‘Sit the fuck down,’ Lottie said.
‘Let her fall out,’ Spike said. ‘If I was an animal, I’d be a lion and eat Tina.’
‘Shut your face, Meteorite Boy. You’re a weasel.’
Solvang was decked out like a Danish town with half-timbered buildings and gabled roofs. There was a replica of Hans Christian Andersen’s house, a copy of the statue of the Little Mermaid, trinket shops with faux-Scandinavian façades and several non-functioning windmills.
‘This place gives me the creeps,’ Tina said. ‘It’s like being on a film set.’ She still wasn’t altogether steady on her feet.
They walked around, searching for somewhere to stay. They looked through windows at bars that appeared to have fires blazing in the hearth and candles flickering on tables, but on further investigation turned out not to have front doors. In a shop window there was a line of children’s costumes on headless dummies – all braces and daisy ribbons and weird aprons. Frosted Danish pastries shone on trays as if they were radioactive. An empty horse-drawn carriage driven by a tiny man with a face the colour of pickled herring clipped slowly down the street.
‘Where are all the people who actually live here?’ Lottie asked. Almost everyone was wandering around as they were, looking bemused, as if they had been expecting a fairy tale and been delivered a parking lot with a few plastic beams and a surfeit of clogs.
‘Challenge Seven!’ Tina announced, pressing her face to the glass of a gift shop window.
‘I’m not doing a challenge today,’ Lottie said.
‘For your information, Miss Information.’ Tina burst out laughing and half slithered down the window.
‘We need to get her into bed,’ Lottie murmured to Spike.
Spike took hold of Tina’s arms. ‘You’re scaring the locals.’
Tina pushed him away. ‘Going clip, clippety-clop, on the stair, so there!’
‘Let’s just find a hotel,’ Lottie said, aware of the curious glances of passers-by.
‘Right! Today’s challenge is . . . you have to go into that shop.’ Tina indicated an establishment across the road with a suspiciously bright thatched roof. ‘You have to steal – steal, mind, I’ll be watching – a pair of china clogs and a windmill.’
‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous,’ Lottie protested. ‘What good could it possibly do to get arrested?’
‘That’s the challenge . . . not get arrested. Use your clever little fingers’ (here she waved her digits in the air in demonstration) ‘to slip them into your handbag. Like the Artful Dodger. Distract them. Use misdirection. Wave hankies around. If you want, I’ll create a diversion.’
‘This isn’t one of your best ideas,’ Spike said, although Lottie saw that he was trying not to laugh.
‘It’s not funny,’ Lottie said to him, feeling cross that he clearly wasn’t going to support her objections. With them both gleefully egging her on, she knew the battle was lost. She crossed the road with the other two following behind, and went into the shop. The tinkle of an alpine bell heralded her arrival. Fortunately the place was fairly busy with aimless tourists trying to get a slice of the Danish dream by purchasing a tankard or an apron adorned with a Viking. She fingered a miniature pair of clogs joined at the heel by a ribbon and looked around her furtively. What the hell was she doing? The sensible thing would be to walk out of the shop right now. Sod it if Tina thought she was lily-livered. She didn’t want to spend the night in a gable-roofed police station. She was eyeing up the windmills when she heard a shocked exclamation coming from the shop counter. She turned to look at what the open-mouthed cashier was staring at. Outside, Tina had pulled up her T-shirt and was pressing her bare breasts to the window. Everyone was staring at the spectacle in fascination.
‘Jeez Louise,’ said a startled man in socks and sandals. ‘That’s not something you get to see every day. This town is sure beginning to grow on me.’
‘Look away now, Stanley,’ said his companion, a woman with sharp eyes and a stomach bristling with zip-up bags.
‘Maybe it’s just a Danish thing,’ he answered, still transfixed. ‘Don’t Danish folks like to barbeque in the nude?’
Out of the corner of her eye, Lottie saw Spike pull Tina away from the window. Her breasts left little mist marks on the glass.
