Linger Awhile (7 page)

Rosalie and her husband have an apartment over the restaurant and there’s a whole other apartment above that one. She and Lester Chun keep it for business visitors but it’s empty now and that’s where I am, thanks to Chauncey. The bed is big and soft, the sheets smell like fresh air and sunlight, there’s a big comforter that they call a doovay, and the whole place is warm and cosy. From my window I can see the Kim Chee restaurant and Supersave across from us and people in the windows above them. They can all remember where
they were two weeks ago. Two weeks ago there wasn’t any me, I was dead and long gone.

I know I’m not real the way real people are, I’m not alive in the same way. But I
am
alive in some kind of way. I think about Rose Harland a lot. I wish I hadn’t taken her life. Now I feel like she’s part of me. Maybe I have to stay alive for both of us.

I’ve been slipping around like a regular little whore. First I let Istvan crawl on top of me and then there were those two men whose names I don’t even know, then Istvan again, then Chauncey but that wasn’t the same thing because he was very polite and I kind of liked him. But those others, Jesus. There’s not going to be any more of that, things are going to be different from now on. Well, like the feller says, ‘I ain’t got to where I’m going but I’m past where I been.’

I get mixed up between what’s a real memory and what’s not. I told the inspector that I was born in Tornillo but then Chauncey told me it was Amarillo. Sometimes I thought it was Tishomingo, Oklahoma. We come out of there in a old Ford truck with everything piled up on it and tied down – mattresses and pots and pans, picks and shovels and Grandma’s rocking chair. Or was that in some movie that I seen. Saw. My land, listen at how I’m talking. Sweet Jesus, help me get straight. Just a closer walk with thee, Lord, let it be.

Sometimes Rosalie and Lester have business meetings in their apartment and then they put a parrot in this one. Flat, I have to stop saying apartment. In this flat. The parrot’s name is Elijah. He’s a very smart bird.
When he saw me he said, ‘Phwoarr. Chauncey won the totty lottery.’ I thought totty was some kind of drink but Chauncey said that totty is a woman you go to bed with. Live and learn.

12 January 2004. Interesting report from Harrison Burke: ‘Cause of Rose Harland’s death we know: all of her blood was sucked out of her body, probably by whoever made the wound in her neck. There were traces of blood and saliva on her throat and the collar of her jacket. The blood was her own; the saliva was not. DNA testing of the saliva cells on throat and jacket on 9 January showed a match with the sample taken from Istvan Fallok 10 January at Hermes Soundways. The 10 January sample taken from Justine Trimble matches that of Chauncey Lim on the same date. The sample from Irving Goodman on 10 January does not match anyone else’s.

‘I put Rose Harland’s age at between twenty-five and thirty. Her womb shows scars of an abortion carried out approximately two months before time of death.’

11 January 2004. There isn’t just one reality, there are lots of them. No, there’s just the one and it contains all the others. It’s a polyhedron and each plane is a window to a different reality. What’s happening now is not the same kind of reality as some I remember.

When I was little we lived thirty miles away from Philadelphia and we used to drive in on Sundays to visit our relatives. My uncle Barney had a drug store at 12th and Poplar in what was then called a ‘colored’ neighborhood. There was a display window in which hung two amphora-shaped glass vessels suspended by chains. The one on the left contained a beautiful red liquid; the one on the right was filled with green. There is just such a drug store in a painting by Edward Hopper, with PRESCRIPTIONS DRUGS and EXLAX across the top of the window. There must have been a lot of constipation at that time. The Ex-Lax slogan was ‘When Nature forgets, remember Ex-Lax’. I don’t think Uncle Barney’s window said EX-LAX. He had many customers who came in with cuts from
razor fights and said, ‘Fix me up, Doc.’

There was no soda fountain that I remember but I was often given chewing gum. The rooms behind and above the drug store were divided by bead curtains made of little pink and yellow glass sticks that clicked as you passed through them. They looked like candy. The lampshades also had little pink and yellow glass sticks hanging from them. In an upstairs bedroom lay my mother’s father whom we called Zayda (Grandfather). The room smelled medicinal. He spoke no English but gave me dimes. Tante Celia was Uncle Barney’s wife and Uncle Izzy, pronounced Easy, from my father’s side lived there also. Uncle Easy wore a truss. My cousins Daniel and Leonard and Bobby were there too. Did we play Parcheesi? There are flavours that one tastes not with the mouth but with the mind. I taste the flavour of those Sundays as I write this: the street lamps in the evening; the brilliant red and green vessels in the illuminated window. Their reality was not the same as what I have now.

