Need

by Nik Cohn

  “More odd than strange,” said John Joe.

  She looked reassured. “Oddity is not an ailment,” she said. But you could tell her mind was elsewhere, she was just rattling for camouflage. Her eyes kept roaming the room as if searching for rescue, John Wayne on a white horse, and she would not take a drink. “Never touch the stuff,” she said. But that was not a true fact.

  Sipping fruit juice, she stood in the pose that John Joe liked best, swaybacked with her toes pointed out. Still it was not the same if she didn’t flex, and her head that should have been held swan-high, had the droops. “I lied,” she said. “I’ve never been in a morgue in my life, I never even smelled formaldehyde, I wouldn’t know the smell from doublemint or dogshit, I just said it to say, the day I’ve had I needed to say something, such a day you wouldn’t believe, if you read about it in a book you’d say I lied.”

  “Mothballs,” said John Joe.

  She looked at him sideways then, that way she had, as if he was God’s misprint. “The smell of formaldehyde,” he explained.

  “I am a dead man,” Mr. Badpa said.

  He had sneaked up on them unawares, this man shaped like a pot-bellied stove in polyester carrying an Accounts book, and the moment he uttered, Anna whirled on him: “Eat my dust, I’m leaving you dinner, I received a better offer, Club Cleopatra wants me, the opportunity of a lifetime, my agent says, my managers too, I’d be mad to turn it down, simply mad, I’d be out of my tiny mind,” she said. “Where’s my money?”

  “Lend me fifty,” Mr. Badpa said to John Joe, which John Joe did, and Mr. Badpa handed it to Anna Crow, who threw it on the floor, then swept away towards the kitchens and her dressing room, trailing her new veil behind her, old gold with crimson tongues, it matched her hair almost. But her own colour wasn’t good, those fever spots like redcurrant stains were on her cheeks again: “One word for you, Badpa,” she said. “Boils.”

  The storage space where she changed was John Joe’s hiding place. His room at the Zoo didn’t feel his own, it was too full of Godwin. Though that was a terrible way to go certainly. To drown head-down and unblessed in a vat of pizza dough, that was a tragic end. Many nights he could not shut an eye till dawn for picturing the final moments, your man’s legs stuck in the air and thrashing, frantic at first, then slower and slower like a wasp trapped in a glass, and not a priest in sight. He died as he’d lived, Anna said, a thought to poison any room.

  But this snug spot felt like home. He knew every label on every can, the robed woman crossing the desert on Demetrio’s Hearts of Palm, the kneeling camel on Maravasti Pitted Olives, the veiled houri on Jalaver’s Nectar. And the stepcharts that papered the walls, the Oasis Floor Lift and Dervish Spin, the Turkish Travel and Pelvis Flutter and Double Hubble Bubble. And the verse tacked to the back of the door, The Belly Dancer, he could recite that by heart. I can arch my back in pride, Contract my spine in humility, Sway my head in grief, Ripple my arms like a snake, those were lines he would not forget. And the music keening in the club, the smashing of plates in the kitchen, and Bani Badpa cursing, his sisters squealing, the sound and smell of the jakes next door.

  All of them together meant Anna Crow.

  The rickety table where she made up was covered every inch with pots and vials and jars, and these too he had memorized. They seemed to hold the key to all mysteries, all secrets. In the long afternoon when everyone else was gone and he had Sheherazade to himself, he would speak their names out loud, and savour their descriptions: Princess Marcella Borghese diNott Complex; Mango Body Butter; spectacular lashes that extend happily ever after; colours that won’t kiss off, good riddance to fine lines, added shimmering reflectants; Exclusive Triple AlphaHydroxy Fruit Acid.

  Every one of these words was a wondermeat, but exfoliates was the best. God alone in his greatness knew what it meant, and even He might need to think twice, yet the sound of it, drawn out long and slow on a dying fall, breathed all the world’s romance.

  What were those words that Anna Crow loved? The lapsing, unsoilable, whispering sea. Those were good right enough, those were champions in their own time. But exfoliates had them hammered: “Knocked into a cocked hat,” he said.

