Enoch's Folly

  The streets seemed empty as a deeper orange red dominated the sky, punctuated by streaks of blue and white, throwing a dusty, warm shadow over everything. Jensen’s Barber Shop, being once-white, absorbed the dusk and took on a strange brightness.

  “Looks like home,” Kristian said absently, but it made sense to Mrs Hatfield and Watson too – who sensed the stillness.

  They’d no problem parking and Kristian went first. A dark metal plaque with a blue metal and glass button sat at rib-case height in the doorframe. “JENSEN” the name tag read.

  “Well I’ll be…” Kristian smiled as he spoke quietly then rang it without another moment of hesitation. Shortly, the door opened – completely. Carter seemed not even remotely surprised.

  “Your friend going to be alright?” He asked without any formalities.

  “Absolutely.”

  Kristian asked about hotels and Carter cut him off. A white kid, white lady and a blind old black man looking for a hotel was ‘the start of a bad joke’, he said, and not the ingredients of a fruitful search for accommodation. And so Carter offered his own small place, telling Kristian not to bother refusing out of graciousness and entering into that theatrical tug of war of refusal and insistence between one trying to be more polite than the other. “You will stay here tonight,” became a statement of fact, and Kristian knew Mrs Hatfield and Watson would be fine with it. And he wondered about the two of them, and Rosti and Carter too, and the apparent madness and undeniable sanity of it all, and asked if it mattered if anyone knew how it was going to end.

  * * *

  Perhaps it was the fact his sister was away for college, and the grey hairs suddenly perceptible on his mother, or the suspicious looks he was starting to notice from police and shop keepers, but Fernando Hammett had started to think of himself as Nando rather than Hammett. ‘If they don’t accept me, I shouldn’t follow their lead’. He was a Hammett, in part, but the man who gave him that name had given him little more before running out. As he grew closer to Rida, the name he’d hidden behind no longer felt much like his.

  One way or another, Nando Hammett hated football and loved baseball, so he dreaded winter. Victoria had, perversely, insisted on dragging him to a football match. Not just any match, but a match at ‘that fancy school of theirs’ as his mother called it. Victoria, who he’d always suspected of endeavouring, to some extent, to hide him as best she could, had invited him to the match and refused to take no for an answer. He had not mentioned his suspicions, but nevertheless developed a new one – that the girl had twigged and was now extravagant in her efforts to set him at ease, as she was in almost everything, and Nando feared it would create a push back from her crowd that would push him out of the picture.

  They sat in the top row of the bleachers, the one row on which no one else sat on that particular stand, and from a distance were two blackbirds huddled together against the endlessly white sky.

  “That scarf looks good on you.”

  Nando had almost forgotten the ridiculous school scarf she’d wrapped around his neck.

  “It doesn’t, but it keeps me warm. I should have remembered my own.”

  “It was fate – delivering you an opportunity to show, for the first time, some school spirit. The Chinese have a saying – crisis creates opportunity.”

  “Yeah. I prefer the ox is slow but the earth is patient.”

  “That is our football team’s motto, I think.”

  Nando noticed people looking up at them, and knew half of them wouldn’t know who he was. He wondered if Victoria wanted them to know and despair, or didn’t want them to know; wondered if she thought she could both allay his fears – as she imagined them – and avoid the realisation of her own. ‘They’re probably talking about her, not us’, he thought.

  “How many of these rituals do you attend a year?”

  Victoria beamed in a way he found, plainly, weird. She didn’t quite catch the question, just smiled – smiled into the cold wind as much as into his face. Then, in some esoteric answer to his question, she began explaining the rules of the game, the form of the school side and the history of the rivalry being played out. Nando knew the rules, but humoured her, poking fun at the idiosyncrasies of the game, which she defended indignantly.

  He pointed out the kicker.

  “Who is that guy?”

  “The kicker. Notice how he kicks the ball?”

  “He’s the laziest man in history. Seriously, that’s all he does?”

  “He specialises. Actually he is the best school kicker in the State.”

  “Well if you only have to do one thing, you’d better do it well. That’s only the second time this game I’ve seen him. Listen, one of his own team mates just called him ‘hey you’.”

  “Stop it.”

  “In last year’s team photo, he was listed as ‘Unknown’.”

  “Stop it.”

  She was laughing now, mostly at the grim expression on Nando’s face.

  “The players are pretty superfluous anyway really… Have you ever been to the circus?”

  “Yes, what are you talking about?”

  “They can train animals to ride bicycles – which is pretty impressive. I’ve known people who can’t ride bicycles.”

  Victoria looked at him, stifling the last of her laugh. “What?”

  “Have you visited a farm?”

  “Of course.”

  “A sheep farm, I mean, not where you get your racehorses.”

  She frowned. “Come on!”

  “I went to a farm last year to visit my cousins, on my… on my dad’s side – they have a lot of sheep. I saw two rams slamming their heads into one another. Now if you can train a monkey to ride a bicycle, surely you could train rams to play football. They’re already half-way there.”

