Scot & Soda

by Catriona McPherson

  “What the hell shreds both pockets in four wears?” said Kathi. “Keys? Pocket knife? This chick needs a tool belt.”

  “They’re elasticated,” I said. “A belt would pull them down.” I squinted at the phone number on Kathi’s order screen and dialled it.

  “Speak!” said a voice.

  It sounded familiar.

  “Oh!” I said. “You’re not a cat groomer, are you?”

  “What?” said the voice. “Who is this?”

  Kathi was miming a lot of strong foul language at me and slicing her finger across her throat. I hung up.

  “What the …?” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll call back from your line. She won’t know it’s the same person.”

  “Right. She’ll think it’s some completely different extra from Outlander. Jeez, Lexy.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I felt so at home here now, I kind of forgot that I stuck out when I opened my mouth. “Sorry. Right, you phone. And ask her if it’s okay to stitch up the pockets and use the fabric to effect the repair.”

  “Effect the repair,” Kathi repeated, dialling. “That’s good.”

  “Tell her it’ll give a better silhouette,” I said. “Pocketless.”

  Kathi nodded and then started speaking. She listened to the answer, gave me a thumbs-up, and then kept listening. Her eyes widened. Her mouth formed an O shape as if to start asking “What the …” again but she remained silent. Eventually she cleared her throat, said, “It’ll be ready on Monday. Thank you for using Sew Speedy,” and hung up.

  “What?” I said.

  “The pockets are shredded from her key chain,” she said.

  “Right,” I said. “Like you thought.”

  “Because her keychain is made out of her cat’s jawbone,” Kathi said. “It’s dead.”

  “I’ll bet it is. Is that a thing? In California.”

  “It’s not even a thing in the Inca Empire! It’s gross.”

  I couldn’t argue, but then the things that I thought were gross around here was a long list. I was dreading my first funeral, because an open coffin with a rosy-cheeked corpse in it struck me as beyond barbaric. I was no fan of the open salad bar either, if I’m honest. And as for mud baths! I was in one the first time it occurred to me that the mud wasn’t changed between customers, and that this sucking, sticking cloying vat of organic goo, just the perfect temperature for bacteria to replicate in, had been sucking and sticking and cloying to that old guy who’d come waddling out of the changing room as I was going in. I felt the pustules begin to heave under my epidermis as I sat there. I felt funguses blooming and viruses spreading. When the attendant had the nerve to say detox I couldn’t even laugh.

  “So I can use the pockets?” I said. “I only need one. Or one half of two. Tell you what, Kathi. Keep the other two bits on file under her name and tell her when this lot wears through again—and it will unless she goes on a major diet—you’ll repair them again for free.”

  “You’ll repair them again for free?” Kathi said.

  I hadn’t been willing to discuss the fee breakdown for Trinity Solutions, because I didn’t want to give it oxygen, so I didn’t know if I was being kind or being had. I nodded and bent my head to start sewing.

  Todd was waiting for me when I left the Skweeky Kleen (featuring Sew Speedy) half an hour later. He was perched on top of the bonnet of his sparkling black Jeep. A stranger would assume he was posing there, getting a bit of height so that his golden perfection could be seen by more of the lesser mortals around him. I knew he was keeping his feet off the ground where the insects live. My heart ached a bit and then melted a bit as he gave me a brave smile. So when Della and Noleen both ambushed me in a sweet pincer move, they each got me a good one.

  Della opened her door with a kitten under each arm. “His skin is broken,” she said, brandishing Flynn at me. He meeped forlornly.

  “Today,” I said. “I promise, Della. Today.”

  “He is crying.”

  “I can hear that. Look, hold him up.”

  I had put a pair of scissors in my back pocket while I was sewing and forgotten to remove them. As Della held Flynn out, belly forward, I made a few snips into the wads of congested fluff in his armpits. They split like loaves of garlic bread, still holding at the hinge side nearest his skin, but now with a bit of play in them. Flynn stopped meeping and let out a rusty little purr instead.