  “Cocked hat is right, or a tin cup even,” said Anna, sweeping bottles of Velvet Cleansing Milk and Turnaround Cream from the table. “Stick me out on a street corner in a Betty Boop costume doing the splits I’d pull down more than I do in this sweatshop, this fucking black hole of fucking Isfahan. When I think of what I sacrificed, I could have been a première danseuse, the toast of the Golden Coast, I could have had the world at my feet, sucking on my toes, and now look at them, there’s a broken vein for every light on Broadway, I could weep, I could just howl.”

  “Calcutta,” said John Joe. “The black hole of Calcutta.”

  Hair mousse, setting gels, skin toners and moisturizers flew off the quaking table, and smashed against the wall. John Joe had never seen her so violently disturbed, her bare breasts flapped like loose tent-flaps in a thunderstorm: “Martha Graham wanted me,” she said. “Wanted me in the worst way and no cheap cracks out of you, Merce Cunningham too, he said he’d never seen anyone like me.” Snatching up a tube of New Lash Out mascara, she aimed it at the Anatolian Shimmy, then changed her mind. “I’m hungry,” she said.

  “I have some peanuts just.”

  The nuts were still in their shells, and Anna Crow, when she skinned them and nibbled, used only her front teeth, squirrel-style. “Stevie Smith had a parrot once, called him Onan,” she said, moving through the room, stripping off her skirt and headband and gilt sandals, scattering peanuts in their shells. “He spilled his seed on the ground,” she said, and she struck a pose, hand on hip, flaunting like one of the dirty pictures in that book Juice Shovlin brought back from England once.

  Art it was called when John Joe was fifteen and Juice passed it round behind the bike shed. Most of the females displayed were old or blown enough to be your granny in their skins, and one of the Three Graces was the spit of Mrs. Kinsella that ran the tripe shop in Killybegs, but there was one picture of a girl still fresh. A skinny French bit lying stretched across a white bedspread with her legs splayed and hanging, stiff as hurling sticks, her private part split open for all to see. “Would you look at the quim on that one! It’s a city in itself,” Juice Shovlin had said, and every man jack present had laughed, John Joe included. Only he had taken a moment to cross himself, too.

  The painting’s title was La Maigre Adeline. Juice Shovlin said that was French for a dose, and maybe it was the truth, but John Joe thought not. Instinct told him that, far from being a pro, the girl took in washing. The white bedspread with the squirls of green wallpaper behind and that scantling body laid sprawling with no defenses, its legs stuck straight out towards you when you watched—for some reason he couldn’t pin down, the whole set-up made him think of scrubbing, a ceaseless scouring. “I wash my hands among the innocents,” he said.

  “And I will compass thine altar, O Lord,” Anna Crow answered him, and she stopped her pacing, she stared. “Lordamercy, where did that come from, St. John the Baptist’s maybe, the Washing of Hands, O Lord, I have loved the beauty of your house, and the place where thy glory dwelleth, the clutter that clings to your mind, Take not away my soul, O God, the worthless junk.” But she seemed calmed. At least she threw no more bottles. “I could use more nuts,” she said.

  Far from washed, her hand when she cupped it to cradle the shells was stained blue and camomile-pink with spilled lotions, and the state of her black nails John Joe could not describe. “My soul, O God, with the wicked, nor my life with men of blood,” she said, and put her mouth on his, her tongue lapped at his teeth.

  She had never kissed him before, not even a peck on the cheek, and he sensed no lust in her now. The way her tongue probed and burrowed, it seemed to be searching just. Asking a question, it might be. A tongue not plump or sleek, but whippy as an iguana when it flicked against the roof of his mouth, then drew back and licked at air
, seemed to be considering, then entered him again.

  This time it didn’t move, her tongue lay flat and dormant upon his own. He could feel it pulse with her breathing, quick and shallow like a dog’s. It tasted salty of nuts and raw of spirits, it was coated in slime. A sleeping slug, it felt like, without sex or any nature of desire. “Take me down,” Anna said.

  “Down where?”

  “The Black Swans.”

