for instance) where the rich had once journeyed to experience the thrilling stink of poverty, the smell of danger, and the just-contained threat of violence born of envy.
Here also were the signs of fragmentation, of religious confusion, of sects decadent and strict. Wild-haired holymen in loincloths, palm-readers, seers, revolutionaries without followings (the Hups, the Namers, the L.A.K.). Gurus in helicopters flew through the air, whilst bandits roamed the countryside in search of travellers who were no longer intent on adventure and the beauty of nature, but were forced to travel by necessity and who moved in nervous groups, well-armed and thankful to be alive when they returned.
It was an edgy and distrustful group of people that made up our society, motivated by nothing but their self- preservation and their blind belief in their next Chance. To the Fastalogians they were nothing but cattle. Their sole function was to provide a highly favourable inter-galactic balance of payments.
It was through these streets that I strode, muttering, continually on the verge of either anger or tears. I was cut adrift, unconnected. My face in the mirror at morning was not the face that my mind had started living with. It was a battered, red, broken-nosed face, marked by great quizzical eyebrows, intense black eyes, and tangled wiry hair. I had been through the lottery and lost. I had got myself the body of an ageing street-fighter. It was a body built to contain furies. It suited me. The arrogant Gurus and the ugly Hups stepped aside when I stormed down their streets on my daily course between the boarding house where I lived to the Department of Parks where I was employed as a gardener. I didn’t work much. I played cards with the others. The botanical gardens were slowly being choked by “Burning Glory,” a prickly crimson flowering bush the Fastalogians had imported either by accident or design. It was our job to remove it. Instead, we used it as cover for our cheating card games. Behind its red blazing hedges we lied and fought and, on occasion, fornicated. We were not a pretty sight.
It was from here that I walked back to the boarding house with my beer under my arm, and it was on a Tuesday afternoon that I saw her, just beyond the gardens and a block down from the Chance Centre in Grove Street. She was sitting on the footpath with a body beside her, an old man, his hair white and wispy, his face brown and wrinkled like a walnut. He was dressed very formally in a three-piece grey suit and had an old-fashioned watch chain across the waistcoat. I assumed that the corpse was her grandfather. Since the puppet government had dropped its funeral assistance plan this was how poor people raised money for funerals. It was a common sight to see dead bodies in rented suits being displayed on the footpaths. So it was not the old man who attracted my attention but the young woman who sat beside him.
“Money,” she said, “money for an old man to lie in peace.”
I stopped willingly. She had her dark hair cut quite short and rather badly. Her eyebrows were full, but perfectly arched, her features were saved from being too regular by a mouth that was wider than average. She wore a khaki shirt, a navy blue jacket, filthy trousers and a small gold earring in her right ear.
“I’ve only got beer,” I said, “I’ve spent all my money on beer.”
She grinned a broad and beautiful grin which illuminated her face and made me echo it.
“I’d settle for a beer.” And I was surprised to hear shyness.
I sat down on the footpath and we opened the six-pack. Am I being sentimental when I say I shared my beer without calculation? That I sought nothing? It seems unlikely for I had some grasping habits as you’ll see soon enough. But I remember nothing of the sort, only that I liked the way she opened the beer bottle. Her hands were large, a bit messed-up. She hooked a broken-nailed finger into the ring-pull and had it off without even looking at what she was doing.
She took a big swallow, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and said: “Shit, I needed that.”
I muttered something about her grandfather, trying to make polite conversation. I was out of the habit.
She shrugged and put the cold bottle on her cheek. “I got him from the morgue.”
I didn’t understand.
“I bought him for three IGs.” She grinned, tapping her head with her middle finger. “Best investment I’ve ever made.”
It was this, more than anything, that got me. I admired cunning in those days, smart moves, cards off the bottom of the deck, anything that tricked the bastards-and “the bastards” were everyone who wasn’t me.
So I laughed. A loud deep joyful laugh that made passers-by stare at me. I gave them the fingers-up and they looked away.
She sat on her hands, rocking back and forth on them as she spoke. She had a pleasantly nasal, idiosyncratic voice, slangy and relaxed. “They really go for white hair and tanned faces.” She nodded towards a paint tin full of coins and notes. “It’s pathetic isn’t it? I wouldn’t have gotten half this much for my real grandfather. He’s too dark. Also, they don’t like women much. Men do much better than women.”
She had the slightly exaggerated toughness of the very young. I wondered if she’d taken a Chance. It didn’t look like it.
We sat and drank the beer. It started to get dark. She lit a mosquito coil and we stayed there in the gloom till we drank the whole lot.
When the last bottle was gone, the small talk that had sustained us went away and left us in an uneasy area of silence. Now suspicion hit me with its fire-hot pinpricks. I had been conned for my beer. I would go home and lie awake without its benefits. It would be a hot sleepless night and I would curse myself for my gullibility. I, who was shrewd and untrickable, had been tricked.
But she stood and stretched and said, “Come on, now I’ve drunk your beer, I’ll buy you a meal.”
We walked away and left the body for whoever wanted it. I never saw the old man again.
The next day he was gone.
2.
I cannot explain what it was like to sit in a restaurant with a woman. I felt embarrassed, awkward, and so pleased that I couldn’t put one foot straight in front of the other.
I fancy I was graciously old-fashioned.
I pulled out her chair for her, I remember, and saw the look she shot me, both pleased and alarmed. It was a shocked, fast flick of the eyes. Possibly she sensed the powerful fantasies that lonely men create, steel columns of passion appended with leather straps and tiny mirrors.
It was nearly a year since I’d talked to a woman, and that one stole my money and even managed to lift two blankets from my sleeping body. Twelve dull stupid drugged and drunken months had passed, dissolving from the dregs of one day into the sink of the next.
The restaurant was one of those Fasta Cafeterias that had sprung up, noisy, messy, with harsh lighting and long rows of bright white tables that were never ever filled. The service was bad and in the end we went to the kitchen where we helped ourselves from the long trays of food, Fastalogian salads with their dried intoxicating mushrooms, and that strange milky pap they are so fond of. She piled her plate high with everything and I envied the calm that allowed her such an appetite. On any other night I would have done the same, guzzling and gorging myself on my free meal.
Finally, tripping over each other, we returned to our table. She bought two more beers and I thanked her for that silently.
Here I was. With a woman. Like real people.
I smiled broadly at the thought. She caught me and was, I think, pleased to have something to hang on to. So we got hold of that smile and wrung it for all it was worth.
Being desperate, impatient, I told her the truth about the smile. The directness was pleasing to her. I watched how she leant into my words without fear or reservation, displaying none of the shiftiness that danced through most social intercourse in those days. But I was as calculating and cunning as only the very lonely learn how to be. Estimating her interest, I selected the things which would be most pleasing for her. I steered the course of what I told, telling her things about me which fascinated her most. She was pleased by my confessions. I gave her many. She was strong and young and confident. She couldn’t see my deviousness and, no matter what I told her of loneliness, she couldn’t taste the stale self-hating afternoons or suspect the callousness they engendered.
And I bathed in her beauty, delighting in the confidence it brought her, the certainty of small mannerisms, the chop of that beautiful rough-fingered hand when making a point. But also, this: the tentative question marks she
