by Sam Leith
That was the best bit. Of course, she’d smoked then too, just the odd one. So the cigarette, the first hit. That was good. But the drink was where the action was. A six of Michelob, pearled with frost in the top of the refrigerator. Crack and sigh as the cap came off. The bottle sighed too. Then a big pull from the neck and it was like the lights came up.
Bree had been sociable. She and Al had gone out in the evenings, taken Cass when she was tiny. They couldn’t afford a sitter in those days. Nobody was buying Al’s paintings, and though he got a bit of work here and there hanging other people’s stuff it wasn’t enough. Bree had stopped being a cop and was pulling down one quarter of jackshit working part-time at the Pentagon.
That first beer, yes. That had been the kicker. Bree tended to make a point of not thinking about it too much. It had been a long, long time and the craving was weaker. But sometimes it still surprised her, like an old ache. And when she did turn and think about it, the taste of that first mouthful was still fresh in her memory as if it was just gone midday.
Level and confront. My ass. What would you give for just – just once more – the taste? Just once more. No such thing as just once. We know where that leads. But before you die, don’t you want to feel that again? The cold filling the mouth, the eyes closing, the eyes opening to an easier world?
It was only later that it got harder. Al got less fun. Bree still maintained this. She knew – she fucking knew, OK, by the end of it – that things had got out from under her, but that didn’t mean that she was necessarily wrong about Al getting less fun. She’d started staying out when he’d gone home, and they started to row about Cass.
That always hit a nerve with her. That was when it got vicious.
‘You dare say that, you fucking piece of shit. I love that girl. I love her more than anything. I’d kill for her. Kill. I do everything for her.’
‘Who got her up for school this morning?’
‘I was sick!’
‘Bree, you’re drinking too -’
‘My drinking has nothing to do with -’
‘You were sick because -’
‘I got day flu.’
‘You got -’
‘I got her up yesterday, and the day before and the day before, and, ’cause one time -’
‘It’s not just the one time, love.’
‘Love’ stung her. The softness of it.
‘Al, do you even think, ever just think, just once what it’s like to be me?’ She’d hear herself slur on ‘ever’, losing the second vowel, but she’d plough on. The thought of what it was like to be her made her eyes prickle but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction, and the emotion was redirected into anger. ‘I’m holding this damn family together while you try to sell your piece-of-shit paintings.’ That would wound him, and she’d see him suck it down. Looking back now, it still made her hurt somewhere remembering moments like that when she’d see how hard he was trying. Turning the other cheek. That holier-than-thou stuff enraged her.
‘I work, and I cook, and I come home and I look after our damn kid, and if one morning I get sick I’m what, I’m a bad mother? I get a drink – yes, maybe I have a couple drinks because I damn well need to unwind and now you’re going to sit in judgement over me?’
‘I’m not sitting in judgement.’ He looked miserable, utterly defeated. Bree had always been strong, always stronger than him. ‘I love -’
Doors would slam, tears come. ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.’ And Bree would show him what was fucking what by going out and necking a couple.
‘I love her more than anything.’ Bree wondered. You had to say it. You had to feel it. What if it wasn’t true?
Bree could look back on all this now and know she was wrong. She didn’t like to think too clearly about how wrong – she’d been through that, and you’d go crazy if you spent the whole rest of your life fifth-stepping, Bree reckoned; you’d get addicted to shame.
But what was odd was that as she accessed the memories she didn’t feel wrong. She remembered not just what she did and said, but what she felt. And as she inhabited the memory she felt it again. She felt indignant. She wasn’t that bad then. Nothing worse than millions of normal people who bring their kids up fine, and whose husbands didn’t get their panties in a twist if they had one bourbon over the line most nights. She was dealing with it.
That was what she thought of as her double vision. That indignation was still a part of her. But so was the part that saw something else. And even back then, the part that saw things as they were was there. It simply didn’t seem urgent. I’ll keep an eye on that, she’d thought.
