If This Is Home Page 6

  He sat back down and I crushed out my cigarette, drained my coffee.

  ‘I’ve got work to do. And so have you,’ I said and stood up. I walked to the door without looking back.

  ‘Don’t leave like this, we have time,’ O’Neil said. I stopped. He looked angry and sad and I wanted to take that look away from him. So I closed the door.

  *

  The East Wing Bar was on the fifty-first floor; wide windows looking down over the strip and over the desert. Searchlights scissored and neon bloomed and the sun went down in a smoky, pollution-pretty skyline. It was a bright room: red-plush sofas, black-leather booths, a brushed-steel bar with stools. Music was playing softly. I walked in and nodded at the two barmen. Apparently they were amongst the best cocktail-makers on the west coast. Each weekend they invented a drink based on the favourite ingredients of the guests. Their skill was often astonishing; their ability to mix incongruous flavours into something swooningly delicious a gift approaching alchemy. They were also arrogant, dislikable and fiercely unpleasant to one another.

  Without speaking, Thomas, the elder of the two, poured me a club soda with ice and lime. He nodded as he set down the drink, then went back to his position, leaning against the bar, and back to the card game he was playing with Grayson. Judging by the stacks, he was losing comfortably.

  To my left, three waitresses were reading magazines, drinking Diet Cokes and finishing their last cigarettes. They spoke quietly to one another, their faces bored, their features delicate. I knew most of their names but had not spoken more than a few dozen words to any of them; like us all, they kept themselves to themselves and only became animated when the clients were around.

  Grayson looked at his watch and called time on the card game, scooping up his chips and putting them away in a drawer. Turning around I saw Brooks enter the room, accompanied by his assistant for the weekend. How he had managed to persuade her to allow him down to the bar before time, I never knew. It must have been a lot of money; or maybe the promise of something more precious.

  ‘Hello, Mr Jones,’ he said, sitting next to me at the bar. ‘I do apologize for my early arrival, but I became rather bored.’ He hailed Grayson and asked for a brand of whisky we had ordered in especially. He was not surprised at its availability, despite its price and scarcity. ‘I do so hate being bored,’ he said. ‘It’s the one thing I can’t stand. Which is why I like Las Vegas so much. So very little time to be bored.’

  ‘It must have made quite an impression upon you,’ I said. ‘As a young man, I mean.’

  He swirled the whisky in his glass and looked at me with mild surprise.

  ‘I’ve been coming to Las Vegas at least three times a year for the last decade. There are few of its secrets to which I am not privy. Which is why this place’ – he moved his arms around – ‘so intrigues me. Perhaps I don’t know all the secrets, after all.’ He winked and sipped at his drink, then removed a cigar from the inside pocket of his jacket.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Brooks,’ I said. ‘I had the impression from your earlier conversation that this was only the second time you’d visited.’

  Quickly, he clipped his cigar and lit it with a heavy silver lighter. He nodded his head.

  ‘So you did, Mr Jones. So you did. But did you really think I’d tell the truth to these … I don’t know what you’d call them? Anyway, let’s just say I like being someone else for the weekend. That’s what you promised, was it not: a holiday from oneself?’

  He blew smoke in my direction and I picked up my club soda. I held the drink aloft.

  ‘You must do whatever will give you the maximum amount of pleasure, Mr Brooks. That’s what we are here for. We do not judge. Especially not where half-truths or obfuscations are concerned.’

  The light caught his hair giving it a kind of auburn lustre; the hairdresser had cut and styled it to a rich kind of perfection. He kept looking at me as he smoked, his thin smile only broken to accept the thickness of the cigar.

  Eventually he set it down in the too-small glass ashtray and laid his hand on my arm.

  ‘I shall remind you of that, Mr Jones,’ he said clinking my soda glass with his whisky glass. ‘In my experience, no one is incapable of judgement. It’s as inevitable and as pernicious as boredom itself.’

