The foyer was not designed to entertain loiterers. Only a devoted narcissist would sit there, Julia thought, caught between Valentin’s sardonic gaze and the glassy reflection of the plate-glass windows that gave on to East 53rd Street. The set of revolving doors at the entrance seemed frozen into disuse and she had had to pick up the semen-coloured plastic phone on the wall outside to get in. Valentin had done the honours, bowing slightly as she hauled her suitcase inside and he made his stately way back to his post. Moving in from the street was like travelling back in time, Julia realised, for whatever renovations had been made to the Nathaniel, formerly the Alhambra, over the years, seemed only to extend to the frontage – the aluminium windows, the tinted glass. The further you travelled into the Nathaniel the more old-fashioned – or decrepit – it became.
There were admonitory notices everywhere. On a silver pod inside the door – ALL VISITORS MUST REPORT TO THE FRONT DESK. A noticeboard beside the reception warned guests not to bring male visitors to their rooms, not to ask for quarters, not to play loud music, not to cook after 10 p.m., not to drink alcohol in the corridors, not to hog the public phone in the foyer and never to ask for credit. The only positive sign was pasted over the lift buttons and scrawled in red marker. PRESS ONCE, it said as if the denizens of the Nathaniel needed directions for even the most basic tasks. But even in that Julia felt there was warning. What would happen if you were so bold as to press twice, she wondered.
Between the lifts, a Christmas tree stood. It was the only concession the Nathaniel had made to the season. It was an artificial tree, spindly, white, three-legged and it looked as if it had fallen victim to some terrible wasting disease. The silver baubles on it were frosted with white, bits of which shed like flaky skin on the worn maroon carpet which was placed underneath as if expressly to catch the dandruff.
‘I’ll need to keep your passport, Miss Fortune,’ Valentin said. A smile hovered on his lips, but he suppressed it. ‘For registration purposes, you understand. I can have it back to you later this evening.’ He eyed her speculatively. ‘I’m on all night.’
‘Okay,’ she replied, though usually she did not like to be parted from her passport.
That time on the package holiday in Portugal had taught her a lesson. She had left it, just like this, at the hotel desk and had forgotten to pick it up the next morning. She and Eric had travelled over a hundred miles before she realised she didn’t have it. Eric had been furious.
‘Jesus, Jules,’ he swore as he did a dangerously daredevil U-turn in the hired car, a rackety Fiat. The car had seen better days. The passenger door was arthritically stiff and there were several scrapes and dents on the bodywork as if it had been used as a getaway in a previous existence. Eric took his rage out on the gearstick, and for a moment Julia had a cartoonish vision of it coming away in his hand. ‘You’d forget your head if it wasn’t tied on to you.’
Eric had the happy knack of getting everything about Julia wrong. If only she could have lost her head … But now there was no Eric and what difference did it make if she had no passport?
‘And you’ll be staying how many nights, Miss?’ Valentin had stopped using her full name, she noticed.
‘Three,’ Julia replied, ‘I’ve booked for three.’
In case she lost her nerve.
Julia gingerly pressed the lift button. While she had been at the desk, the two lifts had stood with their doors eerily agape though there was no one inside and no one had emerged from them. The doors kept making nervous forays as if they ached for closure but some neurotic hesitancy prevented them. Then suddenly, as she approached, both doors clamped shut as if they had drawn courage from one another, and both lifts whirred into action in answer to some higher calling. After a wait of several minutes – during which she contemplated pressing again for fear she had not pressed hard enough, except that the notice made her think better of it – Lift No. 1 opened, empty of course, and Julia stepped in, dragging her case behind her. Her reflection in the mirrored walls looked grey and emaciated. Her hair was flat and greasy, though she had washed it only that morning, half a world away. Under the glare of the lift’s fluorescence, she felt twitchy as if she were giving off static. After all the contraptions she had gone through at the airport she firmly believed that as soon as she jabbed one of the buttons inside the lift an alarm would go off or a red light would flash over her head and give her away. But after several false starts, the lift lumbered into action. The doors opened clamorously several times on the ascent, unbidden, it would seem, and Julia would brace herself for a new arrival, but there were no signs of life in the Nathaniel. She could have been in a ghost hotel. When she finally alighted and wandered through the dingy corridors on the 12th floor, she could hear from other rooms the tinny babble of televisions and the mournful clatter of plates. She got the impression of caged, solitary lives and behind each door she imagined used rooms smelling of stale dinners and tart body spray.
