A Life in Men: A Novel (6 page)

Then finally, what she is looking for. She grasps it with greedy red fingers: a large container of codeine cough syrup.

Yank whistles low. “Damn. That looks like the kind of wicked shit I’d like to get my hands on under better circumstances.”

Her fingers shake; she can’t get the childproof cap off the bottle. Yank opens it for her and hands it over, but even then she can’t swallow, coughs the sticky red-orange liquid and more of her own blood all over his hands. He is
covered
in her blood, of course. He’s long since stopped recoiling from it the way he did at the Battersea train station, though she hadn’t noticed until just now how he’s not even flinching as it hits him, how he’s treating it like water. Wordlessly he holds the bottle to steady it and puts his other hand on the back of her head to keep her still, too, and in this way they manage to dump some of the liquid down her throat.

Twice more, each swallow bigger than a whole recommended dosage.

She closes her eyes. Though it’s too soon for anything to have taken effect, her lungs already feel less spastic, less desperate to contract. Minutes pass, the world receding behind her shut lids, and when she opens them again she is for the first time conscious of sitting there in her underwear, conscous of Yank’s hand still tangled in the back of her hair. Almost violently, she jerks her head, flicking off his hand. He stays crouched, still watching her with those ice-blue, serial-killer eyes.

She should stand up to dress now while she still can, but what’s the point? The jig is up. Already the cough syrup is at work to sedate her, rendering a rapid cleanup of her bodily crime scene ever more out of reach.
You should’ve seen it
, Yank will say when Joshua and Sandor get home.
She was like that scene from
Carrie
, man, a goddamn bloodbath
. And Sandor, who is something of a pussy, will pucker his face in disdainful concern, while Joshua, kind and at ease with bodies, will want to help, will say,
Why didn’t you tell me?
But to any extent that illness can be romantic in concept, at the end of the day mucus and blood are the opposite of sexy. Joshua will pity her now, not desire her—will be repulsed that he has been making love to a walking corpse. Balancing the baby-bath bowl on her knees, Mary gives up, coughs some blood and phlegm inside.

Yank says, “What do we do now?”

But she only clamps her eyes shut against him once more, longing for the reprieve. For the codeine oblivion that can take her outside the grotesque mess of herself—far, far away from here.

I
T TAKES
Y
ANK
five minutes to walk to the estates, which are closer than the Latchmere or he’d go there. The black kids loitering outside could be the same little shits who kicked him in the head and tried to steal his camera, but for this kind of transaction that doesn’t matter; in this kind of transaction, enemies are friends. They don’t have anything on them, so they point him to one of the flats. Her blood’s cold and stiff on his shirt and jacket, his movements jerky like the Tin Man in need of an oilcan. He sees one of the younger boys gaping at the sight of him, but nobody asks. Who’d want to be an accomplice to the things of which he is obviously capable? The cat who opens the door he knocks on is white, a mild surprise, though he’s got dreads and is wearing a Rastafarian-colored shoelace tied around his throat like a necklace, a dirty feather sticking out of the knot. He takes one look at Yank and gets down to business, barks at his old lady and a couple of café-au-lait-tinted little girls to let them alone. No offers to taste the shit together, or talk mishaps and music to kill some time: today they want him out as fast as he wants to leave. It’s why he didn’t wash her blood off in the first place. In a cool twenty minutes he’s back turning his key in the door.

Back to where he left her half-naked, clothes in a pile on the carpet, head lolling onto her red-tinged knees. For just one moment before he opens the door to his and Joshua’s room, fear grips him: What the hell was he thinking, leaving her alone? Who knows what might have transpired while he was gone? Then he opens the door and sees her, still slouched against the wall. She
could
be dead, but no, at his weight on the mattress she opens her eyes, and all her earlier faces—the venomous woman of the train station, the dying animal of their long walk home—are gone. She smiles like a child at a father, serene.

“We’re going on a little trip together, darlin’,” he tells her.

