The Worm in Every Heart (24 page)

(Well, we know who it prob'ly BELONGS to, at least . . . )

Snicker, snicker, snicker.

Dropping squashed packages of McDonald's ketchup in her binder, knowing they'll smear and dry like brown Crazy Glue all across her journal, her poems.
Just looked like the kinda thing you like, Heyyy-ther. Soh-REE.

Didn't matter how many words she strung together, or how well—how many plants she could raise, catalogue, research or harvest, to what mysterious and potentially fatal purposes. In the world outside her own freakishly pubescent body, it was the Jenny Diamonds who had the real power—always had. Always.

But: Poor Mrs Diamond, bound and determined to put the best possible face on everything, however bleak. While she just sat there, thinking: Yeah, well. In a year, a thousand different things could happen. I could be DEAD in a year.

Or rather: Christ, I HOPE so.

“Yo, Heyyyy-ther . . . ”

She levered up, made the stream's far side in one long-legged jump. Heard yelps rise behind her at the flicker of movement (
there she is, there she IS!),
and ducked headlong into the underbrush without a backwards glance, heading directly up: Up through the poison oak, up under the shifting grey-green shadows of trees, up where the hiking trail's woodchip-lined trail turned to mud and mush. Remembered the last time the clique had chased her down here, running her through the blackberry bushes ‘till she was breathless with stinging scratches. Like she'd accidentally grabbed the Black Spot and just not known it; like she was marked with fluorescent paint, invisible to everyone but them. Like she was some kind of, what was that word—

—scapegoat?

Chosen ahead of time, like around kindergarten, to sink and drown under a steady tide of bullying, or picked on simply because she'd been unlucky enough to have grown boobs a year earlier than everybody else—to have them when they were still age-inappropriate enough to be weird instead of jealousy-bait, before they were prized collateral on instant cool. On top of every other unlucky Goddamn thing.

And then that older guy Paul—fifteen at least, a kept-back retard hanging with the Fives and playing Master Of The Universe ‘cause everybody else didn't know any better—had caught up to her at last, shot out in front of everybody else to grab her by the sleeve and wrench, so the two of them went down in a heap together with her hair in the mud, and him on top. Grinning a wet, dumb smile as he stuck his hand down her shirt, like he was fishing for some kind of surprise gift-bag through a carny peep-hole.

“Heather, baby—man, that set feels nice. Just like a couple a' water-balloons.”

“Get
off
—”

“Aw, you know you
want
it. Just be cool and go ‘long, baby, everybody knows you're fifty pounds of slut in a five-pound bag . . . ”

(They can, y'know—just
smell
it on you.)

She felt poison well in her heart, a cold black spurt; rolled and got on top of him all in one crazy lurch, using both fists to hammer his head down hard against the nearest hard thing: A root, a rock.

“Crazy mother b—”

He jumped back, bleeding, and the fear on his face was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.

But the rush of it drained away so fast.

* * *

If this was a movie, it only occurred to her now (as she pulled herself ever further upwards through the mucky treeline, her boots sopping-slippery with mud), then Jenny and her gang would later turn out to have cut the first girl to menstruate from the school herd every year. There'd be some conspiracy. These girls would disappear, never to be seen again—bleached bones under a swatch of weeds somewhere in the Ravine, after a terrifying midnight hunt . . .

But it wasn't a movie: Just life, nothing more or less. Considerably less interesting. Considerably more hurtful.

Further up the hill, the house's porch-light had come on. A car was pulling up outside—driver's side door painted with a coal-bright tiger, crouched and ready to pounce. The other was hidden from this angle; a voluptuous woman, censored by flowers.

God, you bastard.

The tiger opened. So did the front door.

She straightened, suddenly composed.

Tell you what, she thought. Make you a deal. You don't really have to make anything happen, okay? Just make me not care, when it does.

That's all.

A heartfelt prayer. Yet God, as usual, stayed silent.

