Section Twenty Two
Today I was sitting outside one of the little bars in the harbour. I was sipping a granita. (I was mildly hypo.) People came and went. Zig-zagged across my sight. The waitress smiled. I wanted her naked. (For a second.) I sipped and felt better. The sun eased round slowly.
Boats continued to ply along the foreshore. Tourists continued to enter and exit stage left and right. The hydrofoil creamed in from Mergellina. Not many people joined me in my bar. I was Monarch of all I surveyed.
Two men then approached. I thought of them as Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. Syd swelled-out a tent-like white suit. Pete hopped and gibbered beside him.
They were equally sinister, I fear.
A sort of predator-prey magnetism seemed to come into play. They scudded up, Syd bee-lining towards me, his trousers flapping, Pete tacking alongside him. They came to rest at my table.
"May we join you?" enquired Syd. The question was rhetorical. He sat down. He was English. Spoke like Sydney Greenstreet too. "Well, young sir, you are fortunate. We have been looking for you. And we have found you." He hailed the waitress, ordered two cappuccinos (it was mid-morning.) His eyes followed her. He wanted her naked. Permanently.
I tried to contribute to the conversation. "Have you just arrived on the hydrofoil?"
"Yes, indeed we have," he said.
"Then you are equally fortunate. For here I am. Not five minutes' walk away."
"I would beg you not to be so presumptuous as to estimate my average walking speed, Mr. Morris." He pulled out a handkerchief big enough for me to leave home with and mopped his florid complexion. Pete sat down, kicked his feet, tapped his fingers on the table-top and gazed downwards, eyes flicking out as the waitress slid past.
"I'm sorry. But you were fortunate to find me here, comparatively close to the harbour, irrespective of your walking speed."
"Luck has nothing to do with it, Mr. Morris. We were informed where you were as soon as we disembarked. If you had been elsewhere, we should have been taken there. By car. So I would have had a rather less arduous journey."
A gull parallel-flew down mainstreet.
"So let us not delude ourselves about that, Mr. Morris," he continued, "and let us not delude ourselves about your ability to hide from us either. Such ability is non-existent."
Big Mama brought the cappuccinos.
"Grazie," he barked, then made a sign which I took to indicate "put it on the slate". Mama was not amused. Pete giggled to himself and stirred the chocolatey froth with his finger.
"I'm sorry." I tried the bluff. "But why should I wish to hide - from you or anyone else? And by the way - I don't think I've had the pleasure of an introduction. There are not many compatriots I meet here."
"I am no compatriot of yours, Mr. Morris," he snapped. "I am English through and through. And I don't think that introductions are necessary."
"Pity. And what about you?" I stared directly at Pete. His finger slowly stopped stirring the froth. He took a deep gulp. And returned my stare.
I'll swear his eyes changed colour, taking in green and red then back again to what? I'll swear there was no hint of expression in them. His eyeballs glassed back at me, unwinking and desolate, as if they were not connected to his brain. He made no attempt to reply. He grinned a pointed grin. He was like a voluntary deaf-and-blind man.
"You see, Mr. Morris, you will get no reply there. Or here. You are not interested in who we are. Believe me," he shrugged aside my interjection. "You ARE NOT INTERESTED." Each word was emphasised by the tap of a heavily-ringed finger on the sugar bowl. "Mr. Morris, you were told to get out of town. So, get out of town. At this juncture, it will be simplest for everyone, especially you. Even if it has meant dragging me and my estimable companion here over to this prison island on a scorching day to deliver a message in a language which it is hoped you will this time understand."
"Sir, whatever you name is," I said, "I have understood the language throughout. It is the message I do not tolerate."
"Then learn more tolerance, young sir. Intolerance ill-becomes you. You now know that you cannot lie low. As we speak, your things are being packed for you. I do not wish to speak like a gunslinger, but leave town, Mr. Morris, leave town. You have less than twenty-four hours. This will help you." He tossed a sealed envelope on the table. "This is a truly generous offer. You will find subsequent approaches rather less generous." He scanned the horizon. The merest smudge indicated that the next hydrofoil was approaching. "Come," he barked to his companion.
They hobbled back down the slope. Pete looked like a tug that had lost its moorings, as he dithered around the flapping white-serge liner.
