Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories

by Barnacle Bill the Spacer

  Through the French doors I could see a corner of the building that housed police headquarters on Tewfik Square, and facing it, reddish-brown under the arc lights, the colossal statue of Rameses II, marooned on a traffic island, ruler now of a tiny country of parched grass and chipped cement, a steady stream of traffic coursing around it.

  ‘That’s why you called,’ Claire said. ‘Maybe you’re falling in love a little bit, and you wanted…what do you say? A reality check. Well, don’t worry, Danny. The world’s still just like it was this morning. The big ones still eat the little ones, and you and I, we have our arrangement. We still’—she let rancour creep into her voice—‘we still are there for each other.’

  ‘It must be the drugs that make you so wise,’ I said, both irritated and comforted that she knew me so well.

  ‘That’s it! That’s it, exactly. And you, lover. It’s been an education with you.’

  I heard a noise behind me. Kate was standing in the bedroom door, a sheet wrapped around her body, her face in shadow.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said to Claire.

  ‘Duty calls, eh? All right, Danny. I know you’ll be busy for a while, but give me a call when you get tired of it. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Who was that?’ Kate asked as I hung up.

  ‘I was breaking a date,’ I said.

  ‘For tomorrow?’ She came toward me, holding the sheet closed at her breasts. The cloth was dazzlingly white in contrast to her tan. With her hair tumbled about her shoulders, she had acquired an animal energy that had not been noticeable earlier. There was a sullen wariness in her face.

  ‘For tonight,’ I said.

  ‘That wasn’t very thoughtful.’ She put her right hand on my chest; I could feel my heart beating against it.

  ‘I’m not a very nice guy,’ I said.

  She frowned at that. ‘I’m s’posed to believe ’cause you say you’re not a nice guy, you really are? I’m s’posed to overlook the fact that after rollin’ around with me, you hop outta the sack and call another woman?’

  ‘I think,’ I said, ‘you should probably take it to heart.’

  Saying this affected me like a confession, the blurting out of a truth that until then I had only dimly perceived, and I felt heavy with the baggage of my trivial past, my deceits and delusions, the confidence game I had made of ordinary days and nights.

  Kate studied me for a second or two. Her eyes looked all dark. Then she moved her hand lower, her fingers trailing across my stomach. ‘Hell, I’m fed up with nice guys,’ she said, and curled her fingers around my cock.

  This made me a little nervous. That right hand of hers was a marvel. Earlier that evening she had crushed an ice cube into powder between her forefinger and thumb to win a bet, and had flicked off the top of a beer bottle as easily as I would have flicked a piece of lint from my jacket. She might, I thought, want to punish me because of the phone call. But she only caressed me, bringing my erection to life. The sheet slid to the floor, and I touched her breasts. They were small, with puffy coral-coloured areolae. I let their soft weights cosy in my hands. ‘Ah, baby,’ she said, a catch in her voice. ‘Baby.’ I could feel her trembling. She drew me to the sofa, perched on the back of it, and hooked her legs about my waist. My cock scored the crease of her, nuzzled the seep of juices. She guided me inside, worked me partway in. Her head came forward to rest on my shoulder, and her mouth pressed against my throat, breathing a moist, warm circle on my skin. She held me motionless, hands clamped to my buttocks. I pushed against her, trying to seat myself more deeply.

  ‘No!’ She pricked me with her nails. ‘Stay like this a minute.’

  ‘I want to be all the way in you,’ I said. She laughed happily, said, ‘Oh, I thought I had it all,’ and angled herself to accommodate me. I went in deeper with that silky glide that makes you think you are going to flow along with it forever, like the entry of a diver or the dismount of a gymnast, so perfect and gravityless, it should mark the first stage of a journey and not merely an abrupt transition into a clumsier state. I needed to feel it again, and I fucked her heavily, supporting her with both hands. She quit trying to hold me and thrust with her hips, losing her balance and putting a strain on my arms. We wobbled, nearly tumbled off the sofa. It was clear we were not going to make a success of things in this position.

  ‘Let’s go back in the bedroom,’ I said.

  ‘Stay inside me,’ she said, and threw her arms around my neck. ‘I need you there. Carry me.’

