DINNER.
I suppose you’ve got to hand it to Wally. He’s done a huge Spanish prawny dish with fried rice and he’s done it a treat. Under different circumstances it would be a Meal to Remember, one of the Great Meals. But as things are, it’s about half as jovial as things were during the Last Supper. D’Antoni spends the whole time alternating between looking at me and looking at Tina, his expression the same for both of us, a sort of hate-filled contempt expressed by a smirk. And Wally of course, in between dishing up, he’s wondering what the fuck the looks mean, if I’ve been straight with him or not, and he spends more time biting back his questions than eating his dinner. D’Antoni is still stoking himself up on the booze, but like I say this time it’s not causing him to have the verbals; it’s just making his expression smoulder even more grotesquely. Tina looks a little better than she did this afternoon but she’s putting as little effort as possible into moving her knife and fork about. On the other hand, I notice that she doesn’t seem to be having any trouble in lifting her glass.
So as the atmosphere is laying heavily on my tits, the minute I’ve finished eating I get up from the table and go through into the lounge and sit down and light a cigarette and pick up an old Express off a pile on a nearby table and for the fifth time I read how Liverpool knocked out the Hammers in the fourth round, as if I cared. By the time I’ve almost finished D’Antoni appears, bringing his anaesthetic with him.
“You checked everything outside?” he says to me.
“Yes,” I say, folding up the paper. “I checked everything. Everything’s fine. I’ve land-mined the road all the way to the airport and the mountains are all dynamited. I left the plunger on your bedside table, all right?”
D’Antoni takes a drink.
“O.K. Give me all that crap. I’ll do it myself, O.K.?”
He starts moving towards the windows.
“Gone a bit chilly out,” I say to him. “Mind you don’t catch cold.”
I pick up another paper but before I can sort out the sports page the lights go out. Then I hear D’Antoni making his way across the room. A few seconds later the curtains part a little bit and let some post-sunset light into the room. Then there’s the familiar sound of the window being slid open. D’Antoni manages not to stumble outside. After he’s disappeared I sit there in the dark passing the time by trying to listen to D’Antoni’s progress. Maybe he’ll imagine one of the mainland-bound jets has got machine guns sticking out of the portholes and while he’s shaking his fist at it he just might fall over the wall and into the canyon below. In fact I’m just thinking I might go out there and give him a helping hand when suddenly the room’s full of light again and when I’ve got used to it I can see that Tina’s the one that’s pressed the switch.
“What’s this?” she says. “Meditation time?”
Even if I was going to answer her I’m not given any time because D’Antoni re-enters through the windows like a Widnes forward playing against St Helens. He hurtles across the room and snaps off the light without having to push Tina out of the way because the minute she saw him coming through the curtains she moved in the opposite direction even quicker than the way D’Antoni made his entrance. Then I hear D’Antoni making his way back across to the window and his progress is illustrated by a description of his grasp of the situation.
“You bastards, you’re gonna set me up,” he screeches. “That’s what you’re gonna do. Set me up, you mothers.”
The window is slammed to and there’s the sound of the heavy curtains being over-lapped.
“I was standing right in the light,” he screams in the darkness. “There would have been no problem. They could have fixed me with a pea-shooter.”
“It was just our way of making sure,” I tell him. “Saves looking. Now we know there’s nobody out there.”
“Listen, I wasn’t even carrying out there. I wasn’t even protected.”
The source of Tina’s perfume is a little bit closer to me in the darkness. I can hear D’Antoni moving back across the room. Then the lights go on again and now D’Antoni’s moving towards where I’m sitting.
“That’s why you took them, wasn’t it?” he says. “So it shortens the odds. Makes no difference if they take me out or not, ain’t that right, hey?” He stops a foot or so away from me. “You better give me that stuff back,” he says. “Otherwise—”
“Otherwise you’ll what? Break my back?”
D’Antoni looks at me for a while then he turns away and makes for the booze. When he’s made his drink he says:
“Jesus. I’d be safer calling a press conference and just telling everybody where I am.”
“Then why the fuck don’t you do that and give us all a rest?”
He doesn’t seem to hear me because he says:
“I should have done what Wally did. Gone down south right away. I should never have done what I done.”
