Lomita For Ever

by Trevor Eve

  There was the heartening sight of a car, completely stripped of all inside that was ever of value, standing as a shell. A pale blue shell. His new car fitted in perfectly. A good sign. This was somewhere he could melt into insignificance after the act.

  And he appreciated the irony of its location.

  He never thought a piece of nondescript neglect could give him a feeling of such satisfaction. He climbed back into the car, his car, that was a hard concept to grasp; without a thrill, and not feeling like himself, he drove out.

  Was he then, the thought passed through, defined by what he owned in terms of quality? Did this car make him feel less of a person? Of course, what a stupid question, it made him feel like a loser: but what he was going to use it for made him feel full of achievement.

  Did Mr Lorken’s car – his intention took him there – make him feel something, or did he have so much that to him it was the equivalent of this Honda Accord? That was a depressing thought, that riches took away appreciation of things. They took away decency, he knew that, but did they also take away the excitement of acquisition? Where did the pleasure come from? Power then – power – over all around. Power over people. Taking away the power of the people: that was what had happened: more people, fewer with power. Where would that end up? An elite of, say, five, dominating eight billion – distillation. It was not a new thought to him: it was one of his nightmares.

  He pulled onto the road and continued west. On 8th Street the car needed gas, Mr Wong was not a generous car trader: Ever should have stuck on seventeen-fifty. He pulled into a 76 with the intention of buying a can for extra fuel. He filled the car and the gas can, but only after a struggle to find where the release button for the filler cap was.

  He had asked no questions about the car’s functions. Why would he? He couldn’t care less. Paid in cash for the gas, and drove slowly; that was what Ms Del Rey dictated. A compelling drone. He felt sorry that she wasn’t singing in a better car, she deserved more; he decided to switch her off and unplug his ears, and listen to the car to make sure it didn’t have noises it shouldn’t. Mr Wong, for all his training, it appeared, was a smoker: he hadn’t even bothered to empty the ashtray. He wondered how Bruce managed his climb to the eighth floor.

  Should have stuck on seventeen-fifty. Erase the Mr Smith email account; he hoped Mr Smith would disappear into Chinese thin air.

  *

  The thing about buying a car from a Chinese man is you want to do it again in couple of hours.

  Nearly worked, chuckled Ever, appalled at his cheapness, but liberated to be able to tread on that territory. He always considered himself respectful; maybe he was drying out like a piece of clay; his conscience slowly crumbling away.

  He would soon be uncontactable and as unmemorable as the car.

  *

  His potential anonymity brought him only a temporary comfort.

  He was starting to feel that everybody was noticing him in this car. He had stayed off the freeway, not trusting the lump in relentless traffic, taking in Little Mexico, turning down through parts of Koreatown, with its endless medical buildings, to get onto Olympic and continue west before making a right and getting up to Santa Monica Boulevard. He was approaching the more sophisticated parts of Santa Monica Boulevard; he could feel people looking at him, couldn’t he? Questioning why he was driving that car. Why was he in that car? Why was he? He was now, one part of him at least, demanding an explanation, from the other part, as to what he thought he was doing.

  Rational thought scared this brain, a brain that was being exhausted by its focus on this obsessive journey; a commitment to this journey which required abandonment of sense, the health food for the brain. He couldn’t take this conversation, no – discussion, no – argument, no – it was a fight. He pressed the Thin White Duke into his ears for comfort. He’d got his car, he’d got his gun. He hummed a song, not the one he was listening to, so it riffed in counterpoint to what was pumping into his head.

  The thought of the police came in and wouldn’t leave. He plucked out the buds and voiced a God Bless to Bowie. What would he say if he was stopped?

  ‘Yes, I have just bought this car.’

  ‘Documents? Name doesn’t match ID.’

  A panic poured over him in liquid form.

  He got wet. And cold. There was only one word for it and he knew it; he couldn’t face that word, because it was irreversible, you can never come back when you have crossed over, it was – madness.

  Madness that is coupled with an action while in that state allows no control. He was in the middle of an episode; of indeterminate length; of obsessively committed insanity.

  He needed desperately to be in the cool darkness and protection of Lomita’s garage.

  His idea of a paradise was to sit there and hide: no one would ever be able to find him. He started to feel the strangeness of the steering wheel, uncomfortable in his hands, he was forced to stroke it to find the comfort area of the wheel. His hands were perspiring; the cheap plastic of the steering wheel, with the worn construct of finger indentation, mass-produced several million times, only made the attempt at smooth contact worse.

  He wanted to rub the wheel to erase, until a flatness was there; until the finger bumps were gone, the plastic levelled. His hands were hurting as he fought to keep the car on the road.

  He was in Beverly Hills now, turning up Doheny – he was nearly there. He had remembered to do what no one remembers to do when they return a rental: they always leave the garage remote in the rental. He had remembered it, and he felt proud that he was functioning at that level of detail; it gave him confidence. He pressed it with a shaking, wet hand, it opened and he entered; he felt the cold darkness cover him with a safety, then he re-pressed the remote, the darkness increased and then the comfort of the sound of door into frame, completing its descent, hit his ears. He was swamped with relief.