My thoughts about Justine change from moment to moment. I was naturally offended by her rejection of me but I no longer am. To be called up out of the dead as she was must be a terrifying experience and her being must be an uneasy construct of shifting realities that might collapse at any moment into nothingness. I can’t imagine her memories.

13 January 2004. John Hunter said to me, ‘Harry, what are you saying?’

‘What’s in my report,’ I told him, ‘that’s what I’m saying.’

‘OK, so Istvan Fallok left saliva on Rose Harland’s neck?’

‘I didn’t say that, I only said there was a match with his 10th January sample.’

‘So how’d his saliva get on her neck? Did he suck her blood? Is he the murderer we’re looking for?’

‘I can’t answer that.’

‘And Justine Trimble’s 10th January sample matches Chauncey Lim’s of the same date? What about that? Heavy kissing?’

‘I have no explanation for that.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘Just what I’ve said.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it from me.’

13 January 2004. I don’t like being mucked about. Istvan Fallok and I aren’t a couple but we sleep together once in a while and we’re intimate in all kinds of practical ways that make people closer than sex does. And now he’s got this dead-meat video creature and Grace is out of the loop. Fine. Great. But maybe I can make him sorry for that. I’m not sure how but I’ll think of something.

14 January 2004. Somebody once said, ‘You get too soon old and too late smart.’ I’m eighty-three now. Maybe I’ll get smart when I’m dead. Today is Wednesday but it feels like the Sunday evenings of my boyhood. Darkness coming on and tomorrow is Monday and nothing to look forward to but school. Sunday evenings were the death of the weekend and here it is Sunday evening on Wednesday.

I was playing chess against myself and losing. What did I expect? I’m still opening with the Ruy Lopez just as I did at sixteen. While losing I was listening to Souad Massi’s album
deb
(heartbroken):

Oh! My heart, your wound deepens
Oh! My heart, who is responsible for that?

There she was on the album cover, young and beautiful with her guitar and her sweet seductive voice full of sadness. Any man hearing her sing would want to cuddle her and make her feel better but I’m pretty
sure her heart isn’t broken. Mine is, and who is responsible for that? Justine? Not really. How could I think she would want me, what have I to offer? So here I was in the Sunday evening of my old age with a broken heart, all alone and being beaten at chess. I drank some cask strength with very little water and I felt terrible in a much classier way. Burning all the way down. ‘Parv,’ said the inner Irv.

‘I know,’ I replied. Inner Irv says words that are meaningless but I usually know what he means.

When the phone rang I picked it up and said, ‘At the third stroke, the time will be exactly Sunday evening.’

‘Irv?’ said Grace Kowalski.

‘Hi, Grace,’ I said. ‘What’s new?’

‘It’s Wednesday, Irv.’

‘Maybe it is where you are but here it’s Sunday evening.’

‘Are you drunk?’

‘Yes. Would you like to take advantage of me?’

‘Of course, but we have serious things to talk about as well. Can you come over or shall I come to you?’

‘I’ll come to you – your place smells strange and beautiful like the things you make and like you.’

‘Irv!’ she said. ‘Think serious.’

‘I’ll be very serious,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you shortly.’ Feeling almost middle-aged again, I went forth to Fulham Broadway, where millions have been spent to convert the old tube station into a Nowheresville shopping mall with Books Etc., Boots, a Virgin Megastore, Starbucks, Orange and other commercial enterprises
set in a brilliantly illuminated desolation that is part of the greater programme to turn London into Noplace. Shaking my head as I do each time, I took the lift down to the District Line platform and got an Edgware Road train to Notting Hill Gate where I took the Central Line to Oxford Circus. The trains were not crowded and none of the passengers were talking into little telephones or smiling as they tapped out text messages. Some were reading books or newspapers. All of the faces, young, old, male, female, white and brown and black, were part of the many faces of the great sad thing that moves itself from here to there and back again in all forms of transport.

