If This Is Home Page 4

  ‘You know, when we went to that place in the Village and—’

  ‘Don’t,’ O’Neil said. ‘Not now, okay? Later. We’ll talk later.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to be … I am happy for you, you know.’

  ‘We’ll speak later.’ O’Neil said, and walked out into the corridor. I heard the door click shut. The two empty beer bottles were on the table, the cigarette butts in the ashtray.

  In the bedroom, I dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, black tie. I sat on the edge of the huge bed and wanted so much to get inside it, kick down the sheets and sleep through until Sunday. The phone rang though and I rose stiffly to answer it. Carlo was not happy that I’d kept him waiting. I apologized and told him I was on my way. He put the phone down without another word.

  The car park was underground. The cars were covered in plastic wrapping, but under the subdued lighting their shapes were distinguishable – Cadillac, Hummer, Ferrari. They had been delivered the day before from the leasing company, ten automobiles with a combined value of more than a million dollars. Brooks and Hooper were aficionados and wanted to drive these cars fast through the desert, perhaps even race them. Carlo was looking at a red, squat machine with a spoiler as big as a hydrofoil. He’d pulled back the plastic and had his hands on the leather of the seat.

  ‘Hey, Polish,’ he said. ‘Sometimes, man, you see beauty and then you see beauty. She’s just too much. Even touching the leather feels like getting laid. Touch it. Feel it.’

  ‘I’ll pass,’ I said. ‘Sorry I’m late, got caught up with studying.’ I pointed at the files in my hand and he sniffed. He pulled the sheeting back over the car, unlocked the limousine and got in the driver’s side.

  Carlo worked out in the gym when he wasn’t driving: didn’t smoke or drink, wore his serge-coloured uniform with pride. Under his cap his head was shaved bald, which made the long tracing scar at the base of his skull twice as noticeable. He almost died from the blood loss, an incident that prompted him to move from security to logistics. ‘Best thing that ever happened to me,’ he told me once. ‘Would never have met Elvis and Frankie and Howard Hughes on the doors. The guy who knifed me did me a favour.’ O’Neil and I smiled. Every driver of a certain age had ferried Elvis and Frankie and Howard Hughes. It was the first thing they ever told you. There were only about six decent stories in Las Vegas, but Carlo always told them best.

  We took the ramp out of the parking lot into the afternoon heat. I looked out through the smoked glass back at the Valhalla. The building was a shaft of dark metal and mirrored glass, like it was wearing shades for the sake of anonymity.

  ‘Have you heard about Edith and O’Neil?’ I said to Carlo.

  He shot me a look over his shoulder.

  ‘What about them, Polish?’

  ‘They’re sort of an item, or something. They’ve got it together.’

  ‘No shit,’ Carlo said. ‘Really?’

  He smiled and touched his finger to his nose.

  ‘You knew, of course.’

  ‘There ain’t nothing I don’t know, you hear me? Drivers always know the secrets, where the bodies are buried, right? That’s why you guys pay us so much. Stops us mouths from wagging.’

  He laughed and his eyes returned to the road. We were getting closer to the strip and the desert stretched out in umber and gold, rocks and hardy plants scurrying down into the earth. I kept my eyes on the window, a hand against the pane.

  ‘You okay back there?’ Carlo said. ‘Not going to upchuck, are you?’

  ‘You ever feel like things are just falling apart,’ I said. ‘Just unpicking at the seams?’

  ‘Every motherfucking day of my sixty-three years, Polish. Every motherfucking day.’

  He shot me a look in the rear-view mirror and smiled.

  ‘It’s like that for everyone, Polish. You think you invented it? One time I was driving for Sammy Davis Jnr. Musta been seventy-four, maybe seventy-five. And Sammy’s all happy and joking and talking in that way that he did, like he was going to run out of time and needed to tell you something real important. So we’re listening to the radio and suddenly he just stops talking. Bam. Just like that. And after a while I realize what it is: he can hear himself singing on the radio. “Candy Man”, you know that song, right? Then he tells me to pull over, and I do and we’re sitting on the highway, Sammy listening to himself singing about fixing it with love and making the world taste good. He starts crying, Sammy. Crying like a baby. Eventually I ask him what’s the matter. And he looks up at me, his glass eye all dry, and he says, “I believe it, you know. When I sing it I actually believe it.” ’

  Carlo scratched at his chin and placed his hands back in a quarter-to-three formation.

