Kristina was confused. Was this a stop off for a drink? No one seemed to be heading toward the bar, but if they weren’t here for that, then what could it be? Or were they expecting her to step up? The idea didn’t bother her—it was clear these people wouldn’t have money for Midtown prices—but wasn’t anyone going to say anything, or even look hopefully at her? It’d been a long time since Kristina felt gauche (except in Catherine Warren’s company), but she didn’t understand the rules or what was supposed to happen next. It reminded her of being an adolescent, or even younger—of being young enough to long to fit in, desperate to have a friend who’d show you the way and always have your back.
She noticed the plump girl was standing at the corner of the bar, behind a pair of women in business suits perched on stools with big glasses of wine. One was talking hard and fast. The other was listening intently.
The girl was watching them with the focus of a cat waiting for the mouse to stay still …
Then her hand whipped out like a frog tongue smacking on a fly. She grabbed the glass of the nearest woman, took a sip, and had it back on the counter within three seconds.
Kristina blinked.
Her male friend then did the same thing, to the other glass. He was even faster. Both only took sips.
The girl looked at Kris and grinned, then nodded her head toward the drink. Dare ya.
Kristina glanced at Lizzie, a pocket of calm in the crowd. “I wouldn’t,” Lizzie said. “It’s not a game everyone can play.”
The plump girl’s head was still cocked with the same expression on her face, however.
Knowing it was dumb and risky, Kristina grabbed the drink, took a sip, and had it back on the counter before its owner looked back. The girl and her boyfriend laughed delightedly, clapping their hands.
A moment later the woman on the stool grabbed a mouthful of her wine, still listening to her companion, no idea of what had just happened—and apparently not noticing the girl standing next to her even though she was clapping and cheering.
Kristina realized the other Angels were grinning at her, too, delighted, as if she’d passed some kind of test. Even Lizzie smiled, though she rolled her eyes.
Then they all seemed to be leaving, slipping through the crowds toward the door like fish swimming against the current. Kristina followed, having a much harder time of it.
At the door she glanced back at the woman still perched on her stool at the bar, drinking her depleted wine. She realized that if you could do something that simple—if you could learn to always be standing where people weren’t looking, and pick your moments so they didn’t notice you—then there were a lot of gaps between people, and holes, in the city.
There was a whole world to explore, and to live, in the spaces in between.
Another bar, then a couple of restaurants, grabbing a sip here and a gulp there, even a mouthful of someone’s neglected tapas. They passed a few stores and Kristina noticed some of the Angels looking in with a professional eye, as if with a mission in mind … but nobody did anything except for one time when an Angel slipped into a second-hand record place. Kristina saw the way he moved between the customers flicking through cases of retro vinyl, how he clocked shopping bags left on the floor and handbags hanging open off people’s shoulders. The Angel did nothing but look, however, before floating back out toward the street. As far as Kris could tell, no one had noticed that he had been in the store at all.
By then it was full dark and something had begun to change about the quality of the streetlights or the relationship between the Angels and the normal citizens they moved among. It was like tipping over from being drunk to very drunk, or the point where recreational drugs that had so far been supporting an evening of good cheer abruptly gained the upper hand and started leading you rather than the other way around.
Quite a few covert mouthfuls of wine had been consumed by that time, but that wasn’t it. Kristina felt less clumsy, rather than more so, and she stopped finding it hard to follow the Angels along the streets. It felt as if she’d started to hit the same rhythm they were following, as if she’d got the knack of stepping away at the correct time and being where people were not looking, breathing out when everyone else on the street—all the normal people, she caught herself thinking—were breathing in. The adaptation didn’t happen all at once. It was more as if the tracks they’d been following started to wend closer and closer. She’d lose the knack for a moment and bash into someone, but then be right back in the groove.
Then the Angels all started running.
At first Kris thought they must be must be running away from someone, that they’d been spotted stealing drinks in the last bar. Then she realized this was merely her own sense of guilt, and that the Angels were instead running with a kind of joy, or glee.
They ran out of the road and down Eighth Avenue, and it seemed for a time that there were more of them than there had been before, many more. The newcomers weren’t dressed in black and rich colors, however, so it was hard to be sure … but there seemed to be other people running alongside them, or walking fast, or waving as they went by. People on street corners and at bus stops. People walking by. People whom you’d never look at twice when you passed. Background people, who for once had turned to look in your direction, revealing themselves not just to be a texture but living things after all.
Animals, too, dogs and cats and a weirdly large fox, and a little girl whose head seemed far too small …
Then it was back to the group in black again, and Kristina—slowing rapidly, by now out of breath—limped after Lizzie as she ducked off the avenue and onto a residential street. The Angels stopped too, laughing and high-fiving one another, as Kris bent over, leaning against the fence until she’d gotten her breath back and lost most of the spots before her eyes. None of the others seemed at all out of breath. Either they were a lot fitter than she was, or …
“Oh, look,” one of them said quietly—a short, squat guy who’d been on the periphery of the group until now. He was pointing across the street. “Looky there.”
