‘Thomas,’ he said.
‘Where you headed after St Louis?’
‘LA.’
‘Wow. A road trip. With all due respect, you don’t look like the kinda fellas for it.’
‘Well, you don’t look like the sort of person you’d find at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere.’ I eyed him in the overhead mirror. ‘You out here burying a corpse or something?’
‘Haha! No… Hahaha! Nothing like that.’ He paused, unable to maintain the momentum of his theatrical laughter. ‘Besides, if I was out here doing that, wouldn’t I have at least thought about how to get back?’
I couldn’t take my eyes off his bag. It looked like animal hide, but I couldn’t tell what kind. It was tan, and thick, a dark brown. For a moment, I entertained the delusion that it might be human. But then I ignored the theory and asked, ‘Why are you in America?’
‘I was doing an engineering degree,’ he said, staring out of the window like a dog, ‘in Zurich, but I hated it, I got really bored. So I dropped out and went travelling instead. I was in England for a bit, then France, then a bit of Asia, then I came here… I think when I hit Santa Cruz I’m gonna head back over to Asia again.’
‘Your parents must be loaded,’ Eli remarked.
He shrugged.
I frowned. ‘What’s your bag made of?’
‘Oh this?’ He looked down at it and gave the bag an affectionate stroke. ‘Goat.’
‘Right.’
I was unconvinced, to say the least.
‘Want some rum?’ Jimmy reached into the bag, that looked to be the size of an entire adult goat, or the torso of an adult human being.
Eli motioned at the steering wheel. ‘I’d love some but…’
‘You? Mark?’ Jimmy held out a bottle of Havana Club.
His glasses were several sizes too small for his ginormous head, I noticed. They were slipping down his nose resolutely, no matter how many times he pushed them up.
He can’t have bought them, I thought. He must have acquired them from someone.
‘Oh, why not,’ I said, and took the bottle.
There was a funny smell in the car now, I was sure of it. I was also sure it was coming from the goat bag. It smelt like smoked meat. I sipped the rum slowly, paranoid that it might be drugged or something. But it tasted normal. I suppose it always did, regardless. You weren’t meant to know if someone had spiked your drink. That was the point.
‘Where do you come from in Australia?’ Eli asked.
‘Melbourne. Well, just outside Melbourne, this small town called Bairnsdale. You wouldn’t have heard of it, it’s tiny. We had a bowling alley, but it shut.’
There was something infinitely sad about that statement.
‘We’ll take you to St Louis, no problem,’ Eli said, taking the bottle of rum from my hands and gulping some down. ‘What’s in St Louis for you?’
‘I’m meeting a girl there,’ Jimmy said, hand slung across his bag with this mental little smile on his face. ‘She’s the love of my life.’
We ran into a pothole and the car jolted. It disguised the second bemused smile that Eli and I exchanged, wondering who the hell we had invited into the back seat.
‘What are you guys doing in LA?’ Jimmy asked.
‘Assassinating an old foe.’ Eli flashed teeth in the overhead mirror.
Jimmy slapped his knees and laughed.
Eli laughed too.
*
We reached St Louis by sundown, with Goat Bag – as I’d rechristened him – yakking away in the back. It was like having a toddler narrating the journey. Eli was howling, but in a good-natured way; I think he had taken to the Australian.
‘Doesn’t this place have the highest murder rate of any city in the US?’ Goat Bag asked, as if he was asking about the weather.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Yes.’ Eli nodded. ‘They don’t put that in the guidebooks, though it is one of the first facts that comes up on Google.’
‘You know anyone here?’ Goat Bag leant forwards and rested his chin on the edge of my seat.
‘No, we were just gonna check in somewhere for the night,’ I said, involuntarily shifting away.
‘Want to come party with me and Amy?’
Amy was the name of the girl he was meeting; the ‘love of his life’. She was Canadian. Most likely another upper-class drop-out with too much parental money to spare, like him.
‘Where?’ Eli asked.
‘She’s at a house party. That’s why I have rum.’ Goat Bag shook his bag at us. ‘Come on, guys.’
