Ducie by Chris Freeman
Chapter 31. Fortunato’s
At Fortunato’s café, Frank paid for two espressos and made his way to a table on the far wall underneath a huge painting of two lovers dancing the tango on a deserted beach. Harrison, who had been slouched at a spine straining angle between chair and wall sat bolt upright as Frank approached. He enthusiastically snatched the coffee, nodding an acknowledgment of thanks, before necking the scolding little beverage in one. He winced as the burning sensation passed down his throat, then returned to his slump and waited for the inspiration of a caffeine hit to find its way to his brain Frank glanced at the television on the opposite side of the room that was showing one of those news channels that rehashes the same tired nonsense every hour, 24 hours a day. The clock in the corner of the screen advised 3:03pm. That’s when she arrived.
Harrison saw Daniella first. He clambered frantically to a more civilized sitting position and exhaled a sharp breath onto his hand. He sniffed the resulting odour. The smell of espresso had lingered on his mouth and now in his hand. The sharp, distinctive scent of fresh Arabica coffee beans seemed to leave a much less offensive aftertaste than the cheap instant coffee back at work. Harrison caught Frank’s eye and nodded towards the door.
Most people in the room seemed to know Daniella, as she ghosted a weaving path between the tightly packed-in tables, receiving a mixture of Spanish and English greetings along the way. She noticed Harrison across the room, his beefy posture and thick, heavy dreadlocks making him a difficult feature of the room to overlook. She shot him over a smile. That smile. There it was again. Harrison melted momentarily, before quickly reminding himself of his less than smooth performance in the market earlier, the last time he was enchanted by that smile. He muttered a mini pep talk to himself.
- Focus dread.
The two men waited in silence, as Daniella chatted with the man behind the counter. She pointed out Frank and Harrison in the corner and the café owner raised a hand in salute to them, before cracking what must have been a joke or a one-liner to Daniella. She giggled cutely as she took her glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and made her way to the table. As she approached, Harrison shot to his feet and pulled out a chair for her, tucking it in as she sat, in an overly polite gesture of hospitality that made Frank cringe.
- Thanks for coming to meet us Daniella, we really do appreciate it.
Franks opener was an instinctive gap filler, but on reflection it probably didn’t set the scene very well for a supposed compulsory audit Then again, he didn’t plan to sustain that illusion much longer. They had her where they wanted her now. Well…. not exactly. Where Frank really wanted her was back at the Institution, so he could reconcile the real Daniella with the one that Kate Gaffney was apparently becoming every time she slipped into sleep under the influence of the CROP drug. Daniella was polite as ever.
- That’s ok. It’s my pleasure. Where should we start?
Harrison’s confidence was still sore from his fumbling exchange with Daniella at her market stall, so he was happy to let Frank set the tempo.
- We need to be straight with you Daniella. We’re not here for the audit.
Harrison had expected a little more conversational foreplay and was shocked as Frank wasted no time going for the money shot. He wished he’d have taken the lead now and he sucked his teeth, as his way of expressing this.
- Frankie! Ave a lickle more decorum widda gal.
Daniella seemed to take the news about the non-existent audit in her stride, but the full broadness of Harrison’s accent visibly threw her. She sat up a little straighter, offering Harrison a puzzled look that almost invited an explanation. Harrison stayed quiet. Frank continued.
- Forgive me Daniella, I appreciate that we might not have gone about this in the most prudent way.
- Gone about what exactly?
- My colleague and I are part of a research project based in Birmingham in the United Kingdom. We’ve been doing some work focused on helping drug addicts overcome their addictions.
- Oh. Well…. that’s fantastic! Good for you both.
Frank marveled at her patience and composure, given that she was now well within her right to demand some clarity; or worse still, to get up and walk off, leaving this pair of chancers to find some other mug to play their silly games.
- Thank you Daniella.
Frank took a sip of his espresso, sucking air through his teeth to quell its bitterness. In truth, part of him hadn’t even expected to get this far.
- So how can I help you? I’m sorry to waste your time, but I’m not one of them if that’s what this is about.
- One of whom?
- You know….
Daniella tapped the top of her arm with her fist, as if she were far too sweet and innocent to even say the word. Frank wasn’t following this impromptu game of charades.
- Frankie. She tink ya sayin she a smack head.
- Oh….No, no, no, no, no. Daniella, please no. Of course not. You’ve misunderstood. That’s not the reason we need you.
- You need me?
Frank realised that he hadn’t mentioned that part yet, and dropping it into conversation like he was referring to her as a piece of lab equipment they needed probably wasn’t doing much for her confidence in him.
- Smooooooth Frankie!
Harrison saw his chance to take the baton and restore some personal pride.