Everyone turned. The road was lined with houses. On one of these, three buildings along from where they stood, the front door hung open. Halfway down the street a man was struggling along with a huge and saggy cardboard box in his arms, toward a car.
“Easy as pie,” the plump girl said.
“Um, friends,” Lizzie said—but the group was already in movement across the street, heading toward the house. Kristina was carried along with them. Part of this was being drawn in their wake. A larger part was not wanting to be left behind.
The Angels ran up the steps in front of the house, but hesitated on the threshold. Though Lizzie had seemed doubtful, when they ceded control to her, she took it.
She glanced across at the man still trudging up the street with his box. Then smiled mischievously.
“Quickly, then,” she said, and they all went inside.
Chapter 42
They swarmed into the hallway. The floor was uncarpeted, bare boards. A similarly unclad staircase led up the left side of the hall to the upper floor. The man who’d cased out the record store went loping straight up it.
A corridor led off to a rear area where a small television played quietly, presumably a kitchen. On the right was a door, and Kristina followed Lizzie and the others through it, scarcely able to believe what was happening, knowing what they should be doing—what she should be doing, most of all—was getting the hell out before the guy came back and found them there.
What on earth would they say? Yes, of course there were more of them than there were of him, and maybe they could push past him and run away, but that didn’t make it okay. This was … a very bad thing to do.
That awareness didn’t stop her from following Lizzie into the middle of the room. The plump girl’s boyfriend went to the window and checked back along the street, presumably acting as lookout—though by the time he saw the guy coming they’d have no chance of leaving without being seen
. So what was the plan—would they just run straight past him, trusting on speed and the fact that the guy would be so freaked out that he wouldn’t give chase? Was there even a plan? Would they retreat, or was she part of some kind of fucked-up home invasion?
A big shabby rug covered most of the floor. On the other side facing the door (and the battered TV next to it) squatted a lumpy sofa. An armchair lurked at one end. Dotted around the walls were unframed posters from gigs and exhibitions of yesteryear, low-rent versions of the artfully positioned look-what-we-do statements regimented over the walls of the homes of people like Catherine Warren thirty blocks downtown. Box-carrying guy evidently didn’t spend too much time worrying about housecleaning. You could see the dust on the empty portions of the shelves from halfway across the room, and the whole place looked like it could do with a wipe and then repainting.
Half of the wall under a back window was taken up with a wooden table. This was strewn with books, pens, and the insides of a laptop computer.
And on the floor underneath it was a child’s toy.
Kristina stared at it, thinking: Oh Christ.
Then there was a noise out in the hallway. Her heart stopped. Someone was coming.
Kristina whirled around, desperately trying to see a way of escape. There was none. She was in the middle of a room with only one exit. Footsteps were coming along the hallway toward the door—and there was absolutely no hope of getting through it without being seen. She had to hide in this room, somewhere, somehow.
She waited a second too long. A woman walked past the doorway carrying a baby over one shoulder.
Kristina froze, knowing she was caught.
But the woman walked past and to the front door instead, where she shouted something down the street—to the hapless guy with the big cardboard box, presumably. The guy who, it turned out, didn’t live alone.
Knowing these extra seconds were all she had, Kristina took four giant steps toward the only thing she could see that might possibly help—the couch—trying to cover the ground as quickly as possible without making a sound. Halfway through the final lunging step her self-possession deserted her and she dived.
She landed with a thump just around the back of the sofa and yanked her long legs up to her chest. She felt indescribable relief to be behind something, but this was nowhere near as loud as the panicky, yammering part of her mind that knew it was a pathetically insufficient hiding place and the only question was whether she was discovered within minutes or seconds.
This dreadful attempt at hiding would only make things worse. If she’d been discovered standing in the room she could have made an attempt to appear demented, some confused lunatic wandered in off the street. No, she didn’t think she could have pulled it off, but to be found hiding behind the sofa was a straight-down-the-line and no-excuses-possible nightmare.
I’m screwed. I’m screwed.
She heard footsteps and this time they didn’t recede back down the corridor but came right into the room.
I’m totally … screwed.
“Lazy asshole,” said a voice—the woman. “Tell him what, five or six hundred times before he does the thing, and then tell him one more time how to do it right? Yes?”
There was a chirrup from the baby, responding to the affectionate tone with no understanding of the content. Her mother sat down on the sofa. She landed heavily, in the middle—bang in front of where Kristina lay, eyes wide. Kris felt the air pushed out of the cushions.
The woman sighed—the heavy, brooding exhale of someone who’s exhausted, tired of sleepless nights and having to tell someone what to do the whole time and just the whole damned unfairness of it all.
Kristina tried not to breathe.
A minute later she heard feet coming up the steps outside the house and the front door closing.
“Yeah, so it fits, okay?” A man’s voice.
“My hero. You rock.”
“Why are you being so pissy?” His voice was louder as he walked into the room. How many more steps before he got the angle to see someone was behind the sofa? Two? One?
