Chapter 20

‘Come on, come on,’ he muttered under his breath, trying to peer in through the bars and the glass.

The engine revved wildly as the scooter tried to climb the kerbstone up onto the pavement. Scuffing feet; taunts. Kreeger’s heart missed a beat as a light flickered on inside and a bolt hammered back, cracking thunder.

‘Come on, come on.’

The door swung open, but the jump to safety he had been preparing to make proved impossible: a bandy-legged old woman stood in the doorway, like an upturned catapult, backlit by the single bulb of the hallway. Kreeger recognised the interior: it was the hotel, but they must have changed the staff. Nightshift. The hag stomped a wooden stick on the floor, huffed and puffed. Kreeger looked back outside at the gang’s advance, grimaced into the woman’s leathery face, then tried to push past her. As his right elbow jarred against her shoulder, she opened her toothless mouth and, using a vocabulary that must have come from the pages of some black-bound, diabolical book, she tore into him with ageless vigour. Kreeger didn’t stop to wonder what she meant; he kept going, right up to the counter. The hag must have flung the door back into its frame because it banged shut with the force of a portcullis dropped against an army of pursuers, sealing out the danger. As Kreeger caught his breath, an even older-looking, bespectacled man popped up from behind the counter; he dangled a key from his forefinger and spoke to the woman in a calm, mellifluous voice. His eyes watered. She turned in silence and hobbled back to the safety of the sturdy counter, the feebleness of her bowed legs contrasted against the power of her voice.

Tension drained from Kreeger and he remembered the calls he had to make. He leaned forward to ask the old man about the telephones; but the instant he opened his mouth, the front door started to swing open again: it had not been bolted or locked. He gripped the counter and turned his head; his heart, which had barely touched ground, began an unscheduled ascent. But he needn’t have been alarmed: nothing more dangerous than a graceful young woman flitted in through the crack. She wore heavy makeup and little else. On her way through the lobby she dropped onto the desk a yellow packet, which the old man, grinning up at the girl, swiped away with a swift movement of his arm. She breezed past Kreeger without looking at him, leaving behind a faint smell of jasmine and an impression of vulnerability; he thought of the scooter gang outside. She ran up the stairs in racing little steps. She had not taken a key.

Kreeger would have said goodnight but the old man was now busy with the packet behind the counter and the old woman was scowling; he turned and climbed up to the fourth floor, each step a torment to his sore knees. Turning into his own hallway at last, through swinging fire-doors, he saw what he had heard most of the way up: a middle aged woman, dressed in night-clothes yelling through the closed door of room 49. Her voice was sharp and threatening, but the muffled tones that returned through the door were dull and sombre. Without a sign of embarrassment at the arrival of a stranger, she kept up her shrill stream of invective, occasionally turning the knob of the door, which must have been locked from the inside. Kreeger noticed the leathery, liver-spotted skin of the hand that tried to gain entry and thought of the village women who had boarded the chicken-bus at every stop between here and the distant capital, clutching their baskets of produce. All his pessimistic expectations about the hotel were rapidly coming true.

When Kreeger reached his own room, he stole one last glance over his shoulder and saw the door of room 49 suddenly give way, the woman almost falling through it. He made out a skinny man in a white vest and underpants, backing into the room, squealing now like a pig before the slaughter.

Fitting the key into the lock, he tried to remember the last time he had fought with Maria, but it was so long ago he could barely remember it; and it had certainly not been anything like that disgraceful public exhibition he had just witnessed. In forty years or so of marriage, he and Maria had hardly ever raised their voices at each other.

The door swung back and Kreeger reached in and flicked a switch. The strips of neon attached to the ceiling noisily awoke and dropped light into the bare, anonymous room. His mood, already submerged into depression, sank even lower, as his eyes bounced around the stark interior with its unmatching furniture—furniture that could have been rearranged a hundred times without ever filling the emptiness.

He somehow held himself together and immediately tackled his first chore, the thing he always did as quickly after a meal as he could, which was to get to a tap and try, with the help of his toothbrush and paste, to work the filth out of his mouth. Next he went back to the bedroom, where he pulled out his suitcase from under the bed; it slid on the tiled floor, disturbing a cockroach that scuttled away towards the bathroom—he could not find the energy to give chase. He rummaged deep and found what he was looking for. He sat up on the bed and placed it on the small table, next to the telephone.

‘God, I miss you,’ he said, looking into Maria’s eyes.

