Gimme More

by Liza Cody

  ‘I’m glad you like it,’ she said when he complimented her – as he was always careful to do. ‘They’re the best juice oranges in the world. Lin sends me crates of them.’

  It was an unremarkable tit-bit of information which went unremarked for weeks while Alec was supposed to be tracking down old movies, film labs and sound-tracks. But suddenly bells rang when he began to search for traces of Jack.

  Florida oranges. Crates of them sent by Birdie to her sister in England. Why would Birdie go to Florida? Not for Disney World, that was for sure. He wanted to ask her but she wasn’t around to be asked. She’d abandoned him, got herself arrested and made him feel he’d picked the losing side.

  One morning after breakfast, without any purpose in mind, Alec examined the box of oranges and discovered that the original order had come from an insignificant little island off the Gulf Coast of Florida. More to revive Mr Stears’s flagging approval than anything else, Alec suggested the notion of a secret island hideaway. A really ace idea. It should’ve put Alec on Mr Zalisky’s plane, not Mrs Emerson. A move like that deserved a better reward than milk-soaked trousers.

  The car was huge. Alicia, the driver, was tiny. She sat on a cushion, but even so Robin worried that she couldn’t see over the dash-board. Robin worried about a lot of things – the heat, the glare, not having dark glasses, Alicia driving with only one hand on the wheel. She didn’t want to die on the Tamiami Trail in the company of a dwarf and a slug. Tiny people shouldn’t be put in charge of outsize cars. Slugs with jet lag shouldn’t be put in charge of conversations.

  After a stop for coffee and doughnuts, Robin moved to the front of the car to get away from Barry. Alicia talked non-stop and Robin found her hard to follow. But she gathered that Alicia was the agent’s wife. The agent was on the island and he worked real hard. There was this phonecall at three in the morning, and Guido had been workin’ on it ever since. Alicia hadn’t seen Guido for days. Presumably because he was on the island. A big agency in Tallahassee called Guido. Or was it a big legal firm who did stuff for Disney in Orlando? Anyways, with Guido on the island, there was no one else to hire the car and meet the non-scheduled flight in Tampa except Alicia. But, hey, that was cool, she liked driving, and they were going to the island, so, what the heck, she just put a coupla clean shirts for Guido in the trunk and here she was. Neat, huh? England was neat too. Alicia went there once when her older sister’s husband, who was in the air force, was stationed in Essex.

  Robin smiled. Barry had been under the impression that Nash would lay on a chauffeur-driven limo, and he couldn’t come to grips with this tiny woman who insisted on eating her chocolate doughnut at his table and who talked a blue streak. He slumped in the back seat and tried to maintain a dignified silence.

  ‘This glare’s killing me,’ Robin said. ‘I forgot to bring dark glasses.’

  ‘No problem,’ Alicia said. ‘There’s a Wal-Mart in the next plaza. We’ll do some shopping.’

  Robin bought a black T-shirt which said ‘Oh shit, sharks!’ for Grace, and another one for Jimmy which said ‘And now I’m going straight to hell’ in gothic script. Then she bought a straw hat and dark glasses for herself. Buying presents for the kids made her feel more normal.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Robin?’ Barry snarled from the back seat. ‘We aren’t on holiday, you know.’

  *

  ‘You’ve got to come home,’ Grace said to Jimmy on the phone. ‘Everyone’s gone crazy. Auntie Lin’s in trouble. Mum’s flipping out. She just ran off without telling me. Some stupid, stupid bastard’s gone and convinced her that Jack might …’

  ‘That’s why I’m ringing,’ Jimmy said through a lot of static. ‘There was a picture of Auntie Lin being arrested in one of the Italian gossip mags. I couldn’t believe it, sis. What’s the old raver been up to now?’

  ‘She was set up by a bunch of rockbiz dirt-bags. And she won’t come home ‘cos of the tabloids door-stepping this place. It’s like the old days, Jimmy. It sucks, it really sucks.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, Grace,’ Jimmy said. ‘What’re you talking about? You don’t remember the old days – you were just a baby.’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ Grace said loftily. But in spite of what she told Alec, Jimmy was right. She couldn’t remember Jack at all. She didn’t want to admit it, though. Jack was her one and only claim to glamour and she wouldn’t let him go without a fight.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘that’s what Mum told me. She said history was repeating itself. And now she’s freaked out and gone to the States to look for Jack …’

  ‘She’s done what?’

