‘Oh . . . oh . . .’ cried number two, arms raised in sudden shock. She’d recalled a fire, and her grandfather throwing himself out of a window, fortunately only two floors up from a spacious ledge. Grandfather had lived on, albeit with a limp, so it wasn’t a proper tragedy. The important bit, what he’d wanted to tell her, wasn’t divulged.
Number three was foreign and difficult to understand. She wore dangling earrings. The man in the bow tie brought up the subject of an old car breaking down, and of a child watch ing it being pushed down a road. The foreign woman shook her head, the lobes of her ears swishing metal. There was a crossroads, bow tie prompted, and a man had come forward to help. He had then dragged a female, screaming, into the bushes and committed an offence. The child had seen legs without stockings thrashing about in the leaves.
A break was called after this to give the child, now middle aged, time to recover after she blurted out that it was her mother she’d seen being taken into the undergrowth. Paper handkerchiefs were supplied.
Rose knew that she was going to be targeted next. She stayed because she found it amusing, this daft pretence at unearthing memories. What would she do, she wondered, if Mrs Weiner spirited up an image of sand spilling onto the head of Billy Rotten? She needn’t have worried. All that was directed at her was a description of a young man in a yellow sweater galloping past on a black horse.
‘Bright yellow?’ she queried, adopting a thoughtful expres sion. She looked round the dull room, walls painted white, not a picture on display, its low ceiling studded with spotlights. ‘He’s with you at an important time,’ said Mrs Weiner.
Rose said, ‘I’m not into horses.’ It wasn’t true. As a child she had often sat on the back of the brown mare that had pulled the milkman’s cart round the village streets, but that animal had never moved faster than a sedate trot. ‘You don’t know him,’ Mrs Weiner acknowledged, presumably referring to yellow sweater, ‘but you have a lot in common.’
Rose skedaddled out of the door, a hand covering her eyes as though hiding tears; she was avoiding the collection plate.
It was almost dark outside and still warm. A stretch of ground sloped down to a semicircle of trees hung with lanterns, moths flickering like snowflakes above the tangerine lights. Drawn to the sight, she approached and stopped; she had noticed a shadowy couple locked in an embrace. The image was romantic. She hoped their hearts beat in tune. She herself, in all her years of sexual encounters, had known true love but once. ‘A dirty union between underage fornicators,’ Mother had labelled it, which was why it was necessary for the resulting infant to be given away. Mothers could always be depended upon to know what was best.
Rose was in her room, partially undressed, when there was a knock at the door. She asked who it was and heard Harold’s voice. When she let him in, he was fiddling with the undone flies of his shorts, stuffing his erect penis into a condom. He reached her and pushed her down onto the bed. She could have jumped up or punched him away, but did neither. He lay on top of her, his tongue swashing about in her ear. Above the roar of the sea, she heard him mutter, ‘Help me . . . I must . . . I can . . .’
The ease with which he entered her probably made him think she was aroused. He wasn’t to know that she was one of those females whose bodies were ready for penetration even when their minds were closed. It was over in seconds. He left almost immediately.
She slept without dreaming, and was surprised on going outside the next morning to find the motel surrounded by armed police. There were more of them patrolling the area under the trees. Fantasising, she imagined that Harold’s behaviour had provoked an arrest. But then, as she reached the breakfast room, he ran towards her and took her arm. ‘There’s been a murder,’ he said, ‘down by the stream.’ He looked shaken. A woman’s body had been found at dawn, throat slashed. She was the wife of a blues singer performing in Las Vegas. Her father, poor man, was the motel’s manager.
They were about to sit down for breakfast when the spiri tualist woman, Mrs Weiner, approached and seized Rose’s arm.
‘You see,’ she hissed, cheeks aflame with excitement, ‘we really do see things.’
‘Things?’ echoed Rose.
‘Death,’ Mrs Weiner said. ‘That woman last night who was dragged into the bushes by some blackie . . .’
