Against the wall in the car park outside the butcher’s, Lou cried, my arm around her.
‘He came home a new man,’ she said.
‘Nice that the rebirth should happen in the church,’ I smiled.
At her house, the wall in the spare room was festooned with sketches of a naked Rebecca Mar. This homage to her had a unique narrative arc. As it branched from left to right, the chronological order and method her dad had adopted to tack them to the wall, the change was explicit.
‘You can see Dad’s drawing getting better with every single picture,’ Lou told me, ‘and Rebecca gets happier in each and every one.’
The twelfth month. Rebecca Mar stowed her belongings in that very same room on the day she moved in with Lou’s dad, who did the hoovering, cooked the dinner, and rewarded his daughter’s saintly fervour by making her the happiest I’d ever seen her. It made me love her all the more.
‘I’ll come by the shop tomorrow,’ she says. ‘I’ve been thinking.’
61
My heart performed a pirouette when she asked me the question. It spun and it raced, refusing to slow, like no force was great enough to ever stop it. This was the feeling, I now knew, of getting close to what your heart desires.
We were standing outside the butcher’s shop window, me and Lou. The display was of cutlets and steaks, minced beef and tenderloins, shaped and divided by brittle plastic grass and shiny flowers that pretended to be alive. My morning’s work. I was covered in blood and white snowflake splatters where the bleach Ted used to wash his gory chopping block had splashed across the blue material of my apron. And I needed her to repeat herself, to say it again, but for me not to look so desperately like those were the words I longed with all I had to hear. I raised a fist to my mouth and coughed into the microphone head of it because it felt like my turn to make some sound.
‘Pardon?’ I choked.
It felt like I’d leave the ground if I didn’t concentrate my entire bodyweight on two penny-sized patches on the soles of my feet just in the centre underneath the toes. They burned as I did so.
‘Will you come with me?’ she said again, and I could see in the tiny line that makes a fold above her exquisite chin that she meant it.
‘Of course I will,’ I said.
I’d have hugged her if I hadn’t been caked in a pale explosion of pig guts.
‘That’s it then. We’ll go to Ohio. We’ll go to visit Norma Bee. And that dead woman’s cut-throat world of residential lettings and management sales can pay for it all. Dad can have the money he needs to live on. The rest is what we’ll use to escape.’
Lou had stayed in touch with Norma Bee ever since she first got her letter about the trailer. They wrote to each other regularly. In Norma Bee, despite her distance, Lou found a font of advice, more friendly than motherly but maternal nonetheless – not that this would ever have occurred to Lou. Norma Bee understood things, prescient things, in Lou’s life. That they’d not met made her advice all the easier to swallow, the way you listen to a teacher, not a parent, who tells you to shut up. Because of Brian Bee she understood Mal’s weight. Because of Brian Bee she understood Lou’s dad’s dark funk.
In rescuing her father when she couldn’t rescue Mal, Lou felt she had atoned. One person less had given up on life. I’d no doubt she still loved Mal but finally she was wriggling free. I’d waited for a long time, and now her hands were untethered, I was watching her cut at the ropes binding mine.
I thought about the reason I’d never been on a plane.
‘We’ll go as soon as possible then,’ she said, and she placed a hand on my neck to pull me closer so that she could kiss me on the peppery skin of my cheek.
She knocked my butcher’s hat into the breeze and the busy road. Then she turned, her hair skipping around her head behind her like a sharply cracked whip, obediently following her up the road. I watched her all the way.
Back in the shop I found Red Ted buffing meat hooks with a thick white cloth. The hot water it was soaked in condensed in the air as it touched the cold metal. He didn’t even turn around, our having worked together for so long meaning our movements were synchronised, our spatial awareness of each other tuned the way ducks follow ducks in lines preternaturally. It was how we avoided errant knives and raised cleavers.
‘Ted,’ I said. ‘I’m leaving. I’m going to America. With Lou.’
‘OK,’ he said.
‘OK.’
My pardon had arrived.
