The Radiant City (12 page)

“I said I was sorry. I can’t even have friends round now?”

“You cannot have these friends here. You cannot smoke drugs in my house.”

“What are you saying? What are you accusing me of?”

“Not half of what I bet you are doing. What other drugs are you doing? Are you going to be one of the addict boys up the road, sleeping in their own piss, scabs all over their faces? Oh, my God.”

Saida drops heavily onto the couch. There are ashes and crumbs under her table, ground into the carpet, which is not a good carpet, but still, it is a nice red colour and the pattern is pretty. “Is your life so terrible that you want to destroy it?” she says.

“
Imma,
it’s just a little grass.” Joseph sits down next to her. He speaks to her slowly, with a tolerant smile on his lips, as though she is incapable of understanding what matters in life. “It takes the edge off this shithole life.”

Saida slaps her son’s face with her open palm. She has not intended to do it. And as soon as it is done she bursts into tears. Joseph stands and looks down at her, the red mark on his cheek giving him more authority than his posture. She wishes he would say something.

She is still crying and her voice has hiccups in it. “So, that’s what you think about the life you have? And it’s just grass? But it’s not a little anything. It is not. You are floating away, getting lost. I want you to go to university. You don’t want my life? Well, fine. I do not want my life either. But my life or something a whole lot worse is all you’ll get if you don’t stop what you’re doing.” Her voice has risen and now she is standing, although she does not remember getting to her feet.

“Don’t ever hit me again,” Joseph says, and then, “stop crying.”

“Tell me I’ll never come home and find you like this again.”

“Fine.”

“Tell me you’ll stop doing drugs.”

“Fine.”

“Mean it,” she says, taking hold of his sleeve. “Study. No more of these friends.”

“Fine.” His face is like his stepfather’s then: impassive. A wall behind which he smugly hides. She could pound all day on a wall like that and break nothing but her own bones.

“I’ll tell your uncle, your grandfather, too. We’ll see what they have to say about this.”

Still there is nothing, just the blank of him where she can find no purchase on which to pull herself into his heart. “What kind of a reporter do you think you’ll make, stoned? Uneducated. Everything funny?”

It is just a flicker that she sees, then, in his dark eyes. Nothing more. But it is something.

Matthew sits at his desk with his head bent and his forehead resting on his fists. Occasionally he bounces his knuckles against his head, hoping to jar loose some words, no matter how inadequate. Anything to get started. Brent, it must be said, was not impressed with the pages Matthew had sent him.

“This is it?” he had said. “Some story about a dead chick? In all these weeks? Tell me, tell me, Matthew, that you have more than this. Tell me you are playing a sick little joke on old Brent? Tell me this, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay, what the fuck?”

“There’s more. That was just a sample.”

“Matthew. How much are you drinking?”

“Not enough, apparently.”

“I’m laughing. Hear my mirth.”

Silence. Long. The sort of silence that was no doubt engineered to elicit a response.

Brent sighs. “So, there is more?”

“Sure.”

“I want to see at least a hundred pages in my office by the end of the month. Clear?”

And so here Matthew sits. On page three.

He shuffles his feet under the desk and dislodges a small tumbleweed of dust and hair from its grip on the somewhat gummy floor. He looks around and sees the apartment for what it is, a temporary cell, like a third-rate motel. The furniture is cheap, the sofa hard and armless, the chair wobbly. The shade on the overhead light is chipped. Dead flies and moths lie at the bottom of the glass bowl. He drinks coffee from a cracked cup. There is no comfort here.

When he was with Kate, she lit candles every morning for breakfast, white candles that smelled of rain. The snowy sheets were always pressed and inviting. They ate mangoes and drank wine lying on those sheets. Every Saturday morning she polished the wood with lemon oil and the apartment smelled of that and ginger muffins. She painted her toenails the colour of pale iridescent shell. He loved to run his hand along the arch of her instep, to trace the fine bones of her ankle . . .

The phone rings.

“What are you doing?”

“Jack?”

“I got a bottle. Thought I’d come over. Shoot the shit.”

The memory of Kate’s toes dissolve and Matthew sees only the pages before him. “I was thinking about going across the street for some Lebanese food. Want to join me?”

“I’m coming over.”

Half an hour later Matthew hears Jack thumping up the stairs. The footsteps, like battering rams, cannot be mistaken for anyone else’s. Matthew shakes his head. It is a wonder Jack survived in the jungles of Vietnam, where Matthew thinks of stealth as a necessity. He opens the door as Jack hauls himself up the last few steps. He wears the jeans, jean-jacket, black T-shirt and heavy boots that seem to be his uniform, no matter what the weather. He is sweaty and he screws his face up against the smoke trailing from the cigarette dangling between his lips.

“Hey,” says Matthew.

Jack takes the cigarette out of his mouth, coughs and grinds the butt under his heel. “I gotta give these fucking things up,” he says as Matthew steps back to let him in.

“You want to come in, or get something to eat?”

Jack hands Matthew a bottle of good scotch. “I’m starving. Put that someplace, we’ll drink it later.”

At Chez Elias they take a table by the back door so Jack can sit with his back to the wall. They share a bowl of pickled pink turnips, olives and a stack of warm pita bread with their beer. Matthew notices Joseph hovering hopefully near the counter and waves him over.

“Jack, this is Joseph,” Matthew says and indicates the boy can sit down if he likes. He explains that Joseph is Ramzi’s nephew and Saida’s son.

Jack looks at Saida, who is in the kitchen. A bright blue scarf ties back her long hair. “Your mother’s a pretty woman,” says Jack.

