Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

So I close my eyes, struggling to hold the nausea at bay, and miss my stop. Walking the two blocks back to my apartment, everything seems bursting bright: the grass of the lawns a vitriolic, throbbing green, the violent blue of the sky shifting and tilting, making the earth do the same beneath my feet. I stop and vomit beside a fire hydrant. “Drunk,” a passing woman says disgustedly.

The longest walk of my life and the stairs in my building the longest climb. I have to rest on each landing, clinging to the banister. My feet are leaden and awkward; they fumble and paw the stair-treads. The lock refuses my key; I have to brace my right hand with my left to insert it. The light swims giddily in my head, I have to draw the curtains in my apartment. But the darkness whirlpools, a vortex sprinkled with sparks makes a whooshing sound like a firehose. I sit on the sofa, clammy sweat soaking my shirt. Now and then I open my eyes and hold up my hands, not sure if they really belong to me, watch the madman tremble, the dim light between splayed fingers shaking in sympathetic agitation.

I sit like this for hours, my head flung back against the top of the sofa. Every time I try to move, I smell and taste my own vomit, the ceiling and floor slant or rear dizzily.

It isn’t until I find my way to the kitchen that I recognize my thirst. Lowering my head to the gushing tap I gulp an icy flood until my insides turn cold, until the sweat on my skin shrinks back into my pores. Propped against the sink, water-logged and dazed, I stare at the clock on the wall. It says five o’clock – that isn’t possible.

I tear off my clothes and burrow into my bed, weighted with water, weighted with an overwhelming need for sleep. Sunlight shimmers in a slit of the curtains like a candle flame. The flame slowly wanes and I sleep, burning.

I wake with a start. The sunlight no longer stands in the slit of the curtain, the candle has been snuffed. But light is coming from somewhere else; lifting my head I locate a crack of it under the bedroom door, drop back on the pillow. It feels late, the hushed, lonely silence of three o’clock in the morning. Can I have slept ten hours? I feel better, but not well. There’s a nasty, scummy taste in my mouth, like I’ve licked an ashtray clean. The fever is still there, but nearly burned out, restless and fitful, a dying fire. When I move my legs over the sheets, searching for a patch of coolness, they feel strange, weak, the muscles as reliable as ropes of water.

No, I’m not well. Beyond the door I can hear the whispering of the streetcar again. A tramline running in my apartment? Lines overhead, suspended in darkness, rustling with a low insistent rumour. Whisper, whisper, whisper. Monotonous. Was that a word? I thought I heard a word. Now the trolley stops. To take someone on. Who?

Who? Somebody is out there.

“Rachel?”

A mocking voice, a man’s voice. “Rachel?”

It’s not sickness now, just my heart drumming. I pull myself up in bed. Night and a stranger in your house.

“Who is it?”

“Rachel?” the voice calls again.

“Be quiet,” someone says.

Emphatic footsteps. I’m too weak to get out of bed. The door opens and I see two silhouettes cut out of black tin. One of them moves along the wall; I can hear him sweeping the wallpaper with his hand, a faint sandpapery sound. He finds the light switch, my hand flies up to my eyes, but even in that instant of blindness I know who the intruders are.

“Hello, Harry,” says Chance.

The two are dressed identically in linen motoring coats which hang to mid-calf like the dusters cowboys wear. Like cowboys, both are burned brown as berries by sun and wind, a fine layer of dust powdering their features. Chance is thinner, his bones rise under the skin, stark in his face. Fitz is leaner too, stands with his arms folded across the front of his stained coat, reclining against the door frame.

“How did you get in?” My mouth is parched by fever; I have trouble forming the words.

“We knocked and got no answer,” says Chance. “You ought to lock your door when you go to bed, Harry.” He grins. “Not that that would have mattered. Fitz has a way with locks.”

“What time is it?”

Chance glances at his watch. “Four o’clock.”

Fitz laughs harshly.

“What the hell were you doing out there – in my apartment?” Suddenly I’m angry and suspicious.

Chance looks up at the ceiling, smiles to himself.

“Looking for papers,” announces Fitz. “Papers?

What papers?”

“Now, Harry, don’t bristle,” Chance chides me. “It occurred to us you might have neglected to give us everything relating to the picture. Research notes, drafts of the script, material we wouldn’t want to see circulating, people putting their noses into. We wanted to make sure all the loose ends were tied up. Seeing to legalities, as it were.”

“And what did you two detectives find? Nothing. Because I gave you everything, just like I said I did. And speaking of legalities, you happen to be housebreakers.”

“Why don’t you shut the fuck up,” says Fitz.

“Yes, please shut up, Harry, and don’t be difficult. I assure you that everything we disturbed is back in its place. Any letters of a clearly personal nature were not read. Besides, we had another reason for our visit. We bring news which is naturally of great interest to you.”

“What news?”

“We’ve finished shooting the picture. Four months of hard work. Harry, you can’t imagine the difficulties we had to overcome. And now Fitz and I have been driving day and night to rush film back for cutting. An arduous, exhausting journey. Some of those roads in Montana, Wyoming, and Utah are disgraceful, little better than cow trails. You’ll understand if I sit?” He doesn’t wait for permission but picks up a chair and places it at the side of my bed, sinks on it with a sigh. “There,” he says, “much better.”

The thought of Chance settling in panics me. “If you don’t mind -I’ve been dreadfully sick all day – dead on my feet -”

“Do you hear that, Denis? Harry’s been sick all day, dead on his feet. Now that he mentions it, I have to say he doesn’t look himself. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Looks like shit, you ask me.”

“I feel like shit. And you’re not making me feel any better.”

“I think you’ll be very pleased with our picture.” Chance eases himself back in the chair, crosses his legs under the spreading skirts of his motoring coat. “In particular, the performance of the young man who portrays Shorty McAdoo. He conveys magnificently Mr. McAdoo’s visionary ruthlessness.”

“Then he’s conveying what isn’t there. And so are you. Shorty McAdoo is just an unhappy, guilty old man.”

“Yes, but he was young once, wasn’t he? Come, come, Harry, no sour grapes. And no false morality either, please. False morality is what I found so disappointing in your letter of resignation. It wasn’t that I needed you – I never needed you – but to find that the man to whom I had opened my heart and revealed what was at stake could attempt to wash his hands of his actions, that was most disappointing.”

“I explained myself in the letter. I couldn’t write the scenario because I was too inexperienced, too untalented -”

Chance reaches across the bed to lay an intimidating finger to my lips, stopping me. “There, there, Harry,” he says coldly. “I’m not a fool. I know the sort of things that go through a young man’s mind. You want to believe you obeyed your conscience. I find that sheer hypocrisy. Because all along you had no qualms about lying to McAdoo, misleading him. Why? I’ll tell you why, Harry. Because you have a sick mother in an expensive asylum and I was paying you a lot of money to mislead him. But more important, I think, is that you are an intelligent young man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, but only far enough to realize that to get any higher you would need help. I was the man who could give it. Isn’t that so?”