The Colour of the Night Read online

  ‘Would you buy art if you were a wealthy businessman?’

  The waiter poured the wine and took the bottle away.

  ‘Cheers,’ they chimed and touched glasses.

  ‘Would I buy art? Yes, I suppose I would. But I wouldn’t make a scene of it. The trouble is, a lot of these buyers wouldn’t know a good piece of art from a picture of the Queen. They rely on others to tell them what’s good – well actually, to tell them what’s collectible. And that gives them something to boast about. They invite you into their homes and then all they want to do is direct your attention to their latest acquisition.’

  ‘Is there such a thing as a genuine collector?’

  ‘Of course! An unusual breed, but they do exist: just the odd one who genuinely likes art and knows what they’re buying. Rare though, and it’s not common for any moneyed person to buy art without checking its resale value.’

  ‘You appear to be doing well, Simon.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘You seem successful. I don’t know how an artist judges success, but you look … quietly confident. About the whole business, I mean.’

  ‘It’s a hard game, Christina. Especially if you don’t make the kind of product that can be packed easily in a square of bubble-wrap.’

  Simon looked at his glass; he wanted to get off the subject and Adele sensed it.

  ‘Did you see the full moon tonight? Already up in the twilight right over the city. Don’t you think it’s interesting that the first human beings looked up at that exact same object? Everything in the world has changed but we still share that one vision, that one common point of reference.’

  Simon appraised her. ‘It’s like the last hieroglyph in a lost language,’ he offered, trying for something poetic rather than philosophical.

  ‘Yes, a mutual connection.’ Adele sipped her wine. The waiter arrived for their order and the two opened the menu for the first time.

  SIMON’S MIND was buzzing. He was not used to being engaged in this way: no social banter, no dissections of others, no rumours, no trivialities. By ten, he felt pleasantly fortified and the idea of an easy sexual encounter seemed less important. Still, encouraged by the wine, he couldn’t help glancing occasionally at the smooth rise of the woman’s clavicles, at the perfect cleft of her breasts, at the fullness of her lips from where the nectareous words came fluidly and unbidden.

  ‘You are excellent company, Christina. I’m having a very good time.’ He sipped his pinot noir, chosen to go with the thrice cooked duck. ‘What usually happens when dinner is over? What do you expect, I mean professionally?’

  ‘You mean sex. I have no expectations at all, Simon. But let me say I never sleep with anyone I don’t like or haven’t made a real connection with. I’m not a sex worker. Very often men enjoy my company as I enjoy theirs and there is no other intimacy at all. I’ve learnt that sometimes men feel relieved that no performance is necessary; they enjoy knowing that sex isn’t going to complicate good company and real friendship.’

  Simon had to think which category he fell into. Perhaps both, really.

  ‘What would happen if we were to … have sex? You’d charge me of course.’

  ‘Of course. But it doesn’t mean I don’t want to unless I’m paid; it just means we have a business arrangement that’s binding: no questions asked, no accountability, no further responsibilities. Good, don’t you think?’

  Simon smiled. ‘I’m enjoying your company, Christina. Want to go for a nightcap? There’s a little bar just up the street.’

  In this way Adele and Simon’s first night flowed like the Nile in moonlight and at the end of it Simon asked if he could give her a lift home. But Adele preferred a cab – always a cab – and at 1.15 a.m. Simon hailed her one. She placed her hand on his chest and kissed him again, then wiped the mark away thoughtfully. The last thing Simon did was press three hundred dollars into Adele’s soft palm.

  ARMAN VEERED quickly to the kerb and put on the hazard lights; an essential move. Brunswick Street was narrow and cars were prone to slam into the back of him. He’d endured two such incidents – regarded as the other party’s fault despite the fact that even Batman would be unable to brake behind a cab moving from forty to zero inside eight metres. Arman checked his new customer – another essential. He’d once picked up a lovely young girl who really should not have been out on her own at that hour. She put a knife to his throat, took the cash and his watch, cut the brass buttons off his lapels and calmly disembarked. But this woman did not look like the type to carry a switchblade. The man she was with helped her to board and then generously pressed money into her hand.

