Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  It is a section of the ribbon which is tied around my diary.

  My knee nudges something on the floor. An empty glass, the faint shimmer of brown in the bottom, the smell of Scotch. There must be a bottle somewhere. I reach under the bed to the clink of glass against glass. I don’t want to look. There are six bottles, all empty. Neatly lined up. Something about that neatness catches my heart. As though he had done it just before he passed out.

  He stirs and I sit beside him. His shirt must be unbuttoned at the front because it is twisted, revealing almost all his lower back. All his marks. I place my hand into the black lines, feel the raised ridges. It must have been excruciating, the way he had it done. I remember the look in his eyes when he found my old scars beneath the words on my inner arms. And that was done for pleasure, I had said. Not to hurt, not to punish myself.

  Was it? he said and I thought his eyes filled with dark water.

  I want nothing more in the world than to kiss him. I know what will happen. But I can’t help myself. I kiss the blackest mark, the pool of night below his shoulder blade. The worst one, I always thought. I kiss him and I am right. He wakes and rolls over and looks at me as though he hates me. I can’t bear it. I go to the small window, put my hand aimlessly on the cold glass. The world outside is blurring. But I’m not crying. I refuse to cry.

  His voice crosses my ocean of water. ‘What day is it?’

  ‘Monday.’

  He says, ‘I thought it was Friday.’

  I am sitting with Devlin in the back booth of Café Flora. Outside, the rain falls: steady hard streams with diamond chips.

  I say, ‘It’s about to snow, they say.’

  ‘They always say that.’ His hands are shaking on the wooden tabletop. He puts them under the table.

  ‘It’ll be a white Christmas.’

  The woman at the bar brings us our drinks: coffee for me, two glasses for Devlin: Scotch, neat. He calls her Julietta, thanks her. I see the look on her face. It is not even eleven.

  ‘Bottoms up,’ says Devlin and throws back his first drink. Colour floods in under the grey shadows in his cheeks. He closes his eyes for a minute and rests his hands on the table. They lie still.

  There is no other way to say it so I say it, straight out. ‘What if I tell Mitch I don’t want another case officer?’

  ‘It won’t make any difference.’ He takes a sip, slowly, from the second glass. ‘Mitch doesn’t rate my skills that highly.’

  ‘Tell him I’ve been sick.’

  There is an expression on his face which I would like to think is concern. He’s hesitating. But I know before he does that he’s made his decision about whether to trust me.

  ‘Mitch won’t accept dog-ate-my-homework excuses.’

  ‘Even if it’s the truth?’

  ‘Especially then.’

  The coffee goes down, unpleasantly hot against my throat. ‘Nice to know that the government doesn’t worry about the health of its property.’

  Devlin says, ‘But you’re not sick.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  He tries to stop himself but I see it, the small smile.

  I stretch out my hand, almost touch his arm. ‘Dev . . . ’

  But it’s too much for him. The way out is too easy, somehow. He can’t head towards the light. He’s unable. Dis-abled.

  He moves his arm out of reach. ‘I don’t think you understand,’ he says in that familiar locked-jaw voice. ‘I’ve got other cases. I need to move on.’

  He stares into his glass and whatever reflection is there reinforces his image of himself; the black marks are doubled. He is back behind black bars. I speak, knowing it’s not the right time, knowing I am making a mistake but unable to help myself.

  Dis-abled from help, I say, ‘I don’t want you to go.’

  He wants to make some smart crack – it’s the only fun to be had these days, for both of us – but even with the Scotch, he senses that some turning point is being reached. He’s like a fisherman in a boat on a calm surface, suddenly feeling the tremors beneath, seeing the dark shapes moving below, the small churn of white water, the boat rising . . .

  ‘You want someone to taunt,’ he says.

  ‘Stay a bit longer.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What if I tell Mitch he’ll get what he wants after the party?’

  He forces himself to look directly at me, both hands clenching the glass. There is no light, no reflection in his eyes. Pretty soon the niceties will be well and truly over. I wonder – again – if he remembers anything. I can’t believe that he doesn’t. But if he does, and he won’t admit it, then there is some darker sea inside him than I ever imagined.

