“I’m dating a woman who calls me by my surname half the time. You got it?” he carries on, as if nothing unusual was happening. “Right, now what I want you to do is this. Put a piece in your mouth and start chewing.”
“That’s eccentric,” I comment. Unwrapping a fluorescent segment, I put it in my mouth and bite. “It tastes like a wine cooler,” I mutter, trying to pulp it down.
“You know, most people would say that wine coolers taste like bubble gum,” Paul points out. “I see where your priorities lie.”
“Well, that’s what makes me so damn special,” I spit.
“That it does, beautiful Lola.” He calls me beautiful without breaking stride. “Now, what I want you to do is blow a bubble.”
“Paul, I think your imagination’s failing you.” I say it more gently than I normally would. It’s a concession.
“I don’t hear any bubbles.”
“All right, all right.” I rub the elastic mass against my palate, trying to flatten it, and straddle it across my tongue. It’s tougher than I expected. My jaws are starting to tire, an ache mixing in with the taste of mock apple. With a convulsion of the lips, I blow, and plastic stretches out of my mouth for perhaps a second, before a tiny little balloon explodes off-center.
“That sounded pretty pathetic.”
“Oh, are you an expert?” I say. “If you are, I wouldn’t admit it. It’s not to your credit.”
“You wait till tonight. I’ll impress you so much.” He laughs. “It’s surprising what you can do with some bubble gum and a bit of imagination.”
“Oh.” My chest loosens. His imagination is well ahead of mine. Damn it, now I want to meet him all the more. “Told you, I have to work late.”
He ignores that. “Now, what I want you to do is this. You’re stressed, and we can’t have that. So I want you to concentrate on your bubble gum. Blow bubbles. And you’re not allowed to go back to work until you’ve blown a bubble at least two inches in diameter. And I’ll see you tonight. I’ll come by and pick you up. Oh hang on—gotta go.” The phone clicks and he disappears.
It must be a tribute to something that I spend a full ten minutes, stiff-jawed and soaked up to the eyes in the taste of apples, trying to fill a bubble with two inches of air.
Afterward I phone Franklin. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: I’m put through to his assistant, she says things like “certainly, Ms. Galley,” and an appointment is scheduled for tomorrow. I tell Leo about it on our next afternoon walk.
“She was even polite to me,” I say, crouching down to adjust his hat.
Leo turns his head and opens his mouth to chew my wrist. Hoisting my sleeve out of his way, I let him have my knuckles to rub his gums over. He’s too young to be teething, unless he’s a prodigy. I think he’s just being pensive. Leo takes a thoughtful munch at me, and I stroke his face while he sucks, soft-tongued, at my fist.
“It’s never going to happen again,” I tell him. “This is my one brush with the high life.”
He nips me. It doesn’t hurt, he’s too little.
“He’s bringing Ellaway with him.” I sit myself on a bench. Leo whimpers as I take away my hand, and I lift him onto my lap, settling his head in the crook of my elbow. “I’ve got to meet the man again. I don’t know if I can face both of them at once.”
My baby nephew is a good listener; he keeps his eyes on me and lies quiet in my arms. His feet squirm together on my thigh as I tell him about the case, though, and he does that when he’s bored. I stop talking about work, and sing him a song instead, giving him my best happy face. His mouth quirks at the corners, and then it’s open, a pink little cove, gumless and clean. He’s smiling at me.
I lift him onto my shoulder, rest his head against mine. “Such a clever boy,” I whisper. “I’ll tell your mommy how well you smile. Such a good boy.”
So when Franklin does appear, bringing his client to see me, my first thought is that I wish Leo were here. I could do with a warm armful of someone on my side. I remind myself that I’ll see him soon, pat the pack of bubble gum in my pocket and think about last night with Paul, and tell myself that I’m a professional.
Franklin enters the room so softly, the air around him doesn’t move. His palm is lacquered against mine as he shakes my hand. Ellaway strides in after him and sits down without being asked. I remain on my feet for a moment, standing very still, looking at him.
