The Follower (14 page)

As he moved forward, the light grew more distinct. He started to run. He stumbled against a stone pillar which supported a large plant in a kerosene can. The plant toppled and crashed to the ground. He tripped and fell sprawling over it The dog moaned with fright. Then it was licking his cheek with a warm, rubbery tongue.

He jumped up again. The dog pranced and barked around him. As he started forward once more, it leaped up and caught at his sleeve with its teeth. It dangled there, squirming like a fish on a line. He shook it off. The light did come from a window. He could tell that now. Then there must be a door.

He ran straight into a wall. His fingers, groping over the rough surface, found a door frame. Moving down the panelling they reached a handle. He turned it. It was locked. He was shaking now as if he had a fever. Behind him, a thin night piping came from the covered birdcage. He shook at the door handle. The meagre wooden panels quivered.

‘Ellie.’

The dog shrilled a falsetto bark and hurled itself at the back of his knee. He crashed against the door with his shoulder. The lock snapped on the first try. The door sagged inwards.

He crossed the threshold. Inside, the air was stale with a heavy, sweetish stuffiness. A single candle in an empty bottle sent light and shadow quivering around a bare, poverty-stricken room. An iron cot stood against a side wall. Lying on it, with a serape thrown over her, was a girl.

Her face was turned to the wall. Her head was in shadow. She was merely a huddled, anonymous female body. But in the first instant of corroding relief he recognized his wife.

It was suddenly as if neither time nor space had separated them. He ran to the low bed. He dropped to his knees at her side.

‘Ellie.’

She did not stir. Until then he hadn’t wondered at her not moving when he broke down the door. Now dread invaded his vitals.

‘Ellie.’

He put his hand on her arm. Almost roughly he pulled her around on to her back. Her face moved slowly into the dim candlelight. The shock was like ice on the nape of his neck.

Her fair hair lay in limp disheveled tangles. Her face - the face which had almost faded from his memory and then sprang vividly back to be the only real face in the world for him - was almost unrecognizable. It was still beautiful. Nothing could destroy its beauty. But it was empty as an idiot’s face. The lips hung in a meaningless smirk. The eyes, blue and very wide open, looked up at him without any expression at all.

He knew she was not dead; he could see the slow rise and fall of her breasts. But this, because he didn’t understand it, was almost more horrible.

He said: ‘Ellie.’

Something pressed against his knee. The yellow dog had crept up to him. It was sitting on its haunches, its tongue lolling out, looking at Ellie with alert interest.

‘Ellie.’

She did move then. Her whole body changed its position like a child in a profound dream. He felt lost in a world where he didn’t belong.

Two little bubbles of saliva swelled on her lower lip and burst. She giggled.

‘Ellie.’

She giggled again, a low, chuckling giggle like a dirty message scribbled on a wall.

THE giggle unmanned him. Almost for the first time in his adult life he was completely without a plan. He put his hands on her arms and, half raising her from the bed, shook her violently. Some of the dazed blankness left her face. She gave a little grunt. Her eyes roamed and settled on his. For a moment they seemed to show a gleam of understanding. Then they dulled.

Out of the terrible confusion in his mind the thought came that she was insane. Once he had been taken through a mental hospital. He had seen inmates lying like that, stare-eyed, immobile, all their humanity swallowed up in a blind vegetable apathy. He stopped shaking her. Words tumbled out of him.

‘Ellie, baby, it’s me. It’s Mark. I’m here. I’m Mark. I’m here.’

Her head moved slightly. Her eyes were fixed on his again, and for the first time he noticed that the pupils were constricted almost to slits. A vague memory told him that the pupils dwindled under the influence of some sort of narcotic, a little of the horror was crowded out. She was under dope. That’s what they’d done to her. They’d brought her here to imprison her. With only Oscar’s fluttering women-folk as jailers they had doped her for safety’s sake.

He forgot his fear then. In its place came a murderous anger against Frankie and George.

The dog gave a sudden delighted yelp and started to drag at something. He looked down automatically. Ellie’s handbag, its mouth agape, lay on the floor by the bed. The dog had the strap in its teeth and was worrying it tentatively. He picked the handbag up, snapped it shut and looped it on his arm. He bent over his wife again, saying:

‘Ellie, Ellie.’

