by Lucy Lord
‘Yeah, sure.’ Poppy gave Bella a look that seemed to say, No, I’m none the wiser, either, delved into her handbag and handed the phone to Lars.
‘iPhone, huh?’
‘Yup. Oh, come on, Lars, this is hardly the time for a Steve Jobs eulogy.’
Lars laughed. ‘No, but I think Damian has an iPhone also, huh?’
Poppy looked up at him, intrigued.
‘Yup. Why, you inscrutable Viking?’
‘Do you think he will have turned off his GPS?’
‘Well, he’s turned his phone off, but … no, he probably doesn’t even know what his GPS is.’
‘Him and me both,’ said Bella. ‘What is GPS, and do I have it?’
‘What phone do you have?’ Lars asked, smiling.
‘An iPhone, of course!’ Bella was glad she’d upgraded from her crappy old Nokia a few months ago; she could be one of the cool gang now.
‘Well, then you do have it.’ Lars smiled at her again and turned to Poppy. ‘I know that Damian has not turned off his GPS. How do I know? Because I, also, have an iPhone. When he told me that he was planning to “find himself” on the road, I – uh – took the opportunity to change the settings on his phone …’
‘You did what?’ Poppy was looking at him in amazement.
‘Yes, I took my chance when I went to fetch it from the Gansevoort; I figured it may be useful. Now, whenever he turns his phone on, I can see, on my phone, where he is … GoogleMaps …’
Poppy and Bella looked at each other, grinning broadly.
Lars continued, ‘It is true that most of the time he keeps his phone switched off, but he has been turning it on two or three times every day …’
‘So you know where he is?’ Poppy asked, excitedly.
‘I sure do know, kiddo, and it looks like you were right.’ Lars smiled at her. ‘So far – Washington, DC, Pittsburgh, Columbus – I’d say he was halfway to Indianapolis now …’
‘Yessss!’ Poppy slammed her hand triumphantly down onto the sticky plastic-topped table. ‘Didn’t I tell you I knew my husband?’ This was directed at Bella.
‘Yeah, well, I’m more inclined to believe in the wonders of modern technology than one of your mad hunches, but— bloody hell, Lars, this is absolutely brilliant.’
‘My friend Damian has very strange tastes,’ mused Lars.
‘Oh, cheers,’ said Poppy.
‘No, no, I did not mean like that. But this route through the Midwest, it is probably the most boring part of the United States. If he had taken the proper route, down through the Great Lakes, then we should have seen some spectacular countryside …’
‘That’s hardly the point, is it?’ Poppy said mock-sternly, before bursting into peals of laughter. ‘Oh, Lars, I could kiss you!’ she added, and then promptly did, jumping to her dainty little feet and running round to the other side of the table to fling her arms around Lars and plant a gigantic smacker on his cheek. Was it Bella’s imagination, or was Lars blushing?
‘Don’t you both see?’ said Poppy, her eyes shining. ‘This means he’s alive. As long as he’s still moving, it means he hasn’t killed himself (or anybody else, touch wood) with his mad wino behaviour. Oh, God, this changes everything!’
And it had. From then on, the mood had lightened considerably: Poppy’s face had lost its pinched, drawn look, and all three of them were treating the road trip as far more of a holiday than would otherwise have been possible.
It was just a pity the scenery hadn’t been more spectacular, thought Bella as she looked out at the bleak landscape beyond her window. Aside from Washington, DC, the cities they had passed through had been disappointingly homogenous, all gleaming skyscrapers and vast superhighways; or, in the case of the smaller ‘cities’, four or five shabby-looking skyscrapers in the downtown area that gave them their city status. Admittedly, they hadn’t stayed long enough to explore anywhere properly – it was quite possible that each city had its picturesque old quarters, and that she was being deeply offensive by tarring them all with the same brush.
But she had always associated St Louis, for example, with the Judy Garland film Meet me in St Louis, Kansas City with Oklahoma, and indeed Kansas itself with The Wizard of Oz (she had cried at all of them). She knew she was being silly – of course the greatest power in the Western world was hardly going to be trapped in a 1940s Hollywood timewarp – but the skyscrapers and enormous shopping malls that were almost all they’d encountered so far were pretty bloody depressing.
