The World House (7 page)

  Running around the side of the house she heard the double doors at the rear clatter open. She was praying under her breath as she darted around the large urns and decorative pagodas, sure that her pursuers wouldn't fire on her once she was out on the street. The front gate was slightly ajar and she ran toward it, laughing in relief. She saw another man – one of Jimenez's friends, presumably – out of the corner of her eye but ignored him, keeping her attention fixed on the gate and the square beyond it.

  "Don't!" Jimenez shouted behind her, though whether he was addressing her or his accomplice she could neither tell nor care. She ran out of the gate and into the square. Spanish squares are always filled with old men, standing around smoking cheap cigars, chatting and avoiding the women at home (who gather together in one kitchen so as to avoid all the men). Kesara pushed through a small group of them, drawn no doubt by the sound of the initial gunshot.

  "Devil on your tail?" one of them asked as he spun on the cobbles to keep his balance. One of his friends laughed, opening his sagging mouth to reveal a single yellow tooth.

  Kesara ran out of the square and into one of the side streets, sure that Jimenez would still be following. She had five thousand dollars of his in her hand and he was hardly likely to give it up easily. Her best hope was to get to the port as quickly as she could; once there he would never find her.

  As she ran through the city streets she found she was still laughing. She knew she was being premature, she was hardly in the clear yet, but the sense of relief – to be out of that house and with the box in her hand… She had never known anything like it and the elation added speed to her legs and strength to the little soles of her feet. This is what it felt like to be really free, wind in your hair and cash in your hands. She would let nothing hold her back ever again.

  "No." The old man stepped out right in front of her as she rounded a corner, sending her tumbling. "No," he said again, "not you. You're the wrong one."

  Kesara didn't understand his words. He was speaking English and she knew not a word of it.

  His clothes were unsuited to the heat, a long overcoat and wide-brimmed hat; he looked utterly out of place. "Give me the box," he insisted – in Spanish this time – holding out a wrinkled hand with which to take it. Kesara shook her head. She could outrun this old man any day. Hadn't she said she would let nothing stop her? She jumped to her feet and ran past him, the box in her hand.

  "No!" he shouted, "I must have it!"

  Not a chance, Kesara thought, this box is mine and it'll take more than you've got to take it…

  A gunshot rang out in the sleepy Valencian street, a noise that Kesara didn't immediately associate with her until she saw the blood spreading across the front of her blouse. She couldn't get her head around the sight of it; it made no sense to her. Right up until the moment she died.

 

"Here."

  Pablo finished stuffing the coils of rope into his duffel bag, and stared at the old man in the final dying light of this hot Valencian day.

  "What is it?" Pablo asked, taking the wooden box the old man offered.

  "Your destiny," the old man said, pointing his gun towards the young man's head.

 

 

 

"Can you understand me?"

  "If you mean that noise you're making then, yes. I'm not mentally subnormal." The First Observer sits down, the weight of the flesh around it unwelcome and stultifying. "How can they bear to be caged like this?"

  "I rather like it." Its colleague thrashes about, experiencing the body, feeling the centre of gravity shift as it moves. "They consume this as well, you know," it says, pinching at the muscles in its arms.

  "Consume?"

  "The creatures work on an energy input system. They ingest another's flesh in order to make their own function."

  "How disgusting."

  "I think it's neat. I wonder what sensation it causes?"

  "I hope I never find out. We are supposed to observe, not go native."

  "Some would say one has to experience to observe; data is hardly reliable otherwise. How do I look?"

  The First Observer marshals its thoughts, processing the input from the human's eyes and trying to express it in the words it has to hand. It is impossible. "Like a human. What else do you want me to say? You are crude, unappealing and have some form of growth all over you."

  "They call it hair. Have you explored your human's brain?"

  "Briefly. It was depressing."

  "How can you say that? So many thoughts and urges, so raw and energetic!"

  "So basic. We will leave now."

  "So soon? What have we learned?"

  "Enough to know that there is nothing of interest here for us, it's all so…" it pounds at the earth with its borrowed hands until the small bones inside it snap "…pointlessly fragile. How have they have managed to exist this long?"