‘Yeah, come on.’ Eli goaded me with his expression. ‘Let’s go party.’
‘How old are you, Goat Bag?’ I asked, looking back with concern. ‘Like, honestly.’
‘Twenty-two.’
‘Jesus.’ I shook my head. ‘Am I gonna have to come just to make sure you don’t do anything stupid?’
‘Marvellous.’ Eli sat back, starting to admire the outlines of St Louis out of the windscreen. ‘That murder rate statistic seems unfair. I mean, look at it. It’s gorgeous.’
He was right. Maybe it was only because we were seeing it in half-light, the sort that photographers would use to make everything seem softer than it actually was. It didn’t look so much like a city in this light, an ugly manmade blight on the dust-scape; it looked like hills, mountains, something more benign than a super-structure crawling with viruses.
‘Do you have a satnav?’ Goat Bag asked, encroaching into the front.
‘Yeah, knock yourself out.’
Eli handed the dormant device back, and Goat Bag fiddled with it in his strange cumbersome hands. They could snap a neck, I thought. Just crush a skull between his fingers like an egg.
According to the voice emitting from the satnav our destination was twenty minutes away. It didn’t even seem to take that long. I took several more gulps of rum and realized I definitely wouldn’t be getting around to calling my kids tonight.
Eli parked below a tower block, encircled by a serpentine fire escape.
‘I don’t know if it’s OK to park here,’ he said, with the air of someone who could afford any ticket that was slapped on him.
We got out of the car and I noticed the building we were heading towards was behind a locked iron gate. From somewhere in the sky I could hear a drumbeat, or a bass line, thrumming down.
Goat Bag was not fazed by the gate.
‘Hey!’ he hollered over it, both hands cupped around his mouth. ‘Hey!’
A second, where we stood unacknowledged in the dark, and then, ‘What?’
‘We’re looking for a party!’ Goat Bag yelled. ‘Is a girl called Amy in there?’
The voice was located above us.
‘Fack knows, man. You wanna come in?’
‘I have rum!’
Another pause. ‘… OK.’
‘I like you, Goat Bag,’ Eli said with a grin, as the gate unlocked itself and began to slide open. ‘Unlocker of gates.’
‘Bringer of liquor!’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Come on, let’s do this.’
‘It’s a party, Mark. Not war.’ Eli winked at me.
‘It’s evidently been a long, long time since you’ve partied with twenty-two-year-olds,’ I replied, feeling conspicuously decrepit. ‘God, I hope there’s Class As in there.’
We walked up to the building’s entrance, but there was no one there.
Goat Bag tried the doors, and just as we began peering at the buzzers we were accosted by the same voice that had shouted from the sky at us.
‘No, up here.’
I turned, and found myself addressing a bearded Hispanic man, smoking pot, crouched on the brick wall encircling the porch.
‘Up where?’ I said, as he looked us all up and down.
‘Here.’
The man took a drag on his spliff, stepped backwards off the wall and vanished.
Eli darted past me to leap the wall. Goat Bag did the same and I followed them, landin
g on grass. I looked left and the three of them were scampering towards the bottom of the fire escape.
I couldn’t remember if Eli had locked the car. Was this a dodgy part of town?
This is ridiculous, I thought. We’re not sixteen any more.
Up the fire escape we went.
Most of the windows were curtained but every so often I’d catch a glimpse of someone inside, looking back at me with an expression of resigned vacancy. The music got louder.
A woman in her forties wearing a see-through nightgown…
A guy practising guitar crossed-legged on his floor…
Nothing. Maybe a leg leaving a bedroom doorway…
A man was watching Jimmy Kimmel…
No kids in this building.
The music was physical now, a sensation in my nerves.
We reached the ninth floor and I realized Goat Bag and Eli had followed the Hispanic man through an open window. I ducked, clung to the window frame and felt for my footing on a bedroom floor. Through an open door in front of me there were lights, and people moving back and forth across them like a peep show.
I thought I’d lost Eli but he reappeared by my side, grabbing my arm. ‘That guy’s got MD.’
‘Well, thank fuck.’
