by Bella Pollen
maggie
When I opened the door of the Chrysanthemum bedroom, Rory Jones was standing outside. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I knew why he’d come. He looked at me, clearly irritated, and I wondered whether I should scamper off to a basket under the table like little Timmy.
‘Skirt at the dry-cleaners?’ I walked over to the fireplace.
‘I only wear it for best.’
I could feel his eyes on my back and turned to face him. ‘Look it probably sounds a little worse than it was.’
‘Oh?’ His eyebrows shot up. ‘How exactly might it have been worse? I know I told you to be nice to the pets but surely the shampoo and set was just a tad over the top?’ His tone was bitingly sarcastic. ‘From now on I really can’t have you sniffing around any more houses, unaccompanied, as it were.’
‘Like we’re not housebroken or something,’ I said lightly. The fact was my ass was in a sling. Without him I would have to either abort or start fresh and I guess we both knew it.
‘Here’s the situation,’ he said. ‘We’ve banked your cheque. I think you’ll find it’s non-refundable. So, given the circumstances, you’ll have to let me know if you wish to continue or not. Of course you don’t have to decide till morning.’ He opened the door. ‘Assuming you can manage till morning that is.’ His tone was angry but I could swear he was laughing at me.
‘Believe me,’ I said politely, though it was all I could do not to level him with a punch, ‘I can manage.’
* * *
I tried Jay’s number again on my cellphone then snapped it shut. ‘What is the point of a boyfriend if you can never get hold of him?’
‘It’s a time consuming job saving the world.’ Wolf was lying on his bed smoking a joint.
‘Well, you know something, at least it’s a worthwhile one.’
‘Mr Jones really got under your skin, huh?’
I grunted. OK fine, it was a great moment of payback so I shouldn’t have begrudged it, but God knows he needn’t have looked quite so smug.
I flopped on the bed and rested my head on Wolf’s legs. ‘What are we doing here Wolf?’ Nothing about this story was gelling and I had only myself to blame. I felt overtired, felt like I could do with a good cry, sex, a holiday. More than anything I could have done with seeing Jay.
The last time I’d been on ‘holiday’ was when I’d joined Jay in Sierra Leone. It was a mistake for both of us. I had wanted to understand what his life was about, and when I got there I understood. It was about sanitation, clean water, funding. It was about lobbying a sluggish UN. It was an endless, thankless task and I was in the way – just one person more for him to organize. ‘This is not your reality,’ he’d said more than once. But the point was, it was his reality and I didn’t belong in it.
‘You know exactly what you’re doing,’ Wolf said. ‘You just blew it, that’s all.’
I grinned. ‘You could at least make a minimal effort to cheer me up.’
He passed me the joint, and we smoked it in silence. ‘Remember in Anchorage,’ he said finally, ‘when we were doing the stolen land story, that time when you tried to get in with the tribe elder and you agreed that me and Dwight would do that ice bonding thing and we had to squat in a deep hole naked with the Inuit guy with the mackerel breath and Dwight ended up losing feeling in the tip of his—’
‘I remember.’
‘That almost seems like fun now.’
I put my head on his chest and he combed my hair through with his fingers. I really loved him a lot.
‘Are you happy?’ he asked.
‘I think so.’ I was startled by the question. ‘Are you?’
‘How can you tell?’
‘I don’t know, but I can tell you what keeps me awake at night,’ I said. ‘What if you believe you’re driving on a main road, one that takes you to a capital city, let’s say, but you’re wrong – all along you’re on a parallel road but it’s smaller, less interesting, it’s going nowhere and the worst thing is – these two roads never converge?’
He thought for a while. ‘At least there’d be no tolls to pay.’
I laughed and took another hit of the joint. Wolf always had the strongest grass. You could chart his progress round a party by the line of monosyllabic glassy-eyed victims in his wake. ‘One more before I go back to my room,’ I squeaked in a helium Micky Mouse voice. ‘How do I get back to my room anyway?’
