or Darlington, Hazel Burns is sitting cross-legged in the bed of her rented studio, wearing her coat, surrounded by a mess of exploded newspapers. She answers her portable phone. She says,

  ‘Dublin is not in the United Kingdom, no. Yes, Belfast is. It’s a long story.’

  Or she says,’ Yes, there are women priests in the Church of England, and no, the Maastricht Treaty won’t change that.’

  Or she says, ‘Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, and Welsh.’

  She has developed a particular voice to use on the telephone in her professional capacity as a distance-learning teacher. She tries to project an image of herself as older, spectacle-wearing, with perhaps her only vanity some long greying hair gathered in a bun. Not wanting to seem overbearing, she tries to add to her voice a kind of cat-owning warmth, hoping to sound something like an old-fashioned librarian or an earnest female egghead, with the endearingly-shaped head of an egg. It also occurs to her, now that she spends so much time on the phone, that she might be trying to recapture the satisfaction of the long conversations she once enjoyed with Spencer. Back in the good old days, she means, in the permanent golden age of younger than now. At 23 she is suddenly old enough for nostalgia, and she can remember or regret certain events as clearly as if they happened today. Almost all her memories, at her age, include her parents.

  Her father, despite being elected Salesperson of the Year ‘93, and in something of an embarrassment for the Institute of Sales and Marketing Managers, is being investigated for fraud. It’s alleged that he pays bribes to the Italian government or exports aphrodisiacs or sells instant soups labelled chicken which contain more salt than meat. He claims innocence, protesting that none of these things are uncommon, even though Hazel and many thousands of others think he’s rather missing the point. Her mother, at last, has decided that marriage isn’t like a sports team or a place safe for diversity or two nations one capital. Nor is it even very much like an identity card. Without question, it’s a hell on earth.

  At times like these, Hazel often finds herself nostalgic for the car crash, and how brilliant her mother was. She wishes she’d been old enough to appreciate it at the time, and now that she is older she does appreciate it more, and from now on always will do whenever she remembers it.

  The phone rings, and someone else is about to learn something at a safe distance.

  ‘The meadow pipit is brown. It’s the red-flanked bluetail which is red.’

  Or, ‘Yes, that’s right. Only talking can end 800 years of violence.’

  Or, ‘It’s extracted from castor-oil seeds and was widely used by the Bulgarian secret service.’

  But if someone were to ask her, thinking it a simpler question, whether her own real life had started, she wouldn’t know how to answer. Avoiding the troublesome contact of life she is rewarded with a portable telephone, the mobility to live wherever she wants, and enough money to pay for reference books and her own correspondence courses for a Master of Arts or a Bachelor of Science or a PhD, in English Literature or Marine Biology or Psychology.

  Using her experience as a movie researcher she spends most of her time travelling round the country gathering information, wanting to believe that the more facts she collects about life the less inexpert shell become at living. Every day she reads The Times and the Telegraph and the Sun and the Mirror. She also skims magazines like Foreign Affairs or Private Eye or Strand Magazine or Country Life. With time on her hands, she often attempts to catch the mood abroad by reading an-Nahar or the Corriere della Sera or the world’s most sinister newspaper, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. It makes her feel as if she’s somehow exploring all the variety of the real world, as it is now. She snatches at it, trying to catch it on the way past, and even as it slips through her fingers she can’t help wondering if this is what it means to live life to the full.

  She’s hoping that the more she leams the less likely she is to be frightened, and like her mother. But then how much does she need to know before she finds out what’s truly frightening? She leams facts about birds and trees and flowers and kings and queens, hoping to subdue the world with knowledge. But it isn’t subdued, or never stays that way for long. Or she forgets what she leams, and is no better off than before.

  Her students are rarely rewarding. She has aspiring professional sportsmen from Asia or Africa or Australasia, who only enrol for their resident’s permit. Or she has the bored children of the international rich. Some of them take it far too seriously, but it doesn’t really matter. There’s no risk involved because in the distanced world of telephones and computers no-one is anywhere. Or everyone is everywhere. Or nowhere. Wherever.

  To maintain a meaningful connection with the real world, Hazel likes to call Spencer. Nostalgically, she always uses card-phones, although she now only has five phonecards left from her original and mostly stolen collection. She asks Spencer what she should do.

  ‘When?’

  ‘When my phonecards run out.’

  ‘Steal some more.’

  ‘Stealing is wrong.’

  ‘Then come to London,’ he says. The streets are paved with gold.’

  ‘Do you want to meet up?’

  ‘This is London,’ he says, making Hazel think he hasn’t heard her properly. ‘Anything can happen.’

