by Trevor Eve
*
He never slept in his mother’s bed again.
But the guilt that lay inside him was so profound, his agony was increased by the fact that it could never be discussed or addressed; it existed at a level that was really beyond the acceptable bounds of conversation. But he blamed himself, he always believed that in this incestuous Oedipal act, the desire came from him and was the cause of the break-up of his parents’ marriage.
He has never, to this day, had any idea what his mother’s awareness, if any, was of the situation; it has never been referred to.
Ever is trapped in his own deviant and perverted world of blame.
Ever and his mother rarely communicate: but he puts it down to the alcohol.
Not the fact that he fucked her.
Chapter Twenty-six
After his sojourn in the garage.
He walked back into the house through the door that Manita always used. He had received an email from Miss Money-Root. The email account he had opened specifically for Miss Money-Root, at the same time as becoming Mr Smith for Mr Wong, was in the name of [email protected]: he had introduced himself to her through that guise. Clever name he thought.
With the Lorken gallery logo, her email read:
From the office of Peony Money-Root.
Dear Mr Jacob
I wonder if you would be kind enough to pass on an invitation to Miss Lomita Nairn from Mr Lorken, inviting her to dinner at home, on Friday night. The details are in the attachment below.
I do hope I have gone through the correct channel in approaching you: I am unable to access a direct communication with Miss Nairn. Of course, if the date does not suit, please inform and we can accommodate.
I do not wish to presume an intrusion.
With reference to John Everett Millen: we are in the process of arranging the transportation of these works to our private viewing room at the beginning of next week – hopefully Monday.
I would be grateful if you could confirm a suitable day for Miss Nairn’s appraisal of these works thereafter, if that proves convenient.
Please excuse the demand for two confirmations in one communication.
If there is anything else I can help you with, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Many thanks.
Yours
Peony Money-Root.
Gallery Development Executive.
Ever sensed a suggestion of humour towards the end of the email, but he couldn’t visualise her face in response to that humour: he had never seen her smile.
And, of course, he was the minion and was not invited. A fly on the wall: he wished to be.
The house was quiet, it was always quiet; but it seemed to have the sound of sleep hanging in the air on his return. Manita did not appear to be around.
After a brief lie-down on his bed, and a difficult time with the remote, trying, without panic, to access the shopping channel, he felt the need for some calming medication.
This could only be administered by his resident physician Miss Lomita Nairn.
He walked out of his room, stood outside her door, listening for any sound and taking in the sun. Always the sun, playing with the trees: he was glad of the air conditioning that brought a cool to the world inside. It made looking outside at the warmth like a visit to a planetarium or an aquarium, where the observer is placed in a different environment. Complete separation. He was living in a different climate: he was in a different world. He knocked quietly on her door.
‘Hello?’
Was the surprise response. Mainly because the knock was so quiet: good hearing, he thought.
‘What do you want?’
A warm tone to the question.
‘It’s me, Ever.’
‘Come in, my sweet. Come in.’
He opened the door; she was fully in bed, looking pale and tired, but not unhappy to see him. She patted the bed and invited him to sit. It was usually the other way round, with her showing the concern, and sitting, like the doctor, on the bed.
‘I have just overdone it a bit, my sweet. I’ve missed you. Did everything go all right?’
‘Yes.’
He said simply. He did not want to invite questions.
‘No problems, I now have a car that is cheaper than a month’s rental.’
A stretch, but not far off the truth. Right area, thereabouts, anyway.
‘You have an invitation from Mr Lorken for dinner at his home.’
‘Oh my. Show me.’
She said, with an obvious pleasure at her social calendar opening up.
He passed his phone and showed her the attached invitation.
‘Very formal. Dietary requirements? Alcohol.’
Was her sole rider and there was a gurgle of laughter.
‘On Friday? My, a couple of days to recover. I will look forward to that. At least it’s early.’
Noting the 6.30 arrival time.
‘I can’t go. I’m not invited.’
‘Of course you’re not. You work for me.’
He was a little taken aback, expecting – ‘I can’t go without you.’ But no, she was straight into—
‘I’ll wear my kingfisher blue dress. That’ll knock them dead. Valentino. My favourite, I think. Made for me.’
Ever didn’t doubt it.
‘And I will not go in my goddam wheelchair.’
‘My arm won’t be there.’
‘I will take my fist cane.’
The puzzled look spurred her explanation.
‘I use it, a silver carved fist turned with fingers up. That’s the handle. So hand can grip hand – it’s made from ebony. I had to put a bit of ugly rubber on the bottom, it was slipping everywhere, but it does not, I assure you, detract from the overall picture of elegance.’
Again, Ever didn’t doubt it.
‘I am doing all this for you, you know, my sweet. Peck my cheek. Both of them.’
He obeyed.
‘Thank you. What is it about you Ever? That I want. That I want to help?’
