Underlings (Not being updated at this time)

Underlings - 3. Kisses from the sun.

As an old man regained consciousness in a cell at Shanghai airport, a younger man was being drowned in a bathtub at a beach resort in Bali.

“Where is she? What have you done with her?” screamed the European, forcing his victim under once more, hearing a dull thud as the man’s head hit the porcelain underwater; the sound muted and distant, like the banging on the door which he’d also blocked out in his madness. From the noise, he understood the word police, but it mattered nothing to him in this moment. The police had done nothing for him.

“Tell me what you did to my wife! Tell me or you are a dead man!” the man in the bathtub struggled, kicked his feet in the air like he was riding an invisible bicycle, wrestled the grip around his neck as more water flooded into his mouth, ill-timing his breath in the assault. Blood from his nose formed a creeping red mist in the water and the man punched him this time, spilling more of the red into the clouds of it.

“I didn’t...do anything...” He was young this man, healthy and strong, but on his back in the overflowing bath with all of his attacker’s strength and anger weighing down upon him, he was losing the fight for his life. He felt his aching limbs exhaust the last of the energy left in them and there was nothing left to bench press the man who would be his murderer from him.

The aggressor dunked him under the water for the fifth time in seconds and saw that his victim had given up the fight and felt his grip release from his own tensed arms.

“No! Tell me! Tell me where my wife is!” the man lifted him from the bath now, also defeated, he slid back against the wall, out of breath, watching the man in the bath tub vomit bath water onto the tiled floor.

The knocking persisted in the distance, drums angry that he’d not been able to kill the man that had appeared in his room speaking of his wife. He needed to know what had happened. He’d been drifting for days in the nightmare that his life had become.

The man in the bath looked up at him.

“I tried to tell you... I didn’t hurt her. She told me to say...Grantchester.”

“What?”

“Your wife told me to say Grantchester. It’s the place you first kissed... you got a boat from Cambridge and punted along the river. She gave me this...” The man in the bath held up a chain around his neck that had a gold Volkswagen Beetle hanging from on it. The man slumped on the floor began to cry; his wife had worn it as a charm on her wrist.

“What did you do to her? Please...tell me where she is.”

“Six days ago your wife vanished in this suite and you’ve been waiting for news haven’t you? But she went somewhere else and...I’m not doing this right...I know this sounds crazy, but I’m your son.”

“You sick bastard! I don’t have a son.  You’re out of your mind. Look at you... What are you twenty eight? ...Thirty? You’re older than me. You’re insane. Now tell me where my wife is, or I will kill you this time, I swear it, I will take your last breath and wring it out of your lungs with my hands.”

“Look at me. Look at my eyes. Don’t I look like her? I’m your son. She told me so many things... I can’t remember them all just now, I’m messing this up, but she said to say about your car that always broke down on the way home from gigs... roast dinners; you don’t like gravy on your potatoes but you put it on everything else... you rewired the house and all the lights came on in different rooms... you went to see Soundgarden at Hyde Park but you got drunk and didn’t remember it... Molly, your dog is being looked after by your friend Stuart because you left it too late to book a place at the kennels and mum was furious with you... you’re scared of wasps and bees, you hate tequila, you never give to charity, you love rugby and Italy, you love going to Italy...”

The man in the bath was studied then. He did look like her, even the freckles across his nose; she had those and she called them ‘kisses from the sun’. He was telling the truth. Even his expression, it was his wife; the same look she gave thousands of times before. Before she disappeared...

The man on the floor was utterly vanquished and he cried uncontrollably, letting out a wail of pain and loss, after days of being interviewed by the police and accusing people at the hotel, strangers, holidaymakers and staff, of taking his wife in the night.

“She was pregnant when she disappeared. She had me... in the other place. She wasn’t alone. She was never alone... She died eight years ago. She was just forty five, but she was happy. She missed you, but she was happy... and I have waited my whole life to meet you.”

The tap that made tears had been turned off by invisibles hands and the man on the floor composed himself, crawled to the bathtub across the tiled floor and embraced the man he had tried to drown. To anyone walking in, they would look like friends or lovers, but the truth was much stranger and only the blood inside of them would tell the truth.

Outside the banging stopped and the door to the suite had been opened; a rush of feet across the laminate flooring of the room outside which sounded like boots, not the flat slip on plimsolls that the maids wore to keep noise to a minimum, signalled that a quick explanation would be required, or that they should take cover.