He sits back in his chair, stretches out his long legs. Seeing me watch him, he shifts sideways a little, rocks his ankles to and fro. His eyes take a long, slow sweep up and down my body. It isn’t a lustful look, not more than ten percent. It’s more an appraisal: he knows he can stare at me if he feels like it. “You’re looking good, Ms. Galley,” he says.
“Good morning, Mr. Ellaway. Mr. Franklin, won’t you sit down?” I stand up straight. He can stare if he wants. It doesn’t touch me.
“Thank you.” Franklin seats himself, sets his briefcase down, a neat parallel beside his chair.
“Thank you for coming to see me.” I seat myself, fold my hands in front of me, take possession of my desk. “Mr. Ellaway, you understand this is just a preliminary meeting to discuss your defense?”
“Well, yeah.” He gives a surprised shrug. That was me reading him his rights, telling him something for the sake of form. All the trouble he’s been in before, I guess he hardly needs telling.
“Now, Ms. Galley, you’ve had a chance to read the briefs I sent you?” Franklin says. Ellaway’s voice rings in the little room, buzzes hard in my ears, but Franklin’s tone is lowered, fits cleanly into the space.
“Of course. Am I right in thinking that you want to present the case straight, attack the prosecution’s on the grounds of insufficient evidence?” According to the seminars and textbooks, I ought to be paying attention to my client, but I’m not a rookie anymore, and I like Franklin better.
Franklin makes a small, tidy gesture with his hands. “I think it’s certainly to be considered.” I wait for him to go on. “If we look at the evidence, there is nothing that proves our client was negligent. The incidents that followed moonrise were certainly violent, but there’s nothing that indicates it was more than an unfortunate accident.”
Hey, he said “our” client. “There’s plenty the prosecution can say,” I counter. “He was within reach of a shelter. He should have been able to get to one. I’ve been going over it, Mr. Franklin, but whichever way up I turn the map I really can’t find a reason good enough for a judge why he didn’t.”
“That isn’t conclusive proof.”
“No, but it’s not in his favor. And we have to remember—” I stop myself from saying, you have to remember; this is my field and he knows it “—that the system works differently here. The burden of proof may technically be on the prosecution, but there’s no jury to work on, just a judge, and he’s not going to look kindly on our client, whatever we say about it. He won’t jump through legal loopholes.” Franklin raises an eyebrow at this. “What I’m saying is, to convince a judge, the finer points of the law aren’t the issue. We have to build a case that sounds likely.”
“That is our intention, I believe, Ms. Galley.” Franklin’s voice is neutral; there’s just a tiny edge. He sounds almost dry.
“Undoubtedly.” I turn. “Mr. Ellaway.” He glances up from picking at the arms of his chair. “Are you determined to stick to the story you told me the first time we met?”
Ellaway looks idly at his hands on the chair. “I told you, I got lost, I didn’t know the area.” His posture is sprawled, his head inclined carelessly away from me. I follow where he’s gazing, look at his fingers playing with the armrest. The elbow sits comfortably, but there are tendons on the back of his hand, flicking under the skin. I see them twitch and strain as his nails dig into the wood of my chair, cording under the pressure.
I straighten my back, shift in my chair without making a sound. “Very well,” I say, my voice so soft it wouldn’t wake a baby. “Let’s look at the de
tails.”
Within half an hour, I understand Franklin’s reputation. I put up objections, he takes them down. Before I met him, I’d have expected him to smash me, bludgeon away the prosecution’s arguments. What he does is a lot better: he chips, takes a little sculptor’s chisel to whatever I say, until I almost think he has a case. I still doubt we’ll win, but we’ll put up a good fight. It’s the best solution I could have hoped for. Looking over some notes while Franklin settles Ellaway down for the fifth time, I hear myself give a pleased sigh.
Finally Franklin clears his throat. “Ms. Galley, I have a conference in an hour. Would it be all right with you if we continued this discussion in a few days?”
“Very well.” I haven’t raised the issue of the car yet, but making him late isn’t going to help. “I’ll see you out.”