The best bit had been the autumn colours between NY and DC. Bella had gazed out of the back window, utterly enraptured by the extraordinarily vibrant golds, rusts, topazes and corals bringing the countryside alive in a glorious fiery blaze. But it was the reds that had differentiated this autumnal landscape from any she had seen before: proper vermilions, scarlets, crimsons, poppies – she had even seen one tree whose leaves had turned Schiaparelli pink. Bella smiled to herself: she did get carried away when it came to colours. She would definitely be returning to New York State some autumn in the future, with both Andy and her easel.
The upside to the relative lack of external stimulus was that there had been little else for the three of them to do but bond. And bond they had. Poppy had poured her heart out about how difficult it was trying to make a success of her new career against a backdrop of constant, unsettling resentment from her husband. Bella had told them how guilty she felt about not being ecstatically happy all the time – after all, she had both the man and the profession of her dreams; she had no right to be feeling bored, lonely and restless. Lars, in turn, had wiped away a tear as he described his feelings of complete worthlessness at losing his girlfriend as an immediate consequence of losing his job. Sensitive soul that he was, he had honestly thought that the Romanian stunner had loved him for himself.
And they had all reassured one another that, no, they were not going mad, yes, they were allowed to feel the way they did and, yes, they were very much appreciated by the other two people in the car. Therapy had nothing on it.
So, despite the skyscrapers and shopping malls, and despite Poppy’s obvious anxiety about Damian, they had had a pretty good few days. Lars had an apparently inexhaustible supply of road-trip songs on his iPod, which they had played over and over, singing along at the tops of their voices. They had gossiped (‘Honestly, Belles, you won’t believe the change in Ben,’ was a recurrent theme), bitched, and laughed till they cried at Poppy’s impersonations of some of the characters they’d met en route.
And one of their stopovers had been hilarious. Bella smiled to herself again as she recalled Indianapolis.
‘This is where it says he was two nights ago,’ said Lars, looking at his iPhone, as they walked into the bar at nearly six in the afternoon. It was, at such an early hour, almost empty, but still, unmistakeably, a …
‘… a gay bar?’ Poppy’s eyes were wide and horrified. ‘OK, I know he’s been a bit pissed off with me recently, but I haven’t put him off women completely, have I?’
‘Oh, no, Pops, don’t worry, Damian’s just open-minded about stuff, that’s all,’ said Bella, trying to reassure her, though the same thought had crossed her mind. ‘We go to gay bars all the time in London.’
‘Yeah, I know. But we go together, or with our gay mates. It looks as if he came in here on his own. He wasn’t trying to pick up men, was he? Was he?’
Poppy looked as if she was about to cry.
Lars started to laugh, and pointed at a poster on the bare brick wall, advertising all the events that week. ‘No, Poppy, I don’t think he was. Check out Wednesday.’ Today was Friday.
They all looked at the poster, and saw written, in flamboyant pink and mauve lettering: WEDNESDAY – KARAOKE NIGHT!
‘I’m sorry,’ chuckled Lars. ‘I think I gave him the taste for it.’
‘Well, at least you didn’t give him the taste for gay sex … I hope.’ Poppy giggled, relieved.
An enormously fat black man, wearing a woman’s business sui
t, heavy eye make-up, reddish-brown lipstick, a shoulder-length auburn wig and glasses that reminded Bella of Andy’s, though with slightly narrower rims, came over to their table.
‘Hey!’
‘Hey!’ they chorused back.
‘You not from round here?’
‘No, we’re from England,’ said Bella. ‘Well, at least I am, but Lars is from Sweden, and Poppy lives—’
‘Oh, just shut up, Belles,’ said Poppy impatiently. ‘We’re trying to find my husband, and we think he might have been here a couple of nights ago.’
She took the photo out of her wallet, and the bizarrely dressed tranny started to laugh.
‘Oh, the handsome English dude. Yeah, yeah, he was cool. Difficult to take the mike away from him. He sang—’
‘—“Born to be Wild”?’ asked Lars.
‘How d’ya guess? And “Sweet Home Alabama”, and some old Carpenters hits, and his Elton John was just … beyond compare …’
‘Jesus Christ, maybe he has gone gay,’ said Poppy. Then, realizing where she was, added, ‘Oh, shit, no offence.’
‘It’s OK, beautiful, your husband hasn’t “gone gay”. It’s not something that just happens overnight, you know.’
