But she only clamps her eyes shut against him once more, longing for the reprieve. For the codeine oblivion that can take her outside the grotesque mess of herself—far, far away from here.
IT TAKES YANK five minutes to walk to the estates, which are closer than the Latchmere or he’d go there. The black kids loitering outside could be the same little shits who kicked him in the head and tried to steal his camera, but for this kind of transaction that doesn’t matter; in this kind of transaction, enemies are friends. They don’t have anything on them, so they point him to one of the flats. Her blood’s cold and stiff on his shirt and jacket, his movements jerky like the Tin Man in need of an oilcan. He sees one of the younger boys gaping at the sight of him, but nobody asks. Who’d want to be an accomplice to the things of which he is obviously capable? The cat who opens the door he knocks on is white, a mild surprise, though he’s got dreads and is wearing a Rastafarian-colored shoelace tied around his throat like a necklace, a dirty feather sticking out of the knot. He takes one look at Yank and gets down to business, barks at his old lady and a couple of café-au-lait-tinted little girls to let them alone. No offers to taste the shit together, or talk mishaps and music to kill some time: today they want him out as fast as he wants to leave. It’s why he didn’t wash her blood off in the first place. In a cool twenty minutes he’s back turning his key in the door.
Back to where he left her half-naked, clothes in a pile on the carpet, head lolling onto her red-tinged knees. For just one moment before he opens the door to his and Joshua’s room, fear grips him: What the hell was he thinking, leaving her alone? Who knows what might have transpired while he was gone? Then he opens the door and sees her, still slouched against the wall. She could be dead, but no, at his weight on the mattress she opens her eyes, and all her earlier faces—the venomous woman of the train station, the dying animal of their long walk home—are gone. She smiles like a child at a father, serene.
“We’re going on a little trip together, darlin’,” he tells her.
“Where?” she asks foggily. She more topples over than lies down, her tiny body curled fetal on its side. She’s trembling from a drop in blood pressure, a loss of blood, the aftershocks of trauma—who knows? Yank shrugs his crusty jacket off, clumsily maneuvers the bloody sheet out from under Nicole to cover her up, his knees pressed against her abdomen in the thoughtless way their bodies first touched on the train. He hasn’t forgotten she’s there yet—hasn’t forgotten the jut of her clavicle, the curve of her ribs, the shadow of darker hair through her flimsy panties—but she’s no longer the thing he wants most in the room. He’s pretty sure that’s not why he’s doing this, but he wouldn’t bet his life on it.
He’s pretty sure the matter was decided in the broken way her head recoiled from his hand, the harshness with which she spat into her little plastic bowl, the hopeless turning away of her bloodshot eyes. In those gestures he understood all he needs to about her body’s betrayals. And though he’s got little to offer her or anyone, the one thing he could think to do was to say without words, I’ll take your shame and raise you one. At least whatever’s wrong with you isn’t your own damn fault.
He has been carrying his paraphernalia around since his exodus from London a year and a half ago, just like she carries hers—the way an agnostic might still carry his grandmother’s rosary, just in case. His hands shaky, too, from the energy of shifting one desire into another, Yank pulls his old spoon from his bag of tricks and clicks it against the orange bottle of her cough syrup.
He toasts, “To the Pilgrims,” loads the spoon, and begins to cook.
She watches him heat the heroin, her eyes as innocently curious as his son’s on the rare occasions he bothered to give Hillary a break and warm the baby’s bottle. This girl watches him this same way, as though when he’s achieved the right temperature he may spoon-feed the dose right into her mouth. Instead, when the tourniquet goes around his biceps, he sees her eyes flick down to her own puny girl-arm, no veins even visible, and then her fingers reach out to touch the strong, ropy veins that pop from his skin, throbbing with ugly, beautiful life. Her fingers are cold, and he notices her teeth chattering, too. Just before the needle’s pierce, he lets himself lower down next to her, his longer body pressed against her smaller one, and from somewhere far away, he feels her trembling cease.
