A Bright Moon for Fools (18 page)

“I’ve just made a mess of so many things—”

“But that’s all in the past, isn’t it? Look at you now. You haven’t made a mess of us, have you?”

“Do you think we’ll have more than one?”

“Let’s get this one out first, shall we? I’ve a feeling we’ll have plenty on our hands with madam here.”

Christmas cried out. Bridget had given the hammock a huge push and now he was swinging from side to side, his drink going everywhere. “Bitch!” he declared.

“You were making weird noises,” she giggled, “I thought babies liked being rocked.”

Hovering above it all was the imminent arrival of the internet. Judith kept trying to get through to the phone company; they were coming in a few days. Then they were coming in two weeks. Then
they were coming at the end of the week – so the gallows wobbled.

Christmas was sat on the viewing bench. There was a storm at sea. The rain was still some miles away but the wind bawled and swore, thrashing the trees around him as distant
lightning photographed the horizon. He felt a peck on his cheek. Judith was beside him, holding down her hair and her skirt. “How can you be reading?”

“Oh, I wasn’t really” said Christmas, putting the Montejo book away in his jacket. “Fantastic, isn’t it?” They watched the storm together for a while until he
felt her eyes on him. She put her hand on his neck.

“God, I’ve been lonely,” she said quickly.

“Judith?”

“I just – I should’ve gone back to England, but I can’t, I was too scared that I wouldn’t belong there any more and then I’d have left here and the garden
would’ve – the garden. Too scared to leave the garden. Doesn’t that just –” she sighed, “– sound so stupid? Oh, look at me ...”

“No, sweetheart,” he began, “please—”

“But then you came and, well, it’s been fun, hasn’t it? Sorry, Harry, I don’t want to—”

“Judith—” and he took her hand as she stood up.

“I sent some figurines to Juan Carlos in Caracas,” she said in a different voice. “A couple of you, actually. He’s just called to say he loved them. Going to put them on
display. Dinner’s ready anyway. Think we better ...” and her voice was lost in the wind as she turned round and walked back to the kitchen.

Christmas followed her in. Bridget was sat at the table with a magazine open in front of her. “‘What kind of man is the man in your life?’” she read out as he came in,
“‘and how long will he last?’ Well, seeing as you’re the only one here, that’s you. Are you ready?” Keeping his eye on Judith, Christmas shrugged.

“‘One. If you had to choose his best quality, would you say: A) He’s good B) He’s kind C) He’s sexy D) He’s funny E) He’s loyal.’ What do you
think your best quality is?”

“Unreliability.”

“Your
best
quality?”

“It gives other people the edge.”

“Out of these four.”

“Sexy. Obviously.” Bridget laughed for a full minute. Christmas watched Judith as she spooned out home-made gazpacho. It didn’t matter if he wasn’t going to raid her bank
account. Judith was already another Diana. Christmas wrapped his fist over a chair. The only thing he could do was limit the damage, leave before she fell any deeper. He saw it now – he must
simply ask to borrow some money. He’d pay her back when he got to London. He couldn’t wait any longer for some magical money-making scheme to appear. There were no schemes here. Bridget
gave a theatrical cough of recovery.

“I don’t think the ‘sexy’ option is available to the over-hundreds, sorry, Harry. What about good? Don’t you want to be good? Mummy, don’t you think Harry
should try to be a bit less rotten? Mummy – are you all right?”

“Oh yes,” said Judith sitting down and smiling, “bloody garlic on my finger when I rubbed my eye.” Christmas poured out the wine.

“You mean good, as in ‘Do unto others as you would have done unto you?’”

“If you like,” said Bridget, passing round the toast.

“Because as Christ was an obvious masochist, I’d say that was the only honest thumbs-up to violence the church has ever made.”

“I’m not talking about the church, Harry. Stop hiding behind these quips. Don’t you want to be good? Don’t you want to make the world a better place?”

“That usually leads to genocide.”

“Harry Strong you are beyond redemption. Hopeless. Mummy, he’s hopeless.”

“Yes,” she said softly, “yes he is.”

“Look, here’s my theory,” started Christmas, clearing his throat, “the whole problem is people wanting to do good. They get so caught up in the higher good, they’re
so keen to make it happen they’ll kill anyone. What the world needs is some evil. We need some people so hell bent on evil they’re willing to do horrific amounts of good to get
there.”

