by Sam Leith
Bree used to wake with the sound only of her own blood in her ears, and the sheets wet, and the walls and their vertices in place.
Now the dead man was going to bring that back. Bree wanted a beer, now, very much indeed. More than she had wanted one in the many years she had been going to meetings. She made some strong coffee, took two Dylar, waited for breakfast.
Chapter 18
Ellis told Sherman: ‘You finish the job. You finish the job, you get it back to us – you’ll get paid Noone’s bounty too.’
Sherman thought about telling Ellis to have some respect – that a man was dead – but he thought Ellis might actually get off, a little, on acting the tough guy about that, so he didn’t. He instead looked with distaste at his mobile phone.
‘What am I supposed to do with this kid? He’s a British national.’
‘You do whatever you need to do.’
Idiot. Sherman diced up telling him to shove it, but decided on balance that that could backfire badly.
He said: ‘You’re the boss. Where do I start looking?’
Ellis said: ‘He’s going west. He had an onward ticket to San Francisco. You know his car. Assume that’s where he’s going. There’s only one road he’s likely to be on. All you have to do is follow it.’
So Sherman did. But at the same time, Sherman made other precautions.
And when, the next time he called the number he had for Ellis, he heard only the long ‘bleeeee’ of a disconnected line, he put those precautions into action.
He had not been surprised. Whatever Ellis had said, things had got too hot. MIC were gamblers, and like any good gamblers, they had decided to quit while they were ahead.
Sherman remembered what, long before he had thumped him, his father had once said to him when drunk: ‘Life is hell, most people are bastards and everything is bullshit.’
‘Disavowed,’ he said to himself. ‘Hell, bastards, bullshit.’ It remained to be seen whether, to extend the figure of speech, he was one of the losses that MIC would be interested in cutting; or whether they were relying on the lumbering local law to do that for them. He didn’t intend to find out.
Don’t assume anything, was what he thought. Options open. Keep some outs.
His iPod was working again. It was playing REO Speedwagon. He thought of Davidoff, mispronouncing the name, and felt an unaccustomed anger. Davidoff had been set-dressing for these creeps, safe at their desks in front of their computer screens, totting up the numbers, playing the percentages.
Sherman dropped the car, picked up another one across town, and headed as far and as fast as he could out of this story: making time, making distance, making – as he always had – his own luck.
Alex stopped in a Motel 6, sometime after dark, and called Carey. It was past eleven, but he didn’t want to go to sleep without hearing another human voice. The phone rang once, twice, three times, and she answered.
‘Care?’
‘Hey, baby.’ Her voice was croaky. ‘It’s late. Where you been?’ she said. She said something in the background he couldn’t hear.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Just talking to someone. Wait up.’ There was a readjustment. He pictured her wriggling to lodge the phone in the crook of her neck. ‘’Sbetter. Go on. What’s up?’
Alex was leaning against the car. Now he could hear her voice, his earlier panic seemed to calm down. That guy was long gone. Carey’s voice was sleepy. He pictured her in the pyjamas she wore when she slept alone, with the phone crooked into her neck, half paying attention to the television, or yanking open the fridge, or making gestures at him across the room while she talked.
‘I’m in America, Carey.’
‘You’re what?’ Carey spoke the second word in italics.
‘I’m here. I’m in America.’
She seemed to take a moment to take it in.
‘That’s great. I mean – where are you? What? You’re in San Francisco?’
‘No, not quite. I’m more like – I’m in Albuquerque.’
‘Albuquerque?’
‘Well, I was. Few hours back.’
‘What are you doing there?’
‘I’m coming to see you.’
‘Oh my God!’ She sounded like an actress in a teen movie, he thought, the open vowel on the final word like gaahd. Then she said it again, catching herself – that was one of the things he loved about her – sounding like an actress in a teen movie and making herself therefore sound more like one.
‘Oh my Gaahd!’ she said. She was spontaneous the first time. Her voice sounded now like a smile without the eyes going. It was disconcerting.
