Twenty-Four Hours

by Margaret Mahy

  “… and don’t think I won’t know!” the voice was saying. “I’m watching you all.”

  “And I know about you, too. We’re closing in,” said Ellis the actor, his voice contemptuous and steely. “Bring that baby back because, face it, it’s you yourself you’ll be saving.”

  There was no reply, except an indrawn breath followed by a soft, concluding click. Ellis replaced the receiver and looked at Leona.

  “You sounded as if you meant it,” she said in wonder. “But we’re not closing in, are we? We haven’t any idea.”

  Her nose had begun to run a little, and she rubbed the back of her forefinger under her nostrils with a gesture so simple and childish that Ellis, who had no words with which to comfort her, put his arms around her. Leona responded by embracing him with a tumultuous hug, pressing herself against him so hard it was as if she longed to crush herself out of existence by melting into him.

  There in the lobby of the Land-of-Smiles they kissed and, for Ellis, Shelley’s distant wailing, the horrible phone calls, his mother’s damaged car, and his own unfamiliar head – all the concussion of recent events – faded away. There was nothing and no one except Leona, whose soft mouth was sucking just a little at his, as if she had no breath of her own and must steal any he had to offer.

  But then, at last, she gave a small sigh, and their embrace was over. She let her arms fall and tried to step back from him. Ellis would not let her go. Leona leaned away from him, her expression suddenly cautious. Ellis knew he must seize the moment, so he kissed her again, trying to consume her but feeling increasingly consumed himself. Her mouth moved under his again which was thrilling until he understood, with dismay, that she was actually laughing.

  “I must be mad,” she said, when she could. “Nice kiss, though,” she added quickly. “Thanks!”

  Ellis did not want her to say anything, but simply to press herself against him, sealing herself to him forever.

  “You’re …” he began, “you’re wonderful,” he ended lamely, knowing this was not going to make her look at him with new passion.

  “Ellis, you just don’t know me,” said Leona, speaking as indulgently as if he were a child who must have something carefully explained to him.

  “Oh, yes, I do!” said Ellis, struggling to talk reasonably. “I mean, I haven’t known you for long – but I do know you for all that. It’s as if I’ve known you forever.”

  He spoke in a voice which sounded exactly like his but which really belonged to the secret actor in his head. Yet somehow, now, when he most desperately needed it, the voice was failing him. With every passing moment Leona’s softness and her need of consolation were transforming into distance, and even a little hostility.

  “So, remind me about myself, since you know so much,” she said, still smiling, though by now her smile was shot through with mockery. “How old am I, for example?”

  “Twenty,” he said confidently. “More or less!” he added.

  “More,” she replied, still smiling. “I’m twenty-three.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ellis declared, hiding a little flicker of dismay at finding she was fully six years older than he was.

  “And how old are you?” she asked him next.

  “Twenty,” he replied firmly.

  “Oh, no, you’re not,” she said. “Jackie’s twenty, and you were a class or two behind him at school, Ursa says. You have to be younger than Jackie.”

  “But it doesn’t matter,” Ellis insisted, irritated partly by these irrelevancies, but even more by a certain childishness which he could hear creeping into his actor’s voice. “Age doesn’t matter. Look! I know this!” he cried, trying to make himself sound convincing by speaking more loudly. “I mean, I’ve had a picture of you – a sort of vision of you – all my life. Well …” to his horror he found himself floundering “… not of you exactly, but of the idea of you …” He was saying too much, but he couldn’t stop.

  “OK! OK!” Leona struck in, flinging up her hands, palms outwards. “Listen, Ellis! On a day like today real life just crumbles away. There’s only one thing that matters to me – one real, main thing – and that’s Shelley. But the fact is, I don’t know you, and you don’t know me. And even if you did, you probably wouldn’t want to. For example, would you like me if we’d met at my work, say, on an ordinary working day?”

  Ellis stared at her. He felt she had not understood a word he said. He knew he was not understanding her.