Big Mama stood, hands on hips, watching them go.
I picked up the envelope and opened it. A plane ticket. Naples to Manchester. One-way.
one way one way one way one way
-What? She stopped at the road's edge. Pulled out the headphones. -So where are you now? She blinked.
Not there.
Not there?
A sear of imprinted realisation.
-But you told me you were here, you liar!
He wasn't there. Nowhere in this city. She knew it.
And then, looking around, she wasn't so sure.
And then, looking around again, she knew that she wasn't there.
She stared at the wide street, at the pocked tarmac surface, at the tramlines. Looked around again.
It wasn't there.
It was as if the whole city had broken in two and cracked away along the line of the road, revealing a static centre.
It was as if she were trapped in a painting.
She looked up the road - deserted. Deserted of anything moving. Filled with cars.
Silently parked. No, abandoned.
one way one way one way one way
No-one was in them.
Their horns all started to honk together.
The sound blared and hissed inside her ears, as if she still had the headphones on. She couldn't stand it. Tried to defend it aside.
Waved her hands stupidly. shook her head doggedly as if the traffic were still moving and she were counting it, performing some pointless census in her stupefaction.
The clamour stopped suddenly.
Her head continued to wag for a second.
Then stopped.
Static.
Alone.
Static.
Terrified.
She stepped out across the road.
Navigated and negotiated and nudged her way across what had become a sort of horizontal abyss.
No noise, no movement, no opposition.
She passed in front of a tramcar, silent as a ruin.
She stretched out the final three steps. She could almost hear her hamstrings.
Her heel clicked on the kerb as she stepped up.
Instantly, the noise blared up behind her. Swept up and over her like a wind over a garden wind-break. Formed a wall in front of her. She came to a halt, seeming to bang her head on it. The head seethed and whistled and buzzed. She looked back. Traffic was moving with its usual unravelling recklessness. People were yelling through open car windows, some of them at her. Tramcars were grinding along their inviolate but frequently-violated space.
She took a deep breath and looked up. She was outside the Aquarium. She walked in. Cool. Subdued. Except for the bright smile of the girl behind the counter.
"Mi dà un biglietto d'entrata, per favore."
"Certo. Inglese?"
A sigh. "Sì."
"Ecco," handing over a faded leaflet in English.
"Grazie."
"Prego."
She stepped into the main room. It was as if her dreams had branch-offices and someone had shoved all the shop-windows of the branch-offices together. Almost everything writhed. Almost everything induced a familiar shudder. She slowly circumnavigated the passageway between the tanks, some of them apparently leaking, all them bright but still sombre. She took stock of all the elements. The sight of eels embracing and twisting and wrestling made her look away: they were like giant animate linguini; she could imagine bits of herself nestling between them on a white plate, waiting for the teeth to descend. She stared at the glass. She expected to be sucked in any minute. She moved on, then paused to stare face to face with the wise old eyes of a giant turtle: the eyes had the sadness and complacency that said "I am a veteran - I know my place, but I have my pride. I know my achievements." She looked at the sea-horses, vertically hovering along, looking as if they had tiny power-packs on their backs; she looked at anemones and urchins fingering the water; at skates belly-rubbing each other, going nowhere...
She stopped before a tank: gazed at a huge miscellany of fishes, multi-hued and multi-sized, diving across each other, nutting and nuzzling, side-flapping each other as they passed. Framed in their oblong tank, they were reminiscent of something.
She racked her brain. Tried to grasp the missing piece of truth. -Where? -Where? Then knew. She had to get out.
She quickly passed back through the leaky wonderland, muttering a "Grazie. Arrivederci" that she hoped didn't seem too brusque. She turned right at the exit and stormed across towards the other road, trying to get her head clear, trying to focus, crossed the road belligerently - the trick is to keep moving - hand held high - they shall pass - walking away from where she'd just come from, away from the past, towards the sea. -Well, here we are again. She stared far out, trying to cut off the bustling foreshore, trying to focus on the heave of the waves. She formed a frame with her thumbs and index fingers. She let the rest of the fingers on her left hand drop down. They formed a sort of yashmak before her mouth, and blocked out her view of anything that had the nerve to get too close.
She stared out through her rectangle at the sea. Water. Only water. Nor anything else. She conjured up her tangle of fishes. She could see them, though they were far off, and the water murky.