- Look darling. What my friend ere is trying to say is dat we arl-ready ave our addicts back in England. And we med a drug dat work on der brains to stop dem nasty demons dat mek dem want more and more and more. Yeah?
- Ok. Oh…. wow! That could be huge, right?
Harrison had pitched it perfectly in laymen’s terms that Daniella understood completely, but Frank couldn’t resist elaborating.
- Well, it’s a lot less basic than my colleague makes it sound, but….
- Yeah, I know. Doctors jargon though, right?
- Erm…right.
- But I still don’t get where I fit into this.
Harrison had been on a roll up until now, but the whole ‘our little druggie friend back in England think she’s you when she’s asleep’ riddle was more than his hangover could handle right now. He gestured to Frank to continue.
- Well, Daniella…. Where do I start with this? Oh….Ok….Wow!
Frank was stalling for time to compose himself. They’d come half way around the world for this and although he still couldn’t shake the feeling that this was all destiny somehow, he never actually pictured himself sitting in front of Daniella, about to tell her about Kate and her sleep talking episodes.
- Ok. There’s a girl called Kate back at our Institution in England. She’s about your age in fact.
Daniella clasped her glass of juice in two hands as if she were warming from the heat of a steaming cup of cocoa. She leaned forward, her interest as genuine as her smile.
- Kate was the first patient to trial the drug we created.
- Did she know what you were giving her?
- Yeah, yeah. It was all above-board and legit. She signed the papers. She hated her addiction. ‘The greedy beast inside her’ she called it.
- The poor girl.
Frank broke off for a second to marvel at the depth of sincerity Daniella somehow managed to cram into those three words. This young woman was a real life angel.
- Yeah, I really felt for Kate. She spoke about her drug problem in the third person, as if it were totally separate from her. She was desperate to beat it. Spoke about getting her revenge on the beast when the cure was ready.
- So she took the drug….the cure?
- Yeah, she bit our hands off for it.
- And it worked?
- Not exactly.
Harrison leaned back in his seat and exhaled a long sigh towards the ceiling, or perhaps towards the heavens. He knew how the next part of this story went and he knew how it sounded. Even he still struggled with it and he’d seen it unfold fist hand. Daniella was still on
- So nothing happened to her then? The drug didn’t make her better?
- Well…. the jury’s still out on that one. The results were definitely not what we expected though, that part’s for sure.
- How?
Harrison absently wondered to himself what it must be like to be Daniella. So trusting, So quizzical. So genuinely intrigued by it all. Two absolute strangers from another country invited her to coffee under false pretences, having already admitted lying to get her there. Now they said they needed her. Needed her. And their explanation so far involved a drug addict with a greedy beast inside her. Yet here sat Daniella, her twinkling green eyes surely too perfect to have ever seen trouble unfold before them. Engrossed .Pushing Frank for more information. Her naivety made him fear for her, but he also imagined it to be a liberating way of approaching life. Fearless. What will come will come. Frank went on.
- Kate lost consciousness shortly after she took the drug. Wouldn’t respond to anything at all. She was out cold.
- She died?
- No, no, no. Gaffney is very much alive and well.
- She doesn’t sound too well.
- Ok, not exactly well. But….
- Was it a coma?
- That’s where it gets interesting Daniella. Someone in a coma is unconscious and won’t respond to any sort of stimulus. You know, voices, sounds, activity nearby. She ticked all of those boxes.
- So what makes you think it’s something else?
- When someone’s in what we’d class as a traditional sort of coma, brought on by a head injury, a seizure or even a drug overdose; their brain is operating at the very lowest stage of its alertness. That wasn’t the case here.
- You’ve lost me. You said she was unconscious. So what was her brain doing exactly?
- She was talking.
- In her sleep? Like part of a dream?
- Kind of, yes. But not exactly. What she was saying suggested that she was living the experience of somebody other than herself.
Daniella took a moment to process it. She’d finished her juice now, but she ran her finger around the inside of the glass to mop up the pieces of orange pulp. Not a smidgen of nourishment wasted.
- But that can happen in a dream, right? I once had one where I was a pilot flying a plane. I can’t stand flying. I’ve only ever done it once. But this dream felt so real. I could see the dials and instruments in the cockpit. They were spinning around and flashing and bleeping. ‘Warning! Warning!’, I was flipping out. Everyone was relying on me to land that plane and I had no clue how to.
Frank resisted pondering too much on the revelation that Daniella wasn’t a keen flyer, but banked that information for later reference. For now it was just one in a long line of hurdles he had in front of him.
- Of course. Dreams are just a series of images and sensations that happen involuntarily when we sleep. Nobody has properly established what they represent yet. Although there are a few chancers that see themselves as qualified enough to write books on the subject. Dream Dictionaries I think they call them.