62
I formulated a strange revenge that night in my bed, listening to Mal’s stupefying snore. I decided not to tell him that soon I’d be gone with Lou. Instead I thought about how it must feel to sleep in a different room. To turn to a different face, not the ashen patty before me now. Hers. To see a different ceiling.
Over the next few days I sneaked my possessions into a suitcase that I kept underneath my bed and that I only took out when Mal was asleep, Dad was in the attic and Mum was keeping watch upon some simmering pan or other. I rooted out the passport I’d had but never used, and signed the visa papers Lou organised. Not knowing how long we’d be gone for, I carefully folded away everything I owned. Soon enough the case was full to bulging, spilling out over the sides, tearing and stretching at the seams. I sat on it and used a stiff finger to probe the clothes inwards, warding off the frustration each time the zip fell apart by imagining I was sat astride Mal, prodding at his innards as they flapped about the carpet, sticky and collecting dust.
Weeks and weeks seared past, and by the time the Tuesday of our flight arrived I’d still not told anybody bar Red Ted about my departure. At sunrise I wrote a little note for Dad explaining that Lou and I had gone on holiday, that I wanted him to take care of Mum and Mal, if she’d let him, and I slipped it in the thin crack between the entrance to his loft and the ceiling, where it sat. Then, in a hurry to leave before Mum delivered a piping hot English breakfast, I took my case and left quietly. Mal got a parting glance. I walked to the taxi waiting at the far end of the road, out of sight.
‘You’re his brother, aren’t you?’ the driver asked me.
‘Whose?’ I said.
‘Malcolm Ede’s.’
‘Yes.’
Because I had that effervescent insomnia a bride has the night before her wedding, I waited restlessly until we’d picked up Lou, who was waved off by her dad and Rebecca Mar standing in their dressing gowns, and then I told the taxi driver the story of what happened the last time we went to the airport. They both laughed, reminding me that I could talk when I was in the mood. My obstacles were often my own.
Soon we were paying, the taxi driver shaking my hand. We loaded our two bags onto a misshapen metal trolley and I followed Lou’s lead through the airport as we performed a routine I found both hectic and reassuring in preparation to board the plane.
Inside the man directly across the aisle twisted in his seat and said, ‘Excuse me, are you . . .?’, so I turned my head, leant over Lou’s lap and looked out of the window, waiting to watch the world roll out of view.
The kick-start of the engine on the runway set my body in concrete and bound the back of my head to the seat. I didn’t even notice that I was kneading Lou’s cute little wrist, turning her flowery skin white. The muscles in my legs stiffened until they were both chicken-wire rickety with cramp as we moved faster and faster, with each second my body breaking new ground. Blastoff. One thousand feet. Two thousand feet. Three thousand feet further away from home than I had ever been. Climbing at six hundred miles per hour, powered by fire, exiting my orbit. I was airborne, a broken spell and a lifted curse. The machinery made noises as the wheels were stowed away. I was breaking my mooring. Leaving my dock. I was no one’s brother in the middle of the sky.
I saw the white cliffs of the English coast and remembered when Dad told me why they were that colour. Billions of years of bones, he said. Trillions of lives, all the skeletons of the sea, ground up by the tides and impacted by the waves. Pressure plus time mak
ing chalk. Amazing. Enough pressure for enough time will always make something new.
63
Day Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty-Three, according to the display on the wall.
After the kerfuffle, the noise outside gradually dissipates as the crowd that had gathered to watch Mal’s interview with Ray Darling make their way back home. I peek out of the newly resurrected curtain and see that a few still remain. I wonder where Lou has gone in this time before we meet.
I hear Dad, back in his attic, the clanking of metals as he powers into this latest creation with a new and proper urgency. The vibrations make the metal in my legs hum mellow notes. Bang and clatter, tinkle and clash. The panels of the ceiling rattle like he might fall through them.
‘What is he doing up there?’ I say, convinced that if he does fall through the roof he’ll land on me, rather than the hundred-stone man handily spread across the room like a huge pink trampoline.
