Raymond surged towards the side. Naked or not, he wasn’t going to allow some crazy child to keep him imprisoned in this pool. He hoisted himself up into the tiled surround, close to where she was standing, his arm raised to protect himself. Without a sound, she swept her arm in a fast criss-cross pattern in the air, and suddenly Raymond’s arm and shoulder were cross-hatched with cuts.
He tried to stand up, but she cut him again and again, the wounds proliferating as if by magic. His belly was sliced from side to side. His hairy thighs were drenched with blood. He cupped his hand protectively over his genitals, but she cut the back of his hand open, and more blood poured down between his legs. He dropped to his knees. He was silent with shock. The little girl danced around him, cutting his ears, cutting his cheeks. He swayed, and tried to keep his balance, but then he dropped back into the water, in an ever-spreading fog of blood.
‘Raymond!’ shouted Chester, and started to walk out towards him. Chester didn’t swim too well, even when his hands weren’t sliced to ribbons. ‘Hang on, I’m coming out to get you!’ He turned to the little girl and screamed at her, ‘What the hell have you done? You’re out of your mind! You’re insane! You could have killed him!’
Raymond was floating on his face, around and around, surrounded by blood. As he waded out to him, Chester kept calling, ‘Hang on, Raymond! Hang on, Raymond!’ and Raymond let out a gargling, choking sound, so at least he was still alive.
Chester found that the water was growing colder and colder, so cold that he couldn’t feel his legs. This wasn’t just water any longer, this was slush, like half-melted ice. The surface was grey and thick, like frozen porridge, and the waves that were caused by Chester’s wading were languid and self-suppressing.
‘Raymond!’ Chester managed to shout; although it was more of a gasp than a shout.
Raymond gargled, and tried to call, ‘Help!’ but then he disappeared below the surface. Chester saw his hand thrusting up, clawing at nothing at all, then even that was gone.
He took a deep breath and dived. He found it almost impossible to submerge himself. The water was mostly frozen, and he might just as well have dived into quicksand. He groped around in the slush, and by chance he found Raymond’s leg. He hooked his arm around it, and struck out for the surface. But there was something dreadfully wrong. His fingers met a solid ceiling, cold and complete. The pool had frozen over, to a depth of two or three inches. He groped frantically in all directions, trying not to breathe, but he was out of energy and oxygen.
He tried to punch a hole in the ice, but it was impossible. He wallowed, swallowed a mouthful of freezing water, and let out a shrill, hysterical, bubbling noise. Hernandez, he thought. Hernandez will hear me. But then he remembered that Hernandez was driving Laura back to Franklin Avenue. There was nobody here but Raymond and him; and both of them were bleeding badly, and both of them were trapped beneath the ice.
He dropped Raymond, let him sink down slowly in the gelid water. Raymond wasn’t struggling. Raymond was probably dead already. Bursting for air, Chester hammered at the ice with both fists. Dimly, he could see the patio lights and the vague outline of the house. But then a terrible darkness swept across the pool, blacker than any night. The water was cracking and complaining as it froze even harder. He breathed in water, a whole chilly flood of it, and when he breathed in water he knew that he was going to die.
In the instant before he drowned, however, he saw a face, peering down at him through the ice. It was the most terrifying face that he had ever seen – long and white, with darkened holes for eyes, and fronds that grew out of it; and it was all the more terrifying for being so blurred, through the ice, so indistinct.
He drowned, and sank, but only a little way, because the water was so thick with ice.
Laura stood in the shower for almost twenty minutes, with the water running as hot as she could bear it, soaping herself and scrubbing herself. Eventually she slid back the frosted glass partition and stepped shakily out and wrapped herself in her thick towelling bathrobe, and crept to bed with the shuffling gait of a woman three times her age.
She lay on her side and watched the shadows of the yuccas dipping and dancing on the shutters. Aunt Beverley wasn’t home yet, so she couldn’t talk. She didn’t really know whether she wanted to talk to anybody. The pain and the degradation that Raymond had inflicted on her was more than she could bear to think about. What made it worse was that it was she who had encouraged him to make love to her, she had sat astride his lap, and kissed him, and told him that he was a god. She didn’t just feel physically hurt, although she couldn’t even touch her bottom and her back felt cracked. She felt stupid, and betrayed, and ridiculous. Had she really thought that Chester was going to bill her as ‘also starring’? Had she really been suckered into thinking that Raymond was going to buy her a whole new wardrobe and a full-length mink?
