Zwerfster Chic

by Billie Kelgren

  It’s the kind of shit that alters you, seeing someone who wasn’t expecting to die come to an end so sudden that he had no clue as to what just happened to him. Belinda blamed me, for taking away what time he had left, time that should’ve been spent with her and the boys. I was suddenly a home-wrecking bitch as far as she was concerned. As if I never spent an evening in their home.

  Yes, I understood that she was in pain, but, really, didn’t she even consider that I was hurting too? I loved the guy. I loved them both. I missed them both very much.

  When I was in the hospital in L.A., after the attack, after being shredded over half my body, the head-check they sent to talk to me finally came around to asking about Jonesy and what impact that might’ve had on what happened. He didn’t say, exactly, what he meant by the question, but I quickly caught the implication.

  For some reason, this fucker thought that my seeing Jonesy’s brains all splattered was possibly one of the reasons for my putting bullets so quickly into the heads of Luis and Mateo. That it was my way of dealing.

  What a stupid fucking idea.

  I put one down simply because he would’ve killed me otherwise.

  I put the other one down simply because I was covering my ass.

  Jonesy played no part in it at all.

  I’m in the hospital in some town called Msida up at the tip of the harbor, my head wrapped so that it looks like they’ve taped a small football to the side of my forehead. A Nerf football, I guess. Not a good look, even for me. Mia comes back into my room with Constable St. John — with the Malta Police Force out of St. Julian’s she told us the first time she arrived. She speaks with a British accent, though not a particularly strong one, and has red hair, which she keeps neatly pinned back off her collar, and pale skin, which must be a seriously difficult thing to maintain considering the living conditions on Malta, which is sun all of the time. She said she’s a transplant — formerly Constable St. John of Skipton-on-the-Crotchrot (or something like that) of North Yorkshire — where all the English people are murdered each week — now of St. Julian’s for nearly a year.

  She has a round face with freckled cheeks and a freckled nose and I imagine that she spends her nights alone in a lonely little one-bedroom apartment, or maybe a tiny little cottage right outside of…. No, that’s too much. Definitely the lonely little one-bedroom with drab walls and tacked-on artwork. And facing inland, of course.

  Constable St. John sparkles in the presence of Mia, as though she’s found herself the sudden attention of the star…whatever the position is that’s like the star quarterback in the States that they have in the world of football-is-soccer-football. She beams and listens intently to every word that Mia has to say because she has come to the conclusion that this isn’t all some sort of cruel hoax. That he…that is, she is actually speaking to her.

  I don’t like this. Not one fucking bit.

  She tells us that they’re going to hang onto my passport for the time being, that we can probably come by the station in a couple of days to pick it up. Just routine, she says, not understanding that the passport they’re hanging onto is anything but routine. She also informs me that South Africa doesn’t have a consulate on the island, that they work out of the Rome office and that it’s not likely that they’ll send someone out for an incident like mine. She says that I can contact them myself, if I feel so inclined, but I tell her I’m fine with the situation.

  I mean, how awkward would that be, the South African Consular person arriving, coming into my room at the hospital, and then pointing at me and saying Who the hell is this? She’s not one of ours!

  Still, what’s going to happen when they try putting my passport into the system? I can’t contact Bouchard. And I’m pretty certain that Getting will have no fucking clue.

  Mia stands beside Constable St. John as they both look at me. She then touches the woman’s arm as she asks the Constable if we should ask for her when we come by the station. The Constable tries to maintain the appearance of professionalism but the sudden blush and falter in her voice gives her away. She offers Mia her card, taking the time to write her personal phone number on the back, along with her personal name — Vivi. It’s actually Vivian, but everybody knows me by Vivi.

  Vivi, Mia repeats, smiling. Will you be at the station tonight? No, I’m off duty as soon as I get back from here. Oh, well, are you busy tonight? Too busy for a little supper? I really don’t know the restaurants in this town.

  They both look at me. I’m surprised they even remember I’m there. Now I guess they want me to just unhook all my lines, hop out of bed, and go find a junk machine somewhere so that they can get right to it.

  Goddammit, Mia! Goddammitgoddammitgoddammit!

  “What the hell are you doing?” I ask her after Constable-Vivi-Fucking-St.-John-of-Fucking-St.-Julian’s leaves us. She’s going back to the station to clock out and then head home to change.

  “What do you think I’m doing?” Mia says abruptly, which kind of surprises me. “I’m trying to make sure you don’t get into any more trouble, so don’t be so damned petulant with me.”

  No, she’s trying to have sex is what she’s trying to do. I have every damned right to be petulant.

  “Then next time, just let me know your fucking situation.”

  “What?”

  Basic Training shit.

  19

  Manchester — Saint Andrew Parish

  If waiting was an Olympic sport, I would, without a doubt, kick Mia’s butt. Shit, she wouldn’t even make it onto the podium. She’s not cut out for the fine mental exercise that is waiting. Mia’s one of those people who always shows up at the last possible moment — going through security and getting to the gate so she can be the last person to board, after all the cattle in back are already packed in. As soon as she steps into the cabin, the doors are closed. She doesn’t wait, and she makes no one wait for her — slipping in and out, passing through unnoticed.

