The next day, sunbathing poolside, Karen says, ‘This is the life.’ She gets in the pool to teach Mum to swim. ‘Come on, you can do it,’ Karen shouts, pulling Mum along with a float.
‘This is the best way to learn,’ Mum says. ‘In a private pool, with no strangers looking at you. It’s wonderful. I love it.’
Afterwards, we relax with Dad in the jacuzzi, chatting and laughing.
‘Who wants a margarita?’ Amy says, holding a tray laden with giant cocktail glasses, salt on the rim.
Everything’s working out. Everyone’s having fun.
Later on, I insist they watch me trade the stock market online. In the computer room, they gather around. I examine some charts and buy $25,000 worth of Starbucks, which appears to be in a strong uptrend. The investment immediately loses $500, making my stomach lurch and sweat bead on my forehead. I take a deep breath, compose myself and invest another $25,000 to average my price down. The loss increases to $1,000, and I brace to close the position out if it reaches the most I’m prepared to lose on a day trade of this size: $1,500. I start to tremble but put on a brave face. As the stock rises, my pulse falls. As it moves into a profit, my smile and mood expand. I dump it all.
‘I just made two grand in fifteen minutes!’ I say, flushing with excitement. That’ll convince them my wealth is legally earned. Seeing the deception as necessary to give them peace of mind, I feel no guilt.
‘What a genius I’ve spawned!’ Dad says.
At Anthony’s in the Catalinas, a fawning waiter in a dickey bow seats us at a window-side table with a view of Tucson.
‘They have some good wine here, Dad. Do you fancy this one?’ I say, pointing at the list, bracing for his reaction.
Dad reads the description and gasps. ‘No! That can’t be right.’
I chuckle.
‘What?’ Karen asks.
‘Twenty-five thousand dollars!’ Dad says.
‘For one bottle?’ Mum asks.
‘One bottle,’ Dad says.
‘Bloody hell!’ Karen says. ‘And this is your local restaurant!’
‘They only sell a few a year,’ I say. ‘Usually when businessmen sign contracts. I’m paying, so, Dad, pick a bottle, but not one that’s five figures.’
‘A cheap bottle!’ Mum says.
We laugh.
Dad studies the list and orders a bottle of Mount Veeder Cabernet Sauvignon.
The size of the diamond in Amy’s ring attracts Mum’s attention.
‘You want to see it?’ Amy says, taking it off.
‘Promise you won’t get married without us being there,’ Mum says, trying on the ring. ‘We missed your wedding to Sumiko. We don’t want to miss this one.’
Hoping they don’t notice, I exchange guilty glances with Amy.
‘I felt sad just watching it on video,’ Mum says. ‘I want to be there next time.’ She twiddles the ring around a finger, closing her eyes, and passes it to Karen. ‘You’ve got to make a wish. You can guess what I wished for.’
‘What a rock! It’s beautiful,’ Karen says, repeating Mum’s ritual. She hands it back to Amy. ‘We all want to be there next time.’
Having deceived them about everything – drugs, lifestyle, criminal activity – I don’t see any need to disclose our marriage. Trying not to think about what I’ve become, I can’t look Mum in the eye. I hoped to alleviate my guilt by splurging on them, but now I feel worse. At least their holiday’s going well.
We order food and eat. Filet mignon for Dad and me. Seafood for Mum and Karen. After hiding her first-ever foie gras under lettuce leaves, Amy goes to the restroom.
‘What do you think of Amy?’ I ask.
‘She’s lovely, very pretty, and she seems like a nice person,’ Mum says.
‘And she’s made us very welcome,’ Dad says.
‘She’s gorgeous and she’s clever, but she’s young,’ Karen says.
‘Is she really ready to settle down?’ Mum says.
‘Mum, we love each other. Isn’t that what matters?’
‘Don’t go rushing into things,’ Mum says. ‘You know what you’re like. Get to know her properly. It may be just infatuation, living up here like a princess, having whatever she wants. That could easily turn a young girl’s head. Don’t marry her till you’re certain of her, certain she loves you.’
‘I am certain she loves me, but I won’t marry her yet,’ I say, blushing.
