Ben, in the World. Doris Lessing

to look for his little place, where he would live like a free man, not the hunted thing he had been all his life, waiting for the law to put its hand on his shoulders: perhaps his near-tears on leaving were a recognition that their situations in the world were similar. His plans did not turn out well. You may buy a nice little place for a quarter of a million, but then you have to live in it and pay for it, and you have to eat, too. And so Richard drifted back into crime. His story did not have a happy ending.

      Ben sat on his bed and from behind his dark glasses stared at the square of blue in his wall. Richard had gone, and he had been with him all the time, since coming here. The old woman had gone, and Rita, and Johnston. In that world where he had been part of park benches and doorways and railway stations, a person might huddle by you all night so close you could feel the warmth coming out and warming you – and then in the morning, gone, and you would never see them again. He was feeling so loose and weightless and unbelonging he could drop through the floor or float about the room. Yet he had his place here: the room was paid for another two weeks. He could stay in hiding in this room; he could go out into the streets where he had been with Richard. And he was hungry. Richard had said he should use room service if he found the outside world difficult, but to Ben anything he had never done for himself was a trap where he could be enmeshed, and flounder. In the lobby he returned the smiles of the women behind the desk in Reception, then went to the cafe. He went to the café he knew best. The waiter brought him what he always had, steak, then some fruit. Richard had made him practise paying a bill, and he put down the amount the waiter told him, in English, but knew it was more than it had been ever before. He went to the market. Now, because Richard was not there, a shield between him and this noisy bright world, the sound of French hurt him, full of unknown meanings and threats. The two of them had bought fruit at the market, and there Ben pointed at grapes, at peaches, could not understand what the woman vendor said, held out his palm with money on it – and saw it all disappear. He knew from the small satisfied grin on that face, as she turned away, and how she slid the money she had got from him into her money pocket, that he had been cheated. He felt eyes on him; knew people commented; he sat, as he would have done with Richard at a cafe table to watch the events and people – and knew he would have to go through the ritual of ordering fruit juice, of paying for it – and he got up and stumbled back to the hotel. He was in a panic. It was his worst moment. The knowledge of his aloneness was beating into him, You are alone, you are alone. He felt danger everywhere and he was right. He had been protected by Richard, and now he was not.

      He returned to his room. That night he went off into the poorer parts of the town, looking for a girl, but did not see one. He planned to try again the next night. He was thinking of Rita, for now he could remember only kindness, but before he could begin a life of wandering up and down this coast, following the smiles of whores, risking all kinds of bad trouble, something else happened.

      A film-maker from New York stood at the reception desk, chatting to the two young women who were arranging a return flight to New York for him. Alex was middle-aged, but in the American way, looking youngish, lean, healthy, and with young clothes, bright and expensive. Going back home would be a defeat. After long anxieties and crises, he had made a film, three years ago, not the one he wanted to make, but he had not been able to attract the money for that. His film was about youths becoming criminals and drug dealers in a South American city, and had earned him enough attention for him to know his second film would be watched for. This time he would stand out for the film he wanted, and if it took time… But it was taking time, and money was getting short. For a year he had been possessed, a mad man, with one thought: which film, which story? Ideas whirled about in his mind, and even his dreams, took him to this city or country and that, possessed him totally, but left him – not good enough; and then another idea took over. He had got to the point where everyone he saw, every street, or bar or railway station or airport suggested a film. The world had become a phantasmagoria of film sets, and he knew he was a little crazy. For half a year he had believed he would make a film about the great days of a Mediterranean port in an earlier time, and that was why he was here. But nothing seemed to crystallise his ideas, and he should leave. Yet he did not want to leave this coast, and his dreams of it… Into the lobby from the lift came Ben, and Alex’s eyes followed him. Ben went to the revolving doors out to the street, stopped, came back, and sank into a chair. He was grinning – perhaps at an attractive private thought? Alex, who had not for months been able to look at anything or anybody without his mind filling with bright seductive scenes, saw a sombre hillside under a low louring sky, with black rocks clambering and piling up it, ancient vigorous trees; he heard water splashing and from beside a little waterfall emerged a creature, squat, hairy, with powerful shoulders and a deep chest, which lifted gleaming hostile eyes to see this alien, Alex, and barked, at which from behind rocks and through trees came a company of similar creatures, and they went running up the hillside into the mouth of a cave, a big hole in the hillside, and there they assembled and stood alert, to see what threat this unknown might mean. Below them were the crowns of the old trees, of a kind Alex could have sworn he had never seen, and all around jagged rocks. This band of what – dwarfs? Yetis? – nothing that Alex had seen in pictures or on film – held their ground there, staring at him. The tallest were five feet three or four inches, and others were shorter – females, perhaps? Hard to tell what was their sex with that hair falling from their loins. Coarse pale hair on their shoulders, beards, green eyes. Now in their hands were clubs, stones, some as sharp as knives… And the vision faded, it went, and Alex was staring at Ben in his smart clothes, who was looking at the revolving doors, and thinking that, yes, he would go back to London, and look for Rita, after all, there was that money for him in the safe. But Johnston would…It was the thought of Johnston that made that grin of fear appear again on his face. Ben had realised that Johnston had lied to him, tricked him, and now had left him helpless here, surrounded by people who made sounds he could not understand.

      Alex turned back to the young women behind the desk, who were waiting for his questions about Ben: they were used to these questions. They had evolved their own ideas about Ben. One said that he had been in a mental hospital, he was a rich person, and had been sent here with a minder. Another said he was obviously a heavyweight wrestler. A third believed some experiment had gone wrong in a laboratory, and said Ben gave her the creeps. All were protective of Ben, helped him with advice, in English, and with gifts of their time, going with him to his room to make sure he had a bowl for his fruit, or to find something – once, his passport, which for a frightful morning he had thought he had lost. That passport now seemed all that stood between him and being nothing – without it who would know that he was Ben Lovatt, from Scotland, thirty-five years old, a film actor?

      Now these smiling helpful faces were concealing a determination to shield Ben from this film director. Dubious and even cruel exploitations were imminent, for they knew Ben to be helpless. When Alex asked, ‘Who is he?’ one said, ‘He’s from London,’ and another, ‘He’s on holiday here.’ But there was the third person, who did not believe Ben was in films, and who didn’t like Alex, and she said, ‘He’s in films.’

      Alex said, ‘Forget that booking. I’ll stay around a bit.’ He went over to Ben, sat down, introduced himself.

      Ben’s grin held, and his eyes darted about, in fear, but then Alex’s friendly ease reminded him of Richard and even of the old woman, and the terrified grin went, and his smile came. Alex took Ben out for a meal, and then to a cafe, and so that all went on for a day, and then another, and then a week, and all this time Alex, with that vision or dream in his mind of the dwarfs, or whatever they were, was thinking that he would make a film with Ben. But he did not have a story, and above all, no money either. Ideas for stories came and went, each one taking over his imagination for the time they stayed. He was possessed by those creatures – who? – what? – not beasts, for Ben inhabited the forms of everyday life, used a knife and fork, went every day to have his beard clipped and his hair done, changed his clothes – which were beginning to look a little shabby. Alex heard that Johnston had had shirts and jackets made specially for him. Who was John-ston? Ben said that he had cars and drivers and sent people off in them all over London but that he had gone away. Ben was vague about everything. The boundaries of his understanding were narrow enough, and his sympathies and antipathies made even stranger patterns. He talked about the old woman, but not about the cat, about Johnston,