Always

by Nicola Griffith

  “I know,” he said, nodding. “I’d hoped for turkey on rye or tuna salad, but the chef’s pride seems to have been at stake.”

  I’d forgotten he’d spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C. He was wearing a white turtleneck in knitted silk and casual trousers in grey. His shoes and belt were thick and polished. His hair was also thick, with a natural-looking wave. He looked like a cross between a gay soap opera star and a member of the Senate.

  “There,” said my mother, and put the Loetz vase and flowers on a side table. “Lovely. The perfect antidote.” She waved at the heavy vases, the stiff drapes, the gleaming silver, and glistening fish eggs, and her whole body swayed, like that of younger woman. Though her waistband was a little larger than it had been. “You always did have a good eye.”

  Waistband. Jeans. She was wearing jeans.

  “Aud?” I dragged my gaze away from the little rivets on her hip pocket. Both of them were looking at me. “A glass of wine?”

  “Good,” I said. “Yes. Please.”

  My mother in jeans, married to a man wearing Polo. The glass in my hand was reassuringly cold. I kept sipping until it was empty.

  “An Oregon pinot gris,” Eric said as he refilled it. “I’m glad you like it.”

  “Yes,” I said, and they talked some more, some polite chitchat about Vancouver and flights and food while I gathered my wits.

  After a while my mother noticed I was beginning to understand what they were saying. She put her wineglass down. “How are you, Aud?”

  “I’m . . . well.”

  “When did you arrive in Seattle?”

  “We’ve been here since Wednesday.”

  “We?”

  “Dornan. He’s . . .” He drinks coffee. I kill the people who mess with his girlfriends. “He’s a friend.”

  Like Eric’s, my mother’s pause was barely noticeable. “I’m so sorry not to have invited him. We must meet tomorrow. For dinner, perhaps. Yes. Dinner. Tomorrow.” It had been a while since I had seen my mother surprised enough to repeat herself.

  “What do you think of the city?” Eric said.

  “I like it. An interesting blend of American and Scandinavian. And you—how long will you be staying?”

  “A week, perhaps ten days.”

  “I hear you have family here.”

  “I do, but due to an unfortunate accident of timing, they are halfway through a six-week visit to India.”

  “We want to spend much of our time with you,” my mother said. “I want to hear about your life. Do you have pictures?”

  “Pictures?”

  “The filthy American habit,” Eric said, but in a tone that meant he approved. “Photos in your wallet, pictures of your house, your children, your dog, your corner office.”

  “One of many habits Eric learnt in this country,” she said, and laid a hand on his arm. They smiled at each other. She looked at me. “For the first time I think I appreciate the sentiment. I, for example, will be very pleased to see a picture of your daughter.”

  We were still speaking English but she was beginning not to make sense again.

  “The little girl,” she said. “The one who was in such difficulties last year.”

  “You want to see a picture of Luz?”

  She nodded. Perhaps she wondered if I had had brain surgery in the years since we’d last seen each other. “Eric tells me that when you live in America and have a child, it is expected.”

  “I don’t know if I do have a child, exactly.”

  “Then you need to make up your mind.” While I tried to parse that one she turned to the hors d’oeuvres and with quick, economical movements dabbed caviar on a toast point, which she put on a plate and handed to me. Her hands were slender and much bigger than Kuiper’s.

  My mother made a toast point for Eric, and one for herself, took a sip of wine, and again laid her free hand on Eric’s arm. The look she gave me was full of meaning, but I had no idea what it was. “I can’t tell you what is right,” she said, “but I can tell you what is expected—by others, and by this child. It doesn’t matter what she calls you, Mor or Tante or Aud, if legally you are her mother, somewhere inside she will one day expect you to behave as one. It doesn’t matter if this is likely, or even possible, it is what she will expect. One day.”

  Her fingers were white at the tips. Eric would have a bruise tomorrow. I ate my toast point.

  I WAS AT the Edgewater bar, halfway down my second pale green cocktail, when Dornan joined me.

  “Is that a kamikaze?”

