‘Super,’ said Lady Arrow. ‘Now you know where to find me.’ She shut the door triumphantly, waited ten more minutes, and went back to Hill Street.
21
She had said — painfully and barely moving her swollen lips — ‘I don’t want to talk about it now,’ and he kissed her again. Pity or love, it didn’t matter; he saw her wounded and he was aroused, almost passionate. He touched her, felt for her breasts. She sucked air and her ribs lifted his hand. She was hysterical — she screamed; then she was the opposite, numbed and speechless. Her fright trembled away, and when he put her to bed she fell asleep at once. It was the child, Jason, whom he had difficulty in calming, but he dropped off in Hood’s arms. He put him in the cot and went into the other room to lay beside her. Anger kept him awake; he blamed himself for her bruises and claw-marks and he was disturbed by the fear that he could kill them for it — find the bastards and beat them to a pulp.
She had been beaten. He expected her to rebel, but she had no particular anger. She was forlorn, alone; the assault saddened her, like a reminder she was trapped — as if she’d broken her head against her own cage. She didn’t cry — she wasn’t even frightened. The violence that would have terrified another woman only weighted her with bruises and made her frail, brightened her eyes with fever; and lying next to her — it surprised him again — he felt her nakedness heating him, her body hot from her wounds. Now, sleeping, she was a small injured girl; but she burned against him, denying him rest.
In the black hours of the morning — around three — he knew he must roll a pill or stay awake cursing. He felt for his pouch and rolled the opium pill in the dark, then went to the bathroom for a glass of water to wash it down. Standing there in front of the sink he saw his reflection in the mirror and in his eyes those narrow crescents of yellow on the whites, the malarial stain, a mark of Hué. He swallowed the pill and closed his eyes and he was gliding from an inlet on the Perfume River, a rudder-stick crooked under his arm, and in the bow of the boat a Vietnamese girl knelt, the moon shining on her tight flank, her black mane of hair swaying as she worked with the small flame. Then she tossed her hair and smiled and passed him the pipe. It was a perfect memory: his mind had simplified the past, selected from it, and prettied it by making it whole. Twenty nights on the river had become one.
Yet he could not think of the past without embarrassment. It was primitive, mostly error or failure, and though the man in the boat had his name, it was another man, one he had grown to mistrust. So memory itself, that inaccurate glimpse of the past, he avoided or tried to suppress: he hated its futility.
He shut his eyes and saw the future. His mind plunged ahead in time, the landscape altered, his own figure dwindled. The future, always the future — why else would one fight? Memory was retreat. He rehearsed what was in store for him — not a matter of days or a month, but years and more, decades, and then he saw the same solitary man, slightly hunched, white-haired, in fading clothes, treading the dust in some tropical place, making his way in dazzling sunlight. It was what he wished to see. He closed his eyes and saw this old man who had cut himself off and chosen to end his life here, in the simplest way: a man with no country, unknown among strangers, who had rid himself of his family and who, at that distance, had fallen silent and ceased to act. A calm fugitive: he ridiculed the notion of exile — in this world there was no exile for an American.
Hood’s reflections were not memory but this modest vision he hoped was prophecy — as all truth was prophetic — and though at first he felt it was the effect of his drugs (the narcotic flash, the sight of himself in the future walking up and down in Asia), the process became habit. He was older, in a palmy place as dense as Guatemala, never speaking; but the road was always the same, the foliage a deep green and the blurred figures ignored him and passed by, water-carriers, naked children, slow bulls. To live abroad was to create a mythology about yourself, more than a new personality — a liberating fantasy you could believe in, a new world. He could only live in a country where he was willing to die, and it sometimes chilled him to think that he might die here, in this strangely lighted city, on this watery island. He did not want to be known or mourned; he wished only to act and then vanish, to choose his own gravesite. And it troubled him to think that the single reason he was in bed with this woman was that he had killed her husband. But who was that? Who killed him? The murderer was a man he scarcely knew.
In the morning Lorna was groggy. Rather than wake her he gave the child breakfast and took him to school.
‘Are you my daddy now?’ asked Jason, taking Hood’s hand at the end of the road. The faithless child, he thought; he would go with anyone. But Hood couldn’t blame him; the child’s safety lay in this deceit — perhaps he saw it as the only way of crossing the road.
Hood said, ‘Do you want me to be?’
‘No.’ And after a while he added, ‘My real daddy’s coming back.’
Hood held the child’s hand, saying nothing.
‘He’ll duff you up when he comes back. My daddy’s a good fighter.’
Crossing the road, Jason tightened his grip, and he did not release it on the other side. Somehow he knew the terrifying fact without knowing any of the words.
At the school gate a group of mothers stood chatting in an oblong of sunshine. They dropped their voices when Hood approached, and he could see them avoiding meeting his eyes. They were young, several were pretty, and they looked is if they were dressed for more than a trip to the school. Jason yelled and ran to join his friends. Hood noticed how his presence had subdued the group, made the women self-conscious, awkward, with a kind of pedestrian envy and suspicion.
Hood said sharply, ‘Hi, sweetheart!’
They looked away. The teacher came out, an older woman in a smock, fussing with a toy, waving the mothers aside and calling the children by name. Hood was the first to leave. He had gone some distance down the road when he turned and saw them all, staring at him. He knew what they were saying: a new member of the family, her lover — or more likely, the fucker.
He got back to the house to find her up, and now he saw the disorder he had missed the night before — an ashtray tipped over, a smashed lamp, a buckled chairleg, and the carpet littered with glass shards and cigarette butts. Lorna was feebly sweeping the hallway.
‘Have you seen upstairs?’ she said. ‘I told them I didn’t have the key, so they broke down the door of the spare room, where the stuff was. That’s what did it — they saw it was empty. Willy starts screaming at me. The other one — I don’t know his name — he done his nut. He slaps me.’
‘I’ll kill them for this,’ said Hood through his teeth.
‘Leave me out of it. I don’t want trouble.’ She sighed and said bitterly, ‘I thought when Ron copped it I was free. No more fights, no more worrying about the police. I can live, I thought. Then this. The fuckers.’
‘What were they looking for?’
‘How should I know? They asked about you. They got really ugly — who are you? What do you do? Who do you work for? That kind of thing.’
‘And you didn’t tell them anything?’ He was almost incredulous, but he believed, and he was ashamed.
‘Nothing,’ she said; she smiled at the memory of it. ‘Because I knew they were just trying it on, testing me like. I mean, the fuckers know you, so why are they asking all these questions? Play dumb — that’s what Ron used to say — pretend like you don’t even speak English.’ She winced and picked up the broom, and beginning to sweep she said, ‘Well, it didn’t cut no ice. One of them grabs me — twisting me arm — and the other one starts slapping me. And Willy, he’s just standing there whistling out the window.’