To Indigo Page 7

  It had been borne in on me by now he wasn’t starved through impoverishment, merely had a healthy appetite. He could afford after all to stay at the dodgy pub, which I had heard wasn’t cheap. He could pick up on a mad whim, and follow a man, even buy him a dustbin.

  This time he refilled my glass, only half empty, as well as fully topping up his vacant own. I’d have to watch that, when we came to the next bottle.

  “Funny your wife hasn’t called,” he said.

  It was time to wax a little mellow. I hoped I had calculated properly, but a move must be made.

  “I’d better own up, hadn’t I, Sej.”

  When I used his purported nickname, I glanced at him to see how he took it, both the name and my ‘owning up’.

  He looked smug. He might not be a fool, the mad cannot be relied on to be stupid, often the reverse. But he was solipsistic, over-confident – perhaps with good reason.

  “So what’s the dark secret, Roy?”

  “Lynda left me, oh, about seven months ago. That’s why my neighbours didn’t mention her. As for George and Vita, if they believed you were my son they’d assume you knew, and that perhaps you had some real cause to worry about me, my state of mind. It was after she broke her leg. She met some man at the physiotherapy sessions. I also met him once. A fat chap with a long moustache and mop of hair. He was older than me, too. Nearly sixty. She told me the night she left. I hadn’t guessed a thing, but no doubt it wouldn’t have mattered. As for my son…” I sighed. I picked up my glass and drained it, and helped myself to more so we could finish the first bottle. “He and I haven’t spoken or communicated in any way for years. The last I heard he was in New York.”

  Startling me, life intruding on fiction, Joseph said, “What about 9/11?”

  I stared at my plate, mind racing. Then raised my eyes to him bleakly. “I don’t bloody know. We did try to find out but it was too vague. There were enough unanswered questions for parents who knew their sons were in one of the Two Towers. I don’t think, frankly, William would have been anywhere near. He didn’t work, he bummed his way around, in the American sense that is. A waste. My son is a talented artist. He…”

  My glass was full, I put it down.

  Joseph drained his.

  Perfect host, even in sorrow, I looked up and said, “Let’s have the other bottle.”

  Before he could make a move I reached for and secured it. I sat there holding it on my lap as if I had forgotten what one did to open a bottle.

  Joseph said, “Fine by me.”

  “Yes,” I said, “yes.”

  And I put the bottle down and gripped it between my thighs, pulling the corkscrew and scissors towards me.

  The top of the bottle was just below the edge of the table. I sat there again, looking down at it, getting the plastic glove-thumb, unseen, from my pocket. Then I took the scissors and put them to the neck of the bottle, then took them off again and lowered them against the thumb on my knee.

  “Sorry, Sej. Just give me a minute. The trouble is,” I looked up piteously, “you do remind me of him – not any nephew, my son. He took after Lynda. Dark, good-looking…” How flattered she should have been, the real Lynda, dowdy little thing with her flat brown hair.

  But he waited. Although he looked quizzical I had bought just enough time. I snipped the top from the thumb, a tiny slice, meaningless to the uneducated eye.

  Then I worked the serration of the scissors on around the bottle-neck, got off the foil, replaced the scissors on the table and drove in the screw.

  I did this efficiently, only blinking as if tears were in my eyes.

  My hands were rock steady. They amazed me. My legs, gripping the bottle, were starting to shake.

  The cork came out. Then, the final pass. I let the bottle seem to come loose, let it go down as if falling, gripping tighter with my legs while I grabbed for it with my right hand, now well below the table top. And crushed the contents of the thumb into its open mouth.

  ‘Rescuing’ the bottle I was able to give it a mixing shake. I plumped it back on the table with a grimace of triumphant misery. Fumbling for a non-existent handkerchief in my pocket, I restored the now-voided thumb.

  Then I reached for my paper-towel napkin and wiped my face.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to get emotional.”

  “You need another drink.”