‘I don’t know,’ says Mal, with a slight shrug of his nearly imperceptible shoulders. I wonder, if you cut him open, what colour his fat would be. I decide on withered mushroom.
The familiar shuffle of Mum’s slippers arrives with its cha cha cha through the door. In her hand she has a first-aid kit in a green plastic lunchbox. She sets it down on the floor by Mal’s bed and, like a magician’s assistant, plucks an antiseptic wipe from a little packet. With tiny forensic dabs she anoints it onto the network of bright red scratches Ray Darling’s desperate hands had torn into Mal’s skin. He doesn’t wince at the sting of the antiseptic, his nerve-endings long since desensitised by the turmoil the stretching of speed weight-gain inflicts on the body.
A huge thud from upstairs makes Mum jump. She channels her fright into squeezing with some force the tube of emolliating cream she has in her hand, with which she’d planned to lube Mal’s cadaverous groin. A spurt of it ejects with surprising velocity and leaves a slippery trail up Mal’s gut, across his sagging glands and all the way into his mouth.
‘Oh,’ Mum says, ‘what is he doing up there?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, laughing.
I watch Mal bunch up his puny eyes. They sink backwards into the thick plate of his face at the foul taste of the cream.
‘Look what he’s made me do!’ she shouts.
I laugh some more.
‘What does he think he’s bloody doing?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mal and me repeat together.
I hope whatever it is saves him.
64
My eyes were gooey. I shuffled a slow, post-flight zombie shuffle to the endless metal snake of the carousel. The colours on the signs seemed so much brighter. The American yellow was a truer yellow, the American blue more honest and the American green clearer. Everything looked new and big and unafraid to talk to you. We were ushered through with polite instruction delivered so formulaically as to not be polite at all, and found ourselves slumbering through an automatic door that opened like wings webbed with metal. Lou held my elbow. It felt traditional, gentlemanly and good. Unsure of what I was looking for, I faked a confident stride, hoping that the people in the expectant crowd of loved-ones would notice my gait before they did my eyes scanning their signage. We walked to the end of the row, where we ran out of people, the runts of our flight’s litter. I watched people I recognised from the plane throw bags to the floor as arms not seen in some time were flung around them. Embraces exploded in excited squeals.
‘Excuse me.’
An accent, new and pleasurable to our ears, like bathing in the sound of a happy belly. Together we spun on our heels, where a sign written in blister-red lipstick on the inside of a cereal box said simply ‘Lou’. Wrapped around it were nails in that same stop-sign red. They clung like cockles to fingers bedecked in clusters of sparkling golden rings. Discs and bands and jewels. Rings with names on, rings with faces. They moved around and over each other, a busy hive of shiny wasps. Our eyes were magpies, gliding up two smooth black arms to Norma Bee. Her smile was a grand piano, her laugh a grandiloquent diva snickle. She had breakneck curves from her neck down over her huge bosoms and out in glorious rolls round her hips. She had a mayoral amount of jewellery wrapped around her and her bright blonde hair shaved to curly miniature ringlets.
She took us both in her arms and laughed some more, kissing us, leaving rails of red across our faces. We curled up and wallowed in her genuine warmth.
‘Lou. And Mr Ede, I presume?’ she said in the best way. ‘I’ve been expecting you. Now let’s go eat.’
We followed her, through more doors, to the tarmac. We came to her car and she talked at us, I caught barely half of it, not concentrating, Lou nodding, our bearings shot.
‘Have a good flight?’ she said. ‘So looking forward to your visit. I’ve made you some beds.’
Beds. Plural. Our stay followed an explanatory letter, I thought. We were not together, not in Norma Bee’s head or Lou’s. Only mine.