  “I mean, suppose this was an ordinary day?” she persisted. “What would you be doing?” As she spoke, she tried to step back from him, but Ellis clung to her. “When you’re not driving crazy friends up over the hills, passing cars on the wrong side of the road and otherwise helping people whose lives are falling to bits because they’ve been in bits for years and years – what do you do?”

  But Ellis did not do anything – yet. He could not bring himself to confess this to Leona.

  “University,” he said quickly. “Until the end of next year,” he added. Leona sighed and turned her face away, so he was forced to kiss the skin beside her ear. “I’ll look after you,” he promised her in a low voice, then added “Leo, I’ll never let you go.” It seemed to be the truest thing he could say, yet even as he said it knew it sounded like a line from a tired old song. He wished he could try again, with a slightly different lyric.

  “University! Great!” Leona replied, in a tone Ellis hated, for, by now she was sounding like some sort of an aunt. “Me – I’ve got a proper job,” she said, and then added, “Sometimes it frightens people. But I think it’s pure and central. I’m an undertaker at Dommett & Christie. If we hadn’t lost Shelley I’d be there right now, working with David Dommett – David, who you met this morning – laying out the dead.”

  At her words, Ellis was abruptly flooded with an inner picture of Simon, lying in his coffin, wearing his favourite clothes, and that final expression. Every cell in his brain seemed to explode with this single image and his arms did not so much fall to his sides as spring away from Leona.

  “See? That didn’t hurt,” she said, stepping back once, stepping back twice, and then retreating still further. “It doesn’t take long for, ‘I’ll never let you go’ to turn into, ‘I can’t bear to touch you’, does it?”

  “No! Wait!” stammered Ellis. “It was just the surprise.”

  “There’s truth in surprise,” Leona replied.

  Ellis found the clichés of masterly rapture had completely deserted him.

  “I was working on an old man yesterday,” Leona went on reflectively. “Heart-attack case. We put him on a stainless steel bench and stripped off the clothes he had died in. There were no rings … oh, but there were his glasses. I did inventory them, though they were broken. Then I began to spray the disinfectant …” She sniffed her fingers. “He farted a bit. Did you know that dead people fart?”

  Ellis made an inarticulate sound.

  “Are you disgusted?” asked Leona. “Do you think that’s bad-taste information? But farting’s one of the things people do. Babies do. So do people aged seventeen. Death is mysterious, but it’s ordinary, too. Ordinary!”

  Unexpectedly, she took a step towards him, and to his horror he felt himself step back. She might have been the one who inventoried Simon’s glasses, he was thinking, before he could stop himself. It might have been Leona’s slender fingers, the fingers that had curved so warmly inside his own palm only a short time ago, that had given Simon that enigmatic expression, so tentative, yet so final. And now he understood the odd references to Leona’s work that Fox and Jackie had made earlier in the day. “Leo’s good at improving people,” Fox had cried. Perhaps Leona had improved Simon.

  “Every day,” she went on, “I disinfect dead people, drain the purges – that’s what we call fluid that seeps out of the lungs and stomach. Every day I soak cotton wool in autopsy gel and …”

  “Don’t go on about it,” cried Ellis, imagining Simon being purged and disinfected.


  Leona spoke sweetly and coolly. “I used a bit of make-up on the old man. Sometimes the make-up we use has lead in it, but he was beyond being worried by things like that.”

  “Don’t go on!” exclaimed Ellis, still thinking of Simon.

  Leona looked at him calmly. “I like my work,” she said. “I chose it.”

  “Yes!” said Ellis feebly. “Yes, I know someone’s got to do it.” And then, because he couldn’t help it, he burst out, “But … but you don’t have to do that stuff, do you? I mean, you, you’re so …”

  “So what?” asked Leona, looking at him attentively, like a teacher listening for a particular word to crop up in answer to a question.

  “So beautiful!” muttered Ellis.

  It was the wrong word. Leona turned away from him, sighing and saying impatiently, “Do you think only ugly people should look after the dead?”