  She pushed Nando hard and he dropped the paper cone of peanuts he held, spilling them on the two girls seated in front of them, who squealed as the legumes slipped down the back of their coats and landed in their handbags. One of them shot around, glaring.

  “You clumsy oaf!”

  Victoria’s laughter vanished and the sudden silence seemed to take the oxygen out of the air with it. Her face was white as she hissed at the girl.

  “Shut your fucking mouth.”

  Stunned into silence she turned away as her friend helped her clean up.

  “I’m very sorry…” Nando started and they ignored him. He turned to Victoria, who was now watching the game more intently than before. He spoke quietly.

  “Don’t you think that was a bit…”

  She smiled at him.

  “A bit what? It was just a bit; nothing more or less. Forget it.”

  She turned back to the game.

  “I don’t think…”

  “I said forget it.”

  He waited, watching her expression – which showed neither rage, nor regret, nor anything much, just a kind of clinical interesting the game, her mouth unconsciously carrying the last hint of that sweet smile.

  Nando watched the game. He’d heard Victoria’s foul language before, and while he’d almost grown used to it, he’d never seen her unleash it with so much venom. He’d always found her temper endearing in some ways, but today it had showed a deliberate, calculating element. She had not reacted instinctively, he believed, but with the desire to hurt and shock. As far as he could tell, she was indifferent to the outcome – which, at least, was a step up to drawing pleasure from it. But he could be mistaken, he decided, on all counts.

  At the final whistle Victoria stood up and held a fist in the air, crying out a lewd rhyme that slandered the vanquished school and its team. The girls in front of her flinched and Nando sank into the bench as best he could. He left with her, avoiding eye-contact with the girls and offering monosyllabic responses to Victoria’s enthusiasm. He was unhappy, intensely. She grabbed his shoulder after one particularly flat response.

  “I just asked you how your mother
is. I never ask that, and your answer was ‘yeah’. What the hell is that?”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Victoria forced out a laugh and threw her hands in the air.

  Nando wouldn’t let it go.

  “That’s right, you never do ask. I don’t mind, I didn’t until now anyway – but now I know you were conscious of it, that you weren’t just inconsiderate or self-absorbed, but that you knew you were ignoring a question any normal person would ask, not even because they particularly care, but because it’s a polite thing to do – and you chose not to, even while every time I see you I ask about the two lizards who laid the egg you hatched out of.”

  Victoria smirked.

  “Two lizards don’t lay an egg. And you ended that phrase in a preposition. I hate that. Someone who speaks Spanish should know better. You think I didn’t know you speak Spanish? Come on. Honestly…” she circled him “Judith – you remember Judith – asked about you. You. She never asks about any of my friends. Oh it wasn’t much, just, ‘Is he a good boy?’” She laughed. “I said ‘yes’. So come on Nando, I know you wouldn’t make an error in biology, and mangle a sentence, unless something was really under your skin – so what is it?”

  He exhaled hard, his breath fogging up.

  “Why did you bring me here? Before the game you took me on a tour, like you were showing me to every imaginable person who would disapprove. What’s the point? You want to shock people? Want to shock those two girls? Who do you want to shock – your friends? I’ve been a secret for months – us writing letters to each other and sneaking out and all the rest of it, and now this – why?”

  Nando regretted each word but there was no turning back now. They stood isolated, 40 yards into a training field behind the main ground, and beyond that it was lined with woods – tall dark trees in a row. He realised she had called him Nando, not “Hammett”.

  Victoria looked at him anew, and her face visibly altered. She seemed younger suddenly, her real age rather than eighteen impersonating twenty-one.

  “I don’t know.”

  The silence – that kind of silence that can only be experienced in the midst of some other universe’s din – explained all.

  “That’s a good enough answer for me.”

  She grabbed him hard, and pulled him in and kissed him – finally unaware of the other students chattering past in the distance.

  *

  The union of a fomp like a camera flash and the sound of two glasses clashing had Rida start and look up from the book before her. A light had blown, casting half of her small store into darkness. It was later than she usually stayed, but Nando had told her he would be out late. She’d not had a customer in almost an hour, and kept a close eye on the wall clock. Rida has set herself 9.30pm for her departure, but could leave at any moment – and could have left far earlier. She wondered why she’d stayed so late. Her place – the one she shared with her son – was just upstairs, and it wasn’t the first time she knew she’d be heading to an empty home. But she stayed at the counter, on her feet despite the bar stool near by, trying to read but only managing three or four paragraphs at a run.

  Rida thought primarily of her son. From a very early age, Nando had alays approached birthdays with a funny kind of quiet excitement. He’d not ask what was planned, nor what gifts would be forthcoming, but he would grin while going about his daily business, and inquire as to which relatives could make it for the day. Nando was unlike most children in this regard. He decided that talking about things too much dampened the enjoyment of their realisation, like reading too much about a feature film in the papers before seeing it.

  However, this time – with his birthday nearly at hand – he gave no sign of anticipation, or even awareness. He was away from their apartment for long stretches, searched through the records but rarely picked one out – and when he did he seemed to contemplate them without enthusiasm. She knew more or less what was behind it, even without knowing the specifics.

