Authors: Anna Stothard
He raised his eyebrows at my completely blank expression. The words hung around in the air for a while, and I fumbled to open a new cigarette packet from out of Lily’s suede bag. I put one in my mouth.
“I thought you knew,” he said.
“Wouldn’t someone have tried to contact me?” I said.
“I think the lawyer left messages with your father,” Richard replied. “But as I discovered, you’re not an easy person to track down.”
“Aaron Soto?” I said.
“That’s it,” said Richard.
“Are you angry?” I said to Richard as this information slowly sunk in.
“There’s nothing I can do, I would have contested it maybe, if I’d had the fucking deeds when I needed them,” he shrugged. “But then it was too late, I had to declare bankruptcy, and after that it didn’t really matter. I only went back to get the suitcase for sentimental reasons. Anyway, I’ve started from scratch before. It’s probably better this way.” He paused, and turned to face me in a way that made his eyes look almost kind. “In the end I came for the suitcase because I wanted my memories back,” he said.
I remembered Julie saying that Richard used to sell old cars, and it struck me that he seemed exactly like a used-car salesman. He was charming, like Miranda said, but furtive. He didn’t seem as scary as people kept saying he was, but I could see how he might turn. I wished David were there: he’d know exactly what to say. A gecko crawled near my feet, its skin glinting. It was so very gecko-like and so perfect. It made me think of one of my favourite words, from when Grandpa was still alive. Grandpa taught me the word “quiddity”, which is like “essence”, only better. It’s a word that describes exactly what is so compelling about good words. A good word captures the quiddity of its meaning, the drippiness of dripping and the phosphorescence of a phosphorescent light. The geckoness of being a gecko. The trouble is, in the day-to-day reality of life, things are so much more complex. It’s hard to pinpoint the quiddity of people or relationships or conversations, because as soon as you do, it will shift slightly, and the quiddity will be different.
“She wasn’t happy the night she died. We were sorting out our things, separating, not really talking much. Maybe it would have been better if we’d argued. She could have let out steam,” he shrugged.
“What happened, exactly?” I said.
“She drove off too fast, turned a corner and knocked into some drunk in a big car who happened to be out there that night. And that was that. It’s usually so empty around here. It wasn’t directly my fault, but maybe I should have known she’d drive recklessly if I let her go out. Maybe I did know she would.” He lit a cigarette. “The drunk phoned an ambulance for her, then drove off. They couldn’t trace the number. Big old American car drove right past the bungalow even, not that I knew what had happened until the ambulance turned up.”
“What make of car?”
“Buick, I think,” he said. “A big gold Buick.”
I stopped smoking my cigarette and then forced myself to breath quietly. It was really quite dark now out on Richard’s patio, and the embers lit up our faces. You couldn’t see into the distance any more. There were stars, but I’ve never had any interest in stars: I don’t care that they’re pieces of the future or the past or whatever, I don’t care that they’re dying. They’re just pinpricks that make patterns if you stare for long enough. “They remind me of school outings to the observatory,” I’d said to David once when he tried to mumble something romantic about the sky, and he’d fallen about laughing on the floor. “City slicker,” he’d laughed at me.
Richard and I sat up nearly all night in the end, chain-smoking awkwardly and drinking his whiskey. I looked through Lily’s suitcase, but it didn’t seem magic any more. I thumbed the comforting silk of the fuchsia dress, but it didn’t feel as addictive as it had done on Venice Beach after the wake. Instead it felt sort of thin and dry, like my skin used to feel if David kept the air-conditioning whirring all night. I missed him. Nothing smelt of Lily any more. Her perfume, whatever it was, had worn off the clothes. I looked at the greeting cards signed “Teddy” and the photograph of Lily wearing pink scrubs standing next to the debonair old man. I looked at the legal documents, too, and Richard explained what they meant, but I had no way of knowing that Lily’s name on the deeds meant I would inherit the hotel. Jorge came out and sat with us for a bit, but he went to bed early. He said his car was parked a while up the road, and he’d drive me home the next morning if I wanted, but I glared at him and said I’d get the bus.
There were half-eaten sandwiches on the coffee table, burnt saucepans in the sink, beer bottles full of stale dregs and floating cigarette butts all over the tables. Richard and I sat on opposite ends of the living room and made awkward conversation about Lily. We both drank too much.
“Is that the typewriter you wrote the letters on?” I said, pointing to an ancient machine in the corner.
“Sure,” he said.
