‘Well, perhaps we’re more similar than we thought,’ Lottie said, linking her arm through her sister’s. They started to walk back.
‘Route Sixty-six next,’ Tina announced once they were back at the car, ‘and it hasn’t gone unnoticed by me that it’s been a good few hours since the last challenge.’
‘One of these days, when you least expect it, I’m going to set you a challenge.’
‘Bring it on,’ Tina said.
‘Bring what on?’ Spike asked. He was lying on the back seat of the car.
‘Lottie thinks it’s my turn to do a challenge.’
‘Only if I can set it!’ he said, with a glint in his eye.
Chapter 21
JUST BEFORE THEY JOINED ROUTE 66, a coyote crossed the road in front of them and Lottie slowed down. It was so near that as they passed they could see its skin rippling and its wet muzzle. Chuck Berry was singing about not having any particular place to go and they yelled along with him.
They passed through several small towns hanging onto the glories of the past, guileless somehow in their blatant sell of something that perhaps had never quite existed. By the edges of the road broken glass glittered like mica and tumbleweed – ‘It actually is a real thing then!’ Lottie said – gathered in springy clumps against the bottoms of the cattle fences. Lottie was driving fast now. She felt a great rush of exhilaration, a kind of loosening and letting go. The road ran parallel to the railway track and a train was travelling alongside them at exactly the same speed, so that it seemed neither they nor the train were actually moving at all.
‘Go faster!’ Tina said, and so Lottie accelerated and tried to overtake it. Just before the train curved away, Tina got to her feet and waved, and was rewarded by a long pull on the horn. The sound was part of Fleetwood Mac and Lou Reed and the Eagles playing in the car, the tatty beauty of the road, the limpid light, the red and white diners with peeling leatherette benches. It was part of the shops full of plastic tat, men with massive belt buckles standing talking in twos and threes, giant fibreglass statues and abandoned, peeling Chevrolets, the flickering signs advertising Coke and cocktails and karaoke.
Just outside Seligman they stopped at a restaurant because Tina insisted on eating again.
‘All I’ve had today is one tiny sandwich. I need red wine and red meat.’
‘There’s no such thing as a tiny sandwich in America,’ Lottie said.
After they had eaten their fill – or at least when Tina had, which was an altogether longer process – they drove a little further, stopping at the next motel they saw.
They sat outside on the terrace as the moon came up – a perfect, pale disc. A warm breeze blew scraps of paper around their ankles. After a while, Tina said she was exhausted and had the meat sweats, and she went to bed.
Lottie didn’t think she would be able to sleep. The air was full of static and her skin felt prickly.
‘I’ll sit out here with you for a while,’ Spike said. He poured wine for her. She hadn’t drunk anything earlier because she had been driving.
‘Are you leading the life you thought you’d have?’ Lottie asked, thinking of her conversation with Tina earlier.
‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘I’m doing the job I always wanted to do. I’ve got friends and family who care about me. Except when I get bitten by snakes, I’m healthy enough. I get to travel and listen to music and watch movies and walk on the beach.’
‘You’ve not got a girlfriend, though. Someone as nice as you should have someone to love.’
Lottie was a lightweight when it came to alcohol and the glass of wine she had drunk so hastily had gone straight to her head. A film of cloud passed across the moon. She poured another glass. She felt reckless. She thought of the long plaintive pull of the train horn and the way she had fought the car and the road, the sensation that she had been fixed there.
‘I’ve done my share of loving,’ Spike said in a self-mocking, old-movie-star voice.
‘Don’t you think it’s strange that none of us is married?’ she asked. ‘Most people I know have settled down.’
‘Well, you’re about to be,’ he said.