They dived and re-surfaced, bumping their snouts on the frame she had imposed upon them.
-Of course. The picture melted out into colour within her frame, and the fish leaked into and drifted back in from the surrounding monochrome sea.
Now she saw it. -That's where to go. The echo of the rectangle of the picture of mingling fish in some glossy guidebook. -Of Course! -The Pompeii mosaic! -The Museum! -So, is that it? -Is that what you're trying to tell me? -Is that where I have to go?
-IF YOU SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS ON THIS EARTH...
-Not you. -Not now! -Sod it, let's do it! -Museum, here we come! -Station!
She took off.
no time to linger off off stretching back along the straight line between sea and road back along the seashore dodging the joggers, striding past the couples, edged out like furlong posts on a racecourse, marking her progress, pummelling through the singed smell of corn that remained though the hawkers had disappeared wafting in and out of a mingling with the sea-salt-smell; everything seemed symmetrical it seemed as if she were in reverse as if she were going back through time almost as if she should be running backwards too.
She breezed back past the Piazza Sannazzaro - she waved towards the tunnel and its voices - -You won't escape me that quickly, matey! - the waiter saw her and waved back - and then she plundered back up the hill, the heat rashing the sweat out of her.
She saw a sign to the youth hostel. -Sorry, Giles, my little mucka, I'm afraid I'm going to have to make this gig without you. -Some other time, perhaps.
keep going keep going
one-way ticket one-way ticket one-way ticket one-way ticket
The station loomed. -Right. -Station. -We are going to buy a ticket. -It is not a difficult task. -It is quite within our range of possibilities. -These people are not putting deliberate obstacles in our way. -They want to sell tickets. -They want people to use their railway. She hopped from foot to foot for a while, hesitating, then plunged. "Un biglietto di andata sòlo per Piazza Cavour," she blurted, in a breathless stream.
"Certo, signorina." An exchange of ticket and banknote with the man with the moustache behind the glass, and it really was as simple as that.
She descended to the platform. There was no-one else around. She made her way to a red-painted seat. Sat down. Stared out across the rails. On impulse, she opened her rucksack and took the notebook from her folder. It seemed to creak and sigh. Everywhere else was silence. She opened it out.
Boats continued to ply along the foreshore. Tourists continued to enter and exit stage left and right. The hydrofoil creamed in from Mergellina. Not many people joined me in my bar. I was Monarch of all I surveyed.
Two men then approached. I thought of them as Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. Syd swelled-out a tent-like white suit. Pete hopped and gibbered beside him.
They were equally sinister, I fear.
A sort of predator-prey magnetism seemed to come into play. They scudded up, Syd bee-lining towards me, his trousers flapping, Pete tacking alongside him. They came to rest at my table.
"May we join you?" enquired Syd. The question was rhetorical. He sat down. He was English. Spoke like Sydney Greenstreet too. "Well, young sir, you are fortunate. We have been looking for you. And we have found you." He hailed the waitress, ordered two cappuccinos (it was mid-morning.) His eyes followed her. He wanted her naked. Permanently.
I tried to contribute to the conversation. "Have you just arrived on the hydrofoil?"
"Yes, indeed we have," he said.
"Then you are equally fortunate. For here I am. Not five minutes' walk away."
"I would beg you not to be so presumptuous as to estimate my average walking speed, Mr. Morris." He pulled out a handkerchief big enough for me to leave home with and mopped his florid complexion. Pete sat down, kicked his feet, tapped his fingers on the table-top and gazed downwards, eyes flicking out as the waitress slid past.
"I'm sorry. But you were fortunate to find me here, comparatively close to the harbour, irrespective of your walking speed."
"Luck has nothing to do with it, Mr. Morris. We were informed where you were as soon as we disembarked. If you had been elsewhere, we should have been taken there. By car. So I would have had a rather less arduous journey."
A gull parallel-flew down mainstreet.
"So let us not delude ourselves about that, Mr. Morris," he continued, "and let us not delude ourselves about your ability to hide from us either. Such ability is non-existent."
Big Mama brought the cappuccinos.
"Grazie," he barked, then made a sign which I took to indicate "put it on the slate". Mama was not amused. Pete giggled to himself and stirred the chocolatey froth with his finger.
