babyish face, and unclear milk-blue aboriginal Irish eyes.
‘Jeremiah! Were you laughing?’
‘No, sir. I was crying. I was weeping at the sound.’
The thought came suddenly to Clive Sullis that the creatures who had returned him to his body had at last caught up. He began to run – crab-ways, turning, instep patting into instep. In so far as he was in any state to be observing anything he observed all of the colours at once and only grey. A weather condition rose above the trees of the park. Any and all of the trees, they all looked the same. So did the grassy areas. There was no telling where he was, or in which direction he was going. The sky was the sky; towers towered beyond like the fairy follies. Pathways of chewed chewing gum. Choo choo along, he said. Just keep on, keep choo choo-ing. He spun around and the man in the chewing-gum trench coat was gone. The world continued to spin. He was in a cartoon. More like it he’d had a stroke and all this had been assembled using a computer. He wondered when he’d had his stroke. Because it seemed likely that recently he had had a stroke. He was bothered lately. He took more time with decisions. He sometimes did things and was not sure when or why he had done them. The delicate man he was outwardly had started to seep inwards. Fears he had not had since the nineteen pissstained seventies were coming back more wretched, more fawsach, than ever. Irish words had been creeping into his speech. Rude words had been creeping into his speech.
He plunged his hands deep in the pockets of his long black overcoat, narrowing his already thin frame, and hurried along a path towards a bright open area. Ah, but he knew this place. The Conservatory Water, according to all the maps and guides; the toy-boat pond, as he thought of it. He would stop by here sometimes, on the way back from the Boathouse, on his way out of the park. He had just come from the Boathouse, in a roundabout fashion.
He kicked up some late-winter mulch and tore at a salt sachet in one pocket. He rested his foot on the kerb that ran around the edge of the pond and tried to rally his nerves. In the water his reflection was in pieces. The man by the wheelbarrow in the chewing-gum trench coat – had he been the same man inside the Boathouse, he wondered; the man in the mould-blue sweater sitting on his own by the bar, tipping at something in a little pot? It was hard to tell. The man by the wheelbarrow had not only been wearing a chewing-gum trench coat but a trilby, or a homburg. He had also been wearing sunglasses.
Clive Sullis thought to himself: Why? But why now? Why were they coming, after all this time?
Why, because he’d been given, lately, to saying too much. He’d given himself away. He’d let the mask slip. He’d told perhaps rather too many people that he had once been a woman. He realised that now.
This was possibly a condition of his stroke. Or it was a function of his mind. His mind knew what his body did not know by this stroke. His body, at the last, when it came to it, taken by surprise and feeling betrayed, would put up a struggle, pulling in gulps of air and throwing out gobbets of phlegm. It was all it knew to do. And his mind, in its pathos, knowing what was coming, was trying, in its way, to put his affairs in order.
And so he had gone around telling anyone who would listen. And they’d laughed in his face. ‘But sure we knew!’ they’d all said, in words of that order, or in the way they’d looked back at him. And he’d looked at his reflection and seen that it was true: funny; though he’d been a manly girl, he was never quite the manly man. Perhaps it was in the outline of the eyes. And perhaps it was in the nose – and the surgeon had even offered to take a bone from his backside and bolt it to his nose, give him the pugilist’s nose. But he’d worried, stupid girl, that he’d have toppled over while seated.
And it was a pity he’d told so many people because it had been a good disguise until then, he said now to nobody (pulling out the elasticated waistband of his trousers and pouring salt on the sore around where his outlet pipe met his skin – the salt being medicinal). I mean, although I’d never made much of a man, it was still a pretty good disguise – I looked nothing like I did before. I looked nothing like her, that person, me: Jean Dotsy.
And by God Almighty, he’d made a good fist of it. Out of necessity, the very need to survive, he’d given it all he’d got. So that before a year was even out he’d wanted to be the best man there was. She grew into himself, in whole.
But it was a disguise. Still it was. He’d forgotten that. In wanting to grow into it, and in giving it away finally, he’d forgotten that. Why did he give it away? Because he needed everyone to know. Not to know that he’d once been a woman, no. But that it was a disguise.
And he’d go back now, if he could, if he could give his pursuers the slip, he’d go back to the Colombian who sold him his cantaloupe melons, the man, one of them, he’d told he was a woman, and he’d say, ‘No – no. There’s something else.’ And he’d go back to his neighbour, Mia, who he’d told too, and he’d say, ‘No – no. I knew you knew that. But have you since wondered why? If I tell you now that it was all just a disguise, a way to go into hiding, would you like to know why it was so?’
And he’d go to Denny, he would. He would go to Denny, who had thought he knew all that there was to know. And he’d say, ‘You think you know me. You think you knew who I was, and what I became. But. Listen.’
If only he could be given the chance now. If only he hadn’t opened his big bog mouth.
He looked out over the pond for a few minutes. Children and their minders raced yachts and clippers and tourists were spread about. If he stayed here, no harm would come. This was the idea of safety in numbers, this was the feeling of safety that came from being in somebody else’s scene, a windless Dutch scene. This was the play of the light. He could wait here for the man. Where was the man? There he was. His form stretched above and below the line of the kerb. He was as still as the bare branches.
Clive watched him and waited for him to move but he did not.
The enemy: safe to think of him as that now. The envoy. He thought back to the wheelbarrow; the way, after he’d spun around, the man had disappeared, gone, into thin air, in a whip and a swirl of leaves. He knew exactly the enemy he was dealing with here. He looked about him, at women his own age and at little children in paper-boat hats. Common birds of the north-eastern United States that did not have a care. The world was spinning. Litter, little weightless scraps, ash, followed a spiral descent. No amount of witnesses, no number of nobodies, would protect him. He knew exactly what he was dealing with. The spy costume no doubt was deliberate. A taunt. This is what we are doing, yes.
***
A night weeks before. Clive Sullis woke from a nightmare that was gone in an instant and he was worried about blood clots to the brain. He woke up screaming, screaming. The screams out of him. That was it. Just: ‘Pissstains!’ ‘Jisolm!’ Like that, bursting through darkness. Like the original language. The first words after the bang. As if something had broken down and something else was made in its place. False and crude. This was the story of his life. Why couldn’t they see him for who he was?
He sat up and patted the bedclothes around him, letting them cool, and his breathing settle.
He had an obscure memory of getting up in the night with a headache and pulling apart the presses for paracetamol. He remembered having a dry throat and that he was nauseated too and that he was convinced a plastic fork was stuck in the root of his tongue and that his head was a head of lettuce and that he was halfway through a prayer when he realised he was praying to Peter Stuyvesant, the last governor of New Amsterdam. This was an obsession now: Holland. This was the trouble after the bang. Memories from now on might only be vague, or split, or not memories at all. Of the moments before he woke, before the outburst, he could recall, he thought – what? Material, chippings. Lines and circles. Ones and zeroes. These things had been falling through his mind against a black background. But of the day before – of the waking day before, he could recall almost everything, he thought. He remembered he had read that because the beaver ate only tree bark its diet was considered vegetarian. Now hold on a minute, he said.