Room 1210 felt very used. The motif of Middle Eastern splendour had not made it this far and the room was a junk shop of dowdy styles. Yellowing walls, a brown carpet. When she switched on the bedside light it gave off a low-wattage tobacco hue. The bronze radiator growled when she put her gloved hand on it but it was warm, very warm, and she was glad of that. The bed was cloaked in an evil pink nylon bedspread; a rug at its foot was the colour of sick; a wastebasket with a plastic inset was embroidered with a small tangle of hair. She wandered into the bathroom. Where the white tiling halted, the walls were painted in a mouthwash green, speckled here and there with traces of mould. To match the walls there was an acidy eau-de-Nil drip scored into the hand basin and the mirror sported the tributary of a crack. The perfect place, she thought, to end it all.
Behind the moss-coloured drapes in the bedroom she discovered a full-length glass door. After a lot of tugging she worked the handle free. She stepped out on to a balcony and into the glorious thrum of the bitterly cold night. It was her first taste of fresh air – if such the air over Manhattan could be called – and the cold felt different too. Brisker, cleaner. She leaned over the parapet and far below – well, twelve floors – a lighted centipede of traffic snailed towards a vanishing point between the glow-worm skyscrapers. The melancholy toot of car horns played a symphony; the diva sirens wailed. On the building opposite, an electronic tickertape mouthed a silent red greeting: Season’s Greetings 1987. She inhaled deeply – this would be Julia Fortune’s last Christmas.
From the moment she had stepped on the plane, she had felt hunted. Firstly, the form-filling. Reason for trip? Business or pleasure? Pleasure, she had written. And it was true, in part. She was surrendering to an illicit intoxication, a longed-for cessation of hostilities, and there was relief in it, if not pleasure. The form demanded where she’d be staying and Julia found herself looking furtively at what her neighbour was writing, an old schoolroom insecurity coming into play. He was a rough-looking fellow, from the country she guessed, with drills of red hair and raw hands and she knew that he would be bedding down at some ready-made address in Queens with half a dozen other illegal Paddies. Thaddeus Gavin, she saw his name was; Thaddeus, how biblical, she thought.
‘Bit of handle, isn’t it?’ he said to her, grinning when he caught her staring.
‘What?’
‘Thaddeus,’ he said, tapping the form with his chewed biro. ‘Ted, for short.’
She didn’t know if this was a chummy attempt at an introduction.
‘This is the best time of the year to go. They think you’re going over to visit relations.’ He winked broadly. By next week he’d be a hod-carrier on a construction site run by the Irish mafia. Julia wasn’t trying to fool anyone – not yet, anyway – but she felt implicated in his chummy freemasonry. Everything about her visit so far was above board. In fact, it was the boldest gesture of her entire twenty-seven years.
Hers was almost the last case to emerge on the baggage carousel at JFK and it travelled forlornly on its circular journey towards her.
When she went to heave it off the belt, it almost sucked her on, and but for the intervention of brawny Ted she might have toppled over and been carried off on an endless loop.
‘Want to meet up?’ he asked, blushing to his roots as he righted her case on the floor.
‘Meet up?’
‘Ah you know, like, for a pint maybe?’
Oh, she thought.
‘I’ll only be here a few days,’ she said, which sounded so terminal it made her want to gasp.
‘Ah right so,’ he said and he was so easily defeated that she almost felt like changing her mind. ‘Sure, it was just an idea.’