  That was surprising to his ears. Times past when he had mentioned those chosen persons, she had responded with no great warmth. Toxic waste was one phrase he recalled, loonytoons another. But perhaps these stories in the papers and now on TV had helped soothe her doubts.

  With each day that passed, it seemed, mole people were more the rage. Not only reporters and book-writers were swarming the subways now, but all manner of entertainments. A fashion shoot and rock videos, there was even talk of a film.

  Along with the glitz came more and more guards. Randall Gurdler himself had been on the News, promising drastic action. These subway dwellers were no picturesque eccentrics, he said, but drug addicts, sociopaths, violent criminals; a menace to us all. As President of the MTA, he pledged himself to a purge.

  The Black Swans were not mentioned by name, no more was Master Maitland. But no freed soul was fooled. All this blether of drugs and violence was just decoy work, a tactic to mask the true target. The packs of gun-toting mercenaries who roamed the tunnels on Gurdler’s behalf were after one prize only, and his name was not Fu Manchu.

  Not a place or situation for a young lady of refinement. John Joe wished she had not asked. Wished she’d left Mount Tabor as his own; his personal retreat. Everything he possessed, of course, was hers to share, no questions asked. Or simply hers to take. But the swans had been his life apart. The thought of exposing them to any outsider, even Anna Crow, made him raise his hand, trace the puckers and ruts around his trick eye.

  No value to struggling, though. “I need to go. I must,” Anna said, then she left him and started her pacing again, moving through the room in her nakedness with her scrawny boy’s bum and those dimples on the back of her thighs like vaccination scars, he could never remember their name, and her failed breasts that would never hold a pencil clasped or even a cigar. A carrier bag was in her hand, and she was throwing in her possessions without looking. The Mango Body Butter, and the Exclusive Triple AlphaHydroxy Fruit Acid Complex, and the Exfoliating Gel. Exfoliate; X-Foal-I-Ate: “Take me down,” she said again. So he did.

  She put on a long velvet gown, and over it the slicker that she used for camouflage. Shiny black like a watchman’s cape, the slicker’s insides stank of a grey-faced monkey, of urine and rot, John Joe knew that for a fact.

  As for her new gold veil with the crimson trim, she wore it coiled like a bracelet at her wrist but left both ends free to flutter, twin pennants as she sailed out of her dressing room and through the reeking kitchens to the club where the fat girl called Yasmin danced in see-through underwear, wriggling her appendix scar in a turquoise spotlight.

  The alternate barman stood filing his nails, too bored to speak when Anna raided the cash register, scooping up bank-notes in both hands and stuffing them down her cleavage; then departed.

  The night as they walked crosstown towards Grand Central smelled like a storm, and the sidewalks were slick with wet, but no rain fell, there was only heat-mist. Outside the station the boys with their megaphones were still hard at it, they never gave up. “Would you say I was black?” John Joe asked.

  “Black is beautiful. You’re yellow,” Anna said, and she drew him inside, across the grand concourse underneath the painted night sky and the electric stars flickering, into the subways, she brought him underground.

  Never mind Take me down, it was herself that did all the taking. There was not a thing for any man to do, only trail three steps behind her and follow where she led, up steps and down ramps, along platforms to other platforms, past the workmen laying down red carpeting and the runway for tomorrow’s fashion show, and the added guards with their bullet-proof vests, until they were good and lost. Only then did she pause for breath, take one look into his face. “Well, call it jonquil. Or maybe saffron,” she said. She trailed his cheekbone with her veil, placed one fingertip in the socket of his eye, blew softly on the burns. “A fetching shade of quince,” she said.

  For some cause that no words fitted, John Joe felt guilty in her sight then. Unknowable she was to him, forever beyond his grasp, so he turned away in haste, let the tunnels swallow them.

