Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (15 page)

‘Guess what I've just been given?’ she said.

‘A bellini?’

She shook her head and whispered in his ear.

‘A gram of cocaine.’

‘No!’

‘Yes.’

‘How did that happen?’

‘I bumped into a friend. He'd forgotten my birthday and wanted to make it up to me.’

‘Nice friend.’

‘Shall we have some?’

‘Most definitely.’

‘Come on then.’

They pushed through the crowd to the bathrooms. Surprisingly, there was no queue and no one to spot them stepping inside. He locked the door and rolled up a ten-euro note while Laura arranged two neat lines with a Visa card. She snorted up one and he quickly followed suit.

‘Very nice,’ he said, folding away the note. ‘Thank you.’

‘Actually, I need to pee.’

Unsure whether she was asking him to leave or simply making an announcement, Jeff said, ‘Let me watch.’

She pulled up her dress and pulled her knickers down to
her knees. Unconcerned by his being there, she began pissing immediately. Jeff held his hand between her legs, feeling her piss run hotly over his hand while she did so. He was on the brink of asking her, later on, when they were back at the hotel, to piss on his face but, even in the midst of the rush of coke, worried that this might lie outside the realm of her sexual enthusiasms – on reflection, he wasn't even sure it lay within the realm of his. He ran his hand under the tap. They came out of the toilet together, sniffing, glowing, unnoticed.

He'd been in a good mood before; now, with the chemical taste of coke trickling down his throat, he was in a
really
good mood. Unfortunately this surge of good feeling coincided with seeing Charles Hass, whose arm was in a sling. Jeff was about to introduce him to Laura but she was already talking animatedly to Yvonne, the friend she'd been with on the night they met. So Jeff was stuck with him.

‘So, Charles,’ he said, ‘what's been happening to you? Very briefly.’ Unfortunately so much had been happening to him it was not at all compatible with brevity. His injured arm was the latest instalment in a bad run of luck that extended back to the last time they'd seen each other – what? – a year ago? First, his wife had left him. Six months later his mother died and then, within a month of burying her, he was knocked off his bike by a taxi and had broken his arm. Hence the sling. How did you cope with such an unfortunate series of occurrences? By just plodding on, presumably. It actually took less effort to keep plodding on, putting one foot in front of another, than it did to lie down and stop. You kept on going. The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, even after a freak accident, even after the plough has run over his arm, severing it at the elbow. You pick it up with your good arm and head home as fast as possible, undeterred by all the pain, inconvenience
and gruelling physiotherapy that lie ahead if – and it's a huge if – you're lucky enough to get the arm sewed back on. You keep plodding on. What else can you do? The only alternative is to not plod on. But you might as well keep plodding on as sit down and not plod on. As Charles told Jeff more about this terrible run of luck, he found himself transfixed and increasingly distressed by it, distressed by the possibility that something of the kind could be coming his way, hot on the heels of the run of incredibly good luck he was in the midst of now. He was aware of a wave of self-pity, heading towards him, about to crash over his head.

‘Nothing bad will ever happen to me, will it, Charles?’ he said.

‘No, I'm sure it won't.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well, you can never—’

‘Promise me. Promise me that nothing bad will ever happen to me. I need to be reassured.’

‘I promise.’

‘Say it like you mean it,’ he said. ‘Swear on your mother's grave.’

Charles looked at him harshly. Jeff knew he had gone too far, but the only way to get out of this situation was to go further. He gripped Charles's good arm. He implored him, looked him in the eye. By now the fear of something bad happening had gripped Jeff as he had gripped Charles's arm, so much so that it was as if he had gripped himself. He no longer knew if he was joking. Everything began as a joke – or some things did anyway – but not everything ended as one. Some things began as jokes, but ended up not being funny at all. If he wasn't careful, something terribly unfunny could befall him here. He could get punched in the face by Charles, especially now that he was no longer gripping his good arm.
He tried, instead, to get a grip on himself, but it was no good: the thought of Charles punching him in the face had turned into a general level of threat, a premonition that at some point in the coming days someone would hit him for something he had done or not done, something he should have done or had neglected to do.

‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘I don't have the resources to deal with anything bad happening. I'm hanging on by my fingernails as it is.’

‘Let's change the subject,’ said Charles.