* * *
I woke needing a pee. My left arm was numb. Wolf was asleep. His hair, loosed from its ponytail, was spread over one cheek. He looked like the bearded lady, on leave from the circus.
The corridor was dark. I tripped over the carpet then turned my ankle negotiating the steps to the bathroom. As I opened the door something brushed against my face – I yelped, thinking it was a spider but it was only the string from the light. I pulled it but no light came on, instead a bar heater above the mirror glowed red. It gave off just enough light to confirm that there was no toilet in this bathroom, just a bath and a sink. It took another ten minutes not to find where the toilet was located and arrive back where I started. If I hadn’t been quite so stoned, I might have chanced the journey to my own bathroom, more than a thousand stubbed toes away – instead I eyed the sink. Oh well … I’d certainly peed in stranger places than this …
* * *
Dwight told me afterwards it sounded like a bomb exploding. He’d shot upright in bed. The blackness in his room was thick as tar and just as impenetrable but the noise had been too loud to ignore. He searched in vain for the switch on his table lamp, then, pulling back the covers, took a tentative step into the abyss. Hands extended to feel his way around the room, he found a cold surface to lean on. His hands pressed on something damp and soft. A face towel. That meant he was at the basin, which meant a ninety degree turn to the door. He took one giant step forwards and slammed into the wall. Befuddled and now in pain he felt with his hands round the wall until he found the light switch. His eyes had difficulty adjusting, because even when he’d switched it on his hands looked so dark. He shook his head stupidly. Then something caught his eye. The lid of the antique ink pad was up. He looked at his fingers, took a horrified step back. Around the room, indelibly printed onto the priceless eighteenth-century Chinese wallpaper, were the inky blue imprints of his hands.
* * *
Comedy cut to the bathroom. As silly accidents go I have long since cornered the market. Once, at school, I took a basketball so cleanly to the centre of my forehead it knocked me onto the floor and cracked open the back of my head. The double egg forced me to sleep on my side for a month. In Mexico, Wolf turned our jeep, a goat lethargically crossing the dirt road mistaken for a child. That time it was a telephone pole that cracked my head open. I have sliced my calf on a picture hook, got a black eye from a flying lens cap, a fractured ankle tripping over a Dictionary of Erotica at university but I had never heard of anyone being clobbered whilst actually peeing. At first I thought I had slipped off the sink and fallen to the floor, then I realized the sink had slipped off the wall and fallen onto me. I lay semi-naked covered in rubble, T-shirt hiked up, wondering whether things were broken; important things like my head for instance, because the whole thing seemed so funny, but then the lights snapped on, the dust cleared and Rory Jones stepped into the doorway.
The stately homes of England, how beautiful they stand,
To prove the upper classes have still the upper hand.
…
The stately homes of England we proudly represent,
We only keep them up for Americans to rent.
– Noel Coward
maggie
I got hooked on watching people at Rock’n’Roll concerts.
You could say that my dad, Mike, was one of the founders of modern rock’n’roll stage lighting. He was a bona fide hippy and proud of it – he still has a Sergeant Pepper outfit somewhere in the back of his closet. He avoided being drafted by claiming to be homosexual, a good wheeze at the time you might thi
nk, but he’s spent a disproportionate amount of effort since trying to access his papers through the Freedom of Information Act to see whether this boyhood lie is still following him around. Every time his credit card is turned down, his bags searched at the airport, his mail is late – it’s always the same, truth is he’s a little paranoid.
Dad was at the Thanksgiving dinner when Arlo Guthrie wrote ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ and was famous, before he married my mother, for his sexual exploits with various female rock divas who wished to be well lit.
My parents met in Haight Ashbury where my mother was making a documentary called Love is Dead about the decline and fall of the hippies and Dad was mounting the farewell concert of Jefferson Airplane. He was beautiful, laid back and stoned, but Mom was fierce. She prised him away from Grace Slick and marched him back to New York.
