Devil’s Harvest Read online

  The bright red umbrellas heralding the espresso bar calmed his flustered nerves. There was already a group of students and businesspeople waiting to be served. He took his place in the queue, steeling himself against the unnecessary proximity of the others in the line, against the unsolicited whiffs of body scents and deodorants. He tried to establish an impenetrable aura about him, in that determined way one does when standing on the metro, for example, rocking on a fixed pivot. He peered down at the spiderweb strands of blonde-grey hair that had collected on his lapels from the stranger in front of him. Must the woman throw her hair about quite so? He had already spent more time than seemed sensible that morning tapping at his jacket with a loop of sticky tape wrapped over his fingers, plucking at cat hair and what regrettably appeared to be some of his own head-cover, also shedding now.

  The mayor had given a speech the day before, urging that this was a time for all Britons to ‘stand together’. The recurrent disturbances (the right-wing newspapers used the word ‘riots’ while the Guardian insisted on referring to ‘incidents of social unrest’) had apparently established a new solidarity among the better-heeled in Bristol. The middle class was under attack; Thatcherism needed a recall (though Dame Margaret was long demised); immigration laws should be revisited. Stand together with whom, Gabriel wondered. Mr and Mrs Worthington who snuck their garbage into his bin at night? The Greens opposite, whose brattish child trundled up and down the pavement, pants pulled halfway down his knees, his skateboard clacking against the kerb like castanets? The Kahn father-and-son partnership who spent more time revving the engine of the Ford Escort and inspecting its manifold cover than actually driving the thing, their incessant hooting sounding late into the night? Patriotism was all very well until you met your neighbours.

  And yet here they all stood, together in a manner of speaking, as united as they could hope to be in the course of a passing day. But the needs of each individual established only a competitive frisson. The slight jostling was accompanied by strained smiles and polite but assertive interventions. There was little camaraderie despite the shared expedition into the early-morning English fog. The advent of day would be marked for each one of them by the first rush of caffeine. Until then, each remained suspicious of the intentions of the other. Hell is other people, queuing Britishly for their first espresso of the morning.

  ‘Yep! Yep! Give me a flat “why bother” with wings,’ yelled the barista. ‘And a tall foamy with a double hit. Yeah, let’s get to it! Aweh!’

  It always took some time for the trends of London to reach Gabriel’s coastal corner. The whole culture was contrary to his nature – the gaucheness, the overexuberance, the un-English embrace of the espresso bar with its clean lines, Latin American music and sexy quasi-Italian names. But it had become habitual, despite the discomfort and the vulnerability in stepping forward to be berated by the black baristas, jocular and loud in the quiet cold of the early sunshine. Each morning, Gabriel made the short walk from the coffee bar to the biological sciences building. He liked the way his breath puffed out in misted waves, hot with coffee and body warmth. As he pushed his bicycle with one hand, his branded takeaway cup with its moulded drinking lid in the other, he felt cosmopolitan and somehow risqué. Now that it was here, he was as impatient as those around him for the bite of caffeine, the bitter aroma of Arabica sucked over a small square of dark chocolate. Chocolate in the morning; his mother would never have approved.

  ‘Aweh, brothers, beautiful lady for our special attention.’

  The barista was flirting with the immaculately turned-out woman ahead of Gabriel. The man’s skin had a silkiness to it and his lips were a natural dark red. He opened his mouth wide as he shouted out orders, his pink gums and tongue making his teeth seem all the more brilliant. It was inappropriately amorous for the hour. Gabriel wanted his coffee, but the female executive was deliberating over a complicated order involving fat-free milk and ratios of coffee to froth. Her calves were toned, clad in light-brown stockings and half-hidden by high-heeled boots. Gabriel watched how the muscle flexed and relaxed as she spoke, an involuntary peristaltic motion like a feeding mollusc. There was much that was glutinous about her. His mind wandered to darker places, her quaffed hair now tousled. He looked away, mildly revolted by the unbidden image. Such is the distraction of masculinity.

