Thurston kissed them on both cheeks when we left and they didn’t feel the stubble underneath his smooth skin, didn’t notice the bitten-down nails behind the false ones.
“I can’t believe you just did that,” I said.
“No big deal,” he said. “Everyone here is faking it.”
“I suppose.”
“How the hell,” he asked me, taking my arm on the stairs, “does anyone walk in these shoes?”
We stopped at a restroom round the corner from our apartment. He’d stashed his clothes there, his baggy black T-shirt and ancient jeans. When he came out looking like Thurston again, I thought he was a hundred times more beautiful than Charlie, but I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t say so.
He grinned. “They loved me, right?”
“You were perfect,” I told him. “How could they not?”
“Jeez,” he said, “your parents are easy to please.”
Charlotte didn’t appear again. A while later, Hannah and Lowell asked me what happened to her.
I was reading about a sinkhole that had opened up out of nowhere underneath a man’s house and swallowed his bed with him in it.
“I haven’t seen her,” I said.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“I get it,” I told her. “Too good for me, right?”
“Such great potential,” Hannah said, like she’d know.
“I wanted to get her parents over at the weekend,” Lowell said.
I suppose they wanted to believe I’d had a friend with connections, that it might almost make me somebody.
“She died,” I told them, and I didn’t care if they bought it or not. “She moved away.”
Lowell’s face hovered somewhere around shock at the further thinning of his address book, and Hannah said, “Well, which is it?”
“Both,” I said. “But not in that order.”
They didn’t bother to argue
Gullible works both ways. Tricking people requires their full co-operation.
“We’re lazy,” Thurston once told me. “We’re happy to have the wool pulled over our eyes, because everything else is just plain hard work.”
I call my mother Hannah because she told me to. When I was about seven, she said it was time to stop being a baby and start using her proper name.
“Otherwise,” she said, turning to enjoy her reflection from behind, “the older you get, the more you’ll age me.”
She is a beauty. You’d have to give her that. Tall and dark and glossy, like some kind of racehorse, with legs and curves that people feel the need to stare at in the street. We are not one bit alike.
I am plain-looking, skinny and flat-chested and small, and it suits me. I live in thrift-shop jeans and secondhand sweaters because they come in under budget and under the radar and they’re just easy. I cut my hair short like a boy for the same reason. I’ve banked myself plenty of time and money by never minding too much what I look like. I think my day is about four hours longer than Hannah’s without all the grooming in it. It’s really quite liberating, not giving a shit. What am I missing out on exactly – make-up, brand anxiety and crippling self-doubt about shoes? Big deal. Poor me. If I was in charge, mirrors would be for making sure there’s nothing stuck in your teeth or sticking out of your nose or tucked into your trousers, nothing more. I’m not likely to start staring into one and wishing I was different.
I used to wonder if that’s why Thurston chose me, because I was unremarkable, because I’d be useful to him that way. Every hustler needs an invisible friend. He laughed at me when I asked him.
We were making him a mask out of old, broken sunglasses, sticking the smashed lenses on to a plain latex face, so that when people looked at him, all they would see was repetitions of themselves.
“I like you, Iris,” he said, holding it up in front of his face, pulling the strap to the back of his head, “because you are you.”
I was fourteen. I’d known him on and off for two years and he was the only thing I had worth knowing. It was the nicest thing he could have said to me. My smile just about exploded, reflected at hundreds of angles by his mirrored mosaic of a face.
Hannah and Lowell think I am determined to be ugly. They think my attitude is aimed at them, out of spite. It’s beyond them that somebody would go a whole day without looking in the mirror. They wouldn’t dream of leaving the house without a layer of light-reflecting foundation and an accessory with a three-figure price tag. Looking good is the actual bedrock of their moral code. Presentation is ethics to them, which is why they bought me the dress. Hannah threw it down on my bed like a gauntlet, this loud patterned thing with a belt. I avoided it, walked around it like you would a patch of vomit in the street. I took a shower, pulled on yesterday’s clothes and went downstairs for breakfast.
