Live a Little

by Madeleine Reiss

  They had toasted the decision with champagne at the Wave Organ in the bay. Tina hadn’t been before and loved the fact that the sculpture was hard to find, hidden from sight until you walked to the very end of the jetty. They had listened to the strange sucking and drumming of the tide through the periscope-like pipes, the music of the sea overlaid with the boom of distant boats and the voices of the people who passed by. They had watched the sunset sitting on the ruined lumps of granite and marble. He remembered the moment as one of intense happiness, almost too great to bear.

  She arrived at his apartment the next day in a taxi with one box and a couple of bags. Her few possessions barely took up half a cupboard, but the sense of her filled and transformed the place.

  *

  ‘Dean’s so kind,’ Lottie said shyly, flushing a little under Spike’s sudden scrutiny. ‘And he knows such a lot but is never, ever boastful. You know those people you meet who make you feel as if you don’t know anything or that you are lacking in some way? He never makes people feel like that. He always makes them feel better about themselves.’

  ‘It sounds as if you two are perfectly matched,’ he said. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Tina approaching. She must have given her companion the brush-off since he was nowhere to be seen. She was an expert at making people think they mattered and then turning cold. She could really do with a dose of her own medicine. He leant across the table so that his face was close to Lottie’s.

  ‘He’s an extremely lucky man,’ he said, smiling at her, his eyes on her mouth. Lottie would surely see through him in a moment. She had way too much sense to fall for moves like this, and it was clear she was madly in love with her fiancé. He was surprised to see her look startled. He had thought she would just laugh at him and he would be able to show Tina just how little she knew about her sister.

  ‘What are you two whispering about?’ Tina asked, sitting down. Her skin had a sheen of sweat on it and the hair around her forehead had gathered into tight curls.

  ‘This and that,’ Spike said airily, assiduously avoiding Tina’s curious look.

  ‘I expect he’s boring you rigid about rocks,’ Tina said.

  ‘I would actually like to hear about meteorites,’ Lottie said.

  Spike was grateful for the supportive way she spoke and the way she rested her chin attentively on her hand as if she was really settling down to listen.

  ‘What would you like to know?’ he said, mainly because he wanted to piss Tina off. When he had seen some of his colleagues in action, talking about their latest research to anyone who would stand still, as if they had spent the last year under a rock themselves and had lost any sense of proper perspective, he’d learnt not to do the same.

  ‘I don’t even know exactly what a meteorite is,’ Lottie said.

  ‘They are lumps of matter that land on earth after millions of years of travelling. Some of them are as much as four and a half billion years old. They start out life as space debris – usually shards of comets or asteroids, but sometimes bits of the moon or Mars – and become shooting stars when they fall through the friction of a planet’s atmosphere. Those that survive and make it all the way to earth are called meteorites.’

  ‘How come people don’t get killed by them falling out of the sky?’ Lottie asked.

  ‘Well, potentially they could. But most of them are small by the time they’ve been bashed and burned, and in any case they often end up in the ocean. There are reports of a cow or two getting killed, and a man was injured when a sizeable one came through his roof.’

  ‘Do you know where they are going to land in advance?’ Lottie asked.

  ‘It’s very hard to predict. Although there are several times a year when the earth moves through a meteor shower, it’s still hard to tell if or where they’ll land.’

  ‘I find it difficult to get my head around something going on a journey that lasts such a long time,’ said Lottie. ‘All those thousands of years of hurtling through space and then they land up on some scrubby bit of ground.’

  ‘Sounds a bit like our road trip at times,’ said Tina sourly.

  Chapter 14

  ELVIS WAS SINGING ‘HOW GREAT Thou Art’ as the road circled and descended, unfolding deeper canyon layers. The mountains were dark in the distance but moved into the light in shades of yellow, ochre and crimson. In between the wind-ridged mounds, the salt lakes gleamed with an unearthly white.

  They had set off early that morning, hoping to arrive at Death Valley National Park before the full heat of the day set in, but already the sun was blistering – melting the edges of the landscape so that everything looked soft and clay-like. The tarmac ahead seemed to bulge and buckle beneath its retaining neon stripe, its surface shining as if it was wet.

