Does it strike you as odd, the rises and falls that have occurred in just a few pages? Soaring from rooftops and penthouses, speeding up lift shafts and stairwells; descents external and internal, leaves dropping, clothes slipping, heightened hopes, mounting expectations, lowering of standards, plummeting stomachs, sinking hearts. Life isn’t about trudging forwards; more often than not, it’s a series of lurches.
Lace stands in the lift with her legs crossed, balancing with the occasional touch to the wall. And this is where we met her, of course. Hurtling down the lift shaft to escape love — though we didn’t know what she was running from, first time around. There’s one more thing that wasn’t mentioned earlier (perhaps it was too odd to spring on newcomers to Lace’s story?). Halfway down the banker’s building, as she is scrutinising the city with the sharpened perception of the recently fucked, she gives a start. Far away, outlined against a huge glowing billboard, she sees a tiny body falling. Somersaulting, twisting in slow motion so that, for a moment, the body and the lift she’s in seem to be descending at the same speed. Through heavy air, separated by some distance, they swim downwards in parallel lines, and their connection is only broken when other buildings come between them.
OH, VEGAS!
GIBBY LUX. IT’S NOT the worst name in the world, but it’s taken him years to wear it in. Schlepping it through the gritty years up to ten, then shouldering it through the long uncomfortable haul of puberty. Blisters on his soul: this is the legacy of his first name, Gibby, teamed with his surname, Lux.
Now he’s lived with the unfortunate nomenclature for a couple of decades, and he figures if he’s put up with it this long, why not the rest of his life? He’s never quite believed he’ll reach thirty, anyway — so he’s already two-thirds of the way through his feat of endurance.
Nonetheless, just because you’re familiar with something doesn’t mean you’re happy about it. Sometimes, when his feet are sore from work or indigestion is burning in his throat, he enters the living room, snaps back the side wings of the velour TV chair, and asks his mother, as acidly as he can:
‘WHY?’
Almost certainly, his mother has a gin and orange raised to her lips. She’s startled to have her private viewing box opened to the living room, and not entirely pleased. ‘We wanted to call you Digby,’ she frowns. Even though she’s addressing the problematic issue of her son’s name, more than half her mind is on the second half of the third round of the International Kickboxing Championships. ‘We asked for Digby, but the damn registry clerk must have had dyspepsia.’
‘Dyslexia.’ Gibby winces as a wiry Texan’s cheek splits open like a melon.
‘Whatever. That disease when you write B’s as D’s, and D’s as G’s. DIGBY, GIBBY, it doesn’t take a genius to work out how that happened.’ She’s almost shouting over the noise of the TV, the ice cubes rattling wildly in their orange sea.
‘Dyslexia isn’t a disease.’ Somehow Gibby can’t let this go uncorrected, even though the whole issue is long irrelevant.
‘What’s that? You’ll have to speak up.’ Mrs Lux always starts defiantly, refusing to turn down the TV. In a few seconds her better self will overcome her; in spite of her love of blood sports, she isn’t a vicious mother. Brandishing the remote at the roaring crowd, she concedes into a sudden silence that, if Gibby wants the truth (for the umpteenth time), his parents slipped.
‘Slipped?’ This is just one of Gibby’s strange gifts: he can raise his eyebrows so high they disappear into his hair. Few mothers would be able to remain obdurate when faced by their only child, disconsolate, squishy-foreheaded, browless.
‘We were tipsy.’ However many times she admits it, his mother has never disclosed which of them, she or Mr Lux, approved the form with five erroneous letters that officially registered their son as a laughing stock. ‘We’d had a bit to drink after the wedding ceremony. You can’t blame us for that.’
Gibby sinks into the beige velour sofa. Faint whiffs of the past rise from the tasselled cushions. ‘Couldn’t you have got married before I arrived? Did you ever think of that?’
There’s a flush on Eve’s red-veined cheeks, perhaps due to the gin, or perhaps to the fact that, once, she’d been sufficiently wild to get married in a Las Vegas chapel dressed as Original Sin. Ivy leaves in her hair, a semi-transparent flesh-coloured gown, and Mr Lux beside her in nothing but a loincloth. The preacher, overlooking the fact that the bride was carrying an apple rather than a bouquet, had mistaken the couple for Tarzan and Jane. His inappropriate quips about jungle fever and swinging on the vines of life had been mystifying until Mr Lux had finally clicked. Indignantly, he’d pointed out the names on the marriage licence: Adam and Eve. How much more obvious could you get?
