Noise (5 page)

‘In the soul-cleansing blood of the Lamb. Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you walking daily by the Saviour's side? Do you rest each moment in the Crucified?'

And still, she could hear the girl.

‘Use the word: fuck! Use the word: fuck!'

So Ulla sang louder.

‘Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? When the Bridegroom cometh will your robes be white, pure and white in the blood of the Lamb?'

‘Miss Shooks?'

‘Will your soul be ready for the mansion bright? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?'

‘Miss Shooks?'

‘Lay aside the garments that are stained with sin, and be washed in the blood of the Lamb. There's a fountain flowing for the soul unclean. Oh, be washed in the blood of the Lamb!'

‘ 'Scuse me, Miss Shooks.'

Ulla Shooks opened her eyes after that final emphatic refrain, found Tommy and his clipboard standing, once again, directly in front of her. In the gap between his belly and crooked arm, Ulla could see the girl, open eyed and smiling in her direction.

‘You're all done, Miss Shooks. I've got your bill ready.'

Ulla felt the shame crawl up her neck, felt her ears burn red.

She refused to look in the girl's direction. She gathered up her purse and followed Tommy to the counter, where he circled the total on her bill.

‘You get free rotation after three thousand miles,' he said.

Ulla just nodded, dug into her bag for the chequebook.

The telephone rang and Tommy answered it, stretching the long cord back into the garage. Ulla printed out the name of the business and the amount on the plain green cheque in careful letters. She tore the cheque from its pad and when she slipped it under the paper clip on her own bill, Ulla saw the girl's invoice.

The girl.

Ulla tried to see the girl, reflected in the window, but couldn't. Heard her, though, another song pulsing harshly from the headphones. And more singing.

‘Don't just stare, 'cause she's not wearing underwear, em-em-em-em-em-em-em-em…'

Ulla located the total on the young girl's bill, the charge for two cheap tyres, without speed-balancing. On a scrap of paper, she added that figure to itself, added another fifty dollars which she hoped would cover the speed-balancing.

‘Oh, how rude, at least she's got your attention, square. Em-em-em-em-em-em-em-em…'

Almost hastily, Ulla wrote out the cheque for that calculated amount, clipped it to the girl's bill, scored out the 2 under Quantity. Wrote 4, and circled it. Wrote beneath, ‘plus speed-balancing'.

‘Don't you realise, it's just her disguise, ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai, hey mum! Look, no more panty line, ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai, shoewa
shoewa shoewa shoewa shoewa shoewa shoewa, i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i…'

Ulla left Tommy's Tyre Town. The sleet had stopped. And wasn't that the moon climbing up over Tussey Mountain?

One night Mary, a little girl with sisters and parents who loved her, woke in a dark forest. At first she was afraid and then she realised it was her backyard. During the day she sometimes pretended her backyard was a forest and now, in the dream world of night, it had become a forest. During the day she pretended there was a door on the floor of the forest, and so now she went to look for it. She
found it between the garage and the fishpond, and she opened it with excitement and a little fear. During the day she had imagined that under the trapdoor there was a staircase lit with lamps, and so there was. Knowing by now that she was dreaming and that this chance might never come again, she went down the stairs, closing the door behind her.

As Mary descended the stairs, she became me, or, to put it another way, I became dimly aware of her, descending down into herself as I, a middle-aged woman, drove through the town where I live on a rainy spring night listening to an old song on an obsolete tape. The music in the song started with the sound of a crippled machine stripped to its barest function, turning unevenly round and round on a cockeyed pivot, screeching sweetly and brokenly. There was a sound like slow-struck bells and a voice like that of somebody looking for something in the dark. I used to listen to it years ago, lying drunk on my floor in the dark. I would listen and think of a woman I loved, or tried to love. Her name was Karen. We did not belong in the same world, but somehow our separate worlds had overlapped.
I see your wishes on the wall
. Karen was overspilling with impossible wishes and so was I. Our wishes were glowing, and always out of reach; they made life around us blurred, magical and painful. Our wishes were not the same at all, but somehow, we had met in the dark and, for a moment, our wishes had overlapped.

