A True Story
By canarywolf
- 421 reads
I'll tell you this. Most people, if pushed, have the same idea about
truth, and to be fair, it's a sound idea. If I tell you my name is
Andy, they say, it is only true if my name is Andy. Truth, they imply,
is a correspondence between what is said, and what is real.
Well, my name is Andy and I'll tell you something: their idea is
untrue. And here's a true story. Here is why.
We arrived by taxi. It was dark: rain haloes encircled the streetlights
and tear-shaped droplets freckled the tinted glass door. We were
outside the Bullworth Building, in the heart of Auckland - and we were
almost directly beneath the penthouse apartment of Steve Burton who,
speaking through the intercom, was telling us to enter the foyer.
We waited there for perhaps five minutes. But when I think of that
foyer now, the only impression that remains is of translucent brown:
that lucrative colour of the rain on the door.
We were in New Zealand; it was two or so months after we had
materialised through our first arrivals gate. In theory we were
escapees from conformity; love and unharnessed individuality were to
replace the jaded routines of Londonite society. That was the idea. But
in the end, we spent all our money in the South Island not, as it
turned out, on the materials of expressiveness, but on alcohol and good
food enough to block out what we saw as the terminal flatness of
Christchurch, the branded blandness of Queenstown and the bitter, hilly
chill of Dunedin. Ironically, the most fun we had was listening to the
magical, evocative anecdotes that were spoken, about Ireland, by the
Irish. We flew back to Auckland and walked through the spotless glass
doors of odourless employment agencies. These square loop shaped
offices had varnished pine tile floors, 'Microlene' water purifiers and
Maori art on steel plinths. I got a job monitoring shipping containers.
Martha was given work as the PA to an investment banker. We saved money
and booked flights to Chile. On the night before we left, the
investment banker invited us to stay at his for a night.
The lift went 'ping' and sighed open, revealing an ornate, mirrored
interior, plus Steve. He was thinner than I had imagined. His
semi-quiffed, side parted hair was dyed pale blonde and he was wearing
a suit, and a pink tie with a puked-on pattern of slashing lines and
four-sided shapes. Youth and humour twinkled in his fifty-something
eyes, tempered by cunning and seasoned with ambition, part fulfilled,
part 'not yet'. As he spoke, he projected his heavily accented voice at
a volume that aggressively seized my attention - and held it, until he
was willing to let go.
"Good to meet you mate." 'Gud tamit yamite'.
We took the lift to the top of the building and headed towards one of
the four or five doors that were accessible via an ultra-capitalist
impersonation of some kind of Mediterranean hall. We trod over
ocean-blue stone slabs. Our bags brushed light green, large-leafed
plants in giant urns. We passed through, eyes wide open.
The flat was affluent yet drastically sparse. The walls and floor -
part boards, part milky blue marble - were mainly bare. A postmodern
interpretation of the Mona Lisa was leaning above a single step,
returning our gaze.
"Just dump your things in there," he said, indicating toward a door on
the left, without pausing in his stride.
Light-heartedly, but with the awe of people unaccustomed to such
luxury, we put down our enormous backpacks and joined Steve in the
kitchen, a narrow, tidy passage of cupboards and utensils with a full
wine rack and a shelf of perhaps seven pairs of designer sunglasses -
and two china budgerigars. Separated from the kitchen by a breakfast
bar with a built-in sink was the sizeable living area, empty except for
a TV set, a game console and a hi-fi. There were no sofas and no
armchairs, only three beanbags, in a row. A French window opened on to
a wet grey stone balcony overlooking The Mercury Hotel on Custom St and
further back, the docks, where multi-coloured cuboid metal containers
cruised back and forth in the teeth of monstrous frantic yellow
forklifts.
We were sitting on tall stools by the breakfast bar, facing the
kitchen.
"Can I get you a drink?" said Steve. "A G and T? A beer? Some bubbly in
the fridge to break open later. We'll have a pipe. I suppose you drink
tea - have you seen this stuff?"