I reached into my jacket to try and roll myself a cigarette, but Eli was pulling me through into the apartment and I couldn’t get hold of my filters.
‘Where’s Goat Bag?’ I asked, but no one was listening.
‘Here.’ Eli pulled me into a kitchen.
The light was mortuary bright.
The Hispanic guy was saying, ‘Bomb?’
‘Ah, I hate doing it like that,’ I said, as someone handed me a coke-coloured drink that tasted like petrol. ‘I’ll just dab.’
The Hispanic thrust out a clear sachet of white powder and I licked my finger and stuck it in. It didn’t taste like MDMA, but maybe they cut it differently over here nowadays. I washed it down with that vile drink.
‘You Mark?’ the guy said.
‘Who’re you?’
‘Luiz,’ Eli answered for him, as if he was already high. ‘He’s in a band.’
He’s in a band! Like it was the most exciting statement in the fucking world…
‘’S my after-party,’ Luiz elaborated, gesturing at his kingdom.
‘Right.’
I started to roll a cigarette again.
Goat Bag appeared, leering over those absurd glasses. ‘Come and meet Amy!’
‘In a sec.’ Concentrating on not overfilling the paper, taking more concentration than usual… ‘What’s the name of your band?’
Not caring about the answer…
Could have been anything…
Eli said, ‘You’re a proper hippy, yeah?’ sounding so London again all of a sudden.
‘I travel a lot so… you develop an appreciation for things man did not make.’
‘Do you believe in God? This guy does.’
Looking up, blearily, thinking that Eli probably meant me.
Tobacco.
‘We are all Gods, we all have the power of creation—’
‘We have the power to give and take life,’ I said. I wasn’t sure that had been MDMA. ‘We didn’t create the universe though, did we?’
‘We do, with our consciousness, with our perception.’
‘Mate, we’d still exist whether I close my eyes on you or not.’
Definitely not MDMA.
Fuck…
‘Was that MDMA?’ I asked.
‘No, ’s ket.’
‘Ah, no, fuuuuuck.’
That was from Eli, not from me.
I took my jacket off because I was sweating, and walked back into the hallway. If it was ket I needed to be alone, right away. On the floor in the living room there were three mattresses. A guy was on his knees, gesturing in the direction of what I guessed was the bathroom. It was hard to tell, because he kept shouting, ‘Snow! Fucking snow!’
There was definitely no snow. No snow.
Goat Bag had his arm around a girl, both of them sprawled on the floor, and she looked like she’d stepped out of the fucking sixties. She had a wreath of flowers around her head, for fuck’s sake.
Eli said, ‘Amy?’
I didn’t realize he had come with me.
I looked down, thinking that I should roll a cigarette, but my tobacco and papers were gone.
The girl laughed and said… something.
Sound was coming in and out of focus.
Fucking goddamn shitting ketamine…
I desperately wanted to lie down on one of the mattresses but they were mostly occupied. I could lie down next to Goat Bag and his Canadian girl but I knew I wouldn’t be able to get back up again. Those mattresses would suck me in.
The girl laughed and said something else.
I turned and walked back towards the kitchen, but the kitchen wasn’t there. I opened the door to the bathroom and some girl was being fucked over a sink by a guy with too many facial piercings and I said, ‘Sorry, sorry,’ and backed out, and I knew some little shit was going to have taken my tobacco.
I could smell weed – should try and track some down. It might help.
‘It’s so sweet how they met, and within, like, fifteen minutes he was telling her he loved her.’
I had no idea who was talking until I about-turned and saw Eli, and we were in the kitchen again, with Luiz.
‘Who?’ I asked.
My tobacco and half-rollie were on the side, where I’d left them, and my coke-coloured drink.
‘Jimmy.’
‘Who’s Jimmy?’ Luiz asked.
‘Goat Bag.’ I started laughing, unable to roll the cigarette to save my fucking life. ‘I swear, his bag’s not a fucking goat…’
Luiz looked confused. I couldn’t work out if he was standing or sitting, but he was holding a guitar. Best to just not look at him… He had too much facial hair. I didn’t trust men with too much facial hair.