Meanwhile, the dreaming little girl named Mary continued down the stairs in the dark. Outside the glowing perimeters of lamplight, the dark was deep and physical. As she walked, a voice spoke. She could not tell whether it came from inside her or outside. It said: Now you must choose. You can keep going down and visit the Devil. Or you can stop on the landing and visit life
on earth. Mary said aloud, ‘I choose life on earth.' And she came to the landing. The landing was an enormous room, luxuriantly carpeted with nice little tables and chairs placed at intervals. There were pictures on the wall, and they were like paintings and movies combined; the figures in them were loosely formed like the figures in paintings and yet as defined and mobile as the characters in movies. In one of them a child looked out the window at a beautiful woman in the sky and longed for her. Music played; it was like the grinding of a machine with a personality, a personality that was sad and sweet and had to grind the same way over and over. The singer sang, and Mary understood the song to be a song of the child's longing–ancient longing that had taken new life in the body of the child. Mary looked at another picture; in that one a musician and a beautiful model kissed each other on the street at night, outside a bar called ‘The White Rose'. They were like little pieces of glitter in human form, and they were sad because they knew that the lifespan of glitter is not as long as the lifespan of humans–that they would die shortly and yet be forced to live on in the body of a dull, sore human being for years after. The music was singing of their sadness, too.

The windshield wipers rub back and forth, bearing rippling streams of wet light. The wet windshield catches the lights of stores and street lamps and, for a second, I glimpse, between reflections of drugstore and laundromat lights, the reflection of something that has accidentally shown itself long enough for me to see its bright silhouette.
I see you run to make a call, putting up to someone free.
Far away and hard to see, Karen runs for the phone in a forgotten room down a long, long hall that twists and turns through a house with hundreds of rooms in it. I am in another room now, and in
this room the song is about another person. It is about a girl, a poor girl named Kassandra. She came to me through charity. She came to stay with me in the summer. I was supposed to help her; I wanted to help her. Her mother was cruel and she was wishing for a new mother. I had no children and I was wishing for a daughter. We came from different worlds, and each of us spoke languages the other did not know, but still, for a while, our wishes overlapped.

On the luxuriant, carpeted landing, the little girl named Mary looks at another picture. In this one a dark, beautiful girl some years older than her is sitting on a bed in a dingy room, looking at wishes. In the picture, Mary can see the girl's wishes; they are wonderful and terrible. She wishes she was not poor. She does not know she is beautiful and so she wishes she was beautiful. She wishes she was a queen, more powerful and perfect than anybody, telling everybody what to do. She wishes to lay treasures at her mother's feet. She wishes to chop off her mother's head and put it in a goldfish bowl. She wishes to ride horses. She wishes she would be adopted by a woman who has money, who would love her and buy her things. Mary can feel the girl who sits on her poor bed, wishing and being pulled apart by the power of her longing. Mary can almost see the woman with money; she is pale and worried and she is going back and forth from young to old very fast. During one flash of youth, Mary realises that the woman with money is her.

There is the sound of bells; Mary is distracted and forgets what she realised. The picture of the beautiful dark girl becomes a picture of ringing bells; a big iron bell high up in a stone church; handbells rung by town criers; the electronic bell of a phone; the digital bell of a cell phone. The bells vanish. The girl is on her cell phone, but the person she is trying to call isn't there.

The phone is ringing.
Your life and my life, they don't touch at all/And that's no way to be
. I am home, turning on the lights, trying to get to the phone. The music continues in my head.
We've never seemed so far.
I bought Kassandra clothes and helped her with school twice a week on the phone. The other poor girls beat her because they were angry at her for having good clothes. They mocked her for doing better in school. Her mother mocked her too. And so she stopped calling me for help. She put the clothes I gave her in the bottom drawer.

The caller hangs up as I pick up.
We've never seemed so far.

When Kassandra was ten years old I would read to her at bedtime. She would look at me with big glowing eyes, golden with wishes that overlapped with mine. I wished her to be a success. I wished her to be a champion horse rider. I wished her to grow up beautiful. I wished her surrounded by jewels.

The little girl named Mary is looking at a painting of the dark girl and the pale woman; the woman is holding the girl, and, even though she is the smaller of the two, she is able to hold her all the way. ‘Your weight feels good to me,' she says. ‘Lay on me all the way.' And the dark girl does.

Now Kassandra is following her dreams in the street among louche criminals, but I know her wishes are still golden and glowing. Our wishes no longer overlap–but they do. I know they do because sometimes when I am sick with sadness I feel her at my side with her hand on my shoulder. Though I can't say that it is really her I feel or just my wish.

