Damascus (32 page)

11/1/93 M
ONDAY
16:12

What's the point of living if you can't have what you want?

It was Henry's shot, and this had been going on for some time now, so that Henry had the impression he'd taken more shots than he could count. How difficult could it be? Both men felt that by the law of averages the red ball should have fallen into the pocket by now, so the only sign Hazel's God had given them was that he wasn't going to give them a sign. And what kind of a sign was that?

Since his last visit to the table Henry had made a shocking discovery. Whether the red ball fell into the pocket or not was genuinely beyond his control. This wasn't a sport, because neither he nor Spencer had any skill. Hazel was therefore right. If his love for her was destined as he believed, then this game of billiards could provide as convincing a sign as any other. If their marriage was inscribed somewhere before the event, then nothing could stop it happening. So why had he missed the first time round? And the next and the next? He wanted his mug of poisoned chicken soup back, because it represented a much more simple equation. If Hazel refused him, then life wasn't worth living.

He left the cue on the table, neatly side-stepped Hazel, and picked up one of the mugs. ‘I don't think this is working,' he said. ‘I don't want to lose you on a game of chance.' - It's not a game of chance,' Hazel said. She pushed him aside and picked up the other mug.

‘Say you'll come with me,' Henry said. ‘He's missed as often as I have.'

‘It's your shot.'

‘Or I'll drink the soup. It doesn't frighten me.'

Hazel faced him squarely, and it was as if the two of them had been photographed auditioning for a gun-fight. Someone later, an advertiser perhaps, had replaced the guns in their hands with plain white mugs, full of chicken soup.

‘You better take your shot, Henry,' Hazel said. ‘Or it'll be me who drinks it.'

Henry Mitsui looked puzzled. Somewhere behind him, Spencer looked much worse. He'd worked out just before Henry what Hazel was about to say:

‘Well how do you know which mug has the poison in it?'

Oh Jesus Christ Mary and Micah, Mr Mitsui thought (remembering the phrase from his time in New Jersey), another fine mess. A stand-off involving mugs of soup. A man ealled William Welsby, leading him through the house, had tried to explain about the poison while the little girl joined in with something about a goldfish. They'd forgotten to mention there was someone else involved, a tall miserable black-haired chap in a suit.

‘Henry,' Mr Mitsui called down to him. ‘Come out of that swimming pool at once.'

Henry looked up, and the shine in his eyes was familiar to his father - it meant no. It also meant he wanted Mr Mitsui to sort everything out, maybe pay somebody some money so that Henry could have exactly what he wanted. Not this time, son. Pay attention to the young lady. She's talking to you.

‘Well go on then,' Hazel said. ‘Drink up. I will if you will.'

Henry looked at his soup. There was a thickening white skin across the surface, hiding any powder which might have stayed on top. Nor was there any obvious residue sticking to the sides of the mug. There was therefore no way of telling if this was the poisoned soup, or if Hazel had it. Well there was another way. He could drink it.

‘You take the first sip,' Hazel said, ‘and then I'll match you all the way down, swallow for swallow.'

‘But yours might be the poisoned one,' Henry said.

‘So then I'll be poisoned. But how can I poison myself to death if we're destined to live happily ever after?'

‘Bad things happen,' Henry said.

‘Exactly. That's my point exactly. So how dare you force your way into this house and tell me you know what's good for me, or for you, and what destiny has revealed to you?'

'That's what I think.'

'Then drink up.'

‘Don't drink it,' Mr Mitsui called down. ‘Come up here, Henry. We'll leave these good people alone. We ought to make a start for the airport.'

‘Drink it,' Hazel said. ‘Because if you refuse to take your turn at the billiard table, we aren't going to get married. And if we aren't going to get married you said your life wasn't worth living.'

For the first time in two years, Henry stumbled over his English words. ‘I don't want to drink it,' he said. ‘I want you to marry me.'

‘Stop it, Henry,' his father said. ‘Stop it right now. You're putting the fear of God into these people. You're putting the fear of God into
me.'