He was brandishing two small boxes.
"I never ever drink the stuff but that's the thing about you poms, you
like having 'a cup of tea'. I've got some herbal - incredible stuff -
and this is? black tea. Polish."
"I've never seen black tea before," I said.
He put the tea away and brought me a can of Heineken, then poured a gin
and tonic for Martha and a whisky and coke for himself. The ice cracked
luxuriantly. We lit cigarettes, flicking our ash into a tiny concave
glass ashtray, which he emptied and rinsed at regular intervals
throughout the evening, perhaps trying to deflect our attention away
from the ridiculousness embodied by this stylish, impractical object.
At equally regular intervals I exchanged glances with Martha. We were
each checking how the other felt, in this eccentric environment, the
flat of this man, her boss, this man and his generosity: if the
sloshing overflow of a bucket full of water can be called generosity.
And there was a common sense of novelty at finding ourselves, for the
first time in months, outside of that dense, transient and ultimately
superficial social terrain called 'Backpacker Land'.
"We were thinking about going to get some takeaway," said Martha.
"You don't need to worry about that! I made a lamb rack, cos while
you're here in New Zealand, you should try some famous lamb! Well, I
should ask first, what are you?" What am I? "Do you eat lamb? Meat?
Chicken? You a veggie?"
I shook my head. I wasn't a vegetarian, which was lucky because the
dinner he then brought us was fully carnivorous: small, marinated
pieces of lamb, on the bone, on the plate, succulent and strangely
delicious. The meal of a bachelor.
Steve's mobile phone rang.
"Hello?! Oh, hello. Yeah." 'YEAR' "Yeah. Listen, you've got to be very,
very quick because I'm entertaining some friends for dinner. Yeah.
Alright. Send a fax. No, listen. Send it in a fax. No. Listen. Send
it... send it in a fax. Alright. Goodbye. Thanks, yeah. Goodbye."
"It never ends for you, does it Steve?" said Martha.
"Never does." He looked at me. "Your girlfriend's been such a bloody
marvelous help to me. I was up till five last night and I'll be up at
five thirty tomorrow. The work, it just does not stop."
He said 'work' in the way most people would say 'laughter' or 'fun' in
such a sentence; like a lucky, lucky man. He was still looking at
me.
"Andy," he said, with a discordant glimmer in his eye, "I am a
fraud".
A number of possible responses flickered by me. I settled on, "how
so?"
"I am a registered fraud. I was sent to prison for it. You didn't know
that did you, Martha?"
Martha affected a look of concerned scintillation. She shook her
head.
We finished the drinks we were on. He opened a bottle of Veuve
Clicquot.
"Five years. I was a convict for five years. No Veuve Clicquot. No
famous lamb. I only got let out two years back, in May. But you
wouldn't know it, looking at my flat and my business, would you
Andy?"
"No! Definitely not."
He picked up his phone, this time to call the Sheraton Hotel in Bangkok
where Lara Dennis, his twenty seven year old girlfriend, was meant to
have a room booked for what was, in Thailand, the approaching
evening.
"Is that the Bangkok Sheraton? Do you speak EXCELLENT English? I'm
calling from New Zealand. I need somebody who speaks EXCELLENT ENGLISH.
Okay. There should be a booking, for tonight, in the name of 'Dennis'.
No, DENNIS. D. E. N. N. I. S." 'DINNIS. Dee. Ee. In. In. Eye. Iss.' He
held his head in one of his hands and paced up and down the kitchen,
like this was his most stressful experience since emerging from the
womb. "?No, DENNIS. D for danger. E for er? energy. N for Neptune. N
for Neptune. I for island. S for shithead? Yeah, S for stegosaurus.
