troubled by his eyes, which seem to shift without warning between boredom and amusement.
‘What must I do?’ she asks, temporarily incapable of deciding.
‘I don’t know. You must get an ambulance, perhaps. You should take a look, see if you can help him.’
She stubs out the cigarette.
‘Where is he?’ she asks.
‘Next door,’ replies the young man, now openly impatient. ‘In the tattoo shop.’
The white skin of her face turns scarlet. Without another word, she comes round the counter and walks out into the street. Limping after her, the young man follows more slowly.
She stops and turns impulsively, sticking out her hand. She says, ‘I’m Ana Kokt.’
He shakes her hand without enthusiasm – he reads the familiar hunger in her eyes – and says his name softly: ‘Luke Turner.’
She can’t hear him over the noise of Long Street. She does not ask him to repeat his name. Then both enter the tattoo parlour, dodging the palm tree that obstructs the entrance.
Bernal Díaz is still stretched out on the floor. Ana Kokt kneels down beside him and straightens his head. She doesn’t really know what to do, but feels obliged to take charge.
‘He’s fucked,’ she says. ‘Serious, we’ll have to call an ambulance.’
‘There is no phone here. That’s why I came to your shop.’
‘Stay with him then, I’ll go back and phone.’
She leaves Turner in the little tattoo parlour, standing above the ancient form of Bernal Díaz. The man on the floor stirs, and groans. His eyes flicker, but don’t quite open. ‘Tras una larga ausencia,’ he whispers, ‘por fin la muerte se complace en llegar.’
* * *
There is a certain heaviness in the name of Ana Kokt. It is present in her body as a heaviness, a sensuality. It is present in her name, a weight that sags in the middle, but pleases as it sags; or perhaps it is more present in the body that fills her clothing obtrusively, in the curves and soft masses, in the skeletal girders of her frame. As Ana Kokt grows on Luke she becomes ever more complicated, like a skein of wool that gets hopelessly tangled. And yet on the surface she grows smoother. Indeed her skin is smooth – impossibly smooth for a woman who smokes as much as she does – and pale. Her skin reminds Luke Turner of his mother’s skin.
Ana Kokt is different to his mother, Caitlin, in many respects. She is not a silently angry woman, and her emotions play out on the surface. She speaks crudely. Later, he will accuse her of crude speech, but only because the density, the weight of her obscenities gives him pleasure, and the force of her insensitivity amuses him: ‘Why do you speak so crudely?’ he is to ask, outright.
‘Like fuck what?’
‘Like how can a woman who works in a bookshop be so crude?’
‘I’m the cleaning lady.’
It isn’t true. Her job is to sit behind the till, looking bored and unhelpful.
Their love affair, their brief festival of sex and hatred, begins over the barely animated husk of Bernal Díaz. The old man is still lying on the floor; Ana has taken off her light cardigan and folded it under his head.
Díaz stirs, only half-conscious, and says, ‘I am more than five hundred years old.’
She catches Luke Turner’s eye, and, despite her efforts, mirth creases her face.
‘I myself am only a hundred and sixty-three,’ says Luke.
A howl of laughter bursts from her throat, ricochets off the walls. She slaps a hand over plump lips, apologetically.
‘I do not need an ambulance,’ mutters the man on the floor. ‘I require only that you take me home.’
‘Do you know where he lives?’ Turner asks Ana.
She shakes her head, trying to recover propriety. ‘I don’t know. Not too far, because he always walks.’
Silence envelops them. It is a rich silence. To her it feels like the first few drags of a cigarette, when the smoke still tastes clean as paper, filled with oblique promise. And then it grows unpleasant, because there is too much of it. The best way to divert a silence like this, she feels, is to barge into it and say something obvious. But she is cautious about the way Luke Turner might react to her, and takes out a cigarette instead.
‘Match me,’ she says. She’d once known the movie from which the phrase came, but no longer.
Luke stares at her, puzzled.
‘Light me,’ says Ana Kokt, and snaps her fingers impatiently.
Luke is not a smoker, and carries neither matches nor lighter. She gives him hers, a scarlet plastic one, making sure their fingers touch. He lights the cigarette for her; she leans forward into the flame, squinting against the smoke. He returns the lighter.
‘Maybe you shouldn’t,’ he says, gesturing down at Bernal Díaz.
‘Won’t kill him,’ she retorts, inhaling and releasing a generous diagonal blast.
‘That’s no good, the old man needs air.’
‘If you say so.’
She looks at him like a frustrated cat, and walks out, leaving him to manage Díaz on his own. Cigarette smoke lingers, filling every crevasse of the tiny parlour. The brand she smokes is especially noxious.
* * *
Without any explanation of his long absence, or indeed apology for the delay, thinks Bernal Díaz, death approaches at last; but that is the nature of death, to come and go without due notification. Shortly before he opens his eyes, he catches the eucalyptus-scented breath of an angel. It isn’t, or so he feels, the angel of death. Its voice lacks the august timbre he would expect from that being. Also, his head aches insistently. It is a pedestrian throbbing that doesn’t seem to call for the last rites, and indeed proves that he lives.
He opens his eyes and sees the divinity crouching above him, occluded by its nimbus of light. Still, he can see it is magnificently beautiful, though surprisingly plump.
‘Are you alright, sir?’ asks the angel.
The flaring light fades slowly, and the angel resolves into a young man. The young man is chewing gum.
‘I am alright,’ says Díaz. ‘I must get up now, and go to work.’
‘You are at work. You’ve been taken ill, or had an accident.’
Díaz tries to sit up. Luke bends down, and places a hand under his shoulders. They are bony, the old man is light as a feather.
‘I have called an ambulance for you,’ he says.
‘I thank you, but that is not necessary.’
Luke