She seemed to correct herself, in case it had the suggestion of where they never go now.
He mused, though, that they both wanted to: and wondered why they didn’t. But he had felt the invader the last and only time, and was not about to repeat that unpleasantness, that feeling.
*
Lomita and Ever ate an omelette.
Prepared by Manita, they sat in silence in the brown of the dining room. They drank sparkling water, followed by camomile tea.
The garden lights shone bright, the sun was switched off and the last of the hummingbirds had gone to bed. Lomita was in her wheelchair and her Pucci wrap. Exhaustion was on her face like make-up, and Ever, always one to go for guilt, felt it was because of him; it prompted his question.
‘Should I leave? Would it make it easier for you?’
‘I don’t know why you came into my life, Ever, but it was too quiet before.’
A smile. He did not understand her change in tone.
‘What am I doing, Ever? What are you really going to do, and do you think I am going to condone it? You are not well. Don’t you see that? Why don’t you see that?’
Ever’s world took a gravity drop in terms of shock, a bump on the ground of understanding – he thought he was there – that she was with him. Did he really, when had she ever said that?
‘I won’t do this anymore. What can I do? Call your doctor, tell him what you are going to do? I don’t even know that you have clearly expressed what the hell you are going to do.’
A long exhalation that left no breath in her lungs, and a pause for the refill.
‘You are seriously going to kill a man who thwarted your father’s creativity?’
‘Yes.’
There was a pause filled with her amazement.
‘I think so, yes.’
‘On the basis that your father was what? Exposed as a no-talent, a commercially non-viable artist?’
Ever had never entertained these kinds of w
ords with these kinds of sounds and formations.
‘My father is—’
Was all he found himself saying.
‘You are blaming a man for your father’s death.’
‘No, for the death of my father’s life. You don’t understand the concept, a physical death is one thing, but to kill the spirit is another.’
‘Why do you believe that? Have you not understood what I have done to try to discourage this belief in you?’
‘I was just an entertainment, you thought my belief in revenge would pass. Is that it? Well it hasn’t, and I understand you want nothing to do with me anymore.’
‘I can’t do this, if that is what you continue to believe. I have to remove myself from this, my sweet, as much as I care for you. I can’t be party to a murder. I thought that with help and a little bit of love, a relationship, you would realise, change, come through, but you are still fixated. I don’t think you are being honest with me. I am going to my bed. And I think you should do the same, and tomorrow we must address this.’
‘And you want me to go?’
‘What I want is to see this through, help you. Get rid of your pain. I recognise pain, I understand it, and maybe we are both not being honest with each other. You can’t live like you live. I know that feeling. When you can’t live with something.’
You don’t.
Ever kept his disagreement to himself: it never developed beyond a thought.
‘I won’t feed or enable your madness, my sweet, I thought I could calm it and make reason come into that brain of yours.’
He was angry, but continued to keep quiet. He couldn’t understand, they had met and he believed she understood the predicament, the development toward a solution, the tragedy of what happened, the needing to be rid.
*
Ever’s internal jousting stopped. He turned into himself. Did she see through him and his gestures of anger? Was he being honest? Could he ever be truly honest? Did he not recognise in himself there were other, or there was one other reason for this execution?
She wheeled herself back towards the bedroom, he asked for something to help him sleep. It seemed with a sadness she gave him a diazepam and a zolpidem.
‘My sweet, sweet dreams. It will be all right.’
She at that moment ceased to be just another human for him; he sensed that she was the first person to understand what it was he wanted to do for his father. Not to know the detail but to understand the depth of there being another reason kicking in his being.
The love he never knew if he had lost from his father.
A way to make it all up.
*
And with that plague in his head.
Wednesday turned into Thursday with the shopping channel and no volume accompanying Ever through his wakeful sleep. Never really sure, as always was the case, whether he was asleep or not.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Thursday was warmer.
The leaves from the pool had been cleared by the weekly spruce-up, and he decided, as Lomita was still in bed, to swim.
In his underpants, he had no swimming costume, that had never been in his plan, to end up in a pool. Unheated. It was March, and the desert night had instilled a chill in the pool: the cold wrapped itself around his brain and hurt a little. A little like a brain-freeze, and then he wished his brain would freeze. Just freeze over and not operate.
He swam under the water, the sounds all around him were silenced and he felt that if he could hold his breath forever – this is where he would like to be. Brain numbed into silence. Surrounded by pale blue tiles, some cracked; he found that a little disconcerting, the colour that is, not the cracking.
Was it possible to think the same thoughts while holding your breath? As his breath was running out underwater his thoughts went to instinct – the instinct to survive. He liked that, only one thought – survival. Yet he was preparing more agony for himself, underwater he stayed, thinking hard about his father who ended his life floating and bloating in water. The reason he had lost the will to live. Ever still had a will to live, because he wanted to come up for air.
