2

“YOU DIDN’T TELL ME HOW OLD you were?” he said.

“Seventeen,” I lied through my teeth, and that made him smile.

He’s quite a lot older than me. He has joined-together eyebrows above bright eyes.

“What’re you doing at the market this early?” he asked.

“Nothing much, looking at the fruit and vegetables, taking some photographs. Good colors.”

He had caught me off guard, in other words. In fact, I was meant to be collecting news stories from the market about the vendors’ strike; the camera was my roommate’s, a prop. An amazing new Konica-Minolta, with which neither fruit and veg nor the old women at the market would need Photoshop—they’d never have given me one like it at the office.

We had met three weeks earlier, he and I, at a party at Shit.com that was paying me to write or steal news for their site. I was good at reworking news from competitors’ pages: copying, pasting, and touching-up. Even its own author wouldn’t recognize it. It was more than they deserved for the pittance they paid me.

The party was on the fifteenth floor of a skyscraper, and at that time I adored skyscrapers, lifts and all of that, life in the air, in the heights. Understandably, given that I had grown up, as it were in a depression, in a cleft between two houses.

I spent the whole evening being pestered by a scarecrow from Marketing.

Before she turned thirty she would “sometimes knock back a little glass of brandy or dark ale,” she said, but that evening she was smashed.

“I’m totally smashed.”

Unusually, though, she told me the same three stories each time she met me in the corridor or when she found me sitting somewhere, drinking. The first story was about a colleague from the editorial office who, it was discovered, had once mistakenly phoned the mother of a colleague whom he fancied, moaning and saying: “Oh, the things I’d do to you, cara mia.”

As it happened the mother was named Cara and she had a total fit.

“Too, too awful,” said my colloquist, opening her eyes wide and then bursting out laughing. “But it’s true,” she added, grabbing me by the elbow with her long nails, like a crab. The second story was about silicone implants and the possibility of breastfeeding when the woman had children, and the third about a Danish artist who was a cannibal.

She went from one person to another at the party, that crazy goose, repeating her stories, exactly the same each time. But people ignored her, turning back to those they were talking to, so she kept finding me and starting all over again. About the colleague who moaned into the telephone of someone’s mother Cara, about implants and breast-feeding and about that performance artist in Copenhagen who ate fat from liposuction of the chin. In a moment of lucidity, she added delightedly that she had “totally lost it, like a broken record” and went off to get some more wine.

That gave me time to escape. I wanted a refuge from this persecution, and I needed to lie down. My roommate and the boy who drove us to the party had vanished without trace, into one of the bedrooms I assume, and I, dying of boredom, had to wait for a lift.

“I can’t wait to be thirty,” my sister said before she became thirty. “So that I can go home to bed at midnight, without being embarrassed.”

She used to say that often, I recall.

In the kitchen, people were throwing canapés with sea-hare caviar at each other. In the room showing projections of old Disney cartoons, there were some partially dressed damsels lying around, while the guy with glasses showing the films rolled a cigarette and absently stroked the nylon-clad leg of one of the girls.

It was still too early for anything more daring so he put on some silent films. Who on earth would think of showing old films at a party, I thought. Perhaps they were the same people who listened to jazz at a wedding, and then everyone would go into an empty swimming pool and take each other’s photos, turning it into a happening.

In the empty dining room, three guys on Ecstasy were singing a medley of Dalmatian songs, their arms around each other.

“Someone should exterminate them,” said the man with joined-up eyebrows and the pale eyes of a dingo. He appeared beside me in the doorway and smiled. He looked more sober than anyone else.

In the hall I noticed my persecutor staggering purposefully in search of a victim.

“Please,” I said to the dingo with joined-up eyebrows, “if you’ve got a car, get me out of here.”

“You’re white as a sheet,” he said, wrapping his jacket around me and leading me out into the wet street, where lights were playfully flickering.

“Have you had a lot to drink?” he asked me later as he unlocked the door of his flat that smelled of newness, of polished parquet and Ikea furniture.

