He knocked on the first inner door he came to. Darko opened it. A Transylvanian confrontation, just for a second: Darko's eyes were redder than his red hair, redder than the Maestro. He looked Richard up and down, and said, as if identifying him by name, "Charisma bypass." Very soon they were standing in a room roughly the size of a tennis court and filled with furniture that might have come from anywhere or even everywhere: from the SCRs of provincial sociology departments, from business hotels, from schoolrooms, from barracks.
Turning, Richard said boldly, "Where are you from, Darko? Originally."
"From the place I still call Yugoslavia.?
Darko was standing in the middle of the room's kitchen district and staring down at some kind of foodstuff splayed on a plate. Now he looked up, and smiled. Long upper lip with a feathery mustache on it; long upper gum, also gingery in hue.
"Are you Serb or Croat? Out of interest."
"I don't accept that distinction."
"Yes. Well. There isn't any ethnic distinction, is there. Just religion. Nothing visible." On the mantelpiece Richard thought he saw a devotional knickknack or icon, lit from within by a bulb the shape of a closed tulip; it was the Virgin Mary (he sensed), but travestied, with joke breasts outthrust like the figure of a redoubtable maiden on a ship's prow. "Isn't there some big deal about the sequence of making the sign of the cross? In the war, in the world war, Croat soldiers rounded up children and got them to make the sign of the cross. To see which way they did it. To see if they lived or died."
This was obviously news to Darko: fresh information. Richard tried to relax himself with the following thought: that nowadays, in a sense, you could know more about a stranger than the stranger knew about himself. Recently he had involved himself in an argument on his doorstep with a proselytizing Mormon (soon to be sent on his way with a taunt) who had never heard of Moroni: Moroni, the nineteenth-century American angel, the Messiah of the wild-goose chase in whose name the bearded ranter trudged from house to house. Big clue, that: Moroni. Moron with an i on the end of it. Moronic without the c.
Darko said, "I believe that everyone is a human being."
"I buy that too. Belladonna, I take it, is a human being. I mean I assume she exists. Where is she?"
"Getting dressed. Getting undressed. What's the diff? Now what do I do with this cholesterol bomb?"
He gestured at the dish and what it contained. The dish glowed back up at him like the palette of a busy artist: some modern primitive who worked in pastels.
"Bung it in the fucking MW," Darko decided.
MW equaled microwave. That was good. The word had fewer syllables than its abbreviation. Especially good, especially self-defeating, because the microwave was a device intended to cheat time. Anyway Darko had already heated it, and was already eating it-his mango pizza or pomegranate rissole-with both hands… On a video he'd hired and admired, Richard remembered the motorist hero referring to his FWD, or four-wheel drive. One might add that there are certain frolicsome cosmologists who refer to "the WYSIWYG universe," or "What You See Is What You
"Will Belladonna be joining us? And tell me more," said Richard, making sure there was plenty of amusement in his tone, "about her thing with Gwyn Barry."
Darko held up a ringer while he finished a demanding mouthful, one that involved much tongue work on all four sets of molars. At last he said, "Who?"
"Belladonna."
"You mean Diva. She's called Diva now. Now I don't know Diva mega-well."
"Is that right."
"With men, everywhere you look there's Divagate."
No, not divagate: Divagate. Like Watergate, etcetera.
"A lot going on," Richard suggested. "More than meets the eye."
"She gives good girlrock, I reckon. Yep."
Richard went on standing there.
"Oh yeh," said Darko with resignation. "Diva's wild for the wild thing."
"Have you known her mega-long? Where is she, for instance?"
Darko excused himself and left the room through a door beyond the kitchen. When he came back he looked at Richard suddenly and said, "Who are you?"
"Richard. Who are you?"
"Ranko."
"You mean Darko."
"Darko is my twin brother. He's Croat. I'm Serb. We look the same but we've got nothing in common."
"Well you both eat pizza. You've still got a bit of it hanging from your mustache."
The man stood there neutrally, continuing to clean his teeth with his tongue. "She's getting up," he said. "Me I'm off out.?
Richard was alone in the room he should never have entered for only five or six turbulent seconds, while one door closed and another opened. If you could have micro-monitored this time frame you would have found: fear of injury, disease and murder, fear of the dark that was now descending, fear of poverty, of poor rooms, fear of Gina and her swelling irises; despair for the stranded self and its timidly humming blood; and, among all these fears and hates, the sense of relief, of clarity and surety a man feels, at the prospect of temptation, when he knows he has washed his cock before leaving the house. He took one smeared glance at Diva as she came slanting into the room and thought: hopeless. He's safe. I'm safe. Not deadly nightshade. Just poison ivy. We're all safe.
"Hi."
"Hi."
"Richard," she said.
"Diva."
She turned a full circle and looked up at him, saying, "Belladonna. That's me."
Richard surveyed her, now (he felt), with a census-taker's detachment. No doubt she would have laughed in his face to hear him say so (she was probably a goth or a grrrl or a bombo: I haven't yet read the Saturday newspapers, he thought, with a self-fortifying swallow, but Belladonna was a punk. That is to say, she had gone at herself as if to obliterate the natural gifts. Her mascara she wore like a burglar's eye-mask; her lipstick was approximate and sanguinary, her black hair spiked and lopped and asymmetrical, like the pruned trees outside the window. Punk was physical democracy. And it said: let's all be ugly together. This notion held a lot of automatic appeal for Richard-for Richard, who would not mind being poor if no one was rich, who would not mind looking rough if no one looked smooth, who would not mind being old if no one was young. He certainly didn't mind being nuts, though, however many were sane; in fact he was really enjoying it, and believed it was the only good thing that had happened to him for years. She was very young and very small and very brown. With effective perversity she wore her underwear as overwear: floppy pink knickers over the black cycling pants; tight white bra emblazoning the black T-shirt. Her voice was London. Richard could not place her, ethnically. He thought she probably came from some island.