It was a complicated set of sounds. At first I thought a small animal had got caught in some moving part of the air conditioner. There was a rhythmic squeaking and a wet sort of slapping noise and there were little snuffling sounds. Then I came around the bedroom doorway and saw, on the bed, Branston’s bottom, pure snowy white where the sun had never penetrated his golf shorts. It was bobbing and swishing, looking as if it was chewing on something bouncy. Waggling on either side of it were Brandeee’s regularly pedicured feet and, clutching his shoulder blades, were Brandeee’s regularly manicured hands. Her engagement ring winked away in time.
My first thought was that not many therapists get to take part in such a classic scene. It would be no end of help professionally. Next up, I knew this was my chance to be either very cool or very lame. I would be telling this story for years and this was the moment to make sure I came out of it the winner. Third, I couldn’t help noticing that I didn’t feel shocked or hurt. I felt the kind of profound relief I had only ever felt once before in my life: when I thought I’d lost my wallet and then found it behind the couch. Last, admittedly, I wondered how bad The Goldfinch could actually be.
I leaned against the doorjamb, checked Facebook, did half a BuzzFeed quiz, took a couple of pictures of Branston’s bum—one clenched, one flexed—and waited. Finally, with a moan from him and a few unconvincing gasps from her, he fell flat. Their sweaty chests made a wet fart sound as he landed. Neither one of them laughed, although I had to bite my cheeks. Branston, after a few deep breaths, rolled off.
“Cheers, love,” I said, catching Brandeee’s eye. “I don’t suppose you’d do my ironing as well, would you?”
And out it all came. She had had three husbands. Blaike’s dad was the first. Poor Burt was the third, and the second was guess who. He was so mightily pissed off with her for marrying Burt that he flounced off to Scotland to show her he didn’t care. And while he was there, he thought of something even better.
“I didn’t expect it to get this far,” Bran said. He was sitting up in bed, right at the edge, as far as he could get from Brandeee, who was sitting up right at the other edge, holding the sheet up like a bulletproof vest. “I thought she’d come round before the wedding.”
“Ours or hers?”
“Well, first hers and then ours,” he said. “I’m sorry, Lexy.”
“No hard feelings,” I told him. Then at his look, I added, “That was sarcasm, Branston, you total fucking creep. Do you think maybe you could have hooked up with someone who lived in Cuento anyway? Someone who wouldn’t have given up a job and moved thousands of miles for your little game of chicken?”
“I see that now,” he said, squirming. He was physically squirming.
“Are you trying to wriggle out of a condom?”
“No,” he said.
“Wrong answer,” I said. “Now I’ll need to go and get checked for skankitis.”
“There’s no need to be crude,” said Brandeee. Her first contribution.
“Really?” I said. “Seriously? I’ve fallen short of your standards of gracious behaviour, have I? Wow.” Then I went into the walk-in wardrobe and took a suitcase down from the high shelf. I dumped it on the bed between them.
“I can’t leave tonight!” Bran squeaked.
“But I can,” I said. “I’m going to Reno to divorce you and I’m taking your car because I’ll still have to come back to Cuento to see clients. Some of us”—I flicked my best disgusted glare at Brandeee—“honour our commitments.”
I thought I had played it so well, but if I’d chucked him out on Goldfinch night and stayed put, I’d have a clue where to go now. If I’d sent him to Nevada for the nine weeks it took our divorce to go through (Americans can certainly hustle), I’d have friends and neighbours and Lupe to turn to now. Unfortunately, I’d spent those weeks on the couch of a hotel room and didn’t even get the same housekeeping three days in a row.
Apart from that, it was a delight. America is a wonderful place to be bathed in self-pity: Netflix serves up such endless comfort and the twenty-four-hour supermarkets serve up junk food of such great diversity and in such gargantuan units. I watched an entire season of The Good Wife (irony absolutely intended) in one breaded boneless barbecued choc-chip sitting.