Harold interrupted, tone censorious. ‘We don’t know he was coloured. You have no right to assume that he was . . . I guess the name Abe Lincoln means nothing to you.’
Mrs Wiener wasn’t at all cowed. ‘It does,’ she snorted. ‘It was he who said that niggers should never marry whites or ever be given social or political equality.’
Harold stepped backwards as though struck.
‘The mother of the woman with earrings didn’t die,’ Rose said, pushing Mrs Weiner away, ‘she just got interfered with. You’re confused.’
She steered Harold to a table near the door. His face had no colour. She said, ‘It takes time for people to view things differently. Things that are now considered bad will one day be thought of as normal.’ She wasn’t at all sure what she meant.
She consumed a big breakfast, even the hash-browns, and chatted to Harold in a relaxed manner. Admiring his green striped shirt, one she hadn’t seen before, she said, ‘It would be better if you fastened the top three buttons. Your mosquito bites look as though you’ve gone down with the plague.’
He looked at her, eyes hurt. Rose patted his hand. It was easy to talk to him so frankly now that she no longer owed him anything. Telling him she wanted to see what the weather was like, she stood up brusquely and left to go outside. Dazzled by sunlight she heard a shriek of pain above the slam ming of the door behind her.
THIRTEEN
The damage to Harold’s hand was not life-threatening, although the pain after that initial clamping was ferocious. Holding his hand up in the air was helpful, something learnt from an injury received as a child while playing basketball. It was his mother, eyes glazed, a glass of whisky in one hand, who had shoved his fingers towards the clouds.
The blood issuing from his squashed nails upset Rose; there were even tears in her eyes. He was about to reassure her that it wasn’t that bad when he realised it might be advantageous to let her think it was serious. She had been implying over break fast that they should bypass Los Angeles and drive straight to Malibu. He hadn’t told her that a previous telephone call made it clear that Wheeler had booked out three days ago.
Rose insisted someone should look at his hand. The man ager of the inn sent for a member of staff who bathed the crushed fingers in disinfectant before applying a bandage. A sling was produced but Rose objected to its use. She said he wouldn’t be able to hold the wheel, not properly.
‘I’m not thinking of driving,’ he told her, ‘not for a day or two. It wouldn’t be safe.’
‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll hitchhike.’
‘You can’t,’ he protested. ‘It’s dangerous.’
‘You don’t have to worry,’ she retorted, ‘I went all over England in lorries when I was a child.’
‘To hell with England,’ he shouted, ‘this is America. Set foot alone on the road and you could end up stabbed, shot, stran gled . . .’ He was about to add ‘raped’ when he remembered his own behaviour of the night before. Wincing, he clutched the wrist of his damaged hand. For once she didn’t argue, nor did she walk away. He reckoned she was feeling guilty at the harm she’d done.
They remained at the inn for two nights. Rose said that it would be cheaper to sleep in the van, but he argued that with the temperature now above 100 degrees it would be impossi ble to sleep without air conditioning; he didn’t mention that she stank of perspiration.
He insisted she come with him to see the historic railway station, Casa del Deserto, now derelict, that stood beside the line that had linked Kansas City with the Pacific. She gave him a funny look, but followed him as he strode down Main Street. Once there, she stared at the ruined facade while he explai
ned that a century ago the region had been famous for mining gold and silver.
‘Why does everything have a foreign name?’ she asked.
‘Because most of the land belonged to Mexico before gold was discovered.’
‘The gold rush,’ she chirped. ‘I saw Charlie Chaplin in the film.’
‘When the mines went dry the immigrants moved on. That’s why there’s so many ghost towns.’
She began to burble away about the greed of people and how everyone got ruined by wealth. ‘My father,’ she said, ‘was made bankrupt in 1929. He was so into money that he didn’t think about moonlight or flowers.’
Harold turned his head away and gazed up at the sea-blue sky. He wondered how much longer he would be able to put up with her childish and ignorant pronouncements.
‘We had a rose garden,’ she said, ‘that he let die from lack of fertiliser. My mother cried.’
