Loot and Other Stories

AN EMISSARY

‘ … how few Westerners grasp malaria’s devastation. That said, its global toll remains staggering. In the last 20 years, it has killed nearly twice as many people as AIDS …. Malarial mosquitoes can even stow away on international flights — just ask recent unsuspecting victims near airports in Germany, Paris and São Paulo’.

All impurity hazing away, middleage evanescing, you can’t really make out their jowls and eye-pouches in the steam, and your own face if you could see it would be smudged, all that you’ve done to it, the wriggles of red veins down the nose, wafted from view. Underneath is you as you were.

This place calls itself Fredo’s Sauna and Health Club. But when you’re lying here you’re a senator among senators and nobles in a Roman bath. It’s winter now — no need to worry, no dangerous ultraviolet striking you, nothing noxious survives. Winter now but there’s no shivering here! Never any winter. In the humidity summer lives on; and there’s some tiny thing floating out off the misty heat — can’t be — no, must be a shred of someone’s towel — but it lands on a plump wet pectoral, just above the hair-forest there, it’s alive — and now dead, smack! A deformed punctuation mark of black, a scrap of wing, sliding on sweat.

REBIRTH

Winter outside but there’s water and privacy for breeding, eggs to lie low where no-one could imagine it, a place in which to emerge as you were, sloping back, transparent wings and special proboscis feature, in Fredo’s Sauna and Health Club.

The musical conversation of the orchestra, tuning up rather like athletes running-on-the-spot and shadow-punching, before performance; it even includes the pitch of anticipation in the low interchange of human voices. A diminuendo from this audience, as the musicians come from the wings, and a rallentando when the guest conductor, a famous young Czech or whatever, appears to bow, turn his back, mount the podium and settle his shoulders in readiness to enter the symphony with raised baton.

HEAVENLY CHORUS OF THE SPHERES

It’s winter, but nobody coughs. The sonority of wind, strings and keyboard calms all, the following tempest of brass sweeps away all reactions but the aural. The cello and viola file into the temple of each ear with the intoning of monks, there’s the query of the flute, the double-stopping grunt of the bass, the berating of drums and an answering ping of a triangle. All these creatures produce the beauty of the invisible life of sound. They dive, they soar, they ripple and glide almost beyond the reach of reception, and swell to return; some overwhelm others and then in turn are subsumed, but all are there somewhere in the layers of empyrean they ravishingly invade and transmute. They weave in and out of it, steal through it, flow into eight hundred sets of ears — it’s a full house when this conductor comes out on tour from one of those dangerous benighted Balkan countries that are always seceding and fighting and changing their names.

The auditorium is kept welcomingly heated by artificial means and by the pleasant warmth of human breath. A minute manifestation of being flies with the music, contributing a high, long-drawn fiddle-note. Nobody hears this Ariel materialise round their heads.

On the other hemisphere — Southern — it is summer, not simulation that makes all the year a summer.

WINGED CHARIOT

They are not here officially, driving on a rutted muddy road between baobab trees, if officially means that your whereabouts are known to close collaterals — wives, husbands, and professional partners. An irresistible mutual impulse — like the original unlikely one that brought them together — to take to themselves something more than two hours once a week under an assumed name in an obscure hotel, had discovered in each the ability to devise unbelievably believable absences, the call of professional commitments. They took a plane, carefully not travelling even in the same class (how clever passion makes even those who have been honest and open all their lives). They chose an unlikely destination — they hoped; in their circles people travel a lot and quite adventurously, so long as the camps are luxury ones with open-air bars and helicopter service.

The baobabs are mythical animals turned to stone.

Whenever before would he have found himself beside a woman who would come out with such delightful fantasies! She’s a writer, and sees everywhere what he has never seen; he’s an economist, privy to so much about the workings of the world she always has felt herself ignorant of, and here he is, listening with admiration to her trivial knack of imagery.

This adventure of theirs can only last a few days — the credibility of the alibis won’t allow longer — and it has come late and totally unexpected, to both of them. Husband, wife, half-grown children, reputation — now a last chance: of what? Something missed, now to be urgently claimed. He loves her to speak poetry to him as he drives. It’s her poetry, appropriated by her to accompany her life, the poets knowing always better than she does what is happening to her; now, to them. What they have done is crazy, the final destination a bad end; the realisation comes silently to each with a bump in the rutted road. Then she’s saying for them both, as the medium possessed by a dead poet, the lines don’t all reach her in the right sequence — at my back I always hear, Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near … let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up … and tear our pleasures with rough strife through the iron gates of life … the grave’s a fine and private place but none I think do there embrace …

He swerves to the side of the deserted road and turns off the ignition. They stare at each other and he breaks the spell with a smile and slow-moving head, side-to-side. There’s no-one, nothing to witness the embrace, the struggle of each not to let go. Then he suddenly frees himself, gets out of the car, opens the passenger door and takes her by the hand. There are old puddles, soupy with stagnation, to step across. The sagging remains of a broken fence: whose land was this, once. No-one, nothing. The sun rests on their backs as a benign hand, they walk a little while over stubble, viscous hollows bleary with past rain, and cannot walk farther, are arrested by need. And there is some tree that really is a tree, in leaf over a low mound of tender grass grown in its moist shelter.

Lying there they find their way to each other through their clothes like any teenagers making love wherever they can hide. It doesn’t matter. Now they lie, breathing each other in, diastole and systole, and nothing draws near, there is only that indefinable supersonic humming of organic and insect life, the sap rising in the tree, grass sprouting, gauze of gnats hovering, and a silent shrike swoops from a branch to catch some kind of flying prey in mid-air.

He is stirred, eventually, by past reality, in concern for her — remembering the hazards of hunting trips he has taken: I hope there’re no ticks. She moves her head, eyes closed: no. Nothing. Safe. Opens her eyes to see him, nothing else. One of the flying specks has landed on the lobe of his ear, lingering there, while she blows at it. He starts with a faint exclamation, she frees a hand and flicks whatever it is, so small, nothing, away.

SHOOTING UP

The rave is in one of those four-walls-and-roof with creaky boards that has housed all kinds of purposes — a church or school hall where there isn’t, in this neighbourhood, a church or school anymore, and the toilets are across a yard that in the daytime is used by some guys to repair exhausts. Dismembered vehicle parts and gas cylinders have to be navigated to reach where he’s gone off to. There he is, sitting on the broken seat, but he has his trousers on, he’s sure not having a shit, and his sweat-shirt sleeve is rolled back on his bare white arm, he’s got an arm pale and hairless as a girl’s. And just look at it.

I thought you’d kicked the habit.

He laughs. You want to use this seat?

But he allows the arm to be grasped.

Just see your arm.

What’s one more prick? How can you tell one from another, high yourself on booze.

So what’s that on your arm?

Mosquito bite.

Very funny. Hahaha.

Summer, winter, Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere. There’s nothing to be afraid of, nothing! A speck hovering, landing, you can swat with the palm of a hand. It’s not the Reaper with the scythe.

It’s his emissary, Anopheles.