When he’d rung to ask Lace to come in for a couple of hours —
‘You know I don’t rehearse,’ she says.
‘I know you don’t need it.’ He’s quick on the winning responses. ‘But our lighting crew need a run-through. With that witchy face of yours, you’ll be their greatest challenge.’
Lace can never resist a compliment followed swiftly by an insult. It was how Johnny had first seduced her. ‘Your nose is too big, you’ve got the legs of a giraffe, the grace of a hippopotamus’: sexier by far than a stream of predictable compliments.
She succumbs. ‘All right, I’ll come in.’ Leaving a note for Chummie, she slips through the busy afternoon city, looking forward to sharpening up. By the time she steps on stage for the run-through, she’s feeling better than she has for some days.
‘Life’s nothing to laugh about!’ she announces, holding the microphone in one hand, shielding her eyes against the glare with the other, seeing Johnny in the middle row with his feet up. He raises his unlit cigar to her in a perfectly calculated, somewhat lewd manner. ‘And that’s all you’re getting,’ she says directly to him, across the expanse of illuminated dust.
She proceeds to stand where she’s told, on this taped cross or that one, half-listening to the muttered admiration of the crew. ‘Do all your comedians look like her?’ they ask Johnny.
‘Fortunately not!’ His reply is louder, calculated to spike her interest, and possibly to tempt her into the office after they’re done here.
‘Life’s nothing to laugh about,’ she repeats for the tenth time. Perhaps she’ll start tonight’s routine with this? A stark warning, an admonition that will contrast with her spangled net skirt and her flippant punchlines.
‘Don’t get used to this,’ she says to Johnny when she finally steps out of the dazzle. ‘I said I’d only work for you for a year. Time’s nearly up.’
‘Can’t I change your mind?’ He puts a hand on her shoulder.
She hasn’t been touched by anyone for days: has avoided public transport and crowded shops, has made no doctor’s appointments that might require hands on her body, has had no brushes with bankers or any other amorous men (this might be interpreted as a sea change, a slowly building thundercloud, were someone monitoring her emotional state). ‘Can’t you stay?’ Johnny is still holding her shoulder.
The touch, the question, the continued contact — it’s too much. Lace flinches away. Under her dress she can feel a burn appearing on her shoulder. Unforeseen physical contact: 10,000 volts!
‘There are universities waiting to hear from me. Cambridge Oxford Durham Edinburgh Princeton Harvard Yale.’ It’s a roll call of the great and the good but when she catches sight of herself in the huge mirrored wall, she looks pale, less than happy.
Johnny groans. ‘Don’t lock yourself away in the bloody ivory tower so soon. You’re too young and beautiful for that.’ Instantly he retracts this. ‘What I mean is, you’re a damn good comedian and the club needs you.’
Yes, this is better! But now Lace feels a strange ache in her bones, which she attributes to hunger. ‘I have to go home. Chummie’s cooking dinner and I can’t be funny on an empty stomach.’
Johnny moves closer. For someone who spends most of his time in his club, going home at 4 a.m. for a token glance at his sleeping kids, he smells surprisingly fresh: of soap, clean clothes and safety. Lace sways towards him — but no, she mustn’t. This is nothing more than weakness, born from approximately two hours sleep for the last three nights. ‘University,’ she repeats sternly. The word’s a signpost to a more certain future, and she steps towards it, and away from Johnny.
‘I can ask Hugo to cook meatballs for us,’ he says persuasively. ‘We can eat in the office. You always do a good show after Hugo’s meatballs, don’t you?’ It’s not only a suggestive line, it’s also true. Lace’s very best performances have been after spaghetti and meatballs, a bottle of French red, and some good sex on Johnny’s sofa.
But she’s in no mood to be pulled into the past. Outside, darkness is gathering, autumn is marching on the city, and the world is spinning forwards. ‘I told you, I can’t,’ she says.
‘I thought you’d stay around.’ Johnny sinks into a chair and, forgetting his own non-smoking rules, lights his Cuban cigar. ‘You’ll be the death of me,’ he groans, ‘and many other men.’
At the mention of death, Lace feels her heart flying into pieces, sending splinters into her veins. ‘Don’t rely on me, ever!’ The very idea must be dangerous; she hurts all over.