  "They call this Asia," its colleague says, looking around.

  "Who cares?"

  "I do. I want to stay for a while, see how they function."

  "No, we are leaving. It was only a point of… they don't even have the vocabulary… meticulousness that merited exploring thus far. Sitting in this mess of a construct I have learned all I need. This place is beneath us."

  "I disagree!" its colleague insists, bringing a rock down on its fellow observer's head to open the fragile skull.

  "I enjoyed that," it says afterwards to the rivulets of blood pushing their way through the sand. "It was interesting."

  Now alone on the wide Asian plain, it wonders what to do next.

 
 
 

Young men were supposed to have big dreams, but for Tom there had been only one ambition. Nothing beat playing a piano for a living. Tom would assure people of this, anybody that was still around at the magical time – say three in the morning – when the martini took over and Tom quit speaking for himself. He would stop playing, pour himself straight up on to a barstool and graze on olives and punjabi mix until his tongue felt like a tramp's sock during a downpour. "It's, like, pure," he would burble, pointing at invisibles in the air between him and his audience and fixing them with an earnest stare. The sort of look that says its owner knows… OK? He just fucking knows.

  On the night in question, Tom still had some semblance of balance left, having arrived late for work and therefore being two rounds light on his normal consumption. Not that he was what you might call straight. He still had to expend a considerable effort windmilling his arms and breathing deeply so as not to smack his teeth on the bar as he'd done that time in Chicago when a combination of whisky sours and a pair of Quaaludes had sent him carpetwards with a hard-on and a smile but no real consciousness to speak of. When the TV above the bar showed silent news footage of distraught fans gathering at Graceland to pay tribute to their lost idol he was capable of figuring out what had happened. "The King is dead, baby," he slurred, raising a glass. He took a sip and then pushed the glass away. He needed to maintain a modicum of muscle-control tonight; it was Thursday and that meant Elise would be dropping by on her way home from her shift at the
Neon Melon
. Tom liked Elise, in fact he loved her almost as much as he did Jim Beam and Lord Buckley, which – for an emotional retard like Tom – was tantamount to obsession.

  "Knock me your lobes, daddy-o," he said to Terry behind the bar, a man who ran out of the very little creativity he possessed thinking up names for happyhour cocktails. "Frilly Maiden", "Velvet Sunrise", "Fruit Sunstorm"… after that he was spent.

  "You talk like a dick, Tom," Terry commented, whipping a dank towel at the bar as if it had been misbehaving.

  "And you have no jive."

  "But plenty of liquor so I'm sure you'll bring yourself to forgive me."

  "You may well be right. What time is it?"

  "She'll be here soon enough."

  Tom smiled. That Terry was one smug son of a bitch.

  He took the brave step of slipping off the barstool and taking himself to a window booth, a journey so long and perilous for Tom by this stage of the evening that he felt entitled to call it a goddamn quest. He was an inebriated Frodo Baggins heading to the leatherette and formica landscape of Boothor… This idea gave him the giggles about halfway across the shiny carpet and he had to grab hold of a particularly rubbery rubber plant in order to steady himself.

  "You cool?" Terry asked, only too aware of how difficult Tom was likely finding the journey.

  Tom waved, signalling that all was fine, before letting go of the plant and risking a few more steps toward the window.

  Outside, Ninth and Hennepin was taking a beating from the rain. Tom pressed his nose against the glass and imagined sailing paper yachts along the gutter, floating the hell out of there. A man has to dream. The neon of the Triangle Pool Hall buzzed like a trapped bluebottle, winking in and out as if tired. Fat Eugene, the owner, was sheltering under the smudged green awning, pushing cotton-candy balls of cigar smoke into the wet air to be smashed apart by the raindrops.

  "When you gonna quit moonin' over her, for Christ's sake?"

  "Just as soon as she sees sense and gives in, Terry."

  "I've as much chance of getting a BJ from Barbara Streisand."