  ‘It takes nothing for things to turn to shit. A song can do it. The wrong look at the wrong dude at the wrong time. All’s you’ve got to do is accept it and move on. It might not be fucking philosophy, but me? I take every day as it comes, one day at a time. If it all comes crashing down tomorrow, at least I’ve got today, right?’

  I’d heard the Sammy Davis Jnr story before from other drivers – sometimes with Elvis or Sinatra as the passenger who breaks down at the sound of his own voice, but Carlo gave everything a better sheen. We drove on in silence. I took one last look at the files and then put them in the car’s safe. We turned on to the Strip and went slowly past the Luxor hotel and casino. Opposite, the airfield was hazy and the private jet we usually chartered was alone in its landing bay. Its four passengers would be drinking champagne now, making small talk, waiting for their host and for us to deliver on our promises.

  We turned into the airport car park, the long asphalt road steaming slightly.

  ‘Time to take care of business, right?’ Carlo said as he parked the car by the arrivals hall. I nodded and put on my sunglasses.

  ‘This is the bit I hate the most,’ he said.

  Saturday, 7th July 1990, 7.32 am

  Bethany Wilder wakes much earlier than she expected, even before her alarm clock sounds. It is already warm and sunlight streams through the sash windows. She props herself up and is immediately greeted by the dress, which in the shaded glow looks both cumbersome and fussy; something a doll might wear. Alongside it are the other components of the outfit – a crown, a sash, a lightweight sceptre – and to her, lying in bed, it feels like an awful lot to go through. But it is the only thing she can do for her father now; she understands that. He was probably as surprised as her when she agreed. It is, for Bethany, a gesture he can cling to; a reminder of her love. And it will be good for him, she thinks, he will be able to have a life again. She has thought this often.

  The clock display blinks 7:32. She needs to be at the hairdresser’s for nine, so she can probably afford another half-hour. She tries to sleep some more but eventually admits defeat, gets out of bed, puts on her dressing gown and goes to the bathroom. She runs a bath and reads her library book as she soaks. The house is still, but she struggles to concentrate. Her sleep was dreamless and she much prefers mornings where images linger from the night. She shaves her legs and thinks of Mark, then, sinking lower in the water, of Daniel.

  *

  Everything has been arranged. She will make her own way to the hairdressing salon, where the beautician will work her dubious magic, then a chauffeur will drive her to the cricket club, where the carnival floats are to congregate. She will wait inside the pavilion, where tea and light refreshments will be served. Photographs will be taken – lots of them, she has been warned – then, on the stroke of midday, the procession will leave; Bethany at its head, in a coach drawn by the fringed hoofs of shire horses. Following her, a brass band will make its deep masculine sound along Jackson Street, down Harrington Street, then along the Manchester Way. At the town’s greasy spoon, they’ll take a right towards the town centre. They’ll march along Amhurst Street and past the Town Hall, where the mayor will salute Bethany, then back down Manchester Way and on to Cairo Street, where the procession w
ill end at Greenliffe Field. From the coach, Bethany will wave as the retinue passes her by and scatters across the grass. To her right, a funfair’s lights will already be spinning; to her left the military tattoo will be open, soldiers and reservists showing children and their fathers around helicopters, tanks and aeroplanes. After lunch, Bethany will get changed into her normal clothes in the leisure centre.

  She will have a couple of hours to herself before she is due to meet her father, the mayor and a few other dignitaries for an early dinner. It leaves her plenty of time. At around four, she’ll pass the church, take several rights and lefts until she comes to a secluded car park. There Daniel will be waiting. In the back of his van they’ll fuck. Then she’ll make her way home. She’ll shower, change and later – at the restaurant, the most expensive in the town – she’ll kiss the mayor, his wife and the dignitaries. And then they’ll eat.