Frank scoffed at the term, shaking his head, as if the very concept of it was beneath his level of intellect.
- Anyway….we’re pretty sure that this wasn’t any normal dream.
- So did Kate say who it was, this person she was experiencing in her sleep? Was it someone she knew?
Such a far-fetched concept, yet Daniella already appeared to grasp it as if they were talking about someone with hay fever or a common cold. Having got this far without scaring her witless, Frank was beginning to get cold feet about dropping the punch line on her. He lifted a finger to Daniella to buy himself a moment. She looked on inquisitively, as he used his other hand to rummage the inside of his jacket pocket, which hung on the back of the cheap, collapsible aluminum seat. The Dictaphone. He placed it on the table between them and plugged in a pair of earphones, handing one to Daniella and forcing the other into his own ear. She scooted her chair a little closer to Frank to ease the stretch on the wires. Frank clicked the play button and ran his finger over the volume dial. Even at maximum output, the feint recording was tough to follow amid the noise of the busy café. It was audible though, just about. Frank pointed to his ear and twisted his bottom lip at Daniela, which seemed to be unofficial sign language for ‘Sorry about the rubbish recording’. She returned a thumbs up and cupped her hand over her ear to block out background noise. There was a crackle and ten or fifteen seconds of clunking sounds where Frank had been positioning the recorder. Then footsteps. Frank could picture himself walking over to Kate. Her reclined hydraulic pump chair. The gormless expression on her face as she slept. The cold, white tiled floor. The smell of fresh paint that had always reminded him of nursery school. The tape went quiet for a second, before the gruff sound of Frank clearing his throat signaled the start of the real action. Harrison’s voice was the first to kick this little Dictaphone soap opera into life.
- Whatya name lady?
- Very tactful, you lemon! Could you be a bit blunter next time?
Frank smirked at Daniella, proud at hearing his own put-down of Harrison on tape. Harrison’s response was more aggravated than Frank had remembered. So much so that his first couple of words caused a loud spluttering sound on the recording.
- Well, arl ya doing is acksing dees lickle pitter patter questions like she a child or some ting.
- Who are you?
Frank nudged Daniella, ‘That was Kate’ he advised. Daniella nodded firmly. No smile this time. Her eyes were squinted in concentration, as if somehow that helped her to hear better.
- I told you before madam. I’m Doctor Frank Gilbert.
- No, no. Not you, the other man that just spoke. He sounds nice.
- Hey darling. My name’s Harrison. It’s just me and you now, ya see. -
- Hi Harry.
There was a splutter on the tape again, which quickly morphed into what Frank recognised as his own laugh. He cringed at how feminine his gentle tittering sounded. Did he always laugh like that?
- Arl we want to know is your name girl. We don’t mean you no ‘arm. I arl-ready told you I’m Harrison.
- And I’m Daniella.
- I’m Daniella Diaz. Have we met before?
- No darling, we haven’t met before.
Silence.
Frank clicked the stop button on the Dictaphone and removed his earphone, as he turned to Daniella. Realising the recording must have now finished, Harrison’s attention spiked as he sat forward. All eyes were on Daniella. The smile. That smile, it was gone now. Replaced by a look of grave meditation, focused somewhere in the centre of the shiny, silver aluminum table. She bit her lip gently, a slight twitch in her left eye failing to interrupt her intense gaze. Somehow the light reflecting and glimmering off the table at infinite different angles seemed to hold the answer that she was in the process of calculating. Both men considered breaking the silence at least once, ultimately thinking better of it. Then she rose from her seat with the same grace and politeness that no situation seemed able to take away from her. Just the smile was missing. She tucked her chair in and turned without making eye contact with either man. No words, no anger, no clue to what had changed inside her after hearing the recording. She simply left the café in silence, taking the upbeat vibe she’d created with her. The subtle scent of lavender that she carried with her lingered momentarily as they watched her walk away down the beaten, heat-punished street; a lot less crowded now than when they had arrived. An old blue bus destined for ‘Esquina Pescadero’ pulled in to collect a solitary passenger, its bodywork dominated by a picture of an ice cold beer, under the advertising slogan ¡Qué Servida! Daniella disappeared momentarily behind the vehicle, as she continued her progress away from the café. The smell of coffee quickly replaced the scent of lavender, the sight of a gigantic glass of beer gave new life to Harrison’s hangover, and when the bus pulled away Daniella was out of sight.
The c
He sucked his teeth, a habit that was fast beginning to grate on Frank’s nerves.
- Da gal forget aboot dem Empanadas!
- I think we’d better leave pal.