While she swept up in the kitchen and fed Jimmy some story about going to get a replacement coffee pot, I examined the oil painting a little closer. If it was supposed to be a nude portrait, Picasso himself couldn’t have made it more unfathomable, yet there was something violently seductive about it, as if it had been thrown together in a mad frenzy by an eroticised primitive.
‘You like that picture?’ asked Devlin, sceptically. ‘Aunt Velma painted it herself. She took lessons, you know. I reckon she could use a few more but I ain’t gonna be the one to tell her.’
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Shit, can’t you tell? It’s me.’
Life was stirring in the little ghost town – kids playing on a garden swing, a dog snuffling around some garbage, a couple arguing as the man tinkered under the hood of his car, a woman hanging washing. We drove into the hills, where the small dwellings became progressively more run-down and spread further apart. We finally pulled into a forest clearing that was a cross between a junk yard and a smallholding, dominated by a dirty white oblong box standing on bricks. ‘I don’t even know why they call it a mobile home,’ said Devlin. ‘It ain’t never been nowhere but here and I don’t suppose it’s going nowhere else.’
We picked our way past stray items of furniture, a discarded fridge, a rusted bicycle bent in two, a car with no wheels or windows, a broken toilet with plants growing in it and other bits of random domestic detritus. ‘Grandma was kind of a hoarder,’ explained Devlin. ‘People would come round to see if she had anything they could use and buy it off her. Since she passed, the fuckers just use it as a dump. Shit.’
She opened the trailer door onto a grotto of bric-a-brac. Shelves were overcrowded with figurines, mostly religious, lots of Jesuses, Marys and Josephs, but also animals and birds, especially eagles and owls, and elaborate clocks, all set at different times. Walls were papered in tin foil and pinned with pictures, some domestic snapshots, some religious icons, some black-and-white scenes from bygone eras featuring priests and nuns torn from the pages of magazines, and a few framed portraits of John F. Kennedy, Mother Teresa, the bleeding heart of Jesus and various popes. There was also an enormous range of crucifixes and a slightly smaller display of American flags. It was like stepping into the exobrain of a hallucinatory Catholic.
‘Wow,’ I said.
‘I can’t bring myself to take them down,’ said Devlin. ‘It would be like sacrilegious. Wait till you see the bedroom.’
It was even more intense. Pictures had been stuck on top of other pictures and religious icons on top of them until every inch of space was covered, and family members appeared to poke around Jesus’s shoulder and struggle for space with saints and angels. There was a small plastic Christmas tree, fully decorated, and a twelve-inch Mary draped in rosary beads. Pride of place, over the headboard of a small single bed, went to another of Aunt Velma’s garish paintings of a psychedelically colourful, anatomically challenged naked woman.
‘You?’ I enquired.
‘Oh no!’ Devlin protested. ‘How could you think that? That’s my momma.’
I sat on the side of the bed. I just wanted to lie down now, shut my eyes and enter oblivion, but my brain was throbbing, the moonshine hangover kicking in before I’d even got to sleep. ‘Your granny wouldn’t have something here for a headache, I suppose?’ I asked.
A sly smile faintly tugged at the edges of Devlin’s serious mouth. ‘Grandma didn’t hold much truck with medication but I might be able to help.’ She bent down and reached under the bed, pulling out a locked metal box. ‘You won’t tell no one about this, right? The doctor gave Grandma a prescription for her cancer but she wouldn’t touch it, so I got to picking it up instead.’ She opened the box with a small key. There was a veritable medicine cabinet inside, from which she selected a small bottle of pills. ‘I can get a thousand dollars a piece for each one of these little bottles, can you imagine that? One day I’m just gonna sell the whole lot and get the hell out of here, maybe go to Hollywood and audition for one of them TV singing shows, cause you never know what can happen if you get on a programme like that. I could be a star, just like you. Maybe we could do a song together. Shit. That would be something.’ She popped the lid and handed me two pills. ‘Just suck off the outer layer, then chew it up.’ She briefly contemplated the contents of the bottle, before tipping out a couple of pills for herself. ‘What the fuck,’ she said.
