Metro Winds (48 page)

The driver says something and the big man turns and lifts a truncheon. I shake my head.

‘There is no need for that,' I tell him.

I do not know if he understands me, but he lowers his arm and studies me as if my calmness interests him, then he says something in his own language to the driver. The other man shakes his head and begins to shout. The big man says nothing until his companion falls silent, then he turns back to me and points through the front windscreen.

‘Káva. Coff-ee,' he says.

Looking down the road, I see he is indicating a faint illumination on the horizon. The brightness grows until I see it is an all-night petrol station attached to a fast-food café. The car pulls off into an access road and curves round to come to a grinding halt in the gravel car park. There are only two other cars parked alongside the restaurant. One is very new and red.

‘You come,' the big man says. He says something else in his own language that sounds like a warning, and I nod.

They walk either side of me as we approach the door. The driver points at the bowsers and the big man shrugs, steering me deftly through the shining glass doors. The brightness of the light hurts my eyes and I am glad of the thick paw on my shoulder, steering me. He pushes me into a booth, takes out a phone and moves away to make a call.

‘I just wish you wouldn't bring up the war,' one of the men in the booth opposite says with an American accent. ‘It's a sore point with these guys. They think we betrayed them.'

‘You did,' the other man snorts in laconic German-accented English.

The thin driver sits down, and gives the other men a dangerous look, but they are too much involved in their conversation to notice. The big man shakes his head at the thin man.

‘All of that is ancient history. It's in the past.' The American's tone is irritated.

‘Nothing is past here. Haven't you learned enough to know that?'

Silence falls between them, and I wonder what happened to my original driver. Had he been killed? The driver squints at me and I sense that he is wondering why I do not make an attempt to escape or call for help.

‘We could have got coffee closer to the border,' the German says.

‘Coffee, sure.' The American's voice is ironic. ‘We've got a deadline, Klaus. Why don't you wait until we get somewhere civilised to buy a woman?'

‘You don't understand,' the German says with friendly contempt. ‘You don't understand anything but disinfectant and prophylactics. You're afraid of everything, including your own shadow.'

The word
shadow
galvanises me. The thin man opposite notices and narrows his eyes, then he smiles and a gold tooth winks at me. I have the mad desire to laugh, for it seems I have exchanged one sort of farce for another.

‘Aren't you afraid of getting a disease?' the American asks, fastidious but curious too. They do not imagine anyone can understand their words. They have not even looked at me, and what would they see if they did?

The German laughs. ‘The danger makes the pleasure more intense. Darker. In fact, you might say that darkness is the specialty of this place.'

‘This place is no place,' says the American almost plaintively. ‘A stretch of godforsaken highway where the snow looks like dirty sperm. And those women. The way they just loom up suddenly in the headlights with their black leather skirts and fishnet tights and fake fur coats, their eyes like petrol bombs about to blow up in your face. They scare the hell out of me. How can anyone stop? How can you get aroused by that?'

‘They wouldn't be there if no one stopped,' the German observes almost coyly. ‘I've stopped every time I pass this way, and every time I do, I am afraid. Nothing is more terrifying than to stop and invite one of these women into the car. They take me down into the dark so deep I don't know if I'll ever come up, if there is enough light in me to come back.'

‘But they're just whores, terrible rough whores with scars and thick thighs. I read in
Time Magazine
that they're the worst, most dangerous prostitutes in the world.' The American's voice is lace-edged with hysteria.

‘It is true,' the German murmurs.

‘It's the disease that scares me . . .' the American says.

The German calls for the bill. As he pays, the big white-haired man returns, dropping the phone into his pocket. He nods at the two men as they pass, then slides into the booth beside me. It occurs to me that the phone call was about me. Will they now kill me or beat me up and leave me for dead? Will they try to ransom me? Or use me as a hostage? These thoughts flutter distantly though my mind, like leaves blown along a tunnel.

The waiter brings us three espressos. The white-haired man must have ordered them. I drink, enjoying the cruel strength of the dark liquid. I have never tasted such bitter coffee before, like the dregs of the world. The caffeine hits me like a punch to the heart.

An hour passes and the phone rings. The waiter glances at our table in such a way that I see he has recognised my assailants. Or perhaps he has recognised their type. Perhaps he guesses that I have been abducted, but he will do nothing. The big man moves away with the shrilling phone to take the call. He nods. He shakes his head. He shrugs and says a few words. He nods again, then puts the phone away and comes back to the table with an air of purpose. He says two words to the driver, who lights a cigarette. Neither of them speaks to me. Neither of them looks at me.

A strange tension devoid of emotion fills me. ‘What do we do now?' I ask.

The big man tilts his head. ‘We? There is no we.'

I hear the sound of an engine approaching. Both men look away through the glass towards the approaching vehicle. The noise increases until the headlights loom and fuse with the light from the petrol station. The car has tinted windows so it is impossible to see who is inside. The horn sounds and the big man rises from the seat beside me and nods to the driver, who reaches into his pocket and withdraws the keys to the Skoda. He throws them down on the shining formica in front of me.

