Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [50]
Gil came forward and put his hand on Bridget’s shoulder as if it were something he owned. ‘It’s just this—you can’t fuck her for a couple of months and then not work for us, because you’re “principled.” You’re a mechanic, Cooper. You need to pay your way. We’re going to beat that principle out of you.’ He gripped Bridget’s yellow hair for a moment and then moved back, leaving the two of them alone.
‘Look down,’ she said. A whisper. ‘I can give you this, so you will barely feel what they do to you.’ A syringe lay in the palm of her hand. She tilted it and the fluid swayed back and forth; it was like a floater pen in which a woman’s black dress would slip off, or a train would vanish into a tunnel. She was screwing the needle onto the syringe as she looked at him. ‘It’s a favour. … Or you can say you will work with them.’ She hesitated, then the words stopped. He was conscious that everyone was watching him. He said, ‘Do you only fuck him when you’re stoned?’ Someone struck him in the face so hard he fell backwards with the chair, his head hitting the floor.
They pulled the chair with him back onto its four legs. Gil was now sitting on the stool Bridget had used, as close to Cooper as she had been. He swung his elbow hard against Cooper’s mouth. ‘You can’t walk away, not now. Let’s admit we’re all whores.’ He took a deep breath—Cooper sensed a movement but dared not look away from the man’s lips—and then Bridget crashed into Cooper, and under the shield of her body stabbed his neck with the syringe, compressing it fully, and dropped it. The three men were all struggling to pull her off him. Cooper lay on his side by the fireplace, his head capsized with the rush of the drug. She was in Santa Maria, saying, ‘This is for you. There are five flags. The yellow one is earth, the green one is water, the red is fire—the one we must escape.’
He remembered nothing after that.
The Person Formerly Known as Anna
I came to France, in the thirty-fourth year of my life, to research the life and the work of Lucien Segura. I had flown into Orly, my friend Branka had met my plane, and we drove through the darkening outskirts, passing the smaller peripheral towns that were like blinks of light as we travelled south. We had not seen each other in over a year, and now we were catching up, talking all the way. Branka had packed a hamper of fruit, bread, and cheese, and we ate most of it, and drank from a constantly refilled glass of red wine that we shared.
We reached Toulouse around midnight. Nothing was open, and we still had another hour to go before we got to Dému. Branka proposed a diversion to the village of Barran, where her architectural firm was involved in the restoration of an old church belfry, and forty minutes later we navigated the car through the narrow streets of that town. We parked beside the graveyard.
Of course she had an arc light in the trunk of her car, and she lifted it out and beamed it towards the strange steeple that rose high into the darkness like a spear, or a giant beanstalk, though what it reminded me of mostly was the shambling water tower that we used to climb as children. But this was stranger. Built in the thirteenth century, the belfry had been constructed like a coil or a screw. It had one of those unexpected, helicoidal shapes— the surface like a helix—so that as it curved up it reflected every compass point of the landscape. We circled the church in the dark. Who had