“Nearest motel’s just down the block,” I repeated as I left the cop shop. The car park was brightly lit, but when I got back to the street it was dark and deserted in both directions. Which way was down, in a town like a billiard table? The locals probably knew—2nd and B; catty corners; make a right—but it was all Greek to me.
I looked left, towards where the street dipped under the railway line and came up in total blackness. Then I looked right to where it crossed the downtown and headed for the suburbs. Somewhere that way was Bran’s house. That way were green lawns, blue pools, and beige tiles tended by elves at dawn.
I was headed where the elves came from. If there was a motel I could walk into after midnight on the Fourth of July, it was that-a-way. I followed the road towards the railway line, literally crossed to the wrong side of the tracks, and somewhere in the close damp dark of the underpass, finally left my old life behind me.
“You are kidding!” I said, as I caught sight of it. Last Ditch Motel, the sign said in pink and yellow neon tubes like balloon animals. Clean and comfortable, the small print added as I trudged closer, free continental breakfast, fast WiFi, bug nets.
The office(Open!) was at the end of one horseshoe arm. The other end was a launderette called Skweeky Kleen. In between were an empty pool and maybe twenty rooms, double-decker. Some were in darkness. Some shone like pumpkin lanterns, lamps glowing behind orange curtains, but most flickered television blue.
I pushed open the office door braced for pimps and roaches. Inside, a room perhaps ten feet square contained two wrought-iron patio tables and four chairs and on a counter beside them sat a microwave and a bagel cutter. There was a red plastic basket with bags of oatmeal arranged in it and a pair of coffee jugs. It was hours till breakfast but already the shoes were frying.
On the other side of the room, behind a reception desk of Formica mended with leopard-print duct tape, sat a woman of perhaps sixty years, slumped in a Barca-lounger with the footrest extended, deeply asleep. Her chin was on her chest and her glasses had slipped down her nose.
I cleared my throat.
“Plate?” she said, coming awake without so much as a flicker. She sat up, kicking her footrest back and launching herself out of the chair, coming to rest perfectly centred behind her reception desk, with one hand on the mouse of her computer and one hand on her phone.
“Plate?” I said.
“The license plate of your Prius, hon,” she said. “Hybrids have ruined my system after fifteen happy years. I used to wake up whenever a car pulled in, but it’s all over now.”
“I don’t have a Prius,” I said. “I don’t actually have a car.”
“Where’s your luggage?”
“I don’t have any luggage either,” I said. “I just need a room.”
“For?” she said. She narrowed her eyes. With a close look and now that she wasn’t nestled into her chins, I wondered if she was even sixty. Her skin was dewy and her eyes bright. It was just that her hair was silver and cut in a no-nonsense Grandma style and she wore a t-shirt that read I don’t like morning people.
“Well, the night,” I said. “And maybe tomorrow night. What else would I want it for?”
“An hour,” she said, bone dry. She turned away and looked at her keyboard. An honest-to-god board with hooks on it and keys hanging from them. The back of her t-shirt read Or mornings. Or people.
“Two queens or a king,” she said, turning back.
I thought she was giving me more information about how prostitutes order motel rooms. “Definitely not,” I said. “Absolutely nothing of the kind.” I took my credit card out and slid it ov
er the Formica towards her. It was my and Bran’s joint account, platinum of course. I was using it all the way up to the gate at SFO international departures, then I’d snip it and send it back to him.
She glanced at it and then regarded me for another silent minute or two, until at last her face cleared like Alka-Seltzer. “Lancer,” she said. “Tooth-fairy Lancer?”
“I left him,” I said.
“I like you,” she said, her voice as dry as ever and not so much as a twitch at her lips. “Sonofabitch whistled show tunes clear through my root canal.”
I had a mental image of some sort of trumpet (I was so tired by that time I was getting spacey) but mystifying as most of her utterance was, there was no mistaking sonofabitch, and any enemy of Bran’s was a friend of mine.
When she had swiped my card, she shoved a key at me. “Room 213,” she said. “The fan rattles like a mother but I can give you earplugs.”