“Where?” she asks foggily. She more topples over than lies down, her tiny body curled fetal on its side. She’s trembling from a drop in blood pressure, a loss of blood, the aftershocks of trauma—who knows? Yank shrugs his crusty jacket off, clumsily maneuvers the bloody sheet out from under Nicole to cover her up, his knees pressed against her abdomen in the thoughtless way their bodies first touched on the train. He hasn’t forgotten she’s there yet—hasn’t forgotten the jut of her clavicle, the curve of her ribs, the shadow of darker hair through her flimsy panties—but she’s no longer the thing he wants most in the room. He’s pretty sure that’s not why he’s doing this, but he wouldn’t bet his life on it.

He’s pretty sure the matter was decided in the broken way her head recoiled from his hand, the harshness with which she spat into her little plastic bowl, the hopeless turning away of her bloodshot eyes. In those gestures he understood all he needs to about her body’s betrayals. And though he’s got little to offer her or anyone, the one thing he could think to do was to say without words,
I’ll take your shame and raise you one. At least whatever’s wrong with you isn’t your own damn fault
.

He has been carrying his paraphernalia around since his exodus from London a year and a half ago, just like she carries hers—the way an agnostic might still carry his grandmother’s rosary, just in case. His hands shaky, too, from the energy of shifting one desire into another, Yank pulls his old spoon from his bag of tricks and clicks it against the orange bottle of her cough syrup.

He toasts, “To the Pilgrims,” loads the spoon, and begins to cook.

She watches him heat the heroin, her eyes as innocently curious as his son’s on the rare occasions he bothered to give Hillary a break and warm the baby’s bottle. This girl watches him this same way, as though when he’s achieved the right temperature he may spoon-feed the dose right into her mouth. Instead, when the tourniquet goes around his biceps, he sees her eyes flick down to her own puny girl-arm, no veins even visible, and then her fingers reach out to touch the strong, ropy veins that pop from his skin, throbbing with ugly, beautiful life. Her fingers are cold, and he notices her teeth chattering, too. Just before the needle’s pierce, he lets himself lower down next to her, his longer body pressed against her smaller one, and from somewhere far away, he feels her trembling cease.

Then he doesn’t give a shit anymore about being a reminder of how low she could go, who else she could be—he didn’t do this for anyone but himself, this one perfect moment, sliding once more down his own rabbit hole, soaring through his own private sky, riding his own long-lost wave. Never as good as the first time, but he’ll take it, thank you, God, you evil fucker, he’ll take it.

His skin’s gone fuzzy, he can’t say if he’s touching her or anything. Time does not exist. Air buzzes around them, electric.

“My name is Mary. Mary Rebecca Grace.”

Her breath rattles like a baby’s with croup—like his son’s that endless night before Hillary finally reached the doctor on the phone. The boy was fine in a few days, yet déjà vu knocks the wind out of Yank like a punch so that for a moment he doesn’t comprehend her words.

“I have cystic fibrosis. I’m less than a year away from the typical life expectancy for people with my disease.”

And then he does give a shit.

He turns onto his side, lifts her limp hand from the mattress, and shakes it with one soft jerk. “My name is Kenneth Blair,” he says. “I’m wanted for the murder of a dealer named Shane O’Leary. I didn’t kill the bastard, I just dumped his useless body in the Thames. He was my best friend. If I were a better man, I would’ve killed him, but I’m not.”

To his surprise, the fucking girl smiles. “Excellent,” she drawls, pulling her knees farther in against her ribs. “Stick around and maybe you can do that for me, too.” Her finger wags aimlessly, like maybe she’s parodying her mother back in Ohio. “The walking dead should never travel without someone who knows how to hide a body, you know.” She giggles, but it fades fast into something mirthless, airless. “
Poof
.”

Hard not to kiss her then, except that he might suffocate her. Hard not to put every part of him inside her, except that they’ve got work to do.

It’s hard to focus when she’s quiet, too. Yank holds his body immobile as a statue, still straining to hear his boy’s fragile breath, but pretty soon he has to roll his ankle—three, four times compulsively—waiting to hear a crack. At the sound, he’s a little jarred to notice her still there next to him, head lolling, eyes closed, dried blood coating her pale skin. And all of a sudden he can’t
stop
looking. Even when she opens her eyes and watches him, shame doesn’t matter anymore; he can’t remember this high up why it ever did. He shifts her knees off his ribs, sits up, and fumbles for his camera.

