Evangelista's Fan (19 page)

And then, John-Jin began growing.

We measured him against the kitchen door. When he got to three feet, we gave a party, to which Barry came minus his earring and danced with John-Jin on his shoulders. John-Jin had a laugh like a wind chime. Barry said when he left: ‘That kid. He's so sweet. In't he?'

‘Now we can stop worrying,' said my mother. ‘Everything's going to be OK. He'll never be tall because his real parents almost certainly weren't tall, but he'll be much nearer a normal size. And that's all we were asking for.'

I know something important now. Don't ask for a thing unless you know precisely and absolutely what it is you're going to get and how you're going to get it. Don't ask for the old Pier Pavilion back. There's no such thing as the old Pier Pavilion. There will only be the
new
Pier Pavilion and it will be different. It will not be what you wanted in your imagination. My parents asked for something to make John-Jin grow. They didn't ask what that ‘something' was and nor did I. And together we allowed in the unknown.

It took some time to show itself. It took ten years exactly.

I had become a dance student in London when I first learned about it. In a cold phone box, I heard my father say: ‘We waited so long for another child. I used to wish for John-Jin at the end of every game of Miniature Golf. Remember that?'

I said: ‘Yes, Dad. Except you never told me what it was you were wishing for.'

‘Didn't I? Well, never mind. But . . . after all that . . . I never, Susan . . . I mean I never thought about the possibility of losing him.'

‘Shall I come home?' I said.

It was near to Christmas. John-Jin was twelve years old. He lay in bed without moving. His curtains were drawn, to rest his eyes, and he had his old gnome night-light on. He said it reminded him of being happy. His speech was beginning to go, but he wanted to talk and talk, while he could still remember enough words. He said: ‘Suze, I can't hardly move a toe, but I can still chat,
olé!
Tell me about the world.'

I said: ‘Here's some news, then. Remember Barry?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, he's in prison. I went to visit him. He stole a van. He remembers you. He sent—'

‘If you don't love him any more, it doesn't matter,' said John-Jin.

‘No, it doesn't,' I said, ‘but he was a good dancer.'

I sat in a chair by John-Jin's bed and he stared up at me. His face-like-a-flower was smooth and creamy and undamaged. After a while, he said: ‘I've had it, Suze. Did they tell you?'

I took his hand, which felt cold and heavy in mine. ‘Not necessarily,' I said, but he ignored this. He knew every detail about his disease, which had been named after two German scientists called Creutzfeldt and Jacob. It was called CJD for short. It had been there in the growth hormones and had lain dormant in John-Jin for ten years.

He explained: ‘The hormones come from human glands. The chief source of pituitaries used to be the mental hospitals – the cadavers no one minded about – and some of these died of CJD. Mum and Dad are going to sue, but it's much too late. Someone should have known, shouldn't they?'

‘Why didn't they?'

John-Jin shook his head. He said: ‘I can still move my neck, see? I can turn it and look at the room. So why don't you get a flamenco tape and dance while I can still see you. You could become a star, and I would have missed it all.'

I found the music and an old pair of castanets. I put on a black skirt and fixed a bit of tinsel to my hair. I was ready to begin when I looked down and saw that John-Jin was crying. ‘Sorry, Suze,' he said. ‘Get Mum to come and clean me first. I've no control over anything now. I live in a fucking toilet.'

In the dark December afternoon, I walked out along the pier on my own, along and along it to where it ended at the deep water.

I imagined John-Jin's girder underneath me. I wondered, in my rage, if you took that one piece away, would everything fall?

Trade Wind Over Nashville

  

It was July and hot. At six in the morning, vapour rose from the tarmac parking lots.

‘Know somethin', Willa?' said an Early Breakfast customer at the counter of
Mr Pie's
restaurant. ‘You look so pretty in that waitress cap, it's like yore dyin' a' beauty!'

‘I declare!' said Willa. ‘I never heard such a thing in the world!'