They were all set to make love not war and sure as hell not babies. My mother could organize a protest of 400 people standing on her head, but she couldn’t organize a plumber or decent contraception. Even after the shock of my arrival, parental duties were fulfilled as an afterthought. I got new pants when old ones had shrunk to my knees. I had to walk around barefoot before either of them noticed I needed a larger shoe size and theirs were always the two empty seats at the school play. It wasn’t that they were mean, they just never signed on for the whole stroller-pushing PTA parent thing. They never let me need them as a child and they don’t need me now and I guess I’m the stronger for it. Still, it meant we never established much of a sense of family. Instead my life was slotted into their agenda. I didn’t mind. I was happy trailing my mother’s causes, and if Mom was away and Dad had a concert out of the city, he’d just pluck me out of school and take me right along with him.
Concerts were a blast. ‘Just stay still and watch,’ my father would instruct – which I would until, out of the blue, some huge man would hoist me up saying, ‘This is no place for a little prawn like you,’ and whip electrical cables onto the spot where’d I’d been sitting before stashing me like Raggedy Anne in a new place from where the whole scene would shift and change. Minutes later somebody else would come along. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ and again I’d be relocated. I became brilliant at being where I shouldn’t. I was thinking about this the morning we set off. Being brilliant at being in the wrong place. It’s a strange skill to have.
* * *
It was a windy morning. People struggled with umbrellas. At a pedestrian crossing a woman’s headscarf whipped over her face just as she stepped out. Startled, she withdrew to the curb as the traffic roared by.
A wedding party poured out from a Greek Orthodox church. Children in old men’s suits and women in young girl’s dresses. The bride’s veil blew around her, engulfing her in a cloud of swirling net. In vain, guests tried to untangle her but she eventually cast off the veil, laughing as it sailed up to the sky, while children hopped and jumped to catch it.
‘I’m sorry, did you say something?’ I said.
‘I said, you’re not going to sulk the whole week, are you?’ Rory Jones repeated. We were driving through the outskirts of London in his car, an old Rover. Wolf and Dwight were following us in the van. I could have ridden with them but I’d opted to ride with Rory out of – what? Who knows. It had to be either masochism or some kind of reverse pride.
His comment was especially annoying as I hadn’t been sulking at all, I was thinking how much I liked the expression on the Greek bride’s face as she watched her veil spinning into orbit, like she was symbolically freeing herself from the prison of single life. It was a nice moment. One I would have liked to have had on film, but Rory had caught me with my pants down – quite literally. The joke was on me and he’d lost no opportunity to rub salt in the wound.
In the Stately Locations office that morning, he’d rung our next appointment to confirm.
‘No, no need to have second thoughts, Lady Harcourt,’ he’d said. ‘Not all American women are brash, vulgar and distasteful,’ he caught my eye and grinned. ‘No, no, I’m quite sure you’ll like her … yes, yes, very polite, charming, yes, yes, marvellous with animals.’ He’d put his hand over the receiver. ‘You do do charming don’t you?’
To hell with him anyway. Maybe having him come along might not be a disaster after all. It passed responsibility for his clients directly to him – and he’d better be up for the ride because from now on, the way I figured it, these clients, whoever they were, were firmly in my sight line.
‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘if you don’t talk, I’ll have to. I mean, after all, it’s a question of manners.’
I continued flicking through the itinerary, around ten houses in all.
‘It’s my English upbringing,’ Rory said. ‘No matter how obstreperous or dull the person sitting next to you is, you must engage them in conversation.’
I doodled a hangman onto the back of the envelope. A man with a coronet hanging by the neck.
‘Funny business to be in for someone who’s not interested in people,’ he added.
‘I’m interested in people.’ Goaded, I took out a cigarette and lit it. ‘Talking to people is my job.’ My matches had a picture of Roosevelt on the front and had arrived by FedEx that morning at the hotel. Jay collected presidential matches, thought they were very kitsch. It amused him to send them to me from time to time. The idea of the FedEx office trying to find a small enough box to pack them in amused him even more.
