The Sleepless (39 page)

The two young men stared at each other, shrugged, and then did as they were told. The one who was smoking kept his cigarette in his hand, so that smoke appeared to be ribboning out of the top of his head. 

Tense, wide-eyed, Ralph circled around the table. One of the young men glanced around at him but Ralph instantly snapped at him, ‘Face the wall, you mother!’ 

‘Pardon me for looking,’ the young man replied, almost petulant. 

Ralph opened one kitchen drawer after another, until he found what he was looking for – knives. He took out the sharpest-looking, and proceeded to saw left-handed at the cords that bound Verna’s wrists and ankles together. 

‘I don’t know what kind of goddamn perverts you two are,’ he panted, as he cut through one cord after another. 

‘Just as well for you,’ said one of the men. 

He cut through the last of the cords. Wincing with pain, Verna slowly lowered her legs. Ralph dropped the knife, and stood close beside her, his arm protectively covering her back. ‘Do you think you can walk?’ he asked her. 

‘I don’t know,’ she told him. Feebly, she tried to snatch at his sleeve. 

‘Okay ... if you can’t walk, I’m going to have to carry you, fireman’s lift, okay? Try to sit up, that’s all. Just try to sit up.’ 

The young man with the cigarette turned around to face Ralph, and lowered his hands. Ralph shouted ‘Turn around! Turn back around! Are you deaf or something?’ 

The young man stayed where he was. He took a thin drag on his cigarette and then he said, ‘Can we assume from this misguided rescue mission that Mr Latomba is unable to find our money?’ 

‘For the last time, pal, I’m warning you, turn around!’ 

‘My dear sir, I need to know if I’ve been wasting my time here or not. If we can’t recover that money from Mr Latomba, then we’re going to have to find out where we
can
recover it from.’ 

‘Turn around!’ Ralph repeated. 

The young man stayed where he was, smoking, waiting, smiling. Then the other young man lowered his hands and turned around, too, and they both stood watching and waiting, as if they were daring Ralph to kill them. 

‘Come on, up,’ Ralph urged Verna. He went down on one knee beside the table, and managed to heave her onto his shoulder. She wasn’t heavy, he could feel her ribcage and her hips, and smell her perfume and her sweat. His arm, however, began to tremble with the strain. He must have pulled his shoulder when he swung out of the balcony, and his right hand was beginning to waver with the strain of holding up his .44 revolver, which weighed over 21bs. 

He climbed to his feet, grunting with the effort, stepping awkwardly sideways to retain his balance. 

‘Just stay back,’ he warned the white-faced young men. ‘I don’t want to shoot you but I will if I have to.’ 

‘I’m afraid that it’s not up to you to decide when we die,’ said the young man with the cigarette. He began to edge closer, shifting one of the kitchen chairs that was standing in his way. 

Ralph retreated towards the door, hefting Verna higher up. She was hanging on his shoulder as lifeless and uncooperative as a dead antelope, almost toppling him over. Her wrists and ankles must have become so numb that she couldn’t even balance herself. For some reason Ralph thought of his father, who had suffered from multiple sclerosis. One day his father had stood in front of an open fire, combing his hair in the mirror on top of the mantelpiece, totally unaware that his slippered foot was buried in the blazing logs, and that he was burning. 

He could remember his mother walking into the room and screaming, and that scream could still break his concentration, even today. 

Just as Ralph reached the kitchen door, the other young man dodged and whirled and danced his way around the table to block his escape. 

Ralph waved his gun at him. ‘Just get out of the way, okay? You understand what this is? A .44, it’ll blow your head off – shoulders, no head.’ 

The young man shrugged, and backed away, his hands lifted in a gesture of appeasement. ‘It’s all right, friend ... no need to get over-excited.’ 

Out of the corner of his eye, Ralph glimpsed the other young man trying to creep closer. He swung around, and the young man went for him, and this time he fired, the good old Ralph Brossard reflex. The gun bucked, and the kitchen seemed to expand with the deafening boom of an overcharged .44 bullet fired at close range. He saw the young man’s lapels rip open, tatters of black cloth. He saw smoke, and the young man twisting around in it, falling, dropping to the floor. 