  Then came the fight – the compulsion to re-press – to continue to go over the process again, and again; he threw the remote into the back of the car – out of reach.

  They couldn’t find him now.

  He was safe.

  Safe, and he wanted to talk to Lomita; but not for another hour.

  He wanted to sit for an hour and try to smooth out this fucking steering wheel. He stroked and stroked it, until the desire left him and he was able to calm, just calm.

  He had a full minute of consideration as to whether to turn off the engine or let it run in the dark enclosed space. He guided his hand to the ignition and killed the horses, breathless and spuming, in the engine.

  He slept for a dreamless ten minutes.

  At least, he thought he slept, but had no way of knowing because no dream came to mind; no other world that would confirm he had left this one. After what he decided was a wake-up, he accepted a peace. He stopped sweating. He had to force memory back into his head; what had passed that day. Force hard, his brain not going there, or wanting to go there, and accept what he had done.

  He had only bought a car. No biggie. Jesus Christ, come on.

  What was going to happen? When?

  Crumbling conscience.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Ever slept with his mother until he was thirteen.

  Meaning in the same bed; and it didn’t happen every night. The reason for leaving his solitary bed was the dream of the pale blue hand and he would invariably, on opening his eyes from the waking nightmare, leave his room and go into his parents’ room, in the middle of the night, and climb into their bed. Then as he got older, and bigger, his father would reluctantly, to create space, leave the bed and climb into the vacated one, in the next room.

  It was interesting to Ever that his room was always known as the guest bedroom; he was never allowed to put up posters or anything to stake his claim, show any evidence, a physically imposed kind of evidence, that this was his own personal space. It had another single bed alongside his. So it was a twin-bedded room, the bed covers, or eiderdowns, as they were kn
own, were in the same shade of lilac as those that were in his mother’s bedroom. It was never referred to as his father’s bedroom, although he’d inherited the house, or his parents’ bedroom, always his mother’s bedroom. The wallpaper also made no concession to the fact that a boy slept there. It had a green background, with flowers and tree branches, factory rolled out and printed in pale colours; only after a long study – he was probably the only person who had bothered to give it that length of study – when in the summer he lay awake, the light fading, staring and staring, squinting his eyes, screwing them up to extract some definition, did he find something in its purposeful blandness. Ever questioned the pattern’s integrity, the reason to make it: a sort of a garden feel, with a Chinese influence. But why put the outside on the inside? He was six.

  His conclusion, from these times of pondering, was that it was a really anonymous wallpaper and he hated it.

  He never felt he belonged in his room: the room that was kept for guests. There was a much smaller room, attic-style, that he would go to on the occasion that guests came to stay. That only happened once, that he could remember, when his aunt and uncle came to stay for one night. His father was hated by his mother’s brother so it was not pleasant and that was probably the explanation for the single stay.

  But the room remained in name terms – the guest room.

  Not Ever’s room.

  Ever.

  Even though it was in this bed that he was visited in the winter, when he would fall ill with bronchitis that would then develop into pneumonia, to be given daily penicillin injections by a Scottish doctor by the name of Dr Triptle.

  The injections were delivered into his buttock, a slow and increasingly agonising pain, that built and built during the release of the fluid: so he knew that at the insertion of the thick needle there was nothing to look forward to as this was only the beginning of the increasing pain cycle while the serum journeyed into Ever’s system.

  Ever was relieved that when he was ten he was put into Wildwood School in Los Angeles for a year. A bold move and a good one, during another period of success for his father. Ever loved it as the primary consideration was not education: but for the children to be happy. But the most exciting thing for him was that he didn’t get bronchitis. It was his mother who always battled to spend Christmas in England. Both Ever and his father could see the sense of staying in the comparative warmth of Santa Monica but his mother didn’t really care. Her way was the way.

  She was a short woman, quite plump but with a pretty pre-war type face, although she was born five years after the end of the Second World War; her face always maintained an out-of-date traditionalism in its looks. Her name was Dorothy, no middle name, just the one, his mother often stated a resentment towards her parents for their lack of effort, in that they never came up with two names, at least the gift of a middle name.

  ‘That’s all you want in life is choice.’

  That’s what she said, it was a kind of her mantra, she applied it to a lot of things. She hated the name Dorothy. Ever agreed that it never seemed to represent her, or suit her; she was more contemporary than the name implied. But she drank a lot, which she did in front of him and his father; there was never any one else around. There was what she thought to be secret drinking going on, a bottle of gin, kept under the bed, but Ever knew and his father had always known, she probably knew they knew and just didn’t care. The mornings would find her in the kitchen, grumpy, with a hangover, then around midday it was time for a ‘little drinky’, spoken with her welsh lilt in the hope that it would provide a distracting charm. Then in the evening she would state she would ‘only have the one’. But in fact, she had kept herself topped up from under the bed during the course of the afternoon. Anyway she never just stuck to ‘the one’.

