Authors: Anna Stothard
“Hey,” I read, squinting. It was handwritten, unlike the anonymous letters, which were typed. David’s message was written in nearly illegible, boyish handwriting. He pressed hard on the paper with the nib of his pen, and the resulting note was messy and compact. “While you’re in Los Angeles you can sleep at my apartment sometimes if you like,” the letter said. “Someone might as well. I’m certainly not doing much of it. Anyway, this hostel is a total dump. Did you know that someone was chopped into little pieces on this block last month? Did you know that? A third of the victim’s pieces were found in the dumpster outside Rite Aid, a third outside the booze store, and a third in a blender with a box of blueberries and some super-strength protein powder. I’ll be in tomorrow evening if you come over. I’m not asking you to move in or anything ridiculous. The sofa is free, and I’m just saying that I’m never there, you know? Plus it would assuage my guilt about being late to meet you the other day and allowing you to get mugged. So I’ll see you tomorrow evening if you like. Best, David.”
I had a bad dream that night. It was about not being able to move. Every time I breathed, I’d faint and wake up exactly where I’d started. This dream was a recurring one. It started in London two weeks before Lily died, the day I was expelled from school and Dad stopped talking to me properly. One of the most popular places to sit during good weather at school was on the fire escape outside the bathrooms on the ninth floor. The walls were covered in green gangrenous tiles that gave every face a horror-movie glow. There was a row of sinks, a single long mirror pockmarked with rust, and then a frosted-glass window that you could climb out of to huddle on the fire escape. You could smoke out there, and the teachers wouldn’t be able to see you unless they were round the side of the school, which they never were because it was overgrown and dirty. Plus you could spy on the lonely fat woman watching daytime TV in the building opposite and the bodybuilder doing press ups endlessly in the window directly above her. Everyone thought they ought to fall in love. You could always hear the edgy, watery sound of teenage girls laughing from beyond that window.
When my friend Mary and I were younger, we used to play a game with some other kids in my old school from time to time where we’d squeeze pressure points in each other’s necks so that we’d become dizzy and pass out. If you put your index and middle finger on both sides of your neck and press the big blood vessels that run up and down there, you end up fainting for around twenty seconds. It feels sort of funny, like a head rush, but we never did it more than a few times, and it never caused any trouble.
Then one lunch break there were some kids putting on makeup in the bathroom of my new school, talking about how to make themselves faint. They asked me if I knew how to do it, and all I did was tell them how it was done. I obviously told one of the popular girls, because within a week all the younger girls at school were busy making each other faint in classrooms, bathrooms, music rooms, locker rooms and hallways. They were crouching down in frog positions against walls and pushing desks together to make beds to lie down on. It became much bigger than it ever was in my old school when I was that age, with five girls fainting during a math’s lesson and one of them not waking up for twenty minutes. The teacher thought she was asleep. It’s something I noticed about all girls’ schools – crazes spread like fire. Another girl started to bleed out of her ear during gym class. The worst was the group who decided to make each other faint on the fire escape. As far as I understood when people explained it to me later, the game was to faint while looking down a sheer nine-floor drop, but have friends there to stop you from falling.
The obese television addict from the flat opposite said that three girls were laughing hysterically, and when the middle girl came back to consciousness, she vomited over the rail into the overgrown alley underneath. Then she seemed to faint again, only this time she slumped forwards and her friends somehow didn’t catch her as her weight shifted the wrong way, the axis of her hips tipping her forwards. She was only eleven years old, and she died immediately on impact, flat out in the shrubs. Somehow all of this was traced back to the fainting lesson I’d given earlier in the week.
“I got a call from your headmistress,” Dad said when I got home from football practice that freezing cold evening. “They’re finally chucking you out of school. Congratulations. I knew it was too good to be true, you going to that school.”
“Huh?” I said dumbly, out of breath from kicking the football all the way home and then running up the stairs. I’d skipped school that afternoon to play football, and I didn’t even know that the little girl had fallen off the fire escape. I’d been hanging out with some friends from my old school, oblivious to the paramedics and ambulances that had been swarming around my new school all afternoon.