At Oxford Circus I came up to the surface and the squalor of Argyll Street and people buying things they’d be better off not eating.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
was playing at the Palladium, starring Michael Ball. Well, I thought, it’s nice that he has the work. Long ago I read somewhere that all of the visible world is
maya
, illusion, but whatever you call it, it’s what you have to deal with. I carried on to Great Marlborough Street, then over to Berwick where I went well past Grace’s place to buy a bottle of Stolichnaya at Nicolas, then back to All That Glisters.

‘Yo, Grace,’ I said as I pressed the intercom button.

‘Yo, Irv,’ she said, and came down to let me in. A hug and a kiss and I gave her the latest Justine news as we went up to the studio and its professional smells. The unfinished piece on her workbench was a three-legged toad in green and orange stones with an I Ching coin in its mouth.

‘I got the idea for the I Ching coin from A2 Feng Shui on the internet. I don’t know what’s on theirs.’

‘What’s the hexagram on yours?’

‘Number forty-two,
I, Increase
, SUN CHEN, with nine at the beginning, so it changes to number twenty,
Kuan, Contemplation
, SUN K’UN.’

‘That’s a very hopful toad, Grace.’

‘Where there’s life, there’s hop,’ she said, and we drank to that and sighed a little. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Talk seriously to me.’

‘Form is emptiness and emptiness is form,’ she said. ‘You know what I’m saying?’

‘Of course,
ça va sans dire
, ’I said. ‘It walks without talking.’

‘That’s what I like about you, Irv, everything doesn’t have to be spelt out.’

‘So tell me, I’m all ears. Tell me while we’re still coherent.’

‘I think,’ she said, ‘it’s time for me to stop getting mad and start getting even.’

‘Every woman’s right,’ I said.

‘Justine,’ she said, ‘was put together from an image on videotape, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Got any more Justine on tape?’

‘Oho!’

‘Righty-oh,’ said Grace, and we drank to that.

‘But from the video to a walking-around Justine is a whole big project,’ I said, ‘and I have no idea where to start. Do you?’

‘No, but I know a man who does and I’ve got keys
to his place. All I need is a little time alone in Hermes Soundways and I’ll find his notes. Now that Justine’s up in Golders Green he’ll probably drop in on her and that’s when I’ll do it.’

‘OK, say we get the whole thing figured out and we end up with Justine Number Two, have you any idea what to do next?’

‘If we build her it will come. When we’ve got her standing in front of us the next thing will make itself known. Do you think you’ll fall in love with this one too?’

‘I’ve done that particular folly once already; I’m not likely to do it again. Besides, she’s not as amazing as you are, Grace.’

‘You silver-tongued seducer,’ she said, and we retired to the bedroom with the Stolichnaya.

‘Don’t ever say you’re not a player,’ said Grace as we freshened our drinks. She’s very gracious.

‘Well, I don’t do the full orchestra,’ I said, ‘but if you like chamber music, I’m your man.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Grace.

Mutiny on the Bounty
, the one with Clark Gable and Charles Laughton, was on TV that evening and we both enjoyed seeing it yet again. ‘Every now and then,’ I said, ‘I come across some mention of Bligh in the papers where they say he wasn’t all that bad.’

‘He was a hell of a navigator,’ said Grace. ‘Thirty-six hundred miles in an overloaded open boat!’

‘And he had no charts and there were only about a
week’s rations,’ I said, ‘but he got them all to Timor safely.’

‘Well,’ said Grace, ‘he suspended his disbelief and all that remained was the belief that he could do it.’

‘Plus his practical knowledge and his seamanship,’ I said. ‘If I had to be cast adrift in that longboat I’d rather have Bligh at the tiller than Fletcher Christian.’

‘He was the man,’ said Grace. ‘No doubt about it.’

All in all, a very pleasant evening and we fell asleep talking about DIY Justines.

18 January 2004. Harry Burke and I were drinking London Pride at The Anchor & Hope by the River Lea. A cold winter evening but we took our pints outside and sat down on a bench under the street lamp to enjoy the peacefulness of it. Across the river a train clattered with its windows all lit. It went over the bridge and the Sunday quiet moved in again behind it. Four murders, two suicides, three rapes and assorted burglaries this past week. Life goes on.