Her car was huge. Wide and full of crisp, cold air. In the back I had room to extend my legs without them touching the door, and the leather was new and pungent. I inhaled it, clearing my sleepy head. While Lou and Norma Bee made small talk in the front, about Mal and England and tents and fat and butchery and trailers and my mum and dad, I was bombarded through my window by Ohio sunshine. Hard to think it was the same sun. The sky in America seemed so much further away, the roads you viewed it from wider, the eyes you saw it through tinted. I saw the America me and Mal learned about on late-night television. Red fire hydrants. Hanging traffic lights. Steam. I felt smaller and smaller around each corner. More new visions in a journey than in a lifetime so far. We got faster and faster as we drove out from Cleveland, further from the stores and billboards, bigger and bigger distances apart until soon there was little around us but road. Then the lanes multiplied, winding like a neckerchief around a new city on the horizon. The dry heat sucked wet stencils out of my back and by the time we arrived at Norma Bee’s house on the outskirts of Akron, my white shirt had joker lips.
‘Here we are,’ said Norma Bee, standing in the centre of the patchy rectangle of grass where the trailer once cast its shadow. ‘Home sweet home.’
It was a small building, a clear distance from the neighbours on either side, with wooden steps cut thick leading up to a sparse veranda and through a dirty screen door into the house. Inside a small dog yapped and bared its teeth until Norma reassured it that all was fine and it climbed into its basket, gnawing on a bone twice its size.
‘Now there isn’t much room, so we’ll make do,’ Norma said.
The inside of the house had been knocked-through in part to make room for her dead husband. I found a fold-up travel bed laid out in the hall. Though it looked little more than the debris of a crash between some twisted metal springs and a pile of knitted rags, I looked forward to having my own room. I unpacked my clothes into the drawers she provided in cupboards vast and heavy. There were shirts and trousers in there with no purpose any more. Enormous and specially made, some of them the circumference of those huge Army-issue water tanks rolled out when there are floods. There were waistlines for clowns and chest sizes for bears. There were collars that would fit a Sphinx and jumpers so wide you could have hidden children in them. And I thought how odd it was that I wasn’t used to the sight of gargantuan garments, because Mal was always naked.
By the time we’d finished unpacking, it was early evening and a buffet fit for a returning war hero crowned a table on the porch. We sat there all night, relaxed and calm, the sky a thunder blue but clear and quiet, disco-lit by stars and the blinking bulbs of planes far away. But for the bark of the dog at the passing of a car, there was nothing. I was cast out of the storm and it was beautiful. We ate charred roast chicken and glazed ribs and drank red wine until we slurred our words like badly controlled puppets. And then we went to bed. In it I resolved to make Lou mine here.
65
I woke with the dog licking my face, its tongue like a piece of ham. Its eyes were to
o big for its skull, two pool balls inside a melon. Horrible. Lou walked in immediately afterwards wearing pink pyjamas, carrying a steaming cup of coffee and looking early-morning sexy, all bedraggled and messy. Once we’d showered, we ate huge breakfasts. There were combinations of varieties of bacon and eggs and onions and potatoes. Glossy condiments in squeezy tubes like children’s paint sets. There were bottomless juices, icy servings of citrus. Nothing seemed to empty. After we had eaten we headed into town to the shops to stock up on supplies, and I took the brief opportunity to call home.
‘You can use my phone,’ Norma Bee said.
I considered not doing so manners, but didn’t know why.
It rang a strange ring for too long, a new beep.
Dad answered. He was out of breath, that biting wheeze that reminds you of a man’s age.
‘Hello,’ I said, like Norma’s dog scolded for growling, ears down, eyes to the floor, my tail wagging.
‘Hello,’ he replied. No telling-off. Sometimes I forgot how old I was. ‘I was wondering when you’d call. Where are you?’
‘In Ohio. Where the trailer came from.’
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Wow. That’s a long way. I thought maybe you meant the seaside.’ He liked that one of us had escaped, I could hear it in his pant. ‘With Lou?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes? Wow.’
My face turned the scarlet of an illusionist’s cloak, and I caught the reflection of it in the metal coat of the telephone box. Through the glass I could see Norma Bee and Lou loading angular brown bags full of strange boxes and packaging, colours and brands into the car.
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