He wondered then which happened first, his father’s decision not to fight for survival, or death without thought. The choice taken away. He would never know. He broke the surface, pulled in air; he felt the pool water and his tears combine.
The afternoon brought a request from Lomita, for him to push her round the block in her wheelchair. But Ever, as she was preparing for this event, was gone.
*
Gone to the house his father had lived in.
Rented low down on Chautauqua Boulevard. He was on his way in a taxi, courtesy of the Beverly Hills Cab Company, and wondered why he had never gone there before; to where he used to stay whenever he visited.
The taxi pulled up three quarters of the way down Chautauqua, on the left towards the ocean. He stood outside looking at the remembered horrible paint colour. A painful yellow: it did cause genuine peeper pain. A colour that didn’t offer an acceptable position on the colour spectrum. Then, nearly tripping, he looked down at the curbside; smothered with rubber scuffs from wayward tyres was the number of the house. He had not made the connection, not retained the memory: 2027 Chautauqua Boulevard. 2027. 2-0-2-7.
He sat on the wall. Where the front door had been was now boarded up with nailed pieces of wood in a diagonal cross adding the final statement to its closure. He opened the gate, he was only going to look through the windows. There was no furniture left in the house, as far as he could see. The memories in the spaces of the rooms existed: where he painted; where he slept. The curtains were ripped and faded and non-existent in most places, he could see the water stains two feet from the wooden floor which was now twisted and buckled from the flood.
Was it Ever with his mother that had destroyed his father? Is that what he wanted to kill? The me in him, the him in me.
The me in her.
The umbrella still stood in the garden – down – but not tied tight against the wind, frayed with holes visible where the sun would sheer through at certain periods of the day, spotting the table, shafting the table, with hot burning light that his father in his later years stayed out of, having at one time lived in the sun all day long.
What has happened, Dad? Please can you tell me? Talk to me. What do you want? He thought this was taking place in his own silence, with the noise in his head, then he realised he was talking out loud, in the belief that his father could hear.
Why couldn’t he?
He could not turn it off. The same circle of thought. And he repeated the questions again, out loud, in an attempt to get a response.
None came; he felt a disappointment that he had not crossed the spiritual barrier. Incapable of transcending.
He slumped into the belief that Lomita had just given up on the idea of viewing his father’s paintings and didn’t have it in her heart to tell him. No, she said she would. He wanted his father’s work to be a wonder, so he could see that he hadn’t been destroyed. Lost his spirit: destroyed by his son. He sat on the stone paving at the back, by the rolled umbrella in a concrete stand. Was he blaming the wrong man?
After a long and numbing sit, he left the house with a vocalised goodbye, sending it to his father; he walked the length of Ocean Avenue, heading for Chez Jay’s, the bar where his father spent hour after hour and where Ever felt so grown up whenever he joined him. He thought it was the most beautiful walk.
He remembered that when he first got to the top of the hill and saw the palm trees, tall and tropical growing out of their grass surround, he thought the beach, the sand, was just the other side.
His father took him to the edge and, as Ever repeated the move now, that feeling, of immense disappointment, that there was a long drop down to a busy road, Pacific Coast Highway, then some houses and then the beach, hit him afresh.
*
At the bar he ordered a beer with a tequila chaser and decided to drink.
Maybe a lucidity would ap
pear through the haze of alcohol. After three more beers and the equal amount of tequila, life had taken a propeller turn, a full turn to the other end of the spectrum.
People were filling up the bar as late afternoon set in.
Ever, now, at 4.15, this minute, hated the world and all that was in it.
The complicated artistry of the outside of the bar was pure 1950s architecture: the horizontal yellow neon Chez, the vertical and larger turquoise neon of Jay, iconic enough to survive when the rest of the old buildings had been razed to the ground and new development had erupted. An anonymous development. The brutality inside of the crude wooden tables was too much of a conflict with the outside and anyway the people were horrible.
What was going on with these people in the bar? Maybe they could solve his problem once and for all.
He looked too long once, once too long, with a longing to look for the solution, and received a straight punch in the face from a thickset trucker he didn’t know was a trucker, why would he, he just didn’t respond in the correct way he supposed, but he responded in the way he wanted to respond. He was mopping his nose with a piece of old tissue from his pocket that was not enough to cope with the steady flow of the red stuff. It didn’t hurt and his reply to the question, ‘what do you think you’re looking at?’ came, without pause, from his mouth.
‘Your cunt of a face.’
An understandable reaction: trucker or no trucker. He had no memory of why, but he was lying, with disappointment, on the concrete sidewalk outside, shaking his head to clear the stars, to bring back function, a function to which he had no desire to return.
Is this how he might feel after putting a bullet in the head of the man who stole his father’s spirit? Who did steal his father’s spirit? Who was it? He shook his head again to clear the thoughts.