  I look at him and I know it’s hopeless. Somehow I deluded myself because of that night. Maybe it was just an excuse. Maybe the way I mark myself isn’t so different from the way he marks himself. Maybe I never cared either.

  Now I think, I’ve swallowed all I can of thorn smoke.

  He finishes his drink, holding the glass over his mouth so the very last drop runs in. The light through the window turns over in the brown trail running down into his mouth. The light disappears into the marks I know are there at the base of his throat. It is all I can do to stop myself reaching out to touch him.

  But he hates me touching him now.

  He says, too loudly, ‘Quitting drinking. It was one of the conditions to coming here. All I have to do to be off the case is tell them I’m drinking. They’ll find out anyway. They’ll ask around.’

  He’s assembling his defences, stacking them up like walls of black logs. ‘You’d better start worrying about yourself.’ I wonder where the man of last night has gone, the one who unlocked the electronic bracelet. Obviously, he’s thought better of it.

  ‘Mitch won’t believe you’ve been sitting around party-planning,’ he says.

  I push the coffee cup away. Here it comes.

  He says, ‘What do you do all day, with Pietr?’

  I wonder if this is a standard move in the manual – accuse the informant of being a slut – or whether he really wants to know. Knowing my luck, it’s the former.

  ‘I don’t see much of him.’ I try to make my tone as neutral as possible. ‘He’s got his work.’ Outside, the rain is thickening. ‘I’m on my own a lot, taking photos. He lets me use his darkroom.’

  Devlin has relaxed. His attention wanders back to his empty glass. He looks to Julietta behind the bar and raises a finger. He’s almost forgotten what we’re talking about. I stand and pick up my bag, my coat, my gloves. Devlin is turning, his face tightening, he senses what’s coming. I stoop to him. We are so close that our mouths are almost touching. I breathe his breath. There are white lines around his nostrils, his mouth. But he doesn’t pull back.

  ‘And we read poetry together,’ I say.

  Devlin stares at me. Now I see reflections in his eye: myself reflected in his eye reflected in my eye reflected in his eye. Endless reflections into infinity. The world doubled, tripled, quadrupled. We are both very small in the pools of black.

  He has stopped breathing. He won’t open his mouth. He won’t give me anything.

  I walk past him, step outside. The grey has lengthened, become solid. The world is changing. It is snowing.

  On the outskirts of the village, the air is white. The outlines of the small hunched stone cottages blur. I put up my hand and an ice crystal – hexagonal with a rainbow of colours caught in every face – turns slowly on my fingertip. It vanishes into a mirrored scale of water which glides slowly to the ground. The sky is a flat grey lake with yellow shiverings in the surface. The sun is a faint silver-white circle trembling behind currents of yellow-silver mist.

  Although there is a mild ache in the joints of my hands I don’t feel the cold. I have a mind for winter, I say to myself. I notice I am walking more slowly than usual but I see no reason why I can’t walk back to Castelmontrano.

  Once past the last cottages, I am right above the sea. The water is a
gun-metal grey now, almost flat, with paler, crusted slabs – trapped water turned into ice sludge – washing back and forth off the coast.

  There is a dark pebbly beach below me; wooden boats are drawn up in neat rows of faded blues and reds. A man-made promontory of dumped rocks and concrete runs like an exclamation mark into the sea; a tall dark figure faces the horizon. I see the graceful raised hand, the long hair beneath the draped cloak: the Virgin Mary blessing the departing sailors. On the shore, the bronze figure of one-eyed Trident glares at the village, his pitchfork raised. Like the sea, he is dark, scarred, implacable.

  A curtain drops over the sea, a veil over the figures. The road before me retreats under the grey veil, there is a slow rumble and crack behind me – I think of a block of ice moving slowly over stars made of steel. I want to turn but my legs are ice. My hands are blurring, disappearing. I am about to enter another country, one I think has been here all along. If you can’t see me does that mean I am invisible?

  A car stops; the passenger-side window rolls down. The beat of the windscreen wipers drowns out the engine. The wheels are draped in glinting spider webs: steel chains.

  Devlin leans across. ‘Get in,’ he says.