I have no idea if somewhere in the baffled heat of my beleaguered brain that night I was thinking about David’s big gold car from the photographs in his underwear drawer. Certainly it turns out that memories aren’t racked up like souvenirs on a mantlepiece or words on a page. I know that I did a handstand for David the first night we made love, and I felt utterly happy. Yet it’s hard to remember how we argued in the rain and kissed to make up when I got out of the bath, bubbles on my nose, or how I felt when we saw a coyote yawning under a street lamp. Those memories were corrupted by the details of Lily’s crash. You’d think the past would be stable, even if the future and the present were unpredictable. You’d think there would always be that wonderful hour when we ate Oreos in his car. But there are so many factors: the smell of new leather, the scars on his body.
That night, drinking whiskey after whiskey with Richard long after the ice ran out and the liquid was warm on my tongue, nothing was clear. Thoughts were trying to work their way up into my consciousness, and I didn’t want them there. I sunk them in alcohol, and by the time I fell asleep on Richard’s manky sofa I was too drunk to dream.
Many things scare me: sirens, silence, insomnia, sleep. Memory never scared me until the next morning, when Richard gave me the number for Aaron Soto, Lily’s lawyer who’d been calling Dad, and we called from the bungalow telephone. It was a very bright morning, and my head throbbed from the night before. Jorge was frying bacon in the dirty kitchen, where the tap was dripping onto a pile of greasy plates. The light from the windows was hurting my eyes, and I was biting one of my ragged fingernails as I dialled the lawyer’s number. I tore a hangnail off and couldn’t breathe for a second when he said the drink-driver had handed himself into the police a few days previously, and that his name was David Reed.
I peeked through into a crazy-paving courtyard full of palm trees and children’s toys. It was a concrete-coloured condominium on Long Beach, ten minutes from Long Beach Airport and an hour or so out of Los Angeles. Every few minutes the clear sky hummed with airplanes taking off or landing, and I swear the air smelt a bit like diesel. It was a wide suburban street like you see in American movies, but the fences were made of chrome rather than painted wood, and all the gardens were dead from that summer’s heatwave. There was a lot of background noise – cars and airplanes and children – but it all seemed a million miles away as I sat on the corner of the wide road with Lily’s Enkidu book in my lap, leant to me by Richard so at least I could finish it, and my eyes flicking from the page to the condominium gate every two seconds. People came out. There was a mother wearing fluffy slippers and pushing a pram, then a construction worker carrying a thermos in his hard hat. I read the same sentence from Lily’s novel a hundred times, something about Gilgamesh building a wall to protect his people, but couldn’t concentrate on the words.
“Get bananas too, for Lucy’s tea, all right?” someone shouted from a balcony window inside the gates, and I looked up to see David stepping out of the gates wearing grey tracksuit bottoms and a creased green T-shirt. He was two hundred metres away and blended into the variations of grey and green lining the street, but even from far away I could see that his socks didn’t match. There was a flash of purple under the elastic of one of his trouser legs, and a flash of white under the other. It was amazing how his clothes never fitted him. Perhaps it was because his proportions were so vast, but he was always a little bit more than averagely crumpled. He glanced up to the balcony.
“Sure,” David said back to the woman. His voice sounded hoarse and distracted. “You want me to get you some cigarettes?”
“Got a pack this morning,” said the woman’s voice. “No worries.”
I followed David at a distance as the wide suburban road turned into a busier street, flanked with shops and palm trees. David limped in his big scuffed trainers, his head down. The police had given me the address of David’s cousin in Long Beach, and told me he was on bail. It was only ten days since I’d seen him, but it seemed longer. Jorge gave me a lift back from Laguna Town to Los Angeles a few days before, and since then I’d felt angry with David in a way I’ve never been with anyone before or since. It was partly sadness, but the feeling made my stomach ache and my skin sting.
From the way David was walking I wondered if he was drunk, but even when sober David walked with that lazy gangster lollop. I wondered if the limp was from the crash. He limped his way past a schoolboy holding a rat-terrier dog, and a bag lady pushing a shopping trolley full of her possessions. There were DIY shops, coffee franchises and crappy-looking teeny-bopper clothes stores on either side of this main road, none of which David looked up at. Without glancing from the pavement, he eventually turned into a convenience store on the next corner. It was one of those flat-roofed buildings with stretched-out windows and big doors like yawning plastic mouths.