The two of them stand up. “Can I give you a lift, Adnan?” Ellaway says. I see in that moment how he is, outside this building, away from this world. He speaks with the comfortable manners of a man who has good things and won’t diminish his stock if he shares them, because he has plenty more.
“Thank you,” says Franklin.
I walk them out. It’s only when we get to Ellaway’s car that I see something. He gets out a ring with half a dozen different keys, adorned with a heavy silver pendant whose every aerodynamic curve breathes design and which probably cost more than my winter coat, and he doesn’t see me staring.
It’s wrong. All the records say Ellaway owns one car, a blue Maserati, E99 PRM4 on the plate. I know very little about cars. This one is sleek enough to be a Maserati. It just isn’t blue.
Ellaway and Franklin climb in from their different sides. I stand a little out of their way where they can’t knock me down, and scrawl the new car’s number on the back of my hand. Its engine croons as it pulls past me, and I lean against a pillar, my head against the concrete, and the dull yellow lights ripple over gleaming silver paint as the car glides away.
TWELVE
“Circle,” Paul says.
“I haven’t finished it yet.” We’re some hours into the evening. I’m getting better at speaking without watching my every word.
We’re playing the ice game. I lean over Paul, the ice cube in my hand, using it to draw an image on his back. If he can’t guess what it is, he has to perform a forfeit; if he can, I do. We play for best of five. Paul is a better draftsman than me, his pictures more elaborate. I don’t mind. I’m keeping my sketches as simple as possible, making it easy for him: his forfeits are more inventive than mine.
“How did you come up with this game?” My voice is growing softer, unstrung. I rest my free hand against his shoulder blade; it sits curved in my palm, palpable and shapely as an apple. I can’t get used to the sensation of his body against mine, the warmth of it, at once alien and familiar. Flesh of my flesh.
“Your idea…” He speaks quietly, not flinching under the ice. “In the restaurant, remember? When I burnt my fingers. We’ve just improved on it.” He sighs. “It’s a smiley face.”
“Well done.” One out of five. I lick the running water from the cube, and smooth my hand up and down his back to dry it. “Not just this game, though. Where do you get your ideas?”
He crinkles his nose and grins. “Spent a lot of time alone in my room when I was a teenager.”
I think of that, Paul as a boy, the cube slipping like a fish between my fingers. “What were you like?”
“I was a very nice boy.” I set the ice to him and he takes a breath, closes his eyes.
My hand spiders across his neck, testing the heat and resilience of the muscles. Closing my eyes, I picture a younger Paul, sitting alone in his room, waiting to grow up. Brushing the hair from the nape of his neck, I set the ice down and rest my face against him, my fingertips settled at the warm furrow where spine locks into place with skull, and inhale. The warm smell of the air and the solid muscle beneath my cheek are adult, male. This is what children wait for.
“It’s another face,” Paul says, his voice vibrating against my ear. “A brown-eyed and lovely one.” I lay a light kiss against his spine, just a brief taste. He smiles. “Two out of five.”
“Not fair.” I sit up. “That wasn’t an ice picture.”
“It was a print. It counts. I’m winning.”
“No such thing.” I drop the ice cube on his back, and he tumbles over trying to remove it. “You’re a cheat.”
Paul reaches the ice cube before I do, but I grab his hand before he can press it against me. We scuffle and I tighten my grip, wrestling his arm away from my face, knowing I’m outmatched. “Jesus, she’s strong for a little ’un.” Paul laughs, and seizes my foot, pulling me down out of harm’s way. We lie on the bed, face-to-face, and look at each other. Paul grazes his fingertips against my lips, and I open my mouth, curling one leg around him to hold him in place. I lean my head up, trying to reach him, but he covers my eyes and holds back.
