Touchy Subjects (29 page)

"That's right," said Bunch, as if they were chatting about the weather.

Pitre stared past him, at the cypresses, their heavy greenery. "I received a message," he said, jerking his chin upwards.

"Another one?"

He ignored that. "We don't want another Cain and Abel situation. In a spirit of brotherhood," said Pitre, then paused to clear his throat, "I propose that we unite our tour companies."

Not a smirk from Bunch.

"No use both doing six trips a day when we could each do three."

"Whatever the Spirit says, my friend," said Bunch, letting his teeth show when he grinned.

Niniane Molloy had never been anywhere like the Los Angeles Neverland. They sold melatonin for jet lag and chromium picolinate for sugar cravings. There was chocolate-free chocolate and honey-pickled ginseng. In the next aisle, two huge young men debated whether powdered pearl would help them achieve definition. There were trays labeled
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;
Niniane stroked the tender stalks with one finger, then moved away in case she would be seen and made to pay. Sacks of one hundred percent unbromated flour weighed down a shelf. She had never known that flour was bromated before. She wondered what harm she'd been done by thirty-four years of bromate. Or was it bromide? Or brome?

Arthur used to drink echinacea, even though their mother called it one of his fancy American habits. It made him retch, but he swore he never got colds.

Now Niniane was studying the little rolls of homeopathic tablets. One was for travel sickness and general nausea, another for sleeplessness and irritability. She hadn't slept since the night before last. Or was it only yesterday? It tired her to keep adding eight to everything. If it was blazing sun outside the Neverland Health Store in La-La Land, then it must be pub-closing time back in Ireland,
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, said the next label. Niniane thought maybe what she needed was Fear Due to Exhaustion. Did the tablets know the difference?

In the end she didn't buy anything. She couldn't find a remedy for partial deafness due to having the dregs of the cold to end all colds and flying halfway round the world anyway, because it was a free ticket from a supermarket competition, no changes, no refunds. And anyway, she couldn't bring herself to stand at the Neverland's counter, holding up the queue while she peered at dimes and nickels like a visitor from another planet.

It was hard to cross the road in this town, she found; cars saw only each other.

Back at the Hollywood Hills Hotel, Niniane sat in the single chair, its metal tubing impressed on her thighs. She thought of Doris Day's motto for decor—"Better to please the fanny than the eye"—and it almost made her smile. The room was bare as a stage set. A woolen jumper, glasses, purse, a three-pack of knickers she'd bought at the airport when she realized her bag wasn't going to come down the carousel no matter how long she waited; they'd turned out to be thongs. And a broken-spined copy of Marcel Proust's
Remembrance of Things Past,
volume one. It wasn't being read that had worn the book out, but being carried. Niniane had found it in Arthur's room at home in Limerick, years ago, after he left for good, on the shelf in between
How to Get a Green Card
and
Complete Poems of Walt Whitman.
She always took it on holiday in the hopes of getting into it. Not that this was a holiday, exactly.

She took the creased card out of her pocket again. "
LA Self-Storage,
" it said; "
The No-Fuss Solution.
" Below the address, what had to be a room number, scribbled in red:
2011.
Someone had stuck the key to the back of the card; the tape was brittle with dust. She'd found it at Christmas in the ashtray in the drawer, the ashtray Arthur wasn't supposed to have had in his room, because as their mother always said, no child of hers would be stupid enough to smoke. Niniane had kept it in her purse for months now. What did it mean that her brother had left the key in the ashtray? That it didn't open anything anymore, didn't matter at all? Or that it just wasn't worth coming home to Ireland for?

Later. Later would do.

Niniane lay diagonally across the brown and orange coverlet. The slatted blinds made a bright shadow on the wall. She considered taking her tights off, but she had no socks with her, and her heels would be sure to blister as soon as she went out for a walk. She lifted her head off the bed for a moment to contemplate her black nylon legs. Her tights were all that were holding her together; if she peeled them off, the skin might come, too.

It didn't seem to her that she had slept, only that the next time she looked at the wall it was the colour of ashes, and the clock said ten to midnight.

There was a phone beside the bed, but she couldn't hear a dial tone. Had her ears stopped up completely? She sniffed and yawned like a goldfish on dry land. "Hello," she said into the mouthpiece. At least she could hear herself. Then she noticed the sign on the table:
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.

Niniane went around the corner to the Five and Diner and rang the airline. It always slightly embarrassed her to give her name. Arthur used to call her Ninny. Her mother had got them both out of some trashy novel about Merlin. Doris Day always hated her name, too; she had her friends call her Clara, or Susie, or Eunice, or even Do-Do. In America you didn't have to stay what you were. You could change your name or your nose or just get in your Chevy and drive away.

The airline told her that her bag might have gone to Cincinnati.

Niniane's mouth still tasted of sour orange juice from the plane. She sank into the bulging plastic of a corner booth and ordered the All-Day Pancake Special. She picked out new words from the conversation in the next booth:
brewskis,
she heard, and
high colonic,
and
that's bitchin'.

She sat up in bed reading Proust with watering eyes till half past two, while a moth charred itself against the bulb. Then she switched on the Weather Channel with the sound turned down and fell asleep watching a tornado inch its way up the East Coast. In her dream Niniane had the strangest sense that Arthur was nearby, maybe in the shower or parking his yellow convertible on the street below her window.

How long had it been, she wondered when she woke up. Five years this summer since her brother's last trip home, she was sure of that. He'd told them he was living in Dallas, but was very vague about his job, something to do with sales. And when was that slightly peculiar phone call from San Diego, the time he didn't sound happy enough to be drunk?