  “No! No, of course not!” Ellis cried, furious with himself and with her, too, for what felt like trickery. He longed to crush the distance between them out of existence once more, but found he couldn’t bear to touch her.

  “I do my work day after day,” said Leona. “And there, at the end, I try to give people back to themselves … to their families, of course, but to themselves first. Right now, all I can think of is Shelley, but, since the subject has come up, I’ll tell you this. I think my work is noble work.”

  And she smiled at him, still looking beautiful, yet so alien that Ellis turned and ran from the Land-of-Smiles, humiliated by a horror he despised himself for feeling, but which was too deep and ancient to be resisted.

  1.10 pm – Saturday

  His mother’s car, no longer quite the car it had been this time yesterday, was waiting patiently. It had not only been defiled, but had been driven in a fashion that would have horrified his mother. Ellis touched its bonnet with brief compassion before opening the door and scrambling in. As he felt in his pocket for the car keys, he screwed up his face at the smell.

  Staring out blankly, he found himself meeting, through a narrow slot of space between the buildings in front of him, the hard gaze of Phipps – the painted Phipps. There was something quizzical in the way the painting regarded him and, out of the blue, Ellis found himself remembering the real Phipps – the one who had spoken to him earlier in the day. He remembered how he had hurried past, anxious not to let Jackie, Leona and Ursa cross the road without him, and how Phipps, watching him go by, had said … what was it he had said, exactly?

  Sitting there like a stale and weary shell of himself, Ellis pondered on the knowing and secretive glance he and Phipps had accidentally exchanged, and seemed to be exchanging once again. He recalled, with great distinctness, a certain taunting challenge in Phipps’s expression and suddenly felt certain that his smile had contained some kind of coded message.

  “Lost something?” That is what Phipps had asked him, but it was not so much the words as the voice in which they had been spoken that now troubled Ellis. For if he could sit there in front of the Land-of-Smiles and see the painted Phipps looking back at him through a narrow gap in intervening walls, might not the real Phipps be able to climb up to some rooftop perch (up above Legges NiteClub, say) and watch all comings and goings from the Land-of-Smiles?

  Why would he, though? Ellis asked himself scornfully. He had had enough … he had just had enough!

  He had partied hard, and over-partied. He had driven a car in a Hollywood kind of car chase. He had fallen in love and been rejected. Death had confounded him, not with its terror – he could have accepted terror – but by revealing itself as mundane. He had made many mistakes, and certainly he did not want to make yet another. He’d had enough. More than enough. Why set himself up for more? He would go home immediately.

  Shaking his head, Ellis half-turned the car key, then paused, frowning down at the fingers still clamped to the key. This time he was sitting in the car on his own. He was not hurrying like a well-trained dog after Jackie, Ursa and Leona. No one was shouting instructions at him. This time he was free to think for himself, to think as precisely as he could about the mocking way Phipps had asked his simple question, and even more about the expression he had worn, and the way an unstated knowingness had somehow oozed out through the enigmatic blue spirals on cheek and chin. Ellis felt certain that there had been something suggested – intimated – though nothing had been declared.

  He thought briefly of his mother once more. By now she would be worried – very worried – at not hearing from him. And what would she say when she saw the door of her car? What would she say when she saw his naked head?

  Yet how could he leave the Land-of-Smiles without knowing what had happened to Shelley? How could he tear himself out of the story when he had been in it from the beginning and might even have picked up a clue that nobody else had?

  So, at last, Ellis climbed out of the car, locked it once more, dropped the key in his pocket and set off wearily, annoyed with himself because, though he couldn’t believe his own woolly hunch, he couldn’t let it go, either. He jogged down the right-of-way, down Garden Lane and back into Moncrieff Street, bound for Sepulchre Tattoos.

