“Try me.”
“Ecum Secum.”
“Pardon me?”
“Told you. Ecum Secum.”
“Memorable.”
“Yes. A little house on the edge of Lake Ecum Secum. I was very happy there for many years.”
Beatrice starts gathering the pieces.
“I will improve,” I say, trying to let her know that I am open to playing again.
“Fine. I’ll come and get you,” she says not specifying when, and she gathers her things and stands up.
“There is a Reading Room,” she says helpfully. “You might want to look through a few dictionaries for some ideas.” And she leaves.
A weird tingling sensation floods my body and the room acquires the haze of a late summer afternoon when the humidity is high. I’m going to bounce, I think, and that’s exactly what happens.
I come to in the Coffee Room with the others and I am inordinately proud of myself.
“I knew I was going to bounce,” I announce proudly. “And I even got myself here!”
Only Samia acknowledges what I’ve said, and she smiles and gives me a thumbs-up. “I’ll get your latte,” she says, and she starts steaming the milk.
I look around. Agnes is pale and swollen-eyed, staring off into space, chewing on a finger. Grace is digging in the huge purse she always carries with her. She’s the only person I’ve seen with a purse, and I wonder what’s inside. I save that question for another time.
Isabelle is studying her hands and Tracey is watching Agnes with a worried look.
“Agnes? How are you?” I ask. “I know it’s a stupid question. I guess I mean, are you going to be okay?”
She looks at me and her eyes well up with tears. “I killed him,” she says. “And I put my Auntie Miriam in terrible danger. Look at all the terrible shit I did. I deserve the worst things to happen to me. I should never be allowed to be happy again.”
“Yeah, well, that’s bullshit, and if you keep telling yourself that, then you’re going to carve out a very miserable life for yourself. Josh set up the drug buy, he knew what he was doing,” I tell her.
“But he didn’t know. He thought he was so cool, but he was just a nice guy, a really nice, even geeky guy, and he probably thought I expected him to be in the know, and he tried his best and he paid with his life. I was much more druggy than he was. I’d take anything people gave me, but Josh never even smoked weed. And look at Auntie Miriam. Look at what I did there.”
I have no reply to that.
“My mother was murdered,” Tracey says and we turn and stare at her.
I recall Tracey saying that her mother was a drug mule and I had meant to ask her about it but I had forgotten until now.
“She used to go to Hong Kong a lot,” Tracey says, dipping her finger into her hot chocolate that couldn’t have been that hot. “She said she worked for an import export store, a home décor thing, but it was just a front. She’d come back with all kinds of crap for the store and there were never any drugs in the vases or ornaments, but she’d buy fluffy toys and shit like that and fill them up with heroin, and put them in her luggage and because customs were so busy checking her papers and what she was declaring, her bags were never searched. She wasn’t bringing in millions of dollars but she got paid enough money so us kids could live in a nice house growing up. We weren’t rich but we weren’t poor either. We got by.
“Then one night, out of nowhere, on her birthday, her throat was slit, and if that wasn’t enough, she was stabbed half a dozen times as well. I had moved out a long time before, got married, had my two kids, but I still saw her pretty much every day. But I wasn’t at her place when it happened.
“The police thought her boyfriend did it. They’d been together for a couple of years and my mom went to Hong Kong with him a bunch of time, but a few months before she’s killed, she suddenly breaks it off with him and marries some other guy that none of us even knew. My husband said he had heard that this guy was violent, and I told the police it could have been her fucking husband or her fucking boyfriend, and they told me, ‘Listen Missy, don’t you talk to us like that. As far as we’re concerned, you’re a suspect too.’ But the boyfriend took a lot of pills all the time; he took about five Prozacs a day as well as truckloads of other stuff. He always talked really slowly and he even moved slowly. But you never know, he could have got angry and had an energy spurt or something.”
Tracey is talking quietly and she’s relating her story in a monotone and we lean forward, concentrating hard to hear her.
“The boyfriend was very wealthy, at least his ex-wife was. She owned a few carpet cleaning places. I told him, just days before my mom died, that he should come and clean my carpets but he never replied. I told him not to be so lazy. It was the last thing I said to him before my mother was killed. The cops decided it must have been him, not the new husband, but they didn’t have any evidence except that he’d had a nervous breakdown two weeks before he killed my mother, and when she got married, he told her, ‘If I can’t have you, then no one can.’ So they locked him in a psych ward while they tried to find more evidence.
“But my mom always hung out with violent men. It turned her on. Made her life exciting.”
She falls silent and I wonder if that is the end of it. The whole thing sounds extremely bizarre to me. I glance over at Agnes. She is caught up in Tracey’s story, and she has some colour in her cheeks and looks more relaxed.
“Apparently the husband said that the boyfriend had written a letter saying that my mom was his or no one’s, and the whole case hinged on that, but the letter was missing. I tried to find it but I couldn’t. My sister had told me there was blood everywhere in the flat, on the couch, the walls, the ceiling, on the phone where my mother tried to call for help, and on the door where she tried to get out. I had to see for myself and I went there, but what my sister said wasn’t true; there was only blood on the couch and there wasn’t much of it either.
