Authors: Anna Stothard
Pregnancy was an alien idea, like some tribal fable about how tortoise shells came to be cracked or a creation myth about primordial soup and golden eggs. There was no possible way I could have made a creature inside my stomach. On the bus I got a window seat and tried to remember creation myths I’d learnt about at school. The concrete LA streets slid by under the window, and I dredged up memories from a school project about weird “beings” that created themselves out of nothing. They were sleeping entities, nothings, who broke out of their own subconscious to roam the desert as kangaroos or emus or lizards or whatever it was they imagined themselves to be. These dream beings were not only shape-shifters of the mind, but sculptors who set about cutting man and woman from rock that they imagined into existence. The imagination creatures slithered and sliced and licked humanity into existence.
The other story I remembered was about an Aztec Goddess who was impregnated by a knife and gave birth to a daughter who became the sun and a litter of boys who became the stars. The sun and the stars all walked with their mother on earth until the mother goddess found a ball of Hummingbird feathers that took her fancy. They were so pretty that she put them against her breast, and suddenly found herself pregnant again. Presumably the sun and the stars thought that she was pregnant by the actual hummingbird, because the kids weren’t best pleased about the idea of their new bestial and birdish stepbrother. My school-project memory is that Mother Nature gave birth to the God of War, which doesn’t quite make sense. A hummingbird fathered the God of War, while a knife fathered the universe? Anyhow, the God of War set the sun and the stars ablaze before banishing them to the other side of the universe, where they burn today. I know that she got pregnant with a knife at some point, because I remember getting in trouble for illustrating that particular moment of the story rather than, say, the hummingbird feathers or the night sky.
At the front of the LA public bus was a pregnant middle-aged woman with rugged cheeks wearing a shiny top with a sequin-coloured halter neck, the kind of thing a teenager might think she looked precocious in. She was all dressed up. The fashion for leggings instead of tights left a swollen flash of pink skin between her lower calf and the straps of her heeled sandals. She wore glittery lipstick, and must have been in her early forties. I had a vivid, vile split-second visual image of her lying open wide on a mattress, in a tastelessly furnished suburban apartment, being impregnated by the long vibrating beak of a monstrous mythological hummingbird. I blinked the image away.
I hadn’t been to the Serena for over two weeks. It smelt of mouldy laundry and ham sandwiches as I stepped up into the lobby. There was a girl with blond cornrows drinking a can of beer at the top of the steps, and a skinny man with a Jesus beard playing solitaire on the coffee table in the communal TV area. Vanessa and Tony were both behind the desk, and they looked up at me sharply as I came in. Vanessa was wearing her trademark black dress and had backwards halos of sweat under her arms. Her hair was up in a shiny ponytail that didn’t do her any favours and looked almost like a helmet sitting on top of her head. Tony meanwhile was wearing a tight T-shirt, flashing the tattoos on his massive arms. He’d grown a little goatee since the last time I saw him.
“Where’ve you been?” Vanessa said to me.
“I’ve been ill,” I said.
“She looks like shit,” Tony said to Vanessa.
“Are you all right?” said Vanessa, cocking her head to the side. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Food poisoning,” I said.
“Bad luck,” said Vanessa, then there was an awkward pause, broken only by a bunch of European travellers watching American Football in the lounge. I got the sense that something was wrong, just from the hesitancy of Vanessa’s smile.
“Someone already settled up for you,” said Vanessa, grimacing a little and cocking her head to the side in an expression of apology. “Did you know that?”
I didn’t reply. I thought about the chalky letters and all the photographs, the unreasonably heeled shoes and the dresses that smelt of flowers.
“He came for the suitcase again?” I said.
“It was Miranda on shift, not us,” said Tony in response to my blank expression.
“It wasn’t the same guy as last time, though,” said Vanessa.
“Miranda said this was a nice guy.
Charming
, is what she said. He was picking up the suitcase cos you didn’t drive or something?”
“What about the locker key?” I said. “He didn’t have that.”
“He told Miranda you were going to drop it around when you came to say goodbye to us. Obviously, when you didn’t come... ” Vanessa trailed off, and frowned. “I guess Miranda fucked up.”
“I wouldn’t have sent someone to get the suitcase without me,” I said. “Not after all that shit a month ago.”
“Miranda’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer,” said Tony.