  It’s that line, she thought. Between life when you know joy and misery within only a certain range, and life when that range is expanded beyond what you thought imaginable.

  Darkness can often disguise flaws – and the truth – but in Rida’s store it was the opposite. She rarely looked at it in the dark and now, with the light blown, she made out every flaw and crack, spider web, water mark and patch of chipped paint. Rida knew the place needed some work, always knew – and it always had, but there was never any sense of urgency about it. She was proud of the place, and people liked it. Now, with the dark half cast across it, she felt it was aging fast – like a mortal, living thing. She knew why – Nando was too big for this place. When she got too old, it would be palmed off to a manager, and then, when she died – it would die with her.

  On cue, Nando arrived rapping at the front door, peering in. Rida approached, assuming he had forgotten his key somehow. She opened it and smelt gin on his breath. He grinned and almost fell into her with a big childish hug.

  “Ma, for the life of me I can’t seem to get my key from my, uh, my satchel here. You think I’m too old for a satchel? I may need a briefcase before long. You’re working late, shall we call it a night?”

  Rida led him toward the stairs behind the counter – in the rear room of the store. A narrow iron curling stairwell… He negotiated it and Rida made sure he made it to his room.

  He turned to her, somewhat surprised, but being drunk exaggerated his expression to one of almost comical bafflement.

  “You’re not going to insist on my brushing my teeth?”

  Rida paused. She realised she hadn’t said a word yet. Nando hadn’t noticed that yet, he was running on instinct.

  “You need rest.”

  Nando smiled, a broad and uncharacteristically silly-looking smile.

  “Oh Nando. Wait –“ she propped him up in the doorway of his room and darted down stairs, then back again. He was almost asleep when she arrived carrying a huge glass of water and she caught him by the shoulder, realising how heavy he was – ‘almost full size’.

  ‘How strange,’ she thought, and saw Nando tiny in her arms – small on her shoulders, smallish on her back… And now here, too heavy, and too drunk, and too old too soon. Rida was shocked that she felt a king of angry sadness. She was angry at time. She’d always been mortified at parents who tried to wrangle and disarm their children, fighting a lunatic fight against history to keep their beloved sons and daughter dependent on them and at hand. Taught helplessness, she called it – aghast. It never worked, and only did damage. Suddenly she understood the special kind of pain behind it – the irrational pain, if denied – it worsened, if acted on – it brought on self-loathing and inevitable defeat regardless. We must let go, she thought – but please, couldn’t I have three more years? Five at the most? She held Nando with a hand on each shoulder, his eyes heavy.

  “My little man.” She said quietly and he smiled. “Drink this water.” He took it in both hands and drank eagerly, finishing the lot. Rida guided him down to the bed that suddenly appeared too small for him, and put her hand on his forehead.

  “Tomorrow – we talk. Now, you sleep.”

  “Goodnight ma.” And he was out. Rida walked slowly back to her room – barely six feet away, and leaned in the doorway herself. And she cried.

  * * *

  It takes a certain kind of courage to admit that everything you have done in your life has been essentially meaningless. Your dreams, ridiculous. Your efforts, wasted. Your hopes, pathetic. Your work, mediocre at the very best.

  It takes a certain kind of courage to admit that the people you have loved are disgusted by you, or angered, or frightened, or bored… or have forgotten you completely, apart, perhaps, from rare fleeting moments of something not quite strong enough to be called curiosity.

  And from these admissions comes a new kind of courage – one that is not so much bravery but the abandonment of notion of loss, or disgrace,
or defeat. Once endowed with this quality, an individual is capable of anything. It is the material of gods and monsters.

  It is in this sense that the Blue Man was the bravest man in the city.

  It was a cold morning and the snake needed sun. He slipped into a secluded part of the barracks, which, perversely, was taking on the trappings of a home – a large, somewhat demented and all-male home, a criminal lodging house, and abandoned his night shirt for something other than one of his blue suits – of which seven hanged in a row. He worse drab colours, dark brown and grey and a charcoal fedora, a long scarf wrapped high and glasses with a weak prescription which he did not need. The hat was crammed down over a wig, and the snake did a fair job of impersonating a man.

  The Blue Man grew tired of the isolation. He liked to mix in the crowds and did not like being shot at. He missed the city. It was, after all, his home town – a secret not so much well kept as kept by no one but himself. The Blue Man had arrived out of nowhere, unrecognisable and unknown, and hurtled to fame and his horrible fate without anyone getting closer to the truth of his origins. He remained something supernatural, unexplained, a force of nature – or worse.

  But today, behind his scarf and glasses and hat he was just an odd looking man. The luxury of being just one more forgettable face in the crowd is one taken for granted by all but those denied it. He stood at a newspaper stand and rubbed his hands together in their navy blue felt gloves – the one oversight in his ‘disguise’.

  “Cold morning eh buddy?” The newsagent asked. The Blue Man smiled behind his scarf, allowing his eyes to show it behind the pointless panes.