Murder at the Quacking Duck.

The Quacking Duck was a night club in the basement of a hotel in Beirut till a shell landed on it on New Year’s Eve at the turn of a year back in the seventies. Magda had just finished a set with the band shortly before midnight and was stepping down from the small half-moon stage. I had been waiting for her at a table at the back of the smoky room along with Zainab and Nabil. That’s when the shell hit.

The lights were dim; the applause was weak and half-hearted at that time of night before the main act came on to see in the New Year; we were all tired after the long bus ride up from Latakia where Zainab and Nabil had arrived by boat from Alexandria the previous night.

The shell must have hit just as I turned my head away from the stage to see if the bar was clear enough to let me go and order more drinks. There was a confusion of noise and light and sudden movement. In an instant I realised that I was lying on my back with a small, round table lying on my stomach, its legs sticking up in the air inelegantly, but I couldn’t figure out why. Why had the world been re-arranged without me seeing it happen? Why was I looking through swirling dust at the ceiling? Why was Zainab lying on the floor with her skirt pulled that far up? Everything was wrong but there was no-one to tell and I didn’t know exactly what it was that wasn’t right.

“I’ve fallen into a coma”, I thought, “I’ve had a stroke. I have to break the spell”.

So I tried to speak and move. That worked. Forcing air and sound out from between my dry lips was the first act of rehabilitation, the start of the long process of putting things right, bringing order back into life, but it was only the first tiny step.

Bit by bit reality sunk in, pieces of a jigsaw started coming together turning chaos very gradually into order, but many pieces were missing or in the wrong place. Some bits got moved round in my brain as other people joined in. Someone started to moan, then another. As the reality of pain kicked in moans turned to screams, but Zainab wasn’t making any sound and she didn’t move. Sirens blared. Water gushed from a fractured pipe. Noise began to build and men started walking around the room, taking long strides to avoid standing on whatever was in their way, and the world was sitting at an odd angle.

Someone bent over Zainab then straightened again and came over to me. A weight was lifted from my chest, dust poured into my mouth. Some dark, towering figure kneeled beside me and I could feel hands running up and down my body. I was rolled over. I was on my feet. I had grit in my eyes. There was shouting. I was standing in the cold night air in a wonderhell of sirens and flashing lights and the moon made the sea all starry with tiny, yellow pinpricks of light.

Can there be life without a bottom?

"So this is life then; it's not quite what I expected" said the one I had decided to call Flute on account of his melodic voice.

"What exactly did you expect? I asked him.

"Something a lot less ..... colourful. I think that's the word you use for it."

"Is your own planet not colourful?" "Everything is what you call dark green there".

 "That's odd", I said trying to imagine a world of dark green. "Anyway sit down and have a cup of tea", I told Flute.

"I can't" he said. "Why?" "I haven't got a bottom", he explained.

I thought about that statement for a while and couldn't get my head round the notion of not having a bottom.

"What are bottoms like?" Flute asked me.

Again I sat in silence for a while never having been asked such a question before. I didn't know how to begin answering Flute's enquiry. Flute filled the silence by asking, "Will you show me your bottom?" I made it clear that that wouldn't be happening.

"What does it look like?" he asked.

"Well I've never really seen my own bottom", I told Flute as I sat on it on the other side of the table from him, creating a buffer zone between us.

"Would you like to see it?" he asked me.

"Not particularly. Maybe if you watch more TV or go to the cinema you'll see a few bottoms there", I suggested but Flute wasn't too keen on the idea.

"Why won't you just show me yours?" he asked again. "Is there something wrong with yours?"

"NO", I shouted defensively. "My bottom is perfectly normal".

"Then your bottom would be a good one for me to see if it's average", he said, obviously thinking that his logic had defeated my objections and I would have to oblige.

"I said normal, not average Flute. And no. We don't show each other our bottoms and that's the end of it", I said a bit crossly, hoping to close down the conversation.

"But people on TV show their bottoms you said" he replied looking genuinely confused.

"Why won't you show me your bottom? I've never seen a bottom?"

"Oh sit down Flute", I ordered.

"But I don't have a bottom to sit on".

Lissadell Breeze.

There's an old log on the shore at Lissadell, right where the shingle meets the fields. It's lain there for as long as I've been holidaying in County Sligo and weeds grow up round it. I like to take a few beers along when I go to sit on it on a summer evening to smell the seaweed and listen to the curlews and lapwings and watch the oyster catchers on their long legs running on patches of wet sand. After a while , especially if I'm tired, I shuffle on down to sit on the stones and rest my back on the decaying lump of tree and take long looks at the sky while I take long slugs from a bottle. I'm not the only one who finds peace and rest at that old log. Dogs seem to cock their legs at it too.

Ready for happiness.

At long last, after many years of longing I think I might just be ready now for happiness. Certain things have passed, other things are no more and this cold, sunny afternoon has distilled into a drop of pure emotion.

A small, empty piazza in Rome comes to mind, with pigeons that lift away on noisy wings from the dusty pavement. I sit down on the bench under a tree. High walls on every side with shuttered windows to keep the heat out of small apartments. No movement of air.