“Not really. Time of the month,” I explained like an advert for sanitary towels. “That’s why I’m not feeling great.”

“Ah,” he said. And pointed me to the toilet. “Freshen up,” he said.

I stayed for a while in the black-and-white bathroom, looking at the little women’s bottles on the shelf. I touched each of them. I had never been with someone else’s man before.

When I came into the room he was lying on his stomach without a stitch on, snoring. I took off my panties and lay down, naked, on his back, but he didn’t stir. Toward dawn, when I was already asleep, he turned me over like a huge doll and parted my legs. I didn’t manage to protest or draw him to me before we had both cried out. He once, at length. Me twice, but briefly.

* * *

The bedclothes were ruined, spattered with blood and semen.

“Look what we’ve done,” I said in the morning.

“What a pair we are,” he whispered into my hair, pulling me onto his chest, winding his arms and legs around me as though he had at least twice as many, like a hairy octopus. Maybe a spider, I thought.

Days later we ran into each other at the market.

“You didn’t call me. And you said you would,” he said, hopping between the little mounds of Macedonian paprika and Golden Delicious apples. It was winter, freezing, white, noisy mornings and steamy evenings, full of smoke.

“Wait while I take your photo,” I said.

He posed with a stupid smile, paralyzed with cold. Those eyebrows on his face looked like one big one. Later I lost that photo, or I left it in my flat, when I set off for home, to the Old Settlement, with no clear plan, apart from leaving Zagreb and not coming back.

“The last time was bloody,” I said as I pointed the lens toward him. “I wasn’t sure that you wanted to be reminded.”

“You really could be seventeen,” he said.

“Well, I am, in a way,” I said.

He took me home, we put the camera down on the little Ikea table, undressed, and stayed together for two years.

Just before the end it sometimes happened that I shaved my armpits with his lady’s razor and used her brush to do my hair.

With time everything becomes practical. Besides, it would be strange for me to be physically repelled by a woman whose husband I was sleeping with.

We produced the ineradicable strong, bitter smell of fresh milk.

Sometimes I wondered whether she could sense my presence in her apartment—saliva on the pillow, skin and hairs in the dust under the bed—or maybe he did a thorough job of clearing it all up.

What kind of… relationship was it? As soon as I approached, he would shove himself into me. Lying, sitting, standing, kneeling, he’d throw me onto my elbows, lift me onto the wall, a table, a tree, filling me.

I grabbed him. Kissed. Scratched. Hit. Gripped him, gripped him.

Stroked him, stroked him.

As we fucked, my arms grew out toward him, even facedown.

On the morning my sister phoned about Ma, I was sitting naked in his kitchen, watching CDs, which were strung up on the balconies of the neighboring building to scare the crows and pigeons, dancing in the wind. If I closed my eyes and ears tight, I could hear music from all directions in my head.

He had slipped out to the shop for some breakfast; he looked happy when I saw him for the last time, smiling with his dingo eyes. But by then I didn’t love him anymore.

I dressed unhurriedly and slammed the door shut.

The next day I left Zagreb and went to the Old Settlement.

It was forty degrees outside, in the bus probably only five, bitterly cold. The driver had put on the air-conditioning.

A short-legged white terrier crossed the empty road, so I couldn’t even say that there wasn’t so much as a dog in the streets.

* * *

“Rusty,” said a female voice, grabbing me by the shoulder.

I was sitting with my forehead stuck to the dirty window of the bus that went from the bus station through the car-ferry port into the outlying housing developments. I had shoved my suitcase behind my feet. Houses, mostly without facings but some white, various colors, were rising up in Tetris hills and hillocks at great speed. Every time I raised my head, on the hill in front of me there were yet more unfinished cubes with satellite antennae. The wind blew the soil off those hills, while goats had long ago devoured the original vegetation. In summer the north wind brought fires, and above the houses, on the mountain, black pines grew. Here and there one caught sight of a bush of maquis, prickly broom, or a palm with tiny inedible dates.