It was Saturday, the weekend after Hannah called Ernest and agreed to bring me (I think) for a price. Since then, you could see they’d been shopping. Lowell was pacing the kitchen in a stiff pale suit that made him look like a rectangle, like a man in a cardboard box. Hannah had on a mink silk top and a skirt so tight I wasn’t sure she could move. I think she had to cross her legs the whole time to fit into it. They looked like they’d just stepped out of a shop window. I wondered how many hours the two of them had spent fantasising about the scene at Ernest’s deathbed and the muted, elegant, expensive clothing they could suddenly afford to wear. I wanted to put a match to the hem of her skirt and set it alight, drop a hot coal down the neck of his jacket and watch it swallow up the fabric like a black hole.
“Morning,” I said.
Hannah leaned against the kitchen counter, nursing a cigarette for breakfast. My mother often smokes instead of eating. She’d sell you a diet book about it if someone would let her. Her blown smoke bloomed in the bands of sunlit air that striped the kitchen, vanishing in its shadows, expanding to fill the room.
“Kiddo,” Lowell said, like every morning, in his faked transatlantic drawl. “Nice of you to show up.”
“Where’s the dress?” Hannah asked, and I poured myself some cornflakes before I told her it was still in the wrapper.
“Aren’t you going to wear it?”
“Nope. You should definitely take it back.”
Hannah pointed at me with her smoking hand and an inch of ash fell soundlessly on to the soft suede toe of her brand-new shoe.
“Well you can’t go like that.”
“Why not?” I looked down at myself. “I’m always like this.”
“Lowell,” she said, still pointing. “Talk to her.”
Lowell’s jacket was too starched and too big, like the cardboard box was trying to swallow him whole.
“It’s a great dress,” he said, “really on-trend,” as if his opinion mattered, like that would swing it. He talked like one of the girls at my old high school. I thought he’d fit right in there, simpering over labels in the hallways, bitching in the lunch queue about boys.
“So you wear it,” I told him with my mouth full. “Help yourself.”
“Just once,” Hannah said through gritted teeth.
“Just once what?” I asked her, but I knew the answer. She wanted me to slot seamlessly into the picture-perfect lifestyle she had filling the space in her head, to stop being difficult and strange, to dress up and shut up and play along. We stared at each other. She looked away first. I always win that game.
Lowell had already given up and gone back to his magazine. There were lots of people in it he’d stood quite close to over the years. Things were happening. Men more successful than him were starting to lose their hair.
“Let her wear what she likes, Hannah,” he said. “A dying man is going to have other things on his mind.”
My mother put her hands together in prayer at the word ‘dying’ and looked up past the burst radiator stains on the ceiling.
“God knows,” she said, “we could all do with a bit of good luck right now.”
I asked her where she thought God filed that kind
of prayer, the please-harm-others-for-my-benefit kind, and she ignored me. “In a box marked DAMNED probably,” I said, “in a whole archive called Be Careful What You Wish For.”
“What do you care?” she asked me. “You’re an atheist, aren’t you? You don’t believe in God.”
“Humanist,” I said. “There’s a world of difference.”
Hannah lit a new cigarette off the old one so she was holding two. She said, all deadpan, like it was the last thing in the world she was really thinking, “You must explain it to me sometime.”
Thurston made a God box once. It was like a mailbox, with a slot, and he wrote on it PRAYERS ANSWERED. You were supposed to write your prayer and post it. That was the idea. He left it for four days on the corner of Westwood and La Conte, near the University. When he went back there was some trash in it, a couple of crushed cans, a banana peel and half a bagel. There was some angry stuff about blasphemers and the wrath of the Lord. And mostly there were wish lists, money troubles, exam results, job opportunities, and a couple of lonely hearts. My favourite one was written in pencil on a square of pink paper – THAT THIS BOX IS FOR REAL.
