Darkroom (7 page)

‘Pretty unusual taste, your uncle,' said Jim.

‘I know. But I guess they meant something to him.'

Jim walked down to the far end of the living room. There were double doors here, metal-framed, which gave out on to a narrow balcony. It looked as if the doors hadn't been opened in years, and the balcony was cluttered up with dead eucalyptus leaves. The only furniture out there was a cast-iron table and a deckchair with no canvas.

The balcony overlooked a central courtyard, in which there was a dried-up fountain and five or six old-fashioned bicycles, all stacked together. He was reminded of Italian art movies of the 1960s.
The Bicycle Thief, 8½
.

‘This place is in a time warp.'

‘Yeah, it is, in a way. It still belongs to the Benandanti Trust, the people who originally built it. They're based in Italy – Piedmont, I think – so I guess they don't bother about it too much, except to collect the ground rent. There's a super, who can unblock your toilet if you bribe him enough, and a Lithuanian woman comes around twice a week to beat up all the dust which has settled since the last time she beat it up.'

Vinnie led Jim through to the dining room, where there was a dining table with twelve mismatched chairs, and an oak sideboard that was almost a building in itself. The dining table was stacked high with books – some of them old and bound in leather, some of them dog-eared paperbacks. There were also two battered boxes marked
DAGUERROTYPE PLATES
. The room smelled sour, like a second-hand bookstore, although there was another smell, too, like chemicals, which reminded Jim of something but he couldn't immediately think what.

Jim picked up one of the books and took off his glasses to read the cover.
Extinct Tribes of Southern California
, by Charles Oppenheimer and Leonard Flagg. He flicked through to the middle, where there was a section of photographs. The Serrano tribe, 1851; the Luiseño tribe, 1854; the Daguenos, date unknown. The Indians were all in their finest traditional dress, and the Luiseños were proudly displaying their hand-woven baskets. Most of them were smiling at the camera, but some of them looked dubious and bewildered, while a few of them had their hands raised to shield their faces.

Jim lowered the book with a frown. He couldn't help thinking of the naked statue in the hallway downstairs, with its hand raised in just the same way. L
IGHT
S
NARETH THE
S
OUL
.

‘You want to see the bathroom?' asked Vinnie. ‘The bathroom, believe me, is something else.'

‘Sure,' said Jim, putting the book down on the table.

Vinnie was right. The bathroom was like a green-tiled cathedral, with a frieze of dolphins all the way around the ceiling. The windows were glazed in green, too, so that Vinnie and Jim looked as if they had been dead for weeks.

‘What do you think of the shower?' asked Vinnie. ‘My mother used to call it the Iron Maiden.' Jim could see why. The shower enclosure was like an antique torture chamber, constructed of chrome and dusty glass, with a bewildering array of handles including ‘Monsoon', ‘Bracing' and ‘Arctic.' The bathtub itself had feet like bears' claws. The enamel was stained with rust, as if the faucets had been steadily dripping blood, but the tub was large enough for five people to share, or for two people to drown in.

The toilet stood on a plinth, three steps up, and was flushed by an elaborate handle which reminded Jim of the gearshift in his grandfather's 1948 Packard.

The bathroom, like everywhere else, was utterly silent, except for the
plink-plink-plink
of a leaky washer.

‘Terrific room for singing opera,' said Vinnie. The toilet cistern gurgled as if it agreed with him.
‘Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma-a-ah!
'

‘You're sure I can stay here for seven fifty?'

‘Absolutely. You can see how much remodeling it needs. Try it for six months and if you don't like it we'll simply call it quits.'

Jim held out his hand. ‘OK, it's a deal. I'm going to feel like Miss Havisham, living here. Or Dracula. When can I move in?'

Vinnie held up the keys, dangling on a key fob in the shape of a miserable clown's mask. ‘Why not today? No time like the present.'

Jim drove to Sherman Oaks to pick up his cat, Tibbles Two. He had arrived back from Washington last Saturday afternoon, and since then he had been staying at the Grand Studio Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, which was very much less than grand, and had nothing to do with any of the movie studios, and which didn't allow pets. He could have stayed with friends. He could even have stayed with Karen, he supposed. But he needed time to think about the way that his life had suddenly broken into pieces, and so he didn't think he would be very amusing company at the moment.

