Where There's Smoke Read Free Page A

hangover seemed to last months, and the office was slow to return to routine.
    When I next saw Cox he seemed to have mange growing on his skin. And lumps had appeared on his neck. The mysterious car still delivered him food most nights, but it went uneaten more often than not.
    I heard that Cox had AIDS.
    He had befriended a tourist, one Carnival a few years earlier, when he was a teenager. They ended up at the tourist’s hotel. I never discovered if the tourist was male or female; if the sex had been consensual or sold. When you knew Cox it was as shattering a thought as child abduction. Because David Cox wasn’t of the truly wasted street crowd. He never took drugs, nor dealt them. He giggled like a little girl when we goaded him into a half a bottle of beer one night in the office.
    It transpired that Cox had been diagnosed some time ago, and had since developed full-blown AIDS. One of my colleagues had doctors in his family, and Cox was treated for free.
    But his lip hung lower than ever, and he started to dribble. He began to lose his height and build, and his skin lost its shine. Still he rallied from time to time. Occasionally the young Doctor Cox would emerge with his spectacles, and his crucial business dealings. But Cox knew he was sick.
    He asked me one night if I thought there was anything after death.
    The shadowy car that delivered his supper turned out to be from one of the finest restaurants, not far around the corner. It was run by a pair of formidable women who had let themselves be tangled in Cox’s net of charm. As he slowed and grew more dazed, and as we watched the glands on his neck swell, and his body show more bones, a quiet circuit of friendship showed itself around him – the restaurant, the doctor, the bosses at the office. Without fanfare his needs were catered to by souls who were touched by him.
    When Cox was suddenly taken to the accident and emergency department, my colleague Kirtlee and I donned suit jackets and strode into Port of Spain General Hospital to find him. He was on a large ward.
    â€˜It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Just a cough. Tell them I’m coming back.’
    He did come back for a while – but he disappeared again, this time to a facility on a lush mountainside, with a view over all the land. I was leaving the island for a few weeks, and before I left I made the journey to find him. He was on a bed next to a prisoner in chains.
    Cox spread out his hands and grinned his terrified grin, as if acknowledging a dark and colossal joke. I brought him treats, and a wallet with some pieces of official paperwork. But seeing him there, wide-eyed with his situation, I knew his spirit had flowered, his time had come and gone. I hugged him, and told him to wait for me; I would bring him something back from my travels.
    But Cox couldn’t wait.
    He told his last visitors that I was coming back. But it was from them I heard on the phone that he was dead. They buried him at La Peyrouse cemetery; his friends came from the office, from the restaurant, and apparently an unexpected number from out of the woodwork of gingerbread houses and palms and shadows. I don’t know if Miss Universe was there; but it doesn’t matter.
    Mist hung over Port of Spain when I got back. It was butterfly season again. The highway was strewn with needless victims; all dead, but flashing fire and colour from where they lay.

THE YARRA
    NAM LE
    Hours before sunrise my body’s already soaked with sweat, as though in anticipation of the real heat. Melbourne’s in drought. The city a plain of dust and fire. I wake amidst dreams of Saturday sports as a schoolboy, shin guards and box chafing where the sheets have twisted; noise, collision down the pitch as faraway as a deeper dream. There are Tupperware containers at half-time, frozen wedges of orange. Then a sudden switch and charge, players all around me, the rising breathing in my ears – I am sprinting,