‘What the fuck,’ I agreed. The taste was bitter.
‘Just wait there a minute,’ she said. She went into the other room while I flopped back on the bed. Devlin returned with a cheap acoustic guitar, dragging a chair. ‘I’m gonna sing for you. I never sung for no one but Momma and Velma before. They think I’m the best, but what do they know? All they listen to is country music. You can tell me whether I’m good enough for American Voice. I wrote this all by myself. It’s called “Not For Sale”.’
She strummed the soft nylon strings, a single, ham-fisted downbeat. A warm glow was spreading through my body. My headache faded so quickly it was hard to believe it had ever been there. The guitar was slightly out of tune but it didn’t matter. She started to sing.
Conjure me, dream me up
Put your lips on my lips, your hips against my hips,
Drink from my cup, drink it all up
Take my heart, take every other part
Take everything I am, take it while you can
Just take me somewhere nice.
Her voice was thin and high, sharp in some places and flat in others, but that didn’t matter either. It was beautiful.
You’ve seen me walking the street, don’t deny it,
You think you know what kind of end she’s going to meet, that’s right
With her red shoes and her red lips
And her red eyes and her red slips,
And red running like blood through everything she does
I’m going to run like rain down your window pane
Run like a rat down your drain
But I’m not for sale
Not for sale.
The song was beautiful. She was beautiful. The room was beautiful. The world was beautiful. Jesus, Mary and Joseph were watching over me, and everything was going to be fine.
Stretch out my hands, pale in the light
I feel so frail I might blow away tonight
I’ll be carried on the wind, carried on the stars
Don’t imagine I’ll get very far
Not long on this planet now, never cared for it much anyhow
We’ll all be gone before we know it
So take my heart, take every other part
Take what you can get while you can find it
I’m free-falling, on hands and knees I’m crawling
But I’m not for sale
Not for sale.
I opened my eyes. I wasn’t sure how long I had been drifting. It could have been a microsecond. It could have been all day. Devlin was standing over me, wide-eyed with wonder.
‘I can’t believe you came,’ she said.
I smiled.
‘I always dreamed something like this would happen, and now it has,’ she said.
I felt so good I wanted to laugh. I thought my heart would burst with pleasure. I wanted to melt into the universe.
Devlin started to take her clothes off.
‘What are you doing?’ I said. Then laughed at the sound of my voice, floating through the air.
‘It’s fate,’ she said. And climbed into bed with me.
Days passed like that. Devlin would come and go, it didn’t really matter to me as long as I had the OxyContin. Kilo never supplied me with anything like this. It left me blank, null and void but dreamily, euphorically so, blurring the past, extinguishing the future and soft-focusing the present, wrapping me up in a big fuzzy blanket of now. It was the perfect antidote to life and the great thing was it was prescribed by physicians, so it didn’t really count as taking drugs at all.
During the days
I would lie in bed and stare at the walls, or, if I was feeling more energetic, walk around the trailer and stare at the walls. Grandma had done an outstanding job of interior decoration. All those Jesuses, with their glowing halos and sacred hearts and shepherd crooks and flowing robes and gentle, compassionate eyes. The way he shepherded the little china sheep across the shelves made my heart burst with joy. I loved those sheep and spent hours turning them around in my hands. Each one seemed to have his own woolly character. I named them Dozy, Cheeky, Mushy, Cutey and Beasley, the fat one at the end, who looked pompous and pissed off. Even nailed to little crucifixes, our Lord’s suffering never hardened into hatred for his persecutors. His eyebrows were knotted nobly together and his blue eyes always raised upwards, as if he could see right through the roof of the mobile home to a better life beyond. If only Father McGinty had passed out OxyContin during communion, maybe I would never have strayed from the righteous path. But better still were the Marys, lovely ladies with alabaster skin, draped in white and blue and gold, with gentle eyes and mysterious mouths, hands outstretched, palms upturned to welcome me, hold me, wrap me in a cocoon of cotton-wool love. My favourite picture was a gold framed 3-D postcard of Mary tenderly holding baby Jesus to her breast and when you tipped it a certain way, Jesus actually seemed to be suckling. I wondered how Mary had dealt with her son’s halo during breast-feeding.