  Ever always felt a sadness for his mother, she never appeared, unless drinking, to extract any happiness from life.

  He was seven years old when she sat him on her lap and said that he was the only reason she was staying alive, that she didn’t kill herself.

  From that moment he felt a two-fold duty to keep her alive and to keep her happy. To ease the complications of their transatlantic existence, education-wise, at least, Ever was eventually put into a boarding school in England. The shock was made even greater when a postcard arrived for him, after only a couple of weeks at the school, saying that she was having a wonderful time in Los Angeles. This compounded his feeling of rejection, and confusion, in that she had always been the one wanting to go back to England. It also made him worry that he wasn’t there to help her. His thoughts were not about himself, in those early years of his life, never, they were concern for her.

  The letters which followed from his mother, which he dutifully replied to, were always signed off: Yours affec. Mum. No kisses. He had no idea what this meant, he would ask the other boys what was written at the end of their letters, how their mothers signed off: without exception, they divulged, lots of love, all my love, I love you, one of the three, or one of the first two – then an I love you as well. And followed with lots of kisses. He asked his mother, in a letter, what it meant, she explained – Yours Affectionately.

  His immediate thought was, couldn’t she be bothered to write the whole word? He never suggested she change her sign-off, though, so he continued to receive letters ending with those three words, Yours affec. Mum. And no kisses.

  He got his first mobile phone when he was fifteen, probably as a result of his near death experience, rather than any attempt at technological advancement, just to be able to keep in touch; her emails or texts still ended with the same remote formality.

  There was an event that left Ever with an ineradicable feeling of both guilt and horror.

  When he asked, at the age of thirteen, if he could spend a night in his mother’s bed. He felt frightened at the anticipation of the pale blue hand.

  This, by now, was making his father’s anger grow at every request, he repeatedly stated the boy was too old for this now, and, as if to lighten the complaint, always added that he didn’t want to spend the night on his own.

  He got lonely too.

  The he’s-away-at-school-it’s-a-treat argument came up, in a defence from his mother, and his father was forced to acquiesce. Ever got his way, on this particular night, which is written in indelible ink. During the course of the night, he remembers his mother’s nightdress riding up, and for the first time he wanted to see her body, naked; he lifted the sheets but could see nothing in the darkness, and sense only the smell of Chanel No 5, his mother, he supposed in her sleep, seemed to push her bottom in his direction, he, to his horror, realised he had an erection and immediately turned his back on her and lay there, starting to gently masturbate; but he aroused himself more, and in the weakness of single sexual focus he turned back towards his mother, with his erect penis he pushed tentatively and slowly towards her, his heart made his whole body pound and he realised he was shaking, there was no resistance from his mother, he pushed his penis further to what he could only describe as her bottom; there was a definite feel of wetness on the end of his penis but he knew nothing about what he was doing, or the consequences of what he was doing, he pushed a little more and there still was no resistance, he felt he had entered something that was containing him; and it was, his first image and an obvious one; that it was dark.

  A dark place with a comfort like nothing he had ever sensed from anything in his life.

  That is all he could think, he continued to go further inside this darkness and his mother didn’t move.

  He pulled out a little, just once, and pushed back inside; then in a panic that he was going to orgasm, he pulled out and rubbed his penis and, for the first time, with his ejaculation, a substantial amount of semen shot out; he felt covered in his own guilty product.

  He lay there, still, with heart pounding, no longer shaking and waiting to sense any sound or movement from his mother. He listened hard to her breathing to hear if there was the slightest change in
rhythm, or depth of intake of breath. But nothing.

  He lay there, without moving, until dawn. In an awareness of having done something terrible but not knowing if his mother had any knowledge of what had happened and would he, or she, say anything about it. For the hour after his ejaculation he kept his hand that had been around his penis to his nose and inhaled the smell of the place he had lived and entered the world through.

  He felt a shame, the greatest feeling of shame he had ever felt: a guilt about his father crawled over him like ants, always waiting for more pain, from more bites. His father wouldn’t have any ability or place to go to find an understanding of this act, as he remained in what for once could be honestly referred to as blissful ignorance. How could Ever eradicate this from his brain or deal with the relationship he now had with his unknowing father?

  It had all changed, his life, his relationship with his mother and father, in the space of a single minute. A single minute that would make the years, however many he lived, never be the same again. How could he make it up to his father, to get his forgiveness, apologise, for an act he assumed he would never know had been committed? All the words, forgiveness, apology, were feeble in comparison to what he had done. He had committed an act that would haunt him: and it did every day of his life.

  That morning, the morning after the night, and throughout the day, nothing was said. He said nothing, his mother behaved in her usual grumpy way; the result of the previous night’s alcohol consumption.

  The problem was cemented in time for Ever, because it was a year later that his parents split up and ultimately divorced. His father moved permanently to Los Angeles; Ever was left with his mother during school time; during the holidays, he would divide the time and fly to see his father.