‘What the hell is it?’ the FedEx man would ask as he signed over the miniature package.
‘I’m afraid it’s the president’s head,’ I would reply solemnly.
Jay also collected president stories. Apropos nothing he might say, ‘you know Lyndon Johnson once replied to something Jimmy Greenfield said with, “You dare to ask the leader of the Western world a chicken-shit question like that?”’
‘Who’s Jimmy Greenfield?’ I’d say and get his ‘oh-the-cultural-desert-that-is-youth’ look for my trouble.
Rory was eyeing me from the driver’s seat.
‘What?’
‘You know that thing in movies?’ he said. ‘When two people meet for the first time, spot each other across a crowded room and fall instantly, passionately, hopelessly in love?’
I looked at him.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’d say quite the opposite thing has happened here wouldn’t you?’
I stared out the window. Damned if I was going to let him see me smile.
* * *
‘Nice day.’
‘Beautiful,’ he agreed, ignoring the sarcasm.
‘It’s true what they say. It really does rain all the time in this country.’ I gave up fiddling with the car’s dials.
‘It’s only been a couple of days.’ Rory said, ‘I’m sure it’s been known to rain two days running in New York.’
‘Yeah, but it’s different rain.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Less wet for a start.’ I sipped my gas station coffee in its plastic cup. The world outside the window was grey, the sky dulled by cloud so thick you could have spread it on a bagel. Black crows circled in the boughs of leafless trees. ‘Jesus,’ I shuddered. ‘I mean, no wonder you Brits are so repressed.’
‘Ah, here we go – and this based on what? Your extensive experience of … ah yes … one family?’
‘Come on, anybody would have felt uncomfortable in that place, I mean, even the butler knew more about that little girl than her mother. The woman didn’t have a trace of warmth.’
‘She was being polite.’
‘She was totally inhibited.’
‘I’d say reserved.’
‘Try archaic.’
‘A little old fashioned.’
‘Uptight.’
‘Shy.’
‘They’re just privileged with no purpose.’
‘Oh yawn,’ said Rory, ‘that old aristocracy versus meritocracy chestnut. Your problem is you’re incapable of seeing past the house and title—’
‘Oh right, l
ike you people aren’t a little over preoccupied with blue blood and class?’
‘As if your people don’t have an overriding need to believe in Camelot.’
‘Forget the Roxmeres, this isn’t about one family – as a race you’re cold, no passion.’
‘The English don’t consider it gentlemanly to have passion.’
‘Oh – a little lame don’t you think?’
‘Well of course we have passion. It’s just that we don’t get quite all our emotions from those self-help books.’
‘What emotions are you talking about? You send your kids to boarding school before they can walk.’
‘Well, better the world of beatings and buggery than having them settle junior high school disputes with Uzis.’
I opened my mouth to say something then clamped it shut again.
‘Oh my God,’ he said, ‘you’re laughing, it’s a miracle, alert the national press.’ He paused. ‘Why are you laughing by the way?’
‘I don’t know, you sounded just like my mother.’ My mother, like everyone else in America, had long been obsessed with high-school shootings and was on the committee of Women Against Guns.
‘Right wing blames it on the media, left wing blames it on the availability of guns.’ I’d heard it a million times, ‘be careful who you diss in school, honey,’ she used to tell me, and by the way this was the full extent of her teenage advice, ‘cos if they know anyone who even looks eighteen they can go down to their local Woolworths, buy a shotgun and blow you away.’
‘So the question is,’ Rory said, ‘will your broadly objective views on the English be serving as the basis for your film?’
‘Hey,’ I said loftily, ‘I’m just making polite conversation. I film what I see.’
‘Oh and what’s that?’
‘What’s what?’
‘Well you’re not exactly the “oh-gee-that-accent-makes-me-go-weak-at-the-knees, wasn’t-princess-Di-a-saint” type of big-haired gushing American that we at Stately Locations have come to love and cherish.’