  Descending to Mount Tabor at this time of night was no easy task. Lawmen were prowling in posses, and fugitives running in packs, scurrying between the tracks and along the overhead ledges, smashing every source of light for secrecy. So that John Joe and Anna were forced to find their way by feel alone, groping at the tunnel walls, stumbling over garbage and sleeping bags and maybe fallen bodies, there was no means to know. “This is fun, this is a delight,” Anna said in darkness, “I always did like going down, I mean descending, When the going was good, I got so good at going, Waycross Martin wrote that, I got so good at going, I forgot how to come, or plummeting by any other name like skiing or snorkelling or even bungee-jumping, or diving into a vat full of feathers come to that, my natural element so to speak, freefalling is what I do best, and why not, it’s what I’ve done longest, my earliest memory, did I ever tell you that?”

  “You did not.”

  “Must have slipped my mind like I slipped through Chief Wigwam’s fingers when he was pushing me on the swing out by the boating pond. I must have been five, and he kept driving me higher and higher with every push, clean over the treetops it seemed, till finally the rope snapped, and I was flung into the air. Flying then falling, I never was so scared, so thrilled, and when I tumbled back to earth, the instant before I crashed, guess what I thought, I wish I could see me, I thought.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “Only when I landed,” Anna said. But when she hit bottom this time, it seemed the other way round. John Joe heard her gasp in relief, felt her hand soaking wet through his sleeve. “My lips are sealed,” she said, and he tapped at the metal steampipe with his keys, received the two taps in reply, then held open the door in the rockface while she passed into Mount Tabor.

  A few hours just had passed since John Joe had been here last, yet the mood was changed utterly. Instead of a clubhouse, it felt like a bunker now. No children played Power Rangers, no women hung washing, and rifles were piled high at the feet of Crouch’s sculptures. Under the gas lanterns, Master Maitland sat surrounded by his troops, each man garlanded with an ammunition belt.

  Seeing Anna Crow, a stranger, the Master did not rise to greet her. Hunched massive in his black robes, he merely surveyed her, indifferent. “What are you good for?” he asked.

  “I can dance,” Anna said. “Well, not just dance, I can sew and cook as well, nothing fancy you understand, just home-style Southern cooking, smothered pork chops, meatloaf, my chicken-fried steak has won golden opinions, and then I’m training for a nurse, I can heal, I can make you well.”

  “Good for, I said.”

  But Anna had no time to answer him afresh. Before she could compose her thoughts, there came a noise like a stampede, massed footsteps thundering in the tunnel outside, weights hurled against the walls, a shouting and blaspheming that sent the Black Swans scrambling and left her by herself, coiling and uncoiling the gold veil with the crimson tongues round her wrist.

  John Joe made no move, merely stood against a wall among the three unclean spirits, watching Master Maitland, with his bull’s head lowered as if to charge, and Luther Pratt and Jerzy Polacki and Joe Easter racing for the grenades, and Marvella Crabtree with her hand across her mouth to keep the screaming in when the door in the rockface exploded, when the first shot was fired.

  He didn’t see who fired it, couldn’t tell you who it hit. There was no reality to this at all, so he felt no special alarm. When something shattered the third spiri
t, and the gas lamps blew out, and fat popping sounds like pellets of blood sausage dropped sizzling into the pan were all around his head, even when everyone started rushing outwards, he let himself be carried on the tide, not straining to resist or shelter, only searching for Anna’s veil. And he found it. Right ahead of him, a few inches out of reach, the red tongues were drifting towards the broken doorway, out into the white light that flooded the tunnel beyond. For a second he almost had them, but then he slipped down. Something live was moving under his foot, it pulled at him. “Don’t start me to talking,” Anna Crow said, and her veil got away.

  LAST

  583: soiled shirt: you are prey to remorse or regret; and sweating armpits meant shame. You sat in Chez Stadium, drinking apricot schnapps to forget, but your pits wouldn’t let you. Every time you started to wriggle free, they snapped on the cuffs again.

  He should have showered, only he could not stand to lay hands on himself. Just the thought of his own flesh returned him to that barbershop, sighting down his blade at Kate Root.

  Even now he couldn’t figure what had happened. Certain people had told him dreams were the same way, they made sense while you were in them, but when you woke everything was twisted. Bombo Garcia would know, but Bombo was not around. Nobody was.