She didn’t know what made her kiss him then. Perhaps because she thought he looked a little sad. Perhaps it was simply because she had let herself consider some of the other lives she might be leading. She leant over and put her mouth against his. If she had explained it afterwards, she would have said she had kissed him because she wanted to acknowledge the way he made her feel. Knowing him had given her the sense that things were not perhaps quite as decided as she thought they were. Just like the open spaces of America itself – that uncanny stretch that invoked astonishment and gratitude – she felt as if the borders of her life had been widened. It almost wasn’t anything to do with him at all; more the way that everything seemed to have opened out. He didn’t respond at all for a moment. He simply looked at her as if he was forming some sort of conclusion.
*
If he had explained it afterwards, he would have said he had felt unsettled, and that thinking about what had happened with Tina had made him wonder if he knew anything at all. He would have said he was a little drunk and the moon was bright and Lottie looked lovely with her valiant eyes and soft mouth and the silky blue top that slid off one shoulder. He kissed her back. He was careful. He saw her eyes widen. It crossed his mind that perhaps this wasn’t what he wanted to do and that perhaps it wasn’t what she wanted to do either. The road next to the motel was suddenly filled with a great roar and twenty or so bikers, lights and helmets flashing, tassels blowing like the pelt of some great noisy beast, passed by in formation.
*
She laughed at the sound – it was so extravagantly loud – and then they were standing together, he had his hands in her hair, his mouth was on her throat and she felt again that sense of letting go – of the curtains around the screen parting to allow the greatest possible field of vision. He tasted of wine and salt and the dusty road. She could feel him hardening against her. This was the moment to move away, to say that after all this wasn’t what she wanted. They would laugh. They would blame it on any number of things. They would say to each other that it had been nothing more than a passing madness. She made herself conjure up Dean’s face. She stepped back. She looked at Spike carefully. She knew that afterwards she wanted to be able to feel it had been what she wanted. This was to be her decision, not anyone else’s. Spike’s mouth was tender as if he knew what she was thinking, and so she put her hand on the back of his neck and pulled her to him. He was still unsteady on one leg and she felt him stagger slightly.
‘Come on,’ he said, and they crossed the terrace. He had left his window open and the room was full of the night air and the smell of blown paper and diesel and chlorine.
‘You are so beautiful,’ he said when she took off her clothes and stood showing herself to him. She felt as if she was another person altogether – someone bolder, less afraid.
‘I thought you looked like a cat burglar when I saw you for the first time,’ she said. She lay next to him on the bed, touching his warm chest, the narrow hollow at the top of his thigh, his yielding thickness.
‘Be careful of my leg,’ he said as she climbed on top of him.
And then, neither of them spoke. There was only the sound of cars passing, the headlights searching the ceiling, the road-infused air and the push and rock of their bodies.
Chapter 22
LOTTIE WOKE SUDDENLY. Spike was still beside her. It felt odd that he should be lying so close. He was an almost-stranger, despite what they had shared the night before. Sleep had brought a distance with it. It wasn’t that she regretted what had happened – there had only been kindness between them – it was just that she felt suddenly exposed. She had been crying in her sleep; her face was wet. She thought perhaps she had been dreaming about Mia. Four in the morning was always a tricky hour. Not quite night, not quite day. The time when the body is at its coldest, when fights and suicides happen,
when wanting wakes up or shuts down.
She had been told that Mia had died at around four in the morning, although Lottie hadn’t found her until the next day. She always felt sick when she remembered what she had said to her only weeks before her death.
‘Either you leave him, or I will never see you again. You choose.’
‘I can’t leave him,’ Mia had said, her nails biting into her arm. She had been wearing a scarf but it hadn’t hidden the livid red mark on her neck, nor the careful way she had been walking.
‘I mean what I say, Mia,’ she’d said. ‘It’s him or me.’
She had thought her ultimatum might bring her sister to her senses. She knew now that it had been a careless, stupid thing to say. The sort of thing people say when they think they carry more weight than they do. How had she ever imagined that the approach would have been effective? Not only had it not worked, but it had also meant that she had abandoned her sister just when she had needed Lottie the most. What she should have done was refuse to leave. She should have camped outside the house if that was what it was going to take. She recalled the numerous phone calls she had made to the police. She often did this in an effort to feel better about what she had and hadn’t done.