Her head thumped and her mouth felt as dry as Death Valley. The trouble was, she blamed herself as much as she blamed Chester and Raymond. They were both manipulative and lustful, but she was vain, and it was her vanity that had hurt her, as much as Raymond’s cruelty. She still blamed herself for what had happened to Dick Bracewaite, even though he had subjected her to sexual indignities far worse than anything that Raymond had done to her. She blamed herself for wanting too much to be wanted. It excited her, when she knew that men wanted her, and that women envied her. It gave her a bright shining feeling that nothing else did. Elizabeth had her writing, and her career. But all she had was this bright shining feeling, whenever she could get it, which wasn’t often, and sometimes she needed it so badly that she would have done anything, with anyone, just to feel the slightest glimmer of it, the faintest glow.
She closed her eyes and remembered how it had felt, face down on the table, her legs stretched apart, with Raymond forcing his way inside her. It had been agonizing, and humiliating, but the more she thought about it, the calmer she became, because he had wanted her, hadn’t he? He had wanted her badly. He may have thought that he was the master, that he was God, but who was really in control? The wanter or the wanted?
She closed her eyes and slept, without even realizing that she was sleeping, and in her dreams she saw other dreams, like spindly horses, and lords and ladies, and people who rushed silently behind you when you weren’t looking.
It was almost two o’clock in the morning when Jim Boreas found Aunt Beverley sitting in his white Pontiac Chieftain convertible, pretending to drive. Jim Boreas was one of Hollywood’s most successful producers, and tonight he had been celebrating the completion of his latest movie The Woman In Sable at his huge art deco house in Bel Air. Just about everybody who was everybody was there, Charlie Chaplin and Marlon Brando and Alan Ladd. The party had quietened down now. The guests had dispersed around the gardens or gathered in Jim Borcas’s den for stag stories and bone-dry 6-oz martinis or retreated to the library to get some serious slandering done. The laughter had died away, the coyotes were calling eerily from the hills. The orchestra had been replaced by a small Tijuana band. Ken Morales and his Pico Brass, and a few bedraggled couples were still shuffling around by the pool like the survivors of a 1930s dance marathon. Six or seven half-deflated balloons bobbed on the surface of the water, occasionally scuttling from one side of the pool to the other when the morning breeze caught them.
Jim had a cigarette in one hand and a half-empty bottle of tequila in the other. He leaned on the car door and said, ‘How are you doing, Beverley? Where are you headed?’
Aunt Beverley twisted the steering-wheel from side to side. ‘I’m on my way to the beach. I feel like the wind in my brain.’
Jim nodded appreciatively. He was one of the easy-goingest producers in Hollywood, balding, self-assured, friendly to everyone. ‘How far have you gone?’ he asked her.
‘Oh . . . I’m almost there. Just past Brentwood. Beep-beep! Look out, you stupid pedestrian! And as for you, sir,’ she said, turning to Jim, ‘stop hanging onto the side of my car, I’m do
ing sixty miles an hour!’
Jim blew smoke out of his nostrils. ‘How about going for real?’ he asked her.
‘For real?’
‘Sure, we can go swimming.’
‘Swimming?’ she said, in pretended astonishment.
‘Sure . . . the sea’s chilly, the moon’s full, What more do you want? Move over.’
Aunt Beverley shifted herself over, and Jim climbed in. He started the engine with a soft whoosh of power.
‘What about your guests?’ said Aunt Beverley.
‘What about them? So long as the canapes keep on coming and the booze keeps on flowing, what do they care? You know this town better than I do. It’s Christians and lions, that’s all it is. Christians and lions. And not too many fucking Christians, either.’
He swigged tequila. Then he said, ‘Hold this,’ and handed her the bottle. ‘You want wind in your brain? Is that what you want?’
At that moment, Elia Kazan came up, looking sweaty and concerned. He was closely followed by Jim’s accountant, and a woman whom Aunt Beverley didn’t recognize. ‘Jim, get out of the car, please, you’ve been drinking all night.’