She always looked beautiful to him, however many times he saw her: in the flesh, in a glossy snap, or imprinted in his mind. (He regretted for the hundredth time not catching her in that last look over the garden gate. It seemed so long ago.) He also looked better then, standing next to her at the pier’s entrance, in his blazer and corduroys. He lifted his eyes to the dresser and compared that image of youth and vigour with the one that was now reflected back at him. His complexion was drab and grey, puffy and worn. He looked tired, flaccid. He dropped his eyes back to the framed photograph, remembering Benton, his brother, who had taken it. When? Late sixties, or could it have been in the seventies . . .

‘Come here now Jimmy, Benton wants to take our photograph,’ he heard his wife say in her lilting Spanish accent.

‘Not another?’ he replied. He looked across the boardwalk at his younger brother and wondered why he was so obvious in his desire for his wife.

‘You can keep your ugly face out of it if you want,’ Benton called across, without taking his eye from the viewfinder, ‘she looks better without you.’

‘No Jimmy, you must come. Benton, please wait.’ Maria was always embarrassed by the attention that other men gave her, especially that of her own husband’s brother.

But it was too late and Benton had already captured her soft, passive face in a characteristic pleading expression against the choppy blue water of the North Atlantic.

‘Oh Benton,’ she cried in mock anger. Another?’

The question was directed at both the brothers , but neither answered: Benton had what he wanted and James was too hot under the collar. He could not even manage the usual warning glance that he shot off at such times.

They walked along the wooden planks towards the pier, James closest to the ocean, the stiff sea breeze cooling his flush, the other two behind, stretched diagonally backwards. When they reached the pier, Benton wanted to know why his brother was keeping such a beautiful and smart woman shut up in the home. ‘It’s been four years already,’ he said, ‘like a bird in a cage.’

James was still angry about the photograph and put his arm around his wife, almost pulling her over to the pier’s entrance. ‘She doesn’t want to work, do you Maria,’ he said, shifting his fiery eyes from his brother to his wife.

‘I wouldn’t know what to do Benton, really. Now for goodness sake please take that picture . . .’

Kreeger picked up the receiver but it was dead. Forty years and never enough time. And now what did time matter? He would have more than he would know what to do with, and she . . .

There had been time enough in the beginning, but not for love. Benton had always been right: Kreeger had only shown jealousy to his wife, suffocating her in its pervading strangle. Lost time. He banged down the receiver, shaking the slight figure of his unloved wife in its wooden frame.

Kreeger’s eyes wandered around the empty room while he thought of what might have been. This trip was to have been a new beginning (a kind of late second honeymoon) a chance to start the fire that had smoked for a very long time but had never burst into flames. Love was always something he would discover soon and give her on the next weekend, the next holiday, when he was not so tied up in work, had a little spare time, not so tired. That weekend had scudded away in front of him for forty years, blown by a remorseless wind, until it had become this voyage to the exotic Far East, the last chance.

He looked down at his open travel bag and regretted not having bought a bottle of Dragon Fire with him from the capital; he was going to need something tonight. His body might have been a ruin and he was nearing total physical exhaustion, but it was his mind that would keep him awake.

The Doctor had, many years ago, been able to diagnose Maria’s need for love, but he had never been able to fill the prescription. Science could not help him there. He could care, that was easy to grade and quantify. He could measure out his pleasantries and flattery. He could easily be empirical about his responsibilities, and duties. He could even be selfless in a strictly controlled manner. But love? Love was beyond the limits of analysis, a secret he could never unlock. How could he give what he did not have, and how could he have what he did not know how to get.

Without warning, he reached forward and knocked the photograph over; it fell flat on the table, face down. He stood up, deciding to venture back to the lobby to see about the telephones and perhaps a bottle of Dragon Fire, or whatever the local version was called. The six flights of stairs made him think twice, but he grabbed his key and went ahead anyway.

The occupant of room 49 was back in the hallway. Half an hour to crush a vigorous woman. Defeated, she sat on the floor against the wall opposite her door, knees up, head buried in hands. A subdued whimper replacing shrieks and roars. Crying.

Kreeger hastened past with a shudder: an absent husband could never witness the suffering of his wife, never see the torments of her heart. The white-vested peasant in room 49. The distinguished doctor at the city morgue. Red rings around Maria’s eyes, running mascara. A hidden crucifix. Those empty hours and hours. He had destroyed her potential—that much he knew; but of her soul, he knew nothing at all.