The Shining Girls

by Lauren Beukes

  Stewart screeched and pulled away, sucking at the blister already rising on the knobbly bone on the back of his wrist. She didn’t tell the other guys. She might have a fast mouth, but occasionally she knew when to keep it shut. Someone must have seen him coming out, still burning with humiliation, because word got around. Ever since, he’s been dead set against her.

  She works through lunch, so she doesn’t have to run into him on the way out, even though her stomach is growling like a tiger. Only when Stewart goes into a meeting with Martin does she grab her bag and head for the door.

  ‘Not lunchtime now?’ George says, affably checking his watch.

  ‘I’ll be so quick, I’ll be back at my desk before you see me leave,’ she says.

  ‘Like the Flash?’ he says. And that’s it right there. Good as a confession.

  ‘Just like,’ she says, even though she’s never read the darn comic book. She gives him a heavy, saucy wink and sashays out the door, across the shimmering mosaic tiles that look like fish scales to the elevator with its ornate gold doors.

  ‘You all right, Miss Rose?’ the doorman at the front desk says as she steps out, the dome of his bald head as polished and shiny as the fixtures.

  ‘Dandy, Lawrence,’ she replies. ‘And you?’

  ‘Got the flu, ma’am. Might have to pop out to the drugstore later. You look pale. Hope you’re not coming down with it too. It’s a bad ’un.’

  On the street outside the Fisher Building, she leans against the arch of the doorway, feeling the ornately carved dragon fish pressing against her back. Her heart is thudding in her chest like it’s trying to bash its way right out her chest.

  She wants to go home and curl up in her unmade bed. (The sheets still smell like Sasha’s cunt from Wednesday night.) Her cats would be delighted to have her home in the middle of the afternoon. And she still has half a bottle of Merlot in the fridge. But how would that look, taking off in the middle of the day? Especially to George.

  Act normal, for God’s sake, she thinks. Get yourself together. She’s already drawing stares and, worse, kindly intentions. She launches herself away from the archway before the interfering old lady with wrinkles cutting down her neck can come over to ask if she’s okay. She walks purposefully up the street, heading for a bar several blocks away where she’s unlikely to run into any of her colleagues.

  It’s one of those basement numbers, where all you can see from the window are people’s shoes going by. The bartender is surprised to see her. He’s still setting up, taking the battered chairs down from equally battered tables. ‘We’re not open—’

  ‘Whiskey sour. Neat.’

  ‘I’m sorry, miss—’

  She puts a twenty on the bar. He shrugs, turns to the cluster of bottles above the bar and starts mixing her drink, more laboriously than necessary. ‘You from Chicago?’ he says, grudgingly.

  ‘She taps the note on the bar counter. ‘I’m from where there’s more of that if you shut the hell up and make me my drink.’ In the thin slice of mirror behind the bar, she watches reflected legs go by. Black brogues. Tan Mary Janes. A girl in bobbysocks and lace-ups. A man on a crutch shuffling past. It triggers something in her memory, but when she turns to look, he’s already gone. And so what? At least her drink is served.

  Willie downs it and then another. By the third, she’s feeling like she’s ready to go back. She slides the twenty across the counter.

  ‘Hey, what about the other one?’

  ‘Nice try, champ,’ she says, and swims back to the office through a pleasant floatiness. By the time she reaches the door of the building, the light-headedness is turning queasy. It weighs down, like a thunderstorm gathering right on top of her. She can feel the barometric pressure rising with each step, so that it takes every ounce of willpower to turn on a happy face when she opens the door into the office.

  God, how could she have been so wrong about who her enemies are? Stewart looks at her with concern, not contempt. Maybe he knows he was out of hand that night. She realizes he’s been nothing but a gentleman since. Martin is irritated that she wasn’t here when he was looking for her. And George … George grins and raises his eyebrows. Like, What took you so long? And also: I’m watching you.

  The plans on the vellum are blurry in front of her. She jabs angrily at the kitchen walls with her blotting powder; they’re all wrong and will need to be reconfigured.

