The shakes threatened the drunkard’s dignity the photographer was at pains to present. The flash vibrated in its shoe. “How can he photograph anything?” bawled Shota. A test flash went off like a silent shot. He nodded; the cops lifted the tarpaulin and exposed Gia. Villagers retched and cursed, cynical eyes filled, kids were beaten away again. The priest saw Gia’s other wound and turned and walked to the sea and stared north.
Gia blanched under the flashes, and the white glow with the holes where his face and genitals should be burned into Max’s retina. The photographer trembled round, winding on his film, checking his flash recharge, slowly shooting off a roll, and then the tarpaulin was finally lowered on Gia’s humiliation.
“Does it get to you?” asked Max.
The photographer smiled as he chased the film in the back of his camera. “Nothing gets to you if you’ve seen as much as I have.”
“Then show some respect, you trembling cunt.”
The purple face blackened: “I’m doing my job.”
“Fuck you and your job. Do it away from me.”
As he shuffled across the sand, struggling to get the film leader into the spindle, like a small vision Max saw the sadness that runs core deep and is unshaken till death; sadness at a self inwardly despised; sadness under the anger at how it’s all shaken down so badly; the same sadness that persisted in Gia even though things were well for him in many ways. Success and sex could not extinguish it, only death. But a death of incomprehensible terror, screaming for mercy, for his mother, Max, Masha, God, for everyone who was not there for him. Guilt pitilessly lashed them all with the conviction that there must have been something they could have done. He could see it in the other villagers. The murder had made the place ashamed of itself.
When Father Gregory sloped up the beach and started whispering to a cop Max became paranoid that he was being fingered as a suspect. He was the last person seen with Gia; Gia was his ex-lover’s lover. He found himself shaking his head, then everything disappeared and he bumped onto the sand.
They took him to Mrs. Arveladze who stuffed him with eggs and tea. He hadn’t eaten all morning. Through the window Masha’s house stood above the sea wall. Women were keeping her inside, filling her with vodka, but sooner or later he would have to give her the details. Behind her studio the hill climbed in smudges of winter colours and pale trees to Gia’s cottage and barn, then up to rocks carbuncling the sky.
Two detectives arrived. One, barely out of boyhood was pale with shock. He had just seen Gia. Max went through it all again then demanded to know how long Gia was expected to lie naked under a tarpaulin.
“The ambulance is on its way, sir.”
“A horse-drawn one?”
The dead eyes in the Merc were watching him everywhere. He had looked at Gia’s killer and Gia’s killer had looked back with the indifference of the omnipotent. After giving the description, Max realised he had probably put himself in danger and felt faint again.
She woke into bewilderment and slowly was drawn back into the maw of grief. A small boat buffeted beyond the raft. She swallowed more vodka. A thread of saliva linked her cheek to the pillow. Voices bubbled up from her kitchen. She made some distracted noise into the air and one of the women came up. “Get Max” was all she said, then they had to help her to the bathroom to throw up.
Inside Gia’s workshop everything was neat and ordered. Tools hung in racks under a line of roof windows: lathes and band saws stood like shining soldiers. The floor was spotless. Chair frames, unfinished drawers and cabinets waited for completion like Gia’s abandoned children. A table made from dark wood had edges and corners so softly rounded and swept, that it almost seemed moulded. The young detective pronounced it the work of an exceptional craftsman and his senior, an undemonstrative man who registered the positive by absenting a negative, did not disagree. Hopeless in so many things, with wood Gia was touched by God. And in bed too, they said, though perhaps not by God.
Max and the detectives moved through the silence and light under the boiling sky and Max understood how wood drew the peace out in Gia. They sifted through everything for clues and of course, there were none. It was an impersonation of an investigation, but Max said nothing because it seemed important to do something. In Gia’s house there were no signs of struggle or forced entry. The door was open but Gia always left the door open. Forensics had been up and checked for prints, but as the lights weren’t on it was likely Gia had met his killers on the way home.