She knew that her morning routine wasn’t great; wasn’t how it had always been. She’d make sure she was in the bathroom alone, Al out of the house preferably. Then she’d run the shower and before she got in it she stood over the sink with her hands gripping the sides and she arched over it and retched. She had learned to do this silently, for the most part, feeling her diaphragm spasm. She had to do this for somewhere between thirty seconds and a minute. Most days, a few tablespoons of bitter yellow bile slicked onto the white porcelain. She’d ride it out. That, too, passed, and the nausea left with the bile.
Then she’d breathe in and breathe out. And she’d stand up straight. The shuddering and the retching gone, she would feel a lightness, as if she’d been purged. She’d swill her mouth and the sink with water, and step into the shower, almost bright, ready to face the day.
And even though her work at the Pentagon was paper-shovelling, she kept at it. She arrived on time and she left on time and she worked damn well. Until Al left she was keeping it going. She thought of Al’s mousy, too-long hair. The yellow tint to his sunglasses and the brown leather jacket he loved and always wore. The speed and anger of his going.
Bree looked out of the car window. America was passing. It was warm, but the air was thick and the sky was the colour of ash. A couple drops of rain fell on the windshield.
Al was still there when she’d started to lose time. They’d had so much time back then, when they were young and new-married, that Bree barely noticed it going missing. When it did, it had been funny – Al shaking his head at how Bree couldn’t remember getting home from parties and feigning theatrical outrage when Bree would ask: ‘Did we…?’
‘You’ve forgotten?’
Later, though, she lost time more easily, more unexpectedly, more disconcertingly. Time started to vanish in the way that dollars would vanish from her purse – just a tentative five minutes here or there, surreptitiously, calculated so she wouldn’t miss it but not calculated well enough. She’d find herself in a different room than she had been, tips of her fingers grazing the door jambs, mouth open to deliver a sentence she had no idea of. She would frown and withdraw. That, at least, early on.
The thefts became more blatant. Money from the purse was not an analogy. Money really had been going missing from her purse. And it was hard to be sure, at first, how much and when. But it was clear Cass was stealing from her. Finally, she confronted her about it and Cass reacted as she always did when cornered: with the sort of indignation only an eleven-year-old can muster. Her whole face shone red as she screamed back. Bree slapped her – not on the face but on the legs.
Al had gone by this time. Had he? Bree couldn’t always remember the sequence of events. But that would explain why she was so angry – he’d left them both in the shit, the way he walked out. She was under such pressure then. She couldn’t afford childcare. And her money was going missing. And Cassie was bed-wetting and Bree was exhausted and her good-for-nothing husband had meanwhile lit out for the territories with an armload of his own paintings. It was the first time she’d hit her daughter.
‘Never steal. Never steal from your mommy, never. You hear me?’ Blood thumping in her ears, rage misting everything. Cass’s yell, as the blows landed – suddenly turning the corner into a shriek, even shriller and even louder.
It was about this time that the sneak-thief started
to get bolder. Money started disappearing from the bedside table. And drinks – the emergency half-jack in the wardrobe; the old miniatures of vodka in the ice compartment. And time – great chunks of time would have been pocketed, spirited away. It was very confusing.
Was the same person who was taking the money taking the time? That’s all money was, Bree had once heard someone say: frozen time. It became impossible to keep track of things.
The thief was eventually apprehended.
Bree never felt that the Bree who had been doing that stuff was another person, one who had died at those meetings to make way for the shiny new person who was now sitting in the car with Jones. That Bree had continued. In another life, one where Bree had spent a lot less time sitting in smoky, talky rooms on jittering plastic chairs comparing war stories, she was living on, still drinking. She’d be deathbound by now, living through blank, real spaces, passing hours and days into her blackouts like someone patiently feeding a furnace: there, but not there.
And she was here, but not here. She followed this Bree around with the tenacity of a shadow. She was long when the sun was low; almost invisible in the bright of the day. Bree could lose touch with her for just a second, by jumping – but then gravity intervened and Bree wasn’t a great one for jumping up and down these days, in any case.