  She gave Arman the address. ‘42 Frederick Street,’ she said, ‘off Arthurton, you know where that is?’

  ‘Indeed, madam, I know it very well. I can take you a shortcut.’

  Adele sat back and the cab headed north. Ten minutes later, on a main arterial and in constant traffic, her driver unexpectedly swerved left.

  ‘Excuse me –’

  ‘Do not worry, madam, I know a shortcut. I am very familiar with this area. I get you home before you knew it!’

  Moments later, Arman turned into his own street and came to a dramatic stop directly across the road from her place – and his. It was then that Adele realised that her smallest note was a hundred, one of those supplied by her client. Arman’s eyes widened: what a generous man indeed. He processed her credit card with some difficulty and passed it back to her. Just as she alighted, a black Tarrago passed her, did a U-turn and parked a few car-lengths from her door. Adele crossed the street as its driver pressed the electronic car lock. The two parties stepped towards each other and halted just metres apart. Through the cab window Arman noted them standing erect like a pair of Christian statuettes – hadn’t he seen that exact scenario before? He blinked. It was the same couple he’d witnessed in Brunswick Street only twenty minutes earlier! The strange ways of Westerners.

  ON HIS SILENT blacksnake James moved about at night almost invisibly. Well after midnight, with the summer heat still rising from the asphalt, he glided home and slipped silently into the rear lane behind the terraces. But even as he approached his bungalow door he could see light leaking from under it. He turned his key, pushed the bike through the doorway ahead of him and, over the handlebars, saw Jess lying on his bed.

  ‘Jessica!’ She didn’t move. ‘Are you pinned?’

  ‘No, you idiot.’

  ‘Then what? What are you doing in my flat? How did you –’

  ‘The door was open. Thought you might have been robbed again.’ She sat up. ‘Then I just decided to wait.’

  ‘You can really piss me off sometimes, Jess.’

  She shrugged and fell backwards onto his bed again. James glanced at her, his lean sister stretched out, T-shirt shucked up to reveal a heavy navel stud, ringed by a wide circle of tattooed blue. Her skin was as white as copy paper, her bare feet traced with blue veins and her soles as dark as brickwork. It was clear that her coloured hair had for some time been estranged from a comb. His baby sister.

  ‘Shoulda seen what I just saw.’

  Jess turned her head. ‘What?’

  ‘Dad. Out on the footpath. And guess who he’s talkin’ to – the next-door neighbour.’

  ‘The PC geek?’

  ‘Not him, his mother. She’s dressed up all flash and Dad’s lookin’ sweet and they’re just standing there staring at each other.’

  ‘He’s rootin’ her.’

  ‘Wouldn’t say that for sure, but something’s up. I doubt that it was a neighbourly chat … at one-thirty in the morning.’

  Jess sprang upright. ‘Brilliant! So let’s get to it.’

  ‘Get to what?’

  ‘Get to… you know, find out what’s going on. I’ll check his diary and his mobile. And you can take my PC over to her geeky son. See what you can dig up. About time something happened around here.’

  JAMES WOKE around noon. No rush. No one did anything on Saturdays and he knew Elt
on wouldn’t rise until the sun no longer speared a diagonal of UV through a small gap in his makeshift drape. The red-haired kid was of no interest – and James wasn’t particularly interested in Jess’s schemes either – but his neighbour might as well be useful. He waited until mid-afternoon and then carried Jess’s hard drive to Elton’s door. He rang the bell. No one answered. He rang it again. He was just about to turn away when Adele appeared.

  ‘James?’

  ‘Yes, from next door. I was wondering if Elton could take a look at my sister’s PC?’

