Wake Up Happy Every Day (33 page)

Yes, she’s pissed but she gets over it.

Jesus has to work hard to bring her round though. He buys her things, flowers and chocolate don’t impress but he does better with the jewellery and he cooks and takes her to the movies, and finally he even agrees to get a tattoo.

‘But you got to let me choose the design. And it won’t be small,’ Mary says.

And then she reminds him of her other ideas about getting funding. And Jesus says OK, OK, whatever. One way or another, they have to get the money for the Company Barrios. He’ll do anything.

‘The what?’ Mary asks.

Jesus explains that Barrios was a famous figure from Guatemalan history, a man who had wanted to unite all of Latin America, but who had been killed fighting for his dream in 1885. ‘Imagine if he’d come through,’ Jesus says. ‘Man, what a country that would be.’

And Mary can see that it might have been pretty amazing.

‘So Barrios for my corporation – as a tribute.’

‘Yeah. That’s awesome. But you got to listen to me now, and listen real good, hun,’ she says. ‘Because this is for real. I got it figured. All the details and everything.’

And together they examine the plan from every angle but they can’t see any major stress points. It requires nerve, patience and a bit of poker-face, and these are things they do have. You don’t need to go to a bank for those. They are just the basic building blocks of business.

And Jesus says if it all works out he will give Mary thirty per cent of the shares in Barrios.

And Mary laughs and kisses him and says that it will absolutely definitely work, he doesn’t need to worry about that. And that he’ll give her forty-nine per cent of the shares with no argument.

‘Forty-nine? Really? Seriously? You kiddin’ me?’

‘Or fifty-one per cent even.’

And she laughs again at the dangerous golden fire that begins in his beautiful brown eyes, the way his weight shifts like he is getting ready to fight.

‘Relax, Mister,’ she says. ‘I’m only funning with you.’

He smiles wide with relief. Jesus doesn’t smile a lot and it’s always like the sun coming out from behind a big ole cloud. She gets him to give her the list again.

It begins with Selma Hayek, and goes on with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Colonel Tom Parker, Michael J. Fox. All stars who were once undocumented. Famous illegals. Inspiring stories. Stars of the American dream. There are over a hundred other names on that list and Jesus knows them all. And new names are added every week, and he learns them too.

Thirty-four

LORNA

‘Hey, Armitage, listen to this.’ She clears her throat and reads aloud: ‘The Linnaean taxonomy of smells was expanded by Zwaardemaker in the nineteenth century to include nine categories: ethereal, aromatic, fragrant, ambrosiac, alliaceous, empyreumatic, hircine, foul and nauseous.’ Armitage Shanks looks unimpressed and she rubs his belly. ‘Oh you’re so hard to please. Those are great words. I want a lover who smells alliaceous or empyreumatic, don’t you? In fact I wouldn’t mind a lover called Zwaardemaker come to that.’

There is a knock at the door, a hard old-school rat-a-tat-tat and Armitage Shanks springs from her arms and hurries off to see what the commotion is all about. He really is a most inquisitive cat. ‘You know what curiosity did, don’t you?’ she calls after him, puts down the book and hauls herself up, just as whoever it is knocks again, harder this time. Lorna is convinced it’s the post, otherwise she might have been more cautious.

There at the door, hidden behind a vast and colourful bouquet, is Jez. She is obscurely disappointed. No one has ever brought her flowers, or sent her any, not even the poet at uni, and she has sometimes fantasised about it, but now she just feels let down. Let down and somehow bullied.

She’ll have to spend some time with him now, talk with him, ask how he is. She might have to fend him off. She might find herself sleeping with him out of laziness or tiredness, or for old times’ sake. Or because he does some little thing that makes her want him. Basically, her day – which she has set aside for reading old history books so she could feel more immersed in the nineteenth-century social context in which her coven of authors lived and worked, well that’s all spoiled now.

Maybe they’d get drunk, Jez and her, in which case tomorrow is probably ruined too. All in all, it’s a pisser. Armitage Shanks clearly feels the same. As soon as he sees it’s the Fuckweasel on the doorstep he heads back up the stairs.