‘We may celebrate all things Scandinavian, but we certainly do draw the line at that,’ the shop woman said, flicking her long plait back over her shoulder, as if she was throwing a string of sausages to a dog. Despite her reluctance, Lottie felt Tina had worked extremely hard to create a diversion, so she grabbed the required items and exited the shop hastily, while it was still in the grip of Breastgate.
She wasn’t sure why she was running. Her arms and legs tingled with delight. She might just have found herself a new hobby. Not that she would ever rip off small businesses – except for today – but the weekly supermarket shop could be made so much more interesting by the acquisition of an unpaid-for jar of mustard – not the harsh, canary-yellow stuff, but the one with mustard seeds in it – or perhaps a sliver of smoked salmon or those pots of ground-up olives. My God, what the hell was happening to her? Any minute now she would be holding up a bank. Tina was turning her into a delinquent.
Breathless, her skin singing, she ground to a halt beside Spike and Tina.
‘Let’s see the goods,’ Tina said.
Lottie opened up her bag to reveal her contraband.
‘One windmill and one pair of clogs as ordered,’ she said triumphantly.
Spike was shaking his head. ‘I’m on a road trip with a couple of madwomen,’ he said.
*
Once they had checked into their hotel, Lottie waited until Tina had fallen asleep, then crept out under cover of darkness to post ten dollars through the letterbox of the shop that had suffered the crime.
Chapter 12
LOTTIE BALANCED THE COFFEE POT on the tray and kicked the door open with one foot.
‘I brought you breakfast,’ she said, as Tina took the pillow from her head and sat up. ‘Have you forgiven me yet?’ She put the tray down on the side table.
‘I’m still thinking about it,’ Tina answered, biting into a Danish pastry.
‘I shouldn’t have hit you. It was a very cruel thing to do.’
‘Yes, it was,’ Tina replied, pastry flakes on her chin.
‘If I say sorry, will you say sorry too?’
‘What have I got to say sorry about? I could have walloped you back, but I’ve got more restraint.’
‘You were winding me up. You know you were.’
‘I was only giving voice to my suspicions,’ Tina said.
‘Listen,’ Lottie said, sitting on the end of Tina’s bed. ‘I’m in love with Dean. I know you don’t think much of him, but he’s marrying me, not you.’
‘Thank the lord,’ Tina said. ‘Be honest, he doesn’t like me either, does he?’
‘You haven’t had a proper chance to get to know each other. You’ve been abroad for so much of the last few years. He’s a bit suspicious of you. Thinks you’re perhaps not the most reliable of characters. I think he imagines that you might lead me astray.’
‘As if I would do such a thing,’ said Tina, opening her eyes wide in a parody of innocence.
‘You’re not fooling anyone, least of all me. I know you, remember.’
*
Tina’s hand had been behind almost every childhood disaster. Lottie scrolled back through the breakages, the spillages, the close shaves, the tantrums, the tricks, the truants, the break-ins and the break-ups and the times when things just plain spun out of control. Tina had never quite thrown off her habit of inventing new worlds. She would create stories about the people around them – wild romances for the plainest of teachers, mysteries spun from an overheard scrap of conversation.
The summer she turned thirteen, Sandbag Stomach Man, who lived in the house across the road and had a tendency to linger by the window in hefty silhouette, became the focus of one such ta
le; Tina swore blind that she had seen him kill someone with a knife.
‘I didn’t see any such thing,’ Mia had said, ‘and I was standing right beside you at the time.’
‘He did it when you turned away. He was as quick as a flash. I think it’s his wife he killed.’
Sandbag Stomach Man’s wife had been a source of fascination to them all, since she was seldom seen coming in and out of the house, nor at the local Co-op, where pretty much everyone could be found. They would get occasional glimpses of her peering through the gap in the net curtains. At Tina’s instigation they took it in turns to watch the house for signs of the wife. Lottie recorded all activity, or lack thereof, in the back of her diary. Three weeks went by without a single sighting.
‘Perhaps we should call the police,’ Mia said, even her steadiness troubled by the vividness of her sister’s descriptions.