“My mother wasn’t even properly dressed when she was killed. She was in her bra and panties, her stockings and her jewellery.
“I wanted to see the body. I wanted to see where she was stabbed and how bad it was but they wouldn’t let me see her. We had a eulogy for her and I was disappointed because hardly anybody said anything. My mother was no angel, but still. Her husband ran out as soon as it was over, and my sister was crying too much to talk, and only I said something. My dad told me that my mother was in limbo, and that we had to have another mass for her because she needed a minister to tell her soul where to go, but I told them, who the fuck were they to tell my mother where to go?
“I’ve looked for her here but I’ve never found her. My mother was a drunk and all I can say is that I hope she was three sheets to the wind when it happened so she didn’t feel a thing.”
“If they never found the letter, did they convict the guy?” Isabelle asks.
“A couple of days after he was locked up. The cops phoned us in the middle of the night and they said they had found my mother’s house keys in his house and nearly a thousand dollars in cash that he had stolen from her, and some of her jewellery with her blood on it. So that was a slam dunk. But he only ever ended up in a mental home, which was too good for him if you ask me.
“My birthday is the day after my mother’s and she was murdered on her birthday. They think she was killed between five-thirty and seven p.m., while I was out shopping. I was shopping for her birthday while she was getting killed.” She falls silent again and this time she doesn’t have anything to add.
“That’s too terrible, dear,” Grace says. “I am more sorry than I can say.”
We echo the same and Tracey nods. The cynic in me is voicing objections, the story sounds disjointed and uneven, and I have a hundred questions but I know I can’t ask any of them.
“I miss my kids,” Tracey says and she wipes the tears f
rom her eyes.
But I think about what she had told me before, about how she killed herself because no one at work appreciated her and the thing about Tracey, and I feel disloyal even thinking this, is that you can’t be sure what’s true. That’s the way I feel, anyway. But, on a good note, Agnes seems much more cheerful, and at least Tracey took her mind off Josh and Auntie Miriam.
“Did you ever ask your Helper about trying to find your mother here?” Grace asks and Tracey nods.
“It’s not like we all end up in the same nook,” she says. “And Mom was killed, meanwhile I killed myself, so there’s that difference for a start. And also, part of me doesn’t want to see her again because I don’t want to have to explain to her why I killed myself. She thought the guys I worked for were a poncey lot of wankers, and she would have said I was a stupid twat for letting my feelings get hurt by them. It wouldn’t have been a good enough reason to kill myself, not to her, anyway. I don’t think Mom would have thought any reason was good enough, not with me leaving the boys behind, and I don’t want to have to face her, so that’s probably why I haven’t found her.”
The others nod and I realize they know the story of Tracey’s suicide, but I wonder why the details about her mother’s murder are only coming out now? Surely they would have talked about this before? But then again, none of them had had any idea about what had happened to Agnes either.
I want to ask them how long they have been hanging out together and what they talked about before I came, when such important details to their stories are only coming out now? Beatrice would probably call me a nosy parker again, but if you don’t talk about the nitty gritty real stuff, then what else is there?
Which is a bit rich coming from me, me who used to only talk about celebrities and their trending tattoos, and what nail varnish colour ruled the season.
“You know what I miss,” Isabelle says wistfully, apropos of nothing, “I miss thunderstorms. Purple clouds. Lightning.”
“There’s the Rain Room,” Agnes points out.
“I’ve never been,” Isabelle says.
“It’s depressing,” Samia pipes up.
“I’d still like to go,” I say. “Isabelle, you want to go? Can someone show us?”
“Let’s all go,” Grace says. “We need the healing power of water to soothe us.”
I want to tell her that she sounds like Cedar and we’re are about to get up when Tracey starts to speak again.
“I don’t believe that guy killed my mother. The ex-boyfriend, I mean.” Her voice is the same strange monotone, and we sit down again. “He was too fucked up on pills and shit. She could easily have overpowered him if he attacked her. And I don’t think it was her husband. Even though he had an alibi that he could easily have faked. He said he was in bed with his ex-wife and she would have lied for him. But still, I don’t think it was either of them.”
“Who do you think it was?” Agnes asks.
“The guy she carried drugs for. I met him a few times. What a piece of work. Tattoos everywhere on his neck and up the back of his skull. Snakes and ladders. Thinks he’s a British gangster out of a Guy Ritchie movie, he’s got this stupid fake Cockney accent and he wears shiny suits and lots of gold rings. I think he fancied my mom and she thought she could take advantage of it. After her last trip to Hong Kong, she was throwing around way too much cash. Of course, a guy like that, he’s untouchable by the cops. He’d have alibis up the arse. He never even came to her funeral. He sent a huge big bouquet of lilies, which I can still smell today. What a fucker. Wore his hair in a little stripe down his head, like a Mohawk, only a crew cut. I bet it was him, the fucker. I bet it was him. And I bet he planted the evidence in the ex-boyfriend’s house. ”
“Dear, I’m beginning to fade,” Grace says gently. “Let’s go the Rain Room and we can carry on talking there.”
We get up and Tracey is lost in her own world. Agnes puts her arm around her and that brings her back to us and she gives us a small smile.
