Life (55 page)

ii

She took the train to Gatwick, didn’t bother with a Women Only compartment, what a useless amenity; you can’t lock them, and any real nutter makes straight for them. There was a terrorist thing going on. She left them to their doomsday scenario (couldn’t work out whether it was an exercise or real) and set off for Heathrow. Passing through London she sat with a woman who was taking her nine-year-old son to see a specialist. The mother introduced herself through rail chaos, “How many hours did it take
you
to get from East Croydon?” But she was desperate to talk about the child. He had so many problems: asthma, allergies, chest infections, blurred vision, weakness, rashes, lassitude. Finally the doctor had insisted on them seeing a consultant, to discuss the genotype results. The mother’s face was marked with mortal dread. Anna looked at the little boy: noting his rather long, narrow skull, the large eyes, the slightly androgynous cast of his features. She picked up his hand—which he allowed with the sad passivity of a kid too often handled by doctors—and tested the mobility of the wrist joint; examined his nails. “When he was a baby he was hypokalemic…he needed a potassium supplement?”

“Why, yes—”

“And he responded well to that?”

“Yes he did. Are you a doctor?”

“Don’t worry. He’s going to be fine. The little glitches will sort themselves out at puberty, when the extra testosterone kicks in.” She grinned at the boy. “You’ll do.”

“But who are you?”

Anna retreated behind her magazine. She felt happy and perfectly well. She was free. She had left her grief, her desperation, her terrifying symptoms, behind her.

The price of the plane ticket meant nothing. She reached New York easily, without further incident, and checked into the hotel she’d booked from Heathrow. It was a place she’d used before, on 42nd Street, an anonymous hive for budget travelers. The corridors seemed spookier than before, more numerous and more dingy. In the morning she would start her new life. Meanwhile, she filled two trays from the salad bar in a grocery nearby and retired for the night. The second tray was for Jake. When she lay down he was there, curled up snugly with Werg in the other bed. The make believe seemed a sensible recourse: Lavinia Kent would have approved. Fill your world with spirits; keep out the dark by any means necessary. Shadows moved under the sill of the door; strange thumpings proceeded down the corridor. Once, which was very scary, a keycard was tried in the lock.
It’s all right, Jake-boy,
whispered Anna.
The bears are prowling, but they can’t get in…
She told him what they would do in New York: how he would walk between the paws of the great ones, the beautiful monsters, and look up and see their roaring heads high above him, almost closing off the sky. How they would ride the escalators in the Trump building, which was made of golden glass, and sit by the fountains under a bank of fern and moss so green and pure you’d think you were in Lorien. They would talk to the Vietnamese tourists who clustered round the shrine-windows of Tiffany’s, buy candy corn from the Russian street vendors; they would feed the squirrels in Washington Square.

It seemed to her as she whispered that she fell asleep and woke, and she and Jake got up and went out and did all these things, and she was blissfully happy. They climbed on the boulders that lay around in Central Park like sleeping dinosaurs, the way Margaret Mary and Anna Teresa Senoz had climbed on boulders by Lake Windermere long ago. They visited the
Ghostbusters
lions and the White People in Greenwich Village, where she told him a very funny story (somewhat bowdlerized) about what Miguel did to those statues one day, years ago. They lived on salad bar food, coffee, Coke, and hotdogs; they found places, great expanses of old cobbles, that in dawn light or deep twilight made you feel time and space had slipped aside, and you were in Prague or Kraków before the great wars. She was giving him a dream, a dream of the beautiful city that would be to him what the loveliness of lake and mountains had been to her childhood. Never make the mistake your auntie Maggie made, she told him. Don’t try to move into dreamland. Maggie wanted to live in the country; she ended up in a mock-Georgian housing estate, shitting on the beautiful thing she loved… I said a naughty word, I’m sorry. Live in the city, but like this. Be an exile and a stranger. Enjoy the tastes and smells; leave the owning to those other people.

