“Clucking and mooing and naaing, all around me.”
“A farm,” he said.
“Will you let me tell the story?” I said, elbowing him, bad tempered and anxious in the heat.
“Why are you on a farm?” David asked me.
“It’s more like a meat factory,” I replied. “A massive meat factory owned by a great Fat Rich Man with lots of rings on his fingers. He’s a vegetarian himself, and has taste in art and literature. He owns several Monets, a Van Gogh and a library of classic novels.”
“Who runs the farm?”
“Farm hands. Native of the unnamed jungle in the unnamed tropical country. He treats the natives well and considers himself not only a very just employer, but also a civilizing influence. He lends out books. He pays fairly. Before he started his empire of meat, there weren’t enough jobs. Now there are jobs for anyone willing to work. Even the animals live well in his empire, fattened with the best food, allowed to run around in what he considers a ‘free-range’ environment. He only has one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“He has a secret.”
“What’s his secret?”
“I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”
“I don’t like secrets,” he said, and looked at me.
“All right then,” I said. “When the Rich Man first started out in the meat business, he persuaded his childhood sweetheart to marry him and move out to the farm. Unfortunately she wasn’t used to the heat or the germs, and she died within a year. The Fat Rich Man was distraught, and although the meat business was thriving, nothing made him happy. The Fat Rich Man started to drink, and one night he was so lonely, so dizzy from the heat and the stench of blood, that he went down to the farm in the middle of the night, and guess what he did?”
“He fucked a pig.”
“A horse, actually, but good guess.”
“I’m a sick fuck.”
“This was a sick fuck,” I said.
“Very funny,” he said.
“Anyway, the horse became pregnant and bore the Rich Man a son, who grew up into the secret apple – and secret guilt – of the Rich Man’s eye. The Rich Man named his boy Enkidu, after the legend of Gilgamesh, and Enkidu grew up to be a brave, strong boy, who looked almost human if it wasn’t for how the boy walked around on all fours and refused to eat anything except milk and hay.”
“You really have the strangest imagination,” said David, stroking my hair.
“Now I’m self-conscious,” I said. My mind went blank. “You’ll never know how the Rich Man planned to civilize his son and drag him from the animal kingdom.”
“I’m sorry, go on.”
“No,” said.
“Don’t be bad-tempered. It’s the heat making you angry?”
“I’m not angry,” I said.
“What happened to Enkidu?”
“I’m not telling you,” I said. “Why did you follow me today, when you saw me at the Youth Hostel?”
“I wasn’t following you. I just happened to pass on my way to taking a photo of Mary Fodder coming out of the gym.”
“What did you do after you saw me?”
“I got the photograph of Mary Fodder. Then I drove around. Please tell me about Enkidu?” he said.
“No,” I said, and turned my back to him.
I couldn’t fall asleep though, and we both tossed and turned in bed for another hour before starting to talk again. When David tried to touch me, I batted his hand away. Another hour or so passed.
“When you masturbate,” David asked eventually, still stifled by the ridiculous closeness of the air and the rhythmic pulsing of the fans, “Do you think about me?”
I looked at him. David was staring at the ceiling, where the fan was catching nuggets of light from the rising sun outside the window and throwing them against the wall.
“Of course,” I lied, thinking of the indistinct strangers who populate my dreams. It has always upset me to see men in pornography. They look so painfully ridiculous, with their muddy shadows of prominent muscles that shout out like a biology diagram – Thorax! Abdomen! Gluteus Maximus! And those eager faces looking so pleased with themselves, nodding up there on top of clenched shoulders like one of those dogs on car dashboards. The men in my dreams and nightmares are so much less distinct: they are almost without edges, more like distant memories than anyone David could be jealous of. It’s strange that I’ll happily watch pornography involving women, and that in my dreams I am distinct down to the position of my legs and the taste in my mouth, but I will not watch men in pornography, and the men in my fantasies are ideas, not people.
