Matala

by Craig Holden

  “What?”

  “We’re going to Venice.”

  “No,” Justine said. “Florence. I’m sure of it.”

  “We got on the wrong stupid train.”

  “You’re mistaken.”

  “I am not.”

  She put on a good rich-girl look of pissiness and aggravation then, a look of “What have you cock-ups done now?” But when she turned toward the window to watch the last light fading on the ancient hills with their ancient vines, Justine could have sworn she saw a thrill in the girl’s face, a smile she tried to hide. Like when you feel that little tingle on a fast lift as the floor drops away and you hang there, just for an instant, in midair.

  SO NOW IT WAS La Serenissima, city of canals, on the morning after they walked over the bridge from the Santa Lucia Station into a fog so dense they could hardly see one another, and so late that nothing was open. They stood, stupidly looking around, as figures emerged and vanished again around them. They would have slept shivering on benches except that Justine knew where to go, a nice place where she had stayed once. Small and quiet. Locanda Apostoli. Not someplace she could afford anymore, but she knew the girl was good for it. She’d had it in mind that they would get two rooms, one for her and Will, but the girl surprised her by flat-out refusing. Justine said nothing. She wasn’t even angry, just a bit gobsmacked. The girl had refused nothing up to that point. But it was late by then, and she was whacked and cranky. She said one room was enough for them just to crash in, and so they did. They fell onto the bed in their clothes and slept that way, touching, Justine to Will, and Will to her.

  Justine was up early because she had business—real business at last. The two children still slept.

  She watched as a cross on the top of a low white church across a canal began to blush and shine, as if it were giving off its own light, as if it were a holy rapturous thing. She watched the rooftops become orange and alive. The water of that place began to twinkle as the new light made its way into the shadows.

  She had to see Maurice, much as she hated the thought, much as it made her stomach twist and ache. She had begun this job, or it had fallen to her like some gift, some low fruit waiting to be plucked. And it would solve their problems—that was the real point. That was what she had to keep in mind. It would make them flush again, even more than flush. And they owed Maurice so much besides. A couple of thousand. It would wash that all away. There was nothing for it now but that. Him.

  In the beginning, after she’d found Will, she cared so much. She made it nice. She taught him how to run the scams and cons that fed them and kept them. It was fun, her teaching and him learning, and they made a packet. America first and then Europe were like playgrounds again in ways they had not been to her for a long time. They were new to her through his eyes.

  Then Maurice found her again. Found them. They were in Amsterdam, where Will had already grown partial to the hash bars. He liked that pipe. But after Maurice came, he got to try everything, and he was soon drawn to darker pipes. Opium. Sometimes he and Maurice would smoke it for days. Justine was not that type. She always needed to feel the edge, not dull it. She liked it fast and bright, so she was partial to meth. She was an old speed freak, actually, and had been on and off since she was thirteen. But she went off it when she found Will again and he came with her. She didn’t need it. The world was plenty fast and bright.

  Then, after Maurice came, after Will fell in love with the pipe, it began to change. She told Will it was a nipple, a mother’s tit. She might touch him and pull out her own and let him go back and forth, one tit to another, hers to the pipe. She watched him that way until her nipple got as hard as the mouthpiece, and Will grew so simultaneously high and turned on that the confusion itself became a kind of drug, and he did not know what he wanted most in the world, to sleep or to shag. She knew. What he wanted most was that in itself, the confusion, the pain of it. It was what she gave him.

  SHE WORKED ON THE FAG Maurice gave her. She hadn’t wanted to take it off him, but she had needed it, the more they talked. She knew the less she said the better off she’d be, so she smoked as hard as she could, as hard as she wanted a piece of some big action, as hard as she needed this job to break right for her and Will—to get them out of this hole they’d fallen in.

  She and Maurice were in a cramped little back room of a middling hotel. It was a storage closet of mops and buckets and steel racks, of sheets and blankets, a weird sort of office, but Maurice used it whenever he was in Venice. He knew the hotel owner—in fact, the owner owed him money. Maurice said it was so much that he basically owned a piece of the place himself. Of course he stayed here free. But instead of his room to meet in, he used the janitor’s closet. He had learned to be careful that way. Rooms had ears. Closets never did.

