For Joe, in memoriam.
No one was ever happy at the Nepenthe’s Kiss.
The trash-heap of a bar was somehow dingier in the day, hiding in the oily shadow of a festering alley like a fugitive fleeing the sun. Scumbags and drunks used this place to keep off streets, to continue their miserable scenes of prolonged suicide to a private stall, away from prying eyes. In those decaying, stained stalls you could be nobody. Nobody with a drink, and that’s all that mattered.
This was the place if you wanted to drown your desolate life at the bottom of some bitter liquid the colour of piss. A few minutes longer, just five more minutes, just enough time to forget the horror and despair that awaits you on the other side of that mouldering door. Dissolve your disconsolation away at the bottom of your glass like one of those pills you’d get from the guy in the far corner.
Nobody really wanted to be here. You just ended up here when there was nowhere else to go. Everyone drank with their eyes downcast, as if mourning, soaking in alcohol, pickling in peace—more like pieces.
But this guy. This guy was ordering Dry Martinis like they were going out of fashion. Shaken not stirred, three olives – it has to be three, not four, three. Who does this guy think he is, James Bond or something?
In a discreet corner of the dejected bar a man in a dusty raincoat sat staring rather dejectedly at a glass in front of him, occasionally steeling glances at the moustachioed man in the pinstriped suit, drinking those stupid Martinis endlessly. He could see the man’s hoary waves hanging limply from his damp scalp, as if they were too utterly exhausted from their vain attempts to keep the alcohol at bay. His moustache seemed to be following suit.
What was that, ten? Maybe eleven? Didn’t he have a family to get back to?
Today of all days, why did he have to get this job?
The dilapidated dingy room, full of pathetically worn red velvet and darkly stained wood, fitted his mood perfectly. Almost too perfectly.
The ring-stained tabletop of his booth, with its moth-eaten seats and half-hearted repair jobs, slowly incorporated itself into his very being as slowly as nature reclaims long-deserted log cabins in dark brooding woods.
Soon, that red velvety lichen the colour of dried-blood would completely cover his form. If someone were to take an axe to that stained hand that had been resting on the table for so long, unmoving, one would be able to read the passage of his own sad existence by simply counting those ring stains on the inside.
As he sat there brooding, he felt himself lose grip again, and he was unable to stop himself from wading into the comfortably warm and ink-black waters of his threadbare brain, back to those black witch’s robes, leathery like bat’s wings, swarming on the shore, dancing rhythmically behind him, trying to draw him in…
With a jarring jerk, Bruno Nolan, P.I., snapped out of his trance. He sighed quietly and deeply to himself as he stared morosely at the glass of whiskey on the table in front of him.
The ice cubes had long since melted away, the colour of the liquid reminding him of one of those tiny mosquitoes in a dusty and forgotten display cabinet in a museum somewhere, unable to escape no matter how hard it tried. Their tiny screams of rage were just frozen, mid-life, mid-moment, mid-thought – insignificant amber bubbles forever doomed to be just a blip of vague interest on a tour of so much more to see.
He wondered exactly when and why he had gotten that drink he had been nursing so abjectly – he didn’t even like alcohol that much anymore, the taste just made him gag.
Sure, in the past it had had its uses, like giving him that bourbon-scented dash of courage necessary to talk to that bored-to-death looking girl in that midnight blue dress and delicate pearl necklace that seemed so out of place in his friend Gideon’s grimy apartment.
Bruno sighed again, even deeper this time.
Another quick glance up over his horn-rimmed glasses towards the bar, past the countless fresh-faced and perky whores trying to act mysterious and seductive, and he finally saw what he had been waiting for these past two hours. The man in the pinstriped suit was staggering off the stool and heading towards the door to the street, cheeks flushed and a stupid smile pasted on his face.
As he look at the guy, Bruno couldn’t help but notice one of those girls at the bar was looking his way, looking straight into Bruno’s soul as if she was attempting to divine his very essence. The mischievous glint in her dark eyes heightened by her royal purple eye shadow and the coy smile on her blood-red lips only made him feel worse.
But Bruno stared back, transfixed by the miniscule marvels of pure white suspended around her neck. Those pearls seemed to be waltzing so beautifully in time with the jazz that stalked the room from deep with in the nebulous shadows of a crumbling corner.
Those far-off piano keys seemed to Bruno like skittering flea-infested rats fleeing a crime-scene, scurrying away in desperation from a translucent saxophone that seemed to haunt the room. Like a long-dead memory of heartbreak, that sax wailed mournfully like the horn of ship lost in the fog and looking for home for centuries, it echoed forlornly from out of the past and only just making itself felt in the present. The Double bass throbbed weakly, like the pulse of an exsanguinating victim, while those off-kilter drums, transformed the tune into a poltergeist ceaselessly bumping into things and causing mischief, as it stumbled away in the night like a deranged wretch that just escaped the asylum.
