I smile at my reflection in the flawed mirror as I shave. The eyes are the same eyes that stare back at me as a boy, now set in an older face. With my razor I trace the course of the scar – hardly visible now, just another fold of falling skin – through the lather in a crescent from my temple to my lip. Suddenly my smile freezes, concern mists my eyes and for a moment an unspeakable panic threatens to overwhelm me. I can’t remember how I got the scar.
As a boy of ten I am small even for my age, I remember that. And I can remember the room in our house, its terra-cotta walls secret beneath the paintings. I remember too the feeling that humans are incidental here, that the house exists not for them but for the others, the people from the labyrinth: the cobbler in the red fez, the veiled women haggling with a rug seller in the souk, kiff-smokers drowsing at their pipes, the beautiful Arab girl on the beach at Merkala…
I recall them all in every detail but I can’t remember how I got the scar.
Is it simply this, that because I’m a writer and live in my own head the narrative of my off-page life is, of necessity, strange and yet, somehow legitimate? I see things that other people never see. There are things I will never see but I am convinced, as a writer and as a man, that everybody, writer and man, experiences everything. That’s the biggest irony. Everything is strange — the word itself is impossible to define — and yet the concept of everything is and always has been the most central and important of human concepts.
I’m never sure that what I experience actually ever happens and I can’t remember how I got the scar.
Fakirs and snake charmers and holy men, all that remains of my father is in that house, it’s a shrine to him, a vault for his treasures. A prison for his seed? someone demands once of my mother. It just isn’t right, he believes, that a child should be closeted away in this sumptuous, beautiful, smothering museum. Is it not indeed an act of amazing and callous cruelty?
The reception area is light, bright and brittle, the late morning sun cuts a swath through the conditioned air. In the big smoky bar off the hotel lobby Ted Silversteen, the shoe man, orders Perrier with gin and bitters and sucks on an unlit, over-sized cigar.
Ted’s in his seventies but looks older, a small, frail man with a thin stringy neck and a ferrety head on the frame of a mayfly. He’s been a commercial traveller most of his life (“an agent”) and, in an archaic and threadbare way, has retained the attitude and appearance of one. His shoes are immaculate – handmade, buffed to a military standard – hence the sobriquet. He plays piano in a drinking club off Greek Street and sometimes drives a mini-cab.
He’s always been a bachelor on the inside, even though he has once been married and often speaks of a son somewhere. And there is an air of sequestered domesticity about him, a subtle bouquet of oregano.
I get myself a large Irish and join him at a banquette table by the door. A gentle saxophone weeps some lonely jazz that makes me think of the injustice of being the only man in a crowd to spot a solitary magpie. I can tell from Ted’s half hearted greeting that something isn’t quite as it should be but I think better of asking him outright what the problem is. Instead I light a cigarette and wave the green Clipper at him, motioning towards the unlit cigar still held loosely between his lips.
“You know, Jon,” says the Shoe Man, “I never thought I’d say this, but I’m ready to leave this city.” Cigar smoke fills the air, almost enveloping him. “Yes sir, I’m ready for a little seaside town up north, Whitby, perhaps, or maybe somewhere in Devon, somewhere with an esplanade and small, clean streets leading up to a lazy town. You know of anywhere like that?” I do. I live in a place like this once… Hell, that’s from another story.
I feel the emptiness come over me again. The music has changed. A double bass slides up and down behind some minor guitar chords and a snare drum brushing a slow train rhythm threatens to suck me in. I gesture towards the speakers: “Death by vacuum cleaner,” is all I can bring himself to say.
“They’ve killed my Charlie, Jon,” says Ted quietly. “He’s dead. I aways knew they’d kill him one day.”
And I still can’t remember how I got that scar.
Filed under: Crime Fiction, Gangster stories, original fiction | Leave a Comment
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