“Really?” asked David, pleased. “What do we do?”
“It’s not like that,” I laughed, blushing in the dark. “I don’t know. Yesterday, when I was in the bath, we did it on a washing machine.”
“There’s a washing machine in your head? How domestic. Did you come?” He smiled. I loved his smile.
“Of course,” I said, and didn’t mention that in my fantasy I was left naked on the washing machine for a full cycle, my hands tied behind my back. It wasn’t domestic, or even funny. The backdrop of the washing-machine fantasy was actually a Laundromat near David’s office, where I washed lots of Lily’s clothes while I was looking for him. Another problem with my fantasies, which I didn’t tell David about, was that they often ran away from me and didn’t result in my touching myself at all. They also often involved me being left alone and scared. Like my dream of the beach where I wash goo out of the baby’s mouth while someone drowns on the horizon, I’ll begin somewhere perfectly reasonable and end up all alone, in tears, not turned on at all any more, but horrified at my own mind. In reality I won’t be crying, because I haven’t cried in years, but in my imagination I’ll be watching my fantasy self in floods of unattractive tears, tied to a damn washing machine. I often think that if I could make my mind do what I wanted it to do, if the girl in my dreams sat up straighter and smiled more and did what I told her to do, my life would be easier.
“What sort of washing machine?” asked David playfully, turning his head to me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Fast or slow cycle?”
“Fast.”
“Colours or whites?”
“Whites, for sure. Higher heat,” I said.
“Would your clothes be in the machine?” he asked.
“Of course.”
We paused, sleepy as the sun was rising outside the win dow.
“What happened to Enkidu, then? I won’t be able to sleep until I know.”
“I was brought into the farm in order to drag him into the human world.”
“To make a man of him, like in Gilgamesh,” said David.
“Exactly,” I yawned. “But I’m too sleepy to make a man out of anyone tonight.”
“You live in a state of perpetual unreality,” he said.
“Says the alcoholic,” I replied.
“Harsh,” he said.
“Pots and kettles,” I kissed him.
“Let’s run away somewhere,” he said.
“Sure,” I smiled.
“Let’s run away somewhere tomorrow,” he said.
“Where?” I said.
“Rio, Mexico, the moon?” he said, “I really don’t care. I just want to get out of here. That woman from downstairs keeps telling me that things are going to fall apart.”
“She tells me that too,” I smiled.
“Are you as good at lying as you are at story-telling?”
“What do you mean?” I said, confused by the sudden change in tone and subject.
“Are you a good liar?” he said.
“My Dad could always tell when I was lying, cos my left eye twitched,” I lied to David with a small smile. He held his thumb under my eye.
“Do you love me?” He asked.
“I really do,” I said. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he said, watching my eye for a twitch.
33
We didn’t go away the next day, of course, although I wish we had. Instead we woke up in the heat and had a few hours together before Sam picked me up for work. David and I walked up to Griffith Park Observatory. The city and the Santa Monica Mountains stretched out glinting below us like a saucepan of water that was just about to boil. When we got to the top, through all that thick dry heat we could see the bald patches of burnt earth where the fires had been put out only a few days ago. Smoke was still rising, not even very far away, shattering the blue sky into grey and shifty pieces. I watched a dehydrated fly swim in delirious circles and then land on a metal railing, which must have been insanely hot, because the fly fell dead to the floor a few seconds later. David wore a pale-blue T-shirt, slightly torn, and got a triangle of sweat on his back as we climbed. I could smell him. He told me about how one day when he was twenty-five he woke up outside the observatory at nine in the morning with no idea how he got there, surrounded by Dutch tourists who were poking him with their guide books. I laughed, although it was a pathetic image.
“You ever woken up in weird places?” he asked me.
“I don’t think so,” I shrugged, “I don’t like getting drunk much.” David laughed. “But I did have a brief love affair with drowsy berry-flavoured cough syrup – but that’s about it.” I smiled.