‘I could see the knife above his head. He brought it down like that.’ Tina demonstrated the fatal blow. ‘I could see the blood on his vest. It splattered all over his stomach.’
‘What we need to do is draw him out,’ Tina decided. ‘That’s what they do in films.’
She wrote a series of letters and posted them through the letterbox, insisting that the other two come with her as back-up.
Dear Neighbour, we know what you have done.
Confess all and you will feel better.
Where is your wife?
One afternoon, Sandbag Stomach Man was waiting for them behind his front door when they rattled the latest missive through the letterbox. He pulled Tina inside, and so Mia and Lottie followed. They knew they couldn’t allow her to face whatever horrors the house concealed on her own. Close up, he wasn’t nearly as scary as they had thought he was. He smelt a bit and the edges of his vest were a little crusty, but he seemed much smaller than he did through his lighted window.
‘I thought you might like to meet my wife,’ he said, leading them into a bedroom.
Mia took hold of her sisters’ hands. ‘I really think we should go home.’
‘You’re not going anywhere,’ he said. One of his top teeth stuck out like a mini elephant’s tusk. The dim bedroom smelt sweet, like puffy Haribo hearts. There was a rack of clothes and a clock on the wall with a picture of a bird in the centre. As its hands reached four o’clock there was a scratchy sound of a blackbird’s song. His wife was lying in bed propped up by a triangular pillow. She held the blanket against her chest with shining, knuckled hands, as if she was aware, even now, that she had visitors and had to make sure she was covered up.
‘She’s ill,’ he said and touched her head. Her eyes were barely there. They had become lost in the pull of her flesh. Her neck, thin in a nightgown, was tendrilled, like the roots of a tree.
‘I’m sorry,’ Tina said. They backed out of the room, but Sandbag Stomach Man didn’t seem to notice their departure.
A month or so later, on a rainy Sunday afternoon when their parents had sent them upstairs and there was nothing to do but stare out of the window, they saw her come out at last. There were only two men to carry her flimsy body, which was zipped up into a bag that looked like the one they kept the tent in.
‘She’s the first person I’ve known who has died,’ Tina said, unwilling still to relinquish the glamour of it.
‘You didn’t know her,’ Mia said, drawing the curtain as a mark of respect.
*
‘You might think you know me, but you don’t,’ Tina said now. ‘Not anymore.’
‘I’d like to know you better,’ Lottie said quietly. The truth of her sister’s words saddened her. ‘I think Mia would have wanted us to stick together.’
‘If Mia had wanted us to stick together, she should have tried harder to live.’ Tina got up impatiently, slopping her coffee on the bed sheets. She pulled off the T-shirt she’d slept in, then walked around her bed and began rootling in her exploded suitcase. Lottie wished she could be as comfortable in her own skin. Perhaps being unselfconscious went hand in hand with being unheeding.
‘It wasn’t anything to do with not wanting to live. You know that, Tina.’
‘From where I’m standing, it was everything to do with not wanting to live.’
‘It wasn’t a choice.’
‘It felt like one,’ Tina replied, pulling random clothes over her head. She tied her hair back with a silk scarf without looking in the mirror, passed some cream over half her face and still managed to look stylish. It didn’t really matter what she chose to wear, Lottie reflected; she just had that impervious grace that made people want to be near her – hoping, perhaps, that some of what she had would rub off on them. People were attracted to beauty.
She knew they were travelling to dangerous ground, so she changed the subject. She wanted to avoid another row now that they were being civil to each other.
‘What do you think?’ asked Lottie, giving a twirl. She had matched her new blue shorts with a white shirt, tied at the waist.
‘You look great,’ Tina said. ‘Now, shall we hoick that oik out of his bed and hit the road?’
*
As they turned from the coast into the wine county of Santa Barbara, the sun seemed to solidify. It glazed the cracked tarmac of the road in a hard glare. To their left, the distant mountains were dimly shaped and, in the foreground, rolling, dun-coloured hills were bisected with white tracks leading to flat-roofed buildings. There was so much space to spare that it seemed the occupants of the land couldn’t polish all that was there. At the backs of the houses there were well-tended pools shaped like amoeba, and green-leaved plants and plastic-cushioned loungers that were wiped clean of their truck dust every day. At the front, among the limp flags, were piles of rusted barrels, tractors, oil drums, boats resting on gravel and lopsided caravans.
