The Blue Afternoon

'You are Kay Carriscant.'

'I am Kay Fischer. You are making a tiresome and irritating error, Mr -'

'All right, all right. You were once Kay Carriscant. You were born on the ninth of January 1904 in the afternoon. You see, I -'

'Would you please leave me alone, Mr Whoever-you-are? This nonsense is begi

'My name is Carriscant. Salvador Carriscant. Do you know who I am?'

'Of course not.'

The pungent denial in my voice, its plain tetchiness, caused the look in his eye to change. A shadow of sadness crossed his gaze and a deep hurt was revealed there for an instant. For some reason this mellowed me and I felt sorry for him and his hopeless quest for his Miss Carriscant.

'What do you want?' I said, with more kindness in my voice. 'Who are you?'

His face seemed to tighten, drawn down as if there were a pain in his gut. He closed his eyes a second and pursed his lips. He sighed.

'I am your father,' he said.

THREE

Philip accepted the five ten-dollar bills I gave him as casually as if they were cigarettes. Trying not to smile, he folded them into a calfskin wallet.

'Thanks, Kay. I owe you.'

'You surely do. Two hundred and counting.'

'Ho hum. It's only money.'

'Only my money.' I laughed, all the same, Philip was being sweet tonight, as only he knew how, and I was enjoying it. We sat in a piano bar called Mo-Jo's. It was downtown, on Broadway and Third, a joint Philip knew, where his credit was good. It was a curious place, a unique blend of Polynesian idyll and Nantucket fishing village. In the lobby you parted a bead curtain and crossed a log bridge over a moving stream to be confronted by a dark room with a bar decorated with signal flags and cork floats. The barmen wore striped matelot jerseys and red neckerchiefs. Lush groves of potted palms screened intimate booths made from packing cases and driftwood. Carved backlit native gargoyles served as sconces and cast a fuggy crimson-orange light on a bamboo-framed, wall-sized mural of a square-rigged clipper ru

'You look different, Kay. So… you know, bigger. I like it. You, ah, you carry it well.'

'That's meant to be a compliment?'

'OK. Try this: can I come home with you tonight?'

'Won't Little Miss Peroxide object?'

'That's not fair. It's over, long gone. You know that.'

'No.'

'Please -'

'No, Philip. No.' That particular tone of weariness crept into my voice, memories of ancient arguments, and he knew that he should not ask any more.

He stood up. 'I've got to go to the john. I'll have the same again.'

I watched him stroll easily through the tables, light-footed. His tall thin body swayed past waitresses and drinkers as he led with his left shoulder and then with his right, as if he were dancing. Like a Scottish dance, figure of eight… Why did I think of a Scottish dance? I smiled, as I recalled Philip's pale body, almost hairless, and his slim ankles, the Achilles tendon stretched and exposed, like a catwalk model's. He used to make love to me proficiently but selfishly, his head buried in the angle of my neck and shoulder, never looking up, never seeing my face, never looking me in the eyes, until he was finished.

I ordered us both another drink and thought about the man, Salvador Carriscant, who said he was my father.

When Carriscant had made his bizarre claim I told him at once that my father was dead but it gave him no pause at all, he merely gripped my forearm more fiercely and said, softly, insistently, 'Your father is here now, before you, alive and breathing. I know I have done you wrong but now I need your forgiveness. Your forgiveness and your help.'

I called again for Peter and wrenched my arm free of Carriscant's grip.

Peter came quickly up behind him and clutched his elbows, pulling them together. 'OK, brother, outside.'

'Release me,' Carriscant said, his voice suddenly uneven with anger. 'Do not lay your hands on me, I warn you.'

Some rare quality of emphasis in his voice made Peter comply. Carriscant backed away towards the wrought-iron gates of the Escorial 's entrance, still holding me with his persistent, pleading gaze.

'We just need to talk, Kay,' he said. 'Then everything will become clear.' He pronounced the last word 'cleah', in the English ma

Philip and our fresh drinks arrived simultaneously. Philip dipped and slid himself along the banquette until his thigh was brushing mine.

'I've got a lunch party at the beach tomorrow. Lisa van Baker's house. Want to come with me?'

'Can't, I'm afraid.'

'But there'll be movie stars,' he said, hands spread, eyebrows raised, mock-horrified at my indifference.

'I hate movie stars.'

'OK, what's the alternative attraction?'

'Home cooking.'

FOUR

I watched my mother slice peeled, cored apples into a tin colander. The sharp worn knifeblade slid easily beneath the pale yellow flesh as she cut slim discs with a sliding, crunching noise, like cautious footsteps on icy snow,. She was meticulous in her slicing, each disc a precise thickness, her concentration fixed exactly on her task. She was a small woman, shy and modest. She wore her hair always in the same way, as long as I could remember, combed back from her face and held in a vertical roll from crown to nape. Her features were ordinary and unexceptional: it was only when she put her spectacles on that her face acquired some personality.

She lived with my stepfather, Rudolf Fischer, in a small house in Long Beach. It was an old fading canary yellow clapboard bungalow with a shingled hip roof, and there was a newer addition of a two-car garage which took up most of what had been a patchy lawn. A cypress hedge separated it from a house of identical design painted flamingo pink. This was where I had grown up but it was not where I was born. My birthplace had been in the former German colony in New Guinea. It always seemed to me one of my life's crueller oppositions: born in New Guinea, raised in Long Beach. I possessed no memory at all of my real father. Rudolf – Pappi, as we called him, my mother included-had always been there in my life, with his big ruddy face, his fuzzy, balding pate, the curious wen on his face, half an inch below the right side of his mouth, hard and shiny like a sucked boiled sweet stuck there. 'Like Oliver Cromwell,' he used to say, 'I come wart and all.' He was a big-boned friendly man whose easy geniality hid a weak character. My neat, timid mother was the real centre of force in that household, something that Pappi's large shambling loud presence seemed to belie. Only the family really knew the truth.

Pappi was an American, second generation, son of West-phalian immigrants, who, in a conscious act of assimilation, had ceased speaking German as soon as they could string some English sentences together and ensured that their children had grown up monoglottally American. My mother had stopped talking German when she married him, she said, claiming that she even dreamed in English now. But I still heard her singing to herself, favourite songs: 'An die ferne Geliebte', and 'Es war, als hatt' der Himmel' when her guard dropped.