Sin City

by Wendy Perriam

“Carole …”

  I look up. I’d almost forgotten Norah. If she sticks to rolls and jelly, she’ll grow watery and feeble. I pass her a piece of peacock on my fork.

  She doesn’t seem to see it. “Carole, I … I need to …”

  “What? Oh, God, not the loo again. It’s miles.” I’ll have to go with her. She’ll only lose her way or bag, or both. Well, at least I can get a fill-up of champagne. I seize both empty glasses, start the long trek down again. Maybe intimate little bistros have something to be said for them. Norah’s legs are steadier than mine now. I use her to cling onto while I wait for more champagne. The hose-man grins at me.

  “You don’t need those glasses, honey. Just grab two full fresh ones.”

  Nothing’s rationed here. I love that. Rationing makes you mean and thin and bitter, like my mother who grew up as a war-baby. Even forty-odd years after VE Day, she’s still getting out her ration-books, mixing her dried egg – at least metaphorically.

  I sip champagne as I saunter to the exit. Norah’s walking faster. I think she must be desperate. A security guard stops us at the door.

  “We’re looking for the … er … loo.” What do they call it here? I try again. “WC, lavatory, you know …”

  No, he doesn’t seem to know. “I’m sorry, but you can’t go out this way. It’s an emergency exit only.”

  “This is an emergency.” (Norah’s doubled up.) “We want the –” I remember now – “john.”

  “You’re looking for the restroom?”

  “No, the john.” God, it’s worse than French. Perhaps he speaks French. “The … er … toilette de dames.” I add a bit more French. I’m only showing off now. Blame the French champagne.

  He fingers his gun. Wrong again. He’s obviously a Francophobe.

  “Can I help you, honey?” A woman has got up from her seat, elderly, but fighting it. Her hair is tinted pinkish-grey, her eyelids are blue and silver shutters; her smile is double-decker, enamelled on. “Are you gals French or something? My husband knows French – well, just a little. He was in Paris in the War. Harry!”

  Harry’s French is worse than mine. I stop him in mid-stumble. “We’re English,” I insist, though I’m beginning to have my doubts. “My friend just wants …”

  “Oh, you’re English. We just love England, don’t we, Harry? We were in London this last summer – where d’you call it? – Maidenhead.”

  “Maidenhead’s not London.”

  “Isn’t it? I get so damn mixed up. It was just darling, anyway. We stayed in a hotel where your Lord Albert Tennyson wrote …”

  “Look I’m sorry, but we’ve got to find the loo.”

  “Loo! Remember ‘loo’, Harry? We just died when we first heard that.”

  “Well, Norah here’s about to die herself unless we …”

  “Norah? Hi, Norah. I’m Doreen. This is Harry. Harold Edward – two old English names.”

  I don’t think Norah cares much. She’s clutching her stomach, moaning very softly to herself.

  “Carole Margaret,” I say. If we get the introductions over, then maybe …

  “So you gals want the loo? The loo!” she giggles. “I’ll take you if you promise to keep talking. I just love that English accent.”

  She keeps chattering herself, which makes it hard for me to make the promise, let alone honour it. But at least she’s outmanoeuvred the security guard who doesn’t so much as blow his whistle. She links arms with both of us, prattles us along the passage towards a sign marked “restrooms”.

  “Oh, so you mean restrooms are … ?”

  Doreen holds the door for us. Wrong once more – it’s not a public loo. She’s brought us to her suite. There are three huge velvet sofas and the usual works of art and antique gilded mirrors hung on gold-weave linen wallpaper.

  “Right, where’s your bathroom?” It may sound brusque, but Norah’s suffering, and if I give Doreen half a chance, she’ll start pouring cocktails, or running her home-movies of Lord Tennyson in Maidenhead on the in-room video.

  “Just through there, hon.”

  Norah disappears. I follow. I don’t want her peeing in a bidet or jacuzzi, or upsetting Harry’s shaving gear. I stop in shock. It is a public loo – john, toilet, toilette, lavatory – ten of them, in fact, with pink-veined marble floors and tooled bronze doors, and a mock-eighteenth-century oil painting in each individual cubicle, hung just above the toilet bowl. That’s absurd. It looks quite incongruous to have heavy ornate frames rising out of twentieth-century toilet fittings, and you can’t see the pictures anyway, once you’re sitting on the seat.

  I sit myself. I don’t really need to go, but I like peeing onto porcelain flowers, and it makes room for more champagne. Actually, I feel a bit embarrassed pulling up my knickers with a bewigged and whiskered gentleman watching from his frame.

