Sin City (20 page)

“Go away,” I say.

The mirror-mouth is speaking, a squashed and bleeding mouth. Its feet are huge, bigger than its head. I back away, and suddenly I'm tall and thin, so tall I bend the mirror. Somebody is laughing, someone even taller, in the mirror with me. I turn around. He's tiny. Tiny children should be tucked up safe in bed.

I wish I was a child. Not tucked in bed, but sitting at the circus. Under the Big Top. Sitting next to Carole. I don't think I'll ever find her because I've forgotten what she looks like. I feel very odd and tired. I've also lost my card, the one I should have posted. They won't know I've arrived now, may forget who Norah is.

I sit down on the ground, shut my eyes. There's too much noise to rest; bang-bang-bang of guns, screams from dying moles. I try to change the noise, turn it into circus noise: bells instead of bangs, bells on silver ponies, children clapping clowns.

I force my eyes to open. I can feel something on my knee, something hot and damp. It's a hand, a man's hand, dark, with long black hairs on.

“Hi,” he says. “You sick, Ma'am?”

I wish he'd take it off. He's an old man, rather fat, with a bald and shiny head and a brooch pinned on his coat. The brooch says “JESUS SAVES”. He must be a godman. Not the Reverend kind in suits, but a shabby one like Jesus.

“What's the matter with ya?”

I'd prefer to think, not talk, but I explain I've lost my friend and I couldn't find the circus.

“This is Circus Circus.”

I don't know why he says it twice. “Yes, but where are all the clowns?” I ask. “And acrobats?”

“You want clowns?”

I nod.

“Follow me,” he says.

We go down the escalator and past all the games again, and along a corridor and up a lift and down another passage. Then he unlocks a door and pushes me in front of him. It's a hotel room, his room, but nothing like as big and grand as ours. “You want acrobats?”

I don't say anything. I'm frightened now. He's sitting on the bed, undoing his old trousers, just the front.

“I'll show you acrobats,” he says. “Hold this.”

I don't want to hold it. It's very red and swollen, especially at the end. “I'll go now, please,” I say.

He grabs me, tries to kiss me on the lips. I keep my mouth tight shut. You make babies if you kiss.

“Get your hands round that.”

I shake my head. He's holding it himself now. It looks raw and very puffy. I think he may be ill. He's not talking any more. His eyes are closed, his face screwed up in pain. He's making moaning noises.

I don't know what to do, so I stand still in a corner. “Hail,” I whisper silently. “St Joseph lily flower. Eden's peaceful hail.” The words are coming back now, but all jumbled up together. I go on saying them to drown the other noises. The moans are getting louder.

“Word made hail flesh husband of hail Mary chaste …”

When I dare to look again, he's gone. I think he's in the bathroom. I can hear the water running.

I creep towards the other door, the main one. It opens, just like that. St Joseph always hears you in the end.

I tiptoe out. I'm shaking. “Hail,” I say again. It takes me quite some time to find the street. It's raining, heavy rain. It doesn't rain in Vegas, doesn't snow.

A siren howls. Another. An ambulance screams past; a red and rattling fire engine, a white police car. Sirens all around me now. Alarm bells, flashing lights. I've got to cross the road. It looks safer on the other side, darker, with more room to hide. The sign says “STOP”. I daren't stop, dash between two cars. It doesn't matter if I'm killed. Everyone will die, the Reverend said. I'm a sinner now, a real one. I think those germs got in. If you open your mouth even just a crack, they fly right in and crawl down to your stomach. Then you grow a baby.

“Are you prepared?”

No. I keep on running. I saw a picture once of the End Of The World. It was in St Joseph's library, but I didn't cut it out. There were clouds of thick black smoke and great high flames and devils in the flames with toasting forks and all the graves were opening and corpses stepping out in long white nightgowns. Corpses smell.

I stop to block my ears. Sirens, sirens, sirens. Fire engines won't help. You can't put the fires of Hell out, not even if you used every drop of water in every sea and river in the world. There aren't any seas or rivers in Las Vegas. Carole didn't know.