“And that’s it, is it? That’s what you would like to have on your gravestone: ‘Here lies Harry Strong – he wished there was more evil.’”

“No. What I’d like to have on my gravestone is ‘Here lies Harry Strong – he came, he saw, he went home again, he went to bed, he got up twice in the middle of the night
to pee, he barely managed to get to sleep again, he woke up at four in the morning with no feeling in his right arm.’”

“Isn’t there anything in life that’s important to you?” He thought for a moment.

“A good hat,” he replied, through a mouthful of soup.

“A hat?”

“Judith, the gazpacho is sublime. Bridget dearest, turn your nose up now, but when you start losing your hair, you’ll learn to take the noble hat a damn sight more
seriously.”

“So your only values are hats?” Christmas was watching Judith. “You know,” Bridget said after a moment, “I can’t exactly work out which bits are you and which
bits are just a front, but I think basically you’re suffering from a psychological complex that everyone is as rotten as you are.”

“And I’d say you are suffering from a psychological complex about how flat-chested you are. Two Freud eggs, that’s your problem.” Bridget gasped. Christmas cheered his
own joke.

“If there’s anyone with a tit issue round here,” said Bridget “it’s you. Look at those man boobs – they’re obscene.”

“Man boobs?” Christmas looked down.

“Have you been having hormone therapy?”

“Bridget, really—”

“He started it! And you know it’s true ...”

The two women were both giggling. Christmas grabbed himself by the breasts and pushed them together like a glamour girl. “Do you refer to
these
magnificent things?”

“Urrrgh! Put them away!”

Everyone was laughing. Here was his wife and here was his daughter and this was a family dinner, the storm rain beginning to drum down on the roof. Something surged through him and faded. This
wasn’t his family. He wasn’t even Harry Strong. Perhaps in that café in Caracas he could have approached Judith as himself, just been himself, not caught in the lies, not fearing
the arrival of the internet as if it were some giant spider about to walk over the hills. Could he just tell them the truth? No. He was trapped. He should leave tonight. He had to get to
Guiria.

“Oh – and did you both hear the phone this morning?” said Judith recovering her composure. “Bloody internet people! They’ve cancelled again.”

“What?”

“Wouldn’t even give me a date when they can come. Could be weeks and weeks. Kept giving me a load of technical waffle about the phone lines and the hills interfering with the
satellites and whatnot.”

“Hooray!” Christmas lifted his glass.

“I don’t see what’s so
hooray
about it.”

“Bridget, as you keep pointing out, I am a man of mature years, and it’s not often that the relentless stampede of modernity, in this example the internet, is halted by forces as
ancient as geography. So I say – hooray! I toast the past –”

“Furrrrreak.”

“– now pass the toast.”

S
lade paced the roof terrace of the café. Church bells rang out above the moans of the city. He had been walking its streets all day and
perspiration had made butterfly patterns across the back of his T-shirt. His face was pink and peeling. He took off the sunglasses he had bought from a market stall and examined them. They were
cheap and thin and they irritated his ears. He snapped them in two, then twisted the lenses off and threw all the bits over the side of the roof. He sat down beside his beer. He had not eaten. The
roof terrace was empty.

Slade was still touring the hotels of Caracas with a photograph of Harry Christmas. He still rang his
eorlderman
every morning but old Peter Dunstone had got fed up and told Slade not to
ring anymore, that he would call if there was any news. Now when Slade rang there was no answer. He took out the photograph. He wanted to rip it into pieces. Slade was almost out of hotels to check
and had started on the expensive restaurants and bars. He had asked policemen, shoeshine boys and station staff at the metro stops, always with his knife beneath his shirt, assessing everyone
around him.

Slade opened his guidebook and turned to the map. He didn’t know where he was. He had wandered into a residential area with wide empty streets and uniformed security guards outside gated
apartment blocks. He took out his phone. He called Diana. It went onto voicemail. He called again. He had been doing the same thing all day. Harry Christmas was going to walk onto this terrace at
any moment, he decided. He just needed to talk to Diana and fate would produce the perfect moment.
Wait
, he’d say.
He’s right in front of me
.