“Do you know how lucky you were to get to go to that school? Do you know what most people would do for that opportunity? I thought you might do something with your life,” he said.
He was wearing a lime-green sweater, and looked old that evening. He was only thirty-five, but he could have been fifty. The strange thing is that once Dad had decided –or been told – that I was reasonably smart, he seemed genuinely proud of the fact. I once heard him boasting to his friends about me getting a scholarship, and another time boasting about how he always had his daughter check his accounts at the café, because she had “a real head for business”. I was, apparently, going places. But still, he didn’t stick up for me when they threw me out of school. He just accepted it.
“You’re smart, but you’re a fucking idiot,” he spat at me across the kitchen.
“What did I do?” I said, baffled. Were they throwing me out for bunking off school sometimes? That was the only thing I could think of.
“You taught the fourth-year girls to get high by cutting off their blood supplies, that’s what the headmistress said you did. What do you have to say about that?”
“No I didn’t,” I stuttered, adrenaline hitting me.
“I’m bored of your excuses,” he said, and turned away from me. “I can’t be bothered with all your crap. They’ve expelled you. Some little girl died because of you, so they don’t want you at their school.”
“Who died?”
“She fell off the fire escape attached to the ninth-floor toilets.”
“When?”
“This afternoon.”
I closed my eyes for half a second and saw it: her head sinking forwards suddenly, pressing the pivot of her bony hips onto the railings while her friends were in hysterical giggles around her. Perhaps the friends thought she was laughing, too, but instead her limp arms swung as the body weight shifted and her little eleven-year-old feet came off the ground. She was probably wearing high-heeled pumps, that’s what all the younger girls were wearing. How could her friends not notice? Maybe they were laughing so hard in that uncontrollable adolescent way that they didn’t see their friend’s weight shift. I bet the friends grabbed at her legs as she fell, the laughter stopping.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I imagined the girl falling to the ground.
“Tell that to her mother and her father. Tell that to her friends,” Dad said.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. He didn’t look at me. “I told one girl how Mary and I used to do it. That’s all. I wasn’t there when they did it.”
“You’re a bad influence,” Dad said. “They regret letting you into the school. You know how much trouble it was getting you into a good school?”
“You didn’t go to any trouble, Dad. My old teachers went to trouble: you didn’t even know I was doing well at school till they called and told you.”
“Well, there’s gratitude,” he said. “If I’d known you were going to fuck it all up anyway, I would have let you do more shifts at the café.”
“She made herself faint on a ninth-floor fire escape when I wasn’t even at school and it’s my fault? I’m so sorry she died, but I didn’t do it. I have AS exams in a week. They can’t throw me out of school now, can they?”
“I’m not going to argue with you about the rights and wrongs of the shit you get up to any more,” he said.
“You never argue with me about the rights and wrongs of anything I do. The only rights and wrongs I get from you are if I put too much salt on the chips or over-fry the fucking burgers,” I said, although that wasn’t entirely true. Since I moved to the grammar school he did get irritated if I got bad grades or if he found me skipping lessons. It still baffles me that he let me get expelled from school so easily. It took me a long time to forgive him for giving up on me that day. Even when I did a night course to finish my A-levels, years later, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I did well.
“The fact is the school has asked you not to come back and take your AS exams at the end of next week. You have to do the exams somewhere else. You’re out,” he said.
“So stick up for me,” I said. “Tell them that it’s not fair. I didn’t do anything wrong. Those exams are important.”
“Life’s not fair, right?” he said. “Sometimes you have to take the consequences.”
“You’re just going to accept it, then?” I said.
“Why should I believe you?”
“Because I’m your daughter and you love me,” I said, and he turned away from me. He started to unload the dishwasher, and I watched his balding head dip and rise behind the kitchen counter. He looked blasé, almost bored.
It was a warm day when I took a deep breath and rang David’s doorbell. There was a long pause when I didn’t breathe at all, but then he answered the door in orange tracksuit bottoms and no T-shirt. He smelt of shampoo.
“Hey there,” he said.
