City of Lost Girls

by Declan Hughes

  That was when Loy began to understand why Charlie had drunk so much, when he had begun to drink so much himself, not party drinking, not social drinking, steady, daily, whiskey-in-morning-coffee-and-take-it-from-there-drinking, drink-until-you-pass-out-and-get-up-when-you-come-to drinking. Jack Donovan, whom he met for the first time back then, had gotten involved in shooting some live Frank Sinatra shows in Vegas with a view to a concert movie that never happened, and told him the story of how Frank had one day encountered a music producer he deemed to have betrayed him in a hotel lobby. The producer approached, expansive, bygones all bygones; Frank blanked him, barking “Fuck you, keep walking” as he clipped past. That’s what Jack told Ed he was doing, fuck-you-keep-walking drinking: don’t look left, or right, or back; keep angry, keep drinking, keep walking. Denial, rage, booze: that was a surefire way to walk off a ledge, Jack said. And for all Jack Donovan’s reputation as the wild Irish artist with a glass in his hand, he did a good job of talking Ed Loy back from that ledge in those times.

  Ed later discovered that anecdote was pretty well known, and reckoned Jack had probably read it in the same book he had. But still, Jack had met, had talked, had worked, had got drunk with Frank Sinatra, that was for real. They’d even, Jack told him, after the show, having flown back to his place in Palm Springs, and sat up late the way Frank liked to do, they’d even sung together. Ed wasn’t sure, but if there was anything cooler than that, he hadn’t heard about it.

  Somehow, the association—the “It’s Frank’s World, We Just Live in it” aspect—seemed to make what he was doing today feel a little less seedy, or at least, Ed kidded himself that it did. He had already called at the woman’s apartment, a first floor on Horizon, just around the corner. He had a bag in his car with stuff she had left over at Jack’s: clothing, shoes, books. He knew Jack had added a few pieces of jewelry, which was either generous or the worst kind of sorry present. Ed tried not to think about it. This would be the fifth of Jack’s girlfriends he had seen off. Three had cried on his shoulder; one had bitten his ear. From what he remembered of Amanda, he expected her to do neither. She was the kind of woman who didn’t do scenes. Ed had assumed she would leave Jack: Amanda was way too cool and high maintenance and evolved for him. When he went round to collect her stuff, Jack seemed subdued, crestfallen, shamefaced even. Ed asked him how it had gone, and Jack said he didn’t want to talk about it. That was when Ed got the first inkling that this might be even more difficult than usual. There had never been a single thing in all the time he’d known him that Jack Donovan didn’t want to talk about.

  He’d walk around there in a moment. First, he’d smoke another cigarette, drink another cup of coffee. There was time. He’d kept the day clear. There was plenty of time.

  CHAPTER 10

  It was difficult to make up rules about a situation she had contrived, and she knew well that if anyone was going to be unexpectedly late on account of his job, it would be Ed Loy, and it had obviously been a mistake to open the champagne as if he was going to arrive right on time, because then she simply had to have a glass, and then after twenty minutes she knew if she didn’t have a second she was going to have a headache, but since she hadn’t eaten in case her stomach started growling when they started to get into it, she is now pissed, at lunchtime, wearing expensive lingerie the only point of putting on was to have someone else take off, and it’s beginning to look very much like the only man she is interested in letting do that is not going to show, and the scented candles (Lime, Basil and Mandarin from Jo Malone, a gift from Ed) are making her feel a bit queasy. The point, though, is not to sulk, or blame someone else (him) or get all pissy about it, although it did take a certain amount of chutzpah to get dressed up like a (she liked to think upscale) whore, and if there wasn’t a fairly brisk and emphatic physical acknowledgment and reciprocation from an actual live human being, it’s only natural that a girl might get a little demoralized. And it isn’t fair to say he could have rung, or texted, because she knows he doesn’t do the kind of job where he can just whip out his phone, God knows what kind of situation he might find himself in, and she did kind of spring it on him, but Jesus Christ, she does feel like a bit of a fucking eejit.

  Lying here now, wondering if she should get dressed, or undressed and redressed, knowing she’d regret it if he arrived just as she had done so, and then getting mad at herself for obsessing about Him so much, like a character from a Doris Day movie or a Bacharach and David song. The danger now is he won’t show and she falls asleep and is awoken by Bernie from the after-school dropping the girls off and she forgets how she is dressed when she totters downstairs to answer the door and that will give the other mums something to talk about For The Rest Of Their Lives.

  The prospect of playing the lead in a lurid outtake from a Joan Crawford biopic panics Anne into sitting bolt upright and setting the alarm for an hour hence, just in case she does nod off. And she swears she can hear a noise in the attic. Nothing, just a creaking board.