  ‘What’ll it be, man?’

  The sleek blonde had moved off to the side to fiddle further with her americano or whatever it was she had ordered. The familiarity of tone jarred, and for a moment Gabriel was unable to recollect the mock-Italian phrase he needed. He scanned the blackboard above the barista’s head with increasing panic.

  ‘Aweh, brothers, a slow one here,’ the barista joked with his colleagues who whistled loudly in unison as a response. ‘When a man watches the ladies, his mind has no space for anything else, ain’t that right?’ More whistles, a shouted comment in a language that Gabriel could not identify, francophone and nasal.

  ‘Macchiato. One sugar,’ he answered curtly. He felt a surge of irritation at the lack of respect, the assumption that youth and sexiness entitled one to poke fun at the establishment.

  ‘You going to pay for that, my friend? It sure ain’t on this bro’s house.’

  Gabriel pulled out his wallet. He counted out the coins carefully, pushing them across the wet counter with a deliberate finger. There would be no tip today.

  ‘Enjoy, brother.’ It was said a little too jovially, thrown after him like a table scrap once he’d already turned his back and started to walk away.

  The macchiato was hot and satisfying in the moment, but quickly drained, the cup light again, filled only with the foamy dregs. By the time Gabriel had collected his bicycle and reached the crossing over Queens Road, the cup was no longer a statement of the new order; it was just a piece of rubbish that would take decades to degrade in some rubbish pit up the Avon River. All pleasure is transitory, and momentary at that, only the consequences of its imbuement persist, he acknowledged to himself with some satisfaction. That is precisely why one must hold on to that which is solid, empirical, and eschew the vagueness of opinion and feeling. Scientific endeavour provided the only footholds for stability. Perhaps he should work something like that into his annual public lecture, a dig at the soft belly of the faculty of humanities, Gabriel thought. But he found his enthusiasm waning even as he considered the content of his morning’s lecture. He resented the intrusion on his real work, the time wasted as he jumped through the administration’s hoops, pandering to absent donors and parochial bureaucrats. ‘Accessibility’ was the new catchphrase, as if the science faculty was a trade union or government tender board. Those who understood the magnitude of his research had all the access they required, and they would not be in the audience. No, he would be addressing those who denied their nescience, benightedly delivering opinions in the form of pompous rhetorical questions. How he detested the dullards that littered these public lectures, nodding until they drifted off into blank incomprehension.

  Thus he was, a suited knight with sword in hand, wreaking his imaginary academic wrath upon those before him, as he stepped out onto the pedestrian markings on Queens Road, bicycle like a duteous pet at his side. A shrill call rang out – more like a wail – echoing off the facebrick edifice of the Wills Memorial Tower. A few pigeons erupted in flight with a single flap of their streamlined wings. But the shouted alarm was not enough to draw Gabriel from his reverie and he took two further steps, oblivious and well into the road now, before he registered a second clamour. Then he looked up, as if surfacing from a dream. He slowed his next step, aware of movement to his left, and a noise that, until then, had been buried beneath the urban hum.

  The car was already upon him – a white sedan with rust coating the sides of the windscreen. The windows were completely open, each with a youngster perched on the edge, gripping the rim of the roof and holding rags and half-torn flags above their heads. Stranded with his bicycle on the blank expanse of tarmac, Gab
riel’s eyes took a moment to focus and the progress of time faltered. The bonnet was splattered with purple and grey blotches of bird excrement, half-digested figs, little granules of pips encrusted in the stains.

  I’m going to be killed by a car covered in bird shit, Gabriel thought in confusion. Why the hell haven’t they cleaned their car?