  I must be driving her crazy.

  We arrive at the airport in Manchester (Manchester! England! From the sunny paradise that is Malta! Try that one time and see how it fucks with your head. No wonder the Brits all drink themselves into a stupor. They’ve all just got back from holiday in Malta, forchristsake!) and Mia decides that there isn’t enough time to do anything other than sit and wait. Outside, the world is small and gray because an opaque fog has rolled in and contains us in this bizarre alternate universe that is the Manchester Airport. I’m sure it’s nice there at other times, but not on this day. And I’m certain that if I wasn’t with her, Mia would’ve said To hell with this shit! and taxied herself over to some fabulous spa in the city somewhere to spend the three hours that is the wait for our flight to Guernsey.

  You can guess how much I know about the place called Guernsey. Wasn’t there a song about it, about a girl from there or something? And a cow? What a strange song that must be.

  I hunker down and dig myself in, staring off at a mark on a wall that begins to move on its own after I stare at it hard enough. This is how you pass time on the BOP, staring and trying to remember the lyrics of songs you might’ve once heard in passing on the AM station that faded whenever the car passed under a highway flyover, which was often in Boston before the Big Dig.

  At some point, I don’t know how long in, Mia slips her arm around me, tips me over in her direction, and kisses me three times quickly on the top of my head. She sighs as she rests her head on mine.

  Her disembodied voice comes to me from above.

  “Just so you know, Constable St. John and I — we just went out for dinner and some drinks afterwards, and then talked. That’s all.”

  I make a noise of acknowledgement and I guess this makes Mia feel that she has to continue.

  “Nothing happened, like you might be thinking. She was sweet, but I’m too old to be behaving that way.”

  “Okay.”

  It strikes me a second later that she might’ve been fishing for a compliment.

 
; I’m happy enough.

  Guernsey reminds me, superficially, of Malta, only greener, and not as dry, or as warm, with people who appear to be more pale…. Okay, I guess the connection between the two is something other than superficial. They are both islands…. Though they’re in different bodies of water…. I think.

  Allie and Cerise Rose: the Guernsey and Malta of couples.

  Allie’s real name is Alabaster and he’s a middle-aged Brit businessman of pleasant disposition but forgettable appearance. He’s not overweight, but you can see that he’s heading in that direction because his grey flannel suit no longer fits him like it probably did when he first bought it. He’s not bald, but you can see that he’s heading in that direction as well. His skin isn’t exactly alabaster, but it’s obvious that if he ever did spend time on Malta, he would’ve been the chap with the extra thick layer of sunscreen and the big hat to keep his face from turning a brilliant salmon.

  On the other hand, Cerise — said in the three-syllable French fashion — looks like she might be from the Middle East, maybe Lebanon, though Mia later tells me that she’s, in fact, Pied-Noir — French Algerian. She’s tall, thin, and dark-skinned, and speaks French most of the time because it’s hard to understand her when she speaks English. Allie refuses to utter a word in her language so I guess they spend much of their time together not sure of what the other one is really trying to say.

  They are almost a parody of themselves — Alabaster and Cerise — White and Red Rose.

  She seems relieved to have someone around with whom she can speak plainly because even while I’m in the room, most words exchanged are in French. She’ll peer at me and ask a question, or make a comment, and Mia will either translate for me or simply provide the answer and then tell me what she told Cerise. It’s hard to figure out what this woman is thinking, if she really dislikes me or if she’s only being French. I know she really wants to dislike me, but can’t bring herself to do it because she’s still feeling terrible about what had happened when we first arrived.

  Their home sits on a fair parcel of managed farmland on top of a small rise that gives the couple a commanding view of the surrounding fields. It’s old, with small rooms and low ceilings and doorways where even I can touch the transom with only a small leap. The exterior has been whitewashed and then buffeted a mossy gray over the long winter, not yet cleaned up for the summer. It belonged to Allie’s family, who left right before the war, and it was Allie himself who came back to reclaim the home and its surrounding land before it was forfeited due to dereliction and abandonment.

  Cerise was one of five children of a couple from Algeria who came to help in the clean-up following the war and, after making a considerable amount of money, moved back to Algeria only to be killed in the civil war that tore that country apart in the ’90s. Cerise and her older sister, both young adults at the time, remained on the island. She and Allie met when they were both in their twenties but it took until their thirties to convince themselves that they might actually like being married to one another. I really doubt anyone else has ever become convinced.

  They have no children, but they have three dogs, a triplet of Staffordshire bull terriers that came crashing out the front door on our arrival and made the short dash across the front lawn hidden from my view by a low, whitewashed stone and stucco wall that’s draped with the tangle of last year’s vines and the new, green sprouts of spring. I didn’t see the dogs until they came through the opening where the gravel and stone path turned in our direction, I didn’t hear them because a stiff breeze and Mia’s call of greeting to Cerise in French distracted me. By the time I knew they were there, racing to see what I had brought them, all I saw was Dio and Ganza coming at me over the back of the couch.

  Right before they grabbed hold and started pulling me apart.