  ‘You all right?’ George says, putting a hand on her shoulder, overly familiar. ‘You look a little out of sorts. Maybe you should go home.’

  ‘I’m just peachy, thanks.’ She can’t even come up with a witty retort. Dear George. Cuddly, furry, harmless George. She thinks about the night they both stayed late working on the Hart’s project and he broke out the bottle of scotch Martin kept in his office, and they sat up talking until two in the morning. What did she say? She scours her brain to remember. She talked about art and growing up in Wisconsin and why she wanted to become an architect, her favorite buildings, the ones she wished she’d built. Adler and Sullivan’s soaring towers and sculpted details. Which got her on to Pullman and how the workers who lived in his housing were forced to live by these ridiculously patronizing rules. And he said barely a word, just let her ramble. Let her incriminate herself.

  She feels paralyzed. She could wait it out. Stay at her desk until everyone else has gone home for the day and she can try to make sense of this. She could go back to the bar. Or straight home to destroy anything deviant and subversive.

  Five o’clock comes and goes and her colleagues start peeling away one by one. Stewart is one of the first to go. George one of the last. He hangs around, as if waiting for her.

  ‘You coming or should I leave you with the keys?’ His teeth are too big for his mouth, she notices for the first time. Great big slabs of white enamel.

  ‘You go ahead. I’m going to crack this bastard if it kills me.’

  He frowns. ‘You’ve been working on that all day.’

  She can’t stand it any more. ‘I know it was you.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The comics. It’s stupid and it’s not fair.’ To her fury, her eyes are welling up. She keeps them wide, refusing to blink.

  ‘Those things? They’ve been circling the office for days. Why you so wound up about it?’

  ‘Oh,’ she says. The sheer enormity of how wrong she’s been crashes down on her and takes her breath away.

  ‘Guilty conscience?’ He squeezes her shoulder and slings his briefcase over his arm. ‘Don’t worry, Willie, I know you’re not a Red.’

  ‘Thank you, George, I—’

  ‘Pink at most.’ He’s not smiling. He puts the keys down on the desk in front of her. ‘I don’t want anything coming between the firm and this government project. I don’t care what you do in your private life, but you clean up after yourself. All right?’ He cocks his finger like a gun at her and slides out the door.

  Willie sits there, stunned. You can bury your radical magazines and tear up your sexually perverse sketches and burn your sheets. But how do you erase who you are?

  She’s startled nearly out of her skin by knuckles rapping on the door. She can see a man’s profile through the fluted glass hand-lettered with the name of the firm. She’s ashamed that her first thought is FBI! Which is ridiculous. It has to be one of the guys, probably forgotten something. She glances round the office and sees Abe’s jacket hanging on the back of his chair. Just Abe. His wallet is probably in it, with his bus pass. She unhooks it from the chair. She might as well leave at the same time.

  She opens the door to find that it’s not Abe standing outside, but a horribly thin man leaning on a crutch. He turns the corners of his lips up around the wires between his teeth and screwed into his jaw in something that is supposed to be a smile. She pulls back in revulsion and tries to close the door on him. But he jabs the rubber foot of his crutch in the gap and shoves through. The door slams into her, bouncing off her forehead and cracking the glass. She falls backwards
against one of the heavy Knoll desks. The metal edge catches her in the small of her back and she slides down onto the floor. If she can make it to Stewie’s desk, she could throw the big lamp at him…

  But she can’t get up. There’s something wrong with her legs. She whimpers as he limps in, grimacing around the wires in his mouth, and closes the door softly behind him.

  Dan

  1 JUNE 1992

  Dan and Kirby are taking advantage of journalists’ privilege, sitting in the dugout looking out over the field, which is impossibly green against the warm red of the dirt and the crisp white lines cutting through it and the Boston ivy growing up the brickwork. The friendly confines are still empty, although the party has already started on the rooftops around the stadium.

  The other reporters are setting up in the press box that floats high above the curves of gray plastic seating lining the stadium. But it’s still a good forty minutes before the punters start streaming in. The vendors have rolled up their shutters. The smell of hot dogs is percolating in the air. It’s one of Dan’s favorite times, when the whole place is full of potential. He’d be happier if he weren’t half-annoyed with Kirby.