‘We’re going to the beach,’ Jim insisted. ‘Beverley wants to feel the wind in her brain.’
‘Jim, I’m serious, get out of the car!’
Jim frowned at Aunt Beverley, and his expression was deeply drunk-serious. ‘Tell me, Beverley, why do you want the wind in your brain?’
‘Because I did something tonight that I want to forget about.’
Oh, yes?’
‘I arranged for somebody to meet somebody, and I don’t think that somebody’s going to come out of it too happy.’
‘I see! You’ve got a guilty conscience!’
‘If that’s the way you want to put it.’
‘Well . . . there’s only one way to get rid of a guilty conscience, and that’s to go to meet your Maker, and look Him in the face, and say, “So?” ’
Elia Kazan said, ‘Jim, get out of the car, will you? This is crazy!’
Jim violently revved the engine, so that the Pontiac’s suspension dipped with torque. ‘Sorry, Gadge. Meet us at the beach, why don’t you?’
‘You’re out of your tree!’ Kazan rapped at him.
Jim whooped and screeched and scratched his armpits like a chimpanzee. ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo!’ and Aunt Beverley joined in with him, laughing in delight.
‘King Kong liiivves!’ Jim called out, and revved the engine again. Tyres howling, horn blazing, they swerved around the ornamental shrubbery in front of the house, and dipped down the driveway towards the road. As they passed the rows of parked cars, they caught the bumper of a pale blue Rolls-Royce, with a terrible crunching, banging noise.
‘Jim, be careful!’ Aunt Beverley screamed.
‘Hoo-hoo-hoo!’ Jim retorted, and Aunt Beverley laughed all the more.
‘Free!’ she sang at the top of her voice. She leaned back so that the slipstream ruffled and thundered in her hair. The Pontiac squealed down Stone Canyon Road, swaying and dipping from one side of the road to the other.
‘Power!’ shouted Jim. ‘Beauty! Madness! Guilty consciences! Tequila!’
‘Chimpanzees!’ Aunt Beverley shouted back.
They careened through the gates of Bel Air, suspension bucking, tyres screeching, and fishtailed onto Sunset. As the Pontiac slid from side to side, Aunt Beverley thought for a frightening split second that Jim had lost control, and she clung desperately onto the doorhandle. But still she couldn’t stop herself from laughing. A passing fruit truck blared its horn at them, and the driver leaned out and screamed, ‘Crazy loco bastard!’ But Jim yelled back ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo!’ and deliberately swerved the car from one side of the highway to the other.
‘You know what day it is today?’ he shouted.
‘I don’t know!’ said Aunt Beverley. ‘Thursday?’
‘No, no. Today is a very special day! Today is Tlazolteotl’s birthday!’
‘Who the heck is Tlazolteotl?’
‘Tlazolteod, my darling Beverley, is the queen of all Mexican magic! She has a white face like death, and a butterfly tattooed around her mouth, because that’s the symbol of a dead soul. On Tlazolteotí’s birthday, any sinful woman has to go to the crossroads to meet her, take off all of her clothes, and bite her own tongue until it bleeds. Then she has to walk home naked.’
‘What for?’ Aunt Beverley laughed.
‘That way, she gets absolution. Takes her clothes off, bites her tongue, Tlazolteotl forgives her.’
‘Does it really work?’
‘I don’t know. Do you want to try it? How sinful have you been, Beverley? You said you were feeling guilty, didn’t you? What were you feeling guilty for?’
Jim overtook a slow-moving gasoline truck on the long blind curve around the Bel Air Country Club. The truck driver flashed his headlights and blew his klaxon. Jim waved at him and Beverley waved, too.
‘If only he knew who he was blowing his horn at,’ said Aunt Beverley.
‘He’d probably pray to St Ignatius to forgive him.’
‘St Ignatius?’
‘Patron saint of the terminally unappreciative.’
They slewed around the next curve, the speedometer needle touching 70.
‘Power!’ Jim shouted. He took the tequila bottle from her, unscrewed it with his teeth, and spat the cap out of the car. ‘Beauty!’ he shouted, and took a huge swig. ‘Butterflies! Tequila! Happy birthday, Tlazolteotl!’
