The Mayan Codex

25

Sabir couldn’t sleep. He glanced over towards Lamia’s bed. Then towards Calque’s. No sound. They were both fast asleep.

The three of them had finally decided that it was better not to split up and make themselves more vulnerable than absolutely necessary. Despite being the one to make the initial suggestion, Calque, for reasons best known to himself, had finished up looking the most uncomfortable with the arrangement, whilst Lamia, who might reasonably have objected to the idea of bundling with two grown men, appeared to have taken the whole thing in her stride.

Sabir had seen the sense of it too, but he had soon become worried that if he underwent another of his nightmares, as he did most nights, he might cry out, or throw himself off his portable camp bed, and thus wake everybody else up. He had allowed this thought to niggle at him for so long now, that he couldn’t manage to doze off at all.

Eventually he got up and padded outside. He sat on the ledge of the walkway outside their room and leaned back against a pillar. The night was cold, but not oppressively so. He breathed in deeply, and then sat looking up at the night sky.

They’d been incredibly lucky to give the twins the slip back in Carlisle. Almost miraculously so. Sabir could imagine the twins at this very moment, checking out every motel within a fifty-mile radius of the town in the vain hope of picking them up again. But the trio had travelled more than a hundred miles further south this time, and had slipped off the main expressway toward Harper’s Ferry in a further bid to muddy the waters.

They had then found themselves a down-at-heel motel run by a Punjabi family, who seemingly hadn’t minded registering them at two o’clock in the morning, and neither had they objected to the fact that two mature men and a considerably younger woman wanted to share a room together. Perhaps such a thing was normal down here in West Virginia? The Punjabis had simply searched out an extra child’s bed and had set it up for Sabir underneath the window.

The door behind him opened, and Lamia emerged, clutching a blanket around her shoulders.

Sabir straightened up. ‘Hi. Can’t you sleep either? Join the club.’

Lamia waved him back down again. She sat down beside him, and snuggled herself further inside her blanket. ‘Calque has started snoring.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s really quite loud. Is he married, do you think?’

Sabir burst out laughing. ‘Divorced, as far as I know. Maybe that’s why?’

She made a face. ‘I thought about nudging him, but then I realized I was so wide awake that it would simply guarantee that two of us would be deprived of sleep, and not just one. Then I saw that your bed was empty too.’

‘Well you know all about me. I was scared I would wake up screaming, and start a riot.’

She laughed. ‘Well. We’re not doing too well so far, are we? As a team?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. We’ve lost your brothers. We’re a few hundred miles closer to where we want to be, and we’re amongst friends. Things could be a whole lot worse.’

Lamia glanced across at him. ‘We’ve only lost my brothers for the time being. You realize that?’

Sabir nodded. ‘Yes. I do realize that.’

‘Somehow they’ll find us.’

‘At this particular moment I can’t quite work out how. But I’m more than happy to work on that assumption. At least it will serve to keep us on our toes.’

Lamia began to relax, as if she had abruptly decided to disengage herself from an unwanted weight. ‘Not much worries you, does it, Adam?’

Sabir shrugged. ‘Not sleeping worries me. These nightmares worry me. Offending you worries me. But not much else.’

‘What do you mean, offending me?’

Sabir turned towards her. ‘When we met. What I said. How I said it. My drawing attention to your face. I didn’t mean to do that. That was just dumb of me. Calque was right to call me a hick.’

‘You’re not a hick. I understood what had happened. Why you did it.’

‘Then you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.’

‘What? What is that? What is Gunga Din?’ Lamia was cocking her head to one side, like a bird dog, a half-smile on her face.

Sabir noticed, once again, just what a beautiful woman she was. Despite the blemish. Despite her awareness of it. There were moments, and this was one of them, when she seemed to forget all about her face and relate to him person to person, rather than as a wounded woman to a damaged man.

‘It’s a movie. Well, it’s a poem, really, but everyone remembers the Hollywood movie they based on it. Cary Grant is an English colonial soldier, alongside Douglas Fairbanks Junior and Victor McLaglen. They’re on the Indian Frontier, and they get involved in all sorts of shenanigans. Then, at the end, they are all going to die, and their water boy, the lowest of the low, who’s called Gunga Din, saves them, at the cost of his own life. As Gunga din lies dying, Cary Grant says this to him: “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.” That bit comes straight from the Kipling poem.’

‘You’re a strange man. Do you love movies so much?’

Sabir shook his head. ‘It’s more than that. They’re a passion with me. I guess I had what you might call a lonely childhood. No brothers and sisters. Intellectual father. Crazy mother. Movies and books were what I had in lieu of normal family affection. They defined my life. I could escape into them whenever I wanted. The only thing my father ever did with me was take me to the movies. He wasn’t into baseball, or team sports, or anything like that. But every week, without fail, he would take me along to the Lenox Club for their movie matinee. The old guys that ran the matinee would wheel out a screen. Then they’d set up the old projector, with the giant 16mm reels. We’d watch Henry V, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Captain Blood, Robin Hood, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer. Heck, those old guys were more English than the English. If you looked closely enough, you could see their Harris Tweed coats steaming gently in the afternoon heat.’

