Sun at Midnight

‘Rook? You got visitor,’ she called.

He looked around his room, instinctively checking for anything that might give away something of himself. But the place was almost bare, apart from clothes and food, and a few books on the shelves.

‘Rook?’ Marta repeated. Through the thin wood panels of the door he could hear her breathing, but no sound from the other woman, whoever she might be.

He opened the door. Marta’s bulk almost blocked the aperture.

‘Come up, honey,’ she called over her shoulder in her heavily accented American English. His caller wasn’t local, then.

Light, quick footsteps came up the stairs. Marta squeezed herself to one side and he saw that it was Edith.

‘Ede? Christ. What’re you doing here?’

She brought the smell of cold in with her. There was snow on her shoulders and her hair glittered with moisture. She tipped her head and her eyebrows lifted. ‘What kind of a welcome is that?’

‘What kind of arrival is this?’

Edith didn’t let her smile fade. He remembered how white her teeth always looked against her tawny skin. ‘A surprise.’

‘Damn right it is.’

She was carrying a bag. She let it drop now with a thump. Marta looked inquisitively from Rooker to Edith and back again.

Rooker sighed. ‘Okay. Come on in. Gracias, Marta.’

‘De nada.’ She was offended not to be introduced and further included in the unusual event of her back lodger having a visitor.

Edith hoisted her bag, skipped past her and nudged the door shut with her shoulder. She looked around the room, not missing a detail. ‘So this is home? It’s not all that homely, is it?’

‘It’s not home. It’s just where I live.’

After only two minutes Edith knew they had already got off on the wrong footing. Rooker felt her checking herself and trying a different approach.

‘It’s good to see you, Rook.’

She stroked her hair and settled it so it lay back over one shoulder. He took note, as she intended him to do, of how pretty she was and how small and fragile-seeming. Her feet and hands were as tiny as a child’s.

‘What are you doing in Ushuaia?’

She was still smiling at him. Her eyes danced. ‘You know what I’m doing here. And now that I am here, aren’t you going to offer me a drink?’

He was trapped. He looked at the door and at his pan of stew on the electric ring. It was smoking, so he lifted it off. ‘All right, Edith. There’s whisky. Will that do?’

‘Sure.’ She unbuttoned her coat and hung it over the back of a chair, and kicked off her snowboots. She stood in front of the stove, rubbing her hands, then took the tumbler of scotch he handed to her. He poured himself a measure and that was the end of the bottle.

‘Here’s to you and me,’ she said softly and drank. He ignored the toast.

‘How did you get here?’

‘From Buenos Aires, how else? On this evening’s flight.’ The one he had seen coming in to land.

‘Edith, I don’t know why you’re here. I don’t know how you found me…’

‘Frankie told me.’

‘She had no right to do that.’ Frankie was an old friend of Rooker’s. She was younger than he was and although he had known her for fifteen years they had never slept together. He liked that, it made her different. Sometimes he e-mailed her from the locutorio off the main street. Frances was married to a chiropractor she had met at a Jerry Garcia memorial concert, and now lived in New York State with him and their three children. It still surprised Rooker to think of Frances with children, but all the evidence was that she had put her wild days behind her and settled down to being a wife and mother. He liked getting her e-mails about what the kids were up to and the latest funny thing the baby had said. Ross, her husband, was dull but decent.

‘Well, she did.’

He kept his anger in check. Frankie had always liked Edith, out of all Rooker’s girlfriends. And Frankie had his postal address, because she had sent him a book on his birthday. It was The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. It stood on the shelf behind him now. He had read some of it.

‘Rook?’ Edith breathed. She put her glass on the table and came to him, holding out her hands. When he didn’t take them she grasped the front of his shirt and lifted herself on tiptoe so she could kiss him on the mouth. She tasted of whisky.

‘Don’t do that,’ he ordered. He disentangled himself from her grasp and turned away. The room was too small, there was nowhere to get away from this.

