William Boyd - Stars and bars

“Got it,” said Irene, and honked noisily into a Kleenex.

“ RUN! ” Henderson screamed, simultaneously flinging away the umbrella and giving Irene a mighty push. He hauled off his sabres and dropped them on the ground. His hand closed around his wallet, fat with credit cards and dollars.

“Yow can have it, you bastards! ” he yelled at the muggers and with all his strength bowled his wallet in their direction. He saw it fly open and notes and cards shower out, then he turned and ran. At once he tripped over his sabres and barked his knee savagely on the road. Through tears of pain he saw no sign of Irene and assumed she had made her escape. He heard shouts close behind him. Without a rearward glance he got to his feet and started to sprint away up the street, making difficult progress as his belted and buttoned raincoat got in the way of his pounding knees — one of which felt as if it were on fire, the kneebone like some white hot, abrasive nugget. He thrashed frantically on, though, skidding in a puddle, glancing off a dustbin. He was impelled to even greater efforts by another hoarse shout from behind and by the sound of running footsteps — light, energetic, athletic paces, slapping on the wet tarmac. Oh God, just don’t let them pour petrol on me, he prayed. Just don’t let them kick all my teeth out. He thought he was going to vomit with the effort. He felt a hand clutch at his elbow. He screamed and thrashed out wildly behind him, somehow forcing himself to keep running. A hand caught his flying coat-tail.

“OK,” he bellowed in mingled rage and terror as he was hauled to a stop, “kill me, kill me! I don’t card ”

He collapsed gasping against a wall. The end of the street and safety still a dark twenty yards away. Would anyone hear his screams?

Both his arms were firmly gripped. “Sir,” a quiet voice came. “Relax, please, sir. We have your wallet and your money here.”

♦

Henderson lay in his bed in his apartment. Alone. He felt like a man awakening from a deep coma, or like an airliner emerging from a dense cloud bank into clearer air. The white clouds were his shame and embarrassment. Occasionally they swirled round to re-engulf him, but now, several hours later, they appeared finally to be on the wane.

The mighty push he had given Irene, and which was meant to propel her up the street, had in fact been badly askew. She had thudded heavily into a wall and collapsed, wordless and winded, to observe her frenzied screaming lover hurl his wallet at four returning moviegoers and then run frantically away, raincoat cracking, tumbling and falling in desperate panic-stricken flight. Two of the young men had helped her to her feet and pumped air into her lungs while the other two had overtaken the bawling, fearful Henderson. He had reconstructed this version of events later. Shame rendered him a docile automaton. Irene had been bundled into a passing taxi ( now , they passed) while he, with the assistance of the four young men (they were so helpful) had scrabbled about in search of his scattered damp money and credit cards.

He looked at his watch. Half past three. The last time he had looked at his watch it had been twenty-seven minutes past three. This was, he reckoned, insomnia’s cruellest curse. Time dawdled. Time loitered. Time forgot what it was meant to be doing. Henderson could lie awake and review his entire autobiography in merciless detail — all the false starts, the self-delusions, the errors, the if-onlys — in the time it took for the minute hand on his watch to advance one tiny calibrated square. He turned over. He turned over again. He got hot and thrust a leg out from beneath the quilt. It got cold. He drew it back in. He looked at his watch. Twenty-six minutes to four.

By rights he should have been in bed with Irene. Those round flat breasts with their curiously small dark nipples. Her unshaven armpits. Her smells…They had slept together twice before. The first time as he had hovered uncertainly above her (his first sex in eight months, all technique forgotten, trusting hopefully to instinct) she had reached down, grabbed his cock at the root and virtually — there was no other adequate verb — plugged him in. The second time, as he had humped away with damp-browed, slack-jawed abandon in the dark, she had said in his ear: “Shall we stop, Henderson? Do you really think it’s worth it tonight?” He had stopped at once, his shock at the matter-of-fact reasonableness of her tone detumescing him rapidly. She had said that it had all seemed a bit pointless that night — if he’d forgive the expression — she wasn’t in the right mood for all that shoving and pounding. Nothing to do with him, she added, it was just that at certain times she found the sex-act, well, ludicrous and absurd. He had found himself agreeing, to his surprise, but there was a quality about Irene’s scornful logic that, once engaged, brooked no argument. It was like the laser-eye of a guided missile: once locked-on it couldn’t be evaded, no matter how one jinked, side-tracked or doubled back.

Tonight, though, until the disastrous arrival of the four ‘muggers’, had been different, and would have been different, he felt sure. He sank his teeth into his pillow. He enjoyed being with Irene: she could be so odd, so strange. The first time he had gone back to her apartment with her, she had invited him in then picked up a block of wood and a hammer lying in the hall way, placed the wood against a wall and hammered at it for a couple of minutes — an act she repeated every quarter of an hour. She explained to her baffled guest that her neighbours had been redecorating their apartment for the last month at all hours and, now that they were finished, she was letting them have a taste of their own medicine. The last Sunday, she confessed, she had drilled and hammered for a good two hours. “I give,” she had said; with a tough smile and looking at him directly, “as good as I get.”

That was true, Henderson had come to realize. And there also, he admitted, was the source of Irene’s potent allure. She was the very antithesis of him. Rather as cannibals are renowned to eat the brains of their enemies to acquire extra intelligence and cunning, so Henderson fancied his association with Irene might allow some of her forthright vigour to strengthen his soul…

He sat up and replumped his pillows. Over the years, as he had first located, analysed and tried to face up to his problem, the suspicion had grown that it in some way wasn’t his own fault, that in some way his country was to blame. Perhaps…

With a great thrashing heave he turned over.

He slid his hand into the cool crevice between sheet and pillow. That was what he needed. He thought of his lamentable day. He needed some of that strength. He itched with residual shame. There was no hope in ringing her up, asking if he could come round. No hope…Besides he didn’t know if he was up to it himself. When he had fallen over his sabre bag he had cut and grazed his right knee rather badly, and ruined his suit.

He looked at his watch. A quarter to four.

He turned on his side, hunched into his pillow and closed his eyes. But his brain’s life bubbled on, like an indefatigable party goer. It was something about bed, something about his body being in repose that seemed to trigger it into hyperactive motion. He ran through his favourite sexual fantasies, duly got an erection, but then found he was thinking about the problems of replacing his American Express card, which had not been uncovered by the diligent search he and his four new friends had carried out.

He wondered if he should take a sleeping pill, but decided not to. They left him more tired the following day than his usual undrugged night on the rack. Once, in a fit of frustration, he had taken three of the particular brand he was prescribed. They made him go to sleep, after a fashion; but what was worse was that he stumbled around like a moron for the next day — heavy-lidded, rubber-lipped, senses all but shut down, barely able to string three words together. At times in any given night he did drift off but never, it seemed, for more than half an hour. It was a source of constant wonder to him how his body survived on such meagre rations. He had read somewhere that eight hours of sleep per day was a mythical requirement. He was living proof of the fallacy — if such a concept were possible. For a while he played around with the words: can you prove a fallacy, disprove a fallacy…