Green Glowing Skull. Gavin Corbett

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СКАЧАТЬ kicked up some late-winter mulch and tore at a salt sachet in one pocket. He rested his foot on the kerb that ran around the edge of the pond and tried to rally his nerves. In the water his reflection was in pieces. The man by the wheelbarrow in the chewing-gum trench coat – had he been the same man inside the Boathouse, he wondered; the man in the mould-blue sweater sitting on his own by the bar, tipping at something in a little pot? It was hard to tell. The man by the wheelbarrow had not only been wearing a chewing-gum trench coat but a trilby, or a homburg. He had also been wearing sunglasses.

      Clive Sullis thought to himself: Why? But why now? Why were they coming, after all this time?

      Why, because he’d been given, lately, to saying too much. He’d given himself away. He’d let the mask slip. He’d told perhaps rather too many people that he had once been a woman. He realised that now.

      This was possibly a condition of his stroke. Or it was a function of his mind. His mind knew what his body did not know by this stroke. His body, at the last, when it came to it, taken by surprise and feeling betrayed, would put up a struggle, pulling in gulps of air and throwing out gobbets of phlegm. It was all it knew to do. And his mind, in its pathos, knowing what was coming, was trying, in its way, to put his affairs in order.

      And so he had gone around telling anyone who would listen. And they’d laughed in his face. ‘But sure we knew!’ they’d all said, in words of that order, or in the way they’d looked back at him. And he’d looked at his reflection and seen that it was true: funny; though he’d been a manly girl, he was never quite the manly man. Perhaps it was in the outline of the eyes. And perhaps it was in the nose – and the surgeon had even offered to take a bone from his backside and bolt it to his nose, give him the pugilist’s nose. But he’d worried, stupid girl, that he’d have toppled over while seated.

      And it was a pity he’d told so many people because it had been a good disguise until then, he said now to nobody (pulling out the elasticated waistband of his trousers and pouring salt on the sore around where his outlet pipe met his skin – the salt being medicinal). I mean, although I’d never made much of a man, it was still a pretty good disguise – I looked nothing like I did before. I looked nothing like her, that person, me: Jean Dotsy.

      And by God Almighty, he’d made a good fist of it. Out of necessity, the very need to survive, he’d given it all he’d got. So that before a year was even out he’d wanted to be the best man there was. She grew into himself, in whole.

      But it was a disguise. Still it was. He’d forgotten that. In wanting to grow into it, and in giving it away finally, he’d forgotten that. Why did he give it away? Because he needed everyone to know. Not to know that he’d once been a woman, no. But that it was a disguise.

      And he’d go back now, if he could, if he could give his pursuers the slip, he’d go back to the Colombian who sold him his cantaloupe melons, the man, one of them, he’d told he was a woman, and he’d say, ‘No – no. There’s something else.’ And he’d go back to his neighbour, Mia, who he’d told too, and he’d say, ‘No – no. I knew you knew that. But have you since wondered why? If I tell you now that it was all just a disguise, a way to go into hiding, would you like to know why it was so?’

      And he’d go to Denny, he would. He would go to Denny, who had thought he knew all that there was to know. And he’d say, ‘You think you know me. You think you knew who I was, and what I became. But. Listen.’

      If only he could be given the chance now. If only he hadn’t opened his big bog mouth.

      He looked out over the pond for a few minutes. Children and their minders raced yachts and clippers and tourists were spread about. If he stayed here, no harm would come. This was the idea of safety in numbers, this was the feeling of safety that came from being in somebody else’s scene, a windless Dutch scene. This was the play of the light. He could wait here for the man. Where was the man? There he was. His form stretched above and below the line of the kerb. He was as still as the bare branches.

      Clive watched him and waited for him to move but he did not.

      The enemy: safe to think of him as that now. The envoy. He thought back to the wheelbarrow; the way, after he’d spun around, the man had disappeared, gone, into thin air, in a whip and a swirl of leaves. He knew exactly the enemy he was dealing with here. He looked about him, at women his own age and at little children in paper-boat hats. Common birds of the north-eastern United States that did not have a care. The world was spinning. Litter, little weightless scraps, ash, followed a spiral descent. No amount of witnesses, no number of nobodies, would protect him. He knew exactly what he was dealing with. The spy costume no doubt was deliberate. A taunt. This is what we are doing, yes.

      ***

      A night weeks before. Clive Sullis woke from a nightmare that was gone in an instant and he was worried about blood clots to the brain. He woke up screaming, screaming. The screams out of him. That was it. Just: ‘Pissstains!’ ‘Jisolm!’ Like that, bursting through darkness. Like the original language. The first words after the bang. As if something had broken down and something else was made in its place. False and crude. This was the story of his life. Why couldn’t they see him for who he was?

      He sat up and patted the bedclothes around him, letting them cool, and his breathing settle.

      He had an obscure memory of getting up in the night with a headache and pulling apart the presses for paracetamol. He remembered having a dry throat and that he was nauseated too and that he was convinced a plastic fork was stuck in the root of his tongue and that his head was a head of lettuce and that he was halfway through a prayer when he realised he was praying to Peter Stuyvesant, the last governor of New Amsterdam. This was an obsession now: Holland. This was the trouble after the bang. Memories from now on might only be vague, or split, or not memories at all. Of the moments before he woke, before the outburst, he could recall, he thought – what? Material, chippings. Lines and circles. Ones and zeroes. These things had been falling through his mind against a black background. But of the day before – of the waking day before, he could recall almost everything, he thought. He remembered he had read that because the beaver ate only tree bark its diet was considered vegetarian. Now hold on a minute, he said.

      He made himself a cup of coffee and brushed his teeth and swept his jacks across the table with his arm and tried to keep active in his apartment at 1202, The Birches, Stuyvesant Town. He knew who he was, in name: Clive Sullis, self branded. He knew his age: seventy-four. These were the present identifying stamps. But what of his long-term memory? Could he write his whole life story, if given the time, in broad strokes at least? Yes, he felt that he could.

      He poured himself another cup of coffee, tipped out the rest of the container of sweetener on the saucer, and dropped in three of the pills. And he had also read of pills that could help with the despair of getting older. And that they worked by giving you a good view of yourself in the world and making you realise that you are unremarkable and that any of the oddities that you worry the rest of the world might notice are not noticeable at all. He thought that he would have to nullify this knowledge if these pills were to work on him, but he did not need to think so deeply now. He did not need to be fretting and thinking or fretting about not thinking. He needed to relax was what he needed to do. He should not be fearing the worst and he should stop being so hard on himself. He should allow for the fuzzy memories, for the confusion, for the bad language, for the worries, given his age and given every change he’d been through.

      Later that day he was not so coherent. Parting a way through a scrub of cane chairs under the umbrellas of the terrace he greeted his good friend Denny by saying that some day he would say something, that there were some things that needed to be said, that in all their years of friendship there was one thing, that really there was one thing, that СКАЧАТЬ