Slade went downstairs. It was an upmarket, busy café with art on the walls and counters full of pastries. He walked through the tables towards the door. There was a pottery display in the
window. What was that figurine? He stepped closer, disbelieving his eyes. Slade turned, seeing people drinking coffee. Were they laughing at him? Had they put it there? Slade went outside. He
pressed his face to the window and peered through, whispering to himself. He went back inside and asked to look at it properly and the owner smiled and told him it was for sale, lifting it out from
the window and onto the counter. There it was, unmistakably: a statue of Harry Christmas naked, sitting on some stones.

Slade took out the photograph. Yes, said Juan Carlos, it was indeed a sculpture of the man in the photograph, Harry Strong, the famous English writer. Yes, he knew where he was.
Señor
Strong had met the sculptress in this very café and they were now in Estado Sucre together, near a town called Rio Caribe. Did he want to buy the statue?

“Can you give me the address?”

“He is a friend of yours?” enquired Juan Carlos. Slade grinned.

“He’s like a father to me.”

Slade rented a car and drove east. When he had got out of Caracas, the road straightened and the traffic thinned. He followed the coastline. There were fields of salt and
flamingos. In the rear-view mirror he glimpsed the swish of a cat’s tail on the backseat. He turned round but there was nothing there.

He got as far as Carúpano where he spent yet another bad night. Right before he woke he had a dream with nothing in it, just a feeling of unutterable sadness. He phoned Diana. His number
had been blocked.

That day he drove into Rio Caribe. He pulled up at a cheap guesthouse on the corner of a wide avenue. The pavement stood tall from the road. Two old men sat in its shade facing the gutter. Slade
got out of his car, smelling the ocean. His back was soaked with sweat. A truck full of cacao rolled past. The heat was white.

Inside the guesthouse, Slade took a room. He pointed at Judith’s name and address. The owner, a lazy-eyed woman with braids, shook her head. Other women appeared. They all took it in turns
to examine the paper. They gave it back, looking at him and muttering. Slade went into his room and lay down. His belly was tight. His eyelids swarmed with patterns. His organs felt as if they were
floating.

After a few minutes, Slade left the guesthouse. There were few people around. The town smelt of sea-salt and petrol. He found an internet café full of boys playing war games. He walked
across the
malecon
and confronted the ocean. A fat man offered him some fried chicken.

He walked around, asking people, jabbing impatiently at the address, across Plaza Sucre, up and down Avenida Bolivar and Avenida Bermudez while the sun settled into the baths of the Caribbean,
staining its waters and mocking his failure. Everyone smirked and shook their heads. No one spoke English.

Heading down a backstreet he heard noise and music coming from behind a tin door. Someone staggering out revealed a cantina inside. Loud
Vallenato
music blared over tables full of
fishermen and farmers picking at meat and drinking bottles of Cacique. A drunken cheer greeted his arrival and a fourteen-year old girl showed him to his table. He tried to ask her about the
address but she looked at him shyly and said something that made the room laugh. Everyone was watching him. He began to size up the men. There was a shelf with two metal candlesticks amongst the
bric-a-brac. He visualised wielding them as weapons.

A huge woman with a slight moustache waddled out from the kitchen with a laminated menu. She said things in Spanish he couldn’t understand. “Judith,” he said, “Ju-dith
Lamb.” Then he took out the photo of Harry Christmas. This was passed around the room. Slade stayed on the edge of his seat, observing fingers dripping with animal grease manhandle the image.
Everyone was laughing now. Some chicken and
arepas
were placed in front of him. They glistened with oil. He started to pick at the food. Various people were calling things out to him. The
music was deafening. A stout man in red shorts and a battered T-shirt had snatched the photo from someone else and was standing up, gesticulating at it and laughing. He grabbed a bottle of beer and
made an obscene gesture. The man sat down at Slade’s table. He was pointing at Christmas and then pointing at himself. He was one of Judith’s gardeners
.

“English?” said the man, “English womans?
Ju-dit
?” Slade nodded, “Where does she live?” he tapped the address. “Where is this?” The man
understood and, calling for a pen, he drew a shaky map on a paper napkin. It was outside the town, then. The route seemed simple enough. Slade watched the lines being drawn. He flexed his back.