If she was in a Hollywood film, she thought, this would be the start of a romance. But this was the Irish version – two inarticulate people angling to be the first to give the other the brush-off.
The cab journey from the airport had only intensified her feeling of being on the run. The taximan drove like a lunatic, swinging from one lane to the other, as they hurtled towards the city. Her heart lifted at the familiar skyline – there was the Empire State, the Chrysler. She smiled to herself. Wouldn’t Hetty have loved this! It was from here, after all, that she had sprung. Then they had nose-dived underground into an acid-lit tunnel full of numbed traffic roar, before emerging into the heart of the frosted silhouette they had seen minutes before, towers looming up all about her in shining sentinels.
Now it was she who was looming over it. For the first time since she had left home, Julia felt, there on the balcony of the Nathaniel, a moment of unadulterated victory. She had made it! Nobody could stop her now. She was reluctant to go inside again for fear the brief bout of euphoria might fizzle out in the musty confines of the room but she could feel the cold air solidifying in her lungs and she thought she might die of frostbite if she stood out there any longer.
Shivering, she retreated into the fusty warmth of Room 1210. Unzipping her case she fished out her toilet bag and deposited it in the bathroom. The mirror with its jagged seam, she discovered, was actually the door of a cabinet with glass shelves. She lined up her toiletries, adding her tweezers, face cream and the orange tube of capsules. Sleeping tablets. Since the break-up with Eric she hadn’t been able to sleep and the doctor had prescribed the tablets to get her over the hump, as he called it. Eric had been Julia’s last chance and she had thrown herself into the relationship. That was her downfall – mistaking willed abandon for love. But she had managed to fool him and herself for three years. When he had broken up with her, he had said sadly (though it had sounded as if he had been calculating the odds for months) something is just not right. The something, though he didn’t know it, was Hetty. She shut the door of the cabinet. It made a disapproving click.
She wandered back into the room and turned on the television, a large, old-fashioned black-and-white model encased in mock mahogany. She kept the sound low. There was a quiz show on one of the channels and every so often as she unfurled her dressing gown and pyjamas, her underwear, her squashed shoes, she caught glimpses of people in frozen poses of constipated glee. She remembered Hetty’s mother telling her once that the contestants were auditioned, not for their general knowledge but for their ability to ‘do’ hysteria. She spoke of America fondly, or so Julia had thought. It was only in retrospect she realised that Jenny Gardner was being ironic. Julia wondered how much of her existence had been built on the foundations of someone else’s throwaway lines. Someone who literally could not bear her. But, however indirectly, she was here because of Jenny Gardner.
She had told her mother she was visiting an old college friend for the holidays. A lie, the only one in this whole escapade. Christmas at the Fortunes’ was raucous and extended; her absence would barely be noticed.
‘But I was counting you in,’ was her mother’s only protest.
Julia had expected more resistance. In some odd way she was disappointed how quietly her mother had acquiesced in what could only be perceived as a whim – haring off to New York the day before Christmas with next to no notice, though in fact she’d been planning the trip secretly for weeks. The break-up with Eric – a month before – had made it more understandable. Like her, he was in Loss Adjustment at Hibernian Life and Julia had been going out with him long enough for her mother to be sure that she was about to follow the well-worn path of her sisters down the aisle. Even Greta, her mother had said with more than a hint of blame when Julia had announced the split. Even Greta who was considered a lost cause is what she meant. But her mother’s baffled disappointment meant that Julia was granted a brief reprieve; allowed, as her mother said, to be out of sorts.
Julia was the only one living at home. The last of five, the final disappointment, the last gasp to rescue the unfortunate family name. Five evenly spaced daughters – Greta, Rose, the twins Kitty and Liv, and finally Julia – had exhausted her father’s hopes of an heir. Her mother ineffectually tried to curb their spirits as if the communal force of five girls in the house was the ultimate insult to her father’s manhood. A gaggle of geese, he called them. Despite the hectic display of feminine chaos, the prevailing mood of the house was depression, though the word itself was considered too pretentious for the Fortunes. In the dumps was the closest they got. Her mother put any shift into the melancholy register in herself or her girls down to the Monthly Visitor; her father filed all unpredictable behaviour under Evil Moods. All that female energy had exhausted him into submission.
