Live a Little

by Madeleine Reiss

  ‘Shall we get out and have a walk?’ Tina said. ‘Apparently we’ve got supper in the famous provisions rucksack.’

  ‘Bread, cheese, wine and doughnuts,’ Lottie said. ‘All the most important food groups.’

  Tina sighed. ‘You can take a girl out of her comfort zone, but you can’t stop her endless tendency to shop.’

  ‘If I hadn’t shopped for a few basics, we’d have gone hungry.’

  ‘We’d have found something to eat.’

  Lottie was looking up at the sky, which was thick with birds. ‘Yeah, we could always have roasted a pelican.’

  The three of them set off walking through the empty dunes. Where the massive, wind-blasted stretches touched the ocean, the spray from the waves met the blown sand so that land was sea and sea was land. This salty, gritty mingling had a kind of whistling music – the implacable, endless movement making up a single chord.

  ‘It’s so utterly beautiful,’ Lottie said. ‘It’s barren and yet full at the same time.’

  ‘A little further along the coast there’s a buried Egyptian city. The set from Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments,’ Spike said. ‘Once they’d finished filming, they tried to blow it up, but that wasn’t very effective, so they kicked a bit of sand about and abandoned it. Every now and again archaeologists or beachcombers come upon a sphinx’s head or a foot belonging to Ramses the Great, but most of it is still down there – plaster of Paris walls and statues and pyramids.’

  ‘How peculiarly American,’ Tina said.

  ‘There are also hundreds of different species of wildlife, some only found on this coast,’ Spike said, slightly defensively.

  Tina smiled to herself; this was an old battle between them.

  ‘If England is so much better, so much more sophisticated, I don’t know why you don’t just go back to the land of carpets and clouds and cruddy bacon,’ he had said once, when she had been derisive about something or other – the Halloween mania for orange plastic, or the way people were always so needlessly enthusiastic. ‘No one is actually making you stay here.’

  ‘You’re making me stay here,’ she’d said, and he’d laughingly pinned her down in the bed. She could still remember the way he had held both her wrists in one hand, as if her fingers were a bunch of flowers.

  They found a sheltered spot and sat down to eat a sandy picnic. The sky changed from cornflower blue to a misty purple. In the shallows, under the ledges of the dunes, plovers picked their leggy way, dipping their heads to the Pacific Ocean as if paying homage to its shining breadth.

  ‘Do you want to stay the night at my friend’s house?’ Spike asked. ‘I could give him a call and say I’m bringing you along. He has the space, and he has a soft spot for blondes. You don’t have to do any actual fishing.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Lottie said, looking round at her sister. ‘I’m under Tina’s command. She’s calling the shots on this trip.’

  ‘You surprise me,’ Spike said, smiling to take the sting out of his words. ‘She’s usually so accommodating.’

  He threw some crumbs from his doughnut up in the air. A swarm of birds gathered instantly, called from their arduous work of pecking and pulling through wet sand by the lure of fast food. The sun was lowering itself down into the water, its shine making a glittering pathway from the horizon to the shore.

  ‘Remember, we can leave you by the side of the road whenever we want to,’ Tina said. ‘I could wait for some particularly inhospitable terrain and boot you out.’

  ‘I rather like the fact I’m at your mercy.’

  Tina gave him a hard stare and his confident grin faltered. She had always been rather fierce, something she usually kept hidden under a veneer of happy-go-lucky insouciance. That first time he had spoken to her properly at The Fillmore he had sensed her steel, despite the legs (still beautiful, he couldn’t help noticing) on show beneath the small dress, and that way she had of scanning your face as if she was thinking which bit of you to lick first. He had noticed her immediately, even though she had been part of quite a large group. He didn’t think she had looked at him once. There wasn’t a shortage of attractive women in San Francisco – the town produced them as readily as it produced fog – and yet even this first glimpse of her had set up a kind of longing in him. It had been as if he had suddenly rediscovered his appetite after a spell of being indifferent to food. He remembered walking on, leaving her behind, feeling as if he had been deprived of something. When he saw her again at the concert it was as if his hunger had called her up.