“Hi.”
“I’m glad you came,” he said. “You got my note, then?”
“How do I know you’re not the protein-powder killer?” I replied with a smile, not coming in through his door.
“Cos I don’t like blueberries,” he said.
“The murderer would say that,” I smiled.
“I’m the one inviting a known thief into my apartment.”
“You’re
very
brave,” I said sarcastically, putting on a sweet voice for a second and then snapping out of it.
“No suitcase?” he said, looking me over. I’d swapped lockers at the Serena. Vanessa and Tony seemed to have taken a shine to me, and they let me rent a locker. I was wearing Lily’s fitted white cotton dress with black buttons up the front, which I hadn’t worn before, plus her grey ballet shoes. I had the strap of Lily’s tan suede shoulder bag in my fist, and a plastic bag full of her clothes. In the plastic bag I had Lily’s jeans and T-shirts, and ballet shoes and sunglasses – even the stilettos, but I left the leather jacket, knee-high boots, silk fuchsia dress and black minidress.
“Sold it, remember?” I lied. I was careful not to have any of her letters and photographs on me when I was in David’s flat, or at least not when he was around. Having gone this far without telling him, I didn’t want him to guess who I was just yet.
David was out most of the time. His block of flats looked like an army barracks from the outside and a Spanish motel from the inside. The four floors all had balconied corridors outside them, which looked down on a fetid swimming pool where nobody ever swam, but people socialized around and used to cool their feet in the crazy sunshine. It was only if I knew he was going to be out for a while that I’d bring Lily’s letters to his flat and spend my days smoking his cigarettes on the hot steps while reading Lily’s love letters. It was a relief not to have to sleep in the Serena Hostel any more, and although I was still always looking over my shoulder, I felt safer than before.
“To my darling,” wrote the anonymous writer of the typed love letters, which I read while sitting by the swimming pool in the sun. “Do you remember the lunar eclipse?” the letter said. “You asked me why it happened, and when I explained it to you, lovely you, there was this thoughtful sweet look in your eyes and you said, ‘So, it’s a coincidence of geometry.’ What a beautiful phrase, I thought. You liked words. Another time I explained ‘non-locality’ to you – a phenomenon I hardly understood, about when two particles remain synchronized over vast distances? Again, you liked the word. You whispered ‘non-locality’ repeatedly into my ear, in dulcet tones, as if it was a sweet nothing.
“I was showing off, trying to explain Quantum Physics to you, but now I can’t help thinking that the same idea might seem proof of a kind of magical correspondence between faraway structures which, even across massive reaches of space, are communicating far faster than the speed of light. It’s called ‘entanglement’. You laughed at the word ‘entanglement’ as you began to say it over and over and over again in different ways – in a low voice, in a high voice, in a happy voice, a sad voice – all the while staring at your hands making drunken patterns in the air.
“You looked beautiful, but it scares me that I can’t remember the exact patterns your hands made in the air, or exactly how you were wearing your hair. Even when you’re nearby, I feel sometimes as if I’m fictionalizing you, as if you’re a figment of my imagination. Sometimes, I see you in the corner of my eye when you can’t possibly be there. God, you know, I love you, but sometimes my memories turn briefly to vitriol.
“Do you remember the first time we made love? I was lying face up on the bed. You turned your back to me and sunk my body inside yours, while all I could see was your thrusting bottom and your shoulders. Your haunches flexed like an animal’s, the soles of your feet curling, and I felt entirely disconnected from the orgasm that eventually shuddered down your back. I just remember your hair bouncing in the half-light, and how you put your hands to your head like a rodeo girl before you finished.
“After you were finished, that first time, there was an awkward quiet, because where do you go from that position? It doesn’t bode well for affectionate nuzzling or restful conversation. My hands were resting lightly on your hips, and your body was limp. You removed me from inside you without turning around: you just held the condom between your fingers and lifted up your bottom slightly. Then you padded off to the bathroom to wash me off your body, and I was left bemused at how such a beautiful creature could be quite so base.
