Free Sparrow Nights by David Gilmour Page B

sort of favour?”
    “Maybe not such a good idea after all.”
    “Say it, Professor.”
    “Okay then.” It came out as if it were all one word. “Do you think it would be all right if I put my hand under your arm?”
    She pulled back her head and frowned. “Under my arm? Like here?”
    “Yes.”
    “It’s pretty sweaty right there.”
    “I know.”
    She looked over at the table. Blurry pause. “Can you be discreet?”
    I could feel the pressure of her hand on my back as she manoeuvred me out of the table’s sightline. “Okay, go,” she whispered.
    I slipped my hand up the side of her ribcage.
    “Did you get it?” she asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Do I smell all right?”
    “Yes. Great.”
    “What? What is it?”
    “You smell like Emma,” I said.

C H A P T E R         7
    E n tout cas . I was sitting in a café at the foot of my street, killing time before bed. Over the past few weeks I’d been organizing a book of essays on Arthur Rimbaud, but it was slow going. Several key contributors who had promised me papers had proven unreliable. One dropped out entirely, claiming he no longer believed his central thesis (that Rimbaud had not been a homosexual after all). No big loss there, but still it left a hole in the book, one which I was now obliged to fill with my own paper. Others were not up to scratch, obviously dashed off at the last moment, and I was in the delicate position of having to tell their authors that a complete overhaul was necessary. A woman at the university of Tel Aviv, who had been promising me her piece for months now, had taken to not replying to my urgent e-mails. My goodness, they were worse than undergraduates, and I was beginning to regret that I’d ever undertaken the project.
    So that evening I found myself in a neighbourhood café. I liked the waiters there. Sometimes I went for a drink, and just a little chitchat with one of them satisfied my hunger for a human voice or touch, and I could return home and resume my work without that hollowing sensation that I was living somehow on the margins of life.
    I’d taken half a recreational sleeping pill and chased it with a pint of beer. Waiting for that certain flavour of burnt nuts to take hold, I picked up a local tabloid and while flipping through it noticed in the back a full three pages given to sex ads. Escort services, women who were men, a dominatrix named Sheeba, massage parlours. I’d seen this stuff before, but now I found it sort of disturbing. No, I’m being coy, it wasn’t in the least disturbing. It was erotic.
    Reading more closely, keeping an eye out for the waiter—I didn’t want him to see me scrutinizing de près such material—I noted there was a massage parlour just down the street from where I was sitting. The Gold Hat Health Club. Odd, I’d never noticed it before. So I wrote down the phone number and, just for fun, or so I told myself, went over to the house phone on the bar and called the number.
    Soft music came over the line and a girl’s pleasant voice greeted me. I asked if they were open for business. “We are,” she replied with a tone of barely suppressed high spirits, which for all its transparent commercial motivation made me feel quand même as if somehow she and I had struck up a strangely immediate rapport, as if she had recognized something (ahem) special in my voice.
    I asked how late.
    “Late,” she said offhandedly, and the word seemed charged with implication, as if gumdrops hung suspended on its frame.
    I went back to my table in an uneasy state. I had the sensation of sliding into a dark hole, like those nights years ago when, brushing my teeth in the bathroom, I caught myself daydreaming about Emma, about what was going to happen in a matter of minutes when I slipped into bed beside her delicious-smelling body.
    I paid my bill and went over for a peek. It was a nondescript low-rise next door to a pharmacy. On the door, along with a list of doctors, income tax services for