“Sorry for being such a downer,” she says as we walk along the corridor and Agnes jostles her.
“You aren’t a downer. You helped me. Thank you.”
Isabelle starts singing “That’s What Friends Are For” and we join in and silly as it is, it feels good.
A run on an ocean boulevard, Scrabble with Beatrice, coffee and a sing-along with friends. I am actually having the nicest day I’ve had since I can remember.
But then I chastise myself. Murder. Drugs. Tales of tragedy and broken families. What kind of sick puppy has a happy day in the midst of all that?
16. RAIN
SAMIA IS RIGHT. The Rain Room is weird and depressing. We’re in a glass gazebo and rain drizzles down from all sides, rain that is more like mist, and I miss the tapping sound of drops as they land. I feel like I’m in a glass tent, being hugged by a humid fog. There’s no foliage outside. It’s just grey. It reminds me of the time I did a photo shoot in a small seaside town, out of season. I had the bright idea that it would be romantic, and lend a note of mystery to the fashion, to have models coming out of the rain and the mist, all very moody. But it was just damp and dull and the only highlight I had was sex with the boy model who was a vision of androgynous beauty. But that was before Martin, I am sure of that. I never stepped out on Martin, I would bet my life on that.
I kept the model in my room for the weekend, then we went back to the city, reshot in a studio and the results were fantastic. Win-win. At least that’s what I thought of as a win, in those days.
I don’t enjoy remembering that side of myself. I told myself the boy was flattered that I had chosen him to share my bed, but had I given him a choice? Maybe he’d thought he had to screw me royally or I’d fire him and, if so, he’d have been correct. I would have fired him for sure. I thought of William Congreve’s line from The Mourning Bride, “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”
“No fury like that…” I mutter and I let the thought peter out. I settle down on one of the giant red beanbag pillows on the floor. Samia looks enquiringly at me.
“You’re right,” I say. “I prefer not to remember. Some things are forcing their way to the top of my mind and I’d rather they didn’t.”
“Yeah. Ignorance is bliss,” Tracey agrees.
“I played Scrabble with Beatrice today,” I say and the others look at me open-mouthed.
“Why would you do that?” Agnes asks. “Socialize with her?”
“I didn’t plan on it. I admit that the idea occurred to me when we were in her office. Well, it didn’t so much as occur as flit across my mind like a cloud on a sunny day, and I never thought about it again until she arrived in the Makeup Room with her Scrabble board under her arm.”
“Maybe you can ask her for a Viewing for me,” Grace says and she sounds desperate.
“You want a Viewing? After what happened yesterday?” Tracey is astounded.
“Now, more than ever, because of yesterday,” Grace says and her poor, ruined face is sad.
“If I can, then I will.” I am cautious about promising anything. “Beatrice is so powerful, I don’t want to upset her.”
“She must like you if she plays board games with you,” Agnes says. “I’ve never heard of her hanging out with anybody before. Hey, why are you wearing running gear?”
I can’t tell a lie. Not in Purgatory. “Cedar hooked me up with a Running Room,” I say. “Gear and everything. It was fantastic. I don’t know why he did it, but it was great.”
“Motherfucker,” Tracey says and she shakes her head. “Looks aren’t supposed to count here but all of a sardine, Miss Supermodel is playing board games with the Wicked Witch of the West and Cedar’s giving her special privileges that most of us have never had.”
“You want the Running Room?” Agnes asks her.
“That’s not the point. The poin
t is, how come she gets things like that, when she’s only been here three farts from a sparrow’s arse and we’ve been here for like a fucking century and we get nada, zip, banana fudgesicle, el zilcho? I’m splitting. I’ve had enough of the goodwill of mankind for one day. See you guys tomorrow.” She marches out of the Rain Room, muttering under her breath.
“I’m fading,” Grace says. “Please, Julia, if you can—” and then she is gone, leaving Isabelle, Agnes, Samia, and myself.
“I don’t want a Viewing,” Samia says sadly. “The only people I have to look at are my parents and I know I ruined their lives.”
“Let’s take this to the caf,” Agnes suggests, “before we lose each other.”
17. SAMIA
WE LEAVE THE RAIN ROOM and go to the cafeteria where we load up on cookies that have most probably been baked by Tracey. Samia seems down in the dumps and I push the plate of cookies towards her. “You okay?”
She puts her face in her hands and starts to cry. I scoot around the table and put my arms around her. She is tiny, and I hold her while she sobs. “I ruined everything. And seriously, I’d never even done drugs before. I went to a concert with a friend of mine, a guy I’ve known forever and he does a lot of drugs. Well, not a lot, but he does coke and ecstasy and he loves it. And he said here, try it, you’ll feel fantastic, and he gave me a capsule full of white stuff and a little brown pill. Funny, a little brown pill for a little brown girl.” She blows her nose. “I had a job that I loved. I had just turned twenty-five. And then I died. And shamed my poor parents too. I was an only child and I broke their hearts. I never got to live out any of my dreams. I wanted to travel the world, learn how to cook exotic dishes, volunteer and make a difference to people’s lives. Now, I am just dead, and stuck in Purgatory.”
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