I stared at the face of the woman who had roused me from unconsciousness. The bus had left the bus station and the doors hissed shut.

“Rusty, I hasn’t seen you in an age… why’ve you come? Eh?”

Her skirt was tugged right up under her breasts; she was wearing shiny, lacquered pink boots with broken heels. She was swaying over my head, holding on to the strap with one hand.

Only someone from the Old Settlement could have called me Rusty.

“You’ve forgot me…”

Inflamed eyes under a shock of bleached, almost white curls.

“You’ve forgot me. Maria Čarija. The Iroquois’ cousin, for God’s sake!”

To the delight of the passengers, she tapped her open mouth with outstretched fingers briefly and jerkily several times, producing the old war cry of her tribe from the railway track by way of greeting.

She laughed with large yellow teeth, a young woman. What was with her hair? It stuck up in places in long and short thick white tufts, and in places there was none at all. Maria Čarija. That face.

“Why’ve you come? Why’ve you come?” she asked through her cracked lips.

“I ‘member you,” I said quickly. “I’ve come. The world goes ’round, and you always come back to the same place.”

“You never do ’member me,” she said loudly, right into my face.

Now the other passengers were looking at us quite openly, but cautiously, as you look at a spectacle involving two lunatics. If only I wasn’t dressed like this, in red. If only I wasn’t so tall. If I was smaller, paler, more functional.

“But I know you. Oh yes, I know you.”

She laughed with her big yellow teeth, hopping from foot to foot. She had followed Daniel secretly, couldn’t stop pursuing him, there was nothing to be done—he was like a magnet to her.

I pushed my case toward the door. There were still four stops before mine; I hoped I’d be able to walk that far. She had come close to my cheek. I noticed the locks of her hair had been pulled out, drawing blood.

“I know your brother too. I know who killed him,” she whispered.

“Oh, of course you do, why don’t you tell it all,” I muttered crossly, to myself.

The harmonica-like middle of the bus shifted under my feet. The doors hissed again and in the next shot I saw from the pavement Čarija’s face pressed against the bus window. She was licking the glass and smiling, cheerily, without malice.

And so I had made it. Yes, I’d made it! I’d returned to my hometown: nothing more than a vast rubbish dump, mud and olive groves, glorious dust, evenings on the empty terrace of the Illyria hotel, heavy metals in the air, excrement and pine woods, cats and slippery fish scales on the greasy slipway and the sea stretched out as far as November, when the north wind gets up.

On my route home, I see shopping malls and forests of jumbo posters, tundra and sorrowful bungalows on the road, but before that I pass along brightly lit walkways. Down below are the cruisers in the passenger harbor, guides with their arms in the air in front of a column of Japanese and American pensioners with prostheses and toupés; casinos, the mild winds of hashish, the stench of bodies and perfume; acid, transfolk as well as Saint-Tropez, Monte Carlo, Cista Provo, belle dame sans merci, girls in high heels squeezed into white nylon and animal skins; clean-shaven lads jingling the keys of polished cars, their hands, as they touch my face, smelling of vinyl and genitalia, money and tobacco.

Music blares, handfuls of worthless coins are scattered over the copper bar top. Salon Sodom. Cafe Eldorado.

There, on the glass-and-granite quay, while the yachts sail out of the harbor, the workers who swear that they destroyed communism are on strike. Their thinning hair is tied in ponytails, some have bad teeth, all have large hands and look younger than their wives. They sit around the fountain, among the trampled begonias, Indian figs, and dog mess, smoking York or Marlboro and saying that nothing’s going to change that’ll do them any good.

In the early hours, after midnight, women and men take off their clothes, discard their sandals, and go into the sea. They stand and immerse themselves in the sandy shallows. Girls and young men drink long cocktails out of thin glasses. Some foreign students lie on their backs, their legs together, and wave their arms to leave the imprints of wings. That game in the sand is called drawing angels.