Julia’s memories of him as a child were always of activity. Under the car endlessly tinkering, pushing the hand-mower around their abused garden. Theirs was the most unruly patch on Prosperity Drive, which ached so much after prim respectability that the Fortunes with their indiscreetly large brood were considered only a step above tinkers. The garden did nothing to dispel the reputation. The lawn – Julia would have hesitated to use the word – was a patchwork of scutch grass and clover, the fuchsia bushes had gone feral, the roses arched stalkily and proclaimed neglect in their badges of disease, their swarms of whitefly and stains of black spot. Added to that, her father liked to fix things. But not before he had taken them apart. So their driveway was marred by oil blotches from engine parts that had bled and behind the gate there were several old tyres stacked. The family car, a fifteen-year-old Ford Anglia – another totem of the Fortunes’ poor standing on the Drive – was left outside year round to rust and grow moss in its window ledges. Julia felt this mangy piece of concrete was truly her father’s domain, the only place he was safe from female surfeit. Poor Dad, Julia thought, poor beleaguered Dad.
Her mother, on the other hand, was easy-going to the point of slothfulness. She was dumpy with it, her girth expanding with the disappointed expectation of each birth. She was much smaller than Julia’s father so that when Julia got to the age of speculating about such things, she wondered how it had worked between them; physically, that is. Did her mother have to stand on a chair? Was that why there had never been a brother? But mostly she wondered what on earth had possessed them to fetch up together. To think that love or passion or desire might have moved them seemed inconceivable. Or maybe it was the fact that a boy was inconceivable …
Whatever it was, by the time Julia came along they seemed animated by a kind of lazy contempt for one another. Decisions sank between them in a lather of low-grade recrimination.
‘Dad, can I go to the tennis hop?’
‘What does your mother say?’
‘She said to ask you.’
‘That’s your mother for you!’
‘Well, can I?’
‘Am I expected to make all the hard decisions around here?’
‘Is that yes or no?’
‘If your mother says it’s alright … she’s the boss, after all.’
Which meant nobody was the boss. Julia’s friends envied this laissez-faire approach but she felt cheated, the runt of the litter, not worthy of even a marital spat. She remembered her sisters exciting rows of operatic dimensions between her parents.
There was a knock on the door.
Julia froze. Who could it be? Who knew she was here? Cautiously, she inched the door open. A very tall black woman stood outside. Her hair had been viciously straightened but there was one lock of silver amidst the black which stood out like the tail of a skunk. She wore glasses with elaborate wings that swept upwards like encrusted extensions of her eyebrows. She bent forward deferentially, as if by folding herself up she could negate her great height. She must be six foot tall, Julia estimated. She wore a white cardigan over a navy polka-dot dress made of some filmy stuff. Her large feet were carelessly pushed into fur-lined carpet slippers.
‘Hi, hon,’ she said, smiling broadly. ‘Gloria, 1209.’ She pointed regally at the next room. Her door was ajar. Julia caught sight of a miniature winking Christmas tree and heard waves of TV laughter from an unseen set. ‘I thought I’d be neighbourly.’
Julia smiled tightly.
‘You just shipped in, then?’ Gloria asked, peering beyond Julia at her disembowelled case spilling its contents on the floor.
Julia nodded.
‘You like to join me for a little celebration?’
Julia looked at her blankly.
‘It’s Christmas, honey, or hadn’t you noticed?’
Inwardly, Julia groaned. Christmas Eve in the big city and it was not possible to be left alone. And just now Julia wanted to be very anonymous.
‘Thank you,’ Julia said, ‘but I have plans for tomorrow.’
The sleep of the just, she thought.
‘We all got plans for tomorrow, honey.’
Julia felt reprimanded.
Prosperity Drive Page 13