  I lifted her and went weaving toward the bedroom, into the thick darkness, lurching sideways but managing to keep the tip of my cock lodged inside her; then I lowered her carefully, awkwardly, onto the cool, rumpled sheet. We wriggled about until we were centred on the bed, and I sank into her again. She bridged up on her elbows. I thought she would kiss me, but she only put her lips to my ear and whispered, ‘Do everything to me.’

  Those words seemed so innocent, as if she were new to all this sweet struggle, they made me feel splendid and blessed and full of love. But as I moved in her again, caution ruled me, and though I told her I loved her, I spoke in the softest of voices, a windy phrase almost indistinguishable from a sigh, and not so she could hear.

  Two days later as we explored the old bazaar, the Khan al Khalili, idling along the packed, dusty streets among beggars, acrobats, men selling holograms of the Sphinx and plastic cartouches, ox-carts laden with bricks, hooting taxis, more beggars, travelling through zones of garbage stink, spicy cooking odours, perfumes, incense, hashish, walking through a thousand radio musics in the elaborate shade of mosques and roof warrens, past bamboo stalls and old slave markets with tawny arched façades and painted doors in whitewashed walls that might lead into a courtyard populated by doves and orange trees and houris or the virtual reality of a wealthy businessman with violet skies and flames bursting from black rock and djinns in iron armour, it occurred to me that while I had come to know a great deal about Kate during the past forty-eight hours, incidents from her armed service, sundry drab episodes from her marriage, her family in Virginia, she knew next to nothing about me. Having identified me as ‘that smuggler guy’ appeared to have satisfied her curiosity. Not that there was anything more salient to know—my life had gone unchanged for almost a decade, and the colours of my youth had no real bearing on the man I had become, aimless and pleasure-seeking and competent in unimportant ways. I recognized that Kate was hoping to recapture the intensity she had experienced during her war, the talent for intensity that had been shrouded by marriage, and I realized now it was my occupation, not my winning personality, that had attracted her. I was to be the centrepiece of her furious nostalgia, a sinister element of the design. This comprised an irony I did not believe she would appreciate, for I was far from the adventurous soul she assumed me to be. My success in business was due to an attention to detail and the exercise of caution. The urge to play Indiana Jones was not in my canon. On the other hand, a large portion of what had attracted me to her was more or less the same quality she thought to perceive in me: her drive toward the edge, her consuming desire to put herself in harm’s way on both emotional and physical levels. Because of the imbalance of our involvements, I knew that by allowing myself to become obsessed—and I had already developed a pounding fascination with her—I was opening myself up to a world of hurt; but that, too, the possibility of emotional risk, was part of her appeal. In ways I did not understand, I was committed to whatever course she cared to choose. It was as if when I first looked at her and saw the glitter of that impersonal desire in her eyes, that lust for whatever would excite her, I’d heard the future roaring in my ears and said to myself, Now, old son, now you can throw your life away for no reason at all.

  The interior of the shop belonging to Abdel Affifi, my partner in crime, was a nondescript clutter: glass display counters ranked with bottles of various essences, shelves laden with toy camels and cotton shirts, cheap luggage, gilt bathrobes, fly whisks, bearded plastic heads with t
iny fibreoptic memories that recited verses from the Koran, trays heaped with fraudulent antiquities. A beggar peered in through the window, his wizened face visible between two camel saddles, an artefact of the culture more authentic than any the shop had for sale. Abdel himself was a hook-nosed old man clad in a fez and a shabby suit coat worn over a gallibeya. He made a fuss over Kate, who had on a summery print dress and looked very pretty; he served her mint tea and insisted she try his most expensive essence. He failed to notice her prosthesis and seized her right hand; before she could object, he applied a drop of the oily stuff to the inside of her wrist. The perfume, designed to react with the skin to form a unique fragrance, gave off scarcely any odour at all. She pretended to be delighted, but moments later I caught her staring grimly at the wrist, and when I tried to console her, she shook me off.

  Not long afterward a plump, animated middle-aged Arab entered the shop, a man whom I knew as Rollo. Sleek black hair; flourishing moustache; western-style suit. He and Abdel struck up a conversation by the door. This did not please me. Rollo had been trying to involve us in drug-trafficking in the Sinai. I wanted nothing to do with him, but Abdel, who was under some heavy financial pressure, had showed signs of weakening. I must admit I was also tempted by the money, but I had refused to give in to temptation. My policy of not dealing drugs was one of the few fixed points remaining on my moral compass; I needed to maintain it, I thought, in order to maintain my separateness from the chaotic amorality of my environment…though it may be that a form of superstitious fear, perhaps an apprehension that I would expose myself to karmic peril if I breached the policy, had supplanted any true moral feeling.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Kate asked, and when I told her, she said, ‘Rollo? That’s hilarious!’