‘You’re crazy. You know that, Adam?’

‘What? Crazy for talking to you like this?’

She turned abruptly away. ‘I didn’t mean that.’ Then she accorded him a compensatory glance. ‘But crazy for doing what you are doing. For risking your life this way. You could be happily roosting back at your father’s house, writing obscure books about the cinema. All you’d need to do would be to publicize what you found out in France. That way you would be safe.’

‘Would I? Do you really think your family would believe me? Believe that I had published everything I know?’

‘Why ever not?’

‘Because they know I know things, Lamia. Things I can’t tell anybody. Things that I can’t publicize.’ He suspected for a moment that she was going to ask him to dot the i’s and cross the t’s – use the unexpected intimacy that had sprung up between them to wheedle information out of him. A woman’s curiosity, and all that twaddle. But she didn’t.

Instead she stared him straight in the eyes. ‘You want to take this all the way through to the end, don’t you?’

He pretended to consider her question, but he already knew the answer. ‘I’ve got no choice in the matter. These nightmares. They’re something to do with it. But it’s not only that. I’m changing, Lamia. Changing inside. I can’t really describe it. But something happened to me down there in that cellar in the Camargue. Something that I still don’t understand. I find myself drawn to things. Almost as if I had experienced them before, and now need to revisit them to fully understand their significance.’ He shook his head. ‘No wonder you think I’m crazy.’

‘You’re making no sense. Yes. But I don’t think you’re crazy. I was wrong to say that.’

‘And you? Why are you tagging along with us? It can’t be for protection. For Captain Calque and I are probably of less potential use to anybody in that department than, well, than Laurel and Hardy.’

Lamia burst out laughing. ‘Laurel and Hardy. That’s it. That’s who you are. The two of you. Laurel and Hardy.

‘Thanks. Thanks a bunch.’

Lamia’s face became serious again. ‘Why don’t you have a woman of your own, Adam? What are you? Mid-thirties? You’re even quite handsome in an off hand, dean Martin kind of a way.’

‘A Dean Martin kind of a way? I look like Dean Martin?’

‘Yes. A little. And someone else. Some 1930s film actor I can’t remember. But it will come to me later. I’m certain of that.’

‘W. C. Fields?’

She punched him lightly on the arm. ‘But I’m serious, Adam. Most men have settled down by this time. Started a family. Yet you are living in a far bigger house than you can ever use. With a beautiful garden. In an exquisite part of America. Why aren’t you married? What’s wrong with you, Monsieur Sabir?’

‘I suppose you’re going to ask me now if I’m gay?’

‘No. I know you’re not gay.’

‘Oh yeah? And how do you figure that?’

‘By the way you responded earlier this evening when you helped me climb out of the window.’

Sabir could feel himself flushing. ‘Oh come on. I just hefted you for a split second. You might as well have been a sack of grain.’

‘I don’t think so. French women understand such things. I’m not saying you’re attracted to me. Don’t think that. But a woman knows when a man responds to her as a woman. Gay men don’t respond that way. You’re way straight, as the Americans say. So answer my question.’

Sabir laughed. But he was actually caught mid-way between embarrassment and awkwardness. He wasn’t used to women speaking to him in this way. Part of him liked it, and part of him wanted to be a million miles away. ‘It’s about my mother, I suppose.’

‘With men it usually is.’

Sabir rocked back against the pillar, surprised, once again, at Lamia’s directness. ‘It’s not what you think. Not the usual, I mean. During the better part of my adolescence and through into my twenties, my mother was always ill. I mean mentally ill, not physically. It got so bad sometimes that she had to be taken off to a clinic and tranquillized for weeks at a time to prevent her from committing suicide. It destroyed my father’s life. And I suppose it destroyed part of mine, too. I couldn’t bring anyone home, you see. And somehow it felt like a betrayal if I went with girls my mother would never get to meet. She wanted to be normal, Lamia. Desperately so. But there was something – some short circuit in her brain – that didn’t allow her to be. I went to college like everybody else. Had a few short-term affairs. Minor things, that didn’t mean anything. But I could never hold a woman. There was something detached in me – something damaged. When my father died three years ago, I was a 32-year-old man still living for the better part of the year at home.’

‘And your mother?’

‘Oh, she finally succeeded in what she’d been trying to do for half her lifetime. I was twenty-five, maybe twenty-six, when she took the Nembutal and slit her wrists. I was the one that found her. She did it like Seneca the Younger – in the bath. Only she left the taps running. The blood-stained water came cascading down the stairs like a waterfall. A heck of a way to go. As always, she involved everybody.’

‘But you loved her?’

‘I loved her and I hated her. Does that answer your question?’

Lamia put out a hand and squeezed his arm, but Sabir jerked unconsciously away from her, as if there was something he feared in her touch.