  “There,” I said. “That’ll hold him.”

  Della put him down and watched him walk away, the clods of matted fur now dangling like windchimes. “Ugly,” she said.

  “Is Florian okay?” I said.

  She turned him round and lifted his tail, getting him closer to me than I would have wanted before I managed to step back. “What the hell are you feeding him?” I said, even though I knew what she was feeding him because I was buying it. Like I bought the fish food and the live shrimp for the seahorse and the bedding and day-old veg for the rabbit. I left it outside their room so Della didn’t have to say thank you, but she was still angry about being beholden. Hence the war of the groomer currently being waged.

  “He climbed up on the counter and ate a bowl of refried beans,” Della said.

  I swallowed hard.

  “They took thirty-five minutes to go through him,” she added.

  “Della, you’ve got to bathe him!” I said. “You can’t leave him like that until I find a groomer. You can’t let Diego play with him when he’s covered in bean-shite!”

  “Diego is at the Mathnasium,” Della said. “Of course I’ll wash him. I just wanted you to see.”

  “Well, thanks,” I said, quietly taking back everything I had ever said about baby pictures being the worst thing ever. I backed away and turned to find Noleen’s face an inch from mine.

  “Jee! Zuz!” I said.

  Noleen’s face in close-up was a wonder. From a distance she was a plain woman, with strong features and no ornamentation, but from the four-inch distance I stumbled back to, she was beautiful. Her eyes were clear and flecked in seven different colours and her eyelashes and brows were a strong natural black. Her grey hair sat in little curls like Julius Caesar’s without the leaves, and her skin was perfect. She was lined, but she was poreless and she had less of a ’stache and chin strap than I did although she had twenty years on me.

  “Good morning, Nolly,” I said. “You’re looking lovely this morning.”

  “Sarcasm rolls off me like split mayo,” she said. “Listen up.”

  “I meant it!” I said. “You look very well and very prett—-pared for anything.” I had bottled it. Noleen’s t-shirt this morning said I will cut you. Even for her it was a bold choice. “I mean, I’m listening.”

  “You need to get with Trinity,” Noleen said. Her voice was low and from the chin jerk that went with her words, I gathered Todd wasn’t to hear. “Get over yourself and get with it. ’kay?”

  “Any reason you can share?” I said.

  “If Kathi loses the Skweek, this whole place’ll go down,” she said. “And the new owners’ll slap an eviction on you quicker’n you can dial the international code to tell them at home you’re coming back.”

  “But business is good, isn’t it?” I said. “You were full all summer, nearly. And most weekends since.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” said Noleen. “Business is fine. I’m just asking you for favors on account of how much I love asking for favors.” She moved even closer. I could see how smooth her lips were and how well-flossed her teeth were. “It makes me feel all warm inside to discuss my private business and beg for help.”

  “What do you use on your skin?” I asked her. Truly, she was poreless. Even the creases at the sides of her nose looked like marble. Mine looked like peppered jerky.

  “The tears of wiseasses,” Noleen said.

  “Aren’t the t
ears of asses … piss?” I said. “And I wasn’t being a smart arse, by the way. I meant it.”

  “Kick me while I’m down, why don’t you!” Noleen said. “So that’s a hard no, is it?”

  “You are a lot of work, you know,” I said. “No, it’s not a hard no. It’s not even a soft no. It’s not a no.”

  “So that’s a yes.”

  “No,” I said. “Look, Noleen, I don’t even know if Trinity Solutions is legal. Is it a company? Is it registered? What’s the liability? What if someone takes the hump at something Todd says or does—”

  “Don’t say hump.”

  “—and sues us. Doctors can’t use their insurance for lawsuits that aren’t medical, can they? And a solicitor’s fees would shut you down quicker than a rival dry cleaners, wouldn’t it? And I can’t get sued, because if I lose, I’ll get deported.”

  “Only if it’s a crime of moral turpitude,” Todd put in. He had sneaked up behind me. “Not if it’s a civil dispute over a contract to deliver services. What are we talking about? Who’s suing you?”