‘I thought I’d surprise you,’ he muttered.
Now a peal of laughter, unforced. ‘You have surprised me, crazy English boy. Oh my Lord, that is so romantic. And so -’ her voice got muffled momentarily – ‘sorry – shut up – not you – so…’ She had lost her thread.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘What. I mean, romantic. But stupid. Seriously. What are you doing in Albuquerque?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said truthfully. ‘I was going to surprise you, but I got this flight to Atlanta -’
‘Atlanta?’
‘Courier. It was a hub. It was in the right general direction.’
‘Courier?’
‘The flight was really, really cheap. I just needed the onward ticket, and then I missed the connecting flight, so now I’m in a car.’
‘You drove from Atlanta to Albuquerque?’
‘I always wanted to go on a road trip.’
‘You missed the flight is what. This is such a trip. So you coming to San Francisco?’ Her voice sounded suddenly less sure, a little knocked off balance.
‘I had this idea – you ever been to Vegas?’
Carey laughed. ‘You said it like Vegas, without the “Las”. What a player! Soon you’ll be calling San Francisco “Frisco” and we’ll know you’re from out of town.’ Alex felt a little deflated. ‘I’m sorry, baby. You can pronounce Albuquerque Al-ba-kway-kway and you’ll be fine by me. Yeah, I’ve been to Vegas. My folks drove me up there once when I was like thirteen or something to watch them gamble -’ Carey always called her foster-parents her ‘folks’, never her mom and dad – ‘but I haven’t been since. Don’t think I did much gambling.’
‘You want to go? Meet me there?’
‘Hell yee-ah. What made you think of that? Going to get us married in the Elvis chapel?’ She laughed. Alex didn’t. He hadn’t actually thought of the Elvis chapel. Well, actually, he nearly had. Like with the ring, he wasn’t someone who was very good at feeling his way into whether something was so naff it was cool or just naff. And now there was this awkward dead drop in the conversation. She’d been joking and he hadn’t responded with the proper levity and now – oh God – it was like there was this fucking great dead badger sitting between them.
He had to say something. ‘Of course,’ he said, failing to prevent his voice from sounding serious.
In their relationship there was something, he realised, that caused them to strike each other at near right angles. They didn’t quite get each other; from his point of view, it felt like he was always playing catch-up a little. She was hard to read, but he thought that was what made it work. They missed each other that little bit, and then when they caught up they found the misunderstanding funny. He knew he amused her: otherwise she wouldn’t spend all that time giggling at him. And she amused him, he thought – though the more he thought about it the more he realised that probably he loved her more than he found her funny.
There. An unevenness. An unevenness he could live with.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘In the Elvis chapel. Just like Chris Evans and Billie.’
‘Who?’ she said.
‘Doesn’t matter. Just – can you get the weekend off?’
‘Sure. Yeah. I mean. Yeah.’
‘Well, how long will it take you to get there? I don’t – I mean, I think I’m about a day away.’
‘A da
y? From New Mexico? That’s a long day.’
‘It’s all I’ve been doing for days. Thinking about stuff.’
‘Hold up,’ Carey said. ‘Just moving into the other room. I’m with someone.’
She covered the handset and he couldn’t hear anything for a moment or two, then he heard a door close.
‘Who are you with?’
‘Nobody,’ she said. ‘Just a friend from work. So, Vegas. Let’s do it. I’ve got air miles. I think they’ve got flights for like a hundred bucks. Wow. It’s hard to imagine you in the States. You’re so… British.’
She didn’t sound overexcited. Alex, for an instant, felt that flatness he had felt at the start of his journey. Not lonely, just numb. Why did anybody do anything?
‘So, er…’ He couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘OK, sweetie, let’s talk tomorrow. I’ll see about flights, yeah? Vegas. I like it. Let’s do it. Two day’s time? Where are you staying?’
‘Motels.’
‘Uh-huh. OK.’ She sounded distracted again.
He reached into his pocket for the ring, something concrete. He turned it in his hand, and he felt less alone.