  “I don’t normally drink much.” I leaned over and sloshed the drugged red into his glass. Then I drank some of my own, left from the first pure bottle. I held the glass in my hand, keeping tabs on it now. I stared into it, and watched, distorted in its side, Joseph Traskul aka Sej gulp down half his new wine.

  I played with the last of my steak, pushed it around with my fork.

  “No. I can’t eat any more.”

  He smiled. “I’ll have it.”

  “Yes, if you don’t mind. I hate wasting food.”

  “You look very pale,” he said to me as he picked up the remains of the steak and neatly ate it with his fingers, dipping it in the mustard.

  “Yes.”

  “Well don’t worry, Roy. I’m not your son.”

  “I know that very well, Sej.”

  “For one thing,” he said, wiping his hands, “I don’t intend to leave you.”

  The shock of that, even in these circumstances, thrilled me with horror, as Poe might have said.

  But I drank some of my wine and answered, “I don’t see how you can have any interest in me at all.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  He drained the glass once more.

  How much of the powder had been in it? Had it dissolved properly? Had it all sunk to the bottom? So far, he seemed unaffected.

  I tried to recollect how long that one tablet I’d taken had needed to become effective. About ten minutes, I thought. And that had been without the addition of four or five glasses of wine, besides anything else he might have had during the day. But he must drink more. I had to be certain. Wonderful. He took the bottle and refilled his glass. Less wonderful, he leaned towards me to top up mine.

  I snatched it back.

  “No thanks, Sej. I don’t like mixing two different bottles in one glass. It can spoil the taste, even with cheap booze.”

  “What an old fusspot you are,” he said, as my father might have said it, if not about this. “No wonder Lynda got fed up and took off with that walrus.”

  His tactless cruelty, if the tale I’d told him had been true, was predictable. But I smiled and agreed. “He was like a bloody walrus. You’re right.”

  He was drinking the wine.

  He said, “You’re right too. This bottle isn’t as good as the first. Bit chalky.”

  Did he guess?

  I didn’t react except to say, “Perhaps it’s off. Shall I open the other one? That’s all I’ve got.” Say No, say No, this one is fine.

  “You try it, see what you think,” he said. And he held out his glass straight across the table to me.

  He knew. He knew or he suspected.

  I reached over and took the glass, and held it to my face and sniffed the wine. There was no suspect smell.

  “It smells all right.” I would have to taste it now, my God it had enough in it surely potentially to stupefy me, just one sip. But sip it I would have to. I put it to my lips and exactly then his head dropped forward, sudden, without any intent or control. He was asleep, unconscious. The lacuna lasted two seconds and then he raised his head and I observed, licking my lips, “It tastes all right to me. Not the best bottle I’ve ever drunk, but few of them are.”

  Did he realise what had happened? He seemed not to. His eyes were heavy but he thought himself apparently only a little pissed.

  “Give it here,” he said. And he took the glass back, now unsteadily, and once again he swallowed the lot. Refilled it, drank.

  I said, “Let’s have some cheese, shall we? Only cheddar, but I’ve got some biscuits…” I stood up slowly. I said, joking, “I’m afraid I’m a bit drunk. I don’
t usually have that much at one go.”

  I watched as his head dropped again, then again sluggishly rose. “Me too,” he said distantly. “I keep falling asleep.”

  “I just did,” I said. “Maybe we should skip the cheese. There’s a camp-bed upstairs. I’m told it’s not uncomfortable. Will that do? Maybe we should both get some…”

  His head surged down again. Stayed down. His hair curtained his face.

  I could hear his breathing, heavy and slow, loud and solid as thick wet steam hissing through a vent.

  How much had he drunk? I took the bottle and inspected it. About three large glasses were gone. Just a couple of mouthfuls left in his glass. That should be enough, shouldn’t it? Enough to knock him out for several hours, and not enough to kill him.

  XI

  (‘Untitled’: Page 163)

  Black worms slide through

  A needle’s eye.

  Slick with shattered gold

  THE crooked stair led up to a lofty attic of the house. As they climbed it a rat scratched enviously in the wall, and water dripped; the Master’s house stood close to the river.