I'll have to stop. It's hurting when I breathe. I lean against a wall, shake water from my hair, dry my glasses on my petticoat. When I put them on again, a sign appears. I think it's real, but the words are very long.

“GUARDIAN ANGEL CATHEDRAL.”

It takes me quite a time to spell it out, and when I have, I don't believe it. It wasn't a circus and it won't be a cathedral. A cathedral is a church, a grand one with a shop which sells colouring books and cards. There's one in Canterbury. We went by coach to Canterbury with the Friends, and had tea in silver teapots and cakes you ate with forks.

The sign is pointing to the left. I run that way because it's darker and further from the sirens which are starting up again. I need to go – not number two (the pains have gone), just number one. Rain and nerves always make it worse. I can't see any toilets and if the End Of The World is starting, everyone will see me if I do it in the street, because God comes down to earth then, with all His saints and angels.

There's an angel right above me, hanging in the sky. No, it's not, it's hanging from a roof, a huge pointed roof towering over me. You don't see guardian angels very much. We had them at St Joseph's, but not at Westham Hall. One of the Catholics in my ward at Belstead said hers followed her about and she could hear its wings flapping just behind her, but every time I looked, it hid. I think they're shy, like birds.

I'm standing right beneath him now. The nuns said to call them “hims”, but they're not real men at all. I'm glad. They have wings above, instead of red and swollen things below.

It
is
a church, though it doesn't look like Canterbury and there's another sign above it saying “Bali Hai Motel” which they wouldn't have in England. The door opens like a real door, and there's the shop with postcards (closed now, but I can see them through the glass), and another door in front of me. I open it, step in.

It's very grand inside with great tall stained-glass windows and rows and rows of wooden pews and real carpet on the floor. I've never seen a carpet in a church. I don't think you're allowed it back in England.

A sign says “Restrooms” which Carole says means toilets. You don't have toilets in cathedrals. You're not allowed to go in church at all. I follow the sign, and find some real white toilets, very new and clean. I use them both to show I'm grateful and wash my hands, twice, in both the basins.

I can still hear the sirens, but they're fainter now, shut out. It's quiet in here, much safer. If the world is going to end, the best place to be is in a church. During the War, we always went to chapel during air-raids. I wasn't frightened because the nuns prayed out loud to drown the noise, and they said if we were killed, we'd all go straight to heaven because we'd died in God's own house. Then I moved to Westham, where they didn't have a chapel and the bombs were always louder.

The American God must be bigger because His house is twice the size. I walk up and down a while just to feel the carpet, but stay down near the doors. The altar is where God sits and if we hadn't sinned, we could see Him, really see Him, just like a real person with hands and hair and legs. The nuns knelt near the altar because they're holier than children, and if you'd made your First Communion you could go right up there and eat Him. I never made mine. They said I wasn't ready. I still wasn't ready when they moved me to the Children's Home, where we had castor oil each morning, not Communion.

There's nobody about, no men or priests or nuns, so I creep up to the altar. It's very beautiful with white lilies in a vase and golden candlesticks.

Then I see him. St Joseph, in his long brown robe. He's standing by the manger. St Joseph never sits – he's not allowed to. He looks far too rich and grand. All the figures do. The Mary's like a princess in her expensive blue silk frock. And shepherds wouldn't wear such fancy clothes, not for working in the fields with muddy sheep.

Mary's got her eyes closed. The Jesus looks so big, He must have split her coming out. He's lying on green velvet, not on straw. And all around the crib are silver Christmas trees hung with fairy lights and big expensive plants. They didn't have fairy lights in Bethlehem. Or plants with satin bows on top and ribbons round the pots. It was just a poor dark stable where an ox and ass were sleeping. There's no ox nor ass in this crib. I expect they were too messy for the velvet, or would have dirtied Mary's frock.

St Joseph hasn't seen me. He's staring at the floor. He's been up all night, looking after Mary. He didn't put his germs in her. She made Jesus on her own.

I lie down on the carpet. It's brown and very thick. I don't want to make a baby. I'm only a baby myself. I'm lying in my manger on a soft brown bed of straw. St Joseph is my mother – my own St Joseph, not the rich and grand one. He's taking off his robe, tucking it around me. It's old and warm and shabby; smells of sawdust. He's smiling now, rocking me to sleep.