Then he doesn’t give a shit anymore about being a reminder of how low she could go, who else she could be—he didn’t do this for anyone but himself, this one perfect moment, sliding once more down his own rabbit hole, soaring through his own private sky, riding his own long-lost wave. Never as good as the first time, but he’ll take it, thank you, God, you evil fucker, he’ll take it.
His skin’s gone fuzzy, he can’t say if he’s touching her or anything. Time does not exist. Air buzzes around them, electric.
“My name is Mary. Mary Rebecca Grace.”
Her breath rattles like a baby’s with croup—like his son’s that endless night before Hillary finally reached the doctor on the phone. The boy was fine in a few days, yet déjà vu knocks the wind out of Yank like a punch so that for a moment he doesn’t comprehend her words.
“I have cystic fibrosis. I’m less than a year away from the typical life expectancy for people with my disease.”
And then he does give a shit.
He turns onto his side, lifts her limp hand from the mattress, and shakes it with one soft jerk. “My name is Kenneth Blair,” he says. “I’m wanted for the murder of a dealer named Shane O’Leary. I didn’t kill the bastard, I just dumped his useless body in the Thames. He was my best friend. If I were a better man, I would’ve killed him, but I’m not.”
To his surprise, the fucking girl smiles. “Excellent,” she drawls, pulling her knees farther in against her ribs. “Stick around and maybe you can do that for me, too.” Her finger wags aimlessly, like maybe she’s parodying her mother back in Ohio. “The walking dead should never travel without someone who knows how to hide a body, you know.” She giggles, but it fades fast into something mirthless, airless. “Poof.”
Hard not to kiss her then, except that he might suffocate her. Hard not to put every part of him inside her, except that they’ve got work to do.
It’s hard to focus when she’s quiet, too. Yank holds his body immobile as a statue, still straining to hear his boy’s fragile breath, but pretty soon he has to roll his ankle—three, four times compulsively—waiting to hear a crack. At the sound, he’s a little jarred to notice her still there next to him, head lolling, eyes closed, dried blood coating her pale skin. And all of a sudden he can’t stop looking. Even when she opens her eyes and watches him, shame doesn’t matter anymore; he can’t remember this high up why it ever did. He shifts her knees off his ribs, sits up, and fumbles for his camera.
“You mind if I take some pictures of you, baby?” But he’s already clicking a test shot, not waiting for her answer, shifting a little so that the thin light from the filmy window won’t overexpose and dilute the color of her blood. She throws her head back trying maybe for a laugh but loses track of it, flops onto her back, nodding like she’s the one who just shot up instead of him.
“Whatever floats your boat, Desperado.” Voice croaky. Already tears are sliding a river into her hairline, leaving weak tracks in the red. Yank knows the tears are not about him, even if he wishes they were. His heart hammers in time with the shots, fast, fast, fast, trying to catch her trail of tears, but soon she’s zoning too far in her own narcotic stupor to make them anymore. Even when she’s asleep he keeps clicking; at one point he rearranges her limbs so she’s fetal again and still she doesn’t stir. It’s only once the light shifts—a sign that the others may soon return—that he makes himself chuck the camera back under some clothes. Time will be running out.
“Someone to hide the body, huh?” He laughs louder than when anyone can hear. “Who knew you were such a freaky little bitch?” But he’s only talking to himself, like the born-again junkie he is. Soon enoug
h—though not before taking a slug—he will cap her orange syrup and put it back into her rucksack. He will bring her baby bowl to the toilet and rinse it in the sink, watching the red insides of her swirl down the drain until it’s white, then zip that into her bag, too, placing everything back in the wardrobe under her neatly hung clothes. Soon enough he will open up his duffel bag and shove all her ruined clothes inside, noting a faint tinge of red on the carpet where they once rested but deciding that you’d have to be looking for it and that in this place—in places like this—no one ever is. He will soak a facecloth and, after that proves insufficient, a dish towel, methodically wiping the dried blood from her face and hands, though he will not be able to remove it fully from her fingernails or the tips of her curls; he will debate, then decide against, trying to get it off her bra, underneath which her nipples are stiff from water drying cool on her skin. He will contort her cleansed body inside Joshua’s Led Zeppelin T-shirt, though when he strips the sheets, there will be no new set to replace them with, so he’ll just leave Joshua’s mattress raw and unexplained. As he works, his body will hum productively, the lactic acid that burned his arms earlier from carrying her now forgotten, so that he feels young and without pain, though he was never really young enough that pain wasn’t involved.