  ‘You’re Bob’s friend,’ she had said, after he had tapped her on the shoulder. His heart had skipped. It made him a little ashamed to think how eager he had been, how happy to discover that she had noticed him after all. He bought her a drink. They never made it back to their seats, but stayed talking at the bar. He had been oblivious to the crush around him and the elbows impatiently digging into his side. That thing happened that he had previously thought was only the fantasy of delusional people – he felt the world sliding away. It had been love at first sight – something else he had always been sceptical about – although it had taken him a little time to recognise it as such. That evening, all he had been aware of was the need to be near her, to listen to what she was saying. Afterwards, on the way home – he had walked in the rain to try and quench some of the heat in his body – it hadn’t been her beauty that he had thought about most, but the way she had explained herself to him with a kind of shy seriousness. It had seemed at odds with the wild hair and the bare shoulders and that mouth, turned up at the top lip as though she was always smiling.

  *

  ‘Well, shall I call or not?’ he said now. ‘It’s getting late and I’m sure you don’t want to start looking for a place to stay.’

  ‘We can always sleep in the car,’ Tina said.

  ‘Oh, let’s not,’ Lottie said. ‘I always think someone is going to knock on the window and freak me out. I have a bit of a thing about people pressing their face against glass.’

  ‘Oh my good God! That’s another addition to your ever-growing list of neuroses.’ Tina turned to Spike. ‘OK. Ring your friend. He’d better have lots to drink.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ Spike said. ‘He’s the host with the most.’

  He got up and paced up and down a little distance from them talking on his phone while Tina buried Lottie under a mound of sand and commanded her to lie still so that it didn’t crack.

  ‘Right. We’re sorted,’ he said, moments later. ‘Greg can’t wait to meet you.’

  They walked back to the car in the purpling light, Lottie trying to get the sand out of her clothes all the way.

  It was dark by the time they reached the house. It proved tricky to find, even though Spike claimed to have been there before. It was set back from the coast road, along a bumpy track that wound its way past small clumps of trees and a few tumbledown shacks. They caught a glimpse of the white swoop of an owl and two coyotes, standing stock-still, their eyes shining in the car headlights. An enormous, wrought-iron gate opened at the press of a button, and they drove up to a house that would not have looked out of place on an English country estate. It was massive and red-bricked, with pillars and trees in pots at either side of the wide front door. In the lights that suddenly flooded the drive, they could see that there were medieval-style imps extending long tongues, flanking the edge of the crenellated roof.

  ‘Greg’s father was in love with all things British,’ Spike said, by way of explanation.

  The door opened and a small, dark-haired man stood in the light.

  ‘What took you so long?’ he demanded, and gave Spike a great bear hug in greeting.

  ‘So these are the beautiful sisters,’ he said, looking closely at them, and then placed an arm around each of their shoulders. ‘You were not wrong, my friend, you were not wrong. They are exquisite examples of womanhood.’

  Lottie bristled at his words and fixed him with a stare.

  Greg spoke l
ike an American who was trying to impersonate an English person, and at first Lottie thought he was mocking them. When confronted by people from Britain, some Americans seemed to fall into a kind of Billy Bunteresque Tourette’s of ‘crikey’ and ‘cheerio’ and ‘what ho, mate’ – but it soon became clear that this was Greg’s usual way of talking.

  He led them through a hallway the size of Lottie’s entire house, lit with Hogwarts wall sconces and lined with oak panelling.

  ‘What an amazing place!’ Tina said, although Lottie could tell by the tilt of her mouth that she had already decided to hate it. She was always going on about authenticity, and Lottie was pretty sure that she would take a dim view of this Disney version of a stately home.

  ‘Any moment now we will be greeted by a man in a bow tie holding a tray,’ she hissed into Lottie’s ear, as Spike and Greg went on ahead into a sumptuous room in shades of gold and cream. There was a vast window at one end, through which the night swimming pool glowed like kryptonite.