We were silent for a bit, walking around the circles of the building. David said he was going to spend his afternoon out on some photographic mission or other, stealing private moments from famous people. He said he might develop the photos he’d taken of me a few weeks ago, the ones of me posing in my bikini around his living room.
“Ah, no, don’t,” I cringed. “Please don’t.”
“Why not?”
“They’ll be silly,” I shivered.
“They’ll be lovely, I promise,” he said, smiling, and held my hand as we made our descent back down the hill. I wondered what he saw when he looked at me, and contemplated how much dishonesty there was in perception, anyway. He might not know my real age, but he still saw me. He might know things about Lily that I didn’t, but I still loved him. He turned to me and said: “I might try to find the roll of film from ages ago, the photos I took when we first met, when you were a thief asleep on the beach,” he said.
“That’s not fair,” I said. “I might look ugly.”
“You never look ugly,” he said.
“Liar,” I said.
34
The first set I worked on with Sam had been on a fake suburban street, and the second was a Korea Town pet shop. There was a front area full of spider-webbed plastic castles, fake seaweed and rancid dog chews, then two long corridors – one lined with fish and the other with yelping dogs who looked like they were about to drop dead, their little paws scratching at their glass walls. Every night the owners and their two teenage sons would climb up a wooden ladder to a small attic above the shop. They slept up there on four tidy futons while we filmed. In the morning, when the light was just beginning to ruin the continuity of Sam’s shots, the family came yawning down the wooden ladder in matching blue cotton pyjamas to make tea in the kitchen, where they also cleaned out the daily mulch of a hundred animal cages. The family seemed entirely at ease with the camera crew. We learnt later that they’d had other film crews in over the years. Only in Los Angeles is every mom-and-pop shop also regularly a film set.
There seemed to be a lot of crazy people in that part of town, their presence amplified by our shooting through the night. The shop was opposite a Kentucky Fried Chicken branch, one built in the shape of a giant, dirty, concrete KFC bucket on North Western Avenue. When the crew arrived in the evening, religious zealots would be preaching of martyrdom out in the strip-mall parking lots, while Korean men skulked in and out of a 24-hour convenience store. The convenience store smelt of aerosol cans, and the shopkeeper sat behind a safety cage. Next to the store was a tanning salon with a blown-out neon sign outside, which I can’t imagine attracted many customers, and above it was a window display full of dusty wedding gowns and taffeta prom dresses the colour of dried phlegm.
“Maybe there’s a Meth lab in the tanning salon, and they deal from the shop,” suggested Sam on the first night of shooting when I mentioned that the tanning salon and the dress shop couldn’t possibly make any money. “That would make sense.”
“What about the dress shop?” I asked.
“That’s where they live,” he said, “with wedding dresses for duvets and veils for pillows.” I smiled at him. A year or two later, after all of this was over, I stopped by at the strip mall and peeked in at the dress shop. There was a sign on the window that said “appointment only”, and through the dusty glass I could see a woman changing her baby’s nappy on the counter. I could have sworn they were even the same dresses in the display, so perhaps Sam was right.
We worked till 7:00 a.m. that summer morning. Sam gave me a ride home, and it was around eight when I let myself into David’s flat. The first thing I noticed was a wooden chair missing from around David’s kitchen table and dents in the kitchen walls, where a confetti of paint was drizzling off. It was quite a small mark in the wall, but I couldn’t help noticing that the laminate kitchen floor was dented now too. David got out of the shower just as I walked in, and he smelt clean like a baby or a shampooed dog. I walked through the slightly askew living room and into the bedroom. I kissed him on the cheek, but he turned away from me and started to dry himself with his back to the bedroom door. Perhaps there was a faint hint of alcohol in the air, but mostly all I could smell was shampoo.
“How was your night?” I said. My voice sounded relatively calm considering the adrenalin suddenly in my brain. I hadn’t been to the Serena for over a week, not since we saw the Coyote and David accused me of keeping secrets.