The holiday goes well, but every day I stay sober, the louder I hear the wolves howling for me to come out and party. Acid Joey, Alice, Sallywack … Near the end of my family’s stay, I break down. GHB won’t last long. It won’t make my eyes all big and crazy like Ecstasy or speed.
As my dad drives us to Mount Lemmon, I’m giddy on GHB. We hike to a remote spot, where I can’t resist rolling boulders down the slope.
‘Don’t do that. Someone might get hurt,’ Dad says.
‘Stop it, Shaun,’ Mum says.
‘Listen to your parents,’ Amy says.
I just giggle and cackle and run ahead, rolling boulders, mesmerised by the trajectory of their fall and my own insanity.
Karen plans to meet friends in Mexico and to go diving at Cozumel before travelling around South America. Karen and Amy get along so well, Amy asks if she can accompany Karen. I agree and pay for diving lessons and equipment. Excited about the trip, they test the equipment in the pool, bobbing up and down in the water, flippers splashing. Two days after my parents leave for England, Karen and Amy fly to Cozumel.
Chapter 45
During Wild Man’s second month at the Tucson Ramada Inn, I arrive shocked to see four cop cars parked by his room. In a panic, I start to drive away, but Worm opens the door and waves me over. He explains that a crack deal went bad, so Wild Man kidnapped the dealer’s accomplice. The cops showed up just after Worm freed the hostage.
‘Why do you go to such extremes over stupid shit?’ I ask Wild Man, unwilling to express the extent of my frustration in case I provoke his anger.
‘You know what it’s like when you’re so focused on something. I just wanted my crack. I wasn’t gonna be a victim – I heard about that shit on Jerry Springer.’
‘Tucson’s too small for you, la’,’ I say, raising a hand to my ear. ‘I hear Phoenix calling you.’
I ring Sallywack: ‘Wild Man’s here. I’m bringing him to Phoenix, but I don’t know where to house him.’
‘Bring him to my apartment. He can stay with me.’
‘Sallywack, I can’t do that to you! You don’t understand, he’s destroyed everywhere he’s ever lived. He’s a maniac!’
‘He won’t fuck around like that in my place or I’ll fucking kick his fucking ass and set my fucking dogs on him.’
‘OK, if you insist. I need to get him out of Tucson in a hurry. See you soon. Love you,’ I say, relieved by her kindness.
‘Love you, too.’
A few hours later, Sallywack answers the door, naked, flanked by two mongrels resembling pit bulls on steroids. She hugs us and we sit down in the living room. ‘Wild Man can stay here as long as he wants provided he walks the dogs daily and has a word with some guys who’ve been giving me shit.’
‘Sounds good to me, la’,’ Wild Man says, stroking the dogs.
‘La’. What’s this “la’” mean?’ Sallywack asks.
‘It’s Liverpool slang, short for “lad”,’ I say. ‘Like saying “mate”.’
‘I like your piercings,’ Wild Man says. ‘Do you always sit around naked?’
‘Yes, la’,’ Sallywack says.
‘Fucking hell,’ Wild Man says. ‘I can get used to this.’
‘You like her dogs, la’?’ I ask.
‘I love dogs, me. I’d rather kill a human being than a dog,’ Wild Man says, scratching Bella-Boo’s belly. Competing for his attention, the dogs yelp, whine and smile.
‘I’m going to put you in charge of his allowance, too, Sallywack. Make sure he doesn’t spend any of it on crack,’ I say, handing her $200.
After reinvesting in two more smuggling missions, I receive a call from Cody: ‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. We just lost my travelling partner and ten thousand you know what at the airport. And it’s all my fucking fault. I don’t want to get into too much detail. I need you to meet me at the safe house as soon as I get back. I’m jumping on a British Airways to Phoenix in less than an hour. I just hope they don’t arrest me at the US end.’
I meet Cody at a safe apartment in Mesa. ‘What happened?’
‘Customs busted him.’
‘How?’
‘I fucked up big time. It was his birthday, so I bought him some kind bud in Amsterdam. The dog sniffed the weed. It came right up to him, stopped and put its paw on his case.’