  “I thought I’d try it.” I pushed the glass aside. Too much lime. “Ready for that film set?”

  “You saw your mum?”

  “I did.” I dropped cash on the bar and stood. “She wants to invite you for dinner tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  I nodded. He reached past me for the kamikaze and drained it in one swallow.

  THE PARKING lot was full, and the air trembled below audible range with generators and the subtle pheromones of stress and excitement. The light slicing from the partially open warehouse door was blue-white against the inky sky, and the air was stiff and charged, as though before a storm. I felt every bone snug in its socket, and Dornan’s eyes shone.

  Inside the warehouse, the noise and heat and light were intense. He paused on the threshold, trying to take it all in, then made a beeline for one of the Hippoworks posters.

  Kuiper and another woman at the food services table were shoveling food onto plates that were snatched out of their hands by a seemingly endless stream of actors, grips, sound technicians, and extras in street-kid clothes.

  “Killer Squirrels,” Dornan said.

  “What?”

  “Anton Brian Finkel.” He tapped the notice. “He made a film in the eighties about squirrels who eat alien nuts or something and go rogue. Great film to watch when wrecked, all these tiny squirrels flying about, trying to look menacing. It’s got to be the same man.”

  “I don’t know.” From here Kuiper looked very busy.

  He saw that I wasn’t really paying attention, and followed my gaze. “You going to introduce me?”

  “Maybe when she isn’t so busy. I’ll take you to Finkel’s partner, Stan Rusen.”

  We headed through the streams of eating extras to where the lights and cameras were clustered, but the one giving orders was the bad-tempered Goatee Boy, who today wore his earring in the other ear, not Rusen.

  I led Dornan back outside, to the Hippoworks trailer, the one with the lights on. I banged on the door. I was just about to bang again when it was yanked open by a woman talking over her shoulder to whoever was at the other end of the trailer.

  “. . . can’t tell you how pissed off I get when he does that. Oh. Well, who the hell are you?” It was the woman who had been ordering everyone about on the soundstage last time I was here. The set dresser.

  “Good evening,” I said, and gestured for Dornan to follow me inside.

  “Hey,” she said as I brushed past her. “I said, who the hell are you?”

  “She probably heard you the first time,” a man near the door said. I recognized him, too: the technical coordinator she had been arguing with yesterday.

  “Joel,” I said, remembering. He shifted in surprise, and that’s when I saw Rusen, who was sitting at his keyboard looking overwhelmed. When he saw me, he jumped up.

  “Aud, hey, glad you came. Peg, Joel, I’m sorry but we’ll have to do this later. Boy,” he said when they’d gone, “all those two do is squabble: I can’t do my job when he does this, I can’t get any work done when she does that. This is not like film school.” He rubbed the back of his ear. “I’m worrying if I can afford to pay anyone next week and they’re carrying on like a couple of kids.”

  I introduced Dornan. They exchanged pleased-to-meet-yous. “So can you? Pay them next week?”

  “Maybe. I’m hoping Anton will be able to figure out a way to sweet-talk the bank.”

  “Know when he’s due back?
”

  He shook his head, then forced a smile. “Say, I probably sound as bad as Peg and Joel. You didn’t come here to listen to me complain. What can I do for you?”

  I nearly said: Have you eaten? Kuiper would no doubt be nicer to me if I could tell her he had. “I need some information.”

  He sat back at his keyboard. “Okay.”

  “To begin with, general details on everyone who works here: names, résumés, references, date of hire. Anything you think might be useful background information. Former workers, too, please.”

  “Not a problem.” He started tapping.

  “Also any documentation you have with regard to meetings or correspondence with EPA and OSHA.”

  “Easy enough.”

  “Yesterday, someone on the set mentioned that she thought this production might crash and burn. Any idea what she might have meant by that?”

  He dragged his eyes away from the screen and rubbed behind his ear again. “Well, the OSHA thing is killing us.”

  “Apart from that.”

  “There have been some delays. Annoying things. Little things.”

  “Such as?”

