Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

I hated him most when he said, with a concern that was contemptuous patronage, “How do you manage?”

My elbows were on the bar, my head in my hands. Far off on a green ocean I saw a yacht speeding toward me with its pennants snapping in the breeze. A man in a swivel chair on the afterdeck had his feet braced on the gunwales and was pulling at a bending rod. Just behind him a lovely girl in a swimsuit stood with a tray of drinks and — I knew — club sandwiches, fresh olives, dishes of rollmop herring, and caviar spread on yellow crackers. The fish leaped, a tall silver thing turning in the sun, whipping the line out of the water. The yacht was close and I could see the man now. It was not me; it was no one I knew. I released my fingers from my eyes.

“Flowers,” said Leigh. Why was he smiling? “How about a drink at the club?”

My girls were fairly well known at the Bandung—“Jack’s fruit flies,” Yardley called them — but no one there had any knowledge of my club work, and how I came straight from the Churchill Room or the Raffles Grill to the Bandung like an unfaithful husband home from his beguiling mistress’s arms. I tried to whisper, “Maybe later.”

Leigh looked beyond me to the others. “Does this establishment,” he said, “have a toilet?”

“In the kitchen,” said Coony, glad for a chance to say it.

Wally pointed the way.

“Does this establishment have a toilet?” said Smale. He guffawed. I wondered if Leigh could hear.

“Calls it a toilet,” said Yardley. “He knows it’s a crapper, but he calls it a toilet. That’s breeding, you understand.”

Frogget went yuck-yuck.

“What’s this club he’s talking about?” asked Yardley suspiciously.

I said I didn’t have the remotest idea.

“You sound more like him every day,” said Yardley.

“Knock it off,” I said.

“Don’t be narked,” said Smale. “He’s your mate, ain’t he?”

“He hasn’t bought anyone a drink yet,” said Coony. “I could tell he was a mean bastard.”

“Did you hear him rabbiting on?” asked Smale.

“I liked the part about him having tea in the pasture,” said Frogget. “That shows he’s around the twist.”

They had heard. They had been talking the whole time but they had caught what Leigh had said about Elmview — a distorted version of it. I had whispered, confiding my hopes; they could not have heard me. But why had I weakened and told Leigh? And who would he tell? He was out of the room; I wanted him to stay out, never to come back, and for his engine to gripe and stop his mouth.

“He’s a pain in the neck,” I said, at last.

“Been in the bog a little while,” said Smale. “What do you suppose he’s doing in there?”

“Probably tossing himself off,” said Frogget.

“You’re a delicate little feller,” I said.

No one said anything for a little while, but it was not what I had said to Frogget that caused the silence. We were waiting for the flush, which you could hear in the bar. The only sounds were the fans on the ceiling and the murmuring of Wally’s transistor. We were drinking without speaking, and looking around in the way fellers do when they have just come into a bar; Leigh might have crept back without pulling the chain.

“So he’s doing your towkay ’s accounts,” said Yardley. It was a meaningless remark, but for Yardley an extraordinary tone of voice: he whispered it.

“It’s a very fiddly sort of job,” said Yates after a moment. “You really have to know what’s what.”

“Takes ages to do those sums,” said Smale. “Our accountant told me some days he looks at all those numbers and feels like cutting his throat.”

“You have to pass an exam,” said Coony, staring toward the kitchen. “To be an accountant. It’s a bugger to pass. I know a bloke who failed it five times. Bright bloke, too.”

Yardley called Wally, who was holding his radio to his ear the way a child holds a seashell for the sound. He ordered drinks and when Wally set them up Yardley handed me two gins and a bottle of tonic water. “Pink one’s for your pal,” he said. He glanced toward the kitchen.

“I wouldn’t mind living in Wiltshire,” Smale said. He said it with reverent hope, and we continued talking like this, in whispers. I had not realized just how long Leigh had been gone until I saw that the ice in his pink gin had melted and my own glass was empty.

I climbed down from the barstool and hurried into the kitchen. The toilet door was ajar, but Leigh was not inside. He was sitting on a white kitchen chair, by the back door, with his head between his knees.

“William,” I said, “are you okay?”

He shook his head from side to side without raising it.

“Get up and walk around a bit. It’s cool out back. The fresh air — can you hear me? — the fresh air will do you a world of good. Can you get up?”

He groaned. The back of his neck was damp, the sick man’s sweat made his hair prickle; his ears had gone white. I knew it was his engine.

“He sick- lah ,” said Wally, appearing beside me with the radio squawking in his hand.

“Will you shut that fucking thing off!” I screamed. I do not know why I objected or swore. “Get a doctor, and hurry!”

Wally jumped to the phone.

Yardley and the others came into the kitchen as I was helping Leigh up. Leigh’s face had a white horror-struck expression — wide unmoving nose holes — that of a man drowning slowly in many fathoms of water. I had seen these poor devils hoisted out of the drink: their mouths gaped open and they stared past you with anxious bugging eyes, as if they have acquired phenomenal sight, the ability to see far, and see at that great distance something looming, a throng of terrors. Leigh looked that way; he seemed about to whisper rather than scream. He was breathing: I saw a flutter in his throat, and a movement like a low bubble rise and fall in the declivity of his shoulder.

We carried him into the lounge, stretched him out on the sofa, and put pillows under his head. I took off his watch; it had made white roulettes on his wrist, perforations that wouldn’t go away. He looked paler than ever, more frightening in the posture of a corpse. But the worst part was when his legs came alive — just his legs, like a man having a tantrum — and his kicking heels made an ungodly clatter on the bamboo armrest of the sofa.

“Christ,” said Coony, stepping back. Smale and Frogget clamped their hands on his ankles and held them down. The clattering stopped, but the silence after that weird noise was much worse.

I was conscious of standing there with my tattooed arms hanging at my sides, not doing a blessed thing, and I heard a voice, Yardley’s, saying, “See that tatty sofa over in the lounge near the piano? That’s where Jack’s mate from Hong Kong packed it in. It was the damnedest thing—”

I turned to shut him up. But he was not talking; he was standing, expressionless, holding Leigh’s drink, the pale pink gin in which all the ice had melted. He seemed to be offering it to Leigh and though he held the tumbler in two hands it was shaking.

Leigh stared past us, at that looming thing very far off we could not see. I memorized his astonishment. It made us and the Bandung and everything on earth small and unimportant, not worth notice, and we were — for the time Leigh was on the sofa — as curious and baffled as those people on a city sidewalk who pass a man looking up at the sky and look up themselves but are made uneasy because they can’t see the thing they know must be there.

THAT WAS how, in a manner of speaking — by the act of dying — Leigh had the last word; though toward the end we tried to take back the things we had said. I have a memory of the six of us dancing around that green sofa in the badly lighted lounge, before the doctor came and took him away, frantically attempting ways to revive him, to coax him back to life so that we could have another chance to be kind to him — or perhaps so that he could amend his last words, which had been “Does this establishment have a toilet?” to something if less memorable, more dignified.