And oh but she knew, so very very well, that her whole stupid life was an Afterschool Special cliché from top to bottom—her problems clichés too, each and every one of them. Plot twists so stale they all but gave off dust. Ludicrous. Laughable. Lame.

None of which made the pain any easier to take, if and—

(no, just when. When.)

—it came.

The rats, sated, had long since gone their ways. Janice was heading down the yard, already almost to the Ravine's lip. Beside her was a shadow in embroidered jeans, sizeable hand on equally sizeable hip. No visible means of escape.

Before her parents could start to call, therefore, she stood up. And waved.

* * *

“You decent?” Doug asked, pushing the door open; luckily, she was. This time.

She stood in front of the mirror, flossing carefully. One side, then the other, each tooth in turn. Wrap and pull. Up, down and all around, like a see-saw.

The dentist was a luxury. If she'd left it up to them, she wouldn't have a tooth left in her head.

Go away.

“Missed you at dinner, pie.”

Right hand on her shoulder, heavy as a full vacuum-cleaner bag. The warped mirror bent his fingers back, blurring them together: One strange flipper.

“Ah elt ick,” she said, mid-wrap.

“Put that down, babe. Let me look at you a while.”

That's an order, she thought, bracing herself. Floss to the garbage, with a flick. She turned, eyes shaded, as if to some erratic light-source more apt to blind than to illuminate. He grinned back, eyes glued to her chest, watching it bounce with the movement.

“Jan told me you did some more growing up while I was gone this time,” he said. “And I thought she was joking. My oh my.”

A whiff of dope from down the hall; Van Morrison on the stereo. She could almost hear him now, soft and infinitely plausible, at least to a woman kite-high on Doug's own no-name brand of weed:
Just leave us two alone to get reacquainted a while, Jan—play Daddy, y'know. All that good crap.

“'Course, I already saw you when I got back.”

The cap was off the toothpaste. “Driving up, you mean.”

Big grin. “Naaah, I mean last night. I was just off shopping, that's why I wasn't there at breakfast. But I saw you, all right. Was about three, so you were fast asleep, cute as a button, lyin' there in that big t-shirt . . . you sure you don't remember?”

She swallowed; the vise was back again. “No.”

“Well, here I was watching you—and it being so long and all, I decided I'd give you a kiss. So I bend down, and you know what you did?” Pause for reaction. None forthcoming, so: “Took my hand, and then you start—licking it, right? Like it was some old lollipop. Licking and licking.” Still nothing. “Isn't that just the sweetest?”

“I'd never.”

A shrug. ‘'Cept you did.“

She finally spotted the cap, a red smudge wedged between divisions, halfway down the drain. Have to use the tweezers on that. “You're lying,” she said, not looking up.

“Now, would I lie?”

Only every day of my life.

“I gotta go to bed. School.”

But he caught her in mid-stride, backing the door shut; licorice on his breath, rank with time. Pinning both her hands as he reached high over her head for the nearest bottle of moisturizer. “Dad, please don't,” she whispered. “Not anymore. Please, it hurts.”

“But sweetie,” he said, almost genuinely shocked. “You know I only do this for
you
, right? All part'a growing up.”

Don't break you in NOW, it just hurts that much worse later on . . .

And then they were down on the floor, the tiles cold on her face.
Let me not care, let me not care.
His hands. Grunting. Distant shapes in the mirror, blurred and distorted beyond recognition.

Plus God, somewhere, laughing his nonexistent ass off.

* * *

She dreamed, later—for the first time since she was seven or so, that she could recall. The year it all started going to hell or she started noticing how bad it already was, whichever came first.

In the dream, she was wearing her long black dress—the one with the stiff Afghani embroidery, red and yellow with little round bits of mirror sewn across the bodice and down the front. A witch's dress. In real life it didn't fit anymore; she slept with it tucked inside her pillow-case, rough against her cheek in the darkness.

While
Hepzibah
, a voice called.
Hep-zi-bah.

