Noise (9 page)

My mother said, $15 a night, and the first one said, we'll think about it, and the second one said, we'll take it, and my mother said, that's fine. We'll just go get our bags, then, the first one said. Our bag…
we share, the second one said. But I had already dipped my hand through the open window into the cool, cracked-vinyl depths of their Pinto and was coming up the walk with their suitcase when they turned. The fuck, the first one said. Oh, hey, we'll get that, the second one said. Here it is, I said, as they came towards me, but kept my fingers hooked around the handle so that if they wanted it they would either have to effleurage my knuckles or stand there where I could get a good look at them and wait for me to let go. My goddam lucky day: they did both–hands sweeping in only to sweep back out, not quite (double effleurage) in time. I'll carry it in for five bucks or some ice cream, I said. We got it, thanks, they said. Addison, my mother said. The first one smelled like lemons. The second one like limes or grapefruit or something. Or vice versa. Whatever–there was citrus happening. I counted beads of sweat, my eyes flicking from first to second, second to first. I got to seven each before my mother fired off an ‘AD-di-Son', and I let go. The second one smiled, sort of sweet, so I ignored him and smiled at the first one, who was biting the inside of his cheek and looking over my shoulder, maybe at their crap car or our crap street or crap town. This is Addison, my mother said. We're related. We all mumbled this and that and then they were in the house doing God knows what the fuck, and I was sitting in their car where the bag had sat with my shorts and shirtsleeves rolled up getting some afternoon sun.

I had dozed and was half-dreaming about something involving a violet teapot and a band of light that had left the sky and moved
in next door because the nude sunbathing was good or something fucked up like that when the second one leaned his head in the window and said, boo. Boo yourself, I said. I sat up and felt some of the seat come up with me. It's stuck to my back isn't it, I said. Little grey-yellow flecks, he said. Grey-yellow, is that even a colour? I pulled one off my shoulder and looked at it. I wouldn't call that grey-yellow, I said. Well, that's what we call it. I'd call it ochre or quince maybe. We call it grey-yellow, it's our car. Who's we? He's taking a nap–we drove all night. Does he snore? No, but I do. Which one of you is older? We're the same age. Same birthday? We're twins. Yeah, you look a lot alike. Fraternal–same litter, different eggs. Yuck. I'm sorry. Don't be. We bantered on for a while. My mother often uses a kind of fake basso Ha, Ha, Ha with her friends on Monopoly nights. I used this Ha, Ha, Ha to solid effect with him. He had developed fresh sweat droplets and smelled like a tangerine. His jaw quivered a little when he thought about things. Or when he looked like he was thinking. Fuck knows. He gave me the upshot, the lowdown. They had come a long way and now they were going to do some business in Shitsville only he didn't call it that. He kept saying ‘your town'. I told him about my town. I took out my biggest brush and painted him some thick strokes. You should drive me somewhere for an ice cream, I said. I could just murder a soft-cone.

The first one came up behind the second one so quietly that he had him in a wicked headlock before I knew what had happened, and I have excellent senses according to a battery of standardised
tests administered at my lame school. They wrestled around all fraternal and same litter and et cetera, and I brushed off my shoulder and rolled my shorts back down and otherwise prepared myself for non-gratification
in re
the soft-cone. I was not wrong. Beat it, sugar, the first one said. Why do you guys wear those weird suits? I said. Weird? said the first one. Tailor-made, said the first one. Camel–silk blend, said the first one. We were talking about her town, the second one said. I'd like an ice cream, that's what we were talking about, I said. Wouldn't we all, said the first one. Wouldn't we all. He was, undoubtedly, the more aesthetically appealing brother. The other one had nice sweat patterns and the tangerine thing, but this one had the sweat plus lemons plus explosions in his eye sockets and beautiful hands the size of fat hardbacks. Ice cream, I said again, flashing lots of fresh, young enamel, knowing I was about to be standing in the grass watching them drive off. The car sounded about like it looked. Nice suits, I yelled after them. You look like Al Capone. Let me get my machine gun. Addison, propel your butt in here this goddam instant, my mother said.