  ‘I told you. This fat creepo Alec works for turned up and gave her a song and dance about Jack being alive and Auntie Lin hiding him out on an island, and she fell for it. She fell for it, Jimmy, and she pushed off to the States while Alec and I were at the movies. Please, Jimmy, you’ve got to come home.’

  ‘Maybe I’d better,’ Jimmy said. ‘It sounds like you’ve all lost your marbles. Does Lin know what’s happening? Or is she still in chokey?’

  ‘She’s undercover somewhere. I can’t talk to her because the phones are all bugged.’

  ‘Oh Grace,’ Jimmy said wearily, ‘please tell me you’re joking.’

  ‘They’re bugged,’ she said firmly. ‘Alec did it himself.’

  ‘Then tell him to undo it. Is this the guy Mum put in my room?’

  ‘Sort of,’ Grace said. She felt stupid and depressed. She shouldn’t have mentioned the bugged phones, not on the phone. Things were falling apart.

  ‘Where is he? I want to talk to him.’

  ‘He’s out.’ Where? Alec was in a foul mood. That’s why she was so glad Jimmy had called. She was in need of someone to talk to. She was feeling unusually insecure.

  ‘This stinks,’ Jimmy said with authority. ‘Go out to a public phone box and try to get hold of Auntie Lin. She’s a tough old bird – she’ll know what to do.’

  ‘She’ll freak.’

  ‘She’s nowhere near as fragile and romantic as you think she is. She’s survived all sorts of shit.’

  ‘But they’re trying to turn Jack into Elvis. It’s horrible and grotesque.’

  ‘They probably think it’ll sell more records. I’m sorry they’ve sucked Mum in, though. She’s the one who’ll freak.’

  ‘Are you coming home?’

  ‘Hell, yes,’ Jimmy said. ‘You’re making a right dog’s dinner of this. Anyway, I only rang to see if Mum would send me some dosh. Italian campsites suck and I’m going broke.’

  Thank God, Grace thought, someone’s coming. It was only Jimmy, but it broke the isolation. It occurred to her that she’d never been alone in the house for more than an hour or two. It was her home and her mother was always there. Always. She worked in the attic and she rarely went out, except to go shopping or make deliveries. This was her mother’s domain. She was never more than a yell away. Everyone else came and went, but Mum was a constant.

  It never occurred to her that her mother might even own a suitcase. Now she was gone, and without her, oddly, Alec seemed to lose his charm. He suddenly became a stranger. Nice-looking, yes, but a bit self-centred and sort of unsafe. Like, she could trust him when Mum or Lin was there, but alone, she felt weird about him – like, she couldn’t see the point any more.

  The place was extraordinary, Robin thought. You drove down a long straight road behind all the slowly cruising Chevies and Buicks. On either side of you were golf courses and condominiums with names like The Beach Place, The Verandah, Buttonwood Harbor, all sticking up clean and white like false teeth. Behind the false teeth, the Astro Turf grass and sprinklers, the sea winked and glared.

  Then you turned right into Bowsprit Lane, past a line of tidy bungalows with mail boxes shooting laser beams of reflected sunlight straight into your eyes. The lane petered out into a turning circle and then became a sandy track which disappeared into dense dark undergrowth.

  She was barely a hundred yards from
the main road, scarcely five hundred feet from the twin rows of holiday bungalows and, without warning, she was about to step into a tangle of wild oak, unrecognisable tropical trees and vines.

  The sun couldn’t penetrate the twisted unrestrained greenery. It was dark. She took off her new sunglasses and peered into the gloom. She could just distinguish the outline of a screened porch. The timber was the same grey colour as the tree trunks, and thick exotic foliage pressed up against the mosquito netting, making it look like a forgotten, overgrown aviary.

  ‘This can’t be it,’ she said out loud, almost making herself jump. ‘Lin would never own a place like this. Not here. It’s all wrong. Just not Lin at all.’

  She turned back to Barry and Guido. ‘Really,’ she said, ‘this just isn’t Lin. There’s been a mistake.’ Guido said, ‘Yes, m’am.’