In the middle of the night she woke, and
oh god
the second coverlet was flat and smooth. Anna sat up and stared, her heart pounding,
where is my baby?
She lay down again with fire spiders crawling through her nerves, in intolerable distress, too horrified for tears, remembering that she had left him behind. Her nightmares about what went on in the Rectory seemed entirely real. Shambling old Godfrey fucking his daughter, drunken Isobel ignoring it all, Spence fucking Jake… Oh, God. It could be true! Often, nowadays, the doomsday scenario is not an exercise. It dawned on her that, since she couldn’t trust Spence and Meret was a little girl, she had entrusted her child’s well-being to Charles Craft. Charles, you bastard, you’re not such a bad bastard, if any of it is true you must know: for god’s sake don’t let me down.

She lay thinking about her new, outlaw life. She had the name of a gallery, geniTALia: nothing else, no address. When she’d showered and dressed she used the room’s online services to track down geniTALia and didn’t even check what she was being charged, which was unheard of for Anna, but it was okay. She was no longer in danger of losing touch with her poverty. She would run out of credit soon enough. Armed with the address she set off on foot, her carry-on bag on her back like a rucksack. If she knew anything, she knew that she had an invitation, an open door with no time limit.
If you ever change your mind, about leaving me behind…
If you ever realize that I was right all along, come and find me. Nobody, especially not Spence, understood the permanence of this relationship: that if either one of them made the first move, it would always be there. The great alternative; Anna’s other life.

She walked through the shabby, bohemian streets of Lower Manhattan—and the people she passed were so colorful, so insouciantly pierced and scarred, boned and feathered, it was as if she’d already joined the pirates. And here’s geniTALia. She walked in boldly. The gallery was about the size of an English corner shop supermarket, with a floor of blond polished wood and a flat screen in the center of each of the three walls; no other items. In the middle of the room a spiral staircase climbed up to another floor. Beside this feature a girl with cropped brown hair and many piercings, dressed in a dark red shift to her ankles, sat at a spidery desk.

“Hi, I’m beebee. That’s b-e-e-b-e-e, all lower case. Can I help you?”

“I urgently need to get in touch with Ramone Holyrod.”

“Well, I don’t know if I can… May I take your card?”

“You see, I need somewhere to stay, and Ramone said if I was ever in New York—”

She shouldn’t have checked out of the hotel. Suppose Ramone was out of town? She’d have to find another hotel, with a room that DIDN’T HAVE TWO BEDS, because she couldn’t stand waking up and finding Jake not there, not again. And what about when the credit on her cards was used up? What then?

“I’m afraid Mizz Holyrod is out of town,” said beebee, sunnily. “And I can’t reach her.”

“What about—um—Karel and Rio?”

“Ri. I’m afraid I can’t reach them, either.” beebee pulled a little face, beginning to tire of her brush-off routine. But she read Anna’s card and gave a yelp.

“You’re Dr Anna Senoz?” She stared into Anna’s face. “Hey, you
are
her! You look just like your pictures. I’m so thrilled to meet you! I wish my boyfriend was here!”

“Your
boyfriend?”

“Ye-uh. I’m het.” She beamed. “I know, I don’t look it. But it’s the way I am. He’s a major fan! You’ve had email from him, but of course you can’t read everything, you must have tons of mail. Look, I’m not kidding, I really don’t know where they are. That’s the way they like to be, sometimes they just disappear and they are
gone.
” She frowned, sucking on the silver bead that jutted from her lower lip. “Listen, this is what I’ll do. I’ll give you the address of their place, I’ll call you a taxi, and I’ll get the super to let you in. I’m unconditionally sure they’ll be back soon, but no matter what, you’ve just got to stay in their place while you’re in New York; it’s a trip. You’ll love it. If you’re not doing anything this evening, I could take you to dinner somewhere? I’ll call you. I’d come with you now, only I’m not supposed to leave this dump. Mother of God, the sex destroyer lady, in my shop; my boyfriend will
kill me!
”

