by Stephen May
‘I’m the best,’ says Jeremy. ‘The best in Buena Vista anyway. And, Mary, you know most people here don’t call me Jeremy any more. Here I’m Jez.’
‘Boss name.’
‘Just wanted to be a bit, you know, less uptown.’
There’s a pause, then Mary asks, ‘You got a girl, uh, Jez?’
‘No,’ says Jez. ‘No girl.’ He’s telling no one about Lorna. The girl he murders nightly before he drinks himself to sleep. The girl who makes him cry when he hears sad songs on the goddamn radio.
‘I spoil you for anyone else, huh?’ Mary’s golden pigtails quiver. She likes this idea. Jez doesn’t say anything. He lets her know that the talking is over because the work is starting. The business.
He begins. Jesus gasps and moans and the blood begins to appear on his back, a thin trail of dots and dashes as the needle makes its careful, steady, repeated loops and curls. Its graceful swoops and dips. Its figure-skater’s dance. Jesus murmurs softly. Still, she can’t make out what he’s saying.
‘See,’ says Mary. ‘See. It’s not that bad.’
Jez pauses a moment. Looks up at Mary’s sweatshirt.
‘What?’ says Mary.
‘Just getting it all fixed in my mind.’
He bends to his task again.
In eight hours’ time Jesus’s back will be covered in the same shouting red swirling Superdry logo as is on the faded purple of Mary’s cheap cotton top. A punishment and an inspiration all at the same time. She hopes it will spur him on. Jesus has greatness in him somewhere, she knows that. All she has to do is find the way to bring it out. As she looks at his ass, she wonders about pegging. She’s never done that. She wonders how it would feel. If Jesus would be game for that. She could talk him into it anyway. Easy.
Jesus is still murmuring, but louder now.
‘What? What is it?’
‘He’s saying he loves you,’ says Jeremy. Jez. He says it deadpan, without pausing in his task, without taking his eyes from Jesus’s back with its flexing muscle, with its vivid quivering spots of blood. Like ladybugs, thinks Mary. Like especially bright and beautiful ladybugs. She puts her thumb on one swelling scarlet oval. Presses firmly. Imagines the bug squished.
‘He’s saying that he loves you, over and over and over.’
‘Of course he loves me,’ says Mary. ‘Why wouldn’t he?’
‘Crybaby though, ain’t he?’ says Jez.
And it’s true, Jesus is crying. He’s crying not just from the pain of the tattoo or because he is breaking his momma’s heart by getting one. And he’s not crying because he’s tied to a bench buckass naked. He’s crying because he loves a girl and will do anything for her. He knows now that he will go to hell for Mary. Nothing he won’t do for her. And he knows now there’s nothing she won’t do for him. They’re fucked now, both of them, because this is a real love like in the movies.
Of course he’s crying.
Fifty-two
LORNA
‘The cheek of you people,’ says Lorna. It turns out the favour the tax guys want is for Lorna, Megan and Linwood to ignore the fact that the two of them have broken into a house without a warrant. They are, they say, in the middle of an important investigation and yes, they’ve had to cut corners and should have applied for the necessary permissions from judges – which they would have got – but they are convinced that major crimes are being committed and, in the aftermath of a serious act of violence carried out against them personally, have simply tried to expedite proceedings.
Lorna tells them to fuck right off. She tells them she’ll be making a complaint to all the relevant authorities.
The anxious-looking English tax guy shakes his head sadly, while the bright-eyed American pensioner-lady tax woman tries to explain that this’ll be unfortunate because it will certainly mean the end of the case and that will mean a person of interest, someone who they believed might be a major player in various international frauds, escaping justice.
Megan asks what their evidence is. The lady says she can’t say. Megan says well, they can’t help then, and the woman actually growls.
‘Look at this place,’ she says. ‘No one who can buy a place like this has gotten their money honestly.’
‘So that’s your evidence? He lives in a big house. He must be a crook.’
The Johnny English speaks up in his soft, tired voice. ‘We can tell you there have been a number of recent unusual patterns of funds transfers from Mr Knox’s accounts. Large sums given to charities, as well as private individuals. In our experience philanthropy on this scale is most often associated with criminal endeavours.’