Stupid analogy, Bree thought. Raindrops, an unexpected shower, gathered and ran on the windshield. They felt like another analogy, and she wondered what it was like to be Jones, who had shown no signs of making conversation since lunch, and for whom the slick of water running down the windshield would never be anything other than rain.
Bree thought about not-Bree, drinking Bree. It was as if she had acquired a twin. In that life, this Bree would be shadowing her. Sober Bree, in that world, would be not-Bree: would be just there, hanging around, waiting. The thing that was your deepest, darkest terror: the thing you longed for.
Snap. Cheers, sister.
Except in both these worlds, they had taken Cass away, and Bree wondered momentarily in which of these worlds she was living and why.
Chapter 15
It was the morning of the third day that they got a sure fix on Alex. It was pure good luck.
Red Queen remembered that the Directorate had a long-gone field agent by the name of Doc, living in the New Mexico desert near the Texas border. Doc was semi-retired on medical grounds after spearheading the Directorate’s intensive 2003 investigation into the effectiveness of ayahuasca trances as an intelligence-gathering technique.
The verdict of the investigation – reached not by Doc himself but by those observing his experiments with a clearer head – had been ‘not very’. Doc was loco in the brainpan, no two ways about it.
But Red Queen reached out to Doc anyway, and Doc – who did things, if he did them, for reasons of his own – agreed to drive his tangerine-coloured pickup to a bluff overlooking the I-40 and wait for ‘this cat with the magic ring’.
‘Magic ring?’ Red Queen had said.
‘A snake told me about it,’ Doc had said.
Red Queen had made a mental note. ‘And his licence plate. You have it?’
‘Wrote it down. In-scriibed it.’
‘With a pen?’
‘It’s cool,’ Doc had said. ‘I see auras. He’s going to be lit up like a Christmas tree on the Fourth of July. He’ll be haloed in rainbows. It’ll be like the Northern Lights. I’ll see him.’
‘The licence plate…’
‘It’s cool,’ Doc had repeated before ringing off. But true to his word he had perched above the highway and watched the westbound traffic with lizard eyes. And to Red Queen’s voluble astonishment, had not only got a tail on the boy but confirmed that the boy was himself being followed. ‘Couple of wolf-like cats. None too smart. Violent men. Big one and a small one. Keep losing him. And there’s something else. Somebody else. A very old man. He’s here and he’s not here. Like John Barleycorn or an old shaman I know. I’m moving in,’ he had added. ‘Do me good to get within a sniff of civilisation. Reckon I’ve got a fix.’
He had left Red Queen listening to the staticky burr of an open line, then Doc had rolled his old wagon down onto the highway, and followed them at a leisurely distance. And it was as that orange car, with its big, bald, white-sided tyres was lumbering onto the great artery heading west, that Alex had exclaimed, aloud and to himself: ‘Don’t forget your toothbrush.’
Doc said, also to himself, musingly: ‘Something about a toothbrush…’
And two hours later, Doc found a payphone and called Red Queen, who called Bree on her cellphone, and directed her to a superstore in a roadside mall on the east side of Albuquerque in the early afternoon.
‘He’s there,’ Doc said. ‘I’m just not sure when.’
Bree and Jones showed up, and did two circuits of the wide parking lot, and weren’t able to see the boy, or his car, or anything of that sort.
‘Had a feeling, this guy, apparently,’ said Bree, with a shrug. ‘Another hit for the Directorate. Still, best we’ve got. We proceed,’ she added philosophically, ‘through hints and accidents.’
Jones went to get some tobacco. Bree ambled in to check out the store. She walked the aisles, found nothing. No sign of the kid. Near the door there were a couple of girls with too much make-up, wearing long coats. They were chewing gum. With them was a middle-aged man in a cheap suit, pretending not to be watching her as she came in the door. He had something concealed in his palm. She saw his thumb work at it, and he turned his hand, looked surreptitiously down at it. It glinted. Bree didn’t like it.