I flinch as the ice touches my collarbone, draws a slow, stinging path downward. A circle, small and slippery, and I shiver, images prickling across my skin. He slides it down, cold and sweet against me. Drawing a deep breath, I hold myself still. I want this. There’s a triangle, a sweep of something that settles over my beating heart, and then the ice glides high, around one breast, then the other, some symmetry that ends in a rippling line underneath on each side where flesh gives way to ribs. He draws down, a three-sided figure that ends in a line across my stomach, and as my back arches I tangle my fingers in the sheet, holding steady, water chasing in droplets down my waist. Then the ice lifts away, and I nestle my face against his covering hand, an icon glowing against my frosted, shuddering skin. He holds my eyes closed, and my voice catches in my mouth as he draws again, a tiny, wet oval inside the hollow of my throat.
I lie still, eyes shut, trying to keep this, but a tremor shakes me and I crush up against Paul, burrowing for warmth. His hand comes off my eyes and cups my jaw, and I find my teeth are chattering. He runs his thumb across my face. “Are you okay?”
I nod, catching him by the back of the neck and pressing myself against him. He kisses my neck, touches his forehead against mine and smiles at me, his eyes sleepy with heat. “Any guesses, pretty girl?”
“I—I don’t know.” Only lines on my skin. Only someone’s arms around me. I mumble “What?” into his enclosing hand.
“An angel.” His hand slides into my hair, cradling my head. “Don’t you know an angel when you see one?”
There isn’t any answer.
Later, he finds more ice, and I try my hand at art, calling up round-edged images from my childhood books. For Paul, I will do my best at pretty pictures. I begin on a car, then wipe it out and start again, because I was thinking about cars all day. Nothing must get into this room from the outside. I draw apples, I draw a tree and let him mistake it for a lollypop, I draw cats and fish and leaves. My pictures are open and guessable. I invoke the brightest colors and most innocent lines I have seen in all my twenty-eight years, and sketch them out in melting water, playing to lose.
There’s a weightlessness to my body today, a suffusion. I perform my tasks slowly, watch my drowsy hands drift about their business as if there was a soft mist between my arms and my eyes. The day is close and chilly, threatening rain, but I’m warm inside my shirt. Finding no seat on the bus, I lean up against a pole and let it dig into my back, thinking about Paul’s good-bye kiss, wondering how anyone can sleep so little and yet not wake me. We talked about adolescence, told each other things all weekend. My adolescence did not make me inventive, and when I said this to him, Paul talked about lying awake at night. He sleeps maybe four hours to my eight, he said, and can lie still for another four untroubled by restlessness or unease. He teased me, saying it gave him ideas, four hours of lying motionless with nothing to do but think what we could be doing if I was awake. Then he told me about the glow of the streetlamps through the blinds, the sound of my breathing half-echoing in my tiny bedroom, my hands playing piano on the
bedclothes and the arias rustled into the sheets, the voices he hears in the streets and the color of the walls in the darkness. I wasn’t awake for it, so he saved it to give me when I opened my eyes.
At work, I settle into my office and open my files, my hands still lazy on the pages. What I take in is the cool grain of the paper under my fingertips, the texture making it hard for me to pay attention to the words written onto it. When I check my e-mails, I’m more enchanted at the antics of the cute little cursor on the screen than interested in my messages. I shake myself, stretch my fingers out.
I return, once again, to Ellaway’s case. Checking up on the car I saw him in, I find that it’s a courtesy car provided by his employers. He hasn’t reclaimed his old one. The DORLA car patrollers didn’t pick it up. Some serious hacking has located it, and it’s at a small mechanic’s shop in the Benedict Park district. Benedict, the edge of town, the oldest park. It used to be the village center before we became a city and sprawled westward, building backward from the river. The colleges and schools are around Benedict Park, the bookshops and delicatessens. Scholars must need to get their cars fixed as often as anyone else, I suppose, but it’s not the district you’d take your broken vehicle to. Ellaway lives in east Kings, he broke down east of Foundling Park. It would have made more sense to take it to north Sanctus.
It only takes a little record-checking to find out which shelter Ellaway was taken to, after Johnny’s partner managed to collar him. If he wanted his car taken to a favorite mechanic, it’s possible he called from the lock-up; for that I’ll need a witness. I close the cabinet with some good news: it was my friend Ally in charge that night.
Everyone makes exceptions sometimes. Ally is one of mine.
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