This will come later, though. For now, camera securely hidden, he reclines on the island of their mattress, listening to her breath more carefully than he ever has to any jazz riff. She rattles like a broken space heater, no trace of his son anywhere now. She’s merely a car engine that won’t turn over, some failing machine. In any merciful world, there would be a way he could simply reach out and flick the switch to off.
It’s so easy to hide things from people who don’t want to know anyway. Joshua and Sandor came home, and Yank gave them some tale about how I was sick from our first batch of Pixie Dust Bars, how I threw up on my bed and he stripped the sheets and sent my “useless ass” to crash. I heard his flat, lying voice and closed my eyes again and imagined his story into being. The smell of burning hash oil permeated the house. Sandor clucked concern but I wasn’t sure if it was over me or the cakes. Finally Joshua came in and sat on the side of our bed, smoothing back my hair like a mother, and though I have been nurtured before, too many times, something rose in my throat so I almost told him everything then. Instead, he pushed up the Led Zeppelin T-shirt Yank had dressed me in and lowered my underwear around my knees like a snare. Maybe in case I planned to throw up again, he turned me onto all fours, and without a word, with Sandor and Yank still talking low in the common room, rode me so hard my head hit the wall. I started coughing into the pillow, but thank God no blood came up. Still, when I began to moan, Joshua covered my mouth and whispered, “Control,” and slid a sock (whose?) between my teeth to bite down on, continuing his frenzy. I knew I should be pissed. I knew that somehow he’d figured out there was more to Yank’s story even if he couldn’t fathom what, and he was punishing me, just like you were on the ferry when you made me swallow that gross bath-cube candy. But I wasn’t angry. I thought of Yank on the other side of the wall, taking in the pounding, and I knew Joshua and I were both screwing for him in a sense. That all over the world, men and women are fucking for people not even in the room, and I bit into the sock and coughed and cried a little, and as soon as he came, Joshua stood and zipped his pants, then left to sell cakes at the Latchmere. I thought Yank would stay behind but he went.
What if he had stayed behind? Or maybe that is only a story I’m telling myself.
Lately Joshua has taken to regaling me with South African fables. When he returned from the pub, drunk and smelling of a world of men, he twined his body around mine on our sunken mattress and whispered, “In South Africa, this bed could be dangerous.” Then told me the legend of the Takoloshe, a demon some superstitious blacks in his country think sneaks into homes at night to steal souls. In reality, he said, the deaths are caused by gas leaks in faulty, old-fashioned stoves, which is why believers say the demon is tiny. His eyes were bright as he explained, his hand trailing circles on my stomach. Yank had not returned to the flat with him, though I heard Sandor puttering around next door. Joshua kissed my neck over and over again, and I knew he was apologizing even though he didn’t need to. He whispered to me as if telling me an urgent secret, “The ones who die are always those closest to the ground.”
But Nix, I already know that is a lie.
IT HAS BECOME a matter of now or never. Clutching London A to Z (zed!), Mary rides the Tube to West Kensington and disembarks, an excited dizziness overtaking her the way it might a devotee of Virginia Woolf upon arriving at Bloomsbury Square. Turning left out of the station, she walks the few blocks to one of the places she crossed an ocean to see. Ten Archel Road, the flat where Nix lived for four short months. The building is white stone, not so different from Arthog House, unremarkable. Mary cannot go in because she has no key, but she stands outside imagining Nix rushing up and down its steps on crisp fall nights, buzzed and smelling of pub smoke, perpetually searching for her keys. Nix being Nix, in high-heeled boots and her swingy camel coat, hair flattened by London rain.
Mary sits on the steps. There should be more to do here, but what? She avoided coming for so long that the coming itself has taken all her reserves, leaving nothing for gesture or ceremony. Through her tights, the December cement is cold on the backs of her thighs. She gets up.