‘Wheeler has money,’ he interrupted, and added, ‘Me too.’
It shut her up. After all, where would she be without his own healthy investments?
On the third morning, Rose didn’t answer his knock at her door. Alarmed, he hurried into the breakfast room, then out into the street. She was sitting on the veranda of a clapboard shack, talking to herself. He rebuked her for wandering off and she told him she’d met a nice man who’d taught her a song. He pulled her upright and marched her back into the inn. She only had coffee this time and didn’t ask the usual questions about how long it was going to take to get to Malibu. She lit a cigarette, smoked half of it and stuffed the remainder into her raincoat pocket.
‘That black man said there’s been a shooting on a farm about a mile away,’ she said. ‘A woman in a wheelchair. She’s not dead.’
He remarked that shootings were commonplace; looking down at his plate he heard the increased thudding of his heart.
‘And he taught me a song,’ Rose said, and recited:
We grub de bread,
Dey gub us de crust
We skim de pot,
De gub us de liquor
And say dat’s good enough for niggers.
‘For God’s sake,’ he hissed, ‘there are riots all over the States at the moment, mostly on account of prejudiced people like you. You can’t use that word.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she faltered, looking genuinely upset, ‘I just thought it was an interesting song written by slaves. They used the word niggers . . .’
‘Even the names of hills and rivers that once contained the word have been changed,’ he told her. ‘That’s how unusable it is.’
‘But we passed through a place called Nigger Creek . . .’
‘Leave it,’ he said, but she wouldn’t.
‘It’s no different from you being called a Yankee,’ she shouted, ‘you’re all American.’ Then she rambled on about an English politician who had apparently got into trouble for saying there were too many coloured people coming into Great Britain. ‘It was only a couple of weeks ago,’ she said. ‘He warned that if it carried on we’d see the Thames foaming with blood.’
Curtly he told her to collect her belongings, and strode out to the camper.
Los Angeles was ninety-three miles away. Harold avoided Route 66 and chose deserted country roads. There was noth ing to be seen from the window but farmland edged by the swooning blur of sun-drenched mountains. After an hour, he came to a halt. Now that he was near the end of his jour ney, his elation was mixed with fear. It would have helped to confide in his travelling companion, but that’s all she was.
Rose asked what was wrong. He thought of saying they were out of gas. Looking at her face—her pale lips appeared to be quivering—for one crazy moment he felt it might be possible to tell her the truth. But that was out of the question. She would hardly allow him to harm her precious Dr. Wheeler.
He said, reaching under the seat, ‘I need a drink. My hand hurts.’
She said, ‘Go ahead. It’ll do you good.’ She even unscrewed the top for him and would have held it to his mouth if he hadn’t snatched the bottle away. He was aware she was watching him, her mouth curved in a patient smile. ‘Does drink help?’ she asked.
‘Nothing helps,’ he snapped. ‘How could it?’
Reluctantly, he offered her the bottle but she said she didn’t really need it, that she had funny enough thoughts as it was. She lived, she confessed, mostly in the past. The here and now meant little to her; it was what made her so unusual. That struck him as comic, she being so unaware of the impression she gave, but he didn’t laugh.
‘I wouldn’t have taken you for a drinker,’ she said. ‘You’re not the type. You don’t have things that torment you.’
Gazing out of the open window, he saw an image of Wheeler in an invalid chair float across the blinding sky.
Rose was talking to herself again. Seeing his look, she told him she was arguing with her father. She said she often did this because, being dead, he couldn’t answer back. He didn’t comment; he was trying to work out where and how he might confront Wheeler. If Wheeler was involved in the Democratic presidential campaign he’d hardly be found wandering around on his own. Ideally, their meeting needed to be in a solitary place, somewhere so isolated that they wouldn’t be seen, otherwise there was the danger that someone might come up with a description . . . even a snapshot. Perhaps he should shave off his beard.
‘Funny thing is,’ Rose said, ‘although he was a bully, he was a terrible crybaby. Once, he went all over Southport pressing sixpences into the hands of those he called our gallant boys in blue . . .’