Max reluctantly handed over the spare keys in case they wanted to come round and play at policemen again, and as they descended the hill towards the village the young cop asked for his autograph. He had six hundred in his collection, including a letter from Khrushchev to a woman in the Ukraine requesting her walnuts. Max could find no reason to say no. Why disappoint a young man who has to wade in the sewage of humanity with no guarantee of salary at the month’s end? He found himself writing ‘good luck’ on this of all days.
“You’re American, aren’t you, sir?”
“Was.”
“I’ve got a penfriend in the Tulsa police department, Oklahoma. He’s trying to get me Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. Not much hope though.”
To the north the sky spewed pewter onto the sea and Max hoped the young cop got his autographs.
Masha woke to music drifting quietly up the stairs from the radio below. It was dark. She called and Max appeared. Gia had lain till two o’clock. When the ambulance arrived the police had to threaten arrests to calm things. But he was gone now.
“Please stay.” She shut her eyes.
Downstairs the music of Satie trailed out of the radio like clattering wine glasses. The previous night had run itself in Max’s head in an endless loop: the meal, Gia’s enigmatic mood, the Mercedes, the terrifying eyes, the hideousness of Gia’s death. Did Gia know it was coming? He had strange radar systems sensitive to atmospheres in people. Had he seen something that had filled him with foreboding?
The morbidity of the day began to crush him. He had been rushing about since dawn, racing past the grief before it could catch him, but now to Satie’s lonely notes he began to sink. The wind had calmed, the storm gone, the day had blown itself out. No sounds interfered with the crystal phrases, and Max began to feel the fact that Gia was not asleep up the hill and never would be.
California – February 1999
She had left for her father fuelled by a child’s optimism, and coasted back drunk, Fuck-off neon burning on her forehead. He received a call from the airport. Would he please come and pick her up? And the life slid out of him like mud. She was waiting in a bare room under strip lighting sitting at a metal table with a lesbo look cop. They were not taking her in this time but…
Brief periods of sobriety were achieved, but collapsed into longer, devastating drunks. Phobias sprang from her. Phone calls, the mailman, mornings, daylight, people, noise – all had her wincing. She had a lifelong fear of seagulls, but now they became terrorising Eumenides wheeling in thermals of pollution that brought on panic attacks that brought on panic attacks in Timmy. Her sickness was making him sick. She felt hopeless. He felt hopeless. As a frustrated artist his way of coping was to transmute everything into a comic strip in which a helpless female is hounded by the gulls. If art couldn’t weave some miracle into the universe that would heal his wife, then at least he might make a buck or two out of it.
He would escort her to AA meetings and sit in parking lots praying the miracle would happen inside the strip lit rooms where her tribe of fuck-ups hung out. He could offer nothing else but long, lonely stares and reassurances that she would be okay if she just kept trying. But loyalty, love and the desire to be well were extinct in her. All she needed was oblivion and the bizarre netherworld of the bottle.
Despite the nightmares she brought back from Georgia, in a last stand of denial they h
ad married at Christmas on the storm blasted Island of Maui.
She made the effort. She tried to stay sober but couldn’t. By the hotel pool bar on the morning before the wedding, her uncle Henry caught her sneaking a drink when she thought the others were catching the rays or shopping. She froze when he told the barman to put it on his room number. Her childhood abandonment had always been a touchstone for Henry’s hatred of Max, and she had returned from him trailing death on her marriage day. As the barman mixed her drink and shuttled in the ice, she kept silent. There was nothing in the world to say. She could feel Henry’s desperation and was terrified he might ruffle her hair the way he did when she was little. Aware of her psychotic sensitivity he settled for a quiet “God bless you, honey” which she deflected with a dip of the head. The barman put the drink on the coaster, and like a dog with a stolen steak, she carried it off to the hotel shadows.