  Lottie felt her eyes fill with tears. There was no other reaction possible to the strange beauty of it all. It was so ample, so gloriously, impossibly expansive, that she could barely look at its richness. She had the sense that she used to get sometimes as a child, late at night, of being overwhelmed and losing control – a feeling of swelling and turning over and over down a slope, with nothing to catch hold of to stop her fall.

  How Mia would have loved to have seen it, she thought. She had a sudden memory of the way her sister used to open her eyes wide when something pleased or surprised her, as if to see as much of what was on offer as possible. Lottie felt a sudden anguish, an impact that slammed so heavily into her it almost took her breath away. If she had been able to act differently, if she had been different, Mia might still be with them. She would perhaps be looking out of this window now and sharing the wonder of veined mountains and wide skies.

  As she had many times before, Lottie told herself she had done her best. It was the only way to make her pain more bearable. She had certainly done more than their warring parents. They’d always been so fatally entangled that nothing outside the endless recriminations of what he’d done and what she’d done could penetrate that mesh of blame and betrayal. It had made them insensible to anything else.

  As a child, and then a teenager, Mia had borne the brunt of all of that. Ever vigilant, she had been the one who had hustled her sisters from the room when she had felt the air change. Lottie remembered how suddenly it used to happen. All it took was a look, a certain sharpness of tone or a weary complaint and there would be a tangible shift. This rearrangement of the atmosphere had a prickling feeling and a smell, as if something sour had crept through the gaps under the doors or down the chimney. Suddenly the house felt bitter and precarious.

  ‘Don’t listen,’ Mia used to say once they were in their room with the door shut. ‘Don’t listen. Think of something else. Think of the ponies with green ribbons in their manes and the dancing mannequins.’ Sometimes she used to sing the songs they heard on the radio – ‘Ice Ice Baby’ and ‘U Can’t Touch This’ and ‘The One and Only’. She had a terrible voice (the music teacher at school had told her she could be in the front row of the choir because she had pretty eyes, but she must on no account let a single sound come out), but she would stand on the bed, fists balled up by her sides, and bellow until she had drowned out the shouting and the sudden crashes and the terrible silences which were worse than what had gone before.

  *

  They made a brief stop at Badwater Basin. There they walked across the surreal stretch of salt that crunched under their feet as if they were walking on crisp snow. This terrain had no softness to it. The crystals had swollen and cracked into weird geometric shapes and the desiccated expanse felt merciless. Lottie could feel an echoing dryness in her mouth and a kind of bone-deep weariness.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Spike asked Lottie.

  ‘I’m fine. Why?’

  ‘It’s just that you seem a little quiet.’

  She squinted at him with her hand covering her eyes. After a period of rain, followed by a few days of this heat, the new layer of salt was blindingly white and she wished she had brought her sunglasses. Tina had walked on ahead and was
lying on her stomach, taking pictures. They both stood and watched her for a while.

  ‘You’re so much easier to be with than your sister,’ he said. ‘You’re much kinder.’

  ‘She’s much kinder than she lets on,’ Lottie said, instinctively protective. It was one thing to moan about your own sister – it was pretty much written into the job description – but she didn’t really feel comfortable when other people criticised Tina.

  ‘She hides it well.’

  ‘So, what happened between you two?’

  ‘What has she told you?’

  ‘Nothing much. She clams up every time I ask her about it.’

  ‘She betrayed me,’ Spike said, looking away. He paused. ‘Do you see that mark on the mountain? That’s sea level. It shows just how low-lying this location is. Another volcanic shift and it will sink even further.’

  ‘What do you mean, betrayed you?’ Lottie asked.

  ‘You’ll have to ask her,’ he replied. ‘Put it this way: I think I fell for the wrong sister.’