By lunchtime the following day it was fixed. Alex pushed on to Flagstaff, arriving after night fell. He stopped, checked into a motel. The Grand Canyon was near. He imagined its vast absence as he lay on his bed, trying to get to sleep.
On his heels, had he but known it – had they but known it – were Bree and Jones, still heading west, still trusting – as instructed – to luck.
There was little said in the car as they drove. Bree, slightly giddy from not sleeping, was still thinking about what Jones had done, still seeing the surprise on the face of the dead man, still wondering what it would mean to have done the worst thing in the world and not understand what had happened – if, indeed, that was the situation Jones was in. His sunglasses might as well have been armour-plating. There was nothing in there; nothing Bree could understand.
When he was hungry, he would suggest they stopped, and they would eat in silence, standing by the car, Jones looking in whichever direction he happened to be facing; Bree looking in whichever direction Jones wasn’t. After that, again, he just drove, eyes blandly scanning the world.
Bree realised, as the miles rolled past under the blank blue sky, that some part of her hated him not for killing the stranger, but for getting away with it. He had done the worst thing in the world, and nothing had happened to him. He didn’t fear the consequence. He couldn’t feel the loss of another’s life any more than he’d feel the loss of his own.
And was it the worst thing in the world, even? No. The worst thing in the world was what Bree had done. Bree had done that years ago. Bree had lost her baby.
She couldn’t remember much of the sequence of events. By that stage the memory thief had become brazen. Just flashes, disconnected points of pain, smeared routines. Cass getting her own breakfast and going to school – her spoon clanking softly on her bowl, audible through the partition wall in Bree’s dark box of morning pain. Cass, more than once, helping Bree off the couch and into bed. Cass finding bottles and pouring them out, and later, Cass standing barefaced and shaking, chin up, fronting Bree’s rage.
She never hit her. She shook her. Never hit her.
And then Cass’s own anger – ever since Al had gone. There was bed-wetting first, nothing said. And then, after she started her bleed, the focusless rage of a teenager. Bree had done everything she could to direct Cass’s anger at Al. It gave them something to share. It was Al’s fault. Al had gone altogether. How could he do that? How could he abandon his own daughter to… to Bree.
Trouble at school. Bree hadn’t bothered going in to see the head. Bree remembered screaming at the social worker. Marion – pig-faced Marion, with the flakes of dandruff in the dark greasy bit where her hair was parted. Bree hated her whether or not she was doing her job. But the whole machinery went on. Then there were her appearances and non-appearances in court, her desperation, her fantasies, her sloppy embarrassments of love.
Bree even tried to run with her – skip out and run to another state. She pulled Cass out of bed in the middle of the night. It would be like Thelma and Louise, just us girls, she said. She crashed the car into a hydrant, dead drunk, before they reached the end of the street. The seat belt left a purple bruise on the girl’s right collarbone and across her sternum. Bree saw it through the bathroom door, set off by the white of Cass’s training bra.
When they asked about her rock bottom in meetings, Bree always said it was waking up in the nuthouse: dawn growing blue in the awful window, and shaking with the need for something to make it go dark again. That was nearly a year later, the year she completely lost. She didn’t talk about losing Cass. She couldn’t share that.
She said to herself that that had been her real rock bottom – that had been the turning point. But what Bree could not turn to face was that losing her daughter had not been her rock bottom. She had loved her daughter, but she had loved drinking more. She had, in the early days of Cass’s absence, almost been relieved. Someone else was looking after her; someone good. She could drink safely now. Nobody was watching her.
She hadn’t loved her daughter enough to stop drinking, was what the bottom line was. That was a sentence she uttered to herself only when she was so drunk she knew she would forget it.
Every year, at the approach of Cass’s birthday, June 29th, Bree thought: this is the year when I go and find her. She could track her through the care system. She could make the correct applications. This is the year, she would think, when I go and knock on the door of her foster-parents’ home – she imagined some white suburb, somewhere warm, with a smell of oranges in the air and a clean SUV parked up in the driveway and all that baloney – and say: ‘I’d like to see Cassie.’ That would be the year when she would show the young woman who had once been her daughter a fistful of recovery medallions, and beg for her forgiveness. And then what?