My cornflakes were stale and chewy. The milk was on the turn. New outfits aside, it hadn’t been a good month money-wise, again. I knew that’s why we were doing this. Hannah had slot-machine eyes, especially now she knew Ernest was on his way out. She was desperate to get there and clean up. Beneath the surface she trembled with it, like a greyhound on the starting blocks, like a size zero bull at a gate.
“When did you last see him?” I asked.
“When did he abandon us? I don’t know. Thirteen years? Fourteen? Maybe twelve. When was it, Lowell?”
Lowell shrugged. “Beats me.”
I pushed my bowl away. “And why are you all dressed up, exactly? What’s with that?”
“We’ve got to look like we’re doing well,” she said, pinching a strand of tobacco from the surface of her tongue without smudging her lipstick, the same smashed cherry colour as her nails. “I don’t want him thinking we need his money.”
As if a new outfit could do that. As if a throw-up dress or a stomach-bug brown suit would hide our flock of overdrafts, a good silk blouse erase the sly and bottomless need from our eyes.
“Why do you care what he knows?” I said.
“We’re going in there with our heads held high,” said Lowell.
“And coming out with our hands full, right? To the victor the spoils?”
I didn’t want a thing from Ernest. I didn’t want to know him. I thought they should go without me. I had my eye on a clean conscience and the place to myself. I’d exercise control, build a fire in the grate and feed it kindling so it stayed small but never went out. I’d write letters to Thurston at all the addresses I could think of – the bar where Uncle Mac drank, the record store he liked in Echo Park, everyone at my old apartment building. I’d track him down so I could tell him what had happened, where on Planet Earth I was. I’d leave the lights off and the blinds down, be nothing but a glowing, empty house. I wasn’t interested in helping Ernest feel better about himself. I didn’t have room to play suck-up to my sick old stranger of a father for what he might be leaving me in his will.
“Do I have to come with you?” I said.
Hannah smashed out her dead cigarette on a plate like it had done something to offend her. She pulled on the other one so hard her cheeks caved in and I thought she’d smoke the whole thing down in one breath. She saw me, and I knew what she was thinking. Gone were the days when Little Miss Arson could be left alone in the house. There wasn’t enough insurance money in the world that would pay for that.
“Yes, you have to come,” she said. “It’s you he’s interested in.”
“Oh yeah?” I said. “Since when?”
Her fingers drummed hard on the worktop and she declined, as usual, to answer the question. “It’s not optional. We’re not negotiating.”
“I’m a cone in your parking space,” I said. “That’s it, isn’t it? I’m a marker on your property.”
“Think of it as a holiday,” Lowell suggested, the shoulders of his suit rising up for no good reason to meet his ears, his right cuff already streaked with butter. “You can explore the garden. You can bring your bike.”
I looked at him. “What am I? Eight?”
“God forbid we’re there long enough for a bike ride,” Hannah said.
Lowell stuck with it. “You can walk, or swim in the river. Maybe he’s got a boat.”
“An outward-bound holiday in a dying man’s house?” I said. “Nice. Sensitive.”
Hannah smiled coldly at me.
“Let’s be honest,” I told her. “You’re going fishing and I’m the bait.”
“It’s remote,” she said. “It’s isolated. He’s got acres of land, and woodland. It’s a great place for a fire. You could light ten of the damn things out there and nobody would even notice. You’re coming and you’re going to like it.”
I didn’t look up. I kept my eyes on my cereal bowl. “Who else is going to be there?”
“Just us,” Hannah said. “Ernest’s been on his own for years.”
“How do you know?” I said.
She bent towards her reflection in the side of the toaster. It was warped and squat and gauzy. “I just do,” she said, baring her teeth to check for stains. “Trust me.”
My chair legs scraped loudly against the floor as I got up. “Why the hell would I start doing that?”
I rinsed my bowl in the sink. Through the window, I could see next-door’s cat lurking on the fence by the bird feeder, waiting to take one out mid-flight with a swipe of its paw.
It was the start of the summer. I had plans.
Hannah played with her lighter, grinding the flint back and forward with her thumb, holding the gas down, looking right at me over the flame.