  ‘I thought cocktails!’ Greg said, approaching a bar at the end of the room. ‘What do you ladies fancy?’

  ‘I’d like a margarita,’ Tina said. Lottie said she would too, but only because she couldn’t think of the names of any other cocktails.

  ‘So how did you two meet?’ Tina asked, settling herself down on a sofa.

  ‘We met in a bar,’ Spike said. ‘We bonded over whiskey sours and rocks. Greg collects people, along with everything else. You name it; he has a collection . . . geological specimens, first editions, paintings, boats, art deco boxes, coins.’

  ‘You are forgetting my prized collection of PEZ dispensers,’ Greg said. ‘I’m still looking for the extremely rare blue-helmeted astronaut from the 1982 World’s Fair.’

  ‘I’ve got a couple of Mutant Teenage Ninja Turtle ones I could send you,’ Lottie said.

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ Greg said, smiling. He had an extremely sweet smile and she revised her earlier opinion that he was a bit of an idiot.

  ‘What work do you do?’ Tina asked, which was the exact question she had told Lottie that you should never ask anyone because it was boring and elitist.

  ‘I’m a dilettante,’ Greg replied. ‘The tragedy of my life is that I cannot seem to settle on one thing. How do people choose?’ He seemed genuinely perplexed.

  ‘Most people are only good at one thing,’ Spike said. ‘The problem is you can turn your hand to anything. This guy here has built boats. He paints. He’s written a screenplay. He’s even invented a bike light that switches on and off with a click of the fingers.’

  ‘It’s not an advantage, you know,’ Greg said. ‘I’m still waiting for that moment of revelation. The day I wake up and decide this is what I really want to do. Since I’m now forty-five, it’s unlikely ever to happen.’

  ‘What are you doing at the moment is a better question to ask Greg,’ Spike said.

  ‘I’m seeing how long I can hold my breath under the sea. I’ve managed nine minutes, but the world record is twenty-two minutes and twenty-seven seconds, so I have a way to go.’ Greg laughed, as if he was aware of how absurd he sounded.

  ‘How do you maintain all of this?’ Tina asked, waving her hand to indicate the house. Lottie winced. Her sister often mistook being outspoken with being tactless. Lottie had the British aversion of talking about money.

  Greg seemed unperturbed by Tina’s question. ‘My father was very, very rich. I now live off the fact that he invented a cardboard box that could be stacked into lorries more efficiently.’

  They drank a lot more as the evening ran on, and everyone but Lottie smoked some dope. They ate biscuits and grapes, golden and cold from the fridge, and cheese that Greg said he’d had sent to him from France.

  Still later, when Lottie was just thinking it was time perhaps to go to bed, four or five other people arrived. The music was ramped up and everyone got into the pool. Tina was first in, diving straight-legged off the board in a striped swimming costume that looked as if it had come from a fifties movie. Greg had produced it from what he called his ‘guest cupboard’, which Lottie thought was perhaps the grandest thing about the whole grand set-up. He found her a costume too – a pretty red one with a scalloped neck and back – but she didn’t want to go in. She thought she might drown given her state of inebriation.

  She must have dozed off on the sofa, because when she woke Tina was dancing with Greg, dressed in some sort of a diaphanous robe. Their bodies were very close together and his head was resting on her shoulder.

  ‘Where’s Spike?’ Lottie asked.

  ‘Gone off somewhere,’ Tina said. Greg raised his head and looked at Tina as if she was the missing PEZ dispenser. He cupped his hands around her face and kissed her on the mouth. She stopped dancing and kissed him back. Lottie thought it was probably best if she left them alone.

  On her way to the room where Greg had deposited her suitcase earlier, Lottie met Spike half way up the stairs. He was sitting, staring into space.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m drunk.’

