Instruments Of Darkness by Robert Wilson Read Free Book Online

going in there for a Club beer or six and a long lie down. I found the 'uncle's' house four streets back from the main road. I followed the music. They were singing in the open plan church next door.
        The garden boy opened the gates and I went up the short drive past a frangipani tree and parked in front of a double garage. There was a huge woman sitting in the darkness. All I could see was the size of her white bra, which must have been a 90 double Z. She threw a wrap over herself. I asked for B.B. and she pointed to a door at the back of the garage which led to the battleship-grey front door of the main house. The house looked like a municipal building. It was L-shaped and tall with white walls and grey woodwork. There was nothing pretty about it. There were no plants or flowers. It was functional.
        I knocked. There was an echoing rumbling noise of someone clearing their throat in an empty room. The noise rose to a crescendo and ended in a cough and a sneeze which bounced around the walls inside the house. There was an exhausted sigh. A different noise started, a man with a stammer.
        'Ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-Mary!' he finished surprisingly.
        There was the neat sound of someone who picked up their feet when they walked and the door opened. Mary had a round bush of hair and a smile a foot wide to go with it. I walked up a few steps and found myself in the main living room. There was a table and a few chairs which dated back to the British colonial days, then a large space before a four-piece suite which I could tell was going to be hot from where I was standing. A fifties ceiling light of a cluster of brass tubes held in a wooden circle had six lamps but only three bulbs. The walls on either side had two massive grey frames holding eight columns of slatted windows which were netted against mosquitoes. Between the frames, the walls were bare and white. The wall at the far end of the room was occupied entirely by a scene of snow-capped mountains, pine trees and a lake which should have been in the Swiss Tourist Board's offices, circa 1965. I blinked hard at the hoarding because treetops rather than bottoms appeared to be coming out of the lake. I could see that a whole section in the middle was missing. Sitting in the left-hand corner of this scene was B.B.
        'You like?' he said in a thick, throaty voice.
        'I… there's something…' I fished.
        'It get wet in de airport,' B.B. explained. 'You get de idea anyhoare.'
        We shook hands.
        'Bruise?' he asked, as if I did easily.
        He stood up for some reason. He was holding his shorts up with one hand. He had such a tremendous stomach that they had no chance of being done up. He wore a string vest which stretched over his belly and creaked under the strain like a ship's rigging. The vest was badly stained with coffee and a few other things, one of which was egg. He had short, recently cropped grey hair and snaggled grey eyebrows which fought each other over the bridge of his fleshy nose. His mouth was small and sweet and looked as if it might whistle. His neck was like a gecko's. It hung from below his jowls and fanned out to his clavicles.
        He crashed back into the armchair, swung his feet up on to the table and crossed them at the ankles. His big yellowing toenails arced out from the flesh by a couple of inches and he had hard pads of skin on his soles. They were high-mileage feet in need of some remoulds.
        'Sit, Bruise,' he waved at a chair. 'Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka- ka-Mary!' he roared.
        Mary was standing right behind his chair and said, 'Yessah!' which made him jump a bit. He turned as if he was in a seat belt and gave up.
        'I see,' he said. 'You want drink, Bruise?'
        I asked for a beer. He tried to turn to Mary again and it brought on a wince of pain so he relaxed. 'You bring beer for Mister Bruise and the ginger drink for me.' Mary hadn't even moved when B.B. said: 'No, no, no, no,