Henry couldn't do it. He thought he could do it, but there turned out still to be a difference between thinking and doing, and he didn't really want to kill himself. More importantly, Hazel might have the poisoned soup and he definitely didn't want to see her poisoned. That was never one of the lives he'd imagined for the woman he loved.

Taking very small steps, he made his way down into the deep end, his body slanted backwards against the slope. He left his mug against the far wall, and walked back up to the billiard table.

‘What else could I have done?' he asked Hazel. ‘What did I have to do to convince you I was serious?'

‘Take your shot, Henry.'

He took the cue from the table and hit the white ball towards the red. The red skewed off towards the pocket. It missed.

Henry and Mr Mitsui stood in a gap between parked cars waiting for a taxi. It had stopped raining but the daylight was fading, which made it feel like rain again. To anyone else, perhaps, it was just another anonymous late autumn weekday mid-afternoon, soft and grey and after-rain. But even that wasn't certain. People turned out to be more surprising than the lives Henry had stolen to describe them, just as the world was more complicated than the facts supposed to explain it.

Henry looked at nothing and the tarmac. He understood exactly what Hazel had been trying to tell him with the soup. She wanted him to doubt himself, and it had worked. He couldn't risk her drinking the poison, because he'd made the ricin himself and she would have died within the hour. If, however, they were genuinely destined to be together, he would have been certain it couldn't have happened. He wouldn't have been frightened of her dying. And if they were going to live happily ever after, as he liked to imagine, he should also have been confident of winning the game of billiards. But he'd been scared of losing, and suddenly nothing seemed so certain any more. Accidents happen, she'd reminded him, and if not now in an empty swimming pool from a soup full of poison then tomorrow or the next day murdered by terrorists or falling from a cliff edge or crashing a car. She could be a victim of any of the familiar disasters suffered daily by someone, somewhere, and this possibility was a long way from the certain bliss Henry had once imagined. She'd shown him that uncertainty was everywhere in life, and therefore it was an important part of being in love. (He wiped a tear away from his eye and onto his sweater.) If he couldn't abide this uncertainty, then it could never have been love.

‘It's alright,' his father said, putting an arm round Henry's shoulders. ‘Life has a habit of adding day to day. Memories fade. Life moves on.'

Back in the pool Spencer and Hazel looked up at the glass panels in the roof. Then across at each other, the width of the billiard table between them. They'd both seen it. The daylight was fading away.

Spencer said: ‘It's time for Grace's bus.'

‘I'll take her,' William said. He and Grace were holding hands by the shallow end steps. ‘We'll go together.'

‘No you won't,' Spencer said. ‘You know what you're like.'

‘William will take her, Spencer,' Hazel said.

‘William won't get anywhere near the bus stop. You've seen how he is. He's a sick man.'

‘He's better now. This is more important.'

‘Grace is my niece.'

Spencer looked up for some support, but hand-in-hand Grace and William were already leaving, had already left.

Hazel said: ‘Well?'

‘Let's go back to bed.'

‘We haven't finished the game.'

Spencer squeezed his head between his hands, and then shook out his hair. ‘There are people coming to look at the house.'

They won't come now. It's late, Spencer. It's nearly dark.' She took the white ball from where Henry Mitsui's shot had left it and put it back behind the line at the other end of the table from the red. Spencer still didn't pick up the cue. He said:

‘You can't force God to intervene.'

‘Can't you?'

‘We have to make the decision ourselves.'

‘And how long do you think it would take you to decide, left to yourself and your dreams of the perfect woman? It's your shot, Spencer.'

‘You can't force God to intervene.'

‘Maybe courage is knowing that.'

She held out the cue to him and he took it. He placed the white right in the middle of the table and fired it at the red as hard as he could. The red missed the first pocket and rebounded to the opposite corner where it missed again. It lost energy as it travelled the middle of the table before dropping sweetly into the centre of the centre pocket, like an apple.

‘At last,' Hazel said. ‘God or the gods intervene.'

She came up behind Spencer and hugged him, her hands crossing over his chest, her cheek pressed against the hollow between his shoulder-blades.

