Live a Little

by Madeleine Reiss

  ‘Oh God, happy people!’ Dean moaned. ‘A bride who actually intends to go through with her wedding.’ He seemed to have entered the morose phase of drunkenness. Despite his protestations she took him by the arm and led him out of the hotel and into the car park.

  *

  ‘Did you really hit Spike?’ Lottie asked. They had stopped for take-away coffees and, by some miracle, since much of the rim of the canyon was teeming with people, who buzzed around its edges like wasps on the lip of a jam jar, Lottie had found a quiet place with a flat rock to sit on. Just ahead of them there was a tree with white, twisting branches like the antlers on a deer. Below and beyond, the intricate wrinkles and bulges of the canyon were orange and wine red. The sun’s fiery line stretched from one end of the horizon to the other.

  ‘Yes I did. Right in the face.’ Dean managed a smile at last.

  ‘Did he hit you back?’

  ‘He tried to. He was quite pathetic actually,’ Dean said, looking almost happy at the memory. ‘Kept fumbling around with his boots.’

  They sat in silence for a while watching as the darkness crept stealthily over one side of the canyon, extinguishing its brief brightness. The tree lost its pale glint and darkened too. Lottie felt sad. She had thrown his love away so carelessly.

  ‘Was he better in bed than me?’ Dean asked as if he knew he shouldn’t need to know, but couldn’t help himself.

  ‘Of course not,’ Lottie said. ‘Sleeping with someone new is always a bit awkward. It takes time to get it right.’

  They subsided into silence once more. Swift shadows danced across the sky, almost too quick to be seen.

  ‘Bats,’ Dean announced. ‘Probably pipistrelles. They have hairy toes, apparently.’ He smiled ruefully when she laughed. ‘You see, I’ll never be able to change. I’ll always be boring on about the proper names of things. I can’t help myself. No wonder you wanted someone different.’

  He gazed at her for a long moment and in his look was all he had ever been and all she had ever really wanted. How could she have put this in jeopardy? What had it even been for? She thought she must have gone briefly mad.

  ‘Can’t we start again?’ she asked.

  He was silent for a long time, and she found she was holding her breath.

  ‘I’m not sure I can,’ he said. ‘When I think of you with him, it’s as if something solid has crumbled and can’t be built up again.’ He spoke sadly and with resignation.

  ‘Other people get over things like this.’ She took hold of his hand, but he pulled it away.

  ‘I don’t think I’m one of those people,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I can love you when I’m no longer sure of your love.’

  There it was, as she had suspected. He was all in or nothing. The last of the canyon’s shine was snatched away and the giddy stretch of it was sucked inward into dark.

  Chapter 28

  ‘WHERE’S DEAN?’ TINA ASKED, when she finally came back to the hotel. Lottie’s face was sore and puffy with tears.

  ‘He’s gone to his room. He’s leaving in the morning.’ Lottie wiped her face with the edge of her sheet, smearing snot and mascara all over it. ‘God, another thing I’ve spoiled. It’s all I ever do.’

  Tina came and sat down next to her and put her arm around her sister’s heaving shoulders.

  ‘He won’t forgive me,’ Lottie murmured. ‘He said it was like a wall tumbling down, or something.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to be with Spike,’ Tina said, giving her sister’s face another wipe with the sheet.

  ‘I did. At least, I wanted to sleep with him and I wasn’t completely sure afterwards. I was a little dazzled, I think, and he seemed to like me, and there was a moon and I felt pretty. Oh, I’m the crappest person on earth.’

  Lottie gave another gulping moan and threw herself into her pillow. Tina stroked her hair, which was tangled into unruly clumps. Where on earth had her tidy, controlled sister gone? Lottie looked as if she had given up even trying to keep herself together. Tina was almost certain Lottie had her sweatshirt on inside out.

  ‘Maybe he’ll come round,’ Tina said.

  ‘I don’t think he will. He seemed so certain.’

