Blayney Doppelgangers

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-910901-45-8
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 250 Seiten

Twelve-ish. Shade in the Murillo gardens, as satisfying as lemonade. In the heat, just for a moment, Miguel stood in front of me. The old Miguel, not the one we've got now. The fuzzy image held its hand out and led me to the old Arab wall. When we were first married, we tried to climb it in the middle of the night. A celebration. 'This wall's been here hundreds of years,' Miguel said. 'If we can conquer that, we can conquer anything.' I believed him. I open my eyes and he's gone. In these slippery stories the truth and the possible weave as unexpected lives, complicated minds and exotic spaces are sketched in with nimble words and quick wit. Ghosts torment from the past; future selves write back; the lost look about, find themselves watched, are lead astray. Keep company with thieves and murdering artists, with the couple who miss the ferry for their make-or-break holiday; the mayonnaise deliveryman who becomes a reluctant golddigger, and the psychoanalyst and his GP wife investigate a local widow's naked appearances in church. Between these pages you can never be sure quite who you'll meet next, but you can be sure that you're in safe hands. An intriguing new collection from a writer you'll want to keep an eye on.

Mark Blayney won the Somerset Maugham Prize for Two Kinds of Silence. His story 'The Murder of Dylan Thomas' was a Seren Short Story of the Month and he's published poems and stories in Agenda, Poetry Wales, The Interpreter's House, The London Magazine and the delinquent. His second book Conversations with Magic Stones was described by John Bayley as 'remarkable... as good as some of the best of Elizabeth Bowen's, and praise does not go higher than that.' Mark performs comedy as well as MCing regularly.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Blayney, Mark

Leseproben

2: The lover

Aldo taught me some basic Cuban salsa steps because he said it would help me meet women. I find it hard to talk to people. I don’t have an interesting job and I’m no good at chit-chat. Aldo has a friendly face, a belly like a shelf and tiny, nimble feet. He’s been single as long as I have but has a more optimistic expression than me, and somehow that makes his condition less permanent.

It doesn’t matter here anyway. Women will dance with me because their much better looking boyfriends are always clinging to the bar like cockles, too fearful to dance. They don’t mind me dancing with their girlfriends as it takes the pressure off, and I don’t mind when they go back because there’s usually someone else to dance with.

In a break I stood at the bar and the unsmiling waitress poured red wine with ice without asking me what I wanted. When I moved up here I thought it was crazy that people put ice and water in red wine. What are you doing, I thought, watching Eduardo in Eduardo’s, spinning the top from the bottle, splashing it in the glass, throwing in ice, topping it up with water. Sometimes he even sticks lemon juice in there. What are you doing, and what else is in that fridge that you might put into red wine if I hang around long enough?

Yet like many strange things, soon it becomes normal and after it becomes normal, before you know it you’re asking for it yourself.

I danced a couple of times with a girl called Lia and pretended not to notice Aldo’s enthusiastic eyebrow raisings and encouraging winks. The man has a face like a lighthouse sometimes, it’s surprising I could concentrate enough on the steps. Lia was pretty; she had large round eyes and a curviness made all the more alluring because she wasn’t very tall; she looked up at me as we danced and I held her waist and couldn’t help getting to know her figure. Aldo was practically red in the face and whistling like a kettle as he watched and for the first time since I met him, I wanted to thump his fat face and tell him to move his little nimble feet outside and take up smoking or something.

I steered Lia over to the bar and the waitress, her face now like a piece of rock because the lights had gone blue, spun the lid from the red wine.

Lia and I talked and drank, and she looked up at me with those huge brown eyes, and Aldo danced over and we all introduced each other. Aldo and I work at the car factory, spraying the doors. Lia nodded with a convincing attempt at looking interested.

Aldo danced away, the lights flashing red and green on his big bald head, and Lia and I smiled at cards on the counter and I touched her back as we spoke. She leant into my arm and we stood with our arms round each other for a while, rotating the glass and pretending to complain to Miss Stony-Face that it was too warm. She pretended not to understand, and we all had good fun pretending to be annoyed with each other. I asked Lia what she did, and she leant forward to whisper something in my ear. ‘I do this,’ she said, and kissed me.

I must have looked disappointed when we eventually broke away from each other because she kissed me again, this time more sensuously, and my hand slipped and slid along the back of her dress and for about a year and a half the music and the flashing lights vanished. The big brown eyes were close to me now, framed by a glossy fringe of hair, and I looked down and tried to change my expression.

‘It’s okay,’ she said, squeezing my hand. ‘I like you. So it’s free.’

I didn’t believe her and shook my head. Thinking I couldn’t hear, she took a napkin from the bar and stole the waitress’s pencil. ‘Lia and Paulo, €O,’ she wrote, the ‘O’ as big and as round and as friendly as her eyes.

