Helga's Web Read online

  He was conscious of Bixby watching him as he walked along the jetty after the cameraman and his assistant. He had the feeling that Hopkins, the cameraman, should be walking backwards before him, camera raised for a tracking shot: this was the sort of scene one saw night after night in the cheap melodramas that filled in the time between the commercials. The hero, debonair and indistinguishable from any of the heroes in the commercials, walking away from the villain who might at any moment decide to take a shot at him. Then the ridiculousness of his imagination tickled him and he laughed, a cough of embarrassment. Hopkins looked over his shoulder. “Something funny, Jack?”

  Savanna shook his head, looking past Hopkins at the biggest joke of all: Olympus Film Productions. No bigger now than when he had started it ten years ago, eighteen thousand dollars in the red this year alone, still making the shoe-string budget documentaries that were to have been the first step to feature production, still chasing agencies for the odd commercial that would pay the wages of his small staff. Everyone else in the game was coining money, but he might just as well be turning out Rupert Bunny and Flora Finch silents for all the money he was making. Something funny, all right. But Hopkins, a good cameraman, had never had a sense of humour. He would certainly not understand the humour of Grafter Gibson’s trawlers being used to pick up drug parcels out at sea.

  Savanna had known he and his crew were unwelcome when they had reported to Bixby yesterday afternoon. “You weren’t supposed to be coming on my boat,” Bixby had said.

  “I know that. But the other trawler has broken down or something. They just rang and said we were to come to you.”

  “Pity they don’t give a bloke a bit more warning. I don’t like the idea of it.” Bixby looked like a man whose ideas would be as simple and hard as the knuckles on his rock-like fists. There appeared to be no fat on his big square frame and he gave the impression of being all bone and muscle, the con-

  tent extending even to his head. “I don’t think much of advertising, commercials, things like that. Okay, just don’t get in the way, that’s all. Stay off deck while we’re working.”

  “But that’s the whole point,” Savanna protested. “We’re supposed to be shooting fishermen at work, then you all stop for a smoke.”

  “What sorta smoke?”

  Savanna named the brand.

  “Never use ‘em,” said Bixby. “We all smoke Benson and Hedges. Only the best—” he smirked—“when only the best will do.”

  “I know,” said Savanna wearily. “I did the voice on that one myself for a couple of years. Well, we shan’t shoot too close to you.”

  “Just don’t get in our way, that’s all. I dunno how you got permission to use our boats, anyway. Old Grafter Gibson ain’t one for public relations or anything like that.”

  “Mr. Gibson is my brother-in-law,” said Savanna, and thought, Put that in your Benson and Hedges and smoke it, pal.

  Bixby’s face became as hard and bony as his fists; then he turned abruptly and went up into the wheelhouse of the trawler.

  Savanna looked at Hopkins and young Colegate, the assistant. “Welcome aboard. But you heard what the admiral said. No getting in his way.”

  It had not been easy. They had shot several hundred feet of film late yesterday afternoon as the trawler’s crew had set their nets, but Hopkins had had to get his close shots with his zoom lens; as soon as he had moved in close, one or another of the crew had snarled at him to get out of the bloody way. When Savanna and his two men had gone below to eat their supper, Bixby and his men had remained up on deck talking quietly amongst themselves. Savanna, Hopkins and Colegate, reluctant to wear out their welcome any further, had not looked at any of the bunks, not knowing if any of

  them were spare, and had gone to sleep propped in corners of the tiny mess-room. At two o’clock in the morning, cramped, his head aching from the stale air, Savanna had woken and, moving cautiously so as not to disturb Hopkins or anyone else who might be sleeping down here, had gone up on deck for a breath of air and a smoke.