One Christmas, early on, she remembered, her mother had been loud in complaint. "Nothing but a card!" The postmark was from LA, no address on the back of the envelope. Dark inked words inside, scattered like seeds across the printed message.
Happy Christmas folks, hope you're all well
—was that it? Or
Take care of yourselves, love A.?
If Niniane had known it was going to be the last message, she'd have read it more carefully.

A year later, there was no card, and her mother said the American postal system was known for its deficiencies. But Niniane suspected Arthur had forgotten. Men without wives were notoriously bad at keeping in touch.

The following year, no card, no comment.

A friend from the office, waiting by the photocopier, asked after that handsome big brother of Niniane's she'd gone to a college ball with. "My god, how long has it been?" And then, brutally, "Don't you miss him?"

Niniane had felt an immense weariness and walked away.

On the rare occasions Arthur came up in conversation at home these days he was like a figure in a children's book, frozen in time. When neighbours asked, her mother always said that her son was on the West Coast and doing very well. But after tea one New Year's Eve, alone with her father in the kitchen, Niniane had finally asked it, that question without a verb: "Any word from Arthur?"

Her father had said nothing,just kept drying his hands on the dishcloth. The dishwasher was pumping and he was slightly deaf these days. She liked to tell herself that he hadn't heard what she said.

There were some people splashing round in the motel pool already. As soon as Niniane was dressed she walked out to the railing and squinted down. She didn't have anything to swim in, and besides, the pool looked so small, it would be like floating in a petri dish. These toffee-coloured girls and boys with their candy-floss hair would flinch from her pale Irish body.

The man at the desk asked where her car was; she really should have rented a car. "I can't drive," she told him, smiling placatingly. It was obviously a sentence he'd never heard before.

Back home in Limerick, Arthur had been the one who was always borrowing the Fiat to drive to godknowswhere and leaving the seat pushed too far back. Niniane was the one who had stayed in with their parents and made tea and toast in the intervals of
The Late Late Show.
If there were only two of you, things got divided up that way.

She walked out into the shiny street. The morning sun was strange on her skin. She considered buying a clean T-shirt from a stall, but they all had palm trees on them, or Elvis. She'd never known heat like this, so thick you could slice it, so heavy the streets seemed to waver. But she looked up at the glassy sky and for a moment caught that feeling. Songs with the word
California
in them wandered through her mind. If ever a place was the polar opposite of Limerick, this was it. Once you got here, how could you ever go home? Which reminded her of the key, back in the hotel in the ashtray. But it could wait a few hours more. She had come here for herself, really, for a break from ordinary life. She could be a tourist like anybody else.

Only Niniane didn't look like anybody else, as she sat at the very back of the Stars' Homes tour bus. Her skirt was three feet longer than anyone else's, hot on the back of her knees. Her jumper was knotted round her hips. Her black vest revealed tufts of hair at her armpits, which was just about as unacceptable as leprosy in this town; she kept her elbows clamped by her sides. She sang grimly in her head:
Take me back to the Black Hills, the Black Hills of DA-KO-TA.

As the bus wormed its way up a steep avenue, she was pressed back in her seat. She'd stopped listening to the commentary a while back, after Boris Karloff and Marlene Dietrich. Most of these mansions looked the same, anyway: lush trees protruding over twenty feet of security fence. She tried to imagine Arthur behind one of these shaded windows, sipping wheatgrass juice.

Niniane tried to follow the little red stars on the map, but they danced before her eyes like chicken pox. It was too hot to sit still.

The speaker behind her head crackled. "That was Vincent Minnelli's and now look to your left, you'll see coming up at 713 North Crescent Drive, the lovely home of Miss Doris Day."

She pressed her cheek to the glass, but there was a eucalyptus tree in the way. The prickling air was closing in around her. She couldn't bear this any longer. She lurched to the front of the bus.

"Take your seat, ma'am," the driver said. "No standing while the bus is in motion."

"Would you stop the bus, please?"

"We gotta respect the privacy of the stars."

"Let me off, I can't breathe," she bawled. She had never shouted at a stranger before.

As the bus drew away from the curb, leaving her standing on the shoulder, Niniane felt almost wonderful. The grass under her feet was unnaturally plump. The sun went behind a cloud for a moment and the air seemed a little cooler. There wasn't another human being in sight; only high walls and hedges, and the soft whirr of sprinklers, and the bark of a pedigree dog. Maybe Arthur was a gardener. Any minute now he would stroll along the path with a sack of clippings in each hand.

She walked back as far as No. 713. It looked like all the others. The light bounced off the sidewalk like a chorus line. Maybe Doris would come out in a minute, wearing yellow, with that toothy smile. Niniane had a look at the plush lawn and sang in a whisper: "
Please, please, don't eat the daisies.
" Then, all at once, she was so tired she had to sit down on the curb. Her face cream was melting into her eyes; she seemed to be wearing false lips made of paper.

When she looked up, a police officer was getting out of his car. On his hip was a huge gun, the only one she'd ever seen in real life. Niniane stood up so fast that everything went black before her eyes.

"I was walking," she said in answer to his questions. "Just walking, and I got tired."

He put away his notebook and opened the car door for her.

"I wasn't going to hassle her or anything," she repeated as she fastened the seat belt.

The police officer asked who she meant.

"Doris Day."

"Miss Day hasn't lived in that house since 1975, ma'am."