Blood is Dirt. Robert Thomas Wilson

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       3

      I ran like a wild man through the trees looking up and down and all around until I was dizzy and freaked at finding myself in the imagery sequence of a sixties TV drama. I walked back to the car and drove home, trawling the streets like an idiot, hoping for a sight of Napier. Everybody was African apart from four huge sailor types who’d washed their hair in beer and, now that they were fragrant, had their rods out casting for some dangerous sex.

      The lights were on at my house, our house. I parked up behind Heike’s year-old Nissan Pathfinder, a car that came with her job, a job that came with a housing allowance to pay the rent. I sat with my forehead on the steering wheel and worried at the Napier Briggs fiasco like a cat with a dead mouse trying to pretend there’s still some life in it.

      I went upstairs to our part of the house and found a single place setting on the dining-room table with an empty bottle of Bourgogne Aligote beside it, which was better than our usual Entre-Deux-Mers. With Heike’s smarter salary we’d moved off the paint-stripper gut rot from tetrapaks and we didn’t drink whisky called Big V any more. It was minimum Red Label now.

      Heike was asleep on some cushions on the floor, a half-full ashtray next to her head and a tumbler with melted ice in the bottom with nearly a full bottle of nothing less than Black Label by the chair leg. Were we celebrating? I took a right turn into the kitchen and found the lamb tagine on the stove and lit the gas underneath it. I went back into the living room and snitched the Black Label and poured myself a good two fingers. I stirred the tagine and found some cold cooked rice in the pot next to it.

      ‘I waited and I waited for the birthday boy,’ said a tired voice from the door.

      My birthday! Goddamn. Hit forty and go senile. What year is it?

      ‘How old am I?’ I asked her reflection in the window.

      ‘Come on, Bruce, it’s not all that bad.’

      ‘Forty-one?’

      ‘There you are – mind like a steel trap. What happened to you this evening?’

      ‘I got held up.’

      ‘What’s new?’

      ‘I lost someone.’

      ‘Someone you’d already found?’ asked Heike.

      ‘Worse. Someone who was right bang next to me.’

      ‘Jesus,’ she said, as sympathetically as possible. ‘They beamed him up?’

      ‘As if, Heike, as if. And who’s “they'', anyway?’

      She shrugged and concentrated on fitting a cigarette into her holder.

      ‘I drank your share of the wine,’ she said, lighting up.

      ‘I saw.’

      ‘I started on your birthday present too.’

      ‘The Black Label? Yeah, thanks. I mean for the present.’

      ‘Don’t mention it. How’s the foot?’

      ‘It’s OK. I haven’t thought about it.’

      ‘In the heat of the moment?’

      ‘Right.’

      Too scared?’

      ‘Maybe.’

      She sighed. A birthday treat. Most other times she’d have hardened up, cool as marble, no give at all until the whisky loosened off her throwing arm. Heike didn’t like my job, but it had nearly got her killed one time which was why she’d put me out to that kennel down the road. She kneaded my shoulder and turned me round. We kissed. My hand went up her bare back. She didn’t bother with a bra after her evening shower. I cupped a breast and ran a thumb over the nipple. She tensed and backed off.

      ‘Eat first. Shower. Then I’ve got another present for you. Two, in fact.’

      I finished off the tagine. Heike and I shared the second bottle of Bourgogne Aligote. I was about to join my Black Label but Heike pushed me off to the shower. I cleaned up and sat on the sofa in a towel. Heike dropped some ice into my glass and splashed СКАЧАТЬ