The Marks of Cain Read Free

with dignified shading and elegant colouration. Soft grey undulations showed mountains and foothills, lakes and rivers were a poetic blue, green polygons indicated marshland beside the Atlantic. It was map of southern France and northern Spain.
    He sat down and scrutinized the map more closely. The sheet had been marked very neatly with a blue pen: little blue asterisks dotted those grey ripples of mountains, between France and Spain. Another single blue star marked the top right corner of the map. Near Lyon.
    He looked at his grandfather, questioningly.
    ‘Bilbao,’ said the old man, visibly tiring now. ‘It’s Bilbao…You need to go there.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Fly to Bilbao, David. Go to Lesaka. And find José Garovillo.’
    ‘Sorry?’
    The old man made a final effort; his eyes were blurring over.
    ‘ Show him…the map. Then ask him about churches. Marked on the map. Churches.’
    ‘Who’s this guy? Why can’t you just tell me?’
    ‘It’s been too long…too much guilt, I cannot, can’t admit…’ The old man’s words were frail, and fading. ‘And anyway…Even if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. No one would believe. Just the mad old man. You’d say I was mad, the crazy old man. So you need to find out for yourself, David. But be careful…Be careful…’
    ‘Granddad?’
    His grandfather turned away, staring at the ceiling. And then, with a horrible sense of inevitability, the old man’s eyelids fluttered shut. Granddad had fallen back into his fitful and opiated sleep.
    The morphine pump ticked over.
    For a long while, David sat there, watching his grandfather breathe in and breathe out, quite unconscious. Then David got up and closed the blinds; the desert sun was almost gone anyway.
    He looked down at the map sitting on the hospice chair; he had no idea what it signified, what connection his granddad had with Bilbao or with churches. Probably it was all some ragged dream, some youthful memory returning, between the lucidity and the dementia. Maybe it was nothing at all.
    Yes. That was surely it. These were just the ramblings ofa dying old man, the brain yielding to the flood of illogic as the final dissolution approached. Sadly, but truly, he was crazy.
    David picked up the map and slid it into his pocket, then he leaned and touched his grandfather’s hand, but the old man did not respond.
    With a sigh, he walked out into the hot Phoenix summer night, and climbed into his rented Toyota. He drove the urban freeway to his motel, where he watched soccer on a grainy Mexican satellite station with a lonely sixpack and a pizza.
    His grandfather died early the following morning. A nurse rang David at the motel. He immediately called London and told his friends – he needed to hear some friendly voices. Then he called his office and extended his ‘holiday’ by a few days, on the grounds of bereavement.
    Even then his boss in London sounded a little sniffy, as it was ‘only’ David’s grandfather. ‘We are very busy, David, so this is exceptionally tiresome. Do be quick.’
    The service was in a soulless crematorium, in another exurb of Phoenix. Tempe. And David was the only real mourner in the building. Two nurses from the hospice showed up, and that was it. No one else was invited. David already knew he had no other family in America – or anywhere for that matter – but having his relative loneliness underscored like this, felt notably harsh – indeed cruel. But he had no choice in the matter. So David and the two nurses sat there, together and alone, and exposed.
    The ceremony was equally austere: at his grandfather’s request there were no readings, there was nothing – except for a CD of discordant and exotic guitar music, presumably chosen by his grandfather.
    When the song was done, the coffin trundled abruptly into the flames. David felt the briskness like a punch. It wasas if the old man had been quick to get off stage, eager to flee this life – or keen to be relieved of some