  Tina felt a great wave of contrition. It was her fault her sister was suffering. As for her own feelings, they were such a conflicting bundle of emotions she couldn’t say exactly what it was she wanted – only that she had to admit to a sense of relief, squashed almost as soon as it began to worm inside her, that Lottie didn’t want to be with Spike after all.

  ‘I think I should go home, even though I probably haven’t even got a home anymore,’ Lottie said. ‘I can’t possibly continue on the trip feeling like this. Dean will think me even more heartless than he does already.’

  ‘What about the ashes?’ Tina asked. ‘We still have to do that.’

  Here, Lottie pulled the sheet over her head and began crying again.

  ‘We can’t come all this way and not find Landing Rock,’ Tina said. What an utter mess this trip had turned out to be! What would Mia think to find them so at odds with themselves and each other?

  ‘If you come out of there I’ll get you a hot chocolate,’ Tina said at last, when she thought that Lottie had cried herself out. Lottie sat up wearily and smoothed her hair down.

  ‘I think I’ll live life without men,’ she announced, with only the slightest wobble of her bottom lip.

  *

  Spike had decided it was best he kept out of the way, so after parting company with Tina, he found a bar near to the hotel. There was a buffalo head fixed to the wall and a man playing ‘Three-Quarter Blues’ on the piano. The waiting staff had tags on their chests saying where they were from. ‘Yavapai County’, who had ringlets and darkly pencilled eyebrows that gave her a look of permanent astonishment, served him fried potato skins and a beer. His leg throbbed and his jaw ached from the not inconsiderable blow Dean had planted on him. These were minor matters and easily soothed by salty crispness and a cold drink. It was far harder to work out what exactly he was doing in a bar near the Grand Canyon, and what on earth he was going to do about Tina and Lottie.

  His motives for staying on the trip seemed to him now to be terribly unclear. He had joined the sisters partly because he really was stuck without a car, but also because he had been curious about Tina – a curiosity that had perhaps prompted his decision to set off so early to Mexico, although he would never have admitted that to her. He could imagine the derision she would heap on him if he did. Seeing her so unexpectedly at the party had triggered a desire in him that he had thought was utterly dormant to find out what had happened to her since they had been together. It quickly became apparent that she had no intention of telling him anything much at all. Her air of superiority and the way she seemed always to need men to admire her had irritated him almost from the very beginning.

  When she had made her crass suggestion that he should divert Lottie from her wedding, he’d had absolutely no intention of obeying her. He had only fallen in with the plan in order to goad Tina a little, and then he had begun to like Lottie. It had salved his wounded pride to be the object of her admiration. He had thought Lottie cast in the same shape as her sister, and had realised too late how deeply she felt things, how irresponsible it had been for him to play with her affections. Now she had broken off her engagement and he felt that he was duty-bound to try and give them a chance to create something more lasting, if that was what she wanted. He owed her nothing less than that. He was pretty sure that if Tina had been in a similar situation she would never have confessed to the infidelity, but Lottie was much more truthful than her sister had ever been. Lottie would never have allowed him to stumble upon her having sex with a twat in their own bed.

  If he hadn’t started telling Lottie she looked lovely and putting jackets around her shoulders and all the other perfidious crap Tina had encouraged, she probably wouldn’t have looked twice at him and he would have quite rightly thought her engaged and out of bounds. He had never
been someone who actively sought to take women from other people, and yet despite himself it seemed he had. They had flirted, then gone a step further and then they were both enmeshed in something that really shouldn’t have ever started, or at least not started in the way it had. Tina had always been trouble. It would have been better if he had hiked back to San Francisco or even taken pot luck and got on a bus heading pretty much anywhere.

  On the next table, two tourists in dusty boots were holding hands across the table. The woman’s ring finger glittered. They looked completely intact and untouchable, as if they were held by the air in their own private space. He thought again about that strange moment in the canyon when he had been tying Tina’s scarf around her shoulders. It was so unlikely that he thought now he must surely have imagined it, but there had been a kind of tremble in her face when she had looked at him – a kind of softness that he had not expected to see again. It must have been a trick of the dusty light. If she had even the slightest of feelings for him she would never have thrown him so forcibly into her sister’s arms.