‘Your mistake, man!’ The Stetson-wearing preacher was renowned for infusing his ceremonies with humour. ‘No one in Las Vegas reads!’
Adam Lux had stared in stony silence until, slightly desperately, Eve crunched into her apple. Snatched from a fruit bowl in the hotel lobby, it was too soft to make much of a sound. Behind her, a timid Marilyn Monroe and a fat Frank Sinatra shuffled unconvincing feet.
Theatrically, the preacher peered at the Post-it stuck on his palm. ‘Duh! And here I was handed’ (he paused for a laugh that never came) ‘the second clue. Your last name is Lux, for crying out loud! In the beginning let there be light, and all that other good-godly crap! You’ve really got the act down, people.’
At this, the impressive hair on Mr Lux’s barrel-chest had bristled. ‘Lux is an old family name,’ he said in a stifled voice. ‘As old as Brown. Or Green. Or Smith. My father, and my grandfather, and my great-grandfather —’
Nervously, Eve continued to gnaw on her apple. The chapel door banged, the aisle filled up with waiting cowboys and impatient flappers and Beatles and Garbos — until, at last, the preacher cut short Mr Lux’s burgeoning family tree by raising his hand and uttering a word that sounded suspiciously like ‘Whatever’. (True good humour, it seemed, was as thin and veneer-ish as most other things in this desert town.) After he’d hurried Adam and Eve through their ‘I do’s’, he immediately turned away, dipping his handlebar moustache into a bowl of water like a wading bird at a pond. His eyes were bloodshot from ten hours of garish costumes and the temporary euphoria of others.
His sudden indifference was upsetting. Was it any wonder that the Luxes headed straight for the nearest casino to celebrate their newly wed status? Perched on wobbly bar stools, they worked their way down the cocktail list. Eve’s lips grew sticky from glacé cherries, the buttonhole of Adam’s borrowed jacket blossomed with bright plastic swizzle sticks. After sampling almost everything, they decided to get all the paperwork in their lives cleared away then and there, including finally registering the unnamed baby.
‘Anything could be done in that town, at any time of night.’ Gibby’s mother sounds unaccountably nostalgic for a place which, by cutting bureaucratic corners, permitted rash decisions to be made under the influence of sweet alcoholic beverages. ‘We took inspiration from our immediate surroundings.’
‘I should count myself lucky,’ observes Gibby, ‘not to be saddled with Grasshopper or Greyhound.’
‘Your father decided to name you after the barman who made the best drink.’
‘Only he didn’t,’ says Gibby caustically.
‘It was a close call.’ Mrs Lux’s eyes grow shiny at the memory. ‘One barman named Prince made the best Mai Tai I’ve ever tasted.’
On nights when he’s feeling particularly low, Gibby forces himself to think of this narrow escape. Prince Lux. Then he feels almost fortunate.
‘But Digby won out —’ says his mother.
‘With the Kamikaze,’ finishes Gibby. ‘One part Cointreau, two parts vodka, and a dash of lemon juice. Added to twenty-four other cocktails, the result was a newly legitimate son named Gibby.’
Mrs Lux stares unseeingly at the glistening boxers, jabbing silently at each other in a flickering ring. Her mouth is soft an
d full, her hair falls forward over her brown knitted shoulders. ‘Those were the days!’ She takes a large swallow of her drink (two parts Gordon’s, one part orange cordial, one part melted ice cubes). When her gaze returns to Gibby, there’s amazement on her face. Remind her: how long has she been slotted away in this beige velour life? Once, she ran away to Vegas with an illegitimate son and a bare-chested husband, after which she was going to be… what was she going to be? She can no longer remember.
‘I’ve got to go.’ The mix of nostalgia and alcohol fumes, remembered and real, is making it hard for Gibby to breathe.
‘Going out?’ It’s astounding how quickly the lines needle back into her face, puckering her mouth and eyes. ‘With that girl, I suppose?’
‘No. I’m going to work.’
‘At this time of night?’ Mrs Lux sounds suspicious. ‘I don’t like you seeing her any time, but especially not at this time.’