  Adele assessed things carefully. There seemed no outward sign that the boy knew of last night’s events. She could hardly believe it herself – did she simply dream that one of her clients lived behind the party wall of her own home? Now his offspring was requiring the services of her son. Best to send the lad away. Elton is busy, she told James, all the time, usually, and he didn’t do repair work. She suggested he take it to a shop. But James was insistent. Couldn’t Elton just take a quick look? He didn’t know where else to try. Perhaps he could simply leave it with her and Elton could give it a once-over and drop it back another day.

  ‘Elton doesn’t go out much,’ Adele said, flatly.

  ‘Not even next door?’

  Obstinacy was such an awful teen attribute, revisited by the elderly – she thought of her deceased father. ‘Put it down here,’ she said, ‘and we’ll see what happens.’

  As soon as he was gone, she went to find Elton. ‘The boy next door – James – just dropped off a faulty computer,’ she told him. ‘He wants you to take a look at it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A computer. It’s in the living room. And in case you’re interested, your cousin Shaun rang again. He wants to speak to you.’

  ‘To me? What does he want to speak to me for?’

  ‘I don’t know, I didn’t ask. But I told him we’d like him to come and stay.’

  ‘Why did you tell him that?’

  ‘Because it’s true, Elton. And it’d be good for the boy to experience a bit of city life.’

  ‘He’ll have to do it on his own then. I’m not babysitting no wild kid.’

  ‘Just wait and see, Elton. He’s wants to meet you again, after so long.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  He listened to his mother walk away. He had no trouble dismissing the image of his country cousin: brown and fuzzy, resembling some vague animation in a digital game. He sighed and quit the department store without buying a thing. Why the interruptions? Even if he never consulted another human in the material world, there would always be someone demanding attention. It was as if there were two kinds of people: those who were happy by themselves and those who were only happy when they were imposing their will on others. Nicely put; he should post that on Facebook.

  In his underwear he went downstairs, first to the bathroom and then to the front door. There at his feet lay the dull silver box of someone else’s troubles: a Pandora’s box. Not that the problems should be difficult to resolve; the PC itself was not the issue. It was the snarled entanglements of other people’s lives that menaced. To touch the thing meant to take on the burden of conversations with neighbours, the ramifications of favours and deeds; a whole mess of unnecessary interactions. Yet taped to the top was a USB modem which would give access to the owner’s cyber-life. That was a world he understood. He paused beside the hard drive a little longer and then picked it up gently, the way a vet might cradle a wounded dog.

  He carried it back to his room and hooked it up. It was maimed all right, a sprinkle of characters appearing on the screen unrelated to the internal programs. It required more than a simple F8 System Restore, and digitally he went straight into its guts as a surgeon might, removing dead cells, probing deeply until a serious virus was found and excised. The operation was a challenge but he enjoyed it: presented with a terminal case, he had restored the computer to health and returned it to consciousness. Much harder, was working out how to return it to his neighbour.

  JESS WAS NOT pleased to be beckoned. Left alone while the other family members were gone for the day – engaging in optimistic challenges of self-improvement – she was rarely called upon to do anything. Typically she’d have her iPod plugged in which kept her safely behind a wall of sound, but as bad luck would have it, she was in the bathroom when the doorbell rang and it was with some indignation that she went to answer it.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Um … Jess?’

  ‘Maybe. Who’s asking?’

  Elton blinked, still adjusting his eyes to the daylight. Normally he wouldn’t be out of bed at this absurd mid-morning hour, but he really wanted to get rid of his neighbour’s outdated computer. He was immediately struck by how closely the girl resembled some of the characters in League of Legends and Second life. She appeared warrior-like, enigmatic, intense; her kohl made her look a little intimidating; well, quite a lot intimidating if he was to be honest.

  ‘I’m next door. I’ve got your CPU.’

  ‘Oh … okay …’ Jess assessed him: one of the neatest boys she’d ever seen. The creases on his sleeves buttoned at the wrist were sharp enough to cut; his jeans were crisp; his canvas shoes appeared to have come directly from a shop window. Had he just emerged from a photoshoot? But this was the boy whose mother had been sighted late at night in close proximity to her father.