“You Canadian, too?” asks Joseph.

“Hell, no,” Jack laughs. “I’m American.”

“You a reporter, like Matthew? You from New York?”

“Not far from there. I’m a photographer, among other things.”

They
order
chich
taouk,
chicken marinated in lemon, and falafel and taboulé. When Joseph asks Jack if he is visiting Paris, Jack says, “I kinda go where the winds blow me.”

“I would like to travel.”

“You should travel. See the world. Have some adventures before you settle down.”

“I want to go to Algeria. I have friends, and they have family there I can stay with.”

“I’ve been there,” says Jack. “Interesting place.”

“Yeah? Where?” Joseph leans forward.

“Algiers. Biskra. El Golea. All over.”

“What were you doing there?”

“This and that. How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

A small smile, no more than stretched skin under Jack’s moustache, stains his eyes with something resembling loss. “I’ve got a son about your age,” he says.

“You do?” says Matthew. Considering that this important fact is something Jack has so far withheld, it occurs to Matthew that, other than the war stories and battle scars, he does not know much about Jack. It has not seemed important before, this question of pasts and attachments.

“He is here?” says Joseph.

“No. Back in the States with his mom.” Jack knocks a cigarette out of his pack. “Want one?” he says to Joseph. Joseph shakes his head and rolls his eyes toward his mother.

Matthew glances up and catches Saida watching them. The expression on her face is hard to read. He smiles at her and nods. She nods back but her smile is economical.

Jack lights his cigarette and blows smoke toward the ceiling. “Yeah, my kid’s name’s Jack, Jr. Maybe I’ll bring him to Paris one day. Summer vacation or something. You think he’d like that?”

“Sure. I guess.”

“You know, when I was in Algeria, there was this family, lived in a—what do you call it—a town built of earth?”

“
Ksar
,
”
says Joseph.

“Yeah.
A
ksar.
We lived with them for a month or so. Nice people.”

“We? You took your son there?”

“Naw. Just some guys I was traveling with at the time. Stopped off there on the way to Libya. Now that was a hell of a dirty little secret war.”

“Jack, maybe you should leave it,” Matthew says.

“Why? Some people hired us, is all, to do some cleanup work for them. Lot of garbage lying around.”

Saida brings their food over and says something to Joseph in Arabic. The boy shrugs and shakes his head. “She thinks I’m bothering you,” he says as she brings a plate of
katfa
to another table.

The food smells wonderful. Lemons and olives and cheese. Matthew’s mouth waters as he picks up a pita and breaks off a piece, shovelling it full of hommos. He looks at Jack, his cigarette in one hand, a forkful of chicken in the other, and considers what sort of father Jack would make. “You’re not bothering us,” Matthew says to Joseph. “But maybe your mother needs some help?”

“My uncle’s helping. If she needs me, she tells me.” He turns to Jack. “Anyway, you were working—you work in construction, like that?”

“More like de-construction, if you know what I mean.” Jack taps the side of his nose with his finger.

Matthew watches the light switch click on in Joseph’s head and his suspicions that he is a bright boy are confirmed. Joseph looks admiringly at Jack, as though Rambo has suddenly materialized in his very own café.

“
Merde
,
”
he says, and whistles low. “It’s true?”

“For Christ’s sake, Jack.”

“What? Course it’s true.”

Matthew is almost amused to find a little rat of jealousy scratching at the inside of his stomach. Amused to discover he would like Joseph to look at him with the same hero-worship.

Jack talks of traveling through the Sahara. Of a one-eyed man who led them in a convoy of camels and jeeps into the Sudan, of how he lay his head against the dunes at night and when Jack asked him what he was listening to, he said the music of the
djinn.

They finish dinner with Joseph hanging off every word. He wants to bring his friends around, wants to introduce them to Jack. He wants to take Jack, and Matthew, he adds, into Barbès to see la Goutte d’Or neighbourhood, what he calls the real Paris.

Saida has been travelling in ever-decreasing circles, making sure she is near their table as often as possible. When Matthew meets her eye she glares at him and he winces, wishing he hadn’t brought Jack along.

When the bill comes, Jack makes no move for his wallet so Matthew pays for them both, figuring Jack’s bottle of Glenfiddich will even the score. As they leave Jack promises Joseph he’ll come back sometime soon. “And maybe you can introduce me to some of your pals.” They shake hands and as they do, Jack pulls the boy close and whispers something in his ear. Joseph blinks and then smiles. “Sure,” he says. “I can do that. Sure.”

“What was that about?” Matthew says when they’re on the street.

“What?”

“That bit at the end. What did you say to Joseph?”

“Nosey, aren’t ya? I just told him not to let his mother catch him smoking.”

Back in the apartment, Jack settles himself in the chair by the window as if he has been there before.

“Listen,” says Jack. “Thanks for letting me crash on you like this.”

“Not a problem.”

Matthew waits for Jack to continue.

“Bad day, you know what I mean. One of those my-mind’s-a-dangerous-place-better-not-to-go-in-alone-days. You know.”

Yes, Matthew knows. Jack sits with his arms folded and his hands under his armpits. His head is down and nodding, as though there is a conversation going on in his mind Matthew cannot hear.

“Guess that’s why I was telling the kid all those stories. Lots of memories today.”

Matthew starts, unsettled by the fragility in Jack’s voice. His own memories begin to twitter at him from the darkened corners of the room. Ah, to hell with the rest of the world, he thinks. Civilians. “You need a drink,” he says.