After Bathing at Baxters (17 page)

In the diner the breakfast customers are thinning out. The crowd that follows is more ramshackle: kids in baseball caps and Pirates T-shirts; middle-aged women in stretchsuits; a swarm of teenage girls. Lila takes orders: coffee, donuts, shakes. A highway patrolman in a soft hat comes and drinks a hot chocolate standing up by the bar, chats to the teenage girls. As Lila fills him up with a second chocolate he says: ‘Coupla cars out there blocking up the exit to the highway.' ‘Ain't my problem,' Lila says, ‘you want me to fetch the boss?', but the highway patrolman shrugs and lights a cigarette. There is a kid sitting in one of the chairs by the children's activity area playing with a toy Cadillac. When he sees Lila he rolls the Cadillac carefully towards her so it stops an inch or two from her feet. For some reason Lila stops, puts down her tray full of dirty coffee cups and fragments of pie, and rolls it back.

Behind the perspex window Mr McKechnie makes phone calls. His lawyer. Another lawyer the first one recommended. Two suppliers he owes money to. All the time Mr McKechnie does this his leg itches and hurts, so that by the time he calls the bank there are little purple stars of pain shooting up in front of his eyes like Fourth of July fire crackers. For a long time the receptionist keeps him on hold, but finally he gets put through to the guy who wrote him the letter and they talk for a while. The guy sounds too young to be doing this kind of job, Mr McKechnie thinks, too young and too nervous. At one point he says, ‘We're not talking about carrying a debt here, we're talking about foreclosing', and Mr McKechnie wants to yell at him until he recollects that the guy has a job to do and that talking to him like this is the way he does it. Outside bars of sunlight go skittering across the empty tables, and Mr McKechnie suddenly feels tired of talking. He puts down the phone and eases himself gently out of the chair, figuring that maybe he'll walk over to the bungalow and see what Ella thinks of it all. On the wall by the door there is a picture of the diner like it was twenty years back when Mr McKechnie bought the land, just a lean-to with a couple of chicken-runs and a flat-earth car lot, and Mr McKechnie stares at it, transfixed for a second by the memories it throws up, of him and Ella, and the guy named Henderson they had to do the decorating, how there was a state congressman came in one time and Ella never even noticed, the time two bikers held up the till, rain coming in endlessly over the distant Kentucky mountains.

In the bungalow Ella lights another cigarette from the smoking butt of the one in the ashtray. There is more smoke billowing over the trees and over Larry Frazier's forecourt, but Ella doesn't notice it. For some reason she starts thinking about the diner, and about maybe it might have worked out if they'd got permission for the motel, or the freeway extension hadn't gone through Dade County forty miles away. Can't make a living out of kids and dirt farmers, Ella thinks. In her head she can see the bright glow of the LA street lights. She picks up the travelling bag and takes it but onto the porch, seeing nothing except the white blur of the cigarette moving in her mouth, scuff marks on her boot tips, old pieces of paper flapping up over the timber floor.

In the diner Lila is down to her last two dollars' worth of nickels. Neither of the other waitresses has any, so she decides to ask Mr McKechnie for the float. Through the kitchen door she can see Duane telling Joe about this new girlfriend of his, about how Joe can get an eyeful when she comes in to see him today, so Lila reckons there is no point looking there. Placing her heels carefully on the gravel path she sets off across the yard.

Moving out of the kitchen door Duane sees the girl from the Winnebag sitting down at a table near the main entrance. ‘Hey,' he says, so loudly that the waitresses turn and look at him, ‘hey there.' The girl from the Winnebag smiles a little, and then a big guy coming back from the counter with two coffee cups, stops and puts a hand on her shoulder, and Duane stares at them both, his mouth half open, the broom clutched in his hands like a soldier's rifle, frozen in mid-air.

In the bungalow there is a stale, sweetish smell. Flies whirl in the hall and outside the closet door. From where she stands in the porch Lila can hear Mr McKechnie moving around some room in the back of the place, like he was picking things up and letting them drop on the floor. Lila coughs a couple of times, wondering if she should go back, but then Mr McKechnie comes limping through the doorway. There is a kind of glaze over his face, as if he doesn't know who she is, and Lila thinks of Bob, that last time in the clinic, with the tubes running out of his mouth like a crazy motorway intersection. Mr McKechnie stands in the doorway for a moment and looks around him kind of helplessly. ‘It's OK,' Lila says, feeling stupid because these are the only words she can think of, ‘It's OK,' and the two of them look at each other, curious and a little surprised, while the gray smoke blows in the window and the car-tyres squeal and whinny in the dirt.