  Lottie laughed. She figured that his words were simply a knee-jerk gallantry, the sort of thing that men said to women when they couldn’t think of anything else. But he was looking at her with those shrewd eyes of his, and she felt a jolt – a small, almost inconsequential shift in her stability. I need a cold drink, she thought. All this hot whiteness is making me feel strange. What was that passage in the Bible about Lot’s wife turning round and being transformed into a pillar of salt? If she lingered here much longer she could imagine becoming calcified, too.

  Tina turned round and walked back to them. ‘It’s amazing,’ she said. ‘I’ve taken some close-up pictures of the crystals and they look as if they are blooming, like strange, bleached broccoli.’

  Tina seemed to expand in the sun. Her skin glittered and she had draped a green scarf over her head and shoulders. It made her look both robust and glamorous, like an old-style movie star hanging out on location, still beautiful despite the inhospitable terrain.

  ‘Can we go somewhere and get a drink?’ Lottie said, wishing that she cared less about how drab she felt in her sister’s shining shadow.

  *

  At Stove Pipe Wells, a small settlement of tourist services – a hotel, a general store and a couple of places to eat – they parked the Mustang near a sign warning them not to feed the ravens. Spike went into the store to buy the drinks, while Lottie and Tina waited outside.

  ‘You two British?’ a woman asked. She was small and whip-thin, dressed in a black shirt firmly tucked into black jeans, which made her coiffured head look all the more incongruous. Her hair was a bright, Ikea yellow, the colour of road signs warning of dead ends, steep slopes and alligators, and was teased into stiff waves.

  ‘Yes, we are,’ Tina said.

  ‘From London?’ She had an odd, brisk way of talking and small, shining blue eyes. ‘Ever been to Clarence House?’

  ‘No. I don’t think it’s open to the public,’ Lottie said.

  ‘It is every August,’ she informed them. ‘Been there three times myself. Seen the china and the clocks and those itty-bitty spoons.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ Lottie said politely.

  ‘Althorp?’

  Lottie shook her head. Tina went off into the shop to find out what was taking Spike so long.

  ‘Frigging hell, you’ve been nowhere at all!’ the woman exclaimed, hooking her thumb into her belt. She noticed that the woman had an ostentatiously large belt buckle made up of the letters ‘DS’ entwined in a rope motif.

  Lottie tried a placating smile. ‘You know how it is when you live in a country – you tend not to do the tourist things. I don’t suppose you’ve ever walked across the salt flats.’

  ‘If I’m gonna be fried I want to be covered with oil and lain down by the sea,’ the woman said.

  ‘Yes, quite.’

  ‘You have something of her, actually,’ the woman said, peering at Lottie more closely, ‘in the shape of your face, the way your eyes are set.’

  ‘Something of who?’ Lottie asked, wishing that the other two would come out. Her tongue was sticking to the roof of her mouth and the heat was making her feel dizzy.

  ‘Diana,’ the woman said. She spoke as if she thought Lottie was a little obtuse. ‘Princess Diana.’

  ‘No one has ever said that to me before!’ Lottie laughed, but stopped when she saw the woman was deadly serious.

  ‘A haircut and some eyeliner and you could be her twin. You’ve got that same peaches-and-cream complexion, although you would have to do something about them freckles.’

  To Lottie’s relief (why was it she always got stuck with the loons?), Tina and Spike finally emerged from the shop holding dewy bottles.

  ‘Well, it’s been nice meeting you,’ Lottie said.

  ‘You sound just like her too, all soft and classy. Would you like to see my truck?’

  ‘You drive a truck?’ Tina asked. Lottie opened her bottle of water and poured it down her throat.

  ‘It’s the one just over there,’ the woman said, pointing to an enormous white lorry with the obligatory multiple sets of shining headlights and a silver trim.

  ‘We’re in a bit of a hurry, actually . . .’ Lottie began.

  ‘I’m Stacey, by the way,’ the woman said, extending her hand to each of them. Her palm was hard and a little dusty. She led the way across the road to the car park and they followed.

  ‘You sisters?’ Stacey asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Lottie said. ‘I’m older by two years.’