  Saturday, 7th July 1990, 8.03 am

  She winds the telephone cord around her wrist as she listens to Mark tell her a story from the restaurant; something about a local politician and a comment overheard by one of the waitresses. Usually she loves this kind of conversation; his dryness, the acuteness of his observations, his joyfully scathing descriptions of the customers, but instead she distracts herself by looking at the clock on the cooker. Just at the right moment she manages a laugh, and unwinds the telephone cord from her wrist, then sits down at the kitchen table.

  ‘Anyway,’ he says. ‘How’s the carnival queen looking forward to her big day?’

  ‘The carnival queen wishes she could abdicate,’ she says and smooths her hand over the crumb-gritted tablecloth. There are small dots of cheese, remnants from her father’s late-night snacking.

  ‘You could do a runner,’ Mark says. ‘You could dress up as a Russian peasant or something. Your own Flight to Varennes.’

  ‘Oh no. I could never desert my subjects, darling. Whatever would they do without me?’ She’s smiling, despite herself, and soon they are both laughing, reminded of their history revision, names and dates read out loud as they lay in bed, variously dressed or undressed, sometimes still sticky from sex. He is saying something about Debbie, the restaurant owner, but Bethany is troubled by the precise date of the Flight to Varennes. She knows it is 1791, but despite all those hours of study cannot remember the month: June or July, she’s not sure which.

  ‘It’s good news, isn’t it?’ he says.

  ‘Yes, of course it is,’ she says automatically, then pauses and scratches the back of her head. ‘I’m sorry, what did you say? I was thinking … it doesn’t matter. What did you say?’

  ‘I managed to get out of the first hour of prep so I’ll be able to come and see you fulfil your queenly duties. See what they make you look like.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says.

  ‘Oh?’ he says. ‘Is there a problem? I thought you wanted me there. Support and all that.’

  She wants to say yes, there is a problem, but doesn’t. She scratches at her head again and then her left leg, leaving red track marks on her pale skin.

  ‘I’d just got used to you not being there, that’s all,’ she says eventually. ‘And I really don’t want you to see me in that dress. I look like I live with a houseful of dwarves.’

  ‘I bet you look gorgeous.’

  ‘Please. I wish you wouldn’t. For me.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Last week—’

  ‘Last week was last week,’ she says, thinking how trite that sounds, the kind of thing her father might say. She listens to him silent on the end of the line and realizes that he has a slight cold; his breathing is snuffled.

  ‘You really don’t want me watching you? Seriously?’ he says.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I just wish this was all over and we were at the airport. I’m sick of wishing my fucking life away.’

  ‘If you don’t want me there—’

  ‘Do what you like, Mark. Honestly, do whatever you want. Come and watch me, don’t come and watch me. I really don’t care either way any more.’

  In the silence that follows, she feels suddenly naked, fragile and vulnerable: too much on show. The crowds, she imagines, are baying for her, laughing, pointing and staring at her, while he says nothing, or is oblivious, kitchen-bound and occupied by the cutting of carrots and the heading of lettuce. She feels like smashing down the receiver.

  ‘I’m going to have to go,’ she says. ‘I’ve got to be at the salon soon.’

  ‘I hope she goes easy on you. Last year they made that poor girl look like a townie skank.’

  ‘I’ve got to go.’
<
br />   ‘I’ll see you later, though, right?’

  ‘Course. Look, I’ve really got to go.’

  ‘Good luck, honey,’ Mark says. ‘I love you.’

  ‘You too,’ she says and puts down the phone.

  *

  With the dress folded over her arm and a canvas bag bulging with the crown, sceptre and sash, Bethany walks down George Street and turns right onto the High Street. The bunting is already hanging in red, white and blue flags from the streetlamps, lines of it fluttering in the breeze. There are only a few cars on the road, perhaps other members of the carnival and the tattoo, and it’s still too early for the shops to be open.

  Approaching her on the other side of the road, a pinched man runs smartly along the pavement, his shorts far too short, his trainers a shocking neon blue. He is a maths teacher at one of the local schools and is always pictured in the local paper for coming sixth or seventh in national fell-running competitions. He checks the road and heads off down the High Street, kicking on quickly, his calf muscles clenched like fists. Bethany’s PE teacher had said that she had the perfect body for long-distance running – so tall and lithe – and so to spite her, Bethany had made her father write excuse letters whenever a cross-country run was planned. Running, she’s always thought, is pointless: you can never get far enough away.