The waitress cap was lace. Polyester and cotton lace. Then there was the gingham dress that Willa had to wear. With that on, you didn't see the last days of her thirtieth year passing. No, sir. What you saw were her pushed-up tits and the waist she kept trim and the sweet plumpness of her arms. And as she handed the early customer – one of her 6 a.m. regulars – his plate of egg, sausage and biscuit, he took all of her in – into his crazed head and into his belly.

She lived in a trailer in a trailer park off the airport freeway. Her lover, Vee, had painted the trailer bright staring white, to keep out the Tennessee sun. Willa had a Polaroid picture of Vee with his paint roller and bucket, wearing shorts and a singlet and his cowboy boots. She nailed it up over her bunk, just low enough to reach and touch with her stubby hand. Shoot! she sometimes thought, what kills me dead ‘bout Vee is his titchy short legs! And she'd lie there smiling to herself and dealing poker hands in her mind so as to stay awake till he came home. And then, when he did, she'd whisper: ‘Vee? That you, Vee, wakin' me up in here?'

‘Who else?' he'd ask. ‘Who else you got arrivin'?'

‘Well then?'

‘Well what?'

‘Why ain't ya doin' it to me?'

So, on the next lot, at two in the morning, frail Mr Zwebner would wake to hear them shouting and pounding the hell out of their white walls. Zwebner had dreams of Viennese chocolate. Patisseries eaten with a little fork. And what he felt when Willa and Vee woke him was an old, unassuagable greed. ‘That Willa,' he'd sigh, ‘she's got it coming to her. She's got something, one day soon, gonna come along.'

At
Mr Pie's
, she poured coffee, set up a side order of donuts next to the plate of sausage. Seeing her arm reflected in the shiny counter, she said: ‘Lord! Ain't that a terrible sight, the elbow of a person. Look at that, will ya?'

The customer looked up. His mouth was full of egg. He stared at Willa's arm.

‘If Vee ever did see that, how wizened an' so forth it is, well, I swear he'd leave me right off. He'd jes take his gee-tar and his boots an' all his songs an' fly away.'

The man wiped his jowls with a chequered napkin. ‘He sold any a' his songs yet, that Vee?'

‘No. Not a one.'

‘Then he ain't gonna leave ya yet.'

‘What's that gotta do with him leavin' me or not?'

‘Got everythin' to do with it, Willa.'

‘I don't see how.'

‘Only one thing'll make him quit, honey. And it ain't no piece a' your elbow. It's fame.'

Willa stared at the fat customer with her wide-apart eyes. Trouble with a place like
Mr Pie's
, she said to herself, is everyone stick their noses in your own private thoughts.

Out at Green Hills, in the actual hills that looked away from
Mr Pie's
and all the other roadside diners and all the gas stations and glassed-in malls, lived Lester and Amy Pickering.

Lester was a roofer. He'd started small and poor, working out of a garage in East Nashville. Now, he was halfway to being rich. Halfway exactly was how he thought of it, when he drove down Belle Meade Boulevard and past the Country Club and saw and understood what rich was. And at fifty-two, he'd begun to wonder whether he'd get there, or whether this was how he'd remain – stuck at the halfway point.

‘Lester, you know, he's tiring,' said Amy to her friends at the Green Hills Women's Yoga Group. ‘I see it plain as death. It's like he's up against a wall and he just don't have the go in him to climb it. It's like gettin' this far took all the vim he had.'

‘Well, Amy,' the friends would reply, ‘let him tire, honey. You got a good house an' your kids both in college. What more d'you want?'

‘Ain't a question of want,' said Amy. ‘It's a question of dream. 'Cos one thing you can't stop Lester doing, you can stop him doing ‘most anything ‘cept having these dreams a' his. He's the type he'll die dreaming. He's descended from a Viking, see? Got this conqueror still goin' round in his veins.'