  “Dios?” I said to Angel when he first introduced me to his “pets,” a pair of fully grown American Bandog mastiffs. “You call your dog God?”

  Dio was pulling against his chain so hard, trying to reach me, to sniff me out, that it looked as though his collar would slice right through his neck. The chains were heavy, because these dogs were massive, and still I stayed back because a part of me didn’t really believe Angel when he told me that the chain would hold.

  “Dio is short for Diablo,” he told me, saying the devil’s name with that tone guys use when they want to sound menacing. He wasn’t trying to menace me — we had a thing, the two of us. He liked me.

  “And this surly one is Ganza. Short for Venganza.”

  The creature on the other side of the room paced back and forth, dragging the slack of its chain as it eyed me. Its gaze was dark and feral as it sized me up as a potential threat.

  I asked him what his mother thought about her Angel having dogs named Devil and Vengeance and he flashed his toothy grin. His mother didn’t know. He was still a mama’s boy at heart, which was one of the things I liked about him. He had a soft spot for women.

  At least, I believed he did.

  “Merde! J’ai oublié.”

  Those were the words from Cerise after Mia clearly swore in English.

  I think I was screaming.

  I wake up in the middle of the night, much too warm under many layers of quilts and comforters, enveloped by a down-filled mattress-topper. I’m sweating and feeling a little bit queasy from all the wine I drank during dinner, and the glasses afterwards, and the glasses before. I hunt for Mia under the mountain of covers but find the edge of the bed. She’s not there.

  Is she gone? Is she in the room somewhere? Did she have to go pee and will be right back? Or is she downstairs? Or outside? Why would she be outside?

  The wind had kicked up as the sky turned black and the temperature out there dropped much more quickly than I had expected, so I was grateful when Allie stepped out to collect wood to build a fire in the small fireplace in the sitting room where we all gathered before dinner, after I had time to recover. The dogs started yelping and crying again when Allie was outside. The stack leaned against the wall of the long shed where Cerise had taken them to be penned up. She had to explain to him why his “girls” were locked up for the evening and he added his apologies on top of Cerise’s apologies, but I really didn’t want to hear them anymore. They reminded me of the apologies from all up and down the bu-cock — the Bureau’s chain-of-command — after I came off the meds enough to understand that people were speaking to me.

  They were apologies at first, but then they came back at me with the accusations.

  I try to creep down the hall in search of Mia, but there’s no creeping to be done in this house, not with these floors. I’m certain that whenever someone walks on the floors of the upstairs, Allie and Cerise glance up to watch their ceiling bow under each footfall. Talk comes from the sitting room and it’s clearly in French because even though the door to the room had been closed, there’s no way for it to be closed fully. It kind of reminds me of the place Ma and I lived in over the liquor store, where we searched for but never found a straight line in the place. That was due to the indifferent workmanship put into an attic apartment above a place of business. This place is fighting a long and eventually losing war against the Channel winds.

  The talk pauses a beat when I stop outside the door, then a few quiet words.

  “Entrez, Elsja. Entrez.”

  I push the door open and peer inside and immediately Cerise says something to Mia that makes Mia smile faintly. I guess it’s obvious that I don’t like this, being talked about, so Mia quickly tells me that Cerise had made the comment that I wasn’t her husband. She could tell from the lightness of my footsteps overhead.

  Mia moves her feet off the love seat and pats the place next to her and I come the rest of the way in. The warmth of the barely flickering fire, the shudder of the windows from the night wind, that feeling of a wholly self-contained world in that one small room, occupied only by women — it reminds me of me and my sisters under tented blankets on my bed, held up by the
stick I used to hold the window sash open in the summer because the ropes had broken and the weights were lost somewhere inside the wall. Our flashlights were the only thing keeping the darkness at bay, amplifying the sensation of being in our own world. A world where only the dark maidens of the frozen north existed.

  During my sophomore year at BC, I lived on what was known as The Virgin Vault, a particular hallway in our particular dorm where, it appeared, none of the residents had much luck with the kind of new and exciting social life we had all been promised in the brochures.

  It really wasn’t that bad, but it did serve as an excellent excuse for us to all pile into someone’s room at night, down a stunning number of wine coolers, eat ungodly quantities of junk food, and discuss the latest incident of one of us, or some of us, or all of us, being unjustly treated by The Beautiful, the Bitchy, and the Popular.

  It was at one of these sessions that I was kissed on the lips, for the first time, by another girl in a way that wasn’t simply friendly or cute or maternal.

  Shags had stringy brunette hair, oversized glasses, and acne, and it wasn’t her actual name but she had a stuffed bunny on her bed that she named Shags after Shaggy, the character from Scooby-Doo. She stated that she wanted to experience the sensation of kissing a black girl, and while I had no real desire to experience kissing a white girl, what was I going to do, ostracize myself with everyone on campus?

  Afterwards, Madison, the girl in the room across the hall from mine, asked me what it was like. I told her that it wasn’t for me. In fact, I was wondering if I was being unkind by not telling Shags that she really needed to brush her teeth better, and hold back on the enthusiasm of her tongue, because what I experienced was the eye-watering sensation of sour wine cooler and spoiled Chinese food. You know it when you taste it.