I get up and say to Tina:
“Wally still in the kitchen?”
“Well I’m going to bed. If I was you I’d go and help him finish the washing up.”
“If you’re going to bed, so am I.”
I shrug.
“In that case, tell Wally what you’re doing. I don’t want him waking me up more than a dozen times tonight.”
I walk out of the lounge, leaving D’Antoni pouring himself another drink. When I get to the bedroom I put on my pyjamas and lie down on the cot and look at my watch. It’s only a quarter to ten. Well, I think to myself, you’re supposed to do something different when you’re on your holidays. About five minutes later the Mystery Tour Operator appears in the doorway.
“He’s at it again,” says Wally.
I don’t say anything.
“He’s on his third bottle of champagne. That’s not counting the wine he had.”
“Then we should have a peaceful night.”
“It’s what he might do before he sparks out.”
“He won’t do fuck all.”
“He wants me to stay with him.”
“So stay with him. Then when he’s flaked out you can have a good night’s kip in your own pit.”
“Can’t you come down?”
“I thought you’d be happier me playing Fairy Godmother to your offspring.” There’s a silence while Wally tries to figure out the lesser of two evils. Then there’s the sound of water running down the plug-hole.
“Well, I’ll go down then.”
“Yeah. Don’t want him coming looking for you, do we?”
Obviously not; Wally disappears downstairs.
A minute or two later Tina comes out of the bathroom. You got to hand it to her, she knows what it’s all about. She hasn’t bothered to get into her nightie or anything, well, of course she wouldn’t, would she, and in any case there’s nothing to hide I haven’t seen, but she’s very clever; she is in fact hiding it, because she’s put on a pair of brilliant white knickers and over the crutch is a transfer that says Do IT Now, and of course she’s well aware of the fact that having already given her special attraction a previous airing, the wrinkling satin of the pants somehow draws to it an added attraction, which she doesn’t detract from by sitting on the edge of the bed, her legs open, while she dries her legs and her back and eventually her tits, and while she’s doing all this she’s looking at me, and in the look she’s expressing something that’s usually seen in the face of a stripper who isn’t entirely doing it for the money. Now, as far as I’m concerned, I can normally take or leave this kind of behaviour, being as I am in the line of business I happen to be in, where this kind of situation, wherein a young girl from one of the clubs imagines she can advance her career more than somewhat, occurs much more often than does three aces out against three threes. In the normal course of events, I would remind the piece of the existence of Audrey Fletcher, pat her on the bum and send her on her way. Of course, from time to time, I would pat her on the bum without reminding her of the existence of Audrey Fletcher, but those times are very few and far between, the nature of Audrey being what it is. If I ever digress as far as Mrs. Fletcher is concerned, it’s usually with persons that operate as far off her patch as possible. But in this situation, where it is just gone ten o’clock in the middle of nowhere and Audrey’s miles away, those white satin knickers and their message redolent of Norman Vincent Peale are affecting me in a way that the frequent full frontals have failed to so far, and the gaze, too, is an outward shorthand for what it might be like once the knickers have been thrown out of the window.
“A new pence for them,” Tina says, rubbing the towel against some strands of hair at the nape of her neck.
“For what?” I ask her.
“Your thoughts’ll do for starters.”
“I was just wondering how the Spurs went on in the replay what they was playing last night.”
“Is that what you do to keep your mind off it? Think about a bloody silly game?”
“Better than some games I can think of. I would have thought you’d have had enough of the other sort.”
“My back’s sore. Nothing else.”
“If your back’s sore, I should keep off it for a bit, then.”
“You don’t always have to be on your back.”
I don’t answer her. She drops the towel and arches her back and locks her fingers behind her neck.
“Jesus Christ,” she says. “I feel really stiff.”
She looks at me.
“You don’t, obviously.”
She shrugs and starts to make as if she’s going to take her pants off. She’s great, she really is, because what she does is to slip them down her thighs a little bit, then makes a tutting noise and picks up the towel and begins to dab at her hair again, as if she’s overlooked a little bit.
“All right,” I say to her.
I get up off the cot and lock the bedroom door and the bathroom door. Then when I’ve done that I walk over to the bed and stand in front of Tina. For a moment or so she pretends not to notice me. Then after she’s gone through that routine she looks up at me and says:
“That your after dinner exercise, was it?”