She brushed red hair from her eyes—thigh-long, bloody with a power that crackled through her fingers. The voice seemed to be coming from outside, in the backyard, or further: Yes, from the Ravine. She knelt down from the trumpet-vine's main knot, awaiting further instructions.

What do you want?
The voice asked, finally.

Janice and Doug gone. And Wang. And Jenny Diamond. I don't want to have to go to school. I want people to leave me alone, or die.

As quick as she said it, the words bred and splintered. A thousand thousand shades of grey, but one true meaning:
I want them all to be as much afraid of me as I am of them.

And it came to her, sitting there in the cool, impossible dirt of her impossible garden—all her carefully-tended poisons abloom at last, ripe and lush for plucking—that there might still be a way to unpick the thread between her and the world around her, even now. To give up all hope of love. To give up pain. To be free, free, free at last.

She felt it all collect, hard and hot, in a lump just below her sternum—a smooth black egg, finally about to hatch.

And:
This is the gift
, came that same whisper again—from inside, or outside? Or . . . everywhere? At once?

THIS is what you were marked for. To live.

Confirmation, finally, that the fantasy which had sustained her so far might actually be meant to be . . . more. Not fantasy at all. Truth, or truth-to-be.

Foreshadowing.

To OUT-live, Hepzibah. Everyone.

Repeating the words, tasting every inch of them, and wondering at the welcome, impossible weight of them: Live.
Out-
live.

(Everyone.)

After all, what did she owe anyone still left inside this shell she called her life? Really?

I always knew it, she thought, amazed at her own perceptiveness. That if I only didn't have to feel—then nobody could hurt me. Nobody.

Because: When you feel nothing, you can do . . .

. . . anything.

* * *

Later that night, after Doug and Janice had smoked and screwed themselves to sleep, she found their stash, their money, Doug's ridiculously “high-class” straight-razor. Turned it in her hands thoughtfully, thinking about what if this was America, what if the razor were a gun. Standing over them in the dark, watching them breathe and grumble until the weight of her shadow brought Doug up from sleep . . .

“Pie—” he'd begin. And:

“My name is Hepzibah,” she'd answer. Then shoot him in the face.

Janice might even have time to scream, once.

Resurfacing in darkness, turning away. Musing how in a perfect world, a
movie
world, this ultimate revelation would have come to her just in time for the nightshade harvest, so she'd have already had time to gather and dry enough atropine-laced leaves to cut her parents' brownie-hash with dementia and blindness. But you couldn't always get what you wanted, as she knew all too well; daffodil bulbs stolen from the corner flower-shop and added to tomorrow's salad would simply have to do, in terms of a stop-gap. Not that she suspected either Doug or Janice would be in any ultra-big hurry to call the cops, anyway, especially over something like the famous disappearing kid having finally just . . . well . . .

. . . disappeared. For good.

Hepzibah slipped the razor in her jeans pocket and the pre-baggie'd weed down the back of her waistband, pulling her sweatshirt down to cover it. She paused by the hall closet to “choose” between her usual thin coat and Doug's thick sheepskin jacket, then paused again by the front door to dredge a single marvellously unfamiliar word up from the very bottom of herself, a new mantra, well worth saying over and over and over. Forever.

“No,” she whispered, into the newfound night—an ornate and intact sound, utterly crackless. It pleased her so much that she made it again and again, in time with her own footsteps: Down the stairs, onto the pavement, ‘round the corner. Gone.

A new poem growing, unstoppable, in every fresh beat of her tread.

 

But beyond their art still lies my heart

Which no one knows, or owns.

A porcelain frame for my secret name;

An eggshell, crammed with broken bones.

* * *

It would be thirteen more years and too many dreams of murder to count—fulfilled, unfulfilled, otherwise—before she finally made her first mistake.

Oh, buying and selling . . . you know . . . life.

—Tom Stoppard, after J.G. Ballard.