  ‘Me too.’ She sat down next to him. Through an open window somewhere, Lottie could hear the barking of sea lions and the sound of the waves. She vaguely wondered what the view would be like when they woke up and saw it in daylight for the first time. She didn’t like the feeling of not knowing exactly where she was. She felt a sharp longing for Dean. She wanted to be held by him in their familiar bed with the picture of the girl with a pearl earring on the wall and the cushions they had chosen together lined up on the pine chest.

  ‘Why is your sister such a pain in the butt?’ Spike asked.

  ‘She isn’t really,’ said Lottie. She wanted to be loyal, although she had so often asked herself the same question. ‘She just pretends to be.’

  ‘I wish she’d stop pretending then,’ he said. ‘I’m not altogether sure I’m going to be able to do much more of this road trip.’

  ‘Oh, you have to stay with us,’ Lottie said. ‘You can’t leave me alone with her!’

  He laughed and put his arm companionably round her shoulder. ‘I’ll stay for you then,’ he said, and Lottie felt an unexpected, traitorous triumph.

  *

  She was in a deep sleep, ensconced behind the damask drapes of her four-poster bed, when Tina shook her awake. The lights in the room had been switched on. She had forgotten to close her shutters, and when she parted the curtain she could see the sky only just beginning to lighten.

  ‘What time is it?’ she asked.

  ‘Never mind that,’ Tina said. Lottie could see she had taken something. Her eyes were all glittery and she had a hectic flush on her face. ‘Greg knows exactly where that Egyptian city is buried. We are going to get ourselves a sphinx!’

  Lottie felt her heart sink. ‘Can’t it wait till proper morning?’

  ‘Get dressed. It’s Challenge Six.’

  It seemed that Greg had woken Spike, too, and they stumbled out of the house together. Greg seemed utterly sober, dressed immaculately in a tweed suit. He looked incongruous, as if he had appeared from a time capsule. They got into his truck and set off back down the track. Lottie wasn’t happy about being in a moving vehicle with a driver who had been drinking only a couple of hours before, but she supposed they couldn’t come to much harm with no other cars around, on a road that was clearly only used by Greg himself. Spike groaned every time they hit a bump.

  On the beach, Greg passed them all torches and trowels. The man was a marvel of organisation. He did some sort of complicated pacing, turning left then right and counting his steps aloud. Beyond them the sea was dark and massy, like oil.

  Greg held a torch in each hand and pointed the beams into the sand. ‘Right!’ he said. ‘Start digging here.’

  Ten minutes of fairly half-hearted scraping later, they hit upon something hard. The discovery put new vigour into their efforts and they dug eagerly, shovelling the sand that poured back into the hole almost as fast as they emptied it. Under the torchlight a terracotta ear e
merged, and then the side of a face. Spike put the tip of his trowel underneath and forced it upwards.

  ‘King Ramses’ head,’ said Greg with satisfaction. ‘It’s been there for getting on for a hundred years. In America that passes for an antiquity.’

  ‘You knew exactly where it was!’ Spike exclaimed. ‘You’ve found it before, haven’t you?’

  ‘I had a rough idea.’

  They shook the sculpture free of sand. It was a little damaged on one side, but other than that it was intact – almond eyes and aquiline nose almost as real as a proper marble effigy.

  ‘Can we keep it?’ Tina asked.

  ‘Surely it belongs to the town,’ said Lottie. ‘It would be almost like looting.’

  ‘You’re quite right,’ Spike said, looking at Lottie approvingly. ‘We should bury it again.’

  Tina gave them both a disgusted glare. ‘You two are so tedious,’ she said, and stalked off back to the truck.

  Chapter 9

  ‘DID YOU SLEEP WITH HIM?’ Lottie asked her sister.

  Neither of them had woken until midday. The view from the balcony of Lottie’s room at last revealed its stretch of beach and sea, white-foamed and pastel-coloured, with steady, gentle waves that slid over the sand.

  ‘We slept in the same bed,’ Tina replied.

  ‘So you didn’t actually have sex.’

  ‘Not as such,’ Tina said. ‘We did some other things.’