  He sat on a turned-over bucket and watched Justine. He said how she was going to suck the filter off if she wasn’t careful. She ignored him. He put on the pissy look he often got. She hated it. But she hated it worse when he said things like “You can’t even afford ’em anymore, can you?” Meaning cigs.

  Still, she said nothing. He pressed again about whether she was really interested in doing this. In coming back. Because if he set it in motion, he couldn’t put it back. It involved other people, and they weren’t the sorts to be trifled with.

  She looked at the ash and then took another drag.

  And was she finally ready to pay back the two K she owed him? Wouldn’t that be nice? Was she finally sick of the Mickey Mouse scams she and the boy did? He didn’t get how they could live like that. The penny ante. He just didn’t see the point.

  And oh, she thought, wasn’t that the very truth itself? He did not get it.

  She had known it was coming, this nattering. This “I told you so.” She’d known and prepared herself for it, but it didn’t make it any better. It was like knowing you were going to vomit. It was just as awful when it came whether you knew or not. Still, she could hold on to what would come after. How it would be.

  But when he took a plastic baggie from his pocket, she could see straight off what was in it: blacks for her and reds for Will. She imagined that this bleeding bloater, this sodding shit to whom it happened she was once upon a time duly and legally wed, could hear the increase in her pulse.

  He set the bag on the floor beside his bucket and pointedly offered her nothing from it. It was meant to lie there within her sight, hers to keep if she played nice. She dragged and exhaled. Maurice looked like a nothing, a nobody. Pulpy nose. Heavy brows above his eyes and blue bags beneath. Thin in the lips. Short neck, short body. A kind of bread loaf of a person. And he had the crude East End idiom to go with it. But he was not nothing, and he hadn’t always looked this way. He’d been thinner when they were together, more angular and piercing. When he started in about the money again, she closed her eyes and smoked.

  “A naffin’ youth hostel,” he said. “That’s what I heard. Someone your age.” He laughed.

  “We’re at Locanda Apostoli now,” she told him. They’d stayed there together once.

  “Well,” he said, “aren’t we the sudden nob.”

  She drew so hard on the smoke that she felt the heat in the filter.

  “So you must be using the boy for something other than begging coins,” he said. “You renting him out? I bet there’s some good cash in that.”

  She was afraid now of how it might turn out, and it made her feel bad. Though Will didn’t see it, she was constantly aware of how hard it was for them then, how unsatisfied he was, how hungry, how ready to move on to fuller days, richer scenes. She could see it all. But it was as if she were frozen in something. As if even her fingers could not lift themselves. As if she had been swimming in a pool of glue, clear as the day but so thick that every movement required a conscious and extraordinary effort.

  She looked Maurice in his sunken little eyes and said, “We need this, and it’s a good deal. You’ll see.”

  For a moment it looked as if there was ice fo
rming in his eyes, over his retinas, or like cartoon steam was going to come out of his ears. Then he smirked.

  “Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, Justine,” he said. “But it’s you that worries me. Just because you’re gasping for it doesn’t mean you’re any good for this anymore. It’s no small thing, as you well know. And we can’t afford any cock-ups, neither of us. This is a hot customer, the big time. And the timing matters. It has to be on the island and delivered by Christmas, a special gift for someone who has everything. So I ask myself about you, ‘Does she still got it?’”

  It was the sunshine she thought of now, more even than the money. How long since she’d been down there? And how much would Will love it? She thought of floating, of salt water, of heat, and of resting for a long, long time.

  “So I dunno. I got a bad feeling. You going after that boy again after all these years, like he was yours in the beginning.”

  “He was mine.”

  “He wasn’t yours. He was just some flippin’ squallin’ brat. And I’m sure he still is.”

  “Four months, Maurice.”

  “I know how old he was. I was about.”