“When did the guy come for it?” I asked. David must have come to the hostel to check if I’d been lying to him about keeping the suitcase, and of course discovered that I was. I wondered if this was before or after he’d got the photos of me developed and recognized the similarities between Lily and me.
“Ten days ago,” said Vanessa.
“Are you sure?” I said, and Vanessa nodded.
Ten days ago I was walking up to Griffith Park Observatory with him. He hadn’t got the photos developed yet, and he hadn’t seemed angry with me. But perhaps even then he knew I was lying about the suitcase, he just didn’t know why.
“What did the guy look like?” I asked.
“She just said he was charming,” Vanessa shrugged.
“Charming,” I repeated.
“That’s all she said,” Vanessa shrugged. “I’m sorry.”
That night, back in Little Armenia, I dreamt about the desert. Dalita had put the sofa bed back in David’s flat while I was out, along with other comforts like towels and sheets and toilet paper, so that I could sleep there and think for a little while. The manager pretended not to notice. Other than the bits from the Armenian ladies, there was nothing in the room except the plastic bags David had left for me. Of course, it took me for ever to sink under into sleep. I lay there on the lumpy IKEA sofa bed feeling absent. And when I did sink beyond the grey area of half-sleep, the sleep that came was in ragged fits and starts. I kept waking up breathless. I tried to vomit in David’s toilet once or twice, my fingers wrapped around the porcelain bowl. I banged my knees on the tiles and on the edges of the toilet. There was nothing much inside me except cigarette smoke and nettle tea anyway, so I couldn’t throw up. The dream was about Laguna Highway. In my dream the sky was flashing by my face as if the air was solid like I was pushing through translucent layers of jelly and falling forwards into a landscape that could have been a tunnel, but really must have been a desert road. I couldn’t stop falling, but I couldn’t wake up either.
“I’m going to come home now,” I said blankly to Dad over the phone the following afternoon.
“Great news,” said Dad. There seemed to be music on in the background of our flat. Every so often something crashed in the kitchen, and there was laughter coming from the living room. “Someone keeps calling for you,” he said.
“Can you just tell him you haven’t got a clue where I am?” I said. “None of it matters any more.”
“It’s not that Richard guy calling. He only called once. This other guy keeps calling. Aaron Sotto or Spoto or something. Wait a second, I have the number.”
“I don’t know who that is,” I said. There was the sound of crashing and shuffling as Dad looked for where he might have written down the telephone number.
“I can’t find it,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Why don’t you get the fuck home and you can talk to these people yourself. I’m not your fucking secretary,” he said, and there was a loud crash in the background, then the sound of people laughing again nearby. “I don’t know what I did with the number,” he mumbled, and I didn’t press him for it. I wondered if Aaron was the guy with the nose stud.
“What are you
doing
, Dad?” I said, because I could hardly hear him for the music and the noise.
“Making... fuck,” something crashed in the kitchen again. “Ouch. I’m making margaritas. Your stepmother went and invited people round, didn’t she? But I’m the one who’s slaving away with the fucking drinks.”
“You’re making
what
?”
“You know, those ice-cocktail things? I didn’t know what they were either. It’s ice and tequila and whatnot. Daphne dragged me to a dancing class a while back, believe it or not. Now she’s bloody invited them over, so I have to work out how to make these damn drinks she wants.”
“Huh,” I said. He turned a blender on in the background and suddenly I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I think he was grumbling about the people who were coming over, but I couldn’t hear a word. That must have been a new appliance. It was hard enough finding a mug with a handle in our kitchen at home, let alone a blender. “And then Tom fell over his own shoelaces and landed in the famous punch bowl!” Dad said, finishing the story I hadn’t heard.
“That’s great, Dad,” I said. “Cool.”
“So we’ll be seeing you soon. Your bedroom’s a bit of a mess. Daphne’s been spring-cleaning, organizing shit. Plus that old fridge from the shop, you know? It stopped working a while back, but we have to pay to get rid of those things, you know? Haven’t got round to it.”
“That thing’s huge,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah, you can sleep with a fucking fridge in your room for a week or two if we say so, amount of fucking trouble you’ve put us through.”
“I don’t have any money left, Dad.”
“Oh?” he said, and sounded almost happy. “When you know what flight you want, then let me know and I’ll book it for you, but you’re going to pay me back every penny with interest, and then some. Got that?”
“Great,” I said sarcastically, then stopped myself. “Thanks, Dad. I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said. I was wearing David’s blue dress and kitten heel shoes again. The little faux pearls in my ears were rubbing against the phone receiver and irritating me.
