Brian Aldiss - The Squire Quartet

‘You manufacture computers?’

Joachimiak screwed one of his temples with what looked like an awkward but nevertheless determined attempt to touch his brain with his finger.

‘Know-how. Is all in here. I can make a great success. I am a real know-all.’

‘And were you born in Australia?’ Laura asked again. ‘Is Joachimiak an Australian name?’

‘Ah-hark, the lady is a little curious about me, yes. I know, I know it, all lady are detracted by success. Well, I tell you, lady, I was not born in Sydney but in Ostrow Lomelsky. You know Ostrow Lomelsky? Maybe you been to Ostrow Lomelsky?’

Suddenly, he appeared to have lost interest in the conversation.

He turned and lumbered back to his wife, who had produced a paperback entitled Growing Old Today and was glaring at one of its pages.

She was smoking continuously. Her cigarettes and lighter lay on the table beside her empty glass. Joachimiak grasped the lighter and blunderingly relit his cigar.

‘Can I buy you another lager?’ Squire asked the man.

‘A brandy. I want brandy. That is kind of you. I’d like to shake your hand, mister. First bit of kindness I’ve had all day. People don’t care any more, do they?’

He shook hands with Squire as the barman delivered three fresh drinks. Sinatra was singing ‘What Now My Love’.

Joachimiak edged round Squire so as to be able to address Nye face to face, and returned to his previous question. ‘You maybe been to Ostrow Lomelsky?’

‘Not that I remember,’ Nye said. ‘Where is it, exactly?’

He became very cunning, winking and putting one finger along his nose whilst almost laying his head on the bar.

‘Ah-hark, so you never heard of Ostrow Lomelsky? Well, you’d like that place. Very quiet. Wide spaces. Only a little village. Very cold winters, all the time it freeze very hard and the horses die.’ The mere recollection made his accent heavier. ‘Very pain to work, I don’t know. The River Bug, it freeze so hard – you know the River Bug?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Is not good, in winter is not good, River Bug. So anyhow, I tell you how you get to Ostrow Lomelsky, then you go and see what I say. You know Lublin? Is big city south from Warszawa. From Lublin in a car, if you got a car, drive north-east, only nowdays you don’t drive too far or you come to the frontier with the Soviet Union.’

He broke off to laugh, cough, and drink half of the brandy Squire had provided. His wife continued to read, drawing cigarette smoke into her lungs before issuing it into the atmosphere.

‘Sounds a nice part of the world,’ Squire said.

‘Terrible, terrible, I can tell you, Mr Englishman; Sydney is a whole lot better than Ostrow Lomelsky. Not so quiet, no, not so quiet, but a whole lot better.’ He shook his head, laughing and wheezing. ‘You think Ostrow Lomelsky sounds good? I have to sleep with my parents on top of the stove, you know? Turnips frozen in the ground.’

Wheezing, he turned back towards his wife. ‘Tinka, this Limey likes the sound of Ostrow Lomelsky. With the sewer running through the street?’ She paid him no attention, thumbing the pages of her book.

‘You were telling us how to get to your birthplace.’

‘What for you want to know?’ He swigged down the rest of his brandy, gasped, coughed, and said, ‘So you drive in a car if you got a car north-east from Lublin at forty kilometres an hour, across the River Wieprz where was once a massacre in older days, all the Jews killed off, and in two and a quarter hours you will be in Ostrow Lomelsky, right smack by Krzysztof Gajda’s gasthof.’

‘I see,’ said Squire. ‘So Ostrow Lomelsky is ninety kilometres outside Lublin in a north-easterly direction?’

Joachimiak took the cigar from his mouth and laid it along his nose, at the same time cocking his head so that it almost rested on the bar.

‘Ah-hark, you are pretty fast at calculations, mister. Congratulations, for I see you are a smart guy for an Englishman. But your calculations are wrong, anyhow, or maybe you drive too fast, because the correct distance is only sixty-two kilometres.’

He started to laugh, dropped the cigar on the bar, bent double to laugh, turned back to his wife to try and get her to share his amusement.

‘Eh, Tinka, Tinka, this limey guy, he think Lublin is ninety kilometres outside Ostrow Lomelsky! Ninety kilometres! Jesus, Sweet Saviour! This guy’d be in the River Bug before that. How you like that?’

She looked at him stonily. ‘You’re pissed,’ she said.

He redoubled his laughter. ‘Yes, but, Tinka, you hear what this guy say to me?’

‘I heard,’ she said. She regarded him without expression.

‘We’d better be going, Sun’s waiting for us,’ Squire said, slipping off his stool and pulling some crumpled dollars out of his pocket.

‘Don’t go,’ Joachimiak said, grabbing his arm. ‘Listen, let me get you a drink. Barman, barman, two brandies!’

They made a difficult exit. Sinatra was still singing ‘My Kind of Town’. The woman at the table watched them from over the top of her paperback without changing her expression.

Sun asked them, as he held out a hand to assist Laura Nye unnecessarily into the power boat, ‘You have a happy time on the island?’

‘It was lovely. Thank you very much.’

She started giggling. ‘What was the name of that dreadful village near the River Bug?’

‘Oswelsky Tommel?’

‘Stromsky Something. Stromsky Lomsky.’

They could not remember, and ended up laughing. As they snuggled together and watched the astonishing panorama of Singapore rise from the sea, Nye said, ‘That’s broken my dream. I was somewhere on a hillside where I’d never been before. I was walking through a funny sort of garden and there were lights flashing in the sky. Then there was a break and then I was surrounded by little green men. I should have been frightened but wasn’t. Everything charmed me – I think I had the idea they were rescuing me. They had a UFO parked among trees. They led me there and helped me up the ramp. I was getting very excited to think that I was about to fly to another planet, and then I woke up.’

‘Obvious sexual dream. I’m almost twice your age. You regard me as an alien or a time-traveller.’

‘Why do dreams always break off at the most interesting part?’

He laughed. ‘Good question. I don’t know if anyone has answered it. Imagination refusing to go any further? Maybe if the good things always happened in dreams there’d be no incentive to make them happen in waking life. They’d sap your determination if you could get to Venus every night.’

‘Like you have to work very hard really to get to Ossle Tomski.’

‘She was dreadful, wasn’t she? Did she make him the way he is or vice versa?’

They were speeding among the freighters by then, heading for the dockside.

After a light lunch, they returned to their hotel. Grahame and the others were nowhere to be seen. With some relief, Squire and Nye took the lift up to their room. It was a beautiful room, cool, well-appointed, smelling of sandalwood, with an ever-interesting view of Orchard Road and the city.

They showered together and sluiced the sand from their bodies. She let the water course over her upturned face.

‘Laura, dearest Laura, I can think and breathe nothing but you.’

She pressed herself against him. ‘Oh, I do want to be with you. I need you so much, Tom. I can’t leave you.’

Squeezing her, he stared painfully at her. ‘It’ll be different back in England. I can’t let you louse up your life with Peter. Besides – oh, Christ I keep telling you, I really am old enough to be your father.’

‘You told me also that when your boyhood hero Humphrey Bogart married Lauren Bacall, he was old enough to be her father, and that all worked out really happily. Well, we’ll work out something good, too.’