“Not a problem,” I said. “See you in the morning. If you’re still on shift.”
“Ain’t no lottery drawing ’tween now and then,” she said. “I’ll be here. No lean.”
“Sorry?” I said. “To get the door open?”
“My name is Noleen,” she said, then looked at the card as she handed it back. “Lego … what?”
“Lexy,” I said. “Campbell. Lexy Lancer was … ”
“One of Stan Lee’s off-days.”
I laughed. I had decided somewhere around half-past nine that I might never laugh again, but Noleen got a chuckle out of me. It was as short as a snapped biscotto, but it was unmistakably mirth.
As she settled herself back into the Barca-lounger and strained the foot and headrests apart, I let myself out and closed the door softly.
By the time I opened the door to room 213 I would have curled up in a dumpster full of soup cans, so it was no miracle that it looked welcoming. No roaches, no mould in the bathroom, sheets pulled tight enough to bounce pennies off the bed. I drank two plastic cups of tap water, brushed my teeth with the corner of a towel, and slotted myself into the tight sheets like a library ticket.
The fan was indeed symphonic. I just had time to say to myself, What a bloody racket. I’ll neve—and the next thing I knew the sun was shining in the open curtains and my cheek was attached to the pillow beneath it by a patch of drool.
Five
I squinted at my watch and started fully awake when I saw it was eight forty-five. I staggered to the bathroom, stared helplessly at my hair, which looked on one side like my hamster’s bedding when he’d just been let back into a clean cage and gone wild, and on the other side like a patch of flattened bracken where deer have been sleeping. I wet my hands to dab at it and then shrieked as a knock came—bam, bam, bam—on the door. It sounded exactly the same as the knock last night. No doubt, I thought scurrying to answer, it was the cops again.
I opened up and got as far as “How did you know where” when a young man in Hello Kitty shorty pyjamas shoved past me, leapt across the floor, and dived into my bed.
“Emm,” I said.
“Can I stay here?” he said. He had the covers clutched to his chin, a chiseled chin with perfect stubble and a dimple you could have filled with melted chocolate and dipped marshmallows in.
“Emm,” I said.
“I saw the bed was slept in so I knew someone was here,” he said. “Can I use your phone?”
“Are you in some kind of trouble?” I said.
“I’m Todd,” he said. “I live next door. In 214. But I just got up and went into the bathroom and there is a s-p-i-d-e-r the size of Godzilla’s grandpa in the shower. So if I could just stay here and use your phone to call Roger—my hubs; he’s at work—to come and kill it, that would be a really big help to me.”
“Or,” I said, “I could go and kill the sp—it for you.”
He had pulled the covers up to his eyes when I started to say the word, but he let it drop again. “For reals?” he said. “It is bigger than my first apartment.”
“I’ll take care of it for you,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, getting up and springing over to the window. He looked out, peering towards his own room, as if the spider might be following him. “You have to kill it dead. Don’t save it and lie to me. And you have to take the body away. Don’t put it in my trashcan. And you have to clear up any … residue.”
“Got it,” I said, and took a step out onto the walkway.
“And don’t bring it back in here, whatever you do!” Todd shouted after me. “And don’t drop it over the railing. And if you can’t find it, don’t tell me you’ve killed it because it might still be in there.”
“I’ve got it!” I shouted back.
“Can I still use your phone to call Roger?” he was saying as the door of 214 closed behind me.
It was the same room as mine: same size, same shape, same doors, but the furniture was carved with birds and fruit and painted in peacock colours. An enormous oil portrait of … could have been Deborah Kerr … hung above the bed and there was a gif of a waterfall looping on the eight-foot telly. Frog-shaped foot mats led in a winding path from an impressive cross-trainer near the front window towards the bathroom. I followed them to the bathroom door and peeked round it.