Anna didn’t bother trying to understand, she had never found the strange cheepings of the media world to make any sense. She took the taxi, which stopped outside a solid nineteenth-century building, dark reddish brown in color, that looked like the scene of
Rosemary’s Baby.
So here I am. A row of gingko trees lined the sidewalk. It was a street of basement restaurants and dog-walkers, strangely lived-in and normal for a trio of in-your-face art-monsters, but perhaps they were wise to property values. Artists are the ants, after all, getting in their stores and establishing status with the minimum of effort. Anna had been the grasshopper, singing and dancing and wearing herself out for no profit at all. More fool Anna. But she felt proud of her folly, after all these years of believing herself the sensible, boring one. She had butterflies in her stomach. Her name must be on a list of People It Is Okay To Let Into My Flat, but now she had doubts. She wished she could remember exactly what Simon had said about Ramone’s kooky ménage.

The building supervisor must have been watching her arrive. The doors were open, he was standing in a pleasant, black and white tiled hallway, with mailboxes and large, healthy potted palms. “Miz Anna Senoz?” he asked, looking Anna over. He was a big man, dressed in black. There was a large handgun in a holster on his belt: he looked more like a very ruthless bouncer than a man who replaces lightbulbs. Here is where I get raped, killed, and eaten, thought Anna. Nothing occurred, except that he kept casting sly glances, as he traveled up with her in the repo Art Nouveau lift: like a man identifying a well-dressed woman as a whore, on the grounds that she is sitting in a hotel bar alone…

“So you’re the new house-guest. You know these people?”

“I know Ramone Holyrod.”

“I guess this means they’re coming home soon.”

They reached the fourth floor. He led her to the door of the apartment. “Okay, you’re just going to set down your bags, I’m going to show you how to use the door key and where you’ll be sleeping, and then you’re going to come with me to meet the recognition programs. Got to get you ID’d on the hard drive, or you won’t get into the building.”

He handed Anna two slips of plastic on a loop of bead-chain, showed her which one to use and stood by the doorway. She walked into the studio apartment,
studio
not meaning a bedsit but a large and airy set of open plan rooms. She felt uncomfortable about the way the man was standing there.

“Jeezus. Good luck, is all I can say. I used to feel real sorry for that little Ramone, until I saw the way she would bring home the extra guests, just to give her own hide a rest. Watch out for the Korean woman, I think she’s Korean. Did you ever see that video game of theirs? I guess you must have done, called
The Blocks of Wood.
One Two and Three. My fucking god. You know their ‘model’ for that game? She’s in the nuthouse for life. Young Canadian woman. She was their houseguest too.”

In the middle of the biggest room, which was the one you walked into, stood a surgical table. It looked as old as the building, nineteenth century, scoured wood with a row of metal cleats along each side. She looked at it and passed on.

“Yeah, it was a major scandal. But what happens? Nothing. The shocking story of what they did to a girl makes the so-called artwork more desirable. Can you figure that?”

In the room that must be Ramone’s because here were her books, here was her characteristic spartan disarray, there was an array of hooks and straps and pulleys above a bunk-shelf that looked like a butcher’s slab. The leather looked well-used; it was stained with both sweat and blood.

“Some of those
feminists
ought to take a good look at what happens in this apartment. What it says in the literature is there’s a pair of female artists getting in touch with their suppressed erotic desires. What I
see
is a guy who likes beating up girls, and the more they let him do it the more twisted he gets.”

“Sounds like Tex,” murmured Anna. “Sounds like she found another Tex.”

“If this is what women do when they’re on top, I say you girls ought to be taken down from there for your own protection. So tell me you still want to move in?”

Oh, trust you Ramone. You always did walk too far on the wild side for me. Trust you to whip the blanket away, the moment I decide to jump. Those
straps
were too much. She walked past the grinning man without looking at him, headed for a door marked STAIRS, and pushed through it. “Hey lady,” called the supervisor, showing no inclination to follow. “Hey, lady, you forgot your bag.”