If I tired of the religious icons, there were always the insects. The mobile home was crawling with them. Brown moths fluttered about, banging blindly off walls, battering wings against tiny windows. Armies of little black and red creatures crept from behind foil walls and roamed about the ceiling. Cockroaches charged across the floor then dashed under the bed when I stamped my feet. Best of all were the spiders, patiently spinning webs. I watched as they tucked their tiny prey up in silver blankets, as if putting them gently to sleep.
It was hot and airless in the trailer and I sat for hours in the breeze of a portable electric fan. There was no TV or radio. If I wanted music I would pluck at the guitar and listen to bubbles of sound float up and fade away, testing how long I could make a single note linger in the air. Or I would go out for a walk. A few steps beyond the junk pile, the forest was electric with life, laden with heady scents of home but edged with something otherworldly. Wildflowers of scarlet and purple sprang through mulchy floor, luminescent moss bristled like green fur on blue rock, thick ferns weaved through craggy tree trunks, sunlight rippled the canopy of leaves. A spring turned the earth to rich red mud. I listened to water tinkling like bells and tuned into an outdoor choir, bass croak of a bullfrog, French horn in the breast of a blue jay, raucous jazz of crows, contrapuntal melodies of mating birds, clickety percussion of crickets, mournful saxophones of distant cows. I stood for hours, dazed by the symphony of the woods. I remembered this music. I had heard it before, as a child.
After work, Devlin arrived with food from the diner and we would have sex. I liked kissing her, she tasted of cigarettes and I spent a long time exploring her teeth with my tongue, puzzling over her curious flavour of burnt butterscotch and whiskey. Between bouts, she smoked and talked about her future in Hollywood, in a mansion with jewel-encrusted fixtures, a games room with a full-sized pool table for me and a row of one-armed bandits for her, cause she liked to gamble but there was nothing in Siren Creek but an old fruit machine in the Sulphur Tavern which the mayor didn’t let her play any more cause she worked out how to beat it by listening to the tones. She had her heart set on a jacuzzi with gold taps and flatscreen TVs built into walls on either side, so we could sit face to face being squirted by warm jets of water and both watch TV at the same time, which was something she had seen on MTV Cribs. J-Lo had one, apparently. I didn’t say much, I would fuck her and stare at the walls. Jesus kept a close eye on me while I took her from behind. Even Mary failed to avert her gaze as I licked and nibbled between Devlin’s legs. She was a noisy, voracious lover, multiple orgasms rippling through her, sometimes seven or eight in succession, her body detonating fireworks, sparks firing behind her eyes. When she popped a strawberry-flavoured condom in her mouth and expertly worked it over my erect cock using only her lips, I began to suspect she wasn’t quite the virgin princess patiently awaiting Prince Charming. ‘I thought you refused to have anything to do with the boys around here?’ I recalled.
‘They ain’t all boys,’ she said. It was the only subject on which she was guarded. She talked a mile to the minute but there remained something hidden behind her unsmiling face, only released during orgasm. ‘Velma always says there ain’t nothing else to do in Siren Creek but smoke and fuck,’ she told me. ‘I figure you can do that anywhere in the world. I’m gonna do my smoking and fucking in Hollywood.’
She would sit and play her songs, naked but for the guitar. The songs were peculiar and her singing unlikely to impress the panel on American Voice but if she kept her clothes off I thought she might stand a chance. I didn’t tell her that. I just smiled and clapped.
On Wednesday her period started. Not that it made any difference to us. We ground the OxyContin into a powder and snorted it, then fucked on the floor under the ever watchful gaze of the holy family. Afterwards, I sat staring in horrified fascination at my blood-covered penis. ‘Shit, looks like there’s been a murder,’ said Devlin. ‘What would Grandma think?’ She led me to the tiny shower and scrubbed me clean. I could have stayed in there forever, feeling the water prick my skin, watching my pale-skinned Appalachian girl wash my sins away.