  She crosses over the road and passes Palace Walk, a new red-brick and glass arcade of knickknack shops with a cafe in its pyramid-shaped roof. The opening was a grand affair, a brass band played, there were clowns for some reason and the ribbon was cut by a local comedian who made the assembled shoppers shout out his catchphrase before allowing them in. Palace Walk was supposed to usher a new kind of consumer to the High Street, to suck them from the bigger towns in the area, and though there are still empty units, its appearance has changed things.

  A local schoolgirl had written a letter to McDonald’s head office begging them to open an outlet, and apparently they were taking it seriously. Sainsbury’s had been eyeing up land to the west of the town; Next, so the rumours went, was interested in coming too. The town is growing up: it is losing its inhibitions.

  By the Queen’s Head there is a half-full pint pot set down on the pavement, the beer flat and dark. Bethany looks at it intently as she passes, wondering what it would sound like if she kicked it against the stout door of the pub. The road is so quiet she can imagine the noise exploding, echoing around the streets, waking the whole town. You should do it, she thinks. You won’t get the chance again. She ignores the impulse though and leaves the glass exactly where its drinker left it.

  When she gets there, the salon is in darkness. She looks at her watch and lets out a sigh, then sits on the bench by the war memorial. There are always flowers here, though fewer and fewer in number over the years. She remembers the parade after the Falklands, but that all seems to belong to an outgrown time now. She can’t imagine another war; not one, at least, for which there would be a parade.

  *

  Eventually a white VW Golf, its roof peeled back, pulls up alongside the salon and a woman gets out. Bethany crosses over as Emma fumbles with the locks, swearing each time she tries the wrong key. When she finds the right one, she looks up to see Bethany standing next to her.

  Emma is hot-cheeked, yet well dressed; she has a bony, awkward face that betrays the old woman she will become, though she can be little more than thirty. Her blonde hair is dyed, ironed flat and has a brutal fringe. Bethany recognizes her from the Queen’s and has seen her on several occasions crying in the toilets after rowing with her boyfriend. She mentions nothing of this as Emma switches on the lights and inadvertently sends a mug of tea crashing to the floor.

  ‘Sugar!’ she says. ‘Oh, I am sorry, love. Late, and now this. I’m so bloody clumsy, me. Darren. That’s my boyfriend Darren. He says I’m the clumsiest woman he’s ever met. And he’s not wrong neither. I’m always walking into doors or falling down stairs. Or at least that’s what we tell people, right?’

  Emma’s laugh is loud and shrill and continues all the way to the back of the salon where she finds a dustpan and brush.

  ‘Anyway, that useless girl should be here by now. What time is it, love?’

  ‘Just gone ten past,’ Bethany says.

  ‘Told you. Useless,’ Emma says and flicks on more lights. The salon is uncomfortably warm already and just watching Emma’s nervous energy wears Bethany out.

  ‘Sit down, love. Take the weight off and I’ll pop the kettle on. We’ve got a bit of time, haven’t we?’

  Sitting down on the leather seat, Bethany begins to feel somewhat nauseous, angry too. Angry at her father for asking her to do this, at Mark for watching her, at herself for ever agreeing to do this. Every now and again Emma darts her head towards her and says, ‘You know?’ and Bethany nods while imagining punching her once, as hard as she can, right in the face. When she puts the mug of tea down in front of Bethany, Emma suddenly stops talking, as though her power supply has just been severed. She puts her hand on her hip and takes a long look at Bethany.

  ‘You’ve got great skin, you know,’ she says. ‘Not like last year’s. Poor love was like a join-the-dots puzzle. Now you come and sit here’ – she pats the chair in front of her – ‘and we’ll really make you look like a princess.’

  Emma’s is a face of deep concentration and Bethany tries to ignore her pinched precision and the reflection in the mirror. She gets her book from her bag. In the background the radio is tuned to Signal FM. There are adverts for local businesses and then the DJ plays the new Elton John record.