“Part of it.”
“Another part to come, is there?”
“Yes,” I tell her, undoing my pyjama cord, “this part.”
The pyjama trousers reach the floor. Tina looks at me, but this time not in the face. Still doing that, she begins to pull her pants the rest of the way down, but before she can get very far I reach out and stop her; holding her wrist. She looks up at me.
“That’s something I like to do myself,” I tell her, releasing her wrist and transferring my grip to the satin her open thighs are stretching tight as a whip. She lies back on the bed, her legs bent double, her knees in the air. I drop the fragment of satin on the floor, and put one knee on the bed, between her legs. Just as I do that there’s a knock on the door, followed by the sound of Wally’s voice.
“Jack,” he says, “you’re wanted.”
I can’t think of an answer to that so I don’t give him one. On the other hand, I don’t give Tina one either, because we both remain poised in the positions we were in before the knock on the door.
“Jack,” comes Wally’s voice again. “You’re wanted. On the blower.”
Now, normally, the Sydney Tafler dialogue alone would be enough to get on my nerves. But coupled with the fact that he’s preventing me doing just that, he’s mentioned the telephone what’s supposed to be off, due to the heavy rains, and all that. So I abandon my supplicant position and draw up my pyjama trousers and when I’ve tied the cord I go over to the door, unlock it, close it behind me, and take hold of Wally by his throat and walk him backwards across the landing until the opposite wall prevents me taking him any farther and before he can gargle out any questions I say to him:
“I’m what?”
“The blower,” he croaks. “You’re wanted on it.”
“I’m wanted on it,” I say to him. “Now that’s very interesting. Not only because the phone is out of service, but also, who, I ask myself, could be wishing words with me on this island, at this time of night, eh Wally? Couldn’t be a wrong number, could it? Couldn’t it be a fortunate false alarm, eh? Or could it be Gerald and Les, phoning out of a deep sense of concern for my safe arrival? Couldn’t be that, could it, Wally?”
He shakes his head.
“No,” he says. “It ain’t that. It’s Mrs. Fletcher what wants you.”
I give him the kind of look he can do without right now.
“Mrs. Fletcher?”
Wally nods, too many times. I close my eyes. Fuck me, I think to myself. This is all I need. I know she’s barmy, but I didn’t think she’d be barmy enough to pull this one, to put a mouth like Wally onto the fact that Audrey’s making contact with me on the same island where she happens not to be meant to be. My first instinct is to want to give her what is usually reserved for birds that perpetrate this kind of behaviour, but on reflection it occurs to me that once Gerald gets wind of the event, he’ll take care of that part of the arrangements, together with certain contingencies covering my own destiny. So I say to Wally:
“Mrs. Fletcher say why she particularly wanted to speak to me?”
Wally shakes his head. I let him go and walk down the stairs and pick up the extension in the hall. The fish is still dribbling away, and the resemblance to Gerald at this moment takes on a particular poignancy.
“Yes?” I say.
“Merry Christmas,” Audrey says.
Oh Christ. That’s all we need. For her to be pissed up to the gills.
“You’re three weeks early,” I tell her.
“Yeah, but I couldn’t wait to give you your present, seeing as I got it here with me. I mean, what’s the point of waiting? It’s all gift wrapped, pink bows and black lace edging, know what I mean? And as it’s something you never get tired of, doesn’t matter when you get it, does it?”
I take a deep breath.
“Listen, you silly fucking cow. You know what you just done, don’t you? You only just blown everything—”
“Talking about blowing.”
“For Christ’s sake, just leave it out. You’re barmy. I mean, you do realise, when I put this phone down, that Wally gets straight back onto it and talks to Gerald and Les? I mean, you do know that?”
“So what?”
“Jesus.”
“Well, I tell you what, try telling me that when you got two stripes on your face and your mouth muscles don’t work the way they should.”
“I told you. It don’t matter. They know where I am.”
“You what?”
“Gerald and Les. They know I’m here. They know I’m in touch with you. Favourite, isn’t it?”
“They know you’re here?”
“Yes.”
“They know you’re in touch with me?”
“That’s right.”
I feel for my cigarettes and matches but of course that’s futile as I’m only wearing my pyjamas.