She could see Cass – all the different versions, from the first sight of her. Purple face, whitened with vernix, screaming in the hospital. The double whorl in her hair. The surge of love and exhaustion as she first held her weight – her future coiled into that tiny body. The last words she had heard Cass say had been: ‘Please. I don’t want to leave my mom.’ She couldn’t see Cass now. She was a young woman and her face was nobody’s, something indecipherable, unavailable to Bree’s imagination.
Most years she went to two meetings that day, and didn’t talk about Cass. One year, early on, she came within the crack of a screw cap of a bottle of brandy from relapsing. The thought that she couldn’t do it made her desperate to take a drink; the thought that she might one day do it kept her from it.
But she had still never looked for Cass. She could not come face to face, not in that way, with the centre of her shame. She thought Cass would forgive her – and she thought that there was no way, no way on earth, that she would be able to bear that.
Are you ashamed, Jones? Can you be forgiven? Bree slept that night in a motel in Flagstaff, forty feet from where Alex Smart slept. She, too, felt the giant absence of the Grand Canyon out in the night, but exhaustion took her this time and she was almost grateful when she had the death-dream instead of any other one.
Chapter 19
A day and a half later, Alex arrived where he was going. Las Vegas rose out of the desert like a mirage. Even from this distance, it looked like a place that someone had invented, or dreamed about after falling asleep with the central heating on too high and a belly full of Stilton.
Alex arrived in town early in the afternoon, and opened the windows to the dirty heat. He was wondering what the inside of the car smelled like. After the desert, where there was no direction but forwards, and no other cars on the road, he found himself again on multi-lane highways, being bullied by SUVs shouldering from lane to lane.
The movement of traffic pulled him down into the centre. He found himself travelling slowly, from stop
light to stop light, down the broad, gaudy Las Vegas Boulevard. The Strip: it was a place at once new to him and familiar – a place that had lived, in jumbled form, in his imagination. He’d seen it overflown endlessly, by helicopter, in the title credits of CSI – the Eiffel Tower and the Montgolfier balloon traced in blue neon, the pyramid shooting a beam of light into the sky; the burlesque monumental lions outside the MGM Grand; the anonymous coppery curve of the Wynn. He’d zoomed in on it, too, in Google Earth: monumental schematics from the air; frozen images at street level; granular, gaudy and smeared with light.
Was it as he had imagined it? He didn’t know. It seemed to come pre-imagined. But it occurred to him as he drove that he hadn’t seen it in daylight before: it wasn’t intended to be seen in daylight. The concrete and stone answered the sun with a wan brightness. It looked as worn and bleached out as Christmas tree lights discovered in the attic in summer.
He drove up to the top of town, and pulled into the stacked lot of one of the older-looking, shabbier-looking hotels on Fremont Street. He parked the car and an elevator took him to the lobby. There was an old guy wearing an honest-to-goodness cowboy hat leaning on the desk, staring past the waistcoated clerk at nothing. His face was a pained squint, and red thread veins pooled at the hinge of his jaw. Nobody was attending to him. His jaw tightened and relaxed.
Alex checked in. His room was on the eighth floor – it was shabby and small and brown everywhere and it smelled of old smoke. A double-glazed sliding window in a metal frame looked out onto a stained concrete wall gridded with identical windows, the other wing of the H-shaped hotel. Past that, the view towards the north – simmering low-rise, ribboned with tan overpasses.
He felt, at that moment, exhausted. It was another four hours before he was meeting Carey. He lay down on the coverlet of the bed, and fell asleep there without even taking his shoes off.
He woke up with a feeling close to fright. The air conditioner was roaring. His mouth was gummy, his head sore and sweat had chilled on his skin. The light outside was metallic, now, and when he went to the window the facing wall of the hotel was the colour of dirty brass in the old sun.