the luxury of waiting

——

They sat facing each other on the armchairs. The coffee was hot and sweet and burned Joe’s tongue. It had been flavoured with cinnamon. ‘My name,’ Longshott said, ‘isn’t really Mike Longshott. As you no doubt figured.’ He shrugged. ‘My name is really of very little significance,’ he said. ‘I picked Longshott because it had a nice ring to it. It sounded like the sort of name you’d find on a paperback.’

Joe nodded, decided the coffee was too sweet for his taste, and took a sip of cool water from the glass that lay resting on the table. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ he said.

‘Not at all,’ Longshott said. ‘My own –’ he hesitated, ‘pipe is in the other room.’

Joe nodded at that too, as if he had been waiting for just such a confirmation. He extracted and lit a cigarette. The smoke curled lazily in the air. Joe didn’t speak. He had, he’d decided, the luxury of waiting.

Longshott was folded into the armchair opposite Joe. He looked lost inside that space, limbs jutting awkwardly like a doll’s when its strings had been loosened. He said, ‘There was a woman.’

Joe listened to the silence.

waxing moon

——

The was – there had been – a woman. He was working as a journalist, Mike – ‘My name really is Mike, you know –’ told him. He had developed a habit, gradually – ‘I was doing a series of articles on the opium trade, you see –’ and had taken to spend some of his leisure time in the smoking rooms where gentlemen – ‘Both foreign and local –’ of such habits congregated.

‘I first saw her on the first night of the full moon,’ Mike Longshott said. ‘You know, the moon becomes so much more important in places like this. On moonless nights it is so dark, but the stars are beautiful. Beautiful and cold… You can see so many stars out in the desert. But then the moon begins to rise, a little bigger every night – do you know how much light it gives out, how much you can see in the light of the moon?’

Joe nodded. He did know. There was a kind of desperation on moonless nights, when the stars, those alien beings an unimaginable distance away from the Earth, looked down on the world, in a kind of cold strange beauty that gave out no light. The moon was different, and when it came the darkness was lifted, the light of the sun reflecting off of the moon’s surface illuminating the dark world, giving it a soft silvery shape. The moon rose early when it waxed, like a pregnant woman, her belly growing until at last it was full. The fullness lasted for two days. Then the moon would wane, rising late like a surly teenager, growing smaller again until it disappeared and the darkness returned, and with her the stars.

‘Tell me about her,’ he said.

Mike Longshott nodded. ‘I saw her as I came out of the – the place,’ he said. ‘She was standing on the street, not doing anything. She was hugging herself, rocking on the soles of her feet. She looked very lost, and vulnerable. I saw her quite clearly in the light of the moon. When I came her way she turned. Her eyes were warm, I remember that. I remember thinking, they were not like stars. They were like sunlight reflected off the moon. She said, ‘Do you know where they are?’

‘I said, ‘Who?’

‘‘I can’t find them,’ she said. I didn’t know if she was speaking to me, or to herself. ‘They were there but now they’re not. Or maybe they are there, but I am not.’ She shivered, though it was a warm night, and she hugged herself closer. ‘Do you know where they are?’ she said.

‘I said, as gently as I could, ‘No.’

‘She turned fully to me then. Her arms dropped to her sides. She looked at me, at my face, for a long moment, as if searching for some familiar traces in them, for lines or curves I did not possess.

‘Though maybe I did. For, after that long moment had passed, she took a deep breath, and some of the anxiety seemed to go out of her, and she said, ‘Will you help me?’’

He took a sip of water then, and sat in silence for a while, staring into the air. It was then that Joe realised that the voices who had accompanied him, for a while, from his cell and up the hill, were silent now, and had been for a while. Absent or silent, he didn’t know, but he didn’t think they had gone. Like himself, they were waiting, listening to a story being told. He said, ‘Was she –?’ and Longshott said, ‘Yes. She was.’

waning

——

‘You might not credit it,’ Longshott said, ‘but I never learned her story. Oh, I had glimpses of it, from time to time. She spoke in her sleep, sometimes, crying out names – one name in particular. It wasn’t Mike.’ He shook his head. ‘I had the impression she had once had a son,’ he said. He was silent then, staring at his hands, lying loosely in his lap. He looked up and his eyes met Joe’s and the lines around his eyes were pronounced. ‘She… she waxed and waned with the moon,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if it is the same for others. To me, it seemed like enchantment for a time – still does, when it comes to that. I only saw her when the moon was in the skies. I know she craved the daylight. She wanted to see the sun. It hurt her not to be able to. I once asked her where she went, when she wasn’t… wasn’t there. She didn’t know, or was unwilling to tell me. The times of no moon were the worse, for me. She would be gone, an absence, an emptiness no stars could dispel, and every time I worried she will not appear again. My… my habit increased. I smoked more pipes but they didn’t bring me relief. Instead, I began to imagine the world she must have come from. Details of it would come, unbidden, into my mind when I was in stupor. They came to me haltingly, at first. Dates, numbers. Headlines.’ He laughed. There was no humour in it. He said, ‘Do you know what a journalist is? Someone who hasn’t written a novel yet. I couldn’t write it in a newspaper. For a time, I didn’t need to write at all. Then…’

She had begun to appear less frequently. She was fading, it had seemed to him. Each night she was less substantial, less there. Only at the full moon did she still seem solid, present – ‘She was a present,’ he said. ‘My present. I didn’t think in terms of past or future. There was only the moment, when she was there, in my arms, when I could hold her and comfort her and stroke her hair in the light of the moon…’

It had seemed to him more opium would help, but it didn’t. Instead, that other, imaginary world encroached more and more on his own, until he could no longer tell them apart. When walking the streets sometimes he thought he saw others who were like her, shades on the street corners, refugees from another place and time, but he never tried to talk to them. She was all he had.

‘And then she was gone. She was gone with the full moon as it set on the horizon. Her hair was spun silver. I held her hand in mine and it was translucent, I could see the blood vessels inside, bones like pale crystals. ‘I think I see them,’ she said. That was the last thing she said to me. The next night she didn’t appear, or the next, or the one after that.’ He looked up at Joe, but his eyes weren’t seeing. ‘I was alone.’

He waited the dark time for the new moon to be reborn. Yet when it was, she was absent from the night, and he knew she was not coming back. ‘That night I wrote the first chapter. I hardly sleep any more. When I close my eyes I see him, but always in the distance, like a cowled figure with clear cold eyes that are indifferent to me.’

Joe said – whispered – ‘Osama.’ The name shivered in the still air, seemed momentarily to assume a shape, a figure, then was gone.

‘Yes,’ Mike Longshott said. He shivered too, despite the heat. ‘My hero.’ He gave a laugh that was more of a cough. His hands shook. ‘Could you –?’ he said. Joe understood him. Far away he seemed to hear faint voices, whispering. He rose from the armchair and walked over to Mike Longshott, helping him to stand up. ‘It’s in the other room,’ the writer said. There was sweat on his face. Gently, Joe took his arm. They walked together slowly, the writer half-leaning on Joe’s shoulder, and when they arrived in the other room Joe helped Longshott lie down on the cot the man had prepared for himself long ago, and watched him settle, and something seemed to break inside him, like weak glass. ‘Could you –?’ Mike Longshott said and Joe, biting his lips to stop the mist that seemed to have descended on his eyes, nodded wordlessly and helped him prepare the pipe, rolling the ball of resin in his fingers though the smell made him dizzy. He placed the mouthpiece of the pipe in the writer’s mouth and lit the flame to heat the resin, watching as Longshott’s features slowly relaxed and slackened as he inhaled the fumes travelling down the pipe.