Free Air and Fire by Rupert Thomson Page B

bad foot.’
    â€˜It’s good for it. The doctor told me. It’s exercise.’
    â€˜Exercise. I see.’ Rodrigo was still polishing the glass, only much more slowly now.
    â€˜An orange juice and a beer,’ Wilson said, ‘when you’re ready, that is.’
    â€˜No beer today, Señor.’
    â€˜I’ll have two orange juices then.’
    â€˜What about yesterday?’
    â€˜What about yesterday, Rodrigo?’
    â€˜You didn’t pay me for yesterday. Or the day before.’ Rodrigo made a few languid calculations on his fingers. ‘You owe me forty-five pesos.’
    Wilson sighed.
    â€˜I know, I know,’ Rodrigo said. ‘One day you’ll find your gold and then you’ll pay me everything.’
    When Rodrigo brought the drinks, some ten minutes later, Wilson turned to the Frenchwoman and apologised. ‘You know, the oranges come from Mulege,’ he said. ‘It’s about forty miles south of town. The time it takes Rodrigo to make a glass of juice, I reckon he probably goes down there and picks them himself.’
    â€˜It doesn’t matter. I’m not in a hurry.’ She smiled. ‘We saw Mulege from the boat. There were many palm trees. And a rock shaped like a hat.’ She sipped at her drink. ‘And you, Monsieur,’ she said, ‘where are you from?’
    As if he, too, were a species of fruit.
    â€˜San Francisco,’ he said.
    â€˜San Francisco?’ The name had the effect of widening her eyes and softening her voice.
    â€˜That’s where I learned to play the piano.’
    He found himself talking about his childhood, San Francisco in the early days. You could only mine for gold from April until October, and the city was almost empty then. In the winter everyone returned. There were not enough jobs to go around. Pay was low. His father had worked down at the docks unloading cargo. Only five dollars a ton, but he was lucky to have a job at all. It seemed to rain all the time. There was great poverty, great frustration. People got killed over nothing, and the punishment for murder was death.
    The city was so new, unformed. Many of the streets did not even have names. He would make them up himself. In those days the cost of storing merchandise was more than the merchandise itself was worth. Goods were often dumped outdoors, simply abandoned. There was a sidewalk close to where Wilson lived that was built out of sacks of flour from Shanghai. He called it Chinese Flour Street. There were others too: Saucepan Alley, Tobacco Way –
    â€˜The street where I grew up,’ he said, ‘it was always called Piano Street.’
    â€˜There were pianos?’
    â€˜A dozen of them, maybe more. And some still worked. That was how I learned to play, right there, in the middle of the street. With people passing by. Sometimes they would throw me money.’
    â€˜Did you play concerts for them?’
    Wilson nodded. ‘I even did a funeral once.’
    A friend of his, John Goode by name, had died of pneumonia. Wilson had played the ‘Funeral March’ by Chopin for John Goode’s family as they carried the boy’s coffin up the street. It had rained that day and he could still remember the feeling of his fingers slipping on the black keys.
    He stopped and looked at her. She was gazing down into her glass. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Maybe I talked too fast.’
    â€˜No, no,’ she said. ‘I understand almost everything.’
    At last she looked up and wonder filled her face so full, it almost seemed as if it could have been poured. He saw that he had brought her some kind of happiness, though he did not know how, nor could he begin to guess.
    â€˜Pardon me for asking, ma’am, but what’s your name?’
    Her hand moved to hide her mouth. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Monsieur. How impolite of me.’ But she was smiling – or at least her eyes were, leaves