The Museum of Doubt (28 page)

Gordon knocked gently on the door with one knuckle and waited. Smithie, he said. Smithie. He pressed his ear to the cool slippery hardwood. Listening to the silence he looked towards the doorjamb and saw a line of darkness along its length, quarter of an inch wide. He touched it with his fingers. It was space. He placed his palm on the centre of the door and pushed. The half-sprung tongue of the lock snapped out and the door swung inwards. Gordon padded forward, his feet whispering over the carpet, into the lurking area between the bathroom and the wardrobe. The door closed behind him. He stopped, put his hand on the wall, and put his head round the corner to look into the body of the room. A little light leaked in from the moon around the edges of the curtain and from the bottom of the door. There was a figure lying on the bed.

Smithie, said Gordon quietly. He stepped forward into the
room, found a light switch and turned it on. Dark eyes blinked and stared at him, bright and deepseeing and afraid, the eyes of a fierce maternal being uncovered on a nest, with itself and something else to protect. The boy was awake and Smithie was asleep, his white belly lazily belted by the boy’s skinny brown arms. They were naked, the sheet rolled and shifted into a lyre shape around them. Smithie was smiling. His hands were clasped together against his chest. He whimpered in his sleep, passed one hand clumsily across his face, like a cat moistening its paw, and wriggled his toes. The boy stared into Gordon’s eyes.

It wasn’t right of Smithie to kit himself out with something Gordon didn’t want and still not offer Gordon a shot. Double treachery, he didn’t want a boy and he hadn’t been offered a boy. It was wrong. It was against the rules of the club of men. The club of boys was different. Two boys could lie naked in the grass by the river in the sun, chest to chest, cock to cock, thigh in thigh. Two boys had. When they grew into the club of men, the situation changed. They stuck together, they helped each other out, they shared the lassies. Or they could try not to. That wasn’t on, but it wasn’t against the rules. This was Smithie in a different club altogether, and Gordon wanted to go in and see him and talk to him about getting off with the Bangkokian lassie, he just wanted to talk to Smithie, he just wanted to be with Smithie for a bit, and he could go in if he wanted, but he was fucked if he was going in that place, and Smithie knew he wouldn’t go in, and he went in anyway.

Gordon beckoned to the boy. The boy stared, blinking, not moving. Gordon took out his wad of notes, thumbed it loose and waved it. He tapped it with one finger and pointed to the boy. The boy stared. Then he slid his arms off Smithie, sat up
and put on his shorts and teeshirt. He reached down behind the bed and fetched a shoebox marked with the Nike swoosh. He took a pair of new white trainers out of their tissue paper, put them on his bare feet and began lacing them up. It took him five minutes before he was ready to follow Gordon out of the room. Gordon swept out of the hotel with the boy trotting to keep up. Gordon asked his name.

Billy, said the boy.

I knew a Billy, said Gordon. He was a solicitor. Or maybe it was General Accident he was working for. Or was it not the Billy that had the restraining order put on him for drinking the rainwater from his ex-wife’s guttering? D’you remember that? That wasn’t you, was it?

No, said Billy. I’m from Khon Kaen province.

Oh, said Gordon. Is there a lot of arse banditry in those parts?

Don’t know, said Billy.

If I was your father, I’d throw you out on the street.

No father. Mother throw me out.

Gordon led into less bright streets, the lamps further apart and feebler, single fast cars, a pedal rickshaw and a motor trike with two old women in the back dressed in European mourning black. The road was lined with shops selling Buddhas of all sizes and colours, but mainly gold. Failure glimmered in ten thousand gilt faces behind security grilles, where the artisans had tried to render the Buddha serene, and had only made him smug. Billy began to lag and yawn.

You a friend of Cedric? said Billy, running up to Gordon. He’s kind man. I like him. He tries not to hurt me too much. Do you know a place where we can go?

Your laces are undone, said Gordon. He knelt down. Here. Did no-one ever teach you to tie a proper bow?

No.

At 4-U-2 Knight Klub they were nervous and suspicious when Gordon appeared, then relieved. They asked if he was OK, said they didn’t want trouble, told him to be careful. Cindi nodded and smiled and let Donna go with him. But this time, she said, and rubbed her thumb against her fingers. You understand?