  ‘I love this song,’ Emma says. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’

  Bethany looks up and tries not to laugh. The soft, chocolate-box sentiment of the song, the passionlessness of it all, makes her want to puke. It’s a physical thing: she can feel it as sure as the pull at the nape of her neck as Emma winds her hair around a brush. She thinks of her mother for a second and is surprised that a memory of her has surfaced twice in a matter of hours. Her father suffers far worse than her; he still sees her all the time. ‘Supermarket moments’ he calls them – fleeting glances of his wife looking at breakfast cereals or ordering ham at the delicatessen as he pushes a shopping trolley up and down the aisles.

  ‘You okay there, love?’ Emma says. ‘You’ll crack mirror with that face.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Bethany says. ‘I was just thinking about something, that’s all.’

  ‘Don’t want you letting me down,’ Emma says as she applies rollers to the hair at Bethany’s crown. ‘Last year was a disaster and I’m hoping this one’ll be different. I don’t just do this for the good of the community, you know.’ She laughs without humour. Then she stops and puts her hands back on her hips.

  ‘You know, I’ve been trying to place you, but I just can’t. Do you go to the Queen’s sometimes?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Bethany says.

  ‘That’ll probably be it, then,’ she says and pauses.

  ‘Were you there when that black lad let off that air rifle?’

  Bethany has heard this story so many times she almost feels she was there. So many claim to have seen the kid brandish the weapon that the Queen’s would have had to be the size of the Town Hall to house them all.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I was at my boyfriend’s that night.’

  ‘Never been so scared,’ Emma says. ‘A gun. Like Moss Side or something.’

  That’s what they all say: like Moss Side or something. Bethany looks at her watch, thinking to herself that it’s just a matter of hours and then everything will be sorted out and level. For a moment she thinks of her father again, but there is nothing to consider, not really. She is leaving, he will get over it: be better for it eventually. He can come and visit and she will show him around, a new woman on his arm and a spring in his step.

  ‘Time for the blow-dryer,’ Emma says and takes Bethany by the hand. This is the part that she has secretly been looking forward to: being placed under the dryer like an actress from a fifties
movie. She smiles as the hot air circulates and she loses herself in her book, in American vice and squalor, leaving Elton John and Signal FM far behind her.

  *

  Under the dryer she falls asleep, the book open in her lap. There are dreams that she does not understand and then she is awake, Hannah’s hand on her shoulder. Momentarily Bethany is confused and then she smiles. Hannah is dressed in a black shift dress and is wearing self-painted Dr Martens, her lips blood-red and her ears pierced in several places. Around her neck she wears her headphones and she has a small army knapsack which she has plastered with acrylic paint. The last time they were in a salon together was in Affleck’s Palace in Manchester, where a man with a Mohican and a woman with pink dreadlocks had cut their youthfully long hair, the two of them suddenly, properly adults.

  Bethany holds up her hand to say five minutes and Hannah nods. She goes outside to smoke a cigarette. It is just coming up to eight forty-five and there is more traffic on the streets, people walking down to get the papers. They are dressed in shorts, some of the men are already shirtless, fat tongues in their trainers flapping as they walk, their skin blushed from the sun. The dryer finishes. Bethany can hear Signal FM and Emma talking on the phone, telling her assistant that she’s too late. Not to bother coming in. When the phone is replaced in its cradle, Emma smiles.

  SEVEN

  Though the cocktails Grayson had prepared – lychee and vodka and something else muddled with it, several things possibly – were not his best, the men drank them with appetite and appreciation. We were sitting in a booth to the right of the bar, the five of us closely together, our fingers on the stems of our glasses, the waitresses fussing over us, bringing us snacks, napkins and more drinks.

  We had watched the sunset while drinking champagne. All four seemed impressed, standing with hands in pockets looking out of the window. Boulder asked questions about Las Vegas’s history and architecture which I could answer with a degree of knowledge. Inevitably they compared the finest sunsets that they had ever witnessed: Hong Kong Bay, Lake Como, Leeward Islands. Brooks said he preferred the sunrise and they all agreed with him immediately. He looked at me with his flat smile; one of challenge and reproach.