  At the end of the meal, she’ll go to the pay phone, light a cigarette and call Mark. She’ll tell him she loves him, and he’ll say the same. They’ll make arrangements for Sunday. Shopping perhaps, a drink in the Queen’s, a final check whether they have everything they need for New York. Everything back to normal.

  *

  Her father knocks on the bathroom door and tells Bethany that there’s a cup of coffee waiting for her just outside. His footfalls are soft on the stairway and when she can no longer hear them, she fetches the coffee. She drinks it wishing she could have a cigarette, but the last one was smoked hours before.

  Wrapped in a towel, she sits on the edge of the bath, her eyes trained on her feet. She has a blister from the shoes she’s been breaking in. They have a steep heel that hurts her toes, bunching them up tightly like something oriental. It’s the first pair of shoes she’s worn in years and she imagines that they make her Dr Martens jealous. How she would love to wear them with the carnival queen dress! She can see herself standing up on the float, waving madly, then swishing up her skirts to reveal a pair of striped, laddered tights and the boots’ air-cushioned soles, their eighteen eyelets reflecting the crowd’s disapproval. And she would flick the Vs at them all, at the whole town. ‘Fuck you,’ she’d say. ‘Fuck the lot of you. Fuck you all!’

  Mum would have loved that, Bethany thinks, and imagines her sitting on the rattan chair where her underwear is scattered. What would she have made of all this anyway: the carnival, Mark, all their plans? Her mother was a fiery woman, yet given to moments of exquisite, bemusing silence. She often simply dropped out of what was going on around her and retreated into her book or whatever she was writing. Bethany would marvel at that. ‘It’s how I cope with this town,’ she told Bethany once. ‘It’s how I cope with all these bloody people.’

  ‘These bloody people’ were behind everything that was wrong – and implicitly she included her husband with them. She would have preferred to be further towards Derbyshire, closer to the real plague towns, but she had been happy enough with the history of the town and its environs. She was endlessly fascinated by its dead residents, the Civil War, the industries, but hopelessly down on those who now populated it.

  ‘People in this town,’ she once said, ‘would welcome a plague with open arms! They’d bloody love it, being hermetically sealed from outsiders. Protected from the unknown.’ She held her arms across her chest. ‘Mice! That’s what they are. Shrews!’

  The plague was Sue’s thing; an unusual obsession that had drawn her to the North as an undergraduate. She’d spent her weekends and spare time reading and walking in the countryside, drinking pints of Tartan with the locals at pubs. At university she studied archaeology and history, the aftershocks of which subjected the house to a plague of its own; books that were supposed to stay in the small study had spread like a pandemic across every room. They were almost all gone now, along with the cheap bookcases. Her father had kept his wife’s dissertation, though. It was shelved alongside the encyclopaedias, the David Attenborough hardbacks and an old book-club edition of the life of Tutankhamun.

  After the cancer finished with Sue, Bethany and her father scattered her ashes on the grounds of an old plague burial site deep in the Derbyshire countryside; releasing them onto a breeze that smelled of burnt peat and leaf mulch, the ground damp and claggy beneath their booted feet. In unison, Bethany and her father shook the urn but it was too dark to see the grey dust take to the air. Years later Bethany told Mark that she’d felt the ash in her mouth and the grit catch at the back of her throat; but it wasn’t true. Of all her lies this is the one of which she is the most ashamed.

  The bath makes a loud sucking noise as the last of the water empties. For a moment Bethany misses her mother in a way that makes her draw breath. And with the missing comes the regret that she spent her early adolescence wishing her mother were someone else. Someone normal: well-dressed, skilfully made up, lightly scented with perfume and hairspray – in short, exactly like Hannah’s mother.

  After school, Mrs Nicholson would make them both Earl Grey tea in a proper pot and arrange a selection of biscuits on a plate. She’d ask them about their day as she prepared the evening meal and half-listened to Steve Wright in the Afternoon. The recipes she cooked came from Cosmopolitan or one of the other glossy women’s magazines. Bethany would watch her slick through their pages, her nails translucent, finished in the French style. Mrs Nicholson, or Patricia as she insisted on being called, was a decade older than Sue, but somehow looked no age at all. Sue thought Pat a vacuous bimbo; Patricia suspected Sue a lesbian; Bethany loved Patricia like her schoolmates loved Madonna.