  I can’t move my arms. All I can do is hold my hands out, palms up. I am expecting a snide comment but he gets out without a word and picks me up and puts me in the passenger seat. Inside, he turns the heater up and spends the next ten minutes chafing my hands. He won’t look at me but I stare at the dark hair meeting his forehead and I think, We are a long way from the no-touching rule now.

  Just out of Trepani, we cross a rickety bridge. The snow falls more thickly, reducing the landscape to black and white. We take the side road, turn away from the coast. I look back. The sea has dissolved into mist. You can no longer tell where the land is or the ocean or the sky. All the worlds have merged together. No more reflections. No more doubling. Just one big world. Nowhere to hide.

  The landscape streams past: wet fence posts poking out from the white page, dark patches on the road. The trees imprinting the sky with their black hieroglyphics. I lean against the car door. When I lift my head, my cheek leaves a round clear spot where the frost has melted on the glass. Devlin sits, one arm along the window sill, apparently relaxed. But his hands grip the steering wheel and when he coughs, a thin wraith of Scotch drifts through the car.

  ‘I have a mind for winter,’ I whisper to myself.

  Devlin says, ‘Why the hell can’t you speak English?’ He jerks at the steering wheel and the back of the car slides on the slicked road. The dark patches on the road aren’t water. They are ice.

  Another bend is coming up, and a smear of dark blue. The lake. We are closer to Castelmontrano than I had realised.

  ‘I thought you were lying,’ I say. ‘Pretending to look for my brother.’

  ‘I never lied about that. I only lied about knowing whether he was alive or not.’

  Frozen rain rattles on the roof. The road narrows; the cliffs on the right give way to scrubby trees climbing the ridge.

  Devlin says, ‘Even if you know the answer, you have to ask.’

  ‘Like you asked?’ I say. ‘In Borneo?’ I regret the words instantly. ‘I didn’t mean that. I take it back.’

  ‘You can’t take back words,’ he says. ‘They stick to your skin.’ He grimaces.

  ‘You’re starting to sound poetic.’

  ‘Thank God I’m leaving then.’

  I put my hand on the fogged glass of the window. The heat warms the mist away then my hand chills and the mist comes back.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Thank God.’ I see myself standing in the palazzo bedroom, listening to the ticking clock and his breathing.

  I say, ‘That moment just before you woke up in Venice. That was the happiest I had been in years. The happiest ever.’

  He turns to look at me and the car hits ice and slides sideways. A sickening feeling of complete weightlessness as the tyres leave the road. We hit the first tree. The right-hand side of the bonnet crumples up and pushes back towards us: a metal sea, an incoming tide. Unbalanced, we jolt sideways, sliding down the bank. We hit another tree, the car spins around. I see the lake: a thin layer of glittering crystals, bigger than the sun. Devlin shouts as we hurtle through scrubby bush, shattered ice falling over us like tinsel. I just have time to wonder why the snow isn’t slowing us when the car is airborne again. We twist – the weight of the engine pulling us nose-down – and plummet over the bank. We hit the glittering surface. Ice rears up on either side in crystal shards. The red-veined black water falls over us and we sink.

  There is water in my skin, under my fingernails, caught in bubbles under my eyelashes. There is water in my eyes. Water presses against my mouth, my ears, my clothes are filled with water, spreading out behind me like galleon sails, expanding, lifting. I am being dragged out of the car.

  I see Devlin behind the wheel. He is stunned, shaking his head from side to side, water escaping in small silver bubbles from his mouth, his eyes closed. He doesn’t realise where he is. The usual hard line of his mouth is relaxed – the only time that happens is when he is sleeping. He is sleeping in the water and his mouth is beginning to open.

  Above me, the waterlogged sun glows behind the world; the reeds murmur by the riverbank. The water plucks me away from Devlin who is trapped behind glass, pearls drifting from his mouth.

  The car falls slowly through the dark water, the open passenger door making it turn slightly, as though it were pivoting on a wing. Pressure builds in my throat, my ears, behind my eyes. In my lungs. My eyes feel dry from not blinking. All this water and my eyes feel dry.

