Becoming Strangers (21 page)

'So, pour me a glass, take some for yourself, and then come over here and let's get started.'

He glanced at her quickly in the mirror and saw the decline of the skin from her cheeks to her neck, the ragged skin tone of her upper chest. Her breasts were ample but looked elsewhere for their interest, they settled down low, ready for a bedtime story. Her stomach had runways of activity and although she was not
out of shape, nor was she fat, there was something about her that failed to rouse him. He absolutely forbade himself to think about his mother. Or Jan. He could place himself in his mind's eye at a party or in a bar, telling the story. 'So did you get it up, then?' 'Well, it was a bit hit and miss but I came through.' Or, 'Well, after I nearly set fire to her old man's Bible, I fiddled about with the corkscrew, then I made my excuses and left.' Then for some reason, just as he whipped the cork from the bottle, he thought of George's wife Dorothy. He recalled the same facial expression—disappointment, underscored many times.

Was this what women wanted? Was this really any sort of recompense? Or was she, as she said, like a man? No chance of a stiffy now. He barged into the chair with the shorts over it.

'Come over here,' she said, shifting on the bed. She looked a proper hausfrau with a frown and her nose like a chewed toffee.

He drank back his own glass and handed the other to her. Standing on her left side, his penis hung down like a bell pull, she could use it to summon room service.

She sipped her wine noisily and handed him the glass to put down.

'You sure you want to go through with it?' he asked, putting his own glass alongside hers on the bedside table, then added, 'Hang on; there's a noise out there. Maybe it's Jan?'

Her chest rose and she said, 'I want you to give me oral sex now.'

A great tidal wave of laughter rose in his chest and he slapped his hand to his face, covering his mouth, dragging down the skin below his eyes. Opening his eyes again to look at her he discerned fear in her eyes and he knew what this was all about—hope.

All right. He would go along with it. God help the pair of them. The money would come in handy. He could get his next flight with it. Move on. He went to the end of the bed and knelt there, looking up at her as she parted her legs. He squinted upwards with an appraising eye like a chimney sweep and cleared his throat, twice, before starting to kiss her lower legs gently and ruefully as he made his ascent. Fortunately she smelt of soap. It could have been anyone. Not Jans wife, not his mum, not Dorothy...

He pretended a sudden fit of delight at the discovery of her lower thighs and threw himself into kissing them, making the appreciative noises of a dinner guest. Her legs spread further apart and her mons pubis loomed before him, a dead end. Hastily, he felt down between his own legs to see if he couldn't give himself a bit of a hand, and was comforted by the warmth and familiarity of the connection made. With his other hand, he began to stroke and tap her pubic hair and his mouth continued to kiss her thigh but, unable to think straight, he kissed the same place repeatedly.

Annemieke was anxious; she was beginning to feel unlovely. With a sudden jerking action she opened her legs further.

He could ignore it no longer. Adam fell upon her
and did his manly best, his spare hand still at work below. 'It's not her, it's someone else,' he was telling himself, but the smell of her took him elsewhere, not to previous girlfriends, nor to anywhere else organic, but to the smell of the Bible he'd opened.

Annemieke lay quite still, as if she were at the spa, and he supposed he should continue until she told him otherwise. He had no idea whether she was enjoying herself; her pubic mound rose a little, at one point, and then lowered again. He kept at it in a reasonably conservative way. When, at last, he had a hard-on, he held on to it firmly. Suddenly her back arched and she started to mumble something about 'wanting it,' he felt a shudder through his cheeks as she pushed his face against her, both hands on the back of his head, and then she said to him, 'That's it.'

He understood. He rose on his knees and entered her, the back of his hand wiping his mouth, and he didn't look at her until he was in full rhythm. She was silent. When he looked down she had her head way back, she'd thrown the pillow aside, and her tits moved sullenly and out of time but her body seemed grateful enough, and yes, at last, it could have been anybody. But just for safety's sake, he kept in mind Charlotte, the tall, endlessly-legged, perpetually amused young Caribbean mother.

When he came, he sighed with relief and slumped a little but did not fall on top of her into an embrace and opening his eyes after a moment he saw her looking at him.