  ‘Do you know that your Mum is …’ She wasn’t sure how she should complete the sentence. ‘Jimmy said you might be able to fix it.’

  ‘I think it’s okay now. Cleared a lot of bad stuff, downloaded some free programs, anti-spyware, Malwarebytes. Anyway …’ He held out the box. Jess looked at the pink knuckles of his lean, white hands and tried to work out how she might extract a little more information regarding his mother. She stepped back from the door.

  ‘You might as well bring it in.’

  Elton paused and peered into the dark interior. Was that a good idea? He had to admit, the only thing that had caused him to engage thus far was the intimate knowledge he had of her. Unknown to Jess, she was already a close acquaintance, in some ways more familiar than any relative. He only had to click on her social media login page to find her saved password and thus enter her private domain, immersing himself in the network traces of her personality. He soon found her stored photos: selfies, shots of singers, actors, her brother, other people’s tattoos, and dead things: birds, insects, a headless lizard, a cat in the gutter. Her Favourites bar revealed interests in music and witchcraft; YouTube saves showed her preoccupation with the occult, torture, planking, deformity and body-modification; her correspondence revealed a person who had eschewed a social life for a world within, someone who had no concern whatever for the future of mankind. She interested him.

  ‘Do you want me to hook it up?’

  ‘No, just stick it there.’ She pointed to a black leather couch and Elton put the computer down, rubbing his palms together.

  ‘Well, that’s it then,’ he said, backing up.

  ‘You going to charge me?’

  ‘Don’t know. Suppose so. What can you pay?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m broke. But James will fix it up … My brother?’

  ‘Yeah, we’ve met. He bought my bike. Got a bargain.’

  ‘It was a shit-heap.’

  ‘D’yer think?’

  ‘Better now since he patched it up and painted it. Now it’s probably worth what you charged him.’

  ‘Whatever. I gotta go.’ Elton edged away from her but Jess stood her ground.

  ‘Want a beer?’

  ‘A beer?’

  ‘Yeah, a beer, you know, that yellow stuff in a bottle.’

  Elton eyed her suspiciously. It was 10 a.m.

  ‘No, gotta go. I just promised my mother I’d –’

  ‘Anyway, how’d you know my name was Jess?’

  ‘Your brother must’ve said it, or –’

  ‘Or you saw it on my computer.’
r />   Elton found himself a captive of Jess’s green eyes glinting in the pools of kohl. For her part, she was still minus the information she wanted. How to acquire it? She suggested that perhaps he could hook up her PC after all. But it was with some reluctance that Elton finally followed her up the stairs to the bedroom. He knelt on the floor and plugged in the components without disturbing the layer of dust. He turned on the computer and scooted around the screen, making sure it was functioning properly. Jess watched him, assessing his appearance. He was a bit mad-looking: red hair in soft spikes, anaemic skin as pale as her own. He certainly wasn’t a muscular boy – not that she minded a bit of wasting. His clothes were exceptionally tidy, and his features were neat: straight nose, square forehead, lips full and flawless. She watched them quiver; he was clearly nervous, as she usually was. But now, sitting on the bed slightly above him, she felt completely in charge.

  ‘I have a prediction. Want to hear it?’ Elton did not respond. ‘There’s going to be a plague bigger than the Black Death. It’s going to be a radical computer virus. Giant companies will go down, banks, governments, airlines, everything. Millions of flunkies will die and no one will be able to stop it. The whole world will collapse.’

  Elton flicked the cursor across the screen. Jess waited but he said nothing.

  ‘What does your mother do? For a living?’

  Elton glanced at her. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. Mine’s an artist. So’s my father. Bullshit artists, mostly.’ She observed the neat boy staring into the computer screen.

  ‘James thought your mother might be a nurse.’

  ‘Yeah, she is. Well, not exactly a nurse but she works in the hospital, behind the counter.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Which hospital?’

  ‘One of them – I don’t know; why?’

  ‘Don’t you even know which one?’