“I told you it would fit,” the woman sniped. “I told you when I asked you to do it three months ago.”
“Karen, I’m busy, you know?”
“Too busy to pack up a box of your ex-girlfriend’s old shit after two years and drive it to the crazy bitch’s lair? And busy doing what ? Oh yeah, that’s right—all those YouTube videos don’t watch themselves.”
“I work, remember? I have to leave the house every day and go do shit. To earn money. To pay for stuff.”
“I forgot. Because it’s not like you go on about it the whole time. And baby girl here looks after herself. Me, I’m just sitting on the couch watching TV and jerking off.”
It was the man’s turn to sigh.
Trying to ensure she made not a sound, Kristina wriggled a bit closer to the back of the sofa. Doing this altered the angle of her head. She’d been so focused on saving herself that she hadn’t even given a thought as to what had happened to the others.
She saw that Lizzie was under the table down at the end. She sat Indian style and looked insanely relaxed. The short guy who’d suggested they come in here in the first place was next to her, arms around his knees, also apparently at ease.
Kristina titled her head down, looked past her own fetal shape, and saw the plump girl’s friend was still down at the window overlooking the street, standing behind the curtain. She remembered the friend who’d gone straight upstairs, and was presumably still up there.
So they were all hiding. Sort of. Except …
The plump girl hadn’t moved at all. She was leaning against the wall, arms folded, watching the man and woman and child as if they were a television show.
How can that be? Okay, the man was facing away, in fact had his back to her—and the woman was focused on giving him a hard time.
But there was no way they would fail to notice a stranger standing right there in the middle of the room.
“Okay, well, it’s gone now,” the man said weakly.
His partner was smartly back in the game. “Not so much. Next time I get in the car it’ll be right …”
“By which I meant tomorrow afternoon. I’ll dump it around her place.”
“And have a nice cup of coffee, no doubt. Talk about old times. It’s only polite, right?”
“Karen, the old times were crap. You know that. They ended and thank God. This is a box of old random shit she probably doesn’t even remember she’s missing. You want, I’ll go dump it somewhere and be done with it.”
“You can’t do that. It’s her stuff.”
“Right,” he said exasperatedly. “So you said. So I’ll drop it on the way home from work and we can get back to enjoying our so-called lives. Okay?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Kristina had settled into a horrified holding pattern—keeping herself rigid, half listening to what was being said, wondering how long it could be before they noticed the girl standing and watching them or before the man happened to glance over the sofa to see Kristina lying there. She was jolted out of this by a sound and looked up. The baby was staring right at her.
Ignored while her parents thrashed over the same old ground, the baby had pulled itself higher on her mother’s shoulder—enough to see over the back of the sofa. She was now staring down at what she’d found on the other side.
She blinked. Somewhere, deep in her tiny, unformed mind, a flag had gone up. The baby knew the woman who was holding her. It knew the man. But who was this other person? Who was this tall, skinny person behind the thing her mother was sitting on? The baby didn’t know, but she sensed from the deep reaches of its instinct that unknown big people in the cave was not a good thing.
Her face scrunched up. She started to cry. Kristina stared at her, aghast, not knowing whether to smile or try to turn her face away or what.
“Great,” the woman said. “Now she’s off again.”
“Here, let me,” t
he man said.
The woman stood. “Don’t bother.”
“Climb off the fucking ledge, okay? Give her to me.”
“Okay, be my guest.”
Please don’t turn around, Kristina prayed. Please … just don’t turn around.
After a moment the baby’s cries started to wind down. “There you go,” the man said to his child, quiet love in his voice. “It’s all okay. There you go.”
“How do you even do that?” the woman muttered with grudging admiration.
“She senses a masterful male.”
“What—through the walls, in some other house?”
“Ha-ha.”
There was silence, then the sound of a kiss. A sigh, and the woman spoke again, more softly. “At least you’re not an asshole all the time.”
“Whereas you are a twenty-four-seven bitch.”
There was the sound of a man being swatted hard, but not without affection, on the behind. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know Diana’s stuff pisses you off and I should have done it long ago. My bad.”
“You bad, me bad too.”
“Bad as each other.”
“No, I wouldn’t go that far.”
They laughed together, quietly.
“Don’t you spend any time jerking off? I sure as hell would.”
“No. I save it up,” the woman said. “You get princess here down to sleep, I may even show you.”
“Deal. I’ll go upstairs and give it a try. You open some wine. Don’t start without me.”
“Drinking, or the other thing?”
“Either.”
And then, praise God, Kristina heard them walk together out of the room.
She jerked her head to stare at Lizzie and the other friend under the table. Lizzie was looking right at her, already holding up a finger.
The message was clear—be quiet and ready to move.
Lizzie waited a beat, then quickly came out from under the table. Kristina jumped to her feet, her joints crackling like rifle shots, and the person behind the curtain slipped out at the same time.
“Yeah, so I guess now would be a good time,” the plump girl sniggered, making no effort to be quiet. “Though I kinda want to stick around to catch part two of tonight’s special presentation.”
We Are Here Page 24