'Get off me now,' she said, looking aside.

'What's the matter?' he said, whisking himself aside, his tongue touching the tip of a hair between his teeth.

She didn't answer. Oh Jesus, he said to himself, removing the hair surreptitiously. He'd been here before. He knew what it meant.

There was a sudden noise at the door, a card was inserted and removed from the lock and the door shook a little.

'That's Jan,' said Adam.

'No,' she said, 'it can't be.'

The door scuffed and stuck on the carpet but eventually gave way and she heard a voice saying, 'Hello? Hello? Anyone at home?'

W
HEN
L
AURIE LAUGHED
, she laughed hard and bright, her teeth exposed, 'Har, har, har!' They were sitting on the stairs of the church, side by side.

Jan had been to Hong Kong with Annemieke and had been repulsed by the Cantonese with their spittle hawking, their brutal way of addressing each other, their constant stewing of all the worst smells in the world. He had felt as if he bathed in the steam of a bubbling pot of congee when they toured the streets. When he thought of Hong Kong, he recalled the fetid smell of the dried shrimps, little maggoty orange things, loaded into baskets and left in the carbon monoxide air
of the streets outside the stores. He'd not been well at the time, having just come out the other side of some chemotherapy, nausea had been constantly at the back of his throat. While he was in recovery from early surgery on his chest, she'd come to his bedside, flicked through some women's magazines she'd brought with her and pointed out an article which explained that pain was formally described in hospitals on a scale of one to ten, with ten, the worst, being described as that of labour. He had probably got towards a four, she conceded.

Laurie was still laughing, covering her mouth with her hand. He had made her laugh by offering her his impressions of Hong Kong. But his mind had scuttled crab-like out of the alleyways of Hong Kong and along the hospital corridors of Brugge.

'Where there is dirt, where there is disorder, where there is noise, there is life,' she told him. 'This is a well-known saying among the Cantonese. It is a very colourful people, you are true. We have bad language and we shout it. If we can use a bad word, we do so. One
gweilo,
he asked me to translate a meeting we had with some of his suppliers, he was a client of mine, and I told him what had been said, more or less, He said he recognized a bad word, and I told him they'd said I would be a toothless old bitch sucking white men's dicks before they dropped their prices and that it was well known that my mother got fucked by dogs.'

Again she laughed as hard as a boy.

'I miss Hong Kong,' she said, as if she were confiding in him. 'I came to Europe to forget Hong Kong for a few weeks and then I could not be bothered with Europe so I came to America and then I did not like America so I came here. Now I know I will go back to Hong Kong next. To face the music.'

'What music?'

'This is a British expression,' she said, moving across the space between them to sit next to him. She scratched her knee tentatively, causing a thin white mark.

'I have missed Chinese New Year,' she said, lowering her face on to her hands, her elbows on her thighs. 'Crazy place,' she said in a whisper,
'tchi-sin.'

They looked across the brick path to the dried grass of the lawn before the church gate, part of a white picket fence. Dust blew in little effete gusts and settled back down. Across the main street, a spring-loaded windowless door opened and a man stood as if about to leave the makeshift bar there, then changed his mind. Suddenly a woman emerged, swaying with evident pain in her hips and went down the wooden stairs to the small store below, opened it up and disappeared inside. She re-emerged with cigarettes and a bottle and went back up the stairs with the same slow discomfort. It was hot and airless.

'I left my husband, you see,' said Laurie, 'and I started a relationship with an Australian, a client of mine. But my children, who are at secondary school, they would not speak to me and they stayed with their father. Hong Kong is very conservative and we bring our children up to be the same, to fit in, to work hard,
to honour their parents, so this is not strange. My parents also would not speak to me; my mother, she closed the door in my face. Soon, all the things that made me love that man seemed to be like nothing at all. I crashed my car driving down from The Peak one night. I was hurt and went to hospital. After that I ordered my plane tickets for Europe and as soon as I was able to walk I left for the airport.'

'Oh,' he said. 'What are you going to do when you get back?'

'Maybe I won't go back.'

'But you seem to miss it so much.'