  Barry said nothing. He was looking extremely unsure of himself. Guido said, ‘Shall we go sit in the car? I’ll get a coupla cans from the cooler. I got beer, Diet Coke or Sprite.’

  ‘Sprite,’ said Barry.

  ‘Beer, please,’ said Robin. She needed a drink. There was something unnerving about the coiling distorted vines and trees – the unexpected darkness. It was a vestige of primeval forest, forgotten by the planners and architects and landscape designers. Forgotten by progress.

  Guido was only an inch or so taller than his wife, but poking out from the sleeves of his crisp short-sleeved shirt was a pair of arms which would have made Popeye the Sailor Man proud. He and Alicia drank Diet Coke. After a pause he said, ‘See, I was surprised as you. But I checked twice at the Land Registry and the post office.’

  Alicia said, ‘He always double-checks, Robin. He’s known by it.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to be rude,’ Robin said. ‘It’s just… well, I know my sister.’

  ‘Sure you do,’ Alicia said.

  Guido cleared his throat politely. ‘The property was purchased twenty-seven years ago and it’s registered to the Eagle Holding Company, sole proprietor, Ms Linnet Walker.’

  ‘Who pays the property tax?’ Barry asked, sounding confident again.

  ‘Eagle Holding.’

  ‘No, no,’ Robin said. Lin pay property tax? Surely not. Lin didn’t do taxes. Lin wasn’t a resident anywhere. She never even had a place to hang her hat unless it was Robin’s house.

  ‘Have you spoken to the neighbours?’

  Neighbours? Robin looked round vaguely. Of course there were neighbours, close neighbours, on this tacky, nouveau riche playground of an island. But this corner of nightmare jungle seemed to have been picked up from the set of a film about mad swamp dwellers. The darkness, the silence, argued for total isolation.

  ‘See, there’s a problem,’ Guido said. ‘This part of the key ain’t residential. People own property, sure, but, like, it’s vacationers – they just come for the season to play tennis or golf or for the sailing. Hardly no one lives here all year round except the people who work here. And most of them come in daily from the mainland.’

  ‘Regular folks wouldn’t live here and raise families,’ Alicia concurred. ‘No regular folks, no regular neighbours.’

  ‘But I talked to the Quaker lady at the post office,’ Guido said, ‘and a guy who’s been at the pharmacy in the Avenue Mall for years. They say there’s a guy here who was wounded in ‘Nam. He don’t never come off the property, never shows his face. He don’t get no deliveries and he doesn’t own an automobile. They say there used to be a black woman came a coupla times a week but nobody’s seen her in years.’

  ‘Are you listening, Robin?’ Barry said pompously. ‘Doesn’t ever show his face. Maybe wounded in Vietnam. Or maybe suffered serious burns in a fire twenty-five years ago. It adds up.’

  ‘But that’s as far as I can go,’ Guido said. ‘I can’t sit here and watch the house ‘cos that’s what the Sheriff’s Department here don’t like. You hang out here for a spell and just see if they don’t slide on through to check out where you’re at. People here dial 911 if they see a bicycle in a no-parking zone.’

  ‘It’s that kinda place,’ Alicia confirmed. ‘Exclusive.’

  ‘Way I see it,’ Guido went on, ‘only thing you can do is walk on up to the door and talk to the guy straight up.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Barry said.

  Talking to people straight up was not one of Barry’s strengths, Robin thought. She’d had twenty-four hours of his hints and sly rummagings for information.

  ‘Only problem with that’, Guido said, ‘is the dogs. Guy got a coupla mean suckers in there. I saw ‘em night before last. Pit bulls or something. Came out after racoons, I guess.’

  ‘Pit bulls?’ Barry said.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ Guido asked inexorably. ‘’Cos I suggest you don’t wait till after dark. If the dogs don’t get you the bugs will. This guy doesn’t spray – he got mosquitos here big as dinner plates.’

  Guido’s getting a kick out of this, Robin decided. He’s treating us like greenhorns in the wild west. She looked at Barry dithering, playing with his Sprite can, rolling the cold surface over his pink cheeks and between his plump palms.

  She said, ‘Well, Barry? This was your idea. What’re you going to do?’