She turned round and headed outside, intending to take up a position where she could watch the front entrance unobserved. She took a trolley. A trolley would be good. Make it look like she was shopping. Who was that guy? Where was the boy?
Alex ran his tongue around his teeth. His upper incisors were pleasantly slippery. He was worried about the lower set, though. They felt furry, clagged. He had a stark visual memory of his toothbrush, sitting red on the white sink at the last motel. He had left it there, hadn’t he?
It was about lunchtime anyway. He’d stop. Two birds with one stone.
‘Don’t forget your toothbrush,’ he said aloud to himself, before pulling into the supermarket car park. He slammed the car door, hopped out, and set off for the entrance to the shop.
The store dominated the parking lot: a wide glass frontage that could have done with being cleaned more recently, and big scrolls of paper yellowing in the windows advertising special offers, on beer and cleaning products, mostly. Next door were two smaller shops – a tobacconist and a pizza place.
A dirty great sign, hoisted above the entrance like a hat, announced simply: ‘SUPERSTORE’. The letters were picked out in broken light bulbs. A nondescript cartoon character – it looked like a smiling chocolate button – was giving the world an unwavering thumbs up from next door to the letter E.
MIC’s guns for hire had lost Alex’s trail again, and Sherman had morosely assented to Davidoff’s insistence that they stop driving and get some food. A roadside sign half a mile back had promised pizza. Davidoff used a hand on the roof to haul his big frame from the car and they stood there scanning the scene like children at the gates of Disneyland.
Sherman saw the kid before Davidoff did, and nudged the bigger man. He saw the recognition bloom and take hold in his face like a pilot light. Davidoff’s eyes scanned the parking lot, and Sherman knew what he was seeing. There was a hedge down the left-hand side. Maybe a hundred metres of asphalt between the kid and the entrance to the store, twenty metres between the two men and the boy they were chasing.
A fat woman in a T-shirt was pushing a shopping cart out of the store. Nobody seemed to be here other than that. A tall grey-haired guy, a couple of hundred metres away, was leaning up outside the door of the tobacco store next door, smoking. A handful of cars in the lot, empty. Sherman picked up pace. Davidoff broke right, out on a slight trot, as if he was someone jogging to get a pa
rking ticket while his family waited in the car. Sherman closed slower.
Ninety metres, fifteen metres.
The boy was moving on a diagonal. Across the front entrance of the store there was a snake of trolleys – what had once been bright pink plastic faded to brittle white in the weather – shucked into each other. To reach the entrance, the boy would have to walk round the right-hand end of them and up the wheelchair ramp.
If Sherman took the straight line – went left of the trolleys and vaulted up the wrong end of the ramp – he’d get there about the same time as the boy.
Eighty metres, ten metres.
Davidoff way out to the right. Scan left – that angle covered. Was there a back entrance? Probably. Best not let him get into the store in the first place if at all possible. Best not let him bolt.
Seventy metres, ten metres. Easy. Easy.
Ouch! Shit. The fat woman – not at all where he’d expected her to be – had barked her trolley against his shin. Stupid fat -
‘Sorry, sorry,’ she was at once muttering, fussing: ‘Oh gosh, oh gee. Sir, I’m real sorry – I didn’t see where you were…’ She started, inanely, trying to brush down the lapels of his jacket with her hands…
Sherman struggled to keep his temper. He could see the kid reaching the end of the ramp, and here was this woman right in the -
‘It’s fine, really,’ he said.
‘Oh, you’re so kind, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s fine,’ he repeated, jerking away from her. A bit too snappy an emphasis. She was startled, suddenly looking offended.
‘Well, there’s no call -’
Oh for fuck’s sake. ‘Dammit -’
He pushed her trolley to one side roughly – it clattered to the tarmac, lighter than he had anticipated; he didn’t have time to wonder why she was pushing an empty trolley – and hopped past, breaking into an angry trot for a couple of paces, enough to carry him to within nearly grabbing distance of the kid. But as he did so the kid heard something and jerked his head round – saw Sherman looking straight at him, read the tension in his face.