Excerpt: The Desert

Moment of insensitivity covered the only way he knew how. Norton shrugged it off. He was used to dealing with it by now. He didn’t let it get to him. Anders had sobered up a bit. They both sat there in their spheres of reflection, the concentric zones of thought progressively retreating into themselves. The club was getting to be like a steak: fine and juicy at first, but the longer you leave it without doing anything the more sickened you feel by it. By now, the women started to look like willing lambs to slaughter, and all the men had dollar signs for eyes. Norton cast an eye at the bar. Money was being waved, put on the tabletops, women were laughing, teeth, meat, men were flexing their muscles under expensive linen shirts (all the rage! 10% off at Hillier’s, this week only!), teeth beamed everywhere; Norton knew he was imagining it, but he thought he could see them sparkle from where he sat. Truly the beautiful people, they were. Sweat dripped from every pore, make-up smeared over all the women’s faces – not women, girls; what show of maturity had earned them the moniker “woman”? Norton got up to go. Anders had some more left in him, and they parted ways. Norton bumped into a thin foreigner as he left the club. She was tottering past, frail and wrapped in an old beige trenchcoat, weaving across the pavement. She stared at him, frightened and cold: for a moment they were this close; Norton could hear her thoughts, another language, but the words meant something to him – then she was gone. The crowd swallowed her up like a funnel, and she the last drop of liquid. Somewhere, someone was making that cake, and she was the last drop that would be the difference between the cake spoiling and succeeding, but Norton didn’t know that right then. He didn’t know anything. Suspicions swarmed in quick succession around his fevered mind. What could Anders possibly have to do with the offensive woman from the Department of Immigration? Surely it must be another Hillary. Norton didn’t buy the story about Mrs Drapulich for one minute. Perhaps Anders already had a girlfriend and he felt guilty about plaguing Norton with his martyrdom with respect to Astrid?