  In the seconds before impact, he looked up from the messy bonnet and his eyes met those of the driver. The young man’s mouth hung open at the side and he seemed to have cocked his head, his expression utterly perplexed. Was that spittle on his lips? Who would allow a retarded minor behind the wheel of a car? The muscles in Gabriel’s legs were frozen, tied down like a tarpaulin. At the very last moment, just as it seemed he would smack into the dirty bonnet, the driver disappeared to his left into the passenger’s space, pulling down on the steering wheel as he went. The car swerved hard, tipping on its old suspension like a fishing boat turning with the swell. The tyres emitted a squealing hiss as they bit onto the road surface. It was extraordinary, being so close to all that power and friction and noise, as if in slow motion Gabriel might put out his hand to explain the formulae at work. He could not be sure if the car would roll over onto him or if the back would continue sliding until it connected with his waiting figure. He was to be sent flying across Queens Road and he would not be giving his open lecture. That was the last thought to go through his mind.

  Just as it seemed the collision was inevitable, the driver must have turned the wheel back, because the car lurched the other way, bringing its weight slamming down onto the tar and jerking on the window-seat passengers like dolls. The car thundered past within half a foot of Gabriel’s body. He felt its heat and the wind that accompanied it.

  ‘Stupid old cunt!’ a voice shouted.

  As the back end passed, the passenger leaning out the window raised his flat hand and caught Gabriel across the side of his face.

  He felt the thud of the youth’s blow, the awful slick of another man’s hand on his cheek. The back bumper hooked his wheel and the bicycle was wrenched from his grasp. The slap didn’t sting, at first; rather it blocked him like a punch, throwing him off his feet. Gabriel felt stupefied, toppling sideways and barely managing to put out his arm to stave off the fall. His breath rushed out, an indelicate guttural explosion of spittle and coffee as he thudded to the ground.

  He lay still in the road. He was having considerable difficulty breathing. Perhaps he was having a heart attack, yet his vascular system had scored well at his last check-up. What on earth had just happened? He raised his hand to his face. His cheek was throbbing now, the skin coarse as if it had been burnt. His face was wet with something warm and sticky. He let his fingers slide across his mouth and under his chin. Blood, he thought, already wetting my whole face. He brought his fingers into sight. Sludgy brown foam smeared his knuckles, the crushed remains of his macchiato on the tarmac. His bicycle lay a short distance away, its front wheel buckled.

  ‘Oh, my grief,’ said a female voice, the slender-calved woman from the espresso bar.

  Gabriel looked up to see her towering over him, her face pale with fright. She seemed surreal, but less oily and more desirable now, in a homely, maternal way. He tried to smile, but a blush of pain swept over his cheek and his eye started watering. A police car came down Queens Road at speed, hesitating before dropping a gear and revving past after the fleeing perpetrator.

  ‘I shouted to warn you but you didn’t react,’ she said a little reprovingly. ‘I thought you were going to be killed.’

  Gabriel remained sitting on the tar, unable to orientate himself. His new paramour half-knelt beside him and he smelt her woody cosmetics, subtly masculine and assertive. She wiped his face with a serviette, but the tissue felt like sandpaper on his skin and he flinched. The foam had stained it and, gratifyingly, a small line of blood appeared. Where was he bleeding? Again he put his fingers to his face, probing his skin. Around his left nostril he felt a slight sting as the tip of his finger ran beneath it.

  ‘They’ve scratched you, you poor thing.’

  Scratched? He looked up into her face, a pale visage framed by deeply bleached hair. This close he could see that the roots were showing mousy brown. Scratched!

  She spoke again and this time Gabriel could see her fillings, like a metal trench stretching back into the depths of her mouth. ‘These bloody Nigerians,’ she moaned. ‘I wish they’d just get sent back to where they came from. They just cause trouble. Really!’

  Gabriel must have frowned, because she stood up with a look of condescension.

  ‘You can say what you like,’ she countered. ‘They’re just a useless lot and we certainly don’t need them.’

  ‘It’s just … It’s just … I don’t think they were African,’ Gabriel said, first getting to his knees before clambering back to his feet. Half-bred third-generation Pakistani football yobs from the tenements, more like. ‘But thank you for your help. I feel fine now,’ he lied, dabbing at his nose with the back of his hand.

  ‘Well, I think someone should do something. That’s all.’