“So what did you do? Just go to Gerald and say look, I cannot tell a lie, I am not bound for Hamburg pulling birds for the club, I am in fact going to fuck with Jack in Majorca, that all right?”
Audrey laughs.
“All right, all right,” she says. “I’ll tell you straight. I just enjoyed giving you the shits, that’s all.”
I don’t say anything.
“Look,” she says. “They know I’m here, because that’s where they asked me to be.”
“Now I know it’s Christmas.”
“Straight. They asked me to come over here.” She giggles. “That’s not bad. That’s exactly what I’ll be doing, coming over here.”
She begins to build on her giggling so I say to her:
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on or aren’t you?”
“I’m telling you. They asked me to come. They wanted me to deliver something to you. I’m your actual Holiday Tour Courier.”
“Just tell me, Audrey.”
“An envelope. They wanted me to deliver an envelope. Maybe it’s your Christmas Card.”
“Yeah, and it could be my Christmas bonus.”
“I’m your Christmas bonus, sweetheart, and you better get down here before I’m affected by the inflationary spiral.”
“Look,” I tell her. “Just for two minutes. Just start again and tell me what you’re doing here.”
There’s the sound of a glass clinking against the plastic at the other end of the line.
“They told me to leave Hamburg out, as they’d got something important to let you have, and they could only trust me to get it to you. That’s a laugh, isn’t it?”
“You know what’s in the envelope?”
“For once, no. I never asked. All I thought about was getting out here with their blessings, what a giggle that was.”
“But you do know what’s going on up here?”
“What’s going on?”
“About D’Antoni.”
“Oh, the Yank. Yeah. They told me he’d be staying a few days. Why?”
“That’s all they told you?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Oh, no reason,” I tell her. “I mean, them being the straightest people in the world, and all that.”
“What’s happening, then?”
“Never mind. Where are you?”
“Where do you think I am? At the bleeding hotel. The one I booked into before the Ugly Sisters said I could go to the ball.”
“All right,” I tell her. “How soon can you get up here?”
“What you talking about? I may have got their blessing, but Wally’s going to have something to tell them if I screw with you up there.”
“It’ll look even more dicey if you don’t stay up here.”
“Anyway, they told me to give you what I got away from there. In private, like. They want me to give it to you in private.”
The harsh giggle crackles down the line again. Audrey, I think to myself, sometimes I wonder. I really do.
“All right,” I say to her. “I’ll come down. I’ll be about an hour.”
“Well, don’t be any longer. I know you’ll hurry. I mean, it’s been a few days since you seen any. I hope you been saving it up, and if not, I hope Miss Wrist has been due to your loving thoughts of me.”
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
I put the phone down. The fish keeps on dribbling. I walk back upstairs. Wally’s no longer on the landing, but the bedroom door’s open. When I go in I’m greeted with a tableau not too dissimilar to the one I was into before the bell tolled. Wally’s leaning over the bed, but this time Tina’s between the sheets and her legs are drawn up a different way.
“And if you think I’m so fucking stupid not to know what’s been going on,” Wally’s saying, “you got to be out of your tiny mind.”
“I just think you’re fucking stupid,” Tina says, drawing on one of my cigarettes.
“Look—” Wally begins, but I interrupt him by walking over to the bedside table and picking up my cigarettes and matches.
“My old man thinks you’re a dirty old man and that I’m a dirty little bitch,” Tina says to me.
“Is that right?” I say, lighting a cigarette. Wally seems to be at a loss for words.
“Yeah,” Tina says. “Funny, isn’t it?”
I ignore her and say to Wally:
“The Mercedes got plenty of juice in it?”
“Er—yeah, it’s nearly full, that is.”
“Good.”
I go over to the wardrobe and take a shirt and a suit off the hanger.
“Why, you going out?”
“That’s right. Down to Palma.”
“Well what about him?”
“He’s spark out, isn’t he?”
“ ’Course he is. Otherwise he’d have heard the phone and he’d have shot it to bits with his bazooka, wouldn’t he?”
“What about us if he wakes up?”
I ignore him and walk into the bathroom and start getting changed. Naturally, Wally follows me in.
“You can’t leave us on our own,” he says. “Christ knows what he might do. I mean, think of Tina.”