  Tom, baffled at the best of times, was utterly confused by the notion of this. "Would you want to?"

  Terry, still making a pretence of cleaning, nodded. "Who wouldn't?"

  Tom guessed there was little to be said to this without causing offence so he went back to staring out of the window. Fat Eugene had returned to the seedy hop-musk of his pool hall and the street was now empty… No, there was some guy hanging around in the front doorway of Verbinski's Pawn Shop. He was wearing a fedora and raincoat, a regular Philip Marlowe, Tom thought.

  "Perhaps he's on the trail of a red-hot dame," Tom muttered in his best Bogart impression, "surviving on rye and smarts."

  "What you talking about now?" Terry called. "And wipe your goddamn chin – you're dribbling on the upholstery."

  "Nothing, just watching some guy…" but "Marlowe" had gone and Tom's attention was elsewhere, watching Elise – a folded copy of the T
imes
over her wild, electric-shock red hair – running down the street towards them. Tom yanked his brown suit into shape; it had a habit of looking as if it was trying to worm its way off him. He tried to work his hair into respectability but as usual it refused, sitting like whipped ice-cream on the top of his head.

  "Oh, she's on her way, is she?" Terry said with a smile. "I'll get the grill warmed up."

  Elise burst through the door in a shower of rain and cussing. "Jesus, but it's biblical out there," she roared, heading over to the bar. The sodden newspaper hung from her hand like shed lizard skin. She dripped on Terry's carpet but he sure as hell didn't care; maybe the damn thing would grow more luxuriant if she watered it enough.

  "Grill's on, give me five and there'll be patty melt and fries to take the edge off the cold," he said, walking out back to kick the fat-fryer into life.

  "Hey, Elise," Tom offered from his booth, hoping to hell he'd made it sound non-committal rather than the bark of a desperate man.

  "Hi, Tom," Elise replied, "good night?"

  "I've been shaking down the jazz and blues as surely as you've been shimmying those curves of yours. I dare say neither of us really got the appreciation we deserved."

  "I dare say." Elise joined him in his booth, just as Tom had hoped, dragging a snail trail of rain across the leatherette from the damp ass of her coat.

  "You want that whistle of yours wetting?" Tom asked, nodding an inebriated forehead towards the bar and the rows and rows of seductive possibilities it offered.

  "I'll take a Martini, something long, cold and strong as hell – I'll leave the rest up to your creative imagination."

  "I am a veritable Manet of the Martini, a Hopper of the Highball."

  "Then refresh your thirsty nighthawk, Tom, she's had a damn long night as always."

  Tom threw a wink in Elise's direction. Catching his reflection in the window, he thought it looked more like the facial twitch of a man who had just been shot. He really ought to keep the expressions to a minimum; he was long past the point of being able to pull them off.

  Terry was whistling along to the hiss of sizzling hamburger and fries. It was the only tune he knew.

  "Hey, Terry," Tom asked, "fix the lady a drink, would you? Something to wash down the melted Velveeta and cockroach thigh she has forthcoming."

  "Hell with that, I keep a clean kitchen as well you know. Fix it yourself, but mind…" Terry brandished a spatula with conviction "…don't get carried away, I'll be watching you pour."

  "Pour…
poor
me." Tom shuffled his way around the bar hatch and began to throw gin, vodka and vermouth at crushed ice and lemon zest. There was something about his coordination that improved when it came to going through such automatic functions as playing a piano or mixing a cocktail. They were the sort of moves that, unlike walking or trying to look cool, came naturally to him. He throttled the shaker, ice-cold condensation biting into his palms through the chilly chrome, and poured some over one lucky bastard of an olive.

  "Now that's a whistle-wetter." Tom nodded his approval, pouring one for himself, just to be sociable.

  Terry appeared from the kitchen with a hot sandwich and fries and carried them over to the booth before leaving Tom to it with a half-smile.

  "Something to chill your teeth, my good lady." Tom placed the drink next to her plate and took a big sip from his own, just so it was easier to carry to his side of the table. She tried it and acknowledged her approval while gasping for air.