  The breath of air he had taken in one short, quick gasp and he had never had the smoke at all. Bixby and the trawler crew were working at the stern of the boat. There was no light hung there, but a broken lantern of moon silhouetted them. A net had been hauled in and Bixby was taking half a dozen oilskin-wrapped parcels from it, each of them attached to a small buoy no bigger than a toy balloon. He passed one of the packages to a crewman who opened it and said, “It’s okay. Pound packets as usual.” He bounced the package in his hand. “It’s hard to believe, ain’t it? That’s worth more than gold.”

  “Don’t get any ideas,” said Bixby sharply. “You work for your cut and that’s all. Our job finishes when we get it ashore.”

  “Christ,” said the crewman in a hurt tone. “I’d never peddle the stuff. I’ve seen what it does to some of ‘em. I could never look a junkie in the face, you know what I mean?”

  The other crewmen laughed softly. Savanna backed cautiously down the stairs, slid back into his corner and sat staring into the darkness, his sudden information pressing down on him as unwanted and uncomfortable as a load of wet fish. He was still staring into the darkness when Bixby, coming noiselessly down the stairs in sandshoes, flashed a torch on him.

  “Hullo, you still awake?”

  Savanna shut his eyes against the brutal punch of the torch. “You just woke me,” he said, and hoped that the nervous rasp in his throat sounded like the voice of a man just disturbed from sleep.

  Bixby held him pinned by the torch beam for a moment,

  then he grunted and switched it off. He went through into the bunk area and Savanna sank further down into his corner.

  He fell asleep, but he tossed restlessly all night, disturbed by his knowledge and by a queasiness brought on by the rolling of the trawler and the stale air of the mess-room. He was glad of daylight when it finally crawled weakly down the steps and gave some shape to the ugly clutter of his surroundings. He got painfully to his feet, went up on deck and a moment later was followed by Bixby.

  “We’re finished,” said Bixby. “We’ll be heading back. You want any more shots, you better get ‘em in a hurry.”

  Savanna nodded weakly. “Can’t get back soon enough for me.

  Bixby grinned sadistically. “Takes all sorts, don’t it?”

  “What?”

  “To make a world.” Then he looked more carefully at Savanna. “You got something on your mind, mate?”

  Savanna shook his head, managing a smile that rested on his face like a momentary scar. “It’s my stomach that’s worrying me, not my mind.”

  Bixby stared at him a moment longer, then shrugged and went up into the wheelhouse. He continued to look down at Savanna as the latter moved to the bow of the boat, and when Savanna glanced back he saw that both Bixby and the man at the wheel were staring at him. He turned his face into the morning breeze and thought: twenty-five or thirty years ago I’d have shrugged this off as none of my business. It’s still none of my business, but why am I—scared? (He said the word doubtfully in his mind, as if he were scared of it. ) Does the backbone go in middle age, along with the hair, the muscles and the jawline? Is atrophy of the spirit, of guts, part of the process of aging? Twenty-six years ago he had proved to himself and the army that he had courage and the army had decorated and promoted him for it. But his courage now seemed as faded as the long-forgotten ribbon they had given him to mark it.

  Now as he walked along the jetty in the early sunlight, the same thoughts still cluttered his mind, like rocks in a bed that, though lumpy and sagging, had up till now at least been bearable. Nothing was perfect, he had been telling himself for the past six months, throwing straws to save himself from drowning, and the negative optimism had been enough: something was bound to turn up sooner or later. But not this morning: last night’s discovery, the fear (fear? Was that too strong a word?) of Bixby’s knowing what he had learned, the queasiness of his stomach, the bitter joke of the sign on the
side of the truck: it all added up to a despair that he had suspected for a long time was eventually going to hit him. Some men lived in the resigned expectation of cancer or heart disease. His expectation had been despair and now it had come this morning, finally triggered off by something whose connection with him was so tenuous as to be ignored. Except that he had always found it impossible to ignore Grafter Gibson …

  He heard the toot of a car horn and looked along to see Helga sitting in her car twenty or thirty yards along the road.