He didn't want a boy.

He wanted a girl, a little girl called Norah.

“Gamblin' requires brains, Jan. It requires a lot of work. It requires talent, it requires thought, it requires intellect, it requires foresight, it …”

If he says “requires” again, I'll shoot him. Right here in this rotten cocktail lounge. They're all the same, these gamblers, totally obssessed, like Victor said himself. Except Victor's just as bad. I only landed myself with
this
jerk because I was sick of Victor's poker.

“Now, listen to me.” (I'm listening. I haven't got much choice.) “We didn't invent these games here in Vegas, honey. Absolutely not. The Greeks invented craps, the Italians invented roulette, the Chinese invented Keno, the Egyptians invented slot machines, the French …” The heavily ringed hand (three diamonds, two rubies and a garnet) gropes for its Pepsi glass.

That's five “invented”s already and more to come, post-Pepsi. At least I'm good at counting. I might be good at gambling if we ever get around to it. Snake Jake's been talking non-stop for one and a quarter hours. It's my own fault for playing truant from the poker room, sneaking off when Victor wasn't looking. Victor's not as bad. Nothing like. He didn't even want to play; said he had enough of cards all year and he'd prefer to take me out. We've been out two whole days, in fact; hardly parted since that first exciting drink on Cleopatra's Barge – except for boring things like sleep. We got on really well, had a ball, as they all say over here, but I was keen to see some poker, watch the guy in action, so to speak. He warned me I'd be bored, but I took no notice, nagged him into playing, simply overrode him like Jake's overriding me.

“The first gamblin' device on this planet was a slot machine. It's recorded in history, Jan, five thousand years ago.”

God! History now. We've already had geography (the layout of casinos), psychology (the psychology of winning), biology (my tits), cardiology (his heart condition), simple mathematics (counting cards) and religion – his – (gambling).

The briefest pause, for olives. He starts again, still chewing on a stone. “An Egyptian Pharaoh had a wheel and he used to spin that goddam wheel and whatever symbol it stopped on gave him his horoscope for that day. If it stopped on a diamond, he was gonna find money. If it stopped on a heart, he was gonna fall in love. If it stopped on a club, it meant big trouble, and if it stopped on a spade, it meant hard work. Then he started bettin' on it. That's all we're doin' today, hon, bettin' on a slot machine, bettin' on a wheel – except it's three wheels – and instead of hearts and diamonds, it's got cherries, plums and oranges.”

I try to interrupt. I've lost enough on those damned sour fruits already, but his voice submerges mine.

“The real pros in Vegas play slot machines fifteen hours a day, Jan. And some of them have been doin' it for thirty or forty years. Thirty
years
, Jan. And if they're husbands and wives, they may play teams. He'll come in and play eight hours or so, then she'll relieve him while he goes home and sleeps and showers and eats, then he comes back and plays the next eight hours, while she …”

“Eats and showers and sleeps,” I say, wondering who does the shopping and the laundry. At least there wouldn't be any kids to take to school – no time to conceive them.

“Right. You've got it, Jan. That's dedication. That's professionalism. That's …”

“Craps,” I say. I dislike the word. It's worse than cunt and with Norah's bowels still playing up … “You promised to teach me craps, Jake.” That's how all this started. I'd been sitting in that poker room for what seemed like eternity, when I heard a lot of racket just behind me. It was coming from the crap table – a crowd of people cheering, groaning, laughing – a really welcome sound when poker's so damned silent. (No one says a word except “check” or “raise” and a few mumbled “shit”s and “fuck”s, and they're afraid to move a muscle or show the slightest flicker of emotion in case they give anything away.)

Snake was fairly dripping with emotion, making prima donna faces, shouting out his numbers, rocking to and fro. I couldn't take my eyes off him. The poker crowd had been a definite disappointment – a bunch of fogies mostly, and mostly overweight, dressed in dreary polyester, or ghastly tasteless tracksuits, not a hat or gun amongst them, save those stupid baseball caps which Americans seem so fond of, and which make them look like pensioned-off schoolboys.