“You mind if I take some pictures of you, baby?” But he’s already clicking a test shot, not waiting for her answer, shifting a little so that the thin light from the filmy window won’t overexpose and dilute the color of her blood. She throws her head back trying maybe for a laugh but loses track of it, flops onto her back, nodding like she’s the one who just shot up instead of him.

“Whatever floats your boat, Desperado.” Voice croaky. Already tears are sliding a river into her hairline, leaving weak tracks in the red. Yank knows the tears are not about him, even if he wishes they were. His heart hammers in time with the shots,
fast, fast, fast,
trying to catch her trail of tears, but soon she’s zoning too far in her own narcotic stupor to make them anymore. Even when she’s asleep he keeps clicking; at one point he rearranges her limbs so she’s fetal again and still she doesn’t stir. It’s only once the light shifts—a sign that the others may soon return—that he makes himself chuck the camera back under some clothes. Time will be running out.

“Someone to hide the body, huh?” He laughs louder than when anyone can hear. “Who knew you were such a freaky little bitch?” But he’s only talking to himself, like the born-again junkie he is. Soon enough—though not before taking a slug—he will cap her orange syrup and put it back into her rucksack. He will bring her baby bowl to the toilet and rinse it in the sink, watching the red insides of her swirl down the drain until it’s white, then zip that into her bag, too, placing everything back in the wardrobe under her neatly hung clothes. Soon enough he will open up his duffel bag and shove all her ruined clothes inside, noting a faint tinge of red on the carpet where they once rested but deciding that you’d have to be looking for it and that in this place—in places like this—no one ever is. He will soak a facecloth and, after that proves insufficient, a dish towel, methodically wiping the dried blood from her face and hands, though he will not be able to remove it fully from her fingernails or the tips of her curls; he will debate, then decide against, trying to get it off her bra, underneath which her nipples are stiff from water drying cool on her skin. He will contort her cleansed body inside Joshua’s Led Zeppelin T-shirt, though when he strips the sheets, there will be no new set to replace them with, so he’ll just leave Joshua’s mattress raw and unexplained. As he works, his body will hum productively, the lactic acid that burned his arms earlier from carrying her now forgotten, so that he feels young and without pain, though he was never really young enough that pain wasn’t involved.

This will come later, though. For now, camera securely hidden, he reclines on the island of their mattress, listening to her breath more carefully than he ever has to any jazz riff. She rattles like a broken space heater, no trace of his son anywhere now. She’s merely a car engine that won’t turn over, some failing machine. In any merciful world, there would be a way he could simply reach out and flick the switch to off.

It’s so easy to hide things from people who don’t want to know anyway. Joshua and Sandor came home, and Yank gave them some tale about how I was sick from our first batch of Pixie Dust Bars, how I threw up on my bed and he stripped the sheets and sent my “useless ass” to crash. I heard his flat, lying voice and closed my eyes again and imagined his story into being. The smell of burning hash oil permeated the house. Sandor clucked concern but I
wasn’t sure if it was over me or the cakes. Finally Joshua came in and sat on the side of our bed, smoothing back my
hair like a mother, and though I have been nurtured before,
too
many times, something rose in my throat so I almost
told him everything then. Instead, he pushed up the Led Zeppelin T-shirt Yank had dressed me in and lowered my
underwear around my knees like a snare. Maybe in case I planned to throw up again, he turned me onto all fours, and without a word, with Sandor and Yank still talking low in the common room, rode me so hard my head hit the wall. I started coughing into the pillow, but thank God no blood came up. Still, when I began to moan, Joshua covered my mouth and whispered, “Control,” and slid a sock (whose?) between my teeth to bite down on, continuing his frenzy. I knew I should be pissed. I knew that somehow he’d figured out there was more to Yank’s story even if he couldn’t fathom what, and he was punishing me, just like
you
were on the ferry when you made me swallow that gross bath-cube candy. But I wasn’t angry. I thought of Yank on the other side of the wall, taking in the pounding,
and I knew Joshua and I were both screwing for him in a sense. That all over the world, men and women are fucking
for people not even in the room, and I bit into the sock and coughed and cried a little, and as soon as he came, Joshua stood and zipped his pants, then left to sell cakes at the Latchmere. I thought Yank would stay behind but he went.