  ‘His father was a guide for the Brits in World War II. He taught Rollo the King’s English, or at least some fishwife’s version of it. The name’ll make sense when you hear him talk.’

  After a minute or so Rollo came toward us, beaming like an uncle who had just spied his favourite nephew—this despite the fact he knew I detested him. ‘Danny!’ he said joyfully, giving me a hug, enveloping me in an aura of flowery cologne. Then, turning his white smile on Kate, he said in the ripest of Cockney accent, ‘’Oo’s the bird?’

  Kate managed to keep a straight face during the introductions and the exchange of pleasantries that followed, but after Rollo had drawn me aside I saw her over his shoulder, laughing silently.

  ‘Look ’ere, mate,’ Rollo was saying. ‘My friend Abdel and Oi ’ave made us an agreement, but we can’t do nuffin’ ’less you’re part of it. Oi need you to settle things with the Israelis. They’ve ’eard of you, and they’ll be ’appier finkin’ a Yank’s in charge.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said.

  ‘Listen to this offer, my friend,’ Abdel said, making a plaintive face.

  With an air of vast self-importance, Rollo took a notepad from the pocket of his suit coat, scribbled on it and then showed me the percentages he had written. I tried to look blasé and told him I wasn’t interested.

  ‘Nao, you’re not interested!’ said Rollo. ‘Your eyes ’alf bugged out, they did!’

  ‘He’s only asking for you to make some arrangements,’ said Abdel in a wheedling tone. ‘You won’t be carrying drugs.’

  ‘Damn right I won’t.’ Abdel started to say something more, but I cut him off. ‘There’s worse than Israeli troops out in the Sinai. With or without drugs, what he’s asking is risky as hell. I don’t know shit about these people. They might take a dislike to me and blow my fucking head off.’

  Abdel continued trying to persuade me, and this put me in a thorny position. I could have made my own way in Cairo without much difficulty, but Abdel had taken me under his wing, treated me more like a son than a partner, and as a result I was doing very well indeed. He was no saint, God knows; but compared to Rollo he was an innocent. I did not want him to get in over his head. Yet it was hard to deny him, knowing he was in trouble. I’d had dealings in the Sinai before, and I believed I could deal with Rollo’s people. Crossing the border was no problem—though detection systems should have made such crossing impossible, there were many Israelis these days willing to look the other way for a price. It was the Palestinians who concerned me. Since the Intifada had failed, all manner of eccentric fundamentalism, some of it arcane in nature, had come to flourish in the camps and villages of the Sinai, and I had heard stories that gave me pause.

  ‘I’ll think it over,’ I said at last, figuring that if I could put him off, some wiser business opportunity might arise.

  He spread his hands in a gesture of acquiescence, but Rollo, tactful as ever, brayed at me, saying, ‘Yeah, g’wan, fink it over! We’ll just await your pleasure, shall we?’

  After we had left Abdel’s I explained to Kate what had happened. We were walking along a narrow street of open-front shops, ignoring the pleas of the beggars. The sun had lowered behind a mosque on our left, and the golden light had the mineral richness of the light you often get in the tropics when the sun is shining through rain clouds. As we neared the edge of the bazaar Kate leaned into me, pressed her breasts against my arm, and said coyly, ‘Can’t we go? I’d like to watch you in action!’

  ‘You want to go with me?’ I chuckled. ‘Not a chance!’

  She pulled back from me, angry. ‘What’s so funny? I’ve been in the desert before. And I know how to handle myself. Maybe better than you!’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, trying to mollify her. ‘But you’ve never dealt with people like this. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for what could happen.’

  That stirred her up even more. ‘Let’s get this straight,’ she said. ‘I’m nobody’s responsibility but my own, okay? Just ’cause we’re screwin’, that doesn’t mean…’

  ‘Kate,’ I said, uncomfortable with the crowd that was gathering, the taxi honking at us to clear the way. We were standing beside a store that sold baskets, and the owner and customers had come out to watch. A trolley so clotted with humanity, people stuffed inside, hanging all over the outside, that you could scarcely see the green enamel finish of the car, passed on the street adjoining the entrance to the bazaar, and it seemed all those brown arms were waving at me.

