Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

She lay in bed with her eyes wide open and waited for somebody to come and wake her up.

That afternoon a policeman visited the house. He sat in a chair, and she had to stand in front of him. She could still remember the dark cloth of his uniform, the bright metal buttons. He asked her whether she had seen Claire that day.

She thought carefully and then said, ‘No.’

‘Claire has disappeared,’ the policeman said. ‘Do you know where she might have gone?’

Again she answered, ‘No.’

‘Claire’s your best friend, isn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you have no idea where she might have gone?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

The policeman put his hands on his knees and prepared to stand up. She felt sorry for him suddenly. She would tell him something.

‘She had one favourite place.’

Everything fell quiet then. She could hear a wasp trapped between the curtains and the window. Outside it was the end of summer.

‘You know the boats on the canal, the ones they put the apples in? Sometimes she liked to go there.’

Suzanne rose shivering from her chair and moved to the rail of the veranda. The mountains were in shadow now. It would soon be dark. She could hear their maid, Imelda, moving inside the house. She had not even noticed the girl arrive.

The dream about the women dancing was the same kind of dream. Some coded version of the truth, a message in disguise. But she was out of practice. It had been years since this had happened. Six, at least.

It seemed to her, as she watched the dusk come down and the French begin to leave their houses, that the town was offering her some link back into her childhood. It could have been as simple as the presence of the sea: steamships and lighters moored along the quay, the smell of kelp and gutted fish and brine, that salt-water grittiness in the air. It could have been. But the feeling rose in her — and it was a feeling she could not dispel — that there was another side to this that she had still to understand, that it was not just some surface familiarity, some coincidence, but a deeper link, inside her mind, below the skin.

Towards midnight Wilson left the Hotel La Playa. He took the long route to Pablo’s bar, passing through the church on his way. It was strange how the bare arches had the appearance of remains — some creature that had perished in the desert’s grip and then been stripped by vultures; it was strange how the beginning could imitate the end. What he could not imagine, as he limped among the pillars and the stacks of metal, was what came between: the final shape of the building, its place in the life of the town.

It was dark on Avenida Manganeso. The only light came from the pool-hall, which was used for cock-fights and illegal lotteries. He stopped in the entrance. Three smoking oil-lamps lit the room. A man was sleeping on a table, with an empty bottle for a pillow. There was a smell of warm urine. Wilson moved on, his arms aching from the crutches. Stars massed in such numbers above his head that it looked as if somebody had spilled chalk-dust across the sky. As he passed along the north side of the municipal square he heard a baby crying, and then silence. At last he pushed through the door of the Bar El Fandango.

The first person he saw, leaning against the zinc counter, was La Huesuda. He could tell from the angle of her head on her neck that she already had a few drinks under her skin. He began to ease backwards through the crowd, but she noticed him. Downing a shot of clear liquor, she swilled it round her mouth, spat it on the floor, then elbowed her way across the room towards him.

‘So,’ she said, ‘American.’

He touched the brim of his hat.

‘Where have you been hiding?’

‘Nowhere special,’ he said.

‘You’ve been lying low, haven’t you. Avoiding me.’

He glanced down at his foot. ‘I’ve been resting. The doctor told me to rest.’

Her eyes followed his.

‘That’s a pretty flower,’ she said. Her voice had sharpened at the edges.

‘It’s not bad.’

‘Who painted that on there?’

‘A friend.’

‘More than a friend, I’d say. That’s a woman, did that.’ Her thin face scraped the air. ‘Am I right, American?’

He nodded.

‘Mother of Christ.’ Her eyes were knocking around in their sockets like two drunks in a cell. She was muttering some language that he did not understand. All teeth and saliva.

‘Pearl,’ he said, taking hold of her wrist, ‘what’s wrong with you?’

She twisted away from him. ‘Get lost.’

‘Pearl,’ he said.

‘Go fuck a goat,’ she said, and slammed out of the bar.

One of the miners turned to him, ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘What did you do to her?’

Wilson did not answer. He was remembering the afternoon he had spent with Suzanne and how, after saying no to all the flowers he could think of, and all the animals, after saying no to lumps of gold — they would look, she said, like potatoes — she had decided on a rose. He had not been able to dissuade her. In truth, he had not tried too hard. Deep down he had thought that it might represent the love he felt for her and could not name, though he suspected that she was thinking of his heart and how he had lost it to a girl with bright-red hair. And now the Bony One, with the prickly insight that whores seemed to possess, had seen right through the veils and disguises to that secret truth.

‘Nobody wants to fuck her anyway,’ Pablo was saying. ‘She’s too skinny for fucking.’

‘I had her once,’ the miner said. ‘It was like what you leave on your plate after you ate a chicken.’

Wilson sighed. ‘I don’t feel good about it. When my foot’s mended, I’m going to build her a whole new set of stairs.’

Pablo’s lip curled.

‘I’m going to paint them some colour that’s real nice for a whore,’ Wilson said. ‘Like pink, maybe. Maybe put in a few electric lights as well.’

‘Sure you are,’ Pablo said.

‘I am,’ said Wilson.

But somehow it was Suzanne that he could see, standing at the top of the steps in a white silk dress. And, as he watched, he saw the French gold wedding-ring slide off her finger. It slid right off her finger and dropped, spinning, through the air. It landed on a stair and bounced, missed the next two stairs, then bounced again, jumped over his boot and lay down in the dust like it was dead.

He drank quietly for a while, and the blood ran with smooth purpose in his veins, and he dreamed of setting his foot, his mended foot, on that first step, and of her smile as he looked up for reassurance. Clutched in his fist would be a lump of gold. Enough for ten thousand wedding-rings.

Raised voices brought him out of his reverie, and one voice louder than the rest. It was an Indian, his neck and forearms streaked with clay. A miner. He stood shouting in a circle of men. His hands shook as if he were carrying a fever, and his eyes were fastened on the ceiling, though there was nothing there but sheets of tin and smoke from cheap cigars. His words forced themselves out of his mouth; it almost seemed as if he was retching — a flood of words, a pause, another flood. His hair was spiked with sweat.

Wilson asked Pablo what was being said.

‘He has seen a painted man.’ Both Pablo’s eyebrows lifted.

‘A painted man?’

‘The man was seven feet tall and he was naked,’ Pablo said. ‘He was standing at the entrance to one of the mines. He was painted half in red and half in black.’

‘Who was he?’

‘He is a warning.’

Wilson watched the Indians close in around the shouting man. They were pulling at his shirt and talking into his face, but he paid them no attention. He seemed to be receiving a voice from beyond the roof, and repeating what he heard.