Once my mother had finished giving me some flame-broiling about my comportment and sloppy attire and inappropriate attitude and need for a shower and some grooming, I grabbed the spare key and went up to their room. The bed under the south eaves was hot and rumpled so I reclined on it and played listening-staring-corpse-chick, listening to the wall unit pour out
its cold air, listening to Mr Crocker or someone run his pukey mower, staring up at the whorls of wood and the slant of the ceiling, staring at the backs of my pretty-nice hands. By and by, I composed a poem that began,

And ended

Then I got up and opened their suitcase. It was full of the usual travelling crap, like they all have, all the guys who stay here, all jumbled up. I sort of swished it around a little with my index fingers, trying to remember which way egg-beaters turned: right beater clockwise, left beater counter? Vice versa? There was a plastic bag with some shaving cream and a razor in it. There was a can of shoe polish. There was a comb with some of its teeth missing. There was a book of stories by Hemingway. There was an oversize Arkansas-is-for-Lovers belt buckle without a belt. There was a pair of Mickey Mouse flip-flops. Ha, Ha, Ha, boys, I said. After which I put on a pair of blue boxers and a wrinkled white shirt, took them off, did a headstand that I held for a twenty count, then went downstairs because I thought I heard the phone.

It was dark and I waited, first on the front porch, then outside their door, then on the couch in the living room under the ceiling fan, then in the high grass under the fireflies, then at the kitchen table as my mother and I ate pork chops that she had burned worse than usual, then in front of the TV, then in the garage by the box of comic books, then out on the sidewalk where the mosquitoes got me, then balancing on the roof of the long-empty doghouse under the stars, then back on the couch in the living room, then on the phone although everyone was on vacation, then in the shower where I shaved and zoomed and buzzed and hummed, then up in their room, then down in my room, in the basement, where the posters stared at me and the walls creaked and some motherfucker cricket went to work.

The kitchen heating vent and my bedroom's heating vent sit one on top of the other, which is (understatement) annoying when my mother has Monopoly night, given that she and her friends are all drinkie drinkie and double word score whatever for hours at a time. Not so annoying this time. Yeah, said the first one. You bet, said the second. Ha, Ha, Ha, said my mother. I sat up. Still black out. My clock had been blinking midnight for days. I lay back down, sound was better there, right under the vent, kind of a clear channel. A Swede? my mother said. Big guy, used to put on the gloves, had some luck, said the first one. Usually eats
at the diner–every night except tonight. Didn't show tonight, said the second. Which diner? said my mother. Greasy little place, said the second. By the station, said the first. A Swede? said my mother. Like clockwork–every night until tonight. We need to see him. There are lots of big guys around–you say this one's Swedish. Some kind of Scandinavian. Northern persuasion, has a nose looks like a loaf of bread. He's all punched out. Well, I might know him to look at him and I might not. Fair enough. Why are you looking for him? Business. We need to see him. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, pulled on my shorts and went up. The second one had his left hand in his glass fishing for an ice cube. The first one's eyes went Kabam! My mother had her hair pulled back and some ear candy on. Yeah, right–dream on, I thought.
I
know a Swede, I said.

Ice cream, I said. I'd shown them my Swede. That's the one, they'd said. They'd gone right over to him and sat down on either side of the bed where he was lying with the covers pulled up to his chin, breathing deeply, blue eyes carefully blinking, and they had clapped him on the shoulder and chucked his cheeks and told him he needed a shave and a shower or a bath or some cologne, and then they had discussed bogs and quicksand and concrete modalities, just, they had said, for the fuck of it, then they had clapped him on the shoulder again and had asked me to step outside and wait for them so they could do something and then take me home. Out they had come. Nice moonlight, said the first one. Lovely, said the second. Ice cream now, I said.

The Pinto let out a couple of sharp pops and pings that echoed off the school and smacked me on the face, making the earrings I had borrowed from my mother jangle, and the second one groan. The first one said, lead on, and I led on, Quick Stop soft-cone coating my fingers, tickling my wrists, over the glinting asphalt and on to the high grass of the football field, the cool grass, the dark grass, the you wouldn't dare grass, where the first one said, don't run, and the second one said, you won't, will you? and I said, run? A minute later the first one said, spot's as good as any other, and the second one said, good spot, so we all sat down, and I started licking my fingers, which is when the sirens started up in the distance and the first one said, oh fuck, and the sprinklers came on.

