Russell Hoban - Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

‘What are we but clay,’ said Mr Rinyo-Clacton, ‘and infirm vessels all. One million pounds.’

The long darkness of Serafina’s hair! The raven’s wing of it sweeping over my face! Gone! ‘One million pounds what?’

‘Later,’ he said as the house lights dimmed, the audience murmured, coughed, and shifted from buttock to buttock; the conductor appeared, bathed briefly in his spotlight, bowed to us, then faced the orchestra and lifted his baton. The curtain went up, the music and the voices rose and fell like the sea, after a time becoming Mélisande’s song as she combed her hair in the tower window. ‘Mes longs cheveux descendent …’ she sang. ‘My long hair goes down to the door of the tower; my hair is waiting for you …’ said the surtitles over the stage, and I began to cry as Mélisande, leaning from her tower window, let down her long, long hair to cover the face of Pelléas.

Rising and Falling like the sea, the powerful Mr Rinyo-Clacton, long and strong, managing me with a firm hand in the dark wood of his shadowy bedroom, on silken sheets among the glints and gleams of gold and silver, porcelain, bronze, ebony, tinted mirrors, coloured glass, and the smell that I thought of as bitter aloes. In the black marble fireplace the flames flickered and purred. ‘Say it!’ he whispered in my ear as he rode me. ‘Say it, the low and delicious word death!’

My head was still going round. ‘Death!’ I said. ‘Death, death, death, death!’

‘Yes!’ He came, and still holding me to him, quietly began to weep. ‘“Whereto answering”,’ he murmured brokenly, ‘“the sea,

Delaying not, hurrying not,

Whisper’d me through the night, and very plainly

before daybreak,

Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death,

And again death, death, death, death …”’

Serafina! I thought, remembering the taste of her on my tongue, the fragrance of her skin, the scent of her hair. The music of Pelléas et Mélisande was still with me, rising and falling, surging like the sea, death glimmering in moonlight on the water. Serafina! Far away, the land receding in the night to leave the horizon empty in the dawn.

‘How was it for you, Jonny?’ said Mr Rinyo-Clacton.

I shook my head. I’d never before had sex with another male. What did it mean? I hadn’t been too drunk to know what I was doing. Was I losing my manhood?

‘Nothing to say? Still the shy little virgin?’ He slapped my thigh. ‘I hadn’t planned this,’ he said, ‘but we might as well begin as we mean to go on …’

‘I don’t think I want to go on.’ I pulled away and turned to face him. The champagne had worn off somewhat. His skin was blotchy, his breath was bad. I felt sore and thought I might be bleeding. He hadn’t used a condom. How many others had he done this with? Why had he been weeping?

‘What I mean,’ he said, ‘is that I must be master — you understand?’

‘You’ve just given a pretty good demonstration of that, I think.’

‘I’m not talking about sex now. When I saw you sitting on the floor in the tube station I thought I saw death looking out of your eyes. Was I right?’

I picked my clothes up off the floor and started to get dressed. I wondered if there was anyone buried under the floorboards, and yet that room with its glints and gleams, its flickering shadows and its smell of bitter aloes had an atmosphere that I felt rather at home in. Good God! Had I wanted this? The shadows were peopled by African figures, most of them with erect members. I was stood by a low black bookcase, on top of which was a primitive-looking clay pot, greyish-black and decorated with a simple geometric pattern of grooves. It was about nine inches high, eight inches wide at the top, tapering to six at the bottom. It was like the illustration in my Dictionary of Archaeology: Rinyo-Clacton, Late Neolithic. It was filled with black pebbles. I held some in my hand, heard them clicking in the tidewash, heard the sighing of the sea. ‘What you saw looking out of my eyes was most of a bottle of gin,’ I said.

‘It seemed like more than gin to me.’ He was still naked, flaunting himself.

‘That’s your problem,’ I said, turning away.

‘Why had you drunk so much gin that you sat down on the floor in Piccadilly Circus tube station?’

‘Serafina’s gone.’ I needed to hear myself saying her name to him; it was like chewing a razor blade. In our flat were plants that she watered faithfully; I never remembered the names of them except the cyclamen and the one that hung in front of the window, sunlight through its leaves: the Russian vine. The cyclamen seemed to me a secret self of Serafina, as if it might at some time speak in a tiny Serafina voice and explain everything to me.

‘Ah!’ said Mr Rinyo-Clacton, putting on a dressing-gown, ‘Serafina’s gone and that’s why you sat down on the floor in the tube station.’

‘Something like that.’

‘I understand perfectly: she was everything to you, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘So it was as if the world had been pulled out from under your feet and you had to sit down.’

‘Yes.’

‘Maybe you found yourself not caring very much whether you lived or died.’

I shrugged.

‘I have a sure instinct in these matters,’ he said, ‘and I say again that I saw death looking out of your eyes. And if the death in you wants to come out, as I think it does, I’ll buy it for a million pounds and give you a year to enjoy the million.’

‘You want to buy my death for a million pounds!’

‘That’s what I said: one million pounds, cash.’

‘What kind of a weirdo are you?’

‘The kind with lots of money.’ His lips, I noticed, were wet. He had ugly hands, hairy and with thick fingers. ‘Death fascinates me,’ he said, ‘how there’s one in each of us, waiting for its time. There’s one in me as I speak to you but it’s in no hurry. Yours, on the other hand, seems eager to come out. I want to watch it as one watches a woman undressing in a window; I want to think about how I’m going to fondle it and taste it when the time comes. Your death will be a juicy thing for me; when I was in you I could feel it, shy but ardent, responding to me.’

I remembered a dream: Serafina and I crossing a lion-coloured desert until there mysteriously appeared before us an oasis, the feathery palm trees real in a way that only palm trees in dreams are; there were wild asses drinking at a shining dark pool in which the palms were reflected. I said, ‘What would the actual arrangement be?’

‘As I’ve said, I’ll give you one million pounds cash and one year to live. During that time I’ll naturally want to stay in touch, visit you now and then, generally cultivate your ripening death. It’ll be exciting for both of us, I think.’

‘What happens at the end of the year?’

‘Not necessarily precisely at the year’s end but whenever I choose after that I’ll harvest you. It will be quick and merciful; you’ll cease upon the midnight with no pain and your troubles will be over. If there’s any money left I’ll see that it goes to a loved one or the charity of your choice.’

‘Would you do the harvesting yourself or would Desmond do it for you?’

‘I’ll do it.’

‘Have you ever killed anyone before?’

‘Gentlemen don’t tell.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve never had a proposition like this before. It’s a big step to take, isn’t it.’

‘Next to being born I’d say it’s about the biggest.’

‘May I think about your offer?’ I heard myself say that and I couldn’t believe it. What was going on in my mind?