‘Let’s have another dance,’ I said, and put the warm drink down. Lia nodded and pulled me to the dance floor. The band moved up a gear and a trumpet appeared for one of the tracks. A couple had an argument, and danced more sensuously afterwards as a result.

Lia told me she was from Guatemala and couldn’t go anywhere in Europe but Spain, and that this made her sad, but it was okay, because she liked dancing. She looked for a moment like she might get tearful, and this gave me an opportunity to kiss her head and smell her hair.

She held her head against my chest and nuzzled my shirt absently as the music slowed down a fraction and the band played their last couple of songs. When they stopped, there were good-natured boos from the crowd and cries of ‘one more!’ as we formed, without noticing we were doing it, a semi-circle around the band. Just one more fast song, and then just one more faster song, and then the band stopped and this time it was definitely over, and the musicians smiled wide white smiles and packed their instruments away and tried to shuffle past the applause.

‘Why not?’ said Lia, her mouth small and moist and brushing my cheek, and I shook my head and she repeated the question, and I couldn’t think of a good reason why not, so I said yes. My ears rang with the music, I could still hear it although it was long-finished, and it seemed hard not to dance out of the room to its invisible rhythm.

Outside we were about to walk home when Lia saw some friends across the road, and waved. While she chatted away and her friends looked me up and down, I asked one of them quietly if Lia was all right.

‘Yes, she will go with you,’ she said.

‘No I meant, can I trust her?’

The friend tugged Lia’s arm. ‘He’s asking if he can trust you.’

She tipped her bag out on the table and made funny breathing noises as she turned over coins, combs and make-up until she found her phone. She sent a brief message that she didn’t give any thought to, then examined a small envelope stuffed with notes. When I came back from the bathroom she had disappeared. I found her in the bedroom, naked and standing by the wardrobe. She smiled at me. ‘Beautiful,’ she said, and I guessed she was talking to her reflection.

She pulled away from me before time, and slid down and kissed me, taking hair from her eyes, and squeezed on me until I came and the room flashed red as it shot hot as a poker across me. She licked and massaged me and snuggled into my side and fell asleep with a deep snore.

Later I lay in the dark and heard her move. Something about the friend we had met by the river struck me as wrong. I saw Lia standing by the wardrobe and wondered what she had been looking for. Without waking her I reached on the floor for my trousers, took my credit card and put it in my pants. I left the wallet where it was; if she wanted to take some cash, I didn’t mind. I knew she would be gone by morning.

Falling asleep like descending stairs two at a time, I had strange dreams about her being on the roof, climbing across the tiles, slipping down them and looking up at the moon for guidance. The moon raced through clouds, halving and waning and becoming full again like a wine goblet emptying and filling with milk. Waking around four she was still beside me, breathing shallowly, an arm across my back. ‘I wish you were real,’ I found myself whispering to her skin; all that red wine had made me sentimental.

In the morning she kissed me. She tipped her bag out. ‘Ah, me me. Women.’ She jumped up and down, naked. ‘There you are.’ She took her phone, held it suspiciously, then dropped it on the bed. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said, as I was tying the cord on my trousers. She made me untie them, rubbed a hand up and down me and laughed; a high-pitched, joyous snort.

She sang in the shower; a song about a horse and carriage, and the horse went on strike, and the driver had to pull the carriage and the horse sat in the back, its hooves resting on the window. When she emerged she took her dress from the floor and pulled it over her head.

‘Lunch?’ I asked, and the word felt large and unwieldy as it came from my mouth; she smiled and shook her head, and said she had to go. The root around in her bag again; it was like stirring stew. A long slinky dress emerged, magically appearing from a bag that didn’t look large enough to contain it. She held it up against herself and asked me what I thought. She pulled out a white flower, and put it in her hair and danced with me, then looked under the bed for her shoes. She wrote her number on a piece of paper.

She looked sad as she kissed my shirt. ‘I am nothing,’ she said.

‘No you’re not. You’re – ’

But she was gone. I watched her go down the street, swinging her bag, my wallet still sitting inconspicuously on the table beside me.

I made some breakfast and talked to myself. The cat came in, wondering what the noise was, and demanded food and stalked out with a contemptuous arch when I didn’t move from my seat.

‘There’s something not right,’ I said to the bread. ‘There’s no such thing as free. Is there? There has to be a price. Doesn’t there?’ The bread looked back at me blankly.

I felt guilty when I rifled through my wallet and checked she hadn’t taken anything. This act, not what happened last night, but this fingering of banknotes, counting them, made me feel dirty.

I remembered, with a piece of ham halfway to my mouth, that she’d said she was Guatemalan and could not move round Europe. Dropping the food to the returned cat, who leapt out of the way as I ran upstairs, I tipped the drawers out. My passport was there, with paper clips and staples still stuck to it.

Not the passport then. And my credit card lay in the bed, looking at home in the crumpled sheets. I looked up and caught my reflection in the mirror, rifling through my possessions, caught in the act of stealing them. For a...