“Is he at death’s door?” I said, and (may God forgive me), “Will it be quick?”
“Cross fingers,” she smiled, and Lowell got up to start packing the car.
We drove towards Ernest on a bright clear day. He said he woke up to the dry powder blue of the sky and he knew we were coming. The Severn Bridge looked like the entrance to Heaven in an old film I’d seen about a pilot who’d rather not die yet, thanks all the same, because he’s just met a nice lady and only recently started to enjoy himself. The service station on the other side where we stopped for coffee looked like the mouth of Hell.
Later, much later, I told Ernest this. We were playing cards. He said I played poker like a professional. Apparently, I shuffle like a croupier.
“And by the way,” he told me, “it’s only in a film you can decide not to die because your life has taken a sudden turn for the better.”
I smiled, and kissed him on the forehead, and fanned the whole deck of cards out with one snap of my hand.
It was Thurston who showed me how to handle cards. He knew hundreds of tricks. He had this one where the card you chose would end up ripped in half in your back pocket and he wouldn’t ever tell me how it was done. “Magic” was all he said whenever I asked him. He said his Uncle Mac taught him but I knew that was a lie because I once saw Mac try to shuffle a deck and it was like he was doing it with his feet. By then I knew that Uncle Mac wasn’t even his uncle, just some guy he’d met at a hostel, just another stray like me.
I thought about Thurston in the car all the way to Ernest’s place. I remembered the look on people’s faces when he pulled that card trick, the wonder, like he’d given them just what they’d been hoping for, like they were kids again just for a second, until they leant in towards him and said, “How?”
Partly, I was glad he’d never told me. It would have ruined it, probably, to know.
Four hours after we left home, we drove into Ernest’s garden like tourists, suitcases piled up in the back, shopping bags and a black collapsible bicycle crowding at the windows to get out.
“If he’s dead already, it all stays in the car,” Hannah said.
I opened my window, which was tinted and stole the colour from everything, like driving in black and white. The house was a warm golden yellow in the sun, tall with dark latticed windows and narrow brick chimneystacks. Lowell turned the car on the gravel drive and it scuttled over the stones like a roach. To our left was a copper beech hedge, the colour of old coins, to our right a view of the vivid green garden through an iron gate in the wall. The wind moved in the leaves and I could hear birdsong, and music coming from somewhere inside. I tried to picture someone lying upstairs in a darkened room, listening to a violin concerto, reeking of decay and disinfectant while we swooped in to stake our claim. I wondered if he heard the growl of our tyres on his gravel, the beat of our wings.
“Look out, Ernest,” I said. “Here come the vultures.”
Lowell braked too hard and the bike caught me on the side of the head with a punch.
“Ouch!” I said.
Hannah retouched her make-up, pressed her lips together. “Be quiet, Iris. If you haven’t got anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all.”
I wanted to ask if, under those rules, any of us might ever speak again, but I kept my mouth shut.
Ernest wasn’t dead, not yet. He wasn’t on his doorstep to meet us either. Lowell brought the car to a halt and frowned into his rear-view mirror. Birds scattered and resettled at the tops of trees and the front door stayed shut, as if nobody was in. Hannah balled her hands into fists and took an in-breath that didn’t seem to end. Lowell passed her a paper bag and she breathed into it in quick little sips and flapped her spare hand back and forth in front of her face.
“Are you hyperventilating?” I asked. I’d never seen anyone do it in real life before.
She let out a high-pitched whine like a steam kettle.
“Stay calm,” Lowell told her, reshaping his Superman kiss-curl with one finger. “We’re on the home straight.”
“Yeah,” I said, “maybe he’s kicking it right this minute. Cling to that hope.”
Truth is, I felt pretty high-pitched myself. My head was full of white noise and I couldn’t sort one sound from another, like everything was demanding to be heard at once, like I’d been turned inside out and exposed to the loud air. I don’t suppose I expected to feel normal. It’s not every day you get to meet the dad you never had.
Fire Colour One Page 3