The phone rings again.
Come wish beside me–don't you know you know what's right.
It is a wrong number.

Mary looks at the next picture; in it the dark girl is holding
the pale woman as if she is the woman, and the woman a girl. Somewhere a bell is ringing, getting louder.

Come wish beside me–don't you know you know what's right.
Mary opens her eyes. She is in her bedroom and it is flooded with light. Her mother is gently shaking her. She closes her eyes again.

The picture of the dark girl and the pale woman becomes a picture of bells: a big bell high up in a stone church; handbells rung by town criers; the bell of a mechanical clock struck by a tiny gong. Mary opens her eyes, and forgets what she has seen.

The phone rings again.

The night Nikki gets caught fucking Sean in the dorm in Durham–Doug the director pounding on the door and saying her name,
demanding that she open up this instant–she decides that the programme's promise of a happy future isn't worth the constant monitoring, the idiotic puritanism. That the programme's promise is worth precisely nothing. She'll never become who they want her to be, or worse, she thinks, she'll become one of them, half dead and full of fear. Sean practically cowers as he pulls his T-shirt over his head, scrambling around her bed looking for his boxers and shorts. ‘Nikki,' he hisses, ‘come on. Get up. Do something.' But she doesn't want to do anything, not even fuck him any more.

‘Nikki,' Doug calls from the hallway. ‘This is a serious violation. Open the door.' He rattles the knob. ‘Or I will.'

She's not going to talk to Doug any more–Granola Doug, she calls him–not going to answer his questions or beg his forgiveness. But poor Sean is about to cry, may even be crying. ‘Go out the window,' Nikki says, and Doug, slapping the door, says, ‘I can't hear you, Nikki,' and Sean says, ‘How am I supposed to do that?'

‘Hang by your fingertips,' Nikki says. ‘Then drop.'

‘And break my neck?' Sean says.

‘Right now,' Doug says, and Sean says, ‘Get up, Nikki. Come on. Get dressed.'

Nikki's not going to get dressed. If they insist on barging into her room uninvited with a pass key, they can face her naked.

‘Five seconds,' Doug says. ‘I'm counting down.'

‘Please,' Sean says.

‘Five,' Doug says.

Sean sits on Karen's bed across the narrow room, still watching Nikki, but not pleading with his eyes any more, apparently resigned to his punishment, which he must view as catastrophic: expulsion from the programme, meaning no more monthly counselling
sessions at his high school during the year, but no more summer programme at the university either, and worse, no more help clawing his way to college, the only reason any of them are here, the promise of escape, which Nikki now sees as bait for another, bigger trap, creating hope to kill it.

‘Four,' Doug says.

Most of them won't finish the programme at all. Only eight students remain in this year's bridge class, the seniors enrolled in college for fall, while all the ones who've fallen away, who've come and gone the last four years, are already working versions of the shit jobs they'll have the rest of their lives. She's been stupid to believe she could make it through this and go off to college in two years, stupid to believe she could change the future.

‘Three,' Doug says.

Stupid to believe anything. She can't wait two years to get away from Manchester, two years of her mother watching TV in a man's sleeveless T-shirt or dressed up and out all night, not working though she could–pretending Nikki can save them both, saying last weekend, ‘I know you're smart enough, Nikki, if you can keep from fucking up. Then maybe we can get out of this shithole and I can start getting better,' spending all her nights drunk, all her days dying, poisoned by whatever lingers of the cancer that didn't kill her, or the treatment, or maybe just an idea she can't get over three years after the sickness Nikki had hoped so hard would spare her. But Nikki was just a child then, capable of believing anything: that people could get better, for instance, once they went bad, the reason Upward Bound can't change her–because she's already been changed.

‘Two,' Doug says. ‘You better get moving.'

Nikki looks at Sean, holding his face in his hands and staring at his shoes. Why would he want to be part of something that promises a future and then yanks it away for fucking? It doesn't make sense that two people rubbing against each other could ruin a chance for college hundreds of days away. But there Sean sits, mourning his lost future, unaware he's been Granola Doug's hostage the last three years, believing he's lost his chance when he never had one. It's not just that his mother's poor and nobody in his family has been to college. The offer of help, or his blind embrace of the offer, is what has really destroyed him.