‘Oh. Jez. Why are you here?’

‘Well, that’s nice.’

‘Sorry.’ And she is. Kind of. Sorry, because it isn’t really Jez she’s disappointed with. She is irritated at herself. Another girl, a differently wired girl, a girl like Megan in fact – well, she’d just send him away, wouldn’t she? That girl would smile but she’d be firm, and in under a minute the Fuckweasel would know that he was the past. He’d be gone. But Lorna knows she isn’t capable of that and it makes her a bit cross.

She takes the flowers. They are heavy as well as colourful – and they smell heady, almost ambrosiac even. She carefully places the bouquet in the hallway, turns and embraces him. All the times they’d been together he’d definitely been vaguely hircine, but now he smells of soap and apologies. And, also, rather too much Dior pour Homme. He’s made way too much effort.

It feels good to be embraced though, Jez’s wiry frame feeling strong through the battered leather jacket.

But that’s enough of that.

‘Let’s go grab a coffee,’ she says.

‘Oh, right.’

And she knows he is disappointed not to be getting inside the flat, but she can’t quite remember what she’s left lying about. She doesn’t think there is anything too incriminating, but it’d be demeaning to be running around collecting stray underwear from the sofa just because the Fuckweasel was in the building.

They walk in silence for a minute or two and then, of course, begin to speak at the same moment. They both stop. There is a good deal of after you-ing and you first-ing, and, again, Lorna feels irritated. The Jez she had first got to know in The Vesuvio all those months ago, well, he would have just talked over her, wouldn’t he? What had happened to that bloke? She definitely preferred that bloke.

She stays quiet and lets him talk and he just asks how she’s been, and of course she’s been fine, just fine. He says he’s been worried because she hasn’t replied to his texts.

‘And you moved,’ he says accusingly.

‘I did. How did you find where I lived?’

Jez shrugs. ‘There’s an app.’

‘Of course, there’s always an app.’

And as they walk, Jez fills the growing silence by pointing out all the more interesting plants and shrubs, including fruit trees.

‘I’ve actually done a map, a trail that shows all the places where you can pick edible stuff in Berkeley. You know, so people can eat for free.’

Now, that is a surprisingly interesting and useful thing for him to have done. Oh God.

And then they are in the Guerrilla Cafe and he looks at her and she looks at him and they both smile and she feels some of the old chemistry mixing in the air around them. A sort of penumbra of sparkle. Anyone looking over might think what a good-looking couple, what a handsome pair. Her so blonde and him so dark, and both of them so raggedy-stylish. People might think they looked like a young Anita Pallenberg and a young Keith Richards. Or a young Courtney and Kurt. Doomed lovers in a moment of grace in a coffee shop.

So she smiles warmly at him now, and takes his hand and says, ‘So tell me, what have you done with the body?’

And he starts. ‘What?’

‘I mean, where is the real Jez? Because you have to be some kind of replicant what with the flowers, the hunter-gatherer trail and all this polite enquiring after my health and everything.’

‘Oh.’ He relaxes and smiles again. Shit, that is one damn heartbreaking smile. They stir coffee in silence and if he had just sat there a bit longer, looking vulnerable and tired and in need of a good meal . . . If he had let the tension build and then finally just taken her hand and said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ then she might have gone with him back to the apartment and ignored the clothes and the mess. She might have shooed Armitage Shanks off the three-week-old sheets on her bed and done it with him. Yes, she might well have done that.

Only Jez blows it. Blows it by crying. No man ever got a woman to go to bed with him by crying.

It isn’t a pretty thing to see. His face sort of melts and it is all very snotty and gulpy and really quite noisy too. Not Keith Richards now. Not Kurt Cobain.

He is trying to be quiet but not very successfully and Lorna has to ask a waitress for a hankie. The waitress looks at her like she’s a cretin, and then takes in Jez’s collapsing, waxy face and liquid breaths and looks her up and down, as if unbelieving that Lorna could be responsible for such distress, and she asks her if she means a Kleenex.

‘Yes, a Kleenex. Whatever.’

