The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress (10 page)

Walking back to the camper Rose said, ‘She was an ignorant woman. You're not to take it to heart.'

He didn't reply. He climbed into the driving seat and sat there staring at the shimmering field.

She said, ‘Some years ago, when my mum died, I had to go to the mortuary and look at her—'

‘I thought it was a bundle of tumbleweed,' he interrupted.

‘Just to say goodbye. Most people have to do that . . . not to identify them, just to send them on . . .'

‘I wasn't given the chance,' he said. ‘Chip Webster saw to that.'

‘My mum was lying in a sort of Easter egg . . . paper frills all round her. I bent down to kiss her . . . her cheek was so cold that my tears bounced off onto the floor.'

Dismissively he waved his hand and leaned forward to start the engine.

‘I'm not lying this time,' she said. ‘It really did happen. And I noticed her nails were messy, so I went and bought some red nail varnish and coloured them.'

‘To be ready for the next world,' he said. ‘Thoughtful of you.'

‘The good thing it did for me,' she persisted, ‘was to make me believe that there's something beyond death. Her body was there but her soul wasn't.'

‘Soul,' he spat, as though it were a swear word.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Which had gone . . . and that's what made her dead.'

‘For Christ's sake,' he muttered, and then drove at speed past the unfinished fence and the woman with the paint brush.

Darkness descended as the camper devoured the miles, nothing to be seen but black stretches of road stabbed by head­ lights. Then, out of nowhere, Harold recalled an afternoon in childhood when a man had taken him onto a beach some­ where near San Francisco, hand on his shoulder in a gesture of parental steering. The memory induced an odd lightness, a sensation of floating akin to the uplift of the expensive kite he'd tossed into the sky. Almost at once the paper aeroplane had swooped downwards and crumpled into the sand.

He braked, got out and bent over his knees. He was drift­ ing towards a splayed body spread across paving stones. He heard the word ‘Wicked' resound in his mouth and vomited. Rose didn't interfere. He supposed she thought his upset was due to the mowing down of the dog.

 

 

 

 

F
orty-eight hours later—they had fortified themselves with ham and eggs in a town called Bunkerville—they drove into the Mojave desert. Harold had taken onboard two canisters of water, one in case the engine of the camper started overheat­ ing, the other to avoid their perishing from thirst. Rose found their journey disappointing; she had been thinking of that film in which Lawrence of Arabia had faced sandy whirlwinds. There were too many bushes, too many clumps of vegetation; twice she saw a fox burrowing into the earth.

They passed through one of Harold's ghost towns, its sun­ blasted main street patrolled by a stetson-headed crowd in pursuit of the past. He said they were all tourists; possibly some of them had been born here. There was one house with an ancient wagon upturned on the dirt road outside, and another with a withered shirt still pegged to a washing line, strung from its collapsed veranda. Harold said it had been hung there for the benefit of sightseers. No one in that des­ perate yesteryear would have been careless enough to abandon an item of clothing.

Rose asked for a drink—it was very hot and she was sweating—but Harold told her to hang on, that he had a fan thing that swirled air around them. It got a shade cooler, but the expanse of flat landscape increased her need. She said, ‘I could die.' Harold laughed; he didn't know that sand disturbed her mind. He was listening to an interview on the radio with a man who had been present a year ago when Robert Kennedy had delivered a speech to the Senate about Vietnam.
War
, Kennedy had roared,
was the vacant moment of amazed fear as a mother and child watched death by fire fall from an improbable machine sent by a country they barely comprehend
.

Rose said, ‘What a complicated sentence.'

Harold told her to keep quiet.

Who are we to play the role of avenging angel?
the voice on the radio asked.

After a perspiring two hours, Harold halted at an inn, refus­ ing to drive further. He paid for separate rooms. They ate their supper in a crowded dining area, posher than usual and dec­ orated with blown-up photographs of serious-looking men wearing old-fashioned clothes. Rose sat opposite a portrait of Mr. Roosevelt. Their table was shoulder-close to an elderly couple; the man had a paper napkin tucked under his chin, a splodge of crimson ketchup staining the front. The woman hummed some sort of tune quite loudly—when she wasn't stuffing food into her mouth.

‘Your hair's wet,' Harold said. He sounded censorious. Rose admitted she'd had a shower. ‘I hate them, but I'd sweated like a pig.' He stared at her, his expression hard to interpret.

‘What will you do,' she asked, trying to sound confident, ‘once we've found Dr. Wheeler? Will you stay in Los Angeles then drive all that way back on your own?'

‘I'm not sure . . .'

‘I know he'll give you the money I owe you,' she reassured him.

‘Of course,' he said. ‘Wheeler could always be relied on to do the right thing.'