  ‘That doesn’t mean,’ she went on, ‘you got any papers on me. Do you understand? I don’t want you to be confused!’

  I was startled by the intensity of her anger. She was enraged, her face flushed, standing with hands on hips, continuing her harangue. Some of the onlookers had begun to make jokes about me; the taxi driver was leaning out his window and laughing. Even the beggars were grinning.

  I caught her by the arm. She tried to wrench away, but I hauled her along, pushed her into an alley, pinned her against the wall. ‘You can get all over me back at my place if you want,’ I said. ‘But not here. I work down here. People see me humiliated in public by a woman, word gets around, and I lose respect. That may sound sexist, but that’s how it is in this culture. Respect’s the main currency in my business. I can’t afford to lose it.’

  She grew instantly contrite, telling me she understood, apologizing, not backing away from her statement of independence, but saying that she should have known better than to cause a scene, she was just a real bitch on that particular subject.

  I had expected her anger to abate, yet not so quickly, and it was not until later I realized that her sudden shift in mood was due less to my logic than to the fact that I had acted like the character she fancied me instead of like the man I was. And perhaps I had been putting on an act. If Claire had done to me what Kate had, I would have simply walked away from her. But of course Claire would never have acted that way.

  At the time I understood little of this. I believe now that I did not want to understand, that I knew I would have to play a role in order to keep the affair on course, to satisfy Kate’s demands, and I am certain that this talent for self-deception was partly responsible for all that came to happen.

  All that next week
I tried to distract Kate from what had become a preoccupation with illegal adventure by showing her Cairo, a city that, with its minarets and roof warrens, its modern bridges and timeless river, ubiquitous flies, computerized calls to prayer, crushing poverty and secret pleasures, seemed to embody all the toxins and exaltations of life. But Kate, though exhilarated, was not distracted. One evening as we sat surrounded by old men smoking waterpipes in a back alley club—Claire’s favourite, as it happened—a place constructed of ornate carpets draped over a bamboo frame, with folding chairs and little metal tables, all centred about a makeshift stage upon which a drugged young girl wearing street clothes, her cheeks pierced by silver needles, sang a song that prophesied glory for Islam, Kate grew surly and silent, and as she often did when depressed, bent coins between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. There was a great deal I loved about her, but this fixation on her prosthesis disturbed me no end. Once she had slit open a seam that ran across the palm, peeled back folds of plastic skin, laying bare a packed complexity of microcircuits, and demonstrated how, by stripping a wire that ran to the power pack, she could short out an electrical system. I was not happy to think that the woman with whom I was sleeping could electrocute me on a whim.

  I understood her fixation—at least I sympathized with it—but there was much I did not understand about her reaction to war. I had known men of my father’s generation, veterans of Vietnam, who had exhibited a similar yearning for the terrible pleasures of the battlefield; yet they had been brutally used and discarded by their country, whereas the veterans of Kate’s war had been celebrated as American saints. Even if I accepted the idea that all combat veterans longed for such intensity, that did not explain the feverish quality of Kate’s longing, and I thought my inability to understand her might stem from my failure to understand Desert Storm, a fabulous victory that had achieved next to nothing in terms of realpolitik, unless you considered the deaths of a hundred thousand Iraqis, the restoration of a cruel oligarchy in Kuwait, and the drastic upgrading of Syria’s missile capacity to be achievements. Could the inconclusiveness of the action be responsible for the sickness that preyed upon Kate? Or could it be in that delirious sky over Baghdad, with white streaks and flares whirling in the electric blue of the nightscope like a kind of strange cellular activity, the darting of sperm in an inky womb, the mysterious associations of organelles, that some magic had been at work, infecting those who fought beneath it with unending dissatisfaction? I had asked Kate questions that addressed these and other notions, but she would only talk about the war in terms of anecdote, mostly humorous, mostly undermining the popular conception that Desert Storm had been an exercise of phenomenal precision, telling of crates of missiles left untended in the middle of nowhere, tank commands roaming aimlessly, misdirected platoons. Watching her that night, unable to comprehend her motives—or my own, for that matter—I acknowledged that my relationship with her was intrinsically concerned with the exploration of those motives, and so I told her that I was going into the Sinai, that she could go with me.