The three of them sat in the back, Gordon in the middle. They cruised the city for an hour. The children fell asleep with their foreheads against the windows. Gordon rested his hand on Donna’s knee. He found a pulse there. He couldn’t tell if it was hers or his own but the beat matched the pace of the broken white lines being eaten by the taxi as it wound the night road in. He woke the children at a coffee bar at the foot of a motorway ramp and took them inside. He bought them ice cream. Billy stroked his with the bowl of his spoon and wrote a sign on it with the tip. He asked for a whisky and Gordon ordered him one. The waiter crimped his lips when he brought it and placed it down slowly, looking at Gordon with eyes of stone. Donna, her jacket buttoned up to her neck, ate her ice cream fast, scraping tracks in the oozy remnants on the walls of the glass. She asked for another one. Billy pushed his over to her. They began to speak to each other quietly, not looking at each other, with quick low glances. Donna smiled and laughed once. Billy hung tough, forearms flat on the table, taking his drink in a couple of gulps.

Gordon looked out the window at the cars accelerating up the ramp. He turned to the children. How could Smithie go for the scrawny laddie and not a lassie the like of Donna, who was so bonny? Had the wee pervert put something in his drink?

You’re a wicked wee lad, said Gordon. You can’t be fourteen and you’re away corrupting a respectable Scottish businessman,
getting his morals all arse over tit, making him think it’s fine to be in bed with you and God knows what else.

He paid me, said Billy. He said I was the best thing happened to him ever. He’s good. He wants to adopt me. I think maybe I should go back now.

Look at Donna, said Gordon. She’s the same age as you, and she’s lovely, and she knows the right way to behave.

Billy shrugged and looked at Donna. He grinned.

She does, said Gordon. She respects her elders and betters. She knows how to treat us. She behaves beautifully and, when she’s a bit older, she – when she’s older – ah, for Christ’s sake, Donna, don’t get old, don’t do it, avoid it any way you can, it’s terrible what happens. And you, you boy, you’d don’t know your place at all. You don’t have a place. You’re a mockery. Smithie, right, he’s my pal, we go back, way back, we’re one, and we came here for the girls, and there’ll be no boys in his bed, there’ll be no boys in his time, no boys anywhere near him. I was a boy when he was a boy, we were boys together, and we did all the things together that boys do together, and now we’re men together, we’re in the club of men, and we’re busy with Donna, and you’re out, and Mary’s out, and Kenneth’s out, and all the poofs and fascists and niggers and chinks and cunts from the schemes are out in the heat and the rain and me and Smithie, we’re in there, we’re in there, we’re in there in the cool with Donna, you fucking wee princess, eh.

Donna was biting her lip. She had her hands folded tightly in her lap and was staring into the ice cream bowls. Billy fidgeted with his empty glass.

You know something, he said. Me and Mr Smith, we met last year. We spent two weeks together on Ko Samui. Together all time, every day.

Gordon turned away to watch the cars accelerating up the
ramp. They were fast, right enough, and the cars got sleeker as the night went on, swifter and sharper in the nose.

Maybe you want watch, said Donna.

Eh? said Gordon.

Maybe you want watch. Donna nodded at Billy and tapped her finger on her chest.

Gordon shook his head. He put his hand in his pocket and put a wad of hundred dollar bills on the table.

Here’s 3,000 dollars, he said. He flicked through a corner of the wad to confirm its thickness. Let’s have a race instead. You’re both young and fast. See that road out there? Over there, on the far side, there’s a Coke can. D’you see it? Just lying there on its side against the barrier.

Donna and Billy were looking at it.

This is what we’re going to do. You two stand at the side of the road, and when I say the word, you run to try to get the Coke can. Whoever brings it back first gets the 3,000 dollars.

For a while they stared at the notes, unbending from the fold like wings from a chrysalis. Then Gordon lifted the money and got up. He paid the bill and the children followed him out into the night, to the edge of the road.

The ramp was straight and three lanes wide and the cars were coming up it at about seventy, increasing speed as they kicked off the confining city streets for the fast highways. They passed Gordon and the children in a hiss and a blur, leaving the flavour of concussion.

The children began talking to each other in Bangkokian, Donna first, quietly, persuading, looking down at the ground but turning her head in his direction, the boy replying with single words, not listening. He shook his arms out, trod in his Nikes, untied and retied the laces, took deep breaths and spat in the gutter.