Standing in the slip-road next to the drawn-up Pontiac, Mrs McKechnie says: ‘Reckoned you mightn't show.' ‘Thought wrong then,' says Larry Frazier easily. He is a tall, brown-haired guy in his late twenties with a thin moustache. Leaning forward to put the travelling bag in the car a thought seems to strike him and he straightens up. ‘Hey. You tell your old man about this?' Mrs McKechnie nods. ‘Well, he sure as hell isn't going to come running after us,' Larry Frazier says, and for some reason Mrs McKechnie remembers the sound the car hoist made as it snapped and the look on Mr McKechnie's face in the split-second before it fell. She starts laughing, standing there in the road, while the cars slide by and the wind lifts the dust a little and Larry Frazier looks at her uncertainly, like a clamouring kid who, placed finally in the fork of the tree, is scared into silence by the rolling, endless distance.

Cuts

Towards five the late afternoon stupor left him and he became aware of his surroundings once more: of the low, subterranean room with its rows of high-backed chairs; grey, queerly illumined shop fronts glimpsed obliquely through the area window; the curved metal trays with their cargoes of protein sachets and cologne bottles. Each detail of the basement's decor was set in sharp relief by bright, flaring light. Northwards towards Oxford Street a clock was striking the hour and he listened without interest to the chimes rising above a tide of quieter, unfocused sounds: hairclippers, the steady drone of the drying machines, a murmer of conversation.

Outside it grew dark. The woman whose hair O'Brien had been examining for the past ten minutes shifted slightly in her chair and made a small, irritable movement, like a spaniel having its coat combed for fleas. She said:

‘I thought you were asleep just then.'

Knowing that he could be seen in the mirror, O'Brien made a deprecating gesture with his hand. The woman went on:

‘Just before you started putting on the lotion. A glazed look. Miles away, I'd say.'

‘I'm truly sorry,' O'Brien said quickly. He decided to emphasise the Leinster brogue because he sometimes found that this encouraged women to regard him more favourably. ‘A tiring day, if you take my meaning.'

‘Miles away,' the woman repeated. O'Brien felt her scalp twitch under his fingers. She smiled slowly as she spoke but for some reason he was alarmed by the intonation. To forestall anything that might be construed as a reproach he picked up an electric dryer and listened with feigned anxiety as it stuttered into life. Then as a further precautionary measure he glanced over to the square clerical desk by the door, but Mr Trafford had disappeared and there was only an assistant arranging the mass of papers into neat, rectangular piles.

The woman said something else, but O'Brien lost it in the hum of the dryer. To avoid her gaze he pretended to be distracted by a pile of newspapers and magazines which lay on the floor next to the chair's height-adjuster and the coil of electrical cables. Straightening up he said:

‘Would you like a book to read?'

When she did not reply he went on: ‘Surely now? Many of our clients like to have a book to help them pass the time.' Always call them clients, Mr Trafford had said, it gives the place a better tone. Grocers' shops have customers.

The woman frowned, saw the pile of papers – they were free magazines of the kind distributed at underground stations – and relaxed her features. ‘Oh, you mean a
magazine
? For a moment I thought you meant a proper book, like Dickens or someone.' The idea appealed to her and she laughed loud enough for the man next to O'Brien to turn round and stare. ‘I thought you might have a library down there that you lent out to people.'

O'Brien grinned into the mirror. Relief at the woman's good humour fought with a sense of foolishness. It was stupid of him to say book when he meant magazine. It was because of his mother: ‘Mrs O'Brien's book' they had said at the newsagent's when he went to collect her copy of
Ireland's Own
. For a moment he remembered the newsagent's shop with its pink and white canopy and the bottles of stout kept cooling in the tank until another memory came and drove it away, a memory of something he could not quite locate, that was somehow connected with his present surroundings but floated away and hung vaguely above them. Mr Trafford came through the swing doors in a burst of cold air, holding the evening newspaper under his arm. O'Brien waited for the dust to career towards him and swarm around his legs, and he moved his feet up and down uneasily as if he were testing his weight on cracked floorboards.