  Lord God Almighty, that was the scariest day of her life. It was the morning after they had moved in, and Kevin had to go to Riga (the Irish Pub franchise they ran together back then, she designing the interiors, he taking care of business), and there she was in the new house, packing crates and boxes everywhere, and the two girls. Five and three, they were, and high on the adventure of it all, racing from one room to another, finding old wardrobes and fireplaces and whatnot. It was a Georgian house, and rooms had been split and reunited over the years, so there were all sorts of nooks and crannies and strange doors and stud walls that would need to be sorted out eventually, but they had decided the thing to do was to move in and live in the space for a year or two and get the feel of what they wanted, otherwise they might rush into a conversion they’d repent at leisure. Happy days, back when her marriage was sound (although in retrospect, Kevin probably had a girlfriend in Riga, since as it turned out, he seemed to have one everywhere else—but she had believed her marriage to be sound, and she was happy).

  She was downstairs, she remembered, trying to put some manners on the kitchen and hoping the plumber would come soon to get the washing machine and the dishwasher sorted, when Aoife trotted in and announced that she couldn’t find Ciara. Anne said she was sure to be somewhere and why didn’t Aoife just look harder, and Aoife said she had looked, and Anne followed Aoife back upstairs and together they looked for Ciara. For ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Half an hour. She wasn’t in a wardrobe, or under a bed, or in or behind a box or a crate. The windows were all shut and Aoife said they hadn’t opened any and Anne asked if she was sure, possibly in a shouty voice, and Aoife said tearfully that they had tried but they couldn’t open them, they were too heavy. On the second floor there was a dumbwaiter Anne had not known about, and she began to shake at the prospect Ciara might have fallen into it, but getting the panel open proved so tricky that there was no way Ciara could have done it.

  Having drawn a blank, Anne ran downstairs and checked front and back doors, but the back was locked and the latch on the front was too high for three-year-old hands to reach, and too stiff to manipulate if somehow they had. Breathing deeply, and insisting to herself that however old the house was, there were no such things as ghosts (and even if there were, all they could do was scare you, not make you vanish into thin air), she went through every inch of the house again, progressing up the stairs until she got to the room she was in now. And Aoife, who kept by her side and kept her from freaking out entirely, said:

  “Listen Mum, that’s Ciara.”

  And there indeed, drifting on the air, was the sound of three-year-old Ciara singing, to made-up words but the correct tune, “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music, a favorite of hers. The singing seemed to be coming from above. Anne looked up and saw a square panel on the ceiling. Access to the attic, but the panel was attached by four rivets, and was in any case twelve feet from the floor. Ciara appeared to be in the attic, but how had she got there? Outside on the landing, there were two
doors to the left, one leading to the adjacent bedroom and one which had opened onto a partition corridor but which was now locked to form part of the bedroom wall. On the wall which divided the second bedroom from the first, there was another door which connected the two rooms; Anne had noticed it from the other side when they had been listening to Ciara singing.

  As Aoife approached this door, Anne began to tell her there was no point, that it just led back into the room they had come from, and anyway, it was locked. But it didn’t, and it wasn’t. It opened onto a narrow wooden stairway coated with dust and swarming with wood lice, and Anne threw herself up the stairs as if the woodlice-dust combination was very catnip to her, and at the top of the stairs was an attic space barely six feet in height at its tallest and there, sitting beneath the eaves on an upturned orange crate with an old cup-and-ball in one hand and a dusty yo-yo in the other, her smiling face smudged with dust, was Ciara, aged three, still singing, every morning we greet you indeed.

  “Mummy, why are you crying?”

  The ghost room, they call it now. A ghost door to a ghost room. The three of them hid on Ed Loy there once, freaked him out comprehensively.

  Enough of that. Enough of the little darlings. Subsiding onto the pillow again, a little woozily, Anne tries to immerse herself once more within the not unpleasant erotic reverie she has been clinging to. But once you lose a mood, it’s hard to recapture, especially since a) the underwire on the bra she’s wearing (Elle Macpherson, half price in the never-ending sale the recession has spawned) is digging into her ribs, and b) the damp spot in the corner of the ceiling is spreading and getting darker. Oh Jesus, not the roof, she couldn’t face the idea that she might have to get the tiles up again, and all that mess, but she can’t see what else might be the trouble: there are no plumbing pipes there, and it’s four feet from the window frame and eight from the blessed attic panel. Maybe the guttering?

  She tugs on her bra as she tries to remember where she’s left the number of the roof guy, then closes her eyes tight, furious at herself for dwindling from seductress to hausfrau. Don’t break the spell, don’t break the spell, she intones, but all that lodges in her head is a sour joke about the ceiling not being the right location for the kind of damp patch she’d had in mind, which is pretty labored anyway, since what she’d had in mind was not the damp patch itself, but oh for God’s sake shut up Anne.

  Her phone pings its text-message alert. The secret of good comedy. That will be Ed, canceling. She doesn’t need to look at it. Of course she does, because it could be the after-school saying Ciara has a nosebleed or Aoife has fallen off a wall. Three ways she loses.