DENNIS! Yes, DENNIS!" I winced internally. "No, wait! Don't hang up
just yet! I want you to send a limousine to the airport and pick her
up. I want you to get this right. Yeah. She's on flight 3345. THREE
THREE FOUR FIVE? I want a driver to meet her when she gets off the
plane. 3345? DENNIS! Alright? thankyou. GOODBYE!" He put his phone back
on the breakfast bar and lit a Winfield and mumbled "shithead"
loudly.
"See, it's like this. The way I see it, you only live once. But
society lives a lot longer. Do you see what I'm saying? Society has a
different agenda to what you or I or Martha have as individuals. And
that's because it has a decent shot at being immortal, or at least
thinks it does."
We stared at him a little blankly.
""I've read a lot of? history. And I HARDLY EVER watch TV. But when I
do watch it, I always watch something that will teach me something. And
the pattern, the rule - or whatever you're gonna call it - is that the
people who express themselves as individuals are the ones who are
remembered."
I smiled, thinking of all the backpackers I'd met, expressing
themselves as individuals.
"And there's a difference," said Steve, "between thinking you're being
true to yourself when all you're doing is copying someone else being
true to themselves, and actually having the BRAVERY to be who YOU want
to be."
I was thinking: this has been said before. But still, it was
refreshingly unlikely to hear it being spoken by this overbearing,
suited man.
"That's the thing about you backpackers," he said. I winced with
distaste. "You think you're individuals. But you're not. You're
backpackers. You can 'express yourselves' all you like. But who's
listening except other backpackers? When I express myself, people
listen."
I sipped some champagne. Martha sipped some champagne. Steve sipped
some champagne and picked up his phone, again.
"I've gotta try and contact Lara. HELLO? Can you put me through to a
number in Thailand? Yeah, it's?"
In the living room was a framed slow-shutter landscape photograph of
the New York skyline by night; electric ribbons of rainbow light
tracing the streets. Next to this were some colour photocopies pinned
to a noticeboard, most of which were of a pretty, blonde-haired girl at
what appeared to be a dinner party. There were two of Steve sticking
out his tongue and making rabbit ears with his hands, and a blurry shot
of a bottle of vodka balancing on a windowsill.
He left the room but I could clearly hear what he was saying.
"?B for barbarian. U for your anus. R for? rollercoaster. T for
tornado. O for Oliver. N for Neptune. BURTON! Yeah, BURTON. You got
that. Now I want you to wait there and I also want you to write,
underneath what you've just written, YOUR LOVER FOR LIFE. Yeah that's
right. You like that? YOUR LOVER FOR LIFE?"
He had returned to the kitchen and was now holding a green cylindrical
tin and a pipe that looked like something a child might have made in
their first glassblowing workshop. He sat back down and opened the tin.
Martha went to the toilet and Steve removed from it a resealable bag,
about the size of a postage stamp. As far as I could see, it was
empty.
"What is that?" I said
"Crystal."
"Crystal? meths?"
"Yeah. Speed."
It was a Tuesday night; our flight (to Chile) was the next day. And my
carelessly indulgent days were even then behind me, truly they were.
But partly out of curiosity, partly because we wouldn't have known how
to say "no", we both sampled what was in the pipe - and for every
second we sucked, Steve sucked for eight. He burned it black. And when
we sat on the beanbags and turned on the television I felt
light-headed, but strangely, I also felt tired. I did not feel like
speaking. I lost myself in the violent, stylish spy thriller ten feet
in front of me. Martha, on my left, did the same. Steve was sprawled
out cold. He was gone: but at that point, to be honest, I wasn't paying
much attention.