  The general assembly had already gathered.

  In the uncertain candlelight, Vilmos saw many faces he knew and besides, as sometimes happened, a couple of persons quite unknown to him. All would be sworn to the secrecy of the Order. Some would still gossip. There had been the occasional tale of events befalling one or two of these traitors. Whatever else, they never returned to the Master’s house.

  Reiner pushed through the throng.

  “What will happen, Makary?”

  “Who knows?” Makary shrugged. “There has been a summons. Here we are.”

  “How did his summons find you?”

  “At the Tavern of the Golden Grapes. A boy brought it.” Makary said to Vilmos, “Look at you, you disgrace. Your shirt’s dirty. Is it wine or blood?”

  “Blood. I fell down and cut myself.”

  None of the men in the room had donned the ritual robes brought out for particular meetings. None of the rare incenses burned. This anyway was not the Chamber of Revelation. That lay behind a hidden door far down in the creaking, river-damp timber warren of the house.

  Vilmos said, “No summons was sent to me. Why do you think that was?”

  Makary said, “The Master’s messenger failed to find you. You’re elusive.”

  “Or have I been excluded from our fine fraternity?”

  “That’s not for me to say.”

  Makary turned his back on the poet, went to a long wooden table and took up one of the greenish glass goblets, ready-brimmed with an oil yellow wine.

  Vilmos also took one of these. He raised it to his lips, while his mind went on with its inner task.

  And she lies red among the lilies

  Of her sullen sheets,

  Her sapphire soul hung wry-necked from a beam.

  A dark curtain shifted. The Master had entered the attic, and deep silence filled the air like river fog.

  Slowly raising his right hand as if at first, priestlike, to bless the company, the Master pointed directly at Vilmos.

  “Step forward.”

  “I?”

  “None other.”

  Vilmos smiled and swung, seemingly carelessly, through the crowd of men, which drew back from him, staring with all its eyes.

  “I present myself, Master.”

  “Take this,” said the Master. He extended his left hand, and now held before the poet a broken shard of stannum tin – whose original source or purpose was no longer apparent.

  Vilmos accepted the object.

  He found it very cold to the touch. The contact reminded him instantly of some memory he believed he had never accrued, concerning a garden by night, with vines crossing an arbour and white stars far beyond.

  “Lean closer,” said the Master.

  Vilmos obeyed.

  The old man’s bearded mouth approached his ear and the Master whispered solemnly, without emotion or any energy, “You are accursed. The Arch Beast, Satan himself, has singled you out. Take yourself away now. In one hour, return. Come to the little side door above the river. You will be granted admittance. Ask nothing. Go. Return.”

  SEVEN

  Her flat was the smallest I’ve ever seen in my life. It was the flat of a doll.

  One entered and was in a narrow hall, that angled left in front of a red and white kitchen about twelve feet by six, and on to a sitting-room about twelve by nine. To the left at the start of the corridor was first a bathroom and then a bedroom, also both very small. The bedroom window, since her flat lay at the end of the block, ran ceiling to floor and looked out on the concrete hind roof of the Co-op, and the iron stairway from the flats above. She too had ‘nets’.

  The oddest thing in the flat was the wallpaper. It had been there, Maureen assumed, for about twenty years, and was autographed with various blotches and scrapes, but in the hall, sitting-room and bedroom, it was all virtually the same: a tiny pattern of French fleur-de-lys, orange in the hall, dove-grey in the front room, pale blue in the bedroom.

  Maureen didn’t work for the Co-op. A friend had found her the flat; a male friend, I believe. She worked in Woolwich at Fernes, on the lingerie counter. My mother had been used to shop at Fernes. I think I’d been in the shop too, although perhaps obviously not in Maureen’s section.

  Aside from the bedroom I came to know the flat quite well. Sometimes on my day off in the week, she would have her half day. We would eat lunch in her kitchen and spend the afternoon in bed, eat supper, or make toast off the gas fire in the front room, watch TV, kiss and cuddle and drink gin. Have an early night.