Stubbing out the cigar, Johnny gathers her up in his arms. ‘You’ll be all right.’ He gives her a straightforward, almost avuncular kiss on her forehead. ‘Whatever’s going on with you —’ he gives her a searching look — ‘you’ll come out the other side, and everything will be fine.’ He’s surprisingly sensitive considering that he refers to his wife as ‘Ball-and-Chain Jane’ and encourages sexist jokes from his performers to please the regulars.
The pity of it is, the soothing things we’re told usually hold very little truth. Had Johnny said ‘I’m afraid that you’re in for a rather hard time’, he would have been closer to the mark. But, in spite of what he himself has been through (witnessing a dead prostitute being pulled from a dumpster, systematically breaking a man’s fingers in a deserted car park, identifying the body of his best friend stabbed to death outside one of his own clubs) — well, in spite of forty-two years of experience, he’s never known life as Lace knows it.
And so, although she hears the implicit I can save you, Lace knows she has to tear herself away from Johnny’s crisp white shirtfront and enter the grey city again, to face whatever may come. ‘See you tonight, Mr Jackson,’ she says lightly, and she gives him a peck on the cheek.
As she hears the heavy door close behind her, as she weaves between an imaginary queue and runs fingertips over the fuzzy ropes — it begins. The city starts dissolving into a silver pool. The glass shopping mall across the street is melting. Street lights merge into one long streak above a road running with red tail lights.
She scrabbles in her bag and then in her pocket. Tears are pouring from her eyes but she can’t mop them up as she never remembers to carry tissues.
Moving along the street is like driving through monsoon rain. She can take only a few steps before she has to stop and wipe away the tears. The odd thing is she’s making no sound. Her crying is so silent that when she stands still she can hear her own breathing and the blood pumping in her ears.
No one stops to ask if she’s okay. This would dismay Gibby, who’s always adamant that one has a duty to help strangers in distress, but to her it’s a relief. If she’d almost crumbled at Johnny’s familiar touch, how would she cope with comfort from someone she doesn’t know?
She’s reached the park. The sycamore trees screen off the glare from the street lights and Lace stands in their overlapping darkness, tipping her head back and tasting the tears in her throat. She manages to call Gibby’s mobile and leave a message. Can you meet me at home as soon as you can? But by the time she reaches the edge of the park tears are still pouring down her face and she’s becoming alarmed. There’s nothing for it. She grits her teeth, holds the railing for support, and dials the lion’s den.
‘Hello? Mrs Lux?’ She tries to speak clearly. ‘I was wondering if Gibby is home.’
‘He might be. Who’s wanting to know? I won’t disturb him until I know who this is.’ Apparently, though it’s only early evening, it’s already late in Mrs Lux’s day. Her voice is spiked with gin-fuelled dislike. When she’s sober, she tolerates Lace; when drunk, she loathes her.
‘You know who it is, Mrs Lux.’ Lace has no energy for tactical games; all her strength is draining away in salty water. ‘Please check if he’s in his room. It’s important.’
‘He’s gone to work.’ Suddenly Mrs Lux switches her line of defence. ‘He left an hour ago, and he never answers his phone when he’s working. He’s a conscientious boy, not like the rest of you, natt
ering on at your employers’ expense, always making a main feature out of your private lives even when you’re nothing but a commercial break.’
Lace is almost impressed. It’s difficult to introduce metaphor into casual conversation — let alone doing it under the influence. Even Faulkner and Hemingway couldn’t write a worthwhile line when they were drunk. ‘Commercials and features.’ She nods through her tears. ‘You’re onto something there.’
But Mrs Lux is unaware of her achievement. ‘I have to go. The high jump’s on soon. Live from Paris.’
Lace can see the scene all too clearly: Mrs Lux tense in the brown stuffy light, cradling a glass in both hands, glued to the sight of golden-haired youths twisting fishlike over a spindly pole. ‘I could come over if you want company,’ she offers. ‘I like high jump, too.’ It’s not true, but she can’t help feeling sorry for Mrs Lux, stuck there in an empty house surrounded by the petrol stench of gin, with the hours bleeding towards bedtime.