“She can look after herself, don’t you worry.”
I straighten my tie in the mirror and walk back into the bedroom. Tina’s no longer in the bed.
“You see?” Wally says.
“Show me the car, Wally.”
“Jack—”
“Wally.”
Wally shuts his mouth and leads the way out the bedroom. On the way down Wally’s tempted to look in the lounge to check on the state of D’Antoni, but my eyes on the back of his neck cause him to think better of it. We cross the entrance hall and Wally opens a door and we go down a short flight of steps that descend into a short corridor that turns at opposite right-angles a couple of times until we’re at another door and Wally opens this door and we’re in the garage. Wally switches a light and flickering neon finally stabilises and the white Mercedes is revealed in all its boring pristine beauty. Wally presses a button and the garage door slides up and a cool wall of air moves into the garage.
“The keys in it?”
“Oh, yeah; the keys,” Wally says, and fishes about in his pocket. “Here they are.”
I walk round to the driver’s side. The door’s unlocked. I get in and try not to look as if I’m going to have to get used to the left-hand drive. I light a cigarette and push the key in the ignition. Wally sticks his head in through the rolled down window.
“You ain’t going to be long, eh?” he says.
“Tell you what I’ll do,” I say to him. “If I’m not back by Friday next week you can use my aftershave for ever and ever.”
I flip on the lights and turn the key and the engine turns over first time. I release the handbrake and the car slides forward and out of the garage. For the next ten minutes I drive at about five miles an hour and when I’m on the mountain road I drive even slower, the hairpin bends and the canyons being what they are. About three quarters of an hour later, when I’ve negotiated the last bend and I’m on some relative flat, I stop the car and have five minutes to calm my nerves. I never did like driving, and that last three quarters of an hour’s just about done me for the rest of my natural. So I sit there and have a smoke and try to imagine what’s in the envelope Audrey’s brought over. Knowing Gerald and Les, it’ll be a letter informing me that there’ll be a Mr. D’Antoni staying at the villa for a couple of days, and would I afford him every courtesy. Those bastards. I’m really going to enjoy seeing them again, and giving them my opinion of recent events. That will be what I call pleasure.
I flip the cigarette out of the window and a voice behind me says:
“This as far as we’re going, then?”
I close my eyes. There’s a rustling of soft clothes and when I open them again Tina’s finished climbing over the seat and is sitting alongside of me.
“Didn’t go very far in the bedroom, did we? So I thought—”
I twist round in my seat and grab her shoulder.
“Bloody hell,” she says. “That hurts.”
“Listen,” I tell her, “I don’t give a fuck about that. I’m out on business. Now get out of it and clear off back to the villa.”
“You what? I can’t walk all that way back up there.”
“You should have thought of that.”
“Anyway, it’s not bleeding safe. I still hurt from what that bastard done you know. It’s bleeding painful.”
“You should have thought about that, too.”
“Oh, piss off.”
I light another cigarette.
“Listen, Wally’s going to disappear up his own arsehole when he finds you’ve gone missing, you know that, don’t you?”
“So?”
“So that’s another reason.”
“All right. Take me back, then. ’Cause that’s the only way I’m going back. I mean, you’ve got to be joking.”
I blow out some smoke. She’s right. She can’t walk back up there. On the other hand, I ought to clout her and sling her out and to hell with her. But I’ve had enough for one day, and the prospect of dealing with Audrey in one of her pissed-up states is already tiring me out.
“I don’t even know how long I’m going to be,” I tell her. “I may even be all night. What you going to do then?”
“I’ll go to the club. No one will mind, will they? They haven’t before.”
“In that case I should stay there the rest of your holidays if I was you.”
“Charming.”
“I thought you felt like that,” I say to her, switching on the ignition. We drive on for about quarter of an hour without either of us saying anything. Eventually Tina breaks the silence by asking me for a cigarette. I hand her the packet and the matches and when she’s lit herself up she gives the packet and the matches back to me by placing them in my lap but the thing is, once she’s done that, she doesn’t remove her hand, so I say to her: “I told you, I’m on business. You keep on like that you’re walking back.”
“A twist,” she says. “A real twist, that is. The bird walking back because she makes the pass.”