“See you soon,” I said to him.
That night Julie gave me a pill of something – Ecstasy, I guess – and I danced all night with this low thump in my abdomen and a peculiarly brittle sensation of happiness. It was wordless, like my panics, but it wasn’t full of terror. The music fed through me, and I danced for hours wearing David’s prim little navy dress and kitten heels. Perhaps I took more than one of Julie’s pills. I certainly drank, too. I found my brain working in strange, pleasant, unintelligent ways. There was this one time when I ate hash brownies at a friend’s house after school and noticed that my thoughts became very pictorial and literal. Someone was watching
Easy Rider
, and Peter Fonda wants to give some girls a ride on their bike. Dennis Hopper says, “We’re not no traveling bureau,” which made everyone laugh. I laughed too, but only because I imagined these two men dragging a mahogany bureau down the open roads, spilling knickers and bras in their wake. The commonest metaphors became a phantasmagoric horror movie – she caught his eye, he wore his heart on his sleeve, the earth stopped – everything had literal and unpleasantly physical dimensions. It made me wonder how different people formed their thoughts, whether they could feel themselves thinking, or whether thinking just occurred fluidly to most people. Did other people have uncontrollable actors in their conscious imagination, like peripheral shadows speaking unexpected and unscripted lines? Did other people have distinct architectural spaces in their brain? My sexual fantasies often occurred in a minimalist white house, built with as many windows as a conservatory might have. There’s a kitchen made of black-marble counters with a matching black-marble table in the middle, and all the floors are made of pale, varnished wood. In reality, this house belonged to a wealthy school friend who I knew when I was eight. She lived in Primrose Hill, fairly near me, but much posher, and I used to sleep over there sometimes. In reality, my friend’s mother would make bread on the marble counter in the middle of the kitchen, the white flour making patterns on the black marble. In unreality I have made love on this counter in many unreasonable, embarrassing and gymnastic positions. Behind the kitchen was a breakfast nook surrounded by windows looking out on a patchwork London garden of rosemary and lavender. I never enjoyed the reality of my body before David, but I did enjoy my imagined body. Sometimes my dreams bled out into this garden, into the herbs and the thorns and the mud, but mostly they revolved around the trendy, nearly empty living room where my school friend and I used to put on theatrical events based on
Alice in Wonderland
or Suzanne Vega songs. Who knows why this is the stage set of my mental gymnastics. Nothing sexual ever happened in that house. I don’t remember the girl’s father ever being around, nor do I remember any older brother. I remember that it was always too hot, because they had the heating on full pelt, and the mother made us drink tall glasses of cold milk so we’d grow tall.
The pills made me very aware of how my brain worked, especially as I found myself in a rooftop beer garden downtown, lying flat out on the grass with the same superb thump of emptiness in my stomach. There were other people around, people I’d met while dancing, and we were all drinking beer in a sort of circle. Around me were knobbly grey trees the same colour as the winking chrome-and-glass building behind. There was a small guy called Justin with a big nose and chipmunk cheeks. He looked mean and confused and very high. Another boy was tall and had this vast, bobbing Adam’s apple. Everyone in the group was talking intently about “vanishing points”, the space where perspective lines converge, and everyone was tracing the vanishing points around themselves – where paths disappeared beyond foliage, where walls ended and sky began. They were all student filmmakers. I thought to myself: this is a vanishing point, this moment in time, but I didn’t say anything. My mouth wouldn’t have worked anyway. The boy with chipmunk cheeks asked me how I felt, and I had difficulty verbalizing the sensation of emptiness in my gut. More than that, it actually took me a moment to physically feel my body, at which point I worked down from my head to my toes without speaking. My jaw was uncomfortably tight, but the beer went down pleasantly, softening my tongue and the rigid muscles. My shoulders were solid and locked, my stomach was empty, my womb was empty, my legs ached. The boy with the chipmunk cheeks put his hand on mine and I took it away as if stung.
“Hey, hey, chill,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said, and the morning yawned forwards. Everyone around me seemed strangely elegant for this time in the morning and this state of Ecstasy and alcohol. At least it seemed that way. People smiled slowly, discussing the nuances of the morning’s light as it knotted against the reflective windows of the building opposite, or dissipated from a shiny metal Buddha in the corner of the garden. They must have all been camera guys, because all they talked about was different kinds of luminosity.