But Gibby’s mother is numbed to loneliness, at least for today. She’s forgotten the needle-sharp moment that morning when she felt like locking the door, clasping her husband and her son to her, and begging them not to leave her alone. ‘What?’ she says vaguely into the phone, and suddenly she’s shouting. ‘Get on with it, you Austrian idiot! Watch that trailing left foot, you bastard!’ Her exhortations become progressively less audible and Lace realises that any further comments from her will be lost in a welter of brown cushions.
There’s at least one thing Mrs Lux doesn’t know about her son: on his tea breaks, he always checks his messages, and if he hears Lace’s voice he calls back instantly. Just as Lace has reached home and let herself into the hallway, stumbling over matted newspapers and uncollected mail, she hears her phone ringing. She sinks onto the stairs, felled by relief. ‘It’s so dark in here.’ She tries to speak normally. ‘I can’t even see my own feet.’
‘Hasn’t your landlord fixed the light yet?’ Gibby sounds cross, probably from anxiety after hearing the desperation in Lace’s message. ‘Get Crummy — I mean, Chummie to do it. He’s got to be good for something.’
In fact Chummie’s good for quite a lot of things. He may not be much help when it comes to moral guidance, but he’s adept at filling in forms and filling out tax returns, at making phone calls and facing the authorities, and later that very evening he will ring the Ha-Ha Club and tell Lace’s employer that his niece is in no state to make people laugh, not now, perhaps never again. But Gibby’s had a thing against Chummie ever since their Scrabble battle, when Chummie claimed victory by using his own name. ‘It’s an adjective,’ he insisted, ‘not a proper noun.’ He’d punched the air, hitting the light shade so it rang like a bell in a boxing ring. Only later did Gibby find a reliable online dictionary and point out that the adjective chummy ends with a Y. It had been a genuine mistake on Chummie’s part, but Gibby has shown a slight antagonism towards him ever since.
‘The lack of light doesn’t bother me,’ says Lace. Holding out her illuminated phone she sees that her hands are wet with tears. ‘Right now I’m only bothered by the fact that I can’t stop crying.’
‘That’s nothing new, is it?’ Over the course of several years Gibby has witnessed Lace’s tendency to cry often, over almost anything. Mrs Lux calls this a talent. ‘You can get away with anything if you’re young, beautiful and crying,’ she says, rubbing her own red-rimmed eyes. But Gibby knows better. He knows Lace would much prefer not to be this way.
‘Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be the usual sort of crying.’ Lace wipes her cheeks with her sodden wrists. ‘Nothing triggered it. Nothing at all.’
‘Not a six-year-old doing the family washing in a laundromat? Not an article on child soldiers in the Congo?’ Gibby can be slightly snarky when he’s at work, perhaps from being surrounded by the smart-arse attitudes of newspapermen. But when Lace can’t answer (her throat is awash, her nose is streaming) he is instantly contrite. ‘I get off at two. I’ll come round straight after that. Or I can leave right now if you need me.’
‘Need’ is pretty much a relative concept these days. When fresh water gushes from taps and pineapples can be eaten in winter all over the world, how many of us can truly say we need anything? Lace, on the other hand, has grown up lacking so much that need has become a part of her, an ache so familiar that it’s almost unnoticed.
‘Don’t come.’ She stands up. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow. Maybe Niagara will have dried up by then.’
But at 2.20 a.m., as she lies on the sofa with a pillow under her aching head, the doorbell will ring. And there’s Gibby, with concern on his large soft face and a fifty-pack carton of tissues from the staff supply cupboard under his arm. He’ll wipe her damp hair away from her forehead, and she’ll blow her nose like a trumpet, because there’s no need to be coy around Gibby.
‘What are you watching?’ he’ll ask.
‘Nothing at all. I needed some background noise so I could read.’
‘So what are you reading?’
‘Nothing at all.’ She pushes aside Watchmen, Tintin, American Splendor and other old friends. ‘I can’t see the words or the images. Everything is wavering as if it’s underwater.’
She finds some ancient doughnuts in the fridge, solid rings of cold sweetness with splintering pink icing. She and Gibby eat side by side on the sofa, not talking much, gazing at the television screen with its capering showgirls and men in top hats.