He handed the bottle to Aunt Beverley. ‘Come on – you drink Tlazolteotl a birthday toast, too!’
Aunt Beverley took a mouthful of warm tequila, swilled it around, and swallowed it. It roared down her throat like soft fire, and she gasped, and almost choked. Jim slapped his thigh and whooped with hilarity. ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo! Hoo-hoo-hoo!’
The speedometer wavered close to 85. ‘Are you ready for redemption?’ Jim yelled.
Aunt Beverley had never experienced such fear; never experienced such elation. They were invincible, they were king and queen of Hollywood. Nothing could touch them, nothing could harm them. ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo!’ Jim gibbered, in a high-pitched monkey’s mating call.
‘Hoo-hoo-hoo!’ Aunt Beverley gibbered back, pushing out her lower lip so that she looked like a chimpanzee.
And it was then that a huge toiling flatbed truck appeared around the right-hand hairpin bend that takes Sunset Boulevard down through Santa Monica Canyon past Will Rogers park. It was carrying eight steel girders for the new Regency Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, twenty-five tons of them. It was probably travelling at less than 8 m.p.h.
Jim was saying to Aunt Beverley, ‘Whatever it is you feel guilty about, don’t. I gave up feeling guilty years ago.’ He wasn’t even looking at the road ahead.
Aunt Beverley saw dazzling lights and cried, ‘Jim! ’
But when Jim looked ahead, the windscreen was totally frosted over, totally opaque with feathers and ferns. He swerved to the right, and hit the nearside embankment, then swerved to the left. The frosted glass was flooded with white light, and he couldn’t see where he was going, or where the truck was, or anything at all. Aunt Beverley didn’t know if she was looking at Klieg lights or flashlights or the terrible white face of Tlazolteotl, whose mouth was tattooed with the butterfly symbol of a dead soul.
They were less than a hundred feet away from the truck when Jim hit the brakes; but any automobile designer could have told him that a five-and-a-half-thousand-pound automobile travelling at over 80 will take nearly three quarters of a mile to stop, even if the driver isn’t bombed on tequila.
Jim cried out, ‘Mother!’ (Of all things that a domineering and successful Hollywood producer should cry out, in a moment of danger.)
The Pontiac missed the front of the truck by less than an inch, and for a split second Aunt Beverley thought that they were divine. But then the front wheels hit the opposite banking, with a noise like thunder, and the car flew roaring into the air, and she was thrown out and into the night sky. She fel
t as if she were being wrenched this way and that like a Raggedy-Ann doll in the hands of argumentative children. She thought of screaming, but decided that she didn’t want to. She was worried that she was going to ruin her suit. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the car dropping into the canyon, and then she knew that she could fly. This was all going to work out well. All she had to do was land somewhere soft, brush herself down, and then walk back to Bel Air. No problem at all.
She heard the Pontiac nosedive into the ground – a deep, resonant bellowing and banging. I hope Jim can fly too, she thought to herself.
And this was only an instant before she fell head first into the glass studio roof of 3373 Rosita Drive, a purple-suited angel dropping from the sky, with a huge explosive crash. The glass–as she shattered it – caught her just beneath the nose, and sliced off the flesh right up to the bridge. It took off most of her chin, and opened up her left cheek all the way through to her tongue.
She hit the angled architect’s drawing-board that was positioned right under the glass roof, hit the chair, hit the floor, breaking both arms, breaking both legs, then rolled in a chaos of blood and glass and tracing-paper until she finished up underneath a model of a new poolside bungalow.
A fat Mexican maid in a pink nightdress came running into the studio. The first thing she saw was the broken roof. ‘Senor Grant!’ she cried. ‘Ha habido un accidente!’
It was then that she saw Aunt Beverley’s bare and bloodied feet under the table. ‘Senor Grant!’ she screamed. ‘Senor Grant! Necesitemos un medico – rapidamente!’
A tall wiry-haired man appeared, in green-striped pyjamas. ‘Jesus,’ he said. Then, very softly, ‘Jesus.’
‘Esta sangrando mucho,’ said the maid. She crossed herself.
The man crawled under the table and peered at Aunt Beverley closely. Her face was a glistening red mask of blood.
‘Miss?’ he said, his voice quaking. ‘Miss, can you hear me?’
Spirit Page 31