'True. But I don't know if I can go back. Because the people I love,' she paused, 'are not able to love me. Nobody, not him, the Australian, not my husband, not the children, not the parents, nobody came to the hospital. The Australian, you see, Brett his name was, horrible name, I had just finished my relationship with him and was moving out. So that's why he did not come. But the others could have come.'

'But Laurie, perhaps they knew that you were fine or perhaps they were told not to visit because you were not well...'

She shook her head and looked at him momentarily, then the pupils of her eyes rose up to the sky like dark kites.

'No,' she said.

'They are angry with you, but if you say sorry, they will forgive you.'

She nodded without conviction.

'That's conditional.'

'That's all there is, conditional love.'

'Why did you ask me for help?'

He was sitting with a hand around each kneecap. She placed a hand on each of his. He didn't move, he wanted to be touched, to be held in one place, he wanted to submit to someone else's life, their needs.

'That kind of hope doesn't die,' he admitted, 'not really, no matter what your mind tells you. Or your experience. That's the human conundrum.' He looked away, across to the store, and saw the heavy old woman accompanying a suited old man out to his car. He could hardly walk, and his hand kept saluting an invisible friend. She sat him down in the back of the car and he passed out with his legs hanging outside the open door. She brushed herself down and went back inside.

'I know you are dying,' she said.

'Oh.'

'Bill told me this.'

'How does he know?'

'Your wife told him.'

He emitted a breath through his nose, it was almost a cynical sort of laugh, he didn't know whether he was peeved or nervous. More bad news to come, he thought, for sure.

'Do you love your wife?'

'I don't know.'

'Does she love you?'

He shook his head. 'I've no idea.'

'Would you like to go to Paris with me?'

He ran his hand over his face, to give himself time to answer her. 'I would, but it's not possible.'

'Why not, Jan, what have you got to lose...?'

'It's more you I'm thinking of,' he said. 'I take morphine every day now and they say when you do that it is just a matter of time.' He looked down at the church steps upon which they sat and registered the location as a wry thought.

'When time is short, it is easy to love, I'm sure that we can.' He was amazed at her honesty. He looked at her and saw the otherness of her face. Before he'd seen her as a Chinese woman who was unlike her kind, soft and original, now he looked at her again and saw how oriental she was to him with her blunt expression full of candour and sense, she was watching him, gauging him. 'And then when you are gone, I will have been loved. I will have been loved without conditions. You will be able to do that, I think.'

Seeing that his face was in disarray, she pressed her point home. 'This will be a highest love, because you are dying.'

'Oh Laurie,' he blurted out, standing up, shaking the dust of the church steps from him, 'if I wasn't dying or if you didn't know I was...'

'No,' she said, with a wrinkle forming between her eyebrows, 'this is the way it is meant to be.'

He got up and paced around in a circle, mimicking the lone car that he saw going around the roundabout. He didn't know what to make of this, he felt sore inside, as if he had been taken advantage of. This was
sudden, suddenly. If he went along with his faith, faith in the kind of person he had perceived her to be, then he would grasp her real meaning. She was offering him love; she was saying she could love him, after all. He stopped to look at her. She was sat like a teenager, hugging her skirt so as not to show her underwear. She smiled up at him with the canny readiness a young girl offers a schoolteacher in anticipation of good grades.

'Well?'

'Let me think about it. There is so much to think about.'

'Y
OU COULD HAVE KNOCKED
,' said Adam, securing his towel.

'What is it, what's going on?' Jason was asking from the doorway. He saw Adam's head, 'I knew it...' He made to come in, but with an arm outstretched, Burns said quickly to him, 'I cannot allow you to come in, Mr Ryder.'

'What is it, what is it?' Jason asked again.

Suddenly a great sob rose up from Annemieke and turning to her, both Adam and Burns saw her with the sheets pulled up around her, crying. 'Real tears,' thought Adam. Her shoulders started to shake and her teeth chattered. Both men stood stock-still looking at her. Adam thought of her at the pool with her glasses
up and down and her arch looks. Bitch, he thought. Burns turned to look at Adam with savage accusation in his eyes.