Collected Stories (5 page)

“Most definitely. And perhaps, when this little crisis is over, you might like to join my family for a luncheon. Next Sunday perhaps — the eleventh.”

“Thank you. That would be delightful.”

The minister held out his small hand. It clung to Gerrard’s hand, spreading a damp film of secret fear around it.

When the Land Rover entered the site on the following morning he understood immediately the agreement he had made with the minister. As he turned off the engine he finally admitted that he had known all along. He had understood exactly and precisely what would happen but he had not allowed himself to look at it. The minister’s wink had produced a tightening in his stomach. The sweat he had felt in the handshake had been as much his as the minister’s. Their fears had met and smudged together between their two hands.

As he walked between the big khaki trucks of Oongala’s army he felt shame and triumph, elation and despair. They mixed themselves together in the terrible porridge his emotions had become.

All around him the work continued, watched by the keen arrogant eyes of Oongala’s elite force: the notorious 101s.

The English doctor had seen the Land Rover approach and now he watched angrily as the tall man in the grey safari suit walked towards him. His walk did not belong here, amongst these harsh rocks and calloused hands. It was a city walk, the walk of a man who strolls boulevards and sips vermouth in side-walk cafés. The doctor detested the walk. “Like an evil little spider,” he thought, “who will soon proclaim his innocence.”

Now the tall man stopped. Now he ran. He sprinted towards the doctor, jumping across a pile of piping. The doctor grimaced and
transferred his attention to the young Danish worker who lay on the ground before him. The injection had at last eased the pain. Soon he’d be able to shift him to town. He heard rather than saw Gerrard squat beside him. He said nothing and busied himself repacking the syringe with exaggerated care. He picked up the two ampoules from the dusty ground, tossed them in his hand, and with a sudden expression of rage threw them against the wall of the building.

“What’s up?”

The architect smelt of expensive shampoo. The doctor couldn’t bear to look at him. He took the young man’s pulse and was surprised to find his own hand shaking. “I would have thought it was obvious.”

“What may be obvious to you is not obvious to me. Kindly tell me what has happened.” There was a tremor in the architect’s voice, and the doctor, looking up, was astonished to see despair in the other’s eyes. “Kindly tell me what has happened.”

“He was shot by your friends here. He told them he was a free man and didn’t have to work. He made quite a speech. It is a shame you missed it,” he smiled nastily, “all about freedom and democracy.”

Gerrard looked down at the young man on the ground. He was no more than twenty. Someone had placed a shirt under his naked back. His left calf was heavily bandaged, but his clear blue eyes showed no trace of pain. It was a romantic face, Gerrard reflected, with its sparse blond beard, its tousled hair and those luminous eyes. As Gerrard watched he saw, on the young man’s face, the beginning of a smile. He knelt, bending hungrily towards the smile, hoping to kill his own pain with it. He saw the lips move. He bent further, reaching towards words. So he was only six inches from the young face when the lips parted and a hot stream of spittle issued from them with hateful speed, hitting Gerrard on the left cheek. He stood, as if stung, and turned on his heel towards the office. Then, changing his mind, he returned to his Land Rover.

As he left the site in a cloud of dust the Kristu-Du continued its inexorable progress as inch by inch, pound by pound it moved towards its majestic finale.

For two days Gerrard Haflinger remained in his house without going out. Each hour he stayed away from the site made it harder for him
to return to it. The thought of a return was hateful to him. The thought of not returning was impossible to contemplate.

Dirty clothes lay on the living room floor beside the sleeves of twenty recordings, not one of which had given any solace. The empty bottle of sleeping pills lay in the kitchen, its white plastic cap on the dining table.

It was night and the black windows reflected his unshaven face as he stared out into the empty street.

He sat down at the desk in the living room and began to type a letter, but he stopped every few characters, cocking his head and listening. He had become nervous, fearful of intruders, although he could not have explained who these intruders might be or why they would wish to enter his house.

He loosened the tension of the typewriter roller so that the paper could be removed silently from it, flattened the sheet, and began to write by hand.

As he wrote the letter to his son the only noises he heard were the loud scratching of the pen and the regular click of a digital clock.

When he had finished the letter he folded it hastily, placed it inside an envelope, and, having consulted a small notebook, addressed it. Then he sat with his head in his hands while the digital clock clicked through four minutes. His thoughts were slippery, elusive, tangled strands of wet white spaghetti which he could neither grasp nor leave alone.

He stood up then and went to the bathroom where he looked for pills in the little cabinet above the basin. There were none, but he found instead a small bottle of nail polish which he considered with interest.

He shut the door.

First he washed his arm with soapy water. Then he methodically worked up some shaving cream into a thick, creamy lather. Sitting on the small stool in front of the mirror, he brushed the lather into the dense black hair along his left arm. When he was done, he took a safety razor and, very carefully, shaved the arm until it was perfectly smooth.

He washed his arm and examined it in the mirror: a slender tanned arm with long delicate fingers.

Seeing hair on the knuckles he also lathered these and, being careful not to knick himself, shaved them.

Now he picked up the nail polish and applied it carefully. It took him three attempts to get it right.

When the nail polish had dried he undressed completely, folding his white trousers carefully and placing them on the carpeted floor in the passage outside.

He shut the door again and sat on the basin and watched in the mirror as the red fingernailed hand of a beautiful woman crept across his stomach and took his penis, stroking it slowly.