One of her arms started to move upwards. Her wedding ring and the dark sapphire which he had given her the day before their marriage gleamed in the flickering candlelight. The hand crawled with a gentle creeping of fingers around his neck. Her skin was warm and dry. She didn’t say anything. There was nothing to indicate that she had the faintest realization of who he was. But the trustful clinging of her arm touched him to the core.

He lifted her other hand up to his neck. Her fingers caught obediently to the collar of his topcoat. He pushed his arms under her and carried her off the bed. The grey and black serape slid on to the floor, revealing the fact that she was wearing a black suit which was shockingly creased and stained.

The dog whimpered, ran to the open door and paused, glancing back with cocked ears. He followed it into the patio. The darkness was portentously silent. He thought of the six Mexican women, hovering somewhere in the shadows.

The dog jumped around them, ran ahead and paused again. It thought it was going to be taken for a walk. It wasn’t headed towards the door through which he had entered the house. Maybe there was another exit. He followed the dog. It galloped forward. Soon he heard expectant whines and the sound of claws scratching on wood. He caught up. The dog was sniffing eagerly at what seemed to be a rough wooden gate in the wall. Mark released one hand from Ellie, fumbled, found a bolt, scraped it back and swung the door inwards on creaking hinges.

The dog bounded out. He followed into a deserted alley. The women had made no attempt to stop him. It was a strange, flat way to escape after so much effort had gone into finding Ellie.

Music bellowed from the fiesta in the square.
You scream, I scream, We all scream for ice-cream.
The dog loped away up the alley.

The dusty path through adobe walls sloped downwards to the left towards a main street where a single street light showed. A burro, with a length of corrugated iron tied to its back, was tethered to a scrawny oleander bush. A child’s pink balloon, escaped from the fiesta, floated over a wall, trailed its string across the corrugated iron and then, after a moment in which it seemed to knot itself to the donkey’s tail, was caught in a breeze and soared upwards.

Suddenly Mexico, which had never seemed completely real to him, had become a dream world. He lost all contact with it. He was carrying Ellie through a picture or through a fantasy in someone else’s mind.

Her cheek had come to rest against his. Her lips nuzzled against his ear.

‘Ellie, baby,’ he whispered.

‘Ellie, baby,’ she echoed in a small, thin voice.

‘It’s Mark, honey.’

‘It’s Mark, honey.’

His throat constricted. He wanted to hit something, to destroy something and that way to jar himself out of this feeling of unreality. He carried her down the alley to the street which was on the fringes of the square. Colorful crowds were streaming in both directions, but the throng was not as dense as it had been in the square itself. A few cars crawled at tortoise pace down the middle of the road. One of them was a taxi. As Mark’s gaze fell on it, it stopped and an enormous woman in black maneuvered herself out, entangled in a huge bunch of Easter lilies. That’s what he wanted, he thought vaguely. A taxi was what he wanted.

He braced himself to shove his way through the swarming bodies. But it was not necessary. Everyone, even a group of swirling feathered dancers, moved aside to make a path for them with grave, formal politeness. Once one of Ellie’s sandals knocked against a woman’s shoulder and fell off. A whole group of people stopped to retrieve it. One of them slipped it shyly on to Ellie’s foot again. An Indian wearing a great white straw hat, with two tiny boys clinging to his trousers, opened the taxi door. Mark lifted Ellie inside and climbed in after her. The Indian shut the door.

Mark took Ellie in his arms. She giggled again. Her hand, moving at random, found his. The little finger curled delicately around his thumb.

Slowly he became aware that the driver had twisted in his seat and was watching him from bright eyes.

‘¿Un medico? ¿El Senor quiere un medico?’

He paid attention with an effort.

‘¿
Un medico?’
asked the driver again. Shyly he tried English. ‘You want a doctor, yes?’

An unknown Mexican doctor pawing Ellie, asking embarrassing questions, insisting perhaps on the police? No, he couldn’t face a doctor. Not now.

He shook his head. ‘A hotel,’ he said.

‘The Hotel Reforma? Is nice. Is a good hotel.’

‘No, not the Reforma. And not a hotel near the Reforma.’

‘Then the Hotel Mirador? Is close. Is good.’