‘I think my sister’s in danger,’ she had said for the fifth or seventh time.
She had always been given pretty much the same reply: ‘I understand your concern, but we’ve been to see Mia and we can’t do anything if she won’t tell us what’s happening.’
‘She’s too scared to tell you,’ Lottie would say, and it was true. Mia had been terrified about speaking to anyone official about her situation – she hadn’t even talked about it much to Lottie herself – but this fear was insignificant compared to the terror of leaving him. This was the part of it that Lottie simply couldn’t get her head around. In her world, if you didn’t like something, if someone was hurting you, you opened the door and left. It was without question what she would do.
‘Why the hell don’t you just go?’
She had thought that if she said it often enough, Mia would wake up one day and finally decide to pack her bags. Lottie wondered now how hard she had actually tried to understand.
‘He says he’s going to change,’ Mia would say, her lovely face hopeful, covering up the bruises and moving briskly on as if it was simply a matter of a little bit of spilled tea on a favourite dress. She had looked, on the rare occasions when Lottie had been invited to her house, exactly as she had when she had made it her business all those years ago to protect Lottie and Tina from their parents. Her face had had a kind of blank vigilance that Lottie remembered from her childhood, as if she was pretending that she wasn’t waiting for the exact moment to move away from the source of harm. Mia had had an early training in how to play along and hide the fact that under her skin that used to glow like a sunned peach (it hurt Lottie to think of her skin), she would be alert to a tone of voice, to the number of bottles of wine on the table, to the speed of the footsteps up the stairs. Lottie had never allowed herself to consciously recall what she had seen at Mia’s house, but now she could feel her mind nudging her forward.
She was standing outside looking at the symmetrical pots of pansies by the front door, and the shutters at the window that were never allowed to gather dust. She had rung on the bell, heard the echo of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in the varnished hallway where the umbrellas and Rick’s walking sticks stood in a copper stand at the bottom of the stairs. I can’t think about this now, Lottie told herself. I have to stop thinking about this now. The world that had felt wonderfully expansive only hours ago now seemed confusing. I’m in a motel room with a picture of James Dean on the wall and a dodgy stain on the ceiling, my sister Mia is in the boot of the car and I have just slept with someone I hardly know when I am supposed to be getting married to someone else in a few days’ time.
She thought of Dean’s meticulous economies and the sacrifices they had made for the day that was supposed to be the beginning of the rest of their lives. ‘I’ll never feel this way about anyone else,’ he had whispered at the top of the stairs, the day after he had asked her to marry him. He had looked both sure and hopeful. They had gone laughing down to a breakfast of flabby poached eggs (the devil’s food, she had said into his ear, and he’d smiled and touched her knee under the table) to be scrutinised by his mother. He wasn’t expecting this. It would come out of the sky at him like a meteorite. Perhaps she shouldn’t tell him anything at all. Perhaps when she returned home this would all be like a dream and she would be able to resume her life exactly where she had left off. It would be like a film that gets inside you for a while but which always faded, however vivid the experience had been. You surely couldn’t change the outcome of ten years of love in little over a week.
And yet she knew how she was made. The secret would eat away at her. She would not be able to keep it from him and when she told him he would certainly withdraw from her. For all his kindness there was about him, as there often is, even in the best of men and women, a kind of implacable sense, if not ownership, then certainly some more acceptable version of it.
‘I wouldn’t feel the same about you if you slept with someone else,’ he’d once said. ‘I couldn’t bear not to be able to trust you. I know you never would,’ he had said, with a touch of complacency which she had converted at the time into a feeling of success that she had demonstrated her love so effectively.
She had to get out. Her head ached. She needed to escape from this room and get her thoughts in order. Perhaps if she walked a little, she would fall upon some sort of resolution. She got out of bed as quietly as possible and got dressed in the shower room.
