Peter Carey - Collected Stories

Wallis sighed. “You’re about to get a Drambuie.”

Gerrard began to get up but sat down again as the Drambuie was returned to the shelf.

“Oh Christ, I can’t stand it.” Mr Meat pushed his chair back and Gerrard watched him as he strode across to the bar, this big beefy-faced man with the arrogant aggressive walk of a military policeman. He saw the waiters’ mortified faces. He saw the big impatient hand haul the Campari from the shelf, snatch a glass, and pour an unmeasured quantity into it. He couldn’t bear to watch any more and looked instead at the bleak empty tables of the dining room, too depressed to be amused by the fake Doric columns.

Wallis brought back Campari, soda and a beer for himself. “Now you know why I stick to beer,” he said, “they can’t fuck it up.” He raised his glass, holding it with peculiar daintiness with thumb and middle finger. “Here’s to the drought.”

“You’ve made them embarrassed.”

“So they should be. Christ, it’s their job to know a Campari from a Drambuie. They bloody should be embarrassed.”

“Still …”

Wallis leant his bulk into the table, the beakish nose thrusting from the great florid face, his big index finger poking in the direction of the Campari. “Listen, old son, you’re too sensitive. People in our line of work can’t afford to be so sensitive. Skol.” He drank again.

“Our occupations are hardly similar.”

“Oh come on, tell me what the difference is.” Wallis smiled. He was starting to enjoy himself.

“I think there’s a difference.” Gerrard attempted a smile. It didn’t work out very well. “There is a difference between an important work of architecture and what you yourself describe as magic.” None of this exactly reflected Gerrard’s viewpoint but he had no intention of discussing anything so serious with Wallis.

“It’s all magic here, old son, so don’t look so superior. As a matter of fact I’ll lay you a thousand U.S. dollars that it’ll be your magic that brings Oongala undone. There is a limit to magic when people are starving. The holograms might be a big hit here, but they’re not very popular in the villages. In fact I’d say they were very counterproductive. I would say that Oongala is not a popular man with the tribes at the moment. I’d give him three months at the most. When will your great work” — he pronounced “Great Work” slowly and sarcastically — “be completed?”

“Four, five months.”

“Then it’ll be four or five months before Oongala gets kicked out and things get very nasty for you. Look, I can tell you exactly what’ll happen. And listen to me, because this is something I bloody well know about. I am an expert, old boy, in knowing when to leave a country. You can’t survive in my business without knowing that.”

Gerrard looked at the great red face with fascination. “Go on.”

But they were interrupted by the approach of a waiter and Wallis fell suddenly silent. They ordered the Merlin’s safest and most predictable dishes: pea soup followed by vegetable omelette. Wallis, in spite of his avowed dedication to beer, ordered Veuve Clicquot.

The food arrived too quickly and the champagne too slowly.

As he alternated sips of pea soup with Veuve Clicquot, Wallis continued: “Let me give you the exact scenario, as a little present, eh? Oongala will not know how unpopular he is. There is not a man left who is brave enough to tell him. However, he will know that things are not exactly rosy. People are dying. They are upset because there is no water and by now they all know about the canal and they know Oongala stopped it to spend money on your building. They’re angry about that, but Oongala can’t know how angry otherwise he’d drop your building like a hot cake and get stuck into the canal. However, he does know he needs a very powerful piece of magic and your building is about the only trick he has left up his sleeve. But,” Wallis smiled, delighting in the drama of his scenario, “but to impress everyone with the dear old Kristu-Du he’ll have to bring them to see it, eh? He will bloody well be forced to have the famous gathering of the tribes.” He laughed a strange dry cackle. “How about that, eh, isn’t that neat?”

“It was exactly what Daihusia asked me to design it for.”

“Sure.” Wallis brushed that aside like the misunderstanding of a rather dull pupil. “But Daihusia was smart enough to have never built it.”

Gerrard laughed indulgently. “You’re very cynical.”

Wallis’s black eyebrows shot up and his small eyes narrowed and became dark and challenging. “You don’t believe me? You’re living in a dream world. It was a stunt. You, of all people, should have known that. It was a symbol. It was useful to Daihusia as an idea, but he was clever enough to know that the canal was more useful to him as a fact, and he couldn’t afford to have both. If he’d given them water he would have ruled until he was a hundred, a fact our present fellow doesn’t seem to have cottoned on to.”

“You really think so?”

“I know so. Dear fellow, you wouldn’t be building your great masterpiece if Daihusia was in power. Or, if you were, you’d still be buggering around with the foundations and not having money for anything else.”

“Go on with your scenario.”

Wallis looked at him sharply, aware of a new interest in the architect: the contempt had gone from his eyes and been replaced by a deep, quiet interest. “My scenario,” he said, “is that in order to control the tribes, Oongala is going to do what Daihusia would never have done: he is going to have to bring them here to see the Kristu-Du. And when he does that, when god knows how many thousands arrive to see this spectacle, they will be coming as very angry people. They will be angry enough to forget their differences. They may be superstitious and primitive, but they are not stupid.”

“The army, surely …”

Wallis waved his hand disdainfully, tidying up minor objections before he came to deliver his coup de grâce. “Apart from his beloved 101s, the rest of them are all tribally mixed. They’re not going to shoot their own people. The army, old son, will not be worth a pinch of shit.” And he brought thumb and index finger together as if offering Gerrard a pinch of it there and then. As he did so he noted the strange excited light in the architect’s eyes. He interpreted it, incorrectly, as fear. “When the day comes,” he said softly, “they will not love you.” And he drew his index finger across his throat.

He leant back and waited for this to sink in.

“Oh,” Gerrard smiled, “I’m staying if that’s what you mean.”

The smile irritated Wallis beyond belief. “Look.” He put his champagne glass down on the table and riveted Gerrard with his dark eyes. “Look, Mr Architect, you better listen to me. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen this sort of thing before. I have had conversations, almost identical conversations, with people like you before. You will be no different from the bastards who run the detention centre. No one who has helped Oongala will be safe. They won’t indulge in fine discussion about the history of architecture. If you stay, you’re as good as dead.”

“How do I know that what you say is true?”

Quietly, smugly, Wallis took out his wallet. From it he removed an airline ticket. He threw it across to Gerrard, who opened it and read it.

“Tomorrow,” Wallis said.

“But you haven’t finished.”

“I’ve finished everything I’m going to do.”

“Then you really think it’s true?”

“I know it.” He retrieved the ticket and returned it to the wallet.

Gerrard returned to his cold half-eaten omelette with a new enthusiasm. His mind was kindled again with the fierce hard poetry of his obsession: a structure whose very existence would create the society for which it was designed.