The summer night has replaced the day in the flaming center of the town, under the moon’s bloody wink.

That is where I shall erupt from the total darkness of a side street and pass through a scene like this, pure and flat as a drawing—and come out of it appalled that so much life goes on without me.

My suitcase clatters along behind me, a faithful wheeled dog. Even if someone had picked me up and shaken me upside down, I wouldn’t have had enough cash for a taxi. People pass me in noisy groups: they are showered, with loud waves of brilliantine in their hair, while I smell of sweat and the sour bus. My short dress sticks to my back and legs.

I look around several times, afraid that Čarija will appear behind me and spit into my hair. We used to do that at one time. I’m almost ready to give the daft bitch a hiding, because of today, because of every yesterday and day before yesterday, because of things that aren’t connected and because once, long ago, her brothers cut my head open with a stone.

Maria had always been in the background: a silent Iroquois from that bellicose tribe. If she so much as made a sound, one of her relatives would bash her with a stick or turn on her with a “None of your crap.” Later her status improved—when it transpired that not one of the Iroquois, not even Tomi, could fire an air gun as accurately. When the fair came to town at New Year, the Iroquois Brothers took her to the shooting gallery and afterward exchanged their trophies—lucky charms and teddy bears—with the gallery manager for a bottle of Ballantine’s.

“Iroquois Maria can hit a bird’s eye in flight,” the boys said.

But I remember her most clearly in connection with our ginger Jill.

It was Daniel who brought us ginger Jill. When he was little, we often lost him in the labyrinth of streets. He would wander off or disappear from a game without saying a word. But the Old Settlement had natural boundaries, like every peninsula, and there wasn’t anywhere to go. Sea on three sides, on the other desert: the railway, brambles, and along the shore, dust. Now there’s a fresh grass carpet like a golf course and the glazed cubes of shopping malls.

That time we found Daniel on the slipway, as usual, behind a crane and the boats in dry dock, playing with young Jill. She was blind in one eye, covered in fleas, and she stank of wood preservative. The slipway always reeked of the rotten undersides of sick boats, between whose wooden ribs oil glistened in the stagnant seawater. Decay was the smell of my childhood; not even the sun managed to do much about that.

He tried to persuade us that ginger Jill had dropped out of the sky. There was no other explanation, Daniel insisted, because there weren’t any trees or buildings above the slipway from whose roofs she could have fallen onto the tarpaulin and fish crates, there was only the sky.

“She fell out of the sky,” he said. He had already entirely convinced himself of this story, so there was no point in getting cross with him.

Later it turned out that he had taken the kitten from the outlanders, that it had been Maria’s favorite.

Maria spent the whole day meowing, running across the field, calling the kitten, we discovered.

But by that time we had already taken the little animal to the vet.

Herr Professor examined the creature, rubbed an ampoule of anti-parasite stuff into the fur on her back, and explained something to Daniel with undisguised adoration.

Daniel turned up the sleeve of his pullover and scratched a scab on his elbow. There was something coquettish about him, now that I think about it, even when he was biting his nails or squatting on the toilet. And, like all genuine coquettes, he appeared entirely unaware of it.

“Dirty great pedophile,” my sister whispered of our neighbor as we stood at the door of his kitchen in which there was never any heat, even in winter.

Daniel, the strutting warrior, handsomer than anything you could find in the streets of the Settlement, helped him, soothing the brindled kitten with his dirty hands.

* * *

For my brother Daniel, who had just discovered video games, the cat was a space oddity, a furry projectile and little galactic trooper.

But my father, as soon as he saw her, said: “Well, just look at her, the little star, what a coat, what bearing, à la Claudia Cardinale!”

So she became Jill, as in Jill McBain from the Sergio Leone film Once Upon a Time in the West. We wanted to please our father.

Not long after, the Iroquois Brothers came into our street with their heavily armed, little halfwitted Maria to fetch their cat Mikan. My father easily persuaded them that Jill was Jill—that she couldn’t be Mikan, that she didn’t have balls, that she had fallen out of the sky, what else.