I peeked through the window and saw David holding a list in one hand and a shopping basket clumsily in the other. The phosphorescent lighting accentuated the tiredness of his eyes. He was picking up things like canned soup and dried pasta from the shelves, putting them hesitantly in his basket. I’d never seen David buy anything that needed cooking. He ate Oreos and buttered ham sandwiches with the crusts cut off, or Thai takeaway, so he must have been doing the shopping for his cousin. I watched him take a while choosing from different sorts of pasta sauce, then moving onto mincemeat and eggs, but he forgot the bananas.
When he came out of the store I was standing by the window to the right of the door, ready for him to see me immediately as he stepped out. I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say to him, or how I felt, but my skin tingled with wanting him to look at me. But instead of seeing me outside the convenience store, David turned in the opposite direction from where he’d just come and walked with his head down into a public garden a few yards down.
The sign outside said it was a garden, but really it looked more like a square of dried grass between two buildings. There was a bench and a broken swing set covered in seagull or pigeon droppings. Graffiti plastered the crumbling brick walls, and rubbish was heaped in the corners like maybe it was used for teenagers to hang out in at night rather than for children to play in.
David put the shopping bags down in the shade under a tree and sat on the bench for a moment, leaning his elbows on his knees and his head in his big hands. I just stood there at the mouth of the garden, watching him. People walked past the gates, but nobody walked inside. I had my school rucksack over my shoulder and was wearing the jeans David bought me, with a black T-shirt and the little pearls with glue visible in the fitting. He only looked up from his stupor when the sound of an airplane throbbed in the air. He glanced absently into the sky, frowning, then noticed a shadow standing at the garden gate and turned to me.
My heart pounded when he looked at me. Perhaps love is stupid, more than it is blind. The feeling certainly remained vivid despite everything that had happened. I waved hesitantly from the gateway, and he didn’t move, just stared at me.
“You forgot the bananas,” I said after a long silence. It wasn’t what I meant, obviously, but it would do. He smiled very slightly at me, and didn’t say anything for a long moment.
“Shit, yeah,” he mumbled eventually. “Guess I did.”
I took a step forwards, into the little garden.
“That your cousin?” I said. “At the balcony.”
“Yeah,” he said. “She’s okay.”
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Yeah. You?”
“Okay,” I said. Another plane flew over our heads and made a throbbing sound. The noise got caught between the buildings, tunnelled between the garden walls, and I used the moment to sit down on the bench next to him. He straightened his back, and I wondered if his skin bristled like mine did. I had images of his skin sweating into mine while we lay on his bed, his hands on my wrist and my hips bucking against his body in the darkness. I didn’t tell him about the hospital or the Laguna Highway.
“When’s your court date?” I said.
“Two weeks,” he said, and blinked.
“She was upset. She was driving too fast,” I said, but the words felt irrelevant. “She wasn’t wearing a helmet.” He didn’t reply, and we sat in silence for a few minutes, an inch or so apart from each other on the bench.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I can’t even...” he trailed off.
“Don’t,” I said.
I offered him a cigarette. We each lit our own and stared at the wall in front of us for what seemed like ages. I tried to think of something to say, anything.
“I used to love planes when I was a kid,” he said eventually. “Did I ever tell you that?”
“No,” I said, turning to him.
“I used to beg people to take me to the airports on Saturdays.”
“Geek,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. We fell quiet again. His big hands were resting on his knees, and the fingers of my right hand, the one closest to him, stung with the proximity.
“Your socks don’t match,” I said to him.
“You got your rucksack back?” he said, nodding at the doodled-on schoolbag at my feet. I shrugged, lifting my hand from the bench for a second, but not putting it back down on his hand like I wanted to.
“I didn’t have the courage to hand myself in,” he said. My hand snuck a little closer to David, still resting on the bench. The tips of my fingers touched his trouser leg. I could feel his heat through the material, and he glanced down at my hand resting there.
“Why is your phone off?” I said.
“No reception,” he said.
“Liar,” I said.
“Let’s not talk about liars,” he said.
“No,” I said.
“When I took Lily’s photograph, years and years ago, we hardly exchanged a word. I never would have thought of her again if it wasn’t for what happened on the highway. She and I were never involved, you know that?”
“Let’s not talk about it now,” I said.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said, but he let my hand rise up and rest very lightly on top of his hand, between his fingers. My fingers looked pale, and his looked dark. His hand twitched as our skin touched, but he didn’t move away. It felt like sipping water when you’re thirsty, or a first cigarette of the day.