The shadow came first. It fell down from the open doorway onto the dusty floor, a thin emaciated blade of shade. Then it stretched, shrank, and a man came through into the room with a gun in his hand.
The man first: tall, thin, with shoulders that stooped a little, as if used to carrying a burden that could not, momentarily, be seen. The clothes hung from his frame as if he had been better fed once, and had since lost his appetite for nourishment. His face, too, was long and thin. He was unshaven. His hair was brown and, like the rest of the man, thinning.
The gun was a single-action revolver: an antique. In his other hand the man held a polishing rag. The butt of the gun was worn a smooth silver. When he saw Joe, the man stopped still. His eyes were brown and large in his face.
Joe, too, was still. His eyes were on the gun. The man said, ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Are you –?’ Joe said, and somehow all the questions he wanted to ask were crowding and thronging each other in his head and what came out was, ‘Are you going to shoot me?’
‘What? The man looked down at the gun in his hand as if noticing it for the first time. He put it away on the bookcase. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t even know you.’
‘I’m Joe.’
The man stared at him. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Joe.’
Outside the lone bird was still chattering away. Inside the heat felt oppressive. ‘Well, Joe,’ the man said, moving closer – ‘What do you want?’
‘I –’ as the man’s proximity increased Joe noticed a familiar, cloyingly sweet smell. It seemed to cling to the man, or perhaps to his clothes, like to a suit that had been entombed in mothballs for too long. He said, ‘You’re Mike Longshott.’
The man stopped beside the desk. His hand rested on its surface. ‘Yes…’ he said. There was a wondering note in his voice. ‘How –?’ Joe said, ‘How do you know?’ he gestured wildly in the air, taking in, in one encompassing sweep, the bookshelves, the Vigilante paperbacks, the uncompleted manuscript on the desk.
Longshott slowly nodded. Joe noticed he had a prominent Adam’s apple; it bobbed up and down as he swallowed. ‘Please,’ Longshott said. ‘Sit down.’ He gestured, in his turn, at the two worn armchairs. ‘You are a refugee?’
The question floated between them, lighter than air, unanswered. Then Longshott nodded again, equally slowly, and said, ‘Let me make some coffee.’
the luxury of waiting
——
They sat facing each other on the armchairs. The coffee was hot and sweet and burned Joe’s tongue. It had been flavoured with cinnamon. ‘My name,’ Longshott said, ‘isn’t really Mike Longshott. As you no doubt figured.’ He shrugged. ‘My name is really of very little significance,’ he said. ‘I picked Longshott because it had a nice ring to it. It sounded like the sort of name you’d find on a paperback.’
Joe nodded, decided the coffee was too sweet for his taste, and took a sip of cool water from the glass that lay resting on the table. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ he said.
‘Not at all,’ Longshott said. ‘My own –’ he hesitated, ‘pipe is in the other room.’
Joe nodded at that too, as if he had been waiting for just such a confirmation. He extracted and lit a cigarette. The smoke curled lazily in the air. Joe didn’t speak. He had, he’d decided, the luxury of waiting.
Longshott was folded into the armchair opposite Joe. He looked lost inside that space, limbs jutting awkwardly like a doll’s when its strings had been loosened. He said, ‘There was a woman.’
Joe listened to the silence.
waxing moon
——
The was – there had been – a woman. He was working as a journalist, Mike – ‘My name really is Mike, you know –’ told him. He had developed a habit, gradually – ‘I was doing a series of articles on the opium trade, you see –’ and had taken to spend some of his leisure time in the smoking rooms where gentlemen – ‘Both foreign and local –’ of such habits congregated.
‘I first saw her on the first night of the full moon,’ Mike Longshott said. ‘You know, the moon becomes so much more important in places like this. On moonless nights it is so dark, but the stars are beautiful. Beautiful and cold… You can see so many stars out in the desert. But then the moon begins to rise, a little bigger every night – do you know how much light it gives out, how much you can see in the light of the moon?’
Joe nodded. He did know. There was a kind of desperation on moonless nights, when the stars, those alien beings an unimaginable distance away from the Earth, looked down on the world, in a kind of cold strange beauty that gave out no light. The moon was different, and when it came the darkness was lifted, the light of the sun reflecting off of the moon’s surface illuminating the dark world, giving it a soft silvery shape. The moon rose early when it waxed, like a pregnant woman, her belly growing until at last it was full. The fullness lasted for two days. Then the moon would wane, rising late like a surly teenager, growing smaller again until it disappeared and the darkness returned, and with her the stars.
‘Tell me about her,’ he said.
Mike Longshott nodded. ‘I saw her as I came out of the – the place,’ he said. ‘She was standing on the street, not doing anything. She was hugging herself, rocking on the soles of her feet. She looked very lost, and vulnerable. I saw her quite clearly in the light of the moon. When I came her way she turned. Her eyes were warm, I remember that. I remember thinking, they were not like stars. They were like sunlight reflected off the moon. She said, ‘Do you know where they are?’
‘I said, ‘Who?’
‘‘I can’t find them,’ she said. I didn’t know if she was speaking to me, or to herself. ‘They were there but now they’re not. Or maybe they are there, but I am not.’ She shivered, though it was a warm night, and she hugged herself closer. ‘Do you know where they are?’ she said.
‘I said, as gently as I could, ‘No.’
‘She turned fully to me then. Her arms dropped to her sides. She looked at me, at my face, for a long moment, as if searching for some familiar traces in them, for lines or curves I did not possess.
‘Though maybe I did. For, after that long moment had passed, she took a deep breath, and some of the anxiety seemed to go out of her, and she said, ‘Will you help me?’’
He took a sip of water then, and sat in silence for a while, staring into the air. It was then that Joe realised that the voices who had accompanied him, for a while, from his cell and up the hill, were silent now, and had been for a while. Absent or silent, he didn’t know, but he didn’t think they had gone. Like himself, they were waiting, listening to a story being told. He said, ‘Was she –?’ and Longshott said, ‘Yes. She was.’
waning
——
‘You might not credit it,’ Longshott said, ‘but I never learned her story. Oh, I had glimpses of it, from time to time. She spoke in her sleep, sometimes, crying out names – one name in particular. It wasn’t Mike.’ He shook his head. ‘I had the impression she had once had a son,’ he said. He was silent then, staring at his hands, lying loosely in his lap. He looked up and his eyes met Joe’s and the lines around his eyes were pronounced. ‘She… she waxed and waned with the moon,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if it is the same for others. To me, it seemed like enchantment for a time – still does, when it comes to that. I only saw her when the moon was in the skies. I know she craved the daylight. She wanted to see the sun. It hurt her not to be able to. I once asked her where she went, when she wasn’t… wasn’t there. She didn’t know, or was unwilling to tell me. The times of no moon were the worse, for me. She would be gone, an absence, an emptiness no stars could dispel, and every time I worried she will not appear again. My… my habit increased. I smoked more pipes but they didn’t bring me relief. Instead, I began to imagine the world she must have come from. Details of it would come, unbidden, into my mind when I was in stupor. They came to me haltingly, at first. Dates, numbers. Headlines.’ He laughed. There was no humour in it. He said, ‘Do you know what a journalist is? Someone who hasn’t written a novel yet. I couldn’t write it in a newspaper. For a time, I didn’t need to write at all. Then…’