ONE DAY IN 1941,
not long after the fall of Shanghai, my amah (our live-in Chinese maid of all work, who often doubled as my nurse) left me sleeping alone in the abandoned hulk of what had once been my family's home, went out, and never came back . . . a turn of events which didn't actually surprise me all that much, since my parents had done something rather similar only a few brief weeks before. I woke up without light or food, surrounded by useless luxury—the discarded detritus of Empire and family alike. And fifteen more days of boredom and starvation were to pass before I saw another living soul.

I was ten years old.

After the war was over, I learned that my parents had managed to bribe their way as far as the harbor, where they became separated in the crush while trying to board a ship back “Home.” My mother died of dysentery in a camp outside of Hangkow; the ship went down halfway to Hong Kong, taking my father with it. What happened to my amah, I honestly don't know—though I do feel it only fair to mention that I never really tried to find out, either.

The house and I, meanwhile, stayed right where we were—uncared for, unclaimed—until Ellis Iseland broke in, and took everything she could carry.

Including me.

“So what's your handle, tai pan?” she asked, back at the dockside garage she'd been squatting in, as she went through the pockets of my school uniform.

(It would be twenty more years before I realized that her own endlessly evocative name was just another bad joke—one some immigration official had played on her family, perhaps.)

“Timothy Darbersmere,” I replied, weakly. Over her shoulder, I could see the frying pan still sitting on the table, steaming slightly, clogged with burnt rice. At that moment in time, I would have gladly drunk my own urine in order to be allowed to lick it out, no matter how badly I might hurt my tongue and fingers in doing so.

Her eyes followed mine—a calm flick of a glance, contemptuously knowing, arched eyebrows barely sketched in cinnamon.

“Not yet, kid,” she said.

“I'm really very hungry, Ellis.”

“I really believe you, Tim. But not yet.” She took a pack of cigarettes from her sleeve, tapped one out, lit it. Sat back. Looked at me again, eyes narrowing contemplatively. The plume of smoke she blew was exactly the same non color as her slant, level, heavy-lidded gaze.

“Just to save time, by the way, here're the house rules,” she said. “Long as you're with me, I eat first. Always.”

“That's not fair.”

“Probably not. But that's the way it's gonna be, ‘cause I'm thinking for two, and I can't afford to be listening to my stomach instead of my gut.” She took another drag. “Besides which, I'm bigger than you.”

“My father says adults who threaten children are bullies.”

“Yeah, well, that's some pretty impressive moralizing, coming from a mook who dumped his own kid to get out of Shanghai alive.”

I couldn't say she wasn't right, and she knew it, so I just stared at her. She was exoticism personified—the first full-blown Yank I'd ever met, the first adult (Caucasian) woman I'd ever seen wearing trousers. Her flat, Midwestern accent lent a certain fascination to everything she said, however repulsive.

“People will do exactly whatever they think they can get away with, Tim,” she told me, “for as long as they think they can get away with it. That's human nature. So don't get all high-hat about it, use it. Everything's got its uses—everything, and everybody.”

“Even you, Ellis?”

“Especially me, Tim. As you will see.”

* * *

It was Ellis, my diffident ally—the only person I have ever met who seemed capable of flourishing in any given situation—who taught me the basic rules of commerce: To always first assess things at their true value, then gauge exactly how much extra a person in desperate circumstances would be willing to pay for them. And her lessons have stood me in good stead, during all these intervening years. At the age of sixty-six, I remain not only still alive, but a rather rich man, to boot—import/export, antiques, some minor drug-smuggling intermittently punctuated (on the more creative side) by the publication of a string of slim, speculative novels. These last items have apparently garnered me some kind of cult following amongst fans of such fiction, most specifically—ironically enough—in the United States of America.

But time is an onion, as my third wife used to say: The more of it you peel away, searching for the hidden connections between action and reaction, the more it gives you something to cry over.