The yellow road began to soften into vineyards. The plants, turning red and gold now, exactly hugged the curves of the hills, as if stitching the landscape together. From the forecourts of farm buildings and the insides of barns came the smell of fermenting grapes, a yeasty, rancid odour that was almost unbearable when you were close to it. A mile or two further down the road, the scent remained with you, but mingled with the dust and the diesel smell of the tankers sloshing past, fat-bellied with wine, it became so perfumed and exquisite that you longed to go back.
They drove past fields of pumpkins, waiting for their inevitable fate at the hands of children, who, in less than a month from now, would be disembowelling them with spoons. Then there was what felt like an abrupt transition from lushness into a desert landscape. They closed the roof of the car as the wind picked up and turned on the music – a joyful James Brown singing ‘Living in America’, followed by Kim Wilde’s scratchy voice grinding through her half-hearted teenage rebel song. There were several ugly, low-lying towns, dwarfed by billboards and full of travelling dust. The clouds were sketchy and looked as if they had been scraped on the sky with a fingernail. Outside a Burger King a man was filling his tanker up with a long, neon-orange hose. On a cracked piece of tarmac a boy bounced a ball against the palm of his hand.
‘Challenge Eight – at least I think it’s Eight,’ Tina said, ‘is to drive down this road blind.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Lottie replied. ‘When I agreed to say yes to everything on this trip, I wasn’t agreeing to commit suicide.’
‘Don’t be a chicken. There are hardly any cars and it’s about as straight as a road can be.’
True, the low road stretched out ahead, broken only by slight rises and falls and the occasional raven, stirred into clumsy, reluctant flight by their approach. To the left were mountains, too far away to break the monotony of the landscape. To the right there was scrubby vegetation in colours of dim mustard and bruised pink. The passing telegraph poles were the only indication that they were moving at all and these glancing blows, identical and exactly paced as they were, served only to reinforce the illusion of time standing still, as if they were caught between two-minute markers on a clock. Lottie got the
sense that somewhere, beyond the unchanging horizon, proper life was happening.
‘I’ll hit a pole,’ Lottie protested.
‘Not if you keep going straight,’ Tina said. ‘I’ll guide you.’ She leant over from the back of the car and fastened her scarf around her sister’s face. Lottie immediately slowed to a crawl and stopped. Spike groaned.
‘I’m getting out,’ he said. ‘I’d rather walk than travel with you two.’
‘If you get out of the car, we are not coming back for you,’ Tina said. ‘Right, now, foot down!’
Lottie’s instinct was to refuse. She was a cautious driver even at home, never going above the speed limit and punctilious about ensuring two clear chevrons between her and the car ahead.
‘Do I really have to?’
‘Of course you don’t,’ Spike said.
‘If you don’t, you will have failed,’ Tina said implacably.
Lottie did not like failing. She thought that perhaps if she moved her head slightly, she might be able to see enough to get by.
Almost as if Tina had read her mind, she tightened the knot on her blindfold.
‘I hate you,’ Lottie said, and she felt as if she meant it. Every argument and feeling of distrust, every disappointment seemed to come sharply into focus. Why was she allowing herself to be treated like this? She had the despairing feeling that she and her sister would be stuck like this in an eternal standoff, unable to move forward or go back, frozen forever by the distance between them. In the end, it was a feeling almost of panic that set her into motion. She moved forward, slowly at first and then a little faster. She was briefly scared, and then she put her foot down recklessly on the accelerator. She held the steering wheel tight. The car hummed around her. She could feel the vibration of each telegraph pole through the open window as if they were markers guiding her. She floored the accelerator and was gratified to hear a nervous edge to Tina’s laugh.
‘How fast am I going?’ she shouted. She felt as if she could drive like this forever, and that when at last she stopped they would have arrived at the place that was waiting for them over the horizon.
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