There’s noise inside the van, animal scrabbling. He waits, watching, until the side door of the van slides opens and Elliot emerges, all teeth and beard and seaweed hair, swearing and pulling at his trousers. He slides the door shut behind him and hurries across the courtyard. James runs forward and grabs him. ‘Who’s that in there?’ he demands.
Elliot stumbles, looks confused.
‘In the van. Who was in the van with you?’
The man shakes his head, eyes clouded. ‘A chick, man, a chick. What the fuck’s it got to do with you?’ He throws off James’s grasp and disappears into the building. All around people are pushing their way back into the venue while James stands there against the stream, wondering. Cowardice confronts him. To know or not to know. Ellie or not Ellie?
Spin a fucking coin. Heads, you open the door. Tails, you walk away.
He doesn’t even dare trust the decision to the coin. Instead, he goes back inside the Kaverna, where the audience are clapping and cheering expectantly and the Ides are on stage again, strapping on their guitars, John fiddling with his microphone – ‘How y’all doing folks?’ – and Archer hitting the cymbals, sending splinters of sound crashing around in the narrow space. Elliot is there, his fingers snaking across the strings of a Fender Stratocaster as they snake across James’s fevered imagination. John throws out his arms. ‘Beware, The Ides of March!’ There’s cheering, even some screaming, and the band breaks into ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, jingle-jangling its way through the specious phrases while James pushes amongst the crowd looking for Ellie, the Ellie that isn’t in the van, the Ellie who doesn’t pull her knickers down for stoned guitarists, the Ellie who, so her father warned him, has a mind that lives on fantasy. Jitka’s there but where is Ellie? ‘Take me on a trip,’ the Ides sing, ‘upon your magic swirling ship’ and Jitka lifts her arms and puts them round his neck. ‘Haven’t you found Ellie?’ she mouths against the sound of the band.
‘No idea where she’s gone.’
She casts her dancing spell his way and they move in some kind of harmony, for a moment pressed hard together. She is small and sharp and surely she wants to be kissed. There’s that mole on her upper lip. He leans towards her and for a moment their mouths touch before she pulls away laughing, tapping his lips with her agile, violinist’s forefinger. ‘Bad boy,’ she mouths. He turns and sways, careless of what he does, indifferent to whether he is or might be a bad boy. And Ellie’s there in front of him, dancing with the pair of them, her eyes glazed, her hair a disordered cloud. Jitka laughs silently. James leans towards Ellie’s head and shouts against the noise. ‘Where have you been?’
She mouths the words: ‘A walk. Fresh air.’
He knows it’s not true, hopes it is. ‘I was looking for you.’
‘I had a smoke.’ She pulls him closer so that her voice booms in his ear. Laughing and talking at the same time: ‘I’m stoned.’
‘Where did you get the stuff?’
‘You want some?’
‘No.’
She moves her head in time with the music like some kind of automated doll. The music jangles on, replete with all the platitudes of the age – magic swirling ships and smoke rings of your mind and all that stuff – while the crowd sways and waves, for the moment quite indifferent to the threats that encircle them. Music, they feel, can overcome anything – the Vietnam War, the Warsaw Pact, all hate, all violence, all the grim realities of life.
After the gig comes the sad, post-coital let-down. People hanging around outside the venue, their ears still singing. Others drifting away into the night. There’s calling and fractured laughter. Equipment is being carried out of the side entrance into the group’s van. And on the footpath alongside the river James and Ellie have a seething row.
‘What the fuck were you doing?’
‘I was doing whatever I please.’
‘You were with him in the van.’
‘And if I was, what’s it got to do with you?’
‘I just want to know.’
‘You mean you have some kind of rights over my body?’
‘Of course I don’t.’
‘Well, then.’
It’s the kind of argument that goes nowhere, just turns round and round with only occasional forays into a dangerous world outside the circle. ‘So what do you want to do? Go off with him?’
‘He’s a hell of a lot more interesting than you.’
They make their way back to the flat, walking through the ancient empty streets that might belong to any European city. Jitka went earlier – something about Zdeněk expecting her. She reminded him of the address and how to get there. ‘Half an hour to walk,’ she said. ‘It’s easy. Or maybe you can find a taxi. But beware – they cheat foreigners.’
Still arguing in a desultory fashion, James and Ellie walk back across the river, past the now shuttered café where they met Lenka, through streets he does not know to an address he can barely understand. There are few pedestrians around and less traffic. Shops shuttered, bars closed. At one point a police car slows down beside them and a pallid face looks them over before deciding that they are what they seem to be, just a couple walking home. No threat to the Socialist Republic, at least not for the moment. At first Ellie is acquiescent, but later, as the walking goes on, as they wander back and forth through streets already visited, she begins to complain. Complaint is a relief. He can tell her to shut up and not care whether she is offended or not. So, snapping at each other exactly as in the play, Fando and Lis walk on, unobstructed and unchallenged, turning past corners they maybe recognise, and buildings perhaps they’ve seen before, until James finally identifies the one they have been searching for and manages to open the street door with the key that Jitka gave him. Together, his arm round Ellie, they climb the stairs to reach the crouched landing on the fifth floor. As silently as he can he opens the door to the flat and they creep inside. But still they have to pass the tiny room where Jitka and her husband sleep, where a figure with Jitka’s dimensions emerges from the shadows, saying something in Czech. ‘It’s just us,’ James whispers. ‘Sorry we’re late, we got lost.’
There’s a murmured acknowledgement, some further whispering, a collision with a piece of unseen furniture and a suppressed oath from Ellie before they gain the sanctuary of the bedroom. He feels for the switch. The light, when it comes on, is the colour of piss. Ellie is a ragged, morose figure standing resentfully at the foot of their bed. ‘Turn that fucking thing off.’
He kills the light and plunges them back into a deeper darkness than before. It’s easier in the darkness, easier to creep to the bathroom and back, easier to undress in total darkness not knowing what will happen when they come together in the bed, easier to slide beneath the sheet from opposite sides and lie on their backs in the dark.
He wants to touch her but doesn’t dare. ‘Ellie?’ he says softly.
‘What do you want?’
‘Were you with Elliot?’
‘Elliot’s a creep. Why the hell would you think that?’
‘Were you with him?’
There’s a little breath of sarcastic laughter in the darkness. ‘You’re jealous.’
He remembers her words, snapped at him impatiently: you’re jealous of what you already possess; envious of what someone else has. ‘Of course I’m jealous.’
‘That’s very bourgeois of you. But sweet.’
‘But were you? There was someone in the van with him.’