So now, thanks to the established temporal conventions of literature, we will slip fluidly from 1941 to 1999—to St Louis, Missouri, and the middle leg of my first-ever Stateside visit, as part of a tour in support of my recently-published childhood memoirs.

The last book signing was at four. Three hours later, I was already firmly ensconced in my comfortable suite at the downtown Four Seasons Hotel. Huang came by around eight, along with my room service trolley. He had a briefcase full of files and a sly, shy grin, which lit up his usually impassive face from somewhere deep inside.

“Racked up a lotta time on this one, Mr. Darbersmere,” he said, in his second-generation Cockney growl. “Spent a lotta your money, too.”

“Mmm.” I uncapped the tray. “Good thing my publisher gave me that advance, then, isn't it?”

“Yeah, good fing. But it don't matter much now.”

He threw the files down on the table between us. I opened the top one and leafed delicately through, between mouthfuls. There were schedules, marriage and citizenship certificates, medical records. Police records, going back to 1953, with charges ranging from fraud to trafficking in stolen goods, and listed under several different aliases. Plus a sheaf of photos, all taken from a safe distance.

I tapped one.

“Is this her?”

Huang shrugged. “You tell me—you're the one ‘oo knew ‘er.”

I took another bite, nodding absently. Thinking: Did I? Really?

Ever?

As much as anyone, I suppose.

* * *

To get us out of Shanghai, Ellis traded a can of petrol for a spot on a farmer's truck coming back from the market—then cut our unlucky savior's throat with her straight razor outside the city limits, and sold his truck for a load of cigarettes, lipstick and nylons. This got us shelter on a floating whorehouse off the banks of the Yangtze, where she eventually hooked us up with a pirate trawler full of U.S. deserters and other assorted scum, whose captain proved to be some slippery variety of old friend.

The trawler took us up- and down-river, dodging the Japanese and preying on the weak, then trading the resultant loot to anyone else we came in contact with. We sold opium and penicillin to the warlords, maps and passports to the D.P.s, motor oil and dynamite to the Kuomintang, Allied and Japanese spies to each other. But our most profitable commodity, as ever, remained people—mainly because those we dealt with were always so endlessly eager to help set their own price.

I look at myself in the bathroom mirror now, tall and silver-haired—features still cleanly cut, yet somehow fragile, like Sir Laurence Olivier after the medical bills set in. At this morning's signing, a pale young woman with a bolt through her septum told me: “No offense, Mr. Darbersmere, but you're—like—a real babe. For an old guy.”

I smiled, gently. And told her: “You should have seen me when I was twelve, my dear.”

That was back in 1943, the year that Ellis sold me for the first time—or rented me out, rather, to the mayor of some tiny port village, who threatened to keep us docked until the next Japanese inspection. Ellis had done her best to convince him that we were just another boatload of Brits fleeing internment, even shucking her habitual male drag to reveal a surprisingly lush female figure and donning one of my mother's old dresses instead, much as it obviously disgusted her to do so. But all to no avail.

“You know I'd do it, Tim,” she told me, impatiently pacing the trawler's deck, as a passing group of her crewmates whistled appreciatively from shore. “Christ knows I've tried. But the fact is, he doesn't want me. He wants you.”

I frowned. “Wants me?”

“To go with him, Tim. You know—grown-up stuff.”

“Like you and Ho Tseng, last week, after the dance at Sister Chin's?”

“Yeah, sorta like that.”

She plumped herself down on a tarpaulined crate full of dynamite—clearly labeled, in Cantonese, as “dried fruit”—and kicked off one of her borrowed high-heeled shoes, rubbing her foot morosely. Her cinnamon hair hung loose in the stinking wind, back-lit to a fine fever.

I felt her appraising stare play up and down me like a fine grey mist, and shivered.

“If I do this, will you owe me, Ellis?”

“You bet I will, kid.”

“Always take me with you?”