‘Now,' she said. ‘Now let's go back to bed.'

11/1/93 M
ONDAY
16:24

It is the first of November 1993, and all over London dusk is falling. Grace has her European Space Mission rucksack on her back and in one hand she holds the Union Jack carrier-bag, heavy with water and Trigger II. In the other hand she has a Jaffa cake with a hole in the middle. She is waiting for William to close the door behind them, while William wonders what kind of madness could possibly have made him offer to take her to the bus stop. Perhaps he wants a second chance at being a hero, or just to believe that Hazel might be right when she says he's better now. Could she really have made that much difference, in a single day?

‘It won't be as much fun at my house,' Grace says, still waiting for William to close the door. William agrees that it probably won't be as exciting. There again,' she says. ‘You never know.'

She puts the Jaffa cake whole into her mouth and offers William her hand and he takes it. It is slightly sticky.

He pulls the door closed and the two of them, holding hands, step into the centre of the pavement and turn right, towards the library and the bus stop. William holds his free arm straight out, as if expecting problems with balance, but otherwise tries to remember everything Hazel has taught him. As they walk away from the house he is aware, with a vagueness he cultivates, of a hundred and one different individual sources of information. He blocks them out and puts one foot in front of the other. He watches the pavement, glances at the lime trees, squints at the parked cars. He puts one foot in front of the other, and grasps tightly Grace's small hand inside his own.

‘Look,' Grace says, ‘a clown.'

A man is juggling kiwi fruit in front of the music shop (JEPSONS!). He is collecting money for National Library Week. All around the country … William stops it before it can go any further. He watches the juggler, telling himself that this is the wonderful world. If it wasn't so wonderful, there wouldn't be any need to be frightened. If there was nothing worth defending, then the prospect of sudden disaster would carry no threat. Is that right? It sounds about right.

He asks Grace if before today she was ever frightened of something terrible and sudden happening to her. She swallows the last of the Jaffa cake while she's answering.

'I'm only just ten. But I'd say that if a disaster's coming your way you're going to get it anyway, whether you're frightened or not.'

A National Express coach overtakes them and wheezes in at the bus stop, neatly framing itself between two lime trees bleeding some kind of black muck. About the coach, William resists thinking and observing many things. Coach Fares Cut to a Third of Rail. A Diadora bag jammed against the emergency exit. Several of the passengers being single men, anonymous, and a stone-chip in a side window, stop it right now.

When they're beside the coach, Grace pulls on William's hand until he bends down so that his face is level with hers. She kisses him on the cheek.

'Thanks for a really nice birthday,' she says. ‘And thanks for a brilliant present.'

'I'm sorry about, you know what.'

‘It wasn't anybody's fault.'

‘Yes it was.'

‘Say goodbye to Hazel and Uncle Spencer for me.'

'I'll do that. You feel better about going home now? You've decided your parents aren't so bad after all?'

‘They're my Mum and Dad. It's where I live. What about you?'

‘Don't worry about me,' William said. ‘We're an island people. We stay afloat.'

‘You're sure you'll be alright? You won't go all funny?'

‘Of course not. I'll just block some things out, like Hazel said.'

Grace kisses him again, and William hands her up onto the coach. Almost immediately the doors swing closed, and Grace weaves her way down to the back. She waves several times, although without looking outside. She is holding the plastic bag very carefully, trying not to jog the fish. The coach pulls out and away, leaving the street, London, and heading for the darkening countryside of Britain. William watches it go and puts his hands in his pockets and it takes a little while for the fingertips of his right hand to register the unfamiliar coldness pressing againgst them. He pulls his hand away, but he doesn't panic. He blocks out the fact that there is a dead goldfish in his right-hand trouser pocket. He thinks, blocking out this and blocking out that, that he might continue this small miracle of excluding information in the lounge bar of the Rising Sun. Before setting off in the correct direction, one foot in front of the other, he looks around himself with narrow eyes and wonders what, exactly, he can allow himself to appreciate without flinching.