He parked outside the neat yellow suburban house belonging to his friend Dennis Washinsky. On and off, he and Dennis had kept in touch since they were freshmen at college together. In those days, they had both been convinced that they were going to be the greatest screenwriters of the twentieth century. Watch out, William Goldman! Eat your heart out, Joe Eszterhas! To be fair, Dennis had written three episodes of
Star Trek: Voyager
and a made-for-TV thriller called
X Marks the Spot
. But now he was teaching screenwriting over the Internet to housewives whose chances of having a script accepted by a major studio were only marginally better than being struck by a meteorite, while Jim was teaching Special Class II, and the twentieth century was something you watched on the History Channel.

Jim rang the door chimes and Dennis's wife Mary snatched the door open as if she had been standing there waiting for him. She was pale and flat-faced and she was always worried about something, so that she had a habit of stopping in her tracks –
screech!
– and about-turning like Olive Oyl, because she thought she might have left her house key dangling in the front door or forgotten to put the ice cream back in the freezer or turn off the gas under the saucepan of milk.

‘Jim! How nice to see you! Come on in! I'm just about to start supper. You like meat loaf, don't you? Meat loaf?'

‘I can't stay,' Jim told her. ‘Wish I could. I came to collect Tibbles, that's all.'

‘Won't you have a beer? Oh, dear!'
Screech!
About turn! ‘I don't think I put any more beer in the fridge. Or maybe I did! Did I?' She opened the icebox and the bottom shelf was stacked with at least two dozen cans of Pabst Blue Label. ‘There! I thought I must have done! You've come for Tibbles? Have you found yourself someplace to live?'

‘Yes, I've really lucked out. One of the teachers at West Grove has a vacant apartment on Saltillo Street.'

‘That's Venice, isn't it? Venice? You like Venice. Will you be sharing?'

‘Only with the ghost of the previous occupant. You should see this place. It looks like a set from
The Haunting
.'

Jim saw Tibbles's bowl on the floor in the laundry room, and it was licked clean, so she must have been eating well. ‘Tibbles give you any trouble?'

‘I wouldn't say
trouble
exactly. But she's a
very
queer cat, isn't she? For a cat, I mean. For a cat.'

‘She's idiosyncratic, I'll give you that.'

Mary blinked, and Jim realized that she probably didn't know what idiosyncratic meant. ‘Quirky,' he added.

‘Quirky! You can say that again! Look, I'd better find her for you. Come on out back. Dennis has his screenwriters' chat room at six, so he's making sure that he's well prepared.'

She led Jim through to the small back yard, which had a red-painted picket fence all around it, a single row of sunflowers and a lawn covered with that bright green dichondra that used to be popular in the '60s. It looked like a child's drawing of a back yard rather than a real one. Dennis was sitting on the sun deck, apparently asleep, with his hands folded over his belly. His face was covered with a floppy cotton hat, like a wilted cabbage, and he was wearing a red and yellow striped shirt.

‘Dennis!' called Mary. ‘Look who's here!'
Screech!
About-turn! ‘Did I put the washing on? Dennis has to have a white shirt for tomorrow.' She hurried back into the house.

Dennis raised the hat off his face and sat up. ‘Jim! How's things?' He was a bulging, overweight man with sun-reddened cheeks and a Jimmy Durante nose and wildly overgrown eyebrows. But his eyes were so intensely blue that Jim always felt there was a mischievous child hiding inside him, peering out.

‘Come to take Tibbles off your hands,' said Jim.

‘Hey – soon as you like. Gives me the willies, your cat.'

Jim sat down and took a mouthful of cold beer. ‘She hasn't been misbehaving herself, has she? Hasn't made any mess?'

‘Oh, no, she's a very
clean
cat, I'll have to admit that. But she's a very
strange
cat, isn't she?'

‘What happened?'

‘You won't believe this. Sunday night we were sitting in the parlor watching TV when she walks in, takes a sniff around, then jumps up on to the table where we keep all the family photographs.'

‘I'm sorry. She didn't break anything, did she? She's not allowed to jump on the furniture.'