  When I re-emerge, Doreen’s disappeared. I feel a twinge of disappointment. At least she knew my name – the only one who does in all of Vegas, apart from Cindy and Virgil Whatsit Whatsit. You hear so much about Americans being friendly, inviting you to stay before you’ve even exchanged addresses, yet in a whole sixty-seven minutes of queuing, no one said a word to us (save one mumbled “excuse me” when a man bumped into Norah). I peer in the mirror, try to see myself through strangers’ eyes. I look better than I thought. There’s no trace of the hangover. In fact, I could almost be an advertisement for some vitamin or something – cheeks healthy pink, eyes very blue and bright. I even seem slimmer, as if I’ve shred a few spare pounds, and that despite all the food I’ve stuffed. It may be just the mirror. Perhaps it’s tinted, or specially angled, to make you feel good about yourself. Mind you, I’m still not tall enough and the dungarees lack class. I’ve always wished I was more the exotic type with high cheekbones and great smouldering tragic eyes, and my clothes designed by some wild Parisian genius with a torrid past. Or, if that’s not on, I’d settle for a nineteen-inch waist, or floor-length eyelashes, or hair so startling-blonde that strangers stopped me in the street to beg for snippets of it. People call me blonde, but I’m really only fairish, and I’ve got this stupid wimpish dimple in my chin. Jon liked it, actually, said it turned him on, but then Jon liked freckles, too, so there’s not much hope for him.

  I return to Norah’s cubicle, tap loudly on the door. The brunch finishes at three and there are a lot of different dishes I haven’t even sampled yet.

  “Are you coming, Toomey?”

  “Yes. Well, no …”

  God! Martha Mead would have been less trouble than dear Norah. Martha wears incontinence pads, does it where she’s sitting. “Norah, listen, I’ll meet you back there – in the restaurant. Okay? It’s just along the passage. You can’t miss it.”

  I have my doubts, in fact, so I wait another six or seven minutes, pacing up and down. There are three old biddies in the restroom now, reapplying make-up. I watch their faces brighten as they paint on youth and smiles. The attendant whisks away their dirty tissues, slings out age and frowns. She looks sad and old herself, a dark, foreign, brooding sort of woman, wearing a pale green nylon overall – the first work-clothes I’ve seen in this hotel. I’d like to talk to her, make conversation, anchor myself to someone – anyone. If it were England, I could murmur “Awful weather”, but I haven’t been outside yet, haven’t glimpsed the weather. Windows are the only thing on ration in Las Vegas. That dome in the restaurant is kept artificially sun-lit, even in the rain. I say “Awful weather”, anyway. She smiles – a genuine smile which transforms her face a moment, then the smile gives out and she’s sad and plain again. I keep my own smile going.

  “Look, could you do me a favour? My friend in there gets a bit … confused. When she’s finished, would you be an angel and point her in the direction of the restaurant, the big one – you know, where they’re serving brunch?”

  “You want … brunch?” The accent is more foreign than the face.

  I explain again, more slowly, and in simple Beechgrove-type words. With all this tra
ining, I could probably land a job there now.

  At last the attendant appears to understand, so I leave Norah in her hands, dash towards the nearest set of lifts, soar up to my room. I can hear that “Keno! Keno!” re-echoing in my head. Rule number one in Vegas – carry cash. Actually, cash may be a problem. The prize included some spending money as well as the free gambling chips, but it isn’t all that much, and now I’ve seen how greedy those machines are, and checked the minimum table-bets in our Gold Rush Gamblers’ Handbook, I’m feeling rather worried. We’re bound to win eventually, but it may take quite an outlay before we learn the ropes, get the hang of all the games. Before we left, Norah took out every penny she had in Beechgrove bank – a grand total of eleven pounds, six pence (her entire life savings). We’ve gone through more than half of that already, just buying a few items for the trip, and by the time I’d had a drink at LA airport …

  Our suite door is wide open. I assume the worst – a break-in – no chips or cash at all now. Then I remember that they’ve moved us and my stint as bride is over. Yes, our things have gone and a maid is clearing up. I dash back the way I’ve come, passing signs en route to the Temptation Room, Santa Claus Suite and Fantasy Boudoirs. I try to imagine what our new room’s like – a giant Players No.6 pack for a bed, perhaps, with filter-tip cork pillows?