‘Great idea,’ said Jeff. A waiter came by, bearing a tray with a single full glass of champagne. Jeff grabbed it – with his arm in a sling Charles, even if he'd had his eyes on it, never had a chance – and took a huge swig.

‘So, anyway, how are you?’ said Jeff, suddenly in good humour again, so much so that he laughed aloud at this little joke. ‘You see, I've learned from your example. There I was, seriously depressed a few moments ago, but I had the tenacity to butch it out, to hang on in there. And I'm glad I did. I've pulled through and am having a fine old time again here at this party, shooting the breeze with a friend whose glass, I note, is tragically empty’ Jeff clinked it with his full one anyway. What a rollercoaster ride life was. He really was feeling great again. Unlike Charles, who looked distinctly down in the mouth.

‘Come on,’ said Jeff. ‘I know I went off on a bit of a downer a few minutes ago, but I feel fine now, honestly. And I know that, technically speaking, I should have offered that glass of champagne to you but, well, it was a fifty-fifty ball and at that moment I felt I needed it more than anyone else in this entire city.’

Charles turned away. Jeez, he'd had a real sense of humour failure. Not that it mattered, because here was Valerie Sacks,
in seriously high spirits, blahing drunkenly on about the man next to her – Pavel Something. They shook hands, but Jeff didn't catch the rest of his name.

‘He's Polish,’ she said. ‘A count.’

‘Between you and me, though,’ slurred Graham Hart – where had he sprung back from? – ‘I think the “o” is silent.’ Count Pavel Whatever seemed not to have picked up on this vicious slur, but Jeff was quite keen to get away from this little group. Especially when he saw Laura heading towards him. My God, she was radiantly beautiful, high on coke, and, fifteen minutes previously, he'd had his hand between her legs while she pissed. And now she'd come and put her arm around his waist. Life was too good to be true! His whole life was validated by the last couple of days in Venice. He'd never made a mistake in his life because everything, even the mistakes, had led to his being here now. That was the thing about life. You couldn't cherry-pick the good bits. You had to say yes to the whole package, all the ups and the downs, but if the ups – the highs – were like this, you'd sign up willingly to the downs because, by comparison, they were nothing, so irrelevant he couldn't even remember them.

While Jeff had been busy behaving insensitively to poor Charles, Laura had been getting invited to a party on a yacht. A yacht moored nearby, just a couple hundred yards away, on Giudecca. A bunch of people were going. It was being hosted by James Hofman, a German, and his parties, apparently, were always excellent. After the scale and clamour of this party, the idea of going to a smaller party,
a party on a yacht
, was immensely appealing. Especially since, in the course of the following half hour, the booze showed signs of drying up. Jeff didn't actually want anything else to drink, but the knowledge that the drink was running out had the effect of draining all momentum from the party. It began thinning out
and then, once it became obvious that it was thinning out, thinned out still more rapidly. It was time to go.

In characteristic Venetian fashion, the yacht was a lot further away than it was meant to be. They walked so far – past Zitelle vaporetto stop – that they thought they'd somehow missed it, but here it was, at last, docked near the Cipriani.

They bounded up the gangplank, greeted by a crew member in an all-white sailor's outfit.

‘Permission to come aboard, sir?’ Laura asked, throwing in a salute for good measure. She had gauged their entrance perfectly. The party was not just
on
a boat; it had a nautical theme as well. Guests, as they stepped aboard, were asked to remove their shoes but, in compensation, were issued with white officers’ hats.

‘It suits you,’ Jeff told Laura.

‘You too, cap'n,’ she said. Their host, Herr Hofman, stood to attention, welcoming them aboard. With his beard and German accent, he looked like the commander of a U-boat. It was easy to imagine him, eyes pressed to the periscope, firing torpedoes into the merchant convoy and not being at all scrupulous about picking up survivors. Not that there was anything cramped and oily about this vessel. It was exactly what one wanted from a boat: Roman Abramovich on the cheap, but still superbly expensive. You could imagine – something about this boat was making Jeff think in terms of movie scenarios – being out on the Caribbean or the Mediterranean with a load of overweight gangstas and hookers in bikinis, being served Cristal and, after a lunch of some endangered species of freshly-caught fish, unlimited quantities of top-quality cocaine. Much nicer, tonight, though, when all the people aboard were part of the international art crowd, intellectuals, artists, connoisseurs and appreciators of the fine things in life – which meant, basically, that everyone wanted
to drink champagne and snort coke. It was a relief to be spared the tedium of the fish course. A relief, too, to be within a few feet of dry land so that they could jump ship whenever they wanted. James was a quite charming man in that his conversation consisted, almost entirely, of telling Laura and Jeff what a pleasure it was to have them aboard. He could not talk to them for long, however: there were other guests he had to welcome aboard, other people who had done him the honour of coming to his little party.