“I’ve missed you,” said the voice, a quiet, shy, tentative voice that
seemed afraid of derision or rejection, and then, gathering confidence: “I love you, my darling.”

In the street outside a man laughed.

At the detention centre a young shopkeeper was being given the merest touch of an electric cattle prod.

At the Merlin Hotel, Wallis, alias Mr Meat, the man who sold holograms, picked up his telephone and dialled Gerrard’s number.

When the number finally rang Gerrard Haflinger grabbed a bathrobe and ran to answer it. He stood in the living room accepting a dinner invitation, semen dripping down his stomach like spittle.

In a minute or two Mr Meat would change Gerrard’s mind entirely about the whole question of his involvement with the building. He would do it quite unintentionally. In a minute or two he would give Gerrard his scenario. In fact it was one of four such scenarios that he considered to be possible, but he would insist on the veracity of this one because it was the most likely, in his calculation, to frighten Gerrard, to undo a little of his arrogance and moral superiority.

Mr Meat thought Gerrard was a pompous pain in the arse, but he was bored and lonely and wished to fill in one last night before he escaped this dung hole of a country and went back to more predictable and respectable work selling armaments.

So he was not aware that the ascetic man who sat opposite him in the deserted dining room of the Merlin Hotel was more than a little unhinged with guilt and despair, that he was on the point of renouncing his life’s work, and entering the cold empty landscape he had always feared.

But first they had to sit through this circus that was going on at the bar, all because Haflinger had ordered a Campari and the waiters didn’t know what in the hell a Campari was, even though it was sitting on the shelf in the bar, practically biting their silly snub noses.

“You’re going to have to help them,” Wallis said, “or we’ll never get a bloody drink.”

The architect turned in his seat to look at the embarrassed conference of white-coated waiters. “Oh,” he said, “they’ll work it out.”

Wallis sighed. “You’re about to get a Drambuie.”

Gerrard began to get up but sat down again as the Drambuie was returned to the shelf.

“Oh Christ, I can’t stand it.” Mr Meat pushed his chair back and Gerrard watched him as he strode across to the bar, this big beefy-faced man with the arrogant aggressive walk of a military policeman. He saw the waiters’ mortified faces. He saw the big impatient hand haul the Campari from the shelf, snatch a glass, and pour an unmeasured quantity into it. He couldn’t bear to watch any more and looked instead at the bleak empty tables of the dining room, too depressed to be amused by the fake Doric columns.

Wallis brought back Campari, soda and a beer for himself. “Now you know why I stick to beer,” he said, “they can’t fuck it up.” He raised his glass, holding it with peculiar daintiness with thumb and middle finger. “Here’s to the drought.”

“You’ve made them embarrassed.”

“So they should be. Christ, it’s their job to know a Campari from a Drambuie. They bloody should be embarrassed.”

“Still …”

Wallis leant his bulk into the table, the beakish nose thrusting from the great florid face, his big index finger poking in the direction of the Campari. “Listen, old son, you’re too sensitive. People in our line of work can’t afford to be so sensitive. Skol.” He drank again.

“Our occupations are hardly similar.”

“Oh come on, tell me what the difference is.” Wallis smiled. He was starting to enjoy himself.

“I think there’s a difference.” Gerrard attempted a smile. It didn’t work out very well. “There is a difference between an important work of architecture and what you yourself describe as magic.” None of this exactly reflected Gerrard’s viewpoint but he had no intention of discussing anything so serious with Wallis.

“It’s all magic here, old son, so don’t look so superior. As a matter of fact I’ll lay you a thousand U.S. dollars that it’ll be your magic that brings Oongala undone. There is a limit to magic when people are starving. The holograms might be a big hit here, but they’re not very popular in the villages. In fact I’d say they were very counterproductive. I would say that Oongala is not a popular man with the tribes at the moment. I’d give him three months at the most. When will your great work” — he pronounced “Great Work” slowly and sarcastically — “be completed?”

“Four, five months.”

“Then it’ll be four or five months before Oongala gets kicked out
and things get very nasty for you. Look, I can tell you exactly what’ll happen. And listen to me, because this is something I bloody well know about. I am an expert, old boy, in knowing when to leave a country. You can’t survive in my business without knowing that.”

Gerrard looked at the great red face with fascination. “Go on.”

But they were interrupted by the approach of a waiter and Wallis fell suddenly silent. They ordered the Merlin’s safest and most predictable dishes: pea soup followed by vegetable omelette. Wallis, in spite of his avowed dedication to beer, ordered Veuve Clicquot.

The food arrived too quickly and the champagne too slowly.

As he alternated sips of pea soup with Veuve Clicquot, Wallis continued: “Let me give you the exact scenario, as a little present, eh? Oongala will not know how unpopular he is. There is not a man left who is brave enough to tell him. However, he will know that things are not exactly rosy. People are dying. They are upset because there is no water and by now they all know about the canal and they know Oongala stopped it to spend money on your building. They’re angry about that, but Oongala can’t know how angry otherwise he’d drop your building like a hot cake and get stuck into the canal. However, he does know he needs a very powerful piece of magic and your building is about the only trick he has left up his sleeve. But,” Wallis smiled, delighting in the drama of his scenario, “but to impress everyone with the dear old Kristu-Du he’ll have to bring them to see it, eh? He will bloody well be forced to have the famous gathering of the tribes.” He laughed a strange dry cackle. “How about that, eh, isn’t that neat?”