Lincoln, to Tom’s considerable relief, laughed again, then said: ‘Like I say, we’ve all done dumb things, and I used to be a smoker myself. I only gave it up a couple of years ago. With my blood pressure, it was getting in the way of more important things, if you know what I mean.’
Lincoln’s black hooded eyes were directed to the doorway, where his teenage mistress was standing. Despite his state of contrition, and his gratitude at being so speedily shriven, Tom still felt a stab of sexual jealousy, mingled with an unreasoning hatred, at the sight of the black-skinned sylph, her discoid hairstyle forming a fetching halo around her pretty head.
Tom took a deep breath, and half smelled, half tasted Vaseline and coconut oil. Could it be, he wondered, that my sense of smell is already more acute?
‘You’re not going to believe this’ — Tom addressed them both — ‘but that was my last — my last cigarette. I’m giving up too. I guess that’s why I was. . I was so, uh, preoccupied. Well,’ he laughed shortly, in what he hoped was a self-deprecating manner, ‘at least if I stick to my resolution, I’ll never be in any danger of doing such a dumb thing ever again.’
‘At my age,’ Lincoln said, levering himself up on one elbow, ‘young man, you learn not to make too many resolutions at all. You just take each day as it comes, and try to be grateful if you’ve hung in there.’
Observing the keen expression on Lincoln’s dissipated face, Tom was thankful for the ‘young man’, which, for once, seemed genuine, not patronizing, and placed him in the same age group as the girl leaning in the doorway.
He got up to depart. ‘If there’s anything, anything at all I can do for you, please don’t hesitate to ask?’ Tom said, turning questioningly to the girl.
‘Sure,’ Lincoln put in. ‘Atalaya will be here, she’ll let you know if there’s anything, but I doubt there will be. It’s a blister — that’s all. I’ll see you at breakfast in the morning. Lemme tellya — they do a good one here.’
When he got back upstairs, Tom found the eight- year-old twins already drooling in front of the riotous, colourful barbarism of the Cartoon Network. His daughter, Dixie, who was thirteen, was sitting at the round table in the dining area of the apartment, threading glass beads on to a leather thong. Tommy Junior was in the small back bedroom, cross-legged on the bed. With his T-shirt as capacious as a robe, his large long-lobed ears and his sagittal crest of greased part-bleached hair, the boy resembled at once the Buddha and an ape. He was fiddling with the toggles of a handheld-computer games console that was hidden in his big hands.
Tom looked at his eldest son, smitten with the shame and rage that were so habitual as to have formed a callus, jibing his heart.
Tommy Junior looked up, grunted, looked down again.
Was he truly retarded — Tom pondered this automatically, as any other man might have yawned — or wilfully fucking stupid? The boy seemed stupid to his father, his obsessions and his obduracies determined by some inner-peasant, rather than visited upon him. It was as if Tommy Junior tried quite concertedly to do everything in his power to upset his father. He grunted his way through meals, he ignored the most fundamental social pleasantries. If Tommy Junior spoke voluntarily with anyone at all, it was only in order to regale them with interminable monologues concerning whichever computer game he was currently fixated on.
Besides, it wasn’t like he was at some special school. He was in the same grade as other kids his age. He got a little extra help, sure, but he could read, he could write.
Martha came into the vestibule where her husband was standing. She was abstracted, withdrawn into the glossy funnel of a magazine which she held beneath her dripping, freshly showered face. A face hosed of expression as well as make-up. Regarding her sharply, Tom had a bizarre insight: Martha had given up smoking five years before, and ever since then she had seemed increasingly exiguous to him. It was as if the smoke that had once wreathed her beautiful face had given it definition.
‘How’d it go?’ she asked.
‘OK, I guess. He’s got a big blister, he’s lying down. The native chippy’s looking after him fine.’
‘Please, Tom—’
‘What? The kids? They can’t hear — they don’t care.’
‘No,’ she snapped back, ‘not the goddamn kids — me, Tom, me.’
‘Anyways,’ Tom continued, eager to put his wife’s sensibilities behind him, ‘it looks like he’s gonna be OK. I smoothed things over.’
Padding away from him, leaving wet footprints on the white tiles, each one like a blister, Martha said over her bare shoulder: ‘Well, that’s something, but then you’re always good in a crisis.’
Crisis. Crisis averted. A crisis that had happened not to one of his kids — which Tom always feared when they were overseas — but only to the old man, Lincoln.
Well into the cicada-chafed, tropical darkness, when he and Martha had finally managed to get all the kids settled — the twins in the bunks, Dixie on a studio bed grudgingly supplied by the management, Tommy Junior in the back bedroom — Tom allowed himself this positive stroke: the old man was OK, he was safe. Martha and the kids were safe too. They had all survived the drive over the Great Dividing Range, the switchback roads, the slithery mud.
They had survived their adventurous vacation, and the day after tomorrow they would fly home, triumphant, the memory cards of their cameras loaded with digital trophies.
Tom rolled towards his wife. She sighed, and hunkered away from him. He took the rebuff in his self-satisfied stride, and soon enough managed to sleep.
But in the deep of the night there came a hammering on the door of the apartment, and swarming through heavy, humid dreams and misapprehensions — which continent am I on? who am I? — Tom swung the door open to find Atalaya, her breasts swinging free in the warm, damp vee of her lacy nightie, while above this curls were plastered against her furrowed brow.
‘He — Reggie, he’s fallen,’ she said without preamble. ‘I can’t lift him. Can you? Can you lift him?’
‘What time is it?’ Tom asked, reaching out for the quotidian.
However, she only reiterated: ‘Can you lift him?’
It was worse than he could have imagined. Tom found the little old man crumpled up on the tiles between the narrow single bed and the closet. It was pathetic: the blister had burst, and the flap of skin had peeled away from his pate, on it a clutch of the shoe-polish-coloured hairs.
Tom hesitated for a moment — perhaps moving Lincoln would be a mistake? — then Atalaya urged him on with a none too gentle shove.
The body was as light as a child’s, the liver-spotted skin unpleasantly scaly to the touch. Holding the old man in his arms, Tom felt Lincoln’s heart fluttering against his hand. He set him down, gingerly, on the bed, as if to wake him would be to disrupt an innocent repose.
Propped up against the pillows, Lincoln breathed in laboured squeaks and nasal squeals. Tom was reminded of a smoker, gasping for breath after an unaccustomed jog.
Atalaya gripped Tom’s elbow. ‘We must get him to the hospital. Now.’
The old man’s eyelids twitched, exposing yellow bloodshot whites. His twisted hands grabbed at the fitted sheet, pulling it back to reveal the mattress, which was garishly patterned with frangipani blossoms.
Out of unusual consideration — or calculated disdain — Martha had let Tom sleep in. He awoke to find the apartment empty, and, staggering from room to room, his damp soles sucking on the tiles, he saw the abandoned chrysalises of sheets and counterpanes on the disordered beds. The fans on the ceiling lazily sculpted the claggy atmosphere. Tom went out on to the balcony, then recoiled from the fanfare of the tropical day: its brassy greens and reds, its hot jazz of sunlight.