The Last Ditch towels had been banished. There was a hanging holder, every one of its ten cubbyholes stuffed with one of the plushest, thickest, blackest bath sheets I had ever seen. Two matching robes with satin lapels hung from the door-back hooks, and enough cosmetics to fill the ground floor of any Macy’s were crowded around the basin.
I pulled back the shower curtain—also not Last Ditch standard-
issue; more like the roof of a Bedouin tent—and peered in, poised to run if Godzilla’s grandpa was hauling itself up the near edge and heading my way. There was nothing there.
I stepped closer and looked into the plughole. Still nothing. I checked the tiles and the inside of the shower curtain and eventually, on the high windowsill, apparently about to leave of its own accord, I saw a little pale brown spider with thin, thready legs. The whole thing was smaller than a lentil.
Shaking my head, I ran through the options my promises to Todd had left me, then I put one finger on it and squished it. I held my finger under the tap, turned it on and washed away the remains, not wanting to waste a whole sheet of loo roll.
“’Tis gone,” I said, coming back into my own room. Todd was under the covers again.
“I heard the faucet,” he said. “Did you just wash it down the sink? Because they come back.”
“I didn’t just wash it away,” I told him. “It’s dead.”
“What did you—No! Don’t tell me! But what did—No!”
“It’s not out the window. It’s not in your bin. It’s not over the rail. It’s not back here with me. It’s gone.”
“Where? Don’t tell me!”
“Okay,” I said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go. I need to bail a friend out of jail this morning and I’m running late.”
“Would you like to borrow a hat?” Todd said.
“It’s too hot to wear a hat,” I said.
“Hot?” he echoed. “It’s not going to be hot today. I’ll get a hat for you,” he added, standing. “The judge is never going to let your friend walk free with your hair like that.”
For the second time since I’d arrived at the Last Ditch, I laughed.
I passed on the hat, gave my key to Todd so he could “straighten up in gratitude” (I hadn’t left anything there anyway), and headed back across the tracks. A warm wind blew through the underpass like the blast of a hairdryer and already the day felt flattened out by the heat; not recovered from yesterday’s and not nearly ready for today’s. I fanned my sundress and snapped my knicker elastic to get a quick draft up there, then I was out of the shadows again.
I arrived at the cop shop just as Pl
ainclothes from last night was leaving.
“Oh good,” she said, stopping with the front door open, balancing a coffee cup, three fat cardboard folders, and a teddy bear origamied out of folded nappies. “Mizz Visalia is outta here any minute. She’s gonna need you.”
“She’s getting bail?”
“She’s going up to Madding for arraignment.” Madding was the county town, where the courthouse was. Arraignment was … an American thing, like escrow and credenzas. I nodded with my eyes narrowed to look shrewd. “The judge is a Cuento kid, like me,” the cop said. “Mizz Vi taught him piano and probably Sunday School too. She’ll be out before they stop serving pancakes at the Red Raccoon.”
“He’s going to let a murderer walk free because she taught him piano?” I said.
“Uh, no. He’s going to let an old lady out on steep bail because three firefighters were helping her change a tire on the freeway at the same time the Bombaro neighbors heard the explosion. Look, are you coming or aren’t you?” She was straining towards her coffee cup, looking a bit like a gorilla pursing up to strip a branch of its leaves.
“Can I help?” I said.
She snapped her chin into her neck and frowned at me. “I can’t let you carry evidence files,” she said. Neither one of us mentioned the teddy bear.
“I better get a wiggle on then,” I said. “I’m going to have to bus it up there.”
The cop sighed, managed to squint at her watch despite the armload of stuff, and then contorted herself in a way I didn’t understand until I heard a chirp behind me.
“Get in and I’ll give you a ride,” she said, nodding at a dusty car sitting in the twenty-minute spot near the door. “Just need to ditch some of this first.”
“Great,” I said. “Can we swing back by the Swiss Sisters?” It was the drive-through coffee shop where she’d obviously already been. She shook her head and rolled her eyes, which I took to be a yes.
I stopped with the car door open and one foot in and called to her. “Ma’am?”
Scot Free Page 3