‘Money laundering,’ says the old lady, just in case they hadn’t got it.
There is a sudden flash. Linwood has taken a picture of the tax people on his phone. The tax people blink.
‘I am right now sending this photo to my website. I have eleven thousand followers there. I get twelve thousand hits a day. If you proceed with this investigation, this picture of government agents violating the basic right to privacy of a citizen will be filed as part of a suit against you personally and against the organisations you represent. Mr Knox’s lawyers – and I am sure they will be good ones – are bound to sue for punitive damages that could run into the tens of millions of dollars. So I would get along if I were you and count yourselves fortunate that you don’t get a fistfulla hot lead in yo lilywhite punk asses.’
The tax people say nothing else, they simply leave.
‘And please close the door on your way out,’ calls Linwood as they disappear down the long furlong of the hallway.
‘Go screw yourself,’ calls back the old lady, but seconds later they hear the door slam anyway.
Megan says, ‘Go Linwood! Go Linwood!’
Lorna says, ‘Did you actually say a fistfulla hot lead in yo lilywhite punk asses? Please.’
Linwood shrugs. ‘Sounds better when I say it. But I was just giving ’em what they expect from a big black dude. And I hate those guys. You know, a citizen has the right to get rich without the Feds getting all forensic on him.’
Megan says, ‘Funny, but Lorna doesn’t actually believe that. Lorna thinks that everyone should be paid the same. Rock stars and movie stars and sports stars should be on the government pay roll and paid a wage like teachers or nurses.’
‘No, that’s not right,’ says Lorna. Megan and Linwood look at her expectantly. ‘No. In Lornaworld, parasites like rock stars and movie stars would get far, far less than nurses.’
‘And Lorna has actually said, and I quote, “all really nice houses are monuments to thieves”. Which is pretty much what the IRS lady said, isn’t it?’
‘When did I say that?’
‘When we had John and Amelia round for dinner.’
‘Really? Well, I’m sure it’s a line I nicked from somewhere. Sounds too clever for me. It’s true though.’
Linwood stands up. He looks genuinely angry. ‘Commie bullshit is what that is.’
Lorna thinks her imagined three-way idyll is probably not a goer now. Sounds like Linwood wouldn’t fuck a Red.
‘And what’s wrong with communism?’ she says, and it’s worth it just to see the way Linwood’s eyes almost bug right out of his head.
Megan laughs. ‘OK, Ms Trotsky, so what’s with stopping this federal investigation?’
Lorna grins. ‘He’s my dad. Family. Plus, all coppers are bastards. Even the tax police. Plus, some of the unusual patterns of funds transfers were to me. And I have plans for that money.’
‘Oh yeah?’ says Megan.
‘Yeah,’ says Lorna, though she hadn’t yet, but she soon would have. Spending money isn’t hard.
She stands up, stretches. She feels good, fit. She feels like dancing. She catches sight of herself in the mirror above the fireplace. In this gentle lamplight, she looks kind of amazing actually. Really alive. She feels great, looks great. This is clearly one of those moments to savour. She sort of wishes Jez could see her now. She winks at
herself. She is a bad, bad girl. And she is, she decides, going to get badder. She hears Megan cough, and so she turns and pokes her tongue out at her. She doesn’t let you get away with anything that lass. Thank fuck.
‘Who’s for a nice cup of tea?’ she says.
‘Ooh, lovely,’ says Megan. ‘That would be absolutely fantastic.’ And they smile at each other.
Fifty-three
NICKY
I still don’t know what to think about Catherine and her insane James Bond, licensed to kill-type stories.
But I do know that this Catherine has the ability to assassinate sleep. I wonder if maybe I will never sleep again. Not properly. No one under sentence of death sleeps easily.
For something to do I get up, put the Providence into drive and get it to eat up the remaining miles to Vegas. And as we steadily chew those miles we pass a couple sweating away on a tandem. I envy them. The harmony you need in your relationship to take a long distance nighttime tandem ride through the desert. I wonder if we, Sarah and I, own one – and if we do where it’s kept – and from there it’s quite natural to find myself thinking again about cycling proficiency.