  Til see you at the studio/’ he said to Hopkins and Cole-gate, and walked along to Helga. Her car was a low Datsun sports model and he had to lean down, feeling his spine crack, as she *put her face up for him to kiss her. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Hopkins and Colegate watching him, but there was nothing he could do about it. If your mistress expected you to kiss her in public, you couldn’t blame the public for taking a free seat. Except that Helga, in the past, had always been more discreet than this.

  Tired, sick and nervous, he turned his irritation on her. “What the hell are you doing down here at this hour?”

  “Darling.” Thank God she wasn’t coy; that was always one of Josie’s worst sins. There were some women who would never learn that coyness was as unattractive on them as a bad complexion. “I shouldn’t be here if I didn’t think it was necessary. I’m usually asleep at this hour.”

  “Then I didn’t make the mistake of being flattered, thinking you had come down here just to see me.”

  “But that’s why I did come, darling. To see you. I want some money.”

  He swore, jerking his head up as th 3 truck went past. In it Hopkins and Colegate sat with their heads turned aside in exaggerated discretion; some men could act coy, too, blast them. “What makes you think I carry a walletful of cash on me at this hour, getting off a fishing trawler after being all night at sea?”

  “I only want forty dollars, darling. I have to go to my dentist and I’m afraid he won’t do anything unless I’ve paid my bill for the last time.”

  “What time’s your appointment?”

  “Ten-thirty.”

  “The banks open at ten.”

  “Not for me. I’m overdrawn far too much.” She smiled, un-worried as only the habitual extravagant can be. He looked along the promenade, saw the truck disappear; he was so far in debt he couldn’t remember if the truck was paid for. He looked down at her, at the broad beautiful face, the golden hair that looked so unreal and the voluptuous body that was her snare. Sex and overdrafts, he thought, our mutual interests. She continued to smile up at him, reading his thoughts. “There’s time, darling, if you feel up to it.”

  He reached for his wallet, took out forty dollars as he slid into the seat beside her, bending his long legs beneath the dashboard. “I’ll feel I’m paying for it.”

  “It doesn’t worry me if it doesn’t worry you.” She was cool and unoffended; she reached across and kissed him on the cheek. “Ich Hebe dich”

  “You don’t,” he said, but it didn’t worry him.

  Then Bixby was standing over him, towering above the tiny car. “Be seeing you again, Mr. Savanna?”

  Again there was the tightness in his throat. “I don’t think so. We got all we needed.”

  “Well, that was all you come for, wasn’t it?” Bixby took a match out of his pocket, began to chew on it. “Hooroo, Mr. Savanna. Put in a good word for us with old Grafter when you see him.”

  Helga started up the car and pulled it away from the curb. “What’s the matter, darling? You sounded afraid of him. Funny, I never thought you would be afraid of anyone.”

  “You don’t know me.” How can you, he thought, when I’m just starting to find out things about myself?

  “No, except on Tuesdays and Fridays. I really don’t know what you are like the rest of the week.”

  “We’re quits, then. I don’t know you.”

  “No,” she said, smiling to herself. “It’s better that way.”

  Later in her flat he lay in bed and watched her as she came out from the bathroom drying herself. Whether by instinct or by practice, she had a talent for making even the most every-day action look sensual; she towelled her body with the slow, lazy grace of a strip-tease artist unaware of her audience. He liked that: she ran the towel lazily over her full breasts, conscious that he was watching her but making no attempt to put on a cheap titillating act. Josie would have done that; or retreated coyly to the bathroom. He felt a twinge of conscience and, much worse, a sharper stab of pity for Josie. There was not much hope for a marriage when the deepest pain you could feel for your wife was pity.

  Helga turned away from him and he saw the ridiculous tattoo marks on her buttocks, the crude sniggery joke that fitted so ill with her personality.

  “I still wonder what you did in Germany.”

  She turned back, knowing what had prompted his remark. Then she wrapped the towel round her hips, the one modest thing she had done since they had entered the flat almost an hour ago. But she did not blush or lose her poise; along with

  everything else she had learned, she had acquired the art of cool self-possession. He knew he was not the first man who had queried her about the nipples on her plump behind.