Later, nevertheless, that stone was hurled at my head—from the back I looked very like my brother.

My father bequeathed to his sorrowful amigo his leather belt, the parrot, and an old silver Colt—he had bought it specially for him, for his birthday, and it “had once been able to fire real bullets,” Daniel said. He roamed through the streets of the Settlement, got up like that, even after he emerged from his childhood years. He always walked in a diagonal, in an unpredictable tacking movement, trying to trick the murderer Liberty Valance or the greedy Pac-Man. Or to capture the cyber badge of the universe, like a cyber cowboy.

And the rest of us walked like that too, tacking, the aim of the game being to obstruct an invisible enemy sniper. There weren’t any snipers in the Settlement, but just in case.

The parrot didn’t interest Daniel much. She strolled along the top of the dresser, cackling. She was waiting for her master, our father, and then she forgot who or what she was waiting for, but she still went on standing up there, waiting.

Ginger Jill spent a long time stalking the crazy bird, lying in wait for it, the little hyena.

In the end all that was left of the parrot’s puffed-up pride were a few bloody feathers on the tiles and her untouched beak.

That all happened not long after Daniel’s funeral. No one was thinking about the unfortunate bird, which ought to have been shut up in a cage, out of reach, I recall.

Later, my sister cleared up the mess and turned with a broom, full of righteous anger, on ginger Jill, who was calmly licking herself with her pink tongue. Jill is a wily and elastic little beast and my sister assumed she had made herself scarce until the dust settled.

Later we went to look for her at our neighbor’s. She was lying on the floor tiles cleaning her tail just as she had been when we’d last seen her.

We adored ginger Jill, full of electric indifference under our stroking palms. It was easy to construe indifference as wisdom.

“Bloodthirsty sphinx,” said Herr Professor as soon as she had grown into a huntress.

Had ginger Jill been the size of a dog, I thought, she would have slit my throat as well. Sooner or later all cat owners come to believe that. But as it was, she had to accept my love and concern.

And like all cats with a modicum of self-respect, it seemed as though she was on the point of speaking and so we deliberately attributed several powers or inexplicable events to her.

I know something about cats, but neither the Cheshire Cat, nor Snowball, nor Simone Simon nor Natasja Kinski, nor the fiery Behemot, nor Louis Wain’s cat, not one of them had that elegance, that self-sufficiency and commitment of an actress in love, that no one could ever be sure whether they were just putting on. Probably, but that didn’t matter too much to the actors.

“Jill is devil-ificent,” said Daniel, looking at her.

“Why aren’t I a cat? That’s my real nature,” said my sister, watching Jill stretch.

And Jill was our household devil-ificence, but nevertheless, we would have coldly skinned her alive because of our father’s parrot had we caught her in the act.

I sat beside the fridge on the tiles with the dirty black grouting, absentmindedly peeling off a Fanta sticker, while my sister cleaned the bloody marks from the floor with Vim and a scrubbing brush, from time to time emitting shrieks of revulsion and fury, shooting a glance at me as though I was the one who had slit the bird’s throat.

Where had he been hiding all these years, that old guy we called Herr Professor, I wondered as I ambled toward the Settlement, through this town that never sleeps in summer. He must have gone a really long way away. He left without a word and all that reached us from him was a telegram of condolence, stunned, I’d say—three whole weeks after Daniel’s death. There was also a short letter, with no sender’s address, that we presume came from him. The letter was addressed to Daniel, and it arrived a week too late for him to have received and read it. It was postmarked Perm and the stamp had a picture of Laika the Astrobitch on it.

July was on the wane, the night heat bursting out of the ground, in protuberances of earth, bumps in the asphalt—there had been no rain for more than two months. I was still several kilometers from the house and it was several hours before morning. Behind me was Zagreb, distant, more distant than Perm, than Osaka and Juneau, and Santa Fe, the most distant city on earth.