That course a lifetime ago ran every Tuesday lunchtime for twelve whole weeks and it was run by real policemen. Two of them. Two coppers who, instead of catching rapists, burglars and murderers, were teaching the highway code and bicycle etiquette to ten year olds. That’s not a proper job for a grown-up is it? Not for any grown-up never mind a copper. Would Soraya or Claudette have been fobbed off with being put on cycling-proficiency detail? I think we all know the answer to that. The kindest explanation is that the policemen were recovering from nervous breakdowns. Another, somewhat less kind, is that they were under suspicion for corruption or incompetence.
And I suddenly realise why I failed. It was because I’d had a Raleigh Chopper, bought for me by my dad who always loved novelty, and the very look of it annoyed these policemen who must have been looking for ways to make themselves feel like men again.
It was nothing to do with my lack of finesse with the hand signals. It was the spite of men in authority. So many of the world’s problems come down to that.
And then I spend the rest of the night heading towards the future. And out of the steady lulling thrum of the engine a new plan comes to me. A great plan actually. But then it is morning. Viva Las Vegas. Hurray for the meadows. The communities of Paradise and Enterprise. A kind of heaven. A haven anyway. The Strip.
The Strip where, in the nervy, giddy afternoon, we win a fortune on the slot machines. Really. Thousands of dollars. Funny, huh?
Playing the machines is not something Sarah or I would do normally, but we are light-hearted because we have been officially and properly married. Twice. And our unions have been blessed by no lesser authorities than both Elvis Presley and James Brown. The first pastor urged us not to be cruel to a heart that’s true, and the second urged us to get on the scene, like a sex machine – and both of these are probably good pieces of advice for newlyweds.
Our rings are from Sterlings. The American H. Samuel. And our witnesses at both weddings are a couple of guys collecting soda cans for recycling. You could say it’s not a big affair. It is not a fairy tale. But better than our first wedding.
And afterwards we win the cash. Actually it is Scarlett who wins the money. I lift up our own sweet little one-arm bandit and she pulls the fateful lever that sends a tsunami of cash spilling out of the tray and onto the floor. It’s not one of the really, really big jackpots. It’s just one of the modest ten thousand dollar wins, but it’s still enough to have the manager beetle over to have his photo taken presenting us with a bottle of bubbly.
And Sarah tells me about giving cash away to the homeless.
‘Five hundred dollars.’ There’s wonder in her voice and I think about the hundreds of thousands I was giving away at the same time. The evidence from our little experiment is that it works. Giving money away works. Or maybe it’s just another form of shopping. Retail therapy. Buying stuff to make yourself feel good. I hope the Surrey roofer is still around to get his kidney.
I have an idea.
‘Sarah, let’s leave this money on a street corner. And then let’s go and find somewhere that will let us dance.’
‘That is a brilliant idea, Nicky. Let’s do that.’
And I raise my eyebrows and Sarah laughs and says, ‘Don’t I always say yes?’
And this is true. And it’s only occurring to me now that with every idea I’ve ever had, Sarah has said yes to it. And not just to the good ones. She’s pointed out practical problems, but then she’s suggested solutions. She’s made good ideas better ones. She’s made bad ideas feasible ones. She’s always up for stuff, and I think I’d forgotten that somehow.
And I feel a sudden flush of shame, because when Sarah suggests something I think my instinctive reaction is to say no, to put roadblocks and barricades in the way.
And in her arms Scarlett pipes up, ‘Yay! Dancing!’
‘We have to do something about Scarlett,’ I say suddenly, because the moment is right.
She’s ahead of me, of course. ‘Are you suggesting we try rules, boundaries, bedtimes, saying no, and things like that?’
‘Yes. Yes. I think I am.’
‘It’ll be hard work, after all this time.’
‘She deserves the best though, doesn’t she? She deserves the best kind of love.’
‘Even though she seemed to do so well on the second-best kind?’
And I wonder for a moment where Mary is, whether she’s still with Jesus. Maybe her braces and her ukuleles have ended up looking after the little emperors of the Chinese ambassador, the princelings of a Saudi sheikh, the czars and czarinas of Russian oligarchs. Good luck to her, good luck to them. I can’t bring myself to hate her.