  “I’ve told you—I was a secretary. And I did some modelling. But not that sort. Those marks, they were a stupid joke. I was only fifteen. Didn’t you do things as a dare when you were a teenager?”’

  “That’s a cruel question. I can’t remember back that far.”

  She came across, sat on the side of the bed and kissed him on the cheek. “I wouldn’t be cruel to you, darling. I never think of you as—whatever you are. I don’t even know how old you are.”

  “Fifty-four.” That was how low he felt this morning, that even vanity was no longer worth the effort.

  Her surprise was genuine. “Really? Darling, you’re marvellous!”

  “Louis the Fourteenth was doing it twice a day when he was seventy.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean your looks. Nobody would take you for more than forty-three or four, even with your grey hair.”

  He looked at himself in the big mirror on her dressing-table across the room. It was not easy to see himself clearly even at such a short distance; myopia made the man across the room a stranger. He looked back at her, put a hand on her breast, on one of the real nipples. In a moment or two he saw the dark myopic look come into her eyes as the nipple rose under his fingers.

  “Nein.” Her voice became guttural as it always did when her passion was aroused; it was almost as if she changed nationalities when she was in bed, became a natural German again; no one, she had once said, ever took their citizenship papers to bed with them. “Nein, liebling.”

  He hesitated, then took his hand away. “Better get dressed or 111 start trying to prove I’m a better man than Louis.”

  “You are, darling.” The guttural note was still in her voice as she sat back.

  He shook his head, suddenly depressed again. “No. Louis was always wise enough to take the long view. IVe never had that talent.”

  She continued to look at him, the dark look now gone from her eyes. “Darling, what’s the matter? There’s something worrying you. Was it that man this morning?”

  Him, and a thousand other things. But for the first time he took her into his confidence; he had reached a depth where he had to talk to someone. And who better than a mistress? Louis, secretive though he was, must have confided a few of his troubles occasionally to his mistresses. “I don’t know, maybe I’m taking it too seriously.” He told her what he had seen last night out at sea. “What do I do? Forget all about it? Or go and tell my brother-in-law?”

  “That could be embarrassing, couldn’t it? What if he already knows what is going on? If he is the organizer of it?”

  “Grafter has made his money. He wouldn’t need to get into something like this.”

  “Darling, you don’t know how greedy people can get. People make fortunes out of smuggling drugs.
Why shouldn’t Mr. Gibson want to make another one?” She stood up, letting the towel drop from round her hips, and moved across to the wall-closet to pick out a dress. “Why don’t you go and see him?”

  “What do I say when I get there?”

  She looked over her shoulder, smiling at him. “Blackmail him. Maybe then you could retire and we could see each other every day in the week.”

  He returned her smile, thinking: she has been no help to me at all, she has the same frivolous outlook as Josie. He got out of bed and stood in front of the mirror.

  “No,” he said when he saw her look at his reflection and nod approvingly. “You’re flattering me, just like a good mis-

  tress should.” He looked in the mirror again; even the myopia didn’t help at this distance. He might be what you would call handsome, he decided, if you overlooked the tired eyes and the slackness round what had once been a very strong jaw-line. He still carried his tall body straight, but there was no disguising the thickening round the waist and the wrinkling skin over the muscles under his arms. An honest man always accepted the truth of his own mirror: he might look better than most men of his age, but: “The decay has started, love. There’s only one muscle in all that body that’s still any good and it’s never been praised for its looks.”

  She smiled more widely and he saw the faint glint of metal in the corner of her mouth. “Australians are like Americans. They think the only thing worth having is youth. All those men jog-trotting round the streets on Saturday mornings, just so they can get into condition for beer-drinking on Saturday night. At least, darling, you know how to treat a woman as a woman.”

  7 don’t know that Josie would back you on that. But all he said was, “When you’re at the dentist this morning, get him to replace that tin cap on your tooth.”