  ‘I’m not just your access pass to the Sun-Times library. You have to do some real work,’ he snaps. ‘Especially if you actually want that college credit.’

  ‘I was working!’ she sparks with indignation. She is wearing some incomprehensible punky vest-top with a high turtleneck that covers her scar, like a priest’s cassock with the sleeves cut off. Which is not exactly going to fit in with the button-up-shirt-and-sports-jersey brigade in the press box. He was nervous about bringing her here. And now it seems with good reason. He ignores the distraction of the fine blonde hairs on her bare arms.

  ‘I gave you a list of approved questions. All you had to do was read them and add a question mark. Instead, I got Kevin and the guys telling me that while I’m busting my ass trying to get a useful soundbite out of Lefebvre, you’re in the Padres locker room playing cards and flirting.’

  ‘I did ask all your questions. And then I sat down to play poker. It’s called laying the groundwork. Solid journalistic principle, my lecturers tell me. It wasn’t even my idea. Sandberg dealt me in. I won twenty bucks.’

  ‘You reckon you can get away with playing the cute naïve girl? That act’s going to let you get away with stuff your whole life?’

  ‘I think I can get away with being interested and interesting. I think curiosity trumps ignorance. I think comparing scars helps.’

  Dan smirks, just a little. ‘I heard about that. Sammy Sosa really showed you his butt?’

  ‘Wow. Talk about sensationalizing the news. Who told you that? It was his lower back, just above his hip. Besides, it’s not like they don’t get naked in the showers right in front of you. He had this huge bruise from walking into one of those big metal trash cans. He didn’t see it, he was saying goodbye to a friend and half-turned around and wham! He said he’s clumsy sometimes.’

  ‘Huh. If he drops the ball, that quote is so going in.’

  ‘I even wrote it down for you. And I got something else that was interesting. We were chatting about travelling, being away all the time. I told them that funny story about how I was crashing on the couch of a girl I met in a video store in LA and she tried to get me into a threesome with her boyfriend and I ended up on the street at 4 a.m., walking around until the sun came up. It was really beautiful, watching the whole city come alive.’

  ‘I haven’t heard that story.’

  ‘That was it. Anyway. I said it was good to come back to Chicago, and I asked Greg Maddux how he felt living here, and he got a bit weird.’

  ‘Weird how?’

  Kirby checks her notebook. ‘I wrote it down when I got outside. He said: ‘Why would I want to go anywhere else? The people are so friendly. Not just the fans, but the cabbies, hotel porters, folks on the street. In other cities people act like they are doing you a favor.’ And then he winked and started telling me about his favorite swear words.’

  ‘You didn’t follow up?’

  ‘He railroaded me. I wanted to. I thought it would make a good piece, ballplayer’s Chitown. Top five recommendations, restaurants, parks, clubs, hang-outs, whatever. And then Lefebvre came back in and I got chucked out so they could get ready for the game, and I started thinking it was a peculiar thing to say out of nowhere.’

  ‘I’ll give you that.’

  ‘You think he’s planning a move?’

  ‘Or considering it. Mad Dog’s a control freak. He likes to push things as far as he can. He was definitely playing you. Which means we should keep an eye on it.’

  ‘Little rough on the Cubs if he’s planning to bail.’

  ‘No, I get it. You gotta go where your best chances are to play ball like you mean it. He’s hot stuff right now.’

  ‘Oh really? You go that way?’

  ‘You know what I mean, obstreperous girl.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She shoulders him, affectionately. Her skin is so warm from the sunshine that he can feel it right through his shirt, like she’s burned him.

  ‘Anything else up your sleeve?’ he says, moving away, trying to be casual about it. Thinking, You’re being ridiculous, Velasquez. What are you, fifteen?

  ‘Give me a chance,’ she says. ‘There’ll be more poker games.’

  ‘Sooner you than me. I’m a terrible bluffer.’ Really terrible. ‘Come on, we should be heading up.’