Nature added her insult by breaking the mother of all storms that day. A garden ceremony to the sounds of the surf and the breezes soughing the palms was rained off and a corner of the dining room under a ceramic Mahi Mahi became the place of matrimony.
By the time her presence was requested under the china fish all her human wiring had fused and she moved like an animal in a kaleidoscope of half conscious images of her own nightmare. ‘On This Our Wedding Day’ crooning out of a Sony speaker on the salad bar coiled its joylessness round her, as Henry led her to her frightened fiancée. Beaming with joy and pride her uncle had told her it was a privilege to give her away and she wondered which fucking wedding he was in. Sweating vodka, all she wanted was to get married quick so she could get to another drink.
As the hotel engineer couldn’t be found to switch off the muzak permeating all the spaces in and off the lobby including the dining room, the sacrament was celebrated to the Sounds of the Seventies, with an accompanying – or in the circumstances, competing – live Hawaiian ukulele duo. The bride’s asides caught by the microphone the Fotophot Greg Toland had pinned on Timmy’s tie, underscored the Papuan Minister’s veneration of the spirit of Aloha in the sun, sea and rain, with a 1,000 decibel whisper that something had to be done about that fucking music.
Inevitably she stopped the ceremony till someone was found who knew how to switch off Mowtown. Heads turned to the civilizing force of the storm as the wedding manager set off to castrate the hotel engineer. Epileptic flower tips in her bouquet transmitted Georgia’s shattered body rhythms. She asked for a glass of water and Nathan, Timmy’s cousin and best man smiled sure and brought it. By the time the glass got to her lips half the contents were on her satin dress where they remained like an incontinence blemish. At that moment Timmy realized he was participating in an act of public cruelty.
Finally Martha and the Vandellas cut off. The sun blew a hole in the blackness, glittering the sea and edging the slopes of Molokai in gold, and the smiling Papuan minister invoked all the spirits of Aloha and wed Timmy and Lucy.
She skipped the feast in favour of the mini-bar in their room. Everyone except Timmy was grateful. He was ashamed of himself. “I’m only ever wise after the fucking event,” he complained to his cousin. “You need to get fuckin’ real” was Nathan’s response.
Going back to the room was a nightmare. He never knew what to expect, but she was still there, glass in hand, NYPD Blue flickering across a soundless TV, angry that he was interrupting her vocation.
“I’m going to bed” was all he said and she wandered onto the balcony to keep him out of her way. Sometime in the night he woke to see her still standing there in the darkness, watching the sea. It struck him that she might be contemplating the jump; the waves of humiliation she had endured that day would be enough to sweep any normal person off to a welcome oblivion. But she had that oblivion in her glass. He watched her, willing the thought and that split second of utter hopelessness to combine in her so all the pain could be brought to a dramatic end. But she remained still as a statue with a mechanical arm rhythmically lifting the glass to the lips. What in God’s name was going on inside that head, he thought, what was she seeing, feeling; would the mass of madness, drunkenness and confusion move her to the jumping off point? Surely anything was better than this? Did she need help? A slight push, a moment’s struggle, a brief cry, all over. It would be an act of kindness; a dog would not be allowed to suffer like this. The curtains blew in the breeze and veiled her, half seen, a blurred shape. They shifted, a shadow limb moved. She seemed to disappear.
She did get into bed eventually. There was no question of the usual honeymoon formality. Eventually he fell into some kind of sleep. She spent some time staring at the night beyond the balcony before she fell into another oblivion.
At five he woke to something warm on his buttocks. She had wet the bed.
Somehow Timmy thought the marriage might fix her. But she was receiving instructions on another wavelength, and when they came back to Santa Monica, she began to float further out till one morning she just didn’t come back.
California – March 1999
“Is she worth saving?”