  Noleen gave me a look that said over to you, sweet cheeks, but before I was forced to dredge up an answer, my phone started ringing. To be precise, it started singing “Car Wash.” I looked at the screen, saw a picture of my mum and, unable to put one and one together and get two, answered.

  “Lexy?”

  “Mum?”

  “There you are!” she said. I looked round wildly at the car park, chain link, drained pool, and walkways of the Last Ditch. If my parents ever visited me in California, I was in no doubt that it would be a surprise.

  “What? Where?” I said. “Where are you?”

  “Where do you think I am?” my mum said. “I’m at home.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “Bare-faced lie,” my mum said. “Either that or you’re not answering your phone. I just called you at home and left a message then I tried you on your mobile. Where are you?”

  “I am fifty feet from my front door,” I said. “Mum, how are you phoning a mobile?”

  “Oh! Oh! How did I get this number? you’re asking! That’s cold even for you, Lexy.”

  “Because the only reason I’m shovelling out cash for a landline every month is so that you and Dad can call me. If you’ve wrapped your head round calling me on a mobile number, I can yank it.”

  “And what am I worth to you every month, Lexy?” my mum said. “What’s the outlandish sum that you can barely thole to keep your own mother close to you across the miles?”

  “Ninety dollars,” I said, beaten.

  “Ninety! That’s … That’s … ”

  “Sixty pounds.”

  “That’s daylight robbery. See, this is why you’re always short at the end of the month, Lexy. You fritter it all away on things you don’t need. You’ve always been the same.”

  “I bought a Nissan Micra for cash on my seventeenth birthday!” I said. I had saved my pocket money and Saturday job wages for two years to get that little car and it broke my heart ten years later when the head gasket went and it wasn’t worth repairing.

  “Who needs a car at seventeen?” my mum said. “My point exactly.”

  “Didn’t stop you taking lifts in it.”

  “And how do you think that made me feel?” said my mum. “You dropping me off at Keep Fit in that old rust bucket instead of a natty little hatchback.”

  “Wha—?” I said.

  “Showing me up.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “What’s happening?” said Todd.

  “Is that Todd?” said my mum. “Now, Lexy, you know I don’t like to interfere, but he seems like a very nice young man. Family-minded. Very polite and helpful.” That was one mystery solved then. Todd had given my mum my mobile number and tutored her on international dialling to a cell phone. “The only thing I didn’t manage to find out was what he does for a living.”

  I paused. If I told my mother that the nice young man was a doctor, she’d be on the next plane over with a big folder full of sample menus, a list of free dates, and her own veil wrapped in tissue paper. If I told her we were in business together, ditto. And none of the other jobs I could think of—bus driver, bingo caller, milkman—seemed like real things that people still did. The truth—that he was off on long-term sick-leave with a psychological disorder—would slow her down, but Todd was standing right there and I didn’t want to hurt him.

  “He’s married,” I went for.

  “Now, Lexy, we both know that’s not true,” my mum said.” I asked him what his wife would think of him spending so much time with you”—oh, she was good—“and he said he didn’t have one.” Oh, he was great. “Why would you say otherwise?”

  “Mum, is there anything I can help you with? Because Todd’s waiting for me. We’re going out for the day.” Oh, I was best. She couldn’t get off the phone quick enough, horrified to think that her daughter and a nice, family-minded, polite, helpful young man were being delayed going on a picnic together. “Take photos and tag me,” she said.

  “I will,” I lied. I wouldn’t. If Mum saw Todd, she’d pay an extra plane fare for the priest and bring him with her.

  “Why is my mum’s ringtone ‘Car Wash’?” I said when I had hung up.

  “You said you hated when people chose ringtones to match people. So I went random,” Todd said. “Duh.”

  “Silly me,” I said. “Okay, then. Let’s go.”

  Twelve

  So how did you find them?” I said to Todd once we were on our way. “These potential witnesses.”