“Sometimes I think of you not as the beautiful one dancing the mamba or talking to me about her dreams, but as a slut with her back to me on that first night when you hardly even kissed me. I am writing in anger. I’m sorry. I don’t mean it. I love you too much, sometimes. With love, for ever, for always.”
I thought the letter was beautiful. But at the same time it made me nervous. I folded it up along its original creases and put it away. The letters implied something unstable and unfinished.
Often David didn’t even come home all night, but he seemed to like having me in the flat when he did. I was always relieved when he came home. I’d catch him smiling at me, but he also complained that I was taking up space, that he was too hospitable for his own good, wondering why he’d invited a stranger to sleep on his sofa. He was moody, like a child. I ignored him when he was in a bad mood, but even then he was fascinating. Was he so lonely that he let a stranger with kleptomaniac tendencies lodge in his house? He was gregarious and charming, if a little awkward, so why didn’t he seem to have friends? Nobody came to the house, and he didn’t speak about meeting friends when he went out. Where were the glamorous and bedraggled-looking friends from the hidden photographs in his underwear drawer? Often we ate dinner together in those first two weeks, before we started sharing a bed. He told me that he used to get terrible seizures as a child, so he had thick white pills to counteract that. In return I told him strange and pointless lies about my childhood. I told him how Dad and I used to make model boats together and then sail them on the Serpentine in Hyde Park. I told him that we went to Midnight Mass every Christmas even though we weren’t religious at all, and that I was once grounded for winning a game of scrabble using the word “clitoris”. I lied about how Dad threw me a surprise 21st-birthday party in our local pub. I don’t know where these stories came from, but they made him laugh. He suggested books for me to read, too, and I started to make my way through his library.
The residents of David’s block were mainly Mexican or Armenian, but there was the odd student and actress living there too. Armenian teenagers sat on a tattered wall outside David’s apartment in the afternoon, lifting their hooded eyes to scrutinize the passers-by, like ogres at a concrete drawbridge. They spoke in hybrid Armenian-American, but their language was really a series of glances, frowns and lugubrious adolescent shrugs. They knew that Belle, a fat Texan woman with a sausage dog, was in love with Yuri, the building’s Armenian manager. They listened to Yuri as he played the viola for two hours every evening, the strangled sounds of his imagination spreading musical nostalgia over Los Angeles streets. The boys knew that Belle sat at her window every night wearing a baseball T-shirt and filled Sudoku puzzle books while listening to the aching viola from the floor below. The boys knew that sometimes Belle cried, and that a bald Spanish hipster was a secret smoker, hovering like a hooker on the corner of the street and then stuffing his face from a tin of Altoid mints so his all-organic actress wife wouldn’t find out. The Armenian boys would watch and comment with their eyes on the amalgamation of skinny models with fake breasts, the male actors who wore different fedora hats every day, the retired Armenians, the Thai cooks wearing white overalls, the film students wearing tortoise-shell Ray-Bans.
Like the area he lived in, David wasn’t easy to understand. He cleaned the glass top of his coffee table with Ajax at least twice a day, yet if there were no cigarettes in the flat he’d rummage through last night’s ashtray, digging through the dislocated smiles and frowns, looking for something to smoke. If you walked out of his tidy and minimalist living room, there was a balcony packed with broken air-conditioning units, rags, a rusted mini-barbeque, a fan and a gaudy plastic Christmas tree with a white plastic angel. The floor of his balcony was thick with a weird white dust, and the one time I ever went out on it I left footprints in his own personal beach. The balcony detritus was left there by the previous occupant of his flat, and he hadn’t got round to moving it yet, six years after moving in.