‘Fucking hell, Cody! You know quite well I tell everyone never to carry weed on smuggling missions. Every drug dog in the world is trained to smell weed. Only specially trained beagles can smell Ecstasy. This is an expensive lesson we could have done without.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. How do you think I feel? He has a job. This was his first mission, a one-off trip to Amsterdam. His family’s gonna hate me.’
‘It’s fucked up. I’ll activate the attorney immediately and we’ll find out what kind of trouble he’s in.’
‘I already left the attorney a message.’
‘Good.’
‘Let me tell you the rest of what happened. I went through customs first. They asked me questions and let me through with 5,000 pills in my luggage. Then the dog hits on him and he’s not yet gone through. So, he’s fucked. And people are noticing I was with him. I go straight to the restroom and flush all of the fucking pills. There’s no way when they found out what he was carrying that I’d not get stopped at some point.’
‘I agree. You did the right thing. Look, we’ll give him all the help we can, but do you think he’ll talk?’
‘No way. Not after I schooled him. He knows we have an attorney for this type of situation. He’s probably kicking himself for the weed thing, too.’
Another smuggler is arrested at Phoenix airport with thousands of pills.
‘He’s looking at a couple of years in Club Fed,’ our attorney says in his office. ‘With that many pills, he’s going to have to serve some time.’
‘We can’t afford to be losing people and pills like this,’ Cody says.
‘There’s got to be a safer way to get them in,’ I say.
‘As an attorney, I can’t advise you to engage in any form of criminal activity, so what I am about to say is all hypothetical. If a mule were to fly from Europe to Mexico, and then cross into Arizona from Mexico with the pills in something like a piñata, he wouldn’t be going through any rigorous airport customs. A white person coming into Arizona from Mexico is subject to hardly any searches or checks at all. Not only that, on weekends and on holidays, drunken students mob down there and all come back at the same time. It’d be easy to get someone through with those students.’
‘Where’s the nearest airport in Mexico?’ I ask.
‘Hermosillo,’ the attorney says.
‘What’s customs like in these Mexican airports?’ I ask.
‘Nothing like in America,’ he says.
Chapter 46
Amy calls from Cozumel, saying what a great time she’s having with my sister. Lonely without her, I focus on the stock market. The drug trade’s too risky. Too many people have been busted recently. If I quit now, I can sit in my big house with Amy stress-free and my parents will never know about my illegal activity. I look forward to discussing my plans with Amy. Maybe I’ll do a master’s degree in finance to improve my stock-market knowledge. We’ll both go to the University of Arizona.
Amy returns from Mexico pale and nervous. I ask what’s wrong, but she won’t say. Eventually, she starts sobbing. ‘I was raped by a Mexican.’
Devastated, I almost fall backwards. I hug her. ‘Everything’s going to be OK.’ But as she describes what happened, I fill with fury towards the rapist. I let go of her and punch a wall, momentarily distracted by the pain. ‘I’ll get the bastard. Who was he?’
‘Some Mexican who saw me in a bar.’
‘Where was Karen? How did he get you on your own?’ A thousand questions invade my mind.
‘He spiked my drink. I didn’t know what was going on. I woke up in some strange place.’ I hug her and we both cry.
Amy checks into a hospital as a rape victim. Upset and angry and hearing wolves howling, I revert to snorting meth. I plan a trip to Mexico with Wild Man and G Dog to try to find and kill the rapist. They agree to go, so I prepare the logistics.
I call my mum, distraught, and rant to her. My parents panic over Karen’s safety, but track her down by email. Days later, Karen calls. I vent on her for not protecting Amy.
‘You’re wrong, Shaun,’ Karen says. ‘Amy wasn’t raped. She disappeared from a club with one of the locals and didn’t come home all night. I had a huge row with her and we barely spoke again for the rest of the trip.’
‘That’s not what she told me!’
‘I saw her kissing him in the bar. She must have made up the rape story ’cause she’s terrified I’m going to grass on her and you’ll break up with her.’
Who can I believe? Why would my sister lie? My brain snaps again – the wolves howl louder than ever – and my anger swells in a new direction: at Amy.
I hang up and storm into the living room. ‘I just got off the phone with Karen. She said you never got raped! What the fuck’s going on, Amy?’
Amy gets off the sofa. Sniffs. Cries. ‘I’m so … so … sorry, Shaun. I was off my head on drugs and I slept with someone.’