But we agree. Sarah says yes to saying no. And then, because in Vegas you can find anything as long as it’s not real, we find a hotel where not only Elvis, not only James Brown, but Michael Jackson, Dolly Parton, Tina Turner, The Beatles and The Stones are all playing. It’s like a tribute Live Aid. A tribute Woodstock. And they’re all good. All better than the real thing, or very nearly, because they are all young and enthusiastic and hungry. And the real thing is so rarely this.
Scarlett shows us just how dynamic her equinus can be. She wears us both out with full-on boogaloo bopping. She’s the dancing queen.
And when, later, we tell our sleepy girl about a new world of bedtimes and earning screen time and the rationing of that crazy evil bastard Spongebob, she seems relieved. At least, that’s my interpretation. Sarah thinks she’s just puzzled.
‘And Sarah, if anything happens to me, you’ve got to promise to carry on with this little experiment in child rearing. As a tribute to me. A memorial thingy.’
‘Nothing’s going to happen to you.’
‘No, but if it does. You got to promise.’
‘OK.’
‘Really. Promise.’
‘Blimey.’ She’s on the verge of getting irritated now, I can tell. ‘I promise that I will raise our precious daughter Scarlett according to the principles laid down by Mr Knox né Fisher. There will be regular healthy meals, plenty of exercise, and screen time and sweets will be kept to a minimum. There will be cabbage. And she’ll go to bed early and get up early. And her homework will be closely monitored. Also, I won’t encourage the taking of crystal meth. Not on school nights anyway.’
I make the effort to grin. But the important thing is she’s done it now. If, or when, Catherine’s ridiculous 007 death-dart thing kicks in, Sarah will remember this conversation and she keeps her promises. Sarah always, always, does what she says she’ll do. It’s why employers love her, it’s why people love her.
And we talk about our first wedding. The real wedding if you like, and we agree that it was fine. Good, if not outstanding. Nothing wrong with it – we don’t mention the sadness of it – but we agree that we prefer this one. And I tell Sarah something I’ve actually bee
n too ashamed to mention until now. Something about my stag night.
‘Go on. I’m not easily shocked,’ she says. I can tell from the way she’s biting her lip that she thinks this is going to be a tawdry story of strippers and lap dances and a last night of freedom flings. And it’s much worse than that.
I take a breath and I tell her about Russell and I burning a fifty-pound note apiece in front of a Big Issue seller. And how we would have burned more if a passing hen party hadn’t threatened to put us both in hospital. And, now that I think about it, it wasn’t even Russell’s money. My money and I think it might have been my idea. What a wanker, eh?
‘I think you’re in the clear now, Pog,’ she says. ‘You’ve paid your debt. Done your time.’
And we put Scarlett to bed at eight – she’s confused but compliant – and we pop in when she cries for us the first time. And the second time we leave her yelling for five minutes and then pop into her room, grin and say hi and then leave again. And then we leave her yelling for ten minutes. And then pop in again. We don’t switch the light on, we don’t pick her up, we don’t sing to her, or read to her. We don’t beg her. We don’t threaten to throw her out of the window.
And then, according to our new routine, we have to leave her yelling for twenty minutes. Have you ever tried to listen to a child screaming for twenty minutes and not done anything about it? We turn the telly up – live wheelchair basketball from Kiev – but it’s obviously not loud enough to drown her out. You’d need a major PA system to do that.
After seventeen minutes Sarah cracks.
‘I can’t do this.’ And she gets up, which is when Scarlett stops screaming suddenly. So suddenly, that we both think something terrible has happened and we are both up and across to her room and yanking open the door. It’s an ecstasy of fluster. I snap on the light. She raises her head from the pillow. She’s red-faced, her eyes raw with tears. Blistered with ignored sorrows. But she’s also quite clearly just been woken up. She hasn’t swallowed her tongue, or screamed herself into a stroke or a coma. She hasn’t been stolen by Guatemalan blackmailers. Or whatever it was we thought might have happened.