‘One,' Doug says.

Sean doesn't know that, though. Might never know it. He believes in magic. Is willing to be saved. And maybe his belief in transformation, escaping who he was born to become, will make it true. Just by believing.

Nikki watches his head jerk to the sound of the key in the lock. Poor Sean. And she's got nothing against him. Except his weakness, which isn't really his fault.

‘Wait,' she calls to Doug. ‘I'm getting dressed.'

‘No,' Doug says, turning the knob, and Nikki screams, ‘I am!' And the knob turns back and Doug says, ‘You have sixty seconds,' and Nikki looks at Sean still watching the doorknob, his life draining out of him on to the tile floor.

Two weeks ago–two days ago? two hours ago?–she would have felt the same terror, at least a flicker of the doom Sean now feels, the promised future turning to ashes. She was stupid to let herself be sold on their dream, stupid to forget that hope is what kills you. When she got caught smoking the first week of this summer's session–and that seems so long ago, though it was only last month
–Nikki sat in Granola Doug's office, looking at photographs of diseased lungs, her pack of cigarettes on Doug's desk, and she promised–because they were always making you promise here, to love yourself, to believe in yourself, to be the difference, to make every situation positive–she promised as she broke the cigarettes, one by one into Doug's trash can, that she would not smoke again, at least not here on Upward Bound's time. And she kept that promise for several weeks, until she made a new promise, this one to herself, when she bought a pack of cigarettes in Manchester, home for the weekend, her mother gone God knew where, that she would never be caught again, a promise she has now broken.

‘Come on,' Sean says, standing and offering his hand. ‘Get dressed now.'

The only reason they did it here after hours instead of someplace outside earlier was because it was raining all day and they were so close to the end of their time together, and Karen, Nikki's poor, fat room-mate, was home with her prodigal father in Somersworth. And mainly because they wanted to. Because they felt like it. She has no idea how they got caught, if someone heard them or spotted Sean on the wrong floor twenty minutes ago. People get caught and punished here all the time, so it hardly matters how or why.

‘Forty seconds,' Doug calls.

She takes Sean's hand and pulls him down to the bed.

‘Nikki,' he says, and she says, ‘Let's make them wait.'

‘My mom's gonna kill me.'

‘Let's block the door.'

‘With what?' Sean says. He pulls himself from her bed and stands on Karen's side of the room, looking at Nikki, looking at the door, looking at Karen's bed, which, like the dressers and desks, is
attached to the floor, everything here attached to the floor so the Upward Bounders can't walk away with anything. They only have their bodies to keep the fuckers out with, plus two chairs, some clothes and books, and Nikki's duffel bag. But she knows Doug won't force the door if they push themselves against it, that he won't risk hurting his precious charity cases or his image of himself as saviour.

‘Thirty seconds,' Doug says.

Nikki stands from her bed, watching Sean watch her body, the body she's made available to him these last few weeks, pretending their first time she was a virgin because he was and it was important to him. And they've fucked and kissed and held each other every chance they've got, which hasn't been so often, not often enough, Sean believing, she knows, they're at the beginning of something, Nikki wondering whether they're at the end, another reason for taking the chance tonight, because Sean lives all the way up in Berlin at the top of the state, hours and hours and worlds from Manchester, and because he still believes in a safe kind of escape, an entrance into the white-shoe world, where he must believe they're saving a space for him, but that's what she likes about him, too, how he still believes, and Doug says, ‘Twenty seconds,' and Nikki shouts, ‘Will you just give me a fucking minute here, Doug! I can't find my fucking panties, OK?'

‘I am giving you a minute,' Doug says.

She looks at Sean, who looks away. He just needs to be convinced.

‘Now fifteen seconds.'

She knows there are staff members in the hall with Doug, plus all the students on her floor, getting off on this little drama. There
are only two here she'll miss, three counting Sean: Barbara, the residential supervisor, who took her to her own house in Portsmouth two weekends ago when Nikki's mom was in jail, and Jasmine, this wicked funny chick from Dover, a junior like Sean who Nikki got baked with a couple times. They laughed and laughed, wandering the campus, the little town, pretending they were part of it. And even though he's too young, will never be as old as Nikki, and weak, she still feels tenderness for Sean, who just needs to be led.