  I’m really sorry, work got in the way. Later? Ed x

  Well, she feels a total fucking eejit now. What the hell possessed her? She doesn’t drink at lunchtime for a start, not when the kids are around, not even at weekends, it makes the rest of the day unbearable. Maybe it was because things had slowed down a bit since the first few months they’d met, when they couldn’t get enough of each other, in cars, on floors, in a department-store changing room. Those weekends away where they’d barely leave the room. She knew that couldn’t last, even if you did have the time to do nothing but fuck, it would slow down after a while anyway, and with kids involved, life was infinitely more complicated. But Ed had not exactly complained about that, not at all, actually, Kevin took the girls most weekends and a lot of the time there was just the two of them. No, she remembers what it is: she does not want him to turn into Suburban Man for her, partly because that’s neither who he is nor who she wants him to be, but mainly because what would that make her? A fussy Suburban Mummy who can’t lie in bed for half an hour without devising another round of home improvements. Maybe she had gotten carried away, rush of blood to the head and elsewhere, forced it big-time. She knows he can’t just drop everything. But he had texted her, last night, he had got her all hot and bothered. He started it. God, listen to her, he started it, from self-loathing to shifting the blame, what is she like? That’s the drink talking and no mistake. She certainly should have kept the cork in the bottle until he got here.

  Other than that…fuck it, no more negative thoughts. She looks fantastic, she knows that. She isn’t going to submit herself to full mirror scrutiny to check this point, or wonder why this bloody bra is digging into her when it had fit perfectly well three months ago, she is just going to take it for granted. Insist upon it, actually. And she isn’t getting up to find the roofer’s number or plan the summer holidays or do something in the garden or confirm her appointments for tomorrow. She is going to blow out the candle and lie here and not sulk and not be peevish and count her blessings. It’s ten to two and the girls aren’t due back until six and she has the whole afternoon, how often could she say that?

  She could do as she pleased. Whatever that might be.

  Maybe she could just focus on what she would have been doing if Ed had showed, what he would be doing to her, and then…

  No no no, that isn’t going to work. She doesn’t have the patience. Or the interest. Or whatever. And she isn’t going to beat herself up about it either, she just doesn’t want to, that would only make things worse. Next.

  She wonders if it was the Nighttown thing that has ramped things up a level. She isn’t one of those mad women who thinks she is in competition with movie actresses and resents the idea that their men might find them more attractive than her, either on the screen or in real life, but when she found out Ed knew Jack Donovan, that they had been close friends before they fell out, over what, he wouldn’t tell her, extracting that bare information alone had been like trying to get blood out of a stone, well, it was fair to say she had gotten overexcited one night on a little too much white wine (she shouldn’t blame the drink but she had put away at least a bottle) and given a note-perfect impersonation of a mad neurotic bitch, replete with “dark insinuations” about how she was sure he’d find more congenial company among the lovely ladies of Nighttown. Of course, this had been provoked by her goading Ed into telling her everything about Jack Donovan, so once she had established that in the mid-nineties, Ed had not only met but hung out with Drew Barrymore and Patricia Arquette, among others (there hadn’t been any others, and she could tell Ed didn’t really know these women very well and had no especial interest in a woman simply because she was an actress, but the bottle of white wine—the second bottle of white wine—couldn’t be bothered with such finely tuned distinctions), she had sort of gone off on one. Jealous rage (retrospective), and then tears, and then, because he had had the temerity to try and comfort her, or “patronize her,” as she had styled it, more rage (“it’s about trust, actually,” she had heard herself saying) until the poor fellow had no option but to leave.

  He had been lovely the next day, bringing flowers and fixing Bloody Marys and refusing to acknowledge that any harm had been done, and had never referred to it again and brushed off her apologies as if she was speaking in a foreign language. All he had said, looking her in the eye—he had told her once that he liked the fact she could look him in the eye, and she thought it was the most romantic thing she had ever heard, and the thing was, when he looked her in the eye, she filled up so that she thought sometimes she was going to burst, her heart began to race and a kind of prickly heat seemed to explode all over her body until she was sure she must look all blotchy but it had happened when they were at the bar in the Stag’s Head one night and she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirrors and there was no sign of a blotch, which was a blessing and no mistake—all he had said was—

  “Are you all right?”

  And he had pitched it just right, a mixture of cheerfulness and solicitude, so beautifully tender, remembering all the things she had been through, her sister, and her father, bearing everything in mind and casting nothing up to her, giving her as many excuses and outs as she needed, that the least she could do was be honest, and say—

  “I’m fine, I was just being a silly bitch. I know even if I gave you permission
, you wouldn’t slap me, so next time, I’ll slap myself.”

  That had made him laugh. But she brooded about it afterward, not while he was there, bad enough he had to suffer through it once without his having to put up with her agonies of remorse and shame, that was like making him pay twice for her sins. She wondered what it said about her insecurity. Was she afraid she was the suburban mouse, and that at some level, Ed was out of her league? Maybe she felt a bit threatened after too much white wine, but deep down, she didn’t think so. She felt—yes, this was more like it, she felt there was another woman she had to become. She didn’t want to be Ed Loy’s harbor, his place of refuge, the ready-made family he called sanctuary. She didn’t want to do what he did, but a life of safety, with all decisions made and all doors closed against the storm, was not what she was looking for either. She knew he loved her, and she wasn’t afraid of losing him. She just needed to keep raising the stakes. Today was an example of that. There’d be others. It wasn’t a strategy, it wasn’t manipulative, it was a way of making what they had live.