‘You're very quiet now,' the woman said. O'Brien shrugged. He had a range of gestures for when the effort of talking grew too much for him. Out of the tail of his eye he looked over at Mr Trafford, who stood to one side of the big desk holding the newspaper up in front of him at arm's length and flapping the sheets to and fro. The worst thing about it was that Mr Trafford with the paper reminded him of Keenan. With the thin black hair combed back over his head and the way he had of sticking his elbows out as he walked it could almost be Keenan coming into the room and reading ostentatiously in front of him. The memory grew sharper and he remembered suddenly what it was that he had been thinking about earlier in the afternoon before the tiredness overwhelmed him: Keenan, Keenan and the old days.

The woman moved her head slightly. O'Brien's hand hovered for an instant above a clump of dark, grimy curls and then came to rest again. He felt better now, definitely better, as if he had just solved a problem in one of those puzzle books you saw fellows looking at on the underground, or seen the correct results in a football pools coupon snap miraculously into place. Over by the desk Mr Trafford was still reading the newspaper. O'Brien saw that it was open at the page where the advertisement was. You had to hand it to Mr Trafford; it was a fine racket he had going here, what with the advertisement in the newspaper, the headed notepaper and the fancy white tunics he made them wear. There was a copy of the advertisement sellotaped to the glass of the swing doors so that people could read it on their way in, with the words
Trafford Hair Clinic
printed in big letters. It offered free consultations, specialist staff and an end to misery and uncertainty.

Outside in the street it was quite dark. Through the area window O'Brien watched truncated legs walk backwards and forwards. Somewhere in the middle distance a siren began to sound and a bright, flickering light came boomeranging off the walls, making the roomful of white-coated men stir uneasily. O'Brien remembered travelling in an ambulance once with Keenan. It had been a joke because Keenan had known the ambulance driver, and so they had gone with him and helped to deliver some old ladies to a day centre. The woman yawned, a wide, full-throated yawn, so that O'Brien could feel the skin around her neck tighten. It occurred to him that he ought to say something that would make her want to stay sitting in the chair. Dimly, like a radio heard through a noisy room, he remembered the speech which Mr Trafford had made on the salon's opening day. ‘Flattery, that's how we make our money. You have to instill confidence in the client. Make him think that what you're suggesting is for his own good. Nobody should leave here without a cut at the very least.' Mr Trafford's methods were persuasive: it was rare for anyone who entered the clinic to spend less than twenty pounds.

The woman was stirring again. O'Brien wondered if she sensed his nervousness. Or perhaps she thought that he had discovered something dreadful about her hair. Judging the moment right and letting the brogue creak softly into his voice he said: ‘That's a fine head of hair you have in any case.'

The woman smiled, as if she was used to compliments of this sort. She said: I used to think so once. But it's thinning out, you must have noticed.'

O'Brien looked at her closely, the first time that he had done this since she had sat down. She was about forty, he decided, but the bad skin made her look older and she had what Keenan used to call a ‘Derry front'. Keenan had had a joke that all the women in Derry had large chests. He had had other jokes about girls from County Clare and Roscommon sheep farmers. O'Brien shortened the focus of his eyes, so that the room ceased to be a blur of elongated white shapes and became a series of hard, intelligible objects. There was still something troubling him, though, down in the pit of his mind, and he looked over again at Mr Trafford, who had placed the newspaper squarely on his desk and was considering the sports page, but the ratchet-wheel of his memory obstinately refused to click. The woman said: ‘So what would you advise me to do? Seeing that it's thinning and the colour's starting to go.'

O'Brien reviewed the possibilities. You could go too far, suggest an expensive rinse with highlights only for the person to shake their head and leave. He began cautiously: ‘A bit of nourishment, perhaps, to give strength to it. A bit of a trim now. Our clients usually find that that's the agreeable thing.' The woman looked disappointed, as if she had expected something more than this, some bizarre preparation that would magically transform her, and for a moment O'Brien thought that he had failed. But then she gave a small, resigned sigh and settled herself back in the chair.