Outside, the air still had a little residual warmth from the paving stones and tarmac. She set off walking down the road. Despite the hour, occasional cars passed by, one full of shouting men who yelled something unintelligible at her through the window. She felt as if she was in a kind of a trance. The light was gathering stealthily, and she could hear the strange sizzling and booming sound of nighthawks in the sky above her. The thong on one of her flip-flops popped out and she bent to push it back in. She passed a diner, still open for business, where a man was sitting with his arms crossed on the table, looking as if he was waiting for someone. In the lighted window of a white-boarded house, a woman was brushing her hair with long, languorous strokes. As she walked, the day gathered pace as the early risers felt for the shape of hanging clothes in the half-dark and splashed water quietly on their faces so that they wouldn’t disturb the people still sleeping. A man with a fridge on a trolley pushed his load silently up the slope of a driveway. A scrawny dog circled an overflowing bin. Beneath the odour of waste there was the smell of doughnuts and night-scented stock and rubber. There was the sudden sound of an alarm, intermittent and urgent.
She would have to tell Dean she couldn’t marry him. She had slept with someone else, and that surely meant that she didn’t feel as strongly about him as she should. Staying married was difficult enough without starting off on such shaky ground. He deserved someone loyal and true and she had proved herself to be anything but. She tried not to think of how he would look when she said the words – the bewilderment in his pale blue eyes as it sank in that she was not what he had imagined her to be. She would have to speak to him face to face. He deserved at least that. She would wait until she got home and tell him quickly, as soon as she was through the door, so that there would be no time for his pleasure in seeing her to take hold. No time for him to think that she was the same as she had been before. She knew him well enough to know that he wouldn’t say very much – he had always taken his time to process information, looking carefully in words for their proper meaning, pondering a text closely and using the page margins to add pencilled notes that would help him to understand and explain things as clearly as possible. His grief would come a little time afterwards. She thought of the bent back and silent tears with which he had greeted the news of his father’s death. He had made almost no soun
d when he had taken the phone call, and afterwards had wandered from room to room as if he was looking for something.
‘He waited until my mother had gone out,’ he said, and she had seen how difficult it had been for him to let himself down into grief. He had fought his tears as if there had been something shameful about them.
‘He wouldn’t want me to be miserable,’ he had said, wiping his face, as though he was obeying his father’s last command.
Lottie had always found Dean’s father’s determined joviality a little tiring. There were many times in life when just ‘cracking on’ was the foolish option. In her opinion it would have been better if Dean’s father could have occasionally shown the cracks instead. Lottie’s feeling of sadness deepened. She wondered what she was doing wandering along a road alone in the middle of the night. She thought perhaps she had gone a little mad. She wasn’t even sure how far she had walked.
She heard a vehicle slow down behind her, and then a voice called out.
‘Hey you! Where the heck are you heading for at this time in the morning?’
She turned to see Stacey’s helmeted hair poking out of her truck window. How come the woman seemed to keep popping up? Lottie was hardly in the right frame of mind for exchanging pleasantries about Princess Diana with someone who seemed to have a tenuous grasp on reality. She shouted out a vague greeting and carried on walking. Perhaps if she ignored her, Stacey would drive on.
‘Can I take you someplace?’ Stacey asked. There was the sound of the truck pulling off the road and the door opening and being slammed shut. Lottie stopped and turned round. She could hardly leave Stacey to come scampering down the road after her. Tina would have had no qualms about telling the woman to fuck off, but Lottie just couldn’t bring herself to.
‘It’s not safe. There’s a lot of goochers around at this time of the day.’
Lottie had no idea what ‘goochers’ were, but thought that the word fitted Stacey herself pretty well. She realised now that she was bone-achingly tired. She wasn’t really cut out for all this drama. She had always been Careful Carlotta as set down by her mother all those years ago – the person who would never take a risk or be made a fool of. It seemed she had somehow strayed out of character.
Live a Little Page 18