Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

Afterward, exhausted, I fell asleep. When I woke up, I said, “I used to dream of you making love to me the whole time I saw you at the station on 77th Street.”

He stared at me. He said, “I’ve only been there a few times. I live in Brooklyn. I’ve never seen you before.”

My English friend Jane — very proper — gave me the name of this woman in London who would be glad to put me up for a few days until I got my InterRail paperwork sorted out. I just knew her as Victoria. When I called her from the airport, she said the best thing would be for me to meet her at her office in Westminster. I was totally impressed. She was a British civil servant, some kind of undersecretary in the Ministry of Health. These are the people who keep the British government running: the politicians and cabinet ministers come and go; these people stay. They brief the ministers on parliamentary bills and MPs’ questions in the House of Commons. All this Victoria told me as she tidied her office before we left. She was drearily dressed and had greasy hair and was wearing a white shirt and necktie, like a school uniform. She saw I was reading a framed certificate.

“That’s my MBE,” she said. It meant Member of the British Empire, a title. “I say it means My Bloody Efforts.”

She then explained that she couldn’t take any of the papers home, because they were secret.

“Lucky you,” I said. “You can make an explicit division between work stuff and home stuff.”

“Bang on!” she said, and she laughed harder than I would have expected.

We went to her house by tube. Her husband answered the door. He was Jamaican, named Wallace. He wore a wool hat in the house. He was a carpenter, he said. He said very little else. I tried not to look surprised. While Victoria made dinner, Wallace offered me a drink and showed me to my room. The room looked lived in, and I wondered where, in this small house, Wallace and Victoria slept.

After dinner, Wallace rolled a big fat joint and passed it to Victoria. She puffed and passed it to me. I didn’t inhale much. I looked at her and saw the civil servant who had shown me her secret papers and her MBE certificate in Westminster.

“I’m tired,” I said, but when I went into the bedroom they followed me. They looked pretty interested. I said, “I can’t do this.”

My English friend Jane said I really missed something.

I am pretty conservative on the whole and have a sales-and-marketing degree, which my parents urged me to get so that I could help them with their business. They are also conservative, you might even say puritanical. That is one of the reasons they chose this business, which is school uniforms.

Mainly it is girls’ uniforms, skirts and blouses, knee socks and blazers. What is thought of as an old-fashioned line of clothes is actually very up-to-date, since many schools these days are switching over to uniforms, not just Catholic schools but all sorts. My parents chose this business because they believed it was virtuous and fair, that they were promoting modesty. Uniforms are made to order, in batches: a certain plaid for the pleated skirt, a certain blouse and blazer. A lot of the sewing is outsourced to factories in the Dominican Republic and Guatemala.

When I graduated, I was put in charge of mail orders, generally orders from clients who found our website, or from schools or individuals we had not been in touch with before — random orders.

Many of these came from Japan, some from Great Britain and Germany, and quite a number from the United States. In most cases they were single orders, apparently unconnected to any school. I knew this from the patterns that were chosen. An individual would get in touch, specify colors and fabrics and sizes, enclosing the payment.

By tracking these orders, I found out some interesting things. The sizes were usually large, as though for a school for big and tall girls, adult-sized, and these made up at least twenty percent of our total orders. Some of the skirts were huge. The measurements did not make sense. Yet the customers were satisfied, and I found out that they were, most of them, repeat customers.

Where were these schools? Of course, there were no schools. A fifth of our school uniform sales were to prostitutes and fetishists — men around the world involved with sexual role-playing, dominatrixes, sadists, transvestites, and closet pedophiles. I did not tell my puritanical parents my conclusions, or they would probably have shut down the business, and where would we be then?

My father became wealthy importing timber from Southeast Asia, mainly teak but other hardwoods too. He was one of the first to farm it, which meant that when he died the company still prospered. My brother, Hank, and I inherited everything, the big company and a considerable income.

My visits to the plantations got me interested in Asian antiques, and when I began to sell them, I was so busy that I needed Hank to help me out. Soon I saw that he was taking trips to Asia purely to buy drugs. Like Dad, he was an innovator — an early smuggler of heroin inside little Buddhas and carved temple finials in small, hard-to-detect amounts, for his own use. His wealth ensured he’d never have to resort to dealing or relying on dealers in the States. He injected: his arm, his foot, his neck. He said, “I have it under control,” meaning that he could afford it.

But over time the heroin ate up most of his money, and he borrowed from me for a while. A very expensive habit, and destructive too, or so I thought. I made him a promise. I said, “If you give up the heroin, I will hand over half my own inheritance.” I had doubled my money with my antiques business anyway. Hank said, “Leave me alone. I’m like a person with an illness. Just leave me to my illness. A lot of people are in worse shape than me.”

But I begged him. Finally he agreed. Here is the weird part. As soon as he gave up heroin, after a long, painful process of rehab and treatment, he became very weak. As an addict, he had been full of life; as a clean straight guy, he was pale, feeble, prone to colds, and sometimes could not get out of bed. This went on for a few months. Very worried, I brought him to a specialist, who diagnosed cancer.

He said, “Your brother has had cancer for years, but his heroin use has masked it. If he had still been using it, he would have had a happy death — sudden anyway. Heroin has been keeping him out of pain.”

The next weeks were awful. He died horribly a month later.

A stern man is the helper fellow on a lobster boat, and he is at my dooryard at four-thirty every morning except Sunday, ready to go, and if he’s not there, I’ll go without him. He does lots of things — hauls traps, baits them, hoses rockweed off the deck, boxes the bugs, gets handy with the Clorox. When you haul in winter your stern man might say he’s cold, and you say, “Goddamn, if you’re cold, you’re not working hard enough.” The stern man gets fifteen percent of the profit on the catch.

I have had them all, the drug addicts, the numb ones, the stealers, and one was crazy as a shithouse rat. A Christless little son of a whore from Belfast went off with my punt. Another one phoned me with death threats when I fired him, and he also talked about cutting the lines on my pots. It is a hell of a business.

But Alvin was the best stern man I ever had. Never late, not a talker, a good worker. God knows where he came from. I’d ask him where he came from, and he’d go all friggin’ numb or else change the subject. Also, he went quiet when I talked about women. Mention a piece of tail or a fellow’s teapot or a pair of bloomers, and Alvin just began scrubbing the deck or hosing rockweed.