David Malouf - The Complete Stories

“You din’ expect that, didja,” the man hissed. “Didja? Didja?” With each question he pushed his face closer and jerked Colin's arm. “You cunt!”

He whispered this almost lovingly into Colin's ear.

“I seen you get outa that cab. I knew I'd catch up with you sooner or later. Cunt!”

Colin's panic, now that the situation had declared itself, had given way to raging anger. He was surprised at the intensity of it and at how clear-headed he felt.

“Get off,” he shouted, and raised his elbow and pushed.

“Oh no you don't,” the fellow warned, and he held him even closer, half smiling, very pleased with himself. A lean-faced fellow of maybe thirty, red-headed, unshaven, wearing a singlet. Colin could smell the excitement that came off him, a yeasty sourness. When he was satisfied his grip was firm, he leaned back a little and said easily: "So here we are, eh? Just the two ‘v us.” He gave a short laugh, but seemed now to lose concentration, as if he did not know what should come next. Perhaps his arm was tiring and it had occurred to him that he could not go on holding Colin for ever. “I seen you get outa that cab,” he said again. Then he found what it was he really wanted to say. “You din’ think I'd face up to yer, didja? Well, you made a bad mistake, feller. I'm fed up t’ th’ gizzard. I'd rather fucken finish off the both of us.” He said this with passion, his voice rising to a sobbing note, but did not move.

“Look,” Colin said, "this is crazy. I don't even know who you are.”

“Don't you? Don't you? Well, that's what you would say.”

Once again the energy had gone out of him. He swung his head from side to side as if looking out for something. “Only I'm not that much of a mug. I know you've been with ‘er. I wanta hear you say it. Say it, cunt! Bloody say it!”

These were not so much orders as desperate appeals. When Colin did not respond, the fellow looked about again, and with a forceful motion broke his grip, then stood slumped, his arms hanging. His face was distorted with a pain so naked and hopeless that Colin, who was free now and might have run, was mesmerized. The man raised his voice in a dismal howl. “Say it,” he sobbed. But hopelessly now, as if the words were a spell that had failed to work, or whose purpose he could no longer recall.

I should get away now, Colin told himself. This is the dangerous bit.

That other stuff was nothing. Just bluster. This is it. And almost on the thought a knife appeared in the man's hand. He stepped back, the knife flashed, and with a series of anguished cries he began slashing at the freckled, dead-white flesh of his own neck and shoulder and at the dirty singlet, which was immediately drenched with blood.

“For God's sake!” Colin shouted.

But the man was now triumphant. He stood at the edge of the pavement with his head thrown back in the light of a streetlamp and wielded the knife in slow motion while Colin, helplessly, watched. “There!" he sobbed, "There! There!" — as if what he had wanted all along was not Colin's life but his attention, and the sobs came as regular as the gushes of his blood.

Colin, without thinking, made a grab for the knife and felt himself cut.

There was blood everywhere now, some of it on the man's body, some of it on him. The knife slid away into the gutter and they were locked fiercely together on the pavement, grunting and shouting wordlessly between breaths until, with a mechanical whooping and a pulsing of blue light, a car came screaming to a halt beside them and Colin felt himself hauled skyward by a hefty cop. “Okay, feller,” he was being advised, "you just calm down, eh?” The incident was at an end.

He was covered with blood. The other man, savagely wounded, was weeping and on his knees.

It wasn't till he was in the squad car, and his heart had slackened a little, that he caught up with the enormity of the thing. The blood that covered his shirt and jacket in a sticky mess was the stranger's. He was barely scratched.

“But it doesn’ t make sense, now does it, Colin?” the larger of the two detectives told him. He was speaking gently, with tolerance for a navety that might, after all, be genuine; as one talks to a bemused and stubborn child.

The room seemed too small for the three of them. There was too much light.

“Now, tell us again, Colin. You get out of the cab. Why? What was it that upset you? In what way did this Armenian, or Yugoslav, seem threatening?”

The more often he told it the less probable it became. He saw that. A taxi-driver he had been eager to get away from, at midnight, half a mile from his hotel. A perfect stranger who first attacked and abused him and then turned the knife on himself. The only fact he could produce was his identity.

These sceptical fellows, who had never heard of him of course, were not impressed. “What sort of books, Colin?” the blond one, who was larger, enquired with a sneer. He was called Lindenmeyer, the other Creager.

After a time they allowed him to ring the Pedersens, and Coralie verified that, yes, he had been with them. They had seen him off in the taxi. The driver was dark. Greek maybe, Lebanese. “Listen, Colin,” she whispered, when they passed the phone to him, "don't tell them anything till we get hold of a lawyer. Eric will be there to bail you out. Don't say a word. And most of all, don't provoke them. You don't know what they're like.”

Looking sheepishly at the two detectives, he thanked her. They were grinning. Perfectly aware of what Coralie was telling him, they seemed amused by their own reputation — which did not mean that it was undeserved.

But Coralie was wrong, he did know these men. They were boys he had grown up with, and Lindenmeyer might even have been familiar. It was a name he knew from school.

He was very blond and bony, and must, in early adolescence, have been girlishly pretty. There was, behind his rather high voice and beefy grin, a hint of fineness savagely repressed. Only with women, Colin thought, might he feel free to reveal it. But of the two, it was Linden-meyer he was wary of. His brutality, like his coarseness, was assumed. Having no necessary cause, it would also have no limit. Creager, more obviously the bully, had no need to make a show. Red Irish and with freckles that in places had turned to open sores, he was all bluster, but too lazy to do more than put a blow in now and then to keep up his name for toughness. It was Lindenmeyer who asked the questions.

So he claimed to be local. Didn't sound it.

And had stepped out of nowhere into a situation with which he had absolutely no connection. Well, he was in the clear then.

Given the state of his clothes and the amount of blood he was covered with, very little of which was his own, and the crusting of it in the cracks of his knuckles and under his nails, there was some justification, he saw, for Lindenmeyer's irony. Blood needs explaining. He recalled, with astonishment now, the sense of elation in which, just before he was hauled off the man, he had been aiming blow after blow at his face.

“Will he be all right?” he found himself asking, and was uncertain whether the question put him in a better light or a worse.

It was recorded, but neither Lindenmeyer nor Creager gave him an answer. The role of questioner, here, was theirs.

“All right, Colin,” Lindenmeyer said for the third or fourth time, "let's go over it again. This taxi-driver, this Armenian or Lebanese—”

LATER,lying stripped on the cot of a clean cell, he considered his position.

When he was brought down here he had not been thrown into the communal cell at the end of the corridor, which was crowded and stank and from which, as they passed, came catcalls and curses against the constable who was accompanying him, followed by gobs of spit, but he was alarmed just the same. It was a low throb in him, sign of some larger unrest that he had become part of.