  ‘Can’t we watch from there?’ Kirby points out the green scoreboard that looms over the centerfield bleachers. He’s thought the same thing. It’s beautiful. Real Americana, with its clean white font and windows that open between the slats where the numbers go.

  ‘You and every other punter. It’s not going to happen. That’s one of the last hand-turned score-boards in the country. They’re very protective. No-one gets in.’

  ‘But you have.’

  ‘I earned the right.’

  ‘Bullshit. How did you do it?’

  ‘I did a profile on the guy who turns the score. He’s been doing it for decades. He’s a legend.’

  ‘Do you think he’d let me flip one?’

  ‘I think your chances are minimal. Besides, I know how your mind works by now. You only want to go because no one else is allowed to.’

  ‘I think it’s really a secret gentleman’s club where the most powerful men in America plan the future of the country, with cocktails and strippers, while an innocent baseball game plays out below.’

  ‘It’s a bare room with a battered floor, and it gets as hot as hell.’

  ‘Sure. That’s exactly what someone who was trying to protect the secrets of the club would say.’

  ‘All right, I’ll try to get you up there sometime. But only after you’ve gone through initiation and mastered the secret handshake.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Swear to the man upstairs. But only on condition that when we get up to the press box in front of my colleagues, you pretend that I chewed you out for being unprofessional, and you feel real remorse.’

  ‘So much remorse.’ She grins. ‘But I’m holding you to that, Dan Velasquez.’

  ‘Believe me, I know.’

  His anxiety about her not fitting in turns out to be pointless. She doesn’t and is all the more charming for it.

  ‘It’s like the United Nations in here. With a better view,’ Kirby cracks, looking around at the rows of phones and men, mostly, sitting behind the nametags of whichever media outlet they’re representing, already taking notes or jabbering pre-game blather into the handsets.

  ‘Yeah, but this is much more serious,’ Dan says. She laughs, and that’s really all he wants.

  ‘Sure, what’s world peace compared to baseball?’

  ‘This your intern?’ Kevin says. ‘I should get me one. Does she do laundry?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t trust her with that,’ Dan shoots back. ‘But she gets good quotes.’

  ‘Can I borrow her?’

 
; Dan is about to bristle on Kirby’s behalf, but she has a comeback already lined up. ‘Sure, but I’ll need a raise. What’s double of free?’

  That draws a laugh from half the room, and why shouldn’t it? The game is underway. The Cubs’ bats are starting to make some noise. The tension in the press box ramps up, everyone suddenly very focused on the action playing out on the diamond below. They might actually win this. And he’s happy to see her getting caught up in it too. The magic.

  Afterwards, Dan phones it in among the hubbub of other reporters doing the same, reading from his notebook and his scrawled handwriting that is so illegible, Kirby says, that he might as well be writing prescriptions. The Cubs took it in the seventh inning after the game slowed into a vicious pitchers’ duel, largely thanks to brand-new golden boy Mad Dog Maddux.

  He claps Kirby across her shoulders. ‘Nice work, kiddo. You might even be cut out for this.’

  Harper

  26 FEBRUARY 1932

  Harper buys a new suit to fit at the Baer Brothers and Prodie Store (where they treated him like shit until they saw the color of his money), and takes Nurse Etta and her roommate from the woman’s boarding house out to dinner. The other girl, Molly, is a teacher from Bridgeport, a bit rough and tumble compared to her tight-wound friend. She’s going to chaperone, she says, with a wicked smile, as if he doesn’t know she is only along for the free food. Her shoes are worn and the dark wool on her coat is forming little balls, like a sheep. The piggy and the lamb. Maybe he’ll have chops for dinner.

  Mostly he’s happy to be eating real food again instead of white bread soaked in milk and mashed potatoes. He’s lost a lot of weight waiting for his jaw to heal. The wire came off after three weeks, but he’s been unable to chew until recently. His shirts hang baggy, and he can count his ribs like he hasn’t been able to since he was a boy and the bruises from his father’s belt made the calculations easier.