But instead of falling all the way to the floor, the young man kept on twisting around, almost like a Cossack dancer, and then he rose again, up through the smoke, smiling, and confronted Ralph with the same insouciance that he had confronted him before. 

‘I told you,’ he smiled. ‘It’s not up to you to decide when we die.’ 

Ralph fired again, what the hell. The gun’s recoil whipped his arm up and strained his other shoulder. The young man’s jacket burst into shreds of black, and he let out a smoky gasp, but that was all. Ralph fired again, although he knew it was useless. 

He heard somebody beating on the front door. It sounded like Patrice. ‘Brossard! Brossard! What the hell is going
down
in
there, man?’ 

‘It’s okay!’ he shouted back. ‘It’s okay! I’ve got Verna, everything’s cool!’ 

The young man let out an empty laugh. ‘Everything’s cool? Everything’s cool? I don’t think so! I think that everything’s
hot.
’ 

He approached Ralph and his coat was still fuming with gunpowder smoke. His eyes were bloody and expressionless. Ralph lifted up his .44 but the young man simply moved away the barrel, and said, ‘No, that’s not the way.’ 

‘I’m taking this woman out of here,’ said Ralph. 

‘Of course,’ the young man agreed. ‘You’re taking her out of here ... way out of here, and far, far away. Where she’ll be safe.’ 

He reached into the pocket of his ruined jacket and produced a small disc of copper and bronze, which he held up in front of his face between finger and thumb. 

‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked, calmly. 

Ralph took an unbalanced step backward. ‘I don’t give a shit. I’m taking this woman out of here, and that’s all there is to it.’ 

‘But look at it ... ‘ the young man encouraged him, holding the disc higher, in front of his eyes. ‘Doesn’t it make you feel sleepy ... doesn’t it make you feel tired? Doesn’t it make you feel like putting Verna down for just a moment, and taking a well-earned rest?’ 

‘You’re out of your mind,’ Ralph told him. But all the same, he found it impossible to take his eyes away from the copper-and-bronze disc, which seemed to glint at him with knowing simplicity.
All your problems could be copper. All your hardships could be bronze. All of your stresses and all of your strains – every guilt and every anxiety – they could be just as simple as me.
 

A circle within a circle. Like every relationship in the galaxy, like planets within planets, like wheels within wheels.
 

The young man said, ‘You’re feeling tired, I’ll bet.’ 

‘I’m leaving.’ 

‘Sure you’re leaving. We don’t mind if you leave. What’s it to us? Mr Latomba has lost our money, the pigeons have flown the coop.’ He slowly blinked his blood-red eyes and in his blood-red eyes Ralph saw birds slowly flying, flapping their wings, slowly turning over blood-red beaches, where congealing oceans glutinously stirred. He couldn’t stop himself from staring at the copper-and-bronze disc, and somehow the copper-and-bronze disc seemed to wink and sparkle. 

He found himself plunging through the warm and bloody surf, into the sea. The sun shone for an instant through the foam, and the foam was pink; and then it was darkness, an overwhelming darkness, and growing chillier, too, but he kept on swimming deeper, because he had to swim deeper. 

‘What are you afraid of?’ the young man’s voice asked him. 

‘Fire ... my father burned his foot in the fire.’ 

‘Ah, fire! You shouldn’t be afraid of fire. Fire is our friend.’ 

He swam deeper still; and the deeper he swam, the colder he became. He was sure that he could feel his body working, all around him, like a silent, busy machine. 

Fire,
he thought. 

Fire is my friend –
not realizing that he wasn’t swimming at all, but shuffling across the Latombas’ kitchen in a deep hypnotic trance, bumping into the table, colliding with the chairs, still carrying Verna, helpless, on his shoulder. His right arm dropped down, and his heavy revolver clattered onto the plastic-tiled floor. Neither Bryan nor Joseph made any attempt to pick it up. They didn’t have to. It wasn’t for anybody else to decide when they were going to die. 