I told David that I was looking for a job as a waitress or in the tourist industry. But most of the time I wandered around the streets in the heat, among the Armenian grandfathers playing checkers on the pavement and grandmothers in brightly coloured deckchairs wearing ill-advised swimsuits, flicking through soporific magazines like the ones that David did most of his work for. It was as if the social layers of the adults in Little Armenia were parallel universes. The Armenian grandmothers didn’t glance up to see the jogging porn stars, who didn’t seem to register the quiet Thai couples squatting outside the nail parlours. The Armenian pseudo-gangsters who sold little bags of marijuana outside Starbucks in the nearest strip mall only noticed Armenian women. I could have walked by in a miniskirt and no bra, and they would see me but they wouldn’t react, because I didn’t walk through the same dimensions as they did. The pseudo-gangsters listened to their own music on earphones and wore white trainers, which they used to try and trip up pretty Armenian girls wearing tight jeans. Nearer to the doors of Starbucks there would be chess games spread on tables and furrowed fingers twitching over black or white wooden pieces. It smelt like coffee and stale sweat out there, but I enjoyed watching those earnest games. I’d feel content, less aggressive than usual, like I was watching through a crack in the door. It was only the younger generations, the newcomers, who saw the layers.
David had no idea he even lived in Little Armenia, which was really a pocket of Los Feliz and melted confusingly with the slightly more visible, beauty-parlour-and-take-out-famous Thai town. “I live in Los Feliz,” David said, bored, glancing out the window and seeing a platinum-blonde Yummy Mummy with a three-hundred-dollar stroller walking past a hissing traffic jam of smoking SUVs. He didn’t see the watchful Armenian adolescents sitting on the wall. He was aware that we lived near Thai town, but only because of the speed with which greasy chili-and-coconut polystyrene would arrive at his front door. He only saw the layer of his surroundings that affected him.
After two weeks, the middle-aged Armenian women who lived in David’s building seemed to see me, too, and they became my friends. I needed friends, because otherwise I found myself sitting at David’s window watching for Richard or the thuggish man with the schoolboy haircut and the nose stud. The friendly Armenian women were the mothers of the adolescent voyeurs who saw everything and the pseudo-gangsters who saw nothing, although I could never work out who belonged to whom. Perhaps they were also the daughters of the deckchair grandmothers, but that was too complicated.
“I was born in a village at the base of Mount Ararat, that very same mount, child, where Noah came to moor his boat after the Great Flood,” one of them told me while we smoked next to the fetid courtyard swimming pool that nobody ever dared jump into. “I lost a father, a cousin and a brother to finding Noah’s mythical shipwreck, which was meant to be just there where we lived. Why they need to find it, huh? That’s what I always said, but they kept climbing and climbing for the damn thing, so there was never any peace. My sister married an ugly man from the Bible Archeology Search and Exploration Institute when she was eighteen. He left her pregnant with a boy that she named Noah, just like the other twenty-five Noahs at the local school.” I smiled at the woman, who dabbled her dirty feet in the water. Little ribbons of tattered dust lifted up from between her toes and dissipated in the water.
“Oh what a hoo-ha, child, when some local troublemakers claimed they’d found the ark years ago, found it and walked it and played it since childhood. What a hoo-ha, child, really, about a few bits of old wood they’d pulled off a barn and buried in the snow for a few weeks. They claimed to play tag in the sacred bowels of God’s vessel, which my father and brother died searching for.” I offered the lady a cigarette, and she took short, sharp puffs, like she thought it was going to be taken away in a moment. Her knees were worn ragged like leather pouches full of different-shaped stones. Mine were white with jigsaw pieces of white scar tissue from football and fights.
“How did you come to America?” I asked her politely.
“My twin sister and I, we weren’t interested in marrying men named Noah, you know?” she said, a slight American twang entering her speech as another woman from David’s building leant over the motel-like balconies that framed the courtyard. This woman was smaller and slightly balding, which accentuated her already high forehead.
“Dalita telling you ’bout Noah?” said the balding woman from above.
“Na,” said Dalita.
“Dalita was crazy ’bout Noah, would have followed him to the bottom of the ocean any day.”
“Would not,” said Dalita, looking at her knees. These women never asked about what I was doing in Los Angeles, but they liked to tell me things about myself.
“You’re anaemic, child,” said one of them, looking at the bruises on my body.
“That boy you live with has done some wrong things,” said another.
“Haven’t we all,” said another.
“You must not be scared,” said one.
“You mustn’t be angry,” another said to me.
“Your soul is lonely,” another said.