‘Oh, fuck, God, yes, I’m so sorry,’ Poppy repeated, mortified.
‘He looked sad, but the singing helped, I think.’ The tranny smiled at her, ignoring the last apology. ‘Hey, why don’t you guys stick around? It should be crazy in here tonight.’
‘Why?’ asked Bella, intrigued by the nice man, even if he did look decidedly weird (and strangely familiar) in his specs and wig.
‘Sarah Palin lookalike night!’
As he said it, around forty men, of vastly differing shapes, sizes and colours, but mostly wearing auburn wigs and glasses pretty similar to the ones the tranny was wearing, started to troop into the cavernous room. Not a single one of them looked like Sarah Palin, but the overall effect was extremely funny.
‘Hey, Hockey Mom!’ One of them high-fived another, who was wearing a T-shirt over a pair of fake tits, emblazoned with the words OUR ALLIES IN NORTH KOREA.
‘It’s easy for me to keep an eye on Russia, from Alaska,’ somebody else was saying.
‘I have many gay friends, but I do think that homosexuality is an abomination,’ a very camp voice was drawling from another corner of the room.
Poppy, Bella and Lars looked at one another, smiling. This did look as if it could be a fun evening, after all.
‘Can we order some drinks? Do you have a menu?’ Lars asked the fat black tranny, who was still standing by their table.
‘Sure thing, Swedish man. Boy, are you cute.’ Lars smiled bravely back. ‘But we are only serving one drink tonight, and it is frozen—’
‘Do you call it “Alaskan Bitch”?’ Poppy giggled.
‘Jeez, that is a great name!’ He roared with laughter, and shouted over to the bar, ‘Hey, double pitchers of Alaskan Bitch on the house for my new friends over here.’
After a couple of pitchers of weird, sweet, icy, and very potent stuff, Bella, Poppy and Lars had started to make some more new friends.
‘Heeyyyy,’ said one of them, looking at Bella closely. ‘Try these on.’ He handed her his Sarah Palin specs, and as soon as Bella had donned them, the entire table erupted into laughter.
‘Omigod, omigod, omigod, she wins, without even trying,’ said one of their new friends. ‘Give her your wig, Grant.’
Grant ran behind Bella, twisted her hair up, took off his auburn chignon wig, and plonked it on top of her head.
‘Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, I can’t believe it,’ spluttered Poppy. ‘You are the spitting bloody image! All you need is some heavy lip-liner and your own mothers couldn’t tell you apart!’
‘I am nothing like Sarah Palin,’ said Bella, with as much dignity as she could muster after the quantity of Alaskan Bitch she’d just consumed.
‘There is only a passing resemblance,’ said Lars, trying to be chivalrous, as ever, but giggling madly. ‘You, of course, are younger, and much more beautiful, but I think that maybe you share something in the eyes and the cheekbones …’
‘Oh, just give me a mirror, somebody, please?’
One of the local Sarah Palins (small, blond and not very convincing) took a compact out of his neat little handbag and showed Bella her reflection.
‘Noooooo!’ she wailed, instantly whipping the wig and glasses off. ‘Nooooo!’
‘Don’t worry, Belles, it’s not your face, it’s more your innate bigotry, xenophobia and stupidity that I think are the real comparison.’ Poppy was almost beside herself with mirth now. ‘You should show Andy what you look like in his glasses. You could do Democrat/Republican role-play sex games.’
‘I am never showing Andy what I look like in his glasses.’ Bella was laughing too now. ‘And if anything ever goes wrong with my eyes, it’ll be contacts all the way.’
After much persuasion (and another pitcher of Alaskan Bitch), Bella put the wig and glasses back on, and let Poppy make her face up, for the judging of the competition. She won hands down. As she received her prize – a sweatshirt with HOCKEY MOM written across the front, she saw that Poppy was taking photo after photo on her phone.
‘If you ever show those to anybody, I’ll kill you.’
‘They’re all going on Facebook tomorrow.’
‘Don’t you bloody dare! Pleeeease, Pops? Can you imagine the piss-taking I’d get from Mark? Or just about everybody we know, for that matter!’
‘Oh, all right then. Just as you’ve been the best friend ever, coming over here for me, I’ll delete them all. But can we just have one more look?’
‘And I, also?’ Lars enquired mildly.