Two tables with a few chairs outside a dark doorway: a café bar. I drag myself over and go through the door and the air is cool, but stale. Cigarettes, fried food, beer. A girl with greasy hair tied back sets a beer on the counter. I pay for it. I drink it and go back outside to the bench beneath the tree.

By now the sun has moved and the piazza is pretty again with the shutters open and girls passing through it going somewhere and I know I'm ready for happiness.

The sky leaks, Brel bleeds and I cry.

It’s a long time since I’ve seen rain leak so heavily from the sky - it makes me feel quite righteous for having wrecked myself cutting the grass last night instead of putting it off until today. Jacques Brel is bleeding mournfully out of the radio in the café and when his words combine with the rain dripping from my hair and with the thin morning light and the heavy smell of coffee grinds in the air, the resulting melancholy rises around me like steam. The rain bounces off the cars and empty pavement outside like Brel’s “perles de pluie”. It washes down the window I’m sitting beside distorting my view of the street, maybe also my view of life, as the poet rhymes “Bonheur” with “Coeur”, “malentendu” with “le temps perdu”. I could cry.

And in walks Annie, drenched, hair stuck to her cheeks and the warmest smile outlined by the reddest lipstick and turning each “perle de pluie” into another extravagant adjective. I’m no longer in Belfast as she smiles at the room and walks past me to the counter; I’m in Paris, café at the bottom of Rue Moufftard, and it’s still raining, the end of December, and she isn’t Annie she’s Maggi, but the lipstick is just as red. She’s wearing the big, creamy, ankle-length coat I bought her to cover up her bump and keep it warm. My heart swells.

Now I’m definitely going to cry. I’ll go outside so that people, if they look at me, might mistake my tears for “perles de pluie”.

Smoking all the way back to Paris.

Tony's a flying instructor who drinks in the café I drink in early most mornings. He always takes his second cup of coffee outside to a rickety table for a smoke and he smokes French cigarettes and the smoke leaks back into the café through the louvered air vent in the big shop front window and wraps me in nostalgia and I'm right back in Paris.

A hot afternoon in Ahmedabad.

There were flies in the small café but at least it was cool. The chink of plates and cutlery and the low buzz of conversations gave the impression of busyness, but the busyness wasn't happening round me; I sat on my own slightly away from the other customers. From a pot plant just outside the window a faint breeze wafted a whole summer of hyacinth scent in my direction. The smell wrapped itself round me like grave clothes. I found it nauseating and it stayed with me the rest of the afternoon. Even the heavy smell of cumin drifting in from the kitchen was no match for the sickly, deathly hyacinth. The television was turned up loud though no-one seemed to be watching it. The music from the adverts screamed in my head and a football commentator raced faster than the ball he was chasing with his eyes and voice and even the mad dash of red and yellow football shirts that I caught in the corner of my eye were deafeningly loud.

 

I walked back to the hotel reeling from an afternoon of sensory overload beneath an over-headed sun. Children kicked cans up and down the street and shop keepers shouted at each other. Scooters scooted around me like demented wasps at the end of summer and it wasn't until later, in the cool of the evening,  that I began to recover from the day's assaults.

 

At the hotel buckets of water were brought to my room for me to bathe in. Afterwards a sprinkler revived the tired looking lawn while I sat on the veranda. Alcohol would have been too heavy so I ordered a nimbu pani and let the lush garden hidden from the rest of Ahmedabad soothe my eyes and heard. The sounds of the city couldn't reach me from the other side of the high walls: I could have been in a desert rather than in the middle of a dense and clamorous urban sprawl.

Looking out over Naples.

The man leaned against the cold metal rails of the balcony three stories above the street and lit a cigarette. He drew on it deep and slow with long intervals between each drag and let the smoke out through his nose as slowly as he was able. and all the while he looked out over the street below and enjoyed being solitary, brooding and Meursaultesque.

 

 Young people sauntered and dallied in the street and late buses cruised about under the brusque control of drivers who wanted to get home. In the distance over roof tops the man kept an eye on funnels of boats at the docks. The smell of fried food wrestled with the smell of the docks and the street, each taking its turn at dominating the others, but once his cigarette was smoked the man let the smell of the sea win and his imagination turned to scented islands, albatrosses and dusky maidens. The mournful call of fog horns and sirens raised the tension in his breast as did the wail of trains carrying away the cargo brought from faraway places by ships, and he let the night get swallowed up in dreams that tasted of salt and coconut.

Ancient and forgetable.