It’s probably less than a minute before Jez gets himself together. Fifty-five seconds or so, while she wishes she were somewhere – anywhere – else. Fifty-five seconds spent looking over his trembling head and shaking shoulders, staring out of the window of the cafe, at the people strolling in the sun. Students smiling, holding hands, dawdling, enjoying the fact that they are the beautiful, chosen ones. Except for the dude picking up soda cans and putting them in his trolley. He isn’t beautiful, and he hasn’t been chosen for anything good. He hasn’t made the team. He has plastic bags for shoes. String for a belt. Maybe he was beautiful once. Maybe he was jogging along, keeping up with the pack in the fun run of life and he tripped and that was it. Couldn’t get up and everyone else just kept right on going, right over the top of him.

And towards the end of those fifty-five seconds Lorna sees her dad.

Of course, she doesn’t actually know it’s her dad right away. For several of those long seconds it’s just some guy, some reasonably handsome middle-aged guy, but while Jez wipes his eyes with his hands and blows his nose on the Kleenex, the conviction takes hold that it’s him.

He is looking hard into the window of the Guerrilla Cafe. Staring right at her. And she meets his eye, wondering where she’s seen this guy before. And then she remembers the photo her mum showed her, the one taken while her dad and his mate were travelling in Europe the year she was born. Two boys. Kids. Arms around one another’s slim bodies, raggedy T-shirts, lean faces beneath spiky hair, laughing into the lens. Venice or Prague or Paris or somewhere behind them.

He hasn’t even changed that much. Looks in great shape. Still slim, hair cropped but slightly spiky, quite funky for a fifty-year-old. A silver fox, like a proper dad. Like the ones you see in the soaps and the movies.

What she should have done was run outside and say, ‘What are you staring at, buster?’ and she’d have known for sure then, but she’s paralysed, glued to her chair. And Jez is reaching for her hand and muttering that he is sorry, so, so sorry. And she mutters back, saying that he shouldn’t worry, there is no need to be sorry, even while she’s looking over his bowed head and defeated shoulders. And the bloke outside, her dad – her possible dad anyway – nods to her and turns away from the cafe window.

And now is the time. She stands up suddenly, upsetting her coffee and snatches her hand away from Jez’s and moves to catch up with possible dad. Their table is quite near to the door, but she has to struggle past some chairs with purses hung over the backs of them, and it slows her up. Even so it can’t be more than a few seconds until she is pulling open the door of the Guerrilla and looking down the street and shouting, ‘Hey! Hey!’ but he’s gone already.

She runs a few yards down the way he went, but he could have ducked down a side street, he could be in any one of these little shops. He could, in fact, have been a figment of an overheated imagination. Already she is embarrassed, wondering if he wasn’t just some random dude. A mentally ill bloke maybe, though in her experience mentally ill blokes don’t look like TV dads. Then again, neither did most dads. Most real dads looked too tired and sad to get anywhere near TV standard.

She heads back into the cafe. Chairs make an irritable scrape as they inch forward again. Girls with swishy, caramel hair and fresh butterscotch complexions purse their plump lips, annoyed, and suddenly look like their mothers.

Jez seems to have got himself together, but he’s looked better. A red nose is not really a good look for him. Would Jack Kerouac have wept in public over a bird? Would Jim Morrison?

The waitress comes over with a rank cloth. ‘Here, you’ll need this,’ she says. Lorna looks at her, looks at the cloth. Doesn’t say anything.

‘I’ll do it,’ says Jez and he takes the rag. The waitress swivels on her Converses. Lorna remains standing while Jez gets on his knees and mops up the spilt coffee. And then he wipes the table with the same filthy cloth.

And finally they sit again and she has to listen while he tells her how he can’t sleep, can’t eat, how he thinks about her all the time, how every song he listens to now seems to be about her, how he realises that she is the one, that he has just been scared of the strength of his own feelings, that he hasn’t felt this way since . . . well, for a long time, and that he has actually started writing poetry about her. Of course it’s probably not very good. And he tries to smile, but it doesn’t quite work. This smile doesn’t come anywhere near breaking her heart.