‘You have your own business to complete now, eh?' the big white-haired man says, nodding away into the darkness, and he goes up to the counter and pays the bill. The two men saunter out the glass door and climb into the waiting car, which sends up a spume of gravel in its wake as it departs.

Another car pulls in. Two young people emerge and stretch. They enter and I watch them slide into the booth where the American and German sat. Their bodies touch all along one side from shoulder down through the hip and thigh to the heels, their connection far more intimate than if they had been wound together explicitly.

I slip and now I am walking into the freezing night. I glance back at the blazing block of cement and glass. It looks like some outstation at the end of the world. It begins to snow lightly, white flakes swirling against the blackness. Climbing into the driver's seat of the Skoda, I insert the key. The strangeness of sitting on the wrong side of the car strikes me dimly. The engine fires the first time, despite the rapidly dropping temperature. I let the engine idle a moment, then put the car smoothly into gear. I feel no impatience or confusion. No fear. My hands are steady as I drive out onto the verge of the highway, remembering to keep to the correct side of the road. I have no idea which way is the way back to the city. Then I realise I am beyond choosing. I drive in the direction the white-haired man nodded, gliding into the unknown with the sudden inexplicable certainty that I am getting closer to my shadow. I shiver, though the heater has warmed up the interior of the car quickly. The snow is still falling, yet blackness presses against the car so hard I fancy it is slowing me down. After several kilometres, I realise that the car
is
slowing. The petrol gauge shows the tank is empty.

The car coasts and I steer to the verge, my mind a blank. I feel nothing. I have come too far to pretend to have control over my life now. Enormous snowflakes fly past the windows like huge moths. I can no longer discern white from black.

The car stops, and at the same time, the snow ceases to fall.

I see her then, a woman standing beside the road against the vast rising mass of the forested hill behind her. She wears a slick black jacket and long black boots. As far as I can tell, she wears neither skirt nor stockings. The blue-tinged white of her bare skin shines. Her hair is so blonde it seems to give off its own radiance.

She turns slowly and looks at me. My heartbeat slows. I tell myself she cannot see me, that it would be impossible to see anything in all the light streaming towards her.

She comes towards the car, approaching the passenger door in a sturdy undulating stride. She taps at the window with nails as long and curved and transparent as a dragonfly's wings.

Aside from her hand splayed against the window, I can see only her torso, the patent leather, a liquescent black, outlining her hips and breasts. The passenger door opens and she enters the car as smoothly as a dancer, letting in an icy blast of air that vanquishes the warmth. She is older than she looked from a distance and more stocky. Her hair glows with a silvery pallor that might be strands of grey. I cannot tell her age. Her skin is like fine velvet, but there are intricate webs of wrinkles at the edges of her eyes. Her mouth is purple-black, as if she has just sucked some dark fruit whose juice has stained her lips, but her eyes are the bright miraculous blue of the skies above my own land, and nothing is more pure or relentless than that.

‘You are tired?' she asks in heavily accented English.

‘I have not slept for a long time,' I say.

‘It is long. The road.'

She reaches out and switches off the headlights. We are plunged into the intimate ghastly green of the dashboard light. The colour makes her look as if she is a corpse, and her eyes seem transparent. Her hair now looks black, as if it has become saturated with the night, or with something seeping out from the heart of all her whiteness. ‘What do you want?' She speaks English as if through a mouthful of liquid.

‘I am looking for my shadow,' I whisper. My own voice sounds foreign. I have never been so close to a woman before.

‘I have what you are seeking,' she says. Then she leans away from me, and draws aside the slick black edges of the coat like the lips of a wound, to reveal the full, smooth curve of her breasts where they are pressed together into a voluptuous cleavage. They are white as milk and downed like a peach. She reaches a pale hand between them and scoops one breast out. It is so soft that her fingers sink into it. She gestures at it in a businesslike way and I recoil.

I shake my head. I want to tell her that I am a man, not a child to be suckled. Not some doddering senile fool returned to infancy. But she reaches out her free hand to grip my neck, and pulls me towards her. Only then, with her hair swept back to bare her throat and bosom fully, do I notice a dark vein snaking from her neck to her breast. It writhes under her skin as if it has its own life and moves towards the tip of her breast.

She is strong as a peasant and a ripe odour flows over me as she lifts the breast and pulls me to it. To drink the shadow in her, to be drunk by it.

A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I
would like to thank Erica Wagner and Allen & Unwin for their graceful and almost mythic patience with me throughout the long, slow creation of this book. Thanks also to my editor, Nan McNab, for being unfailingly graceful under fire, and brave enough never to let me get away with less than my best. And finally, thanks to Zoë Sadokierski for her lovely, lovely design.

These four stories were previously published, two in a significantly
different form:

‘The Man Who Lost His Shadow' in
Dreaming Down-Under Book 1
, edited by Jack Dann, Voyager/HarperCollins, 1999

‘The Dove Game' (dedicated to Danny) in
Gathering the Bones
, edited by Jack Dann, Voyager/HarperCollins, 2003