The Jealousy Man and Other Stories Page 9

  In the course of that first year I soon became better than Trevor, perhaps because I was more dedicated and more concerned to impress – or at least not to disappoint – Monique. She was and remained far superior to us. Not because she was particularly strong, but that small, neat body flew up the walls with the technique, balance and footwork of a ballet dancer. She understood climbing in a way that Trevor and I could only dream of. I, and in due course Trevor, did not really begin to get going until we were able to find sites where the climbing was done in handholds and ledges, where what was needed was brute physical strength. But it was Monique’s advice, her encouragement and her ability to share in our joys and minor triumphs that kept me and Trevor going. And the sound of her sparkling, happy laughter echoing between the rock faces because Trevor or I had once again fallen and dangled there at the end of a rope, cursing in frustration and asking to be lowered. Not because we wanted to give up but so we could attempt the whole thing once again, from the bottom up.

  At times – perhaps because Monique felt he needed it more than me – it seemed as though she were a touch more enthusiastic in her praise when it was Trevor who managed something new rather than me. But that was fine. The fact that she was like that was one of the reasons I loved her so much.

  It was in our third year that I realised Trevor had begun to take his climbing seriously. I had mounted a so-called fingerboard above the door to strengthen my fingers. Trevor never touched it. But now, quite often, I would see him dangling there. Sometimes it almost felt as though I caught him doing it red-handed, as though he didn’t want me to know that he was practising as much as he was. But his body betrayed him. When the sun shone and it became so hot on those Peak District rock faces that Trevor and I pulled off our T-shirts, I could see that his formerly chubby upper body was still a dazzling milk-white, but now all the fat was gone. Well-defined muscles rippled like steel cables under his skin when he, in his almost robotic way, forced a way up the overhangs on routes where even Monique herself had to admit defeat. I still had the advantage on him on the vertical routes because I had been careful to study Monique’s technique, but there was no doubt about it, the competition between Trevor and me had grown much more even. Because that’s what it had become: a competition.

  It was also around this time that I began partying a little too much. Meaning, of course, I did too much social drinking. My father was a recovering alcoholic. It was something I had known about since childhood, and he had tried to warn me off it. But his warning had been to avoid drink when I was feeling bad, not happy, like I was now. Whatever it was, the combination of a lot of climbing, a lot of Monique and a lot of ‘partying’ began to affect my studies. Monique was the first to point it out, and this became the occasion of our first quarrel. Which I won. Or at least, she was crying when she left because I’d got the last word.

  Next day I apologised to her, laid the blame on Greek social norms for my use of exaggeratedly harsh words, and promised to party less and study more.

  For a while I kept that promise. I even dropped a weekend in the Peak District to catch up on my studies. It was tough, but it had to be done, the exam was just round the corner and I knew my father was expecting results at the very least the equal of my older brother’s, who he had got into Yale and who was now sat on the board of the family business. All the same, this enforced swotting made me almost hate the things I actually loved, literature in particular. I envied Monique and Trevor their days off and was almost relieved when they came back early on the Saturday evening because of the rain and said that they’d hardly climbed a metre.

  I continued to give priority to my studies, so much so that at one point Monique complained. It pleased me, but it was a strange pleasure, and had an even stranger side effect. From the start I felt Monique had more power over me than I had over her. It was something I accepted and attributed to the fact that she was a greater catch for me than I was for her. So I came out on top there too. What was interesting now was that the less time I spent with her, the more that seemed to even out the balance of power between us. So I buried myself again, redoubled my studies, and when the day of the big exam came along and I left the exam room after five hours, I knew that what I had handed in was something that would make not just my tutor and father proud, but Monique too. I bought a bottle of cheap champagne and ran to her room on the first floor of her hall of residence. Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ was playing so loudly when I knocked that she didn’t hear me. Overjoyed – because it was I who had given her that record, and if there was anything I felt at that moment it was a whole lotta love! – I ran round to the back. Even with the bottle of champagne in one hand I easily climbed the tree that was outside her window. Once I was high enough to see inside I waved the bottle and was on the point of calling her name and telling her I loved her, but the words stuck in my throat.

  Monique was always thrillingly vocal when we made love, and the walls between the rooms so thin we used to play music to cover the sounds.

  I saw Monique, but she didn’t see me, her eyes were closed.

  Trevor didn’t see me either because he had his back to me. That milky-white, now muscular back. His hips were moving, pumping up and down almost in time to ‘Whole Lotta Love’.

  I remained in a trance until I heard a crash and, looking down, saw the champagne bottle had smashed against the cobblestones below. Shards of glass protruded from a white, bubbling puddle. I don’t know why the thought that someone might see me caused me to panic, but I slid rather than climbed down, and the moment my feet hit the ground I ran, I fled.

  I ran all the way back to the shop where I had bought the champagne, bought two bottles of Johnnie Walker with the last of the money my mother had sent me and ran to my hall of residence. Locked myself in my room and began to drink.

