Paul Theroux - The Family Arsenal

Seated on a cushion at the upstairs window of the tall house, Hood raised the cigarette to the sun and saw that it was half full of the opium mixture. Filling it was pleasurable, like the wilful care of delaying for love: to taste confidence. He winked and sighted with it, as if studying violence from afar, to take aim. He had a marksman’s princely squint and the dark furious face of an Apache; but he was only finding his landmarks with the unfinished cigarette.

He moved it slightly to the left and covered a church steeple on the next road. In the slow fire of the late afternoon the tall granite spire had the look of an old dagger. Then to the right, past the far-off bulb of the Post Office Tower, a matchstick in metal; past a row of riverside warehouses the sun had gutted, and more burnt spires, and the dome of St Paul’s — blue and simple as a bucket at this distance. Drawing the cigarette down he measured a narrow slice of the river between two brick buildings charred by shadow: part of a wharf, the gas works, the power station pouring a muscle of smoke into the sky, a crane poised dangerously like an ember about to snap, housetops shedding flames, then under his thumb the ditch at the end of the crescent where the trains ran.

The ditch wall was streaked with exulting paint: ARSENAL RULE and AGGRO and ALL WANKERS SUPPORT PALACE. That glint behind it was the river at Deptford, showing like a band of bright snake scales; but the snake lay hidden, and here when the wind was right on the creek it was a smell — a tidal odour of mudbanks and exposed pebbles, a blocked sink holding a dead serpent. Up close, in Albacore Crescent, the severe summer shadow gave the bending terraces of plump-fronted houses the look of iron closets, clamped against thieves, and it was the emptiness of the street — indeed, the emptiness of this part of South London — that made Hood think that in each locked house there was at least one impatient man plotting a reply to his disappointment.

Spying with his cigarette in this way, Hood saw the father and son approach, sweeping the road. They made their way in a bumping procession, detouring around a blind abandoned Zodiac parked on flat tyres, passing the widely spaced trees whose slender trunks were sleeved in wire mesh. The old man was on the broom, shoving at the gutter; behind him, the boy — no more than ten or eleven — fought with the handle of the cart, a dented yellow barrel on wheels. Even with the window closed Hood had heard the scrape of the broom and the bang of the old man’s tin scoop as he emptied a load into the barrel. Hood had been waiting since dawn for Mayo to arrive, and the suspense had made his hearing keen: his frustration amplified the slightest sound.

He was in a room of snoring children. He thought of them as children: they were young and slept like cats in a basket. They were not conspirators — they didn’t know the word. The girl, Brodie, was asleep across the room; Murf slept against the near wall, hugging a pillow. The crudely sketched tattoo on Brodie’s arm (a small chevron of needlemarks: a bluebird), and Murf’s ear-ring and hunting knife, looked especially ridiculous on these contented sleepers. Sleep had removed anger from their faces and made their youth emphatic. Hood used his cigarette to study them. He thought: It is possible to believe in a sleeper’s innocence.

Earlier — around two — Brodie had said, ‘Mayo got lost — or picked up. I’m crashing.’ And she had gone to the mantelshelf and pawed with her little hand in the drawers of the Burmese box and taken out a vial of powder. She faced him, hunching, ten inches from shoulder to shoulder, and shyly, because everything was Hood’s in this house, she showed him the vial. She hesitated, looked to Murf for encouragement, then back at Hood, who had not moved or spoken.

‘Please?’

‘Don’t say that.’

Brodie nibbled her underlip. She said, ‘Then fuck you.’

‘Or that.’

Hood frowned, and Murf laughed at the girl, showing the pegs of his teeth. And only then she seemed to realize her cleverness; she giggled and went round-shouldered. It was this that made them children: they could not be alone, but there was nothing they would refuse to do if they had company. Now they were happy, but even angry they were empty.

Quickly, Brodie had made two cigarettes and looked up for Hood’s approval — he had taught her the trick of making a joint one-handed. She knew enough of her dependency on him to offer him the first one. He said no. Murf rolled sideways and accepted it: ‘Fanks.’ Hood saw how their puffing weighted the air with warm opium fumes, and he had been tempted to abandon his vigil. But Mayo had promised to come — days ago. Hood knew she had what he wanted, the painting — the newspapers had reported her success before she sent him six inches of its fusty lining. He had sent an inch to The Times , but the story of her theft had slipped from the front pages: she was that close. He had expected her at dawn today, and he would not have been surprised to see her steer her ice-cream van from the fog — the signs SUPERTONY and MIND THAT CHILD bright with dampness on the van’s side — and leap out with the painting under her arm. But she didn’t come then, nor at noon. Hood had forgotten to eat lunch, and sick of waiting and not realizing his impatience was aggravated by simple hunger he resented his wasted day by the window; another day. He was quicker than any of them, so it was left to him to wait.

Waiting, a penalty, was his favour to them. He had not insisted on leading; he obliged himself to move at their speed. He looked again at Brodie and Murf. They slept smiling, Murf with his knees raised, Brodie on the cushion where she had propped herself to smoke. She had a smudge on her cheek that Hood found viciously attractive, a blot that threw her pretty face into relief and reminded him of the one fact he knew: she had planted a bomb in a locker at Euston. She slept in depths of silence that counterfeited a happy death. Awake, Hood felt like a parent in a room of napping children, and at five he had crossed the room to the Burmese box that had lain at the edge of his eye all day. He had taken it to the window and set to work. He crushed a cigarette and pinched out the tobacco, and he began filling the empty tube with alternate layers of tobacco and opium powder. He had delayed, tamping carefully, in the hope that Mayo’s arrival would interrupt him. It was the reason he had used it to stare out of the window for so long; and when the cigarette was finished he had avoided lighting the tightly twisted end and kissing the purple smoke from it. Now he did not want to be interrupted; the smoke was definite. It would warm him and give him sleep, release him from waiting and deliver him to a place of numb enchantment where all promises were kept and what he attempted he mastered. And more: fountains of light, the caress of moths’ wings, syrup in his throat, sex like splitting a peach with his teeth on the Perfume River, and all the green heat of Guatemala.