The next morning, I woke feeling a little rough. A car was pulling up outside. I wondered what Devlin was doing there so early but when I tried to move, it was as if my bones were rubbing off each other. I felt about for the bottle of pills but it was empty. ‘Fuck,’ I groaned. I heard the trailer door open. ‘Devlin,’ I called out. I needed the precious key to the medicine box. The bedroom door opened.
‘I knew the little bitch had something going on up here,’ said a woman standing in the doorway. Slim and tan, with too much make-up and dark roots showing in auburn hair, she had the warrior sensuality of an ageing waitress who still relies on looks for tips. It was hard to tell if she was amused or upset. ‘So you gonna introduce yourself?’ she enquired.
I groaned by way of reply.
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ she said. ‘It’s you. Jesus, half the fucking country’s looking for you. What the fuck has she got herself into now? You been on the TV every night.’
‘I’m ubiquitous,’ I croaked.
‘I don’t know about that but you are just about everywhere right now.’
I threw back the quilt and rolled out of bed naked. ‘My Lord,’ she said, in shock or appreciation I don’t know. I fumbled under the bed, grabbed the medicine box and locked myself in the cramped washroom. I looked for something to force the box. There was nothing. It felt like my flesh was melting. I stumbled to the kitchenette, squeezing past my visitor in the tight doorway. ‘Shouldn’t you ought to put some clothes on?’ she asked. I found a fork and started trying to lever open the lid of the box. The fork bent. I grabbed a knife and poked at the lock. When there was no movement I sat at the small table and stabbed the lid. ‘Here,’ the woman said, gently touching my shoulder. ‘Let me do that.’ She took the knife from my hand, carefully worked it under the rim of the lid and prised the box open. I snatched a bottle of pills, popped it and poured some in my mouth.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked, handing me a glass of water.
‘I’m ill,’ I said. But I was OK now. I relaxed back, waiting. It wasn’t long before I felt the first wave wash over me.
‘What have you been doing with my daughter?’ enquired my visitor.
‘So you’re Momma,’ I smiled. I liked the way that sounded. Momma. ‘There’s a painting of you in the bedroom.’ Another wave lifted me up and carried me away. I was drifting into the middle of an ocean of tranquillity. I don’t know how many pills I had taken but it was good, it was better than good. I looked at Momma. I could see the famil
y resemblance now, high cheekbones, tiny love-heart dink in the top lip. Her face was fuller, eyes creased, but she had an ease that Devlin lacked, a sense of being in the world. ‘You look better in real life,’ I said.
‘Well, thank you. I’ll take that as a compliment. You don’t look so bad in real life yourself.’ She lifted an eyebrow at my naked body and we both laughed. She sat quietly, sizing me up. ‘People are worried about you,’ she said.
‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ I replied. ‘I’m fine.’
‘So what are you doing hiding out here?’
‘I’m running away.’
‘From what?’
‘Myself,’ I said.
She sighed deeply. ‘Don’t we all wish we could do that sometimes.’
She had a tattoo just about visible above her cotton slip, over her left breast. I couldn’t quite make it out. I reached forward and shifted the slip aside. It was a mermaid in green, black and pink, hair piled up like a storm, her elemental tail winding round the curve of the breast and out of sight. ‘My husband was a sailor,’ she said. ‘He got lost at sea.’
‘Devlin says he went to live in Scarsdale.’
‘Same fucking difference.’ She put a hand over mine, perhaps intending to stop me going any further but the effect was only to press me into her breast. A pulse crossed the table between us. I tugged the slip down a touch, uncovering more of the mermaid’s tail. The ink work was so delicate and intricate, I had to follow the twists and curls as it wound around her breast, the arc of the tail framing her nipple. She moaned softly. ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ she said.
‘What?’ I asked. I just wanted to follow the mermaid.
Later, as we lay squashed and sweaty on the small bed, she said, ‘I wouldn’t like you to get the impression I do this kind of thing all the time.’
‘I do,’ I admitted.
‘I’ve never even met a famous person before. What’s it like being famous?’
‘It’s like being a little boy in a candy store,’ I said.
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