  And maybe it can. Maybe not all Londoners are like the ones she met at the film company, and it’s possible to live in London without becoming an idiot. Perhaps relationships can begin to mean more than her transitory affairs with men for whom she holds out so little hope she even supplies the condoms. But London seems very close, and because distance-learning is like an open admission that things happen elsewhere, Hazel is increasingly tempted by trav
el for its own sake. She imagines herself abroad, in poor and dangerous places, expecting to learn something from the distress of others. Or she imagines herself anywhere she wants to be in Europe, now that we’re all Europeans and all of it’s supposed to be home. Eventually, however, she manages to resist the old lie that life abroad is more real. It’s just that the stories there are less familiar, and therefore harder to ignore.

  She sits up in bed in the middle of the afternoon with her coat on, even though it isn’t very cold. She spreads her last five phonecards over the red tartan blanket. Her mobile phone rings, and she decides it’s time to take her coat off.

  11/1/93 MONDAY 16:12

  What’s the point of living if you can’t have what you want?

  It was Henry’s shot, and this had been going on for some time now, so that Henry had the impression he’d taken more shots than he could count. How difficult could it be? Both men felt that by the law of averages the red ball should have fallen into the pocket by now, so the only sign Hazel’s God had given them was that he wasn’t going to give them a sign. And what kind of a sign was that?

  Since his last visit to the table Henry had made a shocking discovery. Whether the red ball fell into the pocket or not was genuinely beyond his control. This wasn’t a sport, because neither he nor Spencer had any skill. Hazel was therefore right. If his love for her was destined as he believed, then this game of billiards could provide as convincing a sign as any other. If their marriage was inscribed somewhere before the event, then nothing could stop it happening. So why had he missed the first time round? And the next and the next? He wanted his mug of poisoned chicken soup back, because it represented a much more simple equation. If Hazel refused him, then life wasn’t worth living.

  He left the cue on the table, neatly side-stepped Hazel, and picked up one of the mugs. ‘I don’t think this is working,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to lose you on a game of chance.’ - It’s not a game of chance,’ Hazel said. She pushed him aside and picked up the other mug.

  ‘Say you’ll come with me,’ Henry said. ‘He’s missed as often as I have.’

  ‘It’s your shot.’

  ‘Or I’ll drink the soup. It doesn’t frighten me.’

  Hazel faced him squarely, and it was as if the two of them had been photographed auditioning for a gun-fight. Someone later, an advertiser perhaps, had replaced the guns in their hands with plain white mugs, full of chicken soup.

  ‘You better take your shot, Henry,’ Hazel said. ‘Or it’ll be me who drinks it.’

  Henry Mitsui looked puzzled. Somewhere behind him, Spencer looked much worse. He’d worked out just before Henry what Hazel was about to say:

  ‘Well how do you know which mug has the poison in it?’

  Oh Jesus Christ Mary and Micah, Mr Mitsui thought (remembering the phrase from his time in New Jersey), another fine mess. A stand-off involving mugs of soup. A man ealled William Welsby, leading him through the house, had tried to explain about the poison while the little girl joined in with something about a goldfish. They’d forgotten to mention there was someone else involved, a tall miserable black-haired chap in a suit.

  ‘Henry,’ Mr Mitsui called down to him. ‘Come out of that swimming pool at once.’

  Henry looked up, and the shine in his eyes was familiar to his father - it meant no. It also meant he wanted Mr Mitsui to sort everything out, maybe pay somebody some money so that Henry could have exactly what he wanted. Not this time, son. Pay attention to the young lady. She’s talking to you.

  ‘Well go on then,’ Hazel said. ‘Drink up. I will if you will.’

  Henry looked at his soup. There was a thickening white skin across the surface, hiding any powder which might have stayed on top. Nor was there any obvious residue sticking to the sides of the mug. There was therefore no way of telling if this was the poisoned soup, or if Hazel had it. Well there was another way. He could drink it.

  ‘You take the first sip,’ Hazel said, ‘and then I’ll match you all the way down, swallow for swallow.’

  ‘But yours might be the poisoned one,’ Henry said.

  ‘So then I’ll be poisoned. But how can I poison myself to death if we’re destined to live happily ever after?’

  ‘Bad things happen,’ Henry said.

  ‘Exactly. That’s my point exactly. So how dare you force your way into this house and tell me you know what’s good for me, or for you, and what destiny has revealed to you?’

  'That’s what I think.’

  'Then drink up.’

  ‘Don’t drink it,’ Mr Mitsui called down. ‘Come up here, Henry. We’ll leave these good people alone. We ought to make a start for the airport.’

  ‘Drink it,’ Hazel said. ‘Because if you refuse to take your turn at the billiard table, we aren’t going to get married. And if we aren’t going to get married you said your life wasn’t worth living.’