‘Brossard!’ shouted Patrice, pounding at the door. ‘Brossard! What’s happening in there?’ 

Bryan smiled at Joseph and Joseph smiled back. Verna started to twist and struggle, trying to wrench herself free, but Ralph was gripping her with unnatural strength – the same strength that had enabled Michael to bend the arm of Dr Rice’s chair – and she was weakened and numbed by her long ordeal on the kitchen table. 

‘–
go! Let me – go!
’ she gasped, but Ralph reached around with his right hand and seized her hair and wrenched her head back so hard that the sinews in her neck made a sharp crackling noise and he almost killed her on the spot. She let out a thin, airless scream – but, lost in his trance, Ralph was unable to hear her. 

He believed that he was rising from the sea now, and that he was wading toward the shore. The sky was as black as freshly spilled blood. In the middle distance he could see a fire flickering, and ashes whirling into the wind. A tall man in a grey coat was standing not far away from the fire, his hands in his pockets, his bone-white hair blowing across his face. He had never seen this man before, but somehow he knew who he was, and that they had always been destined to meet. 

He walked across the sand and closer to the fire – so close that he could feel its heat against his hands and his face. The man said,
‘Hallo, Ralph,’
without even opening his mouth; and Ralph thought,
It’s him – it’s Mr Hillary.
 

At the same time, with Verna grasped tightly around the neck, he was twisting the knobs that turned on the front two burners of her gas hob. They popped alight, and Ralph passed his bare hand across them, back and forth, two or three times, so that he could feel their heat. There was a strong smell of scorching as the hairs on the back of his hand shrivelled and smoked, but he didn’t even flinch. 

‘It’s cold, isn’t it, Ralph?’
said Mr Hillary.
‘Let’s get ourselves warm, shall we? Huddle up to the fire.’
 

Ralph held out both hands, as close to the fire as he could. It was burning up fiercely now, a small orange-hot cavern of driftwood and broken packing-cases. He was fascinated by the bright sparks that crawled along the logs and then whirled up into the blood-coloured sky. He felt as if he wanted to pick one of the burning logs up in his hands so that he could watch it more closely. 

‘Fire is our friend, Ralph,’
said Mr Hillary. 

In the kitchen, he seized Verna by the nape of the neck, his fingers digging deep into her nerves. She tried to escape by scratching furiously at his face, and by hitting him with her elbow, and by groping for his testicles. She screamed again and again, but he took no notice. His eyes were wide open but he didn’t blink once, even when she raked his left cheek with her broken fingernails, all the way down from the side of his eye to the corner of his mouth. 

‘Fire is our friend,’ he repeated. Blood ran down his face in four distinct rivulets, and dripped onto his collar. ‘Do you hear that?
Fire is our friend
!’ 

Verna shrieked,
‘No!’
and
‘no!’
and
‘no!’,
her face grotesquely contorted with fear and pain. She tried to escape by collapsing onto her knees, but Ralph mercilessly dragged her upright. Then, without hesitation, he slammed her face-down into one of the lighted gas-burners. 

And held her there. 

And held her there.
 

Verna’s hair flared up. Her whole head became a ball of orange flame. Out of her blistering lips came a cry that didn’t sound human at all – a screeching, endless, off-key wail, like somebody dragging a chisel across the entire width of a blackboard – until Ralph briefly lifted her head and slammed it back onto the burner. She breathed in, and she breathed in burning gas. 

It took only seconds for her hair to burn into glowing, sparkling clumps. The gas jets roared at her forehead and fiercely consumed her ears. Her cheeks reddened and shrivelled and her skin burst open, like the skin of a roasted red pepper. 

All the time she jerked and struggled and thrashed, but Ralph pressed her face hard and unforgiving against the burner, even though his own left hand was burning, and flames were beginning to lick up the sleeve of his coat.