There had been some brief talk of replacing me with Brian Thompson-Greenaway, another refugee, after I had mishandled a particularly choice assignment—protecting Ellis's private stash of American currency from fellow scavengers while she recuperated from a beating inflicted by an irate Japanese officer, into whom she'd accidentally bumped while ashore. Though she wisely put up no resistance—one of Ellis's more admirable skills involved her always knowing when it was in her best interest not to defend herself—the damage left her pissing blood for a week, and she had not been happy to discover her money gone once she was recovered enough to look for it.

She lit a new cigarette, shading her eyes against the flame of her Ronson.

“'Course,” she said, sucking in smoke.

“Never leave me?”

“Sure, kid. Why not?”

From Ellis, I learned to love duplicity, to distrust everyone except those who have no loyalty and play no favorites. Lie to me, however badly, and you are virtually guaranteed my fullest attention.

I don't remember if I really believed her promises, even then. But I did what she asked anyway, without qualm or regret. She must have understood that I would do anything for her, no matter how morally suspect, if she only asked me politely enough.

In this one way, at least, I was still definitively British.

* * *

Afterward, I was ill for a long time—some sort of psychosomatic reaction to the visceral shock of my deflowering, I suppose. I lay in a bath of sweat on Ellis's hammock, under the trawler's one intact mosquito net. Sometimes I felt her sponge me with a rag dipped in rice wine, while singing to me—softly, along with the radio:

A faded postcard from exotic places . . . a cigarette that's marked with lipstick traces . . . oh, how the ghost of you clings . . .

And did I merely dream that once, at the very height of my sickness, she held me on her hip and hugged me close? That she actually slipped her jacket open and offered me her breast, so paradoxically soft and firm, its nipple almost as pale as the rest of her night-dweller's flesh?

That sweet swoon of ecstasy. That first hot stab of infantile desire. That unwitting link between recent childish violation and a desperate longing for adult consummation. I was far too young to know what I was doing, but she did. She had to. And since it served her purposes, she simply chose not to care.

Such complete amorality: It fascinates me. Looking back, I see it always has—like everything else about her, fetishized over the years into an inescapable pattern of hopeless attraction and inevitable abandonment.

My first wife's family fled the former Yugoslavia shortly before the end of the war; she had high cheekbones and pale eyes, set at a Baltic slant. My second wife had a wealth of long, slightly coarse hair, the color of unground cloves. My third wife told stories—ineptly, compulsively. All of them were, on average, at least five years my elder.

And sooner or later, all of them left me.

Oh, Ellis, I sometimes wonder whether anyone else alive remembers you as I do—or remembers you at all, given your well-cultivated talent for blending in, for getting by, for rendering yourself unremarkable. And I really don't know what I'll do if this woman Huang has found for me turns out not to be you. There's not much time left in which to start over, after all.

For either of us.

* * *

Last night, I called the number Huang's father gave me before I left London. The man on the other end of the line identified himself as the master chef of the Precious Dragon Shrine restaurant.

“Oh yes, tai pan Darbersmere,” he said, when I mentioned my name. “I was indeed informed, by that respected personage who we both know, that you might honor my unworthiest of businesses with the request for some small service.”

“One such as only your estimable self could provide.”

“The tai pan flatters, as is his right. Which is the dish he wishes to order?”

“The Emperor's Old Bones.”

A pause ensued—fairly long, as such things go. I could hear a Cantopop ballad filtering in, perhaps from somewhere in the kitchen, duelling for precedence with the more classical strains of a wailing erhu. The Precious Dragon Shrine's master chef drew a single long, low breath.

“Tai pan,” he said, finally, “for such a meal . . . one must provide the meat oneself.”

“Believe me, Grandfather, I am well aware of such considerations. You may be assured that the meat will be available, whenever you are ready to begin its cooking.”

Another breath—shorter, this time. Calmer.

“Realizing that it has probably been a long time since anyone had requested this dish,” I continued, “I am, of course, more than willing to raise the price our mutual friend has already set.”

“Oh, no, tai pan.”

“For your trouble.”