  Before I find it, I pass a waterfall, an indoor waterfall, a great foaming chute of water cascading into a pool with floodlit rocks. There’s a mermaid on the rocks, a jet of milk-white water gushing out of both her stiff bronze nipples. She looks obscene, one hand pushing up her breasts, one fondling her own tail.

  I can still hear her thunderous breast-feeding as I insert my key into the carved wood door of suite number 436. It’s so grand, it’s almost frightening. There’s a downstairs salon carpeted in crimson and panelled in mahogany, with a spiral staircase leading to a balcony and other rooms upstairs. Fluted Grecian columns soar up to the ceiling, a cocktail bar beneath them with blood-red padded stools. The stained glass in the window fits neither garish modern bar nor Ancient Greece. It also cuts down any light. There are two huge velvet sofas in the same oppressive red, guarding a gold table with lions’ paws as its legs. I like red if it’s cheerful – pillar-boxes, robins – but this is a real gory red, reminding me of smashes on the motorway, abortions, operations, the first day of the curse. There’s more red round the walls, oblongs of red velvet inserted in the panelling. Each oblong frames a picture – gods again, but Victory Scenes this time; gods crowned with laurel wreaths reclining on Olympus, winning battles, deciding Destinies. My own nicotine-stained victory seems puny in comparison.

  I walk slowly up the spiral stairs, admire the little balcony with its gleaming golden rails, then push the door in front of me. The entire floor space is taken up by an Olympus-sized jacuzzi (red again), surrounded by a jungle of evil-looking ferns. Next door is the bathroom, which is mercifully pastel. The bath is raised, not sunken; raised on golden lions’ paws like the table in the sitting room, with golden lion-head taps. There must be a lot of spare lion parts around – unwanted tails and torsos.

  Two maids look up as I slip into the bedroom. Both are small and dark. One seems just a child still, the other sad and worn like the lavatory attendant. The elder one’s unpacking my old suitcase, untangling screwed-up tights and jeans, mopping up spilt face-cream from the jumble at the bottom.

  “Look, I’ll do that.” I wrest a shoe from her, blush when I see the state of it, the toe scuffed and stained with face-cream, the heel worn down. “I should have cleaned them, shouldn’t I? And found a mender’s. There wasn’t time. You see, we had to …”

  The woman backs away. She looks terrified, kneading her hands in a kind of silent prayer.

  “You understand?” I ask. “I’m just no good at packing. You’re meant to fold things, aren’t you, and put tissue in the folds and wrap shoes in plastic bags and …”

  Her face is taut with fear. She disappears a moment, returns with all my money, a pile of dollar bills and traveller’s cheques, which she thrusts into my hands. I can’t understand her flood of foreign words, but I can hear the pain in them, the near-hysteria. Does she imagine that I’m accusing her of stealing, about to call the management, demand she be immediately dismissed? I note the thin gold wedding band. Perhaps she has a brood of hungry children. That girl could be her eldest, sent out to work too early, to help pay all the bills. I could land up like that myself. Okay, so I’ve got three A levels, didn’t cut my schooling, but what jobs are there for untrained eighteen-year-olds with psychiatrists’ notes black-pencilling their life-reports? If I don’t strike lucky here, I could find myself making beds and cleaning loos in some second-rate hotel in the back streets of King’s Cross.

  “Look,” I say. “I know you didn’t steal it. It was a stupid place to hide it, anyway, when you’re bound to plump the cushions up. In fact, it only shows how well you do your job. I should have phoned reception, asked someone to come up and explain that wretched safe.”

  She doesn’t understand. She’s still pleading with me, begging, in that shrill and desperate jangle. I peel a crisp ten-dollar bill from the top of the pile. “Here”, I say. “Take this. God! I feel like a damned superior capitalist pig handing out sops to the exploited.” I’m talking to myself, but still out loud. They must assume it’s some mere variation on “Awful weather”, since the cringing terror has changed to cringing smiles. I hate myself. For staying in a $600-a-night suite when six hundred dollars would keep their entire (extended) family for a month or two; for acting like a Beechgrove Friend and feeling smug about it. I stuff the rest of my money in my handbag, have trouble shutting it. Now I’m doubly determined to win – just so I can stalk back here and hand them fifty thousand each. And a few cool thousand for that lavatory attendant. I’ll win so much, I’ll hire a helicopter and scatter hundred-dollar bills all along the Strip, marked “Maids and workers only. Hands off filthy rich, especially all psychiatrists and magistrates.”

  “Listen,” I say. “This could be the last day of your lives you ever make a bed or scrub a floor.”