“That’s what the towns where you abandon your failed illusions are like,” our favorite cowboy Ned Montgomery would say, riding off into the sunset with a cigarette between his teeth.

After a while, in the Old Settlement, we began to avoid Herr Professor. Stories were going around. People stick a stinking badge on you, which everyone can see apart from those who have been marked like that—they even wonder where the stench, wtf, is coming from. Like when you tread in dog dirt, and don’t realize that what’s smelling is your shoe.

Even Jill, with instinctive feline opportunism, avoided our neighbor’s doorway, even though she would have found bits of skin and meat in the kitchen, and mice and lizards in the garden.

Daniel, who lacked any curiosity about village intrigue and scandal mongering—but who was passionately and joyfully curious about animals—once used to go on whole-day visits to the vet’s. But with time, he too stopped going, I recall. That was shortly before the incident.

At the time the incident occurred, I was thoroughly settled in Zagreb, so I can’t say all that much about it. My brother had just begun to hang around with Iroquois Tomi, the younger Barić, and some of his other local contemporaries, my sister told me. They mended motorbikes and got up to the usual secondary-schoolboy foolish things.

Later word went around that Tomi and Daniel and some of the other Iroquois Brothers had thrown stones at a bus on the route Old Settlement–Northern Habor–Center and almost killed the driver. But that wasn’t true, Ma said.

It seems that this was the work of Ear and Tiny, my sister affirmed. I knew Ear and Tiny, two jerks who dressed like Puff Daddy and Eminem.

Now all the actors in that story are corpses.

Ear was sent to a San Patrignano home and all trace of him was then lost. Some say that his body was found burned in a container, somewhere near Ancona.

Tiny had a whole barrelful of bullets emptied into him by a stranger, from behind, as he rode his Vespa.

The younger Barić, was killed on the road. He was walking along the tarmac and taken out by a drunken truck driver. I’m really sorry about him, he wasn’t crazy.

When the incident occurred, when Herr Professor was beaten up and his apartment trashed, I recall, all those lads from the Settlement were summoned to the police station. Including Daniel.

Ma was beside herself, my sister said.

“The man was almost done for,” said Ma, meaning Herr Professor.

“Dear God, I’d prefer he was killed himself rather than have him kill anyone else,” said Ma, meaning my brother.

It ended with the vet making a statement that it was not those lads, Daniel’s pals, the papers reported.

Soon afterward, Herr Professor left the Settlement, while “the perpetrators were not found,” it was reported, I recall.

People carried on gossiping. That the vet had got a job with the UN peacekeeping force, looking after the army dogs, that he had worked his way through half the soldiers or they through him—stories like that were extremely popular at the time—and had finally moved to the Netherlands with a young UN employee.

It was also said that he had a clinic on the other side of town, also that he had married a woman vet with whom he was living in a basement with a little garden, but there were no children.

Ma was convinced that she had seen him once at the Bazaar, stealing a walnut from a pile on a stall; he had passed on quickly, presumably afraid of the stallholder, and Ma would have called to him to say hello, but she simply couldn’t remember his real name.

And now he’s come back.

“That old gay’s back,” said my sister when she called me in Zagreb, after she had opened the conversation with a desperate: “I don’t know what to do with her.” Meaning Ma.

“I can’t leave her like this, but I have to go back to work, I’ve got revision for those losers with resits.”

Then a sigh.

Then: “Hell.” And: “You thinking of coming?”

“Not that soon,” I said, the day before yesterday in Zagreb.

And then my sister said that, that the man I’d given up looking for had come back.

As though I’d been summoned from a stuffy waiting room after I’d already given up the ghost five or six times, I thought.

It took me half an hour to pack a bag with everything I could cram into the idea of my life.

“The number you have dialed is currently unavailable,” maintained my sister’s voicemail when I got off the bus and called her. It was already late, I observed, they would be asleep. Ginger Jill slept on Mother’s feet, Ma lay on her back like a corpse, with a burned-out cigarette in her fingers, while my sister up in the attic slept with her hair in a firm nighttime plait, curled up, with a pillow over her head. On way home. Be there early morning. Press. Sent.