Around the corner she looks for the Indian restaurant, and there it is. There it is! She expected a takeaway joint (Nix mentioned getting her meals to go), but no, the place is upscale if also gaudy, decorated in heavy reds and golds. Through the window, the woman at the hostess stand is unexpectedly beautiful, elegant, serene. She can see the woman returning her stare, so she nervously rushes inside.
“Hi!” The word comes out too loudly and the woman jumps, as though Mary may be concealing a gun. “Is Hasnain around?”
The woman’s sphinx face is blank. “No.”
“Oh! Well, I’m a friend of his—can you tell me when he’ll be working?”
The woman says, “There is no Hasnain who works here.”
By the way the woman has said it, it is clear what she means, but Mary cannot let the smile of anticipation off her face. She cannot admit what she is hearing. If it is not this Indian restaurant, then which one can it be? There are hundreds in London, and this one is around the corner from Nix’s flat, just as Nix specified in her letters. She says brightly, “Hasnain doesn’t work here anymore? Do you know where he works or how I can get in touch with him?”
The woman looks very young, really, no more than her early thirties. Suddenly Mary realizes how delusional she was when she walked in—she had assumed herself face-to-face with Hasnain’s mother. There is no way this woman could be the mother of someone older than Nix. She feels unhinged. The woman is right not to trust her.
The woman says, “There is no Hasnain.” She has not spoken slowly, but Mary hears her as though through underwater.
Later there will be no memory of leaving the restaurant. She will ride the Tube, transferring at Earl’s Court and heading to the Baker Street Station, then veering right (past the shop where Nix purchased cappuccino every morning on her way to class?) until she reaches Regent’s College, inside the majestic Regent’s Park. There is a zoo in here somewhere, but Mary does not see it. She watches swans wandering around, wondering if they are the same swans Nix mentioned in her first letter describing the school. Ah, the magic of London! Nix wrote with the irony of a traveler more experienced than she really was. Once, Nix climbed a fence into the college grounds after hours, when the gate was locked. Mary is not sure what Nix was doing that for; she cannot remember if she ever knew. She was with her flatmates, girls who have graduated by now and are home with their own memories of Nix—of Nicole—and no memories of Mary, whom they have never met.
Mary is exhausted. Since her “major hemoptysis” (as Dr. Narayan called it on the phone), there has been no more blood in her sputum. Still, s
he does not feel the same. All week she’s been afraid to use her inhalers, to thin anything out lest she start bleeding again. She found herself making excuses to Dr. Narayan: how smoggy London was, how smoky the air of Arthog House and the Latchmere. At last, she ended up blurting out, as if to a priest in a confessional, “I’ve been skipping my PTs—the house where I live is so crowded, it’s just hard to find the privacy to do them.” She pronounced “privacy” the English way. Silence expanded on the other end of the line, and her cheeks burned. Dr. Narayan sighed. “I thought you were smarter than this,” he said, his clipped accent not unlike the mysterious woman’s in the Indian restaurant. “I thought you understood there is no way we can help you unless you’re willing to help yourself.”
Until the night of blood, Mary had not felt truly ill since the infection that led to her diagnosis at seventeen. Now, heading back to the Baker Street Station from Regent’s Park, her ragged breath and clammy skin shame her, her body revealing its ugly truth. Waiting for the Tube, she leans against a wall, trying to stay out of the way of flextime commuters, when an announcement comes on the PA system that the Bakerloo line has been delayed owing to a “body on the tracks.” Mary looks around in disbelief, but no one else seems to have registered the news. Londoners calmly read newspapers or munch a Cadbury. Soon the train comes anyway, the body no doubt having been unceremoniously removed.
Next to her in the crowded car is a trendy boy, hair dipping deeply over his left eye, jaw sharp as a knife beneath the curtain. “Does this happen often?” she asks him. “Delays because of . . . uh, bodies on the tracks?”
The boy laughs, one short bark. His breath smells of smoke, and momentarily Mary imagines burying her face in his chest. “You have no idea!” he proclaims, almost proudly.
Apparently, all over London, commuters are hurling themselves to be electrocuted and run over, but nobody minds. It would be in bad form to make a fuss.
A Life in Men: A Novel Page 5