  Barry’s buttocks writhed against the car seat. He said, ‘Robin, look, I mean, Jack was virtually your brother-in-law.’

  ‘Yes. And I’ve been listening to twenty-four hours of you saying he was your best friend.’

  ‘But if he’s scarred, Robin? If he’s mad …’

  ‘If he’s scarred and mad, he’s still Jack.’ Robin opened the car door and waves of wet heat rolled in. She said, ‘Come on. We’ve got to find out, one way or the other.’

  The picture of the bright angel on her wall, the one who greeted her every morning, beckoned. And summoned, Robin walked forward into the gloomy tangled jungle.

  When I think of all those stories of people looking where they’ve been told not to look – Orpheus in the underworld, Pandora and her forbidden box, the foolish bride in Bluebeard’s Castle – I see initiative poorly rewarded. Loss and death follow the curious. Don’t look, they say. Don’t be too clever. Don’t ask too many questions. Death stalks the detective. But the human condition is to ignore warnings, to go where you’re not welcome. That’s how new worlds get populated. The naked ape isn’t satisfied with the tree he was born under. ‘Gimme more,’ he says as soon as he learns to speak. Greedy little bastard.

  Good. The globe is crawling with greedy little bastards. I know, because I proudly count myself as one of them. My gimme-more gene is highly developed, so in that respect I understand Nash, Sasson and Barry perfectly.

  It should be simple: They want what I’ve got; I want what they’ve got. That’s the basis of a great relationship. But nothing is simple in a relationship between art and commerce. For one thing, these days, the art is of secondary importance to the artist. Sometimes I think they don’t want the art at all – they only want a marketable artist. And increasingly, of course, that is just what they’re getting – kids so greedy for attention that they sell their pretty young images to front a product so banal that no one listens to it.

  Which makes it tough when what you want to sell are songs to the greedy bastards who only want the singer.

  And that is why, when Nash was staring at me from across the boardroom table with his little saurian eyes magnified by thick plastic lenses, even before he opened his greedy mouth to drop his bombshell, I wrote on my copy of the contract, ‘Up your bum, Nash Zalisky.’ Childish, undignified? Yes. Satisfying? Oh, absolutely.

  ‘I always wanted Jack,’ he told me once, not mentioning music at all. Well, I’m not selling Jack. I’m not loaning him, leasing him, or giving him away either. I have ten good songs and that was all I ever intended to sell. The rest? Well, call it my advertising campaign, if you like. It was never up for grabs.

  The Antigua Movie? What was that but beautiful visual images packaged for a music industry which is willing to spend more on making a
video than on cutting an album. It was beautiful visual images which got my back taxes paid, brought me to the bargaining table and gave me a bank account with money in it.

  Nash will want it all back, of course. But he can’t have it. He’ll have to let it go – the way I’ve had to let go of all those past royalties, the way Jack had to let go of a little dance number that went platinum in Brazil.

  Obviously Nash will say I scammed him. But he’ll never be quite sure. Nor will Sasson, and nor will any of the other legal and financial advisors sitting at that table. After all, it was Nash who pulled out of the deal, Nash who said he didn’t want to sign with me. Everyone at the table heard him. He said he’d prefer to sign with Jack. I was the innocent party in the rainbow dress who fainted from the shock.

  He spent quite a lot of money on nothing. But even so, the price was small compared with what the industry owes Jack and me. He’ll never pay that back. What he paid was the price for being a greedy little bastard who looked where he wasn’t supposed to look – or rather, being Nash, sending his minions to look. It’s the price he pays for looking when he should be listening, for listening when he has no right to listen, for stealing images I didn’t want to show him, for corrupting kids like Alec who are primed from birth to want, want, want. But most of all, it’s the price he pays for corrupting, with hope, innocent dreamers like my sister.

  Her weakness was to love a man who didn’t even see her. And Nash exploited her love. He said, ‘You can have him, but only if you betray him.’ You pay for that, Nash. I only wish I could’ve made you pay more.

  Later, what Robin remembered most vividly of the horrible, frightening incident was teeth: the gleaming white teeth of snarling dogs and the yellow ochre teeth of a heavy smoker who mouthed the words ‘Fuck off’ at her through mosquito netting.