My heart twists. Pressure builds in my brain until it hurts and electrical crackling noises commence. ‘Amy, I fucking love you! How could you do this to me? And to think, around my sister! My whole fucking family’s devastated!’
‘I love you, too. That’s why I didn’t tell you. I don’t want to lose you,’ she says, her expression agonised.
‘It’s too late for that now!’
Amy sobs so much she can’t speak.
I grab a bottle of wine, smash it on the tiles, march to the bedroom, stuff clothes in a case and take off, hitting high speeds on the freeway. Not been raving in Phoenix for months. Spending too much time in Tucson. Ignoring my friends in Tempe. I miss Acid Joey dancing, Sallywack running around naked hitting on glitter girls, Jake massaging me, Alice letting me suck her lip piercing. Can’t wait to see them all, get high and numb my pain …
I put on a Markus Schulz trance mix and turn it up loud, hoping to drown out thoughts of Amy – but I can’t stop thinking about her. Waves of sadness bring tears. Bursts of anger make me grit my teeth and punch the dashboard. The pressure in my head feels as if a metal band is tightening around my skull, trying to split it in half. Speeding up, overtaking every car in sight, I tell myself, Crashing might fix my pain.
In the twilight, a mountain is visible to my side. Glancing at it, I’m consumed by a peculiar feeling. To get a better look, I slow down. For the first time ever, in my mind’s eye, I see my wolves, light-coloured, a ghostly grey that turns dark above their eyes and on the top of their backs. They’re moving up a rocky slope, briskly, stealthily, with a purposeful stride and stare, their breath visible in the cool night air. Realising I’m watching them, they stop, turn their heads and gaze invitingly, an eerie glow in their amber eyes. They howl that they’ve always been with me and I’m not alone. A ticklish sensation runs down the sides of my head, across the nape of my neck, up the back of my head and around the top, like a force field. The hairs on my arms slant up so slowly I can almost feel each one rise. I’m warm inside. For over a minute, my arm hairs stand erect and the force field stays in place, tingling my skin – and tears stream.
My drug rampage in Phoenix with Wild Man lasts for weeks. While I’m away, the stock market crashes. Wealth that took years to build evaporates. When I go back to Amy, we take more drugs and have mor
e sex than ever before, but things are no longer the same.
Chapter 47
Wild Man stays with Sallywack for a few months until the arrival of his English girlfriend, Wild Woman – a short blonde spitfire who not only fights Wild Man but often gets the better of him.
In their Holiday Inn room – thick with meth smoke, blinds closed, lights and TV on – I say, ‘I know how Peter got the name Wild Man. How did you get Wild Woman?’
Rolling a joint on a desk, Wild Woman says in a raspy Liverpudlian accent, ‘It was in a pub. I was having a night out with my friend. We were dancing, and I was massive back then. I looked over and some woman’s pulling my friend by the hair, so I walked over, headbutted the daughter, put her on the floor, broke the husband’s ribs with a chair and battered the woman, who ended up in a wheelchair. I got bound over to keep the peace for five years and three counts of grievous bodily harm. They called me the Wild Woman of Borneo after that.’
‘You took a whole family out!’ I say.
‘Basically, she was causing a riot on her own,’ Wild Man says, sitting on the bed, nursing a meth pipe.
‘How did the Wild Ones meet?’
‘She’s lying on the floor in some house,’ Wild Man says. ‘I turned to her and said, “If I smoke another one of these spliffs, I’ll probably wanna shag you.”’
‘He didn’t say that!’ Wild Woman hisses, turns and punches Wild Man’s arm. ‘He said, “I just might get a semi hard-on if I have another pull on this, looking at the tits on you.” I said, “You cheeky bastard!” He walked me to the taxi rank and a week later he was outside Top of the Town, and I was having a party back at my house, so I invited him to mine and we were never apart from that day on, except when he came to America to see you.’
When Wild Woman goes into the bathroom, Wild Man whispers. ‘Let’s go to a titty bar, la’.’
The bathroom door bursts open. Wild Woman emerges, hands on her hips.
‘I need to go and take care of business somewhere with Shaun, love.’
‘What do you mean?’ Wild Woman says, scowling.
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