At the same time as I was watching the screen, I was thinking, we've
been living as and amongst backpackers too long. 'Backpackers': that
very word filled me with something like loathing, so trite and
uninspiring and ineffectual was the image it invoked in me. To be
defined by your bag type! Where - in this supposedly radical community
- were the eccentrics and the bohemians, celebrating their freedom,
writing poetry, creating music and debating the things that are
important in life? For surely when they boarded that plane, and opted
out of the rigidity of home or the rat race or whatever, this was what
they had in mind: to become themselves, to express their freedom, to
see the world but also to react to it, not to simply become smothered
by a different insidious social orthodoxy. The mundane conversational
loops of the communal kitchen; the informal uniform; the cliquey
conglomerations; all these things I considered. How refreshing it was,
I thought, to glance round the door of a different way of life, not
just into the 'local culture', but into the world of someone who,
whatever you thought of him, was unapologetically unique. If you'd
looked at me slouching where I was, my eyes half-shut, my greasy hair
hanging forward, you wouldn't have thought it, but my mind was racing,
with ideas, reflections and resolutions. This night, I was thinking, is
an anecdote of the future, even if it is a quiet one.
And I imagined a coin rotating in space. Not a pound or a dollar, but a
coin belonging to the currency of individuality. On one side was the
proud image of a professional white man wearing a suit. On the other
was the letter 'I' stamped onto an image of the planet Earth.
When the thriller finished, we wanted to go to bed, but Steve was still
on the beanbag.
"What's the etiquette in this situation?" said Martha, filling a glass
of water from behind the breakfast bar. "Do we wake him up or leave him
be?"
"Well, you finished at five: this wasn't covered on your timesheet.
Let's leave him. If we wake him and that's the wrong decision, he'll
know we made that decision. But if we leave him, what does he know? We
might've tried but failed and?"
I was stood over him now. He was facing straight ahead, but his eyes
weren't entirely closed. His mouth had curled downwards into a morbid
expression that should have been amusing. His shirt and suit jacket
were scrunched up behind him and his hands were gripping the beanbag on
either side as if to keep it from capsizing. His tie had slunk over to
behind his left shoulder. Beneath his shirt, nothing moved. He was
entirely motionless. He was entirely lifeless.
"?we might have tried and failed and we might have? left him?"
It didn't seem possible. I calmed my leaping insides in a single
swallow, with a simple premise: I cannot trust my own eyes. I staggered
around the breakfast bar and went to bed with Martha.
For two hours I lay awake fretting to the sound of her heavy breathing.
Breathing! The rhythmical affirmation of life! I was like what they
call in the news a 'stricken vessel'; and that remembered image of what
I thought I might have seen was saltwater, elusively gushing aboard;
and my interpretation of that image was a bucket; and I was bailing out
the water, and with it the doubt. I'm just being paranoid? and I've had
crystal meths, I thought? in a glass pipe? and some drinks? and so has
he? his chest! Words spiral into abstract images, moving or still,
sepia or full-colour, of the police, of Steve's body - if he was in
fact? - how would it look? They would not consider not arresting us.
We'd be arrested! Scapegoats. Two young, irresponsible backpackers. No
fixed address. Drugs on the premises. They'd assume they were ours?. Is
he dead?! That word, 'dead', was decisive, the one I had been trying to
avoid. I got out of bed and went into the living room. The TV was still
on. He was still there. His face glowed white; his lips were the colour
of toothpaste. I went back to bed.
We left early the next morning. To Martha, I haven't said a thing: she
doesn't know. That morning, I even managed to half-convince myself that
I'd hadn't really got up in the night, that it was a vivid, anxious,
terrible dream. But as soon as I found an internet caf? in Santiago,
and checked the website of The New Zealand Herald, and searched for
'Steve Burton', there it was, the story in full: a rich dead man,
evidence of drugs, a friend claiming 'Steve was not alone', a feature
about designer drugs.
Why am I writing all this down? I ask myself. This paper will burn,
almost instantly, the sole, only briefly existent evidence of my
pragmatism. But I know why. Because although, in a way, what happened
that night happened, in another way, it did not. At least not in
Martha's world, or for that matter in Steve's - where the 'truth' is
buried, with his decaying quiff. I write because I have had - and am
continuously in the process of having - an unsettling realization.
Truth, I now see, is merely one thing: coherence. Which makes reality
decidedly translucent.
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