  “It’s probably shut,” he said aloud to himself as he jogged. Leona’s recent conversation ricocheted around in the back of his head. Not her exact words – he found himself shrinking from remembering her exact words – but something of their energy and impact. He ran past the health shop, past Kurl-Up & Dye, and past the Book Exchange, all locked so tightly it was as if they were sealed shut. Across the road, people were still discovering that it was never too late for breakfast, while others made for The Grenadier Tavern. Ellis felt, with surprise, and a slightly sad exhilaration, that these shops (which had once seemed nothing more than stage props) were, nevertheless, a true neighbourhood. Indeed, they had somehow become his neighbourhood.

  He paused by the traffic lights outside the door to Legges NiteClub. Almost as if they had arranged to meet at this very moment and on this very spot, Phipps came to the door under the sign that read, Sepulchre Tattoos. Their eyes met. Phipps’s gaze felt almost like a physical touch as it ran over Ellis’s newly-bare head.

  “Tattooing business slow?” asked Ellis, and was pleased to hear that his secret acting voice had regained its power. Not that he had set out to sound powerful – merely ironic, casual and unimpressed.

  “It’s been steady,” said Phipps. “There’s a lull right now. Might be busy later on. People get impulsive after a few drinks. Ever thought of having a tattoo yourself? Something to set off the new hair style?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it,” said Ellis, remembering that Phipps liked to put his mark on the residents of the Moncrieff Street village, but determined he was not going to have a go on him.

  “Saw Monty wandering by a little bit earlier,” Phipps said. “Find the kid?”

  “No!” said Ellis. “She’s still missing. Actually, I thought – I just had an idea from something I remembered earlier – that you might have some clue where she might be.”

  “Dunno about that,” said Phipps. Then … “Well, maybe! Not a real clue! More of a hunch.” Then he fell silent, staring at Ellis, as if he were waiting for him to make the next move. Ellis knew that he could get no more information from Phipps unless he made the right move.

  “If I came in … I mean, how long would it take to have a tattoo done?” he asked, tentatively. Phipps’s map of a face seemed to ease into a slightly different configuration. “A little one!” added Ellis quickly.

  “Thirty minutes, more or less,” said Phipps. “Do you want to see what’s available?” He gestured at his door and then vanished through it. Ellis followed him.

  “If you know where she is …” he began.

  Phipps shook his head.

  “I don’t!” he said. “No idea!”

  “Come on!” Ellis begged. “They’re desperate at the Land-of-Smiles.”

  “I’d have told them if I knew anything,” Phipps said. “I’d have said.”

 
The room Ellis had entered was lined from floor to ceiling with laminated posters displaying a whole range of small, disjointed pictures, and he felt as if he himself were one of them – a cartoon figure fallen from a disorganised comic strip. These pictures, these fragments of design, these bony, hero-faces, these leaping, plunging action-men, were somebody’s art.

  “Take a good look around!” invited Phipps expansively. Behind the counter a middle-aged woman with long, rippling red hair smiled at him with such amused complicity it was as if they had agreed to share some joke at the expense of the world. Ellis wished he could be sure just what the joke might happen to be.

  There on the wall behind the woman was a sheet displaying Maori tattoos. Beside it, there was a series of pictures of a whole regiment of comic-book girls, pouting as they tossed long blonde hair and thrust large, rigid breasts towards the observer.

  “Are you offering to tell me something useful if I have a tattoo?” he asked bluntly.

  “No,” said Phipps. “I probably don’t know anything useful. But work brings out the old woman in me. I gossip about all sorts of things.”

  “He does, too,” said the red-headed woman, laughing as if Phipps had said something witty.

  “Suppose we’re halfway through the tattooing and then suddenly I realise you’re having me on,” Ellis said.

  Phipps shrugged. “Live dangerously!” he suggested. “You’d have the tattoo, so at least it wouldn’t be time wasted. It’ll match up with that haircut.”

  “Be coordinated,” said the woman.

  Beyond the images of the girls was a chart filled with skulls, some embraced by curling vines, and some imposed on racing cars, or Harley-Davidson motorbikes. Others had lightning bolts shooting out of their hollow eyes or were wreathed in flowing hair.