Make something of your life, they say. But what can you make of your life if you don’t have money for a taxi? Your old man never set foot in a taxi. Your old lady never set foot in a taxi. And you live in a country where such a thing is expensive, a privilege. I can see you’ll never marry. No-no-no, don’t get annoyed. You’re not bad, and you’ve got a nice jacket, but you’re a one-off. Try to make something of your life, get an education, if you’ve got connections, let them sort you something where you won’t slave for peanuts, but know this—if your old man never set foot in a taxi, there’s only the remotest chance that you will and that’s the way things are. A brave insight into that fact is the most you’ll achieve in life. Such are the times, such is the place. You and I will always have enough for a decent pair of shoes, because we know that decent shoes are the most we can have. You and I will always have decent shoes: we need them because we don’t have money for a taxi.”

That’s what the guy at the bar said. He sat down beside me, slurping his beer.

Tubby Diana had turned off the music after the police intervened.

In front of the building, by a parked BMW, some lads had got together over a bottle of Chivas Regal. You could hear the kitsch blaring even through the closed doors of the car.

Diana was drying glasses. She had that expression on her face, like abused women who have given up on themselves. But still on a knife-edge.

“If you said boo, she’d have a heart attack,” said my sister. But that’s the same expression women here have if they don’t have a man and they’re past twenty-something. Hey-ho. Where did I go wrong? The girls who never left the Old Settlement didn’t have a lot of choice.

Some became surfers’ babes, others motorcycle molls.

“Born groupies,” said my sister.

“Born to be wives,” she said.

Diana herself had married a boy from the Settlement for whom his Yamaha was the be-all and end-all. He shortened the exhaust and sped past her house until she married him, I recalled.

“Rats,” yawned the guy at the bar, glancing through the door at the lads by the BMW.

“Oh, leave them be,” Diana said, smiling bleakly. She wanted to go home without gunshots and sweeping up glass. Me too, I thought.

“Racketeers,” muttered the guy in our direction. One of them seemed familiar to me, as though I’d seen him at one time in Daniel’s company, when I used to come home from uni. But when our eyes met, he turned his head away, quickly.

I’ve known Diana my whole life. We all called her Tubby Diana, because she had been a tubby child. Now she’s thin, but the Tubby has stuck. She’s no older than me, and she has two little sons with the biker, twins, and her face is puffy.

“All the local lasses are bloated with alcohol by their twenties,” said the guy, tipsily. “Maybe that’s your fate as well. Accumulating fluid,” he informed me.

Diana could give me a lift home when her shift ends, I’d thought as I dragged my suitcase along and caught sight from the street of the familiar pink neon sign of the Last Chance with its painted green palm.

“Sure, old thing,” she had said, “no problem.”

It was almost day.

There weren’t many customers at the Last Chance. Closing time was in the air.

The fellow at the bar, an old guy sleeping with his head on the table (“Dipso,” said the g.a.t.b.), four Swedish tourists at the separate table (“swingers,” said the g.a.t.b. between two gulps), and right at the back, beside the door to the toilet, a mysterious good-looker playing a mouth organ.

Well, well, I thought. What film was this?

A foot on the edge of the table and a blue tuxedo. He was leaning his head and shoulders against the wall. Playing.

Foreigner, I thought.

“Phoney?” I asked the guy at the bar, rolling my eyes in the direction of the lad in the gloom.

“Nah! That’s Angelo!” said the guy.

“Hey, Tubby, take Angelo a Southern and give the kid a cognac! And another big one for me!” he rolled the empty beer bottle across the bar.

Diana looked at him grudgingly. The guy owed her.

“To hell with that!” The guy pulled a face. “Write it down. Just write it down, I say.”

The good-looker in the corner blew twice into his harmonica to clear the dust, then launched into a familiar tune. Yippee ya yo. Yippee ya yay.