  I catch the door, haul myself into the car. He is slumped over the steering wheel. I pull at the seatbelt – it doesn’t give and I am suddenly conscious of how much my chest hurts. I feel bubbles spasm in my heart, I am shaking. I wrench at the seatbelt. In another moment I will have to go to the surface. I can’t leave him. The spasms run up my throat, I convulse. I have to open my mouth. I look into the back seat. There is another shadow there, a presence, a man with pale hair. He puts his hand into the shadow of my hand, puts his hand on the shadow of my shoulder and urges me on. I jab frantically at the belt release panel. The car is growing darker. I put my hand over my mouth to stop myself from gasping.

  I pull at the seatbelt. It comes free. I grab Devlin, kicking backwards. I put my feet on the outside panel, hauling him. He hangs, too heavy – I will never be able to pull him to the surface – then his mouth opens – air and water rush out in a silver stream. He kicks hard and comes free. I place my right hand in his hand like a shadow and we rise.

  In the shallow water, he half pushes me, half throws me up the bank. I feel him fall away and when I turn, he is on his knees. He is so still I think the water is already hardening around him, holding him upright. I push my way through, cracking sounds all around me, grab him. I open my mouth but no sound comes out.

  He hunches next to me, eyes closed, chips of ice trapped in his lashes. I pull at his jacket, my hands shaking so much I can barely grasp the leather. I put my hands around his throat, try to find a pulse. ‘Are you alive?’ I shout. My voice emerges as a faint breeze. ‘Are you alive?’

  His lips never move but from somewhere I am sure he says, ‘No.’

  He is shaking but not as much as me. My body literally sways from side to side. I can’t feel my hands or feet and it is an effort – it is like pushing a mechanical toy – to even breathe. To even be able to help your own body. I hit my leg with my hand. The blow is feeble because my hand is trembling but I sense contact. And now, a rank smell. Something chemical in the water.

  Even as I watch, streams of snow fall, beginning to cover us. We are disappearing into the landscape.

  ‘We need shelter.’ His voice sounds a long way off. ‘Fire.’

  I look towards the frozen horizon: nothing but the disappearing trees. No sound but water roaring in my ears. I search for any glimpse of tiles or wood lying against the gra
in of the forest.

  He has closed his eyes. My hands slip into his black marks. ‘I see it,’ I shout, my voice a whisper. ‘A hut. Come on.’

  We climb the white-patched bank. When the snow hits our skin, it is soft and damp. ‘It’s warm,’ I say to Devlin. ‘It’s a beautiful day.’ We are half crouching, half supporting each other. Our feet won’t grip the ground and we keep falling.

  We climb through the trees.

  You never forget those moments when the odds change, when you know you will live. In one moment, across the black plain, a child with short dark hair is saying her mantra: No coward soul is mine. In the next, I think I see the hut. Then I do see it: the lapping of slate in the patch-worked ground. He sees it too and we change course, skirting a mouldy pile of logs, slipping on the wet ground, smelling the damp corroded leaves, the hollow cavities of dead animals. I am just thinking that it definitely feels warmer when skeins of mist begin rising from fissures in the ground, in long languid strands which part and re-join, almost stroking the air. A broken voice rattles next to me. Devlin forces out words through teeth clenched to stop them chattering. It sounds like ‘oil’ but he gives up, defeated.

  In the hut, wrapped in old blankets while our clothes dry over the chairs next to the fire, he says to me, ‘I hate it that you saved me. Hate it.’ He wouldn’t look at me as we changed, sits as far as he could from me in front of the flames.

  He fumbles through his jacket. He takes out the hip flask and gives it to me with an odd expression. All I taste is bracken water, then faint warmth. I hold the flask out to him.

  He looks nauseous. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’ve had enough.’

  He leans on his knee, gazing into the fire, playing with the slender metal hook he had used to pick the lock on the door. ‘The fissures, they remind me . . . I flew over Iraq when the oil wells were alight. After the first war, when Saddam was retreating and he lit the Kuwait wells. Huge streams of fire shooting up into the sky, black smoke spuming out of the ground.’ He puts the hook back on his keychain. ‘We had to keep climbing to avoid the flames. At fifteen thousand feet we were barely above it. We were in an army cargo plane and the noise was so loud you couldn’t hear what anyone was saying over the vibrations. But I heard a hissing sound.’