“All right,” David said as he dropped his towel and started to get dressed. He seemed to be moving slowly, in a slightly odd way: swampy and thick. The atmosphere was very different from our talks about going on holiday to the moon.
“Want me to make you breakfast?” I asked him.
I didn’t mention the little cuts on his knuckles, or the fact that several plates were missing from the kitchen cupboards. He was looking at me strangely while I made scrambled eggs in his little pink-tiled kitchen. There was a gap between us that I couldn’t put my finger on. He was definitely drunk, or he had been. Maybe he’d just fallen off the wagon and it was nothing to do with me, I thought hopefully, but something was certainly wrong, and I could feel his angry thoughts while I whisked up the eggs in a ribbed-glass cup and added milk. The eggs lolloped around in the glass, and I broke the yolks against the sides with my fork, merging them like bleeding sea creatures into the thick surrounding water. I concentrated on feeding crumbs of salt into the mixture and turning olive oil to fume in the saucepan before I poured the mixture in and watched it sizzle.
I pretended not to feel this horrible itch on my skin where he was looking. I turned and smiled fakely at him across the kitchen table. I’d been wearing one of his T-shirts all night on Sam’s set, from some death-metal band I’d never heard of, and the jeans he bought me rather than Lily’s stonewash skinny pair. My hair was long enough to be up in a ponytail now, although there was only a tuft of blond hair caught up in the rubber band. He had got dressed in his normal ridiculous fashion – tracksuit bottoms with holes in them and visible elastic at the waistband, a nice pressed shirt with blue stripes, a pair of purple plastic sunglasses on his shorn head. His hair was still damp, and his camera lay dormant on the table next to his hand.
“You want cheese in your scrambled egg?” I said to him.
“Is that an English thing?” he replied gruffly, and I turned to look in the fridge, just so that I could use the door to shield myself from his look. He’d been irritated with me before, for moments, but never for long, and it never felt as heavy as this. We didn’t have any cheese, and when I turned back to the eggs they were already setting in the saucepan. I gave them a quick stir, scra
ping the yolk from the sides, and put toast in the toaster. If I’d known this moment was so important, I would have done something interesting with the eggs.
Perhaps I did know what was happening, although not how or why. Perhaps I was stretching out the time before I had to make contact with the problem, or perhaps I was waiting for him to speak first. While scrambling eggs in David’s little kitchen, the trouble seemed to be contained beyond a glass wall. I felt groggy and feline, like someone had weighted down my ankles with sandbags, but I didn’t feel like it was the end of the world. All I wanted to do was curl up and be unconscious, preferably near him. Instead I buttered his toast in the kitchen. The smell of coffee filled the kitchen from the gurgling machine.
“How’s Sam’s set?” David finally said to me as I tumbled the scrambled eggs onto his toast and turned to put the plate in front of him. Then I swung my back to him again and busied myself arranging the remains on the eggs onto another piece of toast for me.
“Yeah, fine,” I said. “Bit crazy.”
“It’s in a pet shop, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, picking at my food. “What you been up to?” I wasn’t hungry. Neither was he, it seemed, because he didn’t even pick up his knife and fork.
“Just developing photos at the office,” David said.
“Anything good?” I said nervously.
We paused. David looked at me, then shrugged and glanced back at his hands. I felt all brittle and jumpy. Film sets often ran on a prescription drug called Adderall, which I’d never taken until Sam gave it to me. Nobody takes it in London, or at least I’d never heard of it, but Los Angeles seemed to use it like morning coffee. It’s meant to be for people who find it difficult to concentrate. It makes you speedy and focused, but after a while it makes you hollow and sleepless. Everyone took it on Sam’s set.
David didn’t touch my scrambled eggs. He looked like he was hardly awake at all, and his body reminded me of a tethered bull or a tranquilized horse. His tanned shoulders were hunched forwards slightly over the table, and his heavy eyes followed me languidly as I moved around the kitchen.
The Pink Hotel Page 18