‘Is Barbara out there?' Nikki calls, and after a second in which Nikki imagines Barbara looking at Doug for silent approval to speak, Barbara says, ‘I'm here, Nikki.'

‘Can't we just have five minutes so I can get dressed?' she says. ‘Can't I just have that tiny dignity,'
dignity
being their favourite word, along with
trust
and
commitment
and
community
, words thrown around so carelessly they mean less than nothing.

She hears murmuring on the other side of the door, then Barbara says, ‘Two minutes, Nikki.'

‘And not one second more,' Doug says.

She looks into Sean's eyes, which won't stay fixed on hers. Why not him? Why not now? If he's so desperate to be saved, why shouldn't she save him? They can save each other. They'll hitchhike somewhere, get jobs. ‘Let's go,' she says, leading him to the window. They're only on the third floor, two flights from the ground and a row of bushes against the brick building to break their fall. But down in the grassy courtyard of Harrison Hall, looking up at Nikki's window, stand three tutor counsellors, including Susan, the chick who busted her for smoking.

‘One minute,' Doug says.

Nikki waves to the crowd below, pulls Sean back from the
window. ‘Wait,' she says, ‘I know how,' and Sean says, ‘You gotta get dressed.'

‘He'll take us down to the conference room to talk,' Nikki says. ‘But no way he's calling our mothers tonight. Look what happened to Casey. Or Sarah. Not even Jenn got sent home in the middle of the night.'

Sean pulls away from her, picks up her tank top from the floor, her skirt, and pushes them toward her.

‘We'll wait till three o'clock, when everyone's asleep,' she says. ‘Then meet in front of T-Hall and take off.'

‘And go where?'

‘Anywhere.'

Barbara told Nikki she was self-destructive, another one of their words here, but taking off seems the opposite of that. Isn't it more self-destructive to be all alone, stuck in Manchester with her living-dead mother?

‘Take these,' Sean says, the drowning back in his eyes as he pushes her clothes against her. ‘Please.'

‘Thirty seconds,' Doug says.

Nikki grabs her tank top, pulls it over her head. The worst part will be in the conference room downstairs, watching Sean beg for another chance for next year, shrinking, promising–what, to never fuck again?–the moment Nikki will erase him from her memory for good, and if that means eliminating a piece of herself, it's only a tiny piece she won't miss. There's nobody in this world she can talk to. Her cousin Melanie gone to Texas. Crystal still in Manchester, but already stuck there forever. Maybe Nikki should beg like Sean, hold her breath for two years, as if anyone could, then go to college
with the people they've been training her to join, the people they've been training her not to offend, the fuckers with ruby slippers who were born into it.

She pulls her skirt from Sean's hand, steps into it, closing the hooks and eyes on her hip.

She'd rather be dead.

‘Fifteen seconds,' Doug says.

She takes Sean's face in her hands, kisses him hard.

‘I would,' Sean whispers. ‘If I could. You know I would. It just doesn't make sense. I can take the bus down to Manchester whenever we want.'

‘I know,' Nikki says. ‘That's exactly what we'll do.' She leads him to the door.

They'll ship her back tomorrow, one day early, if they can get hold of her mom, which they won't. More likely she'll wait here with the others, go back to Manchester Friday when she's supposed to go, Sean gone tomorrow, Sean gone tonight, Sean gone in fifteen minutes, half an hour, fifteen seconds, whenever his begging becomes unbearable.

She hears the key slide into the lock. Doug says, ‘I'm coming in.' The doorknob turns, the door cracks open. Nikki throws herself against it as hard as she can, slamming the fuckers back, taking deep breaths as she plants her feet and leans against the wood, planted and pushing, Doug howling in the hall, Sean behind her doing nothing to save them, until he wraps Nikki in his arms and pulls her back, lifting her from the floor, her legs kicking. Doug crashes through the door, his hand pressed over his bleeding nose, his red face furious. ‘I didn't do it,' Sean says holding Nikki in the
air. And she thrashes and thrashes, clawing and kicking his horrible words, blood running over Doug's mouth and chin, dripping, as he reaches for her, Sean yelling, ‘She didn't mean it.'

‘I did mean it,' Nikki snarls, ‘you goddam pathetic fucker,' and she thrashes and thrashes, clawing and kicking, Doug and Sean grunting as she thrashes and kicks.