Naomi didn't know what was sticking in her back. At first, all there had been was blackness and her breath coming short and fast, but as the hours had passed she'd pieced together an intimate knowledge of her new surroundings. The metal surface pressing against the top of her head was a toolbox, the stiff fabric at her feet some kind of tarpaulin, in front of her she knew was her school bag, and under her was something softer than cheap carpet–maybe a picnic blanket. Mr Lynwood was the type of man who would have a picnic blanket in his car boot, he probably had pimply PVC runners over his carpet, and nasty arm covers on his sofa to absorb the
unspeakable fluids that seeped out of his skin. She couldn't work out what was sticking in her back, though. It felt firm and rounded, like a body. Surely there wasn't another one in there with her. She tried to suppress another fit of shaking. It seemed to go in cycles–a phase of blind panic followed by a spell of calm and heightened clarity. She was trying to cling to the calm, she didn't think her heart could stand another surge of adrenalin.

She tried to imagine all that was being done to find her. Her parents would have contacted the police by now. Her dad would hate that, he fought against any suggestion that everything wasn't running exactly as he predicted. When the kitchen ceiling collapsed some months earlier, narrowly missing her mother, he said he'd long been expecting an incident of that nature. She remembered him poking the fallen masonry with his toe and nodding his head. He'd make her mother phone around before he called the police. Naomi thought back to the friends she used to have, their faces merged into one indistinct pink smudge. They'd tell her mother that they never saw her out of school any more.

She couldn't stop shaking, but couldn't tell now whether it was fear or the low temperature in the boot. It had been five hours. She didn't know where she was. She concentrated hard and tried to remember any features of the journey, but it was no good–all she knew was that they had been moving for about an hour. She could be outside Mr Lynwood's house, maybe he was inside watching TV, or maybe he'd driven somewhere else and left the car. The car had stopped, the door had opened, she had clenched every muscle in her body and then gradually exhaled as the door to the boot remained closed.

A terrible thought occurred to her. What photo were they using?
Why hadn't she thought of this before? Her mind reeled. She thought of the photos that her parents chose to display. Pitiless family shots with Naomi at the back scowling through heavily kohled eyes and an angry mask of acne. Worse still, the school photos, every one of which was displayed on the sideboard. The early ones with just-brushed static hair and tearful eyes; the mid-period gap-toothed smile; the latter phase with the face largely obscured by the long black curtain of hair. She thought of last year's. The photographer had broken wind loudly and lengthily with no comment just as he was taking her photo. Naomi's expression was captured for ever. Was that the backdrop behind the local newsreader's appeal for information? Was that the A4 flyer being shown from door to door?

Her hands and feet were tied, but she was able to move her hands together and reach into her bag. She put one earphone in and pressed Play. Lying in this dark space, listening to music wasn't so different to any other evening. At 5.15 she would fly through the door after school like a leaf blown in by the wind. She'd throw her bag in the hallway and run upstairs to her room, slamming the door behind her and placing a chair against it. She'd go straight to her record player and put the needle at the start of the album already sitting on the turntable and then collapse on to her bed–feeling that she could breathe again. The music flowing straight to her lungs. Someone would knock at her door, a voice would shout, but she was somewhere else. She'd stare at the wallpaper at the side of her head and become lost somewhere in a landscape made up of the abstract shapes in the pattern of the paper and the music.

There were many songs about love. Those were the kinds of songs that her classmates listened to and she didn't. Recently, though,
she'd begun to see a certain truth to the lyrics, they captured some of what she felt–their only error was in attributing such feelings to love. What the words described to her were the manifestations of pure hatred. The power of hate. Hate at first sight. Hate changes everything. These she understood. Mr Lynwood had entered the classroom in September, he'd introduced himself and she'd felt the thunderbolt strike. It was like an allergy, a chemical reaction. His fuzzy hair, his ridiculous shoes, the bobbling on the hips of his slacks, the way he breathed. Everything about him repulsed her. She couldn't bear to look at him and yet couldn't stop thinking about him. Each morning she would wake up and her first thought would be how many times she would have to see him in the day ahead. He was slimy, he was patronising, he wanted desperately to be liked and yet none of this could adequately explain the intensity of her feelings. What she felt was hissing, claws-out, fur-and-feather, bone-deep, animal.

She imagined an alien looking down on planet Earth. Among the trees and the mountains, among the cities and the fields, among the rooftops and the streets there was a girl tied up in the boot of a car listening to the same track over and over again. But Naomi couldn't feel herself to be a speck. Instead she felt the universe contract and shrink to the size of this boot and she was at the centre of the black cosmos floating in the music. It was pure chance that she'd noticed one day that he never locked his car. Clearly he trusted ‘the kids'.