‘I love you,’ Edith said, in a new jagged voice that was raw with accusation.

‘No, you don’t. You’ve just forgotten.’

He hadn’t forgotten. The last time he saw her was in Dallas. He had arrived in Dallas as a pilot for an air charter company but that job had stopped working even before it had started, so he was filling in on yet another building site. Edith had found work as a dancer. They had been living together, an arrangement that only lasted a few weeks this time, and they had gone out drinking one night.

Edith always set out to attract attention, particularly from men in bars, and that night was no exception. She was wearing a tiny skirt that showed her toffee-coloured thighs and a stretchy top that exposed most of her breasts. Before they left the apartment she was shimmying around in front of him, laughing too much and darting hard little glances at him from under her eyelashes. Rooker knew that even if he had loved her, even if he smothered her with enough admiration and affection to suffocate them both, it wouldn’t be enough to satisfy Edith. She was born to be dissatisfied and doomed always to want more than she could get. If she had him, she wanted other men as well, for reassurance. If she didn’t have him she wouldn’t stop wheedling and threatening and seducing until he gave way to her. They had already split up twice before the night in Dallas. But Edith always knew which buttons to press.

That night she had been wild, fuelled by her anger with him and her contempt for the rest of the world. She had barely tasted her first drink before she had her tongue in some guy’s mouth. The man’s hands went straight down inside the little stretchy top and Rooker had hauled him backwards and pinned him against the bar. Even as he did it he was wondering why. He didn’t care who Edith rubbed herself up against. He didn’t want to be here with her, but he couldn’t think of anywhere else that he wanted to be.

‘Don’t do that,’ Rooker had said quietly to Edith’s new friend.

The man tried to smile. ‘Hey, I’m real sorry. I just thought…’ There were beads of sweat in the bristles above his top lip.

Rooker felt as though he was standing beside himself, watching his own actions in boredom and disgust. His hands dropped back to his sides.

‘Come on,’ he said to Edith.

Outside, she moved up against him. She was lithe and taut, like a cat. ‘Hey,’ she breathed in his ear. As always, his aggression excited her.

The evening that had begun badly grew steadily more evil. There were more bars, much more drinking. They found themselves in a place where there was lap dancing and the next thing that happened was that Edith was dancing too, out of her mind and out of her stretchy top and tiny skirt. There was a man whose thick red arms were matted with coarse gingery hair, and Rook saw one of these arms slide between Edith’s thighs. With a weight of sadness on him Rook grabbed her by the back of the neck, just as if she really were a cat, and pushed her out of reach. Then he squared up to the red man, seeing out of the corner of his eye the bar’s security staff heading towards them.

‘Fag,’ the red man sneered.

‘Outside,’ Rook answered.

The night was thick and hot. At first Rook could hardly move against the pressure of ennui and disgust, but when the man’s fist smashed almost casually into the corner of his eye the pain lit a phosphor-white blaze in his head. He hit out, and hit again. The man went down instantly and when Rook looked at him he saw that his face was split wide open. There were teeth and bone in a mess of blood, and Rook was certain that he had killed him. Sick horror and a wash of memories rose up in him and he staggered backwards, hands up in a vain effort to shut out the sight.

He left the man lying on the ground. He left Edith still inside the bar somewhere and he made his way home in painful and blurred slow motion. On the floor of the bathroom were the prints of Edith’s feet outlined in talcum powder. He rubbed them out with the side of his fist as the floor seemed to tilt sideways and the man’s smashed face stared out at him from the mirror on the wall.

When Rooker woke up again he was lying fully dressed on the bed with Edith asleep beside him. He squinted at her, because he could only open one eye. There were black pools of mascara darkening her eye sockets and her breath bubbled through her slack lips. The light in the room was dirty grey and the air was hot to breathe. He sat up very slowly, wincing with pain. There was dried blood on the pillow where his head had rested. Sour-tasting saliva flooded his mouth.

I have to get away from here, from this, he thought.