‘Those were the days,’ sighs Gibby.
‘When men were gay,’ agrees Lace.
‘And girls were showy,’ says Gibby.
If only I could step into the screen, thinks Lace. If only I could step out of my own skin!
‘You need to get away for a while,’ states Gibby the Mind Reader. ‘When was the last time you slept properly?’
True, the speckled cream walls have become like an inescapable hallucination: swirling, hazy, never resting. The television seems to have been on forever, muted or too loud, surrounded by a sea of TV guides that no one ever bothers to pick up.
‘But where would I go?’ Lace’s eyes are so swollen they hurt.
‘You could come to my place, but —’ Gibby stops. He’s apologetic, token-gesturing. ‘The same old story, you know — her possessiveness — her only son.’ When he speaks of his mother his voice tends to break up like a bad phone connection, discomfort crackling around his head.
Sometimes, if Lace concentrates hard, she can put herself in Mrs Lux’s place. Then she sees that the problem isn’t actually maternal possessiveness. The way Mrs Lux looks at Lace is as if she’s staring across a lake and suddenly realising she’s ended up living on the wrong — the unintended — side. I was like you once, says her baleful gaze, magnified through ice cubes. I had beauty, too. And a bright future. And recognising this, Lace is overwhelmed with confusion and pity.
‘No, my house isn’t good — not restful,’ Gibby is muttering. ‘Twenty-four-hour sports. Gin-fuelled rages.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of coming to stay in your house,’ Lace reassures him. ‘Suburbia is as frightening as sleeplessness. Besides, I’m terrified by your father’s zeal for converting the world to Lux Low Energy Light Bulbs.’
This works: Gibby stops his embarrassed mumbling and laughs. His eyebrows are invisible in the glaring light. He’s one big pale forehead, a cranium concealing big ideas and even bigger ambitions.
Lace’s own head is waterlogged, her neck creaking under its weight. ‘Tell me something,’ she begs, muting the TV. ‘Something to distract me.’
And so, obligingly, Gibby thinks for a moment, strokes her hot hand, and begins.
THE BOY WHO GOT AWAY
There was once a boy who looked like a freak. By the age of twelve he was a lot bigger than his classmates and his skin was oddly soft and squishy. At home his parents sometimes sat on him, mistaking him for cushions.
He didn’t take to school, nor school to him. In gym class he broke the springboard. During a piano recital
the stool swivelled so far down under his weight that he ended up eyeballing the keyboard.
(‘Really?’ asks Lace. ‘I haven’t heard that bit before.’
‘I didn’t say this was a true story,’ counters Gibby.)
Most of all, the boy hated school because it seemed like a terrific waste of time. The way things were taught was so slow that every day felt like treading water.
He had an odd name, this boy. Almost every kid he ever met laughed at his name. This caused fits of rage like blackouts in his head, sometimes so strong he thought his brain would burst. Once, after a particularly bad session of jeering, he pulled a handful of hair out of another boy’s head.
There was only one kid who talked nicely to him, and that kid was also a freak.
(‘You can’t call them freaks,’ protests Lace.
‘That’s how the world saw them,’ shrugs Gibby. ‘Probably even their parents thought of them that way.’)
The other freak, whose name was Luke, used to come to school in bare feet; no one knew why. Often his pockets were crammed with mud pies so that he left a crumbling brown trail when he walked. He was the kindest twelve-year-old in the world. Even when he was hit or kicked, he would just smile and limp away.
One day the entire school was given two hours off. A public ceremony was scheduled for 4 p.m.: the opening of a new auditorium, to which all parents were invited. The teachers disappeared to organise things inside, and the pupils were herded onto the huge green playing field to amuse themselves. Two school captains, also aged twelve, in charge of two hundred children.
‘Shall we play Bullrush?’ suggested the Boy Captain.
The Girl Captain shook her head. ‘Too muddy. We’re supposed to stay clean. What about Grandmother Footsteps?’
But it was pretty much decided by the masses what would happen during those two unsurveillanced hours. A Battle of the Freaks! Luke and his best friend would be pitted against each other. They would be told to swing inwards from opposite ends of a cable until they met and clashed in mid-air.
Suicide Club, The Page 7