  The smiles bob back again, though I suspect I could be saying “chicken soup and noodles” for all they understand. Actually, they must think I’m dismissing them, because they’re bowing to me, leaving, tripping down the stairs. Once they’re gone, I glance around the bedroom which I’ve hardly taken in yet, except the fact it’s red and grand again, and with so many mirrors, I can see at least a dozen Caroles. I’ve obviously been cloned and these are my reserves. I grin at them. They all grin back. I’m feeling stronger all the time. Twelve of me to win now.

  I’m also relieved to see twin beds instead of one huge double – though, once again, the language needs upgrading. “Beds” is fine for our narrow two-foot-six affairs at Beechgrove, with their iron frames and thin and lumpy mattresses. These are thrones, or altars; raised up on sort of platform-things, and made even more imposing with velvet hangings, carved and gilded wood surrounds, and crowned with swanky shields. Winners’ beds.

  I close the door, walk slowly down the stairs again. Winners all around me in those gloating gods. Don’t I deserve a laurel crown? I won that competition out of thirty thousand entrants. That’s not bad. And I plan to go on winning.

  I touch my finger to Zeus’s wreath as he sits preening on his throne on the top peak of Olympus. “Bring me luck,” I pray.

  Chapter Nine

  I make straight for the champagne. Winners need fuelling first. The crowds are even thicker in the restaurant now, which reminds me of Wembley on Cup Final day combined with Harrods’s sale. The bubbly shows no sign of giving out, though a chain of empty cannisters are lying like beached whales. Once my glass is full, I heap my plate, concentrating this time on the array of Chinese foods. I hesitate a moment over Dim Sum (dumplings) and deep-fried prawn balls, both oozing grease and calories. But a glance around the tables reassures me. I’m actually quite dangerously thin, at least compared with most of the wo
men here. A party of seven blue-rinsed matrons (whose combined weight must top the hundred-stone mark) are gorging cakes and pastries, fat fingers scooping cream off treble chins; spare flesh dangling from vast upper-arms or oozing over chair-backs. And it’s not just the women. The man beside me looks eight months gone with twins. I feel very frail and puny in comparison, help myself to five prawn balls (the pregnant man takes eight); some crispy duck, sweet and sour pork, and Hung Shao Yu because I like the name.

  Our table is still miraculously free, though there’s no sign of Norah yet. Did that attendant understand, or is she marching Toomey to the health spa or solarium, or booking her a private gambling lesson? I put my plate down, remove a Keno ticket from the rack. I’m here to win, not worry. If Norah can negotiate the miles of Beechgrove corridor, then a few yards of Gold Rush passage shouldn’t faze her. She’s always slow, in any case, likes to take her time.

  I stare down at my ticket. Can that flimsy bit of nothing, badly printed on cheap and dingy paper, really change my luck? Yes. I must have faith. The Bow-Tie Man said Luck is a great lady who rewards those who believe in her. I crayon “$2” in the upper right-hand corner, try to decide which numbers to pick out. Perhaps I’ll concentrate on ones – 1, 11, 21, and so on. After all, I’m on my own, basically, so I’d better learn to like it, look after number one, as Jon’s mother used to say. Jon … I chew my crayon. I wish I could forget him. Okay, I know he wasn’t right for me, but at least he made me real. I existed in his head (and bed), as well as just in mine. I tear the ticket up, take another. Who wants ones? Lonely feeble failures.

  This time I mark the twos – 2, 12, 22, etcetera – Jon and Carole, Virgil and Carole, Zeus and Carole – and I up my stake as well – five dollars instead of two. Risks are part of winning, and the sooner I win, the more we’ll have to spend for the rest of the ten days. It’s economic sense. I take another ticket – one for Norah. If the numbers are drawn just as she returns, she may feel out of things. She’s been a loser all her life. Time she won, or at least participated. I decide on threes for her. This is my third ticket and threes are always lucky. I cross through 3, 13, 33 … No – not 13 – I score that out again, continue with 43, 53 … Woah! Not too many. I think you win more cash with fewer numbers. Actually, I’m not that clear about the rules. They say Keno’s very simple, but by the time I’ve read the (so-called) explanatory leaflet in the rack, I’m totally confused, not just by odds and numbers (and combinations of numbers), but also by special deals such as the Catch-All Rate, the High-Five Special, and the Fifteen-Dollar Combination ticket, which looks the best, since it’s starred in red and printed extra large. I call the Keno girl, ask her to explain it.