  ‘You got the looks. She got the attitude,’ Stacey remarked, which made Lottie smile. ‘Which of you does Keanu Reeves here belong to?’ she asked, jerking her thumb in Spike’s direction.

  ‘Neither of us,’ Lottie said, and then wondered why she had been so quick to reply.

  ‘He favours my sister,’ Tina said, smiling cruelly at Lottie, who stared back furiously.

  ‘He’s got good taste then,’ Stacey remarked, opening the door of the truck and climbing up.

  ‘What are you carrying in your truck?’ Spike asked.

  ‘Pig,’ Stacey said shortly. ‘I can fit in two of you at a time. You girls come up first.’

  Every inch of the walls of the cab was covered in photographs of Diana. A blonde-haired doll in an off-the-shoulder gown swung from the mirror, faded pink silk roses trimmed the edges of the seats and a single candle in a gold holder was positioned on the dashboard.

  ‘Wow!’ Tina said. ‘It’s quite the shrine.’

  ‘She was the best person who ever lived,’ Stacey said, clasping her steering-wheel-worn hands together. ‘She was just like I am. She was always looking for somewhere to be. Trying to get a little peace.’

  After Spike had had his turn admiring the cab and they had declined her offer of a ride, they said they had to get back on the road. She let them go reluctantly.

  ‘I’d try lemon juice on your freckles,’ she said to Lottie, waving them off.

  ‘She’s crazy,’ Spike said as they got into the car. ‘I sincerely hope the “pig” she referred to is in rasher form. She didn’t seem in any kind of rush to make her delivery.’

  ‘You’ve got a fan there, Lottie,’ Tina said.

  *

  Because Lottie was still feeling a little unwell, they decided to cut the day short and find a motel. Old Masters was a Psycho-style establishment with rooms set in a U-shape around an artist’s palette-shaped pool. With the sell line ‘Each room a work of art’, they didn’t have high hopes of the décor. Tina thought it unlikely she would be able to sleep in the Picasso-themed studio that she was sharing with Lottie, with its luridly geometric bed linen and a giant reproduction Weeping Woman. Spike claimed to be delighted with his Titian nude and bosomy pillows. While Lottie took a nap, Tina and Spike sat by the pool with beers and books. Tina’s thriller wasn’t thrilling her much and she looked covertly at her companion through her sunglasses. It appeared rock gathering had kept him fit because he looked pretty good in hi
s shorts.

  *

  Tina recalled a day they had spent together after she had been living with him for a couple of months. She hadn’t thought of it until now. Remembering was what she had been afraid of when Lottie had first suggested they take him with them on their trip. It must have been a weekend, because neither of them had had anywhere particular to go. They had slept in and made love and eaten cinnamon bagels in bed. If she shut her eyes, she could still taste the spicy sweetness of the dough. The rain was running in oily splashes down the window and the darkness was gathering. They had decided that there was absolutely no point getting up and putting clothes on since there was so little left of the day. Before him and after him, she had always disliked lingering in bed, but he had brought out a slothful side in her. With time on their hands, they had touched each other slowly, the lust they had so recently sated renewed by the rain and the dim room.

  ‘I love you,’ he had said as he moved over her. ‘I’ve loved you from the first moment I saw you.’

  It had been on her lips to reply in kind, but she didn’t. She thought perhaps she loved him too, although the feeling was mixed up with the sensation of his hands on her. What if the time came when his touch no longer made her arch towards him? It had happened before with other people. She was familiar with the doubts and the impatience that crept into the spaces left by a cooling desire. How did people put their time and their hearts into something that wasn’t properly tested? It was like buying an old car without looking at the engine, simply because you liked the colour, and setting off on a long journey with nothing more substantial than the hope that what was carrying you to your destination would continue to be roadworthy. Things changed all the time, and you couldn’t rely on love lasting. Mia had given her heart so easily. She could have had anyone, and yet Rick had been her choice – the person she had decided to cleave to and invest in.

  ‘There’s just something about him,’ she had said to Tina when she had returned after an early date with him to the flat in London they had briefly shared. ‘He seems so tough, but really he’s vulnerable.’