They looked at all the photos again, laughing their tits off, until Poppy, true to her word, pressed delete.
‘I’ll have you know that a woman in Paris told me I was très, très jolie,’ said Bella haughtily.
‘You obviously weren’t wearing your glasses then. Or maybe she wasn’t!’ Poppy giggled.
‘You are such a fucking bitch.’ Bella laughed.
‘I know. But you know you love me really.’
So that had been a good night. But then there was the interminable drive through Kansas.
‘It says here that Dalhart, in the panhandle of Texas, was the centre of the dustbowl of the Great Recession of the 1930s, and still suffers from both poverty and dust storms,’ said Poppy from the passenger seat.
‘Oh, fabulous, another uplifting location,’ said Bella.
‘Hey, hey, we made it through Kansas without encountering a tornado.’ Lars laughed. ‘You should count yourselves lucky, ladies.’
‘D’you mind if I have a look at your phone, to see if Damian’s moved again?’ Poppy asked Lars for the second time that hour. Lars caught Bella’s eye in the rear-view mirror.
‘Sure, help yourself.’
According to Lars’s phone tracker, Damian had now been in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for two days. The tracker was proving absolutely invaluable. (Of course, it only showed the places where he had actually switched his phone on, which had read, pretty much consistently: road, motel, bar, motel, road, bar. The reason he had been switching it on had been to update Simon Snell, his best man, about his road trip; there was no love lost between Simon and Poppy, so he knew he was on safe ground there.)
There had been some movement around Albuquerque, so Poppy was reassured that he was still alive, but he didn’t appear to be in any hurry to get back on the road, which was great as far as she was concerned. Even though they had been gaining ground on him daily, he still remained that one elusive step ahead of them. Traffic permitting, Albuquerque was only a four-hour drive from Dalhart – if he’d only stay put, they could be with him by tomorrow lunchtime.
‘Oooh, he switched his phone on twenty-seven minutes ago, and he’s still there,’ Poppy said a minute or so later. ‘Yippee!’
‘Same bar?’ asked Bella.
‘Yup, looks like it �
�� silly drunken sod.’
‘So he will not be going anywhere tonight. I do not blame him for staying in Albuquerque,’ said Lars. ‘It’s a helluva lot nicer than anywhere we’ve passed through the last few days …’
‘How on earth do you know these things? Is there anywhere you haven’t been?’ Bella laughed. ‘Whatever – I’m all for experiencing some nicer places!’
‘But first, my friend, there is Dalhart.’
The reason Damian hadn’t yet left Albuquerque was that he was having too much fun being drunk and maudlin every waking hour to want to hit the road again. He’d found a bar, imaginatively called La Hacienda, with a particularly chatty and accommodating barman, and had made several new friends in the other old soaks who frequented the place.
He had to admit that he had probably got it wrong, route-wise – the only two stretches of open road that had fired his imagination had been New York to Washington, DC, and Dalhart to Albuquerque – but he had drowned his sorrows pretty much every night in a new bar, in a new town, before hitting the road again the following morning, feeling like shit. It had then occurred to him that there was nothing stopping him from staying in Albuquerque for a few more days. It was a pleasant enough, New Agey kind of place, with a relaxed vibe and mild climate, even at the beginning of November. Apart from anything else, he was nearly at the end of his journey, and wasn’t sure what he was going to do once it had finished.
He was a stubborn bugger, as Poppy put it, and didn’t relish going back to New York with his tail between his legs, but he was starting to think that maybe he’d acted a little rashly, storming off the way he had. The hours of driving along monotonous Midwestern roads had given him rather more time for introspection than he’d have liked – which was ironic, considering the purpose of the journey had been to ‘find himself’.
Far more pleasant to hang out in this friendly, accommodating bar, with its friendly, accommodating barman, a little while longer.
La Hacienda was what might kindly be termed a dive. But as dives went it was pretty jolly, with a mixed Hispanic and Irish clientele, plastic cacti lined up on the windowsills, sawdust on the floor and a slightly unnerving combination of jaunty mariachi music and equally jaunty Irish jigs playing from an ancient CD player behind the bar. It also boasted an impressive array of bourbons and tequilas (through which Damian was steadily working his way). It was open twenty-four hours a day, but all the windows were blacked out, so unwelcome daylight never intruded.