  ‘Congratulations!’ he said to the couple next to him, raising his glass. They smiled at him, and although he beamed back, he felt something very close to sadness.

  Chapter 29

  TINA WAS ASSIDUOUSLY PRETENDING NOT to watch them, but every now and again she let her phone drop so that she could assess Spike and Lottie’s body language. Soon after entering the Painted Desert, they had stopped by a lopsided caravan selling cold drinks, and the pair of them were now walking slowly back to the car across a stretch of blond grass. Although the hues of the canyon were still in evidence in little flashes of cerise and lilac layered in cream, they were paler versions of the colours they had left behind. Here the light was harsh and flat and the road was relentlessly straight, its central markings so even they looked as if they were being fed into a machine as they disappeared under the moving car.

  Spike had told them he was planning on getting a bus from Monument Valley the next day. Tina knew that Lottie wanted to speak to him before he left, so she’d pretended she was too tired to get out of the car to give them the opportunity to be alone together. Dean had checked out of the hotel early that morning, presumably to fly back to the UK, and Lottie had accepted his departure with a sad resignation that made Tina feel very guilty.

  ‘I thought perhaps he might have left me a message,’ Lottie had said. ‘I had this feeling when I woke this morning that he’d changed his mind, or at least decided to stay with me for a while so that we could have talked some more.’

  ‘Perhaps he just needs some time by himself to think things over,’ Tina had answered. She was revising her impression of Dean on an almost hourly basis. It was true what they said about still waters running deep. He might have a tendency to pomposity, and she herself couldn’t stand a man who used beard oil or in fact had a beard – but there was no doubting that he felt deeply about her sister. He was behaving in an impressively erratic way.

  ‘More likely he’s rushing back to the UK to see if he can’t get a rebate on the venue and the catering,’ Lottie had said with a grim smile, and Tina had been a little reassured to see her fighting spirit hadn’t been quite extinguished.

  Lottie was making a wide encompassing motion with her arms. She was wearing a red jumper over her orange dress and green espadrilles that laced half way up her legs, and the wind was moving her hair away from her face. She looked beautiful, but Tina could see the weariness in her shoulders and in the way she walked. She fought against her baser nature, a battle she waged and lost all too often, trying not to feel jealous of her sister. At the start of this road trip she had felt sorry for her, believing her to be drearily bogged down in a life that wasn’t of her choosing – and now, barely ten days later, Lottie had driven blindfolded, stolen some clogs, worn something that wasn’t navy, tussled with a kidnapper, run across a night desert and had two men fighting over her. Tina felt almost dull in comparison. It was almost as if they were swapping personalities. She wondered exactly what Lottie was saying to Spike.

  *

  ‘Blame it on the moonlight, or the sunshine, or my utter stupidity. I don’t want you to think that I didn’t want to sleep with you, because I did, but the main outcome of it, apart from me wandering around in the middle of the night and getting kidnapped by a trucker, was that it made me realise how much I love Dean.’

  Lottie stopped, as though to make sure he understood what she was saying. Spike thought she looked lovelier than he had ever seen her, although there were violet shadows under her eyes and her body was tight with the effort of keeping herself together. She was someone who tried to do no damage, who was earnestly truthful to herself and other people. She was an impressive person. For a moment Spike felt a kind of regret that it wasn’t him that she had chosen, but he knew that there was really nothing more between them than a mutual liking and the feeling that maybe life was passing them by. They just happened to have met when they were both a little unsure that the choices they had made and were making were the right ones. Love, or the potential for it, was an altogether heavier and more twisted thing than what they had shared or would ever share. Spike thought again of that strange look on Tina’s face – what had it been exactly? The more he thought about it, the more he convinced himself that it had been shock he had seen in her eyes.

  ‘I get it,’ he said. ‘I really do. Don’t worry, my damaged heart will survive.’

  Lottie kissed him on the cheek and smiled.

  ‘And if that man of yours has any sense at all, he’ll come running back,’ he added, gingerly rubbing his jaw.