  It was dark outside when Monique knocked on my door. I didn’t open, called out that I was in bed, could it wait until tomorrow? She said there was something she had to talk to me about, but I said I didn’t want to take the chance of her catching what I had. Terrified of infection as she was she left, after asking me, through the door, how the exam had gone.

  Trevor knocked on my door too. When I called out that I was ill, and he asked if there was anything I needed, I whispered ‘a friend’, turned over in bed and called out ‘No thanks’.

  ‘Hope you’ll be better for our climbing trip on Friday,’ said Trevor.

  Friday. That gave me three days. Three days to dive down into a darkness I didn’t even know existed. Three days in the grip of jealousy. Each time I breathed out it tightened its grip a little more, made it harder to breathe in fresh air. Because that’s what jealousy is, it’s a boa constrictor. When I was a kid and my father took me to the cinema to see the Disney version of The Jungle Book, I got very confused because in the Rudyard Kipling book my mother read to me so many, many times Kaa the snake was nice! My father explained that all creatures have two faces, it’s just that we can’t always see the other one, not even in ourselves. But I had begun to see my other face. Because as the lack of oxygen over these three days destroyed my brain I began to think thoughts I had no idea were inside me, but which must have been there all the time, in the dregs of my personality. And I saw the other face of the good snake Kaa. The jealousy that tempted, manipulated, hypnotised with wild fantasies of revenge that sent thrilling shivers through the body and needed only another swig of whisky to keep it going.

  When Friday came along and I shook off my depression, pronounced myself recovered and rose as though from the dead, I was no longer the same Nikos Balli. No one could see it in me, not even Trevor and Monique when I greeted them at lunch as though nothing had happened and said the weather forecast for the weekend looked great, we would have a fantastic weekend. As we ate I didn’t listen to Trevor and Monique as they spoke in codes they thought I couldn’t understand, instead I listened to a couple of girls on the other side of the table wh
o were talking about one of their friends’ new boyfriend. I listened to the words they chose, the adjective that was a little too strong, the slightly too pleased response when one spoke disapprovingly to the other of their mutual friend, the anger that made the sentences shorter, more biting, without the flow that comes with calm thought. They were jealous. It was so simple. And I was not basing my new instinct on psychoanalysis but on pure, concrete verbal analysis. No, I was no longer the same. I had been somewhere. I had seen things there. Seen and learned. I had become the Jealousy Man.

  * * *

  —

  ‘Pretty sad story that,’ said Victoria Hässel as she pulled on her panties and started looking round for the rest of her clothes. ‘Did the two of them become a couple?’

  ‘No,’ I said. I turned in the bed and lifted first an empty then an almost empty bottle of Ouzo 12 from the bedside table and filled the dram glass. ‘It was Monique’s last year and her final exam was just a few days away. She didn’t do very well, but after that she went back home to France, and neither Trevor nor I ever saw her again. She married a Frenchman, had kids, and as far as I know lives somewhere in Brittany.’

  ‘And you – who studied literature and history – you became a policeman?’

  I shrugged. ‘I had a year left at Oxford, but when I went back for the autumn the partying thing got out of hand again.’

  ‘Broken heart?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe it was just that the closeness of the memories was too strong. Whatever, the only thing that seemed to matter was to keep getting smashed. Once I even thought of flight nine nineteen.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘When things were at their worst I would squeeze this stone I had picked up from the ground somewhere in the Peak District.’ I held up a clenched fist to demonstrate. ‘Concentrated on transferring the pain into the stone, let it suck it all out.’

  ‘Did that help?’

  ‘At least I didn’t take flight nine nineteen.’ I emptied the dram glass. ‘Instead I dropped out in the middle of the autumn term and took a flight to Athens. Worked for a while in my father’s firm, and then enrolled at the Police Academy. My father and the rest of the family thought it was some kind of delayed adolescent rebellion. But I knew that I had been given something, a gift, or a curse, something that might possibly be of some use to me. And the discipline and training at the Academy helped keep me away from…’ I nodded towards the bottle of ouzo. ‘But that’s enough about me. Tell me about yourself.’

  Victoria Hässel straightened up at the end of the bed and buttoned up a pair of freshly washed climbing pants and looked at me in disbelief. ‘In the first place I’m going climbing now. In the second place you got me to talk about myself and nothing else but myself for over four hours in the bar yesterday. Have you really forgotten that?’

  I shook my head, smiling as I tried in vain to recall it. ‘I just wanted to know more,’ I lied, and saw that she knew I was lying.

  ‘Cute,’ she said, walked round the bed and kissed me on my high forehead. ‘Later, maybe. You smell of my perfume, just so you know.’

  ‘My sense of smell is terrible.’

  ‘And mine is wonderful. But don’t worry, I come out easily in the wash. See you later today? Adio.’

  I wondered whether to tell her that finally, two days after the ferry and the planes had begun to leave Kalymnos again, I had booked a seat on a flight to Athens. But it wouldn’t have changed anything, would just have meant a little more play-acting.

  ‘Adio, Victoria.’