Kitted out, camply, in the white uniform of a naval rating, a tanned waiter offered Jeff and Laura champagne. Glasses in hand, they went below deck – if that was the term – and into the lounge. Even in this relatively spacious boat, Jeff had to stoop through the doors. A few people were dancing to down-tempo music.

A pleasing side-effect of taking drugs is that once you have had some you access, as if by magic, the drug
scene.
You go out looking for magic mushrooms, spend an hour stooped over in a field, eat the few you eventually find, and suddenly, obviously, they're all around, pleading to be picked. It was the same here. Still animated from the line they'd had at the previous party, Jeff and Laura were chatting again with their host, in the lounge, when he asked, quietly, if they would like to join him in the bedroom for ‘a little cocaine.’ There were four or five people already in there, sprawled on the white bed or in chairs, talking, drinking, wearing their naval hats. James ushered them in and shut the door carefully behind him. At the foot of the bed was a mirror with a small amount of powder that he arranged into three lines, two of which were ample for Laura and Jeff. Politely they left the biggest for James, but this, evidently, was insufficient for a man of his considerable appetite. He quickly supplemented it with another fatter and longer one. As soon as he had snorted this,
James said again what a great pleasure it was to have them aboard but, if they would excuse him, he felt he should attend to his other guests. With that he stood up and left the room, shutting the door carefully behind him. Wow, Jeff was thinking to himself, this is not just the drug scene, this is the
yacht
scene. I'm part of the drug-yacht scene! And what a great scene it was to be part of. It was so great that he was unsure whether he wanted to stay here in the bedroom, be in the lounge dancing, or up on deck enjoying the heat of the maritime night. Laura was more decisive. She touched his hand and suggested they re-join the party. They smiled goodbye to the other people in the bedroom and stepped outside, shutting the door behind them as James had done.

They went up on deck. San Marco sparkled across the dark water. The boat swayed only slightly. James came towards them, smiling, his arm around the shoulder of a man wearing a white cowboy shirt (with black trimmings) and dark jeans – an outfit that looked frankly out of place in this nautical context. James must have been buzzing with cocaine, but the only apparent effect it had was to make him still more formal and correct in his bearing.

‘Would you allow me to present to you Mr Troy Montana?’ Jeff half expected James to click his heels as he made this introduction. (He was prevented from doing so, presumably, by the fact that he was wearing deck shoes.) Not that there was anything uptight about him. No, he seemed thoroughly at ease. It was just that his ease manifested itself in courtesy of a kind rarely seen these days, especially among those wired on coke. Was this the very summit of Euro-sophistication? Or perhaps – and it may have amounted to the same thing – he was one of these people (Jeff had encountered them occasionally before) who took cocaine to
relax.
Mr Montana, whose outfit matched his name if not his surroundings, was clutching a bottle of
champagne. He refilled Jeff's glass, which had emptied itself with inexplicable rapidity. Spotting the opportunity for a belated witticism, Jeff asked, ‘So, Troy, were you invited, or did you just sneak aboard on your wooden horse?’

As soon as he said this, Jeff worried that it had come out sounding rude rather than witty. Difficult to tell. Everything was becoming a bit smeary at the edges. He had to make sure that it didn't get smeary in the middle as well. Troy didn't laugh, but he didn't take offence either. Perhaps he'd not even heard. From his repeated sniffing, he had evidently been enjoying James's hospitality, and was in no mood to listen. He was a curator. Next weekend he was going to Documenta and, the following weekend, to Art Basel – or vice-versa. From where Jeff was standing – on a yacht, in Venice – this was a fantastic prospect: two more weekends exactly like the one he was currently in the midst of. Yes, please. He had to ask Troy to remind him of the name of his gallery, then forgot it again the moment he had been reminded. Jeff was in danger of forgetting everything as soon as it was said, even when he was the person saying it. Not that it mattered. Troy was proposing that they went to see what was happening below deck.