"I'm sorry." I tried the bluff. "But why should I wish to hide - from you or anyone else? And by the way - I don't think I've had the pleasure of an introduction. There are not many compatriots I meet here."
"I am no compatriot of yours, Mr. Morris," he snapped. "I am English through and through. And I don't think that introductions are necessary."
"Pity. And what about you?" I stared directly at Pete. His finger slowly stopped stirring the froth. He took a deep gulp. And returned my stare.
I'll swear his eyes changed colour, taking in green and red then back again to what? I'll swear there was no hint of expression in them. His eyeballs glassed back at me, unwinking and desolate, as if they were not connected to his brain. He made no attempt to reply. He grinned a pointed grin. He was like a voluntary deaf-and-blind man.
"You see, Mr. Morris, you will get no reply there. Or here. You are not interested in who we are. Believe me," he shrugged aside my interjection. "You ARE NOT INTERESTED." Each word was emphasised by the tap of a heavily-ringed finger on the sugar bowl. "Mr. Morris, you were told to get out of town. So, get out of town. At this juncture, it will be simplest for everyone, especially you. Even if it has meant dragging me and my estimable companion here over to this prison island on a scorching day to deliver a message in a language which it is hoped you will this time understand."
"Sir, whatever you name is," I said, "I have understood the language throughout. It is the message I do not tolerate."
"Then learn more tolerance, young sir. Intolerance ill-becomes you. You now know that you cannot lie low. As we speak, your things are being packed for you. I do not wish to speak like a gunslinger, but leave town, Mr. Morris, leave town. You have less than twenty-four hours. This will help you." He tossed a sealed envelope on the table. "This is a truly generous offer. You will find subsequent approaches rather less generous." He scanned the horizon. The merest smudge indicated that the next hydrofoil was approaching. "Come," he barked to his companion.
They hobbled back down the slope. Pete looked like a tug that had lost its moorings, as he dithered around the flapping white-serge liner.
Big Mama stood, hands on hips, watching them go.
I picked up the envelope and opened it. A plane ticket. Naples to Manchester. One-way.
one way one way one way one way
-What? She stopped at the road's edge. Pulled out the headphones. -So where are you now? She blinked.
Not there.
Not there?
A sear of imprinted realisation.
-But you told me you were here, you liar!
He wasn't there. Nowhere in this city. She knew it.
And then, looking around, she wasn't so sure.
And then, looking around again, she knew that she wasn't there.
She stared at the wide street, at the pocked tarmac surface, at the tramlines. Looked around again.
It wasn't there.
It was as if the whole city had broken in two and cracked away along the line of the road, revealing a static centre.
It was as if she were trapped in a painting.
She looked up the road - deserted. Deserted of anything moving. Filled with cars.
Silently parked. No, abandoned.
one way one way one way one way
No-one was in them.
Their horns all started to honk together.
The sound blared and hissed inside her ears, as if she still had the headphones on. She couldn't stand it. Tried to defend it aside.
Waved her hands stupidly. shook her head doggedly as if the traffic were still moving and she were counting it, performing some pointless census in her stupefaction.
The clamour stopped suddenly.
Her head continued to wag for a second.
Then stopped.
Static.
Alone.
Static.
Terrified.
She stepped out across the road.
Navigated and negotiated and nudged her way across what had become a sort of horizontal abyss.
No noise, no movement, no opposition.
She passed in front of a tramcar, silent as a ruin.
She stretched out the final three steps. She could almost hear her hamstrings.
Her heel clicked on the kerb as she stepped up.
Instantly, the noise blared up behind her. Swept up and over her like a wind over a garden wind-break. Formed a wall in front of her. She came to a halt, seeming to bang her head on it. The head seethed and whistled and buzzed. She looked back. Traffic was moving with its usual unravelling recklessness. People were yelling through open car windows, some of them at her. Tramcars were grinding along their inviolate but frequently-violated space.
She took a deep breath and looked up. She was outside the Aquarium. She walked in. Cool. Subdued. Except for the bright smile of the girl behind the counter.
"Mi dà un biglietto d'entrata, per favore."
"Certo. Inglese?"
A sigh. "Sì."
"Ecco," handing over a faded leaflet in English.
"Grazie."
"Prego."