  *

  They’re walking quite close to each other, Tina said to herself as she pretended not to peep at them through the window. Perhaps Lottie has decided that, since Dean has gone, she’ll settle for Spike instead. Maybe Spike has told her he loves her and so she’s decided not to hurt him. Lottie was easily capable of doing something as daft as that. Tina tried to read their faces as they came nearer to the car, but there wasn’t much to go on. Lottie looked pretty much the same as she had before, and though Spike was smiling, he wasn’t giving much away. He certainly didn’t look cast down, so perhaps the two of them were going to make a go of it after all.

  *

  ‘If you were a method of flying, what would you be?’ Tina asked as they pulled out of the lay-by. She was desperate to cut through the silence in the car. It was making her uneasy.

  ‘I’d be a hot air balloon,’ Lottie said obediently, although Tina could tell her heart wasn’t in the game.

  ‘I’d be a rocket,’ Spike said, settling back in his seat.

  ‘I’d be a condor,’ Tina said.

  As they drove across Navajo Nation, the landscape seemed to lose its focus and become more desolate. The small towns became smaller and then seemed to disintegrate entirely into scatterings of trailers and abandoned cars. The earth was massed in throwaway heaps, the hills spreading downwards like something thick being poured slowly. There was nothing to see for miles other than signs advertising Navajo artefacts, the occasional emaciated horse and herds of sheep. A dog chased a jeep. A woman, in the middle of nowhere, was walking with her head down, her backpack loaded with tin cans. Train tracks ran parallel to the road as if there was only one way out.

  ‘The Painted Desert sounds so much nicer than it is,’ Lottie said. She felt desperately sad. All she had to look forward to now was going back to England and making a hundred phone calls saying that the wedding had been cancelled. How would she explain it? Glen Campbell was singing about being on his way to Phoenix after leaving a woman a goodbye note, and she turned it off. She didn’t want to feel worse than she already did.

  ‘When in doubt, eat sugar,’ Tina said, sensing her despondency. So they stopped at a garage and filled up the tank and bought a heap of confectionery.

  ‘It tastes wrong,’ Lottie said, letting Spike take over the driving and sampling a bar. ‘Like chocolate with all the chocolate taken out.’
/>   *

  They were not ready at all for Monument Valley. It caught them all by surprise and lifted the mood of depression instantly, as if something heavy had been plucked away. Just after Kayenta there was a small rise in the road, just an insignificant bump, and then there it was, the beginnings of the strangest and most wonderful of landscapes. As she gazed out of the window, Tina thought there would be no point at all in trying to fit what was there within the frame of her camera. Even if she used the widest lens, there was just too much of it to be contained or even to properly make sense of. The evening light made the colours of the rocks richer than any she had ever seen. They were more akin to the bright lushness of fresh paint than the shades normally seen in nature – a fiery, unholy orange, the purple of regal robes and slices of pink and green like an oil-rendered rose. And the shapes! Citadels, cathedrals, the roofs of temples, spires, columns, an Egyptian queen sitting on a throne – just fragments of things, really, and yet on a grander scale than any classical ruins. With wide stretches of flatness between them and around them, it was as if they had simply landed there or been left behind – not quite belonging under this sky and yet so calm and lovely.

  ‘I can’t believe it!’ Lottie exclaimed, turning a stunned face to her sister, who caught hold of her hand and held it. Spike smiled at them both, looking pleased at the reaction and a little complacent, as if being an American meant he was partly responsible for the splendour of the landscape.

  ‘I need to be in it,’ Lottie said.

  They parked and walked towards a distant fortified city within a crumbled, crenellated wall. The fact that they didn’t seem to be getting any nearer to it, even after twenty minutes, reminded Lottie of the strip in Las Vegas and the sense she’d had of moving on the spot. The whole of America was a mirage. Spike had wine and so they sat, finally, in the crimson glow of the evening, and drank warm Merlot out of plastic cups.

  ‘Where do you think Landing Rock is?’ Lottie asked. ‘This is all much bigger than I expected it to be. It’s going to be hard to find.’