Primavera was sitting next to me. Her head was on my shoulder, she was clutching my arm tightly, and she was crying. She was shaking like a leaf, too.
A man stood facing us. He asked me in Spanish if we would be all right. I looked at him blankly. ‘How the fuck would I know?’ I said, in English. He must have thought that I had meant ‘Yes’, for he nodded and disappeared back up a flight of stairs, to the restaurant.
I looked down at Prim again, and I saw my phone in the breast pocket of her shirt. I remembered, and I knew. My mind still wouldn’t form the words, ‘Jan is dead’, but I knew all right. Mike Dylan’s cracking voice on the phone, the look of unprecedented fear on Prim’s face as she had picked it up, and now her racking, helpless sobs, far different from the tears of relief which she had shed earlier.
Horror. It was a word you saw in bookshops over a rack of shelves filled with names like Koontz, Barker and Stoker. It was an adjective used with movies. It was a concept from wars long before my time. It wasn’t a word that was meant to figure in my chaotic, but comfortable, life.
Yet now it did; now it consumed me. I sat there, in that dingy, musky, dusty cellar and I felt myself becoming cocooned in it: in a chrysalis of pure horror. It was numbing; it brought out beads of sweat which clung to my forehead like little chips of ice. ‘Where are my tears?’ I demanded of myself as Prim sobbed beside me, but it was too, too cold for weeping.
I closed my eyes and, clear as day, Jan’s face swam into my vision, her dark hair shining as if moonlit, her head tilted back slightly, her eyes giving me her knowing look, light laughter on her lips. ‘It’s all right,’ I told myself, ‘it was a dream.’ But then, as if to mock me, red blood began to froth from her mouth. It ran in thick lines from her nostrils, and from her ears, down her cheeks and chin to form a river round her neck.
I opened my eyes again, to drive away the vision, but it would not go. Whatever I did I had to confront it. I twisted my head, this way and that, but still it was before me, until at last I felt my mouth twist, and I heard myself scream, ‘No! No! No!’
Then Prim was on her feet, still crying, but wrapping her arms around my head, pressing my face against her. ‘Oz, oh Oz,’ she whispered. ‘This can’t be happening.’
But she couldn’t break through my chrysalis, through my cold carapace. Nothing could crack that. I seized her arms above the elbows, near the shoulders, in my hands, gripping hard enough to bruise, and forced her away from me. I held her at arm’s length and I spoke to her in a voice that I had never owned before.
‘You talked to him? You talked to Dylan?’
She nodded, helpless in my grip.
‘Tell me what he said.’
‘Let me go, Oz. You’re hurting me.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I will, but Oz, you’re breaking my arms.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Oz,’ she wept. ‘Please don’t punish me for being alive.’
At last, her pain got through to me: I let her go, noticing the furious red and white weals which my madman’s strength had left on her skin, noticing, but dispassionately, still not caring much.
‘What did Mike say, Prim?’ I asked her yet again, but patiently this time. ‘I remember he was talking to me, but that’s all. Then we were down here.’
She sat down again beside me, in her dining chair, with its bentwood back, and she began to stroke my arm, with her right hand, gently; up, down, up, down, ruffling the soft blond hairs, then smoothing them down again, ruffling, smoothing. I watched her, knowing that I didn’t really want her to speak.
She did, though, as I had demanded of her, more fool me. She spoke, and changed my life.
‘Dylan told me that Jan is dead, Oz. He said that she was found this evening. He couldn’t say any more, he was too upset. But he gave me a couple of numbers for you to call, when you’re ready.’
Her tears came again. ‘Oh, Oz. I am so, so sorry.’
I was still numb, and by now I was taking relief in it. I looked at her, and I said, ‘I’ll bet.’
She looked at me as if I’d slapped her. I saw her hurt, but I was impervious to it. No, nothing got through my cocoon.
A small part of my rational brain knew all this, and made me realise that I had to use my horror as a shield. It wouldn’t hold for ever, I knew, but while it did, I could be functional. Once it gave out. .
So I cherished my coldness, and I hung on to it. To read that sort of book, they say you must suspend disbelief. In my need, I did it the other way round; I suspended belief.
‘Come on,’ I told her, standing as I spoke. ‘We can’t stay here. We have to go. I have things to do.’
She nodded, wiping her tears with the back of her hand. ‘Okay. Do you want to go back to your hotel?’
I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I hadn’t thought my way past the top of the staircase, in fact. I handed the controls to my ice-cold auto pilot, and let myself go by instinct. ‘No, I can’t be with them. They’re friends but they’re strangers too. I need privacy for what I have to do. Take me to the apartment.’
Primavera looked at me. ‘Are you sure? Is that-’
‘Right and proper, you were going to say? I don’t give a monkey’s about that. What Dylan said isn’t right or fucking proper either. I need privacy if I’m to deal with it. So come on. I’ll drive.’
The man in the restaurant wasn’t going to take any money, but I insisted on paying for what we had ordered. The Faustino III was on the table, not yet uncorked: having paid for it, I took it with me.
The hamlet of St Marti d’ Empuries, in the municipal district of L’Escala, lies just over an hour and a half away, by the Autopista, from the centre of Barcelona. Prim’s car had a sporty engine, and so I did it in an hour and fifteen minutes. Neither of us said a word all the way up the road. I was aware that my speed was making her nervous, but I didn’t care, comfortable as I was within my icy state. Once she reached for the temperature control on the heater panel, turning it into the red zone, but I twisted it back to the blue minimum straight away.
The lights were still on in Meson del Conde when I drove into the square and parked beyond the church. Even before I switched off the engine, Prim jumped out, ran to the ground level entrance to the apartment, opened it and pounded up the stairs to the living area. I followed her, carrying the Faustino; as I stepped inside and closed the door, I heard loud retching sounds coming from the bathroom.
I raised the shutters, opened the glass door and stepped out on to the terrace, gulping in deep lungfuls of the cold night air, as if it was fuel for my mood. I don’t know how long I’d been there, looking out at the sea, when her voice sounded behind me. ‘I’m sorry about that, but all of a sudden. .’ I shrugged my shoulders, my back still to her.
‘I’ll put on some coffee,’ she volunteered.
I stretched out my left hand, behind me, offering her the Faustino. ‘Open that too, and let it stand for a bit.’ As she took it from me, I said, ‘Remember the last time I stood here, and I told you that I was going back? Back to Jan?’
An indistinct murmur came from behind me.
‘God works in mysterious ways, eh Prim. Let me tell you something, love: something you can believe. There is no God; he chucked it years ago. I think he probably gave up in disgust back in the thirties. Now there’s only the other fella, and he’s got the monopoly.
‘I’ll tell you something about Hell too. They say it’s hot. Wrong: fucking freezing, you take that from me.’
I turned towards her. ‘You got those numbers Dylan gave you?’
She nodded, took one of the restaurant cards from her shirt pocket, and handed it to me, together with my phone. ‘Oz,’ she asked me. ‘Why was it Dylan who phoned you?’
‘He and his bird are friends of ours in Glasgow. He works there now, like us.’
I took the numbers from her, and sat down on the couch, beside Prim’s phone, but before calling Dylan, I retrieved the charge card for the hotel restaurant from my jacket and dialled the number. The night porter grumbled for a bit, but eventually he did as he was told and connected me with Senor Davis’s suite.