‘I’m not going to see her,’ repeats Gibby in a suffocated voice. ‘I’m going to work.’ The ranch sliders are fogging up with his mother’s gin-fuelled paranoia. He looks up at the ceiling, longs for a small white object to drop from a previously unnoticed hatch behind the glaring fake candelabra. Put mask over nose and mouth, and breathe normally!
No mask. No emergency exit or inflatable slide. He scrabbles in his satchel to check that he has his keys, then looks desperately for his phone in what will soon become suburban wreckage. Is it under the sofa? Buried in gossip magazines? Drowned in the muddy layers of his parents’ past?
‘She’s an odd one, your friend.’ Mrs Lux’s eyes remain fixed on the muted screen, on the jabs of the pointed-toed Japanese boxer. ‘Beautiful but strange. A bit fray.’
‘Frayed?’ He stops rummaging through a dismaying pile of Heat magazines (perma-tans, perspiration stains, paparazzi) and looks at his mother with an almost-respect. ‘You’re right, she could come across as frayed. Sort of tattered around the edges. Not surprising, considering what she’s been through.’
‘Not fray-DA.’ His mother pronounces the D with the exaggerated aplomb of an Italian sitcom actor. ‘I meant what I said. F-R-A-Y. Like that actress, the one with the wispy hair — slightly vague and stupid-looking.’ She shakes her head and sighs. ‘What’s the point of working at a newspaper if you don’t know your English language?’
And then it happens again. Gibby’s ears begin to grow, and his heart starts pounding to accommodate the physical effort. The hair on his head slowly raises itself to its full height — doing what you might call standing on end. There’s an appalling, increasing din in his ears.
‘The word is FEY,’ he says loudly enough that he can hear his own voice. ‘The actress to whom you’re referring may be Mia Farrow or one of the Redgraves. Expecting a person who delivers newspapers to be a walking dictionary is like ordering your waiter’ — by now, he’s taking huge gulps of air between phrases — ‘to prepare… a Michelin three-star… steak tartar.’ The rhyming end to the sentence chimes wildly in his head. Already, from behind the static surface of the muted TV, he can hear noises: first muffled, then louder. The smacking of gloves on bare skin. Drops of sweat hitting the floor of the ring, the swish of ropes cutting through the air, the groan of body heat pushing through pores, the smack of tongues against the dry roofs of mouths.
The chaos seeps out of the screen into the living room. He hears the dull brown scratch of his mother’s nylon skirt against her chair. The cubes in her glass crack as loudly as icebergs splitting from Arctic shelves; they’re floating in a fizzing orange sea. ‘The word you want is FEY!’ He has to shout to be heard. ‘Although my friend is most definitely not.’
The rustle of the carpet under his feet is deafening.
When his mother’s thick pink lips part, they make a ripping sound like Velcro. ‘NO NEED TO SHOUT.’ The monstrous top lip curls back, revealing a smudge of lipstick on the upper front teeth. And, with the revelation of that mundane detail, suddenly the room quietens down, and Gibby’s ears shrink from super-antennae back to a normal size, and his heart leaves his cluttered throat to settle back in his chest.
As always, his mother hasn’t noticed a thing. She’s looking defensive, an expression she can perfect after three gins but botches after four. ‘Always shouting,’ she says in an injured voice. ‘If it’s not your father, it’s you.’
‘Sorry.’ And Gibby is. The slump of her shoulders says everything: the woollen slope of the left one speaks of lost energy and wasted charm, while on the right one is the daily burden of being unspeakably ordinary. ‘I really have to —’ he says. ‘Now I’ve got to —’ But his sentences break apart, crumbling at his feet like parched leaves.
‘Don’t forget your phone.’ Hauling it up from beside her chair, his mother almost throws it at him. ‘Someone might need you. I might need you. Though you never answer anyway.’
‘I’ll answer,’ promises Gibby. But already the television has been given back its voice, and the crowd roars. WELCOME BACK, MRS LUX! HELLO, EVE! And immediately she’s gone, leaning towards the screen, reaching for the drinks trolley, sloshing liquid from the clear glass bottle into the smudged glass tumbler. Gibby is dismissed, which is what he wanted — but, nonetheless, as he leaves the house he stumbles on the doorstep, nearly falling headlong onto the path lined with jagged ceramic shards, planted by his mother in the days when she still went out.