And those pearls, like searing-white stars, just orbited gracefully around the girl’s neck in tune to the elegant discord of the universe…
Shit! His reverie was cut short by his realisation that the man had disappeared completely from view.
Bruno drained the dredged of his drink, drove his hands deep into the pockets of his one-size too big raincoat and rooted around in panic. Finally pulling out a couple of crumpled notes, he slammed them on the table rather loudly, causing a few in the neighbouring booths to turn around curiously, and the girl to widen her smile fractionally and calculatedly.
Hastily grabbing his hat off the table, almost spilling the overflowing ashtray in the process, he dashed after his moustachioed mark.
As Bruno made his way to the door, a crack formed in the now forgotten girl’s makeup between her perfectly manicured brows, the only clue to her disappointment.
Bruno bolted down the festering alleyway, and burst onto the bustling street looking both ways in sheer panic, displacing more than a few people as they tumbled to the cracked concrete sidewalk. The pavement was packed with so many people he could barely see the other side of the road. Look at all the lonely people. Where do they all come from?
More importantly, where the fuck did that guy go?
Bruno was definitely not the tallest man in the world, and as he stood there surrounded by humungous heads on all sides that completely obscuring his vision, he felt a small sapling of anxiety bloom its first thorny flower.
He dodged this way and that, trying to catch a glimpse of the man in the pinstriped suit between the throng of people, completely ignoring the many flustered grumbles still coming from beneath him.
There. Bruno noticed a greying head bob up and down unsteadily, and he immediately moved off towards it, weaving in between the burly bodies and trying to make up some ground, which was not an easy task considering his small stature.
Eventually though, he just let himself succumb to the current of moving humanity all around him, he let his body go limp and for the briefest of moments felt completely free, a mere bottle in the ocean, and he was born forwards. Until of course he reached the end of the crowd, and promptly found himself face down at the intersection, the bumps of the worn pavement telling countless ancient stories on his soft, squishy face.
Bruno looked up to see the man staggering down a side road perpendicular to the one he had just traversed, swaying gently from side to side as if he too sailed on his own ocean current, the trade winds in his favour. Mercifully, this street was almost deserted.
Bruno got up slowly and dusted himself off, readjusting his glasses in the process. There was no need to rush: he couldn’t possibly lose the man. Not this time. He turned up the collar of his raincoat against the chilly wind, jammed his hands in his pockets, and limped off in the same direction of his mark—the man he had been paid to follow, careful not to step too loudly.
The secret to a successful tail is not to be noticed.
When he had heard that senile old man with those impossibly shiny buttons say that sentence at the Academy, Bruno snorted in derision, just like all the other naive and young trainees around him. That seemed rather obvious. Oh how very naive he had been, still is really.
Not being noticed is actually quite a difficult task. Too close and the mark will feel you breathing down his neck; too far and the mark will take an unexpected turn in to a shop or alley or side road and disappear. It’s a balance that takes years to master. Reflections are your friends: shop windows, car side mirrors, etc. Anything that reduces the time directly looking at your mark is a good thing. If he stops, carry on going and wait, that’s where props come in handy: newspapers, books, magazines.
Of course, the man was so sufficiently sozzled that Bruno didn’t need to worry about any of that.
As he settled into a comfortable pace behind the man, Bruno couldn’t help but let his mind wander the streets with him. He realised for the first time that it must have been raining while he was in the bar. That sweet scent of fresh rain in asphalt, condensed heaven, life itself, brought back memories that he didn’t want.
He stepped into a puddle, and before he knew it, he was standing on that shore again, his back straight and composed, defiant of the rustling racket behind. That witch of darkness, as black as the endless night of the solstice, danced around her fire and chanted, calling upon Mother Nature to strike him down with all the energy of lightening and crush his bones with the deep rumble of thunder.
Well, he would just wade and wade and wade, first his legs, then his entire being, becoming an amalgam with the inky-black water of the still lake. And he’ll sink like a discarded stone until the glistening peaks and troughs of the surface looked as distant as the Milky Way on a cloudy night. And he would be completely enveloped by the superb solitude of the Universe, completely at ease.
Each inky air bubble that escaped from his mouth was a new planet that floated lazily upwards, seemingly forever, only to burst at the surface and release a torrent of swearwords at the dark witch dancing away on the shore. Bitch! Slut! Betrayer!
And she just danced away, in front of that deep dark foreboding forest, carelessly trampling those white lilies beneath her feet.