If, back before Mr Lynwood joined the staff, someone had ever bothered to ask her what the worst thing about school was, she would have had difficulty in choosing. Maybe the cold sweat of anxiety each morning waiting for the bus and not knowing who was going to be on it. Maybe the pain in her shoulders from
keeping them clenched all day long. Maybe the afternoons that never seemed to end. Maybe the existence of netball. Now, though, she knew that the worst thing was her inability to change a single thing. Her dad would bitch and moan about his job. He'd tell her to enjoy the freedom of her school days and she would have to fight the urge to throw a cup at him. He could decide to go in late the next day, he could decide to go to work by car or train, he could decide to take his holidays in February, he could even decide to leave his job altogether and go and work somewhere new, and he wanted sympathy from her.

Her email the previous day said simply: ‘Please stop this or I'll call the police'. There was a chance he might have told a colleague, but she was sure he'd try and talk to her first. A disturbed student was such a great opportunity for him to practise his pastoral care skills. He spent his days imploring them to tell him their personal problems. Totally confidential. Maybe something they wouldn't feel comfortable talking to their parents about. The thought of it made her gag. His class was last period and he asked her to stay behind in front of everyone, just as she'd hoped. To be alone with him, to elect to spend even a few extra moments in his company, cost her a lot. It was hard to do, but she had to win the right to decide.

She couldn't understand why she didn't ache more. She'd get the odd spasm of cramp but not the kind of agony you might expect from being curled up in the boot of a Vauxhall Astra for six hours. She wondered whether adrenalin was a painkiller. She was aiming for eight hours. After that time she'd try and attract a passer-by with banging and shouting. It was tricky not knowing exactly where the car was parked, or how nearby he was–she had to ensure that the passer-by would hear her, but he would not. Her sole aim,
the one decision she was forcibly making, was simply never to see him again. She didn't care whether he went to prison or not as long as he never returned to her school and she never had to think of him again.

When the rest of the class had left the room and he was about to speak she said that she needed to go to the toilet urgently. She walked out to the car park, pressed the button and climbed into his boot. Before she'd tied the rope around her feet and hands she placed a few images she'd downloaded from the Internet around the boot. There were others on the CD they'd find in his briefcase. They were unnecessary really, a missing girl in the boot is all it would take.

She started the track again. The guitar scoured her and made her flesh feel raw inside and out. Thurston screamed he was inhuman, but it wasn't quite working. She couldn't lose herself in the noise, she was still aware of place and time. These final hours would not pass. She was aware of her body, but instead of the pain she'd expected, she felt a kind of swelling, lurching nausea. She was lying on Mr Lynwood's rug, inhaling the hamstery smell of his boot, and she wondered whether she could ever scrub herself clean. She pulled the earphone out and all she heard was the blood beating in her ears.

She rehearsed the next stage in her head. Her rescue from the boot, the look on her parents' faces, the absence of Mr Lynwood from school the next day and the days after that. She supposed the police would question her, but she had her story straight. Her parents would want her to talk too. She thought of the questions they would ask, and she realised that she would be forced to think about Mr Lynwood when answering them. She wondered how
long they'd insist it was necessary to discuss it. After that he'd be deleted from her head for good. Unless it went to court, but she'd refuse that. She couldn't have done all this and still have to see his face ever again. She tried to focus on a future without his shadow cast over it. She imagined walking the school corridors and never hearing his fake laugh, never seeing his fatuous, clumsily written comments on her homework, never feeling his eyes upon her. But, though Mr Lynwood would be gone, her name and his would be on everybody's lips, her name and his joined for ever in classroom mythology. With sudden clarity she realised there was no end to him. She started to shake again, but this time more violently. She struggled with the rope and untied her hands and feet. She felt his presence all around her, in the blanket, in the tools, in the tarpaulin, and it felt like an appalling intimacy. She imagined him putting his groceries into this boot, his toothpaste and toilet paper and tinned soup all around her, and these glimpses of his life were too much to bear. She felt the bile rising in her throat as she started hammering on the boot and screaming.

Later, as she ran from the startled woman who found her, the stars shone above in the clear night sky, the dark streets opened up ahead of her and the black space she'd burst from propelled her forwards into the ever expanding universe and the inescapable cloud of her own breath.