  “That’s a long time for a baby. I helped form him, if you think about it, so he was mine. Part of him anyway.”

  “This is exactly what I mean. I’m sure you’ve cut his balls since you got him back, but it’s like he’s cut yours, too.”

  Now she felt the ice forming in her own eyes.

  Maurice said, “If I decide to go ahead, I’ll see you tonight. If not…then not.”

  Crete, she thought.

  The cigarette was about finished, but she dragged hard on it once more so that it cooked right down, so the filter itself started to burn. She planted it between her lips, squinted, leaned over, and took Maurice’s right hand in both of hers. She ran a fingernail across the palm. He watched stupid-eyed, the way he had always watched as she prepared to hurt him. She said, “How’s this for cut balls, Maurice?” She took the burning dimp from her mouth and pressed the tip into the exact spot where his life line ended.

  He screamed like an animal. He slapped at it and spit on it and ran to the utility sink.

  She grabbed the baggie from the floor, opened the door, and stepped out into the less stale air of the hallway. Maurice was screaming at her and trying to get the water turned on. “Whore!” Time was that was one of her pet names for him.

  She made sure to walk away slowly so he would not think her heart was beating as hard as it was. So he would not see how badly she needed this but how even now, flat broke and sick with desperation, she’d starve before she let some lowlife donk of an ex-hubby push her around. So he could not tell how badly she wanted to be away from him.

  She walked slowly even when another door in the hallway opened and a very large man came out holding a handgun, holding it with both of his hands pointed floorward, as if he knew exactly what he was doing with it. She was sure he did. And when he aimed at her, she slowed even more. She nearly stopped. She looked at the man and could see in his eyes that there was nothing, that he was already as dead as he was planning on making her. She could feel his trigger finger begin to flex.

  “No,” Maurice said then from the doorway of his closet office. He held a wet coral-colored towel against his palm. “Don’t.”

  She looked at him now. She stood with her hand on the handle of the outside door at the back of the hotel and looked at them both.

  “Karl, don’t,” Maurice said again, although the man had already lowered the pistol and was fitting it into the holster that hung under his arm.

  Maurice raised his own hands with the pinkish towel between them and aimed a finger at her. “You half-ass this one, Justine, and something might just have to happen to your pretty boy. Remember that.”

  She could only think of how badly she wanted just to lie down.

  WALKING BACK TO THE LOCANDA, Justine felt as if someone had planted a fist inside her chest where the heart lived or as if she’d swallowed something and it had stuck there. She needed another smoke, but her pockets were empty. She had hidden the money she stole from Darcy and in her nervousness stupidly forgot to take some out this morning—and, besides, nothing seemed to be open yet. She watched the few passersby for a smoker she might bum one from, but saw none. The two dexies she’d swallowed dry from the baggie were kicking in already. The world flew and flashed, and she could hear the hum of the engines that turned it all down deep beneath the mantle. A gondola slipped past, and it was so perfectly gorgeous, so stupidly, postcardishly, touristically, romantically, sentimentally, momentarily beautiful that she nearly stopped and sat down at a table alongside a café just to watch it. But of course she didn’t. She couldn’t sit. She needed a cig so bad she thought she was going to retch.

  IN THE ROOM SHE FOUND them still in bed. She dug into her pack and slipped some bills from the roll she’d buried there. She was about to rush back out to find an open fag vendor when she saw with a start that the girl was watching her.

  “Hey,” she said, all groggy-sounding, and then yawned.

  Justine sat in the chair by the window. The cross was not glowing anymore. Her knees bounced again. She needed to go, but she found sitting nice, too.

  Will sat up then and looked at her and said, “He gave you more?”

  Such an observant little boy.

  “Who?” said the Darcy girl. “What?”

  “Road candy,” he told her.

  She didn’t get it or pretended not to, but she crawled across the bed, giving Justine a perfect shot of her tight little posterior clad only in white French-cut knickers, the sort that pulled themselves up and right in there so you had to go around discreetly fingering them out every so often, so that Justine could all but see right up that charming little cunny. The girl went into the loo.