She was anxious to tell him yet again how grateful she was for his help, how she appreciated the liberal way he had forked out money. ‘I'm not the easiest of people to get along with,' she admitted. ‘It's to do with my background. I know you might have thought that we'd have had . . . you know . . . sex . . . most people do in these sort of circumstances, but—'

‘Keep your voice down,' he urged. ‘You want an end to it,' he murmured. ‘So do I.'

She didn't know what end he was talking about, and didn't care. In her head she was walking towards a figure in a trilby hat.

Fingers dug into her elbow. ‘I couldn't help noticing,' the humming woman said, ‘that you have an English accent.

‘Forgive the intrusion but my husband and I are making a trip to London next week. There's things we'd like to know, if you can spare the time.'

Harold refused to be drawn into the conversation. Twice the woman tried to include him, but he didn't respond. He and the man with the soiled napkin concentrated on the mess on their plates.

The woman told Rose that her name was Mrs Weiner; she was a theosophist, a believer in reincarnation. She was also a teller of fortunes, a reader of palms, of cards, indeed of any personal object belonging to someone requiring information as to the past or the future. In the latter case, even a button would suffice. Feathers retrieved from pillows were the most reliable means of getting in touch with the dead, she said, but that was because they had to do with flight. Flight was migratory, spiritual.

Rose said, ‘How interesting.' Her hand was in the pocket of her raincoat, thumb smoothing the photograph of Dr. Wheeler.

‘Theosophy is not such an isolated practice as you might think,' Mrs Weiner stressed. ‘It began in America, but now it's a worldwide movement, strong in your own country. I'm due to attend a conference in London in two weeks' time in a place called St. John's Wood. Is that out in the country? Will I need a sun hat, mosquito spray?'

‘I doubt it,' Rose said.

‘We're meeting in a house that was once occupied by Madame Blavatsky. You've heard of her?'

Rose shook her head.

‘Everything's been paid for,' said the woman, ‘plane fares, hotels. Is food still rationed? Will I need to take sweeteners?'

It was strange, Rose thought, how someone so knowing about time, both gone and yet to come, should be so short on knowledge to do with the here and now. She said, ‘The hotels will look after you, but it would be wise to take a few jumpers and an umbrella.'

As she spoke, Harold got up and announced he was off to his room. He stretched out a hand as if about to stroke her hair, then abruptly walked away. She watched him thread his way past the tables and walk out into the night.

Mrs Weiner leaned closer. In half an hour's time there was to be a gathering of like-minded people in a room adjacent to the motel's checking-in desk. They were part of a group on their way to a theosophist conference in Arroyo Grande. This evening's discussion would fix on attempts to unearth events that lay buried, forgotten. ‘The persons we once were,' Mrs Weiner intoned, ‘whom we no longer remember, hold the most secrets.' Admittance was free. She felt sure Rose would find it stimulating.

Rose decided to go, mostly because she had nothing better to do. There were no more than nine people assembled in the side room, all female save for the husband who had spilt ketchup down his front, and a fat man wearing a bow tie, who was sitting beside Mrs Weiner.

Rose took a seat at the back and then moved forward; she didn't want to draw attention to herself by looking solitary. The proceedings began with a prayer to Him on High fol­ lowed by a rendering of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand' sung without accompaniment by an elderly lady in a coal-black wig. Rose wanted to laugh. Then the man in the bow tie pointed at a thin figure wearing a blue dress. ‘You've no need to stand,' he said, ‘I know what's troubling you. You have an illness.'

‘Yes, yes,' squeaked blue dress, struggling upright. ‘Help me.'

‘It's the evil cancer,' bow tie declared, voice flat, empty of sympathy. ‘You gotta accept it as a disorganisation of cells, not as a punishment from God. There is nothing you can do now, except rejoice that you have time to sort out the conflicts that remain in your life. Hallelujah.'

‘Thank you, thank you,' cried blue dress, apparently pleased to hear that the end was just round the corner.

Rose was convinced the woman wasn't genuine, that she'd been planted there to show how far-seeing were the minds of those in charge. She didn't think the second and third victims were real either, although their lost memories were more airy­ fairy, more conducive to sparking the imagination. Number two was asked by Mrs Weiner if she had something in her past to do with a man on crutches.

‘He's not tall, wears a red scarf round his neck . . . no, green not red, and he's trying to tell you something.'

Number two said, ‘I don't remember anyone on crutches.'

‘Think, think,' Mrs Weiner prodded. ‘I see a tall building and a swirl of cloud. No . . . no, it's smoke . . . and I see a figure standing at an open window.'

‘Oh . . . oh . . .' cried number two, arms raised in sudden shock. She'd recalled a fire, and her grandfather throwing himself out of a window, fortunately only two floors up from a spacious ledge. Grandfather had lived on, albeit with a limp, so it wasn't a proper tragedy. The important bit, what he'd wanted to tell her, wasn't divulged.