Dennis held his stomach for a moment, and burped. ‘Sorry. Too much beer. But I can never do that chat room thing unless I'm halfway drunk.' He adopted a monotonous, nerd-like voice. ‘“Dear Mr Washinsky, I've written a terrific new action-adventure movie,
Dead From The Neck Upward
, especially for Bruce Willis. Please give me Mr Willis's address so that I can deliver it to him personally in a brown-paper bag. I just know that once Mr Willis has had the chance to read it he'll insist on starring in it.”'

Jim smiled. ‘Come on, Dennis. You have to let people have their dreams. They know as well as you do that they're never going to come true.'

‘Jim – you always were soft. You should see some of the scripts my students send me, complete with totally impossible camera directions and casts of thousands. Scene one: exterior; a high aerial shot; the Battle of Gettysburg; day.'

Jim laughed. ‘So tell me about Tibbles.'

‘Oh, yes. Tibbles jumps up on to the table and starts to nose at the photographs. Then suddenly she knocks one over, with her nose. It's a picture of my half-sister, Isabelle.'

‘You should have whacked her. Tibbles understands whacks.'

‘Well, whatever, Mary shoos her off, and stands the picture up again. The next thing we know, she jumps up again and knocks it over a second time. So this time Mary takes the picture and puts it up on the fireplace. Tibbles doesn't try to get up on the table again, but later on we go into the kitchen, and we hear this crash. Tibbles has only jumped up on to the fireplace and knocked the picture into the hearth.'

‘I'm really sorry. Like you say, she can act a little strange. I think she's probably descended from a long line of witches' cats.'

‘You're not kidding. A half-hour later Isabelle's husband Michael calls up and says that Isabelle has fallen down the front steps and broken her hip.'

‘Coincidence,' said Jim.

‘You can call it what you like. I call it weird. Tibbles knocks the same picture over, three times; and how many steps does Isabelle fall down? Three.'

Mary appeared, with a long-suffering Tibbles hanging from her arm. ‘I found her under the bed. Her, and seven dead spiders.'

‘Yes,' said Jim. ‘She likes chasing spiders. She kind of – well, she
collects
spiders, live or dead.'

Dennis shook his head. ‘Why doesn't that surprise me?'

F
rom the moment he dropped her on to the threshold, Tibbles sniffed at their new apartment with deep suspicion. She smelled the shoes heaped up in the entrance hall and violently sneezed, and when she walked into the living room she stopped and looked around, and her tail slowly lifted as if she could sense something there that she didn't like at all.

Jim went through to the kitchen with his bags of groceries, but then he came back to see what she thought. ‘Well, TT, how does it grab you? It's kind of well-worn, I'll admit. Decrepit, even. But it has
atmosphere,
doesn't it?'

Tibbles padded across the hearthrug and looked up at the painting of the man with the black cloth draped over his head. She stared at it, unmoving, although both of her ears were pricked up.

‘Don't worry about that,' said Jim after a while. ‘I'm going to see if Genevieve Frost can sell it for me.'

Tibbles turned around and looked at him, and gave him a querying
miaow
.

‘OK, we can leave it up if you like. But Vinnie says it gives him nightmares, and it'll probably give me nightmares, too, especially after six beers and a
quattro staggione
pizza with extra jalapeno peppers.'

Tibbles gave a more dismissive miaow, as if she didn't want to discuss what Jim was like after six beers and a
quattro staggione
pizza with extra jalapeno peppers. Then she jumped up on to the sagging brocade couch and sniffed distrustfully at the cushions.

‘That's OK,' said Jim. ‘That can be your couch.' He went across to the throne-like chair which was standing in the far corner of the room. ‘This one's going to be mine.' He confidently tried to pick it up, but it was carved out of solid Spanish oak and he couldn't even lift it off the floor. In the end he had to drag it and push it and walk it on alternate feet. He maneuvered it to one side of the fireplace and smacked its seat cushion in a cloud of dust. Its purple velvet upholstery was faded and threadbare, and half of its buttons were missing, but it still had grandeur. Jim sat down on it and said, ‘There … King Jim and Queen Tibbles in their royal palace. No serfs, admittedly. No minstrels, no dancing girls. But what do you expect for seven hundred and fifty bucks a month?'