  After Sue was diagnosed, Bethany’s ardour towards Mrs Nicholson cooled. She noticed that she wore too much make-up, really, for a woman of her years; wondered why she seemed happiest talking about her school days and the boyfriends she’d had when she was younger. Bethany realized that Patricia’s figure was sustained through taking no pleasure from any kind of food, and that the most contented she ever looked was at the stroke of six o’clock when she lit a Berkeley menthol – her first of the day – and poured herself a gin and tonic. Bethany wondered whether Patricia ever really escaped the kitchen, whether she felt safe only when she was a few feet from the cooker and the refrigerator.

  The first time Bethany saw her after her mother’s death, Patricia gathered her up into her arms and held her tightly in an embrace that was both theatrical and distinctly uncomfortable. Bethany could feel the woman’s bones through the thin material of her blouse. The next week, Bethany insisted Hannah come to her house after school. Instead of Earl Grey, Hob-Nobs and the radio, they sat in Beth’s room drinking coffee, listening to the tapes that Hannah’s elder brother had posted from his university flat in Coventry, and talking in low, conspiratorial voices.

  They began to dress in black, cut their long hair short and started sneaking cigarettes from Patricia’s purse. They hated their schoolmates and whatever good marks they got were achieved without really trying. They dreamt of leaving, of escape. And then Bethany met Mark.

  Back in her bedroom, Bethany picks up her mother’s photograph, slightly blurry on its textured paper, a shot taken long before Bethany was born. Sue is looking directly at the camera as if to say ‘don’t you dare’, her hair long and straggly, a cigarette burning between her fingers. She is dressed in a blue V-necked T-shirt and tight black denims, and behind her a young man and woman kiss against a red-painted pillar.

  Bethany looks again at the dress on the chair. Mum would be proud, she thinks, she’d laugh and take the piss and probably give an impromptu lecture about the ancient traditions and origins of carnivals, but she’d still be proud. She puts down the photograph and reminds herself to take it with her when she goes away. There is a knock at her door which makes her jump. She hears her father’s voice, still thick and muddled with morning.

  ‘It’s the phone, love,’ he says. ‘Mark.’

  ‘Be down in a sec,’ she says, pulling on some underwear and a T-shirt.

  ‘Don’t keep the poor lad waiting,’ he says. ‘He must spen
d a fortune waiting for you to answer that phone.’

  FIVE

  Edith was waiting by the entrance to the lounge, her manner cool as she talked quietly into her clamshell telephone. When she saw me, her eyebrows twitched and she ended the call. The smoked glass looked out over the airfield. There was a faint drone and a smell of engine fuel mixing with the scent of sandalwood and deep-pile carpets. The colour scheme was light fawns and beiges; there was pampas grass in huge terracotta bowls, geometric paintings in similar tones. Behind the door I could hear deep male laughter, the practised giggles of the hostesses following soon after at a higher, airier pitch.

  ‘What are they like?’ I said before Edith had a chance to say anything.

  ‘Have you spoken to O’Neil?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m very happy for you both. How are they?’

  ‘And you’re okay?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be? What are they like?’

  ‘Assholes,’ she said. ‘Total assholes.’

  I paused, my knuckles whitening around the door handle. Through the narrowest of cracks I could see shapes moving around, some towards the windows, others sitting on the couches, the floating grace of the hostesses with their champagne flutes and trays of blinis. I wanted to stay there, just observing these people through the tiny slit. Opening the door would bring the rushing sounds of their lives into mine; there would be no excuse for not knowing where they wanted to go, or what they wanted to do. This was what was expected. Edith put her arm on my shoulder.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Honestly.’

  ‘You’ve got to go in now. We’re running late as it is.’

  ‘I’ve read their files. They don’t seem so bad. Not like Gardner’s party. You remember them?’

  ‘It’s late,’ she said, patting me on my arm. ‘Time to go to work, Joe.’ Her eyes were imploring. I opened the door and closed it quietly behind me.

  The four men formed a horseshoe in the centre of the room, talking, sipping at their champagne, staring without apology at the ruffled behinds of the waitresses whose heels tapped across the black-tiled flooring.