  “The lighting tech spending five hours getting the set lit right, and then coming back from break to find someone’s messed it all up. Hours of night footage lost on the way to the lab. When we reshoot during the day using day-for-night exposures, we find it’s all screwy, though the camera guy swears it was set up right. Not so little, that one.”

  “Write it all down. E-mail it to me.” I gave him the address. I couldn’t spend every minute with my mother. It would give me something to do while I waited for Monday. And unlike Atlanta, this time I’d be helping people to help themselves. “I’d also be happy to take a look at your accounts, see if I can see a way out of this mess, but I’d understand if you felt uncomfortable with that.”

  If he didn’t give it to me, I’d just take it, but there was no harm in playing nicely, especially when it saved time and effort.

  “I’ll have to talk to Finkel about that,” he said. “Anything else? Did you read the promo material?”

  “Not yet, no.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “But my friend Dornan here is a big fan and would no doubt love to hear all about it. He was just telling me about Killer Squirrels.”

  “Oh, jeepers. You saw that? What did you think?”

  Dornan paused, then shrugged. “Well, it’s a fine film if you’re twenty and out of your head and it’s two in the morning and there’s nothing else on the telly.”

  Rusen laughed. “Boy, it’s awful, all right. It was way before my time but even Anton admits it. Feral, now . . . Oh, this one’s sweet, real sweet. It’s about this girl—young woman, I guess—who wakes in an alley completely naked, and it’s night, and she’s in a strange city. There’s all this—”

  “I’ll be on the set,” I said, and they both nodded.

  “. . . with shots of steam, strategically placed to keep it PG-thirteen, but it’s not cheesy, not even a bit, it’s ambience, and then there’s this noise . . .”

  I shut the door on their strategic wisps of steam. The second woman from the craft-services table was lugging a stack of crates out to the Film Food van. Inside, the food line was down to four people: the bony-faced Bri and his friend, one of the carpenters in overalls, and the assistant wardrobe woman. I watched while Kuiper served them what looked like Thai food, shook her head at something the last one said, and picked up her huge knife again, this time to divide a big, squashy-looking cake. “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres,” she said, and no one got it. She seemed used to it. She wiped down the counter, those muscles around her wrists sliding over each other like the reins of a stagecoach, controlling everything precisely, checked the coffee urn, added coffee and water, and then turned to the pile of fruit waiting on her chopping board. She pretended she didn’t see me. I let her chop for a while. Her hair was twisted up into a knot, and as the knife thunked rhythmically on the board, a loose swatch hanging by the side of her neck shook. Sometimes it looked blond, sometimes light brown. Her earlobe was as pink as a baby’s tongue.

  “Good evening,” I said. If I hadn’t been paying attention I would have missed the fractional hesitation between chopping. “Has Rusen eaten anything yet?”

  “He’s carrying a lot of weight on this picture. He needs to eat.” She sounded defensive.

  “What about the director?”

  She snorted and kept chopping.

  “I found out what CAA is.”

  “You must be thrilled,” she said. Then she sighed. “Rusen told me who you are.” It was an apology, I think.

  I filled one of the cups with a stream of pungent coffee. I felt her watching but took my time, adding just the right amount of cream. Didn’t stir. Sipped. Even more assertive than it smelled. “So,” I said, and when I looked up, she was chopping again. “Unusual to find a caterer who knows Caesar’s commentary.”

  “You really know how to endear yourself to a girl.”

  “I expressed it badly.”

  “No, you didn’t. I could quote you more: quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui . . . But your eyebrows are already in your hair, proving my point. You couldn’t be more surprised if I were a trained hamster singing ‘Happy Days.’ ”

  No, I wanted to say, let’s not do it this way. Let’s talk Latin. Do you know Petronius? Ovid? The Aeneid? But her look could have drilled granite. “Tell me about this production.”

  “Not my place. I’m a caterer.” Chop, chop.

  “But clearly Rusen talks to you. Why is that?”