Number three was foreign and difficult to understand. She wore dangling earrings. The man in the bow tie brought up the subject of an old car breaking down, and of a child watch­ ing it being pushed down a road. The foreign woman shook her head, the lobes of her ears swishing metal. There was a crossroads, bow tie prompted, and a man had come forward to help. He had then dragged a female, screaming, into the bushes and committed an offence. The child had seen legs without stockings thrashing about in the leaves.

A break was called after this to give the child, now middle­ aged, time to recover after she blurted out that it was her mother she'd seen being taken into the undergrowth. Paper handkerchiefs were supplied.

Rose knew that she was going to be targeted next. She stayed because she found it amusing, this daft pretence at unearthing memories. What would she do, she wondered, if Mrs Weiner spirited up an image of sand spilling onto the head of Billy Rotten? She needn't have worried. All that was directed at her was a description of a young man in a yellow sweater galloping past on a black horse.

‘Bright yellow?' she queried, adopting a thoughtful expres­ sion. She looked round the dull room, walls painted white, not a picture on display, its low ceiling studded with spotlights. ‘He's with you at an important time,' said Mrs Weiner.

Rose said, ‘I'm not into horses.' It wasn't true. As a child she had often sat on the back of the brown mare that had pulled the milkman's cart round the village streets, but that animal had never moved faster than a sedate trot. ‘You don't know him,' Mrs Weiner acknowledged, presumably referring to yellow sweater, ‘but you have a lot in common.'

Rose skedaddled out of the door, a hand covering her eyes as though hiding tears; she was avoiding the collection plate.

It was almost dark outside and still warm. A stretch of ground sloped down to a semicircle of trees hung with lanterns, moths flickering like snowflakes above the tangerine lights. Drawn to the sight, she approached and stopped; she had noticed a shadowy couple locked in an embrace. The image was romantic. She hoped their hearts beat in tune. She herself, in all her years of sexual encounters, had known true love but once. ‘A dirty union between underage fornicators,' Mother had labelled it, which was why it was necessary for the resulting infant to be given away. Mothers could always be depended upon to know what was best.

 

Rose was in her room, partially undressed, when there was a knock at the door. She asked who it was and heard Harold's voice. When she let him in, he was fiddling with the undone flies of his shorts, stuffing his erect penis into a condom. He reached her and pushed her down onto the bed. She could have jumped up or punched him away, but did neither. He lay on top of her, his tongue swashing about in her ear. Above the roar of the sea, she heard him mutter, ‘Help me . . . I must . . . I can . . .'

The ease with which he entered her probably made him think she was aroused. He wasn't to know that she was one of those females whose bodies were ready for penetration even when their minds were closed. It was over in seconds. He left almost immediately.

She slept without dreaming, and was surprised on going outside the next morning to find the motel surrounded by armed police. There were more of them patrolling the area under the trees. Fantasising, she imagined that Harold's behaviour had provoked an arrest. But then, as she reached the breakfast room, he ran towards her and took her arm. ‘There's been a murder,' he said, ‘down by the stream.' He looked shaken. A woman's body had been found at dawn, throat slashed. She was the wife of a blues singer performing in Las Vegas. Her father, poor man, was the motel's manager.

They were about to sit down for breakfast when the spiri­ tualist woman, Mrs Weiner, approached and seized Rose's arm.

‘You see,' she hissed, cheeks aflame with excitement, ‘we really do see things.'

‘Things?' echoed Rose.

‘Death,' Mrs Weiner said. ‘That woman last night who was dragged into the bushes by some blackie . . .'

Harold interrupted, tone censorious. ‘We don't know he was coloured. You have no right to assume that he was . . . I guess the name Abe Lincoln means nothing to you.'

Mrs Wiener wasn't at all cowed. ‘It does,' she snorted. ‘It was he who said that niggers should never marry whites or ever be given social or political equality.'

Harold stepped backwards as though struck.

‘The mother of the woman with earrings didn't die,' Rose said, pushing Mrs Weiner away, ‘she just got interfered with. You're confused.'

She steered Harold to a table near the door. His face had no colour. She said, ‘It takes time for people to view things differently. Things that are now considered bad will one day be thought of as normal.' She wasn't at all sure what she meant.

She consumed a big breakfast, even the hash-browns, and chatted to Harold in a relaxed manner. Admiring his green striped shirt, one she hadn't seen before, she said, ‘It would be better if you fastened the top three buttons. Your mosquito bites look as though you've gone down with the plague.'

He looked at her, eyes hurt. Rose patted his hand. It was easy to talk to him so frankly now that she no longer owed him anything. Telling him she wanted to see what the weather was like, she stood up brusquely and left to go outside. Dazzled by sunlight she heard a shriek of pain above the slam­ ming of the door behind her.