  “I looked on the Voyager website for stories the day after the reunion, got some names, found one who lives in Cuento and still has an entry in the phone book, and that’s where we’re going.”

  “One?”

  “I’m sure the first one will be able to give us addresses for some more, even if just to get rid of us. Don’t you think?”

  “So you’re not planning a charm offensive then?” I said. “Bad cop, worse cop, is it?”

  “Might be a struggle if Mike got there before us,” said Todd. “And I bet she did. I bet she went straight from sneering at our lead in front of us to scampering off to chase it behind our backs.”

  But, when we got to the house where the Beteo County alumnus of 1968 lived and knocked on the door, it was clear that the visit was a bolt from the blue.

  We were up in the mountain streets, not as fancy-schmancy as The Oaks but still pretty well-to-do. California status symbols took me a while to decode. None of the houses are old and none of the gardens are big, so the Georgian-rectory-with-a-paddock-ometer I’d always used to peg poshness was no use to me now. And at first one two-tone wooden house looked much like the next one. They both looked like sheds. I knew better now. If the street ran in a straight line between one stop sign and the next, you were still climbing the ladder. If the street had pointless bends in it or—best of all—was a loop, you’d arrived. If there was a half-moon window high above the front door so it looked like you’d got an upstairs, but really it was just a dusting nightmare and made the whole place feel weird, you’d really arrived. And then there was one that incensed me. If your drive was made of tarmac, you’d only recently arrived on Loopy Avenue. But if your drive was made of red bricks laid out in a pattern, you’d had time to get your feet under you. That was the thing I couldn’t get over. There were bricks everywhere. Acres of bricks. Miles of bricks. But they were all lying on the ground, and the houses—in this state beset by wood-chewing pests of unimagined variety and appetite—were still wooden. Millions of dollars’ worth of caulk-guzzling, paint-inhaling wood was available for termites on any given day.

  As we wound our way around the loops of Lassen Avenue, pulled up at the foot of a long drive with the bricks laid out in a giant-fish-scale design and looked at a house with a half-moon window above the front door an
d an extra arched window even higher than that, I was already imagining the people who would open the door to a sea of beige, offer us a bottle of water from a fridge bigger than my once-beloved Nissan Micra, and lead us to the farthest away spot in the ground floor where bums could be parked so we would see how huge and tidy their house was.

  I’ve seldom been more wrong. For a start, the front porch was still decorated for Halloween, four days after the fact, and not because the decorations were so impressive they were worth saving. There was a cornucopial pile of gourds stacked around the front door and some cornstalks lashed to the deck supports, and all over these were plastic spiders and fake cobwebs of the dollar-store type. Luminous skeletons, dull now in the morning light, swung above the porch rail with their shrouds billowing and their plastic shin bones clacking. There must have been a seated skeleton too, because its cobwebbed armchair was still there.

  Todd clucked his disapproval. “Honestly, all she needs to do is vacuum off those gross webs—Brrrrr!—and she would be good through Thanksgiving.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m new here, but I know.” I had removed the black cats and orange glittery BOO! sign first thing Thursday, cut up the carved pumpkin for compost, and let the rest of the squash stay on, with the addition of some brown ribbons and a few feathers. They weren’t turkey feathers but they did the job. “Sshh,” I added, hearing movement in the house.

  The door yawned open on a woman I couldn’t believe for a minute was sixty-eight. She had chestnut curls down her back and fake lashes sweeping her cheeks as she blinked at us.

  “Mrs. Heedles?” Todd said.

  “Ms.,” said the woman, which explained a bit. She was divorced and not averse to trying again.

  “We’d like to talk to you about Thomas Shatner,” I said.

  She turned to face me. “Thomas … Shatner?” She seemed bemused; not actually able to frown much, but puzzled.

  “From high school,” said Todd. She turned to face him now. She was swiveling from the hips instead of moving her eyes or her neck. The eyes I could understand. Those lashes looked heavy and the glue holding them on couldn’t be a picnic, but was her neck fused? Can you lift your neck so much you can’t turn it?