‘Okay. The Mirador.’

After an interminable period of crawling and horn-honking, the taxi broke free of the fiesta crowd and plunged down a long, almost deserted street. Behind the anger and shock, part of Mark’s mind had started to function automatically. George had taken Ellie from the Hotel Granada and had imprisoned her under dope at Oscar’s house. Why? What was the pattern? Were George and Frankie playing some small-time kidnap racket for a ransom? Or did all this somehow still link up with Victor? If only he could find some sense, some thread, he might be able to steady himself. But the questions wobbled and scattered like an image on a television screen losing its focus.

Ellie’s finger was still clinging to his thumb. She leaned heavy and inert against his shoulder. He tried to take in the enormous fact that he had found her. She had been hedged around with mystery and danger, and yet against all odds he had found her. There should be a feeling of triumph.

But there wasn’t. Ellie had always been to him something vivid, animated, more full of life than any other person he had ever known. This speechless, senseless body hunched against him was almost repulsive to him. It was some nightmare travesty of his wife created by George and Frankie.

He told himself that the dope would wear off soon. She would come out of this chrysalis of stupor. There would be no permanent damage. Then he would hear the whole story from Ellie’s own lips, and he would be able to settle his score with George and Frankie.

At some point the taxi turned off a residential street through high gates into elaborately landscaped grounds. The headlights spotted palm trees and bougainvillaea vines, cascading over white walls. They stopped in front of a portico. Mark gave the driver a bill from his wallet and lifted Ellie out of the car.

The driver laboriously counted crumpled bills and handed Mark change. He hadn’t expected it or wanted it, but the driver forced it on him.

‘Good hotel,’ he said, nodding emphatically. ‘Good hotel for the lady.’

Mark lifted Ellie out of the taxi. She moaned and started to squirm petulantly in his arms. He thought she wanted to be put down and he slid her feet to the ground. She stood for a moment with her hand on his arm to support her. Then she giggled. She took two or three swaying steps like a preposterously drunk person. Her knees buckled abruptly under her. He caught her before she fell and lifted her in his arms again.

He carried her into a lounge which looked like a stage set for a south of the border musical. It was deserted except for a bellhop and a clerk behind a desk embowered with poinsettias.

He went to the desk, prepared to be belligerent if they made difficulties. He said: ‘My wife’s been taken sick. We have no baggage. I’ll pay for the room in advance.’

His Americanness made them automatically respectable. He could tell that right away. The clerk twittered solicitously, ushered them himself into the elevator and took them up to a room where the beds were disguised as studio couches with chartreuse covers and the telephone was white. Mark laid Ellie down on one of the beds. The clerk hovered with discreet offers of service. Mark paid him the price of the room and he went away.

Mark dropped Ellie’s handbag on the floor and sat down on the bed, taking his wife’s hot, dry hands in his. Her wide-open eyes still gazed inwards at some dream, but it seemed to him that some of the idiot blankness was gone. The stereotyped prettiness of the room made him poignantly conscious of her crumpled black suit and disheveled hair. Ellie always made a point of being exquisitely groomed. He tried to smooth some of the creases out of her skirt. He reached down for the handbag, searched its chaotic contents and found a comb. He ran it clumsily through her hair in a barren attempt to impress some order on it. He thought suddenly of Frankie at the Hotel Reforma, wearing Ellie’s clothes, using her perfume.

He got up and started to pace about the room. He found a cigarette in his pocket and fumbled for a match. He had none. His glance fell on a painted Indian table. A book of matches lay in a charro-hat pottery ash-tray, a larger version of the one Oscar had given him. He picked the matches up. The book said: ‘Hotel Mirador, the friendly hostelry that brings you all the color of quaint Old Mexico.’ He lit the cigarette and put the book in his pocket.

It suddenly enraged him that Ellie should be lying there like a drunk picked up off the street. At least she should be put to bed. He crossed to the second bed and pulled down the coverlet, revealing light yellow sheets. One of the couch cushions was a pillow in disguise. He pulled it out from its chartreuse cover. He went back to Ellie. He took off her sandals. Gently he removed her stockings and, raising her unresisting torso, stripped off the suit jacket and blouse. He unzipped the skirt and drew it down from her thighs. She was wearing a white silk slip.