  She crushed the stained serviette into his hand and turned on her heel, clearly exasperated with his lack of vigour. What had she expected from him? Was he to demonstrate his middle-aged potency by ripping the youth from his moving throne and wrestling him to the ground? Personally putting him on the first flight back to Kashmir or Lagos? He felt mildly aggrieved at her disappointment, but had no desire to call her back. He watched as she clip-clopped her way across the cobbled pavement towards the transport route. Human behaviour persistently left him mystified. He felt an urgent desire to attend to his plants in the herbarium.

  * * *

  Gabriel inspected the damage to his face in the staff toilets in the department building. The staff had their own keys to the washrooms, and the door was kept locked to prevent the hordes of ill-trained students from utilising the facilities. And still the basin was filthy, with bits of soggy toilet paper blocking the plugholes, and the place emitted an odour of stale emissions and cigarette smoke. The tiled floor was slick with water and dribbled urine, left unattended from the evening before. The senior staff were wont to blame the virile juniors for their lack of accuracy, but the mess was more likely to have emanated from elderly professors, prostates clenched as they tried to massage the last squirts from their soft penises. Gabriel tried not to touch the edge of the basin as he leant forward and peered at his face in the liver-spotted mirror. He was unimpressed. Apart from a scarlet cheek and a tearful look to his left eye, he appeared uninjured. The scratch beneath his nostril had dried, and it looked more like a wayward ball of snot than a bloody wound. He tried to wipe it away, but the scab had already hardened. Outside, his crippled bicycle lay on the ground locked to its stand. The overall result was decidedly unsatisfactory.

  He thought of phoning his wife. But Jane would laugh at him, without sympathy, he knew. Theirs was increasingly a relationship of little empathy, fuelled instead by competitiveness. He relished the combat when success seemed to take his side, but in moments of weakness he longed for something more affectionate. Tenderness wasn’t a natural predilection for his wife. Retaining her maiden name – Easter – was a statement of intent: marriage was a commercial and social partnership. Nothing more. Complaining of a scrape beneath his nose would evoke little concern and possibly some derision.

  Gabriel was weighed down by the anxiety that life, his life, would be determined by some unknown misfortune that awaited him, a fate that stalked him. It seemed to him that people were defined by some humiliating tale that had befallen them – like an accusation of paedophilia, these became stains that could never be cleansed. His aunt whose overweight husband had pinned her lifelessly to the bed after suffering an intracoital myocardial infarction; Sheila from Manchester who had vomited copiously on the chancellor’s shoes during her graduation ceremony. Maddy Tinkler, married for six months, only to find hubby in flagrante with the plumber, both clothed above but not below.


  This perverse fascination with humiliation – his own and that of those around him – kept him gripped like a muscle cramp. He wondered what his own defining moment would be. He picked at embarrassing memories: socially inept comments, a stupid face in a photograph, a lack of dignity in bearing – this was the extent of it. And now this: no fractured skull, no stitches, not even any facial bruising. Just an ambivalent scab below the nostril and a mangled front wheel.

  Gabriel pulled back the bathroom door. It was still too early for students, and the linoleum-floored corridor was empty. The building was old, the passages partitioned with heavy metal-and-glass fire-doors and the laboratories and lecture theatres blocked by solid exits that could be locked, though they never were. The walls were covered with posters for green energy options, interspaced with tattered cork boards filled with notices of student piss-ups and digs available for sharing. Student life seemed to centre on alcohol and comfortable beds for shagging one another. There was something both grimy and appealing about the hedonism.

  The same could be said of the building itself, but moves were afoot to shift the entire department to the new building being built on Tyndall Avenue. Light and airy laboratories, ergonomic seating, modern architectural minimalism involving concrete, glass and steel. Gabriel would miss the smells, the institutional National Health feel of the Woodland Road department building. But all the same, he was jostling with other senior members of staff for an office with a view down the hill towards the floating harbour. Some cruel prankster had sent an internal email advising that the building was to be open plan and asking him to choose his station. Gabriel, often gullible, had rushed into the registrar’s office before politely being advised of his error.