‘Where’s my jacket?’ I asked, climbing out of the window.
Down the fire escape, I couldn’t tell if I was following Eli or Goat Bag, or neither of them.
I sat on a step for a moment, but my tobacco was gone.
Face down on the road outside, outside the gate, concrete eating my face, saying, ‘Goat Bag! Find jacket!’
He left a bottle of rum by my head, next to the goat bag. This wasn’t Havana Club. This was Kraken.
‘Goat Bag! Tobacco!’
Black and white tentacles lapping at me.
Eli waving his hands and shouting something.
Lying on the pavement beside me, shouting, ‘I am impaired!’
‘My life! … In that bag! Goat Bag, go!’
I stared at the kraken in this sea of concrete eating my face, until I blacked out.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
There was a diner on the corner of a street near a monument of a man’s head flipped onto its side. Apt, I thought, as we passed it in the car, with my face pressed against the window because I didn’t have the strength in my neck to lift it off the glass.
The café/diner place was called Terry’s. That was it, just ‘Terry’s’. I love Terry. I’d have turned for Terry that morning, or that afternoon, or whatever fucking time it was when I came to.
‘Tuna melt,’ Eli said, staring down at the yellow tablecloth and the back of his hand. ‘Black coffee, please. But a fuck-tonne of cheese in that melt, please.’
Goat Bag – Goat Bag, sat to my right! – said, ‘I’ll have blueberry pancakes please, with a side of fries, and a latte.’
I blinked myself alive, reborn from the K-hole, and said, ‘Bacon, fried eggs, French toast, fries, sausages. English tea, if you have it. Please.’
The waitress looked at the three of us as if we were on drugs – ironically – and left. I wondered what we looked like: pale, eyes like pinpricks, veiny cling-film skin. I tried to raise my hand from the table and it shook, so I put it down.
I realized I was wear
ing my jacket.
Joy!
I had no energy for joy, but I almost raised a smile. Clutching the lapels, groping inside the pockets, I found my wallet and tobacco.
‘Holy shit-bags, guys, you found it!’
‘All Goat Bag,’ Eli said, with a salute. ‘I was busy being… impaired.’
Goat Bag laughed. ‘He means that literally. He was lying on the ground next to you waving at me shouting, “I am impaired!” It was pretty funny.’
‘Seriously?’
Eli raised a hand as if in supplication. ‘I am impaired.’
‘Aw, it was nothing.’ Goat Bag was all humility, smiling, still wearing those glasses.
‘He climbed over that gate, you know, right back up the fire escape into that hell-hole, found your jacket, and made it back out. The man’s a hero.’
‘Just say you owe me a drink. Or it can be my thank you for driving me here.’
‘Goat Bag, I’ll buy you a drink you can fucking swim in.’ I checked my wallet again, just for kicks, and slumped face down against the tabletop. ‘I’m a father, guys. I am actually a father of children. I can’t be K-holing at my age. I fucking hate K.’
‘Accidental K is the worst,’ Goat Bag agreed.
‘The worst,’ I echoed.
I looked up, most of my head still enfolded in my arms.
‘Yeah, and some of us didn’t sleep in the car all morning.’ Eli rubbed his eyes. ‘Some of us had to drive away, pull over, eat a packaged salad and get the fuck on with it.’
‘I need food so much, I think I’m going to fucking die,’ I mumbled. ‘What happened to… thingy? Amy?’
‘I’m meeting up with her again later, we’re gonna catch a flight to San Fran. She was fine, she could see I needed to take care of you guys.’
He gave me an affectionate pat on the shoulder that felt like being assaulted.
‘You wanna catch our flight with us?’ Goat Bag asked, with the kind of deranged sincerity that only existed in the young.
‘We need to shoot off, really.’
I was glad Eli had replied for me.
‘Well, it was fun having an adventure with you guys.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘What exactly are you up to in LA?’
‘Assassinating an old foe,’ Eli said again, smirking.
‘If you don’t wanna tell me, you don’t wanna tell me.’ Goat Bag held up his hands. ‘But I’m glad you picked me up.’
Road Kill Page 9