  Little Bitch, Justine decided. That was her real name, or it would be if Justine had anything to say about it. Of course she didn’t, wouldn’t. But she found something about the girl appealing. Perhaps it was the skin of her face. How nice it would be to lick it. Or the slight fattiness of her bum. How Justine wanted to bite it. Or the shape of her breasts. What a thrill it was to think of binding them. But Justine thought that really it was the look she had sometimes. The look that something as shoddy and common as a pisshole hostel could be fascinating. It was as if the girl had stumbled into the Never-land or Alice’s rabbit hole. As if some new and wondrous world had opened to her. She had this look, a most unjaded expression for a person of her status who was clearly trained in the projection of a veneer of sophistication. This smile. This wonder.

  When Will had returned to the hostel after his little snit and Justine cooled down, they talked about what had happened that afternoon. He mentioned this about the girl: that when he got her to take him out to eat, it all seemed so fabulous to her. His word, delivered a bit dismissively, so world-wearily. What he didn’t seem to realize was that he had the same look, the same wonder. Justine saw that about him straight off when she’d found him again two years earlier. He acted as hard and as bored in his way as this girl did, but he couldn’t help the look that came over him sometimes, just as she could not. They were a pair in that regard.

  The two wonder kids: Lick-lick and Little Bitch.

  Anyway, it hardly bore thinking about.

  “What did he say?” said Will.

  Justine shrugged. “Might have a job.”

  “Really?”

  “Be nice to make some cash, no?”

  “God, yes,” he said. “Doing what?”

  She shook her head.

  When the girl came back out, she grabbed her purse, an enormous shoulder bag that looked as if it was made from an old tapestry, and rifled through it—checking, Justine supposed, to see if any of her new money was missing. It was not. They’d milk this cow slowly now. But then when she tossed the thing to the floor, Justine saw, wonder of flipping wonders, what looked for all the world like a packet of coffin nails sticking out the top.
r />   “You smoke?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “What is that?”

  “Oh,” she said, lifting the purse again and drawing out a gold and crimson pack of English Dunhills. “I picked them up somewhere. I don’t know why.”

  “Would you mind?” Justine said, doing all she could to stay the shaking in her hands. Little Bitch shrugged and tossed the pack on the bed.

  “Keep ’em,” she said.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have—”

  She reached in again and came up with a beautiful gold and silver lighter, a strangely expensive thing for a nonsmoker to carry. But all Justine could think was “Oh, God.”

  “Oh, God,” she said. The girl gave her a little smirk. Justine opened the window, leaned out so as not to pollute the room too badly, and hung there in Venice, inhaling the wonderful poisons.

  Behind her the girl said, “I’m hungry. Where can we get some breakfast?”

  “Aren’t you leaving soon?” Justine asked her.

  “I should,” she said.

  “Because I was thinking,” said Justine, “we could get some wine instead and some real food and have a picnic.”

  “Seriously?” said Will.

  “Yes!” said Darcy.

  She told the girl they could then take her to the station if she wanted. “I’m sorry about all this,” she added.

  “Oh,” the girl said, all disappointed at being reminded that she had a life. “Never mind. It’s fun. A picnic. In Venice.”

  It was amazing, Justine thought. Even when she offered to derail the thing, it just kept coming around. Here they were. Maurice would meet them tonight. It was happening.

  The girl ran back into the bath then for a quick wash up so she could get dressed. Will, who was still under the sheets, could only shake his head in wonder.

  Five

  T HE WORLD TOOK CARE. ONE time, after another fight with my parents, I managed to thumb clear up to Philadelphia. Along the way one of the rides I got, a middle-aged guy in a cheap tie, bought me lunch and a beer. When I thanked him later, he said just that: “The world’ll take care of you, kid. You just gotta let it.” It was only weeks later that I met Justine and my real education began—in letting the world take care, yes, but more than that: in making it, bending it, creating it as I went along.