  * * *

  —

  George picked me up as arranged an hour before my flight departed. It was a ten- or twelve-minute drive, and I still only had hand luggage.

  ‘Better now?’ he asked as I got into the car.

  I had called Athens and explained that I was sick, that they should put someone else on the Tzitzifies case. I rubbed my face.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and it was true, I didn’t feel at all bad. Maybe Ouzo 12 does taste like crap, but I’ll give it this, the hangover is nothing like as bad as you get with Pitsiladi. And I had drunk myself clear. For a while, the clouds were gone.

  I asked him to drive slowly. I wanted to enjoy my last view of Kalymnos. It really was lovely here.

  ‘You should come in the spring, when the flowers bloom, and there’s more life and colour in the mountains.’

  ‘I like it the way it is,’ I said.

  When we reached the airport, George announced that the plane from Athens was delayed, since there was no sign of it on the runway. He parked, and suggested we sit in his car until we saw the plane land.

  We sat in silence and looked out on Palechora, the town made of stone.

  ‘People from Kalymnos used to hide out up there sometimes in the old days,’ said George. ‘From pirates. Sieges could last for weeks, months. They had to sneak out at night to fetch water from camouflaged wells. They say children were conceived and born up there. But it was a prison, no question about it.’

  A swishing in the air above us. A swishing through my head.

  The ATR-72 and the thought arrived at the same moment.

  ‘The prison of love,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Both Franz and Julian had dates with Helena in one of the buildings in Palechora. Franz said he had sentenced his brother to life imprisonment in his own prison of love. That could mean…’

  The brief roaring of the propellers drowned out my words as the plane landed and was waved in behind us, but from the look on George’s face I could see he had already understood where I was heading.

  ‘I guess this means,’ he said, ‘that you won’t be taking the plane to Athens after all?’

  ‘Call Christine. Tell her to bring Odin with her.’

  * * *

  —

  From a distance Palechora looked like a true ghost town. Grey-black, lifeless and petrified, something the Medusa had looked at. But now, close up – as happens in murder cases too – the details, the nuances and colours began to appear. And the smell.

  George and I hurried through the ruins towards one of the houses that was still more or less intact. Christine was standing in the doorway holding Odin, who was barking and keen to get inside. She had been the first to arrive, along with two members of the mountain rescue team, and we’d been communicating over the walkie-talkie. We had stepped up our pace after she reported her find but still had a hundred-metre climb before we were there. They made the discovery in what was probably Palechora’s only cellar. Later I learned that the cellar had been used to store dead bodies in during sieges, since the soil inside the fortress walls wasn’t deep enough to bury them.

  The first thing that struck me when George and I bent down and entered the low-ceilinged cellar, and before my eyes had adapted to the dark, was the stench.

  Maybe my old eyes take a little longer to get dark-adapted than they used to, maybe that was why I was able to control my feelings as the sight of Julian Schmid gradually took shape in front of me, his naked body still partially covered by a dirty woollen blanket. One of the mountain rescue men was squatting beside him, but there was little he could do. Julian’s arms reached stiffly above his head, hands clasped as though in prayer, fastened by handcuffs to an iron bolt in the stone wall.

  ‘We’re waiting for Teodore,’ whispered George, as though this were an autopsy or a church service. ‘He’s bringing something to cut the handcuffs.’

  I looked at the floor. A pool of faeces, vomit and urine. That was the source of the smell.

  The figure on the floor coughed. ‘Water,’ he whispered.

  Someone from the mountain rescue team had obviously already given him all he had, so I stepped forward and pressed my bottle against the dry lips. It was like seeing a half-dead mirror image of Franz. Or rather: Julian Schmid seemed thinner than his twin brother, had a la
rge blue mark on his forehead, perhaps from that billiard ball, and his voice sounded different. Was it because his brother was an exact copy of himself that Franz was unable to kill Julian? Indeed, had it even made it easier for Franz to take his own life? I had my own reasons for thinking so.

  ‘Franz?’ whispered Julian.

  ‘He’s gone,’ I said.

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Disappeared.’

  ‘And Helena?’

  ‘She’s somewhere safe.’

  ‘Can…one of you tell her? That I’m OK?’

  George and I exchanged glances. I nodded to Julian.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and drank again. And as though the water ran straight through his head, tears began to trickle from his eyes. ‘He didn’t mean it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Franz. He…he just went crazy. I know it. It sometimes happens to him.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  A crackle came from George’s walkie-talkie and he went outside.

  A moment later he put his head back in. ‘The ambulance has arrived. It’s waiting down on the road.’ He disappeared again. The stench really was overpowering.

  ‘I think that deep down Franz wanted you to be found,’ I said quietly.

  ‘You think so?’ said Julian.

  I knew then that he knew Franz was dead. And that this was the prayer he looked as though he had been praying, that I would tell him what he needed to hear. What he had to hear if he was ever to be whole again. So I did.

  ‘He regretted it,’ I said. ‘He actually told me that you were here. He wanted me to rescue you. He had no way of knowing how slow on the uptake I was.’

  ‘It hurts so much,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ I said.