‘Careful there, son! You might lose an eye.’ Here’s Mr Lux, who rarely utters a word before midday but, according to his colleagues, turns into a fairly affable person after lunch. ‘Losing an eye on your mother’s creations,’ he chuckles. ‘That’d be what they call Oedipal.’
‘If I were Oedipus,’ says Gibby, ‘you’d be the one losing your eyes.’ Actually, he’s not sure if he says this or only thinks it; he’s still reeling from the din and his sudden release from it. He leans against the dark wall and hears an ominous crack.
Mr Lux’s key is in the lock. ‘Your mother’s inside. You’re off to work.’
Neither phrases have question marks, absolving Gibby of the need to answer. The door closes in a blur of patterned glass. Reaching behind him he finds that he’s broken the ornamental butterfly off the front of the house.
Carrying the fibreglass wing, he treads softly down the path. It’s a gift, this thing that occasionally happens to him. This is what he tells himself. A gift rather than a curse, but nonetheless exhausting. Sixty seconds of such intensity would take it out of any man, let alone a twenty-year-old, slightly plump, with a tendency to asthma. What had George Eliot said, about the exquisite danger of hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat?
But here we must leave Gibby. He has to run, quite literally, so as not to lose the job he’s had since he was fourteen, pushing a barrow through night-streets, heaving newspaper bundles through archways or into the foyers of office buildings. He doesn’t have time to remember a quotation from a nineteenth-century writer who had her own trouble with names, being first Mary Ann, then Marian and finally, out of sheer necessity, George.
Perhaps he continues thinking about it, though, as he jogs along cracked pavements and jumps over curbs. It’s more like music than words; his feet pound it, his veins are infused with it. How did she know? For, somehow, George Eliot imagined what Gibby suffers for real, nearly every day of his life. It’s true: he feels that it will kill him.
A CAR HORN AFTER MIDNIGHT
A CAR HORN AFTER midnight is the loneliest sound. Somewhere, someone is leaving. Toot, tooot! Even when it’s meant to sound jaunty, it’s sad. The evening is at an end; a dinner, a family gathering, is over. The driver clicks his seatbelt, glances in the rear-vision mirror and unnecessarily adjusts it, then leans across the empty passenger seat to peer one last time at the people standing outside.
As the car pulls away everyone waves. Toot, toot; together time’s over, folks! The car glides away down the deserted street, the group on the pavement huddle together as if for warmth. Goodbye, goodbye! Tyres swish, ra
in slides down the windscreen, wet black asphalt stretches like the sea. Soon those left behind will turn away. Any minute now, with small sighs, they’ll go inside to blow out the candles, pick up the smeared plates and put them in the dishwasher, straighten cushions, turn over the calendar on the wall, and face the next day.
The driver is full of rich food and nostalgia. He’s been given a pork roast, because everyone knows it’s his favourite; has been ever since he was a kid. He drives out of the suburbs towards the city centre, where he lives with his wife and son in a luxury loft in a renovated warehouse. The windscreen wipers keep perfect time. The dials in front of him glow softly; he has the road to himself, he’s happy. The severing of the evening hasn’t yet affected him. But, as he exits the soft drizzle and enters the still-dry city, with its buildings rising like pillars and its towering billboards, his thoughts begin to churn. Tomorrow he’ll leave on a business trip. His kid has begun to stutter since starting school. And his wife — is she really happy? And is there time to go to the gym before the airport? And hadn’t his father looked gaunt tonight as he carved the meat? And how many calories were in that plate of roast pork and potatoes? Gravy sloshes through his guts. He puts an irritated foot down; now he’s driving fast, to get away from the evening, to enter the future.
At the intersection with the Jaguar salesroom on the corner, the light turns red. He stops with a jerk. By now things have become so worrisome and bleak that he feels he’s the only person awake in the entire city. Eyeing up the gleaming cars crouched behind glass windows, he imagines them leaping out in a splintering roar. He grips the steering wheel defiantly, reassures himself with the sight of well-stitched vintage leather and top-quality wood panelling within his own car. But when he flicks his indicator, hoping to trigger the traffic light into green, nothing happens. He flicks again, up and down; the indicator is broken. The lights remain red.
Suicide Club, The Page 3