It might, he thought, be a good idea to telephone John Fury.
‘They were soldiers from the new hospital down by the promenade. My father told them that he was proud of them, that they were the walking wounded . . .’
Fury, Harold reasoned, would know where Kennedy and his gang were likely to be.
‘Afterwards it turned out there was nothing wrong with them, nothing wounded that is. They were soldiers all right, Mother said, but they’d all caught a nasty men’s disease from being in the army.’
He pictured Wheeler’s face, his expression, the image sear ing into his mind.
Rose said, ‘I’m scared about seeing him. It’s been so long. What if he’s not the same person?’
It jolted him, her having the same thoughts as himself.
Thirty minutes later he parked in a campsite off the San Bernardino Freeway. Clutching his hand he said he needed to rest, but first he must make a telephone call. Rose objected, on the grounds that he should stop thinking about stocks and shares and concentrate on his health. ‘My health,’ he retorted, ‘is dependent on money.’
A woman answered his call and informed him that Fury would be back the following day, the second of June. He could be reached at his Santa Ana address. On his return, he was astonished to find that Rose had unfurled the mattress and hung up the mosquito net. As she was being so helpful he decided to tell her what he planned to do the next day. He assured her that Los Angeles was pretty close to Santa Ana and that the sooner they made contact with Fury and got to know the exact location of Senator Kennedy the sooner they’d track down Wheeler. Rose made no comment, just pulled a face.
FOURTEEN
Santa Ana had pretty houses adorned with white awnings, along streets parading under palm trees. It reminded Rose of Southport, though there weren’t any fairy lights. Coming round a corner, the camper had to swerve out of the path of a small boy walking his dog. Harold swore.
Fury’s farm was a mile or so out of town, down a dirt track gloomy with foliage. Ahead lay a courtyard edged with what Rose took to be stables, on account of a horse’s head poking out. There was also a parched two-storied house, paint peel ing, bordering a stretch of butter-coloured grassland. She didn’t really register the scene because she was concentrating on Dr. Wheeler. For too many days he had drifted away, ceased to talk, become nothing but a shadow. She hoped this was because they were about to meet, but feared it had to do with him
being dead. It wasn’t easy to make contact with the departed, not unless one had watched them go.
They were approached by a young man in a yellow sweater who was lugging sacks. Rose didn’t like the way Washington Harold treated him. To get over his curt command to be taken to see Fury, she smiled a lot and even winked. Just because he was foreign didn’t mean he didn’t have feelings.
Fury was out, but he had a wife, a small woman wearing jodhpurs and spectacles. She was called Philopsona, or some thing like that. She lived most of the year on the horse farm in order to take care of her elderly mother who, she confided, could no longer live in Los Angeles after being traumatised by events some twenty years before. Her mother sat in a chair overlooking the fields, dressed in a nightie and a straw hat, clutching a woolly rabbit and the remains of a charred handbag.
When Fury at last appeared he played glad to see them. He shook hands with Harold and kissed Rose on the cheek. His lips were cold. Soon after, he and Harold walked out into the yard, leaving Rose alone with the mother-in-law. Philopsona was busy raking up horse poo from the path below the house.
There was an enlarged photograph on the sitting-room wall of a building on fire, and another of a city in ruins. Rose was turning away from them when Mrs Fury’s mother said, ‘I was there.’ Her voice was confident, her eyes glittering; she was someone still endeavouring to make sense of the present. Rose wasn’t surprised; most of her own life had been spent dwelling on the wounds of the past.
‘My mother is dead,’ the woman said, which, considering her age, was only to be expected. ‘She was buried in a pink nightgown and my Pa put pink roses on her grave owing to having humped her into the ground.’
‘It must have looked nice,’ said Rose.
The woman urged her to come closer. ‘Pink has to do with lusts of the flesh . . . and my Pa told me that the name Rose is in memory of the woman of Babylon.’
The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress Page 11