The Man Who Knew Everything by Tom Stacey

Author:Tom Stacey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781905299409
Publisher: Stacey Publishing Limited

5

When he got home he went into the kitchen and opened a tin of evaporated milk. He sat down to a large plate of cornflakes. He brought the sugarbowl over from the sideboard and, when he spooned on sugar, agitated ants sprinted all over the table. After several mouthfuls, he opened a can of beer and drank directly from it. Then he put his right hand into his trouser pocket and felt around for the little screw of paper. It was there among his loose change. He opened it out under the light. It was only two inches square, torn from a flyleaf of a Koran, with a message written in ball-point in Arabic and difficult to make out. He recognised the Arabic signature of the Emir.

He glanced at his watch. One hour to curfew. They could come for him any time – inveterately idiots were employed on the Foreign Desk who, if telephoned at home, would tell the Saturday duty man to query the ‘bust bust’. Either that or they would print the dispatch tomorrow for Monday. That would be dreadful. Of course, he didn’t even know for certain whether the palace telex operator had transmitted the ‘bust bust’ verbatim: he had allowed himself to be ushered from the palace without asking for a copy of his own telex. He hadn’t even brought out the carbon of his typescript.

The elation was quite gone now. He could see Al-Bakr strutting through the staterooms, and Hatim sliding across to tell him how he’d made a poodle of old Jonas.

He had lost his grip, he could see that: if he hadn’t lost his grip he would never have let them persuade him to write anything at all. It seemed to him now so easy to have defied them and to have taken the consequences. He’d really rather they came for him right this minute and got it done with: somebody in the palace would know where he lived. They could wheedle it out of the Emir himself. Maybe if they didn’t come now he could take himself back to the palace and somehow get to the telex machine on the pretext of adding to his dispatch and he could tell those fools on the Foreign Desk outright not to give that dispatch to the Back Bench, not on any account to print tomorrow for Monday.

He was the idiot, that was clear enough. It was just that he couldn’t any longer bring himself to engage in heroics. He was too old for heroics: he was washed up – the slang was descriptive. He saw the old Emir, yellowed and cadaverous: it was as if they were lying there together on the tide-line, bleached and lifeless, halfway to becoming sea and sand.

Now that he couldn’t live here on this island any more, he mused vaguely as to what he should do. He knew he had burned his boats – years and years ago he had burned his boats. Out of the vagueness, he identified the exact moment of boat-burning: when he handed the letter to the postman.

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