William Boyd - The Blue Afternoon

He spoke English. 'Two dollars,' he said, gauchely, like an ignoramus, showing her the notes, 'upstairs.' In the moist heat of the room he could smell the coconut oil on her hair, sweet and spicy.

She took the money, folded it away somewhere gracefully, discreetly. 'You come me,' she said, 'we room five.' She set off immediately across the dance floor towards the stairway. A swaying couple cut directly across Carriscant's path and he had to pause and then negotiate their maladroit shuffle before he could follow his girl. His girl… 'You come me, we room five.' It was all so clear-cut, a matter of plain business dealing, no fuss, no pretensions. He was always struck by the simplicity of this exchange, its no-nonsense straightforwardness – money in return for the short loan of a body – on the few occasions he had resorted to it before. By the time he reached the foot of the stair, however, the girl had already ascended. And coming down, adjusting his belt, was Dr Saul Wieland.

'Well, if it isn't the esteemed Dr Carriscant,' Wieland said loudly, showing both rows of teeth in a yellow grin. 'That your little chicken I just patted on the keester?' Wieland was drunk, as usual.

'What are you talking about?' Carriscant held himself stiffly, arms by his side.

Wieland had reached the foot of the stairs, and lounged on the banister. He was a small man, in his fifties, with folds of jowl, like wattles, overlapping his stiff collar. He had a shaggy untrimmed moustache and an odd loose pouting mouth with wet lips.

'I won't tell Mommy. Relax.' He lolled forward and patted Carriscant's elbow, reassuringly.

Somehow Carriscant managed a contemptuous snuffle of a laugh. He reached forward and took hold of the handle of the door in front of him.

'I don't know what you're talking about,' Carriscant said. 'I'm here to attend my cook's mother. She has a hernia. Good evening to you.'

With that he snapped down the handle and swung the door open, stepping through confidently and closing it behind him. He heard Wieland say, with grotesque sarcasm, at the closed door, 'Oh, so sorry, I'm sure.' Carriscant did not pause further, in case Wieland should try to come after him. He walked down the corridor, past an opening that led to a cramped dark kitchen, and then out of a rear door that gave on to a long narrow high-walled yard. One side was lined with chicken coops and he could hear the soft clucking of the roosting hens and smell the nutty, brothy reek of their accumulated shit. He felt his way carefully to his left and squinnied through the gap in a shutter. He could see Wieland sitting at a table with three other white men in civilian clothes, one of whom was dealing out a pack of cards.

Carriscant had no desire to allow Wieland any further opportunities to glimpse him in the 'Ice-Cream Parlor' or to practise his scornful innuendo further and so he decided to wait until it was possible to leave unobserved. No-one, it seemed, had spotted him enter the yard so he was probably safe there for an hour or so. He moved further down into the darkness at the rear until he found a screened position against the wall. He pulled a section of old matting over and sat down upon it, snug in the angle the wall made with the solid wooden wheel of a caraboa cart. He stretched his legs out and rubbed his face, laughing at himself a little halfheartedly: so much for his 'low flying dove' – she would be up there in her nest, wondering where her Americano had gone. Fool, he said to himself, fool, fool, fool…

He woke up, his head canted against the rim of the wheel, the keening whine of a mosquito in his ear. He slapped it away and stood up, shakily, stiffly, stamping the circulation back into his legs. He could not believe he had slept like that… He moved to the light from the window and checked his pocket watch: 2.30 a.m. Music and chatter still emanated from the 'Ice-Cream Parlor' and peering in through a gap in the shutters he saw that the place was still crowded and, more irritating, that Wieland and his cronies were still engrossed in their gambling. This was absurd, he said to himself, now what was he supposed to do? To walk past Wieland at this time of the night would simply encourage more ribald speculation. He paced up and down the yard, thinking, disturbing the dozing poultry further. Wieland, at this rate, could be there until dawn. And Annaliese would have been in bed hours ago, he realised, no doubt further disgusted at his behaviour. He walked down to the foot of the yard, set an old box against the wall and hauled himself up on to its crumbling top. In front of him was only darkness, but a shifting sighing darkness that suggested vegetation – no glimmer of light was to be seen. He hoped that his pale grey alpaca suit would not become too soiled and that the drop down would not be too steep. Tensing himself, he pushed off.

Mud.

Up to his knees, he stumbled, reached out to steady himself and his hand went into the softness up to the elbow. He straightened, swayed and just held his balance. He took a couple of sucking, clinging steps, his hands held before him like a blind man. His fingers brushed leaves, thick, glossy, with a small serrated edge and he stepped forward, out of the filth of the path and up on to blessedly firm and drier earth around the bole of the tree. Mango, he thought. He turned to look back at the glow of lights from the rear elevations of the 'Ice-Cream Parlor' and the establishments on either side on Gardenia Street. The path he had dropped into must run along the backyards of the houses at this end of the street, recipient, no doubt, of every kind of slop and detritus imaginable and unimaginable. He was not going to attempt to walk out of this particular spot until he could see where he was placing his feet. He lowered himself carefully on to a wide exposed root: there was nothing for it but to sit it out.

First light arrived just before 6. It had been a brain-deadening wait: he had smoked all the cigarettes he had on him – seventeen – had planned his future career in the smallest detail and had sung and hummed every melody, it seemed, he had ever heard, and still the slothful night crawled on. But now it was dawn and the mud on his clothes was almost dry. He rubbed his jaw feeling the roughness of stubble on his palm. Home, as quickly and discreetly as possible.

The tree he had waited under was a mango, it turned out, part of a small grove that, once traversed, gave on to a prospect of misty cane and paddy fields and, beyond them, the low bluey mass of Manila's northern suburbs, blurred by the smoke of morning cooking fires, a mile or so away. He set off, trudging down a path along the top of a dyke making for San Miguel and, he hoped, the first horse tram he could board.

It proved more complicated going than he had expected. The path had joined a dirt track but he had taken a wrong turning, as he discovered when the track looped away northwards again, and he had to retrace his steps. Then he had to make a detour round a brackish meandering estero of the Pasig and pick his way southwards once more along the squelching fringes of more paddy fields before he saw, in the middle distance, the glowing terracotta roof and white walls of the Malacanan Palace through some woods ahead-Governor Taft's official residence. Now he knew where he was. He consulted his pocket watch again: almost 8 o'clock: with a bit of luck he would be home within half an hour.

He knew there was a ferry across the Pasig not far from the Palace and so followed a path that led directly towards it, abandoning the one he had been following. Another mistake, as it turned out, when the path terminated at a semi-demolished bamboo barn. He hurried on, nevertheless, cutting across the middle of a mogo bean plantation towards a thick grove of acacia trees. In his travels across country he had acquired a busy swarm of persistent flies, attracted, though he hardly dared to speculate, by some noxious ingredient in the Sampaloc mud that still daubed his trousers. He swatted wildly at them, tried vainly to outsprint them and then, pausing, removed his jacket and twirled it like a demented bullfighter around his head and shoulders as he went on his way.