  The piano was in the front room too. That is where I heard her play and sing. I will admit, the first occasion she announced she’d play to me, I had been rather concerned.

  As I’ve said, my father was an all right if not inspiring pianist. As for any singing, I had had at least one grim experience of the impromptu turns of friends in pubs, when a piano was present. It was pretty awful, if not much worse than the fiascos perpetrated by modern karaoke.

  So when Maureen sat down and skimmed off a piece of Debussy, flawlessly, beautifully, my already engaged heart lifted like a kite.

  She didn’t sing to me until I’d known her nearly two months. When I heard her voice I wished I had been able to marry her, was worthy of marrying her. This is a fact. But then, I was young.

  I was never in love with Maureen. But did I love her? I believe so.

  And sex with her was what sex should be.

  She enjoyed sex for its own sake. She made no secret of that. She’d picked me up that night because the fat man, to whom she referred only as that bugger Reg, had let her down. She said I had “Something” she liked, something she “took to”. But if I am scrupulously honest I must suppose “anything in trousers”, i.e. reasonably OK and equipped with male genitals plus a will to use them, would have done. But she was kind, too. She once said to me she had never had a kid and I cheered her up, not that I, she hastened to add, was in anyway like a kid to her, but my youth she valued. “Keeps me young,” she said, “being with you young ones.”

  She had a lovely body. Not anything like any model girls, heaven forbid, all tightness and bones. Maureen was – voluptuous, I think is the best expression. She was like a day of full summer.

  On the mantelpiece over the gas fire in the twelve by nine front room were a few photographs in frames. One of these was of a fair-haired, good-looking man in his twenties, with an unmistakable Maureen, then about twenty too, on his arm.

  “That’s Graham,” she said. “My ex.”

  They had married when she was eighteen. He was a steelworker and brought home a good pay packet. She hadn’t had to work, and had devoted herself to tending the home. But they had wanted children, or had thought they did, and none came along. In the end Graham started on a succession of affairs. She put up with this, she said, because he still brought the pay packet in and slept regularly
with her. This was during the miraculous sixties, when sexually transmittable diseases were both less known or, if they occurred, no longer lethal, and well before the universal phantom of AIDs. But it made her unhappy, of course, and in the end the last straw floated on to the camel’s back. “Carol,” Maureen said. Carol was the last straw. They lived in Charlton by then. Carol had lived six doors down, husbandless, childless, mindless, and red-haired. Carol had a russet aura that she displayed regularly to randy Graham, along with endless faulty lights and fridges he could repair, and a lot of flesh. “She just,” said Maureen, “kept on smouldering at him till in the end he caught fire.”

  Maureen was capable of interesting phrases like this one. I confess to storing many of them in a corner of my mind, and using them years later in my work. I’m not sure I could have invented word choices of such significance.

  Anyway, inevitably Graham left with Carol, while Maureen was left with all the bills and the unpaid rent. Somehow she picked up her life and reassembled it. I once asked her why she kept his photograph. “Same reason I keep my wedding ring, Charlie,” (she still sometimes called me that), “part of my life. My life. Don’t throw the baby out with the water, eh?”

  Now she lived over the Co-op and I came to call on her once or twice a week.

  She had other callers. I didn’t and don’t deceive myself. Again, in that era, there wasn’t much physical danger that any of us knew of. If danger for the heart, we risked it, one and all.

  Maureen encouraged me too with my writing. My parents had never taken any interest: I ‘scribbled’. They didn’t mind so long as I had a proper job. Actually I am unfair to my mother here. Left to herself I think she might have been not unapproving, in a careful sort of way. If it was my hobby, she would perhaps have congratulated me as she had my piano efforts earlier. “That’s nice, Roy.” But naturally my mother followed my father’s example. People at work I could never have spoken to. There were enough books on the groaning library shelves, no one needed any more written by such as Roy Phipps.