Hey, said Gordon. No divvying up in advance. There’s only going to be the one winner.

Donna looked at him with her eyes narrowed and her mouth full of molten words, burning but to be kept inside for money, and made her tongue lie still to receive and keep the scars. She took off her shoes and laid them side by side on the pavement, toes outward. It made her smaller by two inches. She pinched her bra straps under the jacket, worked her shoulders and nodded at Gordon.

OK, she said.

On your marks, said Gordon. When I clap my hands and shout. Down the ramp there were four sets of headlights, one coming up fast and close on the far lane, two further away on the centre and near lane, roughtly parallel. The far lane lights belonged to a Toyota minibus, the others were a Nissan saloon and a Mitsubishi off-roader. There was something else behind the Toyota, something massive, but Gordon couldn’t make it out. There weren’t more than six yards to the far side of the road but they’d have to get up to speed first. The Toyota was closing at a good lick. It was a truck close behind. Gordon raised his hands, brought them hard together and yelled: Go! Billy was off his blocks like a born sprinter, he was going straight to the target. Donna was off sharp too, a grunt of effort as her bare sole connected with the warm tarmac of the road, but she was too conscious of the cars coming towards them, she was running at a slant. Billy ran true towards the Coke can, drawing hornblasts from the Mitsubishi and the Nissan as he passed in front of them. The Toyota had no time for a horn. As Billy’s foot entered the edge of the far lane, the Toyota was passing ahead of him. Billy’s body flew past the back of the Toyota, through the narrow seventy mile an hour space between the minibus and the truck. The space he jumped through was so brief that his
left side was lit red by the Toyota’s rear lights and his right side turned white in the full-beam blaze of the truck. He was there, he was at the can, reaching for it. Donna’d been beaten. She’d crossed the Mitsubishi and the Nissan fast, with her legs longer than Billy’s, but she ran at a risky diagonal. Her slanting track took her to the edge of the far lane with the Toyota already passed and Billy ahead and to her right, disappearing between the Toyota and the truck. Donna looked like she was about to follow but she’d lost momentum and the instant passed and she was left shrinking, eyes closed, legs pressed together and arms hugging her body while the truck passed inches from her face. When the truck was gone she ran towards Billy and lunged for the Coke can he was holding high in the air. Billy laughed and held it out of reach. Donna took his arm and tried to use her weight to topple him. Gordon started cheering Donna on. He yelled at her to kick Billy in the balls. Donna pincered Billy’s legs in her own and gripped his hand with hers, prising his fingers off the can. Billy punched her in the chest with his free hand and Donna staggered back, winded. She dropped to her knees, head down. Billy stood for a moment looking at her. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, spat, hitched his shorts and walked back towards Gordon with the can.

Jammy wee runt, said Gordon.

Billy stopped in the middle of the centre lane. He watched Gordon. He looked into Gordon’s eyes. He smiled.

I win anyway, he said.

He turned round and called to Donna in Bangkokian. Donna stood up. Billy threw the can to Donna and she caught it. Billy grinned and clapped his hands above his head.

Billy, said Gordon, pointing. Laces.

Billy looked down at the white cords streaming behind his trainers and frowned. He knelt down and began tying them,
looking over to check the next rush of cars coming towards him after the lull. Donna ran back to Gordon, gave him the can and put her shoes back on. She took the money from him and started to count it.

Billy was having trouble with his laces. He’d managed one bow but the second was tougher. The cars were closing. Billy looked at the growing lights and carefully went about untangling a granny knot and retying the second lace. Gordon scratched his chin and folded his arms. The centre lane car, a Landcruiser, was a few heartbeats away and it hadn’t seen the boy hunkered down on the tarmac. Billy finished the second bow, stood up, turned his head into the lights, grinned at Gordon and launched himself towards safety, millisecond perfect, the timing of a star. When he began the sprint the ornate flower of the first bow burst silently and his foot slid half out of the trainer. Billy lost his balance and twisted round but was struck by the bull bars of the Landcruiser before he could fall. The blow rang dull in the hollow of Billy’s chest over the roar of the car horn and the tearing of the tyres against the road. The boy’s body broke and burst inside on impact, he spun up and over the bonnet, hit the corner of the roof and bounced away, falling on to the ground shoulder down, dislocated limbs laid out butcher-flat on the grey hardtop. The car didn’t stop.