The world was already old when I was born. I tumbled into its ancient, incomplete story just as one day I will drop out of it, unnoticed by most and soon to be forgotten. Even the memory of me will one day be gone; it will probably survive a while in the minds of my grandchildren but then people will stop talking about me, descendants will look at family photographs, point and ask who I am, and no-one will have an answer. My own grandparents' faces are still easily recalled among my siblings but my children cannot recognise them. My great grandparents are now only dark, faceless impressions, ghostly memories, though I do remember the hearses that took away their bodies so I assume they must have been real at some time. By the time I follow after them there will be no trace left to say that they were here other than faded ink on parchment that itself will one day crumble and fall apart. But for now my birth and childhood are vividly held in my parents' minds. My brothers hold other parts, and yet more episodes sit half-forgotten in the unstable memories of school friends. Most of the people I have met along the road have already thought it not important to hold onto whatever snatches of life we shared briefly. My children take care of other impressions and my wife of others still. As one by one their memories or bodies will fail, a part of me will die till there is nothing left.

A cafe in Vienna.

It was an old café with polished tables and high-back, leather chairs. It was an old part of town. The customers were old too, not necessarily in years, but in taste and status. They took breakfast in this particular café perhaps because of its air of endurance, and there they checked the state of the markets from the privacy afforded by the broadsheet newspapers that they held in front of their faces. The rustling of newspapers was the only music to be heard and it wasn’t intended to create an atmosphere that was either convivial or relaxed.

 

I walked into that cafe early on a morning in December many years ago. The pavements along the narrow street were backed up with the snow that had fallen during the previous night, with little paths cleared from the front door of each building out to the road. I had just arrived in the city on the first train from Budapest. My heavy, black travelling coat was all filled up with the memories of trains and European cities, reeking of cigarette smoke and alcohol and dozens of cheap hotels. I was probably also carrying with me a strong whiff of loneliness, though in those days I didn’t know that was the name for the dull ache that I woke up with most mornings.

   

Not quite Smyrna

I stood on the deck leaning against the rail and watched. The dock was heaving with life,  people arriving or departing or just there to look for some lucky break. There were two other boats tied up along the quay. I smoked a cigarette. (I don't smoke in reality but it feels right that I should smoke for the purposes of this little memory). The sun beat down hard on my head. Three bulky, black water buffalo ambled onto the quay. Their long, curved horns were coated in red lacquer that gleamed in the fierce sunlight like bloodied scimitars. Children cried. This wasn't Smyrna quay that Ernest wrote about but it could have been.

I felt uncomfortable in my clothes. I'd slept in them all night on top of a bale of tarpaulin on the deck and watched stars appear in the late sky then fade a few hours later. At the same time the land on the port side of the boat had faded into the night as we headed south then it turned up again in the palor of a cold morning. In no time the temperature had risen again and by mid-morning waves of shimmering heat lifting from the land was distorting my vision. There were only a few shacks clustered around the quay, no town to speak of. A dusty track ran back from the sea across the narrow plain and I could see a road zig zagging up into the hills in the distance.

I could see nothing lush about the landscape. Ruth said it was lush country but it wasn't. The air smelled dry even when it drifted a mile or so out to sea to meet us in the cold morning. There were no trees. There was no grass. We stayed tied up at the quay that had no name for two hours. The sea was slack and silent and the boat hardly rose and fell at all against the land as boats usually do. The people were noisy, the sky and sea were quiet and it was too hot to go inside to the small dining room and bar and lounge. It stank of sweat and stale beer. Ruth was nowhere to be seen.

Lake Malawi: a fine memory.

A boat lying at anchor in the bay, her rigging reaching effortlessly into the apricot skies of early morning, and hardly a ripple on the water. A low murmur of voices rises in the quietness. Three dugout canoes are paddled towards the beach through the light mists sitting on the face of the lake and men jump from them into the water to drag them up onto the sand. They unload their catches of fish; women appear from the bushes with straw baskets on their heads. The fish are soon spread out on mats to dry and I watch the scene from behind the fallen tree where I slept the night before.

A spring morning in the Mournes. Or the Italian Alps or wherever you fancy.

It's good to crawl out of a tent into the freshness of a new spring morning. Birds have beaten you to it of course and are kicking up a din somewhere off in the forest or along the edge on the lake. The sky is still kind of dark over in the west, bruised and purple looking above the water and the mountains but to the east the sun's radiance precedes it into a baby blue sky that's streaked with wisps of apricot clouds. There's no-one about for miles and the air is stained with the scent of the pine trees that grow almost down to the water's edge. You leave the tent and charge across the grass to throw yourself into the frigid, still waters of the lake and come out a few minutes later breathless, blue, teeth chattering and skin taut, and feeling more alive then ever before.

Café in Belfast

There's a man sitting outside the café that I'm in. He's sitting in the shade of an awning, just out of the sun that's beating down on Belfast and he's impeccably dressed and coiffed. He's smoking a cigarette, drinking coffee and eyeing the pretty girls walking past in light summer dresses and bouncy hair.

He could be Albert Camus.

At another table, behind the man and out of his line of vision there's a woman sitting, again impeccably dressed and coiffed, drinking coffee, no cigarette. She's watching him but pretending to be reading a magazine.

She could be Audrey Hepburn.

 

Two very stylish people, he unaware of her, she perhaps letting her imagination run wild in some fantasy featuring them both. I will him to look round and notice her. He finishes his coffee, smokes another cigarette then leaves without turning round and she goes back to her magazine.