Near the end of his graveyard shift ministering to the wrecks spilling into his E.R., the doctor is disappointed she is still alive and needing attention. He had come to this place with its socially marginalized because he had misgivings about the health insurance racket, but six months in the place has made the Hippocratic oath a little anorexic.
“Stinking like a distillery.”
“There’s this too,” The nurse lifts her wrist. Rubies of congealed blood button her forearm.
His ophthalmoscope scours her retina. There have been no diagnostic tests, no witnesses, she was found in the street, so there is no way of knowing what she has shot into her arm, though he’s pretty sure it isn’t Gatorade. He straightens painfully. If his back gets worse, maybe he can get time off.
“Empty her.”
Her upper teeth gouge skull feathers and the lower slide under a rough feathered crop. A beak touches her throat and she gags. Why are they forcing her to swallow a seagull? The great head hinges her jaw wider till the joints dislocate like a snake’s and the thing shoves past her throat, down her gullet, the fat sleek bird stretching her lips to tearing point, stifling screams from vocal chords pressed flat against the front of her throat by the big feathered body. It scrambles deeper, dives into the sea in her stomach, plash! kicks for the fish, round and round, a rapacious bird shimmying after and no escape for the fish but to vomit up in a bunched shoal like a muscle pushing her open all the way up. She wants to cry to them to stop but she can’t speak and fish don’t talk.
Something pushed into her arm and she floated down again. She could hear Timmy sitting on the edge of the boat making Masha laugh and Gia asking if his skin was as soft as Timmy’s. Joseph popped above her bed pleading with her to come round for a coffee and his big wife hit him with a tie-dyed cleaver. She was aware of Timmy sitting on the edge of a bench now, elbows on the table looking at her father, who has a Russian accent for some reason and is wearing a very bad toupee that is fashioned in a thick widow’s peak, like a joke Dracula wig. He looks at Timmy and indicates Lucy and Mom with his eyes. “I vos a bad boy,” he says confessionally and childishly in a cod Russian accent, and the eyebrows jerk up and Timmy says “That was a long time ago, man, c’mon..!” and she wants to murder both of them; boys against girls. Dada moves off with the silent young woman he is with and they stand at the end of the table in the sunshine rubbing noses. He has a ski-run nose, but as he noses his loved one’s nose his nose seems to fold into a perfect little nose and he looks completely different.
“Who is that man?” says Mom.
“Dad!” incises out of Lucy in a lacerating whisper.
“I’ve never seen him before,” says Mom and Lucy sighs hopelessly, but Timmy thinks he looks twenty, maybe thirty, years younger than Mom and is nearer the age of the young girl he’s canoodl
ing. Mom’s a wrinkled old hag. He’s not much older than Lucy. She knows he is thinking this.
“He looks like… that actor… you know,” says Timmy
“Bill Holden,” says Mom, “he used to when he was young.”
“He is young, Mom,” hisses Lucy again.
“Naw,” says Timmy, “naw, not Bill Holden, that other actor… Although he’s got the kinda Bill Holden-type nose till he shoves it in the babe’s face, naw I mean… God, I can’t think… Oh, you know…”
“No, I don’t fucking know!” comes out of Lucy like compressed air. The pressure’s building, building.
“I think he was a Brit. Lost Weekend guy. On TV. They show it on Classics on TV. What’s his name?”
“Yeh!” cries Lucy, “I know. Oh, what’s his name? He wore a toupee too… Oh God, yeah, he was a Brit…”
“You know,” says Mom seriously, “You never get Half Moons in Ohio.”
Lucy closed down for a while.
Fire broke out at the top of the lace curtain. She saw the Edwards fire alarm but her body was ten times its normal weight. The fire became sunlight, a mouth of brightness at the top of the curtains. Everything else was in shadow and she was swaddled at the bottom of the gloom. The room was bare and cheap, cheap green walls, cheap cream framed beds, cheap linoleum. On another cheap bed was a heap with a face pulled in pain, deep asleep in some awful place. A nurse came in.
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