On that July morning at six, as more of Willa's regular customers stumbled into
Mr Pie's
and she wiped the counter for them, taking care not to look at her elbow's reflection, Lester Pickering climbed into his pick-up and drove south toward Franklin. He'd been asked to tender for a job on a Baptist church, to replace tin with slates. ‘Git out here early, Lester,' the Minister had advised, ‘'for the ole tin git too hot to touch.' And now he was doing sixty-five in the pick-up and his light-weight ladders were rattling like a hailstorm above his head. But his mind wasn't on his destination. He was driving fast to drive away the thoughts he was having, to jolt them out of his damn brain before they took hold and he did something stupid. Thoughts about Amy and the fruit seller. Thoughts about this guy who comes from nowhere and calls Amy up, knows her number an' all, and says meet me at such-and-such parking lot and I'll sell you raspberries from the mountains. And so she goes and she meets him and for two days she's bottling and freezing fruit and making jelly with a smile on her face.

‘Who is he?' asks Lester.

‘I dunno,' says Amy. ‘Name of Tom. That's all I know.'

‘An' how's he got all them berries? Where they come from?'

‘From the hills.'

‘What hills?'

‘He said it's a secret where they precisely come from, Lester.'

‘Why's it a darn secret?'

‘I dunno. That's it about a secret, uhn? You often don't know why it is one.'

Lester was driving so fast, he missed the turn-off to the church. He braked and saw in the rear mirror a livestock truck come hissing up right behind him. Ready to ram me, thought Lester, because the thing of it is, people don't care any more. They don't care what they do.

While Willa worked at
Mr Pie's
, Vee slept on in the trailer. The sun got up high. Sweat ran down Vee's thighs and down his neck. He was on the verge of waking, it was so hot and airless in the trailer, but he kept himself asleep and dreaming. In his dreams, he was no longer Vee Easton, cleaner and dogsbody at Opryland; he was Vee La Rivière (he pronounced it ‘Veeler Riveer'), songwriter to the stars of the whole darn world of Country Music. He was certain this future would come. He was so certain about it, he wasn't really dreaming it any more, he was thinking it up.

‘What's the diffunce between dreamin' an' thinkin', Vee?' asked Willa.

‘I'll tell ya, sweetheart. What the diffunce is, is between fairytales and actuality. What them things are now is actual.'

‘You mean “real”, doncha? You mean
re
-ality, Vee. That's the word you were meanin'.'

‘If I'd've meant real, I'd've said real. What I mean is, things actually happening, or, like they say in the Bible, Coming to Pass. Vee La Rivière is gonna Come to Pass.'

And when Vee woke, around eleven, he remembered what day it was. It was the day of the night of his meeting with Herman Berry.
The
Herman Berry, known nationwide, but with his heart and his house still in Nashville and a set of his fingernail clippings in a glass case in the Country Music Hall of Fame, right slap next to Jim Reeves's shoes.

Vee thumped his leg and sat up. He got out of his bunk and snatched up a towel and dried the sweat on him, then opened wide the four windows of the trailer and the daytime world of the trailer park came in, like homely music. He put on some blue stretch swimming trunks and made coffee. He didn't give one single thought to Willa or to anything in his life except this big meeting with Herman Berry, when he would play him three songs he'd written. ‘Keep it to three, boy,' Herman had said. ‘Keep it to a trinity and I'll listen good. More ‘an that and my mind starts walking away.'

But which three would he offer? Veritably speaking, Vee admitted to himself, as he turned the pages of his music note book, there's only one of Herman's calibre and that's my new one.

He got his guitar and tuned it a bit. He felt suddenly chilly in his torso, so he put one of Willa's thin old counterpanes round his shoulders. Then he flipped the pages to his new song, called
Do Not Disturb
, and played the intro chords. Then he made like he was talking to Herman Berry and explaining the song to him:

‘. . . them ther's just the introductory bars, Herman. Key of C minor. Little reprise here before the first verse. A moody reprise, I call it. Let every person know this is a sad song. Tragic song, in all absolute truth. OK? So here we go with the first verse:

‘In parenthetics, Herman, I didn't never stay in no hotel room with a mini-bar, but Willa put me straight on that detail. She said, you can't say “got some whiskey from the bar” just, 'cos what hotel rooms have now is mini-bars, OK? Means adding coupla quavers to the line, but then I keep it scanning in the fourth, like this:

‘You get “it all”, Herm? “It all”, that's his life and the way it's turning out.