The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2. Adam Thirlwell

walked between the lines of chalets, past the empty swimming pools that seemed to cover all Africa, he saw the Peugeot parked below one of the ports. Sitting with her easel was Leonora Sully, a tall man in a white suit beside her. At first Halliday failed to recognize him, although the man rose and waved to him. The outline of his head and high forehead was familiar, but the eyes seemed unrelated to the rest of his face. Then Halliday recognized Dr Mallory and realized that, for the first time, he was seeing him without his sunglasses.

      ‘Halliday … my dear chap.’ Mallory stepped around the drained pool to greet him, adjusting the silk scarf in the neck of his shirt. ‘We thought you’d come one day …’ He turned to Leonora, who was smiling at Halliday. ‘To tell you the truth we were beginning to get a little worried about him, weren’t we, Leonora?’

      ‘Halliday …’ Leonora took his arm and steered him round to face the sun. ‘What’s happened – you’re so pale!’

      ‘He’s been sleeping, Leonora. Can’t you see that, my dear?’ Mallory smiled down at Halliday. ‘Columbine Sept Heures is beyond the dusk line now. Halliday, you have the face of a dreamer.’

      Halliday nodded. ‘It’s good to leave the dusk, Leonora. The dreams weren’t worth searching for.’ When she looked away Halliday turned to Mallory. The doctor’s eyes disturbed him. The white skin in the orbits seemed to isolate them, as if the level gaze was coming from a concealed face. Something warned him that the absence of the sunglasses marked a change in Mallory whose significance he had not yet grasped.

      Avoiding the eyes, Halliday pointed to the empty easel. ‘You’re not painting, Leonora.’

      ‘I don’t need to, Halliday. You see …’ She turned to take Mallory’s hand. ‘We have our own dreams now. They come to us across the desert like jewelled birds …’

      Halliday watched them as they stood together. Then Mallory stepped forward, his white eyes like spectres. ‘Halliday, of course it’s good to see you … you’d probably like to stay here –’

      Halliday shook his head. ‘I came for my car,’ he said in a controlled voice. He pointed to the Peugeot. ‘Can I take it?’

      ‘My dear chap, naturally. But where are –’ Mallory pointed warningly to the western horizon, where the sun burned in an immense pall. ‘The west is on fire, you can’t go there.’

      Halliday began to walk toward the car. ‘I’m going to the coast.’ Over his shoulder, he added, ‘Gabrielle Szabo is there.’

      This time, as he fled towards the night, Halliday was thinking of the white house across the river, sinking into the last light of the desert. He followed the road that ran north-east from the refinery, and found a disused pontoon bridge that crossed the wadi. The distant spires of Columbine Sept Heures were touched by the last light of sunset.

      The streets of the town were deserted, his own footsteps in the sand already drowned by the wind. He went up to his suite in the hotel. Gabrielle Szabo’s house stood isolated on the far shore. Holding one of the clocks, its hands turning slowly within the ormolu case, Halliday saw the chauffeur bring the Mercedes into the drive. A moment later Gabrielle Szabo appeared, a black wraith in the dusk, and the car set off toward the north-east.

      Halliday walked around the paintings in the suite, gazing at their landscapes in the dim light. He gathered his clocks together and carried them onto the balcony, then hurled them down one by one onto the terrace below. Their shattered faces, the white dials like Mallory’s eyes, looked up at him with unmoving hands.

      Half a mile from Leptis Magna he could hear the sea washing on the beaches through the darkness, the onshore winds whipping at the crests of the dunes in the moonlight. The ruined columns of the Roman city rose beside the single tourist hotel that shut out the last rays of the sun. Halliday stopped the car by the hotel, and walked past the derelict kiosks at the outskirts of the town. The tall arcades of the forum loomed ahead, the rebuilt statues of Olympian deities standing on their pedestals above him.

      Halliday climbed onto one of the arches, then scanned the dark avenues for any sign of the Mercedes. Uneager to venture into the centre of the town, he went back to his car, then entered the hotel and climbed to the roof.

      By the sea, where the antique theatre had been dug from the dunes, he could see the white rectangle of the Mercedes parked on the bluff. Below the proscenium, on the flat semi-circle of the stage, the dark figure of Gabrielle Szabo moved to and fro among the shadows of the statues.

      Watching her, and thinking of Delvaux’s ‘Echo’, with its triplicated nymph walking naked among the classical pavilions of a midnight city, Halliday wondered whether he had fallen asleep on the warm concrete roof. Between his dreams and the ancient city below there seemed no boundary, and the moonlit phantoms of his mind moved freely between the inner and outer landscapes, as in turn the dark-eyed woman from the house by the drained river had crossed the frontiers of his psyche, bringing with her a final relief from time.

      Leaving the hotel, Halliday followed the street through the empty town, and reached the rim of the amphitheatre. As he watched, Gabrielle Szabo came walking through the antique streets, the fleeting light between the columns illuminating her white face. Halliday moved down the stone steps to the stage, aware of the chauffeur watching him from the cliff beside the car. The woman moved towards Halliday, her hips swaying slowly from side to side.

      Ten feet from him she stopped, her raised hands testing the darkness. Halliday stepped forward, doubting if she could see him at all behind the sunglasses she still wore. At the sound of his footsteps she flinched back, looking up towards the chauffeur, but Halliday took her hand.

      ‘Miss Szabo. I saw you walking here.’

      The woman held his hands in suddenly strong fingers. Behind the glasses her face was a white mask. ‘Mr Halliday –’ She felt his wrists, as if relieved to see him. ‘I thought you would come. Tell me, how long have you been here?’

      ‘Weeks – or months, I can’t remember. I dreamed of this city before I came to Africa. Miss Szabo, I used to see you walking here among these ruins.’

      She nodded, taking his arm. Together they moved off among the columns. Between the shadowy pillars of the balustrade was the sea, the white caps of the waves rolling towards the beach.

      ‘Gabrielle … why are you here? Why did you come to Africa?’

      She gathered the silk robe in one hand as they moved down a stairway to the terrace below. She leaned closely against Halliday, her fingers clasping his arm, walking so stiffly that Halliday wondered if she were drunk. ‘Why? Perhaps to see the same dreams, it’s possible.’

      Halliday was about to speak when he noticed the footsteps of the chauffeur following them down the stairway. Looking around, and for one moment distracted from Gabrielle’s swaying body against his own, he became aware of a pungent smell coming from the vent of one of the old Roman cloacas below them. The top of the brick-lined sewer had fallen in, and the basin was partly covered by the waves swilling in across the beach.

      Halliday stopped. He tried to point below but the woman was holding his wrist in a steel grip. ‘Down there! Can you see?’

      Pulling his hand away, he pointed to the basin of the sewer, where a dozen half-submerged forms lay heaped together. Bludgeoned by the sea and wet sand, the corpses were only recognizable by the back-and-forth movements of their arms and legs in the shifting water.

      ‘For God’s sake – Gabrielle, who are they?’

      ‘Poor devils …’ Gabrielle Szabo turned away, as Halliday stared over the edge at the basin ten feet below. ‘The evacuation – there were riots. They’ve been here for months.’

      Halliday knelt down, wondering how long it would take the corpses – whether Arab or European he had no means of telling – to be swept out to sea. His dreams of Leptis Magna had not included these melancholy denizens of the sewers. Suddenly he shouted again.

      ‘Months? Not that one!’

      He