She stepped into the main room. It was as if her dreams had branch-offices and someone had shoved all the shop-windows of the branch-offices together. Almost everything writhed. Almost everything induced a familiar shudder. She slowly circumnavigated the passageway between the tanks, some of them apparently leaking, all them bright but still sombre. She took stock of all the elements. The sight of eels embracing and twisting and wrestling made her look away: they were like giant animate linguini; she could imagine bits of herself nestling between them on a white plate, waiting for the teeth to descend. She stared at the glass. She expected to be sucked in any minute. She moved on, then paused to stare face to face with the wise old eyes of a giant turtle: the eyes had the sadness and complacency that said "I am a veteran - I know my place, but I have my pride. I know my achievements." She looked at the sea-horses, vertically hovering along, looking as if they had tiny power-packs on their backs; she looked at anemones and urchins fingering the water; at skates belly-rubbing each other, going nowhere...
She stopped before a tank: gazed at a huge miscellany of fishes, multi-hued and multi-sized, diving across each other, nutting and nuzzling, side-flapping each other as they passed. Framed in their oblong tank, they were reminiscent of something.
She racked her brain. Tried to grasp the missing piece of truth. -Where? -Where? Then knew. She had to get out.
She quickly passed back through the leaky wonderland, muttering a "Grazie. Arrivederci" that she hoped didn't seem too brusque. She turned right at the exit and stormed across towards the other road, trying to get her head clear, trying to focus, crossed the road belligerently - the trick is to keep moving - hand held high - they shall pass - walking away from where she'd just come from, away from the past, towards the sea. -Well, here we are again. She stared far out, trying to cut off the bustling foreshore, trying to focus on the heave of the waves. She formed a frame with her thumbs and index fingers. She let the rest of the fingers on her left hand drop down. They formed a sort of yashmak before her mouth, and blocked out her view of anything that had the nerve to get too close.
She stared out through her rectangle at the sea. Water. Only water. Nor anything else. She conjured up her tangle of fishes. She could see them, though they were far off, and the water murky.
They dived and re-surfaced, bumping their snouts on the frame she had imposed upon them.
-Of course. The picture melted out into colour within her frame, and the fish leaked into and drifted back in from the surrounding monochrome sea.
Now she saw it. -That's where to go. The echo of the rectangle of the picture of mingling fish in some glossy guidebook. -Of Course! -The Pompeii mosaic! -The Museum! -So, is that it? -Is that what you're trying to tell me? -Is that where I have to go?
-IF YOU SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS ON THIS EARTH...
-Not you. -Not now! -Sod it, let's do it! -Museum, here we come! -Station!
She took off.
no time to linger off off stretching back along the straight line between sea and road back along the seashore dodging the joggers, striding past the couples, edged out like furlong posts on a racecourse, marking her progress, pummelling through the singed smell of corn that remained though the hawkers had disappeared wafting in and out of a mingling with the sea-salt-smell; everything seemed symmetrical it seemed as if she were in reverse as if she were going back through time almost as if she should be running backwards too.
She breezed back past the Piazza Sannazzaro - she waved towards the tunnel and its voices - -You won't escape me that quickly, matey! - the waiter saw her and waved back - and then she plundered back up the hill, the heat rashing the sweat out of her.
She saw a sign to the youth hostel. -Sorry, Giles, my little mucka, I'm afraid I'm going to have to make this gig without you. -Some other time, perhaps.
keep going keep going
one-way ticket one-way ticket one-way ticket one-way ticket
The station loomed. -Right. -Station. -We are going to buy a ticket. -It is not a difficult task. -It is quite within our range of possibilities. -These people are not putting deliberate obstacles in our way. -They want to sell tickets. -They want people to use their railway. She hopped from foot to foot for a while, hesitating, then plunged. "Un biglietto di andata sòlo per Piazza Cavour," she blurted, in a breathless stream.
"Certo, signorina." An exchange of ticket and banknote with the man with the moustache behind the glass, and it really was as simple as that.
She descended to the platform. There was no-one else around. She made her way to a red-painted seat. Sat down. Stared out across the rails. On impulse, she opened her rucksack and took the notebook from her folder. It seemed to creak and sigh. Everywhere else was silence. She opened it out.
© 2006 by Adrian Benson
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