  She didn’t say anything. I swallowed more coffee, noticing for the first time in months the slight tightness on the right-hand side of my throat where a razor had opened the skin like silk. That had been a rusty blade. Kuiper’s knife would cut bone deep without effort. “All right. Let’s talk about catering. If I said I was planning a wedding at the Fairmont and wanted you to cater for three hundred guests, what kind of menu would you suggest?”

  “You’re not planning a wedding.”

  “I’m just—”

  “Bullshitting me. I don’t know why.” The knife thunked energetically on her board. She’d take her fingers off if she wasn’t careful.

  In this light, her hair was the color of sandstone. She was like sandstone: a spire of rock rising from an otherwise featureless desert. No toeholds. I thought about toes for a minute, wiggled mine in their boots. Sipped at my coffee. Now that it was cooler it was beginning to taste almost smoky, not at all like that stuff from Tully’s. “So,” I said, “Rusen talks to you.”

  “It’s not a crime.”

  “But as you’ve pointed out, you’re a caterer.”

  She turned around. “And that, of course, makes me not worth talking to.” It was interesting, the basic dichotomy between her behavior and her face. She sounded and acted as though she were angry, or perhaps very sad, but the set of her facial muscles and the few, faint lines told a story of laughter and enthusiasm and occasional stubbornness. That was the woman I wanted to talk to.

  “I’ve never been on a film set before in my life. I have no idea how it works. I own this warehouse. It’s in my best interest to see that the production is profitable and keeps paying rent.”

  “So you’re just here to help.”

  “Well, yes.” Isn’t that what I just said? “I’m trying to understand how things operate. It might help everyone. So, please, tell me how sets like this work.”

  “There aren’t any other sets like this one. There are a lot of raw people. Finkel’s an old hand, but he’s not here, and Rusen’s carrying everything. And it’s his first film. He was a software architect.” An image of someone building a skyscraper from Dalí-like drooping girders popped into my head. “He’s smart, but this isn’t film school. This might be my first craft-services job, but at least I’ve been on movie sets before.”

  “So he talks to you.” Does he like it when you talk L
atin?

  “He hired me. You could say we’re learning our jobs together.”

  A job. “So he asks your advice on things? When there are problems. And there have been problems. You said so.” Just a job. Very good. “More than there should have been?”

  “Like I say, there are a lot of beginners. Two of the camera operators. The sound guy. But there are a lot of old hands, too. Grips, carpenters, technical—”

  “Joel,” I said, looking at her small hand with its big knife.

  “Joel. Peg. Kathy in costume.”

  “Which is why I’m wondering if there’s been some deliberate sabotage.” I was also starting to wonder how to describe her hair. Sandstone wasn’t quite right. Not blond, exactly. Not brown, either. All sorts of different snakes of color in this light, and shiny.

  “Why are you giving me that weird look?”

  “Weird as a beard,” I said, and gave her my best smile. Beards were weird, when you thought about it. Always a different color to head hair. Animals didn’t have different color hair on their heads and bodies, did they? Birds did, chickadees and woodpeckers. And badgers, too, come to think of it. Did they even have badgers in this country? Probably not. Hogs, though, they had hogs. “Gif me a hog!” I said in a bad German accent, and flung my arms wide. Now that I’d thought of it, it sounded like a lovely idea, luscious woman, luscious hair, but the woman stepped back and put a tray of stuffed mushrooms between us. Mushrooms. Not as good as truffles. Truffles. They used to use hogs to find them, get the hogs to snuff under the trees in the forest. “Snuffle my truffle,” I said, grinning. Truffles, food of princes. Princes ate hummingbirds, too—hummingbirds with long, long tongues. Hummingbirds baked in honey, eaten in a palace. “Tongue palace,” I explained, and the woman behind the mushrooms reddened. I reached for her, wanting to take her perfect pink earlobe in my mouth, but my stomach rippled.

  “Oh,” I said.

  She said something, with a question on her face, but someone had turned the sound off.

  I put my hand on my stomach. “It’s like a heartbeat, but too low down.” She put her big shiny knife on the counter and started to come around to my side. This time my stomach pulsed. I frowned. “Where’s the bathroom? ” She pointed. “ ’Bye,” I said.