  For the first time in two years, Henry stumbled over his English words. ‘I don’t want to drink it,’ he said. ‘I want you to marry me.’

  ‘Stop it, Henry,’ his father said. ‘Stop it right now. You’re putting the fear of God into these people. You’re putting the fear of God into me.'

  Henry couldn’t do it. He thought he could do it, but there turned out still to be a difference between thinking and doing, and he didn’t really want to kill himself. More importantly, Hazel might have the poisoned soup and he definitely didn’t want to see her poisoned. That was never one of the lives he’d imagined for the woman he loved.

  Taking very small steps, he made his way down into the deep end, his body slanted backwards against the slope. He left his mug against the far wall, and walked back up to the billiard table.

  ‘What else could I have done?’ he asked Hazel. ‘What did I have to do to convince you I was serious?’

  ‘Take your shot, Henry.’

  He took the cue from the table and hit the white ball towards the red. The red skewed off towards the pocket. It missed.

  Henry and Mr Mitsui stood in a gap between parked cars waiting for a taxi. It had stopped raining but the daylight was fading, which made it feel like rain again. To anyone else, perhaps, it was just another anonymous late autumn weekday mid-afternoon, soft and grey and after-rain. But even that wasn’t certain. People turned out to be more surprising than the lives Henry had stolen to describe them, just as the world was more complicated than the facts supposed to explain it.

  Henry looked at nothing and the tarmac. He understood exactly what Hazel had been trying to tell him with the soup. She wanted him to doubt himself, and it had worked. He couldn’t risk her drinking the poison, because he’d made the ricin himself and she would have died within the hour. If, however, they were genuinely destined to be together, he would have been certain it couldn’t have happened. He wouldn’t have been frightened of her dying. And if they were going to live happily ever after, as he liked to imagine, he should also have been confident of winning the game of billiards. But he’d been scared of losing, and suddenly nothing seemed so certain any more. Accidents happen, she’d reminded him, and if not now in an empty swimming pool from a soup full of poison then tomorrow or the next day murdered by terrorists or falling from a cliff edge or crashing a car. She could be a victim of any of the familiar disasters suffered daily by someone, somewhere, and this possibility was a long way from the certain bliss Henry had once imagined. She’d shown him that uncertainty was everywhere in life, and therefore it was an important part of being in love. (He wiped a tear away from his eye and onto his sweater.) If he couldn’t abide this uncertainty, then it could never have been love.

  ‘It’s alright,’ his father said, putting an arm round Henry’s shoulders. ‘Life has a habit of adding day to day. Memories fade. Life moves on.’

  Back in the pool Spencer and Hazel looked up at the glass panels in the roof. Then across at each other, the width of the billiard table between them. They’d both seen it. The daylight was fading away.

  Spencer said
: ‘It’s time for Grace’s bus.’

  ‘I’ll take her,’ William said. He and Grace were holding hands by the shallow end steps. ‘We’ll go together.’

  ‘No you won’t,’ Spencer said. ‘You know what you’re like.’

  ‘William will take her, Spencer,’ Hazel said.

  ‘William won’t get anywhere near the bus stop. You’ve seen how he is. He’s a sick man.’

  ‘He’s better now. This is more important.’

  ‘Grace is my niece.’

  Spencer looked up for some support, but hand-in-hand Grace and William were already leaving, had already left.

  Hazel said: ‘Well?’

  ‘Let’s go back to bed.’

  ‘We haven’t finished the game.’

  Spencer squeezed his head between his hands, and then shook out his hair. ‘There are people coming to look at the house.’

  They won’t come now. It’s late, Spencer. It’s nearly dark.’ She took the white ball from where Henry Mitsui’s shot had left it and put it back behind the line at the other end of the table from the red. Spencer still didn’t pick up the cue. He said:

  ‘You can’t force God to intervene.’

  ‘Can’t you?’

  ‘We have to make the decision ourselves.’

  ‘And how long do you think it would take you to decide, left to yourself and your dreams of the perfect woman? It’s your shot, Spencer.’

  ‘You can’t force God to intervene.’

  ‘Maybe courage is knowing that.’

  She held out the cue to him and he took it. He placed the white right in the middle of the table and fired it at the red as hard as he could. The red missed the first pocket and rebounded to the opposite corner where it missed again. It lost energy as it travelled the middle of the table before dropping sweetly into the centre of the centre pocket, like an apple.

  ‘At last,’ Hazel said. ‘God or the gods intervene.’

  She came up behind Spencer and hugged him, her hands crossing over his chest, her cheek pressed against the hollow between his shoulder-blades.