As if, he never existed.
As if, he hadn’t said goodbye forever.
He thought of the man in front of him, and how he so desperately wished the man wasn’t staggering off to see his mistress. He thought of that poor woman nervously playing with her wedding ring. He thought of that disorientated and hurt look on her face when he tells her the truth, as she set out on her own journey through that forest of secrets, a journey that would have her picking oil slick black sticks from her heart with fearful fondness for years to come.
Bruno had an overwhelming urge to run up to the man and shake him. He wanting him to warn him of the pain he was causing his wife. He’d shake him until he understood. He wanted to cry out, to tell the man to stop. Did he have any idea? Did he even care? Did that cheating bastard have any pity? Any mercy at all?
The molten lava was bubbling up now from deep within him, he was just so angry he wanted to scream, until he had no more air in his lungs, and he lay deflated on the tar like a cigarette butt. He had stopped dead in his tracks, and was clenching his fists trying to stop them shaking, but only making it worse in the process.
Bruno blinked erratically. He shook his head to clear the smell of rain, the smell of her hair, from his nostrils.
He focussed ahead of him, only to see the man running and looking back every now and then, sheer terror imprinted in his eyes.
Instinctively, Bruno chased after him, must be training from his copper days. His feet pounded the pavement, one after the other, rhythmically bearing him closer and closer to the fleeing man in the pinstriped suit. Bruno didn’t even slow down when he reached the intersection, the endless queue of bright-eyed cars purring quietly to themselves was only a blur as a he sped past, the sound of their hooters only animal calls egging him on.
Ahead of him, the man zigged and zagged across the quiet street, constantly aware of the sprite that was gnawing away at the distance between them with every passing second. Bruno’s heart raced, each beat feeding his straining muscles the oxygen necessary to get him closer to his goal.
He would run and with every step shake those poisonous twigs that infested his heart, and he would forget about her. Cassandra, the witch oracle, who foresaw the future and was unable to change it— who perhaps never wanted to change it, who sat idly by and watched as the truth tore the people she loved apart.
To Bruno, each darkened face-brick building that bolstered the street was an impenetrable fortress of lies and mistrust. He needed to escape those prisons and their chains. He needed to be free of their bullshit that slumbered within, hidden behind those red walls like vicious dragons, ready to tear out your heart if you entered unannounced and unwanted, a bunch of white lilies in hand.
The distance between the two men could not be more than a yard or two. He was almost within reach. Bruno reached out his hands as far as they could go, further even. With all his might he reached ahead, willing the man to succumb to the gravity of planet-sized desperation to save his client any further pain.
He blocked out all the sounds around him – the feet, the traffic, the world. All his concentration was focused on a single point on the man’s back. Three inches and he had him. His heart beat a triumphant song. Everything would be okay.
Bruno didn’t register the dustbin that the man had reached out for, and as he flung it down all Bruno could do was carrying on going.
The universe slowed down as he fell, in solemn solidarity. Bruno counted the cracks in the pavement, like creases in a cushion, as he floated down towards it, limbs splayed out haphazardly. He already knew that the man would have disappeared by the time he got up again. There was no point.
He knew he couldn’t be the one who told the man’s wife. He couldn’t be responsible for her despair. He hoped she’d understand. He had his own shit to deal with.
He thought briefly of those lilies, lying on the floor in his living room amongst the shattered remains of the vase, the one he had fling against the wall when he walked in on his wife and Gideon.
Then, he hit the ground.
As he lay sprawled on the floor, panting heavily, and looking up at the sky above him, he spotted a crow bemusedly looking down upon the scene from its perch on top of a streetlamp.
Though hidden from the yellow wash of the streetlights and barely visible against the night sky, Bruno knew it was thousands of years old, the wisest being ever to have existed. Bruno watched as the bird tilted its head to one side in curiosity at the mortal below. He felt its gaze seer into him, the two tiny pearls in each eye searching every inch of his being, while the hair on his arms pricked up as if to protect him.
With a mournful cry that pierced his very existence, down to the atomic bonds that kept him together, the pitch-black bird spread it wings and took flight, disappearing into the folds of the night sky.
As he looked at the crow-shaped black hole it had left in its place, Bruno felt all the anger, sadness and pain leaving him. He watched as the tendrils of his despair, the foul curses of the witch, were sucked into the void, and disappeared.
Probably not forever, but for now the release was more than enough to sustain him for a while.
Bruno got up tenderly and dusted himself off. He picked up his horn-rimmed glasses, turned up his collar, and shoved his hands as far down in the pockets of his raincoat as was physically possible.
“Fuck it, I need a drink.”